by Richard Dee
When the glasses appeared he sank his quickly and called for more. I couldn’t keep up with him and as the night wore on, the full glasses stacked up and I realised I was getting more and more drunk. Having just awoken from an anaesthetic hadn’t helped me cope with the alcohol and my stomach was empty. In between me trying to drink my way through the line of glasses and him telling me to catch up we swapped stories, he had been everywhere and met everyone, or maybe in my state it just seemed that way. He had a story about just about any place you could mention. In the end I must have just fallen asleep; the last thing I remembered was trying to stand to go to the men’s room.
I woke up with the mother of all headaches; it felt like a gang of miners were opening a new section on the top of my head. Then I moved and it got worse. When the room stopped spinning quite so fast I raised my head again for a look around. I was fully clothed and lying on a bed in what looked like a cheap hotel room. The wallpaper was peeling and beneath me the bed-cover was stained and crackling. Worse, I had no memory of how I had got there, I remembered a man called Griff and hoped that he had put me here. Somehow I got vertical and staggered to the bathroom. The tap grudgingly ejected some warm, rusty water and I splashed it over my face. It made me feel a bit better. Looking around I spotted a coffee maker on the chest.
I was just working myself up to making a coffee when the door burst open and Griff reappeared. “Come on then, boy,” he boomed, setting off another wave of pain in my skull. “It’s way past lunchtime and I’ve got to take you to meet Rick the forger.” He seemed no worse for wear himself and bounded away, calling, “Come on,” over his shoulder every few steps.
I followed him downstairs, working on autopilot as he raced away from me. He led me through some backstreets, the sun was bright in my face and it made me wince. Finally, we stopped by a small door. As he hammered on it a small slit opened at eye level and I could see we were being scrutinised. There was a rattle as several bolts and chains were removed, the door opened about an inch and a small dark face peered through the gap.
“Hello, Griff,” he said. “Long time. What have you got here?”
“This is my mate Finn,” said Griff. “He’s looking for a new ID, he’s a mate of Dolmen’s. I figured that you could help me out?”
“For you, of course I can, come in and take a seat,” the face replied, the door swung open and we entered the room. The curtains were drawn and the room was lit by the green glow of computer terminals. There must have been twenty or more screens hung on the wall, wires snaked everywhere and led to a row of printers. Paper and 3D models were strewn all over the floor. I found a chair and brushed a stack of coffee cups from it before sitting down. My head was clearing slowly, but I had a dry mouth and my stomach rumbled.
“Now to business,” said the man I took to be Rick. “What’s your full name?”
“Finn Donald Douglas,” I replied. “Any chance of some coffee before we do much else?”
He waved his hands vaguely toward a doorway; Griff grunted and wandered off, returning with a couple of steaming cups. I gulped mine, the hot drink burnt my throat but the caffeine helped.
The man removed my bandage and chuckled. “I’ll bet Eric gave you that,” he said and Griff grinned as well. “Bet he told you it would confuse a reader.”
“Eric is only a lad,” said Griff. “Bless him; sometimes it’s too easy to get him going.”
“You mean it doesn’t work then?” It looked like I was the butt of the joke.
“No, it’s just a bandage, but it made you feel better so in a way I guess it did.”
Griff just grinned some more and picked up a magazine from the floor. Settling down in an armchair I thought he would start reading but as soon as he had got comfortable he closed his eyes.
Rick scanned my arm with a chip reader, close up he had particularly bad teeth and his clothes reeked of stale beer and tobacco. It didn’t help my stomach. He crossed to one of the terminals where he tapped away for several minutes. “Ah, I’ve got you,” he exclaimed, pointing to the screen.
Sure enough, there was my face and all my identity details from my Navy card. The realisation that my life was an open book to anyone with his knowledge was worrying to say the least. Looking at the screen, it had my movements listed, but not my arriving here, and in large letters it said that I was reported missing in action and if spotted should be detained for questioning. But there were no more details, so that was something. I still didn’t see how he could alter my chip; they were supposed to be tamper-proof. You couldn’t even remove them. Rick must have read my mind.
“Don’t worry about the chip,” he said. “That’s my next job; now then, who would you like to be?” I hadn’t really given it any thought; I had assumed that various bits of my past would just have been modified. I was about to say, ‘I don’t care, just make it an easy name for me to remember’, when I found that Griff wasn’t snoozing at all.
“He’ll be Dave Travise,” boomed Griff. “That’s who he is from now on.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How do you know who I want to be?”
“That’s as good a name as any,” Griff replied, “and I think it suits you.”
Rick tapped away again for a while. “I’m just transferring all your assets across to your new identity,” he informed me. “I take it you don’t want the loan that’s listed here?”
“You can make it go away?” I asked. I’d been having trouble with the payments, it was a drain on my pay but at least I had a place of my own when I was on leave.
Rick just grinned. “Easy job. You’ll have full ownership of the house and land and all your money; less a percentage for my trouble of course, unless you’ve got anything else to trade?”
“You’ll do it for a very small fee,” Griff growled. “You have his Navy details; they’ll be worth a bit to you, won’t they?”
Rick grinned. “Shouldn’t you be asleep, Griff? Okay, I’ll not fleece the boy, or should I say Dave Travise here, I don’t want to end up on Rixon’s wrong side.”
This was the first time that Rixon had been mentioned and by the look that I saw Griff give, maybe I shouldn’t have heard it at all just yet. Trouble was, I had heard of him, he was a person well known on the Moth, one who had made a fool of Captain Dror on several occasions, and while he had never actually been caught doing anything illegal, he was on the list for a friendly chat.
After a few moments, Rick stopped tapping and sat back with a smug grin. “Look at that now.” He pointed, although it said Finn Donald Douglas the face on the screen was no longer mine.
“Say goodbye to Finn,” he pushed a button and the screen dissolved, a new one appeared, with my face and the name Dave Travise.
“Check it out, Dave,” he said, passing me a keyboard. I tapped away for a while, sure enough all the details of my life up to now had moved over, most of it was true, except for the loss of my Navy service and statement that I had arrived here three days ago on a ship called the Orca. The wanted notice had thankfully vanished; of course it was still attached to my other profile. I was no longer in the Navy, instead I was a ‘trader and navigator’, with a civilian qualification from some place I’d never been.
“How am I gonna remember all that?” I asked. “If I get stopped and don’t know about my own life I’m going to look pretty stupid!”
“You’ll have to do some reading then,” replied Griff. “You could always say you lost your memory in a terrible accident.”
“What, like having my ship shot out from under me by a bunch of psychopathic pirates?”
Griff said nothing but a grin flirted briefly with his lips.
“Right, children,” said Rick, “that was the easy bit, now for the ID chip.” He rummaged around in a corner, and came towards me holding something that looked lethal. “Don’t worry,” he said, grinning. “It’s a lot of kit to do very little.” He pointed it at my chip, embedded somewhere in my arm and it flashed.
I woke up with ragi
ng pain and Griff’s face peering down at me from close range; I swear I could see small objects in his beard.
“Sorry, Dave,” said Rick, “but if I had told you there was going to be a static discharge, you would tense your muscles, which makes it feel worse, and there’s always the chance that the data transfer doesn’t take.” He waved a scanner at me.
“Hmmm…” he said, passing me the read-out. “Looks good.”
The screen on his hand scanner said that I was Dave Travise, so his toy must have reprogrammed my bio-chip, which I had thought was impossible. No, I had been told was impossible.
“Bet you thought that was impossible,” Rick said. “Well it used to be, and as far as the Feds are concerned it still is, so you’re Dave Travise now, and you can prove it. Oh and I shorted out your Navy bio-transmitter while you were asleep.”
That was the last link I had with the service and I had forgotten all about its presence, it could have incriminated me, now it was just junk in my arm.
Chapter Sixteen
Now
I was still trying to work out how to get into the box, or unlock the password on the drive.
I needed a DNA sample for the box and had searched the cabin without success. It only needed to be a small thing, a piece of dead skin or a nail clipping. Even a hair would do it, I had peered into all the corners of the cabin and taken the washroom to bits to try and find hairs in the drains. But nothing I had found had worked. I knew that there were devices that could open DNA locks, Griff probably had one, but I didn’t want the box to become general knowledge. The drive was different, after too many attempts it might wipe, with a bit of luck the password would be in the box or I might get a clue from somewhere else.
I reckoned that the two things were linked with the Chenkos somehow; probably they proved that Dave Mark One had been working for them. Since it wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, the question was how much more might I find out and did I really want to know?
All that would have to wait for a couple of days though, because I had a docking manoeuvre to plan. After having seen the details of the place we were headed I would need all my piloting skills to dock with our destination, which was a mining and research platform in orbit around a Gas Giant in an otherwise deserted system. We had already traded messages regarding the configuration of our stern ramp, and it was clear that whoever had converted the Orca had really thought about it. Our ramp and stern door seal were a standard size, unlike the Navy where nothing ever fitted anything else without a lot of adapters and fiddling. We could link our ramp with their flexible proboscis, which made everything easier. But first we had to secure. And of course there was a complication. The platform was spinning to create its own gravity.
Their docking bay had pylons that attached to us magnetically and held the hull secure, but on approach we would have to match its rotation and move sideways until the magnets could grab us.
The rotation was unusual; most orbiting facilities had field generators that created artificial gravity. When I went to the wheelhouse to do some planning, Griff was there doing something at the workbench. I asked him about it.
As usual he knew the answer. “They have some really delicate stuff on the station,” he explained, “and the field generator would screw up their measurements. So they spin instead, and the centripetal force creates the gravity field. All the manned bits are on the outer Rim, where the spin is greatest.”
“So in the middle there’s weightlessness?”
“That’s it, boy,” he boomed, slapping me on the back again. “You’re getting the idea, all the delicate stuff is in the middle.” He bent back to the task he was attempting, fixing circuit boards together to make some unspecified item.
Funnily enough, his use of the ‘boy’ when he spoke to me didn’t annoy me as much as when others said it. It was said without malice, just part of his persona.
“Nancy,” I said, and once again she was a step ahead.
“Hi, Dave, I have the spin rate and docking details from the platform. I am computing a docking plan, unless of course you want to do it all manually.”
I was getting used to her sense of humour and to be honest I liked it. The programme that created her was a source of fascination; the responses were so varied it was almost real. The more I interacted with her, the more her vocabulary and use of emotion changed, she was learning from me, becoming as sarcastic as I was, with a good line in riposte. It was like talking to a human assistant and sometimes I forgot that she was only a machine.
“You worry about the spin, Nancy, and I’ll move us sideways,” I answered.
“If you like,” she said. “But I can manage to do both, you know.” She sounded offended, crazy for a machine to have emotions like that but the more I talked to her the more she seemed human.
“I’d rather have something to do,” I replied.
“Fine,” she said. “It’s nice working with you, Dave.”
“Griff,” I asked, “where did you get the Nav programme from?”
He glanced up and his eyes shone. “Someone owed me a favour,” he said, predictably.
“Excuse me,” said Nancy in a pained voice. “I’m still here, you know.” Griff just rolled his eyes. “We could get that circuit changed,” he answered. Nancy made a noise that sounded like ‘Huh’.
“The cost of one of these is enormous,” I stated the obvious, all the time trying not to laugh. I had read about the tech, developed on a place called New Devon. As with all new stuff, the price was crazy. In a few years it might be cheaper but now it was a rich man’s toy. It was the sort of thing you would never see in the Navy. Especially if it answered back like that. Dror would have shot it.
“It was a big favour,” he answered enigmatically. “Actually it was a matter of life and death, in more ways than one. I’ll tell you about it, one day.”
“I love a good story,” added Nancy. “And some of yours, Griff, well…” I wondered then if she had recorded all the conversations on the bridge and if I could get her to play them back. That would be another late night mission, avoiding ‘mode 101’ this time.
Chapter Seventeen
Two days later we dropped out of light-speed as we entered the system that was our destination. Before we could call and announce ourselves a patrol craft appeared in front of us. Small and bristling with missiles it blocked our path. However they had detected us, they were efficient.
“They worry about attacks,” said Rixon. “Industrial espionage.”
“Or people like Dolman?” I suggested; my tone innocent. He caught on quickly.
“Precisely, but not like us, or at least not this time.”
The craft interrogated us automatically via Nancy, which showed that there was money in whatever it was they did, and after the two computers had chatted for a while Nancy announced that we were cleared to follow them in. Their speed increased, and Nancy did the same, until we were moving at a speed close to light, even so they were faster and grew smaller as we tried to catch up.
They were headed toward the Gas Giant that already glowed as a purple crescent in the viewer, its large rings part lit by the system star. As we closed in we could see that there was a point of light visible on its dark side, in the shadow cast by the planet’s bulk, and Nancy altered course until it was centred and just above our bow lights.
The patrol craft turned and left us, with a waggle of its stub wings, as we neared the station. Close up it was big and complex, consisting of lots of modules joined together around a central core. I could also glimpse the docking station as it spun past me; it was brightly lit and had a large, blank status board above it. It was only visible for an instant every time it flashed past. Its speed seemed to increase as we got closer and I briefly wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to let Nancy do the whole thing. Then my pride and ego kicked back in.
“Urssa station, this is Orca, permission to dock, please,” I called on the frequency given in our instructions.
A female voi
ce, distorted but understandable, replied. “Roger, Orca, you have permission, and try not to do what the last clown did, we’ve only just finished repairs.” Oh great!
I felt sweat break out on my brow as I took the controls, but I knew that I had a little help for the first bit, and the controller might not.
“Nancy, match us up with the rate of spin,” I requested, trying to keep my voice neutral, but she spotted it.
“Relax, Dave,” she said gently, and the engine note changed as we slowed to match the speed of the turning dock. Nancy juggled our engine thrust; reducing the power of the engine nearest the platform helped us to turn with it. As we started to circle it the planet flashed past the ports every few seconds. Our rate of turn would have been enough to make us all feel queasy, but the inertial dampers took care of the physical effects.
I focused my gaze on the docking arm, which was slowing relative to us, until it appeared stationary, just off our port beam. With delicate touches on the thruster, I inched us in closer, whilst Nancy took care of keeping us moving at the same relative speed. I tried not to look at anything but the pylon as it crept closer. Rixon tried to appear relaxed but he gripped the handrail as we closed in, I could see he was standing by the emergency control panel, probably ready to blast us away if it all went horribly wrong.
The status board above the dock flashed into life, counting down the distance, relative motion and angle of approach as we got closer. I juggled the controls, as we were slightly bows-in and the numbers changed. I was aiming for three zeros and achieved them as the range dropped to ten metres from our wingtip. The bulk of the station masked the background so it now looked like we were approaching a stationary platform.
Our wings slid under the structure and we hovered, the hull was now less than five metres off the arm. Close up I could see that the whole thing was mounted on huge buffers which would allow it to absorb the impact of a badly manoeuvred craft. The paintwork in the area was scratched and dented, with signs of many patched repairs. So far, I was doing alright, with Nancy’s help. The controller called again, “Hold it there, we are starting the magnetic clamps.” Our sideways motion resumed until, with a clang, we were held alongside. I immediately cut the power to the engines, before we could do any damage.
