Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Read online

  So instead she nodded. “The ongoing Justice review process means we have a bit of breathing room. We need to take it, as it greatly increases our odds of success, or at least survival. Joaquim, quietly look into what acquiring a militarized ship will involve. I shudder to think of the cost, because there can’t be many of those flying around, but look into it anyway.

  “Perrin, reach out to Roqe. They don’t stock space-rated gear, but they should be able to give you the name of a trustworthy seller of it. We’ll reconvene this evening, hopefully with news that the progress Justice is making means we won’t have to try anything crazy. Sound good?”

  “Grant has ships.”

  She rolled her eyes, mostly to cover for the fact that she hadn’t even considered the idea…because she didn’t want to think about Grant right now. “Scientific and recreational ships, none of which come equipped with the kind of weapons and armor we’d need. Look into it, okay?”

  “I’m on it.” Joaquim spun and left.

  Perrin frowned at the vacated doorway before standing and turning to them. “I, too, am ‘on it.’ Despite the dire circumstances, it was wonderful to meet you, Dashiel.”

  “And you, Ms. Benvenit.”

  Silence hung in the air for several seconds after Perrin departed. Finally Dashiel glanced at the door, which Perrin had mercifully closed on her way out. “Am I in a love triangle I don’t know about?”

  Her brow knotted up. Did he mean Grant? Nobody really thought…then she realized. “You mean Joaquim’s cheery, welcoming attitude toward you?”

  “I’ve met friendlier automatons.”

  “Sorry. And no. Joaquim’s only love is the cause, and he’s exceedingly protective of it. He can be that way with me sometimes, too, and I’m leading the cause.”

  “All right. So are he and Perrin a thing?”

  “Mighty curious about everyone’s sex lives, are you? No, they’re more akin to siblings than lovers. They argue all the time—something that might lessen if they would just give in and be lovers—but I think either of them would sacrifice their psyche for the other in an instant and without question.” She nudged him in the shoulder. “But enough stalling. What’s your other option?”

  He shifted around on the bed to face her fully. “An Advisor can, technically, go anywhere. Though I’ve never tried it, I assume this means I can get inside Zaidam and visit a prisoner. But Advisors can’t contravene the Charter. I can’t get him out—not legally.”

  “But if we had access to him in person, I could devise a way to sneak him out of there.”

  “I’ve no doubt you could.” His gaze dropped, and he scrupulously picked a piece of lint off his slacks.

  “What’s wrong? It’s still a risky plan, but it’s a magnitude less risky than taking a ship and shooting up the place.”

  “It is. But Justice would soon trace the incident to me. My Advisor status would be revoked, and that wouldn’t be the end of it. Charges would be brought, and they would have sufficient evidence to convict me. To avoid what would likely be a retirement sentence, I would have to give up everything and go underground. Become a fugitive.”

  “Oh.” She sank against the wall and offered him a weak smile. “You know, it’s not so bad here. Lots of interesting people and tech, and you’d already have a room. I’d even install a passcode on the door.”

  “Nika—”

  “No, I get it. It’s fine.” She leapt up and grabbed his jacket off the table. “Come on. I’ll walk you out and deposit you back on the street. You can—”

  “Don’t do that. Listen to me for a second. You didn’t get the chance to choose whether to give up everything you’d worked for centuries to earn. I’m luckier—I do get to make the choice. Forgive me if I plan to take an hour or two to think it over.”

  She whirled on him. “Okay, first off, I didn’t choose to be erased, but I did choose this life. And I’m not ashamed of it. All your wealth, all your possessions, all your ethereal influence? What have they gotten you? You are lonely as fuck. Me? I’m surrounded by friends and allies who care about me and always have my back. Where are yours?”

  “You have no idea what my life is like. No idea what I would be giving up. You did once, but someone took that from you. And I’m angry about it, believe me—right now, more selfishly than before. Because if you remembered, then you would understand the magnitude of what you are asking me to do.” His chin fell to his chest. “But you don’t.”

  “I think you—”

  37

  * * *

  A thunderous roar shook the walls, floor and ceiling. Nika stumbled into the wall, barely keeping her feet under her. Dashiel fell backwards over the table and landed half on the couch.

  Her ears rang with the crackle of lesser explosions mixed with greater rumbles. She funneled the adrenaline already exploding through her veins into movement, grabbing her Glaser off the hook by the door and sprinting down the hall. Were they under attack? Had a security squad somehow made it through one of the doors? Had someone—

  “Nika, wait! You don’t know what’s down there!”

  She didn’t slow or glance back. “You’re right—stay up here!”

  Debris coated the stairway—cement chunks from the pillars, shards of metal from equipment. Blood.

  Clouds of acrid, ionized smoke billowed across The Floor, obscuring virtually everything.

  Ηq (visual) | scan.infrared(250°:110°)

  It looked as if a bomb had gone off—had it? Her Glaser swung around toward the entry alcove, but it was comparatively quiet. The epicenter of the destruction was near the center of the large space…Parc’s command center?

  Moans and cries rose above the fading explosive sounds as she cleared the last few stairs. Gods, how many people were wounded? How to even begin to triage the situation?

  Perrin, are you all right? Where are you?

  She kept one eye scanning for nefarious movement while she knelt beside the first body she came to. “Ava? Can you hear me?”

  “Unh. What’s burning?”

  “The Floor. And your hair.”

  “Ah!” Ava began patting frantically at her formerly emerald locks.

  “Easy—” Nika choked on the smoke, and now her throat felt like it was on fire as well. “Let’s move you against the wall. Your left leg is damaged, but I don’t know how severely. You need to run a diagnostic.”

  Perrin hadn’t responded, and tendrils of dread snaked up through her chest to squeeze her heart.

  Joaquim, where are you?

  Somewhere on the dorm staircase—I was in the third floor storage room. Are you all right?

  Yeah. We need to max out the ventilation system to get all this smoke out of here and de-ionize the air before something else explodes.

  On it. What about Perrin?

  I don’t know.

  Ava had just settled awkwardly against the wall when she abruptly lunged forward, stumbling over a leg that was less damaged and more mangled. “Maggie! She was talking to Cair, trying to calm him down…. We have to find her!”

  Nika yanked her shirt off, leaving only a minimal bra behind, and tied it around her neck then pulled it up over her nose and mouth. “Ava, you’re not finding anyone with that leg. Start pinging people. Make a list of who responds, and who doesn’t. I’ll be back.”

  She spun and dove back in before Ava could protest. Heat signatures clogged her vision, but it wasn’t a reason for optimism. Anyone whose body had expired would continue to radiate heat for a while yet.

  She dodged an upturned table as a shower of dust rained down on her from above. Frowning, she peered up…the pillar to her left sported a wide crack running jagged across it for almost a meter. Shit. It had better hold.

  With her attention focused upward, she almost tripped over a body. She fell to her knees and switched back to standard vision.

  A long shard of metal shelving jutted out of Carson’s chest. His eyes were locked open; scorch marks scarred the white sclerae, sugge
sting his heart wasn’t the only organ destroyed.

  Nika pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead. She couldn’t help him now—she needed to keep moving and find those she could.

  “Nika!” The shout penetrated the background noise mostly because it came from close by. She peered over her shoulder to see Dashiel stumbling toward her.

  “There you—gods….” He stared at Carson’s body until a coughing fit overtook him.

  “Get lower down, where the smoke isn’t as bad.”

  He crouched beside her. “What can I—” another cough “—do?”

  She exhaled through her shirt and looked around. It didn’t matter whether she filtered for the visual spectrum or infrared; the destruction was just as overwhelming either way. “Find Perrin. Try to help anyone you come upon, but find her.”

  He nodded and started making his way through the debris. She forced herself to move past Carson’s body into the core of the explosion.

  Parc’s command center no longer existed. The flooring beneath where it had existed was charred so thoroughly that its cohesiveness had broken down, leaving behind a sooty residue.

  Two bodies lay amid the worst of the charring, burnt beyond recognition.

  She yanked her shirt down and covered her mouth with her hand as acid surged up from her stomach into her throat. What in the—

  I found her. Near the repair bench, beside one of the couches.

  She scrambled to her feet and lurched in the direction Dashiel had indicated, thanking the gods when she didn’t trip over any more bodies on the way. The smoke had finally begun to thin out, and she switched fully back to the visual spectrum.

  Dashiel knelt on the floor with Perrin’s head propped in his lap. Blood streamed from a long cut across her forehead and temple, and her eyes were closed.

  Nika dropped to her knees, unwound her shirt from her neck and pressed it against the wound.

  “She’s breathing, and I don’t see any other significant damage. A cut on her right arm, but it’s not bad.”

  “Thank you. We need to—”

  “Get away from her.”

  She glanced up to see Joaquim approaching them. He had one arm around Dominic, who limped along with a tourniquet tied around his left upper leg. Joaquim eased Dominic onto the nearby couch, then came over to crouch low and get in Dashiel’s face. “I said get away from her! Did you do this? Did you bring this down on us?”

  “No!”

  “Bullshit.” Joaquim grasped Perrin’s shoulders and lifted her out of Dashiel’s lap and into his arms, then snatched Nika’s shirt out of her hand and pressed it back to Perrin’s temple. “You had better get the fuck out of here before my hands are again free.”

  Dashiel slowly stood, an expression she couldn’t interpret dragging his features into darkness. “I did not have a godsdamn thing to do with this, you delusional prick. From what I see, you need to look in your own ranks before you start accusing innocent visitors of being murderers.”

  Joaquim looked like he was going to leave Perrin on the floor and lunge for Dashiel. Nika leapt up and placed herself between them, thrust one arm out behind her to ward Joaquim off and rested a palm on Dashiel’s chest. “You should go.”

  He stared at her incredulously. “You need my help.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t. It’s all clean-up and recriminations from here.”

  “It’s a war zone, and I won’t walk out on—”

  She increased the pressure of her hand on his chest, forcing him to take a step back. Her throat ached, scorched by smoke and anguish. “You don’t have a place here. Let us take care of our own. It’s not a request.”

  His brow knotted up, and his eyes blurred into muddy pools framed by streaks of soot. He took another step back of his own volition as his jaw flexed twice in succession.

  Then he turned and left without another word.

  Nika sat on the edge of Perrin’s couch, elbows on her knees and hands fisted at her temples.

  The burnt bodies belonged to Maggie and Cair.

  Three fatalities. Twelve injured. Ava’s leg had been wrecked so thoroughly that she was still in the tank, getting it rebuilt from the inside out. The rest of the injuries ranged from substantial but not body-threatening to cuts and bruises.

  The structural damage was extensive, but not immediately fatal to the building. Four of the six pillars needed to be shored up as soon as possible, and much of the flooring would have to be replaced. The equipment damage was more significant; they’d lost one repair bench and a third of the stored combat gear, as well as nearly all the furniture on The Floor and a couple of zettabytes worth of data storage.

  Joaquim returned carrying a glass of water. He took it to Perrin and sat beside her on the bed. Perrin sported two strips of bonding tape covering her left temple and much of her forehead, but she refused to use the upstairs repair bench until everyone else’s injuries were healed.

  Joaquim held the glass for Perrin as she propped herself up on an elbow to take a sip, then set it on the bedside table and met Nika’s gaze. “Well?”

  Nika rubbed at her jaw and forced herself to sit up straight. “Based on what those who were on The Floor have reported, Cair was trying to slice into Parc’s command center. When Maggie challenged him, he started rambling loudly about having to get to the data. How it wasn’t fair that Parc kept it all to himself and it ought to belong to everyone. He managed to get the system booted up, but failed to access the file hierarchy.

  “Maggie kept demanding he stop, and at some point he swung around and punched her. He shouted that if everyone couldn’t have the data, no one should, ripped off the casing of the central module, stuck his hand in it and…” she shrugged “…whatever commands he delivered to the module, a few seconds later it exploded. This caused all the other modules to explode. And here we are.”

  Perrin rolled onto her side so she could see Nika. “That fits with what I saw—what I remember of it, anyway. When Cair got upset, I went to get Ryan’s help calming him down. Then he hit Maggie, and Ryan ran to his alcove to fire up IkeBot, since the dyne is strong enough to restrain anybody. Then…I woke up in Joaquim’s arms.” She gave him a pained smile, and he squeezed her hand. “But why did Cair lose it in the first place? Did his up-gen go wrong somehow?”

  Nika sighed. “Not on its own. Cair filed a backup right before he went to the clinic, and Ryan and I took a look at it. He was infected with the virutox. You remember how when he and the others were demoing the sandbox they built, he said that the usual defenses weren’t enough to keep it out?

  “It’s likely he caught it when he did the initial deconstruct on the software, but it took a few extra days to sneak through his defenses. Then, when the up-gen alterations met the virutox’s alterations, everything must have gotten utterly fucked up.”

  Joaquim pinched the bridge of his nose. “Someone should have realized. We should have realized.”

  “We’ve all been preoccupied since this augment business started.”

  “Not an excuse.”

  “No. It’s not.” She’d been the most preoccupied of them all, when she should have been the one paying the closest attention. “But it wasn’t Dashiel.”

  “You cannot blame me for suspecting him.”

  “I don’t. But….”

  The room fell silent for several seconds. Each carried the weight of their own guilt, which did nothing to lessen any of it.

  Finally Perrin cleared her throat. “What about Maggie and Carson? And I suppose an earlier version of Cair, pre-virutox?”

  Nika groaned and dragged her hands through her hair. She hadn’t stopped moving since the explosion, and her hands came away coated in soot. “You know we don’t have the resources or connections to commission new bodies for them. Not yet.”

  It was one of NOIR’S greatest weaknesses. It was the reason why they’d spent an insane amount of credits on a tank, why they had two separate repair benches, why they kept multiple backups an
d generally did everything in their power to make sure a total body loss never happened to one of their members.

  Only now it had. To three of them in a single day. She tried to project a brave, optimistic expression, but all she managed was frustration with a touch of hope. “We will keep their backups safe. No end date on that. And one day, we’ll be able to bring them back.”

  38

  * * *

  The network of maglev routes unfurled out from the hub station like a pinwheel, ensuring every node in the sprawling industrial sector on the outskirts of Mirai Two could be accessed in seconds. Few Asterions worked on the assembly lines or in the fab facilities, but materials, mid-stage components and finished products needed to be tended, transferred, bought and sold, so the traffic into and out of the sector was always brisk.

  Even at three in the morning, it seemed.

  Maris Debray moved fluidly through the maze of interconnecting routes to reach the stub that serviced the Ridani Enterprises factory and slipped inside the maglev.

  The message had arrived while she’d been struggling to tutor a new art student. The woman had taken the fairly radical step of retiring her persona as a successful commerce trader and reinitializing into a persona flush with artistic traits. Her processes were now stacked high in algorithms that imbued skill with a brush into her hands and heightened the color differentiation capabilities of her visual receptors. Yet the newly reawakened woman had no idea how to make art.

  Maris would have advised her this would be the case if she’d been asked ahead of time, but she had not been. True wisdom in life came from appreciating that while the proper algorithms enabled you to do a specific task, and the best-designed ones gave you the skill to do it well, no algorithm performed the deed for you.