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CHAPTER 27


They’d taken to planning in the kitchen rather than the overwhelming information room. Talinn slid in, an unused port cord twisted through her fingers. Heka pointed at the warming unit, and she veered around the table to help herself to the simmering noodles, picking up enough to know they were talking about whether they wanted to take out UCF and IDC, and what would be left if they did. It had been something of an endless circle, and Talinn wasn’t sorry to have missed some of it.

Caytil scooted over on the long bench, opening a space between her and Arnod, and Talinn slid in while carefully balancing her lukewarm bowl.

“Is this a formal debrief, or . . . ?” she asked before shoving a truly unsafe amount of noodles into her mouth. Bee made a noise to indicate she wasn’t commenting on purpose, rather than from inattention.

Otie took a more reasonable bite from her own bowl and waited to swallow before responding. “Tiernan and Hops are back in-system, and should be here in the next few hours. We’ve been waiting on updates from Govlic, and I’m hopeful we’ll have enough information to make new plans once we have it.”

“I didn’t know you’d sent anyone out-system again.” Sammer stood, taking his and Jeena’s empty bowls.

“We had the Pajeeran Fall passing through, and don’t have any other reports or even rumors of glitchy defense arrays, so we decided to risk it. Still unconscious and powered down, but if we don’t know what’s happening in Hynex and Govlic, there’s no chance we can come up with a plan to infiltrate either Command.”

“It would be nice if we could confirm the truncated-program theory before figuring out how to infiltrate.”

“Come on, Belay, that’s base-array talk. Jets know you gotta ‘yes and’ these things—make the plans for both—”

“Jets don’t make plans,” Caytil scoffed, and conversation devolved into insults delivered from partially full mouths.

Until Otie pushed abruptly back from the table. “We have incoming.”

“Incoming.” Not Tiernan and Hops, with that reaction. Spoons clattered into bowls, liquid spattered on the table without anyone taking note.

“Incoming like unexpected. We don’t do unexpected here.” Her gaze unfocused, and she shook her head once, a sharp jerk. “You might as well come. Jeena—”

“I’ll clean up and get back to work. I’m still trying to figure out the potential for Bee’s combination—”

“Good enough.” Otie was up and striding for the door before Jeena could form another word, and Talinn’s scalp prickled.

She risked another oversized spoonful of noodles, then followed on the heels of her less food-motivated fellows.

They jogged halfway around the wheel to the information room, then past it to a door Talinn hadn’t noticed before. The door spiraled open, and the room inside was small, dominated by one large screen, with a bank of controls that looked very like the comms panel in her tank.

Definitely comms.

Otie spun up a seat and didn’t gesture for any more, so the rest of them crowded around her. The screen flashed to life, showing a satellite view of their system.

How nice—Exfora’s armpit instead of Govlic’s, Bee confirmed and Talinn agreed. Eights weren’t Spacies, and so didn’t spend a lot of time training on the three different systems humanity had settled over the centuries since they’d left their home planet. It didn’t take expert spatial understanding to note how remote their asteroid was.

The defense array is at a weird angle, no?

Like everything else in a star-based system, jump points, settlements, and their corresponding defense arrays moved. Their relational distance and angle, however, were meant to remain fairly steady per their respective orbits. The radiation and weight of the array were only so much noise in the grand scheme of the galaxy, but enough to be constantly taken into account for jump point alignment. As such, defense arrays were kept at consistent distances from jump points and their anchor station, as part of keeping the area clear and predictable. Exfora’s largest array appeared unnecessarily closer to the jump point.

It could simply be a delay in the satellite’s data, and probably of less pressing concern than the two ships falling out of the inner orbits. They could be on an impractically long approach for some other point, but most of the probable projected paths indicated out-system travel the hard way, or intersection with the asteroids at the edge of the system.

“Not a whole lot of reasons to come out this way if not for this, huh?” Sammer was furthest from Otie, though her arm twitched as though she were about to swat at him. She controlled herself—Talinn would not have—and moved dials. Likely her Bee did the internal shifting of information gathering and finding whatever frequency the incoming ships operated on, but there was always something to fidget with.

“Mismade pieces of—they’re firing on each other.” Her hands paled, the older woman pressing so hard against the comms console her skin protested.

“So someone’s running here and someone’s trying to stop them?” Heka asked, shifting as though there were any action she could take to help.

“Or someone’s on the way to attack here, and someone else is trying to—” Sammer had apparently determined to be contrary today, and Talinn was about to swat him herself when Otie threw ice down all their spines.

“Neither of those ships are ones we’ve had contact with.” She leaned closer to the panel, and Talinn could feel the frown the other woman must be making on her own face. “And . . . as best we can tell, they’re both IDC.”

“Firing on each other?”

“I don’t want to . . .” Talinn faltered, then put her hands on the back of Otie’s chair. “The defense array is moving.”

Wha—” Otie cut herself off, the strangled sound turning into eerie calm. “So it is. We’re evacuating.”

“Is it going to be any safer out there?” Arnod crossed his arms, widening his stance as though he couldn’t be moved.

“We’re evacuating, on as many different ships as possible, which means some of you are going to get a crash course in piloting.”

“We can’t possibly navigate a jump point—” Xenni blurted, voice skewing high.

“Speak for yourself, Xenni, we absolutely—” Caytil shoved at the other woman’s elbow, her confidence belied only by the fidgeting of the fingers on her free hand.

“You’re going to be piloting very, very small ships, ones that hopefully will pass beneath the interest of whatever this is. Then you’re going to take the individualized escape plans I’m about to send you, make your way to various points in this system, and obtain passage out. Then you’ll find the meeting place each of your AIs has and wait for further instructions.

Otie spun her chair and glared at them. “Do not deviate. Do not hero it. Do not get cute or clever. Get out there, and don’t glitch it all sideways.”

“Jeena—” Sammer began, and Otie snapped out a hand.

“Already sent her a message. She’s transporting the servers up level to the ships. She’ll go with one of you, Bee’s coordinating.”

“We’ll—” Talinn forgot the rest of the sentence and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek. The image stuttered—between one blink and the next, the ships went from blips with trajectory plotting lines indicating their direction to . . . debris.

“Did the—the defense array?”

“They’re IDC ships . . . this is still a UCF held jump point, isn’t it? We should be asking what took so long.” Sammer grunted, sounding pleased, as though it were all settled. Talinn swallowed bile, though he should be right. The situation was handled. Ships were gone. It remained weird, but that was life these days.

“No, given the lack of traffic between the big system settlements, we theorized IDC took control of the jump point a month ago . . .” Otie’s hands tightened to fists, and she held so still Talinn took a small step back. “Which they shouldn’t have, this has been a UCF system for all recorded history I could find, and—why would an IDC array fire on IDC ships?”

“I mean, one threatened us when we tried to leave Govlic, and that hadn’t changed hands at that point. Maybe something in the programming slipped, or there’s a delay?” Caytil chewed on her lip, staring at the screen. Seeing the gesture made Talinn realize what she was doing, and she clicked her teeth together to force herself to stop worrying at the inside of her mouth.

“And why is it still moving?” Heka pointed to the screen, though she wasn’t close enough for that to help—still, the ratcheting of tension in the room indicated they’d all processed it. Bodies stiffened, breath went shallower, and Talinn scanned the display for hints of what under all the skies was happening.

The screen stuttered again, and the debris fields were gone. Another flicker, and the defense array was back in its correct position, relative to the jump point and inner planetary settlements. As though nothing had happened.

Had anything happened?

Otie tilted her head, fingers uncurling, but Talinn dragged in a breath, the scene too familiar, the knot in her neck far too tight. “Is that reality, or are your sensors telling you what someone wants you to see? Like what we had happen to us on P-8?”

“No, that shouldn’t be—” Otie turned her scowl from the display to Talinn and back. “That’s a limited error, introduced only in close quarters. That’s not possible, if—” She stopped, not breathing, then slammed her hands down on the console. Talinn wasn’t the only one who flinched away—infinitesimal movement from each of them, but notable.

“We’re on a delay from our eyes further in system, I can’t . . .” The older woman locked up again, every muscle tensing so hard Talinn thought she could count tendons if there weren’t a coverall in the way. Her next words came out one at a time, so precise as to be clipped, so calm Talinn’s stomach turned over. “What does Bee think, Newt? Does this feel like P-8?”

Talinn held a beat, but Bee didn’t contribute. She had been surprisingly quiet during the encounter, and while that wasn’t impossibly unlike her, not offering an opinion when directly solicited was intensely un-Bee behavior.

“Bee?” she prompted as the silence went on too long, and then when it remained silent, she froze as well. Her nerves screamed warnings, her joints fused into place, but it was nothing like that time on P-8. When she’d woken up and Bee was gone. It was like . . . Bee was there. Right there. But in between them . . . 

“I can’t,” she said, and the words were strangled, spaced wrong, not the neat and orderly calm of her other, older self. “She’s not. I can’t. Bee.” Her heart beat triple time, then missed one beat, then two, the rhythm so far off she couldn’t finish the sentence. No wonder her breath gave out, and the words swallowed themselves instead of leaving her mouth.

“Lei then? Ziti?”

Every individual body in the small room stopped moving, the motionlessness making the small flickers of the display stand out even more, even worse.

Comms were unreliable. Their sensors were worse.

And their AIs were nonresponsive.

“Jeena?” Sammer asked, his voice breathy and high.

Jeena had the servers. Jeena had their AIs. They were on the move . . . that had to be the issue. The whole place was a circle—they’d find her. Solve the problem.

Talinn turned and ran.

Thudding footsteps indicated others followed at her heels.

They should have comms in their ears. Why didn’t they have comms?

Because they had AIs. AIs were better than comms.

But they couldn’t hear their partners, or reach them. Was something shielding them from within the installation? Was it the approaching defense array? Was the defense array still approaching? Was Bee screaming somewhere, trying to make contact?

Bee. Bee. Bee. She called her partner at every level—in her head, subvocally, aloud. She didn’t even know which audible level each attempt registered as. It was a little ridiculous—a little hysterical, she knew it as she did it, it was probably just a mistake, maybe Jeena had picked a ship Talinn had never seen. Maybe it was a small, shielded ship, and Jeena had managed to get all the servers loaded, rapid pace, fast fast fast, so they all lost contact all at once, not with a warning, because she didn’t know how would Jeena know the ins and outs of the tech in this armpit of Exfora and—

Were those footsteps? No, those were footsteps behind her, but up ahead, there was a door up ahead, a passage to the upper level. It was . . . 

The door to the upper level was opening and closing, so fast it was a blur, over and over, and somewhere on the other side was Jeena, and therefore Bee, and even Talinn wasn’t fast enough to get through its flickering pace, even in zero g, even with Bee in her head.

“Shit shit shit,” Caytil muttered, shoving past and slamming her elbow into the small control panel. They didn’t have the wrist control the more senior clones did—doors that were open to everyone opened to them, other ones did not, but over the time they’d been in Deep End, they’d tried and failed to finagle the control panels of doors they weren’t cleared for. Without success.

Talinn’s thoughts beat endlessly against her skull, a massive headache rearing up behind them, and she stared at Caytil, who had a handful of wires and connections and was moving them. Had Caytil figured how to break through the door panels? But no, never mind, they were cleared for this one, this was a standard passage. Talinn had passed through it before. They all looked the same but they moved differently and this one she’d been through. More technically, more importantly, the door already suffered from some sort of catastrophic failure—Talinn suffered from some sort of catastrophic failure—but nothing was happening.

Nothing was happening.

Nothing was—

Static roared inside her head so suddenly and so loud she was on her knees between one blink and the next. The headache was the worst she’d ever had, and she squeezed her eyes shut, then pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes. Pulled her eyelids open when that made it worse.

Static vanished. Talinn dropped a hand to the floor to steady herself. Her arms had the consistency of the noodles she’d eaten minutes and decades ago. No one reached a hand to help her, but she couldn’t move her head, nor twitch her eyes away from a spot inches before her. Maybe everyone was on the floor. Maybe they’d gotten through the door and were—

Static again, the fuzz lined with thorns that scraped against every soft part of her brain.

The port under her ear burned, and someone made a noise, something like a whimper. It wasn’t her—her throat had closed too tight for air, and blackness was narrowing her vision further, but someone was making a noise and—

Gone. She lay flat against the smooth floor, her heart thudding hard against the metal like footsteps.

No, those were footsteps.

No, it was her heart and—static static static.

The enormity of the universe—too loud and too useless and too empty without Bee—rose and cascaded around her, pulling, drowning, sucking . . . 

Talinn.

Her name was there, in the morass, a tiny, shining lifeline . . . 

And she couldn’t reach it.

And she spiraled down into an endless din of nothingness.

It must be what dying felt like.


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