by Sara King
“These anchors,” Anna offered. “There any on Fortune?”
“Oh sure,” Quad said, grinning. “There’s five in the Tear—you know that ship that’s stuck down there? It’s got its own anchors, for when the Aashaanti leaders had to come and go from different hives.”
Anna squinted at him. “Ship… You mean the hiveship that died earlier this month? The thing that’s stinking up the Snake with its corpse?”
“No,” Quad said, a little startled that she didn’t know. “The huge Aashaanti heartship that’s still running about a mile down.”
Anna’s eyes got very sharp. “A working ship. On Fortune.”
“Uh-huh.” Quad nodded. “It got crammed under the big hive that crashed in the Tear. It was the one the Aashaanti leaders all rode around in, so it’s really fancy, lots of armor, really good power supply, that sort of thing. The bigger ship drove it into the planet’s crust when they went down. Poor thing’s kind of lonely down there, ’cause it’s so isolated. Fun to play soldiers in, though. Everything lights up when you walk through the corridors, so it’s like it was when Jedi Wolverine attacked the Death Nova.”
Anna gave him a really long look, then said, “Can you take me there?”
“Sure!” Quad cried. “All I gotta do is grab your hand and—”
“Anna, who is your friend?” Doberman asked, sitting up.
“Quad, here, is about to show me a working Aashaanti ship,” Anna said.
But Quad was frowning. The short must have been worse than he thought—it shouldn’t have affected long-term memory. “You mean you don’t remember me, Dobie?”
The robot peered at him a moment, then said, “I have no record of ever meeting you.”
“Well, you should. He just saved your life,” Anna said. Strangely, she looked almost smug.
“I must’ve messed something up,” Quad said, suddenly very depressed at the idea of Dobie not remembering the Quadraton spray and the Uncle pulse. “Give me a minute. I’ll do a restore from energy fragments.” He moved to pick up Anna’s r-player again.
“That can wait,” Anna said, yanking the device out of his reach. “Seriously, that ship sounds cool.”
Quad frowned. “The ship has been there for the last sixteen thousand years. Dobie needs a memory reintegration now, before the ghost energies dissipate in his next cleaning, or it might be permanent.”
Anna raised a brow. “A memory reintegration? Dobie, do you want this kid tinkering with your programming?”
“Not especially, Anna,” Doberman said, giving him a suspicious look.
That perhaps hurt worse than the skeptical look Anna was giving him. Quad had to remind himself that the robot wasn’t doing anything hurtful intentionally, and that he was just missing key files. “Just give me the r-player and let me see what he’s missing,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Anna said, pulling it away. “You already messed him up once.”
Quad blinked. “But I didn’t. All I was doing was resetting the short…”
“And now he doesn’t remember anything,” Anna said. “Maybe we should just go to that ship and check it out. Dobie can figure it out himself.”
Confused, now, Quad decided to look into the programming error himself. He usually used tools because he’d noticed that people got irritated and nervous when he didn’t, but he was running out of time. Any minute now, Doberman’s systems would automatically reset, and those ghost images would be lost. He opened up a link and went hunting through Dobie’s files.
The error had been startlingly specific. Dobie had lost all memories of Quad. Everything from the first moments of saving Anna and Dobie from the explosion in the Tear, to Doberman clawing his way through robots so awesomely in Rath, to their evening chats while Anna slept, to Quad taking the equipment back in order to keep Anna from finding out about it.
…which made him remember the weird Yolk surge that had moved onto Anna’s device, almost as if it were downloading…
“Okay, I figured out what happened,” Quad said, backing out from all the input. “That surge caused your r-player to download all Dobie’s memories of me, and must have somehow wiped them from Dobie in the process. Just take a look. They’ll be there. You can reupload them to Dobie right now.”
Anna frowned. “How could you possib…” Then, clearing her throat, she said, “Hey, I don’t really think it’s a big deal, do you, Dobie?”
“If I’m missing memories, I’d appreciate them back,” Doberman said.
“Maybe later.” Anna stuffed the r-player into her pocket and said, “Hey. Quad. Take me to that ship, okay?”
“But…” Quad looked at Dobie, who was frowning at Anna, then he swallowed and glanced down at her r-player, twitching to reinstate Dobie’s memories as they were. Then he realized how he could do it—one of TimeMagus’s backskips! He pulled out a marble—only to realize he’d gone over his five minute and thirty-nine second limit.
Quad swallowed hard, realizing he didn’t have an easy way to make Anna forget about him this time. Maybe he could use two marbles…
“You know anything about Void Rings?” Anna said. “We’ve got that broken one orbiting Fortune. Think you could fix it?”
“Oh, easy,” Quad chuckled. “It’s just a receiver. It’s the two-way transmitters like the one at Pedestre that are the harder ones to tinker with. They’re a lot more delicate, computationally.”
“I heard somewhere,” Anna said, “that you can hide a working Void Ring from the central ring. In fact, I think it was in a Jedi Wolverine holobook.”
“It was!” Quad cried. “Jedi Wolverine needed to heal up on Capsciun after one of his fights with Novar. He had his ultra-droid remove the Ring from the grid and reprogram it so that it appeared to go somewhere else.”
“How?” Anna asked. “As far as I know, the Master Ring is run by a sentog.”
Quad balked. “Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to do some research.” Then, perking up at the realization that Anna wanted to see his Jedi Wolverine holobooks, he said, “Come on! I’ll show you my collection!”
Anna looked almost predatory. “I’d like that. Can you bring Dobie?”
Quad glanced at the robot, estimating his total mass. He winced. “I could try, but there’s a two-percent possibility that one of the two of you would get lost in interdimensional space on the trip.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Anna said.
“I’ll stay behind,” Doberman said. “It is as you said, Quad. I have a strange anomaly in my memory banks.”
“Anna could fix it real quick,” Quad offered. “Just hand him the—”
“I want to go look at your Jedi Wolverine collection,” Anna said. “Dobie can find his own files.”
“But you have them on the—” Quad started.
“Quad,” Anna said. “This is important. If Jedi Wolverine could do it, we should be able to do it, right?”
“Well, yeah…” Quad said. “But—”
“So let’s go!” Anna cried.
Quad glanced at Dobie. “You sure?”
“He doesn’t have an opinion,” Anna said. She looked over her shoulder. “Do you, Dobie?”
“I have no opinion, Anna,” Dobie said in an oddly stiff manner. Almost like it was a macro, some sort of automatic response. Frowning, Quad started looking into the robot’s programming once more.
He was just starting to uncover an odd set of commands that someone had embedded into Doberman’s deepest system processes when Anna grabbed him by the arm and said, “Look, Quad, we’re talking about a galactic conflict, here. Like, worse than the Tritons. You heard what my dumbass sister just did, right? She massacred Rath. You know what that’s going to make those Coalition floaters do in ten years, right?”
At the desperation in her words, Quad reluctantly tore his attention from the horrifying things he was finding in Dobie. “Huh? War?”
“Yes,” Anna said, misunderstanding his question. “War. They’re going
to attack us. With everything they’ve got. In ten years—five years for the news to get there, five years for them to get back with an armada, if they use their fast ships—they’re gonna try to wipe the colonist presence from Fortune like exterminators rousting out a nest of cockroaches.”
Quad swallowed. “Why would they do that?”
Anna frowned. “Why would—” She shook herself. “Because Fortune supplies Yolk. They use Yolk to power their entire civilization structure. It surpassed caffeine as the galaxy’s most valuable drug twenty-eight years ago, only four years after it reached the Core en masse. And guess what? They can only get it to grow here.”
“Well, that’s because there’s a working heartship down there powering the hive-beacon keeping the Shriekers alive,” Quad said. “Give them a hive-beacon and they can grow their own.”
Anna blinked at him. Then squinted. “What?”
“A hive beacon,” Quad said. “It regulates Shrieker behavior, keeps the young in check. Prevents metamorphosis until the hive is ready for it. It imitates the different frequencies generated by seasonal cycles on their home planet. They started building their own when they built their first interstellar ships to control hatching times, and have been using them so long that they evolved to need them in order to grow and reproduce.”
She continued to scowl at him. “And what happens when the beacon disappears?”
“Well, if the Shriekers haven’t metamorphosed yet, they’ll die.”
“Where is the beacon on Fortune?” Anna asked. “How do I get to it?”
“That’s trickier,” Quad said. “It’s in this really big valley in the jungle. Somebody dumped it there right at the end of the Triton Wars, to keep it from the remaining Tritons.”
Anna’s brow furrowed further. “The Triton Wars never came out this far.”
“Sure they did.” Surprised she didn’t know, Quad frowned back. “They just never wrote about it in the history books because the war was supposed to be already over and they were already celebrating in the Core. Why do you think Daytona Dae colonized this place?”
“To plunder the Aashaanti tech,” Anna retorted.
“Noooo,” Quad said. “She was trying to stop the Tritons from getting a working Aashaanti ship, and the Sun Dogs were promised the planet as a reward if they’d ‘clean up’ the last Triton outpost on it.” He cocked his head. “Well, that and Daytona was gonna have a baby. That’s what Mom says, anyway. She had a really special little bundle of joy that made everyone cry every time they looked at him because he was a miracle because everybody thought it couldn’t happen.”
Anna narrowed her sharp brown eyes. “I care more about the contranite-encrusted shitstain on my greasy underwear after a bout of bioengineered flu than I do about the ‘miracle’ that is Runaway Joel. Does anyone else know about the working Aashaanti ship, Quad?”
Quad just blinked at her. “How would I know that?”
“Look,” Anna said, grabbing him by the shoulders and getting uncomfortably close. “Quad. This is really, really important. I need to see that ship. I need to see the insides of that ship, okay?”
Quad glanced again at Dobie. “But—”
“Now, Quad!” Anna cried. “There are lives at stake!”
Stunned at her tone, Quad automatically complied.
CHAPTER 37: The Importance of Jedi Wolverine
11th of June, 3006
Heartship Wandering Spirit
1 Mile Beneath Fortune’s Surface, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
Still dizzy from the falling-all-directions feeling of traveling with Quad, Anna stumbled, catching herself on a support beam, blinking at the floor as she tried to get her bearings. The lights were painfully bright, and it left her totally disoriented. It was like being on the inside of a fancy, neon-lighted fish tank, and it was hard to get over the fact that several colors were coming from different directions, casting colored shadows where some lights overlapped others. Her eyes simply didn’t want to adapt to it.
The lights themselves were nothing Anna had ever seen before, looking to be made of raw crystals set into the shimmering white-yet-rainbow-flecked wall, not any form of organized, industrialized lighting structure.
“I took us to the engine room, ’cause that’s the coolest place!” Quad said. “See the planar drive?” He gestured to a dog-sized generator made of glowing purple and black coils. “That’s what takes the ship in and out of whatever dimension the skipper decides to go to. This was one of the new ships, one of the ones built after they discovered the tech that let them jump dimensions. They were using the tech for mining mineral-rich systems in other dimensions when they ran into the Phage.” He was sober for only a moment, then turned to grin at her. “With that thing, we could go try to find ourselves in another dimension. Wouldn’t that be awesome? I wonder if our doubles would be smart, too…”
Still reeling, Anna continued to hold herself upright on the molded metal upright support. At least, she thought the support was metal. It was warm to the touch—like a living thing—and changed color from opalescent white to almost black where her hand touched it, depressing slightly under her fingers, almost like a stiff gelatin. Eerily, she thought of muscle when holding it, like the whole thing was one big block of potential waiting for an electrical impulse to stimulate it.
As if summoned by the thought, the multicolored crystalline lights around them flickered with a burst of power, almost blinding her.
“Yeah, you need to be careful about what you wish for,” Quad said, looking around them solemnly. “It’s really tired of being stuck down here. Wants to get back in the sky.”
Still stunned, Anna turned to frown at Quad. “What do you mean, ‘what I wish for?’”
“That’s livemetal,” Quad said, gesturing to the opalescent ribbed pillar she now leaned against. “At least, that’s what the Aashaanti called it. It’s kind of a living metal symbiont—a multicellular metallic organism that actually evolved to respond to electrical impulses and psychic energies of the host in order to take advantage of more advanced organisms’ mental faculties for complex thought, which it can’t produce on its own. The Aashaanti found a planet of it during their early explorations, and it allowed them to advance to become a galactic power in only a few decades. It’s asking what you want right now, but you’ve gotta be careful, because it can take instructions, and the whole ship has been itching to do something for sixteen thousand years.”
Anna frowned. “You mean I can make it dig itself out?” If it responded to psychic requests, like the alien inviso-shredder robots and the handful of other working pieces they had collected from the Tear, then it should be a simple matter of giving the command and then waiting a few days as it blasted its way free…
“Oh no,” the little rube laughed. “It’d just jump out.”
Anna froze. “You mean the way you jump.” Already, her heart was pounding. This was it. This was their way to beat the Coalition, once and for all, to send the Encompate’s dreams of dominating Fortune spiraling down in gouts of flame as she crushed their fleets and pounded their armies into the dirt. This was the key. She could feel it.
“Not really. It moves around more like Lumerion,” Quad said, naming yet another inane comic book character. “It can’t make jump decisions on its own—the Aashaanti were all about bureaucratic rules—it needs a captain to give it the command.”
Anna ignored the little moron. Her heart was hammering like righteous thunder. A working Aashaanti ship. A flagship. Meant to carry Aashaanti royalty. It would be loaded to the gills with every weapon and technology the Aashaanti had ever known, and it would be at her disposal. She could make the entire Coalition come crumbling down in a few short weeks. She could destroy planets in minutes. She could explode space stations in seconds. The whole galaxy would shiver at her very name. All she had to do was think really hard about getting the ship out from under —
Then Quad’s face lit up. “Hey! I didn’t show you my comic collection.
” He took her by the arm, and then Anna felt that odd, wrenching-in-all-directions feeling and the humming alien technologies faded out of view.
CHAPTER 38: Quad and Anna Destroy the Universe
11th of June, 3006
Ross Mansion
Trinoi, Trellas System, The Core
“—you insane?!” Anna screamed at him, making Quad cringe. “Take me back. Take me back right now!”
Though he didn’t understand exactly why Anna was yelling, Quad was sure that some first-edition Jedi Wolverine holobooks would calm her down. He grabbed one of his coveted ancient discs from his bedroom closet and held it out, still in original plastic. “See the cover?” he said. “That’s Jedi Wolverine number one. The very first Jedi Wolverine. It’s over four hundred years old. That’s from before the Tritons. My uncle Sirius got it for me when I was four.”
Anna stared at him so long that Quad wondered if maybe something horrible had happened to her in their jump to Trinoi. Then, without warning, she grabbed the two-inch holobook disc from his hand, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it. The horrifying crunch that followed stopped Quad’s heart.
“Take me back,” Anna snapped. “I don’t give a crap about a stupid comic book. I care about that ship! Take me back now, you yammering chocolate dumpling!”
Quad stared down at the remnants of his first-edition Jedi Wolverine—one of only five in existence—in total horror, unable to even comprehend breathing, much less put meaning to the words coming from Anna’s mouth.
Anna grabbed Quad by the hair. “I said,” she growled, yanking him painfully around, “take me back to that ship.” He brown eyes were much too close. Their faces were almost touching, drowning him in her sneer. “You get me, you little cupcake? I will kill you if you don’t take me back.”
Quad punched her. Right in the nose.
Anna flew backwards, straight into the wall, then tumbled, blinking in surprise, to the floor. Immediately, Quad felt bad. Sirius had always told him never to use his powers to hurt those weaker than him.
