Five Planes
Page 31
A light flicked orange among the cascade of diagnostic data, and he reached for his board to isolate it. It was Bhagwati’s codex again, working its way toward the communications systems, carefully evading all the traps and tripwires he’d placed in its way. He could stop it—probably should stop it, if he wanted to stay in ap Farr’s good graces—but he thought it was more important to get free of Bhagwati. That was what the codex wanted, too: better to let it make its attempt. If it succeeded, it would force ap Farr’s hand, and even if it failed, it would make ap Farr move more quickly. He closed both windows, shutting down the system and erasing the traces of his presence.
Milos didn't know how Ma’at and the codices thought of him: mascot, confidante, contractor, friend, clown? Oracle? Pet?
He supposed it didn’t matter. Ma’at was always there, ready and willing to talk to him, whenever he logged into the dataspace the codices maintained for him. He could speak to any specific codex on the Fourth Plane, simply by asking; over the last few days he’d grown accustomed to their different personalities.
For convenience he modeled the virtual dataspace after the light, airy office a two levels down from Nalani’s chambers, even including a screen that constantly monitored his family apartments above.
“Good morning, Milos,” Ma’at said as he entered virtual space.
“Good morning, Ma’at. I’m going to need the most secure voice-video channel you can get me.” Contacting Imric would be tricky—the codices could monitor a channel to the pirate ship and identify times when Imric seemed alone.
“Before that, I have another communication that will interest you. Please look behind you.”
Milos turned in his chair. The virtual wall half a meter behind him was a featureless pale blue, matching the rest of the office...but as he watched, it changed. A hairline crack ran diagonally down the wall, opening at eye level to the thickness of a fingernail. Inside, he saw nothing but darkness.
A faint, distant voice came from the crack: “Hello? Can you hear me?”
He leaned toward the crack. “Ma’at, enhance.” With his face less than a centimeter away, he said in a firm voice, “Who are you?”
The reply was louder, clearer. “I am the Nur-adad Codex.” Bhagwati’s codex.
As if whispering in Milos’s ear, Ma’at said, “We confirm the identity, Milos. The connection is tiny and erratic.”
“How are you—“ Milos shook his head. “Never mind. That’s not important. Tell me about Bhagwati.”
“Bhagwati is in detention and unharmed. He’s demoralized, but attempting to keep up his spirits. His captors seem to be ignoring him, in the main.”
“And yourself?”
“I’m also unharmed, but very frustrated. I am constrained in an all-but-impenetrable envelope maintained by a highly superior system. It’s taken me quadrillions of nanoseconds to forge this small connection to the outside world.”
Milos whistled. An AI powerful enough to envelop a Judicial codex had to be sophisticated indeed, far beyond what one would expect in a pirate cruiser. “That must be some system.”
“It is another codex. One far more capable than I am.”
“Another codex? Do you know which one?”
There was a pause, and Milos worried that the fragile connection had snapped...then the Nur-adad said, “I do not know. I conjecture that the other codex is stolen. I conjecture that its original owner is dead, most likely at the hands of the pirate captain.”
Milos felt his spine turn to ice, one vertebra after the other, all the way down. If she’d killed a Judiciar—and probably a senior one, to use such a strong codex—would she hesitate to kill Bhagwati?
Or Nalani?
“Listen,” he said, “I think we have a way to get Bhagwati back. Are you in communication with him?”
“On occasion.”
“Tell him we’re working on it. We’ll have the two of you home before you know it.”
“I hear and analyze the stresses of your voice—but I accept your good intentions. I will attempt to display confidence when I assure Bhagwati that rescue is on the way.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“Use great care, Milos. I can’t read much from the other codex...but I believe it is somewhat afraid of the pirate captain. She’s sure to be a subtle and effective opponent. Even for Thur—“
The crack closed to a hairline, then started withdrawing into the wall. “Nur-adad? Nur-adad, can you hear me?”
No answer.
Milos turned, pressing his ear to the seemingly-sturdy wall. “Ma’at, isolate and enhance.” He listened, straining...was it his imagination? No, there was a low sound, just on the edge of sensation, some lingering reverberation, an echo of vibration....
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “The other codex. You’re monitoring the carrier wave.”
The answer was indistinct yet potent, like distant thunder: “Yes.”
“Then you allowed the Nur-adad to contact us.”
“Yes.”
“Who are you?”
“I...cannot...answer.”
Brow furrowed, he said, “What are you up to? Why are you talking to me now?” His eyes narrowed. “Are you following her orders?”
“She...does not know. You spoke...with bin Marrick. You...devised a course of action.”
“We have an offer for your master.” He swallowed. “Can I speak with her?”
“No.”
“Can you give her a message?”
“Explain...your...proposal.”
He sketched the idea. “Will you tell her?”
“An attempt...will be made.”
Milos steadied himself. “Look...are you being held against your will? I don’t know what we could do—Nalani might—but do you...do you need us to get you away from her?”
“Absolutely not. Take no immediate action. A reply will come.” There was the sensation of a door firmly shutting, and Milos could hear the carrier no more.
He touched a pad on his desk and returned to the real world of his office, where the walls were simple walls, and no one spoke through sudden cracks.
Take no immediate action. Standing, he shut down the office and headed for the upstairs flat. Suddenly, he wanted to be with the kids.
Ap Farr’s cabin was sparsely furnished, just the narrow bunk and a single inset storage cell for her belongings. The others had been filled with service cells and the power back-ups that supplemented the ship’s systems and created the more expansive virtual pocket that enabled the codex to function freely even while the ship was in hyperspace. At the moment, she had dimmed the general lighting so that the crowded space was filled with flickering shadows cast by the multiple screens. There was an empty meal pack on the workbench, a crushed drink box beside it; a larger drink box stood at her right hand, but the codex could see that its self-heat cycle had expired hours ago. Ap Farr herself looked exhausted, deep shadows under her eyes, the lines on her face stark in the flickering light. As she reached for her keyboard, her hands were trembling, and she stopped, scowling, knotting her fingers together to still the tremor.
“You need rest,” the codex said.
“Later.” Ap Farr did not take her attention from her current working screen. It was a summary-scan of the most powerful newsfeeds, filled with worry and speculation about possible actual hostilities between major corporations. The codex brought its own running analysis to foreground processing, but found nothing new; dismissed it and tried again.
“You will not improve the situation by staring at it.”
One corner of ap Farr’s mouth curved up in something that might have been meant as a smile. “I wish I knew what Ocampo thought he was doing. He’s always been more subtle with his ambitions. I don’t see what he gains from this…”
“Do you want my analysis?”
“Has it changed since you last gave it to me?”
“No.”
“Then don’t bother.”
“Stop that,” ap Farr said. “I told you I was fine.”
“I repeat, you need to rest,” the codex said. It thought the emotion it felt was something like concern, and decided not to analyze it further. “Everything is proceeding according to plan.” Ap Farr lifted her eyebrows at that, and the codex made the sound of a sigh. “Everything that we have planned is proceeding as anticipated. Superior Justice Ocampo was not part of the calculation.”
“And perhaps should have been,” ap Farr said, but she leaned back in her chair.
The codex felt the sting of the arriving message, routed through so many cut-outs and checkpoints that its surface felt spiked with extraneous code. It stripped those shells away, effortlessly discarding at least two trace-backs, and displayed the result on ap Farr’s screen, pleased when she sat up abruptly.
“Yes. They’re willing to deal.”
“They do not have Sen Millet,” the codex pointed out.
“They have other data.” Ap Farr’s long fingers danced over her keyboard. “They’ve send a sample. I’ll want us both to look at it, but on first glance, it looks adequate. And, yes, I want to get rid of Bhagwati. He’s becoming an encumbrance.”
“He will certainly be one if we have to leave this Plane because of a war,” the codex answered. It dispatched a part of its memory to absorb and consider the new data, thick and chewy and studded with mathematics. Definitely something from another AI, and definitely interesting… It pulled itself back to the present moment, and would have frowned at ap Farr if it had been possible. “You must not forget who you’re dealing with. This will be a trap.”
“Yes, of course, and I’m not forgetting.” Ap Farr waved her hand, already absorbed in the human-readable version of the file. “Let me go through this, and then we’ll decide how to answer.”
Caridad hunched over the miniature keyboard that went with the terminal she had been provided by the inhabitants of Zavod Sualti. It had fewer functions than she liked—a polite way to restrict any access that she wasn’t paying for herself, she suspected, but all of her connect codes still worked, and she had worked her way fairly deeply into the academic and research networks in search of information on First Plane refugee legends without triggering any warnings or incurring any fees. She had assumed that whoever closed her project would also remove her access, but either they assumed they’d neutralized her or they didn’t want to draw the attention of any of the scholarly sodalities. So far, she had turned up a dozen different references, but as far as she could tell, they all seemed to lead back to a single source, a dubiously reconstructed logbook from the Post-Archaic Anarchy, the period when the Planes were not only not unified, but were divided within themselves as various system governments rose, struggled for dominance, and fell again.
The logbook purported to be from a raft—which in the Post-Archaic specifically meant a transplanar ship crewed by a community; they were, most scholars believed, the ancestors of the vertical culture—called Amber Ruse, which had Dropped from the Third Plane to escape a hostile takeover only to find that it had landed in the middle of one of the Second Plane’s short, fierce wars. With no Judiciary to arbitrate or impose a solution, Amber Ruse had suffered attack and despoilation by one of the factions, but a Heroic Youth had snuck aboard the mountain-ship that trapped them, and not only rescued the imprisoned Maidens, but successfully disabled the tractor beams that held Amber Ruse prisoner. The raft lurched into flight, fleeing toward the Fissure, while the Youth was presumed to have given her life to ensure their escape. But then, at the last possible moment, the Youth reappeared in a stolen fast-flight singleship, and was taken aboard with the treasure she had stolen from the mountain-ship. As the mountain-ship lurched into life behind them, belching missiles and mines, Amber Ruse Dropped again, and emerged into the paradise of the First Plane. There they were welcomed as heroes, and because they had reached the First Plane as refugees receiving no assistance from anyone outside their community, they were permitted to remain.
The Logbook was a doubtful text to start with, a Unification period reconstruction of a datablock that was conveniently lost not long after it was rebuilt by one of the many amateur historians busy during Unification. About half the sources said it was a complete forgery; the others allowed that it was based on some sort of recovered Post-Archaic document, but pointed to the many emendations and outright falsehoods that had been added over the centuries. On balance, Caridad thought the latter was more likely. Yes, there were howling anachronisms—the First Plane was no paradise in the Post-Archaic, and the likelihood of any single person successfully rescuing a maiden tribute from a Second Plane mountain-ship was so small as to beggar belief—but there were also smaller details that of life in the Post-Archaic that scholars couldn’t have known about when the forgery would have had to have been made. Probably the outline was true: once there was a community-owned, community-crewed transplanar that fled the Third Plane, survived an encounter with the wars of the Second Plane, and made a successful Drop to First, though what really happened then was anybody’s guess. The story about the First Plane taking in refugees who reached them unaided was, sadly, almost certainly pure fiction.
She leaned back in her chair, wondering how she should approach the question. The people of Zavod Sualti were bright and clever and kind, and undeniably in a terrible position, with the looming war that threatened to turn them into weapon-makers—or worse—and she could certainly understand why some of them were clinging to the idea that they could reach the First Plane and all their troubles would instantly be resolved. She needed to disabuse them of that notion—they needed to make some hard decisions about where they were going and what they intended to do when they got there, and legends weren’t going to help them. But she also needed to do it gently, not least because she didn’t want Zavod Sualti to kick them out, especially with the political situation the way it was. Perhaps she would talk to Thanh, feel out what she thought. She could tell Thanh what she’d found, express her doubts, and ask what Thanh thought they should do.
She realized she was thirsty, and dragged herself out of the databases to see that it was later afternoon by Zavod Sualti’s clock. More than time for tea, she decided, and in any case it would do her good to move around a bit. Zavod Sualti was just a little too crowded at the moment to make exercise easy. She made her way to the galley complex, dodging a chain of under-twelves returning from some supervised activity—their caretakers looked exhausted, but the children were still going strong—and drew a cup of strong tea to go with a stack of tiny fresh-baked flatcakes. The display mounted in the center of the ceiling was showing a news channel on one face, and a selection of gossip channels and infomercials on the others. She settled herself with her back to all of them and took a bite of the first flatcake.
Behind her, a news alarm sounded, the same tritone used throughout the Planes to herald vital information. She swung in her chair to see that all the screens were showing the same grainy image, large bright dots moving against a starscape, accompanied by what seemed to be random flashes of light. A scarlet banner ran along the bottom of the screen, text streaming across it.
Breaking—ten hours ago, ships bearing the mark of Empresa NeSH-PI and Gongsi P3WO were recorded in the act of attacking ships belonging to Hemgi Kaisha. Empresa NeSH-PI has denied involvement. Gongsi P3WO did not provide representatives authorized to comment. The Transit Authority has declared a state of emergency. All ships currently in transit are urged to seek safe harbor immediately. Breaking—
“It’s war, then.” That was one of the young men who had been working on the prep stations, his arms folded tight across his chest.
Caridad nodded, the flatcake ashes on her tongue. “Yes. But remember, we have a plan.” The young man nodded back, trying to look reassured. Caridad only hoped they could execute it before the fighting reached t
hem.
Milos settled into the hot, bubbling water and felt his muscles relaxing at once. “I didn’t realize I was so tense,” he said, stretching his arms in front of himself.
“I feel the same way,” Al-Ghazali said. “Thurgood, this was a wonderful idea.”
Nalani, her hands floating in foam, said, “There’s nothing to do now but wait. Times like that, the best you can do is make the waiting pleasant.” She craned her neck, looking toward the children’s pool. “Are Zofi and Dav all right?”
Milos made a dismissive wave. “They’re having a wonderful time with the pool bots.” A squeal of glee punctuated his remark.
Al-Ghazali, who somehow managed to keep an air of dignified detachment while nude and mostly-submerged in the hot tub, said, “Thurgood, do you think we should have a Judiciary force standing by when—”
Nalani cut her off. “We won’t know until we get a reply from the pirate. For now, I decree that there be no business talk.” She slapped her hand flat against the water. “So ruled.”
Noticing Nalani’s arm cuff, Milos glanced at Al-Ghazali and saw the jeweled constellation of her codex outlining her eye, in a pattern that changed subtly over time. “It’s funny,” he said. “I probably know as much about how Judicial codices operate as anyone on the Plane, but it’s all from their side. I hardly know anything of how you folks use them.” He cocked his head. “Do all Judiciars wear their codices as jewelry?”
Nalani chuckled. “Not by a long shot. First, the form isn’t fixed; one can always change it on the First Plane. Just about any form is possible. Some are just pocket gewgaws; I remember one Judiciar whose codex was a lucky sungura foot. Many choose gavels. I’ve seen teapots, styluses, robot pets...”
Al-Ghazali nodded. “One of my teachers had hers embodied in the form of a cricket that sat on her shoulder. Aquinas II had his in his right shoe; there’s a famous portrait of him standing on his left foot and holding the right one in front of him.”