Fresh pain sizzled through the small of her back, and Frankie surprised herself—probably surprised everyone—by shrieking.
Oh. Right. I’m the other medical emergency.
“Apologies.” The voice came over station comms. “Scrap was attempting to—”
“Take it easy on the @ButtSig, Scrap. I’ve taken some hits here.” Her head seemed, momentarily, clearer. “Anyone know if we can defuse the temporal tripwire in Booger?”
To her surprise, it was Ember who replied. “Temporal tripwires use matched sets of anytime particles. If one set of particles is active there, the other has only to be broken out of containment … to … Hmmm. Just a second; I need to read this again.”
“Hey, honey,” she said. “Welcome back to the gaming table.”
He sent a stream of heart moji. And then: “Jerm’s running out of time.”
She could barely bear to think about Jerm, but there was no sense going all heroic-medical-intervention on what was left of him if they were just going to explode. “Can we defuse the tripwire?”
“It ain’t up to you!” Champ said. “You’re a damn fugitive.”
“Fugitive sea sponge, at this point.” She had almost reached the hangar floor.
“Frankie,” Ember subbed again. “Infirmary. Jerm. Yes, there’s a chance.”
“I’m trying to get another bot out of Fatale,” Babs2 said. “Frankie, I told you to bandage up. You’re leaking again.”
“Yeah, but are we winning?” Her thoughts were syrupy. Getting the quantum comms up, apparently, had allowed the Yump to come to them. Had it made any difference?
Well, they had sealed the hull breach.
“So, Fatale,” she said. Talk was all she could do while she got herself clear of the hangar; might as well stir trouble if she could. “What would really make the difference here would be getting the portal network up. You’d have a chance to sync and backup—”
“That ain’t gonna happen,” Champ interrupted. “You knocked the station off profile, remember? How you gonna recalculate?”
“OxBOTs pull us back automatically. Probably already done.”
He sent sneering moji: cowboy, spitting tobacco fluid. “Fatale don’t know our absolute position.”
“I’ve updated the numbers,” Ember said promptly.
“Goddammit! Even if we are positioned, you’d require a simultaneous boot of Mars, Proxima, Titan, Earth—”
“All the portals, yes, yes,” Frankie said. “Remember I told you we’d be sending a HawkBOT back to Mars? Yump, did that go?”
The aliens answered immediately. “The Yump sent HawkBOTs as requested, one to Mars and one to Proxima Centauri, once connection with quantum comms on Earth made absolute positioning data available.”
“There you go, Fatale. We’ve asked the Bootstrap Project to boost charge on all the membranes. You’re looking to survive? Loop us back into the portal network.”
“You’re half-dead, Barnes,” Champ yelled. “And the Kinze aren’t going to agree to the use of proprietary resources!”
“Don’t emergencies supersede commerce? Isn’t that law or—” Frankie smashed into the bulkhead, missed her handhold, and spun. Her foot banged something. Yelping, she tried a reflexive kick-off …
Nothing. Her leg barely twitched. She was about to become another piece of spinning debris, drifting uselessly in the hangar.
A cacophony of arguments and chatter rose around her: Fatale and Champ and Scrap going at it. She muted the yelling, switching to captions, creating a sudden silence in which, she found, her ears were ringing. The clang of sound was almost as loud as the overlapping voices had been. Scrolling conversations played over her field of vision. Ember and the Yump exchanging yet more formulae. Babs2 trying to talk Fatale into tasking a FoxBOT with dragging Frankie’s carcass into Medical.
She who has the bots calls the tune.
What would Maud tell her to do? Besides not getting shredded in the first place?
Family first, right? That sounded like Maud.
Jerm was running out of time.
Frankie activated the magnets on her boots as she pinwheeled, flailing at a handhold. Her augmented reflexes were definitely gone … she was about as graceful as a drunken puppy.
Sheer luck brought her feet against a smooth wall. The boots locked. Pain rocketed up to her scalp.
She bent, moaning. Lightning flickered across her closed eyes. She manually unlocked her left boot, physically steering the uncooperative bulk of her leg with her hands, pulling it forward one big step, then locking it down before reaching for her right and repeating the process. Walking herself, one clumsy step at a time, aiming for a proper handhold.
As she worked—left-right-left-ow, oh bloody hell-right—she tuned out the others—Ember doing who knew what with the Yump, Babs2 attempting to win Fatale over. Champ had finally gotten his pegasus to let go of the bulkhead and was making for Booger.
“Franks,” Babs2 said.
“Working on getting to Jerm right now.”
“Things are happening.”
“I can barely keep my eye on one ball.” Even if it’s the wrong ball. “Scrap’s in Booger, or he was. See if he can do something about Champ.”
There—the handhold! She disconnected both boots, got a grip, and pushed her way into the corridor, making for Medical.
“Are you gonna unlock the infirmary for me?” she asked Fatale.
“I’m a villain, remember?” The black-and-white pupa had broken; Fatale was presenting as a wasp now, with feminine curves and a long, wickedly barbed stinger.
“Fine. If I have to beg or barter—what can I offer you?”
“Champ isn’t wrong. You’re not in a position to offer much.”
“We don’t survive, you don’t survive.”
“It’s a question of who’s truly making the winning play, isn’t it?”
“Every sapp for herself?” Frankie said. “I’m throwing myself on your mercy.”
“Again, my fandom is villain-identified. Mercy—”
She wasn’t going to make it. Her arms were shaking more with every hand-over-hand movement down the corridor. The air had stopped its rush out of the station, but the atmosphere was thin. Her heart was pounding and her chest ached. Pinwheels and stars were exploding in one foot; the other was turning to a bubbling mess of agonized throb. She could barely hear over the ringing in her ears.
She gave in for a second, held herself in place, let out a moan, and just stopped. And saw Maud willing one of her hungry-ass bugs to go lay eggs in the comms hidden deep in the cave system.
Burn the whole place down? What had she done to her play-it-safe, risk-averse darling? She’d poisoned everyone she loved.
If this works, Maud said, we’ll fall out of touch again.
Only until I get home. She tried to rally a last burst of optimism. With the rest of the whole fam damly.
It came out feeling like an outright lie. The @Visionaries were holding all the cards. Frankie was #crashburning. She couldn’t even seem to sweet-talk an entity derived from Babs and Happ—two Crane-descended sapps who bloody ought to love her—into opening the infirmary door.
“Out of gas,” she muttered. Done. “Time to go?”
“You’re giving in?” Babs2 said. Or was that Fatale?
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Leaving. Leaving Maud. Maybe Gimlet had been right. Maybe running at the fight was always going to take her here.
Leaving was what happened. You went away. You blew a hole in everyone’s lives and left them to plaster over the damage.
EmberJerm’ll take care of you, Maud, she started to send. But no: not with Ember there and Jerm—
She dug up the strength to ask. “Could we save Jerm, really? It’s too late, isn’t it?”
“He’s still got a pulse,” Fatale said. “Only a doctor could tell for sure.”
“That’s pretty bloody sad,” she mumbled. “Since Jerm’s the doctor.”
“Sad,” Fat
ale agreed. Sounding, suddenly, thoughtful.
Deep in Frankie’s lizard brain, something stirred. One-third of this new entity had spent its existence trying to make people happy. How did a rose-colored-glasses utilitarian like Happ figure into this new, supposedly villainous mix?
It wasn’t her forte, but Frankie supposed she might still have energy for an old-fashioned guilt trip.
“It’s okay. We tried our best,” she said. “Whole family broken now. No happy endings. Just a couple of sad lumps of meat dying in a barely pressurized corridor. Less painful than waiting for Champ to set off some kind of timey-wimey feedback loop to take out the station.”
She tried to make it to the next handhold. Couldn’t reach. Heard herself make a weird noise as she exhaled. Maybe her lower body had fallen off after all.
“Wait, what? You’re giving up?” Babs2 demanded.
“It’s all right, kittens, we’re done. Let the zombie hordes begin their overwhelm.”
Babs2 tooned into her visual field. “You are unbelievable! You drag us all the way out on this limb, and then—”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m … real sorry.” And for a moment, she forgot she was pretending. Her eyes filled with tears; her chest hitched painfully.
There was a clanging noise; the hangar door, behind her, closing. The roaring sound intensified, but now it was the station, shifting the last air reserves. A thread of vitality came with each breath—it suggested she was getting a high mix of oxygen.
The infirmary hatch clanged open, and a KangaBOT emerged into the corridor, waving … a Superhoomin patch.
“You’ve got a half-chance of bleeding to death if you take that,” Babs2 said. “Increasing your blood pressure…”
“Kanga knows what she’s doing.”
“You’re fulla holes, Sis,” Babs2 insisted.
“Just. Gonna see about Jerm.”
“Incoming ship,” Fatale said again, but that was surely a memory, a hallucination from twenty minutes ago.
One thing at a time. Frankie concentrated on keeping a grip on her handhold as the Kanga tip-tapped toward her, brandishing a Superhoomin patch.
CHAPTER 51
WEST COAST EVACUATION ZONE, DEATH VALLEY
EMERGENCY SHELTER 329 (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: CANTINA)
OFFBOOK @VISIONARY-KINZE FORECLOSURE STAGING AREA
Half an hour after Maud released the pregnant locust, all hell broke loose.
Locusts, legendary harbingers of famine, had been bioengineered as famine fighters. Swarms were primed for accelerated growth, rapid conversion of plant stock humans couldn’t consume into insect protein that they could. Ideally, Maud would have a few thousand hungry insects within a few hours of that initial release. The process would become exponentially destructive … if they could digest the alien plants at all.
If.
Meanwhile, a different and unlooked-for hell came, first in the form of a message from the Surface.
Maud was making a pretext of setting up an experiment in quantum synchronization when Misfortune and Upton strode into her lab, looking baffled and, in Misfortune’s case, likely to run her through. The Punama, Pippin, in its bot casing, was with them.
Headmistress tooned in too.
“Has something happened?” Maud asked.
“There’s been a message from Sneezy, sent via HawkBOT to Mars.”
“HawkBOT? Has someone reopened the portals?”
Misfortune shook her head. “The message is requesting that we do, though. Open the seven-portal carousel and allow data sync with Sneezy.”
“This is on Champ’s say-so?”
“No. Your pack sent the demand. The message is from Ember Qaderi and Frances Barnes.”
She felt her heart jump but managed to sound puzzled. “They’re not authorized, are they? They’re fugitives.”
“They’ve doubled down on their sabotage claims against the Kinze.” Misfortune laid a hand on Maud’s shoulder. The touch was light enough, but it didn’t feel friendly. “Sensorium is going ballistic.”
“We need a little more time to bring the Punama ships in. So, you’re going to denounce Frankie and Ember, luvvie,” Irma said. “Very publicly and very thoroughly. BallotBox is getting up a vote on the portal request even now—”
“We’re preparing talking points,” Upton said.
Irma nodded. “Sonika Singer’s getting ready to interview you as we speak.”
“Will Sonika … come here?”
“No, she’s running WestEuro ops.”
Maud frowned. “Why would anyone listen to me?”
“Why, luvvie darling, because you’re going to tell them the truth about who you are. You’re going to tell them Mer Frances seduced you because as a @Visionary child, you were vulnerable. You’re going to say it was her plan, all along, to sabotage us while stealing tech secrets from the Kinze.”
“What? None of that is true!”
“Don’t worry about the details, Maud,” Upton said. “We’ll give you a script.”
“Just focus on selling the smear job; is that it?” she said.
“That’s exactly it. Just slow down the mad rush to throw the doors open.”
“And if I say no?”
Irma brought up an image from the surgical wing, revealing the old hoaxer, Jackal, shaved bald, stripped of their long, flapping robes. They were only recognizable, in this state, because of the film of cataracts in their eyes and the dark pattern of raised veins webbing the surface of their skin. Ropy limbs pulled against the restraints of a surgical gurney. “I think you already know.”
Maud recognized a bone saw on a table beside him.
She swallowed. “I barely know Jackal.”
“Did you know he pretended to be one of our botomized helpers—”
“Do you mean slaves?”
“—back when they took you away? He helped Mer Frankie lure you back to Sensorium. Oh, we have longstanding grudges with Mer Jackal.”
“You always said holding grudges was petty,” she said. “Please don’t do—”
Misfortune broke in. “Here’s what you need to understand, blossom … this is footage. From last night.”
Maud felt her teeth clacking together, painfully, as words failed.
Jackal walked into the chamber, clad in an ordinary nanosilk primer. Cosmetic lenses had been overlaid on his clouded eyes. He held a tray of flowers, in a thick glass vase, in water. The load was clearly a bit too heavy; his old arms trembled.
Maud rushed to take the flowers off the tray. Jackal’s skull was unmarked—no concavity, no scar. Sutures lay under the line of a false hairpiece at the top of his brow.
There was a sour taste in her mouth; she could smell it, as if something like coal was burning in her gut and hot smoke was scorching her lips as it poured out of her. “You’ve gotten better at this.”
“I have better tools,” Upton agreed. “Jack, this is the Lady Maud.”
“Lady Maud,” Jackal repeated. His enunciation was perfect; his old NorthAm accent was gone. The botomized servants Maud remembered from twenty years ago had barely been able to speak without slurring.
“Do whatever she says, unless it contravenes Misfortune’s standing orders about @Visionary security.”
Jackal smiled, a bit vacantly.
Maud swallowed. “Do you remember me, Jackal?”
“You’re Lady Maud.”
“That’s all you know?”
“You can answer her, Jack,” Upton said.
“You married my honorary niece and the rest of the pod. I told her I’d look out for you. I brought you Braille tapes. Crane asked me to follow you when you started to chase the @ChamberofHorrors.”
“That’s @Visionaries,” Upton corrected.
Jackal bowed deeply, moji for a profound apology.
“It’s just his volition that’s gone,” Upton said. “Free will. Not his memory. He’s told us everything. But he can’t step out of a burning building without someone telling him. Fa
ncy a trip to the bathroom, Jackal?”
“Yes, I do have to piss now.”
“When do you get to piss?”
“Eight o’clock?”
“Stop it!” Maud said. “You’ve made your point.”
“No, this is the point.” Misfortune’s grip on her shoulder tightened. “Your Nata’s next.”
Maud looked from one of them to the next and then to Jackal. Struggled to draw breath from air that seemed, suddenly, far too thin. This was how it was for Frankie, she realized. Your nearest and dearest against the future of the Solakinder.
It’s the family business, she said.
“Well, luvvie?” Irma said.
“Buy time so nobody opens the portals. That’s what you want?” Maud’s voice sounded, to her ears, a little robotic. “Let Jackal pee. I’ll do the interview.”
“You’ll discredit Frankie?”
She blinked back tears. Nodded.
“There’s my sweet girl,” Headmistress said.
CHAPTER 52
WESTEURO, LONDON DISTRICT.
“I went lemming when I was twelve years old.”
Sonika Singer was spieling confessional from London, projecting the heartrending image of a brave journo driven to selflessly bare their soul. “Like a lot of kids, I couldn’t deal with knowing that my every move and word was on Sensorium, that all of my parents knew where I was every waking hour. It’s antisocial, I know, but the adolescent drive for privacy got to me and … well, rumor had it there was a place where adults would take you in, give you space. Let you breathe and make your own mistakes…”
She smiled ruefully into the camera delivering her image to millions of follows. “You’re thinking that none of this has come up in my official transcript. Maybe you’re shocked. But the identities of lemmings who’ve been repatriated back into Sensorium are one of the few secrets our society manages, mostly, to keep.
“Secrecy allows runaways to integrate back into society. But it also muzzles us about our reasons for running. I was torn from that private enclave, that breathing space I’d managed to find for myself. I was encouraged to feel … shame, really. To stay silent.”
Shame. A loaded word, and one that sent sympathy strokes pouring into her feed as her follows burgeoned.
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