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?”