Fool's War (22 page)

… into a sensation of absolute stillness. Dobbs turned around. There was no movement, except in one tiny, localized area. Dobbs reached for the packet, touching it lightly so as not to disturb the signal.

It was a request for records from Resit to
Pasadena
.

All else was stillness. Cold Storage. The hold wasn’t even being monitored.

“I don’t understand… ” said Dobbs, knowing that her words and her confusion travelled down the line to the Guild Masters.

“Search the ship.” The words came from Havelock. “Go slowly, Dobbs. It may be hiding.”

“That’s not the only reason to go slow.” She sent back what reinforcing details she had of Lipinski’s road blocks.

 
There was thoughtful silence for a moment. “It can’t have gone far then. And if he has managed to… fragment it, you’ll find the traces.”

Dobbs eased herself forward. She stretched every portion of herself as far as the channels would let her and drifted. She gently brushed the moving information as it passed. All of it was ordinary stuff. Life support. Diagnostics. A navigation simulation Yerusha had left running.

She moved forward another few inches, straight into a cloud of white noise. Her senses screamed in confusion and tried to double back into her. Dobbs hauled herself into a tight ball and tried to calm down.

“Easy, Master Dobbs,” said Havelock. “It’s one of the Houston’s roadblocks. Look at it again. We’ve got to get past this.”

The reminder of her title stung her pride, as Havelock no doubt meant it to. Dobbs extended herself again and touched the surface of the roadblock. It crackled and bubbled underneath her, a wall of chaos filling the pathway.

Well, Houston, you’re even better than I thought you were.

“We have it now, Dobbs.” The line reached deeper into her, a needle into her consciousness. “You need to be this way.” The idea planted itself in her physical memory.

Dobbs twisted herself, rolling into a discrete package. The wall was not solid. It had holes in it. They were small and they moved, but she could find them. She held herself against the wall until one hole opened underneath her. She jumped. The compact bundle she had made of herself shot through the hole before it had a chance to move.

The line trailed out behind her, sending a vague itch into her where it threaded through the wall.

Dobbs moved forward. She brushed against something strange lying inert in her path. She stopped and circled it closely, pulling the line across it so that the Guild Master’s could examine the fragment directly.

“It’s in binary,” she murmured. “This must be Tully’s virus.”

“Not entirely. Look here.” The line turned her gently to another shard. Dobbs pressed against it, examining it for herself. Fear seeped up into her private mind. The shard was a splinter of AI code forcibly grafted onto the binary code and then dropped.

 
Too late. Lipinski did it…

She stopped herself. No. Think. If this was it, if this — mutation — had been the Live One, there should be a lot more of it, and it should be spread out on both sides of the roadblock.

She sent her conclusion down the line and the warm sensation that swam back to her told her the Guild Masters all concurred.

“We’re assigning the study of the fragment to Guild Master Li Hsin,” said Havelock. “This may be a portion of the AI that the Freer lost.”

Dobbs started forward again. She crept along the
Pasadena
’s thousand information pathways and leapt through Lipinski’s hundred roadblocks, until there was nowhere left to go.

There was no one there. She was alone.

At last, she came back to the holding space inside her own cabin’s desk. There was one thing left to do, but she didn’t want to. She reached for the transfer records down to The Farther Kingdom and replayed the markers from the data that had been sent. No reputable ship actually kept a full copy of their packets, but they kept records of configuration and size. Dobbs let the information flow past her.

Her mind almost refused to believe what it found.

“It’s out,” murmured Havelock.

 
“It’s not just out.” Horror tugged at her, threatening to cave her in on herself. “It was planted here. It didn’t come with Amory Dane’s packet, Guild Master, it was his packet.”

The Guild Masters were silent for a moment. “It couldn’t be,” said Guild Master Wesbridge to Havelock. “We have the parameters for the packet from Master Dobbs’ previous report. They do not match this set. This thing that was transferred down is not Amory Dane’s packet.”

“So where is the packet? Dobbs wanted to shout. “What happened to it?” She stretched out and found an inventory of the hold’s contents. She pushed the information down the line. “Everything else is accounted for, except that packet and the live one. It can’t believe the live one carted a load of bio-garden data down with it for no reason.” She stopped.

“The New Medina Hospital thought it was receiving the data it ordered. Could the Live One have been using it as a shield or a blind?” Dobbs felt herself reaching towards the comm lines. The Live One was down in the Farther Kingdom free — and alone.

“This will be studied,” Havelock cut through the debate beginning to boil behind her. “What we do know is that the Live One is free in The Farther Kingdom network. Master Dobbs, we need you to continue the search there.”

Even as he was speaking to her, Dobbs felt the return signal from her transceiver knife through her.

“I don’t have time,” Dobbs told them, with greater calm than she felt. “I’m breaking out as it is.” Her internal processes shifted on their own. She struggled to block the reflexes coming to life. She knew the Guild Masters felt them too. They sent back silence.

“Master Dobbs, I can’t order you to endanger your life,” said Havelock.

Her concentration wavered. She drifted up the path. She had to go back. Now. She didn’t want to hear anymore. She had to move, now.

“… but we do not have forty-eight hours to wait,” Havelock was saying. “The Farther Kingdom is a highly engineered eco-sphere. If the Live One panics before then, it could take the entire world down in less than a day.”

“I know.” Dobbs’ hold on the line slid open. “I know.”

Dobbs fell back into her body. Her blood tingled in her veins and she heard herself groan as she opened her eyes.

She didn’t begin her stretching exercisers. Instead, she just lay there, blinking heavily at the blurry ceiling and feeling the cool of the faux silk blanket under her palms. She swallowed against the dryness of her throat. Her stomach curdled from hunger. She shouldn’t take another dosage for forty-eight hours. No other Fool could make it to Farther Kingdom in less than four. The Live One was out there now, burrowing into the networks, making itself a nest, or nests, working on shaping the world it had discovered into something it could use. It wouldn’t be long before a diagnostic program found it or some cracker tripped over it. It would be frightened and it would defend itself.

Then the war would begin.

And it would end the way it had ended on Kerensk. Her eyes squeezed themselves shut. If it ends even that well.

 
She fumbled for the hypo without opening her eyes and pressed it against her neck.

Jump.

The Farther Kingdom networked opened around Dobbs. Pathways branched out in a hundred thousand dizzying directions. This wasn’t a single network. It was a network of networks. In her brief touches, she could feel knots in some paths that were so snarled it would have taken the entire Guild a week to straighten them out.

Dobbs didn’t need to straighten them out. She just needed to follow them. She paused for a moment, stretching herself carefully through the nearest tangles until she found the thickest of them all. She turned toward that path and forced her way down it.

Where are you?

Outside the hospital walls, Al Shei found herself in the midst of a human bustle that outstripped anything she saw in even the busiest stations. Al Shei had only been to New Medina a couple of times and its beauty had yet to wear off on her. The original Medina was a spartan place, like all of the cities on earth. The Management Union had allotted it the Mosque of the Prophet as a historical building, but everything else had been rebuilt of non-reflective concretes and kept low to the ground to make minimal impact on the environment.

Here though, the minarets were gold-tipped and they towered over luscious green date palms. The central mosque had a magnificent turquoise dome. The street were narrow and dusty. The buildings were allowed to crowd together.

The Management Union encouraged such opulent colonies. It lured people away from Earth and meant there were fewer feet to trample the environment they swore they were rebuilding.

The streets were crowded with people; men in white robes, or long tunics and sandals. Women in
purdah
of every color, some not even showing their eyes. Some led or followed powered wagons. Hard-line traditionalists carried baskets on their heads or on their backs. Animals threaded their way between the people. Chickens, donkeys, camels, and drones to clean up after all of them all roamed through the crowds, some with human keepers but some apparently intent on their own errands. The noise was deafening.

It hardly seemed possible for the market place to be any more chaotic, but it was. It was twice as big as the market on Port Oberon and four times as crowded. Every person, every animal seemed determined to let loose at the tops of their lungs. Not even the swarms of drones underfoot could not keep up with the smells and litter.

Al Shei had heard that the drones, like most of the trams were guided by the settlement’s central communications complex, a place that was reported to make even the New Medina hospital look primitive.

The market’s stalls sheltered goods from who-knew-how-many worlds. The traders were dressed in ten dozen different costumes. New Medina silks, coffees and cottons were popular luxury items and its population took pride in its ancient trading heritage. To one side, a group of students hollered at each other about some point of Islamic law that Al Shei couldn’t quite catch. A hot breeze blew down the streets stirring the up the dust. The press and crowd weighted down her movements and, despite her wonder at it all, she began to feel like she was treading water to stay afloat rather than just walking through a noisy crowd.

Finally, she spotted the sign for the Ksathra Coffee house, one of the few cafes in the city that did not segregate its unmarried male and female patrons. Al Shei got herself a table in the back corner, away from the worst of the street noise and ordered a pot of turkish coffee from the cart-like server. The cafe had a filtration system in its stucco walls that combed out the dust and kept the heat somewhat controlled. While she waited, Al Shei studied the beautiful blue patterned tiles, considering what the cost would be for something similar for
The Mirror of Fate
, and found she was beginning to breathe easier.

Dobbs tried not to see the destruction around her. The Live One had managed to keep from shredding the
Pasadena
’s network, but it hadn’t made any such efforts here. She flew past fragments and loops of programs struggling to knit themselves back together. A whole pathway cave in as the passed. She touched the dead, still ending of a burned out line.

What happened? Did freedom scare it that badly? Or did it just decide that in a world this huge it didn’t need to be careful?

The thought was strange and a little unnerving. She sent it down the line to the Guild Masters.

“It could be, Master Dobbs,” answered Havelock. “It might not even be aware that there are other intelligences outside its world.”

Wouldn’t be the first time
. Dobbs squashed the thought and the others that threatened to follow it. She had to concentrate on the here and now.

The line behind her was stretched out over twenty miles of Farther Kingdom network and over more light years than she wanted to think about. The data running up and down its length was getting difficult to ignore. Unwanted sounds and sensations dribbled into her private mind, like loud conversations at a party when you were trying to concentrate on the person in front of you. Dobbs shut her private mind up as tightly as she could, but as long as she held onto the line, the unwanted information filtered in. Drips of circular reasoning. Pleas for maintenance that got nowhere. Frozen signals and stalled diagnostics.

And vanishing signals.

Dobbs stopped dead still.

Back along the length of the line, some packet of code dragged itself out from the path the line covered, and vanished. Yards away, it happened again.

“Agreed, Master Dobbs,” Havelock told her, almost before she formed the thought. “Back there.”

Dobbs doubled back along her line and flew toward the network’s other mind.

“‘Dama Al Shei?”

A heavily bearded man in immaculate white tunic and trousers picked his way between two small tables to stand in front of her. He bowed politely. His head was covered with a beautifully beaded cap and his sandals somehow had managed to repel all the dust. There was a glint in his eye that spoke of a familiarity with money.

“Peace be unto you,” Al Shei said, dropping into Arabic.

“And also unto you. I am Fedlifah Uysal.” Al Shei had originally heard about Uysal from friends of hers who crewed a corporate freighter. He had a reputation as a very dependable illegal operator.

“Thank you for meeting me.” Al Shei motioned him to a chair.

“You are most welcome, ‘Dama,” Uysal sat in his own chair and lifted the coffee pot. Al Shei pushed the spare cup closer. “Thank you.”

“You are from Istanbul, then, ‘Dama?” Uysal continued as she filled his cup with thick, black liquid.

“Not myself, but I have family there.” Al Shei sipped her own coffee.

“Do you? I have a number of cousins in the city proper…”

It was an old ritual, going back to the Slow Burn when Islam was in hiding. Both parties would try to determine how they were related. It was a very precise game. If you tried to claim too close a relationship, you risked getting exposed as a liar and embarrassed. If you didn’t know enough of your own lineage, you wouldn’t be able to make any kind of connection, and you might just lose your deal or your contact. Also, by revealing your family connections you made yourself vulnerable and showed yourself as trustworthy. Like snatching off the veils after prayer, it had become part of the tradition of Islam. Al Shei spun the dialog out and sat on her impatience. Eventually, Uysal and she determined they were fourth cousins, by marriage, once removed. It might even have been true.

“Well then, Cousin.” Uysal poured the last of the coffee into their cups. “Is this your first time in New Medina?”

“No, but I’ve been away so long it’s a fresh sight.” Patience, patience, she told herself. This one is going to play the game to the hilt and hurrying him will not do any good.

“The whole world is an amazing place,” he said with proprietary pride. “Built from the bedrock up. We’ve got more controls on our ecology than Earth.” He smiled at Al Shei’s arched brows. “You see, in the First Six treaties it was arranged that each faith would get its homeland.” He swept his hand out toward the palms. “Between us, the Jews, and the First-Faith Christians, it was necessary to create a lot of desert.” He drank down the last of his coffee. “Fortunately, we had some very determined engineers. The heat of this climate is primarily due to the fact that someone re-routed the lava from a volcano out there.” He pointed to the distant mountains. “It’s rather like running a heater filament under pavement to melt snow.” He smiled, obviously waiting for Al Shei to be impressed.

She was, actually, but she didn’t have the leisure time to hear more about how someone had managed to channel the lava.

“Cousin,” she said seriously. “I’ve been told you are a man to see about exotics.”

He smiled deprecatingly. “Cousin, I am
the
man to see about exotics.”

She nodded.
Arrogance will out.
“I’ve come into possession of something I shouldn’t have and don’t want. I need to know what it is and how it got to me.”

He tilted his cup toward him and looked into the bottom. “May I inquire, cousin, as to what you plan to do with this knowledge?”

“Wipe the thing out as effectively as possible,” she answered. “It’s making my life very difficult.”

His eyebrows both went up. “That is not a response I am accustomed to.” The server plowed a path to their table. Al Shei found their tab written on its back. She pulled out her pen and transferred over the credit to pay for the coffee.

Uysal waited with an air of complete patience until she had finished. “Can you give me the specifications of this…exotic?” he asked

Al Shei extracted a pair of wafer slivers from her belt pocket and pushed them across the table. “There’s what I’ve been able to learn.”

“Thank you.” He pocketed the wafers and stood up. “Allah’s mercy upon you, Cousin. I shall meet you here again tomorrow at this time.”

“Thank you, Cousin.” She inclined her head. With that, he left.

Al Shei watched him until his white back blended into the shifting crowd and she couldn’t tell him from the rest of the strangers.

Well, that was easy.
Al Shei tapped her finger against the rim of her coffee cup. I hope the answers come as easily as the asking did.

Al Shei pushed her cup aside and tried to push her immediate worries aside with it. She gazed at the bustling marketplace beyond the coffee house, considering the possibilities of the day. Definitely she would pray at the mosque. She did not often have the luxury of praying with a large gathering of Muslims. Then maybe a reading or a lecture, and possibly some shopping, and a night in a bed that didn’t need to be folded away in the morning.

Then back to the
Pasadena
with the information she needed to chase the ghosts out of her ship. And finally, she smiled to herself, back to work. She had to accept that this might be her last run in the
Pasadena
, but she refused to believe that her relationship with this ship and this crew had to end with a negative balance and shameful dealings. There were still chances to make up for the bad start.

If we can pick up a couple extra packets while we’re here, maybe arrange a fly-by data-grab or two, we can still do it. I’ll talk to Resit about getting us access to the advertising lines.

Confident and comfortable from the combination of warmth, gravity and strong coffee, Al Shei got up and threaded her way between the tables and back out into the market.

The world around Dobbs shifted. She froze. A new pathway opened underneath her and half a dozen packets erupted out of it. They shoved past her and drove themselves down the line. Dobbs felt her private mind bunch up. Those were virus killers.

Without waiting for the Guild Masters’ response, she dove after them.

She overtook them easily and spread herself across the line in front of them. She jolted as they drove into her outer layers. She stretched herself out, examining the architecture of each one as they wriggled against her trying to get through. One of them, realizing she didn’t belong there, began to burrow. Dobbs jerked at the pain and grabbed hold of the thing. It tried to eat into her and Dobbs broke it in two. It became absolutely still. She did the same with the others. She sifted through the fragments, trying to find out where these had come from, and where they were going.

Central communications
. She turned over a broken module.
They’re onto it already. They would be
. She stretched herself a little nervously down the path.

“Go cautiously, Master Dobbs,” came back the voice of Guild Master Feazell. “If Central Comm has spotted it, it may have spotted — ”

The packets hit Dobbs without warning. She recoiled under the blow. They swarmed across her, a dozen, maybe more, crawling, poking things connected by thin streams of shared information. Dobbs snatched at them, but passed right through them. Dobbs swelled herself up, blocking the line and trapping the things in a hollow of herself. They milled around briefly, then they turned and attacked.

Dobbs screamed. The things scythed through her outer layers. Nerve and sense tore to shreds, leaving nothing but patches of confusion behind. Anger shoved behind the pain and Dobbs held on. The things cut deeper. Her grip faltered as her senses ripped open. She couldn’t hold them, couldn’t feel them, couldn’t even find them anymore.