“You. Do. Not. EVER. Dump an OP without a BUFFER.” She ground out each word against the pain in her head. It was just bad backlash, she could work through it, but the need to emphasize following the proper steps was paramount. If she couldn’t trust Ivester and Dougal to follow the rules, she was going to be running a risk whenever they swapped in for Keller.
Hofstaeder stayed back a step, keeping clear of the reprimand being delivered.
“You designed this fucking system, Ivester. Why the hell is it so hard for you to stick to your own goddamn rules?”
“I’m sorry. . . . I was just trying to get you out before whatever that was shut down.” Ivester’s stunned expression shifted to contrite. Helen’s anger abruptly found itself without purchase and started to evaporate, leaving her feeling wrung-out and foolish. It would have been easier if he’d been an asshole about it.
“Right impulse. Wrong action. Next time we do this with Keller at the helm. You two . . .” Helen stabbed her finger first at Ivester, next at Dougal, “need a crash course in flight ops. Set it up before we go back out there.”
“I just told you, whatever you were riding has shut down. There’s nowhere to go back to,” Ivester responded.
“There will be. The Scale have incorporated the spider waldo’s entanglement particles. Whatever I was riding was one of a billion just like it. I think we’ve got some very interesting work ahead of us.” Helen managed to get both arms together over one side of the coffin and rested her forehead on them where they met. “Doc, can you please give me a hand out. I’ve got half as many legs as I think I do.”
“Of course.”
“What do you mean, incorporated the particles?” As contrite as he might have been about screwing up Helen’s return to the coffin, Ivester’s natural impulsiveness got the better of him again. “Are you telling me you linked up to a Scale? You waldoed a SCALE?”
Helen winced as his excitement drove his voice louder, and swung her legs out, reaching for the floor with all five sets of feet. Wait. Ten toes, two feet. Getting up and walking around was the quickest way to get settled back into her own body, but every motion resulted in tingling pain.
“That is what I’m telling you right now. I may change my mind after I’ve recovered a bit. Call it first impressions.”
“Dougal, we need . . .” Ivester turned, paused. Helen caught the whisper in the air as Far Reaches communications tried to get his attention. He held up a finger. “Hold that thought.”
Helen managed to keep her feet under her long enough to get to the couch at the back of the room. It will have to do.
Ivester’s expression grew grim at whatever he was hearing. “When did this happen?” He headed briskly to his office, one of the small cubicles along the far wall of Recovr’s space. It was an angry motion, the door closing behind him with a sharp snap.
“What’s that about?” Dougal came over to join Helen on the couch. “He sounds pissed.”
“It’s bad news, whatever it is,” Doc said sourly. “Almighty Ivester doesn’t handle bad news well.”
They could see Ivester’s outline where he paced back and forth behind the frosted panels that separated the office from the rest of the lab. They could hear his agitation, muffled beats of sound without enough definition to become words.
“He’ll tell us when he’s done. Or he won’t.” Hofstaeder fished a hand-scanner out of her pocket. “Now, since we don’t have access to a full medical unit down here in this dungeon, I’m going to have to ask you to sit still for a minute.”
“Yes, please.” Helen leaned back on the couch while Doc held the scanner up against the side of her head.
“So explain to me what happened out there.” Dougal reached out and pulled the constellation of screens floating in the air a little closer. Helen couldn’t see them without her glasses, but she recognized the gesture. “I thought we were just reconnecting to see if we could still get to the Golfball.”
“We were. That’s why we didn’t wait on Keller, right? This was supposed to be a quick drop in and drop out. A connection check. But whatever is going on out there is escalating. The whole waldo seems to be gone, maybe the whole Golfball too. It was hard to tell.”
“If there’s no waldo, what did you entangle with?” Dougal asked the most reasonable question.
“My best guess right now is one of the Scale. I couldn’t tell for sure but it didn’t feel like something programmed by Far Reaches. I was not prepared for this.”
“This entire project gets weirder all the time,” Dougal remarked.
“Can we even identify a Scale from the inside?” Helen responded.
“It looks like we will need to find out. But if you were, in fact, riding an eenie of some kind, my bet is that it’s one of our Far Reaches models. My gut reaction is that your coffin tech would have an easier time talking to a Far Reaches eenie then it would talking to someone else’s.”
The quiet conversation was interrupted by the vibration of something hitting the wall of Ivester’s office. Helen and Hofstaeder exchanged an alarmed glance.
“What the hell?” Helen headed for the door, Hofstaeder right behind. Ivester’s outline had disappeared.
“Nate? Are you all right in there?” Hofstaeder raised her voice, reached for the door handle. Just inside the empty cubicle, Ivester was seated akimbo on the floor, staring through his personal Insight in front of him. The light in his glasses was guttering, like it was passing commands faster than he could think.
“Ivester?” Helen asked. “What was that?”
“Fine.” He answered a question Helen hadn’t asked. His tone was flat, uncharacteristically so. The expression in the cold grey eyes was utterly devastated. In the sudden quiet Helen could hear the whispers in the ether as he communicated, until suddenly the lights in his glasses winked out, like he’d thrown a switch, cut himself off abruptly. He refocused on the three Recovr team members standing in the doorway, settling on making eye contact with Helen. He took a deep breath, let it out.
“Keller is dead.”
Dougal made a high-pitched sound. When Helen turned to look, he had covered his mouth with his hands in shock. His skin had paled, throwing the linework of his tattoos into sharp relief. Helen hadn’t arrived at shock just yet, all of the plans in her head, every thought she’d been forming about next steps to get back out to the Golfball simply imploding, leaving a Keller-sized hole right about where the Ted-sized hole had been healing over. She leaned heavily on the doorframe, waiting for the now-familiar moment to pass.
She exchanged a glance with Hofstaeder, who looked as stunned as she felt. Ivester got to his feet and shook his head.
“Keller never made it back from his meeting. They found him in the lake about two hours ago.”
Helen hunted for a question to ask, already doing damage control inside her own head, trying to stay in denial long enough to act. “Has anyone told Ethan?”
“Next of kin gets notified first. Ethan’s already talking to Metro.” Ivester straightened up, reassembled his composure. “Doc, Keller’s family is going to need some support. It’s probably a little outside Far Reaches’ purview, but we should do as much as we can.”
“Of course, I’ll take care of it.”
“What happened?” Helen asked the next question that came to mind. The timing was too convenient to be coincidence. First someone made an attempt while I was helpless in the coffin, then the news about Beyond Blue making a run on Line Drive broke, now Keller winds up . . .
She couldn’t bring herself to finish that sentence.
“We don’t know anything yet. Just that they found him when someone’s dog got loose by the lake and went in after a body. They should know more in a few hours.”
“You know this is whoever Beauchamp’s working with.” Helen said the words quietly, soft enough to keep them from Dougal.
Hofsteader heard, pressed her lips into a thin russet line at the idea.
“There’s no proof of that yet, but I don’t think we can ignore the possibility,” Ivester responded.
“Nate, this is going to need both of us,” Hofstaeder interjected. “Are you okay for the moment?”
Ivester nodded. “Helen, I need you and Dougal to figure out what the next steps are going to be for Recovr. This is going to take all my attention for a while.”
Hofstaeder held up a hand to stop him. “Nate, this project needs to be canceled. Now. You’ve already lost two people to it. Whoever is trying to take it from you has crossed a line. Let them have the whole damn thing before anyone else gets hurt.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.” Ivester pushed past them and headed for the lab exit.
Helen watched him go, a concerned Hofstaeder trailing in his wake.
“So what now?” Dougal had recovered from the shock.
Helen cast about for something to hold on to. Something that meant she wouldn’t have to think about Keller and yet another gaping hole in her soul.
“You heard the man.” She turned back to her work for a place to hide, as she always did. “Let’s figure out how to tell these eenies apart from the inside.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When Helen had first moved in from the commuter-burbs of Launch City to the Far Reaches campus, she’d found that if she entered a room quick enough, she could catch everything still in low-power mode. It was like poking a friend who had fallen asleep during a movie. The lights came up, but it still took a second to restore consciousness. Tonight she waited after turning the door handle so it would feel less like she was walking into a tragically empty space.
Helen let gravity carry her aching frame across the room onto the lab’s only couch, burying her face in the throw pillows. She had spent the past few hours in the commissary with the rest of Flight Ops, watching the shock of Keller’s death move from OP to OP and NAV to NAV. The room full of pathos was too much to bear and she’d finally retreated to the lab to escape.
The couch smelled vaguely of plastic and dust.
Dust, dust, something about the dust. The thought came unbidden. That part of the mystery’s over, she reminded herself. You solved that bit.
WE solved that bit. She rolled over and stuck her feet in the air, staring pensively at the gaping black void of the ceiling above. But there’s something still not quite right about it. It was exactly the line of questioning she needed, something she could dig in to. The lights in the room shifted from their warm, welcoming glow to a cooler, more businesslike tone as Helen fished her tablet out of her pocket and started to call up the mission files.
Something about the dust.
The dust was comprised of the shells of dead Far Reaches eenies, that much had been clear. But eenies were rapacious; each generation was supposed to consume the one before, making use of every scrap of material they could get a hold of, from silicon to stardust. Inert material like the dust should have all been consumed long before moving on to something active like the waldo.
So what if the Scale were programmed differently? If they were supposed to attack the active elements, it might explain why the Far Reaches eenies had been stuck in rebuilding mode. They were trying to undo the damage. This wasn’t a glitch or an eenie overrun, it was a fight on the smallest possible level.
She rubbed her face with her hands and retrieved her Insight glasses from her pocket. The room lit up with the windows and strings of code that Dougal and Ivester had abandoned earlier in the day. Following her line of thought, James began opening up all her Golfball mission files, from that first catastrophic contact on forward to Myrian. She thumbed through them, separating out the observations from the team in the Fishbowl from notes made by Keller on the fly.
Oh, Keller.
There had been no new information. Ivester had broken the news of Keller’s death company-wide, stopping just short of calling it murder. Hofstaeder had made sure psych services were available to anyone who needed them, but especially Flight Ops. Helen sat quietly for a moment and reflected on the empty space in her soul that had been filled by her mentor. Losing Ted had been a huge blow. Losing Keller was going to be even worse, but for now, while she remained suspended in denial, she could act. Helen could bury herself in the problem and figure out just what the hell her friends had died for and who was going to pay for that.
Beauchamp might just be the hands, but in Helen’s mind she coalesced into the stand-in for whatever person, corporation, or alien was behind the Scale.
High-resolution images played out across the ceiling above her, the mix of hard and soft edges of the eenie shells painting an uncanny landscape in monochrome.
The pounding on the door interrupted her thought process and kicked her heart rate up a few notches. She disengaged the privacy locks before rolling off the couch. There were no weapons in the lab. There shouldn’t need to be any weapons in the lab. She cast about for something to throw and asked James to be on alert, just in case.
The pounding came again, which was puzzling. Anyone who belonged in the lab should have access through the locks. She checked with James, but it returned no data.
What the hell?
The door bounced inward, narrowly missing Helen and depositing a tangle of limbs and suit into the foyer. The door bounced closed equally quickly and Helen found herself standing over a very under-the-influence Ivester.
“What the hell?” She said the words out loud this time.
The engineer accepted her help to get to his feet, and straightened his jacket. “I have a question.”
“That’s nice. Are you even sober enough for answers right now?” A quick glance told her no, but whatever dragon he was chasing, it was occupying his full attention.
“No. Not one bit. It has been . . . a very poor evening and I am looking for someplace to hide until I sober up. Do you mind?”
“Don’t you have an apartment?”
“I started by meeting with Keller’s family. Then I went to the apartment, now I am here.” He held his hands out in front of him and stared at them bemusedly, like they belonged to someone else. “It wasn’t helping. I have questions, and this is where I should be to get answers.”
Helen stepped aside. Ivester headed for his office and left the door hanging open behind him. There was a clattering that sounded like he’d swept everything off his desk and onto the floor. Helen stared after him for a few moments before reapplying herself to the couch. She couldn’t blame him. She was here in the lab looking for the same thing. She perched her Insight glasses back on the bridge of her nose and pushed more photos from her tablet out into the room, working her way back into the eenie problem.
“Why are you here?” Ivester asked, like the thought she might have somewhere else to hang out had only just occurred to him.
“Same reasons, fewer drugs,” Helen responded.
“In my defense, Doctor Hofstaeder failed to warn me of the side effects.”
“Yeah, that’s not fooling anybody.” Helen stretched out to occupy the full length of the couch and started calling up information on Far Reaches eenie designs. The answer to identifying an eenie from the inside, she reflected, might be as simple as counting legs. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the sensations of her most recent entanglement with no real luck. She tried, as a test, to count her own limbs with just her mind, no motions, no actions. It was harder than it seemed.
“Fair enough,” Ivester said.
Helen sighed, train of thought broken again. “If you’re going to be chatty, why don’t you come out here and help me brainstorm on this.”
“On what?”
“How to identify an eenie from the inside. Dougal and I think we need to start by figuring out if I’m Entangling with a Far Reaches model, or one of the Scale.”
“Wait,
you couldn’t tell?” There was a thump from inside the office that sounded like feet hitting the ground. Was he lying on the desk?
“You try counting how many legs you have with your eyes closed and let me know how that goes,” Helen groused.
Ivester got hung up on the office doorway, trying to look down at his own legs. He corrected his path, wandered a few extra steps into the room and came to a halt, distracted by the images Helen had been hanging up in the virtual space.
“It never occurred to me to pull that kind of information from a waldo. We always know what the waldo looks like from our end and we apply the feedback to our local simulation.”
“Really?” Makes sense, otherwise entanglement keys wouldn’t be so hard to lay hands on. “That’s one checkmark in the ‘Scale’ column, I think.”
Ivester pursed his lips and waved his arms like he was conducting an aria. A tidy set of columns appeared in the Insight space, one labeled “Scale,” the other labeled “Fucking Boring.”
“I see we’re not screwing around,” Helen quipped and added “entanglement particles” under the arguments for the Scale column. “As far as I know, nobody has ever operated an eenie like a waldo before. I feel like a total badass. That’s boring to you?”
“It’s marginally less exciting than a first contact scenario, but it is pretty cool.” Ivester gave up standing and dropped into a seated, cross-legged position. He managed to maintain it for about six seconds before giving up and stretching out full length on the rubberized floor mats. Helen threw a couch pillow at him.
“Thanks.” He stuffed the pillow behind his head. “I mean, can you imagine it? We might have just run into the explorers of an entirely new life form.”
“They could just be the new life form. Some kind of space ant or space termite,” Helen theorized.
“I will be sorely disappointed if they are space termites.” Ivester held up an admonishing finger. “And since I am under the influence, I reserve the right to dream big. At least until the next in-house investors meeting. Then it’s back to profit margins and five-year plans.”
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