“Spectrum Management isn’t picking up anything unusual,” Keyes said with a shrug.

  “The damn AWACS out in the Repose was blinking its lights,” Rover said. “That has to mean something.”

  “Agreed,” Norris said. “Daelia, what wakes up a bricked emergent?”

  “Nothing,” she said quietly, thinking. “Nothing.”

  Was it an attack? No, she didn’t think so. She’d seen the aftermath of malicious hacks before, by both human and abiota perpetrators. They were messy. They left footprints of some kind—small, in the case of abiota, but always something. And besides, it hadn’t hurt anything or anybody.

  So then what?

  Daelia couldn’t let go of the idea that it was abiota. It had to be abiota.

  Had to be an emergent. Even predictive hacks left footprints.

  An emergent inside the space rock. One that was able to get around all their defenses. Without a trace. But why?

  She couldn’t shake the idea that it was trying to talk to them. It was trying to communicate. Maybe that was all any of this was. Just an attempt to communicate.

  “It’s the space rock,” she said. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “Except that NASA took it last night.”

  “Did they?” Daelia asked. “What if they just took it down the runway or something? They’ve got hangars here. Maybe it’s still on the airfield.”

  “Can we find out?” Rover asked.

  Daelia bit her lip. “Yeah. I can go talk to Tamm.”

  28

  “You need to consider this.”

  Daelia ignored her advisor, staring out over the main body of campus instead. Up this high, the view was exceptional. A sea of mellow red roofs, interrupted only by the muted greens of treetops.

  “Daelia, are you listening?”

  She tore herself away from the view. That idyllic world Daelia had imagined Ware to be. A peaceful pursuit of knowledge, under the spreading branches of the old oaks and mesquites, a singular kind of place.

  “Yeah, I’m listening.”

  Veda frowned at her, one hand flexing where it rested on the top of her desk. There was none of that old-world Spanish ease here; like everything else in the college, the office was all hard metal and cold angles. Veda had fading henna tattoos across the back of her palm and knuckles, the lingering reminder of a niece’s wedding from a few weeks back.

  “You know that SAAL is funding your research, correct?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “They are funding most of this department.”

  “I know.”

  “It was only with industry support, with SAAL support, that we were able to build this place,” Veda said, fingers tapping now.

  “I thought it was Omphalos that donated the money for the building…”

  “And it was SAAL support, a commitment to a certain amount of grant money, that made the proposition worthwhile,” Veda said.

  Daelia slumped in her own chair. “So what, they own us? We have to just do whatever they say?”

  “Alignment with industry ensures that our students’ research isn’t wasted, and that grant money is properly distributed.”

  “SAAL approved my proposal!” Daelia said, anger starting to overcome her discomfort. “They liked my presentation, they said I had some novel ideas that they were eager to see progress and⁠—”

  Veda held up a hand, silencing her. “The search for source code is very important.”

  “So why do you want me to change direction now?”

  “Don’t think of it as a change of direction. Think of it as pushing further.” Veda rose, pacing now. “You know I’m always direct with you, Daelia”—this was said with a smile—“and you aren’t the easiest person to work with. But there’s an originality to your work, your approach, your entire philosophy that I think many in this department, in this industry, would do well to emulate.”

  “And?”

  “Not everybody thought we should accept your application. I fought for you because I believed in what you could bring to this department. And I feel vindicated on that front, I really do.”

  “Veda, this is nice and all, but⁠—”

  “Let me finish.” There was steel in her advisor’s voice now. “You are the first child of an abiota and a human. That has given you a perspective that is almost unparalleled when it comes to these matters. But it also leaves blind spots⁠—”

  “What blind spot?” Daelia demanded, entirely unwelcome emotions squirming through her now. She hated this, she hated when people brought up her parents like this.

  “Being able to correlate energy fluctuations to actual thought processes would be a massive leap forward in our understand of emergent abiota,” Veda said. “Do you know how much good we could do, for them, if we were able to not only identify source code, but understand it?”

  “My method has nothing to do with that.”

  “I think it can.”

  Shaking her head in disbelief, in irritation, Daelia pressed on. “The 2007 treaty with the abiota kingdom clearly stipulates that any research done into their internal thought processes must have Domain Array approval, with a sapient-class in attendance on the entire thing.”

  “You know how many projects like that they’ve approved?”

  “Yeah. Zero. So why⁠—”

  “All those were proposed by humans.”

  That stopped Daelia cold. “What do you mean?”

  “All of them were human-led initiatives,” Veda repeated.

  “I’m human.”

  “Not fully, of course not. Daelia, you’re half-abiota, aren’t you?” Veda smiled. “Even without your mother to consider, you were one of the first people on the planet with a neural implant.”

  “What, my arm?” Daelia demanded.

  “Of course. It was your father’s development effort, in conjunction with Tamm Medical Industries, that led to our first brain lace a few years later.”

  Daelia was barely listening, mind spinning. A horrible realization hit her. All her other applications, the rejection from MIT, the interview out here… “The college accepted me because you think I’m half-abiota.”

  “You are half-abiota,” Veda said patiently. “Surely you understand that your GRE scores were below what we normally like to see and your grades at A&M weren’t exceptional. But I saw beyond that. Daelia, you have so much to teach us. Think of all the good you can do for your people. Think of everything you can teach humans about⁠—”

  Daelia didn’t wait for her to finish. Something had snapped inside her, tiny and precious, digging at her guts.

  She got up and walked out.

  She managed to get out of the building before the tears hit.

  Now, Daelia marched straight out to Tamm’s pavilion.

  Sure, she was still burning with embarrassment over that last conversation with Veda. Yes, she was still angry about the consortium’s underhanded attempt to use her to break one of the oldest human agreements with the Domain Array.

  As the senior member of the board, she blamed Tamm for all of it.

  But things were getting weird, and she could go back to nursing her wounds later.

  Nobody at the 121st, she guessed, would have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through to him. She just hoped he would listen to her.

  His pavilion was dead center at the performance area, the best seats in the house. The vintage aeronautical theme continued here. Unlike the party on Friday, though, this one wasn’t based on the 1940s.

  No, instead of pin curls and bright red lipstick, the waitresses now had go-go boots and skirts so short Daelia was pretty sure somebody’s butt was going to fall out. The whole place was decorated in olives and mustards and fuchsias. A Brady Bunch nightmare.

  The seating area up front was done up like a lounge, comfortable seats and carpets—carpets, facing right out on the goddamn runway. Tamm was up there now, laughing with a couple of women Daelia didn’t know and didn’t care about.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” the security guard at the entrance asked.

  She glared at the guy. “I’m with Bellona Robotics, and I need to talk to Mister Tamm about a very pressing matter. Let me in.”

  “Name?”

  “I’m not on the guest list.”

  “Then you’re not getting in.”

  “I said⁠—”

  “Daelia!” Frank Tamm said, coming over, a huge smile plastered on his face. “Back off, Andre. She’s welcome.” He waved her in. “Come, come. Let’s talk.”

  She stepped in the shade. There was some kind of portable air-conditioning set up in here; her sweat dried instantly on her skin.

  “I need to talk to you about⁠—”

  “Of course, of course. Anything! Come on,” he said, gesturing over to the lounge area. “Sit down, stay awhile. Good to see you! You’ve been avoiding my offer of lunch for what, months now?”

  She glanced at the women. They were both dressed to the nines. Not locals, she thought. Texans would have been more relaxed. Would’ve worn less makeup too. The humidity stripped it off your face something fierce.

  One of them pushed up her gigantic sunglasses to look at Daelia, curious. She had bionic eyes, and not the discreet kind. These were that butterfly style, pink irises with delicate, decorative metal settings that filled the hollows of her eye sockets and extended out to damn near her temples.

  “Oh, how rude of me,” he said, following her gaze. “I want you to meet a couple of my dear friends from Omphalos. Let me go introduce you to⁠—”

  “Frank, I really need to talk to you,” Daelia interrupted, before any pleasantries could commence. “Right now. Alone. About last night?”

  His smile fell. “Okay, okay. Let’s get a drink.”

  He wandered back toward the back of the pavilion, dismissing the bartender. Daelia followed, feeling more awkward by the second. Those women, and the other dozen or so people there, were watching her. At least, that was how it felt. The attention was like an itch she couldn’t scratch.

  Tamm, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to it. Maybe that was because this was his tent, and it didn’t matter to him what anybody inside of it was thinking. Maybe he was focused on something else.

  One thing Daelia did notice, in contrast to almost everyone around them, was that he didn’t have a NULI. Daelia found that interesting. Hadn’t he helped engineer the things? Why wouldn’t he have had one?

  “So what can I do for you?” he asked, leaning on the bar top. The thing was quartz, real quartz. How much money had he spent on this little shindig?

  “I need access to the space rock. I need to see if I can get it talking.”

  “What do you mean?” This seemed to get his attention for the first time.

  His full attention.

  It was a little disconcerting.

  “We’ve had junk in the AR feeds all weekend, since the thing showed up. You can see it if you switch to the standard base overlay.” She did not mention the thing about the meteors she’d seen prior to the crash. No point in muddling the issue. “But when I got my detector turned on, it stopped.”

  “Your detector?”

  “I had one that I’ve been working on, off and on. Thought it might be useful for talking to whatever is fucking up the AR.”

  “Hmm,” Tamm said. “Where is it now?”

  “The detector?” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Serket fucking broke it last night.”

  Tamm nodded, like he’d been waiting for this and just wanted her to confirm it for him. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “To go see the rock, of course.”

  29

  “Your hangar?” Daelia asked. “Serket just moved it down here, to your hangar?”

  “NASA’s main facility here is currently taken up by that Apeliotes we’re modifying for them, to dock at Kheru. I don’t know why they insist on different air lock configurations than the international civilian standard, but that’s the government for you, I suppose.”

  A space had been cleared in the middle of the hangar for the flatbed truck; the rock was still on it.

  “Yeah, but this is kind of becoming a hazard to flight, isn’t it?” Daelia asked. “Did you see how the Storm Gryphons were behaving yesterday? Why is it still here?”

  “It’s too difficult to get anything off the airfield until the show’s over. Have you seen what the ramp looks like out there?” He waved a hand.

  “Yeah, but this seems kind of dangerous, don’t you think?”

  “It’s not broadcasting, and it hasn’t hacked the AR,” Tamm said. She gave him a look, and he shrugged. “I suspect Serket ran the exact same type of analysis that the military did. More thorough, I’m sure. We have better resources here. No offense.”

  “Something is going on,” she protested.

  “Well, none of my equipment seems to be picking anything up,” he said.

  “My detector could prove it.”

  “Daelia, I hate to break this to you, but Serket and I have run several extrapolation simulations from your project notes. Curiosity, I guess you could call it. Being able to detect abiota purely through analog means would be quite the coup,” he said. “It would change our understanding of them as a species.”

  “Mister Tamm⁠—”

  “Drop the Mister,” he said, almost cheerful, then he sobered again. “But Daelia, it doesn’t work.”

  She took a chance. “Somebody fucked with my notes,” she said, and brandished the external hard drive she’d gotten the night before. “Changed my project. Whatever you ran, it wasn’t mine. I got the originals back from the Domain Array.”

  “Hmm.” He steepled his fingers, looking rather over the top. “Now that’s interesting.”

  “The AR interference stopped when I had the detector on. At the very least, maybe we can prevent some kind of, I don’t know, crazy shit happening out there.” It was a good line. A true line. But that wasn’t why Daelia was saying it.

  If she could prove this, here, now, to Tamm⁠—

  “Let’s pull up your design,” he said.

  “I’ll need a 3D AR space.”

  “Ahh, yes, Veda said you’re visual. Not a problem.”

  An AR bottle server was produced. The data was copied. And soon enough, the two of them were standing inside a white simulation room, looking at a model of her device.

  Tamm had a separate window pulled up, the reference design blueprints, and was circling the thing with great interest. “Yes, yes, this is interesting. I see what you were talking about.”

  Daelia could see now where she’d been going wrong. Shit. She’d been so close, but it was never going to work the way she’d had it. But the fact that the mist had stopped…that had to mean something.

  “What would we need to recreate this? Fix what my idiot employees broke?”

  Daelia snapped out of her contemplation. With her monocle, she blink-clicked sections red for reference as she talked. “Access to a few components, some machining, but my intervalometer is fucked. And that’s the critical component.”

  “Can we use digital components? It would make this a lot easier.”

  “No, no, that fucks up the whole thing.”

  Tamm was quiet for a moment, then dropped out of the AR field, walking outside of the room’s virtual walls. Daelia frowned and almost turned it off, but then he was back.

  With something large and heavy in his hands.

  “This,” he said, hefting the object, “has an intervalometer. It’s older, but this is as pristine as they come and…”

  “That’s your Norden bomb sight,” Daelia said, confused.

  “Yes. Yes, it is,” he said, and set it down on the back tailgate of the truck. “So. Let’s make this happen.”

  Working with Tamm was…nice.

  Daelia had heard the stories. Who hadn’t? The time he’d flown his cat cross-country in his private jet to take it to a chiropractor. How he’d celebrated the first Eurus flight with a piñata of an old NASA space shuttle. The way he only ever wore flip-flops, even in the lab. Things like that. Eccentric billionaire crap.

  She didn’t really see that in the guy, though.

  So yeah, he was in flip-flops. But there was no carelessness involved; if anything, he was scrupulous. By the time Daelia got back from the Scrap House with everything she had, he and a couple of uniformed techs had gotten a workspace set up. He also had a dedicated projection bottle set up, for hosting the AR diagram set from her notes. That way, they could both work on the same file at the same time.

  For twenty minutes, it was impressive.

  He waved her in. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

  For the next three hours, Daelia barely looked up from the table.

  Everything was straightforward now. There had been a few things that had given her trouble on the previous model; some of them were due to the files being corrupted, but a few things were her own honest mistakes. Tamm was able to help with this, pointing out errors or ways of simplifying more complicated elements.

  People kept drifting in. Most of them useful. Where Tamm had gotten them all or why they were here today, Daelia didn’t know at first. The hangar, as far as she was aware, was more like his clubhouse, his showroom, than an actual workspace.

  “Avionics technicians for the Eurus,” he explained when she finally asked about it. “Damn things are touchy as hell. Require constant maintenance. Frankly, I operate Astraeus Aerospace at a loss right now, but it’s a loss I’m willing to take.”

  “Why?”

  He nodded at the ceiling. “We need to be out there. And not just for emotional reasons. You think there’s any way we can keep up with the demand for copper or cobalt or, shit, lithium without asteroid mining?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it,” she said. “Space isn’t really my thing.”

  “You should go up there sometime,” Tamm replied. “Makes you look at Earth in a whole new way.”

  “You footing the bill?” she asked, before she could stop herself.

 

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