Numina code, p.22
Numina Code, page 22
She put a hand out, stopping Argo from moving in front of her. “Stay,” she said.
“I can—” he began.
And then he saw a length of copper pipe the size of his arm swing for him.
Aiden yanked a stunned Argo back down into the access tunnel only just in time.
Emily rocketed up into the room, throwing her kugu bodily at one of their assailants. Systematically, she tore through the three guards that had been placed there.
“Go and get the others,” Argo told Aiden.
“Come on, you don’t need to—”
“You move faster than I do up here,” Argo said, cutting off the argument before it could start. Aiden gave him a look, like he didn’t really believe what he was hearing, but swung himself around anyway, diving back down through the access corridor.
“Hard, yes, having little clone-kin?” Emily said, flipping one of the kugus over. Casually, she broke open a panel in the back of its neck with the hammer she was carrying and reached in. With one quick jerk, she yanked out a handful of cables.
“He’s my brother, Emily. We’re not clones of each other.”
“Yes, TGLP has word.” Her head cocked to the side at an unnatural angle. Her fingers shifted through the assorted wires she’d just ripped loose.
“Then you should use it.”
“Why?” she said, and with another few blows of the hammer, managed to free the entire head assembly from the kugu. She turned it over in her borrowed hands. “Strange.”
“What?”
“Fit within preloaded mechanic parameters,” she said. “For human-make.”
“You’re saying this looks like something manufactured on Earth?”
“Yes yes. Like others.”
Daelia had said something to him about that already. Argo had almost forgotten about it. The Envoy had had an answer for it, after all, and other things had taken up his time. But the Envoy had lied to them about everything else. That much was demonstrably true at this point.
“Anything else?”
“Yes.” The kugu cocked its head again, like Emily was repositioning the cameras for a better view of something. “Combat style wrong.”
“They looked pretty aggressive to me.”
“Yes aggressive. No effective. No combat program,” Emily said.
But Argo’s chance to ask her what she meant was interrupted as the rest of their party caught up, joining them in the observation tower.
“Ahh,” Tomas said. “Look at that. There is a ship.”
Aiden came up alongside, grabbing onto a handle. “Shit,” he said. “That really is straight out of Orpheus Watch, now isn’t it?”
29
Being in space was, in Daelia’s opinion, both underwhelming and totally incomprehensible at the same time.
There was nothing particularly impressive about Numina. Not aesthetically speaking, anyway. The station was rough, small, tight. Even this observation bubble, so much smaller than the ones at Aethera, was mundane. It could have been set up anywhere on Earth, a climbing structure for kids.
But instead of blue sky, there was the endless black expanse of space, unfiltered by Earth’s atmosphere. Instead of playground sand, there was a deep gray carpet of dust, draped across craggy, broken rock.
Weirdest place she’d ever been.
But out in that desolation, the blunt nose of a ship rose above a low metallic wall that Tomas assured them was the outer lip of the asteroid’s secondary spaceport.
Just a few caverns removed from whatever the hell the kugus were protecting.
In an old Booville.
The port. Of course they’d care about the port. But the question was why? What were they doing that necessitated a freighter of that size?
Daelia thought she might know. But she wanted to see it.
She needed to see it.
“And you’re sure that’s not one of ours?” Argo was asking. “A, uhh, a human ship?”
“Not a chance. I know every hull configuration running out here. That’s completely different than anything we fly.”
Daelia put a hand on the acrylic window’s surface, looking. She noticed a slight shimmer under her fingertips and turned to Rachel. The older woman was obviously still struggling but trying hard to keep herself pulled together. Everybody was being gentle with her, Daelia could tell, and tried to do the same.
“Does this have waterfall film in it?” she asked.
Rachel blinked and looked at her. “Yes, of course. We use this space for familiarization training sometimes. Makes it easier to indicate features and display slides.”
Which meant the image they were seeing could have been manipulated.
“Emily,” Daelia said, interrupting the conversation between Tomas and Argo. “Emily, what do you see out there?”
“What mean?”
“What does that ship look like to you?”
The kugu’s head swung around, and then Emily opened a hand. A simple white ball of flame and light. A data upload.
Daelia reached over with her left hand to take it. A look of panic crossed Rachel’s face. “No!” she said. “You can’t transmit while we’re—”
“They already know we’re here,” Daelia replied with a shrug, and grabbed the upload.
The information didn’t transmit directly through her brace or anything like that. Instead, her monocle read the motion as consent to accept the file transfer, opening it automatically in her visual field.
“What do you see?” Argo asked.
“I’m not sure.” Daelia stared at it for a moment. “But it doesn’t match,” she finally said, and drifted herself over to the window. “Why doesn’t it match?”
“They can spoof anything with this film stuff, right?” Argo said.
“What are you talking about?” Rachel demanded.
“Where are the controls for this room?” Daelia asked, looking around. The central column, she figured. Had to be. She kicked off the wall.
“What are you doing?” Rachel asked, a little more frantic now.
Ignoring the hysteria in the other woman’s voice, Daelia yanked the access panel open. Standard rack configuration inside. God bless humans, she thought. There was a nice 1U integrated pullout console in there, and she fired it up.
A few commands later and the room’s AR came on. Data flooded out. Red light picked out stars, planets, features on the surface. The dragon form was wrapped back around Emily’s kugu. Only one head right now, but it was enough to communicate the abiota’s unease.
“Emily,” Daelia said. “Gonna need you to show everybody what you’re looking at.”
Emily’s wings twitched a little, folded up against her body as they were, but she still ambled forward. Puffed out a bit of fire.
When the smoke cleared, the alien ship was gone. And in its place…
“Holy shit,” Tomas said, stepping forward. “That’s a Notus-class freighter.”
“That’s one of Tamm’s fleet, isn’t it?” Argo asked.
“Astraeus builds them, sure, but only to sell. A lot of different organizations up here fly them. Last I checked, there were over two dozen of them in the Archipelago alone, and probably equal that running the new routes out to the Belt,” Tomas said. “They dock here all the time.”
“But do they dock there?” Argo asked.
“Usually not, no.”
“Doesn’t anybody want to know what just happened?” Rachel asked.
“This what see here,” Emily said, and rapped on the side of the kugu’s head with one hand. The motion didn’t transfer in AR well, the dragon form waving a wing around. “Onboard camera see this.”
“But the AR wasn’t on before,” Aiden said.
Daelia looked up at one of the kugus, bumping gently against the window. She thought about the fog and the meteor, the transmissions they couldn’t detect, the imagery they couldn’t decode. “Emily, what do you see in the network here? Is there”—and she hesitated—“a similar infection to what we were seeing back at the unit?”
“Blech, maybe. No know. Not in network,” Emily said.
“So we see something unknown, our emergent sees something familiar,” Argo said. “We can’t confirm where we are right now either. Are there any other windows that don’t have this stuff in them?”
Tomas shook his head. “Windows are expensive, and unnecessary. We’d have to go topside, and even then, most of our helmets have integrated AR HUDs.”
“Great,” Argo muttered. “So we have to just take this on faith, what’s out there.”
Rachel looked at Emily then, like something was just occurring to her. “I assume you’re logged in up here from somewhere else, right?”
“SATCOM from Texas, to Aethera laser communication array, to Magellan’s Bird dish, yes yes. Not destroyed in strike.”
“If she has a working connection, why can’t we just call Aethera?” Rachel asked. “Get more help out here?”
“We thought we were talking to them,” Argo said. “But then Magellan’s Bird got destroyed. No, we need to handle this ourselves.”
“So you want to hijack a spaceship?” Rachel said. “What kind of plan is that?”
“The only workable one,” Tomas said, and nodded. “Okay, Captain, what do we do?”
They talked.
It was a short conversation.
There was really only one thing they could do.
They had to get to that ship. They had to go back through the tunnel system to do it. And they were going to have to breach the old Booville. If that was what the kugus really were defending—and it made sense, it really did—they were in for a fight. Nobody could say with certainty how many more kugus there might be.
Emily, with her USSF kugu and the combat plug-in, didn’t seem to think there would be much of a problem for her. Daelia wasn’t sure. The fact she was using a borrowed body might make her more reckless, and there wasn’t much Daelia could do to return that left arm to full functionality. But the abiota repeated her assertion that the kugus here weren’t operating with proper military combat programs, and that would count for a hell of a lot.
“We’re going to have to turn the comms back on, aren’t we?” Rachel asked. “For Emily to come with us?”
They looked to Emily, who nodded.
“The second we turn that back on, the abiota are going to be all over it,” Tomas said. “All over us.”
“At least we can try to make contact with anybody else out there,” Rachel said, nodding.
Aiden nodded, obviously cheered by this idea. “We might have more survivors.”
Argo nodded. “It’s a risk we’re going to have to take. I take it your people probably have locators of some kind?”
“We stripped all of that out as soon as it became clear we were up against abiota. Clothing, gear, everything we have has been…sanitized, I think is the word.”
“Sanitized works,” Argo confirmed. “Do the tunnels have sensor nets?”
“Of course. And with all our abiota dead, it’s entirely likely these things can get in and look at everything we’re doing. I wouldn’t put the best human hacker on the planet up against even a bot-level predictive when it comes to—”
“Data ghosts,” Daelia said from the other side of the observation bubble, where she was busy trying to pull one of the dead kugus down to the ground and keep it there. It floated off again.
“What do you mean?” Tomas asked.
“Abiota can be tricked by data,” she said. “They don’t see the cyber world and our world as inherently different. Cyber and meatspace aren’t in opposition to each other, in their worldview. Isn’t that right, Emily?”
“Ach,” Emily said.
Argo frowned at her. “What are you getting at?”
“Tomas, we have one of your IT people, right?”
“Yes, Matt,” Tomas said.
“We load an admin account onto something portable. Have him simulate a hell of a lot of contacts out in the tunnels.”
“No video, eh?”
Daelia glared at the kugu. “Then we keep the cameras disabled.”
“Won’t they turn those on, first thing?”
“We care about meat sight,” Daelia said. “Abiota don’t.”
“These are aliens, Daelia,” Argo said. “We can’t assume anything.”
Are they? Daelia wanted to ask, but didn’t. She got the feeling from the room that questions like that might not go over so well. Keep your mouth shut, she told herself.
She looked back out the window, at the ship. Emily saw one thing, the humans something else. The image really was impeccable. Clear, well formed, photographic.
What had Pranav said, before he died? That there were only a few individuals on the planet—abiota or human—who could pull off something like this?
And then she thought of something else.
“The problem with trying to hijack that ship is that it can just leave, right?” Daelia asked.
“Not necessarily,” Tomas said. “Not necessarily.”
“What do you mean?” Argo asked.
“The docking bay here is designed for personnel. It has cargo capacity, of course, but we mostly use that for station supplies now. The bay in the Booville is the one that was used for the truly massive hauls. Big ships, long load times. Can’t leave steering thrusters on while you’re doing that.” Roman shook his head. “They’ll be using the docking clamps. If we can get control of the clamps, we can keep them here as long as we like.”
“But that was all managed by station control,” Rachel protested.
“It was,” Tomas told her, “but there’s a manual override.”
Rachel stared at him. “Are you talking about the EVA shack? Tomas, we haven’t used that place for its intended purpose in years. You have no idea if anything out there is even functional, or if the kugus know about it, or—”
Tomas smiled, a strange expression on his face after all his dourness. “It’s space, Rachel. There’s no wind up here to blow dust into the gears.”
“Doesn’t make any sense,” Aiden said suddenly, still looking out the window.
“The clamps are—” Argo began, but his brother waved it off.
“No, I mean, the whole thing doesn’t make any sense,” Aiden continued. “This is some sort of hyper-intelligent, uber-advanced abiota that’s been traveling the galaxy for what, millennia, and it’s stuck using our fucking air locks? Using our ships?” He looked around the room. “Why can’t they just generate force fields or float around free in the void or beam things up into their ship? Daelia, you said their fleet’s supposed to be on the other side of the planet? That would be within transporter range, right?”
Daelia rubbed her elbow. “This isn’t a science fiction movie.”
“I’d argue it’s exactly a science fiction movie,” Aiden said. “These fuckers should be at that advanced-tech-is-magic level. So why aren’t they?”
“We can worry about that later,” Argo told his little brother, then looked at Tomas. “Can we get control of those clamps?”
“Yes. From the EVA shack,” Tomas said, nodding as he spoke. “I’ll have to go.”
“Tomas, you can’t,” Rachel protested.
“I’m the only person in the group who can navigate the surface without Lucy riding shotgun,” Tomas said. “And I’m the only person with a functioning space suit that isn’t some greenhorn. No offense, Argo.”
“None taken.”
Aiden wasn’t wrong, Daelia thought. This entire thing was a lie. None of it made sense. But whose lie, and why?
“How much time before we’re ready to leave?” Daelia asked, mulling over the question in her head.
“A few minutes to get suited up,” Tomas said.
“The sooner the better,” Argo said. “But—”
“I just need a few minutes,” she said, and kicked up toward the kugu. “Time to take one of these things apart.
30
Although Tomas never would have admitted it, he rather enjoyed walks outside.
It hadn’t always been like that for him. He’d only taken the job with Gravipause because it paid better than the shipping company. Space had seemed less dangerous than the ocean.
What a laugh that turned out to be.
There had been a lot of mistakes in the beginning. A mortality rate that had very nearly gotten the entire enterprise shut down. But the abiota appetite for rare earth minerals was voracious, and so out they’d gone.
Tomas had been on the very first mission, that joint venture that had plucked Numina from the darkness between the planets and brought it back here for processing. Even that had been a thing fraught with risk; multiple Earth governments had protested the notion of dropping an asteroid this large into low Earth orbit. If they’d messed up the process—wrong angle of entry, wrong deceleration, wrong position—it would have been dire for the planet.
The calculations were flawless though, the execution unimpeachable. Serket herself had overseen the process, or so Tomas had been told, and the abiota team on the asteroid tug had been as numerous as the human crew. They’d brought the rock in safely.
People had died in those early days, of course. People still died out here, even in training. Their names were on the wall in the station chapel. Tomas had known all of them, mourned all of them, but they all knew the risks.
Actually mining the rock had proven more difficult than previously imagined, but lessons were learned. Techniques developed. Success found.
Part of the reason Tomas had stayed on with Gravipause so long was the money. Couldn’t argue with the money. His ex-wife got her checks on time, and his kids never wanted for anything. He got to see them more than when he’d been working at sea, too. Four times a year, Tomas was back planetside, twenty days off that he got to spend with his family.
Hell, if he’d had a gig that good from the start, he might have never gotten slapped with that divorce in the first place.
But beyond that, he liked space. He did. He liked the way the stars looked out here. He liked the silence. He liked the weightlessness of it.
Even though that was something that had to be sacrificed to go for a walk on the surface.
