He had the experience of a hundred MD’s
riding shotgun in his head…

Paperback: 136 pages; Publisher: Blue Leaf Publications; Official Release Date: 03/01/2010; Language: English; ISBN-10: 1450531040; ISBN-13: 978-1450531047; Trim size: 9″ x 6″.

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ABOUT THIS SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

Deep within the coldly-glowing Curtain Nebula, drifts the Space Control Corps’ greatest installation, “Fortress Unicorn.” Part port-of-call, part battle station, the “Unicorn” was once home to thousands but has seen its personnel reduced to no more than a skeleton crew since the development of abrain technology—a type of cranial implant that allows a single individual to wield the knowledge of an entire civilization. Surviving the cutbacks and still toiling within Unicorn’s cavernous docks are two abrain-equipped contraband dispersal specialists, a quirky, bohemian Rolf Guten and his stoic partner, Virg Markham, whose duties include identifying and sending to auction materials seized by SCC enforcer ships. Yet, as they appraise their greatest find ever—a stolen shipment of priceless sculptures—they are unaware that their very minds have been invaded by a vicious Trojan program. One that will impel them to assist in the most audacious criminal heist in galactic history and set into motion a chain of events that will threaten to rock the Republic to its core.

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EXCERPT

Serviceman Cal Zeroez never heard the quick, uneven footsteps crossing the deck behind him.

He’d been deep inside one of the server farms on SCC station NetCent Two, guiding a load of replacement spintronic memory cores down long aisles of liquid-cooled computational machinery, his cart drifting smoothly on frictionless bearings. The only sounds impinging on his awareness were the soft huff and wheeze of the ventilation systems, the slight hum of the coolant pumps, and the intermittent buzz of a defective lighttube three aisles over—just enough noise to mask the intruders’ approach.

At the end of the row, Cal had stopped briefly to peer out through one of a series of viewports that lined the end of the slowly rotating cylindrical station. He watched the Trader’s Star creep over the rim of the gas giant Iris far below, painting the water-ice cloud tops pink, and the methane regions below a roiling blue-green. Although he’d seen the sight countless times before, Cal still found it breathtaking. The cloud bands shifted subtly with the long Iris seasons. No two dawns were ever exactly alike.

Cal had sighed, thinking of his Leona. How she’d be amazed by this. Photos or stims simply didn’t do it justice.

It was then that they’d come.

Cal’s subconscious had registered a tremor in the rubberized plate beneath his feet. A prickly wave of sensed-presence stood up the hair on the back of his neck. A split-second later he was assaulted by vapors of booze and the kind of stink that only comes from months spent living on a space vessel without working showers.

Strong hands gripped him. Cal felt the soft flesh of his neck pushed inward by something sharp—just gently enough not to draw blood. He looked down and saw a be-runed and baroquely etched bayonet attached to the business end of a magnetic blaster. The fat barrel of the weapon sparkled with carefully glued pink and silver sequins.

Another man, similarly armed, emerged from the end of the next aisle and kicked the cart. It drifted as silently and inexorably as a supercargo in freefall, crossing the floor to crash against the wall between two of the viewports.

“‘ello, Cal,” the man who reeked of gin said, his voice a high tenor which seemed out of place in his large, flabby body. With his underworld accent, he didn’t speak the language, he chopped at it. “Y’know what this is?”

“Y-yes,” he replied.

Picking up his partner’s cue, the other man leered through the grime and stubble. He even had some of his teeth left. “Know what it does?”

The blaster was the shortened version of a magnetic blunderbuss. Its type was unmistakable, even through the bizarre decorations. Cal saw the breach where the pellet cans went in and the inertial compensator that would absorb the magarm’s terrific recoil.

“They do train us you know,” he said.

The intruders laughed raucously. “Yeahs, ‘magine they do. Butchy lotta good it does.”

“What do you want?”

“‘ee gotta job for you.”

Cal thought for a while, biting his lip. He felt shaky, but his mind was clear, analytical. He realized just how improbable this apparent situation really was. Why me?

“What is it?” he said aloud.

As an answer, the second intruder produced a core from inside his dirty jumpsuit. It looked identical to the ones Cal had stacked on his cart: a black cylinder with a thicket of fiber-optic connectors sprouting from one end.

“‘stall this.”

“You want me to—”

“Yeahs!”

Relief. This was something simple, something Cal could do right away. He didn’t need to die.

With a flicker of thought, he decided he would not even wait until he found a machine with a burnout and brought forward the Operating Metaphor of his Space Control Corps standard-issue abrain. Green vectors danced down his optical nerve, arranging
themselves into letters and digits. Cal saw them as floating in space, superimposed over his normal vision. Knowing that these hallucinations originated from bio-chips running off the sugar in his blood didn’t make them seem any less real. Such was the method of interaction with the machine in his head, his constant companion.  This was how he did his job.

Cal thought again, instructing the OM to load a special utility program. He used it to off-line the server next to him and unlock the cabinet’s metal door. Inside were many cores, arranged efficiently in a honeycomb matrix, coolant tubes woven throughout.  NetCent Two’s full name was Space Control Corps Network Central Station Two. The machines here formed part of an immense, distributed warehouse which stored the hundreds of
thousands of programs used by the SCC. These were not computer programs in the traditional sense, however—they were abrain programs.

Trying to keep his hand from shaking, Cal popped the release and slid out one of the topmost cylinders of memory. He took the replacement unit the man with the stubble handed him. It bore a white label with one neatly printed number: “1642.”

Cal recognized the number of the Senate bill which had put into law the principles of the Holt Doctrine, legislation particularly odious to pirates. He had no way of knowing what sort of malicious, viral software the intruders had put in their purloined memory unit,
but some amount of pre-meditation must have gone into it. Still, he felt confident in the Corps’ security measures. There was much redundancy in the Deep Space Net. It spanned a thousand star systems. If the League was a body, the Net was its nervous system,
and the SCC protected all of it, controlled some of it, and it had survived attacks of precisely this nature before.

Just to be on the safe side, Cal thought he’d use his abrain to immediately inform gate control that all data transfers needed to be shut down until the infection was found. To distract the men during the delay this caused, and to calm his own nerves, he started to
chatter.

“So, who you with?”

“What?”

“Who Are You Working For?”

The intruders exchanged a glance. Shrugged. And answered in unison. “Black Bort.”

“Correction. Th’ infamous Black Bort. Masterah tricks, bane ah the O-beron!” bragged the grimy one.

While they were talking, Cal loaded the program for system-wide priority communications, but the light app complained it couldn’t make contact with the rest of the subnet. Dammit. Reboot and try again…meanwhile, keep them going.

“Black Bort.” Cal’s tone contained more than a little incredulity.  “You ever meet him? Y-You know, in the flesh?”

“Naw.”

“So h-how do you know this ‘Black Bort’ who retained you is not just some poseur hijacking the brand? The last sighting of Bort’s operation was out beyond Mandalgove. He’s got no presence in League space anymore, not for at least seven standard. For all we
know, he-he’s dead. You been paid yet?”

Cal popped the power supply off the core he’d removed—the sweat on his hands made this more difficult than usual—and snapped it onto the end of the new one the men had given him.

“Sures we been paid,” shot back the grimy man.

Cal slid the assembled core into the vacant slot, connectors first.  The cables were sucked in with a thwup and automatically fused to the proper contact points. A slight acrid odor drifted out into the still air. Cal closed the cabinet. Momentarily, he considered not putting the machine back on line, but he knew the thugs would notice; the obvious indicator lights on top of the unit would betray him.

Simultaneously, he had restarted his abrain with a new instantiation of the Operating Metaphor. Still no luck sending the alert. Somehow, the local uplink to the station subnet had been shut down.

Cal looked around desperately, but he was the only one working this shift. No one within shouting distance. Very unusual. What if the grimy man had not been deceived by some slick recruiter? For a chilling moment, Cal, who’d sampled some stims on the subject of
Black Bort, considered the implications. Bort back in the League!  But he’s been gone for so long. The most deadly pirate in the history of the profession, the only one ever to take out a fortress. Would HE stoop to retaining this sort of space trash?

As soon as he thought it, Cal knew it was wrong. These men were throwaways, on the periphery of the syndicate. It would be counterproductive to over-train them. And, if Bort was pulling people off the black nets, he was working with the same piss-poor
pool of talent everyone else was.

Cal realized he had but one last card to play.

“You know,” he said, trying to sound casual for no good reason.  “Being convicted of association with a known pirate means the death penalty. You can thank your boss for that. But it can be fixed if you’re willing to talk. Help us nail your contacts, and you’ll only get a few years.”

“Yeahs. As y’sees, ‘ee know all ‘bout Holt,” said the grimy man.  “But we ‘bey pirate law.”

“‘ee ‘vested,” said his companion. “An’ even if we wasn’t, ‘ee wash on anyone, ‘ee dated th’ minute we out. Dated.” He smiled, gloating.  “Jus’ like you…Corpser.”

Then he pulled the trigger. The blaster made a sound that was something in between a whump and a roar, spewing hundreds of lead pellets at high velocity out its wide throat.

Cal’s shredded body slid to the floor, leaving streaks of gore on the cabinets which it had been thrown against. The fat man stooped and pulled out a laser scalpel. With deft movements he made an incision in the back of Cal’s head and removed the abrain implant from his cranium—a dark horseshoe-shaped cartridge about twenty centimeters long.

He tucked the object into his belt.

“Yeahs, th’ soapheads not gonna play back nothin,’” he said with some satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the grimy one had dipped his finger in the warm blood, and—tittering all the while—used it scrawl a crude emblem on the sheet metal: a grinning skull with snakes for hair.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D. T. Mears grew up on the shores of Hood Canal.  After an adolescence filled with computer games and Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, Mears graduated from the University of Washington then went on to complete an internship with IBM.

Later, Mears spent nearly a decade writing numerical modeling software and living and working for a time in the People’s Republic of China, where he experienced the SARS epidemic firsthand.

An avid reader of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, his interests gradually grew to encompass history, theoretical physics and cosmology, philosophy, and the development of mythology and religions.

D. T. Mears currently resides in Western Washington. “The Fourth Casket” is his first novel.

You can find D. T. Mears on the Net at www.DTMears.com

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