Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  Sanda took a long, steadying breath. He wasn’t going to like this. “I want to find a prosthetic that doesn’t connect to anything and a new battery pack for Grippy. Then… We have to find out where those coordinates are, and the only person I think can help us is Arden Wyke.”

  “Ah. I thought you’d say that. I can’t guarantee I can find them. I can put the word out I’m looking for them. If they’re interested, they’ll come find me.”

  “Do you think they will?”

  “No idea. It’s been years—lifetimes, really, and I don’t know how jumpy they are after what happened with Harlan. I don’t even know for certain they’re still in Atrux. Understand that if you draw their attention and they decide they have something against you, there’s no coming back from that. Arden can make your life hell.”

  “I’ve dealt with a lot of people like that lately. Still kicking.”

  He grinned. “In that case, let’s see about getting you and Grippy patched up. If the shop I’m thinking of still exists, I can drop a few choice words to give Arden a wave at the same time. See if they wave back. They’ve always had networks listening in at certain places.”

  Sanda strapped Grippy to the back of her chair, careful to distribute the repair bot’s weight so it didn’t tip, and followed Graham into the streets. This area was cordoned off for pedestrians, autocabs dropping shoppers in a sinuous line along the concourse. Roads that should have been wide enough for five to pass through abreast narrowed by the growth of stalls sprouting from buildings that could be accessed via thin passages between the hawkers.

  Advertisement drones hovered above, skirting the required three hundred meter altitude bottom limit, their vibrant holographic displays flashing just within the safe margins, their volume barely below the decibel limit.

  “Dios.” Sanda craned her neck to get a better look at a drone that flashed an ad for a VR game in which you could play as a ship, putting down an alien menace. “Even the back markets weren’t this bad in Ada.”

  “Fewer people, fewer credits available to squeeze. The people of Ada are more concerned with making sure shipments of food and medical supplies get through than frivolities like these.”

  “This is what stability looks like?”

  Graham grinned down at her. “Missing wartime already?”

  “Hardly. Ad drones won’t take my leg off.”

  “Through here.” He pivoted, passing a stall selling root vegetables fried in thin bread, and a grey-green door without a sign slid open, revealing a set of stairs reaching down into an LED-spotted dark.

  “Uh,” Sanda said, pressing her palms into the arms of her chair.

  Graham kicked a narrow metal plate in the wall and out flopped a magnetic clamp. She rolled up, and the clamp perked up like a snake sensing a rodent. It wriggled for a second, finding the best place to grab onto, then flew out and snapped its jaws closed around a center bar below the seat. A pulley whirred, and Graham clomped down the steps behind her.

  The room below was scarcely wider than the stairs. Industrial shelving barely constrained overstuffed plastic bins, bits of tech spewing out from under a lid here and there. Sanda wheeled out of the way so Graham could get past her.

  “Hassan.” Graham shouldered his way through the shelves and pounded on a desk at the end of the room. Tablets rattled. “You got customers, you frostbitten old rat.”

  No answer. Sanda scraped a finger along a shelf and came away with a wad of dust big enough to felt said rat a sweater. “You sure your guy is still here?”

  “Nothing short of a tactical nuke could pry Hassan out of here.” Graham grabbed the edge of the desk and shook it, hard. Tools rattled. “Come out or I’ll go through your bins and put things back in new and mysterious ways.”

  Metal hinges squealed. A narrow slip of a man slunk out of the store’s back room, his wiry body hidden under a too-baggy jumpsuit that, if it had ever had a logo, it would have long ago been smeared into oblivion by the grease—and mustard?—stains covering him. Hassan pushed back his hair with one hand and squinted at Graham from underneath brows big enough to clean a socket wrench.

  “I don’t know you. What do you want?” He caught sight of Sanda and took a half step back. “I know her. Get out.”

  “I’m not here to cause you trouble,” she said, and nudged Graham aside. “But I need a new prosthetic and all the ones covered by basic care come with net connectivity.”

  He snorted. “’Course they do. You’d be a damned idiot not to want it. Fluid-level checks, terrain mapping, and gait adjustment. Go get something that works—something not from me.”

  “My daughter—”

  Sanda put a hand on Graham’s arm to shut him up.

  “It’s not just a leg I need.”

  “You need a lawyer, woman, and you ain’t finding one down here.”

  “My repair bot. His battery pack was exposed to hard vacuum.”

  “They’re cheap enough. Get a new one.”

  “No.”

  He pushed down his inspection glasses to peer over them at her. “No?”

  “I like this one.”

  A silent war waged across the man’s face as he both wondered at her insistence and puzzled out the bare minimum of effort it would take to get them out of his shop.

  “Fine,” Hassan said at long last. “Bring it here.”

  Before he could change his mind, she had Grippy out of the pack and up on the table, his tread-covered feet sticking straight up to the sky and his radar-topped head folded safely down. Hassan waved her off with an irritated flick of the wrist, sliding his inspection glasses back up. The oil slick sheen of information spooling up tinted the glasses, hiding his eyes once more.

  “You say it was exposed to vacuum? How long?”

  “Eleven seconds.”

  He looked up to squint at her. “Oddly specific.”

  “I was personally invested in the amount of time.”

  “I don’t want to know.” He rummaged in a drawer and tugged a FitFlex glove over his hand. Micro tools sprung from the fingertips when he flexed his fingers. “I don’t have any dumb prosthetics, but there’s some dead ones in the fix-bin on your right. Help yourself.”

  “Thanks. Is the bot repairable?”

  “Help yourself,” he repeated.

  Fine. He liked to be left alone while he worked; she could relate to that. Sanda averted her gaze as Hassan flipped Grippy’s bottom body panel open and wheeled herself to what was, probably, the fix-bin. To her eyes, half the shop looked like it needed fixing, but the bin in question was a grease-stained canvas laundry trolley, the seams barely winning a battle of determination against bursting.

  Limbs, fingers, and eyes mounded on top of one another, most of them coated in a skin-like simulate. Sanda sucked air through her teeth and shoved down a joke about a serial killer. Hassan was helping, if reluctantly, and she needed all the help she could get without pushing her luck. Graham wandered over to help her dig through the pile, handing likely candidates down for her to try.

  “You know…” Graham raised his voice to indicate he was talking to Hassan. “I need help with some net stuff, too. Complicated things. Know anyone like that?”

  “You need a nethead, you’re in the wrong damn basement.”

  “Used to be this nethead I knew, long time ago. They hung out here. Can’t recall the name… Started with an A, I think? Maybe Adrian. More of a gardener than a hacker, you catch my meaning.”

  Now that was far too on the nose. Sanda busied herself strapping a prosthetic to her leg and did her best not to look at Graham, lest she burst into laughter.

  Hassan set his tool-glove hand down on the workbench. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The wariness in his voice made Sanda look up. He hadn’t just set his tool-glove aside, he was shaking. Not enough for most people to notice, but Sanda could make out the subtle shift in his shoulders that said his chest was vibrating with fear.

  “Everything all
right?” she asked in her best keep-calm voice. Graham had said Arden was dangerous. She’d had a hard time believing that a nethead could be all that frightening, but Hassan’s body language was telling her a story she didn’t like.

  “Your bot’s fine. I replaced the battery pack.” He slammed the access panel closed and his fingertips danced through replacing the screws. “That leg you got fit?”

  She tightened the straps and wedged her thumb in between the SynthFlesh folds at the knee joint and pressed the height adjustment. It slid up and down without a problem—she’d fine-tune the details later. “Yeah, this’ll work but it’s got a sync button. I’m assuming that’s for a wristpad linkup?”

  He came around the counter and picked up the leg, splitting the fleshy calf open with his tool-glove. A microcontroller had been soldered to the bone of the leg; three of the thin wires reaching out to the rest of the system were singed at the entry points.

  “Told you that bin was for repairs.” He grabbed the board and yanked, ripping it and all the wires out in one go. “I fixed it to your specifications. Now pay me and get out.”

  “Whoa,” Sanda said, “was the height adjustment tied into that?”

  “Money. Out.” He tossed the broken board into the bin and brought up his wristpad, then swiped an invoice to her. Sanda swallowed. She didn’t know what kind of credits were in her account. For all she knew it had been frozen after Dralee.

  “I’ve got it.” Graham paid the bill and strapped Grippy to the back of the chair. “We’re good, yeah?”

  Hassan pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, making a massive bulge, as he checked the balance on his pad. “Don’t come back, Greeve. Either of you Greeves.”

  “But your customer service was so delightful,” Sanda said.

  Graham winced. “Let’s go, lass.”

  “Wait,” Hassan said.

  They froze. He muttered to himself as he ducked behind a shelf and dug around in one of his many bins, coming back up with a pack of what looked like long socks. “Rash guard, antimicrobial. Helps with the leg.”

  He extended them to Graham, but when he grabbed the pack, Hassan leaned forward, almost pressing his cheek to Graham’s. His voice was a whisper, but the shop was so small Sanda heard him anyway.

  “I recognized you right off, but this isn’t how the dance is done. You can’t afford to get sloppy if you’re looking for The Gardener.” He broke contact and retreated behind his counter.

  They were halfway back to the main road when Sanda said, “So you know we’re being followed, right?”

  Graham sighed heavily. “Yes. And I don’t believe it’s by who we want. Make our stand here, or at the hotel?”

  “Hotel. Then at least afterward I can order room service.”

  CHAPTER 10

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  DANGERS OF THE SAFE HOUSE

  Humans didn’t meet you when you came in out of the cold. Tomas thought he’d be used to interacting with AIs by now, that the impossible dance he’d played with Bero would have inoculated him to machine-think in all its forms. He’d been wrong.

  That was a part of why he was the Nazca’s best. Because immersive situations always, always, failed to perform the function of vaccine within his mind, within his emotional systems. He was forever on edge, forever watching, pivoting. Never comfortable, except when he could hear Sanda breathing, soft as feathers, in her sleep.

  Don’t think about Sanda.

  In the past, he’d had no trouble abandoning a mission to come when the Nazca called, but now it was only the threat of what would happen if he hadn’t answered the call that made him step into the safe house.

  The warning pain sent through his wristpad had been a prelude. If he’d ignored the call, they might have made use of one of his many implants to liquefy his organs. Or, if they still had use for him, they would have collected him by force.

  Extraction teams didn’t leave witnesses alive, and that Sanda mattered to him wouldn’t matter to the Nazca. In fact, it’d make them more likely to take her out. They still might, if they believed she held any sway over his motivations. He couldn’t let his mask of indifference slip. She was just another target. Just another job.

  The safe house welcomed him with a flash of white light, reading his ident chip, his Nazca neural interface, and the current status of his wristpad and biological vital signs all at once.

  “Welcome, Nazca Cepko,” the house said in emotion-stripped tones.

  “Hello, walls,” he said, but the house didn’t so much as fake-huff at him.

  “Heart rate is elevated, sweat distribution normal.” The AI wasn’t talking to him.

  He waited.

  A woman said, “You’re nervous.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m late.”

  The room shifted. He’d been standing in the foyer of a normal, if pretentiously austere house. Cream-colored walls, pale wood floors. A little rack to put your shoes on, and not a lick of art to be found. Fake, naturally. The walls dissolved as easily as sugar in rain. He tried not to clutch his duffel strap and succeeded at suppressing that urge. Still got it. A little bit of it, anyway.

  Hopefully enough.

  The walls were metal mesh, a material he’d never asked about because he knew they’d just lie to him. There had been a potted palm in the corner. It was a chair now, facing down not a corner but an array of screens that washed up over it like a tsunami, poised on the crest, right before the collapse. The type of chair you’d find in a dentist’s office, if that dentist moonlighted as an interrogator.

  It was for him. He was supposed to sit, now. He knew it, the house knew it, the woman knew it. They were all content to wait until he could marshal up the strength to step over, to bend his knee, to feel the straps slip tight around his arms and legs and chest.

  It wasn’t like he could leave.

  Tomas placed the duffel next to the chair and sat. The restraints slid across his body—one for the neck this time, that was new—and pulled tight.

  “Interfacing,” the house AI said for no one’s benefit in particular. The woman he could not see had initiated that process, and he couldn’t decline.

  Warmth spread up the back of his neck, tickled the nape of his hair as the chair accessed his many implants. Keepers may have mastered the art of hiding information in their brain stems, but the Nazca had taken apart plenty of them over the years—figured out the basics of how the chips worked, even if they never quite got close enough to get the schematics hidden within. Didn’t matter, though. Knowing how the gates worked would be no real use to the Nazca. They were in the business of selling information, and the only pockets in the ’verse deep enough to afford that breakthrough would have been the Keepers themselves. Better to let them keep their secrets, to keep from pissing them off.

  The Nazca knew which tail feathers were worth pulling on.

  “Interface complete,” the AI said.

  The screens flickered, allowing Tomas to see the woman for the first time. Lavani Seelen. As far as Tomas knew, she worked on the technical side of things, cracking systems and designing intrusive software. While any Nazca could technically run a debriefing, it was usually field agents who ran down field agents. The last three debriefings Tomas had suffered through were performed by a handler, administrator, and a senior agent.

  “Lavani, they dragged you out of the caves for this?”

  Her smile was tight, perfunctory. She’d have been terrible in the field. “You are very late, and all agents are in the field at the moment.”

  Interesting. “My mission was given no definite end date. In fact, the assignment was presumed to be intergenerational.”

  “Your assignment ended the moment Sanda Maram Greeve stepped aboard the Taso.”

  “Circumstances required me to stay in the field longer.”

  Her eyes flicked to the side, reading the activity map of his brain laced into the system by the connecti
on between the implants and the chair.

  “That is a lie.”

  He clenched his fists, feigning anger. Start with a lie, when someone expects you to lie, and let them think they’ve forced you into the truth.

  “Partial at best. I had no clear window to attempt self-extraction.”

  Except for having access to Biran’s cruiser on the dock. Lie: part two.

  Her smile sharpened. “That, too, is a lie.”

  “One opportunity, and it wasn’t a sure thing.”

  On the screen, Lavani leaned forward. “Tell me about it.”

  He did.

  INTERLUDE

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  THE INTELLIGENCE, INTERRUPTED

  The intelligence was changing. Arden couldn’t put their finger on how or when the change had begun, they knew only that it was happening—a slow, inexorable shift somewhere in the code-DNA of the being.

  They should tell someone. There was a bureau for this kind of thing, outlined in Prime Inventive’s Intelligence Protection Act. Any non–Homo stellaris sapiens exhibiting signs of sapient thought was to be reported to the bureau for study and protection.

  The protection, of course, was a lie. Once humanity had convinced itself it was the only advanced life-form kicking around the universe—at least in the pockets the gates led them to—the species developed a vested interest in preserving that position.

  Which was precisely why The Light of Berossus had pissed Prime off so much, as far as Arden was concerned. It had nothing to do with the ship being a weapon. It had everything to do with the ship being a mind.

  It wasn’t that humanity was jealous of its apex position. The species was, like most, interested primarily in long-term survival, and there was no telling what a super intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement would make of humankind. No telling what it would do to them.

  For it would be a god, and it could not be stopped.

  Arden brushed their consciousness along the edges of the being, sensing not a change in perimeter so much as a change in density. They could almost sense a purpose in its formation now. Not the searching—all beings searched for something—but a desperation. It wanted something, or someone, it couldn’t find here in the net. It was reaching a boiling point.