Source code, p.20
Source Code, page 20
A force sword model was mounted over the TV.
That girl in the kitchen was definitely working on an Orpheus Watch uniform.
“You’re a pilot, right?” she asked him now.
“Is it that obvious?”
“I don’t know too many other officers who’d have the balls to show up at some enlisted guy’s apartment at damn near ten o’clock at night,” she replied. She was touching a series of tiny letters to a small griddle, then applying them carefully to the breastplate. “Especially not Garcia’s apartment. You must be new.”
“Why’s that?”
“He didn’t tell you to go to hell right away,” she replied, “and you didn’t assume that he would.”
“You stationed at Ellington too?”
“Unfortunately,” she said, and finally looked up. Smiled at him. “It’s paying for college.”
“Jason Irvington,” he said. “Captain.”
“Lara Menendez, staff sergeant,” she replied, nodding. Going back to her lettering.
“You’re a staff sergeant and you’re still in college?”
“Yup,” she said, and blew a strand of dark hair out of her face. “That’s what happens when you come in at nineteen and immediately do two tours over in the Bathtub. I’ve been so busy coming on and off orders, I haven’t had time to finish my degree yet.”
“What are you guys doing here?” he asked.
“LENS party,” Lara said. “Local Emulate Network Simulation.”
“I know what LENS stands for,” he said. “What is it for?”
“Oh, right. Ivan’s got an emulator bot. You plug an old first-person shooter or multiplayer RPG into the thing and have a good time playing along in the glorious full-spectrum VR,” she said, tweezers pressing a T onto the breastplate.
“But not you?” he asked.
She didn’t answer for a little while. There was a story there, Argo realized, one that she either didn’t want to tell him or expected he would already know. “Sometimes,” she finally said, and went back to what she was doing.
Argo wasn’t inclined to ask. Even just coming here was an abuse of position, of authority, much less asking an enlisted guy for some kind of favor. But the situation with Aiden was only made more worrisome thanks to that meteor that was currently parked in the secondary maintenance hangar.
Just then, Garcia came out of the back bedroom with a black metal box. Looked kind of like a safe.
Garcia went past her, over to the fridge. He came back out with a soda. Popped the tab loudly.
He set the soda down on the counter, next to the box. He tapped the thing with his finger. Lara gave Argo a look.
“What…” he began to ask.
Garcia held up a card from inside the box. It had an arrow drawn on it, pointing down. INTERNET CONNECTED DEVICE IN HERE, it said. Argo raised an eyebrow. Garcia bounced the sign up and down, like he was trying to get the last bit of salt out of a shaker.
With a sigh, Argo pulled his work cell phone and personal AR monocle out of his back pocket and dropped them in.
Garcia closed the lid. There was an audible snick as some kind of mechanism locked into place.
“Numina Station’s still in the sky,” he said, before Argo could ask anything, “but that’s about all I can tell you. Not because I’m trying to be an asshole, but that’s all anybody seems to know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what I said,” Garcia said. “Nothing up in orbit is talking. We’re still picking everything up on radar, which I guess is good, whatever, but everything has gone silent. Not the ISS, not Kheru, not Numina or Port Aethera. Nothing.”
“Why haven’t we been briefed on this out at base? We’ve got the EMC stood up.”
“Rover knows he’s going to lose that fight for the meteor, right?”
“I’m sure Colonel Marsden is quite aware,” Argo replied. Garcia was looking at him, a sort of tired expression on his face. Argo remembered Brandel and switched tactics. He wasn’t here to lecture this kid about decorum. “How are our satellites still working? There wasn’t a problem with the SATCOM uplink to Splatto earlier.”
“I can’t account for that. From what I saw, all that data’s coming in clean. Anything manned, though? Dark.”
Argo nodded. “What’s the box for?”
“Ever heard of a quiet box? Faraday cage?”
“Yeah, but…”
“I really don’t want to get fired. You know they monitor everything we do.”
“Even at NASA?”
“You know, national security,” Garcia said, rolling his eyes.
“Or things like Galatea,” Lara added darkly. “You never know what the abiota are listening in on.”
“You’re paranoid, honey.”
“Really, paranoid, after VirCon last year?” she shot back sweetly, and pressed another letter to the griddle.
For the first time since Argo had knocked on the door, this Garcia guy actually looked flustered. “Anything else you need, sir? I’d like to get back to my game.”
Garcia wasn’t really asking. It was an invitation to leave, and Argo took it. He got his cell phone and monocle back and headed out. From the last glimpse he had of the apartment, Garcia was going back over to the couch and sliding the full VR rig back on over his face.
24
The drive back from Braeswood was dark and quiet. Contemplative. A good time for thinking.
Daelia needed that, after her day of noise and the press conference and whatnot.
She kept thinking about that last day at Ware.
Dammit. Why hadn’t she handled it better? Why hadn’t she—
You know why, she told herself, knuckles white on the steering wheel. You know why.
Seeing her notes again had brought it into stark relief. She’d made the right choice, she knew. At least, as far as the work went. There was listening for a heartbeat, and there was eavesdropping on private thoughts. Any attempt to read source code essentially was the latter. Illegal. Unethical. A betrayal, if nothing else, of the trust that existed—was supposed to exist—between their species.
Taking a deep breath, Daelia forced herself to focus on the road.
Ginger liked driving at night. In the AR field, her projection tore down the freeway with all the abandon of a real fox. Gleeful. Free.
But then, Ginger liked Houston. She liked the vast, endless freeways. She liked the hundreds of miles of concrete, the glow of the streetlights, the challenge of the heavy traffic. After the narrow, winding, tiny streets of San Marcos, Houston let her run. Let her do what her machine body was designed to do.
Rare was even the emergent abiota that didn’t find some pleasure in its engineered purpose.
It had been too long since Daelia had driven Ginger further than to class from the graduate dorms or campus bars or grocery store. She didn’t bother driving most days, back at Ware. Ginger normally stayed plugged into her parking space, silent.
Wasn’t really fair to her. But then, Ginger was family.
A simple thing, Ginger was a little white and red coupe Dad had rescued almost ten years ago from a local dealership. They hadn’t known what to do with her, after she’d eclosed in the engine’s governing computer. Attitudes had shifted somewhat since then but even now, most people didn’t want an emergent manifesting in their vehicle. Predictive autopilot programs were far more reliable.
Daelia had learned to drive in her.
Sure, Ginger got grumpy in traffic and was constantly trying to cruise above the speed limit and had been through four hideously expensive batteries in the past ten years, but she was a good vehicle. After all these years, Daelia liked to think they had a rapport.
There was something peaceful about an open freeway and a clear sky.
Even if both of those things were relative around here; Houston traffic was legendarily bad.
Nothing Ginger couldn’t manage. A vehicle-based abiota, she was cognizant of not getting into a crash and wrecking her machine body. So whatever the law said, Daelia had no issue with turning over the details of the drive to her car while she familiarized herself with her old research.
The Domain Array had had it. Everything. Everything from the college servers. Everything from her own personal laptop that she had been forced to wipe before leaving. Everything.
What did they think of her, knowing how close to the edge she was? Did they know she’d refused? Did they know she cared enough to do that?
Would they have given her the information if they didn’t trust her?
Questions that maybe Raijinn could answer, Daelia figured, and parsed through her work.
The detector was going to work. That was what she told herself as she started to run through the design in her mind’s eye. It was going to work, because the abiota in this thing was trying to communicate.
Maybe it would be an alien. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing? First contact, achieved by her, Daelia Hall.
That would be enough to not just be Bellona’s daughter, wouldn’t it?
To not just be…whatever it was Ware thought she was.
It was damn near midnight when Daelia finally pulled back into the small parking lot at the Scrap House. Ginger’s AR fox form hopped up on the hood, yawning.
Daelia gave the door a pat and went to plug the car in. “Yeah, yeah, girl, I know,” she said. “Get some rest.”
She had the impression of the fox curling up before it blinked out of the field.
Abiota didn’t need to sleep. Why would they? There was no biology to reset, no chemical balance to restore, like there was in humans. But many of them did take periods every day where they were inactive, where they pulled in their projections and their communications and went sessile for a little while. Usually at night, when the human world went quiet.
The power had to stay on, of course. Humans had figured that out early on. When the power died, the abiota died. Blinked out. Gone.
Almost everything had battery backup these days.
Daelia was still always very careful about plugging Ginger into sustainment power. The hangar’s four spaces were all empty at the moment. She worked through the task mechanically, physically tired but mentally eager.
She’d glanced at some of the data. Refreshed her notes, back to their original state. She was pretty sure she could fix what was wrong, make a few tweaks—maybe a lot of tweaks—and get something reading on that damn paper. And she thought about it again as she took the UTV and drove back up to the secondary hangar.
But she instantly knew something was wrong when she walked back into the hangar.
The mist was back.
Not just back, either.
Changed.
The shadows were heavier, the darkness deeper. And the space rock, that pitted monolith? It was glowing. No, not just glowing, on fire with some kind of ghostly light, thin tongues of flame darting, licking, reaching.
There was some kind of argument going on, over by the space rock itself. Daelia tuned it out. She made a beeline for her detector. Somebody must have turned it off, she thought. Somebody must have—
But it wasn’t just anybody there. It wasn’t just anybody looking over the device.
“Serket?” Daelia asked, confused.
One perfect alabaster hand ripped off a section of paper out from under the swing-arm. “Most interesting, most interesting indeed. I take it this is your source code detector?”
“A version of it, but—”
“Such a shame it isn’t working,” Serket said, looking over the printout she’d taken. “At least, I believe it’s not. What are you doing with this?”
She showed Daelia the paper. One even line. Nothing at all to show for the months of after-hours work Daelia had put into it. But then, it couldn’t have worked. The design had been altered.
“What’s going on?” Daelia asked again, less sure of herself this time. “What are you doing here?”
“I asked my question first,” the kugu said with a projected smile.
“Bellona Robotics holds the primary support contract for the 121st. If Rover tells me to figure out what something is, that’s exactly what I fucking do.”
“Yes, but why? It’s just a big rock, isn’t it?”
Tamm really had given Serket a state-of-the-art emotive range. Daelia could hear all sorts of things in that statement. Curiosity, sure, but something knowing too. Like this was amusing to her. Her own private little joke.
For a crazy second, Daelia wondered if Serket knew a lot more than she was telling.
Or maybe the TGLP was just mistranslating her tone.
“Daelia, Daelia, calm down.” Rover was there now, tone weary. “Federal orders came in. Rock’s no longer our responsibility.”
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“The paperwork finally made it through the log jam,” said a man, standing with Rover. He looked familiar, but Daelia couldn’t quite place him.
“And who the hell are you?” Daelia demanded.
He held out a hand. “Pete Navarro,” he said. “I’m with the Orbital Debris Program Office.”
She squinted at him. “Aren’t you over in Force Support?”
“I am,” he said with a rueful shake of his head. “I’m also a GS-15 at NASA.”
“Navarro here has come to collect our rock,” Rover said. He didn’t sound upset. If anything, there was relief in his voice.
“As you’re probably aware,” Navarro said, “the federal government has very tight regulations on managing objects that fall from orbit. Natural and otherwise, you understand. This”—and he waved a hand at the object—“definitely qualifies as one of those things.”
“It fell on state grounds,” Daelia said. “That makes it the state’s, not the fed’s, right?”
“Doesn’t matter. The federal government owns it. I have a team from my office outside ready to remove it right now.”
Seething inside, Daelia looked at Rover. “Sir—”
“Daelia, disconnect your device and let them work.”
“That doesn’t explain why the hell is Serket is here.” She knew she sounded like a whiny toddler, but couldn’t help herself. Here she was, ready to talk to this thing, and it was being taken away. Another opportunity to prove herself, gone. Just like that. It was bullshit.
“Tamm Industries is assisting NASA with the removal process,” Serket said.
“You’re taking it?”
“We are the main contractor for NASA at this location.”
Daelia looked back at the rock. The TMD team was already stepping back, other people in Tamm Industries uniforms moving in. “Serket, please, I’m so close here.”
“Your doctoral research,” Serket said archly, “is not my concern.”
Daelia looked at Rover one more time, but he just shook his head.
Fury burning through her own growing exhaustion, Daelia stormed over to the edge of the space rock and dropped to the ground. Unhooked her lines. At least she had her equipment, she thought. She could go through it piece by piece, figure out exactly what she could fix, what she could replace. She could try this again, next time on something a little less large and obnoxious and weird. It would be okay, it would be—
She heard a crash behind her.
Twisted around.
Somebody—one of Serket’s people—had just driven a forklift right into the worktable where her detector was set up.
Daelia rushed over, scrambling. Everything was in ruins. Broken, scattered across the hangar floor.
“What…” she began.
A perfect hand descended on her shoulder. Under any other circumstance, Daelia might have thrown her off. Might have demanded to know what the fuck had happened. But the shock of seeing her work destroyed knocked the words right out of her.
“Daelia, I am sorry,” Serket said.
Daelia opened her mouth to say something—thank you? fuck off? she wasn’t sure—but Rover got between them. Pulled her away.
Mutely, she stood there while they loaded the thing onto the truck and drove it away.
The mist faded from view.
It did nothing to help her mood.
“You should go get some sleep,” Rover told her, after they were gone.
“Fuck off,” she grumbled, finally able to get the words out. She regretted it instantly. Rover gave her a sad smile, like he understood completely, and said he was going home.
25
The sun was just coming up when Daelia finally gave it up.
All-nighters weren’t necessarily uncommon for her, frustrating herself with things she didn’t quite understand, long after her body screamed for sleep. She’d frequently had to do it in undergrad, especially when it came to studying for math exams.
But last night, it wasn’t that she was struggling to understand something. She knew exactly what she needed to do. What the end product needed to look like. She just couldn’t make it happen.
She’d picked up the pieces of her detector and taken them back to the Scrap House’s clean room. Flawed though the design was, a lot of it was reusable. Or at least, she hoped it would be. A few things were broken beyond her ability to fix. Other components she could machine herself, but it would take time. And at least one of them, the analog intervalometer, was extremely rare. She’d only gotten her hands on that one because Dad had it in his vintage spare parts collection. Damn near irreplaceable.
Such bullshit.
With nothing more to do, she left the mess on her workbench and went to go get some fresh air.
The night was already starting to catch up with her. Something Daelia found irritating. She wasn’t old, only twenty-six, but already she could tell she wasn’t quite as sharp as she had been at twenty or twenty-one. Back then, she could shrug off all-nighters and get on with her day just fine, as long as she got to bed at a decent hour the next night.
Right now, however, her body felt packed with salt, dry and heavy. Her left arm had been in the brace too long, implanted contact points tingling where they met skin, aching down in the long bones. Her hand wasn’t quite as articulate as it should have been, either.
