Orphans of Earth (31 page)

The Yuhl, though, they were something else altogether. Here was a tangible enemy. Calling for retaliation wasn’t indiscriminate soapboxing. It was a matter of survival.

A hand touched her shoulder, and she started out of her thoughts.

I’M SORRY, SOL.

THAT’S ALL RIGHT, MY MIND WAS JUST ELSEWHERE, IS
IT JUNO?

YES.

SEND THEM IN.

Three android bodies filed into the cockpit, waved on by Gou Mang. The space seemed crowded as Sol stood up to greet them. The meeting could have been conducted virtually, but where possible, she preferred physical contact with the engrams. It reminded them who was boss, she felt. And right now, that was something needing constant reinforcement.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, nodding in turn to Kingsley Oborn, Materials Specialist Owen Norsworthy, and the colony’s own version of herself. She came straight to the point. “I want to know what sort of progress you’re making.”

Norsworthy glanced at Oborn and swallowed nervously. “Some,” he said. “I have files on several promising weapons systems we’ve found in the Library, as well as a variant on the I-suit envelope, which could cover a much larger volume.”

“Anything we can use right now?”

“Not really. But then, it has only been—”

She didn’t give him time to finish his excuse. “Things can move very quickly when they have to,” she said. “And believe me when I say that right now I expect them to. I’ve given you extra Overseer resources so you can run as fast as necessary. I’ve given you as many Spinner contacts as we can spare, to ensure communications flow smoothly. If you pushed hard enough, Owen, three days could equate to a month.”

“We
have
been pushing, Sol,” he objected.

“Then is it a problem of cooperation, perhaps? Is someone getting in the way?”

Her android copy stepped forward. “Everything is running as smoothly as can be expected,” she said. “The facility will reach optimum efficiency within eight hours. After then, progress will be rapid, I assure you.”

“As rapid as Francis Axford’s?”

“More so, actually. He is only one man, Sol, no matter how many times he’s copied himself. We have the advantage of diversity. We can tackle many fronts at once. Now we know what to look for, we’ll find it much faster than he did.” Juno looked almost smug. “And building the results should be simple, too. We have dozens of nanofacturing plants now, and we can spread designs to other colonies once we finalize them. We could equip the hole ship fleet with what we already know in less than a day.”

Sol nodded. “Excellent,” she said. “The news did go some way to easing her uncertainty. The maneuvering around Hera had demonstrated just how little they knew about the hole ships and how vulnerable they were to outside attack. She needed to know that her pilots were safe before she lost any more. In the bigger scheme of things, she needed her hole ships to ensure that the remnants of humanity could stick together.

Oborn cleared his throat. “I hate to sound critical,” he said, “but I feel that we could be working faster if I’d stayed behind. I’m the contact with the Gifts in Hera, after all, and my not being there is essentially slowing things down. Was there any reason in particular you wanted me here?”

She ignored the slight scold to his tone. He was right: things would be slower on Hera while he was away, but he would only be gone a few hours. She could afford it.

“There is, actually,” she said. “Juno, Owen, if you would give us a moment. See to those plans while I talk with Kingsley.”

The other two filed outside the hole ship, and she closed the airlock behind them.

“Take a seat.” She remained standing as the biotechnician eased himself onto the couch.

“I wanted to discuss a delicate matter that must remain between you and me, for the moment. It concerns security on Juno—and in the colonies in general, actually. It’s important that I know who I can trust.” She paused meaningfully. “Can I trust you, Kingsley?”

As difficult as it was to rattle an artificial metabolism, she was surprised to see sweat beading the man’s brow. “You know you can, Caryl.”

“You’re aware of what I’ve done to you, aren’t you?”

He nodded slowly. “You’ve altered my Overseer settings in order to emphasize the UNESSPRO monitoring program,” he said, swallowing thickly. “You’ve brought that program to the fore and made yourself the sole surviving UNESSPRO representative.”

She watched his reactions carefully. “And how do you feel about that, Kingsley?” she asked. When she saw the anxiety in his expression, she added, “It’s all right. You can be totally honest with me.”

“I feel... I feel conflicted, I guess,” he stammered. “Your colony statutes are different from the original ones I was given, and I know that my reasoning has been corrupted in some ways. There are layers within layers, but—” He leaned forward, reaching out almost pleadingly. “But I know that the core is stable. I
can
see the reasons for what you’re doing, Caryl, and I’m not going to let you down.”

She dipped into his Overseer simulation—into the actual working of his thoughts—and saw enough to confirm the sincerity of his words. His mind was racing along at a feverish pace, using twice as much capacity as an ordinary engram as he checked and double-checked every thought. But it seemed to be functioning well enough. His original engram was reasonably fresh, so she wasn’t building on sand.

Slipping out of his mind, she nodded and sat down next to him. He shifted uncomfortably and averted his eyes. Something about his behavior was bothering her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It was more than nervousness or stress.

“I’m glad that I can trust you,” she said. “Your job on Juno is very important. It might make the difference between life and death.” She paused again to look him firmly in the eye. “Do you understand that, Kingsley?”

“All too well,” he replied.

“I’m sorry to have to put you under such pressure,” she went on smoothly. “I only do it because I know I can rely on you. Hopefully it will be over soon, and we can all rest.”
But not in peace,
she hoped. “The current estimates put the Spinner advance on the far edge of surveyed space in about ten days. The Starfish front will hit that same edge in approximately twenty, leaving, we presume, nothing behind. That, therefore, is the outermost limit on ensuring the safety of the colonies. With the Yuhl active within those two extremes, we have to find a way to fight back now, before we lose any more good people.”

Oborn nodded emphatically. “We’ll do it, Caryl,” he said. “I know we can.”

“So do I,” she agreed. “The biggest problem we originally faced was knowing where the Yuhl were hiding. Since the experts think that tracing the hole ship movements isn’t possible, I feared we might be dead in the water. But that problem seems to be solving itself.”
The hard way,
she added silently to herself. “There are signs that something is going on in pi-1 Ursa Major. I presume it’s the Yuhl. We need, therefore, to find a way to attack them there. But we can’t just hand them weapons on a plate. We know less about the hole ships than they do; we’ll always be at risk of them taking over our ships.”

“So you’d like to find a way to make sure a captured hole ship won’t obey the enemy,” he said, again nodding. “There may be something in the Library relating to the AIs that pilot them. They’re not as sophisticated as Gifts, after all, so we might be able to add something to their programming, which—”

“Just do it, Kingsley,” she interrupted. “It’s very important. In the meantime, though, we’re working on a way to move the gifts. That way we can put them back in the destroyed systems and out of the firing line. If we can do that, we can move you, too—make you safe behind the Starfish lines. Like I said, I don’t want to lose any more good people. You understand that too, don’t you?”

“Fully, Caryl,” he said. “I have nothing but complete confidence in your decisions.” That sounded like his subversive UNESSPRO program talking. She turned away from his intense regard.

“Thank you, Kingsley,” she said. “For coming here, I mean. I’m glad we had the chance to talk.”
I’m glad I got to peel back the layers and see how far I really can trust you Orphans.
“I’d appreciate it if you could keep this conversation and the things we’ve decided to do a secret. There are some who wouldn’t appreciate my reasoning the way you do.”

“I won’t say a thing, Caryl. You have my word.”

“Good.” She stood. “Now, you’d better go find the others and see how they’re doing. I want you in
Cue Ball
and on the way home within the hour. If you need anything, here or there, talk to Juno. She’ll give you all the assistance you need.”

Oborn rose to his feet also. He hesitated for a second, then, much to her amazement, he took her right hand in both of his and brought it to his lips, kissing it lightly. She let it fall to her side as he turned and walked out of the cockpit, moving rapidly as though he thought he had made a grave mistake.

It was then she understood what his behavior had signified.
Is that how he justifies it?
she wondered, sitting back down on the couch, feeling as though she had been sucker-punched.
Does he betray his friends out of love, not programming?

Whatever gets results,
she told herself, but she couldn’t write it off quite as callously as that. It was a reminder that, no matter how unsophisticated they might be, the engrams still thought of themselves as people. From their point of view, their emotions were very real, and she admired Oborn’s persistence with it—especially when he knew she was using him. All that separated her from them was just a matter of scale.

But that scale was important. She was over 150 years old. When she loved—and it had been a long time since she had let herself love in the old-fashioned, human way—there was a mountain of baggage that came with it. She had seen too many loved ones die in too many ways. It was one aspect of her psyche she had learned to keep very under control, even if, ultimately, she’d never had the courage to excise it completely.

* * *

Although she stayed in
Arachne
mentally she was pacing.
Her mind roamed the corridors of McKenzie Base—both real and virtual—observing the work going on there. One meeting contained strategic planners from all the refugee colonies, trying to rationalize resource allocation in Sirius. Another brought her up to date on progress on a shield design that one of the other colonies had found in the Gifts’ Library. A third was discussing a detailed map of the Spinner and Starfish fronts, trying to pin down exactly which systems were safe for the moment and which colonists and their gifts would need to be moved as soon as possible.

She observed the activity of that working group longer than she’d intended. One of her team had confirmed that the Starfish were concentrating their stealth attacks around the loci of most recent communicator uses. That had given her the idea of drawing the Starfish away from colonies by pinpointing the least vulnerable areas and broadcasting from there, rather than from wherever was convenient. While it was too early to know for sure if the tactic would work, she was eager to find out. They had to find a way to reduce their losses from the Starfish—and fast, before they lost any more ground than they already had.

The news from the previous day that one of the five “ostrich” colonies had been attacked had briefly shaken the fragile optimism of the human surveyors. Officially, the systems that chose to opt out of the survivor network were supposed to be left alone, but Hatzis had organized a single hole ship to survey each of them once a day. The discovery that one of them had been destroyed despite having no advanced technology at all had struck her deeply, and she had debated for a long time whether or not to make the knowledge public or not. The next debate had been over whether to let the remaining four know. If she did, that would reveal that the ostriches had been monitored from the outside and would only arouse cries of betrayal. Hatzis didn’t believe that a simple visit or two could have led the Starfish to the destroyed system; if that was possible, Sothis would have been destroyed a long time ago. Surely, she told herself, it had to have been nothing more than a simple case of bad luck.

In the end it was decided to leave the ostriches in peace—a decision that Hatzis hadn’t been entirely happy with, either. It felt like locking her children in a room full of pedophiles. Her hopes of finding them untouched afterward were slim, to say the least.

But there was nothing she could do about that now. If the Starfish and the Spinners steadfastly refused to communicate, she could only try to survive around them—or despite them. And that was why the Yuhl were her biggest problem.

Six hours after Kingsley Oborn left to return to Juno, a message came from Gou Mang alerting her to the arrival of Francis Axford.

HERE? NOW?

HE’S IN ORBIT AND IS REQUESTING PERMISSION TO DRY DOCK.

Sol thought very carefully before she replied. Having seen the tricks his hole ship could perform, she wasn’t going to let it any closer to
Arachne than
she had to. Who knew what else the man had learned to do with his craft?

PUT HIM IN C DOCK AND TELL HIM THAT IF WANTS TO TALK TO ME IN PERSON, HE’S GOING TO HAVE TO WALK ACROSS HERE TO DO IT. ASSUMING HE EVEN HAS A BODY, OF COURSE.

C dock was on the far side of the station in a newly opened section. By the time Axford had docked and walked the distance, almost half an hour had passed. She watched him walk up the ramp into
Arachne
through external sensors linked to conSense. His android body was smaller than most but no less crude in appearance. Its resemblance to the original was quite poor. Its green, blunt, and hairless face displayed no outward emotion whatsoever and gave nothing away as to his reasons for coming. He had rebuffed all attempts to communicate, in person or otherwise, until he reached Sol.

“So,” she said, rising when he entered but not offering him any more welcome than that. “You’re back from Alsafi.”

He folded his arms in front of him and smiled slightly. “Actually, that wasn’t me.”