Insidious (37 page)

“What do I need?” Aldriena asked through her link.

“One submachine gun, two grenades,” replied the guard. He swept his arm out in welcome as the door opened.

She stepped inside. The room asked her to register the weapons she was picking up. She gave permission to proceed and her information was automatically logged by her civilian link.

She took a quick sum of the power laid out before her. She saw several racks holding projectile weapons. The guns were short black rifles with plastic stocks and wide clips that fit into the undersides. Aldriena didn’t recognize the design.

Perhaps they don’t come from Earth. They could have been manufactured out here in deep space … is it even possible that the spinners designed these weapons?

Behind the projectile weapons, she saw three banks of grenades. She wasn’t as knowledgeable about grenades as projectile weapons, but they looked familiar. They might be from Earth. If they were, the grenades would have military level hardening against electronic tampering. Even her Cascavel couldn’t quickly take one over.

She grabbed a gun and two grenades. She accessed the weapons through her link. The weapons registered her as the primary user, but she lacked detonation codes for the grenades. She was locked out.

“I don’t have the codes,” Aldriena pointed out.

“You’ll have them when the time comes,” the guard said.

“I’m missing some briefing. I just got here. Who are we fighting?”

“It’s just an exercise. When you get to your quarters, the details will download to your link, including a virtual handling course for the weapons. You didn’t have to come straight here, but at least you saved yourself a trip later.”

Aldriena considered her options. The new weapons were useless to her but she still had C4B. She felt confident she could destroy the armory, but the result might well be a running firefight with the remaining security personnel. That didn’t sound so bad, it might even be fun, but she didn’t want to fight Captain and Slicer all alone for an hour before the space force arrived.

“So many grenades in these bins,” Aldriena said, reaching down to run her hand over the remaining grenades in the bin. “Can we get more?”

“Not right now,” the guard said.

Aldriena placed one of her registered grenades in the bin, and she grabbed a different one where the edge of the bin blocked his sight. She took out the unregistered grenade and held it next to the other registered one.

“Okay, these two then.”

Aldriena didn’t communicate with her new grenade. She assumed that would be flagged as a security concern since she’d already registered her quota.

Aldriena nodded to the sentinel and then walked away. She might not have the codes now, but if she got the code later then she hoped she could remotely detonate the grenade she’d left in the bin. The armory might have some mechanism in place to prevent such a detonation, but maybe her Cascavel could defeat it?

She shrugged internally.
Better than nothing.

She wandered to a nearby mall, still mulling over her next move. The shopping area spanned two floors. She came in on the upper floor through an entrance flanked by a fountain on one side and a faux rock wall covered in scrubgrass. She shook her head. The decorations rivaled any mall back on Earth, except for all those densely twisted grass shoots in every nook and cranny. It felt surreal to walk through the shopping center with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder and grenades packed into her gear.

It looks like a shopping mall full of starship troopers.

Aldriena looked into the nearest store window. It held VG essentials only—what people needed to replace what was thrown away when they had arrived. She saw towels, depilatories, and tooth cleaning gel. Not exactly a shopper’s paradise, she decided. Surely, people could buy souvenirs around here somewhere? Or was it too expensive to bring such items all the way from Earth, even for VG?

The Cascavel had been snooping the local network. She received a notice in her PV. The traffic on the area network had spiked, rising by about seventy percent.

Aldriena didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it made her nervous.

She looked behind her for a moment, listening. Nothing unusual. She took a glance down to the level below. People seemed to be going on their way. She saw rifles on many of the shoppers. Three people were standing near one another as if they were together, but they weren’t looking at her. Aldriena intercepted enough of their traffic to gather that they were concerned about a virtual challenge.

Then she saw the spinner. It flitted among the people, headed in Aldriena’s direction. Everyone who saw it gave it a wide berth, backing away from the thing as it passed. Some didn’t see it in their gear. As far as Aldriena could tell, it moved silently but swiftly.

She calmly resumed her course and waited until she’d moved out of sight of the level below. Then she changed direction and headed for a maintenance hallway behind the storefronts.

She slipped into the back corridor and started to run.

The odds are low that the spinner is out shopping. Especially at such a crappy alien mall.

The station network efficiently split into hundreds of separate sections to route all the communications traffic of the millions of tiny cyblocs that were packed into every device and machine and person on Synchronicity. Aldriena took a back exit and onto a traffic concourse so that she could leave the current sector.

Out on the concourse, the most she dared was a brisk walk. In another twenty seconds, she’d crossed a line between network sectors.

She slowed. Now she would wait to see if she’d avoided the spinner. Her Cascavel could fool the network to some degree and pretend to be in other sectors. She watched the load drop forty percent on the last router and rise rapidly in her current network section.

“Shit, it
is
coming after me,” she whispered.

Someone had labeled the authorization the machine used as “Slicer.” No reason not to believe it, she thought. So it was Slicer following her.

Aldriena dropped her current connection and started moving again. She knew that the spinner had probably entered from the Main Street sector, so she headed the other direction, toward the inner face of the station.

Her attention had turned from sabotage to survival. If a spinner was after her, she might as well blow the armory, she thought. How could it get any worse?

But the map wasn’t helping. The spinner was between her and the armory she knew about. Besides, she realized that C4B might not cause enough damage to make anything explode there.

If only I could arm my grenades. I wonder if they’ll explode when hit by an armor-piercing round? No. Engaging Slicer isn’t smart. The things are killing machines.

She went as far as she could toward the inner ring and then turned spinward. Toward her ship. She had no choice but to move through public concourses; to wander off them would trap her in a cul-de-sac.

Is the spinner toying with me? They’re faster than any human is. Why the hell did I agree to come back here?

She paid close attention to the network situation. As long as Slicer had control of the station infrastructure, she could never hide. Every door, wall console, and trash bin were equipped with cyblocs and attached to the network, potentially reporting her passage to the spinner.

She saw Slicer had followed her again, if the previous pattern could be trusted. She couldn’t decide if she should move faster or keep an even pace. It depended on how the spinner was tracking her, and what it was doing.

She increased her pace a bit. Speeding up made her feel as if she were caving to a sense of panic, but quickening her pace made sense. If the spinner knew her exact location, then it would be able to outrun her easily. Otherwise, speeding up would make her harder to find. If the spinner were simply toying with her then it would be pleased to see her fleeing.

That might make Slicer take longer to move in, might make it want to extend its fun for a while longer.

She walked into a hangar below the spaceport where her ship waited. She noticed a security robot ahead of her moving at a tangent to her course. She could handle this kind of danger in her sleep. The machine represented such a tiny threat to her well-being compared to the alien that shadowed her.

She closed to within ten meters of
Silvado
. Accessing her ship through her link, she set in a return course and set the ship to request a flight plan for disembarkment. She logged herself as a passenger and reported her imminent departure to the station administration program.

As soon as she lost sight of the security robot, she turned her civilian link off.

Her Cascavel had to cover for her now. She didn’t know how long it could masquerade as a legitimate person. It had to interact with the environment, or else public cameras and services would flag her on security scans. Aldriena knew if a person showed up on a camera and that person didn’t have a link signature, security would be notified.

She left the hangar quickly. She had to find somewhere to hide—somewhere she could go and quit moving so that her fake identity wouldn’t be noticed. She selected the nearest section of living quarters and headed in. Either she’d be able to hide there, or she’d be trapped.

The interior corridor of the living area was much quieter than the outer walkways. A tan carpet covered the floor. No one else walked the hallway. She stopped in front of the nearest door to think. Should she attempt to invite herself into a random room? Make small talk with the inhabitants? And if the main occupant was gone, what then? Overcome the servant and sit tight?

Aldriena noticed some unusual network traffic. This time it wasn’t an activity spike, but transmissions outside the parameters of the universal link protocols. It came from a room on her section and level. Aldriena wasn’t sure what kinds of things might use such packets, other than illegal links like her Cascavel.

Maybe another person with a special link was in the room. Another spy like herself? Or it could be a spinner, she thought. But she didn’t have time to think it over.

She zeroed in on the source of the unusual network packets. Three personal quarters sat on the corridor where she stood. Aldriena brought up a map of the section. She gave the three suites better than an eighty percent chance of being the source.

The door wasn’t particularly secure. Her Cascavel was able to get it to open for her by masquerading as an automated delivery service. She stepped in quietly and removed her helmet. She much preferred being able to hear properly when sneaking around.

An Asian man met her at the entrance. He had short-cropped hair and dark skin.

“
Ni zuo shenme
?” he asked.
What are you doing?

Aldriena smiled. She stepped forward.

“
Ni zuo shenme
?” he repeated in his own voice. Aldriena slammed her elbow into his chin. The man dropped to his knees. She gave him another knockout pill with her knee, driving it into his chin with her hands wrapped behind his head.

She took C4B out and loaded a glue round. She pointed the weapon enjoying the moment.

Snap!

A golf-ball sized wad of foamed glue attached itself to his shoulder. Tendrils slid out to attach to the wall, his face, and his chest, like a fast motion movie of a plant growing. The glue didn’t cover his mouth or nose.

Aldriena smiled.
This time I’ll be in personal quarters like a good little girl when the UNSF breaches the station. And I have my own member of the Chinese bloc to chat with while I wait.

Sixteen

A new set of hardware, a new AI core, and a mission information module that had been designated “Meridian” stepped through the breach first. Lieutenant Hoffman handled the latest Meridian. They’d almost changed the name as well, giving it one of the new names set aside for the latest replacements, but Hoffman had complained: the machine hadn’t fallen in battle, and so it was still Meridian. Only the name remained of the original ASSAIL that had gone in first at Thermopylae.

Bren had seen to that. He’d feared some kind of AI Easter egg hidden somewhere, in a hardware buffer or a file or … anything. Anything to explain why Meridian had been so much stronger and faster than the others were, or how it had survived all the missions where the others had failed.

The horrible part was Bren knew they might need the original Meridian more than ever. But he had no choice. He had to take precautions to make sure he didn’t unleash a rogue AI that could mean the extinction of humanity.

The rest of the Synchronicity ASSAIL team strode into the station: Oblivion, Pandora, Panzer, Patton, Plato, and Pythagoras. Bren could see the inside of a repair hangar through the cameras. The
Vigilant
lay attached directly below where it had sat for the twenty minutes it took to drill a hole into the station.

The cores were fairly mature again. They’d come straight at Synchronicity without any attempt at hiding the UNSF fleet. There wasn’t time with a Chinese task force headed their way under heavy acceleration. In fact, the approach was so direct that Synchronicity might have mistaken the fleet for decoy signals.