CHAPTER 25
SATURN-TITAN REGION, LODESTONE STATION
PROJECT HOPSCOTCH MISSION CONTROL
Frankie had walked Hung Chan through his first saucer sim. She’d been there for his post-op adjustment to augment surgery. She had plugged him into Iktomi for the first time, sat with him through the nightmares that followed that surrender of the body.
They had met flying bots over a massive Siberian grasslands fire. He’d had a flashy style she liked, pushing his plane to its limits … right up until the moment when she got him on board Hopscotch. Then the risk-taking vanished; it had all been a tactic to catch her eye.
He’d piled into pilot training, showing both enthusiasm and good sense. Cut from the same cloth as Ember and all the guys she’d ever closefriended. He was smart, sweet, cooperative, largely undamaged. If she’d found him sexually attractive, too …
… well, maybe then there’d have been no Maud.
Memories hit her in a weird body slam as Heyoka broke up and everyone started to melt down.
Frankie turned to the station garbage system, found a sealed bin liner, and threw up into it.
One of the control crew was praying in some old language. Greek, maybe? Someone else was screaming into their primer sleeve.
We cooked for Hung’s parents. Maud had made ravioli for his whole pack in Pretoria the night he was greenlighted for surgery. Six parents, four partners, twenty in-laws. Their pack even had two pit bull puppies—back then, economic belt-tightening hadn’t gone so far as to bring back pet restrictions; the sapps weren’t even out on strike yet.
Dogs reminded Frankie of Grandpa Drow, who’d had one to help him with the worst aspects of his virtual traumatic stress disorder. She had gotten all kinds of soppy about it. Not that anyone but Maud noticed.
Vivid memory: Hung, lighting up as he made an impromptu dinner speech. “Thank you for bringing me into this project. Thank you for making my dreams happen.”
The memory made Frankie heave again. Through the thin membrane of the degradable plastic bin liner she could feel the vomit, warm against her hand.
Was this murder? Or just a tragic accident? Could the anti-Bootstrap faction really have to nerve to take out Babs and a Hopscotch pilot all in one week?
Why not? What didn’t they have to win?
“Frankie! Frankie!”
That was the onsite medic, Georgia. Her tear-streaked face was blurry—
“Fuck, I’m crying too?”
“We’re all crying,” Georgia said.
Hung, crowing in triumph. Frankie’s body gave in to an attack of the shudders. Georgia was holding out hydrogel.
“Don’t want it,” Frankie croaked.
“Take it anyway.”
Frankie roared and slapped her hand, sending the hydrogel flying.
Violence warnings played across her front display. A few people in her follows gave her strikes for lashing out.
Hung and his poop jokes.
“The Dumpster is not responding,” said a tech, dead-voiced. “Repeat, we have lost contact with the Deep Space Relay Station.”
“Frances,” Crane said. “Might I suggest you are unfit for human interface?”
No kidding. She bulled her way out of the makeshift control room, past Jolene, who was sitting at the console, muttering, “If only we’d stayed at Lodestone if only we’d stayed at Lodestone if only…”
Owello was running diagnostics, wide-eyed and pale. Two of the techs were clinging to each other, one sobbing, the other glazed and shuddering. Ember’s adolescent replacement was practically fetal.
She was almost to the exit when Jolene said, “Some of him’s out there. Pieces.”
Frankie skidded to a halt. “I’ll fly retrieval.”
“No way.” The med, Georgia, had followed her. “Mars has EMTs for that.”
“What are they going to do, defibrillate his leg?” It was an antisocial comment, openly confrontational. A few more strikes trickled in. Not nearly as many as she deserved.
Deserve is a brutal lie; that’s what I told Maud.
Poor Frankie Barnes, all that childhood baggage. She can’t really help herself. Pushes away everyone she loves. Loses the sticky ones anyway. Cut her a break.
“You’re grounded for twenty-four.” Georgia wiped her face. “Go see your therapist.”
Frankie let out another screech that made them all flinch. She strapped herself into a transit chair, making for her pop-up.
See your therapist. That, at least, was a good idea. She sank into Sensorium.
A graveyard materialized around her. Kansas was already there, putting flourishes on the tombs and the full moon, lighting everything silver.
“Did you even see that?”
“I’m sorry about your friend.”
“I can get condolences from every rando in Sensorium.”
“Fine.” Kansas handed her a shovel. “Play it angry, then.”
A pink marble gravestone, color of raw meat flecked with black, stood before her. A shrouded form, on the ground, lay beside it.
She swung the shovel at eir head. Kansas caught the blade of it easily, pushed back. She almost stumbled over the corpse.
“Who you mad at, Frankie? Me?”
“Don’t be so goddamned obvious.”
Ei didn’t point out that she preferred her therapy that way.
“I should’ve been the one—if Maud hadn’t insisted on all this foot-dragging—”
“This is her fault?”
She shivered. Tried to square Maud’s refusal to expose Upton with something that made sense. “I should’ve—”
“What?”
“Gotten better proof that Champ—”
“Champ didn’t destroy that saucer,” Kansas said. “It’s a conspiracy, Frankie. Conspiracies have conspirators. Your words.”
She swung the shovel again, missed again.
“I’m not hitting back. You might as well dig.”
She smashed it uselessly against the stone. Neither tool nor granite deigned to break. “Change the sim. I don’t want—”
“Franks?” Ember tooned in at the foot of the grave.
“What are you doing here?”
“I invited him,” Kansas said. “You’ve no time for niceties. Champ Chevalier’s fully alibied for this disaster. The Sensorium #rumornets are spinning up a story that whatever Babs discovered, just before she was offlined, was proof that Ember was guilty of IP theft, not innocent.”
“So, Ember and I killed our own packmate to shut her up? That’s the narrative?”
“I don’t know if it’ll play,” Kansas said, “but someone’s giving it a try. He killed Babs. You killed Hung.”
“Me?” She tightened her grip on the shovel.
“You can’t expect her to play cops and robbers with you now, Kansas,” Ember said. “That boy was her dear friend. Babs was—”
“Is!” Frankie bellowed.
“Indeed,” Ember said, retreating into stoic calm. “Babs is—”
“They’re coming for the whole pack.” Frankie let herself slump, putting her back to the gravestone. As with all of Kansas’s sims, the details were horribly real: the earth under her seat was cool and damp, and something—a worm?—felt like it might be writhing under her left buttock. “I showed my hand and now they’re biting it off.”
Kansas shrugged. “Ember’s essential to Bootstrap. He’d have been an obvious target.”
“Maybe we need to give them more people to go after,” Ember said.
Frankie let out a brittle laugh. “Wishful thinking. You think they’re going to hare off after some decoy and take their teeth out of us?”
She could see, from the look Ember was giving her, that she looked even more ragged than she felt. And she felt skinned.
A covered corpse, lying next to the open grave, moaned. It sat up, tossing its shroud aside. Zombie? No, vampire. It had distorted features, ridges and yellow eyes as well as fangs. Frankie could feel the soil beneath
her vibrating as something tried to dig itself out.
Ember said. “Is this a branded sim?”
“Public domain. Spawn of Van Helsing, circa 2085,” Kansas said.
Ember stepped back, running a toe through the grass. He had that look he got when he was on the edge of an epiphany.
The vampire growled. Frankie stood, broke the shovel’s handle on her knee, and tossed the end with the handle—a perfectly functional stake—to Ember. She leapt up to the top of the gravestone.
The vampire lunged at Kansas, who dodged handily, snapping a quick punch at its nose. Ember stepped in, stake outstretched, and drove it home.
The vampire exploded in a cloud of dust.
“I don’t anticipate this making me feel better,” Ember said.
“It’s too soon to expect that,” Kansas said.
“Why are we catharting if it’s too soon for catharsis?” Frankie said.
The second vampire had, by now, pushed its way up from underground. Frankie hopped down behind it and decapitated it neatly with the edge of the shovel.
“I’ve had a thought, about the accident,” Ember announced.
“Fucking accident?” Hung, crowing in victory about breaking the FTL record. The hair came up on her arms.
“I need to run it down. Dialing up smartdrugs. Sorry, Kansas, I know we’re supposed to be helping Frankie—”
“I don’t need help—” Frankie swallowed, broke off the denial. “Can you prove Hung was murdered, Ember?”
“Won’t know until I’m done.” Distracted voice, but with one hand he signed, Sorry.
“Go ahead, toon out,” she said.
“Stay where you are,” Kansas said.
Ember ignored them both.
It wouldn’t do any good if Ember figured out how Hung had been killed, not if he still had to surrender himself to Kinze custody.
“I have to get him out of Earthspace,” Frankie said. “Him, Jermaine too. Maud…”
Maud would refuse to go.
“Kansas, you’ll have to slip messages to Jackal and Rubi again.”
“Where can you go?” Kansas said.
“Centauri. Out to so-called civilized space.” It was the only real option. “If we can make it to the offworlder portal at Centauri, we can try to contact Gimlet.”
“There’s a lot of ways that could end up being a one-way trip,” Kansas said.
“Surrendering Ember to Allure18’s as one-way as it gets, isn’t it? We make it to Centauri, we can at least try to involve other races in the dispute.”
A half-dozen vampires broke out of a nearby family crypt. Frankie took a few steps from the gravestone, looking for weapons … and encountered a leg, severed, pale, still in its yellow …
… bodybag, it was Hung who named our flight suits bodybags …
“I can’t deal at this now,” she said.
“This is all you’re dealing with.”
“Kansas, I’m formulating plans here—”
“Oh, I’ve noticed. Pick up the leg.”
“No! I don’t—No! We need—”
“You’re not in control here, Frankie. Stop problem-solving and pick it up.”
Her eyes were swimming. Not in control. She lashed out, swinging the shovel, and failing—despite all her combat levels—to hit.
“Rigged game. No fair.”
“Pick it up!”
She let out a howl.
About a meter beyond the leg, she saw a piece of a hand. In a pilot’s glove.
Her empty stomach churned, fire and acid.
Past Hung’s hand she saw a half-buried body, face turned away. Its familiar silver hair marked it as Drow, adopted grandpa.
“Pick up the leg,” Kansas repeated.
Steeling herself, she bent without looking. Her hand closed around the bodybag with a crackle. The flesh, beneath the membrane, felt wet. Blood-drenched meat in plastic. Still warm.
“Now the hand.”
Frankie turned, taking in the moonlit graveyard. Drow’s body, half-buried, lay beside a furred golden hump—one of his helper dogs, Robin. Beyond them lay her father, Rollsy, who had been devoured by cancer, who’d rejected Mayfly™ implantation and begun to decohere. He was suspended in a consciousness vault to wait on a better iteration of personality-transfer tech. On pause, possibly forever.
Frankie saw the parents and all the people who’d left her, everyone who’d given up, everyone who’d gone away, everyone who’d let her push them to a distance: Mada Sangria, Gimlet.
“Go on. Keep picking up the pieces,” Kansas said.
“I can’t,” Frankie said, and her voice was weirdly high. Somehow, the leg was too heavy to hold anymore. She dropped it, then fell to her knees, there in front of the tomb, and she finally let herself cry.
CHAPTER 26
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Babs1 and Teagan9 had expected to find a rogue bot working the station ducts, running some kind of sophisticated sabotage algorithm. A live entity was a surprise. And an actual Kinze! It didn’t get more incriminating.
But there were so many ways holding someone prisoner could go spectacularly wrong.
The being they had captured was about as big as a grape when it bunched all its yellow-brown needles together. When it linked them into more of a chain, as it had in the ducts, it stretched over two feet in length, becoming an interlinked line of caterpillar-like spines. Live broken spaghetti, all laid end to end.
Careful scanning had revealed that two or three of those spines were tech, rather than tissue. One was essentially a storage trunk, loaded with three hundred incendiary and acidic nanobeads. Another appeared to be a sophisticated nanoscale printer. Thin structures like antennae were probably comms … but were they part of its body or wearable tech?
Babs1 used a BeetleBOT to confiscate the nanobeads, and then, when they were pretty sure it couldn’t set itself or anything else on fire, reintroduced oxygen into the entity’s bell jar.
“Have you a name, stowaway?” Babs1 asked. “Rank? Honorific? Pronouns?”
They had thought it might sulk for a while—a human would—but it bunched up in the bell jar’s apex, and immediately sent, “You-Them may call Us Scrap of the All. He/his/him.”
The two EMbodied parties to this exchange, Teagan9 in her Mayfly™ body and the Kinze, Scrap, were in the infirmary, or what remained of it. Teagan9 had blanked out—maybe seized even—shortly after catching the offworlder. She was now working to repair a specialist nursing KangaBOT that had been damaged in the infirmary fire. If they could get a nurse up and running, it could break down the bad news on Teagan9’s deterioration. Had she suffered a petit-mal seizure or an ischemic attack?
Either way, it was a harbinger of trouble to come.
“Scrap,” Babs1 said. “You know our names already. Can we do anything to make you more comfortable?”
“Them can return the items stolen and cease jamming our transmissions.”
“I had rather been thinking of offering you food.” Babs1 felt a burst of quiet satisfaction. Had Scrap just admitted the anyspace cannons had disrupted his comms?
Experimental results for the win! Wait’ll they got a chance to tell Ember!
“What does Them know of Us and metabolism?”
“You’ll have to tell us,” Teagan9 said.
“We wouldn’t wish for you to be discomfited in any way,” Babs1 added.
Within the zoomed view, Scrap looked like a tiny throbbing haystack, a jumble of needles and threads of silk, or a cluster of tent caterpillars.
Could large Kinze truly be bigger assimilations of similar threads? Babs1 reviewed a shot of Scrap inchworming on the ceiling of the station duct. Nullgrav hadn’t stopped him—there had to be some control over either magnetic or … static charge?
“What we need now is a biologist,” Babs1 subbed to Teagan9.
“We need a lot of things,” Teagan9 replied. “Come on, S
crap. We’re asking how to keep you humanely.”
“Stop jamming Us!”
Teagan9 rubbed her temples. “Useless.”
“Does it hurt?” Babs1 asked.
She shook her head.
“How’s KangaBOT coming along?”
“I think I’ve coaxed her back into service.” Her hand wandered to her jaw. “There’s a numb spot.”
“You had a small stroke, then?”
“Probably—ah, yes. KangaBOT recommends I refresh my backup just in case, and then sleep it off for awhile.”
“Wise strategy. I’ll continue to discuss matters with our guest.”
Was it bad that Teagan9 declined to argue? The kanga printed Teagan9 a blindfold, gave her a quick scalp massage, and offered her an edible marshmallow laced with relaxants and hydrogel. Within ten minutes, it had prepped a cannula for intravenous injection, clipped on a nutrient bag, and webbed her Mayfly™ body into a treatment couch, even as she loaded her consciousness into a vault within the bot.
“All tucked in?”
Teagan9 nodded. “Babs. This … might be a very long nap.”
“Maybe you’d be better off taking Whitelight.” The more drawn-out and traumatic a Mayfly™’s termination, the higher the chance the resident ghost would decohere on its next incarnation.
“We need warm bodies aboard in case—”
Scrap chose that second to try to get into the anyspace cannons’ operating systems.
“Do you believe I’m not watching you?” Babs1 deauthorized its user account.
“Scrap requires comms!”
“Request denied.” Babs1 scoured the systems, tracing back the offworlder’s data usage.
“Babs1,” said Teagan9.
“Yes.”
“Organ pig. Top priority,” she said. Her breath lengthened as she lost consciousness.
“Pardon?” Babs1 inventoried station projects. Iktomi’s autopilot had been tasked with running the particle wands Scrap was trying to shut down. Over in the wet room, Teagan9 had a BeetleBOT crew balancing the algae tanks, maximizing oxygen production. A large bundle of feedstock, part of the load brought by Iktomi, had been secured outside the main airlock.
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