Fool's War (5 page)

“That’s what I’ve heard.” Dobbs spread her hands. “But who knows what a Fool might have heard? So, tell me.” She made her eyes large, round and innocent and blinked rapidly. “Do you always shout at walls and passers-by?”

Lipinski blushed an extraordinary pink color. “Actually, I do. Lousy habit, but there it is. Get me tense and I’ll yell at anything that doesn’t get out of the way fast enough.” He arched a knowing eyebrow at her. “I’m death to apprentice comm-officers. They can’t run.” His grin spread into a leer.

Dobbs cowered behind her hands. “Oh, spare me,” she pleaded, all the while deciding she liked this man. “Please, spare me.”

“Okay.” He shrugged and turned his attention back to the order terminal. “I’ve got to finish getting this order in anyway. Al Shei will not thank me if I keep us here contemplating our navels while there’s deadlines to be met.”

“Is there something wrong with the data hold?” Dobbs stood on tip-toe and peered over his shoulder.

“Yes.” He pulled out his pen and bent over the terminal board. “But there wouldn’t be if our fearless leader Katmer Al Shei wouldn’t keep letting Marcus Tully try to commit felonies with her ship.” He started scrawling orders across the memory board. The station AI must have had his handwriting on file. The screen kept printing out
ACCEPTED
even though Dobbs couldn’t make heads or tails out of the scribbles on the board.

“I thought they had a time share,” she remarked, lowering herself back onto flat feet.

“They do, sort of…
 
I shouldn’t be talking like this.” He scanned the acceptance notifications on the screen and punched the
TRANSMIT
key. “All I know for sure is that Dr. Amory Dane has a complicated load he wants us to carry to The Farther Kingdom. Lots of interconnected, self-referencing programs and a cart-load of background data. Tully’s guys burned out three main wafer stacks and reconfigured another four with whatever it was they were doing out there.” He shook his head. “This is why I’m yelling at walls.”

“And Fools,” said Dobbs with a grin. “Don’t forget the Fools.”

“I don’t think you’d let me.” His smile took on a contemplative air and Dobbs found herself thinking it might be time to make an exit. But Lipinski just sighed and turned back to the terminal. “And, since no one’s ever gotten a direct brain-to-computer interface to work, I can’t just crawl into the lines and see what’s going on in the hold for myself. So, I’ve got to rent all kinds of extra tracers and an AI coordinator, and Al Shei is going to be furious when she sees what I’m doing to her credit balances.”

“Only if the data doesn’t get where it’s going,” said Dobbs.

Lipinski gave her another thoughtful look. “You’re not half the Fool you ought to be.”

“Shhh!” She waved him to silence. “You want me to get fired?” She glanced around frantically.

As she did, Dobbs saw a woman push herself away from the wall and turn deliberately towards them. It would have been difficult to miss her. Her golden-brown skin was mottled with masses of purple and black bruises. Her tan sleeve had been rolled up to expose a blood blister that spread across her forearm like a spoiled rose. Her other arm was encased in the beige plastic form of a stasis tube. A sterile patch covered her right eye. Her good hand clutched the handle of a wafer case so tightly her knuckles had gone white and she walked with the care of someone who didn’t really want to make the pain any worse.

“Sorry to pry, Fellows.” Her language was English but her accent had a nasal drawl to it which could have come from Australia, Cornwall, or the southern reaches of Northern America. Her greeting, though, marked her as a Freer. “I heard you say you were under contract to Katmer Al Shei?”

Lipinski’s adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed his shock at her appearance. “Yes, we are.”

The woman’s right shoulder rolled forward as she tried to move her arm. She winced and scowled at the stasis tube. “I’m Jemina Yerusha. I’ve just contracted to be the Pasadena’s new pilot for this run.”

Lipinski choked. “A Freer? They hired a Freer?”

Yerusha shifted her grip on the wafer case and dropped her gaze so she focused on Dobbs. “I need to report to the Watch Commander.”

“Who will immediately tell you to report to the bio-garden for a new layer of skin.” Dobbs looked her over with an air of exaggerated criticism. “You might want to save yourself a step.”

Yerusha smiled sourly. “Already been there. They’re growing me a new arm and a fresh eye. They’ll be ready in another twenty-four hours or so.” She tried to chuckle, but she winced again. “I was helping lock down the module after the blow-out. Didn’t move quite fast enough when the extra seam burst.”

Dobbs nodded thoughtfully. It was part of the Freers’ system of living. If there was a disaster on the station or ship where you were, you helped.

“Anyway, my agent is an idiot and I don’t want him babbling to Watch and the owners about what went over. That groundhog could ruin my chance at a job when the contract’s less than two hours old.” She gave Dobbs a twisted grin. “I’m ugly, but I’m mobile and I can at least check in and see my station.” She propped herself up against the wall.

Lipinski looked her up and down. All trace of humor had vanished from his face, and been replaced by suspicion. “The meds didn’t mind you walking out like that?”

She snorted, an action she seemed able to manage without hurting herself. “I’ll go back when I’m sure I’ve still got a job.”

“Because the full effect of your heroism couldn’t possibly be conveyed over the video lines.” Dobbs hoped the quip would elicit an explanation. Yerusha could have easily checked in with the Watch Commander over the monitors and explained herself.

Yerusha squinted down at her. “Watch yourself, Fool. My headache shot hasn’t kicked in yet.”

Dobbs arched her eyebrows and opened her mouth, but Lipinski cut her off. “And what’re you planning on bringing aboard with you?” He pointed at the wafer case.

Ah. Here it comes
, thought Dobbs warily. The white plastic case was thirty centimeters on a side, which made it big enough to accommodate a fifty-wafer integrated stack. It had a blue border, which was the Freer color code for top-grade hardware. Lipinski would have spotted all of this. He probably would have jumped to the same conclusion she did about the contents.

Yerusha’s mouth hardened into a straight line. “What business is it of yours?”

Dobbs was surprised. Freers were brash, proud and contentious, but they were seldom secretive.

“Because I’m Communication’s Chief aboard
Pasadena
,” replied Lipinski firmly. “And I have a right to know what’s coming aboard my ship.”

“And I have a right to bring aboard anything that’s legal, non-infectious, isolated, and under my weight limit.” With difficulty, she hefted the case to show the Landlord’s double-ring seal emblazoned on the side, certifying that the contents of the case was everything she had just stated.

Lipinski’s jaw tightened. Dobbs tensed, in case she needed to intervene. “Yes,” he admitted. “You do. But if anything comes out of that case, I have a right to inspect it and confiscate it.”

“You do.” Yerusha did not let her gaze waver.

“As long as you understand that.” Lipinski pocketed his pen and turned away. “I’ve both got to check in at the docking bay,” he said to Dobbs. “You want to walk along?”

Yerusha evidently decided to ignore how the question was directed. “You two go ahead.” She gingerly pushed herself away from the wall. “I’ll follow.”

Lipinski gave her a hard look, but shrugged and took the lead. Dobbs fell into easy step beside Yerusha, watching the way the woman concentrated on making her body keep moving.

“Did we lose anybody?” she asked.

“Eh?” Yerusha cocked an eye towards Dobbs and the Fool saw it was a bright hazel despite being sunken in from the bruise. “Some, yeah. Could have been a lot more, though.” The sheen in her eyes told Dobbs she was seeing something other than the crowded corridor. “That’s why it’s going to take the bio-garden so long to do my arm. There’s a couple of gerbils that need new lungs. The can’s a total loss.” She shook her head with a resignation Dobbs was used to seeing in engineers, architects and others who worked and lived with machinery.

“Do they know what happened?” Dobbs cocked her own eye in an imitation of Yerusha’s expression.

“No,” said Yerusha, too sharply. It could have been her pain, or Dobbs’s bad imitation, but Dobbs didn’t think so. “No idea.”

“The Landlords have got to be crawling up the walls,” Dobbs suggested.

“Do them good.” Yerusha stared straight ahead. “They don’t get enough exercise.”

“I thought gerbils were noted for running around their wheels,” Dobbs remarked as they followed Lipinski through the door to the elevator bays.

“That bunch isn’t gerbils.” Yerusha leaned her bare arm against the wall. “They’re spooks and ciphers.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “And groundhuggers, the lot of them.”

Coming from a Freer, that was a much more dire insult than it generally was. Dobbs glanced up at Lipinski who was keeping his eyes straight ahead and studiously ignoring Yerusha.

She tapped the wafer case softly. “What’s his name?”

Yerusha’s eyes snapped open, and Dobbs gave her her most non-threatening smile. She’d been right. The wafer stack inside the carrying case held Yerusha’s artificial intelligence.

Freers believed that planetary ecology kept human beings trapped. They believed that true freedom came when humanity built its own environments specifically tailored to their needs. Freers lived in stations and ships and were not permitted to even set foot on the ground.

They also believed that the cycle of life and death was a leftover from the time humans had lived exclusively on planets, and that when a human died, their soul was released into the void, where it travelled along, useless and voiceless, like a photon packet without any eye to see it. Their belief system posited, however, that if a sufficiently complex artificial environment could be created, the soul could be trapped in it, just as it could be trapped in the body of an infant born about the time of its death original. This unique explanation of reincarnation was the Freers explanation for artificial intelligences that occasionally achieved violently paranoid independent life. Their massive neural nets, the Freers said, had caught a human soul.

Some Freers “adopted” artificial intelligences and spent their time trying to create an environment that could catch a soul, and thus finally end the loss of knowledge and kinship that evolution had forced on humanity.

Some people regarded this as incredible blasphemy. Some, especially people who’s worlds had known the disastrous after-effects of an AI becoming a rogue entity, saw it as a dangerous idiocy.

Dobbs studied Lipinski’s stiff shoulders. It’s trouble in the making. Well, what’s a contract without that added spice of a personality clash? she asked herself ruefully as the elevator doors opened and they crowded themselves inside along with twelve other shippers.

The elevator rose and gravity dropped, creating confusion inside Dobbs as her sense of balance worked out how to respond. All around her, the passengers eased their weight from foot to foot, or swallowed hard, or twisted their necks, or made any of the hundred other mostly useless physical compensations to the changes. Everyone but Yerusha. She just leaned against the wall, held onto her AI case, and continued to breathe.

It took no great skill at observation to notice that something was seriously wrong with her and that the meds should not have let her go. On the other hand, Freers were a notably contentious and militant group. Titania Station had become Free Home Titania by withstanding a siege that cost the landlords more than five hundred lives and hundreds of thousands in equipment and negotiations. Yerusha might just have been proving she was as tough as her parents who stood the siege.

Then again, she might not.

Dobbs eased her own weight from foot to foot and wished she hadn’t thought of that.

The doors opened onto the hanger bays. Yerusha’s eyes opened at the same time. Lipinski and Yerusha stepped out in the middle of a small gaggle of passengers who dispersed in different directions, moving with the care required by partial gravity. Dobbs followed them all out, keeping her eyes open for whatever was going to happen next.

It happened just as the airlock to the Pasadena opened. Dobbs looked ahead and saw a squared-off, roman-nosed man with skin the color of baked earth come out of the
Pasadena
airlock, obviously called out by their arrival in the bay. He wore the pocket-filled coveralls that was as close to a shipper’s uniform as anything. Then, she heard footsteps brush the carpet behind her. Dobbs turned to see a man and a woman in Oberon security green lope out of the corridor.

Yerusha hissed and jumped forward. The male green snatched at the air behind her. In the next breath, Dobbs lifted herself on her tip-toes and leaned forward. The green’s torso collided with her shoulder. In the light gravity, it just knocked Dobbs forward half a yard, keeping her right in his path before she began to slip towards the ground. The greens ducked frantically around her as she rolled onto the deck plates.

In two long, bounding strides, Yerusha was through the airlock and across the threshold into the
Pasadena
. Her feet slid out from under her and her body lazily settled down until her back measured its own length against the floor with the wafer case clutched against her chest. Green Man shoved the roman-nosed man out of the way and lunged towards her. Lipinski caught Roman Nose’s arm before he lost his balance. Green Woman grabbed Green Man’s arm and pulled them both up just short of crossing the
Pasadena
threshold. Yerusha rolled over and held up her hand to the approaching greens. A glaze of pain crossed over her eyes, but there was a puckered smile on her face.