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CHAPTER 43


“It’s been forty cycles of nothing.”

Two.

“Feels like forty.”

Imagine how the other Breezy feels.

“Breezy.” Talinn sighed and shoved her spade deeper into the rocky dirt under her. “I remember being Breezy. Sure you don’t want to be a tank again?”

Don’t tease.

“It’s not the same being some turrets on a dome.”

I said don’t tease.

The coordinates from the defense array that had made itself a machine god had also included some kind of code. When they’d arrived at Ilvi, which managed to be exactly as ass-end of Govlic as P-8 had been, only on a different orbital loop, the automated systems of the broken-down government had kicked back their assigned dome. It was on the far side of any existent settlement scrabbling along on the planet, and the first cycle had been mostly adjusting to an entirely new style of life.

One with a shocking amount of dust, which Talinn had hoped they’d left behind on P-8 forty thousand cycles ago. They’d repurposed equipment for air cleansing, for improved housing, and—after an aborted scavenger attack—a smaller approximation of a base array.

They slipped Nya and Jeena in and out as often as they could manage it, their lack of AI an asset in going unnoticed. As they scavenged more and more news about events in the system—all messy—they’d stepped up and tried floating the Pajeeran Fall crews out of orbit. Risky, but necessary if they were to ever have a hope of making it to another system, were the war to get too out of balance. Or were they tempted to get back into the mess.

“I’m not trying to tease.” Talinn walked her designated patch of their dome, for little reason except to have something to do. “I was hoping to come up with a shopping list.”

Now that one ship got through, you think we’re free to roam about the systems?

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Talinn dug the top of her boot into the reddish-yellow dirt of Ilvi, glaring at the plume of dust that resulted. “Given we’ve never been able to do that before.”

Is it the entanglement, you think?

It took Talinn a moment to follow, and she shifted her glare from dirt to dome. “Why the defense arrays don’t notice the Spacies? I mean . . . first, we don’t know that they don’t. Maybe they hate us specifically, but the Spacies get a pass. Second, Spacies often roam about the systems unattended, where Eights . . . don’t. Means we’d stick out more than Spacies. Third, what has you so involved?”

What?

“What are you so busy doing that your attention is split?”

It takes concentration to watch the horizon.

“Do we need to load-in and get you fully in the gears?” The corner of Talinn’s mouth twitched. On their first assignment, Bee had balked at load-in, not wanting to remove all her backups from the main servers.

I don’t want to leave the base servers. They’re warm, Bee had protested, and Talinn had replied, “You need all of your processing power to be a tank, Bee. So you need all the backups and all the strings of your code.” Bee’s brilliant answer, No, you need all your backups and code strings to be a tank, had broken the tension. Talinn had laughed all the way through load-in, which almost made one of the techs pull them from their assignment.

Talinn’s twitchy lips edged into a full smile at the memory, and a hint of tortured metal echoed in the back of her head.

I don’t need all my backups and strings of code to be a set of eyes on a dome in the waste pipe of Ilvi.

“I don’t know, Bee. It’s been a while. Maybe you’re getting attenuated.”

You’re getting attenuated.

“There’s my Bee. So what is it?”

Bee did not ask ‘What is what’ and Talinn took that as a good sign. She swung her leg forward and resumed her pacing, waiting out the silence.

I may have broken into something. Like Tiernan and Kay did, to get us into Oxillide.

“May have?”

Have.

“Something?”

Not just me. Lei too. A discordant noise, thankfully brief, grated against the underside of Talinn’s skull. There’s another Eight on Ilvi.

“So one of—”

Not one of us. Records indicate they’re retired.

In all their stops, all the debriefs from the older clones about their own travels, no one had ever mentioned finding the tucked away colony of retired Eights. With a handful of sentences, Caytil, Sammer, and Talinn had all decided “retirement” was another lie of Command’s, and Eights were either decommissioned or run out on assignments until they glitched.

“Is it us? I swear to all the bonzo little defense-array bugs, if it’s yet another Talinn and Bee—”

Not us.

Bee’s hesitation, slight but definite, triggered a connection so painful Talinn staggered to a halt even before Bee made the confirmation.

It’s Mercy.

Medith and Cece. Of course it was.


The scouring dust storms of Ilvi made every trip outside the dome a possible disaster, but the satellites they’d coopted, while not at the UCF’s level of detail, showed a relatively clear path.

“Driving would be safer if a storm spins up,” Otie said, tapping her lip. Twenty-seven of them had gathered to discuss what Bee and Lei had found, but even two cycles into exile, many of their group deferred to Otie, and the overlapping conversations about the discovery of a retired Eight ceased the moment she began talking.

“But so much longer. We go up, skim over the atmosphere, go down, and we haven’t violated the terms of our bonzo defense-array captors.” Talinn traced the path on the display between them and swallowed back her impatience.

“Not captors,” Caytil murmured, swiveling in her chair.

“Definitely bonzo,” Xenni replied in much the same tone.

We could have just gone without telling anyone.

“Lei knew too.” Talinn didn’t bother to subvocalize her reply; they’d all gotten used to non sequiturs from each other.

We being us and them. And Jeena. At Talinn’s wordless question, Bee added, A retired Eight who’s been on their own for a long time? A good tech might be necessary.

“Even if we had a tank, we’d have to fight seven Breezys, another Ziggy, two—” Caytil threw her hands up and stopped spinning her chair. “Ziti says drive, because we don’t know the quality of a landing zone. Besides, then we’re visible longer, which is better than sneaking up on an Eight.”

“But Ziti would prefer to make the trip as a tank?” Tiernan snickered—a bit much coming from a former jet pair—and Caytil ignored him.

“Given our brush with scavengers last cycle, I’m not sure a driving approach to an Eight will be any safer. Unless we can let her know in advance who we are?” Talinn had no valid reason to take a ship, except that breaking the gravitational pull of Ilvi, even for a handful of minutes, would be a relief against the chafing of living there.

I’ve tried, and Lei has too. We can’t secure a contact with this Cece.

“Has our Cece tried?”

“No.” Otie shrugged. “For the record, though she can do it, it’s harder for Bee to break through a Bee-Talinn line than to find a way to talk to other AIs.”

“What about the Spacies?”

“What about the Spacies?” Falix, upside down with his legs propped against the wall, gestured with a foot while his forearms supported most of his weight.

“What if you try? If a doubled AI has a better chance of getting through, and you are basically tripled, maybe you—”

“It will take some time, I think.” Falix lowered his legs to a sideways split, slowly rotated his hips over to sit, then spun to face them. “We haven’t ridden a way into other connections before, but it is . . .” He cocked his head, conferring with his AI or his crew. “Bee has shared the method of it. Possible. We’ll need the time of a drive to be sure—a flight would be too fast.”

Talinn didn’t ask which Bee, nor did she argue—the mourning in his voice to miss a chance at a flight was enough to demonstrate she wasn’t the only one scraped raw under their current reality.

The real argument, it turned out, was who got to go.


Three trucks, prepared for survival on Ilvi with deployable covers and large guns, rumbled across the barren stretches of their disregarded planet.

“No sign of stragglers,” Xenni said over comms from above. She’d taken the guns and let Talinn drive, though it was a pale imitation of their old life for all of them.

“We don’t jinx in this truck, Xenni.” Talinn’s reply was lost to Tiernan’s answer from the second truck, “Isn’t that the point of them?”

Not enough to unjinx the jinx, Bee pointed out, her tone overly helpful.

Ilvi had no teeming settlements to match any part of Hynex, or even the colonies clustered around the center of the Govlic system. Another thing it lacked—reliable records of inhabitants. Active domes were accounted for, and collected taxes accordingly. But the ample, open spaces of the planet left plenty of opportunity for the resourceful. Ilvi only held two real dangers—dust storms that could strip flesh from bone in minutes, and desperate humans. Some of the latter had found a way to avoid the former by living underground, and had a knack for moving unseen underneath the layers of dirt and dust that formed the surface of their shared world.

Talinn gestured to Jeena to toggle comms and, for once, ignored the tension of an impending jinx. “Breezy Two to Breezy One.”

“Is this like Base Actual and Base Two?” Otie, a hint of a laugh underlining the snap of her words, continued with overdone formality. “Breezy One acknowledges.”

“Did you train the scavengers in underground attack back in your disaffected youth, or did you get the idea for your attacks on us on P-8 from them?”

“I’d never been on Ilvi before we made our way here per the defense array.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No, it’s not, is it?”

Talinn chuckled, then bit the sound back, scanning the stretch of hazy horizon ahead of them.

Just because you laughed doesn’t mean everything’s going to blow up. Bee paused, her own twisted metal laugh cutting off. Though that’s happened before.

Falix, lying across the back seat of the truck despite multiple attempts to get him strapped in, hummed off-key until Talinn caught herself wishing for an explosion to save her ears. She tapped her port, scanned the empty horizon, and wished will alone could transform the rumbling truck around her into Bee’s tank.


Despite the creeping tension breathing over the back of her neck, nothing erupted around them, and the trucks halted only to ensure Falix and Benty had reached the retired version of Mercy.

“We’re still not sure,” Falix mumbled, his eyes fixed on the smooth metal above him. “I believe we broke through, but without an answer, there is no confirmation.”

I’m poking.

“Bee?”

Something I learned from Other Bee—she can be infuriatingly, stubbornly annoying. Which means so can I. I can see where the Spacies intersected the line, and it’s small, but . . . I’m poking it.

“Poking?”

Come and see. Bee tugged, and Talinn engaged the brake to keep the truck still, then closed her eyes. With only limited sensor connections, Bee’s awareness lacked the drowning totality of earlier days, but still lines of information pulled at Talinn’s concentration. Each of Bee’s drones flashed their various demands, and her thoughts crackled into multiple directions in an attempt to follow their individual paths. She swallowed, pressed her shoulders back into the seat, and jumped from one stream of data to the next.

Buzzing strings of light spun out of the noise, vibrating at frequencies she could neither hear nor see, but which thrummed under her sternum in varying patterns. Bee didn’t clarify, but after a moment she understood it was each of the AIs—their backups still hosted under the dome hours behind them, their roots in the human heads scattered around her. With that knowledge in place, she studied the area around them, finding the one that didn’t stretch off into the distance. More a pinpoint than a line, it pinged again and again and again and again and—

“WHAT DO YOU WANT THIS IS MINE NOT YOURS WHO ARE YOU GO AWAY.”

The voice blared over comms and Talinn sat up so fast she engaged the cross belt, which yanked her back against her seat hard enough to knock the air out of her.

“Probably not the time for orienting questions.” Jeena turned enough that Talinn could see her smile.

“Medith and Cece, this is Bee and Talinn.” Otie’s voice did as much to settle Talinn as Jeena’s expression, and Talinn unclipped her belt, hand hovering over comms.

“Bee and Talinn are dead.” The voice, now recognizably Medith, flattened. Still loud but not nearly as overwhelming. “Everyone is dead. Leave us be.”

Leave us be, or leave us, Bee? Talinn wrenched her mind away from how her Medith was, in fact, very much dead, and subvocalized a thank you to Bee for the distraction.

“Everyone isn’t dead, Medith. We have Eights on Ilvi—”

“WE ARE RETIRED WE ARE DONE TELL THE UCF OR IDC OR EVERYONE TO GO FU—”

“We have Eights on Ilvi who are done fighting, Medith.”

Talinn and Jeena sucked in their breaths and glanced at each other. That was Medith—the surviving Medith, Otie’s Medith—apparently taking over from Otie in their truck to the left.

“Medith to Medith so you aren’t surprised I guess you know all about it then leave me alone leave us alone I don’t want to know but why are you here?”

“Maybe we don’t retire because we go bonzo before we can get there.” Talinn stared at the comms until Jeena shoved at her arm, then blinked herself back into focus. “Tell me that sounds like a sane Eight.”

“It sounds—” Jeena cut herself off as Falix shoved his body between their seats, his gaze fixed ahead of them.

“She sounds like one of us. Hard to tell because it’s all one voice, but you’re hearing a conversation that you’re processing as stream of thought.”

Yes. Bee drew out the word, then continued with more confidence, Small changes in the intonation—Medith, then Cece. A potential third cadence, not like a new voice entirely . . . maybe that one is Mercy, in truth.

“You think they merged?” Talinn dropped her hand back from comms, unsure what the spike in her heartrate attempted to tell her. She waited for Bee to read it and share an opinion, but Bee remained occupied with parsing who was speaking which words from Mercy’s mouth.

“Merging is an unlikely—”

“Shh.” Falix brushed Jeena’s shoulder with the bare edges of his fingers, and Otie’s voice spoke over comms again.

“We were sent to Ilvi by an unexpected source. Not UCF or IDC. We are on our own.” Otie spoke carefully—the thing about comms, of course, was that even secure channels could be unsecured by someone with the tools and inclination to make them so.

Good news bad news from the drones.

Talinn very much didn’t want to ask, but of course she did.

Storm is spinning up behind us. We have time to get out of the way if Mercy lets us in.

“Is that the good news? Or the bad news?”

Yes. Because she definitely has to let us in. Front drones got shot down while she was talking to us.

“By her, or by scavengers?”

So remember I said good news bad news? Bee hummed for a moment. Because I don’t think the drones were the main target. Scavengers are attacking the caves we’re aiming for. Shots are keeping them hemmed, but it’s getting messy.

Bee wasn’t the only one sharing a similar update, though Talinn didn’t think to loop in Jeena. Instead there was a lull, a sharp question from Otie, followed by a resigned Medith over comms, “Fine you might as well come in and be of use but I’m not convinced this isn’t your fault and we’ll talk about it afterward. Well what are you waiting for?”


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