Page 77 of Spark Transform

Despite the horrific chaos and the hijacked ships, the appearance of the “Libertas Core Network” — a name that sounded suspiciously like a media syndicate — proved her theory. Her relentless pressure had finally forced the Ayorinn’s Legacy conspiracy out of the shadows and into the open, where she could destroy it.

#~#

The command chair’s adaptive cushioning did nothing to soothe the ache in Jane’s bones during her fifty-minute nap. She woke with a gasp, her heart racing as fragments of a nightmare — endless seas of snow burying the gleaming spires of Concordance Prime — dissolved into the dim reality of her GCU office. She rubbed her gritty eyes, her nerves twitching random rhythms dictated by the chemical stay-awakes in her system.

The secure percomp on her arm vibrated with a critical alert. It was a highly encrypted memo from CPS Headquarters on Karybdis, flagged strictly for her level of command.

Jane decrypted the file, then scanned the text. The CPS reorganization announcement had spread like a quantum wildfire through the Central Galactic Concordance, igniting unprecedented chaos. Across the galaxy, the vaunted HQ forecasters and morale officers had completely failed to predict the sheer scale of the insubordination. Employees weren’t merely filing formal protests; they were abandoning their posts en masse, slipping through the fingers of the military squads sent to escort them with unexpected speed and efficiency.

The memo concluded with a directive so detached from reality that Jane had to read it twice. HQ exhorted its planetary administrators to “learn from the initial negative response” and ordered them to detain their CPS employees immediately to prevent further desertion.

Jane let loose an impolite snort of derision. Detain them? The Karybdis bureaucrats truly did live in a stellar-fairy dimension all their own. Ridderth Base alone housed nearly twenty thousand active-duty Minder Corps employees. Who exactly was supposed to do the detaining when her own strike teams were evaporating by the hour? And where did HQ expect her to hold them — in nonexistent, stadium-sized jails?

The only thing keeping Ridderth from total anarchy was the century cyclone currently burying the city under meters of snow. But the storm wouldn’t last forever. Once the news leaked that the hijacked MilTCS was causing targeted military ship crashes, the panic would overcome any reluctance to brave the weather. It wouldn’t just be the Minder Corps abandoning their posts. Very likely, regular military personnel would grab their families, take whatever transports they could find, and flee the base in every conceivable direction.

According to the official memo, Jane’s duty was to round up the deserters, manage the chaotic exodus, and salvage the agency’s crumbling infrastructure on Mabingion. It was the safe path. The bureaucratic path that would protect her pension, her flawless century-long record, and her comfortable future with Raneel.

But the High Marshal’s secret, verbal mandate echoed in her drug-jangled mind. End the Ayorinn Legacy.

The more Jane considered the widespread galactic rebellion, the more certain she became. This catastrophic breakdown of order was the Ayorinn cancer metastasizing across the Concordance. The destructive prophecies, seeded and nurtured by Ridderth’s bottom-feeding media companies, had finally broken the system. The conspiracy was real, it was vast, and she was the civilized galaxy’s only hope for annihilating the source.

If she diverted her remaining loyal forces to hunt down the media targets and the Legacy propagators, she would be blatantly ignoring Karybdis’s evacuation orders. HQ would undoubtedly make her the scapegoat for Ridderth’s collapse, effectively torching her career. Managing the exodus was the easy way out. But eradicating the Legacy would save the galaxy from burning.

When weighed against the survival of civilization, she really had no choice at all.

Jane stood, ignoring the sharp twinge in her lower back, and smoothed the lapels of her formal coat. The Citizen Protection Service had no higher calling than preserving the galactic peace, no matter the personal cost. How hollow would her career be if she lacked the courage to rise to that call?

She tapped her earwire to summon Boroslava for more orders.

Chapter 27

Planet: Mabingion • GDAT 3242.228

Samara Akaramides was finally free to be the rogue minder that the CPS was afraid of, but she couldn’t take time to savor it.

The wind punched the small military shuttle sideways for a heart-stopping moment. A ferocious cross-draft threatened to shake it apart.

Dust arose from every hidden crevice and threatened to make her sneeze. Her perfectly tailored but unfamiliar military uniform and mid-height heavy boots chafed in unexpected places. Her short hair felt weird. Despite the integrated snow hood on her regulation long coat, her ears felt naked.

The cargo bags on the shuttle’s floor would have gone flying if she hadn’t secured them with the holdfast. It was easier to ignore the pilot seat wobbling under her because that was normal. Not normal was flying in a whiteout snowstorm.

Especially not normal was letting the shuttle’s AI fly by itself, disconnected. The military traffic control system was glitching, so the AI was using the onboard sensors to collect data. The constantly updating holo displays used brilliant colors to illustrate the chaos outside.

Fear sucked dusty air into her lungs. Twitchy adrenaline urged her to do something.

Muttering a vile oath, she deliberately swiveled her seat away from the tempting controls. Yes, she was free, but she was still a bureaucrat with civilian-level pilot skills. She would never be a heroic Jumper pilot who could out-fly any AI ever built.

The shuttle’s ready-for-the-boneyard appearance belied its capabilities. She’d stumbled across it two years ago in a regular military storage hangar. Its outer skin bore the scars of countless trips to the orbiting space station and back. Its interior had been repurposed so many times that the floor was a bumpy mass of plasma welds. But its control systems and powerful engines could fly rings around prettier shuttles twice its size.

The military had seemingly lost or forgotten it. She abused her CPS access to alter their records to make sure it stayed that way, then added it to her collection of options for getting off the planet. She’d further abused her credentials to upgrade its flight AI to galaxy-class good.

A medical capsule took up most of the passenger space. The shuttle’s stained and dented interior walls made the shiny capsule look like it was slumming.

She shouldn’t have needed it, except Tuzan was breaking their long-standing deal. She’d planned their escape, and he’d go with her when the time came. Except now he wouldn’t.

His refusal reignited her abiding and long-repressed anger. Since she’d been obliterating her bridges anyway, she’d already unleashed vengeance on three deserving coworkers. Between them, they’d betrayed — or framed — dozens of their CPS colleagues and families in exchange for bonus payments. She’d used her carefully hoarded financial access codes to make sure the assholes would be arrested for taking payments from a notorious minder-rights group. They’d be lucky not to be brain-wiped.

And if she could have, she’d have done the same for the very dangerous Jane Pennington-Smythe. According to Samara’s well-placed source, the administrator was the only CPS leader to notice that Legacy quatrains never originated on Mabingion.