Chapter 3

“Plebiscite! Plebiscite! Plebiscite!”

2nd Lt. DeShane Gallagher let her finger drop from the window blinds that looked out onto the protestor clogged main thoroughfare of Liberty, shutting out the pale red light of Proxima Centauri and turned to her superior, Captain Moon Two.

“I think they might want a some kind of plebiscite or something,” Dey said.

Moon Two, as befitted the name bestowed on him by parents who had clearly not thought very far ahead in their child’s life, had absolutely no sense of humor. Dey was fairly sure he had had it surgically removed in elementary school as a survival mechanism. He sent a look at Dey and the soundproofing that the apartment came with hummed on, then faded away. The noise canceling worked almost perfectly, the only sounds that Dey could hear at the moment was the faint, subliminal thump of hundreds of feet walking by outside.

Liberty had been founded in the 40s by a bunch of anarcho-libertarians and radical progressives. No government, no gendered pronouns, no war, no ... well, no a great deal of things. They had lasted four years before internal division and pressure from corporate interests on Earth caused fissures in their civilization that had dropped the colony of almost ten thousand people into an undeclared shooting war. A year later, President Gardner – riding high on the acquisition of Ceres and several other extrasolar colonies – had dropped troops and Liberty has been a territory and commonwealth ever since. The old radprog constitution remained.

That was what the protest was about.

“We’re not here about them,” Moon said.

Really? Loki muttered in Dey’s head. I don’t know, did you read the briefing? I was sleeping.

A knock and ping came at the front door. Dey’s hand went to her holstered pistol, but she dropped it once the ping filtered through her perception – it was the ping they had expected, sent out by an RIFD chip that only their contact was supposed to have. Moon moved into a covering position – just to be safe – and Dey stepped over to the door. She tapped the unlock button and found herself face to face with an unsmiling Chinese woman. She stepped into the room and Dey shut the door again.

Dey let Loki handle the introductions – her AI had a fully integrated connection to the hundreds of implants that laced Dey’s body. That gave him enough control to move her lips and work her diaphragm. And, well, he knew how to make the tiny noises that the Chinese languages (whichever it was, Dey couldn’t keep it straight) needed to speak. “Good day, Agent Pan.”

The Chinese secret service agent nodded curtly. “Lt. Gallagher,” she said, her English impeccable. “Strange bedfellows, huh?”

To say that the geopolitical situation that had dragged Dey out of the solar system and to the nearest and oldest settled human colony world was fraught and overcomplicated would be a tad like calling the sun a mite bright. Imperial Russia wanted the resource rich and strategically viable colonies on Trappist-1A. The Chinese would really prefer that they keep their colonies and the access to stable transuranic elements created by the unique nature of the planet’s geological history. Unable or unwilling to come to a peaceful resolution to this problem, the two empires had started shooting at each other. And like most wars, it was taking longer than anticipated.

But wait. It got better.

The Russians had a deficiency in their comp-sci. After the glory days of their hacking in the ‘oughts and the ‘roaring’ 20s, the rest of the world had caught up and surpassed them. The terrors of the Reformation and the restoration of the monarchy under Tzar “Vladdy” had given the other superpowers even more of a headway. So, how do Russians fix their comp-sci problems?

Theft. Theft tended to be a good idea, if you could pull it off.

Hence why a spy had broken into the top secret military base where Dey and her AI companion (and a few dozen other AI/human partners) were being trained and started stealing gestating intelligences from storage.

Just one tiny problem.

The spy, after his body had been examined and poked and prodded and studied, wasn’t Russian. In fact, it hadn’t even been human. That wasn’t as big of a shock as it would have been a century – or even a few decades – ago. Humanity had run into half dozens of alien races while trying desperately to out-expand one another, and the most curious and enigmatic of those races were the Perseus Mumblers. Dwelling beyond the veil of a black hole, the Mumblers offered amazingly advanced technology ... for anyone willing to trade.

Someone had punted the asshole through the Mumbler’s event horizon and he had come out radically augmented. Untraceable. But as many people had learned since the dawn of the internet, nothing ... nothing ... is beyond doxing.

“The information contained in this drive cannot be traced to any of our agents. Don’t even try,” Agent Pan said, holding up a wafer of clear plastic containing a bead roughly the size of a grain of sand. “It dissolves without the right command code. I get what you offered, I give the command code.”

Moon’s AI, Bastet, sent the assent codes to Dey. Dey stepped forward and set down her own little drive.

“Names of every Russian spy we know operating in Beijing,” Dey said. “Not all of them, but enough of them.”

Pan took the drive. She eyed it, then looked at Moon. “We all trade codes on three, yes?”

“Seems rational enough,” Moon said, his eyes not wavering.

Dey shifted from foot to foot. This was where the tension got just a bit tighter. The faint drumming, thumping sound of footsteps outside the window continued to thrum through the building. When everyone in a room had the ability to rip people apart with augmented super-powers, the temptation was always there. Gun or no gun, the question came: Was it better to just kill them and run, or better to let the offer stand. But then Moon nodded. Pan relaxed slightly.

The Chinese agent turned and left, without so much as a goodbye.

Dey breathed slowly out – a sigh she hadn’t known she had been holding.

Moon looked down at the drive on his hand.

The plastic popped open with a sigh so similar to Dey’s that she eyed it suspiciously. She picked up the bead with her fingertip and walked it to the external terminal. It was totally possible for the two agents to access the data chip with their AI. But, like making love without a condom in the days before BSSTIT, it wasn’t really the best idea. Doubly so with someone who very well might have been carrying the computerized equivalent of AIDS. AIs weren’t as easily hacked as they were on the vids, but that didn’t make risking it anything less than terminally stupid when you were walking around with enough implants that could rip you and the building you were in to pieces if they went haywire.

The external terminal pinged and displayed a halo of data files in a shimmering holographic interface.

“Showy Google POS,” Moon said, slapping the side of the terminal until he got it to display in the touchscreen that made up the main body. He started to spool through the information, his lips pursed. Dey leaned over his shoulder and – once more – felt a bit like a big squishy machine that carried the person who did all the real work.

She couldn’t read the text nearly as fast as Loki. He highlighted text and flashed it in her vision, letting her get a read on it as Moon kept spooling forward. Dey tried to not scowl.

It was a load of fuzz.

That was something she hadn’t expected when she had been transferred out of the USAF training program on Ceres to the Devil Program. At the end of the day, Devil Troops weren’t just soldiers. They were intelinet troubleshooters, special forces, and spies all merged into a single cohesive whole. Great in terms of operational flexibility. Irritating when the only thing you had wanted to do with your life was fly cool spaceships.

Fuzz was an intelligence term. Basically, nothing was certain in the world of intelligence. Physics might have the surety of gravity and the absolute confidence of thermodynamics. But intelligence had a load of probables, and maybes and well I guesses. The Chinese had been keeping tabs on people who dealt with the Mumblers on Charon. Logical, considering what the Mumblers could do and the fact that the Chinese had two colonies in the V616 Monocerotis system. Research colonies, of course.

“So, we can cut at least half that intelligence out of the process,” Moon said, quietly. “The grad students and the small corporations don’t have the resources or need to steal a bunch of AI cores.”

Dey nodded. “That still leaves at least two dozen names.”

“Skim out the non-Russians-” Moon stopped himself and shook his head. “No. We can’t rule out that this wasn’t something else.”

Dey rubbed her palms along her face. [Loki, ] she thought. [Can you run down how many of these people are still on Charon?]

The list pinged and names were highlighted in red, gold and black. Black for those who were still on Charon. Gold for those in the Alpha Centauri/Proxima system. While Proxima Centauri and Alpha Centauri were both far enough apart that the primary stars of the system were little more than white dots at night, they were still relatively close. Close enough that a ship could get to the various balls of gas and rock that orbited around Alpha Centauri without needing to activate their main drives.

“You take orbital space, Lieutenant,” Moon said.

Dey looked at him.

“Orbital space is easier for someone on their first assignment,” he said, his voice calm. Rational. Still didn’t stop Dey from having to beat down her natural urge to growl at him. “Less places for someone to run.”

“Also more ways for me to experience the joys of decompression,” Dey said, frowning.

And to her utter shock, Moon slapped her shoulder. “Think of it like this, Lieutenant,” he said, then actually smiled. “At least you don’t have to deal with the boreworms.”

Dey frowned.

Loki, helpfully, brought up a picture-in-picture window in the upper left hand corner of her vision. It was a few choice clips from the destruction of St. Daniel – captured on a half a dozen webcameras and cellphones and streamed live on Twitch. Thankfully, he kept out the sound, but the looks on the desperate citizens as they fled the teeming masses of the boreworms was more than enough for her.

“When do I hit the shuttle?” she asked.

“What do we want!”

“One vote, one vote, one vote!” The crowd shouted back. The speaker was standing ontop of a parked hover-truck, her megaphone in her hands. She was dressed in the fashion that was all the rage across the vids: Long coat, with pink fringes along the bottoms. Her hair was done in a more classic punk style, and she had a privacy protection make-up. The idea had been that the random rectangles and black circles painted onto her cheeks, and the half-cheek cover that was mounted on the shoulder, would all work together to fool facial recognition software.

In all, it was roughly on par with going into battle against modern fluxguns wearing full plate.

You’d die looking stylish as fuck.

Dey, by comparison, looked downright staid in her plainclothes outfit. She kept her hands in her pockets and let Loki guide her around the worst knots of the crowd. She stepped past a small burning drum where people were throwing in scraps of paper.

[The hell are they burning?] Dey asked.

It looks like their birth certificates, Loki said. That’s what the plebiscite is about, you know. Pronouns.

[You know, they said that in the briefing, I still don’t buy it, ] Dey said as she finally got to the edge of the main street and started down an alleyway. Liberty was a proper city by now – it had gotten almost sixty years of development and growth to earn the winding back alleyways, the confusing street placements, the multiple redundant systems laid atop old failing systems that hadn’t been allowed to be cycled out of existence because they were still technically needed as the new systems were built. It also, from the three goons that followed Dey into the alleyway, had some of the criminal element that a city on Earth would get.

They are armed, Loki said. Detecting some bats, clubs, I think one might have a stubgun.

[Oh heaven forefend, ] Dey said, mock fear filling her thoughts as she kept walking forward. [Think they’re just taking advantage of the distracted police, or is this something more nefarious?]

I’ve done a facial check and looked them up on Facebook. Lets just say they vote lunatic fringe on the Democratic ticket.

[Oh. Goodie.]

“Oi, transie!”

Dey stopped and turned around. The head thug pointed his finger at her, grinning slightly. “I saw the way you was walking. Only chipheads walk like that.” He slapped the woman to his left – laughing slightly. They all looked eager, their eyes glinting.

“No, I’m thinking you’re confusing augmentations with not being so inbred you call your sister Mom.” Dey smiled brightly.

Hey, Dey, aren’t we supposed to be keeping a low profile?

[ ... right... ] Dey thought.

But it was a bit too late for that. The head thug scowled and started forward. He lifted up his hand, a crude club in his hand. Now here was where Dey had a choice to make – her mind whirring as time seemed to slow down. For the vast majority of people with augmentations, those augmentations were either a personal choice (and paid for out of their own pocket) or they were therapeutic and needed for them to live. The lunatic fringe of the conservative element of United States politics, being carefully courted by the Democratic Party in an old political strategy that never backfired once in the long history of the United States, hated both. Equally.

Almost no one had enough money to get the augmentations she had.

She could have kicked their asses in a few seconds just by letting Loki go nuts with her implanted DV emitters.

But, as he said.

Low profile.

So, Dey used the other thing the military had taught her. She grabbed the man’s wrist and twisted while bringing her knee upwards. His arm bent in a direction it really shouldn’t have. The man shirked and Dey stepped backwards, her fists up as she glared at the other two. “Now,” she said. “That bone might have cut some seriously important veins. If you get him to a hospital, he’ll be using that arm next week. If you don’t, you might need to roll him into the fungal field by the end of the hour. So, you can either try and kick my ass, or you and I can call this quits.”

The two toughs looked at her. They looked at their friend, who was clutching at his arm. The upper end of it flopped – a stomach churning sight.

They grabbed their friend, helping him to his feet and away.

Dey turned and hurried off.

And, unnoticed by her, a figure on the rooftop of the apartment building that boardered the alleyway stood.

“Very interesting,” she said.

The municipal spaceport of Liberty looked and was organized like a brick. It was perched, by necessity, at the edge of the city and by the demands of the local Green mayor and Green city council and Green voters, on the only piece of real estate near the city that wasn’t covered with one of the omnipresent Charon fungal pits or their attendant ecosystems. That meant that Dey had to catch a maglev train from the middle of Liberty and ride it up a small mountain to reach the spaceport proper.

It did give her a fantastic view of the planet.

“Shame it’s the second most fuck ugly planet I’ve ever seen,” Dey said, frowning.

Ceres doesn’t count, Loki said. This is the most ugly planet we’ve seen.

[If Pluto is a planet, Ceres is a planet.]

Pluto’s not a planet.

[Tell that to the fifty six thousand people living on it, ] Dey said, grinning.

The broad sweep of the plains that surrounded Liberty were bisected by the barrier mountains that had made Liberty a choice landing spot in the first place for the original colonists. Protected by the prevailing winds and sitting in a lush valley that got enough rainfall to support as much crops as someone could want, the only thing that made the local area anything less than perfect were the fungal pits. Three to four kilometers wide, who knows how many kilometers deep, they were like huge puckered pimples on the surface of the planet. Colored a plum purple, shaded a deeper color of disgusting red by the omnipresent red sunlight, the fungal pits only got more grotesque when you realized that they moved slightly. The five meter wide, wormlike growths that made up the main spongy mass of the pits constantly writhed. In actuality, they had less in common with fungus, despite the spores that they released every five years.

According to the briefing Dey had been forced to read, they had more in common with deep sea thermophiles. Scientists theorized, but hadn’t proved, that the pits went down into the core of Charon, and the plants fed off the heat there, rather than trying to wring any energy from the red light from overhead.

The maglev train whisked the view away from Dey, thankfully, by plunging into the side of the municipal spaceport, brakes whirring as it decelerated and came to a smooth stop in the internal passenger unloading bay. The lights here were the same red as the lights outside, but walking from the bay to the insides of the spaceport took Dey through a series of rooms where the lights changed hues subtly from red to yellow, until she was in the spaceport proper.

Once there, Dey took off her sunglasses, tucked them into her pocket, and headed for the booking terminal.

So, where do we hit first? Loki asked.

[I’m going off my gut, ] Dey said. [And my gut says that the first four names can be ignored. It’s not that I don’t think that a Russian petrochem magnet doesn’t want Russia to get their hands on some AIs. But I just don’t see them getting involved. Petrochem’s a shaky enough foundation to build your fortune on.]

And the criminals?

[Criminals do things that make them money. Fucking with the US government on this level just gets you in Gitmo, ] Dey said. The terminal had a short line. She smiled at the man she got behind – he looked at her, then looked her up and down. A slow whistle came from him. Dey stopped smiling.

“Sorry, just-” he started.

Dey grinned. “Man, that was too easy.” She shook her head. “I was flattered, stick to your guns.”

The man looked completely befuddled. The line shuffled forward and Dey gestured with one hand to the terminals. He beat a hasty retreat.

You’re like a cat sometimes, Loki said, sounding bemused.

[What can I say? I like fucking with people, ] Dey said, smiling to herself.

When she got to the terminal, she tapped it on and found a shuttle that was heading for the biggest orbital habitat in the area and the place where she was going to find her first candidate. Persephone II, built in the 2090s by a multinational corporate lobby, was neutral ground. Anyone from any of the superpowers could show up. The rules were simple and to the point: No weapons, no fighting, nothing that infringed on the MCL’s profits.

[Whose the MCL on this one?] Dey asked.

General Starships, Xenos Paradigm Biosystems and Apple Computers, Loki said – searching up the information in the time it took Dey to blink. Looks like it’s a general purpose corporate research park. XPB is a genomic corporation doing research on the fungals. I think they’re trying to adapt it into a biological borehole that can produce cheap geothermal energy. Oh, that’s neat.

[Stop reading corporate gobbledygook and tell me where our candidate is living on the place.]

I’ll do you one better, Loki said, sounding proud of himself. I found his Facebook.

There are no telepaths. Some alien races came close – the Sor’Kith claimed they could extrapolate emotional states via a long distance kind of electromagnetic senses, but no one bought the idea that they could read minds. But humanity had sidestepped the problem. It turned out, you needed only twenty five posts on social media to begin building a statistical model for what you would be like. Most people, from Paul DeVilbiss onwards, were more than eager to give the average government spook a lot more than twenty five posts.

It took Loki a few minutes to read everything that Marin Snook had written up on Facebook, Twitter and Twitch and turn it into a digestible set of intelligence briefings. Dey perused them as she walked into the STS shuttle that she had booked, strapped in, and waited for launch. As the ground of Charon started to receded underneath her, she finished the file.

She pursed her lips.

Total asshole?

[Total asshole, ] Dey thought.

The shuttle darted into orbit – turning slowly on its axis to give the fifty odd people on-board the best view through their windows at Charon. Proxima Centauri vanished over the horizon, giving the curve of the planet a ruby glow. Then they reached Persephone II. The station looked like a skyscraper that had been lifted into space and set in the center of a trio of concentric rings. The rings provided a pseudo-magnetosphere, buffeting away the solar radiation that might have threatened the occupants, while the actual station itself got gravity from deck after deck of DV emitters.

They could have spun it, but DV emitters were cheap and building a skyscraper under gravity, then chucking it into space was easier than making a Hamilton cylinder.

The shuttle was kept in a holding pattern for a half hour before it docked with the station. Dey walked through security without so much as a bead of sweat – Loki redirected scans and fed the computer systems passwords that the DHS used to get by this kind of scan. Even if he hadn’t, she was pretty sure that her augments were concealed enough to fool scanners. That made her frown. [Enough to hide from scanners, but not enough to avoid some loonie rightwing nutjobs?]

I know, Loki said. That’s what’s making me nervous too.

The main lobby of Persephone II was decorated in a gorgeous, art deco style. Large golden statues held up the central ceiling, facing outwards, their features just non-defined enough to be no particular race. Several shops and restaurants were set into the walls and most of the people off the shuttle were being met by people and lead off. The back of the lobby led to a series of grav-shafts that dropped people or lifted them up, depending on where they were going. The whole place felt like standing in the middle of an office complex – it had that faintly to clean air. No one was here who didn’t wear a button up shirt and everyone who had them were hiding their tattoos.

Dey took a grav shaft to the habitation deck. There, she walked through a series of corridors that felt like a Hilton – carpeting, no direct overhead lightning, wait droids pushing carts full of toiletries along the center of the corridors, and the rec rooms she passed were all annoyingly fit and preppy, with loads of workout machines and indoor pools.

[And here we are, ] she thought as she came to one of the junctions between habitation blocks that served as a communal area. There was a huge, broad window that looked out at the night side of Charon – bisected by a single, curving magnetosphere projector – and a few dozen tables set out near an open air cafe. There were half a dozen holotables that could be reconfigured to any setting proper, though two of them had been claimed by a half a dozen teenagers playing Magic: The Gathering.

Dey paused, looking over the shoulder of one of them. She smirked, then tapped one of the cards that the youth was thinking of playing.

“I wouldn’t spike now, kid,” she said.

The youth looked up at her – then opened his mouth in adolescent shock. Dey grinned at him.

Down, cougar.

[I’m twenty five, I can’t be a cougar.]

It’s about mental age, sometimes.

Dey shook her head and looked towards the cafe. She saw Marin Snook. He was, at the very least, handsome. She could give him that. And she did appreciate that, among the well dressed, shaved and orderly looking corporate citizens of Persephone II, he looked like he did something with his hands. He was dark black, with pale white hair – dyed, not natural – that had had shaved down to a frizzy set of cornrows. He had dyed his left hand pale white and wore a scruffy leather jacket that might as well have said ‘born spacer’ on it. He was lounging back in a seat and talking to a demon.

Dey froze.

[Okay, ] she thought. [Loki, diagnostics, you see that too, right?]

The demon looked vaguely humanoid. It had two arms, a vaguely leg-like shape beneath it, two eyes, and a wide mouth. There, all similarity with humanity ended – and honestly, Dey would have preferred if it had been more different, like a Squiddy. Seeing echos of a man within that mass of inky blackness just made her shudder. Whatever passed for the creature’s skin rippled like water, though the indications of movement were more suggestions than overt changes in tone or position. It was to dark, to black, to really show much of anything. Its head was slightly to wide, to swept back, and it had a pair of black horns that emerged from the top of its forehead. Its mouth wasn’t so much a mouth – in the same way its eyes weren’t exactly eyes.

Rather, those facial features were pale white glows that were visible more by the absence of blackness than by any intrinsic features.

I do, Loki said. I think it’s a Mumbler.

[No fucking way, ] Dey said, walking over to the table. [They live behind a goddamn black hole – you don’t walk out of a black hole for a coffee in the local Starbucks.]

Except that, apparently, they do.

“Marin?” Dey asked.

Marin looked at her, his brow furrowing.

“Marin, don’t you recognize me?” Dey asked, grinning. “It’s Gidget!”

“Gidge?” Marin looked uncertain. Gidget Walts had been plucked from his friends list. She had a similar mixture of races as Dey, and the last IRL meeting between her and Marin had been far enough back that he wouldn’t quite be sure if he had seen her before. Dey sat down, shaking her head slightly.

“Trust you to forget me,” Dey said, frowning. “And after I posted you that birthday wish last week. How are you doing, space-dog?”

Marin laughed. “Gige!” he shook his head. “You look, uh...” he paused. “Good.”

“I have been working out,” Dey said.

Gidget brags a bit on FB. Feel free to show off dem guns, Dey.

Dey lifted her arm and did just that. From the way Marin licked his lips, he did appreciate the guns. Dey, personally, felt like she could chalk the extra few hours working out at 1.5Gs as something definitely worth the effort.

“And, ah, whose this?” she asked, nodding to the demon.

The demon smiled. “You can call me Mordin Lightbringer...” he said, his voice sibilant and seductive.

Oh dear.

[Loki?]

He might as well have said call me fucking Count Dracula von Doom, Loki whispered. Stay frosty, Dey.

[Don’t trust the obviously evil alien? You don’t say... ] Dey nodded to the alien.

“Gidge is a friend from SOL,” Marin said. “She runs an exoship like I do.”

“Ah, so, you place your forms inside of small boxes of metal and use radioactive decay in steam boilers to shunt energy into unstable systems that warp space/time to allow you to go screaming through space many times faster than the speed of light...” Mordin Lightbringer leaned forward, his glowing white eyes narrowing. “And you do this so that you can earn script? To afford food? Yes?”

“We call them big fat American red blooded dolla dolla bills,” Dey said, trying to stay as cool as a cucumber in hard vacuum.

Mordin laughed. “She does not scare easily, Marin. I like this.”

“You heard of the Perseus Mumblers?” Marin asked. “This guy is one of their, ah, servants.”

“You’re not a Mumbler yourself?” Dey asked. “I thought, well, I mean, I guess they say that they never leave their home. But...”

“My, ah, masters,” Mordin said, waving one hand. Dey noticed that rather than legs, he seemed to simply dissolve into a vague shadow below the impression of his belly. Within that shadow, she thought she was the occasional slippery tentacle. Her mind flashed back to the fungal pits as she tried to not shudder. “They can only exist in a place where physics as you understand it ... break down.” He smiled a Cheshire cat smile. “And so, when they need to explore the universe beyond, they craft beings like me.”

“What are you made out of?” Dey asked, playing up how much she was gawking at him.