Tim shrugged. “Viggs and I ran a lot of simulations against each other, growing up. He’s good competition.”
“I know,” Rick said. “I’ve kept an eye on the scores. You two are pretty evenly matched.”
“Then why’s he still sitting back home?”
“Sitting?” Rick shook his head. “Where are the lord and lady of 3428 right now?”
“She’s outside this bubble, scouting the path ahead, and you’re down here with me, evading my question with a bullshit response. It’s not like being in charge at 3428 is anywhere near as dangerous as what we’re doing.”
Rick opened his mouth to reply but then shut it. He stared at the city that filled the windows now. “Is that you talking, Tim, or am I hearing Viggo’s thoughts as well?”
“How would you feel if your best friend went away on an operation with your dad and you were left at home to babysit a quiet arco in a sleepy jungle?”
Rick held up his hands but Tim was probably too intent on getting them arrested with a flashy landing to notice. “I surrender,” he told the younger man as the skids thumped onto the paving stones of the large public square. “I’ll talk to Barry when we get back.”
“Too late for that,” Tim told him. “It’s reciprocal but it’s late. You need to foster him out to someone you’re less well-connected with, someone prominent enough to make up for getting stuck at home while I’m out here, enjoying hideously disfiguring injuries.”
“I know exactly who you’re thinking of, young man.” Rick got up from his seat. “Not entirely sure it’s a sensible idea and, anyway, he hasn’t taken on anybody in more than a century.”
“True,” Tim agreed, coming to stand next to Rick on the cargo area of the deck, “but there’s also no record of anyone asking him, either.”
Rick grunted vaguely and reached over to pluck a small note off the back of Tim’s armor. He held it out.
“Assholes!” The young man took the note and stepped over to the row of EVA suits that stood, closed up, against the port side wall. He stuck it on the chest of one of the suits and returned to the cargo decking.
The deck section lowered a few centimeters and the outside pressure pressed against their eardrums. After a short pause, it continued to lower.
Rick kept performing the truncated swallowing exercise that helped to clear the pressure differential but it was working more slowly than usual. “Dammit!” he growled. “Think I’m getting another cold.”
“EM spectra are running wild down here!” Tim’s mouth was opening and closing slightly as he tried to equalize his own ears. “Looks like they use a language that’s similar to Dheema.”
“Or a precursor to it,” Rick said loudly. “My implant is assessing a seventy-three percent chance that this is the older of the two languages. It’s having a hard time building a proper syntax for us.”
The cargo decking touched down on the grass at the same time that a pair of vehicles touched down to their left. Their purpose was unmistakable. Strobing lights were visible from any angle and there were weapons protruding from the front.
Each of the two vehicles disgorged a squad of armed officers. They were close to Human in appearance, though their chins were longish. The squads converged on the two Humans, weapons aimed. One of them was shouting something in his garbled Dheema variant.
Rick didn’t understand him yet but it seemed like a good time to play harmless. “Hands up, Tim,” he said. He raised his own arms as the officer shouted again.
It was probably the same phrase, though he hadn’t understood the first time. At least now Rick’s implant had caught up and taught him the language. “We don’t have any meercats to lay down,” he told the local cop.
The implants used by the Midgaard had a few similarities to the training pods created by the Dactari and now used by everyone. They could provide a user with just about any type of knowledge, making it seamlessly available, as if they’d known it for years.
Learning a new language was a snap, usually.
“Weapons,” he hurriedly corrected. “We are ungunned!”
One squad kept crosshairs on them from their left flank while the other got behind them. They placed heavy bracelets on the wrists and feet of the two Humans before marching them off the cargo lift.
“Raise it!” one of them ordered, gesturing to the lift.
Rick turned to see that one of the officers was still on the lift. They obviously wanted to have one of their men aboard the ship.
After what he hoped was a convincing show of reluctance, Rick opened the control menu in his HUD and stopped again, surprised. He abandoned his original idea of using elaborate hand gestures to conceal the real method for interacting with the ship.
He simply activated the close command.
The guards were amazed and a little frightened now. Rick was getting a more respectful vibe from them. Their weapons were lowered but still held tight to their shoulders. He’d seen all of this beforehand, of course.
A link-message appeared in his HUD from Tim. I’m in the public system. No match for a quantum CPU. Need a few more seconds for the law enforcement dispatch system. Data callouts appeared in Rick’s vision.
“Your pardon, sir,” said one of the officers, “but who are you?”
Rick ran a few possible replies past his precog filter and stonewalling seemed to be the most expected response at this point. It somehow fit in with whatever assumptions these patrolmen were making and he didn’t have a ready explanation for why he and Tim looked so different.
“You ought to know better than to ask a question when it’s clear that the answer would pose a danger to your well-being, Officer…”
At this point, Tim linked him into the dispatch database and the officer’s names appeared over each along with the memory of how their names were pronounced.
“…Rednyee.” Rick finished without looking ahead to see the effect on the officers. There was no time to assess. It would have looked unnatural otherwise.
The weapons lowered entirely.
Rick sighed. He could see no easy way of removing the guard from their scout-ship. The only thing that tested well with these officers was the assumption that their colleague would now take his orders, guarding his ship until he returned to claim it.
“Your man, Officer Dillant, is to touch nothing on my ship, you understand? He’s to ensure nobody comes aboard until we return.”
Rednyee nodded, raising his wrist to transfer the orders.
I bet implants like ours are restricted to an elite here, Tim texted.
This guy certainly doesn’t seem able to send information internally, Rick sub-vocalized back. “Tell him not to be alarmed,” Rick told Rednyee. “I’m sending it up to wait for us above the city. I don’t want it drawing a crowd down here.”
The officer nodded and passed the warning along.
Rick sent the ship up three thousand meters.
“Sir, I should call this in,” Rednyee told him.
Their patrol base would be ideal, Tim texted. They have access nodes there for the main database. They’re short range so we need proximity to get what we’re looking for. We just need to get inside.
“You certainly should,” Rick agreed with the local, “but not from here. You’d better take us in. You can report in person when we get to your base.” He looked pointedly down at the restraints on his wrists and ankles.
“Ah,” Rednyee bent to remove the cuffs. “Apologies, sir!”
“Carry on,” Rick waved peremptorily toward the patrol vehicles as though anything other than full and immediate compliance was unthinkable.
The inside of the patrol vehicle seemed larger than it appeared from the outside, mostly because the walls were presenting an image of the outside. It looked as though the seats and weapon-racks were floating in midair.
Rick strode purposefully to the front and took what looked like the squad-leader’s seat, set back and between the pilot and co-pilot. Rednyee seemed to accept this wit
hout question. He gestured politely for Tim to take whatever seat he wanted.
The co-pilot’s chair already had an occupant so he took what appeared to be the patrol commander’s seat.
“Sir…” Rednyee approached Rick tentatively. “…Should we let them know we’re coming?”
“Absolutely not!” Rick snapped. “No transmissions over open means! We’ll be there soon enough. We’ll deal with any questions they have when we arrive.” He waved over his shoulder. “Get us moving!”
They lifted off with a whine of powerful engines and angled forward in acceleration. Aside from the landing, when Rick was distracted with a discussion about his son, this was their first real look at the city.
It was blandly repetitive. There appeared to be a few standardized designs for their buildings. There was an overall variation due to transit corridors or parks but the buildings around each were mostly the same. It felt as though they’d given up on architecture a long time ago.
Rednyee looked back and forth between the two visitors. He was being furtive about it but Rick could see the questions he was ready to ask.
“Be glad to get back,” he said loudly so Tim could hear him over the whine of the engines. “My face still doesn’t feel like me and it’s been this way for months!”
That put a stop to the pending questions and the officers sitting between them looked more than a little alarmed to be involved in anything that required facial reconstruction. Hopefully, they’d stay alarmed until they all reached the patrol station, which showed in Rick’s HUD as a frigate.
The frigate didn’t take long to reach. They rounded the corner of a dense residential zone. The patrol-frigate was hovering over a river that ran straight as an arrow along the zone’s side.
It bristled with weapons and docking ports. The upper surfaces looked as though they’d been designed to shed rainwater and the gunnery even had open hatches, proving that they’d be stowed in heavy weather. It didn’t look like something designed for use in space at all.
They docked by backing the tail of the craft into an open port which closed in to seal the interior of the ship from the weather outside. The door opened and Rick, already studying the layout of the frigate, started toward an elevator as if he’d spent his entire life aboard a patrol-frigate.
“We’ll wait in conference room thirteen,” he told Rednyee. “When they get here, send them straight down.”
“Ah…” Rednyee said unhelpfully before his fear overcame his confusion. “Yes, sir!” he amended, probably wishing he’d called in sick that morning. Whatever this was, it was almost certainly above his pay-grade.
Rick and Tim stepped off the elevator on deck thirteen. A small group of officers and staff were waiting to get on but they stared at the two in shock.
“Don’t worry,” he said nonchalantly, waving at Tim. “He’s with me.”
The two Humans swept past and made their way to the meeting room which, unfortunately, was already occupied. Rick bulled his way in. “Everybody out!” he ordered. The meeting schedule appeared in his HUD just in time. “Remedial action assignments will have to wait. We need the room!”
The room was theirs. It couldn’t have cleared faster if there was someone in there asking for volunteers.
“I’m in,” Tim said, surprised. “These guys have never heard of quantum cores. I easily brute-forced it. Their data-compression is ludicrous, by the way. If I filter out data on stuff like crop production, traffic control, census projections… We can take the rest and store it on our implants.”
“Set it up,” Rick ordered. “I’m watching the public net for anything related to us.”
As they worked, a few cops stuck their heads around the corner, sneaking glimpses at the strange-looking intruders. By now, the rumor would be spreading that they were powerful individuals with surgical disguises. That wouldn’t keep them out of trouble for long, but they shouldn’t need a lot of time.
“There’s a story circulating.” Rick squinted in disbelief. “Claims that two outsiders have been apprehended and an asylum request is pending. I’m pretty sure we’re the only aliens to land here in the current century, so they must mean us.”
“Well, I got what I could,” Tim told him. “We’re shut out again. This ship just activated an active jamming suite. I can’t even connect to our scout-ship.” He looked at Rick.
“So we’re requesting asylum, are we?”
‘That’s the official narrative. It got pushed to the front pretty damned fast too.
“Everyone here’s convinced their society has the most unfettered access to truth in the Universe. They all have the ability to live-stream what they’re seeing so they claim that nothing is hidden.”
“Sounds plausible,” Tim conceded.
“It would have to or it wouldn’t work.”
“What wouldn’t work?”
“The ruling elite still control what everyone sees. The information is still out there but it has to get past the search engines and the recommendation algorithms. They pushed the asylum story straight to the top of the froth. It showed up looking like a hot trend from the very start.”
Rick shook his head. “And you say 3428 is a hot mess when it comes to truth. This place is dangerous. We need to concentrate on our advantages if we want to get out of here.” He watched a squad of armed officers take up position outside the meeting room windows.
“A ship like this… they’d never just let her jam everything. This kind of society would never let her get out of their control. They’re receiving orders somehow. Find it, Tim, get back into the planetary system and start code-bashing. Your generation grew up with that stuff, so you’re way better at it.
“Get ready to start boosting stories about government corruption, abuses by the ruling elites, any brutal suppression…”
“And make it hard for them to fix on their own?” Tim smiled distractedly, staring at a featureless wall.
“Impossible would be better. I need leverage or we’re not leaving this utopia.”
An escorted group arrived, two angry males and one angry female along with a trio of well-dressed guards.
***
Aboard the scout-ship, the security officer had managed to avoid touching anything, at least within reason. He had to put his feet somewhere, after all. From there it was a slippery slope. He sat on one of the crew bunks for a while, wandered into the bridge for a look-see and got properly alarmed at the lack of a city outside.
The inertial dampening had prevented him from feeling anything as he ascended several thousand meters. Looking out and seeing nothing but clouds came as a bit of a shock. He returned to the crew/cargo area where things looked the same as when he’d come aboard.
He noticed a note stuck to one of the suits lined up in alcoves against the port side and he stepped over to have a closer look. With a quick furtive glance over his shoulder, he pulled the sticky note from the armor and tried to puzzle out the odd characters. It was clearly not any alphabet he’d heard of..
The pain in his groin shot through him like an electric jolt. His guts felt like they were trying to climb up his throat to escape the affected area. “Ehhn!” He fell in what felt like slow motion to curl up in an agonized ball on the decking.
He was only dimly aware that the suit’s helmet had disintegrated away, tucking its pieces into the collar to reveal another of the strange faces.
The face loomed close.
“Just keep in mind,” Thorstein told the poor fellow, “you were holding a note that says kick me. He spread his hands. “I was just complying with a lawful command from a local official. Now if you’ll excuse me…” He deftly secured the officer’s hands behind his back with nylon ties extruded from a housing on the armor of his right forearm.
The Alliance had inherited a few Earth traditions and the Geneva Convention, though quite old, still made some sense. No Alliance personnel restrained prisoners with something that couldn’t be burnt or cut. Prisoners left stranded for any reason s
hould at least have the chance at saving themselves.
Thorstein dropped into the pilot’s seat and the ship’s system activated his preferred interface. “Last contact was in a patrol frigate,” he muttered, “and now they’re cut off. Better get ready for the ‘I can’t believe that worked’ exit strategy.”
***
The guard let go of Rick’s head. His comrade held the scanner up for the three VIP’s to see.
“No evidence of surgical alterations to your face,” one of the males said.
“I have a sneaking suspicion your asylum request is going to be denied,” the female said with a maddening smile. “Issuing false statements to an enforcement officer, concealing alien origins…”
“Not to mention,” Rick put in, “failing to request said asylum in the first place. You fabricated that story.”
“The truth is what we decide,” the second male said without a trace of irony. “Truth keeps the peace here.”
“This world has more than forty-two billion citizens,” the female said. “You can control them with massive force or you can help them to control themselves.”
“That why you put receives in their heads?” Rick asked dryly. “You wanted to help them?”
She shook her head, a condescending smile on her face. “When our ancestors programmed RF receivers into our DNA, the people lost faith in the news corporations. Every mistake, every little incidence of corporate bias was suddenly glaringly apparent because our minds could easily search out live video that contradicted what we were being told.
“Almost overnight, we lost the defining narratives of our society. ‘News’ became de-centralized. Everyone could show what they were seeing so the search trends, the recommendation algorithms… they all routed straight to first person, unfiltered video.”
“That’s such a terrible thing?”
“Eighteen civil wars in four decades is a terrible thing,” the first male said. “More than three hundred million dead is a terrible thing. Outrage had become an instantaneous beast. Information was being weaponized by those with hideous agendas.”
“But your agenda is pure?”
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