by C. Gockel
His sister did not organize things; she organized people. She’d instigated many a hoverbike race among the local teens, much to the consternation of the elders of the community and the frustration of the young men who’d thought to beat her. His sister was obsessed with being a pilot in the Galactic Fleet and had been since he could remember. She didn’t just practice hover piloting, she studied it. He doubted the boys in their province played the Formula One Hover Grand Prix in slow motion in their hologlobes and asked their little brothers to explain the geometry behind the optimal arc for tight turns.
“It is something I would say, but not you,” Kenji replied.
Noa nodded again. “You’re right. But I have to change. Pilots have to be meticulous. I will become meticulous.”
She had been keeping her room oddly tidy lately. The set of her jaw … his apps told him that it was determined.
“I have to get out of here, Kenji,” she whispered.
He knew that, too. Noa was like him; she didn’t fit. Kenji was “too smart for his own good,” and even with apps, he “had trouble reading situations,” and “got too strident with his ideas.”
Noa was, in the words of the church gossips, a “handful,” and “a bad girl.” The latter label was particularly strange, as “a bad girl” implied she engaged in promiscuous behavior. In Kenji’s observation, Noa was the least promiscuous member of her peer group. His father always said, “Noa scares the boys away.”
“Tell me your organization system,” Noa said. “I know you have one.”
Of course he did. He explained it, and saw her eyes glaze over as she pulled out her own schematics. For a while they worked together in companionable silence, and then Noa asked, “Who were you talking to before I came in?”
“Charles Ko,” he said. “He is applying for the advanced mathematics program in Prime.”
Dropping her hands to her lap, Noa smiled at him. “I’m so glad you have a friend now. Isn’t talking mind-to-mind in the ether wonderful?”
Kenji huffed at the colloquialism. “The ether does not let us talk mind-to-mind; the transmitters in our skulls are limited to a very small number of frequencies. We send our thoughts to the time gates and satellites that decrypt them and then re-encrypt them for the frequencies and encryption of the neural interfaces of the person we are connecting to.”
“Well, I love it,” Noa said, smiling and squinting at a disperser. His apps told him she was bemused. “It’s great to be able to instantly talk with other kids anywhere in the galaxy.”
Kenji exhaled. That wasn’t an accurate description. The time gates sent data in continuous streams, and it was possible to have an ether conversation in real-time with anyone near a time gate. But a call to anyone not close to a gate, like Luddeccea’s nearest neighbor, Libertas, was limited to the speed of light.
He took a deep breath and let the affront to precision pass. Noa, in Kenji’s father’s opinion, had taken to the ether like a ptery to the sky and made many new friends across the inhabited systems. He’d heard his mother say that it had improved Noa’s confidence and made her happier.
“Don’t you like the ethernet?” Noa asked, squinting at another disperser.
Kenji licked his lips and attempted to be humorous. “It’s buggy.”
Noa straightened. “It isn’t buggy. The time gates and satellites sweep every frequency that reaches them for signs of encoded bugs. The only way you could get a serious virus would be by accepting a data chip from a stranger … or … or … hard-linking!”
Kenji blushed again—talking about putting a cable between his brain and a girl's with his sister was as uncomfortable as her mention of a sex ‘bot. He was also a bit crestfallen that his joke hadn’t gone over well. He cautiously looked up at her face, silently praying, ‘Please don’t ask if I’ve ever thought about hard-linking or sex ‘bots.’ Her brow was furrowed; her nose was slightly wrinkled. Kenji’s apps told him she was indignant, annoyed, and even a little afraid.
Raising her hands and shaking them as though conducting some inner orchestra, Noa continued, “The worst anyone has gotten from the ether is a headache—in over one hundred years! One hundred years!”
And suddenly, his joke didn’t matter anymore. “Why hasn’t there been a serious ethernet virus in over a hundred years?” Kenji asked.
Noa rolled her eyes. “I already told you, because the time gates receive the frequencies first. They scrub them for any sign of malicious code.”
“But Noa, humans are smarter than time gates.” Human brains were the best processors in the galaxy; to be as powerful as a human brain, a computer would have to be as large as a small moon, and would need to be powered by a nuclear reactor. Kenji looked down and blinked, summoning up the volume of the time gate’s computers; it wasn’t as large as that … but the gates were powered by nuclear reactors. The large time gates, like Luddeccea’s, had more than one.
“Computers can be smarter than humans at specific tasks,” Noa parried.
Kenji’s head jerked. “But human minds, especially human minds working together, should be able to outsmart a computer, even one that is so highly specialized.” Especially with non-ethernet based apps to do the tasks humans were normally slower at. Kenji was gifted at mathematics, but he looked forward to having his computational app installed and learning to use it properly so he wouldn’t have to enter large sums into an external computational device. He suddenly had an inspiration. “A virus that had pieces passed from several minds at once, coming together in the gate, could join and—”
“Maybe no one wants to cause that sort of virus. Even here on tech-a-phobic Luddeccea.” Sitting back, Noa frowned and crossed her arms.
Inclining his head, Kenji stared at her. He knew that look—even without apps. She was wrong and she knew it.
She looked at the floor and frowned. “All right, well, all the people who have done it have gotten caught. But the last one was years ago, and lots of investigators and computer scientists went up and they checked the hardware and the software, and they fixed it! There hasn’t been even a minor virus in a long time; they’re happening less and less!”
And that, Kenji had to concede, was definitely true.
Noa looked at a place in the air between them. “I’m calling up the schematics for this hover again,” she said, and her eyes became glazed as the schematic playing in her visual cortex was revealed to her but not to him.
The conversation was over. But Kenji’s mind was still on the question. Why hadn’t a major ethernet virus outbreak occurred in over a hundred years?
* * *
Standing from his seat, Counselor Karpel barked, “I’ll ask you again, how long has the time gate been under alien control?”
Kenji rolled back in his seat. “A hundred years at least,” he whispered.
“We do not know. That will be all, Mr. Sato,” said Premier Leetier.
The Luddeccean Intelligence agent who’d left Kenji's side a few minutes ago was back again, silently hovering beside him.
“If it has been as long as Mr. Sato has suggested, then why suddenly begin this weaponization now?” Karpel demanded. “Could it be that it feels threatened? If it does, perhaps we could negotiate—”
Someone hissed. Counselor Zar said, “We cannot negotiate with an abomination! It would be better to let it nuke one of our cities!”
There were murmurs of assent around the table. Kenji’s stomach sank and he felt like he might vomit again. But he agreed with Zar. It ... they ... had been waiting all this time for humanity to become complacent, more ether-dependent, and more vulnerable. If the intelligence had caught the Luddeccean Central Authority unprepared with an ethernet shutdown, there could have been panic. As it was, the Luddeccean Authority had been able to organize and shut down the ethernet on its own timetable.
The lights in the room slowly brightened. The projection snapped off. Leetier steepled his fingers and said, “There will be no negotiations.”
Kenji exhal
ed in relief. He heard others do the same. But Karpel stood up and half-shouted, “My constituents here on Prime will be the first target. Four million people in this capital! You’re willing to sacrifice them?”
“Be seated, Ivan,” Premier Leetier said. Kenji glanced up. He couldn’t read any emotions in Leetier’s face. But Karpel sat down.
“We have decided to initiate Mister Sato’s plan to apprehend the archangel and use it as a bargaining chip. As Mr. Sato so astutely noted, the entities have gone to great lengths to keep their agent in one piece.”
Kenji swallowed. He had to be right in that analysis. Everything was hinging on the time gates seeing value in the archangel.
Premier Leetier looked around the room. “Our Luddeccean Guard is still entangled locally and cannot be sent en masse to pursue the Ark.”
At the Premier’s words, angry murmurs erupted.
“But we do have another option,” he added. The room quieted as men in the gray uniforms with green piping that identified them as Luddeccean Intelligence got up from the table and walked over to form a line on either side of the premier and the admiral. They stood with their heads high, feet apart, arms behind their backs. Kenji’s eyes roved down the line and stopped at the man standing closest to the admiral. The agent’s forehead glinted in the light. He had a metal exo-skull. Kenji’s eyes fell to the man’s feet. His uniform was cut off at the knees. Instead of feet, he had smooth bands of metal. Kenji inhaled sharply—the man was an amputee, one who had forsworn computer-aided augmentation and instead chosen the purity of etherless steel. The man turned his head, and Kenji could see that he did have a port, but it was jammed with a polyfiber screw, making him untouchable in the ether.
The premier nodded at the admiral, and Salin began to speak. “The Ark is in need of repairs. She will be forced to either dock or conduct them in open space. When she stops, Luddeccean Intelligence will find her and capture the archangel … unharmed.”
The man with the exo-skull lifted his chin. “If I may, I have a few questions for the council.”
Leetier nodded once, and then the admiral said, “You may proceed.”
Turning to the room at large, his metal skull plate glinting in the low light, the agent said, “We have been told we have to apprehend this … archangel … but not what he is.”
There were murmurs around the room. Kenji blinked and then he heard someone say, “Impertinence.”
Zar, a hardliner and a “True Believer”, said, “It’s the devil himself you’re dealing with.”
There were some sounds of assent but also a few choking noises. The Luddeccean Authority was split between those who believed the menace in the time gates was supernatural and those who didn’t follow the Luddeccean philosophy but recognized the very real threat that the time gates represented.
The agent’s jaw hardened. “I need more to go on than that.”
“Djinn!” someone shouted. “They’ve crossed back over.”
Kenji felt a prickling irritation beneath his skin at the mention of the ancient myth of djinn, “energy beings” who had been locked out of the world of humans.
“The man is half-metal himself, how can we trust him?” someone else said, and Kenji felt himself go hot at the injustice. This “half-metal” man had sacrificed being normal to be part of the cause, and now he was going to put his life on the line for these people who denigrated him. Kenji put his hand to his face. Supernatural, alien, or other … the origins of the archangel didn’t matter. The devil might be in the details, but details weren’t what the agents needed to fight him. They needed to know the bigger truth.
Kenji focused on a point on the screen, unable to meet the agent’s eyes. Taking a sharp breath, Kenji said, “I can tell you what the archangel is.”
Chapter Two
Noa was aware in a distant way that there was a floor below her, that the timefield bands still pulsed, that the air ducts were pumping oxygenated air into her cabin aboard the Ark. But her senses had shrunk down to just the moment. Her body was entwined with James’s. They were fully clothed, their arms around each other, and James’s forehead was resting on hers. Innocuous … and not. The weight of him, the way he smelled, the muscles beneath fabric—it made the moment heavy and her skin heat despite the ambient chill. She felt both weightless and heavy, as though she was displaced in time, as though time was moving too fast and too slowly at once. It had been so long since she’d felt like this.
Across the hard-link straddling the distance between their temples, the charge of his emotions was making her hallucinate. They were a supernova—exploding inward instead of out. It was an effort to breathe ... and it was perfect. She could feel the brush of his breath against her face and felt her eyes slipping shut, but she still saw light in her mind.
… And then it ended. The cabin was startlingly cold. Noa was staring at the groove in James’s neck just above the collar of his shirt.
“What’s wrong?” he asked before she even knew; she was only aware that every hair on the back of her neck was standing on end.
“Noa, what is—” his voice was cut off by a trembling beneath their feet. The arms around her back tightened, she felt him looking up, even as she looked down. All her attention was on that tremor; she couldn’t have turned her mind away from it if she’d tried. It was a hard-won instinct.
“Time bands—something’s wrong—the field isn’t holding,” she said, or maybe she only spoke the words into his mind.
“What can I do?” James asked.
She yanked out the hard-link and with the barest hint of intent her well-trained apps started plugging in the codes for the ship’s local ethernet that Ghost, her Chief Computing Officer, had set up. She was on the shared channel in milliseconds. “Gunny, Chavez, start powering down the timefield!” She mentally accessed the Ark’s current velocity: .47C, a little less than half the speed of light.
“Yes, Commander!” Chavez said, her thought broken by a shearing noise.
Before Noa could order James out of the way, he’d gone to the door’s controls and opened it. She stumbled and pitched forward as gravity abruptly increased. James was at her side in an instant, holding her up, his augmented strength evidently allowing him to keep his feet—but the time bubble that kept the ship safe from the worst paradoxes of lightspeed was bursting—even James’s augments couldn’t protect him from that much longer.
“That’s enough, Chavez!” Noa said. For a moment she stood trapped by the fluctuating gravity, her stomach roiling, only keeping her feet because James was holding her aloft. She met his eyes and the moment felt more intense than the kiss they’d almost shared. He had always been there when she needed him, somehow from the very beginning … she thought of Oliver, the little boy he’d jumped into incoming fire to save. He’d complain loud and long that she was an idiot, and grumble about sticking his neck out … but he always came through. Gravity stabilized, and Noa pulled away with a mumbled, inadequate “thanks.”
Falling into step beside her, he asked, “Where can I be most helpful?”
“Stay with—” me, she almost finished. But the ship rocked so violently, and gravity reoriented so quickly that Noa was thrown against the wall, her back connected to the hard surface with jaw-rattling force. She rolled her head in James's direction. Pressed against the wall himself, his eyes met hers.
“This is normal in a power-down sequence?” he asked.
“Ummm … sure,” Noa lied, still pinned in place by gravity, giving James a calm commander’s reassurance to a civilian.
James raised an eyebrow, and Noa swallowed just before gravity released them, and both of them sprung from the wall.
“Okay, it’s not normal,” Noa said, and it was a relief to be able to tell the truth. She opened the door to the access tunnel. “You'd better go to Engineering … the grav shift may have knocked something over and—”
“I can lift heavy things,” he said. His face was stoic, but his avatar bloomed in her mind across the et
her, smiled, and winked.
And when had he become the one to wink and smile in the face of danger? She hadn’t meant to say that aloud, but James responded dryly, “You’ve obviously corrupted me.” And Noa felt her lips twist up in a smile of her own.
* * *
A few moments later, climbing up the access tunnel, she wasn’t smiling anymore. “What is that ensign doing?” Noa hissed as she ascended the ladder, concentrating hard on the three-fingered grip of her left hand. Power-down was the first thing new pilots learned. Chavez should have been able to manage it from .47C.
Over the ether, James said, directly to her channel, “You’ll figure something out.” Noa bit her lip, grateful for the reassurance, even though she hadn’t meant to think out loud. She always needed someone to talk to, didn’t she?
“I nearly gave myself away in a corpse wagon by talking to myself,” she grumbled aloud.
The ship rocked, her left hand slipped, and she was pressed against the wall hard. A squeak and a shape streaking toward her from above made her look up. Throwing out an arm, she caught the- weasel-like shape of Carl Sagan, the ten-legged white werfle she’d found on the streets of Prime. He curled around her neck, purring loudly in her ear.
“Too much, Chavez!” Noa shouted over the ether.
“Yes, Commander,” Chavez said. The ship stabilized a bit, and putting her hand on the next rung up, she whispered, “I’ll talk to you, Carl Sagan.” Talking to James was a bad idea. Nebulas, she’d almost asked him to come with her to the bridge. He’d be useless there. So would Carl Sagan, but it wasn’t as though the werfle would be more useful anywhere else. “So you know, this power down isn’t normal.” Even for a time band malfunction.
The werfle gave a nervous-sounding squeak. Noa mentally counted the rungs to the bridge opening … five more to go. In the tight space, she could smell dust, grease, Carl Sagan, and the scent of James clinging to her clothing. Holding her breath, expecting gravity to give again at any moment, she scrambled up the ladder. Seconds later, Noa threw open the hatch and climbed up into the bottom of the circular stairwell of the bridge. Taking the steps up to the pilot and gunner chairs three at a time, she was directly beneath the obloid glass dome of the Ark’s nose an instant later. Gunnery Sergeant Phillip Leung and Ensign Chavez were behind the cannon controls and piloting controls, respectively. The ship shook again, and Noa had just enough time to brace herself against their seats. Chavez’s prosthetic legs creaked, the squeal of the hull split her ears, and claws of ten little werfle paws dug into her neck.
