The masc-sounding synthesized voice Babs1 had assigned to Scrap played over their feeds. “Frankie-Them, is that you?”
“Yes,” she replied, and then aloud: “Two, you getting this?”
“Yeah,” Babs2 said.
“Scrap, what are you doing in my—”
“Ass?” Babs2 offered.
“Don’t be a brat,” Frankie subbed.
“Champ-Them is boarding Sneezy.”
“Champ is there? Now?”
“Them’s probable orders will be to kill Us-All aboard and enact final stages of Foreclosure.”
The boys. Spots swam within Frankie’s vision. For a moment, she thought she might throw up.
“I think … yes, yes, I am gonna take the opportunity here to say I told you so,” Babs2 said.
All the vestigial endorphins from crying burned off at once, and Frankie found her mind clearing. Every hint of mental sludge crisped away, leaving a bright state of focused rage. “Yump? I have to get back to Sneezy.”
CHAPTER 38
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Ember Qaderi had not bothered to tie his curls back before emerging into nullgrav, and they were haloed around his face as he drifted in crew quarters, regarding Champ with the faintly sleepy expression that indicated he’d been pushing smartdrugs. Jermaine looked sweaty and a little desperate. From the smell of crew quarters, he’d done nothing but upchuck since arriving on the station. The men had some kind of aerosolized mister going, to try to cut the smell, but all that had done was add a humid, minty overlay to the stink of vomit.
“Move and countermove,” Qaderi said. “Scrap says you’re here to kill us.”
“Ember!” Jermaine said.
“Oh, right—I’m tipping our hand, aren’t I?”
Jermaine wobbled. A KangaBOT clamped to a ceiling handhold steadied him. “Champ, think. This doesn’t have to get contentious.”
“Contentious?” He laughed. “That’s your plan? Dissuade me?”
Ember glanced at the hatch leading out of crew quarters.
“You’re not going anywhere, fellas.” Champ kept himself between the hatch and the two of them. “You’re going back into the sarco tubes—”
“What about Babs and Scrap?” They asked it more or less simultaneously.
“Not your problem, guys.”
Jermaine covered his mouth, retching, filling crew quarters with more sour smells.
What would Misfortune do? Float around, negotiating amid the scent of spew? Not likely. Champ spider-climbed around the perimeter of the room, closing the space between them.
“Champ, Champ … stop. Champ!” Ember extended a leg, interposing himself between Champ and Jermaine. Champ grabbed for the foot. Maybe Ember had to go into a pod sans brain damage, but nobody’d said anything about breaking a few of his small bones …
His vision went white. His hand popped open. For a second, the smell of hair burning in his nostrils almost cleared the stench of vomit, gas, and … something sweet. Another flavor of air freshener?
Champ’s ears rang. His thoughts became oddly lethargic. His primer rebooted into a clown suit, popping his panniers open. Everything he’d been carrying was cycling in nullgrav along with some shards of glass.
Had they improvised some kind of taser to use on him?
Clear your head! “You poor deluded sheep.”
He caught a ceiling handhold, steadied himself, and then ripped a hard brick of printstock off the wall. Using it to block any further skin-to-skin contact, he sprang off a wall, plowing into Ember. He shoved Ember into Jermaine, watching to see if that triggered another shock. When none came, he wrapped himself around the physicist as the two of them drifted toward a wall.
“Stop it!” Jermaine shouted.
Champ had known all along that fighting would be harder in nullgrav, but he hadn’t expected his limbs to feel this heavy. Misfortune and her horrible beatdowns and the endless boxing practice had made him quick as well as mean. Why did he feel like he was swimming in syrup?
He forced his leaden arms to wrangle Ember into a chokehold.
“How ugly you want this to get?” Champ demanded. “Eh, Jermaine? How ugly?”
Jermaine put his hands up. “Don’t hurt him. Nobody has to—”
“Shut up.” Champ took a second to check the rest of the station—make sure Babs, Babs1, whoever they were calling themself now—wasn’t trying to jam a FoxBOT up his ass. But the AI was running life-support systems to spec.
Ember wasn’t struggling. Jermaine hung near the hatch, green at the gills.
“Sarco tube, Doc Mwangi,” Champ said. “Grab one and unroll it.”
Jermaine broke the seals on the roll.
Ember struggled against his grip, gritting words out. “You don’t have to do this—”
“You want your leg busted?”
“Let him be!” Jermaine barked.
The sludginess in his limbs was worsening. Had they pumped something into the air?
Champ would have to let go of Ember for a second just to trigger one of the Superhoomin doses Misfortune had given him and offset whatever med was seeping into his system.
“Clear,” Ember said suddenly.
Jermaine had the sarco unrolled. Now, with a sudden flick of the wrist, he slapped the whole thing against a silvery wand of tech beneath the kanga. A defibrillator? There was a smell, sudden and sharp, of burning plastic. The nanosilk lining of the pod blew, releasing more med packets and balls of smartfoam, adding to the general fog of garbage drifting in crew quarters.
Jermaine lunged for the remaining sarco pod. “How bad do you need this?”
Champ had definitely grabbed the wrong hubby.
They shoved him in my path, he thought.
The idea filled him with rage. He had been a decent strategic thinker before. Had the augments to his augments made him pig-stupid along with everything else?
There was no way these two were going to think circles around him. Of course they thought they could, with their tricks and their traps. But …
Champ shifted his grip, released Ember’s throat, and with a swift, brutal move, dislocated the scientist’s shoulder.
Ember let out a gasp. Jermaine bleated, a sound somewhere between a “Hey!” and a “No!”
“You want to think real carefully before you go charging up your shock gadget again.” Red smears slid over Champ’s vision. They had to be dosing the air supply. He popped the hatches and ordered a flush on the air.
Jermaine gagged once, then twice. He drifted to the open hatch, dragging the sarco pod.
“Don’t you test me!” Champ cranked the shoulder back into place with a rough pop. This time, Ember shrieked.
He felt a mean-spirited pulse of joy. Jermaine was leaking tears, big shiny blobs of saline, wobbling off his face into the nullgrav.
“I can just ratchet him in and out all day,” Champs said. “Pop pop pop. Like the arm on a dolly.”
“You gotta,” Ember said. “You gotta, you gotta, you gotta.”
The doctor clambered through the aft hatch, slamming it behind him.
Ember let out a long, shuddering breath, seeming to deflate in his grip.
“Awww, were you being bwave for your boyfwend?” Champ said.
“What are you going to do now?” The fight had gone out of him.
Champ pushed off from the wall, floating back to the Kanga, and clipped the defibrillator they’d used to tase him back into a fitted bracket. Then he popped its pouch.
“I’m gonna have a little laugh at your expense,” he said, “’Cause for once, your math’s actually wrong.”
Incomprehension on Ember’s face … then alarm as Champ reached into the kanga and pulled out a third consciousness vault.
“You can’t … Teagan’s in there.”
“Reformat,” Champ told it, triggering a stream of warning tags and alert moji.
Ember sta
rted thrashing again, clawing and kicking, despite the obvious pointlessness of it. Champ slapped him twice, hard, and then snagged a sedative from the cloud of drugs bobbing in midair, pressing it to his jugular.
A message came up from the kanga: “Purge consciousness vault?”
“Champ, you can’t, you can’t, she’s helpless in there, stop it. Babs! Babs, stop him!”
“Babs wouldn’t do a blessed thing even if they could. Not with it being Tea or you,” Champ told him. He gave all the command codes to confirm. Then he slapped Ember again, just for the fun of it.
“You can’t, you can’t. Champ—” His eyes were rolling in his head as the sedative took effect. The vault beeped, confirming the reformat.
Finally, an unqualified win! “Beddy-bye time, smart stuff.”
CHAPTER 39
WEST COAST EVACUATION ZONE, DEATH VALLEY
EMERGENCY SHELTER 329 (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: CANTINA)
OFFBOOK @VISIONARY STAGING AREA FOR THE FORECLOSURE
Earth’s would-be alien buyers had dug deep, settled in, and gotten disturbingly comfy.
The comms base in Death Valley was vast. If Maud could post video footage of this base—the bottomless artificial crevasse, walled in layers of nutrient-circulating tish and living fields of quantum comms—it would be enough to set off a massive #newscycle snowball, a bona fide scandal.
But grabbing for receipts was the obvious move, one Upton was surely waiting for her to make.
There was no time to earn his trust back, not now that Frankie had reported him to the authorities. The only play for Maud was to put herself out to please Headmistress, working with the Punama, Pippin, to fine-tune the quantum-comms connection to @ButtSig.
“Activity in your amygdala suggests high fear levels,” the offworlder said.
“Well,” she said. “Daddy is going out of his way to scare me.”
“Do stop glowering, Glenn,” Irma said immediately.
Playing one parent off against the other. She’d been reduced to kiddie tactics. The memory of the baby-level zombies, from that sim they’d been playing, surfaced.
Bwaaiiiiins! Another of those thoughts that might have been her own imagination, or Frankie’s voice.
“Do you have auditory input?” Pippin asked.
Maud nodded. “I just heard one word.”
“What word?”
“Brains.”
“Does that mean you’re breaking through the interference, Pippin?” Irma said.
“Possibly. Channels are being adjusted on the other end.”
Maud pulled down a virtual console showing readouts from the data coming from her own brain. She ran it back. The single word from Frankie had lit up her auditory and language centers as well as her prefrontal cortex.
Upton’s toon and Irma lurked behind the offworlder, no doubt having a subvocal conversation—hopefully an argument—about how it was going.
“So, the @ButtSig wasn’t just a happy accident,” Maud said to Pippin. “Upton wired up the pilots into an existing Exemplar comms network.”
“You should thank me,” Upton said.
“For breaking the noninterference pact? Is that how you all got the idea for accusing Ember of stealing tech?”
“Don’t be cute,” he snarled.
Pippin said, “If you are to effectively gather intelligence from Fraud—”
“Frankie,” Upton corrected smugly. “Fraud’s what they call the pair of them. Stunningly appropriate, don’t you think?”
Maud cast a pleading look at Headmistress, who murmured, “Don’t bait her, Glenn. She’s doing her best.”
Sweet daughters worked hard. She asked Pippin, “Is the quantum-comms array self-aware?”
“No, nor are its individual components.”
She pretended to be dubious. “It must be sapient, mustn’t it? How can it possibly self-regulate if it isn’t self-aware? If it can’t process?”
“Consciousness works reasonably well for many tasks.” Pippin shared diagrams. “The neural network has qualities analogous to the long-distance connections found amid your planet’s great forest systems.”
Maud’s back itched again.
“Are you receiving?”
“Maybe?”
A quick vision that had to be hallucination: a green-walled fishbowl, a pile of pulped meat covered in more quantum-comms seedlings …
Maud?
Alive. Frankie, you’re still alive!
A long pause, followed by a frustrated growl. Where the hell are you?
Where the hell am I? Maud’s heart was racing. There wasn’t anything on Sneezy that could have explained that emerald fishbowl.
She put a hand to her head, letting her emotions surge, watching the corresponding flash of colors through her brain. “I have sound and visuals. There’s distortion.”
Pippin made adjustments. She felt a passing cramp above her tailbone.
She saw a pile of burger at Frankie’s feet, covered in comms seedlings. Was it a hallucination?
Irma asked, “What did you see, luvvie?”
Maud rubbed at her temples. “Gel … green gel.”
“Oxygen farms?”
“Meat, and … I’m not sure, something sprouting.” Sticking close to the truth.
“Air and food. She’s making air and food. She is at Sneezy.”
Both humans seemed relieved.
“Trying again,” Maud said, cupping her hands over her ears, the better to listen. “Someone’s Morsing. Champ-Them is boarding Sneezy. Going after … Oh.”
EmberJerm were on the station.
Where the hell are you, Frankie?
No answer.
She glared at Irma and Upton. “You sent Champ Chevalier out there?”
“Champ-Them, she said.” Upton smiled. “That was Scrap. She is telling the truth.”
“Didn’t I tell you she’d be cooperative, luvvie?” Irma said.
“Who’s Scrap?” Maud demanded.
No answer.
“You didn’t say anything about murdering people.”
“Luvvie, luvvie,” Irma said. “There’s nothing you can do to save them. Really, there never was.”
Maud put her hand in her mouth and bit down. Jerm and Ember, completely vulnerable. And Frankie … where? How could she just have left them? “Call him off!”
“Darling, darling … you’re the only link we’ve made to the station in days. If you want me to get an order through to Champ, you’re going to have to make the connection.”
“Stop coddling her,” Upton said. “Maud. We’re not calling anyone off. Now, what’s Barnes up to? Answer me.”
A distinct tone of threat in his voice.
Maud swallowed. “Frankie’s been obsessed with getting receipts on the Bootstrap Project sabotage so she can use the evidence to discredit the Kinze.”
“Are you trying to bore me?”
A burst of adrenaline made her voice rise. “She’s not bringing the evidence back here, as far as I can tell. She’s been thinking about her parent, Gimlet.”
A tiny shock ran through Headmistress. “She’s in touch with Gimlet Barnes?”
“No chance,” Upton scoffed. “They’re off the board. Out deep, schmoozing with the Exemplar races. Our allies are keeping them nice and busy.”
“What could Frankie achieve by dragging her parent into matters now?”
Maud tried giving it a dramatic pause and ended up feeling stupid. “The problem isn’t making a case here on Earth. There’s already plenty of evidence proving the #vandalrumor.”
“It’s only proof if Sensorium believes it.”
“It was enough to delay the Foreclosure, wasn’t it?” Maud shot back.
“Well.” Irma picked an invisible speck off her lapel. “Certainly, it’s been an inconvenience.”
“You’ve ensured that Frankie’s got a credibility problem here.” Maud let her eyes fill with tears. “So, she has to get to someone with power to stop your so-called Foreclosure.
Someone who wants to.”
“There’s nobody like that in the noninterference zone.”
“Exactly! But the Ferals have Iktomi. Ember can do anyspace calculations. Jermaine can monitor Frankie’s augment—” A weird laugh escaped her. “Whole fam damly, Hung used to say.”
Upton stiffened. “You’re saying they’ll make for the on-ramp portal at Centauri.”
Maud said, “If Frankie connects with Gimlet, or manages to convinces another Exemplar race that the Kinze have broken the noninterference pact—”
Headmistress, ever the optimist, scoffed. “Randomly throwing herself into unknown space?”
Maud felt the heat of oncoming tears. It was exactly the sort of thing Frankie might do. Would have done, if not for what was happening at the …
Dumpster. I’m at the Dumpster. Please don’t tell them that.
Upton finally said, “How sure are you about this?”
“I’m getting whispers and images,” Maud said. “But…”
“But what?”
She wasn’t faking it when her voice cracked. “Frankie’s pattern is always to go further, isn’t it? Further into danger, further into the unknown? Trying to sustain an anyspace envelope in poor Iktomi—”
She let them absorb the possibilities, contemplate the logistics, look over her brain scans and no doubt sub back and forth about whether she was telling the truth.
“Well,” Headmistress said. “If Champ’s on station now, it might be a moot point.”
Champ on station. Frankie far away.
I’m working on getting back to the boys; I’m sorry …
Maud let herself slump. If she could just get to her things, she could throw this whole installation a curve it wouldn’t see coming. “I want to go back to Tatween.”
“Absolutely not,” Upton said.
“Now, Glenn, she has been cooperative. And I did promise!”
“What if she tells all of Sensorium we’re down here?”
A graceful sweep of that ballerina hand. Fa-la-la. “Maud won’t do that.”
“Like she won’t report me?”
“I think you have to accept that it was dear Frances who did that, luvvie.”
“Don’t luvvie me, Irma—I’m not one of your kept infants, and Frankie wouldn’t have had anything to report if this one hadn’t confided in her.”
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