“Hope, what the hell are you doing?” Nate sounded desperate, which was a thing people often did when Hope hadn’t explained what she was doing, and sometimes even when she did.
Hope ignored him, turning to Providence. “Your rig is my old one.”
“It is?” Providence looked terrified but maybe a little excited.
“It is,” said Hope. “It has all my old programs in it. I need you to run to Algernon. I need you to fix him. Do you understand?”
“He is a complex thinking machine,” said Providence. “How do I fix him?”
Hope wanted to run to the low-slung building, but she stopped herself, gritting her teeth. Providence is a twelve-year-old girl. She is not an Engineer. Yet. Do not be Hartwig Chinnery. Be Hope Baedeker. Be the best Hope you can be. She put a hand on Providence’s shoulder. “With your heart.” And then she ran.
The problem with the situation they faced was no one had done the math. No one except Hope, and she thought, the white-clothed weird man at the other side of the field. The weird man was after Hope. She heard it across the comm net as he pummeled Grace into the ground. He was also after Providence now. All Providence had to do was get Algernon up, and that would help.
All Hope had to do was get a thinking machine or two back in the fight, but on their side. No problem. She had the program she and Saveria had worked on. A single memory pattern, data scoured from her previous work, a person as near to a perfect, good human as they could find. Get that in a chassis, and cross fingers for a good result.
The small wrinkle in the plan? Last time Hope had done this, it had taken eight hours to resurrect Reiko into a crystal mind. They had minutes at best.
Being small was useful. Hope ducked low, hunkering as she ran through the battlefield. Her bracelet, the one designed to keep espers at bay, was very warm against her wrist. Hope couldn’t take it off, because her rig was on over the top, so it wouldn’t be good if it got much hotter. Saveria jogged at her side, also running low.
All the insects were watching the weird-looking man and Grace, the empress lying flat, unconscious. The weird-looking man stood above her, sword held ready. If Hope was a vile sociopath like the man in white, she might kill her unconscious opponent.
They ducked around a massive Ezeroc crab. Hope keyed her comm. “El? You need to go now.”
“Why? I’m fine over here. There’s—”
“Listen,” said Hope, breathing hard. “Listen, El. There is a man who is about to kill Grace. Grace is our friend. She has stood by us, and with us, and saved us, and protected us, and done everything ever to keep us safe. The Tyche is not a big ship, but she is big enough to make a distraction. Do you understand?”
The comm clicked off, and the ground shook. Hope looked back, seeing the Tyche’s drives bloom. What in the…? El had fired them up, still on the deck, without triggering the Endless fields. Rock chipped and scraped as the Tyche dragged along the surface, then the Endless fields came on, buoying the ship. It slewed in an arc, fusion-powered fire slathering a side of the battlefield, turning Ezeroc into pyres.
Right on cue, all eyes shifted toward the ship. Which pointed its nose at the sky, rising off the deck, roaring for the heavens. Fire roiled, and Hope worried they might be incinerated, but she shouldn’t have been. El was a master and was using the drive cores for effect. Not enough power for lift. Enough power for a light show. The rest of lift was provided by the Endless fields as the ship soared higher, rolled over, and dove for the ground.
Straight into the pit the war machines had come from.
Hope scurried through the Ezeroc as they turned to follow the ship’s dance, ducked behind the man in white who had an astonished look on his face, and into the building. Now for the hard part.
• • •
Inside the Machine High Command, or Human Refabricating Facility, or whatever this was, it was quiet. There was still the noise of things happening outside, so Hope had a little time. With luck, she had enough to pop the cork on one of these robots and get a little home-team advantage.
Wait. Are we the home team or the invaders?
It seemed silly to think of herself as an invader, but Hope guessed that’s what they were, this being the Ezeroc homeworld. Focus.
Much like the AI ship she’d been inside on Pluto, machinery here had human-enough interfaces and ports. The areas where consoles would be were empty, but a few pillars studded out of the ground between racks of machines. Set into these pillars were diagnostic ports, with a universal Guild connector.
Maybe the machines were blind to these kinds of things. Or, maybe, they also need diagnostic couplings. Hope thought about what an AI medic would look like, and then thought of Providence out alone on a battlefield with hungry insects. And then Hope thought about what October might say.
Hope, he’d say, move your ass.
She moved.
Hurrying to a rack of machines, sixteen high and about a hundred long, she spooled out her rig’s diagnostic cable and connected it. Her HUD came alive as the diagnostic worked, and being familiar with the AI ship on Pluto, she knew the steps to this dance. Hope hummed as she worked.
“Are you … are you humming?” hissed Saveria.
“You don’t need to lower your voice,” said Hope. “They’re all asleep. Or, even, not alive.”
“It feels like we’re in a morgue.”
“It’s more like an autofactory,” said Hope. She clicked on her rig’s personal console, fingers tapping away at the keyboard against her forearm. The system showed two thousand forty-eight units in this rack — okay, so not a hundred, a clean one-twenty-eight — and with another eight racks of waiting construct chassis, that gave her sixteen thousand, three hundred eighty-four mistakes she could make.
“Umm,” said Hope.
The comm crackled, El on the line. “Hope? I’m in a fucking deep tunnel, and it keeps going down.”
“Okay,” said Hope. “You should find a machine in there.”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“No,” said Hope. “There isn’t a machine?”
“There’s fucking thousands,” said El. “They’re all in some kind of diabetic coma, it’s weird, but you know. Be specific. Which one do you want?”
Hope looked at the racks of waiting machines. She realized a curious thing, a strange sensation she wasn’t used to. After a moment, she put her finger on it. “I don’t know.”
“You what?”
“I don’t know, El,” said Hope. “I wish I did, but I don’t know what the Judge looks like. If Algernon was up he could help, but he’s not.”
“Do you want me to pick one?” said El.
“Yes,” said Hope. “I want you to guess.”
“Fuck,” said El, and the comm clicked off.
“We’ve got to hurry,” said Saveria.
“Yes, you do,” said a man, and Hope spun. The weird-looking man in white stood at the door they’d entered by, a sword in his remaining hand. Six Ezeroc drones were hunched in behind him, mandibles clicking.
“I’ve got this,” said Saveria. “Do your thing but do it fast.”
“Saveria!” said Hope, reaching out a hand. But it was like trying to catch smoke. The young esper had already broken into a run toward the weird-looking man and his Ezeroc allies. A quick tally of mental math suggested this wasn’t a good odds fight. It was a bad odds fight, one so bad even October might not have walked into it without backup.
Do it fast.
Hope looked around the chamber again, taking in the racks upon racks. Over sixteen thousand machines. Hope had tried to make Reiko over a hundred times, and succeeded once, but only after slowing the memory input process down. She wanted more time, or stims, or something to help. Something to make her mind work better. It was so faulty, not helping when it was needed, like now, and un-helping when it wasn’t, like making Reiko 2.0.
The clash of metal on metal made Hope look at Saveria. Her lover was blade to blade with the Intelligencer, h
er boots sliding back on the smooth floor as the much stronger man pushed against her. The Ezeroc scuttled around, watching. Waiting.
Then two came for Hope.
What would Grace do?
What about October?
Even El could do something here.
“I don’t know,” Hope whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Something!” screamed Saveria.
Sixteen thousand chances. Nothing else for it. Hope tried them all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE UNIVERSE WAS running dry on miracles. El knew that was the root of her problem. Every damn time something happened, she, Hope, Nate, Grace, or even fucking Kohl had to pull a miracle out of their ass.
Hope wanted a distraction, and a distraction she got. As El turned the ship toward the sky, she saw the eyes of the Ezeroc tracking her, hungry. Higher up, she saw what Hope had meant. There was some motherfucker over Grace, sword ready. Whatever distraction she had to give, a simple fly-by wouldn’t do it.
What had Hope said before? You need to take the ship into the hole in the ground.
Tight fit. As tight as the tunnel into Mercury. What was with these damn machines and their friction fit entrances? Gold hand on the yoke, El took the Tyche up, twisted her over, and dove for the ground.
For a Helm, the ground coming at you was never a good thing. The tiny waiting maw wasn’t a big consolation. If El touched the sides, the Tyche would tumble, break up, explode, and El would die. So, don’t touch the sides.
She gave a last glance at the melee as she flew down, the man in white standing slack-jawed. El gave him a wave, then the ground swallowed her whole. She didn’t know if the asshole had seen her, but it didn’t much matter.
The tunnel was smooth, machined, precision work. The Tyche’s RADAR and LIDAR mapped her descent, conduit and rail-like structures leading down. She slowed, because she didn’t know where the bottom was, and she’d done her job of distraction.
El passed giant war machines suspended on massive shelves. Thousands of smaller constructs waited. All were dormant, engines awaiting enlivenment. El clicked the comm. “Hope? I’m in a fucking deep tunnel, and it keeps going down.”
“Okay,” said Hope, a fuzz of static on the line. “You should find a machine in there.”
“Are you trying to be funny?” El scanned the tunnel as she went down. There were countless machines here. Enough to start a whole new machine civilization, which El suspected was the whole point.
“No,” said Hope. “There isn’t a machine?”
“There’s fucking thousands,” said El. “They’re all in some kind of diabetic coma, it’s weird, but you know. Be specific. Which one do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
El tapped the comm. “You what?”
“I don’t know, El,” said Hope. “I wish I did, but I don’t know what the Judge looks like. If Algernon was up he could help, but he’s not.”
“Do you want me to pick one?” said El. She shuddered at the thought. Any one of these could be the Judge.
“Yes,” said Hope. “I want you to guess.”
“Fuck,” said El. She clicked the comm off. The Tyche had found the bottom of the tunnel, an area that widened out into a cavern, except without the class of stalagmites and stalactites. Smooth walls sloped up to form a dome, except with a hole in the top, through which the Tyche entered. Main drives offline, she hovered the ship through Endless fields. Almost without thinking — or maybe it was totally without thinking — her golden hand on the flight yoke turned the ship, surveying the room.
“Well, this is a big fucking empty room,” she said to the ship. Empty except for three things. The Tyche’s lights threw out huge beams, painting the surface of the cavern in pure white light. No matter how much light El played about the room, she still saw the same three things.
A reactor, a tiny ring, and a big metal brick.
The reactor was explanatory enough. Power source. It looked like the kind that used a solid fuel rod of mostly waste material, burning down like a nuclear cigar. Many cities grabbed a bunch of these, burying them well below the surface. Good to last fifty years. After the fifty, dig ‘em up and replace ‘em, just like swapping a battery. This one wasn’t buried, but as long as El didn’t get trigger happy — and her fingers were well away from the Tyche’s weapons controls — she’d be fine.
The ring looked like a Guild Bridge, except if it was from a Lilliput golf course. A miniature space gate. It was about big enough to walk through. El had never heard of one that small. She’d read something once about the minimum diameter for an Einstein-Rosen fabric fold predetermining the size of the aperture, but she’d glazed out about three seconds after that. Endless Drives were more her speed. So, a Guild Bridge, but one that shouldn’t exist, but probably did, because the machines didn’t fuck around.
Which left the brick. It would fit in the Tyche’s hold, if El had a cargo loader and was inclined to use one. No on both, so it wasn’t going in the Tyche. The ship said it was an even eight meters long, and two meters high and wide, LIDAR painting the surface of the object. A perfect rectangular cuboid. Thick cables joined the objects together. Since El was in a talking mood, she said to the ship, “These machines are into their geometric shapes. They need to get some new ideas in the machine think tank.”
The rectangular cuboid was blasting out EM radiation, the same autofactory-like frequency she’d heard before. The first time was at Paloma. El looked at her arm, which didn’t seem to be taking any notice of the signal.
The cuboid was a machine, radiating signals, and being a smug asshole about it. It had to be the Judge.
El brought the Tyche’s weapons online. The trick here was to sever the cables, hopefully freeing the cuboid without hitting the reactor, blowing it up and killing her. She asked the Tyche if, pretty please, it could come up with a targeting solution that didn’t involve instant death.
PARTICLE CANNON: EXCESSIVE SPLASH.
TUNGSTEN PDCS: HIGH RICOCHET PERCENTAGE (AMBIGUOUS RE-ATTACK VECTOR)
RAILGUN PDCS: EXCESSIVE RICOCHET PERCENTAGE (AMBIGUOUS RE-ATTACK VECTOR)
Not ideal.
El flicked through the Tyche’s system files, trying to find out how to single-fire the tungsten PDCs. They weren’t designed to fire in quite that way, but there’d be a switch, or button, or—
A clang brought her eyes front and center, one of the war mechs falling into the chamber in front of her. It landed in a crouch, ancient metal groaning as it tried to stand. She had a moment to wonder where and how the fuck it had come down here — jumped? fell? — before her golden hand yanked itself sideways, clicked the railgun PDCs ON, and fired.
El hoped this was a horrible nightmare she’d wake up from. Even if it wasn’t a nightmare, she wouldn’t mind seeing tomorrow, if it’s all the same.
The railgun PDC fired, the ship trembling with it. The round went through the top of the war machine, leaving a brilliant glowing hole through the armor. The round exited the back, impacted against the ceramicrete wall, ricocheted — there’s that ambiguous re-attack vector — hitting the machine in the leg, bouncing sideways, and severing the cuboid’s power coupling.
Sparks showering from its top, the war machine toppled sideways, falling onto the small Bridge, cables yanking free.
El blinked, then looked at her golden hand, which was back to holding the flight yoke like nothing had happened. “Did you … did you do that?”
The arm said nothing.
She raised it up, turning it in front of her face. It moved like she wanted it to, no surprises. I need to talk to the cap about this. I need to know if his arm and leg do weird shit by themselves. I need to know if I’m losing my mind.
“Good news,” said El, still talking to her arm, “is the cuboid’s ready to go.” She drifted the Tyche above the cuboid, which was now pumping out zero EM radiation, no doubt on account of losing its power source. She had a moment to wonder about the mini Bridge, then
gave a mental shrug. Probably a source or destination for comm drones. El flicked the external Endless fields on, generating a positive energy field above the cuboid, lifting it into the air. “Time to take this sack of shit up top.”
The Tyche growled in agreement, drives online and ready. El looked up. Back through the tight pipe and into a battlefield full of angry insects. No sweat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NATE SCRAMBLED TO his feet. Grace was down, and he was too damn far away.
He ran. His black blade was in his hand — scooped up when passing the mech, now a burning ruin finished off by Ezeroc drones — and that Intelligencer motherfucker was no doubt approaching Grace with his own blade and a promise of death. There were about a million Ezeroc between Nate and Grace, so he couldn’t see, but he also couldn’t shoot. Just one clear shot. That’s all he needed. “Oh, come on,” he hissed, teeth clenched.
His foot slipped on a stone, and he almost went down. Nate saw the Tyche rise, rocky debris falling from the skids as El dragged the ship around in a massive distraction. He didn’t know how or why she’d done that, but he figured it might just buy enough time to get close enough to help Grace.
The Ezeroc between him and Grace watched the ship as it flew, turning as one as the Tyche descended behind Nate into the hole in the ground. Their eyes latched on to him after the ship disappeared from view. “Oh, come on.”
They scuttled forward. Hundreds of Ezeroc.
If there was good news, it was Ezeroc focused on him weren’t focused on his wife.
Nate lowered his stance, blade held ready. “Okay,” he said. “Come the fuck on, then.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ALL HOPE NEEDED was a plan. A simple way to bring one of these machines to life, with the brain map of a dead man who lived in her rig. She needed to do it in less than two minutes.
Saveria sliced at the Intelligencer, who blocked with ease, a lazy smile on his face. Hope’s heart felt like it would explode, not just because it was beating a zillion times a second, but because if she couldn’t use the stupid thing she’d done making Reiko 2.0 work, Saveria would die.
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