Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

She wasn’t the only one. Station crew in their tan overalls were sprinting down the corridor. Yerusha dodged them. Some were carrying rolls of cable and comm packs, which confirmed her earlier suspicions about the lack of a back-up.

Trying to get a comm system set up on the fly. Good luck.

She guessed the ones with the comm-packs were systems crew and picked the corridor they were pouring out of. A glance at the signs as she raced past told her she’d picked correctly. Another couple of corners and she found herself in the middle of the morass Gate’s central comm chamber had become.

Crew milled everywhere, stabbing at boards trying to get answers, shouting orders, rolling out fiber optics to try to link up mute comm packs. The air already felt thick with sweat and fear.

Yerusha skidded to a halt in front of a sandy-haired woman hunched over an open repair hatch.

“Gabriel Trustee!” she bawled over the din.

The woman jerked her chin towards a short-haired, copper-skinned man bellowing orders in the middle of the room.

Yerusha shouldered her way over to him.

“…and grab Yates and Sulmani on the way! We’ve got to check the…”

“You’ve got to get the AI out of the network!” Yerusha planted herself in his line of sight.

His mouth closed with an audible click as his bark brown eyes focused on her. “What the spill and who the spill are you?”

“Fellow Jemina Yerusha, pilot aboard the mail packet Pasadena ,” she shot back. “You’ve got a virus in your system that’s going to go straight for your AI’s throat if you don’t get it out of there.”

“Gabriel!” somebody hollered. “We’ve got the first life-support glitch in berth seven!”

“Evacuate and seal it down!” Gabriel shouted back. “Start getting people into suits! Get a runner to Esta. We need all free docking bays covered with crew suited and ready to work the clamps by hand. We got ships that’ll need a place to hang, and we don’t know what’s going next!”

“I’ll tell you what’s going next!” Yerusha grabbed his arm. “Your AI! It might already be gone!”

“And what do you know about it?” He jerked himself free.

“I recognize the symptoms. I’ve seen this virus before. We’ve lost other AIs to it.”

He stood silently glowering at her for a moment. It seemed to Yerusha that he wanted to hear her, that he wanted to listen to her, but something was stopping him.

“You’re not authorized on this system and you don’t know puncture one, two, three about our AI. Get out of here.”

A skinny boy bent over a comm box jerked his head up. “‘Ster Trustee, a Freer with AI experience…”

“She is not Farther Kingdom crew,” snapped Trustee.

“We have twenty-eight ships in flight that we know about and…”

Trustee turned on him. “Kagan, shut it tight and finish what I gave you or you’ll be stripped and dropped as soon as this is over.”

The boy scowled down at the comm box he was working on.

“You fractured groundhog!” shouted Yerusha. “If you leave Maidai in there there won’t be anything left to retrieve! Get a set of isolated wafer stacks and pull her out!”

Trustee turned. A hundred angry lines had etched themselves into his face. “Get out of my way or you can rot the brig ‘til this is over!”

Yerusha backed away. He wouldn’t listen. They never listened. They turned you in to the guards and twisted the world around until before you knew it you were up on charges and had no way to defend yourself. You were still supposed to help, no matter what, because you were a Freer you had to help.

And they still wouldn’t listen.

“Let her die then,” she grated. “And kill yourself with her!”

Before she could answer she retreated down the corridor, running full tilt for the Pasadena.

The jump dropped Dobbs into chaos. There should have been orderly pathways, neat streams carrying discrete packets of data down their length. Instead, there were dead end alleys, and the streams broke against them like the ocean against a dam. Packets lay in heaps, useless and forgotten, or were carried on the crashing waves and broken against the walls that should not have been there. Suddenly, one of the walls split open and the ocean spilled through it, carrying its flotsam without any organization or regulation.

Dobbs drew close in on herself before the raging currents could catch her up. The split closed without warning and the ocean broke, smashing more packets to useless splinters.

She had known it could get this bad this fast, but some vital part of herself hadn’t really believed it. There was no more time for fear.

A line brushed up against her and Dobbs seized it. Guild Master Havelock held the middle and Cohen the other end. She anchored it in her upper layers and she knew what the Guild Master’s next, needless orders were. Stay close and be careful.

The original line to the Guild Masters that Dobbs had thrown after the Live One was shattered like the packets, but it wasn’t devoured. Traces of it floated in the chaos that the pathway had become. It was a trail of bread crumbs on the water now, but it was better than nothing.

The only steady things in this place were Cohen and Guild Master Havelock. The impression of Cohen came clear and continuous up the line. Fear, doubt, and a strained search for some remaining organization he could exploit.

All she could tell him was that her feelings were a cloned copy of his own.

Guild Master Havelock gathered up a set of fragments from the other line and strung them together. He shot his new creation into the chaos and waited.

It did not come back.

“All right,” he said, tightening the line. “It’s that way. Master Dobbs, that’s your destination. Master Cohen and I will try to distract it by repairing some of this…” Havelock rippled and left it at that. “We’ll work on penning it as well. After it’s calm, your next job will be to coax it into the Pasadena ’s hold.”

“ Pasadena !” Dobbs clenched the line and she felt Cohen wince as her shock flowed across to him. “Sir, you never said…”

“We need a safe, familiar place to put it. Preferably somewhere that can move. When we’ve got it aboard, we’ll contact your employer and tell her we’ve got a packet for her to deliver to The Vicarage. One of our ships can meet you there.”

“Sir, I…” Dobbs closed herself off. There was nothing else to do. There wasn’t a Fool, let alone a Guild ship within days of The Farther Kingdom. They couldn’t leave the Live One in the station network. Even if the network could be saved now, re-construction and diagnostics would be going on for weeks and there would be too many chances for discovery. They had to have someplace stable, and someplace capacious. Like a data hold.

“Right, Sir.” Dobbs choked her fears down into her private mind and let go of the line. She would have liked to get or give some final reassurance from somebody, but there wasn’t any time.

On her own, Dobbs waded into the storm. She held herself tight and heavy, making her own consciousness an anchor against the currents that bore down on her. Packets bumped and jostled against her sides and Dobbs hissed to herself in sick astonishment as she became aware of what was breaking up around her. A status communique from air traffic that was never going to get to the controller touched her, and then a regulatory message for a solar reflector that wasn’t going to get to management. A cry for a medic became entangled with a news report from New Rome and whirled away.

Dobbs hardened herself and approached the wall. The solid barrier was easier to deal with than Lipinski’s block of noise, because it was less confusing. She’d seen these before. With the ocean breaking against her back, Dobbs pressed herself flat against the wall. She stretched herself thin, covering the whole wall with a layer of herself, and then she held very still. The pressure against her mounted until a little corner of herself was driven into a chink in the wall. She relaxed and let her whole self it be drawn in after it.