Numina code, p.2
Numina Code, page 2
It was a strange thing. He’d seen death plenty of times. It was usually through a camera, though. Never in person, and never like that. Not like those kugus in San Antonio behaved. Like the abiota behind them had no idea what they were doing. No combat plug-ins at all.
Who—or what—fielded kugus without combat plug-ins?
Unable to sleep, Argo had finally roused himself around 0400. Grabbed his laptop. Headed for the heritage room. He’d made himself a cup of coffee and pulled up his brother’s emails, comparing the new to the old, trying to put his finger on what, exactly, bothered him about the last few messages.
And then he’d seen it. Aiden had missed the cypher. The question that Argo had sent him.
Remember that six-point buck we got, first time we went out hunting just the two of us?
Aiden had answered in the affirmative, excited about it.
Except that had never happened.
The first time they’d gone out together, Argo had been kind of desperate. Desperate enough to go without a license. Spring wasn’t the best time to hunt—black-tails were all skinny from the winter, and highly restricted in the lean times after the Five Days War. But Argo had been having trouble finding work and they were hungry, so out they’d gone.
It wasn’t a buck they’d gotten. It was a doe. A yearling, a little thing, hardly any fat on it at all.
Hadn’t mattered. That had gotten them through a month or so, until the summer season had started and work opportunities picked up. They’d never talked about that deer online, for fear of getting caught by one of the Fish and Wildlife bots, and they hadn’t taken any photos.
Aiden wouldn’t have forgotten about it, though.
Aiden wouldn’t have forgotten.
“Hey, you okay?” the first girl asked as Argo came back to the table.
Yanking himself out of the unpleasant memories, Argo smiled at her. “Yeah, sorry, it’s kind of early.” What was her name, again? Jessica something, maybe.
“So why are you over here?” the second one asked. Yvette. That was her name. It was unusual. Stuck in his brain.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Jessica—had to be Jessica—replied. “He’s curious about the expo. He thinks he can pump us for information.”
“And here I was, thinking he was just horny,” Yvette said.
This flight this morning didn’t seem to contain any tourists. It all looked like station crew for Aethera. A mix of uniforms, from housekeepers to command staff, but everyone seemed at ease with each other. Dozens of them were packed into Space Coast Coffee, laughing, joking, sharing memes or getting caught up on stories.
If anything, the oddest thing about it was that there were no abiota. Apparently, it was cheaper to either station them up there permanently or let them use dedicated zero-gee kugus over a SATCOM line. Made sense, Argo supposed, but it was still strange not to see them.
The two girls he was talking to were flight attendants, dressed in flashy uniforms. Black with silver piping, kind of old-school Navy with a techy edge. Short skirts. Tall boots. Like something out of an 80s mecha anime.
They were both mid-twenties, slim, gorgeous. Rumor was, Tamm hired his flight attendants the same way the Asian airlines did: for looks.
That didn’t mean they were dumb, though. Argo kicked himself for thinking it was going to be as easy as that.
“Okay, sure. I was hoping to learn more about the expo,” he admitted.
“You could have just asked,” Yvette said.
Jessica smiled at him. “I don’t know. The pumping might be fun.”
Argo almost choked on his coffee. At least it got the girls laughing.
“Well, the moratorium on space lift got lifted this morning,” Yvette told him, still chuckling, “so we’re all going up. They’re bringing in a few more teros—”
“Teros?”
“Yeah, you know, tero, pterosaur, because that’s how Tamm names all the planes. Anyway, they say we’re going to be launching all day. Getting crew swapped out and the port all ready.” She shrugged, sweeping an errant lock of blonde hair out of her face. “I can’t imagine how busy it’s going to be out of Ozona. They do all the heavy supply lifts from there.”
Jessica picked at another bite of muffin. “It’s kind of crazy. We’ve had some tourists stuck up on the station since the landings. Crew too, I guess, but that’s a bit different.”
“Anybody seen the aliens?” Argo asked.
“So apparently they’re in geostationary orbit above the Philippines, but we’re in LEO, and it’s a more equatorial path, so…” Jessica sipped her coffee. “Space is really big. Nothing’s packed real close up there.”
Argo glanced up at the TV. They were showing the official Tamm Good Industries stream. Tamm was talking to some ByYou influencer Argo didn’t recognize and a certain Envoy whom he very much did. The ticker at the bottom was showing the address for the Ellington spaceport, over and over, along with an announcement,
LOTTERY STARTS TOMORROW.
“So what is going on?”
Jessica followed his gaze. “With the expo? You’ve probably heard the same thing we have. Unity has determined that in order for us to, like, believe them, we need to see some visual proof. So they’re hosting this world’s fair thing.”
“I think it’s a galactic fair,” Yvette offered.
“Whatever,” Jessica said with a shrug, and gestured at the TV. “I guess they’ve been off-loading stuff up at Aethera for the past week or two. Won’t it be amazing for the whole world to see what kinds of wonders are out there in the rest of the galaxy?”
The stream switched to a series of short video clips of objects on display. The first was a small personal ship, one of Unity’s transports, parked in a hangar up at Aethera. Skinned in iridescent purple, almost glowing against the black of space. Beautiful. Uncanny. Nothing that would fly in the atmosphere.
“That’s one big-ass carrot,” Argo muttered to himself.
“Hmm?”
“You know, I always thought Tamm was a bit of a blowhard,” Yvette said, “but you’ve got to admire how he’s handling this. The Saudis and Singaporeans are charging through the roof for their flights up to Aethera right now. But Tamm’s giving half our tickets away for free.”
“He doubled the price for the regular tickets,” Jessica said. “I think Astraeus is going to come out of this okay.”
“Anybody that can afford a ten-thousand-dollar ticket can afford twenty,” Yvette sniffed.
And this, this was what Argo was wondering about. “How does that lottery work?” he asked.
“First come, first serve, I’m told,” Jessica said. “Gotta be on-site and put your name into the hat, in person, to qualify. You can’t resell your ticket. And no kids under fourteen, but that’s standard for our flights as it is. Other than that, Tamm seems to be keeping it pretty open-ended.”
“Like I said, maybe he’s a good guy after all,” Yvette nodded.
Argo had tried, when he’d heard flights were opening back up, to book himself a ticket, but everything had been gone within a minute of the announcement. He hadn’t made it. Now, staring at that weird alien ship in that hangar, like something out of Orpheus Watch…maybe there was a workable backup plan here.
Get up to orbit.
Find his brother.
Bail the kid out of whatever mess he’d found himself in this time.
The stream moved on, back to the interview. Tamm and the Envoy were walking now, shown in some deep discussion while the influencer gushed about how great it had been to meet them both.
The Envoy was accompanied by some of those kugus. Argo stared at them. The same fucking kugus from yesterday. Same as the ones who’d attacked the Cirque last night.
“Fuckers,” he muttered.
“Hmm?” Jessica asked.
Argo schooled back his irritation. According to the Air Force, San Antonio had never happened. If he wanted to keep himself out and free in the world, free to go save his brother, he had to toe that line. “Must be weird,” he said instead, “seeing your kugus on the news like this.”
Yvette just frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean those things,” Argo said, gesturing at the TV with his coffee. “They’re mining units, aren’t they?”
Now both the girls were frowning. “No, no, I don’t know where you heard that, but that’s not what the mining units look like. Here.” Jessica pulled out a cell phone. Navigating to the photo app, she thumbed up a couple of pictures. “This is what they look like.”
Argo took it, scanning the pictures carefully. Jessica was right. The tri-lensed kugu and the mining unit looked nothing alike. The ones in those photos were stocky, short, hunched over, like some sort of strange mechanical gorilla. Built for lifting, obviously, with exposed pneumatics and very little design sense.
Cold certainty flooded through him. Something was indeed very, very wrong here.
He handed the phone back. “Huh,” he said.
Jessica cocked her head. “Why’d you think that? About the kugus?”
“Just something I heard somewhere,” he replied, and made a little show of checking his watch. “Well, would you look at that? I need to get going.”
Yvette smiled and waved. Jessica texted him her phone number.
They went back to chatting, like he’d never been there at all.
Argo didn’t go home.
No, no. Not at all.
Instead, he went to the Scrap House. Hoping that Daelia might still be there. Might be willing to do him a favor.
The doors were all locked when he got there, but his access badge got him through the flight line gates. The big hangar doors were shut against the foggy morning, but the small personnel door was open.
Broken open.
Shit.
“Daelia!” he yelled, striding inside. “Daelia! Where are you?!”
It was dead silent on the hangar floor, the lights off, nothing stirring.
“Daelia!” he yelled again, worried now.
Something rumbled. A diesel engine coming to life. One of the bitzers, he realized, and its form coalesced in the AR field. Its canine pretensions were on full display; it looked like a kicked puppy.
RAIJINN, it sent, the words huge on the bottom of his monocle.
Hell, what had he left her with?
Argo headed to the server room, the big one at the end of the main hall where Daelia had told him the training stuff was kept.
That door, too, had been forced open. The lock was half-melted and the surrounding metal scorched. His heart picked up, palms going clammy. If something had happened to her…
The light in here was bright, after the darkness in the rest of the building. Quiet too; the persistent hum that Argo associated with server rooms was missing.
Instead, he heard…
Breathing.
In the central aisle, there was Daelia. She was slumped down in a pile at the base of one of the racks. Door open, tools scattered around. Her head was in her hands, fingers digging into her hair.
She was crying, he realized.
“What’s going on?” Argo asked cautiously, going over. Something had clearly happened here, but he wasn’t sure if this particular display of emotion was about that, or just the night catching up with her.
“I…I got back…from Aunt June’s…twenty minutes ago,” she said, forcing the words out between big shuddering breaths. “Got back and found the door outside like that. Found this.” She patted the server rack, then wiped her eyes. “They killed it.”
Argo looked. All the lights in the rack, on all the equipment, were off. It took him a second to understand what she meant.
“Oh, fuck, Daelia, I’m so—”
“What did Raijinn do? It was a trainer, it took care of things around here, it wasn’t…it wasn’t involved in, I don’t know, San Antonio or the air show or fucking anything!” She kicked the metal cabinet closest to her. “What the fuck?!”
Argo sat down next to her, cautious, not sure what she’d do. Truthfully, he half believed she’d hit him too and tell him to get lost.
Instead, she turned her face into his shoulder and started crying again.
He moved his arm, laying it across her shoulders and hugging her a little.
They sat there like that for a good long while.
That favor would have to wait.
3
The place felt empty without Raijinn.
Daelia didn’t like it at all.
Maybe that was why she kept digging and digging and digging through the training system. Hoping it might be hiding somewhere.
No good. Everything was ruined. Even its rudiment core had been torn out and destroyed.
The abiota had kept scrupulous records. A perfect file system. All the training scenarios were saved, with detailed notes explaining the purpose and function and a whole bunch of other stuff that trailed off into things that Daelia didn’t understand but must have meant something to Raijinn. The volume of data was, under normal circumstances, staggering.
All of it had been erased. Every scenario, every file. Anywhere Raijinn might have gone, anywhere it might have hidden a message, it was all blank.
Or maybe not. Dad had backups, she knew, an off-site continuity-of-operations location, the connection to which could be severed at the hardware level, if need be. So something might be saved, somewhere.
But Daelia didn’t dare try to go access that. Not without Dad. Not…not as tired as she was. It was too much, too complicated, for her to attempt on her own.
The whole thing was a nightmare.
She had been hoping that maybe Raijinn had left her a message, some kind of last words or farewell. If it had, she hadn’t been able to find it yet. For some reason, that hurt. It shouldn’t have; Raijinn never had been worried about human pleasantries or connections.
It hadn’t been emotional.
But trying to plumb the depths of the bottomless simulation server for any missed crumbs of data was a good distraction—both from Raijinn’s death and from the new processor board for her arm—and so Daelia spent what time she could on it.
Until 2Shy was due in, and she couldn’t stay there any longer.
Silencing the alarm in her monocle, she headed out to the main hangar floor.
Where Argo was lounging on the break-area sofa, feet up on the coffee table and laptop open.
“You’re still here?” she asked, surprised. “I loaned you Dingo, if you want to—”
“I don’t particularly feel like going home, no,” he said.
Daelia went over, looking for the UTV keys. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She’d spent a good twenty minutes crying on his shoulder. Stupid thing to do. Military pilots were many things but forgiving of shows of weakness, they were not. It wasn’t like her, either. She didn’t like that he’d seen her that way.
“Well, you can,” she said shortly. “I’m fine.”
“I was trying to look some other stuff up,” Argo replied, without looking at her. His gaze was up, monocle on. Probably had his screen extended up into the AR. Didn’t seem like something he’d do. Whatever he was doing, that kind of pissed her off. So wait, he wasn’t worried about her?
What the hell is wrong with you? she asked herself. “Yeah, well, I’ve got to be there when 2Shy gets in,” Daelia said, searching the coffee table none too gently.
“What are you looking for?” Argo asked as she swept a pile of gears off onto the floor.
“The damn UTV keys. I am not walking all the way up to…”
Daelia trailed off. Took a deep breath.
Shit. Right.
She heard the dull click of a laptop closing, and then Argo was watching her. Monocle turned off again. “Okay if I come?”
Daelia nodded wordlessly, another lump in her throat.
She was not going to start crying again.
The keys were right where Raijinn had put them. Back in their box. Right in place. Daelia stared at them for a moment, before snatching them off the hook and leading Argo outside. She kicked at the door. With the locking mechanism burnt out, it swung freely on its hinges.
“Fucking thing,” she muttered.
“Daelia,” Argo told her. “It’s alright.”
“She’s been en route back for four days,” Rover said to nobody in particular. He was antsy, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Daelia wondered if he’d gotten any sleep last night either. He’d raised an eyebrow when he’d seen Argo walk up with Daelia. “Clark to Changi in Thailand, then down to Darwin, Australia, for a proper once-over and refit with the USAF unit there. Then a long-haul flight to Hawaii, then out to Davis-Monthan in Arizona. I want her checked out, nose to tail. Everything.”
“It’s a lot of stops. A lot of places for things to go wrong,” Critter agreed.
“A lot of new people,” Koval muttered, glaring at Argo.
“How bad do you think she’s going to be?” Rover asked. It was overcast today, with a high chance of thunderstorms in a few hours. Not great weather for an MQ-9 to be flying in, Daelia knew, but the risk of leaving 2Shy on the ground in Arizona was worse.
Only a few people from the unit were here. Rover. Scurvy. Critter, and one of his senior techs, Koval, who was 2Shy’s favorite human in the Group. Daelia was here as a matter of course; as the only Bellona Robotics employee stateside right now, it was her job to give the abiota a once-over.
Everybody else had been told to stay inside. Argo was only still out here because Emily had protested when Rover tried to kick him out.
That didn’t apply to the other abiota on base, of course. Emily was waiting with them. AR fields wrapped around her. One head was gnawing on a skull. The other kept picking at her right wing, like a bird trying to groom its plumage. Anxious. She was anxious.
Everyone was anxious.
“If we go off past experience, it’ll take us at least two fucking weeks to get her back in the fucking air,” Koval said impassively, his big arms crossed. He was built heavy, with an extra thirty pounds around his midsection. His silicone wedding ring cut into his finger a little. Good guy, though. Daelia liked him. “And that’s not accounting for what might have been said or done around her at one of the other bases. Could be longer before she’s operational again.”
