Chapter 28
Ember lay back in her seat and played some death-punk orchestral music as the shuttle tore through the atmosphere of Omm then headed outward. Somewhere in the Omm system, a CESS starship waited for her to deliver the DSU which they obviously wanted. There’d be backups, of course. CESS wasn’t rudderless or leaderless.
But this, this DSU, held what those on Old-Earth might term der Fuehrer. An apt comparison, considering.
The cute thing about this was that she didn’t have to do anything much at all now that she was returning to CESS. The virus either succeeded or it didn’t. She’d tweaked, added some ramifications and limitations, but it was self-driven, reproduced by itself, died by itself, according to rules she’d set up.
The shuttle docked, and she had no idea what she was stepping onto until she exited.
No screens had been shown to her going outward. An incognito super-secret starship.
Or not.
The hatch opened onto a transparent walkway leading in, and this was not merely a starship, though there were starships nearby. This was a pseudo-world, a synthworld, a hollowed globe created by humanoids to sustain life. Only the uber rich could afford such creations. Once made, they could be steered. Hyperspace travel could be incorporated, and clearly this one was capable.
On the outside it seemed a solid sphere, with defensive installations, communications arrays, an engine of mammoth proportions. Within, once she’d whisked along the shoot-rail that took her through the crust, an entirely new world was revealed.
Within was no world such as a god might be imagined to design. Instead the entire inner skin of the crust bore gravity and there were lakes, rivers, forests, towns, and beaches curving upward and overhead. She stepped from the shoot-rail carriage and looked above to the heavens where an ocean lapped. The sky was the core of this bizarre inside-out globe. She shaded her eyes to see past the miniature arti-sun. If she walked for long enough, she could look up and see where she now stood.
This was CESS Nexus – the holiday destination of only the most supreme executives.
“Miss Ember?” Two security-prime guards waited before her dressed in perfect black neo-suits. Beyond them was a field of trimmed green grass with some small, four-legged animals frolicking. It would be A harmless and B useful in a hunt, should an exec choose to spend a day doing so.
“Yes?” She smiled politely.
“You have a DSU unit we are to remove from you. “Please?” He held out his hand, palm uppermost.
“Of course.” Somewhere light music played – a stark contrast to the death punk she’d had booming at her ear. Ember extracted the DSU from her pocket. “Here.”
The grimace on the man’s face said he’d noticed her general disarray, the holes in her tights, the holes and grime everywhere. Her red curls stuck out wildly too.
“I’ve been in a bad situation for over a week.”
“Yes, we understand.” He nodded. The precision stripes of shaved hair running from front to back over his scalp matched those of all the guards she’d seen. Easily identified. “Until further notice, you’re free to indulge in the facilities of Nexus, providing you stay within this area.”
A map flashed onto her retina with the area delineated in translucent blue. There was a beach to one edge, a set of buildings at the other, and walking tracks. She was being treated well.
“Thanks.”
He turned and marched away. One guard stayed with her.
“New clothes?” she asked. Anything to make them think she was happy and merely waiting as requested.
The generic guard gestured for her to follow and set off down a gravel path toward the buildings. Birds flew overhead. The knee-high, deerlike animals pranced. A few strangers in swimsuits or sporting attire walked by, paying her no heed. Her internal awareness of time ticked by.
In ten, the DSU should be in the hands of someone relevant. In fifteen they’d have decided it was safe. In sixteen they’d let it access the system. In sixteen point zero two it’d have spread like a tsunami to every system on this sphere. Another two it’d wipe out everyone and everything’s data, as far as they could tell.
Progressively it’d spread to any adjacent starships. Nothing would escape unless they did not connect the DSU to that first system.
Every exec in the upper echelons would lose their ID forever, throughout the galaxy. Hyperspace travel made piggybacking a virus to everywhere as simple as spreading the black plague with a fleet of superfast rats.
She knew these spheres and though not aware this was where she was being brought, it would go down fast. Without arti-grav to hold people, critters, water, and dirt, and whatever else was here, to the crust, without air scrubbers and life support, this sphere would be a hazard to life within an hour. Breathing in dirt and acid was not good for you.
She followed the man, smiling gently, her boots crunching on the gravel, while thinking how only a few hours ago, she’d been walking among ruins.
Nexus was going to be in ruins too.
It mightn’t be safe for her to be loose, and so she’d added in her little extra plan.
When the siren blared, they came for her – five guards. She fingered the rack of fashionable dresses for one more second as they burst into the salon.
The siren meant the DSU was talking to the system. It meant her virus was amok.
Amok amok.
An announcement began to repeat on a loop.
Emergency. Emergency. This sphere will likely become dangerous to humanoids within twenty spokmins. Evacuate. Evacuate. Use your allotted emergency pod.
Ember went quietly, down the stairs to the maintenance route that wove within the crust to the jail cells. There were always places to restrain prisoners. They let her in, locked the sliding door, and left her. Their eyes had showed their fears even if they said little.
She knew why.
This lovely little fleet of starships and the Nexus sphere was soon to be a graveyard of diseased, high-tech corpses and here she sat in the very, very middle. Ember walked to the low bed against the stark white wall in her cell and she lay down.
Waiting for the cataclysm wave to ebb was a bitch.
Where else was safe except for here? Out there, someone might’ve decided she’d brought something in with her and then they might have shot her.
A few explosions above told her someone was panicking.
She shifted her back on the bed, felt gravity give up the ghost, and floated upward.
Eventually the lights went out, the machinery stopped humming. In the dark she listened to the last of the pods thumping out into space.
Never get a nerd-geek girl angry with you. She might just shut down your life support systems and your life. Every database CESS owned or monitored across the galaxy would be so much digital scrap very, very soon.
Yet she wasn’t suicidal.
“Recover,” she whispered.
The backup she’d arranged of the vital systems kicked in and spread, filling up the ghost she’d made of what used to be in control of Nexus. It was enough to allow her to live here for a few days, until she figured out how to leave. It was possible she couldn’t, that no transport remained, or could be hailed, but that she was prepared to accept. The penalty of such a thorough revenge.
Die you evil motherfuckers.
She had indeed nuked them in the testicles.
The jail door slid open. Lights came back on.
There would be no one else here, or the system would not have rebooted.
Alone again. She hummed a tune as she walked the deserted corridor.
Her boot steps echoed. Tip tap. Tip tap.
Alone again. Only this time she’d lost the tune.
She stopped dead, suddenly afraid to emerge onto the inner crust. What if she were wrong and someone else was here?
What if she couldn’t leave? She actually did want to live – wanted to go back to Hoss and Baz and say, I’m done. To explain and beg forgiveness and put her case for doing what she’d done.
As if they could ever understand this crazy path she’d taken...
Ig appeared as she stepped out onto the inner crust, fluttering before her. The arti-sun was blooming again. The oceans and beaches were a mess of intersecting random waves and dead or stunned fish that’d splattered back to the surface after floating into the sky.
A chaos of towels left by their owners.
A surreal artwork of fallen picnic hampers.
She wondered how many tanned execs in swimsuits were currently hurtling into space in pods, never to be found. Because, after all, they’d ceased to exist.
Data erased, they were no-ones now. Why rescue a no one?
The building here looked mostly smashed, but...
She turned in place.
There was no one.
Alone for reals.
She’d achieved what she wanted to and...felt terribly hollow. She’d had her insides scooped out. The pain of not knowing her past had gone and had been replaced by something else she couldn’t yet quantify.
Worth it? Yes. Give her another day of this. She might change her mind.
Okay, a few hours.
She found her way to the nearest hatchway and peered out the transparent viewsphere as if she could thumb a ride from one of the floating hulks out there. Starships were bumping into each other – collisions of elephantine proportions that broke off pieces as large as skyscrapers and flared fire into the blackness.
If one of those hit Nexus she’d be toast.
Communications had not been preserved. She was not perfect. She couldn’t yell for help and she’d reduced every ship nearby to a nonfunctioning lump of metal. Bravo, she whispered, turning her back to the viewsphere.
She slid down it and Ig landed on her lap.
“Hi, little guy.”
Here was someone who could leave, if he wished to. What would happen to Ig if he stayed and she died? The thought worried her.
Sometimes he obeyed her but where could she send him?
To Baz and Hoss, of course.
“Go back, Ig. Find Baz and Hoss. Go. Please.” He stayed. “Hey! Go find me some pretty data! Stuff I’ll like.” She tickled him again and he made a sound.
The first sound he’d ever made. A chirrup. Tiny but distinct.
“Wow. You sure picked your –”
He was gone.
Well then.
The realization of what she’d achieved blossomed, and for a while it overwhelmed. She’d done what she needed to do and in the process shafted her life, maybe theirs too – Baz and Hoss.
She’d said she’d come back to them but maybe she couldn’t.
What were they doing right now? She needed them...
Ember sighed.
She was still sitting with her forehead on her clasped hands, her fingers cold and growing colder, sifting through data and trying to construct some way of making a system-spanning comm device from what still functioned here, when the metal at her back vibrated.
Thumm.
Something had arrived, docked. Someone was coming.
Enemy or friend? She stood and backed away, bottom lip caught in her teeth. If she was the sort to pray to the gods, this was a good time to begin.
The hatch opened, and Hoss and Baz walked through, wary and bedecked in weapons, with rifles in hand. A squad of Baz’s crew followed them, also ready for a fight.
The bottom fell out of her dismal world and a spark of joy floated, bobbed. But would they forgive her?
They were here, weren’t they? She swallowed her fear of rejection, ignored the writhing ache in her temples, her chest, stomach. Okay she was going to throw up if she held off talking to them any longer.
She grinned, raised a hand, and waved. “Hi. It’s okay! I’m the only one left!” It was a miniscule wave, one that a person might do when they were a little afraid of what was coming. “Read my note?”
At a word and gesture from Baz, his men withdrew, except for two who stayed guarding the airlock. Baz and Hoss stalked toward her, grim and silent.
Oops.