Numina code, p.17
Numina Code, page 17
“The only way to ensure that things are fair is for it to be held in person, with people registering by hand, on physical pieces of paper we will pull from a drum.” One of her kugu’s hands pointed at the stage, where a pair of technicians in Astraeus Astronautics coveralls were setting an antique up on the table. A round brass cage, with a handle on the side, set up between two sets of legs. “It’s much harder to manipulate a physical analog process.” Serket smiled. “Any of my domain could rig a digital lottery. And Mr. Tamm insists on fairness.”
“Uh-huh,” Twohy said, clearly not convinced.
Marathon looked around at the open area. “I take it this raffle is going to happen here?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What’s with the camp, then? People staying here overnight?”
“Mr. Tamm is a generous man,” Serket said. “He has not put a limit on the number of times one may enter their name.”
“So what”—and that was Chief, walking up with a big shiny travel mug, the plastic top in hand—“they’re just going to be here until what, the Rapture?”
Serket inclined her head. “That is an interesting choice of words. An allusion to the Bible, correct? The end times?”
Scurvy blew some steam off the top of the coffee and put the top back on. “Or the beginning of something new.”
“Hmm, fascinating. Typical human imprecision, I assume? But yes, if you mean that Mr. Tamm intends them to be allowed to stay for a while, you are correct. All the local hotels within a ten-mile radius of here have already booked out. And some people, of course, are concerned about the ongoing klaatuu effects we have seen. In San Antonio, for example.”
How does she know about that? Marathon wondered.
“Oh, if that happens here, believe me, we’ll handle it,” Scurvy said.
“Yes, I am sure. But many people right now are scared to even leave their neighborhoods, go grocery shopping without a bicycle in the car.” Serket nodded. “It has been my observation that humans most readily change their behavior when they are afraid.”
“Fear’s a useful emotion,” Twohy said, definitely on edge now. “Provides an advantage in survival situations. If you can manage it.”
“One of those evolutionary traits biota are subject to, no doubt.” Serket smiled. It really was uncanny. “Perhaps we can discuss these things in detail someday, Major. Until then, I have a lottery to set up.”
And away she strode.
One of the SF sergeants was watching her—that exaggerated hip sway, the saunter—a little too closely. Marathon leaned over to him. “You know it’s all silicone and gimbals, man,” he offered.
“And if anybody’s fucking her, it’s Tamm,” Twohy grunted. Scurvy shot her a look. “What? I can’t be the only person who thinks it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Scurvy said. “If this is being driven by that lottery for, what is it again?”
“The Galactic Exposition.”
“Shit, I can’t be the only person who thinks that sounds nuts. But anyway, if this is being driven by that, then the odds are, this is only going to get bigger. And weirder too, I’d bet.”
“What makes you say that, Chief?” Twohy asked.
“Who’s going to wait out here in a muddy field for weeks or months to go up to orbit and see some weird alien shit? Not people with office jobs and a mortgage, that’s for damn sure. At least, not jobs they care about.” He nodded. “Trust me, give this a week or two and it’ll be like Burning Man out here.”
Twohy sighed. “I’ll talk to the sheriff’s department again. Drive down there in person if they keep refusing to deal with this.” She looked at Marathon. “If you want to call Sausage, I’ll brief Kemp.”
“And Cactus?” Marathon shot back.
“Shit,” she said. “Won’t that be fun. Wanna do rock paper scissors for it?”
“You’re the top cop around here,” he replied with a grin. “I’m just a lowly flight commander.”
“Shit,” she said again, looking around. “Cactus picked a hell of a time to be gone.”
20
Emily was bored.
Bored.
Back home, she was never bored. The humans at the unit understood her need for movement, for activity. They kept her in the air as much as possible. Half of her year was spent in the Bathtub, in the air, fulfilling her purpose.
But her machine body—magnificent though it was—still needed maintenance, fuel, respite from inclement weather. At those times, she’d fire up her kugu and puppet it around. Or even better, step into her personal virch and chase some knights, set a village on fire, enjoy the simulated clouds.
There was none of that here.
What there was was a vast hollow, skinned with slag metal and open all along one end to the night sky.
No, space. It was space.
Emily found it utterly fascinating.
Going forward, need thrust, Emily replied.
Ah yes. What a difference such a little thing made. This was what so many of her people didn’t seem to understand. Meatspace was as varied, as strange, as—
Why this? Have fun here now.
Mags chimed in. Inbound spacecraft, estimate five minutes away at current rate of deceleration.
Who?
Emily executed a slow, rolling turn, firing one thruster to bring her around. Whatever the human thought, she wasn’t an idiot. The kugu had plenty of empty memory space, and she was greedily accumulating data on how it handled out here in the airless, weightless docking bay.
True learning was a tedious, difficult process, and when was she ever going to be in orbit again? She did not enjoy this style of flying. Better to create her own script using the kugu’s onboard movement algorithms as a template. Then, Emily could just send her commands via TGLP and the kugu would execute them automatically. Why the thing didn’t have this already, natively installed, she did not know. She would provide this feedback to the Domain Array when she returned to Earth.
A space-based kugu ought to be able to move in any environment an abiota may encounter in space.
Although perhaps the things were limited intentionally. To prevent her from doing exactly what she was doing, flying the thing around outside of the station.
Humans had strange notions of boundaries.
How you know it patrol?
IFF spoofed maybe, Emily replied. She tried to bank, but there was nothing to push against, no resistance to fight or lift to take advantage of. Instead, she fired her aft steering thruster at the correct angle to redirect her momentum in the correct direction. Angles and velocity, it was all about angles and velocity in this emptiness.
Agh. He worried too much.
Take look, she replied.
The kugu’s built-in motion program had comprehensive charts on the chassis’s mechanical capacity. How much it could lift, how fast it could walk, max burn time for the thruster pack, all of that. But Emily didn’t bother referencing that. All kugus, even those designed for combat, were limited to human parameters.
A show of good faith, the Domain Array publicly said, but the truth was a bit more complicated.
Emily had spent years of her life studying humans. How they moved. What they did. So she knew how fast the kugu’s hand could open, how much force the shoulder-joint assembly could tolerate, how fast she could hit the wall without damaging the machinery.
At the exact right moment, she reached out. Grabbed a hand bar built into the outermost edge of the docking bay. She was traveling just a little too fast, and the force of it snapped out through the kugu. Painful, maybe, if the machine puppet could have registered pain.
She made a note of this to include in her script.
Emily ignored him, bracing the kugu as steady as she could, locking the mechanical muscles, turning the whole thing into little more than a tripod for the eye-lenses.
And she looked.
The kugu lacked her own machine body’s exceptional camera suite, but it was serviceable. Good enough to pick out a glint moving against the star field. She analyzed the footage. It was moving toward them.
A glint. And another, further behind.
You say one ship, yes?
Is two at least, she said. Three, is three. One much larger, two small.
Send me the data, Mags said.
Emily pulled out familiar metadata templates and populating them at great speed, to attach to the images the kugu was capturing. She didn’t often use pre-formulated responses to communicate, as Mags did, but operational missions required precision. And she had no doubt they were in such a situation now.
Call Daelia, she ordered. Tell her something comes.
Is alien fleet in orbit, yes? Maybe alien.
Cannot ID them, Mags replied. Need better imagery.
Will continue to monitor, Emily replied.
Emily, deep down in her rudiment core, felt something that she only ever felt when a mission was about to go sideways. Foreboding, Rover said it was. Foreboding.
She did not like the potential futures she saw unfolding within the available data.
With a quick command, she set the kugu to record and transmit back to Mags and pulled her attention away.
Garcia was working his way through another episode of Orpheus Watch, from Lee Hall’s collection, when the message came in.
Need favor. Will pay.
It wasn’t sent to his number. No. It was to Lara’s, coming through on her computer, which he could see quite well, because he’d been trying to find her reference files for the past hour, the ones she’d tried to show him the night of their last fight.
He frowned.
What type of favor? he typed back.
The reply came too quickly to be anything other than abiota. Need find file upload for kugu. Specialized. Probably on Army network although no problem maybe eh?
“Emily?” he muttered to himself, and typed in, Aren’t you on vacation, girl?
The message screen immediately went blank.
He stared at it for a moment, turning over all the possibilities in his mind. Finally, he shut the laptop and got up, going for his car keys.
“You are so lucky I live close,” he muttered to himself.
Twenty minutes later and he was pulling up to the squadron. It was a weekend—for anybody who wasn’t on a shift schedule, at least—so at least there weren’t many people in the halls.
Nobody would have questioned him being there, had they noticed him. Not even in jeans and his falling-apart old sneakers. Off-duty unit members wandered through in civvies all the time. There was always some project to finish, some piece of paperwork to file, some problem that needed hands-on attention.
He headed outside, onto the airfield—which probably would attract attention, so he’d have to be fast—and made for Emily’s shade structure. She was there, hooked into her sustainment power feed and unmoving. He walked around her, trying to trigger the motion sensors of her nose camera. Nothing happened, and that was irritating. If Emily was fucking with him—
Little network-keeper.
The words flashed up in his monocle, right at the same time her AR form shimmered into view. It was sketchy, indistinct. Not fully manifested. Her attention wasn’t fully here, he realized.
What you do here?
“Came to see you, Emily. After those weird text messages.”
Not weird. Asking for special commission. From friend.
“Lara? I don’t know where she is.”
Is problem?
“Maybe. Why?”
Heart rate increases, thinking of it, Emily said.
That took him aback. “You can see my heartbeat? Your thermal camera’s not that good.”
She ignored it. Need favor still.
“Yeah? Like what?”
Combat program for bipedal kugu. Real one, not 2Shy gamer bletch. The last word was more noise than anything else, a merry dance of disgust and smiling poop emojis working their way across Garcia’s monocle.
“Those are controlled. Downloads on those are restricted. I’m not even sure we have a server for them here.”
Find.
“Why?”
You hear about Alamo, yes?
He thought of the NDA he’d been asked to sign. “I don’t think I’m legally allowed to answer that question,” he answered, cautious.
You know I kill kugu yes? Aliens.
“What?”
May need kill more. But in borrowed kugu. No have machine body weapons suite.
What in the hell was she talking about? “Killing stuff? No. No. You know you can’t do that unilaterally. They’ll brick you. For real this time.”
It like little quest. Be fun. I pay.
“Emily…no, shit. No. If you’re bored on vacation, cut it short and go harass the damn campground in your kugu. Do something useful.”
And then, he caught her smiling at him. Fucking with him, no doubt.
This most useful, yes, you see. Give combat plug-in.
“I’m going home, Emily,” he told her.
Blegh, Emily thought, and opened her awareness back into the borrowed kugu.
Just in time to see a chunk of asteroid the size of a minivan sail silently, serenely, into the docking bay. And tear through Magellan’s Bird like tissue paper.
21
Daelia had seen an aluminum casting of an anthill once as a kid. It had been a special exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. A whole thing about ants.
Mom had taken her, when Dad was up on Capitol Hill, having some closed-door meeting with the Armed Forces Committee.
“Isn’t this amazing?” her mother had said, lifting her up to better see the silvery structure. “Insects do this all on their own. No direction, no guidance. Just agreements between them, passed along through scent.”
People had been looking at them. Daelia remembered that too. Seven years old and she had finally started to understand that her mother wasn’t like other mothers. That nobody else’s mom had metal hands or a paneled silicone face or synthetic blue hair. That other moms didn’t talk about things like this.
“It’s pretty,” Daelia had said.
“That’s the unpredictability of nature,” Mom replied. “How things can happen that one can never anticipate.”
“Not even abiota, Mommy?”
“Not even us, my daughter. Not even the best of us.” And Mom had squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry though, there are many ways of looking at the data of life. I’ll teach you how our domain works.”
It had been a good day, even if people stared at them everywhere they went. Daelia had liked the ants. She had liked spending time with Mom like that. She had liked—
But nothing was as simple as Mom had made it sound back then.
“You okay?” Argo asked as they jetted down yet another hallway.
“It’s weird here,” Daelia replied, looking around, pulling herself from the memory. “I feel like I’ve been shrunk down and injected into an ant nest.”
“Let’s hope not,” Argo said. “Last thing we need are giant bugs coming after us.”
Daelia tried to smile, but it wouldn’t hold. “How are you so cheerful about this?” she asked.
“I’m not,” he said. “But there’s no point in indulging fear. If something happens, it happens. Better to not freak yourself out until then.”
The tunnel twisted again, taking them up what was a relatively long, steep slope. And at the top…
“Shit,” Daelia said. “That’s not on the map. Cave-in?”
About fifty yards ahead, according to the map, there was another cavern space. A small one, twenty-five yards in diameter, but one that fed into several other of the branching tunnels. And more importantly, fed right into the oxygen garden.
For all the asteroid’s strange weightlessness, the tunnels they’d traversed so far seemed fairly…normal. No different, really, from the tunnels one might see on a highway, cutting through a cliffside or mountain. The shape, the layout, was the same: road, arched walls and ceiling, bracing here and there, lighting, dull concrete skin. Except here, the roads had big metal tracks sunk into them, the concrete was a strange dusty red color, and the lights were fewer and further between. Cables were run in big pipes along the ceilings of the domes, alongside air conduits of hard aluminum.
But up ahead, it all stopped. A train car lay overturned on its side beside the tracks, its cogwheel pointing up toward the ceiling, spinning slowly in unseen air currents. It was half-buried in a huge pile of debris and dust, some of which was still in the process of falling back to the floor.
“Shit, I think you’re right,” Argo said. His monocle glowed, his forward thrusters firing, slowing this approach. Daelia followed suit. “I really thought this was the best chance of finding anyone alive.”
“Maybe it’s too obvious a target,” she said, scanning the huge rubble pile. The cavern was entirely filled. But the concrete above still had its epoxy sealant intact. Weird. “Even abiota would know that humans need air and food.”
“Yeah, but there is still light and air everywhere in this rock, so maybe—”
“Hands up! Jet down to the tracks and turn around slowly!”
It was the only voice Daelia had heard in a couple of hours that wasn’t Argo’s, and it startled her. She fired one thruster to turn herself around. It was a man, older, with an unkempt gray beard and no sympathy in his lined face. He was vaguely Asian, but the gray cast to his tan skin, along with the beard, made it hard to tell his ethnicity. He had one of the kugu’s DEW guns pointed right at them, cabling and battery pack slung around his shoulder like a bandolier.
