by J. Boyett
She noted the way Burran was dragging Anya along the floor, and said, “Just undo the magno-cuffs from her legs, Burran, and we’ll walk her to the brig.”
“Hell with that,” said Burran.
“Honey, I can see from the way you’re moving that you’re screwing your back up even more. Just undo her feet. She’s not any stronger than us, physically. We’ll still be able to handle her if she tries any funny stuff on the way to the brig.”
“Baby,” said Burran, “you are a genius. That is absolutely true. You proved that today, for the umpteenth time. No one should have the intuitive mathematical access you need for a jump like that. But you’re also an idiot sometimes. I don’t give a damn how helpless this person seems at this moment, I’m not unbinding her hands or her feet. Not ever.”
He paused. Madaku and Willa halted along with him as he let Anya’s form lay prone on the floor and leaned against the wall, bending over to support himself with his hands on his knees. There was an edge of suffering to his voice as he looked at them and ruefully said, “You’re right about my back, though.”
Madaku realized with surprise that he ought to offer to help, at least until they could hook Burran and his back up to a doctor—it wasn’t that he was unwilling, it was only that the notion of performing such a task of physical work was so completely foreign to him.
He was about to offer to help, but Anya spoke first: “Burran is right,” she said. “I am fond of thee, Willa, but that really was a stupid thing to suggest.”
Anya yanked her knees in toward her chest. It was so fast that by the time the crew registered the action she was twisting to center her body weight below her shoulders and nape, and used that base to spring her legs out and smash Burran right in the knees. The magno-cuffs weren’t heavy enough to slow her down, but they were hard enough to do damage when they hit him. Madaku and Willa hadn’t managed to do more than drop their jaws before Anya reared back again and sailed her feet into both their faces, jerking their heads to the side and knocking them down. Now that he was down she kicked Burran in the face, as well.
Madaku curled on the floor, his face a bubbling shrill stunned alarm of pain. Physical violence was not exactly commonplace in any society he’d moved through; the worst he’d ever experienced had been childhood kerfuffles, and this one blow out-did all of those combined. Shocked, he realized that simply by striking him that way, Anya could have broken his neck and that he could have actually died before hitting the floor. She could have broken my neck! he screamed in silent shock. She could have broken my neck! He recovered enough that the external world began to seep back into his awareness, and he saw Anya hopping away from them toward the escape pod, hands and feet still bound, clanging as she went.
Madaku wasn’t facing Burran, and still hadn’t recovered enough to move his head, but he became aware of the wet snuffling wheeze of the man’s breathing. The sound turned into an angry moan, and then the commotion of him forcing himself upright. Madaku managed to turn his head. Brenan dipped down into his field of vision, placing his hand on Willa to assure himself she was all right. Then he went staggering after Anya.
The escape pod’s hatch slammed closed behind her just before Burran caught up. He slapped the hatch once with the heel of his hand and screamed in rage, then grabbed the nearest wall-mounted tablet. After fiddling with it a few seconds, he said, “Got you.”
By now Madaku had recovered enough that he also was able to pull one of the tablets off the wall, and he hastily caught himself up on what was happening. Naturally the escape pod had assumed there was an emergency as soon as it perceived someone boarding it, and had automatically jettisoned; and, naturally, its AI had steered itself toward the nearest habitable environment, which was Ironheart. But the escape pod was gone now. Burran had managed to override its defenses, which were linked to the Canary’s AI, and vaporized it with the Canary’s blasters.
Madaku released a shaky sigh of relief that Anya was dead, and made a note to thank Burran. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d practiced with the blaster simulator, and doubted he would have remembered in time how to take the weapons under manual control before the pod reached Ironheart.
Then he noticed something funny on the readouts.
“What is that?” he asked Burran. He wasn’t even scared yet, so far was he from guessing the truth.
He didn’t have to specify which bizarre reading he meant. It was strange enough that the tablet highlighted it. Burran stared at his screen a long moment before saying, “It’s her.”
“What?”
“It’s her.”
Madaku took a closer look at the readouts. “Her corpse should be particle dust.”
“It’s not a fucking corpse.”
Now, as Madaku took yet another look at the data, it all came together. His lungs emptied of air so that he couldn’t scream. He recovered himself somewhat and looked at Willa to see how she was doing. She eyed him and Burran, her gaze weary and unsurprised.
The mysterious object traveling through empty space was not an odd piece of debris but a humanoid form. It seemed the escape pod had disintegrated around her while somehow leaving her whole. More or less, anyway; but musculature and skin were whipping themselves back into place over her reconstituted, reanimated bones even as he watched. Even her hair was growing back. Madaku checked her trajectory—hopefully she would continue streaking out into infinite space, or plummet down onto uninhabitable XB-79853-D7-4. But she kept zipping along the pod’s original course toward Ironheart. Madaku remembered that the pod was designed to eject its contents on toward its destination, in the case of such destruction. Not that it would do the escapees any good; it was to provide for the contingency of goods or cargo that might have been ejected in a pod.
As he watched the body hit Ironheart’s hull and begin flapping its limbs for a handhold, Madaku screamed. He recoiled from the tablet as if she might reach for him through the screen.
Burran was doing something on his tablet. On his screen, Madaku saw a flare fill the space where Anya was holding on. Burran had blasted her: a direct hit, or close enough to kill her anyway.
But then he saw that she was still holding onto the hull. The camera zoomed in and he saw it was molten steel she had her hand plunged into; the view was close enough for him to see how she snarled with pain and rage. She yanked the hand out before the steel could freeze around it. Again her skin bubbled off but then regrew its smooth surface anew, almost too fast to see it happen.
Near her the laser had burned a hole clean through the hull. She’d hit one of the add-on compartments—if it had been part of the original hull the Canary’s lasers wouldn’t have pierced it. Madaku watched her clamber to that hole across the now-buckled surface of the ship. The tablet guessed what his focus of interest was, both from the movement of his pupils and because humanoids are generally most interested in other humanoids, and zoomed in so close that Madaku clearly saw her face as she turned to snarl back at the Canary over her shoulder. Dumb chance made it seem she was glaring through the lens and straight out at him. Then she disappeared into the ship.
She walks in vacuum, thought Madaku.
“She’s an android!” he cried. “Burran, she’s an android!”
“She’s not an android,” said Willa. She sounded pretty level, all things considered.
“But look at what she’s doing!” Madaku shoved the tablet in Willa’s direction, but she ignored it. “No organic body could do that!”
“I don’t have any idea how her body works, but she isn’t an android,” Willa said again. “What she told about herself is the truth, as far as she remembers it. She really does come from the very dark ages. Pre-tech. Her body can’t be a machine, because it comes from the days before machines existed. Anything we would recognize as a machine, at least.”
Burran had come to stand over them, his forgotten broken nose dripping blood on the white plastic floor and making his voice funny. “Willa,” he said. “Are you sure? There
’s nothing left anywhere from humanity’s pre-tech, not even the planet of origin. Nothing left as far as anyone knows, anyway.”
“Well, now we’re the ones who know.”
Burran kept staring at her. Then his vision cleared and he nodded his head once, firmly, as if he’d only needed confirmation that Willa really believed it, in order to banish all his own doubts.
He put his hand on Willa’s shoulder. “For all we know Anya’s prepping Ironheart for attack,” he said. “We gotta get the intuition bowl on you.”
Willa didn’t say anything, only nodded and let Burran help her up. Madaku was on the verge of pointing out that there was no way Willa could be ready for yet another jump, and that she was likely to get them killed. But then he kept his mouth shut, because Burran was right—they were far more likely to die if they stuck around here, close to that demon.
Thirteen
Minutes later, they were again inside the asteroid. Willa collapsed out of the chair in hysterics, pulling the intuition bowl from her head and shoving it away. This time she was worse than Madaku had ever seen her. A trickle of blood ran from her nostril, and the smell of excrement let them know she’d lost control of her bowels.
While she was still in the throes of her fit, Madaku said to Burran, “We can’t let her do any more jumping for at least ... gods, for at least a day. Otherwise it’s likely to kill her.”
Burran only looked at him seriously and nodded. For once they were in agreement.
Madaku was quietly hoping Anya would get Ironheart stabilized enough to make a hyperjump, but his tablet showed the ancient ship resting at the same point in realspace. They still dared not use an active sensor sweep, but Anya had not deigned to muffle any of Ironheart’s leaking data and they passively received enough of it to be able to see her position. She was doing sensor sweeps, fairly “loud” ones. No matter how well the Canary muffled its data leakage, sooner or later the Ironheart AI would notice that this asteroid’s mass was a bit different from what it had been when first surveyed, as part of the automatic routine of entering a system.
Madaku analyzed the damage to Canary, to see if the hull-kissing had caused any problems that needed to be taken care of immediately. That gambit didn’t seem to have endangered them; but he noticed something else.
Burran had carried Willa to his quarters with the intention of putting her to bed, but now here she was returning with him, a little unsteady but her face washed and a new outfit on. Burran took one look at how Madaku was staring at his tablet and said, “Shit. What is it?”
Madaku looked up from the tablet and let his stricken gaze meet Burran’s grim one. Then he explained that the Canary’s systems had held up pretty well to Anya’s earlier cyber-attack.
But there was a catastrophic exception that Madaku had missed, and that was in the ship’s doctors.
“The med system is infected,” Madaku said, stunned. “Ironheart’s introduced a wild mutative program right into the root of our treatment functions.” The most insidious part was that other functions, like diagnostic and homing, still seemed to work perfectly—if Madaku hadn’t checked, he might have thought the doctors were functioning just fine. But if they had hooked it up to someone for treatment without noticing the program corruption, there was almost no telling what the machine would have done. Except that, whatever it was, it almost certainly would have killed the patient.
If Madaku had gotten a hangnail and tried to treat it with the doctor, he would have died horribly. Like many intuiters, Willa preferred to come out of the hyperface without using the doctor to relieve any of the withdrawal’s symptoms; Madaku had always found the practice eccentric, but now he was grateful for it.
There weren’t really such things as rules of engagement, because people didn’t really fight wars—but if there had been, tampering with another party’s doctors would be the ultimate taboo. Even in adventure vids set in older, wilder times, the most heinous villains were too gallant to even consider such a thing. And the whole reason the doctors were so vulnerable to cybernetic attack was because their defenses were always low, so that they could constantly solicit data from elsewhere in an effort to find out if their aid was needed on, say, a neighboring ship like Ironheart.
“It’ll probably take me at least a couple of hours to sort it out,” said Madaku.
Burran looked grimmer still. “What’s the situation with Ironheart?” he asked.
Madaku re-checked Ironheart’s position for the twentieth time, willing Anya to leave. But still she loomed out there.
“Maybe the hyperface is damaged,” he suggested. “Or the drive. Or maybe she has to do some repairs on the structure before she can leave.”
“She’s not going anywhere,” said Willa. “Not till she tries again to get me. She hasn’t put in enough effort yet to feel like she can walk away.”
“Willa, no offense, but why should she care?” said Madaku. “There are trillions of people in the galaxy who aren’t expecting to be attacked and are totally unprepared for it. Wouldn’t it make more sense for her to cut her losses, forget about us, and jump a hundred billion kilometers away to where she can swoop down on someone unsuspecting? And why does she need to swoop down on anyone, anyway? If she’s got a machine that can run a hyperdrive on any human brain at all, regardless of the person’s personal skill level as an intuiter? And she’s already got a brain for it?”
“For one thing,” said Burran, “if we get away far enough to safely send out a subspace message and stick a bulletin on the Registry, we’ll have the whole galaxy on the lookout for her.”
“Even more than that,” said Willa, “she’s fixated on me. And she can’t just give up on me to go find someone else, because she doesn’t want to give up on the fixation. The fixation is the point. That’s what she craves, thanks to her hundreds of thousands of years adrift. An anchor, an obsession. She gets in the mood sometimes to rest on an island, in the middle of this great big infinite sea. I’m that island now.”
Madaku and Burran were done second-guessing Willa’s ability to intuit what was going on in the unimaginable woman’s mind. Madaku said, “So, what do we do? Just stay hidden in this asteroid in the hopes she’ll get bored of looking for us and finally hyperjump?” More wishful thinking, he knew.
“She won’t get bored,” said Willa. “Not soon enough for it to do us any good. She learned patience a long time ago. She can keep at something till long after we’re dead.”
“Well, if we can’t count on her going first, we’ll just have to leave ourselves. Sorry, Willa, I know you deserve a long break. But I think after you’ve had another few hours of down-time, we should hyperjump out. Even a short wait isn’t very safe, what with those sweeps she’s doing.” He willed her to go take that down-time now, so that he could get to work fixing the doctor. It terrified him that it wasn’t functioning, that it had already gone this long without functioning. Never had he been without a doctor.
But Willa looked at him with a mixture of sympathy, weariness, and exasperation. “Madaku, we can’t just leave her here.”
“Willa’s right,” said Burran.
“What else are we supposed to do?” demanded Madaku. “She’s almost killed us more than once. Soon our luck’s going to run out.”
“Or hers is,” said Burran. “I’d say her bill is more past due than ours.”
“We can’t let her go,” said Willa. “She’s a menace—she has to be stopped, and there’s no one to do it but us. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, we can’t leave Fehd like this.”
“Right again,” said Burran, mouth twisting.
Madaku felt a sickly chilled horror shudder through him. “But ... I mean ... is Fehd even still alive, really?”
“I bet that he is,” said Willa. “In the sense that there’s still a mind there. I think we have to assume there’s still a perceiving subject that the organ is manifesting.”
“But, so, how can we help him? Hope Anya kept the body and then, if we do s
omehow find it, hope we can transplant the brain back inside?”
“No. I don’t think Fehd’s anything rescue-able anymore. I think he’s just got to be irrevocably insane. I think he’s in a terrified hell. A nightmare of confusion. I think Anya’s probably tampered with him to the point he doesn’t know he’s ‘Fehd’ anymore.”
Madaku bowed his head, and took that in.
“If we’re going to be the kind of people who leave a comrade in that kind of state,” said Burran, “then there isn’t much of a point to anything at all.”
“All right,” said Madaku. “But, so, we just attack the ship and hope we can destroy the bridge? Go up against those blasters she’s got? We can’t go head-to-head with that!”
“Correct. But you told Willa you were working on a transparent tendril hack.”
“A fantasy. A hobby. A transparent tendril is not the same thing as the stuff I did to hack into Ironheart before, you guys. It’s a whole different level of impossibility.”
“I don’t know much about coding, but I know you’re smarter than you think,” said Willa. “Anyway, we don’t have much choice but to assume you’ve managed it. You’ve got to try to get into her system, so we can access what’s left of Fehd.”
Madaku’s heart sank. “If I establish that kind of link, and the transparent tendril I wrap it in doesn’t work, she’ll be able to trace it directly back to our location.”
“We’d better hope your program works well enough to be worth the risk, then,” said Burran. “And that Anya’s sweet enough on Willa that she won’t want to blow us away till after she’s been captured.”
“Even then, how are we going to destroy the brain? I may be able to get a tendril into her system. But all the tendril does is hide from Anya my interference with her computers. But what helpful interference can I manage? If I start ordering the support systems to physically destroy the brain tissue, so many other systems are bound to notice and send out alerts that I won’t be able to head off or muffle them all, and she’ll see it. And nothing I can do to the brain’s perceiving apparatus is likely to destroy the mind.” Organic brains were notoriously resilient and resistant to hacker-style attacks—they could be disabled, if a hacker were given access to them through a cybernetic interface, but no one had ever manged to feed the perceiving apparatus any set of commands calibrated so as to effectively order it to not simply drive itself crazy, but to damage itself so catastrophically that it lost the ability to generate experience of any kind.