“So, instead of going on to Centauri, you diverted to here. Happy as I am to see you, I’m wondering why,” the sapp said.
“Centauri’s too far to go for resupply. I dropped a HawkBOT before I beat the hasty retreat—”
“You sent a voicemail? To aliens? Saying what?” Jerm asked.
“About what you’d expect. I’m in the area but with limited resources. I’ll try to come back with water and—”
Three faces—two real and human, one virtual and feline—goggled at her.
“What?” Frankie said.
“You offered to help them?” Ember said. “Hardcore super advanced Exemplar beings?”
“They might’ve destroyed the Dumpster themselves. And they’re in the noninterference zone! They can’t be up to any good,” Babs1 agreed.
Frankie didn’t answer. They weren’t wrong, exactly; the ship-in-distress problem ought to be triaged. But …
“Maybe we are ill equipped for a rescue,” Jermaine managed. “But Franks did right. If we can help them, we have to.”
“See?” Frankie said. “I bet Crane would agree with us.”
Nice up there on the moral high ground, is it?
“What?” Jerm must have seen her face change.
“Nothing.”
“Frances Xerxine Barnes.”
“Okay! Dammit! I keep hearing Maud’s voice. I mean, it’s me … I keep thinking what Maud would say. But—”
“Show me your implant.”
“It’s nothing. I just miss…” It was ridiculous, what a disaster she was, emotionally. Tearing up, Frankie forced herself to finish. “I just miss her.”
That’s almost sweet.
“Implant. Now,” Jermaine said.
What if it wasn’t her imagination? Frankie drifted toward her packmate, backward, trying not to imagine what it’d feel like if he puked on her ass.
CHAPTER 34
WEST COAST EVACUATION ZONE, DEATH VALLEY
EMERGENCY SHELTER 329 (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: CANTINA)
The cave system under the Death Valley emergency refuge known as the Cantina was a step down from the fancy Manhattan digs the @Visionaries had set up for themselves at the end of the Clawback, but as far as they could manage it, the hoarders were still black-marketing themselves plenty of luxuries. Real meat and micro greens, chocolate, designer meds capable of making you feel anything, everything—or possibly nothing—and cushy furnishings.
The first stop on the tour was a well-appointed dining room, linen tablecloths and all, with a real chandelier.
“Tea for Lady Maud,” Upton said. “First-flush Darjeeling, served in china, with cream from a real cow.”
Was that a peace offering? She let herself hope he was thawing. Then a servant appeared, bearing a tray, and laid the service on a nearest table.
“Go ahead,” Upton said. “Have some.”
Maud looked at the woman who had brought the tea. She didn’t appear to have been botomized; she was young and didn’t have the characteristic furrow in her skull. The glassy-eyed look was gone too. Yet …
An object lesson, then?
“Don’t let it go to waste, luvvie,” Irma said. “Be my sweet girl.”
Maud obediently sipped. Bile curdled the cream in the back of her throat as the servant offered Irma a cup and retreated to the edges of the room with a servile bow.
The original @Visionaries had been billionaires on life extension, working with Headmistress to preserve their wealth from the Clawback and wait for a chance at regime change. By the time their Manhattan enclave got busted, many of its founding members had been pushing 170 years of existence; they had been life-supported husks in consciousness vaults, shakily functional minds roaming Sensorium.
After Mitternacht, these founders had been taken into custody. Had been thrown under the bus, in the oldspeak, to cover a retreat by those @Visionaries still physically capable of running.
The younger cohort of @Visionaries caught in the sweep, Glenn Upton among them, had allegedly made restitution to society. They’d laid low, kept quiet, and waited for the attention of the world and its #newscycle to move elsewhere. And it had. People forgot villainy if you gave them long enough, or so Frankie claimed. They wanted to believe the bad things in the past hadn’t been that bad. That there’d been mitigating circumstances. The redeemed hoarders had waited it out, rebuilt their dissident faction, and started rebranding.
Now they were regrouping, as Frankie and her hoaxer chums like Jackal had suspected. And, once again, they were apparently getting ready to hand over the world.
Maud set down the teacup and turned to Irma. “Haven’t you learned anything from Mitternacht and the first #invasionfail? This is going to blow up on you.”
“Luvvie darling,” Irma cooed. “Where’s that open scientific mind I so treasure?”
“Mourning Babs and Hung Chan.”
“Sacrifices to the cause.” She made a graceful ballerina turn, gesturing at an object Maud had taken for an abstract and somewhat homely statue. “Now, Maud, we have a guest: this is Pippin. He’s from a race called Punama.”
Maud covered her startlement with a bow. Pippin was a cylindrical column of tissue, reminiscent of palm-tree bark, punctuated by bot structures—three-fingered robot hands on short limbs. If he could move independently, without using tech, there was no sign. She supposed the actual entity could be within the trunk itself; the whole thing might be a life-support system.
“Pippin from Punama,” she repeated. Sort of a Dalek type, she thought, and tried to remember whether Daleks were good or bad.
Bad, I think. Like, uber-bad? I’ll ask Ember.
That was what Frankie would say. Her tone was husky, as if she’d been crying.
Maud’s arms broke out in goosebumps. “And this helpful woman with the tea?”
“Tell her your name, dear,” Upton said, with a hint of a smirk.
“Susan May.” No inflection in the voice.
“Is she botomized?”
“Nothing so crude, darling.”
“Meaning yes.”
“Forget her—she’s the help.” Irma made a shooing motion at Susan, who about-faced and walked away. “Now. The Punama are about to acquire our debt to the Kinze.”
“They’re the highest bidder for buying out the planetary economy?”
“That is an accurate restatement of our prospective role.” Pippin’s voice was synthesized, a little robotic. Actually Dalek-y.
Upton’s toon straightened. “Earth’s economy will want restructuring, for incorporation into empire and repayment of our considerable—”
“Wait. If we sell out, doesn’t that cancel the debt?” Maud fiddled with her cup, letting her eyes roam over the expanse of Kinze needles carpeting the cave roof. How many of them were up there? If they were all about the size of Herringbo, maybe about fifteen?
“Luvvie, I know what you learned in history,” Irma said, “Anyone with financial capital was portrayed as some kind of world-destroying blackhat. But you don’t understand the nuances of a lend-and-spend economy. Using future profits to fund innovation isn’t nearly as terrible as Global Oversight makes out.”
“Don’t sugarcoat the issue,” Upton interrupted. “Maud, you’re right. It’s not an equally distributed give we’re talking about. There will be beneficiaries once Foreclosure takes place. There will also be unavoidable economic casualties.”
“You mean victims.”
“You can be a team player or you can become one of the footballs,” Upton agreed.
“If you’re going to be contemptible, send me back to Detroit,” Maud said.
The outburst surprised him less than it did her. It sounded like something Frankie would have said. Unwise, and despite the spike of fear—
Jesus, Maud, don’t poke the bear when he’s threatening to lobotomize you!
You antagonize the bad guys all the time!
I don’t care! You’re on a ration.
Shall I tell you what
you can do with that double standard, Hedgehog?
“You got me here,” Maud said. “What now?”
“Yes, Irma.” Upton’s tone was sarcastic. “What now?”
“We want you back in the family, luvvie. That much must be obvious.”
“Just like that?” They couldn’t think she was that naive, could they? Maud opted for making a sulky teen face. “What does that even look like? If the … @Visionaries … end up running all of the Solakinder for these people, while the bank takes a cut?”
“You’ll hardly notice a change. The Punama will preserve much of our regulatory infrastructure,” Irma said. “Global Oversight works well enough for certain kinds of economic management.”
“But no more rapid-response democracy?”
“Good riddance to all the polling,” Upton said. “The @Visionaries will be calling the shots.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. It’ll be them, won’t it? The Punama?”
“Setting performance targets, that’s all! Think, Maud.” Irma lay a spider-delicate hand on her shoulder. “They’ll give us a hand up the tech ladder. Ships and portals—we’ll have the rest of the Sol system colonized in a snap. No more reinventing the wheel. No more population limits!”
“No more hard laws against letting people starve?”
“Luvvie, darling, this is happening. All your dear Frances has accomplished is making the transition bumpy. She’s been embarrassing, true…”
Bloody embarrassing. Bloody hell, darling, I’ve been an embarrassment!
Maud raised her teacup and blew on it, hoping the action hid a smile.
“… but embarrassing is one thing and effective is another. Dear Glenn and I offering you a spot at the top of the only leaderboard that’s going to matter.”
“One you little deserve,” he put in.
Maud ignored this. “Doing what?”
Irma gestured at one of the six chamber exits. “Let me show you one possibility.”
“Irma,” Upton said, tone warning.
“Pish. We didn’t bring her all this way for tea.”
“You better know what you’re doing.” Upton, looking piqued, tooned out.
Irma made for an exit. Maud followed warily, into a curling stone corridor. The walls were unnaturally smooth there, almost polished. They looked as though they’d been cut into the mountain and buffed.
They’d have taken care to keep this concealed. The maze of natural caverns above them, the carefully deceitful wayfinding … they were first lines of defense, meant to keep this from being discovered before the takeover was finished.
She was aware of writhing Kinze biomass overhead, no doubt catching their every word and facial twitch. Pippin the Punama accompanied them, tilting lengthwise and ticking along on its articulated talons.
They took Maud into gloaming light, which steadily brightened as she descended. A whiff of sulfur reached her nose, and she wondered if there might be an active pyroclastic flow farther down.
The gases, in that case, would make the air unbreathable.
Unbreathable to me. The Kinze and the Daleks might be just fine down there.
No Daleks; that’s branded talk!
Don’t you dare make me laugh!
Was it just fear, Maud told herself, making her imagine Frankie there, cracking jokes? Or shock at her own boldness? Easier to imagine the Hedgehog cutting up than to doing it herself.
Nuh-uh. Jerm’s got a probe in my implant—a far-from-pleasant sensation, in case you’re curious—and he says it has been dialed right up to full volume, possibly from your end—
Mine?
Maybe they’re using to you try to locate me and EmberJerm?
The conversation broke up as her eyes adjusted to a change in the light in the caverns. Flickering veins, delicate as capillaries, drew threads of lichens along the rock. The quality of the light emitted by the veins was multicolored, mixing in the chamber so that it was full-spectrum. Maud reached out, laying the back of her wrist against one delicate, glowing blue thread. It was on the edge of hot; it might eventually burn if she maintained contact.
The corridor became a spiral ramp, open at waist height, marked by columns, a whirling screw orbiting a massive central column within an abyssal chamber. Plants appeared as they descended, tiny seedlings, dicotyledon sprouts with leaves colored the green of spring willows.
Here and there, embedded in the wall among the light and the leaves, were devices that looked to Maud much like Iktomi’s dark matter attractors.
The air freshened. The sulfur vanished. The growth on the walls thickened. The light-emitting vein systems densified, becoming deep strata, with the plants growing out of it.
Bending over the rail, Maud examined one of the seedlings. It had a furled knot between the joint of its leaves, a structure she’d initially taken for a bud. Now she saw the cellulose wrapped around it was translucent. Within was a bead of something meaty.
“Is that tish?”
“Of a sort,” Irma said.
“Then this is … a massive biocomputer?” Some of the buds had extruded tiny antennae.
“It’s quantum comms,” Irma said.
“So, even though we haven’t quite been foreclosed on, as you put it, we already have a huge alien datacenter and a comms station Earthside.”
“Setting up a preliminary installation isn’t so unreasonable, is it?”
“But why?” Maud indicated the whole array.
Pippin said, “Quantum navigation is necessary to bring in pacification ships. To enforce the handover.”
Maud pulled her hand back, as if she’d been touching something poisonous. “Auntie! A homing beacon for an invasion force?”
“Don’t let your father hear you put it like that. He’s terribly displeased with you.” Irma waved the objection away. “Maud, developing this tech for humankind under Punama guidance—connecting to the greater data systems of offworlder societies and extracting whatever value you can from Sensorium—this could be your life’s work. But—”
“But what?”
“We have a two-way trust problem, don’t we? Especially now that you’ve shopped dear Glenn to Global Oversight.”
“I didn’t!”
“Your Frances did, which amounts to the same thing.”
“I expect she was trying to keep him from snatching me,” Maud said.
“Do you feel snatched, luvvie?”
Be a sweet girl. “No. I never felt snatched. Never. And—I did miss you, Auntie.”
Irma brightened, grabbing her into a hug, squashing Maud against her tall, bony chest. “I knew you must! Now, showing you this comms array … it’s an expression of trust on my part. Do you understand?”
“What could I possibly do to make you believe I’m onside with all of this—Upton, the servants, Foreclosure, this base? Even if I was fully bought in, you’d never believe it—”
Irma squeezed harder. All Maud’s skin started to crawl. “You’d need to be on probation of sorts, true.”
“On what terms?”
“Tell us what Barnes is up to.”
“I’m—” Her breath caught. “Frankie and I are one step from breaking up.”
Irma broke from the hug, gripping Maud’s upper arms. Her fingers were strong. “Luvvie, why on earth do you think we built you a direct line to dear Frances? Why do you think we arranged to put comms tish from this very array inside your implants?”
See? They meant for you to spy on me all along.
Maud shuddered.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Irma said. “You wanted to keep tabs on your dear Frankie every bit as much as we did.”
“That’s not fair!”
It might be a little fair.
Shut up, Franks!
“We have to get ahead of … What does your nasty little Hedgehog call it? This game of move and countermove.”
They had turned her into a listening device. A bug, as they used to call them.
“There could be n
o better show of good faith, dear Maud—”
“Than if I betray my family,” Maud finished.
“We’re your family, luvvie.”
It’s okay, it’s okay, we can lie to them, there are tricks we can pull, we can stay ahead of this …
Shut up, Hedgehog, Maud sent again. She’d just had a very dangerous idea, one—she was pretty sure—that wouldn’t occur to anyone there. But to pull it off, she’d have to get back to her worldlies. I’m thinking.
She let her fingers drop to the base of one of the seedlings, weeding out a single plant with hairy roots. It smelled of alfalfa. Using her thumbnail, she split the plant tissue protecting the little nodule of tish within its stem.
Infinite redundancy. Each individual plant was just a node.
“This is what’s in me,” she said.
A nod. “In all the pilot augments, darling. And we can see you’re getting signals, which tells us that your dear Frances is alive.”
She wouldn’t learn any more unless she played along.
“Frankie’s taken the boys to Sneezy,” she said.
Maud! Jesus, don’t actually tell—
Irma crossed her arms. “And what will she do next?”
“Take steps to protect Babs.”
“Obviously.”
“They’ll want to reconstruct whatever breakthrough Babs had, about how Ember was framed for IP theft.”
Irma tutted, raising a finger. “What we need, luvvie, isn’t the blindingly obvious list of everything your Frances has to do to stay even with us. That’s easily forecast. You need to get her to spill her troublesome, maladjusted, paranoid intentions. What awkward surprises is she cooking up for us? What can’t we predict?”
Maud felt a thrill of love. Awkward surprises, indeed!
“Well?” Irma demanded. “How strong is your connection?”
“Intermittent,” she said. “We’ve only just realized we can talk.”
“This is a bit urgent—”
“We’ve been fighting, remember?” Maud let her voice crack a little. “There’s a trust problem there, too.”
“Oh!” Another strangling hug at that.
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