Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  “I can get you that,” Lonn assured her. “There’s a new watch on the Titania Freers. You might want to check the systems logs on what that pilot of yours has been up to.”

  Dobbs shrugged her whole self. “Yerusha had an AI with her, but it just got eaten by whatever Pa Pasadena’s carrying around in its veins.” She took hold of Brook’s awareness. “What I need there is a retrace of Marcus Tully’s route over the past eight months, if we can.”

  “That should keep me busy,” murmured Brook, stirring in a small whirlpool of annoyance. “For about the next year. Does Al Shei know how her business partner spends his time?”

  “She does,” Dobbs kept herself smooth and even. “She’s had her reasons for putting up with it, which have been strained to the breaking point.”

  “Don’t blame her a bit.” Cohen pulled back, taking the other two with him. “Good luck, Dobbs. We’ll have what answers there are in forty-eight hours.” The anesthetic that put her body far enough under to permit her to enter the network was un-healthy stuff, to say the least. With her diminutive frame, she could only tolerate an extended dosage once every two days without side effects.

  PING! The alarm signal from her transceiver, back in the Pasadena, cut through her thoughts. This self, the signals and code had three seconds before it had to begin its journey back to her body.

  One.

  “Thank you.” Dobbs let the gratitude wash over all three of the Fools as they pulled their awareness away from her. Inside her, a set of processes began to shift and merge.

  Cohen lingered behind in Dobbs’s outer self for just a moment longer.

  Two.

  “Dobbs, you’ve really got to work on this group’s AI paranoia, you know that?”

  “Yeah, I know. Frankly, neither Lipinski nor Yerusha are making that aspect of the job any easier, let me tell you.”

  “I can imagine.” Cohen shook himself ruefully. “Dobbs, you take care of yourself this run, all right? I am feeling…” his thoughts prickled uncomfortably against her consciousness.

  “So am I, Cohen. So am I.”

  Three.

  Conscious thought began to sink into instinct. She wanted to go back. She couldn’t hold still. Time to go back, now. Time to get back to her body before it woke up and her brain’s functions blocked her implant’s abilities to reintegrate her into her organic mind.

  Dobbs skimmed through the Guild Hall to the laser transmitter. She orchestrated her jumps as efficiently as she could. Urgency filled her actions and pressed additional speed on functions guided now full by instinct. Any second those blips in the Pasadena’s essential systems could break open into real crisis.

  Finally, she felt the unmistakable path opened by her transceiver. Dobbs drizzled herself down it like a trickle of water down a drain. The transceiver recoded the signals so the implant could convert them into electrical signals that would raise the neurochemical impulses to diffuse into her and restart the body that her hypo dosage had shut down.

  There had been cases where Fools’ bodies had woken up before the translation process was completed. The signal selves stayed in the nets as long as they could hold together, and then, they dissipated like Verence had. The body-selves though, woke up as if they had been in six month comas. They were permanently brain-damaged and unable to function independently ever again. The physiological markers for the process were inconclusive. Some theorized that without the extra boost from the implant signals, the cognitive functions repressed by the drugs stayed shut down. Some of the more theologically minded theorized it was because the soul had not returned to the body. Dobbs seldom wondered about the implications of either view. She was content to know the process worked.

  Light and heat touched her. A thorny pain tingled in her hands and ankles. Her eyes blinked, her throat groaned softly and her tendons twitched as she gradually became aware that all these things really belonged to her.

  Dobbs fumbled with the transceiver until she managed to pull it out of her socket and drop it into the box. Then, with forced patience, she began the long series of stretching exercises that the Guild prescribed to reorient her to her body, gently stretching and separating her toes, ankle circles, leg lifts, arm stretches, rotating her neck. At the end of twenty minutes, she was able to see without the tell-tale sensation of detachment that always followed a session in the net. She was defined by her body again.

  Her body, which was parched with thirst, reeling with hunger and had a bladder that was about to burst.

  Dobbs reeled to the bathroom and voided herself. She ran the tap, filling cup after cup of cold water, guzzling them as fast as she could. Feeling moderately more steady, she rifled through her bedside drawer for a deluxe-size ration bar. She had downed half of it when the grief hit.

  Verence was dead. The memory surged up from her unconscious with all the rest of what she had learned in the net. Verence was dead. Her stomach clamped down on itself and so did her throat. Tears she couldn’t even think about controlling burst out of her eyes. She did manage to swallow her mouthful before the sobs welled up. Verence had saved her life. Verence had brought her to the Guild and stood by her while she was learning her trade. Dobbs remembered the little, bright-eyed woman tossing scarves in the air, heard her patient voice going over the principles of humor, felt her warm hand on her shoulder. Gone. Her first and best friend was gone.

  When the tears finished and the sobs had quieted to gasps, Dobbs managed to force her damp palms down from her face and look up at the desk clock. She’d been out of the net for ten whole minutes.

  All right, Dobbs, you do not have time to lollygag. She hoisted herself off the bed. A quick wash and some eyedrops took care of the worst of the evidence of her cry. She made herself finish off the ration bar, even though her stomach no longer felt like accepting it. Then, she activated the desk again and checked the time and the crew schedule. Lipinski was on duty and was probably in the comm center, building yet another diagnostic.

  Dobbs took the stairs to the hold deck two at a time.

  Her prediction proved accurate. Lipinski was swearing energetically at his boards as his pen flew across their surface, making choices and scrawling out orders. Whatever it was giving back to him, he did not like it.

  “It’s not good enough, it’s not even close.” He wiped out the last line he’d laid down with a swift, angry stroke. “You’re not going to get around me like that, whoever the hell you are. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe you are…” If he had heard the hatch cycle, he gave no sign.

  Dobbs felt a twinge of sympathy inside her as Lipinski lifted up his coffee bulb, thumbed the lid back and took a huge gulp.

  She braced herself, set a cheeky smile on her face and stepped forward.

  “They seek it here, they seek it there, the Houston seeks it everywhere. Is it in Heaven, is it in Hell, that damned, elusive…virus of totally unknown origin.” She finished off, deliberately lame. It was evident that Lipinski did not get the joke, but that was all right, he at least looked at her.

  “Piss off, Fool,” he muttered.

  “No thanks. Took care of that before I left my cabin.” She leaned both elbows against the corner of his board. “So, is it in Heaven or Hell?”

  “I wish it was. Actually, I wish its maker was.” He erased the line he was working on and wrote QUERY NEW PATTERN CENTER LACKING HOUSTON AUTHORIZATION.

  “Couldn’t be anywhere near that simple,” he said. “Crackers usually forget something simple though. They’re just like any other systems freak. They think they know everything, but they don’t. They know generalities, not specifics. They don’t know all the ins and outs of a particular system unless they’ve made a study of that single unit, and who in all the hells under all the heavens would have made a study of the Pasadena?”

  “Someone who wanted Chandra’s curry recipe?” Dobbs quipped. “Or, better yet, someone who wanted to STOP Chandra’s curry recipe.” She drew herself up straight. “Marshall your forces troops! We c
annot allow this to get out! We must invade in force, leave no corner unsearched, inside, outside, in my lady’s chamber! You!” she spun around and faced an imaginary private, “take the main database. You!” she spun again. “Take the bridge links! You!” She faced the back wall and poked at it with her index finger. “You take the kitchens, but she’s far to clever to leave it in plain sight. Stay in contact! We can’t let ourselves be cut off! We’ll surround it and cut off its back-ups, divide and conquer, Troops! Because if we don’t…”

  Lipinski had gone round-eyed and slack jawed.

  “Oh my God!” He snatched up his pen. “Oh my God, I’ve been looking for the wrong thing! I’m an idiot! An idiot!”

  He began scribbling in a convoluted shorthand almost too fast for Dobbs to follow. He was ordering searches for binary signals, line feed-back, random number streams, not in any of the affected systems, but in the remaining “clean” systems.

  The responses came back positive.

  “Got you!” he cried. “Got you, you fractured key code imitation comm check! You’re mine! Intercom to Schyler!”

  “Schyler here, Houston. Good news?” The hope in his voice was almost aching.

  “Good news, Watch. I’ve found caught the thing talking to itself. It’s not a single virus, it’s a bunch of them.”

  A moment of silence. “Please tell me you can do something about this?”

  Lipinski licked his lips. “Now that I know what its comm patterns look like, I can write up some roadblocks for them. If we can isolate the individual nerve centers, we can pick them off one at a time.”

  “Any chance of getting this done before we get to The Farther Kingdom?”

  Lipinski looked down at his board. Responses from the ship’s systems were still coming in. He swallowed. “I don’t think so, but we can at least neutralize the thing, things, so that we stand a good chance of getting to The Farther Kingdom.”

  “I’ll take that.” Schyler sighed. “Get going Lipinski. Dictate a report to your relief and let the rest of us know what we need to start doing. I’ll call Al Shei. Intercom to close.”

  Lipinski flashed Dobbs the first genuine smile she’d seen in twenty-four hours.

  “I could kiss you, you Fool.”

  She smiled back. “Nah. You’d have to catch me first.”

  She slid sideways out the hatch.

  In the corridor, she rubbed her forehead. Dobbs, you need some sleep yourself. You keep giving him answers like that, he’s going to be leaving a permission-to-court request on your line before you can say ‘boo.’ And you don’t want to have to deal with that, do you ?

  She started back up the stairs.

  Do you?

  Chapter Five — Landfall

  Al Shei swept her gaze across the roster. Clustered around the far end of the conference table, the other three section heads shuffled their films. Resit tucked a wisp of hair back under her kajib. All of them sat up a little too straight and held their shoulders a little too stiffly. Every one of them had dark shadows under their eyes, except for Dobbs sitting quietly in her corner. Despite that, Al Shei was sure the Fool was as short of sleep as all the others.

  Another six hours and we’re on the ground, she reminded herself. Another six hours and we can start setting things to rights again.

  “All right, we’re going to stay in dock at The Farther Kingdom for a week so we can all catch our breaths. We’ll be using up what leeway we’ve got on the packets for the Vicarage and then some, but we can’t function the way we’ve been going. First priority is to get the Dane packet delivered to the New Medina Hospital, second is to get everybody cooled down. Then, we’re going to flush our virus out of the systems.”

  Schyler nodded. “It’s worth the wait. All three shifts are wound fairly tight.” He cast a sideways glance at the Fool. “Not as bad as it could have been, though.”

  Dobbs accepted the compliment with a small bow.

  “Thank you, Watch.” Al Shei drew her pen across that item on her roster and it vanished. “Houston, we need you to tap into the port authorities, find out about the docking and shuttle fees. Resit, work up the contracts we need to take leave for three local days and get a download of the local regs. Try to bring it in under four thousand, okay?”

  “Any other miracles while I’m at it?” Resit murmured to her stack of films.

  “A dove out of your sleeve would be entertaining,” quipped Dobbs.

  “And messy,” Resit smiled at her. “Chandra would just want to serve it for lunch.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Chandra mildly. “Since we’re going to be staying, I could use my allowance transferred. Baldassare and I should be doing some grocery shopping.”

  “All right,” Al Shei made a note on her film. “Anybody else?”

  Resit waved her pen towards Al Shei. “My Farther Kingdom files are two years out of date, I could use an upgrade.”

  “Cost?”

  “Lots.”

  Al Shei eyed her sourly.

  Resit shrugged. “Look, we’re going to be running loose with two year old legal back up. It could cost much more than an upgrade if somebody mis-steps. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be that important, but The Farther Kingdom law is complicated, even by colony standards.”

  “Get a receipt on film.” Al Shei leaned over and scribbled a new line in the film ledger spread open in front of her.

  “Anybody else?”

  There was silence. “All right.” She flipped the ledger shut and wrote SECURE across the top to seal it. “Watch, work up a leave schedule and notify the crew. Make sure Chandra gets her shopping time. That’s everything for the moment.”

  Her crew filed out dutifully and Al Shei rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw Dobbs sitting in the same corner of the room she had occupied since the meeting started.

  “Bad run,” the Fool remarked quietly.

  Al Shei sighed. “Yes, especially since we’re going to have to be taking late penalties on all our cargo to the Vicarage and Out There because we’ve got to take the extra time to certify that our virus didn’t touch it.” She wondered briefly when she had decided the thing was “our virus.” “If things keep up like this we may just break even by the time we get back to Port Oberon.” She chuckled ruefully. “Some days I think Murphy must be one of the recording angels.”

  “Sorry?” Dobbs picked herself easily up off the floor. “I know Murphy’s law, of course… ”

  “Munkir and Nakir are the recording angels who write down all deeds to be read on the Day of Judgement. I think Murphy’s out there with them recording every incidence of over-confidence to be read right now.” She scowled at the ledger and then looked up at Dobbs. “I’d better get myself on that shore leave roster, hadn’t I?”

  Dobbs nodded soberly. “I think it might be a good idea, Boss. Otherwise Chandra will shackle you in the sun room and I’ll have to sneak in with a string file to get you out and then she’ll be after us both with a carving knife and that’ll be even messier than Resit’s dove.”

  “Mmmm,” Al Shei arched her eyebrows thoughtfully. “Bad for morale, that sort of thing.”

  “Usually, yes,” agreed Dobbs.

  Al Shei chuckled and sighed again. “Ah, Dobbs. Have you ever met anybody you couldn’t make laugh?”

  “Once. But it turned out he had had his sense of humor surgically removed. I tried to have it regrown, but it turns out it requires a special vat, and would have taken my year’s salary, so I resigned my commission and became a monk in the Andes preserve for ten years while the blow to my ego healed.” Dobbs gave her exiting bow. “See you ashore, Boss.”

  “See you,” said Al Shei absently.

  When the hatch cycled shut, Al Shei rubbed her temples and stared at her pile of films.

  It had been two days of quiet. Lipinski’s road blocks appeared to have done the trick. The virus was still inside the Pasadena, but it was inoperative, apparently. Everything had run exactly as it was supposed to and
they had docked at The Gate, The Farther Kingdom’s space station, without incident.

  For those same two days, Al Shei had found herself totally unable to relax. She knew there was nothing else to be done until they got into port where there was help and contacts that went beyond the expertise that even Pasadena’s crew had to offer. All she could do was wait. It had not been easy, on her or on the engineering team. She smoothed her hijab down. If there was any extra to go round after this run was over, Javerri, Ianiai, and Shim’on were getting bonuses.

  If there’s anything at all to go round, she amended gloomily.

  She shoved the thought aside. She hadn’t had a zero run in the six years she’d been crewing the Pasadena and she wasn’t going to start with this one. The Kerensk AI could have been pumped into the lines and Lipinski’d find a way to ferret it out.

  Come on, Al Shei, time for prayer.

  She took herself down the stairs and knocked on Resit’s cabin as she passed. She opened the cabin hatch just as Resit, carrying her prayer rug, opened the bathroom door.

  Knowing they were docked and that, finally, there was something else she could do, infused her prayer with a feeling of relief.

  When they were finished and had reclaimed their veils, Al Shei asked her cousin, “So, aside from spend my money, what are you going to do with your leave?”

  “I think I’m going to New Ashbury and join a spacers commune.” Resit pinned her kijab underneath her chin.

  “Right,” laughed Al Shei. “And I’m going to New Rome and be baptized.”

  “Actually,” said Resit, suddenly serious. “I’ve been wondering what you are going to be doing.”

  “After Lipinski and I get Amory Dane’s medical data delivered to the hospital, I think I’ll stay on and do some shopping in New Medina,” she lied carefully. “Find something fun yet light to send home to the kids and Asil.”

  “Um,” Resit grunted, and picked up her rug. “Just tell me this, oh-my-cousin, should I keep my Incili box with me in case this shopping gets out of hand?”