On planet Tessera, the end of a long day had come. The convention was a large one, completely occupying three full buildings of a convention center and playing host to most of the major names in journalism. One of the side effects of this was that the bigger celebrities of her field were in attendance. Right now, she was walking the show floor, a massive hangar of a conference hall crowded with flashy multimedia displays for the different news outfits. Even after having been open for eight hours, one could hardly take ten steps without catching sight of someone who had been at it for longer than her, or who had had a more recent story than her, and the tide would shift toward them.
For Michella, this was a mixed blessing. On one hand, though she would never admit it, she had rather enjoyed the level of fame she'd achieved thanks to her work since the Bypass Gemini Incident. Suddenly finding that the small crowd clustered around her had the tendency to peel off and fawn over the larger fish in the pond was a bit of a letdown. On the other hand, without the usual level of enthusiasm surrounding her, she was having an easier time excusing herself to take calls, make calls, and generally work her sources. It was her favorite part of the job, and she was having difficulty tearing herself away from it.
The informant she had spoken to a few days ago had confirmed some things that she had suspected, and building upon that confirmation, she had started to uncover more. The tiny morsels of information didn't seem to be leading anywhere meaty, though, much to her frustration. As tended to be the case, the harder the ball of twine was to unravel, the more she fixated on tugging at the threads. As a result, the normally enjoyable interaction with aspiring news writers and bloggers (many of whom were a number of years older than her, she proudly observed) was difficult to focus on, and left her with no choice but to send Jon chasing down time-sensitive contacts.
Now the exhibition hall hours were finally coming to an end, the crowds thinning. As a silver-haired editor drew away the last of her flock, she noticed Jon approaching from one of the entrances.
“I need to hear some good news, Mr. Nichols,” she said, hurrying out into the cool night air.
“Some,” he said, stepping close and lowering his voice to “discussing potential scoop” levels.
The convention center was in the center of a vast, green, park-like setting. Sprawling stretches of manicured lawns and picturesque trees were scattered with footpaths lit by faux paper lanterns. They turned down the path that would lead them to their hotel. Here and there, convention attendees who had lingered longer than most milled about in the idyllic setting, but none seemed near enough to take an interest in the pair.
“Well? Out with it!” she whispered harshly.
“I finally got through contacting all of the local newsfeeds from the robberies--”
“Breaches,” she corrected.
“Whatever. All of the incidents that you thought were related--you were right. This has been going on a lot longer than anyone realized. Some of those bases were hit more than once.”
“And the fact that we didn't know that means that there is probably a cover-up going on. I knew this was going to be a good one. Is that all you got?”
“Nope. It turns out this is one of those groups that wants people to know what they're up to--or, at least, it used to be. One of the small news outfits was given a video taking credit for one of the earlier incidents, but the military put the kibosh on broadcasting it.”
“Since when has someone trying to squelch info ever actually succeeded?” she said with a grin. “Putting a cease-and-desist on something is just code for 'This is guaranteed to go viral.' Everyone knows that.”
“Either these guys didn't realize that or the military is better at intimidating people than studios and music labels. Regardless, I've got the file right here. Two years old, and in a wacky codec, but I got it to play.”
“You're a pro, Jon. Keep this up and I'll be working for you someday,” she said, glancing around casually to make sure no one was near enough to listen in.
“I look for more than a pretty face in my interns,” Jon said.
“All right, all right. Less 'sassy sidekick' and more 'research assistant.' Did it have anything good?”
“If these are the same people, I think we've got a name for the group responsible.”
“Ms Modane!” called out someone at the door of the convention center.
She turned to see a young man and woman hurrying toward her. They had the unmistakable look of eagerness and enthusiasm that first-year college students all seemed to share, and one of them was brandishing an expensive, full-sized camera.
“These two look like talkers,” Michella muttered under her breath. “Head back to the hotel room and get the video ready. I'll be in as soon as I'm done with the cub reporters.”
“You know, they can't be more than a few years younger than you. How is it that you've already managed to become world-weary?” Jon asked.
Michella shot him a sizzling look.
“I know, I know. I'll get to it. Enjoy the adulation.”
Jon hurried off toward the glitzy hotel that the news department had selected for them. As he did, Michella tried to forget that she had a hot lead waiting for her and remember that these two were exactly where she had been not so long ago. It had been hell getting good advice and her name on the right lists back then. The least she could do is give the next generation the attention she wished she'd gotten.
#
Meanwhile, on deGrasse, Lex had spent the last few minutes applying his knowledge of electronics repair to the glass bead on Ma's neck. For the most part, this had been limited to tapping it periodically and asking her to try it again.
“I beg your pardon, but what precisely is happening here?” asked Garotte.
“Ma has this thing built into her neck here. She uses it to interface with computers and stuff. She's basically crippled and mute without it.”
“Fascinating,” Garotte said flatly. “Did you arrange to spring me from my incarceration in order to fret over the fate of an absurd mash-up of genetics and electronics, or were we going to look into the malevolent organization that may be using a mad scientist of our acquaintance to plot nefarious deeds?”
Lex looked to Ma, who had once again turned her gaze to the ground, a look of borderline panic and furious contemplation on her face. She glanced up, then gestured with her head toward the screen with the intelligence Garotte had gathered.
“You sure?” Lex asked.
When she replied with a nod, he reluctantly shuffled along the cluttered floor to the screen. A sequence of still frames from videos had been arranged. Specific areas were enlarged, highlighted, and enhanced.
“Right. I've been looking over the video,” he said, tapping one of the frames. It swelled to fill the screen and began to play.
The shot seemed to be from the point of view of a stationary camera and showed a bundled-up Karter along with three oddly-dressed men, similarly bundled and sporting goggles. The three strangers were standing with their backs to the camera while Karter gestured and waved at a strange rig in front of him. There was no audio.
“There's our boy. Looks just as worn out and cobbled together as the last time I saw him,” Garotte remarked, pointing out Karter. “These fellows here, I would presume, are the prospective customers. Military, the three of them.”
“How can you tell? Those aren't any uniforms that I've ever seen,” Lex said, squinting at the low-quality video.
“No, but look at how they are standing. Look where these gents stand in relation to this one. Practically walking in formation, these three. Very, very military. He's the leader, those are his subordinates. I'd wager they've all seen action, too.”
“How can you tell that?”
Garotte tracked the video forward until he reached a point where the three men were all walking toward the camera. He paused it when they were near enough to make out some details.
“This looks like a plasma splash here in this one's face,” he said, pointing to a cluster of red speckles on the exposed portion of one man's face. “We used to call them lucky freckles. You get them when a plasma charge hits something nearby, such as a fellow soldier, and you're kissed by the splash.”
“How does that make them lucky?”
“Because the plasma hit something nearby rather than, say, you. Where was I? Ah, yes. That one's got a limp. This one's holding his arm wrong, like he's had some work done on it. Probably has an artificial joint. Yes, these boys have been on the wrong end of a weapon or two.”
“So you're telling me that some military is trying to buy a CME whatever from Karter?”
“I don't think so. If this was official military business, these boys would be in full uniform. There would be indication of rank. Definitely not standard military business.”
“Maybe it was undercover?”
“If it was black ops, I wouldn't have had nearly as easy a time sussing out their military pedigree. If it was commandos, they wouldn't be talking to him. No, I'm thinking general infantry, marines, crewmen, something like that. Either retired, discharged, or defected. No current loyalties. Which brings us to the ship.”
He switched to a high-resolution still of the ship in flight.
“That looks like a Delta, without a doubt. The front end, anyway. The propulsion looks off,” Lex said appreciatively. He was the sort of person who consumed spaceship magazines with the enthusiasm that others might devote to periodicals of an entirely more mature variety.
“Well spotted. I was thinking it might be a dollar, but the exhaust vent is wrong, and the body is a bit too long?”
“Dollar?” Lex said with a raised eyebrow.
“Delta Astro Long-Range Recon. DA-L-RR.”
“Oh, right. No, that rear end doesn't belong on a DAL-double-R. Modification, maybe?”
“Doesn't look like it. Lines are too smooth. One does not concern oneself with the aesthetics of a modified spacecraft. No reason.”
“I know a few guys who get body work done on their customs,” Lex countered.
“Do they spend any time doing illegal arms deals?”
“I doubt it.”
“The rebellious set are disinclined to make cosmetic touches when they make modifications. Equipment used by terrorists and extremists tends to have the general appearance of something held together with rubber bands and paperclips. More likely this is some sort of a short run.”
A tumbling noise drew their attention to the ground, where Ma had attempted to dismount her crate with limited success. Before Lex could lend a hand, she'd managed to get upright again and made her way to her slidepad on the floor. Her movements favored the leg that had taken the shock. When she reached it, she plopped down on her haunches and began tapping and swiping at the screen with her front paws. A text window came up, followed by a slow sequence of letters and numbers: NXLRR-0025c.
“I've never heard of NX. Are they a military contractor?” Lex said.
“No. Military designation. NX is naval experimental. That narrows it down a bit. Not a lot of outfits that could afford to commission a custom from one of the big manufacturers like Delta.”
Ma worked at the slidepad some more, conjuring up “EC, OUCP, TKUR.”
“Earth Coalition, Orion United Consortium of Planets, and the Trans-Kuiper Union of Republics. Yes, that about covers it,” Garotte said with a nod.
As Earth had started to spread out across the galaxy, the human race entered something of a second colonial era. About a third of the nations on the planet had active space programs, and at least two major corporations did as well. Even before terraforming was mature enough to make the nearby planets anything more than glorified space stations, everyone with an FTL drive and a budget was staking claims. Settlements were established, cities formed, trade routes mapped out. Those days, faster-than-light travel barely deserved the name, so even the closest of the settlements were weeks or months away. These remote colonies followed the standard colonial life-cycle, developing into their own unique, isolated cultures, and eventually growing resentful of the motherland. Over the hundreds of years since then, the vast majority of them either withered and died, were absorbed by stronger efforts, or joined forces. The result was the current political landscape, which had a hundred or so independent planets or star systems, a few dozen minor alliances, and five or six major ones.
The three biggest were EC, OUCP, and TKUR. Useful though it would be to consider them the galactic equivalent of nations and or perhaps leagues of nations, it wasn't a very accurate analogy. Most of them were so scattered and thin that there was never any reasonable hope to rule them under a centralized government. A better analogy would be a massive, sprawling trade union: useful for collective bargaining and defending interests, but with plenty of infighting, rivalry, and animosity between individual members. Wars between members of the same coalition weren't uncommon, and things became particularly complex when individual planets contained nations loyal to different coalitions. This was more common than one might think, as getting an entire planet of people to agree on something was just as difficult these days as it had been back when Earth was the only game in town.
The Earth Coalition, as the name would suggest, contained the planet Earth, and was by far the oldest, most populous, and most centralized. The next rung down on the power ladder was OUCP. It technically predated FTL travel entirely, having been started by the first expeditions of a lunar counterpart to NASA midway through the twenty-first century. They managed to get exemption from that pesky treaty that forbade nuclear testing, and started flinging ships to the far reaches of space with nuclear propulsion. They didn't get very far, not even to the nearest star, before FTL took over and their ships were obsolete, but the head start had gotten them to a few mineral-rich asteroids and back enough times to be a force to be reckoned with regardless. Their foothold in space led to bigger, better shipyards for their own FTL fleets--and, eventually, independence from mother Earth.
TKUR was a distant third, a cluster of corporate entities that started as a means to purchase and exploit the harvest rights for the chunks of ice floating around in the Kuiper belt. These days they had nothing at all to do with that oddly-named hunk of the solar system, but it tended to be a hassle to change state seals and documentation, so the name stuck. Of the three, though, they could at least boast the most clever name for their citizens. Rather than the boring Earthling or Orionian labels applied to the others, they called themselves Teekers.
The specific history wasn't nearly as important as the realization that the people they were dealing with either had the backing of one of these massive organizations or had the skill and resources to steal from one. Neither possibility was particularly encouraging.
“So, wait. If these are ex-soldiers, how did they get their hands on a fancy ship? Surplus auction or something?”
“Not with an NX on it. The only places you'll ever see an experimental--assuming things are being run correctly--are on the drawing board, in testing, and in a museum after they are obsolete by a few decades.”
Ma began to work at the slidepad again. Eventually, a message was formed.
“No production run. Designed as a platform for modular cloak. Abandoned during testing. Only eighteen produced. Reliability problems.”
“If that information is accurate, then they would have had to steal them. That would make sense, since they have seen fit to steal an entire scientist as well.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Roughly where we started, I'm afraid. Let us look at this from another angle, then. Let us assume that they are after Karter to, at the very least, build that solar flare missile. One would assume that would require specialized components, equipment, materials, etc. Do we know what those might be?”
“Will make list,” Ma typed.
“Excellent. Once we have that, I'll have to see how much of my information network remains intact. We shall need to identify sources of said components. Perhaps someone may have found out a thing or two about where these gentlemen acquired their ship, as well. Either will give us a starting point.”
“After that, what's the plan?”
“We endeavor to locate a unique source of one or more of the required components and intercept their team in the act of acquiring it. Once intercepted, we analyze their mission materials and interview their operatives. If we fail to find anything useful in this way, or are unable to intercept them, we trust that alternate sources will allow us to locate a small outpost, base, or headquarters. From there, we assess what equipment and personnel will be necessary to infiltrate, and we acquire those resources. We then pay the target location a visit and, ideally, gain access to their computer systems.
“Alternately, we would capture and interrogate an operative. Utilizing the information gathered, we would be able to determine the command hierarchy, which, in turn, would facilitate further strikes at higher-level targets until the location of Karter is determined, as well as the nature of the security surrounding him. At that point, further resources would be prepared and a rescue attempt would be made,” he explained, sounding a bit like a professor lecturing a classroom.
“That sounds like it will take a while,” Lex said.
“An operation like this, from planning to completion, typically takes six to eight months.”
Lex's eyes widened.
“That's a hell of a lot longer than I expected,” he said slowly, “and I don't think Ma can last that long. She said something about the funk brain only being good for about two months.”
“That isn't really a concern. I had rather hoped to move on to a computer system that doesn't need to be fed and walked, and I don't think our mission requires a mascot.”
Ma had been swiping at the slidepad since the initial estimate was made, finally completing the message, “Must act sooner. Karter needs little time to do much damage.”
“Doubtlessly so, but one can only move so quickly, and one cannot move at all until one knows where to go. How long ago was he captured?”
“439.2h,” Ma tapped onto the screen.
“What's that supposed to be?” Lex said, head crooked.
“~eighteen days (Earth),” she specified.
“I'm not sure that even Karter could come up with something truly dangerous in less than three weeks.”
“I saw him take out a VectorCorp Asteroid Wrecker with something he threw together in seven minutes,” Lex said.
“. . . well, that is a valid point, to be sure. Presumably this was with full access to his laboratory facilities though, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“I rather doubt that his current accommodations are so fully equipped. And let us remember that he will only build something for them if he agrees to cooperate, and Karter Dee may well be the most disagreeable and uncooperative person in the universe.”
#
“Okay, power her up!” proclaimed Karter, hooking a power-wrench to his belt and drifting over to the control cabin, both arms attached but mechanical leg conspicuously missing.
With an understandable amount of hesitation, the soldier standing at the power controls flipped the main switch. One by one, bits of machinery hummed to life and status indicators lit up.
The last few days had been busy ones in Commander Purcell's space station. Karter had explained that, if he was to be expected to help, he was going to need more tools and more room to work. More to the point, he'd agreed to give them the means to manufacture their own CME Activators, and that meant he would need to put together a facility that could handle that. After much deliberation, they had given him highly supervised access to the secondary maintenance bay. In a building on the surface of a planet, it would have been considered a small space, barely the size of a two-car garage. In a space station, it represented one of the largest areas available. There was an airlock on one wall, leading to a well-marked exterior door just beside the main docking bay, and it had already been equipped with basic automated maintenance arms. It was also one of the sections of the station not equipped with artificial gravity. As a precaution, all bidirectional communication links were severed, completely isolating the room from the rest of the space station. Given his already well-demonstrated skills at circumventing their security, it was considered prudent to effectively turn his work area into a quarantine.
Once his replacement lab was secured, Karter had been given tools, his mechanical arm, and a group of four heavily-armed guards. Since then, he had been working nonstop. The automated arms were augmented with fine manipulation capabilities, electron beam lithography heads, ultra-fine positioning systems, enhanced scanning and computer vision, extruders, and a host of other features to complement their welding and drilling abilities. Dispensers for a dozen raw materials were added to the large-scale replacement part conveyors. Temporary tables were added for subsystem fabrication and assembly. In short, a system that able to replace control modules and repair damaged armor plating had become a mad scientist's playroom in barely a weekend.
Karter drifted to the controls, prompting the guards to raise their weapons and remove the safeties. Technically, firing off a high-powered plasma rifle in this particular room of the space station, which wasn't nearly as reinforced as most of the rest of the station, was even more dangerous than firing one in the deGrasse dormitory, but these were well-trained soldiers at point-blank range. They would not miss. Even if such was not the case, it was generally agreed that between explosive decompression and Karter, Karter was the greater threat. In order to keep both hands free for handling weapons and prisoners, the soldiers were equipped with magnetized boots to keep them on the floor plates. Karter was left to drift free.
“Time for the inaugural run, boys,” Karter said, rubbing his hands together and pulling up menus on the upgraded control system.
“You are to wait until our engineers have had a chance to--” began a soldier.
“Screw that,” Karter said, dismissively, slapping the large red activation button.
Instantly, the arms jerked into motion. In a tightly choreographed dance of machinery and a chorus of mechanical whines, the whole of the central work area came alive. Raw metal was pulled from bins and maneuvered into place, sheets of substrate were applied and shaped, and the blinding light of welding torches began to flash. In no time at all, the arms retracted and a manipulator dropped down to present the finished product; a crude, simplified replica of Karter's prosthetic leg. He drifted out from behind the fortified glass of the control room, grasped the leg, and clicked it into place.
“There you have it, boys. You are the proud owners of a fabrication laboratory,” he announced, testing the movement of his new ankle. “It isn't quite up to snuff for everything I might want to use it for, but it will pump out CMEA warheads like a bat out of hell. Conventional ones, too. And legs, if you aren't a stickler for anatomical accuracy.”
“Secondary Maintenance Bay to Command,” barked a soldier into his communicator, “Dee has completed his modifications.”
“Okay. I need a few things now,” Karter stated. “I'm going to need something with a lot of sugar in it. This arm wasted a lot of juice while it was locked up, and it is playing hell with my blood sugar levels trying to recharge. I'm also going to be taking a look at some of the designs of that transporter now, so get them ready.”
“We will discuss your requests after Commander Purcell has inspected your work,” the soldier said.
“Requirements,” Karter corrected. “My blood sugar is low, hotshot. If you think I've been a handful so far, you don't want to see me when I get hypoglycemic. Are you familiar with the neuroglycopenic manifestations of hypoglycemia?”
“When Commander Purcell--”
“Impaired judgment, moodiness, irritability, combativeness, delirium, automatism, emotional lability, belligerence, negativism, rage. Do these sound like symptoms you are going to want to deal with?”
“She won't--”
“Candy bar! Now!” Karter bellowed.
In a flash of motion, the mad scientist's natural hand clamped onto a handrail on the control panel and his mechanical one snapped around the neck of the intransigent guard. A split-second later, three plasma rifles were pointed at his head, each of the soldiers barking orders at Karter and each other. A moment later, the door hissed open and Commander Purcell paced in, metallic clanks punctuating each magnetically assisted step.
“Enough!” she ordered.
Her men silenced, but Karter continued to squeeze the throat in his fist.
“Karter, release this man, or I will be forced to take action!”
“Simple request. All I want is candy. It is medicinal. I have a condition,” he said. “And the juice he is making me waste squeezing his brain out the top of his head is making it worse.”
Purcell removed her knife from its sheath and, with a high-pitched swipe through the air, separated the mechanical hand at the wrist with a perfectly clean cut. After one or two twitches and a spurt of blood, the fingers went limp and it drifted away from the relieved soldier's neck.
“Well, that's just great,” Karter griped, looking at the stump with annoyance.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” she demanded.
“There wasn't a whole lot of thought involved, really. That was primarily impulse,” he explained. “So, I guess you'll want a demonstration.”
“What I want is an explanation! Why were you assaulting one of my men!?”
“Candy. I need it. He won't let me have it. It can wait, I'll show you this first,” he said, turning around, tapping the control screen and slapping the activation button.
As the arms roared to life again, Purcell had Karter restrained.
“If I am not happy with what this machine does, I am going to slice your ear off.”
“Fine, but take the right one--it's synthetic. Easier to replace,” he said.
After a minute or so of machinery moving at blurring speed, a cylinder the size of a fifty-five-gallon drum was presented by the manipulator arm, while the fabricator went back to work.
“What is it?”
“This is a magnetic bottle warhead. Just add electricity and anti-matter and this sucker will make a very big boom.”
“You were supposed to make a CME Activator. We want six of them.”
“Can't,” he said.
“Why?” she growled.
“You don't have the parts, that's why,” he said, indicating the screen. “Take a look at that list. You need all of those parts to make one CMEA. You've got most of the raw materials, but you're missing Esche alloy. Each warhead will need about three hundred-fifty grams of it,” he explained.
“Why don't you just make it?”
“Because this is an equipment fabricator, not a matter fabricator. Trust me when I say it is not worth the time or the energy to build or buy one of those. It is always cheaper to just get the matter through conventional means.”
“How do I know you aren't lying?”
“You guys have the small-scale version. Presumably you've disassembled it by now. Have your men cut open the reaction capsule and do a scan. They'll find a few grams of something they can't identify, and a quick look in the materials database will reveal it to be Esche alloy.”
Purcell turned to one of the soldiers. “Make the call. Utmost safety precautions,” she said, turning back to Karter. “And if what you say turns out to be true, where do we get this material?”
“With great difficulty. There are pretty much no industrial uses for it, so nobody mass-produces the stuff. And it is fantastically tricky to synthesize. There might be five facilities total that can pull it off.”
“How did you get it for the small scale?”
“Oh, I've got a small supply back on Big Sigma.”
“We will not be returning to your planet to get it. We aren't that stupid. Where did you get your supply?”
“I got it from a colleague of mine, Dr. John Esche. I developed the alloy, but he gets it named after him for coming up with the means to synthesize it. Where is the justice in that? You won't be getting it from him, though. He died a while back. It has some interesting electro-thermal properties, so it is popular for analysis and experimentation at universities. Your best bet is to raid one of those.”
“Have it looked into,” she directed another of the soldiers.
“Give me a hand, would you?” Karter requested, gesturing over the control panel to the work area.
The manipulator arm had finished constructing a similarly-crude duplicate of his now-damaged mechanical arm.
“Handy device to have around, eh? It made this new leg, too. I'll bet most people would pay an arm and a leg for--”
“Shut up. You two, take Karter back to his cell. Give him his food and a hard copy of one-third of the schematics and manual for the transporter. I want engineers in here to inspect both the warhead he built and the modifications to the arms. I want them to disconnect Karter's current arm and leg. I want them to analyze and compare the original prostheses to his newly-constructed ones. Whichever are less of a threat shall be provided during times when he is working, and withheld at all other times. While not in use, I want them kept in an externally-locked, radio-shielded container inside the outer cell storage lockers. Power to this room will be physically controlled via a manual switch. Raw materials entering, as well as waste and finished products exiting, will be subject to strict audit, and any discrepancies will be reported directly to me. Go.”
“Remember, boys,” Karter taunted as he was ushered out, “candy bar!”
Once the inventor had left the room and the engineers had started to file in, she carefully tapped her way through the list of equipment, which, at the touch of a button, she could have at her disposal.
“Bombs. Heavy weapons. Ship engine upgrades. And it took him barely two days to build, with virtually no resources,” she muttered. “If only this man could be controlled. We wouldn't need that snake holding the purse strings anymore.”
She looked to the hand she had sliced off of him. It was still drifting lazily through the air in the zero-gravity bay. In what was almost certainly no coincidence, it was floating with only the middle finger extended.
“But why trade one psychopath for another?” she growled.