Say something. Anything! “So, if your cerebrospinal fluid doesn’t react badly to the augmented starling tish grafted from mine…”
“It won’t.”
“—and if the receiver Jerm’s installing works—”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Then I guess the real question is whether your Doc Upton can augment our so-called resonance until it works across a distance of light-years.”
Maud flinched at your.
Frankie tried to keep her voice gentle. “We’re off the record here, remember?”
“I’m not sure what—”
Enough pussyfooting. “Maud. That frilly pink bedroom for science femmes. That was Upton. He built that for you.”
A zombie dressed as a police officer lunged through Frankie’s makeshift bottleneck. Maud set it afire from badge to boots, slagging it to ash. Her face had locked—jaw set, eyes unblinking.
“Eeeee!!!” the cop zombie hissed like a kettle, and collapsed.
“Was he older than he looked, Upton? Was he on life extension even then?”
Maud swallowed. “Yes. He was probably fifty.”
Frankie shunted the remains of the cop through a broken window, dropping it on thronging zombies two stories below. “Was there a mom, too?”
“Just the sapp who lured us. The one who ran the Manhattan enclave.”
“Headmistress.”
“She always wanted us to call her Auntie.” Maud fiddled with the flamethrower, adjusting output. “Frankie, you wanted to lure in a possible saboteur. Upton—”
“Upton, who augmented the tish they’re grafting on to our optic nerves—”
“I told you he was from Manhattan! You just didn’t know that … that I meant anything to him.”
“Because you didn’t say!” Frankie beheaded a zombie with one great machete-swing, kicking the severed head into a corner.
“Frankie, if there’s a conspiracy to undermine the Bootstrap Pro—”
“If? Did you just bloody say if?”
She’s @Visionary too, sweetpie. Champ, laughing as he shot her full of doubts.
“If there is,” Maud said, “virtually all of the conspirators are here. At home, within reach of the portal carousel, working the project. Nothing’s stopping you from hunting them in-system.”
“They want to haul Ember offworld!”
“And we might not be able to stop them.”
Fury boiled through her. Another damn sermon about defeat and acceptance.
Frankie’d been hearing the same sorry song her whole life: when her first grandfather died, when her parents broke up and one of them got cancer. When he began to decohere within years of joining the EMbodied. That’s the way of the world, Gimlet told her, when she’d been forced to give up her babyjob at the Department of Preadolescent Affairs. Things end. People fail. Nothing is permanent, and that’s how it’s always going to be.
Gimlet, going offworld. Grandpa Drow, dying. Accept, accept, accept.
She demanded, “Where are your bloody sympathies?”
“Not with them.” The disgust on Maud’s face was sincere.
“Then tell the world Upton abducted you for nurture! Accuse him, the way I accused Champ.”
“I can’t!” Maud said.
“Why?”
“Proof! You went to Sneezy so Champ could make his move, didn’t you? It’s how you caught him. This is the same. We let Upton expose himself—”
“We don’t have time for another long game.” Frankie heard her voice rising. “He’s just trying to tie me down here on Earth, playing pattycake with subspace radio while they grab Ember. We need to try something big.”
“Meaning reckless?” Maud risked a peek out into the corridor, almost got grabbed, and hosed a diminishing stream of flame into a sea of grasping dead hands. One of the zombies snatched the flamethrower from her grasp. Lunging back, the two players knocked each other ass over teakettle. Frankie careened into a flask of glowing fluid that had suddenly spawned on the counter of the chemistry lab.
“Damn!” Glowing green sludge splashed across her left wrist.
“Are you dead?” Maud barricaded the door. “Have we lost the level?”
“Don’t think so.” Frankie rinsed her wrist in the lab sink. The stuff, whatever it was, stuck. She fought to rein her temper. “Maud. I can’t even imagine … I mean, he was taking care of you for years, and there’s got to be a lot to unpack there. I know the feels must be … but do you really know he hasn’t reformed?”
Maud was wringing her hands, looking wretched. “Hold your temper, Franks.”
Words almost guaranteed to make her furious. She swallowed. Tried to nod.
“Yes. Upton’s older than he looks. And the thing is, he wasn’t just a life-support tech. He was already a surgeon, even then.”
Frankie focused on the green glow spreading across her arm. The patch of contamination spread, oozing as far as her elbow … and formed text, from Kansas: LISTEN!
She shook water off her hands. “Upton was a bigger deal than he said, within the Chamber hierarchy?”
A tight blink: clearly, Frankie was missing the point. “He was a neurosurgeon, Frankie.”
“He’s still a neuro—” Frankie felt something begin to burn at the back of her throat. “The botomized workers?”
Maud leaned against the lab counter, letting out a long hiss.
“You covered for him?” Frankie knew she shouldn’t say anything—listen, Kansas had said. Somewhere, under a tsunami of outrage, vestigial reason reminded her: Maud had been nine. The guy had effectively been her parent. How much could she have understood about his crimes?
She bloody understands now, doesn’t she?
The lab door shuddered, splintering.
“All those people, Maud. All those—”
She stood with her arms crossed, jet hair sweat-slick against her forehead, expression miserable. On the Surface, Frankie knew, there’d be tears running down her face.
EMPATHIZE! Kansas flashed across her arm, in green toxic-sludge letters.
Bollocks to that.
“All those kids who didn’t fit into their vision of a hoarder’s paradise. All those kids he cut up—”
“I know. They didn’t deserve—”
“Deserve?” Frankie threw a flask, shattering it against the lab window. “Deserve is nothing but a brutal lie. People trot out deserve when bad things happens to someone else and they need to believe it could never happen to them.”
“I never said—”
“What about Upton deserved to be shamed and prosecuted? Why’d you never tell? He’d be in managed care now.”
“I didn’t know how!”
Maud wasn’t fighting back, really, wasn’t backing away. She was sitting there, letting Frankie hit her with all the recriminations. Because of course she felt guilty. Of course. She’d been carrying this all along.
“You’ve covered for him.” Frankie swallowed. “That’s why Upton’s looking to reconnect with you. He thinks if you’d hide this, you’d rejoin them.”
“They both are,” Maud said quietly. “Don’t you see? That’s why investigating the comms project will work.”
“Both? Both who?”
“Headmistress.”
“Headmistress is wiped,” Frankie said.
“Right, like Happ is wiped?”
Frankie swallowed. She hadn’t thought Crane’s little shell game with the backup copy of his codeson had pinged Maud’s radar. How did she know? Could Champ be right? Could Maud have been spying on them after all?
“See? You get to have all the secrets and all the co-conspirators, and apparently I’m on a ration.” The undead mob was almost through: Maud slammed open a lab cupboard, searching for more weapons.
Before Frankie could reply, Jerm broke in with a ping and an audio message. “Frankie, your procedure’s done. I’m rebooting your augment.”
Frankie took the excuse to toon out of the sim, surfacing to her still
-paralyzed body, staring at Maud’s glazed, tear-streaked face through the plastic safety curtain.
Jerm leaned over her. “Frankie? Everything okay? Are you feeling any—”
“Just unplug me.”
He did, throwing her to the void. For a brief second, as she imagined total #crashburn, she wished she could just float there in the black forever. Then she was herself again.
Jerm’s big hand, ungloved now, rested on her tingling spine. “Something’s up.”
“What?”
“Allure18’s in the waiting room.”
Frankie rested her weight against him as she rolled out of bed, leaning into his hand until she had her feet under her and her knees locked. She configged her primer, changing from a hospital gown to her tights and flight jacket.
Maud wiped her face, reset her nanosilk into a formal-looking royal blue robe, and stepped off her own bed. Babs tooned in, filling out the pack.
They stepped out to confront Allure18.
The ghost was immaculate as always, not a hair on her custom-designed head out of place. Frankie was suddenly self-conscious about her black eye, Jerm’s lost weight.
“I wanted to tell you in person,” Allure18 said, in that musical voice. “Since Ember used stolen offworlder calculations—”
“Hey!” Babs objected. “Innocent until proven!”
Allure18 declined to retract the statement. “—stolen Exemplar formulae to help launch the portals at Lodestone and Europa, I am filing a claim for those portals to be ceded to the Kinze. We will, of course, be demanding fees for use.”
“Fees?”
“Back rent, and a share of profits derived from same, spanning the two years since deployment of Portals4/5.”
Frankie’s jaw dropped.
“Only the outer portals?” Maud said. She let out a shocked noise that might have been a laugh. “Why not all five?”
“Ember was tasked solely to Project Hopscotch during the initial rollout,” Babs said. “He didn’t supply the initial math to the Earth-Moon-Mars hub.”
“The potential debt’s incalculable,” Frankie said. Her lips felt numb.
“I’m sure they won’t have the slightest trouble calculating it,” Jerm said. Another first: Frankie had never heard him sound bitter.
“We might take a somewhat favorable reckoning of the numbers,” Allure18 said, “if Ember confesses to the theft and surrenders to Kinze custody.”
“That’s blackmail!” Maud said.
“On the contrary.” She smiled. “It’s a business proposition.”
“You’re afraid we’re about to prove he didn’t do it,” Babs said.
“Your fandom is detectives, isn’t it, Mer Babs?” Allure18 gave her a pitying look. “Fictional ones?”
“Not all of ’em are fictional,” Babs grumbled.
“Well, you can rest assured that the Kinze are not in the slightest bit threatened by the prospect of your amateur sleuthing.”
“Babs is right,” Frankie said. “You can’t claim the portal network if we prove Ember innocent.”
“How is any of you going to find the time?” Allure18 flicked a hand, posting snowballing #newscycle. Kinze Claim Outer Colonies! Global Oversight had ordered a rampdown on use of both portals. Nonessential personnel were being ordered back to Mars and the Moon. Mining and farming opps were wrapping as fast as the machines could be shut down and safely stored.
“They’ve backwashed tens of thousands of people to Mars, Moon, and Earth,” Maud said, scanning the feeds. “Without the farms, food production’s going to drop…”
“They’re pinging me from the flight deck,” Frankie said. “All hands, making supply runs to Europa and Titan—”
“Indeed,” Allure18 agreed. “How convenient that you just got your latency upgrade.”
“How convenient that you waited until I was back on duty to pull this bullshit stunt.” Frankie made a best guess as to what Ember would say once they told him about this nasty bit of blackmail. “Give us two weeks. Let us evacuate the stations using the portals. Pull everyone out—for free.”
Allure18 frowned. “In exchange for what?”
“If Ember does agree to surrender himself—and if we can’t exonerate him within the two weeks—I’ll bring him to Lodestone personally.”
“Frankie!” Maud objected.
The ghost made a tsk sound. “This is a play for time.”
“No, it’s a bloody business proposition. You get him and no bloody doubt you can bog me down in immigration paperwork at Lodestone, if it takes your fancy. I’ll be stuck there for as long as you want to run up the bill for housing me.”
“And … doesn’t the rest of your family get a say?”
Jerm, looking even more pinched, nodded. It was a formality—they all knew Ember would say yes rather than see Earth buckle under this demand.
“Don’t worry, Ferals.” Babs crossed her arms. “I can prove him innocent by then.”
“But … it’s been several. Why haven’t you?”
The cat’s ears flattened against her Nancy Drew hat.
“What about me?” Maud asked. “What am I meant to be doing during all this?”
Frankie said, “Once we lose the hydroponics at Europa, Oversight’s going to be scrambling to maintain the calorie ration. Everyone in food production’s going to be on triple shifts.”
“Back to the farm?”
Frankie couldn’t bite the words back. “What other give could you possibly make at this point?”
Maud’s mouth fell open. She flushed; blood darkened the microinjection sites above her cheekbones.
“Frankie!” Jerm said, shocked.
Maud turned on her heel. “Crane, sign me up for greenhouse work.”
With that, she walked out.
“You’ve got some ’splaining to do.” Jerm rushed after her, leaving Babs and Frankie.
“Your proposal is accepted,” Allure18 said, sounding pleased. “If Ember confesses to committing industrial espionage and surrenders within the agreed two-week timeframe, we’ll rescind the charges for evacuating personnel to your inner colonies.”
“We’ll go see what he says,” Frankie said.
“Answer by midnight, please,” Allure18 said, before turning on her heel.
Move, countermove. “You have to clear him, girl sleuth,” Frankie said to Babs. “Don’t drop the ball.”
Babs looked unimpressed. “We better go ask the ball if he’s on board with the plan. He’s the one putting his niblets on the line.”
Frankie wasn’t worried; Ember would guess what she was really up to.
No more fussing with comms. Frankie covered her face to hide any overt tells as she made for the queue to catch the portal back to the hangar.
It’s on, she thought. Preliminary skirmishes over, thrashing truly begun.
PART 2
MIRROR GAMES
Are you trying to kill yourself, or are you just new at this?
—Xena: Warrior Princess
CHAPTER 21
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
PROCYON STAR SYSTEM, SALVAGE TARGET 1
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Get off the station, hide within the station, or continue to undermine the station? These were Scrap’s options, and as far as Us could tell, all were precarious.
After a great deal of shouting, Them had opened a new portal—facilitating another desperately unfortunate data sync! The All got the portal shut but not before the evacuation of some of Them to Mars.
Some, in this case, might be worse than all or none.
Scrap had spun a false wall within the ducts, a tiny pocket of temporary camouflage. Once concealed, it grew a booster for its portable transmitter. Us continued to struggle to reach the All, and Scrap wasn’t quite sure why.
Thems had left a warm body and a machine sapient aboard. Two Solakinder citizens. They were not requesting rescue. The situation banned Scrap from laying claim to the station.
Scrap didn’t understand how the sapp had maintained functionality, given the fires Us had set in the server rooms. But maintain it had, and now this small crew was bringing system after system online. Oxygen levels and air pressure were rising. Patches were being printed to reinforce the hull breach. Thems’ BeetleBOT army continued a march through the ducts, seeking the arsonist.
Perhaps in the spirit of perversity, Them had also opened a user account within the system for Scrap and were transmitting notes to Us via the @allaboard channel.
Babs1: @Allaboard @stowaway @arsonist—Let us know you survived the fire, won’t you?
Teagan9: @Allaboard @stowaway @arsonist—preferably not by starting another fire.
This triggered a bunch of the animated glyphs Them called moji, implying that the crew found something humorous in the idea of Scrap burning their atmosphere.
Babs1: @Allaboard @stowaway @arsonist, if you need medical assistance, do ping.
That would look propitious and humane if the transcript made it back to Them’s Sensorium. All very prosocial and altruistic, as Them liked to say. Offering medical aid to a presumed enemy?
No-privacy societies were always ostentatiously helpful, whenever Thems were on the record.
Scrap used the comms booster to strengthen the link with station systems. The All were still out of reach. Emerald Station’s databanks offered more bad news. The three of them—human, sapp, and even the Iktomi autopilot—seemed to have ten projects on the go at once.
Signs of Them’s occupation of the station were everywhere. FoxBOTs inspected the repairs to the hangar. One had been tasked with analyzing Scrap’s incendiary and corrosive nanobeads. Grow tanks were using algae to generate oxygen in the station farm, and Babs1-Them had expanded input from the power-harvesting membrane.
It was impossible to make a case for salvage while Thems were actively expanding the station. Us had been caught aggressively salvaging in the past and had incurred large penalties.
How had the All underestimated the Solakinder so badly?
Putting debt pressure on emergent powers was a proven strategy, successful many times past with other warm-blooded species. Tipping mammal races into crisis, debt, discontent, and revolution was relatively easy.
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