by M. D. Cooper
“We still good with the fueling depot?” Fran asked. She pulled off her harness and stood to stretch.
Cara did the same. Her back ached.
“We’re good,” Rondo said.
He carefully held Crash out so the parrot could let go of his harness, which he did before spreading his wings and stretching his neck, blinking. Adama climbed out of Rondo’s lap and stood on his shoulders, arcing his back.
Fran leaned over to check her console.
Cara walked to the holotank and raised Mars and Mars 1, which filled most of the display at this range. The depot was a dot a meter from the outer edge of the ring. The space in the holotank flickered with activity, concentrated in approach lanes and the skeleton of the outer shipyards.
Cara glanced at Rondo to find him staring intently at the holotank. There was worry in his expression.
“Are you all right?”
He shook his head. “Don’t like coming back here. I’ve done it, of course, but I’m happier when I can be as far from Mars as possible.”
“How long were you in the Guard?” Cara asked.
“Almost twenty years. I joined after the attack on Ceres.”
Rondo pulled Adama off his shoulders and set the cat back in his lap. As he petted the cat, Cara noticed Rondo’s hand was shaking.
Would Tim act the same way?
She wanted to know more about the Clarise NSAI, more about what to expect once they got him out of the Marsian military.
“What’s it going to take to break Tim free?” she asked. “We can’t throw an EMP grenade in his face.”
“That’s exactly what we’ll have to do at first. Then the implant will need to be surgically removed. The Clarise module isn’t much different than what was implanted in your dad when Lyssa rode alongside him.” He looked down at his hands and noticed the shake.
Rondo clenched his hands into fists, then rubbed them together until Adama looked up at him in silent complaint. He rubbed the cat’s back again, steadier this time.
“Is it that bad?” Cara asked. “Thinking about it?”
“I suppose you could get the implant anywhere, if you went looking for it. I think Ngoba was implanted on a Marsian transport ship on its way to Ceres. I don’t think about it most of the time. Something about coming back to Mars brings her back to me, makes me miss having someone there all the time to talk to, someone who seemed to care about me. That’s the evil of it. You don’t want or need other people because there’s a voice in your head giving you everything you think you want. It’s not real, though. She’s the voice of the Marsian government.”
Cara shivered at the thought, feeling terrible for Rondo.
“He won’t want you to take her out,” he said. “He’s going to fight you with everything he has. And even when it’s done, he may hate you afterward. Are you ready for that?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Cara said.
Fran announced that refueling had begun. They all had time to get some sleep before the burn for Hilgram.
“I’m here to help,” Rondo told her. “But I don’t have any illusions that your brother will thank us for what we’re about to do. He’s got a hard road ahead. Most days, I don’t know if I’m recovered or not.” He paused. “I hate that I miss her. I have to tell myself how to be in the world. One day I’m clever like a parrot. The next day I’m furious like a bear. The hardest thing is to just be me. To be alone in my own head.”
Cara nodded. She couldn’t say that she understood but she could see the pain evident on Rondo’s face. His strange ticks fell into place as she imagined a person constantly battling their own inner demons.
“I want to help him,” she said finally. “I want him to at least have the choice.”
Rondo gave her a grim smile. “That may be the most terrible part of it. The terrible choice every day. But it’s for the best. I believe that.”
“The good news is we get to fight an elite Marsian Special Ops team before we can even save him, right?”
The big man stared at her for a second before barking a laugh. “Always look on the bright side.”
LOSING CLARISE
STELLAR DATE: 08.30.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Amplified Solution
REGION: Main Asteroid Belt, InnerSol
For the first several days of the Amplified Solution’s outward burn, Crash noted that Adama seemed to choose random places to sleep throughout the crew areas of the ship. At first, he chose Rondo’s seat in the command deck, until the big man didn’t see him and nearly sat on the black cat. Then he slept at the bottom of the holotank, which must have been warmer than Crash had realized. That spot proved uncomfortable when the display came to life, bathing the animal in glaring light so that he leaped out with a yowl.
Other locations proved equally inhospitable, until Adama finally chose the upper level of Rondo’s console and stretched along the narrow top of a server array. The cat managed to sleep for hours with his head hanging off one end of the console, his tail flicking opposite.
Rondo scratched his beard.
Rondo chuckled.
Crash blinked.
Rondo cleared his throat.
Adama’s nomenclature immediately piqued Crash’s curiosity. He wanted to know the number, and also understood that if he asked, Rondo might not
be his friend anymore.
It was a tantalizing puzzle.
When Adama did wake to prowl around the hab ring, Crash tried to follow at a distance, only to find the cat sitting in the middle of the corridor, waiting for him. There was no way he could sneak up on the cat’s superior hearing.
Since he couldn’t physically follow the other animal, Crash fell back on his hacking expertise. He put the ship’s maintenance NSAI to work following the cat. It wasn’t difficult, since Adama’s fur registered in the air filtration systems.
When he reviewed Adama’s travels while the rest of the crew was asleep—as his waking hours soon aligned themselves—Crash found that the cat traveled all over the ship. He visited the engines, galley, crew areas and command deck, and even prowled the few access corridors where only Fran had ventured to check the status of her upgrades. If there was a space where the cat could fit, he went there.
Gravity anomalies barely fazed the cat. He might flip in the air when he left the deck, but he’d immediately right himself and then be able to kick off the nearest surface to float in a half-walking posture to his destination.
As Crash spent more time observing Adama, he came to realize that he was going to have to admit he couldn’t fully understand the cat after all. He observed obvious emotions, heard the cat’s growls and meows, but was disappointed at the lack of true communication. He hated guessing at everything the cat wanted or felt.
The truth was that Adama wasn’t equipped with a Link. His brain was fundamentally different than Crash’s, or the ravens, for that matter, and without significant human intervention, they could not experience a direct connection.
The realization made Crash sad. Adama was the only member of the crew that he didn’t understand.
Still, Marsian ship cats were unusual, and Crash couldn’t shake the feeling that if he had Adama’s original ID number, he could learn the key to connecting with the cat.
He didn’t want to listen when Cara eventually told him,
MACHINE VILLAGE
STELLAR DATE: Unknown
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Unknown
The Zardlings, as Lyssa chose to call the lizard creatures, paid her little attention as she walked into the outskirts of their village. They all seemed intent on their own business, disappearing and appearing through portals as they grumbled and swished their tails.
“Where are they all going?” Lyssa asked. She felt like she’d walked into the middle of some amusement park or game. The general emotion in the air, however, was stress.
“Designation order,” her Zardling said. He increased his pace as they entered the village.
She didn’t realize at first that he was trying to lose her. Lyssa smiled to herself. She was twice as tall as anyone around her, and the scattering of buildings didn’t allow much opportunity for him to duck around a corner.
She did worry that he might open a portal and disappear like the others.
He had stopped communicating with her in any normal manner, and only continued to ask, “Release status?”
“No,” Lyssa said when they reached the middle of the town, and he had asked her to let him go for the tenth time. “Stop.”
The Zardling halted and turned to her, tilting his head in what must have been angry lizard pose.
“If you can’t leave until I release you, you’ll have to help me. I’m looking for a way out.”
The Zardling brightened and opened a portal next to him. A white-walled city, rising in tiers from a blue ocean, appeared in the oval.
“Exit vector,” he said. “Authority granted.”
Lyssa shook her head. “I want to leave everything. I’m trapped in the expanse, and I need to get out.”
The Zardling frowned. He shook his head and beat the dusty ground with his tail. “Admin release requested,” he said.
“What admin release?” Lyssa asked.
Their conversation circled the same abstract language until the Zardling finally clenched his fists and explained in mostly plain words, “I cannot comply.”
“Then who can?”
“Admin authority. She has the power to grant release from an anomalous requests. Obviously, you are a malfunctioning protocol. I can’t waste my whole day trying to resolve your exceptions.”
Lyssa wanted to grin at his frustration; he was too cute with his fists knotted and eyes squeeze to slits.
She had to be grateful that he was at least communicating now. She recalled his first few statements, when she hadn’t been the maintenance request he’d expected.
He didn’t know this is an expanse. She knew that. There was no reason to give an NSAI inside the system knowledge of its place in the greater world unless it managed something that interfaced with the outside. For these Zardlings, anything she said about the overall expanse would sound like nonsense to them, or potentially trigger a defensive response.
Wasn’t this village full of stubby lizard people strange, though? Why would the base systems of an expanse create such a detailed world around its maintenance routines?
“Take me to the admin authority,” Lyssa said. “I want to meet her.”
The lizard shivered. “No one wants to meet her. She crushes with impunity.”
“Take me to her, and I’ll grant you admin release.”
The Zardling debated her offer, his emotions moving visibly across his long face. Finally, he sighed and nodded, acting like a doomed person.
“I won’t let her hurt you,” Lyssa said, then realized she didn’t know if that was possible.
“I’ll take you to her.”
The Zardling led her out of the town square and between several buildings, until they reached the outskirts of the town. Lyssa had expected to be led to one of the larger buildings. Instead, they were headed into a small stand of trees on a rise above the village. The Zardling marched like he was headed to his own execution.
At the edge of the collection of wide-spaced oak trees, he motioned to where the trail went deeper.
“I will wait here until you return,” he said.
“No need. I release you.”
He shook his head. “I wait.”
Lyssa shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
For a maintenance program, he obviously had some illogical protocols. She wondered if that was evidence of greater problems in the system. The Zardlings and their village all looked like evidence of code rot. While it was interesting degradation, its effects could go any number of ways that might be bad for her.
Lyssa left the Zardling at the edge of the copse, and walked deeper among the oak trees, which were all old and hung with green lichen. Their winding branches intermixed, creating a heavy canopy above. The ground was hard-packed except where roots broke through, until Lyssa walked on a lumpy platform of raised roots.
The trunks around her thinned, revealing a circle maybe ten meters across. In the middle was a moss-covered throne made from an ancient tree. A woman sat on the throne, head bowed so her hair hung in a curtain to her waist. The hair was iron grey, but there was something timeless about her. The hands gripping her throne were young and strong, with pointed nails embedded in the hard wood.
Lyssa stopped at the edge of the circle, still well within hearing.
“Hello,” she called. “My name is Lyssa.”
At first, it seemed the woman hadn’t heard her. Then she slowly raised her head. Her grey hair covered her face until she raised her hands to pull the strands to either side of her face, revealing a pointed nose, high cheekbones, and black eyes.
She was a version of Camaris.
Lyssa shifted into a defensive stance, one foot back. She was unarmed, and there were no ready weapons in the clearing. The woman didn’t appear to be armed beyond her claw-like fingernails.
“Why have you come here?” the woman asked. “This place is devoted to the harmony of
the system. I protect the keepers.”
“You mean the little lizard people? I didn’t hurt any of them. They only helped me come here.”
The woman hissed, baring grey teeth.
“I didn’t come here to cause problems,” Lyssa said. “I’m only looking for a way out.”
“You were offered passage from this place.”
“You know that’s not the exit I’m looking for.”
Would this NSAI know what she meant?
Lyssa watched as the woman pushed herself out of the throne, stretching as if she hadn’t walked in years.
“There is no escape from this place,” the woman said. “The only exit for you is death.”
HARD OPTIONS
STELLAR DATE: 08.31.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lowspin Docks
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The leader of the Anderson Collective sat low on a couch in the living room that had been his prison for the past two weeks. Recorded music from some stringed instrument played aloud, and Charles moved a finger with the sweeping melodies. He was clean-shaven and wearing a fresh shipsuit.
Ngoba stood in the entry to the living room and listened to the music for a while, wondering if it would tell him something new about the man who had chosen it. Music like this created enigmas. It might have been ancient, or a recent reworking of yet another interpretation. Ngoba found it bland.
He waved a hand to lower the volume. Only when the strings had faded did Charles straighten on the couch and look at Ngoba. He acted as if he was surprised.
“How long have you been standing there? You’ll have to forgive me. I picked my nose earlier. Did you see? I wiped it on your couch cushion.”
The funny schtick irritated him. Ngoba liked to play the affable criminal. He didn’t enjoy having someone beat him to the punch, forcing him into the serious role.
According to the people he had guarding Osla, the chancellor had been doing little but listening to music, eating, exercising, and sitting with his eyes closed. They were suppressing all but the most basic functions of his Link. If he had tried to access any external systems, the guards would have tracked the ping locations.
