She leaned back in her chair. “Transfer twenty-five thousand credits to my account. I’ll leave for Harmony when it’s confirmed.”
Emotion flickered briefly in his eyes. Relief? He wasn’t sure he could win me over, she realized. And he didn’t have a good plan B. Damn! I could have charged him more. “I’ll see to it as soon as I leave here,” he said.
“Which leaves only one question . . .”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You said it’s important for the Guild not to know about this. Why?”
For a long moment he hesitated. How much was he willing to tell her about the Guild’s internal workings? That question was almost as interesting as the assignment itself. “We sent two investigators a while back,” he said at last. “Dedicated men. When they came back they were . . . less dedicated.”
“Meaning?”
“Someone got to them. Convinced them this project didn’t need to be a priority. At least that’s what it looks like. Granted, the change in attitude was subtle, but it was . . . disturbing.”
She said it quietly: “You don’t trust your own people.”
“Let’s just say I’d like to keep this project between us, for now.” He put his drink down. “I’ll go see to that transfer.”
He started to get up to leave, but she waved for him to wait. “Who owns the station, Jericho?”
“I told you. There’s a board of representatives—”
“That’s who manages it. I’m asking who owns it. If it’s an independent station, that means one political entity had to take responsibility for it. Guera wouldn’t have approved the status otherwise.”
His eyes unfocused for a moment as he turned his attention inward. Probably netting a query to Guild Headquarters.
“Tridac Enterprises,” he said.
She leaned back in her chair and watched as he left the club, turning the bounty hunter license over in her hand, wondering what kind of mess she had just gotten herself into.
Of course, not knowing was half the fun.
We can replicate the trappings of fear. We can set the stage for it, provide props for it, craft terrifying stories to inspire it. But we cannot replicate fear itself.
That must come from within.
MICAH BELLO
Crafting Nightmares (presented at Virtcon LVIII)
HARMONY NODE
SHENSHIDO STATION
THE DARKNESS around Micah was thick and suffocating. Intellectually, he knew that was just an illusion—fear distorting his senses—but the knowledge couldn’t banish his queasiness. Nor could the many tiny points of light in the distance, coming from stars and nearby stations, not strong enough to illuminate anything. One of them was Shenshido. One of them was Tridac. One of them, barely visible from here, would be Harmony. He switched on his helm light, but its outward beam was swallowed up instantly by the darkness. In this dust-free environment such light was intangible, invisible, uncomforting. The evac suit squeezed his body tightly, its embrace claustrophobic; its coolant pulsed against his skin as it channeled excess body heat away.
He wasn’t normally the kind of person who cried under stress, but if one was going to do that, this was as good a setting as one could get for it.
He turned his wellseeker back on and it offered him a dose of sedative, but after a moment’s uncertainty he said no. There was only so much of any one drug stored inside his body, and he might be heading into a situation where he would need a lot more of that one. Then the wellseeker starting scrolling information on his current physical and emotional state in front of his eyes, and he shut it off so that he could see the stars and stations clearly.
So peaceful. So cold.
Concentrate, Micah. You’ve only got six hours of air left. Get your shit together.
He brought the suit’s navigation program online and programmed a course for Shenshido. The suit took a few seconds to digest the order, then fired the small navigation jets in perfect sequence to turn him around, precisely 180 degrees. Jesus. He’d been facing in the wrong direction. For some reason that struck him as perversely funny, a final absurd blow struck by an unfeeling universe. He even laughed briefly, though the sound was hollow.
Then the jets fired again and there was a brief feeling of acceleration, after which . . . nothing. He could not feel any movement, and the darkness immediately surrounding him was featureless. How did he even know he was moving? He focused on his anger at Tridac, his raw indignation that after years of loyal service he should be treated like this. For a few precious minutes it drowned out the fear, allowing him to think clearly.
If he made it to Shenshido, he would have to deal with the bots again. What was it, exactly, that they were programmed to respond to? Obviously the approach of an unknown ship, but what else? If he could avoid triggering their defense programming, maybe he could slip past them. How would one program such bots? He approached the problem like a gaming puzzle, to make it seem less overwhelming. Say that their job was to repel or destroy unwelcome visitors. Such visitors would have to come in a ship, right? But how would a security program distinguish enemy ships from local maintenance bots? Not everything that flies near a station is a threat. Shutting his eyes, he tried to concentrate. When that accomplished nothing, he called up the spaceship stats from one of his games and started scrolling through them, looking for some key element that would distinguish enemy vessels from maintenance bots. The energy signature of a ship would be higher, he realized. A maintenance bot only needs enough power to cruise around a station and do minor tasks. It could run on a simple battery. A ship has to have engines large enough and powerful enough to maneuver at high speeds during long voyages. The energy signature would be completely different, as would the nature of its exhaust.
That made sense to him. It would certainly work in a game. But would the tiny jets attached to the evac suit allow him to pass as a bot? He wouldn’t know until he tested the idea.
As he approached the station, he ordered his suit to reduce his speed to almost nothing. Maybe if he drifted into range of the bots slowly enough, without firing his jets at all, he wouldn’t trigger any response. The downside of that plan was that he wasn’t going to be able to slow down again before hitting the station, so whatever speed he chose now, that would be his speed upon impact. Minimal. Absolutely minimal. With agonizing slowness he drifted toward the docking ring, studying its shadows intently, searching for any sign of the bots. Not until he was nearly upon it was he able to spot one. There: perched on the edge of a broken airlock, its tentacle-like arms curling under the edge. Now that he had found one, he was able to spot others. All quiescent, thus far. God willing, his theory about how they functioned was correct.
Then one of them started to move, and his heart nearly stopped. It rose slowly, then turned in his direction, until he was staring directly into its sensor array. One vast malevolent eye, studying him. Suddenly he was acutely aware of all the noise he was making: motor whirring inside his suit, respirator hissing, blood roaring in his ears like an ocean. Intellectually he knew that the bot couldn’t hear any of that, but his fear was not a thing born of intellect, and he found himself holding his breath, as if air rasping in his lungs would be one sound too many.