Eve of Destruction

by M. D. Cooper

  “What do you do, Sinclair Rondo?”

  “I’m a music lover. I specialize in rare and antiquated items.”

  “Well, we all know our Sylvia is a music lover,” Jentry said. “Mind if we come in? It’s cold out here.”

  Sylvia stepped out of the door and allowed them entry. Jentry walked in as if he had been in the warehouse before, while the two behind him looked around with interest.

  On first blush, Rondo could almost buy that they worked for the TSF, maybe as privateers or contractors. The only one that carried herself with any sort of military bearing was the woman.

  “Who are your friends?” Sylvia asked.

  “This is Amanda, and that’s Pedro. We’re working on a project together.”

  “You’re still freelancing, then?”

  “I’m still with the space force, if that’s what you’re asking. I do various interesting jobs. It pays well. Made it so I could build out a crew. There’s still a place for you, if you’re interested.”

  “Retail keeps me too busy for interesting jobs,” Sylvia said. “Which brings us to your visit. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Jentry said. “I’ve got some work for you.”

  “I’m not taking on any new work.”

  “Really?” Jentry threw out a sum that made Rondo raise his eyebrows. It wasn’t TSF money. It was syndicate money.

  “That sounds like a job that could get me killed,” Sylvia said.

  “I haven’t even told you what it is.”

  “If someone’s paying that kind of cash for it, there’s most definitely somebody getting killed.” She looked at Amanda and Pedro. “Did he make that clear to you? One of you isn’t going to make it.”

  Jentry laughed. “This job isn’t even about us,” he said. “All we’re going to do is create the conditions for someone else’s success. And I know you’ll be interested, because we’re going up against Psion.”

  “Psion?” Sylvia sounded like Jentry had cursed.

  Rondo looked from Sylvia Chase, a woman he felt obvious attraction toward for several reasons, to Jentry and his crew. His mind went immediately to Fugia, because he knew that nothing around Fugia happened by chance. She had put him here with her request.

  “Fine,” Sylvia said, sighing. “Let’s hear about this job.”

  THE ANDERSONIAN EUDAIMONIA MACHINE

  STELLAR DATE: 3.20.3011 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Tranquility City

  REGION: Luna, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  Sitting in a maglev car that was mostly clear plas, Cara had a good view of the Lunar surface on the ride from the refugee camp to New Austin. Low craters and half-buried structures filled most of the view, while the silver towers of the city grew in the distance.

  Osla sat across from her, with soldiers filling out the rest of the car. The two on either side of Cara gave her plenty of room.

  Felix had said as she entered the car.

  “All the world watched your launch,” Osla said. “Did you plan that? What I don’t understand is why you weren’t shot out of space the minute you left Earth.”

  “I guess I’ve got a guardian angel,” Cara said.

  The chancellor gave her a conspiratorial nod. “Who are you working for?”

  “What?”

  “Someone let you out of that prison. Someone helped you reach the ancient rocket. Someone ensured the rocket was operational. Is it Lyssa the Weapon Born?”

  “I have no idea,” Cara said. “If you saw all that, then you saw that I shot Lyssa’s arm off. I don’t think she’s pleased with me right now.”

  Osla waved a hand. “That was all theater. She was wearing a frame. You couldn’t hurt her.”

  “Not everything is Stars the Hard Way. She can be hurt, she’s physically in the frame. I suppose she could control one remotely, but there are limits. She was there.”

  Osla gave her a sly glance. “How do you know?”

  “I know,” Cara said. “Look, I’ve been running since I woke up in a prison cell. I didn’t get much sleep on the rocket ride. How about you tell me something entertaining? Or maybe have one of these guys give me a neck massage.”

  The chancellor raised an eyebrow. “You think I’m here to entertain you?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  Osla chuckled. “You sound as though you want my job.”

  “What’s it like?” Cara asked, leaning her head against the plas wall. “Being the chancellor of a government?”

  “A hustle. We might have more in common than you think.”

  Cara glanced at Osla and found him watching her intently. If she hadn’t been so tired, she might have believed he was flirting.

  “How so?”

  “You had your ship, your crew, no real plan other than survival. Or did you have a plan?”

  Cara shrugged. “Survival.”

  “My ship is the Collective, the council my crew. My plan is to create the conditions for them all to thrive. Millions depend on my decisions as chancellor. The problem is that we live in a world of extremes. Survival isn’t good enough. We have to stand out, separate ourselves, dominate.”

  “Is that the world, or your choice?”

  “I didn’t make the world.”

  “You sound like Psion.”

  Osla gave her a slight smile. “Maybe we all have more in common than we think. Tell me something, what do you want above all else?”

  A memory of Felix asking her the same thing flashed in Cara’s mind. She couldn’t remember exactly when he had asked.

  “A ship.”

  “A ship is a tool. Do you want freedom? Power? To fix your past?”

  “There’s no solving the past,” Cara said.

  Lights came into view in the window behind Osla’s head. The multicolored lights of New Austin glowed on the horizon, growing rapidly as the maglev climbed from the bowl of a crater. Flashing signs hung above the domes of the city, advertising what was visible to High Terra.

  “Do you miss your brother?” Osla asked abruptly.

  “What?” Cara blinked, not certain if she had heard him correctly.

  “Your brother. Do you wish he was still here?”

  “Of course. What kind of question is that?”

  One of the guards shifted, uneasy with her tone of voice.

  “The director is thinking of bringing him back on Stars. They think the people would like to know something good can come from the Marsian military, that they aren’t all human robots. Tim’s story could be a powerful example.”

  Cara looked out the window again. “It’s your program, Chancellor. I can’t control what you do with it.”

  “But do you think it would be compelling?”

  “I’m not your target audience,” Cara said.

  “Now that’s disappointing.”

  Osla received a Link request and stared into the distance. Cara closed her eyes for a few minutes, thinking about Tim and the last time she had seen him, just before he joined the Mars 1 Guard. He had been excited, and she had done her best to share his excitement, despite her worry that she was losing him.

  In the years since, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she had failed Tim somehow. The TSF weapons case had been the last symbol of that failure. Now that the case was gone, she didn’t feel any lighter.

  One of the soldiers grunted for the others to straighten up. They would be arriving soon.

  Cara opened her eyes. The city grew around them, first as grids of industrial zones, and then collections of low domes that marked underground districts.

  More maglev rails came into view, snaking between sets of buildings or diving into the ground to connect the largely underground city.

  “There’s the Andersonian sector.” Osla pointed toward a wide dome in the distance. �
�The Senate-in-Exile meets there.”

  Lights shone across the domes as brightly lit craft floated between them.

  “Exile,” Cara said. “You still think you’re going back to Ceres?”

  A soldier next to her sucked in a breath.

  “That is our destiny,” Osla said. “We’ve been denied our homeland too long, but we remember. We all remember the attack.” He looked around the maglev car and received affirmative nods.

  He pointed across the city. “The New Austin government is there. You saw the ruins out on the rest of Luna, evidence that the leadership here hasn’t considered what a resource this place represents. The history of human expansion into Sol is all around us. You just rode a vital part of our history to Luna, connecting us with the past. The Collective endures.”

  Cara was about to roll her eyes when she caught the expression on the face of a nearby soldier. The young man was glowing as he listened to Osla, sitting upright and ready.

  The car slowed and dropped underground. Tunnel light flashed above them as the maglev arrived at the terminal in the base of the Collective’s governmental building.

  Another squad of soldiers awaited when the maglev’s doors slid open. They snapped a salute for Osla.

  The new security detail escorted Cara and Osla to a lift that carried them twenty levels down a residential section. The public areas were floored in orange carpet with grey plascrete walls. Shifting images of Ceres and the Insi Ring covered the walls at intervals, with slogans like, ‘The Collective Will Go Home’ and ‘Sharpen Your Mind Against AIs’. Other murals showed simple household items manufactured by Collective workers, family scenes and public gatherings where members discussed important topics. None of them looked like the tired workers Cara had met a few hours ago.

  Osla caught her studying the murals.

  “Are you familiar with the concept of the Eudaimonia Machine?”

  “You-die what?”

  “I’m starting to wonder if you’re trying to tease me, Cara.”

  “I promise I’m not.”

  “The Eudaimonia Machine is an ancient idea of maximizing human potential. It’s a misnomer that the Collective hates AIs. We simply don’t need them. These murals are galleries of the great works built by the Collective. As you enter our spaces, you are reminded that you’re part of something greater than yourself. Rather than weaken ourselves by depending on SAIs, we build human nodes to focus super-intelligence. We maximize human labor. We direct all resources toward a greater purpose. Other chambers hold our libraries and work areas. Every Collective space grows from this concept.”

  Cara raised an eyebrow. “What happens when I don’t want to join the machine?”

  “There is a role for everyone, even individuals. You might be surprised.”

  Cara tried to imagine Osla as a cog in the Collective and found herself smirking.

  “Is that funny?”

  “You strike me as the kind of individual who wouldn’t fit well in the machine, Chancellor. Better to be captain than crew?”

  For a second, Cara thought she might have succeeded in penetrating Osla’s cool confidence.

  Then the chancellor merely shrugged. “Spend more time with us and you’ll start to understand. I’m going to leave you in the hands of my security detail now to see you to your quarters. I will see you in fifteen hours for a formal meeting with the Council. Does that sound all right?”

  “Sounds great,” Cara said brightly.

  Osla nodded to the leader of the security detail and gave Cara a quick salute, which she returned with two fingers. Turning away, Osla was already involved in a Link conversation, eyes distant.

  Ten minutes later, Cara was shown to an apartment in the center of the district. The front door overlooked a small park with fountains, and the air had a pleasant smell of greenery.

  As soon as she closed the door on the soldiers, Cara quickly explored the apartment, then returned to the kitchen to dig through the foodstuffs stacked in the cabinets. Everything she found was basic: blocks of cheese, loaves of bread, protein slabs. They certainly weren’t trying to impress her with culinary delights, but there was plenty available.

  Cara carried an armful of the staples into the living room and spread everything on the low table before sitting back on the couch.

  Despite being plain, the food woke a ravenous hunger in her stomach, and she ate faster than was healthy.

  When the cheese, bread and protein had ground the edge off her hunger, she activated the holotank in the table and watched a comedy from High Terra. The jokes didn’t make much sense, and only served to remind her how long it had been since she watched any kind of entertainment.

  She thought about contacting Lyssa and apologizing. That moment had passed so quickly that Cara had suppressed the memory of Lyssa’s wrist bursting, her hand dangling by threads. The damage shouldn’t hurt, but the act would have. Lyssa cared about her, no matter how much Cara had tried to push her away.

  When the comedy became too boring, Cara switched to a newsfeed and found herself watching her rocket launch from the cosmodrome. High Terra had gone to high alert when the launch lit their early warning systems. The replay of thousands of TSF icons filled the screen, and there was her little landing vehicle, separating from the rocket booster to sail through their blockade.

  The fact that she had been allowed to pass and ultimately land on Luna indicated any number of conspiracy theories, and the feed quickly devolved into a call show on which angry Lunans expressed their frustration at being pawns in Terra’s machinations again.

  The fact that Anderson Collective refugees intercepted the lander only seemed to add fuel to the complaints.

  Cara listened with interest as opinion after opinion painted the refugees as criminals, drains on the Lunar economy, and generally unwelcome. They had failed to integrate with the Lunans, and tensions were at an all-time high. Residents of New Austin had been warned to avoid Andersonian-controlled establishments, as several beatings had been reported.

  “That sounds like fun,” Cara said, picking at her loaf of bread.

  She burped, tossing the remaining half a loaf on the table. She crossed her arms and looked up the ceiling, realizing she could smell herself.

  Standing slowly, she walked into the bathroom, stripping off her clothes as she went. The characters on the holotank continued to quip at each other, their voices like chirping birds from the other room.

  Birds. I miss the birds at Cruithne.

  A memory of standing in front of the fountain at Night Park with Tim and her dad, looking up into the branches of the plascrete tree, with the ravens and parrots cawing down at them. The parrot at the top of the tree had seemed like their leader, bobbing its head with a knowing eye.

  Tim had wanted to take the parrot home, of course, and her dad had been forced to make up a story about how parrots wouldn’t be happy in space.

  Leaving a trail of scattered equipment between the living area and the shower, Cara finally stood under steaming water and let her forehead fall against the plas wall. She breathed deeply of the steam as the water soothed her sore muscles.

  She hung onto the memory of squeezing Tim’s hand, telling him to stop complaining about things he didn’t even have.

  That all seemed a lifetime ago, and yet the memories returned as fresh as the moment they had happened. She saw her dad looking at the booths on either side of them with a constant half-frown of worry.

  Once she had let the water run over her for several minutes, Cara soaked her hair, then scrubbed herself down as if she hadn’t been clean in years.

  The bedroom cabinets were lined with clothes, from grey worker’s outfits to a maroon shipsuit with a wide utility belt. Cara chose the shipsuit and added her holster to the belt. No one had tried to take her pulse pistol, but she didn’t see much sense in trying to hide it.

  The shipsuit also had an oversized cargo pocket where she could stick Felix’s book.

  She had just finished pul
ling on a pair of black leather boots with utility maglocks in the soles when the click of the apartment door opening penetrated the sounds from the holotank.

  Cara froze, listening. There was no further sound. No one announced themselves.

  She grabbed the pulse pistol from the bed and quickly stood, flattening herself against the wall by the door. There was nowhere to hide, but her position wasn’t the first place someone would look when entering the room.

  Cara thumbed the safety off the pistol, waiting.

  The sound of a boot on the floor filled another gap in the chatter from the holo. Cara took a slow breath, calming her heart. She could see the holotank on the other side of the short hallway, glowing in the center of the living room. Light changed as a shape moved near the display.

  Moving down the short hallway, past the bathroom, Cara raised the pistol and stepped into the living room.

  Standing in the kitchen was the soldier who was supposed to be standing outside her door. He stared at her with wide eyes, a loaf of bread in his hands, his cheeks stuffed full.

  He flushed, raising his hands without dropping the bread, and choked down his mouthful. He was a thin young man whose grey uniform hung loosely on his body. He had limp, black hair, shaved above his ears. His rifle was sitting on the countertop.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, spraying breadcrumbs. “I heard your shower. I thought you wouldn’t hear me.”

  “My shower ended ten minutes ago.”

  He hung his head sheepishly. “I was so hungry.”

  Cara nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Private Stanson.”

  “Your first name.”

  “Joshua.”

  “All right, Joshua. What did your commander tell you to do while guarding the door?”

  “She said to guard you with my life.”

  “Well, that was nice of her. I’m going to give you the opportunity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Cara waved for him to follow. “We’re going out. Don’t forget your rifle.”

  The guard stared at her for a second, then grabbed his things and followed.

  SIGNAL SUPPORT

  STELLAR DATE: 3.21.3011 (Adjusted Years)