CHAPTER 38
Tiernan didn’t lecture her, which protected all their sanity levels. Her report wiped the smirk off his face, and he wiped his hands over his face before replying. “I found out about those ships too late—expected more chatter, but IDC is referring to them as ‘the issue’ and UCF channels had only ‘the Bandi matter.’ We were on approach to Bandi City, and I couldn’t risk a message.”
That’s almost an apology.
Talinn shook off the lingering discomfort of dealing with a tolerable Tiernan and spread her fingers. “We handled it, and at least we have an idea of how to take the ships down, if we come across them again.” Preferably without losing a squadron of Eights to get it done, next time.
“And we might.” He stood abruptly from his chair and refastened the portable servers ahead of takeoff. His back to her, he continued, “Bandi City has a whole lot of extra comms traffic from Sovoritt than I’ve seen in past visits. Kay is sure the funding is coming from the station.”
Talinn leaned forward at his pause and pressed her lips together to keep from interrupting him. Tiernan had not been much of a sharer, these last weeks.
“And if we’re lucky, the drop point there should have a message from Talinn.” He turned toward her, but kept his gaze fixed on the cargo ship’s control panel. “If we’re really lucky, we can maybe even catch a lift to the Pajeeran Fall.”
“How lucky is really lucky?”
“I’m sure Kay and Bee have already run the probabilities.”
“Does the station have one of those machine-activist stores?”
“The what?” He blinked, cocked his head, focused back on her. “The machinists?”
“The ones who use an artsy pseudo-port on their sign and want to end the war through becoming machines, yes.” Sarcasm wouldn’t help her here, and she kept her voice level.
“Probably. Sovoritt’s the largest station in the system, so they’re likely to have a bit of everyone.” He hadn’t grinned smugly once since he’d returned, and his serious regard tipped her balance.
“What if it’s them?”
“What if what’s them?”
Talinn stretched her hands flat on against her legs and reminded herself he wasn’t in her head, and probably she should use her words. She outlined what she and Bee had theorized, and he sat back with a thoughtful frown.
“It makes as much sense as anything.” Tiernan crossed the cabin, running through the preflight Talinn had already completed. “Which is to say, not much.”
“Maybe they have retired techs, or some engineer went rogue. Makes more sense than defense arrays going independently bonzo and roaming the system.”
“It’s something to check, at any rate. At worst, maybe they make enough noise to keep us off the defense arrays notice a little longer and buy us time to get word from Talinn.” He pulled back from the bunk. “You ready to lift?”
In answer, Talinn crossed to the controls and strapped into the pilot’s chair before he could.
Sovoritt was an old outpost, supposedly the first station built once the jump point had stabilized. Accordingly, it was a mess. The central sphere had long been expanded by an assortment of rounded shapes, including what was still recognizably an outdated UCF troop transport with its hull split as though it had taken too many hits and opened to swallow a chunk of the station. The whole uneven mass of the place made Talinn’s insides twist when she saw it from the outside, and she didn’t like it much better inside.
This time she and Tiernan had dull gray coveralls and their own absurd hats, both of which aligned with their registered purpose of delivering materials on a wheeled cart. Their cover meant they walked the maintenance corridors of the station, which were much less crowded than the main areas. They’d gone the length of an entire subsection without passing another living creature, but to balance the scales, the less public halls were far creepier than she imagined the standard areas were.
The lights, glaringly bright and uncovered, were set at irregular intervals. The floor had been laid in patches that had been welded seamlessly—important in a set of nested orbs hanging in space—but nevertheless tricked the eye with their varying patterns and textures. The walls had more missing panels than not, which revealed circuitry and ducting that snagged the eye uncomfortably. After a few minutes, Talinn locked her eyes on the covered cart and relied on Tiernan or Bee to tell her when to turn or slow down for a door.
The cart, at least, moved smoothly, needing little pressure from her to keep it on track. Three of the crates had actual materials in them—salvaged parts Tiernan had collected in his various disappearances—and the others held Bee and Kay in their temporary servers.
“Hope that means next stop Pajeeran Fall,” she subvocalized.
Do you want the probability on that?
Talinn didn’t, so she leaned closer to the cart and angled her head slightly toward Tiernan. “What’s next?”
“We go to the drop point and—”
“Not this.” She waved a hand. “Not the game of don’t catch me with the defense arrays. After we get to everyone else.”
“We go to ground.”
“You’ve been doing more than preparing to go to ground.”
“We are who we are.” His words were breezy enough, but the tension around his jaw was as clear as his smirks had been. “Got to keep busy or idle minds will turn to anything to keep entertained.”
You two have really gotten good at this code thing. Bee’s tease helped her bite her tongue. Tiernan hadn’t been much for sharing thus far; the back halls of a densely populated civilian station wasn’t going to change that.
They moved through another subsection of the station. In this one the walls were covered to shield the mechanical intestines, but each panel had been covered in layers of old film printouts. Talinn slowed her pace to scan them, but none of it meant anything to her. Unmoving entertainment advertisements? Better than the blinking and yelling display ads of her first station, though given they’d been relegated back here as wall coverings, perhaps they’d been less effective.
She took a cue from the old printouts and remained silent as they moved through the back workings of the station. After an endless stretch of time (Exactly twenty minutes and five seconds) they stopped at a nondescript door amidst a string of equally nondescript doors.
Tiernan gestured her to pay attention, tapped a code on the control panel, then a second, then a third. To an outside eye, it looked like one long code, but there were precise pauses between certain groups of numbers.
Empties could probably figure it out if they knew what to look for and slowed the recording, but otherwise that’s a way to Eightify a code.
It wasn’t quite the pattern of tapping speak her class had developed in training, but the concept was the same. They’d fallen out of the habit of it after first assignments, but it came back readily enough. The last time . . . oh. The last time she’d used it had been with Medith, on P-8, laying the groundwork for the rest of them to get away. Her gut squirmed, she swallowed back bile, and the door opened.
Revealing Medith.
But the one who’d drugged them and shipped them off to a new ass-end of the galaxy. Otie’s Medith. Not theirs.
“Delivery’s a little late,” she called cheerfully, swinging something long and flat down and behind her back. “Thought you got turned around. Come in.”
“No direct path from point A to B in this place,” Talinn responded, and it might as well have been code again. Thought you might have gotten atomized by a defense array, from Medith and We’ve just been having so much fun dodging around, from Talinn, but maybe she was overthinking it. Maybe Medith meant nothing of the sort, and neither did she.
Focus, from Bee, which meant exactly that, and Talinn settled into the moment at hand.
Tiernan gestured her ahead, and she shoved the cart into the room. As the door slid shut behind Tiernan, Medith turned and placed the object in her hand—a projectile weapon—onto a pile of crates.
“It’s about time—”
“Tell me we’re not the only—”
“Did you—”
They all stopped talking, and Medith leaned against the crates and gestured to Tiernan. They were in an innocuous storage room, with various sizes and shapes of shipping containers and cargo boxes stacked six and ten rows high, lining the walls with narrow paths left clear for a loader’s cart or three humans to walk shoulder to shoulder. Apparently deemed safe from monitoring, as Tiernan launched into a concise report of their time since Deep End.
“We missed you at Gillen, and haven’t been able to get any messages through to Oxillide—everything’s monitored in that direction.” Medith sighed and crossed her arms before Talinn could ask about encryptions. “To the point that anything that might be flagged a bit odd gets interested parties knocking on doors to ask questions.”
“Who?”
“Muddy.” Medith gestured them deeper into the room, around the next corner where a cluster of chair-height boxes waited. “At first we thought they were IDC sympathizers, or agitators, but they seem a little too obvious about it.”
“The machinists?” Talinn leaned against her cart rather than sitting, keeping Bee’s box close at hand.
“All orbits lead to.” Medith laced her fingers behind her head and cracked her neck. “Talinn’s had us watching them for a few cycles, but they’ve been low level, more for a possible ally or frameup down the road than we thought they’d be trouble.”
“You dismissed me when I brought it up.” Talinn pulled her voice to a neutral level, but Bee scoffed, indignant on their behalf.
“I’d just met you and was in the process of drugging you at the time, little Talinn. Nonadapted playing dress-soldier wasn’t top priority for either of us.”
Talinn braced herself to answer with a modicum of professionalism, but Tiernan took over the conversation before she got a handle on her tone. “Who else of us is on station?”
“No one.”
Tiernan cursed, but Medith kicked his leg. “No, idiot. The Pajeeran Fall is on maneuvers in system.”
“It worked, then? We can leave the system?” Talinn brushed her fingers over the trailing hair of her wig. She wanted to press on her port, and the synthetic strands were a poor substitute.
“Talinn and the Spacies did a jump with some other volunteers and no one got dematerialized, so while no one’s excited to be unconscious for a few weeks, we’ve got almost everyone else rounded up. All the new class. Four left, now that you’re here.”
“Who’ve we lost?”
“We won’t know until time’s up.” Medith didn’t meet his eyes—she had suspicions, then, and didn’t want to share until they were confirmed. Talinn had trusted her too much, too soon the first time they’d met, because of her Medith, but the women weren’t entirely unalike. She swallowed back guilt—all her people were accounted for, which was a relief, but the same couldn’t be said for Tiernan. She brought the subject around to break the dragged-out silence.
“So what do we do? Go talk to the machinists? Civilians with disruptor technology doesn’t feel like a thing that can wait.”
Tiernan’s focus remained inward, and Talinn settled her gaze on Medith, who sighed. “It’s worth checking, but still, it’s a loose connection.”
“Those can still shock you, if you’re holding the right ends.” Talinn smiled far more than the analogy deserved, and then lifted a shoulder. “Unless you need to drug me again and ship us out to the Pajeeran Fall right away, I’d rather go poke inside the machine god’s business than simmer here.”
“For all the little bittlies in the galaxy.” Medith’s laugh was brief. “You’re like her in the most annoying ways, you know that?”
“I’ve learned, believe it if you will. Just watching Otie has been . . . a lesson in how I can come across.”
Hasn’t really changed you much.
“Us,” Talinn muttered, letting Medith hear. Tiernan sat forward, present again, and Medith only murmured “Otie?” in faint question. When Tiernan didn’t argue, Medith pulled a display out of a side pocket in her coverall. Within a moment the display flickered on, a detailed map of the station resolving into focus.
“We’re here.” Medith tapped a small box in the near middle of the original body of the station. It glowed under her touch, and then a smaller oval in the bulge at the top left of the station’s mass lit up as well. “And that’s where the machine god is spreading the good word.”
“To be perfectly clear, I don’t believe in a machine god.” Talinn rolled her eyes, which pulled a small smile from Medith in answer. “But as Bee has said, maybe these people believe in their machine god, so it’s possible there’s someone or something they think is their machine god.”
Like an Eight that went bonzo. Or a defense array that took over a body.
“How likely do you think either of those things is?” Talinn scanned the map, committing it to their shared memory.
Oh not at all. Infinitesimal odds. About as likely as the task programs on this station waking up and declaring themselves the real brains behind the IDC-UCF war.
“I’m not sure that would surprise me.” Talinn glanced at Tiernan. “You coming with?”
“I . . . have to check something.” He smiled, a ghost of his usual expression, and stood. “Mercy, you staying here?”
“I’m contact, so here unless something urgenter comes along.” The older woman flicked a pinkie. “Both of you go run your routes. Your servers are safe as safe can make, with me.”
At least she didn’t say “perfectly safe” because then you’d be going on about jinxes again.
“And if your box got taken away, you’d be too mad for me to say I told you so. Where’s the fun in that?”
Fair point. I promise I’d know you meant it. Speaking of boxes, Kay’s been awfully locked up, do you want me to try and see what they’re up to?
“It hasn’t worked yet. Let them run out what they have to—at least they’re letting us do something on our own.”
Makes me think Medith’s right, and it’s not going to come to anything.
“Jinxes, Bee. Jinxes.”