by M. D. Cooper
“Don’t get dog fur on the robe,” May scolded.
Cara squeezed Em tighter, his compact body and wagging tail helping her push out the visions of fighting crowds. He was here and real. He smelled like a dog but also like the ship, a mix of plas and lubricants and pasta.
May stepped around Cara to the open door. She put her hand on the door jamb, looking tired. The anxious fire had faded from her eyes.
“Thank you, Cara,” she said again. “Good night.”
Cara looked up from Em’s fur. “Good night, May.”
The senator gave her a tired smile before leaving into the corridor. The door slid closed behind her.
Scratching Em’s head one last time, Cara stood and unfastened the knot at her bellybutton. She slid the robe over her head and draped it across her desk chair. She went to her personal console and pulled up the communications logs. She found verification of the sent message, then moved a copy to her personal media and activated the recording.
The holodisplay activated and an image of herself in the robe stood in the middle of the room, glowing blue. With the headband and ceremonial robe, she hardly recognized herself. Her eyes looked darker than she envisioned, but she liked the way she stood straight and looked directly forward.
Em whined for attention. Cara sat against the wall beside her desk and pulled her knees to her chest, hugging Em to her side. The Corgi flattened his ears, giving her a concerned look. Cara kissed the top of his head.
The recording continued, and when it reached the part where she said, “We must abandon Ceres,” it was hard to recognize herself. Tears filled Cara’s eyes. A deep sadness swelled inside her: for her dad, for Tim, for her mom, somewhere in InnerSol, for all the kids who would be lost when they heard her words.
The one thing May had not instructed her to tell the people of Ceres, amidst the warning of their imminent destruction, was why.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 12.09.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lowspin Syndicate territory
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony
The Weapon Born’s cylinder stood on a small metal platform, a nest of wire and filament snaking out from the base. Petral pushed her face close to the assembly, checking a connection point, then stepped away from her workbench.
“All right,” she said. “We’re ready.”
Jirl was standing beside Ngoba Starl on the opposite side of the room. She was surprised by how anxious the crime boss seemed to be. He kept adjusting his light green bowtie and stretching his neck. He was wearing a spicy wood-like cologne that reached her nostrils every time he moved. Jirl thought about trying to ease his mind, to let him know the AI couldn’t cause them any harm through a holodisplay, but she was enjoying his scent too much to intervene.
“Are we ready now?” Starl asked. “You didn’t ask me if I was ready.”
Petral gave him a smirk. “Calm down. All it can do is comment on your fashion sense.”
“You know I’ve never met one of these before,” Starl said. “Not a Weapon Born. There was the parrot, Crash, but I understood where he was coming from. He was Cruithne.”
Brit rolled her eyes at Starl. “You were friends with a parrot?”
“That’s right,” Starl said. “He was uplifted, as they say. More sentient AI than bird. He was king of the fountain at Night Park.”
“We’ll have to come back to story time,” Petral said. “We need to verify if we can even talk to him.”
“I thought you already had?” Brit asked.
“Not exactly. I got his basic information. I don’t have an audio system set up here, so we’ll have to use the Link.”
The holodisplay activated and a curtain of light rose from the floor. Standing in the middle of the room was a young man with sharp features and short, silver hair. His eyes were a grayish-green. He stared ahead at first, then became aware of them and looked from face to face. Jirl felt his gaze stab right through her before he shifted his attention to Starl.
When he looked at Petral, his lips spread in a feral smile, showing white teeth.
Petral faced him with her hands on her hips.
He looked at the ceiling and then tilted his head to study the doorway.
He glanced at the ceiling again as if thinking.
Jirl noted a change in her tone. Her voice grew softer, more solicitous.
Tristan jerked his head her direction.
Tristan narrowed his eyes.
Starl cut her off.
Petral stared at Starl with an irritated expression. she said.
Tristan said.
Petral glanced at Brit, who shook her head.
Petral gave Starl a hard look, then turned to the SAI.
Tristan said, looking mollified by her intensity.
Tristan said.
The holodisplay flickered as Tristan cocked his ear at some distant sound. Then the SAI disappeared, leaving on the wall of smooth blue light in the middle of the room.
Petral shook her head an
grily. “You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you, Ngoba? Why would he stay if he doesn’t have to? Now I’m going to have to unplug him and do this all over again.
Starl raised a finger to indicate they should wait. “I have a feeling about this one,” he said. “Give him a minute.”
“How can you have a feeling about an AI?” Petral demanded.
“How can I have a feeling about you? I simply do—or did—and here we are so many years later.”
Starl gave her a smile that made Jirl want to giggle inside despite the gravity of the situation. Petral blushed such a deep shade of crimson that Brit asked her if she was all right.
“I’m fine,” Petral said, turning to her workbench. She picked up several bits of equipment and put them down.
“He can’t go anywhere anyway, yeah?” Starl asked. “He’s stuck in that can.”
“He’s stuck in the can.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Petral said, still not facing him.
Jirl looked sideways at Starl, who seemed to be enjoying himself again. After all the days of weathering his frustration in the plans room, this version of him seemed almost childlike.
He caught her watching him and gave her a wink.
In the midst of losing their only chance at infiltrating Heartbridge, Jirl appreciated a little bit of playfulness. What else could they do?
“I should have given him a time limit,” Petral said.
“What are the options here?” Brit asked. “Reboot him and try again?”
“It’s not quite that easy but I can return him to the state we found him in. I think it’s safe to assume he’ll want the same access to the Link, so I’ll need a better answer to keep him here.”
“No,” Starl said sharply. “We’re not doing that. If he chooses not to help us, he chooses. That’s it. I’m not a slave master, Petral. I already told you that.”
“Fine,” Petral said, turning from the bench to face him and crossing her arms. “What should we do? Go back to the conference room and stare at each other for another ten hours? There is no way into that building. We’d be better off to get a group of mercenaries together and go after the locations one at a time like we were going to do before.”
“We can’t face more of the Weapon Born,” Brit said quietly. “Not if they have more mechs like the one Tristan was in. There’s no way.”
“I don’t see another option,” Petral said. She spread her hands. “Or we all say our goodbyes and go our separate ways. Heartbridge isn’t going to stop after we end this program anyway. You all realize that, right? And Heartbridge didn’t destroy Proteus. We all know that had something to do with Alexander. Whatever happened when Andy got out there caused the moon to explode, and now we haven’t heard anything one way or the other.”
Brit shook her head slowly. “Heartbridge needs to pay for what they’ve done. You’re forgetting about what they did to my son.”
“What Kraft did to your son,” Petral said. “And Jirl took care of Kraft.”
Jirl tensed at her name. Petral hadn’t brought up her role in Heartbridge but she couldn’t help but think talking this way would goad Major Sykes into attacking her personally.
“This isn’t the end,” Brit said.
“It will be the end,” Jirl said quickly. “If you cut off all the test facilities at one time, the board will have to view it as a complete loss. They won’t sink more resources into rebuilding the program.” They would most likely try to sell off whatever intellectual property they could and move forward with more profitable endeavors. Considering the chaos throughout Sol, their hospital ships would make more than enough profit during the coming years.” She almost wanted to cry at the idea of years of war.
“You see?” Starl said, clapping his hands together. “Let’s get a drink. We’ll relax and give our friend time to make his decision. If he chooses not to come back, as is the power of any sentient being, then we’ll reassess our plans. As it is, we’re accomplishing nothing to stand here and bellyache about it.”
Petral shook her head as though the whole situation was a waste.
Jirl wished she had more to offer. She had already put herself at risk with the information she had volunteered about the Heartbridge headquarters. The problem was that while she had free access to most areas, it wasn’t untracked access. Everything she did would route back to Arla in some way, notifying Arla of her whereabouts. Most of the time Arla didn’t care what Jirl did, but she had already been gone for nearly a month. Arla would expect her undivided attention when she did return. Jirl was going to have to catch up on hours of listening to her boss complain just to get re-acclimated.
Starl was turning to leave when the holodisplay flickered and Tristan reappeared. The young man was dressed in a faded gray shipsuit with a long-knit scarf from some sports team draped over his neck. The scarf shimmered as he waved at them all with a circular arm motion.
he said.
Jirl said.
Tristan’s eyes widened, and he gave an ingenious smile.
The AI stepped to one side of the holodisplay, adjusting his shimmering scarf around his neck, and held out a hand in an introductory gesture. In the empty space, a girl appeared wearing a flowered robe with wide sleeves that hid her hands. Her brown hair was drawn back from her face.
“What?” Brit said aloud.
Petral’s brows knit as she moved closer to the major. “Is that Cara?” she asked.
“Who’s Cara?” Jirl asked.
“The Sykes’s daughter,” Starl said. As Cara made her speech to the people of Ceres, Starl blew a low whistle and said, “Oh my. She’s going to be famous.”
There was silence when the recording finished, and Cara stood frozen in the middle of the room.
Brit gave the AI a hard look.
Tristan paused to inspect the fingernails on one hand, looking like he was internally debating himself. He couldn’t keep up the facade for long. He gave Brit a grin.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 12.10.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: En Route to Traverna, OuterSol
With final assistance from Fugia, Lyssa broke open the Psion database. She was learning to think like Fugia, looking for paths around obstacles or limitations in the whole design schema, rather than brute-force attacking a problem—although she could do that, too, it just took a long time. It was ultimately faster to crack the thought process behind a system than to test every possible security key to gain entry. In the end, Psion was a human system designed to thwart SAI, that Lyssa understood had been taken over by SAI. The story of Psion’s collapse was demonstrated in its code. When the humans were killed, a group of SAI had stepped in.
The small woman breathed a sigh of relief and
leaned back in her seat. She pushed her visor up on her head, then took it off and tossed it on her desk.
Lyssa swept through the data, moving first to the communication logs and the last send request they had stopped. She pulled the address and mapped it.
Lyssa activated the holodisplay on Fugia’s cluttered desk and a map of Sol floated above the scattered electronics. It was similar to what Alexander had already revealed to them but now everything showed astrogation notes. Lyssa highlighted a location between Nibiru and Neptune, within the Scattered Disk. With available information, she was able zoom in on the actual station, an asteroid approximately two kilometers in diameter with four ring structures and an armada arrayed in the nearby space. The collected ships ranged from small freighters, ice haulers and personnel transports to at least two dreadnoughts the size of the Resolute Charity.
When the updated location returned, Lyssa experienced a sense of dread she hadn’t felt since watching Xander fire on Proteus, when she knew that the AI intended to commit suicide.
Fugia said.
Lyssa admitted.