21.0

It doesn’t make any sense!” Ravi snapped. He stepped out of the way as Boz unloaded a small delivery bot. Inside a couple of bland looking crates were some second-hand inductors, presumably from Uncle Torquil, a bunch of electronic equipment that had vanished from the manifests, and packs of freshly manufactured cigarettes. Boz stuffed the crates in one corner of her Fiji bolt-hole and reloaded the machine with discreetly packaged chocolate.

“Archimedes was a physicist,” she pointed out, not for the first time. She slipped some code into the bot’s routing software, altering its memory. “He has an apocryphal relationship to bathwater, and there’s a bath in your dreams. He’s also the name of this ship.” She paused a moment, as if to examine her handiwork, before sending the bot on its way. When she spoke again, she spoke slowly and with exaggerated care, as if speaking to a child. “Newton was a physicist. He has an apocryphal relationship to apples, and there’s an apple in your dreams. He has to be the name of a ship.”

“But he isn’t! The fleet has three ships, Archimedes, Bohr, and Chandrasekar. None of them was ever called Newton, and no one even suggested Newton as a name. I checked. The ships were just hull numbers when the Liberty Foundation bought them from the Deep Space Commission. They had a variety of nicknames, like ‘the Dreidels,’ or ‘the Hula Hoops,’ or ‘the White Elephants,’ but no one ever, ever called them ‘Newton.’ ”

He bent down and reached into a kit bag he’d brought with him, pulling out a collapsible stepladder, a hulking cylinder of nitrous oxide, and some grimy-looking air filters he’d “liberated” from Bermuda. Ravi had intercepted them on their way to the recycler. They weren’t really fit for the purpose, but they still functioned, after a fashion. Which was more than could be said for the ones in the abandoned control room. He set up the stepladder and got to work, replacing dead filters with the nearly dead. The recycler wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. If anyone was interested, its logs would show an unusual delay between the official repair work in Bermuda-7 and the beginning of the recycling process, but it wouldn’t show anything missing. And once he’d finished, the air in the bolt-hole would be slightly less stale.

Boz watched him from the dubious comfort of a burned-out chair. There was no sign of the usual cigarette, presumably out of respect for the soon-to-be unprotected vents.

“I didn’t just check the ship’s names,” Ravi complained, as he removed the first of the old filters with a well-practiced tug. “I checked the crews. There were no Newtons in First Crew. Not one. And no one’s taken the name since.” He slammed the replacement into place and opened a panel labeled noboss to one side of the vent. He switched out the old nitrous cylinder for its younger replacement.

“What’s a NOBOSS?” Boz asked.

“Nitrous Oxide–Based Oxygen Supply System. Emergency life support, basically.”

“Ugh. Five seconds of my life I’ll never get back. There’s a bunch of Newmans on Chandra.”

“Not the same thing. And you know it.” He closed up the NOBOSS panel and moved to the next filter.

Boz favored him with a careless shrug.

“Let me go over your searches. Maybe you missed something.”

“I didn’t ‘miss something.’ ” But he fashioned a key anyway and tossed it over. Boz grabbed ahold of it and crowded into his head. Link established, he could feel the restless churn of his cousin’s mind, the flow and eddy of digital information. It was a constant burble in the back of his skull. Being Boz, he thought, had to be exhausting.

He pulled up his search history for Boz to see. Even though he was standing on a stepladder and Boz was across the control room in the wrecked remains of a chair, it felt like she was pressed against the back of his eyeballs. The data flickered to life in front of them, pictures, and video, and text.

“See?” Ravi said, or rather thought, communicating with his cousin in code. “Absolutely nothing. Newton, starship Newton, ISV Newton, First Crew Newton, Liberty Foundation Newton, Deep Space Commission Newton, interstellar colonist Newton, Tau Ceti Newton—”

“Wait!” Boz hissed. “Wind it back!” She was using her real voice, low and urgent.

Ravi did as he was told. Boz forced her way into his data stream, making him feel slightly nauseous. She peeled back the underlying code, then peeled it back some more. She reached into the depths and grabbed on to seemingly random pieces of programming, pulling them closer to the surface and fitting them together in a tightly interlocking pattern.

“What does that look like to you?” she asked quietly.

Ravi’s heart thudded heavily in his chest.

“It’s a tracer,” he said, speaking aloud. “A really good one.” He felt sick to his stomach. “I never noticed it. It never occurred to me—”

“That someone might be watching you?” He didn’t need to see the cynical half-smile shadowing her face. He could feel it. He started to say something.

“Stop talking. And try not to think. I need some quiet in here.”

There was a faint tickling sensation in his head. Boz was tiptoeing through his implants, picking away at the search data and reaching out to the hive at the same time—all while using his chipset. It was a breathtaking demonstration of technical skill, but Ravi was too traumatized to appreciate it. Someone had been following him, for Archie’s sake.

With exaggerated care, so as not to leave footprints of her own, Boz followed the path of Ravi’s earlier searches, pursuing his various bots and queries deeper and deeper into the hive.

Ravi looked on, fascinated. He could barely bring himself to breathe.

Boz wasn’t just watching where the bots and queries had gone; she was looking at how those bots and queries had affected the hive. It was like following a stone thrown into the depths of a pond while also looking at the ripples, both on the surface and below. She went through them all in excruciating slow motion.

It was the strangest thing. Not one of Ravi’s searches had got to where it was going. Each one had been hijacked by lurking pieces of code and turned away, diverted into a desert of useless information. And rising back up with that useless information, wrapped in it, in fact, was the tracer. A poison pill of programming, sending information on every single search to . . .

Vasconcelos.

“Are you sure?” Ravi asked. He used his real voice again, worried his cybernetic conversation might be monitored.

“Yes.” Boz had jumped up from her wreck of a chair and was taking elongated paces about the control room. The half-gravity barely held her to the deck. “Whatever this Newton thing is, it can’t be something you just dreamed up. It’s got to be real. Real enough for Vasconcelos to protect it with bots and sic a tracer on you.”

“Am I in trouble?” The words came out unbidden, an anxious blurt. What would he tell his mother if he got thrown off the program?

“For what?” Boz asked, laughing. “Archie’s hooks, Middy, you carried out a search. It’s not a crime!”

“But what about all this?” He gestured around the room. “It’s not something you’d want ShipSec to know about, is it?”

“Not a problem. First, the tracer isn’t geographical; it’s monitoring your search activity, nothing else. Second, even if it was, this space vanished from the schematics years ago. If Vasconcelos was trying to track you physically, your present location would look like a glitch. It doesn’t exist.”

“Yeah, well.” He thought back to his interview in the cramped little office, the ease with which the inspector had bent him to his will. “I don’t like the idea of Vasconcelos keeping tabs on me, is all. It creeps me out.” He slammed the replacement air vent into position as if to mask his apprehension. He picked up the stepladder and moved on to the next one.

“Pass me the filter,” Ravi asked, pointing to his kit bag. Boz pulled out the replacement and handed it up to him.

“You know what?” she said. “We should screw with Vasconcelos for a change. Let’s find out what he’s trying to hide and rub his stupid, smug face in it.”

From his perch atop the stepladder, Ravi looked down at his cousin. Her face was alive with mischief. No, he decided to say. I’m not messing with that guy, and neither are you. He’ll throw me off the program and send you to the recycler.

His mouth, however, belonged to a MacLeod.

“Sure,” it said. He could feel the mouth spreading into a reckless grin. “You got any kind of a plan?”

“Maybe. But first, we should do something about that tracer.”

Ravi could only look on, awestruck, as Boz wormed into the hive through Ravi’s implants and tweaked the very edges of the tracer’s code. To Vasconcelos, it would look like the tracer was still doing its work, but Ravi could block it off whenever he wanted. And when he did so, the tracer would send a made-up feed back to its master. The Commander-Inspector would never know it had been messed with. And if, by some miracle, he did find out, Boz had done all the work through Ravi’s chipset, something she’d once compared to picking up food with two-meter-long chopsticks. Vasconcelos would think Ravi had sarded up the tracer, not Boz. He might be pissed at Ravi, but he’d have no reason to go after Ravi’s cousin. Despite Jaden’s assurances, Ravi wasn’t sure Vasconcelos couldn’t find a way to turn Boz into Dead Weight. Ravi, on the other hand, was as close to respectable as any MacLeod could be. Vasconcelos would need all his sensors in a row to do Ravi real harm. Given the tracer was illegal, he was perfectly within his rights to destroy it. And if Vasconcelos wanted him off the program, he would have to present Chen Lai with actual evidence, which he didn’t have. All things considered, odds were that Vasconcelos would do no more than give him the stink eye. That, Ravi could handle standing on his head in full g.

Subtly crippled, Boz let the tracer drift away, disguising itself once more in the ebb and flow of the hive. Job done, Boz jumped out of Ravi’s head and back into her own.

“That,” Ravi said breathlessly, “was sarding amazing.” He meant it, too. Every word.

For someone who loved attention, the praise left Boz surprisingly unmoved. She was staring at Ravi with a look of frank curiosity.

“It was easier than it should have been,” she told him. “Chip sets are . . . personal. They’re full of nooks and crannies and strange little corners that shouldn’t be there. Yours is . . .” Words failed her for a moment. And as she struggled to pull the right ones together, she began to look less curious and more troubled. “Yours is . . . mapped out. It’s like someone has put a signpost at every twist and turn your implants have to offer. For someone like me, every possible obstacle, every trap, has been smoothed over. Making use of your implants was real simple. Too simple.”

She grabbed him by the wrists and stared deep into his eyes, determined to force the point home.

“Do you remember the last time you let me do a sweep of your implants?”

“Sure. When I asked you to hack the personnel files.” He smiled ruefully in remembrance. “It hurt like hungary.”

“Exactly. And do you remember what I told you about the inside of your head?”

“Yes,” he said, grinning. “You said my code was, and I quote: ‘a bescumbered mess.’ ”

Boz didn’t grin back.

“Yeah, well. The mess is all gone. Tidied away like it was never there. Someone has been playing house in your skull. A lot.”