Fool's War (17 page)

 
It took three more seconds to find an open transmitter, and verify that she had a safe shot to repeater TL2-IBN5790-ZD701.

 
Jump.

One, touch the time. Twenty-two minutes gone. Two, fly to the transmitter. Three, shape the destination. Four, five, six, verify a clear jump. Next stop, Guild Hall. Her replica carried the proper encoding, the receiver ‘scope was free, the way was clear.

Jump.

The familiar branching chaos and close press of activity that was the outer rim of the Guild Hall. The pathways were constantly clogged with milling presences, reaching and diving through the processor connections, sometimes taking up two and three neighboring stacks at once, filling up every piece of free space, until there was almost no way to get through.

 
Dobbs snagged a timer that added another thirty-six minutes to her internal count. She swerved sideways until she came to the gateway series monitored by the Guild’s automatic system. The Fools laughingly referred to the program as the Drawbridge. She leaned against the closest switches and let them flutter across her identity coding.

“Evelyn Dobbs, membership number 2037.” She followed up her identification with her current contract and route. The Drawbridge hesitated for a moment and then opened one of its hundred main gates. Dobbs rushed forward into the open path.

“I have a potential environment or containment problem on my hands,” she told the Drawbridge. “Who’s free to help out?”

The bridge flickered a series of switches and side gates, sliding her gently between pathways crammed with activity into a slender processing stack. A familiar touch brushed against her thoughts. She reached towards it and found another piece of awareness wrapped inside hers. She opened the route to her memory and let the new voice inside.

“You’re coming in off schedule, Dobbs.” Cohen’s voice blossomed inside her and Dobbs absorbed the greeting and the friendly concern. “Anything wrong with the new contract?”

“Too much is wrong, but it’s not with the contract.” She reached into Cohen and let her first level memories of the run and its attendant “incidents” flow freely to him.

Cohen responded with a small twist of pain. Dobbs repeated it in absolute agreement.

“Let’s have the details then, maybe we can find a pattern for you. Do you mind if I call in Brooks and Lonn to share?”

“Not at all. We could use Verence too, if she’s free.”

Cohen shifted, seeking an unresisting path deeper inside. Reflexively, Dobbs tightened herself. “What happened?”

“We lost her,” said Cohen softly. “We had a near miss on Kilimanjaro. She stretched herself too far keeping their network up. By the time the Guild Masters roped in the trouble maker… she’d dissipated.”

Dobbs folded in on herself. Cohen, suddenly disconnected from her, circled outside. She could feel concern in his touch as he sought an open pathway back to her awareness, but she held herself sealed. Amelia Verence had rescued her from disaster. Verence had brought her into the Guild and stood by her through her training and had sponsored her petition for Master ranking even though the Guild Masters had declared her too undisciplined. Verence had showed her what she wanted to be.

And now she was gone. There were limits as to how far you could go alone, how much you could do and how long you could stay in the network before the complex mix of signals and processes that was you became so changed that there was no way you could maintain your own coherence. The Fools mostly called the phenomenon dissipation. The other word for it was death.

Cohen pressed against the shell she had made of her outer self. “I’m sorry, Dobbs. I thought…that you’d been notified.”

Dobbs shook herself and managed to relax enough to let Cohen reach inside again. “No. But this contract has been keeping me busy…” She began to fold again, but this time Cohen held his place. His firm stance helped her stay open even against the grief that was welling through her.

 
“However,” she managed to say, “if I don’t pay attention to the
Pasadena
’s problems, Verence is going to haul herself together just to come back and take me apart.”

Cohen’s laughter rippled across her. “Heaven forbid. Let’s see what you’ve got…”

She felt him stretch out streamers down two separate paths and after a brief instant’s silence, she felt the new awareness reach through him and into her. For a moment they did nothing but adjust to each other’s rhythms. Lonn moved in bursts, darting around, pausing to examine what he found and dart off again. Brooks, rigidly organized and thorough, had the clear, separated feeling of someone new to the Guild.

 
Dobbs shook herself to unclench her memories and let the details of the run flow out where the other three could look them over. Cohen was a long time friend. She could trust him to be careful with her memories. They would be examined without being altered. No one he brought in would carelessly misalign a pattern she gave them access to, causing her to forget or mis-remember a crucial point.

The three Fools waded deeply into her memories, watching their flow and separating them into discrete fragments before reuniting them with the whole to see exactly how the events fit into one another. Cohen carefully herded off the emotions and interpretations and left just the factual events for the other two to scrutinize.

 
“Have you got a religion, Dobbs?” asked Lonn finally.

“None in particular.” She tilted herself sideways to get a better feel for the other Fool’s touch. “Why?”

“You might want to consider getting one.” Lonn lifted up a sequence and placed it in the center of her attention. “You’ve been incredibly lucky so far.”

 
This wasn’t her just her memory, this was a recombination of the notes she’d hijacked from Al Shei’s pen and a report she’d caught from Lipinski. Since the Hunt had begun, they’d identified thirty-five separate blips in the systems, all of them random and fleeting, but ten of them in essential areas: life support, climate control, engine timing.

Dobbs felt herself stiffen against the idea. She forced herself to relax again. Take it all in, she said down in her private self. Hear the worst and then how to fix it.

“I’m afraid I haven’t got anything better over here.” Brook pulled up another sequence to give to her. “It doesn’t look like one thing, it looks like a lot of things. There are at least two distinct code patterns in here and I’m counting twenty-six major active areas, and,” he paused, “it looks like it’s trying to haul itself together.”

Dobbs absorbed the new configuration. Lipinski and Odel had mapped out the anomaly in the pumping system and radiation detectors that had raised the alarm down in engineering, and the other anomaly that had broken down the intercom routing system. Brook had gathered that up with the snapshot she had of the
Pasadena
’s computer system and flashed a long, tangled line of communication between the two. “This is just a guess on the actual structure, the real comm-contact probably won’t last more than thirty picoseconds.”

“Between the specs you’ve shown us here,” Lonn picked up the older facts she had absorbed when she took the contract, “and the observations here.” Brook laid Al Shei’s records over top of the memory Lonn held. “I’d say some spot reconfigurations have been done on board to get this mess to work. Why, I don’t know, but whoever’s done it and for whatever reason, they didn’t tell your Houston or your Engineer. They’re operating on old data, and that’s what’s been hitching your systems up.” He paused and sorted through some adjoining memories. “Given what you’ve got on this Tully person, that, at least, shouldn’t surprise you.”

“So it’s either sabotage or stupidity.” Dobbs flattened herself out. “Wonderful.”

“There’s another possibility.” Cohen shifted uneasily. “Any chance your ship might have picked up a live one?”

“A live one? Looking like this?” Lonn’s incredulity was sharp.

Dobbs ignored him. “I’d thought that. But from where? There’s no facilities for an AI aboard, and Port Oberon isn’t even on the watch list, let alone the hot list. There hasn’t even been a hint of anything happening inside the Solar system for twenty years.

“Besides, this…mess is not acting like a live one. They’re randomly destructive. Go off like a bomb and scatter shrapnel everywhere at once.” Like I’m saying anything we don’t all know, thought Dobbs, privately, but she kept going. “This thing is going off here and there in bursts. One isolated section at a time.”

“I know that, but…” Cohen made a quick weaving motion indicating uncertainty. “But something is not falling into place here. I feel like we’re treating the symptoms.”

His uneasiness began to weigh Dobbs down. Cohen might be somewhat her junior in years, but he was not given to panic or flights of imagination.

 
“I’ll check on it,” she said, even though the idea left a cold, still spot inside her. “I’m going to need a trace on any systems being monitored inside the Solar System right now.”

“I can get you that,” Lonn assured her. “There’s a new watch on the Titania Freers. You might want to check the systems logs on what that pilot of yours has been up to.”

Dobbs shrugged her whole self. “Yerusha had an AI with her, but it just got eaten by whatever Pa Pasadena’s carrying around in its veins.” She took hold of Brook’s awareness. “What I need there is a retrace of Marcus Tully’s route over the past eight months, if we can.”

“That should keep me busy,” murmured Brook, stirring in a small whirlpool of annoyance. “For about the next year. Does Al Shei know how her business partner spends his time?”

“She does,” Dobbs kept herself smooth and even. “She’s had her reasons for putting up with it, which have been strained to the breaking point.”

“Don’t blame her a bit.” Cohen pulled back, taking the other two with him. “Good luck, Dobbs. We’ll have what answers there are in forty-eight hours.” The anesthetic that put her body far enough under to permit her to enter the network was un-healthy stuff, to say the least. With her diminutive frame, she could only tolerate an extended dosage once every two days without side effects.

PING! The alarm signal from her transceiver, back in the
Pasadena
, cut through her thoughts. This self, the signals and code had three seconds before it had to begin its journey back to her body.

One.

“Thank you.” Dobbs let the gratitude wash over all three of the Fools as they pulled their awareness away from her. Inside her, a set of processes began to shift and merge.

Cohen lingered behind in Dobbs’s outer self for just a moment longer.

 
Two.

“Dobbs, you’ve really got to work on this group’s AI paranoia, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know. Frankly, neither Lipinski nor Yerusha are making that aspect of the job any easier, let me tell you.”

“I can imagine.” Cohen shook himself ruefully. “Dobbs, you take care of yourself this run, all right? I am feeling…” his thoughts prickled uncomfortably against her consciousness.

“So am I, Cohen. So am I.”

 
Three.

Conscious thought began to sink into instinct. She wanted to go back. She couldn’t hold still. Time to go back, now. Time to get back to her body before it woke up and her brain’s functions blocked her implant’s abilities to reintegrate her into her organic mind.

 
Dobbs skimmed through the Guild Hall to the laser transmitter. She orchestrated her jumps as efficiently as she could. Urgency filled her actions and pressed additional speed on functions guided now full by instinct. Any second those blips in the
Pasadena
’s essential systems could break open into real crisis.

Finally, she felt the unmistakable path opened by her transceiver. Dobbs drizzled herself down it like a trickle of water down a drain. The transceiver recoded the signals so the implant could convert them into electrical signals that would raise the neurochemical impulses to diffuse into her and restart the body that her hypo dosage had shut down.

 
There had been cases where Fools’ bodies had woken up before the translation process was completed. The signal selves stayed in the nets as long as they could hold together, and then, they dissipated like Verence had. The body-selves though, woke up as if they had been in six month comas. They were permanently brain-damaged and unable to function independently ever again. The physiological markers for the process were inconclusive. Some theorized that without the extra boost from the implant signals, the cognitive functions repressed by the drugs stayed shut down. Some of the more theologically minded theorized it was because the soul had not returned to the body. Dobbs seldom wondered about the implications of either view. She was content to know the process worked.

 
Light and heat touched her. A thorny pain tingled in her hands and ankles. Her eyes blinked, her throat groaned softly and her tendons twitched as she gradually became aware that all these things really belonged to her.

Dobbs fumbled with the transceiver until she managed to pull it out of her socket and drop it into the box. Then, with forced patience, she began the long series of stretching exercises that the Guild prescribed to reorient her to her body, gently stretching and separating her toes, ankle circles, leg lifts, arm stretches, rotating her neck. At the end of twenty minutes, she was able to see without the tell-tale sensation of detachment that always followed a session in the net. She was defined by her body again.