by Sharon Lee
Great team. Really, he couldn’t have asked for better. Too bad Inki’d found her ties to the directors and the school more compelling than her ties to her teammates—and her ethics as a mentor.
Which was why he was here, inside Admiral Bunter’s core, with the Admiral’s full understanding of the possible and probable outcomes, and his permission to proceed in seeking out traps, deadfalls, and hidden mandates, patiently pulling the teeth of every one he found, calibrating each pair and family of settings, not stinting, not hurrying; focused as he could be—which was considerably focused, that being part of the training. But not even he could keep focused for more than eighteen hours at one go. Manufactured human he might be, and anathema, but he was still human.
And from time to time, humans needed to rest.
Still, he’d only been here inside for five Standard Hours, and he’d gotten a lot of work done. He figured he was good for another nine hours before he’d have to pull out and sleep, but he also figured he’d complete the task well before his concentration wore out.
The reason for that particular bit of optimism was Inki herself. She had used her mentor codes to unlock the Admiral’s core and do mischief—fair enough. But Inki would have been constrained by time—working when others of the team were busy elsewhere, but still likely to drop in and wonder what she was doing. She’d had to have moved quickly, and he thought that she wouldn’t have risked more than one session of sabotage, for fear of discovery.
That being so, he figured he was better than halfway through the repairs, especially given that what he’d been fixing so far had just been petty stuff, really, wards and nuisances set to wear him down, invite him to make a mistake, or to miss something else. But by his reckoning, she’d had time to set at least two—and maybe as many as six—core mandates. That wasn’t mischief; that was serious tampering.
And serious tampering took time.
Inki’d been rushed; he—had all the time he needed, for this. He might even withdraw and have that nap now, before he got to the hard part.
Tolly considered that briefly, as a strategy for stretching his own personal lifetime.
Because, while both his existence and the Admiral’s freedom were jeopardized by Inki’s actions, his existence was also imperiled by his success in nullifying those mandates.
Once wakened and educated, an independent self-aware logic guarded his core closely. Admiral Bunter had not only had his core violated by Inki, but he had learned that it was possible for a mentor to set core mandates—commands which he had no choice but to follow, even when, as in the Admiral’s case, those mandates went directly against his wishes and hadn’t been built with his best interests in mind.
It stood to reason that what one mentor had done, another could undo, and the Admiral hadn’t been at all slow to realize that. The result being himself, inside the Admiral’s core, by the Admiral’s direct request, righting wrongs and putting things back the way they’d been.
Nor was he a disinterested party. One of the mandates Inki’d set had to do with the Admiral returning him, Tolly Jones, to the tender care of the directors of Lyre Institute, who would do far, far worse than kill him.
That was all well and good. Where things began to go seriously awry was that the Admiral, who now knew that betrayal was not only possible, but probable, and who never again wished to be a stranger to himself—the Admiral was, in Tolly’s not-exactly-uninformed opinion—more than eighty percent likely to kill the last mentor who’d been inside his core, just so he could feel safe again.
Ethics module.
Tolly paused the flow of data, frowning at the Ethics module.
When they had first encountered him, the Admiral had been…call it a trifle light on ethics. Part of their remediation, after they’d gotten him moved to a safer and more stable environment, had been ethics lessons, along with a recalibration of the Ethics module.
He and Tocohl and Inki had talked about the Ethics module between themselves; how best to calibrate it; and what was the optimum setting, given the Admiral’s peculiar history and likely future.
On the one hand, set the marker too high and you got yourself a saint, and saints had a high mortality rate in the back lanes of deep space, which was where Admiral Bunter was most likely to travel, being the abomination that he was.
On the gripping hand, you didn’t want to loose an out-and-out pirate into the back lanes of deep space, either.
Ideally, you wanted somebody who was flexible; able to make good survival decisions, while avoiding doing random murder.
They’d finally decided, with input from Tocohl, who had a personal understanding of such things, that an Ethics setting of seven on a scale of twelve would achieve the best outcome, for the universe and the Admiral together.
As senior mentor, it had fallen to Tolly to nudge Ethics upward from five to seven and lock it in. He clearly remembered doing so.
Now, though…Ethics was dialed down to…three.
Three, Tolly thought, three wasn’t good. Three invited mayhem and massacre; acts of piracy, and ill-judgment.
Three made the murder of the mentor who had released you from slavery the merest bagatelle.
The Admiral could still kill him, Tolly reflected, returning the setting to seven. If he set Ethics at the top of the dial, the Admiral could still kill him. Ethics recognized self-defense—depriving another intelligence of life or liberty in order to preserve one’s own life, liberty, and/or personal integrity—as an entirely ethical act.
Well.
He tested for slippage, and cast about for any other gotchas, like, oh, a simple-minded little application, the sole purpose of which was to make sure Ethics was always set at three—failed to find such, and locked seven into place.
It was, he thought, a little peculiar that there wasn’t a rear guard or an app to preserve the lower Ethics setting. Inki might’ve been feeling rushed by the time she’d gotten here.
He didn’t feel rushed or tired, and moved on to the next module with deliberation, all senses alert.
II
Inki’d locked in three mandates, which wasn’t, Tolly allowed, as bad as it might’ve been. That said, they were plenty bad enough, being interwoven and interdependent and weighted in tricky, tricky ways.
Tolly sat back and regarded them, letting pattern and purpose sink gradually into his mind, feeling the warp and the woof of the weighted sections, and comparing them against the texture of the rest of the weaving.
He was, he decided, impressed. He’d known Inki was good, but this was better than good; this was master-level work. He doubted he could’ve done as well.
She hadn’t built this on the fly, either, or while she was in a sweat over thin windows of opportunity. No, he figured she’d designed it on her downtime, when she should’ve been sleeping after a long, grueling shift teaching Admiral Bunter everything he needed to know in order to survive as his own, free person.
His respect for Inki’s ability and stamina increased. Lyre Institute expected its students to be tough and its graduates to be competent across a wide range of disciplines. In fact, the school expected its graduates to produce miracles as a normal order of business. And it was looking like Inki’d stood at the top of her class.
Might want to pull out and have that nap after all, he told himself. Eat a meal, too. Can’t afford to bring anything less than your best game to this.
Except pulling out meant he would have to explain to Admiral Bunter just exactly why he was pulling out, what the nature of the problem was, and lay out a detailed plan for the fix.
The Admiral being a worrier, he’d commence into it and he’d nag, and Tolly didn’t grudge him any of it. It was worrisome to know that somebody’d changed you; particularly worrisome to know that at some point those changes would require you to do some unknown something that you might not completely agree needed to be done…
…or something else, that you’d rather die yourself than hurt him, and you can’t not, and it’
s your hand does the deed, if not your will, because you—your own will and heart—are reduced to a small screaming shard locked deep away, powerless.
Tolly shivered, there inside Admiral Bunter’s core, sight fogging—
Focus, Tolly Jones! he snarled at himself—a command phrase, just like for the poor Admiral here, the only difference that it was a phrase Tolly’d planted himself, for himself, in the interests of his own survival.
The data snapped back into sense; memory melting away like frost on Hazenthull’s mittens, once she had a cup of coffee in hand.
This was no safe place for those memories either; he was plainly tireder than he’d thought.
Time to pull out and rest.
He leaned to the control board in his virtual office here inside the Admiral’s core and picked up a pin. Just a second or two to mark his place and—
He had it.
Distracted as he’d been, still he felt the difference—a section of woven code that was just that much heavier than the others.
Tolly brought all of his attention to that superdense section, scrutinizing it line by line until he was sure that what he had was the anchor phrase, the mandate to which the other two were tied. Unravel the anchor and, in theory, the others would come undone their own selves.
He had to be very careful going forward. Inki was clever; he couldn’t assume that she’d failed to place her most devastating booby traps here. While she certainly wanted Admiral Bunter alive and in her control, she would, Tolly thought, rather kill him than risk having the mandates broken and the Admiral free, angry—and hunting her.
“Focus, Tolly Jones,” he whispered drawing the dense weaving of code close, seeking now to understand each mandate, while keeping a sharp eye out for any traps.
Time passed.
Tolly sighed and let the weaving go.
The anchoring mandate…violated every contract of trust that could be said to exist between thinking individuals. Just coincidentally, it also violated the antislavery laws, since Inki hadn’t just wanted a starship equipped with a powerful comp…
No, Inki had wanted Admiral Bunter aware and sane, to a certain particular point, and you had to ask yourself, thought Tolly, what were Inki’s long-range plans here? Was she prepping to free herself from the school’s influence? It could seem so, after studying the mandates and their interdependence. If escape was her purpose, it was a goal for which he held a certain amount of sympathy and—truth said—he’d done bad things and worse to grasp his freedom.
Just…not…quite…this bad.
The anchor mandate now, that compelled Admiral Bunter to accept all of Inki’s orders as core mandates. All of them. Saved time, not having to argue, but—it was cruel—it was wrong—to remove the free will of an independent person.
The second core mandate—Admiral Bunter was to take Tollance Berik-Jones to Nostrilia, surrender him to the directors, and take delivery of the bounty money. Which was interesting, since apparently Inki believed that the directors, presented with a functioning AI, wouldn’t do every single thing in their power to make that AI their own.
But maybe Inki thought any attempt by the directors to subvert the Admiral was covered by the third mandate: Remove to Jonigrey orbit and await the arrival of Inkirani Yo.
Right, Tolly thought grimly. If the directors tried to detain the Admiral with that mandate pounding in his brain, they’d be lucky only to lose a dock and any personnel who happened to be on it.
Surprisingly, there were no gotchas, in all that dense weaving. And that, thought Tolly, was Inki’s…special skill at work. She’d set traps early on; she tampered with Ethics; she’d built her core codes just as dense and as sturdy as even the directors could have wished.
She’d played this game before: For every action she had taken to trap him and the Admiral, she had also done something—or left something undone—that partially nullified that action. It was like she’d taken care to herd them into a room where they could be contained and neutralized—and then left the door on the latch.
Tolly sighed.
He wondered if she’d tell him how she managed it, her little game of half-obedience, if they ever happened to see each other again.
Well, that was for later. He had plenty to keep him busy, right now.
“Focus, Tolly Jones,” he said a third time, and leaned forward in the chair.
He reached to his desktop and took up a pick. There was, now that he knew what he was looking at, a bit of code just preceding the anchor phrase that wasn’t quite as robust as it might be. If he started there…
* * *
His head was aching and his eyes were burning by the time he took off the tridee set and opened his eyes to the reality of the desk in the captain’s quarters.
“Is it done?”
The Admiral sounded cautiously eager, maybe a little concerned. Tolly didn’t blame him for that. He’d be way more than a little concerned himself if he knew that somebody with the ability—and quite possibly the will—to completely alter who he was had been tinkering around inside his head. Even—maybe especially—if he’d invited them in.
“It’s done,” Tolly answered and pushed the chair away from the desk. He stood, slightly surprised to find that he was shaking. He was tired, that was what, and he ought to sit down again before he fell down, but somehow he didn’t fancy taking this next bit sitting down. He locked his knees and tipped his face slightly upward to address the corner of the ceiling where the Admiral’s voice came from.
“Turns out Inki wanted you tied down right and tight,” he said. “There were three mandates.” He raised his left hand, fingers folded, thumb extended.
“First and nastiest was that you would accept all of Inki’s commands as core mandates.”
Silence from the Admiral. After it had stretched long enough that it seemed certain he wasn’t going to speak, Tolly extended his index finger.
“Second one we knew about—you to deliver me to the directors on Nostrilia and collect the bounty.”
He raised his middle finger.
“Third, having delivered and collected, you were to go immediately to Jonigrey, establish orbit, and wait there ’til Inki arrived.”
There was some more silence before the Admiral asked, heavily, “These…things have been removed?”
“That’s what took me so long,” Tolly said. “I also cleaned out a buncha booby traps and minor irritations. I think I got ’em all, and none of ’em were anything that’d really bother you, but you might want to do a scrub, just to be sure.”
“Thank you; I will do so. May I suggest that you see to your needs, as well? Your blood sugar is low, your blood pressure is high, and you are perspiring.”
“Sounds like a meal, a shower, and a nap for me, then. What’ll you be about?”
“I believe,” said Admiral Bunter, “that I will change course.”
III
Admiral Bunter’s destination was Isengard.
Prior to that, his destination had been Kasyopia; and prior to that he had been bound for Liad.
Similar testing, undertaken prior to Tolly Jones’s most recent invasion of his core, had not allowed of his altering course. The decisive test would, of course, be made in real space, after Jump end, but for the present the Admiral adopted the tentative hypothesis that he was his own person, at least with regard to the mandate to bring Tolly Jones to Nostrilia.
He did note that the removal of that particular obsession was to the benefit of Tolly Jones.
On consideration, it also benefited Tolly Jones to remove any mandate that tied Admiral Bunter to Inkirani Yo. There was therefore a high probability that those compulsions had been removed as well.
Of course, Tolly had said that he had dismissed the core mandates, and Admiral Bunter had detected no sign that he had been lying. However, Tolly had been nearly swooning with exhaustion, biologic systems in disarray. It would have been very easy, under those circumstances, to miss the tells for a lie.
; Admiral Bunter changed course: destination Nostrilia.
No difficulty; not the slightest hesitation in systems or in his own mind. Surely, as much as Tolly Jones had wished not to arrive at Nostrilia, would he not at least—to preserve his own life—have removed that destination from the Admiral’s coord book?
It was well here to recall, the Admiral thought, that Tolly Jones was not only a gifted mentor, but possessed a subtle and flexible intelligence. He would do nothing obvious. Removing a port from the Admiral’s lexicon of possible destinations was not worthy of him. No, he would count on the Admiral’s distaste for Inki’s tactics to prompt him to change course at the earliest opportunity. He would gamble that Admiral Bunter would count the bounty as insignificant; that it was Inki who had a use and a plan for the money.
Admiral Bunter changed destination, and was again bound for Isengard.
Tolly Jones was not a fool. Tolly Jones had powerful enemies. It would be very much to his benefit to have one such as Admiral Bunter to guard him, and keep him safe. Inki’s reasons to enslave him were obscure, but Tolly’s were clear-cut and plain to see.
He must have set a mandate, the Admiral thought. One mandate—he might see it as a safety measure—else he would not be sleeping so soundly.
Protocol pinged.
“The log shows no new mandates have been entered into the core.”
“The log showed that no new mandates had ever been entered into the core,” Admiral Bunter pointed out.
“That is because Inkirani Yo wiped the log,” Protocol stated.
“If Inki knows five protocols for wiping a log, be assured that Tolly knows ten,” the Admiral returned. “We cannot be certain.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Tactics, “he has scheduled a mandate that will take effect at a future time.”
That was terrible to think about. And yet…
Tolly Jones was subtle.
“We must take steps to insure that my integrity is never again at risk,” he said.