Flight suits as bodybags. The Deep Space Relay Station, known far and wide as the Dumpster. Emerald Station as Sneezy, with its escape pod, the Booger.
Ember and Frankie venned in having a tendency to obsess—Frankie over winning leaderboards in the flight-training tracks, Ember over the decreasingly hypothetical discipline of anyspace maths. They had no sexual interest in each other; Ember was hardwired for … well, so far, just for Jermaine.
For Maud, marrying Frankie had meant buying into the full deal: one girl, two boys, Babs as sibling. All of them with Crane as oldfeller. Plus one unofficial extra spouse—the Bootstrap Project itself.
She had often felt like the family latecomer, a tagalong bringing nothing to the table but her secrets. But though Frankie’s force of personality attracted possible lovers by the dozens, she also drove off all but the most secure and tenacious. And so, Jermaine was brilliant and generous and wonderful in bed, and—despite his having been raised by stoic logic-worshippers—Ember paired his genius with a profound sweetness of temper.
Ember met her in Mars Arrivals, lighting up in a way that sent warmth to her bones, then throwing her the salute of his mother’s chosen people. Maud leaned close, touching his fingertips.
Ember said, “Hang on just a bit longer.”
“A bit?” Champ had been gone for nearly sixty-two hours. The four hops to Sneezy, assuming Iktomi survived them at all, would take days. There’d be repairs and maintenance, days more of hopping back …
… and if Champ is one of the conspirators, they won’t make it at all …
Maud found herself fingering the pendant Rubi had given her, the locator chip Frankie had dug out of her own arm, all those years before when she ran away. Breathe, breathe …
Ember said, “Come check out my office.”
He set out on a scenic route, over walkways offering views of the red Martian plains. This section of the planet was under active development: a new line of flexible nanocones, two city blocks across, was rising like mushroom caps on the horizon, inflating slowly as production teams grew pressurized atmospheric mix within their gill structures. In the peaks of the domes, algae grew in thin layers of hydrogel, canted to face the sun. The water had been harvested from Europa’s seas, a fact that never failed to fill Maud with wonder.
Bots were doing the bulk of the construction work, freeing up live specialists to supervise and deal with pop-up problems. As Earth’s debt rose and the sapp strike stretched on, expertise shortages were becoming acute.
Maud’s pace faltered. “I don’t know if I can do a tour right now.”
Ember put out his hands, inviting her to clasp them. She did, and he leaned close, locking eyes. “I’m not being frivolous.”
“What are you doing?”
“My mind to your—”
“Stop with the branded talk!”
“You really want to come with me.”
“Do I?”
“It’s essential to the whole darn Fraud.” He practically twinkled.
“The whole fam damly,” she grumbled.
“Exactly.”
Where was she going to go? Back to Lodestone, where her suspicions about Irma du Toit being Headmistress and Champ Chevalier being an anti-Bootstrap traitor were grinding sand in all her mental gears? Home, to try to find a way to explain to Jermaine that his chum Upton was a hoarder and a kidnapper—but that even so, she wanted to give the comms project a try?
Ember’s hands, curled in hers, tapped out a string of letters, off camera, in Morse. T.R.U.S.T.
“My maths aren’t wrong, Maud,” he said aloud.
She focused on the weight of the pendant at her throat. There’s a plan, Frankie said so.
“My maths are…” He paused, hunting a descriptor.
“Hush, I believe you.” Surrendering, she followed him to a domed booth with views of the Martian sky, with grace notes in the key of tech: spectacular vista of Garnet Station, bulk of the elevator platform, and the anyspace portal back to Earth.
Garnet Station was the Solakinder’s second-biggest space station and its busiest. It had begun its existence, just like Sneezy, as a small coil of pressurized compartments with a portal membrane stretched across them. From that original furl of metal it had built out, like an ammonite, expanding in a Fibonacci spiral of nanogrown chambers, labs, docking bays, nullgrav factories, refineries, food printers, airlocks for bots, and crew quarters.
The actual portal dwarfed the station generating it. Something—Ember called it the incomprehension principle—held that humans couldn’t process whatever it was they saw or sensed when looking directly at anyspace phenomena. Maud, in common with 78 percent of the population, saw sunshine-flecked ocean. Ember, she knew, saw impenetrable blizzard.
What you saw, if you were looking with the naked eye, was a sunlit disk of ocean water, or dense snowfall, whirling fall leaves … all hanging in space.
Frankie saw brimstone.
Linked chains of pods—passenger and shipping alike—threaded their way into the convex side of the portal. They would emerge at Europa. The pods coming out the other side, meanwhile, were all from the Moon. One big carousel.
“I want to give you a demo.” Ember opened a hatch, leading her into an ops room where three of the Mission Control techs were seated at virtual consoles, watching readouts on their respective HUDs.
“Morning, team—this is my packmate, Maud,” Ember said, loose-limbed and apparently carefree as she and the techs exchanged waves and Whooz data. “Everyone still on board to spin up a test pulse?”
A round of nods. One tech raised four fingers. “Midnight GMT in four minutes.”
Maud felt a kick, somewhere in the vicinity of her gut.
Mind-melding aside, she suddenly knew exactly what was going on. Ember was bloody—no, Frankie and Ember were about to attempt an unscheduled, unsupported illegal portal rollout.
“Jebote!”
Ember raised both eyebrows, perfect blandface.
Feeling almost disEMbodied, Maud watched her packmate wait out her urge to keep cursing or burst into tears.
Would this work?
My maths are …
She swallowed the feels; the effort made her knees pop. “What do I do?”
“This drill walks the team through the portal-launch process. It’s just practice. Would you like to run Comms? There’s a sim for VIP guests.”
“Clearly, I’d love to be impressed into your … drill.”
“Perfect,” he said, conjuring a virtual workstation, complete with comms board. “There’s a script below so you’ll know what to say. I’ll add you into the @Launch channel.”
The board showed a two-minute countdown. She gave him a look and didn’t say you little cockroach.
He tugged on his sleeve, like a stage magician.
Maud ran her eyes over the control board in her augmented display. It was simplified-tutorial level, not for serious work, just to entertain guests. The designer had chosen the aesthetic of post-colonial steampunk: the display was all bells, whistles, and brass levers.
“Let’s work through the steps for playing a seven-membrane chord,” Ember said. “One two three, like it’s the real deal.”
Just like that, mm? Maud forced herself to stare at the board. A brass text generator—typewriter?—clacked on her steampunk board, creating text—her script for the drill. “All in the green here,” she read.
A tech reported, “Pinging for the low note on Portal6. Three-two-one.”
To pull this off, Sneezy Station and the new station out in the Centauri system would have to charge their membranes at the same time. There was no official launch on the boards; any resonance Ember was asking for was hypothetical.
Not hypothetical. Prearranged.
That means Rastopher’s involved too. How many people did Frankie and Rubi have to pull into this mad hoaxer scheme?
Conspiracies have conspirators.
Ember blinked in time with the countdown.
&
nbsp; Maud glanced at her realtime follows. Sensorium wasn’t showing much interest. #Portalfail had bred a certain amount of noping; nobody was interested in watching Mission Control run yet another drill when the whole population had shifts to fill, debts to pay, harvests to ship from Europa to the Dumpster for the Kinze.
Midnight on Greenwich. A series of Big Ben bongs played within the @Launch channel.
Maud’s skin came up in goosebumps.
“High note on Emerald Station, coming in.”
“Contact—we have contact.” The tech said this in a tone so dry, so bored, that the illusion of a test persisted for a moment longer.
“Full resonance, low volume.”
“Maintain pianissimo,” Ember said. “Assess portal stability.”
“Pinhole portal, two-meter circumference, holding power at low volume. Alignment is good, repeat, alignment is good. Station is locking in.”
Maud stared at the lens-shaped disc of the Mars portal in her HUD view of the sky. Nothing looked different.
“Maud?”
She looked at her steampunk control board. The clacking typewriter wrote a chat prompt: Comms in seven, six, five …
“What an unexpected development,” Ember said. “They must be running a test out at Sneezy, too.”
Maud snorted. Yeah, that’s convincing.
“Portal is stable, repeat, portal is stable,” said the tech at the power allocations board.
“Two, one.” Maud swallowed. Come on!
“@Control, are you there? This is Frankie Barnes and the @EmeraldCrew at Sneezy. Repeat, this is Frankie Barnes—”
The techs whooped. So much for pretending this was just a drill.
Alive! Maud wiped a hand over her suddenly tear-streaked face. “Sneezy Station, we have you. Repeat, we have you.”
“Oh, love,” Frankie said, and her voice caught. “I’m so sorry for the scare.”
Maud sent moji of a dung beetle. “No forgiveness until you’re back, Hedgehog.”
“Working on it.”
By now, they’d been rumbled—the follow counter was blurring into the millions as word snowballed on social media. Emerald and Garnet Stations handshook, performing full data sync. A week’s worth of events aboard both far-flung stations began trickling into the public record. A status bar showed Cyril10 busily streaming all his memories to a Martian consciousness vault—the vaults on Sneezy, apparently, had been compromised. Babs was purring in Maud’s ear—a sign both that she was happy and that she was catching up with another instance of herself.
“Goodness,” she said. “What a week I’ve had!”
Sensorium pounced on the incoming data, going nuts as footage of station fires—fires!—and hull breaches poured into #newscycle. Maud ignored the hullabaloo, ensured that Babs0/1 had priority within the datastream, then used her privileges as comms officer to allocate herself bandwidth for visit.
What she saw, upon arrival, was that Sneezy was a disaster.
A hastily deployed nanopatch was the only thing holding the void out of the hangar, and there was a horrifying bruise above Frankie’s left eye. Scorched-looking fox and HuskyBOTs hung in a net, floating near the airlock. Appaloosa was in pieces. The married Mayfly™ technicians, Teacakes, were having a frenzied argument, mostly in Spanish, the man gesturing wildly with bandaged arms.
“Teagan’s volunteered to stay aboard Sneezy,” the merging amalgam of Babs and Babs1, currently presenting with a fluctuating mix of tortoiseshell and Persian cat features, subbed.
“What’s Cyril10 want?”
“Suicide pact as soon as they’re evacced. Simultaneous reboot in the Rio Mayfly™ crèche. Fiftieth honeymoon in nice, fresh bodies.”
Frankie pirouetted midair … and saw Maud. She brightened. “Week late and a pound short, what?”
“Don’t be cute,” Maud said.
“You’re cute enough for the both of us. I’ll be home within the hour.” Looking smug, Frankie shoved the pegasus pieces up against the pursed sphincter of the airlock. They sank into the nanofluid, spacebound.
“Will you? Because it looks like you’re shipping equipment—”
“—evidence of project sabotage, actually—”
“—before seeing to your personal safety,” Maud finished.
“Cyril10’s prepping Booger. I’d be aboard already, but…” She gestured at the marital argument. “I will be Mars-side in half an hour. Promise.”
Maud swallowed. “Did Champ Chevalier make it out there?”
“He’s got himself stuck in the shower.”
“I did no such thing!” The golden boy chose that moment to emerge through a hatch, looking churlish. “God bless, the Fraud’s back together. Anyone think to tell my family you were attempting this stunt?”
“We’ve got Sensorium, Champers,” Frankie said, zooming in for a close-up on his face. “Ping ’em yourself.”
So much for warning Frankie about Champ maybe being a saboteur. Obviously, she was way ahead of Maud’s big epiphany.
Bet she doesn’t know about Irma du Toit, though.
“What’s this about Teagan9 staying?” he demanded.
“And me.” That was Babs1. “Until we get Belvedere back up and running, grow new tish banks for the servers, and get additional crew aboard.”
Maud’s relief at finding Frankie alive and intact was beginning to fray into something like anger. She and Ember had set up this belated launch without telling her. Babs had been in on it too.
Did Jermaine know? Was she the only one they didn’t trust?
Is it because I came from Manhattan? Do they know about Upton after all?
The packets Frankie had put through the airlock were on autopilot for the portal. Frankie was zoomed on Champ’s face as the hard evidence—Appaloosa’s remains, the burned bots, samples of …
… Maud caught a reference to acidic nanobeads …
… made the transition.
“Where’s that shipment stopping again?” Champ asked, expression bland.
“The @GlobalSec crime lab at the Moon,” Babs1 said.
Frankie let out a thin smile. “@MarsControl, we need a seal upgrade for our atmospheric envelope, and printstock for meds, ASAP.”
“What about a can of worms?”
“Next shipment from us, yep. Champ, could you maybe?”
Champ unshipped a HawkBOT, a bullet-shaped tube about the size of his arm, meant for flying and remote comms tech. It could carry small loads; he loaded it up with a flask filled with dormant life forms—butterfly pupae. Licking his thumb, he ran it over the flask’s enzymatic trigger. As chem and electrical reactions brought the assortment of creatures back to full activity, he tossed the HawkBOT up for the airlock to swallow.
Testing that the portal wasn’t inimical to living tissue was a formality at this point, but it had become traditional.
Back on Mars, Ember was coordinating crew deployments. A team would be sent out to Portal6, at Proxima Centauri, to support Rastopher Kanye. All the personnel who’d been prepped to head out to Emerald last week were assembling, readying themselves to dive into station repairs.
“Champ!” Cyril10 demanded.
Champ fishtailed over to the pod.
“You’re nominally in command. Order Tea to evac with the rest of us.”
“My autonomy exceeds his authority.” Teagan9 was in the server room, cleaning out the burned think tanks.
“It does,” Champ said, “but Teagan, you’re riskin’ six weeks of memories here … Ain’t that the kind of thing that can make a gal decohere?”
“I’m backing up to Sensorium right now. Besides, my sense of self is extraordinarily robust.”
“Guys—”
That was a new voice: Rastopher, out at Proxima. “We have a problem.”
“What problem?” Frankie asked.
All their displays were suddenly overwritten with legalese—cease-and-desist orders.
A new voice broke in. “This is Allure18, representing the
Kinze. Sentient beings of Earth, we charge you with expanding this portal network using stolen intellectual property. You must shut down the phenomena known among you as Portal6 and Portal7, within twenty-seven of your standard minute increments, or incur severe financial penalties.”
CHAPTER 17
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Move and countermove. The minute things start going well, disaster strikes.
Nothing to do but run out and meet it head-on.
Frankie minimized the Kinze cease-and-desist announcement, slamming the hatch on the escape pod, locking herself in with Champ and Cyril10. “Teagan, this is your last chance to flip-flop.”
“What do you think you’re pulling?” Champ demanded.
“You heard the fancy mouthpiece. We don’t go home now, we don’t go at all.”
“I’m staying aboard station,” Teagan9 said. “There’s a consciousness vault left. If this body fails, I’ll load into there.”
“When it fails!” Cyril10 degenerated into cursing in Spanish.
“Babs1? You good to keep running Emerald?”
“Everything is in hand, Frankie.”
“We don’t have to launch Booger in any kinda all-fired hurry,” Champ said. “Oversight’ll probably negotiate more time.”
“Maybe, but they’d charge us for it.” Frankie blasted through the prelaunch protocols for the escape pod. Luckily, it was designed for fast exits. “Ember, the station needs that printstock from Mars and additional vacuum patch kits. Boom boom boom, now now now!”
“Understood.”
“Stand down!” Champ said, voice breaking a little. “I’m in charge here!”
Frankie bared her teeth. “You hopped out here to bring the crew home, didn’t you? Now we’re homeward bound.”
“You’re rushing the evacuation!”
“Can you get us out of here before the Kinze shut the portal?”
Champ’s eyes flicked to Cyril10, seeking backup. “We have Iktomi…”
“Noping big-time,” Cyril10 said. “I’m not gambling on you hopping us home.”
“Frankie Barnes, you are not launching this pod and that’s final!”
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