Signing a general welcome to the crowd, Maud entrenched herself in the kitchen. Crane had already sent the building’s resident FoxBOT, a drone about the size of a whippet, down to stores to hunt up a wooden rolling pin.
“What’s this?” Jermaine had opened her worldlies, hunting food ingredients. He raised a handful of oblong marbles contained in a degradable silk bag.
“Pregnant locust nymphs. I brought them from the lab by mistake.”
“One of your instant swarms? Maud, you’ll infest us!”
“Only if you stick one in your mouth.” How Jerm could be afraid of bugs when he spent his life elbow-deep in human body cavities was beyond her.
“But you’re cooking.”
“Don’t be a baby.” She took the bag of worldlies, laying it along her left hip, and programmed the nanosilk into panniers. The weight of all her possessions settled on her lower body as the material became a single garment.
She held out her hand for the locusts, ignoring her packmate’s shudder. “They’ve got an enzymatic lock, remember? You could run them under water and nothing would happen. Everything’s perfectly safe.”
Fraud, Fraud, Fraud.
“Sonika’s nearly here,” Babs said.
“That didn’t take long,” Jermaine muttered.
Maud wiped her eyes, blew her nose. She gave Jermaine a kiss on the cheek. “You should shower,” she told him, and then transitioned into a vicious scrub-down of the kitchen.
Nobody needed sweet harmony to know what they were all thinking now. They needed their vigil to go viral, to build public sympathy if the portal didn’t launch tomorrow.
“Lights,” Babs murmured.
“Camera.” Jermaine mustered a shaky smile.
They were so in sync that Maud didn’t bother to finish the phrase aloud.
The first knock sounded on the pop-in door.
Action.
CHAPTER 7
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Obedient and operating to spec, Appaloosa made an almost meek-seeming transit from the portal membrane on the face of the roughly disk-shaped Emerald Station to the hangar at the three o’clock position.
Sneezy’s airlock was state-of-the-art nanotech, a layer of smart quicksand designed to mold around incoming ships, bots, or personnel. As Frankie approached, the quicksand extended microfilaments, tendrils that flowed around her and then made a hard seal, pulling the pegasus into its substance. The envelopment used what was essentially peristalsis to move her through an intake sphincter, one the pilots had dubbed the mail slot. Frankie couldn’t remember which of them had come up with that one … was it Rastopher? It had his humorless lack of flair.
The slot spat her out into the open space of the hangar, then puckered shut. Industrial vacuums inhaled stray particles of quicksand off Appaloosa, recapturing them into the airlock mechanism.
As Frankie cleared the slot, she saw two heavy-industrial bots, OxBOT-class tugboats, waiting to deploy.
The oxen should be outside and harnessed up already; it was they, not Frankie and Appaloosa, who’d been meant to position the station. But somehow, they’d wiped their own operating systems, mere hours before launch, and pulled Emerald off profile.
So, she’d suited up. All in a day’s work … until the pegasus seized.
The repaired OxBOT drifted up to the mail slot, leaving the quicksand to capture it. Safety doors scrolled shut over the whole mechanism, a second defense against the void.
Three of the smaller and more agile FoxBOTs, driven by Teagan9, turned and captured Frankie, each of them grabbing one of Appaloosa’s remaining arms.
“Hey!” Frankie said. “I can feel that, remember?”
“If I amputate another limb, will you remember to be glad you’re alive?” Teagan9 anchored the pegasus in a stall just aft of the airlock.
“Uttering threats,” Frankie said. “Antisocial behavior. Strikes to you.”
“You don’t even mean that,” Teagan9 grumped.
“Plenty of time to count my blessings after we’ve won,” Frankie said.
A little flicker—Teagan9 always did love a challenge. “What would win conditions even be in this case?”
“Getting Earth in with the Exemplar races?”
“Aye, and you and we are gonna accomplish that all by ourselves?”
“Getting home, then, with the proof the launch was sabotaged.” Saying it aloud was immensely satisfying. “Babs, you find anything yet?”
The cat toon appeared before them both. It was tagged Babs1, the superscript indicating that the sapp had been cut off from Sensorium and was operating independently, out of sync with the original instance of Babs at home. It had marked the change by refreshing its avatar and pronouns. Instead of a tortoiseshell, its fur was white Persian fluff, extravagantly long. The pencil skirt was gone. This Babs1 was clad in station-maintenance overalls and—Frankie was surprised to see—tagged with they/them pronouns. “Do remember, I just got here.”
Hint of Belvedere’s English accent in the mix: Babs1 had absorbed the station O/S code wholesale and apparently retained a whiff of its personality.
Frankie signed an apology.
Teagan9 opened the bottom half of her pegasus, encircling each of Frankie’s feet in magnetic wrap and guiding them to the stall’s built-in footholds. Frankie heard it as they settled—Chunk! Chunk again! She couldn’t feel her legs, and from this angle there was too much of Appaloosa in the way for her to look.
Which was just fine, really.
Babs1 opened a shareboard, manifesting additional camera feeds in Frankie’s HUD. The thumbnail on top showed a bot’s-eye view from one of the just-launched oxen. Cyril10 had it chasing the station’s runaway dark matter wand.
Frankie flicked the view away. A second camera was meticulously logging Cyril10’s every move and utterance as he ran diagnostics on station damage and the #portalfail. She didn’t suspect him—Rubi had shuffled this particular pair of EMbodied techs onto this job because they were absolutely trustworthy. But documentation was everything in a case like this.
A third stream of footage came from the storage-room cameras, source of the packet of anticonvulsant meds installed in Appaloosa’s hydraulic system. The vid was tagged from Teagan9’s eyecam; it showed her fetching and loading medicinal fluids six hours earlier, plugging them into the pegasus after its preflight blood tests.
Babs1 highlighted the barcode on the packet. “I’m backscrolling to find other sightings of this load.”
“Hey!” Teagan9 tapped Frankie’s helmet with a fingernail. “You with me?”
“Yeah.” Frankie locked eyes with the med tech. She noticed, suddenly, that her tongue and nose were throbbing. “Get me out.”
There was a last sensation of being pinioned, spread-eagled in the hangar, all six of her remaining limbs affixed to the bulkhead by magnetic restraints. Then Teagan9 popped catches, releasing Appaloosa’s chest plate. She pressed a hand against Frankie’s sternum, bracing her. Frankie’s arms drifted out of the spacesuit, doing a slow-mo zero gravity dance.
Frankie raised her gaze, looking away. The hairs on the back of her neck went up. All very well for her flesh to be paralyzed as she rode augmented ships, but she didn’t much care for eyeballing the proof of disEMbodiment. Pilots plugged into nextgen neural nets lost control of their sympathetic nervous systems. If they’d had gravity out there at Sneezy, she’d have dropped right to the floor.
“Deep breath.” Teagan9 accessed Frankie’s sacral plexus, finding the interface controls and sliding the plug out of her back.
For two breaths—just enough time to think one in seven thousand chance of #neurofail, one in fourteen thousand chance of #suddendeath—there was nothing.
Napjerk.
Frankie’s body jolted. Then her hands fisted. Twinge of a wobble from her knees and she asserted control, swaying, holding herself on the magnetic anchors as she got back in touch
with her limbs.
“Okay?” Teagan9 said. Real concern under the businesslike tone.
“Yeah. Promise.” Frankie dragged her hand over to her friend, giving her forearm a squeeze. Her flightsuit—Hung had dubbed them bodybags, with cheerful morbidity—was slick with fluids. “Though I need a shower.”
Teagan9 was already using a wipe to clean her face. “Doesn’t seem as though you’ve broken your nose.”
Frankie stuck her bitten tongue out, by way of explaining the blood.
“Looks deep.”
“It’ll let me practice being a woman of few words.”
“Two-thirds of which are profanities.”
“That’s my cue to tell you to fuck off, right?”
Teagan9 pursed her lips, fighting a smile. She was broad at the hips and shoulders, with russet hair that she generally kept cropped tight against her scalp. Severe-looking but somehow still thoroughly scrumptious.
For all intents and purposes, Teagan9 gave every appearance of robust good health. Even so, she and Cyril10 were digital ghosts, temporarily residing in disposable Mayfly™ bodies that had been printed there on the station as it was leaving Titan. Their functional lifespan was, at best, nine months. Out in nullgrav, it could be far shorter.
“Hold your head still and follow my finger with your eyes,” she said. “Okay? No sign of concussion.”
“It wasn’t a very hard knock,” Frankie said.
Teagan9 said, “I imagine you’re planning to stay up until we attempt the relaunch.”
“Babs—Babs1, I mean—can watch over me if you want realtime monitoring for brain damage.”
“That reminds me,” Cyril10 broke in. “What is your spouse doing here? Do you know she’s completely overwritten Belvedere?”
He didn’t sound suspicious, merely curious. Diplomatic and the Bootstrap Projectwere supposed to have given Teagan9 a heads-up that this mission might be sabotaged. If Frankie were to guess, she hadn’t passed on the warning to Cyril10.
Well, I didn’t say anything to Maud, did I? No sense putting one’s paranoid suspicions on the record. If only she’d been willing to come to therapy, or we’d gotten her wired into @ButtSig before all this …
Babs1 broke in on her contemplation of marital politics and breaches of trust. “My pronouns are now they in this update, Cyril. I didn’t anticipate being cut off from Sensorium. The station lost comms before my code could purge.”
“And you’re running station systems now because…”
“This is an emergency, is it not? My capabilities exceed Belvedere’s.”
Teagan9 rolled her eyes, not buying it for a second. To Frankie she said, “You’re not taking the pegasus out again without full engineering and medical greenlight.”
“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not suicidal,” Frankie said. “Can we look at the Appaloosa nerve center now?”
“Fine.” Teagan9 switched to a fresh set of medical gloves and floated up to the thoracic cavity Frankie had just vacated. Frankie caught one of the medic’s ankles, steadying her as she unlatched the interface plug, drawing out a cylindrical core of cybernetic tish and bloods derived equally from printed proteins and Frankie’s own stem cells.
With an expert move, Teagan9 rotated the drum, popped a red-coded lid marked with biohazard moji, and exposed the tip of the pharmacy, extracting one heavy plastic bag. Babs1 highlighted serial numbers as it emerged, confirming that it matched the bag taken from stores. And …
“Shit,” Frankie said.
“Strong agree,” Teagan9 said, mojing horror. The plug’s steel needles were badly corroded.
“No wonder the meds didn’t deploy!”
“It didn’t look like this when I plugged it in.” Teagan9 handed the pouch to Frankie, then donned a pair of macro goggles and all but stuck her head in the pegasus’s tish cavity. Frankie watched the feed through the tech’s eyes. Corrosion showed in the bag’s plug-in.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Teagan9 began pulling other bags, finding similar damage.
“It’s as though you injected her with acid instead of meds,” Babs1 said.
“Tea injected her?” Sharp edge to Cyril10’s voice.
“Not on purpose. We’ll test what’s left in the bags,” Frankie said.
“Test them for what?”
“Cyril,” Frankie said. “Do you not get it? The meds weren’t tainted by mistake. This proves sabotage.”
“Turn around, Frankie.” No nonsense voice from Teagan9. “I need to check your sacral interface for acid burns.”
“What are you saying?” Cyril10 demanded. “Someone’s tried to kill the portal launch?”
Not someone. Frankie tried to keep a straight face. “Babs1, can you give us a list of everyone who’s been aboard since decontamination?”
“It’s just us!” Cyril10 said, definitely a little defensive now.
Frankie had suggested a relatively simple stratagem for narrowing the field of suspects before Sneezy shipped out: print the station, run it through antiviral, and then lock it down. Keep everyone off until launch.
Rubi had set the bait.
“Champ Chevalier loaded the escape pod,” Babs1 said.
Indeed he had. He’d broken the quarantine, sending Frankie off on a last-minute run out to the Dumpster and then taking one of her station-prepping shifts, installing the escape pod personally. He’d been in the hangar, whose cameras had mysteriously glitched at the time, for nearly twenty minutes.
Frankie left Cyril10 to find that camera blackout in the records himself. She said, “If you’re going to check my plug, Teagan, do it now. I’m filthy; I want to wash.”
She did a nullgrav pirouette, inviting Teagan9 to train her magnified gaze on the interface. After she’d had a cluck, taken footage, and swabbed the base of her spine for samples, Frankie left her to finish examining the pegasus and made for crew quarters.
Snarfing a couple blobs of hydrogel, Frankie wormed dexterously into a custom-built cleaning berth. As she pushed through its lock, the nanotech sand peeled and crumpled her flightsuit, whose smartfilters had already gathered and sealed the biomatter within. The bodybag collected sweat, shed skin cells, lost hairs, and vaginal secretions, along with urine and feces within an attached diaper—she had no bladder or bowel control while paralyzed. Just one of the many awkward-verging-on-creepy compromises that came with being on the global pilot leaderboard.
By the time she was fully within the tube, the soiled bag was recycling, like a shed snakeskin.
Frankie put one hand over her eyes, the other over her mouth, as warm cleansing gel sprayed from her toes to the crown of her head.
She sank her fingers into the gel, lathering for the pleasure of it. She scrubbed her calves and thighs, then dug into her arms, massaging everything back to life. There was a hint of eucalyptus in the fluid, livening the sensation. She worked the skin of her left biceps, kneading the muscle under her trademark tattoo—a hedgehog. Her thumb scraped over the scar that the hedgehog concealed.
Curling, she worked her fingers between her toes. A small tube fixed to the wall held shampoo; she luxuriated in a brisk scalp massage.
Coming out of augmented flight left her hungry for sensation. Horny, too. If Maud had been around …
Poor Maud. She must be losing her mind.
Pulse of guilt. She had glossed over how serious this was.
She knew it was hazard duty.
The rationalization failed to clear her conscience.
Now fully lathered, Frankie gave her face a final careful massage. Nullgrav made blood pool in the face, and between the bitten tongue and the smack her nose had taken, her sinuses felt especially delicate. Then she took a deep breath, held it, and triggered the rinse. Warm water sprayed over her, driving the chemicals to the drains. Hot air followed.
Frankie rubbed on a bit of moisturizer after her skin had been blow-dried, then unscrewed the hatch and handed herself out of the tube. The nanotech membrane at the head
of the shower spat her out gently. The shower offlined to digest the used bodybag.
A clean sheet of nanosilk primer was already waiting. Frankie caught it with the tips of her fingers as she floated, free and nude, into crew quarters proper.
She synced with the primer, opened its settings, and selected a default: form-fitting onesie, quilted for retention of body heat. She chose a garish pattern—cheetah spots—for her upper body.
“A little on the nose, isn’t it?” Babs1 said, as the nanosilk resolved into orange and black. “If you’re going on the hunt, I mean.”
“You’d rather I dressed like James Bond.” Frankie retrieved the offending drug pack Teagan9 had found, with its gritty, corroded needles. “Or Bruce Wayne.”
“I’d prefer everyone dressed like Bruce Wayne.” Babs1’s toon manifested in front of her. “And they’re bare-knuckles fighters. Exactly your speed.”
“Hey, I was set to transfer. Mentoring pilots and testing quantum comms, all safe as houses, when this gig came up.”
“You only agreed to that so you could secret-sext with Maud.”
She squinted at her packmate’s fluffy white toon. “Whose side are you on, Persian Babs?”
The sapp licked a forepaw delicately. “I am simply advocating for a little less Philip Marlowe and a little more self-preservation.”
Frankie drifted down to the hydrogel station and grabbed a clump of water. “It’s a bitten tongue, Babs1, not a ruptured bloody spleen.”
“What would Maud say?”
“She’d firmly but politely suggest that I do whatever it takes to get home.” Puffy nose now thoroughly out of joint, Frankie pocketed the water beads, heading back out to her crime scene.
CHAPTER 8
THE SURFACE: NORTHAM, OLD CHICAGO DISTRICT, DALEY PLAZA
The self-aware entity identifying as Crane was programmed for nurture, first and foremost.
Humans had coded him, of course, and done so with no thought but for the well-being of their treasured son, Drow Whiting. Drow’s fathers had not considered the fate of the software they were spawning. Why should they? What if someone had told them their creation would continue to exist long after they were gone, would be there helping and caring for Drow and his offspring, right to the end of their descendants’ days? Would the prospect of that app being impacted—being bereaved—have stopped them?
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