“You think the saboteurs would get caught blasting us out of space,” Teagan9 said.
“Everyone’s supposed to be well clear of the noninterference zone,” Frankie said.
“If a ship pops in too close…” Babs1 said.
“Their observers might know,” Frankie finished. “They’d have to be bloody careful.”
“Well, that’s great, then, isn’t it?”
“Provisionally great, Cyril, sure. If it keeps us alive and lets us get proof of this stunt with the acid in Appaloosa back to Sensorium, it’s bloody brilliant.” Frankie finished with the last OxBOT.
Her leg cramped then. She bent, massaging out the kink. Then, stretching like a starfish in nullgrav, Frankie took a second to leap around the hangar, bounding from bulkhead to bulkhead, whirling in midair. Enhanced reflexes and balance were part of the surgical augmentation package; there was a lot of starling tish in the plug resting against her sacrum, and a bit grafted right onto her vestibular nerve. Artificially being leveled into star-gymnast dexterity was especially pleasing because she’d been clumsy as a kid. Her parent, Gimlet, a gifted athlete, had always seemed to despair of her.
Back at the meds printer, Cyril10 spat into a flask and then squeezed the gelatinous payload of the drug packet into it, corking it before giving the whole thing a good shake. Checking the integrity of his suicide drugs.
“Is this meant to be a random audit? One packet, one test?” Babs1 said. “You don’t even know if the nanobeads have an enzymatic trigger.”
“We need to start somewhere, don’t we?” he snapped.
“No offense was meant—” Babs1 began.
The flask burst into flame in Cyril10’s hand.
CHAPTER 12
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
SALVAGE TARGET: EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Them’s term for this situation was caught behind enemy lines.
Scrap of the All felt the heat of the nanobeads’ ignition as Them hurled the flaming vessel away. Burning, it crashed against a bulkhead, momentarily spreading the blaze. Then Them snuffed it, under a …
< … translation pending … >
< … pillow … >
Them snuffed the flames using a pillow.
Residue filled the air: smoke, burned mammal hair, fire-suppressant foam issuing from safeties in the wall. Clots of the foam danced in the compartment, large motes that would hopefully confuse any camera footage of Scrap making an escape.
The first priority was getting out of medical storage.
Them scraped the air raw with its distress sounds. Foam was flying.
Screams. The distress sounds were screams.
Translation was so slow! Scrap tried to strengthen the comms connection to the All, to no avail.
Pushing off from a position under a fixed wall cabinet, Scrap took care to keep the hulk of the screaming alien between itself and the room’s primary camera as Us made a zero-gravity drift in the direction of Them’s leg.
This was a risky strategy. Humans wore nanosilk, snugged close to the skin. There were no ruffles or cuffs or loops for the All to use as cover on the bottom half of that immense, overheated body. If Them hadn’t been set afire, the pull of Scrap’s negligible weight on its thigh might have been enough to draw attention.
But Them was distracted, and Scrap safely made the traverse to its mid-waist region, reeling in a clump of foam to hopefully provide cover.
“I’m burned, I’m goddamned burned is what’s wrong!” Physical proximity sent sound vibrations fizzing through Us. “Of course I’m not all right!”
Them was only around to be burned because it had failed to self-terminate as Champ-Them had promised.
None of this matched the narrative Us had agreed upon. Champ-Them had been meant to sabotage the station’s power membrane. Scrap going after the pegasus had been a mere contingency.
All Thems on the station had outlived the initial accident. They had traced the source of the sabotage to med storage … and they’d done it alarmingly fast.
As Cyril10-Them kicked its way out into the corridor, bouncing off bulkheads with its burnt appendage tucked against its thorax, Scrap rode along, scanning for camera blind spots and chances to hop clear. Us had to get some distance before more of Them came to evaluate the fleshy damage from the burn. More individuals meant more eyes, all with implanted cameras. It had already had to fabricate one decoy, and the bots had pounced on it.
That was another problem: all of a sudden, there were far more remotes than Scrap had expected.
Scrap’s ride was headed away from the hangar, with all its useful obstructions and blind spots and places to hide.
Us took a chance and threw an escape line at a bulkhead, releasing Them’s belt. Drifting, it found a duct, tumbling into the air-circ system of the station. Rearranging its spines to prioritize locomotion, it traversed a long metallic desert, taking refuge in a lightless compartment.
The ducts were a relief after the terrible open yawn of the corridor, but they wouldn’t be safe for long. Tiny bots were roaming even here, shining lights and taking footage, inspecting and searching.
Scrap linked comms with the station helix and commenced a passive sift of status updates from the comms running between Thems.
Translation came: all the top-note chatter was about Them’s burns and the source of the fire.
The story Scrap and Champ-Them had meant to tell began with the new human-built portals failing to launch. That had paid out, true. But the rest of Scrap’s obligations were deep in arrears. The station remained occupied, legally unsalvageable. The portal membrane was intact. Thems were hunting for answers and their datastream showed active intention to assemble and transmit proof of interference.
Scrap could only conclude that the Emerald crew had expected sabotage all along.
Now Scrap had to stop Thems from sending any proof back to Earth’s Sensorium.
Before Us had a chance to decide whether this was realistic, a new crisis rose. There was a new entity in the comms channel.
How were Them populating?
Oh! A code-based sapient had loaded into the station during the unexpected comms handshake. It had absorbed the station manager and booted up all the tiny bots.
The new arrival would complicate salvage claims even further. Babs1-Them appeared to be a true sapient …
We were promised the station OS would be inadequate!
The sapp had Scrap’s decoy and was scouring all the footage from those extra cameras.
The thought of being found made Scrap bunch involuntarily. Capture would displease the All greatly.
This wasn’t Scrap’s fault!
The thought was alarming. Scrap was Us, not Me. It checked its comms link with the All. Still dead.
Solve the problem, fast.
If there was damage to be done, it would have to be in the primary server room. Dead infosphere, dead station. Kill the servers, and the new artificial, Babs1, would die too. The ghosts would self-triage, and the lone survivor, Frankie-Them, would wither without life support.
Once everyone died, Scrap of the All could still claim Emerald station for Us.
The station servers, then. Inject incendiary packets into the bioelectronics in the primary server room.
Resolved and relieved, Scrap of the All got moving.
CHAPTER 13
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, SOL STAR SYSTEM
SATURN-TITAN REGION, LODESTONE STATION
Maud,
Never doubt that I love you.
Braille tape was the medium for secret messages and love letters, single lines of coiled text on a brightly inked medium.
This strip had a complex and colorful pattern of moji—hearts. The visual hash made the actual message, the raised dots of the lettering, effectively invisible to cameras as users drew them like ribbon through their fingers.
Braille notes tended to be haiku texts. The form inclined to brevity and abbreviation. It was
something of a miracle Frankie hadn’t defaulted to ILU for her protestation of love.
Never doubt.
Sending secret notes was regarded as antisocial, more secretive than skin-texting. Note-passing was seen, by many, as suspect. Still, the tiny breach in Earth’s wall of mutually assured disclosure was a necessity: children who could Braille and Morse were vastly less likely to self-harm or to cut out their transponders—as Frankie had all those years before—and run away from home.
Maud threaded the next sentence under her thumb. I love you no matter what.
Silly, but having the note made her believe Frankie was still alive.
If the comms project had gone forward before Frankie left, she might not have to rely on faith. They might be able to feel each other’s presence, despite the distance. They might even have comms, if the theories were right.
Upton’s theories. She shivered.
“Almost there!” Hung Chan had come with her from Earth. Now he was leading the way to the Project Hopscotch saucer hub. Compact of body and round of face, he waved cheerily at a woman Maud didn’t recognize. A nametag popped up on her HUD: Irma du Toit. Profession came next—prima ballerina, dance instructor—along with badges indicating enthusiastic support of the IMperish Foundation. She was related to the head pilot, a big white guy named Champ Chevalier.
Beyond Irma, drifting aloof and glazed in a corner, was a ginger scarecrow named Wilbur Mack, who looked enough like Teagan9, despite his pallor, to tag him as as one of the elderly couple’s great-great-grandchildren.
Wilbur’s tags circled him like goldfish: he/his pronouns, #shy, #OK2ignore, #SpanishSpeaker, #notahugger.
Next of kin for the stranded @EmeraldCrew, all invited to Titan to watch the launch of the rescue ship, Iktomi.
I never thought as a kid I would find anyone who didn’t have a heart of sand. Never thought I could have a rock. But Maud, the #vandalrumor is no hoax. Someone is sabotaging the Bootstrap Project. Kinze probably, with help from humans.
There it was, the paranoid fantasy nobody but hoaxers dared utter, not if they didn’t want thousands of strikes for negging the Bootstrap Project. If Frankie ever said this aloud, she’d be broomed from piloting before her social capital could collapse.
We’re expecting an attempt to sabotage the project at Sneezy, Frankie had written. Bootstrap has greenlighted a plan for identifying the turncoat.
Be my rock for a little longer. I will come back, I promise.
“Once everyone’s here, we’ll head to the viewing lounge,” Hung said. “I’ll be with you throughout the launch to answer questions.”
“Splendid,” Irma said. Something about her voice—a disturbing hint of familiarity—snagged Maud’s attention.
She glanced over the ballerina’s tags again, taking note of she/her pronouns and ads for an IMperish-sponsored ballet show in nullgrav. Irma apparently acted as something of a brand ambassador for the idea of eternal EMbodiment. She had lobbied against the noninterference pact; she was passionately anti-Bootstrap.
That must make things awkward at home, what with Champ being FTL’s top pilot.
“How are preflight preparations going, Mer Chan?” Irma asked in what Maud thought of as a plummy British accent.
“Everything to spec.” Hung shared a view of the Titan control room, where seven techs were running boards and watching readings. One display showed Champ Chevalier himself, waiting in Iktomi’s hangar, consuming hydrogels one after the other, ensuring max hydration before he settled into the cockpit.
Champ was clad in one of those awful life-support suits the pilots wore whenever they were about to be plugged in.
Maud shuddered. Hung signed a question.
“Bodybags,” she said.
“Oh. Yeah, that’s my fault. There’s sort of a friendly competition among the pilots, to nickname our tech. All the naughty monikers and gallows humor, pretty much, are mine.” He ducked his head, looking distinctly #notsorry.
The suit flap above Champ’s sacrum was dangling, exposing five deep, pink puckers where the cybernetic plug would penetrate his flesh.
If they’d gotten wired for quantum comms before this, Maud would have a trimmed-down version of the same plug, a single thread of tissue at her sacrum. She and Frankie had also been slated for new neural tish injections, augments to her existing neural implants.
How could she consider trusting Upton to do anything, much less something surgical, to either her or Frankie?
Trust me, love, Frankie’s note read. Try not to worry. Big ask, I know, but after I’m back, we’ll talk everything out. Everything!
After I’m back. No doubts there. Frankie was good at confidence. It was part of what made her so attractive.
She had coded the message on a fragile spool of tape, so the Braille became more degraded with every run through the spool, every sweep of Maud’s fingertip over the letters. Enzymatic trigger, probably, reacting to the oils on her skins. It would be incomprehensible soon.
She’d known about the sabotage and she’d gone anyway. No question of playing it safe. Maud forced herself to watch the techs crawling over every circuit board and nut on Iktomi, completing final checks on the saucer.
Irma du Toit’s face was schooled to neutrality, but Maud thought she could detect hints of disapproval. Anti-Bootstrap speechers didn’t think much of the Solakinder effort to invent #supertechs the Exemplar races had already perfected.
Maud shoved the Braille tape into the pannier on her left hip, tucking it into a segmented nanosilk compartment to keep it from knocking about in nullgrav. Her knuckles bumped against something—the suspended locust nymphs she still hadn’t returned to the lab, probably. She raised and planted one foot and then the other, breaking the magnetic seals as she made space within their circle.
Irma took a graceful step backward—and away from Maud. She smelled, ever so slightly, of lavender.
Memory stirred again.
The chances that Maud would run into a second person from her childhood, so soon after the disturbing encounter with Upton … it was an impossible-to-credit coincidence.
Irma might remind her of Headmistress, but Headmistress wasn’t human. Everyone said sapps couldn’t EMbody …
Everyone who? Allure18?
It felt harder, suddenly, to dismiss her own inner hoaxer. After all, Frankie had gone to Emerald expecting trouble, and trouble there had been. If there was ever a time for indulging conspiracy theories, this was it.
Sonika Singer sailed into the observation lounge. She had her primer configged into a quilted, rose-colored jacket, gathered at mid-thigh. Her prosthetics had been fitted with semi-autonomous grapplers and her thick black hair was twisted into strands the width of a pencil, each clamped, in segments, by bright red magnets. The magnets hung together like clustered ladybugs, creating a mass of strands reminiscent of kelp. The hair undulated in the nullgrav but didn’t obscure the journo’s face.
Tags: extrovert, journalist, pronouns she/her, #upforanything, #heretolisten.
Behind Sonika came the scariest of Maud’s many parents-in-law.
“Mama Rubi,” Maud managed, aiming for maximum respect. “What a surprise!”
“Hello, dearest.” Rubi air-kissed her, left, then right. “May I present Allure18, our account manager, and Herringbo of the Kinze.”
Kinze? Here?
Few of the races who’d shown themselves since Mitternacht fit with classical human ideas about offworlders. Maud had seen footage of only one mammal race that followed the bipedal template, a sort of a rhino-faced organism with two legs and sexual dimorphism. That species might have passed for a costumed actor, from the long-lost days of the Star Trek media franchise.
The Kinze were incomprehensibly, disturbingly weird.
They presented as heaps of mobile insectile spines, shaggy maggot-infested blankets, almost, or chitinous rugs. The same spines that made up their bodies, it was said, covered their ships’ decks interior bulkheads. Spines were omnipr
esent in every environment they inhabited. Maud had seen footage of ceilings and floors ankle-deep in what, anthropologists suspected, were the literal remains of the Kinze’s presumably dead ancestors.
When they weren’t heaped, the Kinze could stretch, or knit themselves into blankets, draping or bunching. This new arrival, Herringbo, stretched into a cone about two meters high, a shape roughly akin to a kid under a sheet, playing ghost.
The Solakinder didn’t know how it saw or heard. Didn’t know how it generated human-sounding speech, or whether it was using tech to do so.
Allure18 said, “Herringbo has been permitted inside the noninterference zone to observe our attempt to retrieve @EmeraldCrew. I would like to remind everyone present that he will not engage in conversations about #supertech or its capabilities.”
When in doubt, fall back on formal etiquette. Maud bowed and said, “Welcome, Mer Allure18, Mer Herringbo. This is Wilbur Mack—Teacakes’ great-great-great-grandchild. And this is Irma du Toit, a relation from Champ Chevalier’s home community in Pretoria.”
“I’m his aunt, dear heart—” Irma broke off, midsentence, as if she’d misspoken.
Headmistress liked for us to call her Auntie, Maud thought.
The Kinze, Herringbo, showed no reaction. Meanwhile, Rubi mojied gratitude to Irma with a deep bow. “What Champ is doing for our family and the project is extraordinarily brave. We’ve sent five strokes to Cloudsight, but I want to thank you personally.”
“Champ and I have different visions of humanity’s future, but I support his ambitions in the piloting program,” Irma said.
“If he has any doubts at all, Hung Chan is still ready to go,” Rubi said. “There’d be no shame in letting a newer pilot—”
“An inexperienced pilot?” Irma shook her head. “Tut. Champ has earned his place at the top of the pilot leaderboard. If anyone can come back with your dear Frances, it’s him.”
The alien fluffed out its spines. “The personal courage of Champ-Them of the Solakinder is laudable. You’s craft Iktomi has consistently failed to achieve continuous anyspace travel. This attempt is risky.”
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