[Avia]
Zach grimaced as a white-uniformed man roughly twisted Zach's arms behind his back and applied handcuffs. Then pushed down, he joined Spade, also cuffed, kneeling side-by-side on the floor.
"You can't do this!" Spade shouted, baring teeth. "We have rights--" A hard backhand strike to his face ended the protest.
Gideon pressed a weapon to Spade's head. "We have the guns, so we can do this. If you were smart, you would shut up."
Spade glared at Gideon, lips tight, but said no more.
"Avia, I know you are watching," Gideon said in an even voice, facing the camera. "Surrender to me, and Zachery lives. If not, he dies." To make his point, Gideon pressed a gun barrel against Zach's head. "Well?"
Zach firmed his lips and shook his head.
"No," I muttered to myself as I slid down the wall. "Please, no."
Drawing knees to my chest, tears traced my cheeks. A big part of me wanted to run to Zach, to save him from a threat that was all my fault. But based on memories of Gideon while serving in the Cyber Assault Force, I knew brutal deception was his way, and he could not be trusted. Surrendering myself now would surely doom us both.
So, I didn't reply to his challenge, hoping the uncertainty of silence would buy me some time. My gut knotted as tense moments dragged on.
"Do you think I wouldn't kill him, Avia?"
Still, I did not reply, defying every fiber of my being.
"Consider this, then," Gideon said.
Swinging his gun around, he pulled the trigger, and a sharp airy report reverberated within the studio. Sucking in a final breath, Spade's eyes blurred. Then he folded to the floor, face down within a widening pool of crimson.
"You bastard!" Zach snarled, jumping up to his feet.
But one of Gideon's goons, a tall burly man with a snake tattoo around his neck, punched Zach hard in the gut, once and again. Zach cried out, slumping down again to his knees, and bending over, wheezed and gagged.
"I'm sorry, Zach," I whispered, hugging myself as tears became rivers. "I'm so sorry..."
"You have one hour, Avia!" Gideon shouted. "Then he dies." He raised his gun toward the camera and pulled the trigger. Then the video feed went blank.
'Anger, properly focused, was a powerful force,' my old mentor Flint once advised. Zach told me to flee, but I'll be damned if I leave him behind. Flinging water from my face, I allowed hot anger to surge through me, tightening both sinew and resolve.
I had one hour.
Running through the crowds, and not caring who I jostled, I made my way to Alpha Port, where I determined Gideon docked his ship. He anticipated I might try to flee in Zach's ship, so docking clamps had already been applied to the Freebird at Gamma Port, and two white-uniformed men guarded it, and I hoped he would not expect me to go near his ship.
Ducking within a worker's locker room off the port, fortunately devoid of other people, I scanned the locker placards for a female name. I hacked the biometric lock to open the door, then grabbed the work clothes inside — a bit over-sized for my body, but they would do. Once changed into grimy blue overalls and stuffing my dark hair under a hard hat, I threw three Goober Gummies candies into my mouth, not noticing the mish-mash of flavors. For the serious coding I planned on short notice, I would need the sugar to power my cybernetics.
Gideon's starship, the Vega Venture, was a sleek corporate shuttle with artistic rounded lines sometimes used by Omni-Corp, but without the logo. The docking scheduler showed it arrived two Earth-days before Zach and I did. Somehow, Gideon knew we would come here.
Overriding a ship AI was difficult, but fortunately, I was exceptionally good at that. But it could not be done remotely — I needed a direct wired connection. Also, for my plan to work, no one else could know of my incursion. Hence, my dock worker ruse.
Carrying a stolen data-coder tablet, I walked toward the Vega Venture like I belonged, weaving between stacked crates and various equipment. Other workers, mostly moving cargo with motorized sleds, paid me no heed. Once I reached the open docking tunnel that connected to the ship, I plugged the tablet into a data port, giving me the direct AI connection I needed.
"What are you doing there?" challenged a woman in a white uniform standing near the tunnel. She drew down thin eyebrows and placed a hand on a holstered stunner-gun.
"There's a power distribution issue," I answered, raising the tablet and pointing. "It might be caused by faulty connections here." For good measure, I accessed the power grid switches with my cybernetics and blinked nearby lights. "I need to do some diagnostics."
The guard cast her eyes up at the flickering lights, then said, "Do what you need to do, but make it quick."
"Will do."
Fortunately, the ship didn't have as much cyber security as a warship, and within a few seconds, I had bypassed two layers of firewalls to reach the AI core. To the AI, my intrusion was just routine hardware diagnostics. Now to lay the trap.
After flipping through standard AI coding like pages in an old-fashioned book, I found the right spot. I inserted a previously coded trojan virus into the core, leaving it inactive for now, but executable with a specific keyword. Once triggered, the virus would replace all command profiles, overriding AI overwatch control to another user — namely, Zach. If Gideon was half as smart as I thought he was, I won't have a chance to trigger it myself.
Next, I coded in defensive measures into the robotic maintenance controls to automatically protect Zach and me, designating anyone else as potential threats. This was tricky to code, since it would rely on the threat assessment of an only moderately sophisticated AI. It might make mistakes.
The guard returned, hovering over me with arms crossed. "Hurry it up. I told you to make it quick," she spat.
I flickered the lights again. "It was a more difficult problem than I thought. I am almost done."
Finally, I wiped my tracks clean, resetting the access log. If anyone, or the AI itself, discovered my modifications... Well, it was game over.
"There. Got it," I said to the guard with a genuine smile, unhooking the data tablet. "Thanks for your patience."
The guard maintained her blank, disdainful expression and tilted her head, silently ordering me to leave. I happily complied.
I've never been one for religion. But as I returned to the locker room, I said a silent prayer to the loving Creator God that Maya professed while at Arcadia. Because if this didn't work, if I messed up the coding, my life would be over, and probably Zach's, too.
While changing back into my t-shirt and black leggings, I checked my internal clock and blew out a breath — still four minutes until Gideon's imposed deadline.
Via my cybernetics, I sent a message to Gideon's com-viewer: Show me Zach is still okay.
Within a few moments, Gideon, gripping the arm of a handcuffed Zach, stepped into view of a passageway security camera. My heart fluttered a bit.
I sent another message: Meet me by your ship.
Sitting cross-legged on a small, empty plas-steel crate, waiting for Gideon was the longest fifteen minutes of my life. Doubts and what-ifs haunted my mind like malevolent ghosts, but there was no turning back now. I watched Zach, Gideon, and his four minions walk the entire way via the station security cameras.
As they entered Alpha Dock through an oversized hatch, I rose to meet them. The minions surrounded me while Gideon held on to Zach's arm. For an extended moment we just glared at each other, silent among the normal dock working clamor.
Zach shook his head.
I rushed up to Zach, embracing him while nuzzling my head into his shoulder. But being handcuffed, he could not return the embrace, only lean his head against mine. "Avia, no," he muttered.
True, my heart desired this embrace, but more importantly, I needed to deliver a message. "Keyword, Goober Gummies," I whispered in his ear.
With Gideon's nod, a white-uniformed woman pulled me away from the embrace, tightly gripping my arm.
"How did you know we would come here?" I asked Gideon.
"We didn't," he replied. "But that blogger, Spade, was on our list of possible contacts, so I had him watched. When he announced a big story was coming, I knew we had you."
"I didn't detect any threat."
Gideon puffed up in pride. "And you wouldn't. We kept surveillance low-tech, human eyes only, given your Aberrant abilities. And by the way, we recovered those stolen corporate documents you gave Spade. You never really had a chance, Avia."
"So, what happens now?"
Gideon's smile was as cold as deep space. "I deliver you to Darius Welde. There is data in your pretty little head he wants back."
Water blurred my focus as I peered into Zach's eyes. "And Zach?" I asked, shifting back to Gideon.
"He will not be harmed as long as you cooperate."
I dipped my head in resignation. But I also knew that once Darius got what he wanted, both Zach and I would become expendable. My scheme had to work. It had to...
"Very well," I said.
The woman beside me pressed a pneumatic syringe against my neck and pulled the trigger. With a hiss and a momentary sting, a sedative invaded my body. This was an expected development.
I gazed again into Zach's moist eyes, which projected both fear and disappointment, cutting into my heart. As a dizzying darkness overcame me, I mouthed the words I should have said sooner: 'I love you.'