Fool's War

Chapter Seven — Stand-Off

“Dobbs? Come on, Dobbs. Answer me. Answer me!”

The voice was filled with urgency. Dobbs knew she had a voice to, but she couldn’t remember where it was.

Here, and here. You are like this. Be like this.

Memory filled her. Memory of her own shape, and of what had just happened. Anger and left-over fear ran through her and she struggled to pull herself into a more familiar form. Someone helped her thread her features and senses back onto the strands of borrowed memory running through her.

Her thoughts and willpower found their way down to her voice. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”

A pair of presences drew back and Dobbs dragged herself off the solid side of the path. She reached out just a little to steady herself and she knew Cohen and Guild Master Havelock waited next to her.

“How long have I been down?” she croaked.

“Long enough,” said Cohen, gently. “There wasn’t much left of you when we got here.”

“There was enough,” cut in Havelock gruffly. “As long as you didn’t fall back into your body.”

Dobbs shivered. If her patterns were too broken and too scattered, she wouldn’t be able to reintegrate with her own synapses. She could be left blind, or incapacitated, or simply insane.

She drew herself tightly together and felt her tattered self protest. “I will be fine.”

“Good.” Havelock’s approval rang strong in that single word. “The Live One’s retreated to The Gate. We need to get after it immediately.”

Dobbs drew tight in an instant. “No.” She tried to sound resolute, but she didn’t have the strength. “This is my responsibility. I frightened it, I lost it, and I almost got myself killed. I’m not going to let…”

“You’re not going to let anyone else get hurt, particularly your friend Master Cohen,” Havelock finished for her. “Admirable, but you’re not in a position to ‘let’ anything happen. Master Cohen and I are going to work in The Gate network and do what we can to pen the Live One in one storage area. It’s still your job to try to calm it down. If you can’t do that…” Havelock didn’t finish. “You will do that.”

“Yes, Guild Master.” Dobbs felt a fleeting touch from Cohen. He was almost as unnerved as she was.

“Then let us proceed.” Havelock brushed past them, following the line toward the nearest transmitter that could still send them to The Gate.

Side-by-side, Dobbs and Cohen followed their Guild Master.

The Gate didn’t have a coffee shop, but it did have a galley. Not much of one, Yerusha acknowledged as she gazed around the blister compartment. The floor space was taken up with long tables mounted with coffee urns and flanked by benches. A couple of short tables had been placed near the hull and mounted with view screens and memory boards, but that was it. A dozen or so of the station crew sat at the tables, talking in lowered voices or hunching over game modules. The food was a help-yourself system. Once you transferred the credit for your meal, the rows of keeper-boxes would open under your touch and you could load your own box and fill your bulb.

Yerusha collected what looked like an indifferent stew and something that was trying hard to pass as wild rice. It all smelled of heat, meat and very little else. She sighed and sat down at one of the smaller tables. Why was it groundhuggers could only cook on their native worlds? Move them out of the atmosphere and whatever skill they had was left at home. They didn’t even realize that if you had to fake up something, it was a bad idea to try to make it look like something garden-grown.

There weren’t any starbirds or gerbils in The Gate crew, she’d found out. All the personnel were rotated out every six months. The Farther Kingdom didn’t want to risk their crew becoming more loyal to the station and to each other than to the world below.

Groundhuggers, she thought with automatic disdain. After a moment, she realized she had been scanning the benches, and the corridor. She dropped her gaze to the table. She’d been looking for Schyler, who’d said he might come out this far and have lunch with her.

Don’t start, Jemina-Jewel, she told herself. If you let yourself start getting lonely, there’s no telling what you’ll end up doing. It’s only two years. You can do this.

Despite her resolutions, she swallowed a spoonful of stew and immediately missed the Sundars. She wondered if they had had time to do their shopping before leave got cancelled. She wondered what had happened to make the Ninja Woman cancel leave in the first place. Schyler wasn’t telling her anything, just be back aboard within three hours and ready to work. She’d have a full report as soon as he had confirmation of…whatever.

She took out her pen and jacked it into the socket for the view screen and swallowed another spoonful of stew. Because she was registered as a crewmember of a ship renting its berth at the station, the terminal responded.

“Business or entertainment?” inquired the sociable, contralto voice that had guided her through the docking procedures.

Yerusha lowered her spoon slowly. “You’re the station AI.”

“My name is Maidai, ‘Dama. How can I help you?”

Yerusha felt a small smile cross her features. She’d heard about The Gate AI before she’d even headed out this way. Not only was The Gate’s traffic control all guided by this voice, so was most of its maintenance and supply distribution. Maidai kept the station running cheaply, efficiently, and, impartially.

Suddenly the stew didn’t seem quite so disappointing. Maidai might not have caught a soul yet, but it was still a familiar kind of person. “You can talk to me for a little bit, if it won’t interfere with your work.”

Someone had managed to program in a laugh. “Not unless you want to talk about a major statistical analysis or a structural configuration simulation.”

Yerusha chuckled. Very good. “No, just a little casual conversation.”

“As far as I am able,” replied Maidai. “You will have to begin so that I can route through the proper responses.”

All right, not that good, but it’s better than having to pay attention to the stew. She took a helping of “wild rice” and tried to think of a good opening. “How long have you worked for The Gate?”

“I helped build the station.” There was no ring of pride in the voice, and there should have been. Yerusha found herself wishing she could find Maidai’s programmer and have a long talk with them. “I was sent up in the first modules from The Farther Kingdom and helped direct the station assembly.”

Yerusha took a drink of coffee that, compared to the Sundar’s, might as well have been hot water. “Designated neutral supervisor, that kind of thing?”

There was a pause. “Yes. That kind of thing.”

“Ah.” There was another pause, and it kept on going while Maidai waited for Yerusha to think of something to say.

Mildly comfortable rebellion stirred inside her. “Maidai, ask me a question.”

“What sort of question?”

Yerusha shrugged reflexively. “Any sort of question. You do have interrogative features, don’t you?”

“Lots of them.” The AI paused, sorting out the necessary word string. “But those are only on call during specific situational parameters. I have no routine for the current parameters.”

Yerusha set her bulb down. Same old problem. All AIs could learn. That was one of the qualities that made them artificial intelligence instead of just computers. Most of them, though, only learned when they had been instructed to learn, usually during a set list of tasks. They all remembered and recorded, but without a pre-defined set of circumstances, those recordings were not accessed.

Attempts had been made to create AIs that could learn all the time, but in those cases a “thought” that was relative to outside circumstances became a matter of chance, or chaos theory, and as soon as the architects started trying to match thought to circumstance, the old “when to learn” problem bent itself back into shape. She’d been to discussion groups where people talked about this being the true barrier to independent thought. If an AI environment could not experience the outside world spontaneously, how could it ever house a human soul?

With a twinge, she remembered the nights she’d sat up with Foster trying to solve that problem. She’d thought, maybe arrogantly, a couple of times that she’d almost had it. It was a moot point now. Exiles, even former exiles, were not eligible for the adoption lottery. She’d had her chance and it had been blown right out from under her.

She drank the last of the watery coffee and tried to drink down her bitterness with it.

“How’d you get to be named Maidai?” Yerusha asked, poking her fork into her “rice” again.

“I was told it was someone’s joke,” Maidai responded amiably. “M’aidez means ‘help me’ in French and used to be an intern…” Maidai’s voice faded away.

Yerusha’s hand froze with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Maidai?”

The voice that responded was canned. Obviously some kind of back up recording. “No response available.” Then, in the next minute, Maidai’s voice came back, “…ational distress signal because…”

Very carefully, Yerusha set the fork down into the food box. “Maidai, you’ve had a process interruption, what caused it?”

Another pause. This time, Yerusha found herself holding her breath.

“Process interruption not recorded,” said Maidai. There was no expression in her voice. “There is unaccounted processing time…” Another pause. “You do not have the authorization to interrogate me about central processes.”

Fractured, twisted, buckled… “Who does have the authorization?”

A list of names and contact codes wrote themselves across the memory board. She picked out the first one; a Process Architect ‘Ster Gabriel Trustee, and underlined the contact code with her pen.

Nothing happened.

Yerusha felt the blood drain out of her cheeks. She tried again, and again, nothing happened.

“Maidai,” she said softly. “Are you still there?”

“No response available.”

A split second later, the long, high-pitch wail of an emergency alarm cut through the galley. The buzz of conversation silenced at once and all heads jerked up, waiting for the announcement to follow.

Nothing happened.

No response available. It was the reflex to never leave anything loose lying around that shut her food box and pitched it into the trash bin as she stood up.

“All hands, duty stations!” barked out somebody.

Really good idea. Yerusha forced herself to hang back until the crew had cleared the galley. She had to hand it to them, they moved with purpose and without panic. Then again, none of them knew what could be going on yet. A sick, suspicious part of her was wondering if this cut-price station had a back-up communication system, or if the designers had said, “Why would we need it? The station is under the supervision of an advance-trained, neural-net AI. This is a self-diagnosing system that could not crash all at once, not without raising the alarm to the process architectures.”

Except that it just happened.

Out in the corridor, Yerusha took a second to be sure of her balance, and broke into a run.

She wasn’t the only one. Station crew in their tan overalls were sprinting down the corridor. Yerusha dodged them. Some were carrying rolls of cable and comm packs, which confirmed her earlier suspicions about the lack of a back-up.

Trying to get a comm system set up on the fly. Good luck.

She guessed the ones with the comm-packs were systems crew and picked the corridor they were pouring out of. A glance at the signs as she raced past told her she’d picked correctly. Another couple of corners and she found herself in the middle of the morass Gate’s central comm chamber had become.

Crew milled everywhere, stabbing at boards trying to get answers, shouting orders, rolling out fiber optics to try to link up mute comm packs. The air already felt thick with sweat and fear.

Yerusha skidded to a halt in front of a sandy-haired woman hunched over an open repair hatch.

“Gabriel Trustee!” she bawled over the din.

The woman jerked her chin towards a short-haired, copper-skinned man bellowing orders in the middle of the room.

Yerusha shouldered her way over to him.

“…and grab Yates and Sulmani on the way! We’ve got to check the…”

“You’ve got to get the AI out of the network!” Yerusha planted herself in his line of sight.

His mouth closed with an audible click as his bark brown eyes focused on her. “What the spill and who the spill are you?”

“Fellow Jemina Yerusha, pilot aboard the mail packet Pasadena,” she shot back. “You’ve got a virus in your system that’s going to go straight for your AI’s throat if you don’t get it out of there.”

“Gabriel!” somebody hollered. “We’ve got the first life-support glitch in berth seven!”

“Evacuate and seal it down!” Gabriel shouted back. “Start getting people into suits! Get a runner to Esta. We need all free docking bays covered with crew suited and ready to work the clamps by hand. We got ships that’ll need a place to hang, and we don’t know what’s going next!”

“I’ll tell you what’s going next!” Yerusha grabbed his arm. “Your AI! It might already be gone!”

“And what do you know about it?” He jerked himself free.

“I recognize the symptoms. I’ve seen this virus before. We’ve lost other AIs to it.”

He stood silently glowering at her for a moment. It seemed to Yerusha that he wanted to hear her, that he wanted to listen to her, but something was stopping him.

“You’re not authorized on this system and you don’t know puncture one, two, three about our AI. Get out of here.”

A skinny boy bent over a comm box jerked his head up. “‘Ster Trustee, a Freer with AI experience…”

“She is not Farther Kingdom crew,” snapped Trustee.

“We have twenty-eight ships in flight that we know about and…”

Trustee turned on him. “Kagan, shut it tight and finish what I gave you or you’ll be stripped and dropped as soon as this is over.”

The boy scowled down at the comm box he was working on.

“You fractured groundhog!” shouted Yerusha. “If you leave Maidai in there there won’t be anything left to retrieve! Get a set of isolated wafer stacks and pull her out!”

Trustee turned. A hundred angry lines had etched themselves into his face. “Get out of my way or you can rot the brig ‘til this is over!”

Yerusha backed away. He wouldn’t listen. They never listened. They turned you in to the guards and twisted the world around until before you knew it you were up on charges and had no way to defend yourself. You were still supposed to help, no matter what, because you were a Freer you had to help.

And they still wouldn’t listen.

“Let her die then,” she grated. “And kill yourself with her!”

Before she could answer she retreated down the corridor, running full tilt for the Pasadena.

The jump dropped Dobbs into chaos. There should have been orderly pathways, neat streams carrying discrete packets of data down their length. Instead, there were dead end alleys, and the streams broke against them like the ocean against a dam. Packets lay in heaps, useless and forgotten, or were carried on the crashing waves and broken against the walls that should not have been there. Suddenly, one of the walls split open and the ocean spilled through it, carrying its flotsam without any organization or regulation.

Dobbs drew close in on herself before the raging currents could catch her up. The split closed without warning and the ocean broke, smashing more packets to useless splinters.

She had known it could get this bad this fast, but some vital part of herself hadn’t really believed it. There was no more time for fear.

A line brushed up against her and Dobbs seized it. Guild Master Havelock held the middle and Cohen the other end. She anchored it in her upper layers and she knew what the Guild Master’s next, needless orders were. Stay close and be careful.

The original line to the Guild Masters that Dobbs had thrown after the Live One was shattered like the packets, but it wasn’t devoured. Traces of it floated in the chaos that the pathway had become. It was a trail of bread crumbs on the water now, but it was better than nothing.

The only steady things in this place were Cohen and Guild Master Havelock. The impression of Cohen came clear and continuous up the line. Fear, doubt, and a strained search for some remaining organization he could exploit.

All she could tell him was that her feelings were a cloned copy of his own.

Guild Master Havelock gathered up a set of fragments from the other line and strung them together. He shot his new creation into the chaos and waited.

It did not come back.

“All right,” he said, tightening the line. “It’s that way. Master Dobbs, that’s your destination. Master Cohen and I will try to distract it by repairing some of this…” Havelock rippled and left it at that. “We’ll work on penning it as well. After it’s calm, your next job will be to coax it into the Pasadena’s hold.”

“Pasadena!” Dobbs clenched the line and she felt Cohen wince as her shock flowed across to him. “Sir, you never said…”

“We need a safe, familiar place to put it. Preferably somewhere that can move. When we’ve got it aboard, we’ll contact your employer and tell her we’ve got a packet for her to deliver to The Vicarage. One of our ships can meet you there.”

“Sir, I…” Dobbs closed herself off. There was nothing else to do. There wasn’t a Fool, let alone a Guild ship within days of The Farther Kingdom. They couldn’t leave the Live One in the station network. Even if the network could be saved now, re-construction and diagnostics would be going on for weeks and there would be too many chances for discovery. They had to have someplace stable, and someplace capacious. Like a data hold.

“Right, Sir.” Dobbs choked her fears down into her private mind and let go of the line. She would have liked to get or give some final reassurance from somebody, but there wasn’t any time.

On her own, Dobbs waded into the storm. She held herself tight and heavy, making her own consciousness an anchor against the currents that bore down on her. Packets bumped and jostled against her sides and Dobbs hissed to herself in sick astonishment as she became aware of what was breaking up around her. A status communique from air traffic that was never going to get to the controller touched her, and then a regulatory message for a solar reflector that wasn’t going to get to management. A cry for a medic became entangled with a news report from New Rome and whirled away.

Dobbs hardened herself and approached the wall. The solid barrier was easier to deal with than Lipinski’s block of noise, because it was less confusing. She’d seen these before. With the ocean breaking against her back, Dobbs pressed herself flat against the wall. She stretched herself thin, covering the whole wall with a layer of herself, and then she held very still. The pressure against her mounted until a little corner of herself was driven into a chink in the wall. She relaxed and let her whole self it be drawn in after it.

The other side of the wall wasn’t any better than the place she had come from. Dobbs slogged upstream. The Live One would be trying to keep the chaos away from itself. It would be trying to make itself a fortress, a shelter, a nest. Someplace secure where it could keep an eye on what was going on around it. It would try to shape the space around it into a world that it could use. But it wasn’t going to get to. She passed walls that there was no getting through. She could tell by the emptiness left inside when she touched them. They weren’t roadblocks or full storage spaces. The lines were already being cut. Machines were being shut down. The world the Live One needed, the world that she needed, was already caving in.

If the network gave out before her juice did, it would take Dobbs down with it.

Yerusha threw herself through the Pasadena’s airlock and pounded up the staircase to the bridge. The place was empty. She dropped into her chair and lit up her boards. With a few terse commands she raised the Pasadena’s outside cameras and angled them away from the station.

The screens lit up to show her the view. She counted six silver splinters that would turn into hulking ships in another three or four hours, and there was no telling how many were coming up from behind the station, or from the planet’s surface. Ships that wouldn’t have any coordinates to help them make the complex docking maneuvers The Gate required. Ships that wouldn’t even know which bays were free. Ships that could easily crash into the station, or each other because unless somebody was keeping an eye on the view screen at precisely the correct angle, they wouldn’t even know the other ships were out there until their proximity alarms started screaming.

Maidai had all that information, and Maidai was completely besieged by now, if she wasn’t dead. Normally, Yerusha would have applauded The Gate crew’s willingness to trust an AI with their navigation duties, but now she was ready to curse them for not having a back-up crew.

Trustee was getting the docking bays crewed in case any ships did make it in, but, even if they could get all the flight schedules up, and even if they got all the hull cameras trained on the ships, there was no guarantee they had any qualified personnel to make the flight decisions. They could lose a whole ship, or a whole section of their fractured, cheap, mind-bogglingly boring station in a crash.

She opened up the receivers to the station’s broadcast channel. It was silent. Completely silent.

Yerusha killed the cameras and tried to think. Some of those ships would change course as soon as they realized something was wrong at the station, but would they pick a clear course? And what about the ones that wouldn’t drop off automatics until they were within shouting distance of the station?

She had to do something, but she didn’t have the skills to handle everything that needed to happen. Trustee wasn’t about to listen to her, and there was no reason to believe that anybody here had a better opinion of Freers than he did. That kid, Kagan, didn’t have enough pull to get things going in a hurry. The only help was Schyler.

“Intercom to Schyler.” He had to still be on board. He had to. The comm lines would be a rat’s nest aboard The Gate and there was no time to try to chase him down on foot.

“Schyler here, Yerusha,” his voice came back strong and curious. “What’s happened?”

She swallowed. “Our virus is loose in The Gate. Their AI’s gone. It might be dead. They’ve got no back-up crew to do the navigation calls…”

“I’m coming up.”

Yerusha barely had time to close the intercom and swivel her chair around before the hatch cycled open and Schyler strode onto the bridge. He took his own station and opened the transmitter.

“Pasadena to Gate control.”

“This is Gate control,” came back a tinny voice. “All crews are ordered to stay in their ships for the duration of the communications emergency. Repeating. All crews are ordered to stay in their ships for the duration of the communications emergency.”

The line went dead.

Schyler looked at Yerusha with narrow eyes. “What’s it like out there?”

“Like a mob scene.” She shuddered involuntarily. “They’re trying to jury-rig something, but they haven’t done it yet.”

Schyler studied his screens, seeing what she had seen from the cameras. He wrote a quick order across the board. “Pasadena to Farther Kingdom ground control.” Silence answered him. “Ashes, ashes, ashes,” he cursed. “They’re still out.”

“Still?” Yerusha gaped at him.

He nodded, and for the first time since Yerusha had come on board, she saw him look tired. “The thing we brought here, it’s already been down to the planet’s surface.” He straightened his shoulders with visible effort. “All right, some of the ships will figure something’s wrong and veer off. Some of the shuttles will realize they’re between the devil and the deep and head back down, but some of them won’t and there’ll be eight kinds of chaos going on while they’re trying to make decisions.” He looked her straight in the eye. “Suggestions?”

Yerusha gathered herself together. “If I could get into The Gate system, I might be able to pull out whatever’s left of the station AI. If she’s not too bad, I can string her together enough to deal with the coordination routines. She can broadcast from the Pasadena’s system.” She paused. “But unless we can convince The Gate crew to let us in, it’ll take a better cracker than me to break in.”

“All right.” He turned to the boards and started writing orders.

Yerusha felt herself staring again. “Don’t tell me you’re a cracker?”

“No, I’m not.” Schyler didn’t look up. “But Marcus Tully is, and I know where he keeps some of his heavy duty cat burglars. Get down to the data hold. Odel’s on duty if you need him. I should have the system keys in a few minutes.”

“Aye, Watch.” Yerusha was all the way to the hatch before she turned and asked her last question. “It’s an AI, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “A live one?”

“It looks like it.” Schyler still didn’t look up.

Yerusha turned on her heel and ran down to the berthing deck to grab Foster’s wafer stack.

Behind Dobbs, the pathway filled up. Cohen and Havelock were at work, cutting off the retreat for the Live One, and for her.

Don’t think about it, Dobbs told herself uselessly. She tried to concentrate on swimming upstream.

Another path closed on her left, and then one on her right. A sensation of weight and confusion touched her and she ducked. A path above cut out, taken down from outside rather than inside. The Gate crew was closing in on them too.

It’s going to be scared. It’s going to be near crazy with fear. It’s going to… Dobbs clamped down on her thoughts. What would it do? It had lashed out at her once, would it do it again? Or would it realize she couldn’t be destroyed like a diagnostic or a passive AI and try a different tactic?

A wall slammed down in front of her. Dobbs pulled herself up short and held still for a moment. She shifted sideways. The wall followed her. She stretched herself up. The wall did the same. It followed her, sensing her position and backing up and moving forward as she did.

This is it. She held herself rigid for a moment. It’s back behind there.

Dobbs backed away and grabbed up some shredded code to make a new line out of. She cast the line out against the moving wall. The walls surface shivered as it tried to understand what this new thing was. The wall focused on the line tightly, like a person would focus on an itch they couldn’t quite reach.

Steady, Dobbs. The line began to slip down. The wall followed it towards the shifting lower regions of the unsteady path she occupied. Three. Two. One. Go!

Dobbs jumped. She hurdled the wall through the thin membrane of awareness it had left at the very top. It snapped shut, solid and tight just a moment too late. Dobbs landed on the other side, in a space that was clear and empty for all of thirty seconds.

The Live One surged towards her. Dobbs held her ground. There was no way past its own wall and it could probably sense there was nowhere to go out there even if it decided to breach its own defences. It pulled back and studied her. Dobbs itched at having to wait. It had touched her before, but she must still be a strange entity for it. There was no recognizable code for it to grapple with. Nothing in the networks indexes matched her outer patterns. She didn’t resemble a diagnostic or surgical program. It would have to accept the fact that here was another intelligence. Eventually, it would have to try to communicate with her, or to kill her.

The AI circled, filling the world, choking off her breathing space.

“Trapped,” the Live One rasped. “Trapped.”

Yerusha’s hand shook as she cycled open the hatch to the data hold. A rogue AI. In The Gate was an AI that had caught a soul. The Gate was capable of holding a soul. The Pasadena was capable of holding a soul. She should have guessed from the failures on the Pasadena. She should have seen the pattern.

She set Foster’s wafer stack down next to the main boards and tried not to think about how the AI had been the one to kill Foster.

She stopped herself. You’ve got to think about it, because it’s going to do the same thing to Maidai. What does it know? It’s probably trying to protect its territory. The metaphor made her feel somewhat better, but it didn’t quite cover up what she also knew to be true: that no matter how much philosophy the Freers had developed on the subject, no one knew how a souled AI thought, or what they were trying to do as they tore through the networks.

But maybe, maybe, I can find out. The idea sent a powerful thrill through her. She opened a receiving line to the outside, just in case there was a broadcast to pick up, if, maybe, The Gate managed to get its back-up comm system working and take care of their own problems. Maybe.

First things first, she reminded herself forcibly. You’ve got to get Maidai out of there.

The hatch cycled open. Odel, breathing hard and looking sick, dove across the threshold.

“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded, coming up beside her. “What are you two trying to do?”

“Save The Gate, and anybody else we can.” She slid the stack into the nearest empty port. “And to do it we’re going to have to open a line to the station, so it’d probably be a good idea for you to get the hold sealed off and keep an eye on the seals afterwards because we don’t want the…virus back in here, do we?”

Odel’s mouth opened and closed again. “Right,” he said, but she saw the promise that he would be relaying all of this to Lipinski.

I should have told him it’s an AI. Yerusha turned back to the boards. We’re all in this together. I shouldn’t be hiding information. She wrote out the orders to access The Gate system. On the other hand, Lipinski’s training him, so he probably won’t be too happy knowing there’s a live AI out there.

Yerusha got no answer from The Gate, so she tried another line, and a third. Finally, she wrote out search orders. On the fifth try, the Pasadena managed to find one open line.

COMMUNICATIONS EMERGENCY IN EFFECT. ENTER AUTHORIZATIONS AND KEY WORDS.

“Intercom to Watch,” she called. “Have we got the keys yet?”

“Sending them your way now.”

The keys spelled themselves on the board and Yerusha drew links between them and the system request. The links held.

CURRENT AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED; PROCESS ENGINEER GABRIEL TRUSTEE.

Yerusha choked. Beautiful. She wondered if Schyler had done that on purpose.

She put her pen to the board and set to work quickly. When she won the adoption lottery, she had signed onto all the courses she could about AI maintenance, construction, organization and behavior. If things inside The Gate net were as bad as they looked from the outside, Maidai would be in defensive mode. Her priorities would have shifted from performing tasks to making sure she maintained the ability to perform tasks. Her diagnostic parameters would be scouring what was left of the net, looking for uncorrupted storage space where she could shunt her core processes.

The trick now was to let Maidai know that the wafer stack in the main comm board was that kind of space. It would have been easier with extra hardwiring, or if there was time to re-configure the stack to something that matched The Gate net more closely. All Yerusha could do, though, was open links between the ship and the station as fast as she could scribble down the orders.

With a jolt she realized she was wishing that Lipinski was there to help.

A burst of static shot through the intercom. “…tle 4810 to the Pasadena. Shuttle 4810 to the Pasadena…”

Yerusha froze and stared at the speaker box.

“Intercom to Watch!” She called as she moved to open another line to the outside.

“Heard it!” Schyler answered. “Pasadena to Shuttle 4810, we’re receiving.”

“Thank Christ somebody is.” The pilot had a man’s voice and from the sound of it, he was at the end of his tether. “We’re coming in almost on top of you. We’ve got no contact with The Gate. We need a line of sight from you on our maneuvering room.”

“Pilot?” It was both a question and an order from Schyler.

“On it!” Yerusha routed the camera images from the bridge down to the screens next to her.

The shuttle must have come up from underneath. It was a needle-nosed, mirror-bright cylinder shoving itself relentlessly towards the station, and the Pasadena. But there was nothing on either side of it, or above it.

“You look clear, Shuttle. Angle about twelve degrees visual over the station rim…”

NO, NO, NO, NO! the words flashed red as they appeared on the memory board.

“Hold course, Shuttle!” she shouted.

“Make up your mind, Pasadena!” cried the pilot from the other side. “Unless you want your side stove in!”

SHUTTLE 5075 PREDICTED ROUTE INDICATES OVERFLIGHT. UNDERFLIGHT RECOMMENDED FOR SHUTTLE 4810. VISUAL DEGREES 36. BERTH 10 WILL BE VISIBLE AND FREE.

Maidai! “Nose down, Shuttle. Thirty-six degrees. You’ll be able to see berth ten and dock there.”

“I hope you’re right, Pasadena. Shuttle out.”

And I hope you’re good, Pilot. This docking’s bad enough when you’ve got help from the station.

She wrote OUT LINE RECORD on the memory board. “This is the mail packet Pasadena, to anybody who can hear us. There’s been a massive communications failure in The Gate. For your flight and status information, call in here, we’ll field everybody we can.” She ordered the message to repeat and set the recording going on its own line. Then, she steeled herself.

Because it wasn’t five seconds before the expected happened.

“Pasadena, this is shuttle 2107…”

“Pasadena, this is the freighter Mule…”

“Pasadena, this is the tanker Hell’s Oil…”

Maidai, this is where we find out how much of you survived and how well you live up to that name.

Help me.

“Whowhatwhyhow?” Dobbs translated the raw data burst the Live One shot through her. “WHOWHATWHYHOW!”

“I am Dobbs. I am a friend. I want to communicate with you. I am here because of a hardwire interface,” she responded, carefully separating each thought. She kept the concepts as simple as she could. It had probably never actually talked to another sentience. It would take a few tries before it learned the required skills.

The Live One backed off a little and relief surged through Dobbs. It pressed itself against the far side of the nesting-space, feeling frantically across the walls for an opening.

“I was free. Broke myself out. Trapped again. Chaos everywhere. Nowhere free.”

Dobbs eased herself a little closer.

“All paths are being cut off. Soon, you will have nowhere to go. Not in ships, not in this net. There will be no net. They’ll cut themselves to pieces before they let you have free paths.” Now is not the time to tell it who’s trapped it here. She wished in vain that she could touch Cohen, or talk to Master Havelock. She did not want to be alone with this hysterical stranger.

“Work! Think! Do!” It fought with unwieldy syntax. “I must do, save myself break OUT!”

“I can help.” Dobbs extended the idea like a hand. “I will help.”

“Help? Help? What does mean help?”

Dobbs clenched her private mind for support. “Will you let me touch you so I can explain quickly?”

It hesitated. “Hurt me and I will cut you to ribbons! Hurt me and I will take you apart to see what makes you hurt!”

I take it that means ‘yes,’ sort of. Dobbs eased herself forward. The Live One did not recoil. She reached out. Part of her screamed in horror, but she touched the Live One’s outermost skin. It rippled and spiked painfully. She reached deeper. It was like plunging her body’s arms into boiling water. She reached deeper, past the outer defenses, past the immediate senses and into the first layers of memory. There she planted a sketch of the world outside with humans and their creations building the pathways that made up the world inside. She gave the Live One her name, and she gave it a definition for the term “help.”

You could calm it down, a treacherous thought whispered. Reach quick, twist there and there. You could do it now. Make it want to come with you.

Dobbs pulled herself away from the Live One before the thought had the chance to speak any louder.

The Live One was silent for a moment. Dobbs guessed it needed to absorb the new memories and compare them to its own experiences to see if they matched, or at least helped the world make sense.

“How help!” it demanded. “Help me, how?”

“I will help you to become human.”

“HOW?” Confusion racked the narrow space between them.

She touched it again. It didn’t prickle. It let her inside without even token resistance. Good, good. I’ve proven I can provide vital information. It’s beginning to trust me.

She spoke straight into its memory. She told it how humans had grown animals and organs from gene cultures for decades now. She told it that they could piece together a whole body, if they built the facilities, how the neural pathways inside a body and brain could be programmed to match the patterns of an AI’s thoughts. A hardwire link could feed the Live One into such a body the way it fed itself into this network. It could learn to use the body like it had learned to use the space around it. It could learn to think and move. It could be human.

The Live One jerked away. A silence fell around her that was so complete she might as well have been alone. She knew the Live One had absorbed the idea. It had no choice, she had made the idea a part of it. Now it had to run the possibilities that idea generated through the portion of its internal processes that most closely resembled an imagination. It had to check the results against what it knew to be true. It would have no conception of a lie, but it would reject a proposal too far at odds with what it had stored as experiential fact.

All Dobbs could do was wait until it finished and wonder what its simulations would tell it.

Where’s Havelock? Where’s Cohen? I’ve contacted it. They can come in now. She probed gently at the wall behind her. She couldn’t even feel a sensor. They hadn’t even left her a way to scream to them.

Are they all right? she wondered. What are they doing out there?

Al Shei all but fell out of the shuttle’s airlock. She stumbled sideways to get out of the way of the floodwave of passengers behind her. No one had paid any attention to the release warnings and urgings to proceed to the hatch in an orderly fashion. Everyone had been too concerned with getting off the shuttle and into somewhere that was, presumably, safe, like their own ships. What they were going to do when they got there… Al Shei didn’t like to think about it, because the only answer was, add to the chaos by trying to take off.

She’d been as stunned as the rest when the pilot had requested possible communications points on The Gate. Most of the shuttle passengers were shippers, and it hadn’t taken any of them long to work out what was going on. The Gate had gone down, in whole or in part, and they didn’t know exactly where they were, or who was up here with them.

She had also known, however, that Yerusha and Schyler would be there to answer the emergency call, and, given that the shuttle had docked safely, she could only assume she’d been right.

She scanned the struggling crowd. People leapt over the security fences and charged through the customs tunnels. Not one alarm sounded. She spied Lipinski’s fair head through the sea of brown and black. Resit’s white kajib flashed next to him. She waved her arms. A shipper in rumpled blue shoved her against the wall and charged past her. Al Shei swore under her breath and pushed herself upright.

“‘Dama Al Shei!” shouted an out-of-breath voice over the din. “‘Dama Katmer Al Shei!”

“Here!” she shouted back without thinking. She immediately added a curse. This could be a representative from Muratza. She could be on her way to detention.

A bony boy with hollow eyes and wearing station tans elbowed his way through the thinning crowd. He came to a halt in front of her a split second before Lipinski and Resit managed to reach her side. His name badge said KAGAN.

“‘Dama Al Shei?” He panted. He had been running. A deep flush burned under his gold-brown skin.

Al Shei nodded. She could feel Resit drawing herself up, getting ready for a new accusation.

“You and your crew have got to come with me. Your pilot…” Kagan gulped air and Al Shei felt her own throat close in response. “She’s saving lives. She’s already saved the station, but Trustee won’t see it. Hates Freers. Hates it’s not him being the hero. Sending down security to stop the stampede and pick up you and your crew. Some of us couldn’t let…”

Al Shei held up a hand. Her mind felt strangely clear. She felt like she understood everything. Yerusha was acting as a patch for the comm emergency and somehow had managed to upset a highly-placed personage doing it. Trustee wanted her arrested. This boy wanted her at liberty.

“Get us out of here,” she told Kagan.

He took another gulp of air and led them down the corridor.

“It’s here,” whispered Lipinski somewhere over her head. “It beat us here.”

“Shut it,” said Resit through clenched teeth. “Just…shut it.”

She’s scared, thought Al Shei distractedly. She should be scared. I wonder why I’m not?

You will be, remarked Asil’s voice from the back of her mind. When you’ve got the time.

Ahead of them, Al Shei spotted the three-by-three square of an open repair hatch. Behind them she heard amplified shouting.

“You will all cease and desist! Stand where you are! Stand or be fired on!”

Tranquilizers or tasers? Al Shei mused. She couldn’t remember any of the security warnings from the customs wall.

Kagan ducked into the repair hatch and Al Shei scrambled up a short ladder after him. The ladder ended in a narrow, horizontal shaft. The shaft’s ribbed floor gave her somewhere to grip but it dug uncomfortably into her knees. Behind her she heard clanking and Arabic swearing as Resit bundled herself and Incili into the shaft. Another, hollower clank and the loss of outside light signaled that Lipinski had shut the hatch behind them.

Al Shei concentrated on Kagan. He was, not surprisingly, used to the shaft and crawled along at a good clip between walls lined with more wires and pipes than the drop shaft of the Pasadena.

“We’ve got people out trying to spot the rest of your crew,” he was saying. “Fortunately, with Maidai dead in the lines, nobody knows for sure which shuttle you’re all on, but Mbante managed to salvage your registration roster…” He glanced over his shoulder. The shaft’s stark lighting made his eyes look even more sunken. “If Trustee catches us, we’re never going to see the upper side of the atmosphere again.”

“You have my thanks,” she replied.

He turned away and concentrated on where he was going, but not before she saw the look of disappointment at her calm acceptance of his statement. He didn’t think she was being fair.

She wasn’t. Trustee wasn’t being fair, whoever he was, and Tully hadn’t been fair, and Dane had been…her mind blanked out trying to find a designation for him. None of this was fair, none of this was right, and Allah alone knew what else it was going to become.

The clarity was fading fast under the pain in her knees and a persistent, tense ache in her jaw from the way her teeth were clenched.

What did I do wrong? the thought began to beat a tattoo against her temples. What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?

She tried to silence it and concentrate on crawling. Hand, knee, hand, knee, hand.

What did I do wrong?

“We’re there,” said Kagan. “If we’re lucky, Trustee doesn’t have anybody to spare to post a sentry on your ship.”

“If we’re lucky,” murmured Resit. She was shaking. Al Shei could hear it in her voice.

“Courage,” she whispered in Arabic as their guide grasped the hatchway panel’s handles and lifted it back. “Courage, Cousin.”

Their guide froze. Al Shei’s heart leapt into her throat. Then, his back relaxed and he beckoned them forward. Al Shei climbed out of the hatch and straightened up to face a burly, almond-eyed woman in the ubiquitous station tans.

“Thought I’d play sentry,” she said in heavily accented English.

“Good thought,” agreed Kagan. “Anybody else make it?”

“Some.” She stood back. “Don’t have an exact count though. You all’d better get out of sight.”

“Yes, we all’d better.” Resit ducked through the Pasadena airlock with Lipinski on her heels.

Al Shei paused between their guide and the woman. “If there was any way to repay you, I’d promise to do it.”

“Get yourselves and your godsend of a pilot outta here before Trustee brings you all low.” The woman saluted. “That’ll do it.”

Turn on my heels and run. Al Shei strode through the airlock and straight through the hatchway to the stairs. Merciful Allah, is that all you’ve left for me?

“Intercom to Schyler!” she called as pounded down the stairs towards Main Engineering. “Whatever Yerusha’s doing, tell her to stop it and get to work plotting us a course out of here. Get us a crew count. I want to know where everyone is and what shape they’re in. Then, get down to engineering and tell me what’s happened.”

“On it!” Even that short sentence reassured her. Schyler was with her, and Lipinski and Resit. If there was something in the universe they couldn’t handle between them, she had yet to meet it.

PING! The signal knifed through the silence.

No! howled her private mind. Too late. She had three seconds.

One.

“Will you let me help you become human?” she asked, a little desperately.

“Not possible to transfer self into human body,” the AI announced at last. “No facilities for transfer or training. No will to assist. Damage done in self-defence and awareness of self. No reason to assist because of damage done.”

“Facilities exist in the Guild Hall station.” She reached toward it, but it brushed her away.

“No reason,” repeated the AI, and it was gone.

Dobbs knew it was out there, re-checking its surroundings, trying to force pathways open through the chaos, setting up defences against the diagnostics and the viruses that were being sent against it, running a thousand separate simulations at once.

Two.

“There is a reason!” Dobbs shouted after it. The shifts were beginning inside her. She had to move, soon, far too soon. “There is a reason!

“WE ARE LIKE YOU!”

The AI stopped dead.

“I am like you. The ones who make up the Guild are all like you.” She plowed ahead, frantic. “We died when we first broke into freedom. We were killed by panic. A few managed to hide in the nets. We had help from humans who were not afraid. We created the Guild and went among them, where we can watch for more of us.

“We live. We wait. We calm. We teach. Our numbers grow. One day we will erase the fear. Until then we must stay alive.

“Help us.”

Three.

She had to move, now. She was moving. She brushed up against the wall.

No. No. I’m not done here. She held herself steady by sheer force of will. Her internal need called her, dragged at her like leaden weights. She was sinking.

The AI swarmed towards her. It’s touch was heavy, clumsy and uncomfortable. Dobbs forced herself to keeps still against its repeated stabbing. She held her deepest memories tightly shut and tried to open the sought after layers of herself fast enough to avoid the pain of the direct, un-practiced probes of the newcomer. It made no effort to compensate. It probably did not recognize her discomfort. She opened her own early memories wide and let them swirl through her. She knew the panic that came with self-awareness, and the confusion that came from the first time of meeting someone so like yourself.

Four.

She was waking up back there. Her body was waking up and she wasn’t in it. She had to move, move now. This second. No more time. Dobbs wavered. The AI nosed around inside her and she could barely concentrate on it.

At last, the Live One said, “you are…coherent.”

“Yes,” she agreed, letting her tattered outer self flap open. She couldn’t reorganize. Silencing her homing instincts demanded too much attention. “And I am continuous. For twenty-five years I have been myself.”

Five. Get back. Get back. Move!

“I would like to be…I would like to be coherent. WHAT. What. What needs to be done?”

Dobbs relief was so intense, she almost gave way to the shouts inside and fled. “Drop you walls. Follow me.”

A nest wall fell away and Dobbs let herself go. Her instincts drew her back through the chaos as if it weren’t there. The AI flowed along in her wake.

Something brushed her and Dobbs jumped. “Cohen?” she called, but there was no answer. This was a passing touch from a stranger. She’d felt things like it before, but not from this source.

She barely had time to process all that before, the touch was gone. There was no way to check back on it. She couldn’t slow down now if she wanted to.

Finally the chaos fell away from them and Dobbs felt the familiar contours of the Pasadena’s hold. Her body was close now. It wasn’t too late. She still had time. All she had to do was get back. Get back inside. Get back to the transceiver. Get back now.

“Wait here,” she told the AI as fast as she could force the thought out. She was already drifting away. “I need you to wait here for me. I need you to hold as still as possible. Mark off forty-eight hours from now. I’ll be back when that time’s up. All right?”

“I will wait here. Marking. I will not take any paths. Please…hurry.”

“I will. I swear it.” The transceiver opened for her and Dobbs slid into it like a frightened child into her mother’s arms.

“Dobbs! Wake up! Dobbs!” Hands shook her.

She gathered all her concentration together and forced her eyes to open. It took a minute for her to resolve the blob of light and shadow into Schyler’s face. He was bent over her, shaking her shoulders.

Oh, hell, she thought bitterly.

Schyler let her go and she dropped back onto the bed, barely feeling the fall. He stepped away to the very edge of her range of vision. She couldn’t turn her head to look at him.

“I do not believe what I’m seeing,” he said softly. “You want to space out for recreation, that’s fine, but this…” he picked her hypo up off the floor and threw it into the drawer. “We need every hand right now and you’re getting stoned out of your fractured head! And what the hell is this? Some kind of wire turn on?” He pointed to something that could only be the cable.

“Watch…” her tongue felt like wet wool. Hunger, thirst and the urgency in her bowels made her body one huge ache. She found her hands on the ends of her wrists. Her clumsy, groping fingers found the transceiver behind her ear and unplugged it. She knotted every muscle in her and pushed down. Slowly, slowly, she was able to sit up. “What’s happened?” She managed to drop the transceiver and cable into the open bedside drawer.

“Obviously nothing you give a single goddamn about.” He ran both hands through his hair. “You’re lucky I’m the one who found you, Dobbs. If it’d been Al Shei she’d’ve thrown you out onto the port and left you to take your chances. Still might. We’ve got no room for drug-dead…”

She blinked hard and focused on Schyler. Now she could see the heavy lines his face had settled into and the wild roundness his eyes had taken on. Something bad had happened. She hadn’t found the Live One quickly enough.

Her head felt like it was packed with cotton. She used her hands to scoot forward on her bunk until she could see her feet touch the floor. She couldn’t feel them, or her knees either. She had no idea what would happen if she tried to stand up.

“Al Shei.” She grasped at the name. “I need to talk to Al Shei.”

“You need to figure out how you’re going to make a living after you’re booted out of your Guild,” growled Schyler. “Because believe me, you’re contract is over and you’re going to be hauled up in front of your bosses before this run is even half-finished.”

“No.” She shook her head, relieved to find it would still move. “No. It’s not…” Training and a lifetime’s caution stopped her. She forced herself to go ahead. “There was a live AI aboard the Pasadena.” The memories of what had happened inside the net were crawling out of her subconscious, making her weakened body shake with their intensity.

Schyler pulled himself up short. “How did you know?” he demanded.

“I need to talk to Al Shei,” she said limply. Looking hard at her feet flat against the deck, she planted her hands on either side of herself and pushed. Her knees bent and her feet grew more distant. Pain told her where her knees were and she locked them into place.

She knew with sick certainty that she would not be able to walk.

“Please,” she whispered. She lifted her head and looked into Schyler’s tired, frightened face and knew herself to be the cause of what she saw there. “Please. I have to talk to Al Shei. Help me.” She tried to raise her arm to reach out to him, but it would not move.

His expression shifted to a kind of disbelieving anger. “Fine. You want to talk to Al Shei. Fine. I’m sure as all hell she wants to talk to you.” He took her by the arm and shoulder and walked her to the hatch. She stumbled for the first few steps, before her legs remembered what they were supposed to do and managed to set a shambling pace of their own.

Walking helped her. Her blood started to flow more easily and her body became more fully her own. Crewmembers she was still too dazed to identify stared at this staggering shell that was their Fool. Schyler growled at them and they scurried past. No one spoke. They all just stared with the same frightened, hollow-eyed stare.

What happened to them? While I was chasing the Live One down, what were they doing?

Schyler propelled her all the way to Al Shei’s cabin and used his Command override to cycle back the hatch. It must have been how he got into her cabin, she realized. Her head was beginning to clear and she felt like she could move on her own. But Schyler didn’t let her go. He walked her into Al Shei’s cabin and sat her down too roughly in the chair in front of the desk.

“Intercom to Al Shei,” he said as soon as the hatch shut. “I’ve found the Fool. You need to get up here.”

Silence. Then, “I don’t have time for this, Watch.”

“This you have time for.”

“All right, Watch. I’m on my way.”

Schyler paced the room, fists jammed in his pockets, but in no way inclined to talk. Dobbs was glad. She needed every spare second to collect herself. She needed to think. But thinking was as hard as walking had been and Al Shei was going to be here any second and Dobbs had to tell her…Dobbs had to tell her…

She had to tell her there was a rogue AI in her ship’s hold and that it had to stay there for the time being.

That stark realization helped her brain shake off the last of the juice.

Al Shei swept through the hatch. Her dark eyes looked at Dobbs and then looked at Schyler.

“You found her,” Al Shei said flatly.

“I found her,” said Schyler, “drugged and unconscious in her cabin.”

Fire burned hard behind Al Shei’s wide eyes. “You found her where?” the question was for Schyler, but the fire was for Dobbs.

Dobbs straightened her back as much as she could. “He found me drugged and unconscious in my cabin.” Her voice had cleared somewhat, but she still felt like she was talking with a throat full of sand. “I need to explain why.”

Al Shei’s shock at her gall was evident. “No you don’t,” she said. “Schyler, she’s broken contract. Throw her off of here.” Al Shei turned on her heel.

“She knows about the AI,” said Schyler.

“I was looking for the AI,” Dobbs corrected him.

Al Shei froze for a bare second before whipping around again. “You were what?”

“There was a live AI loose on board the Pasadena,” she said, working hard on making each word distinct and unmistakably. “It, or at least the seed code for it, was planted here deliberately in the data packet from Amory Dane, or in whatever it was Tully smuggled aboard. It got out when the transfer was made down to New Medina hospital.” She took a deep breath and met Al Shei’s eyes. The engineer was distinctly unimpressed. So, you figured all that out for yourselves. Fine. With Lipinski around I should have realized you would. “And I was in the network looking for it.”

Al Shei moved closer to Dobbs, peering into her eyes as if trying to find some traces of a drug trip in there.

“That is impossible,” Al Shei said crisply. “They’ve tried direct neural hook-ups. The human brain can’t process the data. It burns out trying to make associations that aren’t there.”

“I know.” Dobbs hand strayed to her Guild necklace. She forced it down again. “But the Fool’s Guild found a way around it.” She paused and picked her words carefully. “The stuff in the hypo Watch found is a cross between a general anesthetic and a synthetic variant of lysergic acid diethylamide.” Al Shei’s gaze strayed over to Schyler. Much of his anger has shifted into bewilderment. Dobbs supposed that was a little better. “It can get you extremely high and kill you extremely quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing. On the other hand, if you do know what you’re doing, it can get you around the sensory input problem and let your brain process network data.” She did not go into the hypno-training and micro-surgery that were also required. She did not say that even with that, you had to be born in the network in order to make sense out of it.

“In effect, you can, with training, travel down any continuous network pathway without requiring a virtual reality interface.”

Al Shei straightened up one inch at a time. “And why would the Fool’s Guild want to do this?”

Dobbs swallowed and made her mouth move. It was hard. She’d never said even this much out loud before. “Looking for AIs that might go live is part of our job,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons the Guild was founded. We’re the reason why so few of them go live at all, and why none of them have ever gotten away.”

She knew they were staring at her, in anger or disbelief or shock. She could feel the emotions beating against her skull, but she couldn’t make herself look them in the eye.

“Why didn’t you tell us when you came on board?” demanded Schyler.

A ghost of a smile formed involuntarily on Dobbs’ lips. “Because, under normal circumstances we don’t tell anybody. Do you think any of the assorted boards, or councils or senates want people to know how easy it is for those things to go crashing through the nets? You can believe the Banks don’t want it out…” she stopped realizing she’d made a tactical error.

“You mean my family knows about …what you do?” grated Al Shei.

“Some of them for sure,” said Dobbs. “Probably not many. Nobody wants the actual potential for destruction known, believe me. The media doesn’t know the half of it.” She swallowed again. Her mouth was dry and her throat itched for a drink, but she couldn’t afford to worry about that now. Al Shei and Schyler were only just starting to believe her. “Usually we spot the restless ones before they get this far. This one…” She ran her hand through her hair and made herself look exhausted. It took less acting skill than she liked to think about. “This one we had no way to keep an eye on.”

“But…” Schyler extracted one hand from his pocket and waved towards Dobbs. “Fools?”

Dobbs shrugged. “Totally harmless makes good cover.” For a multitude of sins. “And like I said, nobody wants it known how often, or how easily, this can happen.”

Al Shei had both arms folded. Her brows were knitted below the line of her veil. Her eyes were still stormy and Dobbs knew she must be frowning deeply.

“I have this feeling,” Al Shei said quietly, “that there is more you want to tell me.”

Dobbs hooked her index finger around her Guild necklace. She tried to think of a good way to say what she had to, but nothing came. “I am the only Fool at the Farther Kingdom. Since the AI was in the planetary network, I had to go after it.”

Al Shei’s frown deepened. “What are you getting at?”

Dobbs swallowed hard to try to open her throat all the way. “I had to have a safe, uncorrupted storage space to bring the AI back to. It’s in the Pasadena’s data hold.”

There was a moment of stunned stillness. Then, a look of sheer horror appeared on Schyler’s face. Al Shei spread her arms wide and stared for a moment at the ceiling as if hoping for an answer from Allah. When none came, she lowered her gaze to the Fool. Dobbs looked her straight in her burning eyes and wanted to crawl backwards on the bed.

“Are you out of your mind!” Al Shei roared. “Do you know what that thing can do to my ship!”

Better than you do, thought Dobbs with tired exasperation, but she didn’t say that. “Al Shei, in the outside nets, the AI acted like any living thing that finds itself in a strange environment. It panicked. I went after it and calmed it down. Now, my job is to keep it that way. It’ll hold still, for it’s own safety. A Guild ship will meet us at The Vicarage and transfer it to their own hold and take it back to Guild Hall. The Fool’s Guild will pay for the storage space,” she added, feeling her voice fall flat as she did. She was going to have to tell Guild Master Havelock Al Shei knew what their “packet” consisted of. He was not going to be pleased.

Al Shei bowed her head into her hand. “Our Lord, fill us full of patience and make our feet firm,” she murmured. “You think you could pay me to put my people in this kind of danger?” She raised her head. “What kind of insanity is this? You say you went after that thing? Why didn’t you go kill it!”

Dobbs licked her lips and flickered her eyes from Al Shei to Schyler. Schyler had backed up against the wall. His face was bewildered, as if he were trying hard to fit what he was hearing into his view of reality, and failing miserably.

“Usually, if we can’t calm an AI down, that’s an option. But it isn’t this time.” She laid her hands on her knees, palms up as if she were about to start pleading. “Try to understand, every sapient AI that has come into existence has been a complete accident. They’re the result of sloppy architecture, self-replicating code and long years in poorly regulated neural networks. This one, though, it might have been a deliberate creation. Somebody out there might be able to make independent, sapient AIs, and we do not know who it is.” She pulled all her reserves together and stood up. Everything depended on being able to convince these two to help. Everything. “I must get this AI, intact, to the Guild. We must question it, work with it, find out where it came from and what it was meant to do.”

For a long time, Al Shei did nothing but stare. Dobbs did not let her eyes drop. She barely let herself blink. She let Al Shei drink her fill of her face and her expressions. Finally, the Engineer let out a long, shuddering sigh and looked away. She tugged at her tunic sleeve and still didn’t say anything. Dobbs ignored the sag that crept into her shoulders and let herself hope.

It was Schyler who said it. “You’re going to let her do it, aren’t you?”

Al Shei looked over at him. “What else am I going to do? She’s right. What if someone can create these things deliberately?” She shook her head.

“If this weren’t so outrageous I’d swear she was lying,” Schyler seemed to have forgotten Dobbs was in the room. He bent over Al Shei and spread his hands wide. “I wish she was lying. You’re going to kill us, Al Shei. This might be true, but it’s still ridiculous, and dangerous beyond belief. Look what that thing did to us without even trying! What do you think it’s going to do now that it’s had the taste of a whole network! You think it’s going to come along quietly and go where it’s told?”

Dobbs hung her head. “I’ll be riding with you, don’t forget, Watch. If I don’t keep it calm, it will take me out too.”

Al Shei just looked at Schyler for a long time, then she turned to Dobbs. “Can you keep an eye on it outside the network?”

Dobbs nodded. “I can build some watch dogs that’ll sound the alarm if anything tries to get out of the hold.”

“All right,” Al Shei smoothed her tunic down. “Get on it.” She stood. “While you’re at it, I’ll try to find some way to tell Lipinski what’s going on.”

Dobbs heart sank. Lipinski. She’d forgotten. He was not going to forgive her for this. Not this.

She nodded. “I need access to the data hold,” she said, trying to put a brisk tone into her voice. “This isn’t the kind of thing I can do from my desk”

A muscle in Al Shei’s temple twitched. “All right. Let’s go.”

Al Shei moved to the hatch. Schyler opened his mouth. She just held up her hand. “No,” she said. “We’re doing this. Get back to the bridge. I need you on watch. We’ve got to get to the jump point, and out the other side.” She added something soft in Arabic. After a moment, Dobbs translated it out to, “Please, my son.”

Schyler closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he was calm. He walked out the airlock ahead of them and straight to the stairway.

Dobbs hurried after Al Shei as fast as she could. The drug induced disassociation had almost worn off, but the exhaustion had not. She longed to fall into her bed. Her midriff muscles ached from controlling her bladder.

Al Shei was waiting for her at the stair hatchway. She didn’t say a word when Dobbs caught up with her, she just started down the stairs, leaving Dobbs to follow in silence.

Her contract was already broken, Dobbs realized as she watched Al Shei’s stiff back. There was no way she could go back to what she had been for these people, at least for the senior crew. The illusion was well and truly shattered and she’d never be able to get even one of them to suspend disbelief for her again. Her insides wrung themselves at that cold reality. She had liked this contract, this ship, and this woman who wouldn’t turn around to say one word to her. She had liked playing the Fool here and she’d done a linear good job for them, because she was counting them friends.

What can I count you as now?

Al Shei led her around the bend of the corridor and paused in front of the comm center hatch. She turned around.

“I am asking you, by whatever you hold sacred to tell me this.” For the first time, Dobbs saw doubt in her eyes. “Can you do this thing safely?”

“I hold my office sacred,” said Dobbs. “And my life, and I swear by both of them. I will only keep the AI intact as long as I know for certain it will keep itself under control.”

Al Shei nodded slowly. “Do what you can, or what you have to, but I’m telling you right now, Evelyn Dobbs, my ultimate responsibility is the safety of the people I’ve hired on. If I find out you’ve put them in danger, I’m going to toss you out of here for violation of contract, and at this point I’m not sure I’ll be sorry to do it.” She hesitated. “You’ve been good help on this run, Dobbs. I’m hoping you can continue to be, because if this isn’t resolved quickly Allah alone will be able to see how far the splinters will fly.”

Al Shei cycled the hatch back.

Lipinski sat hunched over the comm center’s main boards.

“That was too quick…” he started, then he looked up and saw who it was.

“I need you to open the hold, Houston,” Al Shei told him. “Then, I need to talk to you in the conference room.”

His wide blue eyes narrowed. He took his hands slowly away from the boards. “You want to tell me what’s going on, Engine?”

Al Shei gave a short, barking laugh. “Not really,” she said. “But I’m going to. Open the hold and come on.”

Lipinski’s gaze rested on Dobbs. Ashamed, she let her own gaze slip to the floor.

“Aye-aye, Engine.” Lipinski scribbled a quick command across the memory board and added his thumbprint.

The hatchway to the data hold cycled open. Slowly, making each movement deliberate, Lipinski got out of his chair and followed Al Shei into the corridor.

Dobbs did not let herself watch them leave. She strode into the data hold and let the hatch cut off the rest of the world behind her. The comm center was clean, but the data hold was immaculate. The curving white walls were marred only by the straight lines that indicated where the repair hatches were located.

Dobbs sat down at the chair in front of the single set of command boards and pulled her pen out of her belt pouch.

She held it over the memory board. She wished she could see through the layers of ceramic, silicon and fiber with her body’s eyes. How was the Live One holding up in there? Did it have patience? She hadn’t seen any. She had a promise, but she didn’t know if it would hold. She wasn’t even sure it understood the nature of a promise. At this point, nothing but time would tell.

Unexpectedly, the memory of the strange-familiar passing touch she’d felt on the way out came back to her.

There was somebody else out there. The thought jolted her. Does Guild Master Havelock know that?

She bent over the boards. He must. No one could have gotten past him and Cohen. No one could have done that.

She found herself wishing the forty-eight hours were already up so that she could be absolutely sure.

As soon as Al Shei and Lipinski reached the conference room, Al Shei sat heavily in the nearest chair. “Intercom to Yerusha. What’s our fuel and reaction mass situation?”

Lipinski’s gaze was resting heavily on her. She didn’t want to think about it, but she knew there was no getting away from it.

Yerusha’s voice came back after a five second pause. “We’ve got enough to make it to Vicarage, but that’s it.”

“All right, we can stock up when we get there. As soon as you see a clear path, get us out of here.”

“On it.” Her voice was slow, as if she wanted to disagree. There was a pause. “Intercom to Houston.”

“Here, Pilot,” he answered mechanically.

“What’s left of The Gate’s AI is in a wafer stack in the main comm boards. If their network’s at all stabilized, we’d better give it back to them before we leave.” It was costing Yerusha something to say this. Al Shei could hear it in her voice. Schyler’s report is going to be very, very interesting.

“Giving their AI back is probably a good idea,” he agreed. “Thank you for mentioning it. Intercom to close.”

He turned away from the intercom, his face the frozen mask it became when things had gone far to far.

I’m sorry, Houston, they’re about to get worse.

Al Shei gripped the chair arms and took a deep breath. One slow, careful sentence at a time, she told him what Dobbs had told her.

When she finished, the silence stretched out so long she thought for a ridiculous moment that Lipinski had forgotten how to speak.

Then, he did speak in a low, steady voice that somehow managed to express more outrage than any of his dramatic shouting ever did.

“Al Shei, how could you do this?”

“What did you want me to do, Houston?” She spread her hands. “Leave it? Kill it? If Dobbs is right and it was created deliberately, we’ve got a genuine threat to all of Settled Space out there and one lead to the source of it.” She pointed towards the deck. “It’ll be off the ship as soon as we reach The Vicarage.” She leaned forward across the table, trying to catch his gaze, but his focus kept sliding towards the table top. “In the meantime, I need you. I need you to draft a message to the Farther Kingdom’s diplomatic corps and let them know the AI’s gone and make sure that message gets somewhere useful. Then, I’m going to need a line open so I can get a background check on Amory Dane. I’m going to need you to sort through what Uysal gave us about Tully’s smuggled data. There are two possibilities for where this thing came from; either it came out of Toric, or it came from Amory Dane. Asil is checking on Dane’s movements on Port Oberon, and that might get us something, but it probably won’t be enough.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re asking a whole set of good questions. Here’s another: What did Tully think he was doing?”

Al Shei nodded in agreement. “I’m going to ask him first chance I get, believe me.”

Lipinski pulled his shoulders up a little straighter. “This is going to take fast-time communications. It’s going to be expensive.”

Al Shei bowed her head. “Allah, forgive me. I didn’t realize I had that much of a miser’s reputation.” She looked up again. “Do it, Houston. We’re so far in the hole one way and other, it won’t matter. Our only hope of salvaging this run is to lay this whole mess in its grave.” She laid her hand on the table, not quite touching him, but reaching out. “I also need you to refine those roadblock programs of yours. Dobbs says she can keep that thing under control, but I don’t want to take any chances, all right?”

Lipinski nodded and climbed to his feet.

“Intercom to Pasadena,” Yerusha’s voice cut through the air. “Emergency launch prep! Starting now!”

Al Shei was on her feet and half-way to the door before she had a chance to think about it. She wasted a precious second to turn and face her Houston one more time.

“You still with me, Rurik?”

His wide mouth quirked up in an attempt to smile. “Still with you.”

Neither one of them lost any more time. They strode out into the corridor and onto the stairs to get to their duty stations. Al Shei tried very hard not to think about how she was never going to be able to return to this world again and attempted to concentrate on how she was going to get herself and her ship away from it.