After what felt like a long time Muz came back online. His voice was flat. ‘The reading’s fine. No, shit, I don’t mean fine. But it’s correct, or near enough. Now eighteen hundred, slowing a bit but still going up.’ He laughed, and suddenly he sounded like his old self. ‘Over three times the lethal dose. That’s practically showing off.’
‘No!’ Fleare almost shouted the word. ‘Look, are your engines online?’ She checked frantically. ‘Mine are. I’ll circle back to you, we’ll lock drives and head into the Heg’ hub. We can give ourselves up, they’ll fix you—’
She broke off, dropped a hand to the fly stick and had actually pulled her drive out of standby when Muz yelped: ‘No!’
She yanked her hand away from the stick. ‘No, what?’
‘No, don’t move. I just thought of something.’ He sounded calm again. ‘No, I thought of two things. They can’t fix me. I’ve had three lethal doses. Cancel that, it’s four now. I’m so dead, Fleare.’
Fleare wanted to thump the console, but there wasn’t room. ‘I have to try!’
‘No, you don’t. Check your levels again. What have you got?’
She peered at the console. ‘About the same as before. Tiny bit higher. So?’
‘That’s what I thought. Mine are still racing up. Come on, Fleare, think. Just for once I flew by the book. My ship is exactly between you and the nuke. You’re in my shadow. We both caught the gamma flash, but the slow heavy stuff, alpha particles and neutrons and shit, they’re hitting me and stopping. If you move out of my shadow you stop some too, and you can’t afford to stop too many before you end up where I am.’
‘Oh.’ She wanted to say something else, but she couldn’t think what. She stared at the crippled visual. Whatever was leaking past Muz’s skiff wasn’t doing the camera any good; more pixels had blacked out, but the silhouette was still there. Superhero, she thought. Too right. And I ran away.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, willing the hot pricking behind them to go away. To her surprise, it nearly did. Then she muted the comms for a second while she got her breathing under control, and switched back in. ‘Right, Corporal, let’s get this sorted out. How do you feel?’
‘Huh?’ He sounded genuinely surprised.
‘Report!’ She blinked at her own sharpness, while a small traitor part of her admitted that it was better than pleading with him to keep talking to her.
‘Um, right. Not great, to be honest. Some nausea, tongue and lips beginning to swell.’
‘Do you have manoeuvrability?’
‘Checking.’ A pause. ‘Yes and no. Drive is sixty per cent; controls only ten per cent. I could do a pretty good drunkard’s walk.’
‘Fine. So slave your controls to me. We’ll stay in formation, but let’s get further away from the problem.’
‘Okay, but I’m still dead.’
‘Not yet you aren’t, and I’m not leaving you alone.’ She watched what was left of her display blurring into a fresh pattern as it incorporated the control memes of Muz’s skiff. When it was finished the display dimmed briefly – the AI equivalent of a nodded head – and she took hold of the console. ‘Stand by. Accelerating in five.’
The drive kicked in, pressing her back into her couch. She stared at the rearward camera with its increasingly ragged view of Muz’s silhouette. She had programmed straight, level flight for both craft and it looked as if that was what she was getting; the silhouette stayed steady in the field of view, still at the centre of the now-receding nuclear fireball. When she was satisfied with the flight path she ramped up the linked drives to fifty per cent, and spoke into the comm. ‘We’re off. What’s your status?’
‘Kind of okay. Uh, no, wait.’ There was a pause full of the tell-tale silence of a muted mike, and Fleare took the chance to swing the mostly crippled camera round to give a forward view. Then the silence ended in a soft pop and Muz was back, sounding slurred. ‘Sorry. Acceleration doesn’t do much for nausea.’
‘Yeah, I bet.’ Fleare stared bitterly at the patchy view of Heg’ territory for a second. Then she set the comm to all channels en clair and spoke through clenched teeth. ‘Calling all Hegemony units. This is Captain Fleare Haas, Society Otherwise. Medical emergency: one fatal radiation dose to human male, one critical to human female. We surrender under humanitarian terms. Location is as message source. Please assist urgently.’ She repeated the message twice more, set the comm to broadcast it as a recording, and got ready to wait.
It was a short wait; the response took ten seconds. ‘Calling Captain Haas. Your signal is acknowledged. We have your location. If you maintain your present course and delta-vee our ETA is six minutes.’ The voice paused, and then added: ‘But what’s with all the surrender shit? I thought we were friends.’
It was Jezerey. Fleare felt her eyes trying to widen with shock, but the sense of relief was too great. Despite everything she could do, they closed instead.
Fleare struggled to wake. There seemed no urgency; she was comfortable, although for some reason she couldn’t move. For a moment there were faces – she saw Jezerey and Kelk, but she wasn’t sure if they were real. She wondered why Muz wasn’t there and felt a touch of disquiet, but then a warm cloudiness spread through her and she slept.
When they finally withdrew the sedation, it took her a while to wake up. She groped back to consciousness to find herself lying under discreet guard in a room in a Hegemony military hospital. Kelk and Jezerey were sitting with her. When she was awake enough to listen, they began talking. It took even longer before she was awake enough to understand.
Talking done, they nursed cups of steaming chai. The silence lengthened. Eventually Fleare said: ‘What, all of them?’
‘Seems so.’ Kelk sipped his drink. ‘It was simultaneous. Every station, at least every one we had news of. All at once. Mostly tac nukes, like us. A few big energy-discharge weapons. Some people are saying the Heg’ must have had help from inside. I don’t know.’ He fell silent again, concentrating on his drink. The expression tightened fields of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and Fleare thought how much older he looked.
‘Did any of our guys get out?’ she asked.
‘Just us two. Kelk figured we should play watchmen too, since the station sensors were offline. So we were a thousand klicks out when the nuke went off.’
‘And Muz?’ It had always been Fleare’s first question. She just hadn’t asked it first.
Jezerey and Kelk looked at each other. Finally Kelk spoke. ‘You can talk to him, if you like,’ he said slowly. ‘But you need to know, he’s not himself.’
Fleare jumped up, spilling chai. ‘Not himself? But he’s alive?’
‘Sort of.’ Kelk looked directly at Fleare. ‘His body’s dead. He’s running as a simulation.’
‘He’s a sim? But that means he can be re-bodied!’ Fleare felt a huge grin breaking out.
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Kelk looked helplessly at Jezerey, who stood up and took Fleare’s hands in her own.
‘Muz was almost gone when we got here. We’re not sure how he did it, but he managed to upload himself to the skiff’s AI cloud.’
‘So?’ Fleare felt elated. ‘He can still be re-bodied. It’ll just take a while.’
‘No. The Heg’ won the war, Fleare. They don’t do the whole mods thing, remember? It’s all illegal again, and that includes new bodies.’
Fleare stared at her. ‘But that means we’re . . .’ she faltered.
It was Kelk who answered. ‘Illegal too. Yes. We are.’
‘And Muz?’ Fleare felt the ground opening in front of her. ‘There must be something? I mean, he’s okay, right?’
‘We don’t know.’ Kelk looked at her sadly. ‘He’s not saying anything.’
Fleare pulled her hands from Jezerey’s and folded her arms. ‘I still want to talk to him,’ she said. And you can’t stop me, she almost added.
‘I know you do. It might do him good.’ Kelk looked at Jezerey, who nodded slightly. ‘Uh, before we
go, there’s someone else who wants to hear from you.’ He reached into a pocket, pulled out something the shape of an antique calling card and held it out to Fleare.
It was blank on both sides. She looked at it suspiciously. ‘Is that who I think it is?’
‘Probably.’ He shrugged. ‘It turned up while you were asleep. We couldn’t decide whether to burn it or hand it over. Sorry.’
‘Not your fault.’ She took the card and watched as handwritten letters walked across the blankness. Can we talk? It was in her father’s handwriting. She gazed at it until the letters had faded, and then shoved the card into her own pocket. Then she looked up, and smiled brightly. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Muz?’
Jezerey nodded. ‘Sure.’ She glanced at Kelk, who pursed his lips and reached for a call patch.
The door opened almost before he had time to complete the gesture.
She was taken underground. She wasn’t sure how far, but the ear-popping, stomach-lifting descent had lasted minutes, suggesting pretty far. Then there had been corridors, with three lots of airlock-style doors. The last one had opened with a faint but distinct sucking noise and a sigh of indrawn air that had made Fleare raise an eyebrow. There was no doubt about it. The space beyond the lock was under a slight vacuum. Someone wanted to make sure nothing got out.
She had assumed that Jezerey and Kelk would come with her, but the door of her room had slammed emphatically shut before they had had a chance to follow, and had shown no sign of reopening despite forceful requests. She expected they would manage. Now she stood in front of a cylinder made of some sort of translucent, smokily greyish glass. It was about the size of a human torso and it floated, motionless and apparently unsupported, so that its middle was roughly level with her eyes.
As far as she could tell through the cloudy glass, it was empty. She frowned, and turned to the orderly that stood at her shoulder. ‘Where is he?’
The orderly raised a stick-thin arm towards the jar. ‘The entity is within the containment,’ it said. Its voice was like the rustle of insects but with a bass undertone. She gave it a glare and then turned back to the jar.
It looked – odd. There was something about the greyness of the glass, if it was glass, that stopped her eyes from focusing on it. It seemed to move. Then she realized. The glass was clear. The greyness was within, a subtly shifting fog. She took a step back and looked at the orderly. ‘Is that him? The floating stuff?’
It nodded. She turned back to the cylinder, leaning down so that her nose was against the glass. ‘Muz?’
There was no answer. Fleare straightened up and turned to the orderly. ‘Has he said anything?’
‘Since being contained it has not communicated, although there is no known reason why it should not.’
‘Hmm. Well, perhaps he doesn’t like being contained. Have you thought of that?’
‘It is irrelevant. The entity is a potential threat.’
‘Threat? He’s a cloud of dust!’
For a while the creature said nothing, but just stared glassily at her while she held on to a rising anger. Then its face seemed to change. The blankness went, and she had the impression that it was using – or being used by – a lot more intellect than before. When it spoke its voice sounded different as well – brisker and more controlled, as if a higher level of processing had taken over. ‘The entity is a prisoner of war, and entitled to our protection. It is also illegal and potentially dangerous. It will be contained safely until legal counsel have agreed a route for repatriation.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘Your friend came close to death by radiation – not a good experience – and was then remodelled into a dispersed cloud of artificial intelligence fragments, each one capable of autonomous action and defence. The transition was not immediate. The AI cloud appears to have resisted the takeover. This, too, was presumably traumatic.’
‘You mean he had to fight his way in?’ Fleare grinned. ‘Go Muz!’
‘Quite. However,’ and it made a show of looking at the glass vessel, ‘it – he – has every right to be psychotic. Psychopathic at the very least. And we have every right to be extremely cautious.’
‘Psychotic? Whoa, hold on!’ Fleare faced the creature. ‘You can’t know that, if you can’t talk to him.’
‘No, we can’t. But we can model. We can simulate his personality, and put the simulation through the experience he faced. There is a better than three-quarters chance that he has suffered substantial mental trauma.’ For the first time, the stony face showed an expression – the trace of an apologetic smile. ‘Hence our caution. We have a dispersed, self-replicating entity of unknown mental state and, at the moment, unknown capabilities. In theory such an entity could multiply until it had overwhelmed the universe. There are good practical reasons why it probably wouldn’t, but even so we will not take the risk of just letting it go. Even if it was legal, and at the moment that is far from established.’
Fleare stared at the creature, and then for a long time at the cloud. Then she mouthed ‘I love you’ at it, straightened up, and turned away. ‘Look after him,’ she said. ‘Now I want to go back to my quarters.’
The orderly extended an arm towards the door. She walked past it, and as she did so she saw the animation that had briefly taken over its features fall away. Whatever it was that answered questions had obviously finished with her.
As they passed through the airlocks she took out the card and watched the letters bloom and fade as she brushed her fingers over them. Can we talk?
Abruptly she turned the card over and used her fingernail to write NO!, pressing hard so that the letters remained incised into the surface even after they had disappeared. Then she shoved the card into her pocket. By the time she had reached her room it had crumbled into a fine white dust. Message received, she assumed. She wondered what would happen next.
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. The next morning she was informed that she had been reclassified as ‘legitimate collateral’, whatever that meant, and she was unceremoniously yanked out of her quarters and hustled to a spaceport. Two changes of shuttle later, she was heading across the periphery of the Outer Spin on board a converted cargo clipper belonging to some outfit called the Strecki Brotherhood.
By then she had worked out that ‘legitimate collateral’ meant the Heg’ had sold her on as a suitable prospect for ransom. She briefly tried to persuade herself that her father had nothing to do with it.
It didn’t work very well. It was never going to. There was too much history, too many memories.
Private Estate, Semph Leisure Complex
FLEARE HAD BEEN five.
The ground car still seemed very big, even though she was now very big herself. She snuggled into the soft padding of the seat, trying to find out how deep she could get. The car was old – Daddy said it had been her great-grandfather’s – and smelled nice, in a grown-up sort of way. She decided that from now on all birthdays would smell like this.
The Feather Palms zipped by. She tried to count them but they were too quick. The car was going quite fast. It swayed a bit, like a bath toy when the only thing moving the water was your breathing. The motion moved her from side to side so that she pressed first against her father and then her mother. Her mother smelled of the perfume from the little pink bottle on her dressing table that Fleare sometimes tried on when her mother was asleep, but not very much of the watery stuff from the bigger bottle under her bed. Her mother thought the bottle was secret, but Fleare had decided it was her job to know everything about her mother so she could make sure she was all right. She knew where all her mother’s bottles and packets were kept.
Daddy smelled of soap and clothes and sweat, as if he was too hot, although the car was quite cool. In the front she could see the rough skin of Fahri’s neck, sticking out of his chauffeur’s uniform, like orange peel only the wrong colour. Although he was very fat, and in Fleare’s experience most fat people smelled quite a lot, Fahri never seemed to smell at all.
He hardly even moved. She wondered if he had grown out of the driving seat, like a sort of tree.
She decided to stop thinking about smells. She nudged her father. ‘Where are we going?’
His shoulders rose a bit, as if he was taking one of his deep breaths. The answer was going to be the same as the last five times she’d asked. She got ready to ask her mother instead.
There was a whoosh, and a car overtook them very quickly. Her mother and father looked at each other. Her father closed his mouth. Her mother sat a bit more upright. Fahri’s shoulders moved, and suddenly he was driving with one hand and holding a stubby tube-thing in the other.
This wasn’t fair. It was her birthday treat, even if she didn’t know what it was yet, and she didn’t want anything spoiling it. She tugged at her mother’s sleeve. ‘What’s happening?’
Her mother looked down and made a hushing gesture, but with such a fierce expression that Fleare flinched back and began to cry.
Another car overtook, not so quickly as the first but very close. Fleare sniffled and sat up, trying to see through the windows to find out if it was anyone she knew, but before she had a chance to look her father had shoved her down on to the seat. ‘Get down,’ he hissed, and then, to her mother, ‘Keep the stupid little bitch out of the way.’
The words felt like a slap, but they weren’t as bad as her father’s expression.
She hadn’t seen him look frightened before.
The car swerved and stopped. She felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder. Then there was a soft booming followed by a much louder noise that said pyock-pyock-pyock-pyock. She felt a sting on her shoulder and another on her cheek. Her mother said ‘Oh’, but in a voice that didn’t really sound surprised, and the pressure of her hand lifted for a second and then returned, if anything heavier. Something warm splashed Fleare’s neck.
Creation Machine Page 9
