“Is it still night?” She sighed. “Anyway, Malcolm’s talking to the head of hospital security down in the admin offices, but I’ll tell him you’re here.”
“Thanks.” He stepped around the rubble into the room, where Devon now ignored everyone to stare into the isolation chamber.
He went over and clasped the young man gently on the shoulder. “Is she all right?”
“Same. They didn’t get to her, though. I stopped them. All of them.”
“So I heard. Why don’t you tell me what happened here?”
Richard met Malcolm down the hallway in the hopes of giving Devon a few minutes of peace and quiet. The normally composed Marine resembled a raging bull in search of a glass shop, and he held up a hand while Malcolm was still several meters away. “I know. I read your report.”
“This is why Paredes and Devore were killed. Anyone involved in taking out Dolos Station is being targeted.”
“I know. In fact, it’s even wider than Dolos. Now I realize it’s been a rough few hours, but calm down. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“You need to alert Majors Grenier and Berg and their squad leaders.”
“Already done.”
“The attack here was an attempt to take out those they missed on the first try—Devon Reynolds, Mia, Harper. I wouldn’t be surprised if they expected me to be here, too, which I should’ve been.”
“I did actually figure all that out on my own, Brigadier.”
Malcolm’s expression softened. “I’m sorry. I’m overstepping. But it’s my people. Several of my squadmates are dead. Mia was almost killed twice in one night.” He shook his head and sank against the nearby wall. “The only one I can’t really figure is Devon’s girlfriend.”
“Emily was just collateral damage. Devon was the target—another reason why they hit here tonight.”
“But he wasn’t involved in the Dolos Station mission.”
“He passed on the details for the shield disrupter you used to get past Montegreu’s personal shield. Dr. Canivon developed it, but in her absence, well, it’s enough of a link when you’re psychotic.”
“Olivia Montegreu is dead. I blew her brain out of her skull, ripped open her spine, vented her office into space then detonated her station into dust particles.”
Richard made a prevaricating motion. “She always was exceedingly resourceful.”
“No one’s that resourceful. It’s a feint. Voices can be modulated and replicated. But right now, I don’t even care who’s trying to impersonate her. This all stems from the destruction of Dolos Station and the killing of Montegreu. There’s an endless supply of mercs in the galaxy for the perpetrator to hire, and these attacks aren’t going to stop until we take out the source. So find me a target.”
Nothing like having those you cared about put in danger to get a Marine’s blood boiling. “I plan to do exactly that.”
Malcolm fished a small object encased in a clear container out of his pocket. “I got this off one of the attackers who tried to break into Mia’s house. She extracted a portion of the contents to study, but the rest is yours. I was planning to bring it to you when I got back to the Presidio.”
Richard nodded. “Good work. You didn’t find more of these on the men who attacked you? The injector they tried to use on Devon got crushed during the attack.”
“No. The initial attacker intended to blow my head off from under my chin. Exactly the way I did Montegreu’s.”
“You think it was that personally targeted?”
“It felt like it—albeit not as much as having her voice threaten us inside Mia’s house, using her own communications system, did.” Malcolm’s eyes narrowed. “You said this was wider than Dolos. What did you mean?”
“I’ve got a disabled hybrid transport with twelve dead Triene mercs on it, including the man who spearheaded taking over Zelones headquarters the day after Dolos went down.”
“Mercs take each other out all the time. It’s a bit curious, but what makes you think it’s related?”
“Because they were killed by some kind of robust and sophisticated EMP, similar to the crew of a certain Alliance cargo transport I believe you found near Orellan a few months ago.”
“Huh.” Malcolm frowned. “So maybe these hits are basically revenge for her being dead, not merely for killing her?”
“Seems like, and I don’t know how wide the circle’s planning to expand. I want to stop it before it gets any bigger, but I’m not there yet.”
Malcolm eyed him for several seconds. “When you get there, comm me with a target.”
35
PRESIDIO
GCDA HEADQUARTERS
* * *
“SHOW ME WHAT the problem is.”
“I’m not certain I can, Ms. Rossi. See, we haven’t been able to precisely…identify a problem. The bot refuses to install the power allocation optimizer in the junction between the main engine and the power distribution module. It says the control system refuses the connection, which doesn’t make any sense.”
The shift supervisor looked pained. “But I’ve never worked on ships with sentient control systems until now, either.”
“Well, let’s go out there and take a look.”
“Yes, ma’am. You can get an environment suit in the staging area two floors below, and any tools you require should be available out on the docks. I’ll meet you at Bay E-3.”
Kennedy forced a polite smile and headed for the lift; halfway there she added a spring to her step for good measure. A spacewalk followed by getting her hands dirty in ship wiring was going to be good for her. Help to clear her thoughts.
She might even forget about the elephant in her head for an hour or so, which would be the best thing to happen all day.
On getting word of a glitch in the assembly line for the troop transport-class vessels, she’d cleared her schedule and left Romane for the Presidio as quickly as possible. Noah hadn’t offered to come with her, and she hadn’t asked him to.
The thing was, she knew he loved her. And she’d never wanted her parent’s lifestyle, so…what exactly was it she believed she did want? What was she chasing? A child’s romanticized fantasy of a larger-than-life fable that must be more fiction than truth?
The spring in her step faded as the uncomfortable possibility occurred to her that part of her wanted him to prove how much he loved her. Or worse, wanted him to demonstrate it by coming one hundred percent of the distance to her. This way she didn’t have to move at all.
She argued back while locating a suitable environment suit. She’d moved quite a lot, dammit—upended her entire world, in point of fact, to repudiate the Alliance and strike out into the unknown.
But that had worked out.
Also, though he’d stood beside her and supported her in the venture, the move had served her own interests more than his.
And now she’d worked herself into an ugly logic knot. Damn, she wished Alex were here to help her talk her way out of it. But this time she didn’t begrudge her friend the absence. Not much. Alex had stuck around long enough for them to make up properly and…well, Kennedy understood the stakes now.
She yanked the suit up over her waist and fought with the sleeves, taking her frustrations out on the stubborn material instead. Why couldn’t life be simple, just this once?
“Hey, Ken—you know what else isn’t simple? Building Artificial-inhabited warships so innovative and cutting-edge no one knows how to build them. So quit feeling sorry for yourself and get to work.”
When she spun around to leave, she found a tech staring at her askance from the entrance. She pointed at her temple and rolled her eyes dramatically.
He scooted back far against the wall to let her pass. She put the odds on him reporting a deranged person to security as soon as the door closed at, oh…thirty percent.
Tugs had hauled one of the half-built transport ships to an auxiliary bay in the maintenance area by the time Kennedy and the shift supervisor reached the manuf
acturing floor. They traversed the skeletal catwalk leading to the separate area off to the right of the main lines.
She smiled in genuine delight as she grappled her way into the frame of the ship. The energy of the assembly operation, out here in space, totally buoyed her spirits. The fact there was a problem needing fixing meant this was all real. Not designs or mock-ups or proposals, but real.
The supervisor was droning instructions in her ear on how to safely get to the engineering well. Since she could have made her way there with her eyes closed, she ignored him to enjoy being up close and personal with one of her designs physically manifested. She hadn’t appreciated how big the vessel truly was. Obviously, of course it was big—it was a troop transport. But it was big in a way schem flows and virtual scale models couldn’t convey.
She landed beside the supervisor on the half-finished floor with a thud and latched her tether onto the frame. “Show me what’s happening.”
One of the installation bots had accompanied the transport to the auxiliary bay, and the supervisor instructed it to restart its process.
It dutifully buzzed over to the optimizer sitting on the floor and started to connect the main fiber conduit into the engine’s output line. It stopped, started again, then signaled an error, dropped the conduit and retreated.
“The components do fit together, don’t they?” It wouldn’t be the first time a slightly different version of a component had been shipped by a supplier.
“Yes, ma’am. It was the first thing we confirmed.”
“And this behavior has been replicated on other ships of this model using other bots?”
“This model began assembly yesterday, and the problem cropped up immediately, so not…no. We did switch out the bot and saw no change.”
“Okay. If you’ll excuse me.” She pushed past him to position herself against the open panel of the optimizer, called up the schem flow on an aural and began studying the implementation in front of her. After a few seconds, she retrieved a modified interface from a pocket on the environment suit and plugged it into the small input port on the corner of the module.
Vii, these ships’ Artificials are partially installed at this stage. Talk to this one and see if you can find out why it doesn’t approve of the power allocation optimizer.
‘Partially’ installed? Oh, dear. I will see what I can do.
She laughed as she placed a probe at the end of the optimizer’s circuitry and fed it a small amount of power. The optimizer’s purpose was to modulate and efficiently distribute power to a variety of core functional systems, and nothing indicated it wasn’t capable of doing its job correctly. It had passed all the normal stress testing by the manufacturer and was rated to manage 21% more power and 32% more I/Os than they were asking of it.
AFT-5k says the manner in which the optimizer prioritizes electrical systems over atmospherics will cause a fault in life support functions in 1.2% of extreme stress scenarios.
But atmospherics should adjust on its own for…unless….
She slammed per palm to her faceplate, prompting a worried movement toward her by the supervisor; she waved him off. And AFT-5k is correct. Different manufacturers, different protocols. So…we can patch the optimizer’s firmware, but without proper testing we risk creating other errors, and we no longer have time for proper testing.
She drummed her gloved fingertips on the module. Run a spec comparison to the largest capacity military-rated model from Magellan. Will it fulfill the spec requirements and not conflict with the atmospherics and life support systems?
The Magellan version was 11% more expensive, and up until twenty seconds ago, she would have said it was for no good reason. At least the price was 34% cheaper than it had been three months ago; six months ago the component hadn’t existed.
Analyzing. Yes. Its use will mean a 0.8% decrease in allocation efficiency, but AFT-5k declares this an acceptable loss.
How generous of AFT-5k. I’m going to wrap up here. Thanks for the help, Vii.
My pleasure.
She removed the interface and put it away before reaching over and unfastening her tether.
“Ma’am?”
“We can head back inside. I have to call in a minimum of three favors and convince Commandant Solovy to authorize a Ͻ420,000 increase in the manufacturing budget, but if I accomplish all those feats, you should have replacement power allocation optimizers in eighteen to twenty-four hours.”
“Ah, yes, Ms. Rossi. Whatever gets the line running, no?”
“You said it.” She pulled herself up and out of the frame, but paused to run her gaze across the factory floor a final time.
A surprising, calm contentment came over her as a she realized sometime in the last ten minutes, while her brain had been occupied engineering, she’d made a decision. It turned out she really had simply needed to clear her head.
She’d go talk to Miriam, and when that went well—which it must—she’d call in those favors while on a transport to Earth. Once there, she’d have lunch with her mother then go see the family attorney.
ROMANE
IDCC COLONY
Ricardo’s Cantina was about as sleazy as bars got in Romane’s capital, which made it roughly equivalent to the nicest bar in The Boulevard on Pandora. Noah wasn’t committed enough to this quest of de-redemption to fly to Pandora, so Ricardo’s would have to do for tonight.
The synth blaring one level too loud out of the speakers carried a rough edge to it, and the lighting spaced unevenly in the walls gave off a dim but warm glow, not all silver-harsh as was the fad these days. Business was steady but the bar wasn’t crowded, and the atmosphere was relaxed.
An all-but-forgotten frame of mind poked at the edges of his mood. Maybe it would more than do. He slid onto a barstool and ordered a beer, and was impressed when it arrived pronto.
“Noah Terrage?”
He took a quick sip of the beer and looked around until he spotted Dylan Shackleford approaching. When his friend from Pandora arrived, he stood and accepted a brief shoulder-hug as he gestured to the stool beside him. “Sit and have a drink. How’ve you been?”
“Surviving. We all thought you were dead, man. You disappeared the night Ella was killed, then…nothing. For over a year.”
Had it only been a year and change since that night? It felt like a decade. “Sorry about that. Zelones took out a mark on me, and I had to make myself scarce.”
Dylan flagged down the bartender. “Lot of shit’s gone down since then—you get caught up in any of it?”
Noah sipped on his beer while Dylan ordered. He could recount getting trapped on Messium during the Metigen invasion, trekking across the ravaged colony with Kennedy and escaping through a pitched battle in a shuttle she’d jury-rigged—or how he’d helped crash a scout ship into the belly of an Alliance cruiser and executed a madman while the cruiser fell out of the sky.
He could talk about co-founding an innovative ship design company on a wing and a prayer, then nearly dying on a manufacturing station as Zelones mercs tried to steal it. Or how he’d made peace with his father before the man was arrested for treason, and made more than peace with him in the aftermath.
He could share a tale of falling in love with a woman who was astonishing and brilliant, maddening and confounding, and how it had changed everything about his life.
But the truth was, bragging about any of it, much less all of it, to a former drinking buddy while sulking in a sleazy bar just seemed…lame. And he couldn’t shake the feeling the events would be lesser for the retelling.
So instead he shook his head mildly. “There were a few scrapes here and there, but nothing too dramatic. How about you?”
“Ah, man, let me tell you. During the Prevo unrest, I got caught in the middle of this riot in The Approach. Almost took a Molotov to the face. It was nuts.”
“Sounds like. What are you doing on Romane?”
“Classing up the place.” At Noah’s raised eyebrow, Dylan grimaced. “Got a del
ivery to make. The tech trade is out of control these days. As soon as some Prevo thinks up a new gadget, some hacker thinks of a way to abuse it.”
“So business is good?”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? But not so much. Parts are too cheap and getting cheaper fast. Everything’s faster, smaller and cheaper—which is great if you’re a buyer. Not so much if you’re a seller.”
Noah nodded in false commiseration. Plummeting component prices had been a godsend for both Connova and AEGIS. “How’s the old gang? Sarah? Brian?”
Dylan’s expression darkened. “Sarah’s in a coma after frying her brain on a spiked chimeral. Brian was killed in the cartel turf war that broke out when Zelones imploded. Mario, too.”
“Shit. What about Lincoln?”
“Got out. He took a job with Avion Transit a few months ago. He’s doing really well, I hear.”
“Good for him.” Noah downed the rest of his beer and ordered another. He was here to kick back and try to recapture some tattered scrap of his former life, dammit, and that wasn’t going to happen without a great deal more alcohol.
Dylan tilted his head and pointed to the amber glyphs winding along Noah’s skin from the back of his neck to vanish beneath his shirt at his left shoulder. “You mélanged now?”
The glyphs came courtesy of a ware upgrade to his prosthetic arm, but he supposed his optional yet always available link to Vii counted as mélange-like, too. “Isn’t everyone?”
“Only those who aren’t Prevos, am I right? I want to get hooked in as soon as I can afford an ad-hoc Artificial. It should help with business. If I’m lucky, maybe it’ll lead to a way up and into a little respectability.”
Noah frowned in surprise. “Is that what you want? Respectability? I seem to remember you repeatedly speechifying about freedom and living your own life your own way.”
“I’m thinking I can still do those things and have a big, comfy bed to sleep in at night, too—possibly one with silk sheets and a view. You may not have noticed, being scarce and all, but it’s a new world out there.”
Aurora Resonant: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 3) Page 25
