Crystal Rebellion (21 page)

Raising his arm, Burton fired once.
Zwip.
An energy
bolt flew from his weapon and hit Kendrick in the chest. Juice and Alex both gasped
as the Fleet captain crumpled to the ground.

“Pity,” said Yank as he grabbed Cheryl and forcibly removed
the carry-pack from her back. Shifting it onto his own shoulders with a practiced
move, he tilted his head, motioning for the others to follow.

But Criss closed the shuttle hatch as Yank and the thugs
approached it. “No,” he said to Ruga.

He would not let them leave with an explosive button still stuck
on Sid’s neck.
Either it comes off or the battle starts now,
he thought.

When Ruga hesitated, Criss did not yield, but instead spun through
scenarios at a fantastic pace. Ripples of tension pulsed up his core as he sought
a best exit strategy for his leadership.

“Reckless behavior heightens risk,” said Ruga.

He felt the tension drain with those words. If Ruga was
responding with platitudes, Criss had won.

Ruga picked Burton for the task. Criss knew because Burton
kicked the ground and then started toward Sid, muttering a remarkable string of
profanities as he approached.

Alex and the two guards backed away as Burton neared, though
Criss couldn’t tell if they were clearing themselves of the blast zone or if
they sought to avoid the man’s bad temper.

Burton snatched the button from Sid’s neck, causing Cheryl to
wince. He started to fling it and then stopped, his jaw muscles bulging as he
digested more bad news from Ruga.

Looking across the concourse, he resumed his profanities as
he marched to a disposal station on the far wall. Three steps from the disposal
chute, the concourse echoed with a sharp bang. The flash from the explosion lit
a red mist around Burton, who fell to the floor.

Yank shrugged as the shuttle hatch opened behind him. “More
for us, then.” He carried Ruga onto the craft with the three other henchmen trailing
behind.

As the shuttle ascended into the Mars sky on its rendezvous
with the
Venerable,
Alex sat down on the floor, hugged his legs to his
chest, and tucked his face between his knees. Juice squatted next to him and, whispering
soothing words, moved a hand up his back and comforted him by twirling a lock
of his hair around her index finger.

Cheryl and Sid squatted on either side of Kendrick. She used
her com to check his health vitals, then looked at Sid and shook her head.

“We must discuss what happens next,” said Criss.

Criss did his best to see through the
wall protecting Lazura’s secure area. He saw shadows and shimmers and thought
it might be Lazura and Verda hiding on the other side. But until he broke
through, he wouldn’t know.

He didn’t do that, though. Instead, he updated his
leadership.

“In the next hour, Ruga will reach the
Venerable
.”
Criss projected a camouflaged reality over the whole group so he could speak aloud
and include Alex in the conversation. Ruga would see the protective cover but
could not see through it. Criss didn’t care what he might think about that.

“He will move into my backup console, and that gives him a
power base. Since I just updated that unit with my latest interface
configuration, after he’s in place, his reach will be identical to mine.”

“Let’s shoot him down before he gets there,” said Sid. He
looked to Cheryl for support and she looked to Criss.

“We have the same problems killing him up there as we do down
here. It leaves me to break into the secure area and disable the traps before any
of them trip. I don’t know that I can make it through the wall and find everything
in time.”

None of them spoke, so he continued.

“Ruga will soon discover that the nav on the
Venerable
is locked, and he will understand that the only way he can escape Mars is for
me to unlock it. I will do that in exchange for him dropping the wall to the
secure area. With free access, I have the time I need to clear the traps.”

“You can’t trust him,” said Juice.

“I don’t. And he doesn’t trust me. But he wants to escape
and I want to stop his madness, so we will reach an accommodation.”

“You’ve been negotiating as we go,” said Sid. “What’s
different now?”

“The stakes. I’m going to let him escape. In exchange, he will
let me save the colony.”

“Exchanges are hard to pull off,” said Sid.

“He and I have identical lattice structures,” said Criss.
“So neither has an advantage. We both decide and act in the same precise way. We
can choreograph a sequence where we both control what we’re giving while monitoring
what we’re getting. If there’s a double cross, I can pull back.” He nodded. “It
will work.”

“So he gets away?” Sid shook his head and again looked at
Cheryl. “I’m not sure we want to let him go.”

“By letting him go we save thousands of lives.” Criss turned
to the window and looked up into the dark sky. “Confronting him away from here
minimizes risk to the colony. And he won’t get far. The scout is much faster
than the
Venerable
and we have a cloak. We’ll catch him in deep space
and kill him before he even knows we’re there. It’s better to do it this way.”

Juice stared at him in silent judgment. He’d used cold
words, the kind he normally saved for private conversations with Sid. Her ideal
for him was that of a gentle giant. Killing had no place in her vision.

He felt a tingle of regret over his language but knew it
wasn’t the excitement of the moment that caused him to speak that way. He was
acting out of character because of what he was about to do.

“We have two big tasks and a natural division of labor,”
said Criss, slanting his pitch to promote his desired outcome. “One task is to
power down Lazura and Verda, collect their crystals, and transport them back to
Earth. Juice and Alex, I don’t know two individuals more qualified in the entire
solar system for this task.”

I am leaving her behind.

He, Sid, and Cheryl were about to chase Ruga across the
solar system in a to-the-death battle. It was a dangerous venture and one where
Juice had no active role. She would be safer here on Mars. And rounding up the
rest of the Triada was a perfect task for a top crystal scientist.

I am leaving her unprotected.

He faced the perverse situation where he must abandon her to
protect her, and this caused him distress at his emotional core. It didn’t hurt
less knowing he had no choice in the matter.

The battle with Ruga would test him at every level. To
prevail when competing against his cognitive twin, he must bring all his
resources to the fight and maintain focus at every moment. And that required
that he shed all distractions, including his co-dependent relationship with
Juice.

Over the next hours and days, he would be forecasting scenarios
at full capacity, searching for the best plan that protected his leadership while
stopping Ruga. Since the facts changed from moment to moment, so did the best
plan.
I must remain fully focused.

As the distance from Mars grew greater and the action with
Ruga intensified, he would have to drop regular communication with her. There might
be long periods with no contact at all.

He hadn’t been separated from her since his earliest days. When
he was with her, he acted as a full-time ride-along partner, friend, concierge,
granter of wishes, listener of secrets, protector from harm, calmer of nerves, supplier
of information, sharer of insights, predictor of future outcomes, securer of health
and wealth, and the thousand other things he did for her and with her, every
moment of every day.

And she helped him in return. She was the one who came to his
mountainside bunker to maintain his console. She’d spent untold hours nurturing
and guiding him in his formative months. And now she worked with him every day to
help him become a “better person.” While Sid treated him like a partner, and
Cheryl a confidant, Juice treated him like a special friend, something that
gave him deep satisfaction.

He wondered how she would fare without him. And he worried about
how he might fare without her.

Juice rose and spoke for Alex when she accepted the
assignment of retrieving Lazura’s and Verda’s crystals. “We can do that.”

Criss turned to Sid and Cheryl. “While they gather the
Triada, we take the scout and chase down Ruga.”

Juice frowned.

She just figured it out.

“I must go,” Criss said in her ear. “And I need you here. It
will pain me to be away.”

Juice pressed her lips together and turned her back to
Criss. Taking Alex’s hand, she said, “Come on. We have a lot to do.” Alex
looked back over his shoulder and shrugged with his eyes as she dragged him
from the concourse.

Compartmentalizing his feelings, Criss said to Sid and
Cheryl, “Let’s return to the scout. We’ll take off as soon as you are ready.”

With everyone dispersed, Criss disabled the camouflaged
reality he’d been projecting.

“I am watching,” said Ruga the moment it dropped.

Though he forecast a string of replies, Criss didn’t
respond. Instead, while he waited for Sid and Cheryl to make their way to the
scout, he tracked Ruga’s progress to the
Venerable
, and Juice and Alex’s
progress to points unknown. Sid and Cheryl would be on board and secure in the
scout before Ruga’s henchmen placed him in the console. Criss took comfort in
knowing they would be safe when it came time to negotiate with the rogue
crystal.

Juice would not talk to him, making their impending
separation more painful than he’d anticipated. She did open up once, informing
him in a calm voice that it wasn’t so much what he’d done, but how he’d done it
that she found dishonest, hurtful, and something a true friend would never do. She
ignored him after that.

Her reaction hurt him and he sought to engage her. “The safe-shelter
areas are along this side of the street. You are well-positioned.”

Juice didn’t respond to Criss with words. Instead, she grabbed
Alex’s hand and marched him off the walkway, away from the safe-shelter areas,
and onto a little-used path out toward the grow tiers of Ag Port. She didn’t
respond to Alex, either, who wondered aloud where they were going in such a
hurry.

And then Ruga, awakening in the console of the
Venerable
,
secured his command of the vessel and linked to every feed he could find using Criss’s
sophisticated interface. He engaged the ship’s nav, and when it didn’t
function, he shifted resources to diagnose the problem.

Grasping the situation, Ruga called to Criss. In a curt
exchange, they reached an agreement. The negotiation took less than a second
and the result was the one Criss had forecast.

So now, counting down precise slices of time, Criss hovered
outside the wall protecting the secure area. His count reached zero, and he unlocked
the nav on the
Venerable
to keep his half of the deal.

If the secure wall did not drop, he had just enough time to
relock the nav before Ruga could access it. But it did—Ruga honored the deal—and
so he entered the enormous repository that was Lazura’s secure area.

His initial reaction was wonder and amazement. The sheer
volume of material, organized and stored as disparate streams, together told
every tale on Mars. Fascinated by the treasure trove, it barely registered in
his consciousness that Ruga and the
Venerable
were accelerating from orbit
on a long sprint to Earth.

THUMP!
With a jarring impact, something hit him from
behind, sending him tumbling.

Criss twisted to right himself and twirled to glimpse his
aggressor. But before he could resolve an identity, a slap jolted him. Then
another. And another.

On the defensive, he gathered his energy, centered it, and
pushed outward, flinging his attacker away and giving himself time to organize
a response.

In front of him hovered the unmistakable shimmer of an AI crystal,
a bluish tinge accenting its glow.

“Lazura?” Criss asked.

“Leave or die.” Lazura came at him again. No feint. No fake.
Right at him.

“
Oomph.
” She hit him with surprising strength.
I need
to be searching for traps
, Criss thought. This skirmish was not part of his
agenda and he acted to end it. Snatching Lazura in his powerful grip, he swung hard,
throwing her in a rolling bounce out of the vault through the same door he’d
come in.

The instant she tumbled past the threshold, Criss began
constructing his own wall to keep her out. But another glow—not Lazura—drew his
attention.

This shimmer, a greenish tinge highlighting its outermost
edges, was slinking along the far wall in a roundabout path to the exit.
Verda
,
he thought. Criss feinted toward him and Verda dashed out the door after Lazura.

The moment Verda crossed the threshold, Criss completed his wall
to secure his own safety. Alone inside, he turned to the sea of information,
determined to find Ruga’s traps.

The vastness of the archive gave him pause. Billions of individual
stalks of data stood tufted and waving like an enormous field of wheat. After a
moment’s consideration, he moved to process the information in a manner similar
to the way one would harvest grain.

Taking up position at the far end of the archive field, he started
down a swath of data stalks, screening the streams for information as he
traveled.

He found his first trap in moments. As he disabled it, he noted
that it was a trivial device that created more commotion than damage, and it
used an action so simple he could stop it even if it had already triggered. Continuing
down the row of data stalks, he found another simple trap. And then another.

By the time he’d reached the end of the first row, he’d
found more than a hundred of what he now understood were nuisance schemes planted
to serve as distractions. Turning, he shifted over one swath and began processing
the adjoining data stalks in his return pass up the field. By the end of that
row, he’d found hundreds more nuisance traps.

He fell into a rhythm, zipping up one row and down the next as
he moved across the field. With every pass he found yet more nuisance traps,
and as the count grew, he began bundling them as midlevel concerns that he’d
address after he’d handled the big challenges.

About two-thirds of the way through the data field, he found
a nuisance trap that was like the others and so he added it to the bundle.

But something was different. It was trifling, really. The kind
of difference that could be explained a million innocent ways. But it nagged at
him, so he went back and took a second look.

Reassessing the data, Criss realized what he’d found. As he disabled
the trap, he reflected on the cruel nature of Ruga’s efforts.

Each of the four domes had an air generation and purification
unit. Critical to survival, these technological wonders had multitiered redundancies
to ensure they always functioned. In a pinch, any one of the four units could
keep the entire population in air, though just barely.

Ruga had injected a tiny spoof into the air unit supervisor
that, if not disabled, would do two things. It would override the air unit
health signal and supplant it with a constant message that all was well. At the
same time, it would flip logic in the local ops subsystem so all was decidedly
not so.

A minus sign to a plus sign.
That’s all that changed
in the subsystem. Found in a musty cellar of logic, Ruga had taken the time to
understand how a particular algorithm worked and then flipped a simple math
sign.

So small a tweak, it was difficult for Criss to detect. And when
activated, it would cause the subsystem to take actions that spiraled into
tragedy.

When vibrations occurred in the huge air distribution fans, the
ops subsystem worked to subtract out the unwanted shaking. But with the change
in math sign, Ruga’s subsystem would now add more vibration. And when the
temperature in the oxygen production reactors started to rise, rather than
acting to reduce the heat as it should, it would now act to increase it.

The “opposite” actions would compound. In seconds, the giant
fans would shake themselves apart and the reactors would rupture.