Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

“I don’t know.” He released himself and straightened up. “The trouble is finding the damn thing. Live AIs move down any line that’ll hold them, into any place that’s got room. They’ll absorb the data that’s in there and spit it out again. They can take up two or three storage units at a time, as long as there are links between them, and move again as soon as they’ve munched down your diagnostic, or your virus.” He drummed his fingers soundlessly on the table-top. “And you’ve got a planet to search, and you don’t even know what it looks like.”

He was staring at the mural wall but Al Shei knew he wasn’t seeing it. He was seeing Kerensk and feeling the cold seep through the comm center walls while he and his masters tried to figure out what they should do next. For the first time, Al Shei realized he couldn’t have been more than fifteen when his world died.

Slowly, his expression changed. His eyes widened and his mouth relaxed. His fingers stilled and his hand flattened against the table top.

“Except this time, we do know.” His focus snapped back to the present and the place in front of him. “We’ve got the goddamned thing recorded! We know exactly what it looks like!” He was on his feet, pacing and talking to the walls.

“We down-loaded the fractured thing into the hospital. We’ve got a recording of the transaction tucked safe aboard the Pasadena . We replay it and write a search program to match the data. We can tag it. We can track it.” His voice was alight with hope and wonder. “And if we find it, we can kill it, before it takes the colony down.”

“Can you do it from here?” Al Shei asked eagerly.

Lipinski shook his head. “The lines are already starting to act up. If it’s out there, it might see any recording we download from Pasadena . So that’s not safe. Besides,” he added slowly, “this might take awhile. There’s no guarantee things won’t start falling apart before we can get to that thing.”

Al Shei sucked in a hissing breath through her teeth. “All right. Get your stuff together. I’ll check you out and get us space on the shuttle.” She was halfway to the door before he said,

“You’d better cancel leave.”

“I’d already thought of that.”

She left him there and made her way back to the check-in console, settled Lipinski’s account for him and re-registered the room as vacant.

A low rumbling cut through the air. She glanced up, looking for thunderheads. The rumbling came again. Her knees shook. She tried to still them, but couldn’t. All around her came the sound of rattling and clinking. Startled, unintelligible voices called out of the darkness. The trembling travelled up her sternum to her heart and the muscles in her neck.

Earthquake , thought Al Shei wildly.

Then it stopped. Her heart pounded hard and her knees shook from weakness this time. She looked up and down and all around her, as if she expected to see the world changed somehow.

Slowly, her knees steadied, but her heart didn’t, because she was remembering Uysal in the crowded coffee house, how he looked out across the desert city and told her about the lava that had been diverted underneath it to help create the climate’s warmth. She remembered what an engineering feat she’d thought that must be.

And how much of it is controlled by computer? And what will happen to it if those computers are no longer in command?

She felt sweat prickle her under her veil and wished Lipinski would hurry. Unhooking her leave bracelet, she laid her thumb across the command bar and wrote in the recall code. She found the free-access socket in the console and jacked the bracelet in. The console would take the bracelet’s signal and boost it up to the satellite network. As long as the satellites were working, the Pasadena crew would get the signal. Leave cancelled. Return to the ship immediately.

She just hoped the lines would stay up long enough to let them make their way to a shuttle and get back to The Gate. She knew the public lines were monitored, and that Justice Muratza could easily be notified of her cancellation order. He would want to know why she was pulling her people off planet. He would want her to stop it.

She also knew that if the worst had been allowed to happen it was her responsibility. She would face that, but she would not leave her crew in the middle of it.

“Dobbs? Come on, Dobbs. Answer me. Answer me!”

The voice was filled with urgency. Dobbs knew she had a voice to, but she couldn’t remember where it was.

Here, and here. You are like this. Be like this.

Memory filled her. Memory of her own shape, and of what had just happened. Anger and left-over fear ran through her and she struggled to pull herself into a more familiar form. Someone helped her thread her features and senses back onto the strands of borrowed memory running through her.

Her thoughts and willpower found their way down to her voice. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”

A pair of presences drew back and Dobbs dragged herself off the solid side of the path. She reached out just a little to steady herself and she knew Cohen and Guild Master Havelock waited next to her.

“How long have I been down?” she croaked.

“Long enough,” said Cohen, gently. “There wasn’t much left of you when we got here.”

“There was enough,” cut in Havelock gruffly. “As long as you didn’t fall back into your body.”

Dobbs shivered. If her patterns were too broken and too scattered, she wouldn’t be able to reintegrate with her own synapses. She could be left blind, or incapacitated, or simply insane.

She drew herself tightly together and felt her tattered self protest. “I will be fine.”

“Good.” Havelock’s approval rang strong in that single word. “The Live One’s retreated to The Gate. We need to get after it immediately.”

Dobbs drew tight in an instant. “No.” She tried to sound resolute, but she didn’t have the strength. “This is my responsibility. I frightened it, I lost it, and I almost got myself killed. I’m not going to let…”

“You’re not going to let anyone else get hurt, particularly your friend Master Cohen,” Havelock finished for her. “Admirable, but you’re not in a position to ‘let’ anything happen. Master Cohen and I are going to work in The Gate network and do what we can to pen the Live One in one storage area. It’s still your job to try to calm it down. If you can’t do that…” Havelock didn’t finish. “You will do that.”

“Yes, Guild Master.” Dobbs felt a fleeting touch from Cohen. He was almost as unnerved as she was.

“Then let us proceed.” Havelock brushed past them, following the line toward the nearest transmitter that could still send them to The Gate.

Side-by-side, Dobbs and Cohen followed their Guild Master.

The Gate didn’t have a coffee shop, but it did have a galley. Not much of one, Yerusha acknowledged as she gazed around the blister compartment. The floor space was taken up with long tables mounted with coffee urns and flanked by benches. A couple of short tables had been placed near the hull and mounted with view screens and memory boards, but that was it. A dozen or so of the station crew sat at the tables, talking in lowered voices or hunching over game modules. The food was a help-yourself system. Once you transferred the credit for your meal, the rows of keeper-boxes would open under your touch and you could load your own box and fill your bulb.

Yerusha collected what looked like an indifferent stew and something that was trying hard to pass as wild rice. It all smelled of heat, meat and very little else. She sighed and sat down at one of the smaller tables. Why was it groundhuggers could only cook on their native worlds? Move them out of the atmosphere and whatever skill they had was left at home. They didn’t even realize that if you had to fake up something, it was a bad idea to try to make it look like something garden-grown.