“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.