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CHAPTER 12


“Again?” Sammer lurched toward the nearer console, as though he were about to will Lei back into his brain from the servers.

“No.” Base Two didn’t flinch, but his single word carried loud and clear through the wailing alarm. “You are all to stay here.” He pivoted and marched out at speed, the door sliding shut nearly on his heel.

“What the shit is going on?” Talinn pressed her fingers into the side of her scalp and attempted to ease the building pressure in her head. It didn’t remotely work, and the volume of the alarm did not abate.

“Why was he in here?” Sammer shouted to Jeena, who shrugged.

“Who was he talking about?” She gestured rapidly with her hands, demonstrating that was the bigger question. “You met with somebody?”

Several of the other Eights drifted closer, needful if they wanted to hear over the alarms’ backdrop of caterwauling. “On patrol?” Sigmun shoved closest. “Is IDC attack finally confirmed, then?” She didn’t ask about her tank, which Talinn noted as evidence of strong discipline.

“It’s not—” Talinn flapped her hands in the air, communicating nothing at all except that she didn’t have words to get across anything more specific. Someone else started yelling about bets on what kind of attack they’d have this time, and Talinn didn’t bother to try and identify who it was.

I can lower your hearing again—

“No. It’s fine, I probably need to hear.”

What, hear what’s going on? It’s alarms and useless shouting. Yet again the base has no one in place to hold back the attack, and there are incoming jets.

“Jets?”

A lot of them. Want me to start shooting?

“You’re completely unprotected out there.” Talinn spun toward the door, unaware of what volume she was speaking at and uncaring of the same. “The arrays are down and there’s no cover, the tank is just in a field of—”

It’s fine. I bet they don’t know I’m active, given the state of the base overall.

“You saw those melted—”

Not ours. Theirs. Drones are out, I have them low in the scrub until the incoming targets hit the first wave of fire. Do you want to tell someone so they don’t panic and EMP me?

Talinn registered that she was only halfway across the room, the door frustratingly out of reach, in large part because someone was holding back her arms.

Two someones. She stopped pulling, now that she was aware she’d been straining against an annoyingly strong hold, and wrenched her mind back into the immediate area around her. Where was all that vaunted increased analytical ability? With Bee outside, and no other Eights ready for additional firepower or backup, she had to keep her shit together.

Bee certainly was.

Sammer and Xenni each had one of her arms, and she twisted in their grip exactly enough to get her eyes on Jeena, hovering over Sammer’s other shoulder. “Call Base Two. Remind him Bee is active and will fire at will. They better not EMP the tank. Drones are launched.” The words ripped at her throat, meaning she had probably shouted louder than needed, but she didn’t want a single word lost against the unrelenting sirens.

Jeena’s eyes widened and she nodded, the motion sharp and efficient, her jaw already moving as she used some comm channel Talinn had zero access to. Did unadapted humans have comms embedded behind their ears too? Were they removable devices? Why had she never paid attention?

Her thoughts scrambled in a dozen different directions, and she pulled them back as best she could. Bee could use her senses, and Talinn was equally able to see what Bee registered. They’d gotten lazy with it during assignments, given the tank’s screens showed Talinn everything she needed to see, but no time like the present to refresh an old skill.

Talinn slackened against Sammer’s and Xenni’s hold, and their hands tightened as her muscles loosened. She closed her eyes and slid into an overload of information. Calculations, six angles of views, heat signatures, velocity matching, wind speed, it all flooded into the space her eyesight had recently taken, and she may or may not have stopped breathing as her brain struggled to corral the flood into meanings it could parse.

Most of the views were the drones; Talinn filtered those out. Calculations she kept running to the side—velocity estimations for each jet’s approach were less pressing since she knew Bee had it—and instead she focused on the stream of information that was a broad view of the sky to the south. Not the direction they’d met Other Talinn and Bee. The direction Riva and Ern should be coming back from.

“No sight of River?”

Not even a ping on the long range.

“Base Two confirms, Bee is clear to fire.”

About time. Bee swept the drones apart—there were extra, more than the six count they’d carried in the tank and from which Talinn had seen lines of data. Before she could ask, Bee murmured—perhaps a touch of guilt in the words—Our tank is still out there, and those drones are still on my frequency. I got two tanks’ worth, and I might be able to get Ziggy’s before we’re done.

“Should be enough for a squadron of jets.”

That and my turrets? Yes. Even if they’re IDC Eights, they’re not ready for me.

Dumb missiles, guided by simple programming rather than AI, shot up from the base, toward the jets, all of which had plenty of time to blow out scattershot and confuse the missile targeting.

Definitely AI jets, Bee and Talinn decided together, watching the way the aircraft moved, and the fine control of the scattershot. If the missiles had been AI guided on their base’s side—as they would have been if the arrays were functional—the incoming targets would not have been able to evade so easily.

They don’t think we have any active Eights. They’re far too casual.

“Unfortunate for them you’re here.”

We’ve really learned a lot about assuming these last few days. Smug, Bee flooded Talinn’s brain with nesting plans, a branching series of actions accounting for each jet’s possible trajectory.

The drones remained low, and the incoming jets showed no reaction to them. As the jets curved slightly away from each other, likely to ensure maximum impact when they fired, Bee sent seventeen drones spinning into the air, all launching their own small bombs while becoming slightly larger bombs themselves.

The jets occupied themselves with the drones, paths changing, apparently taking for granted the base would wait.

But Bee wasn’t the base. The tank’s turrets swung around—three tanks’ worth of turrets swung around. Bee should absolutely not have been able to retain control of even their old tank, out in the field, as she had left none of her programming behind in it. In the midst of the chaos—alarms screaming, other Eights peppering questions, Bee’s perpetual tsunami of information—Talinn couldn’t begin to imagine how Bee would have gotten a hold of a third tank, one they’d never been in. She tagged that thought, along with about a thousand more from the meeting with the older versions of them, as something to scrutinize later.

Three of the drones were out. Talinn meant to say that aloud to the people around her, and maybe she did, but she was too deep into the streaming data from Bee to know how to monitor her volume, so she might have subvocalized it, or screamed it, or anything in between. Her body ceased to have meaning. There was too much else to pick apart.

Two tanks took out two jets. Bee was good—excellent, even—but it was one AI against ten. The only thing saving them was the attackers had to believe there were Eights in each tank, and were therefore giving more berth than they might have otherwise. Their original tank, further out, was closing out the edge of its reach.

Two more jets peeled off, screaming away in opposite directions. The remaining eight increased the distance between them, trying to draw the tanks’ attention and perhaps create some confusion among the defenders.

But the defenders were all Bee, and she had a plan. And then exactly eighty-three additional plans, if that one didn’t work.

Two more drones fell, and one of them crashed into a third as it exploded. “Bee—” Talinn’s idea started in her head, and completed in Bee’s, as the AI sent three more crashing into the airspace ahead of the lowest attacking jet, providing exactly enough of a screen for the third tank to get off a volley the jet could not avoid.

“Three down. Five to go.”

I won’t get them all. Those other two are coming back.

“You cut it down enough, they won’t be able to completely ice the tank. We’ll get you out as soon as the metal cools—”

Hate explosions. It was a risk. The server that hosted Bee was as secure as techs could make it, ensuring it would be all but impossible to lose both AI and human partner in a mission. The goal of any assignment weapon was that enough of the programming survived for Command to get a thorough last report before decommissioning the orphaned AI. With Talinn still alive and functional, any pieces Bee lost in an explosion could be rerouted and all but recovered between their two systems. A risk, but not a death sentence.

The first of the jets got two missiles off between the drones and the tanks, and odds were in Bee’s favor—their old tank, without Bee in residence absorbed the hits, got off one last fusillade before the turret was left as a half-melted slag pile.

Was almost out of reach anyway.

The third tank got off a ballistic round that contained half its remaining payload, and another jet spiraled at full speed toward the ground. But there were still four left, and Bee knew the two that had pulled away were going to return any moment.

Talinn’s knees were on the ground. Sammer murmured something in her ear. The next wave would take out another tank—no matter how good the treads, Bee couldn’t outrun air support.

The missing two jets registered on sonar, though still out of sight, and their heat signatures were off the charts. Talinn couldn’t imagine what the IDC attackers had done while away, but an aching weight of dread indicated they were about to find out.

The alarms had faded—either they were off or Talinn’s ears had stopped working. She said words she didn’t retain, and stayed immersed in Bee’s spinning nebula of data. Bee would survive, she would, but Talinn wouldn’t leave her alone in the seconds leading up to the potential destruction and—

One of the jets fell out of the sky in pieces before either Talinn or Bee processed the dramatic shift in the fight.

The remaining base arrays had come alive.

“Sammer!” The lining of her throat was bleeding; copper flooded her mouth. Talinn must have been screaming the entire time.

“Talinn, we’re here. Is it Bee? Is the tank—”

“The arrays!”

“The arrays?”

Jeena’s voice, urgent. “The arrays are firing.”

“It’s not Lei!”

“Is it—can it be Cece?” Voices overlayed each other until Talinn couldn’t make out intelligible words.

Bee fired in rapid succession, but the arrays took out the last six jets, who had disregarded the arrays completely. The sky above was suddenly, shockingly quiet.

The arrays went still.

Bee tracked her one remaining turret across the empty expanse above.

Talinn stumblingly untangled her senses from immersion in Bee’s, but it took another full minute before she could pry her eyes open.

Every Eight was in a semicircle tight around her, their eyes flicking between Talinn, on the ground, and Jeena, pacing to the side of the press of bodies, her mouth moving as she spoke to someone on comms.

Between one moment and the next, the alarms cut off entirely, as sudden as the change in the sky outside. The silence hurt, Talinn’s ears throbbing in the absence of cacophony.

“What happened?” Xenni demanded, her hands clenched but stretched out toward Talinn, as though she were restraining herself from grabbing and shaking.

Words spilled out of Talinn, a brief report, the way she’d been trained. Her brain was too sore to listen, still spiraling through the plans upon plans she and Bee had held as the fight shifted rapidly in the sky above. She couldn’t keep herself on track, relief and adrenaline and confusion braided together so tightly she almost missed Sammer’s whisper.

“Medith.” He’d half turned from her, staring at the console again, and saliva pooled over Talinn’s tongue. She wanted to know what Lei had to say, so badly her body thought she was hungry. She snatched her hand back to her chest, catching it as it reached for the console as though that would give her the answers she wanted.

An overlapping babble of voices rose around them, a dozen questions half asked. Almost immediately, silence again, as Sammer twitched up a hand impatiently.

“We need to find Medith. Does she know . . .” Sammer’s mouth moved even after he stopped talking, as though he couldn’t imagine the rest of that sentence. If Cece still existed, of course Medith knew. But there never should have been confusion about that to begin with. Unless Medith had lied?

Talinn couldn’t connect to a full decision about the matter, and Bee provided no help. She couldn’t bear to think about Medith, and her own AI provided a perfect excuse. “Wait, Bee . . . how did you—”

“Who was Base Two talking about?” Jeena appeared at Talinn’s elbow, crouched down so they were face-to-face. Talinn hadn’t understood she was still kneeling on the ground—the past hours, and days, had done a number on her situational awareness to say the absolute least.

“I have a lot more questions before that one.” The words came haltingly through her mouth, but managed not to wobble. They crowded together once she was sure her tone wouldn’t betray her, spilling out rapidly. “Like why was Base Two here without identifying himself? Who is attacking us? Why are the Eights taking the brunt of suspicion and getting routed off the field? Why was Base Command holding an EMP over our head? What evidence was used to declare Cece destroyed, and what under every sky in the galaxy is going on that the base arrays came online and saved all of our asses if all the AIs were out of the system?”

Why did you say Bee’s code had a discrepancy, and not report it? Are you a clone? Are we all actually on the same side fighting a play war?

Because the losses had felt pretty real, everywhere else. Until they’d gotten here. And here . . . they’d come close enough to the end. The tension had yet to fully leave, pressure uncomfortable under her ribs, from how close it had been for Bee. How close it might still be, for Medith. Stakes were alarmingly real for a pretend war . . . though that was the point, wasn’t it? Fill it with clones, let it run in the same circles, let money fall out and no one real needs to worry. Terrarium war. No one important suffers.

“Base Two was here to ask you about whoever you met with, and that attack was real convenient to keep you from answering.” Jeena’s voice was low, soothing despite the words. “I can’t imagine even you and Bee could have coordinated that so precisely, and you seemed as surprised as the rest of us that that was Base Two, so don’t protest. I’m not saying it was you.”

Talinn’s mouth had already formed around the retort, every muscle tensing, before Jeena had headed her off at the intercepting orbit.

“If everything’s connected, Base Two at least seems to think it’s rooted in who you met with. So. Who is ‘she’?”

“Me. Bee and I met with . . . Talinn and Bee.”

She wasn’t entirely sure what she expected. Dead silence. Pandemonium. An extreme reaction of some sort.

But what she got, after a heartbeat’s pause, was Sammer throwing back his head and laughing. Deep, from his belly, as though the universe had told him the most delightful joke he could have ever imagined. As though Lei had toggled a corner of his brain that produced laughter, and he couldn’t stop.

He laughed until all pairs of eyes were locked on him, until horror overtook some expressions and nervous humor others, and then Xenni joined him.

“Are their AIs broken?” Talinn subvocalized to Bee, her gaze fixed on Sammer despite her best efforts to tear it away. Like the first time she’d seen a dead, broken body.

Are they broken? Bee’s retort had none of its usual bite. Instead it was as though Bee had busied herself doing something else. What could be distracting her?

“Who are you talking to?” But she knew the answer before she asked. Cece. Of course Bee was talking to Cece. “Did Cece help you connect to the other tank?”

No. Maybe. Unclear.

“Helpful, Bee. Very precise.”

Sammer’s laughter still filled the space around them, and between one heartbeat and the next it became beyond too much. Talinn pushed herself to her feet, her body sluggish to respond, aching in places she didn’t know she’d tensed. She forced each muscle to unclench as she moved, and strode away from the knot in the middle of the tech’s room. She didn’t know what she needed to do, but she was stiff and jittery and her nerves communicated a mix of pain, tingling, and sparks, so she moved. The space didn’t give her a chance to run and force all the parts of her body to work together, to work right, to feel normal again, but at least she could pace.

A commotion behind her, a sharp sound, and Sammer’s laughter cut off. A moment later Xenni’s followed. Talinn kept her face locked forward, the path she took as she traced the lengths of the room, three sides of the square, avoiding the wall that took her closest to the cluster of people.

“Talinn.” Sammer’s voice, still trembling with something—mirth, hysteria, disbelief—she couldn’t tell anymore. She ignored it, marking the edges of her cage.

“Talinn,” Jeena repeated, and Talinn quickened her pace.

Breezy,” several Eights chorused at once, and her feet stopped so quickly she tilted forward, then used her momentum to whirl around and glare.

What.

“You called me. Before the last attack. Sounded a little hoarse, but you knew our shorthand. The codes. The channel.” Slight emphasis in the word meant the other Bee had contacted Lei as well. “It was you.” Sammer’s eyes were intent on hers, no laughter to be seen.

“But I didn’t—”

“Yeah, no, I figured. As soon as you said . . . I knew it. That that hadn’t been you at all.”

“What did she—I—what was the message?”

“It wasn’t much—more of a check in. I thought it was weird you were contacting me instead of Base, but it’s been a weird couple of days, and . . .”

Talinn, who’d had her own unexpected outreach from a Sammer that seemed more likely not to have been her own, understood that to her toes.

“And now I’m guessing the point wasn’t the message.”

On another day—a better day, one not at the end of a whole lot of battering to her brain in repeated and terrifyingly thorough ways—she might have understood right away. As it went, it took her three full seconds before she rocked back on her heels. “She sent a code.”

“Something, something that impacted the arrays, Cece, who knows what else?”

Tanks that Bee shouldn’t have been able to operate, but did. A fraction of the other Bee’s own program? How would that even be possible? They’d tried before, in their training days, competing to get their AI partners into different secured locations without hard load-in. But the same Command that had found the way to perfect the AIs had also put great care into protecting against them, and their competitions had never resulted in success.

The other version of her had had more time to figure out further options, that was clear, but . . . She prompted Bee, who’d listened, but Bee offered nothing. Talinn added it to the spiraling list of questions she needed to get back to. Orienting question: What the shit is happening?

Next question: What are we going to do about it?

“Sure, so . . . wait. Why was that so funny?” Daren cocked his head at Sammer, though his gaze drifted over to Talinn the moment he stopped speaking.

“One—the message from Talinn was the one nice thing that happened all day, and it wasn’t even her. Two—maybe it’s why the day went even more sideways afterward. Three—I actually had a moment today . . .” He held up his hands, warding off protests before he finished speaking. “I let myself be sad that we’d all glitched so much we probably weren’t going to get cloning bonuses, but . . .”

Sammer’s voice skewed, but he managed to control another laugh. “If we’re already clones—’cause I’m guessing if Talinn’s been cloned before, she’s not the only one—they’re not going to pay us again for the pleasure of our company.” He dropped his arms when no one argued, and glanced from face to face. “Come on—that’s funny.”

“That’s a way to look at it.” Jeena shifted to put her hand on Sammer’s arm, and left it there even as she turned her attention fully to Talinn. “What did this other iteration of you have to say?”

“And why bother, if she was just going to sabotage the base?” Caytil grunted, then shrugged when heads turned toward her. “What? It can’t be vanity. I know this Talinn, and I can’t imagine that one is so wildly different. It’s not like saving yourself, not really. What’s the point?”

“Who says it was sabotage though?” Sigmun stared unblinking at the consoles to the side of their group. Talinn wondered what any of the AIs had to say about all of this, given Bee remained silent. “Maybe she was giving us an advantage.”

“By having Cece blow up and strand Medith in lock up?” Xenni spluttered, knocking her shoulder into Sigmun’s.

“By introducing a back door to help when we got attacked, again, without any of us in place—again.”

“But how would she even know—” Daren interjected, shoving forward exactly the way he and Gef did when they were in formation in their jet.

“So we went from having zero combatants on this shitty planet to two different groups—”

“No no no no no.” Caytil whistled, the piercing noise driving into the center of ears recently abused by alarms, then crossed her arms and continued. “Tech finally asked a good question. What did this other Talinn tell you? Please say it’s something that’s going to make all of this make sense.”

Talinn breathed in, and Caytil noted it rightly as a hesitation. She stared at Talinn for another long moment, then blew out her own breath noisily.

“Any part of this, then. Please say it’s something that’s going to make even one part of all this make sense. Please.

There had to be a reason Other Talinn hadn’t simply messaged everyone—or had their respective counterparts do so—and share it all at once. Consequences. Information spilling out of carefully constructed silos, leading to some terrible outcome this Talinn hadn’t yet considered.

She could make their lives infinitely worse, in ways she wouldn’t see coming until it was too late.

We don’t owe anyone anything.

Talinn didn’t subvocalize a response to Bee; she didn’t need to. Bee read her instant disagreement and its conflicting impulses, and sheared metal across their link.

Old Breezy showed up and dumped this on us, and Other Bee talked to Lei but not me? Weird. Command has held this secret for who knows how long. That’s not our fault. We don’t own this, whatever happens. But if we’re going to pick someone to be loyal to, someone to trust, someone whose secrets we should protect . . . it’s not going to be old us. Not Command. Not the war effort. It’s the Eights. Our Eights. You already know that.

Of course she did.

A laugh as alarmingly out of control as Sammer’s bubbled in her throat, and Talinn swallowed, shook her head, and told them everything.


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