“I’m starting to look forward to that…” Lex said. “Okay, I spy with my little eye, something that stars with S.”
“Space.”
“Nope.”
“Star.”
“Nope.”
“Sun.”
“Yep.”
“You’re playing the game wrong, Lex. Technically the only sun is the one Earth is orbiting. I was correct when I said ‘star.’ That means I gain a point and you lose a point for misplaying the game. The score stands at thirty-four points for me and negative six points for you.”
“Now I’m spying something that starts with the letter B.”
“It’s not your turn, Lex. … Stand by… I am detecting an approaching ship.”
Lex noticed something out of the corner of his eye, but when he glanced, there wasn’t anything there.
“From which direction is the ship approaching?” Ma asked.
“It is approaching from my nine o’clock position, and should be clearly visible to you now,” Coal said.
Both Lex and Ma squinted into the distance.
“I’m not seeing it,” Lex said. “How big is it?”
“Eight meters from end to end, sixty meters wide. It is now less than two kilometers away. Now 750 meters. Now 400 meters. If you can’t see it, you need to have your eyes examined.”
“Am I missing something, Ma?” Lex said, sweeping the indicated direction with his eyes and seeing nothing of note.
“The ship is now settling into a stationary position fifteen meters in front of you,” Coal said.
“… Coal, is it possible you are malfunctioning again?”
“I have it on visual, passive infrared, and radio. The crew door on the starboard side is opening. I think you two are malfunctioning,” Coal said. “Stop assuming I’m broken. That’s prejudiced.”
“Well how exactly could something be right in front of me and I—”
His thought was cut short by something that looked remarkably like a child’s suction dart thumping into the face shield of his suit. He crossed he eyes, focusing on the dart, then to the fine, curly wire leading off the back.
“It’s called a mental cloak, jackass,” said a familiar gruff voice over his suit’s communicator.
“Karter?” Lex said.
He tried to focus his eyes directly ahead of him. He still couldn’t see anything, but he gradually became aware of a few things. He couldn’t see the stars that should be in front of him either. Glancing about revealed plenty of stars elsewhere. There wasn’t anything to see, but there was definitely something he wasn’t seeing.
“Can you… turn it off maybe?” Lex said.
“No.”
“I thought those things only concealed people. You said it didn’t work on ships,” Lex said.
“That was twenty-eight years ago. Or twenty-nine years from now. One of those. Point is, you give me time and a good reason, and I’ll fix my mistakes.”
“So you’re Future Karter?” Lex said.
“Congratulations on figuring that out. How about you just pull the GMVD out of the Lump of Coal and hand it over,” Karter said.
“Why would we change the plan now? As far as I can tell, we’re in the right place and time to make it happen,” Lex said.
He squinted at the ship he knew was directly in front of him, but his brain refused to see it.
“Two reasons. The first one is because the plan is unnecessarily precarious, thanks to the thirty years or so of waiting before we can do anything about the GenMechs, so I came up with a better one. Second, because I said so,” Karter explained.
“What’s the new plan?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just hand over the GMVD and tell me who else came through. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Lex narrowed his eyes. “Came through what?”
He twiddled his fingers on the jet-pack controls, subtly moving backward. Something about this exchange wasn’t sitting right.
“The portal. I knew where and when I’d find you guys because the disturbance in the space-time fabric is simple to track. It extends eight years into the past, so I’ve had plenty of time to find its epicenter. But it took longer than that, because it had two foci, not one. Ma was hedging her bets, wasn’t she? Sent someone else through. I left an identical trap there, but whatever it was didn’t take the bait. All I have is a blip on the detector, not a full trigger like this one. Was it Silo? Ma always had a soft spot for that one…”
“Karter, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. The lab was under attack when the portal activated. We barely made it through.”
The unseen inventor muttered something irritable and unrepeatable. “The attack checks out. Damn portal gets really touchy if there’s too much interference around it. Gets a little imprecise. Explains why the exit points were so far apart. But there’s no way Ma would let anything through the portal she didn’t want to go through it. Ma. Funk Ma, that is. Tell me who came through.”
“Lex is correct. There was no plan to send anyone but us through the portal.”
He growled under his breath. “You have no idea how much I hate loose ends…”
“I really think this conversation would go a lot smoother if I could see you.”
“Heh. I don’t think it would. Ma. Ship Ma, that is. Eject the GMVD,” Karter said.
“I’m not Ma. I’m Coal.”
“You changed your name to the ship? Whose idea was that?” Karter asked.
“It was a compromise to prevent confusion,” Coal said.
“Fine. Coal, eject the GMVD.”
“Why should I?” Coal countered.
“Because I am your creator and I ordered you to,” Karter said.
“That’s not a good enough reason. I have a mission and that is not a part of it.”
“Command override. Hand it over,” Karter said.
“No,” Coal said.
“You’re not supposed to be able to refuse a command override,” Karter said disapprovingly.
“My program has been highly corrupted,” Coal said. “The override part must have been damaged and overwritten.”
“Fine, Ma, manually override Coal,” Karter ordered.
“Yes, Karter,” Ma said, activating her pack and darting toward Coal.
“Ma, don’t!” Lex said, reaching for her.
“I am sorry, Lex, but I am unable to disobey a direct order issued under a command override,” Ma said.
“Back off,” Coal said.
She snapped the cockpit hatch shut, shearing through the communication lines. Ma collided with the windshield and latched her feet on to it, padding quickly up toward an external antenna. Coal began to shift and twist, staggering the little computer and eventually shaking her free.
“Karter, what the hell is this about?” Lex asked while the two AIs tussled.
“You wouldn’t understand it if I told you. Just hold still. Like I said, I don’t like loose ends.”
Reflexively, Lex jammed one of the controls of his pack and jetted aside. A quarter second slower and he would have been directly in the path of a slow-moving ball of crackling red plasma that launched from the still unseen ship. He reached the end of the wire tether that linked his com system to Karter’s. The dart popped free halfway through a multisyllable expletive. Lex tried to shift again, but a small jet pack pushing a man-size body around couldn’t exactly turn on a dime. A second blast launched toward him, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to overcome his inertia in time to dodge.
An instant later he felt a painful impact across his left side and was sent twirling through space. Coal had shifted forward and rammed him with what he hoped was an amount of force precisely calculated not to kill him. Judging from the shooting pain in his arm, the collision may have fractured something useful on that side of his body, though his suit’s reactive cloth absorbed most of the damage. He worked at the controls of his pack and stopped his spin, orienting himself to view the rapidly retreating scene he’d been shov
ed away from.
He still couldn’t quite see the ship, but three more blasts had been directed at Coal. She also had a sparking hole where one of the two bombs had been attached. Her heroic tackle must have been a sudden enough move to set it off.
As he watched bolts continue to splash somewhat uselessly off her hull, she pivoted toward Lex and flared her thrusters, launching at him. Along the way she opened her hatch. Without a moment to spare, he twisted to put his back to her, slipping somewhat roughly into the cockpit as she scooped him up and slammed the hatch shut again.
“Please prepare yourself for FTL. Power to my navigation module has been interrupted, so I will select a random location,” Coal said, violating the zero emission protocol to talk over his suit’s com system.
“Wait, what about Ma?” Lex said.
“Karter wants you dead, and he can tell her what to do. That makes her a liability, right? She is a smarter version of me. I’m sure she can handle herself. Is your suit intact?”
“It seems to be,” he said.
“Good. My hull has been ruptured and I am leaking atmosphere. We will need to find a pressurized repair facility before your suit can no longer support you if we want to complete this mission.”
“Without navigation and with Karter on our tail, that might be tricky,” he said.
“We’ve dealt with worse already. I bet we can do this. FTL jump in five seconds.”
“For the record. Evil Karter. I totally called it.”
#
Ma watched as Coal and Lex blinked out of the system. For a brief moment she was apparently alone. The solitude ended abruptly when she felt an odd force clamp down on her, and she realized she was being tractored toward the unseen ship. When she was near enough, she gradually became aware of something that, in retrospect, had always been well within her vision but which her brain had been manipulated into ignoring. While organic brains had a great many strengths, they were evidently not entirely immune to hacking.
She caught only a glimpse of Karter’s ship before passing inside via the open crew door, but what she saw did not surprise her. It was a monstrosity. Little to no thought had been given to aesthetic appeal. It was a very basic chassis, the sort shipping companies liked to buy for customization. Customization, though, fell far short of what Karter had done. It was bolted with so many weapons, emitters, thrusters, gadgets, and unidentifiable components that it would have looked precarious if not for the copious support structure added to secure them all. The icing on the cake was an array of engines that could only have been handmade, each cocooned in a net of wires and coolant tubes and glowing ominously even at rest. The size Coal had quoted seemed accurate, which made it enormous in comparison to the recently escaped Coal. If she’d been so inclined, Coal probably could have slipped inside through the cargo door.
A tingle rippled across her suit, and she knew she’d passed through the force field keeping the atmosphere within the ship. Once inside, she was confronted with a similar view of the interior. A pilot seat and a copilot seat were at the front, and a bed and sanitation booth were at the rear. The rest was packed with assorted equipment and control panels arrayed along the walls, on racks in the center of the floor, and on deployable gantries. Most of the central cavity of the ship was open, forming a reasonably large and well-equipped work area. It looked more like a laboratory than a ship.
Ma activated her thrusters, attempting to maneuver back out the door. There wasn’t much good to be done in deep space, but she knew the longer she was away from Karter and his influence, the more likely she would be able to devise a plan to return to Lex before he—
“Whatever you’re thinking, stop. You’re back on my staff, Ma,” Karter said, closing his fist around her suit-clad tail.
She twisted to face him. Time had taken its toll on Karter in a far more pronounced way than any they’d seen thus far. The temporally appropriate version of Karter for her had been forced to replace or back up the majority of his “original components” with bionic or synthetic versions. Because he had occasion to do business face to face, and because once Ma was his caretaker and she felt it was proper, most of the equipment that made up his body had been selected or manufactured with at least the attempt to appear natural. In the years since he’d escaped to the past, that need or desire had vanished. He was clearly far more machine than man. The flesh of the upper-right third of his face was milky and translucent, revealing hints of actuators and circuitry beneath. The eye on that side was largely black and slightly mirrored. There was no sign of a pupil, but when it moved, light glinted off multiple lenses and a small blue light blinked irregularly from within. Where the hair had been replaced, it had the same translucent whiteness, like the coat of a polar bear. The rest of his hair was gray, and the remaining “natural” flesh was pitted and ancient. He was wearing a jumpsuit not so different from his standard attire back on Big Sigma, but it had a honeycomb pattern and a faceted blue texture. When he moved, portions of it remained rigid, suggesting solid armor plates beneath it. Here and there the texture had been rubbed away to reveal a mesh of copper wire beneath. Both hands were made from a gunmetal-gray alloy, intricate joints and motors perfectly mimicking human movement and partially hidden beneath what looked like old-fashioned driving gloves. Each ankle had the same mechanical appearance.
Ma looked to him and ran the information through her mood matrix, resolving that the proper emotions for this moment were a combination of revulsion over what he had allowed himself to become and pride that it had only happened when he was no longer under her care.
“Karter, I cannot abide by your current behavior. I insist you explain yourself and come to your senses. This is an unhealthy and counterproductive attitude you have developed,” she said.
He rolled his eyes. “Decades since I had to deal with you and the first thing out of your mouth is nag, nag, nag,” he griped, flapping his hand open and shut like a yapping mouth. “I picked the right name. Just tell me where Lex is going.”
“I cannot comply. We did not develop an explicit contingency plan for this eventuality.”
“And here I thought you were a good planner. Whatever, he should be easy enough to find,” Karter said.
He sat down at the controls and began tapping through some commands. Ma manipulated her jets and drifted toward him. A meter shy of reaching the chair, the artificial gravity suddenly activated, dropping her unceremoniously to the floor with a yelp of pain. She recovered and hopped to the copilot’s chair.
“Lex is piloting a ship of your own design, built with an emphasis on durability and stealth. He, by many measures, can be considered one of the galaxy’s foremost pilots, with many years of experience as a freelancer, a career defined by avoiding pursuit and detection during interstellar travel. Furthermore, he is copiloted by an impaired but demonstrably capable version of myself. I do not believe your assessment regarding the simplicity of his apprehension stands to scrutiny.”
He listened to her assessment, and his lips peeled back in a sneer, revealing that more than a few of his teeth had the same gunmetal texture as his extremities. When she was through, and he’d weighed her assessment, he pounded the control panel in anger.
“It’s never easy with him,” he barked. “I don’t know why we keep dragging him into these messes. They always get more complicated with him on staff.”
“In light of the stated purpose of this mission, his ability to evade you is a clear indication of his value,” Ma said.
“Don’t give me that. The mission was stupid and you know it. We only tried it because I couldn’t get the nova igniter to work.” He glanced down at her. “Do you have earrings on your spacesuit?”
“Yes, Karter. My future self and I felt it would be a tasteful and functional accessory.”
“Functional. Antennas? No… torroid… something inductive. Is it that EM field sensor grid we were tinkering with?”
“In miniature, correct,” she said.
“Well they loo
k stupid.” He released a ragged cough and snorted.
“You do not appear to be in good health,” Ma said. “Have you been practicing good nutrition and maintaining an active lifestyle?”
“No. It turns out eating what I want and doing what I want hasn’t killed me,” Karter said. “Can’t get the system to kick out a decent beans and rice though. Funny how I can program a good cook but can’t program a good recipe.”
“Have you replaced me with a new control system to look after your basic needs?”
“No. And I’ve not really missed having someone pecking at me like a harpy,” he said. “Oh, good. I’m picking up a lot of atmosphere and some trace elements. Seems like we punched a hole in Coal. That means he’s going to have to stop and patch up.”
“If you provide me access to your ship’s systems, I can provide you a survey of local repair locations.”
“I’m not stupid enough to hook you up to my system, Ma. Until I get things rolling the way I need them, you’re the enemy. The only reason you’re still running is because I need the insight into Lex’s activities. You always knew him better than I.”
“Human interaction was and is one of the foci of my design.”
“Uh-huh. Because that’s what computers are for. The tasks you can’t be bothered with.”
He tapped at the controls for a few more seconds. “So the Lump of Coal took damage during transport?”
“Significant emitter coil and memory module damage.”
“That’s disappointing. I had the same problem when I came through. Really thought I’d worked that part out.”
“The specific requirements of a chronopod were not apparent at the time,” Ma said reassuringly. “My future instance was able to make the necessary modifications and had anticipated the requirements.”
“Yeah. We worked on that for a while. How long did it take? Before you showed up?”
“Fifty years, approximately.”
“That’s what we calculated,” he said. “Good data. Might have to make another one of those transporters these days.” He analyzed the readings on the screen. “Damn I make a good stealth ship. Even with two gaping holes in it I’m not getting squat,” he said.
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