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CHAPTER 41


Tiernan matched her pace before she got back to Medith. “What,” he said, quite pleasantly, “in the actual entropic state of the universe did you do?”

“I made a friend.” Her voice didn’t sound nearly as hysterical as she thought it might. Interesting, as Divya might say. “And we’re being sent off.”

“I lost contact with Kay for ten minutes. I’m guessing that was you, poking at the machinists?”

A laugh burbled out of her intestines, scraping its way through her bodily systems. Talinn couldn’t tamp it down, and Bee didn’t appear to try. “We should get to Medith—I don’t know if I can explain this twice.”

Three times. Otie will want a full report. Bee’s briskness fell flat, her tone as hollow as Talinn’s skull.

“The real question is if they can ride our frequency all the time, now.”

Tiernan wrapped his hand around her upper arm and tugged her into their next turn. Rude. She knew where she was going. She was perfectly functional. “Ask me an orienting question,” she said, though that laugh returned and made the words skew awkwardly.

Medith paced outside the door of their storage compartment, and her posture locked upright when they crossed her eyeline. She opened her mouth, but didn’t say anything until they were closed inside the safe room.

“The Pajeeran Fall sent a message. They’d like me to know their navigation system is blaring a single set of coordinates at them, and do I have any idea why that might be?”

Talinn strode past her, breaking Tiernan’s hold, and walked until she found the lift with Bee’s server. Her legs gave out the moment she touched it, and she draped herself across the box and let her bones rest.

This isn’t comfortable.

“Fun fact,” Talinn announced as Medith and Tiernan, grim faced and intent, joined her. “It’s not the machinists after us. It’s the bug-eaten defense arrays.”


They took a small ship to the Pajeeran Fall, not bothering to put themselves under. Medith left every sort of message she could, but staying on Sovoritt was a bad play after Talinn’s encounter.

Talinn might have argued, but a massive headache slithered from the top of her spine to press against the inside of her skull, and even Bee’s efforts couldn’t loosen it.

“The luckiest I am, two Talinns on my ship and not a one has to be unconscious. What games we will play.” Falix’s warm tone was welcome, but even squinting through her splitting head Talinn couldn’t miss the tension beneath.

“Dubs is a wreck.” Nya brushed her hands against Talinn’s and threw her arms around Tiernan. With a wobbly smile toward Medith, she continued, “He’s been doing fractal countdowns and refusing to use his words.”

“I didn’t know.” The words blossomed like a confession, or an apology, but Talinn wouldn’t say more until they were all together again.

The debrief itself didn’t take any longer than the conversation with the defense array–machine god combination had, though the resulting argument certainly did.

“I’m not going to some random series of coordinates because a giant AI said—”

“We do need to leave Exfora now, why not jump through to Govlic—”

“There are three defense arrays in Hynex, in what dimensional level of the universe does that make an atom’s worth of sense—”

“The coordinates are in the backass corner of Govlic, I’d give you good odds it’s near Ilvi, the colony so bad they found a new jump point to avoid settling on it.”

“Yes, that makes me want to go to there—”

Between the threaded flood of Spacie talk and the high speed of Heka and Arnod jumping in to add their complaints, Talinn decided to stop listening. To one of their points—probably Kivex, the most reasonable of the Pajeeran Fall’s trio—there were three defense arrays in Hynex, where Otie had meant them to go, and a great deal of IDC’s power.

Benty says we’re going to the coordinates. Bee kept the words soft, which was considerate. While the Spacies hadn’t invited Bee back into their servers, that had more to do with Jeena refusing to load-in for Talinn. Given her headache, it was one more argument she put off having. Before she could ask, Bee added, Says the argument is mostly for show at this point. Getting the remaining Eights to work their way over.

Remaining Eights. Right. Talinn blinked a few times, readjusting to the picture around her. Otie had sat motionless, through the debrief and resulting argument. Caytil leaned her arm against Talinn’s, but had said nothing.

“We need to wait for the rest.” Tiernan hadn’t wavered on the point despite defense-array-sized reasons to go, and that was a third debate she hadn’t engaged in.

“We want to do the best we can by your group,” Falix said.

“But we’re not going to get fragmented because of you all,” Surex continued, or interrupted. Talinn couldn’t be sure.

“Our group.” She pressed two knuckles into the throbbing between her port and her skull, and turned a no-doubt ghastly smile to the gathered Eights and Spacies. “I have a bad feeling the Machine God Defense Array monster has packaged you in with us. I know you have to come with, but maybe you should plan to stay a while.”

Surex cursed, Kivex stared into the void, but Falix laughed. The sound hit a different register than most human throats could, and Talinn restrained her wince. Or was already wincing because of the headache—she wasn’t sure which of the two were true.

“She’s not wrong. That thing did batter into our system, enough that it would recognize us now. If all defense arrays are aware, like it said they are . . .” He shrugged, ran the edges of his fingers over his ports, and then flicked each finger one at a time. “We should lay low. At least for a little while.”

“There’s no little while.” Surex wasn’t arguing anymore, simply stating a fact. “If we need to go off sights, we need to be something IDC isn’t looking for.”

“Jump disaster,” Kivex sing-songed, delight coating her words.

“We’ll be decommissioned.” Benty lowered his volume through the speaker, and Talinn murmured a near-inaudible “Thank you” to him. “We can’t return from that.”

“Do we want to?” Nya’s question might have been tentative, but when no one answered she chuckled in a tone far more pleasing tone than Falix’s. “Then we’re with the Eights now.”

“We’ve been in with the Eights awhile and more, not to fret. Now we’re just going to make it a little more official.”

Heka crossed over to Talinn and took over rubbing her temples, and Talinn leaned into it instead of swatting her away. “And a little more dramatic. How do you fake a jump disaster?”

“With a few explosions and a great deal of excellent timing, my little program keepers. You’re going to want to sleep through it.” Surex laughed this time, and the sound pricked each layer of Talinn’s skin in a different direction.

“The unraveling,” Kivex added, gleeful now that the decision was clear. “It’s going to last for quite some time. To make it . . . convincing.”

Spacies, Bee told Talinn in her best whisper, are even weirder than we thought.

“Otie.” It took a massive effort to move her aching jaw, but the word emerged whole. “What did you find out? Since Deep End?”

“Falix took me to Hynex, when we needed to make sure we could jump.” She rubbed her hands over her scalp, then dropped them to her lap. “And we sent pulses into command, like we did with the defense array.” Her laugh was brief enough to be mistaken for a breath. “The first defense array.”

“Risky,” Arnod muttered, in a tone somewhere between admiring and horrifying.

“We were ground assault for a reason.”

“I thought tanks were ground support?” Nya asked, but her smile toward Otie was brilliant.

“And we got a ping back.”

Talinn sucked in a breath, and Bee managed to tamp something of her headache down to a more manageable level of awful.

“It wasn’t a Bee, or even a B-series, but the code was . . . recognizable.” Otie met Talinn’s eyes briefly, then Jeena’s. “And given IDC’s entire fleet didn’t come screaming after us, I think it’s as close to confirmation as we can get without fully infiltrating.”

I’m not against running the war. I am against Command keeping splinters endlessly spun up, without any chance they can merge like Other Bee.

“Me too,” Talinn whispered, even as Sammer spoke up. “But we can’t go back to Hynex—”

“Not this again—”

“Command will still be there once we figure this out.” Konti pitched her voice to carry, talking right over Xenni.

“We’re wasting time, we should go under so the Spacies can jump!”

“Talinn.” Tiernan pivoted to Otie and stretched out a hand. “We have to wait. They’re still out there.”

“We can’t.” The older woman’s voice didn’t crack, but Talinn’s throat closed up at the tone. “We’ll have to hope they’ll find us.” She stood, met everyone’s eyes one by one. “We make the jump now, or we might not have another chance. And we still have work to do.”


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