by M. D. Cooper
While Ngoba didn’t pretend to understand the technology, he knew that it somehow created electrical pulses by varying viral states, a process that could be stopped or started by external command. Once awakened, the tracker would find and connect with nearby comms systems, sending a carrier signal that could be discovered and tracked as long as communications systems were in use near the chancellor. A primitive version of the technology had been used in Andy Sykes’s dog, Em.
The connection gave Ngoba an inner chuckle.
The autodoc slid its thin appendages into Osla from various angles as it hung above him. Not a drop of blood appeared at the incision sites.
Watching surgery always made Ngoba think of his first Link implantation, received from a filthy street kiosk. Without Fugia, he would certainly have died of infection from that procedure—a state of affairs that had left him with the Marsian Clarise installed in his head, who brought her own collection of problems.
Ngoba released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Watching the surgery was making him tense. Still, he saw no way out of this stalemate with the Andersonian leader so long as AI shards were leading his people on Cruithne—and no doubt hundreds of other places across Sol. Ngoba didn’t want to kill thousands of his own people. He needed them to understand the situation on their own, and the best way to do that with a man like Osla was to let him talk.
Once Osla was free, he would either try to leave Cruithne, or seek out Kamelon and his local followers.
If Osla tried to leave, Ngoba would simply scoop him back up. In the second case, he would be followed, and observed, until Lowspin had the info they needed to crack the insurgency.
There were risks in the plan, but Ngoba couldn’t stand stasis. He would gladly insert a little chaos into the situation, shake the tree, and exploit the results. That was how he lived his life, and the philosophy had kept him sharp and made the Lowspin Syndicate rich and reasonably powerful.
Many of the surgeon’s arms separated into tools as thin as wire, spreading out to penetrate Osla all along his chest, arms, and legs. With seemingly no effort, the autodoc lifted Osla and turned him, exposing his pale spine to the machine’s dancing metal fingers.
When the autodoc was done with its work and Osla lay on his back again, eyes closed and hands along his sides, Ngoba nodded to his crew waiting near the doorway.
“Get him down to the dirtiest of the low docks. I want this peacock waking up in a pile of garbage, a beer can stuck to his face. You make that happen.”
Kirre nodded. “You got it, boss.”
“You got the recording equipment? Not just Link stuff. I want vid-broadcast quality.”
“Won’t that tip them off that somebody wanted him seen?” she asked.
Ngoba shook his head. “I don’t give a shit. I want the world to see the leader of the Anderson Collective waking up in a trash heap. It’s only going to endear him to them more, but he’ll know I put him there, and that I could have done worse if I’d wanted.”
“We should space him, boss,” one of the others said.
“We could. But sometimes the enemy you know is better than the one you don’t. And we know this man, yes we do.”
Kirre nodded. “We’ll get it done.”
Several of the others moved to either side of the surgery couch and lifted the unconscious chancellor.
When they had him at the entry to the surgery, Ngoba said, “Kirre, wait. Take this.”
He tossed her the piece of cloth he had been turning in his hands.
She caught the item and spread it out in front of her. It was a short, frilly skirt of a fluffy material. The design might have originally been meant for dancers, but this was some leftover from a costume party.
“What do you want me to do with this?” she asked.
“Dress the man. We can’t leave him naked on the mean streets of Cruithne Station now, can we?”
Kirre barked a laugh. “That’s some petty shit, boss.”
“I’m a petty criminal, what do you expect?”
PART TWO
BREACH OPERATIONS
STELLAR DATE: 09.03.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Hilgram Station
REGION: Hildas Asteroids, OuterSol
The Andersonians were a crafty bunch, Ty had to give them that. Squatting behind an extruding piece of superstructure on Hilgram Station’s outer ring, he did his best to track the swarm of reprogrammed maintenance drones that had kept him pinned down for the last thirty minutes. Using maintenance drones in combat was nothing new; what impressed him—and his Marsian commanders—was that Hilgram was supposed to have been deserted for the last twenty years. In just a few years, the Andersonian refugees had occupied the abandoned ice processing station and repurposed it as an agricultural center and black market.
As Ty and his team had discovered, the refugees had been ready for an assault.
The Special Ops wing from the Mars 1 Guard, consisting of five coursers and two support frigates, had arrived to find a perimeter seeded with warning sensors and remote attack points, each falling back to the station and its farming orbitals. Nearby space was a dense debris field from the days of ice processing, when Hilgram had chewed up asteroids and spit out the remains, and that debris now served as a barrier to EV assault. Anyone in an EV suit trying to get to Hilgram would be peppered by thousands of micro-meteors orbiting the station. Some shuttles couldn’t make the approach, either, evidenced by the dead hulls spinning above Ty’s head.
After breaching the debris field in an up-armored shuttle, Ty and his team had made the surface of the ring, only to find themselves under attack from waves of welding drones spitting plasma, with no close support. The coursers couldn’t help; their orders were to take the station, not destroy it.
So this was going to be a dirty job.
Tactical trackers flickered and cut erratic paths across Ty’s HUD, filling the space that marked the four other members of his team. He had been glad to serve with Manny Hernandez again, promoted to second lieutenant following the battle on Vesta. The other three were newcomers he didn’t know well yet, fresh out of the selection course.
Ty had been offered a promotion as well, an opportunity he’d immediately screwed up with a bender on Mars 1, ending in a naval brig he didn’t remember entering.
The rank suited Manny, though, and Ty had been glad to take this mission with his old friend.
Ty managed a shot with his heavy kinetic rifle, and disabled a drone chancing an attack run. The drone’s heavy body jerked to the side and bounced against something that looked like a cooling tower, then spun away into space.
Manny laughed.
Swooping drones continued to drop molten metal all around him. The rivets splattered off the surface of the ring, scorching Ty’s armor.
The newcomers sent him confirmation they were tracking. The space above the square incursion vent filled with automatic projectile fire. The closest wave of drones flew directly into the barrage, spinning in random directions as they took damage. One drone shot acro
ss the battle line, knocking several more off course.
With every target shining in his HUD, Ty threw himself out from behind his cover and bounded over the surface of the ring. He maintained a long stride, magboots clicking as they grabbed and released the surface.
The wall of friendly fire holding back the drones fell away from Ty’s path. He had seconds to get through before the next wave dove into the gap and nailed him to the surface of the ring.
It was Clarise, his onboard NSAI.
The dark sky and surface of the ring, littered with control nodes and antennae structures like bare trees, sparkled and glowed. The sky turned blue with white clouds.
Ty found himself running through an open field, jumping over moss-covered rocks and ancient fallen logs. Above him, birds wheeled in loose flocks. They seemed far away, but he knew they had seen him and would be close soon enough. Birdsong filled his ears, musical and menacing.
She pouted.
A fat black bird pulled its wings against its body and dove for Ty. He fired as he ran, cutting to one side and jumping over a log. The ice cream shop grew larger in front of him, its sign flickering between the image of a yellow cone and a red heart.
Taking out three more birds as they dove, Ty slid through the glass doors of the ice cream shop. As soon as his boots passed over the black and white checkerboard floor, the world went dark, and he was falling through the square throat of a heating vent.
Manny chuckled, but sounded tired.
Manny said.
Ty flinched. He hated the overlay. At the same time, he couldn’t deny the shiver of pleasure Clarise’s voice sent down his spine. She was a lover whispering in his ear, urging him to kill. He wanted to please her.
A map of the local utility system filled Ty’s HUD, showing him the location of a maintenance console where he could shut down the defensive system. He blinked sweat out of his eyes and focused on his goal, ignoring Clarise the next time she called.
He knew he wouldn’t be able to hold her off for long. The only answer was to take out each objective before she felt the need to intervene.
Dropping into a maintenance corridor, Ty checked his weapon and sprinted for his objective.
SNOOPING
STELLAR DATE: 09.03.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Amplified Solution
REGION: Hildas Asteroids, OuterSol
Perched on the head of a lamp in the corner of Rondo’s small room, Crash studied the few personal items sitting on the desk beneath him.
Rondo had hung his battered trench coat over the back of the chair, and it draped out on the floor. The jacket had a peculiar smell that lay somewhere between oil and burned plas. On the desk was a thick bracelet that he had heard the man call a Link subverter; apparently, Fugia had commissioned its manufacture on Luna and then forgotten about it.
When Rondo wasn’t busy with a task, he talked about the woman called Sylvia who had sold him the parts to build it. They had listened to spinning disks in her shop that Crash immediately recognized as records, an audio medium made of an early, flexible form of plas. He had learned about records during a puzzling session where a riddle had referred to ‘platters’, and he had wasted five minutes researching old storage drives until he went further back in history.
Next to the bracelet was a long knife with a dull green handle, most likely from Rondo’s military service. Next to the knife was a bent piece of metal with scorch marks on one end. Crash stared at it, sharing the image with an NSAI that identified parts for fab rigs, and it came back as an internal stabilizer from a grenade.
What a strange thing to carry.
There was also a personal console with a translucent screen, and a half-eaten candy bar.
Crash glanced back at the bed where Rondo snored, and found Adama’s green eyes watching him in the dark. The cat was lying across Rondo’s stomach, moving slightly as the big man breathed.
I see you, too, Crash thought.
It was an interesting coincidence that Rondo had found Adama just after he left Marsian Special Operations. Crash had researched Marsian ship cats even further after hearing that Adama had a nomenclature, and he had learned how rare they were.
There was little profit in engineering animals. They had few military uses that drones couldn’t perform in a wider range of applications. Some animals were implanted with communications equipment and used as tracking or hacking devices, like Em, the Corgi that had belonged to the Sykes family. Those were also OuterSol occurrences, where humans were probably more diabolical in general. As Cara had said, piracy was just another means of survival.
So why would a ship cat have been abandoned in a Mars 1 corridor on the outskirts of a military reservation?
Puzzlehead that he was, Crash’s mind spun with possibilities. He kept coming back to some form of military application.
Where was the evidence?
Checking into the ship’s NSAI, Crash accessed the environmental control system, which led him to the sensor array for Rondo’s room. He couldn’t perform a full active scan of the room, but he could check evidence of certain elements: RF activity, and other environmental factors, like atmospheric mix.
He started with the atmospheric mix, looking for trace elements that might be present from metals interacting with organic structures. The NSAI took a sample and told him to wait.
The RF and thermal readings were as expected. Rondo’s Link blazed in the readings. Adama’s RF signature was dark except for a seed-shaped object at the base of his tail. That was probably the ID tag Rondo had mentioned earlier.
The number sequence assigned to the tag flashed in the sensor, and Crash recorded it. As he mulled over how to proceed, the NSAI reported that there were no anomalous results in the room’s atmosphere. If Adama was hiding anything, these sensors couldn’t find it.
Why did he distrust the cat?
Did he distrust him?
He supposed the situation wasn’t much different than birds without Links. On Cruithne, though, he had hundreds of friends to help interpret communication and ensure the group was safe. Here, he had only himself and the humans.
The crew seemed fine with Adama. Would they recognize ill intent from the cat?
Adama had closed his eyes, and shifted from purring
to a heavy breathing that resembled Rondo’s snoring.
Crash spread his wings and stretched his neck, frustrated at his distrust of the cat. So far, Adama had done nothing to earn his suspicion other than patrol the ship and sleep a lot.
Still, there was a puzzle here.
Opening his beak, Crash stared at the ID number in his Link for a second. There were nine numbers in sequences of three. There was only one prime number in the group, and none were sequential. From his cursory glance, the numbers were random, or part of a sequence he couldn’t evaluate.
He knew he was breaking Rondo’s trust by sending the ID to the NSAI for a deeper search. He couldn’t help himself. He had to know.
Crash sent an open command to the door and flew into the corridor. He flew to the command deck and perched above the holotank, staring into a slowly rotating star field with their path in to the Hildas outlined in silver. They were three-quarters of the way to Hilgram Station, and the active scan already showed a concentration of Marsian warships in the area. Cara had said it was just a matter of time before the Mars 1 Guard hailed them, wanting to know why their vector crossed Hilgram. Since there was nothing she could do about that, she had decided to get some sleep.
An alert on the comms station drew Crash’s attention. He didn’t need to move to access the communications system, which had picked up a public broadcast with a high priority.
There was nothing special about those kinds of messages—the ship received millions a day and filtered most of them. However, this one was unique because it plainly listed Luna as its origin point, with Charles Osla as the author.
Crash moved the message out of quarantine and studied the file. It was a vid. Once again, his curiosity got the best of him, and he activated the file.
An image of Charles Osla wearing only a crushed pink skirt appeared in his Link.
Crash squawked in surprise.
Grinning widely with vacant eyes, the chancellor of the Anderson Collective was stumbling in a tutu for all of Sol to see.
