Chapter 17
We ran through the residential hallways until we reached a busy, wide corridor, where we slowed to a walk so as to not draw attention to ourselves. It wasn’t long before we discovered it was busier because it led to another tram stop.
Lyra was beginning to look as uncomfortable as I felt. “We need different clothes. Drones might look only at our faces, but enforcers will notice.”
Hats and clothing provide camouflage, albeit minimal protection, as both enforcers and surveillance drones have your facial images and last known locations on file. I should also note that Nikolai’s people are searching for you and are about to enter this corridor.
I spun around to find them.
“Enforcers?” Lyra asked.
Conceal yourselves in the nook between the advertisement and the unfinished wall.
I didn’t bother responding to Lyra and instead yanked her with me to a narrow space between two walls where it looked like they hadn’t finished building the station.
It was dark, unlit, and rough. I scraped my back trying to squeeze the two of us in, but I ignored the pain and hoped I wasn’t going to have a bloody back.
I detect no risk of enforcers or drones at this time. It seems that surveillance drones scanned all the corridors in this area while we were inside Maris Kelbourne’s residence. I will continue to eavesdrop on the station’s surveillance systems.
I answered Lyra finally. “Nikolai.”
“Oh. I guess that means he won,” she said subtly.
“Not a fan of the guy who likes to shoot first and ask questions later? Yeah, me neither.”
“He’s a zealot. You can never trust a zealot. Maris and Kynan don’t always see eye to eye, but at least she’s rational, and once she gives her word, she keeps it. Or kept it, I mean. If Nikolai’s here, she’s dead.”
I had a visual on Nikolai at that moment. He was walking through with one other resistance member. They were clearly searching the terminal. Nikolai was cradling his arm, and I noticed the dark stain on his sleeve.
His buddy walked over to a guy waiting for the tram.
I couldn’t hear what he asked, but it was pretty obvious.
He was asking about someone—us—and fortunately, the other guy shook his head in the negative.
But someone had to have seen us. It just boiled down to whether they remembered or cared to tell Nikolai.
And if Nikolai could access the surveillance systems…
“Byte, can you do something to keep Nikolai from accessing the vid feeds?”
That will require another update. I currently have read-only access to local-network systems.
Another update, great .
“Let me guess, Byte can’t help,” Lyra said softly.
“You’re a good guesser.”
Her armlet chimed. We were pressed together, but she could read whatever message was being displayed. Her features tightened.
“What now?”
“Nothing,” she replied too quickly, setting my hairs on edge.
“What happened?” Iron laced my question.
She swallowed. “It’s, uh, it’s about Grandmother.”
My body went rigid. “What about her?”
Lyra took a deep breath before replying. In that silence, dread replaced the air in my lungs. “I’m sorry, Cal. Someone saw enforcers entering her house. After they left, someone checked on Grandmother. Her amp had been cut out of her head. She didn’t make it. I’m so sorry, Cal.”
My blood boiled, yet chills covered my skin. Lyra pressed even closer.
If the enforcers have Grandmother’s amp, they have every interaction you’ve ever had with her, including the final one.
I ignored Byte. Grandmother’s amp had been cut out of her head dozens of times before, taken whenever her current host died and then implanted into the next host. The amp, being an archaic line, could be implanted at any age unlike modern amps that were so integrated with a person’s brain that they had to be implanted at birth.
That longstanding tradition, probably the oldest, most revered tradition in Dreswick, had been bloodily ended.
Cal, are you all right?
“I told her to get out of there,” I said blankly.
Cal, I am detecting exceptionally high levels of stress, but Nikolai cannot see you from this angle.
It wasn’t easy to ignore the voice in my head, especially when, at this moment, I wanted to cut it out of my head and smash it with a hammer. It was lucky it couldn’t read my mind.
“I’m so sorry, Cal,” Lyra said.
With all the emotions roiling, I struggled to breathe. Lyra and I held each other as much as we could in that tight space. First, I’d lost my best friend, and now I lost my only family… someone who I’d always believed would live forever through her amp.
At least with Nolan, there was still a chance to make things right. I took a deep inhalation, breathing in Lyra’s perfumed scent.
It was no longer about me and my amp. I’d been looking at it all wrong, playing the victim, always on the run.
I had a tool that a corporation wanted so badly that they were expending a lot of resources at getting it back.
To the corporations, money was everything.
If they were spending that much to find Byte, that meant they thought my amp was worth it, and something that valuable could be used against them.
I might’ve been a poor loser from Dreswick, but this loser had something that could be used against Softbiotics. I just needed to figure out how.
I inhaled deeply and raised my head. I blinked away the last bit of wetness in my eyes and scanned the tram stop. Nikolai and his buddy were exiting the far end of the stop. “Byte, get us to the lab.”
Lyra rubbed my side. “We don’t have to hurry. Take the time you?—”
“I’m good. Let’s go,” I said bluntly.
I have calculated the safest route. Since the enforcers have spread out, it is best to avoid trams. However, that will extend the duration of the journey.
“That’s fine.”
Byte displayed a map—my personal heads-up display—which led us through a maze of residential hallways and service tunnels.
If I hadn’t known that Byte wanted to get to Dr. Katz’s lab as much as I did, I would’ve thought it was leading us in circles.
Everything looked more worn the deeper we moved into Solace Station.
It became clear that money was spent on keeping the tourist areas shiny.
The rest of the moon reminded me of Dreswick, and I found a comfort in the familiarity.
As we passed through a quaint shopping corridor, Lyra stopped at a consignment shop selling secondhand clothes.
Within minutes, we were in threadbare, muted grays.
We’d exchanged our clothes as payment. The shopkeeper tried to hide her glee since the honeymoon clothes were worth twenty times the old rags that belonged in a recycler.
A part of me thought we should hold onto the clothes, to wear them on our way back to TerraSoft, but then I realized that there was no way for us to get back to the planet without being noticed.
But I needed to get back. Softbiotics headquarters was planetside.
I was starving, and I wanted to grab a bite at the café next door, but Byte had pointed out that Nikolai’s people were also searching for us. So I reluctantly ignored my growling stomach, and we continued.
It took another two hours of weaving corridors before we reached an industrial area that Byte identified as the area containing Dr. Katz’s lair.
Two mining companies had large entrances to corporate-owned sections of the station.
Byte led us to a long corridor that seemed to be as far from the life of Solace Station as one could possibly get.
The corridor was lined with storage units.
Most had corporate labels matching those of the mining companies.
And every single one was covered in dust. It looked like no one had been here in twenty years.
“Are you sure the lab’s here?” I asked as Lyra and I walked down the corridor, trying to look like bored workers.
First, I extrapolated the area by using what minimal data points I had.
Since I wasn’t yet active, I had very few data points—primarily time stamps and movement sensors.
Once I was able to screen Solace Station’s systems, extrapolation to a precise set of coordinates was exceptionally easy…
so easy that a human could almost do it.
“Almost, huh?”
Almost.
Lyra cocked her head in my direction. “That is a unique amp with how often you talk to it—I think you talk to it more than you do me.”
She is correct. You speak to me fourteen percent more frequently than you do to her. I have not learned human emotions yet. Does this mean you prefer my company to hers?
“Not on your life,” I said.
“See? You’re doing it again,” Lyra pointed out.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Just getting directions.”
“I thought you had a HUD map,” she countered.
I did. As long as I followed it, we had no problem. “Yeah, but I’m trying to figure out how Byte figures out stuff. I’m still not sure I can trust its deductive reasoning.”
My deductive reasoning is far superior to yours and Lyra’s combined.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Hearing just one side of the conversation is getting annoying,” Lyra said.
Then tell her to not eavesdrop.
I was beginning to think Byte was jealous. “Sorry,” I mumbled to Lyra again, realizing that word was quickly becoming one of the most-used words in my vocabulary. The dot on the map in my vision flashed as we stepped into its outer rim.
“I guess this is it,” I said, stopping at a storage unit that looked like every other storage unit on the row, with a large door for a forklift to move crates in and out and a smaller entry door.
On the smaller door was a logo of a unicorn and a corporation called Fabled Ventures.
I didn’t recognize the name, but that was no surprise—there were more companies than there were people in the universe.
We stood at the smaller door that bore a fingerprint and eye reader.