part0015

It’s funny how today’s circumstances can make you rethink yesterday’s choices. As if somehow you can hop back through time with what you know now and change things. Maybe it’s how we deal with regret. Or maybe our minds are into S&M, and we enjoy tying ourselves up for a little self-flagellation.

I’d been dreaming of Daisy Brace and those last moments on Pallas—not an unpleasant thing as it turns out. In the dream, I hadn’t left her to suicide. I’d snatched up Daisy from the flight deck and hauled her into my ship with a strength I ain’t had since there was hair covering my whole dome. Daisy protested, of course, and there were some close calls with stunners, but we got to the Hearse okay, and she didn’t make a single crack about my age, not once. That’s how I knew it must have been a dream…

We’d make a beeline straight to Erkennen on Titan, I told her. He’d make her well again if anyone could. And if he couldn’t, well, we’d crash land on that pad when we got to it. When we lifted off from Pallas in the dream, I had that same, sweeping view of the pirate base under heavy fire from Galatz’s corporate ships, and the bad guys giving back as good as they got, that I’d seen in real life. But instead of an empty hat and coat on the seat next to me, I had Daisy, half of her body slack with maybe-permanent paralysis, but at least alive and looking just a little like she maybe appreciated my effort.

Then the alarm went off and woke me up. Titan was close. Took me long enough, but I’d made it.

Saturn’s comeliest moon appears out of the void looking like a smooth, underdeveloped Earth. When the seas reflect sunlight, you can even see clouds. After most of a week of breathing my own air, it was good to see something, anything that wasn’t man-made and blinking on a console. Even if I’d sacrificed my Daisy dream to see it.

I’ll give Gregor Erkennen this—he’s made Prometheus Colony on Titan a home away from home for his tech types. His daddy, Viktor, started the colony as a lure to bring people to the ass-end of the system, so far out they might never make it home to Mother Earth again. Titan is a luxury destination for exploration, the most habitable body in Sol next to Earth, really, and homier than Mars. An atmosphere, even if it ain’t exactly breathable. Plenty of water. Plenty of lakes, even if they are methane and ethane. Mountains. Dunes. Tides and caves below the surface, perfect for doming and settling.

Viktor turned a moon with a pretty face into the system’s most enticing excursion park. Gregor took daddy’s idea and upgraded it to an overpriced resort. The well-to-do from across Sol take vacations there, if they don’t mind the week-plus travel time (one way) from the inner system. Erkennen Faction eggheads have access to Prometheus anytime they want—free. Take a tour of cryovolcanoes that shoot water and methane tens of thousands of meters high! They make Old Faithful look like Earth’s spitting at the sky. Haven’t lost your lunch lately? Hop a balloon ride over Lake Kraken Mare. Those whacky atmospheric currents will keep you on your toes, neighbor! Need some exercise? Book an expedition across Xanadu’s rarely solid surface. Pack your vitamins! It’s the size of Australia… Got a death wish? Strap on a pair of Erkennen Wonder Wings® and dive off one of the mountains in the Mithrim Montes range.

Speaking for myself, I can get the same heartbeat acceleration from half an hour at Minnie the Mouth’s Arms of Artemis in Darkside for a lot cheaper and minus the two-week travel commitment. And the most medical aid I’ll ever need there is a course of antibiotics.

As you approach Titan, though, you don’t see any of that. You just see its flat orange-aqua atmosphere. But based on The Real Story vids and the flash-ads from Erkennen, you can imagine how perfect everything is below. The dense, foggy atmosphere makes the moon’s surface inviting from a distance, like Adriana Rabh’s face in all the Company missives—smoothed by technology, regal instead of old—flawless.

Somehow, I doubted I’d have a chance to sample any of it. Gregor hadn’t invited me here to enjoy the carnival rides. And I wanted to get my business with him boxed up. I was worried about Tony and entirely unconvinced Ruben Qinlao could keep him safe, even with that knuckle-dragger Dick Strunk doing the heavy lifting. Plus, sitting on my ass for so long had made me antsy. I needed to be doing something.

Masada Station sits atop a vertical rock orbiting Titan. Its body rises into a wide plateau, a perfect, flat foundation for the research station Viktor Erkennen stuck there during Tony Taulke’s big system expansion initiative a few decades back. It’s named for a Jewish stronghold during the first-century war with the Romans, and the asteroid does look a whole lot like that old Judaean Desert fortress, I have to say.

The odd thing as I came nearer the rock was how dark it looked. Running lights lit up the approach to the small hangar, but the plastisteel windows were dark. Masada is a relatively small experiment station, where Gregor Erkennen and his elite eggheads do their heavy thinking when they weren’t shore-leaving to Adventures-R-Us on Titan. The dark windows reflecting those running lights felt eerie. Like I’d arrived a day too late to find anyone left alive.

The hangar itself was the polar opposite of the busy craziness of Pallas from my dream. There was only one shuttle parked, lonely, in a slip meant for a larger vessel. It looked ready to launch. Two men waited on the deck as the Hearse settled onto her struts. Gregor Erkennen rocked on his heels, like I was a waiter who’d forgotten his table. The other man seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to him.

“Took you long enough,” Erkennen said, doing his crossed-arms, heel-rocking thing. His almost-Russian accent always sounded put-on to me, but I knew he came by it honestly. His pop had been Mother Country, born and bred.

“Invent a better drive,” I shot back. Realizing I’d just barked at a regent of SynCorp, I took off my hat—a sign of respect to take the edge off my cheekiness. Being Tony’s chief enforcer, sometimes I forget my place in the Company pecking order.

“Working on it,” Erkennen said.

“I assume you know my man, Bruno Richter?”

Erkennen jerked his head to the left. The man next to him was thin and weedy. If a ferret could walk upright, it’d be named Bruno Richter. Mid-thirties: old enough to be confident, young enough to think he could still do what he’d been able to in his twenties. Richter was known for assassination by poison. Unlike me, he was an indirect sort of fellow.

“Never heard of him,” I lied, careful to look Bruno in the eye when I said it. “How’s it hangin’, Bruno?”

Richter ignored my outstretched hand, which was really only offered as part of my penance to Erkennen for being a smartass when I’d landed. Bruno hid his hands under his armpits, where most assassins store at least one weapon of choice. That stance is universal enforcer code for don’t fuck with me .

“Glad to see we’re getting off on the right foot,” I said, smiling at him—my go-to expression for putting my professional colleagues off their feed. Let’s establish who’s who here.

Erkennen seemed annoyed by the dick measuring.

“Come to my office, Mr. Fischer. Time’s short, and there’s a lot to discuss.”

“Lead the way,” I said. Erkennen turned to oblige, and Richter and I hesitated to move a moment longer. “Oh, after you,” I said, motioning forward and widening my smile.

“Bruno!” Erkennen called over his shoulder. With a lingering stare of warning, Bruno came when called. Like a good rat terrier should.

I decided, whatever this was, it was gonna be fun.

“So, let me get this straight,” I said. Erkennen was being patient. I was a blue-collar type. I couldn’t be expected to grasp the strategic intricacies of the Company’s technology faction all at once, now could I? “You’ve got a decoy database on Titan chocked full of fake inventions, flashing ‘open for business’ like a Darkside hooker behind in her rent. You’re hoping … hoping , mind you … that your little charade pulls all Cassandra’s attention away from the real treasures here on Masada Station.”

Richter cleared his throat, a warning to watch my tone. I pretended it was just phlegm and ignored him.

“The deception will buy us time,” Erkennen said. “Time to find a cure for Cassandra.”

The Regent of Titan nodded. “She’s an AI. True—a unique form of life, to be sure. But at the end of the day, half of her is still just synthetic code married to nature’s original code—the human genome. And all code, whatever its origin, can be compromised.”

“I thought you were spending all your resources on defense,” I said.

“That would only ensure defeat, Mr. Fischer, as you yourself have suggested. What we’re really doing is delaying Cassandra until we develop a way to defeat her.” Gregor Erkennen looked at me straight on. “Your mission is simple, Mr. Fischer. Help Bruno protect Rebekah Franklin and her team, so they can protect Masada Station. Fail in that effort, and the Company will be lost.”

I let that sink in a minute. Sometimes I have to boil down the cryptic into something actionable.

The huge decoy mission happening on Titan: Erkennen and his people jumping up and down on a hill, waving their arms, daring Cassandra and the SSR to charge. She—it, I had to keep reminding myself—would hopefully take the bait. Meanwhile, Erkennen was looking for a tech miracle to undo her. But if Cassandra got wise and managed to steal the data from Masada Station, that effort wouldn’t matter a bit.

“If I’m going to protect your supercomputer, I need a tour of the station,” I said. “And I need to meet your prodigy programmer.”

“She’s indisposed at the moment,” Erkennen said.

“Unacceptable,” I replied before he’d finished. “You want me to protect your geek crew here or not?”

Erkennen sighed. “Rebekah Franklin’s grandfather passed away two days ago. He was a dear friend of the faction—of mine—and she is grieving.”

I gave that news the couple of breaths of respect it deserved. Diplomacy isn’t my strong suit, but sometimes I surprise myself.

“I understand,” I said, not really caring. Then Daisy’s face popped into my mind’s eye, and I felt like a heel big enough to fit on a clown’s floppy shoe. I adjusted my attitude. “Regent, here’s the thing—”

“Gregor,” he said. “Call me Gregor.”

I paused. Invitation to intimacy was not something easily offered by a regent of the Syndicate Corporation. Especially to a competing faction’s chief fix-it man.

“As I was about to say, Gregor, I work alone.”

“Not dis time,” Richter said, reminding me he existed. His German accent was thick. His smile was skinny, amused. Well, Daisy Brace had worked out, hadn’t she? Maybe Ferret Face would surprise me too.

“The old lines,” Erkennen said, “they’re meaningless now. We have a common enemy.”

I nodded, understanding for the first time, I think, the real stakes. This was for all the marbles. And, especially, one Big Blue Marble.

If Cassandra stole SynCorp’s tech secrets, the Company would end. Understanding that is why I’d set my personal loyalty to Tony aside and traveled in the exact wrong direction to reach Titan. But here’s what I hadn’t realized, not till now—not till Gregor said what he said the way he’d said it.

Life under SynCorp had provided purpose for billions after near extinction at Mother Nature’s hands. Was it a life of value? You’d have to ask them. Each and every one. But it was life.

Cassandra promised freedom. But what did that mean, really? To lift the booted heel of the Company off the neck of humanity and restore its free-willed destiny to do whatever the hell it wanted to itself? Seemed to me we’d tried that already, and it wasn’t all that and a box of chocolates. The she-bot’s promise sounded like a line to me.

Was Cassandra offering a better life than Joe and Jane Average already had under SynCorp? Maybe. For me, it all boiled down to this, though: what would a half machine know about what’s best for mankind? Maybe a lot. Maybe nothing. Maybe, like all of us, it was driven by pure self-interest. Maybe it didn’t give a hoot in hell for mankind at all. Thirty years before, the New Earthers and the original Cassandra—a true, pure artificial intelligence housed in a mainframe, I reminded myself, tasting the irony—had murdered tens of millions.

There’s the devil … and there’s the devil you know.

“You two are Rebekah Franklin’s guardian angels,” Erkennen said to fill the silence. I’m sure it had sounded inspirational in his head. But what he’d said almost made me laugh out loud.