“What do you mean?”
“Why do you think the Crib was so keen to sign those independence treaties in the end? They’d just found out that the Fringe worlds were affected by the same problem.”
“But those worlds are newer. Some of them are centuries newer. Why is their biocyph already failing?”
“We don’t know. All we can say is that the output indicators we use to measure productivity are declining there, too. And a lot sooner, in relative terms, than happened on Central planets. The point is, the Crib didn’t want to be saddled with the responsibility of taking care of the entire Fringe. It was happy to cut them loose.”
“Just as long as they were forced to keep providing resources, under threat of extermination.”
Caleb shrugged. “You come up with a better solution to this entire mess, I’m sure there’s a ’crat somewhere who’ll listen. Just remember, most Crib ’crats sit around pretending it’s not happening. Natesa spent years convincing Central to give Ardra a shot, and they’re still looking for any excuse to shut down the program because it’s too expensive or too ambitious or just because they don’t much like Natesa.”
“What happens if Ardra fails?”
“If this world fails, most likely they’ll cancel the entire program. There isn’t enough support at Central to get a second chance. And if the program’s canceled, the Crib will keep doing what it’s always done—it’ll take what it needs from the Fringe worlds.”
As Edie made her way to the classroom, she gave Caleb’s words serious thought—for perhaps the first time, she was seriously considering the other side of the argument regarding Ardra. There must be another solution. There had to be. But until then…was this the best option? If the cryptoglyph freed the Fringe worlds and the Crib could no longer extort resources from them, the Central planets would need Ardra worlds in order to survive.
That the Fringe worlds were also suffering the same output decline was the most worrisome part of the whole situation. Unlocking the BRATs wouldn’t solve that. The Fringe worlds were apparently still doomed to suffer ecosystem degradation and famine in their future. The cryptoglyph would free the Fringers from oppression and make the next few decades more bearable, but it couldn’t ultimately save their worlds.
Aila was pleased to see her. She wanted Edie to jack in with the children to look at some recent problems they’d been tackling. She directed the children to the projector in the center of the room.
“Take your seats, everyone. Edie is going to work with you this afternoon.”
“But we need Pris for that,” Raena said.
“Edie can take her place.”
The children looked at her with expectant faces, and Edie forced a smile.
“I’ll hook up the holoviz, although the children don’t really use it,” Aila said. “It’s the only guide I have to assess what they’re doing.”
Edie nodded. She, too, didn’t need the visuals but understood that most cyphertecks did.
The holoviz extruded a coil of lights that swirled in a treacly tornado of data, representing a subsection of Prisca’s ecosystem. The children paid no attention to it. Sitting in a circle around the projector, they touched their fingers to the ports and closed their eyes. Edie sat in the empty spot in the ring and jacked in with them.
The datastream flowed through the wires in her fingertips, up her arm, along her spine, and into her wet-teck interface. Her instant impression was that of losing her footing. She slipped and tumbled into the datastream, and chaos closed in from every side. She concentrated on making sense of the cacophony. Somewhere deep beneath the noise, a high-pitched note sang out. She raced between the tiers and followed it. It nudged her away, as if trying to redirect her. Other similar notes, all the same pitch but with different frequencies mixed in, surfaced above the hubbub.
Three notes. These were the children, and they didn’t want her following them. They wanted her to take her assigned place. She observed them for a few seconds and realized where she belonged. Each child moved in a different tier, and as soon as she dropped into place on her tier, the notes blossomed into a rich chord.
The tiers had ragged edges, representing the areas of Prisca’s ecosystem that had not properly evolved toward the target ideal. Had she been working alone, she’d have tackled each tier one by one. But she could see the impossibility of the task: there was too much to keep track of in an ecosystem this complex. Fixing one tier would cause a rip in
another, and no cypherteck could work fast enough to tidy everything up.
The children hopped from tier to tier, swapping places to maintain control of each one while helping one another patch up the broken areas. They composed riffs to slot into place and tied loose areas together with glyphs to stop the cracks spreading. Edie was fascinated as she listened to their music.
She opened her eyes and found Galeon staring at her from his opposite place in the circle, through the colored lights swirling between them. He was frowning. Edie’s first thought was that it had something to do with their encounter last night. Then Raena, beside her, nudged her with her elbow and Edie concentrated again on the datastream. They were annoyed that she wasn’t doing her part.
She closed her eyes and tried to join in, jumping from tier to tier to see what needed to be done. It wasn’t working. The children curved away from her, like repelling magnets. She was being too assertive. She had to work
with
them. She relaxed and let their music flow through her splinter.
Now she saw how they aligned themselves around the datastream to form a diamond-shaped funnel. From these positions they plucked at the edges of the datastream as it flowed past, like a piano tuner listening for bum notes. Edie had been resisting taking up her position in the diamond formation because it didn’t feel right to her. The fourth vertex—hers—was bent out of shape, making the funnel waver.
She fell into place to form a perfect diamond, and heard that pure chord chime again. She sensed the buzz of excitement among the children as they recognized the change. What had felt like a disorganized jumping around between the tiers was now a single machine with four cogs turning in unison, each moving its neighbor and being moved in turn by another to create a circle of motion.
Edie lost her sense of time. The music no longer moved with beats and rhythm. Now it flowed as a continuous stream and she was part of the structure holding it together. The
diamond melded together the ripped tiers, dropped notes into the broken chords, perfected the melody as it cascaded along.
When it was completed, she felt the diamond disintegrating. The children pulled away and jacked out. Edie wanted to hold on to it. Her mind couldn’t maintain the shape and the diamond wilted and crumbled. She had no choice but to let it go.
She opened her eyes and pulled her hand clear, and the datastream dripped away. Galeon grinned at her.
“She figured us out,” Raena said. She sounded a little peeved but was smiling.
“Amazing,” Aila said. She’d watched the visual sim of the datastream. “That’s very promising.”
The other girl, Hanna, didn’t look as pleased as the others. “I want Pris to come back.”
“
She’s
just as good,” Raena scolded.
“Pris’s better,” Galeon said, a challenge in his voice.
Edie sensed the tension among the children and felt like an intruder. They’d only known such harmony while working together, without an outsider—and had created an us-against-them mentality. They were only children, but it was their source of power.
She understood that. She’d been one of them, years ago. The only Talasi in the seeding program—the only child, in fact, and the only cypherteck with a perfect record. That elitism had imbued her with a certain power, which forced Natesa to overlook her attitude problems, her running away, and later, her refusal to cooperate on Ardra. Natesa had no choice but to find ways around her reluctance.
Edie saw no apparent evidence that these children abused their position as vital parts of the seeding team. It was unlikely they even understood their importance to the project, yet they must have recognized that no one else could do what they could do. Until now.
“After what I’ve seen today,” Aila said, “I’m going to ask permission from Administrator Natesa for you to spend the
afternoons in the classroom. You can sit in for Pris until she’s well again, and help the children with the error logs.”
“Are you sure I have the clearance for that?” Edie said, trying to keep the sarcasm light because the children were listening.
“We’ll work something out.”
Natesa stood behind her chair, fingers clasping the back of it in a white-knuckled grip. “I’m granting Aila’s request. I can’t say Caleb’s happy about it, but we need your help in the classroom for a while.”
“Why would Caleb be unhappy? He’d rather grind me under his heel than accept I have something to offer the project?”
“Caleb is something of an eccentric. I make it my business to ignore his personality quirks as long as he gets the job done. Besides, his happiness is not the issue. We do need your help. I will upgrade your clearance accordingly.”
“It’s about time. I already figured out a few things you’ve been keeping from me. Such as the famines on Central worlds. And the declining output indicators across the Crib
and
the Fringe.”
“Well!” Natesa sighed. “I don’t have to remind you that that information is highly sensitive. The last thing we need is mass panic. But at least now you understand how serious things are, and how important Ardra is.”
“What I understand is that Ardra is a band-aid solution, and you don’t have a clue about the root cause of the problem.”
“We have entire departments at CCU devoted to solving exactly that mystery. However, our job at Project Ardra is to feed the people.”
“And in the process, destroy every living planet across the Reach.”
“We’re doing what we must.” Natesa fiddled with a pile of datacaps on her desk. “As for what
you
must do, it’s important that you get up to speed on the children’s work. The
error logs generated by the biocyph on Prisca are increasing. Caleb Chessell can’t explain it. He assures me it’s nothing to worry about, but we need to nip it in the bud.”
“Maybe his regulator code that’s boosting the biocyph is the problem. I’m sure he hasn’t considered that, but have you?”
Natesa all but rolled her eyes at Edie’s heavy sarcasm. “There’s nothing wrong with his code. For twenty years his sims have been lauded by CCU for their predictive accuracy. Those sims with this new code are perfectly adequate for our purposes.”
Perfectly adequate
—it wasn’t exactly a stellar commendation.
“But you’re saying Theron’s sources are correct—there are problems with the terraforming.”
Natesa turned to gaze at the garden held captive behind a plaz wall. Edie got the sense she was avoiding eye contact—avoiding Edie altogether, which was highly unusual behavior from this woman. “Areas of the ecosystem on certain continents are not as healthy as we’d like,” Natesa said. “But Theron is seriously misinformed. Naturally he wants to magnify the problem and shut us down, regardless of the importance of the project. He believes military might can solve everything. But rifles and battlecruisers don’t increase harvest yields, do they?” She spun around, her lips a tight line as if she wished to take back what she’d said. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m sending Chessell dirtside to oversee operations there. I have every confidence in him, and in the children’s ability to handle the increased workload.”
Edie wasn’t so sure. Boosted terraforming was just a bad idea. But she wasn’t going to sweat over it. She wasn’t here to make waves. She was here to work for Finn’s safety and freedom.
“Have you applied for Finn’s freedom papers yet?”
Natesa closed her eyes for a moment and drew a lungful of air in through her nostrils. “Any other loyal citizen of the
Crib with a binding contract wouldn’t dream of trading her cooperation for these little personal favors.”
“Don’t minimize this, Natesa. Freeing Finn isn’t only personal. It’s justice.”
“And it means nothing in the grand scheme of things!” Natesa closed her eyes again for another deep breath, calming herself down. “I have set things in motion. It takes time. I assure you that if and when the leash is cut, he will be immediately removed from this ship. Meanwhile, you have work to do helping to make this project a success.”
And Edie had work to do on her own project, too.
Edie pulled a biocyph module off the rack and set it on the lab counter. Across the room, Galeon had already engaged Finn in a game of Pegasaw. The boy had come through for them, finding his way to the lab that night to unlock the hatch from the inside.
As Edie’s hand brushed the port of the module, she was again struck by the immense potential at her fingertips. She’d never even dreamed she’d have access to stock biocyph. The plan had been to journey to the Fringe with Finn, visiting each planet one by one to use the cryptoglyph. Stock biocyph would enable her to use the cryptoglyph remotely. With this unit, no bigger than a football, along with the algorithm stored in Finn’s chip, she intended to create a master key that would forever change the political and economical structure of the Reach.
And could start a war.
Another
war. Finn had warned her about that, but they’d decided to go ahead and use the cryptoglyph anyway. And when she’d told Finn of her discovery that the Fringe worlds’ biocyph was failing just like that on the Central worlds, his response had been to reassure her that this was worth trying.
“You can only do what you can do,” he’d said. “You don’t have to save the galaxy.”
There was no hesitation on her part. It wasn’t just the
plight of the Fringers that motivated Edie. The opportunity to thumb her nose at the Crib was tempting in its own right.
She jacked in. The biocyph’s orderly tiers hummed with expectation. She’d thought long and hard about how she was going to do this, and now it was time to try. The tiers flowing through her splinter felt slippery. She used glyphs to pin them down, working on instinct because this was new to her. She’d never worked with the untrained, meandering music of stock biocyph before. Time stood still, as it always did when she was immersed this deeply in the datastream. Her mind grew used to the rhythms so that her intense concentration became automatic.