by Sara Creasy
She grasped at the pattern, pulled it apart, studied its details, but it disintegrated. She gathered it together again and realized there was nothing to see unless she viewed the coherent whole. It was not something to be examined note-by-note or even by melody, but to be absorbed as a symphony.
Through manipulating the ecosystem’s genetic code in order to defeat the kill-code lock, the biocyph had learned more than just how to survive. Scarabaeus had its own song now.
A new song that would change everything.
“Finn.” She gently shook his shoulder. She’d been working for an hour, at least, and he was dozing, the rifle lying across his thighs. “Finn. I’ve finished.”
“What…?” He rubbed a hand across his face. The lamplight picked out the gold flecks in his eyes.
Edie crouched beside him. “It’s safe. As safe as it’s ever going to be.”
“How much longer on the shields?”
“Forget the shields. I switched them off.”
That riveted his attention. “You what?”
“I needed to let the cyphviruses in.”
Into their bodies, hers and his. She knew the idea would make his skin crawl. That was the standard reaction. But not Edie’s—she’d been born with it.
“You mean…” His lip curled. “There’s nanoteck running around inside me?”
“I had to give the BRAT a picture of who we are—our biopatterns. The cyphviruses will transmit our biopatterns to the BRAT, but it will recognize us now. I’ve instructed it to ignore us instead of trying to change us. Even the local bacteria will leave us alone.”
Finn narrowed his eyes as she explained. She could tell he wanted to believe her, wanted to be convinced. He wanted to live.
“Jezus.” He tilted his head back against the casing, peering into the gloom as if he could see the nano-sized particles Edie had exposed him to. “Couldn’t you just take a blood sample?”
“Blood contains your DNA—the template that made you. But it’s not you. Terraforming biocyph needs the complete picture, all the metabolic pathways. It’ll take a few hours to take effect, so we can’t leave yet.”
“What about the creatures that attacked us?”
“The jungle should ignore us now. Every aspect of this ecosystem is controlled by biocyph, and I’ve programmed it to treat us as inert components. We have to stop shooting at it, though.”
His hands closed around the rifle. He wasn’t going to give it up that easily.
“There’s something else. Something amazing, Finn.” She could’ve kept what she’d discovered to herself, especially since she had no idea yet what to do with the information, but they were in this together. “The biocyph creating these megabioses—in learning to overcome my kill-code lock, it’s evolved. I can feel it in the datastream…It’s so adaptable, I could develop it for use in any ecosystem. It could be used to crack the locks on the BRATs on other worlds.”
Finn sucked in a breath. “If you’re thinking of taking any of this mutated mess offworld and spreading it around—”
“It’s only mutated because the BRATs lost their target ideal. I’m talking about an algorithm, a cryptoglyph that can be programmed into BRATs on other worlds. It will teach the BRATs how to permanently override their inbuilt annual shutdown. No more renewal keys. No more slapdash keystones.”
“You realize what that would mean?” Finn shook his head, as though it was too much to contemplate. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should just—” She stopped her self, because the idea of keeping it secret was unthinkable. “It could free the Fringe worlds forever.”
“The Crib won’t stand for it.” Finn was still shaking his head. “This is not your fight.”
With a twinge of disappointment, she realized he was talking himself out of it. She wouldn’t let him do that. Once he’d been the kind of man who’d have jumped at the challenge. It was her job to make him remember that.
“We can make it our fight. I made this hell, Finn, and it’s produced a revolutionary technology—”
“Revolutionary? You don’t want a revolution, believe me. You’re talking about starting a war.”
She understood then. Finn had already been there—fought for a cause and lost everything.
“Something good will come from this mess that I made. I have to take this to the Fringers.”
“No matter the consequences?”
“It’s their chance for freedom. They can refuse, but I have to offer it. I have to try.”
Finn didn’t meet her eyes. Was he ashamed of himself for not wanting to get involved?
“I promised you we’d cut the leash,” she told him, “and we will. But whether you agree with my plan or not, I’m taking it with me.”
“How?”
“One of Zeke’s stock biocyph modules would be ideal right now, to imprint the algorithm on. I’ll have to store it in the wet-teck in my splinter.” She turned to jump back into the well of the BRAT.
“Wait.” Finn touched her shoulder, frowning with uncharacteristic uncertainty as he searched her face. “Use mine.”
“Why? You said this was all a bad idea.”
“Yes, I did. But this thing makes me valuable.”
“You think I’ll leave you behind? Is that it?”
“That’s not what I mean. I trust you, Edie, even if I don’t agree with you on this. But I have no value to the rest of the crew. If we get out of this place and off this rock, this gives them a reason to keep me alive. Put it in my head, just temporarily, and make sure only you can download it. At least then I have something to bargain with.”
“Okay,” Edie said automatically. She was still absorbing the impact of his admission that he trusted her. It meant more to her than it should—after all, he was talking about his survival, not his feelings.
He followed her into the bowels of the BRAT, sat patiently while she jacked into his splinter. She’d have preferred to create a new tier in which to store the data, to confine and protect it, but she’d already tried and failed to modify the biocyph in Finn’s splinter. Most of it was unused anyway, an empty matrix to store the cryptoglyph.
She jacked into the BRAT’s core and recovered the dismembered symphony. She had isolated and extracted the algorithm from the biocyph to leave only raw code, like sheet music without an orchestra. There were just enough linkages intact that she’d be able to recreate a functional module later, by recombining the algorithm with fresh stock biocyph that could be coded for use on another world, another ecosystem.
The BRAT knew her now, and Scarabaeus gave up its secret willingly.
If Cat’s repairs had gone well, she’d have picked up Haller’s team by now and ferried them to Finn and Edie’s location. They had no way of knowing, and could only hope someone was waiting for them outside the megabiosis. As for the Hoi Polloi—if someone up there was responsible for trying to kill them all, would the ship even be in orbit anymore?
There was little point worrying about it yet. It would take a couple more hours for the BRAT to make the necessary changes and transmit its new programming out into the jungle. Until then, the only thing on Edie’s mind was rest.
Finn settled against the BRAT casing, and there wasn’t much room to do anything but curl up beside him. The cold from the metal soaked through her jacket, making her shiver.
He watched her with a flicker of concern. “You doing okay?”
She hadn’t slept in thirty hours and was tired beyond belief, physically and mentally. He must sense that. “I’ll be fine.”
She edged away from the cold, leaned against his shoulder, already drifting, not protesting when he shifted to move his arm around her so that her cheek rested on his chest. The intimacy of the position was at odds with the painful knowledge that he would walk away from her, and her future, as soon as he was able.
He tangled his fingers into her hair, at the nape of her neck, holding her there in a gesture that felt more possessive
than tender. She didn’t have the energy to think about it, and his heartbeat was a lullaby.
CHAPTER 28
Everything looks the same as the mission briefing begins. Everything is the same—but Lukas isn’t there. He retired, they tell her, but she knows it’s a lie. He would never leave without saying goodbye and explaining why. More than that, he would never leave at all.
It will be her sixth mission, departing in a few days. The fifth without Bethany, the first without Lukas.
For the first time in two years, she runs. They’ll find her soon, but for a few hours she’s anonymous and free as she follows the endlessly twisting caverns of Halen Crai. In the outer loop she enters a shop and a crowd of toms descends on her. Toys, really. Ridiculous species of all shapes and colors, flashing lights and chattering, waving their appendages as they wheel aimlessly around the floor. One runs over her foot and she nudges it aside. Confused, it spins around a few times, speeds off, and bangs into a wall. Others bump into her ankles, staggering around like blind drunks. She’s never seen such disorder and cheery nonsense, and she likes it.
The vendor emerges from a back room to apologize. “Fringer junk. Non-standard teck. They can’t tune to the local navbeacons.”
She sympathizes. She’s never felt at home here, either. “I could take a look at them, maybe reset their protocols…”
The vendor eyes her appraisingly. “You a teckie? What will it cost me?”
She pulls something from her pocket. Everything that belongs to her, Natesa takes away—but she’s managed to hide this for two years. It’s all she has left.
The vendor steps forward and touches it with her finger. Each of the woman’s fingernails is pierced through with a gemstone, and the nails grow around the gems in distorted ridges. It’s beautiful and grotesque at the same time.
“That’s what I want.” So they can never take it away.
“So what is this? An insect or something?”
“Can you graft it onto my skin, like you’ve done to your fingernails?”
“Suppose that would work. Is it worth anything?”
“Only to me.” A reminder of Scarabaeus, the world she saved, and now of Lukas, who she couldn’t save.
With a nod of approval, the vendor says, “When you find something you care about, you got to hold on to it.”
As the seal hissed open, darkness greeted them. Finn shone the lamp into the jungle, etching the twisted milky vines with a bluish light and casting distorted shadows on the surrounding vegetation. Scattered pieces of equipment were the only indication humans had ever intruded. There was no sign of the slaters, no sign of the bodies of the three serfs who’d died here, or of Zeke.
But she’d saved Finn.
With the shield off, Edie could smell the jungle properly for the first time and she breathed deeply. Clean, moist, earthy, but sharper than seemed natural. The nanoteck in their bodies would take care of any reactive substances they inhaled—or so she hoped. And if not, there was nothing more she could do about it. They’d know soon enough.
Finn leaned against the outside of the BRAT, checking his rifle. “Smells like standard-issue soap.”
He slung the weapon over his shoulder and handed Edie her pack. His endearing nervousness about the nanoteck had evaporated. The jungle was a danger he could shoot at, notwithstanding her warnings—shooting might set off the jungle’s defensive reaction again. In any case, he only had a few rounds left in the rifle.
Together they looked out at the jungle, lit by the puddle of light from the lamp. The vine growth matted into a dense network low over their heads. Beneath that lay the tangle of wide supporting stalks of arboreal species, surrounded by pale open-faced flowers with crooked petals stitched together like patchwork.
Everything was drained of color, washed out and semi-translucent. Unlike the original ecosystem, photosynthesis could no longer be the main process that sustained these organisms. Yesterday Edie had seen only one green species of plant winding its tendrils up through the vines toward the light. Maybe the organisms fed like funguses—absorbing nutrients directly from the soil and air, and perhaps from each other.
Edie checked her compass and set off, due north as planned.
“Wait!”
“I know, I know, stay close,” she muttered, glancing over her shoulder at Finn.
He was a few paces away, shining the lamp over her head. She looked up to see a slater, suspended by a silken thread. Its legs were curled under its carapace, and the jaws on its underside twitched. She couldn’t detect any eyes, but it was aware of her. Its legs started to unfurl.
Finn spoke between gritted teeth. “I thought you said—”
It pounced, its multiple legs scrabbling for purchase among the flaps and ribbing on the shoulder of her jacket. She dropped to her knees, into the soft mud. Its grip was surprisingly powerful, its weight heavier than expected for a flat creature not much bigger than the palm of her hand. Then it was on her neck, its jaws gnawing against her flesh. She forced herself to endure it.
“No!” she yelled as Finn advanced, and he pulled up short.
Its bites were superficial—she knew that from having seen what they did to Zeke. It had taken dozens of these creatures to rip off his flesh in thin layers, gradually working down to the bone. She could handle a few bites—
but damn, it hurt.
Around her, the jungle rustled with movement. Finn’s boots crunched on the moist litter as he turned around warily, rifle at the ready.
“They’re everywhere,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
The slater scurried down Edie’s chest, over her hip, and across a meter of ground before launching a pale glossy thread into the vines above and clambering away. In the tangle of vines above her, dozens more slaters—some dangling from threads, some clasping the vines—were just visible in the dim light. They remained motionless for several seconds. Then they moved, but not to attack. They swung across the vines on their pendulums of silk, scuttled over the jungle floor. Some opened up their wings and flew across the clearing. Going about their business.
Finn hunkered down beside her, dumping his pack and rifle on the ground. Having realized the slaters were ignoring them, he turned his attention to the graze on the side of Edie’s neck.
“It needed to have a taste,” she said.
“I can see that. Jeez…” He had the medkit open and started wiping the wound.
Edie watched the jungle. “It worked. Its cyphviruses recognized my biopattern from the baseline I programmed into the BRAT, and the BRAT told it to leave me alone.”
“And they’ll all leave you alone now?”
“The jungle is like one organism. Everything talks to everything else.”
“What about me?”
“The slaters weren’t interested in you.” There must be a reason why. Then she saw the back of his hand, where the skin was lightly peppered with tiny marks. “The jungle already knows you. Look.”
“Something bit me?”
“An insect bite, looks like. Whatever passes for insects in this place.”
He smeared medigel on her wound and it set into a thin, transparent layer, the anesthetic numbing the stinging. Then he snapped shut the medkit and packed it away.
“Let’s get out of here. And no more surprises, okay?”
Without e-shields it was cold in the depths of the megabiosis. They moved as fast as possible to keep warm, weaving around trunks and boulders and cushiony growths of pallid fungus, cutting through hanging foliage and bracken on the ground, and avoiding the sharp crystalline vines. The pale, moist vegetation glittered in the ghostly predawn light so that the jungle no longer seemed dank or dangerous.
Life rippled around them. Edie swung the lamp to examine as much as she could. Wormlike invertebrates burrowed into fleshy flower petals and tiny multilegged creatures crawled in neat lines along their feathered veins. Some species were physically attached to the stalks and vines by tendrils and nodules, blurr
ing the boundaries between plant and animal.
After three long, tiring hours, there was enough weak light filtering through the canopy to conclude that dawn had broken. Within minutes, the vines lost their crystalline rigidity and became translucent again. Nine hours after the bomb blast, they seemed to retain some memory of that violence, because they moved restlessly, knitting and unknitting in a sluggish dance.
Finn estimated they were more than halfway to the perimeter when they stopped briefly to eat and rest. With the end in sight, Edie couldn’t hold her main fear inside any longer.