Severance (21 page)

He hoped they weren’t
all
concealing murder.

He supposed it might not have been her specifically, more
likely that Redenbach character with the blood on his hands. But it was clear
that one of them murdered Gabelman after he had stumbled upon their plot. The
background check on Stein had changed within the past few hours, now heavily
stressing her connections to the Breeders. He wondered what other surprises
Stein had that he would find out about too late.

This was a logical place for them to run. Along with half
the criminal groups in the ship’s history, the Breeders were known to have used
some of the buildings in this area. All the sensors were scrapped, and few
people were around to see something they shouldn’t.

Though not completely abandoned, Hogg’s team had already
scared up a half–dozen false positives. In one room, a couple of teenagers had
been interrupted practicing basic population growth techniques. He had also
kicked in the door on a group of fake homeless squatting in an old hydroponics
bay, gathered around a cooking fire. Hogg hated the Fauxmless. No one on board
the Argos
could
be homeless — there was just too much damned space.
Indeed, the minimum standard of living had always been very high by most human
standards. Compared to the slums of the big inland cities of Earth, it was a
utopia. Which inevitably meant that after a couple of generations, homelessness
had turned into an exotic hobby for certain types of Argosians. Hogg was not
among that type — he thought they were idiots, an opinion that wasn’t changed
by this particular group. They weren’t even cooking, just singeing meal bars
over a fire. He’d had to fight off an urge to launch one of the idiots into the
flames himself.

They rounded a corner and resumed their search on the next
street over. Hogg was frustrated at the stupidity of their hunt. It was way too
much ground to search with only a dozen bodies. If these terrorists were as
dangerous as Thorias said, why hadn’t he released more security officers to
help with the search? Keeping hundreds of officers on guard duty in the aft
didn’t make any sense at all. Hogg had long been smart enough to spot and
suppress the instinct to suggest better solutions to his superiors, but this
one was particularly challenging.
What could they be thinking
?

§

Sergei watched the man a few blocks away, standing perfectly
still in the center of the street. Sergei’s hands flexed, fingers rolling and
unrolling around his pistol. The guy had walked into the street a few minutes
earlier and was now facing the barricade, perfectly still, his hands at his
sides like a gunslinger. Sergei didn’t have to look to know that every other
officer on the barricade was watching the same man.

They had spent twelve hours on the barricade before being shifted
off for a too brief rest. Now, midday on the day after the attacks, they were
back on guard duty, an uneventful shift until now. The few people that had
approached the barricade were different shades of annoyed, frustrated by the
bizarrely complicated approval process for getting access to the aft. But all had
been civil. At least until this maniac stepped into the center of the road.
People with that kind of haircut tended to lack a bit in the civility
department.

“What do you think he’s doing?” one of the other officers
asked.

“Hard to say,” Sergei said. “Being incredibly crazy, I’d
guess.”

As if to underscore Sergei’s point, the man broke into a
run, charging straight at the barricade, screaming like an animal. For thirty
seconds they watched him run, his scream uninterrupted but for short gasps to
catch his breath.

“What the fuck is he doing?”

“Whatever it is, I think he’s lost the element of surprise.”

“What should we do?”

“I don’t know. Sergei?”

Sergei didn’t respond, only readying his pistol. When the
man got within five meters of the barricade, Sergei fired. The man slumped to
the ground, his scream finally silenced.

“Nice shot.”

“Yeah, nice shot, Sergei.”

“Did you have to lead him much?”

Lacking any better ideas, they left the man lying there,
offering helpful comments on how he should best regain consciousness. Sergei
finally got a good look at him, bare–chested, apparently completely unarmed,
and, as suspected, wearing a haircut that was not a sane man’s. Finally, Sergei
reported the incident to command, who sounded more bemused than concerned.

Twenty minutes later the man stirred, moaning into the
ground. Over the next few minutes, he rearranged his limbs under himself before
eventually sitting up. He stared at the security officers watching him from the
other side of their plastic fortifications, squinted, then put a hand over one
eye. His head bobbed around unsteadily, and he blinked several times before
finally saying a single word — “Rad.” Getting to his feet, he rocked back and
forth on his heels a few times before retreating to the north. Collectively,
all the officers at the barricade exhaled.

Five minutes later, he pulled the same stunt again, charging
at the baffled security officers as before, achieving an identical result. But
before he could stir, he was joined by another lunatic, who charged behind him
a few seconds later. As Sergei explained what was happening to an extremely
confused dispatch, a group of three more men and a woman tried the same stunt,
the last one screaming “Wheee!” as she was brought down.

A crowd of onlookers had gathered down the street. Laughter
and large gestures. They were egging each other on, and every few minutes
another one joined the lunatic pigpile forming at the base of the barricade.
Sergei’s frantic calls for reinforcements eventually yielded fruit, and more
security officers streamed to the barricade to witness — and participate — in
the spectacle.

Within an hour, the Argos’ latest sport had established a
codified set of rules, with points based on speed, distance, and style. Not
long after that, someone elbowed Sergei, showing him a terminal and the current
leader board. He turned away, wondering if the stunned expression he surely had
on his face would become permanent.

§

“Well, what the fuck do you make of that?” Helot asked. One
hand was pressed to his face, massaging his cheek, eye, and temple, and
everything else exposed to the stupid he had just seen on the screens. Across
the table, Thorias watched the scene unfold, arms crossed.

“I think there are two ways to look at it,” Thorias finally
said. “One, they’re not angry at us. It’s a game to them. That’s good news.
They wouldn’t be assing around like that if they suspected what we were doing.”
Helot nodded, seeing the logic in that. “The second interpretation,” Thorias
continued, “is that this means they’re not scared of us.”

“And that’s also a good thing.”

Thorias’ head waggled back and forth. “I guess it is for
now.”

“Ohhhhhh, I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like it at
all when you get contemplative.”

Thorias flicked his head at the image in front of them. “This
is just games so far. And we’ll let them play. In a controlled fashion. Install
extra padding, get some medics there, that kind of thing. Have a lot more
officers on hand. For safety’s sake.” He smiled.

“For safety’s sake,” Helot echoed.

“But we have to plan for something a lot worse than this
happening. We still haven’t found Kinsella,” Thorias said, giving Helot a
knowing look. Helot’s toes curled, regretting his master villain moment yet
again. “It’s only a matter of time before he starts telling people what we’re
up to. And when he does, these little games will become a lot more serious. We
should be ready for that.”

“Ready for what, exactly?”

Thorias reached down to clear the display, bringing up a map
of the aft of the Argos in its place. “The worst case scenario I can see is a
group of several hundred of them, armed with pistols.” Helot’s eyes widened. “Now,
we don’t think they’re armed yet. But it won’t take long once they decide they
want to. The schematics for the pistols will be floating around somewhere — I’m
all but certain Kinsella has a set — and they certainly have the fabrication
capacity. We could try to station guards around all the fabrication areas, but
there are a lot of them, and that would leave us spread very thin in the aft.
Hard to defend the core and Curts and his cutting teams then. So, yeah, I think
they could put together pistols. And rounding up a few hundred maniacs is
something I can imagine our mayor doing.” Thorias reached down on to the map
and pulled up a custom layer. Colored lines and arrows appeared, thrusting and
parrying back and forth across the 9
^th
Avenue threshold.

Helot held up a finger to interrupt Thorias while he
composed his next words carefully. “
Are you out of your fucking mind?
”
he finally asked, struggling to keep his voice steady. The words hung in the
air as the rest of the control room went quiet.

“Sir?”

“You’re planning a ground war?” Helot’s hands shook as he
gestured at the map. “You have, readily available, incredibly detailed plans on
how to fight a ground war on this ship. Is this a hobby of yours?”

Thorias stood up straighter. “I think it’s prudent to
consider all the possibilities.”

“All the possibilities? Really? All of them?” Helot’s voice
started shaking. “This arrow here,” he said, pointing at the map. “What’s this
arrow represent?”

Thorias examined the map. “Twenty enemy troops circling
behind one of our positions.”

“Enemy troops! They’re not our enemy! They’re not even
troops! What the fuck?”

“Sir…”

“No. No! Not gonna happen.” Helot pointed a finger at the
security chief, the closest he had come to a threat in years. He was
livid
.
His careful calculations had accounted for no loss of life during the
separation itself. Certainly not for an extended ground war. “You’re going to
find Kinsella, we’re going to keep him quiet, and there’s not going to be any
fucking arrows on any fucking maps. We’ll keep the doors closed and politely
ask everyone to stay out of the aft.”

Thorias exhaled through his nose. “Sir, those doors will not
stay closed for long — the locks aren’t foolproof, and there are people over
there capable of bypassing them. If that happens…”

“If that happens, then you’ll have to deal with the couple
drunk idiots who figured it out. Not twenty enemy troops. Shit.” He shook his
head, still unable to believe the madman he had working for him. “Shit,” he
added.

Thorias stared at him for a few agonizingly slow–moving
seconds. “Yes, sir,” he finally said and reached out to turn off the map. It
was a gesture which should have caused Helot to relax, but he had a hard time
doing that. He knew the map wasn’t going anywhere, that Thorias would simply
keep his plans to himself from now on. A worrying thought. But there was no way
he could replace the security chief now.

“There is one other thing, Captain,” Thorias said,
interrupting Helot’s train of thought. “When are we going to tell my officers about
what we’re doing here? And their families?”

Helot swallowed. They had plans for that, pamphlets and
other reading material that would have been a lot easier to digest when read in
the detached engine core, several thousand miles away from the rest of the
ship, several thousand miles away from any chance of turning back. “They won’t
need to know for now, will they?” he asked.

Thorias stared back at him, not committing to anything. “No,
I don’t see the advantage of telling them. Not yet.” He panned the map back
towards the bow.

“You were leaving officers behind, correct? Have they
contacted you? How have you handled that?”

“Hogg’s unit. I put them on to Stein and Redenbach. I figure
if they find them, hey, great, and if they don’t, then at least it keeps them
out of our hair for the next few days.”

“How is he? This Hogg?” Helot asked. He was glad for
anything to change the subject.

Thorias stared back at him, expressionless. “Well, he’s not
great.” Over the past few years, Thorias had been altering security officer
assignments, moving the least desirable men off rotation where he could, and
when he couldn’t, to the lone security outpost in the north of the ship, the
Community Outreach and Policing Center. “Most of the ones we’re leaving are low
achievers, as discussed. And everyone with weak Sheeping. Hogg’s one of those.
We’d actually tried to get him off–rotation for this month, but there was an
injury, and he got pulled back in.”

Helot nodded. The “Sheep gene” was a useful misnomer, a
label for a complicated set of genetic tweaks designed to make someone more
docile. Not precisely mind control, it only twisted the personality to embed a
sense of deference towards authority. A useful trait, at least from the
perspective of authority. It was also, obviously, wildly illegal and had been
secretly introduced into the population a couple of centuries earlier by one of
Helot’s predecessors, slipped in during routine prenatal genetic screening. There
was some unknown complication with the technique, however, and it had only been
partially effective, even leading to a few surprising side effects. By the time
Helot found out all of this, only a fraction of the population retained
anything approaching full Sheeping. Unsurprisingly, a large fraction of that
number found themselves serving in naval and security roles.

“Otherwise, Hogg’s not that bad,” Thorias said. “I almost wish
we could have kept him.”

Of course you did, always handy to have another arrow for
your map.
Helot ran his hand through his hair, just a little surprised when
no clumps came out with it.

§

Clicks and bumps and satisfied noises drifted over to Stein
from somewhere to her left, the sounds of Bruce playing with his new toys. He
had a lot to choose from; their hiding spot was well salted with firearms. And
unlike nearly every other thing on the Argos, pistols were simple in design and
incredibly durable. Whatever Bruce was cooing over was evidently still in
working order, despite its advanced age.