by Sara King
She put her hand on the door again, deciding to go find Pan first, to show him his ploy hadn’t had the desired effect. Even if she had to charter a ship to Rath itself to hunt him down, the last thing she was gonna do was cringe and kowtow because he could manipulate a robot. So what if Dobie was gone? Pan needed her. He’d said so himself. She was the brains of the operation—Pan was just the pretty face.
Anna started to turn the gornatev deadbolt.
Her whole body, she realized, was shaking. Her heart was pounding, she was sweating more than usual, and even her stomach hurt, suggesting some sort of rapid-onset infection. Probably some particularly virulent strain of escaped nannite left over from the decades-old Junkyard Cold War that Anna had picked up in the tubes outside the Babies’ compound, considering its acuteness.
Now that was a consideration. If she had the flu, then she probably didn’t want to exhaust herself. She needed rest, food, and a warm bowl of nannite soup. She would’ve had Dobie analyze her saliva for the culprit, but the traitor was off killing robots and ‘saving lives’ instead.
Anna twisted the gornatev deadbolt back into place and went back to her bed. As soon as she sat down, some of the flulike symptoms retreated. Yeah, she’d definitely picked up something bad. She didn’t feel her normal, cheerful self. In fact, she felt downright shitty. She looked at the wall again, wondering if she should call a doctor.
If she did call a doctor, though, she ran the risk of getting one who recognized her—and she had done that little demonstration in front of the medical crew of the Orbital regarding what happens to a wayward Coalition surgeon’s cranium once it was determined it belonged to a spy. Dobie had gotten particularly gruesome with that one, testing one of his new overpowered explosive rounds. Half the room had needed stitches from bone shrapnel afterwards, though Anna, who had advised him of his test beforehand, had worn plastic shielding from head to toe.
Yeah, they’d probably remember her.
Miserable, Anna continued to stare at the wall. She bet Pan was checking her exit logs by the hour, lapping it up. By riding out her illness in her room, she was only making the situation worse, making him think she had a weakness, that she was afraid.
Yeah, screw that. Anna got up again, but this time, her knees trembled under her, threatening to dump her back to the bed. Anna glowered at the door. She could imagine Pan out there, snickering behind his hand with the other Babies, thinking she was camping out in here because she was scared of the big, bad world.
Her heart was pounding again, once more reminding her of her illness. What utterly crappy timing. She could’ve gotten sick yesterday or tomorrow, but no matter what she did now, it was going to look like she was hiding because she didn’t have her pet robot. They were gonna think she was cowering.
So let them. It wasn’t like she cared if they thought she was afraid. Besides, if they thought she had a weakness, it would be all the more sweet when they tried to take advantage of it and she disabused them of the theory. Grinning to herself, she turned back to her bed.
“Hello,” a dark-skinned, blue-eyed kid beside her nightstand said.
Anna screamed.
“It’s me!” the Cobrani cried, holding up both pink-tinged, ebony palms. “I came back to talk, ’cause we didn’t get a good chance last time because I thought Mom had dinner planned because she told me to be back in five minutes, but what she really meant was five minutes after getting here, which is ridiculous, so I had to leave and eat leftovers instead for no good reason at all and we didn’t get a chance to talk.”
Anna blinked at the tube rat.
The Cobrani seemed to calm down slightly and he ran his stubby fingers through his fuzzy black and white hair. “So, um, I thought we could talk a little while Dobie’s gone, and I can just erase the memory later, so he doesn’t get upset. I promised I would stay outside, see? He didn’t think it was safe for me to be in here with you, so I had to fudge things a little bit.”
Anna cocked her head. “How in the everloving fuck did you get in my room?”
The Cobrani frowned like she’d just asked him how many cans of soda were in a six-pack. “Oh, well, that part was easy. I was thinking we could talk about something fun, like the way they’re wasting all that power on the Dotrine loop, when we could cut it by about ninety-eight percent with a Trudine reaction. I mean, there would obviously be the alternate dimensions issue, but I think we could counter that with a spray-on Barytine barrier, maybe even an AI suit.”
Anna’s world immediately sharpened to a pinpoint. “Excuse me?”
The kid nodded. “Yeah, getting the Whorug sphere operational would be utterly badass. I mean, theoretically, we could move a whole planet with it. There’s no mass limitations. Of course, with the compression we’re talking about, we might accidentally ignite a star if we go too big.”
Anna squinted at him, finding the Cobrani’s face familiar somehow.
“Don’t worry,” the kid said, “I promise you won’t remember after, so you won’t have to lie to Dobie—that would scare me, too.”
“I’m not scared of Dobie,” Anna said, automatically. Then, stunned, she realized where she’d seen the kid before. He’d been in the Yolk camp run by Director Nalle—just another dirty, haggard face with the Wide.
Which explained where he was getting his material. She’d been sleep-deprived, cramming a crash-course of chemical weaponry into her weary brain between babysitting her criminally timid big sister and sabotaging key parts of the camp computer system—like the heat settings in the Coalition crew quarter showers. She vaguely remembered putting the little shit in his place when he’d interrupted her, especially relishing the slack-jawed look on his face as she had laid the smackdown. She hadn’t remembered getting too detailed, but she had been utterly exhausted. She must’ve let some of her theories slip. The moron was just parroting them back to her, perpetually trapped in the visions and memories of the Wide.
“I mean, we could take a ship from Fortune to the Core in the time it takes you to blink. Better than a Void Ring. They lose thirty minutes inside the Ring due to the time tunneling effect. We could even direct the dropoff location without an anchor. That means total limitless exploration! Just first shoot a couple drones through a localized rift—”
Anna sighed. “Get out of my room.”
The kid—Quad?—blinked at her. “What?”
“Look,” Anna said, “I don’t know how you got to the Orbital, but all you’re doing is parroting my own observations back at me.”
“Oh.” The kid looked crushed. “Right. Sorry.”
Anna found herself amused by his reaction, as if he were acutely embarrassed by his lapse. It even softened her original desire to strangle him for startling her. “Okay, fugly. Let’s get you out of my quarters and back into the loving arms of Orbital security.” She reached out to grab his arm.
“Well, if you’re finding Trudine circumvention to be too remedial, we could take it a step further. Maybe we could talk about applying the Forensian-Keshaa Theorem to permanently infuse a man with the stable power of a star. All it would take would be two Whorug spheres. One we collapse to the exact shape of a man, the other leave it a sphere, join them on a quantum level, then put a star in one and a man in another, then hit the whole thing with a six terawatt imopulsonic blast. The guy would have to be coated with a micrometer-thick Barytine barrier before entering the sphere, of course, otherwise he’d explode into all his component atoms.”
Anna blinked. “Huh?”
Quad nodded. “Ultorian Man did it, back when the Tritons were using the Death Machine to churn out hundreds of thousands of unstoppable immortal soldiers every hour. I mean, they never said how he did it, but it’s pretty obvious once you think about it. Sure, Ultorian Man couldn’t talk with anyone afterwards due to his sheer energy rating—it’s why I haven’t actually tried it on my pet hamster yet, ’cause he’d probably be lonely—but he could use light signals on cosmic dust clouds like Marquis de Bat, and
he actually managed to knock out Jedi Wolverine with his fist. Do you know how hard that is? Jedi Wolverine’s superconducting nannites keep his body processes stable despite any temporary interruptions, and his secondary assist processors would keep his cranial pressure constant enough to keep him from passing out.”
Anna blinked. “Jedi Wolverine is a character from a kids’ holobook.”
Quad frowned at her. “So?”
Anna peered at him, realizing she’d never said a word about a Barytine barrier. The only place she’d ever heard of one was an obscure scientific thesis in a top-secret classified Coalition military knowledge base. “Nobody’s ever made a Barytine barrier. It’s theoretically impossible.”
Quad snorted like she were the stupid one. Which pissed Anna off. Just to prove what a retard he was, she slapped her habitually-lazy couch potato mind into action, directing it to tackle the processes involved in making a Barytine barrier. The theoretical problem was the shaping and stabilizing of sixth-dimensional nannite plasma using only ingredients found in the third dimension. Quite simply, it would require entry to—and mastery of—the sixth dimension.
…unless someone used a Whorug sphere to bring the sixth dimension to them. Since all dimensions were technically one inside a Whorug sphere, wherein observation alone was the motivator of matter, one could theoretically bypass the official constraints by wanting to create a Barytine barrier—but it would only theoretically work if the observer knew exactly what they wanted, right down to the micrometer, and could effectively visualize it while being distracted by the eye-popping phenomena of multidimensional existence. Considering that it would take trillions of six-dimensional, complex, partially-intelligent nanoscopic shapes working in tandem in order to create an effective nannite plasma, she hardly found that realistic. Besides, the whole point of a Barytine barrier was to protect the human body wearing it—to go in without one, which was the only way they could do it since they didn’t already have one, would result in the very violent, explosive death of the individual as his organic compounds expanded to fill the entire infinite-noninfinite area of the Whorug Sphere. She said so.
“Yes,” Quad countered. “But what if you sent a machine in?”
“A machine can’t observe,” Anna said.
“Dobie could,” Quad said. “Give him a tovlar shell, or some other form of atom-stable material protecting him, and boom. Barytine plasma.”
“It takes creative thought to make an observation,” Anna snapped. “Dobie has the creative capability of a goldfish.”
Quad almost looked hurt. “I think you’re underestimating him.”
“Underestimating him?” Anna demanded, increasingly furious that the kid was questioning her. “Just who the hell do you think you are?!”
The kid grinned and held out his pink Cobrani palm. “My name is Quad Ross. I’ve been looking for someone I could talk to ever since I figured out how Void Jaguar gave himself stable, visually perceptible, antimatter claws that were somehow non-reactive to gasses or airborne particles without blowing up the galax—”
Outside the bedroom, there was a click as someone shut the antechamber door.
Quad’s eyes went wide. “Oh shit! Sorry, gotta go!” And then he turned and grabbed a little swirling blue-black sphere from his pocket and held it out to her on his pink Cobrani palm. “See this?” he whispered. “TimeMagus used these. Took a lot—and I mean a lot—of work, and I never could figure out how to go twenty or thirty millennia back or how he could make a whole city jump around like he could, but I eventually figured out how to go back five minutes and thirty-nine seconds in a one-point-nine-meter radius.”
Anna frowned at the swirling black clouds inside the glowing blue marble-sized sphere. “What in the fuck is—”
Quad threw the sphere to the ground and the flash cut her words off short.
Miserable, Anna continued to stare at the wall. She bet Pan was checking her exit logs by the hour, lapping it up. By riding out her illness in her room, she was only making the situation worse, making him think she had a weakness.
Yeah, screw that. Anna got up again, but this time, her knees trembled under her, threatening to dump her back to the bed. Anna glowered at the door. She could imagine Pan out there, snickering behind his hand with the other Babies, thinking she was camping out in here because she was scared of the big, bad world.
So let them. It wasn’t like she cared if they thought she was afraid. Besides, if they thought she had a weakness, it would be all the more sweet when they tried to take advantage of it and she disabused them of the theory.
Doberman opened the door and frowned into the room at her. “Have you been standing there long?”
“Huh?” Anna asked, not having heard him enter the antechamber. Then, remembering she was pissed at him, she growled, “Of course I’ve been standing here. What was I supposed to do? You left me.”
“My apologies, Anna,” Dobie said. “I was mowing down the forces of evil at the battle of Rath with extreme prejudice.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Of course you were.” Then frowned. “Crap, what time is it? What’d you do…bail on them?”
“No, but I believe Jersey killed quite a few,” Dobie said. “The path through the airfield was clear within moments of landing.”
“Jersey, huh?” Anna said, frowning. “You let a Nephyr beat you?”
“I am just a Ferris,” Dobie said.
“No, screw that, Dobie,” Anna spat. “You and I are going to do some tinkering. You are not going to remain ‘just a Ferris.’ I’m tired of being trailed around by a sub-par piece of machinery. You, Dobie, are getting an upgrade. Next time Pan or Jersey or Milar, or Magali gives us shit, you can wipe the grins right off their faces.”
Doberman seemed to consider. “I doubt those four will give you shit while I’m around, Anna.”
“This is not up to debate!” Anna snapped. “You will have weapons and armor no one has ever heard of. You know why?”
Doberman raised a brow. “Why?”
“Because I’m gonna spend three whole days on it,” Anna said. “It’ll be the full workup. I’m done watching you flop around in the evolutionary tidal pool. You will be the Ferris 2.0. A.k.a. The Doberman Series 1.”
Her robot seemed to consider. “Is there any way you can work Jedi Wolverine claws into the mix?”
Anna frowned. “Jedi Wolverine is a holobook character.” When he just raised a brow, she added, “That’s fiction, in case you still don’t have the processing capability to understand the difference. Light is directional, Dobie. It’s not stationary.”
“Oh,” Doberman said. “That’s sad.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “That’s kindergartener stuff, Dobie. Seriously, read a textbook or something. Besides, it would look stupid.”
“I don’t think so,” Doberman replied. “I think it would look quite impressive, given the proper aggressive targets to showcase it.”
“No claws,” Anna snapped. “I’m the genius, here. I’ll tell you what’s possible, and light-claws aren’t possible.”
Doberman looked like he wanted to do something stupid, like argue, but then said, “Of course, Anna.”
“Now for some breakfast,” Anna growled, heading for the door. “I haven’t eaten anything since I woke up, and I’m gonna need the energy for that damned pilot interrogation.”
“Shall I note it on your schedule for you?” Doberman asked.
“Yeah,” Anna said. “And we need to give me a checkup. I was feeling really strange a few minutes ago. Shaky and gut hurty and everything. Probably coming down with the flu or something.”
“I’ll take care of it after breakfast,” Doberman said. “Will you want to tour your test subjects in the Junkyard? By your calculations, the next six-hour window would be the ideal time to investigate the after-effects of Y-172.”
“Yeah,” Anna said, striding through the door into the hallway outside, Dobie on her heels. “And be sure you’ve got a vial of Yolk on sta
ndby. If any of them prove to test positive, we’ll need to feed them a little to keep them alive for further experimentation.”
“As you wish, Anna,” Dobie said. He paused. Then, “The arrangements have been made. We’ll be picking it up in hallway B632 on the way to the Junkyard.”
Anna grunted. “And preorder me something for breakfast—I’ll be busy working up your new schematics, so I don’t want to have to waste my breath talking to one of the apron-clad dumbasses this morning.”
“Of course, Anna. You’ll be having a Glaxian snow spider omelet with Ne’vanthi hot sauce, fried kamchi strings, and a strawberry soda, as per your usual, unless you would like to opt for something more socially acceptable today?”
Anna grinned to herself. Dobie was the only one who had never complained when she wanted junk food like kamchi strings and strawberry soda for breakfast. Hell, even Pan had bitched about it when the Babies got together each Saturday to talk strategy and developments, as if the sight of snow-spider caviar was somehow more disturbing than his hairy feet. She now made a point of ordering the most interesting things on the menu, just to see if she could make them all grimace. “Keep it simple, Dobie. I’ve got a lot to think about.”
…Like the fact that Dobie was gonna be so cool when she was done with him. Like a Triton, but without the weaker organic parts. Already, she was coming up with dozens of new ideas she wanted to test, her main constraint being space and weight. “You at least bring back some musker swords for me?” she demanded as they walked.