“History is written by the victors, in other words.”
The spines, overhead, waved in a nonexistent breeze. “Agreed. Win conditions may still be achievable.”
“Really?” Maud laughed. “You’re still selling Bootstrappers as the villains? Champ killed Jerm…”
“That’s Ember’s story. Yet it’s poor Champ who’s dead.”
“Oh, yes. Poor, poor Champ.”
Irma’s face was distorted, bright red, and tear-streaked. She boxed Maud’s ears, shockingly hard, setting off a blast of feedback in her skull. Then she hissed, “Ember sabotaged Champ’s ship, just as he did Hung Chan’s! If we adjust the Solakinder debt to the Kinze to recognize…”
Maud felt strangely clear-headed. “We’re beyond creative accounting now! They used #sockpuppets to corner the luxuries market!”
“Their give to the Earth economy justifies the Foreclosure!”
“Ceding sovereignty requires a global vote!”
“No!” Irma raised her hands again. “It’s a debt, that’s all, and we will pay it!”
Maud raised her own fists. “Don’t touch me.”
The gathered @Visionaries drew in a collective, shocked breath.
Irma pulled herself upright. “Luvvie, it’s over. No amount of rhetoric or fussing will change anything, not once the Punama ships are in-system.”
“Done deal, hmmm? What about all those other ships who’ve turned up to keep an eye on what’s happening?”
“The All will convince the observers-Them that our good intentions were sabotaged by Mer Barnes and Mer Qaderi,” said the Kinze.
It seemed impossible. But Maud had studied the Setback in school. She knew the #oldschool oligarchs had made a fine art of telling wild lies to the public and somehow having them accepted as truth … or truthy enough, as they’d said. This was a callback to that same kind of leadership.
It had worked then because the people telling the lies had the raw military power to make dissent more terrifying than swallowing the fabrications. It would work again, if the @Visionaries brought in an invasion fleet.
Irma was still spinning fairy tales for the #newscycle. “We can show the Bootstrappers have been hounding our people for years. Frances brainwashed you! She killed my golden boy!”
“Likely story,” Maud said.
“You’ll sell it. Working valiantly in the face of persecution, we @Visionaries cooperated with the Kinze to liberate humanity from the straitjacket of Global Oversight.” Irma blinked flintily and gave her a thin, dead smile. “Have you forgotten that dear Glenn has your parent prepped in an operating theater?”
Maud pulled in a long breath. Made herself flap jaw for a second, as if she had, in fact, forgotten. How many locusts had hatched even as they were having this argument? “All right. You’re right.”
“That’s a dear!” Irma’s frown dispersed into a dazzling smile. “Let’s get you wired for an upload.”
Maud nodded, trying to look cowed. It was shockingly hard—she felt like some kind of throwback femme fatale, throwing all her poker chips onto a gaming table in a cigarette-fugged casino. Like one of her Royal Navy ship captains, sailing into the face of enemy cannon. Irma gestured to the tech, who led them both into a small chamber wired for transmissions. “Nine-second time delay,” she murmured to the tech. Then, to Maud: “The point here is to make your Frances untrustworthy.”
Frankie. Seriously injured, Fatale had said. “She’s not going to be my Frances after this.”
“That’s my sweet girl! Here are your talking points. Frances hunted you, despite—no, because of your traumatic childhood. Frances seduced you to see if you had @Visionary ties. Frances persuaded you to join her pack and kept you as a prize while abandoning you emotionally for the space program.”
“That’s reprehensible.” The words slipped out; she blushed.
Irma put her hands on her hips. “Shall I ask dear Glenn how things stand in the operating theatre?”
Ducking her head, Maud took a seat on the proffered interview stool. Her augments painted in what viewers would see—an old-fashioned media studio. Sonika tooned in, greyscale avatar indicating she was far away. The journo had her dryad legs crossed as she tucked herself into a cozy-looking seat across from Maud.
Something caught Sonika’s eye, behind Maud.
Maud looked, frowned, temporarily blinked off her augments to restore the real view of the cave wall. There was a locust, making its patient way to the ceiling.
Her heart slammed.
“Oops,” she said, offhand. “They will escape, you know?”
Sonika shuddered, as she had when they’d been in the lab in Detroit.
“Girls, girls!” Irma clapped her hands. “Let’s get started.”
Sonika greeted viewers as the uplink went live, beginning with a brief recap of her own lemming bio, recently exposed: she had been alienated, felt besieged by no-privacy culture, and then the @Visionaries had saved her. Frankie, @Interpol, and the hoaxers had torn her away from her refuge.
Frankie. Badly injured. Jermaine, a ghost …
“Sorry,” Maud said. “What was the question?”
“You were working in a farm laboratory two years ago, when you met Barnes, were you not?” Sonika asked.
“I’d gone to a fandom event—we venn over the Master and Commander franchise—”
Sonika cut off the spiel. “Did you recognize Barnes?”
“Of course. Everyone’s seen the Mitternacht footage. Frankie is … notorious.”
“Was that the first time you’d seen her? In archival #newscycle?”
“No. Like you, Sonika, I was living in Manhattan with the @Visionaries on the day of the raid.”
“You were a lemming, weren’t you? Like me?”
Maud swallowed. “Yes. I’d been with the @Visionaries for five years when Frankie ran through my school that day, fleeing the Shadows—that’s securi—”
Sonika interrupted again, before Maud could evoke that famous picture of adult goons chasing nine-year-old Frankie. “Let’s fast-forward to when you met as adults. Did Barnes recognize you? Did she know who you were?”
“She’s never said so.”
“Whatever she said, she seduced you under false pretenses. All as part of a scheme to see if you would reveal anything about your former parents and schoolmates.”
“I didn’t reveal anything.”
Sonika threw up an opinion poll, inviting viewer thoughts on whether Frankie’s deceit constituted a consent violation. Is Maud in an abusive relationship? Yes/No? Your comments here.
Maud sighed. “Frankie wasn’t lying about her feels. Even you must admit she’s incapable—”
“You had a right to privacy,” Sonika interrupted. “The @Visionaries offered kids like us a refuge, and when we were ripped out of Manhattan, Sensorium simultaneously condemned us and offered a fresh start. Our idents were rebooted because lemmings were treated so badly … It was the only way to end the stigma.”
“I wonder if the stigma would have lasted,” Maud said. “Would anyone have cared who we were, ten years later? Maybe we should have ridden out the notoriety.”
A red line ran through the last line of her transcript, in her lower peripheral, and a buzzer sounded. Irma had cut that last bit of speculation before it could load to Sensorium.
Right. They had her on a time delay, just in case.
Thwarting and editing realtime footage, the better to post #fakenews to the whole Sensorium. Was it naive of her to feel shocked? This was how it would be if the Foreclosure went forward. All the stories managed and the messes cleaned, messages fine-tuned to influence global opinion …
Irma, off camera, waggled a finger in warning.
Maud felt the tickle of insect legs on the back of her primer. Another locust. If the insects were venturing out into the tunnels, it meant they were out of food. The comms must be badly damaged.
Please, please, let that be true!
Sonika’s expression
remained calm. “Is Frankie Barnes fundamentally reckless?”
There was no denying that. “Absolutely.”
“She drags everyone she knows into her schemes, doesn’t she? Your other packmates, even the sapp Babs. Everyone becomes collateral damage.”
“I suppose that might be true.” Maud frowned, as though she was thinking about it. “I mean, she met Ember and Jermaine on the Bootstrap Project, so they weren’t exactly dragged on…”
But Sonika wasn’t going to let her time-waste. “Would you say she is fundamentally antisocial?”
“That’s the Hedgehog brand,” Maud agreed. Time to make a show of compliance. “Frankie Barnes has thrown herself body and soul into ensuring that Earth enters the wider community of sapient races as an equal rather than a client race. Whatever it takes—”
“Whatever it takes. Lying and betraying those closest to her?”
Could she talk through the time delay? Maud tried being a bit loquacious: “Sure. Frankie takes risks and keep secrets. Big ones. It’s part of her personality, really … fundamental, just as you said. Fully committing to everything she does, even if it’s leapfrogging FTL ships across the solar system like skipping stones. But what you have to understand about Frankie, really understand, is she is a prisoner…”
She grabbed a quick breath, gambling that they’d like prisoner—and nobody had redlined her yet. By now, anyone who was listening would be waiting to hear the end of the sentence.
“Frankie is a prisoner to her past. Aren’t we all? You and me too, Sonika. Because you’re right—when my family of origin caught fever, in EastEuro—when my mothers died and Nata fell sick—I wanted to get away from it all.
“I was offered the chance to run, and I was immensely grateful to have someplace to go. Neverland, they called it, our refuge, remember? Headmistress and Glenn Upton came to me and I thought I’d found safety.”
A gratified almost-purr from Irma, off camera.
“In a way, it was the same with Frankie. Her family was falling apart and the pressure must have been—”
She caught another breath. No redline. In her peripheral, at floor level, Maud caught a bit of movement … a pair of locusts ambling past the door to the studio chamber, casual as a couple of bamboo balers heading out to work a gig.
Above the caves, in the installation above them, was a silo filled with delicious things: hydrogel, flour, protein for meat printing. Fresh greens and vegetables, grown in hydroponics powered by the searing desert sun. Not to mention edible food packaging, a substance all grasshopper species ate indiscriminately.
Maud’s insects could smell the hydrogel and food stores in the facility above. They would be laying pheromonal trails as they tracked their way to it.
As the locusts found their way to the surface, they would leave trails of feces and saliva and eggs, leading through the maze of tunnels, breadcrumbing the way to the remains of the quantum comms.
Sonika got a word in edgewise while she was thinking.
“You’re talking about Frankie being damaged. Of emotional damage on an unimaginable scale.”
“What would drive someone to run away from home? Frankie’s pack sustained multiple deaths and divorce. And now, with Ember arrested and Jermaine and Babs killed, Hung too … I can’t imagine how bad it’s gotten, what she’s going through.”
“You’re saying she’s unstable,” Sonika said, pleased. A little wary, too. Irma was happy to take Maud’s apparent compliance at face value, but the human @Visionaries had to know she was caving in far too easily.
“I—” Maud could hear sounds of surprise and alarm within the caves now, people banging around, and a noise, almost like static. A half dozen @Visionaries trotted past the studio door, looking panicked.
She kept talking. “What blows me away, now that I think about it, is that Frankie kept making connections at all. Her grandfather died. Her parents got swept up in managing diplomatic and economic relationships with the offworlders …
“I didn’t have her courage. To reach out again and again. By the time Frankie found me, I’d lost two families and I wasn’t about to risk myself a third time. I loved my Nata, of course. But I didn’t have age peers. Didn’t want to make and lose @CloseFriends. Franks put herself out to get to know me…”
… they’ll like this; it circles back to Frankie looking manipulative …
“… and of course her original motives might have been a little impure, and certainly she’s probably got a few strikes due for getting romantically involved with me if she was just trying to find out if I was a @Visionary.”
“If?” Sonika scoffed.
“But she persisted. Drew me out of myself, introduced me to her family. Even though all her so-called damage should have driven her to push me away—”
“What do you call attempting to get herself killed at work?” Sonika said. Baiting her at her weak point.
“By investigating possible Bootstrap saboteurs? But Sonika, you’re saying the pro-Foreclosure faction isn’t dangerous.”
Sonika’s eyes narrowed.
“I meant flying FTL craft and running portal ops,” she replied sweetly. “Being a test pilot is fundamentally dangerous. As we’ve all recently seen.”
Maud could hear more cries of surprise. “I wonder if that truly would have been so dangerous, if not for the sabotage.”
Of course they redlined that.
Sonika glared at her.
“I was happy in Manhattan,” Maud said, and it was true. “I loved the man who adopted me, and I loved schooling like some kind of off-brand Hogwarts kid. I didn’t think of Headmistress or Glenn Upton as abductors or hoarders or terrorists. I thought of them as my saviors.”
As if summoned by the sound of his name, Upton burst into the room.
“Of course, they made sure I felt that way,” Maud continued.
“What the hell have you done?” Upton demanded.
Irma frowned. “Glenn, dear, whatever’s wrong?”
Maud hopped off the stool, stepping up to her would-be daddy, forcing a close-up. “I was nine when I learned you had been botomizing some of the other abductees. And just like that, all that security and trust and happiness was tainted. Spoiled. You see, Sonika, Frankie didn’t lie about who she is. She’s a wild risk-taker and I hated the waiting and every hazard-duty mission, every chance she’ll never come back—I hate it! But who she is? I don’t hate that, and I never will.” She looked into the camera in Sonika’s eyes, daring them to cut her feed when the whole Sensorium knew she was mid-monologue. “If she was here right now what I’d say to her is—don’t go splat. Just this once more, pull it off—”
“Cut the feeds!” Upton grabbed her upper arm, as if making to yank her out of the camera view.
Sonika’s toon vanished.
“Glenn, luvvie, what’s going on?”
“She’s bred bugs all over the station,” Upton said. He was bright pink. “They’ve damaged—they’ve eaten the comms.”
“How much of the comms?” Irma asked in a voice of puzzlement. Then she read the truth in Upton’s face. She reddened, from her crown right down to where her neck disappeared into the old-fashioned collar of her suit.
“So much for your invasion fleet, Auntie.”
“Maud, dear heart!” Irma said. “After all we’ve done for you.”
“I told you this would happen!” Upton said.
“We gave you a second chance to be part of this family!”
“I have a family, remember?” Maud said. She wrenched free of Upton’s grasp. “Now. I’m getting out of here. I suggest you do the same.”
He laughed. “Just like that? Walk out? You’ll just get lost in the caverns.”
“Think so?”
“Nobody’s going anywhere.” Misfortune stepped into the room, half-leading, half-dragging Nata, clad in a surgical gown and struggling, by the upper arm.
Struggling. Nata hadn’t been botomized yet.
Maud felt exhilarated.
Winning, she sent. I’ve got this, love. Just keep your promises and get your backside home.
Aloud, Maud said, “Hi, Nata.”
“Maybe you should think about saying goodbye, Nata,” Misfortune growled.
She resisted the urge to make one of Irma’s floating, dismissive gestures. Misfortune wasn’t Upton; she wasn’t spiteful. Everything she did had a point. And all of it, always, was for Auntie.
“Threatening Nata isn’t worth your time, Misfortune,” Maud said.
“Is that right, blossom?”
“There’s nothing else I can do to add value to the @Visionary cause, and you’re about to be very busy helping Irma and Glenn escape.”
“Escape?” Upton laughed. “Why would we need—”
“There are no warships now,” Maud said. “You get that, don’t you? Quantum comms is gone. The homing beacon for the pacifiers is gone. Pippin’s stranded and so’s this massive overhead carpet of Kinze. Their presence here proves they were playing silly buggers with the noninterference treaty all along.”
Misfortune appeared to consider this. “These caverns are well concealed. It’ll be days before anyone finds us down here.”
“Wrong! Locusts are messy travelers. They’re leaving all sorts of material in the tunnels. They’re homing in on the scent of the Cantina food stores.”
Irma and Misfortune shared a worried glance. “What?”
“They’re going to leave a trail right through this maze of tunnels. Nearest thing to a straight line between the quantum comms and the Cantina water cooler. Only thing clearer would have been a line of paint on the floor.”
Upton’s face went grey.
Above them, the Kinze structure made a crystalline noise. All its spines shivered. The color leached out of them, all at once, leaving what looked, momentarily, like an accumulation of frost or tiny stalactites on the cave ceiling. Then the tips of each spine began to fray and decompose into dust.
Maud crossed her arms. “Well, Misfortune?”
Lambent predator eyes took her in, considering without expression. Then she released Maud’s parent. “We’d better enact contingencies.”
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