| |
The soldiers must’ve unfastened Elys’s restraints before they dragged her out of the interrogation room, but she hadn’t paid attention to them doing it. Maybe Krebs was lying about the water. The soldiers had brought bottles in and out of her cell without any protective equipment. Then again, she wouldn’t put it past Krebs to let soldiers carry dangerous chemicals without warning them.
How could he sit there talking to her for hours, listening to all her unintentionally voiced thoughts, poisoning her all the while? Maybe that had made poisoning her easier. The inside of her head disgusted her too, some nights.
The soldiers had been gone for a while now, but she was still standing in the center of her cell. She sat on the padded section of floor, the smell of which had finally stopped bothering her. Her gaze traced the spirals she’d scratched in the wall while she pressed her hand over her mouth to see if she was still talking to herself. Her lips twitched, the sound muffled by her palm and not registering in her mind as speech.
At least she’d learned something during this interrogation session. She had less than a week to find the information Alyansa needed to protect itself. Tears pooled on the hand she held over her mouth. She didn’t bother covering the camera lenses in the walls.
––––––––
As Krebs had told her she would, Elys had been feeling tired, but the grating noise which kept interrupting her sleep could’ve caused that. Later the same day he dropped that news on her, someone came into her cell and injected her with the interrogation drug and she wasted several hours talking to herself. Flashes of blue-green reflected on the walls as her brain and photophores fretfully reached for digital resources without the pickup she’d taken off and tossed in a corner.
The drug gave her another terrible headache. Those might’ve been getting worse, too.
She got off the bed to use the toilet a couple of times, but she left the thawed meal by the door where a soldier dropped it. She was dying, she was trapped, and both her pickup and her digital assistant were locked down to uselessness. What was the point of getting up to do anything?
It was early the next day by the time she was able to make herself sit up and think. She pressed her hand over her mouth to confirm that she wasn’t speaking aloud. Taia might still be looking for her, despite what Elys had said to Krebs about betraying Alyansa. Even if she wasn’t, City Support and Alyansa still needed to know what the Republic had planned for them, and how long they had to prepare.
Alyansa was Taia’s home. She’d done her best to protect Elys when the Republic decided her life was an inconvenience. Elys still had time to get the city, and the CRUs, something they could use to defend Alyansa. She hadn’t failed them completely, not yet. And unlike when Reznikov lost its independence, Elys was old enough and skilled enough to fight back.
The pickup Krebs had given her wouldn’t help with that, though. If Taia were here, she could’ve talked somebody into bringing her a useful one, but that was well beyond Elys’s powers of persuasion.
Or was it? If Krebs was watching what she did with the pickup in real time, then she might not have to talk about it at all. She’d just have to be very intentional about what she asked the city to do.
This pickup had to be able to access the ship’s communication system to reach the city. Otherwise, Krebs wouldn’t have given it to her in hopes of her drugged state drawing out records the city wouldn’t send to an off-world government agent. But the city should’ve acknowledged her earlier attempt to ask it for something, even though she’d canceled her request, and she hadn’t received that confirmation.
Despite the lack of acknowledgment, the city demonstrated excellent interpretation of speech and signs, assuming Krebs’s manipulation hadn’t affected that by now. Not precise enough to break codes, perhaps, but it identified assumptions, as it and Nisse had demonstrated. That might be enough.
“Nisse, I may need the city to send me some large records,” Elys said. “Last time I asked it for something, it didn’t acknowledge my request. Would having the receiving system’s precise physical and digital destination for those records make the transfer easier for the city?” That would also make it easier for Taia and her CRU to find Elys.
Since they were well outside real-time contact with the city, Nisse was now a faceless voice for the shipboard AI. After several seconds, her assistant rendered text on the wall in front of Elys. Forwarding your question to the nearest Mayari Embassy. Not Alyansan, because the shipboard AI used Republic terminology.
“What, exactly, are you thinking of asking the city for?” The cell speaker flattened Krebs’s smug tone but did little to obscure it.
“You have to have an antidote. You must.” Elys thought about standing, but she was too tired to waste that much effort on Krebs. “If I get you that algorithm you were asking about and the documentation you wanted on it, that’s a fair trade, right?”
“We’ll see what the city sends, I suppose,” Krebs said, and Elys could swear she heard him smiling. Maybe the poisoning had nothing to do with hiding the RIS’s trail, and everything to do with coercing Elys to reveal more of the city’s structure than Krebs had found on his own.
“I’m not sure it received my first request,” Elys said. “Did it send the ship a confirmation? Because I didn’t get one.”
Silence hung in the cell. Elys’s shoulders and neck tensed, braced for the grating noise again, but it didn’t come. While Krebs searched incoming communications for the confirmation, Elys’s question was on its way to the city.
The city recorded everything that went into the Alyansan embassies. Elys wished she’d had more time to study how it utilized information from the rest of the universe, but since the problem had been localized in Alyansa, she hadn’t made time for that. Now she never would.
“We did not receive an acknowledgment,” Krebs said. “We should receive one from your current request, however. I’ll see that the city receives everything it needs to complete your request.” And if the city had it, it should identify keywords in common with the Off-world Affairs operation revolving around Krebs’s ship, which meant Taia would get Elys’s location.
The message would have to reach an embassy, possibly on Bahoc, although that might not be the closest Republic planet, anymore. That’d give Elys time to decide what to ask the city for. It should refuse to send the algorithm and documentation Krebs wanted, since that would compromise security. If the city didn’t figure that out itself, City Support would.
But it needed to send something Krebs would keep with his other records, ones with more information about the Republic’s invasion plans for Alyansa. Then Taia’s CRU, or Elys if she ever put on another fully functional pickup, could track down that record and all the others Krebs valued, quickly. The faster Taia got on and off this ship, the safer she’d be.
The acknowledgment that came back included a lot of formal language. The city reported conferring with City Support and confirmed that it needed Elys’s exact location to be certain the entire record arrived uncorrupted, and additionally needed her pickup to request the record on some specific communications protocols. The acknowledgment disappeared from Elys’s sight while she was reading. Krebs must’ve deleted it from her pickup.
Elys leaned against the wall beside the padding she sat on, willing her excitement off her face in case she’d missed covering a camera. Those communication protocols... If she read them correctly, the shipboard AI would have to treat her communications the same way it treated those from Republic soldiers. That’d let her communicate with the city, and it might let her ask the shipboard AI to send messages on her behalf, to the Sol system.
Something was always listening. Getting on the right channels to reach the RIS MCAI would be tricky. The protocols the city had asked their communications to take place on would give her a chance to try, though.
A notification flashed past in text before Elys’s tired mind managed to focus on it. Krebs must’ve been making changes to the pickup’s settings remotely. The setting menu offered new options, and she dug into them while they were there.
She switched the pickup to “invisible assistance,” which would minimize visualization instances associated with this physical space. That’d stop her from seeing Nisse’s lifeless dumbed-down shadow-mass again, although she’d need its help to get her messages where she was hoping to send them. She’d rather remember Nisse’s cat eyes blue and bright with intelligence, thanks to the city.
Elys had seen so many wonderful things in Alyansa. No matter how little else she’d get to see of the universe, she was glad she’d had that chance.
––––––––
Another reheated meal, docility dream, bag of water arrived in Elys’s cell while she watched for the city’s acknowledgment that it and the shipboard AI were talking with the communications protocols it’d requested. She left the water and the dissolving dream pod by the door. While she ate, she considered how she’d enlist the RIS MCAI’s help in finding the information she came onto this awful ship to get.
To access the back door she’d left herself in the RIS MCAI’s systems, the MCAI had to know it was Elys talking. But she couldn’t say anything that’d draw Krebs’s attention to the communication.
Decoding had been one of the RIS’s most harped-upon design specifications. She could request a connection confirmation from the Orefield’s AI to the RIS MCAI, which should be expected outbound traffic from a ship with Krebs onboard. And Elys could use the request itself to tell the RIS MCAI who she was and how to contact her. The protocols the city, or City Support, had requested would obfuscate the request’s source enough that a person might overlook it. An MCAI wouldn’t.
She’d plan on having only one chance to ask it for information. If nobody noticed the MCAI’s response, she’d ask it to send records to a public Alyansan inbox, and then she’d ask it for more. Sending the results to the city would alert the shipboard AI and any people watching that something strange was happening. Putting the data in a public inbox, possibly for the marina which the soldiers must have interacted with digitally, might not set off alarms.
The city’s brief acknowledgment disappeared from Elys’s pickup before she’d finished reading, like its previous communication had. She caught a line of it that confirmed the city and the shipboard AI were now using the protocols the city recommended, though. She could slip a message to the RIS MCAI through those.
If she only had one chance to contact the RIS MCAI... Even if it could stop Krebs’s ship, Elys wouldn’t ask it to. That was too dangerous, given its willingness to risk human life. But it should be able to deactivate the weapons onboard without hurting anyone.
Since she had no way of knowing whether the RIS maintenance team addressed the MCAI’s value deficiencies during rebalancing, she’d need to phrase the request as precisely as possible. Not having the city to help Nisse translate further eroded her confidence.
“Disable any currently active weapons on this ship that you have a model for,” Elys instructed Nisse in signs the covered cameras wouldn’t hear, “without hurting anyone. If you don’t have a model for it, ignore it.”
The RIS MCAI should have a complete rendering and function map for Republic equipment, consolidated into a model it understood. It would have modeled civilian weapons too, but it wouldn’t have models for all of those. Anything that put the Republic soldiers at a disadvantage would be useful.
But after what the RIS MCAI had recommended before, Elys would never tell it to improvise. Not even if that omission meant she’d die on a Republic vessel instead of an Alyansan one. That admission made her feel too hot, for the first time since she’d boarded Krebs’s ship.
After several minutes of lying on the floor and listing topics to ask the MCAI about, she realized that the RIS MCAI might have records on the RIS’s antidotes for their poisons. She’d listed at least twenty topics before she thought of that one. Leovostik omnipirin went onto her topic list too.
This list was too long for a connection confirmation. The shipboard AI might be able to ask for a report on the magnetic and radiation environment in this part of space, which could interfere with transmissions between it and Alyansa. The RIS MCAI should handle that request, since many of the routes were estimated and Krebs’s RIS mission was involved.
It took Elys a while to remember how a shipboard AI might convey a request for that. She doubted Krebs would recognize what it was doing. By the time Elys sent the request, she was confident that it’d gone through the expected protocols and an inconspicuous channel in the shipboard network.
After she’d done all that, she felt more tired than she had the day before. The focus required to get two MCAIs cooperating with the shipboard AI, without drawing attention to the second MCAI’s efforts, would’ve explained her exhaustion just as well as poisoning would.
In a way, it was a relief not to have to find a way to survive this experience. As long as she acquired the information Alyansa needed and got it to them, she could take any chances she wanted. Her situation couldn’t get much worse.