One Jump Ahead-ARC Read online

  "Can you stand?" Lim said.

  I nodded, then said, "Give me a moment."

  I closed my eyes and focused on instructing the nanomachines. For the first time since my kidnappers had tagged me on my way to the Busted Heart, I could concentrate. I set in place a full body-cleaning regimen, something I've had to do all too many times in my life, and then took a deep breath. I was back. I'd hurt for a while as the nanomachines cleaned me and my body had to purge the waste, but as long as I drank a lot of water and rested, I'd be back to normal within a day or so.

  I opened my eyes, looked at Lim, and said, "I can stand. Please let me up."

  She removed the IV and undid the restraints, then stayed close as I sat up slowly. I put my hands on either side of my body and gently swiveled my legs so both hung off the side of the medbed nearest where Lim stood. I felt beaten, almost shattered, but in a dull way with no sharp pains, so I was confident no bones were broken. I rested for a moment. Lobo helped by lowering the bed until my feet touched the floor and my knees bent slightly.

  I pushed off the bed and stood. I wavered for a few seconds, dizzy and weak enough that I closed my eyes unconsciously as I struggled for balance. The dizziness passed, and I opened my eyes again. I tried to step forward and almost fell; Lim's hands on my arm and shoulder were all that stopped me.

  "Perhaps," I said, "I should sleep a bit more."

  "Idiot," Lim said. "Of course you should sleep more. Get back on the medbed."

  "No," I said. "My bunk." Lim scowled at me. "Please."

  After a short delay, she said, "Okay, but you're definitely an idiot."

  She ducked under my right arm, and I held on to her shoulder as we made our way out of the small medic area and to my bunk. I moved like an ancient patient too proud or too stupid to let his nurse have the bed transport him, and in a humbling moment of self-honesty I realized that at the moment that was all I was.

  When we reached my bunk Lim lowered me gently onto it.

  "Thank you," I said, as I closed my eyes. "Really. For everything."

  I fell into a deep sleep before she could respond, a sleep blissfully devoid of dreams.

  Chapter 24

  I awoke thirsty and ravenous. I drank a liter of water and ate quickly, staying alone, taking stock internally. I felt almost a hundred percent, the nanomachines and the meds having done their jobs. When I finished, I went up front, where Lim was scanning shimmering windows of information about Macken and Kelco's presence there.

  "As you might imagine," I said, "I have a lot of questions. Let's start with the obvious ones. How long has it been since you dropped me off outside Queen's Bar? What happened to me? And, where are we?"

  "About seventy hours, the last fourteen and a half of which you've spent sleeping," Lobo said. "You were kidnapped and interrogated by some Kelco staff, and we retrieved you. We're in orbit around Velna."

  Lovely. Any time I want a simple answer from Lobo, I can't shut him up. When I'd appreciate some details, he turns into Mr. Terse. I made a mental note to ask him sometime if there was a way he could display the amount of emotive programming at play in his answers. Having a sarcasm meter would be quite handy for dealing with him.

  "Did you think you'd gotten here on your own?" Lim said.

  I knew there was no chance she'd go for the sarcasm meter, so I didn't bring it up.

  "No." I smiled and shook my head. I was feeling better. "As I believe I said before, thank you for rescuing me. I do appreciate it. I'm just trying to understand what happened."

  "Fair enough," Lim said.

  "I have, of course, recorded all the aspects of the mission that I could monitor," Lobo said, a note of pride evident in his voice, the added emotion suggesting that perhaps I had indeed read the earlier sarcasm correctly. "So, if you're interested you can view the logs of the rescue itself."

  "It all started when you were late for the pickup," Lim said.

  They took turns explaining to me what had happened, Lim doing most of the talking, Lobo speaking occasionally and providing the video log he'd mentioned. The story that emerged made me very glad I was working with them, sarcasm and all.

  After dropping me off, Lim consulted Chung about how he'd like us to return him. She stayed out of his sight and used a voice scrambler, so her identity remained unknown to him. He was understandably angry, but he relaxed a lot when Lim finally convinced him that I hadn't intentionally put Jasmine in jeopardy and that he was going to walk away from this. After some negotiation, they agreed on a simple but safe plan.

  Lobo invested some time in basic evasive maneuvers outside the atmosphere, moving among a few heavily populated orbits with no particular goal. Chung agreed to be sedated and took the pill Lim provided through a hatch Lobo opened. When his monitors indicated Chung was in deep sleep, Lobo used his camo capabilities to once again blend with the cliff tourist shuttles and fly the coastline. He landed with a group of them in time for the midafternoon tour-group switch.

  Lim had brought more than work gear with her. Dressed in a color-shifting pantsuit, a blond wig falling loose around her face, huge sunglasses covering her eyes and most of her face, Lim looked every bit the trophy girl embarrassed at escorting her drunken husband off the shuttle and to the nearest restroom. She'd given Chung a mild stimulant to bring him up to a fuzzy consciousness, so he leaned on her and lurched along but would remember nothing. When Xychek security followed up, everyone who'd seen her would remember her, and the cameras would have captured a lot of good images, but neither the people nor the photos would provide a useful trail back to her. So many people passed through the station that her DNA trail wouldn't matter, either. She left Chung at the restroom door and got in line to board another shuttle. At the last minute, she appeared to change her mind and walked quickly down the strip to a different shuttle, one that happened to be Lobo.

  Once they were airborne, Lim called one of her team members who was on holiday on Lankin. He used an anonymous connection at a comm joint in Queen's Bar to send Chung's location to Xychek security. Lim and Lobo, trusting the quality of Xychek's team, hadn't followed up on Chung, but the worst case, they felt, was that Chung awoke in the restroom robbed and sick; no one at a tourist shuttle site was likely to bother to kill him when they could have his wallet for nothing.

  Lobo landed a few minutes before sunset, correctly planning to minimize his time on the ground. At precisely sunset, he started monitoring the frequency of my transmitter to see how long they'd have to wait for me.

  When three minutes had passed without him detecting a transmission, Lobo knew something was wrong and told Lim. On the chance that I'd been coerced into revealing our pickup plans and to generally minimize risk, Lobo immediately took off and blended in with the last of the tourist shuttle crowd. From there he started the search.

  They swept along the coastline up to the northernmost corporate headquarters, but with no luck. Lobo flew a slow series of parallels up and down the continent, starting with the area over the city, until he was about a quarter of the planet away. When he still hadn't detected even a trace of a signal, he headed up to the highest orbital plane on which he could find recent signs of ship or satellite activity. He plotted a cylinder with its center over Bekin's Deal and a radius equal to the peak range of the transmitter, and started sweeping it for a signal. The search was maddening, Lim said, a blind trawling exercise that over the course of many hours reminded her just how much empty space exists around every planet.

  After moving down one radius of the cylinder to a lower orbital plane and shifting a radius westward of the city, Lobo picked up my signal. He traced it to a small, gray, logo-free satellite floating unobtrusively among a group of FC weather sats and Kelco comm relays.

  At this point I'd been missing over twenty-eight hours.

  Per our previous agreement, Lim took command. First priority was intel. Aside from the occasional short bursts from my transmitter, the sat was electromagnetically inert. Nothing about it read as militar
y, and it sported no obvious signs of armor. Lobo and Lim monitored it for almost an hour before it engaged in a short bidirectional comm link with a source on Lankin. Lobo traced the link back to Kelco headquarters there, so now they knew they had to hit fast and hard or Kelco would launch serious corporate security in pursuit.

  With no more data available, Lim opted for as much of a crash-and-trash approach as was feasible given that I was aboard. Lobo copied the markings of one of the FC weather sats and over the course of an hour moved slowly into a position with a clean line of sight to the target. During that time, the sat didn't communicate with Kelco on the ground.

  When the next communication began, Lobo moved a bit closer, and Lim suited up.

  Right after the sat broke contact with Kelco corporate, on the assumption that no one on the ground would be likely to contact it again for a while, Lim gave the go.

  Lobo fired an EM disruptor missile. It moved in fast, hit the sat, and sent a pulse through the vessel. If the structure was milspec and armored, the disruptor would fail, but they had to bank that the small satellite wasn't up to those standards. Lobo followed the missile in and docked hard with the sat, broadcasting interference waves to block as much as possible any communication with the ground. Lobo opened his airlock, and Lim stepped in.

  From that point on, they had multiple AV streams for me: the output of feeds from Lim's forward camera and mic, the in-helmet camera and mic focused on her face, and the body-function monitors Lobo maintained on her. The sound from the forward mic, mixed with an undercurrent of Lim's initially steady breathing, filled the room from Lobo's speakers. The forward camera's output, the images of the camera on Lim, and the standard personnel vitals played across Lobo's wall displays.

  Darkness bathed the sat's interior, the only lighting a soft green glow from the emergency strips. Lim plugged a lead from Lobo into the airlock's manual-override port and waited while Lobo hacked the switch, impatience showing in her elevated heartbeat and her gloved left fist occasionally smacking the wall. The sat was definitely not milspec; anything modern and military would have launched virus attacks against Lobo and used stronger encryption than his processors could defeat in any reasonable period of time. At just under two minutes into the mission, the door indicator glowed ready. Lim pushed it open, staying behind Lobo's wall as she did.

  A shower of projectiles hit Lobo's inner airlock wall. Lobo flashed to Lim's heads-up display the data from a forward video feed: An unarmored guard stood across from the airlock, bending around the corner carefully, exposing only part of his head, his hands, and the projectile rifle he held. Lim ordered Lobo to take him out, not trank him. Lobo fired an energy beam mounted beside the camera. Lim watched in her heads-up display as the exposed portion of the guard's head turned into a fine mist.

  She smiled and said, "Good work."

  Lim ran in and flattened herself against the wall the guard had been peering around. Two halls led away from her position, one toward the guard and the other into blackness on the opposite side. She tossed a sensor grenade down the hall with the guard, then threw another down the other hall. The grenades sprayed microsensors as they first flew through the air and then fell and rolled along the floor. No weapons hit them, so with the lack of armor on the vessel Lim decided to risk that it was pure civilian issue and unlikely to have any significant automated defense systems. Lobo collated the IR and temperature feeds from each hallway's sensors and fed the results to two new images in Lim's display. Both halls were empty, so Lim backtracked the guard and headed down his passageway.

  Lim moved carefully and slowly in the soft green glow, keeping her own lights off and using only the strips to guide her way. After eight steps, Lobo flashed her an alert: Another guard was coming down the opposite hallway. She sprinted back, pulled a short projectile rifle out of the harness on her back, thumbed it to full auto, and crouched beside the body of the first guard. When the sensor-web output in her display showed the second guard was less than three meters away, she leaned into the hall at knee level and shot the guard in the chest until the clip was empty. Her respiration rate and pulse skyrocketed, and she was smiling, eyes bright with effort and excitement, as she killed the guard. I'd wanted to avoid killing, and I wish she'd tranked the guards, but I also understood how she felt: When it's them or you, you is an easy choice, and in that moment survival is the most intense treat you can imagine.

  Neither sensor-web display showed any additional activity, so she headed back down the first hallway, reloading the rifle on the run, moving faster this time on the theory that if more guards were available, they most likely would have joined the pursuit. She approached a room on the outside wall, the first doorway she'd seen. Staying to the side, she pressed the Open button. The door slid aside. Staying low and out of the line of sight of the room, she tossed in a handful of self-dispersing sensors. Lobo collated the video feeds immediately: The room was empty.

  She passed two more outer-wall rooms and repeated the process. No sign of any hostiles.

  The small sat contained a total of five outer rooms, a hallway that wrapped around its center, and a large central area with a pair of doors spaced a hundred and eighty degrees apart. She dropped sensors outside the first door to the central area and kept moving around the hallway. On its other side she found the remaining two outer rooms, both also unlocked and empty. She dropped sensors outside the second door to the inner area, checked the feeds from the first—still clear—and pushed the Open button.

  The door stayed closed.

  Her pulse rose, and she grimaced. I understood how she must have felt, the seconds of the mission piling up like weights on her chest.

  She reached into her pack and pulled out a pair of acid crawlers, purely mechanical, limited-range versions of the squidlettes I'd encountered on Floordin. She attached both to the top of the door, a roughly thirty-degree angle separating their paths to the floor, thumbed them into action, and stepped to the side. They worked their way down the hatch, spewing an acid mix as they crawled, eating away a centimeter-wide strip of the dull gray alloy, until they reached the bottom and all that held up the door was a wispy web of smoking metal they hadn't quite dissolved. Lim stayed outside the line of sight of the door and fired a single round into its bottom left corner. The round was enough to dislodge the door. Its bottom flew backward into the room, and its top crashed into the hallway.

  A flurry of widely dispersed rounds smacked into the hallway wall opposite Lim. The shots covered a large area in a random pattern that suggested the shooter wasn't a pro. Lim dropped to her side, facing the room, rifle held along her body, and tossed in a handful of sensors. The shooter, now visible in Lobo's new feed to her as a man who appeared petrified, fired at the sensors. As he did, Lim pushed forward and emptied the rest of her clip in a tight pattern in his chest.

  Lim's display showed a room full of storage areas but empty of any life, a single door on its opposite side the only other way in or out. That door opened easily, and though she of course took the time to carefully check the connecting room, the only person in it was me.

  Watching her carry me out was strange, the images in front of my eyes colliding with my hazy memories of the same events. I winced as I saw myself hit the floor inside Lobo, where Lim dumped me. "Get ready to get us out of here," she said. "I'll be back in two minutes."

  She grabbed a waiting pack and headed into the sat. She moved swiftly and with no wasted motion through the halls, barely slowing as she tossed one charge from the pack into each outer room and, on her way out, the rest of the pack into the center room with the dead man. She was back in Lobo in well under two minutes. He closed the airlocks and detached from the satellite.

  Via a recording from an outside camera, I watched as the distance between the sat and Lobo grew until the sat appeared only as a small gray dot in space. The dot turned bright white as Lobo triggered the charges, which blasted the sat into small pieces of debris, many of which would one day succumb to Lankin's gr
avity, find their way into its atmosphere, accelerate, and burn up, leaving virtually no physical evidence of the torture I'd undergone.

  I shivered as I recalled the pain my torturers had caused me, the happy images of Pinkelponker that morphed into nightmares as I once again failed both Jennie and Jasmine, the desperate feelings that gripped me on that table, and the even worse knowledge that soon I'd have told them anything, given up every secret I'd hoped to keep, failed myself just as I'd failed Jennie and Jasmine. I understood intellectually that everyone succumbs to torture in the end, but that knowledge was as nothing next to the gut-deep sense of my own weakness.