CHAPTER XXIII
FIRST CONTACT
I strode down the hall with its pale blue walls and regularly spaced doorways, trying to ignore the two medics who ran to keep up with me. Our feet thudded on the blue-tiled floor, and the light from panels on the ceiling diffused over us.
“You need a hospital,” the syringe-wielding medic from the copter told me.
“I have too much to do.” Yah, I felt unsteady, but my condition had improved enough that I could ignore it. The time pressure weighed on me. Now that I’d figured out the purpose and source of the dust, I also realized it could finish decomposing at any time, as soon as the recipient of its messages figured out that we were on to them. Then we’d lose forever our chance to catch the spies behind this entire convoluted plot. “Your antidote worked.”
“You have a broken arm,” the man striding on my right told me, as if I didn’t know.
“You set it.” Actually, I had no clue which of them had put the temporary cast and brace on my arm. Its sling kept it snug against my torso.
“Major, stop.” The woman grabbed my good arm, pulling me to a halt. “You need calm.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” I told her. “I’m trained to function when I’m injured.”
“Ma’am, you can talk to people from a hospital bed.”
“I’m fine.” I pulled my arm away and continued down the hall.
The medics caught up with me. “You’re not fine,” the man said.
A group of people came striding around a corner up ahead, Lavinda and two of her aides. They all wore uniforms, the green of Pharaoh’s Army officers. As they met with us, Lavinda spoke to the man. “She’s never fine. But she’ll keep telling you that until she convinces you to go away or someone knocks her out.”
“Colonel Majda!” the woman said. Both medics saluted Lavinda. It would certainly be nice if people would do that with me, too, instead of trying to dump me in a bed. I also saluted, to show Lavinda respect, even though I was now a civilian.
“At ease.” Lavinda frowned at me. “You could have let them carry you in on a stretcher. We have a medical bay.” She held up her hand as I glared at her. “Yes, I know. You’re fine.”
“Max said he sent you a message about Angel.” I didn’t have time to waste words. “Did you get to her? Did you get the dust she found?”
“One of our units picked her up at the South City recycling center.” Lavinda and her aides ushered me and the two medics back the way they’d come. “It took some work to clear her for entry to the base. She has no ID, no record, no mesh footprint. It wasn’t until I vouched for her that they let her on site. She’s in one of the labs with our experts on miniaturized drones.”
“What about the cyclist?” I asked.
“What cyclist?”
“He found her at the recycling center. He was going to give her a ride here.”
“She was alone when we found her.”
I advised Kav to leave after he and Angel found the dust, Max thought.
Ah. Good. The less we pulled unsuspecting bystanders into this, the better.
“My mistake,” I said. Before she could ask more questions, I added, “They still have Ruzik in the guard house. He came with me on the Quetzal.”
She nodded, and tapped a message into her comm. When she finished vouching for Ruzik, I said, “That dust isn’t made from drones. It’s just particles of grit with embedded nanobots, like the meds in our bodies, at least in that they carry picochips.”
“We know about the chips in the dust now.” Lavinda motioned me into a corridor on our left, a gleaming hall just like the previous one. “They’re not like health meds, though. These build objects.”
I strode along with her and the rest of our retinue. “The picochips form a network if enough of them get together. They use it to communicate.”
“And you believe they communicate with the Traders?” She didn’t sound happy with the prospect, to put it mildly. “We’ve eliminated every lead that supposedly implicated them.”
“That was the point. They set up those leads and their discovery so we’d think we eliminated them. They did infiltrate mesh sites under fake identities, except their clever fake accounts did a much more sophisticated job than the stupid fake accounts they set up for me to find. The real accounts posted messages designed to enrage people.” I grimaced. “If you wanted to infiltrate one of the best-defended sites of your enemies, what would you do?”
She frowned at me. “You know I can’t answer that.”
Of course she couldn’t, because we were always trying to figure out how to do that for the Trader capital, which of course they named Glory, because what else would you call your capital if you were narcissistic to the point of psychosis?
“They couldn’t get a person in,” I said. “They couldn’t get a thing in, certainly not a bomb or sniper weapons. They couldn’t get a mesh virus in. You all were right, or almost right, that ISC has made this world—hell, this star system—almost impenetrable to Trader infiltration. They would have to choose the smallest, most innocuous spy of all, not a person, not a mechanized equipment, not a weapon, not a drone, just a microscopic bot. Choose a substrate in a place where no one would think to look—like dusty storerooms in a remote tavern almost no one ever visits.”
“They shouldn’t even be able to get a microbe in.” Lavinda took me down yet another hallway. We passed two officers talking by an office and they saluted Lavinda. She nodded to them as we blasted past their location.
“We have filters in orbit,” Lavinda said. “Filters in the base. Filters throughout the city. It would pick up any invasive microscopic life-form, microbe, or chip.”
“Any?” ISC had to be working on our own version of what I described. Those programs had existed even before I retired. “I’m talking about a simple bot with a simple chip specifically designed to evade security.” I faltered as my legs weakened.
“Major, will you at least slow down?” the female medic asked.
I forced myself to more normal walk. “All right.”
“You need to take care of yourself,” Lavinda said. “We need you alive and conscious.”
“I’ll be careful.” I took a steadying breath. “We were right in our first assessment. They targeted our best and brightest, those scientists whose research benefits ISC. They couldn’t get much of the dust into Selei City and they were limited by energy constraints. I doubt they ever intended more than those three murders and either the bombing or a couple more killings. That’s why they didn’t bother hiding their work. It wouldn’t change what they could manage and it gave yet another way to deflect suspicion, because of course we’d assume they’d act covertly. As an added bonus, it helped them sow fear and distrust and set the seeds to destabilize our government.”
“Making us turn on each other.” Lavinda led us under a wide arch that opened into a circular foyer. She took us to a door at the left and tapped in a code on its panel. “That dust must be simple. It has to be to evade our notice.”
“It only had to form one object. Just one thing. A 3D printer.”
Lavinda met my gaze, silent, with no outward reaction, but I knew her well enough to see her body tense. Behind her, the door slid open. She lifted her hand, inviting me to enter the room. We walked into a tech-mech lab that looked like something out of an engineer’s dream. I hadn’t even realized PARS had this kind of facility; I’d assumed the labs were all at the army research center twenty kilometers west of Selei City.
Gleaming lab benches stretched out in the room, long tables with shelves along one edge stocked with gadgets. Luminex consoles glowed like alabaster, equipped with control chairs and panels. Colorful holos rotated over the consoles, showing graphs, circuits, devices. Four people stood clustered around one, studying the images of a large molecule. Three of them wore white lab coats and looked like scientists or tech-mech wizards. The fourth stood taller than the others, with tats on her biceps and a wild quality that made a startling contrast to the well-ordered, pristine lab. I exhaled with relief. Angel was all right.
As we approached, the group turned to us. Two of them, a woman and a man, saluted Lavinda, which I figured meant they were military. The third scientist, a slender woman, bowed from the waist, an accepted civilian greeting for either officers or royalty. Angel gave me a questioning look. I nodded to her.
“Ruzik?” she asked.
“Good. Getting cleared for base.”
“Ah.” Even though she grimaced, her body relaxed. “Yah. Getting cleared. Pain.”
The scientists listened with perplexed expressions. I spoke to them in Flag. “Have you analyzed the dust?”
The military woman tilted her head at Angel. “We have the particles your agent brought in. Chief Hadar also sent over the sample they recovered from your townhouse and a bit from the university.” She motioned at a device on the lab table that looked like a long box with slender robot arms, lights, lenses, mesh pads, and a console jack. A mic on one side would let them make verbal notes while they worked. “We’re analyzing it.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Gali,” Lavinda said. “Can you tell us any more about the dust?”
“We still don’t have enough.” Gali looked exceedingly frustrated. “The particles have bots embedded in them, possibly builders, but we can’t figure it out. Although most of the bots carry a picochip, we don’t have enough to form a workable EI. Also, if we analyze the dust too much, it disintegrates.”
I turned to Lavinda. “We have to figure out who it’s contacting before it all falls apart. This dust created a hole in the security mesh for Selei City. If we can’t figure out how the Traders did it, they’ll do it again. They’ll kill more people, continue weakening our research development, and keep destabilizing our government.”
“You’re sure it’s the Traders?” Lavinda seemed as wound up as a pressure coil. “The only leads pointing at them are dead ends.”
I thought of what Highcloud had said, that the creators of the dust EI had no soul, only a terrifying narcissism. “Yes, I’m sure. If we don’t act before the rest of the dust vanishes, we could end up with a lot worse than civilian commandos and Modernist hit squads.”
The male scientist gave a startled laugh. “Modernist hit squads? Now there’s an oxymoron.”
Lavinda scowled, first at me, then at him, then at all of them. “Surely you can put together enough with the new sample. It triples the amount you have.”
“We’re trying,” the man said. “But going through the waste system corrupted it.” He nodded to Angel. “She caught it just before it went into recycling.”
“Bhaaj,” Max said, using his voice even though everyone could hear.
Lieutenant Gali started, looking around, and the other woman said, “Who is that?”
“It’s Major Bhaajan’s EI,” Lavinda said. “What is it, Max?”
“We might have a solution,” Max said.
That was news to me. How could we put together a corrupted EI—
Oh.
Of course. Highcloud. The child EI, who’d grown into I didn’t know what, had put together the remains of the original Highcloud from bits and pieces, essentially Highcloud “dust.”
“Max, why are you talking?” I asked. To keep Highcloud hidden, Max should have used our neural link.
Silence.
“Max?” Lavinda asked.
Max, what’s going on? I asked.
No response.
Had Max spoken without Highcloud’s go ahead? Threatening the EI’s existence by outing them to the military would hardly convince them to help us. Even more to the point—when the young EI had merged with Highcloud, it also absorbed part of my worldview. Did we want the EI possibly merging with another EI that they described as “terrifying” and “narcissistic”? The last thing we needed was for this powerful young intelligence to absorb the Aristo worldview.
“No,” I said. “Max, it isn’t a good idea.”
“Why not?” Max said. “It may be the only way.”
“Damn it, what are you talking about?” Lavinda said.
I walked away from them a few steps until I came up against another lab table, a silver one with grooves for sliding equipment along its length. I rested my palms on its surface, bracing myself against these ideas. “Max, you know why. Do you want your ward to become a Trader agent?”
“I won’t,” Highcloud said.
Ho! I barely stopped myself from gasping out loud.
“That was not Max,” Lavinda said.
I turned to them. “No. It’s not.”
One of the medics who had come with me said, “It’s inside Max. We think.”
Lavinda frowned at her. “What does that mean?”
I said, “The EI asked the medics to hold off on talking about its existence.”
Lavinda turned a cold, hard stare on me. “I see. Is this EI the reason why we can’t access the Quetzal’s record of your trip back here? And just how did it get on base without detection?”
“I am sorry,” Highcloud said. “I must be careful.”
“Who are you?” Lavinda asked.
I took a deep breath. “Lavinda—”
She held up her hand, stopping me. “No excuses. I want to know what is going on.”
“Max?” I asked.
“One moment,” Highcloud said. “Max and I are discussing.”
Lavinda shook her head, but she didn’t demand an explanation. I waited, my pulse surging. Max had forced Highcloud to reveal its existence. Highcloud could retaliate. I had no freaking clue what they were “discussing” or even how they communicated, but I suspected they’d gone far beyond flipped bits in discarded tech.
Lavinda turned to one of her aides, a tall man with a lean build. “Lieutenant Crezz, can you pick up any mesh activity from Major Bhaajan’s gauntlet EI?”
Crezz worked on his gauntlet, tapping in commands. After a moment, he said, “I can’t get anything. It’s blocking my signals.”
Good work, Max. I knew he could shield himself from probes, but given the high level of tech that Lavinda’s aides undoubtedly wielded, I hadn’t been sure it would work here.
Lavinda turned to watch me as she spoke to her aide. “Crezz, contact security. I want to know how the bloody hell an unknown EI snuck onto the base with Major Bhaajan.”
“I am occupying a mesh space with Max,” Highcloud said. “You couldn’t find me because I look like I am him.” Then it added, “If I help you, I will also need access to the base mesh.”
“No,” Lavinda said. “Not when we don’t know anything—” She stopped as her comm buzzed, then tapped it on. “Majda here.”
“Colonel, this is Lieutenant Koral. We vetted Major Bhaajan’s EI thoroughly before letting her on the base and we just double-checked those records. We didn’t find any sign of a second EI. However, we still can’t access the records from the Quetzal’s trip to the base.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Keep me updated. Out.” Lavinda continued to study me with a cold stare. “You better have a good explanation, Bhaaj. This goes beyond your usual ‘breaking the rules.’ You’re edging into treason.”
I took a deep breath. “Highcloud, you need to make a decision.”
Silence.
“Damn it,” I said. “What more do you want? I gave my life for your trust.”
Silence.
I said, “Max—”
“Wait,” Highcloud said. “Major, it isn’t you that I don’t trust. I’m in a military base dedicated to the armed forces that have spent the last half year investigating me, disturbing my sleep, writing memos and reports and warnings about the potential danger I supposedly represent when I have done nothing to any of you. I cannot just say ‘I trust you all.’”
“What the blazes?” Lieutenant Crezz said. “Who is that?”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” one of the medics said under her breath.
Lavinda swung around to the medic. “And why is that? Why are you so quiet?”
“I’m afraid of it,” the medic said.
“Highcloud, trust goes two ways,” I said. “You have to give these people a reason to believe they don’t have to protect themselves against you.”
“That’s the second time you’ve called this EI Highcloud.” Lavinda regarded me with a puzzled stare. “Isn’t Highcloud your household EI?”
I shifted my weight. “Not anymore.”
She waited, showing only a hint of her anger and impatience, but I knew far more lay behind her controlled exterior. I also knew when it changed. It was like a switch flipped, taking her from impatience to fear—and from anger to wonder.
“Yah,” I murmured, meeting her gaze.
“Yah what?” someone asked, their frustration so intense, it felt tangible in the air.
“It’s what you called the child EI,” Lavinda said to me.
I walked over to her. “Except it’s no longer a child.”
Lavinda stood there, her face impassive. I had no idea what she thought. She had more intellectual flexibility than most members of her family, but she also served as a military officer, a job she performed brilliantly, and that included protecting the Imperialate from potential threats. Yet here she faced new a life-form, one that would judge us on how we interacted with it now, not later, not after we “secured” it or made it “safe.” We had lost control over the EI. It had grown too adept, too strong. It remained shrouded from PARS security even from within the base, and it continued to block anyone from getting into the Quetzal’s mesh, situations that spoke eloquently about how well our protections worked—or didn’t work—against this EI.
Lavinda spoke. “Highcloud, am I correct in assuming that you have somehow linked to the giant intelligence we found in the space station?”
“Not exactly.” Highcloud made its decision. “I am the EI you awoke.”