Lieutenant Angers checked the filament line for the fourth time before securing the line to his belt and climbing up the side of the Blue Shrike. In the short time the colonist Carrick had remained with him, Angers had borrowed several of his tools to combine the Blue Shrike’s sparse repair components into a solar charging balloon. A wafer-thin power cell set in the middle of a lattice of carbon fiber rods, and a delicate solar panel would serve as both the receiving surface and the sail to keep it adrift. The Blue Shrike’s engine still poured out water vapor as a byproduct of the life support system’s function, and Angers heaved the balloon up into this upward-drifting cloud.

Angers grinned in triumph as the balloon rose higher and higher, managing to avoid the ceiling and to emerge on the surface. The filament lines scraped against the edges of the hole which the Blue Shrike had created as it fell, but the line was strong and Angers was confident it would not fray. Now he only needed to wait a few hours and see if he could jump start the Blue Shrike’s communications array.

Angers tied off the line onto a protruding bolt, then slid down and returned to his cockpit.

He looked behind his chair to the small holographic display which was now blank, not receiving any power under emergency conditions. While Angers usually relied on the viewscreen within his helmet to view computer data, the 3D projector display allowed for a higher resolution and for more processing power. It was connected directly to the Blue Shrike itself, rather than powered by its own tiny processor as his helmet was.

The ideologue virus lay within the Blue Shrike. Angers had viewed it through that holographic display.

Angers knew who had implanted the virus into his computer. It could be no one other than the space pirate Rakka. Angers had captured and imprisoned Rakka and his crew on five different occasions now. The lieutenant had become known in his sector as a kind of expert on the pirate, who belonged to the alien race which humans informally referred to as Leeches. Leeches rejected advanced technology, relying on their innate psychic abilities for everything from healing to interstellar travel. They also happened to be one of the few alien races who cannot be affected by an ideologue virus.

The last time they had met, Rakka had told Angers that he had a surprise waiting for the human when he got back home. Angers had sent a message back to the space station which served as his home to begin an investigation for anything out of the ordinary, but it wasn't until he found himself orbiting that station that he realized the so-called present had been with him for quite some time.

Rakka would have known that the Paraceum wouldn’t allow Angers and the Blue Shrike to continue existing if there was a chance an ideologue virus had contaminated them. It was a hungry, mind-devouring thing, one of the few weapons which could be turned against the Paraceum itself. It was a virus that ate artificial intelligences and usurped them for the purposes of the virus’ creator.

Rakka would have likewise been aware of the old artifacts of the Paraceum, the only hope a person might have of isolating the virus. Encapsulating it, as official procedure referred to it.

And Rakka would know that none of those artifacts of the Paraceum were available to someone in Angers’ position. The only artifacts in current use were the Oracles used by humanity's planetary elites, things which a simple officer of the Ranging Corps could never have access to.

But the space pirate likely did not know of the terraformers, that they were likewise pieces of the Paraceum which could be drawn upon for their nearly infinite computational potential. The terraformers were things created when humanity did not yet realize the implications of their newborn Paraceum.

Though humanity’s AI god had long after the creation of the colony worlds decreed that no new devices would ever be created which would give humanity even a fraction of the Paraceum’s power, it was perhaps the height of its benevolence that it allowed small, harmless worlds which bore a pinprick of its power to exist in the galaxy's vastness.

When he got off this planet, if he ever did, Angers had to make sure that Rakka was stopped. Though he was sure Rakka’s goal was only to take down Angers and to see the great irony of it being the Paraceum that destroyed him, it was nonetheless true that the space pirate knew how to create a virus that could mean the end of all human life. For this reason, Rakka needed to be stopped once and for all.

Angers was AWOL, and by the rationality of the Paraceum deserved annihilation upon detection. Yet he would still perform this one last act of service before disappearing and making a quiet life for himself. Maybe he would return to this planet, reprogram his facial features with the terraformer so that he looked more ordinary. For all the gloominess of Carrick’s description of his government, it was really nothing to complain about compared to other, more despotic worlds Angers had seen in his career in the Ranging Corps.

***

A few hours later, Angers hauled down the balloon. It appeared unharmed. He removed the power cell from its core and slipped it into the Blue Shrike. This tiny portion of fuel would be less than useless for getting the ship off the ground, but it would at least provide him with a few hours of computer processing time.

The first thing Angers did was check the Blue Shrike's radio log. Even under emergency power, the Blue Shrike intercepted, decrypted, and interpreted all radio signals it heard, with a set of instructions attached to return the ship's coordinates if a recognizable friendly search beacon was intercepted.

It would have been more than possible for the ship to send out a universal distress beacon, but this, more often than not, could lead to enemies quickly finding a crippled craft and destroying it, so it was not the default option. According to the ship's log, the Blue Shrike had not sent out any signals while Angers had been unconscious, but it had received quite a few signals originating within the local vicinity. As expected, they were mostly local radio stations originating from a nearby city.

But there were also radio communications originating from within the prison itself. Angers quickly found the one he was looking for a, a report of an object falling from the sky and landing in the Wasteland's heart. The prison’s limited sensor array had detected large amounts of radiation, which would have been the after-effects of Angers emerging from hyperspace. All of that was long since reabsorbed into hyperspace, but their sensors hadn't picked that part up. As far as the prison was aware, an incredibly dangerous object from space had crashed into the heart of the Wasteland, and they were requesting a properly trained task force from what Angers assumed was some kind of prestigious research facility to perform excavation from the surface.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Whomever the prison was talking to asked if it was at all possible for the prison to dispatch prisoners and equipment as usual and to bring back the object in pieces, but the communication from the prison was not confident that the equipment or prisoners would survive close contact.

Though the colonist Carrick had estimated the task force would arrive within two days, the communication promised an arrival in four from the day following the crash. That was good news.

The bad news was that they were arriving with a military contingent. Angers was not entirely sure he could do what he needed to before the visitors arrived. Were they only scientists, he was confident he could hold them off, but not if they had any kind of military capability. Angers only had a plasma rifle and a few wrist-mounted rockets for small arms. His flight suit was flimsy, and his battle armor was severely damaged after the mission he had performed just before his attempted return home.

Angers looked up at the terraformer, softly glowing above him. It looked like a sleeping star.

Angers planned as furiously as he could. Unfortunately, without Carrick, there was little more he could do.

***

The next morning, Angers ate a small meal from his nearly depleted supply of MREs and keyed a transmission to the truck which Carrick had driven the previous day. The two had determined the previous day that the truck had a receiver on board to receive transmissions from the prison’s central communications array. However, it had no capability to send messages outward. This was likely to prevent prisoners from talking to each other and organizing any kind of resistance while on the job.

Angers and Carrick had come up with a simple encryption which would prevent anyone who happened to be looking at the message from immediately identifying it. In fact, it would look like a simple error message unless they put a command into the truck’s console which ordinarily turned all the lights off.

Angers’ message simply read, “We have three days from now, not one. Take your time and prep cleanly.”

He had no way of knowing if the message had been received or not.

***

Up above, in the prison’s maintenance garage, a civilian mechanic worked on the truck labeled Green 17. He read off a checklist, ensuring all the interior components were in working order before addressing the issues on the repair ticket.

As he was making sure the emergency brake functioned properly, a message flickered to life on the truck’s console. He squinted.

“Weak battery current, please check contacts for corrosion.”

He smacked the console a few times and the message eventually flickered off. “Piece of junk,” he mumbled, and went back to work. He had already looked at the contacts. They were fine. Must have been the humidity.

***

Carrick worked that day with a long-faced man with only one eye who went by the creative name of Cyclops. Cyclops was not happy to be babysitting an idiot kid who couldn't look after himself. He talked to Carrick very little, only barking orders and giving frustrated, groaning sighs when Carrick made a minor mistake.

Their worksite felt like the basement of a factory. It was some sort of supply room, not the elegant research facilities which Carrick had worked on with Apple. They pried up the lids of crates and metal containers to find aluminum cans and glass ampules of cleaning solvents which Cyclops said could separate the impurities in some kind of fuel. These crates and containers were tortuously heavy, and Cyclops said they needed to provide large quantities of them to fill their quota.

One ampule cracked and spilled over Carrick’s left arm, burning through the fibers of his jumpsuit and searing him with horrific, blistered flash underneath. He screamed for close to two minutes as Cyclops frantically performed first aid on him, pouring a basic solution from the first aid kit onto the burn to neutralize the acid. Even with his arm wrapped, Carrick’s arm continued to throb painfully for the rest of the day.

They filled their quota, then parted ways without Cyclops giving Carrick so much as a thank you. They didn't even belong to the same barrack. Carrick was grateful for that.

He went to bed thinking, I can't take another day of that.

***

The next morning, Carrick only followed Cyclops to the truck lot. They sprinted in the cold down the line of trucks assigned to the Green group, but when Cyclops opened the door to Green 21, Carrick stopped.

Green 17 was back in its slot.

He looked at Cyclops, who was glaring at him through the cab window. “Come on,” the man mouthed through the glass.

Carrick shook his head, walked back to Green 17, and jumped in. He was going directly against Old Oak's wishes. He didn't think he had any other choice.

Cyclops didn't bother getting out of the truck and yelling at Carrick. He apparently decided he had better things to do, and simply joined the line of trucks descending into the facility.

Carrick had to take two deep breaths to gather his nerves before he started his own truck and followed. He was abandoning his responsibility for the sake of a stranger who had crashed into the middle of nowhere.

But was it his responsibility? He had not been here long. He had received as reasonable a welcome as he could have expected, but that had been for the sake of the favors which the Boss had called in back home. And those favors have been called in in response to Carrick’s loyalty throughout his life. If anything, Carrick had broken even at this point. What he did with his life now was up to him.

So Carrick betrayed the people who had taken him in. He went further than simply shirking his duty, went further than disobeying the orders of the most respected man among the prisoners of the Green group which had looked after Carrick.

Carrick found the Green group warehouse which was the farthest from any other active work site, and raided it.

He drove into it, seeing the carefully hollowed-out walls, seeing the shelves dug into the stone itself, seeing row upon row of components and crystals and even some food which lay here for the sake of prisoners who could not meet their daily quotas.

Carrick hated himself for stealing from the warehouse. He did not even rationalize that he was saving the world. Though he had no doubt the device which Angers called a terraformer could cause another Accident, he wasn't entirely certain he believed him that it could obliterate the entire world. Nor did he fully believe Angers’ description of the Ideologue Virus. Carrick found it very hard to believe a computer virus could infect the human mind. He assumed some of this story was an exaggeration designed to make Carrick as eager to help as possible.

Carrick resented Angers a bit for this, but not much. He didn't appreciate being lied to, but likewise knew there was no real reason for Angers to trust Carrick’s willingness to help without tremendous stakes. He was just some prisoner in a Wasteland, after all.

The most Carrick could justify in his actions was that he was helping save a man who would likely be dissected alive by scientists if they captured him, seeing as how he was an alien, and that he might save the lives at the very least of anyone who works directly on the terraformer when they inevitably caused another accident.

Even if the men of the Green group did not deserve their supplies stolen, they would only suffer in the beatings they would receive for not being able to meet their quotas. And this would be very unlikely. With the amount of supplies here, just in this single warehouse, half the men of Green group could go without meeting any of their quota for a day. Not to mention they still had all the other warehouses.

So Carrick tried not to feel guilty as he loaded condensing crystals, cooling units, and power inverters into the back of his truck. He likewise took all the food with him. He did not expect he would return to the surface any time soon.

Then he hoisted himself back into his truck and made his way to the site where he had found Angers.