Flyover Planet Ch. 10. Jam Tomorrow. Minus One.

Chapters One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen Pt. 1, Fourteen Pt. 2, Fifteen, Sixteen.
(Non-SF Flyover Valley starts here.)

As the transport ship was mainly intended for cargo there was little by way of accommodation. All the assets were housed in one room, with four bunks and five extra flimsy folding beds crowded into it. There was barely room to move but that was all right, there was nowhere much for them to go. Carroll, watching them on the feed from the room, wondered why the boys had given up the bunks to the girls. The bunks were sturdier and more comfortable than the folding beds, so they had been assigned to those with larger bodies. But there was Asset 11 seated in a bunk with her back against the wall, the number 11 clearly visible on the back of her right hand. Asset 17's head was in the other girl's lap, eyes closed. Asset 03 was sitting on the floor next to her bunk, with his head against the side of it.

Where Carroll saw Asset 03, XieXie (Asset 11) saw Forseti on the floor, Guns asleep or out of it. She had seemed to recognize XieXie on boarding, or at least did not recoil from her. Carroll had logged, in true Neg fashion, that all the Waysider assets seemed to just fall into each other when they met again. You could not call it a group hug (group hug coordination had been part of teaching at Negotiator courses). It was as if they all wanted to connect to each other other, to grow into each other like branches of a bush. All the weirder not to want modifications, Carroll thought. Asset 11 had cried at something Asset 03 had said. It had been recorded but made no sense to Carroll, so he was dutifully poring over it. He wanted promotion as much as the next Neg, and that involved understanding non-progressive cultures.

What Forseti had said to XieXie, could not help blurting it out when she hugged him hard was:

"Your hair..."

The rusting bastards had cut her hair. It used to fall past her wrists, and her chocolate-and-gold braid had been as thick as Forseti's arm. Now it was down to her shoulderblades. And it was purple with pink and blue highlights in it.

Forseti felt rather than heard her give a little sob.

"I'm a right rusty piece of scrap, XieXie, I'm sorry," he said penitently but she shook her head.

"No that's all right," she said. "How could you help it?"

"You are still the best-looking girl around, Rowena," Linder said. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he felt skinnier than before when Forseti had thrown his arms around him, but the spirit was there. "I'd take you to that dance right away."

"And you're still a rotten liar, boyo" XieXie said but the merest hint of a smile floated in her eyes for a moment.

Now they had been herded onto the ship and into the room by a tall man and a couple of medroids. The medroids came in at set intervals to apply patches and bring termovac containers of some food concentrate stamped with the Ed logo. They looked like ugly metal cupboards with manipulator feelers and moved with an unpleasant snickety noise. The first time they rolled in Linder and Forseti tried to get out through the opening door and push the droids away; Cheers had ripped at a jointed manipulator.

There were three zapping sounds that came almost as one; Cheers danced away, cursing and waving his burnt palms against the air. Linder and Forseti both had scorched skin too, on their wrists; Linder got one on the chin. One medroid had fallen on its side, manipulators wriggling and whirring, the other was standing still, all eight of its feelers raised and vibrating menacingly. There was a sharp smell of ozone in the air.

"If you do that again, there will be consequences. For the girls," the voice that came over the comm sounded calm and cold. The last three words had been an inspiration on Carroll's part, to test a hypothesis. Sure enough, the boys gave each other surly looks and stepped back as he instructed them to.

"Now raise the droid, Asset 02. Assets 03 and 04 may help," Carroll said. The boys pushed the thing up, their hated numbers standing out stark blue against the skin.

"In you go," Carroll said, using the Wayside cadence, "and stay slotted in."

So they were staying slotted in.

"Where are those rotting pieces of rusty scrap," Cheers jerked his head at the door, "taking us, do you think?"

"And why us?" XieXie said softly. "Where is everyone else?"

Besides them and Linder, there was also Benjy Rotor, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion on one of the folding beds; Fenny, her pretty face tear-stained, refusing to talk; and two more kids they did not know, a boy and a girl about their own age. They looked so alike that they must have been twins. The girl was, or seemed, asleep; the boy was sitting on the floor next to her bunk, knees drawn up to his chin, hugging them and staring at nothing.

"You don't think they are all dead, do you?" Benjy Rotor asked dully. He had perked up at their meeting but now he had just been given his patch by a medroid and was listless and feverish again.

"No," Forseti and XieXie answered in unison.

"No, because we are going to escape and rescue them," Forseti said with a confidence he did not feel in the least.

"Yeah, a squad of squeaky commandoes like us," Cheers groused. There were long thin scars along the inside of his forearms that had not been there before. "You saw what happened just now."

"We'll think of something," Forseti twisted his head around to see XieXie's tired face. "How's Guns?"

"Sleeping, I think," XieXie carded her fingers gently, soothingly through Guns's short hair. "I wish I knew what they had done to make her eyes like that."

"I wish I knew how to turn it back," Forseti said grimly.

"I wish we could scrap the lot of them," Cheers said, and meant it.

Guns's eyes had been ordinary grey, like her father's, a striking combination with her fair skin and her mother's black hair. Now they were green, not the green of their Wayside sky, not green with gold flecks like XieXie, but the luminous green of a speed display or an old-style screen, as if her eyes had been replaced with glass, and they flickered like those freaky walls had. And if you looked closely, really looked into her eyes, you would see that the flickers were tiny, tiny numbers, glittering in and out of her iris and sclera, as if some machine was now running inside her head, ticking, clicking, ticking.

Cheers said, very softly:

"I just wish we could get the hell home."

They were seventy-seven hours into their flight. Home was getting further and further away.

Hell, on the other hand, was not.

When it did happen, it was quite quick. The screens that had been humming in colors a moment before just went grey all at once. The integrated pilot/navigator slumped in its seat. Carroll had just stepped in on the bridge. He rushed to the pilot, but the blank staring eyes showed grey static over the green sclera instead of the running lines of black code.

Carroll’s anxiety mode compensator kicked in with an almost audible pop, releasing moderators and stabilizers into his blood stream.

“What is going on, Bridge?” he asked calmly. He was pressing the reboot point under the man’s ear but there was no response.

“Unable to transmit or receive,” said the soothing voice of the nav computer. “Single beta stream jammer with a rider. Source unknown. Coder unknown.”

“Jammer?” Ed ships, Eds could not be jammed. Everyone and everything transmitted their own individual signal that streamed together in an unreproducible flow. Any hitch was recorded, any unexpected ping or lack thereof. The nav was chained to the mainframe and would simply self-destruct if it was targeted while far enough from the base so there was no point. “What kind of jam?”

“Jam today, jam tomorrow, jam any day,” the pleasant voice of the nav said and then added, in a different tone, “You been Ragged, boyo.”

Carroll stared at the screens, feeling as if he’d got badly slatted without knowing it. The screens were going black now, one by one with barely a moment between. A green dot glowed at the center of each screen, and as Carroll watched, the dots grew, one after the other, resolving into pulsing green hearts wrapped about with a thorny whip. The thorns were drawing blood. It was not a subtle image and the chill it gave Carroll went right past the anxiety blocks.

“Scrap me,” he cursed, whirling wildly around. The pilot was still slumped down, but his lips were moving as Carroll ran past him. Had he looked he would have seen them shape two words:

“We will.”

In thinking that Ed ships could not be jammed Carroll was perfectly right. They could not be lifted, hijacked, boarded or even pulsed. Oh, you could catch one unawares, as it were. There might be a nav glitch; the pilot’s brain might light up wrong for the implant or something and you just happened to be close enough. A one-in-a-million chance in the Old Dark teeming with millions of ships, why not? But the Eds would burn their ship before you got to it properly, and then they would find you and burn you so bad you would beg to be airlocked before they were done with you.

But say you got the sweets out of the pot before they got to you; say the space fairies helped you, say you even took it apart and blasted every signal chip off it before selling the stuff. They’d still find you, don’t you worry about making a will, easy rider. They had chips on their chips, feeds in their food. You did not live to tell the tale; there was never a tale to tell, and everyone in the aggressive free market fringe world knew that.

Except. Except maybe, maybe somewhere someone got really smart, and really lucky. Someone picked up a geck tech who had been prepped and trained but did not quite cut the mustard. One of the outer stations, maybe, so they were slow to wipe him. The tech was a runty-looking geck, sure, but his eyes ran code same as any tech’s, miniscule squiggles across his sclera going too fast for comfort. And maybe this tech was still awake enough and mean enough to want to give a little back to the eddification system, and over a bottle of Doc’s special when the talk turned real loose and dirty those odd sparks in his brain just went and torched a regular old bonfire. And that was exactly what Captain Raglan was hoping when he picked up that tech.

Captain Raglan of the Fair Heart took in the ship on his viewscreen. The signal kept coming along nicely but his men worked fast and never stopped. From wrap to scrap, that could take a matter of seconds, whatever magic mojo you had.

“Plenty of cargo in the hold, Captain, just like the geck told it,” Bosun said reluctantly. He didn’t like techs but was a fair man, for a pirate. “Ready to pull her, she’ll come apart beautiful.”

“What’s the cargo?” Raglan turned to Coder, the geck with the crazy eyescreens.

“Three sigmas, that’s a kid project. Group 6.2, experimental modifications, that’s the point twos.” He actually sounded pretty human a lot of the time. It was mostly those wriggling lines and dots that winked on and off over the irises and the whites, going up the left and down the right, that made you feel downright antsy.

“Captain.” His First sounded tense too. Raglan knew why. They’d seen some of those at Fatso Moonface’s, human scrap of some mental improvement scheme that had not taken. Couldn’t really call them people anymore. Turned a man’s stomach to look at those, even a man who made his living the way Raglan did.

But these kids would not be scrap. They were being shuttled on an Ed ship somewhere, so they were important. Expensive. Worth something. There were labs that would kill for Ed castoffs. Better yet, they would pay. The Fair Heart would clean up big.

“Get the cages ready.” Captain Raglan did not raise his voice. He did not need to.

Raglan turned back to the ship on the screen. No point in highjacking an Ed ship, but jacking her, that was another thing entirely. The Fair Heart leeched the juice from her veins, gorged on spare parts that went untagged till use, dragged off the paneling, ripped off the wiring. The Fair Heart’s crew worked fast. Raglan had done it all before, though never with an Ed ship. "The Cap’n sure got some mazy-crazy in him," his crew said, and worked lightning-fast.

Carroll had tried the comms. He sent his personal distress spinal signal. It was caught neatly by Coder with the same sticky jam that had turned the gleaming Ed ship into a mess of spare part pudding. Now Carroll was running from the useless bridge to the quarters. He could not reach the medroid either but if needed he would be able to terminate the assets at close quarters himself. Only two were irreplaceable and he was taking them in the escape pod with him.

He was nearly there when the wall on his left burst, showering him in plastic shards and ripped fabric. Negs were not modified for action. Carroll was thrown backward; pain compensation released on its own, he scrambled for focusers in his mind, grabbed at the pulser he had dropped.

He needn’t have bothered. The world went white and far too loud. There was a split second when all the blocks in Carroll's mind had gone and he knew with a terrifying certainty that he had not been lab-grown, that he had come of a man and a woman, that he had been modified and shaped out of a born child who had known his mother, but before the horror of it could overtake him, there was no more sound or color, or memory.

The man who had pulsed Carroll out of existence as casually as Carroll would have pulsed out all the kids but two gave the rigid twisted body a glance to make sure the job was done and moved on, his airsuit gleaming dull white. It was a bit of a waste to leave the biomass like that but Doc had been adamant. No adults. They’d have some weird scrap up those Ed wahoos, sometimes in the liver, sometimes in the bone, you sell it good and clear and a few days later you’ve got an Ed fleet up your ass and all the turds coming the wrong way, end of business, end of days. So the spacesuits swished away, towards the asset room.

The doors had slid open and the medroids were just rolling in when the doors started closing behind them. Started, but did not finish. XieXie had been gazing at the entrance absently and it took her a moment to realize what she was seeing. The doors frozen in mid-closure.

The first medroid stretched out its feeler and just stopped. XieXie stared as its lights went flat and grey and its wobbled like a dozy drunk.

XieXie jumped off her bunk. The world swam but she gripped the railings and held on grimly.

“Seti!” she shouted when the moment had passed and she was sure she wasn’t going to hurl. “Seti, come on!”

The kids were stirring. Seti sprang toward the droids. He cautiously pushed at the one in front. It swayed but did not fall. Did not reboot. Did nothing.

“Up, everyone! Up!” he hissed urgently. “Quietly! Anyone can’t get up, the nearest person helps. Linder —”

Linder was at his side. Together they pushed the second medroid so it fell down backward, just between the half-open doors like a bulwark.

"Good thinking, Captain," Linder said, saluting with just the slightest hint of mockery.

(That was where it started, by the way. When Linder, a head taller and a year older, called him Captain.)

“Out, carefully. You see anyone, get down,” Forseti said. He led; everyone followed.

There was a hallway outside, ending in a wall at one end, turning out of sight at the other, so they followed that. They were young and scared and bewildered. But they were brave under the fear and they were angry, in the way a cornered animal is angry. And some of them were angry with real anger, not just the stupid anger that strikes at your brain and your bowels but the devil-may-care anger that says, “No more!” That’s why when the kids saw the man in the spacesuit Forseti yelled:

"Get him!"

He and Linder and Cheers ran at the man. He had a pulser but he was not shooting in that first second, fiddling with the gun; and the boys came at him full-tilt, Forseti hitting the man in his midriff, Linder tossing a wild punch. They grabbed for the gun, the man struggling; he was strong, but there were three of them.

And then there were three more men in suits who turned the corner into their little cul-de-sac, pulsers at the ready. One-way visors hid their faces. They did not move like andies. They moved like not shooting was an effort.

“Found ‘em,” one of them rasped through the suit speaker.

“Get them the hell up here.” The answer was tinny, barely there. “What is that racket?”

Linder was getting up, the man’s pulser in his hand. It was giving off that threatening whine that meant it was not on stun. He pressed the trigger.

A man collapsed.

“No shooting!” Another yelled.

“That’s awright,” a big hulking fellow who looked like he’d been compressed into his suit lunged forward as the pulser recharged. The shot went wide, scorched the ceiling, as the man bore down on Linder and smashed him into a wall.

Linder fell with a thud and lay still.

The rest was in flashes, like some nightmare slideshow. Whenever XieXie tried to think about it, had to think about it, all that came to her was — Forseti’s scream, an inarticulate howl of pain and rage and loss the human throat should not be able to make — Forseti launching himself at the nearest suit bare-handed, forgetting he was small and unarmed, as if he could just hit them, hurt them, and Linder would be all right — Cheers yelling “YOU BEAITCHES I WILL KILL YOU BEAITCHES!” And Linder, lying there with a broken neck.

Captain Raglan of The Fair Heart was not an unreasonable man. He understood that some of his men had needs or interests outside their profession. He never asked, for example, how his bosun, a soft-spoken ex-cop, got himself banned from the Split, which was certainly one of the most permissive and easy-going whorehouses in the world. Raglan had no quarrel with Doc going through hooch like a pig through bran mash, provided the job got done and no one ended up with an extra limb on the side. But what got his goat good and proper was insubordination and waste. The Captain was already angry when his crew came back from the shuttle with the message that the thing imploding on his screen right now was taking with it the body of one of his crew who should have known better than to get bagged by some scrawny kid; and that the body of the scrawny kid was now just that, a body.

Doc was well-pleased though.

“Weeelll, Captain, it sure looks like we got ourselves a proper li’l motherlode here,” he drawled. “They all been whammied with a regular ole barrage —”

“Just gimme the sell, Doc, no pitchin', no med gook.”

The doctor shrugged. “I ain’t gone over every one of ‘em, but two definitely got some hormonal strafing. I haven't got it all figured out yet, and I might not,” he added prudently, "having just the ship's patch-up room, but there might be some good stuff there." You couldn't hurry Doc, not really. "There is some age slowance there for sure; and there's a li'l gal there that looks like they were going to make a geck out of her."

Raglan whistled. The Youth Serum? That could buy him a fleet, if handled properly. And a little geckie would not be wasted either.

“Can anything be extracted?”

“Not with my tools, Cap’n, but I can do a few samples so as you can show them around. Never let ‘em leave your hands though. You can bleed one kid for a bunch of outfits, or you can sell ‘em whole, that’d be a fortune right there.”

Raglan nodded. There was time to decide; they’d be hot, almost too hot to handle, but there would be quite a few folks who would be willing to pay to get hold of them. It’d be perfect to just keep them on The Fair Heart and bleed them bit by bit and sell that; a bit of the marrow here and a slice of heart there, they could last a while. But that would be like flying with a bullseye on your back. If the owners don’t find you other freebooters will. That’s what Raglan would have done if he had heard some ship was carrying Eds’ biomass.

So Raglan figured they might have as long as a couple of weeks before the Eds might start to zero in on them, maybe three. The Fair Heart was nowhere near the sector where it actually was, according to her trail. If their geck was good, and it looked like he was, they should be getting away clean. But shoulda woulda coulda plugs no holes. He planned to be shot of that cargo in two weeks at most.

“Can we jack them into the slave units, Doc?”

The doc shook his head.

“Shiiit, Cap’n, they ain’t been completed, the kids. They’ll go psycho or croak before the week’s out. I don't even know what else they're carrying.”

Raglan nodded. Doc looked at the file again.

“Pity about the kid Backer scragged. Damaged the brain too, that’s a waste. Besides,” Doc added, for he had not drunk away every vestige of his past life, “whatcha go and punch a kid for? ‘Tain’t like he don't know what his fists do.”

“I’ll deal with Backer,” Raglan said grimly. He couldn’t afford to be shot of the man now, they would be a few hands short as it was. Later, though...

“Let’s go see the cargo,” the Doc rose at Raglan’s words, steady on his feet though he must have had more than his fair share of rotgut in a bottle since the morning. Raglan genuinely liked the Doc who was a funny old cuss when the mood was on him and a steady hand in the surgery always, but Raglan knew that someday the drink caught up to you, got into your eyes and into your hands, and that would be the day the Doc would have to walk into the Old Dark alone and unattended. Raglan hoped that day was not coming soon—

A girl screamed, high and desperate, again and again. Then the scream was cut off on the rise, as if someone flipped the switch. Raglan was already running down the ramp to the hold.