Chapter One ~ Turbo


Agent

Proposal by Shirley Kennett

Based on the short story “Agent” by Shirley Kennett published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Vol. 123 No. 7&8, July/August 2003, Dell Magazines, edited by Stanley Schmidt


In the 23rd century, people create "agents" that inhabit, respond, and act in cyberspace without human direction. What happens when a genius psychopathic killer creates a malevolent agent and plants it on a generational starship?

Chapter 1 ~ Turbo

2220:223
(Year:Day of Year = Year 2220:Friday, August 10)

The tip of Lira Granger’s tongue was pinched tightly between her teeth, but she was so focused on the task in front of her that she didn’t notice the little focus of pain. The recirculated air brought the smell of her sweat-damp shirt back to her, and her heart seemed to be pounding on her eardrums from the inside. Eyes glued to the display floating less than half a meter in front of her, she hadn’t blinked in so long that she might as well have had stitches holding her lids open.

She was having fun.

The sim chamber pressed in tightly around her, serving as the cramped cockpit of the shuttle she was flying through a dense, turbulent reddish-orange atmosphere. From the colonists’ compartment, separated from the cockpit by two meters and a locked door, she could hear moans as a 400 kph wind suddenly elevated the shuttle a couple of klicks. The wind suddenly ceased, and the shuttle dropped, leaving her stomach stranded somewhere along the descent. She was fighting the equivalent of a Category F4 tornado for the privilege of landing an emergency shuttle on an inhospitable but marginally habitable planet named Turbo. Her holographic copilot was slumped beside her, unconscious and predictably unhelpful.

It was her second attempt at landing on Turbo, and if she killed another batch of colonists, she definitely wouldn’t get her auxiliary officer’s rating.

She pointed a finger at the switch that opened communication to the colonists’ compartment. A green light glowed to indicate that the device was live.

“Attention evacuees,” she said in what she thought was a perfect imitation of a pilot’s bored manner of speech, “we’ll be experiencing some turbulence. Please remain in your safety restraints. I’m confident we’ll be on the ground in a few minutes.”

Before she could let any doubt creep into her voice, and before she could say Anybody back there know how to fly this thing? she pointed at the switch, and the green light flicked off. Maybe that would get her a few points for confidence and concern for her fellow humans. The grading matrix was secret, and for all she knew those were key elements.

Everyone stationed at Hoyle Base knew the rudiments of flying a shuttle. It was required training. But there were pilots and then there were pilots. Lira’d learned the basics, but hadn’t had the practice time or, she assumed, the innate flying skill to move up in the standings. Since being plunged into an emergency sim situation—especially because it was a sim with no actual danger to life and limb—she’d discovered a buried interest. She loved flying. The way the control field responded to the movement of her hands, the acceleration that punched her back into the padded seat, even the stomach-twisting drops.

There are people who are paid to do this. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone into medicine.

Lira leveled the shuttle, hands waving gracefully above the multi-colored stream of data hovering over the control panel, fingertips dipping in, altering the flow here and there. She thought she knew the secret to defeating Turbo, and on the next wrenching ascent, she was going to try it.

There! She was riding the wind elevator again. Moving her fingers rapidly in the current of data, she angled the shuttle’s nose down sharply and relentlessly, bringing the craft nearly vertical, eliciting groans and thumps from the colonists’ compartment. She ignored them. Sim colonists weren’t going to line up in the Base Hospital to be treated after the flight was over, although she would lose points for serious injuries. The colonists were supposed to be cocooned in emergency restraints, like sleeping bags wrapped in bubble packaging. Lira could always count on a few not following directions in a simmed emergency, though. For a select group of space-faring colonists, they could be remarkably uncooperative.

She picked out the nav stream and with a few finger movements plotted a course straight down. Jabbing her thumb into the propulsion control field that swirled around her hands like wispy smoke, Lira set the craft hurtling downward. Spinning walls of orange clouds shot with red were dizzying outside the viewport, but she couldn’t take her eyes off them. She should close the port, a window the width of her hand and a meter long, and fly by sensors. Less distracting. She started to direct the port’s shield to slide down, but pulled her hand back. She wanted to experience every bit of the alien planet, even if it was simmed.

The training shuttle, appropriately named the Crash & Burn, dropped out of the bottom of the whirling clouds into a layer of relatively calm air. She leveled out and let out a whoop, then leaned closer to the port for an eyes-on view. Below her turbulence roiled the clouds. Using C&B’s sensors, she prodded the atmosphere below her, and found what she was looking for: more tubes of swirling air, stacked next to each other like straws in a box. Flying straight across them, breaking through the wall after wall of tornadic winds, would eventually get the shuttle torn apart. That’s what she’d done on her previous visit to Turbo. This time she had to suck in her gut and go straight down through a wind straw to the next clear layer, then the next, until she found the surface. Picking an air tube at random, she sent the shuttle down it nose-first, and was rewarded with more bumps from the compartment behind her.

Some people never learn.

Four tubes later, Lira shot out over a landscape in various shades of brown. It had worn features, as though it was tired of fighting the wind that blew clouds of dust, sand, and rocks rapidly over the surface. She speculated about how she and the colonists were supposed to survive here once she landed the shuttle, but fortunately, that wasn’t part of this sim.

The Stranded test, which dealt with that issue, was still to come.

She brought the C&B to the surface as gently as a puff of cotton landing on a pillow, her mind already on the fact that only two tests separated her from an auxoff, or auxiliary officer, rating. She needed to pass Stranded and Trauma MedTech.

She was dreading Stranded. Colonists, specialists, and crew alike had to pass it as a minimal requirement, except for the twenty passengers that were to be chosen by lottery. Rumors were flying around the lunar community of Hoyle Base about the severity of the test. She’d treated three men who’d been through it. They’d been carried into the Base Hospital, unwilling to talk about their experiences. Of course, they were under orders not to talk, but Lira’d thought she could worm a little information out of them to help her prepare. Her charm, raven hair, caramel eyes and, ahem, bedside manner usually proved irresistible to the opposite sex, but these men’s thoughts were turned inward. They didn’t take notice of the doctor with the hourglass figure who hovered—sometimes literally, in the low lunar gravity—over them. The one who had frostbite and a severe case of intestinal parasites hadn’t said a word the entire time he was under Lira’s care.

She didn’t even know if they’d passed or failed.

Solid information about Stranded was scarce. She knew, or thought she knew, that it was held in a surface dome at the other lunar base that was under construction. Magellan Base wouldn’t be fully occupied for another three years, long after the Venture was gone. But it did contain a testing facility for artificial gravity, and that’s where Stranded was held, with the gravity adjusted so that a planetary environment could be configured inside the dome. Any kind of planet, including Turbo or something even worse. The last she’d heard, the artificial gravity had a tendency to go into wild oscillations, pinning test subjects flat to the floor or abruptly floating them away like balloons loosed by accident.

The Trauma Medtech test was only a formality for her, since she was, at twenty-five, already a respected specialist in space medicine. That was an excellent qualification, but two other ratings would move her to the top of the list of flight specialists. The first was qualifying as an auxiliary officer, which meant that in an emergency she could take over a bridge or engineering function, land a shuttle, and survive long enough to begin establishing a colony. The second was being young, healthy, and fertile. Lira had that one aced.

She unstrapped herself, checking the colonists’ simmed medical stats as she did so. One broken arm, a concussion, assorted contusions. Zero deaths. She’d done her part to bring 68 colonists, including herself, to safety, away from the catastrophic destruction of the C&B. Had she kept the damage to craft and person low enough to pass?

Her legs wobbly, her heartbeat reluctant to slow down, Lira stepped from the sim cockpit into a low-ceilinged chamber underneath the lunar surface. Hoyle Base was mostly underground, a series of chambers and connecting tunnels. Still a little disoriented, she failed to plant her shoes close enough to one of the magnetic channels that ran through the floor, strips marked by glowing blue lights. Her first adrenalin-propelled step took her up toward the ceiling, and she automatically raised an arm to avoid colliding with the rough-hewn rock above her. In a practiced manner, she pushed off from the ceiling and came down on a mag channel, her shoes clicking softly as contact was made. The lights in the chamber slowly came up, and she was able to see the control booth, and then the occupants of the booth. She recognized Dr. Mills Claxton, Chief Surgeon of the Star Venture, and Flight Engineer Stella Hon, who’d apparently been running the sim. Both smiled at her from the booth, but with different motivations. Stella’s smile was friendly, though not overly warm. She and Lira occasionally ate a meal together and caught each other up on the news from Medicine and Engineering. Dr. Claxton’s smile was ingratiating. He’d focused his considerable charm on her the past month, and rumor had it that Claxton had a hundred percent success rate with women he pursued.

At least until he met me.

It wasn’t that Lira was immune to charm. It’s just that she didn’t want any suggestion of sleeping her way to a berth on the Venture. Mills Claxton denied it, but Lira was sure he had enough influence to bump a person up or down on the ratings enough to make dreams come true or shatter them. She hoped he’d respect her professional standards and turn elsewhere for his casual dalliance. Lira might have to worry about him later, when they were both on the Venture. Then she’d have no excuse to avoid his advances, and would have to make a decision about her response.

Lira waved at Mills and Stella. She was hoping to find out her rating immediately. In return, she got a shrug of the shoulders from Stella. Mills leaned forward and spoke into the mike.

“Way to go, hotshot,” he said, giving her a thumbs-up.

A thumbs-up from him somehow seemed like an obscene gesture, because she knew he was watching the low-gravity bob and dip of her breasts. She resolved to start wearing a band that compressed her breasts flat against her chest at those times she was likely to meet Mills, already lamenting giving up the pleasant feeling of having her gently floating breasts lead the way wherever she went.

She’d have to wait for her results to arrive like everyone else. She returned the thumbs-up, and headed for the exit of the sim chamber. Out in the tunnel, which was almost four meters wide to accommodate equipment transport, she shifted her feet onto the “slow traffic” mag channel on the right side, close to the wall. Now that the test was over, her stomach was reminding her that it after dinnertime. She headed for Crater’s Café, a gathering place for off-duty science staff.

Other Lunies—what the inhabitants of Hoyle Base called each other—slid by in the center traffic lane, using the grab bars set into the rock ceiling to propel themselves along swiftly. They reminded Lira of monkeys swinging on vines. Pausing in the tunnel, she let its rhythmic ventilation wash over her, like a beast breathing. Above them, she knew, Earth hung heavy and low in the lunar sky. Earth, where she’d been born, but if she had her way, where she’d never set foot again.

Lira had thought hard about it, and decided that she could leave behind the blue-green gem that was Earth, never to see it again except as a hologram. Commitment to a colony ship meant severing all ties and forging new ones only among the Star Venture’s crew, specialists, and passengers. Not that there were many ties to sever. Her parents, of course, but they were rooting for her to be accepted. She had one sister, no close friends, no one else but infrequent and temporary lovers. Her sister Laci was involved in her own life moving up in politics, and, as had been the case for most of their lives, would barely notice if Lira was absent.

Lira’s was a life dedicated to the research and practice of space medicine, and to obtaining a slot on the Venture, the first colony ship to leave Earth. That left little time for a social life. She could have carved one out of her schedule the way some of her colleagues did, but if she did, someone might slip ahead of her in the ratings. Lira could wait to be a woman until she was established as a colony ship specialist.

She found it incomprehensible that some of her fellow specialists wanted to practice space medicine without going into space, or at least no further than the bases on the moon, Mars, or Io. Lira’s parents were involved in the Star Venture project already. Her mother was Security Chief at Earth Flight Control and her father was Earthside Director of Space Medicine. Both in their early sixties, they felt they were too old to go on the mission.

Lira would carry their dream to the stars.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two ~ Stranded