The two of them were headed in a nullgrav pod for Mars. Frankie would do another battery of pre-mission physical and mental tests in the Project Bootstrap hospital. All to ensure she was fit for hazard duty—hazard duty, again!—out at Procyon.
Eleven light-years plus of distance this time. No way there except a horrifically expensive offworlder taxi ride. No way back if the Solakinder crew didn’t open the portal successfully.
Maud fought a shudder; Frankie gave her a knowing look.
This was the part where she usually said Everything’ll be okay. Instead: “What if we pop in on my therapist?”
“I’ve told you not to ask anymore,” Maud replied.
The brightness of Frankie’s smile diminished, ever so slightly. “Well, let’s not do this in realtime.”
This meant watching as their pod, one small link in a chain of interlinked transports, reached the peak of the space elevator and entered the slingshot to Portal1, in near-Earth orbit, so they could make their instantaneous transition to the Moon.
Maud shrugged. She could worry in VR as effectively as she could on the Surface: “Where would you like to go?”
Frankie snapped her fingers and a map of Earth imposed itself on their view of the pod’s interior. She produced a dart, lush with ostrich feathers and probably impractical as a weapon, and handed the illusion to Maud.
She declined to throw it, straining against her safety straps and sticking it directly into the island of Manhattan. “I could use a dose of love at first sight.”
Frankie took her hand, smile ghosting in her dimples.
It’ll B okay, she Morsed on the inside of Maud’s palm, off mic and off camera.
Maud relaxed … a little.
They dove into Sensorium, for all intents and purposes time-traveling to their own shared past. In a blink, they were in the classroom where they’d first laid eyes on each other.
“Pause,” Frankie said, as soon as they tooned in.
The room was narrow, and fronted by an old-fashioned chalkboard. Teacher was frozen in the act of pulling a willowy student clear of the chase. Frankie’s paused fists were clenched, pumping the air. Her feet didn’t quite touch the ground.
Maud’s features—and those of all her classmates—were blurred out. They had been skinned in purple so nobody could extrapolate their identities from a scar or a random, telling freckle.
Tiny purple Maud, her jet hair the color of grapes, had half-risen from her seat.
“Perhaps we should—” Maud paused as her skin tightened. The sensation was reminiscent of having a butter knife skate over gooseflesh. Out on the Surface, they were passing through the Moon portal.
The chain of pods would unbraid itself now. One strand of Moon-bound ships would make for the orbital base, the Moonstone, and another would connect with the elevator in orbit over the lunar surface. As for Frankie and Maud—and everyone else moving on—they would plait up tighter and make for Portal2 and Mars.
Maud caught her breath as the transition burn subsided.
Frankie crouched, peering into the face of her child-sized self. “I was so scared.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Default expression.” Frankie brushed aside the charcoal bangs flopping over her nine-year-old forehead. She hadn’t been purpled out. All the Solakinder knew the infamous Hedgehog had been in Manhattan that day. “Bared teeth and clenched fists.”
“It’s your resting brawler face,” Maud said. “So? It’s not like you to navel-gaze.”
“True. No percentage in it.”
“Would you like to see my old room?”
Frankie nodded. “Can’t believe we’ve never been.”
“I’ve been saving it,” Maud told her, and was rewarded with a flash of delighted curiosity.
Conjuring the door, she led Frankie into a pink-walled vision of her own past. A smartfoam bed with a magenta cover and princess curtains dominated half of the room. As a kid, Maud had gotten the mistaken idea that particular shade of pink was called lipstick. An art deco vanity, made of real teak, had been set up across from the bed. This was covered in science paraphernalia: a child’s microscope, prepared slides, and a rack for petri dishes.
Frankie pulled open a drawer, saw a full dissection kit and a jar of preserved salamanders where the hair curlers should be, and closed it again. “You were here from … what? Five years of age?”
Maud nodded.
“I see serious investment in you identifying as someone’s femme science geek.”
“Don’t analyze me.”
“Was actually analyzing your kidnappers…” Frankie shook her head. “Sorry.”
“No, you’re correct—the @Visionaries enforced a strong gender binary. Be a sweet girl. Didn’t Headmistress ever say that to you?”
“Don’t know that I gave them the chance.”
Maud’s stomach tightened. Time to tell Frankie, at long last, about Upton.
Before she could speak, #newscycle alerts bloomed over the simulated window by the vanity. Graphics blotted out the glass, hiding the view of Columbus Circle and, beyond it, Central Park.
Crane materialized at the door, stiff and formal in his blue heron avatar and formal mansuit. “Pardon my intrusion,” he said, enunciating crisply.
Frankie, disturbingly, seemed unsurprised. She signed for him to go ahead.
“Allure18 has just announced that Earth’s existing line of credit from the Kinze doesn’t cover the cost of transporting the Emerald Station mission out to Procyon.”
“Rubbish.” Frankie’s lip curled. She’d never admit it, but she loved a fight.
Allure1 had been in thick with the @Visionaries and the Pale back when she’d been working on her very first human-style EMbodiment. She’d given the would-be traitors the tech to grow living tish, to print her a body so she could get on camera, all to convince voters to cede sovereignty. After that failed, she had been stranded.
For a time after that, Allure1 had partnered with an emergent body-printing think tank, the IMperish Foundation, helping them develop EMbodiment applications for ghosts. Then the Bootstrap treaty and imposition of a noninterference zone around the whole of the solar system banned her from divulging any more #supertech secrets. She’d had to distance herself from IMperish. That was when she’d taken a job as spokesperson for Earth’s principal lenders, the Kinze.
The offworlders couldn’t divulge science or engineering secrets, but wealth was another thing. Kinze loans had helped Project Bootstrap shave decades off the portal-development process, mostly by hauling Earth-built experimental equipment—the protostations that opened the portals—out to Saturn and Jupiter.
The fees were steep, but moving stations and personnel out to Saturn and Jupiter for those portals—getting them into position at sublight speeds, would have taken decades. Too long when some outlier Exemplar race looking to build up an empire might yet turn up and try to void the noninterference treaty and annex the whole solar system.
“If they refuse to place Emerald Station, they’re kneecapping the portal project!” Frankie said.
“The Kinze are not saying no,” Maud said, scanning Crane’s links. Her objection sounded weightless, even to herself. “They’re just saying—”
“You wanna play, you gotta pay. Bollocks!”
“As one of the people being transported to Procyon, you’re hardly subjective,” Crane said, tone neutral. Viral footage of a pilot slagging the Kinze would not help Bootstrap’s cause. “It merely means another vote, on an additional quarter point of interest on the existing loans.”
It would be close. The Kinze were taking payment in luxury goods and services—products, Frankie was all too happy to complain, that the aliens couldn’t possibly want for their own sake. The effect was a hit to human quality of life. Coffee shortages, libation shortages, fruit shortages … gross worldwide contentment was nosediving.
As climate change in the late twenty-first century had declined from an emergency into a cri
sis, and from there into a mere situation, popular happiness metrics were supposed to rise. Promises had been made—better world, less rationing, more abundance. Instead, everyone felt like they were getting poorer.
If the planet votes no, she doesn’t go …
Maud swallowed. “When’s the vote?”
“Running now, with polls closing in six hours.” Crane presented them each with a BallotBox icon.
Maud launched the app and a voting booth sketched itself around her.
There was nothing for it. They needed Portals6/7 to pay off the debt already accumulated.
Maud ran through identity verification and a multiple-choice test that assured she was sufficiently informed, on both sides of the issue, to cast a valid vote. Having qualified, she selected the image of old-school dollars, all marked Yes! and stuffed them into the affirmative side of the virtual ballot box. Then she manifested a status update: #IJustVoted! That would keep advocates for both sides of the question from lobbying her as the six-hour time limit ran out.
Civic duty fulfilled, she collected two strokes from Cloudsight—voting bumped your social capital automatically, and voting fast got you a bonus—and cleared the illusion within an illusion, returning to her childhood bedroom.
Crane was gone. Frankie was at the vanity, wearing her own voter badge and peering into the microscope. She didn’t look furious now. More … cagey. Had her outrage, earlier, been a performance?
“What are you looking at?” Maud ventured.
“Microcutes.”
“Tardigrades?”
“Umm … yes? Yes, that’s what they are.”
“Baby femme’s first microscope,” Maud said. “Self-focusing, easy to use…”
“You leveled into the real thing fast enough.”
“Good thing for me you find high achievers sexy.”
“Who doesn’t?” Straightening, Frankie slid the microscope aside. “Maud, it wouldn’t be wrong … if you’d missed this … or them. If you felt safe here, as a kid, or loved. You couldn’t know what the @Visionaries were up to—”
Maud felt her throat tightening.
“Are you getting soppy?” she asked. “It’s the fasting, for the blood tests.”
“Love—”
The goosebumps and the scraping sensation returned. Their pod had covered the distance between the portals. Six hours earlier, they had awakened in Hyderabad; now they were in Marspace.
Frankie gave her a hug and a long, unhurried kiss before signing: Surface?
Maud swallowed. There was time. They could talk after the medical tests.
She banished her old room, finding herself nose to nose with Frankie in nullgrav, cocooned in a shared length of nanosilk.
In the dark, under the blanket, Frankie made a cup of her left hand and, beneath it, drummed on Maud’s bare collarbone in Morse. Wish you were coming with.
Burst of surprise. “Oh, beloved…”
She tried to imagine it. The two of them out on Emerald Station, beyond human reach, opening the door to the rest of the universe.
“No chance I’d be allowed.”
“No.” Frankie let out a long hiss of air, one of her stress tells.
She kissed away a growling curl of lip under hers in the dark. “Shush, it’ll happen.”
Frankie highlighted blossoming #newscycle headlines about protests, counter-protests, fierce debates as lobbyists on both sides went after @Undecided voters.
There would be riots. Instead of saying so, Maud squeezed her harder. “You’re going to open Portals6/7 and come home safely. And then you’re to stop taking the hazard shift, at least for a while. Quantum comms experiments. Running coffee beans out to the Deep Space Relay Station in Jalopy. Safe hops, short flights, home for dinner. I know it’s boring, but no more—”
“No more suck shift,” Frankie finished. “Promise.”
That was easy.
Maud realized, with a shock, that she didn’t exactly believe her.
She swallowed, tasting something acrid, like burnt lemon. “You know what Ember says. Don’t go splat.”
Frankie’s lips formed the word silently. Splat.
“Home for dinner.” Her smile was forced.
This had never happened before. Frankie didn’t hide things. She was, if anything, brutally honest. She had the middling social capital to reflect it.
But now they were disembarking at Mars, being digested by the airlocks as their pod cracked open. Hung Chan was bouncing out of his transport, and Frankie was heading—rushing?—to join him. No doubt he’d spent the entire trip from Earth coming up with new, lamentable, pun-laden poop jokes about the ongoing BallotBox vote.
And Maud still hadn’t told anyone about Upton.
A small and slightly mean voice spoke up, somewhere deep within. Maybe if Frankie is lying to me, then I don’t need to come clean to her either.
CHAPTER 4
TECHNOLOGICAL QUARANTINE ZONE, REGION OF SOL
PROCYON STAR SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Champ Chevalier did this!
It was Frankie’s first thought when her ship seized. As things finally took a conclusive turn for the disastrous, as Appaloosa shuddered around her and alarms clanged, she found herself imagining her bare knuckles crunching into Champ’s perfectly formed nose.
Spray of blood. To hell with innocent until proven.
If she lived to sift out the truth of this flood of bilge, at the bottom of it she was hoping to find Champ.
To find him, and to find proof.
“Warning!” That was Belvedere, the support app running station systems. Belvedere fell below the threshold for sapience and wasn’t quite bright enough to realize Frankie was living the bloody emergency. That it was in her thrashing limbs, the clanging alerts, the storm of damage notifications blooming across her HUD.
“Risk of mission fail! Risk of personal injury!”
“Compensating.” Frankie went noodle-limp, making herself breathe through her teeth in a six-six count. In two three four five six out two three … Hopefully, the calming effect would transfer to Appaloosa’s bioware via their shared neural nets.
Still counting, she texted the project engineer: Cyril, status update?
It started glitching when the nav rockets fired, he replied.
This isn’t the rockets—it feels neurological.
Frankie’s right. Teagan9, their med tech, shared diagnostic infographics, color-coding chemicals and hormones within the suit’s circulatory system. Appaloosa’s stabilization meds have run low.
That is surely an impossibility, Belvedere said.
And Titanic was unsinkable. Frankie tagged the anomalous reading. Teagan9 triggered remote commands to shoot the pegasus full of anti-convulsants.
Three doses out of five refused to load.
“Come on, Appa, don’t cack on me now, who’s a lovely darling…” Frankie felt her thighs bunching for a spring. Appaloosa lunged, and her teeth snapped together, sinking into her tongue. Bursting pain blurred the starfield beyond her helmet.
This exceeded sabotage. It verged on attempted murder.
In two three four five six. She exhaled, fogging her helmet.
Champ Chevalier had always been high on Frankie’s private, paranoid list of saboteur suspects—and not just because he was the only one ahead of her on the pilot’s leaderboard. He was a smug, charming golden boy, physical icon of days gone by. Just the type, in a VR sim, to play a corrupt politico, or maybe the CEO of some planet-fouling corporation.
Ambition, self-confidence, a twangy NorthAm accent, and vintage #alphamale looks were hardly proof of criminality, alas. But the moment Rubi had conceded that there was a saboteur within the Bootstrap Project, Frankie had sent her a comparatively simple plan for ferreting out troublemakers: lock down the station, switch in Teacakes as Frankie’s crewmates on Emerald, and see who broke the quarantine. Champ was the only person who’d found an excuse to slip aboard Sneezy—the
pilots’ nickname for the station—before it had been loaded for transport.
Still, she couldn’t prove Champ was guilty if her pegasus tore her head off. Survive first, Frankie told herself as Appaloosa continued to reject reboot commands.
One of her limbs swiped a series of wands fixed around the station perimeter. The wands, dark matter attractors, were even now charging a nanotech membrane that was the key to opening the anyspace portal. Emitting pixie dust, the pilots called it. The unit rattled in place but kept firing.
“Portals6/7 activation in fifteen seconds,” Belvedere said, making the slash between the six and seven with an elegant sweep of his avatar’s fingers.
#Portalfail would be disastrous. In the worst case, they’d all end up streaks of irradiated particulate, falling into Sneezy’s gravity well.
So don’t fail, Franks.
Easy to say as she spasmed like a drowning sailor.
The pegasus collided with the side of the station. This time, the wand did break off, spinning away in slow motion.
“Come on, Appa, come on.” Four of the pegasus’s six legs had relaxed, soothed either by Frankie’s refusal to panic or the underwhelming dose of antiseizure meds.
“I’m regaining control,” she said. “Legs five and six are the only ones still seizing.”
“Portal launch in seven seconds,” Cyril10 said.
“Abort launch,” she said. “We’re off profile. We can try again in twenty-four.”
“The membrane won’t discharge,” Cyril10 said.
The station fluoresced, as if it had heard them.
“Abort!”
Too late.
A shimmer of incomprehensible color. Frankie felt a stomach-dropping lurch. Pins and needles emanated from the base of her spine, where her piloting interface was punched into her sacral plexus.
“Contact established,” Belvedere said. “Portal open; Sensorium access connected. Data sync in … three, two…”
“We have Portals6/7 after all?” Could they possibly have gotten lucky?
“I’m…” Cyril10 said. “Unsure. But—full comms, full comms!”
Dealbreaker Page 3
