Gjosta found that few people understood stage magic. AIs never did. The hand is, in fact, never faster than the eye. Magic didn’t work that way at all.

  Traveller showed LM-25 exactly what it expected. As Gjosta had watched her burn the RDEs hard for the derelict that they had selected in advance, the distant asteroid lit with the flashes of launching missiles.

  Gjosta floated in his deep-space suit, adjusting his cybernetics with the relative calculations to prepare for a bio-liminal warp. He’d managed up to three light seconds, so the shorter distance here would be no problem. The distance was farther than natural eyes could aim, but with the calculations prepared in advance, the optical enhancement up to 10x, and using reference stars for triangulation, he could activate the bio-liminal engine with his cyberware to land him right on target.

  Long dead military scientists designed him for infiltration just like this.

  Even better if he had an AI—like Traveller—to set it up.

  He just needed to wait for the right moment. Floating alone in space where Traveller dropped him off, he couldn’t see most of the battle, except the brightest of the distant explosions. His cybernetics fed him information from Traveller, but even the powerful AI couldn’t send continuously. A stream of radio waves would paint a target on the little vessel.

  Even though LM-25 had 150-year old defensive systems, it seemed Traveller didn’t need to fake much. If Traveller had been any other ship, she would have been destroyed.

  Still, she activated her liminal drive just as they had calculated in advance, right as the explosions would engulf her.

  While the audience has been distracted with the big flourish, the magician already moved the rabbit into the hat. All that is left for the magician is to pull the rabbit out and receive the people’s applause.

  At the same moment as the “destruction” of the vessel—to hide the spacial distortion from the bioliminal drive—Gjosta flashed across the two light-second distance.

  He arrived right on target, half a meter from LM-25’s backdoor.

  He rested for a moment, and got his heartbeat under control.

  The company situated the executive emergency escape system from LM-25 close to its residential habitat. The standard escape vehicles had their own power supply, control system, and dedicated hatches. The company had given corporate executives a way out if the workers decided to run things without Thor & Co. oversight; aka the miners “going pirate.”

  Gjosta imagined that the executives would not have gotten far. At best, the pods were 24-hour lifeboats. If an executive used one, they tended to die in space more often than they died to angry employees. Thor & Co. wasn’t inclined to save managers incompetent enough to cause riots.

  Gjosta used his bio-liminal engine to maneuver close to the small maintenance airlock. This door was entirely secret behind concealed panels both on the surface and in the living quarters. Even now, barely a dozen people were aware of the door’s existence.

  Because they had disconnected the escape hatch from the other station systems, he didn’t worry about being detected. He pulled the lever and drifted inside. He reoriented himself to the arrows showing the gravity orientation and cycled the airlock. When the door closed, the gravity plates activated and dropped him gently to the floor. Fresh air filled the space.

  Gjosta kept his suit on. AI tended toward paranoid, and they had no need for niceties like oxygen or breathable atmosphere. Gjosta worried that if he was spotted in the habitat section, he could find himself choking on noxious gas or struggling for air.

  The inner door opened. Gjosta found himself in long plain hallway, with a metal door at the far end. Only suckers and fools thought they went undetected when dealing with AI; silent alerts could have drones and robots converging on Gjosta’s position, but he didn’t sense any of the vibration typical of a horde of robots.

  Instead, aside form a light hum, the station remained silent.

  Now that he’d made it into the station, Gjosta’s next target would be a computer terminal in one of the executive quarters. From there, he could hack the network computer using the backdoor program he’d devised with Traveller. He cautiously moved along the hallway, reaching the door at the end, and opened it slowly.

  Gjosta checked the other side for camera and electronic surveillance. His military-built cybernetic eyes were good at this sort of thing. He could see a range of light from ultraviolet to infrared, which provided special advantages in infiltration.

  The derelict bedroom he’d reached appeared private; no cameras or listening devices seemed present. ‘It wouldn’t do,’ Gjosta thought, ‘to give a hackable feed to the workers.’

  The room appeared suspiciously clean. No dust at all. The bed had been perfectly preserved, even though it hadn’t been occupied in two centuries. The station’s robotic workforce seemingly continued, even in the absence of a their human masters.

  Dust and humidity could be a nightmare in these sorts of stations, but only for humans. The BE girl probably insisted on keeping this area clean.

  Gjosta found the network port, sat on the bed, and connected his personal cable. He closed his eyes and let the interface do the work of stimulating his visual cortex. He dove into the network as quietly as he could.

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  For a computer system that should not have had security updates in decades, the system security nearly flagged him right away. He had a few tricks that kept the alert from finding an alarm system. The code he inserted spoofed an environmental system, and it fit in seamlessly.

  For now, he wasn’t here to kill the AI. He just needed work some magic. The key to being invisible isn’t invisibility. The key was to stand where no one was looking.

  So, he started programming loops and blind spots that would let him travel through LM-25 to the ore export hanger without any cameras seeing him.

  And, he needed to subvert several stellar detection arrays. He made contact with Traveller over a hijacked narrow beam communication array where Traveller waited in a precise blind spot for his signal.

  “I’m in.”

  “They nearly got me.” Traveller complained. “What would you have done if I died?”

  “I’d have been sad to lose the ship. It’s very nice.”

  “Very funny.” Traveller did not sound amused.

  “You asked. I’ve slipped the ring of invisibility on; the station can’t see you across the noted coordinates. Don’t vary your course, there’s a lot more tracking equipment on the station than we thought. I’m going to send you some entangled data and program information, check it for AI influence.” Gjosta waited patiently for a response. He hardly grit his teeth with anxiety at all.

  A few moments later, Traveller finally replied.

  “I am not seeing any evidence of an AI in the data scrape.” She sounded surprised. “This programming is clean, like an old-world a precision instrument. No paranoia or recursive surveillance code. Are you sure the dragon is an AI? There’s nothing superfluous or any dead end code at all. Some of it looks written in binary, not compiled. It’s wierd, but not written by AI.”

  “Has to be AI. What about the girl, what do you think? We didn’t get to talk about it. Is she real?”

  “Must be. I’d guess she’s the programmer, except she looks too young. Her emotional micro-expressions followed usual human patterns. Of course, I don’t have any other data points. So, that is just based on her video and audio responses.”

  “Help me find her.”

  The girl might be a problem, so Gjosta needed to eliminate that variable. Carefully scraping memory data and downloading it to his cybernetics, he started looking for her location. He passed data to Traveller to see if a pattern could be found.

  A sweep of the last few days of data revealed a lot. Gjosta realized the girl only did the bare minimum to hide her presence from the planet. The data records had her logs from watching Traveller arrive in system, and much of the data came from newer telescopes of different kinds. She had been scanning stars in deep space for a decade.

  Gjosta would have to delve in that mystery later. He had more important treasure to find. And, he needed to make sure that he didn’t accidentally run into her down a long corridor or something.

  Video showed one of the habitats lit and filled with equipment more usually found in a workshop than a living area. Drawers gaped open where clothing or tools would be kept. It seemed she lived in a personal lab in the residential habitat, but had left in a hurry.

  When he found her, she ran past a camera inside one of old mining tunnels. She currently appeared four kilometers away from Gjosta’s position. He relaxed. He could leave the other BE human alone, for now. She appeared safely far enough away for Gjosta to start making his way to the station’s ore handling platforms.

  Gjosta strode out into the habitat, alert for enemies. He unholstered his EM sidearm. The older he got, the less he liked solving his problems with violence. Still, some problems only had violent solutions.

  Originally, a tram system moved workers from the residential habitats to the ore processing zone. Gjosta couldn’t turn it on. Any simple monitoring system would detect the power drain. He would walk.

  Two hours later he was at the “bottom” of the asteroid, manually opening the doors into the hanger bays. Ore had been the bulkiest of LM-25s exports. The hanger bays reflected this massive loading operation.That all ground to a halt after the “dragon” had seized it. The dragon may have kept the habitats in good condition, but it didn’t seem to care much for the station’s largest docking bay.

  To stay as quiet as possible, his hacks already spoofed any signal that might come from the machinery in the bays. But, everything appeared mostly dead anyway. He had to disconnect the doors from the computer grid, separately power them, and open them slowly enough that the machinery didn’t accidentally tear itself apart or reveal the sort of sudden pressure drop that would set of emergency alarms.

  He felt flush with excitement. When was the last time he’d taken risks this big? Corporate life had been largely boring. Now, he faced a real challenge.

  “Traveller, you are clear. There’s a space for the package on your port side.”

  “Bringing it in.”

  During the decade long planning phase, Gjosta and Traveller collaborated on the best methods to infiltrate LM-25. The key point they agreed on was that they couldn’t do it with just themselves. They needed a security team, because when they actually went for the station’s secret propulsion and computer labs, defensive systems inside the station would been to be disabled.

  But, to outfit Traveller with the necessary countermeasures for the misdirection, it’s universal module had to be filled with countermeasures. Traveller couldn’t carry the marines.

  The company had a handy solution. An empty “cargo” cylinder, that was “accidentally” delivered off course could fit everything Gjosta needed. After all, the company made that “mistake” periodically for sixty years. The last one, delivered the prior year, had a stasis chamber.

  This cargo container arrived with Traveller. She gently carried in a magnetic field and placed carefully into the docking clamps. Leaving the control console, and keeping the power to the gravity systems off, Gjosta floated down through the airless space.

  “They still alive in there?” He asked Traveller.

  “The stasis held.”

  “Good. I wouldn’t want to explain how we accidentally killed the Chairman’s grandson.”

  Gjosta opened the hatch, passed through the cylinder’s airlocks, and reached the liminal stasis pod that they’d concealed inside. With a simple button press, the inner door swiveled open.

  He plastered on his best game face and stepped inside to meet his nominal supervisor.