by R. Z. Held
Gentiana had even been the first person Sienna met properly at that facility, but there the strange, flipped echo of her situation ended—as Isachne’s widow, a grieving Gentiana had expected an LSF trick, and had tried to kick Sienna’s face in, not support her. Sienna had chosen not to hold it against her.
The intelligence agent Cyperus had once been engaged visibly in his expression now, tightening a muscle at the corner of his jaw as he shared a worried glance with Sienna over Gentiana’s use of French. He continued firmly in Lingua. “You can guide an emergency burst with the implant’s default piloting functions without any other training, but the number of bursts you’d have needed to get here from Penstemon’s facility—fuck, Gentiana. You’re lucky you didn’t pass out in the middle of one and kill yourself. And Pen. Who’s chasing you? The foxes?” A play on faux-French, referring to the fact that when LSF had adopted a dead language from the archives, they’d “updated” it heavily based on—of course—Lingua.
“They copied Pen. Secretly, without her consent. Easiest way to get another last-jumped AI, I guess.” Gentiana made it back to Lingua, but her choppy delivery suggested she was struggling to stay there. “But it was just another non-sentient Near-AI with more swearing.”
“So they mothballed her. But LSF hit that facility and stole her with a bunch of other tech. The first Pen knew she existed was when she received a brief signal from her, deep in LSF territory. But the military brass didn’t give a shit, and wouldn’t let us go after her. So I had to go AWOL and help Pen transfer herself to the ship and come out here to get Cyperus so we can go save her daughter. We have to leave right away!”
And then Sienna was suddenly supporting all of Gentiana’s weight. She barely managed to stagger them both back to the wall, where Cyperus helped lower Gentiana gently to a seat on the deck, propped against the wall.
“You’re not going anywhere just yet. One of the most interesting symptoms of pilot fatigue,” Cyperus growled under his breath, “is when you forget how to walk for a few days.”
“Universal mercy,” Sienna hissed as she straightened. She could barely process it all. Pen’s daughter—clone?—what must it be like, knowing someone so nearly yourself was in the hands of the enemy? No wonder Gentiana had pushed herself to get here.
A couple of medical techs arrived, surrounded by a layer of security, and Sienna left Cyperus to convey what he knew about pilot fatigue to them as they loaded Gentiana onto a grav-pad stretcher. Sienna had been the one who last-jumped Pen—accidentally, by uploading the remains of Isachne’s memories off the implant to the Near-AI to save her sanity—and while the process of Pen’s personality solidifying then had been different, there was an unbalanced note to Pen’s manner that was familiar. Sienna could only hope that insight could help her talk Pen through this now.
Sienna would bet they were blocking an attempt at comprehensive systems access from a random ship. She made a token effort at making Pen to understand that, but mostly just listened to the AI rant as she followed Cyperus out of the ship in the wake of the medical techs. He let them pull away and waited for her at the foot of the ramp. She gestured to her temple, grimacing. “Pen wants systems access.” By then Pen was winding down, at least, and soon after muttered herself into resentful silence.
That left Sienna’s own thoughts plenty of space to spin up. So they wanted Cyperus to go with them into LSF territory to rescue Pen’s daughter. And if they were discovered? What would they do to Cyperus and Gentiana? As Pax Romana intelligence and military, theirs would be a very different—much worse—situation than hers had been as a civilian who’d ended up in a POW camp by mistake. She could feel the panic attack starting in her chest, rising heartrate driving the clenching upward into her throat so she wouldn’t be able to make a sound here either, as she hadn’t been able to in the camp, with a vocal paralyzer on her throat…
Cyperus stepped into her, hip pressed against hers and arm slung over her back.
Sienna said as she clung to him for a breath. It wasn’t herself she was worried about. Or, well, it was—both the camp and all the times an undercover LSF agent had tried to kill her while she was in Pax Romana hands at Pen’s facility had left an indelible mark on her. But she knew this panic attack, if not the worries that had triggered it, would pass, as others had before. Cyperus was here, anchoring her with his particular scent, the particular play of muscles in his arm across her back.
Which gave Sienna—what had he said about pilot fatigue?—a few days to pull herself together? Because of course Cyperus needed to help them, and she’d do whatever she could as well. It wasn’t hyperbole to say that Pen had saved her life many times over. The least she could do would be to help Pen rescue her daughter, no matter how much it scared her.
***
Gentiana was released from medical two days later, and while she walked into Sienna’s and Cyperus’s apartment under her own power except for a hand on Sienna’s arm, the hesitance to her step showed she definitely needed the additional days of rest she’d been prescribed. Sienna shot a look back to Cyperus as they made their way down the hallway to the guest room, but she could see in his face that she didn’t need to say anything over a channel. He’d avoid any interrogation in service of the rescue. For now.
“You impressed Pen with how much danger I was supposedly in, she’s been awfully quiet since we arrived, ‘so I can recover properly,’” Gentiana commented and slowed further, perhaps so the effort of walking didn’t show in her voice. She spoke firmly in Lingua, however. “I gather we were successful in getting refugee status with the Idyllian government, though?”
“Yeah, I stood surety for you two.” Sienna turned them into the guest room. She’d tidied it as much as she could, but there came a point when storage was storage, and no matter how neat, it was a cousin to clutter. She might be lucky, though—on moving in, Cyperus had been deeply bemused by all the wood; perhaps Gentiana would be too. Pen’s facility was set among timber stands and had a few touches like floorboards, but the Idyllian habit of using the material for everything from shelves to window frames was unheard of on most Pax Romana planets.
Sienna huffed a laugh as she reviewed the last two days for other events Gentiana might need to know. “The call to figure out your status was a hell of a thing to get pulled into unexpectedly—Jeff, the Director of Counseling, is my former boss and a good friend, but all the other Amsterdam Institute directors are damn intimidating as a group, especially when they want to know why a Pax Romana military cruiser has shown up and is demanding extradition of one of their criminals. But when I explained that Pen was a true AI and suggested she might agree to answer questions, the Director of Research about fainted from excitement.”
“Admit it, you love the captive audience,” Sienna teased. And the fact that Research had filled one of the ship’s cabins with as much data storage as they could pack in had gone a long way to improving Pen’s mood as well, even if they still wouldn’t allow her systems access. Yesterday, Cyperus had pointed out that as a Pax Romana refugee who’d been here for a year, even he still had very limited access within the Institute, which had finally cut her complaining back to something bearable.
Cyperus remained just inside the door, setting a shoulder to the doorframe, while Sienna took Gentiana to the bed. She collapsed to a seat there, and looked back up at Sienna with a grimace of gratitude. “I like the hair, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Sienna touched it automatically, though it wasn’t really styled at the moment, just tucked behind her ears. Which was the reason for her current haircut—short at the nape of the neck and angled longer at the front to allow her to tuck it back out of her face when she was painting. LSF had dyed her brown hair black to help her physically pass for Isachne at a casual glance, and while that had mostly grown out by now, Sienna had discovered she liked the cut she’d adopted to try to rid herself of as much of the dyed portion as possible. To soften the remaining black, she’d layered blue on top, giving the black a shimmery tinge at the tips and thinning out to highlights in the brown above.
Gentiana nodded to Cyperus next. “And you’re definitely walking better than when I saw you last.” Sienna hadn’t been the only one hurt by the undercover LSF agent at Pen’s facility—the reason the agent, working as a surgeon, had been there in the first place was to test a new LSF nanite weapon, and she’d started with Cyperus. She’d claimed surgery after surgery to repair his injured knee had failed, to keep him at the facility while the nanite weapon infection spread in his blood. At this point, the old injury would never fully heal.
Cyperus lifted the shoulder he wasn’t leaning on in a shrug. “The Institute does good work.”
Gentiana expanded her focus to the rest of the room, and Sienna thought she saw the bemusement, rather than annoyance, she’d hoped for. “Am I taking over your art studio?”
“I can clear space for my easel wherever. In here, I could just leave it set up rather than putting it away after each session.” Sienna lifted the easel from where it was leaning, folded, against the cabinet stuffed with her messy art supplies, next to the shelves with the supplies she could stack tidily and not be annoyed to see the state of them. The easel was a rather clever device, and she demonstrated briefly how a top layer rolled down to allow her to add physical media that was then incorporated automatically into the electronic display of the whole painting below. Then she could wipe off the top layer and add something else.
“I’m not working on anything in particular right now, anyway.” She tucked the easel away and used her implant to bring up a line of her current unfinished works on the wall surface, scrolling through them at speed to see if any were close enough to completion be shown off. Not really. She displayed her last big project instead, a landscape photograph of a driftwood-studded beach she’d turned fantastical with magic in the gray clouds and tiny creatures hiding in the rocks.
Gentiana’s eyes had gone big. “That’s…impressive. You’re not painting full time?”
“I keep telling her I’d cover the household expenses if she wanted to take the plunge,” Cyperus remarked mildly.
“If I quit my job at the Institute, we’ll have to move out of on-site housing and commute from town, and if I can’t make a go of it, I’ll have lost both an interesting job and a nice apartment. I’d be stuck back in a data-checking job, living out of a closet for months until something opened up again.” If she didn’t make a go of it…and Cyperus didn’t stay. She hadn’t wanted to count on that. So they kept having this same conversation over and over, like they were both in a decaying orbit around actually talking about what their lives should look like, long term. Whether those lives might be spent together.
A year was too long to have put off that conversation, she knew that—but the initial months of that time had been eaten up by intensive counseling on her part and intensive treatment to purge the LSF nanites on Cyperus’s, and then there had been the time to settle into their respective Institute jobs.
And she certainly wouldn’t have been able to avoid the topic alone.
Sure enough, here and now, Cyperus was the one to change the subject. “Speaking of new looks,” he said dryly. He gestured in the region of his own temple, flickering his own rave lines visible, then camouflaged again. “You didn’t get an implant installed specifically to be able to steal a ship and fly out here, did you?”
To business, then. Cyperus was hanging on to his possession of the doorway, so Sienna took a seat farther down the side of the bed.
“No, of course not.” Gentiana grimaced at the absurdity of that idea, then clasped her hands in her lap and dipped her head, emotional fatigue seeming to take over from physical for a beat. “I need to back up a bit. After we implemented the counter for the LSF nanite weapon that you convinced Idyll to develop—” She dredged up a smile for Sienna. “And thanks for that, truly—scientists started showing up at the facility to study Pen. They came up with a plan to add extra storage to people’s implants to record their memories. That way, when they die—naturally, or in the line of duty—the R&D folks can upload the memories to another Near-AI to try to replicate Pen. That’s why I got an implant, so Pen and I can…be together. Eventually.”
And what did Pen think of that idea? She’d been last-jumped using Isachne’s memories, but from the start she’d maintained to everyone—and especially Gentiana—that she was an entirely separate entity. Besides, Sienna would have expected that kind of fairy tale, “together forever” thing would be too damn sappy for someone of Pen’s sharp, ironic bent. But she made no comment now, for or against that vision of their future.
“But I supposed waiting for someone to die was taking too long—”
Gentiana winced. “So they copied Pen. And Pen didn’t find out until she got that signal, like someone had turned her daughter on and allowed network access before hurriedly cutting it off again. We went as far up the military chain of command as I could reach, and then a little farther, on Pen’s clout as the universe’s only true AI, and begged…but Pen’s daughter is just another Near-AI, to them. Not worth a strike force to retrieve.”
Gentiana focused her attention on Cyperus, whole body clenched in her pleading. “That’s why I found a way to transfer Pen into a ship to come out here and get your help. We need your expertise to even find her in the first place. And then to come with us to rescue her. I have no intelligence training, but I can do anything physical that you can’t—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cyperus snapped. He could mention his physical limitations, but no one else could, generally. “You won’t be in any shape for strenuous activity for weeks, and any tracking will need to be done from within LSF territory to be effective. I’ll go alone.”
Sienna had thought she’d prepared herself emotionally for this—it was a risk, he’d be putting himself in danger, but she agreed it was worth it—but now a new thought blindsided her and she realized she hadn’t prepared herself nearly well enough.
What if, after finally being given a chance to return to intelligence work, he didn’t want to come back?
She’d felt his restlessness for months, seen him pore over his friend Galax’s letters and then pull up star maps on the wall after she’d gone to bed. She’d assumed Galax was sneaking him intelligence reports, but none of those had been enough to tempt
him to leave Idyll. Yet.
“Cyperus, can I talk to you for a minute?” She caught his elbow on her way past through the doorway and he followed, frowning but not objecting. She waited to speak until they’d reached their bedroom across the hallway, and shut the door. Some conversations were too fraught to have over channels, even if those would have provided better privacy. “I just—are you sure—”
And now she had no idea how to put her greatest fear about him, about their love, into words. What if she was imagining it? But all she had to do was look around their shared room. He’d had several of her paintings printed onto fabric—easy to take down and fold away—and in place of a nightstand on his side of the bed, he was still using a trunk that converted from baggage to shelves when set on end. A candle, surrounded by a collection of small, meaningful charms to serve as a focus to think of universal mercy, held pride of place on the middle shelf.
She gestured to the mercy candle. “I guess it won’t take you long to pack. You’ve never even found a place for that in the apartment.” Acknowledging it to herself, that he could fold up and pack away his presence in her life in minutes, he’d put down so few roots, made her lose control of her voice. It grew louder and higher in distress, where it broke and then sputtered out for half a word over the gap vocal paralyzer damage had left in her range, which only made it harder for her to find the right words to ask if he’d come back to her. She hated when she couldn’t express herself because of what LSF had done to her.
