Scott Westerfeld - Evolution's Darling

The blackness behind her eyelids was infested with a swarm of red insects, which clustered around the black sun that had been burned into her retinas by the shuttle's engine-glare.

When she looked at the now useless tickets, they had turned a different color. But they remained mercifully silent.

Expired.

Missing the Errant was unfortunate, she thought, breaking the tickets into small pieces. She'd travelled on the craft before; found it rather clever and droll.

Maybe it was time to crush the Warden's box under her heel. To call Darling. To find him and ask him what the hell had happened.

Of course, Darling was certainly all right. Obviously. He had been all right for two hundred years. Now would be an absurd time to stop being all right.

And she could not bear to discard the black lacquer box, nor to deactivate it. It was a promise she had made to Darling, to make this departure as private as possible. She held the box against one cheek, as if to confirm her good faith.

Another thought circled the periphery of her thoughts, marking the minutes just as she had along the circumference of the Minor. A thought to hold on to: As long as she had the box, there was no way of finding out what had gone wrong. That, in its way, was easier.

Easier just to wait.

The Snappy Jack was happy.

New military software was crackling in its processors, it had left the grim gravity well of Malvir far behind, and now the hard vacuum in its passenger section allowed it to execute these twisting, stealthy maneuvers away from Malvir System with a lean, geometric purity. No humans on board to accidently smash.

Like most private pleasure craft, it was overpowered, over-featured, and excessively intelligent. Its atmospheric engines would have been at home on a troop lander. Its overheated pocket universe was fleet-courier rated, its processor rack capable of advanced combat tactics or administrating a huge corporation. But it had always been, basically, a yacht.

A toy.

The vanity of the very rich required that their personal star-ships be outfitted with the very best. A yacht's muscular statistics were for bragging about with colleagues and ladling out to lifestyle reporters. But all this potential was almost guaranteed to go to waste. High-flying execs and pleasure-seeking scions never actually needed to escape pursuit, to make emergency take-offs, or to skim gas giants in improvised refuelings. Being wealthy was, as far as the Snappy Jack could see, a back-and-forth affair between business meetings and social obligations, a simple and dreary astrography whose only spurs were occassional trips to the latest vacation spot. The Jack had only accessed its 12-petabyte survival software package in simulations, those happy dreams in which it saved grateful owners from pirate attacks and devastating tachyon storms, or adroitly surfed the mighty leading edge of some new Chiat Incursion.

But the new owner had made those survival dreams real.

The artificial had purchased the Snappy Jack for a stunning sum, buying cargo, remaining fuel, and berthing rights within moments of the Due Diligence AI's approval. The new owner had flushed all non-essential components into space, going to internal hard vacuum as soon as a young sub-Turing (the only member of their party who wasn't already vacuum-capable) could be modified. A very ascetic foursome. Their only addition to their new craft was a package of tactical software, awesome military code that filled Jack's processors with sizzling confidence, devious stealth, and a gleaming new measure of independence.

They might only be playing at this adventure—with a complex, unpredictable path out of the Expansion that a fleeing war criminal would envy—but they were playing it right.

The Snappy Jack descended into its dream world, a place of intense, modeled futures that were suddenly alight with new relevance, and mentally coursed along its plotted path. It looked for possible improvements, prepared for catastrophic contingencies, as eager to please its new masters as a puppy. A spiralling climb into the Greater Rift, a fuel-gathering jaunt through the Story Nebulae (in which the Jack's long-unused hydrogen scoop would finally be deployed), and a winding egress that skirted the crowded shipping lanes along the Chiat Dai border.

And then, straight to the unexpected coordinates that had been loaded a few seconds after its purchase…

Way Outside!

Mira was still holding the black box tightly an hour later when the message drone came screaming at her across the broad diameter of the Minor. It perhaps had found her by the dull ID ping of her luggage carrier, or her scent, or even the color of her olive skin.

The little drone, as small and knobby as two human hands with fingers interlaced, came shooting toward her at head height. It braked with a gust of hot air, and spoke in a metallic voice:

"You've been betrayed."

"I know," she answered, her voice dry and hopeless, and turned from the drone.

A roar in her head, as if another ship were taking off. Laughing whispers from the fluttering avian carpet around her feet. The burning of betrayal in her mouth, bitter poison she would taste forever.

A rubbish area surrounded the Minor. Birds were clustered there, stepping delicately through the garbage on long, tremulous legs. Mira threw the Warden's box in a high arc onto the garbage. It landed invisibly in the darkness, with a dull crash and a few surprised squawks.

She turned back to the drone, fixing her gaze on it although the gods' voices were now back inside her head.

"Darling left Malvir one hundred twenty-eight standard minutes ago. We tried to warn you."

"The private starship," she said raggedly, the sound of its takeoff still in her head.

"Correct. Purchased only a few minutes before his departure, fueled and with a full trade load."

"He had the money for that?" she asked in disbelief.

The gods' messenger explained it calmly. "He used credit secured by Fowdy Galleries. One of the Vaddum sculptures had already received bids commensurate with the craft."

A strangled laugh escaped Mira. She had bought him his star-ship, his ticket out. Bastard.

"Why?" Mira cried.

"The blackboxes you recovered from Darling were mission-irrelevant. They were Turing-zero. They had never been initialized."

"He saved Vaddum, didn't he?"

"The Vaddum copy and two other entities, yes."

But I… she wanted to scream. We could have done it together.

She pressed fingertips against her brow, cold measures of revenge coming unbidden to her mind's eye.

"Let me pursue him. I know him now. I can find—"

"You are no longer on mission status. We have warship allies within a week's travel."

The drone's words—You are no longer on mission status—began to work some magic on her. The roar in her head seemed somehow muffled, as if a screaming child had been moved to another room.

She forced herself to hear it again.

Otherwise, this pain would go away. She remembered now the cool feeling between missions, the sure knowledge of luxury accomodations and transport arrangements made by avatars and valet drones. Wandering about the Expansion armed with large stretches of time in which there was nothing to do. Pulled this way and that by epic intelligences that worried every contingency, most of which never required her particular talents.

So different from the sharp ministrations of her Darling.

"Buy me a ship. Let me follow him. By the time your allies arrive he'll be long gone."

"He will be hunted throughout the Expansion. We suspect he will stay Outside, though."

Gone forever.

The voice continued calmly. "The rogue intelligence was destroyed, Mira. There will be no more copies." How infrequently the gods and their avatars used her name, she reflected. "All Darling has is circumstantial evidence. Source material for a new legend, nothing more. He is irrelevant."