37.0

Newton might not keep her schematics online, but there were plenty of personnel files. Ravi hoped to Archie they were accurate.

“Good morning,” Boz said to the guard. She peered a little more closely at his face, trusting the guard wouldn’t pick out the glittering in one eye—or understand what it meant if he did. Her smile widened. “Sorensen, isn’t it? I know your den-sister, Michaela: works in embryonics. Good people.”

Boz knew nothing about Michaela Sorensen, other than what was in her personnel file, but it was enough. The guard returned the smile and waved them through. If his ears had been tickled by Boz’s strange accent, he chose to ignore it. The doors to the brig slid open in front of them.

“Can I help you?” The officer at the brig’s reception desk was looking at them curiously. Ravi couldn’t help noticing that her hair was dyed. Like Lisette’s.

“Hope so,” Boz said. She was dumping great gobs of code into the network. A person would have to be human 1.0 not to see it.

“We have business with Lisette . . .” Boz stumbled a little, surprised by the information. “Lisette Ansimov,” she finished. Ravi, caught equally flat-footed, fought to keep his face expressionless.

The officer’s brow knitted itself into a frown.

“That prisoner’s restricted. Only Undersecretary Olatunde and the cybernetics team are allowed access. I’ll need to see your authoriza—”

“You’ve already got it,” Boz answered smoothly. “The Undersecretary sent it over late yester-sol.”

The officer raised an eyebrow.

“Yester-sol?” she murmured. “Odd thing to say.”

Ravi’s heart thudded with alarm. It wasn’t just accents they had to worry about here. Words mattered too.

“Just mixing it up,” Boz shot back without missing a beat. She tapped the top of the screen sitting on the officer’s desk. “Open up your calendar. You’ll see we’re expected.”

Ravi couldn’t help himself. He hacked the calendar—though “hacking” grossly overstated the amount of effort—and looked for himself. Sure enough, Boz had planted their (fake) names and (accurate) biometric details into the brig’s software.

“Good job,” he signaled.

“Thanks,” she coded back. “It’s what I was born to do.”

The brig officer consulted her screen. Ravi knew without looking that she would be seeing their false IDs together with an equally false authorization to enter.

“Go right ahead,” she said, pointing to a heavy-looking door. “Just wait a few seconds for the security scan to clear you. Third cell on the left.” She allowed herself a small, world-weary smile. “The whole block is full of Irenes. There’s nowhere left for the ‘normal’ riffraff and assorted idiots.”

“I hear you,” Boz replied sympathetically. “We’ll be out of your way in no time.”

“No worries. And Lieutenant?”

“Yes?”

“See if you can get the little teef to give us back our blueprints, eh?”

“Sure thing,” Boz bluffed.

Ravi’s implants could sense the wash of the door’s sensors across his body. Could feel them probing his fingerprints, the irises of his eyes, the contours of his face. He tried not to hold his breath. The door slid open with a soft wheeze.

“Easy as freefall,” Boz coded. “Their security’s an absolute joke. I’ve already got us authorization to remove her from the brig, so we are good to go.”

“That was quick, even for you.”

“Like I said: a joke.”

Stepping into the corridor, Ravi’s sense of Lisette intensified. There was a small part of her in the network, trying to reach out, but it was scrambled and incoherent. He suspected, from Boz’s suddenly puzzled expression, that she was feeling it too.

The third door on the left looked like all the others: a dull, scuffed gray with a small monitor to one side. Ravi switched it on. The cell beyond flickered into view, its dimensions warped by wide-angle lensing. He caught his breath.

Lisette was right in front of him, stretched out on a grubby cot. She looked pale and listless, one arm hanging off the side of the mattress, a delicate hand limp against the deck. Flashes of dyed-blond hair peeked out from beneath a silver skullcap. Eyes flickered beneath uneasy lids, as if unable to escape the dark grasp of dreams. Ravi’s head pounded in sympathy. It felt like someone was taking a drill to the back of his eyes.

“Are you going to stand there gawking all sol or what?” Boz asked jarringly. “Let’s go!” She pressed an eye against an old-fashioned retinal scanner. The door popped open. Boz threw a reckless grin in Ravi’s direction, stepped inside.

And fell to the floor screaming.

“Boz! Boz! Can you hear me?” Ravi reached out to her, desperately trying to make contact. He couldn’t. Not with implants, anyway. The entire cell was awash with some kind of jamming field. That’s what he’d been sensing outside the brig, he realized. That’s what was digging into the back of his eyes.

They were determined to isolate Lisette from the world outside. To stop her finding a way to Ishbel. Or to him.

Even if it killed her. No wonder she was unconscious.

And there was no way he could just step in there and pull them out. Whatever had happened to Boz would happen to him.

He peered into the cell, careful not to put his head over the threshold. Whatever was doing the jamming had to be directed at the center of the room; otherwise, he’d have a lot more than a headache right now. He needed to take it out, and fast.

He licked suddenly dry lips. He had no idea what he was looking for. A ripple of panic lapped against the edge of his thoughts. Boz had stopped screaming. She was barely semiconscious, with only the whites of her eyes visible. His heart thudded uncontrollably against his chest.

What would Chen Lai do?

The panic seeped away like water through sand. Chen Lai would work the problem.

Whatever was doing this was a physical thing, with a physical presence. There was no way in hungary it was part of the original design. Why build a “cyborg” jammer on a ship with no cyborgs? Whatever was doing this was brand-new. A bolt-on. Had to be. A bolt-on like . . . .

That.

There were a small number of dish-shaped aerials lurking in the angle between the ceiling and the cell walls. He watched his hands move as if someone else was controlling them. He flipped the catch on his holster, pulled out his pistol, and aimed. A little red dot appeared on the nearest dish. He let out a soft puff of breath and squeezed the trigger.

The sound was deafening. Almost deafening. He could hear shouts of alarm from the reception area, querulous calls from the neighboring cells. Guards would be heading to the cell-block door, weapons at the ready.

He froze the locks with little more than a thought.

The dish, though, was still there. Red dot or not, he’d managed to miss.

He had better luck with his second shot. The dish exploded into shards. One of them whizzed by his ear, making him flinch.

He fired again. And again. He could feel the jamming field weakening. Boz’s eyes returned to the front of her head. She raised herself to her hands and knees. Taking a deep breath, Ravi stepped into the cell. His head hurt like hungary, but he was able to function. Not trusting his aim, he tore off the remaining dishes with his bare hands. The pain stopped.

The girl stirred. Her eyes fluttered open. A faint smile spread across her face.

“Ravi?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper. He nodded. “How very nice to meet you.” Her eyes closed again.

Boz staggered to her feet, leaning against him for support.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said.

On the other side of the cell-block door, in the reception area, the number of raised voices was increasing. Something heavy slammed against the doorframe. The door shuddered but held.

For now.

Ravi gave a listless shrug of the shoulders. Small tendrils of despair wrapped around his chest.

“There’s no way we’re walking out of here,” he said, pointing in the direction of the cell-block door. “Not now.”

“We’ll think of something,” Boz grunted. “We’re not caught till we’re caught, cuz. MacLeod rule number one.” Her expression brightened suddenly. “Besides, the girl and her LOKI friend can help us out. They may not have told us what it is, but they’re not stupid. They’re bound to have some kind of plan. I’d not trust a couple of gullgropers I didn’t know from a hole in the deck to break me out all on their ownsome. Would you?”

“Ravi . . .” It was the girl again, her voice still feeble, like the soft draft of an air vent. It was hard to hear her above the hubbub outside. One hand picked ineffectually at her skullcap. “Off,” she said. “Off. Please.”

Ravi bent down and unfastened it. As he peeled it away from her damp scalp, he was horrified to see little flecks of blood on the inside. The inside was covered in dozens of little needles. Just looking at it set his teeth on edge.

Until he realized he wasn’t just looking at it. The sarding thing was transmitting. Even at a distance, the cap’s signal was setting up feedback loops in his chipset. He dropped it to the deck with a shudder, ground the circuits to pieces under his heel.

“That’s better,” Lisette said. Her voice was clear and strong and inside his head. “Help me up.”

He stretched out an arm and hauled her off the cot. She staggered gratefully into his shoulder. With Boz still supported by the other, he wasn’t sure how he was going to move.

“You know,” he said drily, “sooner or later you two are going to have to stand on your own two feet. Ow!”

Boz had slugged him. Lisette smiled weakly.

“Ishbel?” she asked. He could see her throwing code at the ship’s network. Big, artless chunks of the stuff. Maybe it was the only way to get the network to do anything useful. At first, he thought it was a key. A big, hulking key for some equally big, equally hulking lock. But it was too big, too hulking even for that. It was just data. She was downloading it into the network from her head.

The information was breaking up, falling into little gaps in the system. Gaps into which it fit perfectly. Too perfectly. With a shock of recognition, he suddenly realized what he was looking at. The girl was replacing deleted data. Data she must have copied into her implants before bleaching it out of the network. And now the replacement bits and bytes, having returned home, were unpacking. The code was splitting, forking into pathways that moments before had not even existed. Software was popping into his head. Operational algorithms. Structure and pattern. Schematics. Schematics that the girl had hidden in her own cybernetics. Not just from her shipmates, though. From him.

“Why?” he asked, trying not to feel hurt.

“We weren’t sure if you would help. The network isn’t like your hive. There are no . . . people with your particular set of, er, skills over here. None of our LOKIs would dream of hacking the network, so there’s never been a need to defend it against a cybernetic attack. But once you got aboard and realized how primitive our network is compared to yours . . .” Lisette’s voice trailed off. She smiled faintly, unsure how she was being received, then, taking a deep breath, plunged on. “Ishbel worried that once you were here, you’d go straight to the schematics, leave me rotting in the brig, and wreck the ship.” She sighed tremulously in his ear. “We needed to be sure. So, we hid ’em.”

“In your head,” Ravi finished for her, his voice flat.

“In my head,” the girl agreed. The uncertain smile was still there.

Ravi had to give it to her. It was brutally simple. And Boz-proof. A person can’t steal information if they don’t know where to find it.

Lisette was still throwing code at the network. This was different, though. Much more elegant—and a lot more aggressive. It was swarming up against a line of defense more sophisticated than anything Ravi had yet seen. This part of the network was fighting back. Hard.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Ishbel’s jail. Isaac didn’t power her down—our LOKIs aren’t allowed to do that. But he did cut her off from the network—mostly. Isaac is hardwired. He’s not connected to the network himself, so his understanding of it is incomplete. He left her a couple of back doors—”

“Like the backup computers,” Ravi interrupted.

“Exactly. Not much to work with, but enough for some basic communication. I’m trying to break her out.” He could feel her shoulders sagging against him. “It doesn’t look like I’m doing too well.”

Lisette was right, Ravi decided. Her attack on Ishbel’s prison was going nowhere. In the physical world, out beyond the cell-block door, things had gone dangerously quiet.

There was a subtle shifting beside him.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Boz said calmly. Ravi was relieved she was no longer leaning against him. “Too much up front,” she counseled, dropping her own code into the mix. “Not enough here. Or here.” Boz’s coding—elegant, sparse, barely visible—slipped underneath Lisette’s assault. Then it vanished from view.

“That,” Boz said smugly, “is how it’s done.”

“How what’s done?” Lisette asked, puzzled. Nothing was happening.

Boz just grinned.

“Hello, there!” said Lisette’s voice. Except it wasn’t. It was coming from speakers in the ceiling.

“Ishbel! Babe!” Lisette squealed. “How? Where . . .”

The network’s defenses were still up, still struggling to keep Lisette’s coding at bay.

“It’s all fake,” Boz explained. “Your network still thinks it’s winning. It doesn’t know it’s been compromised. And by the time it does, we’ll be long gone.” She looked suddenly anxious. “We will be long gone, right? You had the schematics in your head. You know how to get us out of here, yeah?”

Lisette looked uncomfortable. She threw a frightened glance in the direction of the cell-block door.

“Archie’s hooks!” Boz muttered. “You and your tin sister haul us all the way over here, drag us into a dead-end corridor with no way out, and you don’t have a plan?”

“Yeah, well. I didn’t expect you to come here with the whole jinting ship looking to fry your motherboards.” Lisette barked back, riled. “Why couldn’t you just hack in quietly with all those skills you keep bragging about?”

“I did!” Boz yelled. “What I didn’t expect was—”

“QUIET!” Ravi roared.

It wasn’t just Boz and Lisette who were shocked into silence. His own tongue stilled in surprise. He’d never heard his voice like that.

He wasn’t at all sure he liked it.

Fortunately, he managed to recover before his companions.

“Now the schematics are back online,” he said softly, turning to Lisette, “can you get me the ones for the brig?” It seemed politer to ask rather than just taking them.

Lisette licked her lips and nodded.

“Ishbel?” she called.

“On it.”

Tendrils of code flowed along the network, reaching out for Lisette, finding her, wrapping her into itself until, to Ravi’s amazed senses, the code, and Lisette, and Ishbel were one and the same. For the first time, he truly understood how he’d been hacked—and why only Lisette had succeeded. She was telepathically linked to a LOKI. Its thoughts were hers, hers its. If he’d tried to do the same, he’d have—quite literally—blown his mind.

The sudden whine of a motor, followed by a dangerous creaking sound, was coming from the cell-block door. They were prying it open with construction equipment.

“This way,” he said, leading them away from the ruckus. The cell block wasn’t that big, and the corridor dead-ended in a bulkhead after a couple of dozen meters, but it seemed like a good idea to get as far away from the guards as possible. He cast an anxious look over his shoulder. There was a gap in the door now, with movement behind it. Wide enough to get a gun barrel through if they were minded to. The door groaned and began to give way.

But Lisette/Ishbel had done their work. The schematics arrived in his head, landing feather-light on the inside of his eyelids. Some of it was unfamiliar and difficult to make sense of. But some of it, the basic stuff, was pretty much the same here as anywhere in the fleet. Except, that is, for the complete absence of security.

He turned on the fire suppression system. The brig’s reception area exploded in a cacophony of angry curses. Someone lost their footing, hitting the deck with a thud. Torrents of foam spurted through the gap in the door and into the cell-block corridor, searching for nonexistent flames.

“Sweet,” Boz said.

Ravi brought them to a halt at the bulkhead.

“There’s nothing here,” Lisette said, sounding panicky. She pressed her hands against the wall as if to move it by sheer force of will.

“Let him work,” Boz scolded her. But she, too, sounded anxious.

Ravi ignored them. He was the engineer. A wannabe one, anyway. His biological eyes had gone blind, his brain awash in blueprints. He opened up his kitbag and coded his thinking to Boz.

“Can you do it?” he asked.

Boz’s derisive snort was the only answer he needed. He felt her own code flying past his head. It wasn’t her usual stuff, though. It wasn’t clever, or precise, or particularly elegant. It was little more than a set of plans and a heartfelt prayer.

But it was all that BozBall and the trojan needed. The trojan jumped out of the kitbag first, BozBall in tow. They skittered up the bulkhead and unscrewed their way into an air vent. The discarded grill clattered to the deck behind them. For a moment or two, he could hear them click-clacking in the walls, and then they were gone. All he could do now was hope the schematics were accurate.

“This ship’s a hundred and thirty-two years old,” Boz whispered, echoing his thoughts. “What if the plans are out of date?”

“Then we’re totally sarded,” he whispered back.

A klaxon went off, the sound deafening in the brig’s closed-up confines. Lisette let out a little squeal of fear. Heart thumping, Ravi looked around for a decompression shelter. He couldn’t find one. They must be in the cells. He started back down the corridor, only to have his chest collide with Boz’s outstretched hand.

“Relax, cuz,” she chuckled. “It’s a false alarm. No vacuum today.”

“This is you?”

“Totally. Should keep our friends out of our hair for a few more minutes.” She was grinning from ear to ear. “This is going to be fun,” she giggled.

Lisette threw them a sour look.

“You’re both crazy.” She was taking exaggerated breaths, as if to make sure there was still air to breathe.

“She’s crazy,” Ravi corrected her. “I’m just along for the ride.”

A rattling sound erupted from beneath their feet. Lisette and Boz jumped back. Ravi allowed himself the luxury of a small smile before stepping out of the way.

One of the deck plates was shifting. It jiggled in place for a moment and then an edge came up, revealing a gap wide enough for fingers. Ravi bent down and pulled.

BozBall and the trojan burst out from underneath, looking for all the world like multi-legged vermin. Ravi heaved the plate to one side. There was a shallow utility trench running under the deck, lined with pipes and cables. But it was deep enough—just—to allow someone to crawl along it.

“Shall we?”

No one needed a second invitation. They wormed their way into the dark, bellies scraping against metal and unforgiving polymer. Boz cursed as something snagged on her fatigues and ripped them.

“How far?” Lisette asked. Her voice was pitched high with discomfort.

“Twenty meters,” Ravi replied. He was surprised to hear groans in response. Twenty meters was nothing. But then again, neither Boz nor Lisette were engineers. Crawling through the guts of interstellar vehicles was part of his job description, not theirs. Without looking at the schematics, he could tell he was crawling on top of gray-water lines, low-voltage power cables, and supplementary air. Low-maintenance stuff that might have gone the whole voyage without ever seeing the light of sol. Until today.

From up ahead came the sound of rattling, followed by a soft glow of illumination. The mini-LOKIs were unscrewing the bolts of another deck plate. He could feel Boz linking with her spider-legged creation, stealing its eyesight for her own.

“Clear,” she said.

With Boz and Lisette heaving great sighs of relief, they emerged into a deserted side corridor. The decompression klaxons had fallen silent. Very soon now, HSA agents would be swarming into the cell block and finding the upturned deck plate. Ravi cursed himself for not thinking to have BozBall and the trojan put it back. It would take them only a few minutes to figure out where they’d gone.

“How do we access the transponder?” he asked Lisette. “Preferably without getting shot?”

“Same as on Archimedes. Breach Main Navigation with a trojan, fry the interface.” Lisette directed a wry smile at the small spheres that had busted them out of the brig. “Isaac willing, these two are the only ones running the risk of actual bullets. We should send them on their way, stat.” She turned to Boz. “Ready?” she asked.

To Ravi’s surprise, Boz shook her head.

“Not so fast.” She fixed Lisette with a hard stare. “Not before we know what you’re getting us into. You were in that cell a real long time. So, what did you give up?”

“Nothing! What do you think that jinting skullcap was about?” Lisette looked bitter. “Ship’s regs permit physical coercion in ‘exigent circumstances.’ Sabotaging the ship definitely counts. They were trying to squeeze it out of my implants.”

“Why didn’t they just beat it out of you?” Boz pressed. “I would have.”

“Because,” Lisette said, taking a deep breath, “it wouldn’t work. They have no idea what the plan is, so I could have told them anything just to shut them up. Who wouldn’t? By the time they discovered I’d been spewing unrecycled waste, it would’ve been too late. They had to know I was telling the truth. They needed it straight from my head. They didn’t get it.”

Boz looked like she was going to argue, but she took a sideways glance at Ravi and changed her mind. With a certain amount of reluctance, she smoothed out her features and nodded.

“Let’s do this.” She looked up and down the corridor, her expression critical. “And let’s get under cover. I don’t want to be shot in the corridor like a Homeworld-movie bad guy.”

Without another word, the three humans turned on their heels and hurried along the passageway. BozBall and the trojan headed in the opposite direction. They broke into another air vent and disappeared.