It was… stunning. There’s just no better word for it. Elms and oak trees, raspberry bushes and poison ivy—I mean, why would you save that?
And baby blue eyes. They had a field full of baby blue eyes!
Poppies, Chinese Houses, Fiddlenecks, Baby Blue Eyes, Yellow Pansies, Star Lilies… I looked for them all.
The botanist in me was in heaven.
—From Drop Day Blues, by Rylan Ramirez
“Tien, can you hear me?” Ally was starting to wish she’d never left the ground. It was little comfort that she’d turned out to be right—crazy damnable AIs!—given that she was trapped with one inside a metal can with no way out that didn’t involve holding her breath, freezing to death, and falling for a very long time. Her lonely life under the Mountain was looking pretty good right about now.
She touched the talkie behind her ear, struggling to keep the panic out of her voice. “Tien?”
“Right here, Allycat.” Tien’s voice in her ear sounded calm, collected. “Sorry, I was talking with Sanya up on Luna. We think the entity attacking Alpha up on Redemption is Harley. We think it’s using Dek’s resources to intensify the attack on Alpha. You almost here?”
Jesus Christ. Ally cursed herself for taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Sorry, no. Dek’s gone fully AWOL and we’re bottled up here in the control room.”
“Dammit.” There was a pause. “You okay up there otherwise?”
“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. Hearing Tien’s voice helped a lot. “A little freaked out. A lot freaked out, honestly. But not hurt.”
“Listen to me. We’re going to get through this. Close your eyes.” Tien’s calm, warm tone reminded Ally of her mother.
Lorelei tapped her on the shoulder. “What’s she saying?”
“Just a sec, Lorelei.” To Tien, she said, “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Okay, take a deep breath. Breathe through your nose. Hold it for four seconds. Then breathe out through your mouth.”
“Okay.” Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out.
“Keep doing it until you feel calmer.”
Ally sucked in a deep breath. Held it while she counted to four. Slowly let it out. She repeated it a few more times, feeling her heartbeat slow. Thank you, Lord. She’d gotten lax about her prayers these last few weeks.
“You okay, kid?”
She opened her eyes to find Lorelei staring at her intently.
“Yeah. Better. Thanks, Tien.” She took one more deep breath. “Tien says the AI we brought up from Earth is using Dek to attack Alpha. Did I get that right?”
Lorelei nodded. “We let it in.”
Tien’s voice was soothing. “Perfect. Ask Lorelei if there’s a way for someone to get outside.”
“Outside?”
“To break the main transmitter. We need to disconnect Harley from Dek.”
“I’ll ask.” Ally looked up.
Lorelei and the others were all crowded around her. Her heart started to race again—she needed space. “Could you all just… just back up a little?” She waved her arm to clear them away.
“Sorry. Everyone, back to your stations.” Lorelei guided her to one corner of the control room, away from the others. “Better?”
Ally smiled gratefully. “It’s just… I’m not used to crowds.”
“It’s okay.” Lorelei squeezed her shoulder, her soft brown eyes kind. “So what do we need to do?”
“Tien wants to know if anyone can get outside.”
Lorelei shook her head. “No, it’s the same problem. We can’t get through this door. We can’t get through any door or lock on the station.”
“So you have to be outside to get outside.” They were stuck. “I’ll tell her.”
Lorelei laughed. “Oh my god, Ally, you’re a genius.”
Ally’s eyes narrowed. What do you mean?”
Lorelei’s eyes twinkled. “We have people outside!”
“We do?”
“Yes. We do. The other drop crews!” She slipped back into her seat and pulled up something above her deck.
“I thought you were locked out.”
“From the system, yes. But my deck buffers whatever I am working on to local storage. Makes things faster.” She swiped the air, and an image of the Earth appeared, rotating above the deck, with four golden lights floating around it. “If I feed her the coordinates, can you ask Tien if she can get them a message? The Gday is closest.”
Ally relayed the info. “Tien, Lorelei says there’s a way we can knock out the transmitter. Can you reach the… the Gday?”
The whoop on the other end almost blew her eardrum out.
Even Lorelei heard it. “I think that’s a yes.”
Tien cut the connection.
“Everything okay?” Maria was hovering over her shoulder, watching what she was doing.
“Yeah, mostly. The whole station is locked down, not just us. But we’re going to call the Gday back to help.”
Marie nodded. “Genius. As you were.”
Tien grinned. She supposed she’d just been conscripted into the Launchpad military. Guess I’m recruit zero. She switched over to the external transmitter. “Sanya, you there?”
“Sorry, Sanya’s not available right now.” The voice was male and suave. A little too suave.
“Rafe?”
“The one and only. Sanya’s off to disrupt the transmission. She left me here ‘cause I was stupid enough to puncture my suit and lose half of my oxygen. So I’m on desk-jockey duty.”
Tien grinned. “Got it. I’m going to turn the transmitter away for a bit. We’re calling on one of the drop teams to come back to try to disrupt the transmission on this end. Dek has us all locked up like junlei stalks in a bottle.”
“Got it. I’ll stand by if needed.”
“Back to you soon.” Tien entering the coordinates for the Gday. With the main station dish, she wouldn’t have needed such precise targeting, but this backup transmitter was much lower power. Maybe she could do something about that. After I get things in motion. She felt a surge of joy—she hadn’t tapped her grid skills like this in years.
She waited while the transmitter got a lock on the Gday.
“Calling the Gday. Repeat, calling the Gday.”
Nothing.
She rechecked the coordinates. They were dead-on. A feeling of dread gripped her. What if the Gday had been destroyed too? “Calling the Gday. Repeat—”
“This is Corey Lennon, captain of the Gday. Who is this?”
“Corey, this is Tien from the Zhenyi. So glad I found you.”
“Tien?” His whole voice changed. “I heard you’d made it back up—welcome home!” There were cheers in the background.
Tien grinned. “Such as it is.”
“Fair. But this isn’t the standard Launchpad channel. What’s up?”
“Things are a bit… crazy over here at the moment. How fast can you get back here?”
“Funny you should ask. It was our turn for a refueling, so we’re inbound now. Arrival in twenty-three minutes.”
“Perfect—wait, I’ve got another incoming signal from the Launchpad.” He sounded perplexed. “Be right back.”
Tien frowned. Had Lorelei gotten control of the comm again? The seconds lengthened into minutes.
Maria hovered over her shoulder. “What’s happening?”
“Corey said someone else called him. From the Launchpad.”
“That’s good, right? Unless—”
“Tien.” Corey’s voice came back online. He sounded strange.
“Who called you, Corey?” She hoped it was Lorelei.
“It was you. Telling me not to listen to you. That you’re an AI? Impersonating the real Tien.”
Hissing cracking hell. “That’s not me, Corey. It’s Harley, the AI we brought up from Earth. Or Dek. Look, it doesn’t matter—you have to disable the main transmitter when you get here—”
“She said you’d say that. I think we’ll wait until we arrive to sort this out.”
“Corey—” How could she convince him she was the real Tien? “Ask her what your mother made for us when Hera and I came to your parents’ place for dinner last year. When the three of us were on shore leave.”
There was silence across the line.
“Corey! Just do it.”
“Okay.” The connection went silent again.
She looked up at the station manager. “Dek—or Harley—is messing with us.”
Maria bit her lip. “What if there was a way to disable the AI altogether?”
“You can do that?”
Maria nodded. “Not here. But if we can get out of this room… maybe.”
“That might do it—”
“Hey, Tien.” Corey’s voice sounded cautiously friendly. “She… it… said we had junlei salad and some kind of wine. She didn’t remember exactly which kind.”
“Ha!” Tien grinned. “So you’ll do it?”
“Affirmative. Operation Transmitter Take Out will commence in twenty-one minutes.”
Maria was staring at her. “Why didn’t he ask you what you ate?”
“Because he doesn’t have any parents.”
Hera woke with a splitting headache.
She tried to remember if she’d been out on a bender the night before. Sometimes the combination of the club thromb music and ill-considered drinking choices—damn you, junlei ale—gave her massive headaches.
That still didn’t explain the hard surface under her head. Usually she at least made it home and into bed with Tovey.
She hadn’t thought about them in hours. Days, maybe. Since just after the drop. Why was that? I do love them. Don’t I?
Then it all came flooding back. The missile. The trees. The NAU spaceship graveyard. The trek through the hills. Sam. The bio-mind.
She cracked her eyes open.
She was lying on the floor, staring at a gray wall.
Grunting, she pushed herself up, shrugging her way out of her backpack’s straps and managing to sit up, if a bit unsteadily.
Red lights were flashing around the perimeter of the room. There was no sound. She brought her hand up to snap her fingers next to hear ear.
Not a sound.
Oh hissing hell no. I will not be deaf. Not on top of everything else. She touched her cheek. It was wet. She stared at her fingers, trying to make sense of things. It was hard to tell for sure in the strange light, but the wetness looked like blood.
There’d been a siren—a terrible, piercing sound.
Ghost.
Hera glanced around and found his prone form a meter away.
She tried to stand, but her biframe wouldn’t work. Cracking hell. Blocked, or simply out of power?
Doesn’t matter. She popped the release on her left side, and then the right, and wriggled backward out of it. It was just dead weight.
Then she turned and pulled herself toward Ghost, thanking the stars for her upper body strength. Never rely solely on your tech, Jolly had told her more than once after she’d gotten her biframe. Hera had taken the advice to heart, working on strengthening her core, her arms, and shoulders.
She reached Ghost and pulled off his pack, one arm at a time, and pushed it aside. She turned him over and put her cheek to his mouth.
He was still breathing.
Thank the stars. She shook him gently. “Ghost.”
He mumbled something but didn’t wake.
“Ghost!” Still nothing.
Hera looked around, trying to decide what to do next. That’s when she saw the deck.
It was an old-style model, not nearly as sleek as the ones she was used to. Sam was perched atop it, apparently interfacing with the enormous bio-mind.
Behind her, the doors slid open again, and a group of the creepy little spider mechs crouched there, glowing a baleful red.
Hera reacted before she could think, dragging herself across the floor the meter and a half to the door. She slammed her hand into the palm sensor, praying that it wasn’t keyed to a specific set of prints.
The doors skittered closed, slamming on one of the spider mechs and crushing it to its component bits, and blocking others outside. But two got through, and they scampered toward the deck, and Sam.
“No you don’t, you little cracking shits.” Hera pulled herself after them, stopping only to grab one leg of her biframe. In need, anything’s a hammer. She missed Jolly and her life advice “Ghost, I could really use some help right now!”
He groaned. Well, that’s something, at least.
The first of the mechs was ascending the side of the deck now, but she was right behind it. Pulling herself up into an unsteady kneeling position, she raised the biframe like a bat and smacked the thing with as much force as she could, sending it flying across the room.
It hit the wall hard enough that she actually heard something—a muted thwack—and fell to the ground, collapsing in a smoking heap.
The other one had made it to the deck and was almost on top of Sam.
Desperate, Hera dropped her biframe and lunged toward it, her fingers closing around it just as it reached out a leg toward Sam.
Electricity sizzled through her hands, and the sharp angles of its legs cut into the soft flesh of her palm where she had already taken a beating from the electric fence.
She screamed, half in pain and half in anger, and lifted the mech, pulling it away from her friend and mentor.
She threw it hard at the wall next to its companion, and it, too, shorted out and fell into a heap.
Hera sat back, looking at her lacerated hand, the aftereffects of the electric shock overcoming her. She collapsed once more, and the last thing she saw before slipping into empty oblivion was the bio-mind that loomed over her.
Rai stepped through the open doors, transfixed by the space beyond.
He found himself in a forest of giants—redwoods, if he didn’t miss the mark. They were enormous, as big as some of the oldest zongies, stretching up into the sky to disappear in a chorus of green leaves. Golden sunlight filtered down through the branches, and birds chirped all around, a cacophony of sounds that defied individual identification.
He knelt to touch the pine-needle-covered forest floor, picking them up and rubbing them between his fingers. They gave off a wonderful scent, something sharp and sweet and unlike anything else in his experience.
He dropped them and laughed as the wind carried them off to deposit them at the feet of one of the redwoods.
Off to his left a fallen tree, half hollowed out by weather and time, offered a microcosm of life. Ants marched in a long line across the top of it, carrying bits of green leaves, and inside spiders ruled over a kingdom of fungi. “What is this place?”
Aidan stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “It’s… beautiful, sure. But it’s just a big room.” His eyes narrowed. “What do you see?”
“A forest. Beautiful redwood trees. There’s a light breeze, and it smells wonderful. Like… I don’t know. Like the world when it was new, maybe. Fresh. Cool.”
The others stared at him as if he were crazy.
Then it hit him. I’m in vee.
He tapped his loop, and the room shimmered and changed.
Aidan was right—It was still an impressive place, with smooth white columns instead of trees stretching up into the darkness above. But the floor was white stone, like the concourse. There were no logs or needles or insects scurrying across the floor. “It’s a projection. I can see it via my loop.”
Ash frowned. “A… loop?”
“Here.” He lifted Ash’s hand to touch his skin. “Feel it?”
A look of wonder crossed Ash’s face.
Rai let Dale touch it too.
“It’s how we connect to Alpha back home, and to everyone else, for that matter.” Of course. For all their culture in the Preserve, for all the artistic beauty, Rosemary and her people were no longer as technologically advanced as their ancestors.
Rai looked around the great hall. The walls on either side of them were covered with squares of various sizes, some white and some black, creating a great checkerboard. He went to take a closer look, and as he approached, the closest ones lit up, creating a blue circle of light.
The squares were between two and six inches on each side, and the light was a series of small letters that scrolled across the face of the box. He peered closer.
Bryophyta > Platae > Eukaryota > Andreaea heinemannii
He frowned. He knew that name. Then it came to him. “It’s moss!” Wonderingly, he touched the panel, marveling that the tech still worked after all this time.
“Moss?” Aidan looked puzzled.
With a hum, the panel slid open, revealing a sphere of glass. Rai picked it up, holding the sphere up to the light.
“Moss?” Aidan peered at the sphere between Rai’s fingers.
“Yes. It’s beautiful!” Rai grinned. He set the sphere back into the drawer, and it closed silently. “Do you know what they have here?”
Aidan frowned. “A… moss museum?”
Rai laughed. “More than that. “This is a gene bank.” He strolled along the wall, and the blue light followed him as more squares lit up. “It’s invaluable. The Preserve has records of thousands… who knows how many plant and animal species? There’s a tree. That one’s a monkey. Some bacteria… and oooh this one’s a dolphin. Aidan, this could change everything!”
Ash was staring at one of the squares. “A dolphin?”
He nodded. “One of the most intelligent animals on Old Earth, behind humankind. Maybe smarter. They didn’t blow up the planet, after all.”
Aidan grinned. “I’ve always wanted to see dolphins….”
“Someday you could.” He stepped back out into the main hall to look around. “Is this the only room in the temple?”
Ash shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ve never been in here. No one but the Council is allowed.”
Rosemary would know.
At the back of the hall, an ancient deck sat on two pillars, on a raised dais that looked like a smaller version of the one in the assembly hall. Like an altar. He supposed it would seem that way to someone not familiar with Old Earth tech. Not that it was necessarily outdated—Redemption used much the same equipment today. A sign of stagnation, for all our talk of progress.
He walked through the columns, suffering from a weird double vision as they seemed to shift from stone to wood and back again.
He stepped up onto the dais, aware that the others had gathered behind him.
It was a standard interface, two smooth black plates in the white surface indicating where he should put his hands.
He had no idea what he’d find inside. A crazy AI? A broken archival system? Or something else?
Rai took a deep breath. All his life he’d been afraid of failure. His default fight or flight response had always been run.
Something had changed. He’d taken a chance with Aidan, and another in the arena. And he had come through both okay.
He’d plunged through the atmosphere in a tiny ship and then a parachute, for Luna’s sake, and had survived. All of which had brought him here, to this moment. No more running.
Rai put his hands on the contacts, palms down, and stepped into a whirlwind. Vee space was chaos, bits of data flying back and forth through the ether in a tempest. The world around him fell away, and he was slashed by vicious winds and rain that were no more real than the forest he’d stood in a moment before, but no less savage for being virtual.
Rai ripped his hands away.
“What happened?” Aidan was at his side, his warm hand on Rai’s shoulder.
“There’s something wrong. The interface… it’s a mess.” His hands flew over the deck while Aidan watched him wide-eyed. “Aha. I thought so. Look.” He pulled up a syslog. It shimmered in the air above the deck.
Aidan squinted, while Ash and Dale crowded in behind them. “What are we looking at?”
“The AI is gone. Or something. This system’s only running core functions. Power, lights, warning systems.” He turned to look at Ash and Dale. “You know what this means?”
The two men shook their heads simultaneously.
“It means all this noise about Her and Her divine will is moon dust.”
“Moon dust?” Ash frowned.
“Nonsense. They’ve been lying to you for a hundred and seventeen years.”
“Fucking hell.” Ash spat on the ground, his fists shaking. “Holy fucking hell.”
“Yeah, I agree.” He turned back to Aidan. “I need an anchor. I want to try to bypass the core and see if I can get word out to the Launchpad. Can you to come into vee with me—the virtual world of this mind—and keep me from getting lost in the chaos?”
Aidan’s brow creased. “I don’t know. I can try, if you’ll show me how?”
Rai nodded. “Stand here.” He held Aidan’s hand above one of the interface pads. “When I put my hand down, put yours down too.”
“That’s it?”
“For now. Ready?”
“I think so.”
“Go!”
They put their hands down at the same time.
Chaos struck him again, but this time he was ready for it. He braced himself against the onslaught and turned to look for Aidan.
Aidan wasn’t there. Rai was all alone, facing the storm.
He tried to disconnect again, to start over. This time he couldn’t drop out of vee. He was trapped. Rai’s anxiety ramped up to a ten, and his virtual heart raced.
All around him the data storm howled forlornly, like a banshee that had found its prey.
Sanya trudged across Hayes Promontory, watching for pitfalls in the broken and pitted surface. The outcropping predated the lava tube that held Redemption by at least ten million years. It was relatively flat… a lava dome that had seen its share of drama and change over the eons.
Luna was like that, a record of overlapping trauma that made it difficult to determine where one feature ended and the next began.
Like human history. Sanya looked up at the Earth, a more permanent companion than the changeable sun. Rarely had she been outside for so long at once. And not once since Avri’s death.
She was still sore from the climb, and she was tired. So tired. She also felt filthy. She longed to go back home, to get a long, hot, wet shower—none of that ionic dry bullshit—and drop into bed. No rest for the weary.
She stopped for a moment to catch her breath, hands on her knees as she stared at the dust at her feet.
Dust everywhere.
I want to see Earth. To walk beneath the tree canopies under the changing colors of sunlight flickering through the leaves. To stand on the beach in the rain, her toes dug into the sand, and watch the waves roll in from the sea. Human things, racial memories imprinted deep in the psyche of every man, woman, and child.
She stood and looked back the way she had come. She was about halfway there, but soon she’d have to climb the side of the tube.
Her stomach rumbled.
If she got through this, she was going to treat herself to a spa weekend, and the biggest, best meal she had ever eaten—platters of fresh fruit, junlei steaks, and bakies until she was sick of food.
With a sigh, she started off again, bounding toward the transmitter dish in the distance.