And his information has got through, or else Kern looked past the battle to what his body was/is working on and has seen his meagre role in all of this.
‘Your cognitive functions are overflowing into ship systems,’ she tells him – still severe, but with a thoughtful edge; she is a scientist first and foremost, after all. ‘Your implant needs limiting functions. It is trying to process a fat bolus of sensory data and it’s just eating up all the processing power it can handle. I’m having to hold it off from rampaging through my own memory, and in holding it off I’m suffering a further drain on my capabilities. Idiot monkey.’ Her expression – or that facet of it she spares him – is appraising. ‘Still, at any other time, an interesting toy. You have come somewhere close to an upload facility in the most backwards manner possible, creating an extended virtual simulation of your own cognitive functions in order to process a recorded medium not in any way intended for a Human.’
Wait – a virtual simulation? Is that all I am? This all feels entirely real to me. Again, he has no way of saying it, but it manages to reach Kern. He expects derision, but the look on her face is solemn, even sympathetic.
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ she agrees. ‘No matter how they peel you down. Even when you’re stripped down to something that can’t think, can’t feel, some pissant little shard of yourself that’s barely good for anything but calculating square roots and prime numbers, it still feels like you, until you try to do something and find that part of you is missing. I’m limiting you, Meshner Osten Oslam. I am fencing you off so you don’t cripple the ship with your existential crisis. And that way, this experience may end up repatriated with the rest of your mind and bring it out of the grand mal seizure you are currently experiencing.’
I . . . what?
‘Your brain is a complicated toy. When you play carelessly with it, you might lose some pieces,’ she says, and that sardonic edge is back, her sympathy apparently exhausted. ‘I’ve devised a solution to purge you from the system for now. I really do need all my wits about me. If you have the chance, there are ways to have your implant recalibrate its internal architecture to make your simulations far more resource-efficient, and thus get more done without involving me. Let me know if any of this stays with you.’
Wait! Meshner’s perspective lurches. He can feel reality ascending to meet him like the ground reaches for a falling man – either Kern’s doing or the fit he is apparently undergoing – and he tries to force more information up the pipe than mere words. He has a course for her, not frantic flight into the black but an approach to the enemy ships. It is threading the needle sideways and backwards and upside down, entirely beyond the parameters of the task he had been set, and yet perfect.
‘Nonsense,’ Kern snaps. ‘This exposes us to the weapons of three of the large vessels in sequence at extreme close range, one after another. Unacceptable.’
You have set the wrong limits on our search, he insists. The ocean returns briefly, pulsing like a slow heartbeat, so that he gains and loses Kern, gains and loses the battle. See their attacks. It is so obvious, and yet Kern hasn’t seen it because, in the final analysis, she is a self-regulating computer trying to maximize her limited computational power. She set herself a narrow task, and that task became her world. They are fighting each other, he manages at last, flagging up various of the combatants in different colours, some hostile, some at least neutral, deploying weapons on their fellows in an apparent attempt to defend the Lightfoot. Each ship has angles and arcs that are being used for countermeasures, casting vast shadows where their attentions pick the void clean of the ordnance of their neighbours. Space is abruptly not a desert, or at least it is a desert with a few rocks for shade. Enough cover, perhaps, to get up enough speed to outrange the enemy.
Kern stares at him, going in and out of his mind’s eye, but he sees her smile before he loses her.
Then he is arching his back, fingers clutching at the fabric of the cabin floor as Zaine clamps a medical scanner to his head, jarring his implant agonizingly. There is a great deal of chaos, and he feels his heart stop and get jolted back into action by Helena applying a muscle override. There is blood in his mouth and his vision glitters with ephemeral stars.
2.
Abruptly they have left the fighters spinning in their wake, the Lightfoot accelerating with all its power. Only the spiders, Portia, Viola and Fabian, remain at the controls. Helena and Zaine are doing their best to save the life of their fellow Human, Meshner, fighting cerebral inflammation and calming his spiking neural activity until at last he opens his eyes.
Helena isn’t sure they still have him, despite everything. There is a moment when nothing of Meshner stares out at her. Then expression falls back onto his face and he says, ‘They’re fighting,’ which seems the most fatuous observation in the world until Fabian starts tapping and scraping at his console and she puts a gloved hand down to catch his meaning.
. . . being screened by three of the vessels. One of the others is damaged – there’s ice bleeding from it! They are at war! He is practically bouncing at his post, hanging head-down up the wall. A moment later he jumps down and runs around Meshner’s prone form, because Portiids have great trouble keeping still when they are excited.
Helena checks the medical monitors: Meshner seems stable now, though he has apparently lapsed back into unconsciousness. She sits back, feeling exasperated at him. Some feedback from his implant struck him down, nothing of the fight at all. She isn’t the only one to be thinking it. Fabian’s skittering progress comes to an abrupt end as Viola jumps down in front of him, her forelegs raised in threat. The male instantly adopts a submissive posture and she hoists herself higher for a moment, displaying her utmost anger with him, before stalking off to Bianca’s station.
Fabian’s palps lift and twitch, which Helena reads automatically as What did I do?
You made this happen, Portia signals, creeping over to hunker down by Helena. You experimented on him.
The male makes a few stuttering motions, not a complete sentence but the equivalent of a Human muttering to themselves, How was I to know?
Curtail your activities, Portia tells him. We are all in danger.
Fabian’s clenched legs suggest he wants to ask how he could have foreseen that, either, and Helena has some sympathy there. One moment the aliens were happy to communicate, the next – the moment they saw a human form, in fact – one group were driven to some furious rage, while others were equally vehement about defending the Lightfoot, both factions springing to instant all-out aggression without any sign or warning. And does that make them human? Not in Helena’s book. Admittedly the Humans of Kern’s World are unusually pacifistic, based on Kern’s dark references to the long past of the species, but she reckons that people would still need to steel themselves for something like that, to justify it to themselves. Unless the whole thing was a trap from the start, already primed to devolve into murderous intent, but that doesn’t explain the ships that apparently took the Lightfoot’s side in the quarrel.
None of it makes sense, she tells Portia through her gloves.
We are being contacted, comes a general announcement from Viola, with Kern’s spoken translation following a moment after. Three large ships, following our course. The vessels that covered our escape.