Cyber Dreams 4.52 - Kindred Spirits

Sometimes, when you know what you want to happen in a story, it's not enough. Sometimes, it's hard to figure out how to portray the events that are living in your head. What's worth showing "on-screen," and what should happen behind a curtain? I struggled when it came to starting this chapter, and I hope it's satisfying enough. I hope it makes sense, at the very least.

I hope I left some vagueness to the details that allow you to fill in the blanks with your imagination. I hope the details I did provide are believable.

Let me know what you think :)

-Plum

“And you’re absolutely, one hundred percent certain she’s on there?” Rodric frowned at the display showing the whale-shaped cargo ship, aptly named Humpback, supposedly in orbit just above Callisto City.

“That’s right.” Dennis frowned, rubbing his chin, moving to sit in front of Rodric’s desk.

“No, don’t sit down. Get a team together, board it, and get her off.”

Dennis ignored him and proceeded to sit. “That’s not going to work in this instance, Rodric.”

Rodric scowled. He felt his blood pressure rising, felt the beat of his heart in his temple as he contemplated screaming at the man. Who did he think he was? He remembered a day when Dennis begged him for a letter introducing his son to the consortium, remembered a day when Dennis would have licked the mud off his boots just to spend a few extra minutes in his presence. The man had gotten above himself. It was an excellent example of why you had to keep people a little hungry, a little desperate to please . . .

“Sir Rodric,” Ravina, his PAI, said, interrupting his thoughts, “your nanites are moderating your blood pressure, and I’m administering a vaso-dilator; I’m worried about the new synth vessels in your right temporal lobe; we don’t want a repeat of last month’s aneurism . . .

“Shut the hell up,” Rodric growled, venting his anger at the PAI.

“If you’d let me explain . . .” Dennis began, naturally assuming Rodric was about to give him a dressing-down.

“Not you, idiot. Explain why we can’t just grab her.”

“The, uh, contractors you hired to retrieve her from the, shall we say, unsavory company she was keeping, are concerned about double-dealing and thought you might try to snatch her without paying or, worse, that, after paying, you might have them somehow removed from the picture. They insist that you come personally to collect her with the payment. They want to have a face-to-face and fear you’ll avoid any contact if they give Antigone directly to you. They don’t mind you bringing a security team, and I’ve taken the liberty of contracting Yang. He and his team are prepping a shuttle as we speak.”

“This is absurd. I won’t walk into an ambush.”

“We’ve thoroughly scanned the ship, and they’ve assured us that it will be acceptable for your team to board ahead of you to ensure an ambush isn’t on the table.” He held up a hand, anticipating Rodric’s next objection. “We can’t just storm the ship because they’ve put a deadman switch in Antigone’s skull. If we try to take her or kill one of the operatives, she will die. They submitted scans of the device and DNA to prove it’s her. They . . .” Dennis paused and licked his lips nervously. “They claim they have incriminating data about Antigone that they’ll release if she dies.”

Rodric felt his face flushing and realized he was gripping the arms of his chair with white-knuckled intensity. He cleared his throat and balled up a fist, holding it before him. How dare they? Before he could object further or spew vitriol or threats, Dennis spoke again, “Rodric, once we have her in hand, I have a medical team on standby that will have the device out in minutes. We’ll track the operatives and kill them for their insolence.”

“I want our fastest interceptors standing by. These scum will not get away.”

“Of course!”

“Yang knows the situation?”

“Yes! He’s hand-picking his best operatives. You’ve used them before.”

Rodric frowned, fuming and, for the first time, contemplating if he really wanted Antigone back this badly. Would he actually stick his neck out to speak with some mercenary scum in person? Would he board that ship, never mind that it was his ship? It was in low orbit, and he’d have an escort with interceptors standing by; there was no way they’d take him, but what if this was an assassination scheme? If Antigone didn’t know what she knew, if she didn’t have so much information in that stupid head of hers, he’d let her hang. “What if we just let her go? What if we blow up the ship?”

Dennis blanched a little and started to stammer a reply, “Th, there’s the possibility that they’ve got insurance, a copy of her PAI’s data drive. Antigone isn’t . . .”

“Isn’t stupid. She’ll know I’d consider this. She’d warn them, tell them to have something like that. Goddamn it. When we’re done with this, I think it might be time for her to spend some time in a facility.”

Could he really do that to his favorite? The one person he'd chosen to trust with his deepest secrets? Why had he done that? What was it Poe said? Vengeance didn’t count if the one you sought vengeance against didn’t know you’d won—something like that. He supposed he’d felt similar about his many accomplishments, virtuous and otherwise; what was the joy in winning if you couldn’t share your triumphs and methods with anyone? “Fool!” he growled, and for once, Dennis realized he wasn’t speaking to him. “I won’t step foot on that ship unless the reactor’s powered down and we’ve had a chance to inspect it for explosives.”

“Yang will fully secure the ship.”

“And these fools think I’ll let them walk after this? What about the fixer, that gold-toothed idiot?”

“It seems the contractors and he had a falling out. My investigators tracked a rumor and found his DNA in one of the recyclers near his office building.”

“At least that saves me one loose end.”

#

Juliet hissed and jammed her finger into her mouth, sucking on the cut. “Why is this so tight?” She was trying to install a jailbroken identity transmission module, or ITM, into the console beneath her pilot’s seat in the medical ship.

“That’s what he said,” Antigone quipped. She was lounging in one of the nav seats, one long leg hung over the side, bright in her skin-tight yellow jumper. Juliet chuckled, shaking her head, and carefully reached around behind the black, hexagon-shaped device, fishing for the screw she’d dropped. She had to admit, Antigone was funny, charismatic, and exactly like she’d seemed in the deep dive she’d done into Roy Tornado’s head.

“I walked into that, I guess.”

“So this ship didn’t have an ITM? Where’d you find this little beauty, anyway?”

Juliet had asked Roy to bring her the device, part of her payment for the data she was sharing with him and Antigone, and he’d done so at their second meeting when he’d liberated the Humpback from the pirate base. “I got lucky on a salvage run once. Pretty sure whoever last had it ditched the ITM so they could disappear. Maybe they took it to put into another ship, you know, to throw off anyone tracking ‘em.”

“I’d say you were lucky. I mean, it’s a small ship, but pretty newish, right? These acceleration couches are comfy, too. Similar to the ones on my dad’s yacht. Well, I mean the crew ones.”

“Yeah, it’s in good shape.” Juliet didn’t elaborate; if Antigone wanted to believe the ship was “newish,” that was fine with her. She didn’t have to explain that she was flying around in a sixty-year-old artifact developed and constructed when true AIs were still trying to elevate the human race. She finally felt the little screw with the tips of her fingers and, biting her tongue in concentration, slipped it into the bracket. Very gently, she let go, picked up the tiny, angled driver and screwed it in. “Finally!” she sighed, extricating herself from the component cabinet and sitting up to stretch her neck.

“All done?”

“Almost. Just need to plug it in.”

“No word yet?” Antigone was locked out of the ship’s network, a condition of Juliet’s deal with her and Roy. Juliet wanted insurance that everything would go as she’d planned, and holding Antigone seemed the best way to acquire it. The young woman, probably a couple of years younger than Juliet, hadn’t argued. In fact, she’d helped her convince Roy it was the best move.

“Nothing. You sure you can trust that Watts guy?”

“Dennis? No, I can’t trust him. Well, that’s not true. I can trust Dennis to do what’s best for Dennis, and getting my father out of the picture will be very, very good for him.”

“He’s the one who first approached you?” Juliet bent back down, finding the bundle of cables she had to plug into the back of the ITM.

“Yes. He and a few others are eager to step into leadership roles, thinking I’ll be more hands-off than my dear old dad. Of course, that’s where they’re wrong, but they’ll still make out like bandits. As they should—it’s what they are, after all. I’ve explained all this to you, though; you don’t want to hear me go on and on about the evils of corporate greed. I know I’m just a spoiled corpo brat to someone like you.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t interested.” Juliet smiled in satisfaction when the stiff, uncompliant cabling finally bent the way she wanted it to and snapped into the back of the ITM. “Also, we all have challenges to face. Some might curse you for what you’re doing to your father, but I think a lot more would praise you if they knew what you knew. I’m not a fan of corps, as you know, so you’ve got my respect, standing up against the flow. You could be burning through daddy’s money, vacationing around the system, oblivious or, worse, appreciative of his wrongdoings.”

“When he first pulled me aside, took me into his private study, poured me a drink, and told me about how he’d ruined a man’s life, broken up his family, and liquidated his assets simply for questioning him at a board meeting, something broke in me.”

Juliet sat up to look her in the eyes, focusing on her pretty, perfect, magenta irises. “How old were you?”

“Sixteen. That was, I think, a test. He told me about that, watching my reaction. Afterward, he had his people observe me. I could tell, you know. I’m not dumb. I put it together, figured out that he was trying to see if I was a kindred spirit, a companion soul, another entity that could revel in the misfortune of others. He watched me for months before he shared his next secret with me. He did over a drink, again, whispering conspiratorially with me about the first man he’d killed.”

“You must have put on a hell of an act.” Juliet knew Antigone wasn’t lying; she’d already read her thoughts a dozen times. The girl was legitimately a genius about some things, and she was terribly sincere in her desire to bring her father down.

“I sure did. For years, I listened to his dirty secrets. For years, I played along, acting impressed, sharing his ancient, expensive whiskey, looking at him with excitement in my eyes as we sat together, and he gloated. I must have a spark of evil in me, to be honest, because there was a little bit of real excitement there, a little bit of a thrill every time he called me to our special meetings.”

“I don’t think you were excited about what he was doing.” Juliet got up from the decking and sat on the side of her acceleration couch so she could keep looking at Antigone. “I think you got a thrill out of the deception, out of knowing you were locking away all those dirty secrets, intent on doing something about it one day.”

“Probably true.” Antigone smiled and leaned back, lifting a strand of her straight, violet hair and twirling it around one long, perfectly manicured finger. “If I’m honest, though, I think, at first, I was deceiving him simply to stay in his good graces. As much as it fills me with disgust now, I craved his attention back then.”

“I think I can understand. I tried pretty hard to get attention from my mom’s boyfriends when I was younger, too. That sounds wrong. I think I always wanted to have some attention from a father figure, you know?”

“Sure I do . . .”

Antigone kept speaking, but Angel interrupted her, so Juliet tuned her out to listen. “There’s a secure connection request coming from Callisto. I believe it’s Antigone’s contact.”

Juliet stood up. “Sorry to interrupt, but your guy’s calling. You ready?”

“Ready.” Antigone also stood, approaching Juliet to stand beside her, looking at the main viewscreen. She was almost of a height with Juliet and walked with a confidence that Juliet envied. She tried to memorize those movements, the way she slung her shoulders back and swung her hips. She only took about four steps, but it was enough to make an impression, not that Juliet hadn’t been studying her for the last four days while they’d worked to set up Rodric’s downfall.

Angel didn’t wait for Juliet to confirm, patching the message through. A neat, older man with finely coiffed gray hair and an impeccably tailored suit appeared on the screen. He was well-groomed; Juliet couldn’t spot a single facial hair or blemish on his smooth, olive skin. When he spoke, his perfect, straight white teeth gleamed in the light of whatever camera he used to capture the image. “Antigone, we’re secure?” He couldn’t see Juliet. As before, when Antigone or Roy had reached out to their contacts, Angel filtered Juliet out of the image.

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yes, I’m in my Lux Alpha.” Juliet had to choke back a snort. Lux Corp was a luxury vehicle manufacturer that had built a reputation for protecting their clients’ privacy. The way he’d dropped the name was what had amused her—as casually as someone might say, “I stopped for a coffee.” The Lux Alpha base model started at something like three million Sol-bits.

“Well? How did it go?”

“He’s not happy, but he’s going. We have to power down the reactor, and he wants his security team to sweep the ship. I have Yang doing it, so there won’t be a problem.”

“You’re sure about him?”

“Yes. He’s fallen out of favor with your dad for his more . . . sensitive jobs, and he knows I’ll be good to him.”

“What about the other team?”

“Fineman and his people will be aboard; they think Ark Corp hired them for security.” Juliet smiled. Fineman was the guy who’d led the slaughter of the Humpback’s crew. She’d shared the footage with Antigone, who’d given it to Greater Gas Corp. They were the lucky corp she’d tipped off about the meeting Rodric was about to have on the Humpback. When their corpo-sec stormed the ship, interrupting Rodric’s “rescue,” they’d arrest everyone aboard—the murders were just icing on the cake; to them, the real crime was Rodric trying to “sell” the data about the dark matter harvesting and warp research to Ark Corp.

“Perfect, Dennis. And how are you going to do the PAI switch?”

“The boarding team from Greater Gas will deploy a military-grade EMP. That should stall his defenses long enough to pull Ravina and install the copy.” Juliet knew what they were talking about, but only abstractly. Apparently, Rodric was pretty heavily chromed out with nanites and synth-organs and a top-of-the-line PAI—Ravina. Dennis and Antigone, along with half a dozen other conspirators, had been building him a cloned PAI, absent many of his permissions, secret files, and account access codes. The change would hobble his defense but also be nearly impossible to prove, especially with so many high-profile people, his daughter included, denying his claims.

“So? Anything left for us to do?”

“Just wait for the all-clear and then come to Calisto to help clean up the mess. We’ll have to prep you for court. I just wish you hadn’t also sold this data to other corporations.”

“I bet you do. I had to make a money trail linking my father to the sales. It’s not enough to have him go down for an attempt.”

“And you won’t give me the account information?”

“You’ll see it when I provide evidence to the courts.”

“And you’re not keeping any? For yourself? For your pirate friends?”

“Dennis, stop looking this gift horse in the mouth, will you? You and I need to stay friendly right now.”

Dennis scowled, and Juliet could see the frustration in his eyes. Not for the first time, she wondered what motivated a man like that to betray his employer and supposed friend, the man who’d lifted him to elite status. He was sitting in a car worth more than a few dozen homes in her old neighborhood. Was his frustration a sign of his true intentions? Was he acting out because he was tired of being stepped on, made to feel like he had to be grateful for everything he owned? “I’m risking everything right now!”

“And I’m not?” Antigone leaned forward, her perfect, full lips curving into a smile that almost seemed seductive. “Dennis, you came to me, remember? We’re about to make your dreams come true, so don’t get caught up worrying about some windfall you didn’t even know existed a few days ago. It’s all a means to an end, okay?”

The crease between his eyes smoothed out, and he nodded. “Right. Right. I’m with you; don’t worry. Everything’s in motion now. I’ll be in touch when it’s over.”

Antigone glanced at Juliet, then quickly back to Dennis, “Wait. What about the Fixer? Larry Fine?”

“He’s in the clear. One of our security subsidiaries based in New Galveston bought out his business, and I secured him and his daughter new passports, as you requested. They’re already off-moon.”

“Where to?”

“I didn’t ask. I figured if I don’t know . . .”

“Good. Thank you, Dennis. I’ll be waiting for your call.” When the screen flickered and then went blank, she turned to Juliet. “He’s had a crush on me since I was fourteen. I’m looking forward to slowly separating him from the business.”

“I don’t need to tell you to be careful. If he’s doing this to your father . . .”

“True-true, sister. Don’t worry, though. I’m dangerous, too.” Antigone smiled and moved back to her acceleration couch. Juliet stood there for a minute, thinking about everything that was about to go down in Callisto’s orbit, and wished she could feel happy about it. She supposed she felt some satisfaction, and that was enough for now. Happiness would come later—maybe when she’d gotten back to Luna and put some distance between her and Nick’s death. “Hey,” Antigone asked, interrupting her musing, “Now that you got that ITM installed, what are you gonna name this pretty little ship?”