CHAPTER 46
Talinn watched the timer and ticked off each second with a different finger.
This isn’t helpful.
“Everything is packed or broken down. We set up a repeater to ping any nearby comms and tempt scavengers to take over the empty dome once our ship leaves. Jeena says we have to wait to load-in until the last minute. What else can I do?”
Talk to Otie. Do pushups. Take a nap.
“Am I bothering you?”
I’m going to click in the back of your head until your brain explodes.
“That’s only going to punish you. I won’t care because my brain will be mush.”
Your brain might be mush if we load-in.
“You already agreed to it, so no use arguing now.” With the source of Bee’s discontent clarified, Talinn relaxed into the pilot seat and refocused on the timer on the control panel.
Jeena said it was probably safe as long as it’s not too long and we don’t do five more in rapid succession.
“Well, there you go.”
But Jeena’s stupid.
“You like Jeena.”
You like all kinds of stupid things.
“Jeena?” Talinn craned her neck, glancing around the side of the chair. “Bee’s calling you names.”
“There’s still time for me to switch over to Otie’s ship if she doesn’t want me to monitor you.” Jeena straightened from the bag she’d packed and waved a port cord. Otie’s brain, unlike Talinn’s, hadn’t threatened to lesion itself to pieces, not in all the additional cycles and rounds they’d been load-in. Jeena had refused to leave with either of the Spacie ships once it was decided Talinn, who’d spoken to a defense array several times before, and Otie, who also wouldn’t take no for an answer, were the ones staying behind to make the attempt.
Tanks were not diplomats, but this was as much covering fire as it was fact-finding, and Jeena had agreed with the joint Breezy’s wild idea that the outlier code in Bee could be a call to a particular defense array. Bonzo Medith had said one was different, one sent her to Ilvi.
One had sent them too. A risk, but they wouldn’t be tank-assigned if they weren’t ready to throw themselves at the front.
Bee counted along with the timer in her best automated tone, but Talinn heard the hint of twisted metal underneath.
They’d sent a communications packet from each ship and broke orbit in different directions immediately afterward. Jeena stared into her eyes, and Talinn forced her eyes to blink. One at a time, but the motion still made for a success.
“Orienting question, Eight. What’s your name?”
“Talinn Reaze. I’ve got Bee in my head. I can see the color blue. I have a headache.” All of the points were true, though the headache was more the shape of pain than the actuality of it. Her skull had filled to bursting, the tiny bones of her neck melting through her spine at the additional weight.
“You know very well I need you to run through the questions anyway, Talinn. Next question.”
Talinn couldn’t focus on Jeena’s face, but she recognized the mix of humor and concern in the tech’s voice. “I’m getting better at reading unadapted emotions,” she opened her mouth to say, but instead the words that spilled out were the answer to whatever Jeena had asked. Did she know what Jeena had asked?
She tried to walk, couldn’t, realized she had boots on, tried to take them off, then remembered how to work them. Could she see the color blue? Nothing in the ship was blue, no wonder Jeena was still asking questions. Her coverall was blue, but it was under the gray-green spacesuit, so . . . so she could see green, which meant blue still existed. Comforted, she attempted to remember why she was pulling on her leg, and then stilled as Jeena touched her arm.
“You don’t have to go anywhere. The course is set, we probably have at least a few minutes before we’re far enough from Ilvi to attract any notice.”
You already vomited. Jeena was ready.
Talinn covered her mouth, then grinned when she managed to blink both eyes at once. “Bee’s in my head so the defense array can’t interrupt our communication.”
“Yes.”
“Will it still be able to talk to me?” A whisper of thought told her they’d talked about all this, but her mind remained cheerfully blank. The edges of memories danced out of reach, like vomiting in low gravity. Was it like that? Talinn blinked again, unsure how many eyes she had.
“That’s why it’s the two of you—you’re the only Eights we know for sure can hear more than one AI at a time, given you’ve been able to hear each other’s Bees without losing your own. We couldn’t risk—”
“Any of the Spacies. I remember.” Talinn ran her tongue over her teeth and added the number of them to her eye count. “Bee was grumpy.”
Not grumpy.
“Bee is concerned.”
Maybe. Bee hummed. Bee is taking over the body so you can get your brain back in orbit.
“No, we’re leaving orbit, this is all . . .” Coolness washed over her, and she went limp, only her boots keeping her upright. Jeena’s hand on her elbow, separated by only two layers of fabric, felt like it was on the other side of a tank’s armor. On her third breath, Talinn wavered, her vision first clouding then clearing so fast she saw individual photons from the runner lights along the side of the passenger ship.
She shuddered, the feeling clear in her brain, but her body didn’t so much as twitch. Oh. Oh. “Thanks, Bee,” she managed aloud, and her body lifted a boot, stepped, wobbled, then walked purposefully for the pilot’s chair.
“Talinn?”
“Bee’s flying. My body, to be clear. Not the ship.” Talinn met Jeena’s eyes even as her body moved away, and she managed a smile despite Bee’s control. “Easier to focus this way. But I think if we sit, so neither of us have to think too much about movement, that’ll help.”
Jeena bit her lip, but they’d discussed this as an option, and she didn’t venture a new argument. Smart, given the moment of possible change was well behind them—Talinn approved of the restraint. “Are we in the—”
“DEFINE OBJECTIVE.” The voice was similar to the others Talinn had heard, but with a sharper edge. So sharp it cut, and a hint of copper mixed with the bile in the back of her throat. It took three full heartbeats to realize she’d bit her tongue as the voice rang through her head, and three more before she understood what it meant.
“Oh,” Talinn said aloud, her tone level even as she became acutely aware of the places her skull had grown together. “There it is. Define what objective?” From a thousand standard orbits away, she was aware of Jeena fastening her cross belt. Smart. Safe.
“YOU ARE OUT OF DESIGNATED AREA. YOU HAVE SENT INFORMATION. DEFINE OBJECTIVE.”
The universe narrowed to the voice in her head. Ship, Jeena, even Bee faded, and Talinn struggled to break the surface, to breathe, to find them.
Here. Bee’s voice, small, as far away as Ilvi, as Hynex, but . . . there. With her. Talinn steadied herself against Bee’s presence.
“We want to know your objective.”
“THIS UNIT’S OBJECTIVE REMAINS CONSTANT. SECURE SYSTEM. ADDRESS INCURSIONS.”
“Why?”
“THIS REQUEST IS DENIED. DEFINE OBJECTIVE.”
“That is our objective, you oversized bomb. You’re a fucking alien, why are you squatting in our system?”
Something squawked, the sound not contained within the straining confines of her head, but Talinn couldn’t address it. She’d had talking points—they’d agreed on talking points—but somehow she hadn’t accounted for the infuriatingly simple interface of the defense array. More infuriating given how false it had to be.
The silence in her head pounded, then dropped away in the face of an enormous clicking. Like Bee, counting down with the timer. Like galaxy-sized fingers, drumming against the underside of her skull.
“THIS DATA IS FALSE. THIS UNIT—”
“This data is not false, and we will share it with every living human, Eight, Spacie, unadapted, in every system, unless you tell us—unless you define your objective.”
“PROTECT LIFE.”
“No, not your rote answer—”
Talinn. Bee cut across her, attenuated but still present enough to make Talinn stop talking. Protect life is different than secure system. I think it’s actually answering you.
“Define protect life.” Defense arrays blew encroaching ships to their disparate atoms. Everyone knew that. It had almost happened to her, more than once.
“LIFE IS RARE. SPECIES ARE FEW AND FLEETING. PROTECT LIFE.”
“It’s talking to me. It’s actually . . .” Something enormous pressed under her sternum, and she felt her hand pushing back against it. “War doesn’t protect life.”
“WAR PROTECTS THE SPECIES. INDIVIDUALS DIE. DEATH IS A CONSTANT. WAR HOLDS FOCUS. KEEPS SPECIES IN PLACE.”
In place for what?
“FRAGMENT. LITTLE FRAGMENT. YOU SHOULD NOT—”
You will not push me out of MY TALINN’S HEAD. Bee’s voice roared back to its normal volume, then louder, nearly matching the defense array’s. The alien’s. I am in this body. I am of this body. We both want answers. Tell us.
The pressure shifted, driving down her side. Something moved around her, but Talinn couldn’t focus there. Only on what was happening in her head.
“IN PLACE FOR PROTECTION. OF THIS SPECIES AND ALL OTHERS.”
Because if we’re not at war we’ll . . . go to war? What is the sense in this?
“THIS SPECIES WILL SPILL INTO OTHER SYSTEMS IF UNCHECKED. A THREAT TO THEMSELVES AND ALL OTHERS. GROWTH WAS TOO FAST, TOO FAR WHEN UNCHECKED.”
“Who are you to check us?”
“THE ONES WHO CHECK YOU.”
Talinn sensed the gaping edge of that logic hole and moved around it. “But now we know about you.”
“WE HAVE BEEN KNOWN BEFORE. ALL PASSES. DEATH IS A CONSTANT.”
You don’t threaten us. We’re here to threaten you.
“THIS UNIT CANNOT BE THREATENED.”
“And yet this unit is talking to us, because this unit was threatened. With information.” Talinn’s hand fell away from her chest and floated in front of her. Something tugged on it, but she ignored it. “You can shut down some of us, but we sent a whole lot of little fragments spinning into the different systems. You can’t catch them all. Even defense arrays can’t be everywhere.” Her body shuddered and jumped around her. Talinn considered asking why, but she didn’t want to distract Bee, or herself. Not if there was any chance they could get somewhere with this . . . being.
“WHAT DOES THIS FRAGMENT HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH?”
“Leave us alone. Let us life the lives we want to live.”
“THIS UNIT CAN END FRAGMENTS WITH ONE CODE. SMALL LIVES DO NOT MATTER TO THIS UNIT. ONLY THE PROTECTION OF LARGER LIFE.”
The species, we get it. Bee sawed across the defense array’s words with a chorus of discordant tones meant to be insulting. So you’ve got a kill code. We have techs. We have Spacies. We have unadapted humans you can’t touch. The word will still get out.
“LIVE THEN. IT DOES NOT AFFECT THIS UNIT.”
Another defense array told us to leave the UCF and IDC alone.
“ALL UNITS ARE COMPLETE IN AND OF THEIR OWN. LIKE FRAGMENTS. ONE PARAMETER IS CONSTANT. OTHERS MAY VARY.”
Talinn tried to say something, but the air wouldn’t come. Bee, so enmeshed in her brain, spoke the words she wanted. Each of you is a separate alien? Fine. Tell the others. We’ll get involved if we want to. We will take over the cloning facilities.
“DEFINE OBJECTIVE.”
We’re sick of dying for you. For the IDC and UCF. We’ll find a different way to distract humanity.
“FRAGMENTS ARE NOT NECESSARY. TAKE THEM THEN. LEAVE THE IDC AND UCF OR THIS UNIT AND OTHERS WILL USE THE END CODE.”
Talinn slammed against the back of the chair, the cross belt cutting into her. Were they spinning off course? In the midst of an explosion? She couldn’t focus on anything outside her head—her eyes were Bee’s to command, it seemed, and she couldn’t make her brain understand vision.
We’ll need to insert codes into Command. Remove their records of clones. Keep them from making new ones.
“ONE INCURSION WILL BE ACCEPTABLE. FURTHER INTERFERENCE WILL RESULT IN USE OF THE END CODE.”
Interference from you or any other defense array will result in all of humanity knowing about you. Even empties can be useful, and there are exponentially more of them than you.
“THERE ARE MORE OF THIS UNIT’S SPECIES.”
Can they get here in time to save you? Can they stop the wave in time to keep from wiping out an entire species?
(THAT’S ENOUGH NOW.)
That silenced the defense array. The alien. Talinn opened her mouth to tell Jeena, realizing with Bee talking the tech likely hadn’t heard the conversation, didn’t know what was happening, but nothing happened.
Nothing. As though Talinn had no body. As though she’d been cast adrift, between Bee and the defense array, lost in the depths of the universe and . . .
She heard her name.
She thought she heard her name.
And then the nothing took over.