Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

The other side of the wall wasn’t any better than the place she had come from. Dobbs slogged upstream. The Live One would be trying to keep the chaos away from itself. It would be trying to make itself a fortress, a shelter, a nest. Someplace secure where it could keep an eye on what was going on around it. It would try to shape the space around it into a world that it could use. But it wasn’t going to get to. She passed walls that there was no getting through. She could tell by the emptiness left inside when she touched them. They weren’t roadblocks or full storage spaces. The lines were already being cut. Machines were being shut down. The world the Live One needed, the world that she needed, was already caving in.

If the network gave out before her juice did, it would take Dobbs down with it.

Yerusha threw herself through the Pasadena ’s airlock and pounded up the staircase to the bridge. The place was empty. She dropped into her chair and lit up her boards. With a few terse commands she raised the Pasadena ’s outside cameras and angled them away from the station.

The screens lit up to show her the view. She counted six silver splinters that would turn into hulking ships in another three or four hours, and there was no telling how many were coming up from behind the station, or from the planet’s surface. Ships that wouldn’t have any coordinates to help them make the complex docking maneuvers The Gate required. Ships that wouldn’t even know which bays were free. Ships that could easily crash into the station, or each other because unless somebody was keeping an eye on the view screen at precisely the correct angle, they wouldn’t even know the other ships were out there until their proximity alarms started screaming.

Maidai had all that information, and Maidai was completely besieged by now, if she wasn’t dead. Normally, Yerusha would have applauded The Gate crew’s willingness to trust an AI with their navigation duties, but now she was ready to curse them for not having a back-up crew.

Trustee was getting the docking bays crewed in case any ships did make it in, but, even if they could get all the flight schedules up, and even if they got all the hull cameras trained on the ships, there was no guarantee they had any qualified personnel to make the flight decisions. They could lose a whole ship, or a whole section of their fractured, cheap, mind-bogglingly boring station in a crash.

She opened up the receivers to the station’s broadcast channel. It was silent. Completely silent.

Yerusha killed the cameras and tried to think. Some of those ships would change course as soon as they realized something was wrong at the station, but would they pick a clear course? And what about the ones that wouldn’t drop off automatics until they were within shouting distance of the station?

She had to do something, but she didn’t have the skills to handle everything that needed to happen. Trustee wasn’t about to listen to her, and there was no reason to believe that anybody here had a better opinion of Freers than he did. That kid, Kagan, didn’t have enough pull to get things going in a hurry. The only help was Schyler.

“Intercom to Schyler.” He had to still be on board. He had to. The comm lines would be a rat’s nest aboard The Gate and there was no time to try to chase him down on foot.

“Schyler here, Yerusha,” his voice came back strong and curious. “What’s happened?”

She swallowed. “Our virus is loose in The Gate. Their AI’s gone. It might be dead. They’ve got no back-up crew to do the navigation calls…”

“I’m coming up.”

Yerusha barely had time to close the intercom and swivel her chair around before the hatch cycled open and Schyler strode onto the bridge. He took his own station and opened the transmitter.

“ Pasadena to Gate control.”

“This is Gate control,” came back a tinny voice. “All crews are ordered to stay in their ships for the duration of the communications emergency. Repeating. All crews are ordered to stay in their ships for the duration of the communications emergency.”

The line went dead.

Schyler looked at Yerusha with narrow eyes. “What’s it like out there?”

“Like a mob scene.” She shuddered involuntarily. “They’re trying to jury-rig something, but they haven’t done it yet.”

Schyler studied his screens, seeing what she had seen from the cameras. He wrote a quick order across the board. “ Pasadena to Farther Kingdom ground control.” Silence answered him. “Ashes, ashes, ashes,” he cursed. “They’re still out.”

“Still?” Yerusha gaped at him.

He nodded, and for the first time since Yerusha had come on board, she saw him look tired. “The thing we brought here, it’s already been down to the planet’s surface.” He straightened his shoulders with visible effort. “All right, some of the ships will figure something’s wrong and veer off. Some of the shuttles will realize they’re between the devil and the deep and head back down, but some of them won’t and there’ll be eight kinds of chaos going on while they’re trying to make decisions.” He looked her straight in the eye. “Suggestions?”

Yerusha gathered herself together. “If I could get into The Gate system, I might be able to pull out whatever’s left of the station AI. If she’s not too bad, I can string her together enough to deal with the coordination routines. She can broadcast from the Pasadena ’s system.” She paused. “But unless we can convince The Gate crew to let us in, it’ll take a better cracker than me to break in.”

“All right.” He turned to the boards and started writing orders.

Yerusha felt herself staring again. “Don’t tell me you’re a cracker?”

“No, I’m not.” Schyler didn’t look up. “But Marcus Tully is, and I know where he keeps some of his heavy duty cat burglars. Get down to the data hold. Odel’s on duty if you need him. I should have the system keys in a few minutes.”

“Aye, Watch.” Yerusha was all the way to the hatch before she turned and asked her last question. “It’s an AI, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “A live one?”

“It looks like it.” Schyler still didn’t look up.

Yerusha turned on her heel and ran down to the berthing deck to grab Foster’s wafer stack.

Behind Dobbs, the pathway filled up. Cohen and Havelock were at work, cutting off the retreat for the Live One, and for her.

Don’t think about it, Dobbs told herself uselessly. She tried to concentrate on swimming upstream.

Another path closed on her left, and then one on her right. A sensation of weight and confusion touched her and she ducked. A path above cut out, taken down from outside rather than inside. The Gate crew was closing in on them too.

It’s going to be scared. It’s going to be near crazy with fear. It’s going to… Dobbs clamped down on her thoughts. What would it do? It had lashed out at her once, would it do it again? Or would it realize she couldn’t be destroyed like a diagnostic or a passive AI and try a different tactic?

A wall slammed down in front of her. Dobbs pulled herself up short and held still for a moment. She shifted sideways. The wall followed her. She stretched herself up. The wall did the same. It followed her, sensing her position and backing up and moving forward as she did.

This is it. She held herself rigid for a moment. It’s back behind there.

Dobbs backed away and grabbed up some shredded code to make a new line out of. She cast the line out against the moving wall. The walls surface shivered as it tried to understand what this new thing was. The wall focused on the line tightly, like a person would focus on an itch they couldn’t quite reach.