The Star Pirate's Folly (14 page)

Bill Silver awoke in weightless suffocating darkness. His
brain made the terrifying assumption that he was in vacuum, but a sharp intake
of breath relieved his fear. Was he sleepwalking again? He groped blindly and
felt bedsheets.

“Myra,” he said. “Where are the lights?”

No response. Eyes wide and straining, Bill realized he was
floating face down above his bed. Why weren’t the backups on? Just as his eyes
adjusted to the darkness the lights snapped back to life. Silver squeezed his
eyes shut against the sudden brightness as the artificial gravity pulled him to
his bed.

“Lights
off
,” Bill hissed.

Immediately the searing white lights on the ceiling were
replaced with a soft amber glow from smaller bulbs recessed along the base of
the walls. It was just enough to see in the darkness without forcing his eyes to
adjust. He rolled out of bed and stood.

“Myra,” he repeated, this time thick with irritation.

Still nothing.

“This better not be your idea of a joke,” he growled.

After dressing and reattaching his prosthetic Silver headed
to the bridge. Everything seemed operational except Myra. He’d always thought
it was sloppy to have the AI in control of so many of the ship’s systems, but
she insisted she could optimize things better than the stock computer. So far
she was never wrong—an infuriating quality which had Silver itching to tell the
Captain “I told you so.”

He went up the ramp to the bridge, through the door, and
Ferro whirled on him wide-eyed from the pilot’s chair.

“What just happened?” she demanded.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Silver said.

“Just cruising like normal, middle of talking to Myra and
everything goes dark,” she said. “No warning, no nothing. For a good twenty
seconds we were dead in the void there, just drifting. Then everything came
right back.”

“Where’s the Captain?”

“Left me on watch about three hours ago, haven’t seen him
since.”

“I’ll find him—”

Silver turned to leave as the bridge door opened.

“Sorry about that,” the Captain said as he entered.
“Couldn’t risk telling anyone or Myra would have found out.”

“Found out what?” Silver asked.

“That I was shutting her down.”

“Why did you do that?”

The Captain shook his head. “She sabotaged the damn ship.”

***

Bee slept through the blackout, but she woke when Captain
Anson’s voice came in over the speakers with a curt command.

“Crew meeting on the bridge,
now.
”

Half-asleep still, she dressed without even thinking about
it, but it occurred to her before she walked out the door that as a passenger
she might not be included.

“Myra?” she asked. “Does that mean me too, or…? Myra?”

Bee frowned and headed to the bridge. She heard footsteps
around the corner and out of habit slowed to what could only be described as a
creep, padding forward to the wall’s edge. The door to the bridge opened and
she heard a snatch of Silver’s voice before it shut.

“—was only half our power cells, but imagine what she could
have done. Autonomous AIs are illegal for a reason, Captain—”

After waiting at the corner for a few more seconds Bee moved
to the bridge. The bulkhead door was shut. She could almost make out the muffled
voices, but she couldn’t understand anything. As she went to put her ear up to
the door it started to open. She backed down the ramp in retreat but made no
effort to hide herself.

“Hang on,” Willis said to her as he poked his head out, then
turned to yell over his shoulder, “Is this a passenger-friendly meeting?”

“Yeah, why not,” the Captain called.

“Come on in,” Willis said as he waved her inside.

With a sheepish smile Bee joined the rest of the crew on the
bridge. Willis shut the door behind her. Captain Anson leaned against the back
of the command chair, Ferro piloted from her own chair, and the rest of the
crew gathered in a semicircle around him. Behind them Bee could see the
shuttered windows on the front of the ship.

“Don’t touch anything,” Willis said.

He nudged Silver and Truly from behind and they parted to
let him and Bee in. Everyone but Spud, the Governor, and Gim was present.

“Oh, she’s part of the crew now?” Silver said when he saw
Bee.

“She might as well know,” the Captain said. “There’s been
some trouble with our power supply. I gave Myra permission to tweak the power
systems for efficiency. I was double checking her work when I found out instead
of optimizing everything she’d vented half of our power cells. We’ll be fine,
it’s just an annoyance.”

“How do you know it was her?” Bee asked.

“She covered her tracks with the new permissions I gave her
and prevented me from finding out immediately by displaying false information
on the bridge.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Well it’s, uh—complicated. I need to do a lot more digging
before I can say for sure, but I think she was trying to stop us from going out
into the belt.”

“Wait, it wasn’t just a mistake? She did it on purpose?”

The Captain looked away and ran a hand through his hair.
“Myra’s not like most AIs. She makes her own choices, just like you or me.
She’s… based on a person.”

Silver, Truly, and Willis exchanged some uncomfortable
glances and Bee got the impression this was a subject to be avoided. She
stopped asking questions even though she wanted to know more.

“Anyway,” the Captain resumed, “It means we’ll have to swap
out our power cells when we get to Optima. We shouldn’t be there more than half
a day, but it’s one more thing on the list now. The real problem is Myra. She
pulled a lot of weight around here—more than I should have given her. She was
managing too much without enough oversight.”

Silver nodded his agreement.

“I’ve got no problem just using the stock nav,” Ferro said.
“The day I need a fancy AI to help me fly is the day I turn in my wings.”

“Yeah, well just don’t let Myra hear you talk like that,”
Captain Anson said. “I’m not leaving her offline for good, just until I correct
the problem. Everyone’s going to have to do more work for now, but we’ll still
need her after Optima. Any questions?”

Silver looked like he wanted to object, but he crossed his
arms and kept quiet.

At their silence he said, “Good. Ferro, Silver, I need you
two here. Everyone else is taking up space. Go on, beat it.”

Bee shuffled off the bridge with Willis and Truly. She had a
thousand questions but wasn’t sure who to ask. She didn’t really know either of
them. Willis left like he had somewhere to be, but Truly was headed to the
kitchen.

“Hey Truly,” she said, waving him down. “The Captain offered
to teach me some more in the nullroom, but I’m guessing he’s busy now. I was
wondering if you could?”

Truly turned and considered it, bobbing his head with a
frown. “Alright. Yeah, alright. Let me eat first.”

“Can you come get me when you’re done? I’ll be in my room.”

Truly gave her a thumbs-up as he continued to the kitchen
and Bee headed to her room. She figured she could ask him about things
casually, ease into the conversation over the course of their training session.
They all seemed friendly, but she didn’t want to overstep her bounds and create
friction with anyone she didn’t have to—especially the first officer.

Bee needed every ally she could get. Silver already hated
her and unfortunately he seemed to have a lot of pull on the ship. The Captain
was nice, but she didn’t expect to see much more of him. Same with the pilot
Ferro. She wished she could get back on the bridge and just watch.

She wanted to know how everything on the ship worked—and
plus then she’d be able to find out more about Myra. The Captain said he was
going to fix her or something, what did that mean? Would she be the same when
she came back on? Bee hoped so. She opened the door to her room and smiled at
what she saw inside.

The white loaner nullsuit was spread out on the floor. She’d
forgotten the Captain let her bring it up to her room. She wanted to clean it
up like he suggested, but she wasn’t allowed in the nullroom with just Spud so
she stayed up a few hours with Myra figuring out how to disassemble and clean
it. It unsettled her a bit how they talked about Spud—like he was an animal,
something not quite tame.

Before she went to sleep she’d put the suit all back
together and laid it out. It was a grungy off-white when she first got it, but
after scrubbing off the layers of dust and grime it was almost radiant. The
color reminded her of the buffet dishes back at the hotel and she became
homesick for her cozy little room.

She hoped Hargrove was okay.

***

“Uh, Truly? Is this on right?” Bee asked, gesturing at
herself in the suit. The helmet was still off—she didn’t want to put that on
until she was sure about the rest of the suit.

But also she wasn’t sure if she would puke or not, and she
didn’t want to do it in the helmet. Being inside the suit gave her this strange
feeling like falling, and she kept wanting to reach her arms out to catch
herself even though she was standing still.

“Yeah, looks fine,” Truly said after a brief inspection. He
wore a black undersuit, the only thing she’d seen him in yet besides armor.
“Someone teach you how?”

“Myra,” Bee said. “She helped me last night.”

“She must like you,” he said as he dressed himself in his
gray armor. There was a mechanical whir and locking noise as each piece of
armor attached at the orange striped joints.

“I guess so,” she said as she took a couple of wobbling
steps. “What… is she?”

She was having trouble keeping her balance since the boots
kept her anchored to the ground, but the rest of her felt light and floaty. She
weighed nothing, which made her movements quick, but she was used to
compensating for the pull of gravity still. Nothing felt right.

“She’s an AI,” was all Truly said as he slipped his
gauntlets on.

“No, I know that, but—never mind,” she said, struggling to
stay upright.

The weirdest part about the nullsuit was that without the
helmet on she could feel how heavy her head was compared to the rest of her.
The thought gave her stomach a threatening lurch and she had to crouch to
steady herself, dropping her helmet in the process.

“It’s okay.” Fully armored now, Truly’s voice projected from
his suit’s speakers. He picked up her helmet for her. “Takes some getting used
to. Since we’re indoors you can take your helmet off if you think you’re gonna
spew—long as you clean it up.”

“Gee, thanks,” Bee said, grabbing her helmet.

“But if you ever end up in zee you’re better off just
swimming in it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said with a laugh.

Bee slid the helmet on and secured it. Truly gave a
thumbs-up after checking her and beckoned her to follow. He took a few long
steps before making a swan dive up into the center of the nullroom, using just
enough force to drift along slowly toward the ceiling while doing neat
somersaults.

“Showoff,” Bee muttered as she focused on walking without
falling over.

“Whistler, you got any more drones?”

Sweat-soaked inside his nullsuit, Two-Gut Gruce couldn’t
keep the desperation from his voice. He’d split up his squads along the
hilltop, scattered them to avoid losing too many in a concentrated attack but
stayed close enough to keep formation. The muscles in his legs tremored from
exertion—without the suit’s assistance he would have collapsed already.

“Down to three,” Whistler said.

“We’ll need some cover,” Gruce said. “Or more targets at
least. Keep moving, you grubs know the drill.”

A chorus of “yups” from the other men. Gruce opened the
private channel to Starhawk.

“Ready, boss,” he said.

“Got ten of my birds headed your way, Two-Gut,” Starhawk said
over the common channel. “Give ‘em thirty seconds. They’ll be more use than
Red
Shade
was, I’m sure. I’ve seen kittens put up a better fight.”

Gruce’s eye twitched at the insult. He couldn’t hear his
men’s laughter, but he could feel it in the silence that followed. All he could
muster was, “Sorry, boss.”

“If you don’t think you can do this, don’t waste my time.
Their guns are forming up again and I’m an easy target up here. Die quickly or
get the job done so we can leave.”

Furious, Gruce shouted orders to his men. “Alright you mangy
apes, snap to and keep steady! I’ve got center, Whistler’s left flank, Pluck
you’ve got the right! Ten seconds and we charge!”

***

“What do you mean he said no?” demanded Hargrove.

Sergeant Mallory glared. “What do you think ‘no’ means?”

“I’ve been held here for hours! You can’t just—”

“We are trying to protect you,” the Sergeant said. “Along
with the rest of the entire population of this city. You’re not nearly as
important as you think you are. There are hundreds of others missing and we
don’t have the resources to put your needs above everyone else’s.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything but
let me go
.”

Mallory shook his head. “Everyone else in the city is trying
to get down here and you’re trying to get back up. You understand it’s about to
be a war zone out there?”

“Yes, and I won’t leave someone I’m responsible for to fend
for herself in the middle of it!”

“You got on that bus, Mr. Levene. You chose to put yourself
in our protection.”

“I made a mistake.”

“The decision’s been made,” Sergeant Mallory said as he
turned to leave. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“Then you’re useless!” Hargrove shouted.

His shoulders dropped when the door slid shut. He didn’t
know what else to do. If they wouldn’t let him out, he couldn’t help Bee. There
had to be some way for him to do something—anything. He was trapped with no
obvious means of escape.

When his datapad rang, Hargrove knew it had to be another
solicitation. He checked the display and almost threw it against the wall when
he saw the same number that had just called him minutes before. Well, he’d give
them a piece of his mind—at least yelling at someone would give him something
to do.

“Why are you calling again?” he demanded.

“Oh, I’m so thrilled to speak with you again, sir. I have an
incredible opportunity for you today.” The man’s voice gushed excitement.

Hargrove cut him off as he was about to launch into what
sounded like a well-rehearsed pitch. “Your name.”

“Of course, sir. My name’s Robert626 and I’m a recruiter for
the Volunteer Core Militia.”

“Privateers,” Hargrove said with disgust. “Dress it up
however you like, I know what you are. And you don’t recruit volunteers. That’s
idiotic.”

“Well, we’re an all-volunteer outfit, but no one can sign up
if they don’t know about us! We have to get our name out there somehow.”

“Do you have no shame, calling a man to profit from his
misfortune?”

Robert626 hesitated. “Misfortune? Sir, you just collected on
the most lucrative bounty inside the Core for years. And considering the man you
killed I’d say you did a good deed today. VCM is always on the lookout for new
talent, and we think you’ve got what it takes.”

Hargrove cringed at the man’s can-do attitude, and was about
to tell Robert how ridiculous the whole proposition was when a thought struck
him.

“What can you do for me?” Hargrove asked.

“Well, let me just start off with what we call our ‘Core
Values.’ The Volunteers are a network of reserve privateers that extend from
Surface all the way out—”

“No, no. What can you offer me? Not money—I have specific
needs, and you might be able to help me.”

“What kind of needs?”

“A girl I know went missing before the comet passed. I want
to find her but I’m inside a bombardment bunker underneath Overlook City. The
police won’t let me leave and they’re too busy to comb the city looking for
her, but I might know where to find her. Can you get me out?”

“Sir,” Robert626 said with firm resolve, “it would be my
absolute pleasure to assist you today.”

One hour later, Sergeant Mallory stormed into the room with
another man in tow. The oddly proportioned sergeant stood at the door and
gestured for Hargrove to get up and leave.

“Alright, let’s go,” Mallory said. “You don’t want our
completely secure fortified facility to keep you alive, it’s your right to be a
moron and get yourself killed. We’ve got all this square on the record so when
you get hurt don’t think you can get some kind of settlement from this—we’ll
come down on you with all the stars in the ‘verse.”

The slim man who followed the sergeant in walked toward
Hargrove, hand outstretched in greeting. He wore a tight-fitting white jumpsuit
with black and red trim. Hargrove shook hands with him.

“Wonderful to meet you, sir. I’m Robert626 and now that I’m
here you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Just get me out of here,” Hargrove said.

***

“Half a mile from the dome, boss,” Gruce said over the
private channel to Starhawk, heaving for air as he sprinted downhill toward the
dome with his men.

“You sound
fat
, Gruce,” Starhawk said with an amused
chuckle.

Before Gruce could react to the barb, superheated beams of
light sliced through the canopy above his squad. Dicer, his number two,
crumpled instantly as a red laser bored through his skull, burning through the
nullsteel armor like plastic. The suit drifted eerily through the air,
weightless, Dicer’s body still twitching inside.

Two-Gut threw himself away from his position and felt the
heat from a laser scorch the armor on his right shoulder. Aerial attack—drones,
maybe. Bad news. He scrambled behind a massive fallen tree trunk and swapped
his filters to x-ray. His lens display picked out four human targets above
him—a squad of nullsuits. So they came out personally to greet his attack.

“Suits in the air,
scatter
!” Gruce barked over the
common band. “Whistler, drones up!”

“We got you, big man,” rumbled an unfamiliar voice in reply.
“Squadron C assisting.”

Diving away from the tree trunk, Gruce glanced at his map as
three warships peeled off from the formation of ten above the city, just beyond
reach of its defenses. The four suits above him flitted around, their laser beams
raking the forest floor nearby as they struggled to hit him. Whistler’s drones
drew their fire for a moment, giving Gruce time to take cover and watch as his
air support swooped in.

Machine guns from the three ships shredded two of the enemy
suits and the other two dropped into the forest. One was too slow and a hail of
bullets found its target just as he dipped below the tree line. Gruce grinned
and doubled back toward the last remaining suit. That would be his ticket into
the city.

Gruce spotted the fallen suit face down on the ground near
Dicer’s body. Looked like he yanked himself down too hard, crumpled his arms
underneath his body. Rookie mistake. Lost his weapon, too. Gruce vaulted over
the fallen trunk and surged the gravity nodes in his boots and palms to pull
himself down onto his foe, driving a vicious heel into the suit’s exposed neck
as he landed.

The Cap City trooper inside the suit died in an instant
under Two-Gut Gruce’s heel, snuffed out like Dicer on the muddy forest floor
beside him. He kicked the suit over onto its back. No glory in a merciful
death. Gruce knew if today was his day he wouldn’t go out so peacefully.

“Pluck, I’ve got our key to the city,” Gruce said.

“Moments, dearest,” Pluck said, the words tumbling from his
mouth with excitement. “Only moments.”

On the map, Pluck’s icon came streaking toward him. The
squirrelly tech expert leaped onto the dead suit with a gleeful cackle and
pulled a long spike from his belt which was connected like an umbilical cord to
his suit. He arched his back as he brought the spike over his head with both
hands and plunged it into the top of the suit’s helmet.

The dead man’s suit spasmed as though in agony, writhing in
the mud underneath Pluck who howled and whooped as he struggled to hold the suit’s
arms down.

“Oh, I’m in deep,” Pluck moaned. “Still warm, it’s all still
warm. Everything, everything, give me
everything
, my love!”

“Boss, we got keys,” Gruce said over the private channel to
Starhawk.

“Good,” Starhawk said. “We’ll make a hole. Get inside, get
the map, and get to the gate station. My birds are dropping you some fresh
grubs. Don’t be wasteful.”

Gruce watched as the three warships overhead opened their
underbelly doors and hugged the treetops. Six more armors stepped out of each
craft and plunged into the forest nearby. The ships zoomed off to rejoin the
others above Overlook City. Flak clouds blossomed in their path and a trio of
sonic booms cracked the air as the three nimble craft dodged away from the
city’s defenses.

Gruce drew his rifle as he approached the new armors. These
were Starhawk’s men, not his. Any one of them could have orders to put him down
and take over.

“Fresh grubs up front!” Gruce shouted over the common band.
“First one in the city gets a quarter of my share.”

A raucous cheer went up and several of the more enterprising
new recruits shoved their squadmates out of the way to get a head start. Now
numbering twenty-eight, the armored pirate soldiers stormed the city,
zigzagging randomly to avoid being tracked by the city’s defenses. When his men
in the lead broke through the forest into open grassland Gruce saw more squads
of enemy suits deploy from the city. Drones, too.

It would be a bloody advance. Gruce brought up the rear of
the formation with his own men, stopping at the edge of the forest. The
troopers in the Core weren’t used to fighting battle-ready men like his, true
killers who fought to win. They’d be a good distraction for his own crew, the
real threat. With access codes to the city’s entrances they could break inside
undetected.

His men in the lead were out in the open now. They didn’t
have the trees for cover, so they changed tactics—the men took a skier’s
stance, leaning back while using their boot nodes to push them a few feet from
the ground as their palm nodes pulled them forward. At breakneck speed they
raced to the city’s walls.

“Cloaks up,” Gruce said over the private channel to the
remaining ten armors from his original crew. “Put some distance between you and
every man around you. We bounce high and fast to the city when the hammer
drops.”

***

Hargrove stuck close behind the recruiter as they made their
way toward the elevator to the surface. Every other person in the compact
hallway hurried in the opposite direction, forcing them to shoulder their way
through at points. They were followed by two Overlook City police officers,
their escort to the surface.

“How did you get me out so fast?” Hargrove asked.

“A VCM badge gives you a lot of leverage,” Robert626 said
over his shoulder.

Hargrove was suspicious of the Volunteers’
intentions—nothing good ever came from an unsolicited call. But at least he was
out of that damn holding room. Now he could focus on finding Bee.

“When we get up there we should try the hotel first,”
Hargrove said.

“Oh, we’ve got a team looking for her already,” Robert626
replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you gave me her information and I passed it along to
one of our teams up in the city.”

“I didn’t know,” Hargrove said.

He hadn’t seen the recruiter make a call, which meant if he
was passing information along it was through a neural link. Thought computers
made Hargrove’s skin crawl. His opinion of Robert626 and the Volunteer Core
Militia sank further.

“Don’t worry, they’ll find her—they’re very good.”

Hargrove stopped in the bustling hallway. “No, I want to
look for her myself. That was the deal.”

Robert626 swung around to face Hargrove, pulling him off to
the side. “I completely understand. Of course we’re going to look for her as
well—we’re on the way right now to a squad of VCM troopers who are going to
escort us through the city. But we’ve got some of our very best members on it
already. They might even find her before we get up there!”

Hargrove pushed past him and resumed walking to the
elevator. “Let’s just go.”