Creation Machine (10 page)

‘You look beautiful,’ she told the necklace.

‘Thanks. Keep still.’ It hung itself around her neck. She felt the faintest touch against the skin below her hairline, and then the necklace settled into place. It was surprisingly heavy; involuntarily she reached up and took hold of the central bead, lifting it a little.

It buzzed under her fingers. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Yes.’ She let go of the bead.

‘Too much weight? Nano-AIs are pretty dense. I can take some of the load if you like?’

She didn’t need to think. ‘No, it’s fine. It’s . . .’ She paused and searched for a way to say what it felt like, to have this thing that was and wasn’t Muz around her, how it was at the same time wonderfully good and achingly lonely.

There were no words. She shook her head. ‘It’s fine,’ she said again. ‘So, shall we go and find Jez?’

Of course, there had been a time when Jez had come to find her. She had kept it from her mind quite well, so far. It was getting more difficult.

Liberty Station, Society Otherwise, Outer Rotate

HER MODS HAD
settled down. Together with Muz and Kelk and the rest she had finished training; she had been passed out and left Nipple and then, unbelievably fast, they had found themselves at war with the Hegemony and she was a cadet on the other side of the argument from her father. And practically everyone else, it sometimes seemed.

In Spin terms, Liberty Station was a cheap room with an expensive view. It had once been a simple transit station, the logistical fulcrum between half a dozen mineral-rich moons close to the outer edge of the Rotate and the industrialized planets that exploited them. But when the moons were worked out the space station was abandoned, to spend the next two thousand years as a lonely hulk floating above their cratered corpses.

When the rising tide of the Hegemony swept through the sector their well-funded radar passed across the old, silent space station and discounted it as useless. But what the Hegemony lost, the hurriedly formed Society Otherwise gained. Moving quietly and using only manual tools so as not to attract attention, over several months they made it first gas-tight and then habitable, and finally recommissioned their finished asset as Liberty Station. An asset that happened to be beautifully positioned, if you wanted to keep an eye on shipping between the Heg’ hub and the rest of the Outer Spin.

Which was all very well until someone noticed you.

Fleare clawed her way up out of the sleep she shouldn’t have been sleeping, opened her eyes and winced. The lights had switched from their usual dirty yellow to an abrasive red that flared in time with the hooting alarms. The pulses came at the speed of a racing heart, and Fleare felt her own pulse speeding up to match. Hurriedly she thought the loop that slowed it, at the same time hauling herself upright from her exhausted slump. She swore as the unpadded metal stool dug into her behind, and blinked down a display space.

It showed a hazy 3-D model of near-space centred on a schematic of the station, usually depicted in dark blue but now blinking an urgent cerise. Converging on the station was a cloud of sharply defined blue-white needles. They weren’t tagged. The geriatric system couldn’t identify hardware – the same warnings could have meant anything from a main battle unit to a meteor shower. Fleare swore again and blinked into her own tactical suite, flipping through models until she found a match.

Missiles – as if she had needed to be told – and a ninety-three per cent match to Hegemony. Her left hand reached out unbidden and slapped the panic patch, while her right thumbed the comm. ‘Emergency,’ she said, hearing her voice echo round the station. ‘Incoming guided, multiple. Source unknown. Origin probably Heg’. Estimated impact,’ and she paused while flight simulations tumbled through her vision, ‘seventy-five seconds.’

The corridors outside her post rang with running feet. Fleare blinked back into a facilities map and watched as the seven manned bombard stations switched from red to green, while wondering whether this, finally, was it. As the station changed to green she checked the tactical and nodded. Fifty seconds to go. Fast response, especially for an exhausted crew. She reached out a hand and slapped ‘engage’, and the display lit up with propulsion trails, streaking out from the station towards the incoming missiles.

Which disappeared.

Fleare blinked again. She reached out for ‘disengage’ and hesitated with her hand poised above the patch while she dived back into the tactical and looked for, well, anything at all.

There was nothing. No missiles, no debris. For whole light-seconds out from the ancient bulbous mess that was Liberty Station, there was nothing. Fleare swore again, quietly but far more expressively. Then she slapped disengage and thumbed general comms.

‘Stand down. We’ve been had.’ She shook her head and added bitterly, ‘Again.’

The refectory was full beyond capacity – seventeen people squeezed into a space meant for ten. It smelled of stale food and stale bodies and limping ventilation. Fleare sighed and banged the table in front of her. ‘Shut up,’ she suggested.

Conversation died down, more or less. When Fleare was fairly sure she would be heard she banged the table again to make certain. ‘Okay. Kelk – diagnostics?’

Kelk stood up slowly. ‘Well, as you know, our systems are more or less the originals. They’re so primitive they hardly count as systems. That’s kept us sort of safe, until now. If you can imagine it, they were just too stupid to hack. But someone finally seems to have thought their way down to our level. We’re crawling with bugs. And before you ask, no, I can’t clean them out. Not with the stuff we have available.’

‘So what do we do?’ someone called out.

Fleare shrugged. ‘Power down to manual. Do without.’

The room was silent for a moment. Then a tall woman standing at the back cleared her throat. ‘But we’d be deaf and blind,’ she pointed out.

Kelk nodded. ‘Sure, Jezerey, in a way. But at the moment we’re hallucinating. That has to be worse.’ He yawned. ‘Sorry. And we’re losing way too much sleep to false alarms.’

Fleare stood up. ‘We have no choice. Someone’s playing with us. They can make us see whatever they like. If they can show us missiles that aren’t there, they can probably hide real missiles. Or fleets. Or whole planets. Frankly, they could sneak up on us and paint us pink. We’d never know. We have to power down.’ She looked at Kelk. ‘Better do it now.’

‘Ah. Can’t power down now. Did it ten minutes ago. Sorry.’

Fleare kept her face straight. ‘Good. Now, we have to maintain watch, and along with everything else we just switched off the remotes. But we’ve still got the scout skiffs. We’ll have to make reconnaissance flights. Two ships to each run; one watches the Heg’, the other watches the watcher. No comms back to station unless there’s news. I’ll go first.’ She took a breath. ‘I want a volunteer.’

‘Whoa!’ It was Jezerey again. ‘What good will that do? We’ll be as blind in a skiff as we are in here.’

Fleare glanced at Kelk, who shook his head and then gave another enormous yawn. ‘Sorry,’ he repeated. ‘The skiffs don’t use the same systems. We brought them with us, remember? They’re new.’ He corrected himself. ‘Well, a lot newer, anyway. Different architecture, different platform. It’s like a cloud model: loads of autonomous micro-AIs. They self-destruct if they get compromised, and the skiff turns out new ones to replace them. You have to compromise over half the colony at the same time before it all goes down, and that hasn’t happened. Yet.’

Fleare nodded. ‘So we can use the sensors in the skiffs,’ she said. ‘Anybody got any more questions? No? Right. I still need volunteers.’

For a moment the room was quiet. Then someone stood up. ‘I’ll go with you,’ he said.

It was Muz. Fleare stared at him. Eventually she said: ‘Thanks, Corporal. You’re on. Main hangar, ten minutes.’ She shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them wide and gave the room a bright smile. ‘Okay. Jezerey, you fix up a rota. Four-hour shifts. Strictly volunteers, no pressure. Kelk, you’re in command while I’m outside. And, ah, can I have a minute? No panic. When you’re free.’

Kelk raised an eyebrow. ‘Sure,’ he said slowly. ‘Now’s good.’ He extracted himself from the press of bodies that had accreted around him and Jezerey and headed for the exit. Fleare followed him.

The conversion of the old station from one purpose to another had left a lot of odd kinks and corners. Fleare and Kelk came to a halt in one of the more secluded ones. Fleare looked round; there was no one in sight. She leaned in close to Kelk’s ear, wrinkling her nose a little at the smell of hair that had not been washed for a while. ‘You didn’t really power down ten minutes ago, did you?’

They swapped head positions. Fleare hoped she smelled better than he did. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Everything’s still running. I just unhooked it from the displays.’ He wiped a hand over his face and then smiled slightly. ‘Whoever it is, as far as they’re concerned we are still little innocents, all systems online, naive to a world full of clever intruders.’

‘Good. Let’s keep it like that.’ She made to pull away but he raised a finger.

‘Listen,’ he said, and she could hear the awkwardness in his voice, ‘it’s not my business but are you okay going out with Muz?’

Fleare blinked. ‘Okay in what way?’

‘Just . . .’ he paused. ‘Just okay. You were pretty short with him, back there.’

Fleare forced a smile. ‘Look, we’re not going to shoot each other, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘I didn’t think so.’ Kelk smiled, and suddenly Fleare realized how exhausted he looked. ‘I just want to be sure you’ll shoot other people properly, all right?’

She patted him on the shoulder. ‘We’re not there to shoot people, remember? They’re not shooting at us, at least not so far. They’re watching us, and doing a little pretending. We’re there to watch them back.’

‘I’d be a lot more comfortable if I knew
why
they weren’t shooting at us.’ Kelk shook his head. ‘Just as long as you watch them back with your finger on the fire button. Look, I’ll try to come up with some kind of fall-back, if that’s okay? Just to cover some backs. I don’t like us being blind in here.’

‘Thanks. Do what you think best. Come on, let’s get to the hangar.’ She pulled a face. ‘Muz will be waiting.’

Fleare’s back ached. She grimaced, braced her foot against a projection on the bulkhead and arched herself a little up and out of her flight couch, twisting against the embrace of the elastic webbing which provided both restraint and pretended gravity. Her foot slipped and she snapped back into the couch, involuntarily throwing out an arm to try to catch herself. It banged into something.

‘Ow!’

Muz’s voice spoke in her headset. ‘Knee?’

‘Elbow.’ She tried to work her other hand round to rub it, but the comms pod was in the way. She sighed instead, and forced herself to focus on the display tank. It helped her, if only just, to forget the discomfort. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite enough to stop her feeling, well, something, at the sound of Muz’s voice. Which should have been annoying but somehow wasn’t.

A Pebble Class skiff was very smart, very fast and very small indeed. The sole occupant lay back on a couch that was allegedly form-fitting. Interior space was so limited that any kind of space suit was out of the question; the interior had to be dismantled to let the pilot get in, and then rebuilt – sometimes even reconfigured – around them. You didn’t so much occupy a Pebble as wear one. It should have been comfortable; ideal, even. And it was, for the first half-hour or so. After that opinions varied, but none were polite.

The two tiny skiffs were positioned five klicks from the station and motionless relative to it. Fleare was furthest out. She was scanning what should have been the busy shipping space between them and the Heg’ hub. Muz, a scant hundred metres closer to the station, and exactly on a line between it and Fleare’s skiff, scanned the space around Fleare.

His voice spoke in her ear again. ‘Got anything?’

Fleare shook her head, limiting the movement to avoid collisions. ‘Negative. At least, the skiff doesn’t think so.’ She peered into the tank, gently moving the focus across the field of view. ‘And I don’t think so either. Where are they?’

‘Dunno.’ There was a popping in her headset, and she realized Muz was clicking his tongue. ‘Could be instruments? Any chance we got the same bugs the station got?’

‘I doubt it. Not the AI cloud. As for the tank, it’s just physical optics. You can’t hack a lens. That’s the point.’

‘You can hack a pilot.’

Fleare shuddered. Keeping her voice even she said: ‘Only if the pilot is patched in to the ship. Which is why the pilot never is. Right, Corporal?’

‘Right, Captain.’

He didn’t sound particularly chastened, and Fleare bit her lip. There were very good reasons behind that rule. Human neural systems could interface with ships’ AIs, but that interface meant that the right kind of hack could start with the ship and bounce back up the chain to the human. Some of these bio-hacks were subtle, like tiny but disruptive changes to the optic nerve. Sometimes they were almost playfully macabre; the hack that had spawned the rule sent several people back to base with a kilo and a half of grey soup where their brains used to be.

The tank was the alternative. It was the focus of a skein of physical lenses, some of them field-generated but the last few made from actual old-time glass, formed to an optical perfection that would have made the early astronomers drool. The resulting display was crystal-sharp, vertiginously three-dimensional and, for the last three hours, obstinately empty.

Fleare sighed again. ‘There’s still nothing to look at.’

‘Yeah, well, imagine how I feel. I just spent three hours staring at your rear end. Is that still okay, now you’ve been promoted, or do I report for court martial?’

‘Concentrate,’ she told him, allowing some annoyance to show in her voice. At least she hoped it sounded like annoyance.

‘I am. That’s the problem. You know something?’

‘What?’

‘I never gave a fuck who your father was.’