The waking process had been streamlined significantly through the introduction of implants and related technologies. As a result, Alaya had lost her familiarity with the process. Years had worn down the fog of post-awake awareness, the haze of uncertainty separating dreams from the real had cleared well before Alaya usually opened her eyes. Normally readouts displayed information to her the moment she became aware.
This time, nothing.
She didn’t have time to panic or consider her surroundings. Gaz appeared before her, hovering in the air. Transparent strings appeared in Alaya’s vision now, diagnostic readouts, suppressed internal logging messages all flowed by without leaving a mark upon her mind.
“Alaya? Can you hear me?” Gaz’s mouth had moved, the same mouth she’d worn for years, but sound only just then started to come through.
“Yes! Can you hear me? What’s going on?”
“Oh thank goodness.” Had there been tension in her face before? “You’re under the knife. Right now.”
“Right now?”
“They fixed your organics well enough for us to communicate, but I told them I needed to talk to you. The surgeon is not happy with me.”
Alaya snorted. “What’s up?”
“We have ten points of reputation from the Root clergy. And a job. In exchange they’re going to give us the jump on Kowal when he leaves.”
“Cherry sweet, Gaz.”
“The ten points are for you. How much metal do you want? Just in your head? Anywhere else?”
“I don’t know what ten points means.”
Gaz covered her mouth. “It’d be enough for a full conversion if you wanted it.”
“The surgeon knows about the implant?” Chemicals had clearly slowed her brain for the thought to come so late.
“Evan’s not concerned.” Gaz flickered in the simulation for a moment. Around them the while floors and walls, all stark and tiled like some kind of old fashioned asylum, stared back at Alaya while she waited for Gaz to flick back.
“Everything okay?”
A look of utter horror crossed Gaz’s face for an instant, so fast Alaya did not think she’d seen it outside the simulation. “It’s fine. Do you have preferences?”
Alaya had to think. Her parents had been baseline, blessed with a little magic and cursed with shoulder-crushing debt. How much of their legacy did she really want to leave behind? “Keep my face the way it is. You can replace everything else. I have a list…” The file was old, but recently updated. Unable to find it herself, she told Gaz where she’d stored it. Then she slowly drifted back to sleep as Gaz zipped away in the fashion of a sim-diver logging out.
“Greetings operator. I am designation Maya 3181, your personal Eidolon assistant. As it is your first time with an Eidolon assistant, I will be guiding you through a user…”
“Halt.” The voice stopped and Alaya hung in black. “Why are my optics down and where’s my somatiform image?”
The voice returned, “All integrated subsystems are in post-installation readiness. Would you like Maya to scan your data registers for preferred settings and initialize with defaults?”
Oh god. Alaya braced herself. Depending on how close the surgeon got with their neural linkage and how upmarket the upgrades, Alaya might be on the cusp of inviting a great deal of pain on herself. “Initialize.”
A world of vibrant, sparkling color rose up around her. Sight was the first of the impressions to trickle and then steadily flow through her neurons. This linkage was… unheard of. Alaya couldn’t tell the difference between what the optics sent her and her eyes. Before long the scintillating colors slowed and the rest of her neural subsystems kicked in.
She lay on her back, perpendicular to the gravitic normal. A creche filled with now pure white light supported her. It was warm — precisely 22 degrees — and she could taste the purity of the freshly generated air.
Chemical analysis informed her of concentration of post-installation particulate matter in the air, some of it matching her DNA profile. Gross.
The ubiquitous machine-hum of a space ship wrapped her in its embrace. It wasn’t just hearing she experienced then, but her ability to sense vibration in general. The ship roared, purred, and in a few places wheezed, which all contributed to her wind symphony of life.
And then the final connections snapped into place. Legs and arms connected to her trunk and raced with each other to send the subtle tactile sensations coursing over their surfaces to her brain. The pale sheet covering her body tickled.
Alaya tossed it away and looked. There was nothing inorganic about what she saw. Vision focusing many magnitudes and she still not could find a single indication of artificial parts. But with the final sensory connections in place, Alaya could access meta-functions. Nerves sent information about the hive clusters in her forearms and calves. These weren’t just holding systems, these were drone fabrication systems. Exactly what she’d asked for.
A full multi-bank processor system sat in her skull and managed the drones. This AI servant, “Maya” — who needed a new name — possessed functions which outstripped their old ship’s AI. Maya was even more advanced than a SenoAg navigation system.
She ordered up a full diagnostic, but the voice sounded again. “Operator, I have already prepared an abstract of your multi-system cybernetic upgrades. Would you like to review it now?”
“No. Let’s set you up properly. Visual appliance mode, simulated.” No one else was in the all-metal surfaces recovery room with her, likely to give her time to do this exact thing.
Alaya fell back out of the real and into the simulation. She sat cross legged with an all-white doll like body. They’d reset her perisomatic projection. Alaya would fix that too. Floating in front of her was a single white flame. It brightened as the voice addressed her. “Engage setup mode? You would prefer automatic…”
“No. Manual mode, enter good child mode.” Now it would only speak when asked to. Alaya had learned to sculpt in the simulation before she was ten, so it didn’t take her long to give her Eidolon a more comfortable appearance.
Then she dove into its specifications and abilities. This thing was high high-end. Apparently reputation was worth way more than they’d thought. Or Gaz had sweetened the deal somehow. None of her original hardware remained and the technicians had replaced close to 98 percent of her organic brain matter with digital replacements. Significant portions of those were devoted to the Eidolon. Alaya gave her a name now: Pontikos.
Pontikos could perform medical triage, she could control the drone AI or leave it to Alaya. She could research, improvise, and create her own plans. Loaded in the Eidolon’s core was a complete personality adjustment system. Alaya gave Pontikos an accent similar to her mother’s and a disposition similar to her father’s.
The implant Alaya inherited from her mother referred to her as “Princess Alaya.” Pontikos was not allowed to call her that under any circumstance. Instead, Alaya picked something which would make her grin every time it addressed her.
Done tinkering and initializing her assistant AI, Alaya fired her up. The flame version of Pontikos shrank into a dot and then unfolded into a squat mouse-girl with soft pink fur and fuzzy round ears. She hopped onto Alaya’s shoulder and said, “what do we do next, Boop?”
A few tears ran down Alaya’s cheeks. They’d left her able to cry. Thanks Gaz.
Coming out of the simulation felt like… nothing. “Do I have multi-sim capability?”
Per her programming, Pontikos didn’t answer directly. Instead, she cast Alaya’s consciousness partly into the simulation. It took massive amounts of computational ability, but one set of senses now hung in the simulation. And one opened her eyes and lay stationary on a medical table.
Alaya took in her surroundings while she up cycled her awareness. This was another ‘borg trick, something Gaz could do which… time froze. Motes of dust floating off of her skin — the only source of dust in the room — stopped in their upward bounces. With her temporal perceptions shifted, Alaya knew the motes were moving. But her consciousness was moving too quickly for the motion to be conveyed sensibly. Her eyes would update when the motes moved enough to trip her visual acuity.
Amazing.
At the same time, in her forked simulation consciousness, Alaya redesigned herself. Part of her fascination with mice had been related to her father and his stories. She was no longer her daddy’s little girl. But she was still the fierce and clever little mousey her father had raised.
A second set of perceptual apparatuses left her simulated body — the somatic projection or perisomatic form — and checked to make sure she looked the way she intended. Humanoid, with mouse-like reversed knees and a light coat of short grey fur. Her face had sharper features, distinct from her somatic body in case she didn’t want to be recognized out of the sim, and curly red hair like a person, with two little mouse ears sticking up from the top.
“We look pretty!”
Balancing her time sense against her body’s ability to move should have been beyond difficult. It should have taken weeks of tweaking by a surgeon or an AI assistant at the least. Not that Alaya had personal experience with such things; she’d only ever read open source manuals. The first time she tried moving in the real while cast into the sim, Alaya turned and slid smoothly off of the medical bed she’d been on. The sheet fluttered off of her legs, but Alaya ignored it for the room.
An ancient civilization, as old to those first people reaching into the stars as those reachers were to Alaya, painted their statues vibrant, garish colors so they stood out and caught the eye gloriously. For centuries though, people had denied those old colorful patterns due to a strange prejudice.
The office she stood in somehow melded those two styles. Above head height, about three meters up, the ceiling bore a stationary mural filled with tiny people going about an amazing variety of tasks. Their lives spilled down the walls into friezes which depicted battles and various events Alaya only bothered to record for now. There was no question her systems could connect to the local Net, but she’d disabled those during setup. Below head height the room was all white, even the furniture.
“What do you think of my paintings?” Alaya’s brain dipped right into slow time, almost automatically. She reviewed her recent recordings and found the door had opened at the corner of her vision, but she hadn’t set any of her subprocesses to personal security. If she did that though she might end up attacking someone… “With so much time, you’d think my question might deserve an answer.”
He didn’t exactly pull her out of slow time. Rather his voice reached her through slow time. How’d he do that?
“You’ll find it exhausting to interact with others in slow time, eventually. For now, consider the paintings perhaps?”
Her laugh dropped her back into normal time. “They’re pretty. Did you paint them or do you just own them?”
“You’re the first person to ask me that.” His skin was pale purple and his eyes a soft sage green, with no variation between iris, pupil, or sclera. The man wore a thin light grey coat which would be at home in a club or in a laboratory with a pair of black pants and a white t-shirt. His hair was as black as his slacks and cut in an old-fashioned military shape. “I painted them myself.”
“I don’t know what they mean.”
“Why don’t you look it up?”
Alaya almost snorted at him. Because inter solar Net rates are even more insane when you pay five times as much for them. “Is that safe for me?”
He gave a small nod, though it wasn’t clear to Alaya whether he agreed with her question or was answering it at first. “Safe enough I suppose. I didn’t find any accounts in your old blackware.”
“They would’ve been encrypted.”
That brought a genuine smile to his face. “That’s a fact.”
“You’re like Evan, aren’t you?” It made sense, the perfect integration with her new parts, the performance, their quality. She’d known before she asked.
“That is also a fact.” He cleared his throat and walked over to Alaya. “And I am still quite unlike my bloodthirsty cousin.” Holding his hands up, he didn’t touch Alaya right away. “Do you mind if I check and make my final adjustments?”
“Sure.” Alaya said the words and the technician touched her on her shoulders. I didn’t even ask his name. Weird.
He answered in her mind. I installed your new cyberware and have greatly interacted with your hardware. The systems trust me. And I assure you I do not abuse the trust of my patients. Alaya had no time to tense up before he continued. My name is Nathaniel and I am aware of your implant and its significance. A wave of inspection flowed over Alaya and Pontikos purred in her head. Green logs appeared in her sight, green across the board. Very good.
Nathaniel stepped away and went to wash his hands. “You, young lady, appear to be the image of perfect health. In fact, you have an affinity to cyberware and technology.”
“Yeah.” What else was she going to say? Oh right. “Do I owe you anything else?”
“Oh no. You and your friend are paid up with me. In fact, I gave a point of reputation to all of you. Enjoy.” He bowed to Alaya and stepped into the doorway from which he’d entered. “Do not rush, but when you are ready, leave through this room and follow the sim path.” He flicked a finger toward her and a packet with his signature as well as various NetIDs registered with her AI. “If you have any difficulties related to your implants, feel free to contact with me. Consultations are always free.”
With that he was gone.
Wait… me and my friend?
Alaya had forgotten clothing. But then again… she didn’t need any. With a thought she extruded a body suit to cover herself, composed from a set of insectoid micromachines she released over her body and woven in seconds.
Then she activated her stealth configuration. A setup as extensive as Vora’s would have deprived Alaya of some of the toys she’d prioritized, so she settled for a trimmed down version. Dampeners broadcast off-phase counter tones to silence her and her skin and clothing took on a blended, active camouflage aspect. Digital systems would pick her out easily, but biologics wouldn’t and some simpler AIs might need time to sort her out too. It was mostly a vanity installation.
The rest of the facility, presumably Nathaniel’s facility, had the same white stone-like walls his operating theater had. A blue trail through the air beckoned Alaya away from the room and to the right. When she focused on it, her optics opened an information window and Pontikos informed her it was Nathaniel’s path to the exit.
An urge to release her nano swarms here and see what they could do gripped her. But there was a bad idea right there. A technomancer like Nathaniel had better find that hilarious. Otherwise Alaya would be in a lot of trouble. Leave it alone and don’t be crazy. Let them loose in the ship.
Compromise established, Alaya activated her systems and sped through the ship. This was another feature of a cyborged conscious Alaya had never tried. Not only did she zoom through the halls, fast enough for the wind to brush against her cheeks and chill them, but she watched the whole thing in fast time, zoomed up to an extreme speed. A boring meeting could end in half a second, the abstract prepared by her assistance AI done before said meeting.
And she didn’t have the slightest difficulty controlling it.
Weee!
She lacked Gaz’s speed, but almost everyone did. Still, Alaya could all but fly.
Flight. Oh my god. That was too tempting to pass on. She sent a message to Nathaniel. He’d given her his contact info after all. “Can I step outside real quick? I mean on the way to my ship?” Dozens of responsibilities and more debt than any one human should have to absorb waited to crush her back aboard that other ship.
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“Sure. I’ll adjust the path for you.” It turned a meter ahead sharply into the side of the hallway. Right into an airlock. “I trust I don’t have to explain space lanes or walking to you?”
“Nope. Salt drinker here.” Alaya gave the answer her dad had taught her during her first space walk. They’d lived in places where no one else did. He’d still insisted she pick up lane rules. Of course, with her current body there was no need for a suit or the little salt pellets her dad insisted she place at the cheek mount of her helmet “for emergencies.” Only later had she learned it was an old superstition from the days of early space exploration.
Alaya popped open the airlock and stepped in. Her personal seals had already engaged. It was impossibly strange to imagine. Parts of her body was still flesh. But she knew what was about to happen. It sent a tingle though her.
The moment the air began to leave the chamber, micro and nano machines covering her body shifted to suit protocols. Where organics would have met the void of space, instead those machines protected and warmed her flesh. Other machines converted themselves into little engines, storing and ready to eject particles. Still others readied to spread between her arms and capture streams of expelled particles. Both of these ejection and capture systems would give her flight.
Space flight.
Zero-G didn’t hit the way it usually did when most of her body was organic. One second gyroscopic controls, better than her inner ear would have been, informed her the normal was here where feet were. The next the normals had shifted to a general tug slightly back toward the ship, barely perceptible.
Alaya gathered her legs to kick the ship away from herself and chuckled at the mental orientation. Simultaneously, her AI and Pontikos gave her precise thrust coordinates. She could see a tiny square of space through the side port. Alaya wanted the whole thing.
Sensors arrayed across her body and transmitters connected in mesh to billions of their fellows in the area provided flight clearance for her. And she was out.
Free from the inertial plane of Nathaniel’s ship, Alaya’s belly clenched despite the conversion of muscles into fibrous dendritic tissues. A primal spacer fear grabbed her, akin to the monkey’s fear of heights, Alaya fell into the embrace of her direct autonomic controls. The fear gone in moments as Pontikos tweaked her hormone levels. All that was left was wonder.
From within a spaceship’s hull, space felt smaller than it really was. Optics, sensors and dozens of disparate systems condensed the vast distances down to human comprehension and thereby stole a fraction of the wonder.
Gone was that abstraction.
Stars. Everywhere. The void was painfully misnamed. Light filled it, bombarding her from distances as ancient as space was big. At her feet, a massive pillar floated in the void. It was so large her optics had to change to non-human magnification to see the front or back. From where she stood, the curve of the ship was hardly discernible with human perceptions.
Floating there in the sea of black with a massive beach below, Alaya relaxed for the first time in weeks. Her friends had saved her life. Had saved her memories. The moment it occurred to her, she checked her memory integrity. Over ninety percent, higher than a baseline human.
Gods I am lucky.
All she had to do now was capture Kowal and get him to point her in the direction of the rest of his pirate gang. Easy peasy.
Mission back in mind, Alaya fired herself to the ship, but not before using her enhanced senses to pick out the various members of the cluster from where they sat. On the other side of the Pillar of Man — Nathaniel’s ship — she’d find a blob of material that, up close, would have looked like trees and roots.
She also pinpointed her own ship, or her temporary ship the Musk Duster. A name she still had to correct. It was close by and contained the expected number of lifeforms. Everyone was okay.
Nathaniel’s path led her back to Gaz and the others. She found them in a small conference room with white walls and pillars adding texture to the surfaces.
They hugged, Gaz and Alaya, and Alaya took a permanent recording of that first contact in her new body.
Evan stood by with a neutral expression, the same as Isham. They resembled twin bookends with their statue-like appearances. It was the closest Alaya had come to nervousness with her new body. What Evan and Isham were doing, that creepy-blank expression. Alaya could do that too.
Then a voice shouted at her down another hallway in the ship. Gaz’s exaggerated eye roll and dramatic sigh staved off a violent response from Alaya when McRory charged into view beating his chest.
Among many things, his paint job had changed. Gone were the old Bahl-Mau symbols and gangster images. Graffiti-like shimmering words covered the chassis. Many of them were challenges in the native patois of the Bahl-Mau drudges. Several of them proclaimed the owner of the chassis as “Kirk the Breaker.”
“Kirk?”
“Yeah! Kirk the Breaker!!!” He shouted and strummed his massive gorilla-like hands as if playing a guitar. That was one of the major changes Alaya picked up right away: the hands were far larger than they’d been originally. If she was guessing, Nathaniel had installed some kind of permanent or semi-permanent weapon in those hands. His legs were reinforced and had redesigned feet articulating on an eight-spoke platform of “toes” which made the chassis very stable. “What do you think?”
The face was a strange thing. Squarish, like a circle which had been pressed on all sides, but not enough for those sides to be actually parallel. Lines of noise trailed down the grey front plate with an font-like smiling face in the center. “You look… unique.” Is that where they installed his head?
“You don’t like it, I get it…” A different voice, one Alaya had not cared for the first time she encountered it.
Vora. Her body slid into view, moving as if gliding across the edge of a blade. Every part of her body language purred with attempted, clumsy seduction, but the grace of her chassis gave the pilot — it had to be Kirk — some leeway for expression. The dress he’d chosen sank her. It was a mid-thigh number, flared at the hem and gathered at the hips. And hot pink.
“Please make him change out of that.” Alaya found equally pained expressions in Gaz’s eyes. A quirk of amusement on Isham’s lips. And total blankness from Evan.
Kirk laughed and his clothes shimmered away. Vora disappeared far more effectively than Alaya could. “What do you think?”
“Pick better clothes, but otherwise I like it. What did you do?” The last question she directed to Evan.
He shook his head and motioned toward where Vora and McRory stood. She’d re-appeared and the two of them moved slightly out of sync with each other. “He did it. Or rather he and Nathaniel did it.”
“My friend… right, but I thought he was going to give you a body.”
“Naw, ‘Laya he gave me three!” Both McRory and Vora’s bodies spoke at the same time.
“Three?”
Gaz interceded then. “Let’s go to the ship and finish this discussion.”
They led Alaya back through Nathaniel’s ship to the hangar. The classical look continued here with massive white columns supporting a room large enough to host ships two or maybe even three classes above their Musk Duster.
A similarly sized coupe ship stood in their way and the group stopped before it. The central axis of the ship made a soft point, almost a nod to the first pioneering vessels who broke out of Earth’s gravity and into space. But the resemblance ended at the flared sides which expanded and offered weapon hatches, cargo mounts, and other utility sockets. Weird that whoever owned this ship didn’t bother to hook anything up there.
Automated systems had initiated a scan the moment Alaya spotted the ship. She called up the name of the ship: Mousehome. Modified SenoAg coupe.
“What the fuck?”
Alaya was shaking her head. Big numbers meant something to her. She had clearly failed to understand the import of ten points of reputation. While certainly nice — Alaya wasn’t dying and Kirk had a new body. A new body she was partly standing in and partly staring at.
Nathaniel and the others had rearranged the Musk Duster, and rechristened her the Mousehome. Now the interior had the same stucco look Alaya had preferred over most of the walls and ceilings. The furnishings had been upgraded to something even SenoAg didn’t offer: adaptive morphic nanostructures. Chairs, couches, beds all adapted to the user’s preferences and comfort. Luxurious! And insanely expensive in terms of credits.
Apparently the total reconfiguration of their ship had cost two of the ten points they’d spent in total. Nathaniel had been cagey about the details, but he’d deemed the final upgrades Alaya and Kirk had received worthy of eight of those points.
For someone who hadn’t grown up under the specter of an otherwise incomprehensible number, it might not have sounded suspicious.
Kirk’s new body was a marvel. Solid dianite construction, a Technomantic material Alaya had trouble getting details on. It was strong enough to withstand a direct hit from some ship-class weapons and could be used as a superconducting medium depending on how it was installed.
Curved over the small cylinder of dark metal was a screen similar to the one on McRory’s face. It showed Kirk’s face, complete with running lines and the occasional jitter.
“This is you now, huh?”
“Yup ‘Laya. I decided a flesh body was dumb.”
Gaz had stood quietly while Alaya took in Kirk’s new “body.” Technically, wrapped in that armor the way he was, Kirk stood a good chance of outliving them all. He had a hybrid reactor power supply connected to his life support mechanisms. She tapped the dark metal next to the screen. “Weirdly, he’s still more flesh than you or me. By mass at least.”
“Me as well. I believe the three of us are very close to the most digital beings aboard the ship.” With a presence as hard to notice as his, Isham could just melt into the scenery. Right up until he spoke.
“Vora and McRory. Nathaniel droned them?”
“Better than that!” Kirk winked and McRory did a little dance. “I can see and feel stuff from their perspectives and everything.”
“He’s cast into them?” She looked over at Gaz. “How was this worth only four points?”
So many emotions. Curiosity about the process of turning McRory and Vora into puppets, hooking into Kirk a caster. Then there was a bit of jealousy. Her new body was fancy and nice. But Alaya wanted two. For no particular reason get your mind out of the gutter! And finally there was the fear, which won out over the others.
The fear told her how dangerous this was. Casting was the purview of the elite. Or maybe the elite’s elite. It should have been so far outside of their pay grade.
“Tell me about the seed mission again.”
Gaz and Isham had been collecting intelligence on their target since arriving at Nathaniel’s ship. The things they’d learned just from the dossier put a potential price on their heads. That little issue came up first. Their contract and the associated files had been filled to the brim with explicit NDAs and various forms of secrecy clauses. In short they’d determined if anyone on their team leaked the details of the Root Clergy’s seed transport network or project, there was a decent chance the whole team and most of their loved ones would suffer terminal accidents. It was surprisingly hypocritical for a group of priests who forbade the taking of life on their precious tree stations.
On a regular basis the dossier did not disclose, seeds traveled from a Root station across the solar system either to a different station to to help establish a new station entirely. Diversity in genome had a premium among the clergy, so they mixed their vegetation samples frequently. Most people knew nothing about the process or the fact the clergy shipped seeds in the first place. Speculation existed, of course, but even on the various Nets they’d checked, no one knew the real details or was willing to discuss it.
Not just one, but several seeds had gone missing recently. All of them either bound for or sent from the Root at Riggon’s Cluster.
There was the first complication. Alaya noticed it immediately, as did everyone else on the crew. Even Kirk had commented on it. The only way someone could have known about the seed network and known enough to steal them both inbound and outbound, was for that person to be a clergy member.
None of the seeds had been recovered thus far. And the dossier did not make clear what the clergy had tried. Presumably some kind of theurgy. Maybe they’d sent paid assassins for all Alaya knew. Neither Gaz nor Isham had turned up more information in the course of their investigations.
After the enormous fee they’d been given, the degree to which the clergy controlled information on their affairs made this mission just a bit more nerve wracking than it started out.
“The only good news is that we know where the seed is and don’t think it will be moving any time soon.” Alaya poked her finger at the station she looked at. They’d cast into the simulation for their discussion. The five of them sitting around a map of the cluster in discussion.
A miniature dragon flew by, sparkling with inner light, a feature of the simulation which marked the various ships with colors to distinguish them. Though the design bore the marks of master craftsmanship, it was clearly a ship. Many of the scales had fallen off and had been painted back in place. Where the mouth opened a large canon sat. Curious, Alaya zoomed in on the canon with spare cycles. Plasma generation and arcane compression. It was an Arc canon, rarer than a Technomancer, like the company who’d made Gaz’s chassis, the group who’d produced the Arc canon had aimed at cracking through the hulls of the premiere ship of the line produced by MilCas at the time. Not the best goal for long-term survival. In the case of the company, Qione Enterprises — she’d had to look it up — MilCas had absorbed them and bought back all of the Arc weaponry produced. Clearly not all of it.
Unlike the post-production modifications Nathaniel had made to the Mousehome, the Arc canon in the dragon’s head had clearly been added later. Much of the housing overflowed the dragon’s head and gave it a cobbled-together appearance.
Back at conversational speeds, Gaz pulled up the map of the facility which held the seed. According to their information, this group was a splinter fact of the Root clergy. Technically the dossier had not used the word “splinter” that had been Alaya’s contribution to the discussion.
“The splinter sect holds the area around the station. But their teams are disguised as haulers, drifting satellites and decommissioned one-person ships. A small cloud of red surrounded the toroid Alaya had poked. Cloud aside, it resembled a wheel missing its central axis. Two interconnected cylindrical rings spun through the cluster with its little defensive satellites in place. “They cannot teleport the seed, so it would have to leave on a transport. Something at least at large as our ship would be needed to move it.”
This was why the clergy were so sure the seed was still there. Nothing big enough to haul it had left the place. Another one of Nathaniel’s helpful modifications of their ship gave them a cargo bay large enough to accommodate the seed and still be able to move around in it.
Gaz continued.“We have to break through the cordon, find the seed on the station, and get out with it.”
“I feel like they should have paid us more.” Alaya wanted to groan. Nothing about this was simple. And it had the feeling of the kind of job that would just get worse. Of course every job she’d taken in the last cycle has spun out of control.
The dossier offered them one more resource: a cleric unaffiliated with the Root who would assist them in dealing with the theurgical resistance. They needed ten or twenty more clerics. Not one.
Evan said. “If it helps, there are no Technomancers aboard the station. And if they employ standard station or ship systems then… well you can imagine.”
Between Gaz and Evan there weren’t many control systems Alaya worried about. “But you can’t slip us through their sensor net or something like that.”
“Mmm.” Evan put his hand on his chin. His form in the simulation was much like it had been when she first met him: a white metal figure with seam lines running over his body. “If we fired ourselves in suits at the station, yes.”
“You can’t just hide the whole ship?”
“No.” He sounded frustrated with himself. “Perhaps a pure arcanist or a Technomancer with a different specialty could.”
Good to know such powers existed. Also terrifying. “That’s not off the table though.” The others looked at her askance, except for Isham. “I mean using Evan to shoot one or two of us with him.”
Kirk, who looked exactly like he’d looked in life here in the simulation, down to the stains on his overalls right before the accident, snapped his fingers. “Two of us, of course. Vora, Isham, Evan.”
“I was going to suggest myself, but Vora should come along too.”
That suggestion started a small row.
“There’s no reason for you to head down in the first team!” Gaz lodged the first objection.
Evan said, “it is inadvisable for you to endanger yourself.”
Gaz and Kirk both pointed at him. Isham had no comment. Alaya had looked at him for too long because he eventually said, “I do not care. If you want my tactical assessment, the correct person to send is Alaya.”
“Why?” The way Gaz said it made it sound like Alaya would have been a liability.
“Hey!” She stood up onto the tips of her mousey toes. “I’m more than capable, thank you.” Especially with her shiny new chassis. “But also, I wanna know what Isham thinks.”
He didn’t actually sigh in the simulation, but the pause and the way his shoulders moved gave Alaya the impression his somatic body had done just that. “Two reasons. First, the Technomancer is the most effective defense and healing aid for Alaya for at least ten AU. Second, she possesses a set of… attitudes which lend themselves to the role.” Before anyone could ask him to elaborate, especially Alaya, he raised his hand. “If you don’t understand, I cannot explain it further.”
Evan winced and said, “I can think of a good reason to keep Gaz aboard the Mousehome: the ship may very well be boarded or attacked on approach, regardless of what we do on the station.”
Right. Unless every ship orbiting around that station was unmanned or their sensors were locked out by the station — something unlikely — then there would be living captains aboard those ships asking questions, making challenges the Mousehome couldn’t answer, and generally complicating their lives. General stand down orders issued from base for a single approaching ship were unlikely to work. Unless…”Do we know what the seeds look like?” It took Alaya a second to call up an image. “We do.”
They might be able to steal this without the splinter cult even discovering it before it was far too late.
With the frame of a plan in place, they continued vectoring generally toward their target. A straight line would have given them away, so they settled on a data farm close, but not adjacent to their target. It had been a flimsy excuse, but when they’d offered up Alaya and Gaz’s coding expertise, most of it legit, the farm ship had offered them positions right away.
It was the first time learning any details about the reputation and currency system of the cluster. PDP - Parker’s Data Processing - sold cycles, data, and various Net services to nearby ships and even remote parts of the cluster. They earned a reputation point every standard year, but a bundle of no-cost services, benefits and other enticements to encourage employees to sign on. Best of all, there was no penalty for breaking the employment contract, as long as they didn’t leave any work pending.
They left the ship in a follow course with Isham, Evan and Kirk still on board. The latter of their team accompanied them in a small drone secreted in Gaz’s body. Alaya had flat refused to hold onto that drone.
PDP used a simulation system to hook employees into their data stream. Gaz and Alaya fell right in. Among other things, the simulation system prevented from fraternizing directly and allowed the company to fully monitor employee activity while in possession of corporate data. Nothing which passed through Alaya’s processors contained the smallest hint of secret. Not an unexpected policy for new employees.
Those new implants and additions Nathaniel gave her became critical here. Alaya left herself plugged into the corporate simulation network and also ambulatory. Such implants were rare enough corporations out in the cluster had not quite caught on. Or the decision regarding what to do was stuck in committee somewhere. Thus she explored.
Most of the ship’s interior was the standard blank metal with AR projections overlain. It was the cheapest solution possible: force cybernetic employees to activate their AR systems or face unremarkable grey day and day out. As to baseline employees, Alaya doubted the company had many of those considering their business and aesthete.
Unfortunately cheap solutions meant Alaya could not find a vantage point on the ship to either activate sensors or just look outside. She’d plotted a course out of the ship and aimed at their target station as soon as she’d boarded and confirmed the interior schematics against her scans. She even reached the bulkhead airlocks in several locations — backups were important — but couldn’t proceed further without tripping security.
From the moment she’d entered the ship, Alaya had been releasing her nano drones in discrete swarms. Gaz had been doing the same thing. It gave Alaya a chance to compete with her friend after that little insult in their planning session. And still Gaz had managed to show her up.
The PDP ship was distressingly old. Old enough the AI pilot was baby-stupid and incapable of handling security all alone. A separate, human-managed system controlled security and the airlock controls were the nearly ancient system requiring an actual lever to be pulled or pushed rather than a simple button. The only way the airlocks would open remotely was if they redesigned the system. Who installed airlocks like this? Even the old cylinder where Alaya had grown up used digital airlock controls.
Alaya’s nanite systems were capable of many things, but they were not capable of moving a larger object like a lever. Gaz’s nanites on the other hand could do even more. She didn’t give details, but Gaz had assured Alaya the airlocks would open when it was time. It stewed Alaya to think about it.
They were best friends. Gaz was Alaya’s oldest friend. She might have even been Alaya’s only friend. Alaya considered Kirk a “friend” in the sense she’d feel bad about spacing him if she had to. Isham was a work colleague and Evan… Evan was super helpful right now. And would remain so for exactly as long as it served Janice’s interests.
Gaz was the only person in the verse Alaya trusted. She was the only person Alaya cared about enough to compete with in the first place. It would have been nice to win once in a while.