Page 76 of Spark Transform

She would like to think Temhathor had come to Mabingion to personally tell her about the CPS’s orders and what they planned to do with her command and staff. Surely the CPS High Marshal would have given her that much courtesy. By the time the official notice arrived an hour ago, rumors had spread faster than light that nearly a quarter of the CPS bases across the galaxy were under similar orders. Unlikely, but fears overpowered facts.

Jane hadn’t had time to chase the truth. Within minutes of the official notice, multiple credible threat warnings indicated the Ridderth military base was a hot target. She had immediately activated the GCU she’d commandeered several ten-days before on contingency, never imagining she’d actually need it.

Then the reports started rolling in. Instead of continuing with the critical operation, CPS employees were abandoning their assignments, presumably to go home and tell their families. All CPS offices were affected, but doubly so in Ridderth, which had the largest base by far.

She was dismayed by how many of her hand-picked Minder Corps staff left their raid teams. Fully two-thirds of her strike force had vanished. In the meantime, the few that stayed on task were unable to keep the Ridderth police in line. With superior military hardware in their hands and no one to stop them, the unleashed police were making the snow-besieged city look like a post-meteor strike. She had reluctantly decided to ignore their excesses as long as they included her targets. The needs of the galaxy superseded the structural integrity of one corrupt city if it destroyed Ayorinn’s Legacy.

She stood and walked unsteadily around her seen-better-days desk to sit in the fully adaptive and cushioned command chair. The stress was getting to her, and thanks to the Jumper chems, she hadn’t slept in seventy-six hours. But she knew the job was dangerous when she took responsibility for the real mission from the High Marshal. After the operation was over, she planned to take Raneel on a long, well-deserved vacation to someplace warm and safe, where they wouldn’t need a contingent of thirty all-hours guards protecting them.

She applied an anti-nausea patch to her wrist, then took in several calming deep breaths before checking her reporting feeds again. Disturbingly, there was an uptick in airborne military vehicle accidents in Ridderth, more than she would have expected during a snowstorm. She sent a query to an agent to check military accident data for previous major weather events and compare it to this one.

Someone, perhaps the very competent Boroslava, had initiated the orders to close the other four spaceports to interstellar traffic. Jane was very glad she’d told her patient, kind, and very loyal aide enough of the plan to carry on the eradication mission if something prevented Jane from continuing. Sadly, Jane couldn’t ever tell her beloved wife Raneel, who was equally patient, kind, and loyal, but was a civilian.

Boroslava stepped into the office, her usually impassive face tight with suppressed tension. Jane didn’t need to be a minder to read the bad news written across her senior aide’s posture.

“Administrator,” Boroslava said softly. “In its complete and utter lack of wisdom, the Mabingion planetary operations office chose this exact day and time to take the Ridderth continental traffic control system offline for a cryptogon upgrade.”

Idiots. Jane pressed her trembling fingers against her throbbing temples. “Tell them to halt and roll back to the previous version immediately.”

“I already tried,” Boroslava replied. “They claim stopping now would keep the system offline even longer. Apparently, no one explicitly ordered them to delay, and their supervisor assumed the storm would lighten the traffic load. The planetary TCS is already slug-slow and failing. The Ridderth city TCS is handling the overflow for the moment, but we all know how glitchy it is. It won’t last.”

Jane straightened her spine, forcing past her bone-deep exhaustion. “Use my authority to order the Ridderth Military Base to take over. Their MilTCS is the largest and best on the planet.”

“That requires a manual handoff of all traffic, one vehicle at a time,” Boroslava cautioned. “The systems are entirely incompatible, and base staffing is currently below bare-bones.”

“Then order the military to conscript emergency staffing and get the job done,” Jane snapped, her patience fraying. “Do it before more accidents litter the city with wreckage.”

Boroslava hesitated, her gaze dropping to the half-empty tube of protein paste on the desk. “Administrator, do you need proper food? Or at least a nutrient drink? You’re pushing yourself into overload. The operation depends on your leadership, but you need a break.”

“Thank you for your concern, Subcommander, but I will be fine,” Jane said, smoothing her expression into a mask of polite determination. “The mission is too important to pause now.”

With a crisp nod, Boroslava exited. Jane turned her attention back to the glowing data streams on her console, intending to review the latest detention figures. The text blurred into meaningless geometric shapes. The aggressive rumble of the GCU’s engines wrapped around her like a heavy blanket. She blinked, trying to force her eyes to focus...

“Administrator.” Jane jolted awake in the plush command chair, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs. Boroslava stood in the doorway, her expression grim. The wall display said thirty minutes had passed. “We need you in the war room,” Boroslava said, using the staff’s dramatic moniker for the vehicle’s cramped conference space. “It’s critical.”

Jane pushed herself up, ignoring the sickening sway of the floor, and followed her aide down the narrow corridor. Inside the war room, her operations staff were crowded around the central holo-table, their faces pale in the blue light.

Linder, the team’s lead informatics specialist, looked up as she entered. “Administrator, someone has breached the military TCS. Their supposedly impenetrable system is entirely compromised. The military has lost all control of air traffic, both military and civilian. Worse, the attackers exploited the same vulnerability to take over every other local MilTCS node on the planet.”

Before Jane could fully process the catastrophic failure of military-grade security, Boroslava projected a text document over the table. “A minder rights group calling themselves the ‘Libertas Core Network’ just published a manifesto claiming credit. It’s long and rambling. Basically, they claim the gods of the galaxy are furious with the CPS, and that pain is all our agency understands. They declare they are exacting old-style, eye-for-an-eye retribution. In this case, a ship for an eye.” Boroslava paused, her voice tightening. “The manifesto ends with this: Swing the comet in the eye of the storm to swallow the dark flooded city.”

“That last sentence,” Linder interjected, adjusting his collar nervously, “is a jumbled quote from one of the more recent Ayorinn Legacy quatrains.”

A white-hot spike of fury pierced Jane’s meticulously maintained control. The rotting Legacy again. She snatched her heavy ceramic water mug from the table and hurled it at the wall. It shattered with a violent crack, raining sharp shards and water over the credenza below.

Silence shocked the room. The staff stared at her, wide-eyed and paralyzed, as if she were an unexploded munition.

Jane closed her eyes, appalled by her own unprecedented outburst. She took a deep, shuddering breath, reached into her pocket, and slapped a fresh pain patch onto her neck alongside another stay-awake chem. “My apologies,” she said, her voice dropping back to its customary, frigid calm. “Let us focus on the tasks at hand.”

She moved to the head of the table, rapidly recalculating the operational parameters. “Linader, order all CPS informatics security specialists to drop whatever they are doing. Their sole priority is to stop the attackers — kill them if you have to — and regain control of the MilTCS. Boroslava, get that manifesto text suppressed across the entire planet. Then contact the Mabingion Space Station. Use my authority to order them to allow docking, but absolutely refuse any and all launch requests.”

A chilling realization settled over Jane. With the MilTCS hijacked, every military ship currently in the air was a potential unguided weapon. “Order all military ships to be grounded immediately for safety,” she commanded. It was a bitter tradeoff. Grounding the ships meant she lost her air support for the ongoing raids, and fleeing minders would be impossible to track from the sky. “Commandeer regular military ground vehicles to assist our raid teams. We will simply have to bottle the fugitives up within the Mabingion system.” She let her tone imply she was pivoting to hunt these new violent activists; only she and Boroslava knew the true targets were the journalists and the Ayorinn propagators.

She turned back to her aide. “One last order. Use my authorization to send orders to the incoming military fleet that was dispatched to ferry the Minder Corps off-planet. Instruct them to stay at the Mabingion transit jump point and form a blockade. Nothing leaves this system. I will clear it with CPS HQ.”

Boroslava nodded, her stiff posture easing marginally. “Understood, Administrator. Everything is in hand here. Perhaps you should return to your office and finish your… report in peace. We will call you if we need you.”

Jane hesitated, recognizing the tactful cover for her unintended nap. The pounding in her head hadn’t entirely subsided, but she was starting to see an unexpected outcome from the attack. She gave Boroslava a slight nod, then left the war room and returned to her office to send a request to the CPS High Marshal to enforce her order for a blockade of the Mabingion system. It was critical to contain Ayorinn cancer at its source.