SCHOLAR ZYCHTYKAS THREE—Kas to her friends, of which she had none—had slaved, scrimped, and swindled to get the fourth spot on the team going to Old Earth. She’d pulled strings, spent the pathetic remains of her savings, contemplated blackmail, and come perilously close to having to fuck an associate dean, all to guarantee that her name would be at the top of Archscholar Grio One’s list. No doubt he’d raised one delicately sculpted eyebrow and given the slightest of sighs before signing off, but he had signed off, and that was all that mattered.
So she’d thought, anyway. Now she was actually here and all she wanted to do was go home and stick her jacks in a vat of bleach forever.
The trip was part of the problem. Unlike on a civilized planet, where the transfer point was parked a few minutes’ gentle acceleration from the nearest skyhook, getting to Earth involved spending two days in a tin can. Their ship was glamorous, decorated like a Sixth-Empire battlecruiser complete with masked thralls serving drinks (they’d gotten the uniforms wrong, of course, everyone did), but all the polished marble and fade-silk curtains couldn’t disguise the fundamental fact that they were using reaction jets to accelerate, like a bunch of fucking cavemen.
The reason for all this was that by the time transfer points had been invented, Old Earth had already been surrounded by a belt of slagged tech, fast-moving wreckage, and miscellaneous debris so dense that it required a skilled pilot with algo assistance to navigate it. The last time anyone had attempted to clear a path, they’d accidentally started a conflagration between leave-behind killbots from the sore losers of three different wars, and nobody had been able to reach the planet until the shooting died down.
That was Earth all over: a mix of monument, mausoleum, and trash heap. It was only a small consolation that they were able to land wherever they pleased, agrav spraying substring radiation across a landscape of monocrete and twisted metal. No other traffic to worry about, after all, and who cared if a bunch of carnivorous rats got extradimensional tumors?
It just gave her less time to adjust to the other shock—no network. The ship had plotted their trajectory, then put itself into full blind-deaf-and-dumb mode, which was the only way to protect it from Earth’s corrosive datasphere. Kas put her jacks into full shutdown, something she hadn’t done since she was prepubescent, and then for good measure covered them with blocker, two cool patches of translucent jelly stuck just behind her ears. She’d bought a cheap flimsy for the trip on the Sentinel skyhook, a little flexible tablet that was advertised as being loaded with the toughest anti-malware available. Within minutes of landing, it had started flickering with advertising. By the time they’d boarded the little train to the Drome, it was playing a repeating jingle from some long-dead corporate memeplex, and it gave up the ghost and died entirely before they arrived.
Thinking about that happening inside her skull, combined with the sheer weirdness of being off-net—it felt like losing a limb; she kept reflexively flicking her eye to where her feed should be—meant that Kas didn’t pay much attention on the ride. Nothing to see here, anyway, or at least nothing of interest. The Drome and everything around it were Ninth-Empire trash, aping the grandeur of a bygone age. Anything really interesting was long buried. If it were up to Kas, they’d forego the tourist show entirely—a week was barely enough time to get started, why waste any of it—but the Archscholar had paid Homeward Voyages for a tour package along with their transit, and that apparently meant there was nothing to do but grit her teeth and wait until it was over.
Right now, that meant attending a party.
* * *
Kas did a quick assessment of her level of intoxication, weighed the likely risks, then decided fuck it and grabbed something blue and bubbling from the tray of a passing server. Somewhere a watchful drone no doubt added the cost of the drink to the Scholarium’s tab, but fuck that too; the Archscholar could afford to stand Kas a round or two.
It wasn’t like her companions were restraining themselves. They’d been conducted to a vast curving balcony overlooking the Drome, walled in with nearly invisible warglass to give the impression of being under the open air. Here they’d joined a few hundred people from a variety of tours and missions, all gathered under the auspices of Homeward Voyages to eat, swill liquor, and watch priceless antique machines tear one another to pieces for their amusement.
Most of the guests were first-wave, naturally—either wealthy enough to be tourists or important enough to be sent by some institution. The rest of her own party blended in nicely with that crowd—Scholar Firidi One carried himself with all the casual grace of his exalted pedigree, and his primary husband, Scholar Vanalt Two, was an expert at humbly ingratiating himself in august company. Scholar Gneisin One, barely twenty and daughter of one of Sentinel’s founding families, was throwing herself into the booze with all the enthusiasm of a dog first let off the leash.
Like Kas herself, they wore the gauzy, translucent robes of academia, wound multiple times around the body and fastened with a line of silver pins. But they, of course, had the tall, slim frames of first- and second-waves, which made the wrap look shimmery and elegant, while on Kas it bunched and twisted uncomfortably. There were a few other academics in the group, who gravitated to Firidi and Vanalt to do the usual pecking-order dance. The tourists—a more colorful group; scales and feathers seemed to be in this year—bunched around the buffet, chattering happily and ignoring the view. That left Kas with nobody to talk to, which was a blessing. With no network, you couldn’t even fake an urgent blip to get out of a dead-end conversation.
The bubbling blue thing had a sour aftertaste, but at least it had some kick. Kas sipped, made a face, and stared down at the Drome. It wasn’t much to look at—an oval floor a few hundred meters across, surrounded by level after level of tiered seating. Time and neglect had stripped off the fabric and paint, leaving only the monocrete foundations, a brutalist sketch of an amphitheater in keeping with twisted, decaying skyline that stretched beyond it. Overhead, the sky was nearly black with endless clouds, which flickered with caged lightning but refused to actually rain.
When Kas had pictured the famous mecha fights of Old Earth, she’d imagined—well, not this. Something grander than a box full of overstuffed tourists staring down at a wreck.
“Pretty good, yeah?”
Kas blinked and looked up. A young woman was standing beside her, looking down at the arena with shining eyes. She was paler than anyone from Sentinel, built like a third-wave, with a dusting of freckles, a pug nose, and flyaway brown hair. She wore a blue jumpsuit, half open, with a stained gray undershirt beneath. Kas guessed her for twenty, though age was a tricky thing to figure between planets.
“I suppose.” Taking a sip from her blue bubbling thing to cover her confusion, Kas considered how best to get rid of this person. If they’d been on a civilized planet, she’d have had a dozen options; then again, on a civilized planet, she’d have been broadcasting mood signifiers and contact protocols that would have made it unforgivably rude to speak to her in the first place when she wanted to introvert. Things being what they were, she settled on a haughty indifference. “If you like ruins.”
“Not the Drome,” the girl said. She had an odd singsong accent Kas had never heard before. “The warbots. ’Ent seen those before, I spec.”
“Not in person,” Kas admitted. She pinch-to-zoomed on one of them, and when that naturally failed to work leaned forward with a sigh. “The one on the left looks like a DreadCarl mark four.”
“DC-3B1,” the girl corrected, but she sounded impressed. “You know your warbots. A fan, yeah?”
“Of a sort,” Kas said. When the girl’s raised eyebrows invited her to continue, she sighed and admitted, “I’m a research historian. Old tech is my job.”
“Really? Killer.” The girl grinned. Two of her teeth were crooked, Kas noted absently. “You spend all day poking old bots?”
“I spend all day going to meetings and begging for grant money,” Kas muttered. A little too honest, there; probably the alcohol speaking. “Poking old bots is more like a hobby.”
The girl gave a cheerful blink of incomprehension, then shrugged. “Killer,” she said, an apparently all-purpose adjective. She extended a hand, which it took Kas a moment to remember she was supposed to shake, something she’d only seen in period dramas. “I’m Zhi.”
“Scholar Zychtykas Three,” Kas said, trying to figure out how long one was supposed to spend clasping the other’s hand. “Call me Kas.”
“Kas,” Zhi said, trying out the sound. She disentangled their fingers and pointed down to the arena floor again. “What do you think of the other? Flash, yeah?”
Kas peered down into the arena again, bemused. In truth, mecha were not her area of expertise, but the DreadCarl was an Eighth-Empire mainstay, manufactured by the million. Its basic shape—ten meters tall, wide enough that it looked squat, with powerful arms and a crested “helmet”—was instantly recognizable. The other mecha, the one that was to be its opponent, looked like a hodgepodge, with one arm longer than the other and one leg painted a bright green that didn’t match. She raised her eyebrows.
“It looks like scrap,” she said.
“It ’ent scrap,” Zhi said. “You should see it move. Like lightning.” She gave her gap-toothed smile again. “Quick-an’-smart beats big-an’-dumb every time, yeah?”
“If you say so.”
“Bet on it?” The words came out a little too fast. “Ten thousand ’terci.”
Kas blinked. Between the alcohol and Zhi’s accent, she felt a few seconds behind the conversation. “Ten thousand sesterce?”
“Done!” Zhi snapped, then looked overhead. “Register that!”
“Registered,” said an artificial voice. A drone the size of Kas’s fist hummed down to hover alongside them. “Ten thousand sesterce on the outcome of the next contest, between Scholar Zychtykas Three and Pilot Zhi Zero. House fee will be ten percent.”
“Wait just a fucking minute,” Kas hissed. Her head was swimming. “I didn’t—”
“’Bout time to get started,” Zhi said. “Wish me luck, yeah?” She cocked her head. “Or, maybe not?”
Before Kas could get another word out, she was gone.
* * *
Ten thousand ’terci!
The number marched round and round through Zhi’s head, with all its wonderful round zeroes. She ducked out of the off-worlder’s box through one of the kitchen entrances, ignoring the alarmed shout of a waiter who dropped a tray of something green as they nearly collided. Zhi snagged one of the little morsels out of the air and popped it in her mouth as she rounded the corner into a storeroom. Fresh fruit popped between her teeth, sweet as soda, tangy like orange gummies. It was almost worth breaking in here just for the food, and she wished she had time to stay and get proper drunk on the fancy alco.
No one had raised an eyebrow at a scav snatching drinks. One man had even complimented her on her fashion sense!
Off-worlders are dumb as ’crete, ’ent they? Always said it.
In the back of the storeroom was a half-size door, leading to a vertical tunnel for the use of porter bots, long abandoned. Zhi flipped it up, slid through, and closed it again. Her little override was still stuck against the lock, and she yanked it free, which should hopefully keep anyone from following. Then it was just a matter of shimmying down the vertical shaft, which she was just about the right size to do, back jammed against one side and knees and palms against the other.
Ten thousand ’terci!
It wouldn’t be quite that, of course. The House would take its cut, and she’d tapped her credit to get Speedy up and running. Even after paying all that off, though, there would be a healthy chunk left. Enough to spend a few years without fighting, if she wanted. Or enough to roll into her real project, her chance to get away from the Drome forever.
All she had to do now was win.
Easy as sludge. Her heart was already pounding, and she forced herself to concentrate on descending the shaft. One thing at a time, yeah?
She felt a pang of conscience for Kas, the off-worlder, but only a small one. She’d seemed nice enough, and she’d looked almost as out of place as Zhi at the party, all short-an’-curvy among the other tall, spindly tourists. And she knew something about bots. Most off-worlders wouldn’t know a DreadCarl from a forklift. Anyone who knew something about bots, in Zhi’s opinion, couldn’t be too bad of a person.
Still. Kas could afford it. Off-worlders are rich-an’-comfy, ’ent they? Worse came to worst she’d have to sell off one of those fancy robes they all wore, that were barely solid enough to hide all your bits. Not that I mind, yeah? Kas had bits worth ogling, under other circumstances.
One thing at a time. Zhi glanced down, pulled in her legs, and dropped the rest of the way, hitting the bottom of the shaft in a crouch. First win the slagging match, yeah?
From here she was in her element, among the maze of corridors and tunnels that ran under the Drome. Zhi headed back to the arena floor at an easy run, crossing from service passage to drainpipe to elevator shaft, through doorways and up rusty ladders installed by generations of scavs. In no time she popped out onto the main steps leading up to the floor of the Drome, where a small crowd of her own people had gathered. Most were just assorted scavs come to ogle the bots, kept back by a couple of House reps in dark, mirror-finished armor. Zhi grinned at them, and they didn’t stop her as she strolled past, out onto the floor.
Speedy was waiting for her, his legs pulled up in front of him, his mismatched arms folded across his knees. Kas was right, he did look like scrap, but the off-worlder couldn’t see the hours Zhi and Solomon had put into the warbot. Speedy might be ugly, but his servos were fast, and his reflexes were tuned to Zhi’s. Quick-an’-smart beats big-an’-dumb, yeah?
Speaking of big-an’-dumb. Custis was waiting for her. The other pilot was huge for a zero, towering over Zhi, with a thickly muscled frame he hadn’t gotten drinking soda and eating sludge. He’d been a scav once, but he’d worked for the House for at least a decade.
“Hey, Zhi,” he said.
“Hey yourself,” Zhi said, trying for nonchalance. “’Ent you got checks to be running?”
“Techs’ll do ’em,” Custis said with a broad grin. He’d lost most of his teeth as a scav, and had since had them replaced with polished chrome. His smile gleamed. “Wanted to have a word, yeah?”
“So have it,” Zhi said. “We ’ent all got other people doing our work for us.”
“You could, though,” Custis said. “Nass would take you for the House in a hot second.”
“I slagging bet he would,” Zhi said. “’Cause he knows I’m ten times better than you, yeah?”
Custis’s cheek twitched, but he maintained his smile. “Everyone knows you’re on the edge. No more credit. How many times have you patched this piece of junk back together?” He slammed a hand against Speedy’s leg, dislodged a patch of rust, and laughed. “After this you won’t have a choice.”
“After I tear your botbot to pieces, maybe Nass can beg me to take your job.”
“Zhi—” Custis’s lips curled back further. “You’re going to be working for the House, one way or the other. You need to decide how hard you want that to be, yeah?”
“That all you got to say?”
“For now.” He rapped Speedy’s leg with his knuckles. “We’ll see who’s smiling after.”
“Slag off, then.”
Custis sauntered away, deliberately taking his time. Zhi made an obscene gesture after him and turned back to Speedy. Solomon had emerged from between the botbot’s legs, blinking owlishly behind too-large spectacles. The mechanic was a year or two younger than Zhi, with the slightly wasted frame of most scavs. He wore a stained coverall too large for his meager body, with extra fabric tied off at the wrists and ankles.
“He didn’t touch anything, did he?” Solomon said, glaring after Custis. “Did you see if he touched anything?”
“He just banged on the armor a little,” Zhi said. “Custis ’ent got the brains for sabotage, yeah? Anyway, listen. I got the bet!”
“You got it?” Solomon blinked again.
“Signed-an’-sealed. One of the idiot off-worlders put ten thousand on us.”
“House cut is ten percent,” Solomon muttered to himself, “we owe Meri the Jaxican another fifteen hundred, Jast will take three hundred, maybe—”
“It’s enough,” Zhi said. “More than enough. This time next week we could have everything we need, yeah?”
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Solomon said. He pushed his spectacles up his nose, where they immediately slid back down. “If Meri even has the parts.”
“The point is,” Zhi said, “I was right, yeah? Worth the risk.”
“If you win.”
“Speedy can run rings around some slagging DreadCarl. With all the tweaks you made—”
“I’m still worried about the joints.” Solomon frowned. “At full speed we’ll be pushing them past their ratings.”
“Speedy won’t let me down.” Zhi rapped the patchwork bot affectionately. “You got him all tuned?”
“More or less.” Solomon straightened up, tugging his fingers through his ragged mop of curly hair. “Please be careful, Zhi.”
“Always am, yeah?” Zhi wrapped the embarrassed mechanic in a brief hug. “Come back safe-an’-sound, like always. You worry too much.”
“No such thing,” Solomon said as she pulled away.
He gave a weak wave as Zhi ran around the back of the warbot, scrambled up the ladder there, and slid over Speedy’s shoulder and down into the waiting cockpit in his chest cavity. It was cramped, barely big enough for her to spread her arms, with a gimbaled seat facing a dozen small screens. Zhi slid into the chair and strapped herself in with the ease of long practice, the worn, tape-patched cushions molded to her shape. Her left hand slapped switches, closing the cockpit with a hiss and bringing the screens to life with views of the outside. Three of them flickered, and one remained entirely dark until she gave it a good kick and it reluctantly cleared.
Speedy’s control leads, a pair of long wires ending in sticky gel, went onto the jacks behind Zhi’s ears. Most scavs didn’t even have jacks, but you couldn’t pilot without them, and Zhi had spent a year in debt to get hers installed. They were simple input/output, no internal processing, nothing for the omnipresent malware to attack. Speedy’s OS bloomed in her vision, his status board blooming in her peripheral vision—some green, mostly yellow, nothing crimson—and his artificial muscles clenching and humming as she ran through her checks.
An external feed rang in her ears, the House flack running the game for the benefit of the tourists. “Pilots, are you ready to begin?”
“Bet your ass,” Custis said, his amplified voice ringing through the Drome.
Zhi glanced at Solomon, visible in one of the screens, working on an external display. He gave it a few more taps, then shot her a thumbs-up and backed away.
“Ready,” Zhi said, and heard it echo through the external feed.
“The match will continue until one mecha is disabled or the pilot surrenders,” the House flack said. “Deliberate killing blows are not permitted. Begin!”
Speedy surged to his feet with a whine. He was tall and ungainly compared to the squat, purposeful DreadCarl, and his mismatched arms gave him a half-finished look, but Zhi knew it was an illusion. Solomon worked his ass off tuning him up. When the warbot moved forward, it was with a smooth, even gait, a trot that gradually built into a run.
Across the floor of the Drome, Custis’s DreadCarl shook itself out. It was painted a flaking black, with red accents, the impression of stoutness enhanced by the thick armor plating bolted across its joints and torso. It carried an oval shield in one hand, rimmed with spikes, and a brutal-looking axe in the other. Custis turned in place, shield raised, as Zhi sprinted toward him.
Knows he can’t keep up with me. Zhi grinned savagely. ’Ent gonna save him.
Speedy’s weapons were a pair of long knives strapped to his back, each blade longer than a human was tall. They were as strong and sharp as Solomon could make them, but Zhi didn’t fool herself that she could punch through the DreadCarl’s armor. Go for the gaps. Wear him down, yeah? She threw herself forward.
Custis held his ground, meeting her charge with his shield, his axe swinging in from her right. Zhi saw that coming kilometers away, already turning. Speedy slammed into the shield with one shoulder, a glancing blow that sent the warbot into a spin and rocked Custis back on his heels. Before he could readjust, Zhi dug in her back heel, metal screaming as it dug into monocrete, and lunged low and fast. One knife came out, slashing at the back of the DreadCarl’s knee. The screech of contact was audible even through the cockpit walls, and sparks sprayed like an incandescent fountain. Then she was past, the DreadCarl clumsily turning in her wake, axe swinging a wild, pointless arc.
Yes! Zhi bounced in her seat as Speedy got clear, turned in a neat arc, and came around again. Yes, yes, yes, I can do this, I can take him. Ten thousand ’terci!
Custis half turned, expecting her to try the same approach again. Instead she zagged right, ducking under the axe’s arc, her knife slashing against the DreadCarl’s elbow. Armor screamed and broke with an almighty crunch, sending half a plate spinning away to crash against the arena wall. Zhi pivoted on one foot again, delivering another blow to the DreadCarl’s rear that sent the heavier machine staggering forward.
Another pass, and another, and another. Speedy’s cockpit was growing warm, and drops of water from Zhi’s hot breath condensed on the monitors. Slagging break, you piece of scrap!
The DreadCarl was tougher than she’d bargained for. A half-dozen hits had mangled the armor around its joints and left bright scars on the metal beneath, but all she’d gotten for her pains was a slight limp on the left side. Custis’s axe had yet to connect, but more of the status indicators in the corner of Zhi’s eye were slipping from green to yellow. Fucking slagheap!
“Sol!” she called, over a private link. “I need more power!”
“Bad idea,” Solomon sent back, his voice scratchy with static. “I told you, the joints—”
“Just talk me through it, yeah?”
Reluctantly, he muttered a few command strings. Zhi repeated them through her jacks, watching her screens. Custis seemed confused by her pause, the DreadCarl shifting uncertainly. Finally, it lumbered into a slow jog, coming at her shield first.
Limiters released, the system told her.
She pushed off, and Speedy flew, meters between each enormous bounding step. Zhi gave a high, delighted laugh, closing the distance with the DreadCarl, ducking to get under the rim of its shield. Her knife slammed into the other bot’s knee with all the momentum of her run behind it, and this time the armor tore away entirely, the joint half shattering under the impact. Custis staggered, and Zhi planted her feet, skidding to a halt in a spray of sparks. One more hit—
Warnings jangled in her ear, and part of the status display flashed red. Through her jacks, Zhi felt Speedy’s ankle shatter, a nearly physical impact that lit up her leg with sympathetic pain. Her slide turned into a fall, the lanky warbot coming down heavily on his face, leaving her hanging against her straps. One of her leads came loose, her feed from the bot suddenly flickery and intermittent, and she groped for it desperately with one hand while trying to get Speedy to roll over.
She managed both, eventually, pressing the lead back into place as the bot heaved himself onto one side. Half her screens were dark, but the other half showed the DreadCarl coming, one leg dragging behind it, axe still in hand.
Almost got him down. Zhi’s teeth were clenched, her hair matted with sweat. One more hit. Speedy’s right ankle was gone, and his left was damaged. She probably couldn’t stand up, but she could get to her knees. Come a little bit closer . . .
The DreadCarl lurched forward, axe rising. Zhi pounced, coming up to her knees, knives in both hands now. She swung for Custis’s bad leg—
—and missed. The DreadCarl shifted to one side, not nearly as badly damaged as it had seemed moments earlier. He slagging baited me—
The axe came down on Speedy’s shoulder, and Zhi screamed.
The pain wasn’t real, not exactly, just an artifact of the link, but it felt real for just a moment. Metal screeched and tore, and a second blow severed Speedy’s arm entirely, tons of metal crashing to the arena floor. Energy popped and crackled at the joint, and fluids sprayed. Custis lashed out with his shield, catching Speedy in the chest and driving him onto his back, Zhi slamming into her battered seat with tooth-crack force. She went for him with her remaining arm, weakly, but he slammed a foot down on Speedy’s wrist.
“Surrender.” Custis’s voice crackled over the link.
“Go fuck yourself, slag.” Zhi tasted blood in her mouth. “Limp-dicked coward slagfucker—”
The DreadCarl raised its axe, reversing it, the butt equipped with a nasty spike. Custis brought this down, straight at Speedy’s chest, straight at her, and Zhi screamed. Sparks exploded through the cockpit, screens going to snow. A second blow from the DreadCarl’s brutally strong arms tore the whole frontpiece away, leaving her staring up at the huge machine without the benefit of cameras, watching helpless as the axe rose and came down again—
—and halted, a few meters above her. Custis’s voice crackled in her ear.
“You’re finished, Zhi.” She could hear his elation. “The House owns you now.”
* * *
Arguing with a bot wasn’t easy at the best of times, and being suddenly aware of just how drunk you actually were didn’t make it any easier. Kas stared at the little hovering thing with a strong desire to smash it to the ground with a drinks tray and grind it underfoot. Unfortunately, she suspected this would only make things worse.
She tried again.
“I don’t have ten thousand sesterce.”
The bot buzzed contemplatively. “You are here under the auspices of the Sentinel Scholarium, and have been authorized to access its credit line. We have determined that credit to be adequate.”
Fuck me with a neutronium strap-on, Kas thought, and narrowly managed not to say it aloud. Ending up in hock to some Old Earth gambling den would be bad enough. If she lost the Scholarium ten thousand sesterce, she might as well throw herself out the airlock on the way home. “Fired” wouldn’t even begin to cover it—the Archscholar would have her banned from every responsible profession and she’d spend the next two decades in mandatory reeducation.
“But I didn’t even agree to the fucking bet!” she said.
“Analysis of your vocal pattern indicated consent,” the bot said smugly. “Details of wagering procedure were sent to you as part of your Customer Agreement.”
Kas closed her eyes, pulse pounding in her temples. Of course extensive, unreadable blink-to-agree contracts were still considered binding here on Old Earth, junkheap of the empires. A good intersystem lawyer might get her out of it, but she couldn’t afford one, and had no way to recruit any sort of help anyway without tipping off Firidi and the rest of the scholars. Fuck fuck fuck—
“The match is beginning, Scholar,” the bot said. “Good fortune to you.”
Under other circumstances, watching hundreds of tons of ten-meter robot smashing into one another at high speed might have been, if not Kas’s preferred entertainment, at least exciting. As it was, she could only stare through the warglass with a sense of mounting despair. The DreadCarl, so formidable-looking, was outmaneuvered from the beginning by the patchwork mecha Zhi had called Speedy. Kas had to admit the girl’s claims about her bot were at least close to accurate—it moved with a smooth synchronicity, while the DreadCarl shifted awkwardly, like a badly programmed toy.
I wonder what the code looks like? The majority of Speedy’s parts seemed to be late-period, Eighth Empire at the earliest, but the mecha’s movement implied considerably more sophisticated processing than that era had allowed. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a Sixth-Empire core. But getting it hooked up without a gateway layer introducing extra latency—
She slammed her head not-too-gently against the glass. Does it really fucking matter right now? Speedy’s knives scored against the heaver bot’s vulnerable joints, again and again, and with each hit Kas’s stomach sank. Forget the projects she’d hoped to pursue here on Earth; her chance of ever seeing another piece of ancient code was rapidly going down the vacctube. She glared at the DreadCarl, willing its pilot to do better. Come on, come on, come on!
Speedy went under the other bot’s shield, slashed at the back of its knee, and skidded to a perfect halt, ready for another blow—
—and one of its ankles blew out with a crash and a shower of sparks, sending the patchwork bot to the monocrete.
Yes! Kas slammed her hands against the glass. Oh, Sacred Throne. She’d never been a religious person, it was terribly unfashionable on Sentinel and smacked of third-wave superstition, but she swore to herself then and there she would offer a sacrifice at the Throne every day for a year if Zhi contrived to lose. Come on, you sneaky little girl, you can’t get out of this, can you? Surrender already!
The DreadCarl dodged a last blow and brought its axe down, severing Speedy’s arm at the shoulder. The heavy warbot forced its opponent on its back, and flipped the axe around, slamming the spiked butt into Speedy’s cockpit.
Surrender! Kas urged. The scene in front of her felt strangely silent, isolated. Any similar event back on Sentinel would be plastered over with commentary and emoji from the spectators. Kas blinked as the DreadCarl raised its axe again. He won’t actually—I mean, not even on Old Earth—
The blow fell, ripping the whole front panel off of Speedy. Kas swore aloud. “Fucking Throne!”
“The match is decided,” the officiant declared. “Pilot Custis Zero is the winner.”
Right. Kas let out a breath. Old Earth might be a mess, but it wasn’t savage. This wasn’t an Eighth-Empire blood sport. Zhi will be all right. Her hands slipped off the glass. And that little fucker owes me ten thousand sesterce!
“Congratulations, Scholar Zychtykas Three,” the bot said at her elbow.
“Fucking Throne,” Kas repeated quietly, and took a deep breath. “So do you just put the money in my account?”
“Funds will be transferred to you once they are received from Pilot Zhi Zero,” the bot said. “Her credit instrument is routed via an out-system bank, so settlement may take some time.”
“Of course,” Kas muttered to herself.
“In the meantime, the House cut of one thousand sesterce will be deducted from the credit of the Sentinel Scholarium,” the bot burbled happily. “Thank you for gaming with us.”
“Wait.” The little thing tried to hover away, but Kas grabbed it with both hands. “Wait a minute. What did you say?”
“Please release this unit, or security will be notified.”
“Just repeat what you told me, please.”
It buzzed through her fingers, irritated. “The House cut of one thousand sesterce will be deducted from—”
“I won the bet, didn’t I?”
“Correct. Pilot Zhi Zero owes you ten thousand sesterce. You owe the House a one-thousand-sesterce fee. Since your account is not currently adequate, your organization’s credit will be—”
“And how long will it take to get the money from Zhi?”
“Unknown. Her credit is with the First Bank of Rigel Prime, and communication lag—”
Kas’s jaw fell open. She blinked at the bot, which was still going on about long-distance fees.
“Rigel Prime,” Kas interrupted, through gritted teeth, “was blown into gravel by Emperor Reaps-A-Dark- Harvest.” Her voice dropped to a hiss. “Four. Thousand. Years. Ago.”
“Communications may pose some difficulty,” the bot said blithely, “but the cryptographic signature and proof of transmission on the credit instrument—”
She fucking faked it. Of course she had. Zhi hadn’t looked like she had ten thousand sesterce to spare, either. Oh, fucking Throne. Losing a thousand sesterce of the Scholarium’s money might be better than losing ten thousand, but only in the same sense that being thrown in a furnace is better than being thrown into the sun.
“All right,” Kas said, very slowly. “I would like to cancel the bet. I can do that, can’t I, since I won it? I don’t need her money. We can call the whole thing off.”
She waited, heart in her throat, while the bot whirred and clicked to itself. Finally, with great reluctance, it said, “House rules state that wagers can be canceled—”
“Then do it!”
“—with the explicit agreement of both parties.”
“She lost the bet!” Kas exploded. “Of course she’ll want to cancel it!”
“House rules state—”
Kas hurled the little thing against the warglass window as hard as she could, and took off running.
* * *
“Zhi!” Solomon’s voice, breaking through the fog of pain. “Zhi, are you all right?”
“All right” did not, in any way, describe how Zhi felt. But she forced her eyes open and ripped the leads from her jacks, letting poor Speedy’s blaring-red status display and clanging alarms vanish. That left her lying on her wrecked chair, staring up through where the front of the cockpit had been at the gray, flickering sky. She popped the restraints and unbuckled herself, groaning, and tested her limbs.
Nothing broken. Except slagging everything obviously. Any hopes she had for the rest of her life were in pieces along with her warbot. We were so slagging close.
“Zhi!” Solomon’s bespectacled face appeared over the side of the broken cockpit.
“I ’ent dead,” Zhi said. “Just a little bruised, yeah?”
“You have to move!” Solomon said. “Custis wasn’t kidding. There are House guards coming.”
Oh, slagging corpse-rats. Zhi scrambled to her feet, standing on the now-horizontal chair. From there she could reach one of the torn struts. The sharp edges dug into her hands, but she levered herself up until she could hook her legs over the edge of the huge wound in Speedy’s skin, and from there a bit of acrobatic contortion got her standing on his stomach beside Solomon.
The DreadCarl was nearby, struggling to kneel with one damaged leg. I managed that much, yeah? As she watched, it finally settled down, and the cockpit opened. Custis scrambled out, descending the ladder in his mecha’s back. More worrying, the House flack was heading their way from across the arena, with a couple of armed and armored guards in tow.
“Come on,” Zhi said. She jumped off the mech to the monocrete, absorbing the fall with a crouch, then turned around and caught Solomon when he jumped after her. The nearest edge of the arena was only a couple of dozen meters away, and she knew the area well—there was a service elevator that still worked. Best bet, yeah? She winced at the thought of wagers. So slagging close.
“Zhi!” Custis, a little wobbly on his feet but improving with every stride, started across the ’crete toward her. “Just stay put, would you? Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“Slag off with a blender!” Zhi shouted back at him.
She tugged Solomon to follow her, but he pulled free of her grip and shook his head.
“I’ll slow them down as much as I can,” he said. “I’ll be fine, they don’t care about me.” When she hesitated, he gave her a push. “Go, Zhi, unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a slave of the House!”
Slag and slime. Zhi looked at the rapidly approaching troopers, ducked her head, and started running.
“Hey!” Custis shouted. “Throne curse it, Zhi—let go of me!” He’d started running as well, but Solomon had intercepted him, the diminutive mechanic grabbing hold of the burly pilot’s leg like blast-tick and refusing to let go. Custis cuffed him across the head, but he only held on tighter. “Don’t be a fool!”
Better a fool than a slave, yeah? The troopers were closing, but she had enough of a lead to reach the service door. They won’t shoot yet. They want me as a nice-an’-quiet pilot for their fights, not a slagged corpse. Still, her back itched as she bolted for the service tunnel.
One last look back showed her Custis finally prying Solomon loose and joining the troopers in pursuit. Zhi put her head down and ran, completely missing the figure in diaphanous gray robes trying to flag her down.
* * *
Descending from the glassed-in balcony to the arena floor turned out to be a matter of simply following every stairway and ladder that led down, while trying desperately to keep from becoming disoriented. Fortunately, Kas had always had a good sense of direction, unlike the first- and second-waves who needed algo assistance to find their way to the toilet. She pushed through a set of swinging doors, leaving the furnished and carpeted section of the Drome, and pounded down a bare monocrete tunnel.
Every part of her mind that wasn’t rigid with terror or drowned in alcohol was screaming at her that this was a bad idea. Old Earth might not be savage, but it was indisputably unpleasant, and she could all-too-easily imagine what nasty things could happen to an off-worlder who wandered away from her tour group. But if there was any chance of getting out from under whatever insanity Zhi had caught her in, she had to catch up with the girl before she disappeared. And since she apparently scammed the authorities with a bogus credit doc, I’m guessing she’s going to try to disappear pretty fucking quick.
A twisting stairway took her down to what she guessed was ground level, ending in a broad monocrete tunnel with a high, curved roof, big enough for a warbot to walk down. It hadn’t been used for that purpose in some time, though, and it was crowded with debris—chunks of broken ’crete, rusting wrecks of small machines, accumulations of scrap metal and plastic trash with shredded, colorful labels. To Kas’s left, it continued on into darkness, while to her right it let onto the Drome floor. She was close—she could see the kneeling shape of the DreadCarl, and the sprawled, twisted figure of Zhi’s mecha.
Zhi herself was on the ground, hurrying closer. Kas could see the DreadCarl’s pilot, a big man, apparently fighting a younger boy and shouting something. Zhi ignored him, sprinting now, dodging through the rubble. Kas stood up and waved.
“Zhi!” she said, but apparently not loud enough, because the girl just kept running. With a muttered oath, Kas started after her, cursing her scholar’s robe; it was meant for sitting in a library immersed in ancient archives, not chasing through ruins. “Zhi, wait!”
Zhi did not wait. The tunnel grew darker the further they came from the entrance, and the girl was visible as little more than an agile shadow. Kas barked her shin on a torn block of monocrete, swore again, and raised her voice.
“Zhi! I’m not here to collect, Throne damn it, I just want—would you wait?”
She hurried onward, limping slightly. Zhi was out of sight, now, the rubble just darker patches in the gloom. Kas’s heart sank further. A little ways further on, the ground underfoot turned from monocrete to metal, her boots clanking with every step. She paused for a moment, listening, but heard no other footfalls.
She’s gone. Kas stopped beside a rusted-out metal crate and fought for breath. Sacred fucking Throne. She felt more like an idiot than ever. I should have known better than to chase after her. This was Zhi’s home, and if she didn’t want to be found, presumably she had ways to vanish. Which leaves me completely and utterly fucked.
Kas leaned against the crate and sighed. Maybe I should just go throw myself on Firidi’s mercy. She’d always gotten along all right with the old scholar. At least, he smiles at me at parties, even if he can’t be bothered to say hello. If she offered to pay back the thousand sesterce, maybe Firidi could be persuaded to keep the fact that she’d lost university funds from the Archscholar.
Not fucking likely. If she’d been a first-wave like Gneisin, of ancient pedigree, no doubt even the Archscholar would have bent every rule in the book and laughed everything off as “youthful indiscretion.” But Kas had fought all her life to reach even her modest position, and she was acutely aware that any third-wave who tripped up even slightly would find a dozen others just behind her, ready to pull her down and take her place. Why would Firidi or the Archscholar put themselves out helping someone they can easily replace?
Fuck. She sank to her knees, rusted metal scratchy against her back, and fought against the sobs that threatened suddenly to overwhelm her. Fuck, fuck, fu—
Bright lights snapped on with a clank, turning the tunnel into a sharp-edged hash of shadows. Blinking, Kas wiped at her eyes and made out three figures standing in the tunnel, back the way they’d come. Two wore red-painted armor and faceless visors, with the lights fixed to their shoulderplates. The third was the big, broad-shouldered man who’d piloted the DreadCarl.
The armored figures, Kas noticed abruptly, carried squat, ugly-looking rifles. She knew the shape from vids and sims, but she’d never seen one in person.
From where they were looking, she guessed they couldn’t see her, sitting amongst the debris. She thought about standing up and identifying herself, but the sight of the guns gave her pause. But they have to be with the authorities, don’t they?
“Zhi!” the pilot said. “I know you’re here. We don’t want to hurt you.”
Of course. No doubt what passed for the law here would be just as interested in tracking down the fleeing fraudster as Kas was. Maybe they can help me. She gathered herself to get to her feet—
“But we will,” the big man went on, “if we have to.”
One of the armored figures brought rifle to shoulder and fired a burst, aiming high. The strobing flash was bright even against the spotlight, and the sound was shattering in the enclosed space, a cacophonous roar punctuated by cracks and pings as the bullets hit and ricocheted. Kas doubled over, hands pressed to her ears. The thought of white-hot metal zipping around, moving so fast that it wouldn’t even notice if it happened to encounter a slightly pudgy third-wave scholar, only reduce her insides to the consistency of ground meat and move happily on—
She wanted to scream, and didn’t dare.
The firing cut off, leaving her ears ringing with echoes. The pilot raised his voice. “Come on, Zhi! Don’t make me get rough.”
There was an extended screech of metal on metal, as something ancient and rusty inexorably shifted. The ground under Kas’s feet shivered, then gave a tiny lurch, enough to throw her off-balance. Then it dropped out from under her, throwing her against the rusted crate and sending her stomach into her throat. The spotlights vanished abruptly, and she was falling through absolute darkness.
* * *
It felt like an eternity before Kas got ahold of herself, but it could only have been a few seconds. The falling sensation vanished, and her feet were once again firmly planted on the metal floor. But they were still moving, blurred lights appearing and vanishing around her, the ground vibrating with a steady buzz.
She was on an elevator platform, she realized, a big one, moving downward. Which made sense, the scholar part of her mind reported—if the tunnel had been for moving warbots to the arena floor, there had to be some way of getting the warbots into the tunnel. From the speed they seemed to be moving, they were going a long way down. On a civilized planet, with a network and a locator grid, she could have immediately called up a map and figured out how far she’d come and where she was likely to end up. Here, all she could do was grit her teeth and wait.
After another few seconds, the platform slowed, the hard acceleration less surprising but still unpleasant. It coasted to an abrupt stop with a clank, and the vibration ceased, leaving Kas trembling herself in sympathy. At first she could see nothing, but soon a faint glow appeared overhead, strengthening gradually to a weak twilight. It came from a meandering strip painted on the ceiling, which was the same vaulted monocrete as the tunnel above, and revealed a similar stretch of empty corridor, pocked with small craters, floor littered with fragments.
Someone shifted. Kas froze, and watched as Zhi got up from behind a broken-down lifter bot. The girl was visible only in silhouette, but she moved slowly, with a feeling of utter exhaustion. She picked her way through the debris on the elevator and then headed off down the tunnel.
For a long second, Kas hesitated. It was possible she could find the controls for the elevator—everything on Earth had to have a manual control, didn’t it? If it wasn’t locked, she might be able to get back up. Right back to a bunch of armored gunmen who seem to want to shoot first and ask questions later.
On the other hand, if she stayed put, Zhi would quickly be out of sight, and then her only other option would be to become hopelessly lost, starve, and die. On the third hand, which Kas had occasionally contemplated having installed, she was no longer eager to confront Zhi herself. If people were actually shooting at each other, she was so far out of her depth she could no longer see the surface. Better to take her chances with the Archscholar.
Considering all of this, Kas pushed herself to her feet, finding her legs rubbery and uncooperative. Zhi was still visible, but far enough ahead that she probably wouldn’t notice Kas unless she looked backward, and she didn’t seem inclined to do that. Kas followed her at a careful pace, keeping a generous distance between them, enough to run for it if it came to that.
Zhi made a few turns down apparently identical side tunnels, enough to confirm Kas’s assumption that she would be hopelessly lost if she struck out on her own. Eventually she came to a large doorway, warbot-sized like the tunnel itself. There was some kind of terminal on one side, and Zhi went to it, while Kas flattened herself against the wall and waited. After a moment, the doors slid open from the center, grinding and groaning, and Zhi slipped through as soon as they were wide enough to admit her.
Kas gave it a little longer, while the door continued to open, then followed. Beyond was a big, mostly empty room, the walls raw monocrete, a few brighter lights on stands supplementing the gray glow from the ceiling strip. Machinery of various sorts was arranged around the periphery, but Kas gave it only a cursory look, because in the center of the room—
It was a warbot. But it bore the same resemblance to the DreadCarl that a monomolecular-edged ceramic thermocutter did to a crude stone axe or prehistoric steel bayonet. Where the DreadCarl had been all blocky brushed metal, painted with red stripes, this machine was smooth, organic-looking, sleek and black. The surrounding lights reflected off its curved surfaces in smeared streaks. It knelt on one knee, arms crossed, as though in the act of taking an oath. Its head, slightly bent, was a featureless black oval.
That’s . . . old. Kas’s mind was buzzing, cross-referencing and gathering evidence, barely leaving room for conscious thought. Third Empire, maybe. The legendary height of mankind’s technological prowess, before the Fracture, the wars, and the long slide downward. It’s beautiful. She had never seen anything remotely like it in twenty years of study.
Barely aware of what she was doing, Kas moved into the room, walking with the same reverent silence she would have in an ancient, marble-floored library. She stood in front of the bot, and saw her own face reflected in its sleek black armor, distorted like in a funhouse mirror. Reaching out to touch it, she realized she was holding her breath. Her fingers slid, dreamily, over a nearly frictionless surface, as though it was slick with grease.
It looks intact. The number of still-functional Third-Empire relics could be counted on the fingers of one hand, even if you’d had an unfortunate encounter with berserk autochef. The most famous was the battleship Megachiron, which even crippled made the Volstrian fleet an unmatched power amongst the worlds. And that was why there were so few relics left—they were so effective that they got used, over and over, until they finally gave out. What time could not accomplish, the weapons of man did.
If it was Third Empire, the warbot was well over three thousand years old.
I need to see inside. Processors were more likely to have degraded than armor, but if there was anything left it would be the find of a lifetime. The scraps of archeocode in this machine could be the basis of the rest of her career.
The cockpit was open, she saw, a hatch on the bot’s back, not into the chest like the DreadCarl. Moving as if in a dream, Kas found a rickety metal gantry that ran along one wall at the right height to give access. She climbed up a set of creaking stairs and hurried around to it. The hatch, breaking the smooth lines of the warbot’s outer skin, looked almost offensive, but Kas was just glad to see that the inner mechanisms looked reasonably intact.
She reached the edge, and looked down. There was a chair, molded into the back wall, but otherwise the cockpit was just a coffin-sized space as black and featureless as the rest of the bot. Curled up in the chair, arms wrapped around her knees, face buried, was Zhi.
“Oh.” Kas let out a breath, suddenly remembering how she’d gotten here. “Um. Hi.”
Zhi looked up, her eyes red and her face streaked with tears. At the sight of Kas, she unfolded, shockingly fast, hoisting herself out of the warbot’s cockpit and onto the gantry. Kas fell backward, scrambling away on hands and knees, but Zhi was on her immediately. One of the pilot’s hands pressed her shoulder against the metal, while the other snatched a long-bladed knife from a sheath on her back. Kas struggled to focus on the gleaming weapon as Zhi held it poised between them.
“What,” the pilot grated, “are you slagging doing here, yeah?”
* * *
Zhi had hoped that Custis and his thugs would conclude she’d escaped another way and give up. When the guard had started shooting, though, she’d instinctively slapped the elevator button, which in retrospect was probably the kind of reaction they’d been hoping for. The cargo platform had gotten her clear, but now that they knew it still functioned the House would have it watched, which meant one fewer way out.
Not that it mattered. Not that anything matters. She’d staggered the few hundred meters to Alpha Zero’s hangar in a daze. The ancient warbot was waiting for her, as always, looking so gleaming and perfect. And he’d been so close to actually being perfect, too. A few more parts, some software work, and—
Finished. ’S all finished. She clambered into the thing’s cockpit and curled up in the gel-surfaced chair. The smells of the old bot, ancient dust and the ozone tang of her own metalwork, were comforting. She had her own quarters, a hidey-hole down one of the side corridors with a sleeping mat and a few personals, but after all the hours she’d spent here the warbot now felt more like home than anywhere else. And before long, that’ll be gone, too.
Because there was only one choice left, really. She owed the House, now, for the bet with Kas; she owed the scrap dealers for the parts she’d used for Speedy, she owed for food and water on credit, owed Solomon for his work, owed and owed and owed. The only way to pay any of it back was to strip Alpha Zero for parts, sell his ancient muscles and armor and processors off piecemeal. To take the bot she’d spent what felt like half her life restoring and tear it to pieces, and get only a tiny fraction of its true value. Maybe enough to square everyone, to leave her with nothing. Then I can be a slave of the House, all sweet-an’-helpful like Custis would want. And never, ever leave, never see space, never never never—
Never. Zhi choked back a sob. I won’t do it. Better that Alpha Zero stay here, down in the dark-an’-dust, than he get torn to shreds for a quick credit. Maybe someday somebody’ll find him who understands, yeah?
Which left nothing for Zhi herself but—but—
She didn’t know.
Slag me. Her sleeve was wet through with tears.
Above her there was a sound, a footstep on the metal gantry. Zhi looked up, and got a blurry glimpse of a figure bending over her.
They slagging found me! She grabbed for her knife, terror warring in her heart with a kind of fierce exhilaration. Surging upward, she knocked her attacker down and straddled her. Can go down fighting, yeah? And take a few of them with me—
She blinked the tears from her eyes and focused.
It wasn’t Custis or any of his House thugs underneath her, but someone considerably smaller and softer, dressed in a gray robe. Her eyes were very wide, and her breath came in quick gasps. She was terrified, Zhi realized.
“What are you slagging doing here, yeah?” She shook her head, fading adrenaline making her feel slow and heavy.
“Please,” Kas said very quietly. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m not—” Zhi realized she was still holding her knife with the point to Kas’s throat. She hurriedly returned it to its sheath. “Slag it. Sorry. I thought you were . . . someone else, yeah?”
“Okay.” Kas swallowed, her breathing slowing a little. “If you’re not going to kill me, do you think you could get off?”
“Sure,” Zhi muttered, shifting backward. Kas extracted herself and shuffled into a crouch, backing away a few steps. “But how did you get here?”
“I followed you,” Kas said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” She cocked her head. “Well, I guess I meant to at first, but then I got stuck and I didn’t want to get lost—”
“I ’ent following,” Zhi said, scratching the back of her head. “Maybe slow down a bit, yeah?”
“Sorry,” Kas said again. “When that guard started shooting I kind of panicked.”
“You were there?” Zhi said.
“I tried to wave to you!” Kas said.
“I was a little busy, yeah?”
“I understand that now,” Kas said. “I came down to talk to you about the bet, and I saw you run past. I followed you onto the elevator, and then when that pilot—”
“Custis,” Zhi muttered.
“When Custis showed up I hunkered down. And then the elevator turned on, and when we got to the bottom I figured I had better keep up with you or I would never find my way out.” Kas swallowed, some of the color returning to her face. “I wasn’t expecting . . . this.”
I bet you weren’t. Zhi looked the off-worlder over, assessing. She didn’t look quite as . . . off-worlder-y, down here, away from her fancy friends, with her robe mussed and her hair damp with sweat. Doesn’t look half bad, actually, a slightly inappropriate part of Zhi’s mind supplied. Her body had been soft under Zhi’s hips—
Noooot the time, yeah? Her eyes narrowed. What am I supposed to slagging do with her?
“You’re wondering what to do with me,” Kas said.
Zhi knew off-worlders couldn’t really read minds—not like the stories, anyway, not without fancy equipment that wouldn’t work in Earth’s corrosive datasphere—but it still made her sit up straighter. She frowned, then nodded.
“If people knew about this”—Kas gestured at Alpha Zero—“then someone would have told us as soon as we landed. It’d be huge news, especially among scholars. No one did, which means you’re keeping it secret.”
Zhi gave another slow nod. Too smart for her own good, this one.
“Which means now that I’ve seen it . . .” Kas swallowed, apparently not having realized where her own train of thought was leading. “Ah. Maybe . . . we can work something out.” She didn’t sound hopeful.
“It ’ent like that.” Zhi didn’t fancy putting a pretty girl in fear of her life, but mostly she was just tired. She sat down, leaning against the edge of Alpha Zero’s cockpit. “Maybe a month ago I would’ve thought about it, yeah? But now it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.”
“I don’t understand,” Kas said. “This thing must be worth a fortune. Why hide it? And why try to scam me out of ten thousand sesterces when you’re sitting on this?”
“It wasn’t a scam,” Zhi said, then paused at Kas’s look. “All right. Was a scam. Can’t blame me for trying.”
“I can,” Kas said.
Zhi sighed. “Blame me, then. That won’t matter neither.” She rubbed the warbot’s flank affectionately. “Alpha Zero might be worth a fortune, but it ’ent me who owns him, yeah? He’s salvage.”
“The law . . .” Kas said uncertainly.
“’Ent about the law. He’d belong to whoever has the most guns, and that means the House. Same as runs Custis.”
“Ah,” Kas said, looking around the hangar. “And I suppose you can’t exactly move him.”
“Not unless it’s under his own power,” Zhi said. “I could strip him down and sell the parts—”
“No!” Kas said with surprising forcefulness. “Do you have any idea what you have here? This is a Third-Empire warbot, almost intact. That’d be . . .” Her hands moved as she searched for a serious enough word. “Practically sacrilege.”
“Dunno what empire he’s from,” Zhi said, “but when I found him I knew he looked killer. Thought about selling the info to the House, but slag them. I wanted him for myself, yeah? So I started working.”
“Working—” Kas looked around again, this time taking in the equipment set against the walls, the welders, printers, and external processing units. “You’ve been fixing it?”
“Him,” Zhi said. “Yeah. Me and Solomon. If we can get him moving, up to the arena, ’ent nobody could stop us, yeah? Could win enough to get out of here for good. Nearly had it. Just needed a few more parts, some programming time.”
“That’s why you came trying to rip me off?” Kas said. “To get money for parts?”
Zhi gave a tired nod. Kas sat back on her haunches, looking thoughtful.
“So if you came after me for your ten thousand ’terci,” Zhi said, “you probably guessed I ’ent got it.”
“It’s not even the ten thousand I’m worried about,” Kas said. “That ridiculous bot said I owe a thousand just for the privilege of winning.”
“House fee,” Zhi said.
“Which I can’t afford,” Kas said. “I came to ask you to cancel the bet. Apparently we can do that if we both agree.”
Zhi snorted. “Can’t afford. Sure thing, slagger.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re an off-worlder,” Zhi said, though watching Kas’s face she felt herself growing less certain. “Off-worlders are all loaded, else how would you get here, yeah? What’s a thousand ’terci to you?”
“More than I’ve ever had in my account?” Kas said. When Zhi snorted again, her face darkened. “Look, you’re probably right that most people who visit Earth have plenty of money. But I’m only here because I talked the Scholarium into sending me on a research trip, and I could only make the bet because the system lets me access their credit. They can afford it, but if I spend a single half-centi without permission . . .” She drew a finger across her throat.
“Didn’t think off-worlders got slashed for debt,” Zhi said.
“I mean, they wouldn’t literally kill me,” Kas said. “But next best thing. My life would be over.”
“Right.” Zhi pursed her lips, looking thoughtful.
“So can we please just call off the bet?” Kas said. “Do that and show me the way back to the surface, and I swear to the Throne I won’t tell anyone about what you have here.” There was genuine pain in her voice. “Although . . . if you let me put in a quiet word to Scholar Firidi . . .”
“They’d come and take it and leave me with nothing?” Zhi said.
“Probably,” Kas admitted. “All right. I’ll keep quiet. Just . . .”
“I have a better idea,” Zhi said. She couldn’t help a slow smile spreading across her face.
“What do you mean, a better idea?” Kas said.
“You help me get Alpha Zero up-an’-running.”
“What?” Kas shook her head. “I can’t. I mean, the code, maybe, but not here, and—”
“Not the tech stuff, yeah?” Zhi was grinning now. “You use your Schoolario’s credit to buy me the parts I need to finish, and bring ’em down here since I can’t show my face up top anymore.”
“I just told you,” Kas said, “that the Scholarium will tear me to pieces if they catch me spending as much as you’ve already made me, much less more.”
“But not lit’rally?” Zhi waved dismissively. “Anyway, once Alpha Zero is working, I’ll take him up and fight Custis in the all-comers match next week. Put a big enough bet on me, and when I win, all your troubles are over, yeah? Pay back the Scholarium with credit to spare.”
“Assuming you win!” Kas said.
“Course I’ll win,” Zhi scoffed. “You saw the fight today. If Speedy’s ankle hadn’t given out, I’d have been a lock, yeah? Can you imagine what Alpha Zero will do to a clunker like that DreadCarl?”
Kas blinked, then shook her head. “I can’t. If the scholars check their accounts before the fight, or if anything goes wrong, I’m completely fucked. I wish you luck, but I can’t be involved in this. Can we please just call off the bet and pretend all this never happened?”
“Nope,” Zhi said. “’Cause here’s the thing. This is my only shot, yeah? I’m in debt to the House. And they will, lit’rally, slash my throat, or make me into a slave, or whatever they slagging want. And just because I’m not going to knife a pretty girl who ’ent fighting back doesn’t mean I have to roll over when she bats her eyes at me.”
“I am not batting my eyes,” Kas growled.
“So you can take your chances with the House and your scholars,” Zhi went on. “Or you can help me, and maybe fix everything, yeah? Which is it going to be?”
She glared at Kas. Kas stared back, lips tightening.
* * *
Fuck me with a neutronium strap-on, Kas thought, and leave me to dry on a Throne-damned pulsar.
She had a sudden, profound wish that Emperor Haberistus II & IV & VIII hadn’t succeeded in his quest to remove all possibility of time travel from the continuum. Could I borrow the time machine just for, like, a minute. I just need to go back and warn myself to give up on this whole Old Earth trip. Just stay home, get drunk, and have a sim-fling with a stranger, resign myself to a normal third-wave life, and it’ll be better than all this.
Sadly, tachyons were forevermore out of reach, and people were stuck with the results of their terrible decisions, even if they’d only tried their best all along and honestly what the actual fuck was she supposed to do?
Confess everything to the scholars, accept professional ruin, and endure the smug look on a bunch of perfect first-wave faces.
Or go along with Zhi’s madness, and hope that it didn’t get her literally instead of figuratively murdered.
It was no choice at all, really. Better to push off the inevitable a little longer, even if it meant doing insane things. Which is how Kas found herself following Zhi’s directions to reach the scav town under the Drome.
Good sense of direction or no, she’d hit at least four dead ends on her way, and had to laboriously back up to a place she could identify on the dumb hard-copy map Zhi had sketched for her. Under the skin of ruins, Old Earth was a hive of metal and monocrete many layers deep—whether she was underground, or the original ground layer had been buried long ago, Kas had no idea. She followed tunnels, ladders, and stairs, with only occasional arrows painted on the walls to indicate other humans lived somewhere nearby, lit by flickering stripes of glow-paint that went dark at regular intervals.
How do people live without network? Parts of Sentinel would be just as much of a maze, she was sure, but you’d never visit them without an algo confidently whispering directions into your ear or laying a glowing trail over your vision. When she finally reached a scrap-metal arch painted with a few incomprehensible glyphs, with steady light and human voices beyond, Kas was ready to cry with relief.
The town—if that was the word for it—occupied a huge open space, boxy and high-ceilinged, with tunnels running off in all directions. Its “buildings” consisted of whatever the inhabitants could be bothered to throw together to get a little privacy, and they varied wildly—a snug-looking house made of chiseled monocrete blocks stood next to a scrap-metal shack that looked on the verge of collapse, and beside those were derelict vehicles, tents, canvas domes, and other, stranger accommodations. There was even an old warbot, stripped of its internals and turned into a shelter, laundry hanging limply from its limbs.
There were more people than Kas had expected. Obviously people still lived on Earth, but she’d had the vague idea that it was only a handful, and the kilometers of empty tunnel she’d walked through tended to reinforce that notion. But—her mind was settling back into its scholarly mode, like an ancient bot returning to a familiar routine—that was a trick of the scale. With dozens, possibly hundreds of levels, the area available in just the region around the Drome was colossal; the odds of running into anyone if you weren’t trying to were slim. No wonder Zhi can hide an entire Third-Empire warbot without anyone noticing.
Walking down the main street—the only street, really—was like stepping into some kind of ancient-world sim. Everyone she saw was here, not auto-piloting while their attention was off in the net, and most of them were staring at her. It didn’t feel dangerous, just curious; an acknowledgment that, with her off-world looks and scholar’s robe, Kas was more interesting than most people who strolled through.
Kas stared back in return, fascinated. The scavs were dressed in patches of bright colors, repurposed fabric printed with logos and slogans of corporations that no longer existed and political movements long-dead. Almost everyone was engaged in some kind of work that any Sentinel citizen would delegate to bots—fixing machines and clothes, preparing food, cleaning, and a hundred other domestic chores Kas couldn’t even identify. Young children—so many children, more than Kas had ever seen together in one place—ran around in swarms, apparently at random, laughing and shouting.
They were all so young. At twenty-five, Kas was used to being the youngest person at gatherings that regularly included a dozen double-centenarians in their gel-padded mechassistors. Here she felt like she was practically an adult, which gave her a warm feeling until her scholarly brain took a guess as to why.
It’s because they all die, idiot. No mechassistors here, no autodocs or anti-senescence drugs or oncsuppresents. Starships landing directly overhead, agrav blazing. Who cares if a bunch of carnivorous rats get extradimensional tumors, was it? She felt her stomach lurch. Here and there, a withered oldster sat on a stoop or helped with chores, but only a few. Which means, her remorseless, analytical self informed her, if this society is in a stable state, all but a few of those kids are going to die before they reach their first century. Maybe long before—she had no idea when people started to look old, without civilized medicine—
Stop, Kas. Just stop. You didn’t come here to make an anthropological survey. She took a deep breath, glanced down at her scribbled map, and started walking with more purpose.
Solomon’s shop was easy to find, as Zhi had promised, a small but sturdy shack on the main street with an open space behind it crammed with junked machines. There was a curtain in lieu of a door, so Kas pushed her way in cautiously, rapping on the doorframe. She thought it was still daytime, but there was no way to tell down here.
“Just a minute!” A young man’s voice came from behind another curtain, separating the front part of the shack from the rear. Out front there was a makeshift table and a couple of chairs, with a few boxes of assorted parts piled up in one corner. Kas stood and waited until the curtain parted and Solomon emerged.
He was the boy she’d seen, briefly, when she’d chased Zhi down the tunnel. He had pale skin, like Zhi, flyaway brown hair, and enormous spectacles that had been broken and patched several times. She guessed him for seventeen or eighteen. The right side of his face was a mass of bruises, and his eye was nearly swollen shut. A line of neat stitches ran across his forehead.
“How can I help—” He paused as he took Kas in, and blinked his good eye. After the pause, he repeated, “How can I help you, madam?”
“My name is Kas,” Kas said. She lowered her voice. “Zhi sent me.”
Solomon sucked in a breath. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” Kas said. “She told me to tell you she’s hiding you-know-where.” Kas frowned. “Are you okay?”
“Me?” Solomon touched the side of his face and winced. “I’ll heal. I tried to get in Custis’s way, and he didn’t care for it.” He breathed out. “But Zhi got away. That’s . . . good.” He paused again, then shook his head. “So where do you come into it?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It usually is, with Zhi,” Solomon said, with a pained smile.
“The short version is, I’m helping her with her . . . project.” Much against my will. “She sent me here to get the parts she needs.”
“The parts—” His good eye narrowed. “She explained how much that’s going to cost, I assume.”
“I’ve got credit,” Kas said, suppressing a wince.
Solomon whistled. “I guess off-worlders really are as rich as they say.”
Don’t push it, kid. Kas maintained a straight face with an effort. “So what do we need to do?”
“We can head over to Gytha’s,” Solomon said. “She’ll have most of what we need, and she can get the rest. Your credit is with the House, I assume?”
Kas nodded.
“That should be fine, then. Are you ready now?”
Another nod. Solomon stretched, winced, and led the way out the door, with Kas trailing behind him. He walked with a slight limp, too, she noted.
“You’re a mechanic?” she said.
“Of sorts.” He looked embarrassed. “Nothing by off-worlder standards, obviously, but I’ve picked up a few things.”
“If you put that warbot Zhi piloted together, that’s impressive by anyone’s standards.”
He snorted. “It didn’t work out so well, yeah?”
“Still.” Kas sought for something to fill the awkward silence as they trudged on. “How long have the two of you known each other?”
“Since we were kids,” Solomon said. “Zhi’s parents took care of me for a while.”
“And . . .”
Kas trailed off. She had no idea what to ask, what would be considered polite conversation and what might be hopelessly rude. It didn’t help that without a network, she couldn’t read Solomon’s ephemera—the signals his persona would give off, telling everything from his romantic preferences to his interests and comfort levels in various topics. Once again, Kas felt like she’d lost a limb, or a sense.
At least the boy seemed just as awkward. He cleared his throat and said, “How long are you on Earth for?”
“I’m supposed to be here a week,” Kas said. “For research.”
“Research?”
“Old tech. Archeocode is my specialty.”
He perked up. “You’ll find plenty of that here, though obviously the datasphere’s destroyed a lot of it. There’s still a lot of scraps, though, if you know where to look.”
“Where should I look?” Kas said, genuinely curious.
“Oh, ROM templates, cold storage, cheap archives. Anywhere the physical storage media is sequestered from the processing units, basically. Sometimes the nits get into that too, of course, but not always. There are old libraries—” He paused. “Here’s Gytha’s place.”
Kas gave an inward sigh. If not for Zhi’s scheming, meeting Solomon would have been a pleasant surprise—he might have even been able to help her find material for her research that would have made the whole trip worthwhile. Now Throne knows if I’ll have time for any of that. She fought down another spike of useless anger.
Gytha’s place was just a scrapyard surrounded by a fence, without even a pretense at looking like a building. A middle-aged woman in a bright orange headscarf, presumably Gytha, paused from shouting at two unrepentant children and looked up at them as they arrived.
“Hey, Sol,” she said. “You get your face caught in a compressor?”
“I’m fine, Gy, thanks for asking,” Sol drawled. “I’ve got an order for you.”
Gytha’s face went hard. “I said I’m not floating you another centi. The fact that your warbot got torn to scrap doesn’t make me more inclined to be generous.”
“I’ve got hard credit this time,” Solomon said. “Or my partner here does.”
“I wondered what she was doing here.” Gytha turned to Kas. “You’re sure this little slag isn’t putting one over on you?”
“Solomon has been very helpful,” Kas said stiffly.
“Fair enough.” Gytha ambled over and produced a battered tablet, connected to a heavily insulated hardline. “Scan here.”
Kas proffered her hand—manual identity scans, another barbarism unheard of on Sentinel—and Gytha surveyed the results. Her expression unkinked slightly.
“Will that cover it?” Kas said.
“That’ll about cover the whole slagging yard, if you want it,” Gytha said. “Just let me know what you need.”
“Here’s a list,” Solomon said, handing over a rumpled note. “And we’ll have a look around, too.”
Gytha grunted, peering at the note. Solomon led Kas out among the broken machines that were piled up around the yard.
“She’s charming,” Kas muttered.
“She’s not so bad,” Solomon said. “She’s not wrong that Zhi and I have taken advantage of her goodwill. Zhi burned every bridge she had to get Speedy up and running for the fight.”
“All in the hopes of fixing up Alpha Zero?” When Solomon nodded, Kas shook her head. “Seems like a long shot.”
“That’s what I told her,” Solomon said.
“She didn’t listen?”
“You’ve met her, haven’t you?”
Kas snorted a laugh, but she caught Solomon’s slightly wistful smile. She hesitated, then asked, “Are the two of you—” She had no idea what style of romantic relationship might be the norm here on Earth, or how people might refer to it, so she settled for clearing her throat and lamely finished, “together?”
“Me and Zhi?” Solomon shook his head. “She’s more like a big sister. You’re more her type than I am.”
“Ah.”
That was another problem with the lack of ephemera. On Sentinel Kas would have been able to tell at a glance what Zhi’s preferences were—gender, phenotype, personality, to whatever extent she felt like revealing them—and vice versa. Not that I’ve been broadcasting my preferences much. She’d kept herself locked down since joining the Scholarium, for fear of letting any entanglements intrude on her work, keeping her assignations to sim-flings.
Still. If they had met in a sim, Zhi might have been . . . intriguing.
Not fucking likely. She shook her head. “So what are we looking for?”
“Some kind of external processor we can use to get at Alpha Zero’s control OS,” Solomon said. “We’re going to have to rebuild a lot of it, and we’ll need something hardened to work as the near end. I figure we’ll rip a unit out of a dead bot. Look for military, the older the better.”
“Got it. Just a processing unit, or the whole input stack?”
He looked at her owlishly, a bit of respect creeping into his glance. “Just the unit. We can virt the rest of the stack if we need to.”
“Probably a cry-matrix then, instead of an arachnoform.” Kas pointed. “That looks like the sensor bay from a link-support unit, would that work?”
When the talk turned to tech, Solomon’s residual caution around off-worlders dropped away, and he became practically chatty. It also became apparent that he knew his stuff, to a degree Kas had to admit she hadn’t expected. She’d spent most of her life reading about old processors, data systems, and code, but Solomon had been arms-deep in the stuff for almost as long, and it showed. Pretty soon, she felt like she was running to keep up.
In the end they rejected the link-support unit (too damaged), a surgery bay controller (wrong inputs), and a recon drone (Kas pegged the processor type as known-corruptible). They settled on an Eighth-Empire grenadier bot, badly slagged around the edges but with an intact core. Gytha added it to the small pile of pieces she was building, and punched a few numbers into her tablet. Kas blanched a little when she saw the totals.
Doesn’t matter, she told herself. Either Zhi’s plan would work, and they’d put it all back—hopefully before anyone noticed it was gone—or else she was irrevocably fucked, and the scale of the fucking probably didn’t make a difference. But still. She couldn’t help but imagine the Archscholar’s face when he was told. In other circumstances, I’d probably pay to watch.
* * *
Kas parted with Solomon, after he’d drawn her yet another map and promised to get her a meeting place when the parts were delivered, so she could take them down to Zhi. By this time it was, apparently, late evening. Kas followed the map back toward the surface, heading for the quarters she vaguely remembered the tour company had promised them, adjacent to the Drome itself.
Her navigation skills seemed to be improving—or else Solomon was better at drawing maps than Zhi, which seemed likely—because she only took one wrong turn. Emerging aboveground at last, she found herself on an apparently endless plain of weathered monocrete, which had once been a storage space for personal vehicles of visitors to the Drome. (The idea of owning a vehicle, which would then spend the vast majority of its time unused, felt vaguely obscene to Kas, like the height of Ninth-Empire arrogance and waste.) In this later age, the lot had become an ideal place to drop prefabricated buildings, all glamorously styled and looking wildly out of place in the wrecked landscape.
Kas headed for the one that said “Homeward Voyages,” was greeted by a cheery security officer in branded armor, and was admitted once she’d provided sufficient assurance she was in fact Scholar Zychtykas Three. Firidi, Vanalt, and Gneisin were sitting around a table in the common room, learning to play some sort of analog card game from the company flack assigned to entertain them. Kas ignored them, headed for the door with her name on it, and collapsed into the deliciously soft bed. Sleep came instantly, even without her algorithmic meditation aids.
When she woke the next morning, she spent a long time in the shower. The tour company might not have been able to provide its customers with a civilized network, but some luxuries at least could be imported—presumably at great expense. The events of the previous day had left her covered in grime and sweat, and simply scrubbing it off and dressing in a clean outfit—a practical coverall, this time, suitable for field work—helped her state of mind immensely. By the time she emerged into the common room, where the table was set with an elaborate breakfast, she was feeling almost optimistic.
“Morning, Scholar,” she said to Firidi, who was poking through a small bowl of assorted fruits.
“Morning, Kas,” Firidi said.
Kas sat down next to him and helped herself to toast and skyroot pods. “Where are the others?”
“Gneisin had a desire to see the warbot from yesterday’s match,” Firidi said. “Vanalt agreed to accompany her.”
“Sounds exciting,” Kas said. “You weren’t interested?”
“I wanted to speak to you,” Firidi said. “And I thought it was best done alone.”
Oh, fuck. Kas’s good mood vanished immediately. Fortunately, she was halfway through chewing a pod, so she could mask her confusion as she slowly popped the sweet seeds between her teeth.
“What about?” she said, when she was sure she could control her tone. Maybe they don’t know. It seemed unlikely. What else would account for that dark tone?
“Your behavior yesterday,” Firidi said. He shifted, looking uncomfortable, not an expression you often saw on a first-wave.
“What about it?” Kas said, stalling.
“Will you make me spell it out?” Firidi sighed. “You left the party arranged for us by our gracious hosts, and you were later seen in a . . . vagrant community.”
“Ah.” Kas took a deep breath. “The thing is . . .”
“I understand the allure of the forbidden,” Firidi said. “I was young once, loath though your generation is to admit it. But . . . intimate services . . . were restricted to sims on Sentinel for good reasons, including the safety of all concerned. Obviously, Old Earth falls into a different jurisdiction, but that does not change the dictates of ethics and prudence—”
“Wait,” Kas said. “Wait, wait, wait. You think I was . . . what, visiting some kind of brothel?”
“There’s no need to be ashamed. It’s merely an error of judgment. Not unexpected, given your youth and class.”
“My class?”
Firidi raised one delicately cultivated eyebrow. “Everyone knows third-waves are more susceptible to . . . carnal influences.”
Only because nobody would fuck you for all the creds in the Googolvault, you withered old turd. Kas kept a straight face, but only just.
“In any event,” Firidi said, “I wished to speak with you alone, so we could resolve this matter between ourselves. Gneisin is young and promising, and part of my role here is to protect her from any influences that might damage her career.”
“I see.” Kas let out a long breath.
“Good.” Firidi turned back to her fruit, face a little flushed. “I trust we can speak no more of the matter.”
“Of course. Wouldn’t want to be indelicate.” Kas pushed her plate away. “But I think there may be some real research potential here. I’ve had several excellent leads.”
“Hmm,” Firidi said.
“I may need some support once I run them down. Transport arrangements, that sort of thing.”
“If you truly believe you’ve found something, you can run it by me and Vanalt. Gneisin would have to come and confirm your findings, of course.”
“Gneisin?”
Firidi smiled thinly. “Of course. Her family contributed generously to the Scholarium. They are going to expect appropriate results.”
“Appropriate . . .” Kas fixed Firidi’s gaze. “You’re joking.”
“Kas . . .” Firidi sighed. “You cannot be that naïve. What did you think was the purpose of this expedition?”
“To further the knowledge of the Scholarium!”
“Yes, of course, in the general sense. But specifically . . .” Firidi waved a hand. “For Gneisin to continue on her path to becoming a first-rate scholar, she must publish well-respected research. Her family expects this trip to provide it.”
“So what are the rest of us here for?”
“To . . . support her.”
“To do it for her, in other words?” Kas said.
“Vanalt and I are to serve as . . . mentors.”
“And me?”
“Once she has made a discovery, no doubt there will be a great deal of data-gathering and other minutiae . . .”
“I see.” Kas pushed herself to her feet.
“Apparently I ought to have clarified your position earlier,” Firidi said. “I assumed it had been made understood to you.”
“That I’m supposed to be an assistant to some twenty-year-old who couldn’t find a warbot in a closet without an algo?”
“Kas,” Firidi sighed. “This is how the Scholarium works. You know it as well as I do. Perform well, and the Archscholar will take notice. In a few years, perhaps—”
“—he’ll trust me to clean the bathrooms?” Kas shoved the chair back in and turned away.
“Kas!” Firidi snapped. “Where are you going?”
“Back to the fucking brothel,” Kas shouted back, and slammed the door behind her.
* * *
The hangar doors ground open, startling Zhi out of a light doze. Her hand went to her knife—a useless gesture; if the House had found her the game was up regardless—and she only relaxed when she recognized Kas standing beside a powered cart full of miscellaneous scrap.
’Bout time. A low-grade anxiety in Zhi’s gut vanished. She’d had faith in Solomon, of course, and she thought Kas was neatly trapped, but there was always a chance one or the other would slag things up. But here she is. So far, so good, yeah?
Zhi hopped down from the gantry, not bothering with the ladder, and trotted over to meet Kas. The off-worlder had traded her diaphanous silk for a practical working outfit, which showed good sense, although Zhi found herself obscurely disappointed. Kas’s face was thunderous, and she gestured the cart-drone forward with a grumpy wave.
“You found Solomon okay, yeah?”
“More or less,” Kas said.
“Killer. And he found what we need?”
“Almost everything,” Kas said. “He’s waiting on a few pieces.” She paused, then added, “Custis roughed him up pretty bad, you know.”
Zhi’s chest clenched. “Slagging scumfuck. He’ll get his when we get Alpha Zero going, yeah?” She forced down the boiling anger and blew out a breath. “Sol going to be all right?
“He says he will.” Kas nodded at the cart. “You don’t need his help for this?”
“Tweaks are mostly dataside,” Zhi said, surveying the gear. “That I can handle.” Hopefully. But Solomon wasn’t any better at patching code together than she was. Zhi glanced up at Alpha Zero with a frown. If we can’t get the OS up, after all of this . . .
She pushed the worry down into the same pit she’d shoved the rage. Later.
“Looks like everything’s going neat-an’-clean,” she said aloud. “I’ll have Sol get in touch with you for those last few pieces. I’m sure you’ve got scholar stuff to attend to, yeah?”
Kas glared at her. “Are you going to cancel the bet? I got what you wanted.”
“Better not,” Zhi said. “Sorry. You could turn me in to the House otherwise.”
“I figured,” Kas said, with a long-suffering sigh. “In that case I’m going to stay right here, and make sure you don’t run out on me now that you’ve got what you want.”
Zhi wasn’t sure exactly how the scholar intended to stop her if she did want to welch on their agreement, but given Kas’s expression she decided not to argue. She summoned the cart to drop its load on a lifter in the corner, then rode up with the scrap to the gantry, where she could get to Alpha Zero’s cockpit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kas look around for a seat, then flop moodily onto a monocrete block in one corner. She pulled an old-style book from the pocket of her coverall and started reading, after a couple of false starts figuring out how to turn the pages.
Figuring that it was safest to ignore her for the moment, Zhi set to sorting through what Solomon had sent her. Mostly it was bits and pieces of machines that were broken but contained some infotech component that might be useful, so the first step was disassembling them to get at the intact pieces. This was long and tedious work, removing mag-screws and unsoldering boards one at a time until some critical processing unit or conduit came into view. Zhi bent to it diligently, a curl of smoke rising from her laser cutter to coil lazily in the air above her. From time to time, she glanced up at Kas, who was staring ferociously at her book, looking increasingly annoyed. Finally, Zhi couldn’t take it anymore.
“Not enjoying the story?” she said as she cut through the fasteners on a fixed-width six-way entangled bus.
“The what?” Kas snapped.
“The book.”
“It’s something about tribal warfare in the pre-spaceflight era. Spears and combustion engines, that sort of thing.”
“It looks like it’s bothering you.”
“It’s not bothering me.” Kas frowned. “It’s just broken, like everything else on this stupid planet. It doesn’t hyperlink, you can’t get definitions for anything, and I keep losing my place.”
Zhi tried to stifle a laugh, but couldn’t quite manage it. Kas shot her a nasty look.
“Like to see you navigate a six-sided political-romance-polygon sim,” the scholar muttered.
“Dunno what that is,” Zhi said, finally working the conduit free, “but it sounds killer, yeah?”
Kas looked back down at her book for a few moments, trying to focus, then let out another long sigh and tossed it aside.
“So what’s eating you?” Zhi said as she pondered the next piece.
“Apart from being blackmailed into helping with a crazy scheme that in all probability will ruin my career and get me sent for reeducation?”
“Sure,” Zhi said. “Apart from that.”
Kas looked up at her for a moment, as though considering her options, then slumped back against the wall. “I had a talk with the senior scholar on our mission this morning. She made it clear that I’m not going to be allowed to do any real work while I’m here on Earth, even if I manage to resolve this insanity.”
Zhi chuckled. “Off-worlders never do any real work anyway, yeah? You still get fed-an’-watered, so what does it matter?”
“It’s—never mind.” Kas settled her chin against her chest. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” Zhi said. “Picking these DNA capacitors off this thing is boring as slag, yeah?”
“I’d offer to help,” Kas muttered, “but I’m sure I’d only fuck things up.”
“Probably.”
There was a long pause.
“I’m a third-wave,” Kas said eventually. “Scholar Zychtykas Three. You know what that means?”
“Not really.” Zhi’s tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth as she extracted a particularly stubborn capacitor with a pair of fine-point tweezers. Tiny organic threads connecting it to the board snapped and curled up, one by one.
“It’s down to when your ancestors left Earth,” Kas said. “The first wave went out and settled the Thousand Worlds before the First Empire, back in prehistory. No transfer points back then, not even fold drives, so it was just . . . the craziest shit you can imagine. Cryosleep ships that took hundreds of years to get where they were going, generation ships, where your great-great-grandchildren would arrive. You had to be special to head out on those trips. ‘The best and brightest in all of civilization,’ the first-waves like to say.”
“Or the weirdest, yeah?” Zhi lifted another spiraling conduit free.
“Yeah.” Kas shrugged. “Anyway, a lot of them didn’t make it, but those that did set themselves up pretty well on the new colonies. After the fold drive came along, and the First Empire got going, the second wave left Earth—which was getting pretty bad by then—and wanted in. Fold drives were expensive as anything, so this was all wealthy types looking to start new lives. The first-waves welcomed them, mostly.”
“Rich bastards are always bastards,” Zhi commented.
“Then came the Third Empire, and transfer points, and the Fracture. Everything falls apart. Earth is . . . well, turning into what it is now. But it’s easy to get a ship out to the transfer point and turn up at one of the colonies uninvited. That’s the third wave. We got let in out of charity, and the first and seconds never let us forget it.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Depends on the colony. For Sentinel, maybe a thousand years?”
“You’re slagging kidding.” Zhi sat up and stared down at Kas. “They look down their noses at you for whose great-grandmas begged off of whose a thousand years ago?”
“Pretty much.” Kas’s shoulders were slumped. “Like Firidi says, that’s just the way it is. So this little first-wave girl is going to get credit for anything we find here, and I’m supposed to take notes and deal with ‘minutiae.’”
“Sounds awful,” Zhi said, and realized that, for a moment, she meant it. She felt a stab of regret for dragging Kas into her own problems, and pushed that down as well. Too slagging soft for my own good. “’Course, around here, career recognition isn’t as much of a problem as finding enough algae sludge to fill your belly.”
“I know.” Kas leaned back. “I saw the scav town. If I swallow my pride and help Gneisin, I’ll go back to Sentinel, get fed by bots, play around in sims, and live to be two hundred. Horrible fate, right?”
“Two hundred? Now you’re having fun with me, yeah? You’d be shriveled up like a dead roach.”
“The Archscholar definitely resembles a dead bug sometimes, and he’s two hundred and twelve.” Kas pushed herself to her feet. “Fuck it. I’m not doing any good here. I’ll go check with Solomon and see if he has those parts.”
“Thought I needed an eye kept on me.”
“Are you going to run off with Alpha Zero when you’re finished?”
“Nope.” Zhi popped another conduit free. “Gonna squash Custis proper first, yeah?”
“Good enough for me.” The scholar rolled her shoulders wearily. “I’ll be back.”
* * *
Solomon reported that nothing new had come in, which meant two long trudges through flickering, empty tunnels for nothing. Honestly, though, that suited Kas’s mood better than giving Zhi history lessons. Lots of time alone meant plenty of opportunity to feel sorry for herself.
She bought a few more books on the Scholarium’s centi, just out of curiosity. Paper books weren’t exactly unknown on Sentinel—they were easy enough to fabricate on any printer—but they were more decorative than actually useful. Why read dead words on a page when you could see them alive and vibrant in your augmented vision, each a portal to a million other possibilities if you so much as let your attention linger on it for a moment? But there was something . . . tantalizing in the battered paperbacks; possibly it was the feeling of not knowing what to expect, when you couldn’t access a review average or an algo precis of any text instantly.
In any event, it gave her something to do that wasn’t taking Gneisin’s fucking notes. Once again she turned up at the Homeward Voyages shelter long after dark, and received a glower from Firidi and a bland smile from his husband Vanalt. Kas ignored both, went into her room, and read until she was pretty sure everyone else was in bed. Then she emerged, in search of leftovers from dinner—her curiosity in the scav town hadn’t extended to trying the food.
She’d pulled a plate of sliced ham and pickled butterwings out of the cold storage and was just settling in when another bedroom door opened and Gneisin emerged. Kas did her best not to make eye contact—Who am I to impose on a future “first-rate scholar”?—but Gneisin waved and raised her eyes conspiratorially, then pulled out the chair opposite her.
Gneisin was tall and slender, like most first-waves, with pale gray hair that sparkled with metallic silver flowing like a curtain down her back. She wore pajamas in place of her scholar’s robe, and she was without her customary cosmetics, which made her look a little more human. Her huge, dark eyes were alight with mischief, and Kas greeted her warily.
“Want some?” she said.
“No thanks,” Gneisin said. “They fed us over at the Drome, and again when we got back. My healthalgos are going to be furious with me when we get back to civilization.” She waggled her eyebrows again, sighed, and snatched a butterwing off Kas’s plate. “Okay, just one.”
“Did you get a look at the DreadCarl?” Kas said politely, while Gneisin sucked juice off her fingers.
“Yeah,” the girl said, and sighed. “It’s not as impressive up close.”
“Hopefully it at least gave you a few ideas for the direction of your research,” Kas said, her tone perfectly level.
“I told Firidi to check up on some things,” Gneisin said, waving her hand dismissively. “But tomorrow I was hoping you and I could go out together.”
“Me and you?” Kas blinked. “For research?”
“Strenuous research.” Gneisin leaned forward. “Firidi told me you’ve already made a start.”
Kas put the eyebrow waggling together with her conversation with the senior scholar the previous morning, reached a conclusion, and suppressed a groan. “He told you I was out at a brothel.”
“Hey, no judgment from me. No sims here, what else are we supposed to do? People have needs.” She grinned. “I’ll square it with him, I just need you to show me around.”
“Isn’t Firidi going to expect you to be doing research?”
“He won’t complain, unless he wants my grandmas tearing his sims down around his ears. Relax!” She spread her arms. “We’re on Earth. Anything goes here, right? That’s the point.” She grabbed another butterwing and popped it in her mouth.
For a moment, Kas considered it. Gneisin might be able to paper over the debt she’d run up on the Scholarium’s credit. It was more likely to work than Zhi getting Alpha Zero running and winning a jackpot in the Drome, anyway.
But even if I got her to promise to help me, what are the odds she follows through? Gneisin was a first-wave, like Firidi and the Archscholar. When push came to shove, they didn’t think of third-waves as real people. We’re just props, for them to reward or punish.
“Come on,” Gneisin said. “You don’t know how close my grandmas watch me back home. I haven’t had a decent in-flesh fuck in months.”
“That does sound rough.” Kas put on a sympathetic expression, only slightly curdled at the edges, and started working on extricating herself from the conversation.
* * *
Kas took a further quarter of an hour to convince Gneisin that rumors of her carnal excursions were greatly exaggerated, and that she’d have to locate any houses of ill repute on her own. It was a relief to slip out the next morning, before any of the others were awake, and head down to the hangar. Zhi was already working—Kas realized she had no idea where she lived, or if she just slept curled up in Alpha Zero’s gel chair—and from the sound of it, it wasn’t going well. As Kas arrived, a small piece of scrap emerged from the warbot’s cockpit at high speed, ricocheted off the ceiling, and rained to the floor in fragments, accompanied by a fulsome swearing.
“I hope that wasn’t an important bit,” Kas said.
“There ’ent no important bits if it doesn’t slagging work,” Zhi said, head popping up over the edge of the cockpit. “Sometimes you have to smash one as an example to the others, yeah?”
Kas laughed. “That’s how I feel about houseplants.”
“Whatplants?”
“They’re like—little plants you keep in pots in your room. And then you tell the bots you’ll take care of them yourself, because it seems like fun, but after a couple of weeks you forget and then they die and you have to get new ones.”
“Weird. Can you eat them?”
“Not usually.”
Zhi gave a dismissive shrug. “Anyhow, if you’re here, bring me another of those ripple-shunts, yeah?”
Why not? Kas climbed the ladder to the gantry, located the object Zhi was pointing to—a small hexagonal thing made of black glass—and brought it over to the cockpit. The formerly featureless space around Alpha Zero’s control chair was now occupied by a layer of humming infotech, boxes and boards with whirring fans, connected by colored conduits. To Kas’s eye, it had the clunky, primitive look of Eighth- or Ninth-Empire technology, which was presumably why it functioned at all in Earth’s vicious datasphere.
Two long leads stretched out of the collection of boxes and attached to pads just behind Zhi’s ears. Kas raised her eyebrows.
“I didn’t know you had jacks,” she said. “I thought Earth natives couldn’t use them.”
“They’re not like yours,” Zhi said, gesturing to the protective pads covering Kas’s own interface. She’d gotten so used to them she almost forgot they were there. “These are safe-an’-stupid, yeah? Input/output only. No processing for malware to infect, nothing for nits to grab on to.”
“What good is that?” Kas said. “Without processing, how can you image anything?”
Zhi tapped the side of her head. “Wetware. You get the hang of it, yeah?”
“I guess.” Kas leaned over to examine the hardware Zhi had assembled. “So what’s giving you trouble?”
The girl sighed. “OS layers. Whatever’s native in Alpha Zero’s processors got slagged way back, yeah? Don’t know the protocols anyway. So we gotta build a layer out here, override at a lower level, and run it that way. Not as fast, but it should work, but . . .”
“But?”
“Slagging things don’t want to work together.” Zhi glared at the recalcitrant machines. “The old code’s weird, and it ’ent playing nice with the new stuff.”
“I wish I could see it,” Kas said. “I might be able to help.”
It was painful, being this close to a treasure trove like Alpha Zero and not being able to look inside. But connecting to the warbot would mean opening up her own jacks to the malware that lurked in every microscopic wireless router, and unlike Zhi’s, Kas’s wetware was smoothly integrated with the neural lace that had been implanted when she was only a few weeks old. She wasn’t certain what would happen if it crashed and burned, but it wouldn’t be good.
Zhi was giving her an odd look. “What?”
“You really think you could help?”
“Probably.” Kas straightened up. “My specialty is archeocode, exactly the old stuff that’s giving you problems. I’m a scholar, not an engineer, but I imagine I’d be able to contribute something.”
“Wanna try, then?”
“I can’t.” Kas touched her jacks protectively. “You have no idea what it’s like.”
“Have some, yeah?” Zhi was rummaging around on the floor. “You’re not the first off-worlder I’ve worked with. Here.”
She handed over another pair of leads. Examining the ends closely, Kas saw they were pads of the same shielding gel she had on, but with a tiny conduit threaded through the center.
“Even if this protects me from what comes over the air, the machines themselves are dirty,” Kas said. “It’s not safe.”
“You don’t connect direct,” Zhi said. “You connect to me, and I connect to the box, yeah? Then everything’s filtered through my bone-an’-brain, and no nasties can get through.”
Kas’s brow furrowed. It was certainly unlikely that any malware would be able to transcode through human brain signals, but there was still a risk. She’d be more or less handing control of her sensorium over to Zhi—if the girl wanted to spike her nervous system, she probably could.
Zhi grinned. Not Gneisin’s knowing, condescending smile, but something more genuine. She held out the leads. “Trust me, yeah?”
Fuck it. If Zhi wanted to hurt her, she had a knife, she didn’t need any fancy tricks. Kas climbed down into the cockpit, squeezing awkwardly in beside the chair.
“Okay,” she said. “What do I do?”
* * *
It turned out there was a slight complication.
The leads had to run from the box to Zhi’s neck, and the secondary set from there to Kas’s. Neither pair was very long. There wasn’t really room for someone to stand up in the cockpit, not without constantly endangering Zhi’s equipment. Certain inevitable geometries, therefore, meant that the only reasonable position the two of them could occupy was the control chair, one atop the other. Given their relative sizes—Kas had never thought of herself as large, in a world of two-meter-plus first-waves, but she outweighed the slight-framed Zhi by some margin—that meant Kas sat back as far as she could and let Zhi sit on her lap.
It was . . . distracting. Zhi had a tendency to go limp when she was concentrating on something entirely virtual, which meant that she leaned back against Kas, her head lolling on Kas’s shoulder and her short hair tickling Kas’s nose. Kas had started out with her hands on the armrests, but Zhi had rested her own hands on top of them, and after a few embarrassed moments Kas had pulled hers away. For lack of anything better to do, she’d fastened them around Zhi’s midsection, as though they were riding a speeder bike. Whenever Zhi shifted or stretched, it did interesting things to the toned muscle under Kas’s fingers.
Gneisin had complained about not having had an in-flesh fuck for months. For Kas it had been . . . well, she wasn’t eager to compute the exact length of her abstinence, but considerably longer, since before her promotion from Scholar-Apprentice. Sim-flings were perfectly satisfying, and considerably less complicated than the alternative. So she’d always told herself, anyway. The degree to which Zhi’s warmth pressing against her made it hard to concentrate argued that perhaps the satisfaction wasn’t quite perfect.
It was with some difficulty, therefore, that she turned her attention to Alpha Zero’s code, and the hacked-together OS layer that Zhi was attempting to bolt on top of it. With her neural lace down and her jacks just barely operating—Kas still didn’t fully trust the shielding gel—she had none of the usual tools or visualizations she was used to. Instead, she had an image coming over the link from Zhi, sketchy and flickering, annotated with the girl’s cryptic explanations. It was an operating environment to make the most hardened software tech weep with frustration, and Kas had to keep reminding herself that Zhi was maintaining this construct in her actual brain. That was a feat that Kas herself certainly couldn’t have managed.
She was pleased to find that she could contribute, though. Zhi was obviously a self-taught coder, and a relatively good one, able to hack together the chunks of software tied from the various scraps Solomon had salvaged. Alpha Zero’s Third-Empire systems, however, were another matter altogether, arcane and indecipherable unless you were familiar with the coding standards and frameworks of the day. Which, as it happened, Kas was. So they quickly learned to operate in an efficient tandem, Zhi creating the links on the modern side, Kas showing her where to slide them into Alpha Zero’s operational layer to replace the warbot’s destroyed OS.
It was slow, painstaking work, made all the worse by the knowledge that if they were on a civilized planet, where Kas could use her implants and access a decent reference library, it could have been an order of magnitude faster. For that matter, it was quite possible there was a way to cleanly rebuild Alpha Zero’s original OS buried in a ROM, but without the ability to link into its deeper layers, there was no way to access it. As it was, by the end of the day they’d made considerable progress, but there was a long way to go before they had something that would function.
Zhi pulled the leads from her jacks, and Kas’s view of the codebase winked out. The girl stretched, her bottom shifting on Kas’s thighs, and got to her feet. Sweat ran out of her hair and trickled down her face, and her collar was soaked. Between the two of them and all the gear, the cockpit was a sauna, and Kas’s own undershirt was sticky against her skin.
“Well,” Zhi said, turning to look at her. “Not easy, but at least we’re getting somewhere, yeah?”
“Seems like it,” Kas said. She felt unaccountably out of breath.
Zhi grabbed the edge of the cockpit, hoisted herself smoothly up, and held out a hand. Kas took it, gratefully, and they stood together for a moment on Alpha Zero’s shoulder, luxuriating in the cooler air of the hangar.
“I should . . . get back,” Kas said. “I think Firidi’s given up on trying to make me behave, but if I stay away for too long they might send out a search party.”
“Right,” Zhi said. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m ravenous.”
“You’ve got enough food down here?” Kas said. She hadn’t thought, until now, about how Zhi was surviving cut off from the rest of scav society.
“Oh, yeah. I stocked my bolthole with plenty of water-an’-sludge.” Zhi paused. “You’ll be back tomorrow?”
Kas nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good. I ’ent sure I can finish this without you.” Zhi wiped sweat from her forehead. “You’ve got a real way with the old stuff, that’s for sure.”
“Thanks.” Kas took a deep breath. “I’ll try to bring you something from breakfast. The tour company always gives us too much anyway, it just goes to waste.”
“Sure,” Zhi said. There was something on her face Kas couldn’t read. Confusion? Amusement?
Don’t be stupid, Kas. She remonstrated with herself during the long trudge back to the shelter. She’s still blackmailing you. Nothing’s changed. Just because she’s got a pretty smile and nice eyes and it feels good to have a warm body next to you and the way she smells . . . She shook her head, having lost her train of thought. Anyway, none of that is important. She’s a scav, for Throne’s sake.
This time, Firidi didn’t even bother to glare at her when she came in. Kas helped herself to dinner and once again fell asleep immediately, although this time her mind supplied dreams rich with such explicit detail that she woke up feeling less than fully rested. She wolfed a plate of breakfast before the others woke up, squirreled away what she could in the pockets of her coverall, and headed back down into the tunnels.
Zhi grinned brightly when Kas arrived, and even brighter when she presented her with some slightly mashed pastries. The girl wolfed them down, then practically bounded up onto the gantry, eager to get started. Kas followed only a little less enthusiastically. Because I’m eager to be done with this, she told herself, though even she had to admit that was starting to sound a little thin.
* * *
The trouble is, Kas thought, this stupid planet and its stupid lack of network.
The trouble was that it made it very hard to know where you stood.
The trouble was that Kas didn’t know how to flirt when all she had to work with was . . . well, her actual self.
It was the sixth day since she’d landed on Earth. She’d spent four of those days jammed into Alpha Zero’s cockpit with Zhi, and she’d long since run out of ability to lie to herself about how she felt about that. It wasn’t just the shape of the body pressed against her during those coding sessions, although that was . . . a factor. Zhi was funny, whip-smart, and alive in a way that Kas hadn’t understood she wanted until she’d come here, worlds away from the scholars who surrounded her on Sentinel.
But having admitted all this to herself, she faced the obstacle that she didn’t know what, if anything, Zhi wanted, or whether she was at all interested, what her preferred gender/phenotype was, or anything. Back home, all that would be accessible—if not outright stated in someone’s ephemera then signaled according to various well-understood conventions. You could get algos to parse it for you, if you were having trouble.
She smiles at me. More than she used to? And this whole stuck-in-the-cockpit thing was her idea. And there were moments when their hands touched, and Zhi didn’t pull away. All of which could mean anything or nothing. Fucking Throne, how did cavemen ever manage to mate?
And, of course, she was running out of time. Today would be their last chance to work on Alpha Zero. Tomorrow was the all-comers fight, where pilots working for the House would take on anyone who wanted to try their luck. Zhi had already entered herself, anonymously, in the first slot to fight Custis. If Alpha Zero was working—which is a pretty fucking big if—she was confident that it would tear Custis’s DreadCarl to pieces, and Kas was inclined to agree with her. The Third-Empire technology that drove the ancient warbot was like nothing she’d ever seen. If only I could get that back to the Scholarium, without fucking Gneisin taking credit for it . . .
There were a few more pieces Solomon had promised to find for them. None of it, according to Zhi, was absolutely critical, but it would help stabilize the patchwork OS they’d built on top of Alpha Zero’s original system. Kas yawned as she passed under the gate to the scav town—she’d gotten increasingly less sleep as the week went on, spending more hours on the code—and headed down the main street to the engineer’s shop.
There was something different in the air today. Fewer people lounged outside their ramshackle dwellings, and more doors were closed, as though in expectation of bad weather. The gangs of children that had grown accustomed, like feral dogs, to Kas’s presence were now absent. Kas frowned as she approached Solomon’s little shack.
Something’s wrong. But what to do about it? On Sentinel, she’d alert Security, but the closest thing to that here was the House and its enforcers. Maybe Solomon knows what’s going on. She paused in front of his curtain, and caught the smell of blood.
Oh, fucking Throne. She pushed through the curtain, then pulled up short, hands to her mouth. Solomon hung, upside down, in the doorway between the front and back of his little shop. Someone had bound his hands behind his back, strapped his feet to a pillar, and slit his throat from ear to ear. A tide of blood had washed out, painting his face a deep crimson and matting his hair into spikes before draining into a huge pool on the monocrete floor. His spectacles, only slightly askew, were spattered with dried brown droplets.
So much. For a while, that was Kas’s only thought. He’s so small. How could he have so much blood?
She’d never seen a corpse before. Death on Sentinel happened behind closed doors, often by request, something to be handled tastefully by bots and professionals. Solomon’s eyes were open, and blood had pooled around them, as though his tears had turned crimson. Something moved, beside his slightly parted lips, and Kas realized there were flies all over him. Scavengers, beginning the process of turning what had once been a human being into a rotting mess of—
Everything she’d had for breakfast fought to be the first out of her mouth. Kas stumbled through the front curtain into the street and fell to her knees, spewing vomit. She was sobbing and retching simultaneously, her whole body racked by painful spasms. They were in his eyes—
Zhi. She let a long string of bile drool past her lips and fought for breath. I have to tell Zhi. Part of it was rational; a detached segment of Kas’s mind admitted that most of it was not. This was Zhi’s world, her people. She would know what to do.
Kas forced herself to her feet, ignoring the curious stares that followed her from windows and doorways. Her mouth tasted vile, and her breath came in hiccupping gasps, but she staggered on, back out through the gate and down toward Alpha Zero’s hangar.
Zhi will know what to do.
* * *
Zhi wasn’t sure what to do, and it was starting to get on her nerves.
The problem was that Kas was too . . . too off-worlder-y for her own good. Zhi was reasonably sure Kas wanted to fuck. She was absolutely certain that she, herself, wanted to fuck. Zhi had tried to communicate her understanding of this set of facts, and assure herself of Kas’s similar comprehension of the same, by a series of time-honored and generally well-understood hints and allusions, casual touches, a smile and a pointed glance—
Normal things, in other words. Any other scav would have already rolled their eyes at how ridiculously direct she was being. And sometimes, Kas seemed to go along happily, but there would always come a point where she would need to make a move to signal her own interest, and somehow it wouldn’t happen. Which left Zhi feeling like maybe everything was on her side, and she was getting everything wrong, and obviously an off-worlder wouldn’t want to fool around with a scav, what was she thinking.
And so they’d spent the week excruciatingly not fucking, and Zhi wasn’t sure how much more of it she could take.
And she’s leaving tomorrow, ’ent she? One way or the other, this is it. Big fight. Get this done. If the plan worked, she’d be able to take Alpha Zero and Solomon and get away from the Drome, leaving the House and its minions behind. There were plenty of other arenas on Earth, and if she did well enough there might even be a ticket off-world, someday. Wouldn’t Kas be surprised if I dropped in on her on Sentinel?
This morning, Kas was retrieving the last of their gear from Solomon. After that, there’d be a bit more work on Alpha Zero to do, some final tests. No chance for a full workup here, though. Just have to cope with any bugs up in the arena.
Footsteps in the tunnel. Zhi had taken to leaving the hangar doors open, so she could hear Kas coming. Not like anyone else know I’m down here, yeah? She hopped down off the gantry, then paused, listening.
Too fast. Kas was running. And behind her, softer—
Slag me. The House had found them.
She had, at most, fifteen seconds. Zhi threw herself down behind a stack of old barrels beside the open hangar door. It wasn’t much, but it would shield her from immediate view. She drew her knife, and struggled to control her breathing.
“Zhi!” Kas ran into the hangar, looking around with too-wide eyes. Flecks of vomit crusted her cheeks and the front of her coverall. “Zhi, where are you? Fucking Throne, Zhi, say something—”
Zhi’s heart slammed in her chest. She wanted to run to Kas, but forced herself into stillness, watching through the gap in the barrels. The off-worlder turned in a circle, searching, and then froze facing the hangar door. Four more figures came in, two in the lead and two behind, each with a pistol drawn and leveled in a professional two-handed grip. There were two men and two women, all wearing dark coveralls with dull red armor across the chest, shoulders, and thighs.
“Who are you?” Kas shouted at them, though from her expression Zhi thought she knew.
“Where’s the girl?” One of the House thugs, an older woman, crossed to Kas and shoved her pistol in her face while another covered her. “Where’s Zhi?”
“I don’t know,” Kas said. “You fucking killed Solomon, didn’t you?”
The bottom dropped out of Zhi’s stomach, and there was a ringing in her ears. She almost didn’t hear the thug’s response.
“We did. And you led us right to the prize.” She pushed her gun against Kas’s forehead. “Now where is Zhi?”
“I don’t know.” Kas stood to her full height, defiant. “Going to fucking shoot me? That’s going to be hard to explain to the Archscholar.”
“People go missing down here,” the thug snarled back. “Not our fault if you go wandering where you shouldn’t. Last chance.”
Last chance, Zhi thought. And the odds weren’t going to get any better. She ducked around the barrels, knife in hand.
The first thug never saw her coming. Zhi slammed her knife into the small of his back, angling it up to catch his lungs, and ripped it free as he crumpled. The second thug started to turn at the man’s strangled gasp, but Zhi was already charging her, keeping low. Her free hand came up, pushing the thug’s gun high, even as she brought her knife in a sideways stab into the woman’s armpit. The blade sank in, finding a gap between ribs, and the thug stumbled to one side, reflexively pulling the trigger.
The pistol shot was thunderous, echoing off the monocrete walls. It distracted the third thug for a moment, but not quite long enough for Zhi to cover the distance between them. A second shot rang out, and she felt a tug on her left arm, but no pain, not yet. The point of her knife ripped across the back of the thug’s gun hand, and he yelled and recoiled. Zhi twisted inside his reach and jammed her blade upward, through the soft underside of his jaw and into his throat. He fell, sputtering blood, and Zhi looked around for the fourth.
“Stop right there,” the older woman said. She had a knife in her off-hand, pressed against Kas’s throat, the off-worlder pulled close in front of her. Her pistol was leveled at Zhi. “Drop the knife or she dies.”
Zhi paused for a long moment. Blood was running freely down her left arm, and the wound was beginning to hurt badly. Zhi squeezed her free hand into a fist; at least her fingers still moved. Kas’s eyes were very wide, but she didn’t look out of her mind with terror. She met Zhi’s gaze, and there was a question there.
“Go ahead and kill her,” Zhi said. “She’s just an off-worlder. I’ve gotten what I need out of her.”
“Drop the knife,” the thug said. “Now.”
House must have told them to take me alive. ’Ent that convenient. Zhi’s eyes flicked to the left, and Kas gave a very slight nod. The off-worlder’s hand rustled against her leg, showing three fingers. Then two. Then one.
Zhi ducked and threw herself forward, just as Kas twisted in the thug’s grip, shoving the older woman off-balance and snaking one arm between her and the knife. The pistol roared, and at the same time the thug pressed her blade home, spattering blood. Kas screamed. Zhi felt another shot go over her shoulder, and grabbed the thug’s wrist before she could fire a third, twisting her arm out of the way and stabbing her in the belly, just below the edge of her armor. When she doubled over, Zhi tore the blade free and jammed it sideways through her throat. The thug hit the monocrete with a wet wheeze and a clatter of armor, taking the knife with her. Zhi left it there and ran to Kas.
“Hey!” Kas’s scream had died down, but she was staring at the bright red flow down her arm as though in a trance. Zhi grabbed her, blotted the blood against her own shirt, and did a quick assessment. “Hey, you’ll be okay. Just a cut, yeah?” A long and deep one, across the back of her arm, but it could have been a lot worse. It could have been her slagging throat. Zhi tried not to think about how thin a chance they’d played.
“Cut.” Kas’s voice was small. “They . . . you killed . . .”
“Everybody’s dead, yeah?” Not quite true, one of the thugs was still choking on her own blood and twitching, but close enough. “You’re safe. Can you walk?”
Kas blinked. “W . . . walk?”
“Gotta get somewhere safe-an’-secure. It’s not far. Just follow me, yeah? A couple steps—that’s right.”
Kas followed Zhi out of the hangar, past the bodies. When her foot came down in a pool of blood, she shuddered, but kept moving.
“That’s good,” Zhi said, when they were outside.
“W . . . where are we going?” Kas’s teeth were chattering, and blood still dripped down her arm.
“My hidey-hole,” Zhi said, grabbing her wrist. “Come on, this way.”
* * *
Kas had killed people in sims. Who hadn’t? Sometimes that was the whole point—there was a popular scenario called Murder Town in which you were turned loose in a city block with a dozen other players and challenged to rack up the highest body count you could before time ran out. Other times killing was ancillary to some kind of adventure, whether you were spying in the decadent courts of the Fifth Empire or fighting across prehistoric Earth with sword and machine gun. Either way, she’d seen too many murders to count, and committed enough that she figured she had a certain familiarity with the concept.
Except that was wrong, horribly wrong, and this was real life and everything was different. People didn’t thrash around in the sims after you’d stabbed them, bloody foam on their lips. They didn’t grope aimlessly in pools of their own blood. And when they cut you, it didn’t hurt.
She’d been certain she was going to die. The blade had been pressed against her throat, and the pressure of the metal made her horribly aware just how fragile her body was. Skin and muscle and bone, blood and piss and bile, and hardly anywhere you could shove a knife in it that wouldn’t end up killing you one way or another. Her heart hammered so hard she thought it might simply burst, and save the captor the trouble. And then Zhi had—and she’d—
Now they were stumbling together down yet another corridor. Blood dripped from Kas’s elbow, pattering behind them. Zhi’s sleeve, she noted, was sodden as well. Is that my blood? Or . . .
“You’re hurt,” Kas said.
“’Ent bad,” Zhi hissed. “Got lucky, yeah? Nearly there.” She pointed ahead with her good arm. “Next turn, then look for a hole in the wall.”
They rounded the corner, each half leaning on the other. At the base of one wall was a crack in the monocrete, big enough to fit through on hands and knees. Wearily, Zhi propped Kas against the wall, then got down and pushed herself through. Kas followed, gritting her teeth every time she put any weight on her wounded arm. If the tunnel had been long, she might not have made it, but after a meter or so Zhi took her hand and helped her back to her feet.
Glow-paint on the ceiling flickered fitfully to life, revealing a space about ten meters by ten. A single doorway was sealed over with more monocrete, leaving the crack the only way in or out. Zhi’s bed, a messy tangle of threadbare sheets, occupied one corner, and another was taken up with stacks of crates that Kas now recognized as algae sludge, a scav staple. Barrels of water stood beside them. Otherwise, the only furniture in the room was a low table against the opposite wall, with a small box sitting on it.
“Sit,” Zhi said, piloting Kas to one of the cushions scattered across the rough monocrete floor. “Give me a second, yeah?”
She rummaged amidst the crates of food and other supplies as Kas gingerly sat down. Zhi returned with a selection of rags and a battered metal box, from which she extracted a tube and a roll of bandages that looked relatively clean.
Kas expected to be a little more squeamish—cuts and bruises on Sentinel were handled by autodocs, painlessly and efficiently—but it felt like all capacity for fear had been drained out of her by the shock of the fight. She watched with near-clinical detachment as Zhi blotted up the blood from the long cut on her forearm, sprayed blue foam from the tube over the wound, and then wrapped the whole thing in bandages. The foam must have had a numbing agent, because the pain started to fade quickly.
“Can you check my arm?” Zhi said. “Doesn’t feel deep.”
Kas nodded. Zhi tried to pull her sleeve away from the wound, then shrugged out of her overshirt entirely and tossed the bloody thing away in a wad. Kas wiped carefully at the blood and found a long, ragged tear in Zhi’s skin, but no puncture.
“That’s all right, then,” Zhi said with visible relief. “Just spray it a little and wrap it up.”
Kas did as she was told, feeling like a bot. Zhi flexed her arm, satisfied, then caught Kas’s hand.
“You’re freezing, yeah?”
Kas found herself nodding, teeth clenched.
“Tell you what. Get out of that nasty shirt, and I’ll get you a blanket. I can turn my back if you need, yeah?”
Modesty was another thing that the draining adrenaline had taken with it. Kas pulled off the top of her vomit-spattered coverall, and Zhi settled a slightly stale-smelling but wonderfully thick blanket around her shoulders. Kas pulled it tight around herself, protectively, and sat staring at nothing while Zhi did something in the corner.
“Here,” the girl said sometime later. “Drink.”
Presented with a tin cup of hot liquid, Kas drank. The stuff was slightly bitter but not unpleasantly so, with a faint tinge of mint. It cut through the taste of bile that still coated her tongue, and she let the first mouthful dribble onto the monocrete beside her, then drank more.
Something about it seemed to spark her mind back to life, like a processor finishing its boot cycle. Kas sat up straighter, inhaling the aroma of the stuff, and gave a little sigh. Zhi, sipping from her own cup, sat across from her.
“What is this stuff?” Kas said.
Zhi looked puzzled. “Tea, yeah?”
“This isn’t tea,” Kas said. They drank plenty of tea on Sentinel. “It tastes nothing like tea.”
“Dunno. It comes out of a box labeled ‘tea.’”
Zhi shrugged, and Kas gave a weak chuckle. There was a long pause.
“You all right?” Zhi said quietly.
“I think so,” Kas said. “I’m not . . . used to this sort of thing.”
“I ’ent exactly used to it either,” Zhi said.
“But you’ve done it before.” Kas gripped her cup tightly. “Killed people.”
“Yeah,” Zhi said quietly. “Sometimes.”
“I’m . . .” Kas shook her head and forced her fingers to relax. “Thank you. You saved my life, I think.”
“’Ent sure who saved who, really.” Zhi scratched the back of her neck. “Let’s say it was a big-an’-nasty mess and call it even, yeah?”
“Even,” Kas agreed, remembering the way her hand shook when she gave Zhi the countdown. “Okay. What happens now?”
“Did they really kill Solomon?” Zhi said.
Kas had, shamefully, almost forgotten about that. She gave a quick nod. Zhi’s face went tight.
“Did he . . . was it bad?”
Kas wondered if she should lie. Instead she gave another small nod.
“Slagging bastards,” Zhi muttered. “He was just . . . fuck. He didn’t deserve any of this. Much less . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Kas said. “I only knew him a little bit, but he seemed like . . . a good person.”
“If he hadn’t helped me, he’d still be alive,” Zhi said.
“He wanted you to make this work,” Kas said. “I know that much.”
“Yeah.” Zhi blew out a breath. “Okay. I don’t think those bastards sent a runner back after they found me, which means there ’ent going to be anybody coming after them yet. I’ll give it a while, then check the hangar. If there ’ent no goons waiting, then plan’s the same as before. Finish up Alpha Zero, take him up to the fight tomorrow, win.”
“If the House is after you,” Kas said, “if they’re willing to do . . . all this, then won’t they kill you tomorrow once they realize who you are?”
“They ’ent likely to want to with all you off-worlders watching,” Zhi said. “Bad for business, yeah? And I’ll have Alpha Zero. They’re welcome to slagging try.”
“What about after the fight?”
“I’ll figure it out. But that should get you free-an’-clear.”
Right. That was, after all, the point of all this. Free and clear. “Okay.”
They fell into a long silence again. Zhi drained her tea and went back for another cup, and Kas sipped from hers. She was suddenly extremely aware that Zhi was wearing only pants and a thin, sleeveless undershirt, which was soaked with sweat and didn’t conceal much. She coughed, and Zhi looked over her shoulder.
“So,” Kas said. “This is where you live?”
“I know it ’ent much,” Zhi said. “I been moving a lot recently. But this is a good spot, yeah? Hard to find, sealed-an’-dry, not too far from the hangar. I was happy to find it.”
“I can imagine.” Kas nodded toward the little table. “What’s that?”
“’Ent nothing really.” Zhi ran her fingers through sweat-slicked hair. “Sentimental. I should know better, yeah?”
“Can I see?”
“If you want.”
Kas shrugged out of the blanket, feeling much warmer. She contemplated her own discarded shirt, but it was crusted with blood and vomit, and she couldn’t face the thought of touching it. If Zhi’s comfortable in transparent underthings, I can manage with a bra. She shuffled across the room on hands and knees and sat down beside Zhi in front of the table.
“I found this in an old storeroom,” Zhi said, touching the little box reverentially. “Vac-sealed, yeah?”
It took Kas a moment to understand. The box was made of wood, polished so the grain was visible. On Sentinel, it would be a cheap, bot-fabbed thing, free to anyone who wanted it. Here on Old Earth, where every bit of furnishing was ’crete, metal, or plastic, it was unique.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
Zhi ducked her head, embarrassed. She reached out and flipped the box open, revealing a picture set into the lid. A physically printed image, Kas realized, and marveled. This planet.
It depicted a girl, recognizably Zhi but only five or six years old, with another older child. A man and two women stood behind them, arms looped around one another’s shoulders, all smiling. The family resemblance was unmistakable.
“Your parents?” Kas said.
“Yeah,” Zhi said quietly. “And my sister.”
There wasn’t going to be a happy ending to this story, but Kas felt like she had to ask. “What happened?”
“We were scavs,” Zhi said, with a shrug. “Mama Beru and Mama Ess always wanted to find something better. Join one of the tour companies, maybe. They take Earth natives, sometimes. Or . . . something. They kept trying. Papa Toa thought they were crazy, but he loved them anyway. When Nia and I were old enough, we started helping out.
“Mama Ess went first. Some kind of lung infection. Papa Toa was never the same after that. When Mama Beru died in a tunnel collapse, hauling gear, he kind of . . . went into himself. He didn’t come out again.” Zhi swallowed, running her thumb over the image. “Nia tried to take care of me. And Solomon, he was with us by then. But one day she just . . . didn’t come back.” She gave a small shrug. “It happens, yeah? A lot of tunnel to get lost in. ’Ent nobody going to go searching for your bones.”
Kas reached out, tentatively, and touched the girl’s arm. Zhi leaned toward her with a sigh, until her head rested on Kas’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Kas whispered.
“’S okay,” Zhi said. She flipped the box closed. “It’s been a long time, yeah? But that’s why I gotta get out of here. Otherwise . . .”
“I get it.”
Another long pause. Zhi didn’t move, her head a gentle weight, and Kas felt the warmth of her skin against her own. Her heart was racing.
“Can I . . . ask you something?” she said eventually.
“’Course,” Zhi said.
“Do you . . .” Kas swallowed, and let the rest of the sentence out in a rush. “Do you want to kiss me?”
Another silence. Then a faint gasping sound. Kas risked looking down, and found Zhi with one hand over her mouth, laughing.
“What?” Kas said, feeling her face flush.
“Nothing!” Zhi managed, between gasps.
“If you don’t want to,” Kas said, in as haughty a tone as she could manage, “a simple no would suffice. You don’t need to—”
Zhi held up a hand, and Kas paused as she giggled again, then got herself under control.
“I just wondered,” Zhi said, “if everything on your planet is that formal.”
“It isn’t normally,” Kas said, her flush deepening. “If we were on Sentinel, I could read your ephemera, and then you could flag—” Seeing Zhi’s incomprehension, she shook her head. “It’s just different, all right? And I didn’t know how anything works here, and I didn’t want to do something without your permission—”
“I get it,” Zhi said, shaking her head. “I get it! Sorry. Just . . . the way you came out with it . . .” She started giggling again, then calmed herself under Kas’s furious glare.
“Well?” Kas said. She felt like steam must be rising from her face.
“Scholar Zychtykas Three,” Zhi said, “I would very much like to kiss you. And for you to kiss me. And other things. Is that sufficiently clear, yeah?”
“I think I’ve got the idea—”
“Fuck. I’d like to fuck.”
“Okay.” Kas felt herself grinning.
“Specifically,” Zhi went on, grinning herself, “I’d like to take your—”
“All right,” Kas said, laughing, and cut off the rest of that detail by covering Zhi’s mouth with her own. Zhi turned, wrapping her arms around her, and pressing her thin, wiry body against Kas. It was a long moment before they broke apart again, panting for breath. For a long moment, they just stared.
“And in step six,” Zhi said, “I plan to stick my—”
Dissolving in giggles, Kas kissed her again. Then, over Zhi’s mock protests, she pulled her across the room, toward the bed.
Afterward, lying together in a naked, sweaty tangle, Kas shifted around until they were face-to-face.
“I have an idea,” she said.
“Yeah?” Zhi blew a drop of sweat from the tip of her nose. “I may need a minute.”
Kas rolled her eyes. “For the fight. What you can do, afterward.”
She explained. Zhi listened, attentively, and then squeezed Kas’s good arm.
“’Ent you going to get in trouble with your bosses?” she said.
Kas’s chest clenched at the thought, but she forced herself to smile. “Only if you lose.”
* * *
“Scholar Zychtykas Three!” Firidi said, stiff and aggrieved, for all the world like a parent scolding an angry toddler.
Kas stopped in the door to her room and gave him her best innocent look. Once, the merest suggestion of his disfavor would have her quailing, but things had gone rather beyond that now.
“Yes, Firidi?”
“You didn’t return to the shelter last night,” the older scholar said, stalking across the common room.
“I didn’t. I was otherwise engaged.”
“You might have been dead, for all we knew.”
“I’m sure Homeward Voyages would have compensated the Scholarium in that case.”
“Don’t joke with me, Kas.” Firidi’s lip curled. “Your behavior on this trip has been unconscionable. A junior scholar on her first research expedition should enjoy some leeway, I understand that—believe it or not, I was young once—”
“You mentioned that last time,” Kas murmured.
“—but you have ignored repeated warnings. The Archscholar will hear of this, have no doubt.”
“I wish him joy of the news,” Kas said. “Is that all?”
“Is that all? Do you understand the magnitude of the trouble you are in?”
“Exquisitely. But I intend to catch the fights at the Drome today before we head home and the Archscholar gets a chance to exsanguinate me. So if you’re quite done, I need to change.”
“You—” The elder scholar’s face had gone blotchy, and Kas wondered if she’d overdone it. She didn’t want him keeling over on her. But he took a few deep breaths and apparently mastered himself. “Very well. I wash my hands of the matter. Make sure to be at the train for our scheduled departure, because we certainly will not be waiting on you!”
Firidi turned and stalked away. Kas closed the door to her room and put a hand to her mouth to muffle her laughter. I should have done that years ago. Having already wagered everything was a surprisingly good feeling. Like being free.
She showered off the sweat of the previous night, rubbing at her gritty eyes. It had taken until the small hours of the morning before Zhi had pronounced Alpha Zero finished, or at least as good as it was going to get, working around the absence of Solomon’s last shipment. By that point it had been too late to return to the shelter and get any rest, so they’d gone back to Zhi’s hidey-hole, but between one thing and another they hadn’t actually gotten much sleep there either. Zhi had a gritty, black substance she claimed was coffee, which tasted nothing like coffee but certainly contained some kind of stimulant; Kas had the stretched-out, rubbed-raw feeling she associated with ignoring her health algo’s advice.
Dressing in her scholar’s robe, she went back out and grabbed another cup of coffee—the real stuff, this time—and waved cheerfully at Gneisin, who was eating breakfast. The young scholar raised a curious eyebrow, but waved genially as Kas stuffed fruit and pastry in her mouth and hurried out, heading for the Drome.
The same suite of rooms where they’d had the party the day they arrived had been prepared for the festivities, though this early only servants and a few bots were around, setting up tables and cleaning. The clouds were broken and patchy, for once, and a weak sun snuck through. A door in the warglass led out and down to a balcony directly overlooking the arena floor, for patrons who were willing to risk getting hit by flying metal for a closer look at the action.
Kas loitered until she spotted a bot with House markings, one of the little fist-sized spheres she’d argued with the first day. She beckoned, and it buzzed down to hover beside her.
“Greetings, patron,” it said. “How can I assist?”
“Can I place a wager with you?” Kas said. Between the coffee and the tension, her pulse was racing.
“Certainly!” the bot said. “We have six contests planned for today. Which are you interested in?”
“Pilot Custis Zero is fighting a challenger, correct?”
“Correct!” the bot burbled. “Odds are as follows—”
“I’m not bothered about the odds,” Kas said. “I’m authorized to access the Sentinel Scholarium’s credit line, am I not?”
A slight pause while the thing ran a check. “Of course, patron. The House appreciates the Scholarium’s business.”
“How much credit is available, out of curiosity?”
“The House has extended credit of three million sesterce to the Sentinel Scholarium,” the bot said, sounding smug. “Spending since the last settlement has been eleven thousand, three—”
Most of that had been Kas’s. Thank the Throne for the lack of network. Here on Earth, there were no algos watching for unusual spikes, and no easy way to call up data. Firidi would have to physically speak to a House bot before he noticed anything. Kas smiled.
“Good enough,” she said, putting on her best haughty air. “Put the rest on Custis’s challenger. Mmm, but leave me a couple of hundred for drinks.”
She expected the bot to protest, at least a little. But, of course, it had been happy to take her very questionable assent to Zhi’s bet as ironclad. The House’s bots were programmed to be eager to take wagers.
“Registered,” the bot said. “Two million nine hundred eighty-eight thousand two hundred fifty sesterce on the challenger to Pilot Custis Zero. House fee will be ten percent. Will there be anything else, patron?”
“No,” Kas said, heart hammering harder than ever. “That’ll do for now.”
* * *
Okay. Zhi’s heart was pounding. Here goes nothing, yeah?
She sat in the gel-padded chair in Alpha Zero’s cockpit, which was not nearly as comfortable without Kas’s generously padded body underneath her. Leads ran from the makeshift control rig to her jacks, and fans spun up as she sent start-up commands into the hardware. When she was satisfied that their hacked-together OS was up and running, she ordered it to activate the link to Alpha Zero’s hardware.
The ancient warbot began to hum, very slightly, as power flowed through it for the first time in millennia. Zhi had checked and rechecked every connection, but for a moment she closed her eyes and prayed to the Throne that everything would hold. Then she glanced down at her feet, where she’d carefully set the precious wooden box with her parents’ picture. If you’re watching me, maybe throw some luck my way, yeah?
She ordered the cockpit closed. It sealed around her, noiselessly, ancient technology smooth as oiled slag. No clunky screens here—the entire cockpit flickered once, then seemed to go transparent, the black metal walls shifting to display the feed from the external sensors. It was as though Zhi, her chair, and her ugly patchwork machines were floating where Alpha Zero’s torso should be, the rest of the hangar drawn around them with perfect fidelity.
Killer. Zhi grinned like a shark. You-an’-me are going to get along just fine, bot.
Gingerly, she ordered Alpha Zero to stand up. There was a brief hesitation, the lag introduced by the clunky OS, but then the mecha obeyed. Zhi pushed the gantry aside, astonished at Alpha Zero’s deftness.
She’d dropped the bodies of the House thugs down a deep shaft, but the bloodstains were still there, crusted brown on the monocrete floor. Zhi stepped over them and out into the corridor, moving cautiously. Alpha Zero was more agile than any bot she’d ever piloted, whisper-quiet except when his feet crunched on the monocrete, slick black form as flexible as an acrobat’s. As a test, she got him up to a jog, and almost laughed with delight at the smooth response. Ohhhhh, killer. Custis isn’t going to know what slagging hit him.
The elevator hummed underneath the warbot, carrying Zhi and Alpha Zero toward the surface. She touched her parents’ box with the tip of her toe and waited, trying to calm her breathing.
Are you anxious too, bot? It’s been so long since you’ve seen the sun. Must be exciting, yeah?
For her part, Zhi was worried about Kas. The off-worlder had seemed certain her bosses wouldn’t do anything but yell at her, not yet, but Zhi wasn’t so sure. If I lost a bunch of the House’s money, they’d do a lot more than yell. As evidenced by the corpses she’d had to haul down the corridor, blood slick under her fingers—
She swallowed as the elevator slowed, then stopped. The tunnel led to the arena floor, where two other mecha were already squaring off. She and Custis were the second fight.
This was the dangerous part, and she hadn’t mentioned it to Kas. She’d registered anonymously, but now she had to put in a personal appearance with the House official in charge. She didn’t think they’d try anything, not here with everyone watching. Not if they’ve already got wagers on the fight. And if Kas had succeeded with her plan, they would have a slagging big one already. Don’t want to risk that, yeah? She sent up another small prayer, this time that the House’s greed would outweigh their need for vengeance.
Settling Alpha Zero in the tunnel, Zhi opened the cockpit and reluctantly pulled off the leads. She climbed down, warily, and slipped out of the shadows onto the arena floor. The current fight—two smallish bots, grappling like a couple of teenagers trying to figure out how to fuck—was well underway at the far side of the Drome. Up against the wall on this side, a small cluster of owners and pilots stood beside a House flack and a pair of red-armored guards. Zhi recognized Custis, and squared her shoulders.
The flack, an older man with heavy jowls and a bald head, turned toward her and gaped. The guards tensed, and Zhi heard a murmur run through the other pilots. She forced a smile and gave them a jaunty wave.
“Can I help you?” the flack said.
“Pilot Zhi Zero,” Zhi said. “I’m registered anonymously for the next fight.”
She proffered a chip with her anonymous key on it. The flack took it gingerly, fitted it into a tablet, and frowned.
“Your entry is valid,” he said. He glanced at the guards, who relaxed fractionally. “Is your mecha ready?”
“Absolutely,” Zhi said.
“Then you will begin as soon as the first fight is finished and the field is clear.” He gave her an absolutely humorless smile. “The House wishes you good fortune.”
The House is the one that’s going to need good fortune, yeah? If nothing untoward had happened to Kas, she’d already placed an enormous bet on Zhi, probably at favorable odds. No doubt that once the bot had reported in, the House managers had instructed their agents to try to lay the bet off, encouraging people to take the other side and put their money on Custis. But they were short on time. With any luck, when I win, it’ll slagging break them. And good riddance.
She grinned at the flack and turned away, ready to hurry back to Alpha Zero, but a large figure blocked her path. Custis. The other pilot looked down at her, arms crossed. Zhi’s hand dropped to the handle of her knife, sheathed at the small of her back.
“You need something?” she said.
“I knew it was you,” he said. “They didn’t think you’d have the juice for it, but I knew.”
“Slagging great for you. Take a job as an oracle.”
“They wanted me to give you one last chance. Surrender, and join the House stable. Final offer.”
“Tell them to slag off.”
Custis’s face split in a wide smile. “I told them you’d say that, too. I’m glad you did. You’ve pushed them too far this time.” He leaned closer, and Zhi’s fingers tightened on her knife. “This time I’m not going to pull the last punch. I’m going to fucking kill you, Zhi.” His voice dropped. “Just like I killed your little friend.”
Zhi tried to swallow, but her throat had gone solid. Her fingers twitched. If I gut him now, they’ll just shoot me, and it’ll all be for nothing. Breathe, Zhi. Breathe. Eventually, she trusted herself enough to speak. “You’ll have to catch me first.”
“I managed that last time.” Custis clapped her on the shoulder, and it took everything Zhi had not to break his arm. “But I’m sure whatever piece of junk you’ve slapped together now will be up to the challenge, yeah?”
* * *
The first fight, which the House referee tried to bill as some kind of grudge match, made Kas realize just how good a pilot Zhi was. Even in Speedy, a junkyard mecha, she’d been worlds above whoever drove the two converted laborbots that grappled with one another as a prelude to the main event. Finally, something broke inside one of them, and it went down and didn’t get up again. More laborbots came onto the field to clear them out of the way, and Kas drifted to the window, looking down.
The lounge was filling up, but only gradually. Firidi, Vanalt, and Gneisin were here, the elder scholars shooting Kas ominous looks while Gneisin addressed the bar and buffet. A scattering of other tourists were around, too, but fewer than had attended that first night. Maybe they all found the brothel.
Kas had had a single glass of something strong and purple, but that was all. If something goes wrong . . . She couldn’t imagine how things could go wrong in a way where she might be able to fix them, but she refused to take the chance nevertheless. Come on, Zhi. Let’s get this done.
“The second match,” the referee announced, his voice coming over the speakers, “will be Pilot Custis Zero against Pilot Zhi Zero! A rematch from last week’s event, which I’m sure you all remember! Fighters, take your places!”
Alpha Zero emerged from the tunnel. It was so black that it looked like a roughly humanoid hole into the depths of space, the reflections of the arena lights sliding across its surface like smeared stars. All that was really visible was the long knife in the warbot’s hand, which was a scavenged weapon Solomon had delivered—if Alpha Zero had any integral weaponry, they hadn’t been able to access it.
But they had made the mecha move. Kas watched with swelling pride as the Third-Empire warbot stalked across the field with a predator’s grace. The code that had seemed so rickety and haphazard when she was in the midst of it worked, and Zhi’s skill showed through. Kas imagined her cocky grin, and a smile spread across her own face.
Most of the tourists didn’t know what they were looking at, of course. But here and there, people were drifting to the window. Those who understood a little bit about warbots, or simply could tell that there was something different here. Kas saw Vanalt do a double take, then prod his husband sharply. Firidi looked down at the ancient mech and whispered something under his breath.
No DreadCarl is going to stand up to that. Ninth-Empire junk couldn’t compare to the glories of the past, any more than a child’s wooden toy sword would stand up to a real blade. Kas felt triumph fizzing through her veins. Then a door opened on the other side of the arena, and something big came through.
* * *
As soon as she was back in Alpha Zero’s cockpit, Zhi started feeling better. The ancient mech responded to her will with only the slightest hesitation. She wondered what Custis was thinking, in the cockpit of his DreadCarl, watching Alpha Zero’s slick, almost invisible entrance.
The door to the opposing tunnel opened, and a warbot was outlined against the light. But the silhouette was wrong, not even humanoid, and Zhi’s brow creased in puzzlement. She watched as the ungainly thing stepped forward, clear of the tunnel, and then . . . unfolded.
Slag me. The answer to the puzzle, it turned out, was straightforward. The warbot had been bent double in the tunnel, unable to stand to its full height. It did so now, what had to be twenty meters of polished metal gleaming in the ranked Drome lights. It was twice the height of Alpha Zero, its vast chestplate was battered and battle-scarred, with the merest suggestion of a head at the top bearing three red-tinted lights like eyes. It had four arms, two on either side, the top pair bearing long axes while the bottom ended in colossal spikes, ideal for punching through armor plate.
Zhi had never seen anything like it. ’Ent nobody seen anything like it.
* * *
That’s a fucking Dreadnaught. Kas ran to the window and pressed herself against it, leaving her drink behind. Then, as the other party guests began to cluster around, she swore and pushed her way to the door out to the balcony, leaving them behind.
There weren’t supposed to be any Dreadnaughts left. The treaty that had ended the Ninth Empire had specifically required that they be disassembled, along with all the other war machines Emperor Octavard’s twisted imagination had dreamed up. Where in the fucking Throne did they get that thing?
The colossal warbot had none of Alpha Zero’s grace or sophistication. It was the product of a later era, like the DreadCarl, but unlike the DreadCarl it wasn’t some frontline, mass-produced warbot. The Dreadnaughts had been the Emperor’s honor guard, and they’d left a trail of carnage across a dozen worlds. In terms of raw power, they’d never been matched.
Throne defend us. Kas swallowed hard, gripping the railing at the edge of the balcony. Throne defend Zhi. These fights weren’t supposed to be to the death, but if that thing hit her . . .
* * *
Well. Zhi forced a smile onto her face. Just have to make sure not to get hit, yeah?
“I was surprised when they offered to let me drive this monster.” Custis’s voice crackled and popped over the link. “Apparently the betting was going in your favor, and the House was getting nervous. Honestly I would have preferred to take you down in a fair fight, but I’ll settle for squashing you like a bug.”
“Not gonna beg me to surrender again?”
“Oh, no,” Custis said. “This time, you die.”
“The match will continue until one mecha is disabled or the pilot surrenders,” the House flack said. “Deliberate killing blows are not permitted. Begin!”
Small fucking mercy there. Custis wouldn’t need to pretend he’d killed her “accidentally,” not with the size and power of the monster’s weapons. All the more reason not to give a chance to use them.
Alpha Zero sprang forward, a leap with so much power behind it that it caught Zhi by surprise. The acceleration slammed her back against the gel seat, then threw her forward against the straps when the bot landed, feet spraying sparks and pulverized monocrete. The leap had taken her behind Custis, and she ran at the monster’s legs, knife aiming for the back of the knee.
The huge mech twisted, rotating at the waist a hundred and eighty degrees. Its two axes slashed down, and Zhi desperately aborted her attack and threw herself to one side, then ducked under a spiked punch. She scrambled away, out of range, as the monster straightened itself out, torso remaining steady while its legs made a neat circle.
Custis was laughing. “Nice try, Zhi. But it’s not going to be that easy.”
“’Ent any fun if it is,” Zhi muttered.
She pushed off again, more gently this time, circling to the right. Custis swung at her with a spike, and she dodged, waiting for the axe. When it came down, she stepped inside, raising her hands to catch the monster’s arm as the blade went over Alpha Zero’s head. She wrapped herself around the huge forearm, pulling the monster off-balance with Alpha Zero’s full weight.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Custis said.
“Evening the odds a little,” Zhi shot back.
She dropped her knife, shifting up the monster’s arm. Custis tried to reach her with his other axe, but his enormous warbot was too wide for him to get any leverage. Zhi felt a jolt as his flailing limb managed to connect, but Alpha Zero’s black armor held against the wild blow. She concentrated on her grip, putting one hand on each side of the monster’s elbow. Then she set Alpha Zero’s legs, feet digging into the monocrete, and twisted.
Metal screamed and sparked as the monstrous folly of the Ninth Empire strained against its ancestor from the pinnacle of technology. But Alpha Zero had all its weight behind it, against a comparatively weak joint. All at once, the elbow gave way, spraying shattered metal, and the huge axe dropped from limp fingers to clang against the arena floor.
“You fucking slag!” Custis roared. The spike-arm on his right side pistoned out, driving for Alpha Zero’s back. Zhi shifted enough to miss the point of the spike, but the base of it still caught her a glancing blow. The impact sent Alpha Zero tumbling across the monocrete, whipping her back and forth against the restraints. Desperately, she turned the fall into a controlled roll and brought it to a stop, only meters from the edge of the arena.
The hardware all around her was getting hot, fans screaming, the cockpit turning into an oven. Sweat dripped down Zhi’s face, and she blinked it away from her eyes. She concentrated, getting Alpha Zero back on his feet, putting her back against the wall as the monster crossed the arena after her. She summoned a damage report, and found to her surprise that the bot still reported all green. Zhi eyed the straining, makeshift interface hardware and gritted her teeth. Alpha Zero will hold out longer than our junk will.
Custis came on, three arms ready, the fourth hanging limp and useless. Zhi squared herself against the arena wall, waiting. Her knife was on the floor behind him, but she wasn’t sure it would be any good—the huge bot’s armor was too thick for a stab or a slice. Which leaves a twist as the only option, yeah?
The monster attacked. Custis swung his remaining axe overhead, but Zhi only had to duck a little, and the huge blade rebounded off the monocrete wall of the Drome. She kept her eyes on the spike, bringing Alpha Zero’s arms up to parry one blow, then twisting out of the way of the other. With a horrible rasping crunch, the monster drove its weapon a meter into solid monocrete, cracks spidering outward through the wall. Then, as Zhi had hoped, it got stuck.
It was only for a moment, but that was long enough. She threw herself forward, jumping onto the immobilized arm with both hands extended, hitting it with all of Alpha Zero’s strength. Once again, it was the elbow that gave way. This time the forearm tore free entirely, leaving the spike stuck in the wall and Custis wielding an amputated stump, sparks crackling and arching from severed cables. Zhi spun away.
“Only two arms left, you giant fucking slag,” she said. “Come and get me, yeah?”
Custis roared, and spun to face her. Zhi bent, ready to dodge. Then there was the nail-on-glass shriek of machinery seizing up, and a burst of sparks cascaded through the cockpit. All at once, everything went black.
* * *
Kas watched with mounting disbelief, and then giddy excitement, as Zhi systematically took the Dreadnaught to pieces.
Her perspective had shifted again. Alpha Zero had seemed small and weak against the Dreadnaught’s bulk; now it was the Dreadnaught that looked hopelessly outmatched, a lumbering, hopelessly slow behemoth against a slick, fast killer. She shouted in triumph as Zhi ripped off one of the huge warbot’s spike-arms, and she wasn’t alone. Everyone inside the lounge was watching now, though no one else had dared to emerge on the balcony and watch the struggling mecha without the protection of warglass.
Kas could see the rage in the Dreadnaught’s movements, the frustration of its pilot. It turned to face Zhi, and Zhi got ready to evade. And then—
Alpha Zero went perfectly still.
For a moment Kas thought it was a trick. Custis apparently did too, because he lashed out with his remaining axe, aiming for a point well past where Zhi was standing in anticipation of her dodge. But the black mecha didn’t move at all, and the haft of the axe connected with its midsection, bowling Alpha Zero off its feet and sending it rolling toward Kas and the lounge. The bot slammed into the wall below the balcony, sending a shiver through the monocrete, and lay in a heap like a corpse.
Something’s gone wrong. It had to be the control rig, the OS she and Zhi had spent so long putting together, or more likely the hardware that ran it. Maybe Zhi can fix it. Kas pictured her in the cockpit, tumbled over and over by the warbot’s wild roll, fighting the restraints to get to the broken machines . . .
And then what? She had no tools in there, no spare parts. If the system is down, she can’t even signal for surrender. The Dreadnaught was advancing across the arena, with its axe and its wicked spike, and the House referee showed no inclination to call off the fight.
She’s going to die.
Kas would be ruined, of course, and possibly the Scholarium as well. She would spend the rest of her life in an institution for the dangerously insane. But in that moment, none of it seemed to matter.
She’s going to die. Zhi’s glorious, cocky smile, all her wit and wonder, smeared into paste by screaming metal. No. No, no, no. Behind her, in the lounge, people were shouting.
Kas reached up behind her ears and tore away the pads of blocker gel. A mental command woke her implants, putting her jacks into fully active mode for the first time since they’d breached Earth’s atmosphere. Augmented UI bloomed across her vision, familiar and strange at once, a constant companion from what now felt like another life. Almost immediately, red warnings began to blink—a tide of malicious traffic, firewalls collapsing, contamination imminent.
She ignored it all, and reached out for Alpha Zero.
The warbot responded to pings, at least. There was a brief stutter of handshakes and protocols, and then she was in, looking at a devastated domain. Sometime during the millennia it had slept, Earth’s endless adaptive parasite software had broken through even Third-Empire military-grade security, and turned the warbot’s onboard processors into a digital wasteland.
But Alpha Zero was military hardware. As Kas had hoped, it had been designed with this scenario in mind, accounting for the possibility it might be compromised by combat hackers or battle-worms. Deep in its core, physically etched onto diamond media, was a clean copy of its system code.
She had to push through the corrupted mess to get there, malware lashing out as she went, counter-hacking and coating her with a slime of advertising and nonsense. More vile code streamed in through her jacks, viruses iterating through a million generations in a microsecond, twisting themselves to breeze through her pathetic civilian security. The red warnings blinked out as her implants were hijacked by the invaders, dozens of overlapping virtual views opening at once in a confusion of tumbling windows. Earth’s deadly, corrupted datasphere thrashed inside her brain, desperate to sell her things, teach her things, radicalize her and placidize her and turn her into a zombie mining cryptocurrency.
Somehow, in the center of the storm, Kas held on. She broke through the last of Alpha Zero’s defenders, the twisted things in the warbot’s memory that seemed to know what she intended. Finally, she reached the failsafe, live archeocode so familiar from all her research, sent over a simple command—
Dump everything. Reload. Restart.
* * *
“Move, you heap of slag!” Zhi tore at the restraints in pitch darkness, sending every command she could think of down the leads. Nothing responded. She wasn’t sure the things were even still connected. “We ’ent finished yet, yeah? Fucking move!”
It was like being buried alive, in the universe’s most elaborate coffin. Except out there, somewhere, was the monster, crippled but not down, coming for her. The first she would know about it would be when Alpha Zero started coming apart around her.
I’m sorry, Kas. Zhi wanted to scream. Our code worked. It had been the hardware that had failed, ancient processors crashing and burning under impossible conditions. I’m sorry—
Light blinked on, a white diamond hovering in the darkness. It didn’t shift when Zhi turned her head. Virtual light, coming down the leads from the warbot. Bit by bit, achingly slowly, the diamond filled in with green.
Come on. Zhi didn’t know what was happening, or why, but she knew it was her only chance. Come on, come on, you can do it, I’m sorry I called you slag—
The diamond filled, and a gentle tone rang through Zhi’s head. Then the cockpit went translucent again, the view from the sensors painted across the walls. Zhi clenched her fingers on the armrests and sent commands to get the warbot on its feet.
“Zhi?” Kas’s voice, right in her ear.
“Kas? How—”
“Never mind,” Kas said, then dissolved in a rush of static. “He’s—coming—”
Alpha Zero got back up, moving smoother than it ever had. The slight lag between intention and movement was gone, and the warbot responded to the leads like it was Zhi’s own body. She turned, and saw Custis approaching; flickering patterns danced across the monster, combat algos highlighting perceived threats and outlining options.
We thought we could build a control system for this thing. They hadn’t even scratched the surface. Like we strapped a stick to a processor and used it as a hammer.
Now, Zhi understood. Alpha Zero spoke to her, and she understood.
“Sorry about this, Custis,” she muttered. “But I ’ent got time to play with you anymore, yeah?”
The monster took another step forward. Zhi reached down to the back of Alpha Zero’s thigh, and a compartment slid smoothly open, launching a knife into her hand. It hummed with power, a subtle vibration Zhi could feel in the cockpit through the soles of her feet. She pushed herself away from the wall of the arena and squared up, just as Custis reached her and swung a roundhouse blow with his axe.
Zhi ducked under the blade, and brought her new weapon up. She slashed at the elbow, and nearly stumbled as Alpha Zero’s knife went through joint and armor as though they weren’t there, carving through solid metal like a spoon through algae sludge. The monster’s forearm fell away, axe and all. Zhi grabbed the sparking stump with her free hand, lifting herself into the air and clear of the desperate swing of the monster’s one remaining arm. Her knife slashed across its chest, scoring deep through the meter-thick armor. She made a crossing cut, forming an X of torn metal, the triangular ends red-hot and peeling back. Zhi grabbed one and ripped, metal tearing with a horrible screech. Sparks flew, power arcing from damaged conduits, and the monster staggered back against the wall. Zhi leapt back to the ground, skidding to a halt in a spray of torn monocrete.
For a long moment, there was stillness. Alpha Zero was silent, except for the hum of his blade. Energy crackled across the monster, hissing and popping, but it didn’t move.
“The victor . . .” The House flack sounded hesitant, as though awed by what he’d just seen. “The victor is Pilot Zhi Zero!”
Zhi felt like she was floating. Time for the last part of the plan. She cut in Alpha Zero’s external speakers, and her voice boomed around the Drome.
“I have something to say.”
* * *
The edges of Kas’s vision were a blur of shifting windows and virtualities, messages and warnings. Through a narrowing tunnel, she watched Alpha Zero get back up and tear the Dreadnaught down with three effortless strokes.
She did it. Kas staggered against the balcony rail as her limbs started to spasm. We did it.
She tried to shut down her jacks, to stem the flood of malware, but she’d already lost control of the system. A thousand vicious parasites had turned her mind against her. She felt her heart pound, then stop, then thrash again, as berserk health coaches warred with routines designed to get her feeling excited about long-dead presidential candidates. Smells burst through her sinuses, one after another, baking bread and rotting garbage and her mother’s cooking.
“I have something to say.” Zhi’s voice, echoing and enormous. “This warbot, Alpha Zero, is a Third-Empire relic. I would like him to be studied as he deserves.”
A murmur ran through the assembled off-worlders, gathered at the window behind Kas. She got a glimpse of Firidi and his husband, fighting through the press to get to the balcony, Gneisin scurrying in their wake.
“Therefore,” Zhi went on, exactly as they’d rehearsed, “I would like to donate Alpha Zero to the Sentinel Scholarium, on the condition that Scholar Zychtykas Three be given custody and sole authority over him.”
Behind Zhi, the Dreadnaught pushed itself away from the wall.
“Zhi!” Kas shouted her warning through the ether, a scream that turned into a twisted electronic shriek. “Zhi, look out!”
* * *
“Zhi—out!”
Zhi spun.
The monster was already moving, leading with its spike like a lance, putting all its momentum behind the blow. Energy crackled and arced across it, and the torn armor of its chest had gone from glowing red to white as something inside overheated.
“—kill you.” Custis’s voice. “You little slag. I’m gonna kill you, no matter how many tricks you think you’ve got—”
Alpha Zero flashed up a dozen options for escape. Zhi executed the simplest, stepping smoothly aside as the monster lumbered past. Custis tried to turn, coming around in a wide arc. Energy spiderwebbed the huge warbot continuously now, and the glow was too bright to look at.
“Goodbye, Custis,” Zhi said.
“ . . . kill . . . you . . .”
Something inside the monster exploded, armor bulging with the force of the blast. Flames gouted from where Zhi had cut it, followed by a gush of molten metal, dripping out like white-hot blood. Very slowly, the thing fell to its knees, then measured its enormous bulk across the arena floor, rocking with further detonations. Metal sludge flowed out of it, cooling against the monocrete with a hiss.
It ’ent enough, Solomon, Zhi thought. But it’s something, yeah?
She turned back to Kas. At her command, Alpha Zero zoomed its view, and Zhi saw the scholar struggling to stand, her companions trying to restrain her spasming limbs. Her face was ashen, and bloody foam flecked her mouth.
* * *
This may—
—fix your end your sell your—
—have been—
—buy buy buy fuck fuck fuck hate hate hate—
—a mistake.
But Kas knew it hadn’t been. Not really. Zhi’s alive. She clung to that thought, even as her mind unraveled.
The balcony shook. Through the remaining tunnel of her vision, she saw huge, black hands grip the edge, crushing the railing. Firidi and the other scholars let her fall, backing away in fear. There was the hiss of a cockpit opening, and then Zhi’s face, her desperate voice, as distant as the surface of the moon.
The storm of malware reached a crescendo.
—hate him hate her sex sex sex spend spend spend
ENLARGEYOURPENISGUARANTEED—
No thanks, Kas thought. Her heart gave a particularly violent shudder in her chest, and she was gone.
* * *
When she woke up, Kas was in a clean bed, under clean sheets, and—best of all—the familiar pings of a clean network all around her.
Am I dead? If there was an afterlife, Kas had always hoped that it had a decent network.
She opened her eyes. No blinking messages urged her to sell surplus organs. That’s something.
The room around her was clean and off-white, with gentle lighting and soothing patterns of subtle shadow undulating on the walls. Kas found these a little distressing, and the mere thought made them vanish. The light darkened fractionally, as she preferred it, and a window irised open on the far wall, showing a forested mountainside, trees bending and rustling in a stiff breeze.
In other words, the room responded properly, as any room would anywhere in civilization. She was no longer on Earth, with its horrible invasive datasphere. She was safe.
Zhi!
A door slid open, and Zhi appeared, holding a blinking tablet. She looked from the device to Kas, and grinned.
“It said you were awake,” Zhi said. “I still ’ent sure how any of this works. How you do feel?”
“Zhi!” Kas sat up, and found the effort had her panting. Zhi hurried to her side and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Easy, easy,” Zhi said. “You’re gonna be okay, yeah? Just take it slow.”
“Am I . . .” Kas shook her head, the room spinning around her. “Where are we?”
“Space station!” Zhi said, as proud as if she’d personally constructed it. “For off-worlder big shots, yeah? Which apparently is what you are now.”
“So I’m not dead?”
“Not anymore. Apparently things got complicated for a couple of minutes there.”
“I . . .” Kas put a hand to her chest, and felt her heart’s steady beat. “I was . . .”
“You’re okay. You’re talking to me, ’ent you?” Zhi shook her head. “I told that old stick Firidi that my gift of Alpha Zero only applied if you were around to receive it. That got him real interested in getting help for you, yeah?”
“I imagine it did,” Kas muttered. She could only imagine how much an unscheduled lift to an orbital medical station would cost. Well, thanks to me, the Scholarium can afford it. “We won, didn’t we?”
“I won the fight.” Zhi put her hand over Kas’s. “But that was thanks to you, yeah? Otherwise Custis would have chopped me to bits. And then after I thought . . .” She paused, and Kas could see a glitter of tears in her eyes. “Anyway. Docs said they fixed your brain, recached your neural lace manifold or some nonsense like that. All fixed up.”
Kas imagined it had been more complicated than that. Purging malware from implants was a notoriously difficult affair, which was why such pains had to be taken to keep it out in the first place. Rebuilding a system as trashed as hers had been couldn’t have been easy. But, again, the Scholarium can afford it.
“So what happens now?” Kas said.
“Last I heard, the House is going to law with your Scholarium to try and get out of the bet, ’cause otherwise they’re dead broke, and also some authorities want a word with them on where that big warbot came from. Alpha Zero’s coming up on the next heavy lifter, and then him-an’-you are headed back to Sentinel. I swore a law-thingie to record the gift and the conditions, got an algo to help me. When you get back, you’ll have a genuine Third-Empire relic only you’re allowed to touch.”
Let’s see the Archscholar take that away from me and give it to Gneisin. Kas matched Zhi’s fierce grin for a moment, then hesitated.
“What about you?” she said.
“Well. I ’ent sure.” Zhi gave an exaggerated shrug. “I’ve got the pot from the fight, yeah? That’s something. Maybe enough for a ticket somewhere, but I’m not sure what I’ll do when I get there.”
Kas eyed her, caught the gleam in her eyes. Her smile returned.
“Have you considered Sentinel?” she said.
“Maaaaaybe,” Zhi said. “Think there’d be a job for me there? Research assistant sort of thing, yeah?”
“Research partner,” Kas said, then paused. “If that’s what you want.”
In answer, Zhi leaned in, across the bed, and kissed her.