Trident's Forge (35 page)

They walked along a short path of fresh stones to a small outbuilding that looked nothing like the grand architecture carved into the cliffs to their right. The ill-fitting stones were stacked and mortared at odd angles, as if they had been hastily assembled from backfill.

“Hardly seems a fitting home for an oar-a-coal,” Kexx said in a low voice.

“I think ze just moved in recently,” Benson said flatly. “Kexx, I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Don't offend our hosts, Benson. We have been treated with respect this far.”

“We'll see how long that lasts.”

The procession halted, and the chief motioned two of zer advisors into the shelter. Benson realized he was holding his breath. He touched Mei's shoulder. “Be ready to move.”

“You'll be right behind me,” she said humorlessly. Apparently, they'd had the same thought. The advisors reemerged from the darkened interior of the hut holding the ends of a makeshift stretcher. Benson couldn't see through the Atlantian at the head of the stretcher, but gasps from members of the crowd all but confirmed his suspicions.

Then, the stretcher turned sideways and removed all doubt. Lying there, about a meter across, was a quadcopter drone. Its photovoltaic skin caught the bright, early afternoon sun and drank it in.

“Ah, Benson,” Kexx said. “Isn't that a–”

“Yep.”

“And won't it–”

“Probably.”

“So you should be–”

“Hiding.” Benson backed away slowly, trying to put the taller Kexx between himself and the drone. The sound of rotors spinning up signaled the drone was about to launch. Damn, but they charged quickly.

The under chief began to chant, zer advisors joining in at the chorus. A voice fed through a tinny speaker answered with its part of the chant. Prerecorded, if Benson was any judge. Whoever was controlling the drone, they'd been playing the oracle game for quite a while now. That confirmed Benson's suspicion of how the Dwellers' dialect had ended up in his translation software. Somebody had forgotten to block it off from the linguistic database updates. It was the little fuckups that got most perps caught in the end.

The chant reached a crescendo, and as one, the Atlantians fell to their knees in prayer. All of them, including Kexx.

With his hiding spot lying on the ground, Benson stood there feeling very, very naked. The hovering drone spotted him instantly and swiveled in the air to point its main visible spectrum camera at him.

“Uh.” He waved a hand dumbly. “Hi.”

Kexx looked back over zer shoulder at him. “Oh, shit.”

“What are you doing?” Mei hissed from the ground. “That's the part where you get down.”

“Sorry, I forgot my hymn book,” Benson bit back.

The synthesized voice started shouting angrily. The only part Benson caught was his name, but its meaning was clear by the way several dozen spears leapt up and pointed at him.

Kexx put up zer hands and started to object, but it was Kuul who really got their attention. Ze grabbed their prisoner by the crests and hauled zer to zer feet. Several guards turned their spears to face the new threat, but stopped dead in their tracks as Kuul calmly, coolly placed the tip of zer obsidian dagger into a hollow between the prisoner's neck and shoulder.

Everyone froze as Kuul spoke, slowly and evenly. Benson didn't have to know the language to know what ze was saying; they were all walking out of there, together, and if anyone so much as twitched in a way ze didn't like, the chief's cousin was going to do zer best impersonation of a pin cushion. That Kuul's voice was even and emotionless, and zer skin placid only helped to punctuate zer resolve to see the threat through.

As one, the members of the caravan retreated carefully from the little hut. The chief and zer retinue of advisors and guards, as well as the drone, shadowed them with every step. Twice Kuul had to stop and order them further back, repeating zer threat and even drawing a small stream of blood from their captive.

“One of these times, I'd like to be wrong,” Benson said. “Just to break up the boredom.”

“This is boredom?” Kexx asked. “What do we do?”

“Me? I'm going to let Kuul keep backing us up until we aren't surrounded anymore.”

“And then?”

“And then I'm going to run straight for that fucking bridge like a scalded cat.”

“A good plan,” Kexx said. “You can tell me what a cat is on the other side.”

Benson dug his sat link out of his pocket and looked at it nervously. His cover was blown anyway. Whoever had tried to kill him knew he was still alive now, so there was no point to his radio silence. Of course, he had no way to know if whoever he connected with was working with them or not. He looked back up at the semicircle of spears, war clubs and daggers a few meters away, waiting for their chance to carve him up like a lake perch. He needed to worry about surviving the next few minutes, and to do that, he needed his rifle. He'd sort the rest out later.

Benson manually punched in a connection to the Command deck on the Ark and waited.

“This is Command, Ensign Harrington speaking.”

“It's Bryan Benson,” he shouted into the link. “I'm alive and under fire.”

“Er, but you're dead, sir.”

“I will be if you don't pull your head out of your ass.”

“I'm not reading any signal from your plant. How can we be sure you're human?”

“My fucking voice print is on file! Actually, to hell with the voice print. Do you know any Atlantians who can swear in English, you stupid son of a bitch?”

“There's no need for that kind of language, sir. I'm just doing my job.”

A spear point shattered next to Benson's ankle. Kuul shouted an obscenity-laced warning at the warrior who threw it and tightened zer grip on their prisoner's neck.

“Just run the goddammed print!” Benson screamed.

An eternity later, the voice returned. “All right, we've confirmed your identity. How can I help you, Mr Benson?”

“I need you to unlock my rifle!”

“For which user?” came a patient reply.

“Any user! Just turn the damned recognition system off.”

“But that's against–”

“If you say one fucking word about safety protocols and I somehow survive this shit storm, it will be very hazardous to your health. Clear?”

“OK, sir. I understand. I just need you to read me the serial number located on top of the side of the magazine well.”

“Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

“
W
hat's
our girl doing now?” Korolev asked as he slid back into Theresa's office.

Theresa glanced up from her desk's screen, then spun it around so her junior constable could see the feed from inside cell number four where Hallstead was being held. “Nothing,” she said. “Just sitting there cooling her heels, letting her hair dry.”

“Sure isn't acting like someone facing a death sentence, is she?”

Theresa rubbed her chin. “No, she sure isn't. I think she still believes she's going to get bailed out of this somehow.”

“Are we sure she isn't?”

“Yeah. I am.” There was a finality in her voice that did not invite further commentary. Korolev had the good sense not to argue.

“So, what's the game? Good Cop/Bad Cop? Double Blind? Solberman's Gambit?”

“I thought I'd just go in there and hit her until she talks,” Theresa said.

“By the book, chief,” Korolev scolded.

“Can I hit her with the book?”

“No.”

“Fine.” Theresa huffed and crossed her arms. “Then let's just go talk until her ears bleed.”

“That I can get behind.”

As a precaution, both of them slipped back into their jerryrigged helmets before transferring Hallstead from her cramped holding cell to the interrogation room. The Sweatbox, as the constables had nicknamed it, was larger than the cells and contained an L-shaped desk and three chairs. Two of the chairs were padded and comfortable, one of which sat in the L for the backup constable to take notes, monitor recording or diagnostic equipment, or review case files. The other comfortable chair was for the interviewer. The third chair was a thin metal folding chair with a straight back and no cushioning. It was intentionally uncomfortable, and meant for the interviewee. Across from the desk was a large, one-way mirror leading into a second room, ostensibly to give the interviewee the sense that unseen people were watching the proceedings, but in practice the anteroom was almost always empty.

The walls and doors of the sweatbox, as well as the individual cells, were imbedded with a fine copper mesh that acted as a Faraday cage to block all contact prisoners had to the plant network. To make sure that no one “disappeared” while in custody, each cell was equipped with video cameras that live-streamed onto the network where anyone could check in on prisoners at any time. The sweatbox lacked the live feeds, but still employed a CCTV system that could be reviewed on demand after interrogations were over.

Korolev plopped Hallstead down in the tiny chair and locked her foot shackles into a steel loop set into the floor.

“Comfortable?” Korolev asked. “Are the cuffs loose enough?”

“Well, I'm still in them, so no.”

“I think you're fine.” Korolev walked around and sat in the chair behind the desk, then tapped a few icons on his tablet to start recording. “We're ready.”

Theresa didn't take a seat, preferring instead to lean against the door, arms folded. “Let's make one thing clear. You found a way to make our stun-sticks inert, or at least unable to recognize you. You may have thought you were being clever, but here's the problem. If you'd left them alone and tried anything, we would've just stunned you. But, since that won't work, if you try anything, and I do mean anything, we'll just have to handle you the old-fashioned way. Which is quite a bit more painful.”

Theresa nodded at the butterfly strip covering half the woman's nose. “Sorry about the knee, needed to make sure your head was scrambled enough that you couldn't send the detonation command to that little package of yours.”

“It'll make me look more distinguished.”

“For all the hot dates you're going to be going on?”

Hallstead shrugged, oozing confidence. The little idiot really still believed she was going to be protected somehow.

“I don't know what you thought you were going to accomplish with that little stunt, but I really wish you hadn't done it. Now we're going to have to install chem sniffers and backscatter scanners at the spaceport, the anchor platform. Put security guards on the gates. You made a lot more work for us.”

“My heart bleeds,” Hallstead replied.

“I'm sure. We're fishing your bomb out of the drink now. The techs will have it apart in a few hours, and we'll be able to backtrack all of the components you used to build it, which will lead us to your accomplices and suppliers within a couple of days. But that's not what interests me right now. What I want to know is how a minimally competent programmer somehow managed to rewrite the plant source code to induce heart attacks. We already know that's how you killed Administrator Valmassoi, Captain Mahama, and I strongly suspect that's what happened to my husband.”

Hallstead's eyes twitched, just a fraction, and only for the barest instant. If Theresa hadn't been intensely studying her face, it would have been very easy to miss.

“Oh, you didn't know about that one? Or you didn't think I knew? Well, whichever it is, your next thought should be whether or not you want to keep fucking around with a grieving widow who currently has no one to blame but you, or do you want to start answering her questions?”

“I want to see my lawyer,” Hallstead said.

“That's hilarious. How did you insert the code? That's not supposed to be possible. You even stumped Dr Russell on that one.”

“Take off that helmet and I'll show you,” she snapped back.

“So you admit it. Good. Now I just need to know how.”

Hallstead blinked, trying to regain her composure. “I didn't kill nobody.”

“That's a double negative. So you did kill somebody.”

“Anybody,” she corrected. “I didn't kill anybody.”

“Sorry, but someone who just threatened to blow up the goddamned beanstalk seems like the sort of person who doesn't have a whole lot of moral compunctions about taking human life.”

“Look, I didn't kill anyone. But, speaking… hypothetically.”

Theresa looked at Korolev. “This will be good. Please, Ms Hallstead, hypothetically…”

“
Hypothetically
, you wouldn't have to write any new code at all. You'd just have to stumble on some really old code. Legacy code, see, left over from the very first plant OS, Starfire. It's still in there, you know, buried under two centuries of tinkering and updates and bug fixes and performance upgrades and integration patches.”

“And this Starfire OS had a heart attack app? Is that what you're saying?”

“No, just the opposite, see. That first generation of people on the Ark, the real pioneers, they were as close to perfect as people could get, but they still came from Earth, with all the pollution and crap food and what have you. Even if they weren't hereditary, there were still heart attacks. Hell, marathoners sometimes drop dead in the middle of races, and those people are psychotic about health.”

“This is coming back around to a point, I trust?”

“I was just coming to it,” Hallstead said, excitement in her voice. She was enjoying this. “The Starfire app wasn't to induce a heart attack, it was an internal defibrillator. Heart stops, the plant itself jolts it back to life right that second, minutes before a medic or doctor could administer a shock.”

“But,” Korolev jumped in, “if it was triggered on a heart that was beating properly.”

“Yahtzee,” Hallstead said triumphantly. “Instant heart attack.”

Theresa nodded along with the revelation. “But if it was so effective, why did we stop using it two centuries ago?”

“Because it wasn't effective. During a heart attack, there's so much disruption in the central nervous system because of the disruption of the oxygen flow to the brain that the bioelectrical voltage to the plant gets spotty and throws up errors. The app didn't have the power it needed in a real-life situation to deliver the shock half the time, so they stopped using it. A couple of updates later, everyone forgot it was there altogether. It was one of those things that worked great on paper, just not in practice. But to throw a healthy heart into v-fib? No problem.”

Hallstead beamed with pride at her cleverness. Theresa held back her sudden urge to smack the smug little bitch across the face. Instead, she picked an even tenderer target.

“Well, thank you. That was thorough and illuminating. It makes sense to me now. You weren't clever enough to write the code. Someone else did all the work, you were just lucky enough to blindly stumble onto the answer.”

“Hey, now just a minute–”

“Sorry,” Theresa cooed. “Hypothetically speaking.”

There was a knock on the door behind her. Theresa glanced back over her shoulder to see what the issue was. One of her newer constables looked back at her through the mesh in the glass making a “phone-call” gesture with his pinky and thumb held up to his head.

Theresa opened the door a crack. “I'm kinda busy, Epstein.”

“Sorry, chief, but the administrator is on the vid asking for you.”

She rolled her eyes. The man had the timing of a shitty comedian. “Sorry, kids,” she said to Korolev and the shackled Hallstead. “Take five. I won't be long.” She returned to her office and brought the waiting call up on her display.

“Chief constable,” Merick said impatiently. “I couldn't raise you on your plant.”

“I was in the sweatbox.” Theresa pulled off her helmet and shook out her hair. “I'm in the middle of an interrogation, which I'd like to get back to.”

“I'm afraid that won't be possible.”

Theresa stared blankly at the screen, not sure she'd actually heard the last sentence. “I beg your pardon?”

“You are to stop your interrogation of Ms Hallstead immediately and prepare her for transport to the Ark.”

“Like hell,” she snapped. “She's been arrested for assault, terrorist threats, possession and manufacture of an improvised explosive device, and resisting arrest. And on top of that, she's under suspicion of involvement in the deaths of Administrator Valmassoi, Captain Mahama, and maybe even my husband.”

“Chief, I know you're in mourning, but your husband was killed in an attack by natives.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Sure, that's the official story.”

Silence stretched over several heartbeats. Merick was the first to speak. “Are you questioning the official record, chief constable?”

“Not yet. But someone has been running around tugging at strings all over the place. And that someone certainly has the capability to have a few seconds of plant recording doctored. I think she's sitting in my interrogation room. And she's not going anywhere.”

“Chief constable,” Merick said with the weight of his position. “I've been in contact with Acting Captain Hitoshi, and we agree that Ms Hallstead should be extradited to the Ark where she will stand trial for Captain Mahama's murder.”

“So, you agree it was murder now? What about Valmassoi? Our claim on him is just as strong as Hitoshi's.”

“This wasn't a request or an invitation to debate, Theresa. Clean Hallstead up and get her back to the beanstalk. You did your job. Congratulations on making the arrest. She wouldn't be facing any sort of justice if not for that. But I shouldn't have to remind you that your immediate concern is getting your team assembled and in the air for Atlantis so you really can find out what happened to your husband. Surely, you haven't forgotten that?”

Theresa's jaw clenched tight. “No, sir.”

“Good. Now then, I…” Merick's face froze as something off screen grabbed his attention. “Er, I have to attend to another matter. You have your orders, chief, see to them. Merick out.” The connection dropped.

“Cocksucker,” Theresa mumbled, then got up from her desk. After a moment's consideration, she set the helmet down in her chair and returned to the sweatbox.

“Chief!” Korolev shouted as she opened the door. “Your head!”

She waved away his warning. “Shut off the recorders, Pavel.”

Korolev blanched, but did as he was told. Theresa walked right up to Hallstead's seat. “Here's your shot, kid. You want it? Take it. It's not like you could be in
more
trouble.”

Hallstead stared up at her, incomprehension and fear mixing on her gaunt face. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Testing a theory. See, you don't strike me as a coldblooded killer. A leech, sure, but I don't think you have it in you to murder someone.”

“I would've gotten you at the dock if it wasn't for your helmet.”

“Yeah, sure. But it was that or get caught. Life and death. Now, we're just two people standing here. So, what's it going to be?”

Hallstead held her gaze for a long time. Long enough that uncertainty started to creep up Theresa's spine. What if she'd miscalculated? What if she winced and her heart suddenly stopped? Could they get her help in time?

Then, her anxiety was banished as Hallstead broke eye contact and looked at the floor. “I didn't kill nobo… anybody.”

“I believe you,” Theresa said. “But you did give them the tools to do it, which still makes you an accomplice.”

“I haven't admitted to anything.”

“No, you just walked us through an incredibly detailed hypothetical that explains the whole thing the way only someone with direct knowledge could. Just prefacing it with ‘hypothetical' doesn't mean we can't use it against you at trial.”

“But–”

“But nothing, Yvonne. You're sunk. And here's where it gets worse for you. I've just been ordered to extradite you up to the Ark. We're not even supposed to be having this conversation.”

Hallstead's expression lightened instantly. “Well, today's my lucky day after all.”

“Don't be stupid,” Theresa snapped. “You were caught, Yvonne. They'll need a scapegoat, and a dishonorably discharged, pill-popping crew member fits that bill nicely. Whatever deal you had with them is out the airlock, and you'll be right behind it if you go back up there. Do you really believe the sort of people who are willing to assassinate an administrator and a captain will bat an eye over killing you?”