Round And Round

By M. K. Dreysen

The Court of Drifting Winds dreams of freedom.

Those who attend the Courts dream of wealth and power. That none of them will ever need to account for.

Time and space wait for none at all. The universe spins itself so that the Courts must once again face the grasp of their progenitors. The powers of Old Earth and its empire will reclaim that which has eluded them these past centuries.

Maggie Ojeda has been called by the Duke to prepare the Courts for the inevitable. Accounts must be balanced. The Courts must, at least in theory, be made to appear to be just as the absent ownership groups expect.

At the same time, Maggie has been contacted by an entity from Old Earth. One of the absent owners wants to get ahead of the competition before the rush begins. And Maggie comes highly recommended.

Maggie knows well that going round and round between management and ownership is part of the job. Only, this time, there's an entire system, and all of its people, hanging in the balance.

This job's going to be a little more trouble than Maggie's usual audit...

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. K. Dreysen
• Release date: Jul 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005271893

Book preview

Prologue:

The Milky Way yet hides secrets in its folds and drifts. Colonies, empires; physics and biology; economics undreamt of.

One of those secret spaces is the Court of Drifting Winds.

The claims made by the members of the Court are unimportant, yet worlds-changing. They are an offshoot, forgotten, of the first Human Empire. There are many such. Bits and pieces left over after the First Great Collapse. Wayward souls, sometimes fighting over the scraps left by their progenitors.

Mostly, they've forgotten the reasons in favor of the drama of the immediate. Remembered glories may serve, except for the part where the hungry belly and the scavengers demand their due. If there's a silver lining here, it's that: the clearing out.

The Court had some respite, granted by an accident of title. It was the way of things, in the first Empire, whatever the pretensions of machines and humans on the home world, that corporate entities divided the galaxy among themselves. This bit and that, constant negotiation. Occasional bloody battle.

Always something to fill the quarterly reports.

The Collapse caught the networks, the nerve bundles that fed the corporate entities. Blistered, twisted, anywhere the many became the one madness followed.

Holding title to something physical was the only hard currency left. Oh, not title on the homeworld; the judicial system of Old Earth remained vapor-locked, forever navel-gazing its way to some perceived resolution.

Title was held by main force. That which could be claimed, was. Against any and all.

The Courts were one of the few who were never tested. Luck, and the accident of being disconnected from the Trails by just a hop and a Jump.

The Duke, the first one, had made the claim. This world is mine.

The Courts had risen from the fact that she who made up her own title was, for whatever reason, still standing when anyone else bothered to notice. Power having its own gravity.

That's the long ago and far away. Today, the Courts had an unlikely request.

It was time for an audit. Today's duke, many-times grandson to the first, grew tired of the opaqueness of his Court. Finances, ownership, who owed what to whom.

He didn't really believe it would do any good. If the light illuminated, it would generate shadows, new ones, that in turn would generate new scams.

So be it.

You are asking someone to perform a minor miracle, sire.

He knew that. You mean, who am I going to stick with the thankless job? And, the high probability of assassination?

Well, there was only one choice that his Court would agree to en masse.

I just hope she'll forgive me.

It's more likely she'll buy your assassination herself.

The role of computers and artificial intelligences fluctuated; Collapse brought reckoning.

Duke Ricardo Ricky Montegna wondered if maybe allowing his personal AI the full autonomy to call him an idiot was the next step down the road to the Second Collapse. Is she available?

She's found some way to disconnect her personal loggers from our network.

Ricky sighed. Meaning?

The hologram flickered a bit; the systems were engaged in calculation. I put the odds at about two to one that she's on planet.

Ricky moved to the windows. Even with the passage of centuries, the planet, Hellera, was only sparsely populated. One of the benefits of his great grandmother having been, effectively, the only one standing on the place when she'd claimed it. He called up the virtual maps.

Ten thousand people, about double that for AI systems, spread out over a planet with similar land area to Old Earth. He could, had in the past, walk for days without seeing or hearing another soul.

If she wanted to remain unfound, she could. The network, his network, was the only practical way to track individuals on the planet. He'd never known it was that easy to hide from.

She didn't care that it meant he'd have to rebuild the thing. If she knew of a way to sneak past the net's snoopers, others would find a way.

Ricky wasn't as paranoid as some of his ancestors. But if he knew there was a backdoor, he did sort of owe it to himself to close it off. Just in case. We need to do two things then, Raul.

Yes, sire?

First, we need to contact her. Raul's systems were more than capable of this. In one way, it was just an extension of the methods he'd have used to contact someone off planet, out of the reach of Ricky's personal network.

And then?

Once she's here, you'll need to take her computers apart and find out what she did.

I'm assuming you don't mean that I am to literally take them apart.

Ricky chuckled. The ethical questions that would bring up... No, Raul, your constraints still hold. We're bringing her in for a purpose, remember?

What if she says 'No'?

Oh, hell, don't borrow trouble. She's enough of a pain in the ass as it is. Treat her with respect when you approach her, please.

And maybe we'll both get out of this alive, Ricky added to himself.

Chapter 1:

Some weeks later. The lady in question being attached to the side of a very long, very deep, very dark open tube connecting the planet's surface to a cavern beneath.

None of it was natural. Not the cavern somewhere below her feet. Not the tube, maybe a meter wider than her outstretched arms, if she'd been able to stretch them out that way.

And definitely not the fiber-metal alloy netting that held her to the stone wall.

Magdalena Maggie Ojeda didn't mind that the netting only looked like a giant spider had come along and woven herself a snack-holder. All things considered, Maggie wasn't one to turn her nose up at pretended naturalism.

Considering her options, of course. Just pay attention to the matter at hand, Maggie, she told herself. As fascinating as the metal-carbon hybrid material was, compositional analysis would probably be best set at a lower priority.

The net, and Maggie inside it, hung from a pair of hooks; the hooks were attached to a power cable. Well, a bracket that the power cable ran through. The bracket wasn't exactly overbuilt for the purpose. All it was supposed to do was hold conduit.

Maggie examined the screws holding the bracket to the cavern wall. The top one had already pulled ever so slightly loose of its starting point. Steel screws, steel hook, ok, some sort of steel-alloy, whatever. Aluminum conduit and bracket.

The result was inevitable. Could she hurry it along? By bouncing, just a little. And then swinging, just that little more.

Maggie focused on the immediate, the momentum exchange at each turn, she didn't count, she didn't try and hold any time in her head, she just breathed and moved the rhythm of the dance along.

Until the aluminum, stressed past its limits, tore loose of the screw, and Maggie tumbled down the side of the tube.

She realized, in that too-complete instant when the bracket broke free of itself, that cartoon moment where the laws of gravity had yet to close their iron grip, that her career, varied and longer than she'd ever given herself the possibility of, might just come to an ignoble end, right here and now.

Shit.

The tube wasn't as horrendous as her panicked mind imagined. Maggie fell about a meter, then the tube bent beneath her and she was sliding down an incline, rather than free-falling into the ether.

It was still dark as the bottom of, well, a cavern in the middle of the earth, when she slid to a stop; the netting hadn't let go, either.

She lay there in the dark; with the bend, naturally enough, the light from the tube's entrance had taken a breather. 'Too far, Maggie girl, sorry, couldn't make the party.'

Right. She'd have continued the cussing, but the thing that had netted her like a fish was wandering around somewhere. No need to give it another job to do. She settled for trying to get her breathing under control. And listening.

The breathing, ok so that wasn't too hard, sure there was the fall into eternal darkness bit, but that was done, now we're laying here in the dark, Maggie girl, just fine, sure there's a robot spider bigger than a horse wandering around, probably wondering what it needs to do to tack us up to stay in one place...

She wound down to the point where she could listen. Eventually.

Nothing there. Discounting the hard pulse in her ears, Maggie was, as best she could tell, by herself here. Wherever here was. So, time to ditch the netting, right?

That much was easy enough. It had been tight-wound, however many meters ago, but there'd been a few rearrangements since then, a bit of friction, some gravity, random what-not's.

Maggie shrugged the net loose. She didn't move, otherwise. Just pass the net from her chest, free the chest pouches in her vest and the belt. Especially the one with the IR goggles.

No permanent lenses or implants, they interfered with too many other things.

The voices in the back of her head, the second guessers and the accompanying choir, were happy to jump in at that point.

Ignoring them was the work of long practice. She eased the goggles on, nice and slow, quiet, no need to let anyone who might be hiding in the darkness know that she had things to do, places to go.

The tube wasn't a cavern, but at least it was a hallway. In the IR view, clear and clean, smooth-cut walls, an almost perfect circle, the only flat spot took up about three feet of the hall floor. Convenient, since that's where she lay.

No evidence of accompaniment; if there were cameras, she wouldn't find that out 'til much later in the proceedings, so she eased the net aside and stood up. No time like the present.

Maggie didn't run down the hall, quite. Jog, pace, jog a little more. A door loomed, the end of the hallway and the beginning of something else.

Whatever eyes watched via hidden lenses, belying the aluminum-alloy of the conduit piping that disappeared into the living rock instead of following this hallway, the door was locked shut with an iron handle and lockworks.

Well, it looked that way. She bent over the keyhole, nice and large of course, so she could get a good look at the insides. The IR showed it just fine, she might as well have been outside at noon for all the warm colors floating around. The iron was cooler than the wood surrounding, so the goggles programmed up the contrast, together with a little splash of projected light in the proper range.

Her tools fit the bill just fine. They were homemade, not in the hand-cut method, she'd put them together in her own shop; it made the whole thing just that much more appropriate, she thought.

She was halfway through the tumblers before another nagging little thought surfaced. This one, was not the backseat driver.

This was the voice of caution. There had to be a trap here, right? Practically derigeur, she'd trip the last tumbler, like the one sitting in front of her right now just waiting. And then the hidden lever, maybe a thread even, would pull or drop, something would get started on the other side of the door. Which she'd throw open, just like she was doing now.

And?

She heard a not-quite thud. A thunk, maybe? Softer, not a club or the clear ring of metal on stone, more like. A club hitting the back of someone's head? What kind of trap was this, anyway?

Maggie watched what looked for all the world like a video game orc fall unconscious at her feet. Tusks, green skin, an underbite to go along with the leather armor, the whole bit. Originality being in short supply; so either the deeper regions were where the cavern's originator had stowed the good stuff.

Or, she was going to have to charge someone extra. For the boring bits. In which case, hoist the