CHAPTER 10
Bee held Talinn’s breath, both of them still. Talinn stared at Other Talinn. Her face was shades off from Talinn’s own, which she could laser in on now, this close, with silence between them. Her nose had been broken, the lines by her eyes, around her mouth, across her forehead—they were more prominent versions of the faint tracings Talinn had recently developed. She had the impression the other smiled more than she did, which seemed a ridiculous thing—both to think, and to be true. Her ears were different, though Talinn couldn’t place why. (Lobes are a little longer. She pierced the top of each once, not several times. Also the canal on her left ear is point zero three—) But her eyes—they were identical. The shading in the left, the small dark spot in the right. It tilted the world around her, because it was flipped, not at all how it was when she looked in the mirror. Made gravity wobble, if only a hint.
But the same. She was the same person. So she should feel the same.
Did she?
We’ve wanted to burn it all down before.
In theory. Jokingly, in frustration, in passing . . . she’d never actually plot against Command. Consider mutiny.
Would she?
Would they?
The facts are these. Command has a balanced world—three systems of them—and even with this other Breezy scooting around the edges, trying to pick out other Bees and Talinns, it’s been mostly stable. It’ll keep going, a war that leaves most people alone. There will be more Eights, who may or may not be the same. Things might shift, but not change. Is that good or bad? Do we like the world as it is, or hate it?
“Who are you loyal to?” The other woman asked it softly, as though she knew she were interrupting. She probably did, which made the fact of it more annoying.
“Bee. The Eights. The UCF.”
“In that order?”
“In that order.”
And not necessarily with equal weight, Bee added, which was entirely true. Descending importance—and entirely UCF’s fault, if not their main intention. Bee was a fundamental part of Talinn. Not her other half, as they were more than the sum of their parts once combined rather than incomplete pieces, but her bedrock. The idea of putting anything ahead of Bee was absurd. Similarly, the Eights—especially those she’d been raised and trained with—were the gravity well of her life. The universe didn’t make sense without them. The UCF was a framework—she’d been immersed in it, their goals and rationale and need for the ongoing pushback against the overreach of the IDC—but there were times she could cheerfully burn it down with their own tank. Not enough to run off at first sight of an almost familiar face, but . . .
“What glitches?” If it were all falling apart anyway, as this woman had alleged, maybe it wasn’t mutiny. She wouldn’t be a traitor, but a bug fleeing the system crumbling to pieces around it.
“Say more.”
“You said there are glitches. Like what?”
“It’s still small, broadly speaking, but for example the IDC has—” Her head snapped to the side, and the turret of the IDC tank moved nearly as fast.
What the sh— Bee moved her own turret, but in the same direction as the other tank, not at them.
“What—”
“Window’s closing. If you want more—if you want in—your Bee has the key.”
“Old Talinn don’t you dare—”
“You’ll do better next time.” Despite the extra cycles and the marked slowness the other Talinn had shown in her shifting positions before, she sprinted up the ditch before Talinn could do more than take a step toward her.
“Is something coming?”
No, I don’t know what caught Other Bee’s attention, but— Bee made a metallic crunching sound that might as well have been a shriek. But they’re probably still messing with my sensors.
“What key?”
I almost got in, I thought I almost got in . . . I don’t know. Bee’s frustration twined with her own, and then Talinn realized she was still in a ditch in the middle of nowhere and the other tank was moving away.
“Should we follow them?”
We should probably get to where we’re supposed to be so no one asks any questions.
“You really think . . .” Talinn stood at the edge of the ditch, the unbroken ground just above her midsection, and gave up formulating the rest of her question.
That this can go unnoticed? That we should take down two galaxy-spanning empires? That I have some mysterious key to get in touch with other, older versions of us that want to watch the universe burn?
“Will it?”
Burn? I mean, heat death is a convincing theory of—
“Bee.” Talinn put her hands on the stable ground and pushed, swiveling her hips and swinging her legs up over the edge. “Is upending the UCF and IDC going to make the universe burn?”
The better question is—can we really upend the UCF and IDC? Is it worth our throwing ourselves into the mess to get torn apart for . . . potentially nothing?
“That Talinn didn’t seem torn apart.” The skin between her shoulder blades itched, the muscles beneath twitching, but Talinn kept her pace steady. Something had made the other Talinn run, but if that . . . woman wasn’t going to tell her what it was, well. No sense in panicking.
Bee did open and close the hatch of the tank at her, but that appeared impatient, not nervous, so Talinn didn’t hurry. She realized—far too late—that she hadn’t put back on her face cover, and a new gust of wind shoved half a ditch’s worth of dust into her eyes and up her nose, so she coughed and sneezed the last strides back, but she didn’t run.
Clean off, Bee directed when Talinn’s feet hit the floor, and the hatch slammed closed above her with more force than strictly required. Then we’ll do our job and make some decisions.
“Like if we’re going to tell Sammer, Medith, and Caytil?”
That seems an obvious yes. More like if we’re going to talk to Jeena about what’s off in my code, in case that’s the key the other us meant. Like if we’re going to spend the rest of our life on this planet until Command decommissions us because of what another Breezy has done. Like if we’re going to do all the things unadapted humans are always afraid we’ll do.
“If we have a base to go home to.” Talinn scrubbed her face, the top of her head, and behind her ears until the abrasiveness cleared her dulled thoughts. She stared at the opened bunk in front of her without remembering opening it. Had she left her helmet in the ditch? No, it was clipped to her belt. She flipped over the towel and scrubbed again, then deliberately began removing her gear one piece at a time.
If we do . . . No, that Talinn has a Sammer too. They’re not going to take out the base.
“You know . . . they never did confirm it was them. The attacks, the—”
Talinn.
“There’s a whole lot that we’ve accepted at face value over the cycles, Bee. I always thought of us as sneaky and clever, but . . . Command is sneaky and clever. We’re good little automats, following our tracks. We probably shouldn’t assume anything, anymore.” She pulled out a fresh coverall, ignored that it would be a few inches too short, and shook it out.
Well, that’s our decision, then.
“Not to assume?”
Not to be good little automats. Your cortisol and adrenaline spiked so hard when you said that, I checked to see if you were about to vomit. You don’t want to stay in track. Bee dimmed and brightened the lights, and Talinn turned enough to catch the screens flicker.
“Do you?”
I don’t have cortisol and adrenaline—
“Bee.”
I absolutely do not.
“Even if it means making the universe burn?”
Sometimes that seems like it might be better, don’t you think?
Talinn laughed, but the sound had never torn against the inside of her throat quite like it did in that moment.
Nearly ten unremarkable hours later, patrolling their empty patch of assigned dirt, Talinn and Bee had fallen into a silence only a skin flake’s width of preferable to their circuitous conversation about what to do after they told the other Eights.
They’d come to no firm decision, and so the crackle of comms landed as both a relief and a stabbing interruption.
“Base to Breezy.”
“Breezy here. What’s your status, Base?”
“Base is clear. Report, Breezy.”
“Patrol is uneventful. Should we continue along assigned coordinates or is there”—Bee interrupted the broadcast before Talinn could complete the sentence—“something worthwhile for us to do,” Talinn finished for her usual audience of one.
Behave. Burning it down does not mean getting locked up for insubordination.
“I think it takes more than that to—” Talinn stopped muttering as Base’s reply began.
“Cleared to return to base, Breezy. New orders will be given at that time.”
They couldn’t keep us out here much longer. The tank wasn’t as well stocked for your needs as mine.
“All the ammo, not enough food?”
See, it sounds good when you say it.
“Bee. What’re we going to do?”
Return to base. Get new orders. Figure out a key. Plot a revolution. At least two of those.
“Eat something warm, probably.”
Three things you get to do. Isn’t that exciting?
“I hate that it is.”
Bee’s tortured metal laugh was faint, but there. Noticed Sammer isn’t doing comms on their side post attack.
“Do you think . . . do you think he already knows? Did Belay help with a distraction to get us out here to talk to the old us?”
Bee flickered the screens, and Talinn swung her legs out from her chair in unconscious echo of the timing.
Possible. Belay does tend to get into places I wouldn’t have expected. But . . .
“Then why wouldn’t they have just told us?”
Yes, that. Though I suppose—would we have believed them?
Talinn pressed her back firmly into her chair, stilled her legs, and picked through a rush of thoughts. How it had felt, receiving the sheer amount of lunatic information, from her own face. Picturing any one piece of that delivered by Sammer, the one who used to lead all their ridiculous drinking games in training. The one who managed to blow up their entire class in a simulation. The one who kept it together, with Lei locked away, separated from his AI. The one who had the discipline and focus to run an entire defensive array and not send a single volley out of place.
“We would have. We would have argued a lot more, and probably demanded explanations until Lei turned the array on us, but . . .”
Yeah. We would have.
“So, I don’t think they know.”
But they could be involved in something.
“The incursion into the base’s systems? Don’t you think—I assumed that was the other Breezy.”
Thought we weren’t assuming anymore.
Talinn gurgled a nonsense sound and bounced her head off the back of her chair. “Stop being right!”
Never in our life.
Bee didn’t slow the tank as they rolled toward the base, but she did focus all the screens on various views of their pockmarked approach.
“Gates are down.” Talinn chewed on the side of her thumb and scowled at the display. “A whole lot more holes in the ground than before.”
Some new arrivals.
The attackers hadn’t been invisible and underground this time, or at least not only that. Four twisted metal hulks studded their approach, one markedly larger than the other three.
“Two tanks and a jet?”
Not a jet—too big. A bomber, but not one I’ve seen in records of what IDC has.
“IDC doesn’t even have a presence here. Where did any kind of heavy machinery come from?”
Maybe we have a new enemy.
“Delightful as that would be . . .” Talinn rolled her eyes and leaned forward, Bee automatically enlarging the areas Talinn’s gaze lingered on. “One of the arrays took a lot of damage.”
Given the lack of other offensive weapons, I’m surprised it wasn’t worse.
“No air support, no heavy armored ground defense . . . Did they hunker in and hope for the arrays to win, or send out unadapted soldiers to shoot at the approaching . . . Bee. Does it look like there were a lot more than four on the attack? I know we can’t track air after the fact, but can we tell if anything else came in or out on the ground, and if so, how many?”
With all the debris and gaping holes, hard to tell.
“What if . . . what if it wasn’t our Sammer who told us to go to the meeting point?”
Why would Other Breezy do all that, talk to us, and send us back to a trap?
“I’m not saying it was a trap. I’m saying what if Sammer wasn’t ever tasked to base comm during the attack, and the other . . . us, they spoofed the comm channel.”
Possible. But what does that have to do with—
“What if the other us-es, they weren’t behind the attack but they knew one was coming . . .”
It’s all as likely as most of what’s happened the last two days, but I’m not following you to your point.
“Shit on a hot day. I’m not sure I have one.” Talinn pressed her hands against her eyes and stared at the swirling patterns made by the pressure.
Whether our Sammer or hers warned us off, there was another attack.
“Seems like.”
And unless you think we secretly lost and are about to present ourselves to the enemy hiding in the corpse of our base—
“Little grisly with the imagery there, Bee.”
I’m not saying it’s what I would do . . .
A small spasm pulled her stomach, and Talinn scrubbed her face again before dropping her hands. “No. All of the arrays would have to be destroyed before I’d believe the base fell.”
The turret’s ready to go if we need it.
“The only time the turret isn’t ready to go is when we’re load-in, though, so that’s not saying much.”
Staying ready is better than having to get ready.
“Nothing weird on comms?”
Nothing weird. No motion outside the base, but the empty humans aren’t going to be out and about without their trucks.
“Hey, hey—unadapted.”
Because they’re empty.
“And you don’t like me parading around outside the tank either. Adapted or not, our squishy bits are still squishy.”
Yours are more important than theirs.
“To you.”
Exactly.
They rolled into the base through the broken gates, navigated around the largest of the holes, and watched their potentially misleading sensors, but all remained quiet.
Until they pulled up to the wreckage of the largest cargo bay, and what seemed like every unadapted soldier in the base poured out, weapons aimed at them.