Unity code, p.3
Unity Code, page 3
Even though whatever had happened didn’t seem to have been broadcast over any discernible EM frequency. The quiet box probably wouldn’t stop it.
Raijinn didn’t protest, though.
Which was weird enough, but not the weirdest thing going on right now, and it probably wouldn’t have given her a straight answer if she’d asked.
She turned off the lights on her way out.
Raijinn didn’t need them anyway.
She got outside just as the Houston Police Department flatbed pulled up. A quick conversation with the driver, verification of her registration metadata, and confirmation from Ginger, and her car was back on the ground. In her parking spot. Where she belonged.
Ginger didn’t manifest in the AR for Daelia, though. No happy little fox form running around. No, instead, Ginger filled Daelia’s entire monocle up with sad emojis.
Just once.
Then nothing.
Weird.
Everything looked okay. On the surface, at least. Back in high school she and Dad had taken Ginger apart more than once; Daelia was extremely familiar with the abiota’s chassis. There was some superficial damage, body stuff, but nothing that looked too bad.
There was always the possibility of mechanical damage somewhere she couldn’t see. Maybe even in Ginger’s electrical system, or deeper in, down in the heart of her. The rudiment core.
Daelia couldn’t rule that out. Not without some serious diagnostic work.
“Everything okay?” the driver asked.
She started; she’d forgotten he was still there. “Yeah, fine,” she said.
“Let’s get your forms signed, then. Can I have your AR number?”
Daelia gave him the number. Waited. Signed with her digital ID. The whole thing took way too long.
Why wasn’t Ginger coming out?
The driver gave her some pleasantry that she wasn’t interested in returning. She waved vaguely at him, then slid into the driver’s seat. She could see the tow truck retreating in the rearview mirror.
She pulled up the recording of Ginger’s hijacking again. Her monocle had recorded what was there in the AR field. Smoke. Tentacles. Weird shit. Shit that didn’t make any sense. The code beneath it was a mess. Daelia had already tried to render it twice but got something different each time.
What had that damn alien kugu done to her car?
“Hey, girl,” she said gently, blink-clicking a couple of reassurance emojis into the AR, and hit the ignition button on the dash. “I need you to wake up for me. Let’s figure out what’s going on.”
It took three attempts to get Ginger to turn her engine on. That was weird enough. But when she finally showed up, Daelia was shocked.
The fox form appeared in the passenger’s seat, head down, ears flat. All trace of her normally rambunctious personality was gone. Her fur was matted on her left side, wet.
Bleeding.
“Just like Emily,” Daelia muttered out loud.
Ginger’s fox gave Daelia one look, infinitely sad, and winked out again.
Left hand on the steering wheel, Daelia sat there for a moment. Considered her next steps. She really needed to get Ginger inside, on one of the vehicle lift racks. Give her a proper examination. But Daelia would have preferred Dad to be there for that. And she didn’t trust herself right now.
The weekend had left her absolutely wiped.
Plugging the abiota back into her sustainment charger, Daelia gave her one last pat. “Get charged back up,” she said. She didn’t like the low battery light she could see, blinking in the car’s dash. “I’ll get a space prepped inside for you tomorrow.”
The fox appeared for another moment, curled up on the hood. She gave a sleepy yawn. Then nothing.
The 4 o’clock news was on in the upstairs kitchenette when Daelia came back in. Had she left it on? She couldn’t remember. Her head felt like it had been stuffed with cotton. It had been like that all day. Between the weekend and that final terrifying race through the city, she was bone-tired. Maybe that was why she wasn’t making any headway with the sustainment unit.
Food was a good idea, she decided. Food, and sleep, and come at it in the morning fresh.
But all that went by the wayside when she realized what was playing on the monitor.
The local news stream was going over the chase. Her chase, hers and Dingo’s. That final frantic scramble down Washington Street.
Only they were reviewing the wrong part of the bayou park. That was Dingo, sure, and it even looked like her, running out, but they were headed west instead of east. And in the next shot, where a cop was being interviewed in front of a wall of caution tape and AR jammers, it was…
It wasn’t where she’d stopped.
It was the wrong bridge.
“Huh,” she said to herself, staring at it for a moment. Why would the news footage be wrong? And how? Whoever had spoofed the feed had done a damn good job. It looked real. But why? What was the significance?
Had Emily known?
Had Emily been trying to tell her?
Daelia shook herself. The main show was off now, on a commercial. Cirque de Synthétique. They were in town this week. Good for them.
The footage was showing the wrong bridge.
The cops were searching the wrong section of the park.
The kugu…
“Raijinn?” Daelia said, pulling up her messaging app. “If anybody from the base comes by, tell them I had to step out.”
Of course. Should I tell them where?
The kugu might still be there.
“No. No. Don’t tell them anything.”
Ginger was in no shape for a drive.
Instead, Daelia took Dingo. A mistake, she realized, as soon as she got him out on the highway. He was in a bad mood, frustrated that his quarry had gotten away from him last night, and the evening weekday traffic only aggravated him further.
When he realized where they were going, right around the time she steered him off the exit into the Washington area, he became downright hostile. Fought her all the way to a parking space. It took all her skill with him to keep him in line.
The cops were indeed staged out of the same lot where she’d stopped the night before, so Daelia opted for one of the street-side pull-ins a block or so away and hoped Dingo wouldn’t get punchy. She engaged the mechanical brakes just in case, the ones he couldn’t mess with, and grabbed a flashlight.
Darkness was falling as she made her way back down the path, to the tangle of overpasses and bridges where the kugu had fled last night. She saw no evidence that the cops had been through here at all.
They hadn’t faked the footage, then.
So who did?
Bats were streaming out into failing daylight as Daelia climbed up to where the kugu had self-destructed. The flutter of so many wings stirred up a light breeze in the otherwise still, heavy air. It stank. She wrinkled her nose. Tried to ignore it. Focus on the climb.
The slope was littered with little bits of metal. Shards. Gears. Screws and pins. And up near the top, right where it had fallen, was the main body of the kugu. Blown out, sure, skin cracked and motive system clearly FUBAR, but intact.
Whole.
Sort of.
Heart pounding, Daelia considered her options. Turning it into the cops, or NASA, was out of the question. No, no, she wanted to see the inside of this thing herself.
The alien kugu was big though, almost six feet tall. Lifting one of the shattered arms experimentally, she realized it was heavy, too. No way she was going to pack it out of here on her own. And then, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t send off some kind of signal or have a homing beacon or something,
And there was no way she was going to take it back to the Scrap House. Not right now. Not with the ACC incident investigation team inbrief scheduled for Wednesday.
There was only one place she could—would—take this.
And to get it there, she was going to need the quiet box. The big one.
No way she was hauling that thing up this slope without some help.
But who was she going to talk into helping her do that? It wasn’t like she had a surplus of friends. Raijinn couldn’t broadcast itself this far. Dad was still out of town. That left somebody at the unit, and most of them didn’t like her enough to help her hide a body from the cops, and they were all on duty right now anyway, and…
Then she thought of something.
“Aww, hell,” she muttered to herself.
4
Back in his Academy days, Argo hadn’t done a whole lot of drinking.
Sure, military culture revolved around booze. Dining-ins. TDYs. Roll call at the Officers’ Club. Whatever random bullshit was happening at somebody’s house next Saturday night. Weddings—the last one of those Argo had been to, the squadron drank the bar dry. So sure, he’d consumed far more than his fair share of alcohol over the years.
It had never really been Argo’s thing, though. He’d been too broke as a cadet to afford it, and then, after he’d left…
He’d been too broke then, too.
But he’d needed a drink last night.
Needed it.
Argo was still exhausted from the weekend. He’d had no plans to do anything that week besides eat, sleep, and unpack his house.
Instead, he’d found himself glued to ByYou.
The last of the old twenty-four-hour news networks had broken themselves years ago. Argo remembered his grandpa talking about how the whole thing got established during the first Gulf War. Maybe it was appropriate that it had ended with the unmitigated insanity of the Five Days War. The old journalistic models simply hadn’t been able to keep up.
In contrast, ByYou, with its billions of users and millions of video streams, had stepped into the gap. The video site provided crowdsourced event coverage and all the political commentary one could ever consume.
There was so much of it, in fact, that news aggregators were essential. There was only so much information that the human mind could absorb in one go. The better aggregators kept commentary to a minimum, allowing the relevant individual streams to talk for themselves. An Omphalos site, ByYou’s premiere news aggregators were all overseen by Galatea herself and her extensive human fact-checking team.
There were hundreds of other news streams though, run by anyone from college kids doing it as a hobby to organizations backed by old money and older names. Taken all together, Argo supposed it approximated the old twenty-four-hour cycle, albeit faster, cheaper, and usually, more entertaining. Biases were rated, as was accuracy, via algorithms that Galatea had always studiously provided, open source and searchable.
Argo didn’t care about that sort of thing. The military had recommendations for channels that were supposedly vetted for content, and he had a few favorites of his own. But he wasn’t interested in other people’s opinions right now.
He put Galatea’s main aggregate stream on and let it run.
He also set up a bot on his laptop. Set to his own parameters.
Looking for one thing.
What the hell was going on up in orbit.
His bot gave him a wide range of videos to choose from. NASA. The European Space Agency. Space Command. Gravipause. But none of them were saying anything of note.
Argo had gotten so desperate to find something out, he’d actually pulled out his barely used VR visor and logged into Gravipause’s Hive server. The one they kept for employee families. Couldn’t just have a group ByYou page. Had to be a Hive server.
If there was anything Argo hated, it was the Hive.
The place had been empty though, which seemed incredibly suspicious.
So he started calling. And calling. And calling.
Finally, five hours into that, somebody finally answered.
“Gravipause Resources Family Support, how may I help you?”
“You can tell me what’s going on with my brother.”
And that started another half hour of back-and-forth, apologies and transfers, bullshit and spin.
It ended with a five-minute argument with somebody who swore up and down that everyone and everything was just fine. The arrival of the alien fleet had disrupted transmissions up in orbit, especially those within the mining archipelago, but don’t worry, Mister Irvington, your brother will be back in contact with you as soon as Port Aethera’s communications relays are adjusted to compensate for the alien fleet’s presence.
Alien fleet.
For fuck’s sake.
Argo hung up.
That was about the time he decided he needed a drink.
Although Houston nightlife was highly mobile, with the hot spots moving around every six months or so, the Rice Military neighborhood was an oasis of stability. Even with the devastation wreaked on the Inner Loop by the Five Days War, that area had come through relatively unscathed. Tucked between the largest parks in the city, it had remained a popular place with young families and singles alike and boasted an impressive number of pre-war businesses. Boutiques, coffee shops, restaurants, and, of course, bars. All within walking distance of Argo’s new house.
Argo hadn’t been too worried about shopping. He’d chosen the area for access to running trails and trees, two things in short supply at Nellis. But that night, the bars were a nice perk.
Out he’d gone. Had a few drinks. Maybe a few too many. He wasn’t really sure; he hadn’t been trying to get hammered. Things had been crowded, though there had been a kind of uncertainty hanging over everything.
First contact. Aliens.
What the hell was anybody supposed to do with that?
He woke now in the harsh morning light, streaming through his east-facing windows, to the sound of pounding on his front door. He was on the sofa, a news stream on the TV.
Argo rubbed a hand across his face. Grimaced at the taste in his mouth, that sour morning-after bar-stink of his clothes.
He must have fallen asleep watching the landing. It was still on repeat, the ticket at the bottom saying something about a speech at the UN later that afternoon.
Wouldn’t that be fun? The goddamn United Nations, getting another chance to play at importance. The institution had been all but dissolved in the wake of the Five Days War. What had it ever accomplished, really? Abiota were the ones who had stopped World War III, not that pack of self-important diplomats.
The knocking continued.
“Yeah, I’m coming!” he hollered. He didn’t feel hungover, not horrendously so, anyway. Maybe it had just been exhaustion, then. It had been one hell of a weekend.
He blinked in surprise at who was standing out on his step.
“Daelia?”
“Good,” she said, stepping inside, “you’re home. I need some help.”
Rubbing his face, he let Daelia pass. Saw her do a double take around the main floor of his town house. Not like there was much to look at. Everything he’d looked at had a similar floor plan: garage and bonus room on the ground floor, living room, dining room, and kitchen on the next level, bedrooms and bathrooms above that.
There had been a building boom in Houston about two decades ago, his realtor had told him, and in the rush to meet demand, every developer had ended up using the same template. No reason to get creative. No reason to try and distinguish yourself from the competition.
Rice Military was a bit older, so his place had a bit more character.
Only a bit.
“What are you doing this morning?” she asked. She was dressed like she was going to the gym. Leggings, loose old T-shirt, scuffed-up sneakers. The gleaming metal of her prosthetic brace seemed out of place under the sleeve of that shirt. Incongruous. But she wasn’t wearing her monocle for once; she was cute without it, he found himself thinking.
“Umm, it’s my day off,” he said, trying to wrap his head around this.
She very deliberately sniffed. “You hungover?”
“Not really,” he said with a shrug, and went into the kitchen for some water. “What’re you doing here, again?” Had she said? Maybe he was hungover. He couldn’t remember.
“I need some help.”
“Yeah?” Argo waited for it. Daelia Hall didn’t strike him as the kind of girl who asked for help very readily.
But what she said was not what he was expecting.
“Wanna see an alien?”
Argo sipped his water. Let Daelia lay out her proposal. Tell him what she wanted to do.
Go scrape a half-destroyed alien kugu out from underneath a bridge.
It seemed more than a little insane, but it also seemed like it was important to her, so he let her talk.
It was the first success she’d had with her dissertation research, she said. She needed the data. It had—maybe—precipitated that disaster at the air show, so it could only help with the pending investigation. And it was dead anyway, while dozens of the things were popping up all over the planet, so what difference did it make?
“What’s the real reason?” he asked when she was finally done.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s the real reason you want this thing? Everything to do with the aliens is supposed to get turned in.”
“By you, maybe. I’m a civilian, I can do what I want.”
“That’s not an answer.”
She didn’t look at him, but her fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
“It hurt Ginger,” she said, “and I think it hurt Emily. And I need to know how if I’m going to fix it.”
Argo rubbed the back of his head. It was starting to hurt. Definitely a hangover. Damn.
“Eh, I’m not doing anything more important this morning,” he said.
At least, he reasoned, it was a nice change of pace from worrying about his brother.
He asked her to wait in the kitchen while he grabbed a change of clothes.
When he came back, she was looking at his photo wall. He’d started setting this up before anything else. Always did. Sentimental, maybe, but normally, there wasn’t anybody around to give him crap for it. Aiden never minded.
