The hanky-sized Kinze undulated its spines out of the tartan pattern it had adopted, into chaotic light and dark shapes. “Scrap declines to betray the All.”
“We didn’t ask anything about your people, my good man,” Babs1 said.
Could Scrap be pussyfooting? Nothing to see, folks; it definitely wasn’t us? Nudge nudge wink?
“We. Need. Assistance.” Frankie’s voice played in the feeds again.
“Shouldn’t have bloody offered to help in the first place,” Frankie muttered.
“It’s good you did,” Ember said.
“Yeah?”
“Hung mentioned hitting something, at the Dumpster, when he made the test flight. What if these guys hit something too?”
“Something besides the Dumpster itself? Like what?”
“A mine? A really…” Ember raised his hands, groping in midair for words. “A really advanced anyspace…”
“If the Kinze planted mines, could it mean they were expecting these new folks to turn up?”
“More likely a Solakinder ship was the target,” Babs1 said.
“What Solakinder ship?”
Jerm nudged her. “Us, stupid.”
“Why’d the other ship even go there? Scrap?”
“Scrap declines to betray the All.”
By now, Ember had dosed up on his preferred cocktail of smartdrugs, digging into numbers on the HawkBOT’s hard drive. He threw up a shareboard. Chemical symbols proliferated across Frankie’s field of vision. “They’re asking for supplies: water, protein. No oxygen required, fortunately, but they need copper.”
Frankie frowned. “Do we have copper, Babs1?”
“Copper we aren’t using for ship systems?”
“Ideally.”
“I would estimate … ten grams?”
We. Need help. Do whatever. Can you?
Frankie made for stores. Hydrogel and protein, at least, they had.
“So, you’re going to do it?” Babs1 said. “Fly back into all that wreckage?”
“What’s the alternative, Babs1? Let ’em die?”
Ember expanded the shareboard, filling with maths from the HawkBOT. “This packet they’ve sent—it’s specs for comms tech.”
“Comms? So, they can talk to us in realtime?”
“It’s anyspace dynamics for quantum comms. And ways to use them as a nav beacon for ships.”
“Can you build one?”
“If we get supplies … I think so?”
“Whoever these people are, they don’t give a shit about the Exemplars and their prime directive,” Jerm said.
“Can’t blame ’em for wanting to live, can we?” Frankie opened up the stores, found two mesh nets full of hydrogel, and commandeered a FoxBOT to drag them to the hangar.
“Maud would tell you to play it safe,” Babs1 said. “Triage them, concentrate on family.”
“Don’t bloody hide behind Maud!” Maud’s absence ached like a missing tooth; she didn’t need Babs1 sticking a probe in the wound. “You want me to stay, say so.”
“I don’t wish to be antisocial, but we’ve considerable problems here. Just this once, could you hold off on charging into battle? Keep your powder dry, as they say?”
“Clearly not.” Frankie surveyed the protein stocks. Eight barrels of protein left. Three adults would burn through that much food, and with the state Jermaine was in, they’d go through hydrogel fast too …
“What if I take the organ pig?” Frankie said. “It’s tissue and blood. Lots of protein; we’ll have to hope they can eat it.”
“It’s not doing Teagan any good,” Ember agreed.
“I guess that means you’re in favor of Frankie helping the wounded math dispensers,” Babs1 grouched.
“Are we voting?” Jermaine asked.
A pause. Then Babs1 let out a long sigh. “Need I point out that depleting our supplies brings forward your starve date?”
Frankie untethered two of the barrels. “Champ and his sponsors aren’t going to leave us here to die of deprivation.”
“Which is an argument for staying together,” Babs1 said. “Besides, Jalopy needs maintenance.”
“Well, you’ve been tightening all the bolts on Iktomi, haven’t you?”
The argument petered out. They loaded the saucer, charged her batteries, tested her pixie dust cannons. Frankie flew inspections over Iktomi’s surface with a husky, piloting remotely while physically holding Jermaine’s hand. Ember sat at his other side, churning the interesting new comms maths.
“I don’t mean to be gone for more than twenty-four,” she told them. “If they sent one HawkBOT, they can send another. I’ll get them to let you know I made it there. At least you’ll know I’m safe.”
“I’m not worried,” Jerm said. “You’ll make it.”
“I don’t want to do this.”
“Then you shouldn’t,” Babs1 said. “A countermove from our opposition is overdue. Jermaine remains ill—”
Jerm shrugged. “That ship’s in the same boat we are. Stranded, far from home. Limited supply chain, high risk of death.”
“Marrying humanitarians was one of my best ideas ever, wasn’t it?” Frankie cracked a smile. And then, tiresomely, almost teared up.
“This isn’t about you running off on us,” Jerm said.
“No?”
“Anyone could be inside that thing. Widows, orphans, refugees—”
“Man-eating wolf beings bound for space prison!”
“You really ought to play more nuanced sims,” he croaked. “It’s not in your nature to abandon people. Be who you are, Hedgehog.”
“They’re at the Dumpster for a reason,” Ember argued. “Everything happening now is connected.”
Frankie felt the rightness of that, at least.
“Babs,” she said.
No response.
“Babs, I need an AI aboard Iktomi. Are you gonna create another instance of yourself or you gonna keep sulking?”
“If sulking’s an option—”
“Bloody hell! It’s not!”
“Indeed, then. I’m doing it. Happy now?”
“Delirious. Socket me into Iktomi. Sooner I leave, faster I’m back, right?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” Ember gave her his most luminous smile. Jerm, tethered and green a few feet away, mojied a weak two-thumbs-up.
Frankie hugged them both, managed not to break down, and headed back to Iktomi, making awkward use of three FoxBOTs to get herself positioned and plugged. When everything was in the green, she began the startup sequence. “Kitten? You installed?”
Nothing.
“Babs! Come on, dammit.”
“Don’t nag,” the newest tab—they were up to Babs2—said, in yet another vintage US accent, this one from the West Coast. It manifested she/her/hers tags and a scrappy-looking marmalade alley cat appearance, complete with tattered ears, pilot’s jacket, and brush of yellow hair between its well-gnawed ears. The words #PUNKROCK and #MARSHMALLOW were emblazoned on the jacket. “I had to make sure autopilot hadn’t become self-aware before I overwrote him.”
“Okay, Two. There and back, fast as we can.”
She cleared her mind, double-checked the coordinates, and ran a last check through Iktomi’s systems. Ember supplied navigation calculations.
Ember’s maths are always right. Frankie triggered the leap.
She came out right on spec, on the far side of the debris field. The offworlder ship didn’t look any different—immense, damaged, with that iridescent skirt of spines around its apex. The crack, near the center, pulsed against the pressure of the gel bleeding against its edges.
Zooming, Frankie scanned the damage—the torn and burnt ridges of rock, the clear weeping sap at the edges of the wound. “Unknown ship, this is Mer Frances Barnes of the Solakinder, currently based out of Space Station Sneezy. I’m rendering aid as requested. I have protein and water and a small amount of copper. Awaiting instructions on transfer of goods to your craft.”
The answer came as another acoustic paste-up of words she’d sent: “Transfer. To. Aid. Craft. Unknown-Craft.” There were more maths, too.
“If this is how their translator works, they’ll need us to provide more vocab,” Babs—no, this was Babs2—subbed.
“Unknown vessel, can you tune in and translate multiple discussion channels at once? Yes or no?”
“Yes. Multiple. Discussions. Translate. Yes.”
“Split comms into four channels, okay?” ordered Frankie. “Tune them to our ambient conversation so they can start parsing what we’re saying to each other. Get Iktomi’s maintenance manual on autoplay so they learn engineering lingo. Explain that we haven’t invented quantum comms yet, since they seem so interested. I’m going to work out how to transfer the supplies we brought.”
“Copy that,” Babs2 said.
Frankie opened a channel of her own, beginning to monologue about Iktomi’s capabilities for loading and unloading cargo.
“The Solakinder are the combined races of earth. Babs2’s a program,” she explained, “a sapp—a code-based intelligence. I have a body—ah, warm-blooded body. For me to come aboard and assist you, I would require breathable, pressurized atmosphere…”
She explained that, talked about the water and eggwhite she’d brought, tried to describe the organ pig. She emphasized that Sneezy was damaged, counting down a near-term starve date, light on oxygen, and certainly no treasure trove of supplies. Left out the part about them being fugitives. She apologized about their lack of on-hand copper—
They replied before she spieled out.
“Unknown vessel can bring the Solakinder ship Iktomi aboard a hangar with. Breathable pressurized mammal atmosphere. Please hold—”
Its words had become a mishmash of their voices. Words from Frankie and Babs2 and the tech manual, stapled together in stilted strings.
“Appreciate vocabs. I appreciate vocabulary upload and. We appreciate the vocabulary upload. Thank you.”
Fast learner. She smiled. “What can we call you?”
“Your words are—advocate, observer, intercessor, umpire—”
A slosh in Frankie’s fuel tanks registered as heat, or gas—her stomach, probably, lurching. Diplomatic had widecast a request for a neutral arbitrator—
“We requested assistance—someone to intercede in a possible dispute with the Kinze. Are you them?”
“Affirmative, yes, confirm, correct.”
Keeping her voice neutral, Frankie said, “What if we call you the Umpire?”
“Too much like vampire,” Babs2 objected.
“The Ump?”
“Yump,” the composite voice agreed. “We accept designation Yump ship.”
“Hung would love that,” Babs2 said. “Yumpster at the DYumpster.”
Grief caught Frankie sidewise; she welled up again.
“Yumpster of Dumpster affirming, Iktomi. We will tow you in now.”
Iktomi eased toward the ship, nudging up against the fissure in its immense surface, then sinking into the clear gel. She counted to a hundred, tried not to panic. Then light broke on the other end. Iktomi had been submerged into an air pocket, a vaguely egg-shaped bubble of space about the size of the Colosseum in Rome.
“Mammal oxygen pressure mix is available here,” said the composite voice of the … Yump. It wasn’t hesitating now—its paste-ups of their words were smoothing out.
“Do you have bots? I need to unplug…”
The spherical cockpit popped gently from the ship socket, sinking on a tendril of slime to the floor, then cracking its seals of its own accord.
Frankie reflexively held her breath, but the air flooding over her face smelled like meadows in springtime.
A pseudopod of clear gel flowed down from the ceiling, looping around her waist, gently unplugging her from the craft. By the time she came out of the usual interlude of paralysis and darkness, it had lowered her to the floor.
Frankie wobbled as her legs reasserted their connection to her central nervous system—outside the saucer, within her bodybag. There was a bit of gravity to push against. The pseudopod of gel flowed away. Under her feet, the surface of the floor felt like rock. The air—her hand automatically went to her throat—was a little warm, dry but apparently breathable.
She looked up. Iktomi’s front end was inside the bubble; she could climb into the hold and engine room through the socket. She could see fluid, deep green, beyond the safety barrier.
The fluid looked gelatinous and softly illuminated. Finger-length growths writhed in it, pushing their way through, leaving slickly illuminated trails that slowly collapsed in their wake. The trails had vestigial bioluminescence, glowing threads that lost their brightness as she watched.
Were the wormy things the aliens themselves, or were they tech?
Babs2 appeared beside her. “The Yump agreed to send a HawkBOT back to Sneezy, confirming our safe arrival.”
“Great. Can they bring one back from there?”
“They need time to figure out if that’s possible. But they are superkeen to connect to our resident anyspace expert. They want us to repair the quantum comms here and install comms on Sneezy for them to use as a homing beacon.”
“What about—Hello, Yump? Yumps? I’m going to pull out the protein and hydrogel we brought you. Where do you want them?”
“I’m attempting to establish a connection to your datasphere,” it said. “May we try?”
“Sure,” Frankie said. And then: “Wait, try what?”
She found herself in a white painscape of sensation: light like sun, sound like sirens, acid burning the tissues inside her cheeks, searing heat, burning cold, and in the midst of it a vision of a rock-walled room and—
Maud?
Alive, you’re—
When it stopped, she found herself bent double, almost fetal, and the only voice screaming was Babs2.
“Stop, stop, stop it, you’re killing her—”
“I’m—” She wiped at her dry mouth. “I’m okay, Two.”
“Right! And by okay you mean you’re only having a small seizure?”
“Rubbish.” She let herself sit so she wouldn’t fall. “I’m great … Don’t fuss.”
“Apologies.” The Yump voice was beginning to be an amalgam of the two of them—lower base of Frankie’s BritAnglo, with a top note derived from Babs2’s Veronica Mars–inspired California contralto.
White light diffused across her visual augments again, damping down before it could hurt her eyes. A camera feed painted itself onto her visual field—the view from Iktomi’s hold: an organ pig in a bodybag and two canisters of eggwhite tish.
Arrows showed a path across their bubble of air, breadcrumbs indicating a drop point for the supplies.
Frankie sprang to her feet, not quite on purpose, and then bounced on her toes to confirm her assessment of the gravity—about half Earth normal. Leaping, she reached the socket of Iktomi easily, pushing aside the umbilical winch connecting the cockpit to the rest of the craft. Crawling through a maintenance tube to the cargo bay, she grabbed the bodybag holding the organ pig, dragging it out of the ship. Following the arrows on her implants, she laid it flat, unzipped it.
The smell of meat washed upward. The Yump gel above her made a squirting noise, dropping what looked like barbed peppercorns onto the surface of the pig’s flesh.
Frankie went back for the eggwhite. By the time she returned, the peppercorns were popping open. The flesh of the pig was being rapidly covered in seedlings, faint green tendrils like hairs growing out of its skin. She cracked the canister of eggwhite and poured it over the whole thing.
“Is this you? You’re plant people?”
“What you see is a nascent comms array,” it said. “Ours was damaged; we have had to reseed.”
“They grow in meat?” She resisted the urge to rub her arms vigorously.
“It is a viable strategy in an emergency.”
“And when it’s grown?”
“This st
ructure will remain small if we cannot add growth medium. It should nevertheless connect with mature … groves? growths?… in your home system.”
“We haven’t invented quantum comms, I told you. That’s Exemplar stuff—”
“Kinze ships in-system have quantum comms.”
“There aren’t supposed to be any Kinze ships in the Solakinder system,” Frankie said. “And if they’re trespassing within the noninterference zone, I don’t know if you want to go ringing them for help. After all, if there was a booby trap waiting out here at the supply point, they’re the ones who’ll have planted it.”
“Understood. Blocking the All from your communications array.” Another stab of heat from her sacrum, but one that passed swiftly. “Was it also the Kinze who seeded the quantum-comms installation on the Solakinder homeworld?”
“There’s no quantum comms on Earth,” Babs2 said.
“Incorrect.”
“No,” Frankie said.
“Yes,” the Yump said.
“Well,” Babs2 said. “That’s. Super interesting. Or super ominous. I’m not sure which.”
“Super both.” Frankie’s mind was racing. “Did you say you can use quantum comms as a homing beacon?”
“Affirmative,” Yump said. “On a related issue: your experimental augmented pilot sacral implant Mark One is picking up pulses now that we’ve blocked All traffic.”
“Is it?” Her hand went to the base of her spine. Maud?
“Shall I amplify?”
“Not if it’s going to feel like what you did before.”
Apparently, it wouldn’t—her sacrum began to vibrate. In Morse.
Attention. This is Scrap, this is Scrap. Frankie-Them, are you there? This is Scrap …
“Oh, my god!”
“What? What?” Babs2 demanded. This third tab of her seemed to be dialed a bit high, emotionally.
She made calming signs with both hands. “Scrap’s using @ButtSig.”
“How is that possible?”
“No frigging idea,” she said. “But it means we have realtime comms with Sneezy. And you said you can block the Kinze, Yump? I mean the other Kinze?”
“Loading software update…”
The image of a steampunk headset, remnant of Ember’s Mission Control defaults, appeared on Frankie’s HUD. She enabled it, activated the mic, and tried voice comms. “Scrap, are you there?”
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