Agnosis

Ray Morrical, captain of the Proletariat Horde, consensus leader of the fringe worlds’ leading political insurrectionist organization, and notorious geo-economic provocateur, stood on the bridge of the Magellan class battle cruiser the T.E.S. Indianapolis calmly perusing the day’s mission status log over the shoulder of Third Cycle Leet Commander Cadigan Pyle.Pyle scanned the text on the vision-targeted active decryption one-time slipsheet with only perfunctory interest, and when he had finished, crumpled the missive between his hands and tossed it into the classified dox disposal bin beside thechair.The bin quiksealed itself with a hiss and bang as a cloud of nano-disassemblers went to work de-rendering the slipsheet’s formal structure down to its base molecular components.

Pyle grunted unhappily and patted the pockets of his uniform like a man looking for his misplaced packet of cigarettes–which Ray suspected was exactly what he was doing, because he stopped when his gaze fell on the NO SMOKING idiot light at the top of his comm panel.Pyle was a wiry, hollow-cheeked officer with a machinist’s knotty red knuckles and somber, bloodshot eyes.His entire vocabulary seemed to consist solely of heavily nuanced grunts, cosmic hyperbole and a startlingly complex arsenal of colorful, if biologically improbable, profanities.

The Leet Commander shifted his weight, making a labored noise deep in his throat that was somewhere between a grunt and a sigh.His hair was oily; his skin sallow and unshaven.His uniform did not appear to have seen the inside of a san in a hard week.

“TechShipman Lloyt,” he rumbled.“I’ve been instructed by the Powers That Be to make the utmost effort to discover–with all due and appropriate haste–exactly what is going on with our ranged datburst array.Second Cycle Grand Bunghole Toson is reporting undifferentiated flakiness in the recursive foam-hole something-or-other.This aforementioned flakiness seems to have no visible effects on either mission performance or our essential combat readiness.However, I have been informed in the strictest of confidence, that it is directly responsible for an unacceptable pattern of random signal scrambling in the tightbeam broadcast to him by certain, shall we say, unsavory business associates indirectly employed by the sports entertainment industry.Mr. Toson has somewhat significantly overextended his personal assets, and unless he can salvage a certain equanimity in his cash flow through a series of fortunately placed wagers in the near future, he is facing a less than hospitable reception upon our return home.Given these circumstances, Mr. Toson would quite understandably like to see this flakiness unflaked as quickly as possible and for the duration of this ass-humping military exercise, so that he might rightly attempt to get his financial house in some semblance of order.I’m certain you can appreciate his predicament.”

Pyle drew his hands wearily across his face.“My deeply seated desire to please Messr. Toson notwithstanding, I would also point out that concomitant to this issue with the datburst array, I seem to be having my own difficulty accessing my happiness-essential crawl of Championship League rugby scores, for which I pay a premium monthly subscription fee.This situation may very well make me exceedingly cranky if it is not resolved in the immediate, if not causally pre-existent, future.Have I made myself understood?”

The unfortunate crewman who appeared the be the intended recipient of this potentially apocryphal barrage of data–a bright eyed and tow-headed young man seated on the far side of bridge complex at the Systems Engineering Console, assimilated the relevant factoids with a bemused nod and reclined into his grav-couch.His eyelids fluttered rapidly as he accessed the ship’s network core.

“I’ll run a system diagnostic now, sir.”

Pyle puttered his lips disdainfully in Lloyt’s direction.“I’m absolutely confident that the solution will be that simple, TechShipmen, which is undoubtedly why no one else has thought of it to this point.”

Lloyt lifted his head.“I’m sorry, sir, is there another course of action you’d recommend?”

Pyle waved him off.“Of course not.I sit in this chair so that I can demand results without being required to demean myself by offering useful suggestions.Proceed with your assignment, you miserable little tool.I don’t have time to nursemaid you through it.Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full with carrying one of the most technologically advanced warships ever constructed by human hands through the mind-bogglingly complex tasks necessary to continue to maintain the same basic geosynchronous orbit we’ve been in for the last three hundred and sixty eight hours?I shudder, I tell you.I shudder at the thought of the weighty responsibilities that have been laid upon my shoulders.”

Someone who was not Lloyt chuckled.Pyle grunted, then heaved himself out of his chair and braced his feet unsteadily on the deck.“Now, I have to hit the head.Mr. Sprechtman has the con, provided he understands that if I find him sitting in my seat again when I return, I will remove the entire length of his intestines through his anus and hang him from yard arm with them.In the event that this ship does not actually possess a yard arm, I will not hesitate to have one manufactured.In the related event that I don’t catch him there, but he did occupy my seat, the first person who tattles on him will be awarded a full rank field promotion on the spot.Ping me if anything interesting happens, and for God’s sake, somebody get me the latest scores from the Championship League by the time I get back.I’ve got fifty rups riding on the Jetland Green result.”

Pyle’s subsequent departure reminded Ray of the sudden deflation of a child’s balloon.Second Officer Sprechtman rose from the Ordnance Targeting panel and quietly, but efficiently made his way around the bridge from station to station giving general orders, offering course corrections and fielding status reports from the crewmen.

Michael Raville whistled softly in Ray’s direction.“That may have been the most singularly impressive display of verbal communication I have ever seen in my life.”

“According to the ship’s personnel records, Cadigan Pyle is the favorite nephew of Someone Exceedingly Important within the Stratiskaya Daransk political structure.”

“He would have to be, wouldn’t he?”Raville observed, smirking, but he quickly grew serious.“Nevertheless, now that our hosts have discovered the drain on their datburst resources, our remaining time is limited.Leet Commander Cadigan Pyle may be the next best thing to completely incompetent, but my money says Sprechtman probably isn’t, since he’s been assigned to babysit him.”

The lateness of the hour was the last thing Ray needed to be reminded of.He had lost six of his crew in the last eighteen hours, as well as Dorian and Amara.Every moment wasted was a lost opportunity to exact his vengeance from Michael Raville, but he was patient, and he was cautious, and if he gave his people time and space in which to work, he was confident that they would come through for him, just as they had always done in the past.

Raville peered at him expectantly, but Ray didn’t answer at once.He didn’t feel compelled to share his private sense of urgency with Raville’s digital copy.

“DeMartel has done his best to compensate for the politically mandated shortcomings in his leadership cadre by surrounding Pyle with a highly motivated and technically savvy Cycle crew,” he said at last. “Stine and Ghast will frustrate them for awhile yet, I believe, but our discovery has become inevitable.”

A low volume klaxon buzzed in his ear, one of Dorian’s brilliantly modified tell-tales announcing that the current incursion script had worn out its welcome and was vulnerable to detection.Ray hooked his fingers around Raville’s forearm.“Come on.We’ve found what we came to learn.”

He blinked his eyelids twice and the ambient feed projection of the bridge jacked from the Indianapolis’s internal comm datacore faded.It was replaced by the sloping, pale-marbled virtual architecture of Dorian’s backup foam.The sudden shift in percipient variables nearly staggered him, and he had to put out a virtual hand to steady himself on the railing to keep from falling over.He stood there for a moment gathering what remained of his waning strength.He had been awake for more hours than he cared to remember, had nursed himself through the worst of the zap crash with cortical stimulants until he breached the wall of exhaustion, but it was a race now to see if his will would outlast his body.Even in geek, his body was announcing its desperation for rest.

With a slight pang of guilt, he seated himself at the control deck and began tapping out the load sequence for a series of post-intrusion chaff routines.He had promised that he wouldn’t violate this space again—space that Ray himself had once given Dorian, partly from friendship, partly as investment in a stunning talent.But he had made many promises lately, the most binding to Amara herself, breathtaking avatar of an alien race.You must find the weapon for me, Captain, she had said in their final hours aboard the Proletariat Horde, while Dorian had been all but flash-baking his synapses attempting to seed the data he had stolen from Raville’s datacore.He’s hiding it from me, just as he masks his intentions from the Exousiai.I don’t know how.Perhaps I’m at fault.Perhaps I haven’t awakened to my true self enough yet to uncover the truth.It may be that old fashioned human ingenuity will uncover what has been hidden.Maybe that is as it should be, the price of our admission to the cosmic pleroma.When we reach Giari Tau, my responsibility is to stop Raville himself. If I fail, his weapon must be destroyed before it can be raised against the Exousiai.He cannot be permitted to strike this blow against them.

But Ray had been thinking about strategy, about the logistics of attempting to control an entire outpost station with only a dozen men at his disposal.My dear, isn’t this why you’ve brought along your own datacore incursion expert?Without meaning toinsult any of my own compatriots, John’s skillis unmatched, at least insofar as our resources are concerned.The man is practically a savant, and I can tell you now that he won’t appreciate anyone else gumming up his gears when he applies himself to the task.What God denied him in social acumen, He made up for in raw technical ability.

John was not chosen to destroy Raville’s weapon.

No?Then what is he here for?

And she had grinned, sweet and fetching, a picture of innocence.Honestly, I have no idea.I only know that he’s been chosen.

Chosen bywhom?

That’s the pivotal question, now isn’t it?

And so he had promised.His oath to Amara was the only reason he was willing to go back on his word.This sacred space was where John had chosen to secret the purloined package of Michael Raville he had rescued from the Archive, and Raville was the only chance they had of locating the weapon and finding a way to disarm it.As far as Ray was concerned, the instant Amara had been captured, all other oaths became moot.If his action saved their lives, John would forgive him.

And if it didn’t, the fact of his betrayal wouldn’t matter anyway.

“So how much longer do you estimate we have before they figure out you’ve pinched a portion of their stream to spy on their communications?”

Raville manifested in a regal Louis XVI chair which appeared to the left of the control console, where he could casually oversee Ray’s activities.This incongruous design erupting into the symmetrically perfect environment Ray had once so lovingly constructed made him wince, though it wasn’t just the offense to his aesthetic sense.He was dismayed at how thoroughly the self-cognizant Raville package must have insinuated itself into the architecture if it could spontaneously generate its own environmental variable templates on a whim.The code blocks of this universe were supposed to be inviolable.

“I have faith in my people,” Ray answered off-handedly.He executed another series of cache purge scripts to lower his packet profile in the datburst stream.He was already fat enough carrying around Raville’s density.“They’ll give us as much time as I ask them to, which in this case shouldn’t be absolutely indeterminate.I suspect that things will be coming to a head fairly soon, judging by the activity in the mission log.DeMartel and Commander Temple will be launching for the surface in the morning for an emergency session with your—ah–”Real self?Other self?Ray stumbled over the proper term.

“Nemesis is a good word,” Raville offered.

“Yes, well, I doubt that he would be calling an emergency session unless something of import was about to occur.Given that we may assume his forces have taken control of Amara and John, it’s probably a safe guess that the mission schedule will proceed with renewed vigor from this point forward.All the more reason for us to do the same.”

Raville nodded his agreement.“You can assure me, I suppose, that the people you have left are more reliable in their loyalties than was the lately mourned Mr. Yartz.”

Ray sat up stiffly.“Yartz was an aberration.”

They had discovered Yartz’s treachery purely by accident while carrying out a wide scan of the Strat military’s ship-to-ship streaming content intranet when Stine’s search parameters had tripped over the tightbeam encryption key specific to the Proletariat Horde.He still considered the whole situation off limits for discussion, a fact which his own people had instinctively understood without the need for blundering about launching stupid recriminations and otherwise poking sleeping bears with sharp sticks.

Ray had hand picked Yartz for his crew three standard years ago after the young man had risen to a certain regional prominence for the daring jack of a mining conglom account transfer.The funds had been more traditionally diverted from the pockets of the local workforce through a hidden surtax illegally passed during closed door legislative sessions in return for certain price fixing services.In hindsight, it was apparent that Yartz may have been more interested in achieving personal fiduciary gains with his jack than in the abstract moral satisfaction of having fought the good fight.But regardless of hindsight clarity, Ray certainly did not appreciate Raville’s casual assertions that one man’s greed might reflect on the reliability of the Misfit Toys as an organization more generally.

In fact, Ray was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he did not much like this version of Michael Raville any more than the bona fide original.It seemed to take too much pleasure in making people bristle.Small scale omnipotence had made it capricious, or merely cruel.He wondered how John had tolerated it for so long.

Whatever Raville’s reasoning for taking a stab at them, Ray didn’t hesitate to fire back a shot of his own.“To be honest, comrade, I’m less concerned about the ability of my people to do their job than I am about you to do yours.Until you’ve proven yourself useful, both your personal agenda and your fidelity are still in question.”

Raville’s eyes widened in a lugubrious display of outrage.“Your doubt wounds me, Captain.”

“Not sufficiently to make me happy, I assure you.”

“And what is it you would have me do to prove myself?”

“Find Raville’s weapon and tell me how to destroy it.”

“You already know where it is.You know it can’t be on the lunar station. They don’t possess a launching mechanism to deliver a weapon of sufficient magnitude to its target at a safe distance.There are no hidden silos, no cislunar cannonade platforms.Thus, the mechanism in question must be one of the ships.The warships, I almost hesitate to remind you.Judging by the contents of the bitstream originating from the Juggernaut, she is nothing more than a support vessel, a floating barracks for thick-necked Marines and the communal larder.If any ship is going to fire the opening salvo of an interstellar war, it’s going to be the Indianapolis.”

Raville just was parroting the logic he had used with Ghast and the others to narrow the focus of their investigation.“But what is it?I can’t find the weapon if I don’t know what to look for.”

“And I can’t tell you what would constitute meaningful force against a race of functionally omnipotent beings.I can only encourage you to keep looking and assume that we’ll recognize it once we’ve found it.”

“That’s not good enough.It was your mind which envisioned such a weapon in the first place!You have to have some idea about what you yourself would do—what sort of device you would design—if you were in his position.”

“That man is no more me than you are your own father, Captain,” Raville snapped.He jabbed a finger at Ray in accusatory fashion.“You carry a replicated viral template of his genetic organization, just as I was assembled from the map of my progenitor’s synaptic matrix, but I daresay that you consider yourself to be a unique entity despite that fact.Our foundations are not predeterminative.I can’t imagine what precipitated Raville’s madness or what solution he might devise to act upon it any more than you can predict your father’s thoughts.”

Ray pressed the heel of his palm against his brow and lowered his head.“You’re right, of course.That was unfair of me.I can’t expect you to know what you might do if you thought completely differently than you do.”

Neither man spoke for several moments.Ray lashed about in the mire of his own increasingly incoherent thoughts.He felt lost, hopeless.He needed sleep.

Raville cleared his throat, and in placatory tones, said:“The one thing of which I can assure you is that he is not bluffing.The weapon exists.The mechanism for delivering it exists.And if he has steeled himself to using it, the weapon works as advertised.I am not a man who gambles unless I am certain that I can take the house for more than it takes from me.”

“Assuming we do not identify and locate this device, what course do you recommend?”

“If you can’t stop the weapon itself, you have no choice but to find a way to keep it from being delivered.Whatever the cost. Even if that includes this ship, the Giari Tau station and all of our lives.”

His words hung in the air, as black and ominous as death.Ray pinched the bridge of his nose and kept his eyes shut tight.

If I fail,Amara had said, his weapon must be destroyed before it can be raised against the Exousiai.He cannot be permitted to strike this blow against them.

And he had promised her he would see it through.

Promised yes, but he wasn’t willing to entertain such desperate thoughts.Not yet, at least.It couldn’t have become so bleak that mass murder was the only answer, could it?And if it had, was that truly the oath that he had sworn?Did Amara, did the Exousiai themselves, really expect him to spend so many lives as a show of good faith?

He cannot be permitted to strike this blow against them.

Without another word, he terminated his foam session and flipped out of geek.

Ghast lifted his head as Ray roused himself.His visible eye narrowed; the triDvid monocle which covered the other eye dilated accordingly, telescoping out as though it was subjecting Ray to a minute physical examination.For all Ray knew, it probably was.He levered himself up from his reclined position on the makeshift surfing couch—a pair of flimsy breakdown shipping containers covered over with an arrangement of unused mop heads.It had fully been his intention to swing jauntily to his feet and check on the status of their efforts, but sitting up with his feet dangling over the edge of the crate was as far as he got.He didn’t think his legs would support him if he tried to stand.

Without the false stimulus of geek, his fatigue descended on him like a sodden cloth.Geek was part of it, actually, or at least this flat, two-dimensional approximation of geek that his external array was giving him was.The images attempting to stimulate his optical nerves through the reductive medium of the monocle were grainy and uncertain, prone to random skips and gray fugues as though they had been piped through an unreliable burst wire.Working with them for too long almost had him wishing for an old fashioned keyboard and monitor.Maybe then the throbbing pressure behind his eyes wouldn’t be so bad.Ray bowed his shoulders and let his head hang.The Parkman had shifted on his skull as he lay in session, and it hung slightly askew from his ears.His temples and orbital socket felt raw where the harness had chafed against his skin.He was miserable in just about every way he knew how to be.

Ghast rose from his seat against the wall next to the utility sink.Ray heard him blundering about the cramped and acetone-reeking space of the maintenance closet that served as the tactical headquarters of his latest glorious command.They had not moved from the place where Amara had improbably deposited them, a narrow and claustrophobic pair of adjoining rooms with barely enough space to fit them in with the racks of cleaning supplies and boxes of paper goods.A brief reconnoiter of their surroundings had established they were on the outer fringe of the Giari Tau research station, a few meters underground andjust down the corridor from the pressure locks which led to the blast pits and launch bays that passed for the station’s fledgling space port.He hadn’t known what to make of their destination at first, and had even feared that it was some subliminal form of white flag—Amara sending them the clear message that the mission had failed and they should get off the planet in any way that they could.But Stine had dispelled such a bleak assessment by jacking into the local comm hub and returning with the information that the closet was in a dead sensor zone between the active monitoring of the station proper, which was under the control of local security, and the newly (and somewhat hastily) constructed launch complex, currently overseen by Strat IT.The gap created a convenient veil of chaos from which a few extraneous viral bits could be streamed into the nearest connex as redundant signal grams and relayed between the competing cores as friendly packets that had been degraded in the buffer exchange.

It was handy at times like these, he realized, having a god on your side.

Several grey moments passed in which he may have dozed, then Ray snapped back to alertness, suddenly aware that Ghast was standing in front of him.He attempted to raise his head, found he couldn’t manage it, and settled for flopping it onto one shoulder, where he could at least gaze semi-sidelong at his First Officer.

Ghast took one of his hands and pressed a steaming cup of coffee into it.Ray gasped in blissful surprise.He had understood that they’d exhausted the last of the insta-therms more than four hours ago.Leave it to Ghast to tuck one aside for him.

“You’re an absolute saint, my friend,” he said.The thick aroma of freshly brewed coffee worked wonders on his flagging energy.He managed to drag himself nearly erect.“Bless you.”

“When was the last time you slept?”

“I grabbed a few winks in session.Don’t worry about me.”

“I’ll worry if I feel like it.You’re dead on your feet.And don’t think I didn’t see you pass your dose of epiphene to Youkilis.How long do you really think you can keep going?”

Ray tossed his head weakly.“Youkilis needed it more than I did.He was actually working on the problem at hand rather than flailing about entertaining daemons.”He sipped at his coffee.It was still too hot and he managed to scorch his tongue.It didn’t stop him.He was too exhausted to care.“And speaking of jackhandies, where is Youkilis?”

“I sent him and Anderson and Stine into the back to snatch a couple hours of real sleep.Thomas, Gallegos and I are rotating through the watch.We’re none of us very fit for keeping a lookout for more than half an hour at a time, but we’re managing.”He hawked and spat, disgusted.“Unfortunately, just managing isn’t going to cut it for much longer.Did you learn anything useful?”

“I learned that even the mathematical representation of Michael Raville is an asshole.”

“Big surprise.”

“Yes.”Ray shook his head, smiling.“On a more positive note, you’ll be pleased to hear that the shuntpipe Stine bored in the space traffic net does open up into the flagship’s comm network.I don’t know that I could have managed to tunnel in as deeply as I did without some of Dorian’s little toys to assist me, but the way is clear in the short term.Tell her that we’re spawning interference by routing through the Juggernaut’s hub, so we need to either modulate our stream or peel bandwidth from their datburst array.They’ve got sniffers out after us, but I don’t think they’re aware that their system has been compromised at this point.I also managed to find out that Temple and DeMartel are coming here first thing in the morning for a short-notice strategy session with Bryce and Raville.”

Ghast grimaced.“That can’t be good news for our side.”

“Have you discovered anything about the status of our dearly departed companions?”

“No.We had a brief blip when the lieutenant who led the Marine strike force routed a request for mission change verification through the local skip-connex, but since he turned them over to Raville’s security honcho, they’ve fallen off the network.”Passing along this data made him look almost ill.“What do you think it means?”

“It means, my dear boy, that I’m going to have to ask you to do something awful.”

“Really?”His face brightened with anticipation.“What’s that, exactly?”

It was tantamount to a crime against humanity to even ask it of him.Ray knew from years of shared experience that Ghast was only in marginally better shape than he was, despite the protests he would make if accused of weariness.But there was no help for it.

He placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder.“I need you to steal me a shuttle and a docking code for the T.E.S. Indianapolis.We’re going to take a little trip.”

“To the Strat flagship?”

“In my experience, it’s difficult to launch a covert assault against a ship of the line unless one actually arranges to travel there.”

“Are you serious?”

He was afraid that Ghast would balk, that for once, the simple fact of impossibility would override his enormous sense of duty, and he would announce that it couldn’t be done.Ghast had never done refused him, no matter how extreme the request, how improbable the hope of success, but Ray wouldn’t have blamed him if he refused now.He was all but asking him to put the knife to his own throat.

“Should I book passage for all seven of us, or would that be considered taking unfair advantage?”

Ray let his breath escape as relief washed over him“Oh, I think we’ll stick together this time.”

They chuckled at their bravado, and when they had finished, gazed solemnly and silently at one another.

“Did you find it?”Ghast asked.

“No.”

“But Raville thinks it’s there?Aboard the Indianapolis?”He hesitated, chewing on his lower lip, a suggestion that he did not find Raville’s imprimatur was not all that convincing under even the best of circumstances.“I’ve been all over their core for the last hour, Ray.I pulled an extract of their arsenal and their munitions transfer logs.There’s nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not anything that would seem sufficient to cause all this fuss.”

Raville doesn’t even know what we’re looking for, Ray thought grimly, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak the words.It didn’t matter.What they chose to do was not Raville’s decision.It was his alone.He was responsible for their success of failure and any lives that would be lost in the process.

“I believe it’s there,” Ray answered, “but I don’t have any evidence to support it.It’s a hunch, a guess.”

Ghast shrugged his shoulders amicably.“I’ve followed you on the basis of less.Give me a few minutes and I should be able to come up with something.I’ll have to haul Stine out of bed.”

As his First Officer turned away toward the small storage room and the execution of his latest charge, Ray felt a stab of guilt.His crew, his beloved Misfit Toys had already endured so much loss and grief.It was unjust to ask more of them, to ask this of them.It was useless and demanding to the point of being cruel.And he had no doubt that they would hear and obey his every command.He asked it, and they would make it so, reason be damned.They didn’t allow themselves to fail.

“Take your time,” he said.It was the only way he knew to show his gratitude for faithfulness.“We’ve still got a little, at least.”

He only hoped it was true.

Ray nodded congenially in greeting to the young sergeant seated in the corner across the narrow deck from him.There were no windows to otherwise occupy his attention, no status displays to watch, and he couldn’t bear to look at the slump-shouldered exhaustion of his crew crashed out around him any longer.In the absence of sensory input, he was forced to imagine the ascent of the gondola shaped and self-guided tetherpod as it crawled smoothly up the nanocarbon fiber line strewn from the spaceport to the Gimbrell observation platform more than eight kilometers above the station.Thus far, the sergeant, who had joined them at the last minute in the departure queue and who was the only one aboard who was not one of the Misfit Toys, had proved to be a poor ambassador for the Strat military apparatus and an even more disappointing source of interest.The young man’s eyes fluttered in a constant rhythm and the muscles of his cheeks and jaw rippled with suppressed stimulus reaction, indicating that he was more than casually engrossed in the plotline of what was most likely an explicit full immersion pr0n feed direct from the Strand.He did not acknowledge the greeting nod Ray gave him, but Ray kept the glassy smile fixed on his face just in case.

When he had satisfied himself that they were functionally (if not actually) alone, he spoke to Ghast out of the side of his mouth, keeping his voice low.“Explain to me again exactly what we’re doing here?You were supposed to steal me a shuttle, as I recall.”

Ghast patted the toolbox on the bench beside him.They each had one, small metal chests with flip top lids, the top trays of which were loaded down with screwdrivers and socket wrenches in assorted sizes.The space beneath had been emptied out to make room for their Parkman units, which might otherwise have attracted unwanted attention.

“There was no chance we were commandeering a shuttle on a straight chute to the flagship from the port.There’s still too much security buzz about terrorists infiltrating the depot, and the immediate section Chiefs are proving slow to step it down even though the threat has reportedly been contained.That shouldn’t be wholly unexpected it, because without an active alert, they’ve got to figure out what to do with five thousand Border Marines who suddenly have too much free time on their hands.Strat Command has all of their direct flights on combat footing, and the AT controllers are being extremely touchy about deviations from the published flight schedule without counter-verification from Admin officers.Say what you will about rent-a-grunts, but Strat Command is notoriously anal about logistical details and flight discipline regs.”He studied their fellow passenger uneasily for any indications of realtime awareness, and seeing none, went on.“On the other hand, there’s a regular flow of technician traffic up and down the tether to the Gimbrell platform from both sides of the aisle.The station residents have agreed to share to scan time on the radcast deep space orbital array with the military in return for the loan of a few billion prox cycles to help them analyze the images bouncing back off the singularity farm.Strat’s benefit is that they get an extra farcasting eye on the circumference of the system that’s already calibrated to look harder and deeper than anything they brought with them.Given that they’ve likely got a reasonable idea about what’s coming, they’re more than happy to have all the extra snoopers they can get.”

“And this benefits us how?”

Ghast took a breath and plunged into his explanation, rattling off the connections in his daisy chain of reasoning like bullet points in a political debate.“The software package that was developed to remotely direct and focus the radcam telescopy array was designed in-house by some grad student drones on Giari Tau and is the registered intellectual property of AimScan Radiotronic Solutions, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Phi Sophia Scientific Exploration Cooperative.Pee-Sec is not-for-profit academic support organization founded by station CSO Kenwood Bryce to generate reliable revenue streams for the ongoing maintenance of the Giari Tau facility and its related research missions.The licensing fees and voluntary service contract associated with this software package account for almost eighteen percent of the station’s general fund revenue outside of government sources and is subject to all the standard EULA restrictions regarding decompilation, reverse engineering and source code manipulation.Meaning essentially that the lawyers for AimScan, Pee-Sec and ultimately the Earth Outreach Sciences Organization take an understandably dim view of folks screwing around with the guts of their software, even if the folks in question happen to be the military forces sent here for the express purpose of keeping them from getting their asses shot off by invading alien hordes.

“In order for the Indianapolis to use the resources of the Gimbrell platform effectively, they had to license and install the software that drives its telescopes in their datacore.When that software broke, they couldn’t try to fix it without either a time-costly full reinstall or attempting to crack open the can and diagnose the problem themselves, thereby subjecting themselves to the possibility of intellectual property litigation they would more than likely lose.Since they were in the neighborhood anyway, they made the safe choice and decided to put in a service call to the local support gurus.”

Ray arched an eyebrow.“The software broke?”

“Well, not spontaneously, of course.”

“I see.”

“Bottom line is that the service call was received by individuals representing themselves as AimScan technical support.In response to the reported difficulties, capable technicians have been dispatched, a Strat Admin official has signed off on their emergency boarding passes and there will be a short hop shuttle docking at the platform in ten minutes to pick us up and transfer us to the Indianapolis.”

Ray suppressed a look of admiration.It was a good ruse.Clever without being too smart for its own good.He nodded his approval.“I don’t suppose you actually know anything about this software suite we’ve purportedly been assigned to fix.”

“Does tech support ever know anything about the system they’re hired to fix?”

“Good point.”

“Besides, since I’m the one who broke it, I’d like to think I’m qualified to back the hex out.”

“But only if it becomes necessary to preserve our cover story.Don’t make the repairs too much of a priority.I’m going to need all the expertise you can spare once we get hooked into their core.Maybe you’ll catch something that I missed.”

“We’ll find it, boss.Don’t worry.They can’t hide a weapon that big from us forever.It’s only a matter of time before we find it and wreck it.”

Ray heard both the confidence and the unspoken anxiety in Ghast’s voice, and while he appreciated the sentiment, he couldn’t help but wonder which of them Ghast was trying harder to convince.

“It looks as if everything is in order for the time being,” Ray said.He opened the lid on his toolbox and removed the top tray.He took out his external array and pulled it snug against his skull as it ran through its diagnostic and warmup procedures.

“How many technicians did the call center tell the Indianapolis to expect?”

“It didn’t.”

“Good.One more question, then:would you agree that the sergeant there and I are more or less of the same build?”

Ghast smiled wickedly.“Close enough for government work, I’d say.”

“My thinking exactly,” he said, focusing his attention on the library of p2p jack scripts and personal foam penetration virals at his disposal.“Be a good lad and pop open that maintenance hatch.It should be large enough that we won’t have to scrunch him up too badly to make him fit.”

As long as one stays south of officer country, it isn’t terribly difficult to go unnoticed on a Magellan class warship provided one has the right uniform, the right access keys and above all, the right attitude.In military terms, be it naval or Marine assault forces, the proper attitude consists of looking lower ranking pukes in the eye, scowling an inordinate amount of the time, and not being slow to raise one’s voice and bust some balls forreal or perceived lapses in discipline.Most grunts and astros were ecstatic to duck their heads and scurry out of the way when a finely delivered tirade erupted anywhere in their vicinity.They didn’t bother with determining the identity of the sergeant building up to stomp on them with both feet; they just wanted to get out of the way as quickly as possible.It was a basic survival lesson inculcated in basic training and had been the backbone of military discipline since the dawn of human civilization.

Ray played the role of First Class TacSergeant Dan Gideon, the borrowed identkey overlaying his array’s connex protocol, with extraordinary gusto.The problem with being the captain of an interstellar spacecraft manned by a volunteer crew was that too often, the captain had to restrain himself in the interest of morale.One had to be diplomatic, cajoling, encouraging, and when pushed to corporal forms of discipline, stern but merciful.Above all, the captain had to be fair in all things.Sergeants on the other hand were paid to be hard and ruthless and even capricious—the martial equivalent of the all-seeing, all-knowing, ever-vigilant thunderbolts of a faceless god waiting to rain down from Olympus at the first sign of a breakdown in staunch order that kept the military machine running smoothly.

He found that he liked screaming at people, and even more, he liked screaming as a First Class Sergeant because no one below the level of a butter bar Second Lieutenant dared to stop him.Even other First Classes simply stood back with their arms over their chests and, as professional courtesy to a colleague, displayed appropriate expressions of awe and agreement.He also discovered that if he howled long enough and loud enough, no one thought to ask why he wore a civilian model external array instead of being properly outfitted with standard issue military array hardware or why he was wearing non-regulation footwear ( TacSergeant Gideon’s boots had been too small, alas, even when he curled his toes).No one asked where he had come from or what he might want when he stomped into normally secured areas and demanded to view the written activity logs, be it TacOps, Targeting, Field Engineering or TechTac.They merely complied, quickly, efficiently and on the double.

Ray had very early on concluded that pretending to be a Marine was much more personally gratifying than actually being one had ever been.

But an hour into his renewed tour of duty, even with the lax security access typical of Third Cycle operations, Ray was running out of zones for which Dan Gideon’s profile could reasonably gain him admittance, and he was no closer to finding what they had come for than he had been when he started.It was beginning to occur to him that the actual TacSergeant Dan Gideon would probably be emerging soon from his impact induced stupor to reclaim his lawful identity, and Ray had best be well rid of it before the core golemechs were notified and locked him down.

After his fruitless visit to TechTac, he ducked into the head on Engineering Sub-Deck Nine.He made a brief circuit of the room, peering under the stall doors and listening carefully for any noises that seemed out of the ordinary.Maintenance had been through recently.The floor was still damp from a vigorous scrubbing and the room reeked from overzealous dedication to a liberal sanitizing philosophy.He was alone, and probably would be for at least a few minutes, barring incident.Ray strode to the stall farthest from the entrance and latched the door from the inside.

He sagged onto the toilet and opened a narrow beam encrypted p2p channel back-packeted on the Strand connex node via the compromised ranged datburst array rather than trying to push signal through the Strat comm network.Unless he had vastly underestimated Herr Sprechtman’s capabilities, the tunnel Stine had excavated for them would not yet be collapsed, and it was time for him to start acting as though some greedy little IT wonderboy would be trolling through Dan Gideon’s usage logs for clues to his identity before too long.Ray wanted to be absolutely certain he didn’t leave behind any incriminating or traceable pathways.

The ping went through after a slight re-encryption delay.His connection burped with static as it cleared the node protocol.“Status report,” he said subvocally by way of greeting.He was more in geek than out of it, but still not fully immersed.He needed to be alert in the event of company.

Ghast’s voice sounded tinny and distant in his earpiece, stiff with the generic modulation of another’s subvocal reply.“Where are you?”

“We’ll avoid getting into specifics, if you please,” Ray cautioned him.“Suffice it to say I’m within a kilometer of your location and leave it at that.Why do you ask?”

“Don’t mean to tell you your business, but I’d recommend you extend that margin by several orders of magnitude in the near future, boss,” Ghast said uneasily.“It’s getting a little warm in here.I just spent the last twenty minutes being grilled by a security drone who was curious to know if my team had noticed anything out of the ordinary on our trip up the tether.Seems some TacSergeant who was supposed to have ridden up with us didn’t show up for his shift in Astronav.The questions were pretty routine and the guy I spoke too didn’t seem overly concerned.At this point, they’re assuming that he’s jerking off somewhere and hoping to bill his absence to travel time on the tether, but that opinion is going to change before too much longer.”

“I was beginning to suspect the same thing.Hold the line, please,” Ray said.He leapt into full geek, and materialized at the command console in the control center.He punched up the index for profile purge routines and was gratified to find several terabytes worth of options, most with names like ASSREAMER, KILLTRACEDIE, and PROFPURGE, along with a particularly intriguing entry called FEDTAILCRASH.But the use history seemed to indicate that CRAPDUMP was Dorian’s personal favorite, and Ray spun it up for execution.

Almost immediately, Michael Raville appeared behind his left shoulder, leaning over the gangway rail beyond the control center.“I was just starting to wonder what had become of you—hoping, of course, that you hadn’t managed to get yourselves rounded up and shot prematurely.”

Ray shushed him and scanned through the app’s NFO file for alerts or warnings.CRAPDUMP was an all-purpose profile purge that cycled through the entire session cache looking for key sig related files and replacing them on the fly with partially corrupted alternate data ids from a preloaded batch file.It had the fascinating side effect of scorching any disconnect-delay enabled node channels with a viral worm designed to prevent session profile skiptracing, a favorite traffic tracking method of nosy sysadmins.

Such extreme measures might be considered overkill, but if the ship’s network security agents hadbegun to assume that Gideon’s profile had been hijacked, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to slam to door on them before they could get their tentacles wrapped around Dorian’s native foam ip.He didn’t have time to search for a better option in any event.Dan Gideon’s period of usefulness was rapidly expiring.

Raville watched what he was doing, and he hissed a breath through his teeth.“Do you really think that’s a good idea?Infecting the datacore’s nodes with a jack worm?”

Ray ignored him.An indicator light on his panel flashed to indicate that the script had loaded successfully and was awaiting execution confirmation.Ray stabbed the button to launch the initiation sequence.

The lights dimmed.The control center’s speaker system blared with the screech of vulcanized rubber tires skidding across pavement, followed by a thudding crunch of metal.Ray smiled at the aural theatrics in spite of himself.Dorian certainly had style to complement his abundance of substance.

A quick ping of his ip id indicated that he was once more in a pocket of uncataloged foam, a ghost form untracked and unrecognized, cruising along the underbelly of the Strand network.

“Audio up,” he said calmly.The speakers popped in anticipation, and a row of status lights flickered across his console as his connex protocols recalibrated themselves.Ray cleared his throat and jabbed his thumb at Raville, indicating he should feel free to take a seat and shut up.“I’m back, and in theory, clean for the time being.That should buy us a few extra minutes.”

“Glad to hear it.Is this channel still secure?”

“It may get tricky if someone starts backtracking Gideon’s last node transfer and decides to come looking for him, but that will take some time.His ship access has traveled quite extensively in his absence, and IT is going to have their hands full for the next few minutes putting out some unexpected node fires.We should have a limited window of clear communication, before someone starts poking around seriously.”

“Then I should get this out while we’re safe:Stine has found something I think you might want to see.”

Ray sat up straight in his chair.He suspected that his body, tucked into a bathroom stall on Engineering Sub-Deck Nine, did the same.His digitally synthesized heart began to thunder like mad.

“Go ahead.I’m listening.”

“Thomas, Youkilis and I have been working hard to distract the local techs with smoke and mirrors, while Stine and the others double-teamed the data storage stacks.We’ve been beating our heads against the wall trying to find the device itself and coming up null either because of our search parameters or due to access locks we couldn’t crack without tipping off network security.Stine decided we were going at it all wrong.She realized that any advanced tech coming up from GT was going to have to be accompanied by its own assembly and testing experts.Raville isn’t going to risk blowing this deal because some squid can’t follow directions.Do you follow me?”

“I follow you,” Ray said impatiently.“Go on.”

“She was able to plug into the personnel allocation system—the timesheet logs—and by cross-referencing those with the Access Request Scheduler found a matching pattern of security grants for a party of non-enlisted techs to a systems lab on Deck Eight-Astra-Four.It’s the same song and dance we went through to get our boarding passes and coordinated limited zone security access.The ship has to coordinate visitor arrivals with locking mechanisms, guest accounts, the whole works.No one wants to flip those switches manually every time the work crew shuttles up,so it was batch loaded to automatically activate their badge credentials and network rights on a prearranged schedule over the last few weeks.The ship’s directory tells us the systems lab in question is in the Tech Deployment Grid on the ass side of Jump Engineering.”Ray had a pretty good idea of where that was.It was only a few decks up and aft of his current location.“In case you’re curious, TDG is the unit responsible for launching sensor arrays, sidescan photon guns and broad spectrographic analysis probes.In general, we’re talking mass survey types of stuff, adding factoids to the human trivia pool, more scientific in nature than strictly strategic.If I’m the captain of a battle cruiser on active alert, that’s where I’d put a bunch of tech sharp and questionably politically affiliated eggheads intent on playing around with highly experimental doomsday weapons.That way they don’t see too much classified military hardware in action, they’re not a distraction to the crew, and if an accident happens and things start blowing up, none of the critical ship’s components are jeopardized—at least to the extent that the unscheduled detonation of any doomsday device can be said to not jeopardize the ship at large.”

It was sound enough reasoning, but Ray needed to be sure.“It’s possible that the Indianapolis maintains its own contingent of non-enlisted scientific personnel.If Strat is willing to rent their defense forces to EOSO, they’re more than capable of renting space and cycles to academics.Can you confirm that these personnel were affiliated with the research station?”

Ghast paused, and Ray strained forward intently.“Boss, one of the access badges issued was Michael Raville’s.This has to be it, doesn’t it? Why else would Raville spend weeks jetting up from the station to this ship unless he was overseeing the assembly of his weapon?”

Ray’s virtual heart hammered in his chest.“Have you re-checked the internal shipping logs?I’m thinking load orders, component listings, equipment transfer records?We need to conjure a dirty sketch of what this device might be capable of, but more importantly, we need to determine where it is located now.”

He could almost hear Ghast smiling.“Way ahead of you.Anderson has tracked it to a forward launch bay on Deck Nine-Astra, Sector Six.That’s just a hop from the systems lab where it was assembled.”

“Have him squirt you the data they’ve retrieved so far,” Raville said into his ear.“I should take a look at it.”

Ray grimaced.He didn’t want to risk moving extra packets across their connection, but Raville was probably right.If anyone could decipher the intent of the device from specs and lading sheets, it was him.“Have Anderson send me her findings.”

“Will do.We’re packing up our gear now.I figure we can be there in eight minutes.”

Ray brought up a schematic of the ship’s tube system on the main screen.“I can be there in twelve from my current position.What’s the access restriction look like on that level?”

“Anderson says she already has it cracked and has added that zone to our security access.It’s a kluge, so it probably won’t hold much past shift change, but it will get us where we need to be.We’ll worry about how we’re going to get back out later.”Ghast paused suddenly, as the obvious hole in his thinking occurred to him.“That doesn’t really help you much though, does it?”

Ray didn’t have a visitor’s badge.He’d been cruising the ship solely on Gideon’s account, and now he didn’t even have that.He consulted the local system time.The ship would be gearing up for shift change soon.With any luck, he could make it at least part of the way unnoticed in the morning rush to duty stations.“I’m on the move,” he said, putting as much confidence in his tone as he could muster.“But if I’m later than zero-seven-hundred on the dot local time, assume I’ve been detained and proceed with the plan as instructed.”

“We’ll hold the door for you as long as we can,” Ghast promised.

“Take no extraordinary measures.Our sole advantage remains stealth and quickness.This isn’t a fight we can win if we try to go toe to toe.Is that clear?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Good.I assume you can handle your current escort detail?”

“We’ll be at our destination before they even know we’re gone.”

Ray smiled bleakly.“Then expect me shortly.Don’t forget to have Anderson load that file.Captain out.”

The p2p connection broke and Ray leaned back in his seat with his hands pressed over his eyelids.Almost a full kilometer of deck, a dozen different security zones, more than a two thousand members of a hostile military force and a countless army of sensors, pineyes, id readers and passive scan security locks were all that separated him from the launch bay on Deck Nine-Astra-Six.It could conceivably be worse, but his imagination wasn’t up to the task.

“The file is coming in now,” Raville observed.“It isn’t very big.”

“That’s good, because we don’t have very much time in which to process it,” he responded, and immediately regretted his glibness.He lifted his head and looked over his shoulder at Raville, smiling wanly.“It looks as though we may have gotten ourselves into a bit of trouble.”

“By ‘we’, I assume you mean yourself and the mouse in your pocket.I’m not the one who decided to scorch the security network and give them advance warning that their perimeter might have been penetrated.But other than that, I concur completely.”

“Care to make a wager on how far we can get with no access pips, a wanted man’s uniform and a security system about to go critical once it realizes terrorists have seized one of the ship’s compartments?”

Raville grunted humorlessly.“I’ll start digging into Dorian’s script library to see if there’s anything we can apply to confuse the golemechs between here and there.I’ll leave the actual physical barriers up to you.In the meantime, might I strongly suggest you petition whatever deity it is you hold to for some timely intervention.We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, and one more thing while we’re contemplating the tough questions:ask yourself why the captain of a warship clogged with blast hardened, v-field reenforced bulkhead compartments each loaded to the rafters with highly volatile plasma battery shells, phased singularity mines and every other form of universe rending ordnance known to man would choose to allow a bunch of eggheads with no military training to assemble a doomsday device in an unshielded quasi-civilian sector on the soft underbelly of his precious vessel–one of the few places in which the slightest accident could trigger a catastrophic chain of events that would send this entire ship plummeting into the gravity well of Giari Tau.”Raville lifted a skeptical eyebrow.“The captain must have had great confidence in the competency of Raville’s team, wouldn’t you say?”

Ray stared at him for a full ten seconds considering the implications.“How can you know that?”

“Do you think I’ve done nothing but sit here idly peering over your shoulder or lurking in the shadows of your foam sessions while you conducted your fruitless searches?I’m limited in this format, Captain, but not wholly without resources. ”

“You don’t think this is Raville’s doomsday device?”

“I’m not saying that.But I am saying that we—not just you and I, but all of us—may have been making assumptions about what exactly constitutes a doomsday device that are unwarranted.”Raville peered at him hard, his jaw set and his face pale.Ray couldn’t tell if it was anger or simple, stark terror at facing the unknown.“There’s something else going on here that I don’t yet grasp.A deeper game than the one we believe we’ve been playing.But the cards have been dealt and the wagers made.All that’s left for us is to call or fold.Your choice.”

“I’ll leave this session active,” Ray said, taking a deep breath.“I’ll appreciate any technical assistance you manage to offer.”

Raville nodded.“Aye.I’ll do what I can.”

Ray retracted his focus and the render of the control room faded into a ghost image hazily scrawled on the monocle of his external array.He thought he heard a last whisper in his earpiece, a determined and grimly hopeless encouragement.

Good luck.

Twelve minutes.

The time it took an average man to walk a kilometer of open ground.The median duration of a fast food meal.The length of a standard sexual encounter, of a normal bowel movement, of a relaxing shower.Twelve minutes was nothing.It was a hiccup in the span of a normal day.Time enough to read a zine article of no particular depth, to catch up on the news headlines, to study the box score for your favorite sporting team.

But ask any man who has lived through a life threatening experience:a combat veteran, an attack fighter pilot, a policeman or fire fighter, and he will tell you that twelve minutes can be an eternity.Ask any man who has been hunted, because to a hunted beast, twelve minutes is the difference between life and death a dozen times over.They are seven hundred and twenty individuated opportunities for death to reach out a cold and instant talon-like claw and clutch you in its ineluctable grip.Each of those seconds stretches out, slows down, breaks off into discrete units of potentiality, until each one is an eternity unto itself.

Ray exited the restroom on Engineering Sub-Deck Nine and flung himself down the corridor to his left.He tried to look hurried, preoccupied, just another grunt commuter on his way to a dull duty station.The schematic drawing he’d pilfered from the datacore informed him that there should be a tube lift at the end of the corridor that would take him up to Engineering One.From there, he would have to traverse a large portion of the lateral bulk of the ship along the Bainbridge Artery—what passed for Main Street on the T.E.S. Indianapolis—in order to duck into the Tech Deployment Grid situated just behind the humpdeck, a bulbous eruption of vacuum porous nanocarbon lattice set aside for cold storage and reactor steam venting.

He kept his head down and avoided eye contact with anyone in the increasing volume of foot traffic pounding up and down the deckplates.He chewed his lower lip and plunged his hands deep into his trouser pockets, trying to look both casually preoccupied and slightly rushed.No one gave him a second look, if they registered his presence at all.The hour was early, and the ship, even on combat alert, had been idle for many days.Most of the men and women he passed seemed either bored or still sleep sluggish, more concerned with their morning routine than with marking an unfamiliar face as they grumbled their way to work, therms of coffee, or whatever quick breakfast they could obtain from the deck canteen.

Once, he slipped into another public restroom and stood behind the door breathing rapidly as a pair of security dragoons stomped toward him.They laughed raucously at one another as they strode past,trading bawdy jokes with the casual air of soldiers either fresh off a duty shift or not yet yoked into the one in front of them.It was just his own nerves, he realized.No one was looking for him yet.Still, he waited until the sound of their voices had faded completely before easing back into the flow of commuter traffic.

At the end of the hall, he crowded into the lift with a handful of other astros, all of them general enlistment drones considerably lower than his putative rank in the chain of command.They were yawning and bleary eyed, content to stare at the floor as the doors hummed closed and the carriage lurched into motion.His first objective obtained, Ray heaved a small sigh of relief and put his back against the rear wall.So far, so good.He crossed his arms over his chest to obscure Gideon’s id badge.

As the carriage ticked past the first floor, it shuddered and a pretty young Midshipman with short chestnut hair and wearing blue engineering coveralls stumbled up against him.Ray caught her with his arm and held her up until she regained her balance.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the woman said.Her cheeks flushed pinkly with embarrassment.“We hit that hitch every morning.You’d think I’d remember to brace myself.”

“Not a problem,” Ray said.“Glad I could be here to cushion your fall.”

She gazed up at him, smiling, her eyebrows quirked in curiosity.“You’re a long way from home aren’t you, soldier?”

Ray forced himself to smile back, but kept his expression guarded.“Aren’t we all?”

“That’s not what I meant.I haven’t seen you in Engineering before, and I usually notice the Marines kicked down into our can.That’s my job.I’m shipside interservice liaison for engineering staff.”She flashed him a practiced, officious grin that was all teeth and extended her hand in greeting.“My name is Channett Gabrial.”

He squeezed her fingers gently.“TacSergeant Victor Spence.”

“But you are new around here, right?”

“You caught me.I transferred in from the Juggernaut.Shuttled over on Third Cycle a little early to test my clearances and line up housing before I’m scheduled to report for duty this afternoon.My CO assured me that all the details had been taken care of, but you know how it is.Doesn’t matter how routine the procedure, somebody is going to find a way to drop the ball.I didn’t want to end up sleeping in the mess hall for the next two weeks.”

“I hear that, sergeant.So where is your assigned duty station?”

“Tac ops.I work on shaped charge neo-plasmatic warheads.My specialty is propulsion system design and implementation.”

“You’re going to have a lab station in Engineering, then?We have some fine, state of the art propulsion testing facilities on Six.”

“So they tell me.I haven’t gotten to see my workstation.”Ray self-consciously tapped the side of his external array and grimaced.“Like I said, somebody dropped the ball.I lost either my foam connex or a component in my array when I shuttled over.One of the friendlies on the shuttle hooked me up with a temporary array, but the network hasn’t picked me up yet.I was just on my way to IT to see what can be done to iron things out.Don’t want to make a bad impression by being locked out of my workstation on my first day.”

Midshipman Gabrial fluttered her eyelids reflexively, frowning.“I see that you’re right about your network access.I’ve got nothing on your id on the intership grid.I can’t even ping your ex array.Somebody screwed you up good.”

“Tell me about it.”

Her eyelids went on fluttering for several more seconds.Ray snuck a glance at the carriage’s status pad to see how close they were getting to Engineering One.The last thing he needed was a good samaritan digging into his nonexistent profile.

“I don’t know,” she said finally, with a small shrug.“I’ll have to work on it from my desk.The IT security agents are paranoid about allowing us to dig too deeply into personnel allocation files without black box encryption.Understandable, I guess, but it’s a pain in my backside.You’d think the military could take some of that massive sinkhole budget and drag themselves into the current century technologically, you know?”

Ray was sure she was going to drop it there, back off from an idle conversation before it actually cost her physical effort, but after a moment, she said, “The thing I don’t understand is how you got all the way down to Sub-Deck Nine without any of the necessary clearances.We’ve got some classified labs running on that level, and it usually takes a week or more for anyone to get their access lined up in the first place.We’re supposed to have a guaranteed sub-thirty security response time on the pineyes.”

The status panel flashed Engineering Two, and the lift picked up a burst of speed.Ray did his best to look confused.“I didn’t run into any problems.Maybe your reporting system is buggered.Happens on the Juggernaut all the time.Somebody decides to patch a part of the network and it flips the wrong switch.”

“Sure.That’s probably it.”Gabrial squeezed the bridge of her nose, clearly unhappy.“Look, I realize its an inconvenience, but would you mind coming around with me to my CO’s office?I really ought to get someone drilling down into this issue until we get it resolved.If you could give him an idea of the places you’ve been, it would help us immensely in figuring out the extent of the system failure.”

Ray kept his tone level, but his mouth went dry.“I’d like to, but I really should get over to IT first thing.Maybe I could swing by this afternoon sometime, when its convenient for you, of course.”

“Yeah, that would be fine.”

Relief surged through him, and Ray grinned apologetically.“Hey, I’m sorry to cause so many problems first thing in the morning.I’ll bet this is exactly what you wanted to spend your day on.”

“No sweat.It’s better we find out bugs this way than as a result of an actual infiltration.”

The lift doors wheezed open and the riders crowded for the exit.Ray moved quickly to separate himself from the friendly and inquisitive Midshipman Gabrial before she could cause him real problems.His internal chronometer informed him that he was already forty plus seconds behind his estimated travel time.If he didn’t find somewhere to make it up, he’d be cutting very close to the zero-seven-hundred deadline.

The press in front of him began to thin, and Ray peeled off down the broad main corridor of Engineering One to the right, the next stage in his quest for the Tech Deployment Grid.He scanned ahead restlessly, waiting for a gaggle of slow movers to get out of his way.Engineering One seemed to be mostly private offices and admin centers, the names and ranks of the upper level occupants inscribed in gold chased letters on plates beside the doors.This early, the ports were still largely sealed.Ray consulted his map.There were no immediate security checkpoints on his display, and only a few fixed pineyes and id scanners, all of which he should be able to avoid.A left, a right, and a tube ladder up to the Bainbridge Artery.Piece of cake.

He made it all of a dozen steps before he heard a familiar voice calling after him.

“TacSergeant Spence!Hold up!”

He wanted to ignore her, pretend he didn’t hear.Every muscle in his body told him to keep going.But that would look suspicious.Already, some of their fellow travelers and other astros on their way to work were beginning to perk up curiously.

Ray turned, a forced smile on his lips.It froze there, a cold, dead thing.

The ever-helpful Midshipman Gabrial was weaving her way through the crowd toward him with a gray clad, red collared security agent in tow.He dared not move, though a ripple of panic crept up into his stomach and settled there.Gabrial bounded up to him, breathless, glowing with pleasure.Ray was almost certain he was going to vomit.

“TacSeargeant Spence,” she gushed.“I’m glad I caught you.This is Sergeant—“Her mouth opened, and she stiffened self-consciously, then wheeled toward her companion.“I’m sorry, sergeant, what was your name again?”

“McAvoy,” the man said.He smiled politely, but the warmth did not reach his eyes.They were firm, hardened with suspicion.

“Yes.Sergeant McAvoy, with Security.I’ve explained your situation to him, and he agrees that it’s probably best if he escorts you to IT to get things straightened out.There are a dozen pineye readers between here and there, and with the threat of terrorist insurgents still technically on the books, I’d hate to have you detained on suspicion of something nefarious.It would ruin our reputation for hospitality.”

She laughed at her own humor, but Ray barely noticed.His attention was locked on Sergeant McAvoy, whose eyes fluttered characteristically as he accessed the network.

“Indeed, TacSergeant Spence,” he growled.“I think it would be best if you came with me.”

The security agent’s hand flexed almost imperceptibly and drifted a few centimeters toward the weapon strapped to his side.

Ray’s comm channel hissed abruptly in his ear.

They’re on to you, Raville announced.I’ve got security scramble alerts in four contiguous sectors.I’d suggest you get yourself out of there quickly.

Ray tensed his muscles, tapping into the reservoirs of strength and enhanced reflex that had been programmed into his package build.It was like flipping a switch, closing a circuit.The lumbering wreckage of his body came alive.His senses flared with sudden sharpness and acuity.Tightly focused energy flooded into his limbs.

Relative time slowed to a crawl, as though space itself had curved about him, and for a pure, crystalline instant, he saw everything:the craned necks of curious on-lookers and interrupted commuters; the bright and expectant eyes of Midshipman Gabrial; the burgeoning threat of Sergeant McAvoy.He felt the droning bursts of the fine orbital jets firing, the patter of boots on deckplate, the first guttural blat of the incursion alert belched through the comm speakers.The ship was alive, a creeping ecology of parasitic crew, neuronal connex nodes andflexsteel flesh.But also a stalking beast, its teeth bared and claws splayed, poised to fight and rend and tear to the extent of its stupid, animal strength.It would fight for its survival.

Ray dropped himself into a coiled fighting stance, curled his fists and struck.

His blow caught Sergeant McAvoy in the center of his chest.From McAvoy’s shocked perspective, it would have arrived instantaneous with Ray’s thought, an impossible blur of motion followed by a biting impact.Ray felt the bones in the security agent’s sternum crack, and McAvoy grunted, flailed his arms wide and went down hard like he’d been shot, his eyes growing wide with shock and pain.One of his forearms caught Midshipman Gabrial just below the cheek.She bounced off the wall and tumbled forward in slow, deliberate fashion, then landed on the deck and lay still.

Ray was sorry for that despite everything.She’d only been trying to help.

That was the problem with the universe:a dearth of simple decency, and even when someone mustered the courage to do a decent thing, this was the payment they could expect.A vicious feedback loop.Was it any wonder things kept insisting on going to hell?

He sprang away, already ten meters down the corridor before anyone around him even registered what had just happened.He dashed down a tight corridor to his left, and ran as hard as his enhanced biomechanics allowed.His monocle display described a strange elliptical path, a complex route of narrow gangways, maintenance hatches and brief climbs through poorly illuminated tubes.At first, the way was often crowded with crewmen paused to gape at the unexpected and inexplicable growl of the alarm. Ray brushed past them as a gust of wind and a splash of color.In tight spaces, he sent them sprawling and launched himself over their tumbling bodies as they fell.

All the time, the blat of the alarm pursued him.The deck rapidly began to empty out.Bulkhead doors snapped shut on either side of the corridors he entered.Engineering launched itself headlong into security lockdown.

Ray accepted this change as a gift and put on an extra burst of speed.His superhuman strength wouldn’t last much longer.Even with his reconfigured body, there was only so much energy he could store, and he had been weary beyond reckoning before, relying on stimulants and adrenaline to keep himself going.Over a brief span of minutes, his breath grew ragged, and cyanotic pinpoints of darkness began to appear at the edges of his vision.His muscles began to wail all the way down the length of his legs.His deep tissues felt like they had been set on fire.

And finally, as he crawled out of a cramped HVAC tube two levels above the Bainbridge Artery, the map overlaying his left eye began to pulse with red pinpoints of light.He peered both ways down a narrow chute of grey metal, some sort of backwater access tunnel.He was so exhausted that he trembled.Trembled uncontrollably.Ray hauled himself up and stopped, hunched over with his hands planted on his knees.He greedily swallowed huge chunks of deliciously cool air heavily scented with machine oil.

He pinged his companion.

Raville responded immediately.<Passive id scanners.>

<In both directions?>He bit his lip on a curse.<Route me around them.>

His limbs felt sodden, as limber as sacks of sand.

He transmitted it as a snap, but there was no force behind it.Ray didn’t have the strength to be angry.

Ray didn’t spare the oaths this time.

A sudden thought, inchoate and terrible, blossomed in Ray’s mind.Something about an overly suspicious security agent, an instantaneous four sector alert, and a frenzied, circuitous route of escape that led irrevocably to a bleak stretch of dirt between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

But Raville was right.It was the only chance he had.Better to never arrive at the launch bay at all than to come with security bugs crawling all over him.

Ray closed his eyes and flashed through the access protocols.

<You’re in.>

Almost at once, the warning beacons on his display went dead.

<Go left.>Raville transmitted.<Updated map is flashing onto your display now.I’ll divert the passive scanners as you reach them.It should be a straight shot from here as long as you manage to keep yourself from getting killed.>

Ray glanced up at the system time flashing in the corner of his screen.It was two minutes to seven.

<Aren’t you glad you brought me along?>

Once again, he started to run, certain that in the back of his mind he could hear Michael Raville laughing.

At exactly 06:59:50 hours local time, Ray Morrical stumbled through the bulkhead door to Flight Staging Bay Gamma-15 on Deck Nine-Astra.Thomas held the passage open for him, looking worn and relieved at once, as he plunged through.Exhaustion made him clumsy, and he managed to catch his foot on the raised lip of the bulkhead’s bottom seal.Before he could even think about catching himself, Ray was on the deck, scudding gently across a smooth sheet of flexsteel deckplate.

He lay there for a moment, feeling his arms and legs intact, enjoying the sensation of his face pressed against the cool surface, ecstatic with the sheer and simple pleasure of not having to move any longer.He’d made it, even if he was too tired to be properly elated with his success.The door closed and sealed with the rasp of a vacuum lock, cutting off the worst of the phantom alarm that had pursued him all the way from Engineering.

Presently, he became aware that he was not alone, and that shadows had gathered over his supine form.Groaning, Ray rolled himself onto his back.He gazed up into the still unfamiliar faces of Ghast, Thomas, Anderson and Gallegos, Stine and Youkilis—all of his surviving crew.He didn’t even have the strength to feel chagrined.He was just so happy to see them again, together and whole.

Ghast wore a pleased smirk.“I should have known that you wouldn’t be able to make it this far without kicking up some sort of a ruckus.”

Ray sighed affably.“I didn’t mean to.It wasn’t even my fault.It started when this pretty girl bumped into me on the elevator.”

“It always starts with a pretty girl, doesn’t it?”

There was laughter then, and Ray let the sound wash over him.It was the sound of bliss, of harmony, and a brief reprieve from fear.Only when it had gone did he ask, “So what about you?Any problems encountered on your trek?”

Someone offered a hand and Ray allowed himself to be tugged to his feet.He wavered unsteadily for a few seconds, but eventually his legs decided to bear the load.Ghast said, “We crossed a sector barrier we’d missed with our access hack and managed to get detained by one of the local cops on his way to log off his duty shift.We told him we’d gotten lost trying to find our way back to the hangar.He didn’t seem prone to believing us given some of the other network oddities that had infected the system over the last hour and was preparing to call for backup when some fool tripped the incursion alarms and turned the whole ship into a madhouse.”

“Glad I could be of assistance,” Ray said, chuckling.

“The guy ran off in such a hurry, he didn’t even give us directions.I can’t say I was left with much of a positive feeling for this ship’s hospitality.”

“Believe me, the benefits of its hospitality are not all that they’re cracked up to be.Now, who’s going to give me the grand tour?I’m breathless with the anticipation of laying my eyes on my first ever legitimate doomsday device.”

Ghast and Stine exchanged an uneasy look.“That makes seven of us, boss.”

Before Ray could ask what he meant, his First Officer took him by the arm and led him out of the pressure lock into which he had stumbled and through a second bulkhead door.Thomas and Youkilis remained behind to guard the entrance.They entered a launch bay that was cramped but sanitary, a carefully maintained workspace, more reminiscent of missile firing station than a deep space deployment platform.Immediately to the right of the bulkhead door sat a pressurized control center cocooned in an oblong box of flexsteel and plastisheen.Through the tall windows, Ray could see racks of flickering displays, blade servers and dedicated system hardware.Small, portable carts laden with tools and outmoded computing devices were crammed into the corners and other available patches of open deck.

But the bulk of the launch area had been given over to a portable industrial winch and a short staging cradle abutted by a hydraulic loading piston that fed the black maw of a probe launch tube.The impression of a missile firing station persisted, and Ray was reminded of a rifle—the long shaft of the barrel running into the cocked hammer that, when snapped against the brass shelled projectile, hurled it on its destructive and irrevocable path.

And what a projectile it was.

Sleek and black, its skin glossy in the bay’s overhead lights, secured to the cradle by nanocarbon straps.A silver fatburst data cord trailed from an access port in the nose cone to a connex node attached in turn to an array of diagnostic and nav equipment that hung pendulous and spider legged from the ceiling.The device measured fully two meters in length, including the fine, razor thin fins attached to its tail.It bore no insignia or call signs, no official designations at all.It’s lines were shark-like, potent and vicious, the latter day representation of the golden arrows of mighty Apollo himself.

And it looked exactly like every other plasma propelled conventional missile Ray had ever seen.

He stared at it, a million nonsensical thoughts rumbling through his head, but only one surfaced with any force.

That’s it?This is what we came all this way to see?

On his own ship, there was a whole munitions dump full of missiles almost precisely like this one.Just as fierce, just as subjectively evil-looking and doom-suggestive.Except the Horde’s were twice as big, three times as big. . .and all of them worth more in scrap metal and depleted uranium than they were as offensive ordnance, casualties of the inexorable march of technological progress.

The deck shifted beneath Ray’s feet, and he nearly went down to his knees.For a terrifying instant, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.Everything he thought he had known, all the sacrifices they had made, spiraled about him like images of loss, of failure, of disaster.

Then he got a handle on himself.

“I don’t understand,” he said steadily.“Is it. . .what?Some new technology?Some hitherto unknown form of star buster?A pinhole singularity bomb?A phased riftwave shell?”

He reeled through his mental catalogue of every form and type of destructive weaponry known to man, both actual and theoretical.Planet killing devices, plasma weapons, Spriggs-Detmer arrays, Fleish hammers. . .he considered them all and tossed them away.

“I need information Mr. Ghast.”

Ghast nodded stiffly, understanding Ray’s lack of understanding.“Anderson and I have been going over the data we sent you:the manifests, the inventory sheets, the spec docs, such as they are.There are missing pieces, of course, and we’ve only done a preliminary analysis at best, but I can tell you that we’re not seeing the sorts of design patterns one would expect from known categories of offensive weaponry.Most of the device’s mass is plasma shell propellant cartridges armed to feed a standard ion-pulse thrust battery.The tubes are nicely tooled, but more or less standard issue for a projectile of this size and mass, meaning that even at max thrust, it isn’t going to acquire a velocity that will curve the space-time horizon.The warhead appears to be anything but, and once the plasma has gone dry, it probably wouldn’t even go pop if it smashed head on into an asteroid.The skin is a unique flexsteel nanalloy with amazing tensile strength and flexibility, assembled in one contiguous piece, probably all but indestructible—which is an interesting feature, but not really relevant that I can tell.That leaves the nose, which most likely is all guidance, complex prox arrays and whatever other voodoo they’ve crammed into it.It does carry a modified 18 millisecond burst singularity seed in a phased containment cell, which is sophisticated tech for a weapon of this type, but it only grades out as a comm scale potential density.”

Ray stroked his chin.“To call home, you suppose?Confirm its target coordinates and that sort of thing.”

“Unlikely.The nav components are a significant upgrade on the usual tube and bubble matrix.I don’t think they need the backup of a BSS one-time.Besides, an 18 millisecond spew?You could move a ton of data through that tunnel before the leading curves began to collapse.”

A ton of information, Ray repeated to himself.“What about a viral weapon of some sort, then?”

Ghast only shrugged.“Who knows?It certainly doesn’t have enough punch to do any real physical damage, which might not matter, since the enemy reportedly isn’t physical in the first place, but how would you get it there?I mean, talk about the slow boat to Chenga.”

“Fine.Then that’s where you can start.Analyze the core and nav systems and find out what sort data its capable of moving and where that information is headed.Focus on predictive models for the wave collapse.”

“We can do that,” Ghast said.“I’ll get Stine jacking on the control center to see what might be in the cache files, too.Then we’ve got the assorted diagnostic units—they’ll have some level of resident memory we might be able to recover.It’ll take time, but we’ll track down the missing pieces of the puzzle.”

The words were right, but Ray could tell even as Ghast began issuing his instructions to the others, that he was troubled.When the Misfit Toys had dispersed and the two of them were alone on the launch deck, Ray pulled him aside.

“Care to tell me what you really think, old friend?”

He hesitated at first, as though unwilling or unable to give up his typically optimistic attitude, but finally, Ghast set his jaw and sighed.His shoulders sagged with the weight of all he did not comprehend.

“I just don’t know, boss,” he confided.“I don’t know what it is.Not without taking it completely apart, at least.And I thought about doing that, just as we’d planned.I thought about disabling it, destroying it.I could probably wreck it beyond usefulness with just a pry bar, but–”

“But you realized that someone has been playing a different game than the one we thought we were playing,” Ray finished for him.“I’ve begun to suspect the same thing.The question is:whose game is it?And what is really at stake?”

Ghast shifted uneasily and hooked his thumbs into his belt.“I’m out of my depth on this one.I don’t know what it is, or what it’s supposed to be, but I can state definitively that what it is not is a bomb, let alone some kind of doomsday device as we understand such things.If you tell me to destroy it, I’ll do that, Ray, but it scares me, to be honest.I thought I knew what we were doing, what we were fighting for, but now that we’re here. . .now I just don’t know.It isn’t what we were told to expect.It isn’t anything we understand, which means that either someone has been lying to us, or someone hasn’t fathomed what’s really going on.And both of those someone’s are the same person:Michael Raville.And I don’t mean the real one.Raville started this whole tilt at windmills.Raville explained her destiny to Amara and unlocked her power.Raville is desperate to get back at his better half, and that makes his judgment, and maybe his entire agenda, suspect as far as I’m concerned.We’re here to help John and Amara, to keep this war with the Exousiai from ever getting started, but that’s only because Raville told us it was what we needed to do.”

“Are you suggesting that stopping this war may not be in our best interest, Mr. Ghast?”

His second in command shook his head fierecely.“No, sir.Not at all.I’m only saying that we’re on the verge of taking an irrevocable step in one direction. There’s no going back once we junk this thing down, and I’d like a little more proof that it’s the right thing to do than just Raville’s say so, you know?I’m have this sneaking suspicion that anything we do in his name is going to be the wrong thing.I’m not even sure which side we’re on any more.Which side we’re supposed to be on.”

Ray heard Ghast’s unspoken plea.He wanted someone to tell him what to do, to absolve him of doubt.He was lost and confused and most of all, terrified of failure.He desperately needed to be told what was right and true and that what they were doing was honorable, that they were keeping promises that would benefit mankind, stave off the wolves at the door, save the universe.

And those were precisely the answers that Ray did not have.

His weapon must be destroyed before it can be raised against the Exousiai, Amara had said.But that instruction had been predicated on the assumption that the weapon existed.There was no weapon.No doomsday device.Just this thing, this turbo-charged, but nevertheless old-fashioned rocket.

It made no sense.But that was always the stumbling block of faith, wasn’t it?Faith was believing even when belief was nonsensical.Faith was action in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

The problem with faith, of course, was that ultimately, its power didn’t come down to the potency of the believer who practiced it, but in the reliability of the god in whom it was placed.

Again, the wriggling maggot of suspicion gnawed at him.Raville’s unseemly embedding in Dorian’s architecture.The flight into peril.Give me access. . .

Raville had answers.Raville had much to answer for, much to explain.And those explanations were past due.And if Ghast was wrong and Ray’s suspicions unfounded, maybe Raville, the shadow sibling of his human self, could read oracles in this device where the rest of them perceived only riddles.

Ray opened a channel into his foam and called Raville’s name.There was no answer, just a faint hiss of static.

He called again, and when Raville did not heed him, attempted to flip into a full immersion session.

For the first time in his life, Ray Morrical encountered seamless, opalescent ice.There was no sensation, no awareness of being repelled, just the simple, flat impenetrability of an environment that no longer belonged to him.The amber hued splash screen of his monocle display flashed the message:INVALID NODE REQUEST.

Ray realized with a shock that he had been disconnected from the beautiful, chaotic and data rich universe outside that of his own thew and bone.

His foam was gone, and the digital presence of Michael Raville was gone with it.

<– Chapter 22 / Chapter 24 –>

This entry was posted on May 1, 2008 at 4:00 am and is filed under Agnosis with tags Agnosis, blook, Darren Hawkins, science fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Agnosis - Ch. 22 « Agnosis Says:
May 1, 2008 at 4:04 am

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Agnosis – Ch. 23

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