Within the room were Irma du Toit and one toon: Glenn Upton.
“… agreed to wait on bringing the girl here,” he was saying.
“What’s wrong, Daddy? Don’t you still want to reconnect?” Maud said.
Upton turned, giving her a flat, grizzly-faced stare.
Maud swallowed. She had forgotten about the twists of temper, the way he could sink into sulks over little things …
What little thing? What’d I do?
“I know I wasn’t overly friendly in Hyderabad…” she ventured.
“Someone’s decided to review my parole agreement,” he snapped.
“Review? What?”
“Now, now, luvvie, look at her,” Irma said, bustling forward. “She’s the very picture of innocence.”
“Aren’t we all?” Upton growled. “Meanwhile, I’m on the slow boat from Rio—”
“I didn’t tell on you!” Maud began.
But she had, hadn’t she?
Frankie! Did you report him?
Come on, Maud, what would you do in my position?
That definitely didn’t feel like her own thought.
Maud swallowed. She hoped Irma was right and she was mojing conspicuous innocence.
“Never mind that, dear heart. You’re here now.” Irma was clad in a heavy-looking vintage suit, cut to accentuate her long, thin limbs, and affecting gold-rimmed spectacles—probably to make herself look older. “Look at you! All grown up. So clever and successful!”
No doubt, then, that this was Headmistress, reborn from code into flesh.
Maud forced a big smile. If she’d lost Upton’s trust, she’d need the sapp. “Hullo, Auntie.”
“Ah!” Triumphant glance at Upton. “I told you she’d worked it out. Clever girl!”
“Too clever for her own good,” he said. “Or ours.”
“This is amazing,” Maud said. “I thought sapps couldn’t be EMbodied.”
Pleased, Irma gave a slow twirl. “The IMperish Foundation has a few tricks up its sleeve.”
The Headmistress sapp had been Maud’s self-appointed mother figure, back in her long-ago runaway days. She had begun her existence as a corrupted backup of Crane, and like Crane, her driving impulse was to nurture—essentially, to parent. This drive was what had led her to tempt unhappy kids to run from home.
“So, you really were purged from Sensorium?”
“After the raid on our Manhattan enclave, the Asylum left me little choice but to get offline. But I’ve always been good at making friends. Lurra—well, Allure3 she was back then—tucked me into a consciousness vault.”
“And then copied you into a printed body. But … is it a Mayfly™?”
“No, no. Ninety-year warranty, same as womb-born. Stabilized bioforms are child’s play to the Exemplar races.” Irma ticked a salute at the Kinze above them. “And you know what they say! EMbodiment!”
“For everyone.”
“Forever!”
“Well. Maybe not everyone,” Upton said.
A surge of horror, made worse by a remnant touch of affection, ran through Maud. She looked at each of them in turn: angry hologram father, EMbodied sapp mother, and the offworlder cluster writhing above.
Smile. She thought of Frankie, hoping it would make her expression seem sincere.
“Well, then,” she said. “Since you’ve done so well for yourself, Auntie, are you going to introduce me to all these new friends you’ve made?”
CHAPTER 33
PROCYON STAR SYSTEM
VICINITY OF DEEP SPACE RELAY STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: DUMPSTER)
The Thing was big. Egg-shaped. Iridescent.
Perhaps it had been an asteroid once, but when Frankie slipped Jalopy out of anyspace near the remains of the Dumpster, what she saw wasn’t rock—it had the smooth surface of whaleskin.
The apparition had a portal membrane—a tiny, elegant portal membrane—at its narrower end. There was a structure shaped something like a skirt, a hoop of stalactites in iridescent arrays, growing and shrinking, extending and retracting. These were color-shifting in a manner that reminded Frankie of octopi.
Another ship, of some kind? A station? An individual?
“Ember.” Her throat was so tight, she could barely form audible words. “Ember, are you seeing this? Dumpster’s totaled. And this … ship?”
“It looks damaged,” he said.
“Hung didn’t hit Dumpster, did he?”
“Definite no. It must’ve been these guys.”
The rear of the asteroid’s whaleskin had a tear in it. Thick, gelatinous fluid pulsed at the breach. The iridescent swirl at its midline was ripped, and several of the spines were snapped.
The Thing was surrounded by pieces of the Dumpster and …
Frankie’s eyes flooded. Pieces of the station were intermingled with hunks of Hung’s saucer, Heyoka. And, come to that, hunks of Hung.
What’s a ship doing here, anyway? We’re supposed to be in an isolation zone.
“Franks,” Ember said. “Frankie, what do we do?”
Staring at the massive asteroid-ship-Thing—she wouldn’t even have been big as one of Maud’s locusts on its surface—she felt a yawning sense of her own insignificance. Then resentment.
Stumbling into another unsolvable problem—
Was it a stumble, though? And why was it her problem?
If you can’t make a good decision, make a fast one. “Can you recalculate our trajectory?”
“We’re going home?”
“No!”
“Franks, calm down.”
“Sneezy,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “Ember, calculate a hop for Sneezy.”
“Okay.”
The Thing shimmered. An illusion of lava roiled over its surface. Would it vanish back into anyspace? It solidified, still gushing fluid.
She tried comms. “Anyone there? Offworlder ship, this is Jalopy. Can you hear us?”
Nothing.
“Hop coordinates in two minutes,” Ember said.
Frankie pulled inventory, deploying a HawkBOT. “Record message.”
She tried to think what to say. Finally ended up rambling even as she launched the bot, trying to pilot it through the debris field, moving it closer to the ship’s surface …
Whose ship? Why are they here?
“Ready to go,” Ember said.
She fired rockets, ensuring Jalopy was clear of the rubble—and pulled up the anyspace field, bound for Sneezy.
What now? What next?
They broke out of anyspace, within hallooing distance of Sneezy.
The station was there. Babs1 sent a ping: “Welcome, Jalopy. This is Emerald Station—”
Frankie surprised herself by bursting into tears. For the thousandth time in a single bloody week.
Kansas’s fault: ei’d been so determined to make her deal with her emotions that all her usual armor was stripped.
She let out a miserable yelp: “Don’t sync, Babs1! Don’t sync until you’ve made an offline backup!”
“Do relax; Frankie-Ember has that very message all but screaming out on Jalopy’s autoloop. I’ll submit proof of backup if it will reassure you.”
An especially hard sob made her hiccup, and something in her implants glitched. For a second, she was in a cave, standing next to a toon of Glenn Upton, staring up at the biggest single accumulation of Kinze spines she had ever seen.
Babs1’s next words cleared the … hallucination? “You didn’t come all this way to drown in your own tears, did you?”
“Suh-suh-sorry.” Frankie’s face, the only part of herself she could properly feel while plugged in, was slick with tears and her nose was running, itching on her upper lip and threatening to clog her breathing gear. She pulled air noisily, hoping to swallow some of the fluids, and hiccupped again. Painfully.
“Merciful heavens—” Babs1 said. “I died?”
Merciful heavens?
“And you’ve got the gentlemen with you?”
This new Babs instance had really doubled down on the Victorian language. It was the merger with Belvedere, no doubt. Frankie wondered what they’d say if she commented on the similarities between this new instance of Babs and Crane. Instead of picking a pointless fight—
Another pointless fight?
Internal self-criticism. In Maud’s voice. So not what she needed right now.
“Ember’s being incarcerated?” Babs1’s voice rose to a squeak on that one. “You’re on the run?”
“Yeah, arrest me. I meant to take the guys to Alpha Centauri, ask for refuge.”
“So I see.”
“We were going to try to get to Gimlet. But—”
“Oh, dear. Oh, what a tragedy. That poor boy—” Babs1 must have got to the Heyoka footage. “Frankie. I am so terribly sorry about Hung … I can’t even—”
Fresh tears. Instead of answering, she just tipped her head forward and let herself blub.
The sapp waited until she’d reined in the feels again. “This is quite the set of countermoves from our opposition.”
“Well, I don’t think we can hit ’em harder.” Frankie’s voice echoed weirdly, sounding raw and stuffy. “So we better move faster. Babs1, you need to reconstruct whatever it was you learned. In the original Babs investigation into Ember, I mean?”
“I shall make the attempt, of course. Do you have transcripts?”
“Cradle to current. How fast, do you think?”
“Impossible to say. I have rather a large number of projects on the go. Additionally, keeping Jermaine hydrated as he tries to overcome his spacesickness…”
“I don’t suppose Teagan’s still working full shifts,” Frankie said.
Oh, there’s an ominous pause. Maud’s voice again.
“Would you like to swap places with me?” Babs1 said. “I’ll keep Jalopy on profile for the airlock. You can assess the station for yourself.”
Frankie greenlighted the swap, authorizing Babs1 as boss for Jalopy’s autopilot. She tooned into the hangar, establishing presence within its camera network, and found the space buzzing with activity.
As fire-damaged shells went, Emerald Station was in fantastic shape. Babs1 had organized BeetleBOTs into tiny working crews, setting each cluster to carry out a host of construction tasks under Iktomi’s supervision.
A BeetleBOT didn’t have the dexterity of a FoxBOT or the sheer pulling power of huskies, but working in teams, they’d boosted uptake on the station’s power-harvesting membrane, stripped and rebuilt one fire-damaged HuskyBOT—bringing them up to a total of five—and were even now trying to Frankenstein another hybrid bot out of parts.
Another of these micro-crews was out in vacuum, running a tiny printer over the surface of the station, using it to form the hexagonal rivets that could anchor new compartments, the next stage for expanding the station.
“Yeah,” Frankie said. “You’re barely keeping up here.”
“Kept the lights on, didn’t I? Hard to argue for salvage if the station’s actively growing.”
“Salvage—you think that’s the plan?”
“I do, rather. Given some of the things Scrap has said.”
Scrap? Frankie followed that tag to a lab containing an imprisoned Kinze.
“You caught the saboteur,” she said, almost breathless. “That is … You are amazing.”
“I am gratified that you’ve noticed.”
“Smartass.” Frankie zoomed on the trapped offworlder. It would have fit in the palm of her hand. Its spines were colored rust and slate, and it was growing a new one even now, a milky spike of chitin, like a cricket’s shed skin.
That hallucinatory vision of the cave ceiling, expanse of Kinze like a crawling upended carpet, returned to her … then vanished again.
Babs1 had created a shareboard of everything she knew about their prisoner. Name: Scrap. Pronouns: he/him. He was currently tooned into a sim drive-in theater, watching something from Teagan9’s media archive, a McDiznazon retelling of some Anansi story, made around 2077. For some reason, Scrap’s toon in the drive-in sim was manifested as a folded linen napkin with cartoon eyes.
Frankie moved on, surveying Teagan9’s body. She got caught up there for a minute, fighting tears again. Remembering the two of them running training drills—how fast could they get Frankie into and out of a pegasus?
Tea’s fine, she told herself. Safe and cozy in the consciousness vault, just waiting on a ride home.
Last, she shifted her awareness into the cameras in crew quarters.
A half-repaired FoxBOT was there, sprucing up berths for her, Ember, and Jermaine. It had fans freshening the air even as it stocked up on hydrogel. The food printer was converting artificial eggwhite and vat-grown blackberry tish into easily digested biscuits and slices of fruit, the latter laced with anti-nausea meds.
Supplies were low, but everything was in hand.
“I know you’re probably spoiling for company, kitten,” she said, “but I’m so tired, I’m actually hallucinating. Can you tow me in while I doze off?”
“A nap is an excellent idea. If a bit off-brand.”
“Orders from Kansas.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll wake you if anything develops.”
If anything else develops, I’m going to go into full-on mental collapse. A low electrical pulse crawled Jalopy’s skin—the equivalent of a shudder.
“Thanks. Um.” She couldn’t quite make herself go off-shift without mentioning … “You see the footage from the Dumpster?”
“I’m fully synced with your onboard OS. Believe me, I’m just as disturbed as you are. We’ll talk about it as a family, once EmberJerm are up and you’re decanted, washed, and rested.”
Frankie sent thumbs-up. She banished the illusion of Sneezy and summoned a sim: hammock between palm trees, rolling ocean waves murmuring nearby. Clouds overhead, designed to draw the eye. Silently, she began to recite the lyrics to one of Grandpa Drow’s pop hits.
She felt her breath hitching into sleep.
I’m as disturbed as you are.
Her mind served up another image of the Thing. Ship. Had to be, right? Now, within the Jalopy cockpit, she began to transition from memory to dream. For a second, she thought she was asking someone, “Why me?”
It felt like talking to Maud.
You chose this, Frankie. That’s what Maud would say.
This wasn’t the plan! We were going to check out the Dumpster for clues about what happened to Heyoka. Then reorient the navigational maths and make for Centauri. Get Ember beyond their clutches, you know? Beg for help.
Begging for help? You?
We weren’t supposed to get wrapped up in a rescue!
Frankie caught a weird sense of heat—desert sand and a scent of lab, faint flavor of faux salmon on the tongue and a primer configged tight against the chest. Then her mind slid on, thoughts moving like butter on a hot pan.
“What rescue?” Dream Maud appeared before her, standing in that chamber Frankie had seen earlier, the cave covered in Kinze spines.
“The offworlder ship was damaged. They might need—” Frankie tried to imagine helping—helping how? And why her? Why now?
Even as she tried to come up with answers, Maud melted away, taking the cave with her. Frankie didn’t wake until Babs—no, Babs1—and their HuskyBOTs pulled Jalopy through the airlock and began a careful extraction of EmberJerm from cargo.
Frankie watched with dopy relief as first Ember and then Jermaine passed safely into atmosphere.
“Are we certain about waking Jermaine?” Babs1 asked.
“He said he wanted to try riding out the wobblies. Earning the space legs.”
“Understood.”
“Wake Ember first,” Frankie said. “He’ll have to nurse him.”
Reaching back, she triggered the cockpit unplug. Jalopy retracted her implant. Everything went dark. Frankie saw again the ceiling full of Kinze, just for a moment, before opening her eyes to nullgrav and the sticky press of a filthy bodybag ar
ound her.
Bodybag. She remembered Hung making the joke for the first time. Shouts of laughter and groans from all the pilots. She flashed on the memory of Dumpster and ship wreckage, in a ring around the whale-skinned asteroid-thing.
Now she had a stomach again, it clenched.
Move on, move on. She made herself concentrate as sensation returned to her hands and feet, wiggling toes and ticking boxes. Right thumb, left thumb. Right toes, left toes. Circle one wrist, then two. Get her extremities online.
She and Babs1 knuckled to the task list. Iktomi’s autopilot was sent to run a hundred BeetleBOTs over Jalopy, assessing wear and tear. Babs1 roused Ember while Frankie washed and changed.
They gathered in crew quarters, weird parody of a family at dinner, as the first of Jermaine’s self-prescribed anti-nauseant doses percolated through his system. As he surfaced, Ember and Babs1 jabbered about quantum comms and perceptual translation, whatever that meant, and FTL navigation and pixie-dust interference profiles and weird ships.
Frankie drifted off in the vicinity of sleep again. She dreamed of Maud’s parent, Nata, hefting seedlings in a fungiplex greenhouse. Dreamed blisters on Maud’s ankles.
Those sandals never fit right.
Shush, they’ll hear you!
She snapped awake. The KangaBOT they had brought from Earth was doing the hard work of keeping Jermaine stable. Wrapped in a cocoon of primer, he was anchored so his eyes and kinesthetic feedback would create some sense of his being upright. Ember was ready with a barf bag.
“Come on, baby, come on,” Ember murmured.
Jerm’s eyelids fluttered. He took them in: Frankie, Ember, the Persian toon of Babs1 in their overalls.
“Hey, doll,” he said to the sapp, voice thick. “We’ve missed you.”
“A pleasure to see you, too,” Babs1 said. “How do you feel?”
“Pretty.” He took a deep breath. “Green.”
“Ah! That reminds me. You have rights to screen a Muppets movie, don’t you?”
At Jermaine’s incredulous look, Babs1 added, “It’s for Scrap.”
“Let me check my med levels.” Jermaine’s hand came up, then slapped back down. “Oh. Augments off. Oh, no.”
Ember offered the barf bag and he clutched it. Frankie put a hand on his back. When the first, immediate urge to vomit seemed to have passed, Frankie described the situation out at the Dumpster. Babs filled their HUDS with all the footage of the Thing.
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