Flyover Planet Ch. 13.

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

Anais was brought awake by the popping sound of her comm that signaled the simultaneous additional stimulation of her neurotransmitters. In a few seconds her compensators would kick in to balance things out but she could not help relishing that extreme awareness that made everything stand out with a clarity just this side of painful. Usually, that is. Today she was halfway across the cabin in an instant, freshener blitzing her clean, stinging her skin, her suit molding and sealing itself around her frame. The emotional stabilizers were not doing their job; the neurotransmitted alert that had brought Anais out of bed made that impossible.

“Nice start to the morning,” the Chief Developer muttered, sliding on his uniform by hand on the other side of the bed. He did not sound particularly ruffled but he had half an eye on the the alert flashing bright orange against the gray light of the room:

Urgency: Orange. Urgency: Orange.

The letters rotated with Anais, always staying in her line of sight, expanding and contracting. She felt her hair settle into shape and waved the doors open, not bothering to check if the Chief Developer was dressed. But of course he was. The alert kept popping up in the air just in front of them and would till they reached the meeting room with the Chief Medical Officer waiting. As it must have activated for high-rankers only, lower-ranking Eds' optical nerves would be unaffected; everyone they met seemed to be going unconcernedly about their business.

"Figures. The first glitching time I get a proper physical on this job, and they send up a glitching orange wakeup call," the CDO said ruefully. Anais gave him a commiserating grin as they entered the lift.

"Think this got something to do with your little side deal?" the Developer asked casually.

The CMO's reaction to Anais's sending off her assistant and a few of the assets without the say-so of the head of the mission had been nothing short of incandescent, so more people were aware of their departure than had been strictly necessary.

Anais gave a noncommittal shrug. She had bypassed the CMO's punishment by pointing out that Negs had some leeway and could make urgent decisions based on urgent circumstances, and that the CMO had not been available for conference at the time due to shons modification procedures taking place. Both Anais and the CMO had known that this was how Anais had timed it to be able to send the assets off station. Anais also refused to reveal the destination, citing Precedent Five; she cited the same for the rest of it: video scrubbed, records sealed. Even the people who had worked on the assets from Wayside or were still working on them would not talk. Everyone knew that Precedent Five referred to the Epsilon Cluster. No one would be fool enough to speak of it lightly; to lie. The CMO had to suffer in silence, but the very quality of shons silence told Anais that the episode was not over.

To Anais's surprise none of the senior officers were there, only a Counselor and for some reason a geck standing quietly in a corner, eyes flickering with tiny green columns of numbers running up and down the sclera. It was always hard to tell gecks apart; once they were fully integrated there was no way to, except for some small differences such as height or skin tone. They had no personality and generally did not talk unless addressed directly. Anais read him, the data cloud popping into existence on the side of his head but all it gave her was his position. A monitoring geck, completely aligned with their station.

It was unusual to see a geck not plugged into a work station; though in a way they were always plugged in. In fact you could say that one geck was all the gecks on a ship or a station, all the gecks in the system, on occasion. Gecks had no rank as such, being merely human extensions of tech, in Anais's view at least. That one was present meant major data issues. For the first time Anais knew a personalized flicker of unease. It could not be the shuttle; it was — she checked the time by blinking her left eyelid — at most the shuttle was eighteen hours away from docking.

The Chief Medical Officer burst in like a blast of freezing air.

“Shuttle 89 is lost,” shon spat and glared at Anais. "Well, Negotiator?"

Anais’s response had been premodulated for a shock but this went beyond a shock. It was unprecedented. She scrambled through her incoming feed, visual, audio. There was nothing from Carroll, nothing from the shuttle. They had agreed to comm when it arrived but...

“What do we mean by ‘lost’?” the Counselor asked. “Destroyed?”

“Apparently,” the CMO directed a look of undisguised cold fury at Anais. "We — don’t — know — what — happened! Holo!"

The holo came up floating in midair. A collective sigh went out around the table as the little flashing blip in a black cloud, the shuttle moving to some undisclosed location, but still transmitting a rerouted signal, broke off suddenly, incomprehensibly, into —

“Dots,” Anais breathed out. “What are the mothering dots for?” someone gasped at the profanity.

“These are an asymptomatic correlate of marginal deviations.”

The geck’s colorless voice made Anais jump.

The CDO snapped his fingers twice, impatiently. The geck’s eyes flickered.

“Again,” the CDO ground out. Development detested gecks and preferred theirs to be plugged in full-time even if it did speed up their burnout. “No one likes that geck gumbo. Use interpersonal speech.”

The geck’s jade-green eyes ran data streams, dots up the right iris, numbers down the left one. His voice was as bland as before but the double finger snap had adjusted his vocabulary range for something with a bit less technobabble.

“The dots represent a discontinued data stream. There is a perceptible ... emptiness where the data stream should have been. The data ... simply stops.”

“Traffic?”

“Record shows no vessel or piece of equipment within the radius that could have caused this.”

“There is no vessel or piece of equipment that can cause this,” Anais said flatly.

“Looks like you got that wrong," Chief Developer was turning the holo around. "Bring up every vessel in the radius within the ten-minute time frame."

A passenger carrier. A two-person racer; both still traveling merrily. A cargo barge plodding along on its slow course. Soap bubbles of numerals popped out and resolved themselves into tiny ships with their manifests unfolding around them. Anais watched in disbelief. There was nothing, nothing to show where the shuttle had gone.

"A probe is going to bring back samples," the geck's face spasmed. Speaking like a person was usually painful for them for some reason that Anais did not know, nor did she care.

"Samples of what?" she snapped. The assets, if the assets were gone...

"Analyzing for debris, if the ship was destroyed," the Chief Developer said.

Destroyed. No. Anais had no thought for Carroll. She was thinking furiously, trying to tamp down her emotions. She had made a plan after the Epsilon call; that batch of assets was going to be her ticket to the Epsilons; to immortality. To everything. How could they be gone? They couldn't. She would not accept it.

The CMO jerked her head at the Chief Developer.

"Assemble a team for a deep search protocol. Take a counselor and enough gecks. Chief Negotiator, I am personally placing you in deten—"

"Precedent Five," Anais interjected. She could not allow herself to be detained. The assets were too important; she would not think of their destination but —

"I refuse to believe that Precedent Five applies to an Educationalist who lost an uncertain number of assets, an officer and a ship," shon said curtly. "Now —"

Anais had gotten up and was heading for the door. Though that was not precisely true. Rather her body had gotten up, to everyone's surprise including hers. She could not speak, could not stop it. It walked out of the room and turned right. Anais, trapped inside it, could only watch helplessly as her feet measured the regulation carpeting, her hand palmed another door open and walked, the door shutting and locking itself with a soft snick. Her body turned itself around. Anais's will counted for nothing; familiar impulses — release soothers! Stabilizers! Move my hands! — were suddenly just thoughts, not commands. Her heartbeat refused to slow, her breath was caught as her chest tightened. She was a terrified prisoner encaged in her own bones and smothered by her own flesh. What had been a friendly perfectly modified machine was now an alien runaway thing with her inside. What is this?! She shouted in thought as her body fell forward on hands and knees no longer hers. Her head arched up, as if pulled by an invisible force.

A cluster of spiky petals was opening up in the air in front of her, whether a holo comm or a vision directed right into her optic nerves Anais could not tell. But at least she knew now who had hijacked her body.

"Do we have your attention, Anais?" the voice was like cold metal against her throat, except that it was inside her.

Anais tried to answer, but her throat was locked. She knew her vocal cords had tried to move, but no sound came.

"Do you know how many pain receptors there are in your body, Anais?"

She could not answer that of course; but the answer came in the shape of a simple word:

"Enough."

The pain was instant, pitiless and bright, more real than anything she had ever known. She could have sworn she had been stabbed right in the center of her left palm, again and again. She wailed her why and please and stop, but still in her mind only, her jaw locked immobile.

When stop it finally did she was not allowed the relief of tears; the same force that was holding her motionless, speechless, constricted her tear ducts.

"This is a very small thing, Anais," the voice told her. "Unmodified humans live with this every day; with much more. They do not have stabilizers. They cannot tell their pain to go at will." There was another stab of edgy pain, as if tearing open an old wound.

What do you want from me?! The scream broke all protocol but the animal part of Anais did not care. She had never been so scared in her life. Please make me normal again, please!

"We wanted them, Anais. The children," the obscene word was a threat, a sign of her powerlessness, of her utter unimportance. "And now it looks like they are dead, does it not?"

Another stab, in the thigh this time, her mind somehow telling her body to hurt. Were they going to go on doing it again and again, until she went mad?

"Because of you, Anais. Do you know what that means for you?"

"What if they are not dead?" The forbidden word popped out on its own. "I can get them back! I can—" she would promise anything, try anything, just let her go. Thoughts jostled each other; she had never felt anything like this horror. She was going to faint — adrenaline shot through her body, dispensed by the same thing that held her captive. Her heart beat furiously and she could not slow it down.

"You thought you could be one of us," there was a faint suggestion of furious laughter in the back of her mind. "And you lost the one thing that would have made this possible. Now, you think you can find them? You think they are not dead? But where will you look, Anais? Can you think of one place, one, without all these good things we gave you? No tools, just your stupid, your born mind?" Another obscenity, but Anais barely noticed, struggling against the pain and the helplessness. She knew now that this was a test. Yes, she had wanted to join the Epsilon Cluster ever since she found out that it was possible, became aware of what they could do. If she had caused the loss of the assets, if the, the children, were gone, she was dead, she was — she fought her stupid mind, so alone without the tweaks and twitches and the data clouds.

"No ideas at all, Anais?" Her muscles were in agony and still the invisible hand kept dragging her up by the hair, pressing down on her spine. Dark motes floated in her vision like numbers in a geck's eyes —

"Geck! There must have been a geck!"

The pressure eased a little. Air was pumped into her lungs, her vision clearing.

"Explain yourself, Negotiator." The voice had changed, less of a presence in her mind, more of a tinny comm vibration.

"There must have been," she wanted to gasp for air but was not allowed, "there must have been another ship with a geck. A pirate ship or…"

"All gecks are ours. All gecks are accounted for. Checked. On the record."

"No! No, please! A... a damaged geck!"

There was a stillness. No new pain. She thought her words furiously, not sure anymore if she was speaking or not.

"Someone damaged, unintegrated, unintegratable! Or unfinished!"

"Such are destroyed. Scrapped into biomass."

"According to protocol, but," her ideas tumbled furiously together: remote stations, lax commanders, the black market. These things happened.

"How would you go about finding the trail, Negotiator?" The pressure on her neck eased. Air flowed again.

"Look..." She thought furiously, panic receding, making her thoughts faster, crisper.

"Look for all gecks in progress; cross-reference with commanders' records. Anyone who was assigned a remote posting for wrongdoing..." She was trying to plan, hampered by not having a data cloud, but she could do it, she could!

"Enough."

This time the word brought with it a sharp burning pain to the back of her right hand, though it was less harsh than before, like an angry slap.

"You will do it. You will take command of the search team. You will plan, take what you need."

"The CMO —"

"That is taken care of. And if you succeed," the spiky petals of the cluster moved invitingly, as if beckoning her in. There were no words, only images, suggestions in her mind. Anais of the Epsilon Cluster. Never hurting like this again. Never aging. Never dying. Outside the Epsilon, any mind or body to be taken at her will. She, Anais, drinking another's fear like they were basking in hers. Invincible.

"If you succeed," the voice said, cold with warning. And then it was gone; Anais, alone in her mind, her body hers again, Anais the invincible, collapsed, shaking and sobbing on the carpeted floor.

An hour later a medium-sized ship left the station. The CMO had been seething with impotent rage that shons modifiers were powerless to curb completely, but shon said nothing. A memo from the Epsilon Cluster had that effect on people, men or women or shons.

The ship was carrying a contingent of developers, a number of gecks, Anais, and one unmodified man in a medical coma.

No one had argued with Anais or asked her any questions. she was not surprised. As her functions were restored, her emotional stabilizers kicked in, soothing her, letting her cry, smoothing her skin, slowing her heart; Anais could finally see her hands.

There were no marks at all on the left hand; the stabbing had been in her mind. But the back of her right...

Black against her regulation skin tone (honeygold, no shading), it stood out harsh and clear: spiky petals, half-closed in a tight cluster. That was her authority pass now; till she became one of the Epsilons herself. And she would. She would.

As the ship moved out, she sat in the command chair, crew and gecks doing their jobs softly and swiftly around her. She had no thought or feeling for Carroll, who was probably dead. She was thinking of them. The assets.

"You are out there, and I will find you," Anais thought. "And when I do..."

She clenched her right fist. The black Epsilon petals moved slightly, as if to open.