Code Enforcement: Wetware

The siren shrieks loud enough to hurt, a repeating high-pitched wail ringing throughout the station. I wince and clap my hands over my ears, seeing Sparrow double over as well. All of the silver knots and nodes around me vanish in a flash as the exonet connections shut down. I try to link in, but I can't get a connection anywhere.

Gritting my teeth, I look towards Sparrow. "What the void-spawned fuck is going on?"

She glances at me before ducking to the front door. "The station is on lockdown!" She shouts, kicking the thin door panel a few times until it pops open.

Wincing, I try to link to the node, in vain. Nothing but a flashing red denial from the door. "Well, do we know why? Is this a decompression alert?"

Sparrow hunches over the panel. "No, the exonet would still be up!" She yells back, burying her hands in the electronics. "It's a combat alert. Shots fired in the Jovian, that's all I know!"

My mouth falls open, eyes wide. Shots fired? As in, from a vessel? I clench my teeth, wincing at wailing siren, scuttling closer to Sparrow. "Shots fired? By who, the Navy? Or at them?"

She shakes her head, tugging a length of fiberoptic cabling from the wall. "I don't know, but it must be within the gravity well."

What chrome-licking moron fires weapons in a military zone? Civilian, Pirate? Maybe out in the Oort or the Kuiper; it's vast and mostly empty. But the Jovian? Io has a permanent Naval presence precisely to deter pirates! Someone's ship is getting impounded, if they're lucky. The alarm sets my teeth on edge, and being locked in isn't helping.

But finally, Sparrow snaps a cable and the alarm dies inside the room. The ringing in my ears slowly fades, and she gives me a grin. "At least we can hear, and leave," she says, gripping the edge of the unpowered door and tugging it with a grunt.

As the door shudders open, the blaring of the siren from outside spills in. Lucy steps inside a moment later, looking pissed and fingering one ear. "God-damned pirates. I've already got tinnitus, and this ain't helping."

Sparrow grabs a few items, including my shopping, under an arm. "Mom, you got the bugout bags?"

Lucy pulls a thumb over her shoulder. "Over there, but you'll have to carry them.

I take a deep breath, trying to think things through. "Has there been a combat alert on this station before?"

Lucy shakes her head. "Not for eight years, and that was a glitch in the software."

Sparrow glances over at her as she stuffs items into the bags. "Could this be too?"

Lucy squints. "Doubt it. A false alarm going on this long?"

"So, someone's shooting..." I murmur, shaking my head. "But that's all we know. Could be at the station, could be somewhere else."

Sparrow looks back at me, zipping the bag and brushing blue bangs out of her eyes. "So, what's the plan?"

I take a deep breathe, thinking. "I say we get to the Chimera."

Sparrow snorts, lifting the two full packs. "Are you kidding? Argus Station is on lockdown; we'll never get clearance to take off."

"But the Chimera has its own comm array and exonet node," I point out, taking one of the bags from her and slinging it over my shoulder. "The station's local network is down, but we might be able to ping someone off-station for info."

Lucy scratches her head, grunting. "Still, how does that help, if we can't leave?"

I roll it over in my head. "At least we'll know why, and we might get a timeline," I say, giving them both a shrug. "Besides, if we do have to leave, we'll be packed and ready to go, first in line."

Sparrow chews on her lip, giving me an uncertain glance as the tattoo traces serpentine whorls on her legs. "Melody, we could be riding into a firefight."

I nod. "Or away from it. Either way, let's cultivate options."

The station seems far emptier while on lockdown. In part, it's because everyone is driven away from the public areas by the sirens. Partially, it's the complete lack of exonet activity. My overlay might as well be off; none of the nodes or access points are active. It must be a security precaution to prevent malware attacks in a combat situation. But running through the station, I'm deeply unnerved. There's no way to contact anyone, no way to find out what's happening. Someone could fire on this station and kill us all, and we'd never know it was coming. It's like being blind and deaf.

Still, there's a flurry of activity at the docks. People desperately fleeing to or from vessels, but nobody actually able to leave Argus Station. The crowd is mostly civilian, though a pair of confused looking MPs struggle vainly to maintain order, shouting that disembarking isn't permitted while the crowd pushes past. The vibrant blue-green waves of aurora seem to roll around the dock, making foxfire swirl around the vessels.

And the Chimera sits amongst them, a lunar shuttle with dozens of modifications and an attached cargo-hold. I barely wait for Sparrow to clear the airlock before I'm inside, tossing the bags down in the hold. I fly up the ladder, taking the rungs two at a time, as the hatch to the cockpit swings open. "Sparrow, get the core online and the engine prepped," I say, jumping up to the deck and making space.

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As she climbs off the ladder, she gives me a skeptical glance. "Sure, but I don't think we're getting clearance to launch," she says, leaning back to offer Lucy a hand.

I nod, buckling myself into the co-pilots seat. "I want to have the option of being the first ship off this station, if it's all the same. Lucy?"

The older woman is barely breathing heavy, and even one handed manages the ladder. "I'll get the bags situated and set up in the engine room. What about you, Mel?"

I try to link into the Chimera, but she's still cycling up. "Someone's shooting nearby, but we don't know who, or at what," I say, tapping my foot and waiting for the shuttle's exonet node to boot up. "We need info, so I'm going to log onto the net and see what I can find out." The exonet node finally comes online, a silver knot blooming in my vision, and I feel a little relief. "If there's danger heading this way, we'll at least know when and- wait..."

I have a ping sitting in my queue. An anonymous ping, and not from someone in my contact list. Wait, it's refreshing every few seconds; someone's pinging me right now, continuously. I frown. My profile is set to private. How the hell is a stranger pinging me? A sudden tightness grips my chest and my eyes widen. I bet Rabi could do it. Holy void-spawned fuck.

My shoulders tense, and my heart leaps into my throat. But nothing else happens, just the ping repeating. And thinking for a moment, the fear begins to ebb. Rabi wouldn't just be pinging me. Unless it's bait? After a moment, I sigh. Better to nibble the bait than spend forever wondering.

Taking a breath, I accept the ping. "Hello?" I ask, voice mostly steady.

A youngish-sounding male voice, thick with tension, answers immediately. "This is Dame, right?"

No lag. Whoever it is, they're in the Jovian. Maybe on Argus Station. I lick my lips. "Who's asking?"

"My name is Diego. I'm a netrunner hired to tail you; my ship is the moon-hopper that just fired on Lenny Gruder's skiff," the man says quickly, voice tight.

My eyes widen, and I take a moment to parse that statement. "Wait, you killed Gruder? That's what caused the lockdown?"

"No, I didn't kill anyone!" The voice protests, cracking. "I'm stuck on Argus Station. My ship was hijacked, and I'm pretty sure it was your daughter."

"My..." my head rings like a struck gong, and I grip the arm of the chair. "What the void-spawned fuck? My what?"

The low voice whispers on the ping. "Your daughter, Union. She also murdered my boss, and if you don't help, she's going to kill me too."

After a few minutes' discussion, Sparrow agrees to bring him on board. It helps that her mother has a plasma rifle slung under one arm and has it leveled at the man from the moment he steps inside the airlock. Somehow, seeing the thin twenty-something young man shaking there in the cargo hold, I can't imagine we'll need it.

He's lanky, with a buzz-cut and wearing non-descript pants and a plain white shirt and black jacket. Everything is generic and cheap; there's no brand labels. And much like me, he has no obvious augmentations; he's going stealth. For a netrunner, I guess that makes sense; it's not a profession one tends to advertise.

But I still can't help but glower at Diego, the data-scraping spy who's been selling secrets for credits. "So, Diego. You were snooping on me. Why?"

The man looks over his shoulder at Lucy, who gives him a humorless smile and hefts the rifle. "I was paid to," he says with a gulp, looking deeply uncomfortable.

I roll my eyes. "I figured that much. By whom?"

He turns back, meeting my eyes. "Voidborne Industries. Through a third-party, technically."

I blink a few times at that. Not the Gaian League? "I've never done business with them. Is this about the coup on Ganymede?"

He shakes his head quickly. "No, I was hired to scrape any data I could get about the nuclear detonation on Europa and the contemporaneous events."

I hiss, clenching my fist. "That void-spawned nuke is going to haunt me forever. Fine, I assume your boss was pissed because he had claims to pay out?"

Diego nods, brown eyes wide as he leans forward. "Initially, but that took a backseat to the hostile xenoform program Rabi Gupta obtained on Ursa Miner station."

I lean back, mouth falling open. "The... wait, not the squid?"

Diego tilts his head, looking surprised. "Huh. So the cephalopod-analogues are legit?" Ah, fuck. Good job, Mel. Diego must see my darkening expression, because he raises both hands. "Look, I don't care; Voidborne was never interested in patenting genomes. Besides, even if there were biota down there, the crab-bucket mentality will keep anyone from going down."

I frown, wrinkling my brow. "How so?"

The man raises a hand, rubbing his forehead as he sighs. "By now, I assume GenCorp and the Telomere Corporation are suing each other's subsidiaries into oblivion to stall the other's mining efforts on Europa. But that's just intellectual property; Communion is different," he says, shivering.

I narrow my eyes. "How do you know about Communion at all? Not to mention Rabi Gupta's involvement?"

"From you, in part," he admits with a shrug. "I hacked the Code Enforcement files; it wasn't that hard to construct a timeline from the logs and reports. You, Ashton Cartwright, Cythia Wintz, Bent Rockchaser."

My eyelid twitches, but I take a deep breath before responding. "You seem awfully calm for someone who's claiming that alien malware is real, and hunting for him."

The man's shoulders fall and he throws up his arms. "Look, I was skeptical at first too. But it's pretty clear Gupta is a genius, and she wouldn't have broken cover unless this was her endgame."

My jaw clenches at that. "Who can say why she'd do anything? Rabi is fucking crazy."

Diego nods quickly. "Crazy like a fox, and slippery as a barrel of eels, but she's not insane. Or maybe she's differently sane."

My fists clench. "She's trying to create a god. That's plenty insane."

The young man squints at me. "Hyperbole aside, the data I scraped from her forensics lab suggests she's trying to create a conscious technological singularity."

I sneer at him. "She'd call that the same thing."

Sparrow steps forward, putting a hand on my shoulder. "I hate to interrupt, Melody, but none of this helps us. It's all old news."

I feel the reassuring warmth of her hand, taking another breath. "Do you know what she's going to do?"

He blinks. "Rabi? Or Union?"

"Either!" I snarl, making him rock back on his heels.

"Kill me, I presume," he says, swallowing.

I growl. "But why?"

He looks around the bay at Sparrow and Lucy, then back at me. "Because I know too much? Because I was working for your enemy? I was hoping you might tell me. It's your daughter."

"Stop fucking saying that, you oxide-huffing back-birth!" I shout, clenching a fist.

"Melody!" Sparrow's hand on my shoulder holds me back. And maybe keeps me from throwing a punch.

I press a hand to my face, taking a moment to just breathe. "You think Union took over your ship? And fired on Lenny Gruder?"

Diego gives me a nervous nod. "Yes. My ship had a mass-driver. Unregistered, of course," he adds with a shrug. "But she got through my synth partner, and took him and the ship both."

I feel my heart hammering in my chest. "And how do you know it was Union?"

He meets my eye, without hesitation. "Because I met her, and she told me so."