John Ringo - Sister Time

As they jogged down the hall to the secure room, she heard Granpa clap the other man on the back. “I knew I liked you,” he said. In any other circumstance she’d have been thinking what the fuck? Or contemplating killing someone. And later, she might even decide to wring Granpa’s neck. But that would be later. The only thing in her head right now was: mission.

They had done something right with their security. There were no dedicated guards on the door to make the room scream out, “Place Where There Is Something Interesting, Valuable and Important!” Unfortunately for them, but through no fault of their security people, the team already knew what it was, and where it was, so the lack of extra guards was going to bite the bastards in the ass. Too many places arranged their security in such a way as to announce, “This way to the secret documents.” If he hadn’t gotten a couple of breaks, it would have taken George several more days, at least, to find the device with this setup. There was another thing they had done right: there were very few groups and no individuals, that she knew of, who were capable of subverting an AID.

Epetar and Winchon wouldn’t have given the security people a better view of the risks. None of them had any idea Michelle O’Neal had anything like these contacts, resources, or any will to use them. All they would have expected to face was garden-variety industrial espionage — played according to a Darhel-style version of hardball. For the kind of threats they thought they faced, and within the constraints put on them by the bean counters, the security people had done their jobs right. They would probably get the blame, anyway. Cally felt almost sorry for them. Almost.

AIDs had a real bad habit, hard programmed in. The Darhel were so confident of the AIDs’ ability to infallibly record and transmit their data load that the AIDs wouldn’t scream for help on their own initiative, they just transmitted their load on the prescribed schedule, and “talked” when tapped from a higher authority than their user, or when told by their user to call someone or send something. If an AID was left to secure something, it was enough that nobody could, theoretically, go in and mess with whatever it was guarding without being caught on the next upload. The Darhel were frighteningly smart, and more deadly than even Cally had expected. They just had some real odd blind spots, one of which included being slow to change and update.

She still held her breath while Tommy cracked the door and ran over to treat the annoying little computer to the electronic version of an intimate rear intrusion with no lube. If it had started a transmission while Tommy was crossing the room, they would have been so fucked.

She relaxed and helped George carry Michelle’s decoy over while Granpa opened the black box sitting, alone, on an ordinary steel pushcart in the center of the room. The lid off of their own decoy, all three saw the same problem.

The base artifact had not been reproduced by Winchon or Michelle — perhaps they had not even been able to reproduce it yet. That was fine as far as it went. Michelle’s toy matched up on the surface. Unfortunately, for these people to tweak and change it to learn new tricks, they had connected cables to it in seemingly random places, hanging off and doubling back in a black tentacular mass that would have done credit to H. P. Lovecraft. To top off the similarity and the problems, the entire device sat within a mass of translucent, green, gelatinous goo, which moved and dripped, almost as if it sensed their presence.

Cally looked at the thing in the target box. She looked at the thing in Michelle’s box. Michelle’s gizmo had it going on with the tentacles just fine, only there weren’t enough of them. Not by a long shot.

Tommy had apparently gotten the next AID violation set on automatic, because Cally felt him peer over her shoulder. “Looks like the suit undergel we had in ACS,” he said. “Well, except for being snot green.” He looked at Cally. “So, what now?”

“You tell me. How is that goo going to react if we scrape off as much as possible and swap out black tentacle thingies.”

“Dunno,” the ACS veteran said.

“You don’t suppose we could, kinda, rip off some of those black thingies from his box and tape them to our box, or something, do you?” Granpa asked. Technology still wasn’t really his thing. Unless it went boom.

“Probably not,” the three younger operatives said, almost simultaneously. Growing up in the virgin age of television apparently left a guy… different… from growing up just a few decades later. Very different.

“Okay. Here’s what we try. Tommy, you pick up the gooey shoggoth or whatever the hell it is, and scrape any goo you can off it — keep as much goo as you can in their box. George and I will pick up the decoy and put it in there and see if we can get any of the goo to stay on it. Maybe they still won’t notice for awhile,” Cally said, doubtfully.

“And me?” Granpa asked.

“Uh… go watch the door, Granpa. Somebody needs to watch the door,” she said. He harrumphed grumpily at being shuffled off. Everybody in the room would hear someone approaching the door, so a watchman was strictly unnecessary. She expected he’d grouse at her about it when they got home. But they had to get there first.

Tommy picked up the object of their endeavors with about the enthusiasm of a fourteen-year-old boy for a baby’s dirty diaper. The goo tried hard to stick to the device, but by dint of a lot of brushing and pulling and wrestling, the big man managed to get about half of it to stay in the box.

At least, it stayed long enough for them to fit the decoy in. Then, to their immense relief, it swarmed up and around the decoy as if they were best friends. If nano-goo could have friends. The bits on Tommy even crawled down his arms and into the box, obediently wrapping around the decoy. Both devices had less goo, but at least their decoy had green goo. She’d been really afraid of how the stuff would react.

“Gross,” she said. “Lids on the boxes, me and George. Tommy, finish up with that AID. Granpa, how’re we looking?”

Instead of answering, he held up a hand and slid silently out the door, moving sideways down the wall.

After her AID terminated Erick Winchon’s call, Prida sat and stared, silently, at the far wall. Dahmer had, of course, made a valiant effort to insinuate itself into her affections over the couple of years she’d had it. The artificial human personality was limited, however, in the fundamental lack of same in the psyche of its charge. Prida had known, and still knew, of the machine’s efforts. They amused more than alarmed her. She had never become attached to her AID for the simple reason that she had never been attached to anyone, in anything but the most temporary physical sense.

When debating her course of action, in any circumstance, Prida had and used an excellent poker face. Now, she was considering the amount of trouble and risk someone would have to go through to kill or incapacitate a Darhel, as well as the amount of power that indicated. She had idly considered, herself, what it would take to kill a Darhel. She had investigated only to the extent of hitting absolutely no tripwires. Paranoid herself, she had an uncanny ability to estimate where others would put measures in place for their own safety. In particular, she had noticed very early that the Darhel tended towards the same self-honesty in their emotions as she did herself.

Anybody with the will and ability to eliminate a Darhel necessarily had the ability, and perhaps the will, to eliminate Prida Felini. Erick Winchon was a good employer. She had found some of their interactions truly delicious, although she had been a bit piqued that he had not derived equal pleasure from their mental trysts through the machine. It would have been so much more convenient if he had.