CHAPTER 21
The Pajeeran Fall didn’t have any other living cargo, so the Spacies brought them all together in the passenger mess, which had more room than their own. Xenni’s right hand twitched every four and a half seconds, but otherwise the small group of Eights appeared in normal bounds of health.
There were varying levels of emotional health—Arnod’s frown was ferocious, Heka’s eyes watered constantly without her wiping away the tears, Caytil kept drifting away and blinking herself back to focus and her seat at the table—but Jeena relaxed in her seat and didn’t peer worriedly at anyone, and Talinn figured that was the best they were going to get given the circumstances.
“It goes like this.” Falix gestured widely, his body not even shifting in the decreased gravity.
“Please forgive,” Benty chimed in over the speaker, his version of Falix’s voice shaded with more of a wry amusement.
“We don’t interact with passengers much.” Nya, busy farming out prepackaged foods to each Eight, beamed brightly.
“At all,” Surex muttered.
“Except that we do, on occasion. This group, however, is a treat.” Falix lowered his hands, smile wider than before his team’s interjections. “So. It goes like this—”
“There’s a war,” Dubs interjected helpfully. Bee sheared metal in Talinn’s head, but didn’t add to the interruptions through the speaker. Talinn considered feeling grateful, realized that would only encourage Bee, and focused on the matter at hand.
“Thank you, X-11.” Falix rolled his eyes, but no annoyance Talinn could read flickered across his face. “There is, indeed, a war.”
“That part I think we got.” Konti unpeeled the food container Nya had handed her, but didn’t pierce it to begin drinking.
“I knew I should have brought Kivex.” Falix opened his mouth to continue speaking, but Nya merged into the conversation with yet more cheerfulness.
“She’s still pulling back together after transference, but she’ll be ready for personal interface in—”
Personal interface as opposed to?
Talinn repeated the question aloud. The briefing was chaos already, she couldn’t see how it hurt at this point.
“Ah. Well. So.” Falix pushed closer to the table, and his AI made a short, discordant noise that strongly reminded Talinn of Bee’s method of sticking out her nonexistent tongue.
“X-series AIs have several adaptations not afforded to Artificial Intelligence Troops.”
“In that we are all semilooped into each other’s conversations.” Dubs, his voice a mix of Benty’s and Surex’s, took up the next sentence without a pause.
“More than semi,” Nya offered, glancing at Falix before continuing. “Semilooped is by design.”
“We are fully integrated in terms of communication.” This voice, much like Kivex’s, must have been Ditto—a fact Nya murmured confirmation to for the rest of the Eights. “We believe Command is aware, though it is neither a matter of our training nor something we are cautioned against.”
“Which is why I say they don’t know.”
“They do.”
“They don’t.”
The chorus of voices overlapped so briskly Talinn wouldn’t have been able to separate them without Bee’s immediate, and amused, assistance. Falix, then Ditto, then Surex and Dubs at once.
“We’re not arguing amongst ourselves, I should note.” Falix cleared his throat, perhaps noting the array of expressions across the Eights. “It’s a way we discuss to decide what we really think.”
“You’re . . .” Caytil wrapped her hands around the table to anchor herself in place. Her unopened food drifted to her left. “You’re like a hive mind?”
“No.” Surex bit off the word.
“But also not entirely no.” Falix tipped a foot side to side, then shrugged elaborately, the motion moving down his body in a ripple. “But that’s not why we’re here—”
“So you’re connected, and that means you’re in touch with Kivex, but she’s not ready to be face-to-face with anyone?” Sammer sipped his food idly, glancing from Falix to Surex as though they had all day.
“Entanglement is a process. Kivex will need some time to put all of her own head back into place.” Ditto again, her tone precise. “We are currently semiscattered, but as that is my constant state, given a part of me always resides at my jump point, it is easier for me to interact than it is for her. Usually, this is not a matter of concern.”
“Because again, we don’t get to interact with passengers much.”
“Can you imagine an empty’s response to this? Your finishing each other’s thoughts. The wonky eyes?” Arnod chuckled, though alongside his ever-present frown, the sound grated.
“What’s wonky about our eyes?” Falix asked in perfect sincerity, and Arnod’s ferocious expression wavered until Nya laughed.
“A part of you always resides . . . ?” Caytil prompted, and there was a momentary silence.
“Different X-series are entangled with their different jump points, and in part that holds through a sphere in the jump point hosting a small piece of that X-series’ code.”
“Like a defense array, anchored in a point in space?” Konti hummed thoughtfully, eyes not quite focusing on any of them.
“Much smaller.”
“And unweaponed.”
“So we can’t blow anything up from there.”
“Less overwhelming death.”
“More like statis arrays.”
Again, Talinn could have followed which Spacie said which words, but it didn’t seem worth it, given she still couldn’t wrap her mind entirely around how the jump points worked.
Jeena flattened her hands on the table, and for no reason Talinn could discern, that called them all back to the matter at hand. They’d left their entire reason for existence behind, along with more than a few bodies of their friends. As far away as that felt, on the long side of load-in and a jump point with pieces of Spacie AI in it, it crowded close in the moment.
I think that was them trying to help. Bee again didn’t use her new access to the speaker to share the thought, and Talinn’s lips twitched into a semblance of a smile.
“So there’s a war,” she prompted, pretending not to notice Jeena’s thankful glance. “And it’s like . . . this?”
“Yes. Right.” Falix straightened and floated back from the table. “So we have three systems—”
“A debrief, please, not a history lesson—”
“Given we don’t know what version of information you have been given, it will be both.” Dubs did not sound apologetic, and Arnod didn’t protest again.
“Hynex.” Falix tapped his temple.
“Govlic,” Surex continued, his word immediate even if unwillingness was clear in his tone.
“And Exfora,” Ditto contributed.
Also what they’re each entangled with. Spacies aren’t as hard to read as empties.
“I think they made that one a little obvious,” Talinn replied, mostly subvocal.
“In order of age, if not importance.” Falix had continued without pause, whether he’d heard her or not. “Hynex, named after the first ship to ever jump there, historically remains in IDC control, being the birthplace of the Interstellar Defense Corps and our first anchor into space.” He examined each of them, but no one protested. “Hynex continues to have the highest population of any of the systems, mostly due to its six habitable planetary bodies, endless planetary ring settlements, and very large stations.”
“The UCF is currently in possession of four of those stations.” Surex stalked over to the table, his magnetic boots clumping louder than perhaps necessary, and tossed a disk into the middle of them. Heka flinched, then wiped her eyes and straightened, and Jeena touched the former jet Eight’s elbow briefly.
Talinn held her eyes on the disk, which abruptly sprouted into a display, shooting rough estimations of the three systems between them.
“So let’s call UCF green and IDC blue for fun.” Surex’s dry tone didn’t make any of it seem fun, but Falix picked up the conversation with another smile, as though it had.
“Hynex historically would be a real throbber of a blue, yeah? But here’s some green squeaking in.” The display changed accordingly, and not that it mattered, but Talinn nearly asked which AI was moving it.
“How though? UCF has never gotten a toenail hold in Hynex—the defense arrays—”
“You’ll note, Konti Rooks of fair Govlic, they’ve been careful to stay at stations close to the jump point.”
Talinn chewed her lip, then forced the abused skin out from between her teeth. “So if IDC comes after them hard, they blow the stations and potentially glitch the jump point.”
“A last-ditch choice, to be sure, but one that would hurt IDC far more than the UCF, in the short term.” Falix did his whole-body shrug again and Benty picked up the statement.
“We could adjust, depending on where the debris and changed readings were in jump-point space, but it would take time. Ships would likely be lost in the meantime, and IDC uses that jump point a great deal more than the United Colonial Forces.”
“Who stay more in the colonies, namely Govlic, of which we all have so recently vacated, and Exfora. Let’s color those green.” The display had changed before Falix continued speaking, and then Surex grunted.
“Problem there is the IDC is taking a whole lot of ground in Govlic, including areas they’ve mostly ignored in past cycles.” Several chunks of the system shifted from green to blue.
“We’re going to drop you at a neutral station in Exfora—” Falix didn’t pause at the immediate chorus of questions—neutral?—and the display shifted to show the third system as mostly UCF green with small dots of blue. “There’s been more IDC activity than usual in Exfora, probably retaliation from the station-nabbing in Hynex, but these outskirt stations have never been much of a target for either side.”
“I want to know more about neutral,” Xenni said, her hands folded too tightly together to show any lingering twitches.
“I want to know what this has to do with us. We’ve heard things are getting weird out there.” Sammer gestured to Talinn, and Bee muttered Sammer’s getting weird out there so Talinn didn’t have to. “You said you had something to tell us that might conflict with what UCF Command has shared with us previously.”
“Oh.” Surex crossed his arms, and it took Talinn a breath to realize Dubs had spoken over the speaker. “So you knew all this? You weren’t surprised by the IDC incursion on your insignificant little P-8?”
“No, but—”
“Did you know civilians are trying to make new jump points?”
“They don’t know what we have to do with it, so they’re sure with enough math—”
“—that they can find a new one just like the old explorers did centuries ago.”
“Did you know that neutral stations existed before ten seconds ago?”
“Because it seems like you did not.”
“Perhaps you’d like to know more about—”
“All right, you’ve made your point.” Talinn shoved up from the table, meaning to stand but forgetting the reduced gravity and rocketing above them all. Bee expressed her tortured metal of a laugh over the speakers, and Talinn was gratified when everyone swung around and paid attention.
Just float there. Don’t ruin it by trying to flail back to the table yet.
Talinn twitched her shoulders to orient toward the people now below her and ignored the brilliance of Falix’s grin. The Spacies—human and AI alike—had blurred their words so much even Bee didn’t bother to untangle who had said what. Now that they were all obligingly quiet, she’d forgotten what she meant to say.
“Have there been any other reports of defense arrays going out of spec? Is that why the footholds are shifting?”
“Is that Bee?” Sammer blurted, twisting toward the speaker in a way none of the X-series voices had caused him to do.
“We’ve had Bees in our system before.” Falix waved a hand dismissively, his attention still on Talinn. After a moment, he brushed against the floor and kicked off again, his arc taking him slowly over Talinn’s head. When he extended his hand as he came around her other side, she took it, and somehow his momentum was enough to drift them both back to the floor. She engaged her boots and waited longer than she had to before untangling her hand from his.
“No. No other reports of defense arrays going rogue and targeting jump-point traffic.”
As satisfying as that was to hear, it led to a fair amount more temporary chaos as then Talinn got to be a part of the Spacie method of explaining things, given no one had told the rest of the Eights about their most recent near-death experience.
The concept of a neutral station was much easier to accept after that.