The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

"Like they did to that Ashmore guy on Procyon,
remember? They'll process your body through the fungi food-farms to get rid of
all the evidence. And the colonists will have no idea what's in their
food!"

Vik slams his hand on the table. "So that's why you
scored so bad on target practice—your brain's full of shit."

"Stop it," Denise says. "Leave Taryn alone,
she's had a rough time."

"She doesn't need your help," Blondy throws
back. "She's an alien infiltrator. She can just
kill us all
if she
wants to."

"You're such an asshole," Denise says.

I stare down at my untouched food. Blondy has it all
wrong. I can't kill anyone if my life depended on it. I could try stabbing
people, but with my luck that'd just get me
linked
to everybody and my
head would explode.

'Scatterbrain', my post-mortem nickname.

My heart climbs into my throat, and my hands turn cold and
sweaty. "Let them speculate," I tell Denise, and rub my jittery
fingers under the table. "They can imagine whatever they like."

"I think there's a grain of truth in every
rumor," Hamster-Face says snottily.

"So it's true, then?" Blondy asks. "They
turned you?"

I try to think of some witty response, but my pulse is
drumming loudly in my ears. I shouldn't have come here. I'm not just the
outsider anymore, the favored target for harmless practical jokes and
uncomfortable questions. Now I'm the one who spent three weeks alone with the
aliens, selling them who-knows-what to save my hide.

"Excuse me." I stand up, turn around and plow
between the tables.

I hurry between the countless smacking lips and grinding
teeth, between the slobbering maws and sweating bodies—out,
out
of this
hell contracting around me.

I trail between the chairs and random legs of people, my
vision narrowed into a tunnel, my throat constricted. The room throbs around me
like a full stomach trying to digest. My heart drums loudly.

Thunk—thunk—thunk—thunk.

The exit. It's right there. A million clicks away.

I stumble and bump against a shoulder. Someone grabs me
and pulls me along. I swim through the thickening air, trying hard to separate
reality from dream—from Amharr's memories.

I'm dragged into the corridor to lean against the wall,
bending over, swallowing back the acid.

"What happened? You okay?" Jade's face is a
blur, his voice a distant echo. My chest tightens into a painful knot. I feel
like I'm going to die. He touches me, but I slap his hand away. My heart has
climbed behind my eyeballs, inside my ears, inside my tongue. It's beating so
loud, so close, drumming faster and faster inside my skull.

THUNK—THUNK—THUNK—THUNK.

He's here
.

I drop to the floor and claw at my shirt. Panic swallows
me like an avalanche.

"Taryn?"

I know this kind of heaviness. I remember it. It's been
part of me my whole life—
his
whole life—this is Amharr—
I'm in
Amharr's mind
!

"Taryn!"

Something strokes my face in the darkness, ripping me out
of
his
consciousness. I jerk back. "What the hell happened?"
Jade yells, shaking me.

I start to cry, unable to help myself.

"Are you alright? What's going on with you?"

I want him gone. I want everything gone. Every single
thing around me—gone.

Are these Amharr's feelings? Or mine? I don't know.

I'm having a panic attack. Hallucinations. PTSD. Neurosis.
Whatever. It's a normal reaction. I'm fine. I'll be fine.

"It's nothing," I mumble and get up.

People have gathered in the doorway of the mess hall to
gawk at us.

"Can you walk?" Jade asks.

I nod and flounder into the corridor, not caring where I'm
headed as long as it's away from here, away from what just happened.

"You have to get me an unregistered synet," I
tell Jade as soon as he closes the door to his room.

"You sure you're fine?"

I nod vigorously. He throws himself on the bed with his
feet stretched out into the room, and crosses his arms under his head.

"So will you help me?"

"You know what you're asking me."

"The aliens fried my synet, Jade." He sits up,
wide-eyed. "I can't be a no-tech, not for another second. My cyber skills
are all I have. They're what's kept me alive and free this long. I need a new
synet—one that I can control, not one of Preston's crawler-ridden hackwares."

"Yeah, about that synet of yours." He frowns.
"What happened to you out there?"

I shrug and look for a place to sit, but there isn't one
except next to him. So I cross my arms instead.

"I'm not helping you unless you tell me what's going
on," Jade says. "What happened to you on that ship, Bug-Nut?"

My shoulders sag, and I drop on the edge of his bed. I try
to recount the facts as dryly as possible. Some things I keep for myself,
though. I can't talk about Amharr, not really, and I don't say a thing about
the ship still being out there either. Not after what Bray told me. I don't
want anyone getting wild ideas about trying to reason with Amharr, and I don't
want to be involved in it. Sure, I was the one all riled up about getting some
powerful aliens on our side, given the size of our challenge with the Ticks,
but this is definitely
not
what I signed up for.

Jade listens to my story with a serious face, then thanks
me for telling him. I feel a bit guilty for the many things I haven't said, so
I get back to the synet issue.

"I can't stand this, Jade. It's like being an
amputee. I can't even use the intercom right. And I don't want to stay here any
longer, either."

"Why not?"

I tilt my head toward him. "Like I've ever been
welcome."

"Want me to welcome you more warmly?" He lays a
hand on my thigh, and I see the sarcasm blooming in his eyes. I try to smile.
And he smiles back. "I don't believe you're fine. Sounds like some nasty
shit you've been through."

"Just help me get a new synet, Jade, and I'll
be
fine. I promise."

"Let's say I can find one. Do you plan to swallow it,
or what?"

"You'll implant me."

He straightens and looks me in the eyes. "You're
crazy."

"I don't have a choice. I don't want Preston or some
fucking metal monkey poking around in my head."

"I'd have to break into the storage deck and search
through a gazillion secure units, then sneak you into the medical bay and use
the medroid to implant you. For which I'd have to hack into the medroid first,
then calibrate your synet correctly,
and
implant you too. And I'm no
doctor. We're going to get caught."

I stand up and rub my itching palms. "Come on, Jade.
I need this."

"What about me?"

"You'll be fine. You're a roly-poly."

He sighs. "Just to be on the same page here." He
stands up too, a head taller than me, one eyebrow crooked up. "You
actually want me to implant you with a stolen synet. Not just smack you over
the walnut until your senses comes back."

"Smart guy." I wink. "Preston must have
some synets hidden somewhere. You find me one and we'll see from there."

He ponders it for a couple of seconds, hangdog, then
blurts, "We can use the emergency equipment on the
Transiter
! All
we need to do is disable the AI. Oh, Amelia's gonna neuter me if I mess that
up. It took her three weeks to get the AI back up and running. And it lost all
its memory."

"That's great!" I mean the
Transiter
idea, but the AI's loss of memory is good news too. Preston doesn't need to
know how good my hacking skills really are, or he'd have me monitored
twenty-four-seven, even without a synet.

"We still have to break into the engineering and
diagnostics bay," Jade says, thinking aloud. "And make sure no one
finds us. You know this is still a really bad idea, right? I'm no surgeon. What
if I screw up?"

"I can't get any worse. I'm practically seeing
fairies dancing in the hallways. Next I'll be gnawing at my foot like a damn
floathead."

He laughs. I've won him over.

But my last argument still rings noisily in my ears. A
strip of all the lowlifes I've ever seen crosses my mind: all the narcos, VR
bingers, and Dreamers, and of course the floatheads. Just thinking of them
makes me shudder.

Backwater addicts who can't afford the luxury of
high-class, low-risk drugs frequently end up shooting narcotics or running
black market VRs. They get trapped in glitchy realities while levy robots suck
their blood and spinal marrow for payment. The even more desperate ones turn
into Dreamers, allowing rogue AIs to rent their brains. They spend weeks in a
dream-like state, sometimes months, turning into babbling idiots with
plummeting IQs and disintegrating nervous systems.

The floatheads are the worst though. They're my greatest
nightmare, ever since I ventured out into Maza's colony alone one day when I
was six.

Consciousness-to-machine uploads—C2Ms—are normally used to
transfer the terminally ill into expensive databanks or holograms. But they've
also created an underground market, where criminals buy off the bodies of
addicts at ridiculous prices, promising them eternal life. Those who can still
afford it buy whatever's available as a body-substitute to download themselves
back into and live, if you can call it that, since the cheapest shells are
organ-supply clones—lab-grown bodies unfit to carry healthy human minds, let
alone distorted ones. The results are often grotesque zombies, insane and
crippled by disease. Colonial services routinely root them out, but some manage
to slip through the cracks. They crawl into the gutters and prey on vermin and
each other, sometimes reliving horrible things, sometimes doing them.

Being dragged into a sewer by one of them as a
six-year-old nipped my interest in C2Ms in the bud. I still have nightmares of
floatheads clawing at me, trying to gut me open.

"Seriously, Bug-Nut." Jade lays a hand on my
shoulder. "So many things can go wrong. You don't have to do this."

"Yeah, I know." I brush his hand away gently.
"But yes, I do. With or without you, Jade, I need a new synet. I just
stand a much better chance if you help me."

"Ah, what the hell. I'll get my hands on a clean
synet. You go find out when the diagnostics bay is empty. Or maybe hack in some
last-minute schedule changes or something. Wreak some havoc so we can get to
the
Transiter
."

"Um... how do you propose I do that?"

"Oh, right." He scratches his head and grins.
"Fine, I'll do all the work, you parasite. Go get some rest. It might be
your last moment of clarity, what with untested wetware in your brain and me at
the helm. So shoo."

-

By the time Jade picks me up from my room, I'm a bundle of
raw nerves.

He programmed a fake decontamination into the
Transiter
's
maintenance schedule, making sure no one would be in the bay to spot us. But
since the gates are sealed, we have to break in through a ventilation shaft,
past several filters. Jade's got a jam-packed toolkit strapped around his
waist, and one around his ankle, and assures me it'll be 'a wink.'

The shaft is just large enough for us to wriggle through,
but it still feels as if we might get stuck any moment. We crawl past several
broken fans, their rotor blades glazed with burnt dust and organic residues,
circuitry hanging behind them like spilled guts. The shaft's irregular welding
seams, covered in smut, scrape my hands and edge into my knees.

"Jade?" My voice sounds stuffy in the confined
space. "Where did Preston find this ramshackle station anyway?"

He peers at me between his arm and leg, his headlight
making me wince. "It's made of scraps. Rigged up from pieces of space
stations and satellites from the first wave of colonization. Some of it's even
pre-FTL, like the water recycling system. I think he stole most of it," he
adds quietly.

"Damn." I crawl behind him, staring at his worn
TMC-issued boots. "How did he get it out here? He didn't fly all the way,
right?"

"Did too."

"No shit?"

He grunts as he squeezes into a narrow duct to the right.
"The doc's real good with limited resources, and he's got the connections
for it. That's why I joined him in the first place. If anyone's gonna find us
alien allies, it's him."

"Jade, let's be honest. We don't make a very good
impression in this rustbucket, or that flying egg-shell of a
Transiter
.
Why would aliens want to have anything to do with
us
?"

He stops and peers at me down his chest. "Would you
rather leave everything to the Ticks?"

"That's not what I'm saying. Look. All I mean is that
Preston might have good intentions, but he sure as hell's doing everything he
can to make sure it's going nowhere."

"What do you mean?" Jade keeps crawling.

"Isn't it obvious? Sending us out to make contact in
a
Transiter
. Putting
Bray
in charge."

He snorts. "Cut the man some slack."

"He's a self-important prick with no clue what he's
doing."

"That's what
we're
here for, But-Nut. That's
why he recruited us."

"To get his ass out of trouble?"

He stops again, and squints at me. "What are you
talking about?"

"He panicked out there, and almost got himself
killed."

"Preston was never out there."

"Preston?" I ask confusedly. "I'm talking
about Bray."

"Oh." He chuckles. "Of course you
are."

"What's
that
supposed to mean?"

"Nothing."

"Jade!"

He snorts, and keeps pushing forward. I groan and try to
keep up, crawling into the suffocating darkness on my stomach.

We exit the ventilation shaft on top of a pile of
pressurized crates. It's dark except for a couple of dim, red strobe lights
warning us that decontamination is currently underway.

The
Transiter
is parked on polyfoam-cushioned
buffers. An unsightly bundle of cable entrails hangs out of its cracked hull to
trail along the coolant-dampened floor toward the diagnostics terminal.

We walk up to the hatch, and Jade takes a flexpad out of
his pocket and peels a corner open with his fingernail. He pulls out an optical
fiber relay, licks its needle-thin plug and inserts it into a tiny hole in the
left gasket of the hatch. The gasket is backlit by a blue light and the optical
fiber pulses with blue sparks, as the flexpad and the
Transiter
talk to
each other.

"Learned this trick from Vik," Jade says.
"Pretty cool, eh?"

The hatch hisses open and Jade hoists himself up on deck.
I follow, and notice the three chairs have been removed. I crouch next to a
jumble of cables springing from where the projector used to be, and watch Jade
connect to the main computer. Then he sits next to me.

He pulls a small plastic casing out of his pocket. It
contains a sterilizer and a cell-spray, an injector with a tranquilizing
cocktail, and a set of medical instruments for implanting temporary tags. It's
the kind used for emergency synet replacements in case of EM-pulse attacks
during military deployments.

He meets my gaze. "Still wanna do this?"

"We got this far, right?" I take the injector
out of his hand. "We won't be needing this, though. Drugging me is not
gonna work."

"Want me to cut your skull open raw?"

"The MD pumped me full of these. They had no effect
on me other than pissing me off. You don't want me pissed off."

He rolls his eyes and pulls the instruments out of their
rubber fixtures. I lay face-down on the floor, forehead resting on my forearms.
He takes a deep breath. I hear a short hiss, and feel the cool dampness of the
sterilizing spray on the back of my neck.

Jade palpates my vertebrae with steady fingers, then
pricks my skin with the tripod that stabilizes a gamma drill. The rays coalesce
and cut into my skin, cauterizing their way straight into my spine. It hurts,
but not as bad as I expected.

Jade breathes shallowly above me. "There, that's it.
I'm in."

The back of my head starts to burn. Waves of heat run up
and down my back.

Jade inserts the synet dispenser next, and a stabbing
flash of pain pierces my skull. I try to ignore it, focus elsewhere, think of
other things, distract myself. It doesn't work. The pain intensifies. I clench
my jaw.

"Done," Jade says. "But don't move yet. The
slot's still in. I have to check if the synet unfolded correctly."

My jaw hurts from the grinding pressure. I try to breathe
steadily, exhale the pain. It doesn't work.

Jade takes out his flexpad, disinfects the plug he licked
earlier, and sticks it into the carbon nanotube slot sticking out the back of
my head.

I cringe under a million burning stings.

"Did it work?" I whisper, trying not to move my
head.

"Give me a sec."

Whatever happened, I'm prepared for it. I can take it.
Even if the new synet will report some neural damage, or an alien disease. I
can handle it. One way or another.

"There's nothing," Jade mumbles.

"What?"

"I'm not getting any feedback from the synet at all.
My pad tells me it's right where it should be, but there's just nothing coming
from it."

"Let me see." I push myself up and turn around.

He protests, but I snatch the flexpad from his hand and
run a few checks myself. Blood rushes through me as my pulse accelerates,
making me queasy. I give him back the device. My vision narrows and spins. Cold
sweat runs down my skin, and I start to hyperventilate. All my senses howl in
an inarticulate mess.