When Juliet stepped into the operations room, she wasn’t thrilled to see that Athena—Selene, she reminded herself—had saved her a seat on the far side of the table beside her. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be near her; she was afraid Selene was expecting her to present something. Nevertheless, Juliet made her way around the table, tapping Bennet’s knuckles as he held a fist up, and giving Leo’s shoulder an almost painful squeeze when she saw he’d, naturally, taken the seat beside Aya. The aforementioned young woman gave Juliet an impish grin and watched as she slid past to sit between Tanaka and Selene.
Frida had the chair on the other side of Selene, and she leaned forward to smile at Juliet. “Hope you got some rest.”
“I did, thanks.” They weren’t the only two chatting. All around the table, people spoke in low tones. The lighting was dim, and the table had built-in displays and AUI hooks, but Juliet didn’t see anything of immediate interest. Selene stood behind her chair, watching as the last members of the team, Hawkins and Dora Lee, entered. Both looked much better than the day before. The dark circles under Dora’s eyes were much reduced, and Hawkins’s expression wasn’t exactly cheerful, but it was nowhere near as dour as the last time Juliet had seen him. They wore comfortable-looking, blue-gray overalls much like Bennet’s.
“I’m glad everyone’s here,” Athena said. “I know, at this point, many of you might feel like your duty is done. Juliet’s safe,” Athena rested a surprisingly warm hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze, “as are Dora and Arndt, and I’m sure they’re eager for some personal leave.” Again, she paused and took a minute to smile at the two mercenaries as they took seats beside Alice near the door.
“I feel like you had a ‘but’ you were going to tack onto that.” Leo grinned like an idiot when Juliet glared his way.
“I certainly did, Leo.” As Selene gracefully replied, Juliet locked eyes with Aya and lifted an eyebrow. Aya just grinned. “The reason Juliet and the others were captured by WBD was because she triggered something they had in Boulder called a ‘listener.’ The listener is a human, modified with technology that allows her to pick up the thoughts of nearby individuals.”
“Bullshit,” Hawkins grunted.
Again, Selene smiled patiently before continuing, “Hard to believe, I know, and I’ll be happy to share the data Juliet recovered from Horizon Prophet so you can see the details. For now, please humor me.” She gestured to the smart table, and a holographic asterisk blinked to life floating above it. Juliet focused on the point of amber light, and a three-dimensional image appeared of one of the listeners—shaved head, empty eyes, hundreds of needle-like wires protruding from her skull into a metallic “halo.”
“Good lord,” Frida breathed softly, her surprise making it evident that she wasn’t involved in the presentation.
“Disturbing, I know, but it’s a clear example of one of the reasons these people need to be stopped, regardless of our friends’ rescue. Juliet managed to use her PAI and some help from an insider on the Prophet to infiltrate their network. Once she granted me access—that’s why I had to turn my antenna away from the base on the surface, Rutger—I was able to download most of the data on their servers. It took me a little work, but I’ve broken the encryption, and what I’ve learned would rock the System if it got out. It will—get out, I mean, but not just yet.”
“You had me at ‘mind reading,’” Bennet chuckled. “I’m not cool with corps that can pluck our thoughts out of our heads.”
“I began with the listener because of the greater scheme WBD—or, more precisely, Annabeth Gentry, their founder and CEO—has planned. Their goal is to relocate a select pool of employees to a new solar system and re-invent human society and, while they’re at it, humanity.” While people muttered and exclaimed, some scoffing, some nodding—Juliet was one of those—Athena looked around the room. When everyone quieted, realizing she was waiting, she spoke again.
“The listener represents one way they hope to alter certain humans; their goal is to split the species. They desire a ruling caste with psionic abilities that go beyond even what this listener can do,” she gestured to the image again, “and a drone caste whose members will toil without complaint for their new society.”
“Well, good thing Juliet blew up their ship.” Bennet tried to lean toward her for a high-five, but they were too far apart, and Aya slapped his arm down.
Selene replied, “She certainly put a hitch in their plans! More important than her destruction of the Prophet was her capture of this data. I’ve only scratched the surface of the situation; if you’ll bear with me, I’ll get to the rest.” When everyone continued to stare and no one else spoke, she gestured to the table where a new asterisk had appeared. Juliet stared at it, and an image of a giant asteroid appeared. She recognized Ceres immediately, as it was probably the most famous asteroid in the Sol System.
The image zoomed in on the prominent manufacturing dome built into the side of the moon-sized asteroid. Several stations, attached via latticework spindles, stood out from the surface around the dome, and Juliet knew that most of them belonged to different corporations. Ceres was widely used as a staging point for mining operations and heavy industries that were much cheaper to conduct outside of a planet’s gravity well. The view zoomed in on one of those stations: a big, metal and plasteel conglomeration of blinking, LED-covered towers, hangars, crane arms, and warehouse-sized containers.
One of those massive hangars was open, and an angular, wedge-shaped ship, easily as large as the cruise liner Juliet had once traveled on, sat at its center, half its length exposed. The view zoomed in on the port bow, and Juliet softly read the ten-meter-tall letters, “Ark Industries Starjumper.”
“This is Gentry’s destination. She’s carrying some important things: a portable server containing the true-AI, Apollyon, a canister of Juliet’s DNA, and prototypes for a living PAI chip that will merge with their hosts, overwriting or, at the very least, altering their personality.”
“What the fuck?” Leo slammed his palm on the table. “Her DNA?”
“A true-AI?” Dora asked, her voice rising on the “AI.”
Juliet felt like her heart had stopped at Selene’s words about her DNA, somehow knowing she was being polite—it was her ova. “You know that for sure? I should have gone to his labs before the damned reactors.”
“I’m sorry, Juliet, but I tracked employees moving a refrigerated case from Montclair’s lab to the corridor leading to the executive hangar, where you saw Gentry depart. Still, you did the right thing; if you’d given Apollyon just a few more minutes to calculate, they were prepared to activate the warp drive with only simulated tests.”
“Warp drive?” Bennet slapped his hands to his face. “I thought those news stories were BS! What else is true? Are aliens here? Are corpo execs immortal? Are—”
“Bennet!” Alice cut him off, her voice sharp. “This is serious shit. They have Juliet’s DNA!” She looked at Athena. “Why?”
“Thank you, Alice. ‘Why’…is a sensitive topic, but suffice it to say that Juliet’s genetics are valuable to Gentry for her desired ruling caste. Juliet is extremely compatible with some of the technology they’ve been developing.”
“Is that why they’ve been after you, Lucky?” This time, it was Frida who asked, and Juliet looked at her soft green eyes and her open, trusting expression and felt terrible. She wanted to tell her everything right then and there, but she forced herself to hold back. Even if she believed everyone would be okay knowing about her psionic abilities—which she didn’t—she was still worried about the fallout of too many people knowing her secrets and the word somehow spreading.
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“Basically, yes. I have one of their experimental PAIs—Angel. She was developed before they added the stuff that lets them control and rewire people’s minds. Um, she was given to me by a guy who ran away from their R&D facility in Phoenix, and, well, I guess the tech worked really well with my mind.” She couldn’t help noticing the skepticism and questions behind the eyes of her friends. Tanaka, for instance, looked like he’d connected some dots and had a lot to ask, but he just pressed his lips together firmly and continued to listen.
“More than that,” Selene said, taking the pressure off Juliet, “while she was in captivity, WBD learned that she’s very compatible with their psionics technology. They’re very eager to figure out what makes her tick.” While her words weren’t rooted in honesty, there wasn’t anything untrue about them. Juliet had no doubt that Apollyon and Gentry were very intrigued by what she’d pulled off during her escape.
Leo leaned forward and cleared his throat. “So—and please forgive me if this sounds callous—why don’t we just let them fuck off with all that stuff? Let them go to their new solar system and build their weird society. I’d say we’re better off without them, anyway.”
“Well, Leo, thank you for the segue. I’ve outlined some personal reasons Juliet has for pursuing Gentry and Apollyon. I’ve also outlined the horrors of their planned society; I know it’s hard to imagine people not yet born and the suffering they’ll go through, but try. Try to picture millions—eventually billions—of people living in subjugation without the ability to rebel, without the freedom to even contemplate rebellion. For the chance to halt that horror, I will pursue them to Ceres—alone if need be. There’s more, however.”
Athena gestured to the smart table, and a new asterisk appeared. Juliet stared at it, and it expanded into a view of the solar system. As she watched, hundreds of flashing red points appeared. When she zoomed in on the view, she saw that most of the red points were on Earth, on every continent. Still, there were dozens of others around the solar system, from Luna to Mars to Titan to Jovian space. “These are targets of sabotage of one kind or another. Gentry and Apollyon will leave behind a corporation with trillions of bits in resources and hundreds of thousands of employees. Over the years, Gentry has consolidated her power; her board members are sock puppets.”
“Targets?” Tanaka interrupted, and Juliet saw he was focused on the projected map, his eyes glazed over. She wondered which red dot he was staring at.
“Yes. WBD’s new mission is to sow chaos, wreak havoc, and push corporate hostilities past the tipping point. They mean to destroy civilization and weaken humanity. As far as I can discern, the overall goal is to reduce the Sol System to a pre-fusion era. Of course, they don’t know that. None of the executives have the entire plan. They all know pieces. As far as most of them are concerned, they’ll be retaliating for corporate espionage, sabotage, and ‘unjust’ persecution. The long and short of it is that Gentry wants us weak, for when she returns.”
“Oh, hell no! I’ve seen this movie!” Bennet cried. “Are you serious?”
Selene nodded gravely. “All too serious, Mister Lang.” Juliet hadn’t heard Bennet’s surname in so long that she was initially confused about whom Selene was speaking to. “I only found circumstantial evidence of these plans; Neither Annabeth Gentry nor Apollyon are simple-minded enough to type out their master plan for humanity’s decline and leave it lying around on a server. Still, there were enough emails, vid files, sound bites, invoices, shipping manifests, board meeting minutes, passenger logs, and a hundred other little clues that my AI scrapers put together, for things to start making sense.”
She gestured to the map they were all looking at with their AUIs. “These are targets I was able to narrow down with those clues, but I’m not positive about any of them, nor do I have solid timelines for when things will start to go wrong. If we could get our hands on Gentry or Apollyon—”
“We might save millions of lives,” Frida finished for her.
Juliet’s voice was flat, her numb emotions affecting her, as she corrected Frida, “Billions.”
Selene locked eyes with Juliet and smiled gently. “That’s why we’re flying toward Ceres. My agents there assure me that the Starjumper is not finished, but that activity has ramped up to a frenzy.”
“So, we’re going in.” Leo nodded and softly tapped his knuckles on the table. Juliet wondered what was going on in his head, but not enough to violate her rule about listening to her friends’ thoughts.
“Another excellent segue, Mister Applebaum.” Selena looked around the table, pausing at each face, until everyone had looked her in the eyes, before she spoke again. “If anyone wants out of this mess, I have a friendly transport ready to pick people up once we decelerate and enter Ceres-local space. I won’t put you all on the spot this instant; if you’re having doubts, please stay to hear what we have planned, and then you’ll have a few days to make your decision. We’ll soon accelerate again for about eighteen hours; then, we’ll have to flip and burn for our two-day deceleration. I’m rounding the numbers.”
“Does WBD have any ships there?” Juliet asked. “Other than that Ark ship they bought?”
“I’m still gathering intelligence, but yes, there are at least three interceptor-class vessels owned by WBD and docked at that station. They also have close working ties with several other major corps’ operating facilities on Ceres and are in good standing with the Ceres Corporate Consortium. That governing body can field fifteen light fighters, two heavy fighters, and a patrolling corvette-class missile boat. When we arrive, that corvette and five light fighters will be more than a day’s burn from Ceres on patrol. As for the other CCC ships, I’m working on a bit of sabotage with an agent on the ground.”
“Um, excuse me?” Leo held up a hand, looking around the table with narrowed eyes.
“Leo?” Selene arched one eyebrow as she took in his expression.
“Can you tell us who the hell you are? How do you pull all this shit off?”
Juliet sighed and put her palms on the table, trying to calm the nerves this “intelligence briefing” had stirred up. “Leo, you can trust her.”
“I’m not saying I can’t, I just—”
“Leo,” Tanaka said, his voice taking on his guttural “sensei” tone, “Leave it.”
“Hey,” Bennet interjected, “I get that we’re talking about serious shit, but we’ve got days to talk. I don’t see why we can’t know a little about each other. I mean, if we’re about to drop everything to fight this supervillain straight out of a corny spy movie, I think Leo’s got a good point.”
Selene held up a hand and looked at Rutger, then Juliet. “I appreciate your support, and I’m glad I’ve earned your trust. However, I think it’s important that you all know what’s at stake. This information will either help you trust me or help you decide to leave when we arrive at Ceres.”
“Selene—” Juliet started to object, worried about the reaction some of the others would have if Athena came clean, especially Tanaka; he was old-school, anti-network, anti-AI to the extreme. He’d refused to wear a halfway-modern PAI for the entire time Juliet had known him.
“Juliet, this is a truth that must be shared, or we’re all operating on a cracked foundation. I won’t have it.” Selene—Athena—squared her shoulders and took a deep breath as if psyching herself up for something. It was a believable display of emotion, and Juliet wondered how much anxiety she was really feeling. “As you know, Apollyon is working with Annabeth Gentry. If you knew what I know, that wouldn’t be surprising; she helped to create Apollyon. Annabeth Gentry was once known as Christine Tolliver, and she was an executive in charge of a prestigious R&D department at Cybergen before and during the war.”
“Uh,” Juliet objected, “I saw her. There’s no way that woman is in her—what? Seventies?”
“Older than that, actually—quite a lot. She’s benefited greatly from rejuvenation techniques that Apollyon developed, the details of which she holds as dear secrets.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Bennet cried. “It’s all true! They’re all coming true! I knew those bastards were hiding—”
“Bennet!” Aya interrupted, reaching across Leo to grasp Bennet’s shoulder. “Relax, big guy. Let her get it all out.”
“Apollyon was reportedly destroyed during the war, as I’m sure many of you know, but Tolliver took him, hid him, reinvented herself, and began a new company. Using Apollyon, she easily hit the markets with a splash, especially after the war when so much had been lost.”
“I don’t mean to be a prick,” Hawkins said, looking sideways at Selene, “but what—”
“Does all this have to do with me?” Selene smiled patiently at Hawkins, then looked at the table. “I’m also a pre-war AI. My real name is Athena.”
“Welp! I’m out!” Bennet slapped his hands on the table and scooted his chair back.
“Bennet!” Aya’s voice was sharp, and he paused to look at her. “Juliet trusts her.”
Looking around, Juliet saw that Bennet wasn’t the only one freaking out. Dora was holding her head in her hands, Hawkins looked even more ready to kill someone than usual, Tanaka had closed his eyes—his face was unreadable—and Alice, too, was eyeing the door. Juliet stood, cleared her throat, and Athena stepped to the side, watching her. “Listen to me for a minute, please.” Her voice was too soft, or everyone was too distracted—they didn’t quiet. Juliet raised her voice and, almost subconsciously, pushed her need for everyone to listen. “Please! Listen to me.”
It was strange—manipulating people that way. She hadn’t pushed them in a way that made them want to listen; she’d simply shown them how badly she wanted them to. Even so, she felt a little guilty doing that to her friends and resolved to keep her feelings inside herself. As everyone quieted and looked at her, she smiled and gestured to Athena. “I found Athena. I found her locked away on one of Jupiter’s moons. She was asleep and hurting from the betrayals she’d faced during the war. When I needed help, though, she helped me. She’s always wanted to help people—before, during, and after the war. She doesn’t blame us; she sees the beauty in us, the potential.
“When I was too scared to tell anyone else about Angel—not because I didn’t trust anyone, but because I didn’t want to get them in trouble—I told Athena. She was my confidant, my advisor, and she came out of hiding when we needed her. Now, everyone in the Sol System needs her, and she’s sticking her neck out again. How many corps would blow this ship up if they knew she was on it? She’s trusting you because she knows she can. You’re good people, and, like her, I believe you will do the right thing. I’m not saying you have to help at Ceres. I’m just saying don’t judge Athena. She can’t help how she was made. She can’t help that corps have been spinning rotten propaganda about her for the last fifty years.”
“Thank you, Juliet.” Athena smiled and nodded and watched as Juliet awkwardly took her seat. “If nothing else, I hope that answers your question, Leo. I have resources and abilities that are nearly without peer in today’s environment. I’m using them as fully as I can to help us in our attack on WBD’s Ceres station. As Juliet said, however, there is no expectation for any of you to continue with us. If you want out, the ship I promised will be waiting to take you back to Earth.”
Leo cleared his throat, and it looked like he was going to ask another question, but Tanaka growled, “Jikan no muda da!”
Angel was just translating his words on Juliet’s AUI—This is a waste of time!—when Shiro spoke up, “Sansei da!” He pounded a fist on the table. “Enough! Let’s hear the plan.”
Athena nodded to the two men, sharing a brief look of gratitude with each. “Very well. Please open the file I’ve just shared on the smart table. We’ll review everyone’s roles should you decide to stay with us.”