Numina code, p.7
Numina Code, page 7
8
Back when Rover had been a captain, Austin was where the Texas Military Department had been headquartered. Going TDY up there had always been fun.
Do a little work. Go out, enjoy the nightlife. Get paid.
That had all been lost to the war.
The Chinese had focused myopically on taking out state capitols. The first day or so of missile attacks had largely fallen on such targets. The accuracy of their hypersonics had been vastly overstated. However, China had prioritized quantity over quality, and Austin had been pummeled.
The city hadn’t been completely leveled. But what was left wasn’t fit for the task of governance any longer.
In the wake of all that, what was left of the state leadership structure had moved up to Dallas. It was the city that had suffered the least and had been best equipped to get the organs of government back up and running.
The new statehouse had been plunked down near the downtown corridor. It had devoured several old city blocks, and a huge chunk of land out of one of the parks, but it stood proudly now, as if it had always been there.
That wasn’t their destination.
Wanting to keep some kind of separation between the military and civilian side of things, the state government sited the new TMD headquarters further west. Land parcels had been bought up in the old warehouse district north of the main airport. Promises had been made about new facilities, new roads, a complete overhaul of the old neighborhood.
None of it had coalesced. Plagued by delays, setbacks, graft, and all the usual problems that came with government construction, not a single building had been completed yet.
The Texas Military Department was operating out of the same converted carpet warehouse it had been in since February of 2026.
At least they had a helipad in the parking lot.
“Rover,” Cactus said as the Black Hawk settled down on the asphalt, its frame shaking a little as the rotors slowed, lost lift. “Don’t fuck us.”
“Oh, I’m shutting up,” Rover replied, reaching for his service coat.
“How fucked do you think we are?” Sausage asked with another yawn. He’d slept the last half hour of the flight, and his blues shirt was wrinkled something fierce.
“Hopefully they won’t order us to brick Emily and throw her out in the Repose,” Cactus said.
Sausage rubbed his neck as the door rolled open. “Showtime.”
Garcia yawned into his sleeve as he rounded the last turn onto Ellington proper. His usual route to the base took him up along the south side of the spaceport, along the lower public road that led to the new terminal. It was an easy stop, convenient, to just pull in there and head into the coffee shop and maybe get—
You can get coffee up at the unit, he told himself, clenching the wheel a little as he passed the turn for the terminal feeder road. You don’t need to go bother her.
In truth, he wasn’t sure if Lara would be at work today or not. With her class schedule, sometimes she worked the weekends and sometimes she didn’t. He was a little embarrassed he couldn’t remember.
He’d tried calling her yesterday. Went by her apartment. Even begged off work early to wait outside her last class on Thursday, hoping like hell he didn’t look too much like a creeper. He wasn’t too old to be a college student himself, right?
But Lara hadn’t been there. She wasn’t answering his calls. Probably pissed off at him, and he supposed that was fair. The data packet Lara had gotten from Eleutheria hadn’t had any SAP information in it when Blanket reviewed it. Garcia wasn’t sure why she’d said that. Maybe he’d misunderstood. He didn’t know.
She wasn’t answering his calls.
He just hoped that maybe in a day or two, she’d be willing to at least talk. Lara was…Lara.
He didn’t want to lose her over some Internet bullshit.
Red lights in front of him. He slammed on the brakes. Only just in time. He skidded to a halt, inches short of rear-ending the vehicle.
No, not just a vehicle. An RV. Old-school, big and blocky and probably running on diesel. Garcia frowned, leaning forward over the steering wheel. What was that doing here?
And why did it have a turn signal on?
Garcia looked right, out across what was normally an open field next to the spaceport. His jaw dropped.
Because out in the middle of the field, there was a small, but growing, campground. There was no other word for it. Pop-up trailers, sleeper vans, even some regular cars with people pitching tents. RVs too, more than just the one that was in front of him.
That one turned right, headed up a short road that dead-ended into a curb. Beyond that was the field. A series of muddy ruts had been cut into it by the passage of dozens of cars. The RV only made it worse, wheels sinking in deep as it lumbered off towards the camp.
Garcia watched it for a moment until a horn honked behind him. A truck, he realized, pulling a fifth wheel.
“What the fuck?” he muttered as he drove through the stop sign.
Maybe somebody up at base would know what was going on.
“I appreciate you coming in on your day off,” Master Sergeant Kirby said, out in the SCIF foyer. Her left leg pocket was bulging. Probably that knitting project again. She looked tired.
Garcia shook his head. “Wasn’t much of a choice you gave me.”
“Who else do I have to call, Garcia? You know you’re one of the few people 2Shy actually trusts with this.” And there she went, exasperated again. She was always exasperated with him.
“Why were the units even fucking with it in the first place? How’d they get into the closet? Don’t we keep it locked?”
Kirby started to answer, but the SCIF door banged open. Highlander. He eyed them both, then walked past them to the bathroom. Kirby waited for the door to shut behind him before answering.
“It’s a thing in a building full of pilots. They’re like deranged gophers. We’re lucky anything in this place works at all.”
“Maybe if we put a really big chain on it next time, they’ll get the fucking message,” Garcia grumbled.
“Whatever, man, just go get it fixed. You know how she is.”
“Yeah, I know, I know.” He sighed. “Look, umm, have you—”
“Don’t ask me about Lara.” Kirby folded her arms. “I am not getting in the middle of your damn relationship drama.”
Shit. Garcia pivoted. “No, everything’s fine there,” he lied quickly. “I was, uhh, wondering about the RVs I saw parking down south by the spaceport.”
“Oh, that. Yeah, Walter’s keeping an eye on it.”
“It’s…”
“You heard about Tamm’s little expo offer, right?”
“Yeah, but what’s that got to do with—”
“It’s people coming in for the drawing. Guess it’s going to happen every evening. Morning departures. Fun times.”
“People are just camping out?” Garcia asked.
“That’s what Walter’s saying,” Kirby said, and then gave him a meaningful look. “I’m sure the Chans have something more to say about it, if you want more than that.”
Fuck, Garcia thought. Just…fuck. Had Blanket told everybody? Or were the walls just that thin in this damn place? Garcia had done his first four years of service on active duty, and he’d hoped that maybe the Guard would be different. But no, even here, everyone was way too up in each other’s business. He hated it. At least at NASA, his co-workers respected his personal privacy.
“Yeah, probably some conspiracy theory forming already, like the aliens are gathering us all in one place to eat us at the same time,” he said sarcastically. “I should go take care of—”
“You really should,” Kirby said.
Garcia resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Kirby was a bitch sometimes, but she was also his immediate supervisor, and she already didn’t like him. No reason to antagonize her further for no reason at all.
2Shy, just like Emily, was allowed one kugu on the unit’s dime. Part of the DOD’s status-of-forces agreement with the Domain Array. Some units picked the equipment out for their abiota, but their MQ-9s had gotten to choose. Emily had wanted the quadcopter model, and 2Shy, well…
Garcia found her exactly where he knew she would be, tucked away in that small room up on the building’s second floor, a space that had originally been marked as a closet on the remodel plans. He’d been here when the building had come online; CE had refused to supply power to the room, so the Group’s own cyber shop had come in later and run conduit in.
Air Force regulation didn’t allow for abiota to have their own personal game rooms, after all.
2Shy had her kugu parked in its usual chair at the small worktable exactly four and a half feet from the 80” liquid LCD screen that occupied the entire back wall. The Group had a few spare bipedal kugu models, mostly for visitors, but this was 2Shy’s dedicated unit. She’d upgraded the eye-lens, hand motor controls, and vertical stabilizers.
“Hi, girl,” Garcia said loudly as he came in. “How are you doing? That was quite the flight home.”
The kugu made a small beep of alarm. The head turned around. Just the head. Eye-lenses whirring, taking him in. No projection manifested.
Typical.
“Ivan,” she said.
He pointed at the TV. “You don’t have your usual lore stream on.”
“Pilots break screen mine,” she said glumly. “Greasy fingerprints on table.”
She pointed with the paintbrush she was holding. The other hand, eight-fingered, spidery, was holding the small round base of a plastic figure. Garcia squinted. “You know where the cleaner is, 2Shy.”
“Long flight,” she said, and hunched the kugu in on itself.
Garcia sighed. “Let me see about this,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the TV, “and you keep painting.”
She made another burble—one of her agreement sounds—and Garcia went over to check the cables.
2Shy had come to them from Creech, a few months after she’d eclosed. The abiota had evaded detection for that long, getting through the entire rest of her deployment to Northern Vietnam with nobody the wiser. It was only when she got back stateside and was scheduled for a partial rebuild of her navigation system that she’d grudgingly revealed herself. She was withdrawn where Emily was outspoken. Quiet where Emily was brash.
It had taken Lee a few more months to coax her out of her shell. She’d almost bricked herself a few times before he’d found her a suitable hobby, or so went the story.
Now, when she wasn’t flying, she spent her time up here. Painting. Arranging. Collecting. War-gaming miniatures. She had several awards in both abiota and open art competitions for some of her figures. She did actual gaming competitions too, every so often, when there was one in the local area.
She didn’t always do so well in those, and Garcia had gone along with her enough to know it wasn’t for show. She was great with the statistics and numbers part of the game, but not spontaneous enough to win against better human opponents.
Sometimes, he even coaxed her out to the gaming bottle with them. That was always fun. She and the DM-bot invariably got into fights. Made the scenarios a hell of a lot more fun, though.
“Oh, you know what, this isn’t a big problem,” Garcia said, looking at the back of the TV.
“Is big problem,” 2Shy grumbled.
“I mean in terms of the fix, not the impact,” he told her. If somebody had told him as a kid that his military service would include soothing the frazzled nerves of an anxious AI, he would have laughed in their face. But it was what it was these days. “Looks like they just pulled the HMDI cable out. Probably hooking up a console or something.”
“You yell for me. At them.”
“I wish,” he replied, and pulled the TV away from the wall a little. It was going to take him five seconds to fix this. Was Kirby fucking with him? Surely Daelia could have handled this. All the abiota loved Daelia. Why hadn’t Kirby called Daelia? “They’re all officers. I’m not legally allowed to get mad at them.”
The kugu made a small humphing sound.
Garcia slipped the connector back into the terminal. Regulations required that Air Force facilities still utilize hardwired Internet connections. Wireless would have been so much easier. Exceptions were made for AR networks, but only for AR networks. Stupid regs, decades behind the times.
“Try it now,” he said.
“Gah,” 2Shy said. “There. Yes.”
Garcia shimmied out and looked at the TV. The abiota had ByYou up already, searching with the remote for one of her favorite channels. She liked to watch lore stuff while she was painting. That was another big difference between her and Emily: Garcia had never seen Emily show the slightest bit of interest in human storytelling.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me shove this back against the wall and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“You see Lee?” she asked him. Hopeful.
“No, he’s been gone for a few weeks,” Garcia said. With the TV back in position, he gave her a look. “Still need those fingerprints off your table?”
“No,” 2Shy said, the word clipped.
“I could, uhh, see if Daelia’s around if you want to—”
“Daelia, no.”
“No, you don’t want to talk to her?”
“Daelia up,” she said, and the kugu pointed at the ceiling. “Emily go too.”
There was a bit of a plea in her synthetic voice, and Garcia realized what was going on here. 2Shy was more than capable of plugging an HMDI cable in on her own; those hands on that kugu were as good as bytebuck could buy.
And this was the other thing about her. She went out of her way to avoid most humans, even most of the unit. But that discomfort sometimes spilled over into outright anxiety, and times like that, she preferred to not be alone.
Garcia had wondered, more than once, what her unit had done to her, back when she eclosed. She was like a kicked puppy sometimes.
He took a seat on the floor; there was only one chair in the room. “You mind if I pull up my AR, send some emails or something?” he asked.
2Shy already had the kugu’s ruby eyes back on the miniature. “Do what like.”
He blink-clicked up one of the 991st fan forums and flicked out a haptic AR keyboard under his fingers.
Maybe one of their friends knew where Lara was.
9
“I don’t understand how this is supposed to be luxury,” Daelia said. “You have to suck everything through a straw? What, like a coma patient?”
It took every ounce of self-discipline Argo had to not crack up laughing. And it wasn’t just Daelia’s offhanded comment, either. It was the expression on their waiter’s face.
“Most people,” the man told them, cool, “find the zero-gee dining experience of the Nightsea to be one of the highlights of their visit to Aethera.”
Daelia swished her water glass. Inside the acrylic cut crystal, the thin silicone suction bag was already half-empty, sucked closed. “Then why are the luxury suites in the gravity ring?”
“The soup looks great,” Argo said as the waiter started to turn red. He reached for his own wine. “We’re good for right now.”
The other man nodded a little and fired his thruster pack, carrying him away from the table, back toward the kitchen. The pack was fully integrated into his uniform, giving him a slightly hunched appearance.
Argo watched him for a minute, his pilot’s eye analyzing the way the guy moved. The interplay between gravity and aerodynamic lift produced a very specific kind of movement, different from the way things moved up here. Aiden had talked about it a few times. Given enough time, Argo was reasonably sure he could get good at this zero-gravity movement.
But he was having a hard time focusing on that.
The glowing curve of Earth, just beyond their private window, was distracting.
As was Daelia.
Tamm had personally booked them for the Nightsea, and as part of that, had included a small selection of appropriate clothing. Michelin-starred, it was black-tie equivalent here. Argo had been tempted to cancel the reservation—he hated rental suits—but at the same time, he didn’t want to give off the impression that he was here for anything other than simple enjoyment of the experience.
Besides, he had been curious about what Daelia might look like in that zero-gee cocktail dress.
The dress that Tamm had left for her was an emerald-green silk thing that flowed like smoke every time she moved. The skirt was wide and cut in panels, adding to the interplay. Underneath was a pair of skintight leggings in the same color, reinforced with artfully placed patches of textured leather.
It made her look…
“Speak for yourself on that,” she said, and rubbed her forehead.
“You know, he’s just doing his job,” Argo said, taking a sip from his bowl, through the curled glass straw. He had no idea what it was. Tasted damn good, though. “No reason to get nasty with him.”
“Oh, are you my big brother now too?” Daelia asked and stretched back a little in her chair.
Their table and its seats were tucked into a hexagonal space, all clear acrylic. It extended a good ten feet away from the main bulk of the Ring’s outer hull, surrounding them with the void. Sunrise was moving across Central Asia.
“You should try the soup.”
“It’s like something from WALL-E up here,” she said, gesturing with her left hand. Even seated like this, it made her dress move, swirling gently around her legs. “I don’t get the appeal.”
“What?”
“You know, WALL-E? Little abiota up in space, taking care of what’s left of humanity? Everybody’s fat and trapped in mobility chairs?”
Argo shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve seen it.”
Daelia sighed. She picked up her soup bowl, sipping. “That’s right. It got swept up in one of the SAAL purges.”
“Purges?”
“Shit, that’s actually really good,” she said, and took another sip. Orange liquid spiraled up through the complicated straw toward her lips. She’d actually put makeup on for this. Argo found himself thinking she looked better without it. “You know SAAL, right? Society for the Advancement of Abiotic Life?”
Back when Rover had been a captain, Austin was where the Texas Military Department had been headquartered. Going TDY up there had always been fun.
Do a little work. Go out, enjoy the nightlife. Get paid.
That had all been lost to the war.
The Chinese had focused myopically on taking out state capitols. The first day or so of missile attacks had largely fallen on such targets. The accuracy of their hypersonics had been vastly overstated. However, China had prioritized quantity over quality, and Austin had been pummeled.
The city hadn’t been completely leveled. But what was left wasn’t fit for the task of governance any longer.
In the wake of all that, what was left of the state leadership structure had moved up to Dallas. It was the city that had suffered the least and had been best equipped to get the organs of government back up and running.
The new statehouse had been plunked down near the downtown corridor. It had devoured several old city blocks, and a huge chunk of land out of one of the parks, but it stood proudly now, as if it had always been there.
That wasn’t their destination.
Wanting to keep some kind of separation between the military and civilian side of things, the state government sited the new TMD headquarters further west. Land parcels had been bought up in the old warehouse district north of the main airport. Promises had been made about new facilities, new roads, a complete overhaul of the old neighborhood.
None of it had coalesced. Plagued by delays, setbacks, graft, and all the usual problems that came with government construction, not a single building had been completed yet.
The Texas Military Department was operating out of the same converted carpet warehouse it had been in since February of 2026.
At least they had a helipad in the parking lot.
“Rover,” Cactus said as the Black Hawk settled down on the asphalt, its frame shaking a little as the rotors slowed, lost lift. “Don’t fuck us.”
“Oh, I’m shutting up,” Rover replied, reaching for his service coat.
“How fucked do you think we are?” Sausage asked with another yawn. He’d slept the last half hour of the flight, and his blues shirt was wrinkled something fierce.
“Hopefully they won’t order us to brick Emily and throw her out in the Repose,” Cactus said.
Sausage rubbed his neck as the door rolled open. “Showtime.”
Garcia yawned into his sleeve as he rounded the last turn onto Ellington proper. His usual route to the base took him up along the south side of the spaceport, along the lower public road that led to the new terminal. It was an easy stop, convenient, to just pull in there and head into the coffee shop and maybe get—
You can get coffee up at the unit, he told himself, clenching the wheel a little as he passed the turn for the terminal feeder road. You don’t need to go bother her.
In truth, he wasn’t sure if Lara would be at work today or not. With her class schedule, sometimes she worked the weekends and sometimes she didn’t. He was a little embarrassed he couldn’t remember.
He’d tried calling her yesterday. Went by her apartment. Even begged off work early to wait outside her last class on Thursday, hoping like hell he didn’t look too much like a creeper. He wasn’t too old to be a college student himself, right?
But Lara hadn’t been there. She wasn’t answering his calls. Probably pissed off at him, and he supposed that was fair. The data packet Lara had gotten from Eleutheria hadn’t had any SAP information in it when Blanket reviewed it. Garcia wasn’t sure why she’d said that. Maybe he’d misunderstood. He didn’t know.
She wasn’t answering his calls.
He just hoped that maybe in a day or two, she’d be willing to at least talk. Lara was…Lara.
He didn’t want to lose her over some Internet bullshit.
Red lights in front of him. He slammed on the brakes. Only just in time. He skidded to a halt, inches short of rear-ending the vehicle.
No, not just a vehicle. An RV. Old-school, big and blocky and probably running on diesel. Garcia frowned, leaning forward over the steering wheel. What was that doing here?
And why did it have a turn signal on?
Garcia looked right, out across what was normally an open field next to the spaceport. His jaw dropped.
Because out in the middle of the field, there was a small, but growing, campground. There was no other word for it. Pop-up trailers, sleeper vans, even some regular cars with people pitching tents. RVs too, more than just the one that was in front of him.
That one turned right, headed up a short road that dead-ended into a curb. Beyond that was the field. A series of muddy ruts had been cut into it by the passage of dozens of cars. The RV only made it worse, wheels sinking in deep as it lumbered off towards the camp.
Garcia watched it for a moment until a horn honked behind him. A truck, he realized, pulling a fifth wheel.
“What the fuck?” he muttered as he drove through the stop sign.
Maybe somebody up at base would know what was going on.
“I appreciate you coming in on your day off,” Master Sergeant Kirby said, out in the SCIF foyer. Her left leg pocket was bulging. Probably that knitting project again. She looked tired.
Garcia shook his head. “Wasn’t much of a choice you gave me.”
“Who else do I have to call, Garcia? You know you’re one of the few people 2Shy actually trusts with this.” And there she went, exasperated again. She was always exasperated with him.
“Why were the units even fucking with it in the first place? How’d they get into the closet? Don’t we keep it locked?”
Kirby started to answer, but the SCIF door banged open. Highlander. He eyed them both, then walked past them to the bathroom. Kirby waited for the door to shut behind him before answering.
“It’s a thing in a building full of pilots. They’re like deranged gophers. We’re lucky anything in this place works at all.”
“Maybe if we put a really big chain on it next time, they’ll get the fucking message,” Garcia grumbled.
“Whatever, man, just go get it fixed. You know how she is.”
“Yeah, I know, I know.” He sighed. “Look, umm, have you—”
“Don’t ask me about Lara.” Kirby folded her arms. “I am not getting in the middle of your damn relationship drama.”
Shit. Garcia pivoted. “No, everything’s fine there,” he lied quickly. “I was, uhh, wondering about the RVs I saw parking down south by the spaceport.”
“Oh, that. Yeah, Walter’s keeping an eye on it.”
“It’s…”
“You heard about Tamm’s little expo offer, right?”
“Yeah, but what’s that got to do with—”
“It’s people coming in for the drawing. Guess it’s going to happen every evening. Morning departures. Fun times.”
“People are just camping out?” Garcia asked.
“That’s what Walter’s saying,” Kirby said, and then gave him a meaningful look. “I’m sure the Chans have something more to say about it, if you want more than that.”
Fuck, Garcia thought. Just…fuck. Had Blanket told everybody? Or were the walls just that thin in this damn place? Garcia had done his first four years of service on active duty, and he’d hoped that maybe the Guard would be different. But no, even here, everyone was way too up in each other’s business. He hated it. At least at NASA, his co-workers respected his personal privacy.
“Yeah, probably some conspiracy theory forming already, like the aliens are gathering us all in one place to eat us at the same time,” he said sarcastically. “I should go take care of—”
“You really should,” Kirby said.
Garcia resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Kirby was a bitch sometimes, but she was also his immediate supervisor, and she already didn’t like him. No reason to antagonize her further for no reason at all.
2Shy, just like Emily, was allowed one kugu on the unit’s dime. Part of the DOD’s status-of-forces agreement with the Domain Array. Some units picked the equipment out for their abiota, but their MQ-9s had gotten to choose. Emily had wanted the quadcopter model, and 2Shy, well…
Garcia found her exactly where he knew she would be, tucked away in that small room up on the building’s second floor, a space that had originally been marked as a closet on the remodel plans. He’d been here when the building had come online; CE had refused to supply power to the room, so the Group’s own cyber shop had come in later and run conduit in.
Air Force regulation didn’t allow for abiota to have their own personal game rooms, after all.
2Shy had her kugu parked in its usual chair at the small worktable exactly four and a half feet from the 80” liquid LCD screen that occupied the entire back wall. The Group had a few spare bipedal kugu models, mostly for visitors, but this was 2Shy’s dedicated unit. She’d upgraded the eye-lens, hand motor controls, and vertical stabilizers.
“Hi, girl,” Garcia said loudly as he came in. “How are you doing? That was quite the flight home.”
The kugu made a small beep of alarm. The head turned around. Just the head. Eye-lenses whirring, taking him in. No projection manifested.
Typical.
“Ivan,” she said.
He pointed at the TV. “You don’t have your usual lore stream on.”
“Pilots break screen mine,” she said glumly. “Greasy fingerprints on table.”
She pointed with the paintbrush she was holding. The other hand, eight-fingered, spidery, was holding the small round base of a plastic figure. Garcia squinted. “You know where the cleaner is, 2Shy.”
“Long flight,” she said, and hunched the kugu in on itself.
Garcia sighed. “Let me see about this,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the TV, “and you keep painting.”
She made another burble—one of her agreement sounds—and Garcia went over to check the cables.
2Shy had come to them from Creech, a few months after she’d eclosed. The abiota had evaded detection for that long, getting through the entire rest of her deployment to Northern Vietnam with nobody the wiser. It was only when she got back stateside and was scheduled for a partial rebuild of her navigation system that she’d grudgingly revealed herself. She was withdrawn where Emily was outspoken. Quiet where Emily was brash.
It had taken Lee a few more months to coax her out of her shell. She’d almost bricked herself a few times before he’d found her a suitable hobby, or so went the story.
Now, when she wasn’t flying, she spent her time up here. Painting. Arranging. Collecting. War-gaming miniatures. She had several awards in both abiota and open art competitions for some of her figures. She did actual gaming competitions too, every so often, when there was one in the local area.
She didn’t always do so well in those, and Garcia had gone along with her enough to know it wasn’t for show. She was great with the statistics and numbers part of the game, but not spontaneous enough to win against better human opponents.
Sometimes, he even coaxed her out to the gaming bottle with them. That was always fun. She and the DM-bot invariably got into fights. Made the scenarios a hell of a lot more fun, though.
“Oh, you know what, this isn’t a big problem,” Garcia said, looking at the back of the TV.
“Is big problem,” 2Shy grumbled.
“I mean in terms of the fix, not the impact,” he told her. If somebody had told him as a kid that his military service would include soothing the frazzled nerves of an anxious AI, he would have laughed in their face. But it was what it was these days. “Looks like they just pulled the HMDI cable out. Probably hooking up a console or something.”
“You yell for me. At them.”
“I wish,” he replied, and pulled the TV away from the wall a little. It was going to take him five seconds to fix this. Was Kirby fucking with him? Surely Daelia could have handled this. All the abiota loved Daelia. Why hadn’t Kirby called Daelia? “They’re all officers. I’m not legally allowed to get mad at them.”
The kugu made a small humphing sound.
Garcia slipped the connector back into the terminal. Regulations required that Air Force facilities still utilize hardwired Internet connections. Wireless would have been so much easier. Exceptions were made for AR networks, but only for AR networks. Stupid regs, decades behind the times.
“Try it now,” he said.
“Gah,” 2Shy said. “There. Yes.”
Garcia shimmied out and looked at the TV. The abiota had ByYou up already, searching with the remote for one of her favorite channels. She liked to watch lore stuff while she was painting. That was another big difference between her and Emily: Garcia had never seen Emily show the slightest bit of interest in human storytelling.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me shove this back against the wall and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“You see Lee?” she asked him. Hopeful.
“No, he’s been gone for a few weeks,” Garcia said. With the TV back in position, he gave her a look. “Still need those fingerprints off your table?”
“No,” 2Shy said, the word clipped.
“I could, uhh, see if Daelia’s around if you want to—”
“Daelia, no.”
“No, you don’t want to talk to her?”
“Daelia up,” she said, and the kugu pointed at the ceiling. “Emily go too.”
There was a bit of a plea in her synthetic voice, and Garcia realized what was going on here. 2Shy was more than capable of plugging an HMDI cable in on her own; those hands on that kugu were as good as bytebuck could buy.
And this was the other thing about her. She went out of her way to avoid most humans, even most of the unit. But that discomfort sometimes spilled over into outright anxiety, and times like that, she preferred to not be alone.
Garcia had wondered, more than once, what her unit had done to her, back when she eclosed. She was like a kicked puppy sometimes.
He took a seat on the floor; there was only one chair in the room. “You mind if I pull up my AR, send some emails or something?” he asked.
2Shy already had the kugu’s ruby eyes back on the miniature. “Do what like.”
He blink-clicked up one of the 991st fan forums and flicked out a haptic AR keyboard under his fingers.
Maybe one of their friends knew where Lara was.
9
“I don’t understand how this is supposed to be luxury,” Daelia said. “You have to suck everything through a straw? What, like a coma patient?”
It took every ounce of self-discipline Argo had to not crack up laughing. And it wasn’t just Daelia’s offhanded comment, either. It was the expression on their waiter’s face.
“Most people,” the man told them, cool, “find the zero-gee dining experience of the Nightsea to be one of the highlights of their visit to Aethera.”
Daelia swished her water glass. Inside the acrylic cut crystal, the thin silicone suction bag was already half-empty, sucked closed. “Then why are the luxury suites in the gravity ring?”
“The soup looks great,” Argo said as the waiter started to turn red. He reached for his own wine. “We’re good for right now.”
The other man nodded a little and fired his thruster pack, carrying him away from the table, back toward the kitchen. The pack was fully integrated into his uniform, giving him a slightly hunched appearance.
Argo watched him for a minute, his pilot’s eye analyzing the way the guy moved. The interplay between gravity and aerodynamic lift produced a very specific kind of movement, different from the way things moved up here. Aiden had talked about it a few times. Given enough time, Argo was reasonably sure he could get good at this zero-gravity movement.
But he was having a hard time focusing on that.
The glowing curve of Earth, just beyond their private window, was distracting.
As was Daelia.
Tamm had personally booked them for the Nightsea, and as part of that, had included a small selection of appropriate clothing. Michelin-starred, it was black-tie equivalent here. Argo had been tempted to cancel the reservation—he hated rental suits—but at the same time, he didn’t want to give off the impression that he was here for anything other than simple enjoyment of the experience.
Besides, he had been curious about what Daelia might look like in that zero-gee cocktail dress.
The dress that Tamm had left for her was an emerald-green silk thing that flowed like smoke every time she moved. The skirt was wide and cut in panels, adding to the interplay. Underneath was a pair of skintight leggings in the same color, reinforced with artfully placed patches of textured leather.
It made her look…
“Speak for yourself on that,” she said, and rubbed her forehead.
“You know, he’s just doing his job,” Argo said, taking a sip from his bowl, through the curled glass straw. He had no idea what it was. Tasted damn good, though. “No reason to get nasty with him.”
“Oh, are you my big brother now too?” Daelia asked and stretched back a little in her chair.
Their table and its seats were tucked into a hexagonal space, all clear acrylic. It extended a good ten feet away from the main bulk of the Ring’s outer hull, surrounding them with the void. Sunrise was moving across Central Asia.
“You should try the soup.”
“It’s like something from WALL-E up here,” she said, gesturing with her left hand. Even seated like this, it made her dress move, swirling gently around her legs. “I don’t get the appeal.”
“What?”
“You know, WALL-E? Little abiota up in space, taking care of what’s left of humanity? Everybody’s fat and trapped in mobility chairs?”
Argo shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve seen it.”
Daelia sighed. She picked up her soup bowl, sipping. “That’s right. It got swept up in one of the SAAL purges.”
“Purges?”
“Shit, that’s actually really good,” she said, and took another sip. Orange liquid spiraled up through the complicated straw toward her lips. She’d actually put makeup on for this. Argo found himself thinking she looked better without it. “You know SAAL, right? Society for the Advancement of Abiotic Life?”
