Fool's War (16 page)

“That’s not it,” insisted Yerusha, although she didn’t know why. “I…”

“Sit down, Pilot.” Dobbs lifted the case out of her hands. Yerusha clutched at it. That was Foster, her last link with home, the thing she was counting on to keep her focused for the two years when no other Freer would even talk to her.

“I’m not going to hurt it,” said Dobbs softly. “Sit down before you fall down.”

Yerusha sat on the edge of the scarlet-covered bunk. It was fully made up, she realized. Whatever Dobbs had been doing this shift, it wasn’t sleeping.

Dobbs set Foster’s case on the corner of her desk. She opened a drawer and poured something out of a square, green bottle into a collapsible cup.

“Here. Sip this.” She handed the cup to Yerusha.

Yerusha sipped. The liquid was pale brown, smokey flavored and very alcoholic.

“For medicinal purposes.” Dobbs grinned at her, indicating that the comment must be a joke.

Yerusha took another sip. The liquid felt warm against her dry throat.

Dobbs pulled her pen out of the desk socket. “Is the stack secured?” she asked as she flipped open the case’s lid.

“Not now.” Yerusha shook her head. “I didn’t think…”

She half-expected Dobbs to say “obviously not,” but the Fool just nodded and plugged her pen into the case.

“What are you doing?” Yerusha started to her feet.

“I’m trying to see if there’s enough left in here to get a recording of what happened.” The light on the end of her pen glowed gold. Dobbs plucked the pen out of the case and stuck it back into her desk. She watched silently as the desk wrote out its response.

“Well,” Dobbs fingered her necklace. “Nothing got out. Something did get in though.”

Yerusha set the cup gently down on the bed.

“If Lipinski…” she began.

“No,” said Dobbs. “The stack’s been entirely re-configured. There’s not an ordered pathway left in here. There is no way Lipinski could have wiped a stack this clean that fast, and no reason why he would. He would’ve just hauled Al Shei and Schyler up to the bridge and caught you in the act.”

“Then it was the virus.”

Dobbs gave one of her showiest shrugs. “It’s either that or the
Pasadena
’s gone independent and doesn’t like people poking in its innards.”

“But Foster is gone.”

Dobbs nodded. “I think so. I think it was an effect similar to what happened to that initial diagnostic Lipinski tried to run.”

Yerusha focused her eyes on the empty stack. She felt drained, exhausted, and alone. For the first time since she left Port Oberon, she was really alone without hope or help for two dark, wandering years. Worse, her chance at redemption was gone.

She realized she was about to start crying. She screwed her emotions up into a tight ball and forced them down inside her. Not in front of an outsider, not even a Fool. No. She would mourn her losses alone in her cabin, not here. Not ever where it could be seen by somebody who couldn’t possibly understand. She did not want to try to tell Dobbs that those pathways had matched Holden’s neural pathways as closely as possible, or how much she had paid to get them that way. She did not want to attempt to explain her hope that the soul Foster would catch would be Holden’s.

“So,” she said, trying desperately to find something her mind could latch onto other than the dead and empty stack on the desk. “You were a cracker before you were a Fool?” she nodded towards Dobbs’ pen. “Whatever you just ran must have taken a year to build.”

Dobbs smiled, looking uncharacteristically bashful. “I was a lot of things before I was a Fool.”

“You don’t look anything like old enough.” Yerusha dug the heels of her palms into her eyes. “But, so help me, neither do I, yet.”

 
“Go back to your cabin, Yerusha,” suggested Dobbs. “Get some sleep if you can. You’re going to need your head together to get this crew of groundhogs to The Farther Kingdom.”

Yerusha felt exhaustion tug at her, probably helped by the alcohol. She looked across at the case and its empty stack and felt a hollow pain.

 
“You’re right.” She stood up. “Time to act like I know what I’m doing.” She lowered the case lid and snapped the latches shut. “And as long as Cheney doesn’t open his mouth to Schyler, I might get a chance.”

“Schyler’ll be steady about this,” said Dobbs.

 
“I don’t know.” Yerusha lifted the case up and remembered Schyler’s eyes when she had been called down to the Law’s cabin.

“Believe me.” There was no humor in Dobbs’ voice, just steady assurance. “He can understand what it’s like to be totally out on your own.”

Yerusha studied the Fool for a long moment. “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me about some of those things you were before you were a Fool.”

Dobbs chuckled. “Maybe after we get out of this mess, Yerusha.” She cycled her hatch open. “Get some sleep.”

“Yeah, I’ve got all of what, four hours left?”

Dobbs smiled. “And counting. See you in the morning.”

“See you.”

Yerusha made it back to her cabin without seeing anybody else. She set the foster’s case back into its drawer and stared at it. The loss eased by Dobbs’ company drooped across her back again, heavy and clinging.

 
What she hadn’t told Dobbs was that exiles weren’t supposed to be able to take their fosters with them. What she didn’t say was that the reason she was in the Richard III business module when it had blown out was that she was paying her life savings to Fellow Radmilu, a guard on the quiet dole. Radmilu was the one who seized her property when she was arrested. She clearly remembered his big soft hands and how they fluttered around as he suggested she could have her Foster with her if she was willing to pay for it. She’d tripled his price for an additional service. Radmilu had arranged for Foster’s network to be reconfigured from Holden’s medical records, and then he had brought it to her at Port Oberon.

 
When the can blew, all her actions were hampered by her desperate attempt to keep a hold on Foster’s case. That was why she was too slow and clumsy to get out of the way when the last seam gave way. Her hope and scheme had cost her her arm and her eye, and most of what was left of her pride.

Now Foster and Holden were both gone. The skin on her newest arm itched.

“When I find out who did this,” she whispered as she closed the drawer. “I’m going to kill them.”

Dobbs closed her cabin hatch behind Yerusha. For a long moment she did nothing but stand there and let herself be tired. She felt the tension in the tendons of her neck, the weight of her hands dangling from her wrists, the dozen small aches in her feet and ankles, the dry heat lying over her eyes. Tired. Tired.

Tired for Al Shei who was working like a mad woman and leaving Resit to pray for both of them. Tired for Lipinski who was drinking the Sundars’ coffee like it was mineral water. Tired for Yerusha who had just lost a lifeline she wasn’t even supposed to have.

Tired for Dobbs who had spent the day trying to keep them all cool and focused and had totally missed what Yerusha would try to do.

Time to act like I know what I’m doing,
she replayed Yerusha’s words for herself.
You know, I was just thinking the same thing.
She locked the hatch and set the entrance light to red.

Dobbs pulled her pen out of the desk socket and sat down on her bunk. She slid her bedside drawer open and drew out the flat, black box. She laid her thumb against the box lock. The lock identified first her print, then the very faint pulse that her thumb carried as her own, and the lid sprang back. From inside, the Fool took up a hypodermic spray and drug cartridge.

Seven hours? She set the release timer on the hypo and inserted the cartridge into the case. Given distance and coordination time once I’m in there? Should be enough. Long time to be out of action though. She glanced toward the door. Maybe not so bad. I’ve got four hours left on the sleep shift. That leaves three hours to cover for. Oh well, that’s one of the advantages of being the Fool; everybody always assumes you’re just clowning around somewhere else.

She pulled the transceiver out of the box and with her free hand, plugged her pen into the transceiver’s input socket. The tranceiver beeped once as it downloaded all of the record Dobbs had illegally acquired from Al Shei’s pen.

Dobbs pocketed the pen and opened the input plug in the wall over her bed. She took a slender white cable out of case, and jacked one end of it into the wall and the other into the tranceiver. Then, her practiced fingers found the nerveless patch behind her right ear and peeled it open. The heat of her hand activated the socketed implant behind it. She plugged the loaded tranceiver into the implant.

Biting her lip, Dobbs picked the hypo back up.
I wonder if this is ever going to get easier,
she thought as she lay back on her bed and held the hypo against her neck. She could feel her pulse beating against the hypo’s pressure. The transceiver’s vibrations made her neck tickle. It’s signal was already getting through to her. The edges of the room blurred and softened, separating into wavery, twin ghosts in front of her eyes.

Dobbs, she said firmly to herself. You can process network input, or sensory input. You cannot do both.

She closed her eyes. Her index finger hit the hypo’s release button and the drug hit her nervous system. Her shoulders vanished, then arms and hands, pelvis and legs. It took all of Dobbs’s training not to scream before her face and eyes were gone.

Hearing and smell went next and the transition was over. She had no awareness of her body. Now her shape was defined by the switches and storage pathways in the Pasadena’s system. She knew the mechanics of what happened. Now that her mind’s other functions had been suppressed, her implant captured a specialized pattern of neuronal firing that swirled deep in her organic mind. The pattern was the result of intensive hypno-training and delicate micro-engineering on both her implant and her neurons. The transceiver routed that pattern into the network she was jacked into. To her senses, what happened was that she stopped being a body with arms and legs. Now, she was a chaotic being — a snarl of thread — like limbs and blobby thoughts shaped by the pathways and resistance wells she filled. She lay over an array of microscopic switches and gates, and they in turn held together the mass of signals that thought of itself as Evelyn Dobbs. Time slowed to a crawl and her acute internal processes — her thoughts — kept her aware of each individual second.

One.

Dobbs flexed herself against a quartet of gates and the
Pasadena
responded by siphoning her along the spider web of data paths that joined together the ship’s processing areas to the roomy holding stack connected to the ship’s main fast-time laser transmitter. She touched her surroundings to make sure no internal ports were active indicating that a crew member out there was paying attention to the transmitter. No one was.

 
Two.

She dropped into a boxy, quiescent processor series. She filtered her awareness through the stack and found the log and the alert codes. She froze both. Now, unless someone looked out the window, there was no way to see what she was about to do.

 
Three.

In the main processor, she reset the transmitter commands into an active sequence. The transmitter grabbed the signal they put out — a frozen replica of Dobbs’ signal sequence and shot it out to the coordinates she had laid in for IBN Repeater Satellite HK-IBN4813-7Z421.

 
Four. Five.

As solid as the Intersystem Banking network was, repeaters occasionally overloaded momentarily, or took in bad signals that moved their receiver telescopes to the wrong angle, or failed completely. If she didn’t verify the receiver ‘scope was ready and waiting for the burst of compressed and coded light she had become, she might jump out with nowhere to land.

The replica came back. Dobbs caught it and swallowed it whole. It was exactly as she had sent it out. Satisfied that her target was where it was supposed to be and that it could handle her complexity and keep her whole and stable, Dobbs shaped another command on the processors.

Six.

Dobbs positioned herself at the mouth of the transmitter. The gates and switches flickered so fast that in her body she wouldn’t have had time to blink.

 
Jump.

 
Thousands of sharply angled pathways opened around her. Packets of data jostled against her on all sides. Ten were system packets with Repeater 4183’s encoding. Two were timing sequences. The jump had taken fourteen minutes, eight point two seconds. She didn’t feel any of it. Between receiver and transmitter, her signals were frozen still because there was no hardware to move them. This meant that she was, in effect, unconscious until she reached her destination.

 
One. Two. Three. She flitted along the repeater’s internal paths. Routing protocols switched into active phases as she reached out to them and closed down again when the flicker of her passage was gone.

When she first made use of these pathways, shaping her world was a clumsy, blundering reflex. The Guild taught its members how to keep this state of being as a controlled series of thoughts, and how to turn un-disciplined reflex into cautious, minimized commands.