Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (70 page)

She turned towards the Triton settlement,
seven kilometres away, and started running between two piles of
debris. There were no people out in the open, only frameworks, and
she took two down the moment she broke out into the open, strafing
as she passed.

Alice dropped and slid under a fallen
girder, rolled onto her feet and lurched towards the yellow marker
designating the spot where her prized rifle was last spotted.
“Target zero, in my quadrant!” shouted a framework as she passed a
thick hull plate. The tactical computer only detected him once he
was right beside her - he was using the plating as shelter and she
had to wonder whether he knew it would stop her system from
detecting him.

She jumped to her left, taking a hit on her
hip. Alice’s thick armoured vacsuit registered the strike and
advised her that the suit would only take another two hits in the
same place before offering no protection. Her tactical system
warned her that there were several more frameworks coming out of
the wreck behind her. Her foot caught on some rubble and sent her
sprawling, holding onto her rifle for dear life.

Flipping onto her back, she took aim at the
one who called her ‘Target Zero’ and fired. He ducked behind a
heavy strut jutting out of the ground as though he saw her
retaliation coming well in advance. Three more targets drew her
fire. She missed the second but shot the other two who were taking
positions behind a leaning landing pylon.

She rolled onto her feet and sprinted
towards a large, warped sensor dish as shots pecked at her
surroundings. Her cover made creaking and pinging sounds as several
super-heated bolts of energy struck it. She could feel her outer
vacsuit repairing itself, and in that moment she could see her comm
system’s tactical map in her mind. The next moment it was gone.
Alice ran up a broad cargo ramp into the main hold of an old cargo
ship. “Wait, what was that special thinky-seeing thing?”

There was a hatch open on the other side of
the cargo hold; she could see the light of day coming in. With a
grace that was as natural as walking, she leapt up and caught a
support beam then used her momentum to swing over the rough pile of
crates between her and the hatch opposite her. A hop and a roll got
her over the rest of the debris and she came out the other
side.

“Alice, you have a neural node made to
communicate mentally,” Ayan said over her comm. The sound of a fire
fight was in the background of her message. “I’ve looked you up and
gotten more details. I don’t know how you’re with us, but you might
still have a device like that, and if you’re seeing status from
your equipment, then that’s going to be helpful. Concentrate and
you’ll get it.”

“Might be helpful? Yeah, just a bit,” Alice
said as she dropped from a scaffold that, inexplicably, was still
intact along the side of the old cargo ship. The two frameworks she
dropped behind only had time to half-turn before she riddled them
with rounds. Her tactical screen populated with more information,
including paths that would lead her directly to the Triton
settlement. There were hundreds of frameworks moving and firing
towards their location, and a few trying to close in on her. “You
expect me to concentrate with all this going on? Oh, and thanks for
the uplink.”

“You’re welcome, we’re getting a good amount
of information from you too, but it’s time for you to come in. Our
shields are down so you’ll have an unobstructed run straight in if
you can get past the frameworks,” Ayan said, the end of her
statement was punctuated by her rifle cycling up and firing.

“That simple, just come on over,” Alice
said.

“You just covered a kilometre, leapt twice
your height and dropped seven metres without injuring yourself. You
can make it, and we want you here,” Ayan said.

“Of course you do, now that you’re under
siege,” Alice said, running up the side of a ruined shuttle and
leaping onto a segment of broken hull. Several soldiers tried to
fire at her while she was in mid-air, but missed, and she increased
her pace as she found good cover and a flat surface.

“Alice,” Oz said. She immediately liked the
sound of his voice, as though there was some subconscious memory of
him that indicated that he was trustworthy. “We’re suspicious
because we saw you die, but we want you here. We want you to be who
you say you are. Ayan and I never got a chance to really meet you,
and I’d like to.”

She leapt off the edge of the broken hull
into the open air, peeking down. Vertigo gripped her as she looked
nineteen metres down at a collection of sharp, wrecked bits of
metal and junk. At the last instant she looked back up to her
target and missed her footing. Alice fell forward, dropping her
rifle onto the hull in front of her and sliding off until she
turned the tackiness of her vacsuit up and it stuck to the bare
hull, leaving her legs dangling over the edge. Scrambling up she
said, “That woulda hurt.” Picking up her rifle, Alice ran on into a
labyrinth of abandoned crew cabins and corridors that would
eventually lead her to a curve in the ship and a hatchway closer to
the ground. The overturned bunks, stripped consoles, and dark
hallways were eerie. “Ships are for living in, best way to make
them look alive,” she muttered to herself. “Dead ships are
spooky.”

“What was that?” Oz asked. “It came through
so fast it barely sounded like words.”

Alice realized then that she didn’t say it
verbally, but mentally. “I think I connected to something,” she
said. “One sec.” She ducked behind a twisted bulkhead and checked
her tactical screen. There were frameworks trying to follow her,
and there could be more waiting at her exit point. There was no way
of knowing, not even the Triton Settlement’s sensors could see that
side of the ship.

Alice made an effort to ignore everything
around her. “I just need a moment, a moment of peace,” she
said.

A memory invaded her senses. She was leaning
on a railing, watching a group of children walking below. One of
them looked up at her and waved hesitantly. Alice gave her a big
smile and waved back. The little one was immediately all atwitter,
anxiously telling a little blonde friend at her side about the
stranger above as they were walked down into the mass transit
tunnel.

“I wish I had a childhood,” she recalled
telling Lewis using her neural link. It was so easy, treating the
device just like it was a finger or a hand. No one thought about
how a hand did what it did when it grasped an object, they just did
it. The neural connection in her memories was the same, and when
she tried to apply that information to herself she could see all
the electronic objects she could touch, the workings of her comm
unit, and she understood exactly how it worked with the systems she
used to hack the Freeground ship. “They’re all part of the same
sense,” she said aloud. “I think I got it, Oz.”

She couldn’t get past the mental image of
the little girl waving at her though, and in a flash she realized
why. “Oh, no way,” she said to herself, commanding her vacsuit
headgear to retract and bringing up a holographic mirror image of
her face. “Rounder face, baby-fat, not so much as a little laugh
line around the eyes,” she paused a moment and checked her
physiological scan. “Oh no, I’m a teenager! And I’m short!”

Alice’s tactical system warned her that
there were frameworks entering the ship lower down, and she sealed
her suit back up, then moved on, rushing towards them. “Guess I
wanted to have a childhood so bad that this framework rig
compromised. That might explain why I can’t remember a whole ton of
stuff. Love having a tactical system feeding my head though,” she
said. Alice simply knew how much ammunition her weapon had, what
the sensors on it, her vacsuit, and every other system she had were
saying, and seeing her enemies in her mind’s eye. She was at one
with her equipment, and it only made her faster, more confident.
The inventory system made her aware of what she had in every
pocket, where those things were, and what their status was.

She pulled a shield puck from one of her
pockets and configured it to her purpose with a thought. There were
three frameworks waiting for her through the next hatch, standing
between her and the exit. She held the shield emitter out in front
of her and dropped through the hatch, firing at one framework while
blocking the other two, one of which said, “We have eyes on Target
Zero, engaging!”

The first framework soldier was blasted to
pieces. The other two couldn’t fire past her shield, so she rushed
them with it between her and their deadly fire. Knocking the first
over, she continued to collide into the other while firing at the
first as she passed it. The third screamed as the energy barrier
burned its face. Her suit connected to the shield emitter, keeping
it charged with reserve power. She spun and held the barrel of her
rifle up to the last framework’s head for a moment before pulling
the trigger.

Her sensors told her there were eighteen
framework soldiers waiting behind cover for her to emerge from the
ship.

“Wait for air support,” Oz said. “We’re
seeing resistance but we should be able to get a couple of fighters
out there soon.”

Alice slung her rifle, watching the first
framework she killed upon entering the cabin slowly begin to
regenerate. She affixed the shield emitter to her left forearm and
pulled ten thin grenades from her hip pocket. She had two left
there and a cartridge of thirty-five in her pack. “I’ve got this,
keep your fighters for defence.”

Crouching low behind the energy barrier, she
ran as fast as she could towards the hatch. The barrier ran along
the ground in front of her, humming and crackling as it adjusted to
her gait. The first shots struck the shield the moment she made it
to the hatch, but she’d caught many of them by surprise, and most
missed while she rushed the first trio, who were taking cover
behind an overturned antigravity truck.

She leapt onto the truck’s cab then dropped
down on top of one of them, leaving a grenade behind as she
sprinted to the next group. Her suit registered a thirty six
hundred degree spike behind her as the grenade exploded. She
increased the timing on the rest of the grenades, relieved that she
was just far enough from the first explosion for her heavy vacsuit
to deflect the shrapnel.

Alice flung a pair of grenades towards a
group of three to her far right and mentally sent a detonation
signal using her mind’s data connection as she rushed another
group. The group of five were smarter than the rest. The other
frameworks were finding better cover as she moved, while the five
she charged directly broke cover and intensified their fire. Alice
tossed the two grenades in their direction as her energy shield ran
out of power, and she jumped for the nearest cover.

Her suit absorbed several shots before the
grenades went off, incinerating the five of them. She discarded the
burnt-out shield emitter, unslung her rifle, and ran from the
scene, limping as her right leg regenerated a deep burn. A second
later she was running down a fresh path of loose gravel between two
wrecks as she watched the frameworks try to catch up. She emerged
into a large crater and stopped, jumping behind cover. “Oz, you’re
going to want to send people down here, right now. There are real
soldiers in a pit I just found, and a big ship. They took my
XO-99.”

“Your XO-99?” Oz asked.

“My gun, they took my favourite gun. I was
tracking it so I could get it back before I headed to your camp,”
Alice said. Her heart skipped a beat and she was filled with rage
as she saw Grabriel Meunez and Lister Hampon emerge from the large
main hatch in the side of the top of the ship. She verified with
her suit’s sensors and nodded. “How are they down here?”

“There’s a major segment missing from the
Leviathan, the Order of Eden command ship. They must have come down
right after the Carthan carrier crashed.”

Alice looked at the rows of soldiers
gathering around the outside of the ship. They lined up black boxes
she recognized from the drop pods and worked on setting up
equipment. She peeked out from behind the wreckage and zoomed in on
Gabriel Meunez. His hair was longer, and he was dressed in ornate
robes. There was no one in the galaxy she hated more. She couldn’t
help but remember him, and how he pursued her for years. “I see
you, bastard.”

He looked directly at her over the one
hundred fifty-six metre distance. “I can see you too,” he said
through her neural communicator. “There’s something new, something
wonderful and fresh about you.”

“Get out of my mind, sicko,” she replied
through her mental node.

“That was such an emotional response, I only
heard static,” Meunez replied. “You must have missed me. If I knew
you were alive, I would have never stopped searching for you. I
love you, Alice. I ache when I can’t feel you connected to me.”

His message was so loud in her head, his
voice was so clear, she retched involuntarily then hurriedly
retrieved the clip of grenades from her pack and slapped it into
her rifle, setting all its systems to maximum. She calmed her mind
and suppressed her disgust. “What can you give me if I join you?”
Alice asked.

“Control,” Meunez replied, his response
slightly garbled by emotional static.

Her tactical systems told her two squads of
soldiers were moving around the sides of the crater, carefully
creeping towards her. She could also feel exactly where Meunez was.
Hampon was a mystery, invisible to her.

“What kind of control?” Alice managed with
some clarity.

“Control over your destiny. You can live
your life however you like, wherever you want.”

“You’d have control over me,” Alice said.
“How can you call that freedom?”

“I love you, Alice,” he replied. “I’m
overjoyed that you’re still alive.”