For some perverse reason, she wished Cat was here with her. The woman could be impossible, but she was a friend. The only real friend left in Edie’s life now.
Finn finished his checks and kicked off his boots. He didn’t seem inclined to talk, anyway. She knew how hard this must be for him—to make himself helpless in the face of his enemy. He climbed into the capsule and slipped his arm through the cuff. It wasn’t until he lay back and hit the switch to close the lid that Edie was able to move. She looked through the window of the capsule and locked eyes with him until his eyelids drooped and closed.
Too late now to say the things she needed to say.
“We’re starving,” Raena said as soon as Edie returned to the cabin.
“Where have you
been
?” Hanna whined.
Edie had been gone almost two hours, completely forgetting both the children and the sim she’d left with them. Emotionally exhausted, she didn’t have the energy to deal with their neediness. Fortunately, Galeon had something more important to discuss.
“There’s someone in there.” He pointed to the console.
Edie blinked, baffled by the incongruous statement. “Someone?”
“Someone very angry.”
“Not someone,” Pris said. “
Pieces
of someone. And not really angry. More like…confused and broken.”
“Okay, what are you talking about?” Edie said.
“All those little bunched up feelings that are clogging everything up,” Pris said.
“You mean the knots of code sitting between the tiers of the datastream?”
Pris gave her a strange look. The children didn’t interpret the datastream like she did—she had to remember that. Aila had said they personified it, and that’s exactly what they were doing here.
Edie tried again. “Can you tell me what the pieces are doing?”
“I think they’re broken and they want to be fixed,” Pris said.
“That would make the biocyph happy again,” Galeon pointed out. “You know, it’s forty-seven minutes past supper time.”
“Should we fix it?” Hanna asked eagerly. Fixing glitches was, of course, all they knew how to do.
“No…no,” Edie said distractedly. “Uh, let’s get your supper, okay? We’ll figure it all out in the morning.”
She needed time to process this. She was fairly sure the knots of code had little coherent effect on the biocyph itself.
But it must be doing something if the children could decipher it well enough to describe its “moods.”
Whatever it was, it was one more thing drawing her back to Scarabaeus.
A sim only ever provided a fraction of the information to be gleaned from an active BRAT. A sim was a recording of the biocyph at a particular moment in time. You could run it backward or forward, but what you were seeing then was an extrapolated best guess as to what the biocyph had done in the past, or would do in the future. The sim from Scarabaeus was only a tantalizing glimpse of what was really going on.
The children were fascinated.
“When we get to Scarabaeus, can we jack into a BRAT for real?” Pris asked. “We want to meet Macky.”
Macky was the name they’d given the “someone” in the sim. This was a new experience for them, and they were hooked. They spent hours each day running the sim, exploring the many moods of Macky, talking about “him” as if he were a real person who had somehow wandered into their datastream and was flailing about, sick or injured, unable to comprehend his environment.
“You won’t be going to the surface of the planet,” Edie said. “I’m sorry, it’s too dangerous. But if we can find a way to download more sims like this one, you can look at those.”
The sim kept them amused, which made Edie’s life easier. Pris worked hard by herself to regain the function she’d lost when her wet-teck overloaded. When she couldn’t quite keep up with the other children, they learned to adapt their strategies to accommodate her limits. Galeon seemed to have forgotten or forgiven his altercation with Edie and Finn, and was disappointed Finn wasn’t around.
“Do you have my Pegasaw pegs?” he asked one day.
“No. You threw them away.”
“I wish I had them back. Now I only have the board and it’s no use without pegs.”
“Perhaps you can make some more.”
“If I tell Finn I’m sorry, maybe he’d make me some more.”
“He can’t do that right now. I’m sure he knows you’re sorry,” she said, and he brightened a little.
It was so easy to forgive a child anything.
Each day that passed brought the
Molly Mei
one day closer to Falls Station. One day closer to saying goodbye to Finn. Except that she couldn’t say goodbye to a man who couldn’t see or hear or touch her.
She’d made her choice. She would stand by the children, and that had to be enough.
On the eleventh day, Lieutenant Vlissides had sobering news.
“We’ve lost contact with Colonel Theron. He arrived at Scarabaeus six days ago and since then we’ve had four daily hails from his ship, the
Plantagenet
. Then…nothing for the past thirty hours. Central hasn’t heard from them either.”
“Could there be trouble in the system?”
“I doubt it. No one knows that planet even exists. Probably just a problem with the commsat. But I’m canceling our detour to Falls Station. We can’t afford a four-day delay. We’ll go directly to Scarabaeus instead. Our ETA is about twenty-eight hours.”
“What about Finn and the others?”
“That will have to wait. After we transfer you and the children to the
Plantagenet
, we’ll go back to Falls and drop them off. Can’t imagine the colonel will be anything but pleased when we arrive early.”
Being woken up by sirens was unpleasant at the best of times. The accompanying screams of terrified children wasn’t exactly a welcome twist. Edie stumbled out of bed. On the bunk above hers, Pris was sitting up—the only one not making any noise. Galeon, on the other top bunk, was shouting questions and seemed more angry than scared. The screams came from the two younger girls, sharing the lower bunk.
“See if you can calm them down,” Edie told Pris. “I’ll find out what’s happening.”
Edie pulled on her boots, snapped the hatch, and headed toward the bridge. Private Gleick rushed past in the other direction, ignoring her. She couldn’t fail to notice his sense of urgency. She ran to the bridge. Through the open hatch, she glimpsed the hurried gestures of the crew as they punched consoles and exchanged curt questions and responses. Their manner reeked of a dire emergency. Vlissides paced the deck from one console to another.
“What’s going on?” she called out.
As if in response, the ship lurched sharply. Edie grabbed a panel on the bulkhead to keep her balance. The gravplating took a moment to stabilize.
“We’re crashing into the planet, that’s what’s going on,” the engie screamed from his post behind the navpilot’s seat.
Edie went onto the bridge. Vlissides had stopped at one of the workstations, his expression serious but not panicked.
“No sign of the
Plantagenet
when we came through the jump node a few hours ago.” He barely glanced at Edie as he studied garish readouts and flashing telltales. “Then, as soon as we fell into low orbit around Scarabaeus, our nav guidance went haywire. We’re spiraling downward, can’t escape the gravity well.”
“Can I help?” Edie said, certain she could not.
He looked at her now. “Seems trouble follows you everywhere.” There was a resignation to his voice. “Is there something on that planet that could do this? I heard whispers that Theron was talking about an intelligence, crazy as it sounds. Well,
something
took over the commsat and used it to fuck up our systems.”
Or someone. After hearing the way the children talked about that sim, Edie was prepared to entertain the idea of an intelligence. But it hadn’t evolved on Scarabaeus, she was sure of that. Those tangles of code weren’t O’Mara’s so-called emergent property. They were superimposed on the datastream—and badly. It was the work of a hacker, a trick of some sort. It had to be. They were being played. Now the game had become dangerous.
Before she could voice her theory, the ship listed again and Edie was thrown against a railing on the walkway. It jammed painfully into her back.
The junior milit—an op-teck and Vlissides’s fourth crew member—called from the other side of the bridge. “Sir! I’ve found the
Plantagenet
.”
Vlissides covered the five strides to cross the bridge by grabbing onto railings and seats as the
Molly Mei
continued to roll and tilt. The op-teck showed Vlissides her holoviz while Edie peered over their shoulders from her vantage point on the walkway. The display, an aerial landscape captured by a drone, zoomed in on a rocky landscape. Scattered across a wide area were smoldering pieces of wreckage.
“Damn. I’m guessing the same thing happened to them,” Vlissides said. “The commsat’s hijacked, so like us, they couldn’t even send out a distress call. No sign of their lifepods—must’ve happened fast.”
“We’ve lost stabilizers!” yelled the engie. He turned frantically to Vlissides. “Once we hit atmo, the gravplating won’t hold.”
“How long?”
“If we can’t pull out of this…fifteen minutes.”
“Too late to eject the lifepods into space, then. We’ll have to hit the dirt in them.”
That was bad news. The stats for a lifepod surviving reentry and a hard landing weren’t good—the pods did a much better job sustaining life in space.
Vlissides punched a series of commands into the console. The high-pitched siren changed to a lower, repeating horn. Edie had heard that before. “All hands, abandon ship. Five minutes.” He pointed at the engie. “Program the lifepods to land as close as possible to the crash site. We’ll rendezvous there and look for survivors from the
Plantagenet
.”
The engie nodded, wild-eyed, and left.
Vlissides hit his commlink. “Gleick, get the prisoners into lifepods.” He closed his hands around Edie’s shoulders. His skin felt clammy against the thin fabric of her tee. “You’re
responsible for getting the children to the lifepods.” He indicated a side corridor outside the bridge. “Can you do that?”
“Yes, of course. What about Finn?”
“I’ll send someone to fetch the cryo capsule.”
“Please…please don’t leave him behind.”
“Get the children!”
She hurried out while Vlissides gave more orders. Back in the cabin, the children were already pulling on sweaters and boots over their PJs. Despite a sheltered upbringing, their instincts for detecting impending disaster were fully functional.
She herded them through the corridors to the lifepod bay. A small crowd had already gathered there. The engie, still checking the pods. Gleick, guarding Achaiah and Corinth. And—
“Cat!” Edie was irrationally pleased to see her. The emotion was wildly out of place considering the situation.
“Who the hell are all these kids?” Cat said, shrinking against the bulkhead to put some distance between them and herself.
“Can you get them into a pod for me?” Edie said as the op-teck came running toward them from the bridge and started ordering people into pods. Vlissides and the navpilot would no doubt remain on the bridge until the last moment.
So who was going back for Finn?
Edie slipped away. She wasn’t about to let Finn die, helpless and unaware. Rushing into the cargo hold, she found it abandoned and blissfully quiet. That didn’t last. The ship shuddered and the engines made a terrifyingly unfamiliar whine.
There was no one here to rescue Finn. No one had been sent—or whomever Vlissides had sent had ignored the order. The cryo capsule glowed green in the far corner of the hold. Surrounding it was a jumble of dislodged crates and equipment, some broken apart by the tumbling ship.
Edie gave a cry of frustration as she pushed through the rubble. She couldn’t possibly clear a path for the capsule and drag it out in time. Once the ship hit atmo, it would be too late to eject the lifepods.
There was nothing to do but try. Her hands fumbled at the brackets that held the capsule to the bulkhead. They released abruptly, and the frozen coffin slid a few meters along the deck until it crashed into a wall of crates. Edie climbed over it, dropped to the other side, and began to push.
Her efforts were close to futile. The capsule was impossibly heavy and it caught on every damned ridge of the gravplating. She needed a gravlift or a pallet. Panic rose in her throat as she looked around for something she could use.
Precious seconds ticked by. Edie returned to the cryo capsule and tried again. She pulled from the front this time, tugging upward on the leading edge to help the capsule over the ridges.
A second pair of hands was suddenly beside hers. Tiny, white-knuckled hands.
“Galeon! Get back to the lifepod!”
“Pull harder! We can’t leave him.”
“I won’t leave him. But you have to go back.”
She released the capsule and grabbed Galeon’s arms to wrench him away. He fell onto his backside on the deck. She hauled him up and pushed him in the direction of the hatch.
“Go on!”
Galeon clambered back to the capsule. “Get him out of there. Wake him up!” He pounded on the window, as if Finn might hear.
To do that safely would take an hour or more. “We don’t have time.”
“Wake him up! Wake him up!” Galeon was near hysterical, his cheeks smeared with tears.
He was right. Rapid emergence from cryosleep was dangerous, but it was Finn’s only chance. They’d never get this bulky capsule to the lifepods in time, even with more help.
Edie pulled up the capsule’s holoviz to access the controls. The screen showed clear instructions on how to manually wake up the occupant, along with the recommended timeframe. She hit the switch to pump warm plasma into Finn’s blood, to replace the cryo fluids. Ignoring the warning beeps, she cranked it to max and then flipped open the catches around the lid. It slid aside, frustratingly slowly.
Vlissides’s voice came over the shipwide comm. “Six minutes until we hit atmo. Report immediately to the lifepods.”