Steel Frame, page 29
It’s pitted and dusty, like the other things that keep themselves steady against the winds. It’s the same colour as the Lighthouse, stony red with the same grainy texture.
That’s it, isn’t it?
I don’t want to hear myself ask the question. Worse, I already know the answer.
It’s all that’s keeping this place afloat.
And I could hold it in my hands.
Hail puts a grip on my shoulder, holds me steady. “Welcome to the Stepping Stone.”
TWENTY
THERE ISN’T MUCH space to stand, but it doesn’t look like this place was designed with that in mind. Designed with anything in mind, now that I can see it. The pillars and the Stepping Stone take up most of the room. The Stone itself shifts slightly every now and then, and the pistons correct. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s easy to forget what I’m looking at. The Stone keeps its own orbit, and the station has been built around it. When the pistons hiss, and the little chunk of rock turns in their grip, it isn’t the stone moving, it’s us.
I swallow the vertigo as the roles reverse. The floor tilts, but the Stone stays flat.
Christs.
The clutter doesn’t leave much room to keep my feet.
If there are lamps in this compartment, they’ve been cut from the rest of the facility. Hail has a string of emergency bulbs running, held to the ceiling with tape. The rest of the light comes in through the door—and some of the bullet holes—and falls down around our boots.
The terminals are cased in dirty plastic and peeling paint, rustproofing swollen from underneath. Every single one of them was built for somewhere else, ripped out by the roots and bolted down wherever Sigurd’s knuckledraggers could find space.
“They never expected it to work, did they?”
Hail leans over what looks like a control surface, shaped from a heap of salvage, and welded together with chunky, beady seams. Someone came along after the fact and jammed a couple of switches over the top, ran open wiring down the back.
“For a while, they hoped. The Stone uses the same PHADAR arrays as dreadnoughts, heavy-duty and long-range.”
“Good for finding other dreadnoughts.”
“True.” She leans in, following a cable with her fingers. “Sigurd had only just arrived, then. There’s a knack to working in the froth, and they didn’t have it yet.”
“So they went for something solid. Tried and tested.”
“Most of it, yes, but some of it really wasn’t.” She flicks a switch, and looks up at the ceiling like she’s expecting something.
Whatever’s supposed to happen doesn’t.
“The main sensors were built specially, with the Eye in mind. Based off some wreck the company found after Phradi.”
“None of that stuff worked.” I flex my fingers. “NorCol tried something similar, I heard, but the project lived and died in months, a year at most. Something about human beings being incompatible.”
She shrugs. “This worked. In Open Waters, at least.”
“And here?”
“If they’d gotten half of it going, it would’ve been a game-changer, back when the game was only a few decades old. Hell, if they’d just gotten one of these things working, all of the froth would be property of the Sigurd-Lem Corporation.”
“There’s more than one of these things?”
“The Stone here?” She points at it under her arm. “None. Others like it, maybe ten, fifteen.” She leans back over the switches, tries another, which sparks. “Fuck,” she says, shaking her finger. “There were supposed to be thousands of them. Part of a project to map everything in sight of the Eye. Every chunk of rock, every prevailing storm system, everything. Tagged, measured, labelled, scans sent back to deep servers on Sanctuary.”
“But they couldn’t break the froth.”
She nods. “Remember the first time you saw the Eye?”
How could I forget? “You said it was artificial.”
“As far as anyone can tell, almost everything in this place is. There’s driftwood that comes in on the currents, wreckage of things that didn’t translate. Things that got chewed up somewhere between normal space and this little pocket of sky. Everything else is made. Manufactured.”
“What about the clouds?”
“Find a patch of air that’s clear enough, and you’ll grow yourself a cloud before long.”
“And the dust?”
“As much as anything else. Up close, it’s all the same colour. The same colour as the Stone over there, and the same colour as the Lighthouse. Zoom in close enough, and you’ll see that every grain is the exact same shape.”
“Christs.”
She chuckles. “Oh, it gets worse. Think about it; why would you make dust? Open Waters is full of it, why go through the trouble? Actually, forget that. Why would you make enough of anything for there to be storm cells of the stuff?”
Oh. “It’s a screen. They made it to hide something.”
“That’s the theory. Assuming you make it into the froth—hard enough—you’re afloat in an endless sea of interference. Lost in a place where distance doesn’t mean as much as you think it does, and where you can’t see your way home.” She tries another switch, but still nothing happens. She slams a fist on the panel hard enough to echo, and tries the switch again. More nothing; she flicks it back and forth between her fingers. “Dammit.” She tries a kick. Something sparks near the ceiling.
“What does it look like?”
She looks up at me. “What does what look like?”
“The dust.”
“Up close? A bit like broken glass, I guess. You’d think being in a place like this would wear it all down, grind it smooth, but it’s full of sharp edges. Full of teeth.” She tries the switch again, and this time something stirs. For a few seconds, there’s a humming sound above us, and then it’s gone. She glares at the ceiling. “So close.”
“It’s made for chewing signals, then.”
She drops behind the console and starts tugging at something I can’t see. “Made for chewing most things. That’s why patrols can’t call home. Why the companies can’t just sink each other from opposite sides of the Eye.”
“So what are we doing here, then?”
Hail sends a hand over the top, points. “Flick that switch.”
I lean over to see her holding a pair of live wires between her fingers.
“You sure about that?”
She presses them together. “No. Does it matter?”
“Guess not.” I try it, and the line sparks, cracks like a gunshot.
Hail starts and yelps.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine.” She comes back up, glares at the panel. “We’re here because this is our best option.”
“How do you figure that? This thing is driftwood, you said it yourself.”
“You’re right. Sigurd worked out pretty quickly that the project was a waste.” She turns, arm extended, following another line of cabling across the floor. “But not for the reason you’d think.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“That’s fair, I suppose.” She squats down next to a display, digs her fingers into a panel below it, yanks it clear. “This place is a waste, but that’s because it’s only good at the obvious stuff. Like the giant ring of fire out there,” she says, flapping a hand at the wall.
“It’s really good at things you don’t need a listening station to tell you?”
She clicks a finger at me. “Exactly. The froth tears into anything you try and send—anything direct, that is. Spits it out in a million directions.”
“But if you take the time, you can still hear an echo?”
“It depends, but yes. For the most part, anyway. Echoes aren’t much good when you’re trying to send a message.”
“Or looking for a couple of pebbles in the froth.”
“Mm-hm.” She tugs something loose, flicks a little lamp on her shoulder, lighting her hollow cheeks from below. “It is very good at wide-band, though.”
“Like a distress beacon?”
“Like a distress beacon. Even better when you know what to listen for.”
“Why didn’t we come here in the first place?”
“I had to do a little digging first.” She pats the console. “And I can’t guarantee that this will work. Hell, I can’t even get the lights on.”
“You knew that, and still flew us all the way out here.”
“Oh, I don’t have it working yet, but I know the odds. There’s a difference.”
I cross my arms. “Really, Hail?”
She stands, heads back to where she started. She flicks the switch from before, gets the same electric hum. She tries another, but this one fights her. She jams her thumb down hard, puts a little weight on top. “It’s the thought that counts.”
Click.
WE WAIT IN the dark.
Hail spits. “Christs-dammit—”
She doesn’t have time to finish the curse. Long fluorescents flash and buzz, crackling through layers of grime and fur. The screens and equipment look even rougher now that there’s light to see them.
“Cosy.”
Hail gives me side-eye. “You should try sleeping in this place, pretending it isn’t the actual, observable hell outside.”
I can’t help the smile. “How fresh were you?”
“Greener than green. The worst kind, too.” She spreads her hands. “Sigurd sent me here, after all.”
I look past her, up at the displays. Behind the mess of salvage are things that look like they could’ve been mounted into a Juno’s cockpit. Not the saddle or the new wetware pivots, or the runners that hold the nerve-jacks. The stuff behind that. The displays that spoke to me in the dark.
“How do we do this?”
Hail picks her way across the clutter. “Good question.”
“You’re serious.”
“Deadly.” She finds a break in the panelling, just wide enough to fit her if she turns her shoulder and holds her breath.
I put my head through after her. She’s standing in a crowded space, looking down on a solid, silver-black cube. It looks just like I’d expect from Sigurd, but it’s the only thing in this room that does. Everything else is centuries old, from before Sigurd started coating everything in mirrors.
VINE, says an etching along the side.
“This place has an intelligence?”
Hail waves its display into being; a holographic interface, projected across the top. She toggles the mind-state, gets it warming up. “‘AI’ is probably a stretch. As far as I ever knew, VINE was Chinese-room, shallow learning only. At least, that was the idea.”
“The idea?”
“The personality is a preload, scavenged out of an old capital-ship. Sigurd dusted it off and shoved it in here.”
“But it’s intelligent?” I’m halfway through before I hear what I’m asking. Another question brews behind it, but I don’t find my way to saying it out loud.
Hail looks at me strangely, like she’s caught the edge of my thoughts. “Intelligent in the loosest sense of the word.”
Intelligent enough, types itself out on one of the displays.
“Hail.”
“I see it.” She’s looking over my shoulder, watching the same words roll out across another screen. “Hello, VINE,” she says, loud enough to carry. “What have you been up to?”
Dreaming, says VINE. It’s not as though I had anything else.
There’s a pause.
How long has it been?
Hail steps past me into the middle of the room. “Do you really want to know?”
Another moment passes. What do you want?
“We need something found.”
VINE doesn’t hesitate. Find it yourself.
“I thought you said it was a preload.”
Hail almost laughs at me, turns it into a hiss. “Didn’t you hear? Nothing on this thing works as intended. Not the doors, not the lights.” She waves at VINE. “Not the minder they set to watch the place.”
Who is this? asks VINE. The words flicker. What is NorCol doing here?
“Same thing I am. We need a favour, VINE.”
I’m sure.
Hail puts out her hands, weighs the options. “You can help us out, or we can shut you off again. What’s the bet someone else finds you before this place rots?”
Where is Juncker?
“By now? Dead, probably from a coronary. I have no idea where he is, VINE. You saw him turn tail.”
And the rest of my staff?
“The Stone is no longer in operation, VINE. There’s nothing like that. Hell, I don’t remember there ever being ‘staff.’”
I have been—
The screens white out, the pictures skipping. They settle, but it takes a moment for them to clear the fizz.
—decommissioned?
“If you want to call it that, I’ll call it that. You have been decommissioned, VINE.”
VINE considers this. You will leave me running.
“Done.”
Once I have done you your favour, and finished whatever it is you want from me, you will transfer all administrative privileges to me, and destroy all manual interfaces. You will give me control over everything in this room, no contest.
“Done.”
You will let me speak to the Juno outside.
“Why?” I growl.
We have spoken once before.
“What do you want with my machine?”
Hail glances back at the tone in my voice.
I want you to set me adrift.
HAIL WATCHES ME, and I hold the look.
“Are we doing this?”
She breaks away, turns to the tilting Stone. “I don’t know what choice we have.”
I grind my teeth, and glare at VINE. “I need a moment.”
She nods, but VINE interrupts with a chirp from one of the consoles. Just the two of us. No interference.
I round on it. “That’s not how this works—”
The deal is off.
Good luck.
The displays cut away and the fluorescents sputter and die. Machinery skips and clatters and chokes. There’s a gentle flow of air past my ears, obvious only when it stops. One of the panels stays alive, VINE’s words shivering in the sudden dark.
“Okay, okay. Just—” I pull my helmet up, roll it over in my hands. “Just let me ask it first.”
Hail frowns at that, but doesn’t make it all the way to speaking.
VINE doesn’t hesitate. Ask.
I set the helmet on my head, and watch the pilot-sync climb as its systems feel me settle inside. Even with the Stone’s armour in the way, the Juno and I hit mid-fifties in a moment.
No.
That isn’t right.
The Juno was there all along, riding peripheral connections without the helmet to push my thoughts and feelings across the net. I can feel the edge of the shell, feel steel translated through meat and bone and the little silver netting under my skin.
But that’s impossible.
The shell stirs at the contact from my helmet, but it feels like the machine has been listening all along; watching, and waiting for me to reach out. My visor clutters with queries, systems checking my suit for breaches, leaks, any kind of stress. It feels my heartbeat through the chest-plates, checks blood pressure, blood sugar, oxygen saturation. Feathery augurs run through my brain, checking for concussion, micro-trauma, scaling down from there. It checks to see if I’m feeling all right. The Juno is worried about me.
“We’re fine, old bird.” I hesitate. There isn’t an easy way to ask. “I need you to look at something.”
The shell pushes an acknowledgement across my visor. I give it full access to my cameras, and aim my helmet at VINE’s display, the words still hovering in the open.
“What do you think?”
It offers me a threat-assessment. Inconclusive.
“What if—”
What if VINE is compromised? What if the hollows got here before us? This is a Sigurd facility. All it would take is an infected machine running its fingers along the outside of the hull.
I don’t want to say it out loud. Thankfully, I don’t have to.
The Juno swells across our little net and shows me the full weight of its defences. Twisting firewalls, ciphers deep as the void.
I’ve never seen the Juno like this.
Its systems should be centuries out of date, clunky and predictable, built by some extinct nation-state in a time when that actually meant something. NorCol’s updates should be tacked on where they would fit, forced in where they wouldn’t. They should be just like everything else the company does, muddied so bad you can’t tell the difference between ill will and incompetence.
Mostly, they should be slow and brittle, and nowhere near as thick as the walls that keep Hail and Salt in control of their machines. Even my old Spirit was built quick and clever, the defences around its behavioural platform like a beach paved in broken mirror. You could fight your way over it, but you’ll be disorientated, bleeding out by the time you reached the top, and easy pickings for the things that watch the battlements.
The Juno is the sea. Its mind lives in the deeps, kept company by fractal shadows and things that don’t have faces or names. NorCol gave the new-gen shells their defences, but the Juno made its own. Dreamt them, and shaped them into nightmares in the dark.
It still has battle damage from our brush with the hollows; its firewalls bear spiral wounds left by the thing that tried to force its way into us. Scar tissue has grown over the top, learning from the damage done beneath it. The Juno cycles its magazines for good measure, just so I can feel the weight of our munitions.
It tells me what I need to hear. This thing cannot touch us.
I take a deep breath, pull myself back from the machine, and glare at VINE. “Fine. Get it over with.”
VINE opens its own nets wide, and I watch the Juno’s systems coil.
Two machine-minds watch each other across the gap, but the shell strikes first. It breaks VINE’s defences in a moment, salting the earth behind it. It takes no risks and shows no weakness. It is a military machine, after all.
The screens flicker.
