Eve of Destruction

by M. D. Cooper

  Reaching inside his jacket to scratch Adama’s head, he continued down the main mall corridor, idly musing on which version of Cara he would rather meet in person. Show Cara dropped one-liners, threw a mean right hook, and dominated TSF, Marsian, and Jovian officers in and out of the bedroom, while Real-Life Cara looked like she would bite the head off a cobra.

  As the crowd started moving again, Rondo did a quick sweep of his surroundings. It had been four days since he’d fought the AI, and he hadn’t yet spotted anyone that looked like a tracker.

  He’d sent Fugia an update on his slagged equipment. The loss of a node could be a major event for the Mesh. They were running leaner now than they had in the ten years Rondo had been a data hoarder.

  Fugia had acknowledged his message and sent him back an encrypted snippet of text that read: [Go to ground for a couple days. When safe, go shopping.]

  The message had included geolocations for several hardware markets, and a list of usage requirements for a device he had come to think of as a Link extender. Why Fugia might want such a device, she didn’t say.

  “Mine is not to question why,” Rondo had been muttering to himself for days now. “Mine is but to do or die. And maybe try. Have to get by. Can’t just fly. Say bye-bye.”

  Rhyme was not one of his skills.

  It was good to have a task. Following the attack, Rondo had a hard time sleeping in the tiny hotel room he’d found. Adama’s complaining had given voice to his own feelings, but Rondo had started to relax over time. The second and third hotels were better, as he’d had more time to explore Fugia’s addresses.

  Still, wherever he went, he matched walking speed with the people around him and kept moving, trying not to look too paranoid.

  Cara’s vid was helping, in a way. Everyone wanted to talk about the rocket launch, and could care less about the bear-looking man walking past them.

  I want to talk about it too, dammit, he complained inwardly. I did that! I made that happen.

  Rondo was aware of Fugia’s connection to Cara. In typical Fugia fashion, she would verbally slap anyone who asked her about the Sykes family…but she had let a few details slip.

  For instance, Cara was a hacker to rival any data hoarder, and had grown up signal-freaking her family’s communications relay, bending the old ship’s systems to her will. She had also found a way to eavesdrop on the audio Link connections of anyone aboard the ship, an act that SolGov now considered prison-worthy.

  The story of how Cara and her brother had ended up living with her aunt on High Terra seemed to pain Fugia more than anything else in her life, and she had never shared the complete tale. Rondo had sussed out that Fugia blamed herself for what had become of the Sykes kids, and she didn’t want to hear it when people mentioned their mother, Brit Sykes, who had disappeared on a TSF mission when Cara was fifteen.

  Mall traffic thinned around him as Rondo reached the outer edge of the shopping district. He passed several re-sell shops filled with spacer equipment before pausing in front of a display window filled with esoteric electronics. The door into the little shop was closed even though the lights were on, so Rondo slid the door open and ducked inside.

  A woman with brown hair and augmented blue eyes sat behind the counter. She was attaching filament strands to a control board as Rondo came in. She put the work down and gave him an appraising glance.

  “You might be the biggest person who’s ever been in here,” she said.

  “I’m big for my age,” Rondo said, giving her a smile.

  His gaze ranged all over the tiny shop, taking in the multitude of gadgets on the shelves and hanging from the ceiling. He didn’t see a single item that wasn’t intriguing in some way, either by its age or rarity.

  “Is that a Geiger counter?” he asked, pointing.

  “Sure is. You interested in old tech? This is just the tip of the iceberg on what I’ve got. Most everything is in the warehouse, and it’s all operational. I make sure of that. What’s your name?”

  “Sinclair Rondo,” he answered, immediately charmed. “Yours?”

  “Name was on the door. I guess you missed it. I’m Sylvia Chance, purveyor of fine hardware from all eras. Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  Rondo wanted to impress her with the cosmodrome hack so badly that he felt physical pressure in his chest. He pushed down the urge.

  “I’m looking for something specific.” He explained the list of features Fugia had charged him to find.

  Sylvia listened, nodding. “You’re looking for military tech,” she said bluntly.

  “Maybe. That’s not the important aspect. Could be private, rather than military. What matters to me is that it does the job and the price is right.”

  Sylvia crossed her arms, and Rondo noticed her body for the first time. He cleared his throat uneasily; he had never been comfortable with attraction.

  Sylvia tilted her head, raising an eyebrow at his expression, possibly mistaking it for a bartering technique.

  “The price is going to be expensive,” she said. “But I think I’ve got something that will meet your requirements. It’s at the warehouse, though, so you’ll have to wait until I close up the shop.”

  “When’s that?” Rondo asked.

  “One hour. How about this…. There’s a bar further down the district, I’ll meet you there. Game?”

  Rondo nodded, gaze drawn to a wall of components behind her.

  “Is that a cutting laser?” he asked.

  “Sure is. You want it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He opened his jacket to find some cash, and Adama poked his head out of his pocket.

  “You have a cat in your coat,” Sylvia said.

  “I do.”

  Without further questions, Sylvia leaned across the counter and held out a hand for Adama to sniff.

  “I guess you’re a cat person,” Rondo said.

  Adama inspected Sylvia’s oil-stained fingers, then let her scratch his ears. He started purring.

  “I don’t know how I feel about you, Mr. Rondo,” she said. “That’s kind of unusual.”

  Rondo straightened, not sure if she was complimenting him or calling him weird. He was used to the latter, but her smile said otherwise.

  “Unusual is good, right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Sylvia affirmed. “First thought, let’s figure out a price for this laser.”

  * * * * *

  The bar was a narrow space between two shipping companies that had closed for the day. As Rondo stepped inside, he took in a mix of local and spacer tech heads who were drinking, but mostly engaged in heated, small-group discussions. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find a data hoarder or two in the place.

  As usual, his size drew a few surprised glances as he worked his way to the bar. The room was overheated, and he immediately started to sweat in his coat. Getting a beer, he moved down the bar to an empty seat and scooped Adama out of his secret pocket. Then he shrugged off the coat and set the purring cat on his shoulder.

  Adama stiffened, looking around for a second before rubbing his head against Rondo’s ear, then settling down, relaxed but alert. Rondo dipped his finger in the beer and gave Adama a taste. After a sniff, the cat wasn’t interested.

  “Suit yourself,” Rondo said.

  He leaned on the bar and sipped the beer, surprised to find it completely flat.

  “Hey,” he called to the bartender. “Why’s the beer flat?”

  “You new here? Carbonation turns your guts into an air compressor. You’ll be farting for days if you drink carbonation. We’ve got plenty of hard liquor if you want something else. The beer’s local, though.”

  “I’ll stick with it, thanks.”

  Yet another thing to dislike about Luna.

  The bartender gave him a nod and went to help someone else.

  Rondo liked to think of himself as a social introvert, which meant he wasn’t opposed to social interaction, he just didn’t seek it out. He had too much
on his mind currently to want to engage in random conversation, so he hunched over his glass and scratched Adama behind the ears as he thought.

  He was pleased the rocket hack had worked, but it indicated that Fugia was working on much bigger things than she had ever let on. Rondo was a big proponent of security through obscurity, and the fact that most of Sol didn’t know about the Mesh was just the way he liked things. If the Data Hoarders got political, their project might get dragged into the daylight, and their data exposed.

  Information was power and couldn’t help but be political—that was why it was so important the Hoarders stay out of politics. They controlled Sol’s information.

  The fact that the Anderson Collective had seized on the rocket launch so quickly, boosting their signal across Sol, had to mean they were working on some play. Rondo wasn’t an expert in geopolitics by any means, but he knew the Collective was the canary in the coal mine when it came to violence in Sol. They were a militant people without a home, and their chancellor had been pounding the war drums along with the Humanity First element in SolGov.

  Cara Sykes’s flight seemed like the firing of a starting gun.

  But what did he know? He was just a hacker. And his memory was bad.

  Rondo was halfway into his third beer when Sylvia Chance appeared beside him. She was wearing a brown leather jacket and fingerless gloves, her augmented eyes flashing.

  “You’re here,” she said. “That’s good. But you’re drunk. That’s bad.”

  “I’m not drunk,” Rondo said. “Just sleepy. We staying here or going?”

  “Going.” Her gaze roved around the bar. “I don’t have time for socializing.”

  If she recognized anyone, she didn’t show it.

  Rondo lifted a sleep-heavy Adama off his shoulder and got one arm in his coat so he could deposit the cat. He followed Sylvia out of the bar, noticing that the bartender gave her a nod as they passed.

  “Take care of yourself, newbie,” the bartender called.

  Rondo gave him a half-salute as he walked through the door.

  After the blazing bar, the outside corridor felt like a meat locker. Rondo wrapped his coat around him and walked quickly after Sylvia.

  “Where’s this warehouse?” he asked.

  “Other side of the district. Takes about twenty minutes to get there.”

  “That seems like a long way from your store.”

  “Sometimes it’s a good idea to keep your assets in separate locations.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  She maintained a fast skip-walk that Rondo could barely keep up with despite his longer legs. Sylvia noticed him struggling and gave him a smirk.

  “You’re going to have to figure that out if you want to fit in around here.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Utility is never ridiculous. Now stubbornness is just willfully ignorant.”

  “You’re sassy, aren’t you?” Rondo said, grunting with effort.

  Admittedly, he liked falling back a bit so he could watch her skip from behind. But he reminded himself he was on a mission for Fugia and couldn’t risk failure by making an ass of himself.

  Buttoning his coat and holding Adama’s pocket against his body, he attempted the skip-walk to somewhat better results. Skipping made the low gravity even more apparent, and he wasn’t used to the flip his stomach did at the top of each leap. Adama gave him a low growl, also not pleased.

  The shopping district had gone to sleep except for a few restaurants and bars scattered among the stores. Couples sat at benches or walked slowly with their heads close together as they passed.

  In ten minutes, they had entered a manufacturing section lined by small production companies. A few had fabrication plants operating in their display windows, advertising small-scale testing runs for off-world companies.

  One of the few industries that continued to thrive on Luna was prototype manufacturing in these small foundries. Combined with cheap lift prices from the low gravity, companies could test designs and easily move them to other parts of Sol. Proximity to Earth and High Terra meant a steady stream of projects for the highly competitive industry.

  Winding through increasingly smaller corridors, they arrived at a blank metal door in the middle of a long wall.

  “Here we are,” Sylvia said. “Prepare to be amazed.”

  “Really? I’m actually excited about this.”

  “Good,” she said. “This place is my pride and joy.”

  Sylvia pointed at the lock, passing her security token, and then pulled the door open on a black space. Lights flickered on inside as she invited him to enter.

  Rondo stepped into an enormous room lined with racks. Each storage location in the symmetrical space was crowded with gadgets and knick-knacks, while larger items hung from the ceiling and walls.

  Sylvia pulled the door closed, and the lock made a substantial magnetic click.

  “We’re locked inside,” she said. “I try to keep this place as low-profile as possible.”

  Walking up to a nearby speed rack, she leapt to the top shelf like a dancer and brought down two headlamps.

  “How long have you been collecting all this?” Rondo asked.

  He had already moved to the second aisle of racks, poking among a collection of gears.

  “I inherited some of it. The rest I’ve been building for the last five years. Getting this space changed everything for me.”

  “You manage all this by hand?”

  “I do. It’s more work, but that’s the part I enjoy best. You want to see something amazing?”

  “Of course,” Rondo said.

  She led him into the center of the warehouse to a rack filled with ancient circuit boards filed like books. On a shelf in what he realized was nearly the center of the warehouse sat a silver and wood-grained box with dials on its face and a second plas box sitting on top of it. The shelf next to the equipment was filled with multi-colored sleeves.

  “I’ve seen these before,” Rondo said. “They’re records.”

  Sylvia gave him a pleased smile. “I had a feeling you would know what these were. You want to listen to one?”

  “Is that safe? I thought the player physically touched the media. They degrade when you play them. That’s why they’re so rare.”

  “Dumb idea, right? These aren’t the original disks. I’ve copied them all. But the player is original, or mostly original. I’ve had to rebuild several systems, but it’s not complicated. Here, let me show you.”

  Sylvia selected a sleeve and slid out the plastic disk. With her free hand, she lifted the plas cover and then placed the disk on a rotating platform.

  She pressed a lever, and the disk started spinning. With another lever, she started the music.

  Rondo straightened, surprised by the depth of the sound. He felt the bass notes in his chest. Horns and reed instruments filtered in over the bass and drums, and then a woman’s voice came to the forefront. The sound was mesmerizing.

  Sylvia swayed beside him, obviously pleased that he enjoyed the music.

  When the song was finished, Rondo asked, “Where did you find this?”

  “A dead freighter off Cruithne.”

  “Really?”

  “You’d be amazed how many Earth antiques end up off-planet. They always have value.”

  “I was just on Vesta and saw something similar,” he said.

  “You were on Vesta? During the battle with Psion? Why?”

  Rondo caught himself, realizing he’d slipped. No sane person would have been on Vesta recently.

  “For work.”

  When he didn’t elaborate, Sylvia seemed to decide the moment was over. She clicked off the player and carefully inserted the disk back in its sleeve.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the scanner.”

  She led him to another part of the warehouse, counting racks, then jumped to a shelf near the top and came down with a bracelet-shaped device.

  “You seem to like
the jumping,” Rondo said.

  “Luna isn’t good for much, but it’s absolutely the best place in Sol to keep a warehouse.”

  A banging knock echoed through the room. Sylvia tensed as she was handing him the bracelet.

  “Were you expecting someone?” Rondo asked.

  “No. Are you armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “You might be a useful guy to have around. Come on.”

  “What are you getting me into?” Rondo asked.

  “If I knew, I probably wouldn’t be inviting you along.”

  She led the way back to the front of the warehouse. Rondo slipped the bracelet in his pocket, then patted Adama. The cat swatted at his hand; he’d need to get some exercise soon.

  As they approached the door, Rondo straightened to his full height. He pushed his coat behind his holster, and rested his hand on the butt of his pistol. With his free hand, he gripped a flashbang in another pocket.

  Sylvia went to the door as the banging continued. She activated the security panel, and a dusty display beside the door flickered alive. The cracked view showed three people standing in the corridor on the other side of the door.

  “You know them?” Rondo asked in a low voice.

  “Unfortunately,” Sylvia said. “They don’t look it, but they’re TSF.”

  Rondo squinted at the display again, studying the slick-looking man in front, then the thin woman and thick-necked man standing behind him. They looked like a small-time gang.

  Sylvia activated the door.

  “Jentry,” she said. “What a terrible fucking surprise.”

  “Sylvia, it’s good to see you.” Jentry was medium height with shiny black hair and a blade of a nose. He checked the corridor on either side of him. Then he looked past Sylvia and spotted Rondo. His gaze rose ceilingward as he took stock.

  “If you say so,” Sylvia answered.

  Jentry cleared his throat. “Who’s your friend?”

  “I’m Sinclair Rondo.”