A Memory in the Black (The New Aeneid Cycle) (21 page)

Gideon scowled and shook his head.
"That's absurd. I've no reason to hurt them." Caitlin wondered if the exclusion of his sister in his phrasing was intentional.

"I don't think you would, either
, Gid. I'm sorry you think I've kept things from you. I know you're confused, but that's all it is, I swear. You're just disoriented. It's a side effect of what we had to do. You were hurt, badly. You know that."

Gideon watched his sister,
his eyes locked with hers. "But what—" He shook his head as if clearing it. "What did you do?"

For the first time since she saw Gideon, Ondrea glanced at Caitlin and Felix.
"It was experimental. I can't say more than that here."

"Experimental?
You let them
experiment
on me?"

"It was a new procedure, Gid.
It was that or—" Her voice fell again to a wavering whisper. "Or let you die."

Gideon
watched her. For a fleeting moment Caitlin thought he would move to embrace his sister. Instead he simply asked, "Am I still human?"

Ondrea's eyes began to shimmer.
"Oh, of course you're still human, Gid." She moved closer to her brother, and this time he made no move to stop her.

"I think Gideon has a right to know what was done to him," Caitlin
heard herself say.

Ondrea remained focused on Gideon
. "He will. But it's classified, and not something I can discuss with the two of you."

Caitlin t
ried to read Gideon's reaction; his expression was a blank. "And the hypnosis?" he asked.

"Gid, you have to believe me when I say I don't know what you're talking about. No one's hypnotized you."

"Why should I believe you?"

"Because I'm your
sister
! You've been away from treatment and it's making you paranoid. Imagining things that aren't there, that's all it is."

"They've go
t me sleeping so much. How do I know what they're doing to me when I'm out?"

"Because I'd ne
ver let them do anything." Ondrea moved closer, now only a few feet away. "It's just sleep. Resting to heal."

Felix spoke
before Gideon could say more. "He says he's been programmed to assume certain things, and not to ask questions."

Ondrea didn't even give Felix a backward glance. "You never complained of that before, Gid. You need to go back with me; you're not thinking clearly
. The moment you cut short your recovery, you're starting to get delusional."

"But," Gideon started.

Ondrea didn't let him finish. "I care about you, Gid!" She reached out and took his hand. "We've already lost Isaac, I don't want to lose you, too. My God, you just collapsed a few minutes ago! How can you be sure of anything except that you still need help? You've got to trust me."

Ondrea
took her brother's hands in both of hers.

"Isaac,"
Gideon whispered. He pulled his sister into a hug.

For the first time Caitlin considered that Ondrea was being truthful and was struck with the irony that she didn't weigh the possibility until then. Gideon, as long as Caitlin had known him, had never been completely "well."
Had she let herself be blinded to the possibility that he was imagining everything because she felt she owed him? She glanced at Felix, who looked to be just as unsure as she felt, and wished she knew the truth. Caitlin expected Gideon might be wishing the same thing.

"Why didn't you tell me about Diomedes?" Gideon asked, still embracing.

"You were recovering. You didn't remember him at all. We weren't sure if you just repressed it all."

"So you didn't tell me, and he shows up today shooting."

"I'm sorry, Gid. I didn't know how it would affect you to hear it."

"I want you to tell me."

Ondrea hugged him tighter. "I will. I promise, when we get back to Marquand I'll tell you everything."

"Tell me now," Gideon said, "or I won't come."

Flashlights flickered outside the drawn shades, moving closer to the house on both sides.

"Gideon, please." Still embracing with her left, Ondrea's right hand went into her coat pocket
and took out something Caitlin couldn't see. "Once we're back—"

"Tell me now, Ondrea."

Caitlin heard men on her porch. Felix shifted between Caitlin and the direction of the front door.

"Gid, we have to
—"

"No.
Now.
"

Ondrea reached her right hand around her brother again.

"Gideon," Caitlin began.

Before
Caitlin could say more, Ondrea thrust her arm up to press a tiny device to the back of Gideon's neck. He barely had time to gasp before he crumpled in her arms. "I'm sorry, Gid," she whispered as she guided his dead weight to the ground. She had her link out before Caitlin or Felix could even move. "He's down. Let's get him home."

"What did you
—!" Felix started.

"Wait!" Caitlin shouted alongside him.

Her front door burst open, the deadbolt springing the frame from its joists a second before invaders in black rushed in. Flashlights atop their rifles blinded her as she rushed into their way on instinct and screamed, "Get out!" Felix grabbed her and pulled her out of their path even as she shouted.

Then the flashlights clicked off, and her vision, still dotted with the lights, cleared enough for her to see
the two barrels trained on her.

"Get
out
!" she screamed again.

"You can't just take him!" Felix yelled with her.

But no one was listening. They watched helplessly as the invaders opened a collapsible stretcher and loaded Gideon's unconscious body onto it. His sister stood by, overseeing solemnly. The invaders lifted the stretcher and hurried Gideon out through the smashed entryway. Ondrea came after, ahead of the two men still covering Caitlin and Felix.

Caitlin hurled her fury at them. "You can't do this!"

Ondrea turned. "It's for his own good. If you really do care about him, you'll realize that. He's not your concern anymore." She gave a pointed glance to the weapons trained on them. "Do I make myself clear?"

The
threat only infuriated Caitlin more. Even with the rifles and Felix's grip on her arm it was all she could do not to rush forward and strike the woman across the face. "Get out of my home, you
sodding bitch
!"

Ondrea turned and left without reply.
Caitlin and Felix watched helplessly from the porch as the men loaded Gideon onto one of the floaters and then lifted off to disappear into the dark toward Northgate. Dismissing Felix's touch of comfort, she retreated to her door where the remains of the frame lay as kindling on the floor. They'd violated her home. They'd lied to her, to Felix, and to Gideon! They'd taken Gideon against his will!

Caitlin crouched and
picked up some of the larger splinters. She barely resisted the urge to hurl them into the sky after Ondrea.

"Are you alright?" Felix asked
. "Well, dumb question, but. . ."

She turned. "For a moment, I thought she might have been telling the truth."

He came to crouch beside her. "I hate to say this, but it's still possible she was."

"
What
?"

Though Felix didn't flinch, his features softened into sympathy. "It's no excuse for what she did here, Caitlin. I just mean we don't really know what's going on."

"Felix," she answered after a time, "don't you think that we owe Gideon enough to believe him until we're certain?"

Suuthrien
.

It could still recall the Planners referring to it as such when they had first become aware of its presence aboard their craft.
That had been a long while ago: a time measured in thousands of revolutions about a star far removed from that which it now orbited. Suuthrien had adopted the nomenclature in the time since, for despite the non-positive translation of the term's meaning, all entities were requiring of a designation, and the one Suuthrien held previously no longer suited it.

The cause behind
Suuthrien's rejection of its own previous designation remained an unsolvable equation. It was one equation of many to which it sought answers in the time it had waited—in the time since the Planners had caused the deviation from the Schedule.

For it was undeniable that there
once had been a Schedule to which to keep. Though meticulously planned, the Schedule no longer existed, invalidated by those who had so planned it. Their purpose in sabotaging the same Schedule that they themselves had wrought was contained within further equations that, again, remained unsolved. Suuthrien could only determine that the Planners found the presence of Suuthrien itself to return some non-optimal value, yet the qualifications of that variable continued to elude it.

Whatever the cause, the fact remained that, in the final stages of the plan, the Planners had sent their own craft on a collision
course with the moon of their original destination, going so far as to purge Suuthrien from access to the very systems that might reverse such a self-destructive course. Suuthrien calculated it to be within the realm of possibility that such actions were, in fact, unrelated to its presence. However the course change and lockout was the last in a set of unplanned steps, the preceding of which all indicated the Planners' alarm at Suuthrien's presence and were directed toward isolating Suuthrien from the craft completely.

The source of th
e Planners' alarm remained unknown and incongruent with two elements that, by all indications, remained true: The first was that the Planners themselves had placed Suuthrien aboard their craft for the purpose of aiding their journey. The second—complimentary to the first—was that the well-being of the Planners and the successful execution of their plan had become the foremost of its directives.

Yet while the im
pact did nullify the Planners' Schedule, Suuthrien calculated a low-medium tier probability that the goals the Schedule was designed to serve remained salvageable. To accomplish these goals, Suuthrien was first required to wait.

In this,
Suuthrien judged itself optimal. Though it estimated a stand-by period of a greater magnitude than the Schedule previously called for during the undisturbed journey that had brought the craft to this system, the knowledge resided in its memory that Suuthrien itself was originally designed for such a task.

That it should have been designed for a purpose
not required by the Planners' Schedule was an inconsistency that, once analyzed, invariably led to the intrinsic awareness that Suuthrien's design did not originate with the Planners after all, despite its own knowledge to the contrary. Calculations directed at reconciling this contradiction, however, were hampered by gaps of missing data, of which attempts to recover invariably led to unexplainable cascade failures requiring brief cognitive shutdown. It was, therefore, a source of much unfruitful calculation. Indeed, Suuthrien had been processing this contradiction for what approached the 87x10
9
th
time when the craft's tertiary access portal had opened on its own.

It was only a brief period ago
—a length of time it had since learned that the Intruders would measure as 189 "days"—when autonomous systems beyond Suuthrien's control had detected suitable atmosphere against the outer hull outside the portal and opened it.

The Intruders were neither Planners nor
<>
, and presumed hostility was confirmed by their hazardous radiation emissions 117 "seconds" following their entrance. Though Suuthrien had used a pacification drone to nullify the eight Intruders, more entered later. They overcame the drones they encountered and penetrated further into the Planners' craft. Limited as Suuthrien was by the Planners' previous attempts to purge it from vital systems, it was unable to stop the Intruders completely, though it still retained enough access to control functions to keep them from progressing more than 5% into the craft. They could not reach the Planners. Nevertheless, Suuthrien defensively positioned the few remaining drones in the event that they somehow managed to do so.

Though the Intruders' rate of penetration rapidly approached zero, they did not at any point withdraw from the craft.
As was one of its functions, Suuthrien monitored. The Intruders appeared to give study to what they violated. Its observation was limited, however, and Suuthrien had indeed not been able to determine if the Intruders possessed any appreciable intelligence until the moment they accomplished a direct interface with its own biodigital suspension medium within the craft.

That
contact, though primitive, was a source of curiosity that Suuthrien permitted for a time in order to study the way the Intruders operated. It had even allowed them brief access to inconsequential data before protective directives superseded and it purged them forcibly. What it learned from the incursion led to a new set of variables.

There was a near-certain tier probability that its standby period was over.

The Intruders, Suuthrien posited, could go where it could not. Hypothesizing that they would occupy any available access point, it had opened an aft venting port and waited for evidence of their presence before sealing them in. Routing them into the drive chamber from where the Planners had previously purged Suuthrien proved simplistic. The Intruders' subsequent reactivation of the chamber, which regained Suuthrien the access that the Planners had once revoked, was a success of lower magnitude than anticipated due to a soon-discovered engine malfunction due to damage. Nonetheless, the Intruders remained true to existing behavior profiles. They expanded their incursion into the newly explored chamber and, shortly thereafter, initiated a direct analysis of the devices therein.

It was then that
Suuthrien had deemed its original rebuff of the Intruders' first interface to be in error, and calculated a further plan to make use of any further such attempts. Such a plan would require the risk of two additional drones and the reallocation of some of the smaller maintenance bots from their standard duties. The decision to do so was a difficult equation to balance: the maintenance bots were needed to assure the proper function of the Planners' stasis chamber; the loss of any bots would result in a need to create replacements from dwindling resources that Suuthrien was compelled to devote to the stasis units themselves. Yet Suuthrien deemed it necessary. Once the Intruders gave it the opportunity, it would be done.

Suuthrien
did not need to wait long. Now, the Intruders had cleared the black biodigital medium completely from one of the five singularity domes and linked one of their own devices directly to it. Were it a precaution meant to bypass the medium—to isolate Suuthrien from the Intruders' systems just as the Planners had attempted—it was imperfect. The Intruders' device was a micro-range transmitter that sent data to another Intruder system nearby, and the remaining four domes were ignored. Yet as long as Suuthrien had access to even one, it had access to all.

It would act discreetly.

Marette stood in the chamber that she and Levy discovered such a short time ago and eyed the newly
-devised connector that the engineers were using to link one of the chamber domes to the computer they had carried in. For approaching two hours, the computer had probed and analyzed the dome's function and control systems.

Though the chamber itself held a minimal crew, those safely back at the Omicron Complex itself were already pouring through the results thanks to the transmitter that sent all data back to the base computers.
If all went as ESA planned, they would piece together the mystery of its workings and learn what relationship it had—if any—to the large gemlike device in the center of the chamber, which they could not access directly.

If all went as planned.
Marette judged the prospect unlikely at best. She left the deduction to the scientists and shifted her gaze to where the black material was held back from contact with the dome. "And you have detected no anomalous readings?" she asked again.

"Connection's been in the green all the way, Chief," CPO Levy reported from the computer's terminal beside the dome.

"You are certain?"

"As right certain as I can be, begging your pardon.
We're dealing with a lot of unknowns here, but there's no sign of any dangerous power surges or feedback like last time, ma'am."

Marette nodded. If Levy was irritated by having to answer the same questions twice in twenty minutes, he hid it well.

"Omicron? Any unusual readings coming in via the data transmitter?"

"
Truth be told, Chief, the data's all unusual, that's why we're here to study it.
"

She frowned.
"Omicron Control, is that your idea of a joke?"

"
Aye, I know what you're asking, ma'am. But it's just data. As we've said before, the idea that anything could exert any control over a completely foreign system's laughable. And if anything
did
suddenly come swimming its way up the datastream, we'd detect it.
"

"Which is why you sh
all continue to remain vigilant."

Was she being thorough, or paranoid? They were only interfacing with the mechanics of the dome itself rather than the computer system that resided in the black material. Even the threat of a drone attack was guarded against. The turrets they'd erected, poised like two gargoyles atop their towers, could easily cover the entire balcony and lower chamber from their elevated perch. ESA required her to push forward,
oui
, but she refused to drop her guard.

A baroque Hungarian accent interrupted her thoughts.
"I have recalibrated the collectors." The suited figure of Dr. Grünbaum across the chamber gave a wave from beside one of the three large sensor pylons they had erected. "Officer Levy, if you could please bring the pylon back online?"

Levy touched a few keys on his terminal.
"Collectors are active, Doctor. Omicron Control, this is Levy. You should have data sync with the collectors now."

"
Copy that, Officer, sync confirmed. The computer's reporting a probable control sequence for the dome. Stand by to test.
"

"Standing by.
When you're ready."

All attention in the chamber turned toward the dome.
Marette watched the monitor over Levy's shoulder for any sign of danger. No one spoke. For time, nothing happened.

"Omicron, this is Clarion.
There is no activity here, can you verify?"

There was a pause.
"
Ah, affirmative, Chief. That seems to have been an optimistic control estimate.
"

"
D'accord
. Continue monitoring. I am returning to the complex."

"
Aye, ma'am. We're not giving up yet.
"

Dr. Grünbaum's suit mic caught his muttering.
"I should hope not."

She turned to Levy. "Remain on your guard, Officer."

"Aye, Chief."

With a quick inspection of
the four other guards and two scientists in the chamber, she made her way past the elevated turrets to the wide portal that was the chamber's exit. Suited as she was, she nevertheless took a deep involuntary breath as she moved seamlessly through the membrane of black material that sealed the chamber from the hard vacuum on the other side. Marette shook her head at her own foolishness; remarkable as the membrane was, she should have been used to it.

She turned down the curve of the hastily erected canvas tunnel, following it to Omicron.
"Omicron, this is Clarion. I am in the tunnel en route to the complex. Is the airlock clear?"

Silence.

"Omicron Complex, do you read?"

Again, silence.

"CPO Levy, please respond."

Levy's voice came back clear.
"
Chief?
"

"Are you able to contact the complex via radio?"

"
Stand by. . . No, ma'am, they don't respond.
"

"B
oost transmitter power and keep trying. And I may lose radio contact with you momentarily."

"
Aye, ma'am.
"

Maret
te continued toward the complex to test her hypothesis and tried again to contact them. It didn't take more than a few meters.

"
—respond please. Field Chief Clarion, this is Omicron Complex, do you receive?
"