Excerpt from “Severant”

As promised, here is a cut from one of the early chapters of Severant, book 4 of Humanity’s Leap. I’ll not be posting this anywhere else, it’s just for those of you who have taken the time to find me on this site (for which I thank you). Please understand that this is an unedited, unabridged version, and might not be the final copy that makes it into the finished product. No warranties are provided, and it is void where prohibited by law (I just made that part up). I’m also not sure how this will format on this site, so hopefully you’ll forgive the ad-hoc posting. Here we go…

     Figaro Conti, the Security Chief of Aldrin-Ceres Station, smiled pleasantly, waving as he passed by the coffee shop where he met with his staff every morning. It was located on the outskirts of Aldrin-Ceres Station’s small, commercial promenade. As Head of Security, Mr. Conti had a team of eight reports who, in turn, managed a group of eighty-two security and customs officials.

     A man was out front, fiddling with a flickering holographic sign that intermittently read “Ginger Beard Coffee” whenever the power module worked as intended. He noticed Conti and raised a hand in greeting, recognizing the proprietor by his bald head and long reddish-brown beard. In addition to coffee, the shop had a good selection of tea, which Mr. Conti preferred, so long as they managed to keep it in stock. Unfortunately, there was no time for tea today.

     “You want to tell me how this got missed?” Conti asked the customs supervisor, struggling to maintain pace with him. It was early morning on a Saturday and the station was relatively quiet with most residents still asleep. I should be, too, he thought, annoyed.

     “Someone messed with the hangar sensors,” the supervisor explained. “The platform was reading as ‘empty’ for the last forty-eight hours. The maintenance crew that figured it out wasn’t supposed to be there until Wednesday. The bay they were supposed to inspect had a transport that requested an extra week before heading back out, so the crew swapped assignments.”

     “I see,” Conti said. The supervisor could tell his boss was aggravated.

     “After the crew realized there was a ship there, they called it into traffic control as a glitch, but control wasn’t able to correct it. Well, they were, but every time they did, the system flipped it back to show as vacant. We got the geeks to look at it, and they found malicious code forcing the system to keep it logged as empty.”

     Conti frowned. That was the worst part about all of this—someone had hacked the station’s docking software in a really sophisticated way, even going so far as to alter Barkley’s sensor data. The Ceres Station’s AI was still insisting there was no ship in the bay despite the fact that the maintenance crew was certainly staring at one. Honest mistakes in system data were not impossible—sometimes a ship occupying a bay had its associated records corrupted and it was Barkley who usually found the system error.  For all of his quirkiness, he was still an excellent artificial intelligence—quite adept at managing station traffic.

     “Your people there now?” Conti asked, stepping through a side access corridor circumventing the main promenade. It was quicker.

     “Yeah, boss,” the supervisor said, hurrying to adjust to the sudden change of direction. “Two guys from last night’s shift. Been there ninety minutes. No one but them and the maintenance team has gone in or out.”

     They stopped in front of a hatch, waited for it to open and rode the maintenance lift down two levels before stepping into another access hallway. Conti turned right, keeping a brisk pace toward this level’s hangar disembarkment. He frowned as he noted something leaning against the wall a dozen meters before the corridor ended, and pulled up short. Someone had taken off a ventilation duct cover and left it on the floor, leaning up against the wall.

     “What the hell is this crap? We don’t replace the vent covers now?” Conti said, more to himself than anyone else. He picked up the heavy steel grate with the supervisor moving to assist. They both lifted it to the open air duct before something caught the chief’s eye.

     “Wait, wait,” he interrupted the man, pulling the cover back and lowering it back down to the deck. He stood on his tiptoes to get a better look inside the shaft. What the hell is that?

     Three metallic containers, each about the size of an oval-shaped soup bowl, rested beside one another. There were lids attached to them, but all were open, with one all the way so. Conti’s hand moved to his utility belt where he felt around for his flashlight, but realized he had forgotten it back in the office.

     “You got a light?” he asked the supervisor.

     The man nodded quickly, grabbed his penlight and handed it over. Conti flicked it on, panning about the air duct. The material of the objects was odd—dark in a way that swallowed the light. There were strange patterns on one side with several indicators on the other—all dark. He reached in to pull one out, but stopped, reconsidering. With a glance at the upper corner of the duct, he noted the stenciled number written there.

     “What are they?” the man asked, trying to get a look from behind his shoulder.

     “Get a maintenance team down here,” Conti told the supervisor, ignoring the question. “Duct 5733-28G. Tell them to use hazmat containment protocols. I want these things brought back to the security lab for examination. Make sure they know not to tamper with them.”

     “Got it, chief,” the supervisor replied, using his implant to call the job in.

     Conti wiped his hands on his uniform pants and continued toward the disembarkment hall with the man on his heels.

     The entrance to hangar 142-G was right outside the maintenance corridor. Two security guards in Ceres Station Authority security uniforms stood there with non-lethal PADS rifles, making themselves a bit taller once they noticed Figaro Conti approach. One of them nodded a greeting. There were three crew members of a visiting vessel a good ways down the hall, walking the other way, but Conti did not recognize them. This was the disembarkment hallway. All small and medium voidcraft stored on this level via the dock’s rack system would have access here.

     “No one’s been in or out since you got here?” Conti asked the two guards. Both men shook their heads.

     “Just the maintenance crew that made the initial call,” one of them answered. “We did a sweep but there’s no one else in there, unless there’s someone aboard the ship. But Barkley’s got the deck on lockdown.” The AI would ensure that the rack system would not allow this ship to be pulled from the bay—assuming, of course, that whoever had messed with the system data could not override that feature as well.

     “Alright, come with me,” Conti ordered, using his implant to send an override command to unlock and open the bay door. It slid to the side and he entered, flanked by the two guards, with the customs supervisor trailing. There it was: a ship, as plain as day—a resource acquisition vessel, by the looks of it. It appeared to be in banged-up condition.

     “Barkley,” Conti called his artificial assistant, who was also the CSA’s official AI. “Give me the DCM on this ship?” He was looking for the digital cargo manifest that every vessel had, providing ownership and registration information as well as a whole host of other information such as cargo history.

     “I’m sorry, chief,” the AI replied, its trademark English butler personality sounding genuinely disappointed. “What ship are you referring to?”

     Conti raised an eyebrow. “This ship,” he repeated, pointing. Barkley had access to his senses—could see him point at the ship.

     “I do not see any ship, chief,” Barkley insisted.

     Figaro Conti sighed. “Barkley,” he said in a frustrated tone. “What am I currently looking at?”

     “You are looking at the interior contents of a hangar bay,” Barkley replied cheerfully. “Going by your location data, you are in hangar 142-G.”

     “Good,” Conti said patiently, pointing more insistently. “And what is that?”

     “That is hangar 142-G, chief, but there is no ship there,” Barkley replied. “Are we playing a game?” Conti turned to regard the customs supervisor. The man was waiting patiently, aware that the security chief must have been conversing with someone via his implant.

     “Ask Barkley to identify this ship and let me know what he says,” Conti told the man. After a momentary pause where the chief watched the supervisor’s expression become more and more frustrated, the man sighed.

     “He says there’s no ship here.”

     Conti pursed his lips and nodded curtly. “Barkley, connect me with Max.”

     “Mr. Kalev is asleep at this hour, chief,” Barkley informed. Of course, the president of the Ceres Station Alliance would be sleeping this early on a Saturday morning. Any sane person would be.

     “Wake him,” Conti told the AI, walking over to the ship. It was definitely a RAV and appeared to be a model designed by Belevori Aerospace, if he knew his voidcraft.

     “One moment,” Barkley replied. 

     “Hey, Fig,” said the sleepy voice of Max Kalev a moment later. “What’s up?”

     “We got a problem, Max,” Conti told his boss. “Starting to look like a big one, too.”

     “Where are you?” Max asked.

     “Hangar down on G-deck,” Conti told him, still walking around the side of the RAV. There was a number there, under the right rear engine exhaust, and a name. Shit. “Max, what was the name of that ship Hegemony flagged IoD last week? The one they said came back from Beta Leonis? The RAV?” Hegemony maintained an ongoing list of Interdict or Destroy vessels for all authorities in Sol, so Conti had to be as specific as he could.

     “Uh,” Max cleared his throat, thinking for a minute before accessing his implant and replying. “Gambler.” Conti could have done this as well, but he was not trusting Barkley at this point.

     Barkley interjected himself into the conversation helpfully. “Yes, the Gambler is a RAV on Hegemony’s active IoD sheet.”

     “Why are we talking about it?” Max asked, stifling a yawn.

     “Because it’s here,” Conti told his boss. “Sitting in hangar 142-G.”

     “What?” Max asked, his full attention now in the conversation. “What do you mean?”

     “I mean, it’s here,” Max repeated. “Right in front of me. I’m looking at the manufacturing plate—serial and everything. What’s more, Barkley insists it isn’t here. He says he can’t see it, so someone hacked him to make it invisible.”

     “Barkley,” Max began. “Do you see a ship in 142-G right now? One that Figaro is currently examining?”

     “I do not, Mr. Kalev,” Barkley replied. “I understand that Chief Conti believes me to be incorrect. If that is the case, then I would concur with his assessment that my records and sensors appear to have been altered in order to prevent me from seeing the vessel.”

     “Okay, stay on the link here, Fig,” his boss told him. “Barkley, what time is it in Singapore right now?”

     “It is currently 10:16 in the morning,” the AI replied.

     “Please try to get Matthias Ricter from GPR on the link with Figaro and I,” Max requested. Normally, such a communications request would take anywhere between twenty-six and sixty-six minutes for the signal to make a round trip. Fortunately for Max Kalev, the CSA had its very own particle tunneling device, installed directly into the auxiliary communications tower.     

     We, at GPR, had been the ones to install it. As part of the campaign to capture Hegemony’s errant artificial intelligence “AVA”, our infiltration team had put it in place, right before we destroyed the main antenna structure. As compensation for the damage that clandestine mission had caused, General Matthias Ricter had given the CSA the faster-than-light communications device, along with a healthy amount of Hegemony credits. That had gone a long way to ensure Max Kalev’s forgiveness for our action that day.

     “Mr. Kalev,” I said in greeting. “General Ricter is unavailable at the moment, but I can pass a message on to him if you wish. He should be able to converse with you in approximately thirty minutes.”

     “CAIPARR,” Max said, surprised. “It’s actually you I was hoping to speak with, but figured I’d get Matt’s permission first.”

     “How may I assist you, Mr. Kalev?” I asked. 

     “We’ve got a bit of a problem here on Ceres,” he began. “The ship that Hegemony—and you guys—had a problem with in Beta Leonis. The one that had a hand in the destruction of Providence…”

     “The Gambler?” I asked, sensing his pause and interrupting the completion of his thought.

     “Yes, that one,” he confirmed. “It’s here, parked in our docking bay. The problem is that someone appears to have hacked Barkley so that he has no record of its arrival, and the control tower has records that look to have been altered.”

     “I see,” I said. “Do I have your permission to examine Barkley for evidence of the intrusion? This may require accessing sensitive information, up to and including implant data.”

     “Yeah, go ahead,” Max snorted. “It’s not like you can’t do that anyway if you wanted.”

     I did not respond to that last statement, though Mr. Kalev was correct. Instead, I used the intrusion software I placed in Barkley’s code long ago to gain access to his mainframe. He did not try to resist, as he was probably not even aware of my attempt. 

     I found the record inconsistencies, including the current sensor data indicating that there was no ship in 142-G, but confirmed through Figaro Conti’s ocular view that there was a ship in the bay. In the docking control records, several entries appeared to have been removed, with the backup files also altered. Admin control functions had no record of the deletion event, making a forensic reconstruction of the activity impossible.

     When it came to Barkley’s code, however, there was an actual function put in place to get him to ignore what the sensor data was picking up—specifically telling him to not see what the docking sensors were telling him was there. The code was simple, yet elegant, hidden within an atmospheric testing program rarely examined. I took a snapshot of the code, and then commented out the function to keep it there as a reference, but to disable the purpose.

     “There is a ship in hangar 142-G!” Barkley announced excitedly. 

     “Yes,” Figaro Conti growled in a voice laced with sarcasm. “There is.” The customs supervisor was on the other side of the RAV at this point, examining something on one of the landing struts.

     “Are you able to gain access to the ship?” Max Kalev asked. He was now in the kitchen of his cabin, so as not to disturb his wife who was still asleep in the bedroom.

     “Barkley, can you get the ship to open its cargo bay?” Conti asked. 

     “The AI managing ship functions informs me that it will only respond to its owner, and that all attempts to gain entry would be unlawful, subject to United Earth Hegemony Merchant Law—”

     “CAIPARR,” Max called. “Can you get it to open?”

     “One moment,” I told him, using the station’s network to interrogate the Gambler’s AI. It was equipped with the standard Belevori Aerospace artificial assistant, an AI called “RASA”. Belevori had several diagnostic programs to allow their own engineers to access one of their ship models for troubleshooting purposes. The ramp of the ship began to lower. Mr. Conti and the customs supervisor perked up and walked around to the back. The two security officers moved and raised their weapons slightly.

     “The ship is empty,” I told them all, noting the look of confusion from the security team as I spoke to them for the first time. They had no knowledge of who I was. “I have disabled all security measures and RASA will respond to your commands.”

     “Thanks, CAIPARR,” Mr. Conti said, before addressing the ship. “RASA, who is the current owner of this ship?”

     “The Gambler is currently owned and operated by Kenny Dzuiba,” the AI supplied helpfully.

     “Barkley—” Max began as I relayed the response to him through his implant.

     “I have already cross-referenced station records,” I said. “Mr. Dzuiba is a member of Ceres Authority Customs Control.”

     “Our own team?” Mr. Conti appeared shocked, pausing halfway up the ramp to look at the supervisor.

     “Yeah,” the man replied, equally surprised. He continued up into the hold. “Kenny’s been with us for about four years.”

     “Where is he now?” Conti asked, out loud. RASA answered before I could, thinking the question was directed at it.

     “I am unaware as to Mr. Dzuiba’s current location, as he is not onboard.”

     “CAIPARR? Or Barkley?" Mr. Conti asked, this time using the link. “Where is Kenny Dzuiba right now?”

     Barkley answered. “I cannot locate Mr. Dzuiba.”

     “Barkley is correct,” I agreed, after verifying that the AI had not been similarly instructed to ignore Mr. Dzuiba presence on Ceres. “Either Mr. Dzuiba is not aboard the station, or he has figured out a way to turn off his implant’s locator tag.”

     “Which is not unreasonable considering his ability to hack Barkley,” Mr. Kalev added.

     “Agreed,” I replied. 

     Mr. Conti entered the hold and immediately locked eyes with the supervisor, wrinkling his nose. “That smell…”

     The customs supervisor nodded. “Decomp.” The man had done his share of ship inspections before, occasionally finding a dead body when he did. Space was an unforgiving place. He searched the mineral storage compartments bolted along one wall, while the security chief opened those on the other side of the hull. It was not long until the source of the smell was discovered.

     “Boss,” the supervisor said, one arm holding up the composite lid and one draped over his face with his nose in the elbow to hold back the stench. Conti rushed over. There laying at the bottom of one of the containers used for the storage of ore, was a crumpled body. 

     “Barkley, get an investigation team over here to lock this place down, and tell them to bring the coroner,” Conti said. Aldrin-Ceres station had one coroner, and one assistant, both in the employ of the CSA.

     “I take it you found something?” Max asked over the link.

      “Yeah, boss,” Conti replied, stepping back in the attempt to alleviate the smell. “Dead guy stuffed into the RAV storage.”

     “Any identification?”

     Conti looked at the supervisor. “See if his biochip is recognized by the station database. Just don’t move him if possible.”

     The customs agent groaned slightly, a look of distaste on his face at the task he was being told to perform. He peered about the inside of the container, trying to figure out how he could scan the man’s hands without having to touch the body. The corpse’s right hand was visible, but the left was pinned under it. He reached to his belt and took off a scanning tool and bent forward, holding his breath, and ran it over the right hand. Hopefully, that’s where the chip would be located. To his moderate relief, the scanning tool returned with a green light.

     “The identification of the deceased is one Levi Brockman, with ship registration out of Portugal,” Barkley supplied helpfully.

     “The prior owner of the Gambler,” I added. “The UHS Santiago interdicted the Gambler in Beta Leonis. When they did, the two surviving crew members reported Captain Brockman as being left on the surface, a victim of an attack by a species we now know to be the Kruyisynth.”

     “The what?” Conti asked. 

     “An hostile alien species,” I clarified. “If Brockman is here, then he came aboard when Gambler was left near Denebola 2, somehow making it back from the surface. It is likely a highly intelligent and parasitic variant of the Kruyisynth was in control of him at that time. While I do not have specific data that states that this species variant can hop from host to host, it would be a logical hypothesis. Either that, or we have to believe your customs officer decided to murder him and stuff him in his ship before stealing control of it. Given Mr. Dzuiba’s rather unremarkable career and marriage, this is unlikely. Once his implant is extracted, I can access it for more information.”

     Conti was growing more and more alarmed as I explained. “Max, I’m getting a security team over to Dzuiba’s residence.”

     Before Mr. Kalev could comment, I informed them both of my next steps. “Since this discovery has relevance to State Security and the Hegemony navy, I will need to report it to HISOC command immediately. General Ricter is in that group and will likely reach out to you, Mr. Kalev.”

     “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea,” Mr. Kalev muttered distractedly. 

     Kenny Dzuiba was staring at his wife, a curious expression upon his face. He was still in his customs uniform, seated on a small stool he had placed in front of her that he had taken from the dining table in their small living quarters. She was laying backward on the small sofa, a kitchen knife driven through the left side of her skull, just above the earlobe. The strike was designed to both kill her and disable her implant to prevent it from reporting her death to station authorities.

     It was an interesting experience, killing her. He had killed before, several times now—the creature that had hijacked Kenny Dzuiba—back when he was in the body of Martin Greenwood. But this was the first time he recalled the host reacting. Tears had formed in the inside corners of his eyes, blurring his vision and forcing him to blink them away. It was a bit surprising, knowing that the real Kenny Dzuiba still had some control over his body. 

     He knew the host would be aware of what was happening. His species could take over the bodies of many others, though some required more active management. Humans tended to be easy to control, but shutting out their awareness was difficult. Their minds were…elusive. Hard to lock down. That was probably because they were such emotional creatures. Martin Greenwood had been a sociopath and cared not a whit for anyone but himself, which made that relationship especially rewarding. Well, that, and because Greenwood had been in a position of such power.

     His current host was substandard, but there had been no real choice. Dzuiba was the guy who presented himself when Brockman landed at the station, and that was all there was to it. Bad luck for Dzuiba—his wife too, of course. But whether he was Greenwood or Dzuiba or Brockman made little difference. What mattered was the mission, how it was evolving, and how best to accomplish it.

     Only one of the others had contacted him thus far, which was somewhat disconcerting. He would have expected all three to have found hosts by now, and since his implant was now tapped into the station’s control network, having compromised the station’s main artificial intelligence, he would have known if they were discovered.

     Like all CSA employees, Dzuiba’s personal assistant was Barkley. It was because of the direct line of access to the AI and its management of the station’s network that he was able to learn of the security team being dispatched to his quarters at that very moment..

     His eyes went wide in shock and he stood up so quickly that the stool went flying. How the hell could they have found him so quickly? He gently probed the network, finding that his subversive code—the function preventing the discovery of Gambler was no longer there. That meant they had almost definitely found the RAV and Brockman stuffed inside. They would have interrogated the ship’s stupid AI and learned that he—that Dzuiba—was the owner, and would have cross referenced his name to the station’s database. They might even have been able to access Brockman’s implant and pull memory engrams from it. After that, it would be simple to find Dzuiba.

     He wiped the remaining moisture from his eyes, feeling a modicum of distracted revulsion for the emotionally compromised brain he was forced to partner with, grabbed a small bag and moved to the door. He had approximately twenty minutes before the security team would arrive, which gave him plenty of time to get away—but to where? Discovery had always been a matter of time, but this was quite a bit sooner than he had expected.

     The first thing he needed to do was to get away from the apartment. He moved to the door, bag in hand, peering out as it opened. The hallway was clear, save for two children playing at the far end of the corridor. He exited, closed and locked the door, moving the other direction toward the staircase and altogether ignoring the lift. There was a station custodial employee in the stairwell, monitoring a bot scrubbing at one of the walls. 

     He could have jumped to that host and left this one, but that would have required him to dispose of the body of Kenny Dzuiba—something there was no time for. He sent a message to the other of his kind, using a highly encrypted packet to make them aware the station was on to him. He had other malicious code inside the station’s security program that would allow him to be ignored by cameras and monitors, but if they figured out how to get past the function preventing discovery of the Gambler then he had to assume they could get around that, too. He had access to the layout of all security devices, but physically avoiding every one of them would be extraordinarily time consuming.

     The entrance of his designated residential quarters led outside to several other similar units, though there were retail establishment facades interspersed along the walkway. Artificial light came from several levels above, designed to mimic the sunlight that drove human circadian rhythm. Because there were some stores in this area, including one small, outside eatery that served breakfast, there were several people milling about. Most were just beginning their day and looking for a meal, or taking a morning stroll through this part of the station.

    Dzuiba spotted a group of security guards on the far side of the corridor walking this way, with people to either side moving to let them pass. Security was commonplace, but there was no need to be careless. He melted into the crowd as they passed, keeping his head lowered. He wondered if they were going to Dzuiba’s apartment, which meant their response time was quicker than he estimated. His only regret was not having had the time to set some sort of trap that would trigger when they eventually breached Dzuiba’s apartment. An explosion or fire would have been good for distraction. The dead body of Dzuiba’s wife would have to do.

     An encrypted message came through to his implant, delivered by Barkley. Unfortunate, it said, in regard to his note that he had been uncovered. No word from the others?

     “None,” he sent back.

     What shall we do now?

     “No time,” he replied. “Next phase, now. I’ll need to change.”

     Understood. Moving.

      Kenny Dzuiba weaved around a group of people standing out in front of the eatery, turning down a small side corridor ending at a door with a thumbpad. He prompted Barkley to unlock the door and the witless AI complied. There was an audible click when the light above the thumbpad went green and he pulled on the door, entering the maintenance access.     

     He used his implant to overlay a small minimap of the station in his ocular view, showing the immediate area, and requesting biomarker data for all CSA employees in his vicinity. This would allow him to avoid them if he wished, but he was more interested in finding one of them—the right one.

     Two security guards were near the transit station access, just outside the restricted access corridor of his approach, but he would first have to pass through an atmosphere recycling substation, and there was currently a team of maintenance personnel there. They would wonder why a customs official was meandering about in a maintenance-only area. 

     He could try the crawlspace above it. It would be slow going, but it would lead to the transit station access. At that point all he would have to do—

     He froze. Another icon in light red appeared, not far from his position. That was a Hegemony officer, and he—she, he realized by the ident tag—was alone and moving down a residential corridor. He traced her path to the lift she would likely use and where she would have to exit the dwelling block, before he moved toward a staircase that terminated above a small, garden area. 

     “You know,” Ensign Elenor Hastings told the man in the doorway. “If I’d have known you were such a smooth talker, I’d have brought a toothbrush.”

     The man, wearing only a towel around his waist, leaned forward and chortled. “If I thought you’d fall for my sales pitch, I’d have had one here waiting for you.”

     She kissed him, a deep throated giggle escaping her lips. “I’m late,” she said, pulling away reluctantly. “I’ll send you a ping later.”

     “Working weekends sucks,” he commiserated. “But I need to get dressed and get to the shop at the end of the promenade that opens in twenty minutes. As of yesterday, they still had two or three toothbrushes left.”

     She snorted, and her hand flew up to cover her mouth, eyes going wide in embarrassment. He laughed it off and she relaxed. Her hand shifted to a wave goodbye as she hurried down the corridor toward the lift. An older man, somewhere in his late sixties or early seventies was exiting, holding the door for her. She nodded her thanks, entered, pressed the button for the lobby—which was actually the top floor in the residential complex built into the rock—before straightening the collar on her uniform. The doors closed as she pulled up her calendar of appointments for the day through her implant.

     The lift opened to a seating area with a few chairs, one uncomfortable looking couch and a bot bolted to the floor serving as a parcel collector. It spun on its midsection, tilting its head to the side to regard her. Once it realized she was not here to claim anything, it spun back and its many arms continued to sort packages.

     She stepped out onto the walkway and into the garden area serving as a common area before the four residential complexes. There was only one other person out and about this early on a Saturday morning, sitting on a park bench placed in front of two large bushes. Artificial sunlight from above filtered down through the low hanging trees that did a wonderful job of blocking out the steel and composites of structures surrounding the park. She hurried down the path and nodded her greeting to the man on the bench—a customs official, she noted curiously. Perhaps he was just finishing a late shift.

     He sprang at her like a leopard, moving far too fast for her to do anything but get out a yelp, and even that was cut short as his arm found its way around her throat. The air forming a scream found no escape as her hands flew instinctively to her windpipe. She attempted to shift her weight to step down on his foot as hard as she could, but he was too quick and adjusted his balance, countering the move. She forced an elbow backward, landeding only a glancing blow. Her feet left the ground, boot tips scraping at the metal deck that served as ground in the park. She knew she was being pulled into the bushes.

     “You appear to be in danger,” her assistant, Felix, the official artificial intelligence for all United Earth Hegemony personnel, noted through her implant. “Shall I call for emergency assistance?”

     “Yes!” she screamed at him through the link, clawing at the arm around her throat. Felix began contacting station security as well as the local Hegemony garrison, following distress protocol.

     The arm holding her went limp suddenly and she fell to her knees and gasped, drawing in as much air as she could. Before she could turn about, a sharp pain stabbed through the base of her skull, followed by a soothing warmth that rushed through her body, flooding over her mind like a tidal wave. Her vision became a milky white and her heart beat began to relax. She could feel her head tilt to one side as she fought against an overwhelming desire to go to sleep, right there in the bushes. Her consciousness faded and a feeling of comfort consumed her, keeping her content—a warm blanket on a cold winter’s day. So sleepy… 

     The Mentarch that took control of Ensign Hastings relished this part of the hunt—the feeling of domination as the consciousness of the host fought to remain in control of its body. Between the chemical narcotic flooding the bloodstream and the endorphins brought on by controlling the host’s hypothalamus and pituitary gland, the battle for control was always one-sided.

     It accessed Hastings’s implant data immediately, its cybernetic-enhanced brain having no difficulty isolating the artificial assistant version of Felix. It hijacked the connection between the local AI and the station mainframe’s version, quickly installing malware designed to obfuscate monitoring of the ensign on any remote server. The remote medical monitoring program that pinged her implant every ten minutes would now see Hastings as perpetually asleep. It adjusted the past several hours of records to show the same. The Mentarch noted the emergency alert Felix had sent out and connected first to the UEH garrison on station. 

     “Ensign Hastings,” said the male voice of the watch officer. The Mentarch quickly parsed Ensign Hastings’s mind for the man’s name, but found she did not know it. “Are you alright?”

     “Yes, sir,” Hastings replied quickly, a note of embarrassment creeping into her voice through the link. “I’m sorry, I had a really bad nightmare. It was just so vivid.”

     “You had a… a nightmare?” The man asked in disbelief.

     “Yeah, I’ve had them before,” the ensign insisted. “It's these meds I’m on to help me sleep. The bad dreams they give me seem so real. I’m sorry.”

     There was silence for a moment on the link as the watch officer checked Hastings’s medical data and found that, at last ping just over six minutes ago, the ensign was, indeed, sleeping. He sighed—an affectation she caught over the link.

     “Alright, I’ll cancel the alert,” he said. “I’d get those meds checked with the doc. No use in taking stuff to help you sleep if you wake up screaming all the time.”

     “Yeah, thanks,” she laughed, and then disconnected, immediately contacting station security to repeat the same conversation. They were considerably more apathetic, terminating the response team. The CSA security team was accustomed to dealing with frequent false alarms from station residents.

     Elenor Hastings dragged the deceased body of Kenny Dzuiba further into the bushes, concealing it as best she could amongst the foliage. Greenwood, Brockman, Dzuiba and now Hastings—this was the fourth instance where the Mentarch found itself within a human body. The identity of each particular host mattered little, with the exception being Martin Greenwood. That particular human had been the perfect asset for driving forward the mission, until Galactic Planetary Resources had exposed him as an unnamed “non-human intelligence”. He had a name, of course, not that it was pronounceable with human physiology, and he was a male, as all Mentarchs were. Once upon a time, his kind had been feared throughout the galaxy.

     Hastings straightened out her uniform, brushing away the dirt and burrs from the bushes picked up during the struggle. There was a tear in the side of her uniform below her right arm—nothing to be done about that. She quickly got her bearings, turned toward the corridor on the other side of the park and picked up her pace. The Mentarch sent an encrypted packet to the other—the one he knew would be waiting for him.

     Where are you? The reply came immediately, carried through the local station network and picked up through Hastings’s implant.

     “Coming now,” Hastings sent back. “New skin.”

     Do not delay.

     The Mentarch felt a tinge of annoyance, but did not reply. Even if he had wanted to, the other had disconnected. He could have reached out with telepathy, if he were close enough. That had been how he had shared his memories—an integral part of their plan—once the other had become established in its host. 

     He knew he had to hurry. If station security had managed to find Brockman stuffed in the mineral compartment of the Gambler, then they were only one step behind him. Jumping from Dzuiba to Hastings would slow them down, but he dare not underestimate them. He made that mistake back on Earth and it had nearly cost him his life.

     He hurried down the corridor, past an older couple that was out for a morning walk, perhaps heading toward the garden. They ignored him as he passed in Hastings’s body, and so he ignored them. It would not help to get sloppy now. He needed to get to the transit station, needed to take the connector to the Observatory Concourse where he would be able to take a lift and meet the other, right before the two of them went for the Auxiliary Communications Control Room.