Am I insane? some part of her wondered. But it was a very small part indeed.
Initiating detach, she stepped away from the support frame, then scuttled insectlike to the airlock. Once outside she clung to the hull and looked around. With her cowl spread, her surroundings seemed as bright as day from the residual infrared emitted from the ship’s thrusters and the further fluorescing of complex ices nearby.
The cell she had entered was a hundred yards across, its six walls nearing sixty feet high. Orlandine pushed herself from the hull and dropped slowly towards the floor. Making contact with it, she began walking away from the ship with a steady floating gait. In a moment she realized that the low gravity here would prove an inconvenience. If she moved everywhere like this, it would take her forever to get anything done. Using the enhancement of her legs she leapt forwards, hitting one of the walls ten yards up but absorbing the shock through her other enhanced limbs. As she dropped down beside the wall surface she studied it contemplatively, turning to look back at the Heliotrope only as her feet connected with the floor. This chamber she would prepare first for the rapid escape of the ship, and perhaps in time she could convert it for her own comfort. She would pressurize it and insulate it, maybe move out of the ship itself. In the wall behind her she would cut a hole and construct an airlock, and the cell beyond would then become her laboratory. That would be perfect. The Jain node would sit between clamps right in the middle of it: the focus of every resource she could muster.
Aphran considered the facts of her life, if it could be called that. Even though she was a second generation recording of the original Aphran, a sentence of erasure hung over her because of the crimes that original one had committed. No claim of being a changed person, of having understood the error of her ways, of now being prepared to actively support the Polity, would change that. Aphran had murdered people, hundreds of people, and nothing she could now say or do would bring them back. Her sentence remained suspended only because ECS currently found her knowledge very useful, and because she had become intertwined so closely with Jack that her erasure might damage him in the process. But Jack was slowly untangling himself from her, and her usefulness to ECS was decreasing. She was a dead woman, and felt sure she would soon be a non-existent one.
Tracking Freyda as she came aboard, Aphran recognized another walking dead woman. Their captive wore a security collar which could paralyse her in a second, or blast a toxin straight into her carotids. She strode with a kind of arrogance, ahead of the bobbing telefactor, and Aphran knew Freyda probably thought she could get through this using just nerve and lies. Soon she would have to wake up to reality. Jack had appointed Aphran to the task of administering the cold shower.
‘And not a krodorman in sight,’ Aphran murmured.
‘Aelvor’s people have yet to make a search,’ Jack replied, ‘but none are listed in crew or on any passenger manifests of arrivals within the time frame.’
‘They won’t find any,’ interjected Thorn, over com from the planet below.
‘Perhaps you could explain, Thorn?’ Aphran enquired though, knowing Freyda, she knew what Thorn’s answer would be.
Freyda looked up and around, almost as if hearing part of this com exchange. Impossible of course. Perhaps she wondered why Aphran had not come to greet her the moment she boarded. When she eventually found out why, that would be the first shock.
‘There was no krodorman. That’s why you found no krodorman DNA at the scene. I’ll bet you found syntheflesh at von Hellsdorf’s place that’ll match samples in the hotel. She simply wore a krodorman suit… By the way, Aphran, what’s your history with her?’
Reluctantly she replied, ‘She recruited me to the Separatist cause on Corolon.’
Aphran and her two sisters were each born from different fathers, but that was nothing unusual in the Corolon arcologies. She remembered the three of them playing together in the enclosed arboretums, in the shopping malls and sometimes in the rooftop fields. But best of all were the secret places of the sprawling city: the tunnels and niches, the air ducts and hollows through which spread forests of cables and pipes. It probably all started with them when the latest game became ‘break it and see how quickly the robots can fix it’. Enger obtained an electric saw with ceramo-carbide teeth, and not being the most incandescent lightstrip on the block, she found and cut into a superconducting cable. There seemed little point sending what remained to the crematorium. Aphran and Arial then blamed the robots. Arial, the eldest, was caught destroying three welding robots, and, while pursued by monitors, fell down a ventilation cavity. She survived but, after they bone-welded her skull back together she was never quite the same again: never wanted to play those same destructive games any more. Aphran believed the AIs had tampered with her brain. So when, a few years later, Freyda approached Aphran to recruit her to the Separatist cause, she knew she had at last found her place in the universe. Only in later years did she realize that after fighting for the cause for so long, a love of death and carnage had displaced Freyda’s initial idealism. Aphran now recognized the blindness of her earlier self: Freyda representing what Aphran herself had become before her physical death.
The cell Jack had prepared for their prisoner was unfurnished, deliberately claustrophobic, the lighting too bright. If Freyda wanted to sleep, or even just sit down, the cold ceramal floor would have to suffice. As the door closed behind Freyda, Aphran allowed the woman a little time to contemplate her present situation.
‘No reservations?’ Jack asked her, coldly dispassionate.
‘None at all,’ she replied, trying to believe that completely.
Machines first, just like those she had destroyed as a child, but now she was working with more effective tools. Freyda taught her all about explosives: which ones to use in what situations and how to maximize their destructive effect. Aphran learnt impatiently — she wanted to do something soon about the injustice done to her two sisters. Obviously it was all the fault of the AIs. Why wasn’t that s-con cable adequately shielded? Why no safety nets in that ventilation space? Why didn’t these godlike AIs look after people? At the age of seventeen she killed her first monitor. He had fancied her, so was not sufficiently on his guard. She shot him once through the throat, again through the back of the head as he lay gagging for life. Then she spewed up her guts nearby. The organization got her out of there—she’d left just too much of her DNA as evidence at the scene. On another world she graduated to mass murder with a bomb planted in a runcible facility, but it failed to take out the AI there. The only AI she ever managed to actually… kill, was a free Golem, and that at close range with a missile launcher, while its back was turned. But though the AIs were the main enemy, the most hated of all were those who willingly served them: ECS and its agents—no agony could be too much for them to suffer. How utterly and completely did the Separatist organization brainwash her, and how downright stupid of her to allow it.