The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  The locator stone felt heavy in her hand.

  She looked up, at her reflection in the window glass, and saw Isavel standing there. Broad shoulders, muscular build, tangled brown hair, full lips. All the Isavel she couldn’t keep out of her mind, no matter how far away she might be.

  Isavel was anxious, her emotions written in Ada’s own face. She looked messy. Was she okay? Was she out there somewhere, waking up from a bad dream too? Did she need Ada?

  Isavel was the first person who had not rejected Ada for who she was and what she did, and she was the only one Ada never felt the need to apologize around. Elsa, Turou, Baoji, Zhilik, Tanos - they accepted her for who she was, perhaps, but she still felt a little guarded, apologetic and resentful of feeling apologetic at the same time. She endangered all of them, and it felt wrong to do so. Isavel, though… nothing could endanger her. Ada didn’t feel like she needed to hold back.

  The distance was frustrating. It was all her fault - she had left Earth, come out here, triggered all this massive chaos, and for what? She had found all the ancients’ foolishness and none of their wisdom out here. And she had lost Isavel. And that hurt.

  She put her hand up to the glass, and in her reflection Isavel did the same, their palms touching through the cold, hard medium of reflection.

  “Isavel.”

  She took a deep breath and sighed. She remembered the excitement she had felt when she had heard that Isavel had suddenly appeared at Campus. Then the anxiety, the nervousness, the warm jitters that had kept her off balance for that entire conversation. All she had really wanted to do was lay her face into the crook of Isavel’s neck and be close to her.

  She leaned forward, her forehead against the glassy window, and Isavel responded in kind.

  “I miss you.” She watched their breath fog the glass. “I made a mistake. I’m coming back.”

  Nobody else was with her now. Jinna was long gone, Tanos was either dead or wandering through some wilderness with Sam, Zhilik was on another planet struggling to adapt, and her new friends here did not deserve to be caught up in this. There was only one unscratchable itch in Ada’s heart, a magnetic pull that threatened to tear her through the glass window and across the stars to wherever Isavel was standing. The rest of them had no such pull.

  Isavel was upset with her. Frustrated with her. Ada saw pain in that face, and she knew it was her own fault. Ada had left, after all, hadn’t she? This was all her doing. Ada nodded slowly into the reflection. She understood.

  She would have to make it right, she realized.

  When she returned to Earth, the gods and the secrets of the ancients would wait. She had to find Isavel first. Isavel’s forehead rested against hers in the reflection.

  Then Isavel looked up, over Ada’s shoulder, and her eyes widened.

  An ear-splitting horn ravaged the silence. Baoji woke howling in terror like an injured wolf as sirens screeched and all the world hemorrhaged crimson light.

  Chapter 14

  Ada stumbled into the kitchen, her suit flowing over her, as Baoji made for the comm on the wall. Elsa and Turou scrambled out of their room, disheveled and panicked. Baoji was shouting into the comm, eyes wide in the red light, then turned to the rest of them.

  “Line’s dead.”

  Elsa growled. “Weapons. Baoji, do you have -”

  He nodded, blurted something in his native human language, and bolted back into the bunk room, returning quickly with a modest gun in his hand. Elsa gave a small one to Turou and hefted a serious-looking pistol in her own hands.

  “We need to figure out -”

  An unfamiliar voice boomed from the communications device. “Change of plans. We’re being boarded. You four, there are maintenance closets inward from your position. They each fit one person securely, so you’ll need to split. Go now.”

  They exchanged glances, and Baoji shouted up at the ceiling. “Who is this?”

  “First officer. Hesk is busy. Hurry.”

  They seemed to have little choice in the matter, and Ada followed the others out into the hall; there were indeed a number of storage spaces, but as she stepped inside one she thought it should fit more than one person. She didn’t like the look of it at all - it felt like a trap. Who was boarding them? Hadn’t Baoji told her it was impossible for ships to sneak up on each other?

  She turned around to ask the ceiling and the door slammed shut, sealing her in.

  Isavel was standing in front of her. Except, not Isavel - not even the way she had been in the reflection. This was an image projected from a small node in the corner of the room, flickering vaguely reddish under the emergency lights. Something about the way she moved seemed wrong.

  “You failed.”

  The voice was Isavel’s - off, distorted, but recognizable. Ada’s heart sank. “What? What are you talking about?”

  Isavel’s reddish head tilted to the side, awkwardly and uncertainty. “You left me.”

  “What are you - how are you talking to me?”

  “Does it matter?” She crossed her arms. “You would rather waste your time with these people than be here.”

  The barb stung, a poisonous feeling of shame coursing through Ada’s blood and making her lungs seize. Why was she talking like this? “What? Listen - I - we talked about -”

  The image flickered, and Isavel was standing in front of her, kissing her, then pulling back. Then she shoved at Ada’s chest in disgust, her mouth moving slightly out of tune with her words, hands passing through her. “You are worthless. You failed me.”

  She looked like she had when Ada left her, back on Earth.

  She looked exactly like she had back then.

  Ada frowned. This wasn’t Isavel - it was a fusion of recordings taken by the military shuttle that had seen her on Earth. They were remixed and her voice was contorted into new words, but the source was the same.

  Somebody was playing tricks on her. The shame and rage cooled into ice, and she slowed time, reaching out with code to disintegrate the small projector generating the images. It collapsed into metallic dust and Isavel disappeared.

  “Who the fuck -”

  All the lights went out. All the ship’s noises fell silent. Not wanting to be trapped, she slowed time and disintegrated a hole through the door.

  “Elsa? Baoji? Turou?”

  They were still trapped, but in stretched-out seconds she crumbled the doors locking them in as well and batted holes into them with her hands. They each scrambled out warily, as she clawed a few light sigils into the bulkheads. The shadows on their faces were still dark in the dim, pallid light.

  “What the hell -”

  Elsa suddenly raised a gun, and though she wasn’t pointing it at anyone she was staring angrily at Baoji. “Did the rest of you get any messages?”

  Baoji’s ears flatted as he stared at the weapon, but he didn’t draw his. “Adrall told me you transmitted our location, Elsa. Why -”

  “No!” She hefted the gun a little higher. “I got a transmission from my SO telling me I’d be pardoned if I brought you in, but there was something wrong about it.”

  Turou stammered. “I - I got a transmission from APHEC. They said Guwenhua was being raided and people were being imprisoned, and that I should signal my location to the navy.”

  Elsa stared at Ada. “What about you?”

  Ada briefly considered disintegrating all weapons present. “It was fake. I know it was fake. Someone is messing with us.” Elsa and Baoji continued glaring at each other, so Ada stepped in between them.

  Elsa nodded slowly, letting her weapon fall back to her side. “Ada’s right. It’s crude - no way we all got calls at once.”

  Baoji sounded cowed. “Fine. Elsa, any cyberstrikes that you know of that can do this?”

  “I never got far in information security.” She sounded tight-lipped. “But anything’s possible if someone has remote access. Could Adrall be fucking with us?”

  The remaining doors around them all slammed shut.
<
br />   Then opened again, letting in screams from deeper in the ship.

  Half of them slammed shut. Some opened again while others closed. The cacophony only worsened with the random patterns and intensities. They stared around, backing up against each other to keep an eye on what was going on, and Ada was bizarrely glad she hadn’t taken away everyone’s weapons, as though the guns might help.

  A projector flared to life in the hall as the doors continued slamming, projecting an image of Elsa shooting Baoji in the head right on top of their actual selves. It was crude - the body movements were unnatural, the blood didn’t look right, the expressions were untrue to their bearers - but it was disconcerting. Another soon began projecting images of Ada carving their hearts out, of Turou shooting his fellow scholars in the backs, and Ada flung out more dark code to grind the projectors into dusk.

  The four of them stayed silent for a moment as the ship went mad around them.

  Baoji finally spoke. “This is crazy. We need to get to the bridge.”

  “And walk through those guillotines?” Elsa was gesturing at the doors.

  Whatever a guillotine was, it was clear the doors could crush them if they stepped through at the wrong moment. Ada knew her way around this sort of thing, though; advancing wordlessly to the end of the corridor, she snuck code into the mechanical parts of the door that moved it, disintegrating them then scratching out welding sigils that flared with molten heat, fusing the door open. Returning to realtime, she turned to her companions in the dim light and shouted. “Come on!”

  At some point while they were running, Ada bursting doors whenever they seemed dangerous, a voice started shouting from the loudspeakers in several languages. “Die, die, die, die, die!”

  Elsa reached out to grab Ada’s shoulder. “Ada, wait! This - I’ve seen this before.” She rounded on Baoji. “Baoji, is Adrall really just a gas miner?”

  His ears flattened back against his skull. “As far as I know. Why?”

  “He’s not running any AI on this ship, is he? Because this feels a lot like the time I raided an AI cult on Tlaloc.”

  Turou’s eyes widened. “You think this is AI?”

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” She looked around, suddenly cowed, and stepped up against a wall. “Ada, we need an armory - if there are robots running around, these little guns -”

  A high-pitched screech filled the air. They covered their ears, but after a moment Ada realized it might never stop; she reached into time dilation, the sounds were mercifully muffled, and cracked the speakers nearby. Elsa grabbed her wrist and shouted something about guns that Ada’s ears still weren’t ready to hear.

  They followed Elsa up a dark ladder for what felt like two levels, trying not to pay attention to the occasional shouting or screaming from within the ship. Ada burst doors aside for them, and when Elsa slowed to look around, she stamped light sigils onto the ceilings so they could see beyond the constant flickering.

  Ceiling. They weren’t floating - the ship was still accelerating, even amidst all this. Were they still on course?

  “Ada - break these open.” Elsa pointed at a sealed metal box. “I trained on one of these models once; this room is heavily reinforced and fire-proofed. It’s where you’d store weapons if you had any.”

  Sure enough, when she cracked open the lid, there were guns; only five in a box clearly built for more, but they were large enough the colonials each grabbed one and put away their smaller weapons. Ada was more than happy to stick with code, not needing to worry about carrying anything as they climbed back up the ladder to the bridge.

  Except the door to the top level was sealed. “Ada?”

  She was already thinking it, reaching out to disintegrate the door entirely. Elsa gingerly kicked her way through the weakened metal and they all followed, stepping out onto the bridge.

  Adrall turned and gaped at them all in horror. “What the fuck is going on with my ship?”

  Elsa briefly trained her gun across Adrall and the three mirran crewmembers up here with him, then pointed it back at the ladder. “Do you have any AI on this thing?”

  “AI?” Adrall’s muzzle scrunched up. “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “This feels a hell of a lot like -”

  A voice boomed over the loudspeakers again. “Ada Liu. Am I saying your name correctly? I must thank you for creating such a wide open tunnel throughout the ship, just like I asked. It will greatly speed venting.”

  A tunnel? A tunnel through the ship. Venting. Without the doors she had destroyed, one open airlock could kill almost everyone onboard. Ada’s eyes widened. She had to act fast - slowing time to a crawl, she started looking for metal she could peel away. Deeper in the ship. She snaked a set of eyes and tendrils down into the next level below them and began disintegrating parts of bulkhead, ferrying large chunks of metal up through the tunnel. Unfortunately the metal itself did not move nearly as fast as code, so she needed to let herself work in faster time than she would like.

  Suddenly red lights turned on again, and she felt a pull of air around her skin.

  She moved the metal into place around the breach in the door and began fusing it into place. She’d never had much use for the welding sigils and their briefly molten flashes, but now she was thankful they were so simple to remember.

  When she was done she cracked all the speakers, too, silencing that voice. The red lights faded again, and she let herself slip back into normal time. She was sweating, and rounded on Adrall. “Okay, we’re sealed off. What -”

  “The bridge is a separate computer system, but everything beyond here is unresponsive.” Adrall started pacing. “Life support. Airlock and hangar bay access.” He turned to one of his officers and started asking something in his mirran language, then glanced at the fugitives and switched to something comprehensible. “What systems do we have?”

  The mirran officer scratched her head. “Communications are sandboxed, so I can access those. We have personal devices here in lockers, and we can disable network connections before turning them on. Bridge lighting controls. Um… Sanitation, apparently. Everything else is on the main grid, and I can’t get to that.”

  He rounded on them. “We’re fucked. We have no scanners so we can’t tell if anyone’s approaching us. The ship is on a course to burn up in Chang’e Major’s atmosphere. We can’t send a distress call. Oh, hi, an AI took over our quantum server? We’ll get rescued and thrown straight into prison for computational warfare or something, or they’ll just blow us up to keep the AI from escaping.”

  Elsa swore and started pacing as well, Baoji moved to the computer consoles, and Turou shrank against a wall, running his hands over his hair.

  Ada paused. Something about Adrall’s words. “Computational warfare?”

  The captain raised his furry arms, as though to indicate the ship. “This. Hijacking computers to make them hurt the people they’re supposed to serve. It’s -”

  Ada slammed her fist down on the nearest control console, popping some kind of screen frame out of its socket. She looked at the code tattooed to her skin. Cherry. Cherry had claimed to be designed for information warfare, while applying those tattoos.

  She had been meaning to make that call.

  “Adrall Hesk.” One of his ears spun towards her. “This is a big ship. Does it have a tachyon transmitter?”

  His ears slowly flattened. “It’s designed for long-term deep-space transit, we’d be crazy not to.”

  Ada took a deep breath, looking around the room. Her companions were all staring at her. “I need to send a transmission. To Earth.”

  Everybody on the bridge suddenly froze. Adrall’s ears flattened more than she had ever seen on any mirran, and he lowered his head and shoulders as though cowering. “Earth? Why?”

  “I want my own fucking ship back.”

  “Ada, that won’t help.” Baoji pointed out the bridge windows. “Even if it somehow jumps from the Sol gate straight to Chang’e, it’ll still
take almost a day to reach us afterwards, and that’s not counting the time to reach that gate from Earth in the first place. It would take at least two days. We don’t have two days.”

  Elsa was shaking her head. “I’m pretty sure the Sol jumpgate was hardlinked to Freyja Three.”

  Ada didn’t know the specifics, but she knew they were desperately short on options. “My ship can do all sorts of things. Even if it’s late, I’d rather it be on its way so it can get us out if we’re captured.” She pointed at Adrall. “Give me my damned message. Now . If this works, I’ll owe you one personally.”

  Adrall flexed his lips around his teeth, nervous. “Tenrac, can you point the transmitter at Earth?”

  The officer he had spoken to earlier hesitated. “Um, no sir. It’s not in the transmitter’s core charts because - well -”

  “You mean the default maps only cover the twelve, and our full astrography charts are in a database on our AI-infested main network.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ada scowled. “Can’t we just beam in every direction?”

  “Tachyon beams are expensive, and the communicators are running on device battery since the main grid is locked.” Tenrac leaned back, scratching the side of her face. “We could get two, maybe three transmissions out, but the beams are narrow. We’d probably miss it.”

  Everybody in the ship fell quiet for a moment, seeming to slip into deep thought. Was there any other option? Ada couldn’t think of one, but she couldn’t determine how to solve the problem either. She was no astronomer.

  Then another mirran officer spoke up. “This is going to sound stupid.”

  Adrall turned to him and smiled in an almost kindly way. “Nothing that involves us living is too stupid to consider.”

  He nodded towards a series of lockers at the side of the bridge. “I have Parsec Probes installed on my personal computer, sir.”