Dogs
(Starspeak)
I tossed the spent plasma stave back to her. Instead of catching it though, she just dematerialized it mid-air.
Five entrances were all guarded by Vorak guards and pawn-robots. But none of them were firing.
Interesting.
I understood why the guards were hesitating. They were mortal flesh and blood. Watching three Adepts dismantle mechanical killers the size of tanks had stuck them with fear and blunted their morale.
But the pawns should have been operating on the same programming as the Knight and Rook bots…unless they weren’t. What if the pawns had an operator? Someone at a computer somewhere giving them orders?
Even criminal organizations were still businesses at the end of the day, and they wouldn’t want to waste the resources if we were just going to chew through the pawns anyway.
<…How are we doing at the vaults?> I asked.
As soon as I asked, Mavriste burst up from the massive hole in the floor the Rook robot had made.
Rats. So much for diverting him.
Instead of bothering with words, Donnie sent me a quick snapshot of another rook robot conspicuously taking up one of two dedicated alcoves in the circular vault room.
Located at the very bottom of the Diving Bell, the vault room was a veritable death trap to set foot in. It was a ten-sided room with two entrances on opposite sides with the Rook robots’ alcoves set ninety degrees off-set from that.
There were three-hundred-sixty degree unobstructed lines of fire. You couldn’t set foot in the room without getting shot.
We’d first assumed the shooting would be from living breathing rak manning a bunker built into the center of the floor. The difference between six rak toting light machine guns and the Rook were academic though.
Did we have the time for the four of us to simply divert?
We honestly might.
If the security guards were already considering giving up, then there was a chance we could just take over the whole facility without any resistance and deal with any mechanized security at our leisure. At first blush, it seemed to minimize the chances we’d lose any of our people too.
But before coming here, we’d talked about tertiary goals: bonus objectives we had. One of which was looting the on-site offices of Turoi Ray or whoever was actually in charge.
Whether that was Turoi Ray or some casino manager, it didn’t matter. That person ran a bank on the bottom of the ocean for criminals; I didn’t want to see what they did when backed into a corner.
So we needed to keep up the pace.
<…You’re right,> Nai said.
I trusted their call, especially with Nai giving it the green light. One look at Mavriste and Macoru confirmed what I wanted to do. Vo was ready too.
The four of us broke into a sprint, not for the hole in the floor, not for any of the stairwells leading down to the kitchens or maintenance corridors…
No, we rushed the elevators.
That was what the pawns needed to open fire on us. There were too many to track the number of shots, but Macoru and Mavriste both threw up sweeping curtains of pink and black plasma.
I pointed at the elevator doors and blew them wide open with a kinetic bomb. No elevator was on the other side, but that was fine.
Mavriste and I both dove into the shaft, each of us throttling our Adept mobility tricks to the max. Maneuvering jets fired each time I leapt from handhold to handhold, propelling me dozens of feet up the shaft at a time, while Mavriste’s cloak of plasma seemed to just slide right up the sheer wall pulling him along.
Man, I really wanted to figure out that trick…
Vo and Macoru were only seconds behind us, gunfire spraying through the open doors the very moment they cleared the opening.
I ignited another radar-candle while my first still had a minute left—just to be safe, and found at least four rak taking up positions on the top floor.
I spun up my superconnector on minimum intensity, pushing one-way connections to Mavriste and Macoru. Routing my radar’s feed into the connections let the two of them sense exactly where the minds were.
I preferred it that way.
Did they know I had hangups about killing?
Robots though…robots I could tear through without a sleepless night in sight.
Mavriste materialized some platforms at the top of the shaft so we could catch our breath before going through the doors. The enemies below were spraying potshots up the elevator shaft in hopes of catching us, but they just plinked uselessly against the improvised platform.
It was pretty surreal: panting and wiping blood from my eyes while feeling gunfire rattle just a few inches below my feet.
Still, we were trying to keep our foot on the gas pedal here. Thirty seconds for Mav and Mac to cascade the room and flag the targets that weren’t showing up on psionic radar, and then we were ready.
Mavriste went first, puffing up his black plasma cloak like it was a winter parka, he dove right through the elevator doors, twisting and tearing them clear away from the walls.
Macoru followed him only a fraction of a second later.
Both of their bodies clad in their smart-plasma, ripping clusters of bolts at every breathing target in the room even while gunfire immediately lit up the space.
It wasn’t just the Pawns and security rak firing though. Vo and I waited a heartbeat for the two of them to draw the fire before we turned out, focusing on the robotic shooters.
My revolver bucked twelve times, putting a pair of bullets into the torso of each bot on my half of the room. Vo’s shotgun barked half that many times, blasting slugs through the six Pawns spread out among the other half.
From start to finish it didn’t even take ten seconds.
But when the shooting stopped, we had four Vorak spasming on the ground with thin arcs of plasma still flickering off their bodies and the shattered ceramic armor and steel of a dozen Pawn robots guarding the floor.
“
It was a Vorak equivalent of ‘open sesame’. Behind my mask? I smirked.
One mind was inside the office, a rak seated at the desk trying to pretend they were unconcerned with the armed Adepts storming their office.
“I think you’ll find—” they began.
“Don’t care,” I said.
Vo kept their shot gun trained on them while Mac, Mav, and I immediately went about searching the room, pulling boxes off the book shelves, cascading every surface looking for hidden compartments or safes—oh, there we go.
Hidden behind an expensive looking stone statue on a bookshelf was a wall safe.
Pushing my cascade through and around the whole thing confirmed that there weren’t any explosives or acid packs built in. Sucks to be them. Booby traps weren’t just good for harming intruders.
My psionic defense lesson came to mind. If your enemy was going to steal the information from you anyway…it became worth destroying just to keep out of their hands—or in this case, ours.
“I’ll die before I surrender the combination,” the manager in the chair tried.
“I believe you,” Macoru said simply, not even bothering to look at the rak in the chair.
I stepped aside to give Macoru easier access. I could have melted through the locking bolt, but my way risked burning the stuff inside. But Macoru just cut the safe completely out of the wall before shearing off the top.
She pulled out packets of documents, a very ornate pistol, and the gold mine: a computer hard drive.
No laptop though.
CENSOR had mechanized units on the premises! There was no way there wasn’t a laptop here.
Darn it.
I stomped over to the rak’s desk, shoving them out of the way and ignoring their protests. Their desk was outfitted with a computer, but not the super-advanced kind CENSOR and her siblings gave their agents…
Still, I tore open the casing and ripped out that hard drive too. You never know what might be useful.
The security main office hadn’t had the laptop either, but it had upgraded hardware. Our probe would copy all the data there, but I really wanted to steal the moon here.
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Madeline and Serral had chewed around the periphery of CENSOR’s operation in this system for more than a week and barely raised the alarm. If I understood CENSOR’s perception of threat, they thought it would be weeks or even months before Serral and Madeline’s attempts came anywhere near discovering the Diving Bell or CENSOR’s investment here.
But through completely separate means, my crew on Kraknor had managed to skip to the end. It was basically entirely by accident, and with the aid of several variables that even CENSOR had been unable to predict.
Cadrune’s scouting, the Missionary Marines’ presence, and my suspicion that CENSOR hadn’t realized the abductee’s corpse was stored at the Diving Bell…it all contributed to the perfect storm for us to skip to the end of a long and arduous investigation and just steal the prize at the end.
All because we happened to stumble across it. Sheer luck.
Best machine-minds in the cosmos still couldn’t outwit luck.
But cruel fortune cut both ways, because here we were tearing apart the office unable to find the computer banks we really wanted to loot.
Vo, consummate professional, kept their eyes and shotgun fixed on the casino manager. Just in case.
His cascade flexed underfoot. An impressive feet, considering the office floor was carpeted.
<…There’s a spot I can cut through,> he reported, moving just off center to the large rug splayed over the first half of the office. Mavriste tore the carpet away with a flourish. He took a deep breath, focusing, and I felt the energy in the room change from his Adeptry.
Black plasma flashed out from his body in a blur, and square of floor more than a foot thick pulled away. A rush of hot air blasted out from the opening, and Mavriste gingerly slipped through.
I followed and found myself…
Inside a computer.
Not inside a server room. Not inside a room full of computers. Inside a whole computer. Different components were arranged in row after row, almost like a tile pattern repeated, but both Mavriste and I were hesitant to actually put our feet on it.
We wanted to steal the drives, not destroy them…
So we hung from the ceiling like idiots while I spun up Ben’s computer flow chart once again.
Unlike last time, it wasn’t a Vorak computer. Ben’s flow chart wasn’t so easy to navigate when applied to CENSOR’s preferred hardware, but that difficulty actually made me grin wider.
I’d wanted to steal the moon alright. No wonder there wasn’t a laptop. This was better than one measly laptop. Those were found in the hands of her agents. Foot soldiers.
This was a brain. A critical control center to CENSOR’s entire operation.
For exactly one glorious second, with the hot air from the components washing against the frigid cool air pumped in, I let myself dare to believe.
There might be a way home hidden on this machine.
No sooner did the thought occur to me than did I dash it out of my mind with extreme prejudice. I wasn’t that lucky, and even if I somehow was, I refused to jinx it by getting my hopes up.
Besides, even if it didn’t contain the secrets of a way home, this was still a massive gold mine.
One by one, the flow chart started to pick out the memory chips and hard drives of the room-sized-computer. I flagged each one and Mavriste started gently removing where able and violently cutting where necessary.
The memory components themselves were left pristine and intact, but the stuff around them could be carved through if it meant extricating the rest safely. What did we care about the power conduits? Even the motherboards and processors weren’t worth grabbing—okay, that’s a lie, I did grab one processor just for study—but in just a couple minutes, Mavriste and I had stripped hundreds of terabytes worth of hard drives from CENSOR’s (probably) most heavily defended operation in the system.
So, so worth it.
Every last component was encased in foam and placed in a materialized duffle bag, and then it was time to go.
Donnie obliged and—in a psionic feat I didn’t know he was capable of—opened a psionic video feed from his own eyes.
For a second, it was impossible to tell what we were looking at. It seemed to be just a field of featureless grey-black. But with a few glances, the shape of the vaults room became clear.
Johnny had materialized a solid block of his crystalline black iron to take up more than two/thirds of the vault room’s space. At first I thought it was to crowd out the Rook and deny it lines of fire.
But then there was a hideous groan and creak from somewhere inside the block.
No…
He’d actually managed to encase the Rook on all sides in iron. And now he was just adding material, filling in the block bit by bit.
Donnie and Johnny both looped their cascades into the sensory feed, revealing the Rook contorting its legs in every direction trying not to get crushed inside a single solid hunk of metal the size of a small house.
Every second, Johnny was having the iron grow inward, squeezing each part of the robot just a little bit tighter with each fraction of a centimeter. One ceramic armor plate split in two from the stress, spraying shrapnel through the enclosed space like a bomb, but there wasn’t even a scratch inside or out.
It was eight to ten feet of solid iron between the robot and freedom—on all sides no less.
Donnie couldn’t keep the smarm out of his voice, but I wasn’t about to call him out on it. Even if Johnny had done all the heavy lifting, as a team they’d done a truly flawless job.
I had to ignore how much it still bothered me to see Itun walking into the vaults with them, but hey, nothing’s perfect.
My approval of Donnie went up when I realized he was shooting regular suspicious glances at Itun, making sure the rak wasn’t up to something behind his back.
But that security measure was pretty pointless when Johnny could just fill the gap between vault and floor with his brain. Doubly so when we controlled the computers and alarms that would normally be triggered by such attempts to circumvent.
With the M&Ms back on the subs still connected to security through the probe we left, and Mavriste having similarly compromised the computers that regulated the facilities power supply…
Johnny and Donnie didn’t even have to break in. They pulled a lever, a request was sent, a Vorak on a submarine pressed a button, and presto change-o.
Robbing a bank vault.
Right in the middle of it sat one sleek black coffin.
Had I been in a good mood? Just the sight of it was enough to drag me back down. My skin even crawled with the Diving Bell’s walls closing in from all sides.
Biting my own lip hard enough to draw blood helped snap me out of it.
Fighting our way back to the subs was much easier than entering had been.
The Pawns couldn’t descend the elevator shafts safely, and their operation seemed to be badly compromised by the damage Mavriste and I had done to the facility computer. The guards were the only meaningful resistance as Macoru, Mavriste, Vo, and I slid down the elevator cables to the sublevels.
Back in the cramped bulkheads of the maintenance shafts, we met with Johnny, Donnie, and Itun struggling to get the coffin through the narrow corridors and hatches, but I was hard not to laugh at the sight of Itun and Johnny hunched over at odd angles getting the coffin up on its side.
Donnie materialized gobs of glue, slathering them across the coffin before pressing it against the hull of the Hebbivene. Johnny materialized a thick metal exterior shell to further affix the coffin to the sub’s hull, and then we all darted inside.
Nai brought up our six, materializing a blockage in the tunnels behind us before dematerializing the section actually connected to the Diving Bell. Water rushed back in, pressing the exterior hatches shut again.
She actually filled the tunnels solid before dematerializing them slowly, outside to in. ‘Preventing cavitation’, she explained.
But I was thinking more about the Vorak still inside, battered from our attack, disorganized, security utterly compromised. The guards would sweep the sublevels in search of us and find no one.
I had a feeling that no one in the Diving Bell would quite understand where we came from until a careful review of the whole facility was carried out. It would baffle them every hour until it clicked.
But we’d be long gone by then.
Hell, we already were.
·····
It wouldn’t be hard for Turoi Ray to put the pieces together. We’d been bundled up under our gear and masks, but it was still obvious that humans had been an integral and leading part of the crew that robbed the Diving Bell.
But the funny part was, they couldn’t do anything about it.
Even ignoring the very obvious physical retribution if they tried, their very attempts to shield the Diving Bell from legal authorities prevented them from having any kind of legal case against us. Even if they could somehow prove we’d committed various crimes of our own robbing the place, we had plenty of damning evidence to return the favor.
What legal recourse there was could be found strictly through the interplanetary authority, specifically its highest executive office: the Prolocutor. But trying that route would be…unproductive, to say the least.
Peudra Cuvay, you see, was a muse of their craft.
So the only viable recourse Turoi Ray had was violence.
And I bet even the most hardened criminal mastermind would think twice about resorting to that. After what we’d just done?
“Seventeen-hard drives, a processor, one point five kilograms of documents too sensitive to be digitized, four giant robots crushed, dozens of small robots destroyed, and most impressively of all?” Mavriste announced. “Zero casualties…If that isn’t a successful mission worth celebrating, I don’t know what is!”
“Well done, Caleb,” Macoru agreed. “I can’t remember the last time we had an operation where we didn’t kill anyone or lose anyone.”
“Thanks,” I said awkwardly. “I’m honestly surprised. Zero? No one even got hurt?”
“I took some shrapnel,” Macoru said. “Mav’s team got some bruises tripping on the bulkheads, but nothing significant. We’re less sure about the security on site, but everyone’s accounts seem to agree that none of them took anything lethal. I think you might actually be the only person who shot any rak through that whole thing.”
“Maybe,” I snorted. “The one I shot was wearing a vest though. Wasn’t pretty…”
“But they’ll live,” Macoru nodded. “My brother’s right. Not every day goes this well. Enjoy the party.”
The Jack crew and Missionary Marines were sprawled across one of the not-so-nice beaches on the south edge of the city. In the distance the city lights shone so brightly they cast colors onto the lowest hanging clouds. Our bonfire wasn’t nearly as impressive by comparison, but it still towered more than ten feet above the sand, and the flames reached even higher.
Everyone kept congratulating me for the heist, but I didn’t know how to take that. I’d been in charge, sure, but the planning had been a group effort, especially with how quickly the whole affair had brought so many moving parts together simultaneously.
Five days ago, there hadn’t been a single thought in my mind about committing a robbery.
From nothing to the heist of the decade in under a week?
Maybe they were right, and I just couldn’t take the compliment. Then again…everyone on the beach was laughing and playing games. This was a reward for more than just me. We’d all pulled off something impressive.
Jordan was having a great time playing music, Nai was giving Sid and Dyn a break and watching all the munchkins. Every human on our crew was proving popular. Dozens of marines were half-fluently limping their way through conversations in Starspeak, but every one of them was hanging rapt on every word.
It was strange contrasting them with the stoic professionals I’d seen on board the subs. I’d always heard it was important to give military units time to unwind, but seeing it firsthand was something else.
This had to be the second party the Missionary Marines were throwing in a month. Just how much did they get up to that they needed to blow off steam this frequently? Maybe this was just a busy season.
“…Why are you moping out here?” Vo asked, making their way to the edge of the party.
“I’m not moping,” I defended. “I just don’t have the emotional energy to dance and shout and play games right now.”
“You’d rather just sit and watch everyone else have a fun time?” they asked.
“Apparently you would to,” I pointed out.
“As if,” Vo said. “A bunch of your crew noticed you weren’t participating much, and it got us talking about it too.”
“And you just came over to check on me out of the goodness in your heart?”
That actually struck a sore spot with Vo, and they deflected their gaze, hurt.
“No, I just…everyone said I should do it because we fought together. Twice now.”
“Fair enough,” I nodded. “I just didn’t expect anyone to seek me out. No offense or anything, but we’re not actually close, you know?”
Vo nodded.
“You usually seem like the kind of person who would enjoy a loud bash like this one,” they admitted. “Why keep off to the side this time?”
“I’ve been really busy ever since I got to this planet,” I said. “This was supposed to be a vacation for me, see? But I haven’t stopped doing, doing, and doing things since I got here. This is a chance for me to legitimately do nothing. So I’m taking it.”
I lay backward onto the sand, emphasizing the point.
“Besides, as well as today went? I actually got my hopes about something else,” I said.
“And you were disappointed?”
“That corpse in the vaults? I’d hoped it belonged to someone I knew,” I explained. “…It didn’t.”
“They’re missing?” Vo asked.
“They’re dead,” I shook my head. “It’s just their body missing. Red Sails had custody of it, but then they lost him and a whole bunch of others, including the one we pulled up from the Diving Bell today. But…I didn’t know any of the others before they died. My friend, Daniel? I knew him before he died.”
“…You sound guilty about that,” Vo said.
I looked the rak in the eye. I barely knew them. We hadn’t spent more than thirty cumulative minutes around each other. I didn’t want to share with someone I knew so shallowly.
But we’d also saved each other’s lives. Barely thought anything of it in the moment too.
My eyes flicked over to Tasser, currently playing some kind of jumping game with Nemuleki and a handful of Marines. I suppose I’d built friendships on less, hadn’t I?
“I killed my friend,” I admitted. “Self-defense. He lost his mind. Ask anyone reasonable and it's not my fault. But…yeah. I still feel guilty about it.”
“I know what that’s like,” Vo said quietly.
I eyed them again, scrutinizing their body language. I knew they were the same kind of recruit as Itun: someone bad Mavriste and Macoru picked up and a shot at penance forced into their hands.
Vo sounded genuine.
I bet Itun could sound genuine too about his past misdeeds.
My gut said Vo wasn’t faking though.
“You kill a friend?”
“A couple,” they nodded. “No self-defense either—well…no, not really.”
“Well, then you probably should feel bad,” I said, trying to sound like I was half-joking.
“It’s going to take a lot more than that,” Vo said. It sounded like a spike was going through their own chest with every syllable.
This rak was not faking.
“…Everyone else really just sent you over here?” I asked, changing the subject. “You’re right. This is supposed to be a party. I’ve had enough time doing nothing.”
“Gotta get your partying done while you still can?” Vo asked, grateful for the veer in subject.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Vo pointed north.
Even with the sun below the horizon, you could still see the ripples and eddies in the clouds a hundred miles or so up the coast.
“Hurricane’s swinging back through here tomorrow.”
“Ah,” I recognized. “Good point.”
What went unsaid was the second reason I was taking it easy: with Ingrid more or less on board and the real corpse officially recovered, we had precious few obligations keeping the Jack on this planet.
Agent Avi’s fugitive, and the summit that Peudra had spent more than a year playing a tangled game of five-dimensional chess trying to arrange.
From a mile away, I tapped into the Jack’s psionic hardware, checking the itinerary.
The Clark Kent and the John Brown were in the middle of their decelerating burns on approach to the planet’s orbit. With how much time it would take to shed off their excess speed, then trading clearances with orbital traffic, and actually finalizing their approach vector…
Our guests would touch down before dawn.