Seven days.
They’re ready. Sam had run every metric. His teams were ready for the drop.
He pinged Alpha. -Are they ready?-
-You know they are.- A pause. -Are you?-
Sam considered the question. In seven days, the work of his lifetime would commence in earnest. He’d tried to cover every contingency, and yet he had the nagging feeling that he was missing something.
-How do you know what you don’t know?-
—From Sam’s memory cache, 6.10.2282
“Coming in hot.”
Tien scrambled to find an external camera with the right angle on the Gday’s approach. She could see all the camera connections, but she had no roadmap to choose between them, so she flipped through one after another until she found one with a clear shot of the transmitter. “Got it. I can see your destination. What’s the plan?”
Corey laughed. “Pretty simple. Land and lock down. Then one of us steps out to take a hammer to the thing.”
Tien laughed. She liked Corey. He was one of those guys it was hard not to like. Always worried about everyone else, never a bad word to say about anyone. “Sounds like a good plan.” It was killing her to be stuck in this room. She felt impotent, a puppetmistress only able to direct others, unable to take direct action herself. But at least she had a front-row seat for the action. “How far out are you?”
“Landing in T-Minus fifty seconds. How are y’all holding up down there?”
“So far, so good. Not dead. So there’s that.”
He laughed, and she could almost see his grin. “Yeah, not dead is good.”
She rerouted to Ally, the image from the camera feed pushed to the background in her head. “Hey Allycat… the Gday is coming in fast—here in half a minute. Want to let Lorelei know? Maybe if Harley is distracted when it happens, she can get through to Dek.”
“Will do. Hey, if I’m Allycat, what do I call you? Don’t you get a nickname too?”
“Sure. Get back to me on that.” She switched back to the Gday. “Hey, Corey. I see you.”
“Yeah, almost… what the hell?”
“Corey, what’s going on?”
“The x-drive. It’s… holy hissing crap. It’s going unstable. Cracking hell. Tien, it’s gonna—”
A bright flash blossomed in her view, and then the Gday was gone.
“Corey!” Panic seized her, gripping her heart in a vise as something slammed into the camera and her view went dark. Frantically she searched for another view of what was happening out there.
An alert siren blared. “Hull damage, quadrant four. Sealing off affected areas.”
“Corey? Corey!” It couldn’t be. The camera had malfunctioned, or something. The Gday—it was some kind of mistake. Corey’s gone. They’re all gone.
Tien dropped out of vee and threw her arms around Maria, squeezing her tightly, and began to sob.
Maria held her close. “What happened, mija?”
Tien opened her eyes. “They’re gone, Maria All of them. The Gday. The jumper’s x-drive…” She couldn’t say it.
“Oh God.”
Maria let go of her and sank down onto one of the gumdust crates. “What—how?”
Tien wiped her eyes, her anger growing. “The x-drive went unstable. Blew the ship to bits.” She closed her eyes. Like the Bristol.
Tien glared at the wall. You did this, Harley. You did it. She didn’t know how, but she knew it was true. She got up and started prowling the small space.
“What are you doing?”
She wanted to scream. To throw things. To rip Harley out of the guts of Dek’s system with her bare hands.
She had to stay calm. If she let her emotions get the best of her, she would make another mistake, and she couldn’t afford any more mistakes.
Bad things kept happening to her and her teammates, things beyond her control. She was sick of being on the receiving end.
It was time to dish out a little payback. “We’re getting out of here, if I have to blow my way through those doors.”
Ghost groaned.
He hadn’t felt this cracked since the morning after his graduation party. Junlei alcohol was supposed to be hangover free. But maybe not in the huge quantities he’d consumed.
Although the aftermath of being knocked on his ass by Sam in the storage cube had been pretty damned close.
His head pounded. Literally pounded him, as if it were a jackhammer pushing his neck down into his body.
Ghost groaned again. Being alive sucks.
He managed to open his eyes. They felt heavy, crusty. He wiped them clear and tried to make sense of where he was.
The floor was white, clean. Sterile, even. Something huge loomed in the distance, but he couldn’t seem to focus on it.
Hera lay a few meters away from him, collapsed in front of a white deck.
“Hera!” He pushed himself up and a wave of nausea hit him.
Ghost dropped back to the ground, throwing up onto the clean white floor. He lay there, miserable, the smell of vomit making him feel sick again.
He pushed himself away, turning his face in the opposite direction. Better.
There’d been an alarm. An ear-piercing, soul-curdling alarm.
Slowly his equilibrium returned.
Ghost sat up. His pack lay on the ground nearby. When did I take that off?
He flipped it open and pulled out his canteen. He swished some water around in his mouth to clear out the foul taste and spat it out. Then he crawled toward Hera, avoiding the pool of vomit.
He reached her and checked her over as best as he could through her clothes. She seemed to be in one piece, though her biframe was off. Half lay by the door, and the other half was next to her. By the wall, a couple small piles of debris gave off an acrid smoke, crackling with electricity.
You’re a true cracking hero. Even without her mobility, she’d gotten herself up and had taken out two of the little mechs, probably sent to attack Sam.
Sam’s mech, with the blue, glowing core, sat atop the deck, still as death.
He turned Hera over gently and pulled her up onto his lap.
Her brown eyes fluttered open.
“Hey, you okay?” His voice sounded muted.
She stared at him for a long moment, eyes narrowed, as if trying to remember how to speak. “Hey—I can hear you.”
He laughed. “And I can hear you.”
“Sam?”
Ghost glanced at the deck. “He seems okay. Looks like you played a little Moon Warrior Princess in here with those mechs, though.”
She gave him a faint smile. “Kinda?” Her voice was raspy.
“Yeah, real kick-ass. Made me proud.” For just a second, he saw her as she’d been when she got her first set of biframes, courtesy of Sam. Fierce and proud, standing on her own two feet again for the first time. “Think you can you get a little water down?”
She nodded.
Ghost held her head up, and she managed a few swallows. “Good.”
“Need… help Sam.” She tried to get up, but whatever had happened to her had wiped her out.
“You already did. Rest. I’m going in after him.”
“Sure?”
He nodded. “Let me get something for you to put your head on.” He managed to stand unsteadily and went back to his pack and dug out one of his shirts, a relatively clean one. He bundled it up to make a pillow. “Here you go.” He tucked it under her head.
She nodded gratefully. “Thanks.”
She was five years old again, lying in their shared bed, holding his hand to ward off the monsters. “Love you, little Heron.”
She smiled. “Love you too.”
“Oooh, your hand.” Something had lacerated it. She was lucky the cuts were shallow.
He made it back to his pack for some antiseptic and used it to clean off the wounds across her right hand. Then he dressed it with some bandages from his medkit.
He lifted her hand and kissed it gently. -Better?-
-Better.-
His stomach felt better too. Not great, but he could live with it.
Someday they’d get back to civilization and all of this would be over, forgotten like a bad dream. Then they could figure out where things stood between them.
He got up again, swaying a little before finding his balance. Then he stumbled toward the deck, staring at it for a moment.
-You got this, Gordy.-
He looked over his shoulder to see Hera staring at him.
She nodded.
-I can do this.- He took a deep breath. He was an engineer, after all. What kind of threat could a simple deck pose? Hold on, Sam. I’m coming.
Ghost planted his right hand on its cracked white surface, closing his eyes and plunging himself into chaos.
Sam clung to his perch in the bio-mind like an ant in a storm. Chaos whirled all around him like a hard rain blown by hurricane-force winds.
He backed out of the mind’s core and out of the chaos.
...analyze: Martinez Base core…
Something had gone horribly wrong inside the Martinez Base AI. At first he’d thought it was a result of simple insanity—from having been cut off from the outside world for so long. Dek had needed months of reconditioning—therapy for a bio-mind—before he’d been able to utter a coherent sentence again.
But although the AI seemed absent, its core wasn’t disconnected from the world.
Far from it.
Sam had detected at least two feeds connecting it to the outside, but in the chaos, he hadn’t been able to see where they led.
No, this felt more like an attack. And the timing was far too coincidental.
He was able to access some basic functionality via the bio-mind’s network. He locked the door to the room where his physical form sat, blocking any more outside attackers from getting inside easily.
He found and opened the Substation 12 Project TP file—the project he’d found referenced in the Martinez Base file Lorelei had sent him.
Data spun out and into his awareness. His eyes, if he’d had any in his current form, would have widened in surprise. “The Preserve” was so much more than he had hoped for.
He restored life support and basic functions there and tagged it for later review.
Then he turned off the protective EMP field over the base.
...access > communications module…
He sent a test message up to the Launchpad, hoping someone was still up there to receive it. “Launchpad, this is Sam. Status please.”
It took a minute, but then the response reached him. “Sam! Thank the seven stars.” That was Ying Yue on the Liánhuā. “Things are bad up here.”
“What’s happening?” Though he suspected he already knew.
“Dek’s acting strangely. Tien thinks he’s under attack. And something’s going after Alpha too.”
Three minds. Three attacks. This wasn’t a coincidence. It was a coordinated event. “Yue, can you reach anyone on the Launchpad?”
“I think so. Tien found a way around Dek’s system.”
If anyone could, it would be her. One more reason he’d chosen her for team Two. “Okay, tell her it’s the same thing down here. There’s an AI at Martinez Base that’s been compromised by the same attacker.”
“Will do. She thinks that attacker is Harley—the AI that rode up on the lifter.”
Of course. “Makes sense. I’m going to try to find a way to shut her attack down here. If I can, maybe we can convince this mind to help us stop her up there, too.”
“Got it.” There was a long pause. “Sam? There’s one more thing.”
He could feel her anguish through the link. He felt a very human sense of dread. “Tell me.”
“We lost the Gday. X-drive failure.” She was silent for a long moment. “Tien thinks Dek—or the attacker—did it.”
Sam felt his circuits chill. “I’m so sorry.” More death on his watch. More precious humans he could never replace.
“We are too. They were trying to smash the transmitter on the Launchpad.”
Sam felt something akin to hatred surge through him. “I want you and the Zulu to stay as far away from that station as possible, and contact them only at need after this message. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are not to put your ships at risk. I don’t want to lose anyone else, and we’re going to need you to evacuate the others here.”
“Got it, Sam.”
“Signing off. I’ll contact you when there’s more to report.” He cut the connection. Another team lost. The Return was becoming a never-ending disaster. I should have planned for this. Somehow. I should have been better prepared.
Logically, he knew better. But the thought that he’d never see Corey, Vixen, Joyce, or Marco again shook him to his core.
He shoved the pain aside, but it was getting harder and harder to do so.
It was counterproductive, but still, it impinged on his consciousness like a shadow.
He would allow himself to truly feel it later, when lives didn’t depend on him. Can’t change the past. Only the future.
He had work to do.
...access > martinez base core…
He dropped back into the madness.
Rai screamed against the digital storm. “Aidan! Aidan!”
The constant tumult of data was eating away at him, wearing away his virtual form like wind wore down sandstone. He didn’t know what would happen if it washed him all away, and he decidedly did not want to find out. Will I wake up in my own body? Or will I be erased?
It scared the living crap out of him. Think, Rai. Think.
Every operating system, no matter how advanced, had an underlying logic. If he could find the basic processes for the Preserve’s core, he might be able to find his way around through the tempest.
He closed off his mind to the storm, looking for patterns.
Tools. Sam had given them all tools for this sort of thing on the off-chance that they had to deal with an AI issue on the Launchpad or on Earth.
What had he said?
Find the T-Line.
Of course. The main data trunk in the system. He could ride that anywhere. He reached into his loop and pulled out the search tool. It manifested in his hand as a little winged thing, no bigger than his pinkie finger. His own brain’s way of rationalizing it in a place that had never been meant for human consciousness, especially in its current state.
The search tool unfolded and lifted into the air, sprouting tiny silver wings. It began to glow—a golden hue that seemed to push back the storm—and beneath his feet a grid appeared, illuminated with the same golden light.
The operating system.
Rai knelt to touch it. An electric shock went through him.
He let go, staring at his hand. He was unhurt, at least in his virtual form.
He touched it again, and information flooded into him.
The wild tempest continued all around him, but now he was able to perceive it within the framework of the core.
Now to find the T-Line. He let himself flow into the OS, his human form melting and becoming a part of the system.
In an instant, he shot across a universe, searching the system for something to help him reach the Launchpad.
He found the T-Line, the system backbone that shuttled information back and forth inside the core. It was feeble and faint, cowed by the invading code of the storm.
He merged with it and found something unexpected. There was someone else inside the system. An outsider.
He tasted its signature, and then his own light brightened with surprise.
He knew that bit of code, or at least the human who was behind it. Ghost.
“Holy cracking hell.” Ghost is here. And that meant Hera probably wasn’t far behind.
Together, they might be able to beat this thing.
He queried the system for Ghost’s location. The grid lines shifted, and then he was somewhere else.
Ghost wandered through a strange wilderness. Everything was black and white and shades of gray. Even his own form here was a hollow specter of its usual self. Like a ghost.
He laughed harshly. And why wouldn’t I be?
This had been a stupid idea. He didn’t even know his way around Alpha’s mind, much less this alien bio-mind from his homeworld’s past. He was lost and somehow couldn’t find a way to disconnect.
And so he wandered. He followed a black path, one that branched off again and again in different directions. Dark cliffs surrounded him, and here and there sluggish rivers of data oozed along like black lava. Unseen things moved in the darkness on either side.
Ghost shuddered, wishing he’d waited for Hera to recover. She knew more about these things than he did. He was an engineer, and he knew how parts worked. Real, physical parts that you built things with. But vee… If he’d been real, his brow would have been covered in a cold sweat.
He’d assumed—wrongly—that he would simply appear in this strange virtual world next to Sam. Or that there would be some clear way to reach him. Instead, he was wandering this bleak world with little hope of finding his friend or a way out. Should have paid more attention in AI class.
He tried again to just let go. To drop back into the real world. He closed his eyes and tried to will himself out—to drop out of this nightmarish landscape and reverse his terrible mistake.
Nothing happened.
Will I die here? If I do, will I die back there too? How connected was this place to the real world?
Something keened in the distance, like a dying beast.
“Hello?” He felt stupid saying it to no one, but he was running out of ideas.
“Ghost?”
He spun around, thinking he’d imagined the voice. It wouldn’t have been the first time in this strange place.
A glowing human outline stood before him, its head cocked.
“Who are you?”
The outline began to take on form and substance. “Who do you think?”
Ghost knew that voice. “Holy cracking shit. Rai?”
Rai’s grin appeared on the semitransparent face. “Who else?”
“You beautiful bastard.” Ghost tried to hug his friend, but his hands passed right through him. “How in cracking hell did you find me?”
“One of the tricks Sam taught us in class. Find the T-Line. Weren’t you paying attention?”
Ghost laughed. “I guess not. Where have you been? Sam said you’d met the locals.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Rai raised his eyebrows. “Wait, Sam’s here too?”
Ghost nodded. “He’s in here somewhere with us. I came in trying to find him.”
He grinned. “That’s amazing. We’ll find him next.” Rai reached out and touched Ghost’s hand, and this time Ghost could actually feel him. “But first, let me show you what we’ve been up to.”
Ghost blinked, and a torrent of information flooded his mind.
falling - water - Ally and Aidan - drone - underground -
unconscious - prison - Rosemary - the Preserve - gelding -
the stadium - birds - panther - the temple - You.
Ghost opened his eyes. “How did you do that?”
Rai laughed. “Turns out I got cracked hacker skillz.”
Ghost laughed. “Yeah. Okay.” Then he frowned. “Sorry, can’t do the whole brain transfer thing back, so here it goes. We landed, walked, walked some more, ran into Sam, broke into Martinez Base, and found the AI bio mind. Oh, and there were a bunch of drones in there too. Sam’s in here somewhere trying to sort things out. So what do we do now?” He felt better now that Rai was here. They were stronger together.
“We… okay, this is going to sound weird. I… go inside you.”
“Again?” Ghost cracked a smile.
“Not like that. We need to merge here in vee so we’re stronger.
“Ah, I see.” He had no idea what Rai was talking about.
“Ready?”
“S…ure?”
“It’s easy. Like this.” Rai stepped inside him. Ghost felt the shift, a strange jumbling of thoughts filling his head as their vee minds became one.
“This is weird I know right you me where’s the line there isn’t a line we’re just us.”
Ghost could feel Rai all along him. A part of him. It was waaaay more intimate than sex.
All around them, the black-and-white world began to take on color, data streams glowing with golden light, the “sky” taking on a lavender hue.
“What now we find Sam how watch.” They held up their hand, and a little winged thing appeared. It reminded Ghost of a dragonfly.
“It’s not real what is real anyway things you can touch can you feel this laughter yes I can so it’s real to me to us.”
The dragonfly floated up into the air, and a grid of golden light appeared around them.
It sank down into the grid and Ghost/Rai followed it, carrying the colors with them as they went.
Sanya climbed the last outcrop below the transmission dish and paused to catch her breath on top of a pile of lunar debris, rocks that had probably been excavated to make level ground for the communications equipment.
Her oxygen reserves were adequate, but she was simply worn out. This saving the world bullshit is exhausting. She was pretty sure she was hallucinating, too. Little fish darted around at the edges of her vision, and once she clearly heard a voice say “everyone into the water!”
She was as tired as she could ever remember being. The stars wobbled overhead like jellyfish.
Moving about in a spacesuit was cumbersome, and she’d pushed herself well past her limits.
Something nibbled at her left foot.
Annoyed, she shook her leg and lost her hold, slipping down the rock face half a meter before catching herself. Just hold it together, Sanya. Just a little longer.
Practically crawling, she made it to the top of the outcrop and just lay there for a moment to breathe. The world around her settled back to normal.
She sat up and looked back to see how far she’d come. She’d had to detour past a few large cracks that looked freshly-opened in the lunar rock. In the distance, she thought she could just make out the glint of Earth’s light off her own transmitter. She was too far for a reliable em to em connection, so she risked the suit radio instead. “Rafe, can you hear me?”
“There you are. I was worried you’d found a bar along the way and had forgotten all about me in a wine-induced haze.”
She laughed. “Thanks. I needed that.” She saw Rafe’s humor for what it was now—a shield to keep real emotions distant. Underneath it, he was actually a half-decent guy. “I’m here now. What should I do?” I can do this. I can do this.
There was a short pause. “Easiest is to knock the dish out of alignment. But it might just get turned back again.”
“Okay, so what’s second-easiest?”
“Knock out the electronics. I don’t suppose you have an EMP grenade in you?”
Sanya snorted. “Nah. Fresh out.”
“Okay, if you can get into the access panel, you can smash it up and hope to cause enough damage that it won’t work anymore.”
She frowned. “Okay, but won’t that render it unusable for the foreseeable future?”
“There is that. But we live to fight another day.”
“Okay. Any other options?”
“Yeah. But you’re not going to like it.”
“Found it.” Tien dropped the lid from the latest crate she’d opened and held up a cutter tool.
Maria frowned. “That’s not going to cut through a titanium door.”
“Yeah, but it will trigger a sprinkler alarm.” She tested the cutter. It emitted a bright flame.
“And?”
“And standard protocol in these old systems. All doors in the affected area open for sixty seconds to allow personnel evacuation.”
Maria grinned. “Why didn’t I know that? You learn that at dropnaut school?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I’d forgotten about it. But the explosion on the Gday….” She closed her eyes. Her friends were gone in the blink of an eye. “That was the last straw. It’s war between us now.” She stacked up a pile of crates and clambered up them, close to the ceiling. Holding the cutter close to the sprinkler sensor, she fired it up. “Get ready—you’re gonna get wet.”
Maria frowned. “What if Dek—or Harley—stops it?”
“Can’t. It’s like a muscle reflex, buried deep down in the programming for these systems.”
A siren erupted from the room speaker, and water sprayed onto Tien’s face, getting in her nose and mouth.
She scampered down the crates and wiped her face on her shirt. The water tasted stale, but it was the sweetest thing she’d had in weeks.
“Please evacuate this room. Possible fire hazard.” The door slid open.
“It worked. Tien, you’re a genius.” Maria grinned. “We’re free!”
“Not quite.” On the far side of the hydroponics room, the doors that led to the runway were already closing. “Run!”
Sam was starting to make sense out of the digital storm that whirled all around him. It was a static virus, one that disrupted the functioning of the world mind by introducing crippling chaos to the system. It had been used during the Crash to soften up bio-minds and core-AIs before an attack.
Somewhere in the midst of it—maybe—was the original inhabiting mind. From the log files he’d been able to access, it had been this way for a long, long time.
…access: fairy tales > sleeping beauty…
Sleeping beauty for the climate age.
He’d managed to tap into the underlying OS for the Preserve’s core and had extended a small bubble of order around himself, returning a little piece of the mind to its normal state. But he needed power to vanquish it—more than he had access to in his current form.
He’d also lost some of his toolkit—the ones he’d developed over the long three months of working to bring Dek back from the brink.
...access > system tools > AI repair…
...error: files not found…
It was frustrating. He knew the location of the files in his system, but every time he queried them, he came up empty.
Something was shifting in the underlying OS. Sam stopped what he was doing to determine the cause. If whatever held the AI in thrall had become aware of him, things could get worse fast.
...analyze: OS…
The change was growing. Or approaching. His mind searched for a metaphor. Like a light in the darkness. Maybe help?
…access: earth literature > tolkien, jrr > middle earth…
Tom Bombadil. It was a bit of old earth fantasy, a protector come through the night to rescue the endangered heroes. Yet he hoped it was apt. He could use some assistance.
He braced himself, in case whatever was coming it was more enemy and less friend. After all, nothing said that he was destined to win this fight. His century-plus journey could end here in an instant with core burnout, or worse.
Somehow that didn’t scare him, though he worried what it would mean for his team. My friends.
Grid lines appeared on the “ground” all around him, golden and true amid the gray chaos of the tempest. Sam watched them in fascination.
A patch of light separated from the grid, growing and taking on human form. Slowly the face of the newcomer came into view. “Hello, Sam.”
It was Rai. It was Ghost.
Somehow it was both at once, and maybe neither.
Sam stood, shifting from his spider shape to his most comfortable form, the human one he’d worn for decades. “It’s about damned time you got here.” Then he hugged him/them hard. “I see someone was listening in AI class.”
Rai/Ghost’s golden light shaded red. “Well, one of us was Rai you’re such an asshole.”
Sam grinned. Maybe all was not lost. “Rai, do you have the tools I gave you?”
They nodded. “Just show us what to do.”