The Machine Awakes (7 page)

If there was one psi-cadet who had scored better than Tyler, it was her—his beloved twin sister.

Twins were a gift, the perfect Academy candidates. And boy, did the tests show it—of course,
they'd
both known about the gift all their lives. There was a
connection,
a bond, link, call it what you want, something only twins had.

Only there was something else that Cait had that Tyler hadn't. He was strong, a powerful psychic warrior. But Cait … Cait had a talent that went beyond the norm. She knew it, and was frightened of it, and when the Academy saw it, her fear had only increased.

And then Tyler had been sent on tour, and Cait vanished.

A fanfare sounded, giving Cait a fright. She swore under her breath, then let that breath out, long and slow. Goddamn it, she had to focus and do her job. Her new job, the one given to her by her new friends. They'd seen another ability in her, a skillset they said was useful.

Caitlin, it turned out, was good at sneaking around, at being stealthy and shooting things from very,
very
far away. Sniper skills were not useful to the Psi-Marine Corps, but her brother had taken it as an elective course, telling her how much he enjoyed it. So she'd followed his lead, completing nearly all the advanced training before she ditched New Orem.

And she enjoyed it too. The quiet, the secrecy. To be a good sniper you had to be a certain kind of person: you had to enjoy your own company (check); you had to enjoy silence and stillness in a world that was full of noise and movement (check check); you had to be a very,
very
good shot, no matter how augmented your performance was by the computer systems and low-level psi-fi field of your weapon (check check and check again).

She wondered, not for the first time, whether her
other
talent had anything to do with it, the power nudging her accuracy into the highest percentiles. It was impossible to tell. Maybe they were linked, maybe they weren't. All she knew was that she was a good shot with a long rifle. Then again, so was Tyler.

Cait blinked and then the Fleet Admiral was standing at the podium, right in the center of the scope, all of the moving crosshairs now locked on. He was talking, making his speech, looking left and right and center, then down to his notes—he would have learned his speech by rote, but the notes were a useful prop, giving him moments to pause, the rhythm of his speech carefully rehearsed.

It was such a scam, Cait thought she might throw up, there and then.

Because she knew other things about the Fleet. About what the Fleet was doing.

She felt the heat rise in her cheeks, the tingle on her skin, the buzz in her mind. Fuck it. Let it out. Let it all out. Let them see what they had tried to control. Let them see what they had helped fashion.

Her finger moved from the safe position to the trigger position. In her scope data flowed: wind speed and direction, distance, time, angles, options for different shots, different targets. All she had to do was think it, and the scope, loosely linked to her mind, would refocus, pick a different mark, suggest better ways of taking it out.

She zoomed in until the Fleet Admiral's face filled her vision. The crosshairs changed from green to blue, and a dot was painted onto his forehead.

Target locked.

Cait thought for a moment. Thought that this should feel like the end. Closure. Punishment, revenge, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it. Justice, maybe.

But she knew that wasn't the case. This wasn't any of those things, because her twin brother Tyler was alive, the casket was empty, and the Fleet was lying about what was happening to their war dead. If Tyler's casket was empty—and she knew it was, he had told her himself—then what about the others? Of the thousands being interred today, was it
all
a fraud? They weren't all alive, were they? They couldn't be, because the Fleet was at war and war meant death and the Fleet was losing. Badly. The Spiders were chewing through the Fleet out there on a dozen fronts, on a thousand Warworlds.

But Tyler was alive.

The others too?

More heat, more anger. What was the Fleet doing, out there on the Warworlds? What were they hiding from everyone? She was determined to find out. Her new friends had some of the answers, but not all of them. What they needed now was a demonstration of their power, a demonstration that the Fleet was vulnerable. Here, at the heart of the capital, with the world watching.

The Fleet Admiral kept talking, the blue spot fixed to his forehead. Cait's finger curled over the trigger.

A shot rang out. It was dull, somehow—the sound of heavy metal striking heavy metal on the other side of the city. The Fleet Admiral fell, and behind him the assembled Fleet brass swarmed into action, most on the higher tiers ducking down as the front row rushed for their fallen leader. The scope zoomed out and Cait could see the panic ripple through the crowd as the honor guard began waving at people to keep down even as they lifted their weapons and began scanning the horizon for the enemy.

Cait ducked back behind the tree, more by instinct than conscious decision, her trigger finger slipping back to the safe position. She pressed the back of her head into the soft bark of the trunk, her eyes squeezed tight, her heart punching against her ribcage so hard, so fast it hurt.

Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck?

She opened her eyes. She felt dizzy. She felt the buzzing in her mind like a physical thing, pressing on the world around her.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she thumbed the readout on the top of her rifle. The blue display flicked on, showing the weapon status and ammo count.

She hadn't fired a single shot.

Her earlier anger, hot and sharp, had been replaced with something else, something cold, something that made the world swim around her.

Fear. Panic.

What the fuck just happened?
What. The. Fuck?

Someone had assassinated the Fleet Admiral. Someone
else.

Fuck fuck fuck.

She stood, the muscles in her arms and legs suddenly weak. She fell onto her knees and stared at the grass under her. It looked weird, pressed down in a circle around her like she was kneeling on a circular plate of glass.

Because there was an invisible force, and it was coming from
her.
Her skin prickled with heat, the noise in her head nearly deafening.

And she was floating an inch from the ground. As soon as she realized, it stopped, and she jolted to the ground.

She had to leave.
Now.

She began regulating her breathing, like she did when things started happening around her, trying to calm her unconscious mind. Letting her hands work on automatic, the result of ingrained routines learned by rote, she disassembled her weapon and slid the parts into her backpack.

And then she ran.

 

5

>> … please wait …

>> SECURE_COMMAND_CHANNEL_IPSILON

>>PRIORITY_ONE

>>~avalon_L_199900

>>password: *************************************

>>WELCOME BACK, COMMANDER

AUTHORIZATION ORDER GAMMA TWELVE. PRIORITY 1 OVERRIDE. EXTRACT PRIMARY ASSET USING PREPARED COVER. RESOURCES ASSIGNED AS BRIEFED.

AUTHORIZATION GRANTED, AVALON L 199900

P.S. Discretion is the better part of valor, Mike. Don't take any risks, and make sure you bring him back in one piece

 

6

The Sentallion contest at
the Grand Casino on Helprin's Gambit had been running for four hours, and Kodiak's hack was paying off, and paying off well.

“Fifty-thirty on thirty-thirty,” he said into his glass as he took a swig of whatever-the-hell the vicious red liquid was and slid a pile of chips across the table. He'd been practicing for several cycles too—the casual laugh, the easy smile. He'd even prepared a backstory—the spoiled son of a starminer, left to his own devices while daddy-O suffocated on some chunk of herculanium spinning out there in deep space. It was a bit of a stretch, given he was pushing forty, but he thought that actually might help with the story. A charming, if greasy, little rich kid who refused to grow up, dressed in a tailored suit of crimson silk, shirt and tie to match, the height of Fleetspace fashion among those rich enough not to worry what other people thought of their taste in clothes. Out of the technician uniform, hair artfully styled, stubble trimmed just
so,
he wouldn't be recognized by anybody who worked on the service levels. Not that any of the station's crew would have been able to afford entry to the casino anyway. Lucky for Kodiak, the credit stick in his pocket still had plenty of money left over after buying his way into his tech job and collecting the gear for this little disguise—although, damn, did people really pay this much for bright red suits?—and Kodiak was adding to his fortune at a steady rate.

The game he'd selected was also helping with the image. Sentallion was an obscure favorite of starminers, big in the ports of Arb-Niner and a dozen other industrial colonies, those unlucky in the asteroid fields drawn to the complex game that married advanced mathematics with pure random luck. The puzzles made you feel like you were actually doing something, that your years of interstellar navigation gave you some kind of edge on the calculations, while there was enough blind chance to make it dangerous. Kodiak had been familiar with the game long before he had arrived at Helprin's Gambit, but it was here that he had learned just how popular it was among the nouveau riche, who threw nauseating amounts of credits at it, even if most of them didn't really understand the principles behind the game. Any opportunity he'd had over the last three months, he'd read up on the game and its rules, downloading a version to his maintenance datapad and playing as often as he could. He'd never got
that
good at it, but he knew he didn't need to be. For the big game, he had a little help.

The dealer accepted his bet. There was a smattering of applause, which Kodiak saluted by draining the fiery liquid in his glass and lifting the empty tumbler high above his head. Holy smokes, what
was
that stuff? It tasted like sweet wild strawberry, with just a trace of shuttle engine coolant.

While he grinned at the crowd around him, the HUD in his glasses spun as a face recognition algorithm ran matches on everyone in sight, comparing the casino guests with the central register of employees held by the station's computer. That was a little add-on Kodiak had thought of only yesterday, along with a quick little screening override that prevented the AI of his glasses—and the HUD it powered—from being picked up by any security scanners in the room. Both additions were, he now realized, absolutely essential. While the screening jammer went on in the background, the facial would alert him immediately if any undercover security agent came within his eye line.

The three-dimensional projection of the Sentallion game board hovering over the table shuffled the players' pieces; then the thirty-thirty square came up with a score of 93 percent on Kodiak's last calculation. He'd won. He laughed as the dealer pushed a large pile of chips toward him, the shocked look on his face not entirely fraudulent, while his AI glasses chimed, indicating that the next bet would go against him so as not to create a suspiciously long winning streak.

To the cheers of the spectators, Kodiak selected a single chip—a sliver of clear blue plastic, the logo of Helprin's Gambit embedded within in glittering gold—and slid it forward on the table. One hundred thousand credits. It was a lot of money to lose on the next play, but two more rounds after that he would win it back, and more besides. A couple more plays after that and it would be time to high-tail it off the platform and hide in the shadow of an asteroid, watching while Helprin's empire suffered a financial meltdown.

The holographic Sentallion game board realigned itself, presenting a new challenge to the players. There were three seated on Kodiak's left. They were all men, each dressed, like him, in scarlet evening wear. Two were young—younger than Kodiak by something close to twenty years, he thought to his own chagrin; exactly the kind of annoying rich kids he was pretending to be. The third man was much older, sixty at least, the tattoos covering his face and bare arms—and the jewelry studding his nose, ears, eyebrows—suggesting he was, or had been, a starminer. The real deal.

The first young man reached forward into the air in front of him and traced some lines on the puzzle board, solving his equation. The grid tilted toward player two, who did the same. Then the grid aligned itself to the older man with the tattoos. The mathematical puzzles on the grid were randomly generated—when Kodiak's hack wasn't at work, anyway—and the level of difficulty fluctuated. The game might have been created by starminers as a useful way to stretch the mind as their ships' automatic systems processed tons of ore, but that didn't necessarily mean the tattooed man had a natural advantage. Kodiak winced as he saw the equation presented to his fellow player. The poor guy had drawn a very difficult calculation indeed.

The gnarled player had already pushed a large pile of chips toward the dealer, an early gamble that now looked like a gigantic mistake. He frowned at the grid, reaching out with a finger, ready to drag his solution through the air in front of him. But then he quickly drew back, like he'd got a shock. He wet his lips and tried again, slowly drawing a series of lines over the puzzle as he linked formula and mathematical functions. Kodiak watched, trying—failing—to solve the problem in his own mind. Tough luck.