Old implants, spiky temper, rude mouth, emotional damage. “A pegasus doesn’t care if you’re a people-pleaser.”
Back in her lab, Maud was decanting the now-powdered locust from the grinder to the dryer, steaming out fluids before running the resulting flour through nutrient analysis.
On Mars, Ember and the Carousel team were on final countdown.
“Here we go,” Sonika said, as the clock ran down. Midnight GMT.
“Sound chord for portal launch,” said Ember, up at Mission Control.
Everything seemed, for a moment, to be running normally. Views of humankind’s five established space stations showed their portal membranes fluorescing with added energy as they ramped up. The dark matter particles used to open and maintain stable wormholes created sense phenomena incomprehensible to humans, whose brains substituted familiar things for … well, for whatever the portals really were. Most people apparently saw ocean.
Everyone waited breathlessly.
Data coming in from the sixth station, out at Proxima Centauri, looked great. Perfect launch. Camera views presented a colorless circle of anyspace, shimmering like a halocline as it formed on target. In the background of the shot, a quintet of saucer-shaped craft owned by the planet’s bankers and alleged mentors, the Kinze, kept their distance, monitoring the experiment from beyond the border of the noninterference zone.
“Portal6 is up. Repeat, Portal6 is up and performing to spec.”
By definition, that meant Portal7 was up too.
“Comms in three, two, one…” Ember said.
Frankie’s voice came from eleven light-years off. “Mars? Ember?”
… and then …
“Portal launch is not to spec, repeat, not to spec. My mount’s seizing—”
Babs saw Maud freezing in place, back in her lab. She had another iced locust in hand, but she glazed immediately, forgetting it. She shifted into Sensorium, no doubt seeking any feed of Frankie she could get.
Babs legged after Maud, the two of them following links through the mission footage from Sneezy as the feeds updated. Data streamed through the unstable portal. Computers on both sides handshook happily even as the human teams fought to stabilize the anyspace corridor so matter could pass through too.
Maud muttered something that sounded to Babs like “moh bojay.” She rarely dropped out of the near-invisible Hyderabad-with-a-touch-of-London accent she’d so carefully cultivated, but once in awhile, when deeply stressed, she reverted to her Nata’s native Croatian.
“It’s just a nosebleed,” Babs said.
Maud ignored her, bringing up vid of Appaloosa flailing, head-butting the station.
“She’s all right, Maud, she’s okay—”
Sonika, of course, would be following every word.
Maud: “Somebody do something! Come on, Ember…”
This was her chance.
Babs kept one tab in close conference with Maud, continuing to verbalize reassurances: “It’s all right, she’s okay, look, she’s getting control of the suit!”
At the same time, she opened a second tab, flinging an activation file—Kitten.zip—across to the Emerald station auxiliary servers.
<< … Installing kitten.zip … >>
It filed a formal request for full access to station processing resources. As long as comms remained steady across the portal, Babs would be one entity, a consciousness strung across the extended Solakinder network, with two tabs operating simultaneously, one instance here at home and another out there, eleven light-years away.
“Franks.” That was Ember, back on Mars. “Don’t—”
“What?”
“Don’t die,” Maud whispered, as Ember said, “Don’t go splat.”
“Ignore the flyboy,” Frankie said. “He’s being—”
Silence.
Babs’s new connection to the station snapped, like an eye going dark, an eardrum breaking. Maud dropped the frozen locust in the sink with a gasp.
“It’s just comms,” Babs said. “Maud, they closed the portal. It’s okay; they had to. She’s fine.”
“We have #portalfail,” Ember said. “Repeat, we have #portalfail.”
“Frankie’s fine,” Babs said again, but back in the diner with Sonika, all of her toon’s fur had spiked out in an alarm reaction, and she could feel her virtual claws denting the iced surface of her milkshake cup.
CHAPTER 6
HYDERABAD BIOLAB 4, FOOD WEB DIVERSIFICATION PROJECT
My mount’s seizing …
Latest in a long string of risks …
Shut up, shut up, shut up, she’s fine, she’s Franks.
Maud logged off her research shift, automatically recording the nutritional data gleaned from the gene-tweaked locust. She swept everything off her workspace and into a nanosilk satchel containing her worldly possessions, clearing the surface without a second look.
“Crane, would you do me a favor and finish up here?”
The request activated her visual augments, bringing a vertical ribbon of app icons into her left peripheral. At the top of the stack was the bespectacled heron representing her AI father-in-law.
“Remotely scrubbing all lab surfaces, Maud,” Crane replied, in that crisp retro-British accent. “Will anything else be required?”
“What’s going on in Mars Control?”
“Ember is allocating data analysis tasks. All feeds from Portals6/7 have to be audited before the backup launch attempt in twenty-four hours.”
If they couldn’t open the portals, Frankie would have no way back to civilization and safety, not unless Earth paid the Kinze to go fetch her.
“I am following the feeds meticulously,” Crane assured her as Maud tried to capture the explosion of tagged posts. “As soon as there’s news, I will stream it.”
Compulsively refreshing #newscycle when nobody knew anything would simply shovel coal on the fire of her already well-stoked anxieties. Shouldering her worldlies, Maud trotted down three flights of stairs, emerging into the food security center’s jewel box of an atrium.
The atrium was a soaring, conical chamber walled in a vertical slice of jungle, controlled habitat for over seventy-five species of Odonata. Cams situated around the pools offered close-up views of dragonflies and damselflies, hunting in crystal-clear ponds. Tourists stared up at the insects, no doubt using their augments to view them via high-res cams. They could look at the dragonflies, if they wished, in perfect detail at absolutely giant size.
Frankie’s irrepressible pilot friend, Hung, had called it a bug jar.
One of the visitors broke off a conversation in midsentence. “It’s the other half of the Fraud!”
Maud turned away as they all captured footage of her.
Frankie and Maud, sitting in a tree, F R A U Dee Dee Dee! She remembered Frankie making up the singsong, just after someone had mashed their male packmates’ names into EmberJerm. EmberJerm and the Fraud. Fraud, fraud.
It had been funny—before. Now, if Maud was right and Frankie’d been hiding something before she left …
“Hypocrite,” she hissed. She had so many secrets of her own.
“Maud?”
“Nothing, Crane.”
Beyond the screened airlock—which kept insects out of the revolving doors—a stream of Hyderabad’s nightshift workers were walking and bicycling home along Necklace Road. Pedestrians clumped together, deep in live conversation.
“News of the #portalfail is snowballing,” Crane said. “People are speculating about the fate of the @EmeraldCrew. Some Bootstrap fans are petitioning Allure18 to ask the Kinze to send a rescue vessel.”
Maud laced her fingers, squeezing the knuckles together until they hurt.
She checked the building lobby’s communal closet, pushing past the umbrella stand and withdrawing a full-length sunscreen printed with red damselflies. Draping it over herself to conceal everything but her eyes, she smoothed it against her hips. People could still Whooz her as she passed, or search her location. But r
andom passersby wouldn’t recognize her.
“Fraud, fraud, fraud.” Maud completed the ensemble by beefing up her social cues: icons in moji to show she was running in extreme #respectmyspace mode. This in addition to her default moji—#notahugger.
“Frankie’s all right.” Crane’s codedaughter, Babs, spoke up in her cool-kid alto purr. “She’s absolutely fine.”
Maud stepped out onto the street. “Where’s Jermaine?”
“Still in surgery,” Babs said. “Ember will get a six-hour rest cycle; he’ll call.”
“He should use that time sleeping, not smoothing our ruffled feathers,” Maud sighed.
“Frankie’s MIA—he ain’t gonna sleep. Anyway, I’m telling you, the backup launch will go fine.”
“If it doesn’t?” Maud was winding herself up. She couldn’t seem to help it.
“Frankie’s therapist is taking crisis appointments—”
“No!”
Crane interjected smoothly: “Ember’s mothers are on their way, and Hiroko Sento has asked if you would like them to come.”
“Nata? Come all the way from Europa?” Maud took the sidekick’s toon out of peripheral, expanding it to full size. This created the illusion of Crane stalking along beside her and Babs on the street corner, straightening the sleeves of his butler jacket. His yellow beak was wickedly sharp. “Why would they suggest…”
Her throat closed. They’d come for a funeral, wouldn’t they?
“It’s customary for family members and @Closefriends to offer in-the-flesh support at such times,” Crane said.
We just had a party, Maud thought. The gathering on Surprise felt like it had happened years before, not a mere two weeks.
“I can, of course, tell them you prefer space and privacy as you wait.”
A flesh gathering would offer opps for Maud to talk to people. Maybe Mama Rubi would show. If Frankie had been concealing something, Rubi would certainly know what it was. “Let them come,” she said. “Throw the doors wide.”
Crane didn’t miss a beat. “I suggest we take a largeish residence. There are extended family suites available in a pop-in tower not far from the Surgical Center.”
She let out a brittle-sounding laugh. “On the one hand, you’re telling me everything’s perfectly all right, and on the other, you’re saying dozens of people might haul flesh—flesh!—over to the house.”
“Human nature,” Babs said. Cat to her AI father’s bird, she ran the back of one brown-and-orange paw over her cheek. “Closeness is comfort.”
“Get me a house with a full kitchen.” A sense of purpose, possibly false but nevertheless welcome, spread through Maud. “Order a few trays of printed appetizers to get us started, and I’ll cook.”
“As you wish,” Crane said. Maud’s visual augments painted footprints onto the sidewalk, indicating a route home. She would skirt Sanjeevaiah Park before heading north through the market and then make for the residential greentowers near Jermaine’s hospital.
“We’ll have a full house,” Babs said, putting up a shareboard. Practically everyone they knew in Hyderabad was already pinging arrival times.
Maud minimized the guest list and began paging through recipes. She’d make pasta from scratch. Nothing too elaborate—fettuccine, maybe? As Crane took the recipe and began assembling a shopping list, her display showed fifteen Call Anytime alerts and bouquets of support moji, sent by friends who couldn’t make it in person.
“This is serious, isn’t it? They really might be—”
Babs’s tail puffed out, programmed cat-response to a scare feel. Before she could insist, again, that Frankie was alive, Jermaine pinged the channel. His toon appeared beside those of Crane and Babs. Now Maud was striding amid a group of three mirages.
Jerm was a big man, broad-shouldered, with the kind of booming voice and grand physical presence that conveyed authority and comfort. It played well with patients, families, and prospective lovers. “My mothers and my fathers are en route. Maud, are you sure you want to cook?”
“Pasta,” she said. Sound certain. Certainty felt safe. “Fettuccine.”
Babs ran an inventory of their new apartment, scanning the kitchen equipment and sending images to Maud. “Kitchen shareboard for Feral5: in case you need a rolling pin or a bigger steel bowl or something.”
“I do need a rolling pin.”
“Cooking, though? Really?” Jermaine said. “They’re coming to support us.”
“I must keep busy, Jerm.” Prissy phrasing. Stress brought out the formality Headmistress had drilled into her all those years before, submerging her carefully cultivated Hyderabad accent into something—as Franks would put it—Anglo Upper Crusty. “Besides, there’s something about talking over a kitchen counter.”
“Ancient ritual,” Babs said, tossing her girl-sleuth hair. “Conducive to good shares.”
“Exactly.” A burst of satisfaction: Babs, at least, had figured out they’d be gossip-mining.
“Frankie’s fine, you’ll see. They’ll launch tomorrow,” Jerm said. “We’ll be face-to-face again before you know it.”
Maud made herself nod.
Crane spoke again. “The Bootstrap Project has offered to send Hung Chan to the open house. Sonika Singer has also requested an invite.”
Jerm’s toon let out an odd-sounding snarl. “We’re here with the family of the missing pilot as they keep vigil…”
Hearing his fear further loosened the mailed fist crushing her own chest. “We need journos. There might be a vote on funding a rescue,” Maud said.
Allure18 and the Kinze would charge top dollar if they had to go after the Emerald crew. People who opposed the Bootstrap Project would already be posting, by the thousands, to say that humanity shouldn’t do it, that the #portalfail showed they couldn’t engineer large-scale #supertech themselves …
By now, she and her entourage of toons had reached the market. Skirting a series of boarded-up drink stalls—shortages in the commodities market had hit the trade in things like coffee and cocoa particularly hard—Maud stopped to pick up the grocery order: zero-zero flour, printed egg proteins, and the makings of two sauces, one cream, one red. Crane had authorized spending on the few available luxuries: the flour was real wheat, and the basil and tomatoes were locally grown.
The grocer handed over the cart personally, with a smile and gestural moji indicating sympathy—a sort of two-handed wave. It communicated the same emotional message as a back pat or an arm squeeze, without the body-to-body contact that would transgress Maud’s prominent #notahugger tags.
Maud signed her thanks, adding a stroke—the grocer was always generous and friendly. She dropped her satchel of worldlies atop the cart and rolled everything the remaining ten blocks to their pop-in.
She and Jermaine arrived at the same time.
The greyscale toon representing her packmate steamed away as the real thing, live and in color, came into view. His beard was coming in ragged—the emergency call for surgery had come fourteen hours into a hospital shift, and the procedure had run another twelve.
“The last thing you need is a party,” she murmured.
“Pshaw, as they used to say,” he said. “I’ll collapse on a couch and everyone will file by, stuffing food in my mouth and making much of me.”
They got to the lift, riding up to the expanded family pop-in Crane had chosen, a vast-seeming space when compared to the two bedrooms the five of them usually occupied. The walls were presenting, through Maud’s augments, with the same Feral5 decor elements as the smaller unit they’d left that morning: bamboo fixtures and watercolors from medieval Japan, works by a Nairobi virtual sculptor in the corners, mobile photos of the five of them on a display shelf over the couch. As their HUDs converted the generic pop-in into their family home, Maud surveyed the main room, a big semicircular space with couches on its perimeter, with a glass wall overlooking the city.
Crane had paid for a customized add-in, a simulation that used VR to create the illusion of an
outdoor patio beyond the glass. The deck would serve as a gathering space for remote guests, people whose flesh wasn’t resident in Hyderabad. Present and remote guests could talk across the boundary of the glass. Nobody would walk through a virtually present guest. The illusion would be perfect.
Over on the family shareboard, Crane had posted his attempts to raise and track in-laws, schoolmates, and Frankie’s @CloseFriends. Marked on a city map, their trails converged on the building.
“Could we get a message to Mer Gimlet, do you think?” Crane asked.
Babs shook her head. Frankie’s primary surviving parent was one of a handful of people authorized to meet and greet alien representatives in the flesh. Wherever Gimlet was, they were well beyond the noninterference zone established to keep offworlders at a distance while humanity tried to invent the #supertechs envisioned by the Bootstrap Project. “Can’t afford the long-distance fees.”
Archaic phrasing, but she was right. They would have to ask the Kinze to contact Gimlet. The aliens were sure to charge premium rates.
“What would we say? Guess what, Gimlet? Frankie’s out on a limb again!”
“Someone get her a damned desk job.” Jermaine met her eyes, checking consent, then pinched up Maud’s sunscreen, lifting it off her as if he was unveiling a statue. He held out his arms. Maud leaned in, feeling the onset of tears.
First, it was the augment surgery. Then it was the experimental flights in the FTL prototype, Jalopy. Then repeated runs in Jalopy out to the Dumpster, with loads of luxury product meant to pay for transport services the Kinze had provided in the early days of the project. It was Frankie who’d been assigned to Titan Station when humanity set up the five-portal loop.
Always the expendable one. Always the spiky loudmouth.
“She’s safe—”
Maud felt the movement of Jermaine’s arm as he used gestural moji to tell Babs to shut up. She burst into tears and he held her, standing there rasping his stubble through her bangs, his hand circling her back.
Everyone in their local social networks was pinging Crane, updating in-the-flesh arrival times. Some sent their toons ahead. Greyscale versions of friends and family manifested on the deck, congregating to reassure all the Ferals that Frankie was fine. No need to worry at all.
Dealbreaker Page 5
