Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 13


Jeena took it the best of everyone, and Talinn couldn’t decide if that made sense or not. Sammer periodically chortled to himself, to the point she had to consider if the Other Talinn’s backdoor code—or whatever it had been—had damaged him.

Sigmun insisted they should “tell everyone” and that would “make it right.” Caytil, ten minutes in to mercilessly mocking her, was in the midst of a pretend livecast of what that would sound like when Talinn had yet another belated realization.

She eased over to Jeena, on the outskirts of the group and with Caytil’s projected monologue as cover (“And the clones, citizens, you should see them. Thirteen generations—or thirty, they’re unclear, everyone knows clones don’t know history, or counting—”), and murmured, “Who else has access to what we say in here?”

Jeena blinked out of her unfocused study into the unseen void, and fixed her eyes on Talinn’s. “I’m not going to betray—oh, no, you mean monitoring?” At Talinn’s impatient nod she relaxed, her mouth twitching up briefly as though she were about to smile. “There are no listening devices in here. We have too many energy fluctuations—purposeful and in the course of our work. And we clean. Thoroughly. Techs handle sensitive matters, and Command doesn’t want any chance that anyone—even our own people—will learn too much about the AIT program.”

“Is that what you think Base Two was doing? Trying to find out too much about the AIT program?”

Jeena frowned and tapped her fingers on her hip, tilting her head first to the left, then the right. Considering her answer, or weighing how much to say? Talinn told herself to start paying more attention to how unadapted humans’ expressions worked, though the list of things she needed to pay more attention to had grown exponentially of late.

“I doubt it. He already knows at least enough to ask you the right question.”

A protest half formed before she swallowed it back. “Did you see her?” could only have meant so many things. While possible Base Two had another “her” in mind, the likelihood of that was . . . not great. She discarded several conversational directions, then loosened the tension in her upper body. An attempt to appear more conversational, less urgent, and welcome a confidence or three from the tech.

“I haven’t seen Base Two outside of the ceremony when we landed here, but he’s been all over the place the last few days. You seem to be more familiar with him. What do you think he’s doing?”

“I’m not familiar.” Jeena glanced at Sammer as she emphasized the last word. Talinn managed not to make a face. “But techs fall under Base Two’s purview, not Base Command Actual, so we see him more often than you would.”

Talinn not only continued to control her expression, she also didn’t make a “get on with it” gesture, and under the circumstances that seemed like all the win she could expect.

“He . . . he has a strong record. It didn’t make sense to me that he’d be assigned to a base so far from the active fronts.” Jeena hesitated again, and Talinn decided some personal interest might help move this along.

“You seem pretty good at your job, and you’re out here.” Her voice remained neutral—no need to give the impression she was making an effort to flatter the tech.

“Hm?” Jeena blinked, as though pulled back from a side path her thoughts had wandered down. “My senior advisor told me it was so I’d have space for research.” She lifted her hands, outlined the barest sketch of the portable server Talinn had spent all too much time with recently. “Still remaining in practice, skills sharp, part of the effort, but . . .” Her eyes narrowed, and Talinn held her breath, watching small motions flicker across Jeena’s face.

When the tech remained silent, she swallowed a sigh and prompted, “You’re well regarded in the command structure and were sent here for a specific reason. If that’s the case for Base Two, as well, what do you think—”

“You.”

“Say more?” Talinn intended that to be a flat directive, but her voice betrayed her and lifted at the end.

“Not you, just you . . . you, the Eights.”

“Going to repeat myself here, and—”

“Say more, I know.” The smaller pupils of Jeena’s eyes contracted and dilated, and Talinn wished she could slide Bee in there to tell her what parts of the tech’s brain were lighting up. Not that it would do much good—without the familiarity built over cycles and cycles of training and targeted programming, Bee wouldn’t be able to make more than the most generalized of meaning from someone else’s brain. Never mind the lack of ports and the—Talinn reined her own thoughts back on course.

“Are you going to, then, or . . . ?” Talinn leaned back against the console, trapping her hands between her backside and the smooth metal to keep from making any regrettable, if satisfying, moves.

“The Eights posted here have successful records—unsurprising, there are very few active Eights with poor records—but when the last assignments came in . . .” She trailed off again, and Talinn ungraciously wondered if unadapted humans were unable to complete thoughts because they didn’t have anyone else in their head to prompt them.

“Is this what you have to do for me?” Her subvocalized question to Bee went unanswered, though a hint of tortured metal spoke to Bee’s faint amusement.

“Dorvil was our senior tech last cycle. Here mostly because she . . .” Jeena’s face flushed, and Talinn couldn’t summon the curiosity to pry into the potentially scandalous reason—her own skin warmed as impatience ratcheted through her. “She asked a couple of times why we were getting experienced Eights out here, instead of the newly graduated. Array support made sense—every base needs at least the minimum there—but usually an outskirt like this gets new Eights. Or glitchy ones.”

Glitchy?

“Now you’re interested?”

Sounds like something we should know more about, don’t you think?

Yet another benchmarked topic she needed to come back to. Talinn filed it and bit down on the front of her tongue to keep from interrupting Jeena. The tech, her eyes unfocused again, seemed to be more parsing her own thoughts than choosing what to reveal, and Talinn didn’t want to derail that. No matter how long it took.

“But the last two batches that came in, you were all midcareer. Well reviewed. Successful in missions and no notable variances in connections or loads.”

Connections to each other, I’m guessing. Loads to . . . our assignments? Or processing capacity, once we’re set up? Load-in?

Talinn didn’t ask those questions either. Her fingertips pressed hard against the console behind her, but she held otherwise still.

“Dorvil asked a couple of times. And then she was reassigned.” Jeena held up a hand, cocked her head. “No . . . that’s right. She was supposed to retire. But we never got the—” Her eyes snapped back to focus, locked on Talinn’s again. “When a tech hits retirement, all the people they served with get a notification to contribute a message or note or something for their exit package. I don’t know if Eights do that. But we never got one for Dorvil.”

Talinn’s brows pulled together, and she hurriedly smoothed them out. What did it matter if a bureaucrat missed sending a notification that some unadapted human had successfully completed their term of service to the UCF?

“Talinn . . . the exit package is used as a nice sendoff, sure, but Command also takes all the reviews and notes from the other techs to determine the compensation for retirement. They don’t expressly tell us that, but we all know. There’s no way someone retiring wouldn’t trigger that request in the system.”

It was an entirely underwhelming supposed revelation. Given its evident importance to Jeena, Talinn didn’t say such a thing, but it must have been on her face.

“I didn’t notice . . . shit in a spiral what else did we miss?”

“Jeena . . . I don’t want to be rude here, but—”

“What under all the skies, right?” Jeena nodded, but her attention wasn’t on Talinn anymore. She scanned the room, straightened her shoulders, and strode away.

“Do I . . . should I follow her?” Talinn half asked herself, half asked Bee, but she’d already pushed away from the console and taken two steps after the tech. As Talinn crossed the room, Caytil swung around, lifting a hand in silent question.

Talinn spread her own fingers to the side, silently responding “Glitched if I know,” and was unsurprised when Caytil broke off her own conversation to follow.

“Getting the group of you here was weird.” Jeena’s fingers blurred over a different console, shorthand streaming over the small display between buttons. She spoke as Talinn came to a halt next to her, as though she hadn’t cut herself off and walked off midconversation. “But you were assigned in batches, and after Dorvil left we had our own rearranging to do. But if . . .”

“Jeena, this is all interesting.” Talinn was sure she sounded genuine about that, as untrue as it was. “But what—”

“Base Two signed off on the orders. All the orders—Dorvil’s early retirement. The three sets of assignments upon receipt of the Eights . . . and Talinn, come on, you know this. A Base Two doesn’t deal with Eights. That’s for Base Command Actual. Whatever the reason you were all sent here, Base Two is read in on it. More than he should be. At least enough that he knows something’s off.”

“And so you’re looking for what, exactly?”

“The ship Dorvil went out on. I take notes on everything, and—”

“Everything?” Talinn’s voice sharpened, and Caytil brushed fingers against her elbow in concern.

Jeena waved a hand dismissively. “The shorthand is less a code, and more a process I’ve trained into my own brain. The notes only toggle where I’ve stored the exact memory in my—ahh.” The last word became more of an exhalation, and for the first time Talinn wondered if there was something different about techs’ brains. Were they truly unadapted humans? Would Command trust plain, simply trained, normal people with the secrets of the AIT program?

“Dorvil lifted up to take the Takana Majot out of system, to get back to UCF Command for final retirement processing.”

“And?” Caytil’s prompting emerged much calmer than Talinn’s might have been, given how tight Talinn’s throat had grown.

“The Takana Majot, turns out, decommissioned early this cycle after repeated transit discrepancies.”

That was a casually unassuming way to mention the deadly side effects of quantum travel.

“Seems a little obvious for a conspiracy.” Caytil continued to speak gently, but she’d gone rigid at Talinn’s side.

“No—the timing technically works out, if I didn’t have in my notes that the . . .” Jeena’s words tumbled into a breathless laugh, and she snatched her hands back from the console, tangling them in her hair and yanking pulled-back strands loose. “The ship was decommissioned after Dorvil’s transit window, but it wasn’t traveling for some time before that.”

“Orienting question, Tech Class Boralid: How do you know?”

“Because the ships are built around their AI pairs. And I had its central AI in a box.”


Back | Next
Framed