“You mean to tell me that thing you’ve been hiding in your top right drawer was a fucking RPG?”
“ManPAD, actually, and don’t act like you didn’t watch me smuggle it in.”
“I thought it was booze!”
“Sir, don’t be ridiculous,” Reggie said. “I keep the booze in the bottom right drawer.”
“Does everyone around me have hidden weapons?”
“Was that hard enough?” Elsa asked.
Tyson turned around to help her to her feet. “What?”
“Was that slap hard enough to knock the arrogance out of you?”
Tyson smiled. “Jury’s still out. Are you all right?”
“My ears are ringing.”
“Mine too, it will pass.” In a few days, Tyson thought but did not say. “C’mon, we have to go.”
“Go where?”
“Off-world. We have your answer from Beckham’s bosses. They went for Option B. We have to be gone before they try again.”
“But it was your AI that attacked us!”
“She was hacked. I don’t know how, but they got into her core programming. I don’t know when. She may have been compromised for days, maybe since the beginning of this. Reggie, I hate to ask, but I need your airpod.”
“Doors are already unlocked, sir.”
“But I was going home.”
“Too late for that, dear. You’re a witness now. You saw Paris try to kill me, you’re just as much a target as I am. So are you for that matter, Reg.”
“I can handle myself, young pup.” He held up the spent rocket tube. “This isn’t the only souvenir I kept from the Marine Corps. Get the good doctor to safety. I’ll keep them off you as long as I can from down here.”
Tyson took two long steps to his doorman, grabbed behind his head, and leaned in until their foreheads touched. “Still protecting this stupid kid after all these years?”
“Promised your mum.”
Tyson kissed the wrinkles below Reggie’s hairline, then pushed back. “You stay alive, old man. The company doesn’t pay out funeral benefits for idiots who get themselves killed.”
“I expect my toys to be replaced.”
“Done. Elsa, c’mon.”
“They’re not all strictly legal!” Reggie announced to their retreating backs.
“No shit!” Tyson yelled over his shoulder as they took the stairs to the basement garage and, after a brief search, located Reggie’s blazing-green airpod. It was, like the man himself, old, but powerful and in impeccable condition.
“Damn,” Elsa said, looking at the classic. “Reggie likes expensive toys.”
“He got a generous settlement. Hop in, at least the ride’ll be fun.”
Once the doors were closed, Tyson fired up the countergrav and the single turbofan engine that ran down the centerline of the airpod and accounted for at least half of its mass. A genuine gas-burner. Tyson had no idea where Reggie got fuel for the damned thing.
“Who’s doing this?” Elsa asked as they pulled out of the parking garage and angled for open sky.
“I have no idea. A competitor. An investor sick of dynastic control. Ambitious board member. I have no idea who to trust. Which is why I can’t protect us here. We’ve got to get off this planet and far away.”
“To where?”
“Grendel.”
“Why there?”
“Because I think a war is about to break out there.”
Elsa stared at him silently for a long moment. “You know that sounds crazy to anyone not living in your head, right?”
“Which is why it’s the last place anyone will expect us to go. Your inquiries about Beckham were uncovered, that’s why we were attacked, probably ahead of whatever schedule they had laid out because we’re getting too close. So we can’t go to Ceres, or anywhere in the Sol system for that matter. We’d be spotted and killed before we could get off the transfer stations. I have it on good authority that Grendel is about to be a pretty lonely place, so there won’t be a lot of people around to come after us. And whatever is going on, Grendel is the flashpoint. I’m sure of it. Our answers are there.”
“But how are we going to get there without whoever is responsible knowing?”
“Simple. We’re going to see a smuggler.”
“Oh, yes. Naturally.”
Tyson firewalled the throttle, and the overpowered little suicide machine made the acceleration of the transit pod feel like a halfhearted spin on a merry-go-round.
TWENTY-TWO
“Mum, can you take a look at this?” Mattu said from the Drone Integration Station. “It’s … weird.”
“I don’t like weird,” Susan said. “Our Xre friends acting out?”
“No, mum. It’s Grendel. An unscheduled skip drone just popped its bubble really close to the planet.”
By just, Susan knew Mattu meant almost ninety minutes ago with the light-speed delay from their drone platform tasked with keeping an eye on Grendel’s high orbitals, but one learned to think in four dimensions after spending enough time in the fleet.
“How close?”
“Its gooey zone took out a GPS sat.”
“Holy shit,” Miguel said. “That’s thousands of klicks inside the safety margin.”
Susan got up from her chair and went to inspect the raw data. “Navigational error?”
“From a skip drone?” Mattu said. “When was the last time one of them screwed up that badly? Thirty years? Forty?” She dialed in a new information screen for Susan to look at. “Besides, it didn’t act like it screwed up. Didn’t go into shutdown, or start a diagnostic. It went straight into transmission mode and dumped whatever messages it had.”
“Well? What were they?”
“That’s the thing, mum. They’re encrypted. Heavily. And not with any mil-spec encryption Ansari’s AI can recognize.”
“What are you saying, Scopes?” Miguel pushed.
“You want my speculation?”
“Yes, out with it.”
“I think that skip drone was told to pop bubble inside Grendel’s safety margins and deliver that message, whatever the hell it is, as close and as quickly as possible and damn the consequences.”
“What kind of out-of-system message can’t stand a second of light-speed delay?”
“Whose drone is it, Scopes?” Susan asked.
“I don’t know, mum. It’s a standard Marathon unit, but it’s not squawking ID. Could be fleet, could be one of the transtellars, or even a UN boat. No way to know.”
“A skip drone running dark, flouting safety protocols, and throwing around
