by Mel Keegan
They were seeing the same feed as Vidal and Queneau, eavesdropping on Mick and Jo to compare reactions. Only one correct, safe route could be cut through the gravity express; room for error was normally measured in less than a second – just enough time to correct, if a mistake were make.
Vidal was good. This was the first time Travers had flown in parallel, shadowing Queneau, reading the same data, watching, feeling Vidal’s responses. He was brilliant. His error factor was smaller than Marin’s and his correction time was shorter – which was not to disparage Marin. But Vidal was born for this – he was a natural transspace pilot who dabbled in other aspects of life, while Marin had always been Dendra Shemiji, and flew transspace of necessity.
And no matter Vidal’s brilliance, Marin’s numbers were more than good enough for him to remain one of the best transspace pilots in the business, even as ships like the Gypsy began to fly, and transspace flight crews began to abound. Those days were coming, Travers thought. The lid was off Pandora’s box and no force would cram it back into place.
Time raced by. He was never aware of it while he was immersed in the simulation. At Alshie’nya this assignment would be done, but he knew he would want to fly again. He indulged himself in a fantasy of navigating for Vidal on the Gypsy, while Marin and the Sherratts ran a mission of exploration on the other side of the galaxy. He gave a small start as Joss said,
“Driftway 884 in 20 minutes. Colonel Marin, Colonel Travers, your presence is requested in Tech 3.”
He slithered out of the veeree envelope with a groan. For as long as half a minute after the visor lifted and the hair-fine needles drew out of his temples, it was reality that looked fake, so dull, it could only be a bad mock-up. Slowly his brain adjusted; he blinked away the vivid veeree images of the writhing, roiling world of transspace, and stretched every joint.
“Tech 3,” Marin echoed – also blinking, forcing himself away from a realm in which he flew ‘naked’ in the transspace stream, without any awareness of the ship about him, hull and engines and machinery. He gave Travers his hand, clasped it tightly. “It felt good. I was damned close to Mick, every time, all the time.” He paused. “You trust me?”
“I’ve always trusted you,” Travers told him mildly. “So does Mick – and Richard. They wouldn’t be handing this ship to us if they had any doubts.”
Rabelais’s quiet voice surprised them. He was still sitting on the other side of the tank, following the comm feed though he only glanced now and then at the graphics. “You guys are the best,” he told them. “Mick is something else, beyond everyone’s league … it’s in his genes. Maybe something he inherited from me.” Pride spoke in his voice. “I’d fly with him anytime – and you. He taught you well, and you had the aptitude to start with.”
“Thanks.” Travers stood, skin prickling, pulse beginning to race in anticipation, like a not-too-unpleasant sickness. “We’ll be in the tanks in half an hour – Mark’s asking for us right now.”
“I heard.” Rabelais gestured toward the lab. “You go ahead. I want to listen to this – I want to hear the exit into the driftway.”
The lab was almost dark. The threedee display seemed almost too bright, and Travers wondered what he was looking at. It seemed to be a grid structure, where each cell in the grid was octagonal, and streamers of colored light wove glorious abstract art, dynamic forms that came together and flew apart again while he watched. All three Sherratts, Tor, Midani and Roy were on one side of the threedee, Vaurien, Jazinsky and Rusch on the other side. Even now, Travers was inclined to look into the shadows, as if Teniko would be there. He caught a phantom glimpse of him, just a replay of old memories triggered by the situation.
“There! You saw it?” Mark pointed.
“Nope. Back it up, run it again.” Jazinsky leaned closer.
“It would help,” Vaurien said caustically, “if you told me what I was looking for.”
But this time Jazinsky had it. “Well, son of a bitch.” She froze the display, backed it up a few frames at a time, until a flare of red and a square-edged, sharp-cornered, rhomboid shape coalesced out of the smooth, liquid flow. “There is it.”
“And what it is?” Travers wondered.
Mark’s left hand traced the smooth, blue flow curves. “These are the normal, pure processes for Lai’a. The way its ‘thoughts,’ if a machine can possess any such thing, cascade from logic processor to logic processor. Each of the cells in the grid is a discrete logic gate; notice how it can take between one and several hundred logic gates to arrive at any decision. Living brains use essentially the same method to sift sensory input and arrive at conclusions, make decisions. And against all of that, you have this.”
“All I can tell,” Marin mused, “is, it’s different. It doesn’t flow; it’s static, not dynamic. All sharp edges and rigid corners.”
“Exactly.” Mark stood back. “It’s a set point, not a dynamic flow. It represents, for instance, a solid instruction: thou shalt do … whatever. Fixed points are inflexible, solid. They form the basal programming, what we call the fundamental code, on which the AI is built, like … like a set of building bricks. They form the simplest concepts, giving the AI its understanding of what things are, including its own language. Without these fixed points all you have is windmilling chaos, no point of reference. But this … isn’t one of our fixed points.”
“Ours,” Dario went on, “are all buried so deep in the fundamental code, they’re only one level above the hardwired instruction set, without which the AI can’t even boot itself up. This?” He breathed a long sigh. “This is code that hitched a lift with us.”
“Zunshu?” Vaurien asked sharply. “You – and Lai’a! – saw no risk, you were delighted to transfer everything you could squeeze out of the computer core.”
“We were,” Mark agreed. “And this is not Zunshu. The Zunshu AI language, we’ve known since Kjorin. Even before that, I got the first glimmerings when I took years over interrogating a captive probe. This is very different.”
“It has to be Veldn, then.” Marin groaned. “Is this a virus? Did the Veldn plant a time bomb before they left? Were we supposed to buy the ranch in transspace? Damnit, that’s low.”
But Mark made firm negative gestures. “No, no, this is far less sophisticated than any virus. This is just a … a fragment. The problem is, it’s a fragment of something like a weapons control routine. It’s very potent, and it’s crossed the species barrier, as it were, like a virus. It’s purely accidental, and now we know the Veldn AI language, we’ll design the next generation firewall to deal with it. But this …”
“Enough to disable Lai’a?” Jazinsky hazarded.
The Sherratts shared a glance, and Mark nodded. “If it replicates itself, yes. And it was replicating, making copies of itself everywhere it found a breach in the security we built into Lai’a. It was already big and bad enough to fool several diagnostic routines, blinding Lai’a to its very existence.”
Vaurien stooped for a better look at the graphical representation. “And what does it do?”
“We have no idea,” Dario confessed. “It could cause Lai’a to spontaneously erase itself. Or give directives to go offline right in the middle of critical transspace maneuvers … undock the drive, scram all three generators without warning. Or,” he admitted, “change the color of the lighting in the crew lounge and carbonize the croissants. The problem is, there’s no way to know what it’ll do without observing it, and if we let it run its course, it could kill Lai’a. And I do mean kill.”
For some moments the lab was silent, and at last it was Vaurien who said evenly, “All right, it has to be winkled out of there.”
Mark’s big arms folded on his chest. “Easier said than done.”
“Not something you can do in-flight?” Vaurien guessed.
“Not in a few days,” Dario mused. “Shutting Lai’a right down stopped the little bugger from replicating, but all we can do is go in there with another virus-like AI that’s configured
to find the little bastards and snip them out, like putting the shears through rotten DNA.”
“Problem?” Travers looked from Mark to Dario and back.
“Numerous problems,” Mark said bleakly. “We can certainly create a virus to do the job; we can even adapt several existing viruses, to save time. But long before I set this thing loose on our Lai’a, I’d want to test it on a copy – a holographic memory matrix loaded with something equally as sophisticated as Lai’a, and deliberately infected.” He gestured at the display. “Think of it as radical brain surgery. We can delete this fragment of Veldn code, but what’s the point, if Lai’a comes back online with all the brains of a game machine in a veeree den?”
The words stung. “You, uh, don’t happen to have a copy lying around the lab?” Travers asked.
“It’s the one thing we don’t have.” Mark was glaring into the display. “We have a standby holographic matrix – in the event we had mechanical, physical problems and had to dump Lai’a into the new crystal memory. We can copy Lai’a into it, of course, but we’d be copying the Veldn code along with it, and that’s the problem. We don’t know – yet – how much damage has already been done. Working on a copy of Lai’a as it is right here, right now, we’d have no idea if diagnostics were giving us a clear picture of what we were doing.”
“What we need,” Dario went on, “is a copy that was certified clean before we infected it under controlled conditions. Then we’d know the kind and extent of the damage, so we’d also know if our virus was doing what it’s supposed to rather than just lobotomizing the AI.”
“We can create a clean AI,” Mark finished, “but not in a few days, this side of Hellgate. Think months. Or,” he said reasonably, “we can pull the AI core right out of the chassis, take it aboard the Carellan, into proper laboratory conditions … copy over a prototype of Lai’a, or something very similar; and infect it. Experiment till we have our virus right. Then fix Lai’a and reinstall the core.”
“Time?” Vaurien wondered.
Mark’s mouth compressed as he thought it through. “No less than a month, and perhaps closer to three. Can’t do this any faster, Richard, not if we’re serious about fixing our Lai’a. Damnit, it trusted me. It shut itself down on my word, my recommendation.” He paused and favored Vaurien with a lopsided smile that might have mocked himself. “Give me the time. Joss can take care of housekeeping at Alshie’nya.”
“Do it,” Vaurien agreed. “There’s no fixed schedule, and I’m in no hurry. Joss is still running the manufacture shops; we have about half the comm drones needed to seed Hellgate, blanket the whole region with the deactivation code. And the Wastrel,” he added, “is headed for Borushek and Velcastra. Take your time, Mark.”
“I will.” Mark gave Dario and Tor a speculative look. “Do you want to pull out the core and transfer it to the Carellan … or do you want to pull the lab out of the Carellan and transfer it, and the core, to the Wastrel?”
“There’s a hell of a more space on the Wastrel,” Tor said pointedly, “and if she’s headed to Borushek, that suits us. There’s a bunch of stuff we left in Riga. Dar?”
“You can only pack so much, and in a hell of a hurry,” Dario said in philosophical tones. “Sure. Rick, if you’re agreeable, we’ll transfer the whole job to the Wastrel. The driftship can stay where it is, at Alshie’nya. In any case, there’s a bunch of work to be done. She took a bad beating and parts of her are still contaminated. We’ll need to rebuild Ops from the deck on up. Not to mention,” he added quietly, “Teniko and Kim are still in there somewhere.”
“I know, and they’ll be taken care of,” Vaurien said soberly, “as soon as we can get to them. Harrison needs to contact Jon’s family, back in Marak. It’s almost certain he’ll be interred on Ulrand, with full honors … and I’ll take care of Tonio. We’re drydocking, Dario, soon as we get home.” His voice had a plaintive quality. “Home.” He glanced at his chrono. “Joss?”
“Driftway 884 in five minutes,” Joss responded.
Travers set a hand on Marin’s shoulder. “You want to change over right away?”
“Yeah.” Marin stirred. “While my brain’s still in the groove.” He slid a combug into his ear. “Mick, how goes it?”
And Vidal, from the simulator – the transspace cockpit: “Cruising. Five minutes, Curtis, and you can have it. I’m ready for a break.”
“Food, shower, stiff drink,” Queneau added.
The transspace drive continued to idle as the converted cryogen tanks opened. Vidal was tired but exultant as he took a water bottle from Rabelais and drank it to the bottom. He was trembling with fatigue, but Grant was there at once and a shot fired into the thin muscle of his thigh. Vaurien offered his hand in congratulation, and Mick took it.
“No problems you couldn’t handle?” Richard prompted.
“Nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before – and a lot worse, in simulation.” Vidal worked his spine and shoulders. “Simulation is always worse than a real flight. They deliberately throw crap at you – most of it’ll never happen.”
“But when it does,” Marin added, “you’ve seen it, done it.” He gave Travers a speculative look and asked of Vidal, “Any reason we should delay?”
“Nope.” Vidal was enlivening as the shot kicked in – vitamins, minerals, mild stimulants. “She’s purring, all the numbers are right where they ought to be.” He offered his hand to Neil. “You guys just fly it the way you always do. Forget that it’s not a sim. Fly it. Live it.”
A pulse jumped in Travers’s throat as he clasped Vidal’s hand and glanced at Vaurien and Jazinsky. Richard nodded. Barb was listening to the loop, ship data relayed by Joss from the automatics. “Go,” she said. “It’s only sixteen driftways to Hellgate.”
“Four days,” Queneau rasped as she let Rabelais pull her up out of the navigator’s tank, and took a bottle of juice from him. “Hey, Mick, you want to eat with us?”
“Soon as I take a shower, stretch out.” Vidal stood back to watch as Travers and Marin settled down into the tanks. “Hey, Neil …”
Travers glanced in his direction as the tank began to close. His hands were already in the filamentary mesh, with the prickles of connectors intruding into his skin. Vidal’s remarkable blue eyes were dark, sparkling. “Showtime,” he said simply.
The tank closed, locked, and Travers licked his lips to moisten them as he seated the veeree visor. His hairline prickled as the hookups connected, and he closed his eyes for one moment, felt his way through the mesh that had formed up around hands and forearms.
When he opened his eyes again he saw the driftway, and the great blue arch of the gravity tide stretching away toward Hellgate, which fluttered in the extreme distance ahead of them, perfectly visible, just as the Orion Gate was visible far astern.
“We’re drifting with the current,” Marin said quietly. “Aragos coming up … I’m going to tack with it, Neil, let it take us right in.”
He would make a thousand minute adjustments, Travers knew, keeping the driftship balanced in the freefall channel. It was not so very different from sailing an iceboat – one blade on the ice, the deck canted at thirty degrees, the kevlex ’chute billowed out, straining against the wind, the second blade high overhead and slicing freezing air with a whistling sound. The wind speed and direction, the ice texture and thickness, the pressure on the ’chute, the ride angle – all factors were critical, disaster was never more than a hand’s span away, and the good iceboat pilots never even thought about any individual detail. The magic just happened.
The fast-time and slow-time currents wove like strands on a loom. Ahead was the deep, booming gravity well of the supergiant star known as Eratosthenes, while a thousand smaller stars chimed like bells in Travers’s ears. The thrill was seductive. Vidal was addicted. Transspace would always call him back with a lover’s voice, and Travers shared something of his fascination.
“Here we go,” Marin crooned. “We’re in the channel … driftway in two-h
ours-twenty. She’s riding well, Neil. Feels a lot more responsive than in the simulation.”
“Power,” Travers guessed. “Think about what you’re flying. The simulator was designed around the parameters of a ship a tenth this size – the tolerances were a lot tighter.”
“Meaning…” Marin paused to slither through a rollercoaster curve “…this baby will be a lot more forgiving. What’s that, up ahead?”
Travers streamed data directly. “Gravity well. Trinary system, three big stars in a mutual orbit. Damn, look at the tangle of temporal currents! Stay the hell away from it. Try … this.” He sent four alternate routes, with ten seconds’ margin for the decision.
“Got it.” Marin sifted the four, discarded three – two took them a fraction too close to the gravity tide, the third set them up for a too-close passage by the transspace footprint of a dead star which howled in Elarne while it would have been anonymous, dark, invisible, in normal space.
The fourth route slung them up over the back of the gravity tide, safe in the freefall channel while Travers read hundreds of gravities off the dead star. From high above the expressway they glimpsed Hellgate itself and Neil whispered, “It looks so close.”
“Looks are deceiving,” Marin said softly as the driftship plunged down a mountainside of blue-white energy, where the e-space horizon swirled with pearly luminescence at the bottom. “Refix the driftway for me, Neil … I’m off by a few percent here … thanks.”
The datastream was not merely at Travers’s fingertips, it responded to them as if he were playing an instrument. Elarne seemed to flow through him – or was it that he flew it like a living creature, an eagle so minutely aware of every shift in the windstream that he seemed to be the windstream? He did not know, but he knew this was what had addicted Vidal as if he had lived his whole life waiting for transspace.
