The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

I try to scratch him, but he slaps my hand away and knocks
my head back against the crate to gentle me. I go fuzzy, and he turns to yell
over his shoulder, "Hey Stella. Gimme a rope or sumthin, will ya?"

I look around desperately for something,
anything
,
to knock him out with. There's a welding torch lying atop a crate not far from
me. My fingers crawl along the edge of the crate toward it, bit by bit, as
Stella rummages through the garbage for something to bind me with.

"Hold still, doll," the man grunts in my ear.
"Don't want to ruin your pretty face just yet."

I reach the torch, and wrap my fingers around the handle.

He draws a strong breath, savoring the moment before he
moves on to break my last resistance. His face goes slack as I swing the heavy
torch up into the side of his head. There's a crunch of bone and a crack of
teeth, and a moment of silence. He totters, then drops me as he stumbles back,
hand pressed to his cheek to staunch the blood flow. I drop the torch and
tumble through the doorway, ears ringing.

I hobble down the sidewalk, fast, focused straight ahead.

Jade bumps into me mid-run, ducking out of the bar.
"Get out of here," he pants. Raised voices and the smash of
shattering glass filter through the open door of the bar.

I don't take the time to answer, just sweep him up and
pull him along.

"Where's Bray?" I pant, glancing over my
shoulder as we run for the port. Several men have poured into the street, two
of them coming after us. We pick up speed.

"Got into a fight."

"Idiot."

"He's fine," Jade pants. "I hope."

We turn the corner around the Center and slow, then stop,
sides heaving. I can already see the ship parking zone with its many loading
bots and mobile ramps.

Jade draws down a lungful of air. "What
happened?"

"Nothing. Let's just—get out of here. Leave the
system."

"I know it's not your dream spot, but leaving's not
an option."

"I can't stay here, Jade. Not a minute longer."

"What's your plan, eh?" He's not taking me
seriously. But I'm dead serious. I can't linger here, waiting for some drunk or
some floathead to ruin my life, or for Preston to turn me into a fucking
lab-rat. I straighten up, hold my aching side, and walk back to the ship.

Jade falls in step beside me. "Taryn, what happened?
What's this really about?"

"Nothing. I'm going home, Jade. That's all. Back to
Maza."

When we reach the ship I slap my hand on the bulkhead
scanner and open the bay door. Jade follows me silently all the way to the
cargo hold. I'm still shaking from head to toe as I heave myself up into the
Transiter
.
Jade climbs in after.

"How do I fly this thing manually?" I ask,
turning on the spot.

"Are you crazy?"

"Fuck, Jade, I have to get out of here.
Now
."

"Alright. Alright." He settles into one of the
chairs. "Calm down and buckle up."

He plugs his nacom in, and nods at me to sit down. The
Transiter
's
AI cycles through the pre-flight prep, and as soon as the gates open the
Transiter
bucks up and jets out of the ship.

Jade maneuvers us over the port, dealing with the local
authorities, feeding them whatever lies Preston taught him to get us back out.
When we're cleared, he leans over and looks me straight in the eyes. "Will
you tell me what happened?"

I avert my gaze.

He huffs, frustrated. "Tau Ceti it is, ma'am."
Then leans back and brings up the containment fields.

Kriahm's orders are to take his vessel back to the
Ascendancy's home cluster, Nobelanin, and have the unclassified organisms that
attacked it purged and analyzed. The
Kaluvian
must be freed of the
infestation before the parasites can damage its integrity. And the parasites themselves
will need to be thoroughly investigated as well.

But Kriahm is not comfortable leaving Amharr alone in
charge of an assessment. It goes against Ascendancy orders, but more
importantly against his own instincts. Something isn't right about Amharr's
attitude toward these neophytes. So Kriahm postpones his departure a bit longer
to find out what's going on with Amharr and these...
humans
. He begins
by investigating the human vessel that crossed his path.

Unlike Amharr's
Undawan
, equipped with Raimerian
surveillance technology and a plethora of weapons, the
Kaluvian
is a
charting and storage vessel. It carries only scanners, sampling automatons, and
other necessities for planetary assignments. It also doesn't have a caste of
Kolsamal warriors like the
Undawan
, but a small contingent of menial
Semri-Ar.

Kriahm detests the fact that when this section of the
Grand Helix was assigned for inspection Amharr was the one to snatch the
executive rights for himself, while Kriahm was left to chart and analyze inanimate
bulk with a pathetically equipped vessel. There was at least the promise of
apprenticeship, if a containment occurred. Being given the opportunity to learn
from Amharr redeemed this unfortunate assignment in Kriahm's eyes. Amharr is
renowned as among the most effective of Dominants: ruthless and swift,
unwavering in the face of challenge, and favoring action over discussion. Which
makes his hesitation concerning these humans all the more puzzling.

It's possible Amharr has learned something of value he's
not sharing. Or that he plans to exploit the humans to his own advantage,
before he declares their containment. Regardless, Kriahm is certain
something
is the matter. Amharr is indecisive, distracted.

If nothing else, this may finally allow Kriahm to outgrow
his position. The prospect of demoting Amharr and assuming command on the eve
of a containment is deliciously seductive.

To that end, Kriahm deploys three Semri-Ar to the
conjoined human vessels he's been quietly following. Their brutish mechanical
merger has forced both vessels to temporarily drop their shielding, creating a
perfect window.

The Semri-Ar are an eerie but useful plasma-based species,
primarily employed for stealth observations and data analysis. They're
particularly good at infiltration, as their biology allows them to penetrate
alien environments unobserved—a very useful side effect of their 'flexible'
molecular cohesion. And they're virtually undetectable to most conventional
scanning technologies.

The Semri-Ar return surprisingly quickly to report their
findings, relaying image by memorized image to his vessel's Onrysses. Kriahm's
interest is piqued.

The humans have already begun experimenting with the
parasitic organisms, infecting various captive creatures. Among their test
subjects are three Totorkha adults and a breeder pupa. They're the last thing
Kriahm would've expected to find on a human vessel. Do the neophytes not know
the Totorkha's nature?

Soon after the infiltration the Totorkha Worker sensed the
presence of the Semri-Ar and tried to escape confinement to attack them. The
humans subdued it, remaining thankfully unaware of why the Worker had gone
berserk, his Semri-Ar returning undetected.

Now Kriahm has far more to ponder than Amharr's agenda.

Where have the humans captured live Totorkha? Their race
is contained and isolated—isn't it? What relationship, parasitic, symbiotic, or
otherwise, do they have? What can they possibly hope to achieve by testing the
organisms on Totorkha? Are they seeking a way to exterminate the beasts, or to
defeat the parasitic infection? Or perhaps gain some disquieting knowledge.

Kriahm can think of several instances of technological
races using inferior deconstructive races as weapons in war or conquest. The
Ascendancy has forgone tolerance toward such unions. If the humans are
attempting something similar they'll have to be contained immediately. The
assessment is obvious.

So why does Amharr hesitate?

Kriahm's mind runs in circles. If Amharr
doesn't
know, then Kriahm won't hand him the information freely. He would have to admit
he'd stayed to investigate. And if Amharr
is
aware, then something is very
wrong.

He must know more, before he is too far removed to act.

Kriahm re-deploys the Semri-Ar to follow the merged human
vessels in secret until his return, ordering them to infiltrate whenever
possible and gather intel. Then he sets his infected vessel's course for
Nobelanin. He intends to engage Amharr well-informed and well-armed upon their
next meeting.

Bray escaped the brawl at
Salute
with nothing more
than a swollen lip and sore knuckles, thanks to Costa and a few men loyal to
him. But by the time he got back to the ship, Taryn and Jade were nowhere to be
found, and the
Transiter
was missing.

He caught up with Costa in the morning, who then contacted
Preston. Now, Bray makes his way into Erano, Preston's blame still lying heavy
in his gut. He doesn't even know where to begin looking for them. And without
Taryn and her 'infection' to occupy Preston, he's not sure what's going to
happen next.

Bray gets off the cargo speed-train at the city border.
Like most domed colonies in the Confederacy, Erano has five radial districts
with a sixth in the center reserved for the seat of government and
administration offices. He has to cross D3, the industrial district, to enter
D2, the technological development district—Erano's 'hot-zone.'

Bray heads quietly toward the nearest gate, hoping
Preston's makeshift codes will guarantee safe passage. Or at least keep him out
of prison.

Preston's somehow been involved with the riots in Erano.
He's been in contact with the people instigating them for a long time, has even
kept tabs on their activity from a distance. Bray asked him about that logo,
repeatedly, until the doc eventually owned the truth: he's part of the Dabaran
Syndicate, the most notorious resistance movement in the Confederacy,
headquartered on San Gabriel, and once led by none other than Maican himself.

The fucking Dabaran Syndicate
!

Why not tell him sooner? Hasn't he earned Preston's trust
after all this time? Doesn't he deserve to be in the loop?

Bray grinds his teeth. Best he can do now is try to catch
anything potentially dangerous coming his way. Bad enough he's being roped into
terrorist activities, but not knowing exactly how deep he's in is fucking
crackbrained.

As he passes the filter at the gate, Bray glimpses the
city between the heads of men and transport droids, and his jaw drops. Gigantic
buildings and towers grow between broad boulevards and Maglev highrails like an
untamed jungle. Bray's never seen anything like it. The industrial area on
Bessel's Eye could fit at least five times inside Erano's.

TMC sentinels scan the crowd entering the district,
reading their synets with handhelds, like processing livestock.

Bray wonders how many of these overpaid thugs he could
take in a fistfight. He straightens and keeps his chin high as he walks the
gauntlet, flanked by armored men with faces stern as stone. Maybe if they
weren't armed he could split some lips and make a run for it. But Ticks are
always armed. Automatics are strapped to their ribs and submachine guns peek
over their shoulders. Bray stays in line, head down, until he's through.

Once inside D3 he boards a Maglev to the main entrance
into D2, roughly fifteen clicks northwest. The embedded positioning app in
Bray's nacom has already connected to Erano's datasphere and floods the small,
flexible screen with tourist information. It also connects to a waiting hook
that links him to Preston's underground network and directs him to the team's
whereabouts.

The hydrogen-powered Maglev jets between various buildings
and blade-shaped skyscrapers erupting from the cityscape, sporting huge
screens with hyper-bright animated ads, busy shuttle landing platforms on their
sides. Bray gawks at the impressive constructions, struck suddenly
inconsequential. He shrugs it off and try to clear his mind.

The Maglev takes a turn as it approaches the Spoke to D2.
Bray cranes his neck to look at the gigantic Rebreather dominating the view.
Obscured from afar, hidden by steam and smoke cascading from its cap, the
Rebreather reveals its dizzying size in full now. An enormous mechanical
mushroom eight hundred meters tall, dwarfing the rest of the skyline. Its
carbon-filtering gills rumble as its turbines suck in polluted air—audible
despite the Maglev's sealed windows. Hundreds of shuttles buzz around it like
angry wasps, enveloped in light-blue fluorescent fields.

Erano's pentagonal Hub, with its own five Rebreathers, is
connected to the outer wall of the city by five Spokes, functioning as district
separating walls. They also hold ducts and data relays, power lines and a
jumble of ventilation shafts. Each Spoke has an additional Rebreather midway,
like the one Bray is approaching now. The team's HQ is located not two hundred
meters further in—a noisy spot, for sure, but it places them right next to one
of the city's aortas. Preston planned well.

Bray has to pass through yet another filter as he enters
D2. He queues up with a couple hundred other people, shoulders hunched and
inching forward, and looks up at the gigantic Spoke wall, then further up to
the strangely checkered artificial sky. A lightning bolt arcs overhead to
strikes the cap of the Rebreather with a crack like thunder. Several of these
spontaneous discharges from the filament net are visible all around them,
striking Erano's mechanical mushrooms in a continuous storm.

He's through the filter, heading down the district's
crowded central boulevard, when he bumps into Vik and Franky, dressed in worker
overalls with matching caps and backpacks.

Vik eyes him up incredulously. "Bray? I thought the
doc told you to—"

"Long story." Bray licks his cracked lip.
"Where you two headed?"

"Scouting," Franky says. "Wanna come?"

"You better meet up with the doc," Vik says,
shaking his head. "He's gotta be pissed."

"I will. Later." Bray places an arm around
Franky's shoulder. "So, where to?"

Vik nods up-street, and takes the lead. They round the
next corner, digging deeper into the urban jungle with each block, Franky
keeping close to Bray's heel.

If it weren't for the kid's insane skills with long-range
scanners, Bray'd kick him out of the team himself and send him off to get a
home and a life somewhere safe. Except Franky has nowhere to go. His parents
are both rotting in an asteroid prison-camp in the Procyon system, and his baby
sister's being methodically ground down in an orphanage on Bessel's Eye. Bray
already checked to see if it's the same one he grew up in. The girl's luckier
than that.

They spend a couple of hours stalking through back alleys,
marking surveillance towers and tracking drone patterns, before Vik decides—to
Bray's chagrin—they ought to head back to Preston's makeshift HQ.

The building is cylindrical like a water can, about thirty
meters high and fifteen in diameter. It's connected to the building next to it
by a common shuttle parking tract spanning between roofs. The main hallway's
narrow and the air stuffy. They file into an elevator, shoulder to shoulder,
and head down four levels, not up. B
ray's
stomach bottoms
out too. If Preston's chosen an underground hide-out, things are going to get
ugly pretty damn fast.

They exit the elevator and stop in front of an apartment
door labelled
Nanotech Fiber Lab D2-G41, Temporary staff housing -213
.

"This it?" Bray asks. "This is the best he
could get us?"

"Don't worry, you won't have time to bring girls back
here," Vik says with a wink and opens the door via his nacom.

"Hey, Bray." Amelia. Grinning widely with
red-glossed lips. "See you finally caught up with us. And you lost your
annoying tail, too. My bunk's this way."

Bray shakes his head. "I already have a
roommate." He lays an arm around Franky's shoulders, and follows him.
Amelia's a complication Bray doesn't need right now. He could use a break from
trouble, at least until the
other
trouble comes back from wherever she's
gone and can resume fucking up his life.

Ever since he crossed paths with Taryn nothing's worked
right. Once she's back in Erano he'll have no way of avoiding her, what with
Preston making him her watchdog. He'll have to put up with her insufferable
temper every day, listen to that throaty voice as she complains about things,
watch her roll her hazel-green eyes every time she sees him.

Bray's hands start sweating, and he dries them on his
pants. What is it about that walking disaster that has him so ruffled? She's a
damn nuisance. A brain-worm of the worst kind. With her piercing stare, and her
pouting lips, and the way her chin creases when she's angry—

Stop the fuck now, man
.
Damn
!

Bray ruffles his hair angrily and shuts the door behind
him, startling Franky. The room is much smaller than any he's had to live in
before. A fucking tomb with datasphere connection.

Franky busies himself with his backpack. "So... you
thought about what I said?"

"Maybe," Bray says, unzipping his sweat-drenched
overall.

"We could lift a shuttle, head to the main port. Go
from there."

Bray leaves his overall in a lump on the floor, grabs a
protein bar from the pathetic welcome box on the table, and climbs into the top
bed. Stretched out, he knocks his head and feet against the bed-ends. He cusses
and takes a fair chunk out of the bar, then crumples the plastic wrapping in
his fist. "I don't know," he mumbles around the protein bar.
"It's too risky."

"C'mon, Bray, please." Franky grabs the edge of
Bray's bed with both hands and looks up at him. "We can't stay with
Preston. He's going to get us all killed."

"We all die someday."

"Not like this, man.... I want to get Meg out of that
shithole and help her gain some ground. Teach her how to fly a shuttle, how to
hack her first synet. You know. I wanna be there to bust the nose of her first
boyfriend."

"I can't help you with that, Franks." Bray
breathes deeply and closes his eyes. Taryn's face flashes out of the darkness,
knocking his heart around his chest again. He squeezes his eyelids tighter
until the dancing sparks drown her out.

"You don't have to do everything Preston tells you
to, you know."

Bray glares down at Franky. "You think I wanna be
here?"

"No, I—"

"Even if we do make it out of Erano, hijack a ship
from the main port—which is teeming with Ticks, by the way—how the hell you
plan for us to get off San Gabriel? We just flip them off and leave the system,
waving out the port hole? Have you seen how many fucking Darts and warships are
buzzing around this rock?"

"Don't be like that, I didn't—"

Bray leans over the edge of the bed and grabs Franky's
shoulder. "There's no easy way out, boy. Get that into your head."

Franky nods sadly, and disappears in the lower bed.

Bray stretches out again. Stares at the ceiling. Maybe she
won't come back. She's smart enough not to come back.

"Bray!" Preston calls from the hallway.

"I'm sleeping!" Bray yells back.

"You'll sleep after I'm dead. Out. Now."

Bray jumps down from his bed and walks out into the
hallway in his shorts. "
What
?"

"Give me your hand."

"Why?"

"Just give me your goddamn hand." Bray does, and
Preston grabs his wrist and taps something into his nacom. "There, now
we've got a secure link so I can update you over the following couple of
days."

"You going somewhere?" Bray asks, rubbing his
sore wrist.

"No. You are. I've uploaded a preliminary map with a
set of targets into your nacom. You'll check them off one by one, with utmost
discretion."

"Head hunting?" Bray scowls.

"You don't get to complain, Bray. Just do whatever I
tell you until I get Miss Harber back."

Bray groans. But nods anyway. He goes over the marks in
his virtual vision, and frowns at the Syndicate crest hovering over a bunch of
them. "What are these?"

"Sleepers from the old days, people I've been kept in
touch with whenever I could. Most of them have been quite busy, thankfully.
Contact them. Tell them we're here and on the move."

"What's your plan?" Bray shivers, unsure if it's
from standing barebacked in the hallway, or from the realization that things
are moving even faster than he feared.

"From now on, everything's need to know,"
Preston says. "And all
you
need to know at this point is that this
is your last chance to make amends for your failures."

Bray grinds his teeth. "I'll start first thing in the
morning."

"No, you start
now
. Within the hour. The first
dayshift is about to end and all the streets get flooded with people. Makes for
good camouflage."

Bray considers arguing, but he's too tired. Too beaten
down. He heads back into his room to get dressed again.