by Patty Jansen
Melati didn’t think twice. She fired the gun. The flash hit the woman square in the chest—
—and she kept walking.
Melati fired again, with the same result. Each time the charge hit the woman, her skin seemed to light up a little. But that was the only effect her shots had. Now she was so close and it was clear that the weapon was not going to do anything. Melati ducked behind a workstation. The woman kept going straight past her, almost ran into Ari and then encountered Milo, who had seen the results of Melati’s shots and hefted an electric baton.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the room, a vaguely familiar male voice yelled, “Don’t!”
But Milo had already brought the baton down—
—And it went straight through the woman’s body—
—Which then split in half and became two identical women.
A great arc of lightning sizzled from the baton to a nearby workstation.
Milo yelled, but held onto the baton. Ouch. That had to hurt.
He lashed out again, cutting both women at the waist, but the two became four. Another arc of lightning tore through the room.
“What the hell is this nonsense!”
“Stop, stop, stop it!” Majoa grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms by his sides. So they stood, watching the four identical women, who now seemed to have forgotten about the newcomers. One of them brushed off her clothes, a uniform made from an unusual fabric. One crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the back of a workstation. One fiddled with a little pouch on her belt and one gave Milo a coldly disapproving look. Then she turned her attention to Melati.
Melati knew what they were: fragments come to life. This was all a very clever 3D illusion from the projector on the desk over there. That was why shooting them or dividing them had no effect except that it temporarily disrupted their cohesion, so that they had to reconfigure and forgot what they’d been doing.
Then she also, belatedly, realised that no one else had attacked her either.
Milo and Majoa had taken up position in front of them, but the fourteen people in the room didn’t look like they had been about to launch an attack. They stared at her as if she were an apparition. Fourteen faces with wide eyes. Two of them were Jas and Nysa—thank the heavens they were all right. Two were aggregates, but they weren’t doing anything either. They sat, looking astonished, tired, dirty.
God, it stank in this room.
In amongst a couple of Allion guards sat an old man whom Melati assumed to be Sep Kerakis, but he looked nothing like the stiff and pompous man from the vid messages that Dolchova would play in the mess room.
With his deathly pale skin and hollow eyes, this man resembled a walking skeleton. The hands he held on the armrests of his chair were thin and knobbly, the skin waxen and translucent.
His eyes were pale blue and bloodshot. He nodded when Melati looked at him. He said, “Sadly, getting in is the easy part.” His Standard was accented but sophisticated.
Melati glanced over her shoulder. The four identical women had fanned out over the room. “But getting out is not?”
He shook his head.
The smell in the room should have told her as much. Of course he was not going to tell her exactly what was going on.
“We want our station back.”
He spread his hands and leaned away from the control panel that faced him. “You’re welcome. Let me sit here and laugh while you struggle with this menace that our friend Bassanti let loose. Let’s see if you can deal with the threat that all of our best engineers have been unable to contain.”
Melati again glanced at the four women who had taken to prowling around the room. One copy came past one of the aggregates. He flinched away from her.
Melati met Jas’ eyes. Certainly he would know. The area where they sat was on a slightly raised platform. When Melati put her foot on the step, she was thrown back as if she’d run into a wall.
Ouch, her knee.
She poked at the air before her. He finger met a hard surface.
“What is this?”
Jas said, “Some kind of shield. She put it up when I was trying to reinstall maintenance modules.”
The ships used shields, but she didn’t think they were anywhere near as solid as this one. “But all the people who ran out when we opened the door—”
“She didn’t see them as a threat. She was content with simply locking them in here. So when you destroyed the door . . .” Jas shrugged.
“Who is this woman?”
“Someone who thinks she is the centre of the universe,” Sep Kerakis said, his tone bitter.
But Melati knew. In the recording made from the worm that roamed the station, she had looked at Paul Ormerod through someone else’s eyes. She had wondered if he had a wife, or a mistress. She would guess that this was the woman.
This was why her clothes looked odd: they were very old. The garment was a set of overalls of some description, awkwardly thick material that was probably meant for wearing under a vacuum suit. She was pale-skinned with a smattering of freckles. Dark curls framed her face, coming down to the top of her collar.
Then Melati noticed something else that she hadn’t seen before. On the woman’s chest, she wore a tag. It said Kessler 129.
That was a very old cohort. That whole 1-series had ended up with the Taurus Army.
“What are you staring at?” the closest copy said.
God, she was talking to a sentient mindbase of the highest order.
“You’re a construct.”
“Of course I am. You have a problem with that?” The venom in her words made Melati shiver. It belied her friendly appearance.
There was a workstation next to where Melati stood. She leaned over the chair, pulled up the public database, and typed Kessler 129.
The database told her it needed a while to search. Need to access archived material. Do you want to proceed? Y/N. Melati hit Yes. While she waited, the woman looked on, a suspicious expression on her face.
Her three copies now stood at the exit to the room. They were calm, but she wondered how long it would be before they grew aggressive again.
The search data came onto the screen. Kessler 129. It gave a list of nine names, most of them female, most of them based on some mythological figure. Aphrodite, Dione, Neptuna, Freya. They were odd names for constructs. These days they named constructs with unique names or spellings of existing names that were not widely used in the population. Most of the Kessler 129 sisters appeared to have died in their fifties. Funny, but these days they were still struggling with increasing the longevity of constructs.
All except one. There was no date of death for Hadie Kessler. And of Hadie Kessler, the database said that her body was found in the settlement Envio2 on Titan, missing her mindbase. It was never found.
An application was still open for her to remove her anti-fertility implant. The application had been made by one Paul Ormerod.
That was it. Melati stared at the screen, her mouth open. Since when did a highly gifted scientist take a construct woman as his partner?
“I can see what you’re looking at,” the projection said.
“Are you Hadie Kessler?”
She gave a low hiss. “You must be the smartest one of the bunch.”
“It’s not that hard to figure out.”
Another low hiss. Melati sensed that one of the other copies now stood behind her. A glance at the clock told her that they had half an hour until Dolchova’s ultimatum expired. And there was not going to be any time for niceties or negotiations. How did you negotiate with a sentient mindbase anyway?
Melati sat down at the workstation. She connected her PCD to the control room’s systems and opened her mindbase reading software. It said no mindbases found. She widened her search for the program directories, and found 7656487 copies of faulty mindbase code. Fragments. The real one would be much bigger than all of those files. She ordered them to be sorted by size. That was going to take a while.
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All four copies now stood around her, looking at the screen. “What are you going to do?” The voice sounded suspicious. A breeze of cold air whirled around her.
“I can see you here. I’m going to find you and copy you to a separate device.” Her PCD would have to do. She didn’t think the datastick would hold another mindbase.
From the back of the room, Jas said, “Don’t touch it. We tried that, too. That’s why we’re all locked in here. This thing went nuts and wouldn’t let us out.”
“We have no time. I have to try.”
Twenty-six minutes to Dolchova’s ultimatum.
The sorting was complete. At the top of the list was a mindbase file much bigger than the rest. But when Melati went to copy it, it came up with an error message No such file. Well, damn it.
Another search, of the library. This one took longer.
Twenty minutes.
“Your friends out there are warning us,” Kerakis said. He was wearing an earpiece and must have picked up some broadcast by the Felicity.
“Tell them that we’re working on it.”
“What do you think we’ve been trying to do?” He sounded indignant.
“All outgoing communication is jammed,” Nysa explained.
The four fragments were looking on with much bemusement.
Melati checked the results of the search. No such file. She had a suspicion that catching a sentient mindbase inside a computer system was impossible.
“Just tell me what you want from us.”
The women laughed.
Melati wiped sweat from her upper lip.
Nineteen minutes.
“Do you just want to be obnoxious? Do you want to—”
Wait. She had an idea. She didn’t need this woman to tell her what she wanted. She knew at least one thing that she would want.
Melati pulled the chain from under her clothes and brought the chain over her head. She set her PCD on the workstation bench. She unclipped the cover . . .
“What are you doing?” Fatima yelled behind her. “You’ll cross-infect everything.”
“I think this is what she wants.”
Melati’s heart thudded like crazy. She met the eyes of one of the four fragment copies that were still observing her.
“I have something for you.”
She inserted the stick into the slot and called up Paul Ormerod’s mindbase. It started scrolling over the screen of its own accord, faster and faster as Paul’s mindbase escaped into the station’s system. There was no stopping it now. This was either the most brilliant or most stupid thing she would ever do.
Then it was gone. She waited. Everyone else in that room was quiet, too, as if they sensed that something monumental had just passed. For far too long, nothing happened, except the numbers ticking over on the clock.
Seventeen minutes until all hell would break loose. Sixteen fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven—
A flash tore through the room. Several people gasped. A vortex of light whirled in the central projection space. The swirls coalesced into vague shapes which came together and formed the figure of a man. Melati recognised him from the memories of Jas’ mindbase. This was Paul Ormerod.
With a soft poof, the fragment next to Melati exploded into shards of light.
Melati turned to the remaining three fragments, holding out her hands. “What? Did you even see who that is? You can’t just disappear like that—”
Poof, poof, poof. The other three fragments also exploded.
Fifteen minutes.
If ever Melati had felt like swearing, this was the time.
“What are you doing?” Jas called out. “This will just attract them.”
“That is the idea.” That it would attract the real mindbase so that she could capture Hadie.
Paul stood in the middle of the room looking forlorn and confused. He held out his hands to the invisible barrier. It glowed where his fingertips touched it.
Melati scrunched up the hem of her shirt. It wasn’t working. This was all for nothing.
They had only twelve minutes left. They might as well be dead. They couldn’t reach the Felicity or any of the other ships.
“Look!” Fatima called.
A luminous glow surrounded the projector. It swirled and formed an indistinct shape which turned into another copy of that same woman. She looked more solid than the previous ones. This was the real Hadie Kessler.
Milo tightened his grip on the gun. Melati held up her hand to stop him.
Hadie called out, “Paul!”
He smiled and held his arms wide. “Hadie!”
She ran to him.
The moment they touched each other, the projections exploded in a flash of light. The light struck the barrier, which shattered into thousands of little pieces that glowed and went out before they hit the ground. A gust of wind tore through the room, whipping up Melati’s hair. Dust and grit hit her skin.
Nine minutes.
One by one, the computer screens blinked out, blackened and turned on again. There had been a soft hum in the room from air scrubbers, but it fell quiet. The lights flickered and went out.
Melati turned back to the screen in front of her that lit the area around it with an eerie blue glow. She found both mindbase files easily enough. She moved them to her PCD and turned off the projector.
Five minutes.
Quick. She ran to the communicator’s chair, and put on an earpiece, and fumbled with where and how to connect it. She was blasted with warning sirens.
A mechanical voice announced, “Felicity to station. Ultimatum expires soon. Please respond to this broadcast or risk being fired upon.”
Melati yelled, “This is New Jakarta Station to all ISF ships. Does anyone copy.”
The automatic voice continued.
“New Jakarta Station to all ISF ships. Please respond.”
Three minutes.
She banged her fist on the workstation desk. “It’s not connecting! Please anyone.”
“Wait,” Fatima said. She fiddled something on her PCD screen.
Two minutes.
Melati repeated, “New Jakarta Station to all ISF ships.”
Fatima said something to Iman in hypertech code. He ran across the dark room, the light from his PCD bouncing with each step. There was a clanging noise.
One minute.
“Please, Felicity, Dixon, anyone, can you hear us? We’ve recaptured the command room at New Jakarta—”
The light came on.
The wailing sirens in the earpiece stopped.
And a male voice said, “Felicity to New Jakarta Station. Hearing you loud and clear.”
Melati could have cried. She had never been so glad to hear Dixon’s voice. “The station is under native control. Do not shoot, repeat, do not shoot. Repeat, the station is under our control.”
While she spoke, the clock ticked to 00:00.
Chapter 32
* * *
WHEN SHE SIGNED OFF, Melati leaned back in the chair, wiping sweat from her face. That had been a very close thing.
Only then did she notice that two of the Allion women crouched next to Sep Kerakis. He had collapsed on the floor.
Milo and Majoa, who had been guarding them, were watching with puzzled expressions. Majoa, who was closest, cast Melati a puzzled look. Could it be some kind of trick? Maybe.
Melati pushed herself up and went to have a look, her hand on her gun, but the women were too busy with their leader to take notice of her. Kerakis’ eyes were shut and the way his arms had gone slack convinced Melati that this was real. His skin looked really pale, and now that she paid attention to it, all the Allion people looked thin, sick and worn out.
She called the team to her. “Milo, you stay here to keep an eye on them. Let them take care of him, but don’t allow anyone to leave the room. Ari, you stay with him and make contact with Hasegawa and the ship. Get them to send transport. Fatima and Iman can stay here with you.”
Melati, Majoa and Ky
a left the command centre for a sweep of the rest of the C sector. As they had noticed before, the corridors were eerily quiet. In one room, they found a body slumped on the ground. It was a dark-skinned woman. Her cheekbones stuck out so much that they would penetrate the skin. Her cheeks were hollow. Her wrists were thinner than Melati’s, who was considered unusually slight within ISF.
Next they found another body on a mattress in an office that used to house the office of the Commerce division. This was a man, quite tall, with rubbery-looking black skin. The muscles underneath had wasted so much that the skin showed the lumps and bumps of the artificial robotic skeleton underneath. Aggregates could store food for a long time, but even they ran out, apparently.
There were more bodies, all in the same emaciated state. God, how long had the station survived on marginal rations?
They found no constructs, and Melati could only shudder as she contemplated what might have happened to them. Problems with the recycling indeed. The thought made her sick. Charlotte West of the Taurus Army was not going to be impressed.
Majoa said, in a haunted voice, “They came here, took control of the station and then bluffed their way through terrible shortages of everything. They could have just let us know that their food supplies ran short.”
“They fed the civilians first,” Melati said. All things considered, the barang-barang had been well off because they were partially self-sufficient.
* * *
When they returned to the command room without having found anyone alive, Ari reported that he got word that the Felicity had sent another shuttle with a technician to fix the airlock. They’d also sent immediate food aid. And a hospital ship would be departing later.
The team was ordered to go back when the supply shuttle returned to the Felicity. Melati spoke to Dolchova and the logistics department, and it wasn’t hard to convince them to leave all the civilians on board the station, and send tech crew instead. Milo would be staying to supervise the distribution of food. Melati assumed that Uncle would have a thing or two to say about that, but she resolved not to interfere.
Things changed rapidly in the B sector over the next few days, but largely back to the way they had been before the occupation. People continued to grow their own food. The hypertechs fixed the damage to the recycling room and everything went on as it had in what Melati was beginning to think of as “the old days”. Maybe the aunties didn’t complain about ghosts so much anymore. And maybe a New Pyongyang refugee, or two, could be seen working in the countless shops that were suddenly springing up in the BC corridor. Maybe, too, a New Pyongyang family with three children came to eat in Uncle’s rumak, though Melati had to take Uncle’s word for it; and much as he complained about “strangers”, “at least they paid their bill” was an endorsement of trustworthiness when coming from his mouth.