Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (44 page)

“An averted self-sacrifice. His heart was in
the right place, but I need him,” Ayan said.

“And the messenger in there?” the fleet
warden asked. “The Victory Machine?”

The fleet warden’s guards were between her
and her protection, Jenny Machad and Victor Davis. Ayan activated
shield emitters hidden under the black horizontal slats covering
her hostile environment vacsuit. The emitters glowed red. “He’s
gone.”

Her guards did the same. Ayan’s comm display
notified her that the seven other soldiers they’d left near the
lift were alerted.

"You were only in there for twenty minutes,
and the transmission we picked up between him and the Victory
Machine were so compressed, we couldn't get anything but partial
still images," complained Fleet Warden Harrison. "Did he pass any
information on to you?"

Ayan eyed Victor and Jenny. "Tamber will be
under siege tomorrow morning. You'll find information on the lead
Order of Eden ship - the Leviathan - in the logs you copied from
the Triton. I'd begin preparing right now," she stated.

“We need more information. Please come with
us, you have to be debriefed," Fleet Warden Harrison said, inviting
Ayan to enter a side room.

"I have more important things to do," Ayan
said as she started walking towards the gap in the Warden’s
guards.

Two of them stepped into her path. "I
insist," Fleet Warden Harrison said.

With a glance at the optical controls in her
visor, Ayan disabled the safeties built into the synthetic muscle
woven through her armoured vacsuit and she began walking again. The
nearest pair of guards raised their rifles. She took two quick
steps and punched one guard just below the breastbone. He slid down
the hall past Alaka, who cooly stepped out of the way.

Jenny tripped the other, took his rifle, and
bent it in half effortlessly. She tossed it at another guard hard
enough to knock him to the ground.

Ayan’s shield absorbed several shots from
one guard across the hall. She closed the distance between her and
her attacker in two leaps and bashed into her shoulder first. Bones
broke, and the soldier was sent flailing into the guard next to
her. Ayan drew her sidearm next and pointed it at the fleet warden.
"Let me leave without complications or I order all my cloaked
troops to begin clearing a path between me and my ship," Ayan
ordered calmly.

"We have cloak traps at the entrances-"

"You saw the logs from the Triton. We didn’t
trip them on the way in. They need to be upgraded. You and your
people are surrounded and I don't have time to spare."

Fleet Warden Harrison looked at the barrel
of the particle weapon then back to Ayan's visor. "Let them leave,"
she ordered.

"I'll send you a report with all the
information you need when I have time." Ayan holstered her weapon.
"Right now, you should concentrate on preparing your orbital
defences. According to what I just learned, you fail to keep the
fighting off the ground. Consider it a challenge." In no great
hurry, Ayan strode down the hall towards the lift at the end of the
hall.

"I'm impressed," Alaka said over secure
proximity radio.

"With that stand off? You should have seen
some of the epic battles I've had with my mother, the Admiral,"
Ayan replied, trying to control the shakiness in her voice. The
adrenaline and shock of her own actions were enough to make her
want to hide out of sight until it passed. Following behind Alaka
was almost as good. People didn’t notice her nearly as much when he
was around.

“She’s waking up,” said a slightly garbled
voice from nearby. Alice could feel that the bed she was in was
rumbling, the smell of disinfectant was thick in the air.

She opened her eyes and was immediately
greeted by the sight of an infirmary, seen through a screen filled
with raw programming code. Something was booting up, and it was
inside her head.

Alice’s hand went to her face immediately.
In a panic, she felt for what changed. “What did you do to me?”

“Wait! Wait! Let me explain,” Lewis said,
pulling his arms down around her from behind, trapping her elbows
at her sides.

An android rushed into view, her mismatched
eyes focused like micro-lenses pressed into layers of circuit
board, examining Alice hurriedly. The ‘bot was a fantastic
imitation of a human woman, except for the smaller appendages with
finer tools on the ends that extended from her sides. They were
constantly moving out of the way of her more human looking arms,
except for one that was tipped with a small scanning suite. It
waved in front of Alice, absorbing data from different regions of
her body. “You are on Veers Nine,” it explained in a soothing
voice. “This is emergency medical transport three-oh-eleven and I’m
Seven C, but you can call me Seven.”

“What did you do to me?” Alice said as the
frantically scrolling code finished listing and a targeting reticle
focused on the android. It confirmed what Seven had already told
her.

“Your eye and temple were destroyed. Your
comrade Lewis brought you here and spent his medi-credits to have
you treated. It was very expensive, especially considering the
optics.”

“Optics?” Alice asked, relaxing a little,
recalling her last memory – getting shot at and plunging into the
freezing black water.

“Your eye was destroyed, so I took the
opportunity to upgrade you with a combat implant. It has its own
computer, long term storage, and it’s linked to your mind using a
computing and communications package, just in case you lose the eye
in a future engagement. It’s the perfect union between rugged and
elegant cybernetic solutions. Epitech is the foremost manufacturer
of cybernetic products in this region.”

Alice took a moment to look past the
android. There were other soldiers resting in partitioned sections
of the long cabin. A couple of smaller, dented, and discoloured
robots busied themselves with cleaning a blood trail leading in
through one of the battered doors. Hanging bags of supplies swung
as the vessel moved. She’d never seen the inside of a mobile combat
hospital before, and didn’t think she’d ever want to again. “You
can let me go,” Alice told Lewis. “I’m not going to scratch my eye
out.”

“Sorry,” Lewis said, releasing her. “Never
know how people are going to react when you replace some of their
bits with implants.”

“Some of my bits?” Alice asked.

Lewis held up his hands defensively and
smiled. “Just your eye and the processor node, darlin’.”

“I tired to match your natural eye colour as
well as possible,” Seven told her. “But it’s difficult matching old
organic parts.” She projected a flickering hologram of Alice’s
face. One of her eyes looked much like Seven’s, focusing in
overlapping layers as she looked from one thing to another.
Specifications began to appear as a list in her new heads up
display, detailing zoom distances, maximum recording times in terms
of centuries, impact tolerances, different vision types, and
several other details. Technically the eye was brilliant, and her
vision had never been clearer. It would take her time to get used
to seeing it in the mirror.

“I know,” Lewis said. “I wish I could have
gotten you to a hospital where they could grow you a human one, but
this was the only place that wouldn’t turn you in to authorities
the moment I carried you in. That, and I had credit here.”

“No,” Alice said. “It’s fine, we’re safe.”
To her surprise, the idea of having a cybernetic upgrade didn’t
bother her. The idea that her body was a fleshy temple didn’t
overrule her logic, like it did with the majority of humans. “I
like it.”

“Well good,” Lewis said, relieved.

“You should like it, it is our best ocular
combat implant and I masterfully reconstructed your eye socket as
well as the surrounding flesh, which is still perfectly human. I
wanted to use bio-armour-mesh, but the lieutenant wouldn’t
consent,” Seven said. “Now, I must tend to other patients.”

“Lieutenant?” Alice asked Lewis.

“Another life,” he replied. “I served on
this battlefield for six years. Got off with most of my human
parts, too.”

“What about the thing we were after?” Alice
asked.

Lewis patted his jacket and nodded. “You had
a death grip on it, saved us a trip to the bottom of the sea. This
whole excursion would have been a wash if it weren’t for you, being
honest. I’ve never seen anyone get through that kind of security
without firing a shot.”

“Well, armoured suits and weapons would have
tripped alarms, especially near a luxury suite,” Alice explained.
She wasn’t used to the kind of praise she was getting from Lewis,
who was every inch the war veteran. The medical transport, the
little bit of story she got out of him about his past on Veers
Nine, completed a picture of him that made all too much sense to
her.

“I know there were separate layers of
security, and you hacked them without a neural node, then snuck
past more guards that we could fit into this mo-hos.”

“Mo-hos?” Alice asked, laughing at the sound
of the term. She ignored his compliments.

“Mobile hospital.”

Alice sat up and made sure that everything
was where it should be, then dug into Lewis’s jacket for the Amber
Heart. She closed her hand around the bag and Lewis closed his hand
around her wrist. “It’s mine, even if you spent a life’s worth of
credits on fixing me up, this job and the rock are still mine,” she
said.

“We never discussed my cut,” Lewis said.
“You made your way through that maze like a pro, but still needed a
hand in the end.”

“I was sure I could convince them to let me
go,” Alice replied.

“Until you got shot,” Lewis said. “Needed
some saving.”

“All right, how much?” Alice asked.

“Half, fully half of whatever getting this
rock is worth, and I know what this is. It’s worth a lot.”

“Not in your wildest,” Alice scoffed. “The
reward’s not cash, anyhow.”

“Oh?” Lewis said, smiling crookedly. “What
are we earning?”

Alice regretted telling him as much as she
had, but he saved her twice. Just the fact that she needed saving
at all was frustrating, but his mercenary attitude made it so much
worse. He deserved a reward, certainly, but she didn’t think she
could trick him into getting less than he deserved, and she
desperately wanted to. “There is some cash,” Alice said after some
hesitation. “You can have almost all of it, ninety thousand in
Galactic Currency.”

“Ninety thousand?” Lewis whispered,
recoiling a little. He let her slip the Amber Heart out of his
pocket. “You’re kidding. That thing would go for over a hundred
million on a black market auction. Probably a lot more.”

“You’re right, but you can’t auction this.
It’s too hot. The chances of the word getting out and who knows
what authority busting the event before you get paid are too high.”
Alice checked inside the bag to make sure it was there, and her
head’s up display verified that it was indeed the Amber Heart
before she could request that it scan the object. She took her
battered jacket off the hook and stuffed the precious object into a
hidden pocket in the under-arm. “I’m not fetching this for a buyer,
I’m working for its rightful owner.”

“Easy enough to look up,” Lewis said.
“Wouldn’t take much for me to get it off you, leave you somewhere,
like here, and bring it to him myself.”

Alice was stunned at Lewis’ matter-of-fact
declaration. She stared into his face and saw nothing but
self-assuredness. She was sneaky, and had gotten out of some nasty
situations, but just at that moment, she was completely vulnerable.
Not only that, but Lewis definitely seemed to have more experience
at shady dealings. He just stared at her with an expectant, amused
expression that was beginning to make her blood boil.

“But then,” Lewis said. “I didn’t meet with
your employer, I only caught wind of the job you were on.”

“And shot your way into it,” Alice said. “I
never invited you, and my employer chose me over anyone else who
could do this.”

“So, there it is,” he said. “Somehow, you
made an impression on this bloke, and he’s keen to see you at the
finish with his bauble. My two saves are still worth a nice slice
though.”

He was right, frustratingly so. “I’ll give
you half the cash and you can help crew the ship I’m getting.”

“First Mate,” Lewis said. “Is it an armed
ship?”

Alice looked at him in a new light,
considering what it might be like to be stuck with someone like
Lewis. He didn’t look too old, seemed to have more than a little
British in him, and knew his way around weaponry. He was also a
better pilot than she was. Having people like him around opened up
a whole spectrum of work, and he’d done nothing to seem
untrustworthy. It’s what he said that made her question him, but
she couldn’t help but think that it was just his way of keeping her
on her toes. “It’s an armed ship, and it’s new.”

“So he’s paying market value for what he
already owns.”

“The price is high because it’s all got to
be done quietly,” Alice said.

“He knows the thief,” Lewis concluded.

“Ex-wife, actually.”

“Why didn’t I guess?” he said, laughing.

“How did you find me in the first place?”
Alice asked.

“Does it matter?”

“If I’m to seriously offer you second in
command on a brand new ship, yes, it does.”

“It’s like I told you before, I caught wind
that you’d been hired to go after something big on the Stellarnet,
and thought I’d stay within saving distance,” he said.

“You’ve done this before?”

A holographic news report appeared between
them, projected from something he had implanted or was wearing, she
couldn’t tell which. A comical news caster announced that ‘Loretta
Neve and her three children had been rescued by a group of
mercenaries’ over video footage of Lewis and five other
rough-looking spacers. “It’s a living,” Lewis said. “This job paid
pretty well, but the cash ran out after a few months so I went back
out.”