Konami added a personal note just for her to the message: Looks like your short career as lookout paid off! She recalled her schoolgirl anxiety while Konami and Third Wren searched for the storage drive several days before the spindown.
Shame Wren won’t get the credit! They had worked out a plan earlier — if Wren found anything critical in the copied drive’s data, he and Konami would indirectly leak it to other Data technicians to keep their collaboration out of the spotlight. Someday, she thought, when all this is over, credit will go to where it’s due. And justice, too.
It occurred to her that this provided the motive for Muahe’s murder – he was about to find all this data, just due to being a conscientious data technician, and they killed him for it. Almost doesn’t matter now…
She returned her attention to the journey to Repro. The route was circuitous to avoid the surface, and any safe zones she might have to cross. Circuitous, and quiet. Most of the passageways were identical, but the silence seemed to differ — in one the quiet would be so stark that she could hear her heartbeat, and in the next, barely audible metallic clicks would keep her on edge until she made her way through.
Twice she came across Bots larger than DustBots. For the first, she had warning — scraping sounds on the other side of a hatch. As she manually cranked it open, she held the axe, reclaimed in the Garden after the pandemonium, against it horizontally, and as soon as the crack was big enough, shoved it forward, tumbling what turned out to be a RoverBot along the next corridor.
“RoverBot, do not move!”
Obedient as ever, the Bot remained where it was, anchored to the far bulkhead by its limbs. Since receiving the news about their programming, and the physical update fix, she was more reluctant to use force, though the corridor wasn’t quite wide enough to be sure she’d be out of reach.
The solution came in a conveniently placed storage closet. She had to order the Bot out of the way, and then manually open the closet hatch, but the Bot dutifully folded itself into the little storage space, chirping curiously as she shut the door. Before she continued on, she scratched the word “Bot” onto the hatch with the axe edge.
As she crossed through the central Ring, her worries about Pat increased, swirling her stomach into disconcerting eddies and currents. Was Pat really a fighter, if necessary? Mattoso knew that her lover was utterly devoted to their students, but she had trouble recalling even the slightest bit of anger from her companion. In fact, their gentleness was what attracted her to them in the first place. Maybe the MOMbot will protect them. But unbidden, an image of the spider-like TenderBot pulling apart the MOMbot with its long appendages came to her mind.
She increased her pace again. At the next junction, the metallic clicking returned, faintly, but growing with each hatch she passed. Checking the map on her wearable, she was almost there.
The clicking turned into a rhythmic clanging. Mattoso clutched tightly to the fireaxe as she rounded the corner into the Repro lab.
Bang, bang, bang… It was coming from the nursery. Where the TenderBot lives… Spindly metallic limbs reached out in her imagination.
Axe in one hand, she hurriedly unlatched the manual operator to the nursery hatch. Through the growing crack was only darkness, but the clanging sound had stopped.
Quicker than she could bring her axe to bear, something reached out of the darkness and pulled her inside.
CHAPTER 43
Konami barely paid attention to the minutiae of the department head meeting. They were nearly a daily occurrence now, even as everyone onboard was busier than ever. At least the casualties seemed to have stabilized — thousands of square meters of ship spaces remained outside of the safe zones, but only about two hundred missing persons remained. Not for the first time he marveled at the discipline of Aotean parents — instructed to leave the search for missing children to the surge teams, they mostly seemed to obey.
Doctor MAdani reported that Bot injuries were on a steep decline, but the minor medical complaints were up. “Nausea, digestive complaints, fatigue…”
“It’s just all the time in freefall,” interrupted CHENG Papka.
“I don’t think so, Commander. It could be reactions to the new diet — maybe after sitting in storage for a few years, the dry rations lose some of their digestibility.”
Data systems was next, and Director Shin reported that Bot ‘reclamation’ was proceeding, but slowly. Since DT3 Wren’s revelation, and subsequent anonymous ‘leak’ to the other Data technicians to maintain the secrecy of his work with Konami and Mattoso, distressingly few Bots had been successfully reprogrammed. It turned out that the same safety programming that was meant to keep Bots from injuring Aotea’s crew was also used to ensure Bots cooperated with the ministrations of TechBots. And strong as the repurposed TechBots — sent out with code sticks throughout the ship — were, it turned out to be very difficult for them to execute the relatively delicate CPU code stick insertion when the Bots were not cooperating.
Konami perked up when he realized he was being addressed by Shin.
“Chief Inspector, I’ll ask again why the surge teams can’t be utilized—”
Goddamn, that again… “And I’ll give you the same answer — we don’t have enough manpower without cutting our surge teams in half. We’re still days, if not weeks, away from regaining control of the entire ship. If we double the size of the surge teams — and that’s what it takes to make sure they can safely hold any kind of Bot and insert a code stick without bashing in its CPU — then that time doubles, at least.”
“My techs tell me that with just a little change in strategy, three deputies should be able to disable any Bot smaller than a TechBot without significantly increasing—”
“If you can spare the manpower, Director, I’ll be happy to add Data techs to my surge teams.”
Silence was the response. But he had a thought. “What about the MOMbots?”
“What?”
“The MOMbots. I mentioned it earlier during my brief — a MOMbot protected a classroom full of children that my deputies brought back from outside the save zones. They haven’t changed a bit, apparently.”
The XO leaned forward, suddenly interested. “Lieutenant Mattoso reported that to me as well. In fact, she logged a vid.”
“Let’s see that vid,” ordered the captain. “Chief?”
Admin Chief Pohamba dutifully cycled through his projection, loading the vid Mattoso had marked as ‘MOMbot rescue’ onto the conference room’s main display. Konami saw grins break out through the department heads as they viewed the impressive demonstration of martial ability and obedience from the MOMbot called Zinnia.
“Why aren’t MOMbots affected?” asked the captain. “Or was this a single anomaly?”
CHENG Papka cleared his throat. “How can we trust any Bots after all this? Every system onboard can be operated manually. Just continue the purge, and recycle the scrap.”
Shin squinted as he stared down at a projection, swiping through the display in a lazy finger-dance. “No — MOMbots were programmed in a unique coding language, on non-standard, non-reproducible chipsets. We can’t even copy the data. Records say that Aotea purchased a dozen MOMbots from the Mercurian firm during construction — and that’s the only firm that fabs or even maintains them. Some savant on Mercury, decades ago, taught herself how to program and made her own chips—”
“Okay Shin,” interrupted the XO. “Enough of a robotics history lesson. What do you suggest, CI?”
“The MOMbots are strong and agile — I’m sure they could insert the coding sticks into any Bots onboard. And there’s no safety programming against MOMbots to corrupt, so there won’t be any resistance.”
“You can’t take this idea seriously!”
Oh screw you, Papka…
“But they can’t be programmed,” objected Shin. “We can’t even read the MOMbot’s code. Whoever wrote it back on Mercury was either a nutcase or a genius.”
“We don’t need to repro
gram them,” Konami replied. “Just tell them what to do.”
“What?”
“Just talk to them.” Everyone looked at him, and Konami almost felt embarrassed for a moment. “Why not? They’re vocal, even if they usually only talk to children. I’ve seen one of my deputies chatting with one for a half hour.”
XO Criswell nodded slowly.
“What else are the MOMbots doing? School kids don’t need as much supervision if they’re staying in the classroom all day.”
Captain Horovitz leaned toward Mayor Akunle and they had a short, whispered conversation. “Very well,” said the captain aloud. “We will proceed, but very carefully, with evaluating MOMbots for surge assists. The progress will be monitored in these meetings.”
Papka snorted, turning red when the captain turned her glare toward him.
An alert buzzed in Konami’s ear. A mini projection on the back of his hand showed an encrypted, temporary vidlink, sent from Wren — the timer on the right counted down from sixty seconds. He looked down and surreptitiously fingered it to play. It was a split-screen, each scene from the all-hands gathering at the Arena — the right showed Arvid Singh as he arose in the crowd of the Arena, and started to speak, just a minute or so before his assassination. The left showed another part of the crowd, presumably recorded by one of the constables or deputies attending. Both showed identical timestamps. As Singh rose, several members of the crowd stood up as well to get a better view. The vid zoomed in — someone, seated along an aisle, took a single look, and then rose and sprinted down the steps and out of sight. The entire vid was less than ten seconds long. Well done, Wren.
With the timer winding down, Konami replayed the dual-screened vid. His stomach jumped into his throat as he zoomed in further. The spectator’s eyes briefly widened in undisguised shock before he left in a rush.
As the temporary link vanished, gone forever from the ship’s network systems, whatever resistance he had built up to zero-g nausea over recent days fell away like a shed skin.
He recognized the spectator who abruptly fled. Konami knew him, or thought he knew him, better than anyone else onboard.
Kiro.
CHAPTER 44
She flailed in the darkness at whatever had dragged her through the hatch.
“Oof… shhh!”
Oh shit, person not Bot! “Who are you?”
“Bea?”
“Pat? Pat!” She lunged and embraced her lover, squeezing tight until she was rewarded with a wince. “I’m so glad you’re safe!”
Her eyes were starting to adjust to the gloom — there was no spindly-legged TenderBot, just the Teacher and a dozen children. With no MOMbot, apparently.
“We’ve been waiting here since the announcements to stay put after Spindown. At one point we tried to leave, but there were Bots in each direction, so we stayed put.”
“For that long? How? You must be starving! And the kids, too.”
Luckily, they had the embryos’ nutrient packs in the lab.”
She asked Pat where their MOMbot was.
“At this age we start to wean ‘em off the MOMbots — don’t want the kids getting too reliant. Good timing, huh? Wouldn’t want to see a MOMbot malfunctioning…”
Not so sure about that… She hugged her lover again and summarized the last several days’ goings on.
“C’mon. Let’s get back to civilization.”
Halfway back to the nearest safe-zone, Mattoso heard something.
“Shh,” she said, silencing the children, who had been chattering excitedly about returning to more familiar environs. It had sounded like a voice, speaking low. Maybe a surge team? She told Pat to wait with the children. She almost shouted a greeting, but something told her to remain silent.
The voice came back, barely audible. She followed it as best she could around the corner, finding a maintenance storage hatch cracked open. Mattoso still couldn’t make out what it was saying, but it was louder.
She squeezed through the cracked hatch, taking care to be as quiet as possible. The closet was mostly filled with harsh-smelling cleaning chemicals. Damn vent fans should be… She looked up — a fan vent, which normally would help tone down the harshness of the odor, wasn’t running, most likely due to the low power rig. The voice was coming through the vent.
Still unable to make out any words, she programmed her wearable to amplify any voice audio, but was still only able to hear snippets of the conversation.
“…low enough concentration… need to wait. The symptoms are… and… something’s wrong, I think I hear… I’ll call…”
The voice stopped, and Mattoso heard the ruffling-fabric sound of rapid movement. Shit. She hurried back to Pat and the children.
“We need to go,” she said quietly. “Quickly.”
Pat whispered questions, but she ignored them — two words kept repeating in her mind: concentration, and symptoms. Symptoms of what?
CHAPTER 45
Konami rushed out of the department head meeting, mumbling something about a break in the investigation. What the hell, Kiro?
He briefly considered a mundane reason for the DCI to abruptly leave the Arena, but he knew that was just wishful thinking. It could have been some constabulary concern, but it wasn’t like Gregorian to leave off things like that in his logs. He called up the duty logs and schedule — Gregorian was currently between shifts, and as Konami suspected, had not noted anything in his logs about leaving the Arena during the all-hands address. After he sent a brief message to both Emer stations asking about Gregorian’s whereabouts, Konami thumbed over to scan Gregorian’s history and qualifications:
Kiroshi Gregorian, born Ares City, Mars, 51 cycles prior to Aotea’s departure. Eighteen cycles experience in Mars Police Force, reaching rank of Senior Lieutenant, thrice decorated for bravery. Served as Chief Weapons Instructor for Ares City region. Joined crew of Aotea fifteen cycles prior to departure, and earned full Aotea Ship’s Qualification six cycles prior to departure. Earned Engineering Qualifications three cycles prior to departure.
Shit. Konami had forgotten about the surprise of Gregorian’s Aft Quals, and shook his head to himself. In all the hubbub of the attacks and surges he hadn’t spent any more time on Mattoso’s list.
The Emer stations responded — Gregorian wasn’t at either Constabulary. Konami dove and bounded through the passageways, kicking off bulkheads and virtually flying in the freefall, all the way up to the surface, dodging and pushing past startled Aoteans in his way. “Urgent Constabulary business!” he shouted at the occasional obstructing passer-by.
On the surface, he rushed over to the appropriate guycable and leapt up, pulling himself along to accelerate, friction guide in hand. He landed on the other side and fairly danced across the surface into Gregorian’s hab unit, stomach churning with worry.
Konami waited, floating, in front of the door of his friend’s quarters to gather himself, unconsciously checking his weaponry — dart gun and slugthrower. Kiro might have that railgun… could he be waiting for me? He shook the fear from his mind and knocked, eschewing the bell.
Gregorian opened the door, greeting him with a grin, which melted away when he saw Konami’s expression.
Flexing hands looked ready for action, and Konami resisted the temptation to draw the dart gun. “Please take a seat, Kiro.” He brushed his fingers over the vidcam on his chest, confirming that it was on and recording.
The deputy chief inspector’s grin returned, and Gregorian started to pull himself toward Konami until he gave a terse shake of his head. “Sit down.”
Gregorian backed off and sat against his deck, the motion awkward, as usual, with the lack of gravity. Konami’s eyes swiveled to Gregorian’s right hand, hovering above an open desk drawer.
“Why, Kiro?”
Brief silence. “Why what?”
Konami shook his head. “Don’t play with me. You’re my best friend. You were my best friend. Why? What’s the goal?”
The mask melted away,
revealing, more than anything else, pure exhaustion. “It’s been in the making for years, Cy. Decades. Planned from the beginning.”
“What was planned? Why the murders? Why do so many have to die?”
Gregorian closed his eyes and leaned his head back, sighing. “I know it seems harsh. We all had the same concerns — we went over it a hundred times. But when it’s all done, when we get to Samwise — you’ll see; well, maybe not you, or me. But they’ll see, eventually. Trust me, it’s necessary.”
“What about the Society?” Konami felt a sudden affection for the organization. “What about casting off the violent culture of Earth?”
“That’s why we’re doing it – it needs to be fresh. New. I know it doesn’t make sense like this; it took me years to understand. But it’s right. It will work.”
“What will work? Kiro, you’re not making any sense.”
“It will be worth it — it will be incredible. A new…” He trailed off. Konami got the sense that Gregorian wasn’t just trying to convince him, but also himself.
“A new what? Damn it, Kiro!”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, you know. We were cycles away from phase three. It just… the Data tech was looking in the wrong place.” Gregorian shook his head sadly. “Bad luck, and bad timing. You know they’re gonna come back, right? They’ll live again. First in the queue, every one of ’em.”
“What…? Live again? Damn it, Kiro!”
Something changed on Gregorian’s face, and in his posture. He’s going to go for it. Konami put his hand on the dart gun handle at his hip.
“Please, Kiro. Talk to me. Help me fix this. We can fix it together. We still have a mission — a new home to go to. A new home for us — for all Aoteans.” He sensed an imminence of action in his best friend. Konami knew he sounded desperate. “Wait! Help me — for the future of Aoteans — the future of our colony.”
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