The Machine Awakes (26 page)

It looked like absolutely nothing was happening in the other room—the psi-interrogator leaning over Caitlin Smith's head, Caitlin herself still on the angled couch. In reality, the psi-interrogator was extracting information by the gigabyte. But there was nothing Kodiak could do until the procedure was over and the psychic data feed had been analyzed and interpreted in a way he could read, or hear, or see.

As a Bureau agent, Kodiak was trained in standard interrogation techniques, but he didn't enjoy it. Some agents were better at it than others—some even seemed to have a natural talent, a knack that made watching interrogations a fascinating and highly educational experience. Kodiak knew he was not one of these agents. Back in the day, before Helprin's Gambit, he'd preferred to let his partner do the hard questioning. Kodiak's main problem—as Braben had often said—was that he was impatient. This he knew. Interrogations were frustrating, an open-ended game in which one partner steadfastly refused to play for as long as possible, if at all. And when they did—and most did, eventually—Kodiak drew no particular satisfaction. If they'd just told the truth from the beginning, nobody's time would have been wasted. Crimes would be solved, resources saved, and in some cases, lives saved.

Psi-interrogation was altogether different, and Kodiak had to admit he liked the technique, whatever moral qualms churned somewhere at the back of his mind. The special kind of cases psi-interrogation was reserved for were rare on Earth, and for most reluctant suspects, just the threat of psi-interrogation was enough to make them talk. But out on the Warworlds, things were different—out there, there
were
secrets to be sold, missions to be sabotaged, escapes from the madness of a never-ending war against a nameless, unrelenting machine race to be made. Out on the Warworlds, psi-interrogators were kept very busy indeed.

Kodiak sipped his coffee. It was terrible but strong. He'd been awake for … he'd forgotten how long. But he was close now. Answers were coming. He could feel it.

And then, as Kodiak watched, the interrogator tilted her head. After an age of nothing, the slight movement sent Kodiak's heart thundering in his chest.

Caitlin Smith was saying something. Kodiak could see her lips moving, but only just. It reminded him of the cadets earlier, just before things went batshit crazy.

With that good old sinking feeling, he reached for the controls on the wall next to the observation window and pumped the sound up.

“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”

“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”

“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”

Oh,
shit
.

The interrogator tilted her head to the other side, then began looking left and right, like she was following something in the room. On the bed, Cait's body was still, her lips moving as she intoned the secret, mysterious, meaningless code.

The interrogator stood from her stool, still turning her head, left and right and left, then looking over her shoulder, spinning around in a complete circle, knocking her stool over.

Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Kodiak's hand found the comm on his collar and he thumbed the call button.

“Control? This is Special Agent Kodiak down at the interrogation center. Can you get me—”

The comm barked in his ear. Kodiak yelled in surprise and jerked away from the window, sending his half-dead cup of coffee flying across the gallery to splash against the wall.

He looked around. He had the feeling something else was in the room with him. He turned back to the observation window and saw the interrogator was still on her feet, looking around her room like Kodiak was in his.

Kodiak gingerly reached for his comm again, but his hand paused as he watched the scene unfold in front of him. The interrogator had stopped moving and now looked at the window—at
him,
he thought, even though from the other side the window was just another gray wall panel. She held her hands to the side of her head and appeared to be squeezing the sides of her skull. She sidestepped Caitlin's supine form.

And ran at the window.

Kodiak watched, eyes wide in surprise, as the interrogator smacked head-first into the window with a loud thud. She bounced back and, tripping over her own feet, fell onto the floor of the interrogation room. Without pause, she pushed herself up and ran again. This time the impact didn't throw her off her feet. Instead, hands braced against the panel, she began smashing her forehead into the window, again and again, right in front of Kodiak. The skin on the interrogator's forehead split, blood splashing across the window.

Kodiak jolted back and thumbed his comm again, but was rewarded with another burst of ear-splitting static. His back hit the opposite wall and, unable to tear his eyes from the horror in the other room, he dragged himself sideways until he could reach the gallery's in-built comm panel next to the door. He pressed the button.

“Emergency in interrogation room A!” he yelled. “Get someone down here
now!
”

He let go of the button and someone responded to the affirmative, but their voice was lost under a wash of white noise and something else … a rapid, mechanical staccato, the sharp rattle of a radiation meter running at full tilt.

The psi-interrogator's face was a mess of torn skin and blood, each crash against the window spreading more and more gore. As she pulled back, it looked like she was looking right at Kodiak. He pushed himself against the back wall of the gallery, afraid that the interrogator was somehow going to smash the wall panel and climb into the gallery with him.

Reaching for the staser on his hip, he made for the door. He could get in and stun the interrogator and call for a medical team.

Kodiak left the room but was immediately pushed back by three armed agents as they ran past, heeding his request for help. He followed them down the short corridor and into the interrogation room. Immediately the agents fell into a firing stance, their weapons raised, but Kodiak yelled at them to keep back. He raised his staser and, as the interrogator turned to face him, to
charge
at him, he felled her with a single stun bolt.

Kodiak fought to control his breathing. His heart was racing, and his ears were filled with the blind roar of adrenaline. The three agents ran to the interrogator's body, one of them calling for medical assistance.

Kodiak turned away, not wanting to look at the crushed remains of the interrogator's face, his mind reeling with what had happened. He steadied himself on the edge of Caitlin's bed. She was still out for the count, but her lips moved silently.

Kodiak held his breath and leaned closer, lowering his ear to her lips. Behind him, two medics arrived and rushed to the aid of the interrogator.

He squeezed the grip of his staser as he listened to Caitlin's whispers.

“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”

The coordinates.

“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”

Whatever they were.
Wherever
they were.

“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”

It was important.

“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”

He had to know what was at the other end of them.

 

26

Less than a cycle
later—just enough time to get at least something to eat and grab a couple of fitful hours of sleep—Kodiak found himself staring at the ops board in the Bureau bullpen. On display were the results of Caitlin Smith's psi-interrogation. Whether he could call it a success or failure, he wasn't sure, because now they had a psi-interrogator lying in the medical center with a smashed-up face and zero brain activity, the suspect she had interrogated sleeping peacefully in the unit next door.

The data extraction itself had gone well though, before everything had gone to shit. Specialized analysts had worked through the night to decode the raw feed, piecing together Caitlin's story out of her own memories—memories of how she had decided to follow her brother into the Academy after learning he had been deployed early, fearful perhaps of being separated from her twin, with whom she shared a psychic connection, by such a gulf of space; how, eager to follow in his footsteps, she entered the Psi-Division and made it straight into Alpha One.

How, as soon as news arrived that Tyler Smith had been killed in battle, she knew,
knew,
that it was a lie. Despite the distance between them the brother and sister had maintained their connection—until his final battle, in which the Fleet lost Warworld 4114 to the Spiders. Their connection had been severed, suddenly, without warning.

But … he was alive. She knew it. Felt it. He may not have been able to talk to her anymore, but his mind was still out there.

Tyler Smith was alive. She just had to find him. The Fleet was covering up his fate—he was dead, they said, but she knew that was a lie. Enough to sow doubt. So much of what the Fleet did out there, as it struggled against impossible odds, was classified.

And that made her think. Think about what else they might be covering up.

Then came the contact. Mysterious and anonymous, an untraceable communiqu
é
left on her personal computer. A contact that had said yes, Tyler was still alive. A contact that promised to not only reunite them, but to show her what the Fleet was
really
doing. A contact that demanded one task of her, to show her loyalty but also, said the nameless sender, to initiate a chain of events that would reveal the Fleet's secrets to
everyone.

She hadn't known who “they” were. But over several nights of discussion, she began to think of them as her employers. She accepted the task she was given—she was a
warrior,
something she kept telling herself, one that was following new orders, fighting on a new front, not just to save her brother, or herself, but to save everyone.

Save them all from the
real
enemy: the Fleet itself.

So she left, abandoning her training, abandoning the Academy. She was so afraid, so desperate to escape. They would find her, she knew that—her Fleet manifest tag had been implanted on day one of her training—but … they didn't. Either they weren't looking, or they couldn't track her tag. Somehow, they couldn't find her.

And then, cycles later … she heard Tyler speak.

At first she'd thought it was her imagination, her experiences finally catching up with her, producing phantoms in her mind. But they talked, and she knew it was real, and she knew she'd been right. From the very beginning, she'd been right. Tyler was alive, somewhere, somehow.

Her employers left more instructions. They suggested hiding places. They left her packages.

They outlined the plan.

Kodiak frowned, and folded his arms. His eyes moved across the ops board.

Then he sighed. Caitlin Smith was young, na
ï
ve, foolish. Gullible, clearly. Her mind pushed by the shared trauma of her brother's “death” on Warworld 4114, she had accepted her employers' instructions without much question. All she wanted to do was get her brother back. She was single-minded to the point of pathology, unheeding of consequences.

All she wanted to do was get her brother back, and if that meant taking down the Fleet itself, then so be it.

Because the Fleet was lying to everyone, weren't they? Tyler Smith was proof of that. Caitlin's employers knew what was going on, and they were going to change things. No, they were going to
fix
things.

And all Caitlin Smith had to do was carry out one single task. Shoot the Fleet Admiral, save the world.

Caitlin had no idea who she was working for, who her employers were. According to the psi-interrogation report, when she found out she was working for a cell of the Morning Star, she began to have doubts. They were terrorists. Fanatics. A violent, chaotic organization that couldn't be trusted, not now, not ever.

Except they knew where her brother was. They promised they would bring them back together and bring down the Fleet while they did it.

And then they operated on her.

Kodiak frowned. An Academy dropout gone rogue. A terrorist cell operating in New Orem. It was a workable theory, but there were two problems.

One, the Morning Star was, as far as Bureau intel went, little more than an extremist group—officially categorized as a banned terrorist organization, but one that hadn't been seen for … well, years. Their interests didn't lie with the Fleet—or so it was believed. They claimed to be pilgrims searching for their missing god, a mission that took them way out to the very peripheries of Fleetspace.

They weren't supposed to be a threat. And yet, here they were, operating a cell on Earth. A cell that had funding, equipment, weaponry. And more important,
training.

None of that was in the Bureau's intel. Either the intel was hopelessly out of date, or the Morning Star had got help from somewhere else. And that was a
whole
new kettle of fish; Kodiak felt a small, cold ball of anxiety grow in his stomach even as he considered the point.

Kodiak scratched his cheek as he considered the second problem: Caitlin Smith hadn't carried out her assigned task. She hadn't shot the Fleet Admiral—either of them. She had fled the first assassination without firing a single shot, and as far as
she
knew, the Morning Star seemed to think that she had pulled the trigger. Mission accomplished. The Bureau had her weapon, the sniper rifle with the hacked, pirated operating system. The weapon had been fired—she'd done that herself, according to the psi-interrogation report. A bluff to make the Morning Star think she
had
carried out her mission successfully.

The assassination of Zworykin, the Fleet Admiral's self-declared successor, posed a real problem. The ousting of Sebela just a cycle before his death and the elevation of Zworykin to Fleet Admiral was unknown to the public. And according to Caitlin's own memories, she didn't have anything to do with his death—she didn't even know about it.