by M. J. Locke
“Thanks,” Geoff said. He clicked the comm link, and punched in his dad’s code. The call went through. It was audio only, and the line had a lot of noise.
His dad’s voice quavered. “Hello?”
“Dad, it’s me.” Geoff’s own voice wobbled a bit, too. “Are you OK? Is Mom there?”
“She’s here. We’re both all right.” Then, before Geoff had even a second to register relief, his father started in. “Where the hell have you been? Why aren’t you calling on your own line?”
“Dad, I’m sorry … the lines are down. But I’m all right.”
“‘All right.’ All right? We’ve been worried sick about you! I’ve been trying to reach you all night! What have you been off doing? Joyriding on that damn bike of yours? All you had to do was call! After what happened to your brother, don’t you think you could show a little consideration? Your mother has been beside herself! I saw the originating number and thought they were calling me to tell me you were dead!”
By this time, his father was screaming at him. Geoff could only hang there and take it. Worse, when they found out Geoff had been fighting machines out in the Hollow, and heard what had happened to Ian, Dad and Mom would have to be scraped off the bulkheads.
Amaya and Kam were looking at him; they couldn’t hear his dad but they could see his expression. He closed his eyes, tuning out his dad’s hateful words. It never mattered what he did; he got shit for it.
“I’m at the hospital,” Geoff said finally, when his dad paused to take a breath. He resisted the impulse to yell, because a machine just pulled my friend’s arm off, you asshole! “They just want to check me over. I’ll be home in about an hour. OK … gotta go … bye.”
He hung up before his dad could reply.
A medic waved him over to be examined. He went with her, even though he knew he was fine. She smiled at him as they floated together down the hospital corridor. “You’re that biker that saved the ice!”
He felt his face heat up. “Yeah.”
He could tell by how she looked at him sidelong that she liked him, and that if he showed interest, he might end up with her digits. But he couldn’t bring himself to. That empty space Carl’s death had planted in his chest seemed to be expanding, like a noiseless explosion in him. It was consuming him from the inside out. He had no room or heart for anything else.
19
The shutdown interface winked out. Jane looked across meatspace at Tania. The projection of the construct still hovered in the room’s middle. It was fraying, segment by segment, into haze. In seconds only burning blotches remained in Jane’s vision. The team members were cheering.
Jane carefully threaded her way through the forest of lead wires to Marty. He looked haggard. He held up a finger as she started to speak, and made some gestures in-wave.
“There.” With a sigh, he turned to her. “Everyone notified.”
“Good. Now go check on Ceci, and get some rest.”
“Thanks, Chief.” He left.
Tania was conferring with a tiny knot of her team leaders. Tania looked haggard and shaken: a belated reaction to the stress of the past few hours.
“Well?”
“Backup life-support systems are coming online,” Tania reported. “We won’t know full status for a bit, but so far the critical ones seem to be OK.”
“The sapient?”
“It’s gone—from our systems, at least. I’m awaiting confirmation from the Upside-Down team, but I’m reasonably confident we got it out of theirs, too.”
Michaela, the Upside-Down team leader, flickered into view even as she spoke. “Phase Three complete. It’s gone.”
“You’re sure?” Tania asked.
The woman nodded. “The copy up here never reached full sapience. We’ve deleted it all, and they are wiping and reinstalling from backups to make certain it hasn’t buried any bits or pieces that are going to give us trouble later.”
Tania sagged with a sigh. She saw Jane looking at her, and gave her a salute. “One feral sapient removed from the computer systems, as ordered.”
Jane clapped her shoulder. “Good work.”
“Upside-Down’s data is trashed,” Michaela told them. “They’ve lost nearly three days’ worth of ‘Stroiders’ material and they’re pretty upset.”
Jane replied, “Don’t worry about it. That’s my job.”
“That’s why they pay you the big bucks,” Tania muttered.
Jane chuckled. Speaking of big bucks: “Did we capture it alive?”
Tania replied, “I’m about to check. Thondu is supposed to be finishing up with the captive version. Care to join me?”
* * *
The trap system was only a few hand- and footsprings down the shaft. On the way they dodged trash, globules of unidentified, dirty liquid—probably unprogrammed assemblers—and debris that swirled gently skew-wards in the microgee air currents. Zekeston had stabilized at an orientation to Phocaea’s gravity such that “down” in this sector was actually about forty-five degrees off of the down they were used to. Jane thought again of Xuan and the clan, and prayed they had reached safety.
They entered. Thondu was wrapping up his harp, clinging to a wall cord, because the room was bare of webworks or Velcro strips: of everything, in fact, except a suspended tank with a cluster of interconnected biocomputers inside. He looked like hell: sweat-drenched, clothing askew, face gaunt, eyes sunken with exhaustion, shoulders hunched. His hands were claws; his fingertips bloodied.
“Well?” Tania said, gesturing at the processor globes. “Is it in there?”
He puffed out his cheeks, eyeing the tank. “It’s not answering.”
“No…” Tania looked aghast. “Are you sure?”
In answer he pulled out his harp, brought his Tonal_Z interfaces up again, and plinked out a rough melody.
Info: I = MeatManHarper. Query: BitManSinger, you = at-place what, at-time this? That’s all.
The difference in the quality of his playing now versus the first time was striking. He winced with every pluck of the strings, and left red smears on them. Jane felt a twinge of sympathy.
Once finished, he stilled the strings and they waited. Seconds ticked by. He repeated the query. No response. He tried a different musical phrase: Command: BitManSinger, respond! That’s all.
Still nothing.
Urgent Command: BitManSinger, respond! That’s all.
After a minute or two, he gave Tania a regretful look.
“We must be missing too many of the proper linkages. Or perhaps some small but crucial module was overlooked.…”
“Maybe it’s just in shock,” Jane said, “or hiding.”
Thondu shook his head. “Ever since the connection with the larger system was severed, this copy has been inactive. It couldn’t maintain its identity-formation without some minimum level of activity. It’s gone.” He spread his bloody hands. “My regrets.”
Tania turned away. Jane rubbed her eyes, which burned with fatigue. Her own doom lay before her, tomorrow, in her meeting with her boss.
“There’s still a chance,” Tania said. “Still a chance that we can recover enough information from the Upside-Down team’s work to get it going again.”
Jane could tell from the look in her eyes that she did not hold out a great deal of hope.
“How long?”
“Let me get back to you on that.” Tania paused. “I’m sorry. I know you were counting on a live extraction.”
“You got it out of our systems,” Jane said. “The cluster is safe, for now. That’s the most important thing.”
By this time, Thondu had put away his harp.
“Any chance you could stay and join our team?” Tania asked him. “I could put you to good use. We’ll gain a lot of knowledge from this”—she waved a hand at the processors holding the digital corpse of the sapient—“even if we can’t recover the sapient itself.”
He shook his head. “Sorry. I have other commitments. I will zap you a bill before I
leave.”
“Very well,” Tania said. “Thanks again for your help.”
He looked at Jane. “I’m very sorry. I wish we had been more successful.”
“As do I.” The words crossed her tongue, tasting of cinders.
* * *
Jane hailed Sean. “The sapient is gone. You can call off your attacks.”
“Already done. We severed the connection to the surface.”
“We saw, from our end. In case you’re interested, you got it with very little time to spare. We would not have been able to stop it without you.”
“Well, that’s something, at least.” He paused, and sighed. “Ma’am … Commissioner Jane … I’ve got bad news.”
Jane braced herself. Sean did not get rattled over trifles. “Go on.”
“Communications went down right after you called me, while I was briefing my second-in-command. I couldn’t get warehouse crew down to the Hub. So, well.” He cleared his throat. “I recruited four of those young bikers who helped us rescue the ice stores the other day.”
“Holy shit, Sean!”
“Yeah. One of them I believe you know, Geoff Agre—the brother of the young man who was killed in the disaster. I recruited him and three of his friends. They were with me at the time of the attacks, I had very limited time, so … I made a command decision.”
“I see.” Jane tried to absorb this. A breach of judgment on Sean’s part? No. They had had only moments, she had given him an order, and he had done what he must. But she could picture Sal and Deirdre’s reactions now.
“They came through,” Sean reported. “In a big way. But one of them was injured in the attack. Badly.”
Geoff’s face flashed in her mind, and an icy hand squeezed her heart. “Who was injured? How?”
“Name’s Ian Carmichael. A friend of Agre’s. His arm was ripped off by one of the maintenance craft out on the Hub, under control of the feral sapient. He and two of the others were fending off the machines, while two of us were cutting through the conduit housing for the xaser transmitter.”
“Will he survive?”
“He’s in surgery now. They say his chances are good. They got to him right away. And they expect to be able to either reattach the arm or grow him a new one. Likelihood of long-term damage to his shoulder is still uncertain. He’ll probably lose some mobility. They won’t know for a while.”
Jane released her breath, slowly. He was very fortunate, she thought. As were we all. If the young man had died, given current tensions and the overcrowding, they’d have an uprising on their hands. “Have the parents been notified?”
“I’ve been trying. I can’t get through.”
“I’ll make sure they are contacted tonight. I’d like you to follow up with a personal visit to each of the families first thing in the morning.”
“All right.”
“Are they all of age?”
“Let me check.” A pause. “Yes. Geoff, Amaya, and Ian are seventeen. In Geoff’s case, just barely—his birthday was two weeks ago. Kamal is a year older, eighteen.”
So Sean could not be prosecuted for endangering minors. He added, “I’ve been in touch with Shelley on the warehouses. They were alerted in time, and were able to shut down all their automated systems quickly. The feral did not do serious harm up there.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“Well, there was something odd…” Sean’s voice trailed off.
“Go on.”
He hesitated. “It’s not urgent. It can wait till our morning meeting. I’d like Tania to hear it, too.”
“Very well. Get some rest, if you can.”
Next she called Xuan. Even before she spoke, just seeing his pug face and the figures of his siblings behind him filled her with a deep sense of relief. She could hear one of the twins squalling. “Is everyone all right?”
“It was a scramble, but we’re all here. We’re safe.”
“I’ll call you back,” she said. The prime minister needed to know.
Benavidez hung suspended in his office, perched in his webworks and switching through various views in his waveface, studying the workers and machinery beginning repairs within Zekeston and without.
He looked up as she materialized. “Well?”
Jane straightened. “We were successful in removing the threat from the system, and critical life-support systems are back online. We won’t be fully operational for a few days—”
“But we’re a hell of a lot better off than we might have been.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The sapient?”
She shook her head. “We didn’t have enough time to finish mapping it before it launched an attack.”
He was silent, but she sensed his deep disappointment.
“Tania is trying to find out what went wrong,” she went on. “It’s possible they can salvage something useful. I’ll know more by our meeting tomorrow morning.”
He sighed and rubbed at his eyes with the fingers and thumb of one hand.
“I’ve gotten word,” he said finally, “that Reinforte plans to summon you before the Joint Resource Committee.”
Jane forbore from mentioning that she already knew this.
“According to my sources,” Benavidez went on, “Councilor Reinforte has set his people to try to dig up dirt to use on you, but your people have all remained loyal, so far. It appears you have powerful allies.”
Chikuma, he meant. He himself treated Jane rather more gingerly than he might, if not for Sensei.
It troubled Jane that Benavidez had sources in her organization that she did not know about. She wanted to know where all the lines of communication in her organization were—whom they flowed to, and why. She made a mental note to do some checking. Not that she did not trust Benavidez, but—well, she didn’t. In this business she dared not trust anyone completely, except perhaps Chikuma-sensei. And as the old woman had once told Jane, Don’t trust even me. Rely on multiple sources for your information, and always keep something in your pocket for later use.
All Jane had in her pockets this time was lint. “I’m glad to hear it.”
The real question mark was Benavidez himself. If he remained loyal to her, she might yet weather this storm. If he had made up his mind to trade her for the ice, nothing anyone else could do would make a bit of difference.
“One more thing you should be aware of,” she said. “During the feral’s attack I assigned my man Sean Moriarty to shut down the wavefeed up to the surface. He deputized four young citizens to help him. They were successful—in fact, they saved the city. But one of them was seriously injured, nearly killed. His prognosis is good, I’m told, but I think it would not go amiss if someone from your office contacted the youths’ families right away and made sure they are getting everything they need. I’m sending you the details now.” She forwarded their contact info. “I’d be glad to do it myself, but I think it would mean more coming directly from your office.
“I’ll have Emily follow up.” He sighed deeply, and rubbed at his eyes. “And now we should both get some rest. I’ll see you first thing in the morning in my office.”
Jane swallowed her worries, her impatience. “Good night, Mr. Prime Minister.”
* * *
On the way to the aerogarden, she got reports. The emergency lines were back up. But several sections of Zekeston had experienced partial decompression or other damage. She located Xuan and his sister Kieu in the corridor outside the life shelter, the one nearest their campsite.
She saw relief in his face. Behind him, Kieu looked tired and worried.
“Where’s the clan?” she asked. “Is everyone safe?”
“Everyone’s all right,” Kieu said. “They’re asleep in the life shelter.”
They peeked in on them: the family had bedded down in the netting over in one nook of the badly cramped shelter. Pham blinked blearily at them when they opened the door; Kieu said good night, and entered the shelter, leaving her and Xuan in the corridor.
Jane turned back to Xuan. “What about everyone’s belongings?”
“Mostly unrecoverable, I’m afraid. I’ll show you.” Xuan lofted himself across the hall, and opened the door to the park, where they had pitched camp. Jane looked out over ruin.
The aerospheres must have shattered the aquarium, and its destruction had taken out most of the park’s trees and plants. The water had finally all settled in the wedge made by two walls: it was filled with debris, dead greenery, lumps of nutrient gel that looked like giant jellyfish, and many dead and dying fish in water that still sloshed gently from the earlier violence. Gone were the cherry trees and the picnic tables; the Goh boards stood out against what was now nearly the ceiling. Even the plants still hanging were dead. Though there was plenty of air now, the area must have been at least partially decompressed for some time. The hole to the “lower levels” was now nearly overhead. Fragments of light shot through it, revealing glimpses of further damage to other areas. Pham, Emil, and several other adults floated here and there, picking through the debris in a search for what was left of their belongings.
Jane caught a glimpse of something terrifying: what appeared to be a child’s skeleton. She rushed over and bent next to it, but when she touched it, it spasmed, and exploded into a cloud of glass beads and silicone tendrils.
“What the hell?” she said.
“Ah! That was on the news. An assembler hacking prank at the university.”
“What’s it doing here, then? This means we’ve got an assembler contaminant in the system, using up resources at a crucial time, that might screw up repairs. On top of everything else!” Furious, exasperated, she called Aaron to let him know. When she got off, Xuan said, “I’ve arranged for us to stay with some friends of mine from the university.”
“I can’t do that! Don’t you see? This puts me, and them, in a very awkward position.”
“Why?” he asked.
“You know damn well why. All their work and funding comes from Kukuyoshi.”
