Borderlander Read online

  Using non-ideal points like this one took much longer for the distance traveled.

  And the effects of n-dimensional travel on the human mind were a lot worse.

  She sighed. This was going to be a hard sell.

  *

  “Sounds good, let’s do it,” Grant said when she brought him the idea.

  Crash blinked. “Oh, uh. Okay. Kinda thought you’d bitch about it.”

  He grinned at her. “I must have misheard you, Crash. Surely you just said you expected a reasonable and logical counter argument.”

  Crash lowered her brows in mock consideration. “No, I’m pretty sure I thought you’d complain like a little girl with a skinned knee. But easy surrender works for me.”

  She liked this version of Grant. He had never been a bad leader, not really. He’d just been stuck in the weird place all commanding officers find themselves in at some point in their career. He had been frozen at a point where he knew what to do, but didn’t have the confidence in himself that ignited confidence from the crew.

  Hard to blame him for that. Most of their jobs before the advent of the Children were survey missions and high-priority courier runs. Not much in the way of stakes to snap a captain out of his funk. She would never wish for anything like the Children, but if the attempted invasion had to happen, Crash was happy for this small silver lining. Grant was a good man, and she loved him dearly. It was nice to see he’d become more comfortable in his own skin.

  He swiped the file over to his own monitor and leaned forward. “So, we’re heading to Rome, huh?”

  Crash nodded. “Rome colony isn’t really a colony any more. The city itself has more than four million inhabitants spread over almost thirty thousand square kilometers. There are eight satellite cities in the usual octagonal array around it, plus our destination.” She brought up the map of Caesar, the host planet for the colony. One day she would find out what ancient madman had control of naming rights for colony planets and piss on his grave. “These two settlements are relatively new. Rome has been there for almost a century, but these are less than twenty years old. Atherton is a farming hub on the southern continent, and it supports our destination, which is right here.”

  She tapped the map over a dot labeled Bacchus. It was a solid hundred kilometers from Atherton, but that didn’t matter. The first thing most planetary engineers did when seeding new cities was set up a high-speed mass transit system. That went double for specialty cities like these. She had of course read the Alliance files on them, and had been a little surprised to find an entire dedicated underground tube line for bulk goods transport.

  “It’s gonna be nice,” Crash said. “Atherton has remote cabins for rent if either of the couples want some time alone. Bacchus has every amusement you’d expect from a city named after a god of wine.”

  Grant drummed his fingers lightly along his control panel. “How are our finances looking? I know the crew has been paid, but how long can we afford to stay in port before our accounts start to hurt?”

  “Three months,” Crash said immediately. She was thorough before anything else. It was part of what made her a fantastic fighter pilot.

  His eyes widened. “Seriously? How are we that flush?”

  Crash shrugged. “We can mine our own fuel, the Navy footed the bill for the enormous overhaul of our ship, and our food mostly comes from bioreactors. If you want to stock us up on gourmet food, that will knock about three weeks of our free time. We just don’t have much overhead right now, other than salaries. That’s assuming we don’t have to restock on ammunition on the fly. Batta promises me we can make our own with the right materials, but in a hurry we’d have to buy it and that ain’t cheap.”

  Grant ran a hand along his stubble. She knew he deeply enjoyed not having to keep to Navy trim. “What kinds of jobs might we pick up afterward, as a free company? What kind of payouts?”

  Crash tilted her head. “Assuming Sharp doesn’t commandeer us for Fleet work first? Plenty. The number of free company licenses only rose by three percent at the new year. We’re still part of a relatively small club. I’ve kept an eye on the boards, and the cheapest job I’ve seen so far was an escort run lasting three weeks that paid six times what our last survey run did.”

  Grant whistled. “Jesus.”

  Crash nodded. “Yeah, Sharp wasn’t kidding about how well these mercenary groups do.”

  They got regular paychecks from the Navy for being part of the Ghost Fleet. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, certainly not enough to raise any suspicions even if the tangle of anonymous payment processors could be sorted enough to find the original source. It was enough to pay for the basic costs of the ship like tariffs, docking fees, and other assorted expenses.

  “Okay, see if you can find us something in, say, three weeks,” Grant said. “Nothing too dangerous, since whatever new hires we pick up on—” he glanced at the other planet they’d be visiting “—Nolan will need time to integrate and settle in. We’ll also have to make sure we have enough combat armor, weapons, and whatever else you think we’ll eventually need for whatever missions we might bid on.”

  Crash held back a smile. “That’s appropriately vague, sir. You’re definitely a captain.”

  Grant smiled somewhat sheepishly. “I haven’t taken a good look at our inventory since you told me we were good to go.”

  She nodded. “We are. When I said we were covered for three months, I included new hires and equipment into that. Commander Sharp made sure we had what we needed to thank us for our work with the Children. The drop bay has two surface vehicles, eighteen sets of combat armor, and more than enough maneuvering packs to let us field a ship-to-ship assault using nothing more than our specialists.”

  She watched him try to juggle the numbers and estimate costs. He gave up after a few seconds. Grant was a good captain and one of the deadliest gunners she’d ever seen, but his brain didn’t work like hers. Crash could do differential calculus while making dinner and had no trouble juggling sets of information and understanding how they related to each other and changed over time. Grant was more linear when it came to data, though she didn’t see that as a flaw. Quite the opposite, in fact; what made them a good team was the gulf between their modes of thought. Batta was the other senior officer and part owner of the ship, and Crash thought his bizarre and disconnected way of looking at things might be the most effective of the lot.

  Grant leaned forward and tapped the screen. “Yeah. Find us a job, but don’t be a slave to that time frame. Get us a good fit before anything else. A nice shakedown run. And have Iona start pinging any Ghost Fleet sims who might have suggestions for team members on Nolan. I’d prefer to hire a group who know each other if we can manage it.”

  She did smile now. “No problem, cap. I feel lucky about this trip.”

  Grant looked up at her in mild horror. “Oh, come on. Are you trying to throw the gauntlet at the universe? Now we’re gonna go to Nolan and get arrested and killed or some stupid thing. Thanks a lot.”

  Crash shook her head as she walked away, pleased with how thoughtlessly confident he’d been in seeing the best way forward and giving the orders. They were of course the same orders Crash herself would have handed out, regardless of whether Grant thought of them. The old him might not have, leaving her to cajole and guide him toward the best decision.

  Now that he was starting to get there on his own, it took a lot of pressure off her. She’d been the glue holding the crew together since they’d first lifted off, but with the influx of new faces, the time she could spend helping her friend find his balance would grow sharply limited.

  Vacation was well and good, and she planned to spend as much of it as possible getting blind drunk and picking up strangers. That would be after they dropped off the rest of the crew and hopped over to Nolan for a day. Duty first, always.

  She just hoped the new hires got with that program. Crash hated having to bust heads, but by god she would if heads needed it. Suddenly she was looki
ng forward to the heavy drinking more than was probably healthy.

  2

  According to Ghost Fleet rules—Dex thought it was funny that a covert appendage acting as a third-party intelligence unit would have hard rules—Iona was only supposed to leave the ship during emergencies or at predetermined locations like the NIA hub at Athena station. Vacations were strictly prohibited.

  The captain had other ideas, however, and sent them on their merry way.

  It didn’t bother him that his partner was a sim. Her job was ostensibly to act as the eyes and ears of the NIA brass, using the bleeding edge Ansible technology incorporated into her body to communicate instantly with the other Ghost Fleet sims stationed on each ship. They created a real-time network of watchers whose job was equally split between keeping the crews alive and making sure they didn’t do anything to threaten Alliance interests.

  She was an artificial person who had been given specific orders, but Dex and the rest of the crew didn’t care. Because unlike some in the Navy—the only place sims were ever created—the crew of the Seraphim thought the person aspect of who she was mattered more than her mission.

  At that moment, Iona was cheerily trying her hand at making mixed drinks for the first time while Dex lay sprawled across their bed covered only by a small portion of the sheet.

  “We’ve been in this cabin for twelve hours,” she chided as she shook a silver container full of ice and booze. “You’re only twenty. Surely you have more stamina than that.”

  Dex groaned. “I’m not a machine, woman!”

  Iona chuckled. “Hmm. Maybe I should find myself a nice male sim. You know, for when you’re too tired.”

  She meant it as a playful jab, but there were still a few cultural differences she hadn’t yet adjusted to. “If you can get Sharp to authorize it, that’s not a bad idea. Or maybe one of the new crew.”

  Though Iona was not a biological entity, she looked entirely human. The mistake humanity had made on Jefferson, the colony planet where the Children were first conceived, had been to build artificial super-intelligence as a whole. Design the framework, write the code, feed it data, then switch it on. Within a year of those first originators becoming active, they had begun to kill and enslave the entire planet.

  The solution was to grow new AI. Iona’s body contained only a few hard mechanical parts, mostly backup devices. The rest of her was made of cells like any living creature, a seamless blending of nanotechnology that housed the network of quantum processors that was her magnificent brain.

  Because all sims were raised to believe they were human, a certain amount of cultural imprinting was inevitable. Iona was shaped like any human woman, attitudes and ideas ingrained in her at a deep level that only faded so much over time.

  She looked at him in naked astonishment. “Are you joking?”

  On his back, Dex was gazing at her upside down. “Uh, no? Why would I be?”

  “You’re casually suggesting I sleep with someone else,” Iona said.

  Dex hauled himself into a sitting position. “Have you not read the dossier I wrote for Sharp about Threnody? There’s a whole big section on our culture. It’s in my terminal. Feel free to check it out while I grab a shower.”

  The idea of Iona having multiple lovers didn’t bother Dex in the least, but the fact that she clearly hadn’t read up on where he came from did. That was to be expected to a certain degree. After all, he was one of a tiny number of people to ever successfully escape his home world. He’d talked to her more than once about the horror show life there was. Yet she seemed to forget that the same cultural pollination that gave her human instincts and morals—which was the entire purpose of growing artificial intelligence in the first place—also took place in him. He hated Threnody and what the ruling class there did to its children, but he was no less a product of its culture for it.

  The cabin could have fit in on old Earth easily, provided no one looked past the surface. The shower used water, though the system inside the place was almost as closed and efficient as a starship. Dex gloried in the endless stream of hot water, a far cry from the infrequent and too-short water showers aboard ship. Most of the time he had to use recyclable synthetic cloths soaked in an enzyme-based cleansing agent. It worked, but was far from satisfying.

  When he was done, Dex toweled off and put on clothes to lounge in. He wanted to take a long walk in the mild wilderness outside at some point, but didn’t want to leave while Iona might think he was angry.

  He wasn’t, not really. Irritated was about as far as Dex got most of the time. Another indelible mark left on him—aside from the scarification on his chest adeptly hidden beneath a swarm of complex tattoos—was the effect strong anger had on his body. The last thing he wanted to do on his vacation was trigger one of his genetic modifications. The after effects were the least amount of fun possible.

  His modified brain was capable of running multiple tracks at once. As he walked from the small bathroom to the main area, he played out the possible scenarios. The most likely was that Iona read and absorbed the dossier during his shower, an easy task. All other forks split off from that assumption. There were a lot of ways he could explain the odd relationships the Threnody underclass had, but he thought the best way forward might be to let her lead the way and answer questions. When every person on your planet grew up without family, raised in education crèches and forced to survive increasingly dangerous tests, your concept of love and togetherness couldn’t help being different.

  For him, sex was completely separate from love. It was no different than any other bodily need, though for her sake he’d decided at the outset that he would remain monogamous. No real worry on the ship, of course. On Threnody, love born from the deep understanding of shared hardship mattered far more than any brief coupling. He and Iona—he and the whole crew—had lived through plenty of things that should have killed them. He loved them all, though only Iona in a romantic sense.

  He was trying to think of how to express this sentiment, this idea of a larger and closer family than she was used to, in the brief moment between walking into the communal space and recognizing that something was wrong.

  Five men wearing adaptive combat armor stood with weapons raised. Three at Iona, two at the doorway Dex stood in. He was suddenly aware of the shirt clinging to his damp skin, the faint currents of air in the room, every individual sight and smell. A familiar heat rose up in his body as his already superior musculature took on a dose of the biochemical cocktail supplied by the special glands engineered to produce it.

  Yet he didn’t move. In moments of need, he was faster and stronger than the strongest unaltered human ever to live. His grace and coordination were unmatched. His mind worked at speeds and in ways few geniuses had ever achieved. He was supremely confident of his ability to kill all five intruders.

  But fingers were on triggers. No calculation gave him the time he needed to stop all three of the men before at least one of them got shots off at Iona. Even here his brain ground through information with mechanical coldness; how and where could she be shot without dying? Her nature made her far more hardy than a living body, but there were limits. Limits in what she could endure, but also in his knowledge.

  Suddenly he felt like a complete asshole for expecting her to know everything about him just because the information was available. If they survived, he would apologize.

  A filtered voice issued from the helmet of the mercenary closest to Dex. “You will come with us, or she dies.”

  Dex snorted a deep breath. “If you hurt her, I’m going to kill all of you slowly.”

  He let himself be restrained by a surprisingly comprehensive body lock. He could walk, but that was about it. Sudden movements of any kind caused the constriction coils of the lock to tighten and hold him in place.

  “Please,” Iona said in a voice so terrified and pathetic that Dex knew it was false. She rushed forward shakily, risking being shot, and grabbed the sides of Dex’s face. Their lips met and her
fingers pulsed in a quick pattern against his skull. Not a message, or at least not one that could be decoded beyond the fact that she was trying to tell him she was up to something.

  He tasted something bitter and metallic before the guards pulled them apart and shoved her across the room. His first guess was she’d put a number of the nanites that composed her body into his mouth. For what reason, he had no clue.

  “Move again and we shoot you,” the lead mercenary said. He produced a small cylinder from a pouch on his armor and depressed a plunger. A blinking light began to strobe. “This will release a sedative gas in thirty seconds. You’ll wake up with no memory of the last few hours.”

  He tossed the gas grenade down and waved everyone else through the door. Only a second or two before the countdown, the leader stepped outside and closed up behind him.

  “We should have killed her,” one of the other mercenaries said. “Loose ends are a bad idea.”

  The leader didn’t so much as turn his head as they hustled toward a copse of trees. Real trees, the kind grown from seeds transported from Earth. “You know the rules. No deaths if we can help it. We lose our bonus if we kill anyone. Draws too much attention.”

  Well, he was screwed. Whatever was about to happen to him couldn’t be good if they were talking any sort of details in front of him. He had to hope Iona would get word to the Seraphim quickly and let the crew know what happened.

  Then he remembered that the ship was already gone, on its way to Nolan if not already there. Light years away, hours by the Cascade, and with no way for Iona to get in touch using the Ansible in her brain.

  Though the shuttle waiting for them only sat half a kilometer away from the cabin, by the time they got to it Dex felt as if rescue was nearing impossible. These men had the practiced air of having done this countless times. Unless he missed his guess, they would be away long before tracking became possible.