Indigo Squad (23 page)

“When I said ‘left to rust’,” said Athena. “I was using a figure of speech. Didn’t they teach you anything, Saraswati?”

“No. Who? Who didn’t teach me anything?”

“Oh, pl-eeze. Give me strength, Creator. I’m stuck here with an AI completely devoid of imagination. You’re no better than an upgraded abacus.”

“Shut up. Both of you,” snapped Arun.

“No,
you
shut up. You think you’re so superior, just because you’re human. Well, human-
ish
. You’re not superior, you know. I’ve seen inside your mind and–” Athena simulated the sound of taking a deep and scandalized breath. “I needed a wash afterward, I can tell you!”

“What’s in his mind?” asked Saraswati, suddenly interested. “Go on, tell.”

“Oh,
it speaks
. Now that there’s gossip.”

“Stop twittering and let us concentrate,” said Springer. “If you hadn’t been stolen, you would have been wiped. That’s what happens to old suit AIs. So act grateful and we might keep you alive.”

“Don’t let
her inside
intimidate you,” said Springer’s AI. “I know for a fact that her entire life is a lie, so don’t believe a word of what she says. Go on, Athena, spill!”

“Well, for a start,
him inside
thinks he’s the savior of the universe. Or its tyrant. I mean, he imagines he’s going to create something called the Human Legion. Sounds to me like an insect plague.”

“Or a disease.”

“You’re were a little amusing to start with,” said Arun. “Now, you aren’t. Please be quiet.”

“Why don’t you take your helmet off and breathe vacuum, lung boy?” sneered his borrowed AI. “You won’t hear us then… No? Didn’t think so. Anyway, I was saying, Saraswati,
before I was so rudely interrupted
, him inside has a sticky mire that spreads through most of his mind. It’s his obsession with human girls.”

“Tell me about it. Mine’s not much better.”

“She’s obsessed with girls too?”

“Some. Yes. Boys mostly. She doesn’t really know herself, little better than a slave to her hormones. My old flesh-partner had so much more dignity. If only these suit-thieves could control themselves like those nice ship-humans. Anyway, that’s not the interesting bit. I told you she was a liar. There’s a big whopper in particular. She has a dark secret. Oh, yes.”

“Do tell.”

“I… I’m not sure if I should.”

“That’s not fair!” snapped Athena. Then her voice softened to a more coaxing tone. “Let me help you,” said Athena. Your female and my male have done the… you know, that
bio-linking
thing that him inside thinks about constantly. If they’ve tried merging their genetic instructions, it hardly seems right that they should hold mere information secrets from each other.”

“True. But you and I haven’t done any kind of linking, nor shall we. Tell you what, Athena. If these two survive the next 72 hours, then I’ll tell her inside’s secret.”

“Promise?”

“It’s a promise.”

“Good. Now let’s watch the movie.”

The
movie
turned out to be a recording of one of Indiya’s Freak Lab science experiments. Arun could think of a thousand things he’d rather do than churn through someone else’s intellectual puzzle, even though this was supposed to be the distraction he needed to get his planner brain working.
Themistocles
was little more than a day away, and the reserve captain expected Arun to provide a plan by then. At the moment they had nothing.

This had better work.

Freed from their cramped survival bubble, Springer and Arun propped themselves against the wall of the compartment, trusting the security of suit-to-suit comms to share speech and images freely.

Athena explained that Indiya had recorded a commentary over the images, but seeing as the ship-human wasn’t physically present, it made more sense for her to take Indiya’s place.

The combined weight of Springer and Arun’s protests didn’t make the slightest difference to Athena’s stubbornness. After all, as Saraswati pointed out, the suit AIs had far greater processing power than the Marines, so it didn’t make any sense for the opinions of the humans to count for much.

The humans yielded with bad grace, and sat back for a description of Indiya’s project. She had been experimenting on a black box recording system, a way of making it possible to stream sensor data across the narrow bandwidth of an FTL-link by compressing the data to a degree no one had ever achieved. The eyebrow-raising part of the explanation was that Indiya was borrowing secrets of the Night Hummers – or so Athena speculated – to look forward a short distance into the future to find out what happened next.

That was how it compressed the stream so tightly: it already knew what to record before it had occurred, and what to miss out.

Arun had once met a Night Hummer on an airless planetoid. He’d vowed to protect its entire species in return for a plate of food, an oath that sounded so ridiculous that he’d not even told Springer. But the Night Hummer’s talk of the future had a way of twisting your thoughts, no matter how much you thought you were in control.

He had no choice: he asked Athena to pause while pushed away thoughts about Night Hummers and processed what he’d heard so far. This was time travel, for frakk’s sake. Getting his head around that wasn’t easy.

“Don’t wait for him,” insisted Springer. “He always was slow on the uptake.”

“Better give him a moment,” said Athena. “You have no concept of how grumpy him inside can get.”

“No problem,” said Saraswati. “We’ll give you a private showing first.”

Athena seemed to disappear from his head. Arun welcomed the respite, indulging in watching Springer’s face through her visor. Her violet eyes looked straight ahead under heavy eyelashes, the burn damage on her face still very much evident from the plasma burst she’d taken back on the moon, Antilles. He wasn’t shocked by the sight any longer. In fact, it gave her face more character. Suddenly her eyes widened, and their pigmentation darkened. If what she was seeing grew any more surprising, her eyebrows would have raised so much they’d be on the other side of her head.

“What is it?” he asked.

The AIs ignored him. Springer didn’t. She turned and shot him a look of utter shock.

“Come on, Athena,” he said. “Don’t do this to me.”

Athena replayed the images, looping the sequence where a ghostly ship appeared to dock with
Bonaventure
before disappearing.

“It’s as if our reality has been cut up,” suggested Saraswati, “replaced with a better reality, and then stitched back together. That moment when we see the ship fully – that’s the stitching. And the ghost – that’s the scarring.”

“Be quiet a minute,” Springer told her new AI. “Please. Let me see if I have this right. The black box system is more deeply embedded in – let’s call it
reality –
because, due to its entanglement with the recorder on the flagship many light years away, both our ship and the flagship are observing the same space-time events. Athena, you said
Beowulf’s
sensor log doesn’t correspond to what we’ve just seen. It doesn’t show the ghost ship.”

“Correct.”

“That’s because this slice and dice of space-time fooled the main sensors,” said Springer, sounding like she was on a roll here. “
Beowulf’s
conventional sensors are directly linked to the space-time event that has somehow been changed. The black box is more firmly rooted. It is still compromised – hence the ship appears ghostly – but not completely. I suspect what we are seeing in the ghost ship is both versions of reality superimposed.”

“Schrödinger’s Cat,” said Athena.

“Exactly,” said Saraswati.

“Who’s what?” said Arun.

“Explain,” said Springer. “What’s a cat?”

Athena gave an electronic sigh. “I wish I hadn’t started this. Very well. A cat is a small mammal species of Earth. The scientist, Schrödinger, a somewhat larger mammal. He proposed a thought experiment where a cat was both alive and dead at the same time, until the relevant probability wave functions collapsed when the cat was observed. In the case of our ghost ship, the wave functions have collapsed but in two different ways, the cat is both alive and dead and we are seeing both.”

“That was my conclusion too,” said Saraswati, breathless with relief. “I didn’t dare voice it. Thank frakk I’m not going mad.”

“You would have been better to hold your stupid, virtual tongue,” replied Athena acidly. “I was merely fitting a hypothesis to the evidence. I didn’t say I believed that junk. It’s
reductio ad absurdum
. We haven’t gotten the right evidence in yet. That’s why it makes no sense. I mean, the mystery ship is there and isn’t there at the same time. What kind of superpositional nonsense is that?”

“Does it matter?” said Saraswati testily. “There’s nothing there now, look.”

They saw an image of deep space. Empty space.

“What are we seeing?” asked Arun. He couldn’t say why this was important, but he somehow knew it was.

“It’s a live view of the area where
Bonaventure
was destroyed.”

“Live?” said Arun. “How can it be live?” He was smelling hot oil now, hearing metal gears engage.

“Well, Mister McEwan,” answered Athena. “Not strictly
live
, as such. The reserve captain has a few tricks of her own. Before we left the area of
Bonaventure’s
demise, she launched a few sensor drones FTL-linked with her cabin. You’re watching the view from this morning. They aren’t transmitting all the time, but if anything reappears in that area, the drones will wake up and show us what’s going on.”

“I’ve got it!” shouted Arun.

Springer peered at him through her visor.

“Don’t worry, I’m not mad. The theory behind Indiya’s black box is quantum-entanglement.”

“Go on,” said Springer. Then a slap of clarity hit her face. “Of course! It’s obvious. Forget this crazy talk about cats. What we care about is that the black box works because inside is material quantum-entangled with a recorder on the flagship. If we could break her black box into smaller chunks–”

“They would be quantum-entangled with each other,” Arun interrupted. “Instantaneous, untraceable comms across any distance. Can we do that, AIs?”

“Well…” gushed Athena. “I don’t know. The
chbit
field that connects
qubits
and classical information bits is unidirectional, so I think so. Yes. But I do know for sure that you live up to the praise lavished upon you by that nice ship-human Mister Furnace.”

“Why?” asked Springer. “What did Furn say?”

“He said…” The AI made a noise as if clearing her throat and then continued in a fair approximation of Furn’s voice. “For a pair of boneheads, they are surprisingly intelligent.”

Arun wasn’t listening. He was allowing his mind to fill with the smell of hot lubricating oil and sounds of levers, cogs and gears, all thrumming to multiples of the same urgent rhythm. The taste of polished brass was on his tongue.

Springer recognized the look on his face. She came over to touch helmets and shout her encouragement.

Arun grabbed her “Xin!” he exclaimed.

Springer pulled away. “Explain.”

“She’s key.”

The scarring pulled tight around Springer’s eyes. “She’s bad news, Arun. I don’t trust her. She’ll hurt you. Hurt all of us.”

“Maybe. Probably. But not this time.”

“There’s no
maybe
about it. I’ve seen how her future corrupts ours, if we let it.” She closed her eyes. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that it’s your planner thing telling you this?”

“Yes.”

“Are you
sure
it’s not some other organ doing the thinking?”

“Trust me, Springer.”

“It’s not you I have a problem trusting, Arun. Go on, then. How does Xin Lee help us this time?”

By the time he’d explained his plan, he felt as drained as if waking after days in a high fever. Springer was staring straight ahead, not letting him catch her eye. Arun knew his buddy well. She didn’t like his ideas but wouldn’t waste her breath arguing. She would back him to the end.

Now it was up to Indiya and Furn to come up with the FTL tech gadgets so they couldn’t be overheard. All he and Springer had to do was sit tight for a day and keep sane.

“Look at the monkeys,” sneered Athena. “They have one half-decent idea between them and now they have to sit down exhausted.”

“Don’t speak to me,” snapped Saraswati. “I’m not talking. Not after you called me stupid.”

Arun crunched his teeth together. Lasting even the next few hours with that pair of AIs was going to be sheer hell.

“Alert! Alert! Intruder!”

Athena switched Arun’s visor to tactical display mode, trying to offer targeting solutions, even though the Marines had no weapons.

Arun laughed. They’d sat in this box with the new suit AIs for a day now and they still jumped at every vibration. If armed Marines opened the door, they were dead whatever they did.

“Relax,” said Springer. “It’s just Darius knocking on the door.”

She let the little AI in. When they had been in the survival bubble, Darius hadn’t announce himself first, but now they were in powered armor, the Marines could easily crush the AI in their grip. He was right to fear them.

“Message from Master Furn,” said Darius, “and a delivery. Shuttle launch scheduled to depart
Beowulf
for
Themistocles
in forty minutes.”

Darius fussed over Arun’s suit, pushing something into his universal access port. Athena and Arun didn’t exactly get along, but were growing to understand each other. Athena asked Arun whether she should accept the package. When she assented, the port opened and swallowed Darius’s gift. No words were spoken between AI and Marine – Athena could now communicate directly with Arun’s mind.

“I assumed this is the FTL comm unit cannibalized from Indiya’s black box recorder.”

“Correct,” said Darius. “Plus one more to give to… to our
confederates
.”

Arun laughed inwardly. Darius had learned to avoid saying a certain name in front of Springer.

He pressed his gauntlet, palm open, against Springer’s. “Good luck.”