The Pandora Paradox Page 8

  When he opened his eyes again, he was trembling.

  "I-I don't know what to do," Jason said. "This is Lucky. He's one of us, and something is wrong, but I don't know what, and he's too dangerous to try and approach."

  "You can't just leave him locked in a cargo hold," Doc pointed out. "And he's not answering anybody."

  "What would you do?"

  "If Lucky attacked and almost killed me?" Doc asked, blowing out a breath and spinning his chair to face the infirmary hatch. "I guess I don't know, either. His new body has reached full-integration stage, so there's no practical way to shut him down until we can find out if something has gone wrong. He's too powerful to contain, and I think that sends the wrong message anyway. In the end, like you said, he's one of us, and regardless of the risks, we're going to have to try and reach him."

  "Agreed," Jason said, swinging his legs over the bed. His neck was still very sore and once his head was off the pillow and supported by the muscles, he winced in agony. "What the hell, Doc? No painkillers?"

  "Oh, right," Doc said absently and pressed a programmable hypospray to Jason's upper arm, pressing and holding as the device dispensed the prescribed drugs. "This will hold you over until the nanobots finish repairing all the blood vessels, but you can go back to your own quarters and rest. What do you want me to tell the crew?"

  "Crusher already thinks I got drunk and fell while wildly brandishing a loaded weapon," Jason said. "I suppose we're pretty much committed to going with that." Doc just nodded.

  "It's a completely believable story, so nobody will ask too many questions—"

  "Hey!"

  "—and by the time we reach our rendezvous, it'll all be healed up."

  Jason hobbled back to his own quarters, thankfully avoiding anybody in the corridors. He locked the hatch and activated the formidable security measures Mok had ordered installed. It was doubtful it would keep out a determined battlesynth, but Jason figured it would give him some sort of warning if Lucky was trying to come through to finish him off. He went to a wall locker and pulled out one of his short-barreled railguns, checked the loadout, and placed it by his bed. He questioned how smart it was to leave the rest of the crew in the dark if Lucky had indeed turned homicidal on them, but the battlesynth had seemed pretty focused on Jason and hadn't caused any trouble while he was in the infirmary.

  He decided to keep the rest of them out of it…for now. Once he told them, if he hadn't come up with a solution to help Lucky in the meantime, he would almost have no choice but to kick Lucky off the ship and out of the crew…or even something more permanent if he felt the battlesynth was a threat to the civilian population. Just the idea of such an action—even after the incident earlier—sent waves of anxiety crashing over him. Once he was rested up, he needed to come up with a workable plan, and fast.

  The last thought he had as the narcotics kicked in was how sad a state of affairs it was that he had to barricade himself in his own quarters, on his own ship—sort of—just so one of his own crewmates didn't murder him in his sleep.

  "Actually, now that I think about it, this is the third time something like this has happened," he slurred before slipping into unconsciousness.

  9

  Lucky

  "—and by the time we reach our rendezvous, it'll all be healed up."

  I switched off the intercom channel that allowed me to listen in on Jason and Doc. I am relieved Jason was not permanently damaged, but the feeling is hollow. There is something wrong with me. Why did I kill all those people who were trying to surrender in the parts depot? Why did I almost just kill my captain and closest friend?

  I do not know.

  Every hour I feel like something is gathering at the edges of my awareness, pressing in on me. Sometimes, it gets in. When I try to access the specialized powers of this new body, I can feel my defenses falter, and instincts that are not my own guide my actions. When I was first awoken in this strange place, my friends told me this next generation body had been one of several types that had been in the secret laboratory they had raided. Given its smaller stature and unique camouflaging technology, they had assumed it was an infiltration and reconnaissance unit. I have come to believe this body was meant for something else…that it is making me something else.

  An assassin.

  The espionage game has been dominated by microscopic machines and signal snoopers for so long, it had not seemed likely that Khepri would design and build a battlesynth that could mimic another being just for the purpose of gathering information. As my new body drove me to kill coldly and efficiently whenever I tapped into its power, I suspected its real purpose. A battlesynth that could look and sound like anyone could be deployed against high-value targets without the telltale mess of micro-drone assassinations or the crudeness of a kinetic strike. Discreet, precise eliminations…a government with a few hundred just like me could destabilize a regional power in a matter of weeks.

  This left me with some uncomfortable realities I must face. I had tried to deny what might be happening to me for some time but attacking Jason Burke has changed all that. I cannot be trusted to be around my friends. I am dangerous. The only choice left to me is to leave and try to figure out if my urges can be controlled or, ideally, eliminated altogether. It is something I have to do alone. The others will neither understand nor agree with me, so I will need to be discreet.

  Fortunately, being discreet comes natural to an assassin.

  "Where the hell is Lucky?" Crusher grumbled for the tenth time that day alone.

  "He's working in his lab, and he asked to not be disturbed," Jason said. "Given how much you're annoying all of us right now, I have to assume he meant from you."

  "Mok's ships are here," Kage said.

  "The ship you pegged as being our likely traitor?" Jason asked.

  "Bracketing it now on your tactical display," Kage said. "It's the light cruiser that's second to last in the trailing delta formation."

  Jason eyed the cruiser on his display as the Devil's Fortune fired her main engines and surged into the deserted system towards the loose formation of rebel ships. It looks like any other ship in Mok's eclectic private fleet, no helpful, illuminated signs saying: "Here we are! We sold you out!" But according to the analysis done by Kage and Lucky, this ship was the only one that would have been in position to drop off the small ConFed drones that deployed slip-space trackers on their engine baffles.

  Despite their suspicions and Jason's confidence in his team's ability to reach the right answer by looking at the sensor data, they still didn't have a plan. Most of those ships belonged to Mok…not Blazing Sun, but Mok personally. The crime lord was rightly paranoid about uprisings within his own organization and fielded one of the largest private militaries in the quadrant. The amount of wealth Mok poured into his own protection made Jason's head swim. And, in the end, they'd probably still get him anyway. It was just the nature of the life he'd chosen.

  Since opening fire to disable it while still at a safe distance would only draw the fire of all the other ships in the formation, Jason had to figure out some pretense to board the cruiser. Not having Lucky available was a major setback when planning a boarding assault. It would be down to just him and Crusher, and Jason had left his heavy armor back aboard the Phoenix. The odds of the pair of them being able to get to an airlock, force their way aboard, and then subdue the crew were slim.

  "Okay…tell Mok I want a face-to-face," Jason said. "Make up some bullshit about only showing him the data in person. Once he's over here, we can make our case for why I should be allowed to open fire on one of his ships."

  "So…no raid?" Crusher asked, sounding mournful. The pack of weapons he'd brought up from the armory slipped from his hand and dropped to the deck with a clatter.

  "What were you going to do with all of that?" Kage asked.

  "I just wanted to be ready," Crusher said defensively.

  "There will be plenty of shooting," Jason promised him. "I just want to get an advantag
e before we go. Mok escorting us to the airlock will do nicely."

  "Why is there a hole burned in the deck!?"

  "I need you to focus, Mok," Jason said. "You're a powerful executive. You need to think large to small. Whoever might have accidentally discharged a weapon on the command deck is small detail stuff."

  "There is never an interaction with you where I don't regret that we ever met," Mok said softly through clenched teeth.

  "Let's get some Terran coffee in you, and you'll forget all about that little blaster hole that Twingo will patch and make good as new," Jason said. "This way to the—"

  "I know where it is!" Mok snapped. "I designed the damn ship!"

  Jason just smiled and followed Mok into the command deck conference room, a spacious room with gorgeous wood paneling that was stained a rich, dark brown. The oval, stone-topped table dominated the center of the room and sat in a pool of light, the rest of the room kept dramatically dim. It was a powerful room, meant for a powerful being to hold court and make sure the people they had invited to the table were suitably awed. Mok breezed in and sat down at one of the narrow ends of the oval, allowing Jason to take the head. Jason nodded to him, acknowledging the gesture of respect given the ship's current captain. Mok might be a hardened criminal, but he had manners.

  "Where is Lucky?" Mok asked, accepting an oversized mug of Terran coffee from Doc—couldn't be called Earth coffee since it was grown on S'Tora—and couldn't help but smile as the aroma reached his nose.

  "Lucky's indisposed," Jason said, trying to sound casual. "He's in that computer lab we set up in one of the cargo holds, working on another side project."

  "So, why am I here? By the way…if you send a sizeable amount of this drink with me back to my ship, I might be inclined to forget you blasted a hole in my deck. What's it called again? It's not tea, I know that."

  "Done," Jason said, smiling again. "And it's called coffee. It's brewed the same way as chroot grounds." The fact he owned the Rocky Mountain Coffee Company was a loosely kept secret that Mok never really seemed to be consciously aware of. Jason presented him with the stuff as a gift, and Mok always raved over it, completely unaware that Jason was basically just giving him free stock from his own warehouses.

  "Thanks," Mok said, seemingly calmed down enough for Jason to send him back through the roof with the news he had.

  "You have a traitor in your fleet." Jason dove into it. "We've been able to determine that one of your light cruisers, one that's here with us right now, released stealthy tracker drones that tagged all of our ships."

  "How did you come by this?" Mok asked, still calm.

  "Information exchange with a ConFed intel agent named Tulden. He used one of the trackers to intercept us."

  "What information did you offer in exchange?"

  "He wanted to know the nature of the thing that's taken control of the ConFed," Jason said. "Apparently, there's dissention in the ranks. I gave him the broadest of strokes, only that the Machine was a sentient, hyper-intelligent AI that came from beyond the ConFed's borders."

  "I know of this Tulden," Mok said. "He's an oddity among agents due to his preference to accomplish his mission without the trail of bodies and wreckage most leave behind. I'm inclined to believe he approached you in earnest and not as an effort to entrap you."

  "My thoughts as well, although I don't have any insider knowledge of the guy," Jason said. "I figure if someone bothers to grab me, there's already plenty they can pin on me that they don't need to bother with games or bargains."

  "So, which of my ship captains has betrayed me?" Mok asked.

  "Doc," Jason said. Doc activated the holographic projectors, and a real-time representation of all their ships appeared over the center of the table. The culprit was highlighted with a rotating red sphere.

  "The Hein," Mok sighed. "Of course."

  "Friend?" Doc asked.

  "Family relation," Mok said. "Captain Hyst is related to me through pairing of a distant cousin, but it's still family."

  "How big is his crew?" Crusher asked.

  "I'm not sending you over there to slaughter her crew until I can determine who is responsible," Mok declared firmly. "What I am going to do is return to my ship and— Wait, what's happening? Is this live?"

  "It's real-time," Jason frowned. Within the hologram the Hein began listing badly to port and dropped out of the formation. The representation was so good that Jason could make out tiny plumes of flame belching from holes near where the engineering spaces probably were. "Interesting."

  "Get me a report on what's happening to the Hein… NOW!" Mok barked, but not at the Omega crew. He was yelling into his com unit and storming out of the room, Crusher and Kage hot on his heels to see if they could find out any details.

  "Captain, I'm getting an alert that a maintenance airlock is…open?" Twingo stared at his tablet computer and fluttered his ears in confusion. "The time stamp on the cycle is from almost an hour ago, but it just now alerted me. It looks like the outer hatch is hanging wide open."

  Jason frowned at that, about to order Crusher down to make sure nobody had snuck over with Mok and boarded through the ventral maintenance airlock, but something nagged at his mind about the time stamp code. He looked at the tiny holographic burning Hein, and his eyes widened as realization slapped him. By the look on Doc's face, he'd already figured it out for himself.

  "Oh, shit," he whispered.

  10

  Getting out of the Devil's Fortune undetected had been easy. As the Second Officer, Lucky had access to all the necessary security protocols that allowed him to bypass the alarms on the ventral maintenance hatch. He also made sure to temporarily disable all the ship's internal security and tracking systems so he could move about undetected. Once he was out on the hull, all he had to do was wait while the Devil drifted closer to Mok's ships before activating his stealth countermeasures and pushing off towards the ship they'd identified as the likely source of the tracker drones.

  His sensors picked out Mok's shuttle heading towards the Devil when he was only one hundred meters from his objective. The timing would be close, but he needed to be done with his task before the others realized he was missing or Mok went back to his own ship. He decelerated hard and hit the hull of the light cruiser with a barely-felt jolt, just aft of the portside airlock.

  This was another auxiliary airlock like the one he'd left on his own ship, not the main airlock further forward that could dock to other ships. The small hatch he stood over was meant to give access from the engineering bays to the port engine nacelle for normal inspections and emitter alignments. Lucky stooped down and let his optics rove over the locking mechanism and the recessed control panel. It was a common enough unit, and his database held detailed files on how to overcome it without resorting to brute force. He used his integrated cutting laser on his right arm to cut through the hull plating ten centimeters below the access panel. The hole he created was just large enough for him to get his hand inside, reach over to the backside of the panel, and pull off the connector.

  The locks disengaged, and the hatch exploded outward as the air inside the lock escaped in a cloud of vapor, swinging wildly on its hinge. Lucky wasted no time slipping inside and closing the hatch after him. He manually reengaged the mechanical locks, and the airlock automatically pressurized again. Once the air pressure had equalized, he drew into his mind what he wanted to do. This would be the first time he'd attempted this with only a physical scan and voice print, not a neural implant download.

  "I am Saditava Mok," Mok's voice came from Lucky's mouth as his holographic generators fired up and completed the illusion he was the stocky crime lord. His plan was that when the crew came to investigate the alarm they undoubtedly received on the bridge about one of their external hatch controllers losing power, they'd peek into the airlock and see the big boss himself standing there. Hopefully, in their confusion, they'd open the much more secure inner hatch and let him walk right in.

  "S-sir?" a ti
mid voice came over the intercom. "How… What are you—"

  "I will explain everything once I'm aboard," Lucky/Mok said. "Please, open the hatch."

  "I… Sir, I need to wait for Captain—"

  "I said open it! Now!" Lucky shouted, slamming his palm into the hatch. He made sure to not hit it where the young crewman could see the hologram waver where his hand made contact. "If you do not open this hatch immediately, I will have you killed the moment your captain comes down and opens it anyway."

  The crewman looked like he might die of fright. Not all the crews in Mok's private fleet were made up of hardened killers. Most were simply skilled spacers from merchant fleets who either had criminal backgrounds or flexible morals that allowed them to serve on an unaffiliated warship for better pay. The one on the other side of the hatch, a junior technician according to the visible security tab on his shirt, looked back and forth before keying in a code sequence on the panel to disengage the locks. The hatch popped open a few centimeters with a meaty thunk.

  "Close it! Close that damn hatch! Don't let it aboard!!" someone screamed from a side corridor out of Lucky's field of view. The technician, to his credit, tried to shove the hatch closed again, but it was too late. Lucky kicked it so hard that it flew open and launched the crewman across the airlock antechamber with enough force that when he hit the wall there was little doubt he'd died on impact.

  Now that he was aboard, Lucky disengaged his mimic mode and switched over to full combat mode. His eyes blazed a brilliant crimson, and his powerplant surged, routing energy to his weapons and tactical systems. This was familiar to him. He felt a faint whiff of nostalgia as he stepped into view of the armed crewmembers rushing down the corridor. Apparently, the sensors had not been fooled by the hologram of his mimic mode, and they knew he wasn't Mok and had come ready to do battle with whatever was trying to force its way aboard their ship.