The Pandora Paradox Read online

  "We're not exactly available right now for the job," Jason said. The words had been torturous to utter. If his son was in trouble, the obvious thing to do would be to drop everything and rush to him. But what he was doing right now had wider ramifications and, honestly, as part of the rebellion against the ConFed, it would be dangerous for him to be too close to the people he cared about. "Given that the ConFed is actively hunting us right now, it wouldn't be smart for me to be flying too near your operations."

  "Are you staying in a resort or something?" Webb asked, looking past Jason and into the room.

  "Not exactly," Jason replied. "So, tell me you have a backup plan to either save him from himself or make sure he has the support he needs for a mission like this."

  "My first choice was to reach out to you," Webb said. "My next best option is to try and see if I can get the rest of Lot 700 to help."

  "I'm going to kick 707's ass the next time I see him."

  "I would pay to watch you try. Look, I know you're pissed about this, but I thought you had the right to know whether you decide to help out or not," Webb said. "Your kid has me over a barrel right now since he's right about all the leaks within my command. It turns out my own aide was a traitor, working directly for the enemy. If I try to use my own assets to bring him in, I could end up inadvertently putting him in more danger."

  "You're slipping," Jason said. "You let some jarhead lieutenant outmaneuver you and then blackmail you to get his own way."

  "His tests indicate he's quite a bit smarter than you, and you were enough of a pain in the ass on your own," Webb said, smiling briefly before turning serious. "Jacob said he scanned the fleet of your little rebellion, and he didn't see a ship that matched the Phoenix's profile, but it looks like you're still heavily involved. I won't pretend to tell you what to do, I just hope you recognize the risk you put us all in as a human participating in something like that."

  "The…thing…that's in charge of the ConFed knows me personally," Jason said. "The risk is the same whether I sit it out or not."

  "I don't suppose you'd care to share what you know?" Webb asked. "Our intel on the internal workings of the ConFed is beyond murky right now."

  "Sure! I'll tell you what, you give me your exact location so I can come there and tell you in person," Jason said, smiling humorously. Webb picked up on the warning signs immediately.

  "I…don't think so," the ex-SEAL said. "At least not until that homicidal glint in your eye fades a bit."

  "But we will be talking about this, Marcus. I promise you that," Jason said quietly, leaning in so much that Webb actually leaned back despite the lightyears of space between them. "I can accept what you've told me on the surface, and I don't just come out and call you a liar…but the bottom line is that you tossed my boy into the meat grinder after you promised you'd keep him safe. I have some strong feelings about that."

  "I can see that," Webb managed to get out. Jason had no doubts his friend remembered what happened to his spec ops team when they'd tried to come after him years ago. The first engagement ended when Jason had killed one of Webb's hitters with a single blow and threw the body back at them like a sack of potatoes. "Hopefully, we can sit and talk about it like civilized people."

  "I’m all kinds of civilized, you know that," Jason said. "I'll keep my ear to the ground and see if I can let you know where Jacob is, but for right now, I'd just make things worse by trying to locate him myself."

  "Understood. Webb out."

  Jason flicked off the terminal and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his head. Learning that his only son had not only gone into the military but had been pulled into a special operations unit was unwelcome news. Even if Jacob had joined, Jason had assumed the kid would be pegged for some boring analyst job or maybe even put on a non-combatant starship since people were supposed to be looking out for him. Instead, he was a Marine in a forward recon unit. Not only that, but he had a brass pair big enough to steal ships and go rogue, calling his own shots as a lieutenant. Jason honestly wasn't sure if he was more angry or proud at this point.

  "I still gotta kill Webb, though," he said, slapping his thighs and standing up. "That's a given."

  Not very charitable of you.

  "And where the hell have you been all this time?" Jason demanded of Cas, the unwelcome voice in his head.

  As I've told you on multiple occasions, we're fighting a losing battle here in this implant. I had to shut down part of my own core program so I could make repairs.

  "And?"

  And I've bought us some time, but we need to come up with a permanent solution…soon.

  Jason just grunted an acknowledgement, not wanting to get into another protracted debate with the AI program that had taken up residence in his neural implant. Cas was part of a much larger, more complex program that had been part of the operational matrix for a massive, star-killing weapon built by an ancient, long-extinct species. The program being stuck in his head was an unintended consequence of accessing a massive database file he stored in his implant called the Archive. The Archive had been entrusted to him and contained all the knowledge of that ancient race, including their weapons technology that had ultimately turned on them and wiped them from the galaxy.

  The reasons Jason hadn't just purged the file from his head and had his implant replaced weren't complicated, but were profound. Since the Archive contained the last known legacy of the race he called the Ancients, he felt he was the custodian of all they were. It was a weighty responsibility he didn't take lightly. If anything happened to the Archive, the last vestiges of a mighty race of beings that had dominated the galaxy would go with it. So far his crew had not been able to guarantee that they could remove the file intact before replacing the implant, an otherwise routine procedure, since it had integrated so completely with the device.

  So why even keep something as fragile and irreplaceable as that in his head to begin with? Because the terrible knowledge contained within the Archive could also be used to cause indescribable harm in the wrong hands. The weapons technology the Ancients had developed was capable of destruction and death on a scale an order of magnitude greater than anything the ConFed could build. It was these secrets that caused Jason to suffer through the headaches and the unwanted running commentary of a smartass AI. He was terrified that once the genie was out of the bottle, there would be no stuffing it back in.

  "I'm going back to sleep," he said to his passenger. "So, keep it down in there."

  2

  "Captain, you will want to see this."

  "I'm on my way," Jason said around a mouthful of pastry. He grabbed his coffee mug and walked out of the galley just as Crusher and Doc walked in, arguing loudly. For the last three days, Crusher had been soliciting parental advice from everyone on the crew, and then when they gave it, he would start a fight about how they didn't know what they were talking about.

  Jason had already had his turn in the hot seat and wasn't wanting to get dragged back into it. He put his head down and sped up, looking like he had something important to do.

  "Captain—"

  "Busy!" Jason shouted over his shoulder as he resisted the urge to break into a run. Crusher's species had evolved from predators and, though he might be lazy and slovenly while shipboard, tended to give chase when something ran away from him no matter the reason. At least that was the theory Jason had been working on. He escaped the escalating argument just as Twingo's voice joined the fray. Jason just rolled his eyes and walked into the waiting lift.

  "Deck Two."

  The doors slid shut silently, and the lift dropped him down from the main deck, past Deck Three, and stopped gently at Deck Two. This was where most of the ship's storage and workshop space was located. If you walked all the way aft, you'd come out onto the hangar deck, a cavernous bay so tall it straddled decks two and three. The bay where Lucky had set up his bank of supercomputers was just forward of the hangar bay and above an engineering compartment, where he could route power and coolin
g up to the machines. The battlesynth had isolated himself in there since they'd left the main fleet, and Jason had begun to worry about him.

  "What's the good news, Lucky?"

  "I have stripped away all of the security protocols protecting the data and successfully decrypted it. I have been processing it most of the morning but thought you should know about this part specifically," Lucky said, gesturing towards a seat in front of a terminal with what looked like technical schematics and star charts on the monitor. Jason just sighed.

  "No chance you could give me the condensed version?" he asked hopefully.

  "I feel it would be better if you reached your own conclusions," Lucky said, never looking up from his own multiple terminals displaying data at a dizzying rate.

  Jason grumbled and sat down, resizing the images to his liking before digging in. Right away, he could see the technical data referred to a few new classes of starships, but they weren't anything like what the ConFed fielded now. These ships lacked any sort of aesthetic appeal. They were asymmetrical, oddly-shaped, and didn't even have an outer hull over the entirety of the vessels, leaving internal workings exposed. It was a pure expression of function over form and led Jason to believe they had likely been designed by a machine.

  He scrolled down and saw the dimensional data on the ships and whistled. They were on a scale that dwarfed even the largest capital ships flying in the quadrant now. The power source they were using must have been immense, but there was scant information on that in the brief Lucky had given him. He slid the ship specs away for a moment and looked over the star charts. The positions highlighted had been triangulated using stellar objects he was already familiar with, but the points themselves weren't near anything significant. He assumed he was looking at the positions of secret shipyards producing the behemoths on the spec sheets he'd just read, but that didn't really make a lot of sense.

  Starship construction was not a subtle process. It took prodigious amounts of power and raw material as well as an enormous, well-trained labor force that could direct the automation and oversee the builds. Shipyards were always located either near the source of the raw materials or near a logistics hub where it could easily be brought in. These were out in the middle of nowhere. That raised a lot of questions about how they were building such massive ships in such a remote location without it being all over the underground Nexus channels.

  "Your thoughts?" Lucky asked, sounding like a professor prompting along an enthusiastic, if somewhat dull, student.

  "You mean about this information or your condescending attitude?"

  "Either that you wish to discuss," the battlesynth said. Jason flipped off his friend's back with both middle fingers.

  "Given the size and unusual designs of the ships here, I'd say we're looking at something specialized and purpose built, not just the next generation of ConFed warship," he said. "The impression I get is they were designed by either a machine that had little care for beauty, or an alien race we've not been exposed to yet. Operating under the assumption these are built for combat, I'm not sure who the hell the target would be. The Eshquarians are gone, the Cridal are not really a threat, and the existing ConFed battlefleet has more than enough muscle to take out the Saabror Protectorate."

  "The Avarian Empire?" Lucky asked.

  "Possibly, but not likely," Jason said. "Avarian tech isn't really any better than what we have here, they just have a lot more of it. There's also the issue of the remote locations. I have a hard time believing they've been able to do that sort of heavy construction like that without anybody we know catching wind of it." Lucky turned and gave him an appraising look.

  "That is not bad," he said. "It is close to the same conclusions I myself reached, and I have access to much more data."

  "Then what the hell is with the pop quiz?" Jason asked.

  "I am just trying to get you to think more strategically. Tactically, you have no issues, but sometimes you fail to see the bigger picture in time," Lucky said. Jason just stared at his friend like he was insane.

  "What the fuck are you even talking about? I always see the big picture. Anyway, isn't it a little late in the game to be teaching an old dog new tricks? If I'm not killed outright, I'll probably retire soon anyway."

  "Your body is still plenty young for this type of work," Lucky said.

  "My brain isn't," Jason said, suddenly growing serious. "Humans are meant to live only so long, buddy. My body feels better than it did when I was in my twenties, but I can feel the years piling up. My mind seems convinced it's time to start slowing down."

  "Interesting," Lucky said, peering closely at Jason as if he might be able to see his soul aging before him. Jason just shook his head. Lucky's naiveté had always been one of his more endearing personality traits, but since they'd been forced to swap his mind into a different, newer body he had regressed somewhat. He was almost childlike in his inability to grasp nuance, sarcasm, or metaphors.

  "It's not important." Jason waved him off. "Okay, class is over. Tell me what you know."

  "The ConFed appears to be constructing heavy weapons in the absence of an enemy to use them on," Lucky said. "From the other documentation included in this data dump, I would surmise we're talking about weapons that can annihilate on a planetary scale."

  "Blow up a whole planet?" Jason asked skeptically.

  "Not quite. But make it completely uninhabitable in a very short time? Definitely."

  "This has the Machine's fingerprints all over it. Hell, the thing used to be part of a weapon designed to kill entire stars. Maybe he's just going back to what he knows: massive scale, impractical weapons."

  "You are suggesting it is doing it out of some sort of neurosis. I disagree. There is a specific reason these weapons are being built, but we have no way of knowing what that is from the information given," Lucky said.

  "Maybe the Machine is looking to hold on to its new territories with an iron grip, terrifying conquered systems so badly with its new arsenal that nobody would dare revolt," Jason said. "That sort of mass overkill approach seems like something it would be fond of."

  "Perhaps," Lucky said, sounding unconvinced.

  "Okay!" Jason slapped his thighs again and stood up, wanting to end the semi-awkward conversation. "Go through all this and organize it, then work with Kage to re-secure it with our own encryption and incinerate the original core."

  "Of course, Captain."

  Jason gave his friend one more look before walking out of the bay. Lucky's behavior had been…odd…lately, but the impromptu lesson he'd sat through in there was stranger than usual. He still hadn't shaken off his unease at Crusher's revelation the battlesynth had likely slaughtered dozens of guards who were no real threat during their last ground op. He and Kage were working under the assumption that, somehow, the new body was asserting some sort of control over Lucky's primary processing matrix and affecting his personality, but there was no way to prove that either way without letting their friend know they were worried he might be psychotic and a danger.

  "Command Deck," Jason said as he entered the lift again. The car obediently whisked him up three decks to the plush environs of the corvette's command deck. It was so nice up there that Jason had made an effort to make sure the rest of his crew spent their leisure time down on the main deck where they couldn't damage the luxurious space.

  "Captain," Kage greeted him when he walked onto the bridge.

  "How're we looking?"

  "We'll be dropping out of slip-space in…five hours, give or take," the little Veran said. "The dealer already knows we're coming and has offered to pick you up in a shuttle so you don't have to deorbit the ship."

  "Considerate," Jason said. "Tell him I'll be bringing two passengers with me."

  "Crusher and Lucky?"

  "Crusher and Twingo," Jason said. "I need an engineer to look things over before I pay, and I want Lucky here working on the data core project. Speaking of which, how will this skew our timetable?"

  "Thi
s thing is fast," Kage said. "We'll burn through a lot more fuel, but we'll make our rendezvous with Mok. We'll actually make it with time to spare if you don't get held up on the surface."

  "This should be a quick in and out," Jason said over his shoulder while he was walking back off the bridge. "Call me up thirty minutes before you drop out of slip-space."

  "Will do."

  Jason went back to his quarters and sat down at the beautiful desk made of some type of wood so dark it looked almost black in the low light. He ran his hand over the glossy surface before logging into his terminal and accessing one of the Devil's slip-com nodes. He waited for the security checks to finish, and then reached out. He needed to try and find out how deep his kid was in the shit. Jacob could be the most capable operator in the Corps, but the people he had pitted himself against were among the most ruthless and calculating Jason had ever seen. If he couldn't go himself, maybe he could send a care package.

  "What do you want?"

  "Is that any way to greet a friend?" Jason asked, turning back to face the camera.

  "We are not friends, Burke," the Viper said. Her real name was Carolyn Whitney, and she was a human…or at least she used to be. Jason wasn't even sure how much of what he was looking at was even organic. Whitney had also been abducted, but her experience had been much different than his and her owners had paid handsomely for all the cybernetic augmentation she sported. It was just too bad it had been installed without her permission.

  "I think of you as a friend."

  "Cut the shit. What do you want?"

  "You on a job right now?"

  "Of course, but I can take on a little side work. What have you got?"

  "So, it turns out there's someone within the United Earth Marine Corps I need to keep tabs on," Jason said carefully.

  "It wouldn't happen to be a young lieutenant named Jacob Brown would it?" Whitney asked. Jason's stomach clenched. Any known ties to him were in danger thanks to all the enemies Omega Force had happened to collect through the years.