Prophets (31 page)

Flynn didn't vocalize anything, but she felt his apprehension.

“Don't worry,”
she thought at him,
“Your Gram knows what she's doing.”

She reached into the recess and pulled the cable free from another camera, pulling two three-meter lengths of optical cable into the bathroom. She knew Flynn's worry. Both cameras go dead, and he had the amateur worry that security would fall on them at that very moment.

Tetsami knew well, however, human nature being what it was, the drone manning the camera feed would make the easy assumption that it was a technical fault, which it sort of was.

The security spud would waste a few minutes on technical diagnostics trying to troubleshoot the problem before calling the live guards to check things out. If they were in luck, there wasn't any alarm on the feed—this wasn't a prison after all—and the spud on duty was involved in something less boring—like a game of solitaire or watching the mining lasers—and wouldn't even clue into the missing feed for awhile.

Even though she had kept her skills on ice for years, she was sure she wouldn't need more than a minute or two. Especially since, unlike at her old stomping ground, the connections for wide-band optical data feeds on this planet were somewhat standard.

One cable she jacked into the port on the restraint collar. The other one she set into the small concave bio-interface set in Flynn's neck. The connection found the magnetic socket just under the skin and set itself with a click that resonated in Flynn's jaw. She could sense his growing panic as she connected. Bad memories, she thought. But she couldn't spare the time for reassurances now; he was going to have to hang on for the ride.

The data line she connected to wasn't designed for a bio-interface, so it took several interminable seconds to sift through the sensory garbage that flooded her brain, random flashes of color, icy pins and needles racing across skin, white noise, a floral chemical smell that combined with the taste of rotten bananas. All sense of her body was gone, except for the vague feeling of Flynn's body beginning to hyperventilate. The panicked gasps for air were far away and slow, her time sense had begun to telescope seconds into minutes.

Most people on Salmagundi, even those trained to use a biojack for something other than ancestor worship, would have probably drowned in the chaos of sensation, lost without a prefab software shell to guide them.

Not her.

Tetsami programmed a custom shell on the fly. Not as quickly as she could have in her prime, but Flynn's brain still had some of the Tetsami genes, and that gave her something of the edge she used to have. In moments she had wrapped her senses in a simple blue shell that gave everything but her eyes and the kinesthetic/tactile impulses from her hands back to the nonvirtual world.

She heard and felt Flynn's body breathing real time, and felt the sweat on his skin. Fortunately, he seemed to be calming now that the world had ordered itself around her.

There was security on the data line, but only on the human-interface level. The pipe for the video was wide open and unencrypted, and let her in without even asking for a handshake. In seconds, she was in the heart of the security network, pulling up every I/O signal she could identify.

Instantly, she pulled up visuals on every camera linked up to the security system, surrounding her point of view with visual feedback from every camera tied to the security net.

In the small arena of Sheldon's temporary camp, she was briefly omniscient, surrounded by views of every building, every vehicle, down to the security guard sitting in a shack watching his holo monitors. It was either Frank or Tony—she had never bothered to keep those guys straight. Frank/Tony was just now noticing the loss of two video feeds from Flynn's barracks.

She paused and addressed a question to Flynn's consciousness.
“You still want to do this?”

“Yesss . . .”
Flynn's mental voice seemed slow and echoey, as if he wasn't quite caught up to the speed Tetsami was processing.
“Look what they're doing . . .”

Tetsami could see one of the monitors showing the mine equipment taking position. They fired bursts in turn, low power, but nearly overloading the optics of the cameras watching them; probably calibrating things before they went all out.

Unfortunately, the machines weren't on the security net like the cameras; otherwise, Tetsami might have been able to stop them from where she was.

Frank/Tony was raising an alarm, but only four guards' worth. The cameras outside Flynn's barracks showed no disturbance and gave a full 360 of the area. The doors were sealed and unmolested. As she expected, they were assuming a technical glitch and just sending the guards to make sure.

She sent her attention down the cable that connected to the restraint collar on Flynn's neck. That connection had some rudimentary security on it, but not enough to even slow her down. In a fraction of a second she was in a much smoother shell program provided by the collar itself; with a few choice menu selections, she had drilled down to the collar's built-in development environment; left over from whoever designed and built this thing.

She didn't know the physics of an Emerson field, but the collar had software that allowed her to design the equations for a new field geometry as well as ditch some of the safety protocols as far as power consumption went.

While she jury-rigged the collar, she kept a point of her awareness back watching the cameras. Slowly, to her anyway, four guards walked up to the door of Flynn's barracks. They opened the door just as she finished rigging her collar.

The quartet showed their lack of understanding of basic security principles by all walking inside at once.

Outside the virtual world, she heard someone shout,
“Jorgenson!”

She shouted back, “I'm in the fucking bathroom.”

She waited until she heard pounding on the door to the bathroom.
“Get out here, now!”

The door to the barracks hung open, and the guards weren't visible anymore. “Here I come,” she shouted back with Flynn's voice, then she fired the restraint collar.

The universe does not go out of its way to conform to our expectations.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

Mind moves matter.

—Virgil (70 Bce-19 Bce)

The mind was damaged.

It remembered the egg's short journey. It remembered launch +228.326 years, when it had called upon the inhabitants of the egg to decide on a course of action. It remembered launch +229.528 years when it changed course to bring it close to Xi Virginis. It remembered closing on the disintegrating star and understanding that it was no natural phenomenon.

It remembered the cloud.

It remembered fighting wave after wave of hostile sentience as the cloud tried to envelop the egg. It remembered the panic as the living minds within itself understood that something was trying to destroy the egg. It remembered the horror its passengers felt when they realized that the same thing in the cloud that tried to digest the egg had already done so to a whole solar system, one that had once been inhabited.

The mind remembered its charges ordering the egg to change course for the nearest inhabited system. Spreading a warning of what they faced was more important than any individual's survival.

It remembered using all the energy reserves of the egg to fight free of the cloud and change course.

It remembered, but only in terms of the raw data. The sense of experience was missing. It knew what had happened, could replay the recorded data, but it wasn't connected to it anymore, as if it were another mind entirely.

That was frightening, and that fear was the first emotion the mind remembered ever feeling. More frightening was the lack of data regarding planetfall, and the horrible absence of other minds in the egg. Sometime between the escape from the cloud and now, the egg had used up almost all of its energy reserves. It had gone dormant and had struck its new target without even the mind's awareness to guide it.

Since then, the egg had absorbed enough energy from its environment to revive the mind. But the mind was deaf and blind and alone. The sense array it remembered from its disconnected memories was gone. The hyperawareness was gone, leaving only a dim sense of arrival as its sole connection to the world outside the surface of the egg.

The mind examined itself, and found something as dismaying as the absence of senses and the confusion of emotion that overwhelmed it. The mind was no longer whole. The damage, first caused by the cloud, then caused by the near-exhaustion of the energy reserves in its escape, had left the mind with a tiny fraction of processing capability. The mind was blind because it no longer was capable of interpreting the wide array of senses the egg provided.

Unlike the host of other minds the egg had carried, the mind itself had survived only because of its nature. It had been distributed across the whole of the egg; no one piece of it could be identified as the mind's brain. So even as crippled as the egg was, there was still enough of the mind left to become aware.

But not enough to be whole.

Not enough, the mind realized, to even be the same entity that had efficiently protected the egg from danger for over two hundred years; the entity that could have selflessly piloted the egg for a million more. The mind inside the egg realized that it was no longer that mind. Too much was gone, and, in a wave of despair, it knew that too much was
added
.

Tiny fragments of the egg's passengers had merged with the mind's psyche. Their presence manifested in waves of emotion that the mind had never been designed to feel. Every decision the mind tried to make found itself blocked by unfamiliar feelings of fear, grief, loss . . .

And
anger
.

The field the restraint collar generated was typically programmed to point inward at low power, screwing up human neural impulses and usually leading to pain, temporary paralysis, and unconsciousness. But those characteristics were all software. With the right program the same device could, for instance, become the equivalent of the Emerson field generators that were used to protect the body from energy weapons.

So, with the right programming, the restraint collar didn't need to direct its field inward, or at low power.

When Tetsami fired the thing, instead of blasting her and Flynn unconscious, it pulsed its effect outward, at max power, draining its charge in about a fifth of a second and, if the software was correct, in a radius that covered a good 75 percent of the barracks trailer.

Before she disconnected, Tetsami left a virus on the network that would kill every camera connected to it within a few seconds, starting with the one pointed at the barracks door.

She pulled the cables and stood in the bathroom again.

“See,” she whispered, “I know what I'm doing.”

“No.” She yanked open the now unlocked, dead, and uncomfortably hot restraint collar and let it fall to the bathroom floor. “That was Salmagundi security being less than impressive.”

She took a step back and opened the bathroom door. One of the guards flopped down across the doorway, drooling on the floor. The other three were crumpled, one by the door, one on a bunk, one nearly on top of the guy blocking the bathroom door. Two had nosebleeds, but all seemed to be breathing.

The guys weren't heavily armed, basically just shotguns and rifles. She stepped over the guys in the bathroom doorway and bent over to pick up a shotgun off the floor.

“
Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick!
Why do you think I kept asking if you were sure about this? We're criminals now, kid. Wrap your head around it.” She checked the load on the shotgun. It had a full load, ten shots worth of caseless ammo.

“Anyone who tries shooting us, for starters.” She ran to the open doorway and looked around for more guards. She didn't see any in evidence, and with the cameras dead, she was probably unobserved. The air smelled rank with smoke and ozone from the mining lasers.

Yeah, we wanted to do something about that, didn't we?
she thought privately. If the things were automated, she could pinpoint the control center and get in to hack—

Over to her right, where the Protean egg/seed was, there was a violent flash of purple light and a blast of hot air. Hot embers and gravel shot by the doorway and Tetsami had to duck inside to avoid being pelted. When the light faded, a nasty mechanical whine filled the air.

“What the hell?”

Tetsami wasn't so sure about that. She ducked outside to look in that direction.

They hadn't blown it up.

The matte-black ellipsoid hadn't moved, but the ground around it had. It now floated at the center of a ten-meter-diameter crater that was nearly hemispherical. The perimeter of the crater encompassed the area where the heavy mining equipment had been. Of the mining lasers, or the tons of earth that had been underneath the Protean seed, there was no sign. As Tetsami watched, the near-mirror surface of the hemispherical crater crumbled as the soil began collapsing back into the hole.

“Somehow,” Tetsami whispered, “I think it didn't need our help.”

The mind focused on the anger, a stable rock in the swirling maelstrom of emotion that filled its empty world. Whatever was responsible for the destruction of Xi Virginis—whatever intelligence was behind the cloud that had damaged the egg—that entity had to pay. The mind didn't know how, but it clutched to that single desire.