Ironheart Read online

  Willa nodded slowly. “I can do all that.”

  “No she can’t!” said Madaku. “Jumping into the hollow core of an asteroid was amazing enough the first time. Do you think her luck and strength are going to hold out for a second try?”

  There was a hardness in Willa’s voice when she answered, that Madaku had never heard there before: “I can do it,” she told him.

  “She can,” said Burran.

  They got ready. They got some weapons from the armory—Madaku had only been there once, during the tour when he’d first been hired. Burran commanded the automata in the docking bay to attach the axe-nose to the front of the shuttle. Axe-noses were meant for burrowing into minerals, but perhaps it would be just as good at burrowing through the airlock doors. Only the airlocks, though—remembering how indestructible Ironheart’s strange hull alloy looked, Madaku knew the axe-nose wouldn’t be any good against that.

  Madaku left his brain-chip neutralized, but Burran uploaded records of Willa’s readings onto his. They set the shuttle to run minimal computer systems and shut almost all sensors off, to data-starve the AI. If Anya hacked in and looked at the AI’s knowledge of the ship’s contents, she might be fooled into thinking there was only one person aboard, and that it was Willa.

  Madaku and Burran went ahead and boarded the shuttle, so that once the Canary jumped they could detach immediately. “What exactly is our plan?” asked Madaku.

  “We’ll make it up along the way to Ironheart,” said Burran.

  Madaku assumed Burran was messing with him, so he held his tongue while Burran fiddled with the controls. He was about to break down and point out that they would be on Ironheart in about three minutes, assuming Anya didn’t just open fire on them, when Burran pointed at a section of the ship on the schematic display. He said, “We’re going to ram right up against that airlock—it’s closest to where Fehd’s readings are coming from. Get the code spray ready, to scramble her readings and maybe slow down her defenses. As much damage and confusion as possible. Hopefully the hack we used to get in before will still work. If not, maybe our axe-nose will be strong enough to break through her airlock while leaving ours more or less intact.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “We’ll die, I guess. Assuming we do survive, we should come out pretty close to Fehd. I wish we could just use the axe-nose to eat through closer, but I don’t trust anything to break that hull. We’ll go to where Fehd is, and we’ll take these guns with us and will use them to shoot anything or anyone that tries to block our way to Fehd, or block our way back to the shuttle. Please remember which end of the gun you shoot out of.”

  “All right. I do have a basic understanding of how guns work, Burran.”

  “We should have done all that combat practice, the way I wanted to all along.”

  There was a lurch somewhere deep under the floors of their stomachs, there was a sensation somewhere between nausea an an erotic tickle. It was the hyperjump. Still dizzy, Burran detached the shuttle from the Canary, the AI already prepared to automatically lock in on Ironheart. Madaku hoped that Willa was able to immediately jump back out of danger, and even more that she was able to repeat the miracle of landing the ship so precisely back inside the asteroid.

  They kept the shuttle as tightly sealed against data leaks as they could manage, but listening for more radio transmissions cost them nothing in terms of visibility. There was only silence, though.

  “I figured she’d be yakking away at her new best friend,” said Burran. “If we were really fooling her, that is.”

  “I don’t see any reason to assume she isn’t fooled,” said Madaku. “She wants Willa because she needs an intuiter. Now that Willa’s on her way over, she doesn’t need to be nice anymore.”

  “That’s not the only reason she wants Willa, man.”

  They were coming up on Ironheart, bearing on the dock assigned by Ironheart’s AI, the same one they’d entered a week ago, when they’d first encountered the ghost ship that had proven to be occupied after all. Burran had his hands on the controls. They were going to swing around manually; programming the maneuver in beforehand would risk Anya seeing it. Madaku wondered if Burran’s merely human speed would be enough.

  The assigned airlock grew closer and closer through the porthole. Madaku kept forgetting that they had their outbound sensors off, so as to prevent leaving a trail for Ironheart’s AI to follow back to their computer; he kept glancing at the monitors as if he would see the usual detailed analyses, but they were a blank abyss.

  He was tempted to ask Burran if he was sure he’d be able to maneuver around, using only his naked eye. But there was no point in distracting him. It was too late to rethink things.

  “Here goes,” said Burran, and hit the thruster controls. Half a second before that, Madaku launched the code spray.

  Burran swung the shuttle over and around Ironheart so violently that the inertial buffers weren’t able to entirely compensate, and Madaku felt the ghost of a lurch inside his flesh. More dizzying was the sight of Ironheart’s spinning hull rushing at them. Madaku had only a second in which to realize that there was no way Burran would be able at this speed to fit them into the other airlock by eyeballing it, and that they were going to smash into the hull. Then, hearing the muffled clicks of the seals, he realized he was wrong.

  The airlock popped open. Madaku’s code spray must have disabled Ironheart’s defenses, and at the same time his translated override must have outsmarted the airlock door.

  But he was too scared to bask in his pride, and anyway there wasn’t time. He jogged out of the shuttle behind Burran, the gun’s strange bulk in his hand. Burran held his gun in one hand and in the other a tablet displaying the map schematic they’d lifted from Ironheart. The doctor’s reading of Fehd’s position was linked to the tablet. Two dots represented their position relative to the last one detected for Fehd. Presumably that was some kind of cell, because the doctor hadn’t noticed him moving.

  The airlock didn’t even open into a bay. Madaku trailed after Burran through a dizzy, curving, narrow corridor. It was disorienting almost to the point of being terrifying—human craft generally preferred straight lines, but the interior of this ship had almost the instability of something organic. At one point they found themselves running upstairs! Who ever heard of a spaceship with stairs?!

  They had no need of the life-support packs on their belts. That had been expected—life-support systems were generally the best-protected, with multiple redundancies, and besides the code spray had not been designed to attack life support. What would be the point of risking their lives to rescue Fehd if they themselves asphyxiated him? Still, it was worrying that there were no flickering lights, no alarms, no odd noises, no sign whatsoever that their code spray had caused any disruption at all.

  Madaku began to wonder if Anya had simply allowed them to board, for reasons of her own.

  But then, as they entered a new section of the ship, he started to think that Ironheart’s functioning may have been impaired, after all.

  At least, the lights seemed wonky. They were in the big chamber that preceded the small room in which the doctor said Fehd was being held. This room was a bit more like a small cargo bay, except it was too deep inside the ship. The bluish light was so dim it was hard, the first moment, to gauge how high the ceiling was.

  Then again, maybe the lighting was meant to be that way, because the whole room was weird. Crates were jumbled everywhere, as elsewhere in the ship, but among those crates were other items, loose and unboxed and set in any old place. Some were little knick-knacks, what looked like glass or plastic toys scattered atop dust-caked crates, as if they’d been abandoned after an unfinished children’s game, long, long ago. In the far corner, hard to make out in the murk, was what looked like the stone statue of some alien god, a formidable thing the height of two men, with three glaring eyes and a beak. And there was other stuff that seemed like plain junk, big hunks of rusted metal, primitive derelict machi
nes whose original function had probably long been forgotten by all but the Registry and, perhaps, Anya, and which looked like they hadn’t been good for much in eons.

  “What is all this stuff?” whispered Madaku.

  “I don’t care,” answered Burran, and continued toward the far door. That was where the doctor said that Fehd was.

  As Burran opened the door, Madaku turned his back—the plan was that he would cover their rear while Burran loosed whatever bonds might be restraining Fehd. Behind him, Madaku heard Burran cry out. He almost couldn’t bear to turn around to see why—whatever it was, if it scared Burran, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see it.

  He did turn, though, and rushed after Burran into the room. And immediately stopped short. “Where’s Fehd?” he gasped. But even as he said it, he didn’t look around for his captain. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the organic thing under the transparent bowl in the middle of the room, connected to half a dozen electrodes and reflecting in its glistening surface the blinking of dozens of particolored lights.

  “Where’s Fehd?” he said again, his voice edging toward hysteria, his own brain refusing to recognizing the object before him. “Burran, what is that? Where’s Fehd?”

  “That is Fehd,” he heard Anya say behind him.

  Both he and Burran turned their backs on the disembodied brain, whipping around and firing their blasters at her. Madaku was so scared he started shooting almost before he could even see her.

  Something was wrong. Anya was laughing—he didn’t know what she was laughing at, unless it was the way the laser fire tore through her flesh, leaving smoking cauterized holes. Madaku’s mind couldn’t quite process it that she was still standing there, laughing and unharmed. It couldn’t be that she was a hologram, her laser wounds wouldn’t leave that burnt-meat smell, and anyway she didn’t seem like a hologram. The psychedelic combination of the impossibility of what he saw, and its raw carnal immediacy, threatened to overwhelm him. Then Anya raised an object and pointed it at him, and something really did overwhelm him, and he was collapsing onto the floor and into blackness before he had time even to wonder what it was.

  Eleven

  They sat on the floor, wrists clasped in manacles attached to chains attached to the wall. Nearby were crumbling skeletons, whose bones had long since fallen out of the same kind of manacles that held Madaku and Burran, and Anya was lurking in the far corner of the room.

  Really, it was wrong to say she was lurking. She was only standing over there on the other side of the chamber, her back almost but not quite turned on them. She wasn’t moving; she seemed not to be doing anything at all.

  Madaku slid his eyes Burran’s way and managed to take some comfort from the other man’s expression. None of the terror and despair Madaku felt on his own face could be seen in the security specialist’s. He didn’t even look very angry—he looked like a man who was making a plan. Madaku hoped he was, anyway.

  He’d been planning to wait until Anya left them, to attempt some sort of conference with Burran. But he couldn’t stand the tension anymore. He was about to whisper something, anything to his companion, when at last Anya began to move.

  She was picking her way across the room to them.

  When she began to move it was not exactly abrupt—there was no brusque jolting of one lurching back into motion. Nor was there any of the preliminary languorousness of one having to rouse herself from a daydream. Anya took her first steps as if they were the continuation of a series, as if she had been strolling a long while instead of standing stock-still for nearly half an hour.

  She came to a halt and gazed down at them, her intentions unreadable. Madaku tried to control his breathing, to be as calm and stoical as Burran.

  After taking them in for a moment, Anya sat on the floor in front of them, perching ramrod-straight upon her sacrum, legs folded before her and hands resting lightly on her knees. She sat out of reach of their legs, but Madaku had the impression that was mere chance, and not a precaution on her part. She didn’t seem remotely frightened of them.

  Madaku said nothing—he waited for Burran’s cue, and Burran was waiting for Anya to speak first. She regarded them a while. Then she said, “You shall tell me stories. In return, I shall feed and water you.”

  Somehow, Burran managed not to look surprised by the demand. “Stories about what?”

  Anya shrugged. “I care not. Any data or tales I ever need, I shall be able to download from this Registry of yours. But there is a flavor given to things by an individual consciousness. Something worth savoring for its own sake.”

  “And how long do you plan on this arrangement lasting?” asked Burran.

  “Until you bore me.”

  “No. We’re not interested in becoming your playthings.”

  Madaku couldn’t help but think it was a little presumptuous of Burran to answer for both of them.

  Anya didn’t seem put out by the refusal. “Either you shall be interesting to me, or you shall not. It has little to do with your intention. A brave refusal to tell me tales might be more interesting than the tales themselves.”

  Madaku said, “And so, if we fail to amuse you, you’ll just kill us?” Or leave us to die, he thought, involuntarily eyeing the skeletons again.

  “Probably not,” said Anya. “It costs me so little to keep you alive, and there is always the chance that you will do something interesting after all. Such a chance is worth the meager expense to Ironheart’s resources. Unless I decide it would be more interesting to kill you. But I doubt that. Killing has long since ceased to interest me much, even in its more exotic forms.”

  “Willa’s going to be trying to kill you,” said Burran. “You should get out of this system and away from her, now that you’ve got Fehd hooked up to your hyperdrive.”

  Madaku’s head snapped Burran’s way: “What?” he said, before he could stop himself. The notion that what was left of Fehd could be running the hyperdrive was too absurd even to have occurred to him. For one thing, Fehd was plainly dead, more or less; for another, in life he had never demonstrated anything like the level of intuition necessary to become a pilot. In fact, he’d been well below the average level for humans.

  Anya gave him a weary look before returning her attention to Burran. “Your friend relies on his tools so much that he has allowed himself to become stupid,” she said, nodding Madaku’s way. “Men have been ever thus, since first they harnessed fire upon the end of a burning brand. But as the tools grow ever more powerful, the intellects grow ever lazier. When next I wake I expect I’ll find roaming through the galaxy millions of intelligent machines, inhabited by that benign parasite of man born in their hulls who have devolved into apes and have no idea of their own origins or nature.”

  “Yeah, could be,” said Burran, as if he couldn’t care less. “Meanwhile, it doesn’t take a genius to see you’ve got all sorts of shit here that we don’t understand. I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of it’s never made it into the Registry.”

  “Yes. After long enough, the past becomes as opaque as the future. For you. And for me sometimes, as well.” She turned away from them, let her eyes play among the jumbled piles of junk. “All of these items have been so important to me. That is why I brought them onto Ironheart. That is why I took them aboard in the first place. Yet there are so many that I myself can no longer remember. Their significance, their provenance. But no matter. They are aboard Ironheart. Therefore I know they are a part of me, my past. I need no further details.”

  She turned to the skeletons. “Them, I mostly still remember. Mostly. Though under these bones, I know there is the dust of others whose owners I recall hardly at all. Unless I am mixing memories, and attributes I ascribe to these more recent fellows belonged in fact to those of an earlier age. That could be. My memories have for so long tended to grow muddled.”

  Madaku tried to keep holding out, in case Burran had some strategic reasons for not asking the obvious questions; but it occurred to him that Burran might simply
have zero interest in the why of any of this, only in how to stop it; besides, Madaku couldn’t bear not knowing any longer. “What do you want Willa for? And what are you?”

  Anya turned that blank gaze upon him again. But in her tone there was something almost akin to pleasure, or approval: “So. Thou hast finally realized that I am not simply a human being who began going into cryosleep a few thousand years ago?”

  Neither Burran nor Madaku said anything. Madaku felt his ragged breath heaving in and out of his chest, and was sure his eyes were telling her plainly enough that he had, indeed, realized that.

  She looked away from him, off into some obscure point upon the wall behind them. “Yet I know not how to tell thee what I am.” Despite the distant, almost entranced quality of her voice, she didn’t slump, as if her body had so long been accustomed to this posture that it required no attention from her to maintain it. She said, “It seems to me that once I did know, long ago, in what I suppose were early days. And then, I think, one day I found I’d ceased to know. I had let a thousand years pass without ever holding the knowledge clearly in my mind, and it had had time to decay, to splinter as it had become fused to the memories of other times, of dreams and suchlike. And now, so so much later, I would not dare to guess which of my nonsensical memories are rooted in truth and which are not.”