CHAPTER 19
Talinn strode from the partially collapsed base toward the transport ship as though everything were normal. No one who caught sight of her could possibly imagine her feet were made of melting sludge, or that she was constantly fighting the urge to pull her feet high as they were repeatedly sucked down into the morass she tromped through.
There were people around her, and she knew who they were, but their names spun out of her head in colored ribbons, too slippery to grasp. One main thought, vibrating through her brain, held her in one piece. Get to ship.
She thought she was a tank, but apparently she was a ship. There were worse things. Jets. Mudflats. Asteroid fields.
Get to ship.
She’d done this before. Walking. Becoming a ship. Routine. Training. Her head kept tilting up to look at the sky—was there something up there? Something she should know about—but if she took her attention from her feet they would fall off, merge with the slippery ground. Then she wouldn’t be able to get to the ship.
Which was what she had to do.
Get to the ship.
Yes, she knew that already. Time skipped around her, and she was on a ship, but it wasn’t the ship. Seemed unfair. The walls swirled around her, gravity pulling away, she was falling, spinning, sliding—
Almost there. Get to the ship.
Was that her thought? Sounded not right—Bee, but her Bee? Another Bee? Never had that question before, but . . .
She blinked her eyes open, unsure when they’d closed, something pressing on her, pulling on her, pulling her apart . . . her stomach heaved, but it was floating away from her anyway and she let it go, decided it was better to let her eyes close again but then—
And then—
Ship.
She was on a ship. Her legs had broken—no, they were heavier because she was anchored to something. She pulled, then a hand wrapped around her arm, a voice in her ear.
Wait.
Something smooth and thin brushed her ear and she lurched away. Hair! Slime! Creature!
Wait. Wait. Wait. Port. Cord.
Something tugged behind her ear, and she tensed all over, but finally something said, Almost, and she knew that voice, and then someone calm and brusque and loud.
“Orienting question: What is your name?”
“Talinn. Not other. Just me.”
“Orienting question: What is your—”
“Talinn. Talinn Reaze.”
“Next question—What—”
“Can we not?” Talinn squatted, mostly so she could prop her arms on her knees and rest her thudding head. “I’m fine. I’m back.”
“We need to map your—”
The words washed over her, and she made neutral noises in all the pauses. She should have known it wouldn’t be different once she was out from under Command. After a beat they resumed questioning, and she answered and didn’t ask where Jeena was until it was done.
“The tech is working with a different pair. There were some difficulties with—”
Talinn surged upright, glaring at the speaker and taking in her surroundings for the first time. She was in an angled room with consoles on three of the five surfaces. The patch of wall to her left and under her feet were bare, and three people stood across the empty spaces.
Medith was dead. The array had blown, the ghost in the machine—
No, no, that was the past. This was the now. Deal with the now. Three people.
Two were as bald as she, each with three ports in a semicircle along the base of their skulls. The other had a fuzz of hair and one port, which made no sense at all. She dismissed it for the moment.
“Who had difficulties?”
“Easy there, Eight.” The person on the wall to her left disconnected his boots and twisted, reengaging as he oriented to her direction. “No one’s dead or dying. Xenni glitched, and they’re finishing a diagnostic cycle.”
“Define glitched.” Her heart hammered in her chest, but that could be a reaction to being in zero g after load-in.
“Does that mean something different to your sort?” The other multiported person snorted and waved a display between them, the projected screen flickering between images. “Glitched. Forgot what she was doing, thought she was a tyrophan.”
“All the AIs are loaded,” the fuzz-head interjected, casting a quelling look at the snorter.
Talinn tried to summon a short-term memory of who everyone was, but there was nothing behind her last few minutes except the haze of transit. What was a tyrophan?
Large fungus eater, found on Zilliar in the Hynex system.
Tension ebbed at the sure note in Bee’s voice. It allowed Talinn to ask the next question. “And who are you all, since I’m sure I’m going to be so delighted to spend time with you?”
“Oh, aren’t we just the charmingest.” The first speaker kicked off from the floor and performed a spinning, twisting, multiaxis maneuver that seemed more of a display than a greeting. He landed and swept his arms out to the side as his boots clacked to what they’d all apparently agreed was the floor. “I’m Falix, lead of the Pajeeran Fall trio. I’ve met you before—not you, obviously, but . . .” He spun his hands around, the gesture encompassing some larger picture. “You. You know.”
Unfortunately, she did. He knew Older Talinn and Bee. Or perhaps some other version of them, running about the settled systems.
“Surex.” Fuzz-head pointed at the other three-ported individual, then smiled radiantly. “And I’m Nya.”
“Nya.” Talinn’s face echoed the smile, though she didn’t make a conscious effort to do so. “Are you a tech?”
Nya laughed, tipping a hand side to side to indicate “sort of” until she got control of herself. “You can say that. I’m a host.”
“Don’t tell you everything, do they, Eight?” Surex’s screen flickered again, and Talinn noted the way his eyes tracked across it. He had to be absorbing information at an even faster pace than she could.
Or he was showing off. Ugh. No wonder no one spent any time with Spacies.
“Can’t imagine Command tells anybody everything,” she replied, crossing her arms.
“Hosts are—we don’t have our own anchored AIs. But we are receptive to multiple series of constructs.” She tapped her port. “Temporarily. We keep pieces as needed.”
“And if there’s an emergency, she can carry part of one of our AIs, allowing at least one of us to get off the ship whole.” Falix said that cheerfully, but his voice hit a register that made Talinn’s skin attempt to slough off her bones.
Is that an IDC thing, UCF thing, side group of clones thing?
While interested, Talinn forbore to ask. It wasn’t pressing, and she wasn’t entirely clear how much anyone knew about anything. “A little bit of both” wasn’t the most helpful answer Other Bee could have given regarding if they were traveling under orders or as rogue clones. Last thing she wanted to do was accidently blow some sort of operational security. If she were to ruin things, she’d prefer to do it on purpose.
“Thank you for sharing.” She thought of half a dozen questions to ask the Spacies, but her thoughts kept circling back to Medith, sitting in the array room, finagling it to blow.
Cover. All the Eights were in there, according to Jeena’s report and the comms log. Cece resurged, everything and everyone fried, the array tower collapsed.
Why could she remember that with perfect clarity, but not the walk to the ship? Not the surface to orbit lift? Not arriving on this ship with these Spacies? But Medith’s face, which she couldn’t possibly have seen, Medith clinging to the array as though Cece were really in there . . .
She shook her head and asked the first thing that popped into it. “Why am I here, apart from the rest?”
“Your tech asked to be left to handle the glitch. It will all be fine.” Falix gestured to the bare wall to the left. “We’ve broken orbit and will drop toward the jump point shortly. Do you want a tour while Kivex gets us underway?”
“Xenni hasn’t ever glitched before.” She didn’t want to ignore the invitation—Bee clamored for the tour—but she was still off balance. Couldn’t even blame zero g. “Is she all right? Can we go there?”
“Everyone is recovering in their own space. Your tech has it all in hand. Would you like that tour?”
“I—”
Yes.
“Yes. We would.” Talinn chewed on the inside of her cheek until it hurt, then swallowed and straightened her posture. Focus on the matter at hand. Not Medith. Not P-8. Not even Xenni, reverting to some enormous herbivore.
“And is Bee comfortable in the server?” Nya kicked off from the floor, and the formerly bare wall receded, revealing a rounded hall on the other side.
It’s warm.
“She’s fine. It’s shielded from the main servers, I’m guessing?”
“Oh no, we love to let other AIs trounce around and bother ours.” Surex rolled his entire body, and Nya grabbed the corner of the wall and bent backward to meet Talinn’s eyes with an apologetic smile.
“It actually isn’t shielded, just gapped. Bee can talk to whomever she likes—through comms, not through AI channels.”
I . . . can?
“I can.” Bee’s voice emerged into the air, and Talinn’s entire body went rigid. It was doubly odd—Bee’s voice was Talinn’s own, for the most part, though with a slight tonal shift that was Bee’s twist to it. And usually, it sounded directly in her head, not vibrating on her ears. Externally, it was like hearing her voice through a recording, but with added harmonics meant to tug at the base of the spine.
“That’s . . .”
“Oh man, the other Bee I knew had a lot of fun with that. I bet yours will too.” Nya pushed through the hall, and disappeared almost immediately around a curve.
“She won’t go far without you,” Falix said, smiling almost as contagiously as his host. He gestured her ahead, and she reluctantly pushed back on her heels twice to release the magnetic locks on her boots.
“So I can talk to anyone on the ship.” Bee wasn’t asking, but stating facts, delight all over each word. “However I want. And your AIs do this all the time?”
“Of course we do.” Another voice—modulated, but recognizably similar to Falix’s—responded as Talinn speared toward the opening. She was going too fast, and turned slightly at the new voice. Her shoulder, barely healed from its last injury, bumped against the edge of the wall opening, but Falix was already there and nudged her away before she rammed entirely against it.
“Careful there—know you don’t get as much practice as we do in float.” He beamed at her, fingers flashing over her other arm and hip, too fast to be overly personal, but somehow enough to right her trajectory.
This close she saw that his eyes were less a pair and more a mismatched set—one crystal blue with an enormous pupil, one a dark hazel with a pinpoint of black—and though it was nothing like Medith’s, it made her stomach twist over itself again.
“We’ve got to get better at this,” Bee announced, a little too gleeful. The interruption brought Talinn back to the present moment, and she pulled her legs in to reengage the magnets of her boots. She’d practice, all right, but for now walking would be perfectly sufficient.
Nya clunked her legs down once Talinn rounded the corner, orienting to the same floor-to-ceiling direction Talinn had chosen. Falix floated alongside, the smallest of motions countering his spin and keeping him aligned with them as they moved through the halls. The walls were smooth, dark-gray metal, studded with thin strips of lights at evenly spaced intervals that left room for feet or hands and still provided sufficient visibility. Occasional rungs—tucked against the more rounded edges of floor to wall—did not create a tripping hazard, but even non-Spacie Talinn knew they’d provide a way to add speed or sudden stops if passengers chose floating rather than magnetic boots for propulsion.
“Are you adapted for zero g?” Talinn’s curiosity about Spacie specializations served as an excellent distractor from everything else—from the monumental decision of leaving UCF behind to the losses of Medith, Sigmun, Daren, and the rest, to the brooding presence of Surex following behind them, still immersed in his screen.
“We’re adapted for any number of things. Mostly math.”
“You’re adapted . . . for math?”
“A lot of our training is tailored toward spatial awareness and rapid calculations and holding conflicting information in our brains at one time. I joke that it’s specialized to the point of adaptation, but . . .” He spun in the air, enough for her to catch several glimpses of his broad grin. “I guess that’s not actually funny.”
“It’s funny,” Nya interjected loyally, a chuckle underneath her words.
Talinn thought it better not to comment, but Bee spoke from a speaker a few strides ahead of them. “Humor is very subjective. It’s possible we just don’t get it.”
“A very nice way to say I’m not funny.”
“To say that wasn’t funny to us.” Bee’s words dripped graciousness, and Nya cackled.
“She’s funny.”
“Anyway . . .” Falix incorporated his broad arm gestures into his motion, remaining apace with Talinn despite their different modes of travel. “We are adapted to survive quite a bit that would ruin even you, Eight.” Unlike Surex, he used the nickname with a welcoming sort of tease. “Rapid pressure changes, low oxygen, extreme temperature shifts—nothing indefinite, of course, everything that would kill you would eventually kill us too—”
“And we sacrifice limbs for processing power if there’s an emergency. Toes go, then legs. Eventually fingers and hands,” Surex grumbled, and Talinn turned slightly to take in his expression. Glaring, as before, but not at her. Perhaps Surex was grumpy about the state of the universe as a whole, then, and not Talinn and her people being on board in particular.
“We train with our elbows.” Falix laughed, then caught sight of Talinn’s questioning face and explained further. “If the environment around us gets questionable, our bodies automatically redirect blood, oxygen, and all helpful chemicals to our brains, even if it means starving our extremities. It’s a good idea in theory, given the more efficient our brains are, the likelier we and our AIs will figure out a solution, but less exciting when opposable thumbs are the difference between solving our issues and eventual death.” Falix angled his spin closer to her, giving the impression of confiding, though he didn’t drop his voice or stop smiling even a little.
“And it’s never come to that on this ship,” Nya added, though her smile did slip a little. Enough to tell Talinn obviously enough that it had happened, on another ship, one with people Nya knew. That was a subtle expression she knew all too well, even on a new face.
“We’ll give you a tour of our specs later.” Falix made that so suggestive even Surex grunted something like a laugh, then swirled forward and half sat up, so his face and torso were oriented toward Talinn even as his legs kept his motion steady ahead toward Nya. “And we don’t have time for a full tour of the ship, so an overview.”
“You’re in the guts of it right now.” Nya picked up the conversation as though they were linked. Or had done it before, Talinn corrected herself, nodding along as the host spoke. “There are four levels above and to the left of your current orientation, and three below and to the right. The loading rooms are in the rough middle of the ship, for a skooch more protection on normal transit assignments. Below and to the right is propulsion and all the way above is cargo loading.”
“We’ll cross two conduits to other levels on the way to the central command—down that way are passenger bunks, likely the kind you’d be familiar with from prior assignments.” Falix took the tour back without a pause. “That’s also public mess, a small open space for exercise and rec when people are conscious. After the next crossing will be our space—quarters, mess, tech, med—”
“Nothing that will matter to you and yours—”
“Thank you, Surex.” Nya beamed harder, and he grunted behind them again. “We have a gym you are all more than welcome to use—I believe this will be a longer route than what you would have used between postings before, and of course you will all be conscious for the bulk of it. Not your usual interassignment run.”
“Oh! Another adaptation.” Falix pulled his forearms in to flex his biceps, then took the momentum of the motion to flip around and drop his feet under him. “Our muscles take quite a bit longer to go lax in zero g. Though we’re also resistant to higher g’s as a whole—we’re very bendy.”
“That seems nice for you,” Talinn replied politely.
“Not just us.” He winked, as though the intent hadn’t been clear enough, and she couldn’t help the small laugh that rose out of her in reply.
“I’m glad to say Falix has distracted you just long enough for us to confirm all AIs are properly hosted in our side servers.” Nya tapped her port, which apparently doubled as a comm, and continued walking and talking, neatly hopping over an opening in the floor—one of the crossings they’d mentioned. “And all Eights are within normal operating parameters.”
“We have to get to command center.” Surex’s grump vanished into a more strained tension, and he shot ahead of them, body in a straight, spearing line.
“Nya—” Falix launched so quickly off the floor next to her he passed Surex before they reached the next rounded corner.
“I’ve got her.” The words seemed more for Talinn’s sake than Falix’s, as his feet disappeared around the curve ahead.
“Are you taking me to command central, or out of the way?”
“Command central,” Bee interjected, with all the confidence in the world.
“As Bee commands,” Nya murmured, and they tromped through the ship.
Command was an open semicircle of space, with six chairs mounted on what was ostensibly the floor, consoles around the edges of the room interspersed with screens, and an enormous display serving as the ceiling, one which currently showed a shifting fractal design.
Usually Talinn would have asked about the decoration, or the random chairs, but instead she was occupied by the monotone voice blaring from all around them.
“CODE NOT ACCEPTED.”
“We’re leaving the system, you big, stupid hulk. You don’t need a code—” This must be Kivex, who’d been aligning their point in space with their designated jump point.
“CODE NOT ACCEPTED.”
“We’re UCF,” Kivex shrieked, fingers flying over controls Talinn couldn’t make out. “We’re on your side!”
“CODE NOT ACCEPTED.”
“Yeah, we got that.” Falix stood over a long console opposite Kivex. A smaller chair than the six along the back wall spun out of the floor, but he didn’t lean into it. Instead he spun his hands through some configuration Talinn couldn’t make out. “Nya, strap in. Big defense arrays have lost their unpressurized minds and we might have to run for it. Kivex tell me we’re ready—”
“Something’s not lining up, there’s a vibration—”
“We’re in space—” Surex interrupted, and Talinn craned her head back, unable to make out what he was doing above them, close to the edge of the ceiling screen.
“Obvious things are not helping!” Kivex, strapped in on the furthest of the six chairs, typed furiously on the arms of her chair. Inside the arms of it? Talinn’s angle wasn’t the best, though Nya gestured her toward the closest of the seats.
The fractal above was . . . a representation of the jump-point alignments. She’d seen similar images in training, though she’d never been in a Spacie’s command center to know how the experts saw it. Usually the Eights were unconscious at that point of travel, and they were always kept to their corner of the ship.
“Bee.” Talinn hunched her shoulders as though that would make her subvocalization even less likely to disrupt the tension around her. “Is there anything you can do?” Too late she realized Bee might answer her on a speaker, but even the novelty of a new toy wasn’t enough to make Bee add further confusion to the current scene.
Scream into the void. Bee’s voice stretched thin, though the server holding the AIs was no more distant than it would have been on the base. Don’t know how helpful that would be.
They hadn’t been trained for space travel—the AIs and human counterparts made for quantum transit were built for the job, same as AITs were built for violence. They were not translatable skills, though they should be, because then she wouldn’t be sitting here, strapping into some large chair, like and entirely unlike her command chair in the tank, because here she was useless and helpless and about to be blasted into infinitesimally small pieces by an enormous weapon from her own side—
“Are they on our side anymore?” Talinn asked, hands on the straps she was meant to fasten, her body straining toward the console Falix was using for comms.
What?
“Did Other Talinn give you any other codes? Like . . . IDC codes, maybe?”
No, why under any sky in the galaxy would she . . . Huh. Wait, maybe—
“Try this!” Talinn launched out of her chair—stupid, unsafe, but so was getting blown up—and crashed against Falix’s console. She shoved his hands out of the way and ran her fingers over the screen, inputting the code Bee summoned from—Talinn didn’t know where Bee had summoned it from. That should have worried her, but in the moment she was too busy holding her breath.
Nothing happened, other than Kivex rocking and muttering as she and her AI continued wrenching space around them to match another piece of space absurdly, astronomically far away. The fractal above moved exactly as it had been, and Surex cursed once, loudly but with effort. Talinn’s chest burned, and still she held her breath. Her throat worked, fighting against her, and Bee offered a small ping of concern, but Talinn refused to draw in new air. Not breathing held the moment, preserved it, kept them from blowing up, and if she gave in to the biological urge they would immediately and irrevocably blo—
“CODE ACCEPTED.”
“Thank all the little space demons and their tiny quarky friends.” Falix blew out a breath so loudly Talinn couldn’t tell how ragged her own was. Then he shoved her away. “Go belt up, Eight face. I’ll have questions for you later. Dubs—”
Chimes rang through the command center, followed by a low, soothing voice. It was vaguely similar to Surex’s but modulated for maximum calm. “Passengers, transit is eminent. Secure any organic bodies, and prepare to unravel.”
This is a weird ship. Bee hummed thoughtfully.
“Thank you for staying out of their speakers.” Talinn yanked the cross belt over her shoulders and felt the click more than heard it—potentially because it coincided with the chair stabbing her. “We’ve got to try to stay on their good side.”
Try nothing. Bee refused to elaborate, which was for the best, because Talinn’s consciousness was already ebbing away.