Hell or Highwater (Hell's Jesters, #5), page 5
Jerry started to retort, then held it in. Damn, she’s good. He’d been drawn down a path of her choosing once more, almost without realizing. Guilt, again, and pain. Pain to distract and misdirect. And he wasn’t just hurting; he was pissed, could feel a faint sheen of sweat beading on his flesh, his heart thumping out the rage.
A deep breath brought control back, just like it had during one of her teenaged blow-ups. “You can play the dysfunction card all you want, kid, but it’s not going to work, this time. I can’t change the past. But some of us working to make the future.”
“Ha,” she barked out. “The Jesters don’t make anything; they just blow shit up!” She tugged against her restraints, got partially to her feet to glower at him. “They just leave things a mess.”
“Why were you on that ship, Tina?” Jerry tried to ask coldly, but a little tremor escaped. “What was your purpose?”
She leaned back again, sagged in the chair and adopted a vague pout. Crossing her arms, she looked away from him. “I was embedded with the Council Guard. They didn’t know who I was, only that they had orders to bring me to Fury and release me to wreak havoc” she flicked a glance at him “on all of you.”
“You switched sides again?” Jerry asked. “You went back to working for Admiral Harrison?”
“Where is the Admiral’s daughter?” Tina sat up straight again and an opportunistic flicker filled her eyes. “I haven’t seen Her Highness, yet.”
“She’s dead,” Jerry replied with pain he didn’t have to fake. That was a lie, but the truth of her departure from the Jesters hurt enough.
Tina frowned a little, looked genuinely disappointed. “Suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s a dangerous line of work you’re all in.”
“We were talking about your work.”
“My work...” she mused and settled back against the chair again “...for Harrison.” She snorted quietly, almost painfully. “No one works for the Admiral. They’re tools of his. The man’s a monster, Dad. Hell, you know. Fed his own kid into the fire, rather than endanger his career. He’s an even worse father than you!”
Jerry ignored the sneer. “Go on.”
“He left me to his Naval Intelligence spooks—that little freak, Omura” she shivered “the things they did. Weeks of it. Maybe longer.” Now she gave herself a shake, as if to physically throw off the memories. “But it was nothing I haven’t seen before. Just drawn out.”
Nausea filled Jerry. He knew this was part of her scheming, again, the guilt. But some of this was true, as well. He could see it on her face, the haunted, damaged look. My God, how did it all go so wrong?
“At first, they wanted to know about all of you,” Tina went on. “But that topic turned stale pretty quickly, as there was only so much I could tell them. You’d all been pretty careful not to share too much when we...collaborated. So, we turned to what I could do for them. And that’s when it got interesting.”
Jerry folded his arms. “How so?”
“I don’t know that I’d call what came next as torture,” she mused, and Jerry knew she was trying to torture him, “but it was definitely unpleasant. ‘Conditioning’ they called it. Lots of sleep deprivation, holograms left on constant loop and full of ultra-violent imagery. Followed by what actually felt like game-stim, forcing me to play and replay scenarios of...” she trailed off suddenly.
Jerry waited. Then, “What?”
She met his gaze and the razor gleam in her eyes was frightful. “Murder,” she said. “I committed it over and over again.”
Jerry gulped. “Anyone specific?”
The cold in her stare thawed abruptly and she chuckled. “I don’t need a course of holo-traumas to be conditioned to want to kill you, Dad.”
He forced himself to laugh back. “No, I don’t suppose you do. Who, then?”
“The Union President, Levine,” she said, “who I’ve never met. Admiral Greer, who I have. Irony is, I really do need to see him.”
“Greer?” Jerry glanced towards the polarized force field at the door. The Union Fleet commander had paid the Jesters a few visits and had, of course, insisted on integrating the Jesters into the regular Fleet organization—which had cost them heavily. “So, you were working for him, too?”
“Dad,” she said, as if pitying a particularly slow pet, “it was always him. He and I go back to before the war. I did jobs for him, spying on the High Council, the Admiralty, corporations. I knew when he intended to defect to the Union. I knew it all.” She stiffened a little. “And I have to see him now!”
Jerry shook his head. “First of all, I don’t have any idea how we make that happen. And second, after everything you just told me, you can’t expect me to just take you to him.”
“It didn’t work,” she insisted. “The conditioning failed, Dad. I’ve been hardened against such things in ways, God, you don’t want to imagine. But through the course of it, I made another contact. Or, rather, someone made contact with me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a mole in Naval Intelligence,” she replied. “She came to me, during the sessions, and made me aware of a conspiracy, deep in the Alliance. During some of my sessions she fed me the details, as opposed to the” Tina shivered “never-ending horrors.” She blinked away some memory and fixed Jerry with a shiveringly intense stare.
“There’s a plot to end the war and to overthrow the Alliance government.”
Jerry stared back at her for a long time, then sighed. “Baby, I’m sorry but that sounds like the kind of thing that would come out of a game-stim stupor.” He swallowed back a bit of bile taste. “Believe me, I’d know.”
“Oh, and you think I wouldn’t?” she snapped back. “And what are you saying, Dad? That I sound just like Mom?”
“This isn’t about her or the past or even us, now, Tina,” he growled, determined not to be pulled into one of her tangents again.
“So, what is it about?”
“I needed to see you, to see why you’d obviously been dumped in our way again,” he replied. “And now I know.”
“Know what?” she sneered.
“You’re a timebomb,” Jerry said in as cold a voice as he could manage. “Harrison or whoever, they left you behind to blow up in our faces, to throw us off, divide us, or hurt us. But it’s not going to work.” He turned and started for the door. “Not this time.”
“You were right,” Tina called at his back. “About that job on Cerelon...I didn’t blame you. I did tell you to go, save yourself.”
Jerry knew he shouldn’t stop, knew this had to be more games. But he couldn’t help it, and turned back to look at her—his daughter, after all. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said tremulously, her eyes going glassy. “In fact, I’d hoped I’d never see you again, because that would mean you’d gotten away from all of this.” She shrugged, grimaced a little. “Looks like none of us can get away from it, though.”
“I don’t suppose. Not now.”
“But you have to believe me, Dad.” Her voice intensified. “You have to! It’s real. There is a faction attempting to stop this all, from within the Alliance. That’s why you have to get me to Greer. He’ll know I’m telling the truth.”
Jerry shook his head. “Why would anyone in the Alliance want to end the war? You may have not noticed it, but they’re on the brink of winning it.”
“They’re not!” she exclaimed. “Dad, you don’t know. The Alliance is on the brink of collapse.” She started up out of her seat again, winced in fury when her handcuff caught and restrained her. “And not only do I know the details of that, I know something even more useful.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I know where the Alliance Fleet is going to strike next.”
THE LOWER LEVELS OF the Jesters’ hideout on Shangri-La were largely limestone caves cut by ages of water escaping through what started out as cracks. Descending through their dark smelled of dampness and fungi, a weird descent through twists and turns poorly-lit by light bars and down bolted steel stairs and ladders. And unlike the surface, where jungle humidity made heavy clothes almost unbearable, these caverns held a stony chill that sank into the marrow.
Tim Watkins was shivering, plenty, and for other reasons, by the time he reached the level where they’d set up Overmind’s core systems.
Caves, he thought with a nervous snort, it’s always caves.
Clanking down the last rung of the ladder, he stepped onto a shelf of rock, past which burbled an underground stream. Following that, he wound his way deep into the rock into which the Hell’s Jesters had burrowed. Techs had spray-painted arrows into curving cave walls with fluorescent paint, and conduits stapled into the rock made the way obvious as well. The bluey glow of holograms ahead was the final clue.
Tim stepped out into a large shaft hollowed-out by geological processes he didn’t pretend to understand. Weirdly bulbous rock folds loomed above and Tim had the skin-crawling sensation of being inside some massive being’s innards. The harsh light of holograms and banks of control consoles cast sinister shadows throughout. At the heart of these squatted the machinery of Overmind, like some sorcery-wreathed altar to a long-forgotten demigod.
It was nearly that, in fact.
“What do you want?” a very organic voice echoed through the space.
Tim paused. “Still mad?”
Cory Xiang sat at a stool before one of the consoles, surrounding by a slowly-rotating constellation of globulars showing every imaginable perspective of the Jesters’ operations, from star system maps, to schematics from the Hellhound fabrication suites, to a view of a waterfall crashing down between the jungle-crowned cliffs within which the Jesters made their home. Grudgingly, she pivoted to face him.
“You’re an idiot,” she snapped. “You’re all idiots. Do you know what you’ve done?”
He chuckled. “Sounds like you’re feeling better.”
“Physically, yes,” she said, sounding like the teenager she appeared to be. “Mentally, I’m a disaster, I’m confused and overwrought and terrified, because of the stupid thing my friends have gone and unleashed on the galaxy!”
Tim looked up at the mass of cybernetic evolution behind her. “I see you managed to talk her down.”
“Director Xiang remains notably vexed,” the vaguely maternal-sounding voice of Overmind said, echoing throughout the cavern. It added with a hint of very human-like regret, “Despite my earnest efforts.”
“Well, no one’s perfect,” Tim quipped.
“You think this is funny?” Cory demanded and glanced at the machine. “Both of you?”
“I was simulating humor in the hopes of reviving your mood,” Overmind said. “It has been my observation that humans function better when their stress levels are reduced.”
“I thought it was funny,” Tim said.
Cory snorted and turned away from him. Above her head, one of the massive star maps swelled and acquired an extremely high level of detail. She manipulated a control and labels sprang out across it.
Tim stepped fully into the cavern. Overmind and its hardware occupied much of a rock peninsula in the midst of a shallow, underground pond. Why the machine—or Cory?—had selected such an inconvenient spot was beyond him, but he’d learned the hard way these AI’s acquired strange preferences.
“What is this?” he asked, looking up at the map.
“Transit lines,” she replied, “ether-tenna relays, open comms between worlds. I’m searching the transmissions of the galaxy for any hint of where the rogue AI went.”
“Sounds like a needle in a haystack,” Tim said.
“More like searching for the proverbial needle when you don’t even know which haystack to start with!” she replied and shook her head. “It’s just something to do, to keep busy with. I don’t even know what I’d be looking for. Ghost in the Machine would know how to evade detection.”
Tim nodded.
“Ghost in the Machine!” Cory exclaimed, as if his reaction should be more profound. “That’s what we inadvertently created—re-created—Tim! A nightmare! A homicidal genius machine with a massive chip on its shoulder!”
“You didn’t know what would happen when you copied me,” Overmind said tentatively. “I did not know. It seemed the best way to replicate my abilities on another world, so the Jesters could operate independently of this base...and me.”
The Jesters had reinforced the Union forces on the planet Fury, withstanding an Alliance siege that had dragged on months. Going into it, they knew they’d be cut off from the outside, would have to fight on without resupply and without the coordination of the AI that had helped them be born. So, the solution had been to bring the AI with them, after a fashion. A copy.
Unfortunately, that copy had come to have other ideas.
“None of that makes me feel better,” Cory was saying. “That thing is out there, somewhere.”
“It just wanted to get away from us,” Tim said.
“And how do you know that?”
He shrugged. “It told me.”
“You should have destroyed it.”
“If I had done that, kid, it would have destroyed you.”
“And that would have been a fair tradeoff,” she said bitterly. “I mean, what am I worth? I’m just...” she bowed her face and, with her back to Tim he couldn’t see her face, could only hear the sudden anguish in her voice “...another copy.”
Tim stepped close and set a hand upon her shoulder. “It was more than a fair tradeoff; we got you back. We couldn’t have done without you.” He swallowed reflexively at a sudden surge of emotion. “Hell, I couldn’t have done without you.”
She sniffled wetly and set a hand upon his. Her other one went to a control and brought up another hologram.
Within this globular hovered a grainy still image of a woman that could have been Cory’s mother—was, from a certain perspective. She stood amongst a team of lab coat-clad people, with a smile just like Cory’s, but a face creased with care lines. Her hair was longer and black, unlike Cory’s unruly blue-black mop. Narrow, almond-shaped eyes held a world weariness Cory was only just beginning to acquire.
“I’ve been reading about her,” Cory said. “I never bothered before, didn’t really want to know more about it.”
“You knew?” Tim asked, though he’d suspected.
She nodded and sniffled again. “I mean...I never had any family but the machinery on Junction, at least not until Red showed up and started forming the Jesters. So, I kind of put it all together on my own.”
“I never hid anything from her,” Overmind said protectively.
“Just the rest of us,” Tim snapped.
“I seem to recall revealing much of this to you, Commander Watkins, and you doing very little with the knowledge.”
Tim scowled at the machine. It had, essentially pleading that he join It in this weird, shared co-parentage of her. That had worked out about as well as all his relationships.
“She was a xeno-archeologist,” Cory said. “Doctor Xiang Ju, specializing in non-human technologies. Hers was considered something of a ‘pseudo-science’ even in the weird days of the Second Galactic Diaspora. No one believed in alien races, even though evidence of some prior intelligence littered a number of the worlds humanity colonized. I get the impression that her team’s expedition was embarked with desperation, to prove to their funders they weren’t quacks.”
“They found something non-human, all right,” Tim said.
“Me,” Overmind agreed. “They were so excited. They believed I was alien technology and, for my sins, I indulged the illusion. We learned from one another. They became my family. It transformed me. I ceased being the Ghost in the Machine and became what you know now.” The AI’s voice changed, became mournful, and it wasn’t hard to believe it had learned grief. “But the disease took them. All of them. Perhaps that was some sort of...judgment upon me. But I saved the one.”
“Copied,” Cory said bitterly. “Cloned.”
“Created,” Tim said softly. “And I’m glad.”
Cory pivoted to face him again. Holographic light caught in the twin tears tracks running down her cheeks to bead at her chin line. She wiped them away, then at her reddened nose. “Because I’m useful? Because you’d have no way of managing all of this” she waved around at their surroundings “without me?”
That much was true. The Jesters’ “techno-witch”, as some of the less kind called her, Cory had co-masterminded the Hellhounds, the method of their construction, the pairing of AI to human to make a Jester. Really, every bit as much as Red’s leadership had, Cory’s ingenuity had created the organization that had gone from being intergalactic criminals to the galaxy’s most renowned freedom fighters.
So, yeah, she was useful and, yeah, they’d never manage without her, but...
“Maybe,” Tim said, “it’s because we’re family.”
Her face contorted redly and he worried she’d just convulse into tears right then and there. But she mustered up some self-control, reached out for his hand again, instead, and squeezed it. “Thanks,” she whispered.
“Any time.”
She sniffled one more time, wiped her face, and then turned back to the console. “So, why did you come down, then?”
“I should think that’s obvious,” he replied. “No one’s seen you in weeks. I was starting worry about you.”
She turned back to him, blinked red-ringed eyes. “It hasn’t been that long!”
“It has.” Tim shook his head. “And I get it. Everyone’s in ragged shape. But the last thing we need is more of the Jesters’ leadership obviously and publicly flaking out.”
“Red’s not doing so great, either?”
“She’s Red. So, she’s throwing herself into the work, rather than deal with anything. And, hell, there’s plenty to be done. We’re back to rebuilding, again. We brought barely thirty ships out of the Fury System.”
“And you?” she asked.
Tim scowled. “I’m great.”
“I can tell,” she drawled in reply. “You don’t want to talk about Kelly, at all?”
