Fool's War (31 page)

What can I count you as now?

Al Shei led her around the bend of the corridor and paused in front of the comm center hatch. She turned around.

“I am asking you, by whatever you hold sacred to tell me this.” For the first time, Dobbs saw doubt in her eyes. “Can you do this thing safely?”

“I hold my office sacred,” said Dobbs. “And my life, and I swear by both of them. I will only keep the AI intact as long as I know for certain it will keep itself under control.”

Al Shei nodded slowly. “Do what you can, or what you have to, but I’m telling you right now, Evelyn Dobbs, my ultimate responsibility is the safety of the people I’ve hired on. If I find out you’ve put them in danger, I’m going to toss you out of here for violation of contract, and at this point I’m not sure I’ll be sorry to do it.” She hesitated. “You’ve been good help on this run, Dobbs. I’m hoping you can continue to be, because if this isn’t resolved quickly Allah alone will be able to see how far the splinters will fly.”

Al Shei cycled the hatch back.

Lipinski sat hunched over the comm center’s main boards.

“That was too quick…” he started, then he looked up and saw who it was.

“I need you to open the hold, Houston,” Al Shei told him. “Then, I need to talk to you in the conference room.”

His wide blue eyes narrowed. He took his hands slowly away from the boards. “You want to tell me what’s going on, Engine?”

Al Shei gave a short, barking laugh. “Not really,” she said. “But I’m going to. Open the hold and come on.”

Lipinski’s gaze rested on Dobbs. Ashamed, she let her own gaze slip to the floor.

“Aye-aye, Engine.” Lipinski scribbled a quick command across the memory board and added his thumbprint.

The hatchway to the data hold cycled open. Slowly, making each movement deliberate, Lipinski got out of his chair and followed Al Shei into the corridor.

Dobbs did not let herself watch them leave. She strode into the data hold and let the hatch cut off the rest of the world behind her. The comm center was clean, but the data hold was immaculate. The curving white walls were marred only by the straight lines that indicated where the repair hatches were located.

Dobbs sat down at the chair in front of the single set of command boards and pulled her pen out of her belt pouch.

She held it over the memory board. She wished she could see through the layers of ceramic, silicon and fiber with her body’s eyes. How was the Live One holding up in there? Did it have patience? She hadn’t seen any. She had a promise, but she didn’t know if it would hold. She wasn’t even sure it understood the nature of a promise. At this point, nothing but time would tell.

Unexpectedly, the memory of the strange-familiar passing touch she’d felt on the way out came back to her.

There was somebody else out there.
The thought jolted her. Does Guild Master Havelock know that?

She bent over the boards. He must. No one could have gotten past him and Cohen. No one could have done that.

She found herself wishing the forty-eight hours were already up so that she could be absolutely sure.

As soon as Al Shei and Lipinski reached the conference room, Al Shei sat heavily in the nearest chair. “Intercom to Yerusha. What’s our fuel and reaction mass situation?”

Lipinski’s gaze was resting heavily on her. She didn’t want to think about it, but she knew there was no getting away from it.

Yerusha’s voice came back after a five second pause. “We’ve got enough to make it to Vicarage, but that’s it.”

“All right, we can stock up when we get there. As soon as you see a clear path, get us out of here.”

“On it.” Her voice was slow, as if she wanted to disagree. There was a pause. “Intercom to Houston.”

“Here, Pilot,” he answered mechanically.

“What’s left of The Gate’s AI is in a wafer stack in the main comm boards. If their network’s at all stabilized, we’d better give it back to them before we leave.” It was costing Yerusha something to say this. Al Shei could hear it in her voice. Schyler’s report is going to be very, very interesting.

“Giving their AI back is probably a good idea,” he agreed. “Thank you for mentioning it. Intercom to close.”

He turned away from the intercom, his face the frozen mask it became when things had gone far to far.

I’m sorry, Houston, they’re about to get worse.

Al Shei gripped the chair arms and took a deep breath. One slow, careful sentence at a time, she told him what Dobbs had told her.

When she finished, the silence stretched out so long she thought for a ridiculous moment that Lipinski had forgotten how to speak.

Then, he did speak in a low, steady voice that somehow managed to express more outrage than any of his dramatic shouting ever did.

“Al Shei, how could you do this?”

“What did you want me to do, Houston?” She spread her hands. “Leave it? Kill it? If Dobbs is right and it was created deliberately, we’ve got a genuine threat to all of Settled Space out there and one lead to the source of it.” She pointed towards the deck. “It’ll be off the ship as soon as we reach The Vicarage.” She leaned forward across the table, trying to catch his gaze, but his focus kept sliding towards the table top. “In the meantime, I need you. I need you to draft a message to the Farther Kingdom’s diplomatic corps and let them know the AI’s gone and make sure that message gets somewhere useful. Then, I’m going to need a line open so I can get a background check on Amory Dane. I’m going to need you to sort through what Uysal gave us about Tully’s smuggled data. There are two possibilities for where this thing came from; either it came out of Toric, or it came from Amory Dane. Asil is checking on Dane’s movements on Port Oberon, and that might get us something, but it probably won’t be enough.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re asking a whole set of good questions. Here’s another: What did Tully think he was doing?”

Al Shei nodded in agreement. “I’m going to ask him first chance I get, believe me.”

Lipinski pulled his shoulders up a little straighter. “This is going to take fast-time communications. It’s going to be expensive.”

Al Shei bowed her head. “Allah, forgive me. I didn’t realize I had that much of a miser’s reputation.” She looked up again. “Do it, Houston. We’re so far in the hole one way and other, it won’t matter. Our only hope of salvaging this run is to lay this whole mess in its grave.” She laid her hand on the table, not quite touching him, but reaching out. “I also need you to refine those roadblock programs of yours. Dobbs says she can keep that thing under control, but I don’t want to take any chances, all right?”

Lipinski nodded and climbed to his feet.

“Intercom to
Pasadena
,” Yerusha’s voice cut through the air. “Emergency launch prep! Starting now!”

Al Shei was on her feet and half-way to the door before she had a chance to think about it. She wasted a precious second to turn and face her Houston one more time.

“You still with me, Rurik?”

His wide mouth quirked up in an attempt to smile. “Still with you.”

Neither one of them lost any more time. They strode out into the corridor and onto the stairs to get to their duty stations. Al Shei tried very hard not to think about how she was never going to be able to return to this world again and attempted to concentrate on how she was going to get herself and her ship away from it.

Yerusha finished tightening the launch straps around herself just as Schyler burst onto the bridge. He threw himself into his own chair.

“Intercom to
Pasadena
,” he called out as he pulled his straps around him. “Role call, all hands!”

“Law!” came Resit’s voice.

“Comm, Huston, Odel, Rosvelt.”

“Galley, Sundars!”

“Engine, Ianiai, Javerri, Shim’on.”

“Cheney, on my way up!”

“Cheney, you get to your bunk and strap in!” called Yerusha. “We’ll handle it up here!”

The voices rattled off the crew names, and Schyler’s breathing began to grow easier. They’d done it, she could practically hear him thinking. They’d gotten them all back.

Yerusha turned her attention back to her own boards. They’d gotten them back. Now it was her job to get them all out of here.

“Watch, we need to put out some kind of clearance call,” Yerusha said, scribbling down her orders to the ship. Set the engines on stand-by. A check of the lines to The Gate showed some repairs had been managed. She could get to the docking clamps. She called up Trustee’s authorization codes and set the clamps on stand-by as well. Change the view on the screens, make sure there was still a clear route out there.

Schyler drove his pen across the boards, opening the lines to the port. “This is mail packet
Pasadena
to The Gate Flight Control. We will be launching in thirty seconds. I repeat we will be launching in thirty seconds.”

“
Pasadena
,” called an unidentified man’s voice. “You’re under house arrest! You’re not go…” A burst of static cut the voice off.

“Oh yes we are,” answered Schyler and he shut the line down. He nodded to Yerusha. “And make it good.”

“Aye-aye, Watch. Intercom to
Pasadena
. Clamps releasing. Prepare for free fall.” Yerusha slapped the
OVERRIDE
key and brought both hands down on the boards.

The station fell back and what little hold gravity had on them vanished. Years of training screamed at Yerusha to call in, to get the distance and time verification. She glanced at the clock over her board. Two clicks at fifty seconds. A good rate. Steady. Three point six at one minute twenty. She checked the angle on the thrusters.

“
Pasadena
this is the Farther Kingdom Port Master!” shouted an auto-translator’s tinny voice across the intercom. “You are hereby ordered to stand down your…”

“Don’t,” said Schyler quietly to Yerusha.

“I wasn’t going to.” Five clicks at four minutes fifty five seconds. Close, but not fatal. She hit the command keys on her board. The primary indicators blinked from yellow to green. “Torch lit.”

The port shot backwards and gravity laid its hand over the ship again. Yerusha didn’t give the all clear, or make a move to undo her own straps. She kept her gaze fastened on the window and its attendant view screens. The screens showed everything clear, port, starboard, stern, bow, topside and keel. The proximity alarms stayed quiet. The way ahead was unbroken darkness.

But they still had no contact from the port, no real flight plan out of the system, and no way to know what any one else out there was doing. She cursed the reasoning that made her send Maidai home. They could have used her. She could have made her a foster…

She could have left The Gate to founder in its own mistakes, except it turned out that she couldn’t. She had told herself that she was sending Maidai home because The Gate could hold a soul and her wafer stack couldn’t. But that wasn’t the whole truth.

“Intercom to Lipinski,” she called without taking her attention off the screens. “Can you tap a signal from the port? We could stand to know who else is making a run for it.”

“On it.” His voice was strained. Yerusha clamped down on her curiosity. Her job was not to interrogate Lipinski, it was to get them out of here.

Which left the question of how.

Schyler seemed to be having the same thought. “What’s your plan, Pilot?”

Yerusha sucked in a breath between her teeth and checked the fuel burn rate. “Watch, we have two options.” She called up the fuel reserves and the amount they needed to get them through the Vicarage system safely. The difference between the two was not enormous. She forged ahead anyway. “We can either go very slowly and carefully and take an extra ten, maybe fifteen hours to get to the jump point, or we can burn the reserves through, take the extra gee for about five hours and be out of here in twelve.”

She shot her calculations across to his boards and risked a glance up at him. His square face looked ten years older than it had when they put into the port.

“Burn it,” he said.

A mix of reckless excitement and trepidation hit Yerusha with his words. “On it.” She bent back over the boards and started her calculations. “Intercom to Lipinski. Have we got that line yet?”

“Intercom to
Pasadena
,” said Schyler beside her. “We’re going to double gee for five hours. Observe all precautions. Keep strapped in unless absolutely necessary…”

The central view screen lit up with a map of the system. It was criss-crossed with red, green and white lines representing flight paths. Satellites hung as gold dots and asteroids burned blue. Even as she drank it in, the pattern changed.

Nice going, Lipinski,
Yerusha thought, writing her preparatory orders down. It wouldn’t be a straight path. There wasn’t one. But at least she could do a little navigation…

Schyler was still talking. “Acceleration in…” he tapped the counter so Yerusha looked across at him. She processed the unspoken question and held up five fingers. “Five minutes.” Schyler finished. “Repeating…”

Yerusha tuned out the message and barely noticed when he fell silent. Her mind was full of voices plotting paths and thrust and angles and attempting to measure fuel and reaction mass down to the cubic centimeter.

Can do. Just barely, but can do.

A silver blur shot past on the port screen. Its white line dragged itself across the view screen. “Fractured burn brain,” Yerusha muttered and changed her projected path by a hundred clicks. The lines held still for a moment. She called up the activation menu and fed the flight plan to the system. Nerves made her check the OVERRIDE key, and the clock. Fifteen point six-five clicks at twelve forty-five.

She reached across to one of the sideboards and opened up a broadcast channel. “This is the mail packet
Pasadena
. We are heading at 42, 15, mark 4 towards the jump point at two gee acceleration. All ships advised to clear route.” She set the message on a loop, muted the internal broadcast and set it playing.

“Twenty seconds and counting until acceleration,” Schyler said loudly, and Yerusha fastened her gaze back on the screens.

The orders are in. Pay attention. The ship’s on auto. Don’t blink, you don’t know when some idiot’s going to come too close. It’s crowded out there and nobody knows where anybody else is. At this speed you’re going to need…

“Four…three…two…one.”

The torch burn doubled and gravity pressed down. Yerusha sank into her chair and labored to keep her head tilted forward so she had a clear view of the boards. Without her noticing, her hands pressed flat against the boards. Her feet tried to dig into the deck.

She took several deep breaths with her lungs sagging inside her suddenly restrictive chest, and lifted her hands with exaggerated care. Moving too fast in free fall gave you a good chance of injuring your surroundings. Moving too fast in extra gees gave you a good chance of injuring yourself. She picked up her heavy pen with clumsy fingers and wrote the order for a status update.

Green, green, and green. According to the ship’s system, everything was working fine. The silence on the intercom confirmed it. No new lines appeared on the view screen. The navigation display altered as they shot through space, but it didn’t show any new ships in their way. The view from the window and the cameras remained clear. Yerusha let her sense of urgency relax a little. It might just be that things were under control back at the port. Maybe the panic was over and they were really out of here.

Her shoulders sagged into the chair’s padding. She flicked her eyes up and checked the clock. There were four hours and fifty-six minutes of heavy acceleration left. She shifted heavily and tried to get comfortable. She had to keep her eyes on the screens for twice that long, just in case.

She was suddenly keenly aware of Cheney’s empty chair.

You said this ship’s runs were uneventful, she thought. Didn’t your mother teach you about lying?

On her main view screen, Al Shei watched the silver refraction bubble enclose the ship. Even though Ianiai was sitting right next to her, she allowed herself a long, relieved sigh. She lifted the coffee bulb off the board in front of her, stared for a moment into the stone cold dregs and put it back down.

She unfastened her straps and climbed stiffly to her feet. She’d gotten up three times in the past twelve hours to use the head, but other than that, she’d remained fastened to her station, watching the readings and hoping the intercom would stay quiet. Twice Chandra had come around with food and coffee, reporting that Baldassare and the steward Dalziel were making the rounds on the other decks.

If I had any money you’d all get a raise
, she thought towards the coffee as she stood up and stretched her arms back. “Relief!”

As Ianiai took her seat, she glanced at the clock. “Javerri will be relieving you in ten. Stay sharp.”

Al Shei left engineering and climbed towards the berthing deck. The brief feeling of accomplishment that had come when the fast-time jump went off without a hitch faded away. She was left with the memory of everything she had learned on the Farther Kingdom.

She closed the cabin door and sat at the desk. “Intercom to Lipinski,” she said.

“Here, Engine.”

“I need you to tap into the bank lines,” she said. “I’ll transfer the credit for it. We’ve got to get the latest…developments to Asil so he can file a fraud charge against Amory Dane.”

“On it,” he said. “I’ll call you when we’ve got an opening.”

“Intercom to close.” She pulled her
hijab
off and ruffled her hair. She glanced towards the door and prayed it would stay shut long enough for her to rest just these few minutes. “System, open Asil Day Book, day ten.”
Only ten days. It feels like it’s been a year.

“Hello, Beloved,” Asil’s voice was warm, but tried. “Storms are brewing on the horizon today. Uncle Ahmet says that we’ve taken on a questionable credit source, and he’s being very vocal about it. I am double checking his information, but it does not look good. We’ve got enough to cover it, but it’s going to cut into the liquid funds by about five percent.” She could see him giving his wan smile and an easy shrug. “I’ll have the numbers run tomorrow, if it comes to that.” Al Shei twisted her
hijab
in her hands. She’d forgotten this would be coming up. They had taken a bad source. They had lost the money. Asil had been very upset with himself about it, even when she got home months later. They had been hoping to make some of it up this run.

“There is good news though…” Asil’s voice rolled on, talking about new contracts and the details of the children’s days. She could hear his spirits lifting as he spoke, and knew he was thinking about how the news would affect her. How she would be comforted and warmed and reminded of her other home and her other life and his steady love.

“We’ll make it yet, Beloved,” she said to the wall as his voice paused.

“I love you, Katmer. Good-night.”

She sat in the silence that followed, running her
hijab
through her fingers. They’d be talking in a few minutes. They’d be taking steps to right this whole mess. Nothing was over yet. Nothing was sealed or signed. They’d work something out. They always had. Her memory was filled with countless scenes of Asil close beside her while they poured over a contract or projection, or studied merits of school programs for the children, or even selected an economic caterer for a family event. They could work anything out. It was something they were not only good at, but proud of.

“Intercom to Al Shei.” Lipinski’s voice interrupted her reverie. “Engine, we’ve got a problem.”

You mean another problem.
Even though he couldn’t see her, Al Shei wrapped her veil back around her face and tucked it into the high collar of her tunic in an attempt to get ready for action.

“What is it, Huston?”

He was silent for a moment. “I can’t find the IBN line.”

“What?” She couldn’t stop herself from blurting the word out.

“I can’t find the IBN line,” he repeated. “It’s not on the recorded path. I’m putting through a search, but…” he coughed. “We, um, might be having trouble with our passenger. I’m getting a couple of flickers on Dobbs’ watchdogs here…”

A warning bell sounded low and heavy in the back of Al Shei’s mind. Too many things had gone wrong on this run for her to keep from thinking the worst. The Intersystem Bank Network had to be there, almost by definition. If they couldn’t reach it…was there lingering damage from the previous jump, or had Dobbs already lost control of…the passenger?