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CHAPTER 6


Most of the Eights without their AI partners lapsed into leaning against the back wall with their eyes closed.

Sammer, Medith, and Xenni, the three Eights assigned to base support, took turns pacing the length of the cargo bay, poking at the door, and shoving at boxes. According to Xenni, their AIs were still loaded in the base arrays, but shielded from both their weaponry and their human partners. The three of them didn’t speak, and no one else bothered them.

Talinn slumped against Bee’s housing and ignored the building soreness wrapped around the base of her spine.

Maybe they’re discontinuing the program.

She sat up, stretched with one hand pressed into her lower back, and shook her head. “Then they’d just have decommissioned all of us at once.”

How’s that?

“Either call us in, immediately give us the group orders, and ship us out to civilian life with no bonuses and no designated citizenship, or give us lethal doses while we were all distracted by load-in.” Talinn considered a handful of other ways the higher ups could have handled such a thing, quietly or explosively or dramatically, and Bee made a chewed-up grumble of a sound.

Herd you into a cargo bay and flood it with suffocating gas  . . . 

“Not efficient or definitive. Cargo bays are the stupidest place to put us if they want us dead—it’ll take too much time to get levels to a lethal level.”

It is the smallest cargo bay.

“And they already had us each vulnerable, so why put us together to get it done?”

Sigmun, one of the other tank pairings, slid down next to her, cocking her head. “Bee?”

Talinn nodded. “We’re theorizing the stupid ways Command could be looking at decommissioning us.”

“Sure, sure.” Sigmun laughed and shifted to keep her hand in contact with her own portable server without twisting her body like an unattended port cord. “I would have left us all in load-in, given a humanitarian dose when we cracked, and called it a drill gone horribly, horribly wrong.” She lifted a shoulder and tilted her head in the opposite direction. “Such an easy report to write. They could even note how long it took each brain to fry, in case the program got rebooted down the line.”

“Wins all around.” Talinn rested her cheek on the rounded edge of the cube and stared at the space between her and Sigmun without focusing on anything—especially not Caytil, slumped at the end of the unevenly spaced Eights. “What’s your bet?”

“On what’s happening, or how long we’ll be here?” She waved away Talinn’s potential answer and pursed her lips. “We’re under attack, and the IDC bonzos are doing something clever with their version of AIs, so Command had the bright idea to separate and firewall us to shore up vulnerabilities. Our fine UCF brains aren’t telling us because the handful of unadapted humans on this shit stain of a planet are enjoying their moment of glory, and so we’ll be in here for at least seven hours longer than necessary so they can make the most of it.”

“That’s not  . . . unreasonable.” Talinn curled her free hand around her neck to touch the port behind her ear. “Any ideas what the AI attack could be?”

“Ooo, see now that is interesting.”

“And a bad idea.” Sammer—Talinn hadn’t even noticed his approach—cut through Sigmun’s words in the flattest tone Talinn had ever heard from him. They both craned their heads toward him, and he touched the corner of his eye with his longest finger as though clearing a small bit of gunk.

A quick enough gesture, one humans made all the time without thinking. But one Talinn and Sigmun knew from long practice to mean that they were monitored.

Which was obvious, when Talinn bothered to think about it. Why put all the Eights together unless you wanted to see what they did?

Might as well cause trouble then, and see what provokes a reaction.

“Given we don’t know what severity level the reaction would hit, that seems  . . . suboptimal.” Talinn subvocalized, but Sigmun either followed or was having a similar conversation, because she winced.

Sammer continued before the pause grew noticeable. “The last thing we want to do is encourage bored AIs in boxes to consider how they can get out. We’ve probably got a little more time before that becomes urgent.”

Now why would he say something like that after warning us—oh. He’s giving Command a countdown.

Talinn considered Bee’s point, and found it a logical enough conclusion. The techs would know the limitations of the temporary servers—emphasis on temporary—and Sammer had pointedly reminded any listeners that the Eights shouldn’t be left to languish indefinitely. Anyone who’d read a training record or three would know that ended badly one way or the other.

The floor vibrated beneath them, and for a fraction of a second Talinn knew in her bones Command had heard the warning and decided to collapse the cargo bay around them. Nearly as quickly, she realized that was on the list of inefficient and unguaranteed ways to decommission the Eights, and by then a series of muffled whoompfs followed.

“Explosions.” Sigmun drawled the word, but the effect was spoiled by the slight skew upward at the end, questioning.

The more inert of the Eights sat up, and all of them held still for a long moment, straining to hear more.

Nothing—not even base alarms—and Talinn gathered her legs underneath to stand when the floor vibrated again, then seemed to shift rapidly to the side.

She slid back to her knees, turning unerringly toward Caytil. “It’s the same?” she asked, and Caytil dipped her chin.

“Feels like what we dealt with out on patrol. The vibrations, explosions—either it’ll all come to nothing—”

“Or if we’re lucky, it’ll tunnel right under this cargo bay and blow a hole in the floor. Or the wall.” Caytil pushed against the wall and worked her way to a standing position, her faint eyebrows drawn low and the smooth skin of her forehead wrinkling as she glared.

“Let’s get some of these servers loaded back up on Talinn’s gurney,” Sigmun suggested, glancing at the walls and ceiling as though the fabricated metal might crumple or crack before their eyes.

“And for the ones that don’t fit?” Daren asked snidely, prompting a withering chorus of replies regarding the handful of hand loaders leaning around the bay.

Talinn shifted to help in the sudden increase of activity, then turned on Sammer instead. “Are the base arrays still hooked up?”

“No, instead of offloading the AIs they detangled  . . .” He squinted at her, then slowly drew out the next words. “There are always emergency port cords stowed near the arrays.”

As a less active base far from any of the main war fronts, their base had a minimum set of enormous ballistic arrays to defend the installation. It only took three AIs to cover the 133 separate mounts—more regularly pressed defensive bases had at least ten AIs for many more arrays—and they could all be run from a single AI pair if something were to happen to the other two.

Base support took a certain kind of Eight—fast cognition and assessment, of course, but a different level of stability. The focus required to reorient the various components of the array to maximize enemy losses and minimize cost on allies was not entirely common across Eights. Bee and Talinn, for instance, had shown even less aptitude for the arrays than they had the jets, and during training they’d held the record for the number of different ways they’d crashed jets in sim training.

But all Eights had the same port configuration, and if they could get to the arrays, any of the AIs could load-in and accomplish at least enough to prove to an attacking force that the base wasn’t without its largest weapons.

“We won’t have any techs to be sure nothing gets corrupted or catch if a glitch gets introduced.” Sammer hesitated, but Talinn could see him considering the idea.

The reasons for the specific process to move AIs had been pressed into their heads—literally and figuratively—since they’d toddled their first steps on unsteady legs. Load-in from server to human brain, then human brain to new war machine, allowed multiple checkpoints to ensure a piece of programming didn’t get left behind, where it might replicate and become something unchecked and unpaired, and that none of the operating parameters in human or AI connections had been blocked or corrupted. Allegedly their answers to the orienting questions—and the way their neural links sparked in answering them—allowed techs a clear and comprehensive view of the state of both sides of the Eight equation.

Not engaging in those checks and balances could result in a permanently broken partner, which made the entire pairing useless. An expensive waste, as far as UCF was concerned, given the astronomical costs incurred taking Eights from their component building parts—biological and coded—to an obsessively trained piece of the war effort.

Continuing to sit and wait for an unspecified amount of time—especially for those cut off from connecting properly with their AI—might also end with some permanently broken halves. Talinn prepared to do something about it, and let the consequences fall where they may.

The twenty plus of them straggled into place and crossed the bay. Sammer stretched his hand toward the door’s control panel, and a wailing alarm sent several of them flinching backward.

“Are you kidding—”

The door slid open, revealing Jeena and one of the fully suited soldiers. Jeena took a step away, and the soldier’s hand twitched his gun upward before he stilled. “With us.” The soldier’s voice, to Talinn’s best guess, belonged to the impatient leader from before who’d told the others to let her bring Bee. “Glad to see you assembled and ready and not where I told you to be.”

“You didn’t say how long we had to hold position against the wall.” Talinn doubted he could hear her over the blare of alarms and ongoing muffled explosions, but she felt better for saying it. With witnesses, training kicked in, and the Eights snapped into an approximation of proper formation.

Jeena leaned close enough for Talinn to catch the gist of her shout. “Remaining AIs have been secured in the array control room. Stay with us—get through easier!”

Talinn passed the word back, and Caytil surged forward beside Sammer as they moved.

The array control room was in a reinforced block of rooms in the middle of the base, next to one of the midsized watch towers. It had connections to every bit of external monitoring equipment, but UCF’s Command, for all their blind spots, knew very well sometimes equipment failed and line of sight might be required.

The floor moved under them twice as they jogged, but nothing collapsed or exploded in their faces, and they made excellent time to their target.

The alarm didn’t falter, and after a few minutes either Bee stopped her brain from processing it, or she got so used to it the noise shrank to a small burr against her eardrums.

Either way, she couldn’t hear what either Jeena or the soldier said to the two unmoving humans outside the control room. Regardless, the door opened, and the Eights without their partners moved through on Jeena’s heels. Without need for discussion, the rest held out of their way and pulled up the rear.

When Talinn stepped into the room, Jeena directed the last of the Eights to their corresponding portable server, and shoulders visibly eased throughout the space.

Sammer pointed at one of the furiously flashing panels against the wall, and Jeena nodded. He leapt forward, fingers blurring over buttons.

The alarm cut off.

The lights died.

An enormous roar surrounded them that even Talinn’s deadened hearing couldn’t muffle, not with her ribs vibrating independently inside her chest.

Lei was still in the array, Bee provided helpfully, even as Talinn ducked against the server and wrapped her free arm around the top of her head and Bee’s temporary casing. Was just secured from it. Not anymore.

“Is Lei blowing us up?” Only Bee could have heard Talinn in the cacophony, but Bee didn’t answer.

The unrelenting assault indicated Sammer and Lei, once again in action as Belay, staggered the firing outputs precisely to account for reloading needs. In the dark, Talinn had to assume Xenni and Medith had reconnected as well.

She considered inching through the room to find a port cord and get Bee out of the cube, but before she could commit, something wrapped around her arm. Hand, she registered, and so only tensed rather than jerked away.

“Something’s wrong.” Jeena’s voice, close enough that Talinn felt as much as heard it, breath too warm against her scalp.

Of course something’s wrong, I thought techs were smart—

“With Bee’s code.”

Bee froze, and Talinn’s gut roiled, acid sloshing in the empty spaces. She could let go of Bee and strangle Jeena in the dark. No one would ever know.

There was too much light for that, Talinn reminded herself—or Bee interjected. Her thoughts were too sluggish to separate one from the other. Jeena would have the result of her evaluation of Bee stored somewhere other than her own head. Strangling her would lead to a complete and definitive end to the Talinn and Bee pairing—any remaining copies of her own biological code would be incinerated and flagged unsuitable for possible future cloning.

She swallowed back bile, the temptations and consequences instantaneously clicking through, and Jeena kept talking.

“Not what Command was looking for.”

Something was wrong, but it wasn’t the thing Command thought it would be? What was she supposed to  . . . 

“Results wiped in the chaos. I’ll report it clean.”

“Why?” Talinn hadn’t meant to speak, but the word burst out of her.

“Later.”

Talinn wavered at the edge of the gurney, and Jeena let go of her. She tried to remember who was standing where—the sort of information that should have come instantly to mind—but failed. Instead of peering in the dark, she lowered her head to the top of Bee’s cube and waited for the noise or the world to stop—an end, one way or another.


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Framed