“Fat chance of her managing that without help.”
“You just got yourself into Lipizzan, didn’t you?”
“Saucer ain’t a pegasus.”
“You got inventive. Frankie Barnes is basically made of inventive.” It sent a meme from 2110—the snark shark, winking in the empty space of the hangar.
Banishing the graphics, Champ switched his view to scan the station exterior. The OxBOT cohort holding the station’s position was fine. Jalopy was under repair. The only piece of tech available and truly suited to shucking Frankie out of a saucer was Lipizzan itself.
“Give me BeetleBOTs.”
“Control of the BeetleBOTs has been ceded to user Scrap.”
“How?”
“It was rather clever, actually. Babs1 removed their control app from everyone’s network and then loaded it into Scrap’s user account—”
“Purge that user account, stat! Load the app to my station dashboard.”
“Sure, honey, if that’s what you want.” Calm voice. Sweet, placating. Infuriating.
He was supposed to have torn through the station like a category four storm. Kill Barnes, kill Scrap, grab Ember, kill doctor-hubby. Let Revenant1 do the deed on Babs, Babs1, all Frankie’s adopted AI sibling instances. Maybe applaud as the sapp virtually tore her stupid kitty head off.
Why was everything so damned hard? Was Champ some kind of magnet for disaster and incompetence?
And now this with Frankie. Back from the Dumpster with who knew what tricks up her nanosilk sleeve.
“Babs1,” she was saying, even now. “Babs1, you there?”
“Sorry, Frankie,” crooned Fatale. “Emerald Station’s helix is under new management.”
He could almost hear her bristle. “Are you the entity that killed my packmate on Earth?”
“Strangely, no.”
The app controlling the BeetleBOTs loaded. Champ grabbed for the cluster within the infirmary and activated their cameras. “Lights to full in the infirmary.”
They rebooted. While he waited, he used the station’s exterior cameras to zoom in on Iktomi.
Frankie had materialized ten clicks from the station. Plugged in as she was, she had no bodily control.
“Game’s up, Barnes,” he told her. “Bring yourself into the hangar, nice and easy.”
“And what … let you peel back the cockpit and gut me like a trout?”
Beetles pinged him. Scrap had apparently fired off a last request that flushed them into medical waste disposal. Camera views lit up filthy tubes full of fluids and tiny seedlings.
“What do you think, Frankie? Gonna test me?”
“I’m on my way in,” she said, and Iktomi’s aft rockets fired. The data tracked—she was on approach.
A countdown formed in his peripheral: 597 seconds before Iktomi docked.
One busted beetle had failed to make it out of the infirmary. It was tumbling in freefall with all the junk in the air, and Champ activated its camera, trying to get a look at the mess he’d made of Jermaine …
“What the—” Teagan9’s face was carpeted in something that looked an awful lot like new-sprouted grass interspersed with … Were those antennae? Small worms were capturing the particulate the hawk had spewed all over the infirmary, and were laying them in dense lines across her skin. Her mouth and eye sockets gaped, belching a profusion of bigger leaves. The growth was dense everywhere the skin was broken, like the calendula inserted into her left hand. A sheet had been tacked down over her body, but a mound near the join of her legs suggested that the soft tissue there had been germinated too, in her vulva.
He felt his gorge rise. This was … obscene. “What did you do, Barnes?”
Five hundred seconds before she docked.
He had to kill … whatever this was.
“Fatale, reopen Medical!”
“Can’t, honey. If I want to remain resident as station manager, I have to obey quarantine protocol. There’s danger to personnel—”
“You let Scrap out, didn’t you?”
“Scrap’s not personnel and I don’t have a location on him.”
He could get to the infirmary and be back before Frankie docked. Champ lunged for the port hatch.
Frankie promptly fired Iktomi’s rockets again, accelerating. The timer on her ETA blurred, recalculating.
Keep going, keep going! “You can’t dock at that speed, Barnes.”
“Rubbish, Champ. You can’t dock at this speed.”
“You’re gonna cave in the side of the hangar!”
“Why play careful now?”
“You want to see careful?” He humped through the first hatch, bulling his way forward to the infirmary.
She wouldn’t really ram, would she?
Why are you even asking?
He was at the infirmary door. “Get this open!”
“We have an active biohazard situation,” Fatale said.
“You said I was in charge!”
“Only a doctor can deactivate that lock.”
“Wake Jermaine the fuck up, then.”
“Jermaine’s in #crashburn. Because murdered.”
Champ pulled back as far as he could, grabbed the infirmary hatch with three hands, and grabbed a handhold further down the corridor. He pulled.
Metal groaned. The handhold tore out of the bulkhead.
215 seconds before Iktomi docked. Frankie hadn’t decelerated yet.
She was going to ram.
CHAPTER 47
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
“I can’t remember,” Babs2 said. “Are you bait to keep Champ out of the infirmary? Or is the infirmary bait to keep him from killing you as you unplug?”
“Depends on where he ends up in three minutes’ time,” Frankie replied.
Sneezy was coming up on screen, perfect approach angle for slotting in, and just the fact that the station was still there at all was something of a relief after all this, but—
“You are winging in too fast.”
Frankie resisted to urge to add more burn. “About this AI running the station—”
“Fatale. Biblical Judith as played by Joan Crawford meets Ursula the Sea Witch, with doses of Villanelle and Yennefer and someone named … Xena?”
“She’s the entity that killed you?”
“No? I think it’s new. Newborn.”
“I’m not delighted about the lack of certainty there.” Frankie scanned for the on-station tracking points, a move that felt like blinking her eyes and which brought up the electronic equivalent of a landing strip.
Spots swam in her field of vision, just for a second. She, Babs2, and Yump had batched together the only precautions they could think of when plugging her into Iktomi. The contingencies meant packing extra matter into the cockpit; the decreased space made breathing harder.
Doesn’t matter. If I don’t stick the landing, I’ll kill myself and rip the top off the hangar.
As the thought gelled, she stiffened—had Maud heard that? Even thinking about her brought an unwelcome vision ghosting across her augments. Misfortune Wilson was at the door of Maud and Nata’s Death Valley pop-in.
“Holy OMG shit,” she muttered. “Maud!”
Maud did hear that. It’s what I get for throwing myself into the fray.
There are worse places. You can do this, Maud. Play her.
Or burn the place to the ground?
What else could she say? Grimly Frankie sent, Whatever it takes.
“Do I want to know?” asked Babs2.
“I’m guessing no.” A distance alarm pinged, breaking the connection to Maud. Frankie forced herself to focus. They were docking in two minutes.
Champ had made the same choice she would have: he was trying to break into the infirmary before she landed. Smart move on his part; bad for her. The comms seeds needed more growth time.
“Will Fatale help us?” she asked Babs2. “Can you Friend?”
“She’s refusing Convergence.”
“You needn’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Fatale said.
“You’re siding with Champ,” Frankie said. She was on profile to dock, coming in hot. “A murdering piece of—”
“Not to criticize, but your argument kinda stinks.”
“In what way?”
“Coming in at that speed? Looks to me like you’re trying to kill everyone on Emerald,” Fatale said.
“I don’t intend any harm.”
“You need to decelerate if you don’t want to smash my hangar.”
“She’s not wrong,” Babs2 subbed.
“It hardly matters if I do some damage,” Frankie said.
“Excuse me?”
“The Kinze are going to blow the station to chunks.”
Fatale had yet to choose an avatar, apparently; a black-and-white chrysalis, covered in spots, took up her space in Frankie’s chat peripheral. “You’re bluffing.”
“Check out the tech Champ brought aboard Booger,” Frankie said. “Your shiny new life is about to be cut short, along with all hands aboard.”
“Says who?”
“Me-Us,” said Scrap.
Frankie tried to get a camera on Champ, only to discover that the entire BeetleBOT cohort had been locked in the medical waste system, along with a handful of quantum-comms seeds. Lipizzan continued wrenching at the infirmary door.
“Scrap,” she texted, “any thoughts on slowing him down?”
“Scrap-Me is running for dear life.”
“Make for Booger. Show Fatale you’re not kidding about the station destruct.” Frankie’s mind raced. No bots to command, no control over station helix. All she had was the Yump plan to farm up a comms link … and she didn’t even know why the offworlders had been so insistent about that.
The airlock signaled: ready to receive. It had little choice.
“Recommend deceleration burn,” Fatale repeated.
Frankie sped up.
“Sis!” Babs2 protested.
“Override safeties,” Frankies said. “Peel back cockpit connectors in ten-nine-eight…”
“The impact will throw the cockpit right through the airlock,” Fatale said. “You’ll cut the station in half.”
The latest burn, at least, caused Champ to pause. “Barnes? You fixing to save me the trouble of killing you?”
“Fatale, if any part of any Babs is left within you, you’ve seen my scores on the #crashburn sims,” Frankie said. “Open the safety doors. Lower airlock viscosity. I’ll slam hard when I come in, but you’ll survive.”
“This move is an extreme emergency contingency—”
“This is an extreme emergency! Why doesn’t anybody bloody recognize that? The entire last twenty years have been one long—”
“Open the mail slot—she can’t slow down now!” Champ yelled. He glazed, tasking a station OxBOT. Was he hoping to tow the station away from Frankie?
It wouldn’t be enough.
At least if he was flying the oxen, the infirmary door was going unmolested.
Fatale apparently wanted to survive. She unclamped the docking-door safeties.
Frankie finally switched from go fast go fast to OMGStop! She fired rockets fore, sending a plume of fire directly into the open hangar, where it ignited in the escaping burst of atmosphere.
She felt the heat of the burn blowing back onto the skin of her hull.
“Iktomi’s sustaining damage,” Fatale said.
“This? This ain’t nothing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh god oh god oh god,” Babs2 said.
Things can’t be good when even the sapps are praying. Frankie triggered the contingencies they had built into her bodybag.
Her body was cushioned with all the excess nanosilk they’d been able to swaddle into the cockpit, along with a thick layer of the gel that had formed the surface of the Yump fishbowl. The gel was packed around her pelvis and sacrum, a layer of cushioning. Much of the rest was spinal support.
Almost there. The quicksand covering the saucer’s mail slot billowed like rising bread dough, configging for the hit.
Iktomi was slowing.
“Three,” she said. The countdown had unsettled Champ before.
“Two.”
“One.”
Impact.
Bright sense of a full-body smack, like doing a belly flop into water from a high board. A shudder, as she hit the quicksand. In that last moment, as she was still plugged in and EMbodied within Iktomi, she felt the hard edges of the mail slot raking at what felt like her ribcage, felt hot and cold burns running the length of her torso as metal met metal, ripping the soft seals of the docking tech. Spots whirled in her field of vision; she tried blinking them away, trying to link with station helix, looking for cameras …
In the infirmary corridor, Champ was shaken by the impact, rattling on his extended legs.
“Now now now!” Frankie shouted.
Babs2, bless her, knew better than to ask if she was sure.
The saucer’s ejector had been designed to hurl the entire cockpit clear of a crashing saucer. Like most ejection tech, it had a crude explosive at its heart, a gadget that traced its lineage all the way back to vintage car airbags.
Before she’d plugged back in to Iktomi, Frankie had moved the explosive packet from the outside of the pod to the inside. Now it was nestled against that layer of nanosilk and slime. Ten inches of cushioning between Frankie and a bomb.
Just a small bomb, Maud, I swear!
Frankie? Frankie, what are you …
The ejector went off with a sharp report and a smell of gunpowder, propelling her, bodybag and all, out of the cockpit. In freefall, within the bag, she shot out and then through the impact-fractured pod window, into the largely depressurized Sneezy hanger.
She didn’t feel herself breaking through the pod. Didn’t feel herself hitting the far bulkhead. The nanosilk rope unspooled behind her.
She did feel it—felt something indescribable, really, like a sense of turning to water, or a thick, somewhat meaty electrical current running through her body—as her implant contacts yanked free, as if she were a lamp whose cord had been ripped from the wall.
Ringing noise. Blackness. Taste of blood in the back of her throat.
Shucked.
No limbs.
No vision.
No cameras.
Blackness. Blackness. A ringing sound …
I’m gonna get away with this, I’m gonna get away with this. I’m … Am I gonna?
Listen to me. Maud’s voice. You are going to survive. You promise to come home …
You promise to be there?
I do.
A voice resolved. “Frankie! Frankie!”
… and then I might just kill you.
Honestly, that seems fair.
“Frankie!” Babs2’s California cool-girl voice.
“In the old days,” Fatale said. Her voice was only coming through one of Frankie’s speakers. “We’d have called you a certifiable lunatic.”
“You’ve been alive five minutes; you don’t get to reference the old days,” Frankie groaned. Pins and needles signaled the return of her hands. Below the waist …
Nothing.
She grabbed for a handhold before she could drift away from the wall. Missed, grabbed again. Her whole body felt drunk, inoperable …
Visual displays came up, reluctantly. Her implant system had taken a hit. Countdowns swam before her eyes. Ten minutes until the quantum comms was online. If their estimates were anywhere close to accurate …
It’s plant growth—how accurate can it be?
Champ. Where was Champ?
He was still pulling on the infirmary door.
“Where’s Ember?” she said aloud.
“Bagged for shipping.” Babs2’s voice came from a HawkBOT—they’d stripped its operating code out so Champ couldn’t take it over. “Tethered to Jalopy.”
&nbs
p; “Wake him up.”
“How?”
“Don’t care. We need him for that maths convo and we need to reformat the consciousness vault in his sarco for Jerm.”
“What’s he supposed to breathe? Hangar’s venting air.”
“Is it?” She had hoped the quicksand would close in around Iktomi after the not-quite-crash. Now she rolled and squinted.
Ah. Things were getting drawn through Iktomi, through the empty socket of the cockpit. The ship must have popped a rear hatch.
One problem at a time.
“Seal Ember into Jalopy and wake him up.”
“Be easier to put him in Booger.”
“Booger’s full of bombs, remember?” Frankie examined the racked saucer. There was little doubt that its seals were broken. Bits of debris, hydrogel grapes, and drops of fluid were whooshing up toward the cockpit, getting blown out as the station continued to lose atmosphere.
“What’s it gonna be, Champ?” she demanded. “You gonna come seal the hangar so you don’t suffocate? That pegasus’s only got five hours of life support.”
“I ain’t gonna need that long,” he replied, but Frankie thought—hoped—he sounded nervous. “Rate you’re going, you’re gonna bleed out.”
“Is he right?” she asked Babs2.
“Of course your implant is bleeding.”
She reached back, pushing on the gel. The Yump had promised it would move. Nothing happened. “Can you make a pressure bandage out of some of the nanosilk?”
“I can’t get into station helix; Fatale’s taking up too much room. And Iktomi’s glitchy now, in case you’re curious.”
“Shut up. We lived, didn’t we?” Frankie said.
“Maybe. Anyway, you’ll have to bandage yourself.”
Stretching out her arms, covered as they were in the thick gel, was hard work. Nevertheless, Frankie hand-over-handed herself closer to Booger. It was slow going. Clumsy, so clumsy … There was something familiar about this.
Her legs were still numb, absent, disturbingly outside her control.
Never mind band-aids. The key now was making Champ lose his cool. Convince him things were going to go very badly for him there, and thereby delay him from ripping the infirmary hatch off its hinges.
She’d tasked Babs2 with getting Ember out of the sarco bag. Fixing Iktomi and getting to the explosives …
Dealbreaker Page 38