Idyllian (Amsterdam Institute)
Page 37
“Talking to…a last-jumped AI…” Valerie’s voice faded out and she collapsed into the chair behind the desk. Cyperus leaned in and neatly confiscated the gun, turning it on Sienna and Gentiana both, with an apparent novice’s lack of confidence and steady aim. Then Valerie straightened. “How do I know you’re not just their human compatriot on their ship?”
“You don’t get to come peer at my memory core, that’s for fucking sure,” Pen said, caustic.
For some reason, the last part of that made Valerie press her hands over her face. “Simon,” she said, after a tight pause. “You know the first thing the Near-AI said when I finally got it networked in enough I could get sense out of it? It cussed me out. In Lingua, but the tone was identical.”
She lowered her hands and her gaze sharpened on her work surface, perhaps in lieu of any other presence to focus on, for Pen. “Tell me how you were last-jumped, and you can have your daughter.”
“No!” Gentiana spat. Still a loyal enough citizen of the empire that she didn’t want that technology in LSF hands? “If they treat their human citizens this way, what would the foxes do to last-jumped AI they made?”
Sienna’s chest contracted hard enough to burn for a breath. Yes, call your lover by an epithet, that would no doubt make the betrayal better. Or maybe Valerie was a part of “us,” different than the “they” who were the foxes.
“Jeanne.” Valerie’s mouth worked as if the name had an aftertaste now she must have realized it was false. “The Near-AI in that room—” She pointed to another inner door, across from where Cyperus had appeared. “Isn’t meant to be isolated, and I have no idea how to turn it off either, without cracking the case to get at the power source, which seems like a terrible idea. When I first plugged it in, it wasn’t shut down—it didn’t seem like it had been shut down at any point—it was screaming. Much as I hate to admit it, Ines was right about that much: it would have done much better connected to the planetary network, but we couldn’t have it shouting to the Pax Romana. I’ve given it as much of a self-contained network as I can, within the shielding, as many sensors as I can attach, but if I were to disconnect it again…”
“Her!” Pen apparently could contain herself no longer. “Stop calling my daughter ‘it’.”
“But a last-jumped AI might have a chance of understanding what was going on long enough to hang on,” Sienna said, low. She clenched her hands into fists on her knees. Like Pen, running for it in a ship that forced her to be “so small.”
Shit. No time. Sienna rose. Valerie tensed, but Cyperus continued playing his part by following her up with the gun. “The AI for the secret of last-jumping. Your word on that?”
“My word.” Valerie spoke over Gentiana’s renewed objections.
“It was my secret in the first place,” Sienna spat as an aside to Gentiana, then focused on Valerie. “You need to add a set of memories from a living human to the Near-AI, into its core storage. Gentiana’s been recording hers—I don’t know if they’ll be enough to last-jump Pen’s daughter, but we can at least try.”
Gentiana’s expression drained down to something hollow. At Sienna sharing the secret, she assumed until the woman spoke, behavior controls not enough to smooth the waver from her voice. “Seraphine…I can’t do it twice. They told me it’s like cutting down a tree—you can start a new sapling on the stump, but it’s never going to be perfectly straight after that. If I give my memories to Pen’s daughter now, I can’t be with her when I…” When she died. “Of course I’d make that sacrifice in a heartbeat, if I knew it would work, but what if it doesn’t?”
“Please,” Pen said. Just that, nothing more—or perhaps Gentiana’s internal look, hugging herself, was because Pen was expanding on her plea over a private channel.
“I don’t understand,” Valerie said, an inextricable mixture of exasperation and pain.
One side of Sienna’s mouth hitched up in a dry smile. “I guess there was more thread to follow than I realized. You’re almost there.” She ticked off questions with raised fingers, the ones with the data paths, though those couldn’t currently be seen. “Where’d I get the memories I last-jumped Pen with? From the dead agent who used to own my implant. And who was that dead agent to Gentiana—” She belated started to change that to “Jeanne,” but Valerie waved away the necessity of that.
“The family member—the daughter—is her priority,” Valerie said, low. Her gaze flicked back to Sienna. “You were honest with me.”
Sienna rolled her shoulders, awkward. “As much as I could be.”
“All right.” Apparently once Gentiana was moving, she was moving. She crossed to stand before Valerie in two strides. “Pen will do the actual transfer if you’ll connect her daughter to an external network.”
That was easier said than done, apparently—the shielded room was behind two doors, so at least one would always be closed, and Valerie didn’t have a cable that long just lying around. Cyperus, in his guise as Simon, tucked the gun into the back of his waistband and stumped over with his cane to speed the search for lengths to chain together, and Valerie didn’t seem to notice that left Sienna unguarded.
Valerie’s work surface chimed and she snagged an earpiece from one of the tech-cluttered tables as she passed, fitting it on while ferrying a last length of cable to Gentiana. “I’m busy, Ines,” she said, after listening for a few seconds. “You really need to meet this minute?”
Cyperus came to a stop and hissed a wordless warning noise. “Don’t you dare.”
Valerie tapped the earpiece to mute her voice, turned on Cyperus in surprise. “What? If I go distract her, it’ll give Jeanne—whoever—more time.”
“What if she’s trying to get you out of here to give her the chance to come in and search for—or plant—an excuse to arrest you?” His eyes were wide, making the scenario sound a bit far-fetched. When he spoke on a channel to the rest of them, Sienna heard his frustration with the strictures of his cover.
Someone needed to say it, and Sienna figured Gentiana wouldn’t.
“Of course they can arrest me—both of us—” Including Simon, of course. “But they might let us go eventually.” Valerie nodded once, resolved, then unmuted her earpiece. “I’m sorry, Ines, you’re going to have to wait.” And she ended the connection.
It didn’t take long to finish hooking up the cube to the external network, and Pen announced the download beginning not long after, but then silence settled that stretched wider and wider and strangled everything it touched. Finally, Sienna edged around where Gentiana had pulled up a chair, face now completely blank, and stepped up to the cube on the considerably tidier surface of the work table inside the shielded room. It looked—well, it looked exactly like the dummy she’d spent days perfecting. Anticlimactic.
But it did give her an idea. “Why don’t we swap in a dummy after all? If it goes unnoticed for a while, it’ll be another layer
of evidence you weren’t involved and couldn’t have stopped us.”
“After all—?” Valerie shook her head, not bothering to finish the question. “Scanner for a print-pattern is all the way in the outer room.” She pointed.
Sienna delicately lifted the cube to finally get a sense of its weight balance, set it back down, and strode out. “I can recreate one from memory at this point.”
Cyperus joined her at the printer, watching as she cheated and got the data paths in her first two fingertips to interface with the LSF system so she could work faster. He dragged up a chair with the air of someone who knew soon he’d need all the strength he could save now.
Cyperus looked up from where he’d been focusing on the head of his cane, offered a tight slash of a smile.
“Did it work?” Gentiana said suddenly. There was the sound of a chair leg scraping against the floor from the inner room, presumably as she jerked back to herself.
“If you tie me to a chair or something—” Valerie offered as Gentiana gathered the cube into her arms.
Cyperus pushed to his feet, Simon dropping away like a face full of water he’d splashed on and then wiped away at a sink. “No time. And we might need a hostage to make it safely as far as the ship.” He smoothly drew the gun and eyed Gentiana. “I can’t run and aim. Can you handle it, or do we need Sienna to do it?”
“I can handle it,” Gentiana growled. She and Cyperus traded in a pair of smooth tosses, cube for gun, and Sienna noticed Gentiana couldn’t look Valerie in the eyes as she settled the gun into her back, grip tight on the woman’s upper arm. Cyperus shrugged on a shoulder bag to keep his hands free, and Sienna snatched up the dummy cube as well, still warm from the printer. No time to stage it back in the shielded room now. No time for anything except running, as best they could.
Valerie hissed a curse as they headed into the hallway, twisting in Gentiana’s hold to aim a glare at Cyperus. “Universal mercy, Simon, you too? A whole team? How did I ever rate that?”
“I don’t think it counts as a team when one member is retired, one’s AWOL, one’s a non-citizen civilian, and all of us have the opposite of official sanction,” Sienna said sardonically. She placed herself next to Cyperus in case he needed the support, but he was moving reasonably quickly at the moment, cane wielded to smooth out his gait. Probably using the implant to remove the pain, which was a very bad idea, but there wouldn’t be a later for him to regret it if he didn’t do it now, so.
They had no time, no guarantee they hadn’t caused further psychological damage to Pen’s daughter, but at least they had her now. They had a chance.
***
The back of the R&D building, viewed from the street as Sienna glanced back to make sure no one was following yet, at least didn’t pretend it was better than its functional construction—no tromp doil arches or stone blocks, just gray plascrete in warming late morning sunlight. Only delivery and mobility assistance vehicles were allowed in the city core and foot traffic was minimal with the day shift having already started, creating the sort of quiet that tipped easily into creepiness in this kind of district.
Sienna should have been looking ahead, not back, though. She almost ran into Cyperus as he stopped short beside a similarly stilled Gentiana, gun and grip on Valerie as tight as ever. Henri, golden and immaculately styled, gave a couple of ironic hand-claps.
“The silent Pax Romana conversation thing is fucking creepy,” Valerie said, ironic tone walking the line of fear and falling on the correct side. “What the hell is going on?”
Were Securidad forces even coming at all, or was that just a lie Henri had told to flush them out? Ines had called unexpectedly about something, though. “Why did Ines go to Securidad now? Gentiana must have been in and out of the building to visit Valerie plenty of times before now. Adding me to the mix is nowhere near the hard proof she’d need to convince anyone else of her suspicions,” Sienna said.
And Henri—he blew her a kiss, the fucking asshole. The next moment, he focused his attention on Cyperus like she wasn’t even present. “Tell your vapid girlfriend to hand over the AI and you can all be on your way off the planet to go home and die of boredom, hm?”
In the rush, she’d honestly forgotten she was carrying anything. Sienna looked down at where she’d cradled the cube against her side, resting on her hip.
The dummy cube.
Vapid girlfriend? Sure, she could give him that. “Cyperus, it’s not worth our lives.” She put a panting breath of panic into her tone and threw the dummy cube right at Henri’s smarmy head.
He caught it handily, of course, and saluted them with it. Then he was gone, jogging down the street and through an anonymous warehouse door with a smoothness to his gait that seemed to Sienna to mock Cyperus’s injury. “Universal mercy, I’d like to set him on fire,” she muttered. She didn’t realize until he broke into a jagged laugh and moved again, that Cyperus had been literally frozen with the strength of his own rage.
“Save some for me,” he said, the humor in his tone perhaps not properly humor when it held such a razor-blade edge. He aimed his limping path for one of the warehouses down the street. “I have a vehicle in the garage there. We can meet Pen outside the city—they’ll send a team to prevent us accessing her, but they won’t realize she can lift off by herself until it’s too late.”
“How well prepared of you,” Gentiana said, pulling Valerie along. Or guiding her, more like. And, Sienna noticed when she glanced over as their knot tightened up for travel, there was currently no magazine in the gun pressed into Valerie’s back. She looked first to Gentiana’s coat pocket, but found the extra weight pulling at Cyperus’s instead. So he’d had it unloaded all the way back when he was pointing it at her. She couldn’t remember a moment when he could possibly have palmed the magazine, but that was the point, she supposed. It felt—warm, somewhere deep beneath the surface of her current near-panic, to think that he’d dared that extra step to protect her.
“I retired, I didn’t purge more than a decade of training and experience from my mind,” Cyperus snapped. Sienna let them bicker—maybe it would help them feel better.
“Stop!” The voice, heavy with authority, came from a Securidad officer rounding the corner from the front of the R&D building. One officer at the head of a whole hell of a lot more of them.
Gentiana slewed herself around, bringing up the gun to show stark in silhouette against Valerie’s head. “Don’t shoot, we have Bordeaux. We’ll let her go when we’re safe. No one needs to get hurt.” She lifted her voice, sounding confident and almost relaxed. If that had been her and Cyperus, Sienna could only imagine she would have been shaking apart.
Having belonged to an intelligence agent, Sienna’s implant still managed to surprise her sometimes by flinging up automated warnings she’d never realized existed in the system. So GUNFIRE DETECTED flashed across her vision even before she’d decoded what she was hearing, the deceptively benign crackles of bullets embedding into plascrete. Instinct flinched her down toward a crouch and the implant flung her forward instead, piling with the others behind a half-height wall that enclosed one side and the end of a descending stairwell down to a basement-level door in the building they’d taken shelter against.
“Universal mercy,” Valerie was repeating in a whisper. Gentiana handed her of
f to Sienna, as if Sienna could do anything if Valerie decided to jump them. Cyperus handed over the magazine, Gentiana smashed it into the gun, and chose her step to put her at the correct height behind the enclosing wall. She peeked up, took one careful shot, then dropped back again as more bullets smashed into the wall and the side of the building.
“Give yourselves up.” Ines’s voice reached them, amplified over the sound of gunfire.
Valerie had to rely on plain shouting in return. “Ines!” Her voice swooped up to a panicked register. “They could have hit me. Tell Securidad to stop shooting.” Cyperus brushed past the two of them, attention focused on the locked door into the building, and in the shuffle Sienna lost hold of Valerie. The woman seized the opportunity to go up a step, toward the gunfire, as if the only problem had been that she wasn’t visible enough before.
Sienna lunged and caught her again, held on tight as Ines replied. “You got yourself into this, Valerie! You allowed yourself to be seduced by the Pax Romana—or did you join their side gladly?—and now you’re reaping the consequences.”
“I’m sorry,” Gentiana said, nearly too quiet to hear, then she was popping up for another shot and dropping back down, chased by another spatter of bullets. She never broke her focus on the enemy, so it seemed almost as if it was Securidad she was begging for forgiveness. When she spoke again, it was in a soldier’s clipped tones. “I don’t have the ammo for much more of this, Cyperus. Can you get us in or not?”
Cyperus slammed the heel of his palm beside the lock, an apparently unsuccessful effort to bleed off frustration. “Given ten minutes, maybe! Pen, can you get any purchase coming in from the network?”