Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (46 page)

Eve stared into the hard face of the
creature standing over her. His hand gripped her shoulder gently,
and there was alarm in his voice but no indication of malice. It
was true, she was having a hard time remembering what happened the
day before, but she could recall Veers Nine like she’d just left
right down to the smell, and the grit in the air. “Help me,” she
said, feeling as though she was drowning.

The creature looked over his shoulder and
several of his companions moved towards the pool swiftly. He looked
back at her. “I’ll earn your trust in separating you from Alice. I
can feel that you’d like her saved, and I’ll make sure neither of
you are lost.”

“Can you help me get away from Meunez?” Eve
asked.

“You mean Hampon,” Wheeler said. “Right? She
means Lister?” he asked the beast.

“She does,” he confirmed. “We shouldn’t have
put her in stasis for so long. This has advanced further than I
thought.”

“Stasis?” Eve asked. A slim silver casket
was brought from the pool to her side. Once again, her limbs, her
mouth were no longer under her control.

“We can’t strike a deal like this,” Kipley
said. “Is there going to be anything left in there after you’ve
scooped all of that other chick out?”

“Shut it,” Wheeler snapped at him. “We got
to her in time, she’ll be fine.”

Eve watched dumbly as the slender case was
tilted up vertically and opened. “Be ready to catch her,” the beast
said. He gestured towards the white bones arranged inside. The
skeleton emitted white light, then flesh was woven so quickly it
appeared to erupt forth. In the time it took her to blink her eye,
a fully intact human woman stood where the case and bones once did.
She was caught in the arms of three issyrians with care.

They brought the woman’s body closer. She
was hairless, with a plain face.

“Are you sure about this?” Wheeler said.
“You’ve done neural healing before, but never a wetware to wetware
transfer.”

“Your memories of the Victory Machine’s
predictions, as they were given to Collins, made you certain that
Eve and Alice would stand in one place at the same time in two
bodies. Why question it now?”

“The Victory Machine didn’t provide an
image, or coordinates, just a line of text. That thing has a way of
being cryptic, and that kind of statement comes from the
interpreter, not the machine itself.”

“So you’ve said.” The beast placed one hand
on Eve’s head. It was so large it covered most of her forehead and
she could feel his fingers firmly gripping the base of her skull.
He did the same to the breathing female body opposite her. She
could feel something cutting into the back of her head, and wanted
to scream as pressure increased on several small points of the bone
beneath. With a crack that resounded in her head, whatever was
tunnelling into her skull broke through. “I know how to do this.
There’s no doubt that this transfer will work.”

“What’ll be left when you’re through?”
Wheeler asked.

The beast looked towards him. “Everything
that matters,” he stated. He closed his eyes and Eve suddenly felt
Alice as though she were looking at her memories all at once. The
horrible truth came to light: Lewis was dead. Alice died aboard the
Triton. She had been dreaming of ghosts.

As Eve began to mourn Lewis and Alice, the
weight of emotion was lifted from her. She couldn’t feel Alice’s
memories as she did before, not so quickly or naturally. It was as
though someone had put a partition down between her and the other
woman. She could pierce it if she chose, and she could feel them as
though she was recollecting something she’d experienced, but the
constant knowledge that they were not her own put distance between
her and those experiences. The memories were still there, but the
feeling that Alice was somehow with her was gone.

Then she felt the Beast. His name was Clark
Patterson. He was a Freeground soldier once who was controlled by
corrupt elements of his government. He was never asked if he wanted
to continue serving after they executed his sister for her
intention to defect to the Order of Eden. He was programmed to
serve. Omira Gerring, a woman who was once Doctor William Marcelles
before he transformed himself using advanced framework technology,
freed him from their programming. He also began Clark’s
transformation using a highly advanced version of the framework
conversion process and introducing him to the issyrians. Clark
could access human, issyrian, proto-edxian and a host of cybernetic
physiologies and he began to remake himself.

He most related to the plight of a group of
issyrians who were being exterminated by the Order of Eden for
territory and financial gain. He fought for them, lost all of his
dearest friends in the fight either through death or alienation,
and had come to strike a bargain. He wanted to trade the safety of
the issyrian race for the technology Hampon required to save
himself from the temporal radiation that assaulted his body.
Wheeler promised that it could be done, that the trade would be
made and the terms honoured.

Beyond all those details, she felt something
familiar, deeply emotional. Clark had lost so much. Everyone he
loved was gone. Sadness, loneliness and, most of all, rage flowed
endlessly from that well of emotion. He had learned how to shelter
the issyrians around him from most of it, but it would never be
hidden well enough to prevent contamination in their ranks. What
Wheeler was saying earlier, about the smell in the air, the smell
of the clutch’s waters, was something she realized too. It was
sweet, almost sickly so, but there was bitterness beneath, and that
was Clark Patterson’s rage, the Beast.

Then his thoughts, his memories were gone.
Eve dropped to the floor, gasping for air. The tiny holes in her
skull and the incisions overtop healed. She looked up and watched
as the nondescript, hairless female body started to change.

Red-brown hair grew where it ought to,
especially from her head, where it didn’t stop until it was past
shoulder length. Her blue eyes opened and the rest of her body
adjusted to specifications right out of Alice’s memories. That
wasn’t what the woman looked like, it was how she pictured herself,
which never matched with the body she escaped into on the Overlord
II.

The Beast let the woman’s head go, then
turned to Eve. “Would you like to be able to communicate with your
fleet?” he asked.

Eve was surprised to find the need to
commune with her metal children fresh and urgent. “Yes, more than
anything, yes.”

“Then turn away from Alice, decide to remove
those memories from your mind right now,” he told her.

Before she could question the decision, the
memories were gone. She couldn’t recall anything other than what
she’d dreamt, the ability to recall anything else was gone. Even
the dreams were beginning to fade, slipping away like any nocturnal
imagining. “Wait, I wasn’t sure,” Eve said, shocked.

“I’m sorry. I left an instinct in your mind,
like a subroutine in a program that would reject any foreign memory
if you chose. There’s no going back,” the Beast said. He turned his
attention to Wheeler then. “Tell me when she’s delivered our terms
to Hampon.”

Eve watched as he returned to the pool,
followed by four of the issyrians who arrived with him. “But I was
just getting to know her,” Eve muttered to herself. She looked to
the slumbering woman, who was being laid out on a cot. One of the
issyrians pressed a command and control unit onto her wrist and
activated it. A basic blue vacsuit materialized from her neck to
toes. “Now she’s real.”

“I know,” Wheeler said. “There are a lot of
moving parts to this trade. Nice to see that we’re getting more
advantages all the time though.”

"Both crates are aboard, Sir," whispered
Frost.

Jake leaned against the bulkhead of the
narrow maintenance access hall. "There were more than one?"

"Aye. Between small arms confiscated and
found while we were aboard the Triton, we got ourselves a nice
armoury. Two crates."

"Anyone find out what was inside when you
were moving them to the Warlord?”

"One of the issyrians caught them on a scan
as I was passing. I told it I was moving them under your orders,
and to keep it quiet. I think it let me go because the guns weren't
in security's inventory."

"Good. Oh, and if you can’t tell whether an
issyrian is male or female, just call it a ‘he’. Something I
learned from Agameg,” Jake said. “He said it’s what they expect
from humans.”

"Aye. Not used to having so many of them
around. A few more signed up at the gate today. Wish we had them
aboard the Warlord, they work twice as long as most humans and
complain half as much.”

“True. Maybe we’ll take a few on after
this,” Jake replied. “For now, I’m glad we’ll get into port with
something to sell.”

“Lucky we stored these in a gunnery deck
lockup compartment and forgot 'em. The only people who remember
taking all these guns from the star liner passengers are me and
Steph."

"You take your favourites yet?"

"Nay, waiting until things get quiet. What's
the penalty for selling these things?" Frost asked.

"Small arms? In Carthan space we'd lose the
Warlord, spend some time in jail, or get transported out of the
system with nothing. Where we're going, we'd be hit with a
registration fee and a sixty percent tax if we don’t claim the
sales in advance. I’m claiming in advance, so get someone to take
inventory when we’re out of the system."

"Good thinking," Frost said. "Good thing we
have a place to sell these at all. We're just serving the public
needs, people have to protect themselves."

“Exactly. It’s been a long time since you
were in the gun trade. Miss it?”

“Not until I had my hands on these crates.
Now I can’t wait to get back in. If the market out there is like it
is in Port Rush, then this is going to be a good trip. I wonder if
the Carthans’ll have something to say about our drop guns," Frost
said.

"You just can't wait to fire those up."

"Being honest, I'd rather we didn't need
them this trip. Maiden voyages are touchy enough without dropping
seeker mines."

"Good point." Jake looked at the door to his
left for a moment. "Let's get this done so we can finish up and get
going."

"Good to be back, Jake. Don't get me wrong,
the Triton was a wonder, but this old hull is home, whether she’s
called the Samson or the Warlord."

"Good to be back," Jake agreed with a
nod.

Frost left the hall. "Quiet down!" Jake
heard him call out, silencing the remaining crew of the
Warlord.

Captain Valance took a breath and held it
for a moment. "One more speech, then the fun begins," he
exhaled.

There were over a hundred crewmembers in the
main cargo hold. A few stood at attention at seeing him. Most
followed the senior officers’ example, however. Ashley sat on one
of a Uriel fighter's thruster pods amidst Stephanie, Finn, Agameg,
as well as several rescued slaves. Others looked from the second or
third level walkways. The new design of the main cargo hold allowed
for a large opening and fighter launch systems at the top. Nerine
and David, a pair Jake had come to know since rescuing them from
slavery, watched with the crewmembers that looked down from the
second level catwalk. For the first time, the ship didn’t feel like
the Samson anymore; it had become the Warlord. He thought it would
happen when he saw the hull finish thickening and hardening in
space, or walk along one of the seven gun walks, but it was seeing
the cargo space he was released from a stasis tube onto that did
it. With the division between cargo areas gone, the whole ship
seemed new. The place where he was practically born was only three
metres from where he was standing, and he didn’t realize it until
he got a good look.

Jake couldn't help but be surprised at how
many people decided to remain aboard as he looked the crew over
with a quick sweep of his gaze. He had his pick of specialists,
hard workers, mechanics, and soldiers. Jake was sure most of the
people who worked on his ship would volunteer for the Triton, but
less than a fifth did so. He had to reassign some of his people to
transfer, otherwise there would have been too many people aboard.
Former Aucharian military, rebels from Pandem, a smattering of law
enforcement officers from across two sectors, and many technical
crewmembers remained.

All together, there would be one hundred
forty seven souls aboard, more than Captain Valent’s ship ever
needed. More than half of them would be working on the ship around
the clock, continuing to build the unfinished interior. Even the
soldiers aboard wouldn’t be idle. They had labour assignments
during their downtime.

Jake knew Stephanie was quietly pleased with
the bunch she’d chosen for the Warlord boarding teams and security
personnel. She called them her marines, and adjusted the markings
on their vacsuits so they had WARLORD MARINE instead of WARLORD
CREW written between their shoulders. They stood near her, most of
them dressed in heavy environment and encounter vacsuits that had
been made on the Triton.

He didn’t show his approval to the crew
openly. His expression was almost stern as he looked over the lot
of them.

They silently waited on Captain Valance’s
word, for the most part. He took a breath and started, the rear
cargo hold and work shop booming with his voice. “You’ve all worked
hard regardless of an uncertain future. I know what it's like to
wait for a promise to be fulfilled, wondering if it's empty.
Wondering if you'll ever see a reward. There has been a lot of cash
in your pockets since we paid you, and I understand that you
probably want to spend some of it, maybe in a place like Drifton,
just a few slips away. You could celebrate like kings and queens
for a few days there. The problem is, a king in a shanty town is a
peasant anywhere else. Still, a lot of people would prefer that to
taking off with full pockets.”