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Roland never thought he would enjoy being on a warship, but returning to Exit Wound turned out to be a huge relief. Pike greeted them at the ramp and supervised the loading of passengers. Once inside, the entire team met in the conference room. Pike got right to business. “I see you got the football. Top work, maggots.”
Roland held up the thick black disk. “It wasn’t easy, but yeah. Now we just need to get it home without another problem.”
“That frigate is going to take a few potshots at us on the way out. We good for that, Skipper?”
Captain Fischer replied with a lazy salute. “I’ll start the jump while still in Gethsemane sovereign airspace. It will piss the locals off, but what the hell do we care? By the time Sloane gets a shot off, we’ll be moving too fast for it to matter. We’ll lose some paint if she’s really pissy, but other than that I’m not worried.”
“Good,” Pike grunted. “If you ain’t worried than I ain’t worried. Do your thing. Dismissed, Skipper.”
Fischer stood with another salute and left for the bridge.
Pike waited for the door to close behind him before continuing. “Next, we gotta unlock that goddamn encryption so all this bullshit actually matters. Nerds?”
Dr. Ribiero sneered toward the commandant. “We are working on it. The data I can decipher, but the encryptions will require either a lot of time or very sophisticated slicing AI. Do we have either of these things?”
“Time, we do not have,” Pike said. “But I’ll make some calls about a slicer.”
Catrina raised her hand. “Gateways has the resources to crack it.”
“Do we trust Gateways, though?” Lucia asked. “Once we hand this over to them, they don’t have to give it back.”
“I, for one, am very curious about what is inside,” said Roland. “And I don’t want to hand it over to a megacorp before I know if it’s the sort of thing I want a megacorp to have.”
Pike chewed his lip and pointed at Roland. “Normally I’d give the big fella a ration of shit for being unprofessional. But in this case, I think I agree. I’m not in the business of saving the goddamn universe without a very large goddamn retainer, but my gut tells me that we are up in some very rarefied air right now. I hate being a patsy, and I want the goddamn intel.”
Catrina’s frown aged her by a decade. “I don’t want to believe that Gateways is caught up in anything like what we saw on Prospectus, Uncle Chris.”
“What you want ain’t got shit to do with what is.”
“Thanks, Uncle Chris. You are very helpful. Who do you suggest we use to slice this encryption, then?”
Pike leaned back in his chair. “I know a guy on Thorgrimm. Very discreet, very pricey. But good. He freelances for governments and corps all the time. A pro.”
Catrina shook her head. “Gateways is not paying for this.”
Lucia added, “Neither are we. This is your mission, Pike.”
“Fuck all o’ you. What about you, Jimmy? DECO willing to step up, or are y’all still just gonna skulk?”
James folded his hands on the table. “DECO cannot afford to be caught up in corporate conflicts, Commandant. However, we do have some of the most sophisticated codebreaking AIs ever developed at our disposal. I can’t authorize you to use them, of course. But things get misplaced all the time. Sometimes when we loan out a slicing AI, it gets copied and kept by untrustworthy assets.”
Manny gasped. Everyone at the table turned to look at him. With eyes wide, he blurted, “Nosebleed!”
James nodded. “Nosebleed is our most sophisticated slicing AI, Mr. Richardson. I think with a few minor alterations it would have no trouble extracting the data from Chapman’s memory. I also seem to recall that we loaned a copy to you once so you could infiltrate the Arthur Inskip matrix.” James shook his head slowly and gave a theatrical sigh. “Too bad it erases itself after use.”
“Yes,” Manny said. “And making a copy would have been both illegal and unethical.”
James nodded. “Of which you are neither. Now I will excuse myself to the restroom for, shall we say, fifteen minutes? Don’t talk about anything that might implicate DECO while I’m gone.” James stood and left the conference room without another word.
Lucia fixed Manny with a glare. “You have this Nosebleed thing?”
“Yes. I don’t really know how it works, but it slices code like nothing I’ve ever seen. I’m sure it reports directly to DECO every time it’s used, though. It’s probably why he wants us to use it. Either way, I haven’t touched it since Inskip, other than to try and figure it out.”
“I say we risk it,” Pike said. “I don’t give a fuck if DECO knows about it, I just gotta know what we have before I hand it over to Gateways.” He looked over to Catrina. “Sorry, Cat. Maybe you ought to leave the room too. I don’t want to mess up your career over what remains of my questionable scruples.”
“I’ll stay,” she said. “I don’t want to not have scruples, so I guess I need to know what’s in there too.” She shrugged, “Even if it does cost me my job.”
“I’d hire ya,” Pike said. “Good admins are worth gold in an outfit this size. Plus, this way your mom and aunt won’t kill me.”
“So we’re agreed then?” Lucia asked. “We crack this thing open with Nosebleed?”
“DECO better appreciate what we are getting up to,” Pike groused. “Get to it, kid.”
Manny pulled out his handheld and swiped through some screens. “Okay, it pretty much does its own thing once I cut it loose. But it will shred whatever encryption they used and unlock everything it finds. It will probably beam it all straight to DECO too.” He looked up. “We ready?” Everyone nodded. “Okay. Here goes.” Precisely nothing happened at first. Manny held the device next to the memory core and chewed his lip. “It’s identifying the encryption now... and there it goes. That did not take long.”
Pike, Lucia, Mindy, and Roland all crowded in to look at Manny’s screen. Exactly what he expected to see, Roland could not say. He blinked down a glowing progress bar and scrolling file names. He watched with the others for a long minute before he realized that none of what he saw made any sense to him. Based on the progress bar, the little AI was going to be at this for a while yet. He stepped back, and Lucia did the same.
“I guess I thought this would be more exciting,” she said with a sheepish grin.
“Goddamn riveting,” Pike said. “I’m gonna head to the galley for some grub. Somebody call me when we know something interesting.”
“I’ll stay with Manny,” Catrina said. “The rest of you might as well eat something too. We’ll be under acceleration soon.”
Lucia, Dr. Ribiero, Mindy, and Roland all left with Pike. Roland skipped the galley and made his way to the storage room he used for a cabin. He felt tired in a way he was not accustomed to. Jericho’s blow had damaged him, but no worse than a thousand other hits he had taken in his career. His repair systems would handle it, and that did not bother him. He dropped his helmet on the floor and sat heavily next to it. He rubbed his forehead with one big hand, sighing in frustration.
“Wanna talk about it?”
It was Lucia’s voice, and Roland was not surprised to hear it. He could never hide anything from her. He answered slowly, trying to pick the right words and not sound like an idiot. “As big as this galaxy is, with all the places people can go, why is it that nothing ever changes?”
“Vague,” Lucia said. She moved to sit on the deck next to him. “You talking about Grimes? Or Jericho?”
“Both. Me. Chapman. All of us. Is it so hard to separate the people from the weapons? How does this keep happening? This thing where powerful assholes take a young person full of life and conviction and twist them into monsters, I mean. I used to think I had it bad. Hah! I have it easy. Fucking Jericho had it bad. Grimes even worse.”
“Young men fight wars that old men start,” Lucia said. “Conviction is easy. You feel things strongly when you are too young to know what the universe is really like.”
“Later it gets hard to feel anything,” Roland retorted. “If you manage to survive long enough to see it all for what it really is.”
“You wanted to save Jericho, didn’t you?”
“I wanted him to save himself. I wanted him to get past it all. He was not evil, Lucia. Arrogant, stupid, maybe a little mean. He was the product Polito constructed him to be, no more or less. I know that story, and it doesn’t have to end with death.” Roland banged a fist against the floor. “But it always fucking does. Dawkins was a thug, but he didn’t ask to have his mind hijacked. I killed him. Roper was crazy from the start. He needed mental help, not a weaponized armature. Doesn’t matter, because I got him killed too.” He held up three fingers. “Torvald? He was just a mercenary. I still killed him, though. Chico? Rotten to the core from the start, but that didn’t stop Corpus Mundi from making him a thousand times worse. No big deal, because he’s dead now too. Then there is Bob. Bob was literally made from scratch. A new kind of artificial lifeform. He didn’t know shit about the universe. He was a fucking toddler, for fuck’s sake. Well, too bad. I killed him just like I always do. And Grimes, of course. They fucked him up the old-fashioned way, and I think that’s the worst one. Poor bastard might have been a musician, a doctor, a goddamn interior decorator if he had been born anywhere but Venus.” Roland ground his teeth, turning his diatribe into a meandering snarl. “Over and over, wherever we go, people are still doing the same shit, and I keep killing the results.” He looked to Lucia, legitimate confusion on his face. “When does it stop? When do they stop making monsters that look just like me? I didn’t realize it at first, but it’s like killing myself every fucking time, Lucia. I could have been another Harland Jericho. I damn near was. His face when he really understood how deep the lies went... it was like looking in a mirror.”
Lucia frowned. “I don’t know, Roland. I used to think I was too smart to buy into the concept of evil. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve seen too much too, I think. But I haven’t lost hope yet. You see Grimes and Jericho and Chapman, and it reminds you of all the horrible thing that happened to you. I see them, and it reminds me of how far you’ve come. You are proof that things do not have to be the way they always have been. Sometimes the monsters aren’t so monstrous.” She elbowed him in the side. “Whether you realize it or not.”
“Don says we might be immortal, Lucy. I think of how long forever is, and I look at how shitty humanity is, and I wonder what the fucking point is sometimes. Will we be any better in a thousand years?”
Lucia sat up and turned to face him. She took his head in both her hands and kissed him. Then she patted him on the cheek and said with a smile, “Ask me again in a thousand years.”
Roland fought the smile he knew was coming. Lucia always knew what to say. “That’s a pretty good answer.”
“I am the smart one, remember?” She sat back down. “And if you want the galaxy to become a better place, I suppose somebody should start fixing what’s wrong with it. Know any good fixers?”
“I got some leads.”
The acceleration alarm chimed, interrupting their moment. “It’s going to be a bad jump, I think,” Lucia said as she stood. “Dodging particle beams at 50-G is no way to start a trip.”
“Yeah, well, it beats the alternative.” He extended one hand to the standing woman. “Your G-pod got room for one more?”
She took the enormous mitt in her own much smaller hand and pulled. “Thought you’d never ask.”