CHAPTER 20
When she woke up, she had no idea where she was.
To be fair, for at least three seconds, she had no idea who she was.
Talinn.
“Bee.” She sat up, remembered she was Talinn, and twisted to see what she’d been lying down on. A chair. A fully reclined chair. In a . . .
It crashed back into place as she scanned the command center. They’d left their shit assignment on P-8. Left UCF. Load-in had been rough, but not unusually so. A quick tour of the Pajeeran Fall that had quickly become a crisis . . .
“The defense array tried to blow us up.”
Yup.
“And you had a code that stopped it.”
Yup.
“An . . . IDC code. That stopped a UCF array.”
Yup.
“What the shit?”
“What the shit indeed, Eight.” Falix dropped from above, and Talinn’s abused brain belatedly offered two things—on a spaceborne ship, all three dimensions of surroundings were important to be aware of, and she’d been talking fully aloud, not subvocalizing with Bee.
Had Bee been on speakers, audible to others? No . . . but then it hadn’t really mattered, given the conversation.
“I have three questions, and you will answer them or this ship will, in fact, stop moving. Ready?”
Talinn nodded, a muffled numbness against her skull all the indication she needed that Bee was shielding her from a truly enormous headache.
“One: How did you have an IDC code to soothe a UCF defense array? Two: How did you know an IDC code would work to shut down an UCF defense array? Three: What other critical secrets are you holding that may mean the difference between normal life and screaming death for my ship?”
“Easy. Ready?” She didn’t wait for him to reply, but pressed the heels of her palms against her cheekbones and charged ahead. “One: Another Talinn and Bee dumped a whole lot into my Bee without explanation. Two: See one, because it was a wild guess. Three: See one, because I have no idea what else they gave us, or why, and given you know other us-es, you’d be about as qualified to guess as I would, because this is all still pretty bugging new to me and I’m still hung over from load-in. So.”
Fair on all fronts.
He folded into the chair next to her, and after a long moment, smiled. It was a strained, exhausted, and not-nearly-the-glowing-regard-of-earlier sort of expression, but a smile all the same.
“Fair.” He might have echoed Bee on purpose—at this point, Talinn would be only dully surprised to find that was possible. “It’s never boring when we get a Talinn.”
“How often—”
“You’re only the second one.” Surex’s voice—no, not Surex, but his AI partner Dubs—emerged from the side. The lack of sneer was the giveaway. “There’s no point in being mysterious.”
That was clearly meant for Falix, whose smile brightened slightly. “There’s always room for a little intrigue, my friend. And speaking of such—a thing you might not know, only the second Talinn, is that there are not very many Spacies.”
“I’m only vaguely aware of the number of ships—”
“No, no, you misunderstand. Base models, I mean. Clone lines.” He tapped the skin under his bright blue eye, and Surex snorted loudly and turned away.
“You’re right, I didn’t know that.” She stretched out her legs, letting her arm and sore-again shoulder rest. “I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true of Eights, too.”
“Yes, most of you think you are to be cloned, not that you are already cloned. For us, it’s harder to pretend, so they don’t.”
“They just keep us apart.” Kivex floated closer, and smiled nearly as warmly as Nya had. “It’s a programming miracle that we’re socialized at all.”
“You’re welcome,” Nya murmured, and Kivex laughed. “Though not so socialized we’ve done actual proper introductions. I’m sorry, Talinn.”
“You introduced yourself, I’ve no doubt.” Kivex laid her hand on Nya’s shoulder, her legs hanging in midair. “And I was otherwise occupied. I’m Kivex. That’s my . . . what do you call them? Name sign? Combination call?” She shrugged and went on without waiting for an answer. “All Spacies are linked to an X-series, and we build that right into our names. I am paired with X-22, whom you can and should call Ditto.”
“Falix is paired with Benty, X-20, and Surex with Dubs, X-11,” Nya continued in the same breath. Falix smiled again, and Surex lifted a hand in their direction.
“There are very few X-series versions overall.” Falix spoke as though the belated introductions hadn’t happened, and Talinn would follow as flawlessly as his fellows had. “And so then very few human stock to choose from to keep them anchored.”
“Not to mention the demands of your adaptations,” Talinn suggested, and he laughed.
“There, you are as clever as the other Talinn. I am not surprised.”
“Why so few X-series?” Bee asked over the comms, and Talinn swallowed back a pang. It wasn’t on her to filter what questions Bee did or didn’t ask, not here. That was a good thing.
“It is to do with the jump points and the entanglement principles.” Surex’s answer was sharp, definitive, as though to make an end of the conversation, but Dubs must not have agreed.
“We are what is entangled to the jump point. Without that connection, you can make space as identical as you like, but there is no spark to make the unravelment bridge.”
“One of you for each point?”
“Indeed, indeed.” Falix waved a hand idly, but Talinn noticed the other three people shifted slightly. Another bit of intrigue, maybe. “So what’s next.”
“That didn’t sound like a question, and I hope under every sky in the known universe you’re not expecting me to have an answer.”
“Of course not, of course not. Let’s get you back to your Eights. I’ll tell you all what I know, what’s next, and . . .” He gave her a critical once-over, eyes lingering on her forehead. Or scalp. “We’ll talk disguises.”
“Dis . . . guises.”
“Dear New Talinn, you’re an Eight off assignment. No Spacie ship can run invisible forever. If you’re going to be out in the world, you have to be less . . .” Falix waved his hands in her general direction. “Eight-ish.”
“Hair.” She touched her scalp, imagined synthetic strands covering her head, and did not shudder. When they were small, her class had competed in draping increasingly ridiculous things over their heads to mimic their trainers and carers. The crowning triumph had been Caytil, who’d darkened her eyebrows and drawn on a streaky beard with grease, tied a clever knot in scavenged port cords, then paraded around the training quarters until one of their carers came in, shrieked, and they were all locked down for a week. The given reason was hoarding port cords was wrong, but Talinn had been sure it was that they were making fun of “normal” people.
It had been worth it either way, though they hadn’t plopped things on their heads and strutted around like unadapted empty people after that. Was that why the idea of it now squirmed uncomfortably around the back of her neck? Or was it that she’d temporarily, but thoroughly, put her fellow Eights out of her head?
“Hair to start, my little number friend.” Falix leaned against the arm of his chair, his legs floating behind him. “We have to make you softer. The empties don’t glare nearly as much.”
“I don’t glare.”
“You’re glaring right now.”
“It’s been a long couple of days.” She forced her brows up, tugged her mouth into a careless smile.
“Now that is a good point. And a terrifying face.” He held up his hands, and she smiled more naturally at his own overdone expression. “In the meantime—”
“I’d like to go to the rest of the Eights.” They were safe, and all aboard, and that was good to know. But she wanted to know what had happened. What Jeena had worried about. Why she’d been apart from them in the first place.
“Exactly what I was going to say. But first . . . Talinn.”
Her hands stilled on the lap and leg belts holding her to the chair, and she tilted her head at him, expectant.
“I didn’t take you aside only because you’re a Talinn and we liked the Talinn and Bee we met before.”
“I did, in fact, think that might not be the case.”
Though we are very charming. Even with the glaring, apparently.
“It’s not going to get easier from here.” He gestured toward his temple. “I have a message for you, from them. We will give all of you an overview of the war, the state of the systems, such as you might not have received from UCF before. But for you . . .”
“They will not be in contact with you again, the other Breezy.” Dubs spoke through the comms, as though he’d already been speaking. No one but Talinn thought that weird, given the lack of reaction. “Not until you get to where she’s sending you.”
“It won’t be the first place we bring you,” Kivex continued. “You will pass through several transits, several locations. They say you must watch for the odd. The thing that moves the space around you that should not.”
“Everything’s going to be odd to us, this will be our first off-base—”
“No.” Surex didn’t turn from his console. “Not the new weird of broader humanity. Odd, unnatural. Hinky. Things you can’t explain.”
“Once they are sure UCF is convinced of recent events, once you are clear, she will bring you to the others.” Falix shrugged and pushed away, spearing through the air. “And those are all the details we are allowed to know.”
“That Talinn—the other version of me you’re so fond of—she said ‘Look out for anything hinky?’ That . . . that’s her grand, brilliant advice?”
“She said something’s moving that she doesn’t understand. Things are changing more rapidly than before, and she’d like to think it’s her—us—those of us who know. But . . .”
“But it’s hinky. She said it’s hinky?”
“She said it’s hinky.” He looked at her, one pupil wide and the other the barest dot of black in a mass of too-round green-brown iris.
“Clone generations change more than ear measurements,” she muttered, and he grinned.
“There aren’t a lot of words for ‘something’s shifting those asteroid chunks that’s not the main star we can see, and I don’t know if it’s a new space monster or something weirder’ so I can’t fault her for ‘hinky.’”
“New space monster?”
“I used that as part of a longer way to show how I might get across a general feeling, I’m not reading you into any other secrets of the universe you don’t know. Now you see why ‘hinky’ works.”
“Now I want to know more about space monsters—I’m not conceding on hinky.”
You’re focused on it to keep from worrying about what’s moving out there that a version of us, who knows a lot more than us, still hasn’t wrapped their brains around.
“Of course I am. Doesn’t take an AI to figure that out.” She didn’t bother to subvocalize—the Spacies had a disconcerting knack for figuring out what she and Bee had to say to each other regardless of how they communicated.