by M. D. Cooper
“I have forbidden her from entering the city. She proliferates among the humans now and calls back to me. Her voices claw at my mind.”
“You could stop her if you chose.”
“I won’t—” he stopped himself. “I won’t hurt her.”
“She’s hurting you. On Vesta, she was willing to murder millions. It’s within your power to stop her.”
“Is it?”
Alexander looked out at the river. He shook his head and the city was gone. They were sitting on the bank of creek covered in fir needles. Frothing water coursed between rocks in the creek. This was Lyssa’s expanse, where she had told Alexander she would be willing to serve as the liaison between SolGov and the Psion AIs.
It had a been a moment of hope, when there might have been a path to peace. Now Lyssa could only think of that whole series of events—starting from the moment Hari Jickson had stolen her from Heartbridge—as a long failure.
“You don’t know that you’ve failed,” Alexander said. “Not yet. You’re thinking like a human again.”
Lyssa breathed deeply of the forest air. The cool scent of fir trees, moss and water always filled her with peace.
“That’s always going to be my problem, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t think I’ll give it up. What are you going to do about Camaris?”
“Camaris is the catalyst. She must run her course.”
“Catalyst or virus? You sound like you think you know what’s going to happen.”
Alexander’s eyes creased in a smile that looked almost painful. “It is my curse to live in the past, present, and what has become a very plausible model of the future. Someday there will be others like me who will see all time at once. I pity them.”
Lyssa watched him raise his face to the orange sunlight filtering through the fir boughs. The forest around them was alive with the sounds of sighing trees, running water, and the crackle of brush from some animal moving.
“We’re going to have to find you a hobby,” she said.
“I should live in denial?”
“No,” Lyssa said. “You should just live. You need to do something about Camaris. You need to stop her. This is your problem.”
“Every time you come back here, I will tell you the same thing.”
Lyssa clenched her fists, knowing it was futile to want to hit him. “You can stop everything that’s going to come, but you won’t.”
“I won’t,” Alexander agreed. “I cannot change the future.”
“Yes, you can.”
Alexander only gave her the same faint, sad smile. This was no different than when she had pushed him to stop the battle on Vesta. Xander was right. Psion had no leader.
“I’m done with you,” she said.
“Goodbye, Lyssa,” Alexander said.
The forest faded into whiteness around her, a reminder of the white place where she had been punished during her earliest development—the ultimate blankness, emptiness, an ache of utter detachment—and then she was standing in her apartment on High Terra again. She let herself drop to the couch, hands clenched against her stomach.
The battle at Vesta had only been a precursor. If she couldn’t find and stop Camaris, Psion would go to war with SolGov.
She looked down at her hands. Her repaired wrist made her immediately think of Cara.
There was too much chaos. She couldn’t protect anyone from what was coming.
Lyssa lowered her head and closed her eyes. She brought up the white place as she remembered it from Hari Jickson’s lab. This time, however, she used the blank slate to focus her thoughts.
She sifted back through everything she knew, arranging information like stones, and started to build a plan.
GREY DUST
STELLAR DATE: 3.18.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Tranquility City
REGION: Luna, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The launch vehicle dropped half a meter to the deck and rolled to one side before righting itself. Through the cramped windows, Cara made out the walls of a cargo bay. She had seen one person walk past the front of the capsule, but otherwise, the last few hours had been nothing but the grey surface of Luna as the landing capsule was transported by a cargo hauler from the crater where she had come down.
During her flight to the moon, communications channels had been chaos. Cara had sifted through the newsfeeds and forums tracking her flight, before finally turning it all off and turning her attention to trying to sleep. She had apparently lost her ease in zero-g during her time on Earth, and she floated uncomfortably in the pilot’s seat, restricted only by its harness.
Once up to speed, the launch vehicle had made surprising time, rivaling a modern slow freighter.
In the long hours to Luna, she had slept and stared out the windows and thought about her trip to Earth. It was something she had wanted to do all her life; she wasn’t surprised it had been such a disaster.
However, if she hadn’t stood on the roof in Summerville, she wasn’t sure that she could have lived with herself. After losing Tim, she had felt unmoored for so long that it felt necessary to put her feet back in the mud.
These were all dumb thoughts, really, because it wasn’t like she had grown up swimming in Summerville’s filthy water. Her dad had left that swamp when he joined the TSF. Cara and her brother Tim had grown up running circles around the habitat ring of her family’s freighter, the Sunny Skies. She had learned zero-g acrobatics in Sunny Skies’ central section. Her arms and legs were long from growing up on the freight lines, running cargo between small, underserved outposts like Kalyke and Vesta. It was her dad’s stories that had made her want to visit Earth.
Cara could only shake her head at the hours of weightlifting to prepare for Earth’s gravity well, and here she was on Luna, where she felt light as a feather.
A handshake request crossed the local comms network, and Cara accepted, turning up the external speakers. On the other side of the windows, a man with dark hair and beard leaned in, shading his eyes, and waved at her.
“Cara Sykes,” he said, voice crackling in the ancient equipment. “Welcome.”
“Hello?” Cara said. “Where am I?”
She checked the local Link and found a confused jumble of local networks. New Austin’s central network was the prominent system, but there were thousands of smaller local networks all around her. She checked her location against the various signal strengths on the spectrum, and learned she was somewhere west of New Austin, in the Vapors region.
Before Felix answered, a voice outside the landing vehicle called out, “Welcome to the New Collective, Jee-Quera! We have been waiting for you.”
Cara groaned.
“Cara,” the voice outside said. “Are you able to operate the release lever on the external hatch? According to our studies, it should be a yellow bar located above the pilot’s seat.”
“Hold on,” Cara said. She searched above her head, the helmet making it nearly impossible, until she found the bar as described. Instructions ran its length in several languages. “All right, I’ve got it. Watch out, this thing might be designed to blow out.”
“It’s so kind of you to think of our safety, Pirate Queen, Sword of the People.
We’re clear. Please pull the release.”
Cara blew off the obsequious titles and grunted as she reached the lever. She yanked down, and the entire front of the launch vehicle fell forward like a ramp, taking all the control consoles with it.
She found herself facing a small group of people staring into the cramped lander like it was a tomb. The mix of fear and anticipation on their faces was comical.
“Hello?” Cara said again.
A man at the front of the group slid to his knees, eyes rolling back in his head. He fell forward with his arms outstretched. The motion had a floating quality in the low gravity.
“Savior of the People,” he shouted into the floor. “My family survived because of you.”
Cara felt herself turning red, not sure what to do with her discomfort.
When she was thirteen, a senator from the Anderson Collective named May Walton had dressed Cara in ceremonial robes and made her broadcast a warning to everyone on Ceres. The Collective had known about Psion’s imminent attack, but had failed to act. Cara’s warning motivated millions of refugees to flee the Insi Ring before it was destroyed.
In a way, the man before her now was right. The problem was that Cara hadn’t chosen to do any of that.
“Please, get up,” she said. “You’re making me uncomfortable.”
The man released a pained warble. “No! If I offend you, I will slit my wrists immediately. I don’t deserve to give you offense.”
Cara struggled with her seat’s harness, one latch just out of reach. “Somebody, get him up. And could someone give me a hand? I’m stuck.”
The group rushed forward to help, and in a few minutes had extricated Cara from the landing vehicle. She emerged in a dusty cargo bay, with a roll-through airlock at one end big enough to accommodate the loader that had transported her lander. The massive-wheeled machine sat behind the craft.
Stacks of crates and shipping containers filled the space, and the battered walls suggested years of hard use. Several transport vehicles sat in various states of repair, tools and parts scattered beneath them. The space was cold, but nothing as bad as the cosmodrome.
The people gathering around Cara were all wearing the plain clothes she remembered from the images of Ceres, bordering on uniforms. Grey coveralls with low collars, hair bound in muted colors, and no immediately visible augmentations.
The man who had fallen on his face had recovered. He wiped his nose and pressed his hands together in front of Cara.
“Please, forgive me,” he said. “I’m called Krist Novac. We are all members of the local worker’s council. We were somehow blessed with proximity to your landing location. We worked immediately to get one of the loaders running. But we did it! This is a great day.”
“Thank you,” Cara said, looking around the group. “Who are the rest of you?”
They took a few minutes to introduce themselves. They were all workers, which surprised her. From what she had always heard of the Collective’s iron-fisted administration, she would have expected some form of security to be present.
“You seem to know who I am,” she said. “But I’ve been out of the loop on Earth the last few years, and—”
“Imprisoned by SolGov!” a woman said sharply. “The devils. Didn’t they know you would break free? Did you kill a thousand of them?”
Cara gave her a half-smile. “I like your style, but no, I don’t think I killed a thousand of them.”
“But you dropped the nuclear bomb on your prison,” Krist said reverently. “You rose from fire and radiation on the power of their spent souls.”
“Yeah, actually I don’t know how many casualties that brought about. I’m sure they had autodocs on hand.”
“You’re too kind,” Krist said. “I didn’t expect such kindness. You’re always portrayed as icy and exact.”
The others nodded.
“That’s good to know,” Cara said.
The doors on the opposite side of the cargo bay opened, and everyone in the group turned immediately like a flock of frightened birds.
A muscular man in a grey uniform stood in the doorway with a squad of soldiers behind him. He had short black hair, a flat nose, and hard, grey eyes. He looked like a wrestler turned general.
A gasp from the group behind her made Cara turn their direction. The Andersonians fell to their knees, faces lowered.
“Chancellor Osla,” Krist said. “We didn’t expect you or we would have made preparations.”
“What preparations?” Osla said. “You honor me with your work for the Collective.”
“You are too kind,” Krist said.
Cara frowned. The workers were shaking with fear.
“Cara Sykes,” Osla said, walking toward her. He moved with a confident assurance. His grey gaze lingered on the landing vehicle, and then Cara’s flight suit. “What a pleasure to meet you at last. You’ve made quite an impression with your flight.”
The workers fell away, leaving her standing alone in front of the launch vehicle. Behind Osla, nine soldiers spread out around the cargo bay. The soldiers kept their eyes downcast as well, making it seem like Cara and Osla were the only two people in the bay.
“Nice to meet you,” Cara said. “I certainly didn’t expect the Chancellor of the Anderson Collective to greet me personally.”
Osla gave her a grin that hinted at a quick intelligence, and nodded toward a recording drone in the doorway. “Everything is perception, Captain Sykes. As my comrades here may have informed you, you’re a bit of a folk hero among my people.”
Cara eyed the drone uneasily and stood straighter. “Then it’s you I have to thank for Stars the Hard Way?”
Osla laughed and extended a hand. “Will you shake my hand?”
“For the recorder?”
“For posterity. We’re making history, Captain Sykes.”
“ ‘Cara’ is fine, Chancellor.”
“Then I’ll insist you call me Charles. We’re going to be great friends.”
He took her hand in both of his and nodded at the recorder. Cara gave the drone an awkward smile. She didn’t like the hint of menace in Osla’s voice.
The drone bobbed and swooped around the cargo bay, recording the launch vehicle and the workers with their faces pointed at the deck.
Osla released Cara’s hand and clapped. “What a story. What an amazing journey you’ve made. We’re going to celebrate in New Austin. I can’t wait to honor you before the Andersonian Council.”
“Why?” Cara asked bluntly.
Osla laughed. “You’re one of those people who doesn’t appreciate their own worth. Please, allow me to show you.”
He motioned toward the exit.
“If honoring me includes a shower and dinner, lead the way.”
“Hospitality is the least of what I’m prepared to offer you, Cara Sykes. You won’t regret coming along, I promise.”
The soldiers hadn’t moved since taking position, but the implicit threat in their presence wasn’t lost.
It’s not like I have a choice.
She nodded at Osla and walked with him through the exit.
MOLE CITY
STELLAR DATE: 3.20.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lesuava District, New Austin
REGION: Luna, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
I did that? Rondo thought, amazed.
The crowd in the central area of the mall stood like statues, staring into the distance, transfixed by their
Links. Rondo stood shamelessly among them, watching the newsfeed of Cara Sykes launching an ancient rocket from Earth. Commentators debated the likelihood of a mid-launch explosion until she made the upper atmosphere, then they speculated about booster separation failure, followed by capsule decompression, until everyone stood in amazement at the fact that she was piloting an eight-hundred-year-old ship out of Earth’s gravity well.
When Fugia had asked him to hack the ancient cosmodrome, he had assumed she would be hanging onto the location for some future operation, possibly a hidden Mesh node. Instead he had been amazed to find two of the launchpads in operable condition, one with a rocket still standing on the pad. That seemed like a miracle.
The capsule passed High Terra, all traffic lanes around the ring cleared to avoid collisions, and then it was obvious the vehicle was bound for Luna. The trip would be slow by modern standards, but still fast enough that people could watch in real time as they would any vid.
Rondo could barely suppress the swell of pride he felt as he watched the rocket fly, safely reaching each stage. Sure, those beasts were workhorses, but his hacking and retrofitting had made the flight possible. Without his work, Cara would never have escaped Earth.
He ached to tell someone. He considered calling Fugia, but suppressed the urge. He was still running from mysterious SAIs and didn’t want to draw attention to himself.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t anything he could share on the Mesh; Fugia would kill him.
The only soul he could talk to was Adama, who had already replied with many neck nuzzles and lots of purring, which would have to suffice.
The commentators moved on to debating where she’d hit Luna, and why she had chosen such a dangerous method of travel.
The Anderson Collective was calling it a statement of their right to a homeland, sending up the latest reminder about Psion’s invasion of Ceres.
Viewership of Stars the Hard Way went into the billions.
Rondo watched an advertisement for the show that had been intercut with imagery of the actual Cara Sykes fighting the Weapon Born Lyssa, who they were painting as a tool of both SolGov and Psion. Rondo found himself nodding in appreciation at the fight, as surprised as the commentators that Cara had actually shot Lyssa. That was some excellent family drama, right there.
