Chapter 26
Craters pocked the landscape. Smoke haze floated, obscured the horizon. Felled buildings had become irregular hot mounds where girders and melted glassomer were often all that was recognizable. Verd was flattened. Most of the bodies of humanoids were charred, contorted things.
She’d made herself not look. There were too many to bury.
She had the DSU in front of her on the black Xatar pack, to keep it clean. Dirt wouldn’t get into this sophisticated storage unit but it didn’t hurt to be careful. She adjusted her data specs on her face then raised the knife.
Ready, steady, let’s do this and fuck up my employment opportunity. My career, my pristine record – splat.
On the right planet, CESS might even get her jailed on criminal charges for misuse of company data. She had to know why this thing was so important. If the cybermonks lived, she needed this to throw some screws into their machinery.
She switched on the knife and applied knife tip to the DSU. The violently purple blade flickered and twisted.
Carefully, she peeled back the first layer of defense and encryption. Violet specks danced over her hand as she adjusted the knife.
If she was going to be with Hoss and Baz, it didn’t matter about career. Baz had detected a faint signal from the Leaf and, logically, that was where she and Hoss would end up working. Discussing this would happen after she said yes to them.
She was saying yes, wasn’t she?
Frowning, Ember peeled back the second layer of defense.
The guys were being patient with her. They all knew what was at stake.
Same as she did with a work contract she’d set herself a deadline, a goal. The DSU was it. After this she considered herself free to choose to be...
She swallowed, staring up at the sky. A few breaths calmed her. Okay...to be theirs and she guessed that’d make them hers. Though somehow she liked the first way of thinking this.
Theirs. Mmm.
She peeled back three more layers and there it was – raw data. This wasn’t just files, it was a clone of the AI in charge of CESS on the other planet.
Wait. No.
Unholy whatevers, that was a no. It was more.
Her head swam with dizziness as she contemplated what she had here.
It was not a clone. It was the AI in charge of the entire CESS network. Everything. Knowledge back a fuck-ton of years. She flipped through the decades and by no coincidence at all, found the year of her approximate birth.
She always looked at that. She never found anything of consequence.
Her stomach turned queasy.
But this time she had.
That year CESS had been involved in neutralizing several planets, same as it had the year before, and before that. She’d been working for a company that advocated genocide. Correction, planetocide.
“Fuck,” she breathed, thinking fast. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
How could she tell if one of those was her home planet? Her own name came up a fat negative, but she didn’t know her other names or her parents.
Her carer. She knew her full name though it’d never been a hit on any databases. Hands shaking on her knees, she closed her eyes and mentally input the name.
Ding. The info scrolling down her retina said the woman’s home planet was Venet and that planet had been obliterated in its entirety by a special CESS task force, turned into asteroids and cosmic dust in the year Ember thought she’d been born.
She’d done it. Found her home. Her heart had always known it was gone, yet tears filled her eyes and snailed down her face. She wiped them away, hoping Baz and Hoss hadn’t seen.
From the following records, CESS had left the planetocide business long ago. They were still corrupt, their fingers black with devious operations – sex trade, crime, military dark operations, government and individual blackmail. A veritable mountain of evil. Money made the galaxy go round. Greed oiled the wheels.
Ember gulped. What could she do?
Leave their employ and walk away.
Was that enough?
No. Hells no. She wanted to grind her teeth on their bones, flamethrower their testicles, laser their eyeballs in their sockets, and make sure they never ever did this again.
Anger, retribution and sheer bloody-minded pissed-offedness was howling and twisting through every dark and righteous cell in her damned body.
How could she just walk from this?
She’d thought the cybermonks were deserving of punishment? CESS needed destruction rained down upon their bloodied souls.
She couldn’t walk, no. She simply couldn’t. Love, being happy, it had to wait. She had shit to do.
Of course it wouldn’t be simple. CESS wasn’t one man or one head. CESS was a snake-pit of writhing tentacles, and every one of them needed lopping off at the genital level. Using blunt scissors. Grrrr.
If Baz could get a signal from Leaf, maybe her data knife could get one too. Maybe something nearby was boosting the signals?
It was. A device underground, near where the library had been, was boosting still. Automatic perhaps, it didn’t matter why or how.
She encrypted her message, triggered an emergency burst, waited. Seconds later a CESS starship replied.
They were coming for her. Coming to get that DSU she’d said she had. That very important DSU.
Bait.
ETA 2.2 hours.
If she survived this, she’d beg forgiveness off the guys. If. If they still wanted her. If she wasn’t in pieces or in prison or persona non grata on a million planets.
While she’d uncovered this foulness, Baz had received a reply from Leaf.
She nodded amiably when asked if she was ready to go off-planet. She agreed to a discussion about their future when Hoss and Baz pinned her down to talking some time soon.
They smiled and she smiled back. Gods, what was she doing to them?
This had to be done. Had to be!
Since the Leaf’s ETA was two hours after hers, she could say anything. She was just going to be sad if she couldn’t come back to them.
A note, she had to leave them one.
Her hands were shaking again, and since this time she needed to write it on paper, it made for a messy farewell note, spotted with tears. Her anger was still at fire-and-brimstone level and she was surprised the paper didn’t turn to ash beneath her fingers. Paper. The one thing she blessed the Xatar for was their obsession with the old ways. Apart from their robotic armor, and their weaponry, their star ships...okay maybe preferring to use pen and paper was a bit daft.
The Xatar always had been daft. A pity CESS hadn’t managed to planetocide them.
Ember pinned the note to the pack and walked away from Hoss and Baz, pretending she was merely walking for recreational sake. There’d been no signs of anything alive here in the smoking ruins so they allowed her to go quite a distance.
Incoming. Await transport, scrolled in red down her retina. Incoming.
The starship’s little golden emissary vessel shafted down through the clouds, like a communication handed down by the gods, and landed in a cloud of dust and pulverized building. By the time Hoss and Baz were running in her direction she was entering the hatch.
As it took off, she watched them jog to a halt and shrink into tiny dots. She didn’t wave. She fully intended to return to them. Waving was a goodbye.
She prayed they wouldn’t hate her for this.
Think positive and plan well was a CESS employee primary imperative.
She would live and come back to them.
She only had a few thousand highly trained security guards and soldiers to outwit, as well as AI defenses to breach. Luckily, she had just the right tool.
CESS was a spiderweb and she was mama spider, coming home...toting all those flamethrowery, testicle-eliminating things. Okay, her metaphors were getting out of hand but fuck she was so angry.
They’d killed her planet, her parents, turned her into an orphan, made her life a bitter, hollow thing compared to what it could have been, and all of them would suffer, because really this was what any reasonable girl with any courage and a cataclysm virus would do.