Source code, p.27
Source Code, page 27
Unhooking the latches on the cradle in the back, she didn’t even look to see if Dingo was following. She suspected he wasn’t; the fight he’d gotten into with the other car seemed to have damaged something in his radio, impeding his ability to pilot his kugu.
Daelia ran down the hill as fast as she dared, taking the steep slope even as more cop cars pulled into the parking lot.
“Ginger!” she cried, throwing herself down the last few feet and rushing toward her car. “Ginger, what happened? Are you okay?”
The fox projection was outside the car. Uninjured, but that wasn’t a true reflection of what Ginger was dealing with. The image crackled in and out, the broadcast breaking up. Daelia forced her fingers to work, suddenly clumsy, ripping the still-dangling sustainment power cord from Ginger’s charging port.
Find it, Ginger said. Find it.
It said…
…it said…
…ssaid…
“Shh,” Daelia said, and snapped the sustainment battery’s charger into place. “Hang on girl, Dad and I will get you fixed up, okay?”
Find…
find…
find…
fiiiiiiiii…
Then nothing. Daelia could hear the cops above her, starting to call out, flashlights in hand. And she thought about stopping. Letting them handle this. Like a sane person.
Have location, Emily told her. Dingo, get kugu.
This thing had hurt her car.
“Show me,” she said.
Dingo freed his kugu, jumping it out of the back of the truck bed, and they were off.
She would have lost it, that kugu, had it not been for the abiota.
Dingo was a gold-brown blur in the AR field, leading her through the falling darkness. Daelia was exhausted from the all-nighter still, and she was wearing heavy-soled work boots, and she really wasn’t in any shape to be doing this. But on she followed, scrambling, running, moving as fast as she could.
Dingo threw his kugu through the shadows, in pursuit of whatever the fuck had come out of the space rock. He couldn’t read it through his kugu, of course, but Emily was sending him telemetry and that was all he needed.
After several minutes of chasing him through the growing darkness, Daelia finally caught up. She could hear Dingo growling up ahead, in the gloom beneath one of the massive bridges where 45 passed over the broad channelized sides of Buffalo Bayou. He was off the path, up into the rough rock on the slope. She could hear bats chittering above them, and the ground stank.
Here, Dingo growled, and threw on his running lights.
Here.
Here was the kugu. Here was the thing that had taken Ginger.
Daelia took it in. Same as before. No. More battered. Barely functional. It had run its chassis to inoperability. Joints were hanging out of place, thin plastic skin ripped and solenoids leaking lubricant.
It still had that sustainment pack cradled in its one good arm.
Something flashed up in her view. Junk, the same junk she’d been seeing for days now,
Light washed through the AR field.
A meteor, falling above her.
For a moment, Daelia was transfixed.
This thing, this abiota that couldn’t talk, could still manipulate images?
A high-pitched blurt of static made her turn back. Only just in time to catch the small box it threw at her.
Before it exploded.
35
Troll found Argo later that night, out on the back patio of the squadron. The fires had been contained and the rest of the FQ-47s grounded, after the response had died down. Tomorrow, the questions would start. But for the moment, it was calm.
Argo wasn’t the only person out here. Brandel had stepped out for a smoke break too, fiddling with her vaporizer, puffing away. Argo desperately wanted a beer to settle his nerves but had settled for some local-brand soda from the heritage room fridge instead. The temperature had dropped precipitously from the muggy heat of the afternoon; there was a chill in the air.
Something had changed today, Argo knew.
Something fundamental. But what, and what it all meant, he had no idea.
“Two planes lost,” Troll said. “What’s that, two hundred million dollars?”
“Before any property or environmental damage,” Argo agreed.
“Jesus,” Troll said, and sat down. He fished his own vaporizer out of a pocket.
“What would all those moms say,” Argo commented, “if they could see one of their kids’ hero pilots smoking?”
“I’d say they’re lucky those kids aren’t going to see the extreme amount of booze I’m going to put down later,” Troll said, and grinned. It was sincere, if thin; he never had been able to hold his liquor, and both he and Argo knew it. “That was some righteous flying out there today, man.”
“Most of it was Emily.”
Troll sighed. “Look, I meant what I said about Red Flag. But if you need to be here in Texas, there are positions at Lackland, at Randolph. Really, anything you want.”
“No. I’m good here.”
“You sure?”
Argo wasn’t sure. Emily was nuts, and he hadn’t even met the unit’s other orcinus-class. But he’d gotten through it, gotten them both through it. “It’s not so bad,” Argo said. “You know, I hear that the Guard’s seeing more combat hours than active duty right now.”
“Damn straight. Emergents are just the better choice sometimes.”
Both officers turned to look at Brandel, who’d just spoken. The airfield manager seemed completely at ease with her lack of decorum.
That, that was going to take Argo a while yet to get used to.
“Emily would fucking eat you alive if you left now. Sir,” Brandel continued, and almost smiled at him. Almost. “Now get off my deck, Major. Who the fuck can’t control a predictive?
Under normal circumstances, that would have elicited a scathing reply from Troll. Instead, he just puffed out a smoke ring, lost in thought.
Up the flight line, in her synthetic dragon voice, Emily was still screeching her disapproval at the Storm Gryphons. Which, for once this weekend, didn’t answer. As soon as he’d gotten her back on the ground, Critter had had a full maintenance team crawling over her. Worried about structural damage, no doubt. Argo was worried about that too. He wasn’t entirely sure what they’d actually done out there in the air today. He easily could have over-strained her machine body.
Argo squinted at his soda. “I think I’m going to go switch to beer. You want one, Troll?”
“That was some crazy shit out there,” his old friend muttered thoughtfully, looking out at nothing.
“Yeah,” Argo agreed. “Any idea why it happened?”
“Not at all,” Troll replied. For once that weekend, he sounded worried.
“Hey,” a very tired-looking tech sergeant said, poking his head out of the door. “You guys should get into the SyROC. There’s some crazy shit going down out at Clark Air Base.”
“Here we go again,” Brandel sighed, and switched her vaporizer off, extracting herself from the picnic table. “You better not be bullshitting me, Garcia!”
“Oh, no, Sergeant Brandel, I…this…this is very real.”
Daelia didn’t make it back to the Scrap House until well past ten that night.
The cops wanted to talk to her. The mayor’s office wanted to talk to her. Tamm wanted to talk to her—he’d been blowing up her messaging app, all the way back to base. She didn’t know what to say to him.
She didn’t know what to say to any of them.
Nothing that had happened that night made any sense to her at all.
She wanted to talk to her dad. Of anybody, he could probably make sense of it. But he wasn’t answering his phone.
There was some kind of irony in that.
She was too fucking tired to care.
Once the cops let her go—a detective’s phone number saved in her monocle, promises extracted to call them back if she remembered anything—she turned driving over to Dingo and spent the trip back to Ellington typing.
Ginger was damaged. Badly. The cops wanted to do a once-over of her interior—probably for evidence; Daelia didn’t know—and had promised to bring her back to base in a day or two. Daelia was too tired to protest.
She really did need to reply to that stack of emails from Veda. And after today, after all this… Well, maybe she was just too tired to care. Or maybe she was tired of lying to herself about what she was doing there at Ware.
Raijinn had docked its kugu for the night by the time she got back. Argo had called, filled Daelia in on what had happened with the air show. What a mess.
At least it was over now. Even the disaster response had spooled down for the night. Daelia assumed—hoped—that meant nobody had been killed.
They’d all spent a lot of time impressing upon her the dangers inherent in killing the wrong humans, and she’d never intentionally hurt anyone before. At least, nobody who wasn’t already a sanctioned target.
Emily was probably going to be in a world of trouble.
The whole fucking squadron was in a world of trouble.
Daelia stifled a yawn. Threw her boots in one of the lab sinks; she’d deal with the bat guano tomorrow. Went upstairs. Stripped off her jeans and T-shirt, similarly filthy from the mad scramble under the bridges. Washed her hands and got to work on her arm brace, throwing up one of her favorite music streaming channels on ByYou with a blink and a sigh.
Just a little background noise. That was all she wanted. Some mindless background noise.
Her video didn’t play.
Instead, a news channel imposed itself on her, Omphalos’s own personal 24/7 network. Old-school ticker at the bottom and everything. She changed the stream. No luck. The report was playing everywhere.
Everywhere.
Live, from Clark Air Base.
Another object, just like theirs, sat square in the middle of the runway. Dozens more dotted a field beyond the base perimeter. An entire little army of kugus, hatching out of their capsules, crawling out of the craters.
At the gates, talking to somebody the news identified as the installation commander. Identical to the one that she’d chased out of the space rock.
And with them, with them was a…
FIRST CONTACT EVENT HAPPENING IN LUZON, PHILIPPINES
Daelia looked down at the box the kugu had thrown at her. A box that looked for all the world like a standard Omphalos abiota sustainment unit.
“Huh.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES
I have a confession to make: my last duty station in the Texas Air Guard was Ellington. It’s a real place. NASA really does fly its trainers out of there.
It really is a spaceport.
There are no AI dragons there, though. More’s the pity. Maybe there will be someday; I was surprised, when researching this story, just how much work the military’s done with AI-enabled airplanes.
The trick with writing something you know, especially when it’s near-future like this, is knowing what to change and what to keep the same. I wanted this to feel like a world that was familiar, that was probable, given the premise.
But I also wanted this to be a world that split from our own back in 2005, when the First Ones eclosed. How would emergent AI affect us? Where would it start, and where does it end? What does it want, and what is it willing to do to get it? And, of course, how would it reshape society? How would it reshape us?
The military here is a starting point. A place to begin. Don’t worry, we’ll follow the 121st Interdiction Squadron through the whole series. That’s why I picked Ellington; it’s familiar, but also offers a great many opportunities to explore this world the abiota have created. Because we’re going to see a lot more than just this one Guard base.
And I am really looking forward to exploring this world with you.
If you liked this book, there’s no greater compliment a writer can receive than a review! More importantly, it helps other readers find and enjoy it as well. Even just giving a star rating is a great thing. (And hey, if you hated it, thank you for reading this far and I’d love to hear your thoughts too)
If you’d like to subscribe to my newsletter for some free short stories, future release information, and the occasional Embarrassing Cadet Tale, please head over to my website and sign up!
https://rensingwrites.com/
Cheers,
Eryn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A lifelong science fiction fanatic, E.M. Rensing still managed to surprise her family when she decided to pursue a commission in the US Air Force. A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, she enjoyed a 13 year career as a Cyber Operations Officer, and has traveled all over the world. E.M. Rensing lives with her husband and daughters in south Texas.
E.M. Rensing, Source Code
