Kaden looked at her. “Why Charlotte?”
“I’m with Sunday,” Doron said, joining the party. “I think Nemesis is perfect.”
Except it wasn’t Doron.
It was Lian.
My heart rate must’ve spiked.
She’d put on another ten years in the past ten thousand— must’ve been staying up extra late to keep the end-game on track. Her hair was more silver than black now. She looked strong, though. Burly. Not the waif who’d shipped out with us at all. An elemental born of the Glade, corded with muscle. Coreward grav does that to you.
Still Lian, though. I didn’t know how the Chimp missed it.
Kaden turned. “Glad you could make it, Dor.” A slight emphasis on the name, the merest subtext of Don’t fuck it up, Sunday. Just play along. “How’s the Glade?”
“On schedule,” Lian reported. “Have to run the samples to be sure, but based on morpho I’d say maybe another hundred terasecs before we can reintegrate.”
No exclamations from the Chimp. No mention of the unlikely odds that a long-dead crew member might suddenly appear on deck, like some kind of Boltzmann body spontaneously reassembled out of quantum foam.
“It is beautiful.” Lian joined us at the tank. “What do you say? Nemesis?”
“Works for me,” Kaden said.
“Sure.” Kallie spread her hands. “But I still say Charlotte’s more whimsical.”
“Got that, Chimp?”
“Yes, Doron. Listed as Nemesis.”
I pinged my innerface, checked the personnel icons: Levi, D. floated in virtual space a few centimeters above Lian’s head.
Lian’s face, though. Lian’s voice.
She looked at me. “I think Chimp’s got us pulling plugs down in the Uterus. Wanna get that out of the way before things get busy?”
Right. I’d forgotten why we were up in the first place: a gate to build, and some Chimp-defeating uncertainty about where to put it.
“Sure,” I said.
Why doesn’t it see?
“Well then.” Lian swept a theatrical hand toward the door. “After you.”
“See that verse I wrote for Cats of Alcubierre?” she asked. By which she meant, You up to speed on the timestamp hack?
“Yeah. I like it. Feels like it wants to be a bit longer, though.” You should crank up the jump. Give us more time.
“I think so too.” She pulled one closed hand from her pocket, opened it just enough to let me glimpse the tiny device in her palm. One of a kind. The key to the cage, the lynchpin of the rebellion. Lian Wei’s custom-fabbed time machine.
I’d never seen it before.
She slipped hand back into pocket. “I figure maybe five minutes, by the time it’s ready to perform.”
We were in the tube, dropping aft and up, curving out across Eri’s isogravs. The things it did to my inner ears added to my sense of disquiet.
It was supposed to be Doron. Doron and me, installing the hack.
“You know I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Lian said. Levi, D. floated obstinately over her head.
“Uh huh.” Doron must still be down in the Glade. Lian had cloned his transponder. I wondered how long they’d been doing that.
“New look?” she asked innocently.
I shot her a glance. “Uh, yeah. I guess.”
“Thought so. Had a weird flash when I hit the bridge. Thought you were someone else. You know, from behind.”
“Really.”
“Just for a moment. The clothes, you know. ’Course, soon as I saw your face…”
“Right.” I nodded to show I understood. As far as the Chimp was concerned, transponders were definitive. They were the facial-recognition of Artificial Stupidity, the telltale that confirmed ID above all others. Of course the Chimp knew our faces, our voices. It could use them to identify us, the same way we’d use mods or clothing to identify someone from behind. But when that person turned toward us, we knew them by their face; no matter if they happened to be wearing someone else’s clothes.
The Chimp was even simpler. Once it had an innerface ID, it ignored biometrics entirely. Why waste the cycles?
“So who’d you think I was?” I asked as we decelerated.
“Lian Wei,” she replied.
We arrived at our destination. The door slid open.
“Spooky,” I said.
“Uh huh.” She gave me a small smile. “Happens, sometimes. When you get too close.”
Which was a rebuke, of course.
For forgetting what it was. For humanizing the enemy.
Chimp had taken to assigning us manual hardware checks. Brute-force stuff, mainly: making sure that plugs were securely seated in their sockets, that sort of thing. Maybe he was just being extra careful as we geared up for this Mother of All Builds. Maybe it had something to do with the steady drip-drip-drip of random static into certain sensory pathways down through the ages, maybe even the extra few meters of fiberop that Kai and Jahaziel had spliced into the lines a few builds back. Nothing corrupting, mind you, nothing to contaminate vital telemetry. Just a little extra distance-traveled, an extra microsecond of latency to make the Chimp furrow its brow and double-check the connections.
That’s what Lian and I were doing. Checking the Uterus. We emerged on the equatorial deck, glanced with feigned indifference at a bit of Painter graffiti just inside the entrance. An appropriation of another tribe’s culture so we could hide a number in plain sight:
172.
Someone had plugged in the grasers since I’d last been on deck. Black shiny cables sprouted from the apex of each cone, drooped across the gap, joined others in medusa nests converging on each of the buses mounted around the mezzanine. We visited each bus in turn: a series of black boxes, indistinguishable one from another except for arbitrary labels stamped into the metal and my backbrain. We pried open each casing, manually checked each connection; closed each lid and moved to the next.
If I hadn’t already known the target I might have missed it: the subtle shift in Lian’s body language, the way she hunched her shoulders and turned her back to Chimp’s main line of sight. I did the same, leaning close to block the view of any shipboard eyes. Lian popped the lid, started checking connections.
“Hmm. That one’s a bit loose.” She pulled the plug, slipped a pocket microscope off her belt, turned it on the socket.
I looked away.
I don’t know exactly what Lian did. Maybe she did the install by touch. Maybe the same hack that identified her as Doron Levi spliced some equally fictitious image into the feed from her visual cortex. But I heard the click of the connection sliding back home, and let my gaze wander back to the bus as Lian closed the lid. “That should do it.”
Lynchpin installed.
“Yes,” the Chimp replied, and sent a few milliamps down the line just to be sure. “The numbers are good.”
If you followed the beam path of Graser 172, extended it through the center of the firing chamber and on out the other side, it would hit an unremarkable patch of bulkhead and bedrock. There was nothing especially critical at that precise point, should the graser fire by itself. There didn’t have to be. Whole cubic meters of the surrounding rock would turn instantly to magma. Any circuitry embedded in that matrix—optical, electronic, quantum—would simply evaporate.
We’d tracked the Chimp to an uncharted node about four meters to the left of the bullseye, and maybe a meter behind the bulkhead. That was its ringside seat for the upcoming build, a location from which it could preside over events with minimal latency. If Graser 172 fired by itself, the Chimp would die.