BLOOD AND CIRCUITS
A Sol Blazers Short Story
Jacob Holo & Edie Skye
Aiko had seen this movie before.
A spaceship of Average Joes and Jills just minding their own business when suddenly a uniformed stiff with a secret military budget shows up and says, “We have a problem, and your unique set of skills just happens to be the solution.”
There were a handful of sentences a woman—well, preserved consciousness spread across multiple synthetic bodies—wanted to hear in her life, and she’d spent her entire extended life (and most of her meat life) waiting to hear that one.
Today she’d chosen the body best suited for it: fashionable combat android, red armor accented with gold filigree, triangular head as sharp as an axe wedge, leather jacket she didn’t need for warmth but deemed necessary for maximum badassery.
In short, she looked the part.
Trouble was, she couldn’t figure out why the man needed her. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of people in the solar system who’d shoot stuff for pay. But he’d requested her by name, so now she and her captain stood outside the Neptune Dragon while their potential employer strode to meet them.
Her initial characterization wasn’t exaggerated. He was a uniformed brick right down to his hard-lined blocky face and clay-red skin, modified from human baseline. The rest of that angular body was clad in a dark green uniform with black trim, tailored so precisely it looked like he’d been born in it. A patch bearing the black silhouette of a horse rearing marked him as belonging to the Neptune Concord Space Force, while his rank insignia designated him a commander.
He looked like the kind of man who could bust heads, whether by his own hands or through a well-targeted order. The kind of man you could throw through a window, and he’d get the problem solved.
There was a pinch in his face as he approached them, as if to say he wanted to be the one breaking the window but had somehow been forced to throw her through instead.
Or maybe he’d just glimpsed her captain.
If the commander was a solid brick, Captain Nathan Kade was a weathered stone that had seen a hard season of messy storms and needed a good pressure wash. He’d prepared as best he could for the potential client, but the fact was their recent jobs had pitted them against a crazed, world-ending superweapon and an invisible monster in search of love in all the wrong places. Those sorts of adventures took their toll on a person.
Aiko didn’t grow tired and rarely worried about risking life and limb. Sure, she had to avoid being shot or exploded (again), but even then the most she’d lose was her current body and a handful of unpreserved memories. In some ways, she rather regretted that she’d never look tired for her captain.
In his own rough leather jacket, with that coarse stubble, the old adventure scars, the huge pistol strapped to his muscular thigh, that tousled brown hair—Nathan made tired look good in a way that put her fully back in her meat brain.
He extended a strong hand to the approaching naval officer.
“Welcome to the Neptune Dragon. I’m Captain Nathaniel Kade, and this is my second-in-command, Aiko Pratti.”
The man greeted both of them with a handshake as solid as the rest of him.
“Commander William Hughes,” he declared in a gruff, clipped voice. “Special Operations Officer aboard NCSF Azure Eagle.”
“A pleasure, Commander. Aiko tells me you’ve got a job for us.”
“Yes, though I can’t discuss the details out here.” Hughes made a circular gesture, indicating the docking bay the Neptune Dragon sat in.
“Naturally.” Nathan gestured toward his
ship. “If you’ll follow us, Commander.”
Aiko had looked up both Hughes and the ship he served on before this meeting. She hadn’t found much information about the man, but Azure Eagle was a truly gargantuan vessel—a cruiser capable of wiping the floor with anything short of a Saturnian or Jovian warship. Commander Hughes squeezed into the small side room and dropped into his seat like he was accustomed to having more space, which was probably true.
“There’s a piece of trouble the NCSF would like to see taken care off,” Hughes began once Nathan and Aiko were settled across from him. “Quietly and discreetly.”
“How discreetly are we talking?” Nathan asked.
“NCSF involvement must be kept a secret.”
“Well.” Nathan shrugged his arms. “That sort of discretion comes at a premium.”
“My superiors are aware of that.” Hughes produced a vlass tablet and slid it over. Nathan spun it around and read the bottom line. Suddenly he looked a lot less tired.
“That’s . . . what I would call ‘reasonable compensation’ for discretion.”
Nathan slid the vlass over to Aiko, who whistled without lips.
“Now the question becomes,” her captain went on, “why can’t the NCSF handle this themselves?”
“The problem involves a foreign warship.”
“Ah. Then you’re trying to get rid of the problem without provoking an interplanetary incident?”
“Precisely.” Hughes tapped a button on his tablet, and an image of Neptune appeared, its equator girdled by the green-blue ribbon of its orbital ring. He zoomed out, and icons for the hundreds of nearby habitats flooded the screen.
“There’s a situation on a habitat called the Broken Bottle.”
He zoomed in on one of the sorriest excuses for a habitat Aiko had ever seen. It looked like it had once been a windowed cylinder, but now resembled debris from a drunken bar brawl. Only one end remained—a disk eighty-five kilometers across and one kilometer thick, with metal teeth forming a jagged crown on one side along the rim, completing the illusion of the bottom of a shattered bottle
“We believe the Broken Bottle was nearly destroyed four millennia ago during the Scourging of Heaven. It’s considered worthless, and for good reason. Not much habitable space, and no deifactories or other lost technology. It’s currently leased to the Saturn Union, which subleased it to the Tarsho Syndicate.”
“Should we assume they’ve been up to unsavory business in Neptune’s backyard?” Nathan asked.
“We have our suspicions, but can’t act upon them,” Hughes explained. “The problem is a legal one. Technically, because of the agreement between the Neptune Concord and Saturn Union, the Broken Bottle is Union territory for the duration of the lease.”
“Which means you don’t have the authority to move in,” Aiko said.
“Correct. Given the current political situation, the NCSF is only allowed to enter the Broken Bottle under extreme circumstances, such as violation of the terms of the lease or a disaster requiring our aid. Evidence of criminal activity would also satisfy that requirement and allow us to move in.”
“So, you’d like someone unassociated with the NCSF to go in and get the evidence.” Aiko sat back. “Someone like us.”
“Plausible deniability is key.”
“Do we know who’s in charge of this little enterprise?” Nathan asked. “You said it was leased to the Tarsho Syndicate.”
Hughes tabbed over to a pair of images on his vlass.
“The two key players are Captain Alfonso gen Arturikk, in command of the Saturn Union Navy destroyer Echoes of Flame, and Director Xavier vaan Tarsho. We understand the latter’s something of a rising star within his family’s syndicate.”
Aiko leaned in to better study the men. Both were baseline humans with cybernetic enhancements, but where Captain Arturikk’s were slick and subtle, Director Tarsho’s were conspicuous and boastful, perhaps even intended to draw attention to themselves.
“And by ‘rising star,’ you mean . . .” Aiko prompted.
“Rumor is the last subordinate to get in Tarsho’s way was found hung from a meat hook.” Hughes grimaced. “Alongside the rest of the man’s family.”
“And that makes him a rising star?”
“In his family, apparently so.”
“Lovely.”
“We believe these two men,” Hughes continued, “are conspiring to utilize the Broken Bottle as a staging area for illicit activity near Neptune. The nature of the activity is unknown, but Echoes makes regular circuits of both the leading and trailing Trojan habitats, picking up unknown cargo and transporting it to the Broken Bottle.”
“The Neptune Trojans?” Nathan frowned. “What’s out there that has them so interested?”
“We don’t know.”
“Any idea who or what they’re transporting?”
“They have declined to provide manifests, citing the”—Hughes sneered—“legally-correct fact they’re not setting foot on Neptunian soil.”
“And you’d rather not pick a fight with a SUN warship to search them,” Nathan surmised.
“Exactly.”
Nathan glanced once more to the vlass, then nodded slowly.
“The job seems straightforward enough. Go in, secure the evidence, get out.” He looked up. “Why us?”
“You’re the only freelancers in the solar system with a Jovian stealth corvette.” He indicated their surroundings. “You’ll be able to infiltrate the Broken Bottle undetected, even with that destroyer nearby.”
“True,” Aiko said, “but stealth is going to be a problem once we’re inside.”
“Which is one of two reasons we specifically requested you.” Hughes met Aiko’s cameras with a steady gaze. “We have a body you can use.”
“I have plenty of spares.”
“Not one with this kind of weaponry, I’d wager.
“Firearms are the fastest way to your heart,” Nathan teased, then his expression turned serious. “What’s the second reason?”
“This.” Hughes tabbed over to another page on his vlass. “I believe you’re already acquainted with Prinn Pratti.”
The woman in the picture was blue-skinned and silver-eyed with a long white braid slung over a bare, slender shoulder. Despite Nathan’s joke, Aiko didn’t have a heart anymore, but she still felt an emotional jolt upon seeing her.
“Of course I do,” she replied after a long pause. “She’s one of my copy-clan sisters. She’s basically another version of me.”
“She’s Tarsho’s girlfriend.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Aiko crossed her arms once she and Nathan were alone. “All of the Pratti branches have some predisposition for deviancy. I mean, all you have to do is look at yours truly to see that! But we’re not criminals!”
“Seems Prinn is,” Nathan said.
The Jovian Everlife was composed of copy-clans: singular minds spread to multiple bodies and regularly re-integrated to maintain the intellectual coherence of one being. That was why Aiko couldn’t bring herself to believe Prinn would involve herself with a scumbag like Tarsho. She and Prinn were, in many ways, the same person.
“Maybe one of Prinn’s copies went bad,” Nathan suggested. “Or perhaps she made some bad choices and is in over her head.”
“Maybe . . .” Aiko sighed without exhaling. “Whatever’s going on, I need to go in there.”
“You know that’s what Hughes wants. Prinn’s the bait for us to accept this job.”
“Don’t care. She’s my sister. Hell, she’s practically me! I need to do this, Nate. I need to know why she’s hooked up with Tarsho.”
“All right.” He spoke those words with an undercurrent of sympathy borne from countless close calls together. “But can you do sneaky?”
Nathan looked her up and down. She would have been flattered if she hadn’t been in her bombastic commando body. (Oh, heck, she was still flattered.)
“Depends on the body they have in store for me,” she replied with a shrug.
“Oh, this’ll definitely work!”
The body put her in mind of a femme fatale, and there was a gun hidden in the forearm.
Specifically, the entire right forearm unfolded into a veritable cannon that, despite a barrel that looked designed to fire ballistic shells, discharged energy beams with a dull thwomp. It shot energy beams as silently as a dead body falling on a bed, with multiple settings from stun to “Where’d he go?” She’d never heard of an energy weapon this miniaturized, and when she asked Hughes about that, all he said was it involved lost technology and had taken an obscene amount of paperwork to requisition.
That was good enough for her.
There was plenty of femme in that fatale, too. The body was sleek and lithe, adapted for all manner of infiltration with curves that could exploit . . . a multitude of meat bodies’ weaknesses. She showed off those curves to her captain and even made him blush a little before returning to all business. The job was to be a dangerous one, and both of them needed to keep their heads in the game.
Several hours later, the Broken Bottle loomed ahead of the Neptune Dragon’s slow approach.
“We’ll drop you off near the disk’s center,” Nathan said. “You’ll need to make your way ‘down’ to the outer edge, where gravity is about one gee.”
“No problem,” Aiko replied. “Zero-g? One gee? Three? I fought in them all back in my commando days.”
“How about ‘sneaked’?”
“That, not so much.”
The Echoes of Flame lingered nearby, resembling a skyscraper plucked into space and slathered with guns and armor.
There were more weapons on the habitat—SUN missile batteries, courtesy of the Echoes of Flame. Aiko studied them through the Neptune Dragon’s telescope.
“Looks nasty. I bet those missiles could pop a cruiser.”
“Arturikk placed them there to protect the habitat when his ship isn’t nearby,” Nathan said.
“And they don’t violate the lease?”
“Not unless they do something dumb like shoot down unarmed merchants.”
“Still, I bet firing them would be an easy way to draw official attention.” Aiko wagged her eyebrows. She liked having eyebrows for a change.
“Resist temptation. You’re supposed to be stealthy.”
“I’m only kidding.”
The Echoes of Flame vanished from view as they slid beneath the disk’s dark side, heading toward the central dock. The outer door had been bent open by some ancient calamity. Aiko maneuvered them inside and then set them down within one of the many unoccupied docks.
The ship was in freefall this close to the disk’s rotating center. Aiko unbuckled frrm her seat, gave her captain a confident salute, and ventured out of the ship.
Toward the mission.
Toward her copy-clan sister.
She made her way out of the dock, through black, airless passages, traveling ever “downward” toward the rim of the rotating disk. In these shadows, she sensed why this habitat appealed to the Syndicate’s purposes, whatever they were. She’d navigated barely a mile from the dock when warped debris blocked her. She squirmed in through a gap in the wall and continued her descent through the guts of the habitat. She felt like a bug crawling through the intestines of a great, dead, mechanical beast.
Her journey continued downward for forty kilometers and took the better part of two days. She descended through twisted passages and pinched ducts, through holes and around great utility canyons, always downward, the gravity
ever increasing.
She began to notice signs of power, passed through an airlock, and kept going with gravity as her guide.
She had to be getting close.
A short while later, she found what she sought.
The condition within the Broken Bottle made it inviable for large-scale settling—not when there were so many functional (or close enough to it) habitats left over from the Scourging—but its stark passages still carried the growing din of activity.
She heard hatches opening and closing. The clack of weapons. The rustle of clothing. The clomp of heavy boots and . . . clicking of high heels?
She approached those sounds carefully, cautiously, slinking her way forward and down until she came to a series of large chambers, open and interconnected around the habitat’s great structural members. The nearest chamber was quiet, so she found a loose wall panel, eased it open, and took a quick glimpse.
The Syndicate must have installed its own dock somewhere nearby along the disk’s circumference. The people here were far too fancily dressed to have traversed the Broken Bottle’s guts like she had. They milled about in a queue leading to a giant hatch built into the far wall. Guards uniformed in Tarsho Syndicate red-and-black stood on either side. They opened the way for the guests like fancy doormen, but their slung rifles left no doubt as to their capacity for violence. The guests passing into the second chamber regarded the guards with casual aloofness.
Aiko made her way through the walls to the chamber beyond the big hatch. She located a panel she could pry loose and began to work it free. This one was riskier; sound alone told her there were a lot of people nearby, but she couldn’t stay hidden in the walls forever and considered the risk worth it.
She cracked the panel open a hair, and light spilled into her hiding spot. Far more than from the first chamber.
She peered through to observe an explosion of luster and fashion. The mundanity of the previous chamber here shifted to a grand expanse of lavish flourishes. Red and black banners hung from the ceiling alongside diamond chandeliers that blazed like fiery rainbows. Artwork hung from the walls, and artifacts
sat atop ornate plinths. Long, intricately-carved tables were laden with sumptuous feasts and great quantities of alcohol. Over a hundred people—all as elegant and ostentatious as their surroundings—milled about the tables or in more private, cushioned alcoves that all faced a central stage.
This was no mere fancy dress party. The location was too secret, the pompousness too . . . confined. She hadn’t stumbled into a display meant to flaunt wealth and power to the public. There was no public in attendance, just color-coded goons: red and black for the Syndicate, beige with white trim for the Union spacers.
Except for the serving staff.
Those were exclusively women, baseline humans or with very subtle divergences such as unusual hair color or pointed ears.
They weren’t wearing a lot of clothing, either.
Definitely not your average dinner party.
Aiko was too far away and there were too many overlapping conversations for her to ever hope to pick out anything useful. She needed to get closer.
She might even have to mingle.
But how to best pull that off?
The fancy guests all looked like people who would be recognized by the goons, so pretending to be one came with buckets of risk. The serving girls, though, were treated more like part of the decor than people, their faces forgotten as soon as they delivered their trays of appetizers or drinks, and all their routes passed through a small sliding door inset into an alcove behind the tables, perhaps leading to the kitchen.
A few of the serving girls deviated to a second doorway, this one labeled as the place where certain biological necessities tied to food and drink were relieved in privacy.
Aiko didn’t miss that part of being organic, but it made her next step easier. She replaced the panel, maneuvered through the guts of the walls until she reached the restroom, waited above one of the stalls until one of the serving girls entered it, then put her to sleep with a soft thwomp from her arm cannon.
an was surely hired to serve drinks and, potentially, to satisfy other needs. The chances she was a major player in a criminal conspiracy were slim to none.
But, Aiko reflected, she could probably use a good nap . . . even if it’d be a drafty one without her clothes.
The short black dress satisfied all those words: so black it seemed to soak in the light, so dress its lacy bits clung to her curves like the hands of a long-lost lover, and so short it limited no range of motion.
She hid the sleeping body and left the restroom.
It took exactly one poured drink for a slimy patron to slap her ass, then took every ounce of her self-control not to blast him in the face with her arm cannon. Instead she flashed a carefully cowed look and skittered off to refill another drink.
Stealth was hard.
She wondered what all of this was for as she moved about the chamber, and quickly she began to piece together an explanation. The guests spoke of bidding on exotic purchases. An auction, then? But an auction of what?
“From what I hear, Tarsho’s outdone himself this time,” said one guest. Aiko tried to linger to hear more, but he switched to bragging about a recent business deal, and she couldn’t stay longer without drawing suspicion.
Still, it soon became clear that Tarsho had organized this auction, and it wasn’t long before she spotted the man himself.
With Prinn Pratti on his arm.
Director Xavier vaan Tarsho reclined in one of the cushioned alcoves, arms spread across the back in the manner of one who owned the place and didn’t intend anyone in the room to forget it. Now that she saw him in full, she noted his cybernetics probably weren’t the result of necessity. If Commander Hughes had been a solid brick, Tarsho was a whole sturdy house, if perhaps renovated to accommodate a killer security system.
He was capable of a lot with that standard body, but the cybernetics must have made him capable of more. Prinn reclined beside him, head against his shoulder like someone who’d seen everything those cybernetics could do and found at least some of the less savory features worth exploring.
Aiko acknowledged there were some women—meat-based or otherwise—who would risk entanglement with powerful, dangerous men, and that went double for men with jawlines that strong, even if the jaw and teeth were metal.
She just couldn’t figure out what Prinn saw in him.
Her copy-sister still maintained the body Aiko most associated with her—an emulation of divergent human flesh with blue skin and silver eyes, clad in a dress on the skimpier end of the fancy spectrum, her hair done up in an ostentatious style.
Aiko began to inch closer when the stage lit up.
A spotlight illuminated a lectern to the side of the main stage, and a man in Syndicate formal wear strode to take his place behind it.
“Welcome once again, our illustrious and esteemed guests.”
Aiko associated most auctioneers with annoyance, but this man had a voice like velvet. The kind of voice that made people want to buy things. The kind of voice that could sell a piece of scrap from a trash bin at prices reserved for artifacts from before the Scourging.
“We’ve acquired an enticing variety of collectables for your perusal this month, including the treasures of which you were already informed—as well as several . . . tantalizing surprises.”
He smiled conspiratorially. The guests oohed as if he’d promised them an extra special cake this evening.
Aiko doubted it was cake.
“Now, to start the evening—”
“A-hem.”
A woman at the table next to Aiko lifted her empty glass with an imperious sneer, offended that the serving girl had the audacity to leave her glass empty. She refilled it with an extra-subservient face, and then—dammit, her bottle was empty. She needed to grab another from the kitchen.
For our canine aficionados, a Dobrian Shepherd from the finest stock of Neptune.”
Well, that was surprising. It looked like a normal black and fawn guard dog.
“With, shall we say, some aftermarket modifications.”
The attendant escorting the dog snapped a terse command, and the dog unfolded into a true cybernetic terror, eyes glowing, claws transforming into scythes, teeth buzzing like mirrored chainsaws.
Definitely aftermarket.
But not exactly illegal, at least on Saturn, where cybernetic enhancements were fairly common. Securing deifactured cybernetics compatible with the animal must have been quite the feat, but not unheard-of given how many unexplored corners of the solar system remained.
“We’ll start the bidding at—”
The bidding started at what Nathan and his crew had been paid for their last job.
By the time she’d exited the kitchen with a new bottle, the dog had gone for four times that amount.
Subsequent pieces were of more ambiguous legality: a selection of animals, both divergent and cybernetically modified, alongside deifactured artifacts and weapons.
But these seemed intended as teasers to whet their guests’ appetites, and soon, the audience was sufficiently primed for the main course.
The auctioneer leaned over the lectern with another of those winning grins.
“Now, for one of the most anticipated items up for bid—a piece I know several of you have been yearning to see. ...
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