But no. One of the many bad experiences that had warped her journey to adulthood—damage that hadn’t quite noped her out of the augmented piloting program—had left Frankie immune to his charms.
A hoverboard had come to meet him. Released from the obligation to walk, he stepped aboard and sent his toon ahead to the pilots’ lounge.
His augmented views filled with livestream of his cohort gathered around a series of shareboards, running numbers. Beatrice Owello, from Pretoria, had her head in a sealed vape bubble, inhaling meds of some variety. Hung Chan, their annoying rookie, was doing nav calculations while skipping around in nullgrav, enjoying the preternatural grace that came with augmentation and probably coming up with new poop-joke nicknames for every portal, station, and ship on the drawing boards. He and an EastEuro flyboy, Yuri Danshor, had covered the lounge wall in graphics, tracking portal numbers, consulting anyspace physicists, reading up on the ongoing investigation and comment threads on the first #portalfail, examining damage data from Appaloosa, Frankie’s pegasus—
Champ winced. Who knew what revelations lurked in the data synced from Emerald Station when that partial portal launched?
Pilot6 and Pilot7 were tasked to other portals: Indigo Markham was permanently attached to Earth, ready to deploy if anything went wrong with the original portal membrane. Rastopher Kanye was out at Proxima Centauri, twiddling his thumbs while waiting to see if they could roll out Portal6. The Centauri system already had one portal—an Exemplar consortium had put in one of their own just beyond the noninterference border.
Proxima was the come-no-closer line for offworlders as Earth attempted to bootstrap their way into the #supertechs.
If humanity leveled from five to seven portals as planned, that connection, at Centauri, would create a two-way anyspace highway. The on-ramp would allow contact and trade with the wider galactic community. Earth’s economy might just get enough traction to enable payment of their debt to the Kinze. The @Visionary dream would die.
Meantime, Emerald Station—Hung went and got everyone calling it Sneezy—had political rather than economic significance. Planting a flag out in the middle of nowhere would shore up humanity’s contention that they were a high-tech and expansive culture—qualified, if only just, to sit at the Exemplar grown-up table with the various space empires.
To Champ’s way of thinking, that claim made about as much sense as paddling up to an aircraft carrier in your best birch-bark canoe and demanding tribute from the Navy.
“Evening, all.” Having arrived virtually, he pinged the others with an update on his in-the-flesh ETA.
Hung beamed. Owello took off her vape bubble, drawing and holding one last breath of … something as she signed a greeting.
Indigo tooned in beside Champ, sending her remote presence from Earth.
“I’ve got five minutes, Hung,” she said. “What’s this plan?”
Hung grinned.
“You’re not gonna say we leapfrog out there,” Champ said.
“We absolutely leapfrog,” Yuri replied.
“That is … loco.”
“Thank you,” Rastopher said. “That’s what I told them.”
Hung expanded the central shareboard’s proposed route to Sneezy, outlining four FTL hops, each just under three light-years in distance.
Champ said, “Short hops are a bug, not a feature. FTL ships are supposed to fly continuously. You know that!”
“Ember’s been developing a theory—”
Words to chill the blood, always.
“The short hops can work to our advantage here. Iktomi and Wiigit are reliable at the under-three light-year threshold. We’ve been leapfrogging out to the Dumpster with shipments for the Kinze, right? So there’s no reason not to send—”
“There’s plenty reason. Saucers ain’t meant to be dropping out of anyspace. Each piddly little hop brings wear and tear. Almighty Ember don’t know why they can’t sustain anyspace burn. It’s hazardous!”
“Everything we do is dangerous,” Yuri said.
“Eleven light-years, Champ,” Hung said. “It’s not beyond our reach.”
“That’s an untried double-hop past the Dumpster,” Champ objected. “Four anyspace hops to get there, four to return. And carrying at least one passenger back, assuming you find anyone alive.”
Oh, Frankie’d be alive. He could hear his plans #crashburning. Aunt Irma was gonna have him skinned, tanned, and made into purses.
“Plus … plus!” he added. “We’ve never done more than six consecutive hops without a full maintenance inspection. Break down. Build up. This’d take eight.”
“Cyril10 can do an inspection when we’re at Sneezy.” Hung signed soothing moji into the space between them, toons of soft baby dachshunds, gamboling past Champ’s shoulders.
Worse and worse. And yet all Champ could do now was moji back: thumbs-up. “Seems like you’ve thought of everything.”
“Even if we just get Franks,” Yuri said. “Teacakes can lock into consciousness vaults and huff some Whitelight. Fortunate, yes, that Bootstrap sent ghosts?”
Champ nodded, hiding uneasiness. Had it been luck? The techs had been last-minute substitutions. Frankie’d been chums with Teagan since her eighth incarnation. And he’d had a mighty shitstorm of a time getting aboard Emerald before it launched.
Three minutes to midnight and the second portal launch.
Champ’s flesh, in transit even as he argued remotely, rolled into the lounge. The hoverboard slowed, carrying him into the space his toon appeared to be occupying. The greyscale illusion of himself popped like a soap bubble.
He cleared his throat. “It’s a cool idea, Brat, but you’re talking about risking a second pilot to save the first. Iktomi could be hopping into a debris field. And Frankie volunteered specifically so it wouldn’t be your ass hanging out there.”
“Yeah, and I’m going after her,” Hung said.
“You’re too new.”
“Then I’ll fly the mission,” Yuri said. “It’ll make a nice change from running tobacco to the Dumpster in Jalopy.”
Champ didn’t need to look to know how this would be polling. A daring rescue? The fact that it was Frankie insufferable Barnes who was stranded? People would be lapping up the performance of gumption.
“We have to try, Champ. Frankie’d do it for any of us.”
There was no way to oppose Hung’s scheme without looking suspicious as all get-out. Champ forced a grin.
“Ikky’s old,” Yuri said. “She’s gonna have to be decommissioned soon. It’s worth risking one old ship and one pilot if we can find out what went wrong.”
Champ looked to Indigo.
“Reluctantly agree,” she said. “Heyoka rolls off the assembly line soon. Portals is dead in the water without data about what went wrong. And we can’t leave her out there.”
Even Owello and Rastopher nodded at that.
Champ looked up at the route. Fucky fucky fucksticks.
The countdown clock ran out and they all switched focus, bringing in Garnet Station, at Mars, and Launch Control. Portal membranes one through six built up extra charge. Earth’s five open portals crackled with power, pulling like horses ready to run.
Six remained dormant. It could only fire if Seven did—carousels only sustained when the number of nodes in them was a prime number.
Three. Two. One.
Nothing.
Ember’s voice, over the feed, was calm. “Sneezy Station, are you there? Frankie, come in. Teacakes?”
Two minutes. Ten.
Finally, the words Champ had been awaiting for twenty-four hours. “Discharging all membranes and standing down. We have #portalfail.”
He’d expected to feel relief. Triumph, maybe. Now, with a retrieval on the boards, he felt like his throat was lined with ashes.
The other pilots turned to him, faces expectant. Champ could only see one way to clean this up before it became a bona fide turd explosion.
“Brush up the navigationa
l data and get it ready to present to Bootstrap. The plan’s polling well … but someone needs to do Q&A with public stakeholders.”
“I’ll do that,” Owello said. She was good with the press.
He signed thanks. “Safety contingencies, fuel allowances, confirmation on the nav math. Request a full maintenance crawl over Iktomi. Make up the work roster.”
Hung and Yuri nodded soberly, all business.
“But.” Champ put up a hand. “If we’re throwing old ships at the problem, we’re throwing an old pilot, too.”
“Champ—”
“It ain’t you who’s gonna be going, Hung. It’s gonna hafta be me.”
CHAPTER 11
NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM
EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)
Appaloosa’s seizure meds were far from the only packets contaminated with acids, it turned out; the anticonvulsant dose had just been first to fail. Teagan9 found corrosion in most of the steel and copper components of the pegasus, everything connected to its circ system.
This, naturally, noped the backup launch. The @EmeraldCrew simply didn’t have time to examine every potential failure point for sabotage. Not that rules were likely to stop Frankie, Babs1 thought, especially out where she couldn’t be ordered to stop. But she had been almost meek when Cyril10 said they couldn’t attempt the launch. It hadn’t been a very convincing performance.
It took Babs1 three hours, running a FoxBOT in the station’s rudimentary pharma lab, to work out that the drug pouches had been mined with corrosive seeds, nanobeads activated by enzymes within Appaloosa’s hydraulics system.
They posted the results on the group shareboard. “Does anyone still believe this was an accident?”
Cyril10 ran simulations with shaking hands. “Those things could eat through our deck plates, given time.”
“We must find out where they originated.”
“I always thought the #vandalrumor … I figured that was paranoia.”
“Yes, I’m famously paranoid.” Frankie sounded amused. “Childhood damage and all.”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
“Why not? You must know I suspected this all along.”
Their three warm bodies were scattered throughout the station, logged on to the data helix as they multitasked repairs, chatting via the @EmeraldCrew channel. Frankie’s flesh was adrift in the hangar, most of her concentration taken up by piloting the OxBOT team into harness around Sneezy’s perimeter so they could maintain the station’s position relative to Procyon.
“He didn’t mean to be insulting,” Teagan9 said.
“I’m only insulted on Ember’s behalf. Everyone’s been blaming his anyspace calculations. Saying the problems with the FTL saucers were maths fails, pilot error, human fallibility.”
“It’s not unreasonable,” Cyril10 huffed. “The Bootstrap Project is … We’re playing catch-up with species who’ve been in space for centuries.”
“Spoken like an anti-Bootstrap wank.”
“I’m out here, aren’t I?”
“Don’t bait the ghost,” Babs1 subbed. “You need him onside.”
“For someone facing starvation, Frankie, you seem cheerful.” Teagan9 extracted the corroded tech from Appaloosa’s core, sealing the pieces in improvised evidence bags, releasing them to bob in the hangar like a string of ill-designed balloons.
“Frankie loves being proved right.” Cyril10 ran a hand over his face; Babs1 noted he was sweating profusely. “Speaking of starving, Tea and I should start copying into consciousness vaults immediately.”
“You can’t,” Babs1 argued. “We haven’t learned how the contaminants were introduced to the meds packets.”
“We’re not qualified to solve industrial sabotage!”
Babs1 ignored this. They had assembled their backup copy of Happ in one of the consciousness vaults; now they began looking for somewhere else to hide him.
“You can run the basic chemistry experiments yourself,” Cyril10 went on.
“Ah, yes. Let the AIs do all the work. This is why the Asylum went on strike.”
“Now who’s antagonizing him?” Frankie subbed.
“Frankie needs—”
“What Frankie needs is every calorie I’m not going to burn. As soon as Tea confirms her injuries are healing to spec…”
“I bit my tongue, that’s all,” Frankie said. “I’m clean on concussion and skull fracture.”
“Then, given the second #portalfail, my wife and I should plan to disEMbody.”
DisEMbody. Trademarked euphemism for a suicide pact.
Teacakes were ancients, relics from the first days of life extension. Hence the vintage husband-wife mono-marriage. They had been among the first digital imMortals, early adopters of tech that converted human consciousness into data and uploaded it to Sensorium.
Despite the IMperish branding, with its implication of eternal life, the science of digitized consciousness was in its early days. The Solakinder had been given the first steps by their would-be alien invaders, but after the noninterference agreement had been signed, Allure18 had been obliged to stop providing #HowDo info to the IMperish Foundation. The tech, at this point, still had as many bugs as features.
Not everyone took to disEMbodiment, or reEMbodiment, for that matter. Each new incarnation of a ghost came with a risk of decoherence.
Teacakes had stepped up for this mission because they were stable and comfortable with being triaged: their source code was safe at home, and they had survived almost a dozen disEMbodiments and reinstalls. Still, that didn’t mean there was zero risk.
“You can’t kill yourselves. Not until you’ve made full statements about the accident,” Frankie said.
“You’re not a cop, Barnes. And if our continued existence poses a threat to your life—”
Inspiration struck Babs1 then: “If I may, Cyril10. We’re not sure it’s just the pegasus meds that were sabotaged. You wouldn’t want to deploy your final dose of Whitelight and find out it’s contaminated.”
Cyril10 sent Babs1’s toon a vicious side-eye.
“Nobody’s committing suicide,” Frankie said.
Teagan9 sent a stream of moji through the channel at that: angry face, GhostPride™ shield, and a hand with one upthrust finger.
Ignoring this graphical protest, Frankie centered Appaloosa’s damage metrics on the shareboard. “This isn’t a matter of guessing that maybe the anyspace wands are misaligned or overcharged, not anymore. Nobody can argue the FTL ships’ curvature has been miscalculated. You can’t hide behind oh, dear, nobody really expects a bunch of gun-waving monkeys and their AI spawn to level into Star Trek technomarvels like the warp drive! In a matter of decades? Poor deluded apes!”
“Strike, Frankie, for IP breach.”
“Rubbish.”
“You’re not supposed to call it the warp drive,” Teagan9 agreed.
Frankie doubled down. “We’re past pretending Ember’s team bollixed up the portal maths, past tutting over how inconveniently tragic it was that Sienna Mary Murray had that aneurysm, and just when she seemed to be nearing a breakthrough on subspace—oh, pardon me, quantum comms—”
“Strike for sarcasm,” Cyril10 objected. “And hoaxer talk.”
“Look at Appaloosa, you gobshite! These nanobeads are a straight-up spanner in the works. Vandalism isn’t a rumor anymore. It’s bloody sabotage.”
Reluctant nod from Teagan9.
Cyril10 signed, Yes. He took his second strike back.
“Aside from us, the only person who came aboard was Champ Chevalier. We need to tie him to our equipment fails. Nobody has the luxury of noping on the mission until I have hard evidence and viable options for getting it home.”
They chewed on that silently. Finally, Cyril10 said, “Why would Champ—why would any hypothetical saboteur suddenly do something so overt?”
“We’re rather far from home,” Teagan9 told him gently. “Nobody would know if something went wrong
out here.”
“Someone would check, eventually,” he said. “The station would still be here.”
“Would it?”
That unsettled him. “No?”
“It’d be easy to get rid of the station. Give it a good swift kick toward Procyon. Sayonara, baby,” Frankie said. “Guess the star sneezed.”
“Imagine if you hadn’t got comms during the #portalfail,” Babs1 agreed. “Earth wouldn’t know anything about what was happening out here.”
Frankie nodded. “We’d have vanished. Anyone could’ve moved in and cleaned up.”
“Then why haven’t they?” Cyril10 had reached drug storage now. He detached a pristine bag of fluids and scanned the serial number. “What’s stopping your saboteurs from flying in and scuttling us?”
“Babs? What do you think?”
“The greater galactic community has accountability protocols, like us.” Babs1 highlighted relevant treaties, alien contracts humanity had painstakingly acquired and translated. “Few cultures take mutually assured disclosure quite as far as we do, but they don’t default to trust, either.”
Cyril10 rummaged for a sealed chem flask in the lab cupboards, dislodging a ball of fluff. Babs1 used station cams to zoom in on it. Dead spider, in a bundle of web.
“The aliens make deals with each other but don’t take compliance on faith. So what?” Teagan9 said.
“We’ve never encountered an offworlder ship with just one kind of alien aboard. According to Diplomatic, that’s not about them being great chums,” Frankie said.
“It’s transparency enforcement.” Babs1 tasked a BeetleBOT with collecting the spider corpse she’d spotted in the infirmary.
“They’re observers. They don’t trust each other.” Teagan9 sounded thoughtful now. “So, potential offworld saboteurs—”
“By which you mean the—”
Frankie broke in before Cyril10 could finish. “Let’s not put specific accusations on the record.”
“Oh, sure, warp drive’s fine but let’s not get actively slanderous.”
Dealbreaker Page 9
