Adrift in Space

Iris read his mood and stood nervously, as soon as Brittany had emerged he stepped forward and slid an arm around each set of shoulders and nudged them. They walked, turned sideways to get into the living room/kitchen area and stepped around the green pile of their uniforms and boots in the middle of the room. He turned and kissed Iris, counted four before he turned and kissed Brittany and again counted four. Then he pulled away and opened the door.

"We'll have lunch, eh?" He didn't quite read the expressions that didn't fit the soft smiles and nods before he nudged them out the door and pushed it close.

"Lock door, Queen's personal override only," few other people had the ability to lock their doors almost absolutely. Without a battering ram there was only one person who could open the door.

He stared at the padlet in the charging cradle in which it had reposed all weekend and saw the notifications LED blink. He'd known they were there, his wristlet had told him. But he just shook his head and walked into the bathroom and turned the shower on. He'd overridden the strict limits on shower time, they were on a satellite where everything needed to be cleaned and recycled endlessly and he usually hewed to the limit.

Not today. He let the steam rise and lathered up his face for the first time since Friday. He still preferred a razor to the electric shavers.

Shaved and with his still wet hair combed for the first time in days he finally retrieved his padlet and carried it to the counter where he told the service machine to boil water. Before he'd been taken he'd never even heard of a French press but getting the coffee beans the Queen rejected for her own use meant they made a brew a million times better than the machine did directly. He tapped at the padlet as he poured hot water over the ground coffee and capped it to let it steep. He used more hot water to mix up a bowl of instant 'oatmeal,' some rough equivalent of alien origin but since engineered to make it edible for humans as well. Despite its usual blandness this morning it was surprisingly tasty.

His agents had retrieved the personnel data. Okay. Only a hundred alien faces to work through. He sighed. He easily pictured one of them in his mind, he couldn't work it out but something about the face stuck in his mind. He'd been nothing special, decently handsome as Sylvan males go, light brown hair, cut short, eyes a dull blue, not Brittany's vibrant blue. The latter was rarer but neither that unusual. So why?

There was something else though. Had the agent been detected? That would be a first. But he had to wait until he was in the lab for a full evaluation. He had layered his own security on his padlet but no use pushing it.

His agents also had more files about the mysterious nanomachines. He pushed the plunger halfway as he offered the screen a confused look.

He needed to get into the lab.

The plunger hit bottom and he poured a mug. First, a jolt. He closed his eyes as he sipped then singed his tongue as he forced more down. He felt the heat add to the oatmeal in his gut. He took another gulp and drained the French press to refill the mug.

He checked more notifications, nothing special, a couple of messages from the Queen asking how it felt getting trampled by a Triceratops and then being eaten by a T-Rex as he'd tried to drag his broken body to shelter. Yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence. He'd enjoy throwing that one back. But how'd she know? Oh, Stuart. Keeping her people entertained was a keen interest and she'd ensured he'd been given a team to do Dinosaur Hunt, with the absolute proviso they do that version for children.

Nothing more interesting than that until he got to the shuttle arrival. Just past Sunday morning ship time. He'd not stopped the agent he'd sent to check out the shuttle logs so it'd kept monitoring. This was unscheduled and unusual. It was a small one, but it had come from the third satellite, not the surface.

"This can't be right," he said to the room. The arrival hadn't been logged. The agent had caught it real time but the logs weren't there. No. They'd been redirected to the bit bucket.

"Ok, do we have video?" The agent had saved it real time. Peter's hand froze with the coffee mug at his lips.

Two guards, a male and female as always and indistinguishable by him without checking the nanotransmitters embedded in the back of each one's neck. The other two. Male Sylvans. Those two, the pair who'd been at dinner with the human woman Cherry Powell. They were somewhere on the command ship.

Their pilot had been Bernard. Had his skewering been intentional? It would've given him time to get a shuttle, get to the other ship and back. Just. Hmm, his flight from here had been a training flight, already scheduled, but he'd been a last-minute replacement to another trainee pilot. The flight was scheduled to wait a couple of days to return while the trainer assisted in giving exams. The shuttle was also still there, officially speaking.

Why?

And Cherry. And her friends. With their connection to these strange nanos and being routed through Sheryl as their human contact, he'd tasked an agent to poke around Earth's networks for more info. He'd again wished his home planet's networks were more connected, that he could simply say 'search the Internet' and have it happen. But a couple of weeks before he'd told the Queen he'd asked Anna Squared in Tennessee to check out some interesting pointers to news articles in the library newspaper archives not accessible via computer from the university from which she'd just 'graduated.'

Sheryl had indicated this Cherry had a couple of brushes with the law, not unusual for a succubus recruit. It wasn't a role for upstanding virgins, Carole hadn't been squeaky clean before she'd been recruited. But a computer on Earth he controlled had broken into the police computers via modem in his and Cherry's native City and the history it had finally extracted was well beyond what Sheryl had exposed. Why?

Then he got to Munich-born Brigid Mueller. Or was she Maria Bader born in Graz, Austria? Or maybe half-English, half-German Constance Beyrfeldt from leafy St. John's Wood? Red Army Faction? Baader-Meinhof? Anna's message showed among others a picture she'd taken with her padlet from the Die Welt microfiche of an armed robbery in Munich not quite a decade ago. One suspect had never been found. Was this the same woman? If not, they were sisters at the least, almost twins.

Patrick Collins' background was still murky. Actually, it was nonexistent. That wasn't good.

All of this well beyond the information Sheryl had provided on backgrounds. But that woman had also indicated she'd been the one to connect Patrick and Cherry and thence to Brigid. Maria. Constance.

He finished his coffee and told the padlet to match the shuttle's passengers to the personnel records and ran in to get dressed. A nagging feeling told him to grab one of the custom pullovers that offered a pouch to carry his padlet. He didn't know why but he wanted it close and he wanted his hands free.

The padlet had matches when he'd returned. Of course it had. Duskrider. 'Victor' Duskrider. Duskrider? Shit. Brittany's older brother. The other was 'Charles' Seaskimmer. Iris's older brother. This was too connected to be random.

And the new layers of computer security and obfuscation was familiar. Too familiar. Brittany was putting her studies to good, or ill, use. Had the weekend just been to keep him out of the way?

He slipped the padlet into its pouch. He felt like a marsupial with the phone book sized computer on his stomach, but since it wasn't quite a centimeter thick he hardly noticed it.

"Oh no. No... no," Peter said as he worked in a corner of the lab.

"Paetor, are you okay?" One of the two male Sylvans in the room asked as both looked at him. They were regular coworkers.

"What? Oh, hey, Harry, ah, no. You know, you think your code is perfect, but. It ain't."

"Ah, yesh. I know," short coughs from both and Peter offered a forced laugh. They didn't pick up on his mood.

Fortunately his companions were engrossed in their own work, heads together and soft but animated voices. Peter's padlet chirped as it began the download, it was less than a minute before it chirped again once it had the full data on the altered nanomachine design. His hands paused over the keyboard, he looked around, found what he wanted and grabbed a spare padlet. It would take a few minutes to wipe it and download and configure his custom security on it, but without it every padlet could be accessed and controlled and even wiped from the central computers. He set it to work.

He rumbled in his throat and mumbled 'Brittany.' The satellites didn't have hotels but each had rooms that were used for visitors. Most of these were in the area around his place since there were few full-time resident humans. There was a database to allow reservations and to prevent double-booking. It had minimal security beyond ensuring it was the user reserving or canceling the room. It also allowed most anyone to search and find someone.

Except today. Searches for Duskrider or Seaskimmer were rejected. They could've been next door to him and he just hadn't noticed because he'd been locked in a room for two whole days. And the whole of the previous night.

Had it all been an act?

Save it. Save that for later.

'You made a mistake, Brittany,' he thought, this showed their hand. This was a slow time, there were few transits right now and plenty of free places to simply crash. They'd had the right idea with the shuttle, pretend it didn't happen. If his agent hadn't captured the data in flight it would've been lost.

Brittany. Her brother. This Seaskimmer. The records called them historians and sociologists. The kind of paeple who would've studied human revolutions. Ringleaders. Iris had to be in on it too. That pale creature was a nuclear engineer. Well, a trainee one. Everything ran through the computers. Control them, control communications. Life support. And the reactors. Everything absolutely depended on them.

Including the stealth field.

They had their own pair of Guards. That was the linchpin. You didn't bring them if you were coming for dinner or sightseeing.

The new padlet chirped. He keyed in his security key before he started the download of everything he'd found.

He heard the wristlets of both of his coworkers offer the trills of incoming top priority messages that silenced their quiet conversation.

"Paetor," Harry said, "we have been summoned to an immediate department meeting. Did you not get called?"

He looked at them and held up his wristlet, shook his head.

"Not that I'm complaining. Maybe I'm being fired. If you see a couple of Guards coming this way, send me a quick message, okay?"

His fake smile convinced them it was a joke and they offered tight smiles as they gave him quick waves and left. That was very odd but it made the next step easier.

"Wristlet, call the Queen."

A moment later his earbud said "she's not accepting calls or messages, highest priority."

Not good. He grabbed his padlet and with a couple of taps pulled up his messaging app.

"WE NEED TO TALK. Not shitting you. Open a channel, if you're in trouble get 'just thinking of Ian' to me. If not, get alone. Now."

He sent it on an override channel that she couldn't block. No one could. No one else knew it existed. It would be invisible and delivered directly to her earbud. If that earbud still existed.

He tapped his foot. Where was she? His hosts' culture was deeply trust-based and egalitarian. It was also weird in that anyone could willingly share anything but no one could track you if you didn't allow it, and few did. He could force his way in and find her personal devices but that would require battling the supercomputers. They didn't bother as a rule with security of data but they directly obscured where anyone was at any time. Voice calls, texts, messages, went into that cloud of intelligence and got delivered.

That also meant that the bulk of Sylvan living and working areas didn't have cameras, unlike the hallways in his human and guest area. Labs, the farms, the VR tanks, all had cameras. He quickly ordered an agent to check those for her. Maybe she'd decided on an inspection tour.

Human and guest area. Shit. He typed furiously to send an agent to scan all of the footage since Saturday midnight to look for this Duskrider and Seaskimmer. And hopefully their guards. As a test he added in his, Brittany's and Iris's images.

His earbud chirped a specific tone.

"Yeah?"

"I'm bishy. Not like I shit around paining for you to cal—-"

"Where are you?" He winced, slowed his voice. "No, are you safe?"

It took her a moment and when she spoke she'd switched languages.

"Safe? What does that mean?"

"Anna. I... might be wrong. I might be. But, I might be right. Something big is going down. Now, or real soon."

"Something big? Like the T-Rex you brutally murdered?"

Despite her strong accent her actual understanding of human nuance was better than almost any other Sylvan he'd met. Even Brittany and her friends, despite their much smoother pronunciation, didn't have quite the same grasp of the language and human culture as she did. But now wasn't the time for their banter.

"No, has anyone threatened you?"

The silence was long enough it almost worried him.

"Threatened me? Who would do that? Now, I—-"

"My girlfriend. And her brother, and someone named Seaskimmer," he'd almost never interrupted her in a conversation, much less twice in a minute.

Again, a long silence.

"The Duskriders and the Seaskimmers were vital in those early days," Anna said slowly, "helped organise things and save the expedition. But after, none wanted to be part of leadership. Wanted children, and to be teachers and academics."

"Where are you?" He again had to rein his worry, her summary hadn't soothed his thoughts.

His terminal beeped. He smiled faintly.

"Never mind. You ARE at the VR tanks."

"How do you know that?"

"I broke into the security camera feed."

"You don't have access."

"We discussed this. Who's with you? I know Ralph's away with Catanie and the kids. Do you have guards? Who knows you're there?"

"Angie and Kim, we'll join with some other trio. We are going on Dinosaur Hunt, the short version, you made it sound so much fun. Secret, my calendar says I'm doing evaluations in my office, disturb me and die horribly. Just Stuart and a minimal team are here. Fuck work for a few hours."

As he listened his terminal showed his trio's transit the previous evening from the VR rooms to his place, Iris and Brittany's exit then his earlier this morning. But then his goal. His target pair and their escorts had been around. But once they'd crossed into Sylvan territory, nothing. Not ten minutes before he'd turfed the two females from his room.

"Now, I need to get going, get dress--"

"No, listen," three times, he heard the likely subconscious growl and wondered if she was still as good with her fists as she had been, "it's a revolution. A coup. Brittany's brother and Charles Seaskimmer. But my bitch girlfriend's in on it."

"I don't have ti--"

Four times. The padlet next to him chirped happily, pleased at having digested its meal of data.

"YES, you do, please, Anna. The nanomachines--"

His lab went black, the dimmed overhead lights blinked out as one and took every terminal with them including the one in front of him. His regular padlet threw up a stream of warning windows.

"What?" Anna's tone had changed.

"You lost lights?"

"Yes..."

"Hold on, I'm checking," as with the security, he'd injected tendrils into the central control and operations systems. A human ship of this size and complexity would've required a crew of five hundred or more, hell, Roger back at the Uni managed a staff of thirty full time people for what weren't even toys in comparison. Here, a suite of supercomputers did the vast bulk of it, massively redundant communications and processing links everywhere and the main team wasn't much larger than Roger's. Despite his attempts to downplay it, he indeed was almost the best on board but even he didn't muck with the supercomputer internals. He'd 'talked' to them any number of times, they weren't sentient, or didn't seem to be, but while meatbags always approved the final deployment, the systems mostly even wrote their own updates based on directives from the meatbags. It was just too damned complex. His strength was creating code that interpreted events outside of pre-defined operations. The ops systems seemed not yet able to do that.

"I cannot call my office," Anna's voice was firm but slow before her sentence trailed into silence, "that has never..."

Alarms began. An alarm. A specific alarm. Reactor instability, proceed to local shelter.

"Iris... oh, damn you, you stupid, stupid girl," Peter muttered as he told his padlet to sort systems alerts.

"She slept with you, of course she is," Anna's voice was forced lightness, "that is the reactor alarm. She is a reactor engineer. Are you worried for her?"

"How do you know, never mind. No, Anna, sorry, I haven't explained," Peter said, "they're taking over your ship. Trying to. Iris has done this intentionally. Well, probably. I doubt any of the senior engineers would do this. But I hope she really, really knows what she's doing. She's overriding safety locks and fail safes to make the ops computers think there are failures so they trigger alarms."

He was grateful for Anna's extended silence as he scanned and dismissed systems alerts.

"You can't call your office because my fucking girlfriend has blocked the server. And she's messing with the supercomputer operations. Well, not directly, blocking them. That's impressive."

"Did you teach her that?" The question was coated in ice.

"No. We discussed how they worked, well, as much as any meatbag knows about how they work."

"Then why are we still connected?" Mostly thawed.

"She can't stop the Ultranet, unless she wants to kill the ship, too many redundant networks. She's just interposed her agents to lie to the operations supercomputers. But she can cut phone calls, all that goes through central servers and she's blocked requests getting to the routing supercomputers. But this link is my own. She's chasing us though. She won't catch us."

He heard voices in the background, Angie, one he thought was Stuart, and some he didn't recognize. All worried.

"Stuart wants us to go to one of the conference rooms, it is the designated radiation shelter.'

Oh, um, no DON'T go," he said suddenly, "they're..."

He opened and dismissed windows.

"We have to—-"

"They'll lock you in. Trap you. That's what they want. Get everyone out of the way."

Her line went mute for a moment. "Life support? Air?"

He really wanted his terminal. Blue-eyed bitch.

"That's..., that's ok for now. They won't kill anyone they don't have to. Even they seem to hate the Golden Criminals. They just want to say 'we're in charge' when they let everyone out, go back to work, the new normal. I'm rerouting your comms, it'll go through my links. Call people. But first, do you have Guards who answer only to you?"

"What? Why?"

"Right now, the gang, my strong hunch is they're going to your office. When they find you're not there, they'll eventually figure out where you are. I've got my own agents blocking camera feeds. But they might work out you're where I won't let them look, once they work out you're not in the Sylvan areas. They brought a pair of Guards with them. They might have more. You need protection."

"Protection? From what?"