Her Insight was flooded with information from the NAV computer. Most of it she chose to ignore, shunting it off to the side. Warnings from various parts of the Golfball, error messages as non-critical systems malfunctioned. Elliot and Zai had successfully triggered the program to break down the Golfball and rebuild it into what would become the heart of the communications frame for the jumpgate. Instead of completing their task, the eenies were running up against the Scale, stuck in an endless loop of destruction and creation. The two tiny armies were very nearly at an impasse.
She dumped everything to a logfile to hand over to Ivester and the techs later. Somewhere in this glittering storm of errors and rapidly decompiling programs lay the eenie development environment. Helen checked the countdown.
Three minutes left.
Helen scrambled to clear as much of the NAV computer as possible, digging in deeper to find what she needed. Ivester had given her the file that should deliver new programming to the eenies. It would free them from the endless reconstruction loop they’d been trapped in and allow them to go solely after the Scale. It didn’t guarantee they would be able to destroy all the Scale on the Golfball, but it would give them a better shot.
Helen glanced out over the miniature war zone playing out across the entire interior of the Golfball. A few idiot lights still sputtered here and there, but the majority had been turned into an alien landscape of eenie-driven design and error. Helen could clearly see the outlines of the two armies as they faced off, one brightly colored in patches and moiré patterns, the other like liquid silver. It was a patchwork of opportunistic encounters that ended with one cluster consuming the other. Neither seemed programmed to flee or regroup; they just kept eating and building, eating and building.
Two minutes thirty seconds.
Both sides had long, winding supply chains. The opponents consumed in one skirmish might be carried or floated like spiky puffballs to another location to build more of the same. It was gorgeous, like watching two lichens fight over the same bare patch of rock, except with the speed cranked up 100,000 times.
The regular NAV cameras showed Helen the brightly colored shells of the Scale, but when she switched to the ultraviolet spectrum, it reversed, the Scale turning a dark, matte grey and the Far Reaches eenies exploding in their own fantastic colors.
An internal communication request caught Helen by surprise. The NAV had no backup channel like OPs did, so that meant the call was coming from inside Golfball. Normally that line would be reserved for local radio communications between the waldo and the NAV. Since the waldo had been completely consumed by this point . . .
Helen answered it.
Two minutes.
Without James backing her up, the language of the alien Scale was indecipherable. Her Insight paraded gibberish in front of her eyes as it tried to make sense of the syllables.
“I know at least one of you fuckers speaks English,” Helen said.
There was a pause. The voice that followed sent a chill down Helen’s spine.
“Now, now, that’s hardly the language of the diplomat.” The voice belonged to Catherine Beauchamp. It was distorted, filtered, translated and retranslated back, but unmistakable all the same.
“Beauchamp?”
One minute thirty.
“Cat? What the absolute hell?”
“I warned you to put Far Reaches in your rearview mirror. Looks like you were crazy enough to ignore my advice.” The other OP’s voice came through the Golfball’s internal comms, doubtless connected somehow by the Scale.
“Cat, what the hell is going on? How are you even here?”
“Now that I’m back at Beyond Blue, I have a direct line into the iLlumina command structure.” There was a long pause, filled with chatters and half syllables. “Everybody’s talking. Everybody. All the time. I know exactly what is going on with every single Scale in this cluster at every single moment.”
Helen started searching, looking for a difference in the colors, in the quantity of the Scale laid out on the Golfball’s surfaces before her. They had to be organized somehow. The patterns on the shells repeated, like clustering together with like. There had to be a central node, a command post from and to which Cat was communicating. It was the kind of problem she’d send back down the line to Ivester, but this time she was cut off, alone.
“So you brought the Scale here from Myrian, fine, we already knew that. But why are you still talking to them? Why are you helping them?” Helen tried to keep the other OP talking, keep the communication open as long as possible while she hunted for the source. Pieces of the puzzle continued to fall into place.
“Helping them? Not a chance. They’re working for me. I know you’ve been poking around, trying to figure out if there’s anything you can do. Let me save you the trouble. The Golfball is mine. The Scale will consume it, rebuild it, and bring it to our new gate right on schedule. Beyond Blue will own your very expensive asset and there is nothing you can do about it.”
One minute.
“Cat, you can’t be serious.” Helen continued searching frantically. “Industrial espionage is one thing. Great, you scooped us, you get a cookie. But we can’t let these things through that gate. That will bring them right to the edge of our inhabited worlds.”
The language of the Scale grew more angry, syllables coming faster, sharper. It was like Cat’s words were being echoed by a chorus of minuscule voices.
“You misunderstand, sweetie. I’m the one controlling the Scale. I tell them what to do, where to go. This isn’t just espionage, this is now a war. The Scale won’t come through the gate unless I tell them to, and if I tell them to, well, that’s going to be a very tough time for everybody.”
The statement of intent was chilling. The scenario Cat described was way outside the capacity of a semi-disgraced waldo jockey to fix.
“It’s a hostage situation, you mean,” Helen retorted angrily. “You’re going to hold an entire system hostage for what, exactly?” She was only partially aware of the import of what Cat was saying; she didn’t have time to parse the seriousness of that information. She just kept talking, feeling around the edges of her counterpart’s frustration.
Thirty seconds.
This was a conversation for bigger dogs. Maybe they could entangle Ivester to negotiate, maybe XERMo could pass this on to the government. The list of maybes spiraled out of Helen’s control and she had to let them go, refocusing on the one thing she actually had a hand in. Take back the Golfball.
“You don’t understand, Helen, the Scale don’t care. There is no malice, there is only expansion. We encroached on their territory back on the Myrian asteroid, and now they are encroaching back. I can keep them under control for now. That’s something worth paying a price for, don’t you think?”
“So why the hell are you bringing them straight to us?”
There. She had it.
By flipping back and forth through the spectrums available to the NAV camera, Helen identified a new cluster of Scale. Not centrally located, but tucked way back in the corner, looking more like an idiot light gone dark than a cluster of alien eenies. A single mass that the NAV computer highlighted as quantum-particle dense. It had to be the connection point for Beauchamp. Now, Helen just had to get to it.
If I can cut Beauchamp out of the equation, maybe our eenies can get a leg up.
“Cat, you can talk to them.” Helen kept talking. “Help us open a dialog. We can get somebody up here to negotiate, but not if they get through the gate.”
“Time’s up,” Beauchamp said.
The disentangle sequence began.
Not yet. Notyetnotyetnotyet. Helen fought the disentanglement. Ivester might have hard-coded in the kill switch, but an Operator, any Operator, was far from helpless once entangled. As the edges of her consciousness flaked away, Helen dug into her Insight, finding the kill switch and disablin
g it. It stung, like someone had run sandpaper over her eyelids, but the connection was under her control again, at least until the Almighty Ivester panicked and pulled her back into her own body by force.
One minute past, not a second more, she reminded herself.
If Beauchamp really was in control of the Scale, then why didn’t she bump up the timeline, attack Helen the same way she had Ted? Unless that five-minute mark was something hard-coded in, somehow.
Move faster.
“I’m not going anywhere, Cat, so let’s see if we can figure this out. You know nobody’s going to let you get away with this, right? XERMo or one of the other agencies is simply going to kick in your door and take the NAV particles away from you.” As she talked, Helen dug into the eenie software, loading the files she needed to reprogram the eenies. She was out of time, so she had to switch tactics.
“This is a surprise.” Beauchamp didn’t bother to listen. “Sticking around until the last possible moment? I would have thought Ivester would have pulled you back out by now.”
The Scale covering the surfaces of the Golfball began to collect into larger groups, aggressively flanking and surrounding the patches of eenies. Helen could see Beauchamp’s influence as the Scale began to attack in earnest and the eenies started to lose ground.
Fifteen seconds past.
“Aw, Cat, you’re an OP, you know how stubborn we can be.” Helen found the file, sprang it open, and found herself faced with a familiar checklist of items ranging from Panel Reconstruction to Catastrophic Meteorite Strike. Helen began to thumb through the list. A hundred-plus missions under your goddamn belt and you can’t think of the protocol you need.
A properly entangled NAV would have everything at their fingertips already. Despite her skill as an OP, there were just some things NAVs had a lot more training in. She burned precious time loading up Ivester’s “eenie overrun” software and sending it to the remining “builder” eenies. Now she needed a solution that would let her get back out to the Golfball again after her five minutes were up.
Eenies acting out of turn were destroyed and added to the feedstock. Larger, more complex tasks meant that programming instructions had to be streamed to the eenies from the NAV computer. Whatever else happened, Helen had to keep these NAV particles safe, otherwise Beauchamp would be the only one who could control anything.
I hope.
If Ivester got his act together and pulled Helen back to her body, she wasn’t sure how quickly they’d send her out again. Better to take the risk and put her own army of eenies on the offense before she had to ditch out.
Thirty seconds past . . .
Helen found what she needed. Designed to fix strikes from micro-asteroids, it would attack a specific section of the Golfball, break it down to its component molecules, and rebuild it to spec.
Helen cast about for the eenie clusters closest to the NAV computer. A fine dust made of eenie shells floated over the battlefield, static forces causing them to clump together and drift where they fetched up against surfaces. The Scale were moving in a hurry now, destroying as they went, leaving the remnants for later.
Helen found the three closest eenie clusters and made a connection to them, delivering their new instructions through the NAV’s coded channel. Once they had received everything, she could hit the abort button and get safely back to her own body, a billion miles away.
Five minute mark.
Helen recognized the sound. The same crawling chattering noise, the same incomprehensible squeals. Except here, inside the NAV computer, it was far, far worse than she had experienced before. There was pain, sharp needles in her temples and behind her eyes. Here in the NAV computer, there were no barriers, nothing to dull the pain, nothing to separate her from the knives that seemed to find easy purchase in the space behind her eyelids.
But she had to hold her focus on the connection until the eenies had received their new programming.
“Oh, I see you’ve reached the five-minute mark.” Beauchamp’s voice was there, buried in the sound and fury. Helen could not tell if she was hearing Beauchamp over the local channel or whether it was part of the attack that felt like it crawled around the inside of her skull, scrabbling at the bone with glass shards for fingernails.
Helen pulled her focus tighter, allowed the pain to slip past. In her memory, she could see Mira seizing in the NAV’s chair.
Constrained as she was inside the coffin, there was a very real risk that nobody would realize Helen was under attack until it was too late. They can just bury me in it as is, I suppose, she thought darkly.
Beauchamp continued talking. “The five-minute mark caught my AI NAV too, but by that point BrightWinds was on the downward spiral. They didn’t bother to investigate, they just took it offline. Beyond Blue lost two human NAVs before they figured it out and came to me, but you wouldn’t have heard about that.”
“Two NAVs?” Helen ground out the words between clenched teeth. “You let them kill two NAVs?” Almost there, she just had to hang on a few more seconds. Keep her talking. Keep her distracted.
“It was before they came and recruited me. It was before they knew what they really had,” Beauchamp said, her voice like acid in Helen’s ears. “You can’t hang those around my neck.”
“And now? Can you call them off or are you going to let me go the way of Ted and the other two NAVs?” A small part of Helen’s mind was genuinely curious in that quiet, detached way thoughts got when faced with ongoing pain. The extent of Beauchamp’s control would be a puzzle for another day.
“I could, but calling them off is not in the plan. If whatever trick you’re trying to pull gets you killed, then Far Reaches will shut down the entire Line Drive project. Beyond Blue is prepared to pay handsomely to take over all the assets. And if not, the PR fallout will be crippling. In fact, it’s been suggested that the best possible outcome from my trip all the way out here is that you somehow find yourself unable to disentangle at all.”
Lovely, she’s gloating. Helen would have rolled her eyes if she’d had any. She’d known Beauchamp was gunning for her, but this, this gun-for-hire aspect, was toxic. It’s fucking crazy. The sound was coming in waves now, maxing out the data transfer down the entanglement link back to her body a billion miles away.
Oh. That’s how it works.
It wasn’t interference they were crowding the link with, it was instructions. They were trying to overload her neural pathways, cause a short circuit in the brain itself. The mother of all grand mal seizures. But Helen was working with an OP’s entanglement rig on a NAV line, not a NAV’s brain-only set of wires. Those instructions had a lot more places to go than just the cortex. Helen’s OP hardware was distributing the attack to her entire system: brain, body, even the coffin would be picking up the load. It hurt like hell, but it would take longer to kill her.
You have a harder time taking down an OP because of the hardware, Helen realized. I’ve got you now, you fuckers.
The eenies acknowledged their new instructions and moved in her direction. Helen confirmed and turned her attention to another set. She needed as many eenies as possible if she was going to have even a chance at pulling this off.
Helen’s NAV sensors were obscured by the scrabbling dust of the Scale as Beauchamp turned her microscopic army against the NAV computer. She felt a shiver in her mind as the feeling of being covered in biting ants overrode her conscious thought processes for a moment, giving Helen an extreme case of the willies. If she dialed the camera down far enough, she could see individual bellies, stubby legs, and stabby manipulators as they started chewing away, destroying the electronics and recording surfaces as they went. She might have been screaming out loud, it was hard to tell with her body so far away. In moments Helen had gone blind and deaf.
Shit. Beauchamp got the drop on me.
In Helen’s moment of distraction, Ivester disentangled her before s
he had a chance to block him again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“JUST WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?”
If Helen had been able to move a muscle she might have flinched. Ivester wasn’t shouting, but the force of personality behind the words felt like a physical shake.
“Four minutes, we agreed on FOUR. It’s been seven. Why didn’t you abort?”
The coffin had been folded open, lid off, sides down, a whole new series of wires and connections added in the time she’d been entangled. Ivester was furious. Dougal similarly so. Helen counted to ten and made sure she could move her lips before responding.
“Beauchamp was out there.” She checked the drug delivery on the coffin’s screen. Everything hurt. Whatever the Scale had sent down the line to her body had left it feeling sore and aching all over, like every muscle had been tenderized by a thousand tiny mallets. The health monitors were throwing up screaming red warnings about isometric tissue damage and neurotransmitter deficits. She dialed up the painkillers and dialed down the stimulants. Good thing this coffin’s not sending data to Hofstaeder yet or I’d be in even more hot water.
“Wait, what?” Dougal’s expression changed to surprise.
“You heard me. Beauchamp was out there. She’s Entangling through NAV particles from Myrian. Directing the Scale, giving them an advantage.” Helen waited while the feeling was restored to all her limbs. Ivester’s anger quickly ran through confusion and emerged at incredulity.
“How the hell did she manage that?”
“You’re going to love this. She’s in their command chain. As far as the Scale are concerned, she’s just a bigger, bossier Scale. Ivester, you’ve got to send me back out.”
“Send you . . . No. Absolutely not.”
“Yes. Now. I sicced our eenies on keeping our NAV particles safe. If I did it right, they’ll break up the NAV computer and incorporate it just like the Scale were doing. Now I’ve got to get your overrun software installed and break the communication with Beauchamp. If I can stop her, then we can get the upper hand.”
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