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CHAPTER 31


“Let’s try this again.”

For a painfully long series of breaths, Talinn had no idea who had spoken. The voice garbled, someone whispering into a broken tunnel, through a fusillade, under a waterfall.

She couldn’t place where the thought had come from. Had she been in a broken tunnel, under fire, water pouring down? Was that where she was now?

Adrenaline spiked, and it cleared enough of the debris for her to remember where she was.

“You drugged me!” Talinn attempted to sit up, but something held her back. Restraints? She shoved harder, and nearly upset the cot. She hadn’t been tied down, simply tucked in tight with a covering of some sort.

“Jeena drugged you.” Otie sat next to the cot on a table, a portable server on one side of her, a messy pile of films on the other. “Because you were going crazy.”

“Because I was figuring out—”

“Talinn.” Otie held up a hand, and her face was so earnest Talinn hesitated. “You were right. Yes, we want to re-create merged AIs, and more importantly, we have strong reason to believe a fully merged human/AI pair is something Command is afraid of. But you were . . . you were glitching. Badly. The entire time you were talking, your body was . . .” She glanced to the side, reluctance clear, then fixed her gaze back on Talinn’s.

“You were shaking. Your nose bled again. I wasn’t trying to stop you to protect any secrets, I was genuinely afraid you were going to collapse.”

“And Bee’s in the box?”

Otie turned her head from Talinn to the portable server and back, then smiled. It was a brief, haggard version, but still a smile. “No. Bee’s in the server.”

“Couldn’t get her into a box after you drugged me?”

“Didn’t even try,” Jeena said, so softly Talinn almost didn’t recognize her voice, either. “I said we’d put them in the server, and we did.”

“I can’t hear her.” Talinn paused to consider it. “But it feels like she’s there, still. What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re still a little drugged.” Jeena touched her head, fleetingly, enough for Talinn to feel skin on her skin, and know that the wig was gone.

“What happened?”

“You were drugged, and—”

“No.” Words weren’t hard, her mouth and tongue moving normally, but it took an effort to ask because in truth she didn’t want the answer. “You’re upset. Your face is . . .” Blotchy and swollen and eyes a twist of gravity away from leaking.

“Sammer . . .”

Talinn’s entire cardiovascular system retracted and plummeted into her gut as a tangled lump. She couldn’t feel her toes, but was very conscious of the fact that her insides had a strong momentum toward becoming outsides, which gave some level of distraction from what had happened to Sammer.

“The other Sammer, older Sammer, he . . . He’s gone.”

Talinn held so still her heart barely thumped, whether it was still in her chest or deep in her intestines, and she stared at Jeena’s mouth and waited for the rest.

“Sammer isn’t conscious yet, he’s still unresponsive, we’re going to . . .” Jeena took a breath so deep Talinn couldn’t get any air. As much as she realized that must be in her head, it didn’t stop the tightness in her chest.

“You’re going to put the other Lei in him.”

“We’re going to see if merging the two AIs and feeding them back into his brain will kickstart activity. Lei isn’t responsive either, so . . .”

Woozily, Talinn decided the drugs lingering in her system were doing good work, because otherwise she would be vomiting again, and it really seemed as though she’d done enough of that lately. Instead she pushed up onto her elbows and studied Otie.

Could she have done it? Killed her own friend, her own Sammer, in order to layer AIs and . . . do whatever to Command that might allow her to do?

Either the drugs or the silence caused by Bee’s absence made her ask a different version of the question. Would Talinn herself have done it? If killing her Sammer cleared a path toward ending the war, ending the influence of the IDC and UCF once and for all . . . would she do it?

Could she?

No. Not if there were another way—not if slowly seeding secret bits of code into other versions of herself could accomplish the same goal. Not if there were any other path at all.

Talinn sighed so deeply tension fled her body, systems returning to their proper places, and she flopped onto her back. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Thank you,” Otie murmured, quiet enough that Talinn decided the other woman knew exactly what Talinn had been thinking. “And yes. Read the information about merging. It’s limited, and theoretical as you said, but maybe you’ll see something we missed.” She pointed at the messy pile of printouts next to her, then slid from the table.

Talinn let herself lay on the cot another two moments. Then upright, two more moments. Swung her feet over the side, another two breaths. She scanned the room—Caytil bent over a pile of flickering screens, Konti pacing, Heka taking notes, Jeena and Otie leaning over a cot like her own, where Sammer, her Sammer, remained unconscious . . . 

Flashing in the corner of her vision drew her attention away from the bodies, both moving and unmoving, and she frowned as her heart rate kicked up. The aftereffects of the drug clearing her system? If so that meant she should hear Bee again, preferably before panic set in. Then she realized the lights were flashing in a very specific pattern, one after the other.

Bee, sticking out her tongue.

Something else relaxed, an untwisting of a piece of her that had been so knotted she hadn’t realized it wasn’t right, and she breathed again, heart slowing.

Hey there.

“Not my Bee.”

Get ready for a trick.

In another setting, Talinn might have smiled. But Osis—Sammer, of another generation—was dead, and Otie had been experimenting on them, and there were enemies around them they couldn’t properly identify, and—

You can hear both of us now. Her Bee, a little tinny but fully present, fully Bee, spoke as though she’d only been out of focus, and now dialed back in. A frequency realigned.

“And that’s—”

A good thing, yes, because Talinn . . . we are in some megascopic trouble.

“Please tell me while I’m still a little bit punchy from the drugs.” She braced herself against the cot and closed her eyes. The installation’s floor shifted dramatically underfoot, her inner ear protesting everything, and she pried her eyelids open, focused on the ceiling instead.

That’s part of it. It’s not the drugs—there are lesions on your brain from all the load-in aftereffects. Another one might . . . it won’t be good. And Talinn, there’s going to be another one, soon, because the defense array?

She’d forgotten about the defense array. How could she possibly have forgotten? They were scrambling to get away from it, but then maybe their sensors were lying and they didn’t have to, but also they couldn’t verify and needed the combined Bees to punch through and find out and—

“I’m panicking.” She observed it as a fact about herself she had distance from, and wondered if she could get Jeena to dose her again. Easier to forget the other Sammer was dead, that way. That there were all about to be dead, potentially.

Probably a healthy stress response, honestly. The two Eights got back, Tiernan and Hops. They confirm the defense array has fully left its position. If it continues on its current path, it could be in firing range in a few hours.

“We . . . we have plans to take out arrays. In tactics, in training . . .”

That failed to take a few important things into account. This sensor disruption. The lack of big guns on our ships. The lack of a potential escape route.

“So we’re going to sit here and see what happens?”

I don’t think sending random IDC or UCF codes is going to save us this time. We’re going to have to try something . . . 

Fancy. Other Bee hummed, her tone bare shades off from Talinn’s Bee.

Or really, really stupid.


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