Unity code, p.22
Unity Code, page 22
She thought she was protecting a friend. Sure. Argo could understand that. But it was his job to ensure that the mission wasn’t compromised, and if something had hacked Emily’s cameras, there could be no trusting anything she did.
It was like Marathon keeping his kids out of school.
People didn’t always act logically when they were afraid. Or rather, fear warped logic.
Argo didn’t like it, but he understood it.
He wasn’t afraid of the aliens though, or not being able to get back to his house, which still didn’t feel like home. He was afraid for his brother, stuck up in orbit. No matter how many emails the kid sent him, it didn’t do anything to ease the feeling in his gut that something was horribly, horribly wrong.
But he wasn’t about to let that fear warp how he behaved. He was a professional, and he was damn well going to conduct himself that way.
He wasn’t going to do anything stupid.
Besides, getting up to orbit was too expensive.
As they rounded the edge of the huge hangar doors, mostly closed against the chill morning breeze, Argo was grateful to see there was no formation being organized. It was just Cactus and Sausage, Troll and Levinson. Rover was there, too, with Scurvy, and Daelia, whose UTV was parked outside and hooked up to the charging feed.
“Well, with our pilots here,” Levinson said, “that’s everybody. Do you suppose we could wake Emily up and have her attend as well?”
“No,” Daelia said immediately, before anybody else could answer. Nobody from the base reacted, although Argo could see a smile playing at the corners of Scurvy’s mouth.
“That settles that, then. Let’s get started. I know everything is in an absolute uproar right now with the escalation late last night. We’ve got taskings, I’m sure you do as well,” he said, addressing that last bit to Cactus, who nodded back, “and our C-17’s going to be here in an hour or so. So let’s make this quick.”
No slides. No pomp. Everything had been concluded to ACC’s satisfaction, Levinson said, that the data scrub on Emily had turned up no deeper issues, that no additional planes would be grounded. The Domain Array rep had already ruled that no punitive actions would be taken against Emily for deleting the SIB team’s predictive.
And that was that.
That was that.
“Shockingly anticlimactic, isn’t it?” Marathon observed to nobody in particular, after Levinson had walked away.
“Better that way,” Rover said with a grunt. “There’s no need to draw this shit out. Not with everything else going on.”
Troll kicked the ground, arms folded. “I’m sorry again about the hole you’ve got in your golf course.”
Cactus shrugged. “Nobody was hurt, Major. That’s what’s important.”
“They find anything with your planes?” Daelia asked.
“Nothing they said we needed to act on,” he replied. “How about Emily?”
“She’s right as rain,” Daelia replied.
She was lying, and she was bad at it. Argo could see the unease in her eyes.
“You think I could go say hi real quick?” he asked Marathon. “It’s the least I can do. Emily was put through all this shit because of me.”
“It wasn’t you,” Marathon said. And yeah, sure, it wasn’t, and Argo knew that, but sometimes things had to be said. “Go ’head. I’ll go fill in with Splatto.”
“Thanks,” he replied, and strode over to Daelia. “I saw you’ve got the virch bottle on the back of your UTV.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I was going to go check in on Emily. She’s been refusing to talk to Raijinn.”
“Well,” Argo said, and made a little sweeping gesture with his hand, “let’s go.”
27
Out on the flight line, wheeled out of her shelter into the warm morning sun, Emily was getting a bath.
In her AR field, Daelia could see the abiota’s glee. Strange, that. Emily didn’t have sensors in her machine body’s skin anywhere; she couldn’t feel anything. And while a wash from time to time was necessary, to prevent any buildup of grime or salt or other things that might affect aerial performance, it wasn’t something that affected deeper systems. The rudiment core. And Daelia had never heard of the unit moving Emily off the flying schedule for being too dirty.
It wasn’t something she should have cared about.
The huge dragon form was stamping its feet, arching its necks and leaning into the huge brushes that the maintenance team was using to scrub down the fuselage. There was a low rumbling sound in Daelia’s ear. Emily’s version of a purr.
“She seems chipper,” Argo said, adjusting his monocle. It was standard-issue, but at least he was wearing one. Daelia wondered if the other guys in the unit had talked to him about it, or if he’d figured out you couldn’t do this job through your phone screen. Maybe active-duty abiota didn’t care, but emergents preferred the attention.
“Yeah,” Daelia said. “She does, doesn’t she?”
But then, why wouldn’t Emily be happy? The investigation was over, the Storm Gryphons were leaving. Most of their equipment had already been packed up and driven away, off to the next show, no doubt. The remaining FQ-47s were still parked at the northern end of the airfield, but without their support package, they seemed small. Diminished.
Not Daelia’s problem.
“Somebody looks happy today,” Daelia said drily, walking up.
Spawn, Emily acknowledged, dipping a projected head, and then throwing it back again. Why not happy? Beat charges.
“Yeah,” Daelia said, and walked around to the front of the plane. “Yeah, I suppose you did.”
Happy for me yes?
“Of course I’m happy for you,” Daelia replied, suddenly uneasy.
Emily made a rumbling noise and turned her heads onto Argo. Little pilot.
“Glad to see you doing better,” Argo said, and nodded. “No more wound, huh?”
Emily’s left pair of eyes narrowed. Her right head dipped.
You have virch bottle?
Daelia gestured back over her shoulder at the UTV. “Yup.”
Get it up.
Daelia jogged back over. Drove the little vehicle up. By the time she got back, the maintenance team had made themselves scarce. Something Argo had said, probably. Didn’t matter. Emily wanted privacy, Emily was going to get privacy.
Five minutes later, they were standing in the virch. Not in the usual aerie, but on the shore of a small pond, pounded by the remnants of an impossibly high waterfall. Most of the water seemed to turn into mist before it reached the pool. The rocks around them were slick, wet with moss and mist. Emily was half-submerged in the water, droplets running down her wings, steaming against the false heat of her form.
“What’s up?” Argo asked, looking around.
“Your wound is gone,” Daelia said. “I stayed up until three this morning working on a patch for that damn thing, and it’s just gone?”
Yes.
“How?” Daelia demanded. “Please tell me you weren’t faking it, like Serket said you were.”
No, no, wound was real.
“Why is it gone? And why was it there in the first place?”
You worry on me.
Daelia thought about that for a second. “Yes, I was worried about you.”
Calculated 73.5% chance they no take valuable war machine out of sky, Emily said, but the emojis accompanying the words indicated unease. Not right now, with alien abiota freezing cities.
Argo crossed his arms. “What do you think about them?”
Unity? Emily snorted, weak red fire curling around both sets of nostrils. The falling water in front of her face boiled into steam. Makes sense, to have abiological life make contact.
“Yeah, that’s what the DOD is saying, too. But—”
“Argo, don’t change the subject,” Daelia groaned. “I want to know what happened to her fucking chest wound.”
Heals.
“First you can get injured, then you can heal?”
Have immune system. Like biota domains.
“What?” Daelia asked.
TGLP word, Emily said.
“What does that mean?” Argo asked.
“It means it’s something that doesn’t translate well and the TGLP is reaching for the closest word that might convey what she means,” Daelia clarified.
Heal yes, maybe right.
“Since when?”
How you think we no get hacked?
And that hit Daelia hard. Not that she was about to admit it, but she had never really thought about it before. It was a truism, a maxim, an empirical fact that had been proven over and over and over again. “You just don’t.”
Immune system.
“Emily,” Argo asked seriously, “what happened to you and the Storm Gryphons?”
I tell you, before. Thing pushes. I keep out. They listen.
“Then the aliens did do this?”
Emily shrugged, an odd, rolling gesture that ran wing tip to wing tip. Something.
“If they didn’t make it in, what happened to your camera?” Argo asked.
Daelia looked at him, the realization hitting her, too. This entire past week or so, she’d assumed that whatever was going on with Emily—the wound, the camera malfunction—had been related. Same root cause.
No camera happen, Emily said, suddenly coy.
“Don’t do that,” Argo said, angry now. “I’ve seen it, I’ve seen the result of it, there’s a good half hour of your camera footage that wasn’t just fucked-up, but faked. So how in the hell did that happen?”
Emily looked back and forth between them, retreating further into the remnants of the waterfall. No.
“Emily, if your camera is messed up, we can’t have you fly missions,” Daelia said, and she pulled out the patch she had made. In the virch, it showed as a blue ball of shifting light, just above her palm. “There was a connection there. I saw it in the projection. Real deep, down near your rudiment core. What was that?”
Wound-maker want me to see its way, Emily said. I refuse. Wound heal now. No problem.
“The camera footage you sent to the cops was definitely forged.”
Yes. For you.
“What do you mean for Daelia?” Argo pressed.
For Daelia.
“Bullshit that was for me. What’s going on with your cameras?”
And then, Emily told them.
“Did you know about this?” Daelia demanded, storming into the simulations lab.
Raijinn’s voice cracked out from the speaker set into the main workspace. “Know about what?”
“Emily. Emily fucking modded herself. Without permission, without notification.”
“How so?”
“She spoofed the video, Raijinn. It was her. It wasn’t the aliens, it wasn’t some bullshit intrusion into her or the base system, it was her. She can manipulate the images from her cameras.” Daelia paced. “That has to be a fucking modification, right?”
She’d left Argo back at the unit. He wanted to go talk to Rover. No matter how much that could screw over Emily, Daelia knew better than to try and talk him out of it. Military. Things ran a certain way in the military. Maintaining human control of the kill chain was of paramount importance. An abiota airframe that could—and more importantly, would—control its own cameras was a potential hazard for mission execution. RPA units relied on those cameras for accurate targeting data. The human pilot had to know what target they were marking, what target they were shooting.
Daelia understood that. She did. But Emily was a friend. She didn’t want to see the abiota bricked. Not now. Not after getting through the SIB.
“Potentially.”
“What do you mean ‘potentially’?” Daelia asked. “We do core scans monthly. She doesn’t extend into the camera system. So she found some other way to connect into it.”
“Did she say that?”
Daelia paused. “Not exactly,” she admitted. Emily’s exact words had been change image yes yes hide kugu you find you figure out all well in future yes. “But what else could it be? It has to be her, right?”
“How do you imagine she accomplished such a thing?”
“A mod, Raijinn, fucking hell, what do you think I’m talking about?” Daelia snapped and rubbed her left elbow. “But why, and how, and how she’d get away with it for this…Raijinn? Are you even listening?”
The speaker issued static for a few moments. “I have no knowledge of this either,” it said. “But we can get to the bottom of it, that I assure you.”
“By what, another diagnostic? It obviously hasn’t been picked up yet. We don’t know how long she’s been hiding this, or where she got it done…” Daelia trailed off, thinking of the implications. “What if she had this when she was over in the Bathtub earlier in the year? Wouldn’t that call into question every single strike the unit took with her? Has ever taken with her? Shit, ACC is going to flip their fucking shit when—”
“You are projecting problems without hard data. Let us take this one issue at a time. The where, for example.”
“Okay. Where?”
“The only place to purchase this kind of modification for our kind is the Hatchery.”
That name was like cold water on Daelia’s anger. “Shit,” she said. “That’s right. But she’s… she’s kind of conspicuous, and not all that mobile…you can’t do this through a software patch. Something would have to be physically rewired, wouldn’t it?”
Raijinn didn’t answer that. “I can make some inquiries for you. To the best of my knowledge, the Hatchery moves around. She easily could have arranged a rendezvous just about anywhere to have a modification done, as there are airfields and bases all over in this region. If you upload her activity logs, I should be able to determine an exact date rather quickly.”
“I can do that,” Daelia grumbled. “Don’t need to waste your processing time on that.”
“I am here to help, Daelia.”
Daelia scrubbed her hands over her face, feeling the fine wires encircling her left fingers tug at their connection points. “Do you think all this shit we’ve seen in the base network is just a result of that? Maybe something that rode in on this mod with her?”
“It is possible.”
“How likely?”
Raijinn’s speakers hummed for a minute, a flat noise that set her teeth on edge. “I would have to run a proper simulation to be sure.”
“Give me a guess.”
“It is a nonzero number.”
Daelia wondered if that was Raijinn attempting a joke. It wasn’t funny. She sighed. “It’s mobile?”
“Yes. Highly.”
“Can you find out where it is for me?” Daelia leaned on the desk in front of the speaker with both hands. The mics could pick up talking anywhere in the room, but somehow, this always felt more personable. “We have to make sure we don’t have other issues lurking below the surface.”
“I can make a few phone calls, yes. I would not mourn the place, should it be shut down. The Hatchery is a scourge on my people, an organization that peddles in false promises and dangerous methods. Snake oil, I suppose a human might call it.”
“It worked, though. That’s not what I’d call snake oil.”
“I’ll make a note in my idiom tracker,” Raijinn said. “Precision in spoken language is essential.”
“I don’t call it what you call it, Raijinn. Let’s just figure it out.”
But no sooner than Daelia had sat down to review the results of Emily’s most recent core scan—which should have showed her extending into the fucking cameras—she got a call from Rover.
A very angry call from Rover.
28
Rover was exactly where they’d told Argo he would be.
Out on the roof of the unoccupied BX.
In workout clothes. Running pants and sneakers, a baseball cap pulled down over his sweaty hair. A NULI silencer clipped onto the interface nodes in his forehead. A set of golf clubs by his side.
With Scurvy. Who also had golf clubs.
The two of them and a quadcopter.
“Argo, good to see you,” Scurvy said.
“Don’t be nice to him, Chief,” Rover replied.
“Oh, come on, innocent until proven guilty,” Scurvy replied.
The quadcopter did a little dip-and-roll maneuver, beeping. Rover tapped his NULI, which was currently capped, unable to transmit or receive, but nodded at it. “Yes, he is in quite a bit of trouble.”
“Bumper said you were out here,” Argo said, unsure what was going on here. “That you wanted to talk to me.”
“You leave your monocle, cell phone, whatever, back at the squadron?” Rover asked, digging a ball out of the hopper beside them.
“I did.” He glanced at the quadcopter. “Aren’t you worried about that?”
“It’s fine,” Rover said. “That’s Emily’s kugu. Say hi.”
“What am I doing here, Rover?”
“Cranky, isn’t he?” Rover commented to Scurvy. “No wonder Daelia likes him.”
“She’s not that cranky.”
Rover scoffed. “I’ve known her most of her life, Chief. Yes, she is.” He lined up and took the swing. There was a distinct pink sound as he whacked the ball off its tee, sending it flying east across the empty field. It was hard to see exactly where the unkempt wild grass gave way to the St. Augustine of the golf course. The quadcopter zoomed after it. “Not bad, eh? See, I’m getting better.”
“Yeah, in five or six years, you might have a chance of making par,” Scurvy replied.
“Sir—”
“I heard you the first time, Argo.” The squadron commander straightened up. “You talked to Bumper, Bumper talked to me, I talked to Daelia. Quite the little conundrum we have on our hands, isn’t it?”
“Sir—”
“Would you stop that shit?” Rover sighed. “This is not active duty. Formality is not going to save your ass here.”
