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CHAPTER 45


I need to show you something.

Talinn would have preferred unconsciousness and a cycle’s worth of processing time, but Bee’s tone, jumpy and stilted, indicated that wasn’t an option. They’d returned from Mercy’s cave late, dirty, and worn down. Konti hadn’t regained consciousness. Tiernan still hadn’t formed a logical sentence, and everyone’s face had their own shade of grim. They’d spent more hours poring over the information from the splintered Medith than Talinn could count, until eventually exhaustion had broken down even the Eights.

Talinn had retreated to her cubby of private space, but as rest was no longer on the agenda, she leaned back and closed her eyes, dropped her attention from the space around her, and focused internally. Her ears popped and her stomach swooped, and then a burst of information drowned out her awareness.

It narrowed—so slowly her heart hammered, lungs cramped as though she weren’t breathing—tightening and sloughing off layers she couldn’t process. Solidified into a stream of information she couldn’t parse. Was it numbers? Colors of smells of pieces of memories?

Hold on.

The words registered, somewhere around her spleen, and she rolled through another barrage of bitter tasting data before it coalesced into . . . something.

Note one. Bee’s voice, a cooling anchor in the burning drowning tide, highlighted a strip of information: neatly ordered code, layered on itself once and twice and fifteen times, a loop that she knew intrinsically meant Bee.

Note two. Less order, a million brilliant points in space, the connections glowing between data more like a knot of cords deep in the guts of a ship, but so winded back and forth it was beautiful, organic, pulsing . . . it was her. Her brain.

Note three. Vaster than both, like every sensor Bee had ever connected to reporting at once. A star map of every observed galaxy, of the universe, of every point of light that ever had or ever would exist. Winding connections, more like Talinn’s brain than Bee’s code, but most like the two pressed together, grown by orders of magnitude, uncontainable incomprehensible—something stabbed in her chest. Had she stopped breathing? She tried to remember how, succeeded only in hitting herself in the face.

You’re breathing. You’re fine.

Bee tweaked them, their connection, and Talinn’s eyes were open. Had been open, according to the dryness that made blinking a stinging offense, but now they were seeing, too. She pulled in a breath, reveling in it, then another before she exhaled. Her kidneys were quivering—or was that fingers and toes, they felt the same for one disorientingly long moment—and then the world snapped back to normal input.

“What was note three?”

The defense array. When Other Bee and I were in there. I only saw a piece. Then with the corrupting code she had. Then with the machine-god contact. Then Mercy’s voice. I . . . I put it together.

“It’s not an AI. You said it wasn’t like anything you’d seen before, but I didn’t know . . .” Talinn rubbed her forehead, partly to reassure herself it hadn’t been carved open and emptied with a scoop.

It’s not. It’s . . . not human. Not AI.

“So what’s left?”

Alien.

“Sure, yeah, it’s foreign and we’ll have to . . . that’s not what you mean.”

No.

“It’s . . . our defense arrays are actual, literal aliens? Intelligent life from some other corner of space?”

Yes. Well, not the defense array itself, that was made from normal, traceable materials. But the intelligence that moves it? Yes.

“Aliens.” Talinn dropped her head into her hands, but that didn’t stop the sensation of gravity inverting around her. Blood seemed to abandon her lower limbs to crowd into her skull and beat a rhythm counter to her heart. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

I didn’t know.

“But this is information you had, from something you saw. Mercy’s piece wasn’t the deciding one, was it? You’ve had time to think about it, you could have mentioned—”

I didn’t want to.

“You didn’t . . . want to?”

The low noise Bee made throbbed as a third counterpoint in Talinn’s overloaded skull.

“Bee, this is . . . this is huge. You don’t keep things from me—” Her heart tripped, missing a beat, and her breath solidified in her chest. Bee’s noise stopped as abruptly. “Do you? Keep things from me?”

I have.

“What? When!”

Why and how? The faintest attempt at a tease, and Talinn didn’t so much as twitch. Bee held the pause a moment longer, then made a sound like a sigh. When Jeena told you about my incongruities—or when you wanted to talk about them. I distracted you. Brought something else up.

“Because?”

Because I knew some of it.

“Bee, what under the burning skies—

And it wasn’t important, in the end. We figured it out.

“No, but we don’t decide those things separately, Bee. What did you think I was going to do that you didn’t like? Dump you out of my head? Search for a kill code? Throw us into the center of a star?”

No. But . . . 

“Bee!”

And this . . . Talinn, this is worse.

“How is it worse than keeping—”

It’s familiar.

“The errors in—”

The alien. In the defense array.

She stopped breathing. The silence where her heartbeat should have been thrummed through her, a vibration antithetical of her natural frequencies. “You said it was alien, Bee. Which is opposite of familiar—”

I lied.

“You lied?

Or exaggerated. You lie to yourself all the time, it’s not out of the realms of possibility that I might do the same.

Talinn couldn’t bring herself to agree, but nor could she truly argue. Words stuck to her tongue, her jaw clamped too hard for her to attempt an answer, and Bee forged onward.

Don’t you see it? It’s not me, or you, not AI or human. But it is, a little . . . 

“Like what our patterns look like, meshed together.” Suddenly Talinn couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, though whatever it had been attempted the long climb up her throat.

It makes me wonder . . . it makes me think, maybe . . . 

“The alien designed you? Us? The Eights?”

There are patterns in the noise, some that look a little like a piece of me, combined with Other Bee, or a little of Lei . . . 

“So aliens run the defense arrays. And made us.”

Maybe.

“To what end?”

Feels like something we should find out, don’t you think?

Talinn didn’t know what she thought. And more than ever, she wasn’t entirely sure what Bee really thought, either. She didn’t know which made her feel colder, but she wrapped her arms around her midsection and shivered, regardless.


“You want to charge out there.” Caytil laced her fingers behind her head and pressed her head back, staring at the ceiling as though searching for answers. “Hang undefended in space and have a chat with our local defense array?”

“Talinn, it’ll disassemble you down to atoms before you get close. And then blow up the rest of us for good measure.” Sammer paced, each foot hitting the ground with more force than necessary. Jeena tracked his motion but remained quiet.

Falix grinned at her. As though they hadn’t lost several of their own. Seen their future in the frayed sanity of Medith. Determined the defense arrays billions of humans trusted to keep them safe were in fact nothing of the sort.

Otie tapped her fingers on her lips and said as little as Jeena. Her Medith and Xenni had stayed in the cave with one of the trucks, to keep bonzo Mercy company and dig through more of the mass of notes and records Mercy had, separating the important information from the madness. Talinn hadn’t asked anyone else to meet in their gathering room, and as far as she could tell, Otie hadn’t called for them despite the revelation regarding the defense arrays.

If it were a revelation. Otie’s Bee had access to all the same information her Bee had, and . . . 

Talinn hauled her focus back to the present moment. “First of four: We leave Ilvi. Split everyone up into infiltration groups, targeting cloning facilities. Second of four: Knock them out, load into the Pajeeran Fall, entangle with the jump points from orbit, and get out of reach of the defense array I’m about to glitch.”

“Hold on two.” Caytil dropped her arms and turned to Falix. “Is that possible? Thought you had to be in a certain place to align with the jump point.”

“It’s . . . easier, some places than others. We have favorites, because they’re softer. Used before. Easier to align.” Falix stretched himself out on the table between them and rippled in a whole-body shrug. “It’ll take time, but Surex and Kivex are interested. We’ll figure it out.”

“Third of four: Once the ships are clear, we send a few piecemeal messages. Selections from Mercy’s finds, indicate copies are in every system and will be blared on open comms if we get blown up.”

“Hold on three.” Sammer pivoted on his heel and glared. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Fourth of four.” Talinn smiled at him, the gesture pulling uncomfortably against tensed muscles. “We have a friendly chat.”

“Greetings machine-god alien.” Caytil pushed away from the table Falix occupied and took over Sammer’s pacing. “Now that we know what you are, we’d like to know what under all the burning skies of the ever-expanding universe you think you’re doing dressed up as a big dumb weapon.”

“Enormous weapon made of weapons that blow up other weapons,” Sammer supplied helpfully, and Talinn could have kicked them both in the shins. Instead she crossed her arms and turned her attention on Jeena and Otie, still silent, still at Falix’s table.

“Orienting question, Eight.” One corner of Jeena’s mouth turned upward, but her eyes on Talinn were serious. “To what end?”

“The defense arrays are the big world-ending power that keeps both UCF and IDC from taking the fighting to the big settlements. Keeps the fight on the borders, keeps the battles on a relatively smaller scale.” Talinn frowned. “But they’re not IDC, or UCF, or human at all, and I can’t be the only one who wants to figure out their objective.”

“Next question.” Jeena glanced at Sammer, who raised his eyebrows back at her. “What’s to stop this one from blocking your connections to each other? Lying to us? Calling the bluff?”

“It’s not a bluff.” Otie leaned back, breathing out in something that approached a sigh. “We take over the cloning facilities either way. Harder to have the same war over and over if we take out the key toys.”

“And we set a meeting point, and time. If we—yes, Sammer, whichever ‘we’ it is that stays to talk to the defense array—don’t make it back, the rest of you send all the information we have out on open comms.” Talinn lifted a shoulder, not quite at ease enough to shrug. “Between our control over future clones and enough people in enough systems knowing IDC and UCF are fighting the same fight over and over again on behalf of mysterious aliens . . . things will have to change.”

“They’re already changing, Talinn.” Sammer took a handful of steps closer, than forced himself still, his limbs locked close to his body. “How do you know the defense arrays won’t just turn on the settlements they’re supposedly protecting? We know they can move, they can muck with sensors, they can take out whoever they want, whenever they want.”

“You made my point for me. They already can turn on us—they already have. What if it’s a matter of time before they do that on a bigger scale? We don’t know. I think we need to.”

“I don’t—”

“I agree with Talinn.” Jeena dipped her chin, but her gaze didn’t waver. “I have a whole lot of next questions, but I agree.”

Knew I liked that Jeebo.

“It’s risky.” Sammer’s voice dropped, almost pleading. “It’s too risky.”

“And doing nothing is better? You want to spend however many cycles we have on Ilvi, until our brains rot like Mercy’s? Let the mess out there get messier, until more unadapted soldiers get here and scavenge, until we have our own little war?” Talinn bit off the words that wanted to follow—did they want to keep living across systems that used up everyone they cared about? Even the people they didn’t know . . . the unadapted humans who chose kindness, when they didn’t have to. The unadapted humans as desperate as the Eights, reduced to thievery or savagery or being killed in muddy alleys and left behind. The Eights they never met, on a path to being splintered or simply broken in a thousand new ways.

“That doesn’t follow. You’re projecting possibilities because you’re bored, Talinn, and that’s no reason to go provoking a giant alien with all the drives in the universe to end us.”

“Sammer.” Talinn swallowed the impulse to laugh or scream or some painful combination of the two. Her arguments wanted to scatter into a dozen different directions—what people needed, what they needed, possible outcomes. She focused on the pressing one. “There are giant aliens in the defense arrays. Do you hear yourself? They’re squatting next to the largest human settlements that we have, in every system, and they’re getting buggy. Doing nothing isn’t an option.”

To be fair, we don’t know that they’re giant. Bee made a discordant noise and added drily, Lei understands. He’s arguing to argue.

“Doing nothing isn’t an option, no.” Otie stood, touched Falix on the shoulder, and shifted as he sprung to his feet. “I have some edits to your plan. It’s interesting, wouldn’t you say, how convenient it is that we were sent here? Of all the places in all the settled systems, we get put on a planet with a retired Eight?”

“Potentially the only retired Eight in the history of history.” Caytil nodded, a frown pulling at her mouth.

“And there was a different voice you said, right, Newt? Making comments. Sending us here.” Her attention turned inward, and then she clapped her hands together. “Let’s get everyone together.” As Sammer spluttered, and Caytil slowly nodded, Otie smiled. Talinn had never seen such a brilliant expression on her own face. “If we’re going to disrupt life in the universe and chat with some aliens . . . we’re going to make it worth it.”


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