Backyard Starship: Origins 2 Read online

  “I’m ready, of course, but why in one minute?” I asked, a creeping sense of horror dancing along my synaptic links.

  Yektun managed to look less surprised, and that worried me even more. “Because the UnZip seals are designed with planned degradation, too. And as of 21:00 local time in three Earth days, the security caps will, as the locals say, go poof.”

  I loaded my combat routines and turned to face Yektun full on. “Can you move that departure up?”

  The bay warning light flashed, indicating the outer doors were opening to a ship.

  Yektun smiled again, and this time it was almost warm. “I was hoping you would say that.”

  “What the hell is that?” I asked, staring at the ship’s exterior scanner returns. A storm boiled away below us, lashing the wide river into a whitecapped frenzy.

  “That’s an F2 tornado, according to Earth standards. No matter what planet I’m on, tornadic storm cells are my least favorite part of the local flavor,” Yektun said.

  We were three hundred meters above the Cuyahoga River, at the edge of a large, rotating storm with so much lightning it felt like I was in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. The wreck lit up immediately when our pilot, a competent if sullen Wut’zur named Bragdish, pinged the crash site with a deep scan.

  Bragdish waved two arms. “It’s at a depth of nine meters. Of muck. I read… about thirty meters of water over that. This storm is a bit much, even for me. Are you sure about this, Purry?”

  “It’s Perry, and yes, Bargdish, I am.”

  He shot me a look, but I was in no mood. Three days in a tin can with him and Yektun had been enough diplomatic interaction for me, thank you very much.

  And the vials were about to pop. I knew it, and Yektun knew it, and by every ceramo-feather on my construct, I would not let Earth melt into chaos because shitty pirates made shitty choices and left a loaded weapon where it could go off to end a civilization that was just warming up.

  Bragdish stared at the real-time returns just as a vehicle—I’m pretty sure it was something called an Altima—came apart like a child’s toy, shredded by the whirling funnel cloud. Then he twitched, looked at me, and relented. With a grin, he ceased being a dickhead, as Mark would have called him.

  “Sorry to do this, but you have to go,” Bragdish said.

  Yektun placed a hand on my wingshoulder and squeezed. “Down, dig, locate, and up. We will orbit once and sweep low at almost stall speed, if necessary.”

  I nodded in the slow way Mark used to and then the door opened to the howling rage of a summer storm.

  Pointing myself like an arrow, I didn’t jump. I drove myself into the maelstrom, and the water rushed to greet me, dark and churning and frothed in brown and white. It was nearly dusk, but only my sensors allowed me any sight at all as I struck the river at exactly ninety-one point two five nine meters per second, curving my arc with wing adjustments that strained my connective struts to their utter limit.

  “I’m in, heading for—”

  I hit the log at full speed as a flash of codespray filmed my vision, and then the river took me, and I could do nothing but drift and curse, knowing I’d failed, and I’d failed the people of Earth.

  But mostly, I’d failed Mark, and that hurt worst of all.

  “Perry?”

  “Yektun?”

  “We have contact again. Brag, swing us off this cursed wall cloud and—”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Eleven minutes local time. There’s a second storm coming now. To the northeast at incredible speed. Winds are nearing the verge of our safe range, Perry, and it appears that the unstable air isn’t going away anytime soon. We can’t stay here.”

  “You won’t have to. Light up my target again.”

  “Complying now,” Bragdish said. “It’s hot. You see it?”

  I did. I wasn’t far away thanks to the river bottom being covered with shopping carts, engine blocks, and other metallic debris that served to hold me in place against the spirited current.

  “I’ve got it. Yektun, did you say nine meters of mud?”

  “About that, yes. Perry, we’re pressed for time here, and—”

  “I know. I’m going in, but I’m going to have to use a protocol beyond simply moving some mud. The cargo is on top, but it’s not under mud. It’s an accretion of industrial compounds, mud, and metal shavings of some sort. It’s not really rock, but—let’s call it Clevelandite and move on. If I make it, I’ll be back up in three minutes. Can you buy me that much time?”

  I heard a muffled conversation, then one short sentence from Bragdish. “I’ll get you three.”

  I knew what he was risking and thanked him with both the words and a digital salute, and then I turned to the river bottom, activated my most secret ability, and began to vibrate like a sonic drill, parting the detritus of an American industrial city as my feathers abraded with each passing second.

  I shook and rolled and fought for every meter of that slimy rock, churning through it with a vengeance. I hit something four meters across and impossibly solid—a glacial irregular, most likely, scouring to one side as water and organic material flared into steam and plasma.

  Four meters. Eight. Ten. My power was waning as my feathers ablated, and even my beak took significant damage, clipped by an ill-advised strike at the rusting core of a steel girder that had come to rest down here like the bone of some robotic megafauna.

  And then, the hull was there—or what had been a hull long ago. The tear was along a seam, opening five meters of interior to the swirling water and stone and everything else I allowed in with my relentless quaking.

  I hit my light at maximum power, flooding the space with punishing white illumination.

  And I stopped.

  An orchard of tiny bottles waved before me, moving in the new current I’d allowed to invade this dead space. And all the bottles were identical.

  Thousands of them.

  “Yektun?” I asked.

  No answer. Only the hiss of the stars—dead air made scratchy by the interference of distance, debris, and storm.

  I’m an artificial being, designed to be quick and decisive based on a swath of data that makes libraries look malnourished. But in that moment, seeing the waving glassine bottles mocking me, identical in the current, I knew an emotion I’d never experienced before.

  Despair.

  I listened, briefly, at the comms across every channel I could open, but there was still nothing.

  I sifted my options, which came down to three choices that would carry implications well past my existence. I could do nothing and leave, but that was an abrogation of my duty—and a betrayal of my friend, Mark, who had bled in combat more times than I was comfortable recollecting.

  I could bundle as many of the vials as possible and hope for the best, but hope is no strategy, and the odds were terrible.

  Or I could ignite the power source within me and sear the UnZip, and ship, and myself into the oblivion of pure plasma, doubtless taking a sizable chunk of Cuyahoga mud with me into the digital beyond.

  I scanned the vials again, noting how they’d spilled free of their casing over the years. The Bolunvir had chosen biodegradable packing for the flammables as well, and there was little order for me to survey as I stared, my wide-spectrum sight showing plenty of product, but no distinction between the festival duel and the killing secret. It was the glass, I realized. Thick enough to obscure my scanning, the vials rendered my skill and technology useless, and for the second time in as many minutes, I experienced a rare emotion.

  This time, I felt simply rage.

  How the Bolunvir let something this catastrophic out of their sight was beyond me. The idea was monstrous, but the mechanism of actually carrying six tiny vials of galactic lethality was incomprehensible.

  “You murderous scum love money more than you love reason, don’t you?” I asked the swirling water, but I expected no answer and got none.

  Then I saw the seat.

  Bent and torn, the pilot’s seat had an occupant, or at least the remains of someone. In a flash of pique, I hoped it was a Bolunvir who’d gone down with their ship, clutching—

  “The treasure,” I said, and this time, I spoke directly to the yawning skull of a Bolunvir, all teeth and haunted by the echoes of avarice. The pilot was there all right, and around his—no, her, I realized—chest was a ceramic bandolier with a quick release clasp. The holder was empty, and I felt a trickle of despair again—

  Until I saw the section of belt, like an old American gunfighter would wear in films, and in each of the holders nestled a bland vial, so like all the others on board but so very, very different.

  The ship moved slightly as currents began exerting pressure on the opening I’d made. The flight control area was accordioned into scrap, but I could just reach the pilot’s illicit prize with my beak, as neither wing could fit into the tormented space.

  And then I remembered I didn’t have fingers, and it all came to me in a moment of clarity there under the raging river and the storm and the clouds as black as night.

  “I will never reveal this method of transport until the day my core shuts down,” I vowed, taking each vial, one at time, and swallowing them into the hidden compartment I had for high security message and hardware transport. I called it my craw, in honor of the avian I was modeled after, and with a delicacy born of desperation and engineering, I secured the most dangerous objects on planet Earth inside my frame, withdrew, and bolted for the surface after burrowing back up out of the primordial muck and Clevelandite.

  I broke the surface into bright sun and an unnatural stillness, only to see Yektun and Bragdish looping around for another pass, exposed to Earth radar and anyone who thought to look over the river once the tornado had gone northeast.

  I leapt and drove up into air that had been a shrieking fury only moments before, and when Yektun pulled me aboard, her round, surprised face wore a smile that was more human than I thought possible.

  “You made it,” she said, and in those three words, there was wonder.

  “I did. Got a package to deliver.”

  Bragdish turned to bathe me with a smile, then his expression shifted. “Where… where are they?”

  With a wing that looked like a crumpled bumper, I tapped my chest. “Secure. In here. Remembered I don’t have thumbs. Or fingers.”

  “Beaks are handy that way,” Bragdish remarked, pulling on the stick as the drive spun up with a basso hum.

  I dipped my beak in thanks. “It was just now. How do we dispose of these? I know I can’t be destroyed by them, but I’d rather they weren’t in me. It seems… unclean.”

  Yektun gave me a small nod, then held out a woven ceramic pouch with a metallic ring on the side. “Oh, as to that. We have a simple answer. Perry, if you would?”

  I disgorged the vials with great delicacy, and Yektun sealed the bag, then walked four steps, put it in the airlock, and gave Bragdish a casual wave. “Are we out of atmo?”

  “Free and clear,” Bragdish said. Behind him, onscreen, the permanent midnight of space yawned, endless and eternal.

  “Maser, if you please, Brag,” Yektun said in a casual tone.

  The bag was a hundred meters away and accelerating, having been nudged when the outer airlock cycled. Bragdish feathered a screen, and the point defense maser spat, soundless and invisible.

  The bag seared to plasma, and it was gone. All that death and destruction, vaporized in a second.

  I stared, then looked down at my frame. I’d need weeks of work to recover my combat capability, and one wing was sending operative ranges in the 60th percentile. My beak was degraded, and I knew both eyes would need recalibration if not replacement; the exterior lid was abraded enough to allow light through in a soft blur.

  And I would do it all over again.

  “Time to get paid. And one other thing,” Yektun said.

  I understood. “Take me to Anvil Dark, please. I have a humble request to make.”

  Bragdish keyed the route from memory, and we twisted with soundless efficiency. The Six Stars League had good ships, and Bragdish was an excellent pilot. I settled back and ran systems checks in the silence that followed. No one felt like talking.

  Especially me.

  I balanced on the chair, staring across a desk at the least likeable of any Peacemakers I could have drawn on that day. Adept Santorelli was human but curt to the point of rudeness. I’d lobbied for a meeting with Master Gus, only to be faced down by Santorelli, her gray eyes implacable under dark hair cut for efficiency. She was a seasoned Peacemaker, but Mark Tudor had not been close to her, a choice made by Santorelli.

  I waited to speak, observing decorum as we were in her office. In a petty display unworthy of her rank, she looked down at a screen, then up, then closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair as if prepping for a nap. Naps were one of the rare things I envied about humans, but if she planned on making me wait much longer, I would have to take a different approach to my diplomatic proposal.

  “What do you want?” Santorelli asked without opening her eyes.

  “My choice of assignments.”

  At that, she sat up, her face hardened by my direct request. “No.”

  “You don’t even know who—”

  “Don’t care. No. You’re an associated agent. You don’t tell us where you’ll work. We tell you,” Santorelli said. There was a hint of glee in her tone, and as I sat there, missing feathers and damaged to the point of massive repairs, I felt another human emotion, just like back on Earth in the storm and the mud.

  This time, I felt anger.

  “I just saved a few billion sapient beings at some cost to myself. Yes, it’s my job, but I did it despite the tendencies of people like you.”

  Santorelli opened her mouth, and I lifted my good wing, asking for a chance to speak again. “I wasn’t finished, Adept Santorelli.”

  Her eyes went flat, but she chose silence, because she wasn’t stupid, and for an AI to make demands, I had to have leverage.

  Naturally, she was right.

  “Permission to access your wallscreen?” I asked.

  “Override given,” Santorelli said in a slow, cautious drawl.

  I stared at her before continuing. “After this is over and you’ve given me what I want, you will act as if we’re barely familiar with each other. You know as well as I do that corruption is a disease in the guild. I’m not saying you’re corrupt, because you aren’t. But the person who hired you is awash with filthy lucre, as they said on Earth, and when she goes down, so does everyone she lobbied for. Some of you will lose rank, but some of you will lose everything. A quiet word from a trusted, heroic AI who saved a planet could tilt the balance of your career in the event that Master Yotov is exposed doing—well, let’s just play the clip and see, shall we?”

  The screen flickered to life. Yotov stood next to Santorelli, who stood next to a pair of Yonnox handing over access keys to a container that looked remarkably like a registered banking bag, marked with the Quiet Room code in bold black numbering.

  “Where the hell did you get this?” Santorelli asked, stricken.

  “A friend. The Quiet Room agent skimmed thirty percent off the mining rights of a friendly little moon known for a holiday—The Night of Sparks and Wind? I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Regardless, the good Kastinet were sheared without ever knowing just how valuable their resources were, and all because Yotov and her… friends… allowed smuggling operations to bloom in and around the moon. They did so with a specific purpose.”

  Santorelli’s pale cheeks were red now. She had nowhere to go, and she knew it.

  “That purpose was to obfuscate the real crime—massive theft by a bank and the Guild itself. And in doing so, these friends of Yotov allowed six vials of UnZip to go missing—I found and destroyed them all, by the way, which is why my reasonable request isn’t just for a choice of partners.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “Repairs. Maybe an upgrade. But you, personally, will pay for my repairs, Santorelli. Right down to the last feather, and then, when I’m shiny and new, you’re going to give me transport to my next assignment. And if you so much as cut those dead eyes at me, I’ll paint a picture of you and Yotov that will make it seem like you’re two peas in a pod, to borrow another human saying. Am I clear?”

  Santorelli sat very still, and she surrendered to the circumstances. With painful slowness, she gave me a grudging nod. “And the video?”

  “Erased.”

  “All right.”

  “Thank you. I’d like my repairs to begin this moment, so that I can get to my next assignment,” I told her, hopping down with a soft whirr of damaged parts.

  “Where is that?” Santorelli asked.

  I told her, and her face shifted into something less angry, then she waved at the door. “When I see you next, we start at zero.”

  I dipped my beak. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  The repairs took nineteen hours, two AI engineers, and a lot of patience on my part. But Santorelli was as good as her word, and I wasn’t just fixed.

  I was improved.

  My new protocols included a flash weapon and talons that were nine percent more damaging, neither of which was a small improvement. My transport delivered me on time, and on target, and now I sat in yet another storm, the winds lashing a fertile land around me as lightning tore at the sky in silvery fingers.

  Signal activated.

  It was time.

  I flew thirty meters and landed on the wooden windowpane as the young man inside stood, staring at me in complete amazement while chill rain ran off my augmented feather system.

  He didn’t know me, but I knew him, and I decided there and then that I would help him be great. Whether he could be as great as the rest of his family remained to be seen, but for now, our path lay before us, unmarked and undiscovered.

  Dropping my beak, I spoke to Clive VanAbel Tudor III for the first of what I hoped would be many, many times.