Al Shei shivered and tried to pull her thoughts away from useless fears. She had only partial success. Even conjuring up Asil’s warm image didn’t help. She just saw him looking at her gravely from across the coffee table and saying, “Beloved, we might just be in for it this time.”
Finally, the tram stopped in front of Lipinski’s guest house. Al Shei climbed out gratefully. She’d had too much time to sit and think on the ride.
The guest house was a long, low building set up to resemble a series of town houses. It was a very non-traditional structure and stuck out like a sore thumb in a street of tall apartment buildings. In the yellow courtyard light, Al Shei found the registry and check-in console. She pulled out her pen and wrote her name and Lipinski’s on the board. She waited while the system located him and asked if he was willing to see her. Apparently he was, because the board blanked out the names and replaced them with his room number 419.
Al Shei hurried past the long row of doors. A shaft of light spilled out into the street and a familiar profile leaned out the door. When she reached him, Lipinski stood back and let her in.
“What’s happened?” he asked as he hesitated by the door. He shouldn’t close it and they both knew it. It was sinful conduct for her, but right now what she had to say couldn’t be overheard by anyone. Sending up a short prayer for forgiveness, she closed the door for him. Lipinski swallowed audibly.
The room was small and lightly furnished, but heavily carpeted. A mural wall was lit up with what looked like a communications map of the city. There were notes scrawled across it that must have been Lipinski’s. His booted feet didn’t make any noise as he crossed the room and slid into a chair behind the writing table. Al Shei sat on the divan near the low coffee table and forced her hands to lie still on her knees.
“Houston, if there was an AI loose in New Medina, could we do anything about it?”
Lipinski bowed his head. “What changed your mind?”
“Resit, and Uysal. They back up your theory.” She was glad she had not tried to say that while standing. Somehow, saying it out loud made it even more true. “So, I’m asking, is there anything we can do about it?”
Lipinski rested his elbows on the table and ran both hands through his hair. He held his hands clasped behind his neck as if forcing himself to keep his head bowed towards the table.
“I don’t know.” He released himself and straightened up. “The trouble is finding the damn thing. Live AIs move down any line that’ll hold them, into any place that’s got room. They’ll absorb the data that’s in there and spit it out again. They can take up two or three storage units at a time, as long as there are links between them, and move again as soon as they’ve munched down your diagnostic, or your virus.” He drummed his fingers soundlessly on the table-top. “And you’ve got a planet to search, and you don’t even know what it looks like.”
He was staring at the mural wall but Al Shei knew he wasn’t seeing it. He was seeing Kerensk and feeling the cold seep through the comm center walls while he and his masters tried to figure out what they should do next. For the first time, Al Shei realized he couldn’t have been more than fifteen when his world died.
Slowly, his expression changed. His eyes widened and his mouth relaxed. His fingers stilled and his hand flattened against the table top.
“Except this time, we do know.” His focus snapped back to the present and the place in front of him. “We’ve got the goddamned thing recorded! We know exactly what it looks like!” He was on his feet, pacing and talking to the walls.
“We down-loaded the fractured thing into the hospital. We’ve got a recording of the transaction tucked safe aboard the Pasadena. We replay it and write a search program to match the data. We can tag it. We can track it.” His voice was alight with hope and wonder. “And if we find it, we can kill it, before it takes the colony down.”
“Can you do it from here?” Al Shei asked eagerly.
Lipinski shook his head. “The lines are already starting to act up. If it’s out there, it might see any recording we download from Pasadena. So that’s not safe. Besides,” he added slowly, “this might take awhile. There’s no guarantee things won’t start falling apart before we can get to that thing.”
Al Shei sucked in a hissing breath through her teeth. “All right. Get your stuff together. I’ll check you out and get us space on the shuttle.” She was halfway to the door before he said,
“You’d better cancel leave.”
“I’d already thought of that.”
She left him there and made her way back to the check-in console, settled Lipinski’s account for him and re-registered the room as vacant.
A low rumbling cut through the air. She glanced up, looking for thunderheads. The rumbling came again. Her knees shook. She tried to still them, but couldn’t. All around her came the sound of rattling and clinking. Startled, unintelligible voices called out of the darkness. The trembling travelled up her sternum to her heart and the muscles in her neck.
Earthquake, thought Al Shei wildly.
Then it stopped. Her heart pounded hard and her knees shook from weakness this time. She looked up and down and all around her, as if she expected to see the world changed somehow.
Slowly, her knees steadied, but her heart didn’t, because she was remembering Uysal in the crowded coffee house, how he looked out across the desert city and told her about the lava that had been diverted underneath it to help create the climate’s warmth. She remembered what an engineering feat she’d thought that must be.
And how much of it is controlled by computer? And what will happen to it if those computers are no longer in command?
She felt sweat prickle her under her veil and wished Lipinski would hurry. Unhooking her leave bracelet, she laid her thumb across the command bar and wrote in the recall code. She found the free-access socket in the console and jacked the bracelet in. The console would take the bracelet’s signal and boost it up to the satellite network. As long as the satellites were working, the Pasadena crew would get the signal. Leave cancelled. Return to the ship immediately.
She just hoped the lines would stay up long enough to let them make their way to a shuttle and get back to The Gate. She knew the public lines were monitored, and that Justice Muratza could easily be notified of her cancellation order. He would want to know why she was pulling her people off planet. He would want her to stop it.
She also knew that if the worst had been allowed to happen it was her responsibility. She would face that, but she would not leave her crew in the middle of it.
Chapter Seven — Stand-Off
“Dobbs? Come on, Dobbs. Answer me. Answer me!”
The voice was filled with urgency. Dobbs knew she had a voice to, but she couldn’t remember where it was.
Here, and here. You are like this. Be like this.
Memory filled her. Memory of her own shape, and of what had just happened. Anger and left-over fear ran through her and she struggled to pull herself into a more familiar form. Someone helped her thread her features and senses back onto the strands of borrowed memory running through her.
Her thoughts and willpower found their way down to her voice. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.”
A pair of presences drew back and Dobbs dragged herself off the solid side of the path. She reached out just a little to steady herself and she knew Cohen and Guild Master Havelock waited next to her.