Horseplay

by Cam Daly

  The lobby was minimal, since the building was designed for discretion and there was no doorman or common area. Kery had destroyed a planter of orchids in her passing, leaving a trail of rich brown dirt and tattered greenery all the way to the open door. The metal arm connecting the door to its motorized opener had been broken off, its jagged bits now preventing the door from closing. Connor realized that maybe he should be more worried about his overall safety than just his arm.

  Just outside, a man was climbing out of a black sedan. The passenger door had apparently been crushed inward moments ago, judging from the bits of safety glass that were still on the man’s coat. He stared wide-eyed at Connor then turned to look at something up the street. Connor followed his gaze to the next intersection and saw Kery standing on the corner there, head angled upward with her hands up to her eyes. He jogged to her, still pressing on his injured arm.

  “What is it?”

  She slowly walked between parked cars and into the street, still looking up into the cold night sky.

  “The Observatory…I can’t…”

  He thought that she was rubbing her eyes but realized that she had left her fists just slightly loose. Like little telescopes.

  Her frown deepened. She whipped her head from side to side in a superhumanly fast motion to view the street then went back to staring at the sky.

  “What’s going on?” He looked skyward but couldn’t see anything unusual. Thankfully this dead end street was free of other pedestrians.

  “I’ve lost contact with Shadow. And everyone. I can’t see any sign that the Observatory was destroyed - geostationary orbit is only a tenth of a light second away - but something must have compromised it without visible results.”

  “Can you connect your tangle-thing to them a different way?”

  “Entanglement communications requires a specifically linked pair of devices. Our orbital Factory here built one into this body to connect it to the Observatory, but that’s it. If the other side of a pair is lost then the one on this side is useless junk. The Observatory has the connection to Labworld Operations and Fleet Four. I don’t.” She was still standing in the street, but was turning her head to look at other points in the heavens.

  “What about your birds? Can they contact Shadow?”

  “No, they only connect directly to this body. They were built at the same time as it.” She ignored a shout from the driver a half block away whose car she had crashed into while leaving the building. “I know where some other things should be in orbit, and I don’t see anything happening to them. Hawk is heading higher as quickly as it can to give me a better view of things.”

  “So, the Craven zapped your Observatory. Why did that cause what happened back there?”

  She looked at him and noticed his injury for the first time. “How bad is it? My team was using my body remotely, and when the connection was cut I lost control of myself for a second. Even now I’m operating in a slightly degraded state - a lot of the Interloper’s processing is actually done in Fleet Four.”

  She got close to him and reached her hand up to the shoulder of his injured arm. He noticed what looked like silver-gray armor on her forearm, armor that strangely resembled the ribbed sides of her purse. She pushed her hand down into his sleeve next to the wound. “It’s minor. You’re already clotting.”

  This close, he also realized her hair was warm. Warm enough that he was concerned about getting his face too close to it.

  “That’s…”

  She was staring through him to some unknown depth, her hand still inside his jacket sleeve.

  “That’s…what?”

  Her hair was starting to dance in a wind that he could not feel. Warmth radiated off of her.

  “…impossible.”

  Her eyes widened. He didn’t think she was pretending to be afraid.

  She staggered and sagged against him, her arm in his sleeve almost dragging him off balance. That scared him immensely. “Something. Someone is decohering?Tanglecomms.”

  “Decohering?”

  She struggled upright then shook her head violently for a moment, as if trying to deny what was happening. He winced as her hair singed his neck. “Jamming. Blocking. Doing something impossible.” She seemed to notice that her arm was still in his jacket sleeve and pulled it free. “Someone has interrupted one of the fundamental technologies of our entire civilization. Imagine if you woke up one day and your enemy had a weapon that made electricity not work.”

  That sounded familiar. “We have those weapons. EMP. I can’t remember what it stands for, but I read about this government test called Starfish or something. It was-”

  “Starfish? Hold on. Just - hold on. I have to reroute all of my data systems through local links and getting information is a lot slower now. I was getting all my data through the Observatory. Damn. I will be easier to track if I’m not careful.”

  “Is that what this is about? Tracking you? Forcing you into the open, sort of?”

  “However they did it, this is bigger than me. Much bigger. They wouldn’t reveal they could do something this dangerous just to find me.” She sounded distracted. Her mind was probably working so fast right now that this conversation would feel like watching glaciers move. That realization made him feel useless.

  “How dangerous?”

  “Everyone I know - every single member of my family - lives on a ship in Fleet Four.”

  “Your family?”

  She didn’t seem to notice that question. “Oh, of course. This is what they did to the Vreen ship. See, every system on every ship is connected through tanglecomms. Weapons, drives, control, life support, everything. If you take away that communication then the ship won’t know what’s going on. The Craven could slaughter us like it did them.”

  “Would they?”

  “If they were certain they couldn’t lose? In a heartbeat. We probably would.”

  “You would attack them? Try to wipe them out?”

  “Hold on. I’m reading about your EMP experiments. This isn’t the same technology - quantum entanglement doesn’t have anything to do with electromagnetic waves - but apparently your Starfish Prime experiment was much stronger than anticipated. You humans have a tendency to do experiments before you figure out all the math.”

  “If your birds are still connected to you, does that mean the…decoherence…effect is just happening in space? Can you fix something once it's decohered?”

  “Hawk was a few kilometers up when it lost connection, but when it came lower on autopilot it was fine. That’s how I figured out what’s happening. The effect seems to have a boundary, like a field. The Observatory wasn’t destroyed, it’s in that decoherence field. I’m trying to map it now.”

  “What can I do?”

  She looked at him like he was crazy. Or a distracting child. “Nothing. I don’t know what I can do. This is beyond anything we ever imagined happening. But I am totally alone. Again.”

  He had a moment of deja vu, remembering when he broke off his engagement with Amanda. She had seemed so suddenly frail and alone, and he still cared for her, but he couldn’t do anything to help her. Perhaps Kery read something of that in his face as she composed herself and reached out to rest a hand on his chest.

  “This is the beginning of their end game. Killing our Active, using antimatter here, directly attacking enemy ships. The Craven have a new weapon and they will do everything they can to keep anyone from interfering. You are a point of vulnerability that I can’t afford right now. I’m all alone, in a way that hasn’t happened in a long time for me. Before you go, I need you…” She stopped again and seemed to stare through him.

  “Need me…to do something?”

  He had started to get used to the way her face worked. When she was distracted there was a range of casual expressions that it seemed to randomly select, but sometimes an unconscious reaction seemed to break through. She had explained that her android body interpreted her natural reaction into a human expression but he hadn
’t seen such a natural one until now. Her eyes were suddenly widened and her mouth had come slightly agape, stretching into a smile. She was relieved about something.

  “She’s back. Shadow. The Observatory is back. I have to go.”

  “So it wasn’t…decoherenced?” He wasn’t sure he was using that right. “Everything is all right?”

  “No, and No. It’s still inside the decoherence field but there is a workaround so I have some communications. Their field isn’t quite big enough. But this is still something incredibly critical and I have to go help figure things out. I need you to deal with the driver of the car I damaged, go back to the apartment, get the black backpack and close everything up. Get to the airport. I'll call you on the Sneaker in a few minutes to figure out where to meet you to get the backpack but right now I have to move quickly, before the field grows.” With her hand still on his chest, she leaned in close and kissed him delicately.

  The heat was too intense for him to take for more than a second. He pulled back from the kiss. “I know that doesn’t mean anything to you.”

  “I know that it does mean something to you.” She stepped past him to the curb, glanced around again then casually pulled apart the lock on a motorcycle parked there.

  “What’s that for?”

  She lifted it over the cars next to him and hopped on. It didn’t occur to him to protest her actions. He wasn’t a real police officer before all this craziness, and he certainly wasn’t one now.

  She fiddled with the starter for a second and it sprang to life. “To get me somewhat inconspicuously to the subway entrance at Market Street. I have to map the decoherence field, so we can calculate where it came from. If it follows any normal rules.”

  And she was gone.

  #

  The Planning Stage that Keryapt had known was no more. She could tell the replacement construct was vastly larger, perhaps spherical in shape, but couldn’t immediately make out the details beyond Shadow and the information structures they shared. Keryapt’s new laser connection to the Observatory had greater delay and less bandwidth than the tanglecomm array, so her visualization system tried to efficiently display what it thought she needed to know.

  “Shadow, I’m buffering like crazy. What’s going on?”

  The chamber was apparently subdivided by expertise. Nearby there was a tennis court-sized area covered by a giant block of text which just read FIELD PHYSICS. Another was GUARD. Overhead a vast swath was occupied by SHIPWRIGHTS.

  After several excruciating seconds Shadow finally replied. “The Planning Stage is now a War Room. The Admiralty is assembling everyone here who might be able to help figure out what is going on. The best of the best. They’re all around us.” Keryapt could hear the nervousness in her voice. “They can see and hear everything you experience. This is the most important thing happening in Fleet Four right now. Maybe the most important thing ever in the history of Fleet. I…I…”

  The delay in communication caused Keryapt to almost let Shadow break down before she could interrupt. “You can handle it. We’ve come this far. The Admiralty has confidence in our ability to work together. Let’s figure this out. Where do we stand?”

  Shadow took a moment to regain her composure. “We thought at first that someone had taken out the Observatory and Factory simultaneously, but Stopgap was able to reconnect with the Observatory via laser relay.”

  A stylized system map appeared as she spoke. The Observatory in Earth orbit was linked to another satellite much further out. One she hadn’t been told about. Stopgap.

  “The Observatory was able to laser link to the orbital Factory and then your Hawk when it got high enough in the atmosphere. But the laser connections are much slower than tanglecomms. The Observatory is the lynchpin holding everything together in the inner system. Does that make sense?”

  Keryapt followed along easily enough. “So you have a tanglecomm connection with Stopgap. Whatever that is. But if we lose it, or the Observatory, then I lose my direct connection to you. Understood.”

  Shadow had waited for the answer to her question, then resumed briskly. “The Admiralty has assumed direct control of Terran Labworld operations, so now I am just the point person for you. We don’t know how long we will have this connection but several key files have now been downloaded to you. For now, start running south.”

  “You have no idea how glad I am to have you back. I'll review the files when you tell me to, or if we lose contact. I can get myself out of town. You deal with things there.”

  The longer they talked, the more data she received about the environment. What had merely been a vast chamber with text descriptions was resolving into a functional space. If she zoomed in on a far off area she could read theories, study data or even request a conversation. The Admiralty was swiftly bringing together the top minds of every aspect of technology and military from across a thousand separate ships. Perhaps more. In her decades of time as an Active she had never seen anything like it. It was no surprise that Shadow was overwhelmed.

  She switched her senses back to physical reality, dropped the motorcycle at the entrance to the subway station and stared for a brief moment at the clusters of holiday shoppers. Hawk was going north and she was heading south, and the subway tunnels were the most direct route out of the city. If Homeland Security was compromised by the Craven, they could easily monitor traffic and transit camera systems to watch for her.

  She pushed her way through the crowd, wondering about the best way to get through the crowd safely. She knew that the time delay to Stopgap - wherever and whatever it was - would make conversation with Shadow too slow. She needed to take matters into her own hands.

  Unfortunately, a quick check revealed that most of the options for interfering with human data systems were inoperable. They had been reliant on tanglecomm connections between the Observatory and wiretapping hardware installed by Mezerello on local systems, but there was no connection now.

  If she couldn’t change the human data feeds, she would have to shut them off entirely. Her searches for subtle options to cut the power temporarily were all rolling up to more drastic direct action. She found one that should accomplish her goal with minimal chances for loss of life. “I guess I have to cut power for the entire city. Sorry, humans.”

  She sent the command and walked down the stairs into the subway station.

  36 million meters away, the Observatory fed a trickle of antimatter through magnetic vacuum lines into its weapon systems. The majority of its supply was safely stored in a micro satellite located twenty kilometers ahead of it in orbit, but it had enough onboard at any time to energize its gamma beam array for a few seconds.

  The graser was a directed energy weapon, which meant there was a very small chance that an observer of the beam could trace it back to its point of origin. That made it a weapon of last resort against a Fleet technology-equivalent enemy. The humans had no real chance of detecting the beam, however, so it could be used with relative impunity against them and their constructs. Firing through Earth’s atmosphere slightly reduced its effectiveness, but the power available to the Observatory via its antimatter reserves more than made up for that.

  A tenth of a second after Keryapt gave the order, the sky over a hill south of the city was etched with a nearly invisible line of vaporized atmospheric water. If there had been anyone standing nearby they would have heard the ting as the first of three transmission lines was cut and the sizzling thud as the cable hit the wet ground. The location for the cut had been carefully selected so that there would be minimal chance of injuries, and a human fire station was located less than a kilometer away.

  Two more graser strikes cut the power flow completely. In theory the severed lines shouldn’t cause the transmission pylons to collapse and the humans should be able to patch them within a few hours. The electrical imbalance to the power grid of the city was much more traumatic. The lights in the subway tunnel flickered, returned to life for a second and then went out entirely.


  She sprang to full speed, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in the industrial tile flooring. Before the scattered handful of emergency lights came on she vaulted the fare gates and was racing down the handrail of the escalator. By the time anyone in the station had their phones out to use as flashlights, she was in the tunnel and away.

  #

  Whoever had paid for Connor’s ride to the airport was apparently spending a fortune with the car service, as the driver simply made him record a short audio testimony that the damage to the car had occurred as part of the job. No questions were asked. Thankfully the path from the safe house to the highway was mostly clear of traffic, as the surprising power outage in the city caused every intersection to turn into a vehicular roll of the dice.

  A few blocks before the Highway 101 on-ramp, the car stopped in an alley and he was courteously ushered into a normal looking taxi. The new driver didn’t start the meter but just made sure that the black backpack was his only luggage and they were off again.

  Less than thirty seconds and one flashing red light later he heard a crash from somewhere nearby. It wasn’t the first since the traffic signals stopped working but definitely the closest. His driver cursed as a second crash sounded even closer.

  Connor was thrown against the door as the cab veered into a side street, just barely evading a collision with a bright orange city dump truck barreling up the middle of the road. Connor looked out the back window as it roared past them, continuing towards where they had just switched vehicles. It hadn’t slowed at all despite having just hit several parked cars.

  He could just make out two or three men standing in the back of the truck. They wore hard hats and were holding on to the front or sides with one hand. He had no doubt that they were more Tumorish, looking for him or Kery, and had somehow figured out where one or the other of them had just been.

  The driver, apparently unfazed by the incident, looked in the rearview mirror at Connor as he continued driving. “SFO terminal 1, right?”