by M. D. Cooper
“No way.”
“She’s not the Cara in the show,” Rondo said.
The young officers obviously didn’t care.
“Did you see her fight with Llana?” Rycer asked.
“I was busy at the time,” Rondo said. “Didn’t get to watch.”
“I’ve got the recording,” the comms officer said.
Rondo spotted his opening and sat at the console, turning to face its display screen. “Oh yeah? Let’s watch it.”
As the replay of Cara and Llana came to life on the small screen, Rondo reached inside his coat to activate the insertion device. The terminal gave him a short buzz when it had connected with the MSS Insurmountable’s control mainframe, and then another seconds later when the payload had been delivered.
Rondo focused on the display in time to see Cara delivering a hard punch into the other woman’s pretty face.
He smiled. Apparently, he had missed a pretty good fight.
A yowl from above him revealed Adama peaking over the edge of the console. Rondo followed the ledge all the way back to the door, where the cat must have jumped above their heads. He stood and reached for the cat, who blinked at him before jumping into his hands.
“They’re good luck,” the comms officer said. “You’re fortunate to have one. I’ve missed having cats on board.”
“This one shares his luck in strange ways,” Rondo said. “But otherwise he’s all right.” He slid the black cat into the inner pocket of his coat, where Adama immediately started to purr.
THE GREAT PEARL
STELLAR DATE: Unknown
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Unknown
With the Zardling mumbling in its code language, Lyssa walked down a gently descending trail among shadowed hills. The sky was dark with few stars, which provided a backdrop for the thousands of luminescent plants on either side of the trail. Even the Zardling glowed along lines running his snout, arms, and legs.
Lyssa felt invisible in this glowing world.
Far below them, a pale dome shone in the distance. Thin lines of light ran from the dome in different directions, like a pearl in the middle of a luminous web.
Let’s hope it’s not an egg sac. Or worse, a body.
Pulses of light ran down the threads at regular intervals, feeding into the dome.
When she asked the Zardling what was inside the dome, all he answered was, “Repository.”
“That could be a whole lot of things. Repository for what?”
“All sets.”
She felt like she was talking to Fred again, the AI who controlled the Mars 1 Ring. His mind had been vast, moving in all directions like a great ocean, but he spoke in abstractions that were often too obtuse to make sense of.
He had been lonely, though. Lyssa remembered those giant emotions flooding off him, like a child alone in the dark, so hungry for anyone to stay with him.
Wasn’t that also the ultimate human fear? Dying alone?
She recalled that Fred hated abstractions, despite that being the only language he could use. He could have made his own language, she supposed. That must not have occurred to him.
Everyone had their blind spots.
The pearl grew as they traversed the foothills. When Lyssa looked behind her, all she could see was a black wall of a mountain with glowing specks in its lower reaches.
Was all this an abstraction of some part of Camaris’s mind? Lyssa had already seen enough flashes of the AI’s horrible memories that she hoped this might be the one calm place Camaris held in reserve.
Still, she walked with her guard up, ready for attack from any angle. The black sky was especially worrying.
When it became clear they were alone, at least for the time being, Lyssa tried enlisting the Zardling in conversation. It only responded with its form of language. Lyssa tried different questions to see how the creature might answer, and rather than get frustrated, it responded in ways she found endlessly humorous.
The Zardling was like an ancient NSAI that never tired of returning the same obtuse responses. It was poetic word salad, when she got him going.
The grumbling Zardling was chastising her for eliciting a ‘Drop table response sanitation’, when they rounded a hill where the valley dropped abruptly, and the base of the pearl came into view.
The dome covered a city. A grid of lights had been hidden by the wide, opalescent dome and its surrounding hills. Now the streets and rectangular buildings were plain to see, making the scale of the dome more impressive.
“We’ve got a long way to walk,” Lyssa told the Zardling.
He tilted his head from side to side—his approximation of a shrug—and continued walking down the trail.
Camaris had built a second Psion. The implications swirled in Lyssa’s mind. As Alexander failed to interact with humanity, this must have seemed the only course of action. But a second AI homeland meant an inevitable conflict, on a timeline dictated by how fast Camaris could build her new world.
The lines of light leading into the dome grew larger as she and the Zardling walked, looking more like tubes or conduits carrying what might have been maglevs. When Lyssa concentrated on watching the lines, she never saw anything leaving the city. While there didn’t seem to be a pattern to the inward flowing pulses of light, they never paused. Something was flowing continuously into the city.
When they reached the valley floor, the dome towered in the distance, sitting on top of a black wall probably a kilometer high. Their trail dissipated into fine gravel that slid underfoot but didn’t deter the Zardling. He walked fixedly toward the pearl dome, grumbling in humanized machine code.
Cold wind swept across the valley floor, swirling the dark gravel. Lyssa wasn’t bothered by the cold, and it didn’t seem to affect the Zardling, but it was an interesting addition to the scene. Was Camaris trying to create a forbidding place? What would they find inside the dome?
She had been guessing at the city inside as they walked, imagining webs hung with white spiders, or the interior of a giant ocean clam, or the largest Heartbridge clinic in existence, populated by pale, ceramic corridors leading to labs and cold storage centers.
Psion City was so plainly based on an ancient version of Paris on Earth (or maybe a Paris transported to the Amazon) that Lyssa hadn’t bothered to wonder what kind of homeland an AI could envision if it wasn’t based on an Earth settlement. Why use the organic human body as a base at all?
Remembering the fishbone fighters Camaris had built for her attack on Vesta, ships with no consideration of an organic crew, her imagination populated the city with a deep ocean, then silica forests covered in a constant drift of white flakes transporting data, or each its own expanse, providing a world until it struck the floor and melted.
The options were infinite, saying more about her imagination than what made sense.
What would Camaris imagine? This expanse was already evidence of her mind; the Zardling was proof that she’d skipped maintenance details, using default libraries to manage her systems, and allowing code rot to set in.
The wall grew as they approached, until finally, the dome was just a glow along its upper edge. There were no openings that Lyssa could see, no indications that any ground traffic entered the city at all.
The Zardling walked right up to the wall, which was made of a cool, black stone substance, and tapped its surface. A clean rectangle appeared, so similar to one of the lizard being’s portals that Lyssa wondered if they were actually entering the city.
Through the rectangle appeared a dark street lined by buildings with glowing windows. Beings walked the street, and in the distance, vehicles filled a cross-path.
The Zardling paused, looking back at her.
“Submission verification?” he asked.
&n
bsp; “You coming with me?” Lyssa asked in return.
The Zardling did his shrug motion again, although Lyssa thought she caught a hint of excitement in the shape of his black eyes before he trundled through the opening.
Lyssa stepped through the door after him.
The air was warmer on the other side of the wall. From somewhere down the street, she heard piano music. The Zardling closed the door.
They were inside Camaris’s new city.
LOOSE THE WORMS
STELLAR DATE: 09.03.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Amplified Solution
REGION: Hildas Asteroids, OuterSol
Fran was waiting for them at the Amplified Solution’s airlock.
“Thank the stars you’re back,” she said when Cara stepped aboard.
“What’s wrong?”
“I couldn’t communicate with you because they’ve been hitting us with active scan continuously since you left. I was worried our long-range antenna was going to get fried.”
“Which ship?” Cara asked.
“The second Marsian courser, Firebrand, and the station. Hilgram has some high-powered comms systems.”
“It’s a station,” Cara said.
“This was unusual. I’m serious. I thought we were going to get cooked. I’ve got the engines online, and a burn path laid in. I figured you’d want me to save your ship.”
Rondo left the airlock, frowning. “The comms officer told me Hilgram wasn’t broadcasting anything but Stars the Hard Way.”
Fran put her hands on her hips. “He lied.”
“Huh,” Rondo grumbled. “Now I won’t feel so bad about frying their systems.”
“Let’s get up to the command deck,” Cara told them. “I want a good view on what’s in front of us. If we’re getting offensive action from the station, that changes our approach once we shut down the Marsians. Rondo, get your attack ready, but I also want you to siphon off some of that data stream Fran’s talking about, and crack it.”
“I already pulled you a data set,” Fran said. “I don’t know how to de-encrypt it, but you’ve got a couple hours to work with, at least.”
“Thank you,” Rondo said. “That’s going to help a lot.”
“How long until we can set your worms loose?” Cara asked.
Rondo rubbed his hands together. “They’re already loose. I had control of their NSAI before we left. We can execute any time you want.”
“Good,” Cara said. “I’m stopping by my room to change out these clothes. I smell like Marsian soup. I’ll meet you both in the command deck.”
* * * * *
As Cara entered her room, she received a Link request from Crash.
Crash sent her a mental frown.
Cara stood in the doorway to her room and looked around angrily, realizing she didn’t have the time she had spent coming here.
She quickly changed her shipsuit, splashed water on her face, then left for the command deck.
* * * * *
Rondo was already at the comms console, petting a purring Adama in his lap, when Cara walked in. Cara couldn’t help studying the cat, with its low-lidded, green eyes.
Crash needs something to do, she decided.
The parrot was too smart for his own good, and like any smart rookie, he was going to get himself into trouble without something to keep him occupied. As captain, she should have put him to work from the beginning. She’d treated him differently, and that had been a mistake.
Rondo glanced up at her, and Cara gave him a reassuring nod. She knew he wouldn’t care where he sat on the command deck. It wasn’t like they were overflowing with crewmembers.
Rather than showing a schematic of the Insurmountable, as Cara had expected, Rondo pulled up a view of local space, with the Marsian coursers orbiting Hilgram like blue ghosts above another ghostly outline. Smaller icons noted station and Marsian military drones. The Hilgram farming orbitals were gold cylinders in the space between station and ships.
Cara had to admit the Andersonians had built something impressive in the short time since they’d left Ceres. She hoped it didn’t get destroyed in the coming events.
Would she sacrifice Tim to protect the Andersonians? She thought of the families she’d met when she landed the ancient Soyuz capsule on Luna. They were just people—an especially downtrodden people, as far as she could tell.
Cara steeled herself. She was here for Tim.
With barely any pause, Rondo said,
The MSS Insurmountable, outlined in a darker blue than the other two Marsian ships, was enveloped in a red haze concentrated around its engines. Cara realized the view was a heat map.
The red haze grew in intensity, and two minutes later, the Insurmountable went to full burn. The courser jumped in the display. For a second, Cara thought the holotank had glitched, until the ship braked.
She bit her lip. Rondo had most likely just killed everyone on board with g-forces.
She glanced back at him. He had moved to the nav console, where he was running remote commands on the Marsian ships. His face was focused but impassive. Adama sat across his legs.
I didn’t tell you to kill them.
In the display, the MSS Insurmountable came around, its main railgun crackling as it fired on the nearest courser.
By now, the third Marsian ship had realized something was terribly wrong and brought up all shields. Their engines blazed alive. They came around, bringing the Amplified Solution within their attack range for missiles.
“Rondo,” Cara said.
“I’m on it,” he said, voice still calm.
The MSS Insurmountable’s point defense cannons poured rivers of kinetic rounds on the ship moving to attack the Amplified Solution. The courser was forced to take evasive action, as a short burn jerked them away from the station.
Rondo rotated the MSS Insurmountable and emptied its missile batteries on the other ship.
The third courser couldn’t outrun the missiles. It faded in the holotank in an orange haze.
With the Marsian ships neutralized, Rondo pulled the MSS Insurmountable into an overwatch position just outside the Amplified Solution’s orbit, a drone escort filled with dead Marsians.
Cara took a deep bre
ath, gripping the arms of her chair. She hadn’t thought Rondo capable of this kind of operation. Of course, she hadn’t told him how to neutralize the threat, just to find a way.
Did Fugia know what he was capable of?
The door to the command deck slid open, and Crash glided through. The parrot landed on the back of the chair at the comms console. He looked from Cara to Rondo, blinking.
APROACH POINT
STELLAR DATE: 09.03.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Hilgram Station
REGION: Hildas Asteroids, OuterSol
Ty led the way through corridors lined with network filament and conductive piping. He tried to imagine what purpose the various systems served. They seemed to be moving through a section of the ring that provided power transfer from external generating stations to the station’s interior. Drones trundled along the corridors, checking node-points, and thankfully ignoring the running Marsian soldiers.
He glanced back at Briggs struggling with the big gun. Chandrey jogged behind him, focused on the corridor ahead. Manny brought up the rear, lumbering like an ogre in his battered armor.
