Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 3


“Nothing.”

The wind dried the exposed skin of her face as Talinn clung to the side of her tank, glaring at the space outside the hatch Bee had indicated. Besides clumps of dirt, easily cleared, and barely noticeable dings in a small stretch of armor, it all looked exactly as it should.

Maybe we’re the problem. Bee’s voice was far too quiet in her head, and Talinn snorted.

“An external exploding attack, outside our tank, can’t possibly have affected us inside the tank. We’re shielded—”

We’re armored. But we can’t entirely block EMPs. There could be other ways to dig into our connection and hang on for a ride.

“Like what?”

The AIs broke into each other’s channels, which is officially impossible. Who’s to say someone else didn’t figure out  . . . something else?

“Reassuringly vague.” Talinn tapped her fingers against the side of the tank and reangled her body to sweep the area. She didn’t expect it to look any different than it had on the screens, and she was right. The scrubby grass had given way to some tree-adjacent plant life, each sprawled longer than they were tall in a flurry of long, twisting branches. The dust in the air diffused the sunlight enough she hadn’t bothered to dial her protective goggles for light adaptation.

Unrelenting wind flung stinging particles of planet at the small patches of her unprotected skin with abandon. The doctors in charge of selecting the proper edits for her embryonic body hadn’t given her soft tissue any upgrades when it came to ignoring tiny projectiles. She opened her mouth to complain about it to Bee—not for the first time in their thirty-odd cycles together—and then snapped her jaw shut as a low vibration indicated they wouldn’t be alone for much longer.

Incoming, Bee said helpfully, then added, Awful lot of activity in the part of your brain you store the bad words.

“Thought you weren’t assuming anymore.” Talinn ran her gloved hand over the matte surface of their tank and twisted to shift backward into the hatch. She squinted into the distance, but whatever convoy approached was still out of visible range—unless that particular dust cloud, slightly larger than all the other eddies of flying dirt, was it.

Visual lock confirmed useless, she stepped further down the ladder and pulled the hatch closed behind her. “Are we at least where they told us to be?”

Close enough. The middle picture in the display widened, then zoomed in on six squat, heavily armored trucks coming their way. They’re definitely worried we caught a bug or got compromised out there. Not a single Eight in the crew.

“They can’t exactly send a base array out here. All ground assault—”

Ground support, Bee corrected in falsely formal tone.

“Are assigned, assaulting and supporting all the absolutely nothing out in this ass-end of the universe. None of the jets are landing out here. So who’s left?” Talinn dropped off the ladder and paused to listen out of habit as Bee locked the hatch. She left the rungs extended instead of collapsing the ladder back against the ceiling, then frowned down at the coating of dust she’d brought inside.

They could have rerouted a tank. There are at least three that could have made it in the window—

“An entire square—it was vaguely square-ish, yeah?—of previously inert ground just blew up in our faces and temporarily kept us from connecting to a single comm channel, so they might want the tanks out there patrolling.”

She crossed to the bunk in three steps, pulled out the waste compartment and grabbed a clean rag. Bee snapped a different drawer open, pointedly, and Talinn laughed. “We might be about to get violently decommissioned, but yes, of course I’ll wet the rag before wiping myself down.”

If the techs come in here and there’s dust everywhere, they’ll think we’ve abandoned all training and hygiene, and they’ll definitely use the wipe code.

“The mythical wipe code.”

That’s probably what they save it for. If you just wipe the dust off your uniform, it’ll float around in here and you’ll complain about it. I don’t need more whining today.

“So if we’re still alive tomorrow—”

You can whine all you want.

“Holding you to that.” She had time to thoroughly clean herself, her gear, and the floor before their comms pinged, which kept her from getting too anxious during the interminable wait.

“Techs are approaching tank designation 617-AR. Reaze, assume position next to the load-in port and await further direction.”

“Reaze and B-617 acknowledge.” Talinn managed the words with crisp diction, even as her head echoed in stingingly foul language. Their not using her and Bee’s actual combined name sign wasn’t the best omen. “Bee, channel is clear?”

B-617 has closed the channel. Tortured metal shrieked under Bee’s words. B-617 would like to take over their stupid dead trucks and use the trucks to run them all over. B-617—

“I know. We went from Breezy to our component parts real fast. Let’s not make it worse.”

Load-in makes it worse.

“We don’t know that they’re going to—”

They are. They brought too many techs not to. At least then we’re all in one place if they decide to wipe us.

Talinn’s throat burned, bile and saliva pooling in the back of her mouth. They’d successfully completed load-in more than a handful of times, in training and for new assignments, but the process never got any easier. An adapted human mind was designed to host part of an AI program, and that it did well. The majority of the AI program wound through the machinery the pair was assigned to—in Talinn and Bee’s case, their tank—but there was only one way to get the entirety of an AI program into that machinery. Or out of it.

Load-in. Eighty-odd cycles of the Eights’ service hadn’t made the adapted human brain glitch-proof when it came to holding an entire AI. Talinn would be moderately functional for an imprecise amount of time—if she didn’t stroke out immediately, she likely had at least ninety minutes before things went irreversibly sideways.

Likely, because load-in past performance did not necessarily predict present outcomes. Talinn could last an hour. Five minutes. A day. Twenty seconds.

At top speed in those trucks, the base is thirty-nine minutes and five seconds away. Accounting for high-security lockdown procedures and transit to the server bank, forty-eight minutes and twenty seconds without unexpected interference. We’ve done worse.

They had, barely. On their second assignment, which involved a much more active front, load-in had been delayed an hour and two minutes as the landing pad the tanks were parked on took heavy fire. Talinn had forgotten how to see blue for a week, but the techs had cleared them for duty, sure it would clear up. And it had.

“Keep your silicates clear, Bee.” Talinn rubbed her hands over her scalp and knelt by the small port in the far corner of the comms console. “If we die, we don’t have to worry about how long we have until you rot my brain.”

Fry, not rot. The meat won’t rot for hours.

“Point to you. Maybe you can just overwrite me and take over entirely.”

Disgusting. Limbs are absolutely no substitute for turrets.

“That we can definitely agree on.”

Bee opened the hatch politely as asked, and a person dropped in, not a grenade or smoker. Suited up and generously armed, but he didn’t swing his weapon toward Talinn, and she counted that for as much of a win as they were getting.

“In position,” he said aloud, not to either of them, and so both Talinn and Bee held silent.

Three more people followed, one at a time, and the temperature in the tank rose some thousand degrees.

“Are you trying to boil everyone alive?” Talinn asked on their subvocal level, her mouth barely moving.

That’s your adrenaline and too many humans radiating all their body heat in too small a space.

“Can you dial down my adrenaline?”

Before load-in? Ha. So ha. You are the funniest human in all the systems humans have ever seen.

Talinn restrained her urge to snort, holding her place as directed while one person covered her, one paged through the control console, and two others plugged a variety of cords into more ports than she could count.

That wasn’t entirely true—they plugged into seven ports, only three of which Talinn had ever seen used before—but overall the constrained space of the tank transformed into an unbearably tiny and crowded box sprouting too many limbs and wires.

Talinn had never felt uncomfortable pressed inside the various models of tank they’d operated across their assignments—techs accompanied them for load-in only, then cleared out. She’d never shared the space with any other breathing creature once she and Bee were active. Once the tank was Bee.

“How’re you doing?”

I hate everything. Techs most of all. Bee snapped each word and one of the techs cursed under his breath.

“Bee?”

That wasn’t me. A beat while Bee considered. It probably wasn’t me.

The soldier in front of Talinn snapped up his larger weapon, and Talinn raised her chin, refusing to blink.

“A shock,” the tech muttered, flapping a hand without looking. “Some of the relays must have crossed in the battle.”

I wouldn’t call the ground blowing up at us a battle. I don’t think a single one of our rounds hit anything but dirt.

The other tech had moved too close for Talinn to risk answering, even subvocally. Techs who worked on the Eights knew what the slightest twitch of cheek or jaw meant, and neither human nor AI wanted to give them cause for more questions.

“Reaze, prepare for load-in.”

“Prepared.” Talinn angled her head away, though the techs had a clear approach to the port behind and under her ear regardless. She’d occasionally wondered what she’d look like with hair on her scalp, like the unadapted humans had, but the idea of having to shave it back to keep the port easily accessible seemed too itchy to be worth the effort. At least the people who’d edited her genetic material had been sensible about that, even if they couldn’t be bothered to give her metal-infused bones or eyes that didn’t water on dust-riven planets.

A mostly hairless body was why the tank walls were melting—no. She blinked. Load-in must have started?

“Orienting question: What is your name?”

She blinked again—were her eyes always this heavy? Had she gotten metal-infused eyes after all? “Reaze.” Silence dragged on around her, and she pulled her eyelashes apart from each other one at a time. “Talinn, Talinn Reaze.”

“Next question: What is your status?”

Here. Bee’s voice was a drop in the overcrowded room. Tiny, caffeine flavored, a little bit of a burnt blue flavor. No, that was load-in again.

“Bee is loaded.”

Silence. Had she been lying down the whole time? The tank floor was smooth and cool on her cheek. Good thing she’d cleaned it—why had she cleaned it? Dust. She’d gone outside and it got dusty. Right. Were they waiting on her?

“B-617 is loaded. We are functional.” She was still lying down, but no one seemed alarmed by that.

“Next question: What are your current orders?”

“Await load-in.”

“Next question: What were your orders previous to load-in?”

“Patrol coordinates D-North, K-East, W-South, L-West, with ground-support pair Ziggy, consisting of Tagana, Caytil and ZT-881.”

“Next question.” The tech droned on, running through the standard questions that would pinpoint what Talinn and Bee still knew, or could remember accurately. The questions were always the same, which may or may not have defeated the purpose. None of the Eights had ever wanted to ask in case it made the questions and the process somehow worse. Talinn opened her mouth, words came out, and it might have been her or Bee talking. Here and there it wasn’t words, but vomit, but no one seemed alarmed by that either, so she continued to stay on the floor and consider herself even more lucky she didn’t have hair.

At some point she was standing, with something else cool and striped on her face.

Wet.

“What?”

It’s wet, not striped. Cleaning.

Something cleaning and swirling on her face. That’s what she’d said.

There was dust in all of her eyes again. How many did she have? No. Just the left eye. Was she outside?

Moving. Not the thrumming of the tank. She’d recognize that, even in the midst of load-in. But her legs weren’t loud, unless they were loud now? Did legs get loud after you got blown up?

She opened her mouth to ask the question, but her tongue fell out, unspooling on the chair legs in front of her (No, you’re vomiting again.) and then she went to sleep instead.


Back | Next
Framed