Fractured Simulacra: A Military Cyberpunk Thriller (Sol Arbiter Book 6) by J.N. Chaney & Jia Shen

Author:J.N. Chaney & Jia Shen [Chaney, J.N. & Shen, Jia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Variant Publications
Published: 2024-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

13

I dreamt I was sinking into the cold dark of the Atlantic.

There was no lead-in, nothing to place me there logically, I just was. Falling like a stone, my augmented body too dense to float, staring at the fading light of the sky as it receded farther and farther into the distance above me. As the water squeezed my body and slowly pushed breath from my lungs, I thought about how similar yet so different it was from the void of space. Both the sea and stars were inhospitable—arguably malicious—realms unfit for human life. Both required precision engineering and considerable effort to traverse in any real sense. But Humanity had attempted to conquer the oceans since before the invention of farming, and even now that we’d touched the most distant bodies in the Sol System and built homes on icy Jovian moons, the ocean depths were still an alien frontier. As I rapidly sank to crush depth, I thought about my final moments in the crash on Europa. It was dark then too, but the milky way had been a studded veil of light and color against the black void. The sea's interminable darkness was pure absence with no reprieve. Dense and full of matter, but far more empty.

I was jarred awake when the alarm sounded, a sequence of quiet tones that could be better described as a digital whisper. Three short pulses, I counted, blinking my head clear in the dark. Direct contact.

So even after sending Andrea away, we had been found. Was the data sled itself also being tracked? Maybe this entire mission was a setup and the intel that brought us here was planted. Or had we been made on the way to Thetagen and they’d swapped out the real sled for something that only served to lead them to us after the fact.

Admittedly, the nanites and Andrea had left me paranoid, and I’d slept in my field gear in anticipation of something else going wrong. Paranoia proved right is prescience, as she’d say, and I had only to pull the cowl of my thermoptic gear over my head with one hand and unlock the weapons locker with the other. The locker had slots for four SMGs inside, with one already missing. I took a weapon, checked the magazine, and raced up the stairs.

I pushed open the bulkhead door and entered the body of the ship.

“Andrew?” I called out, and got no answer.

I ran over to the shaft of moonlight streaming down from the deck hatch and slung my weapon over one shoulder. I cloaked, ascended the ladder, then peered out over the lip of the opening. In the middle distance on the port side, I could make out another ship against the blue-black night. It was a silhouette of darkness to even my augmented eyesight, a shadow cutting through the water without a single light. Andrew was crouched down against the starboard gunwale with the missing SMG in his hands.

How bad is it? I subvocalized.

It’s not. Pirates.

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