Numina code, p.12
Numina Code, page 12
“Yes, I was,” Skorokhodov replied, and waved to the bartender even as he turned his attention on Daelia. “And let me tell you, this guy? Total pain in my ass the entire time. Most of the incoming Basics have no idea how to do land nav, but Irvington here was way too good at it. There was one day out at Jack’s Valley when—”
“Ca—” Argo only just caught himself. “Skoro, come on.”
“You were going to call me Cadet, weren’t you?”
“No,” Argo lied.
The other man laughed. “You were, you totally were. But you can explain to me what you’re doing in this armpit when I’m done warning your girlfriend about how much trouble you are,” the Aethera captain said with a grin. He looked at Daelia again. “You know he didn’t graduate, right?”
Argo felt hot now. Of all the damn people to run into, it had to be this guy. His Basic Cadet Training flight commander. The guy who had gleefully made his life a living hell, and sure, it was a game, but you didn’t know that when you were eighteen and sleep deprived.
“I mean, it makes total sense he didn’t finish it out, with as much trouble as he was in his four-degree year. Like I said, total pain in my—”
“My mom died,” Argo said. The words tumbled out with his permission, flustered and angry as he was. Shit. He picked up his beer. “My mom died in a car crash and my brother was fourteen. His options were me or foster care. So I left.”
Skoro’s earlier mirth evaporated. “Shit, man, I didn’t know.”
Argo shrugged but his hand was trembling, just a little bit. Hell. “Yeah, well, why would you?”
Skoro clearly had no idea what to do, but roused himself enough to give Selma a smile as he ordered something. When she left, he picked the conversation back up.
“Look, I hear some military guy is up here asking about getting a ride out into the Archipelago, I get curious. Didn’t realize it was you. But now that I know, I’m more inclined to listen. What’s going on?”
“We need to get over to Numina,” Argo said. “Tomorrow. Tonight, if possible.”
“Tonight’s not possible,” Skorokhodov said. “Or tomorrow. Numina…Numina’s having some issues.”
“What kinds of issues?”
“Lots of rumors, very few facts,” Skoro said. “Last I heard, it got hit by a micrometeor shower about a week ago. Destroyed a lot of the comm equipment, penetrated some of the habitat space. Nobody can go in or out of there until the damage is repaired. And that’s before we talk about the no-movement order that goes into effect every time we lap the Unity fleet in orbit.”
“It’s leaking air and they won’t do evacuations? Does that make any sense to you?”
“I can’t take you over there. I’d lose my docking berth. And things are weird right now.” Skoro dropped his voice. The bartender came over with their drinks. He waited again until she was gone. “Really fucking weird, with the aliens and whatnot.”
“Have you seen them?” Daelia asked.
“Their ships are out there, all for the looking. But as far as the aliens themselves, it’s kugus only.”
“Weird things with the bent-back legs? Tri-lens eyes?”
“Where have you seen them?”
“Skoro, come on,” Argo said.
“Irvington, if you came all the way up here to check on your brother, I don’t know what to tell you, but—”
“Something’s wrong over there, Skoro. I’ve been getting emails from him, from his account, that aren’t right. Wording is off. So I send him a cypher. It’s wrong.”
“You sure?”
“Something’s going on over there and it’s not a micrometeor shower,” Argo said. “I’ve been getting emails from his account all week. If they can’t broadcast, then who have I been talking to?”
Skoro didn’t say anything for a moment, but he did look over at the darts area. Emily was still working at the darts. “That’s a USSF model. Current issue. What’s driving that thing?”
“Skoro,” Argo said again.
“If it was anybody else, I’d tell you to go pound sand,” Skoro said, “but a classmate? What can you afford?”
Daelia stared. “He’s telling you his brother’s in danger and you’re going to pull that shit?”
“My bird runs on liquid fuel. Fast, but very expensive. I have to cover what goes in the tanks.”
Argo sighed. “How much?”
“For a run out to Numina? Thirty-five grand, easy.” He looked at Daelia. “You can even talk to the fuel depot, if you want to know what their rates are. That’s my cost, without an upcharge.”
“I can cover that,” Argo said. “When can we leave?”
Skoro nodded, like he expected that answer, and pulled a keyboard under his hand. “If I go now, and I mean, right now, I can probably have us void-worthy by 0400.”
Argo checked his watch. “It takes five hours to fuel up?”
“Sometimes it can take a day or more. You’re lucky things are quiet right now.”
“Daelia?”
She didn’t look happy about it, but she didn’t start complaining. “Eh, what the hell,” she said instead.
“You know a place we could crash for a while?” Argo asked.
“You’ve got a room, don’t you?” Skoro replied. “Crash there. I’d let you wait on my bird, but that burns good oxygen for no reason. Breathing air’s almost as expensive as fuel, and carbon scrubbers are a bitch to replace.”
“It’s not in a dock?” Daelia asked.
Skoro jabbed a thumb at the window behind him. “You think there’s air down there? Hell, no. This isn’t Orpheus Watch or Star Wars or whatever, some magic force-field bullshit separating us from space. If you can see stars, it’s open to the void.”
Argo didn’t bother looking. “We do have a room. But it’s out in the gravity ring.”
That got a raised eyebrow from Skoro. “Jesus, if you’ve got that kind of money, why are you hiring me? Go bribe somebody at—”
“Fuck. I’m not going to go bribe somebody.”
“Okay, fine. There are a few places you might try. There’s a big cavern that serves as kind of a hub for everything that comes through here. Food, rest capsules, all that. We’ll leave from out of there ourselves, so not a bad place to stop. But Irvington—”
“Argo.”
“Shit. So you actually did get a pilot slot?” He looked at Daelia. “What is this world coming to?”
Argo’s earlier shock was fading into irritation. “Skoro!”
“Yeah yeah, Argo, you might want to go back to your room. Everything on Aethera, and I do mean everything, is watched. Eos is in everything, and the station crew does not play around. If they think you’ve gone missing, they will look.”
“Does Eos extend down here?”
“Of course it does.”
“Is no problem,” Emily said. The kugu jetted up; she had clearly gotten the hang of zero-gee movement much quicker than either of the humans.
“And you are?”
“Skoro, meet Emily,” Argo said. “She’s one of our MQ-9s. She’s coming with us.”
Skoro eyed the kugu warily. “What class?”
“Orcinus,” Emily said, hissing the last syllable.
“Oh, so this is going to be a party,” Skoro said.
“Better with combat plug-in,” Emily said pointedly.
Skoro frowned. “Why would you need—”
“Eos, no problem,” Emily said, and her AR form bared its teeth. “Me. Friends in right places.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. Sure.” Skoro pulled a pen and notebook out of a flight-suit pocket. He held the pad down to the table, writing quickly. “I don’t recommend staying down here, but if you’re going to do it, I can’t stop you. The central hub feeds out into all the docks. You want Delta-Six. That’s where I’m parked. Meet me at the top of the air lock at 0400 and be on time. Look for Magellan’s Bird.”
Argo turned his head to look at what Skoro was writing. “Do we need anything? Space suits, or…”
“No, no, they won’t rent those to you without a commercial license and confirmation that you’ve been through the station-mandated safety course. I have a few spares. Probably don’t smell too good but should be fine.” He looked Argo over. “You should take the suit off, though. Kind of conspicuous.”
“How do we get out to your ship?” Argo asked, ignoring the dig.
“We’ll extend a gangplank tunnel.” Skoro finished writing and ripped the paper off the pad. “Look, I’ve got about sixty percent in my tanks right now, but that final forty percent is expensive.”
“A bank transfer’s going to leave a footprint,” Argo said, taking the paper. It had account information on it, and an amount. “Especially one this big. And you want to warn me about Eos?”
“I’m not trying to screw you,” Skoro said. And Argo really did trust that. None of their cadre had been better at coming up with creative insults on the fly, or highly objectionable jodies during marches, but Skoro had been a pretty stand-up guy during the school year.
“If you don’t want us to get caught—”
Emily plucked the paper out of Argo’s hand, looking it over with borrowed eyes. “Accept bytebuck?” she asked.
“Umm, sure. That’s preferable, honestly.”
Emily tucked the paper back in Skoro’s pocket. “In account. Take us Numina, eh?”
Skoro frowned and the light patterns on his monocle lens changed. “Shit, yeah, yeah, look at that, okay.”
“Good,” she said. “More darts now.”
“No, no, girl, no more darts. We’re going to go check out the hub,” Argo said cheerfully, enjoying Skoro’s sudden confusion. “0400. Delta-Six. We’ll be there.”
As they left the bar, Daelia glanced back. It threw off her momentum, and Argo had to grab her sleeve to keep her from crashing into the passage wall.
“Emily,” she said, recovering badly, “what the hell was that?”
“Is money, ech.”
“How do you have that much?”
“What I buy?”
“You have something like two hundred grand sunk into illumination costs!”
“Have more,” Emily said. “Now, you load combat plug-in?”
“Shit, you need to drop this,” Daelia groaned.
Argo tuned them out and pulled up the station map.
The hub was easy to find, it turned out.
All roads led straight there.
Another large cavern, this one had apparently been intended for human use, right from the beginning. Centrifugal gravity technology had originally been pursued as a means of tackling ore processing; taking anything other than fully refined metal down to the planet’s surface was a waste of fuel and drew the ire of environmental groups.
But now, the refinery stations had moved on to other asteroids. The huge docks meant to feed them were used by guys like Skoro, flying freelance, facilitating intra-Archipelago transport needs. And the main staging floor, where once huge containers of copper, iron, and nickel ore had once been warehoused, had been turned into a weird, three-dimensional port.
There were no hand tracks here, the false direction of the passageway gone. Instead, there was only one open space, oblong, hundreds of yards long. Balconies jutted out into it, while alcoves, caves, and passageways had been scooped out. Quite a few hosted structures, and ones that didn’t were overgrown with sickly green plants, lit by overhead UV lamps. Signs, AR and LED alike, called out bars and equipment rentals, capsule hotels and shipping company offices. The overlapping smells of a dozen different cuisines hung thick in the air. And everywhere, everywhere, there were abiota.
That took Argo aback for a moment. After encountering so few in the tourist regions of Aethera, it felt even stranger to see so many. The AR field here was thick with projected forms, everything from simple humanoid figures to animals to a lot of unfamiliar things that Argo couldn’t quite identify. Amalgamations of gears and levers, alien creatures that superficially resembled a dog here, a bird there, shapes of light and mist that his monocle’s internal TGLP filters couldn’t resolve into anything substantial.
“Yes yes,” Emily said when Daelia asked her. “All domain.” She rapped the kugu’s chest. “Earth abiota, no alien.”
“Predictives typically don’t manifest like this,” Daelia commented.
“No. Emergents, most.”
“What are they all doing here?” Argo asked.
Emily shrugged. “Go beyond horizon,” she said, and sent them both a complicated package of emojis. Argo didn’t bother trying to decipher it.
“Looks like a Tin Town,” Daelia said.
“Yes. Domain Array has presence here,” Emily confirmed, but would say no more on the matter.
Like the tunnel-passages, things here were roughly organized with a defined floor and ceiling, business fronts and small parks all oriented the same way to give the illusion of up and down. Relative to that, they had emerged from the passage near the top.
It was, Argo thought, like falling very slowly through a football stadium.
According to the map, the docks themselves were accessible near the floor, where a final staging area had once allowed for cargo to be rolled through flat tunnels and into waiting cargo freighters. His monocle didn’t offer any additional information on that, which Argo took to mean Eos wasn’t actively pinging them down here. He didn’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security, though.
“Let’s go see what’s at Delta-Six right now,” he said as they made the floor.
Daelia had grabbed onto a pole, looking up.
“Daelia.”
“Hell of a thing,” she said, and pushed off, overcorrecting a bit with her thrusters. Cursing, she corkscrewed off course, only to be caught by Emily.
“Human no fly well,” the abiota chuckled. She’d pulled her dragon form back over the kugu, already adapting the built-in thruster pack to its movement. She wasn’t flying so much as she was swimming, gliding. One big claw, wrapped around the kugu’s leg, hit the floor lazily, propelling her forward again.
“Show off,” Daelia retorted.
They passed under a huge arc of stabilized rock and into the docking area proper.
Argo had expected a window of some kind. Unfortunately, there was nothing, no way to see into the docks. An employee there—Aethera, judging by the uniform—did show them how to access the station cameras, set up in every bay. Argo thanked her but didn’t access the stream.
Eos would see it, right?
It was stupid to be worried about this, he reflected as they headed back out, looking for one of those capsule hotels. Abiota surveillance tended to be very thorough, more so if it was predictive.
Hell, odds were good Eos probably knew about everything they were doing. Hopefully, the thing just wouldn’t care.
Argo mentioned it after he’d paid for a room at one of the nearest hotels and they were checking it out. The descriptor was charitable; the place was little more than a set of four bunks with an open area in the middle, just big enough to get dressed, stretch out.
“No see,” Emily said. She’d rolled the kugu into one of the bunks and powered it down. Daelia was hooking it up to a charging panel. Emily had thrown her projection out, a little miniature version of herself, perching on the upper bunk.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Eos no see,” she said, and the dragon blinked out.
Argo looked at Daelia. “What is she talking about?”
Daelia had a little tool kit out now, working on her brace. “I don’t know,” she said, twisting a screw at her shoulder connection. “Normally I’d say it’s her virch, but it’s not one right now. Obviously.”
“So what?”
“You know San Antonio? How she dropped all those kugus?”
“Yeah.”
“She didn’t do it with the NNEMP. At least, I don’t think she did.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think she was worried she was going to hurt me. This”—and Daelia waved at her arm—“isn’t all there is to this brace. I’ve got metal, wires, in my arm. So she didn’t use the NNEMP.”
“Then—”
“I have no idea. Maybe she reached out through the virch, just like she reached out with those Storm Gryphons. Or maybe…maybe it’s something we don’t understand.”
She was struggling. Argo wondered if he should offer to help. Daelia didn’t seem like the type to accept it. But then, her hand kept slipping, fingers unsteady.
He pushed himself over next to her and held his hand out for the screwdriver. A moment’s hesitation. Then she gave it to him.
“Just undo these screws?”
“Yeah, not all the way out. Just enough to get it loose.”
“So. The virch? Can they do that? I’ve never heard about that.”
“Killing each other, with no physical hardware involved? Yeah,” Daelia said, and she looked pensive. “I’ve never heard of it either.”
“Maybe it’s just her friend,” Argo suggested.
Daelia shrugged. “Maybe. Or…it’s something else.”
Argo got the last screw out. “What now?”
“It just comes off.”
Daelia slipped the right thumb under the palm strap of the brace and pulled it in one quick, fast movement off her arm. Her limb hung in midair, unmoving now. She grabbed it with her right hand and drew it across her body, right hand cupping the elbow to pull it close. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
She was embarrassed, he realized. He almost touched her shoulder, just a little reassuring gesture, but she pulled her body away.
“Or what, with Emily?” Argo asked.
He didn’t get an answer. “You trust this guy?” Daelia asked instead.
“Who, Skoro? Yeah, of course,” Argo said. “He’s Academy.”
“Must be nice. Having friends like that.”
Argo laughed. “We’re not friends. He was my Basic cadre,” he said, and seeing her blank expression, clarified what he meant. “Cadets train cadets there. He was a huge asshole.”
“And you trust him.”
“Implicitly.”
Daelia was scrunched into herself, closed off. “I wonder if Emily’s always been able to do this, or if they’ve always been able to do this. Like, maybe this is something abiota can just do. If they can communicate through virtual reality, why can’t they hurt each other with it too? They do have a significant software component, after all.”
