The Firmament of Flame, page 5
“Worse,” I told him. “At least on Kandriad, the weapons were determined by the pulse. Your people never had access to orbital laser platforms, or black-hole missiles, or core-melting fracture bombs.”
“No; just guns, and awful determination,” Sho replied. I didn’t really have an answer for that; he was right. Hate was hate, regardless of the scale.
“Best way to win a war, though,” Sahluk mused; I could hear him rubbing his chin, even through the comm, stone scratching against crystal. “Don’t let the other side know they’re even at war before it’s too late.” He was right: if the Bright Wanderers really were planning to bring the sect wars roaring back to life, they’d have … distinct advantages, just in being prepared for the return of the bloodshed, when the rest of the galaxy was not.
“We need to know more,” Javier said simply. “Out here in unfamiliar territory, we’ve had few enough chances to broadcast our findings back to Sanctum, and we don’t know when the next time we’ll happen across a broadcast tower will even be—we need to find out as much as we can before we send the next packet out.”
“And your suggestion as to how we would do that?” Marus asked.
“How do you find out anything?” Javier asked, and I could hear the grin in his voice, the grin that meant he was about to do something stupid, but before I could do anything to stop him, he’d answered his own question: “You look.” And then he was pulling Bolivar out of our flight pattern, arcing his little ship upward through the crimson atmosphere.
“Get back here,” I hissed at him, with no results. If he’d been standing right beside me, I would have grabbed for his arm, but there was nothing I could do—short of having Schaz shoot his ship out of the sky, which would draw just as much attention as anything he might be planning—so instead I simply ground my teeth as, per fucking usual, Javier acted without thinking of the greater consequences.
“Calm down, Jane,” Esa said, and I could hear a smile in her voice, “your sweetie knows what he’s doing.”
“My sweetie is going to get us all killed,” I hissed back, not bothering to cover the comms channel as I said it. The two patrol ships were still out there, scanning for any sort of movement; Bolivar had the least stealth tech of any of us outside of Shell, and I reached for the control stick, ready to blast the two smaller craft out of the sky the instant they locked onto Javier’s position—maybe, just maybe, if I could take them out quick enough, they wouldn’t have time to send a warning to the shipyards: instead, the shipyard control would just know that its two patrol craft had disappeared once they didn’t check in, which wasn’t much better—
Except Bolivar had barely broken free from the gravity well of the gas giant before Javier brought him around in a tight loop, diving right back into the smooth clouds of velvet, the patrol ships none the wiser. “Relax, sweetheart,” he said evenly. “’Var’s got the best long-range scanners of our little convoy, remember? I just wanted to take a more … focused … look at the network data surrounding the yards. We need information, and the network’s where the information lives.”
Relax? Relax? I’d give him “relax”—I’d give him—
“What’s the setup?” the Preacher asked calmly, as if he hadn’t just risked giving away our position entirely, and bringing down the wrath of god knows how many vessels on our heads.
“Not great,” he admitted, dropping back into position and sharing out the data with the rest of us. “Each of the dreadnaught superstructures is tied in to a single network hub down in the planetary atmosphere—that’s probably what those towers Esa picked up are for—but the network itself is locked down, tight. Feel free to prove me wrong,” he added hopefully, “given that I’m not the most tech-savvy member of this little crew…”
“Unbreakable,” JackDoes replied succinctly, already studying the new information himself. “Shifting encryption derived from purposefully chaotic algorithms. They must generate a passcode, then share that passcode—likely physically—with the AI on each dreadnaught core before even they can access the larger network. And even if we did—somehow—get access to one of the AI’s central controls, a thing that would require us to be physically present on one of the dreadnaughts, they’d simply shift the passcode again, at the network’s hub: here.” A region of the gas giant’s golden surface was highlighted on our maps as JackDoes transmitted the data: one of the spires Esa had seen on our first pass through the system. “The AI we’d accessed would be locked out from that point on.”
“And if we accessed the hub directly?” Javier asked him; the whole idea was ludicrous—we had no idea what sort of defenses the Wanderers had in place—but I let it play out, even so. If there was some sort of way to hack into the network hub, we’d have access to the answers to all of our questions: the Cyn’s relationship with the Bright Wanderers, the purpose of this armada, maybe even why the Cyn were kidnapping gifted children. The thought of all those answers, hidden on the world below: it was a tantalizing idea, but getting to it would still require us to pull off one hell of a heist, hitting the fortified shipyards and cracking their network open.
“Same problem,” JackDoes replied to Javier. “In order to access the network, we’d need access to the hub itself—physical access—as well as a passcode, which we could likely only get from one of the dreadnaughts’ AIs. And even if we sent two teams, more or less simultaneously, in the time it would take to hack the AI core of whichever dreadnaught we chose, even if we were physically at that location, that dreadnaught could be cut off from the network by any of the other AIs present on the system.”
“So the only way to do it would be to gain access to an AI without taking the time to hack it,” Javier mused.
“I’m good, but no one is that good, no matter how weak-willed their … machines … are.” The Preacher had gotten better, but she sometimes still slipped into a certain level of haughtiness when comparing herself and the Barious to other, more recent AIs.
“Maybe not, but what if we accessed one of the dreadnaughts that was on the network—but didn’t actually have an AI installed yet?” On the screen, a circle appeared around one of the hulls still under construction, Javier indicating what looked like the newest of any of the dreadnaughts. All there was of the craft was a sort of hollow shell, great gaping holes in its superstructure giving away the emptiness inside. “Judging from the network scans, that one’s not drawing enough power to even run an AI, and they haven’t completed her reactor, either. We could retrieve the password from her computer banks without the effort of cracking open the AI.”
“And then what?” I asked, intrigued despite myself—it was still impossible, given the level of resistance we’d be likely to meet, but not so impossible it couldn’t even theoretically be achieved. And we’d done the impossible before.
“We’d still need a second team, at the hub,” he admitted. “Working in concert with the dreadnaught team. One group to secure the password from the dreadnaught hull, and the other to plug that password into the hub at the tower. Then we could lock the rest of the AIs out of the system, and download as much of their data as we had time to. Before they, you know, kill us.”
“I can reach the towers without being detected,” Schaz said confidently. “I don’t know that any of the others could, but I can.”
“Khaliphon can’t reach the network hub, no, but he could at least get an assault team onboard the dreadnaught before he was spotted,” Marus said.
“But as soon as he was, wouldn’t they just change the password?” Sahluk asked.
“Not if we shut that dreadnaught off from the network completely, which I can do from any terminal on board—assuming their terminals are up and running,” the Preacher said. “Alternately, the hub team could do the same—bring the network down, before the dreadnaught team even landed. Granted, the dreadnaught team would still have to deal with any workers and any security on the ship, but the rest of the system wouldn’t even know there was a problem. They’d realize the network was down, of course, but that would seem like a software glitch rather than an assault. That sort of scheme wouldn’t be possible on a dreadnaught with an AI—even cut off from the network, it could scramble the password on its own recognizance—but if Javier is right that there’s not an AI installed, then it’s … doable.”
I examined the plan from every angle I could think of. It was insane, but “insane” was a definite downgrade from “impossible.” The difficulty was that we just didn’t know what sort of resistance we’d face, either at the hub or on the dreadnaught: if it was just cultists armed mostly with the machinery they’d be using to work on the superstructure, then it was doable, but if—like every other cult in existence—there were armed guards, unobtrusively watching to make sure their own people stayed in line, the difficulty would skyrocket. And that was only taking the dreadnaught into account: we had no idea what the hub team would encounter.
“Send Sho and me to the hub,” Esa said, her voice rising the way it did when she got excited. “That’s your best bet. We know the other team will hit at least some form of resistance, so you need all the gunhands we can spare—we don’t know that about the hub. It could just be technicians maintaining the equipment—”
“And it could be a small army,” I reminded her. “Based down there to handle any insurrections among the new arrivals who maybe decide they don’t want to build dreadnaughts for the rest of their natural lives.”
“A small army, maybe,” Esa shrugged, “but a small army protecting a tower built to generate a massive, planet-wide data network. That sort of network requires power, and that much power means they must have a reactor. And where there’s a reactor—”
“There’s energy for me to draw, and channel to you,” Sho said as the realization of Esa’s full plan dawned on him. “Esa, that’s brilliant.”
“With access to that much raw energy, they’d need a small army to stop us,” she said firmly, and I frowned—confidence was one thing, but this was skirting dangerously close to arrogance, and that could get her killed.
“So you and Sho slip into the hub—hopefully unnoticed—and you take the central control room,” Javier was summarizing. “Meanwhile, the rest of us hit the dreadnaught, and once we’re on board, the Preacher cuts it off from the network. Then, once we’ve reached the core where the AI would be installed once the ship was finished, the Preacher retrieves the password, and broadcasts it to you. One problem.”
“Shoot,” Esa said.
“I don’t mean to be insulting—”
“Neither Sho nor I know the first thing about computers or hacking; we can barely operate the holoprojections on board Scheherazade.” She was right—they’d both been raised on deeply pulsed worlds; neither of them had even seen a working computer until they’d joined the Justified. But Esa had seen this coming, which meant she had a plan. “We can’t even ask Schaz to do it remotely, because—to stop the other AIs from changing the passcode—we’ll have to bring down the network as soon as we reach the hub.”
“Correct.”
“Which means we’ll need to take Meridian with us.”
Oh, Marus wasn’t going to like that at all.
CHAPTER 7
Jane
“No,” Marus said flatly, his tone brooking no disagreement. “Esa, she is not ready for this—”
“Neither was I, when Jane took me off my home; neither was Sho, when we pulled him from his. Like it or not, Marus, combat is part of being Justified—and violence is part of being gifted. There are just too many people in the universe trying to use us for it to be otherwise.”
“She’s right,” Meridian said, the first she’d spoken up. “I knew when I signed on to serve outside Sanctum I’d likely have to fight. I went through the operative training; I know how to handle weaponry, tactics.”
“Theoretically,” Marus said, his voice almost a growl—more emotion than the Tyll usually showed. “Theoretically, you know all of that.”
“When you agreed to take me on—as your apprentice, on this mission—you knew there would be violence. You and the others keep throwing Esa, Sho, and me together so that we can learn to work as a team: this is why. Esa’s plan needs each of us to succeed—and the other operation needs the rest of you. I want to do this, Marus.”
“No,” he said again. Then, to Esa: “Take JackDoes.”
“We need JackDoes on Scheherazade, writing a virus,” I replied instead. Believe it or not, Esa had thought this through, and she was my partner: I could see the same connections she’d already made. “Once he has the passcode data to base it on, we’ll need something to introduce into the hub, something that will shut down production here, at least for a little while. Even spiting their production for just a few days could save countless lives.”
“Also, JackDoes really doesn’t know how to fight,” the Reint hissed. He wasn’t wrong—Reint, the smallest and the lightest of the seventeen species, were in general ill-suited to modern infantry combat. They’d evolved as apex predators on their homeworld, and facing a Reint in hand-to-hand combat was a daunting experience, given the claws and the teeth and the razor-sharp tails, but a melee wasn’t a gunfight: very few of our weapons, for example, would fit comfortably in JackDoes’s claws—the recoil of even the smallest handgun in my collection would likely put him on his scaly hindquarters.
“I want to do this,” Meridian said again to her mentor. “This is the job, Marus; this is why I’m here. I’ll be with Esa—I’ll be with Sho. They won’t let anything happen to me.”
Marus sighed, something like regret in the tone of the sound. “They all grow up eventually, Marus,” I told him quietly. I remembered the resistance I’d felt, sending Esa into combat on her own for the first time—and she’d done me proud. Meridian would do the same for Marus.
“That doesn’t mean they have to grow up into us,” he replied evenly. “Fine. But Meridian”—he turned to his ward, though we could still hear him over the comms—“if shooting breaks out, you do exactly what Esa and Sho tell you to do; you keep your intention shields raised at all times; you—”
“I have studied basic tactics, Marus,” she said, the sarcasm in her voice hiding a quiet note of anxiety. “I know how to—”
“No, you don’t,” Sahluk put in. “But soon enough, you will.”
“And don’t be afraid to hide behind Esa,” Marus added.
“Hey,” Esa objected mildly.
“What? It’s your mission—so I’m holding you responsible for bringing her home.”
“Plus, you do have the heaviest intention shields of all of us,” Sho pointed out reasonably. “And, you know … telekinesis.”
“Fair enough,” Esa sighed. “So. It’s Sho, Meridian, and me on Scheherazade, to the hub. The rest of you can cram into Khaliphon: he can get you closer than any of the other ships, maybe even drop you onto the dreadnaught skeleton itself before alarms start going off.”
“There is another risk, you know,” Javier said quietly. “Just so someone says it: the Bright Wanderers are our best lead on finding the Cyn. Maybe antagonizing them isn’t the way to play this.”
“You want to play nice with people who abduct and brainwash their recruits?” Marus asked him.
“I don’t want to, no, but I’ve made deals with the devil before. When it was necessary. Devils—quite often—have more to offer than angels do.”
“No,” Sahluk rumbled. “No deals. This isn’t just about the Cyn any longer. These Bright Wanderers—if they have this many dreadnaughts, if they’re building more—they’re a threat. And we answer threats.”
I agreed with him, wholeheartedly, though that was inevitable: it was what I did, what I’d been trained to do, the same as Sahluk. The job meant eliminating threats against the Justified before they could materialize at our doorstep, hitting them before they could hit us. It was what Mo had been doing when he’d recruited me, and it was what I’d done with him, right up until the point where we failed, and the Justified wound up with a weapon of planetary destruction pointed at our home. That was part of the reason I’d volunteered for the pulse-bomb mission in the first place—because it had been my job to prevent that kind of threat from ever reaching the Justified, and I hadn’t done it well enough.
The guilt of what had come after—the inexplicable spread of the pulse, the worlds locked away from the galaxy—had driven Mo to the empty spaces of the universe, looking for God; it had driven me to throw myself into new work, the missions to rescue the next generation, so that I could try and put something good back into this universe, rather than constantly taking away from it. But when push came to shove, my answer was always going to be “Hit. Hit first, hit harder, hit them so they can’t hit you back.” And these Bright Wanderers were our enemy. They were a cult with warships: everyone who wouldn’t join them would be their foe.
“What would you suggest instead, Javier?” the Preacher asked him. “Do you want to fly Bolivar right into the center of their shipyards, see if you can open a channel to negotiate before they blast you out of the sky? You saw those patrol craft they sent to investigate the telltale signs of our exit from hyperspace—they were bristling with guns.”
“Well, sure, but would the security craft we’d send, if it seemed like someone had discovered Sanctum, be any different?” He asked the question honestly, rhetorical though it was, and he had a point. “They’ve made no aggressive moves toward us—”
“The trap, in the observatory,” JackDoes reminded him. “They drove the station AI mad, so that it would try to kill us. Us, or anyone who came looking into what they were doing.”
“Look—I just want to make sure the question is raised. If the agreement is we should go in hot, we go in hot. I just want to make sure we consider all our options first.”
I shook my head. “We’ve seen this all before, sweetheart,” I told him. “The population brainwashed into believing there’s only one path to salvation, and that path leads through their enemies; that’s no different from the Pax, from any number of doomsday cults you or I have run into on the fringes. It’s not all that different from the sect I was raised in, and I still think the Justified made the right call there, as well.” Javier and Marus were the only ones who knew what had happened to my homeworld, the aftermath of my recruitment—but the rest knew it hadn’t been pretty.
