Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection Read online

  Caleb shrugged and sipped his beer. It really was rather good. “Eh, it blew up.”

  “What? Dammit, I’ll have a conversation with my—”

  “Not the scrambler—the ship it was in.”

  Noah’s head cocked to the side. “Oh. Yeah, that does happen.”

  He had met Noah nine years ago. An influx of chimerals had begun flooding the streets on several of the smaller Federation worlds; he tracked the source to a drug ring on Pandora. Noah was little more than a freelance street merchant back then, hocking black market surveillance equipment, hacking tools and modified energy blades. Illegal, but nothing hardcore. The modded gear had come in handy, as had the inside information provided as a bonus.

  After a few years, Noah earned enough credits to move his operation off the streets and began serving a more discerning clientele and their more unique needs. Caleb had called on him on occasion over the years, and now…well, they weren’t friends. But in another life, they might have been.

  “So how’s Pandora these days? The last time I visited, holo-babes in the spaceport terminal were selling head trips which would make you believe you sported three cocks and twice the women to fill with them lounged in your bed. Oh, and the bed floated upon a golden nebula in the stars. God knows what they were selling in the markets.”

  Noah laughed in wry dismay as he motioned the bartender for a refill. “Trust me, Caleb, you do not want to know what they’re selling in the markets. I don’t mess with such insanity, nothing but trouble.”

  “As opposed to the trouble you already get in?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah? Still, it’s all good. Business is good. Life is good. Nobody’s tried to kill me in at least a month.”

  Caleb chuckled in spite of himself. “I guess that’s all you can ask for, right?”

  Noah sighed wistfully. “No…you can ask for a beautiful, witty, intelligent yet minxy woman in your arms every night, a mansion on a hill—or better yet in the sky—and the best bodyguards to protect you when someone does inevitably try to kill you. For starters.”

  Caleb raised his mug to clank against Noah’s. “I’ll drink to that.”

  6

  EARTH

  VANCOUVER, EASC HEADQUARTERS

  * * *

  MIRIAM SAT AT HER DESK and tried to focus on reviewing next week’s schedule. For a moment, she failed.

  She prided herself on superior compartmentalization skills…yet hours after the Board meeting, she couldn’t seem to shake a lingering unease. Disappointment. Annoyance.

  Being overruled gave her no pleasure, particularly when the facts were on her side. Egos coupled with narcissistic insecurity had won out over logic and reason once again. Hopefully they wouldn’t come to regret this decision, or the dozens before it.

  With a private groan she sat up straighter and returned to her calendar. Schedule.

  The christening ceremony for the new cruiser EAS Thatcher was on Monday, followed by a status meeting for Project ANNIE. She had various staff meetings on Tuesday, then Phase II testing review of new biosynthetics for special forces in the evening. Wednesday she left for the TacRecon Conference in St. Petersburg.

  Her mouth twitched involuntarily. She had tried to get Richard to go in her place—it was more his area of expertise anyway—but he was elbow-deep in the damn Trade Summit.

  She didn’t want to go to St. Petersburg, where memories of David lurked around every corner and across every street. Even the places they had never visited held shadows of the stories he had told of his childhood.

  She would need to visit her father-in-law while there. David had made certain his father received the latest in stem cell rejuvenation treatments, though the elder Solovy had accepted little else in the way of financial assistance. As a result, at one hundred sixteen years old he was built like a boxer and working low-altitude field construction ten hours a day.

  It would be uncomfortable and melancholy. He would ask after Alexis, say, ‘I’ve always loved that little girl,’ leaving unsaid the insinuation ‘as opposed to how I feel about you.’ Her position of prominence meant nothing to him. In his own twisted way he would forever blame her for David’s death, ignoring the fact that David had joined the military six years prior to meeting her. He would inquire as to whatever man she must have moved on to by now, oblivious to the reality that in twenty-three years she hadn’t moved on; that she had no intention of ever moving on.

  After two miserable hours she would excuse herself and return to her five-star hotel room, order her 250-credit room service, allow herself one glass of sherry and occupy her mind with vitally important matters of galactic security until she was too tired not to sleep.

  She didn’t want to go. But she’d do it anyway, because it was her job, and because she didn’t trust anyone else other than Richard with the responsibility. At least next year the conference location rotated out to somewhere—anywhere—other than Russia.

  She blinked to push aside the dangerously sentimental thoughts, opened the ANNIE briefing and proceeded to dive into breakdowns of recurrence quantification analysis, time series prediction, stochastic controls and most importantly, dynamic security feedback loops.

  Nearly two hundred fifty years after the Hong Kong ‘incident,’ synthetic intelligences of all types were still locked down and circumscribed on every world, but nowhere more so than in the military. The Alliance didn’t curtail the advancement of non-cybernetic synthetic technology; they merely kept it corralled inside safety fences, as it were.

  ANNIE (Artificial Neural Net Integration and Expansion) represented the most advanced Alliance-sanctioned synthetic neural net to date. It also promised to be the safest, most secure Artificial ever constructed, for they had had centuries to perfect every control and safeguard.

  Yet believing such to be true was exactly what had resulted in the Hong Kong incident in the first place. So she intended to double- and if necessary triple-check the dynamic security feedback loop protocols.

  She had made it through an entire third of the file when her secretary pinged her eVi to inform her the Minister for Extra-Solar Development was in the lobby asking to see her.

  She frowned in annoyance, and a bit of surprise. She didn’t care for people dropping by without an appointment, but the man was influential enough she couldn’t afford to rebuff him. “Give me two minutes before you send him in.”

  The layers of screens vanished; she went to the cabinet to fix a cup of tea. By the time the Minister walked in she was in perfect form and smiling with poised grace.

  “Minister Karolyn, so good to see you again.”

  “And you, Admiral.” He half-bowed from the waist. She dipped her chin and gestured him toward the chair opposite her desk.

  There was only one conceivable reason for the visit—but she never made assumptions where politicians were concerned. “What can I do for you?”

  He nodded and adjusted himself awkwardly in the chair. “I apologize for the unannounced visit. I found myself in the area this afternoon and thought I might drop in.” Her left eyebrow raised the slightest bit. “I wanted to take the opportunity to impress upon you in person how much we want to see Alexis in the Deep Space Exploration directorship. She’s a stellar candidate who can bring new energy and initiative to the department.”

  Her lips pursed briefly. “She would unquestionably do so, and I regret she was unable to accept your generous offer. But if I may be honest? This seems rather a lot of effort for a position which, while prestigious, is not one I consider to be world-altering. I imagine you have other qualified candidates.”

  “Yes, obviously.” He fidgeted again, though this time it didn’t seem to be related to the comfort level of the chair. “If I may also be honest, Admiral, I’m getting a fair amount of pressure to make sure your daughter is named to this post, and soon.”

  She suppressed a frown, but barely. It concerned her if political forces had taken an interest in Alexis without her knowledge. “Pressure? Wherever f
rom? Alexis is hardly politically connected.”

  “That’s the thing about political pressure, ma’am. One rarely can see from where it truly originates. All I can say is someone higher up than me very much wants your daughter in this job. So if you were able to reach out to her again and reiterate the degree of interest, I’d greatly appreciate it.”

  She sipped her tea, both to buy herself a moment and to center her thoughts. She wasn’t eager to divulge the abysmal state of her relationship with her daughter to a stranger, much less a politician. But if there was any chance of Alexis accepting the position, she wanted to help make it happen. It would be good for her…eventually, it might be good for them. “Minister, do you have children?”

  “I’m a bachelor, so not as far as I’m aware of.” He smiled.

  She didn’t. “I see. You will not have experienced this yourself then, but like many children, my daughter developed a mind of her own before she was two years old and has never lost it. She stopped taking my advice around the time….” A shadow passed across her face she couldn’t fully disguise.

  The security office on Le Grande Retraite was as bright and clean as the rest of the orbital luxury resort. A young lieutenant in a spotless uniform greeted her at the entryway with a salute. “Commodore Solovy. It’s an honor to meet you.”

  She leveled a dismissive glare at him. “This is not a social call, Lieutenant. Take me to my daughter.”

  His posture wilted as he stammered out a response. “Y-yes, ma’am. We put her in one of the interview rooms. I, um, gave her a juice. And some popcorn.”

  She fell in beside him. “And the young man?”

  “Uh, he was of age and no laws had been broken, so we weren’t able to detain him.” He stopped in front of a doorway and glanced at her, then hastily opened the door and stepped back.

  Alexis tossed a kernel of popcorn in the air and caught it in her mouth. Her feet were clad in braided flip-flops and kicked up on the desk, legs crossed at the ankle. She was all elbows and knees, half a child and half a woman. Her hair was bound in long pigtails draped over her shoulders and down her chest—strange, they somehow made her look older, not younger. Perhaps it was the sharp, spirited fire in her eyes. David’s eyes.

  “Mom. Here to throw me in the brig?”

  “I am here to take you home.”

  Alexis gave a melodramatic sigh, rolled her eyes in exaggerated annoyance and pulled her feet off the desk. “Fine, whatever.”

  She turned to the lieutenant. “Thank you for taking care of my daughter, Lieutenant. I do apologize for any inconvenience she may have caused you.”

  “She was no trouble, ma’am.” He jumped when Alexis tossed the bag of popcorn to him as she passed.

  “Thanks for the snack, mes’ye.”

  Miriam didn’t say a word until they reached the ship. She set the autopilot then shifted in the seat. “What were you thinking? You are fourteen years old and had no business flying off-planet without supervision.”

  “It’s not like it was far off-planet….” Her hand jerked toward the viewport dominated by Earth’s profile.

  “How did you access the ship? The security should have prevented you from flying it.”

  Alexis snorted. “Please. I hacked full access to it weeks ago. It actually recognizes me as its primary owner now, you know.”

  “Not for long it doesn’t. You will— ”

  “Did you even know I was gone until they called you? You didn’t, did you? You spent another night at the office, doing whatever the hell it is you do there.”

  She felt her jaw tighten, but made certain her voice remained even. “I trusted you were mature enough so I didn’t need to check on you constantly, trusted you would respect your curfew and not, for instance, steal the family ship and run off with a boy four years older than you.”

  “Nick? He’s a tupïtsa, and entirely too easy to impress. I was bored with him before we got to the station.”

  “That is not the point. The point is I was mistaken. You aren’t worthy of my trust.”

  “Bullshit. The point is—”

  “Do not speak to me in—”

  “The point is you will do everything in your power not to have to spend time with me. I’m nothing but a nuisance in the way of your damn career—but hey, it’s fine. Say the word and I’ll be out of your hair forever. I’ve got things to do anyway.”

  She opened her mouth to retort…then closed it.

  How could she tell her daughter it was a knife in the heart every single time she looked at her? That she saw David in the light in her eyes, the way she walked, her voice, her smile and even her frown? That she could hardly bear to be in the house where he was a ghost in every shadow and a whisper in every corner, yet couldn’t bear to let it go for the same reason? That she sought refuge in work because it was the only place where she could pretend there wasn’t a hole in the world? Where she could at least try to make sure he didn’t die in vain?

  She couldn’t, of course.

  “Don’t be absurd. You are my daughter, and I care about you. But with the implementation of the armistice there’s a tremendous amount of work to do. A lot of changes are on the way. Someone has to ensure matters are handled properly.”

  “Chto za khuynya! I don’t understand why you agreed to the armistice in the first place. We should have blown Seneca into space dust.”

  “Alexis, please mind your mouth. Cursing in Russian is still cursing.”

  “I certainly hope so. And my name is Alex.”

  She gritted her teeth in frustration, inhaling a deep breath to swallow her initial response. “’I’ did not agree to the armistice—you know better. The Prime Minister and the Assembly did, because the simple fact is we were taking too many losses. It was against Alliance interests to get into a long and messy quagmire.”

  “A ‘quagmire’? Is that what you call them murdering Dad? That’s cold, Mom, even for you.”

  “Don’t you dare say such a thing. Your father died a hero.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me. You know what? He’s still dead. They should be, too.”

  Yes they should be. But David wouldn’t want—wouldn’t have wanted—it. “I’m afraid their fate isn’t up to me. But one thing which is up to me is your punishment. You are on home restriction until such time as I feel you’ve learned to be responsible. You can go to school and activities I have approved beforehand. Otherwise, the security system will not allow you to leave. If you get into trouble while at school, you will be holoing your studies for the foreseeable future.”

  “I’ll just hack it.”

  “Young lady, I have people working for me who are far better hackers than you. You will not.”

  Alexis shrugged, threw her feet up on the dash and crossed her arms over her chest. “Right. Absolutely. You’ve got me.”

  Naturally, she had hacked the security system within the week; the tougher encryption subsequently added, two weeks later. And after that….

  She gave the Minister a tight, formal expression. “Well, she hasn’t taken my advice in quite some time. In any event, if you legitimately want her to accept the position, I’m afraid asking me to press the matter is not the tack you want to take. I think it best if you reached out to her directly.”

  He exhaled in a suggestion of weary acceptance and stood. She stood with him and accepted his outstretched hand.

  “Thank you for your time, Admiral, and your frankness. I’ll likely do that.”

  “Certainly, Minister. My door is always open.” It was a bald-faced lie, but one she had uttered at countless dinner parties and conferences, and she delivered it as smoothly as any greeting.

  Once he had departed, she drifted to the window. Fall came early here, and the sun had already begun its descent into the waters.

  Perhaps her suggestion to the Minister hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Please, Alexis, don’t tell the man to fuck off.

  She thought on it a minute, then turned on a heel and
went down the hall to Richard’s office.

  A checkerboard of screens decorated his desktop surface and an aural hovered in front of his right eye. When she walked in he shut off the aural and smiled, though it was a weak attempt. “What’s up?”

  She didn’t respond immediately, instead pacing halfway across the room, hands clasped behind her back, before stopping to look at him. “You took Alexis back to the spaceport the other day, right?”

  “Yeah, I caught her on her way out. Why?”

  “Did she by chance say anything about the Deep Space Exploration offer?”

  He huffed a brief laugh. “Not anything you want to hear.”

  Her eyes squeezed shut in a grimace. “Excellent. The Minister just left my office. He’s rather eager—disturbingly so, actually—for her to accept the post. I told him he should contact her, but now I’m not convinced it was the correct thing to do.”

  He gave her an understanding smile, this one genuine. “Well, I’m not sure it really matters. She left Earth yesterday morning.”

  She sighed softly. “Of course she did. Listen, there’s something else. Karolyn said he was receiving political pressure to name Alexis to the post. I don’t suppose you’ve heard any chatter about that?”

  “Miriam, I’m shocked you would imply we spy on domestic political affairs.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Ha…no, I’m not. To answer your question, not a peep.”

  “Damn. I know you’re underwater right now with the Summit, but if you get a few minutes could you dig around a little? It bothers me that politicians are meddling in her affairs without my—”

  “Approval?”

  “Knowledge.”

  His hands rose in surrender. “Okay, I’ll look into it. It may take a few days.”

  “Thanks, Richard. I’ll let you get back to work. Try to get some rest though—you know next week is going to be worse.”

  Despite Miriam’s advice, it was almost twenty-two hundred before Richard walked in the door to his home in the foothills above Lake Sammamish.