The Machine Awakes (27 page)

Kodiak sighed and took a step back. Finding Caitlin and extracting the information from her mind had been vital to the investigation, if for just one piece of information it confirmed: that their original suspect, Tyler Smith,
was
alive. His tag had shown up at both crime scenes. That it had not appeared on the manifest before and after was still a mystery—but Caitlin's own tag had also been inactive, only broadcasting again once it had been removed from her brainstem.

Something that was supposed to be impossible.

And of course, that wasn't the only impossible thing Kodiak had experienced lately. Servitors that were perfect facsimiles were also supposed to be impossible, a thing straight out of science fiction. And yet one lay in parts down in a Bureau laboratory.

Nearby, Braben sat at his desk. Out of the corner of his eye, Kodiak could see the agent swiping his fingers across his datapad, faster and faster, until he sighed and let the pad fall to his desk with a clatter. Braben caught Kodiak's eye, and Kodiak turned around from the board. It was early morning, but the bullpen was packed with agents and analysts, all deep in their work. The longer the situation went on, the worse it would get too, Kodiak knew that. The Fleet was teetering on the brink. The city was on lockdown. It was still red ball, everyone on duty.

And despite the activity, the chaos, Kodiak still felt like they were on the back foot. Caitlin's data was useful, but it was a lot to process, and as Kodiak sighed, he tried to figure out the next step.

Braben leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “So she was telling the truth. She didn't do it.”

Kodiak nodded, then pursed his lips, a new thought coming to the forefront of his mind. “That's what she believes, anyway,” he said.

“You think she might be wrong? Like her memories were tampered with or something?”

“I don't know,” said Kodiak. “She's been through a lot, including surgery to have her tag removed. There's a lot of tech involved that seems beyond what we have. Brainwashing, memory implantation … it seems like it could be possible.”

“I sense a ‘but' coming.”

Kodiak nodded. “But it seems unlikely. Why bother going to all that trouble? Caitlin Smith's knowledge that her brother is alive tallies with his manifest ID showing at the crime scenes.”

“A manifest ID that magically appeared and disappeared from the tracker.”

“Right. But if Tyler Smith
is
alive, and the tech exists to remove the tags surgically, without killing the subject, then why leave his in at all?”

Braben gave a sort of noncommittal shrug. Kodiak frowned. Not helpful.

He turned back to the ops board. The official Fleet photographs of the Smith twins were on display, next to the portraits of the two deceased Admirals. He moved close to Tyler Smith's image.

He was the key.

“I get the feeling we're still looking in the wrong place,” said Kodiak.

“Still think there's a Fleet connection? An insider helping the terrorists?”

“Oh, there's a Fleet connection all right.” He tapped Tyler Smith's image, enlarging it. He turned to Braben. “Psi-Marine Tyler Smith is alive and well, despite the Fleet saying he was killed in action. That in itself doesn't add up.”

Braben stroked his chinstrap beard. “Some kind of cover-up, then. A conspiracy.”

“Damn right,” said Kodiak, his expression dark. He began rearranging data on the ops board, then paused as he brought up an image. He tapped to enlarge it—it was grainy, distorted, a processed piece of data pulled from Caitlin's visual cortex and reassembled in the computer. It showed a man, apparently wearing glasses. His body was indistinct, but he looked like he was wearing a long, pale coat.

The servitor, the one they'd cornered in the warehouse.

Braben stood from his desk and moved over to the ops board. He nodded at the image. “The mysterious Glass.”

“A servitor that looks like a real person,” said Kodiak. He could hardly believe he was saying it.

“According to her own memories, Caitlin Smith killed him. Or she thought she had. A little push with her mind and,
pow,
down he goes.”

Kodiak folded his arms. “You can see why she was fast-tracked through the Academy.” Kodiak replayed the moment the carrier had come up onto the roof of the building in Salt City. He'd watched with the other agents as Caitlin had sent her attackers flying without laying a finger on them.

Kodiak tapped the board and brought up a panel of text. He tapped again, and text began to scroll. It would have been too fast to read, except for the fact that the lines of text were an infinitely repeated sequence. Six numbers and two words.

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

Braben shook his head. “And
that,
” he said, jabbing a finger at the board, “gives me the creeps, man.”

Kodiak nodded. He agreed with Braben's comment—just seeing the sequence stirred a certain nervousness inside him. “It's a message, not broadcast over the comms, or lightspeed link, but broadcast over the same psychic wavelengths used by the psi-marines. A broadcast powerful enough to overwhelm the gestalt the cadets created when we were looking for our suspects. Powerful enough that when the psi-interrogator heard it she was driven out of her mind.”

Braben put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and pushed them out, away from his body while he turtled his neck. “We haven't been able to decode the coordinates yet—they're proprietary, somewhere in the Jovian system. Jupiter and everything in orbit around it is private enterprise, owned by the Jovian Mining Corporation. The chief has put a request for an assist through to them. We should hear back soon.”

Kodiak frowned. Private enterprise. Well, great. Even with a war on—even with the Fleet's command structure in danger of toppling altogether, dealing with private enterprise would be difficult. The independence of corporations was even enshrined in the Fleet's constitution. Topping it off, the JMC was the largest corporation of them all, a political power bloc all its own. Getting their assistance was paramount—and they
would
get it, considering the circumstances, but that didn't mean it was going to be easy.

“Good,” said Kodiak. “Because as soon as we know where those coordinates point, I'm going to take a look myself.”

Braben's eyes widened, and he shook his head. “You're not serious?”

“I am,” said Kodiak. “And I'm going to take Caitlin Smith with me.”

 

27

“I told you, I
don't know what that means.”

Cait sat on the other side of the table from the Bureau agents. Her wrists were manacled. She still ached all over, her neck stiff and encased in a thin plastiform medical collar to accelerate the healing of her surgical wound. She felt rested, physically at least—although she knew that was because she'd lain, sedated, in a medical unit rather than any kind of natural sleep.

She was torn inside. On the one hand, being in Fleet custody was actually a good thing. Her ordeal at the hands of the Morning Star was in the past, and the results of the psi-interrogation would show she hadn't killed anybody. All she wanted was to get her brother back. They would know that he was alive. And if he was alive, then maybe there were others officially listed as killed in action who were still alive too.

But maybe they knew that. There was the problem: the Morning Star had promised to expose the secrets of the Fleet, secrets so dark and terrible it would cause the military-industrial complex to collapse.

The fact that Tyler was alive—and presumably others too—was likely one facet of that terrible truth.

A truth the Fleet wanted to keep very well hidden indeed. Which meant being in Fleet custody was perhaps worse than being used by the Morning Star. Which meant, Cait thought, there was a good chance she wasn't making it out of this building alive.

The agent called Michael Braben narrowed his eyes at her as he sipped his coffee. The other guy, Kodiak, looked like he hadn't slept in days. He was sucking in his bottom lip, his eyes wide. Clearly he was expecting her to give a different answer.

Cait sighed. She moved her hands, rattling the manacles against the tabletop. “Look, I'm telling the truth. Didn't your interrogator suck it out of my brain already?”

The two agents glanced sideways at each other. Not for the first time in her life, Cait wished her wild talent enabled her to listen in to their thoughts, but that kind of direct telepathy was impossible, even for someone special like her. The best she could do, with a little concentration, was to reach out and get a very general sense of what someone else was feeling, thanks to the low-level psi-field every living mind broadcast. But even that didn't tell her anything she couldn't pick up with her normal senses. Kodiak was tired and annoyed. Braben's emotions ran a little hotter … underneath his own quiet anger was something else. Fear, perhaps. It was hard to read.

Agent Kodiak licked his lips. He glanced down at the table, tapped the translucent red datasheet in front of him. Cait's eyes flicked down, then back up. She'd been staring at the sequence for what felt like hours.

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

She sighed, shook her head. “How many times do we have to go through this?”

Kodiak frowned. “Okay, fine. They're coordinates.
Proprietary
coordinates. They belong to the Jovian Mining Corporation, IDing something within Jupiter's system. We don't know what yet, but the JMC is looking into it for us.” He tapped the datasheet with an index finger. “So what I want to know is, where did you get the coordinates from? Did the Morning Star cell tell you? How did they get them? Do they know what they point to?”

Cait blinked. She looked back at the code. “Jupiter?” She'd heard of the JMC, but Flood had never mentioned anything about them, or the Jovian system. She also knew that the whole planetary system, moons, rings, and all, was owned by the corporation, a giant slice of private company real estate right in the middle of the solar system.

Cait pulled the sheet closer, staring at it. She didn't know why they were asking her these questions—wouldn't they have the information extracted from her own mind? They knew that she
didn't
know anything about it. She'd never heard or seen the coordinates before the agents had shown her the datasheet.

And then it clicked. She looked up at the two agents.

“That's where my brother is, isn't it? He's there. Jupiter. That's where they were going to take me.”

Braben and Kodiak exchanged a look. Cait shook her head. “Have you caught them?”

Kodiak sucked on his lip again, like he was considering whether to answer her question. They would know she wasn't part of their group, so there wouldn't be any harm in telling her, would there?

After another beat Kodiak shook his head. “No. We cleared out the warehouse—they left a lot of gear behind. All brand-new, expensive, but untraceable. They were good at covering their tracks. The city is on lockdown and we have multiple sweeps in progress. No sign of them yet.”

Cait nodded, then winced as her neck ached. She reached up to feel the collar, but was brought short by the manacles. “Why did they take out my tag?”

Kodiak spread his hands. “We don't know that either.”

She shook her head. She looked at the datasheet again.

Jupiter. That was where Tyler was. She had to get there, somehow. But it seemed impossible. She was a prisoner, on Earth. The only place she was going was a holding cell prior to her trial. She was in it, and in it deep, that she knew. Even if the results of her psi-interrogation showed she wasn't the assassin …

Cait looked down at the datasheet, looked up at Kodiak.

“We have to go to Jupiter. We have to find my brother.”

Braben leaned forward across the table. He tilted his head and fixed Cait with a hard glare, almost as though he'd been able to read her own thoughts, as he outlined her situation.

“We've got you on conspiracy and collusion with a known terrorist organization, conspiracy to commit acts of treason, felony evasion, and about a dozen other serious charges. You're not even looking at life imprisonment—we're talking the death penalty here. Under martial law we could even carry out your sentence here and now.”

Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Cait closed her eyes as the room spun a little. There was a faint prickle across her skin, but her power seemed to be exhausted after her ordeal.

And what was she going to do with it, anyway? Break free of her manacles and kill the two agents? Smash her way out of the interview room, smash her way out of the Bureau offices, out of the Capitol Complex?

Yeah right. They may as well just shoot her here, sitting at the table in the interrogation room.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Braben had his arms folded. He had turned on his seat and was looking at Kodiak. He also looked pretty pissed. Kodiak, on the other hand, had a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

What the fuck was up with these guys?

Then Kodiak pulled a key from the pocket of his vest. He held it up between two fingers.

“There is an alternative,” he said.

Cait's jaw dropped. She looked between the two agents. Now Braben was shaking his head and he looked away, to the floor, his arms still tightly crossed.

She met Kodiak's eye. The smile had gone—had it ever been there?—and he was staring at her with his brows furrowed. But still he held the key up. The key to her manacles.

Cait stammered. “I…”

“Cooperation,” said Kodiak. “Full and complete and unconditional. You are already Fleet property, so you have no rights and no protection.”

Cait's eyes moved back to the key.

“But,” said Kodiak, “if you help us, then we can re-evaluate the charges, perhaps get whatever sentence you receive commuted. If you
help
us.”