Tanos pointed at Ada. “You heard Ada - you need to stay here. You’re just too scared to try to deal with this life, so you’re running away.”
Sam’s face reddened, and she shouted back at him. “You have no idea who you’re talking to or what I’ve been through -”
Ada groaned. “Both of you, shut up. Look, Sam, I think you’re trying to be noble to prove the world wrong for hating you. Tanos, I think you don’t want to lose Sam. There, simple. Sam, if people are going to attack Campus, we need people standing on these walls.” She pointed to the edges of the city. “We need people shooting back, slowing them down, holding the line. You can’t do those things if you run out into the wilderness and try to throw down with an army that has ten times more people than you do. So if you ask me, you need to stay put and get ready to defend the city for as long as it takes for these outers to get the hell out of here on their ships. You get to actually be useful, and if you really want you can die nobly. How’s that sound?”
Tanos gaped at her. “You can’t just use them like cannon fodder!”
Sam grumbled, crossing her arms. “I still think we should leave, but let’s say some of us do volunteer. Anyone who wants to run can run. Ada, walls still aren’t going to help. You realize how many of them there must be, right? They can easily overpower us either way.”
“Ada, listen.” Tanos was pointing towards the beach, beyond the walls. “You’re at least going to help the ghosts evacuate as soon as you can, right?”
“Right.” Ada had no idea what was going to happen in the coming weeks. For now, she wanted to turn her mind to the real problem at hand, the one Sam was correctly pointing out. “Sure. But Sam’s right, walls aren’t enough. We need better defenses.”
“We have guns. The outers have guns, though I can’t imagine why.”
“No, not guns.” Ada frowned, looking at her hands. Code. What could she code? Aside from breaking the technophage, she had been intently studying the golem sigil, and though it was complex, it was also full of potential.
Golems.
“Wait a minute, I have an idea.”
Sam and Tanos exchanged nervous glances, and Ada grinned wider.
“A few weeks ago, during the whole Elysium thing, Isavel and I met in a ruin filled with golems. We destroyed a lot of them, but there were definitely some left. If we could get them over here, maybe I could mess with their code, make them defend the city.”
Sam blinked. “Can you do that? I’ve never seen a coder do anything useful with a golem, and I’m older than I look.”
“I don’t know what I can do. I’m willing to try, though.” She glanced at the two of them. “You two want to go for a boat ride? You look like you could use some romantic downtime, staring out at the sea together.”
The insinuation seemed to jolt them both, and they glanced away from her in discomfort. She laughed, and clapped them both on the shoulders.
“Come on, unless you’ve got something better to do. Let’s get that hauler and pack it up. Hell, we really should have done this last time. Anything else we might need on the mainland?”
Sam bit her lip. “The Mayor’s drones?”
Ada thought about it, but she remembered the limited range of the devices. “I don’t think they can move far enough from Hive. It’s probably a waste of time. Let’s just grab those golems and go. You two get the hauler and meet me at the shore - unless you really want to stay here.”
Sam exhaled loudly through her nose, but Tanos clapped her on the shoulder and started pointing her away from Ada. Ada wasn’t too worried - she trusted Tanos to be insistent enough in his youthful optimism. If worst came to worst she could to do it all on her own, but she found she liked the idea of having the company.
By the time she had made it to the Chengdu they were already waiting for her, faster in the hauler than her feet could possibly manage even at a run. She grinned as she felt the warship reach out to her and respond to her commands, slamming open its great maw of a cargo hold to let the the hauler skim inside. She followed and mentally pulled the ship’s mouth closed again, the great door swinging up and sealing shut with a hiss. She ordered the ship forward, gave it its destination, and her warship was soon slipping into deeper waters.
“What is this place we’re going?” Sam looked suspicious. “We never got close enough to see it - we were too busy putting ourselves in the firing line while you dug around in there.”
Ada started walking for the command room, and they followed her through halls lit vaguely blue. “Some kind of archival building, among other things. I think it was a research facility, actually, but I was just there to figure out where the Elysium crystal was.”
“I assume you made a mess of the place.”
Tanos shook his head. “Ada freaks out about people damaging ancient ruins.”
Ada opened her mouth to agree, but in truth she and Isavel had caused more than a little damage. The core systems in the basement should still be intact, but she had had Cherry shoot clear through the entire building to throw off the drones and golems attacking them. “Well, sometimes things get damaged anyway.”
In the control room they stared at the map, watching points of light smoothly shift through the air as the environment around the Chengdu changed and the map responded. For the most part the world around them seemed empty and unconcerned with their passage.
Not far from them, to the north, was a group of white blips slowly moving in the opposite direction. Tanos pointed at them. “What are those?”
Apparently the Chengdu decided to try and help. “ Shì jīngyú . ”
The two of them looked at her as though she should understand that, but Ada shook her head. “Yeah, I have no idea what it’s saying. Sorry. Maybe fishing boats.”
Ada pulled out the locator stone out of her suit, holding it inside the map at the Chengdu ’s location and following it through the world. It looked to be pointing north of Campus, but the locator sigils didn’t respond to distance in any appreciable way, so it was hard to tell exactly where she was. As the island slipped out of view of the map, Ada traced the line with her fingers. Would she pass over the right spot, or would she waver and land to the side? Or was Isavel too far from the city to even appear on the map?
She stood in silence as the warship cruised through the water, eyes roaming around the curves of the map, the mounds and hills of the mainland, the crevasses and creases of the coast, wondering where Isavel was in all this, listening to the strangely hollow sound of the ship propelling itself through the water by arcane means.
When they reached the shore and hauled out onto the beach, she drew their attention to the map again, to that same golem-infested ruin. “We’re going here. The map can’t follow us, but it’s in the middle of a sort of clearing, so we should be able to find it if we keep going in about the same direction.”
Sam glanced up above the map. “Where’s the ring? How do we keep our bearings?”
Ada pointed to a small blip at the top of the map. “That’s north, as far as I’ve been able to tell, and the map already shows what direction we’re pointed in now. It’s not that far from the shore - we’ll just have to trust memory. We’ll be fine.”
Sam didn’t look convinced, but she followed Tanos to the hauler and they climbed in, leaving Ada alone on the flatbed. As the hauler started up and left the Chengdu , Ada tried to peer down at the sides of the warship to see what exactly was carrying the ship out onto the beach. Legs? Wheels? There was nothing there, though. It was as though the ship simply slid up of its own accord.
She frowned, but got the ship to lock up and wait for her a bit further in the water. The Chengdu slunk back into the sea , always responsive to her silent commands, and she leaned back on the flatbed, letting her legs dangle off the edge.
Then it started moving faster, and she scrabbled back up, suddenly uncomfortable at not being entirely on the vehicle. She propped herself up behind the cabin instead, feeling the warm summer air whip past he
r face and tousle her hair. The forest had been torn up by war less than a month ago, but the marks left on it were slowly fading. Broken trees and gouges in the soil were still visible, but whatever bodies had fallen here were long gone. Who or what had made them disappear, Ada could only guess.
Still, she felt good about this - this should be simple. It was a way to make progress, to defend against the worst case scenario, and that sort of thing felt rewarding. When they reached a clearing unusually devoid of ruins, then skimmed further into it and spotted the facility in the distance, she smiled. It really hadn’t been that hard to find.
They pulled to a stop outside the blocky ancient facility, and Ada hopped off the hauler to look at it, tapping on the hauler’s windows as she walked passed. It was more damaged than she remembered; her own work. Cherry’s, really.
“This is the place?” Tanos was staring at the ruin even as he stumbled out. “It looks… well it’s a mess, but it doesn’t look that old.”
“I think the golems maintained it pretty well until we showed up.” She held out a hand stopping Sam from stepping closer. “Watch yourselves.”
Ada noticed that the grounds were surrounded by a concrete circle of some kind, inset into the ground, some parts of which still supported standing fences that had become overgrown. She glanced at Sam and Tanos.
“Don’t step over that. It’s dangerous.”
Tanos looked around the circle and looked back up at Ada with a grin. “Since when do you respect stone circles, Ada?”
She backhanded his shoulder. “When I know there’s an army of angry golems on the other side of them waiting to shoot me - and when I know it was put there by the ancients, not by village people.”
Sam looked puzzled. “Am I missing something?”
“Oh, this one time Ada and I -”
Ada had no need to hear the story, so she winked at Sam instead, nudging her ribs. “Tanos and I have a history, you see.”
Tanos gaped and scowled at Ada, but Ada just laughed. Sam glanced between the two of them and gave a wry grin. “I’m hundreds of years old. You think I care?”
Ada nodded, though she struggled to imagine whether such age might mellow her own temper. Perhaps time would teach her that lesson on its own. “Well, settle in; I’m going to try something. I bet they’re going to start shooting if I step over, so let’s see if we can get them to come closer. Stay near the hauler and get ready to run if this goes sideways.”
She stepped up to the concrete ring, then hopped over it all at once, planting both feet on the other side. Something immediately started shooting, but Ada was ready. She slowed time and let coils of code fly, etching force sigils into the air that shoved the weaponfire off-course before it reached them.
Belatedly, she realized Sam and Tanos were behind her, and could easily get hit by any projectile that missed her. She stepped away, hoping to draw out the golems, but as soon as she was outside the concrete ring they stopped firing.
Damn it. This was getting complicated. “Okay, I guess that’s not going to work.”
“They only attack if you’re in their territory?”
“Looks like it.” Ada thought back to the golem sigil she had been studying, and smiled. The entire thing functioned on a sort of mental connection - if she could connect with them, maybe she could overpower them and force her own will onto the constructs. “I might be able to change what they think of their territory. I still need to grab one, though.”
Sam and Tanos looked at each other in horror. “Grab one what? A golem? ”
“Sure! I want to take a closer look.”
“How are we supposed to grab a golem?”
Ada stepped along the concrete circle, away from the others to avoid putting them at too much risk. “Magic.”
Among the code she had copied from technology hoarded by the outers was a whole new set of eyes. A great deal of ancient technology was designed to collect, store, and reproduce images, sounds, and other patterns from the world, and Ada knew of a pair of sigils that would do just the trick here.
She conjured up one half of the pair in front of her eyes, in time dilation, and sent the other coiling off into space. A pair of writhing dark sigils nestled in front of her eyes and conjured an image up in front of them, showing her what the other sigils stretching out into the air could see, new eyes of her own but moving at lightning speed and unbound from her body. These seeing eyes snaked through the air, towards the golems in their redoubt, searching. She found one metallic human shape watching her from a window, snaked around it even as it very, very slowly responded, and traced a huge set of sigils to disintegrate the walls in front of it and send it flying.
With a crack and a bang, in real-time again, the dark code fell away like ash and the golem was flung out of the building towards Ada. It landed on the ground a few meters into the concrete circle, and for a second she feared it might have been broken. Luckily, it wasn’t - it hauled itself to its feet and turned away, ignoring them and walking back towards the ruins.
Sam’s mouth hung open. “Holy shit, Ada. What was that? ”
“Magic!” Ada smiled. It might as well be. “Would it really make more sense if I said complicated code?”
She stepped towards the circle again, but slowed time before she crossed the threshold, setting work. Dark tendrils laced through the air, faster than normal human eyes could truly see it move, and settled in a small storm around the golem’s head. Ada had done this before, and this time it was all the simpler - she pried it open and connected her own mind straight to the parts of its brain that helped it figure out what it was doing.
The sensations here were far more primitive and alien than what lived in Venshi’s mind, a shadow of a human’s inner life. This golem had no emotions to speak of, no will or desire, only a set of rules and considerations it was constantly running through in its mind. The last orders it had been given. It was droning and monotonous and the sterility made her uncomfortable, but she needed to figure out those rules and break them.
As she let them flow around her, passing in and out of focus, feeling more or less tangible, she understood something and clung to it. The golem was constantly thinking of this facility and its grounds, in particular of its bounds and shape and center. When she vaguely felt her foot settle on the ground, slow as time was, she felt the golem’s sudden realization that someone was trespassing. Agonizingly slowly, the golem turned around, preparing to shoot at her.
Focusing on the link between herself and the golem as clearly as she could, she wrapped her attention around passing threads of artificial thought that focused on the facility, the forbidden place she was stepping into, and she pulled those threads into her mind, dyeing them in the image of her own memories. A great, grassy meadow spanned northwest of Campus; flowers there billowed in the light breeze, indigo-violet lilies with six petals swaying on stiff green stalks, tiny yellow blooms nestled close to the ground, old stone ruins to the south-west, rocky beaches to the north-east. This is your home.
Some of those threads of thoughts wove in numerical patterns, however, and these were intractably linked to the golem’s understanding of the place it was meant to guard. Ada couldn’t imagine what those might be, though, so she cut them off and let them fade, leaving the golems with only her understanding of the place she wanted them to go.
Then she felt the golem having new thoughts. It was trying to figure out how to return to the meadow it had to protect.
She broke the connection, sweating a little, and let time run loose at its normal speed. That had cost more effort than she expected. She shook her head, trying to regain her alertness - she would have to do this again, for as many as she could. After making sure it had worked, of course.
The golem stood there, briefly silent and still, then turned to her, speaking in the older dialect of ancient machines and remnants.
“I am suffering from a parametric error. Please return me to my home. Cash rewards will be provided. My coordinates are co
rrupted. I am looking for a -” The voice changed in tone, becoming even more garbled. “- large field, with oak trees and wildflowers, with a shoreline to the north-east, with a set of damaged structures to the south-west.”
Tanos called out to her from the hauler. “Holy shit, Ada, what did you just do? ”
She kept peering at the golem. “I convinced it it was supposed to protect the fields near Campus. If the army tries to move through that area it should attack them. But I don’t think it knows where Campus is . There were numbers, though, but… Wait, what did you said you were missing? Coordinates?”
The golem nodded awkwardly. “My coordinate data appears to be corrupted. A cash reward will be -”
Ada cut it off. “Right, fine. Tanos, Sam, do either of you have one of the outers’ communicators?”
Tanos fumbled around in his shirt pockets. “I brought one.”
She reached out a hand, and after a moment Tanos clued in and brought it to her. She took the small machine, inspecting it for a moment. “Thanks.” She had no idea how the thing worked, though, and after a moment of awkwardness and mounting discomfort she handed it back to Tanos, who stared at her. “Call up Zhilik.”
“You don’t know how?”
She bristled, feeling her face flush. “I need to get the rest of the golems. It’ll take me a minute.”
She turned around and slowed time again, uncoiling code out in branches that split and wove through the air and into the facility, creeping through every opening and passageway, questing their way to golem after golem and invading their simple thoughts, stamping into their minds her understanding of the place she wanted them to go and protect, severing their connection to this old ruin. One after the other, humanoid golems and violent defense drones alike, their minds were changed.
Ada pulled out of the slowed time again after what felt like almost an hour, and her legs were trembling. Sam caught her as she stumbled. “Ada - gods, are you okay?”
Second Contact Page 13
