“Mars Control!” Frankie said. “Ember! You there?”
“Here, Franks. We have contact. Congratulations, you’ve—”
“We’ve done nothing.” Relief, at hearing her packmate’s voice, warred with urgency. “Portal launch is not to spec, repeat, not to spec. We’re off profile and my mount’s seizing.”
“Confirm,” said Cyril10. “We are not positioned; Portal7 may be unstable.”
All business now, Ember replied, almost as mechanically as Belvedere: “Confirming partial contact. Confirming portal instability.”
“Take my word for it, can’t you?” Frankie scanned the sky beyond the station. Her HUD projected views from a bot-mounted scope, revealing …
There! A ripple of anyspace, twenty thousand clicks out. Instead of a perfect circle, it distended, pulling to a teardrop whose point was arrowing toward them.
Heads-up displays zoomed, surrounding the portal view with data.
“It’s expanding toward Procyon,” Ember said.
Frankie slammed, face-first, against the front of her pod. Her head, cushioned by the foam of her helmet, nevertheless rang chimes. “Can you shut it down?”
“There’s pushback within the network—”
“That’s a no, then.” Her harness shuddered, and this time it wasn’t just Appaloosa’s nervous system dancing the flamenco. She felt one of her back muscles straining, muscle heating into molten hyperextension.
One leg at a time. She extended her right hand, shaking out the bots at the end of leg four. Unfurling twenty tentacle-like fingers, she raised the arm, moving as if she had all the time in the world, as if she was dancing. She imagined reaching across her body, visualized massaging the opposite shoulder. By this means, she was able to use Four’s fingers to grasp one of the rebellious legs, number Five, by the socket.
“Outpost Seven, this is Champ Chevalier. Couldya scuttle the portal membrane?”
Frankie growled. The Mars Control camera feeds offered her a thumbnail of Champ, leaning over Ember’s shoulder, back at Mission Control. His affable features were arranged in an expression of concern.
“We’re not killing the membrane,” she said. “Not with Earth’s economy hanging by a thread.”
“If Frankie shreds the membrane, it could take out the station,” Ember told Champ.
“That portal’s spreadin’ like a cracked egg,” Champ said. “You don’t sort it, it’ll eat the project engineers and your wife too, fella.”
“Nobody’s getting eaten.” Frankie had a good grip on arm five; she pulled it out by the root like a dandelion in a suburban lawn sim. The feeling backwashed: it felt as though she’d torn off a chunk of her own scalp. Head singing, she flung the wayward leg away. Tears streamed down her face as she grabbed leg six. Appaloosa was nearly calm now, but she wasn’t taking chances; she jettisoned it, too.
Gasping against the second amputation—a feeling of something sinking long teeth into the flesh between her shoulder blades—she grasped the station’s outer ring with her remaining six hands. “Pull, goddammit!”
This time, her rockets fired in sync.
As she turned the portal membrane, bringing it closer to proper alignment, the buffeting increased. Portal7 itself widened, becoming more properly circular.
“Can I realign, Ember? Balance the membrane, stabilize the portal?”
“Negative. Break contact and try again in twenty-four.” Ember sent specs. “And Franks?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go splat.”
“Ignore Champ,” she said. “He’s being dramatic. I’ve got this.”
The station shuddered as she fired rockets, pulling in the opposite direction.
It was rough going. Correctly positioned, portal membranes held an absolute orientation relative to the stream of anyspace they were generating. This one was trying to lock in at the wrong angle. It was like trying to pry a tile off a wall after the grout had cured.
In her peripheral, Frankie saw a glimmer of silver.
Her mind glitched on the impossibilities of anyspace and supplied a familiar image instead—lava running on the horizon, an incoming wave.
“Ops. Portal distance?”
“Nine thousand clicks away and closing.” Cyril10’s voice was thready as he sent images of it, a teardrop extending its point toward them. “If it gets to three…”
“Eeaagh!” Straining her muscles didn’t make Appaloosa work any harder, but it helped psychologically. Frankie’s pegasus buckled to the task. Blood from her bitten tongue spattered the inside of her helmet.
Rockets fired. The station shifted. The silvery surface of its membrane brightened. There was a flash, sun-bright and blinding, as it discharged its load of dark matter particles. Resistance to Appaloosa vanished as Belvedere emitted a plaintive stream of damage reports.
Portal7 turned to a slit of smoldering coal, a line on the horizon, 4500 clicks away, diminishing to a point. The pins and needles in Frankie’s gut dissipated.
“Ember, Ember, we’re okay. Do you hear?”
“Comms are down,” Belvedere said. “Contact lost.”
#Portalfail. But at least she hadn’t, as Ember liked to say, gone splat.
Teagan9 immediately pinged her. “Status rep, Frankie?”
“Everything to spec.” Sweat was pouring off her face, adding to a haze of fluids within the helmet. Everything felt slick and hot and tasted of bile. Frankie took a second to steady her voice. “Did we sync data with Mars while we had connection?”
“Dunno. Get in here, will you?”
“Back to the barn, Appaloosa.” She greenlit autopilot mode. Then, as soon as she was sure the craft was indeed headed back to the airlock, Frankie transitioned her awareness, loading a virtual version of herself into Station’s remote bridge.
The illusion of a circle of datascreens—a continuous torus of glass, with Frankie in the middle, formed around her. Her avatar was dressed in its default skin: charcoal base layer, two shades darker than her skin, under a vintage RCAF bomber jacket from the twentieth century.
Belvedere tooned in beside her. Like all apps, the station manager presented as a cartoon animal—in this case, a Humboldt squid. Its reduced size and limited color palette reflected its lack of sapience.
Emerald Station had got its nickname, Sneezy, by way of Hung. The moniker was a reference to the nearby star’s tendency to throw out sudden flares of radiation; Hung had wanted to extend the trend by naming its power-harvesting membrane, which caught and converted that energy, the Snotrag.
That had been one too many gross monikers for Champ, who’d pulled rank before Snotrag got traction.
“Teacakes okay?” Frankie asked Belvedere.
“Teagan and Cyril are well.” Belvedere brought up crew health stats on a section of the glass hoop. The only one showing orange alerts was Frankie herself.
“Good, good.” Frankie lit up other display boards, digging for numbers on the portal manifestation, its instability—
“What’re you doing?” Teagan9’s toon appeared beside them. “Your helmet shows two impacts.”
Frankie said, “We have to figure out what went wrong, before the next portal launch.”
Teagan9 posted a feed from one of the station’s exterior cameras. It was Frankie herself, real-time visuals. Glazed within Appaloosa as she accessed the station network, her lips were bloodied.
“You cut that close,” a raspy alto voice, speaking with a US accent, purred in Frankie’s ear.
Ha! We did sync, then!
Playing innocent for the record, she replied, “Babs! Whatever are you doing here?”
“Got caught on the wrong side of the comms fail. Purely an accident.”
Teagan9, unaware of this exchange, said, “We know what happened; the membrane wasn’t aligned.”
“What went wrong with Appaloosa?”
“After I’ve seen your head’s not cracked, I’ll remember to care slightly about that.”
“I’m no
t letting the crime scene get cold.”
“Crime scene?” Cyril10 scoffed. “There’s no call to go boosting the #vandalrumor.”
“Are you kidding me? What just happened wasn’t a bloody accident,” Frankie said.
“Temper, temper,” purred the voice in her ear. “Remember, all this will go into the public record once you’re home.”
“Relax, Pilot2,” Teagan9 said. “Leave off opening an active investigation until I get a look at you, is all I’m saying.”
“Humor the doctor,” said Babs. “I’ll start sleuthing around. You brought my stuff? Bots and servers?”
Frankie nodded. “All right, Teagan, have it your way. I will lie here like a noodle until you check my head for bumps.”
“Cheer up.” Babs tooned in next to Belvedere’s Humboldt squid, appearing before her as an anthropomorphized grey cat, adrift in space, in a pencil skirt and jacket, with Nancy Drew hair. “Not everything that could go wrong did.”
“How do you figure?”
“You’re not dead, are you?”
“Just bloody stranded,” Frankie said. “Eleven light-years from home.”
“Goodness,” Babs said dryly. “When you put it that way, it almost sounds bad.”
CHAPTER 5
VRTP://HOUSEBOOK.EARTH//FAMILYHOMES/USERS/FERAL5/BARBARATHESLEUTH/MALTSHOPPE.VR
EIGHT MINUTES BEFORE PORTAL6/7 LAUNCH ATTEMPT
“Launch days must be extraordinarily stressful for a pilot’s family.” Journalist Sonika Singer had Finnish-Laplander heritage tags, coarse graphite-colored hair, and ropy, muscular arms that—Babs had observed—she very much liked to show off. She had anti-Bootstrap sympathies and prosthetic legs, and in VR sims like this one, they presented as carved wood, illusion of NorthEuro dryad. The toenails were opalescent, glimmering moons peeking out from black, open-toe sandals.
Babs had decided to host the journalist in a simulated twentieth-century diner, chatting as if they were intimates, bent over a couple of milkshakes. People following the interview in realtime—a counter in Babs’s peripheral showed sixty thousand of them—had the option to enjoy the illusion of eavesdropping, playing with the jukebox, carrying around trays of hamburgers, or lingering on stools nearby.
Sonika continued: “How do you deal with the anxiety, as family members, with Mer Barnes making runs out to the Deep Space Relay Station or taking one of the experimental saucers out to try breaking the FTL distance record?”
“Lots of faith, and a dash of liquor,” Babs said.
“Sapps don’t drink.” The journo gave her a polite smile. “Be serious. She’s further from home than any other human has gone, practically.”
“She’ll be able to ride the carousel home.” Babs wagged her milkshake straw. “Frankie and the other augmented pilots are gonna bust out Portals6/7—”
“Eleven light-years,” Sonika repeated. “There’s a lot of potential failure points—”
“Maybe, but I choose to believe she’s safe and sound in the hands of the anyspace innovation team.”
“You would say that, wouldn’t you? Given that the calculations were made by Ember Qaderi, another of your pack members?”
“Project Bootstrap is where the core of the Feral5 met. We’re a cluster. That’s no secret.”
“Qaderi’s been criticized for accepting the theoretician lead on both Project Hopscotch and Portals.”
“Is that a question?” Babs refused to get ruffled. “Expertise shortages are a thing, honey.”
“Qaderi was raised in Star Trek 2115 fandom, was he not? One of his mothers identifies as Vulcan.”
“A couple of them. So?”
Condescending smile from Sonika. She unfurled infographic. Babs’s malt-shoppe preferences transformed to a newspaper.
Be a good sport. Babs opened the paper onto the table. With a crackle of virtual newsprint, the headlines blazed, full of #urbanmyth about Star Trekkers having a grudge against the Bootstrap Project.
“Ancient history,” she murmured. Years back, when the first FTL prototype, Jalopy, was barely off the drawing board and Frankie was still getting used to the surgical augments that allowed her to fly it, Ember thought Bootstrap might court some brand alliances, like an opp to license the name #warpdrive as a descriptor for its experimental FTL engine.
“Don’t you think raising this is a little petty?” she said, waving the paper. “If Ember hadn’t suggested it, someone else would have.”
Sonika goosed the display, spawning additional infographic. Bootstrap had doubled down on the perceived insult to Star Trek when negotiations fizzled on a second naming-rights option, #RadioSubspace, as a name for the quantum-comms project. (They also noped #hypercoms, from Shanghai Spacers, and #theBlast from Rio Station Niner, but nobody was vilifying their fans).
The controversy had snowballed. The Bootstrap Project managers ordered a stakeholder poll, throwing the question to BallotBox. Fannish voting blocs canceled each other out; the project got stuck with a mandate to use generics. Worse—generics chosen by committee. So: portals for wormholes, universal translator, quantum comms. Project Hopscotch for the faster-than-light ships. That at least had some flair. But instead of naming the dark matter particles that propelled the #supertechs something like Anansi particles, or dilithium, Bootstrap went with anyspace. Yawn, yawn, yawn.
Babs still didn’t quite understand how all that had washed out in a way that let people infer that Ember might have divided loyalties. Heck, maybe Sonika could ’splain it. “Are you seriously asking me if Ember would endanger Frankie because ParaWarner got their knickers knotted over a branding deal?”
“A lot of things have gone wrong for Bootstrap,” Sonika said.
“Not with the anyspace math.” Babs laughed. “You must be hoping I’ll slam my glass down and launch into a passionate defense of Ember.”
“Your love is awfully pure.”
“The Bootstrap Project is massive and ambitious,” Babs said. “When we Solakinder committed to leveling up our tech so we could try joining the Exemplar races, we knew there’d be hitches along the way.”
“Hitches. Like failing to keep an FTL ship in an anyspace field for any distance beyond three light-years?”
“Three light-years is good enough to leapfrog to and from the Deep Space Relay. Even a decade ago, a round trip to Mars took months, didn’t it? Now look at us. Traveling all those miles in a breath. We’ve got a working portal carousel, Sonika! Ping, pong! We go here, we go there. Mars, Titan, Europa, home for supper. All because of Bootstrap.”
“Bootstrap—and the Kinze loans for hauling portal Stations4–7 into their initial positions.”
“Now you sound like Allure18.” Babs toasted her. “Nobody’s forgotten what we owe our allies.”
Even if we wanted to, nobody’d let us.
Babs checked the time: mere minutes until the launch attempt. “Earth got the local portal carousel up and running. We’ll expand to seven, no problem.”
“The math becomes exponentially more complex, doesn’t it, each time we increase the network’s range by jumping up to the next prime number?”
“You want math? Ask him.” Babs pulled up a live feed of Ember, up at Mars Control. He seemed perfectly calm as he ran Team Portal through its final prelaunch checks—he could Vulcan with the best of them when he chose.
Sonika grinned. “A loyal expression of confidence in your … do you say husband? Spouse?”
“The five of us prefer the term packmate,” Babs said.
“Packmate it is. While we’re on the subject, how is it different for you, being an AI with human family?”
“My being a code-based sapient doesn’t mean I don’t feel concern for Frankie,” Babs said. “Of course she’s taking a risk—”
“The latest in a long string.”
You don’t know the half of it!
“Someone has to put themselves on the line, don’t they?” Babs sipped virtual milkshake. Like all artificials, she was required by Sensorium
convention to present as an animal; her toon was a sleek grey cat with a head of red hair inspired by early Nancy Drew book covers. “No test pilots, no #supertech breakthroughs. No #supertech, no respect from the Exemplars.”
“Still. There’ve been insinuations that your Frankie’s not up to the job. Isn’t that why she’s being moved to quantum comms?”
Ah. Here they were at last, and just in time for the countdown. Babs gave the reporter a good once-over. Sonika’s expression was warm. Eyebrows raised, face open, ready to listen. Out in the fleshly world, meanwhile, Maud dropped a compressed pack of nutrients and cursed under her breath.
Maud messaged via the family channel: “Explain to me again why you agreed to this interview, Babs?”
Babs answered them both. “Frankie blazed trail for the Bootstrap Project by agreeing to the first pilot-augmentation surgery—”
“As the trailblazer, she’s now carrying the oldest and most heavily used neural interface,” Sonika said.
“You don’t develop first-gen tech if everyone’s scared to go first,” Babs said.
“And you don’t resist retirement when your implant’s pushing obsolescence.”
“Ah, Frankie just needs a software update and another couple tish grafts.”
Back in the biolab, Maud had recovered her composure. She opened a freezer, pulled out a frozen locust, weighed it, and ran it through a grinder. “Don’t let her bait you, Babs. Play it safe.”
Babs sent her moji—tapdancing cat in a top hat, performing flawlessly. The more Maud attended to her sparring match with Sonika, the less bandwidth she had for imagining fifty shades of horrible death for Frankie.
Distracting Maud was one reason Babs had agreed to virtual milkshakes with the media.
“The oldest implant, the shortest temper, the most childhood damage, and a history of playing badly with others.” Sonika ticked off bullet points on her fingers. “That’s what they say about Mer Frances Barnes.”
Babs didn’t point out that this had been the unspoken rationale for having the Kinze ferry Frankie out to Sneezy. The pool of augmented pilots was tiny. If the project had to sacrifice a pilot, she was the obvious choice.
Dealbreaker Page 4
