“If I wanted to hide something from you,” Meloku said, “if I asked you to pretend that you had never seen something, you would do so without hesitation.”
“Absolutely.” Joanna was almost proud.
“You shouldn’t be proud of that. I’m not.”
“You do not have anything to be ashamed of,” Joanna said, playing the counselor. She did so without feeling. It meant nothing. It was just a way to get to the goal.
“I am not a good person,” Meloku said. “I never will be.”
From the way that Joanna shifted in her chair, Meloku could tell that she had made her genuinely uncomfortable. Joanna was trying and failing to think of something to say.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Meloku said. She stood. “Excuse me.”
Joanna tried to follow her, but a dismissive wave halted her. From Meloku, that was as good as an order. She just watched Meloku go.
Meloku retired to Veroncia’s room, to the wooden bed. Sunlight poured through the barred, jail-like window. A vortex of dust motes swirled above her breath. It was a long time to go until nightfall.
At midday, a servant slid the usual tray of water and bread underneath the door slot. Meloku did not even look. Her matter disassembler crawled over to claim it.
11
Osia’s crew had been at sea for longer stretches than this, but they had never traveled such a distance. Coral’s course had already brought them into the Indian Ocean.
The air turned cooler, though not cold. Osia stood at the prow. Salt dotted her lips. She bounced pulse scans overland every morning. She no longer bothered to hide from Ways and Means’ other agents. This trip to strange waters had invigorated more than her senses. Her foolhardiness, too.
If the rest of Ways and Means’ crew was still intent on harassing her, she never would have escaped them anyway. Not in the long run.
Most of the time, she found little of note. Fishing traffic, river boats, vast and irrigated barley and rice and poppy fields. And even vaster tracts of wilderness. This world was still broadly unpopulated. Had she chosen to exile herself on land instead of at sea, she would have had little difficulty avoiding the natives.
She also would have found more signs of trouble, and sooner.
Her pulse scans often found more people than homes or agriculture capable of supporting them. The signatures of metal weapons, metal armor, were clear enough even at this distance. They were soldiers. Trace particles of foreign cooking carried on the wind. Jerky spiced with Indonesian pepper. Russian dried rye. Mongolian fermented yogurts.
No matter where she sailed, smoke accompanied the winds that carried her. Too much for just cooking.
After long enough spent ruminating on that, she asked Coral to set their course far from land. The shore melted into the horizon.
Next, the east coast of Africa, and then she would take her crew on a journey few native ships were equipped to make, around that continent’s southern cape. Then onto western Africa and Europe. She would see how far Ways and Means’ influence had spread.
She could not articulate why she was sure that, if she had asked for the data rather than taken it, Ways and Means would have given her something other than the truth. It had the capability to lie, certainly. It could produce a simulacrum of the truth so convincing and detailed that she would have had no power to tell the difference. But it had no reason to fear telling her. There was nothing she could do to change things.
Yet it had discouraged her from heading this way. If she believed it was sincere about anything, it had been sincere about that.
With only salt on the wind and no ships within ninety kilometers, she could almost pretend things were as they had been for the past three decades.
Her crew struggled to cope with a strange set of stars and winds. Osia had cut their access to Ways and Means’ weather satellites. She trusted their ability to cope, but they did not bother to hide their frustration.
She returned to the port aft railing, where she had gone into her last fugue. It was the place Ira had taken to calling her “brooding spot.” She needed the quieter space to think. The forecastle blocked the wind.
Even after living with her as long as they had, her constructs did not quite understand the range of her hearing. They did not have her specs. She had never shared them. Their words carried on the wind.
“Paranoid, distrustful,” Braeloris told Coral and Straton. “Even of me. Even of it.” She must have meant Ways and Means.
Coral pointed out, “She knows you always have an ulterior motive.”
“I do not. That was fiction.” In the serial, Braeloris had tried her hand at comforting the other crew mostly to make herself feel better. “We should compile our concerns, send them to Ways and Means. It might be compelled to take her back.”
Straton asked, “Whether she wants to go or not?”
The wind had shifted, taken the rest of their words. Osia could not talk to them about it without giving away her eavesdropping.
Ira said little. He just spun his rigging knife. Of all of them, he alone seemed to realize the distance at which she could hear them. She caught him staring at her when work slowed. Studying her.
One late red evening, he settled his elbows on the railing next to her. “Going to be like this for the entire voyage, then? Like a gargoyle? Not going to help?”
“You don’t need my help,” she said.
“It would be nice,” he said. “It would show that you cared. Sailing around the tip of the world, in a boat as primitive as this, is not the easiest thing you could have asked us to do.”
“You seem to be doing well enough.” She had tracked their position. If her crew had made any serious error, she would have corrected them.
“It’s not about whether we ‘do’ well or not. It’s about us, watching you stand here, doing nothing.”
“You’re the crew. I’m the captain.” And they were not sentient. Their social performances were mimicry, a knot of feedback loops. It did not often behoove her to remind them of that, though. They were her only company. And they were sufficiently personlike to needle her.
“Is this what it was like up there?” He nodded to the reddening sky. “You were the crew, it was the captain? It just gave orders, and you followed?”
“Broadly,” she said, though she could not hide her discomfort. “Yes.”
“Then how did you end up here?”
She tightened her lips, looked at him.
Ira answered with a low, mocking whistle. “She moved. Now we know she’s serious.”
There were not many things Osia missed about her human body, but the ability to take deep and measured breaths was one of them. Simple physical actions that helped to defuse her. Her demiorganic body could be a prison cell. She had no easy releases.
She turned back to the sea, and the deep red of the horizon. Truncated radio traffic from Ways and Means’ satellites babbled at the fringes of her awareness.
Ira stepped as if to leave, and then stopped, behind her. “Do you think Ways and Means cared about you?” he asked.
Osia did not dignify him with an answer. She focused on anything other than what she was hearing and thinking. She failed. She must have meant something to Ways and Means. It had listened to her. Even after all this time, and in the face of mounds of contrary evidence, she refused to believe that she had been made a scapegoat. Maybe that was part of it. But it couldn’t have been everything.
Ira asked, “Do you care about how we feel?”
“I only care about what I need to,” Osia said. “Why are you pushing me?”
“I’ve been trying to make up my mind about which side I want to be on.”
“Whose ‘side?’” Osia asked. She refused to look at him. “There are no ‘sides’ on this ship.”
“Thanks. I figured it out.”
Ira punched his rigging knife into her lower back.
The tip of his blade speared
through her internal shock armor. Before she had a chance to process what was happening, he had buried his knife to the hilt.
Its point pierced a command routing node deep in her spine.
Her vision flashed white and dark. A flurry of confused nerve signals spiked through her system. It was the nearest thing to pain her body would deliver.
An instant later, emergency combat awareness programs kicked in. Her sense of time dilated. Dimly, she perceived Ira sawing upward, destroying vital nerve threads.
Half of her body had dropped away from her. Her legs locked in place, inoperable. Ira had destroyed most of the nerves reaching them.
He couldn’t be allowed to continue sawing, no matter how unpleasant her options for removing him. She had to do something, her training screamed. She reviewed her combat programs’ options, selected one.
She grabbed the railing for leverage. Then she twisted, first to the left, and then – as Ira struggled to keep his grip – hard to the right. His knife lodged in her internal armor. Ira lost his hold on it. The knife stayed in her.
Ira lost his footing along with his grip. He stumbled into her as she turned around. She lost her balance, sagged into the railing. He fell into her, facing her.
She tasted the heat of his breath, of his cheeks.
Osia did not dream like unaltered humans did. But she remembered what dreams were like. They were like this. Moments of nonsensicality punctuated by discontinuity. Narratives of anxiety strung together. This was a dream. This couldn’t be happening. All the usual denials.
Color returned in flashes, strobes of broken perception. Ira snarled, his face red-rimmed against the sunlight, hallucinatory.
Pieces of her awareness kept dropping out, taken over by emergency response and management programs. Ira’s blade had struck where her impact armor was the thinnest. Ira shouldn’t have known to hit where he had. He’d gone right through armor and muscle, known which node to destroy. Up or down a centimeter, and he would have done less.
Now he attacked her like she was human. He squeezed her neck with one broad hand. She had no airway to crush. He should have known that.
She saw the rest of her constructs over his shoulder, open mouths shadowed. They were yelling. Calling for Ira to stop. Coral was closest. Thi was running to help.
Osia could not trust thir when thi got here.
Osia’s combat programs presented limited options. Without functioning legs, she could not run away. She did not have the leverage to shove him off.
Her nervous system’s best hard route to her legs had been destroyed. The surviving connections did not have either the bandwidth or the speed to control demiorganic musculature. There was another option: radio. In the absence of signals from above, her waist and legs had become independent, governed by emergency management programs. There were radio receiver cells scattered through Osia’s body.
She would need time. Precious seconds. Her autonomous systems below the point of damage would need convincing that Osia’s transmissions weren’t a hostile force trying to hijack her body. Encrypted handshakes would have to be exchanged, extracted, triple-checked. And then came the hard work of developing a language of command.
Ira brought his free hand behind him. She felt his muscles shift. He was grabbing something. Another weapon. A knife. Of course he would bring another if he planned to attack her.
She began receiving some signals from below her waist. The security handshakes were in progress. But her demiorganic muscles were complicated, and her bandwidth limited. Her autonomous systems had not yet developed an effective language for movement. Osia did not need to wait to see the flash of Ira’s second knife to decide that she had only a single option.
She lifted her arm from the railing, and then drove her elbow into it as hard as she could. The wood splintered. The railing cracked, gave way.
Osia fell backward.
As Ira whirled his knife, the two of them lost what little balance they had. He tried to back away. Osia grabbed his wrist. She pulled him with her.
His nightmare snarl turned to an open-mouthed yelp of surprise. Her world tilted.
They plummeted. She held on to his wrist. In midair, she squeezed hard, felt artificial bone fracture, pop. He let go of his knife. It tumbled away, struck the water at the same instant they splashed in.
The water was a sensory shock. Her vision went black and white again. Digital agony trilled up her back as salt water crept through her wound, into systems never meant to be exposed. Her nerves shorted. Her last, tenuous hardwired connections to her legs flared and died. Damage reports plastered her subconscious.
But her autonomous systems finally established radio control of her legs.
She kicked free of Ira’s tangle of limbs. Her ankle landed in his sternum. She pushed herself away. Her body was still not quite hers. She needed time to test her new means of controlling her body. Her legs twitched and jerked as her autonomous systems ran them through a battery of tests, calibrating response times.
Most of all, now that she had the mental energy to spare, she needed to call for help. She sent a distress signal to Ways and Means, via its satellite network.
Nothing. No answer.
Shock boiled in the back of her throat. She tried again, knowing she would receive no answer. Rage was next. She was several meters under the surface, but that shouldn’t have interfered. Even from here, she could pick up truncated radio snippets of routine chatter. Her signal was being ignored.
She and Ira had plunged in head-first. Ira thrashed to right himself, swam toward the surface. Osia’s combat programs presented her with a slew of options. They sensed her mood, ordered them from wicked to cruel.
Osia’s feet had been designed for freefall gripping. They had toes as long, and dexterous, as her fingers. She lashed out with one of them, snagged Ira by his tunic’s collar. She bunched the linen tight, squeezing his neck. She dragged him down.
Neither she nor he needed to breathe. An important difference between them, though, was that she had been built to approximate a human, and Ira to simulate one. He still drew breath. He turned purple if it was held. He believed he needed it.
She pulled him into darkened waters.
The boat loomed over them, a heavy shadow under sunset-red glimmering waters. He swung at her leg. Underwater, he was too sluggish to batter her.
Osia carried him under the port hull. She swung him around, slammed him against the wood. The planks were slick with the slime of sea travel.
Ira kicked and spasmed. He was losing control. She held him against the wood, firmly, arcing her legs around and hooking them under the boat to keep herself anchored. He reached toward the sunlight. She felt his pulse beat hard against his skin, false capillaries burst.
She waited until his eyes turned toward her, and he finally he found her gaze.
The angle of the sunlight fell so that he could see her. “Why?” she mouthed.
He opened his lips. A torrent of bubbles exploded out, made a brief curtain between them. He sucked water into his lungs. He convulsed.
She gripped him tighter. He turned his eyes to her ,one last, desperate moment. And then the convulsion stopped. He went limp in her hands. His pulse, already thready, ceased.
He had to be faking it. Tricking her. She held him a minute longer, waiting. His neck hung loose. He stared. A deep pulse scan found no electrical activity in any of his muscles or nervous centers. If he was faking death, it was a very good simulacrum.
He could have lived. Should have lived. Again, she wondered if this was a dream.
She had to find out more. There was only one good way to do that, and to make sure that he wasn’t playing dead.
Pinning him to the hull with one hand, she drew back her other and smashed it into his chest.
Fragments of titanium and steel, scraps of skin, and ribbons of gore splashed her arm. A dark cloud mushroomed between her fingers.
She pried his me
tal ribs away. She reached inside, fished through silver viscera of nerve fibers, battery coils, and muscle gel, she found what she was looking for: slivers of foggy yellow glass. Memory cells. They were still slick with fake blood.
She placed them in her mouth to keep them from floating with the current. She shook her hand free of blood and gel. Even if he had faked his death, he couldn’t have faked this. She released him.
It did not take him long to sink into the mote-filled dark.
She swam underneath her ship’s keel, taking her time. She surfaced, as quietly as she could, on the side opposite the one she’d fallen in. Even without pushing herself over the deck, she heard the others talking, yelling.
They were calling for her. Calling for Ira. Braeloris was weeping. More than once, Braeloris claimed, she had told Coral she was afraid Ira would do something like that. At that, the others grew more heated. They shouted at each other, and then scuffled.
They did not sound like assassins.
She could hear Ways and Means’ satellites chatter on all their normal frequencies. She made one last-chance call to Ways and Means. No answer. Her fury burned incandescent.
Most of her crew was by the broken railing, but Tass had remained by the mainmast, her hand over her mouth. She turned. When she saw Osia climb over the edge of the deck, she gave a cry.
On the other side of the ship, Coral had gotten thir hand around Braeloris’s chin, had raised a fist. Straton was yanking thir off. At the cry, they all turned.
Osia had not bothered to grab Ira’s knife. Her hands were better weapons, but that meant she had nothing to brandish, nothing to signal to her crew that they shouldn’t get closer. With a swift stroke, she chopped at the railing, snapped a segment loose. She leveled it, held the sharper end facing Coral. Thi halted mid-stride.
Coral actually looked stunned.
For that alone, Osia couldn’t go without explaining herself. “I cannot trust you or anything right now.”
“He must have switched sides, but none of us did. We don’t have any reason. We wouldn’t betray you or anybody”
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