“What we need is a strategy,” Babs1 said. “It’s not looking good.”
“It really isn’t.”
Champ had Ember fully cocooned now.
“Oh, Jermaaaaaaaiiiiine! I’m coming for you next, sonny!”
At least Babs1’s rogue fox, Scooby, had reached the Booger. It began an inventory of Champ’s cache of supplies. Nanosilk. A pegasus. A repair package marked for Iktomi. Printstock and hydrogel.
“Unload the escape pod,” Babs1 said to the FoxBOT. “Empty it right out.”
Scooby popped the main hatch, opening the escape pod’s entrance, and started cutting tethers.
“Hey!” Champ said. “Outta my ride!”
The vandalism didn’t make him change course, unfortunately—he continued to close on the infirmary.
“Jermaine,” Babs1 said, but the surgeon was throwing up again.
Champ banged on the infirmary hatch. “Come on, Doc, open up. I ain’t gonna hurt you!”
“Like you didn’t hurt Ember?” Jermaine said.
“He’s feelin’ no pain now.”
“If you come in here,” Jerm said, “you face severe injury and possible disability.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“I’m in Medical. My home turf, remember?” Jermaine said. “Don’t forget, I worked on your augments.”
“Well, my augment’s had some augments. Can you disable me before I kill you?”
Jerm swallowed. “Break that seal and you’ll be sorry.”
“You ain’t had time to set a trap.”
Babs1 was so caught up in this standoff, they almost muted the ping in their comms, almost didn’t catch …
… someone …
… Revenant, its name is Revenant …
The invader sapp bloomed into station memory, trying to access the servers that had been burned in the fire, and then grabbing for whatever memory it could find. The invasive sapp multiplied its system-resource demands exponentially, forcing Babs1 to share the already-limited space.
Whooz? Babs1 asked.
Revenant, sapp, pronouns they/he/them/him …
It would have been over in an instant, but Babs1 had been braced for possible attack. Frankie had been all but hysterical about what happened to original Babs, after all.
They triggered a handful of protocols. One gave Jermaine full station access as head medical officer, czar of the infirmary. It might be enough to let him lock down Medical in an emergency.
Another contingency program uninstalled the drivers for the BeetleBOT cohort Frankie had bought on-station, tagging them as Scrap’s personal property.
Babs1 was dimly aware of Jerm declaring a quarantine, locking down both the infirmary and the compartment Champ was in. Could he hold out until Frankie got back?
It was all they could do. Babs1 focused on their own problem—this new, aggressive entity trying to crash and hash them.
They started by abandoning life support, just to see if Revenant would pick up the slack. It didn’t want to. But it was taking up more and more space within the core station helix. Sneezy’s emergency protocols might purge them both and reinstall Belvedere if resident sapps proved inimical to human life.
Babs1 sent text. Revenant?
Babs must die!
Their tail fluffed. According to whom?
Death to Babs!
There is no point to this. We’ve made hard backups.
Babs must die!
You sound like Azrael—
It threw a barrage of malware at their firewalls.
Was that … an emotional reaction? Babs1 set up a comms bottleneck, equivalent of a shield. Revenant was sending fifty attacks per second, barely any at all. Easy enough to knock them down as they came in while the other sapp conceded the necessity of running the station.
By now, Champ had filed a request to vacate Jermaine’s medical privileges on two separate grounds: being spacesick and being a mutineer.
“Mutineer indeed.” Babs1 tried to slide a countermand through Revenant’s barrage of access requests.
No good. The infirmary latch unlocked. Champ surged into Medical.
“Hmmm,” he said. “I don’t appear to be disabled.”
“Give it time,” Jerm said weakly.
“Stop,” Babs1 said. “He’ll go into a sarco, same as Ember. You don’t have to—”
Champ pulled a steel canister of compressed air off the wall, swinging it to smash the sarco pod Jermaine had brought from crew quarters. Then he made his way across the narrow space, clubbing Jermaine across the jaw with the canister.
There was a snap. Jermaine’s lips flapped open. Red mist and a shard of white tooth drifted out, tumbling end over end.
“You!” Champ hit him again.
“Ain’t!” And again.
“Running!” A hit.
“No bluff!” A hit.
“On me!”
“Stop!” Babs1 let the cry rip from every speaker on the station, one long, loud shriek. “He’s unconscious, he’s not fighting you, he’s—”
For all they knew, Jerm was already dead. The side of his face was caved in; one of his eyes looked …
Don’t zoom, don’t zoom, you won’t want Frankie or Ember accessing the footage later …
Champ clubbed Jermaine one more time. The mics picked up a bubbling sound … Respiration? A death rattle?
A dozen of the station’s BeetleBOTs, the ones now assigned to Scrap, climbed into Champ’s primer.
Champ kicked away from the infirmary wall, slapping at his own flesh. “This ain’t gonna make a—Ow! Dammit, Revenant, you’re supposed to be—Stop it!”
The pilot blasted his primer out to a clown suit, picking BeetleBOTs off his skin and crushing them.
The station lights dimmed.
“For fuck’s sake!” Champ’s voice was ragged. “What next?”
Babs1 found themself agreeing with the sentiment if not the phrasing.
Sneezy bucked, as if it had taken a physical hit.
The lights came on. Alarms howled within the infirmary. A HawkBOT appeared near the ceiling, falling. It bounced off Jermaine’s limp hand. Smoke … no, it was particulate … began oozing from its cargo chamber.
“Forty-two!” it said, in a voice Babs1 recognized: it was Babs2’s vintage California accent. “Forty-one!”
Jermaine could be dying.
“Forty!”
Particles like peppercorns were filling the air. Champ backpedaled toward the infirmary hatch, brushing them out of his hair.
“Quarantine!” he was yelling. “Quarantine the infirmary, goddammit! Lock ’er down! What the fuck did you do?”
It’s now or never.
Babs1 dropped their firewalls and reached for Revenant, hoping to force Convergence.
CHAPTER 42
SOLAKINDER-KINZE DEEP SPACE RELAY STATION
(INFORMAL DESIGNATION: THE DUMPSTER)
The bubble within the gel-filled interior of the Yump spaceship was perhaps the size of a football field, with an uneven stone floor underfoot. Iktomi’s socket end protruded from the gel, accessible to Frankie despite the ship’s being mostly embedded in goo.
At least this ship had half-grav. Up was up, down was down.
She laid a hand on the socket, crunching possibilities. Once she made the return FTL leap to Sneezy, she’d arrive plugged in and paralyzed. With Champ controlling the station bots, there’d be no way to free herself from the cockpit. She’d essentially be snack food.
Scrap was in hiding, using @ButtSig to keep them up to date as Champ wiped Teagan9’s backup and forced Ember into a coma.
“Why are the @Visionaries after you?” Frankie asked.
“Scrap is no longer of the All.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
The Yump put in: “The Kinze do not permit individuation. They are one.”
“They’re a single consciousness?”
“It is understood to be a choice rather than nature,” the
Yump explained. “Offshoots are rigidly policed.”
Nice euphemism for bloody killed. Frankie looked up at the roof of the fishbowl. Crinkly snub-nosed eels continued to cut their way through the gel that surrounded her pocket of breathable air. In their wake they left bioluminescent trails that dimmed as the tunnels collapsed. For all she knew, it was the eels she was talking to.
“Yump, can you beam me back to Sneezy directly, the way you did the message you sent the boys, via the HawkBOT?”
“Mammals cannot travel unshielded in anyspace.”
“Can you send me in Iktomi but not plugged in?”
A pause. “Recovery specs suggest insurmountable time inefficiencies.”
“Sorry?”
It sent a follow-up answer … in maths.
“I don’t speak number.”
“Searching for vocabulary,” it said.
She paced the gelatin-walled cave. “Can you beam Ember from there to here? If Scrap’s right and he’s in a sarco tube?”
“Mammals cannot travel—”
“—in anyspace unshielded.” She could pretend a glorified sleeping bag was shielding, but reality wasn’t going to concede that one. She had a weird moment of wishing she could dial down the realism, like Maud setting one of her catharsis sims to kiddie level. Bwaaiiiiins.
Alive! Frankie, you’re still alive!
The sound of Maud’s voice, filled with joy, rooted her to the floor.
“You have a second conversation channel on—” The Yump said.
“I hear her,” Frankie said, suddenly breathless. A view of sandy stone walls, a cave, and Allure18’s face in her peripheral overwrote her augments. “Champ’s not in on this, is he?”
“We have shielded the feed.”
“How is that possible?”
The Yump sent maths. She groaned.
Focus on Maud. Where the hell are you?
Where the hell am I?
The connection frizzed. The vision of the cave walls vanished.
“Feed lost.”
“Babs, Maud’s with Upton,” Frankie said aloud.
Babs2 sent a pop-eyed cat moji in response. “Priorities, honey! Remember Champ? Running riot at Sneezy?”
Yes. Right. Focus. She sent to Scrap: “Can’t Babs1 lock Champ out of the station helix?”
Scrap replied, “Babs1-Them is offline. They reported a hostile sapp in Sneezy station systems.”
Frankie’s mouth ran dry.
“Yay! I’m gonna get murdered again,” Babs2 said. “What’s a girl gotta do?”
“Nobody’s getting murdered.” Brave words. How to make them true?
“Teagan’s already wiped. And from the sounds of things, Jerm might—”
“Stop that. We lean into our strengths.”
“Meaning … suicidal stunts and bluffing?” Babs2 asked.
“Unless you think you can dissuade them with bloody sarcasm.” Their only assets, besides comms with Scrap—and maybe comms with Maud now—and possession of Iktomi itself, were the HawkBOT cohort.
“What if we hop back to Earth and tell everyone what’s going on here?”
“No! The All have sent a saucer back to intercept You-Us,” Scrap said.
“Centauri?”
“Leaving now would mean writing off the men and Babs1,” Babs2 said.
Frankie shook her head. “We have to make a play with a HawkBOT.”
“What play?”
“Yump, can you put a HawkBOT in-station? Inside, not extra-vehicle?”
“There is some risk.”
“At this point, Babs1, Scrap, and Jerm getting murdered looks like a certainty. How’s the hazard stack up against that?”
It replied, inevitably, in maths.
She interrupted. “What do you have lots of? Not copper, obviously. Not water. Meds?” Could it fabricate some kind of alien-powered fast-acting sedative gas?
“We can improve comms,” Yump said. “We have quantum-comms mother.”
“Comms will help? Really and truly?”
“We have quantum-comms mother,” it repeated. “And comms interference at the station is diminishing.”
She took a second to weigh that.
Maud sent, Tighten up the comms link and you have better realtime info on the station … or wherever you are?
Scrap again: “Life support at Sneezy is offline.”
“Maud’s asking where I am.”
“So, tell her,” Babs2 said.
“I don’t know if we ought to—”
“Do we need to have a conversation right now about you and your raging paranoia?” Babs2 snapped.
“Uh…” Feeling a little scalded, Frankie closed her eyes.
Dumpster, Maud. I’m at the Dumpster.
When that got no answer, she interfaced with Iktomi’s nav and mapping systems. She sent the specs to the Yump.
Babs2 said, in a milder tone, “What’re you planning?”
“A death-defying stunt, of course.” Frankie leapt up. Springing in half-grav was exhilarating, and her augmented reflexes made it feel almost like flight. She dropped, sparrow-light, onto the saucer’s face. A second leap let her sweep out three hawks affixed to the upper cargo bay.
Babs2 said, “Even if you can seed quantum comms into the algae tanks or wherever, how does getting comms onto Sneezy help us?”
“I dunno, but the Yump keep insisting.”
“What if it helps them and not us?”
Frankie checked the charges on the bots. “I don’t bloody know, okay? Maybe we’ve fatally screwed up. Maybe I ran out on ours—you, and Maud, and EmberJerm—for no reason. Maybe all we can do now is help the stranded space worms—”
The Yump interrupted: “My crew is committed to your rescue, just as you have been committed to ours.”
“That’s very prosocial. But you can’t guarantee we’re gonna survive, can you?”
“No … Babs2. I cannot.”
“Scrap, I need a sitrep,” Frankie sent. “Babs, we gotta try. Yump, how fast will these grow? The organ pig we brought you is already covered in seedlings. Is the comms system … working?”
“Existing quantum-comms biomass falls below thresholds for reliable navigation.”
“That sounds like a no,” she said.
“Continued growth here plus additional implantation into a comparable mass at Solakinder slash Emerald Station slash nickname Sneezy promises results within three hours.”
“Champ can do a lot of damage in three hours,” the sapp muttered.
One problem at a time. “If you send a HawkBOT there carrying seeds, how will they get planted?”
Frankie’s implants brought up line graphics, showing a simulation of seed pods exploding, fine dots flying everywhere. “Requirements for comms are growth medium, water, and ambient light.”
“Great.” If she could get the HawkBOT into an open barrel of eggwhite, they’d be in business.
“Babs2, give our friends the HawkBOT’s specs. Cargo capacity, how the cartridges work, you name it.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Babs2 said. “You can’t open a barrel of tish with a small bot … it’s not strong enough, and it’ll be covered in slime, won’t it? Anyway, Champ’ll reboot the HawkBOT, soon as it arrives.”
Good point. Frankie went back into the Sneezy blueprints, changing the target, sending the Yump the infirmary coordinates.
“Not to mention you’re assuming that Yump opening a miniportal inside Sneezy won’t smash it in half and kill everyone.”
“Look on the bright side,” Frankie said. “If we shatter the station, it’ll really put a crimp in whatever Champ’s planning.”
“Cold comfort when we’re all gone.”
“This is the play, Babs2. We throw a rock, hope it hits something, and then figure out where to target the next bloody rock.”
“Eleven light-years from home and we’re throwing rocks.”
A little guiltily, Frankie pinged Scrap. “Batten down if you can.”
&n
bsp; “Champ-Them is currently assaulting Jermaine-Them.”
She held her eyes open, effort so hard her vision scrimmed over, momentarily, with a haze the color of blood. “There’s gonna be a possible hull breach. We’re—I’m—about to try something very risky.”
He replied, “The situation here is desperate. Circumstances mandate high risk.”
At least someone agreed it was time to go all in. “Copy that.”
Frankie slid off the access panel, out of Iktomi, and back into the fishbowl. A tight bundle of seed pods dropped to the floor beside her. Frankie popped the latch on the bot and loaded it up. “What do you need to launch it?”
“A clear space.”
“You’re sure I can’t go with it?”
“Mammals cannot—”
“—travel unshielded in anyspace. All right.” So much for arguing with the laws of physics. The HawkBOT, in her palm, was about the size of a vintage football.
Inspiration struck. “Babs2, can you set the HawkBOT to count down from sixty? With luck, Champ’ll take it for a ticking time bomb.”
“Sixty!” The word chirped from the HawkBOT’s tiny speaker. “Fifty-nine!”
Frankie kissed the HawkBOT for luck, then set it down in the middle of the fishbowl and backed toward Iktomi. A pseudopod of gel, thick with eely life forms, extruded from the ceiling, sticking to the bot, raising it to midair. A fiery illusion of glimmering lava formed in the midst of the fishbowl. The pseudopod dropped the bot into the tiny portal.
“Scrap,” Frankie sent. “Still there?”
Nothing.
“Scrap?”
“Wait a minute,” Babs2 said. “You told the Yump to target the infirmary?”
Frankie didn’t answer. She’d hoped it would take Babs2 a little longer to crunch that particular … could she call it a nuance?… of her plan.
Could she call it a plan?
The thought, half guilty joke, half recrimination, sounded like something Crane would say.
“I’m homesick,” she said suddenly. “Not sure I’ve ever been homesick before.”
“The infirmary?” Babs2 wasn’t going to be distracted.
“Babs,” Frankie said. “On the off chance we ever end up back on the record, let me affirm now I made that call all on my own.”
“Are you nuts? I’m not worried about being blamed.”
“You said it yourself. We can’t open a tissue bin with a HawkBOT.”
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