by M. D. Cooper
She had seen the Weapon Born seeds before, so she didn’t understand why standing in the room and watching Tim had brought on such powerful memories. She was also experiencing a confusion where her personal memories were mixing up with the emotion everyone felt around Tim, so that images that had represented curiosity before now made her sad. If they had lost Tim, then that must also mean she had lost something when she had undergone the same procedure.
There was a question on the edge of her mind that she refused to recognize. She circled the question in the same way Andy kept his distance from the reality of Tim’s condition, focusing instead on the details that concentrating on individual pieces she didn’t have to add up to a whole.
The pale light through the window.
The rustling willow trees.
The sound of people talking in the hallway outside the door.
Cara humming to herself.
Did I survive?
Her conversation with Sandra came back to her, remembering how the AI had told her she was made, and Lyssa had responded, almost naturally, I died and then I was born. She had been so focused on Tim, on getting Sandra to help, that she had paid little attention to how she had responded. What did that mean exactly?
Had Hari Jickson given her a new name, or reminded her of what she should have already known?
“Are you hungry?” Brit asked Cara, snapping Lyssa from her reverie.
Cara shrugged, probing the tile floor with the toe of her shoe. “This place smells like fish. It kills my appetite.”
“You mean the room?” Brit asked.
“No, the whole district. It’s like there’s a fish factory somewhere.”
“When have you ever smelled a fish factory?”
“On Cruithne. You weren’t there.”
“I’ve been there,” Brit said.
Cara ignored her, continuing, “There was a park where they sold fish they kept on ice. I think Dad said they raised them in tanks on some part of the station.” Cara looked at Andy. “Isn’t that what you said, Dad?”
“What?” Andy turned from the window. The images in his mind dropped away, leaving Lyssa with her own memories. She quickly placed herself in a separate section of her mind, closing the door on what she remembered, and focused on Cara.
“I can go find something and bring it back,” Andy said. “Or I can stay here and you two can go. I’m going to need to meet Fugia in two hours and it will take about thirty minutes to get there by maglev according to the district map.”
“I’m going with you,” Brit said.
Andy shook his head. His fatigue made Lyssa feel heavy. “Both of us can’t go. I’ll stay here if you want to go.”
“Isn’t it Lyssa they want to talk to?”
“Yes,” Andy said, rubbing his face. “You’re right. It has to be me.”
“Can I go with you?” Cara asked.
Andy looked at her. “I suppose you can. But your mom might also like to have you here with her.”
“She can go,” Brit said, her voice heavy with emotion. It was far different than her usual, crisp tone. “Get me something to eat first.”
The question of eating pushed Andy’s thoughts back to what they were going to do for Tim. Lyssa felt his disgust at the idea of Tim inside some tank, being fed by tubes.
Andy stood. “Come on, Cara. Let’s go take a look around.” He didn’t wait for Cara or Brit to answer, just went to the door and activated its lock. Cara followed close behind as he walked out into the hallway lined with the blank doors of a hundred other rooms. Everyone they passed on the way back outside seemed just as anxious as Andy.
After they found a stand selling sandwiches consisting of some kind of local fruit, Andy called “like a giant grape,” they went back to the room to eat. Andy picked at his food and focused most of his attention on cleaning his pistol and verifying its battery status.
Lyssa found the motions soothing as she listened to the willow branches moving against each other, which almost seemed in time with Tim’s measured breathing. She realized that the biggest change in Tim was how calm he was while lying there. Dr. Avery had never called Tim unconscious, only non-responsive. That was an interesting demarcation that no one seemed to have registered. He was awake but he was calm, which was so different than the way he had interacted with the world before.
She had been like that for a time. She remembered waking to Andy’s senses, not knowing how to process all the information flooding her simultaneously. It had been Fred’s ocean without the word ocean to describe it.
“Time to go,” Andy said.
Lyssa started from her thoughts, unaware of how much time had passed.
“You didn’t eat anything,” Brit scolded. She was sitting at the window now, the edges of her black hair silvered by the light from outside. Andy felt warm toward her then, images crossing his thoughts of how she looked when they had first met, then later when she had been pregnant with Cara, her smiling sometime in the past. Lyssa had to remind herself that she couldn’t read his actual thoughts, but it didn’t matter when his emotions crossed the barrier between them. It was all data that became easier to parse.
“I’m still coming,” Cara said. She didn’t look at her mom as she stood and went to the door.
Andy stood slowly and walked to Tim’s bed. He leaned over and kissed Tim’s forehead, smoothing back his hair, then nodded at Brit. He met Cara at the door and passed the unlock token, then walked into the hallway again.
Down in the street outside, Andy told Cara, “Stay with me, just to my side so I can see you. When we meet with Fugia and the senator, they might ask why you’re there. You don’t get into it with them. Let me do the talking. Understand?”
Cara nodded. “Rabbit country.”
Andy stared at her for a second, then smiled, laughing a little. “That’s it. Keep your ears up.”
“What’s it going to be like meeting a bunch of AI, anyway?” Cara asked.
Andy laughed again. “I have no idea.”
They fought their way through the crowds to the nearby maglev station and caught two connections back to the terminal where the shuttle was docked. Andy approached the port authority security checkpoint Fugia had identified when they arrived.
The envoy who had initially received Fugia, the senator, and Harl when they initially debarked, appeared twenty minutes later, a young woman with short blonde hair with the build of a TSF ground soldier—or perhaps JSF in this case.
“Mr. Sykes,” she said, walking past the security officers. “I’m Kalis Tarnan. I’ll be escorting you to Senator Walton.”
Andy shook her hand. “Thanks. This is my daughter, Cara.”
Kalis looked Cara up and down and nodded. “This way, please.”
The envoy spun on her heel as a security officer opened the gate on the checkpoint. Andy and Cara followed her into a corridor away from the main terminal. The tunnel had walls of burnished aluminum and very few doors.
For the first time since arriving on the Cho, Lyssa reached out to see what she could find on the local systems. She immediately picked up a network in the secure area they had just entered and started following it back to various node points that lead into both private and governmental data centers.
Out of curiosity, she quickly checked the clinic where they had taken Tim and picked into Dr. Avery’s accounts. She found the original messages Avery had posted to medical databases, checked the various responses she had received, and then verified the letter from the Scion Group. Avery had been telling the truth. Apparently, she often posted anonymous patient profiles and asked for feedback. Lyssa wasn’t sure if that made her a better neurologist or basically incompetent.
She checked the security on the hotel where Brit and Tim were waiting, then hopped through several public networks. Along the way, she talked to four separate non-sentient AI operating public works and one banking facility, but nothing like Fred noticed her activity, or if they did they kept quiet. Lyssa looked for evidence o
f a central controlling agency but found only human protocols guiding non-sentient systems.
The corridor ended on a private maglev car. Andy and Cara followed Kalis inside. Now that Lyssa had allowed herself to roam, she couldn’t stop from checking the control system in the car, studying its logs and maintenance records. She saw that Fugia and Senator Walton had ridden this car just an hour ago, so they had spent more time in the terminal than Fugia had said they would. Lyssa supposed that discrepancy didn’t matter much but she found herself wondering about the gap between Fugia’s actions and her words. If she was an operator like Petral, Lyssa knew she had to assume some information might be meant as misdirection, which made her checks all the more interesting.
The maglev car connected with a line that ran along the outer edge of the ring and increased speed. In the twenty minutes the car traveled, Lyssa estimated they traveled half the circumference of the Chorin Tree. The maglev re-entered the body of the ring but didn’t pass back through to the inner surface. Instead, they continued for several kilometers through dense material that Lyssa registered as power generation equipment. When the car slowed to a stop, she found her ability to reach outside networks dulled by powerful energy fields. They had entered a quiet zone where she would only be able to communicate across a few meters.
Lyssa made an involuntary disgusted sound.
Kalis led the way off the maglev car into a small terminal obviously meant to be more utilitarian than those back at the Port Authority. A reinforced door stood in the facing wall with two guards on either side wearing uniforms from the Callistan military. They brought their rifles to port arms in salute as Kalis approached. She returned the salute.
“Are we the last to arrive?” she asked.
The closest soldier nodded. “The others are all inside, lieutenant.” His gaze slid to Andy and Cara. “Are they cleared?”
“They’re clear,” Kalis affirmed. The soldier who seemed to be in charge slung his rifle and turned to engage the lock system. The door hissed as inside atmosphere was released, then swung open.
“Why is it pressurized?” Andy asked.
“This area controls district power outputs,” Kalis explained. “It’s secure against atmospheric breach. Also works to secure the area from surveillance both inside and out.” She motioned for Andy to step over the threshold into the corridor on the other side. Cara followed him in.
The corridor on the other side of the door was much like the interior of a ship, with heavy ribs and utility lighting running both deck and ceiling. Kalis took the lead again and Andy followed her with Cara close behind.
Inside the corridor, Xander’s presence felt much closer, like a firefly dancing around Lyssa’s awareness, but he still hadn’t made himself present as Fred had done by showing her the ocean of his mind.
The corridor ended on another reinforced door, this one looking like the entrance to some prison. There were no guards this time. Kalis passed her security token into the control panel and heavy bolts inside the wall retracted, making the deck vibrate as they moved.
“Everyone else is in here,” she said. The room on the other side of the door was dim, with more low lights along the deck and ceiling. A group of people stood in a circle along the walls. In the center of the room a low pedestal stood with a control console on its face that seemed related to the power generation facility. Lyssa recognized Fugia, Senator Walton, and Harl Nines on the other side of the room. They were all staring at something near the center of the ceiling and didn’t acknowledge them when the door opened.
Andy noticed the strange arrangement in the room and gave Kalis a wary look. “What’s going on in there? Are they drugged?”
“They’re communicating with the AI,” Kalis said.
Andy looked back in the room, studying the faces of several people. No one appeared to be in distress or even distant. They were engaged in something he couldn’t see. He glanced at Cara.
“She doesn’t have a Link,” he said.
Kalis shrugged. “Then I guess she’s going to be bored.”
Andy stepped inside the room and Cara followed. Kalis didn’t enter. Instead, the door swung closed behind them and the locks engaged.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.26.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mercy’s Intent, Clinic 46
REGION: Jovian L1 Hildas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The image of Clinic 46 hung in the center of the command deck’s holodisplay as the officers of HMS Mercy’s Intent went about their duties. Sitting in an empty pilot’s seat, Cal Kraft stared at the misshapen lump of asteroid, his gaze flicking to the icons indicating ships gloating around it and back. Four silver cylinders stood on the edge of the console next to him. He noticed that the command crew didn’t like to look at them. They would glance at the seeds as they walked past then quickly look away, acting busy.
He had sent the update back to the Heartbridge headquarters on High Terra that the fleet would need to be moved from Clinic 46 to some other location. Jirl had received the actual report and she would need to interpret the information for the board. Whenever he received a reply, he expected that he would either lose his job or be tasked with moving the fleet. Since he had resolved to do his job until the moment it was no longer his, he had set the crew of the Mercy’s Intent on waking the fleet in preparation for inbound crews.
Commander Kaffren and most of his staff had been killed in the second attack on the station, and since most of the drone fleet was gone, the clinic was essentially dead. Its data stores were intact and would require physical transport.
He had mulled over the question of what had happened to the drone fleet without finding an answer. The empty drones, which shouldn’t have been able to operate without a Weapon Born pilot, had all left the hangar and attacked the station. Obviously, someone had figured out how to penetrate the clinic’s defensive systems and gain control of the drones. The drone assault on the asteroid’s exterior support systems had done as much or more damage than the attack on the command deck. Cal had sent the logs to Jirl. He didn’t have the time or expertise to waste on the problem.
Cal had decided he would follow the Worry’s E
nd and the Sykes as soon as it was possible to leave Clinic 46, but he acknowledged that he had been a step behind them since Hari Jickson first run off with his research. If he couldn’t catch them and retrieve the AI Jickson had developed, he had to find some other way to track their movements.
It was too bad Brit Sykes had killed Dr. Farrel. The man had been brilliant and had quickly understood what Cal wanted to accomplish. If Cal were to turn over the cylinders standing on the console, each would have a serial number imprinted on its base. The standard procedure had been to imprint a seed in a specific order, that way it was easy for follow-on researchers to know how early in the program a specific seed had been developed. The researchers often referred to them by batch numbers or sequences that tended to align with the host they had imaged or the station where that sequence had been developed. A frustrating aspect of the program had been ongoing inconsistencies in the seeds. Clinic 46 had been comparing samples from various series to isolate problems. They had also been conducting research in copying or imaging seeds from single hosts to create new series. Would the copy of a copy show the same errors?
Could images be combined, manipulated, and re-imaged to new seeds? The research had rapidly moved into areas similar to early genetic manipulation, where as soon as scientists identified a specific strain, they tried to change it or combine it with something else. This lead to all the legends about apples with fly DNA, etc. The efforts to enhance intelligence in near-sentient animal species had fed back into this later research, Farrel had once explained.
With Farrel’s help, Cal had created a Trojan horse in the form of a seed and convinced the Sykes to steal it from him. It was regrettable that Farrel had died in the process, but the man had done his job well. Now Cal also had four other seeds based on Tim Sykes that might prove valuable in the future.
“Sir,” the captain of the Mercy’s Intent, a woman named Gala Fitzgerald, said. “I’ve got three personnel carriers inbound.”
“That was quick.”
Captain Gala Fitzgerald had short brown hair, a nose like a hawk’s beak, and a prosthetic right arm—full of hard angles with exposed internals—that she liked to keep exposed. None of her uniforms had right sleeves. She gave him a sardonic smile. “Apparently they were diverted from Europa. Whatever report you sent back to headquarters, it’s got the these three captains fired up.”
