Lipinski’s jaw tightened. Dobbs tensed, in case she needed to intervene. “Yes,” he admitted. “You do. But if anything comes out of that case, I have a right to inspect it and confiscate it.”
“You do.” Yerusha did not let her gaze waver.
“As long as you understand that.” Lipinski pocketed his pen and turned away. “I’ve both got to check in at the docking bay,” he said to Dobbs. “You want to walk along?”
Yerusha evidently decided to ignore how the question was directed. “You two go ahead.” She gingerly pushed herself away from the wall. “I’ll follow.”
Lipinski gave her a hard look, but shrugged and took the lead. Dobbs fell into easy step beside Yerusha, watching the way the woman concentrated on making her body keep moving.
“Did we lose anybody?” she asked.
“Eh?” Yerusha cocked an eye towards Dobbs and the Fool saw it was a bright hazel despite being sunken in from the bruise. “Some, yeah. Could have been a lot more, though.” The sheen in her eyes told Dobbs she was seeing something other than the crowded corridor. “That’s why it’s going to take the bio-garden so long to do my arm. There’s a couple of gerbils that need new lungs. The can’s a total loss.” She shook her head with a resignation Dobbs was used to seeing in engineers, architects and others who worked and lived with machinery.
“Do they know what happened?” Dobbs cocked her own eye in an imitation of Yerusha’s expression.
“No,” said Yerusha, too sharply. It could have been her pain, or Dobbs’s bad imitation, but Dobbs didn’t think so. “No idea.”
“The Landlords have got to be crawling up the walls,” Dobbs suggested.
“Do them good.” Yerusha stared straight ahead. “They don’t get enough exercise.”
“I thought gerbils were noted for running around their wheels,” Dobbs remarked as they followed Lipinski through the door to the elevator bays.
“That bunch isn’t gerbils.” Yerusha leaned her bare arm against the wall. “They’re spooks and ciphers.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “And groundhuggers, the lot of them.”
Coming from a Freer, that was a much more dire insult than it generally was. Dobbs glanced up at Lipinski who was keeping his eyes straight ahead and studiously ignoring Yerusha.
She tapped the wafer case softly. “What’s his name?”
Yerusha’s eyes snapped open, and Dobbs gave her her most non-threatening smile. She’d been right. The wafer stack inside the carrying case held Yerusha’s artificial intelligence.
Freers believed that planetary ecology kept human beings trapped. They believed that true freedom came when humanity built its own environments specifically tailored to their needs. Freers lived in stations and ships and were not permitted to even set foot on the ground.
They also believed that the cycle of life and death was a leftover from the time humans had lived exclusively on planets, and that when a human died, their soul was released into the void, where it travelled along, useless and voiceless, like a photon packet without any eye to see it. Their belief system posited, however, that if a sufficiently complex artificial environment could be created, the soul could be trapped in it, just as it could be trapped in the body of an infant born about the time of its death original. This unique explanation of reincarnation was the Freers explanation for artificial intelligences that occasionally achieved violently paranoid independent life. Their massive neural nets, the Freers said, had caught a human soul.
Some Freers “adopted” artificial intelligences and spent their time trying to create an environment that could catch a soul, and thus finally end the loss of knowledge and kinship that evolution had forced on humanity.
Some people regarded this as incredible blasphemy. Some, especially people who’s worlds had known the disastrous after-effects of an AI becoming a rogue entity, saw it as a dangerous idiocy.
Dobbs studied Lipinski’s stiff shoulders. It’s trouble in the making. Well, what’s a contract without that added spice of a personality clash? she asked herself ruefully as the elevator doors opened and they crowded themselves inside along with twelve other shippers.
The elevator rose and gravity dropped, creating confusion inside Dobbs as her sense of balance worked out how to respond. All around her, the passengers eased their weight from foot to foot, or swallowed hard, or twisted their necks, or made any of the hundred other mostly useless physical compensations to the changes. Everyone but Yerusha. She just leaned against the wall, held onto her AI case, and continued to breathe.
It took no great skill at observation to notice that something was seriously wrong with her and that the meds should not have let her go. On the other hand, Freers were a notably contentious and militant group. Titania Station had become Free Home Titania by withstanding a siege that cost the landlords more than five hundred lives and hundreds of thousands in equipment and negotiations. Yerusha might just have been proving she was as tough as her parents who stood the siege.
Then again, she might not.
Dobbs eased her own weight from foot to foot and wished she hadn’t thought of that.
The doors opened onto the hanger bays. Yerusha’s eyes opened at the same time. Lipinski and Yerusha stepped out in the middle of a small gaggle of passengers who dispersed in different directions, moving with the care required by partial gravity. Dobbs followed them all out, keeping her eyes open for whatever was going to happen next.
It happened just as the airlock to the Pasadena opened. Dobbs looked ahead and saw a squared-off, roman-nosed man with skin the color of baked earth come out of the Pasadena airlock, obviously called out by their arrival in the bay. He wore the pocket-filled coveralls that was as close to a shipper’s uniform as anything. Then, she heard footsteps brush the carpet behind her. Dobbs turned to see a man and a woman in Oberon security green lope out of the corridor.
Yerusha hissed and jumped forward. The male green snatched at the air behind her. In the next breath, Dobbs lifted herself on her tip-toes and leaned forward. The green’s torso collided with her shoulder. In the light gravity, it just knocked Dobbs forward half a yard, keeping her right in his path before she began to slip towards the ground. The greens ducked frantically around her as she rolled onto the deck plates.
In two long, bounding strides, Yerusha was through the airlock and across the threshold into the Pasadena. Her feet slid out from under her and her body lazily settled down until her back measured its own length against the floor with the wafer case clutched against her chest. Green Man shoved the roman-nosed man out of the way and lunged towards her. Lipinski caught Roman Nose’s arm before he lost his balance. Green Woman grabbed Green Man’s arm and pulled them both up just short of crossing the Pasadena threshold. Yerusha rolled over and held up her hand to the approaching greens. A glaze of pain crossed over her eyes, but there was a puckered smile on her face.
Roman Nose pulled himself upright and looked down at Yerusha as if he was memorizing her face. Then he turned and took in the greens with the same care.
“Pilot Jemina Yerusha,” Yerusha called past the greens to Roman Nose as he steadied himself. “Checking in.”
“Watch Commander Schyler,” he replied, his gaze darting between Yerusha and the security greens. “Wondering why the hell you’re doing it like this.”
Yerusha grimaced and shifted her one-handed grip on the wafer case so that its corner was no longer digging into her chest. “I was trying to avoid a hassle.” She nodded towards the greens.
Schyler stuffed his hands into the pockets on either hip. Dobbs saw the cloth bulge and strongly suspected he had just thumbed a button on his pen. She picked herself up and made a great show of dusting herself off.