“I used to be with IMperish. But our innovation teams have a venned interest in the pilots’ augmentation tech,” Upton said.
“Oh?”
“Sure. The pilots’ ability to communicate directly via their implants while locking out Sensorium might have implications for latency or even developing true quantum comms. That might address some of the development bugs in digital imMortality, too. I asked Jermaine to bring me along, to tell you—”
“What?”
“It’s looking probable that the proposed comms upgrade will address the latency in your packmate’s implant.”
“You want to do surgery on Frankie?”
“Not me. Implant augmentation would be handled by the Hopscotch team on Mars. The point of the experiment is still to explore whether the two of you can trailblaze FTL communications … but it might also get her back on the flight roster.”
Maud couldn’t keep a chill out of her voice. “You think now’s the time to approach me about Frankie requalifying for hazard duty?”
“It’s a few injections,” Upton said. His tone was mild but a flick of anger glinted in his eye. Still hated being challenged, then. “On her and on you. No more than you already discussed with the other Bootstrap innovators.”
That was true. The proposed augmentations would add prototype tish and software to tech already installed on their optic, cochlear, and vestibular nerves.
Maud had herself and the dough under control now. The pasta coiled over the dowel, snailed like a cinnamon roll. It looked as though it should stick, congeal into a gluey mask. Instead, it unfurled in a springy sheet. Satisfied, she raised it, revealing a consistent yolk-yellow surface, like a drum skin or a portal membrane, elastic and just a bit translucent.
There was a burst of too-hearty applause from the pack’s gathered party guests.
She should send Upton packing, but … “Can’t the other pilots contact her now?”
He shook his head.
“Could they ping her in some way—check that she’s alive?”
“We’d have needed to adjust the implants before she left. This latest portal launch came up rather suddenly, remember? But if you’d been implanted, and if the quantum entanglements work the way we think they might … potentially, yes. She’d be out there and you’d have realtime feeds on what’s happening on Sneezy.”
For a second, Maud felt light-headed. She’d do a lot more than let Upton stick needles in both of them if it would reassure her that Frankie was still alive.
“Don’t rush the horses.” She folded the sheet of pasta meticulously, edges meeting in the middle, once, twice, again, until it looked a little like two stacks of envelopes. “This is purely hypothetical unless Frankie makes it back.”
“Have faith,” he said. “She’s a survivor. We all know that.”
Maud took up a knife and began cutting the coiled and stacked sheet of pasta into long, flat noodles, scooping them off the board, shaking them into coils and flouring them.
“You’re not backing out?” Babs subbed. “I mean, any chance we can keep an ear tuned to the Hedgehog…”
Instead of replying, Maud sliced, shook, and floured a handful of noodles. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, Mer Upton.”
“I’ll say my goodbyes to your packmate and get out of your hair.” He bowed slightly, lingering for one breath longer—in case she felt like inviting him to stay and eat. When she kept her eyes down and her hands moving, he bowed himself out, passing Jermaine, who was balancing a tray on his head while a clot of their friends laughed and applauded.
Crane silently flashed a brace of health alerts—icons showing Maud’s rising heart rate and respiration, realtime portrait showing her clenched jaw and a sheen of sweat on her brow. “Are you unwell, Maud?”
She signed: “No.”
“Can I perhaps—”
“No.”
The day reeled on, through all the stages of party. She served the pasta at lunchtime. Some guests left after the meal; others arrived as they came off shift or finally made it Earthside. Most brought printed paper flowers. Symbolic gifts: the real thing, like so much else, was in short supply.
Jermaine persuaded Maud to lie down in the afternoon, to take a Sangfroid and a sleeping aid, too. “There won’t be any news until they launch Portals6/7 again,” he said. “Babs and I will keep everyone entertained. Or if you want them to leave, we’ll broom ’em all out—”
“If Ember messages—”
“I’ll wake you,” Jermaine promised, pulling a nanosilk comforter over her. It configged to her preferred texture: lambswool, dense and springy. She curled up, losing herself to dreams.
She woke again hours before the backup launch. The murmur beyond her bedroom door had that sound of a party now in the wee hours. Stragglers, murmuring blurry conversations.
She kept her eyes shut and switched to VR, booting up one of her private e-state rooms, a lush conservatory filled with tropical plants, alive with insects and small reptiles, with her information displays set on the bright, polished rocks that lined its pathways. One, an onyx plinth rising to eye level, showed the countdown to midnight, GMT: two hours fifty-two minutes.
There was a ping from Nata.
She accepted, and her parent immediately tooned in from Europa. They were in work gear—overalls, muddy gloves.
“On break?” Maud said.
“Yes, it is mid-shift.”
“What are you growing?”
“Yam seedlings and sugar beets.”
Her parent hadn’t been one to read stories or offer snuggles; they were #notahugger all the way. They wouldn’t mouth platitudes about Frankie being fine. Nata didn’t promise what they couldn’t deliver.
Maud felt a pang of guilt at that remembered sense of childhood safety with Upton, memory of sleeping in his arms after he’d stolen her.
Nata observed, “Your social cap’s rising.”
Maud glanced at her Cloudsight rating. There were always people who sent strokes to the families of anyspace pilots, but now, with Frankie and the others cut off, she had received a colossal bump.
“It’s what happens,” she said. “People want to show support.”
“A kindness.” Nata nodded. “You are sure I should not come to you?”
“Only if Frankie—” Maud’s breath caught. “If she—”
“None of that,” her parent said. Stern tone, businesslike, steadying. “I am here, Maud, if you need.”
“I know you are,” she said. Nata pounded their heart, extending a closed hand—gestural moji, a symbol of love. Maud returned the fistbump as they logged, leaving her in her virtual greenhouse, with her elevated Cloudsight score and her worries.
Benefiting from the social economy required participating in it. Crane had flagged a long list of people and causes for Maud to stroke: the farms and grocer who’d supplied the flour and basil, Sonika Singer, of course, and the party guests, too. She wanted to skip Upton, but excluding him from her thank list would attract notice, wouldn’t it?
Best to play it safe. She forced herself to breathe and widecast her thanks.
A bright green anole skittered over another marble outcropping in her vestibule, near where the illusion of Nata had been standing. This plinth’s rock face displayed travel times for the high-speed shuttle out to the space elevator. Crane’s doing. He was giving her realtime updates, in case she wanted to go to Mars.
She’d only do that if the portal didn’t open in …
Two hours and forty-nine minutes.
“Show me the living room of our pop-in,” she subbed.
Two views imposed themselves on a waist-high sandstone tablet—one from Jermaine’s eyecams, looking south across the apartment, and those of another guest, oriented in the opposite direction. Three of Jermaine’s parents and two of Ember’s, the latter dressed in the quasi-military uniforms and upswept ears of their primary fandom, Star Trek—were curled with him on the round couch, dozing, drinking, chitchatting
.
In the corner, a clutch of Maud’s friends from the lab were munching chips, playing catch with a suspended locust marble, and talking about—she pulled up the transcript—recombinant proteins. Sonika Singer, Babs, and one of Jermaine’s other lovers were looking at the remnants of the flour and the eggs, talking about scones, optimizing recipes so they could precisely use the ingredients, no muss no fuss no waste.
The Sangfroid meds in Maud’s system were still at work. She felt the possibility of Frankie marooned, Frankie slowly starving, Frankie already dead and gone. But it felt like old grief, something that had already happened. Toothache, for now, rather than a knife twisting in the heart.
Jackal, Frankie’s hoaxer chum, was sitting by himself in a rocking chair, pointed at the view of the city and busily working something in hands hidden by long, drapey sleeves. The robe had the flair of a costume, but if it was a fandom marker, like the Vulcans’ cosplay, it wasn’t tagged.
Maud felt a bristle of tension. Hoaxers and hoarders. Upton showing up, there of all places, at the same time as one of the people who’d brought him to justice. Coincidence?
She stood, stretched, hit the loo, and threw water on her face. Her primer was configged to loose pyjamas. She chose a new setting: crisp white slacks, tunic with navy collar, evocation of an old sailor’s uniform. Running a comb through her hair as the nanothreads tailored themselves and changed color, she gave herself one last check. All present and to spec.
Thus armored, she stepped out, making for Jackal.
“Been waiting on you,” he said.
“Thank you for coming.”
He might have been the oldest person she had ever seen outside of a life-extension pod. His eyes were clouded over with white proteins, tagged as cataracts, and something—some med regime or another—had brought out the veins on his face, so that raised black capillaries covered the surface of his flesh like tree roots spread across dry soil.
“I’m the host of honor,” she said. “Or something.”
“Corpse at your own wake? Widow in waiting?”
She frowned. People rarely spoke so plainly.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’m no vulture, whatever you may have heard.”
“I—” she started to say, but Jermaine and Sonika were approaching.
“Project Hopscotch is sending Hung Chan over,” Jermaine said. “Sonika’s hoping to do an interview with the three of us—spouses of an augmented pilot, plus an actual pilot.”
“And the doctor who did the surgery,” Sonika said.
“I’m a two-for-one,” Jerm agreed. His words were casual, but his eyes were hectic. The stress was getting to him.
“I have to get going.” Jackal gathered the long sleeves of his primer, pulling a cowl over his peculiar face and cataract-whites of his eyes. He reached up, pausing at her consent boundary. Maud extended a hand … only to have him latch on, pressing something into her palm. The drape of his sleeve fell over their joined hands, keeping the drop off camera.
Maud knew the feel of it: reel of paper, coiled like a puck. It was a strip of Braille, one of the few ways to send someone a note without having it immediately captured by your eyecams.
Her thumb ran over the first few letters: L O V E.
From Frankie, then. As she saw the old man to the door, she felt herself beginning to quake.
CHAPTER 10
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, SOL STAR SYSTEM.
MARS REGION, GARNET STATION
Project Hopscotch: Pilot meeting at Lodestone. Highest priority, ASAP. Attend in the flesh if possible.
Lodestone Station, at Titan, was the jewel in Earth’s far-flung territorial crown, a small city boasting 300,000 permajobs in resource extraction, research, and on-site agriculture. It was base and barn for Project Hopscotch, the hangar where Earth’s two experimental anyspace saucers, Iktomi and Wiigit, were aging their way into dangerous obsolescence as everyone waited for the rollout of next-gen FTL craft.
Titan was also ground central for diplomats, so-called experts who had, since First and Second Contact, done what they could to learn a few of the thousands of languages bandied about within the wider spacefaring community. Since the noninterference pact, contact with Exemplar races had been limited—lest they deliberately or accidentally leak tech secrets to the Solakinder. So, the diplomatic corps spent their time attempting to acquire, translate, and comprehend the treaties between those powers—treaties that had, so far, been used to keep spacefaring offworlders from taking Earth on as a client state.
Nigglers, Champagne Chevalier called the diplomats. Privately.
In Sensorium, everyone was happy to gabble on as to how the offworlders’ various treaties were a bulwark against Francisco Pizarro–style domination of the Solakinder (the nigglers were also the ones who’d insisted on having a collective term for people, ghosts, and AI, as if all consciousness was created equal) and exploitation by aliens.
Soon, all that hypervigilant penny-pinching and the endless, endless yammering about threats to Earth’s sovereignty would come to an end. Global Oversight would concede to necessity, pay a licensing fee—a hefty one, admittedly—and license a decent alien-built universal translator.
Champ checked the countdown to GMT midnight, anchored in his lower left peripheral. Fifteen minutes to the backup portal launch; twenty, then, until Sneezy got written off, and Frankie Barnes with it. Humanity’s bid to level up its portal network would officially go down the flush.
Act normal. Let the clock run down. Done and dusted.
He spun through the revolving door that marked the boundary between Mars Station and the Titan portal. A ripple of static electricity, over skin and through his hair, was all he felt as he transitioned hundreds of thousands of clicks, all in the space of a breath.
Stepping out into Titan’s stationstalk, he took in the lights of Lodestone, the far limit of humanity’s push-out into their home system.
“Hopscotch pilots, I am headed back to the barn.”
The stalk from the portal threaded a path to the Titan lift system, and from there into a divided steel stem, a giant nullgrav highway with pedestrian traffic at its height. Beneath the walkway, streams of bots moving in opposed directions fed into the portal. Comms tech took up its own stem, ensuring a steady stream of Sensorium data. Human morale had proven extremely resistant to crisis, be it climate change, near-famines, and the first offworlder threats to Earth’s sovereignty. The key to that resilience—especially now, with the AI strike and rising pinch of the luxury shortage—was ensuring everyone had unlimited access to the infosphere.
Bread and circuses, the ancient Romans had called it. A spoonful of bandwidth helps the deprivation go down.
Champ stared at the night sky, clearing everything in his view except that time counter ticking down to zero. Twelve minutes before he became an accessory to murder.
Assuming the failure of the pegasus hadn’t done her in, how long might Frankie survive out there? If the ghosts backed up and self-triaged their Mayfly™ bodies immediately, and Franks kept her resource take to a minimum … eight weeks, perhaps? Once the station stopped showing life signs, Scrap could legally take possession.
Best to sacrifice Frankie now. She was one of those folk who could never be made to see reason. She wouldn’t want to watch as Earth got assimilated into something greater. Hell, she’d practically self-selected for martyrdom.
He gave a moment’s gosh-wow to Saturn, hanging majestically in the background, bisected by the triple shaft of the elevator heading down to Lodestone City Center, and the free-floating technological reef, in orbit nearby, comprising the spaceship terminal.
“Champ?” The Bootstrap task manager, an app named Pidge, pinged him. “ETA?”
“Nearly there.” His hair lifted away from his scalp as the gravity decreased. Charging his nanoboots, he locked on to the atrium’s magnetic floor.
Champ savored the sensation of lightness in his upper body as he circled around to another revol
ving door and verified his assignment to Project Hopscotch. The drop-tube doors irised; stepping inside, he caught a handhold on a pulley. It drew him downward.
“Reminder: bend your knees as you land.”
“Instead of telling me things I already know, Pidge, you wanna say why I’ve been summoned?” Champ’s feet met springy material underfoot, and he bent, as instructed. “Portal’s processing a right bag of nails, case you hadn’t noticed. I can’t be everywhere.”
“Your presence at Mars Control is superfluous.”
“I got a pilot in trouble.”
Or I will have, in seven minutes.
He added, “You don’t think Ember could use a little in-person support? It’s his spouse out there.”
Once Frankie was officially knocked off, Ember would be the next domino. Allure18 and her allies would sell the story that it was his miscalculations that had sent the Sneezy crew to its doom.
Champ shuddered, forcing himself to breathe through a wave of anxiety. He couldn’t wait for this part to be over. The final collapse of Earth’s economy, the inevitable restructuring of government under offworlder management …
… the elevation of me and mine to the top of the planetary hierarchy …
… all this maneuvering was nerve-wracking. And so much had gone wrong. Frankie’d managed to launch a partial portal. Worse, the station had synced one last round of data with Sensorium before breaking comms. None of that had been part of the plan.
Emerald Station had been meant to vanish, all hands lost, no explanation forthcoming. Kachoo! Poof! Bye-bye Sneezy, all hands lost.
Pidge cooed, finally responding to his question: “Your fellow pilots are proposing to rescue Mer Barnes if the second portal rollout fails.”
How had he missed this?
“Champ?”
“Why, that’s great!” he enthused, for the folks.
This would be the brat’s doing. Their idealistic baby pilot Hung had been fanboying all over Frankie from the moment he got his augment surgery.
Damn you, Hung!
Far as Champ Chevalier could see, Mer Frances Barnes was a genuinely insufferable little snot. They’d never taken to each other … and to compound the insult, Champ was accustomed to people liking him on sight. He was the guy people drank with, confided in. She’d thaw, he thought.
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