CHAPTER 5
Jeena snapped over to a small panel by the doors, and Bee made a thrumming noise of disgust audible despite the blaring alarm only because Bee’s connection was inside her head. Even then, it was a near thing.
Talinn counted out the pattern of the alarm, but she’d known the answer the moment the shriek pierced her eardrums—the base was under attack.
“Can you get Lei out of the box?” Sammer crowded close to Jeena by the door, his solid form stretched up as he strained to get out of their larger box.
“I can’t get us out of this room.” Jeena slammed the palm of her hand against the panel, which accomplished nothing but looked satisfying.
Talinn pressed her own hand harder against Bee’s cube and slid from her cot to kneel next to the portable server. “The floor is green,” she murmured, and Bee replied, immediately and with a warning crackle.
No.
“I can see all the colors. All my buttons work.”
You don’t have buttons. Talinn, this is a bad idea.
“I didn’t even tell you what it is yet. You know assuming is bad for the war effort.”
That’s not even—
“Put Bee back in my head.”
“WHAT.” Jeena unwittingly managed a solid approximation of Bee’s shrieking metal sound. “Reaze, that’s about a thousand stripes of bad idea.”
Tell her that’s what I said.
“Talinn . . .” Sammer’s head moved as though he were about to shake it, but he trailed off on her name and didn’t finish the gesture.
“We need out. I’m smarter with Bee in my head.”
“Not load-in you’re not, and you were so unconscious there for a minute her activity was about the only thing firing in your front cortex—”
“Don’t load-in all the way. It’s a portable server—when we’re tied to base, part of Bee’s programming stays hosted in the main servers . . . so why not this way? And it’s portable, you said, somehow, so . . . we take it with us.”
“That’s not at all how it’s meant to function—”
“The base is under attack. Belay can help, but we don’t have Belay, we have Sammer and Lei locked up separately, and from what you said that’s true of all the Eights. So no tanks. No jets. No defensive arrays.” Talinn ticked off each point on the fingers of her free hand, then waggled them at the tech. Sammer didn’t argue.
“We still have plenty of weaponry. It’s not like it’s you and Bee or we all die.”
“Do you have any confirmation of that, or—” Abruptly the alarms cut off and Talinn was yelling into a ringing silence. To her credit, Jeena didn’t recoil, but instead spun back to the panel and started mashing buttons.
After a silence punctuated only by the ringing of her ears, Talinn lurched forward when the doors slid open. She froze before her hand lost contact with Bee’s cube, leaving her to stand and glare as Jeena crouched and leaned to observe the hall outside.
The woman held out a hand behind her, then turned halfway back toward them. “Stay. Here.” The words carried like a hiss, and then she was gone. Sammer hesitated exactly long enough for the doors to close in his face, and Talinn’s throat ached with the noises she couldn’t let herself make.
“Techs aren’t top combatants.” Her words were choked with the effort to keep them from emerging as a scream, and Sammer slumped forward against the doors.
“Yeah, Talinn. I got that. Neither are we, with half our computing power gone.”
Generous estimate.
“Even with Lei in your head, you’re not a super soldier, Sammer.”
“We’re adapted for a reason, and it’s not just to have the biggest guns on an endless swivel.” He shoved off from the doors and paced along the wall bordering the hallway. “Or to be a constantly patrolling tank.”
“Then why the shit are we locked up?” She held up a hand, though he wasn’t looking at her, and kept talking rather than waiting on an answer as useless as the question. “Did you learn anything useful from your girl Jeebo?”
His stride slowed, but he ducked his head and didn’t turn toward her. “What do you mean?”
“Techy stuff. Ports. Getting Bee out of this bug-eaten holding cube and into something useful!”
“Talinn.” Sammer stopped. Tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling. Blew out his breath and then gestured around them at the mostly empty medical room. “What would we put Bee into? Your head? You practically died twenty minutes ago. A diagnostic machine? It’s not going to be any more mobile than that box.”
“What about that control panel Jeena was bashing?”
Sammer pressed his hands against his head and squeezed until his fingers visibly lightened. “You think they have an AI compatible port on a control panel? You think Command is dumb enough to leave the base open to IDC attack if we ever got overrun?”
“I think they’re dumb enough to have us all locked up for no discernible reason. Dumb enough to have us here on the ass-end of the war effort after spending a quadrillion dollars on making and baking us. Dumb enough the base arrays are down and the tanks are locked and the jets are grounded and we are just sitting here while we’re under fucking attack!”
Bee grated metal in the back of her head, satisfied with the rant, equally done with the idea of a Command that had no regard for their efficacy. They’d been bored for too long—to be sidelined now, when there was finally, finally action . . .
“I hate it too.” Sammer spoke more softly than she did. Talinn considered screaming at the top of her lungs, and whether that brought enemy or allegedly friendly attention, at least it would be something other than this infuriatingly cramped room—
Her arm tensed, and she nearly pulled it from the box. Part of that was her, but part—maybe most—of the raging with no heed to consequences was coming from . . . Bee. Trapped in a box, after trapping herself in a corner of Talinn’s brain, after being forced out of their tank . . .
She tapped her thumb against the cool metal in a futile attempt at comfort, and then the doors opened again. Both she and Sammer swiveled, her still in a crouch behind the chair and him dropping behind the dubious cover of a gurney.
Three UCF unadapted soldiers stood in the door, flickers of motion behind them indicating there were more in the hall. “With us,” one barked, and the other two gestured with their weapons.
“We were told to wait here on authority Zero—”
“Orders have changed. Code Nine-D-Nine.” Base Command. That outranked Jeena’s tech clearance and whoever had sent them to this room in the first place.
Sammer stood, but Talinn held her place. “Do you have a way to move this?”
None of the soldiers so much as twitched to look. “Only bodies. Nothing else.”
“This is B-61—”
“Only bodies. No AIs. Let’s go.”
“I’m not going without Bee.”
The two flanking soldiers stepped forward, and one lifted his weapon. The other dropped a hand to the smaller pistol holstered at his side, but the one who’d been speaking gestured them back.
“I know Sammer here, and he’s been away from his AI this whole time. It’s secured by the arrays, and he’s way over here. Let’s go.”
“You said secured.” Talinn lifted her chin and pitched her voice to its calmest, most reasonable level. “Bee isn’t secured. If the base is under attack, medical is not considered high security. Anyone could come in here. Anyone could take this, and then anyone could find a way to get at all the information stored in our AIT program.”
“Lower one of the med tables.” Sammer moved slow, arms held a nonthreatening distance from his body. “We can get the cube onto the gurney, raise it up, wheel it with us.”
“Report her later.” The new voice was male, impatient, from an unseen body in the hall. “But she’s not wrong, and Bayhoun’s reliable for an Eight. Do it.”
Talinn might have had a horde of follow-up questions in another scenario, but at this moment she focused solely on getting Bee’s housing loaded. While it seemed beyond unlikely the corrosive would be so easy to unleash that shifting the contraption would wipe Bee, all the same she made far too many sharp noises while she, Sammer, and two soldiers lifted the cube and settled it onto a gurney.
She kept one hand on the bed and one at an awkward angle to keep the connection to Bee, and then they moved out into chaos.
There were seven soldiers around them, at least four of them in the midst of different conversations on comms. The skin around Talinn’s port prickled, but she didn’t have access to any of the channels and couldn’t hear who the soldiers were talking to. She’d need an earpiece like any standard human to hear what was going on, and that hardly seemed a priority of anyone else’s.
There were no echoes of gunfire or muffled explosions once they were out of the semisoundproofed medical room, but the terse, truncated partial sentences the soldiers exchanged didn’t give her a clear picture.
A wall had caved in, maybe by the landing pads?
Something had crashed into the main entrance gate.
The artillery storage was inaccessible.
None of this sounds good.
Talinn didn’t disagree. They jogged through three junctions, heading toward either the largest of the cafeterias or the smallest of the cargo bays, if Talinn had oriented correctly. The gurney had been positioned in the midst of the soldiers, and had been built to corner at speed in standard UCF-designed halls, so Talinn didn’t bump anyone unnecessarily. Given the tension, that seemed high on the short list of positive developments.
“Straight ahead is cargo bay four—go directly inside. The door will open as you approach, and Haywell will lock it behind you. At speed on my mark . . . go.”
Talinn didn’t register which soldier directed them—sounded like the impatient hallway voice that had sided with her earlier, but they were all fully suited and indistinguishable while she was at less than her best.
Sammer dropped back and put a hand on the table, and they burst ahead at triple the speed they’d traveled with the group. The wide door slid slowly to the left, so they angled right and were inside before it reached its halfway open point.
Someone barked at them to continue to the other side of the bay, and the door groaned as it abruptly changed course to close.
Talinn scanned the large space as they ran. This was the least used cargo bay—the external doors weren’t large enough to fit tanks or the big trucks, so it mostly held excess gear, the longest lived of rations, and things that packed small enough to come in on hand loaders.
Boxes lined the side walls, leaving a clear area in the middle of the room, and no cover for the twenty-one bodies that milled around against the far wall.
The rest of the base’s Eights—even without Bee properly in her head, Talinn put that together right away. There were at least ten metallic rectangles amidst the group, so she hadn’t been the only one to refuse moving without her partner.
They slowed as they reached their fellows, and everyone stared at everyone else.
“Any chance you know what’s going on?” Caytil—who looked about a hundred cycles older than she had when they’d gone out on patrol three weeks ago—shoved forward and grabbed Talinn’s arm. Talinn let go of the gurney—but not Bee—and put her free hand over Caytil’s.
“Not even a little. Sammer’s tech friend bounced on us, then soldiers came to fetch us, and here we are. Ziti?”
Caytil jerked her head to the side, then flinched and didn’t continue shaking her head. “I woke up in the big med center near the entrance. Ziti wasn’t speaking, but . . .” She pressed her hands against her eyes and rubbed her face. Several other hands brushed her arm—Eights gathered close enough to touch her briefly without crowding. “Ziti stopped talking when we were in the field.”
The long muscles in Talinn’s legs tensed and then went so loose she staggered. “What?”
“The tank was still responsive, and it didn’t feel . . . I didn’t feel like there was no Ziti at all, but the connection was off—I couldn’t hear anything. Then we got rerouted, then the techs came in . . . then I woke up.”
Ziti didn’t glitch. But Bee, for once, didn’t sound sure.
“After they scrambled the jets to cover—”
“They told us it was to take us off the board,” Talinn interrupted, which set off a round of muttering before Daren interjected.
“They told us it was to provide cover for the attack—then they called us back before we got to you. Soon as we landed a tech came over instead of flight line, and they started load-in on all of us without so much as a ‘get comfortable’ first.” Daren—human part of Jiff, whom Bee and Talinn had agreed to shoot down if it came to it, shook his head, his usual smug grin missing. “Thought we were getting called back to an actual front, it was so quick.”
“I think they’re closing down the base.” Medith lounged on a midsized crate pulled away from a pile of identical packages, tension visible only in the jerky motion when she shifted. “Something’s been off on this planet the whole time, it’s coming to a head, and the UCF is calling it a wash.” The corner of her mouth tweaked upward, and Talinn half smiled back. Medith, like Caytil and Sammer, had been part of her training class, and had been as equally unthrilled to fetch up in such a useless posting. Her tone spoke more of wishful thinking than a real theory, and the uptick in hubbub answering it seemed to agree.
“Hasn’t been anything here in months.”
“Hasn’t been anything here until today—seems a weird time to pack it in.”
“Training exercise.” Xenni had been here the longest of any of the Eights, a base array pairing who claimed they were close to retirement. She spread her arms wide, then dropped them when her fingers started twitching. “They do this on the long hauls, when they think everyone’s gotten a little too comfortable. A lot of sound and panic and mysterious attacks, rushed load-ins and a big mess, and then back to normal.” She snorted and spread her arms wide. “Normal other than a solid week of debriefings and rehashings and what to do better-ings.”
“Like this?” Talinn gestured as widely as Xenni had, keeping one hand in contact with Bee, and tried not to let her eyes linger on Caytil, Medith, Sammer, and the other miserable AITs in their group. “Where we all got locked up together in a cargo hold and everyone else runs around waving their weapons?”
“No . . . no, not like this.” Xenni ducked her head and murmured something apologetic toward Caytil.
“Training exercises always have to be a little different, or how will they keep us on alert?” Konti, another of the jet pairs, put too much effort in her voice for it to land with any sincerity. A round of scoffs answered, and then they were quiet, straining to listen for signs of conflict or updates or the soldier who had locked them in bothering to acknowledge them.
None of it happened, and Talinn rather wished for a return to unconsciousness.