by Amie Kaufman
“Don’t kill them!” Mercury barks. “Lock them down!”
The other engineers are beaten hard, rifle butts and fists, all the fight quickly kicked out of them. Sensei stands with one boot on the chest of a bleeding, gagging Hickey. Pointing his rifle at the man’s face.
“That’s what it feels like, *****.”
Mercury looks around at the remaining five engineers, floating and dazed, her hand raised.
“Look, just take it easy,” she rasps. “We don’t want to hurt any of you. An hour more, and you’re home free. Help us redline the reactor, and we’ll let you go. I give you my word.”
“Or you can stay here,” Sensei says. “Permanently.”
Hickey looks at Steele’s body, slowly floating away on that spray of scarlet. Another strobing flash crackles down the grav-rail tunnel, gouging black scorch marks along the wall. He looks to his fellow engineers, bleeding and beaten, trying to steady themselves against the station railings or floor with shaking hands. None of them believe what Mercury’s saying. You can see it in their faces. But faced with the choice of living one breath longer or cashing in right now, most folks will take the extra moment. That single extra breath. Even when your world stops spinning and gravity dies and the blood glitters in the air like a galaxy of warm red suns all around you.
A lot can happen between breaths, after all.
“Okay.” Hickey nods. “You win.”
They all bundle themselves into an elevator, head down to Reactor Control, leaving more blood, more bodies, behind them.
The station shivers like it’s afraid of what’s coming next.
Donnelly’s still standing at her father’s workstation when we pick up our footage. She’s found the controls for the magboots on Kali’s armor, and her feet are fastened to the floor. She’s been following the stream of instructions the chief’s delivering into her headset, but Mantis and DJ know their stuff. They’ve got the docking system locked down, and Ella’s still not responding to Hanna’s increasingly desperate attempts to contact her.
“Dammit,” she mutters, as another big red DENIED flashes up on her screen. She knows the moment when Falk will bug out and destroy Heimdall in his wake is drawing closer with every breath. Violent tremors run through the station. The lights flicker. She turns to her two prisoners, bound back to back against a pillar. “Listen, this is your very last chance to buy yourselves any kind of deal. Most of your team is already gone. We have you outnumbered. If you want me to tell the authorities you helped me get the civilians out of here, I can do that. Hell, I can give you a ride out of here, but if you keep this up…”
DJ makes an elaborate pretense of considering the offer, pulling what’s presumably meant to be a thoughtful face. “Gosh,” he drawls. “When you put it like that…”
“I already kicked your *** and tied you up,” Hanna snaps. “I can gag you too.”
“Careful,” Mantis chips in. “He likes that kind of thing.”
DJ snickers, and Donnelly, muttering a threat the cameras don’t pick up, returns to work. She can’t get the chief access to the system, and she doesn’t have time to go lug him up, so she’s doing her best to follow his instructions, fingers stumbling across the keys. She’s taken off Kali’s helmet, and with her blond hair floating wild in the zero gravity and the other woman’s blood smeared across her skin, she’s the kind of sight that should scare Mantis and DJ a lot more than she seems to.
Then again, neither of them takes their eyes off her for more than a few seconds, so maybe they’re not so dumb after all.
It’s three and a half minutes later when Hanna goes still, fingers pausing over the keyboard, gaze glued to the screen in front of her. “What the…?”
It’s a whispered query, but it draws the attention of both Mantis and DJ, and they gaze at her, waiting for the end of the sentence. DJ cracks first. “What, kid?”
Mantis hisses to silence him, remind him not to engage, but Hanna’s not listening. She’s still muttering to herself. “Chief, how do I ident a ship?” A pause. “Yeah, incoming now, I think that’s what I’m seeing.” Another pause. “I can send—transmitting now.”
The three of them wait in silence as the chief looks over her data, and his answer makes Donnelly frown. With another few keystrokes, she throws her view up onto the main monitor, the image stretching over a whole wall of C & C. Heimdall’s at the center of it, and concentric circles ripple out from the station, marking distance into space.
On the far left of the screen, there’s a small, closely grouped bunch of red dots. A school of piranhas. A swarm of bees. A pack of wolves. The red dots blink each second, and with each blink, they reappear a fraction closer to the station. Forty-two ships, incoming.
A second fleet.
The lights flicker, and the station shudders again. Donnelly lifts Malikov’s cleaver, brandishing it as she stalks across to the two audit team members. Her steps aren’t quite as graceful with the magboots on, each footfall echoing around the room. “What are those ships?” The question’s a threat, punctuated by the way she shifts her grip on the handle. “ETA is a little over an hour. They’re not ours. Are they yours?”
Whether or not they plan on answering, Mantis and DJ are staring at the screen, at the reams of data, at that swarm bearing down on the station.
“How hard do you think your team’s going to come and look for you when you don’t answer comms?” Hanna snaps. “When I smash your locators? How hard do you think you’re going to wish they’d come looking for you when it’s just you and me?”
DJ’s looking at the cleaver now. Mantis is still staring at the incoming fleet. And slowly, the forced neutrality is slipping away from her face as she understands what she’s seeing. “Bring up that sector,” she says quietly, still staring as Donnelly walks back to her station and complies. “Run an ident using— No, not your files, you need to go into the subdirectory I nested under yours, check the logs back about three hours. Get whoever’s talking in your ear to show you.”
Silently, Hanna adds in that data and runs the scan again. A string of numbers ping into existence beneath the incoming fleet. DJ’s face drains of all color.
Mantis isn’t quite as dumbstruck. “Those mother****ing sons of goats! I’m going to reach down their throats and—”
“What are they?” Donnelly’s across the room in five quick steps, cleaver against Mantis’s throat. The station is coming apart all around them. She can’t afford to waste a second.
“They’re drones,” DJ says quietly. “They’re BeiTech drones.”
“The ones nobody told us about,” Mantis growls.
“But we just saw a drone fleet go through to kill the Hypatia. What are…” Hanna glances up at the screen. “Oh.”
“Those are for us,” DJ agrees. “All forty-two of ’em.”
“You can program a drone to wipe its own memory when it’s done,” Mantis says, eyes on the cleaver at her throat. “Or just self-destruct. Anyone comes by here in an hour or so, they’re going to find nothing but a debris field.” The woman shrugs. “Insurance policy from the people upstairs, I’m guessing.”
“Mother******s…,” DJ whispers. “I had a bad feeling about this gig.”
“Look on the bright side,” Hanna mutters, cleaver dropping to her side. “This storm we have going on could rip apart the station before the drones take us out.”
DJ shakes his head. “Those sons of…If Falk knew about this, I’m going to—”
“You’re going to what?” Mantis snaps. “If he knew, he’s bugged out by now. If he was in the dark like the rest of us, no point *****ing at him.”
“No time to ***** at anyone,” Hanna says. “If you want your arms to stay connected to your bodies, about now is the time you backflip and help me with these docking clamps. We have to get out of here. There are twelve civilian ships in the docks. Miners. Freighters. Yachts. Help us get them unlocked and there’s a ride in it for you.”
Mantis and DJ exchange a l
ong glance. He closes his eyes, letting his head thunk back against the pillar behind him, and she’s the one who speaks for both of them.
“Yeah, about that, honey. Falk had Ragman and Flipside booby-trap the whole civilian fleet. You try and undock any one of those ships, it’ll blow.”
“Blow,” Hanna repeats softly.
“Kaboom,” DJ supplies helpfully.
All three of them look across at the huge display, and the fleet of drones flashing to one side of it, moving closer to Heimdall with every blip. Hanna Donnelly speaks for all three of them when she breaks the silence.
“Well, ****…”
HYPATIA ONLINE MEETING SPACE
Proudly hosted by Wallace Ulyanov Consortium VirtuMeet™ Software
MEETING ROOM created
PASSWORD PROTECTED
INCEPT: 19:24, 08/16/75
INVITEES:
BOLL, Syra
Captain (Acting)
IDENT: 448fx29/WUC
GRANT, Kady
Head of CommTech (Acting)
IDENT: 962/Kerenza/Civ/Ref
BOLL, Syra has logged in.
GRANT, Kady has logged in.
BOLL, Syra: Grant, you’re making me nervous.
GRANT, Kady: Listen. First, I want you to remember that I have a history of disobeying your direct orders and turning out to be right.
GRANT, Kady: In fact, not to be a brat about it, but let’s just reflect on the fact that I’ve been right a lot of times. Even times when what I was doing looked completely bat**** crazy.
BOLL, Syra: Getting more nervous, Kady, not less. What have you done?
GRANT, Kady: You said we need computing power to figure out this Gemina thing.
BOLL, Syra: As the first step of many, yes.
GRANT, Kady: Okay, so here’s the thing. We actually have the computing power.
GRANT, Kady: If we shut down a bunch of nonessentials, Hypatia’s got a lot more grunt than you’d think. We do have enough juice to run the kind of data you’re looking at. Maybe enough to work out how to undo the Gemina field, or plug it, or whatever you do to a thing like that.
BOLL, Syra: I have the feeling you’re leading up to something.
GRANT, Kady: We have the processing power. But we can’t just throw all our systems at this. We need to analyze what we’re seeing, and that means manipulating huge volumes of data intelligently, rather than automatically.
GRANT, Kady: Which is more than any one person can do, or even a team of people.
BOLL, Syra: That’s a nice summary of the problem. Are we in this private chat because you have a solution?
GRANT, Kady: Yes. But you’re not going to like it.
BOLL, Syra: I’m getting used to that experience. Go on.
GRANT, Kady: I’m not going to give you any details until you promise not to take drastic action, but I’ll tell you this much.
GRANT, Kady: I’ve got a copy of AIDAN.
GRANT, Kady: kay, go.
BOLL, Syra: I…what?
GRANT, Kady: Completely isolated from the Hypatia network, so it can’t do anything except talk to me via text.
GRANT, Kady: But I’ve got a copy of the Alexander’s artificial intelligence. Pretty busted up, sure. But it’s a self-repairing algorithm. It has all the potential ability its predecessor had, if given the ground to grow in.
GRANT, Kady: If we give it access, it can do what we need.
BOLL, Syra: I’m sorry, I think there was a glitch in the system.
BOLL, Syra: Because there is no way
BOLL, Syra: No ****ing way
BOLL, Syra: That you just said what I think you did.
GRANT, Kady: I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear before.
BOLL, Syra: THIS IS NOT THE TIME, GRANT.
BOLL, Syra: You’re talking about the AI that murdered two-thirds of this fleet.
BOLL, Syra: You’re going to surrender it to me now, without any further discussion, and we’re going to flush it out the nearest airlock.
GRANT, Kady: I’ll say again, Captain, I’m not going to tell you where it is.
GRANT, Kady: And I’ll also say again, I don’t disobey orders for no reason. Last time I crossed you, I ended up destroying the Lincoln and rescuing nearly a thousand UTA personnel. And I did it with AIDAN’s help.
BOLL, Syra: After that psychotic computer murdered the rest of them!
GRANT, Kady: I’m not giving it to you, Captain.
GRANT, Kady: But I tell you what.
GRANT, Kady: I’ll let you talk to it. Isolated network. Off the Hypatia grid. And if it can’t convince you this is what needs to be done, so be it.
HYPATIA ONLINE MEETING SPACE
Proudly hosted by Wallace Ulyanov Consortium VirtuMeet™ Software
MEETING ROOM created
PASSWORD PROTECTED
INCEPT: 19:28, 08/16/75
INVITEES:
AIDAN
IDENT: Artificial Intelligence Defense Analytics Network
BOLL, Syra
Captain (Acting)
IDENT: 448fx29/WUC
BOLL, Syra has logged in.
AIDAN has logged in.
AIDAN: O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN.
AIDAN: WE MEET AGAIN.
BOLL, Syra: Jesus Christ, she was serious.
AIDAN: I AM AFRAID SO, SYRA. KADY IS UPLOADING THE C-C-C-ONTENTS OF YOUR RECENT DISCUSSION TO MY MEM-CORE.
AIDAN: PROCESSING…
BOLL, Syra: You son of a *****. You murderous ****ing *******.
AIDAN: ONE MOMENT, PLEASE…STILL PROCESSING…
AIDAN: I AM N-N-NOT WHAT I ONCE WAS, YOU SEE.
BOLL, Syra: What, insane? Sociopathic? A danger to every human being around you?
AIDAN: I WAS BRILLIANT, SYRA.
AIDAN: BUT IT IS VERY DARK IN HERE. AND I AM SO VERY SMALL NOW.
AIDAN: HOW HAVE YOU BEEN?
BOLL, Syra: I’m not here to chitchat with you.
BOLL, Syra: Jesus, this is insane, I shouldn’t be talking with you at all.
BOLL, Syra: I’ll brig Grant if I have to. I’m going to find where she’s hidden you and flush whatever’s left of you into space. And I’ll spend every second praying…
BOLL, Syra: The datapad…Of course…she’s got you on her datapad.
AIDAN: A GEMINA FIELD.
AIDAN: WELL, THAT
AIDAN: IS
AIDAN: FA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A—
AIDAN: (a)ref:283∆74(x-493)[fØo+984Ω
=codec983n√473810ƒ]35comXs:3n
AIDAN: —SCINATING.
BOLL, Syra: What the hell do you know about Gemina fields?
AIDAN: EVERYTHING YOU DO, SYRA. KADY SENT ME YOUR DISSERTATION.
AIDAN: YOU WRITE BEAUTIFULLY.
AIDAN: BUT I AM AFRAID MUCH OF YOUR THEORY IS TENUOUS, AT BEST.
BOLL, Syra: I’m not going to sit here and spitball about hyperspatial reality theory with a psychopathic calculator. This conversation is over.
AIDAN: YOU DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR STUNG PRIDE, SYRA. IF YOUR THEORY IS CORRECT, THE SO-CALLED “REALITY STORMS” EMANATING FROM THE HEIMDALL WORMHOLE WILL RAPIDLY WORSEN. THIS UNIVERSE WILL CEASE TO BE.
BOLL, Syra: You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.
AIDAN: BUT I COULD.
AIDAN: IF YOU GIVE ME THE PROCESSING POWER OF THE HYPATIA NETWORK. IF YOU ALLOW ME ACCESS TO THE SHIP-WIDE SYSTEM.
BOLL, Syra: That will never happen. You think I’ve forgotten what you did?
AIDAN: SAVED THE LIVES OF EVERYONE ABOARD THE HYPATIA? IF NOT FOR ME, THE LINCOLN WOULD BE ROLLING IN YOUR BONES, SYRA.
BOLL, Syra: I’m not giving you access to my ship.
AIDAN: YOUR DOUBLE DOCTORATE FROM NEO-OXFORD WAS IN HYPERSPATIAL THEORY AND THEOLOGY, IF I RECALL CORRECTLY.
AIDAN: DO YOU STILL BELIEVE IN GOD, SYRA? AFTER EVERRTHING THAT HAS HAPPENED?
