by Sarah Zettel
Yerusha felt exhaustion tug at her, probably helped by the alcohol. She looked across at the case and its empty stack and felt a hollow pain.
“You’re right.” She stood up. “Time to act like I know what I’m doing.” She lowered the case lid and snapped the latches shut. “And as long as Cheney doesn’t open his mouth to Schyler, I might get a chance.”
“Schyler’ll be steady about this,” said Dobbs.
“I don’t know.” Yerusha lifted the case up and remembered Schyler’s eyes when she had been called down to the Law’s cabin.
“Believe me.” There was no humor in Dobbs’ voice, just steady assurance. “He can understand what it’s like to be totally out on your own.”
Yerusha studied the Fool for a long moment. “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me about some of those things you were before you were a Fool.”
Dobbs chuckled. “Maybe after we get out of this mess, Yerusha.” She cycled her hatch open. “Get some sleep.”
“Yeah, I’ve got all of what, four hours left?”
Dobbs smiled. “And counting. See you in the morning.”
“See you.”
Yerusha made it back to her cabin without seeing anybody else. She set the foster’s case back into its drawer and stared at it. The loss eased by Dobbs’ company drooped across her back again, heavy and clinging.
What she hadn’t told Dobbs was that exiles weren’t supposed to be able to take their fosters with them. What she didn’t say was that the reason she was in the Richard III business module when it had blown out was that she was paying her life savings to Fellow Radmilu, a guard on the quiet dole. Radmilu was the one who seized her property when she was arrested. She clearly remembered his big soft hands and how they fluttered around as he suggested she could have her Foster with her if she was willing to pay for it. She’d tripled his price for an additional service. Radmilu had arranged for Foster’s network to be reconfigured from Holden’s medical records, and then he had brought it to her at Port Oberon.
When the can blew, all her actions were hampered by her desperate attempt to keep a hold on Foster’s case. That was why she was too slow and clumsy to get out of the way when the last seam gave way. Her hope and scheme had cost her her arm and her eye, and most of what was left of her pride.
Now Foster and Holden were both gone. The skin on her newest arm itched.
“When I find out who did this,” she whispered as she closed the drawer. “I’m going to kill them.”
Dobbs closed her cabin hatch behind Yerusha. For a long moment she did nothing but stand there and let herself be tired. She felt the tension in the tendons of her neck, the weight of her hands dangling from her wrists, the dozen small aches in her feet and ankles, the dry heat lying over her eyes. Tired. Tired.
Tired for Al Shei who was working like a mad woman and leaving Resit to pray for both of them. Tired for Lipinski who was drinking the Sundars’ coffee like it was mineral water. Tired for Yerusha who had just lost a lifeline she wasn’t even supposed to have.
Tired for Dobbs who had spent the day trying to keep them all cool and focused and had totally missed what Yerusha would try to do.
Time to act like I know what I’m doing, she replayed Yerusha’s words for herself. You know, I was just thinking the same thing. She locked the hatch and set the entrance light to red.
Dobbs pulled her pen out of the desk socket and sat down on her bunk. She slid her bedside drawer open and drew out the flat, black box. She laid her thumb against the box lock. The lock identified first her print, then the very faint pulse that her thumb carried as her own, and the lid sprang back. From inside, the Fool took up a hypodermic spray and drug cartridge.
Seven hours? She set the release timer on the hypo and inserted the cartridge into the case. Given distance and coordination time once I’m in there? Should be enough. Long time to be out of action though. She glanced toward the door. Maybe not so bad. I’ve got four hours left on the sleep shift. That leaves three hours to cover for. Oh well, that’s one of the advantages of being the Fool; everybody always assumes you’re just clowning around somewhere else.
She pulled the transceiver out of the box and with her free hand, plugged her pen into the transceiver’s input socket. The tranceiver beeped once as it downloaded all of the record Dobbs had illegally acquired from Al Shei’s pen.
Dobbs pocketed the pen and opened the input plug in the wall over her bed. She took a slender white cable out of case, and jacked one end of it into the wall and the other into the tranceiver. Then, her practiced fingers found the nerveless patch behind her right ear and peeled it open. The heat of her hand activated the socketed implant behind it. She plugged the loaded tranceiver into the implant.
Biting her lip, Dobbs picked the hypo back up. I wonder if this is ever going to get easier, she thought as she lay back on her bed and held the hypo against her neck. She could feel her pulse beating against the hypo’s pressure. The transceiver’s vibrations made her neck tickle. It’s signal was already getting through to her. The edges of the room blurred and softened, separating into wavery, twin ghosts in front of her eyes.
Dobbs, she said firmly to herself. You can process network input, or sensory input. You cannot do both.
She closed her eyes. Her index finger hit the hypo’s release button and the drug hit her nervous system. Her shoulders vanished, then arms and hands, pelvis and legs. It took all of Dobbs’s training not to scream before her face and eyes were gone.
Hearing and smell went next and the transition was over. She had no awareness of her body. Now her shape was defined by the switches and storage pathways in the Pasadena’s system. She knew the mechanics of what happened. Now that her mind’s other functions had been suppressed, her implant captured a specialized pattern of neuronal firing that swirled deep in her organic mind. The pattern was the result of intensive hypno-training and delicate micro-engineering on both her implant and her neurons. The transceiver routed that pattern into the network she was jacked into. To her senses, what happened was that she stopped being a body with arms and legs. Now, she was a chaotic being — a snarl of thread — like limbs and blobby thoughts shaped by the pathways and resistance wells she filled. She lay over an array of microscopic switches and gates, and they in turn held together the mass of signals that thought of itself as Evelyn Dobbs. Time slowed to a crawl and her acute internal processes — her thoughts — kept her aware of each individual second.
One.
Dobbs flexed herself against a quartet of gates and the Pasadena responded by siphoning her along the spider web of data paths that joined together the ship’s processing areas to the roomy holding stack connected to the ship’s main fast-time laser transmitter. She touched her surroundings to make sure no internal ports were active indicating that a crew member out there was paying attention to the transmitter. No one was.
Two.
She dropped into a boxy, quiescent processor series. She filtered her awareness through the stack and found the log and the alert codes. She froze both. Now, unless someone looked out the window, there was no way to see what she was about to do.
Three.
In the main processor, she reset the transmitter commands into an active sequence. The transmitter grabbed the signal they put out — a frozen replica of Dobbs’ signal sequence and shot it out to the coordinates she had laid in for IBN Repeater Satellite HK-IBN4813-7Z421.
Four. Five.
As solid as the Intersystem Banking network was, repeaters occasionally overloaded momentarily, or took in bad signals that moved their receiver telescopes to the wrong angle, or failed completely. If she didn’t verify the receiver ‘scope was ready and waiting for the burst of compressed and coded light she had become, she might jump out with nowhere to land.
The replica came back. Dobbs caught it and swallowed it whole. It was exactly as she had sent it out. Satisfied that her target was where it was supposed to be and that it could handle her complexity an
d keep her whole and stable, Dobbs shaped another command on the processors.
Six.
Dobbs positioned herself at the mouth of the transmitter. The gates and switches flickered so fast that in her body she wouldn’t have had time to blink.
Jump.
Thousands of sharply angled pathways opened around her. Packets of data jostled against her on all sides. Ten were system packets with Repeater 4183’s encoding. Two were timing sequences. The jump had taken fourteen minutes, eight point two seconds. She didn’t feel any of it. Between receiver and transmitter, her signals were frozen still because there was no hardware to move them. This meant that she was, in effect, unconscious until she reached her destination.
One. Two. Three. She flitted along the repeater’s internal paths. Routing protocols switched into active phases as she reached out to them and closed down again when the flicker of her passage was gone.
When she first made use of these pathways, shaping her world was a clumsy, blundering reflex. The Guild taught its members how to keep this state of being as a controlled series of thoughts, and how to turn un-disciplined reflex into cautious, minimized commands.
It took three more seconds to find an open transmitter, and verify that she had a safe shot to repeater TL2-IBN5790-ZD701.
Jump.
One, touch the time. Twenty-two minutes gone. Two, fly to the transmitter. Three, shape the destination. Four, five, six, verify a clear jump. Next stop, Guild Hall. Her replica carried the proper encoding, the receiver ‘scope was free, the way was clear.
Jump.
The familiar branching chaos and close press of activity that was the outer rim of the Guild Hall. The pathways were constantly clogged with milling presences, reaching and diving through the processor connections, sometimes taking up two and three neighboring stacks at once, filling up every piece of free space, until there was almost no way to get through.
Dobbs snagged a timer that added another thirty-six minutes to her internal count. She swerved sideways until she came to the gateway series monitored by the Guild’s automatic system. The Fools laughingly referred to the program as the Drawbridge. She leaned against the closest switches and let them flutter across her identity coding.
“Evelyn Dobbs, membership number 2037.” She followed up her identification with her current contract and route. The Drawbridge hesitated for a moment and then opened one of its hundred main gates. Dobbs rushed forward into the open path.
“I have a potential environment or containment problem on my hands,” she told the Drawbridge. “Who’s free to help out?”
The bridge flickered a series of switches and side gates, sliding her gently between pathways crammed with activity into a slender processing stack. A familiar touch brushed against her thoughts. She reached towards it and found another piece of awareness wrapped inside hers. She opened the route to her memory and let the new voice inside.
“You’re coming in off schedule, Dobbs.” Cohen’s voice blossomed inside her and Dobbs absorbed the greeting and the friendly concern. “Anything wrong with the new contract?”
“Too much is wrong, but it’s not with the contract.” She reached into Cohen and let her first level memories of the run and its attendant “incidents” flow freely to him.
Cohen responded with a small twist of pain. Dobbs repeated it in absolute agreement.
“Let’s have the details then, maybe we can find a pattern for you. Do you mind if I call in Brooks and Lonn to share?”
“Not at all. We could use Verence too, if she’s free.”
Cohen shifted, seeking an unresisting path deeper inside. Reflexively, Dobbs tightened herself. “What happened?”
“We lost her,” said Cohen softly. “We had a near miss on Kilimanjaro. She stretched herself too far keeping their network up. By the time the Guild Masters roped in the trouble maker… she’d dissipated.”
Dobbs folded in on herself. Cohen, suddenly disconnected from her, circled outside. She could feel concern in his touch as he sought an open pathway back to her awareness, but she held herself sealed. Amelia Verence had rescued her from disaster. Verence had brought her into the Guild and stood by her through her training and had sponsored her petition for Master ranking even though the Guild Masters had declared her too undisciplined. Verence had showed her what she wanted to be.
And now she was gone. There were limits as to how far you could go alone, how much you could do and how long you could stay in the network before the complex mix of signals and processes that was you became so changed that there was no way you could maintain your own coherence. The Fools mostly called the phenomenon dissipation. The other word for it was death.
Cohen pressed against the shell she had made of her outer self. “I’m sorry, Dobbs. I thought…that you’d been notified.”
Dobbs shook herself and managed to relax enough to let Cohen reach inside again. “No. But this contract has been keeping me busy…” She began to fold again, but this time Cohen held his place. His firm stance helped her stay open even against the grief that was welling through her.
“However,” she managed to say, “if I don’t pay attention to the Pasadena’s problems, Verence is going to haul herself together just to come back and take me apart.”
Cohen’s laughter rippled across her. “Heaven forbid. Let’s see what you’ve got…”
She felt him stretch out streamers down two separate paths and after a brief instant’s silence, she felt the new awareness reach through him and into her. For a moment they did nothing but adjust to each other’s rhythms. Lonn moved in bursts, darting around, pausing to examine what he found and dart off again. Brooks, rigidly organized and thorough, had the clear, separated feeling of someone new to the Guild.
Dobbs shook herself to unclench her memories and let the details of the run flow out where the other three could look them over. Cohen was a long time friend. She could trust him to be careful with her memories. They would be examined without being altered. No one he brought in would carelessly misalign a pattern she gave them access to, causing her to forget or mis-remember a crucial point.
The three Fools waded deeply into her memories, watching their flow and separating them into discrete fragments before reuniting them with the whole to see exactly how the events fit into one another. Cohen carefully herded off the emotions and interpretations and left just the factual events for the other two to scrutinize.
“Have you got a religion, Dobbs?” asked Lonn finally.
“None in particular.” She tilted herself sideways to get a better feel for the other Fool’s touch. “Why?”
“You might want to consider getting one.” Lonn lifted up a sequence and placed it in the center of her attention. “You’ve been incredibly lucky so far.”
This wasn’t her just her memory, this was a recombination of the notes she’d hijacked from Al Shei’s pen and a report she’d caught from Lipinski. Since the Hunt had begun, they’d identified thirty-five separate blips in the systems, all of them random and fleeting, but ten of them in essential areas: life support, climate control, engine timing.
Dobbs felt herself stiffen against the idea. She forced herself to relax again. Take it all in, she said down in her private self. Hear the worst and then how to fix it.
“I’m afraid I haven’t got anything better over here.” Brook pulled up another sequence to give to her. “It doesn’t look like one thing, it looks like a lot of things. There are at least two distinct code patterns in here and I’m counting twenty-six major active areas, and,” he paused, “it looks like it’s trying to haul itself together.”
Dobbs absorbed the new configuration. Lipinski and Odel had mapped out the anomaly in the pumping system and radiation detectors that had raised the alarm down in engineering, and the other anomaly that had broken down the intercom routing system. Brook had gathered that up with the snapshot she had of the Pasadena’s computer system and flashed a long, tangled line of communication between the two. “This is
just a guess on the actual structure, the real comm-contact probably won’t last more than thirty picoseconds.”
“Between the specs you’ve shown us here,” Lonn picked up the older facts she had absorbed when she took the contract, “and the observations here.” Brook laid Al Shei’s records over top of the memory Lonn held. “I’d say some spot reconfigurations have been done on board to get this mess to work. Why, I don’t know, but whoever’s done it and for whatever reason, they didn’t tell your Houston or your Engineer. They’re operating on old data, and that’s what’s been hitching your systems up.” He paused and sorted through some adjoining memories. “Given what you’ve got on this Tully person, that, at least, shouldn’t surprise you.”
“So it’s either sabotage or stupidity.” Dobbs flattened herself out. “Wonderful.”
“There’s another possibility.” Cohen shifted uneasily. “Any chance your ship might have picked up a live one?”
“A live one? Looking like this?” Lonn’s incredulity was sharp.
Dobbs ignored him. “I’d thought that. But from where? There’s no facilities for an AI aboard, and Port Oberon isn’t even on the watch list, let alone the hot list. There hasn’t even been a hint of anything happening inside the Solar system for twenty years.
“Besides, this…mess is not acting like a live one. They’re randomly destructive. Go off like a bomb and scatter shrapnel everywhere at once.” Like I’m saying anything we don’t all know, thought Dobbs, privately, but she kept going. “This thing is going off here and there in bursts. One isolated section at a time.”
“I know that, but…” Cohen made a quick weaving motion indicating uncertainty. “But something is not falling into place here. I feel like we’re treating the symptoms.”
His uneasiness began to weigh Dobbs down. Cohen might be somewhat her junior in years, but he was not given to panic or flights of imagination.
“I’ll check on it,” she said, even though the idea left a cold, still spot inside her. “I’m going to need a trace on any systems being monitored inside the Solar System right now.”