Ironheart

by J. Boyett

  Fehd frowned. “Um. Sorry? Sorry, Anya, I don’t really follow....”

  “No matter. Forgive me. Over the years I have grown accustomed to speaking to myself.”

  Anya stood, and went to the door. Fehd cleared his throat, and said after her, “Heading back to Ironheart, I guess?”

  Anya nodded. She said, “Were I you, I would not feel too keenly the loss of that coffin. You might be surprised to find out just how very simple its design truly is.”

  Fehd ignored that. As she reached the door, he said, “I guess you think I’ve got a pretty low character, huh?” Immediately upon hearing the words leave his mouth, he hated himself even more. He was especially disgusted by his own faux-cheerful tone.

  Before she left, she deigned to give him one backward glance. “No matter,” she said. “I don’t need you to be of good character.”

  Eight

  Usually, when Willa wasn’t with Anya, she was working with the guys on ship business, or else was alone with Burran in their quarters. But the next day Madaku found her in a quiet moment alone in one of the lounges, curled up in a blue chair sculpted into a depression in the silver bulkhead. She was reading her tablet.

  Approaching her almost shyly, he said, “Willa?”

  “Yes?” she said. Then she looked at him and, a second time, with more energy, she said, “Yes?”

  He cleared his throat. “That code of Anya’s?... I think I’m on my way to cracking it....”

  ***

  Later that day, Anya called to say she’d like to invite Willa to come to Ironheart and spend the evening. To spare the crew of the Canary any trouble, she was willing to come pick her up in her own shuttle. Fehd still felt so ashamed that he gave his consent automatically.

  But as they were getting dressed in their private quarters, Burran tried to dissuade Willa from going over. Actually, what he said was, “I forbid you to go over there.” Willa laughed and kicked him on his naked backside. He was too solid and she too slender for that to budge him, not that she’d kicked very hard.

  He grinned ruefully. “Let me rephrase: if it were possible for me to forbid you, that’s what I would do.”

  “Well, it isn’t.”

  “You’re as bad as Fehd and Madaku. I know you like the woman. I can respect that. But you should be able to see that we can’t trust her. If she wasn’t here for the mining, then it’s fishy that she ever wound up way the hell out at XB-79853-D7-4, of all places.”

  “You mean Burran,” she corrected, and then threw her arms back around his neck with a grin. “I told you days ago: I’m naming the planet Burran.”

  “No you’re not,” he said, and squirmed out of her embrace. (Few people in the galaxy had ever seen Burran squirm, besides Willa.)

  Willa laughed. It was an honest, hearty laugh, but there was a hint of sadness to it too. “Look at the way you wince! Why shouldn’t I name the planet after you?”

  “Well, anyway. Back to what you were saying....”

  She shook him. She was so much smaller than he that she ought not to have been able to move him, so he must have been allowing his body to be rocked back and forth. “What’s wrong with naming the planet after my lover?” she demanded.

  He grinned, as if he thought she were cute. Which was probably true, but one could still sense a self-conscious anxiety behind the smile, a strong desire to change the subject. “Nothing, I guess, if you want to name it after some random thing. I guess any word will do just as good as any other. There’s nothing special about me, though. Unless it’s the fact that I love you, but even that isn’t unusual, in case you haven’t noticed how Madaku moons over you.”

  She shook her head back at him. The sadness in her smile was closer to the surface now. “You know one thing I do like about Anya? She’s one of the only people I’ve ever met who doesn’t think she’s just like everyone else. I don’t care if there are a couple trillion humans spread through the galaxy, you don’t have to get embarrassed and think I’m fooling myself if I decide you’re special enough to name a planet after.”

  Burran didn’t reply at first. He only looked at her with a dreamy gaze, as if one of the things he loved about her was the way she could make him almost believe in goofy things that he knew were almost certainly untrue, because the mathematical odds were so astronomically against them.

  Her arms around his shoulders, she let her whole weight dangle from his bulk, and he barely even noticed it. “Anyway. You’re afraid she’s going to kidnap me and make me be her intuiter?”

  Anger bubbled up and out of Burran. “Yes, I am. She needs an intuiter. And if she runs off with you, we won’t be able to follow. Not till we can get another intuiter out here, and by then it’ll be too late.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. I wouldn’t intuit for her.”

  “People have ways of persuading other people. You know that, you’re not as naïve as you make out.” He slid the backs of his fingers tenderly down her cheek. “She could do things to you, and I wouldn’t be there to protect you.”

  Willa gazed into space, perhaps replaying some of the times she had spent with Anya. “I don’t say you’re wrong to be suspicious of her. She does have secrets. Or maybe it’s not even that, exactly ... the truth is, she’s the hardest person to read that I’ve ever met. Not because she’s being deceptive, necessarily. She’s just so different from anyone I’ve ever known. She has, I don’t know, depths. But one thing I’m pretty sure of is that she doesn’t want to hurt me.”

  “‘Pretty’ sure. Baby, listen. You’re a genius, I know that. But you trust too much in your intuition. It tricks you into thinking that you should empathize with everyone. That’s a good way to forget how dangerous people can really be. Why don’t you leave the security decisions to me?”

  “The real decisions, you mean.” Willa’s tone remained one of teasing banter, but an attentive listener would have heard an edge underneath it. “You come from a planet with a patriarchal tradition, and sometimes you don’t even realize how much it’s rubbed off on you, honey. You’re happy to acknowledge my competence, but only as long as it’s limited to one narrow specific field that doesn’t impinge on yours.”

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “You’re from a patriarchal world too, though, you know.”

  “Yeah, but I left it. Going over to Ironheart is a calculated risk, hon.”

  “A calculated risk is when you gain something. What do you stand to gain, by going over to Ironheart for this slumber party? The chance to avoid hurting your new buddy’s feelings?”

  She draped herself over him again, and peeked up at him like a mischievous animal. “How about hacking our way into that alien code of hers?”

  Burran had been buttoning his shirt. Now he stopped and looked down at her.

  And then she told him about the conversation she’d had with Madaku earlier that day.

  “Madaku thinks he may have cracked the code,” she said. “But we can’t sneak a message to Ironheart’s AI asking it to open up, because Anya’s likely to intercept. For that, Madaku would need to perfect a transparent tendril, and the mutative function of Ironheart’s code is too fast and unpredictable for him to manage that yet. He’s working on it, and he says he’s got some promising models already running in our system. But for now it’s better if someone goes over there and attaches the plug manually, and hopes the plug can persuade Ironheart’s AI not to ding a notification of its installation to Anya. And I’m the only one with a standing invitation.”

  Burran shook his head. “You sneaky little minx,” he said, wonderingly. “Madaku, too.”

  “I don’t feel very good about tricking her. But you’re right, we do need to know what extra capabilities she’s got hidden. On the one hand it’s her own business, but on the other we don’t know enough about her to safely let her keep those kinds of secrets.”

  Burran frowned. “I’m no expert on coding, but wouldn’t programming a transparent tendril for a code with a base logic architecture that’s foreig
n to the Registry be incredibly hard? Wouldn’t you practically have to re-build the original pre-mutative code from scratch? Basically go back and read the minds of programmers whose whole species might have been extinct for ten thousand years?”

  “Yup. But don’t remind Madaku of how impossible it is, or he’ll start remembering he can’t do it.”

  He kept staring at her face, like he wanted to memorize it. “Every time I start thinking you’re soft, you go and prove you’re smarter than me.”

  “I’m not smarter—if I’ve learned how to be sneaky and careful, it’s been from listening to you. And anyway, I can be soft, too.”

  “Be very careful around her. The AI analysis makes it look like this code originated with some unknown sentients, that we can’t yet identify in the Registry. Maybe we can’t identify them because they’re not around anymore.”

  “An extinction event?” Willa frowned. “Okay. But why should that have anything to do with Anya?”

  “She’s a pre-Registry woman, Willa. Or at least an early-Registry one. That implies she’s also pre-Hygienes.”

  Willa stared at him another moment; once it sunk in she laughed. “Oh, honey! You seriously think Anya might have acquired some code and then annihilated its engineers? Annihilated their whole species along with all trace of their math strategies and cognitive structures? To, what, protect herself from hackers?”

  “I didn’t say it’s likely, but certainly she might have done that. Even the Canary could be weaponized adequately to destroy a planetary system. And the historical record has plenty of examples of stuff like that. Remember, the point of the Hygienes was to cut those kinds of destructive impulses out of the galactic gene pool. And Anya claims to date from before the Hygienes really got going. For all we know she could date from long before anyone had ever even thought of them.”

  It was impossible; it was too big an idea to wrap her head around. Before the Hygienes? No one had ever heard of suspended animation that could take one that far through historical time, without many many repeated hibernations; the only other way was an epic journey through the relativistic distortions of sublight, realspace travel. Merely trying to imagine the idea of encountering a revenant from those days gave Willa chills. For a moment she was lost in the awesome terror of the notion.

  But soon she noticed Burran’s mournful expression, and that called her back. She shook him, tugging and shoving as hard as she could. He allowed his muscular weight to be jostled back and forth. “Come on,” she said. “Why the sad face?”

  He softly ran the backs of his fingers down her cheek again. “Now that I know you’re right to go, I can’t try to stop you anymore.”

  ***

  Anya came, picked Willa up, and took her back to Ironheart. A couple of hours later Burran was in a small room with no specific purpose, just a place to use a tablet or consult the monitor. He was supposed to be triple-checking the safeguards along the exploitation chain’s realspace links, making sure there weren’t any undefended spots where someone could skim the top off of the ore, and, more likely, that there weren’t any unpredicted cosmic phenomena that might prove damaging. Burran had already confirmed all this ad nauseam, but he needed something to distract him. Even so, when Madaku entered the room, he didn’t look up.

  That didn’t stop Madaku from approaching him. “Listen,” he said, softly, as if to make sure an imaginary third person in the room couldn’t hear him. “Why did you let Willa go over to Ironheart?”

  “Willa wanted to go. I knew you think I’m a thug, but I don’t boss Willa around.”

  “Maybe this once you should have, if there’s really no special reason to let her go.”

  Burran tried to keep his eyes on the module’s schematics. How had he let Willa talk him into this? She was always doing that, making him believe that her idea was the best way to do things. No one else was able to persuade him like that.

  “Willa said you had managed to break Anya’s alien code.” If Madaku didn’t think Willa would be able to set up a link with Anya’s code, after all, then they’d get her back ASAP, even if it meant force-docking with that gods-damned relic.

  Madaku looked guilty. Burran sucked his teeth and remained calm as he waited to see whether that guilty look was because Burran knew he’d been showing off to try to impress Burran’s girlfriend, or, much worse, because he’d shown off by pretending to have cracked the code when maybe he hadn’t, and had therefore sent Willa over there with a lot more confidence than was warranted.

  Luckily, it seemed to be the first one. “Yes, it looks like I finally did,” said Madaku. “But she would never try to go over and use it herself.”

  “You don’t know Willa. Besides, if you didn’t think she’d do anything with the knowledge, why did you share it with her?”

  Burran knew the main reason was that Madaku had wanted to impress her. But he asked anyway, because he enjoyed watching the way it made Madaku sweat.

  “Listen,” Madaku said again. “I’ve come around to your point of view. There’s something too suspicious about Anya for us simply to ignore it. And Fehd isn’t going to be any help.”

  “What, are you so concerned all of a sudden because Willa’s there alone?”

  “Um. Yes. Exactly.”

  Burran let that settle. Then he said, “Yeah, okay, I respect that. But don’t panic. Willa’s more resourceful than you think.”

  “Really?”

  Burran found Madaku’s incredulity offensive. Both his mouth and his innards twisted as he said, “For someone who acts like he worships her, you sure don’t give her much credit. Willa can out-brain the shipload of us. Hell, we’re more likely to wind up needing her help, than the other way around.”

  There was a thrumming vibration through the floor, and through the console that both men were leaning on. Their eyes locked in alarm.

  “What was that?” said Madaku. “Did something hit us?”

  “No. No way. Not hard enough to do that. But why haven’t the alarms—?”

  Right on cue, the klaxon came on. Though neither man had ever heard a klaxon in real life before, only in drills, they could feel that this was the real thing—the alarm cranked itself up slowly, as if it had been asleep and was groaning at having to get up. All the lights went red, and the computer’s voice, strangely distorted, announced, “Attack! Attack! We are under attack! Attack! Attack! We are under attack!...” and so on.

  “What the hell’s wrong with the computer?!” demanded Burran.

  For a moment Madaku’s eyes were wild with confusion. Burran was about to hail the captain, but he paused and waited because he could see that Madaku was groping toward an answer. Madaku said, “A hack! Anya’s hacked us with her code!... She didn’t know that I’ve partially decoded it and there are examples of her logic architecture in the system—the Canary must be using the models to fight back. If Anya’s attack is doing this much damage with our system able to program antibodies, it would’ve knocked us out completely without the code.” It was lucky she hadn’t even bothered to peer through their scramblers and check, Burran supposed.

  “She was going to kill us, now that she’s got Willa.”

  Madaku hesitated, then said, “Yeah.”

  Burran wanted to run somewhere, do something, but this was the kind of thing one handled with computers—he dove onto the nearest console, even though Madaku was the superior cyber-jockey and likely to get results faster.

  Madaku swiped readings back and forth with his fingers. Sure enough, Ironheart had launched an attack; the Canary AI was using the analysis of Ironheart’s code, that Madaku had stored in its memory banks, to breed counter-programs and fend it off, create work-arounds that the Ironheart code wouldn’t recognize as foreign to itself. Until another nanosecond had gone by, that was, and the Ironheart code had mutated enough that the Canary’s work-arounds no longer passed. With all Madaku’s work on the mutative factor, the rates of evolution were almost but not quite matched on the two sides; so far the Ir
onheart’s rate was outstripping them, by an infinitesimal amount. The Canary would probably hold out for another four minutes. That was pretty good—it would mean their AI had fended off Ironheart’s code through billions of iterations. Everyone on board would still be dead, though.

  Burran started to think that maybe it was a good thing Willa was on the other ship, after all. Even if she was a prisoner, at least she’d be alive.

  He said, “The comm system’s coming back online.” A particularly effective work-around must have morphed into being somewhere in that system. Burran mashed the comm toggle. “Fehd! Hey, Fehd! You got any idea what’s going on?”

  Fehd’s hysterical voice came through the speaker: “Oh gods, she’s watching me!”

  “I think he’s in the observation deck,” said Madaku, checking the ship’s schematic and Fehd’s locator blip.

  “Fehd!” said Burran. “Fehd, calm down!”

  “Oh my gods, she walks in vacuum!” shrieked Fehd. “She walks in vacuum!”

  “Hey, there’s something funny going on with the pressure in the observation deck,” said Madaku, then another flashing red light caught his eye. “Shit, the inertial buffers are acting up. That’ll make us vulnerable to—”

  There was a massive jolt. They flew across the room and slammed into the far wall.

  Nine

  Despite what he’d just said, Madaku couldn’t figure out what had happened at first. He’d never been inside a ship that had hit something while its buffers were noticeably weakened. The physicality of the experience was so far outside his ken that he had trouble categorizing it.

  They were being shoved against the wall they’d slammed into. To Madaku it felt like the artificial gravity had gone wonky and had set “down” as the corner where the floor met the wall. “What’s happening?” he shouted.

  Burran was crawling back to the consoles. “Something’s pushing us, I think.”