“Ted, can we run something with ‘Catastrophic’ in the title? It’ll make me sound more like a badass.” It was meant to be funny, to take the edge off her own worry. What was supposed to be a high-end, high-priced milk run was starting to turn into the kind of situation that could end with her driving moles for the remainder of her career. Ted wasn’t listening and the joke fell flat.
The lists settled down and Helen was faced with a number. No title, no designations, just a number, 9523. After each step was listed a single word. Evaluate. It was a slow list. Test and assess, test and assess. It wasn’t Ted’s usual efficient task-making. It was a list full of fear.
“This is it?” She didn’t need to ask, but she did, just to be on record. Even when they were crèche-kids, Ted never operated from a point of fear. That caution alone told her things were coming off the rails.
“So far. See where it says ‘Evaluate’? Those are our riff-points. That’s where we get to make stuff up if we need to. Just make sure you verbally justify each and every decision before you take action so we have it all documented.” They were moving into unfamiliar territory now. A small part, a very small part, of Helen’s brain wished they could just go back to following the original boring checklist.
“Roger that. First on the list, checking hull integrity.”
This time around, Ted didn’t interrupt. Helen opened a connection from her waldo to the bank of glittering shards that comprised the Golfball’s processing core. It was much like watching a video. She could see the data coming in, but at this level she couldn’t interact with it: that was all on Ted. The waldo and the Golfball were isolated from one another, two completely separate entities, down to the eenies that built them. Any connection between them had to be made manually.
“Ted, are you seeing this?” The numbers never lied; it was Helen’s most and least favorite thing about them.
“Affirmative.”
“It’s like the hull never got finished.”
“Just the facts please, we don’t do theories.”
“I’m the one running the waldo, I get to theorize. Especially since I’m going to be making the repairs.” The visualization of the outside of the Golfball appeared in her line of sight. “The reason you’re not getting any data from sectors two through six is there are no sectors two through six.” She spun the image, noting where the green lines crossed into red as numbers came and went.
“What? Why?” That note of panic was back, more than a note, an aria of panic that Ted’s voice wasn’t qualified to sing.
“There’s no signal coming back, no power going in. It’s gotta be something simple. Maybe the eenies just didn’t get initialized properly?”
In the corner of her vision she could see the mirror image of Ted’s console displayed in outline. Ports opened and closed as he dug deeper into the Golfball’s programming than Helen was allowed to go. Helen did her own digging, accessing the layout of the Golfball to see if she could get a better read on the outer hull.
The hissing sound broke her concentration.
“Ted, are you whistling?”
“Am I what?”
“Shut up a second, I hear something.” It was a high-pitched sound, tickling the same place in her brain that a dentist’s drill did, making the muscles along her spine twitch. She checked to see if any of the sensors inside the capsule were picking it up.
“I hear it too, but it’s not in the capsule. It’s in the entanglement Feed somehow.” Ted’s voice was hard to make out through the sound.
“In the Feed?” The Feed was quantum, less than a pinprick of matter that allowed her body back home to control the waldo from a distance measured in years rather than miles. It was an intimate, two-way connection, one molecule to one molecule. Whatever that sound was, it couldn’t be in the Feed.
The sound hit a higher pitch, she could hear it, but not hear it, like it was being applied directly to the space inside her skull.
“Ted, can you stop it? Find out where it’s coming from?” Her right eye went blind as the sound twisted in her skull like a knife. Curling up to defend against it was no help. The waldo body had no soft bits to muffle the noise, if it was a noise. Helen hung in the center of the Golfball, legs curled up like a spider playing dead.
“Ted?” She ground his name out. Her other eye, the one still receiving input, had stopped making sense, the lines and colors jumping like an old CRT screen that had encountered a magnet.
Something responded. Something low and shattered and horrible. The piece of her mind that wasn’t scrabbling for a way out insisted it was Ted’s voice. She wanted to scream, to push back against the sound with her own, primal roar. Fight or flight, a small voice said in her head. She gritted her teeth, willed herself to differentiate between where the sound stopped and her own thoughts began. Always fight.
Without warning, the sound stopped. The emptiness that followed hurt almost as badly.
Helen forced herself to focus, adjusted the lenses, unfolded her legs, and reached out. Data continued to flow in, uninterrupted, sketching lines and symbols in the space behind her eyes.
“What. The. Hell.” She was trembling, the involuntary twitches translating to the waldo in a thousand tiny adjustments. Just in case he hadn’t heard her the first time, she roared the words, “WHAT THE HELL, TED!”
She started tearing apart the data, sucking it out of the Golfball and searching for the source of the sound. Protocols be damned, something was really wrong.
“Vectorovich.”
“Piss off, Ted.”
“Vectorovich, respond please.” It took her a moment to figure out that it wasn’t Ted’s voice coming down the line.
“Where’s Ted?” She barked the question, ignoring the consequences of snapping at management. Ted had already told her Ivester had been called in; for some reason they had pulled him off the line and Ivester was taking over, that had to be it.
That thought brought her up short.
The entanglement that linked her body to the waldo was no less complicated than the one that also tied in Ted to the Golfball as her Navigator. Unlinking him should have taken an hour or more. Whoever it was had to be using the emergency channel. There was always a backup ready, but then she should be in contact with them both at once.
“Your NAV had to be taken offline for the short-term.” The sentence followed another of those long, considering pauses she was coming to hate. “What is your current status?”
Helen wanted to laugh, the kind that made the other person step back a pace.
“Current status is indeterminate, sir.” Helen didn’t stop pulling apart the data, but all she could find were errored-out figures and bad connections. Everything the Golfball could throw at her was popping up into her line of sight and there were still no answers. She continued talking, more of an information dump than a conversation, speaking out loud so the recorders would pick it up and add it to the mission logs. “We brought the Golfball live, but are getting no readings at all from sensors two through six. Ted and I had just started trying to determine what was responsible for the dead areas when we got some kind of horrendous feedback.”
“Feedback?”
“I’m not sure how else to describe it.” She held back, reminding herself that whoever this guy was, he’d just walked into the middle of their situation. “Something, I think it was a sound, started up. The last thing Ted said about it was that it was in the Feed. I experienced visual impairment and physical discomfort for the duration. You’ll have to ask Ted what he got on his end.” The more clinical phrasing played better on the recordings, never mind that her heart was racing and she felt as though tiny insects were crawling over every inch of skin. The one that panics first . . . It was like a high-stakes game of chicken when a mission went bad. Somebody was going to go down for the mistakes, even if she managed to pull the mission back out of the bin. If
she started freaking out now, there would be no saving her. As long as she stayed cool and collected, Ted could handle management in the aftermath.
“Affirmative. That follows with the records as we are seeing them.”
The crawling feeling on her skin was getting worse, harder to ignore. She popped out a diamond-tipped claw and scratched at the itch, leaving visible furrows in the carbon fibers of the waldo’s limb.
“Have you checked the integrity of the payload yet?”
The Golfball’s payload had long since fallen off Helen’s list of things to check up on. If they’d managed to finish up on the protocols, she would have gotten to it in proper order, but now . . . Well, now she had more important things to worry about.
“No, sir.” She contemplated throwing Ted onto the rails, dropping the blame into his square. It wouldn’t make any difference; there was going to be more than enough trouble to go around unless they could rescue the mission. The thought was distracting. She scratched, felt the fingertip break through the skin. When she turned her attention to the damage, she was struck again by the presence of way too much dust. The waldo’s itchy leg appeared to be oh-so-gently sublimating, dissolving into powder.
What the hell . . .
She ignored the voice in her ear and refocused her attention on the waldo, shunting all the data off to the side. She had missed it on the first pass. The corpses. All those microscopic eenie shells that gathered like dust on the panels and joints. Ted hadn’t thought they were important. Helen opened the video recorder and pulled her focus in tight, zooming in to examine them, dumping copies of the video to the waldo’s memory. Maybe one in a thousand of them showed some sign of movement. Like hermit crabs, the dead shells had been occupied by something else? Something that was busily de-constructing every surface it touched.
“Sir, we might have a bigger problem.”
“With all due respect, Operator Vectorovich, the biggest problem right now is—” There was backchatter, Helen could hear it. However Ivester was linked in to the Feed, it wasn’t a secure connection. “Can you confirm the data you sent over earlier?”
“Confirmed. The whole damn cabin is covered in dust. I’m continuing to keep a record.”
More backchatter. The voices faded into the background as she stayed in close focus, watching the tiny forms grind and chew. She’d thought the eenies had failed to finish building the capsule, but the opposite was true. They’d been stopped by a microscopic army. An alien army that was doing exactly what the Earth-built eenies were programmed to do. They were breaking the Golfball back down into stardust, back into components that could be used to build anything, as long as you could transmit the right program. She’d come online not into an experiment on the edge of failure, she’d walked into a battleground too small to see.
“Vectorovich, can you confirm the payload?”
“The payload?” She refocused on the voice from a billion miles away. “I’ll have to open a two-way link with the Golfball to do that. Protocols require—”
“Vectorovich, we have lost all capability to access the Golfball’s systems. Whatever killed Theodore Westlake managed to lock us out.”
Wait. Killed? She must not have heard correctly because that was impossible. The itch was back, coupled with a sour taste that didn’t belong.
“You have to deploy the payload, do you understand?”
The payload, of course, the payload. The whole point of this mission. Everything else was expendable, the Golfball, the waldo, everything in service for the greater good. Everything to deliver a block of eenies the size of her head, big enough to build the mother of all power stations.
“Confirmed.” She didn’t have to refocus to see them now; the tiny alien eenies were swarming, covering the lenses like overlapping scales. The itch was almost too much. She could feel them now, FEEL THEM as they nibbled and bit. She continued to pull data, now focusing on dumping as much information as she possibly could down the line to the NAV station. They attacked her joints, the soft spots where the dust could get in between the cracks. Leg eight went first. Helen had to laugh at that, they had first gone for the weakest member, a mindset she could understand. She opened the direct link to the Golfball, ignoring the warnings that clustered around the edges of her vision. Deploy the payload, then break the link to the waldo—she would snap back to her own body and spend the next six months fighting with the psychiatrist, no problem.
“Deploying payload.” She felt the crack and shiver through the legs of the waldo as the payload was launched from the Golfball’s cargo space. No rockets, no jetfuel, just the clever application of inertia and physics.
“Confirmed, we are receiving telemetry.”
“Permission to return?” she asked, debating whether or not she should just hit the button and eject, even without their sanction.
“Granted.”
Helen breathed a sigh of relief. The itch, the gnawing disassembly of the waldo was all background noise now. She could ditch out, go back to her own body and let the union lawyers sort out the mess. After this tour, even the moles seemed like a dream gig for the next couple of years.
“Confirmed. Operator Helen Vectorovich, disembarking. Entanglement disengaged in three . . . two . . . one . . .” Helen focused her vision on the Golfball’s main panel, entered in her personal identifier, and keyed the release.
The view blinked once, twice. The connection pulled her back, the long slow slide back into her own body, more than a billion miles away. She could hear voices, a cacophony filling the void of the quantum feed in a language that had no reference.
CHAPTER TWO
Getting abruptly cut off from the waldo was like waking up with a hangover. The nasty kind that followed booze, ice cream, and parasols with little flowers on them.
Ow, what the hell? The reaction headache didn’t wait for Helen to take a breath. The pain was immediate, eyeball-deep, and made worse by a nerve-deep twang that came out of nowhere. She’d been dumped right back into her own still paralyzed and disoriented body. Pain and panic closed in, chasing her down the billion miles from deep space to the inside of her own head. The bubble of the coffin was always dark, to help ease the transition from waldo to self, but today the warm and soothing black felt alien and isolating.
Helen was trapped in an immovable body with a voice that failed to reach her lips.
Slow down. The idea came to her from long experience rather than rational thought. Helen tried to take comfort in the checkboxes she knew were being ticked off, one by one, toward her release. The coffin started dripping drugs into her bloodsteam to counter the backlash from her barely controlled return.
One breath.
Two breaths.
The outer corners of her vision were framed with the soothing blue lines and icons of Insight, Far Reaches’ communications system. Little lights and readouts winked green and blue as the screens inside the coffin came to life. Normally it was a bit disappointing to come back to earth. Today it was a relief.
Helen still couldn’t move, but the panic started to recede. This was familiar. This was safe.
Protocol, protocol, protocol.
“Helen, are you awake in there?” Against the black a hawkish face appeared, the golden brown skin and silver hair in sharp relief against the darkness inside the coffin. Dr. Lillian Hofstaeder, the company doctor, worried about the wrong side of the emergency as always. She was smiling gently. Never a good sign. Helen was fairly sure the woman practiced that smile in the mirror. Doc was perpetually worried, perpetually insincere. In Helen’s opinion she was all too eager to sideline an operator at the first hint of trouble.
Hofstaeder’s just another box to be checked off.
Something is out of order here. Where the hell is Ted? There were holes in her recollection, pieces missing. They’d come back, they always did after a bad drop-out. The checklists demanded immediate hum
an contact after a bad ejection, actual contact. Face to face through a screen didn’t cut it. In the time they’d been working together, Ted’s had been the first face she’d seen every time something went wrong. It gave a tangible connection back to the real world; it helped fill in the holes in their conversations. Instead Helen’s first friendly face was through the Insight, off protocol, all wrong.
“Yes.” Helen responded curtly. The neoprene supersuit that restrained her, kept her from banging around inside the coffin, didn’t stop her from talking. This wasn’t her first bad mission. Operating a waldo by remote across a billion miles of space had occasional problems, but even within the bounds of really bad trips, this was turning out to be a doozy.
Normally they yanked you out of the pod as quickly as possible and dragged you off to the medical bay.
Normally they popped the top and got you back to seeing real light, breathing real air, before they did anything else.
Normally they stuck to the goddamn checklist.
Helen was being held in limbo and nobody was telling her why.
“Doc, why are we off protocol?” The words left her lips as quickly as she could call them to mind.
“Relax, Helen, we will have you out of there in a couple of minutes.”
Helen recognized that tone of voice. It meant you were being “handled.” It meant something had gone wrong and they were scrambling to come up with an explanation. She shifted her attention to getting stiff fingers moving across the keypads inside the coffin. Hofstaeder might not be willing to give her details, but something in the coffin’s computer might.
“We are pulling your connection pod entirely. Dr. Ivester cut all the media Feeds, so the reporters started mobbing the Mortuary to try and get a story.” Helen caught Hofstaeder’s grimace. Doc might not take overt issue with the operators’ grim nicknames, but she hated using them herself. It didn’t fit with her strangely rosy mindset.
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