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CHAPTER 17


The tank limped back, uneven treads barely held together by Bee’s cannibalized material patch job. Talinn stared at comms until her eyes burned enough to force her to blink, but no updates were forthcoming.

The losses weren’t confirmed—no one trusted their comm channels any more than they’d been able to trust their sensors—but Bee had only been able to contact a handful of other AIs.

“This planet is the worst.” The repeated sentiment had never felt so heavy, her tongue fumbling around the edges of each syllable.

We should leave.

“Right now?” Talinn leaned her head on the back of her chair, her eyes closed and arm throbbing. She had a few guesses about how she’d hurt it, but her processing abilities had been on other things at the time. The cause, she reminded herself, hardly mattered. Only the effect, which she attempted to ignore as much as possible.

As soon as that ship is ready. Whether Command is in disarray or no, it’s not going to get better out here.

“So we might as well go where other us suggested, see what we can do?”

It’s that or wait to die on a useless front, from our Command or theirs.

“Is it an active resistance, you think? Or just scooting around the edges, recruiting new clones?”

I don’t care. We can do more than this.

“To what end?” Of all the endless questions on her list, that loomed heaviest on her mind. “Stop the cloning programs? Singlehandedly end the war? Find a hundred versions of ourselves and start a singing group?”

You can’t carry a tune.

“I mean it, Bee. What will be ‘more’ about what we do? What’s the point of it?”

What’s the point of this? I love being a tank, but there’s only so much we can do if orders and intel and Command are broken.

“So we get on a ship, and wait for more information?”

We can get more information and get on a ship, Talinn. Do you want to stay here?

She thought of the dead. Being separated from Bee. The chaos of the base. “No.”

So then we go. Maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s not.

“And if it’s not?” She stretched out her shoulder, winced as the ache sharpened to stab down her side. “It’s not something we can come back from.”

There’s a whole set of systems out there. We’ll explore them.

“We stick out, Bee. I can’t keep the whole of you in my head—even if Other Bee wasn’t lying about the eighteen hours and whatever . . . there’s a lot more time than that. We can steal one of Jeena’s boxes, but that’s not really laying low, either.”

We steal Jeena. We have her make a box less shielded, so you don’t have to keep in contact with it. Put wheels on it, make it look like a breathing apparatus . . . If other clones are out there running around outside the IDC and UCF, then so can we.

She almost smiled, but her face carried three g’s of pressure and exhaustion pulled at even the smallest of her facial muscles. Instead she relaxed her arm, letting the shooting pain soften into a dull ache, and rocked with each bump of broken tread and unlevel ground.

You aren’t sleeping.

“I’m pretending the world away. No decisions needed when reality doesn’t exist.”

And how’s that working out for you?

Talinn groaned, forced her eyelids open, and pushed upright with her good arm. “We’re obviously going to go, Bee. What’s the way to do it?”

I’m not following you.

“Other Bee said you’d have the way. Tell me it’s another wrinkle in your bug-eaten program string—”

Oh. First, not bug-eaten, thank you. Didn’t we decide I’m not glitchy? Second, no. I don’t have anything from that other Talinn, we’re supposed to get in touch again. You said you wanted more information, didn’t you? I didn’t take the coordinates—she offered them as an upload package, and I . . . 

“You didn’t trust it.” She rolled her shoulder again, some invisible weight lifting.

She’s very like you, but she’s not you. And I don’t like accepting anything I can’t examine first.

“The code that let you take over the tanks?”

I reviewed it. The pulse of Bee’s pause matched the pace of blood throbbing in her shoulder. And I thought it was from Cece, so I trusted it more than I should have. Besides, I knew you’d have more questions, and my not having what we needed to do what they wanted, meant they’d still talk to us before we committed.

“I’m the only one with more questions, huh?” Talinn managed a truer smile that time. She slid forward and stood, steadying herself against the uneven motion as they continued toward the base. “How do you think we steal Jeena?”

We tell her the truth.

While her laugh didn’t have much humor in it, Talinn didn’t bite back the sound. “She hasn’t gone against us yet, even knowing about everything else. Seems as good an idea as we got.”

It helps that Base Two most likely killed the last tech who asked questions about weird Eight stuff.

“Safer with us than without.” Talinn crossed to the bunk and reached for Sigmun’s blanket before she realized it was the wrong tank. And Sigmun and her blanket both were . . . “For whatever that’s worth.”


No one waited outside the tank when Talinn emerged. It was better than a contingent of heavily armed soldiers, which she reminded herself of twice as she awkwardly maneuvered down the side of the tank with one good arm.

More fire had hit the base than she’d realized. “Jets are hard to pin,” she murmured, and Bee made a discordant sound of discontent.

A lot of our jets fell fast, and the arrays split toward the front line and above. The arrays were the targets, but the rest of the base took the worst of it.

Arrays were designed to be hard to take out, and the base structures had not been entirely kept to spec given the distance of the active front. It showed now—most of the outer structures were collapsed. An enormous crack ran through the center of the largest storage bay, and the doors had collapsed out of their tracks.

Debris Talinn chose not to examine littered the ground, and she kept her gaze focused on the entrance ahead. Slightly wider now since a wall had been blown out, but after a moment her vision shifted enough to make out the guard inside.

The soldier inclined his head to her, but didn’t otherwise react, and she continued inside.

Building isn’t going to fall on you.

“I didn’t think it would.” She steadied her pace, aware the uptick in her heartbeat had tipped Bee to her not unreasonable worry. “I don’t entirely trust unadapted soldiers with guns.”

They fought as hard as we did. And that building does have a lot of cracks in it.

“You wouldn’t have let me go in if you thought it was going to fall down.” Even as she subvocalized the words she felt better, which had been Bee’s aim. She strode through the corridor, a mostly clear path, and it was quiet for the first two turns. Approaching the third, ambient noise rose in pitch, and it was an effort not to slow her pace.

Medical.

“I shouldn’t go in.”

Your arm needs to be looked at eventually.

“If I can hear them from out here—”

You shouldn’t go in.

“Reaze!”

Or maybe you should.

It was too late for her to duck into the medical facilities, and she’d let P-8 swallow her whole before she’d let Base Two see her run from him. He’d been on his way to medical, or to intercept her, or off on some other business—the variables were too many, but either way he approached her from the far end of the corridor without hesitation.

“You’re overdue for a report.” He gestured for her to fall in with him and kept walking, back in the direction she’d come.

Talinn pivoted and strode alongside him, and at the next intersection they turned deeper into the base rather than continuing toward Bee. Toward Base Command’s office hub. She forbore to subvocalize anything to Bee, and to say anything to Base Two without prompting. In her peripheral vision, she noted he’d been banged up, the side of his face swollen and his pale skin patched in deep red shading toward purple.

Despite his head and her arm, they marched without speaking until they reached Base Command’s office. Base Two strode in without knocking, and Talinn shrugged to herself and followed him in.

Into the empty office.

Base Two turned sharply in front of the desk, facing her, and sat against it. She knew what he was going to say the moment he opened his mouth, but the words landed as blows all the same.

“Base Command is dead.”

“I—”

“He went out with the soldiers, and left me to coordinate, and I already have orders.” Base Two’s expression remained neutral, but his left eye twitched with the last word and his voice roughened as he continued. “Didn’t get more than a few hours alert on the IDC forces, but nearly the moment Base Command fell, my comms pinged with incoming orders about evacuating the base.”

The other Talinn and Bee? Or actual UCF Command?

“Not ten minutes ago, I got another set of orders letting me know they’d received confirmation of Base Actual’s death, and would be sending someone out directly. Then five minutes ago a third set of orders, reaffirming the first that this base will be shuttered. P-8 isn’t worth holding, and they need all remaining hands closer to the jump point.” He made a guttural noise, maybe some sort of attempt at a laugh, and Talinn straightened into attention without a conscious decision to do so.

“By remaining hands, they mean less than twenty, including eight AITs.” He lifted a hand to his face, as if to scrub along his jawline, then dropped it before coming into contact with the darkening contusion. “Seven, really. Seven and a half.”

Her body tightened so quickly her arm stabbed a protest through to her core, and she barely kept from audibly sucking in her breath. “Why seven and a half?”

He tilted his head at her, and while she couldn’t entirely read him, it seemed sarcastic. As though he’d been wondering what it would take to make her speak. “You’re not very functional without your AI, are you?”

“Bee is fully—”

“A general ‘you,’ Eight.”

Someone had splintered. Out on the field, an AI had gone down irrevocably, and somehow the human partner survived. Her exhausted mind stuttered to a halt, considering it, and he didn’t wait for her to ask who.

“CC-525 was not in true action during the previous engagement, but more of a trace program. AIT pair designee Mercy has ended. AIT pair designee River has ended, and a trace remainder of ER-913 exists until the techs take last report.”

Talinn and Bee held a beat of silence between them. They hadn’t been as close with River as they had Mercy, but the confirmation of Riva’s death and Ern’s lingering splintered AI half-state landed with all the muffled, awful weight of Medith’s reality.

“Is Medith conscious?”

“Primarily.”

“I want to see her.”

“After your report.”

He’s dangling Medith in front of you to get you to talk. Jeena will let us contact Ern if there’s anything to contact, but Medith is unreachable without Cece.

Talinn had understood the matter without Bee’s prompting, but it didn’t clarify what she should or shouldn’t say to Base Two. Maybe with more time she could come up with something clever and strategic, but even vaunted Eight processing stalled after repeated load-ins, battles, and shocks to the system.

“Should put that in the file.”

“What was that, Reaze?”

Talinn tried to remember if she’d subvocalized or muttered, then dismissed it. Either way, he’d picked it up, and she pulled her shoulders back to keep from shrugging. “I’m exhausted, Base Two. My report is that the IDC forces almost broke our line, and if they come back any time before we get reinforcements, they will. My report is that my friends are dead or dying and you—”

“Talinn Reaze.” Abruptly the bruised man in front of her shifted from battle weary to Command, his posture and tone snapping into place. “Do not speak to me as though only AITs fought, and only AITs are dead. I am responsible for this base until Command gets their shit together, and you know exactly what I’m asking. Who did you meet with? What did you talk about?”

I am not a traitor.” The fact that she would be, and soon, put extra emphasis on her words. His rebuke still landed—she only wanted confirmation on which Eights were dead. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask about the unadapted soldiers. “Our comms and sensors have been all over the place. I’ve gotten messages from Sammer that he didn’t speak, and he’s heard me on comms when I wasn’t. Bee and I have made efforts to figure out the cause of the errors and it’s still unclear.”

You’re getting better at technical truth. Very AI of you.

She didn’t know if he’d debriefed any of the other Eights or Jeena, didn’t know how this would compare to that, didn’t know if that would be enough. Whatever he intended to say, it was lost when he tapped his ear—someone needed him on comms.

The interruption was welcome, but before he could dismiss her she mouthed, “Mercy?” and he held up a hand to gesture for her to wait. After several moments of half a conversation, Talinn understood he was needed back at medical. Her gut squirmed—the unadapted soldiers were as affected by this mess as she was—but she ignored the feeling and fixed her gaze back on him as he ended the comm conversation.

“Medith is in SR-3. I’ll message ahead that you’re to be allowed in. We’ll continue this conversation directly after.” He gestured her out and she went, though her thoughts snagged as she moved.

“That was a little too easy.”

No doubt they’ll be listening in on your conversation with Medith.

“The secure rooms have too many recording options for even you to block.”

We’ll figure out something.


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