Chapter 22
Deep Dive
The makeshift hammock in the cargo bay was comfy enough to relax in, but Fia was having a hard time finding a suitable position to hold a datapad while coiled up in it.
Her wrists were cramping, and she was going cross-eyed filtering through all the data she had siphoned into the buffers.
There was some useful insight she had gleaned on Fed patrol routes, and a few internal affairs documents with juicy inter-office drama.
But she had found nothing to lead them toward the mysterious shadow they were hunting for.
The sound of footsteps along the gantry overhead was a welcome distraction, and she felt excited energy flicker across her tendrils when she realized it was Davik.
“How did the family reunion go?” she asked, setting the datapad aside to watch his approach with rapt attention.
“Eh, it could have gone worse. I’m really sorry about all that.
” He walked up to her hammock-nook, pulling up a crate to sit on beside her.
“He’s an ass, but it usually isn’t that bad.
Drey’s just…” She watched him run his fingers through his hair, an anxious gesture she had grown to realize. “He’s gone off the deep end.”
“Too much of something, or not enough of something?”
“Little of both. He’s off his usual drugs, self-medicating, and probably not doing so with the right stuff. The guy’s ripping at the seams, and he just keeps getting more augs to knit it back together. Which just gets him a brief window of relief before something else fails.”
“It sounds like something with which you are keenly familiar?” she asked, keeping her voice gentle.
She wasn’t trying to pry, but heavily augmented humans were still new to her. In the Fleet, most had only minor additions of communication transponders. Having entirely inorganic limbs and organs was something she had no context for.
“Kinda. I understand the struggle. He’s got to keep a lot in balance. It doesn’t justify being a bigoted ass. We all have trauma. He’s not special in that.”
She nodded and sighed. It was a far different interaction than she had experienced since she had awoken in Tau Ceti. But strangely, it was more understandable. Even though he wasn’t a soldier any longer, Drey had the aura of a Federation trooper. And aggression from them was the standard.
During the war, that was the way of things. Sol was on the other side of that divide. The defined and clear enemy. She had drawn their blood, and they had drawn hers.
It was a brutal world, but one lacking in complexity. And now every other interaction I have in this world is terribly complicated.
“Speaking of struggles,” Fia murmured, looking at him over her datapad with an inquisitive tilt of the head. “You vanished before I woke. I did not have a chance to ask. Did you rest well?”
He nodded, his eyes distant.
“Are you actually rested, or are you saying that so I do not scold you? I find it hard to believe you slept well on your floor.”
He cracked a smile, opening his eyes to look up at her. “Little column A, little B. I’m alright enough. Far less achy than I would be without your help.”
She nodded, leaning back and adjusting her seat in the hammock to give her an excuse to look away and hide the rush of pride she felt.
“Good. I was a little worried I might have kept you up late, subjected you to experimental electro-stimulation, stolen your bunk, and left you worse for wear.” Her voice broke into a soft chuckle, and she shook her head. “I have poor bedside manner, it seems.”
“Hey, best electro-stim therapy I’ve ever had. Hands down.”
“I thought you had never experienced it before?”
Davik beamed. “Well, yeah. So you are by default the best.”
Fia groaned, but smiled. “I will take my de facto prestige, if that is all I can manage.” She flicked her eyes from him to the cargo bay doors. “We are docking soon, no? Do you need a hand with anything? I am decrypting a data buffer right now, but I can—”
He waved a hand dismissively. “Nah, delivery isn’t until the evening. I’m meeting a friend at this station for lunch before we get busy.”
“Are you just getting lunch, or do they also have a maintenance request that you will see to?”
“Hey!” he protested with a smile. “You say that as if I’ve got a reputation.”
“You do.”
“I’ll have you know, he’s only interested in lunch.” He paused, looking at his shoes before continuing with a grumble. “He also might need me to help him pack up and ship out some of his art. But that’s just what friends do!”
Fia bit back a laugh. “I do not judge. I find your compulsion to aid charming.”
She found it charming. She found it delightful and heartwarming. And she wanted to drag her lips to his and find the source of that generosity with her tongue.
“Mm, far from a charmer if I’m the one being conned into manual labor, but I’ll take it,” he grumbled. “If I were truly a charmer, I should have been able to land a cushier job than being a tinkerer on a second-rate smuggling rig.”
“This is the best smuggling rig I have ever been on.”
“Fia, this is the only smuggling expedi— Oh, I see. I see what you’re doing.” He rolled his eyes and gave her hammock a gentle shove that sent her swaying again.
“I think you make a fantastic smuggling technician. Or, what would you call yourself? Tactician?”
“Eh, definitely not a tactician. That was an aspiration for a younger Davik, the foolhardy kid who also thought he could make a career out of art. I’m happy being a stable and boring engineer.” He looped his fingers in the hammock, idly tensing and tugging on the mesh as he spoke.
“That’s always been the big goal. Carve out somewhere my family and friends can just be.
Make a little haven. Even if it’s just a little hab unit on a station,” he said with a wistful sigh.
“I just want a place the people I love know they can come to and be safe. They’ve all given me a place to stay and helped me get back on my feet. I just…”
“You want to repay the kindness,” she murmured, and he nodded.
“Speaking of, I’ve gotta get lunch and play errand boy.” He gave her hammock one final push and shot her a weary smile. “Thanks, Fi. For always listening to my rambling.”
“It is the highlight of my day.”
She gave him a parting squeeze on his forearm before he turned to leave, barely holding back the impulse to sink her fingers in and just keep him there.
Keeping true to his flighty reputation, Drey’s shuttle departed before Davik had even returned to say goodbye.
At least that is one less distraction.
It took several pots of coffee and a day spent teasing apart the data in three buffers, but she had finally found something. An innocuous something. A privately owned and operated orbital research station in a medium-security region of Tau Ceti.
Officially, it was not a station the Federation should be involved with.
It was owned by a medical biotech company called KurelTec, one specializing in neuro-augments and nervous system integrations.
According to the intel she could find, KurelTec had no on-the-record contracts with the Federation of Sol.
And yet, despite that, there were dozens of records showing Federation-badged ships docking, unloading cargo, and departing there. Daily. And one of those ships had travel patterns that aligned perfectly with the last known location of the missing Icthian operative.
She had only taken in a shallow sample of data in her last dive. To find anything further, she needed to get back into the bell and do a more targeted sweep of the datastreams.
Despite her being comfortable delving in the observation tank without help, Davik was insistent that he join her when she told him of her lead.
She did not protest, and instead reveled in the moment as it gave her an opportunity to watch his eyes go wide, and his cheeks flush when she stripped down in preparation to dive.
The temptation to see what reaction she could get out of him by taking more off was strong, but she already felt guilty having pushed him so far before. While it would brighten her spirits to see him fluster, she needed to concentrate.
I can’t keep teasing him. It’s cruel. What he needs is something I can’t give him.
She sank into the tank with practiced ease.
The data buffer was cleared, and she was ready to delve.
As the electrodes within came to life, she let her senses carry into the fray.
There was still an occasional twinge as the bright, loud, chaotic mess grated against her, but it was a manageable irritation.
With her imagined limbs, she reached through the weave of the streams of data that surrounded her. A familiar shape, a familiar signal, came into focus.
The KurelTec station glowed before her like a vast ocean of information. Research data, station mechanical diagnostic feeds, and employee records. It was a dense labyrinth of signals that she sifted through with precision.
One stream, gnarled and thick with encryption, danced across her focus. It was filed under the directory “Contract 7-R”.
Even confidential R&D information doesn’t have protections like this. You must be something special.
As she reached out to try her first interaction with the safeguards, she swore she could almost feel it snag on her skin like barbs. An actual, physical sensation of pain bloomed along the inside of her skull. It left a lingering sting of heat and sharpness that made her tendrils flare defensively.
There were advantages in the way her mind blended sensory input together. It offered speed and precision in finding patterns. It made her quick to adapt to new frameworks.
However, it was a boon that cut both ways.
It meant she could perceive the intangible as a physical, painful stimuli.
It gave her an edge, but made things like this dangerous.
She could influence the datastreams, but they could reflect that influence in kind.
Unmitigated and inescapable pain, created by her own mind.
Reaching towards the roiling, shifting stream felt like reaching towards a red-hot slab of steel.
She knew it would not harm her flesh, but every survival instinct in her body was screaming at her to flee.
To retreat to safer waters, to a comfortable distance from the brutal coil of oscillating data protection.
This was not the time to seek comfort. Something important was secreted away. And that something was almost certainly her quarry.
“I think … I have it,” she echoed along the comms line. “I need a faster link to do this. Turn on the ancillary module.”
The sound of Davik’s response felt distant, but she could feel the shape of his words and his hesitancy bubbling into her focus.
“That’s a lot to shunt at you at once to process. You sure?”
She nodded, and after a pause, she heard a click and a high-pitched whine as the module spun to life.
Her imagined limbs, lithe and agile, surged with enough strength to shred through even the most over-engineered encryption.
The feedback of pain it brought was potent, but she would only have one good strike at this before alarms were sounded.
The first contact was like rust against her nerves. She was cautious, and the shifting layers of obscurity peeled back like the husk of some ancient seed. She moved, matched its speed, tuned herself to its undulating frequencies.
Each layer she broke through brought a compounding sensation of heat and excruciating noise. Her vision was flooded with blinding light, and her stomach churned with the perception of whirling gravity that tugged at her from every angle.
This is just signal-fray. Just electrical impulses perceived by my mind. This cannot hurt me. This pain is not real.
She needed to focus. She needed more of her own mind to bend and let her do this. The temptation of the stimbeads she had pocketed in her cheek called to her, and she cracked one between her incisors. The sudden surge of skin-tingling vigor made her shiver as if she had just plunged into ice.
I can do this.
No matter how much she reassured herself, the sensation of panic and pain did not wane. The thin semblance of control she had was fading fast.
With each layer she peeled away, she unfurled a bit more of herself. She would pop another stimbead, gain a bit of ground, but then slide back.
Trying to tame it was not feasible. She had to alter her approach. She would have to plunge into the fire and wrench out what she came here for, pain be damned.
Molten metal was sliding roughshod through her nerves, pooling somewhere behind her eyes and filling her skull. She couldn’t scream. Her connection with her physical self fell away in the onslaught. She clawed, dragging everything she could through the violently fizzing streams around her.
Something kept repeating in the chaos, though. A low, rumbling cascade of words. Words in Teelish.
She followed the familiarity, sending her ragged sense of self into the depths to latch onto a camera feed of a stark white box. Not a box, but a room. A steel operating theater. Three humans in sterile garb tending to implements. And a withered figure on the table, draped in white sheets.
The patient was singing a lament. A song sung to mourn the loss of the Icthian homeworld.
He continued to sing as someone pulled back the sheet to expose just his brow-ridge, and Fia watched as one human sank a metal probe into the dark purple crest of the Icthian’s forehead.
His voice rose into a scream, but he never stopped singing the lament.
There was no mantra to speak that would quell the spasm of agony that tore through her. Every bright spot of light, every sound, every piercing sensation peaked past her ability to fathom, and her world went dark.