Insidious (24 page)

“Huh. She’s wearin’ Momma Veer. Getter outta that skinsuit,” the man grunted.

A couple of the rangers laughed. She felt pressure through her suit as two men grabbed each of her arms. Someone fiddled with her zipper tunnel and caught the clasp. Zzzzzzzzzzip. She felt cool air on her chest.

“Nice,” one of them said.

“Yeah, she’s hot.”

Aldriena bucked and tried to clasp her legs around the head of the man in front of her, but they held her too tightly. Clearly, after the chase, they were expecting her to fight. She wondered if it was only bad luck that the squad didn’t have any women.

“Lemme have another look,” Faber said. They pulled her off the wall and pinned her on the floor.

Faber kneeled on her with his knee between her breasts. Aldriena felt her sternum would have broken under normal acceleration. She guessed he must have been over three hundred pounds in Earth gravity with all his equipment. He leaned forward until she could see every one of the scraggly whiskers on his chin. His breath smelled like bad medicine. She figured it was the space force mouthwash, ‘
strong enough to kill even space germs
’, as the enlisted men liked to joke.

A strangled grunt escaped her. She couldn’t breathe.

“Lucky for you you’re such a famous lady,” the man told her. “Else we’d deliver you … damaged.”

Then he got up. Aldriena tried to breathe again, but she ended up rolling over and coughing. She almost passed out, but finally her lungs obeyed her command to fill with precious air.

“Pull that suit off. Grab a feel if you like, but we gotta get her straight back so let’s hit it.”

Aldriena closed her eyes while they yanked her out of the skinsuit. She felt hands roaming her body but she ignored them. A calloused hand clutched an ample handful of her right breast.

“Damn, bro. We need to get back Earthside,” a man grumbled.

“You got that right,” another one said.

“I don’t have tail like that waiting for me back home.”

Her face felt hot.

I must be blushing. As if I had anything to blush about. What a stupid physical reaction.

She should have been enraged, but she didn’t feel anything. This was the down side of being beautiful. She used her body often enough to her advantage, it was worth paying the price.

After a few more seconds, the groping was over. They must have realized that the frustration they had created in themselves wasn’t worth anything. The squad glued her up and carried her to their troop carrier like a sack of potatoes. Warning stickers decorated the peeling paint of the entrance hatch of the squat craft. Inside, the carrier looked to be larger than
Silvado
. It smelled of sweat and electronics.

As they walked pass the secondary bulkhead, her head struck the side of the hatch.

“Careful Henderson, you’ll be cleanin’ up brains,” one of the men said.

“Rotting brains would clear up the smell in here a little,” said another.

They brought her into a small room with bare metal walls and a folding table. Cases of equipment were stacked in one corner. A machine the size of a motorcycle with a red plastic case sat next to the table. She couldn’t tell what it was, but a lot of cables ran in and out of the back and the top of it. The cables from the top were strewn across the table. The rangers thrust her down into a metal chair with restraining straps hanging from its sides. Her view righted itself to the normal perspective, and she saw a man in a red lab coat sitting directly across from her.

His beady eyes regarded her coolly under the high, layered brow of a balding head. His frown lay deep-set into his face. He looked evil. She thought about attacking him, smashing his pointy head deeper into the soft fatty folds of his throat, but she rejected the idea because her legs still felt wobbly and the space force men were nearby.

The man stood. He took a spray can of solvent and soaked her with it, removing most of the glue from her torso with precise swipes of his gloved hands. He didn’t seem to bat an eye at the sight of her shivering body clothed only in undersheers.

He pulled a thick strap over her arm and attached it to the chair somewhere behind her.

Last chance to beat this guy up.

Aldriena didn’t have much choice. She remained still as he strapped her other arm down, then moved to her lower arms, torso, and legs. Her arm still quivered as if fighting her restraints on its own even though she didn’t have the will. Aldriena fought down a wave of panic at being unable to move.

They don’t pay me enough for this
.

He picked up the cables one by one, and started to connect them to her with suction cups and conductive gel. A set went on her face and more on her back. He remained straight-faced. He even attached electrodes to her breasts without copping an extra feel. In a strange way, that scared her a little, because naked lust she could understand, and maybe use to her advantage.

“That’s pretty old school,” Aldriena observed. “Do you really need to monitor physiological reactions when you can see into my brain?”

The man didn’t say anything. Instead, he reached between her legs. She heard her undersheers tear and felt an invasion of her genitalia. She bucked in the chair.

“You bastard! What the hell?”

The man didn’t answer. Something cold slid into her bladder. She realized that he had introduced an auto-seeking catheter. Aldriena wondered if she’d really be here that long, or if the catheter was just to scare, humiliate, and demoralize her. That probably explained all the cables as well, she decided. The device probably worked by scanning her brain directly.

The man stepped behind her, out of sight. A voice came through her link.

“This is a lie detection device. I am the operator software. The use of this device has been authorized by the UNSF because it has been determined there is imminent danger to the citizens of Earth.”

“Whatever,” Aldriena replied aloud in a drawl. She tried to disconnect her link but her link didn’t obey. She knew that was bad, because world citizens were supposed to have a right to privacy that extended to cover the links in their heads. She thought that if the UNSF was willing to ignore that right then they might hurt her to find out as much as they could about Insidious.

She felt the cool caress of a drug sprayer on her deltoid.
Interrogation chemicals
, she thought.

The front of the machine had a logo on it. Aldriena looked at it for a second and then identified it as the red silhouette of a scorpion.

“What do you know about a project codenamed Insidious?”

Well, might as well see how good the UNSF lie detectors are, she thought.

“Insidious? Nothing.”

A red light glittered on the top of the device.

“Oh, so I’m supposed to get all upset that you red-lighted me?” she asked. “Is that supposed to make my heart race? Make me sweat?”

“You do know,” the operator said in a neutral voice. “Please elucidate.”

She took a deep breath. “No, I don’t know.”

“You do know. Please consider the danger your silence could pose to Earth.”

“Sorry.”

“If you don’t comply, you will be held indefinitely. The UNSF cannot negotiate with your employer for your eventual return. You will no longer have any means to support yourself above subsistence level.”

Aldriena gave a false smile. Subsistence level was a state of utter poverty so severe that sometimes even basic needs weren’t met. Anyone on Earth who didn’t work for a megacorporation or the world government knew intimately how bad the official subsistence level was.

Sigh. Time for a strategic retreat.

“Project Insidious is an espionage effort directed toward some of the deep space stations,” Aldriena said.

“True,” the voice replied evenly. “Thank you for your cooperation. Which space stations are involved in the project?”

“Synchronicity. Xanadu. Avalon. Thermopylae. Tanelorn. Maybe others, I don’t know.”

Aldriena’s vision fuzzed for a moment and then cleared itself.

Oh, shit. Here we go. I was always better on the other side of coercion.

“What information in particular is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?”

Aldriena hesitated. Then her whole body clenched convulsively like her arm, as if to eject the answer like vomit.

“Technological secrets.”

“Whose technological secrets is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?”

A drop of sweat trickled down her neck. Aldriena tried to imagine that it was Martin’s lips. Then in a perverse inversion of her imagination, she ended up with the mental image of the hideous technician behind her, gnawing on her neck. She managed to forget the question.

“Whose technological secrets is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?”

Damn. Just get it over with.

“Captain. Slicer. Claw. Hitler. Red.”

“For what company or companies do Captain. Slicer, Claw, Hitler, and Red work?”

“I don’t know.” The words exploded from her. Finally, a question she didn’t have to fight. She tried to marshal her will to sidestep the next question.

“For what company or companies do Captain, Slicer, Claw, Hitler, and Red work?”

“I don’t know!”

“Tell me about Captain.”

“Captain is … he is … it is … the leader.”

“Tell me more about Captain.”

Aldriena groaned. She closed her eyes but it made the spinning worse, so she snapped them back open again. She felt the sting of sweat in a cut on her temple.

“Captain is the leader of a group of aliens that made contact with Synchronicity.”

Finally, there was some respite. Her statement took the program awhile to dissect. Aldriena tried to breathe deeply. Then she clenched her stomach muscles and opened her mouth trying to puke. When that didn’t work, she tried to sleep. Nothing was working.

“What do you mean Captain is an alien? Tell me more about that.”

“It is a cyborg that resides in an artificial body that moves in a … an alien spinning motion. It has enslaved several stations and forces the inhabitants to participate in virtual contests in order to attain ranks.”

“Why haven’t you informed the UNSF of this development?”

Aldriena laughed. Then she spat on the logo of the shiny machine.

“That’d be pretty dumb, now wouldn’t it? If we did that you’d, oh, say, fly in with a heavily armed space fleet and shut Insidious down before we could learn anything from them. Before Black Core, Bentra, and Reiss-Marck could analyze their technology and catapult themselves a century ahead of the competition.”

Ten

“This is outrageous,” Vendrati proclaimed.

Bren barely heard her. His mind had already accepted the report of the Black Core operative and moved on to the repercussions. Aliens! It fit the facts they had; Bren felt that if they’d been up against a rogue AI core they’d have lost already. But a small group of aliens, with technology ahead of that possessed by humans, could well explain past events.

“It makes sense,” Bren said.

Everyone stared at him. He realized he must have interrupted the meeting in progress.

“Excuse me? Niachi has probably been suborned by the AI core. We already know it has some kind of mind control,” Vendrati said.

“We thought the mind control was related to the suits,” Jameson said. “Bren, why are you so willing to believe the Black Core operative?”

“The Reds are superior technology. Plain and simple. They’re smaller, faster, and better armed. We only win because of strength of numbers. Yet, other than the superiority of those few machines, our foe is strangely weaker than an AI core would be. They don’t fully take over our computers, initiate mass production of war machines, or anything else we saw before the Marseilles Purge.”

“The purge is only one incident. For all we know, these super-AIs are each unique just like people are. This woman has created a ridiculously elaborate story to mislead us,” Vendrati said. “Crates of the strange gear that we’ve seen on these stations were found on Xanadu. I believe this woman has been spreading elements of the rogue core to new stations.”

“Yet the rangers on Xanadu have not reported any problem,” Jameson said.

“Those rangers may already be lost to us,” Vendrati said.

“The woman isn’t making it up,” Devin said. “She can’t be fooling the Scorpion.”

“If her brain has been rewired by an AI core, she could have the ability to defeat the Scorpion,” Vendrati said. “In fact it’s probably not even safe to keep her alive at all. We have no idea what she’s capable of.”

“The tissue we found inside the Reds is not an indication of bio AI technology,” Bren said. “It was an alien brain. The Reds are cyborgs. Open your eyes.”

Vendrati leaned forward as if she intended to continue the argument, but then she sat back. She frowned.

“Well, unless these aliens are the vanguard of a full-scale invasion, this is actually good news,” Jameson said. “We can handle a small group of them much easier than a runaway core.”