Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

He left her there, sitting on a bed that was a match for almost every one she’d ever slept in, nursing her weariness and a bizarre kind of restlessness that she couldn’t put a name to. She replayed what he had just said to her, and kept seeing Lipinski hunched over his boards, his eyes filled with eagerness as he realized he could paralyze the invader in his systems. Try as she might, she couldn’t make the picture go away, but she couldn’t make herself feel angry at the Houston either. She missed him. She missed his tentative attempts to get closer to her. She didn’t want to think about why that was.

In the end, she stripped off her clothes, left them in a pile on the chair and dove under the covers. Oblivion came with merciful speed.

The crew filtered out of the conference room in absolute silence. Yerusha couldn’t blame them for being stunned. They were a secure bunch. Pasadena was not a trouble ship. People crewed her because they wanted work, not adventure. All that had changed in the space of a few days. It was a whole new world to get used to, and it was a lot less pleasant than the old one. Even Al Shei had stomped out without saying anything. What was going on inside her head, well, she was leaving that as an exercise for the mind reader.

Yerusha looked across the table to Schyler, who was the only person left. He hadn’t moved since he dismissed the meeting. He still stood there with both hands planted on the table, watching the hatchway, which had cycled shut. His face was…stoic. He’d worn the same expression the whole time she was explaining to him about the real identity of Dobbs and the Fool’s Guild and about how Al Shei had responded to the same news. She didn’t want to begin to guess how much he was covering up.

“You going to call Al Shei out on this?” Yerusha asked quietly.

“I’m going to have to.” He shook his head and straightened up. “She’s not going to volunteer anything, that’s for double-damn sure. I just wish…”

“Intercom to Yerusha,” Odel’s voice cut across Schyler’s. “We’ve got a request for funds to open a fast-time line down here. Want it routed up to your cabin?”

Yerusha started. Kagan had finally gotten through. She’d almost forgotten she’d sent the fast-time to him. “Yeah. I’ll head straight there. Intercom to close.”

Schyler’s eyebrows were raised.

“That’s the comm-tech from The Gate. I was going to get a dump of the records from when Dobbs was charging around in their network.” She stood up. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

“Get those records,” Schyler told her. “Sooner or later we’re going to have to prove all this. It’ll be a lot easier if we’ve got witnessed stacks to pull the evidence from.”

“Good point.” Yerusha cycled the hatch back. “Want to watch?”

“Only sort of.” He followed her into the corridor and back to her cabin. The request for credit transfer was glowing on her desk boards when they got there. Yerusha sat in the desk chair, pulled out her pen and opened her account. The line accepted the transfer and the text cleared. In the same second, the view screen lit up.

Wherever Kagan was, it was barely lit. His face was mostly shadows, and the background around him was nothing but undefined blobs of shadow.

Yerusha sighed at the melodrama. I bet he opens with ‘I can’t talk long.’

“I can’t talk long,” said Kagan, right on cue. “What do you want?”

She and Schyler exchanged a look that said kids.

“I need a download of the records from the time your system…” Why try to be subtle? “went insane. We’ve run down a possible cause but we need more proof.”

Kagan shifted his weight. She could just barely see his eyes flicker back and forth. Put some lights on, kid, or learn to make your covert calls when you’re not on shift!

“I don’t think I can do that, Yerusha.”

“Why not?” Yerusha moved her hand out of sight of the camera, so he wouldn’t see her drumming her fingers on the desktop. “The data’s too bulky? Or is Trustee watching the lines?”

“The records aren’t there.”

Yerusha froze. She had to replay Kagan’s sentence a couple of times in her head before she could decide that she’d really heard what he said. She glanced up at Schyler. He was doing the same thing.

“We’re trying to figure out what happened,” Kagan went on. “Maidai’s got no record of crashing, or being removed from our network, or of anything having happened other than some wide-spread connection glitches. We’ve traced some vague leads back to New Medina Central Hospital. All they show is that we might have had a viral infection of the system, but there’s nothing definite.”

Yerusha swallowed hard. Schyler’s cheeks had gone pale. He touched her shoulder and mouthed “back-ups.” Yerusha nodded.

“What about the back-ups?” she asked Kagan. “You must have made some dumps onto tape. Can you access those and send them?”

“Right,” Kagan’s voice brightened. “The back-ups. Give me ten seconds.” The shadows near the bottom of the screen shifted as he got out his pen and began writing orders. She touched her pen to the MUTE button.

“They beat us to it,” she breathed. “They knew we’d be coming after The Gate’s records.”

“Not necessarily.” Schyler frowned at the screen. “They might just be covering their tracks. It’d make sense for either the Guild, or Curran’s side. After all, neither side knows that we know about them.”

“Unless they got a hold of Dobbs and made her talk,” Yerusha pointed out. A chill sank into her blood as she said it. “We don’t know where she really is. That departure announcement I saw could have been a fake.”

Schyler froze dead still.

Her desk beeped. Kagan was trying to say something. Yerusha touched the MUTEcommand again.

“… on its way to you…”

“Shut it down!” shouted Schyler. “Get the back-ups off-line!”

“Wha…what?” sputtered Kagan. “Yerusha’s who’s with you?”

Schyler leaned into the camera’s sight. “Get those fractured records off-line right now!”

“On it.” Kagan’s voice was bewildered, but his hands moved. “All right, they’re off. There’s about four hours in transit to you anyway, do you want me to…”

“Never mind,” Schyler’s shoulders slumped. “It’s probably too late.”

Yerusha stared at him in confusion. She had a feeling Kagan was doing the same.

“You should be getting the first of it in about three minutes,” Kagan said. “I’ve set everything on auto. I’ve got to get going…”

Or somebody’ll notice you’re gone. Kid, you have got to get your mama to teach you more about timing.

“Or somebody’ll notice I’m gone. Good luck, Yerusha.”

“Good luck, Kagan.” Yerusha watched Schyler collapse onto the bunk. “I owe you.”

She cut the video, but kept the line open. She swivelled the chair so she could face Schyler. “What?”

“Think about it,” he said bitterly. “They may not have even needed Dobbs. They must be paranoid about their own security, or they wouldn’t have stayed hidden as long as they have. If you were an AI hiding in the network and you wanted to stay hidden, and you knew the Pasadena had gotten caught in an extremely delicate situation that involved you, what would you do?”

Slowly, the ideas began to surface in Yerusha’s consciousness. “I’d monitor the lines to see what kind of communications were coming out of the Pasadena , just in case they’d made some dangerous guesses.”

Schyler nodded. “And when those hard-medium back-ups got connected to the network you’d go right in there and make sure they were doctored to match the on-line records, which you’d already gotten to.”