Fool's War

Chapter Four — More Questions

Yerusha lay in her bunk staring up at darkness. She was supposed to be getting her seven and a half hour sleep shift in, but it wasn’t working out that way.

It was ridiculous. It was triple-fractured and double-twisted ridiculous. The entire crew was running itself ragged to find a virus that the stack in her case could locate in ten seconds.

They were all so scared. They relied on human engineering for their shelter, their air, their warmth and their flight, but they wouldn’t let their shelter be guided by an engineered mind, a native of an environment where even Lipinski was just a visitor. Even if her foster hadn’t caught a soul yet, it was a diagnostician that was ten thousand times faster than Lipinski could ever be.

While they all scrabbled around, the walls were crawling with who-knew-what. Yerusha shifted restlessly, wrinkling the sheet underneath her. Hadn’t anybody thought that it might get into the environmental controls? Or the fuel containment system? The vents were electronic and could be opened by a faulty command. Then what? They’d still have their groundhog security, but they’d be quite dead.

And her with them.

Yerusha sat up. “Lights.” The white glow she’d set to match the lights on Free Home Titania flooded the room. She kicked back the blanket and swung her feet onto the floor. She padded over to the storage drawers and unlocked the compartment that held her toolbelt. She extracted her pen from its pocket and thumbed the activation switch. Then, she held it against the lock for the lowest drawer. The drawer beeped once in acknowledgement and slid open. Yerusha extracted a grey metal case about ten centimeters on a side and six centimeters thick. Inside, snug and secure lay her foster’s wafer stack.

Foster was her last link to the Free Home until her exile was over. It was the only Freer voice she would hear, the only friend she did not lose. Right now, it was also the only help she had.

She looked towards the folded-up desk. No good. Lipinski, no matter what Al Shei said, would probably still be watching her lines. Besides, she squeezed the case, what she had said to Al Shei was the truth. Even though current theory said a fledgling intelligence needed as much input as possible, she had no intention of hatching her foster aboard the Pasadena, while the Houston’s reaction was going to be to hunt it down and kill it.

Even the best Houston, however, could not be everywhere at once. Some lines would be given priority over others.

Yerusha pulled her work clothes on over her pajamas and tucked her foster into one deep pocket. Then, she cycled open her hatch and headed for the bridge.

Cheney was the only one on the bridge when Yerusha got there. That meant Tulsa, Cheney’s relief, was out on what Al Shei was calling “the Hunt.” Schyler was nominally on sleep shift, but, somehow, Yerusha doubted he would be having any more luck with it than she did.

Cheney paced between Station One and Station Two, peering at the boards and scribbling ones on the memory pads.

He jerked his head around as Yerusha let the hatch cycle shut.

“Any trouble?” she asked, coming forward to peer over his shoulder.

“You mean, any new trouble?” Cheney corrected her. “Not yet.” He wrote down the new coherency reading for the system diagnostic. “But no new answers either.” He brooded for a moment at the curving, silver wall that was the only thing visible through the window. Then, he spared her a glance. “Aren’t you on Z-duty?”

She shrugged. “No luck on that assignment. Thought I’d come up and run a couple of simulations, see if I can work up a pattern on this mess.”

Cheney gave her a sour smile. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” she answered in what she hoped was a suitably wry tone.

The chair for the virtual reality station looked more like an exo-skeleton forced into a sitting position than like a chair. Yerusha settled herself at the VR station, tucking her feet into the boots that were attached to the floor rests. Keeping her back between Cheney and the boards, she pulled her foster’s case out of her pocket. She removed the delicate stack and inserted it into one of the board’s empty slots. Behind her, she could hear Cheney rustling and scribbling without interruption.

She pulled her pen out and wrote Activate port 37C on the board, but did not put down a period to finish the sentence and send the command. She laid the pen on top of the board, right next to the socket holding her foster.

She strapped her torso to the chair, closed the chair’s flexible arms around her arms and slid the wired gloves onto her hands. Then, she lowered the muffling helmet over her head. VR sets worked perfectly well with goggles and earphones, but most ships still used the helmets to keep any conversations in virtual reality from interfering with the bridge routine.

The helmet clicked into place and a menu board glowed bright white and green in the surrounding darkness. The menu displayed three selections for her:

ENTER PROGRAM NAME

DISPLAY PROGRAM MENUS

ENTER NEW PARAMETERS

Yerusha touched ENTER NEW PARAMETERS. A memory board with a pen clipped to the top appeared. Yerusha picked up the pen, twirled it thoughtfully in her fingers for a moment and started writing.

Initiate Pasadena simulation, current conditions, continuous update, delete crew.

She tapped down a period and waited. Some systems would not accept a continuous update command because it used up too much line space.

Pasadena, however, just came back with; SPECIFY STATION FOR POINT OF REFERENCE.

Bridge VR Station One, she wrote.

The darkness lifted and Yerusha was seated at the VR station, alone on the bridge. The slot where, on the real bridge, her foster was plugged in was empty, however. The stack was inactive and the ship’s system carried no record of it, so as far as the simulation was concerned, it did not exist.

Now came the part that was a little tricky. Yerusha closed her eyes and gripped what her left hand told her was the tip of her right index finger. She pulled. She repeated the motion for each finger, tugging at skin and finger ends until she peeled off the VR glove. She did not open her eyes, because if she did, she would see her right hand cut off at the wrist and lying in her lap. She did not have time to be disconcerted. If Cheney picked now to check up on her, things were going to get awkward, fast.

With her right hand, Yerusha groped across the real board until her fingers closed around her pen. She fumbled with it until she held it the right way up. She stabbed a period down on the board.

She could not risk an interface between the ship’s system and her foster without the cover of the simulation. The sudden increase in activity would be too noticeable and she had been directly ordered to keep it in its case. Now, however, the relatively small increase in power consumption and line usage under the myriad commands of a constantly updated program would be barely detectable.

She opened her eyes.

Her right hand was lying limp and lifeless across her thigh. She picked it up and slid it back onto the end of her wrist, twisting it around until she could wiggle all her fingers.

In her ear, a voice whispered “I’m here, Jemina.”

“Hello, Foster.” The foster was not independent yet. If and when it became complex enough to catch a soul, it would be encouraged to choose a name. For now, though, it was just “Foster.”

The fostering program had been going on for twenty years and had yet to see any successes. Nonetheless, the sporadic appearances of rogue AIs reinforced the Freer’s faith, and there were always more applicants for the adoption lottery than there were AIs to be fostered.

Humanity’s freedom came when they were able to shake off the chaotic planetary environment they were born into and make their own homes designed specifically for them. Their final freedom would come when they could break the cycle of death that chaotic ecosystem had trapped them in, when human beings could build houses for human souls that would not age and perish. That was the Freer ideal, and Yerusha believed in it.

“What is happening?” asked Foster. “Am I being hatched?”

“No, not yet.” Not for awhile yet, either, I’m afraid. She could not let Foster go out of its own stack until she had a secure environment for it. That would not happen until she was back on a Freer station.

Foster didn’t ask any more questions, like a flesh-and-blood child would have. As usual, Yerusha found its inability to display impatience or undue curiosity a mixed blessing.

“I need your help, Foster. The ship is having severe system trouble. I need you to scan the input from the simulation and see if you can establish a pattern for the disruptions.”

“An accurate simulation cannot be created when the root causes for observed effects are unidentified,” answered Foster, sounding way too programmed.

Need to work on the grammar structure paths. “I know, but we’ve got a constant update going so you should have an accurate picture of the symptoms. We don’t need an exact answer. A best guess cause and effect relationship will do for now.”

“Okay,” said Foster. “Setting up scan routine.”

“Be careful of the security protocols,” Yerusha reminded it. “Don’t trip over any of Houston’s wires.”

“Noted. Precautions being integrated. Predicted time to initial report, thirty seconds.”

Definitely have to work on those grammar paths. Not half enough flexibility in there.

Yerusha settled back to wait. The predicted thirty seconds passed, and thirty more, and thirty more.

Yerusha drummed her fingers impatiently on the virtual chair arm.

“Foster? What’s going on?”

There was no answer.

“Foster?” Yerusha gripped both arms of the chair and leaned forward.

There was no answer.

Yerusha snatched up the pen. Status of module in port 37C, she wrote. Real world interface.

The board absorbed her command and wrote out its answer.

MODULE IN PORT 37C IS INOPERATIVE.

“Ino…” the word died on Yerusha’s lips.

She slammed the heels of both hands against her temples to cut off the simulation and raise the helmet. In an instant, the world went black and she felt the helmet begin to rise. As soon as she saw the thin line of outside light, she ducked under the helmet’s edge and tore off the gloves. She pushed the chair arms away from her. With a shaking hand, she removed Foster’s stack from the port. She laid it back in the case and bit her lip as she pressed the diagnosis key. Two words appeared on the edge of the small message board inside the case’s lid:

STACK EMPTY.

A small, involuntary sound escaped Yerusha’s throat. She tried to stand, but the skeleton’s straps and boots forced her back down. Viciously, she slapped the catches open.

“Are you okay ?” asked Cheney.

Yerusha couldn’t even begin to think of a way to answer him. Cradling Foster’s case in both hands, she ran for the hatch.

What happened? What happened? She pounded down the stairs to the berthing deck. She was aware of an exclamation from an engineering platform, but she didn’t know who it was.

Did Foster get loose? Did it hatch? Fractured and damn, Lipinski will kill it! Did the virus get it? She lunged into the corridor. Did I open it up to die?

What happened?

Hands grabbed her shoulders, jerking her backwards. Yerusha stumbled into a cabin, barely catching herself against a bunk before she over-balanced. A hatch cycled shut behind her. Yerusha forced her eyes to focus, and she saw a window looking out onto rolling, mist-covered hills.

“Jemina Yerusha,” said Dobbs from behind her. “What have you done?”

There was such a note of command in her voice, Yerusha almost answered.

She ran her hand through her hair.

“Nothing,” she managed to say. “I was just running some simulations on the bridge. Overdid things. I should be asleep…”

Dobbs sighed. “I really wish you’d tell me what’s going on, because I know you don’t want to have to tell Schyler, or Al Shei, and possibly Lipinski, if you live through telling the first two.”

Yerusha swallowed hard and looked down at the case in her hands. “I was using my foster to scan some data simulations. It…stopped responding after the first thirty seconds. The case diagnostic said the stack was empty.”

Dobbs stepped into her line of sight. The Fool’s forehead was wrinkled in perplexity. “It got loose?”

Yerusha shrugged helplessly. “It shouldn’t have left the stack, it was scanning input. I don’t think it could get loose, it hasn’t got any independent initiative…” She felt herself begin to sway on her feet. “I don’t know…I was trying…”

“To prove the worth of humanity’s ultimate efforts to a shipload of groundhuggers,” Dobbs said for her. Dobbs hooked two of her fingers around her Guild necklace. “And I should have seen it coming.”

“That’s not it,” insisted Yerusha, although she didn’t know why. “I…”

“Sit down, Pilot.” Dobbs lifted the case out of her hands. Yerusha clutched at it. That was Foster, her last link with home, the thing she was counting on to keep her focused for the two years when no other Freer would even talk to her.

“I’m not going to hurt it,” said Dobbs softly. “Sit down before you fall down.”

Yerusha sat on the edge of the scarlet-covered bunk. It was fully made up, she realized. Whatever Dobbs had been doing this shift, it wasn’t sleeping.

Dobbs set Foster’s case on the corner of her desk. She opened a drawer and poured something out of a square, green bottle into a collapsible cup.

“Here. Sip this.” She handed the cup to Yerusha.

Yerusha sipped. The liquid was pale brown, smokey flavored and very alcoholic.

“For medicinal purposes.” Dobbs grinned at her, indicating that the comment must be a joke.

Yerusha took another sip. The liquid felt warm against her dry throat.

Dobbs pulled her pen out of the desk socket. “Is the stack secured?” she asked as she flipped open the case’s lid.

“Not now.” Yerusha shook her head. “I didn’t think…”

She half-expected Dobbs to say “obviously not,” but the Fool just nodded and plugged her pen into the case.

“What are you doing?” Yerusha started to her feet.

“I’m trying to see if there’s enough left in here to get a recording of what happened.” The light on the end of her pen glowed gold. Dobbs plucked the pen out of the case and stuck it back into her desk. She watched silently as the desk wrote out its response.

“Well,” Dobbs fingered her necklace. “Nothing got out. Something did get in though.”

Yerusha set the cup gently down on the bed.

“If Lipinski…” she began.

“No,” said Dobbs. “The stack’s been entirely re-configured. There’s not an ordered pathway left in here. There is no way Lipinski could have wiped a stack this clean that fast, and no reason why he would. He would’ve just hauled Al Shei and Schyler up to the bridge and caught you in the act.”

“Then it was the virus.”

Dobbs gave one of her showiest shrugs. “It’s either that or the Pasadena’s gone independent and doesn’t like people poking in its innards.”

“But Foster is gone.”

Dobbs nodded. “I think so. I think it was an effect similar to what happened to that initial diagnostic Lipinski tried to run.”

Yerusha focused her eyes on the empty stack. She felt drained, exhausted, and alone. For the first time since she left Port Oberon, she was really alone without hope or help for two dark, wandering years. Worse, her chance at redemption was gone.

She realized she was about to start crying. She screwed her emotions up into a tight ball and forced them down inside her. Not in front of an outsider, not even a Fool. No. She would mourn her losses alone in her cabin, not here. Not ever where it could be seen by somebody who couldn’t possibly understand. She did not want to try to tell Dobbs that those pathways had matched Holden’s neural pathways as closely as possible, or how much she had paid to get them that way. She did not want to attempt to explain her hope that the soul Foster would catch would be Holden’s.

“So,” she said, trying desperately to find something her mind could latch onto other than the dead and empty stack on the desk. “You were a cracker before you were a Fool?” she nodded towards Dobbs’ pen. “Whatever you just ran must have taken a year to build.”

Dobbs smiled, looking uncharacteristically bashful. “I was a lot of things before I was a Fool.”

“You don’t look anything like old enough.” Yerusha dug the heels of her palms into her eyes. “But, so help me, neither do I, yet.”

“Go back to your cabin, Yerusha,” suggested Dobbs. “Get some sleep if you can. You’re going to need your head together to get this crew of groundhogs to The Farther Kingdom.”

Yerusha felt exhaustion tug at her, probably helped by the alcohol. She looked across at the case and its empty stack and felt a hollow pain.

“You’re right.” She stood up. “Time to act like I know what I’m doing.” She lowered the case lid and snapped the latches shut. “And as long as Cheney doesn’t open his mouth to Schyler, I might get a chance.”

“Schyler’ll be steady about this,” said Dobbs.

“I don’t know.” Yerusha lifted the case up and remembered Schyler’s eyes when she had been called down to the Law’s cabin.

“Believe me.” There was no humor in Dobbs’ voice, just steady assurance. “He can understand what it’s like to be totally out on your own.”

Yerusha studied the Fool for a long moment. “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me about some of those things you were before you were a Fool.”

Dobbs chuckled. “Maybe after we get out of this mess, Yerusha.” She cycled her hatch open. “Get some sleep.”

“Yeah, I’ve got all of what, four hours left?”

Dobbs smiled. “And counting. See you in the morning.”

“See you.”

Yerusha made it back to her cabin without seeing anybody else. She set the foster’s case back into its drawer and stared at it. The loss eased by Dobbs’ company drooped across her back again, heavy and clinging.

What she hadn’t told Dobbs was that exiles weren’t supposed to be able to take their fosters with them. What she didn’t say was that the reason she was in the Richard III business module when it had blown out was that she was paying her life savings to Fellow Radmilu, a guard on the quiet dole. Radmilu was the one who seized her property when she was arrested. She clearly remembered his big soft hands and how they fluttered around as he suggested she could have her Foster with her if she was willing to pay for it. She’d tripled his price for an additional service. Radmilu had arranged for Foster’s network to be reconfigured from Holden’s medical records, and then he had brought it to her at Port Oberon.

When the can blew, all her actions were hampered by her desperate attempt to keep a hold on Foster’s case. That was why she was too slow and clumsy to get out of the way when the last seam gave way. Her hope and scheme had cost her her arm and her eye, and most of what was left of her pride.

Now Foster and Holden were both gone. The skin on her newest arm itched.

“When I find out who did this,” she whispered as she closed the drawer. “I’m going to kill them.”

Dobbs closed her cabin hatch behind Yerusha. For a long moment she did nothing but stand there and let herself be tired. She felt the tension in the tendons of her neck, the weight of her hands dangling from her wrists, the dozen small aches in her feet and ankles, the dry heat lying over her eyes. Tired. Tired.

Tired for Al Shei who was working like a mad woman and leaving Resit to pray for both of them. Tired for Lipinski who was drinking the Sundars’ coffee like it was mineral water. Tired for Yerusha who had just lost a lifeline she wasn’t even supposed to have.

Tired for Dobbs who had spent the day trying to keep them all cool and focused and had totally missed what Yerusha would try to do.

Time to act like I know what I’m doing, she replayed Yerusha’s words for herself. You know, I was just thinking the same thing. She locked the hatch and set the entrance light to red.

Dobbs pulled her pen out of the desk socket and sat down on her bunk. She slid her bedside drawer open and drew out the flat, black box. She laid her thumb against the box lock. The lock identified first her print, then the very faint pulse that her thumb carried as her own, and the lid sprang back. From inside, the Fool took up a hypodermic spray and drug cartridge.

Seven hours? She set the release timer on the hypo and inserted the cartridge into the case. Given distance and coordination time once I’m in there? Should be enough. Long time to be out of action though. She glanced toward the door. Maybe not so bad. I’ve got four hours left on the sleep shift. That leaves three hours to cover for. Oh well, that’s one of the advantages of being the Fool; everybody always assumes you’re just clowning around somewhere else.

She pulled the transceiver out of the box and with her free hand, plugged her pen into the transceiver’s input socket. The tranceiver beeped once as it downloaded all of the record Dobbs had illegally acquired from Al Shei’s pen.

Dobbs pocketed the pen and opened the input plug in the wall over her bed. She took a slender white cable out of case, and jacked one end of it into the wall and the other into the tranceiver. Then, her practiced fingers found the nerveless patch behind her right ear and peeled it open. The heat of her hand activated the socketed implant behind it. She plugged the loaded tranceiver into the implant.

Biting her lip, Dobbs picked the hypo back up. I wonder if this is ever going to get easier, she thought as she lay back on her bed and held the hypo against her neck. She could feel her pulse beating against the hypo’s pressure. The transceiver’s vibrations made her neck tickle. It’s signal was already getting through to her. The edges of the room blurred and softened, separating into wavery, twin ghosts in front of her eyes.

Dobbs, she said firmly to herself. You can process network input, or sensory input. You cannot do both.

She closed her eyes. Her index finger hit the hypo’s release button and the drug hit her nervous system. Her shoulders vanished, then arms and hands, pelvis and legs. It took all of Dobbs’s training not to scream before her face and eyes were gone.

Hearing and smell went next and the transition was over. She had no awareness of her body. Now her shape was defined by the switches and storage pathways in the Pasadena’s system. She knew the mechanics of what happened. Now that her mind’s other functions had been suppressed, her implant captured a specialized pattern of neuronal firing that swirled deep in her organic mind. The pattern was the result of intensive hypno-training and delicate micro-engineering on both her implant and her neurons. The transceiver routed that pattern into the network she was jacked into. To her senses, what happened was that she stopped being a body with arms and legs. Now, she was a chaotic being — a snarl of thread — like limbs and blobby thoughts shaped by the pathways and resistance wells she filled. She lay over an array of microscopic switches and gates, and they in turn held together the mass of signals that thought of itself as Evelyn Dobbs. Time slowed to a crawl and her acute internal processes — her thoughts — kept her aware of each individual second.

One.

Dobbs flexed herself against a quartet of gates and the Pasadena responded by siphoning her along the spider web of data paths that joined together the ship’s processing areas to the roomy holding stack connected to the ship’s main fast-time laser transmitter. She touched her surroundings to make sure no internal ports were active indicating that a crew member out there was paying attention to the transmitter. No one was.

Two.

She dropped into a boxy, quiescent processor series. She filtered her awareness through the stack and found the log and the alert codes. She froze both. Now, unless someone looked out the window, there was no way to see what she was about to do.

Three.

In the main processor, she reset the transmitter commands into an active sequence. The transmitter grabbed the signal they put out — a frozen replica of Dobbs’ signal sequence and shot it out to the coordinates she had laid in for IBN Repeater Satellite HK-IBN4813-7Z421.

Four. Five.

As solid as the Intersystem Banking network was, repeaters occasionally overloaded momentarily, or took in bad signals that moved their receiver telescopes to the wrong angle, or failed completely. If she didn’t verify the receiver ‘scope was ready and waiting for the burst of compressed and coded light she had become, she might jump out with nowhere to land.

The replica came back. Dobbs caught it and swallowed it whole. It was exactly as she had sent it out. Satisfied that her target was where it was supposed to be and that it could handle her complexity and keep her whole and stable, Dobbs shaped another command on the processors.

Six.

Dobbs positioned herself at the mouth of the transmitter. The gates and switches flickered so fast that in her body she wouldn’t have had time to blink.

Jump.

Thousands of sharply angled pathways opened around her. Packets of data jostled against her on all sides. Ten were system packets with Repeater 4183’s encoding. Two were timing sequences. The jump had taken fourteen minutes, eight point two seconds. She didn’t feel any of it. Between receiver and transmitter, her signals were frozen still because there was no hardware to move them. This meant that she was, in effect, unconscious until she reached her destination.

One. Two. Three. She flitted along the repeater’s internal paths. Routing protocols switched into active phases as she reached out to them and closed down again when the flicker of her passage was gone.

When she first made use of these pathways, shaping her world was a clumsy, blundering reflex. The Guild taught its members how to keep this state of being as a controlled series of thoughts, and how to turn un-disciplined reflex into cautious, minimized commands.

It took three more seconds to find an open transmitter, and verify that she had a safe shot to repeater TL2-IBN5790-ZD701.

Jump.

One, touch the time. Twenty-two minutes gone. Two, fly to the transmitter. Three, shape the destination. Four, five, six, verify a clear jump. Next stop, Guild Hall. Her replica carried the proper encoding, the receiver ‘scope was free, the way was clear.

Jump.

The familiar branching chaos and close press of activity that was the outer rim of the Guild Hall. The pathways were constantly clogged with milling presences, reaching and diving through the processor connections, sometimes taking up two and three neighboring stacks at once, filling up every piece of free space, until there was almost no way to get through.

Dobbs snagged a timer that added another thirty-six minutes to her internal count. She swerved sideways until she came to the gateway series monitored by the Guild’s automatic system. The Fools laughingly referred to the program as the Drawbridge. She leaned against the closest switches and let them flutter across her identity coding.

“Evelyn Dobbs, membership number 2037.” She followed up her identification with her current contract and route. The Drawbridge hesitated for a moment and then opened one of its hundred main gates. Dobbs rushed forward into the open path.

“I have a potential environment or containment problem on my hands,” she told the Drawbridge. “Who’s free to help out?”

The bridge flickered a series of switches and side gates, sliding her gently between pathways crammed with activity into a slender processing stack. A familiar touch brushed against her thoughts. She reached towards it and found another piece of awareness wrapped inside hers. She opened the route to her memory and let the new voice inside.

“You’re coming in off schedule, Dobbs.” Cohen’s voice blossomed inside her and Dobbs absorbed the greeting and the friendly concern. “Anything wrong with the new contract?”

“Too much is wrong, but it’s not with the contract.” She reached into Cohen and let her first level memories of the run and its attendant “incidents” flow freely to him.

Cohen responded with a small twist of pain. Dobbs repeated it in absolute agreement.

“Let’s have the details then, maybe we can find a pattern for you. Do you mind if I call in Brooks and Lonn to share?”

“Not at all. We could use Verence too, if she’s free.”

Cohen shifted, seeking an unresisting path deeper inside. Reflexively, Dobbs tightened herself. “What happened?”

“We lost her,” said Cohen softly. “We had a near miss on Kilimanjaro. She stretched herself too far keeping their network up. By the time the Guild Masters roped in the trouble maker… she’d dissipated.”

Dobbs folded in on herself. Cohen, suddenly disconnected from her, circled outside. She could feel concern in his touch as he sought an open pathway back to her awareness, but she held herself sealed. Amelia Verence had rescued her from disaster. Verence had brought her into the Guild and stood by her through her training and had sponsored her petition for Master ranking even though the Guild Masters had declared her too undisciplined. Verence had showed her what she wanted to be.

And now she was gone. There were limits as to how far you could go alone, how much you could do and how long you could stay in the network before the complex mix of signals and processes that was you became so changed that there was no way you could maintain your own coherence. The Fools mostly called the phenomenon dissipation. The other word for it was death.

Cohen pressed against the shell she had made of her outer self. “I’m sorry, Dobbs. I thought…that you’d been notified.”

Dobbs shook herself and managed to relax enough to let Cohen reach inside again. “No. But this contract has been keeping me busy…” She began to fold again, but this time Cohen held his place. His firm stance helped her stay open even against the grief that was welling through her.

“However,” she managed to say, “if I don’t pay attention to the Pasadena’s problems, Verence is going to haul herself together just to come back and take me apart.”

Cohen’s laughter rippled across her. “Heaven forbid. Let’s see what you’ve got…”

She felt him stretch out streamers down two separate paths and after a brief instant’s silence, she felt the new awareness reach through him and into her. For a moment they did nothing but adjust to each other’s rhythms. Lonn moved in bursts, darting around, pausing to examine what he found and dart off again. Brooks, rigidly organized and thorough, had the clear, separated feeling of someone new to the Guild.

Dobbs shook herself to unclench her memories and let the details of the run flow out where the other three could look them over. Cohen was a long time friend. She could trust him to be careful with her memories. They would be examined without being altered. No one he brought in would carelessly misalign a pattern she gave them access to, causing her to forget or mis-remember a crucial point.

The three Fools waded deeply into her memories, watching their flow and separating them into discrete fragments before reuniting them with the whole to see exactly how the events fit into one another. Cohen carefully herded off the emotions and interpretations and left just the factual events for the other two to scrutinize.

“Have you got a religion, Dobbs?” asked Lonn finally.

“None in particular.” She tilted herself sideways to get a better feel for the other Fool’s touch. “Why?”

“You might want to consider getting one.” Lonn lifted up a sequence and placed it in the center of her attention. “You’ve been incredibly lucky so far.”

This wasn’t her just her memory, this was a recombination of the notes she’d hijacked from Al Shei’s pen and a report she’d caught from Lipinski. Since the Hunt had begun, they’d identified thirty-five separate blips in the systems, all of them random and fleeting, but ten of them in essential areas: life support, climate control, engine timing.

Dobbs felt herself stiffen against the idea. She forced herself to relax again. Take it all in, she said down in her private self. Hear the worst and then how to fix it.

“I’m afraid I haven’t got anything better over here.” Brook pulled up another sequence to give to her. “It doesn’t look like one thing, it looks like a lot of things. There are at least two distinct code patterns in here and I’m counting twenty-six major active areas, and,” he paused, “it looks like it’s trying to haul itself together.”

Dobbs absorbed the new configuration. Lipinski and Odel had mapped out the anomaly in the pumping system and radiation detectors that had raised the alarm down in engineering, and the other anomaly that had broken down the intercom routing system. Brook had gathered that up with the snapshot she had of the Pasadena’s computer system and flashed a long, tangled line of communication between the two. “This is just a guess on the actual structure, the real comm-contact probably won’t last more than thirty picoseconds.”

“Between the specs you’ve shown us here,” Lonn picked up the older facts she had absorbed when she took the contract, “and the observations here.” Brook laid Al Shei’s records over top of the memory Lonn held. “I’d say some spot reconfigurations have been done on board to get this mess to work. Why, I don’t know, but whoever’s done it and for whatever reason, they didn’t tell your Houston or your Engineer. They’re operating on old data, and that’s what’s been hitching your systems up.” He paused and sorted through some adjoining memories. “Given what you’ve got on this Tully person, that, at least, shouldn’t surprise you.”

“So it’s either sabotage or stupidity.” Dobbs flattened herself out. “Wonderful.”

“There’s another possibility.” Cohen shifted uneasily. “Any chance your ship might have picked up a live one?”

“A live one? Looking like this?” Lonn’s incredulity was sharp.

Dobbs ignored him. “I’d thought that. But from where? There’s no facilities for an AI aboard, and Port Oberon isn’t even on the watch list, let alone the hot list. There hasn’t even been a hint of anything happening inside the Solar system for twenty years.

“Besides, this…mess is not acting like a live one. They’re randomly destructive. Go off like a bomb and scatter shrapnel everywhere at once.” Like I’m saying anything we don’t all know, thought Dobbs, privately, but she kept going. “This thing is going off here and there in bursts. One isolated section at a time.”

“I know that, but…” Cohen made a quick weaving motion indicating uncertainty. “But something is not falling into place here. I feel like we’re treating the symptoms.”

His uneasiness began to weigh Dobbs down. Cohen might be somewhat her junior in years, but he was not given to panic or flights of imagination.

“I’ll check on it,” she said, even though the idea left a cold, still spot inside her. “I’m going to need a trace on any systems being monitored inside the Solar System right now.”

“I can get you that,” Lonn assured her. “There’s a new watch on the Titania Freers. You might want to check the systems logs on what that pilot of yours has been up to.”

Dobbs shrugged her whole self. “Yerusha had an AI with her, but it just got eaten by whatever Pa Pasadena’s carrying around in its veins.” She took hold of Brook’s awareness. “What I need there is a retrace of Marcus Tully’s route over the past eight months, if we can.”

“That should keep me busy,” murmured Brook, stirring in a small whirlpool of annoyance. “For about the next year. Does Al Shei know how her business partner spends his time?”

“She does,” Dobbs kept herself smooth and even. “She’s had her reasons for putting up with it, which have been strained to the breaking point.”

“Don’t blame her a bit.” Cohen pulled back, taking the other two with him. “Good luck, Dobbs. We’ll have what answers there are in forty-eight hours.” The anesthetic that put her body far enough under to permit her to enter the network was un-healthy stuff, to say the least. With her diminutive frame, she could only tolerate an extended dosage once every two days without side effects.

PING! The alarm signal from her transceiver, back in the Pasadena, cut through her thoughts. This self, the signals and code had three seconds before it had to begin its journey back to her body.

One.

“Thank you.” Dobbs let the gratitude wash over all three of the Fools as they pulled their awareness away from her. Inside her, a set of processes began to shift and merge.

Cohen lingered behind in Dobbs’s outer self for just a moment longer.

Two.

“Dobbs, you’ve really got to work on this group’s AI paranoia, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know. Frankly, neither Lipinski nor Yerusha are making that aspect of the job any easier, let me tell you.”

“I can imagine.” Cohen shook himself ruefully. “Dobbs, you take care of yourself this run, all right? I am feeling…” his thoughts prickled uncomfortably against her consciousness.

“So am I, Cohen. So am I.”

Three.

Conscious thought began to sink into instinct. She wanted to go back. She couldn’t hold still. Time to go back, now. Time to get back to her body before it woke up and her brain’s functions blocked her implant’s abilities to reintegrate her into her organic mind.

Dobbs skimmed through the Guild Hall to the laser transmitter. She orchestrated her jumps as efficiently as she could. Urgency filled her actions and pressed additional speed on functions guided now full by instinct. Any second those blips in the Pasadena’s essential systems could break open into real crisis.

Finally, she felt the unmistakable path opened by her transceiver. Dobbs drizzled herself down it like a trickle of water down a drain. The transceiver recoded the signals so the implant could convert them into electrical signals that would raise the neurochemical impulses to diffuse into her and restart the body that her hypo dosage had shut down.

There had been cases where Fools’ bodies had woken up before the translation process was completed. The signal selves stayed in the nets as long as they could hold together, and then, they dissipated like Verence had. The body-selves though, woke up as if they had been in six month comas. They were permanently brain-damaged and unable to function independently ever again. The physiological markers for the process were inconclusive. Some theorized that without the extra boost from the implant signals, the cognitive functions repressed by the drugs stayed shut down. Some of the more theologically minded theorized it was because the soul had not returned to the body. Dobbs seldom wondered about the implications of either view. She was content to know the process worked.

Light and heat touched her. A thorny pain tingled in her hands and ankles. Her eyes blinked, her throat groaned softly and her tendons twitched as she gradually became aware that all these things really belonged to her.

Dobbs fumbled with the transceiver until she managed to pull it out of her socket and drop it into the box. Then, with forced patience, she began the long series of stretching exercises that the Guild prescribed to reorient her to her body, gently stretching and separating her toes, ankle circles, leg lifts, arm stretches, rotating her neck. At the end of twenty minutes, she was able to see without the tell-tale sensation of detachment that always followed a session in the net. She was defined by her body again.

Her body, which was parched with thirst, reeling with hunger and had a bladder that was about to burst.

Dobbs reeled to the bathroom and voided herself. She ran the tap, filling cup after cup of cold water, guzzling them as fast as she could. Feeling moderately more steady, she rifled through her bedside drawer for a deluxe-size ration bar. She had downed half of it when the grief hit.

Verence was dead. The memory surged up from her unconscious with all the rest of what she had learned in the net. Verence was dead. Her stomach clamped down on itself and so did her throat. Tears she couldn’t even think about controlling burst out of her eyes. She did manage to swallow her mouthful before the sobs welled up. Verence had saved her life. Verence had brought her to the Guild and stood by her while she was learning her trade. Dobbs remembered the little, bright-eyed woman tossing scarves in the air, heard her patient voice going over the principles of humor, felt her warm hand on her shoulder. Gone. Her first and best friend was gone.

When the tears finished and the sobs had quieted to gasps, Dobbs managed to force her damp palms down from her face and look up at the desk clock. She’d been out of the net for ten whole minutes.

All right, Dobbs, you do not have time to lollygag. She hoisted herself off the bed. A quick wash and some eyedrops took care of the worst of the evidence of her cry. She made herself finish off the ration bar, even though her stomach no longer felt like accepting it. Then, she activated the desk again and checked the time and the crew schedule. Lipinski was on duty and was probably in the comm center, building yet another diagnostic.

Dobbs took the stairs to the hold deck two at a time.

Her prediction proved accurate. Lipinski was swearing energetically at his boards as his pen flew across their surface, making choices and scrawling out orders. Whatever it was giving back to him, he did not like it.

“It’s not good enough, it’s not even close.” He wiped out the last line he’d laid down with a swift, angry stroke. “You’re not going to get around me like that, whoever the hell you are. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe you are…” If he had heard the hatch cycle, he gave no sign.

Dobbs felt a twinge of sympathy inside her as Lipinski lifted up his coffee bulb, thumbed the lid back and took a huge gulp.

She braced herself, set a cheeky smile on her face and stepped forward.

“They seek it here, they seek it there, the Houston seeks it everywhere. Is it in Heaven, is it in Hell, that damned, elusive…virus of totally unknown origin.” She finished off, deliberately lame. It was evident that Lipinski did not get the joke, but that was all right, he at least looked at her.

“Piss off, Fool,” he muttered.

“No thanks. Took care of that before I left my cabin.” She leaned both elbows against the corner of his board. “So, is it in Heaven or Hell?”

“I wish it was. Actually, I wish its maker was.” He erased the line he was working on and wrote QUERY NEW PATTERN CENTER LACKING HOUSTON AUTHORIZATION.

“Couldn’t be anywhere near that simple,” he said. “Crackers usually forget something simple though. They’re just like any other systems freak. They think they know everything, but they don’t. They know generalities, not specifics. They don’t know all the ins and outs of a particular system unless they’ve made a study of that single unit, and who in all the hells under all the heavens would have made a study of the Pasadena?”

“Someone who wanted Chandra’s curry recipe?” Dobbs quipped. “Or, better yet, someone who wanted to STOP Chandra’s curry recipe.” She drew herself up straight. “Marshall your forces troops! We cannot allow this to get out! We must invade in force, leave no corner unsearched, inside, outside, in my lady’s chamber! You!” she spun around and faced an imaginary private, “take the main database. You!” she spun again. “Take the bridge links! You!” She faced the back wall and poked at it with her index finger. “You take the kitchens, but she’s far to clever to leave it in plain sight. Stay in contact! We can’t let ourselves be cut off! We’ll surround it and cut off its back-ups, divide and conquer, Troops! Because if we don’t…”

Lipinski had gone round-eyed and slack jawed.

“Oh my God!” He snatched up his pen. “Oh my God, I’ve been looking for the wrong thing! I’m an idiot! An idiot!”

He began scribbling in a convoluted shorthand almost too fast for Dobbs to follow. He was ordering searches for binary signals, line feed-back, random number streams, not in any of the affected systems, but in the remaining “clean” systems.

The responses came back positive.

“Got you!” he cried. “Got you, you fractured key code imitation comm check! You’re mine! Intercom to Schyler!”

“Schyler here, Houston. Good news?” The hope in his voice was almost aching.

“Good news, Watch. I’ve found caught the thing talking to itself. It’s not a single virus, it’s a bunch of them.”

A moment of silence. “Please tell me you can do something about this?”

Lipinski licked his lips. “Now that I know what its comm patterns look like, I can write up some roadblocks for them. If we can isolate the individual nerve centers, we can pick them off one at a time.”

“Any chance of getting this done before we get to The Farther Kingdom?”

Lipinski looked down at his board. Responses from the ship’s systems were still coming in. He swallowed. “I don’t think so, but we can at least neutralize the thing, things, so that we stand a good chance of getting to The Farther Kingdom.”

“I’ll take that.” Schyler sighed. “Get going Lipinski. Dictate a report to your relief and let the rest of us know what we need to start doing. I’ll call Al Shei. Intercom to close.”

Lipinski flashed Dobbs the first genuine smile she’d seen in twenty-four hours.

“I could kiss you, you Fool.”

She smiled back. “Nah. You’d have to catch me first.”

She slid sideways out the hatch.

In the corridor, she rubbed her forehead. Dobbs, you need some sleep yourself. You keep giving him answers like that, he’s going to be leaving a permission-to-court request on your line before you can say ‘boo.’ And you don’t want to have to deal with that, do you ?

She started back up the stairs.

Do you?