Ironheart

by J. Boyett

  “I’m going to ride that tendril in,” said Willa. “People have been talking for thousands of years about the corollaries between the layout of hyperspace and the symbol logic of the human mind. I’m going to take advantage of that to go in and finish tearing apart what’s left of him and put him out of his misery.”

  Madaku stared at Willa. She really was crazy. “Yes,” he said, slowly. “For thousands of years people have been talking about those similarities. Hundreds of major religions have been built around them, and had the time to die out. And in all those millennia, no one has ever managed to do what you’re suggesting.”

  “Right,” said Willa. “But I think I can.”

  Madaku looked at Burran, appealing with his eyes for him to make Willa see reason. But he only shook his head, and said, “You and I have both seen plenty of proof over the last few days that Willa’s the greatest intuiter anybody ever heard of. I checked the Registry, and there’s no record of anyone having ever accomplished such feats of precise hyperjumping, much less within that narrow time-frame. Not ever. She’s the best, the very best there’s ever been. If she thinks she’s got a shot at doing this, that’s good enough for me.”

  Without even noticing it, Madaku waited for the unassuming Willa to protest that, no, she wasn’t the best, and he was startled when she didn’t. She merely gazed back at him, as if no one had said anything very extraordinary.

  He felt himself gasping for air, as if the insanity in the room were a palpable field filling his lungs and drowning him. “Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Your thought processes have been clouded by all we’ve been through these past few days. Okay—a lot of things have turned out to be possible that two days ago I would have called impossible. Okay. I admit that. It’s amazing. But it doesn’t follow that everything’s possible. What are the odds that we just happen to come across an immortal, invulnerable creature, the closest thing to magic anybody ever heard of, while at the same time we just so happen to have aboard the greatest intuiter who ever lived, and a great genius of a programmer? Which is what I would have to be to slip that tendril in without the Ironheart AI noticing. Don’t you think that’s an awful big pile of coincidences?”

  Burran looked unfazed. “Let’s say the odds are a million-to-one against things falling out that way. Well, we could easily be the millionth ship she’s done this to. Is it so crazy to think that, in all these millennia, she might finally bump into the greatest intuiter who ever lived? What happens to your coincidence then?”

  Madaku had a choking feeling, like ashes were clogging his throat. “You can’t just play with statistics like that,” he said. “That’s cheating.”

  Burran’s voice got harder, like he was done fooling around. “Cheating or not, this is the plan,” he said. “Honor and galactic safety demand it. Now, go get your tendril program prepped while Willa rests up. That tendril is the priority—not the doctor.”

  There was no way out of it, Madaku realized. Stunned, he began to drift away—to go prep his program, he supposed. Good thing he’d kept at it, more in the hopeless hope of impressing Willa than because he’d actually believed they would really use it.

  As he went, Willa called after him. He turned to her. She stepped forward to place a light, reassuring hand upon his chest. With an odd, unreadable smile, she said, “Actually, traveling via hyperspace is the closest thing to magic anyone’s ever heard of. We just don’t notice anymore, because we’ve been doing it for so long.” With that, she turned to leave the room. Burran followed her out.

  Madaku watched them go. Willa’s remark struck him as a strange thing to say—he wasn’t sure of its relevance. Probably it was a sign of strain. All the more reason to be wary of their plan.

  But it was hard to argue against Willa’s and Burran’s conviction that Anya had to be stopped, and impossible tasks called for impossible solutions, maybe. Once again, Madaku prepared to go work on his tendril program. This time, for the first time, he allowed himself to fully indulge in the fantasy that it might work after all.

  Fourteen

  Burran requested that the AI take over piloting duties and slide them out a thin crevasse in the surface of the asteroid, since there was no point having Willa exert herself needlessly with a jump. As soon as they were out, they became visible to Ironheart. Hopefully they were correct in their gamble that Anya would not destroy the Canary with Willa still aboard.

  The three of them were gathered in the pilot’s room. No sense in spreading out. If they were going to be blown up, they may as well do it together. Madaku wiped his clammy palms on his trousers before bringing his fingers up to once more hover over the tablet in his lap. The robot loomed in its niche. Madaku was so nervous that when he’d entered the bridge he’d jumped at the sight of it—having never seen the thing activate, he’d ceased to notice it months ago and had forgotten it was there.

  On the wall monitors they saw Ironheart changing course to head over to this side of XB-79853-D7-4 and intercept them. The ship seemed in no big hurry.

  Burran consulted his own tablet and said, “No weapons powered up, far as I can tell. Madaku, you agree?”

  Madaku scrolled through the data, taking a deeper look at the readings than Burran’s expertise would allow, checking for any deceptive code shielding or clever scrambling. “Confirmed,” he said. “As far as I can tell.”

  Madaku looked at Willa. She sat there cool and still, her breath steady, her blink rate normal. Madaku wiped some sweat off his brow before it could drip into his eyes, admiring her courage and the poker-face she presented to the weapons-bristling ship cruising their way.

  Someone would have to hail somebody, soon. Madaku needed an open, active channel to piggyback the tendril onto, otherwise it would surely be detected.

  Anya caved first. “Receiving a hail from Ironheart,” said Burran.

  “Put it on,” said Willa in her soft, firm voice, never taking her eyes off the monitor showing their relative positions. Somewhere along the way, Willa had become the one in charge.

  Anya’s voice was there in the room with them: “Ah, Willa. And Burran and Madaku, hello to you, too. Which of you is captain now?”

  Madaku couldn’t help but shudder at her voice. The speakers rendered it flawlessly, as if she were here in the room with them. Hastily Madaku asked the AI to add a slight distortion, just to distance her. Then he got to work trying to embed the tendril.

  “Fehd is still our captain, Anya,” said Willa. “We’d like to rescue him, if possible.” This was the ruse they’d decided on. Like Willa had said, even if Fehd’s body was still in existence and revivable, there was little chance his mind would ever regain its personality functions. But pretending to believe otherwise gave them an excuse for contacting Anya, some motive other than hacking into her system.

  Anya sounded bored when she replied. “Surely, my dear, you can surmise that the process Fehd has undergone has ruined his personhood, even if one may say he remains technically human. In fact, that human quality of his symbol logic is precisely why I have need of him. Which brings me to my second point: you cannot be so naïve as to think I would give up my hyperdrive capability, merely to fulfill your sentimental craving.”

  Meanwhile Madaku was threading the tendril to the information being beamed to Ironheart’s AI, the data which conveyed to Anya’s speakers the auditory content leaving Willa’s mouth and which would smuggle in this hidden data as well. They’d feared that Anya would insist on radio communication again, so as to avoid the risk of such contamination, but maybe she was feeling reckless.

  Or maybe she knew that what Madaku was trying was fucking impossible. But he shoved that thought aside.

  Willa answered Anya. “It didn’t seem like such a wild hope. Not after all your talk about how important I am to you and how you want me to be your companion and want to fulfill my whims. And with all your exotic tech, it didn’t seem too crazy to think there might be some way for you to revive Fehd. And if I did go with you, then you wouldn�
�t need Fehd’s brain anymore. I could be your pilot. If it turned out you were able to restore Fehd captain.”

  Through the fevered haze of his work, Madaku’s attention suddenly snapped to Willa. Something in her voice had alerted him: this wasn’t merely the ruse they’d talked about. Willa was feeling out the chances that Anya might have a way to restore Fehd, and, if so, was seriously offering to trade herself for him. From the silent glare Burran was fixing upon her, Madaku knew that he had just come to the same realization.

  But at the end of Anya’s long, dry sigh, he knew the offer would come to nothing. His shoulders sagged in relief.

  “Ah, Willa,” said Anya, the distortion Madaku had added crackling across her words. “True, you are a formidable pilot, perhaps the best Creation has ever seen. But, clumsy though the mechanism I have in place may be in comparison, the fact is that it allows me to control the ship, despite my lack of hyperdrive intuition. And none but I may pilot Ironheart.”

  “Well, technically, you aren’t piloting it. Technically, Fehd’s brain is.”

  Anya’s voice hardened, as she said, “Aye, but he now is but an appendage unto Ironheart, and obeyeth me as doth my right hand.”

  Burran was flashing Madaku a look that asked plainly how long until he infiltrated Ironheart’s system. Madaku tried to ignore the unspoken query and concentrate on getting it done.

  Willa gave no sign she noticed their tension, or felt much of her own. “Why do you need me so bad, then? If you’ve got piloting covered?”

  “I think you must be toying with me, child; I suspect you know the answers to such questions. Be that as it may, buy time as you can. The truth is merely that I need a companion because I need a companion. And I need adversaries for much the same reason. I am grateful to your two remaining friends, you know, for having supplied that need. After I have procured you, I may decide it is enough to beat them, and that I need not kill them as well. Or perhaps I will let them go, that I might have the pleasure of knowing I could find them again someday, in whatever starfield they roam, and defeat them again.”

  “Have the guys been so formidable as that?”

  “Oh, no, in truth. There is no shame in that. I am very old and very strong, and wise to boot. It is not so easy to get the better of me.”

  “Yet we did.”

  “You did, friend Willa. And only for a time.”

  “We did. Burran did, too.”

  Madaku poked his head up, to flash at the room a look of protest at not being included. Neither of the others noticed, and, abashed, he got back to work.

  “Yes, yes,” Anya begrudgingly admitted. “But I tell you I was gotten the better of because I wanted it to be thus. It is hard to explain. If you accept my gift and become as I am then perhaps someday, eons hence, you will understand how one may crave a worthy conflict so badly, that one comes to willfully dampen one’s powers of perception and control.”

  “If you say so. You’re not doing a good job of selling me on this big gift.”

  “Cease to mock me, Willa.” The frigidity of Anya’s voice made Madaku shiver. “There are other ways than killing by which one may punish.” When she spoke again, Anya’s voice was swollen with the dreamy soft exaltation of a mature woman who by a romantic liaison has just been made to feel youthful again: “Ah, but once I was back aboard my Ironheart, how grateful I was to you all! After I knew that Ironheart was stabilized and that she would survive. Though there were some trinkets and trophies that you destroyed, and that sits ill with me.... Still, that is no great price to pay for battle! Long has it been since I have known that thrill. Not that it has been so very long since I have destroyed a ship that was shooting back at me—but that alone does not constitute a battle, for against me those vessels never had a chance. You, though, came to fight me within my very lair. Truly, I feel something so close to gratitude, I cannot think what else it might be.”

  “Gee, that must be why she’s arming her blasters,” growled Burran.

  “I can hear you, Burran security,” said Anya. Madaku quickly set the computer to transmit to Ironheart only Willa’s voice, and not remarks made by himself or Burran. “Aye, it is true I am arming them. But you need not necessarily fear. I simply like to have them powered up. Many have been the times I have come to halt in some desolate patch of space and sent my blood-red lightning ripping silent through the void.”

  Madaku was busy with the final touches of uploading the tendril. It was as solidly implanted as he knew how to make it. Desperately he tried to make eye contact with Willa, to signal her that all was prepared. He was afraid to say anything to her, for fear Anya might hear and glean some hint. He was too superstitious to even send an encrypted message to her tablet.

  Willa was oblivious, but Burran saw him trying to catch her eye. Burran himself fixed his eyes upon her, giving her a significant look. After a moment she seemed to feel his gaze and looked his way. He nodded, once.

  Willa turned to her tablet and danced her fingers over it, hooking the intuition router into the tendril Madaku had inserted, all without ever looking Madaku’s way. Madaku could follow her progress on his own tablet. Once the router and tendril were intertwined, Willa reached up and pulled the intuition bowl down over her head, her calm never wavering.

  Fifteen

  Anya toyed with the targeting controls as she and Willa spoke. She had the Canary fixed dead in her sights. If she chose to fire, there could be no escape for the freighter—Ironheart’s weapons were not the tacked-on afterthoughts one found on ships designed under the long reign of the Registry, but were survivors of a more serious time, when speed, accuracy, and power were required for survival.

  “If only I could be sure my friends would be safe,” Willa was saying. “Obviously I don’t mind the idea of eternal life. But I couldn’t bear the thought of you killing Burran and Madaku, after I took the shuttle to you.”

  “Shall I give you my word I’ll not kill them, Willa?” Anya knew that Willa was stalling for time. Even she had proven so, so transparent, despite her early promise. Or maybe that promise had never been there at all—maybe it had only been what Anya wanted to see.

  Even now, she was compartmentalizing her mind so that a part of herself was almost fooled by Willa. She chose to trust her, and so a part of her did trust, sincerely; Anya’s overmind let that trusting part steer, at least for the moment. It was a practice that would be difficult to reproduce or fully comprehend, for most humans. There was nothing supernatural about it; or, if Anya’s immortality really was supernatural, and not some unheard-of fluke of the natural world, nothing directly supernatural. It was simply a series of habits Anya had gradually developed, over millennia of loneliness and boredom. During long stretches when the world could no longer surprise her, she had trained her mind to occasionally surprise itself.

  Willa was still talking. Anya trailed her fingertips absently across her console. She had a biter-grabber in the hold—those three in the Canary had likely never heard of such a thing. She could shoot it over, have it eat through the Canary’s hull, find and capture Willa, then have it shoot back over to Ironheart while Anya opened fire on the Canary and its remaining complement of two.

  Or she could capture Willa, zip off into hyperspace, and leave the two men stranded with no pilot, wailing their distress signals into subspace till they were rescued. Then she could track them down again in fifty years, hopefully with Willa by her side, the girl’s youth still intact. Perhaps Willa would have come around to her way of thinking by then, enough that they could kill the two old men together.

  Anya sighed heavily. Or she could kill them all, right now. Who was she trying to fool? Willa was not so rare as Anya had forced herself to think.

  Anya still did plan to take Willa, but killing all three of them gave her something to think about while the girl prattled on. In the spirit of looking for ways to make the experience more interesting, she shut down her targeting apparatus, though the blasters remained powered up. Her blasters left the
Canary so over-matched that there was almost no sport in it. With the foolproof targeting thrown in, it would have been just ridiculous.

  She played with the manual targeting controls, seeing how well she could keep the Canary in her sights by using only her eyes and hand, trying to think of some reply for Willa, who was bound to stop talking soon.

  Then, Willa did stop talking. Abruptly, though, so much so that Anya had to check to be sure their connection hadn’t been cut.

  No, the line was still open. “Hello?” she said, uncertainly. Although she’d just been fantasizing about killing Willa too and having done with the whole lot, now the prospect of losing her was unbearable. She had grown so lonely, she wanted so badly for a companion to share the void with her. She recognized this feeling well, and knew it had nothing necessarily to do with Willa, in and of herself. She had felt it before, for other mortals, and likely would again. That knowledge didn’t make its current hold upon her any less potent.

  “Hello?” she said again, not caring for the moment that the other two mortals could hear the need in her voice.

  Maybe she would even have begun to plead with Willa to speak again. Pleading would at least be something she’d not done in a while. But then she was distracted. A corner of her monitor was flashing, flagging data related to the brain hooked into the hyperdrive, data the AI couldn’t decipher.