The elevator stopped, opening onto the deck. We hurried past the other inmates to the door leading to the capsule that would deliver us back to Kasper’s surface. A guardbot waited near the entrance. A green light scanned the codes on our necks and the door slid open, letting us in.

  “Do you think you’ve still got the magic?” I asked as we walked down the corridor to the waiting capsule.

  Matt cracked his knuckles. “Yeah, I think I’ve still got what it takes.”

  We boarded the capsule. As soon as we sat down, the inner airlock opened and we began our descent.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sergeant Grist waited for us at the other end of the space elevator as the capsule settled onto the floor. A pair of prison security guards flanked him, armed and armored, ready to protect him if we caused any trouble. We stepped out of the capsule and stopped in front of him. I followed Matt’s lead, standing at attention as best I could.

  “Stang. Hondo,” Grist said. “Thanks for coming down.”

  “Because we had a choice?” I asked.

  “You’re a convict, son. Your choices are over. Follow me.” He turned and headed for the door.

  “What, no bomb on the back of our necks?” I asked.

  “Ben,” Matt warned softly. “Cool it.”

  “Don’t need ‘em,” Grist said. “Plasma works too. It actually hurts more. Blowing up your head is instant.” He looked over his shoulder, grinning.

  “He seems to be in a good mood,” I whispered as we fell in behind him, a few feet back. “Nicer to us, at least.”

  “Probably because he knows Alter killed the security guard,” Matt answered. “And we didn’t really do anything that bad, except for stealing the confidential slab.”

  “But we didn’t steal it.”

  “He doesn’t know that.”

  “Maybe if we can convince him, we won’t have to go back up.”

  “Are you going to leave Shaq there? Zar?”

  I winced. “I don’t want to. But I also don’t want to die. If this is our only chance, we can always come back for them. At least he likes Quasar, and he doesn’t even seem to mind being incarcerated. I kind of think he’s enjoying it since everyone is afraid of him. And she’ll end up with a bodyguard and someone to talk to. Not a terrible trade.”

  “Maybe that’s your tumor talking. We don’t leave anyone behind.”

  “What are you two going on about?” Grist said, stopping and turning around.

  “Uh, nothing,” I replied. “Just trying to figure out what you might want to question us about.”

  “We’ll get to that shortly. Shut up until then.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said.

  We trailed Grist out of the capsule room and through another door, down a hallway to a door on the left, another corridor to another left-hand door. He pushed it open and waved us in.

  “Shit,” I said. “Are you going to torture us?”

  The room was mostly empty, save for three chairs with a metal table in the center. A shiny steel orb the size of a softball sat on the table. It had a piece of dark reddish glass in the middle that reminded me of the indent on the Death Star.

  “We don’t need to torture you,” Grist said, pointing at the chairs. “Sit.”

  We circled the table and sat down. Grist sat opposite us. The door closed. The thunk of a heavy lock followed.

  Grist picked up the orb and did something to turn it on. Removing his hand, it floated in place between us.

  “Cool,” I said. “What is it?”

  “This is a TRTH-40. We call it a truther. It’ll monitor you while I ask the questions and let me know if you lie about anything.”

  “Oh. I’m not really much of a fan of that.”

  “Why? Do you have problems telling the truth?”

  “Not generally.”

  “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

  “I assume you got the report back from forensics?” Matt said.

  “You assume correctly. Two days ago.”

  “And you know we didn’t kill the security guard.”

  “It certainly doesn’t seem that way. Especially because we have witnesses who saw you on the concourse at the estimated time of her death. And the truther didn’t just have a fit right there.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “If you have floating polygraphs, why didn’t you just use it when you arrested us? Why send us to the satellite for a week first?”

  “You were too agitated right after your arrest for the truther’s scans to be wholly accurate. What’s a polygraph?”

  I decided to test the orb. “It’s a machine I invented. It floats around and tries to zap you with electricity, and you have to deflect it. It helps hone your reflexes.”

  The orb floated over to me and zapped me with electricity.

  “Ow!” I complained, rubbing the spot on my arm where it hit. “You could have warned me.”

  “Why? I figured you’d want to test the truther out.”

  “It works.”

  “It does,” Grist agreed. “What’s a polygraph?”

  “It’s a machine similar to the truther. But less advanced.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you have a harder question?”

  “Sure. Where is Enigma now?”

  I fought not to smile, assuming the question meant they hadn’t caught up to Alter. “Have you checked our ship?”

  “Your ship is at the impound waiting for the results of our investigation before going to auction.” He reached into his pocket, withdrawing the phone he had confiscated from us earlier. “That’s one of the reasons you’re here. I need you to disable the security so we can get inside.”

  “You moved it to the impound without lowering the shields?”

  “Oh, we used a disruptor on the shields to shut them down, but the door’s still locked. We don’t like selling damaged merchandise when we can avoid it, and since I have you to turn it off…” He passed the phone to Matt. “Let me ask you again. Where is Enigma now?”

  “I wish I knew,” I replied.

  Grist seemed surprised when the truther didn’t move. “Okay. Who’s the stiff you were standing over when security caught up to you in the tunnels, and why did you kill him?”

  “I don’t know who he was, and I didn’t kill him.”

  He glanced at the truther again, confused that my answer hadn’t activated it. “You’re telling me the truth?”

  “That’s what you brought the machine for.”

  He thought about it. “Who killed him, then?”

  “I don’t know.” The truther zapped me in the opposite arm, causing me to wince. “Shit. Fine, his name is Avelus Keep.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He sold us our starship on Caprum.”

  “Why was he on Kasper?”

  “He was after the slab.”

  “The one you stole.”

  “We didn’t steal it,” Matt said, shoving his phone back at Grist.

  “Who did?” Grist asked.

  “I don’t know. We picked it up on Cestus and brought it here. The dead guy was the courier meant to deliver it to someone else.”

  Grist stared at the truther. “The slab came from Kasper. Why would someone have you smuggle it back to Kasper?”

  “We’d love to know that, too,” I said.

  “Do you know where Keep is now?”

  “No. He set me up to be blamed for killing the courier and took off.”

  “Interesting. So you were running a dark exchange job?”

  “No,” Matt said. The truther floated laterally and zapped him. “Damn, that does hurt.”

  “It was a rhetorical question,” Grist said. “If you were working for Enigma, it had to be dark ops. Do you have any idea where Enigma might have gone?”

  “No,” I replied, cursing when the truther zapped me. “Damn it. Fine. She may be on board our ship. Or she may have gone off with Keep.”

  “She knows Keep?”

  “Yeah. They might be working together. It’s possible they set us up here.”

  Grist laughed. “I’d say there’s more than a fifty percent chance of that. Which makes a lot of sense why Enigma hired you now.”

  His statement caused me to slump in my chair. “Yeah. Because we’re idiots.”

  “Young and naive,” Grist said. He held up the phone. “Well, now that I have this we can make sure Enigma isn’t on your ship. Otherwise, she’s probably still on Persephon. We haven’t had any reports of anyone matching her description leaving the planet.”

  I held my tongue. I definitely wasn’t going to tell him they could never match her. She could be anyone.

  Grist picked off the truther from the air and switched it off, placing it back on the table and getting to his feet. “Well, that’s all I had for you. I appreciate your cooperation.”

  “What about our sentence?” I asked. “You know we didn’t kill anyone. You know we didn’t steal the slab.”

  “This interview will be disseminated by the adjudicator. They’ll update their sentencing recommendations based on it.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “For the recommendation? I don’t know. The office is pretty backed up. Six months?”

  “Six months?” I shouted, jumping to my feet. “You do remember I told you I was sick, right? I’m not going to survive another six weeks, nevermind six months.” I circled the table, going at him. “I can’t get through a day without getting dizzy, and my hand won’t stop shaking.”

  “Back up,” Grist ordered.

  “Why? What the hell do I have to live for?” I threw myself at him, throwing another hard right hook. Grist caught it easily, twisting it over and putting pressure on my arm at a bad angle.

  “Ben!” Matt shouted, moving in behind Grist.

  They must have had a camera or other observational means because Matt had just grabbed Grist from behind when the two guards burst in. One grabbed Matt and threw him across the room. The other grabbed me.

  “I’m going to die up there!” I shouted.

  “That was a stupid thing to do,” Grist said calmly. “The entire interview will go to the adjudicator. You just cost yourself a few years. Take them back to the capsule and send them back up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The first guard picked Matt up off the floor. They each held one of us by the arm, leading us roughly back the way we had come and dumping us into the capsule.

  The doors slid closed and it began the journey back to the prison satellite.

  “Well?” I asked Matt, rubbing at my arm, sore from Grist’s grab.

  He pulled up the leg of his coveralls and dug into his boot. I expected him to pull out Grist’s slab. He held his phone in his hand instead.. “I was mostly worried he would realize it was gone before we started going up. I don’t think they can reverse the process now.”

  “That’s the wrong device,” I said. “We can’t hack the network with that.”

  “One, how do you know you can’t? Two, why would we need to hack the network? Do the words ‘remote control’ mean anything to you?”

  “Do the words ‘limited range’ mean anything to you?” I asked back.

  His face went tight. “Oh. Shit.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “Grist’s going to flip his lid when he realizes I took the phone,” Matt said, still holding the device out to me. “I thought you could remote Head Case up to the satellite and break us out.”

  “How would I do that?” I replied. “Even if I could get the ship up here, we need to dock or at least have spacesuits to leave. We needed Grist’s security slab.”

  “What if you got to the capsule before it reached the station?”

  “That’s like trying to catch a baseball with a butterfly net.”

  “I’m sorry. I was trying to help.”

  “I know. Well, what’s the worst that can happen? They keep us locked up for life? We were already on that train.” I opened the device, bypassing the interface to enter the command line. I had messed around with the software enough, I knew it had some functionality only available with direct code. “We may still have a chance.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Well, Zar said the networked slabs from security aren’t likely to be hardened because who’s ever going to get their hands on one to try to hack it, right?”

  “Yes?” Matt guessed, not really up to speed on how software worked behind the scenes.

  “So, what if their network isn’t hardened either?” I said. “Either not password protected at all, or defended by a weak password.”

  “Okay, I get that part.”

  “If that’s the case, we might be able to get our phone onto their network. If we can do that, we might be able to cause some trouble.”

  “But can we escape?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have a chance. That’s all we can hope for.”

  It was harder to type on the phone than the pilot console, but I managed to locate my way into the networking settings on the device. I didn’t expect the capsule to have connectivity, but I ran a scan anyway. As expected, it came back without a hit.

  “How close do we need to get to the station to pick up their signal?” Matt asked.

  “I have no idea. I’m going to keep scanning until we get something.”

  I ran the scan a dozen more times as the elevator ascended. As soon as we broke through the atmosphere, a network address finally appeared on the device.

  “It’s good for us that the future hasn’t changed basic networking protocols all that much,” I said. “And that they originated on Earth.”

  The address reminded me of IPv6, a series of letters and numbers separated by colons. Trying to connect to it, I was greeted with a password request.

  “It’s password protected,” I told Matt. “Let’s hope they’re lazy.” Fortunately, I had read an article on the top two hundred most common passwords only a few weeks before we met Keep. A lot of them remained fresh in my mind, and I set about entering them, starting with the simplest:

  password

  It didn’t work, suggesting they had at least some small degree of network security aptitude. I moved on:

  123456

  No go. I continued from there to:

  123456789

  Nothing. Maybe it wouldn’t be as easy as I thought. The capsule began its deceleration, the satellite looming overhead. If they were using slightly more advanced security, they would ask for a capital letter, number, and special character:

  Password123456!

  “Yes!” I shouted, pumping my fist when the command line continued past the password prompt. “I’m in.”

  “Seriously?” Matt said, getting excited.

  “I know, right? Twenty-five hundred years in the future in a galaxy far away, and they still don’t follow simple networking security guidelines.”

  “What now?”

  “I’m running a scan for other devices on the network.” The capsule reached the outer airlock, which opened ahead of it just as the scan finished. A list of hundreds of addresses came back, each one labeled with abbreviations like AD-01 and DC-1105 and either a one or a zero. “There are so many.” My eyes traveled the list, pausing when I reached a more familiar abbreviation. PSS-142. “Oh, shit. The guardbots are on the network.” I scrolled the list, noticing that AD-04 was currently set to 1. The rest of the AD devices were zero. Could it be? I waited for the capsule to advance to the inner airlock, the aperture spinning closed and sealing beneath it. I ran the scan again before the inner hatch opened, confirming my hunch when I saw AD-04 was now set to 0. “All of the hatches are on the network too.”

  Could I change which state the hatches were in?

  I closed my eyes, trying to remember the commands I had learned while on Head Case. Alter hadn’t been happy when I’d inadvertently shut off gravity while she was fixing a shorted out conduit.

  The inner airlock opened, and I ran the scan again to check the label. AD-05, status 1. The capsule moved up to the end of the line and we stood up.

  The blast door at the end of the corridor began sliding open, even though we weren’t anywhere near it.

  “I don’t think that’s good news,” Matt said, pointing down the dimly lit passageway.

  I ran the scan again, flicking the list to identify the door in question. BD-1101. It was the only door whose status had changed. That had to be it. I smacked my forehead with my free hand.

  “What are you doing?” Matt asked.

  “Trying to remember the command to edit the door state,” I replied. “So I can close it again.”

  The shape of a guardbot became visible on the other side of the opening blast door.

  “Better make it fast,” Matt said. “He doesn’t look happy.”

  “It’s a machine, how can it look unhappy?” I asked. “I’m trying.”

  I typed in a command, struggling to memorize the door’s ip address. Wrong. I tried again. Wrong.

  “Ben,” Matt said in warning.

  “I know,” I hissed back.

  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

  The guardbot passed through the opening doors just before I finished typing. The doors immediately started sliding closed behind it.

  “You missed,” Matt said.

  “I see that, thanks,” I replied. “Can you see its identifier?”

  The guardbot stomped toward us, still a fair distance away. Matt squinted, trying to make out its ID. “I think it says PSS-1111.”

  “All ones?”

  “I think so.”

  I found it in the list, repeating its ip address a few times to memorize it before typing on the command line. It reached the end of the corridor, only a dozen feet away, and came to a stop.

  I entered the command to change its state from one to zero.

  Error. Invalid action.

  Damn it.

  It clicked as its external speakers activated.

  “I think you two have something that belongs to me,” Grist said over its comm.

  “Technically, it belongs to us,” Matt replied.

  “Not anymore. Turn it over, or the bot will shoot you.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh? It’s not like we can escape.”