Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

“Wait here,” she told the AI as fast as she could force the thought out. She was already drifting away. “I need you to wait here for me. I need you to hold as still as possible. Mark off forty-eight hours from now. I’ll be back when that time’s up. All right?”

“I will wait here. Marking. I will not take any paths. Please…hurry.”

“I will. I swear it.” The transceiver opened for her and Dobbs slid into it like a frightened child into her mother’s arms.

“Dobbs! Wake up! Dobbs!” Hands shook her.

She gathered all her concentration together and forced her eyes to open. It took a minute for her to resolve the blob of light and shadow into Schyler’s face. He was bent over her, shaking her shoulders.

Oh, hell, she thought bitterly.

Schyler let her go and she dropped back onto the bed, barely feeling the fall. He stepped away to the very edge of her range of vision. She couldn’t turn her head to look at him.

“I do not believe what I’m seeing,” he said softly. “You want to space out for recreation, that’s fine, but this…” he picked her hypo up off the floor and threw it into the drawer. “We need every hand right now and you’re getting stoned out of your fractured head! And what the hell is this? Some kind of wire turn on?” He pointed to something that could only be the cable.

“Watch…” her tongue felt like wet wool. Hunger, thirst and the urgency in her bowels made her body one huge ache. She found her hands on the ends of her wrists. Her clumsy, groping fingers found the transceiver behind her ear and unplugged it. She knotted every muscle in her and pushed down. Slowly, slowly, she was able to sit up. “What’s happened?” She managed to drop the transceiver and cable into the open bedside drawer.

“Obviously nothing you give a single goddamn about.” He ran both hands through his hair. “You’re lucky I’m the one who found you, Dobbs. If it’d been Al Shei she’d’ve thrown you out onto the port and left you to take your chances. Still might. We’ve got no room for drug-dead…”

She blinked hard and focused on Schyler. Now she could see the heavy lines his face had settled into and the wild roundness his eyes had taken on. Something bad had happened. She hadn’t found the Live One quickly enough.

Her head felt like it was packed with cotton. She used her hands to scoot forward on her bunk until she could see her feet touch the floor. She couldn’t feel them, or her knees either. She had no idea what would happen if she tried to stand up.

“Al Shei.” She grasped at the name. “I need to talk to Al Shei.”

“You need to figure out how you’re going to make a living after you’re booted out of your Guild,” growled Schyler. “Because believe me, you’re contract is over and you’re going to be hauled up in front of your bosses before this run is even half-finished.”

“No.” She shook her head, relieved to find it would still move. “No. It’s not…” Training and a lifetime’s caution stopped her. She forced herself to go ahead. “There was a live AI aboard the Pasadena .” The memories of what had happened inside the net were crawling out of her subconscious, making her weakened body shake with their intensity.

Schyler pulled himself up short. “How did you know?” he demanded.

“I need to talk to Al Shei,” she said limply. Looking hard at her feet flat against the deck, she planted her hands on either side of herself and pushed. Her knees bent and her feet grew more distant. Pain told her where her knees were and she locked them into place.

She knew with sick certainty that she would not be able to walk.

“Please,” she whispered. She lifted her head and looked into Schyler’s tired, frightened face and knew herself to be the cause of what she saw there. “Please. I have to talk to Al Shei. Help me.” She tried to raise her arm to reach out to him, but it would not move.

His expression shifted to a kind of disbelieving anger. “Fine. You want to talk to Al Shei. Fine. I’m sure as all hell she wants to talk to you.” He took her by the arm and shoulder and walked her to the hatch. She stumbled for the first few steps, before her legs remembered what they were supposed to do and managed to set a shambling pace of their own.

Walking helped her. Her blood started to flow more easily and her body became more fully her own. Crewmembers she was still too dazed to identify stared at this staggering shell that was their Fool. Schyler growled at them and they scurried past. No one spoke. They all just stared with the same frightened, hollow-eyed stare.

What happened to them? While I was chasing the Live One down, what were they doing?

Schyler propelled her all the way to Al Shei’s cabin and used his Command override to cycle back the hatch. It must have been how he got into her cabin, she realized. Her head was beginning to clear and she felt like she could move on her own. But Schyler didn’t let her go. He walked her into Al Shei’s cabin and sat her down too roughly in the chair in front of the desk.

“Intercom to Al Shei,” he said as soon as the hatch shut. “I’ve found the Fool. You need to get up here.”

Silence. Then, “I don’t have time for this, Watch.”

“This you have time for.”

“All right, Watch. I’m on my way.”

Schyler paced the room, fists jammed in his pockets, but in no way inclined to talk. Dobbs was glad. She needed every spare second to collect herself. She needed to think. But thinking was as hard as walking had been and Al Shei was going to be here any second and Dobbs had to tell her…Dobbs had to tell her…

She had to tell her there was a rogue AI in her ship’s hold and that it had to stay there for the time being.

That stark realization helped her brain shake off the last of the juice.

Al Shei swept through the hatch. Her dark eyes looked at Dobbs and then looked at Schyler.

“You found her,” Al Shei said flatly.

“I found her,” said Schyler, “drugged and unconscious in her cabin.”

Fire burned hard behind Al Shei’s wide eyes. “You found her where?” the question was for Schyler, but the fire was for Dobbs.

Dobbs straightened her back as much as she could. “He found me drugged and unconscious in my cabin.” Her voice had cleared somewhat, but she still felt like she was talking with a throat full of sand. “I need to explain why.”

Al Shei’s shock at her gall was evident. “No you don’t,” she said. “Schyler, she’s broken contract. Throw her off of here.” Al Shei turned on her heel.

“She knows about the AI,” said Schyler.

“I was looking for the AI,” Dobbs corrected him.

Al Shei froze for a bare second before whipping around again. “You were what?”

“There was a live AI loose on board the Pasadena ,” she said, working hard on making each word distinct and unmistakably. “It, or at least the seed code for it, was planted here deliberately in the data packet from Amory Dane, or in whatever it was Tully smuggled aboard. It got out when the transfer was made down to New Medina hospital.” She took a deep breath and met Al Shei’s eyes. The engineer was distinctly unimpressed. So, you figured all that out for yourselves. Fine. With Lipinski around I should have realized you would . “And I was in the network looking for it.”

Al Shei moved closer to Dobbs, peering into her eyes as if trying to find some traces of a drug trip in there.

“That is impossible,” Al Shei said crisply. “They’ve tried direct neural hook-ups. The human brain can’t process the data. It burns out trying to make associations that aren’t there.”

“I know.” Dobbs hand strayed to her Guild necklace. She forced it down again. “But the Fool’s Guild found a way around it.” She paused and picked her words carefully. “The stuff in the hypo Watch found is a cross between a general anesthetic and a synthetic variant of lysergic acid diethylamide.” Al Shei’s gaze strayed over to Schyler. Much of his anger has shifted into bewilderment. Dobbs supposed that was a little better. “It can get you extremely high and kill you extremely quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing. On the other hand, if you do know what you’re doing, it can get you around the sensory input problem and let your brain process network data.” She did not go into the hypno-training and micro-surgery that were also required. She did not say that even with that, you had to be born in the network in order to make sense out of it.