Hatizda didn’t respond to that. Daja ground her teeth. Maybe the connection was too oblique; one of those things that only made sense to her.
“I want to tell you two secrets,” Hatizda said. “Given the secrets you’re already required to keep, two more shouldn’t be a problem.”
I don’t think that’s how problems are measured, Daja thought. “What are the secrets?”
A shadow approached the screen, and Hatizda reached over and keyed the entry permissions. A server—his apron was very bright, Daja noticed; it probably wasn’t her imagination if it fluoresced, just a little, in the light—set down a tray with a pot and two small cups, and then retreated. Hatizda pressed the screen closed again.
“Tea?”
“Secrets,” Daja said.
Hatizda reached over to the pot, and poured tea for both of them anyway. Daja winced. Pay attention. Pay attention. Words, not smells.
“I send messages out to Caribou,” Hatizda said.
Daja stared, and thought her way through several responses. The smell of the tea, floral and bright, rose up through her sinuses, made it hard to think. Felt like her head was floating off. “Is that legal?”
“No. Not technically. I’m appropriating official resources, even if those resources are just a bit of time and bandwidth.”
“What... do you say?”
Hatizda was silent for a few seconds. “The window for sending anything that they’ll get before the end is closing. Mostly, I say ‘I’m sorry.’ And, ‘I hear you.’”
Daja barked. “But no one else does.”
“How many people have to?” Hatizda asked. “How soon? Does it really matter—does it matter in any actual, measurable way—if everyone in the settled systems learns about it now, while it’s happening, instead of in fifty years, when we’re all living in defended systems and Caribou is history? They’re still all going to die.”
Daja shifted. That reasoning didn’t sit right with her, but she didn’t have the words to explain why. Maybe it was a matter of, we’re all going to die. Eventually. If she was hurting, she’d want someone to know while she was still alive.
If she was dying, would she want someone to know while she was still alive? Some stranger she’d never heard of, in a system she knew nothing about, except maybe what she’d seen in entertainments?
Her head said Yes, I think so? And her gut said, I don’t like this. I want to go back to when I didn’t know about it.
Neither answer was helpful.
Hatizda shook her head. The light scattered across the patterns in her hair. “Secret number two.”
“I don’t want another secret,” Daja said. She was still processing the first one.
“You need to hear this one,” Hatizda said. “I’m not sure the man in your position before you actually killed himself.”
Daja opened her mouth, then closed it again.
“I have no proof,” Hatizda said. “Just speculation. Just... he didn’t seem the type, and it didn’t seem like the right time.”
Daja opened her mouth again. She could feel the muscles shifting around her jaw, and the wafting scent of the tea rolled back through her mouth to her throat.
Hatizda pushed the cup of tea toward Daja. “Here.”
Will that help? Daja wondered, but her hand curled around the cup anyway. She brought it to her mouth; closed her mouth against the rim. The tea tasted more bitter than it smelled.
Then she slammed the cup down on the counter. The tea sloshed out, stinging against her palm. Felt, in her current mood, like someone holding her hand. Reassuring.
“You’re calm?” she asked. She couldn’t tell. “Does this bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me,” Hatizda said. “But what can I do?”
“Tell someone,” Daja said. “Don’t hide them.” How could a handful of people—thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, however many— hide an entire star system?
“Pouring it on everyone—that bothers me more.”
“Because people need to stay calm,” Daja filled in.
Hatizda shook her head. “I don’t want them calm,” she said. “Not about this. But that’s the thing: if we start broadcasting this to all and sundry, what’s going to happen? We’re not getting attacked —not likely. So we keep people worked up, we keep people afraid?”
Her words were getting faster, the consonants beginning to mush and flow. Daja listened, fascinated in her head and repelled somewhere beneath her lungs.
“Daja, people get used to things,” Hatizda said. Her voice rose a note or two in pitch, and quite a bit in volume. “If we’d flooded them with news of war for the past four anno, they would get used to the war. And I don’t want to live in a system used to being at war. Not when the war isn’t even here.”
Daja didn’t have words for a long while. And all Hatizda had, apparently, was a disconcerting amount of eye contact.
“That’s not... even a little like what Supervisor Channing said.” Daja tapped her fingers. “I think that’s kinda the opposite?”
“Supervisor Channing and I don’t agree on very much,” Hatizda said. “But we don’t need to. And I don’t need you to agree with me. What I need you to do is find the place in your own mind where you come to the same conclusions the two of us did.”
I don’t want to, Daja thought. But even in her own mind, she was having trouble linking up the words with the reasons why.
“And,” Hatizda said, “enjoy your tea. I’m sorry.”
“For—?” For the lies? For the death of a system?
“For yelling.”
DAJA WENT BACK to her quarters, and ran the visuals until she could no longer focus on them, because her fingers were itching to call home. To occupy them, she ran them over the fabric of her bed, the covering on her seats, the composite of the walls, the soft coating on the floors. Compared the pressure in the give in the furnishings to the pressures in her own body, in her shoulders, at her lungs. She was halfway to deciding to call Hatizda again, just to feel like she was doing something, when a call came in.
Channing’s face appeared on the screen. Daja felt an instant phantom impact to her gut.
“What?” she asked.
Channing’s mouth drew into a wide, flat line. “I understand that this is outside of your assigned duties,” he said, “but a few of the technicians on the outbound Sol databurst have taken ill. Could you assist in the classifying and compiling? It’s grunt work, mostly.”
“Grunt work?” Daja asked.
“Supervisor Hatizda believes that some light outside duties help our task force to acclimatize to their work here.” He glanced to the side of the screen. “If it’s not helpful to you, I won’t waste your time.”
Daja shook her head. “No, it’s fine. Fine? What do I do?”
Channing’s fingers moved on something outside of the screen. “I’ll have you patched in.”
Channing’s face disappeared. A moment later, a disembodied voice came out, and her screen began to fill with text.
“Hello! Daja?”
“That’s me,” she agreed.
This voice—very musical, wasn’t it? More tones than Channing’s, smoother than Hatizda’s—wafted over the shifting text. “I’m Arduo. Thanks for volunteering to help—there’s nothing time-sensitive in this databurst, but we like to have things out on time.”
Daja laughed, short and sharp. Volunteering. “What do I do?”
The text organized itself into a grid. “We double-check the sorting information, so that when the burst arrives in Sol, people know where to look for what they want. The data’s already been cleaned and restored, and the computer automatically sorts most of these. Just confirm or edit the sorting. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory; if you have any questions, just flag them back to me. I’ve given you the pile that’s usually easiest.”
She looked at the list of data packets, and the suggested categories. News and reports from Colossus, mostly; a few suggested Relay Point as the origin,
or some of the smaller stations and colonies on the minor planetary bodies. “Okay.” The preponderance of letters made the screen look bristling. “I can do that.”
Sato System tended, overall, toward more angular lettering than Caribou. Or maybe Caribou just liked rounder letters in their entertainments. Daja realized she’d never seen what an actual Caribou dwelling looked like, or a console, or a text screen—just what someone imagined they should look like, and put into a show or a sim or a virtual. And heck, it wasn’t as though her life resembled any entertainments to come out of Sato.
She had access to that level of detail now, supposedly. So that she could scavenge it out and pepper it into the fictions her task force developed.
But for now, she was going to do grunt work, work that wasn’t actively obscuring the death of billions, and see if it would help. She didn’t think it would.
An hour or two into the process, when her eyes were aching and her conscious brain had mostly wandered off, leaving some other process to confirm—edit—confirm, a tone sounded to get her attention. She ignored it until Arduo coughed, and she was going to ignore that, but then he started speaking again.
“Hey, so—there’s a few things I’m not authorized to look at, in my pile. I was going to flag them on a delay until people got back, but it says I can transfer them over to you?”
“Okay?” Daja wondered if he found that strange. New person on the station, random fill-in for some ill workers, and she had authorizations he didn’t. Authorizations those ill employees presumably had, too. She wondered if he knew about her task force, through rumor or leaks or just sensing a pattern, in that. If he knew that there were secret task forces at all. How much of a ripple did all this secret data make in the outbound databurst?
“I’ll... okay. Over to you.”
Another grid flurried up on her screen, just like all the others at first glance. But then the first entry made it through to Daja’s brain, and for a moment, the entire world of sensory input became an uncaptivating nothing. All her attention was on the words.
Caribou.
She touched one of the entries. It unfolded under her fingertips: she had access to glosses, metadata, for most of these, but these were identified in the computer as resources she could access in any case. And this—this was media of the Caribou attacks.
She opened one.
Not full immersion—she didn’t think she could handle that. First just the visuals, without sound, without tactile feedback. Objects in space, coming out of space, slow inexorable approaches—they didn’t look like ships, to her. No uniformity. They looked like crystals, bismuth, maybe; all angles and layers and rigid geometry and chaos at the same time.
They were slow. Slow and inexorable. They came across outlying planets, not even inhabited ones, and slow geysers of rock and ice rose up from the surface, the whole of the planet eroding away. Daja watched in fascination, the muscles tightening in her stomach, hands, back.
So, this was what it looked like. What did it smell like, to have part of your planet ripped up and shot into orbit? What did it—no. She didn’t want to know what it felt like; if pieces of debris flew and ruptured skin, broke bone. She didn’t want to know what it looked like when a station came apart at the seams and you were standing in a corridor, watching the walls that held you enclosed splinter or tear or fragment. She didn’t want to think about the ground beneath her feet not being there to stand on. She’d have nightmares, and then feel guilty that she was alive to complain about them.
But Channing and Hatizda wanted her to detail the fabricated reports they’d say were coming out of Caribou. Reports to explain a system going dark. And Daja knew the numbers, the facts, but she didn’t know how it felt in the chest when there were too many dead to recycle and consume.
This media was going on toward Sol. That was the job under her fingertips now. All the media was tagged as Official Factual—Classified—Strategic, which seemed right. Or she could flag it back for someone else to deal with; probably one of her coworkers she’d never met. That was probably the correct response.
Daja found that she didn’t like the correct response.
Rather, she didn’t know what meaning correct had, here and now. And it occurred to her that if she could say nothing to her friends on Colossus, maybe she could say something to strangers on Earth. Wasn’t all of Caribou trying to do the same?
She opened a list of categories, trying to find one least likely to come under scrutiny, and most likely to be seen by a number of people. That didn’t work; the computer wouldn’t let her flag it non-classified. Apparently it had come in as classified information, and it was going to leave that way, nothing she could do about it.
But there was a list of Correspondence—Classified, and when she selected that, it opened up a long list of potential recipients. And it let her select one. And then, when she tried it, it let her select two.
Daja thought for a moment. Then, in a burst of spite, she selected every single recipient available on the list, and copied the setting to every Official Factual—Classified—Strategic report with anything to do with Caribou.
Then she sat back, and paid some distracted attention to her heart thudding away in her chest. That felt surprisingly good, though she imagined it wouldn’t if it went on for very long.
Still. Still. Maybe this list was just people who already had clearance for classified intel; she didn’t know, she didn’t recognize the names, and she didn’t recognize most of the acronyms after them. But maybe they weren’t, and maybe there would be someone who wasn’t ordered to stay silent, and maybe Sol could hear Caribou, even if no other system would. Maybe. Just maybe.
And yes, this was very clearly divulging information she’d been ordered not to divulge. She was disobeying orders. But Hatizda was also disobeying her orders, just because it felt right to her. Well, maybe there was no right, in the mix. She was sure that Channing and his Earth-spectrum morality would have some hard line that made no sense to her; no, she had to listen to him, not to the billions calling out in Caribou, because he was more important because Sol said so. But she didn’t much care what he had to say.
Every single piece of media in Daja’s pile was caught, re-tagged, and sent along. And then Daja went back to the mind-numbing work of categorizing the rest of it, half-distracted by the blood singing in her ears.
DAJA WAS VIBRATING almost until the moment when the Sol databurst went out, and then she spent several days waiting for something to happen. But nothing did. She was introduced to her coworkers, under pseudonyms and pseudopresence, and listened in on all the ideas they threw around for the scenario they’d build. Violent anti-Sol revolution in Caribou. Computer corruption which destroyed all communications equipment. Epidemic brought on by unwise genetic engineering, or by flaws in food processing. She mostly stayed silent in those meetings.
In the meantime, she drank down the media from Caribou—as raw, as unfiltered as she could get it. The rhythm of their languages, the layout of their rooms, the hues of the skies on their single, unfinished world, the taste—synthesized, probably poorly, via chemical profiling—of the drinks they drank while socializing. And she was just about to cue up one in a long sequence of musical offerings one day, when the door to her quarters flew open, unannounced.
Hatizda.
Daja waved her console back to idleness. Hatizda had gone a shade redder than usual; it made her clothing look less congruent with her, somehow. Like she would have chosen a slightly darker grey or a looser collar if she’d known.
She invited Hatizda in. There wasn’t much else to do.
Hatizda didn’t give her the opportunity to search for the right words. “I checked the Earth-bound databurst as soon as Channing said he’d volunteered your time,” she said. “What is wrong with you?”
That startled Daja so much that she started laughing. “I thought you talked to my friends on the creative teams.”
That, in turn, seemed to startle Hatizda. She shook
her head, quickly, as if water had been tossed into her face. Daja imagined droplets flying off the angles of her expression, glittering in the light, patterning the floor and furniture in broad sweeps like the stars outside.
“We—they told us about the—that’s not what I’m trying to say,” Hatizda said. “None of them ever said that your judgment was massively compromised.”
Daja shrugged.
“Did you think this through? Did you think at all? You can’t hide this! As soon as Sol transmits back, Channing is going to piece together that it’s you!”
Daja shrugged again. Even with the information flying out, faster than light would carry it, it would take the better part of an anno for the round trip. That was enough time to either think her way out of this, or consider her mistakes. “Yeah.”
An absence-of-words settled between them. In the relative silence, Daja’s attention was caught by the station’s air cyclers—and by Hatizda’s, her breath coming short and sharp.
At length, Hatizda blew out her breath. “I’m not going to tell Channing,” she said. Her voice had dropped a few notes in pitch. Every syllable weighed out like it cost her something. “But I don’t think there’s much I can do for you.”
“I don’t need you to,” Daja said. Nor was there much either of them could do for Caribou, who needed it more.
Hatizda shook her head again. Daja mentally overlaid another pattern of imaginary water drops, landing across the previous spray. Darker, fresher stains.
“You honestly think that was the right thing to do?”
“Does that exist?” Daja asked, and was momentarily distracted by a mote of dust, turning in some unevenness in the ambient light. Then it passed out of sight, and she had to adjust her balance, feel her whole mass move against the gravity.
When she looked back at Hatizda, her supervisor gazing, open-mouthed. “That’s what you’re coming back with?”
“I don’t know,” Daja said. “It doesn’t matter what we do. Not in Caribou. But it matters here, and in Sol, and Waheed, and all the other systems. But we don’t know if it matters if we don’t... know.” Was that right? She tried to fit the words together in her mind. “We have to know that there’s something to matter. I think. I don’t know. It hurt too much to stay quiet.”
Infinity Wars Page 5