by J. N. Chaney
Or, Dash thought, remembering the dissected creatures, worse than killed. Maybe much worse.
But if they didn’t do this, then Amy was probably going to die long before they could get her to help.
And then, of course, there was another problem.
“Sentinel,” Dash said, “can you even protect me in that Meld? The last time, whatever firewalls and things you put up—oh, and that whole making it look like I was somewhere else—that all didn’t hold up, did it? You yanked me out of it just in the nick of time.”
“That is true. I do have a better grasp of the Golden system’s capabilities now and can erect more durable defenses. But they will not last indefinitely. There is a risk that they will not endure long enough for the process of stabilizing Amy to be completed.”
“And then what? I become some sort of Golden-controlled drone?”
“I am unsure to what extent the Golden are able to manipulate the operations of an organic brain directly. However, the system is more likely to simply terminate your life functions.”
“Oh. Well, that’s better than being a meat puppet for the Golden.”
“Dash,” Leira said, “if we’re going to do something, we need to do it now.”
Since he’d gotten to know Leira, Dash had never heard her voice as flat with desperate desolation as it was now. Not even when she’d been caught on a disabled Slipwing, plunging toward fiery oblivion in the star in the Forge’s system.
He saw why. Amy had gone the color of cold ashes. Blood slicked the front of her slashed excursion suit, its steady ooze barely held back by what remained of the clean-clot.
She was dying.
Dash looked around at the others. The looks he got back from them all said the same thing—we’re with you, and we’ll be with you no matter what. Conover’s, though, held something more, a plea.
He tried to imagine the dynamics of their little group if he said, Sorry, this is just too risky, I’m afraid we have to just let Amy go.
Dash slung his carbine. “What the hell. Nobody ever said saving the universe was going to be easy, right?”
His previous instances of merging with the Golden tech had given Dash a smattering of understanding of their language. He now frowned at the console built into the base of one of the clear cylinders, one that Conover had said seemed fully powered up and fully connected to a data stream. He finally tapped a colored spot, then another.
“And I think it would be this one,” he muttered.
He touched another glowing spot. The transparent cylinder suddenly rippled like water, split along a vertical seam, then peeled back from the split, a third of its circumference vanishing to a height of about two meters.
“Okay,” he said, “it’s open.”
Leira and Conover immediately lifted Amy, who could now barely stumble, much less walk. Carrying her between them, they lifted her into the cylinder. As they settled her in place, Dash found himself frowning. Not that there was any shortage of things to frown about—but the one person who’d not given an opinion on all of this was Amy herself. They weren’t just going to use more clean-clot on her, or let a doctor treat her. They were about to expose her to alien tech, and from a life-hating, hostile alien race, at that.
While Leira and Conover worked her into a kneeling position, propped against the back of the cylinder, Dash leaned in close to her. “Amy, do you understand what we’re about to do here?”
Her eyes fluttered open. “Dash?”
“Yeah. Amy, look, we’re not going to force you to do this.”
Her eyes closed again.
“She’s not lucid, Dash,” Conover said. “She can’t answer. We have to do this.”
“You’re not the one we’re planning to save with tech made by a bunch of xenophobic assholes.”
“You were all for using the Lens to save me right after the Harbinger attacked the Forge,” Leira said. “And that put everything at risk—not just us, but the Archetype and the Forge, too. So you’re really not sitting on the moral high ground here, are you?”
Dash shot her a glare, but it collapsed under the weight of Leira’s desperate determination. She was about to break.
“Okay, let’s get this done then get the hell out of here,” he said.
When they were clear of the cylinder, Dash worked the controls to seal the cylinder again. With Amy fully contained inside it, he suddenly couldn’t pull his mind away from images of those other creatures they’d found, sealed in identical cylinders, but subjected to things the sheer horror of which he could only guess.
“Sentinel, you said you were going to do something about turning this damned ship back off. I gather you need me to stay in the Meld for that, too. How long is that going to take?”
“I am not going to provide you with that information unless you request it, but I strongly advise against such knowledge. You are The Messenger, and my protocols are clear, but so is my ultimate goal, and you must stay alive to achieve it.”
“You’re not—” He scowled. “What do you mean, keep me alive? I could die due to—learning something?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Dash snapped.
“Because, Dash,” Viktor said, “if you know it, and this ship manages to get inside your head it could be bad.”
“Then I’m compromised, and that means everyone is at risk. Understood. Save that information then,” Dash said, his voice cracking with authority. “I’ll go in without it.”
“Very well,” Sentinel said. “You need only make direct contact with any component of the ship that contains Dark Metal to establish the Meld.”
Dash pulled the glove off his left hand then paused and looked around at the others. “I have no idea how long this is going to take. I’ll probably be out of it, so I’m counting on you as my interruption, in case things go badly.”
“Do you really need to say this, Dash?” Leira asked. “We know. We—we all do. It’s all I can think about right now.”
He took in their collective, grim resolve then shook his head. “No, I don’t. Just let Ragsdale here call the shots.” He met the man’s eyes. “If anyone here knows what he’s doing when it comes to a fight, it’s him.”
Ragsdale returned a thin, hard smile. “Glad you think so.” He held Dash’s eyes and nodded back.
“Okay, then.” Dash flexed his fingers, looked up at Amy, and said, “Here we go.”
He placed his hand against the console.
A torrent of data slammed into Dash, rushing around him, over him, burying him under a flood of information that filled his senses to the breaking point.
But he didn’t break.
Sentinel’s countermeasures stood against the raging flow, forcing it around Dash and his stalwart resistance to the inundation. Still, this couldn’t last. Unlike when Sentinel had been able to misdirect the Golden ship’s efforts to ensnare him, this time they became instantly aware of his invasive presence. He felt them batter at the firewalls, smashing at them with brute force one instant, and the next trying to insinuate themselves, stealthy and insidious, through the smallest crease in his virtual armor.
All he could do was hang on, little more than a conduit, and hope to ride it out until Sentinel had finished her work. He could feel her presence, a warm weight, like someone leaning against him, counting on him to hold her in place against the torrent.
Dash opened his eyes and gaped around. He was back in the compartment, back with the others, back with Amy in the tube. The cylinder in which they’d placed her had become a blank, featureless column of metallic grey. It had filled with liquid Dark Metal, submerging Amy entirely.
19
Dash flung himself at the cylinder. “Amy!”
He hammered his fists against it. Punched at it. He would break through the crystalline wall with his bare hands or die trying.
“Dash! No!” Viktor pleaded, voice strained with an unseen effort.
Someone grabbed him, but he shook them off. They grabbed him again. More
than one someone, this time. He tried to shake them off too, but couldn’t. The gripping hands turned him around toward faces. Leira’s. Conover’s. Viktor’s.
“Dash,” Leira said. “Listen to me.”
“Amy!”
“We know! Listen! The Golden ship has her. Sentinel’s plan didn’t work, but it’s willing to make a deal.”
“It’s…what?”
“The Golden ship. It’s willing to make a deal.” Leira’s face was a mask of uncertainty.
Dash shook his head. “Screw that.”
“No!” Viktor snapped. “Dash, listen. The Golden ship is in control. It has Amy, in there.” He nodded his head toward the iron-grey cylinder. “She’s alive. The ship’s willing to make a deal. If we tell it what Sentinel plans to do to shut it down, it will let Amy go. It will even heal her.”
“We have to do this, Dash!” Conover said, his desperation so intense it had a presence. “We have to give it what it wants. We can save Amy!”
“We can’t let this ship keep powering up!” he shouted back. “We can’t. Nothing will be able to save Port Hannah if we do.” He looked around for Ragsdale and Freya but didn’t see either of them. “Where the hell did the others go?”
“They both went outside this compartment to keep watch,” Leira said. “Dash, we don’t have time to argue about this. We have to give the ship what it wants.”
He craned his neck back at the cylinder. “How do we even know Amy’s alive in there?”
“I’m alive, Dash.”
“Amy?” He pushed the others off him. “Amy, you can hear me?”
“I can. I’m…I don’t know how to describe it. I’m here, but I’m not. It’s kind of cool, actually.”
Dash turned back to the others. “We can’t just give in to this damned ship.”
“We have no choice, Dash,” Leira said. “If we don’t, then we lose Amy.”
Dash took a long, shuddering breath. “Shit. Shit. Just give me a second, okay?”
He walked a few paces away.
So it hadn’t worked. Despite Sentinel’s best efforts to protect him from the Golden AI, it had failed—and now the ship held Amy hostage. And the only way to save her was to betray Port Hannah—and possibly everyone else, everywhere. Because, when this ship was fully powered up and active, despite its damaged condition, it could become a firm base from which the Golden could operate—their own version of the Forge, as it were.
The answer was simple. As keen as his desperate need to save Amy was, he couldn’t let it override his grim duty to save everyone else.
And yet, as Leira had even said, he’d risked far, far more arranging to save her from falling into the Forge’s sun.
He turned back. “I can’t tell the ship what it wants to know, even if I wanted to.”
“You command Sentinel, Dash,” Viktor said. “Just instruct her to tell you. Order it to.”
Dash looked away again, eyes going unfocused as he worked the calculus of a bad situation. It was truly amazing, he thought, how an already impossible choice had somehow just gotten even more impossible.
He looked back again. “I can’t surrender all of life for the life of one person. Not like this.”
Leira’s face grew fierce and she stalked over to him, a hand on the grip of her plasma pistol. “You are not going to just abandon her, Dash. You are not going to let her die.”
Conover appeared beside her. “No,” he said, “you’re not. I love her, Dash. I’m not going to lose her.”
“If you let her die, Dash,” Leira said, “then this is over. I don’t care what happens to the rest of the universe, then. I won’t have anything more to do with this, or with you.”
“The same goes for me,” Viktor said.
“I might just decide to take the Golden’s side,” Conover snapped. “There’d be nothing left for me here.”
Dash looked away, at nothing again, because that was what he faced. A void. There was nothing to see. Everything was bleak. Everything was empty. It had all come to this—and this was nothing. An end to everything he’d been given, and entrusted with—here and now, in the form of a dying woman.
A flickering light edged through his black despair. It flashed from a console, one attached to another of the cylinders. For lack of anywhere else to look, his gaze had come to rest on it.
It alternated, he saw, between two symbols. One meant the system it controlled was locked in a stand-by mode. The other offered diagnostic information, data about power levels, signal strength, specifics about the system itself.
Dash narrowed his eyes. He knew this, because he could read it. He could understand it, because of the Meld he’d somehow achieved with this ship.
He turned back to Leira. “You say the Golden ship told you it will kill Amy if we don’t give it what it wants.”
“Yes, that’s right. Dash, we don’t have time for this—”
“How?” Dash asked.
“What?” Her lips were pulled to one side, halfway between impatience and disgust.
“How did it tell you that?”
“It just told us.” She let out an exasperated sigh. “We’re wasting time.”
“No,” Dash said, shaking his head. “You’re lying.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Leira asked.
“You’re lying. This ship’s AI is basically dead. Sentinel told me it was too badly damaged to become aware again, either because of the battle or the crash afterward. So there’s no way this ship could have told you anything.”
Viktor took a step toward him, his voice rough. “Dash. You’re killing Amy. You are. No one else. Just you.”
“I don’t think so,” Dash cut in. “I don’t think I’m killing anyone.”
He turned, strode to the console that had caught his attention, then tapped in a series of commands.
“What are doing?” Leira asked.
“Just one second.”
Conover raised his slug carbine. “Listen, you get Sentinel to tell you what it plans to do, and you do it now, so we can save Amy!”
Dash ignored him and kept tapping at the console. He had to do a bit of navigating here, not being entirely sure where he wanted to go.
Wait. There. Right there.
He punched in a final command.
“What have you done?” Leira asked.
Dash stepped back from the console then waved at it. “You tell me.”
Her expression hardened, but she just said, “I have no idea.”
“Yeah, your face is telling me otherwise. Which is strange, because you’re right. You should have absolutely no idea what I just did.”
Conover aimed the carbine at him. “I swear, Dash, I’ll kill you myself if you don’t do what we want.”
“What we want? Don’t you mean what the ship wants?”
Conover’s finger paled as he put pressure on the trigger. “Last chance.”
Dash walked forward until the muzzle of the slug carbine almost touched his nose. “Do it. Put a round in my skull. I want you to fire.”
Dash gritted his teeth and waited. In truth, his gut quivered close to nausea; he was almost certain he knew what was happening here, but almost wasn’t entirely.
Conover finally lowered the carbine.
“Fine. I won’t kill you. You couldn’t save Amy.”
“Amy’s fine,” Dash snapped back, the clench in his gut easing a bit. “Or, at least, she’s not this ship’s hostage. Or, should I say, your hostage.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Conover said.
“Oh, yes you do.” Dash gestured around. “None of this is real. You’re inside my head. So you know what I know. But Sentinel refused to give me any info about how she planned to shut you down. That means no one in this room—or, this place I should say—knows how.” He gave a thin smile. “Good effort. You really sold it.”
“Dash,” Leira said, “you’re not making any sense.”
“It’s not surprising all of this
has finally got you, Dash,” Viktor added, but Dash just chuckled and shook his head.
“You’re almost perfect. Maybe if your AI was working properly, it would have been perfect. That’s what happens when you have to rely on the minions, though. I’m assuming you’re some autonomous security systems, subroutines, whatever. You’re good, yeah. But you don’t quite get us humans, do you? You think we’re barely primates, not smart enough to solve this on our own.”
Leira and the others said nothing. Their faces simply went blank.
“I’m guessing you decided that Ragsdale and Freya couldn’t be part of your elegant simulation,” Dash went on. “Because that’s what this is, a simulation. You knew they’d probably pick saving Port Hannah over Amy. Not because they’re uncaring assholes, but because that’s where their loyalties are naturally going to be. Or that’s what I would expect of them. This fabrication is built around what I expect. So, you conveniently got them out of the picture because, if they didn’t object to saving Amy, it might give away the show. But if they were here and did object, it would just make things complicated.”
“You cannot possibly prevail,” the woman who wasn’t Leira, and didn’t exist at all, said. “As you noted, we’re inside you. We own you. We control you.”
Dash just chuckled again.
“Okay, maybe you’re not as good at this as I thought you might be. If you really controlled me, then none of this would be necessary, right? You’d have made me order Sentinel to reveal what you want to know. You sure as hell wouldn’t let me do anything you didn’t want me to do. Like adjusting that console over there, for instance.”
“You cannot access any critical systems from here,” not-Conover said. “As you said, this is just a simulation.”
He made a derisive sound. “What do I know about critical systems? Honestly, I’m probably the least tech-savvy of our happy little group. I leave the critical systems to Sentinel and the others.” He nodded toward the console. “If I’d have tried to do something you didn’t like, it wouldn’t have worked. Oh, it would have seemed to work, but it wouldn’t have really. It’s painfully obvious to everyone except you.”
