CHAPTER 4
“Talinn?”
Her mouth tasted like rotten fire and broken gravity. She worked her jaw, decided air made the flavor worse, and pressed her eyes more tightly closed.
Realizing belatedly that didn’t make sense—eyes and mouth were not connected in any way that helped—she opened her mouth, then her eyes, and then groaned in protest at the hot light burning her.
Bright. Bright light. Not hot. Still—hurt.
“Don’t make the man ask you all the orienting questions again, Breezy.”
That was a different voice than the first one. This second one she recognized. It was green and soft and—no, not those. Familiar. Known.
“Sammer.”
“There’s my girl.” Muffled sounds, probably voices or clothes or a black hole floating past, and then the light stopped burning her. She tracked the floating spots left behind idly, swallowing until only a little film of death coated her tongue, not a whole battlefield’s worth.
“All right, Talinn. You’re going to sit up now. Bee’s going to hold very, very still, and you’re going to move all your limbs, one at a time. Ready?”
Sammer, she or Bee thought dreamily. Good doctor.
Then she blinked, followed by a squint so hard all the ghostly balls in her eyes squished into one. Sammer and Lei were base support, not medical. Eights didn’t work on bodies. Something about AIs not being trustworthy when it came to living matter they weren’t dependent on.
“AIs can’t eat you,” she muttered, swimming through the logic and sure she’d solved an ancient issue.
Don’t want to be a doctor.
There. That was Bee. She was Talinn. A little Talinn and a lot of Bee—or maybe the other way around—and her head had gone about eighty thousand times too big for her floppy neck, but she could still sit up.
Was she wearing trees? No, clothes. She was wearing clothes. Different than the ones she’d been wearing in their tank before . . . before . . .
Load-in.
Why was Sammer here?
“They thought you’d cracked, wanted an expert opinion before they flushed you.”
Sammer could hear her thoughts now?
“You’re talking out loud, pinbrain.” His words had a laugh in them, but tasted like warning, like spoiled rations. Talinn ran her heavy tongue around her mouth and tried to swallow the taste away.
“No, but why are you here really?” she managed, and she was fairly sure she was the one using her vocal cords, not Bee. Talinn moved one limb and then the next, though she forgot about half of them until Bee prodded at her.
“Way to follow directions, Breezy. I might like you better all loaded up. Here, let’s work on fingers and toes next.” He stepped closer, and her eyesight finally managed to focus. She’d known Sammer as long she’d known Caytil—since training. Since they’d been decanted from the store of embryos the United Colonial Forces paired with truncated starter programs to make Eights, however long ago that was. Long enough to know that he never looked that cheerful and carefree unless there was something real disgusting to step around. Sammer took one of her hands, then made a production of frowning and moving her fingers, and leaned in closer.
“All the Eights have been locked into rooms. Techs are in and out.” The words were so low and rushed Talinn was on to stretching her toes—hadn’t she had shoes?—before she fully registered what he’d said.
Well . . . that’s not good. Bee’s contribution was as quiet as Sammer’s, and given how unobtrusive her partner had been throughout all of it, Talinn had to assume the understatement served a purpose.
Maybe she should throw up again? Fake a seizure? Would that bring more people in, or less?
“You here to take care of me?” She was reasonably confident each word had gone in the correct order, and that she’d sound like she was responding to the right comment for any ears that weren’t Sammer’s.
“Aren’t I always?”
“Then . . .” What was the word? Talinn blinked, forgot how to see, then remembered she had eyelids and they parted one way or the other. Took her two tries, but she got them open and held them wide to keep from having to figure it out again. “Water?”
“Yeah, you’re not up to swallowing yet, Breezy. You got a line in.” Sammer lifted one of her arms and she stared at it, belatedly realizing the limb she couldn’t move wasn’t a limb, but the thin tube of a fluid-filled IV.
“How long?”
“You’ve been hooked up for about twenty minutes.”
So she’d been on the base—she had to assume they were on base, though she couldn’t bring the space around her into focus, it was all she could do to keep her sweating eyes on Sammer—at least twenty minutes. Plus the time it took to get there. So she had been load-in for . . .
The numbers slithered out of her grasp, and she pulled at the IV and considered passing out again. How long?
Too long.
“How long?” she asked again, meaning something else, and Sammer shook his head.
“Lei?” Sammer Bayhoun and Lei were Belay, for some reason that slithered out of Talinn’s thoughts along with numbers and how to separate eyelids.
“Still in the base array, but disconnected from the network. We’re blind.” Sammer made his voice louder on the last two words—he wanted someone to hear them. “If there are more attacks, we won’t be able to do our job.”
“Were there? More attacks?” She and Bee had been in an attack. Something like an attack. Things had definitely exploded, which had to qualify.
“Only you and Caytil, but there were unexplainable readings in five separate sectors where we had eyes. It’s possible the IDC has some new toys they’re testing out away from the main fronts.”
“Survive?”
“Everyone involved was secured back to base, yes.”
Secured. Were only Eights involved? Or were unadapted soldiers also locked into rooms to wait out whatever was being done above their pay grades? Talinn couldn’t manage any questions that big, and so contented herself melting against the surface that had held her so far. It continued not to betray her to gravity, so she let go of her bones and breathed through her skin for a little bit.
None of that is what’s happening.
“Am I on the floor again?”
No.
Then some of it was happening, and her brain hadn’t fully cracked under the pressure of holding the entirety of Bee’s programming. The idea of arguing made all the nerves in her elbows spark and pop, so she forbore doing so.
Instead she twisted a hand around in a vague gesture Sammer would hopefully understand. “Any idea?”
“What’s going on, or how long it will last?” The noise Sammer made crackled in her ears like shivering glass, and Talinn swallowed until her throat burned. “Either way: none. Let’s try to get you walking.”
“Oh no.” Talinn shook her feet, considered, flapped her hands. She knew that wasn’t right, but it took another set of breaths until she managed to shake her head slightly. Her reward for that was a sudden and all-encompassing headache.
By the time she blinked clear of that, she had reoriented enough to understand the room.
You’re walking. Think about the color blue.
It kept her from falling, though the why of it eluded her. They were in a mostly white cube, filled with soft tables (Beds.) and blobby boxes (Medical equipment.) The floor was smooth and too shiny to have a color, and the lone door was harshly dark.
There was no one else in the room with them. Talinn took a few more shuffling steps, most of her weight against Sammer’s arm, before she formulated the question.
“Wasn’t there . . . someone else here? When I alived?”
“When you woke up.” Sammer nodded, his face pointed straight ahead, not at her. “There were three other people—two techs and a medical doctor. I believe they’re going to get a suitable temporary house for Bee.”
Talinn’s spine burst apart, and her legs went out from under her. Sammer yanked her arm and caught her before her head slammed into the colorless floor, but she couldn’t do anything other than hang there.
“Bee.” Sammer spoke the word, but Talinn had meant to. “I know it’s awful—trust me I know—but get small and deal.”
Talinn hesitantly flopped out a leg and got lucky as a foot landed against the floor in the correct orientation to bear her weight. As she climbed up Sammer’s support to stand again, she put together what had happened. Bee’s rejection of “temporary housing” had been so sudden and loud their currently shared body had simply given up and decided motion was unnecessary.
She should probably be grateful it had been her nerves, not her heart.
It hadn’t been her heart, had it?
Talinn cocked her head, listening for her heartbeat, but she couldn’t remember what it sounded like. Could she feel her blood moving?
“Expensive,” she managed, the word oily on her teeth. Bee apologized, shunting the last of her headache away, and that was too much for the rest of her consciousness to deal with.
She managed to hope Sammer could catch her again before the spiral of blackness took her out.
“Orienting question: What is your name?”
“Fuck. You.”
“Orienting question: What—”
“My name is Talinn Reaze, and I want to talk to Base Command now.” Words moved normally from brain to tongue to sound waves, and Talinn bolted upright before she realized she’d been half reclined.
Her skin hurt. Her eyes hurt. The hairs inside her nostrils hurt. She was aware of her kidneys in a way no one should ever be aware of her kidneys. Bee was there—a heavy, waiting presence curled in the corner of her mind, still trying to be small and quiet for her.
No . . . that wasn’t right, but Talinn was too angry to parse it at the moment.
“Next ques—”
“If you ask me about orders or my training or what the color blue looks like, I swear by every galactic constant that I will tear open your throat and shove Bee inside your head through your trachea. Base Command. Now.” She was vibrating with rage—or her hands were shaking with adrenaline—or she was . . .
Talinn grasped for Bee, realizing . . . realizing . . .
“Give her a minute.” Familiar . . . Sammer. Sammer was here—had been there. Blocked off from Lei somehow, the way Talinn couldn’t feel Bee. Because what she’d taken for the holding pattern of Bee during load-in was a pins-and-needle numbness in her brain. An absence. A lack of weight she couldn’t comprehend, because it had never been empty before.
“Bee’s not gone. She’s here. Talinn? Let the nice tech do her job. It’ll get back to normal soon.”
Blinding white light sparkled at the edges of her vision, and if Talinn had had anything left in her guts she would have expelled it right then. A sharper pain shoved the other hurts back—she’d wrapped her fingers so tightly around the handles on her cot she’d split her own skin.
She forced her hands to release, hissing as the burning across her palms spiked. Bee usually blunted complaining nerves, but Bee couldn’t—Bee wasn’t . . .
“There. A little emotional instability is normal in times like these, right, Jeebo?”
Talinn frowned, trying to place the last gibberish thing Sammer had said, then it clicked. Nickname. Sammer had a nickname for the tech. Talinn had never once learned a tech’s name, and Sammer had a pet name for one. She wanted to make a joke about it—the urge clogged her throat—but the words wouldn’t come together.
“From the top.” The tech frowned but met Talinn’s eyes straight on. Usually they looked at her port, or her nose, or somewhere around her cheekbones, and the combination of eye contact and Sammer’s familiarity with the woman nudged Talinn into compliance.
She focused on zero of the answers she gave, but she complied all the same.
“Why can’t I hear Bee?” Enormous effort kept her voice level, and was rewarded when the tech nodded sharply and quirked her lips in a hint of a smile.
“Swing off the chair carefully—don’t stand, just rest your legs there. Put your hand . . . here.” The tech touched her wrist, guiding Talinn’s fingers to the rounded top of a matte-gray rectangle on the floor. It stood about knee-high to Talinn, and had a slight indentation in the vague shape of her hand.
This is the absolute worst thing Command has ever come up with. I’m including sending us to this ridiculous planet and also making us train on jets after we crashed seventeen times in a row in sims.
Talinn blew out her breath, tension ebbing from her shoulders. Bee’s words were reasonable and carefully spaced, but each were lined with a metallic buzz that grated under Talinn’s skull.
“What can you do?” Talinn subvocalized, though the tech was close enough to catch the motions. It was a normal enough question to ask, if anything in this situation could be considered normal.
Nothing. I’m in a cube. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t connect to anything, and fun fact, there’s some sort of near field inhibitor. I can’t complete the circuit to you, even, unless you’re touching this mismade terror.
“It’s more a rectangle than a cube.” Talinn returned her voice to normal volume, and Bee sizzled in disgust at the same time as the tech stood and cleared her throat.
“It’s a cube as far as B-617 can move through. The additional space is part of the shielding.”
“Shielding.” Talinn glanced at Sammer, but his focus remained on the tech.
“I’m Jeena Boralid,” the tech said, and Talinn lifted a shoulder in a more mildly dismissive reply than she might have in another setting. “I’ve been on the Eight program for ten cycles and I . . . I helped develop the portable server currently holding B-617.”
“Just Bee is fine.” Talinn kept one hand firmly pressed to the machine, and paused for an addendum Bee did not supply. “What’s the point of it?”
“The shielding keeps the program protected and functional while we isolate any contamination or degradation in the code.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“It’s not something we want Eights spending a lot of time worrying about. It’s exceptionally rare that an AI gets corrupted—they’re closed-loop systems, with their human partner’s neurological operating system providing a firewall to—”
“You’re saying Bee’s corrupted?” Talinn heard her voice skew upward, and she held herself rigidly still until she could trust it again.
“I’m saying we have B-6—Bee safe until we can be sure.”
“And all the AIs,” Sammer interjected. He’d been pacing the room, though Talinn registered his movement only after he spoke.
“We’ve got techs in and out of every room, checking in on the portable servers. As each clears, we’ll get them loaded back on the base server—”
“The base server? We’re not going back out there?” A chill sweat prickled along Talinn’s back. It could be good—it could mean they were getting off this planet—but the way events had gone over the last handful of hours, good didn’t seem to be on the menu of options.
“The underlying attack is unclear, we need to be sure that—”
“That all of your best weapons are locked in boxes?” Sammer stopped at the front of the room, his posture so rigid Talinn was momentarily sure he was about to launch through the door regardless of locks or consequences. He didn’t, more’s the pity, and Bee made a small pop of disappointment.
“The Eights aren’t the UCF’s only line of defense or offense, Sam.”
Sam? Talinn blanched before she could control her expression, but the tech—Jeena, Jeebo, whoever she was—had eyes only for Sammer. Were they . . . no, surely not. Techs never saw Eights as entirely human—which, fair—and relationships between the ranks were . . .
Not unheard of. But definitely . . . gross. Though as base support, Sammer spent a lot of time holding down the lines while the other Eights took outside positions and patrols.
Not at all pressing right now. Bee wasn’t wrong, but it still took another handful of seconds for Talinn to push off the distracting creep of “blech” in the back of her throat.
“I didn’t say only. I said best.” He remained facing the doors for a long moment before pivoting on his heel and orienting toward them again. “How much longer?”
“Until the AIs are cleared? It’s going to vary—the density of their code has an exceptional range given the—”
Talinn tuned out once she realized there wasn’t going to be an answer buried in the tech vomit. She tilted her head down toward the box on the floor. “What do you think?”
That if something is attacking us, they’re probably going to win, and I won’t even be sad about it.
“You’ll be a little sad.”
Most of me will be glad as long as this stupid cube melts in the aftermath.
“The way this day’s been going, the box is indestructible and you’ll be spinning inside it until the heat death of the universe.” Talinn had excellent control of her vocal register—long cycles of training amongst unsympathetic unadapted humans had made sure of that—but either the aftermath of load-in or sheer exhaustion meant she’d spoken at a perfectly audible volume.
Which she only realized when Jeena swung around and gaped at her. Then the tech jerked her chin up sharply and . . . laughed. Talinn took a turn at gaping and Sammer walked three steps back toward them while the woman cackled. Finally, she gasped in a breath and wiped the tears in her eyes.
“I promise,” she said, her voice shaking with mirth or stress or some unnatural combination of the two. “It’s not indestructible. An explosion will take it out same as anything, and part of the shielding involves . . . well, enough of a corrosive that you won’t have to wait for entropy to knock it all off.”
“And that’s . . . funny?” Sarcasm dripped from each of Talinn’s words, as though she and Bee hadn’t gone to humor in the face of wholesale destruction for most of their shared life.
Before Jeena could summon an answer, Sammer inexplicably began laughing as well. Only the fact that the pitch verged on hysterical kept Talinn from screaming and or throwing something at them both.
Can we get back to the corrosive? Bee was not as faint as she’d held herself most of the time she’d been piled throughout Talinn’s brain, but she did sound . . . stretched. Attenuated. Less.
“How much longer until you know the state of Bee’s programming?” Talinn decided against questioning what was wrong with Sammer and Jeena—she herself had very nearly cracked during load-in, so who was she to judge at this point—and attempted to bring them all back to more urgent matters.
“Bee is a particularly dense string of—no, no,” Jeena interrupted herself, and Talinn cursed herself for visibly flinching like a raw recruit. “It’s not unusual, given the number of assignments you’ve had, the different locations, the battles, the jump points you’ve been through—I wouldn’t have expected much less at this point in your career.”
“Caytil and Ziti?” A flush climbed the back of Talinn’s neck and over her scalp as she realized she had no idea how much time had passed since she’d last seen—or thought of—her friend.
“I’m not tasked with their evaluation, but I imagine ZT-881 will look much the same as Bee, given the similarity in your records.” Jeena swiveled toward Sammer, still lingering between her and the door. “I’ve meant to ask you—is that usual? So many pairings from the same training class being tasked together on assignments? There are four of you, with Medith.”
Sammer shrugged, but Talinn cut in before he could answer. Partly because it was a needless question, and partly because she couldn’t storm around the room and burn off the jumpy nerves sparking along her limbs. That would mean losing contact with Bee again, given the cube didn’t look particularly movable, and the word “corrosive” still bounced between her and Bee’s thoughts.
“Wouldn’t you know that better than us? Eights aren’t read in to all of Command’s plans—or any of them. We’re tools, and we get to know exactly what we get to know. They don’t like us fraternizing.”
Jeena’s mouth turned down, but Talinn couldn’t tell if she’d scored a point or if the tech was thinking. Expressions were entirely different on unadapted humans’ faces—all that hair, probably.
“Do you think it’s any different for us?” Jeena snorted, and Talinn pressed her lips together to keep from open-mouth staring at her again. “The last thing the command structure wants is any one of us knowing too much detail about how you work—what if we take it back to civilian life when we’re done, and AI tech bleeds out into the broader world?”
“Eights go into civilian life after—”
Is this really the right time to—
An earsplitting alarm cut through every level of conversation.