Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

Al Shei rolled onto her back and threw her arm across her face, pressing her eyelids shut. She let herself imagine Asil lay beside her. She conjured up the memory of his scent, the heat of his body, the sweet sensation of his arms around her, loosely embracing her in sleep. She felt his warm, comforting weight against her as her breast rose and fell in long, contented breaths. His lips brushed lightly against her cheeks as he pulled her closer in his dreams.

Dreaming of her husband’s dreams, Al Shei managed to fall asleep.

Yerusha lay in her bunk staring up at darkness. She was supposed to be getting her seven and a half hour sleep shift in, but it wasn’t working out that way.

It was ridiculous. It was triple-fractured and double-twisted ridiculous. The entire crew was running itself ragged to find a virus that the stack in her case could locate in ten seconds.

They were all so scared . They relied on human engineering for their shelter, their air, their warmth and their flight, but they wouldn’t let their shelter be guided by an engineered mind, a native of an environment where even Lipinski was just a visitor. Even if her foster hadn’t caught a soul yet, it was a diagnostician that was ten thousand times faster than Lipinski could ever be.

While they all scrabbled around, the walls were crawling with who-knew-what. Yerusha shifted restlessly, wrinkling the sheet underneath her. Hadn’t anybody thought that it might get into the environmental controls? Or the fuel containment system? The vents were electronic and could be opened by a faulty command. Then what? They’d still have their groundhog security, but they’d be quite dead.

And her with them.

Yerusha sat up. “Lights.” The white glow she’d set to match the lights on Free Home Titania flooded the room. She kicked back the blanket and swung her feet onto the floor. She padded over to the storage drawers and unlocked the compartment that held her toolbelt. She extracted her pen from its pocket and thumbed the activation switch. Then, she held it against the lock for the lowest drawer. The drawer beeped once in acknowledgement and slid open. Yerusha extracted a grey metal case about ten centimeters on a side and six centimeters thick. Inside, snug and secure lay her foster’s wafer stack.

Foster was her last link to the Free Home until her exile was over. It was the only Freer voice she would hear, the only friend she did not lose. Right now, it was also the only help she had.

She looked towards the folded-up desk. No good. Lipinski, no matter what Al Shei said, would probably still be watching her lines. Besides, she squeezed the case, what she had said to Al Shei was the truth. Even though current theory said a fledgling intelligence needed as much input as possible, she had no intention of hatching her foster aboard the Pasadena, while the Houston’s reaction was going to be to hunt it down and kill it.

Even the best Houston, however, could not be everywhere at once. Some lines would be given priority over others.

Yerusha pulled her work clothes on over her pajamas and tucked her foster into one deep pocket. Then, she cycled open her hatch and headed for the bridge.

Cheney was the only one on the bridge when Yerusha got there. That meant Tulsa, Cheney’s relief, was out on what Al Shei was calling “the Hunt.” Schyler was nominally on sleep shift, but, somehow, Yerusha doubted he would be having any more luck with it than she did.

Cheney paced between Station One and Station Two, peering at the boards and scribbling ones on the memory pads.

He jerked his head around as Yerusha let the hatch cycle shut.

“Any trouble?” she asked, coming forward to peer over his shoulder.

“You mean, any new trouble?” Cheney corrected her. “Not yet.” He wrote down the new coherency reading for the system diagnostic. “But no new answers either.” He brooded for a moment at the curving, silver wall that was the only thing visible through the window. Then, he spared her a glance. “Aren’t you on Z-duty?”

She shrugged. “No luck on that assignment. Thought I’d come up and run a couple of simulations, see if I can work up a pattern on this mess.”

Cheney gave her a sour smile. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” she answered in what she hoped was a suitably wry tone.

The chair for the virtual reality station looked more like an exo-skeleton forced into a sitting position than like a chair. Yerusha settled herself at the VR station, tucking her feet into the boots that were attached to the floor rests. Keeping her back between Cheney and the boards, she pulled her foster’s case out of her pocket. She removed the delicate stack and inserted it into one of the board’s empty slots. Behind her, she could hear Cheney rustling and scribbling without interruption.

She pulled her pen out and wrote Activate port 37Con the board, but did not put down a period to finish the sentence and send the command. She laid the pen on top of the board, right next to the socket holding her foster.

She strapped her torso to the chair, closed the chair’s flexible arms around her arms and slid the wired gloves onto her hands. Then, she lowered the muffling helmet over her head. VR sets worked perfectly well with goggles and earphones, but most ships still used the helmets to keep any conversations in virtual reality from interfering with the bridge routine.

The helmet clicked into place and a menu board glowed bright white and green in the surrounding darkness. The menu displayed three selections for her:

ENTER PROGRAM NAME

DISPLAY PROGRAM MENUS

ENTER NEW PARAMETERS

Yerusha touched ENTER NEW PARAMETERS. A memory board with a pen clipped to the top appeared. Yerusha picked up the pen, twirled it thoughtfully in her fingers for a moment and started writing.

Initiate Pasadena simulation, current conditions, continuous update, delete crew.

She tapped down a period and waited. Some systems would not accept a continuous update command because it used up too much line space.

Pasadena, however, just came back with; SPECIFY STATION FOR POINT OF REFERENCE.

Bridge VR Station One, she wrote.

The darkness lifted and Yerusha was seated at the VR station, alone on the bridge. The slot where, on the real bridge, her foster was plugged in was empty, however. The stack was inactive and the ship’s system carried no record of it, so as far as the simulation was concerned, it did not exist.

Now came the part that was a little tricky. Yerusha closed her eyes and gripped what her left hand told her was the tip of her right index finger. She pulled. She repeated the motion for each finger, tugging at skin and finger ends until she peeled off the VR glove. She did not open her eyes, because if she did, she would see her right hand cut off at the wrist and lying in her lap. She did not have time to be disconcerted. If Cheney picked now to check up on her, things were going to get awkward, fast.

With her right hand, Yerusha groped across the real board until her fingers closed around her pen. She fumbled with it until she held it the right way up. She stabbed a period down on the board.

She could not risk an interface between the ship’s system and her foster without the cover of the simulation. The sudden increase in activity would be too noticeable and she had been directly ordered to keep it in its case. Now, however, the relatively small increase in power consumption and line usage under the myriad commands of a constantly updated program would be barely detectable.

She opened her eyes.

Her right hand was lying limp and lifeless across her thigh. She picked it up and slid it back onto the end of her wrist, twisting it around until she could wiggle all her fingers.