Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  The airlock cycled back slowly. Inside, stood a broad-faced young man. A shot gun hung from his shoulder by a black strap.

  Al Shei couldn’t help but stare at it. A shot gun! Aboard a space station! It had a small barrel though. It probably fired low caliber shot, sufficient to pass through a human body without punching through deck plate, or the hull. Actually, it was a good compromise, she thought clinically. It was more lethal than tranquilizer darts or a taser, but it was less hazardous to the can than a flash-burn.

  She gathered her wits and remembered her role.

  “Brown, maintenance.” She stepped briskly across the threshold. She presented her pen. He stared at it like she’d just offered him a live wire. “You’re overdue,” she said. “You should have been notified by now.”

  He took the pen and his gaze flickered from it to her. Skepticism filled his expression, but not absolute certainty. Over his shoulder, she saw the far side of the airlock had not cycled open. Behind her, she heard the station side hatch crank shut. Now they were trapped. If the clamps released now, the airlock would seal automatically, leaving the two of them rattling around inside until the can was reattached to the station, if they lived that long.

  “Let me just check on this.” He side-stepped to the intercom beside the far hatch and jacked her pen into the wall socket. He did not take his gaze off her.

  Al Shei measured the guard up. He was a lot bigger than she was, and he had the gun dangling by his right hand. Speed was her only hope.

  She launched herself at him and caught him in the chest with her shoulder. He hit the hatch with a “whoof!” She grabbed his hand and slammed it against the palm reader. He wrenched himself around, but she dropped to the floor. He wasted a second looking wildly around for her. The airlock cycled open. Al Shei rolled across the threshold as soon as there was room and scrambled to her knees, dragging her spares kit with her behind the retreating hatch. She was in a corridor full of waldos, cameras and drones. She spotted a hatchway to her right and she dove for it. It cycled open. A store room.

  “Stop!”

  She stared up at the guard with his gun. She climbed to her feet with her spares kit clutched to her chest.

  This was it. If Yerusha and Schyler hadn’t found the command breakers and overridden them, Al Shei was dead where she stood. She backed up until her spine pressed against the wall.

  “Put the box down, Katmer Al Shei.” He smiled, quite obviously knowing he’d gotten the name right on the first try.

  A low grinding noise reverberated through the walls. The world plunged into darkness and spun out of control.

  As soon as Dobbs touched her surroundings, a packet slammed up against her. She grabbed it. One touch told her it was stuffed full of random strings of numbers. She reached inside it for the command code, and it disintegrated in her grip. One tiny piece flitted off into the network.

  Oh, hell. Dobbs lunged for the fragment, and missed.

  She barely had time to wonder what was going on before the next packet hit. She ducked the one after that, but not the next. Now the path was full of them, all rushing at her, battering at her sides, demanding her attention. It was like being in a swarm of maddened bees. It was like being shouted at by a hundred people and not being able to understand one of them. She could barely think. She couldn’t move under their clamour and pressure. She tried batting them away, but it was no good. One would splintered if she stabbed at it, but a dozen others swarmed up the path to take it’s place.

  Then, she felt Cohen’s touch like a fresh breeze. What was he doing here? She hadn’t sent the all-clear. He’d come anyway. He would. She tried to reach him, to warn him, but it was too late. He’d already picked up one of the random packets and now a swarm of them bore down on him.

  Very slowly, Dobbs felt herself begin to panic. The things swirled around her, smothering her senses, choking off all awareness of everything but their endless, meaningless noise. She struck out randomly. Through a brief clearing she heard Cohen call her name. A packet clogged the hole, cutting her off from him.

  An idea flared inside her.

  Dobbs forced herself to hold still. She hardened her outer layers and did her best to hold her wound closed. The packets slammed against her, piling one on top of the other, burying her in a solid layer of random numbers and alien code.

  Burying her so deep that no other packet would be able to find her. She hoped. If she was wrong, she was already dead, trapped in here until she lost what was left of her mind. With great difficulty, she flexed herself a little. Just enough to drag one of the packets out of the puzzle-work shell they’d made over her. Another one oozed into its place. Her imagination supplied a low “slurp.”

  Dobbs dragged the packet down until it was almost touching her private mind. It disintegrated, but the fragments had nowhere to go except inside her. She set to work on it with tiny, cramped movements. It responds to us, Terrence had said, but not to stuff we create. Well, she had plenty of raw material to create with. It was pressing against her like cotton wadding. She knew nothing beyond her little world. She grabbed another packet. Seconds creaked past. Cohen might be dead. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. She clenched herself tight around her handiwork. She dissected one more packet for its search code and joined it to the others. Anything might have happened by now. The war might be over by now. They might have won or lost. She might be permanently alone under an endless weight. She might be buried alive.

  Dobbs pushed her new-made searcher into motion. The shell around her parted briefly, because this new thing was not Evelyn Dobbs. Dobbs, straining to keep herself from blind panic, waited two seconds. Then, she stabbed downward. The shell splintered and, almost instantly, sealed shut. But that fragment of time was enough to tell her her idea was working. She was moving.

  The deafening packets were not spontaneously generated out of the nowhere. They had no self-replicating code inside them. They had to be coming from some command sequence somewhere. Her searcher was trying to find out where that was. It was dragging the mound that held her with it.

  She could stand this. She knew she could. It wasn’t any different from when Cohen had carried her. Stab. Still moving. Well, not much different. But, she hadn’t known what was happening then, either. Stab. Still moving. She couldn’t touch, couldn’t hear, couldn’t know then either. She had not gone crazy then. She had not died then. She wouldn’t now. She wouldn’t now.

  Stab. Stillness.

  Dobbs gathered all her energy and bust free of her shell. The packets flew apart like shrapnel and she clamped herself onto the processors in front of her. The swarm descended, fastening onto her back. She shivered reflexively, but not enough to falter in the work in front of her. The processors flickered and shifted under her touch. No time for finesse. She reached deep into the middle of them and with one hard twist, she froze all the microscopic gates shut.

  She turned her attention to the packets. They still clung to her, but now when she swatted them aside, they were not replaced. She kicked herself free of the last of them and streaked up the path back toward Cohen.

  He was tearing apart the last whole packet as she reached him.

  “Cohen!”

  He swung his attention towards her. There was something wild and swollen in his motion that made her back off. “It’s all right, Cohen. I’ve turned it off. We’re out of it.”

  Slowly, Cohen shrank back to his normal shape. “Thank you.”

  He turned to the transmitter a little too deliberately and sent the all clear.

  Stay with me, Cohen, thought Dobbs in the deepest part of her private mind. I can’t do this without you.

  The black air around Al Shei was full of objects, all of them rushing straight up. She had her hand up in time to stop her head from colliding with the ceiling. The guard hollered wordlessly as he hit. Bracing herself with her spares kit, Al Al Shei switched on the band lamp on her forehead. The beam fell across Curran’s security guard. He no longer l
ooked pleased with himself. She brought her tool kit down to chest level and shoved it away from her. It rocketed across the room, knocking lighter miscellany aside and catching the guard square in the chest. All the air left him as he slammed against the far wall. Al Shei kicked off the wall and snatched the shot gun out of the gloom as she flew past it. The guard had time to stare open-mouthed at her before she swung the gun like a bat against his skull. The impact smashed him back against the wall and left a trail of scarlet droplets hanging in the air behind him. Al Shei bounced backwards against the wall and felt the impact against her spine. She ignored it, tucked the gun under one arm and kicked off again, launching herself down the corridor.

  Up and down were without definition. Her body told her she was falling, in all directions at once. The walls rotated around her, scattering missiles and meteorites through the air. They clanked, chinged and rattled off the walls, and each other, and Al Shei. Nothing was heavy enough to slow her down.

  Someone with chestnut skin and a green coverall fell into her lamp light. They snatched at her and missed. As she drifted past, Al Shei twisted around and aimed the gun between her own feet and fired. The recoil shot her past the stranger and into the wall, slamming into her stomach and knocking all the air out of her lungs. There was more scarlet in the air behind her and her stomach lurched senselessly. She had hit something with that trick.

  She fell toward a major hatchway. The stranger, a man, she saw now, launched himself at her. His shoulder was leaking red bubbles. Al Shei yanked on the hatch with one hand and pressed the shot gun against her ribs and fired again. Again, the recoil knocked her backwards, through the hatchway this time.

  She didn’t slow down to see if she’d hit him. The spin was slowing and the alarms were silencing one by one. The AIs were regaining control. They’d have the lights back on soon. She flew through a broad corridor, ricochetting off the curved walls. She coughed painfully and tasted blood. The gun’s recoil had broken something inside.

  The lights came on, flooding the corridor and making Al Shei blink hard. Something grabbed her left arm ruthlessly and hauled her toward the wall. Al Shei gasped and twisted. A waldo gripped her forearm, and a second reached out toward her. She stuffed the gun’s stock into its pincers. They closed down and the stock splintered, sending slivers of plastic flying in every direction. Al Shei ripped the wire cutters off her tool belt. She wrapped their jaws around the waldo’s smallest pincer, and wrenched it back. The pincer casing bent and snapped, exposing a series of multi colored wires. In the corner of her eye, Al Shei saw a cart-sized drone racing toward her down a grooved track in what was now a wall. She was close enough to the corridor’s side to brace her feet against it. She hooked the cutters around the waldo’s newly exposed wires, arched her back and yanked. The mechanical hand spasmed, and her abrupt motion pushed Al Shei into open air again. She bounced off the wall/ceiling, sending a whole wave of pain through her. That was when she really saw the cameras. They were directing the waldos. These AIs had hands and eyes and they had spotted her.

  She pushed herself toward the cart. The wall waldos hadn’t oriented on her yet and she dropped past them. She hit the grooved track and bounced. As she rose, she hooked her hand under the cart’s belly, holding herself against the wall/floor. A waldo swooped toward her and she swung her wire cutters up to block it. It wrenched them out of her hand and tossed them away. As it did, Al Shei braced her feet against the nearest wall and shoved backwards. The force of her movement jarred one pair of the cart’s casters out of the groove. Its right side rose at a drunken angle and its waldos flailed to reach the track again, catching some of the wall’s arms in their grip.

  Another waldo stretched out from the wall to catch hold of her. Al Shei’s body rose to meet it. She grabbed its forearm with both hands and used it to lever herself up into the relatively clear air, snatching her wire cutters as she passed. The cart arms and the wall arms were still grappling with each other, trying to sort themselves out. Al Shei pried open a panel in the ceiling/wall over them. She caught up a clipper full of wires just as a waldo closed on her ankle. She clamped both hands around the wire cutter’s handles as the waldo dragged her backwards. The wires broke and a shower of sparks exploded out against Al Shei’s face. The lights went dead, leaving only the narrow beam of her lamp to cut the darkness. The waldo holding her relaxed and Al Shei was able to launch herself around the curve of the hallway.

  On her right she drifted past a doorway, not a hatch. Her brain skimmed memories of the schematic she had pored over in her cabin. Maintenance Closet! thought Al Shei jubilantly and she scrabbled at the edge of the door. Fortunately, the power was out here too, so any electronic locks had been disabled.

  Al Shei slid the door open, pulled herself inside and slammed the manual bolts shut behind her. She hung in the darkness for a moment, trying to catch her breath and collect her thoughts. Her abdomen burned painfully and the taste of salt and iron wouldn’t leave her mouth. Anonymous objects bumped against her. She turned her head to shine the lamp’s beam around. Multiple cabinets had been knocked open, and the detritus formed a whirlpool around her. Flotsam scraped past her hands and torso as the walls turned. The air had cooled perceptibly since the disaster began, but not dangerously. The Fools had obviously maintained their generator batteries well, at least.

  First things first. The power. They’d have a drone down to repair the damage she’d done to the wires in no time, and it wouldn’t take them long to guess where she’d gone. Her light glanced on a whole host of waldos on the walls. She swam across to a maintenance panel, pulled it away from the wall and looked at the underside. She smiled. They’d gotten rid of all the exterior labels, but the AIs hadn’t thought to erase the panel diagrams. She scanned the symbols and her smile grew wider. There was a breaker cluster in here with her.

  She counted three panels up and four over from the one she had opened. Underneath it, she found a gorgeous set of orange, green and blue cables all feeding into a group of four squat wafer stacks. Bobbing unsteadily in front of her target. Al Shei pulled her overall sleeves up over her hands and grabbed the stacks. She closed her eyes, braced her feet against the wall and pulled. The wafers came free, almost burning her hands even through the cloth. The pin-pricks of sparks landed against her cheeks and brows. Al Shei drifted gently through the sea of detritus and bounced off the far wall.

  She let the cluster go and shook her hands free of her sleeves.

  Take that! She thought wildly. She shone her light all around the closet. The waldos remained still. Most of the level should be out of power. Which was good for now, but the AIs most certainly knew where their own breakers were. Her light landed on the silver-grey doors of a locker below her feet and Al Shei felt a surge of hope. Maybe there was one other human necessity the AIs hadn’t been able to quite do away with.

  Al Shei tucked her legs and dove towards the locker. She grabbed the handle to steady herself. She could hear a distinct rattle inside.

  Didn’t they have anything secured? She thought as she opened the door. She hid behind it as the contents of the locker spilled out. As she had hoped, a pressure suit floated past her. It must be for emergencies. The AIs couldn’t install their ubiquitous waldos on the outside of their can without someone noticing. For the same reason, they couldn’t send any of their customized drones out there. There was too much activity outside. Too many chances to be seen. If something happened to the outer hull of this can that they had electronically hidden from the rest of Port Oberon, one of them would have to take the cold walk outside to fix it.

  She nabbed the suit out of the stream by its collar and pulled it behind her toward the nearest wall. Her lamp showed her that it was a standard industrial issue get-up; mustard yellow emergency gear, a back pack for gas tanks, a cutting/welding torch holstered on the side. It had a chest plate for tools, and pockets for the wrenches and screwdrivers that were now swimming through the whirlpool. She checked the gauges on the gas tanks and
batteries. The suit was charged and ready to go.

  Al Shei abandoned her tool belt to the whirlpool and climbed into the suit. Her body had given up trying to reason with her about relative directions and she was able to ignore the fact that she was rolling perpendicular to the rest of the room as she locked herself inside and secured the helmet. As soon as she did, the suit batteries kicked in and lit up the chin keys and interior displays. She bumped a key with a jerk of her chin and the external lamps came on. A quick glance around showed her where the tool belt had drifted. She retrieved it and loosened the cinch out as far as it would go so she could strap it around the suit’s waist.

  Al Shei nudged the chin control to darken the faceplate down enough to conceal her face, but not enough to hinder her vision. She checked the readout of her air, her gasses and her batteries one more time, and then opened up the door.

  And almost collided with a woman in tan overalls. She recoiled from the glare of Al Shei’s lamps. Al Shei opened up the suit’s intercom.

  “She was here all right,” she said. “Pulled out the wafer stack in there and headed for the ether.”

  “Ashes!” cursed the woman, holding up her hand to try to shield her eyes from Al Shei’s lights. “She’s got two whole levels out of commission. Any line on where she went?”

  “Probably trying to find her husband. Where’s he at?”

  “Med bay level ten…” The woman bit the sentence off. Al Shei clasped both fists together and swung hard at the woman’s temple. She connected, and as the motion drove her backwards, she heard something heavy hit the wall. She took her own impact on her shoulder and shone her light around. The woman’s body floated limp and still in the middle of the corridor.

  The maintenance closet had done one other thing for her. Al Shei swam to the far wall and used the dead waldos to pull herself along it. It told her which were the inner and outer sides of the corridor. The next hatch she came to on this side should be the stairs.