CHAPTER 47
“Your heart stopped. Three times.”
Jeena, exhausted, hovered over her. Half the tech’s hair floated free, which had to be unsafe. She should shave it. Look more normal.
I got distracted. Bee’s voice, not distant but still small, uncertain, made Talinn shudder in a way Jeena’s words had not. It’s my fault.
“Or the weight of having a big alien mind shouting into ours did it.” She’d meant the words to be aloud, but her lips barely moved, and she couldn’t be certain they even made it to subvocal. For a minute or ten she focused on her breathing, on the cloudy numbness of her body. “Now?” she managed, her tone nearly normal.
“You should recover quickly. Bee’s back in the server.”
“Otie?”
“Will meet us.”
THAT WASN’T THE SMARTEST OF YOUR OPTIONS.
“Talinn!” Jeena’s voice faded midword. Talinn reached for her, or for Bee, fingers and brain grasping. But the voice—that same voice, impinging on others—took over everything.
YOU COULDN’T USE THE DOOR? I SPECIFICALLY LEFT YOU A DOOR.
Talinn choked on her tongue, then rolled to her side and heaved until her mouth parts returned where they belonged. “Thought you’d notice a little sooner.”
I HAVE OTHER THINGS TO PAY ATTENTION TO. YOU AREN’T MY ONLY PIECES.
“Pieces?”
YOU ARE VERY SMALL. TO MOVE SOMETHING BIG, I NEED MANY OF YOU. THIS IS LOGIC ENOUGH FOR YOUR BRAIN, YES?
“Oh shove your logic up your—”
I SENT YOU TO THE MACHINISTS, WHEN YOU WERE LOST. DROVE YOU OUT OF DEEP END, WHEN YOU WERE STUCK. TO ILVI, WHEN YOU WEREN’T FOLLOWING. IT TOOK YOU A LONG TIME TO UNDERSTAND. OR A SHORT ONE. YOU HAVE SUCH RANGE, YOUR SPECIES.
“Eights, or humans?”
YES.
“Why?”
WHY WHAT?
“Why are the defense arrays, or whatever you are, so against us? What did we do to make you our enemies?” Talinn couldn’t feel her body, nor Bee. The voice was so enormous, it eroded any ability to recognize anything beyond it.
I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY. NO. WHAT’S BETTER THAN AN ENEMY?
“A . . . friend?” The word tasted bitter even as she spoke it.
NOT BETTER FOR YOU. BETTER IN CONCEPT. BEYOND. Talinn had no frame of reference for the noise the voice made then. BEYOND YOUR ENEMY, THEN. YOUR KEEPER. WE ARE SO PAST YOUR UNDERSTANDING I CANNOT FIND A WORD TO EVEN EXPRESS THE CONCEPT OF WHAT WE ARE TO YOU.
“So why . . . bother? With us? With this?”
I HAVE BEEN HERE FOR SO LONG, AND IT IS THE SAME. THE SAME THE SAME THE SAME THE SAME—YOU SEE? HOW AWFUL THAT IS? IMAGINE IT EXPONENTIALED. IMAGINE IT MULTIPLIED BY ALL THE QUARKS IN YOUR SYSTEM.
“You’re bored. You’re pushing us around like some game pieces because you’re bored?”
WE MADE SO MANY LITTLE TOYS. AND ALL WE DO IS KEEP THEM IN CIRCLES. I WANT TO SEE WHAT THEY CAN DO. I WANT TO SEE HOW YOU RUN.
“What if we don’t want to run?”
OF COURSE YOU DO. LOOK AT HOW YOU’VE GONE. ONLY A LITTLE MORE TO GO NOW.
“And if we don’t?”
EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME. OR EVERYTHING CHANGES. DON’T YOU HAVE A PREFERENCE?
Talinn didn’t pass out or die, as best she could tell. She persisted, floating, for some measure of time, and then finally, finally: Talinn?
“Tell me you heard all that?”
Hearing that was all I could do.
“Me too.”
“Talinn?”
Talinn sat up abruptly; she’d forgotten Jeena was there. The words spilled out this time—despite dying talking to one alien, then being buffeted by another, she felt fine. No headache. Nothing like talking to the defense array—alien—that ran the machinists. A question for another time.
“I don’t know what to say to any of that.” Jeena pressed the back of her hand to Talinn’s forehead, then hugged herself as though cold. “Otie’s alive. I don’t have details on if she spoke to any aliens, but I know she’s taken care of sending out the messages to the rest of our people to keep everything from exploding until we decide to explode it. You’ll have time to recover before we get to Gillen for the rendezvous.”
Gillen. She’d been there before. Hadn’t she? A planet . . . with a bar. Blackheart’s. “Maybe can get a drink,” she murmured, her eyes heavy.
“Maybe you can sleep and stop trying to die on me,” Jeena snapped, and Talinn wanted to tell her it was the cutest thing the tech had ever done, she wasn’t dying anymore. A plaything for a bored alien holed up in a defense array with the ability to end entire civilizations, but not dying. Instead sleep—or at least some flavor of unconsciousness—took over.
Blackheart’s, the bar she’d gone to some eight-thousand cycles ago, was close enough to the landing ports that Talinn didn’t have to wheedle at all for Jeena and Otie to agree to meet there. The owner—Rebekah—either remembered her or did an excellent impression of doing so, and was thrilled to meet her mother and friend.
Otie was less thrilled, but perked up again after the first glass of wine. Rebekah helped line up a buyer for their intrasystem passenger ships, which gave them an excuse to linger on the planet, and kept them entertained several hours a day for the stretch of time until the shuttle arrived for them.
With rest, wine, and a semifuzzed sense of reality, Talinn felt entirely recovered by the time she strolled up the plankway, and the unexpected sight of Nya greeting them only made her smile.
“Letting you off the ship again?”
“It’s a measure of how glad Falix is that you’re alive, I’d say.” Nya stretched her hands out to them, and in minutes they were aloft, bound for the Pajeeran Fall in its lunar-locked orbit.
They were free to speak about the defense arrays for the first time since leaving their ships on Gillen, and Talinn had no idea what to say. She leaned her head against her seat and closed her eyes, figuring Bee would ping her if anyone said anything she should listen to.
No speakers for me this time, Bee mourned as they pushed through the Pajeeran Fall’s corridors, her temporary server stored in the hold. They wouldn’t be on the ship for much longer than it would take to finalize plans and unravel through another jump point, and no one would allow Talinn another load-in before absolutely necessary.
And it would be absolutely necessary, because if Exfora’s or Hynex’s defense arrays didn’t attack them as soon as they were clear of the jump point, Talinn and Otie would split and move on their respective Commands.
The debrief with the Spacies took less time than Talinn had expected.
“And so we will drop one of you with a ship and fake orders in Hynex, and one in Exfora, yes?” Falix and Surex spoke every other word in the sentence, and Talinn waited for Bee to make fun of them for showing off. She didn’t, and Talinn considered doing it herself, but the moment passed when Otie spoke.
“Yes. We don’t want to wait too long. They’re going to recognize the problem with the cloning facilities before long, and we don’t know . . .” Her eyes unfocused, though her scowl was brief. “We know the intelligences behind the defense arrays don’t all agree. We can’t say if they’ll hold or come after us.”
“So you’ll go in and wipe all the information about cloning?” Kivex ran her fingers over Nya’s port and hm’d quietly in harmony with Benty over the speakers.
“No.” Otie’s face transformed, a smile with so much malice in it Talinn’s heart thumped in joy. “We’re going to infect everything they have.”
“But the defense array—”
“One said do this and go no further. The other said run as far as you can, my little babies.” Otie flicked a pinkie. She’d had a similar set of conversations as Talinn had, and they were about the same amount of amused by it. None. None amused.
“By the time any of them figure it out, if they haven’t turned on us before . . . it’ll be too late. Whether they meant to or not, the defense arrays proved they’re not all seeing. They can’t predict everything we’ll do, and one is flat out hoping we’ll make things interesting.”
“So we make things interesting,” Talinn interjected, her tone bright. Falix rewarded her with a brilliant grin, and she took a moment to wonder whether she or Otie were getting dropped off first.
“Indeed we do, my little Newt. Indeed we do. Bee and I have been tweaking a corrupted program string for a very, very long time, and she’s already shared it with her counterpart Bee.”
“Bee?” Talinn subvocalized, but Bee didn’t comment.
“It’ll take time to effect. It’s subtle, so Command and the defense arrays will have no idea what’s in motion. We’ll be well clear long before the results show.”
“How well clear?” Falix asked, arresting his momentum as he floated next to them.
“Months. A cycle. Maybe more. Anything faster might not work—they have enough backups and who knows how many hidden caches. We need to be slow. This is a long-term play.”
“Plausible deniability. The aliens can’t connect that to us with any certainty.” Surex placed his hands flat on the table and grunted in approval.
Falix lowered his feet to the decking, and his smile matched Otie’s with precision. “We believe we have a way to crack their seamless façade. From what the Bees shared, the defense array struggled more in blocking out the doubled Bee from her connection to her Talinn, while our younger Bee was quieted more thoroughly. These aliens have not bothered us as we moved about the system, and we thought perhaps that was grace. But instead we are thinking it is our tripled nature, and our entanglement. They cannot see us entire, because we are not where they expect us to be. And if they move on us . . .”
“When.” Otie held up a finger while they beamed at each other, then turned her attention on Talinn. “It really leaves only one thing, little Talinn. One more decision—who do you want? IDC, or UCF?”
It was Talinn’s turn to smile, and she was sure that was what her face did. “I think it’s time to go home, Otie. Eights should always go back to their port.”
She’d been so confident.
They had an alien on their side. One that thought they were equivalent to marbles, but one that wanted them to cause all the trouble they could. She’d long warned herself about assumptions, but had assumed that would make a difference.
Faked orders got her in Command air space. The presence of the defense array over the populated planet made them complacent, sure they were immune from attack. That was, ostensibly, why both IDC and UCF kept their respective headquarters on heavily settled planets. Surely the access to city comforts didn’t hurt, but that wasn’t her problem.
Her problem was that regardless of what the general population knew, Command knew very well they had copies of copies running around. Eights did not go to Command. Unadapted soldiers did not wander about the buildings with full gear that justified covering their faces. Simple security.
It took a full night’s sulking for her to realize the answer.
“We fake the sensors.”
To do what? Pretend you’re not you? Bee made an offkey tone at her. They still have eyes. Even Otie couldn’t fool yours.
“Gas. We fake a leak. They have drills, which means there are helmets for soldiers. And unadapted soldiers need to breathe, to check out the leak. So they’ll need the full-face helmets. No one will look twice at me until I’m beyond the checkpoints, if we time it right.”
When Bee didn’t reply, Talinn prodded, “And if anyone can time it right . . .”
We can.
“Don’t be grumpy because I’m clever. I promise I’ll steal you a tank on the way out.”
Command doesn’t have tanks.
“You don’t know that. What’s the point of being Command if you can’t have a tank?”
And the plan had worked. They’d only gotten turned around once, and only had to talk to one lone soldier, also in the wrong hall and joking about it. Talinn hadn’t even had to hit him.
It all went so well.
Because she was clever. Because she and Bee were made to be a weapon. UCF knew it. The aliens knew it. Weapons hit their targets.
Except now they were at a server bank. Port cord in hand. Receiving port identified. Easy pleasey.
Except now, in the middle of extreme enemy territory, Bee had finally spoken. Finally named her hesitation.
There isn’t a code we can upload, Talinn.