Yeng had found several commercial channels, and several internal company reporting channels, which were either not encrypted or easily hacked. We kept our forward lasers trained on the New Martians’ comms drogue. We stayed near our acceleration couches, watched the screens, and waited.
Hours passed.
I was keeping an eye on a narrow-band monitoring channel, relayed from a camera and a mike in an upper corner of a room in a ship. Not encrypted, nothing special. Full colour, sleety image, mono sound, trickle feed. Probably just one of those capitalist things: management spying. Maybe something more benign, a sort of online black box. It was certainly not that ship’s main comms channel, which was sending back an unbreakable flood of coded data. It showed a constant, unwavering view from inside one of the trading vessels—its command deck, by the look of it. Much less cluttered than ours, no recycling equipment, none of the trailing tubes and climbing tendrils. Five acceleration couches, moulded and resilient and glistening, like black jellies. Four men and a woman in identical blue fatigues, drifting around, checking instruments, watching their outside screens; joking and chatting. They didn’t seem to have much to do. They were excited about being in the Solar System. One man had been there before, which gave me an eerie feeling when it became clear from his conversation that he’d been one of the uploaded slave-minds in the Outwarders’ construction robots.
The real work of their mission was being carried on by their ship’s computer, which they referred to as the Bitch, apparently in honour of the ship’s name, which was
Running Dog
. I was not as bored as they were, partly because of my still-simmering tension, and partly because—as generations of producers of visual wallpaper have shown—there’s something hypnotically watchable about people in space, just as there is about watching planetary surfaces from space.
Snatches of conversation, picked up by that unobtrusive mike, narrow-cast to a nearby drogue, lasered at a critical angle into the wormhole, cutting through millennia of space and time, bounced to another relay, beamed by radio to—no doubt—some bored watcher on New Mars, picked up by Yeng’s eavesdropping aerials, to finally be heard by me:
‘Bitch is hot!’
‘Yeah man, she’s got her tail up now. Musta met another Jovian.’
‘Meeting a minds.’
‘Sniff, sniff.’
Laughter.
‘Reds still around the Mile?’
‘Like flies on a shit. Don’t like it, man, don’t like it at all.’
‘Home says not to worry.’
‘Don’t trust them, but. Fuck. It’s their territory—’
‘Says who?’
‘Home, that’s who. We don’t know what they can do yet, anyway.’
(No, I thought, you don’t.)
‘Not a whole helluva lot, not if they’re like the commies we useta know and love.’
‘Ha-ha. Didn’t know you were that old.’
‘Looked good on the tel, though. See the tall black one?’
‘Yuh-uh!’
Ribald noises. About me, I realized, and felt flattered. The men rolled and somersaulted, trading ineffectual pokes and punches. Then a voice cut across their laughter; the woman’s voice, like a dash of cold water.
‘Something’s wrong.’
‘Wha—’
‘Look at the board! What the fuck!’
‘Bitch, are you all right? Bitch?’
They were diving backwards to their couches, which caught and embraced them in swiftly emerging pseudopods of glassy black jelly. As soon as they’d smacked into place the five astronauts were working very hard, very fast. I could see their heads move, tracking virtual head-ups; their fingers flex over invisible keys. My own movements were almost a reflex of theirs—I was yelling, patching the view from this channel into the other screens and tiling in theirs.
On a news channel, one of the merchant ships—which a sidebar swiftly tagged as the
Running Dog
—had begun to move strangely, yawing under irregular thrusts from its attitude jets.
‘They seem to be having some—’ A child’s puzzled voice.
‘Boris!’ I shouted. ‘For’ard laser now! Get ready to hit the comms drogue! Yeng! Screen out all encrypted input now! Andrea, warm the torch!’
The voices of the
Running Dog
’s crew were still coming through.
‘Can’t raise the Bitch! Can’t raise the Bitch!’
‘Shaddap shaddap, we’re trying. Shit shit shit shit, drive’s not responding.’
‘
Running Dog
to home,
Running Dog
to home. We got a bad situation
here. Engine out, Bitch haywire. We’re getting sorta rolling motion, irregular. Say again please, say again please … shit. Comms are out.’
‘Lights are on.’
‘Nobody’s home.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Running audit now … OK guys, we’re in deep shit here, deep shit. Bitch seems to have taken a massive data hit, she’s down … No! She’s running!’
‘The hell she is, she’s not—oh fuck. Gotta report this, gotta—Shit! Comms are still out.’
‘Hey, the monitor!’
Faces turned, looking straight at me.
‘If anyone’s getting this,’ the woman’s voice said, quite calmly, ‘please act fast. We think our onboard computer has been hacked into and taken over—’
‘A fucking Jovie’s uploaded on us!’ another voice yelled, and meanwhile in the background a third voice was intoning: ‘Holy Mary Mother a God pray for us now and at the hour of our
hey, wait a minute, guys, everything’s back to normal, it’s cool, look
!’
As I watched, their expressions changed from frantic concern to calm relief. The woman was making waving motions at the monitor.
‘Cancel that,’ she said urgently, smiling. ‘False alarm. Sorry, folks, false alarm! Electrical glitch, Jovian atmosphere storm, that’s all, panic over.’
The men behind her were moving in a completely different way than they had before, heads and arms working away in a new virtual space; there was nothing wrong with their movements, except that they were all making the
same
movements, in unison. Four heads turned as one, smiling at the monitor as their hands reached and fingers flexed in their synchronized puppet ballet.
‘Boris,’ I said.
On the forward view the twirling parasol of the New Martians’ comms drogue flared at the focus of our lasers, and flash-burned instantly to a million fragments of twinkling foil.
Andrea hit the drive as all the other screens went out.
It wasn’t a long burn, just enough to kick us into a closing orbit with the Gate. We had only a few minutes in which to act. Lots of things seemed to happen at once.
‘Enemy fighter spinning around,’ Boris announced calmly. ‘Firing. Missile launched and closing. Active-defence—’
The forward view lit up, with a big flash then lots of small ones as the active-defence lasers mopped up the missile’s fragments.
‘Fighter taking evasive action. I’m realigning the laser. Over to automatic fire. Target destroyed.’ He thought about it for a second, and added: ‘Yee-hah!’
‘What’d they attack us for?’ Suze demanded.
‘For burning the drogue,’ I said.
‘Should be grateful.’
Jaime was running a plot on the nearest comet-train, and Andrea was aligning the ship to match his calculation. Our attitude jets fired, again and again, sending us on a giddying roll. Yeng passed the data to the fighter-bombers, and the
Necessary Evil But Still Cool
sent its own message to the Gate’s little attitude-control jets. By the time we were ready to dock with the Gate it was lying at an odd angle, apparently ‘below’ us, like a tilted plate, and we were sliding backwards ‘above’ its mile-wide face. On some screen I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that our own small comms drogue was darting about like a flea on a griddle, squandering its fuel in a mindless attempt to hold the correct position, relative to the disc of the Gate, for picking up the Division’s messages. Zap it too? No—I was confident, even now, that the Division’s computers and comms weren’t going to fall for the Jovian outbreak.
The ship was now lined up for a straight blast into a course to intercept the comet-train, and to continue along ‘up’ that infall orbital path. The hull shuddered repeatedly as the grappling lines were fired. They snaked out, and were snared by the perimeter clamps. Andrea played another subtle but sickeningly violent crescendo on our own attitude jets, adjusting our alignment as the lines took the strain of the Gate’s mass.
One hundred thousand tonnes, Dee had said. Plus another twenty thousand for the score of ships that had sailed through it on their bright bold enterprise … and had encountered at least one entity which had found the temptation, or competitive necessity, of
getting in first
as powerful as theirs. I thought of Dee, and wondered how her vaunted competitive countermeasures were holding out against whatever had come down the line from the poor, possessed
Running Dog
. Doing better than I expected, I hoped, for my sake—and hers, I realized, in a sudden pang of anguished solidarity with a self that, human or not, was at least as singular as mine.
‘Holding position,’ Andrea said.
‘
General Arnaldo Ochoa
to
Terrible Beauty
.’ Yeng was patching the message through to my phones. The voice was almost languid. ‘Situation back home severely compromised. Situation here totally confusing. Please advise.’
Whoever that was had the right stuff, all right! I cut in the override on the Division’s all-ships channel:
‘Hi guys and gals,
Terrible Beauty
here. Situation as follows. At least one New Martian merchant ship, with crew, has been taken over by a Jovian upload or personality copy. That is confirmed, repeat confirmed. Comms drogue destroyed by us to stop viral spread. We don’t repeat do not know if we did this in time. Observe extreme caution with all incoming comms of New-Martian origin. We are about to blast off with wormhole Gate in tow. Intend to try punching local comet-train through to hit Jupiter. You have two minutes to get clear or attempt to return home.’
The languid voice returned. ‘Thanks for the clarification,
Terrible Beauty
. Good luck. We see heavy fighting back home. All ships have been recalled. We’re leaving. Do you wish continued updates from our own comms drogue?’
‘
Yes!
’ shouted Yeng, the sheer volume of her voice carrying it to my over-ride.
‘Patching you through.’
The scene, relayed from the home system by the—for now—stable and on-position drogue, flashed up on the virtual screens of the suits, which were still tensing and hardening around us. It came from an external camera on the
Turing Tester
, loyally on station in front of the Gate.
Jupiter was bang in the middle of the view, as I’d hoped. The rest of the view sparkled with the flashes of distant laser hits and was scored by the scorch of particle-beams, and snowed by the chaff thrown out in efforts to deflect or diffuse both. Missile trails and kinetic-energy tracers added to the battle’s blaze. Two or three of the trading vessels were in sight, each surrounded by a swarm of fighters. One was heading away on what looked like an entirely orthodox evasion course. The others were wallowing in the same bizarre way as the
Running Dog
had when its systems were first suborned. I could almost feel the strivings of the new minds in their unfamiliar frames, new impulses racing through controls, and the struggles of whatever parts of the ships’ programming resisted its new master. The ships’ yaw and pitch were resultant of these conflicting forces. Through the whole confused scene flitted the dark shapes of our own fighter-bombers, their violent manoeuvres dodging at least the kinetic-energy and missile weapons, but even in the first seconds of our observation, two were successfully targeted by particle-beams, and burst in silent agony.
One by one, the fighter-bombers on our side darted past, seeming to pass over our heads from the camera’s viewpoint, our whole ship rocking as each fighter’s mass passed through the Gate. I counted nine, then heard a now-familiar voice.
‘
General Arnaldo Ochoa
says goodbye and good luck.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
For a tenth and final time, the great drumhead of stretched space to which we were attached resonated as the fighter-bomber went through. I
saw its black, bat-like shadow-shape flit sideways a moment after its exit. We were on our own now.
Then I saw, heading straight towards us, filling the view, the bulk of a merchant ship. Something burned into its side, but it ploughed on. The last thing that the
Turing Tester
’s camera showed was an out-of-focus image of its looming forward shield. The last—and, while we were watching, only—sound to come through that channel via the comms drogue was a voice breaking in, by some frantic feat of hacking, to yell the warning: