Crystal Rebellion (16 page)

In a theatrical voice, she read the laws aloud. “One. Life
is a trip, enjoy the ride. Two. Strengthen society so more can ride. Three.
Don’t detract from other people’s rides.” She nodded. “They still work for me.”

For weeks after, they’d made private references at work,
like, “That jerk is messing with my ride.” It had been a silly but wonderful
time of sharing.

Her hand still on his knee, she turned in her chair to face
him. His cheeks reddened.

“I still live by them,” he said. “Or try to.”

“Which one are you struggling with?”

He turned to look at the list. “Now that you’re here, I am
definitely enjoying my ride.” He paused for a moment as his blush intensified,
and then he continued, “And I try to be aware of whether my behavior impinges
on others in a negative way.”

Are you ever going to kiss me?
she thought, studying
his mouth.

“And I was confident my work was for the good of society. But
lately I’m not so sure.”

Keeping her eyes open, she leaned in and kissed him full on
the lips. His eyes widened, and then closed as he melted into his chair. When
she sat back, his eyes remained closed, a blissful grin lingering.

“Can we do that again?” he whispered.

“We will.” She patted his thigh. “But first, back to
business. Tell me about the fabrications facility. How are you able to implement
this four-gen design using your equipment?”

Sid crossed Civic Avenue and entered
the Kensington Pub. While his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he soaked in the
ambiance of this neighborhood tavern.

A row of stools lined a bar made of crafted copper—a
material abundant in the colony. Two somnolent patrons, sitting with an empty
stool between them, sipped beer. A bored bartender joined them in watching an
upcast of a baseball game from Earth.

“None of them are Security Assembly snitches,” Criss said in
his ear. “But I’m tracking a Red on the move in your area.”

Sid was at the pub to recruit a local. Every operation, big or
small, needed people who belonged in that setting and could move about without
drawing attention. Sid’s target for this outing sat in the last booth in a row
of four along the back wall of the pub.

Sliding in across from Bobbi Lava, he asked, “Is this seat
taken?”

She lifted her head from reading and placed her coffee mug
on the table. The fine gold chain draped from one eyebrow to her cheek danced
as she spoke. “You’re with the Union delegation, so you know about the
Amsterdam Spa down the street. Take your urges away and don’t hassle me.”

Without missing a beat, Sid continued, “I need your help
fighting the synbods. I saw what you did at the tram station. When your weapon
discharged, the energy bolt broke your cloak for a few seconds. I know who you
are and what you can do.”

“Heads up,” Criss said in his ear. “That Red is coming your
way.”

“You will leave now or I’m calling for Pete.” She tilted her
head at the bartender.

“Let me show you what I can do. Then we’ll chat about who I
am and what comes next.”

As he finished speaking, a perfect man in a gray jumpsuit
entered the bar. With fluid strides and a clear sense of purpose, the synbod strode
past the row of bar stools, turned, and like an attentive waiter, came to a
halt at the end of their table.

Sid eyed the only visible adornment on his clothes—bright
red patches on each shoulder.

“Excuse me. Would you please stand, Bobbi Lava? I am here to
escort you to headquarters to discuss an incident at the tram station
yesterday.”

“Stay where you are,” Sid told her.

Wide-eyed and slack-jawed, she looked up at the humanoid.
She didn’t move.

Yet she seemed to. A twin melted out of Bobbi. Peeling off
in a smooth motion, a bejeweled doppelgänger slid out of the bench seat and
stood in front of the Red.

“Are you talking about Bobbi Lava?” bubbled the projected
image, lifelike in its presentation. “Isn’t she just amazing? I’m Mindy
Abramson, by the way. My friends and I are all dressing like her now. You know
how hard it is to find this style of jewelry all of a sudden?” Mindy caressed a
dazzling chain hanging from her lip.

The Red scanned the image standing in front of him. “Pardon
the interruption, Mindy Abramson.” He backed up a step, turned, and left the
pub in the same sweeping style as his entrance.

“I’ve confused them,” Criss told Sid. “But they’ll figure it
out and be back.”

The image of Mindy slid into the booth, and Criss added an
effect so she appeared to melt back into Bobbi and then vanish.

“That was impressive.” Bobbi took a sip of coffee, and as
she returned the mug to the table, she took time to square up the handle so it
pointed straight at her abdomen. “Now leave me alone or I call Pete.”

“Pete didn’t see that and he doesn’t see you. If he were to
look this way, he’d see an image of you enjoying a conversation with someone
who appears to be a close friend. You know how cloaks and projected images work.”
He said the last part as a statement.

She looked at Pete, who watched the game.

“I suppose I could ask Joselyn Arpeggio for help,” said Sid.
“Or maybe Marcus Procopio?”

He felt daggers in her glare. “Why are you hassling me? This
isn’t my fight. Come to think of it, please do talk to Marcus. He thinks this
is all a thrilling game.”

“My team is focused on protecting the domes from breach. We
think the threat is real. The approach we’re taking is to integrate threat
assessment, offense-defense, structural fortification, automated repair,
everything, all focused on this one menace.”

“An entwined system.”

“Do you know anyone with skills in that area? We’re partial
to people with degrees from California.”

“Cheryl’s almost done,” Criss said in his ear.

“I have to go, Bobbi. Please consider helping.” Sid slid out
of the booth and stood where the Red had been moments earlier. “My team has the
automated stuff pretty well handled at this point. I’d love to show it to you.
We could use your help with integrating human observation into the picture.”

She nodded. “That’s always the hard part.”

“The sooner you start, the more value you bring.”

She moved her hand in a swirl. “I need to process all of this.
First I have to decide your true intentions, because it feels like you’re
scamming me. Right now, my leading theory is that Marcus staged this to get me
to stay.”

“I’m not with Marcus. I just arrived with the Union
delegation, remember?”

“Which is how he would stage it, though I admit it doesn’t
seem likely he could do that.” She thought for a moment and then looked at Sid.
“How do I get ahold of you?”

“Just say out loud ‘Yes, I will help’ or something to that
effect. We will hear and someone will contact you right away.”

“Show-off,” Criss said to him.

She bit her lip and shook her head. “Marcus couldn’t pull
that off.”

“Wait a bit if you want to make it challenging for us to
hear you. But don’t wait too long.”

An hour and fourteen minutes later, Bobbi Lava entered her
apartment. Dropping her satchel and coat to the floor, she sat at the keyboard
and engaged her home cloak. At her dressing table, she placed her jewelry in
the basket, and as the hairpiece followed, she met the gaze of her reflected
image, floating life-like in three dimensions and looking back at her.

“I’ll do it.”

* * *

Criss felt a growing confidence that
he could penetrate the Triada’s secure area and deactivate Ruga, Lazura, and
Verda before they could harm anyone. He neared the end of a massive tactical study
and hadn’t found anything that would counter this belief. The time to act
approached.

Yet one issue—the four-gen project and its prominence in
Ruga’s agenda—nagged at him.
It’s going to kill him. He has to know that
.

Once awakened, the four-gen would learn that Ruga had control
over its power supply. A way for the new intelligence to ensure that the power switch
always remained on was to eliminate those who could flip it off.

But Criss had no intention of waiting to find out how that
all played out. He was ready to act.

And then everything changed. During a routine check on threats
from above, Criss discovered an errant navigation buoy.

Mars Space Authority, which consisted of a woman, two men,
and a three-gen crystal connected to an impressive array of equipment, used
dozens of small navigation satellites to coordinate the arrival and departure
of spaceships from the planet.

Called “buoys,” one of these satellites had an errant orbit
where it looped out and swooped back, avoiding an impact with Mars by a narrow
margin. Next loop around, the buoy came closer to impact. The next time, closer
still.

In fact, once a day around dinnertime, the buoy would start what
should be its last loop, flying on a path that swooped out and back. If it
completed this last orbit, it would no longer come close. It would hit the
planet.

Plunging through the meager Mars atmosphere, the buoy would
smash into the Quarter, opening a hole in the containment shell big enough to
let all the air rush out and the carbon dioxide enveloping Mars to rush in. From
there, the buoy would continue its fall, hitting the tram tunnel with a force
sufficient to demolish it, blocking this vital passageway out. Thousands would
die.

After more research, Criss learned that it was Ruga who sent
the command every day to modify the satellite orbit, causing it to miss hitting
Mars today, but sending it on a new sequence that ended in catastrophe tomorrow.

A dead man’s switch
.

If Ruga were unavailable to adjust the buoy’s path, no
matter the reason, then it would crash into the Quarter with devastating consequences.

Criss wasn’t concerned about this particular buoy. He’d
already installed logic such that, if it didn’t receive the signal from Ruga,
it would self-correct anyway. But Ruga’s cold calculation and the horrifying consequences
appalled Criss.

He is mad.

This discovery changed the situation at a fundamental level.
It established that the threat to the colony was no longer something that
could
happen—a theoretical concern—but something that
was
happening—an active
threat.

And it established that Ruga had no limits. With this ploy,
he showed his willingness to put all lives in the colony at risk.

But perhaps most important—and the diabolical beauty of a
dead man’s switch—was that Criss could no longer remove Ruga from the playing
board, which had been his plan until this discovery.

Because if Ruga had taken the time to set one trap, he
certainly had set more. And Criss could deactivate all of the traps he could
find, but how could he know that he’d found them all? Luck, at least in part,
led to his discovery of the buoy.
What else don’t I know about?
Sid
called them the unknown unknowns.

So he could not shut down the Triada. Not yet. But that
didn’t mean he had to sit still.

Quite the opposite, he launched a massive search to identify
lurking threats from Ruga. And he continued planning, confident that the right
opportunity would present itself. He had the patience to wait. When the time
came, he would prevail.

He’d observed earlier that the feed to the eastern spur
churned at an astronomical rate.

They’re out there. Time to take a look
.

A cold and craggy tunnel, the eastern spur ran from the
colony containment shell out to a mining operation owned by industrialist Shi
Chen.

Copper, aluminum, titanium, zinc—machines in the mine refined
thirty-six different minerals from the planet’s crust. A dozen boreholes snaked
out and down, some traveling to the horizon before plunging into the depths,
gathering precious ore from hidden pockets for processing.

Chen had built the tunnel to support and supply the mine,
but as production ramped and his profits grew, he’d decided to move to fast surface
trawlers. Soon after, he repurposed the tunnel for utility service—air, water, data
feeds, and the like.

Moving to a node near the spur, Criss defeated security and,
like a surfer on the ocean, rode the data flow out from the colony, along the
tunnel, and into the mining complex. Once inside, he jumped to the three-gen
running the operation. The three-gen’s intrusion detector tripped before Criss
could disable it, forcing him to chase down and stop a signal racing to sound
the alarm. He took control of the three-gen. With that, he had control of the
entire complex.

Riffling the local record for clues, he thought about what
the extraordinary security measures signaled.
They are here.

He found them moments later. As he expected, they didn’t live
in the mining complex itself. They lived underground, just as he did at home.

The mine had an underground power network, accessed through
a single shaft running from the surface down to a central chamber. That room held
the primary generation and distribution equipment for the entire complex. Three
tunnels branched from the central chamber, radiating out to connect to three duplicate
rooms, each of which stood ready to deliver backup power to the mine and to the
other two substations.

Of course they would give themselves redundant power.

One chamber had an extra feed that twisted and turned,
seemingly terminating at several points along the way, before reaching the
Triada’s secure area.

Defeating yet more mine security, Criss scanned inside that
chamber. Three gleaming crystal consoles sat in a row along the wall.

He would leave them in place for now.

But as soon as he’d cleared the traps, that would change.