His last memory backup was two years old. That was before he had come to the surface to work with Meloku. When he came back, it would be like they had never met.
Meloku did not have to overhear much narrow-beam chatter to know that the crew was furious. Bitter. Fractious. Meloku did not know how much they had been told about Ways and Means’ backup or the other amalgamates’ plans. The other amalgamates had contacted Ways and Means before, but she doubted Ways and Means would have told its crew anything. Maybe it had good reason. She wondered how many of them would join the amalgamates’ conspiracy if they could.
Ways and Means told her, “We will be shunting power away from the passageways behind you. Oxygen pumps will not function. Please remain in the hull segment you just entered until power is restored.”
“I’m not planning on going to my cabin soon.”
On the surface, Meloku had spoken to Ways and Means only at intervals, and not for a long time. By its standards, it had been positively chatty. Best to take advantage while she could. She transmitted, “So you really were planning on colonizing this world.”
“In the space of a century or so. On terms its people could understand. We would use their military. Their forms of government. And create an illusion that they had their own leaders.”
“Just like the old days.” The amalgamates had hijacked the governments of thousands of planes. It was a manipulator par excellence. It had aimed to unify this world under its largest, richest, most militarily capable government: Yuan China.
Then the colonization could begin. With a single government, managed by its agents, Ways and Means would have had an easier time introducing itself and its crew. Especially since Ways and Means’ triennial visits had primed the Earth’s peoples to accept gods from the sky.
Ways and Means said, “Yes.”
“You could have taken over immediately. Skip the screwing around. It would have made your crew a lot happier.” Her, too, as she had been.
“We had been persuaded to a different plan.”
By Osia, Meloku realized. By Habidah. By the monk Niccoluccio Caracciola. Niccoluccio’s thoughts and experiences had blasted through Ways and Means’ minds. His perspective had become one of its.
Ways and Means said, “We had come to believe that it would be healthier for the people below if we allowed them to preserve their culture and sense of identity.”
“I doubt the people who brought you to that point of view would want you screwing with this world at all.”
“We would expect not.”
Ways and Means was not the type to apologize. Or to ever feel it should. It said, “We have to provide for our crew’s needs. None of them were prepared for a life outside the Unity. They need a context which we cannot provide alone.”
She had been among them. She was guilty too. It was all moot now, probably. Ways and Means’ doppelganger had spoiled it. She wondered how long Ways and Means had known it was coming, and how deep the enemy’s infiltration had already gone.
She could not stop thinking about the communications satellites. She did not know if Ways and Means had always had complete control of the satellites, or if it only seized them at the moment that mattered most. The intruder had ostensibly tried to block her and Osia’s calls. If Ways and Means had had control all along, it might have heard them.
Before Ways and Means had sent the shuttle, it had treated them as though discovering them for the first time. That could have been another deception. It would not have wanted to reveal, to anyone, that it retained control of its satellites. That would have forfeited its advantage. It had only blown that when it could be sure of getting her, Osia, and Fiametta aboard.
Betrayal upon betrayal. Maybe. Meloku did not know what to think. She did not ask. She did not want to know the answer.
At least she understood why, back when she had entered Hawkwood’s camp, the devices there had only deactivated after the second scan. Those devices had been the intruder’s, not Ways and Means’. The intruder had had control of the satellites, or believed it had, but hadn’t wanted to risk giving that away by reorienting their sensors and telescopes to track Ways and Means’ surface agents. They hadn’t known she was its agent until she had pulse scanned them.
The first flight of shuttles were close to their berths. Meloku squeezed her hands into fists. When she had come here, she had not known if she was going to go through with meeting the shuttles. Now she had nowhere else to go. Several embarkation lounges were nearby.
Like the observation dome, this lounge was another showy area built for guests, though this time the window was not real. A projected view of space blanketed a bulkhead. Rows of empty seats and couches faced a five-meter-wide hatch.
The shuttles’ engine burns glittered across a half-crescent Earth. Closer, they became lightning bugs, flitting about. One by one, the shuttles settled into the hangar complexes, found their berths.
Meloku planted her hands on the back of one of the seats. No one waited with her. The crew had their own problems to worry over.
Dr Habidah Shen was the first through the hatch. Meloku had not kept track of the disembarkees’ movement, had not expected Habidah to actually be the first. She stiffened. She had hoped for more time to think.
Habidah did not bother to hide her surprise either. Or her displeasure. She scowled, looked away. Just like that, Meloku was back to feeling bitter. She bit the inside of her cheek and folded her arms.
Kacienta was right behind. She brushed her floating hair out of her eyes. Neither she nor Habidah had packed any gear. Habidah was still in costume, European style, her outfit missing only the wimple. Meloku could not remember the last time she had seen Habidah in anything but costume. She had trimmed the red fabric and laced string around her ankles and sleeves to secure it in freefall.
Meloku strode toward Habidah before Habidah could move elsewhere. Habidah said, “I suppose you’ve got some deep thoughts about all of this you’re going to share with me.”
“If you insist,” Meloku said. “All I wanted to do was apologize.”
“Wonderful,” Habidah said. She turned toward the exit.
Meloku said, “If you want to hear me say you were right about everything I’ve done, this is your opportunity.”
That was enough to make her turn back, but she said, “I’m not a salve for your conscience.”
“I thought you would want to hear it.”
“It sounds like what you want is somebody to listen,” Habidah said. “An apology doesn’t entitle you to anything like that from me.”
“I am sorry.”
“I don’t believe you. And I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”
Habidah had always been very matter of fact, very clinical about these things. After a moment of holding Meloku’s gaze, Habidah turned to go, started walking.
There was little concept or expectation of privacy aboard Ways and Means. All Meloku had to do was ask Ways and Means what Habidah had recently queried it about, and it told her. She had asked it about Niccoluccio. She wanted to know where he was, how to get there.
Meloku said, “I wouldn’t go to him.”
Habidah stopped, foot rigid on the deck. Gradually, she lowered her other leg.
Meloku said, “I just saw him a few hours ago. He’s not the same person. Ways and Means hasn’t been rebuilding him the way he used to be. It’s made someone new in his place.”
Habidah said, “More blood on you.”
“Not this time.”
But Habidah wasn’t listening. She had already turned away, started walking. Kacienta followed, a backward glance tossed in Meloku’s direction.
Meloku didn’t follow. Habidah hadn’t been referring to Meloku specifically. She had meant the whole bunch of them – Meloku, Ways and Means, Osia, everyone she saw as on the other side.
Meloku was guilty. It may not have been possible to do enough to make up for it. She would have to harden herself to accept that.
She had
always thought of herself as a hard person, and was continually surprised by the ways in which she wasn’t.
Ways and Means said, “You should not look for much from her.”
“Then why is she here?” Ways and Means wanted Habidah and Kacienta back with the first batch of evacuees for a reason it hadn’t divulged.
“Dr Shen is an experienced anthropologist. We value her input.”
“About the world you’re leaving behind?” she asked. “You could have gotten them remotely.” These first flights back hadn’t been test flights, to gauge whether the intruder’s combat drones would shoot them down, either. Meloku had checked the crew manifests. Ways and Means had put some of its most senior agents on the other flights.
When Ways and Means didn’t answer, she said, “I’m surprised she accepted your order to come back.”
“We told her, accurately, that there was a good chance the enemy would target her if it returned,” it said. “Unlike our crew, we have no backups of either her or Aquix Kacienta. And it has been a long time since Dr Shen visited Niccoluccio Caracciola. They were once fond of each other.”
Meloku brushed its rationales away. “You’ve got a plan.” That was so obvious that she immediately felt ashamed to have said it. Ways and Means always had plans. “Something involving Habidah.”
Ways and Means did not dignify her meanderings with a response.
Not so long ago, she would have left it there. She wouldn’t have pressed. “What is it?” she asked.
“This could be your final exam,” Ways and Means said. “When you figure it out, let us know.”
34
Osia did not have to be ordered to join the rescue and recovery effort. She did not have to ask. She just went.
Crewmembers raced past her. She did not step aside. Inwardly, she cringed. She had dreaded this moment for decades.
She had not, in all the time she’d been away, been able to trick herself into thinking that she would never come back. She’d known that, at some point, there would be no choice about it. Just as there was no choice about helping with damage control. It was all ingrained.
She was still the Woman Who’d Stopped Them. The one who’d helped keep them from the perfectly exploitable planet below. Who had made their exile so much harder and more limiting than it had to be. They could not be angry with Ways and Means, so they had chosen her instead.
None of them so much as looked at her. She did not detect any pulse scans. No more snippets of narrow-beam transmissions about her.
She had imagined much worse. She started to wonder if, like the first time she’d seen Verse, she had played it up in her head too much.
But no one was going out of their way to talk to her either. Not even after thirty years away. She heard names she knew, saw faces she recognized. Hardly a nod. Everybody aboard was busy.
She focused on her work.
Ways and Means had flooded the damaged hull segment with vacuum. All of its hundreds of kilometers of intestinal passageways were empty. The planarship had changed a great deal, but not by so much that she couldn’t find her way.
After some time, the fields holding her to the deck failed. She propelled herself with her four hands. The beam had scalpeled deep through the hull. The first step back to a semblance of normalcy was to shore up the ship’s structure, replace the slagged supports and beams.
The passageway turned black, twisted. The bulkhead surface cracked and flaked off at her touch. The passageway opened onto a naked canyon.
Thirty meters across the gulf, the other end of the passageway stood open like a cut artery.
Some pieces of the damage zone still glowed red. They bled heat slowly. The stars shone unblinking overhead.
Osia stared. It had been too many years since she had seen the stars without an atmosphere interceding. Shadows occluded them. Construction drones, bearing emergency supports, were arriving at the damaged zone.
Without structural repairs, Ways and Means could not accelerate any faster than a half-g. Any harder, and this hull segment would collapse in on itself. Ways and Means would have had to eject the whole segment, lose one-tenth of its body. It could never have replaced the loss.
Ways and Means was not ready to die a little at a time, bleeding out until there was nothing left. She also knew, without asking, that it was pressing repairs so urgently because it expected to accelerate again soon.
She asked Ways and Means, “Will they go on ignoring me?”
“Do you need them to accept you?”
Osia thought about that. “No. So long as they leave me to live.” She had never felt like any part of a community here. That had never been the point, and not why she’d left.
Part of the trick of living with Ways and Means was learning to ask the right question. It had taken her a long time to figure that out. She hadn’t started with the right one here. What she had to say was not really a question.
“I don’t trust you,” she said.
“We don’t trust us either.”
She blinked. There was a candor in Ways and Means’ voice that she had not expected. She said, “You deflected the crew’s anger at me, deliberately. You thought it would be too disruptive if they focused it entirely on you.”
“We were in flux. It seemed the reasonable thing to do, at the time. And safe for both of us.”
She caught the key phrase. “At the time,” she said. “Does it not seem reasonable to you now?”
“One of the virtues of our backup’s intrusion is that it has given us an impetus to reevaluate our goals.”
Osia said, “That wasn’t an answer.”
“There is no answer,” Ways and Means said. “Yet.”
One of the construction drones sank into the black-edged canyon and halted ten meters away. Its tiny arms bore a malleable mount for a fullerene support pylon. Thoughtfully, it even brought her a torch.
She set a hand on the drone’s belly. Its fields gripped her palm. It pulled her from the severed vein of the passageway and carried her deep into the still-glowing canyon. It brought her to a whale-sized snapped bone, an evulsed fragment of Ways and Means’ superstructural skeleton.
Sparks sometimes radiated from the starry gap above, another crewmember or drone at work. They did not, or would not, talk to her. She was alone with her work.
All the sounds she had were the vibrations carrying through her hands, up her body: the hiss of her torch, the grinding of metal on metal. Just enough to unsettle her. On Earth, she’d always had a whisper of wind, the murmur of the sails, her constructs’ voices.
No amount of calling up even older memories made this easier. She felt like she was being driven to speak with Ways and Means.
Osia said, “I’ve never heard you say that you don’t trust yourself.”
“We have never needed to say.”
“I would have known the answer. It wouldn’t have been what you said. Did the backups change your mind?”
Ways and Means asked, “Are you the same person that you were thirty years ago?”
“In most ways. Yes.”
“If you committed a crime thirty years ago, could you not now be held accountable for it?”
Osia had committed plenty of crimes in her life. Everyone who crewed Ways and Means had. They had served the Unity.
“Naturally,” she said.
“Our backup is us – as we were when we made it. That its life has taken it on a different path is immaterial. Its crime, attacking us, is ours.”
Its backup was its past, its history in the Unity, come to life. This was what Osia was still struggling to comprehend. She could not help but perceive Ways and Means and its backup as separate beings. Everything its backup did, Ways and Means felt it was culpable.
Ways and Means said, “We see more clearly the crimes we would commit to remain part of a body like the Unity. As well as what we are doing now, on this plane, and where it would all lead.”
“Back to
the Unity?” Osia asked. “A million planes, under your control?”
“We’ve had that before. Look at where that brought us.”
Osia flicked on her welding torch. Her vision dialed back to near-solid black, leaving only a white-hot cone of flame visible. “You couldn’t have predicted this.”
“We had thought empire was the best way to keep ourselves safe. Perhaps it is. But we’re increasingly open to finding alternatives.”
Osia asked, “What alternatives? Staying alone in the multiverse?”
“‘Finding’ does not mean ‘found.’”
If it was a solvable problem, Ways and Means would have solved it. “Your backup is still out there. It’s not going to leave us time to noodle over it.”
It said, “We will hold a conference soon. We are pulling in as many people to participate as we can. We need perspectives beyond our own.”
That was unusual. Ways and Means never called for advice. It never even made the pretense of asking for it, or pretending to listen to any offered.
It said, “You are invited.”
Osia nearly stopped her torch. “Me.”
“Your perspective, on us and our situation, is entirely singular.”
A searing-hot spark bit her skin. She set the torch aside. “You’re playing some kind of game.”
It did not deny it. “For very high stakes.”
She had only just settled, in her mind, the idea that Ways and Means had not tried to kill her. At least not this Ways and Means. Its backup had sent the virus to her constructs. It had had control of the satellites she had used to speak with Ways and Means. It had eavesdropped on her telling Ways and Means that she was about to investigate events in the west, and had transmitted the virus to keep her from investigating and interfering.
Ways and Means didn’t see it the same way. It figured that it had tried to kill her. Or at least it was responsible for the attempt.
Osia said, “I don’t believe in redemption. The past is dead. It shouldn’t affect what we do with ourselves now.”
“The past is with us every day,” Ways and Means said. “It sliced this gouge in us.”
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