by M. D. Cooper
“You just want to get me out of this suit,” Ngoba said coyly.
“To mend your broken ribs, yes. That would be necessary.”
Ngoba laughed, then cut himself short and bit his lip, looking at Fugia with a pitiful expression. “Not even a little compassion?” he asked.
“Once we get out of here,” she promised.
“Until then, crack the whip,” Karcher said. “The boss needs it.”
“No love from anywhere,” Ngoba said, grimacing in pain. He transitioned the grimace into a grin and nodded at Fugia. “I’ll be all right.” He stepped away from the wall.
Karcher ventured down the corridor, checking for more drones or anything else that might decide to attack.
Around them, the control consoles for the drive system flashed status updates, showing everything at optimal condition…except the crew. Knowing the crew was incapacitated made the ship seem haunted somehow. That reminded her that, at this point, it probably didn’t matter if she contacted the ship’s NSAI. They weren’t hiding anymore.
Through her Link, she accessed the local command net. Astrogation, communications, internal bio-systems and other controls became available. She sent the NSAI an access request, including a stolen TSF security token that should allow her admin authority over its functions.
The NSAI didn’t respond.
Fugia fowned.
“What?” Karcher asked, looking back at her. “Should we wait?”
“No,” she said. “Let’s go, it’s a long way back up to the lab sections. I was trying to access the ship’s NSAI, but it doesn’t want to answer.”
“We scared it away,” Ngoba said.
“Huh,” she grunted. “It’s offline. I’m going to power cycle it.”
They rose another level by way of ladders as Fugia pushed through the NSAI’s logic systems one relay at a time.
They were halfway to the cargo lab sections when she heard an aristocratic voice say,
She groaned inwardly. Some crews enjoyed an NSAI that talked like an old-world butler, but Fugia found them irritating; the accent usually served only to cover up any number of logic flaws overlooked by cheap manufacturers, or software crackers selling stolen systems.
Even better, she thought.
She knit her brows.
Fugia sighed. She didn’t have time to run a check on the NSAI. It was obviously corrupt.
They reached the cargo level access point, and Karcher waited until they were closer together before taking the final ladder. He and Ngoba disappeared through the hatch, and Fugia followed, scanning with her visor as the climbed.
She found Karcher and Ngoba standing in the corridor, sniffing curiously.
“You smell that?” Ngoba asked.
“What?” Fugia said.
“Smells like yeast and—apples,” Karcher said. “Like a lot of apples.”
Ngoba glanced at Fugia. “Should we be concerned? I haven’t heard of any bio-weapons based on apples.”
She shrugged. “Let’s find the SAIs and get off this crazy ship.”
Karcher took point as they followed the corridor away from the access hatch. A series of large bays opened on either side of the passage. In the first one stood a row of giant silver tanks; on tables in front of the tanks were half-filled glasses of amber fluid. The air smelled even more strongly of apples.
“It’s cider,” Karcher said. “I knew I recognized it.”
Ngoba chuckled. “That’s right. My damn ribs hurt too much to enjoy it. But you’re right.”
Before they reached the next room, the corridor grew noticeably warmer. The apple smell was even richer as they found another cargo bay filled with three more tanks, these heated to boiling. Copper coils ran from the top of each closed tank to transparent vessels on the floor, which were slowly filling with drops of gold liquid.
“Brandy,” Fugia said. “The NSAI told me he was making brandy, but I thought he was corrupted.” She shook her head.
The NSAI responded immediately.
Fugia cut him off. “The NSAI says there’s someone on this level named Dr. Jickson, but he can’t track him, and he won’t tell me if there’s anyone else.”
“We’ve wandered into a mad scientist’s laboratory?” Ngoba asked. He glanced at Karcher. “You scared?”
“Scared is a relative term. It’s more useful to ask if I’m combat effective. That answer is yes.”
“I love you, Karcher,” Ngoba said. “I’m not ashamed to tell you that. You see, Fugia? I can express my emotions.”
Leaving the distillery behind, they passed several more rooms full of shelving units, each rack lined with transparent bottles of amber liquid.
“That’s a hell of a lot of brandy,” Karcher said.
Turning a corner in the corridor, they found the deck covered in broken glass. Moving further down the corridor, more broken glass crunched underfoot.
“Looks like somebody’s emptying their bottles and throwing them at the wall,” Karcher said.
“That’s a special kind of drunk,” Ngoba said.
“You’re familiar with it?” Fugia asked.
“Only by observation. I stay out of the spirit world.”
After passing through a short section of corridor littered with more broken glass, and lined by stainless steel lab tables, they found a closed hatch with a sign that read ‘Secure Cargo’.
Fugia pushed ahead of Ngoba and scanned the door, finding nothing out of the ordinary in its control hardware. She spun the lock handle, and the door swung toward them, revealing a large cargo bay illuminated by white floodlights.
The room was filled with workstations, arranged in a grid of five rows of five terminals. Each workstation consisted of a desk and chair, with a combined display and input board. Some of the workstations had silver cylinders mounted beside their displays in a socket assembly covered in loose wire and filament. One workstation, in the farthest corner from the door, lay on its side, its display cracked and wires dangling from the socket assembly to the floor like multicolored worms.
Through the filter of the visor, the room was one of the most complicated wire diagrams Fugia had ever seen. Information pulsed between workstations and a central network node on the right side of the room. Codebase upon codebase scrolled past her vision as she switched between layers in her HUD. As far as she could tell, each workstation was a Link node. The workstations with the silver cylinders were active, pulling and pushing information on the scale of most TSF cruisers.
She recognized immediately that the cylinders were the SAIs.
A man stood in the middle of the grid, leaning against a terminal with his forehead pressed against the top of the silver cylinder.
They paused in the doorway for a g
ood minute, taking in everything they saw, and the man never looked at them. Eventually, Fugia heard him crying.
She took a step forward. “Dr. Jickson?” she said.
The scientist rotated his head so his temple now rested against the cylinder. He was a pale, fleshy man with thin blond hair that hung over his face in unkempt bangs. His face was flushed with intoxication, cheeks shiny with tears. Even at a distance and dulled by brandy, his eyes were a piercing blue that expressed intelligence.
“Dr. Jickson,” Fugia said again. “Are you all right?”
Looking reluctant, he straightened and stretched his neck as he took a shaky step forward. He carried one of the brandy bottles in his left hand. The right hand went to his hair, smoothing it with an anxious jitter.
“Who are you?” he asked. “You’re not crew. How did you get here?”
“We found the crew,” Fugia answered, falling back on their cover story. “We’re here to deliver freight. When nobody met us at the airlock, we were worried about the ship.”
“The crew is fine.” He waved a dismissing hand. “They’re in stasis. Or a form of stasis. They were getting in the way of my work.”
“Is this your work?” she asked.
“What does it look like?” he demanded. He raised the brandy bottle and took a long swig.
Ngoba and Karcher walked up on either side of Fugia. Karcher still held his rifle, but had let the muzzle drop to point at the floor. Ngoba stood with his hand on his pulse pistol.
“How about I send you our manifest then,” Fugia offered. “Once we’ve got verification, we’ll get out of your hair.”
“Sure, whatever,” Jickson said. He took another drink. As he let the bottle drop, he said, “Wait. How did you know my—”
Through her Link, Fugia sent Jickson the Hoarders’ equation that had resolved to his current coordinates. She had a theory about where the equation had originated, and this seemed like the quickest way to verify.
Jickson stood blinking as he absorbed the information. His eyes glazed for a second, searching the near distance. Then he turned his head to focus on her, and a clarity came into his face that had been absent before.
The bottle slipped from his grip, and Fugia watched it fall in what felt like slow motion. Instead of shattering like all the others, the bottle bounced on the deck and rolled under a workstation, trailing brandy.
“You’re here,” the doctor said. “I didn’t think anyone would actually come.” He took a deep breath, snorting phlegm, then patted his lab coat and looked around. He looked back at Fugia, then to Ngoba and Karcher.
“This is good,” he said, turning toward the grid. “This is very good. All right.”
He stopped and turned back to Fugia, like he’d just realized something. “If you’re here, that means Heartbridge is on their way. We have to get out of here right now.”
“You’re working for Heartbridge,” Fugia said, half statement and half question.
“Exactly. All these seeds belong to them. But that’s why I sent the message; I’m getting them out of here. I’m getting them to Proteus, and you’re going to help me.”
THE MESH
STELLAR DATE: 04.16.2979 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Hopscotch Devil
REGION: Hellas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, InnerSol
The Hopscotch Devil was not going to outrun the Heartbridge cruiser on their trail.
TSS Benevolent Hand had appeared on scan just hours after they had the SAIs—‘seeds’, as Jickson called them—moved off Harmon’s Place. They had spent fifteen minutes reviving the crew at Ngoba’s insistence, but had not waited to argue with the groggy captain about the state of his passengers.
“It’s not harmful,” Jickson had explained. “It’s a neural blocker that just knocks them out. Most major body functions cease. I sold the tech to the TSF for stasis research, but they haven’t done anything with it.”
Leaving his brandy behind, Jickson had started to shake after just an hour. Now he was unconscious in the Hopscotch Devil’s medbay with an intravenous feed, not looking much different than the crewmembers he’d put in stasis.
Fugia had run several database checks for information on him and come back with his public biography. He was Hari Seldon Jickson, neuroscientist and consciousness philosopher. Born on Mars 1 and educated at the Marsian Serba University, with post-graduate work in Raleigh, High Terra, and post-doctorate back with the Mars 1 Guard. By that point, he was considered a state asset, having developed two distinct artificial intelligence constructs that qualified as sentient. Jickson had overcome barriers that had stymied other research teams for decades.
In a move that put him on the Marsian most wanted list, he defected to the private sector with a start-up called the Psion Group, which was where he had spent the last ten years before disappearing again.
Fugia knew that at that point, he had gone to work for Heartbridge Medical, but the rest of the world did not.
However, she couldn’t stop turning over the fact that he’d known someone in the Hoarders would alert Heartbridge once she found him. It had happened like clockwork, and now a heavy cruiser was closing with obvious intentions to board them. If they hadn’t wanted to save Jickson and their SAIs, it would have launched missiles before the Hopscotch Devil even knew they existed.
How did the Hoarders know I found Jickson? They had to have her bugged, which meant she’d have to tear down every bit of kit she carried, including her beloved visor.
Her attention was mostly on the process of scanning her visor’s electronics by hand using a jeweler’s loupe. It was tedious work, but the only way to be sure it carried no stowaways. She had already scrubbed the software and found nothing.
she said.
She made herself stop and check the last section again. Talking to Ngoba upset the calm she usually felt while tracing hardware, despite the other frustrations moving through the back of her mind. The Hoarders had very little hierarchy beyond the dedicated few who manned the data storage nodes. Those crews were zealots, and she had only interacted with a few of them.
Over the next four hours, Fugia studied each layer of the visor’s internal components, not finding anything she didn’t expect. She forced herself to put the visor down twice and think about how she would attack the hardware if she had never touched it before, running through the power systems, communication stacks and neural overlays. The problem was that she had already done this exercise when she designed the visor. She had always known the visor was only as good as the inputs it provided her, even if the information wasn’t what she wanted to see, and from the very first prototype, she’d built with security over function. Each iteration had increased the capabilities of the visor, but she never let go of its basic security architecture.
If they hadn’t hacked the visor, how else had they been tracking her? She sat staring at her workbench, thinking through every place she’d been between Ceres, Mars 1 and Cruithne, coming up blank. She’d been very c
areful.
A sound in the corridor outside her door made her look up, frowning. She watched Jickson stumble into the doorway, eyes red-rimmed. He set a trembling hand against the jamb to hold himself up.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
“Your seeds? They’re right there.” She nodded toward the three security crates stacked in the corner of her room.
Jickson’s bleary gaze hung on her worktable for several seconds before he swung his head toward the crates.
“We can’t keep her in there. She’ll be frightened.”
“You told us they were in stasis,” Fugia said. “You yourself said they would be fine that way for transport.”
Jickson stared at her. “I didn’t say that. She’ll be trapped in the transition zone. It’s frightening for her. I need to put her back in test assembly, it’s the only time there’s an environment variable. Otherwise it’s just…nothing. Can you imagine the horror of nothingness?”
“Probably, if I tried,” she answered dryly. She set down the loupe. “What do you need me to do, Dr. Jickson?”
His rubbery face passed through several emotions, starting with anger and ending in surrender.
“I failed,” he said, wiping his nose. “I failed the first time. We fielded the testbed, and every volunteer died. They couldn’t rectify the duality.”
“Look, doc,” Fugia said. “I’d like to help you, but I’m very busy right now. You said yourself, your seeds are safe. Don’t forget that you called us.”
“I did,” he said. He squeezed his eyes closed, rubbing the sides of his head, then looked at her with new eyes, a bit of focus she’d seen back on the Harmon’s Place returning to his gaze. “You’re right.”
“Thank you,” Fugia said.
“I’ve been alone a long time,” he apologized. “And I’ve been self-medicating. I set your medbay to administer a liver stabilizer. It looks like I let myself get cirrhosis again.”
“Again?”
He shrugged, looking miserable. “I have—problems with reality.”
“You drugged your last crew and sent an attack drone after us,” Fugia recapped. “I’d say that’s a disconnect from reality, yes.”
