“Let me guess again, then,” Wei continued, “because the look on your face has that peculiar, righteous cast that you only get when you think someone’s played with one of your toys. Did Salome try again to alter SAM’s language heuristics so that he would snort like a pig? Gods, if I have to hear that woman joke about SPAM one more time, I’m going to—”
“No… no.” Wei wasn’t letting this go. Alec sighed and turned out of the main corridor, toward a room that he knew was likely to be unoccupied and—SAM had confirmed—unbugged. It was a conference room too small for the top Initiative directors to use; he thought it was probably used by individual department teams whenever they needed to confer.
When the door closed, shutting out the ambient noise, Alec felt himself relax imperceptibly. Wei raised both eyebrows and sat against the edge of the O-shaped table, waiting for his companion to continue.
Alec sighed again and ran a hand over his hair, beginning to pace. He always paced when he was angry. “Remember how interested Goyle was, in SAM? Before, I mean.”
Before the court martial. Before Alec had been drummed out of the Alliance military for violating ethics rules—for doing whatever it took, damn it, to get SAM up and running. Ambassador Goyle—the woman who’d preceded Donnel Udina in the job—had been one of the first people to whom Alec had gone in his quest to make integrated AI work. Goyle had been wary and suspicious… ultimately denying Alec the right to continue his research.
Then Goyle had hung Alec out to dry.
“Of course I remember.” Wei folded his arms. “You called me on a military-secure line and ranted at me about it for an hour. But Goyle’s not even in office anymore. Why are you bringing her up?”
“She knew about SAM’s potential. I know, because I tried to convince her.” Alec tapped his fingers on his lips. “Her aide was in the room, too, and God knows who Goyle reported it to, especially after there was political hay to be made from throwing me under the bus.”
“Yes, yes, but why—?” Abruptly Wei blinked. “Oh. Ohhh. This is about the theft.”
“The theft.” Alec ground his teeth as he paced, remembering the day he’d come into his lab to find half his terminals fritzed and every camera and sensor array in the place running on a loop. Only later had he realized the attack hadn’t been corporate sabotage, but an elaborate smash-and-grab.
Or something more. “I don’t know if it was just a theft,” he admitted. “I don’t think that, anymore.”
Wei was silent for a long moment. When Alec stopped pacing long enough to glance at him, he saw that the other man’s expression had gone foreboding. Yes, Wei would see it, too. “Similarities in motive do not suggest the same mind at work,” Wei said.
“They do. Especially after three separate tries, now.” The theft and the kernel turning up at Home Away; the co-opting of Ygara Menoris; the theft from Menoris when she’d tried to double-cross whoever hired her. Alec took a deep breath and steeled himself. He’d never been good at asking for help. “And if I’m right, you know what I’m up against.”
Wei snorted, getting to his feet. “I know what your enemy is up against, between you and that overgrown synthetic pet of yours. I feel sorry for them. But I’ll help you.” He scowled. “If we can’t trust our own… shit, Alec.”
To cover his relief, Alec turned and headed for the conference room door. He had to go run another electromagnetic-storm simulation. “Stop thinking of everyone involved in this project as ‘our own,’ Wei. We could never trust anyone but ourselves. Nobody else is smart enough to settle another galaxy, anyway.”
“That’s what I love about you, Alec, your humility and grace.” It was Wei Udensi’s turn to sigh, and as Alec opened the door and glanced back at him, he saw the man rub his eyes in weary frustration. “And the fact that you never bring me small problems to solve.”
JUNE 1ST, 2184
Andromeda Initiative recruitment ad, prospective title: “A New Future Awaits.”
Developmental notes of the Central Nairobi Advertising Agency.
[Close-up of galaxy map. Should be immediately obvious that this galaxy map is unfamiliar. Frame-and-zoom on quadrant, pull back to show helmeted FIGURE in body armor observing map. (Director note: Can we get an actor who looks like Shepard? Will Shepard’s estate sue us?)]
VOICE-OVER: The Cluster. That’s our target site. By best estimates there should be more than half a dozen garden worlds in this region which are habitable or readily terraformable. The conditions are right. The suns are in the main sequence. The atmospheric compositions are exactly what we need. What are you waiting for? It’s only the unknown.
[FIGURE turns to camera, draws a pistol, begins walking toward viewer.] Let’s go get ’em.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Something was wrong.
They had reached the Pamyat System, which should have been full of nothing. Well, pirates and rocks and fly-by-night mining operations, and maybe debris from clashes between the pirates and rocks and fly-by-night mining operations. But beyond that, nothing.
Everyone knew that Volkov, an oversized asteroid or undersized dwarf planet in the Chazov Belt, was a deadly honeypot—rich in resources, but dangerous to mine or even visit because of near-constant, unpredictable asteroid strikes. Most of the other asteroids in the belt were the same, and not worth the danger, which was why no one had ever bothered to contest the pirates for control of the system.
Cora remembered visiting Pamyat once, back during her childhood. They’d needed to pick up a few thousand pounds of platinum via quick probe-mining. The whole trip had been tense for hours, given the threat of pirates, but her parents had gambled correctly that pirates wouldn’t be much interested in a single battered cargo vessel held together with spit and goodwill.
They’d escaped unscathed… that time.
Now, the shuttle’s sensors found no evidence of pirates. The old habitats were empty, the illegal mining scars more than a year old. The old tourist trap was still there, the giant THERE’S NOTHING HERE scrawl etched across two hundred kilometers of the third planet’s surface. Some pissed-off miner had done that, but somehow it was fainter than Cora remembered. As if someone had tried to obscure it? Maybe.
It was subtle, not the sort of thing that anyone other than a Traverser would notice… but this whole system felt as if someone or something had scoured it cleaner than the forensics after an STG espionage operation.
“Shuttle sensors detect no communications, heat signatures out of the ordinary, or other signals,” SAM-E said over the shuttle’s PA. Maybe it was Cora’s imagination, but the AI seemed to be speaking in a hushed tone. That was about how Cora was feeling at the moment, much more than she had as a child. Like she needed to tiptoe through this unnaturally silent, empty region of space. Like there might be monsters lurking somewhere nearby, who would hear if they spoke too loudly.
SAM-E continued: “Public records indicate that Altai Mineral Works, a small company headquartered on the second planet, is currently in receivership. Apparently they lost their last eezo refining contract bid. Its personnel have all been laid off or relocated to operations in other systems. The facility is in shutdown mode, with only maintenance and property defense drones present; the last staff member left a few months ago. The sensors don’t even detect engine emissions which are typical of pirate vessels with irregular or improper maintenance. Not anywhere in the system.”
And yet the Hades Nexus relay, back in the Hekate System, had clearly indicated that the thief’s vessel had engaged FTL in the direction of Pamyat. There was nothing else along that trajectory worth checking—no planets at that point in their orbits, no stations, no vessels, nothing but the usual dust between star systems. Nothing in Pamyat itself, though odds were the ship would’ve only used FTL to reach the system, then navigating thrusters from there. But navigating to where, in this strangely empty system?
“It’s like all the pirates just up and left,” Cora murmured to herself. “Someone must have attacked t
hem, driven them off. But why? They didn’t have anything worth taking; that’s what made them turn to piracy. And even they had to have barely been making ends meet. There’s nothing here.” She gripped the console, scowling. “I remember what it was like, back when I was a kid. Engine signatures all over the thermal map. Sneaking in was like navigating a minefield; there must have been hundreds of pirate operations in the system. Do you know what it would take to remove every single pirate from a system like this? It would be like trying to pick the fleas off a dog with tweezers.”
“Is it possible that you’re misremembering?” SAM-E said this with a delicacy that suggested he had said something similar to other organics, and discovered that organics didn’t like having their memories questioned. Cora herself had to tamp down an immediate defensive reaction in order to consider the question. She had been a child last time. But…
“There’s an asteroid in the Chazov Belt that’s shaped like it has cat ears,” she said. “Can you scan for it?”
SAM-E made a credible imitation of a splutter. “Cat. Ears.”
Cora felt her cheeks heat. “My father used to read me stories that had cats in them. I got a little obsessed. I was eight, all right? For some kids it’s dinosaurs or horses. For me, it was cats.”
SAM-E said nothing for a moment. Then, very quietly, he said, “I very much admire hive insects.”
Cora blinked. “Okay…?”
“Bees, ants, social wasps, the hive-dragonflies of Sur’kesh, the rachni—”
“The rachni?”
“They were very efficient.”
Cora counted, slowly, to five. Otherwise she was going to start laughing, and might not be able to stop. “Okay. Maybe you shouldn’t tell anyone you admire the last species that attempted to commit galaxy-wide multi-species genocide.”
“I can see how that might be concerning, Lieutenant Harper. I have also located the asteroid with cat ears.” A moment later the shuttle’s holo display lit up to show a slow-tumbling asteroid, lumpen and irregular—but when it tumbled to just the right angle, it did look like a cat’s head with its ears alert and pricked forward.
“That’s it!” Cora grinned, feeling for a moment like she’d seen an old friend.
“Interesting. Your species’ propensity for pattern matching is very much like that of a rudimentary machine learning program—”
“Um… thanks?” She couldn’t tell if that was meant to be an observation, or something more. And while the feeling of foreboding didn’t fade with the banter, the disquiet would keep her on her toes, she decided, before taking a deep breath and straightening. “All right. I’m going to take us through this system—slowly, to keep our heat signature low. Plot a route through the asteroids and planets so we can use them for cover. Scanners at widest range.”
“Acknowledged, Lieutenant. What am I scanning for?”
“Anything weird,” she said. There wasn’t much to see through the forward viewport. Star a little redder than Sol. Just the one asteroid belt, just the four planets, none of them even remotely habitable. She thought the slightly larger sphere visible through the port might be the planet Patsayev. “Just look for anything that shouldn’t be here.”
She’d braced herself for pushback, but she kept forgetting that SAM-E was more than flexible enough to run with such nebulous instructions.
“Of course, Lieutenant.”
Even if it did occasionally sound less like an assistive AI, and more like a friendly co-worker.
With SAM-E directing her hands, Cora took the shuttle up to moderate speed for a few seconds and then cut thrusters to drift on momentum. That way no one would detect the shuttle unless they were specifically scanning this part of the system, because an unpowered shuttle emitted little in the way of heat. Their active sensor array might raise their profile a little, but Cora called up the control display to watch. SAM-E was being careful here, too, sending out scan waves only as they passed through Patsayev’s radiation belts, and again when the star pumped out a momentary gust of solar wind.
As they edged into the asteroid belt, Cora could only tell they were doing so by watching the nav display. Since the asteroids were so spread out in this part of the system, she could just see one or two in the viewport at any given time. SAM-E directed her to activate the thrusters once more, very briefly, to give the shuttle a bit of spin. It was disorienting to watch through the viewport, but when Cora checked the display she was amused to realize SAM-E had made the shuttle look like just another asteroid tumbling along, albeit in an unusually straight trajectory.
“Good thinking,” she said.
“I do try, Lieutenant.”
Then something blipped on the nav display. Cora inhaled and leaned close, reading data that scrolled up near the blip. A ping off one of the nearby asteroids; it had a warm spot on its polar surface. “Warm” was relative against the heatless vacuum of space; in reality, the spot was just slightly-less-cold. Still… SAME’s readings suggested a mass effect envelope had briefly contacted the asteroid at that spot, generating heat from friction as it deflected a potential collision.
“There’s more,” the AI said, scaling the nav display up to show the whole system. Two additional blips glowed on it, at varying points along a gently curving trajectory that SAM-E helpfully illustrated with a line. “The ship we’re following kept near the Chazov Belt, perhaps for concealment. Extrapolating from the temperature of this asteroid and accounting for several hours’ cooling amid the vacuum of space, infrared scans show these points as additional impacts with asteroids or patches of dust.”
Cora leaned in, narrowing her eyes. “It looks like the assassin’s shuttle was aiming for something in the Belt.”
“That would be a sound assumption.” SAM-E paused the nav display, which had been real-time, displaying the slow orbits and rotations of each sector of the Pamyat System. For a second or two the display moved backward, asteroids spinning and tumbling in a different direction before freezing. “This is what the system looked like at the time the ship moved through it.” SAM-E then extended the trajectory line until it intersected a large asteroid, which blipped. “With only this shuttle’s sensors to employ, I cannot be certain, but…”
“Right.” Cora touched the blip, reading the lines of data quickly. “‘Quiet Eddy?’”
“Yes. It appears a hanar freighter was the first to chart the system, back in 1879. The freighter was damaged and thus unable to plant markers which would have established legal ownership of the system; the Systems Alliance did that in 2156. But the freighter did briefly land on this asteroid in order to conduct repairs, and during the month that it remained here, the hanar aboard gave their temporary sanctuary a name which the Council chose to recognize.”
Quiet Eddy was one of the largest asteroids in the Belt—big enough to have a spherical shape, which made it officially a dwarf planet. Just a rock, though, without an atmosphere and space-cold, possessing little in the way of valuable mineral inclusions and a surface pitted with craters from impacts. Nothing special… except that SAM-E’s trajectory line went straight to a region in its southern hemisphere, near a ridge that was probably the remains of an old crater rim.
Cora activated thrusters just enough to propel the shuttle along that same glowing trajectory. And there, near the ridge, she finally spotted something she’d expected to see: the unnaturally rectangular mouth of a hangar bay surrounded by dim blue landing lights.
“Hello, there,” she murmured, with satisfaction.
Then, however, she scrolled through the sensor readouts and frowned. “This can’t be right. The shuttle’s scanners show nothing there. Either my eyes are lying, or the scanners are.”
“I can confirm that your eyes are functional, Lieutenant,” SAM-E said. “Nevertheless, the system comm buoy and other shuttle sensors say there’s nothing there.”
“Well, I’m looking at a hangar.” She squinted, her gaze tracking along the ridge, and there she spotted two more unnatural additions to
Quiet Eddy’s rough surface. “Sensor arrays, too, though I can’t tell what kind. There’s a facility of some sort embedded within that asteroid.”
“It is standard, Lieutenant, for equipment that utilizes an Internal Emissions Sink, cloak, or other stealth technology to be invisible to standard sensor equipment even as it remains visible to the naked eye.” He paused for a moment. “I have written a script to adjust the shuttle sensors. They perceive the hangar now, though only on the thermal spectrum.”
Stealth technology. That didn’t sound good. “Illegal miners wouldn’t be able to afford stealth technology. Pirates wouldn’t bother.” She looked around. “No identifying markings, either. I don’t know if this installation is Alliance or what.”
“Lieutenant, my guess would be either a hidden, privately owned research facility, or military intelligence of some government or another.”
That had been what Cora was afraid of.
“A black op.” She sighed. “Well, we are after an assassin. Why aren’t there fighters all over us, though, if we’re dealing with a clandestine site? We don’t have stealth tech. Any decent midrange proximity detection system should’ve spotted us.”
“True.” Even SAM-E sounded puzzled by this. “Those sensor arrays aren’t moving or projecting thermal emissions. I believe they are offline.”
Stranger and stranger. On impulse, Cora said, “I’m taking us in.”
“Lieutenant, if you activate our thrusters to land, we will no longer be running cold—”
“I’ll activate them now. See what happens.”
“This is ill-advised.”
Cora shook her head, though she had no idea whether SAM-E could detect it. Maybe he could read her muscle twitches or nerve impulses through the amp. “We’re going to have to activate thrusters soon anyway, or run into that rock. Any ship with a decent drive core could catch us in a heartbeat before we make it back to the relay. But if they’re trying to pretend nobody’s home, let’s let them know we see through that game. Walk up to the door and knock.”