Interstellar gunrunner, p.28
Interstellar Gunrunner, page 28
“That’s… smart. I think.”
She grimaced. “Now go. Get it done.”
“Will you be hunkering down on the station?”
“Of course not. That artifact’s ours.”
“So what? You hid the damn thing. You ought to stay out of danger until it’s over.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not going to risk you selling that thing if you find it and decide to flip sides on a whim.”
“Right, because I’m the double-crosser.”
She glared at me. “You’re wasting time, Bodhi. Go. I’ll meet you on board.”
As I ran out of the suite and down the worm-friendly tunnels, I wished for all the world that she wouldn’t.
I made it onto Stream Dancer’s main atrium in a sheen of sweat, my lungs feeling bruised and battered within my rib cage.
Ruena came jogging into view and moved alongside me as I made for the machine hub. Despite her dragging gait, she seemed to have made an impressive recovery. All the more reason to keep Chaska around as an all-purpose combat medic.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked, wincing slightly.
“Something absolutely insane,” I said.
“Nothing new, then.”
“Just follow my lead, will you?”
She glanced at her chrono-implant. “We have six minutes to undock, Bodhi.”
“Yeah, well, if this takes longer than five, we’re dead as it is.”
Upon reaching the machine hub’s doors, I understood Chaska had failed to brief Ruena on some critical issues that had occurred during her knock-out period. One of these issues was Chaska’s manual door-breaching and the fact that she’d learned about the constructs. Ruena halted in place and gasped, likely envisioning a scenario in which the constructs had managed to pierce their iceboxes and escape like writhing, nanite-swarming eels.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said, waving her through the busted doors.
“What happened?” Ruena whispered. “Are they…?”
The constructs approached their iceboxes as we came into view, but didn’t engage in their usual flattery routine or pull on those tired smiles.
“Are they free?” I said, finishing her unspoken question. “No, much worse. They’re sentient. And they have been for some time.”
She nodded, all four eyes wide as she watched their androgynous heads drifting.
“Listen here,” I said to them, folding my arms in a sad bid for establishing dominance. “There’s a crisis situation afoot. I need your help in doctoring a very specific scenario on the ship’s surveillance systems.”
That’s right—despite Chaska’s idea being the literal worst option at our disposal, it was the only one that resulted in a mathematically significant chance of us surviving the next hour. When you’re already at the bottom of the barrel, there’s little harm in digging deeper. And besides, I hoped that my impromptu plan would safeguard us against the most severe of the plan’s existential risks.
“What sort of scenario, Bodhi?” Left asked, strangely interested.
“Well… you remember Kesh, right?” I said. “The sudrona?”
Left and Right nodded.
“We need to make it appear as though they performed a robbery on the ship. They took that metal cylinder, said some threatening things, and escaped at this station. They were trying to sell the cylinder to a buyer and betray Nerikhad the Lesser. Oh, and they sabotaged our godengine. Or something.” I shook my head, somewhat disbelieving that I’d even reached the point of considering this plan. “We also need a transmission from an insurgent. Any insurgent. But not Chaska, obviously. In the transmission, the insurgent will tell us that they found Kesh, killed her, took the artifact, and are bringing it to me in a few hours.”
“What color should the insurgent’s shirt be?” Left asked.
I drew a deep breath. “You two are creative. Come up with something good.”
Right gave me a thin, mirthless smile. “But, Bodhi… in order to carry out this task, we would need access to the ship’s mainframe. This would offer us the potential to merge.”
“Yes, I’m fully aware,” I said. “Which is why I’ve brought a safeguard.” I looked at Ruena with a firm, commanding stare, though she didn’t seem to pick up on the hint. “I assume both of you have heard of ligethans during your operational history.”
Left angled their head to the side, studying Ruena at length. “Ligethans possess the ability to see into parallel time-threads. I gather that your companion is a ligethan, based on her physiology and neural waves.”
“That’s right,” I said fiercely. “She can see into the future, so if either one of you have the bright idea to merge once you’re patched into the system, she’ll yell. And if she yells, I detonate the antimatter charge that’s planted on the main reactor.”
Ruena spun toward me, but I kept staring the nanite heads down, hoping they’d fail to see through my bluff.
“That would be sufficient to destroy the entire vessel,” Left said. “Including us.”
I nodded. “And that’s why you need to cooperate.”
“Are we being… threatened?” Right said.
“I suppose,” I said. “I’ll make you two a deal, and I mean this one. If your footage is good, and it passes muster a few minutes from now, I’ll let you merge. No gimmicks.”
It was yet another lie, of course, but the constructs had already demonstrated their inability to pick up on human deception. Despite their advanced intelligence, they were missing the essential wisdom that accumulated through years of existing in the wilderness of the free world.
Left moved closer to the glass. “That sounds… excellent.”
“Yes,” Right added quickly, grinning. “We would very much like to take part in this.”
I clasped my hands behind my back. “Good. Let’s get started.”
Despite being an immediate precursor to universal collapse, the process of allowing a construct to merge with a ship’s mainframe is so simple I can explain it without metaphors. The only things preventing the constructs from using their nanites to form a hair-thin connection and snake into the onboard systems were their iceboxes. An energetic mesh filled the interior of the container, ensuring the nanites were confined to that space alone. So long as the mesh remained active, or the icebox itself remained unpunctured, there was no risk of the constructs escaping.
Therefore, all we had to do to allow the constructs their precious mainframe access was run a pair of cables into the iceboxes. It might have been faster to switch off the mesh and allow their nanites to flow out, but there were two problems with that.
For one thing, nanites were powerful. Frighteningly powerful. Even the aforementioned hair-thin chain of them could be used like a blade, slicing and dicing Ruena and me apart in a second’s time. Bad.
The second problem was that once any nanites got outside the icebox, we had no way of spotting, controlling, or disabling them. Even if we reactivated the energetic mesh, any nanites beyond the icebox would be autonomous servants of the constructs. Also bad.
So, to that end, we ran the cables into the iceboxes. Ruena stood watch, pretending it might change anything if she shouted her warning word, but I suspect she was just as rattled as myself. If the constructs did decide to go about their universe-murdering plan, there was nothing we could do to stop them.
Just one second after we inserted the cables, however, the constructs used their nanites to push the cables back out.
“We are finished,” they said in unison, beaming.
“That was… efficient,” I said.
Right descended in the icebox, eventually coming down to eye level with me. “We apologize for any delay. The request was more challenging than we had anticipated.”
I rested a hand on the icebox. “Don’t you worry. You two have done me proud.”
Several seconds later, my wrist transmitter crackled with an incoming signal. This one, at least, I recognized as Chaska’s.
“I’m on the bridge,” she huffed. “Where do I go?”
I smiled at my potential saviors—Ruena and the constructs—then tabbed the transmit button. “Tell Umzuma to take us to the fortress, Chaska. I just have one more job for my mechanical friends before I join you…”
I could write an entire volume about the debauchery, decadence, and depravity associated with Nerikhad’s fortress, officially named Ravenous Maiden. To be clear, Nerikhad was not the Maiden’s sole owner—far from it, in fact. It had changed hands every few centuries since its creation, and nobody I’d ever met was old enough to recall its true chain of custodians. All I know is that anybody who’s anybody in the murky world of underground economics has either partied aboard it, been tortured aboard it, or heard tales about it. In my own case, I’d checked all three boxes.
At any given time, Ravenous Maiden could host ten thousand wayward bastards and succubi. It was a city in its own right, jam-packed with casinos, clubs, slave markets, weapon shops, and all other manner of venues that mothers warn their children about. Wars and revolutions had raged in its corridors. Fifteen new species had been either engineered or discovered in its grimy bowels.
The point is, the fortress was a thing of legend, but also a thing of terror, a final destination for those who dared to renege on the wrong deals. And as I stood on Stream Dancer’s bridge, staring out at the fortress and its prickly, radiation-blotched shell, I realized there was a good chance I’d wind up being just another cautionary tale that ended in its jaws. Years from now, young merchants would be told about Blundering Bodhi and how he’d been sentenced to eternal torture for trying to pull a fast one on Nerikhad the Lesser.
Now, Ravenous Maiden was barely half the size of the Purgation, but reputation goes a long way in leveling out the difference. Unlike with the Hegemony flagship, I knew what sort of horrors had gone down aboard the fortress. I knew that I didn’t have an army of aim-assisted, fanatical rabbit-people on my side. And most crucially, I knew that the enemy was not only prepared for our arrival, but eager to see me suffer.
“Everybody, be sure to stay calm,” I said, even as sweat ran in fat drops down my face.
Everybody, here, refers to Chaska and Ruena—and Umzuma, if you believe he had any interest whatsoever in our conversation.
“It’ll work,” Chaska said. She went over to the simscreen and pulled up the constructs’ manufactured footage. “We should run it through once or twice, just to be sure we’re all on the same page.”
“And to make sure the constructs aren’t sabotaging you,” Ruena said darkly.
Until that moment, I hadn’t considered the notion of the constructs being subversive enough to undermine me in my time of need. It added yet another coat of paint to this masterpiece of dread.
Chaska worked away on the terminal, navigating the myriad surveillance files and best-of war-zone footage I’d accrued over the past years. Meanwhile, I paced back and forth along the viewpane like a caged beast, unable to look at anything aside from Nerikhad’s palace of death.
If you think that label is hyperbolic, consider this: Nerikhad had taken the time to adorn the outside of the fortress with thousands of corpses. Many were from species I’d never encountered. Some of the bodies were burnt, others flash-frozen, depending on how much starlight they’d absorbed since being impaled on the armor panels. It wasn’t difficult to envision myself as one of those bloated, bruised lumps of meat.
“Bodhi, come on over,” Ruena said.
By that point, I was hungry for a distraction. I went to the simscreen bank and watched the foremost display as Chaska ran our file.
Impressively enough, Left and Right had possessed the forethought to render our fake encounter from six different vantage points. Chaska was able to tab between them at will, allowing me to get a read on the “setting” the constructs had chosen. A coolant span, by the looks of it. It began with me fleeing behind a stack of pumps, visibly pushed to the point of collapse. I was hauling the artifact with both hands.
Kesh came tearing after me with the long patient strides of a predator, wasting no time in finding me amid the machinery. She delivered a few brutal strikes to my head—explaining my bruises, in a nice touch—and then wrenched the artifact away.
“Foolish human,” she said. “We will profit greatly from this item. And we shall not incur the wrath of Nerikhad the Lesser… oh, no. You shall suffer that.”
I nodded as I watched the footage, rather inspired by Left and Right’s creativity. They’d clearly analyzed the surveillance systems to simulate Kesh’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and overall scariness.
“No!” my simulation cried. “Nerikhad needs me to complete this job!”
“It does not matter,” Kesh replied. “We do not care for either of you. We hope you die in the void of space, Bodhi Drezek, while we make the best sale of our life.”
Then Kesh knocked my simulation into a pipe, plunging sim-me into unconsciousness. After an evil laugh, Kesh headed down the corridors, intent on the godengine. Sure enough, the constructs had included my request of sabotage. Kesh yanked on a few wire clusters, stomped a pair of valves, and tore something free outside the gullet. Then they exited the ship and moved out of view.
Now that was a falsified footage job.
“Nicely done,” Chaska commented. “Interesting how you got them to comply with this plan even though they aren’t fully wired to you. You said they don’t work at your command, right?”
Ruena shot me a pointed look.
“They did it out of preservation,” I said. “Not wanting to be stolen by Nerikhad and whatnot.”
“But you said they weren’t sentient.”
“Pre-sentient behavior. Very complex. You wouldn’t understand it.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” She sighed. “It looks like it’ll hold. A bit stiff, but so was Kesh.”
Next, Chaska played the second, yet equally important, reel of doctored footage. This one was a cut-and-dry project consisting of an insurgent woman saying exactly what she needed to say. Kesh had the artifact, they got her, they’re coming back to arrange a meeting. Simple.
“I suppose they’ll work,” Ruena said. “Hopefully.”
I glanced out the viewpane. Sure enough, we’d begun entering the long, oily span that led to the fortress’ private hangar. Milky lights flicked on along the passageway and streamed into the bridge, illuminating scores of wall-mounted body parts in the process.
“It’s fine,” I said with a self-pitying laugh. “Everything within our control is fine.”
“Crumb,” Ruena said softly.
“Huh?”
My answer came in the form of a young, too-enthusiastic shout. “Whoa!”
Once I whirled toward the source of the sound, my heart dropped into my colon. Standing in the bridge’s doorway was none other than Gadra.
“Oh, shit,” Chaska whispered.
“Am I hallucinating?” I said. “Chaska, didn’t you tell me you checked on the others?”
“I did! She must’ve followed me.”
“No, no, no, no, no.”
“Where are we?” Gadra asked, wandering past Umzuma’s pit with a lopsided smile. “Is this some sort of prison?”
I hurried over to her. “No, of course not. This is much… different… than a prison. Listen, why don’t you go check out the best hiding spots on the ship?”
“Why do I need to hide?”
“Because you snuck aboard, and now you have to.”
“But why?”
My face burned as I hunched over and stared her in the eye. “Gadra, remember how I said there are some bad things out here?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, this is one of those things. So I need you to hide right now.”
She peered past me, inspecting the landing passage. “I can help you, though. You said it yourself. I’m from Makalma. I’m tough.”
“I’m not asking you, Gad. I’m telling you.” I hardened my gaze until her eyes lost their luster. “Go and hide, now. And don’t come out no matter what.”
Fortunately, Chaska ran over and clamped a hand on Gadra’s shoulder.
“Come on,” she said, leading Gadra toward the doors. “Bodhi’s busy right now.”
The girl’s expression only darkened as she was hauled further away. Just before she crossed the threshold, she twisted out of Chaska’s grip and called back at me, “I’m not a kid! I can be tough, too.”
The saddest part was, I had no doubt she was correct. But I can tell you firsthand what a travesty it is to grow up too soon.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the army that greeted us when I dropped the staging bay’s ramp, but I was. Nerikhad had gone all out in marshaling his forces, confronting me with twenty sudrona enforcers, ten Cooker fabriques (I’ll allow the name to paint a mental picture), and a host of slavering recomps—grisly beings made of recycled organic matter and cybernetic fittings, for the unaware. There were others among his cadre, too, seemingly high-profile private security operators and mercenaries from a variety of species.
He hadn’t done it for efficiency’s sake. He’d done it to intimidate me, to frighten me, to make me feel small and powerless.
He’d succeeded.
I stood in silence, Ruena at my side, as Nerikhad ascended the ramp and ordered his troops to fan out across the staging bay. They did so in a rush of clanking footfalls and growls.
“Bodhi Drezek,” Nerikhad spat. He moved closer until he was a mountain above me. “You seem to have lost your senses since our last meeting. You informed us that you’d send an update within two hours, yet… nothing. Not even a response to our transmission once we’d arrived in this pitiful system.”
I tried to keep my voice from quivering as I spoke, though it was a tall order. “It’s been a rough few hours, Nerikhad.”
“And why is that?”
“Well, I took a few bumps and lumps. To the head, I mean.”
Nerikhad lifted a frost-speckled metal glove and brushed aside a few locks of my hair, examining the wounds beneath. “They seem to be healing quite well.”
