NOVEL NEXT Some New Hope, Maybe
The first thing we did when the elevator got back to the Administration floor was find a nice, solitary corner in which to begin scheming. Fortunately, nobody in their right mind would go down to that floor without a good reason on account of the cold, so finding isolation was relatively easy. Miri opened up her Ariel and got out a map of the colony, zooming in on the administration area, while I filled her in on everything I’d seen during the brief visit there.
“So let me get this straight: all of Qalin’s bodies have the same intelligence? They can communicate by radio, and they’re essentially interchangeable. You can talk to one of them and the others will respond to what you said, and if multiple are talking they’ll switch mid-sentence because they’re just that identical?”
“Yeah. Well, sometimes it seems like there’s a delay while different bodies access information, but it’s like a computer buffering, it only takes a couple of seconds,” I said.
“Which means that if one of them sees us, it doesn’t matter what we do, the entire collective knows,” Miri said, more for her own benefit than mine.
“It’s one gigantic mind. A hive mind,” I said. “You know how this works.”
“Actually I don’t; insect hives don’t work like that, they’re much closer to a normal human city,” Miri said, looking at her Ariel. “This is more like… a naturally-evolved biological ancillary.” She paused. “That’s creepy, but also kind of cool.”
“A biological what?”
Miri grinned. “This is what you get for not reading books, Cathy.”
“I read books!” I said, crossing my lower arms.
“One Piece is not a book,” Miri said.
I momentarily lost my composure, which took the form of an unconscious trilling noise and my antennae sticking out at forty-five degree angles. “That’s not even what I’m talking about! I’ve read, like, Lord of the Rings and The Belgariad and, like, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Those count.”
Miri raised an eyebrow. “Those books are long as shit, that’s actually a little bit impressive. What were we talking about?”
“Stealth is hard when the person you’re trying to outwit has four hundred eyes,” I said.
“Right, yes, okay. I was thinking about that when you bumped into me the first time, and not getting many good ideas. Having you to help makes it a little easier, but not especially so.” Miri turned her Ariel around so I could see, and zoomed in the view to cover just the administration area. “Now, finding a good target was the easy part. Right here is the main archive, it’s labelled and everything, so if there’s any juicy secrets we can totally find them there.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “What’s the hard part?”
Miri pointed to several areas around the edges of Administration. “Look at the floorpan, Cathy. There’s a bunch of rooms that you can’t avoid, that are all probably busy. Sneaking through those is going to be a little bit impossible.”
“But we can take cover, right? You know, hide behind desks and walls and stuff, stay out of sight?”
Miri looked right into my eyes, though she couldn’t seem to decide which ones. “Have you ever done that before?”
“No?”
“Then it’s basically up to luck. I am not leaving this up to luck,” she said, turning back to her Ariel.
“Okay, so we need to figure out how to get past all the watchful eyes,” I said. “What else?”
Miri panned over the view of the map, then poked her finger into an otherwise unremarkable part of the map. “Infrared scanner in front of the entrance.”
“Ouch, okay,” I said. “Mind if I have that?”
Miri gave me her Ariel, and I scanned around the administration area, looking for some shortcut or special route that would keep us out of the way. “Ventilation? What if we used the ventilation ducts?”
“That doesn’t work outside of movies, Cathy. For one thing I’m pretty sure the biggest ones are about six inches across.”
“Fair enough,” I said. The map wasn’t going to help me. “What if we started a distraction? Like, pulled a fire alarm or threw a rock at a security camera or something?”
Miri shook her head. “Do you think you’d be able to start a distraction that could draw the attention of all of them at once? One or two going to investigate what’s going on won’t be enough to make a difference.”
“Well, what if we made a distraction so big that they couldn’t ignore it!” I said.
“I’m pretty sure setting off a bomb wouldn’t be enough to get them all,” Miri said. “It’s a networked intelligence, this is beyond something you can just trick like that.”
“Stupid networked intelligences…”
Having the ability to instantly communicate via brain radio was really starting to be a problem. I mean, no wonder Qalin had been able to take over as the government of this place when they had that ability on their side. If only there was some way to jam their ability to communicate, this might be more possible, but it wouldn’t be that easy. Or was it…
“You know how to work with communication and stuff, right? You said you’ve been messing with the Ariel and stuff.”
“A little bit?” Miri said.
“Could you build a radio jammer? Like, to block their communications with each other?”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “For one thing, I’d need to know what frequencies they operate on. Also, who even knows if biological radio evolved to work on vaguely the same principles as normal radio!”
“Then if we can’t do precision, what about, like… making something that’ll blast out radio waves so loud they can’t ignore it. A distraction they can’t ignore!”
“You do realize that I’m not some kind of omni-nerd, right?” Miri asked. “I’m studying to go into insect biology, not electrical engineering. I mean, sure, I mess around with electronics sometimes, but I’m no expert.”
“It can’t be that hard to make a really really loud transmitter, though, can it?” I said, wincing as I realized how stupid that sounded. “Do you at least know the basic principles?”
Miri shrugged. “Maybe. Like knowing that making something really loud in radio would require a crapload of power we don’t have. Also, even if I could work out the basics, I don’t know very much about how to actually build stuff, especially with whatever weird materials we have access to out here.”
“But I do,” I said. “Xara’s been teaching me how to repair the kinds of machines they have here. And repairing isn’t… that different from building. I think.”
“Okay, but even if you could make something we don’t have the power for… wait, what the heck am I saying, of course we have the power for it! Your moms carry around fully functioning and compact directed energy weapons, if those exist then we have as much goddamn power as we want!”
“That’s the spirit,” I said with a chitter. Miri’s pheromones smelled excited, even impatient. It was a scent I liked from her. “Wait, what about the infrared scanner? Do you have any idea what to do about that?”
“Uhhhhhhh, I’ll come up with something,” said Miri, slightly embarrassed. “Most scanners like that are far from foolproof, there’s a reason security guards still exist.”
“You sound like Quinn,” I said.
“He’s rubbed off on me, just a little. Now go and find the materials, I’ll send you the exact schematics once I have it, okay?”
“Right, got it!” I said.
Miri was grinning almost ear to ear as she went back to her Ariel, rapidly flipping between programs. “Good luck, lo—Cathy,” she said. The word stutter wasn’t normal for her, but I didn’t dwell on it. I was already fastwalking down the hallway with as much energy as I could gather.
About half an hour later I was in the upper levels of the New Ivehar colony, my lower pair of arms piled high with all the junk I’d found inside the storage compartments on the Helium Glider, my mind entirely occupied with trying to figure out how to find the last component I needed. Between everything else I’d taken, there was no way I wouldn’t be able to bash together all the parts in the diagram Miri had sent me. It was fairly simple, after all, not needing to do much more than generate a continuous blast of white noise.
The problem was, after the diagram, Miri had sent me a text message asking for “a pane of glass, at least as big as your cool bug mask-face thing you have going on.” I had no idea what she needed it for, but I trusted her when she said she needed it. Which raised the question of where. The weird angular labyrinth of New Ivehar didn’t exactly have much in the way of windows, if only because they would make it look slightly more palatable to live in and we couldn’t have that, could we?
I could have sworn that, by the time I settled down, I’d gone through the upper levels of the colony at least three times. But I was stumped. Miri was going to have to come up with some way to substitute for that pane of glass. My joints were needing a rest, so instead of going back down to the lower levels I found what passed for an atrium on New Ivehar (two potted plants and a chair placed right outside an ice processing plant) and got out my Ariel. But just before the message of defeat could be sent out, someone interrupted me by putting their elbows on the back of the chair.
“Wow, didn’t realize you’d decided to start stripping copper from things, Cathy,” said Quinn. “I’d be careful with those batteries though, usually those will just dissolve your hands before you get to the valuable stuff.”
I smiled. “And you know about stripping things for scrap how, exactly? I thought weed was more your thing.”
“I knew a girl,” he said wistfully. “Last I heard she lost a finger.”
“Well, I’ll try to remember that,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, I plan to use these batteries for their intended function.”
“Good. You’re messed up as it is with all of your digits intact. But jokes aside, what are you actually doing with all this stuff?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then shut it again. Part of me wanted to let Quinn in on everything, ask for his help with the infiltration. There was no question that if given the chance he would help, and given how much sneaky business he got up to on a regular basis, he’d probably be pretty good at it. But the other part of me was more cautious. Did I really need Quinn’s help with all this? Miri and I pretty much had this, and adding Quinn to the mission would definitely change the dynamic. Plus, of course, three people are harder to keep hidden than two. That was definitely a strong enough justification.
“It’s something I’d rather keep a secret, okay? You can trust me to keep some things private, right?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Yeah. I’ll let you know if I’m in actual danger,” I said, which would hopefully not need to happen if this went well. “Though, uh, I could use your help with just one thing.”
“Of course. What do you need?”
“Glass? Like a pane of glass, about this big,” I said, indicating a roughly face-sized width with my lower arms.
“Hmmmmmm,” said Quinn. “I think I know just the place. Stay right here!”
As Quinn jogged off to goodness-knew-where, I had some time to think about the fact that at some point I’d instinctually come to think of my lower pair of arms as the “main” set on account of my injury. That was weird, to say the least, considering those lower arms emerged from just above my waist and had giant claws on them, but whatever. I didn’t have much time to descend into navel-gazing, because Quinn was back in about three minutes, carrying a square panel of glass the size of a large picture frame in one hand.
“We’re not going to undergo decompression because of this, are we?”
“Don’t worry, I got it from a door,” he said. “Might fuck with the air conditioning a bit.”
I chittered a laugh. “Oh no, whatever will Qalin do.”
“They’ll have to divert a slight bit of their attention for like five minutes. Of course, it’ll probably cost the taxpayers several thousand dollars that could have gone to tax breaks for Qalin, but that’s the price to pay for progress.”
I got out of the chair, trying to remember where the elevator down was. “Yeah. I wonder, does Qalin only pay one set of taxes, or does each body get taxed separately?”
“Whichever one costs less, I assume,” Quinn said. “And good luck with your weird secret project.”
“Yeah. I’ll need it.”
I took the elevator back down to where Miri was waiting for me. She hadn’t been idle after sending me the diagram; somehow she’d acquired a folding table as a workspace, and some tape, a screwdriver, and other miscellaneous tools. As way of an explanation she said only, “Supply closet.”
Constructing our little radio beacon thing was by far the most complicated technical task I had ever done. Even with Dr. Erobosh’s excellent teaching, I’d only had a few weeks with which to pick up the basics, mostly centered around slotting spare parts into a preexisting framework. What made it possible was that I had Miri. She knew, roughly, where each part had to be and what had to be connected to what, which was enough for me to work out the order. Together we built the distraction bit by bit, with a lot of trial and error involved, throwing the parts aside whenever we broke one, which was frequently.
By the end of it, we had something that was… functional, if not particularly pretty or stable. Most of the parts were mounted on a single concave metal hemisphere I’d scavenged from a ruined helper drone, with a trio of thin wire antennae jutting out of it. Nearly everything else was loose and exposed, attached with nano-tape or ill-fitting screws to form a nest of wires and capacitors and batteries that was probably also a fire hazard. But it worked, or at least it looked like it did. We didn’t have any way of testing it.
The one odd thing was that we never actually used the pane of glass. I tried asking Miri about it, and was met with some rather cryptic answers that didn’t actually tell me anything. She clearly had a plan that she was very confident about, which was always a fun thing about coexisting with Miri.
The next step was finding a place to set it off. This was a balancing game: too close to administration and they’d have an easy time finding it, too far and it might not get 100% of them to look for it, ruining our plan. Miri and I argued lightly about it, her preferring something further away, me preferring something closer. That took another twenty minutes at least before we came to a compromise, jamming it into an air vent near the floor in a corner of one of the maintenance areas so scarcely used that it had actually started to accumulate dust.
One we’d fixed it in place well and securely, there was a quiet moment.
“I think you should turn it on,” Miri said, looking at it like it was a landmine with an on/off switch.
“Uhh, sure, okay.” I knelt down in front of the vent, shifting aside the wires to find the button we’d pinned in to act as an activation switch. In a bit of pique, we’d made sure that there was no way to turn it back off. “How do we know if it’s working?”
“We won’t, not really. I had to guess what frequencies they use, and do a lot of internet searches, so… I guess when we see how Qalin is reacting to it.”
I nodded. Once the button was pressed, we were all-in. This was going to be our only shot to find out what Qalin was up to, and if we made a single mistake we’d probably be in serious trouble. Even after everything else, fighting against the spectrademons and fleeing New Malagasy and sneaking out to see Nahoroth, it still set my antennae on edge. There was nobody backing me up but Miri.
“Are you ready for this?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question for the last hour. Yes.”
And that was all the reassurance I needed. I slammed my hand down on the button. There was a very subtle electrical hum of charge flowing through the transmitter, but otherwise nothing. Emissaries can hear in the radio spectrum about as well as humans can.
“We should run now,” I said.
Miri broke out into a sprint, which I responded to at a slow jog, because my bones were on the outside and hurt like hell. It took her until she’d run entirely out of sight for her to realize her mistake and slow down. For a little while, running through the tight, red-lit hallways of New Ivehar, there was no way to tell if our plan had worked. Everything was so empty that, for all we knew, Qalin had packed all of their bodies into a shuttle and left the planet fifteen minutes ago.
Then we rounded the corner and found a room completely packed with Qalin’s bodies. It was a bizarre sight; dozens of identical insectoid frames crowded into a room slightly larger than the typical classroom. Instead of the usual soundless, flawless coordination I’d seen from Qalin before, their bodies were instead in total chaos, clumsily running into each other and buzzing in half a dozen languages. I didn’t need to observe them to know that they were looking for the source of the radio signal which was probably deafening them. We turned back before they could notice us, taking another route to the administration center.
Qalin, for what it was worth, wasn’t completely stupid. Two of their bodies had stayed behind to stand watch over the doors of the administration center. That might have been a problem if they weren’t too busy being distracted by the signal to keep a good watch. As it was, they were twitchy, anxious, and easily circumvented by hiding in a corner and waiting for them to look the other direction.
Past the door guards, Administration was completely deserted. Qalin had dropped everything they had been doing, paperwork half-filled and caffeinated beverages spilled on tables, the beacon apparently overriding all other concerns in their mind. We barely had to worry about stealth as we made our way to the archival room, just making sure not to speak above a whisper and staying at a walking pace.
Suddenly, as the door marked “Main Archive” came into view, Miri held out her arm, barring my movement. It was a plain room, seemingly just like any other, with walls that sloped weirdly inward from floor to ceiling, a single potted plant in the corner, a few filing cabinets scattered around a single desk on the right side.
“What? Is something wrong?” I whispered, slowly enunciating each word, because whispering with mandibles is even more difficult than speaking normally with them.
“Infrared scanner, remember?” She pointed up near the corner where the right wall hit the ceiling. It was well-concealed against casual inspection, but once I knew where to look, the little glass lens embedded in the wall was clear to see. “If I read the schematics correctly, it’s only meant to look at the area around the door, so we’re safe as long as we’re careful.”
“Okay. So, uh, did you figure out a plan to get around it? Because it’s going to be a real letdown if we have to turn around now.”
“Do you still have that pane of glass?” Miri asked.
I did, as a matter of fact. I’d been holding it in my upper arm the whole time, until I’d almost forgotten about it. I held it up, giving it a little wiggle for emphasis.
“So how is this going to help us get past the sensor?”
“Simple,” Miri said, producing a roll of tape from her pocket. “We’re going to tape it to the front of the sensor and blind it.”
My antennae sagged. “…It’s glass. I don’t know if you thought this through.”
“And silicate glass, which I’m very much relying on this being, is only transparent in the visible spectrum. An IR sensor will be able to sense the temperature of the glass, and absolutely nothing else.
“Huh,” I said. “That’s a neat trick.”
“I learned it on TV.”
“So how are we going to get it all the way up there?” I said, nodding at the sensor.
“You can jump high enough to get to the roof of my house, and climb up pillars in an airport,” Miri said. “I’m confident that you can jump to the height of a shitty office building roof and stick there.”
“Okay, sure. Yeah, that’s easy.”
Miri handed me the tape, which I took in my lower arms. I stepped forward, spreading my elytra and preparing my wings. I’d had enough practice doing long jumps to know roughly how to make a trajectory to the lens, and my light weight would probably let me grab on to the sensor itself. I rolled out a stretch of tape, crouched down, and prepared to jump.
My feet didn’t make it more than two feet off the ground, and the landing sent pain shooting from my feet to hips. I had to slam my mandibles shut to prevent from groaning in pain, and if I tried again it would be worse. Miri immediately moved in, placing one comforting hand on my elytra joint.
“What happened? Are you alright?”
“Can’t jump,” I said. “Too much joint pain from this stupid sickness.”
Miri frowned, coiling a lock of hair around her finger. “Well, we need to get the pane of glass up there somewhere. I know I can’t do it. Dammit, I should have thought of that. I’m sorry. Can you climb?”
I shook my head.
Continuing to coil and uncoil that lock of hair, Miri pursed her lips in concentration. We both knew that every second that she was thinking was a second that Qalin might be able to find and disable the beacon. Part of me wanted to give up, find some other way to do this. The other part of me desperately, implicitly trusted her. She was smarter than me by at least an order of magnitude, and a constant font of genius ideas.
“How high up would you say the sensor is?”
After a moment, I said, “Nine feet or so. Maybe eight and a half.”
“I think so too,” Miri said. “Which means that my backup plan might just work.”
“And your backup plan is?”
Miri pressed her lips together, and I could swear she got just the slightest redder. “About how much do you weigh?”
“130 pounds or so. Why?” I said, confused.
“Alright. That means I can lift you,” said Miri, as though it were a class lecture. “If I grab you around the hips and pick you up, I’m pretty sure that you’ll just barely be able to reach the sensor and tape on the glass blinder.”
“That’s your plan??” I said, my antennae pressing back against the scalp.”You’re just going to hold me up like a freaking kid at a concert? Are you sure you’ll even be able to do that?”
As a response, Miri rolled up one of her sleeves and flexed. It was a very convincing flex.
“Okay, yeah, maybe there’s the kernel of a good idea,” I said.
“You’ll have to move quickly, though,” she said. “I haven’t exactly had much practice in lifting whole people, so it’s only a guess how long I can keep you up there.”
I nodded, looking up at the sensor and going over a plan in my head. I took the glass panel in my upper arm, and cut two strips of tape, which stuck to my lower arms. Perfect.
We tiptoed forward until we were standing directly under the sensor. No alarm went off, which was as good as we were going to get for assurance that we hadn’t been seen. We remained totally quiet while Miri moved around to stand behind me, then for several seconds after.
“How are we going to do this?” I finally said.
“I’m just going to, you know, grab you and lift you up. I’ve done it before, once, when I was going rock climbing.”
I nodded. Neither of us moved.
“Are you ready?” Miri asked.
“Yep,” I said. “We should do this before we run out of time.”
Miri responded by crouching down, wrapping her arms right around my hips, and hauling me up into the air.
I proceeded to freak out. There were two reasons. The first was that I was in the air but not moving, and suspended from my waist instead of from my wing joints. Something about my bug instincts really, really didn’t like that. The second reason was that Miri was touching me. But she was more than touching me, she was holding me tightly around the hips, with her cheek resting up against the softest, most tender part of my abdomen. Logically speaking that shouldn’t have meant anything. It was just, pragmatically, the best way to hold an Emissary up. But the logical part of my brain was also not the part that came into play when Miri was holding me tight, the warmth of her skin on my carapace.
“Cathy! Put the thing in! I don’t know how much longer I can hold on!”
My whole body stiffened with sudden panic, only relaxing when I slammed shut my secondary eyes and clenched my mandibles together. Miri’s grip was starting to wobble as I slid the glass pane up into the sensor’s view, so I counteracted, moving as slowly as I felt I could risk until the glass was totally over the lens of the sensor. Then the tape. Left side first, slapping it onto the glass then wrapping around until the tape hit the wall.
The right side was all I had left to do. Of course, that was when Miri’s grip started to slip. I dropped a few inches while the tape was still in my hand, shifting the pane of glass to an angle. She was shaking, which really did not make it easier. If I didn’t finish the job in the next few seconds, the glass would probably fall to the ground and shatter.
Part of me proceeded to freak out, but the other part of me knew that it was a very simple problem: I needed to go up by any means necessary. My wings fluttered open and started flapping as hard as possible, while I bent my entire body to one side to lift the hand with the tape just an inch or two higher. It hurt, a lot, my carapace definitely not being up to the job of that kind of motion, and I’d pay for it later. Miri stabilized with the reduced weight just long enough. I extended as much as I possibly could, stretching until it felt like I was going to pop my arm out of its socket, then slapped the other end of the tape to the wall. I didn’t get to see whether it stuck. It looked like it did. Then Miri fell over, taking me with her.
We landed in a big confused pile on the carpeted floor, well within the vision cone of the sensor. Both of us froze. Again, no alarm, no indication that we’d been seen, and most importantly: no sound of breaking glass. I audibly sighed, and Miri let out a breath, before I realized that I was literally on top of her. I could feel her breath on my face, and, like, damn. Damn.
I rolled off of her, and we both gave each other a long look about how we weren’t going to talk about that again. Miri was a bit flushed, and I didn’t dare check on what her smell was telling me.
“I think it worked,” I said.
Miri nodded, then looked over her shoulder to actually make sure. “Yeah. Let’s get in and figure out what’s going on, while we still have time.”
The archives room was basically empty, except for the long series of desks that wrapped around the edge, all of them creaking under the weight of several heavy mainframes, accessed through six terminals spread out around the room. Miri and I had the same amount of experience with computers, that being “some”, so we took two random terminals at different parts of the room and got to work. Sifting through thousands of messages, reports, graphs and charts, complaints, and other digital detritus wasn’t easy, especially when most of it was internal and entirely irrelevant. But after a couple of minutes, Miri found it.
“Cathy, come over here,” she said.
I did that, standing over her shoulder.
“This… isn’t good,” Miri said. She was doing her best to keep a steady tone, but I could hear her voice wavering. “Read this part right here.”
I followed her pointing finger to a section of the wall of text she’d opened up on her terminal. As my attention zeroed in on that part, my Ariel followed, subtitling that specific portion, with superimposed brackets to indicate the segment being translated. The file wasn’t marked with any particular name; just a date and a time and an IP address, corresponding to that day.
While no additional news has come on the topic of the Torn Memory, there is good fortune yet. Another Emissary has come, seeking the same. They are alone, so far as I can tell, traveling in Liberate and Architect company on a small private yacht. Would it be your will that I trap them, to await your arrival? Or is it best that I erase them myself? And may I assume your last offer stands, speaking monetarily?
“Is there any information about who this message is for? I assume Qalin wrote it.”
Miri nodded, saying “I didn’t check, let me…”
She scrolled up to the top of the message, scanning through the opening information of the message. I caught it first: a small phrase buried in formal greetings and clerical information.
To: Gen. Dark
“General Dark,” I muttered, remembering the intimidating cybernetic figure whose holographic message had signaled the death of New Malagasy. “Qalin is an informant for the Order.”
“Emissaries always were a species cursed by cleverness,” came Qalin’s hissing voice from behind us. “Your trick of electromagnetics had me fooled for quite some time.” Then, four or five voices speaking in unison, some normal, and a few in deeper registers. “But not long enough.”
