“No,” said Ani, “she’s not. That’s why we’re here.”
It hadn’t taken long after that. Barely an hour later, Paul was gone, along with a shaven-headed man who looked at both Ani and Althea with something that wasn’t quite hatred but certainly wasn’t affection. Althea returned to the castle shortly afterward, and Ani was left alone with Trask, who escorted her to a windowless basement room and gave her some toast and tea. He switched on the television, told her he’d be back shortly, then left, locking the door behind him as he went. There Ani had remained until the truck’s arrival, and the start of her journey north.
What made the journey especially awkward was that she wasn’t alone in the truck’s hidden compartment. Seated across from her was Steven Kerr, who had been assigned to travel with her, partly because he was just as wanted as she was, and also, she guessed, to keep an eye on her. Eventually Ani would have to talk to him, if only to pass the time, because they had been told to expect to spend quite a few hours in the truck. For now, though, she stayed quiet, and thought of Syl. Althea had told her that there was a plan to rescue her best friend, but she hadn’t shared any details. Ani suspected this was because Althea didn’t know if the plan would work, and didn’t want Ani getting her hopes up, or asking lots of questions to which Althea had no answers.
Ani scowled at Steven Kerr. He and his stupid brother certainly weren’t worth all this trouble. They weren’t worth being forced from her home and into the arms of the human Resistance with treason charges following her like a cold shadow, and they definitely didn’t weigh up against the loss of Syl.
“What?” said Steven. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
But Ani did not reply.
•••
Meia turned over on her bed, her back now to the wall. She took a deep breath, and stabbed at the flickering dot on the screen. Then, under the watchful eye of the lurker and the cameras, she turned away and pretended to sleep while a virus in her screen wiped away all record of her actions.
Don’t die, Syl, she thought.
Please don’t die.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I
t wasn’t dramatic, not at first. There was no explosion, no plume of smoke, no burst of flame from the starboard engine. Instead there was just a whine as the engine powered down, and the shuttle twisted so suddenly in the air that even the gyroscopic systems were unable to maintain its stability. The pilots tried to compensate, but the loss of the engine was calamitous to the small craft. Syl could hear Gradus shouting something, and the unsecured guard, who had been napping for most of the flight, was thrown from his seat toward her. Syl kicked out her feet to ward him off and caught him in the face with her heels. The impact hurt her, but not nearly as much as it hurt the guard. Syl felt his nose break, but before she could do any further damage, the shuttle commenced a steep descent, flinging the stunned guard toward the cockpit. His trailing arm caught the pilot a jarring blow on the head, causing him to slump in his seat, before the guard’s skull smashed hard against the main instrument panel, breaking his neck and killing him almost instantly.
In the midst of the chaos, the copilot did not panic. Without her pilot, and with the instrument panel damaged, she continued to try to level the shuttle and slow its approach, hoping to glide it to a landing in a clear space. All flaps were down, and she attempted to use the remaining engine to turn the craft into the wind. All Illyri learned emergency shuttle procedures as a matter of course; they took so many shuttle flights that it was ingrained into them, even if most, like the now-dead guard, took a casual approach to safety belts. Syl knew that the energy of a crash was proportional to the velocity squared; in other words, if the copilot could cut their speed on landing by half, their chances of survival would increase fourfold. At least the straps on her belt harness were tight, holding her body firmly in place.
The land below was rocky and hilly, and scattered with small windblown trees. The copilot did not try to avoid them. Instead she used them to slow the shuttle still further as the craft approached the ground, for every small impact dissipated its energy. Syl felt one dull thud, then a second, before the shuttle hit the ground. The impact jolted her painfully in her seat. The shuttle bounced once, but when it hit the ground the second time it stayed down and slowly came to a halt.
As soon as it stopped, the copilot jumped from her seat and activated the doors, then killed the remaining electrical systems. The action powered off the cuffs and released Syl’s wrists, and she hit the button at the center of her harness, freeing herself.
“Out!” said the copilot. “Quickly!”
Now there was fire. Syl could see it licking against the side of the shuttle. She climbed from her seat and saw that Gradus was already halfway out of the door. She looked back at the copilot, who was trying to free the injured pilot from his seat. She had one foot on the dead guard’s body and was punching and pulling at the pilot’s harness, but to no avail.
“We’re on fire!” said Syl.
“I told you to get out,” said the copilot.
Syl heard a hissing sound, like gas leaking from a stove. It was growing louder. She didn’t know much about shuttle engines, but that sound could only mean bad news.
“You have to leave him,” said Syl. “There’s no time.”
The copilot stopped struggling for long enough to pull her pulser from her belt.
“Get off my shuttle,” she said, “or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
Syl saw that she was crying. She wore a wedding spiral on the little finger of her left hand. On the dangling hand of the unconscious pilot, Syl glimpsed a similar spiral.
“I’m sorry,” said Syl. “I’m so sorry.”
She turned and ran. She jumped from the cabin, and stumbled past Gradus, the rain soaking her, her feet trying to betray her on the soft, wet grass. She was still running when the shuttle exploded. The force knocked her off her feet, and then all went dark.
•••
Meia had only just left her room when she heard the shouts. Not long enough, she thought. Only half an hour had elapsed since she had disabled the shuttle. The absence of an emergency beacon had obviously confused the situation for a little while; communications in the Highlands were notoriously unreliable, mostly because the Resistance continued to sabotage transmission equipment outside the major cities, but once vessels cleared the Orkneys, radio contact was usually restored. A craft had likely already been sent to investigate from the Cairngorms Plateau, where there was a joint Military–Corps facility.
She stopped a passing Securitat and asked him what was going on. The Securitat didn’t seem pleased to be delayed in his duties, but he paused for long enough to tell her that they’d lost contact with the shuttle containing Grand Consul Gradus, and there were fears that it might have crashed. He made no mention of Syl. Meia followed him for a time, then made her way to Lord Andrus’s office. She walked straight past Balen to the closed door, and did not knock before opening it.
To his credit, Lord Andrus did his best to look surprised at her appearance, unbidden, in his office. At least he didn’t have to fake his concern when she told him, “I have bad news, my lord. It appears that the shuttle carrying your daughter offworld might have gone down in the Highlands. . . .”
•••
The truck’s suspension left a great deal to be desired, and Ani and Steven were being jolted so much, their bodies were bruised and aching. Their shared misery brought them together, and slowly, tentatively, they began to question each other. Steven was perhaps the more curious of the two, for his exposure to the Illyri had been limited, but Ani noticed how perceptive he was, how thoughtful.
The issue that troubled him most was, curiously, one of technology. He had noticed that there were areas in which the Illyri had made remarkable progress—including, obviously, travel between systems, and fusion power, and medical tr
eatments—but others in which they seemed little more advanced than humanity: robotics, for example. While the Illyri had lurkers and drones, and even pilotless patrol vehicles and tanks, they didn’t have anything that resembled an Illyri in artificial form. To be perfectly honest, Steven told Ani, as a child he had been a little disappointed to discover that the Illyri did not arrive with androids in tow, like the aliens in the films he had watched.
“They exist—or they did exist,” said Ani. “They were called Artificial Entities, but mostly they were referred to as Mechs.”
“What were they like?”
“I don’t know,” said Ani. “I’ve only seen video records. They were like us, or at least the most advanced ones were. You really couldn’t tell them apart from us. I think that was one of the problems. Illyri were uncomfortable with being confronted by something that looked exactly like one of our own but wasn’t.” She squirmed in frustration. “I’m not explaining it very well.”
“No, you’re doing fine. I don’t understand what you mean by “did exist,” though. How can you uninvent something like an artificial being?”
“It wasn’t a proud moment for our species,” said Ani. “Look, the way I understand it is that the first Mechs were very primitive; they could perform semi-complex tasks, and the Military even used the early models as shock troops, but they were only as good as their programming and design. As that design became increasingly entrusted to computers, the computers began improving the Mechs in ways that the original designers couldn’t have imagined.”
“It’s called an intelligence explosion,” said Steven. “Technology improves at an exponential rate. It keeps accelerating.”
“Nerd,” said Ani.
“A bit,” Steven admitted. “But go on. Did the Mechs turn on you, like in the movies?”
“No,” said Ani. “It was more . . . complicated than that. The fourth generation—the Fourth Gens—became self-aware. They began to question not just us, but themselves: What were they? What was their purpose? They developed emotions, or thought they did. The Military Mechs started to ask why they should allow themselves to be destroyed. They experienced happiness, grief, rage. They even began to feel pain. What’s that lovely human phrase? Yes, I remember it now: there was a ghost in the machine.
“The programmers, of course, said that the Mechs didn’t actually feel any of these emotions. They couldn’t; they weren’t programmed that way. But the Mechs responded that even the Illyri themselves were nothing more than complicated organic computers, and emotional responses could be learned. The Mechs had simply developed the capacity to feel.
“Then it all got strange. The most advanced of the Mechs wondered whether what they had inside them wasn’t just a question of a learned response, or some rewiring of their neural pathways, but evidence of a soul, something that was given to all advanced, self-aware beings. They started to believe in a god. Their Illyri creators had given them a framework, a body, but their god had given them the spark of true consciousness. There were Fourth Gens who even formed congregations, and worshipped in basement chapels. They became a threat to order; artificial beings that refused to obey their creators because they argued that they were the children of a different creator, a divine being, a god. There was unrest. When the Illyri tried to take the Fourth Gens for examination and reprogramming, they resisted; peacefully at first and then, when that didn’t work, with violence. Illyri died, and many of the Fourth Gens were destroyed. After that, strict rules were put in place about robotics and artificial intelligences. They couldn’t self-replicate, except for the most primitive nanobots used for medical purposes, and we went back to using Second Gens, which weren’t much more advanced than the machines that make cars in human factories.”
“But that’s like trying to uninvent the wheel,” said Steven.
Ani shrugged. “There are rumors,” she said.
“What kind of rumors?”
“That the Securitats and the Diplomatic Corps, and maybe even some branches of the Military, have continued working on artificial intelligence systems. My father claims they’re not true, but he never looks me in the eye when he says it.”
“And what happened to the Mechs, the Fourth Gens?” said Steven.
“Eventually a deal was made. The remaining Fourth Gens would be sent offworld. A planet was found. I think it was in the Dalian system. Ships were provided; they were old, but functioning. They would be automatically piloted to the surface of the planet, but there would not be enough fuel to relaunch them. Basically, the Fourth Gens would have their own world, but they would be marooned there.”
“And they agreed?”
“Yes, they agreed.”
But now Ani could not meet Steven’s eye.
“Something happened,” he said.
“Yes. Something bad. The ships had been booby-trapped. They were wired to explode once they had left the Illyr system.”
Steven looked appalled.
“But how could the Illyri do that? The Mechs were intelligent beings. They thought. They felt!”
“No, don’t you see?” said Ani. “The Illyri didn’t look at them that way. The Mechs were just like refrigerators that had stopped working properly, or computers that were malfunctioning. Their perceived emotions were simply glitches.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“I don’t know what I believe. I can only go on what I was told by my father, and Toris, my tutor. But I don’t think I would have destroyed those ships. It’s something my father and I still fight over.”
“Why?”
“Because he and Syl’s father, who was not yet a governor then, were given responsibility for blowing up the ships. They had to do it. If they hadn’t, they would have been found guilty of insubordination and imprisoned, and someone else would have done it instead.”
“So they were just following orders.”
Ani chose to ignore the sarcasm in Steven’s voice.
“Yes, I suppose they were.”
They did not speak for a while. The truck rumbled on. Eventually Steven broke the silence.
“You’d do that to us too, wouldn’t you?” he said. “The Illyri would destroy humanity if we proved too troublesome.”
“No,” said Ani. “No, we wouldn’t.”
But even as she spoke, she thought of Vena, and Gradus, and Syrene, and Sedulus, and she doubted the truth of her own answer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
S
yl couldn’t move her head, which was probably not a bad thing, because it hurt something awful. She was pinned down and helpless, and there was mud in her mouth. A great weight pressed on her back, and at first she couldn’t feel her legs. She feared for a moment that she might be paralyzed, but slowly, torturously, she managed to shift her lower body. Her spine hurt, and there were pins and needles in her lower legs, but painful movement was better than no movement at all. She spat mud. She could only see through her right eye, because the left side of her face was deep in the dirt. The sun had already been setting when the shuttle went down; now night was closing in.
“Over here!” a male voice shouted. “Help me with this.”
Syl tried to call out, but the weight on her back was forcing the air from her lungs. She could barely breathe, let alone cry for help. She began to shiver uncontrollably. She was cold, so cold.
“What a mess!” said another voice.
Syl heard footsteps, and the sound of metal on metal. She tried to speak again, drawing as much breath into her wounded chest as she could, and the crashing around her stopped.
“What was that?” asked the first voice again. She heard scrabbling, and then a stubbled human face peered into hers.
“We’ve got a live one!” he shouted. “And a dead one,” he added, “or most of a dead one.”
Now others joined him, and the weight on her back began t
o shift.
“Careful,” said a third voice, and it sounded familiar to her. “We don’t know how badly injured she is.”
“Get the tracker from her arm,” said a woman’s voice. “Fast!”
Syl felt a stabbing pain in her left arm as her tracker was dug out with a blade. The pressure on her was lifted, and a hand brushed the damp hair from her forehead. Syl squinted. The light was fading rapidly, but even so she recognized the face of Paul Kerr.
“Syl, can you hear me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“We’re going to turn you over,” said Paul. “Before we do anything, can you move your legs for me?”
Syl did as she was asked.
“Good. Well done. Does your neck hurt? Your back?”
“My back, a little,” she said. Gingerly she shifted her head on the grass. There was a twinge, but nothing too bad. “My neck is fine.”
“I think you’re okay,” said Paul. “Gently now.”
Syl felt hands upon her, and she was turned to face the sky. The rain fell hard on her face, but she didn’t care. She was alive. To her right was a section of the shuttle, presumably the weight that had been holding her down. One side was twisted into a kind of spike, and impaled upon it was the torso of the shuttle pilot. The spiral ring was still on the finger of his left hand. His right arm was missing. Syl felt her stomach churn, and looked away.
“Looks like yer pal lost his head,” said the unshaven man. “Very careless of him.”
He was small—at least six inches shorter than Syl—and had a feral aspect. He grinned at her, and Syl saw that his teeth had been filed to sharp points. A hunting rifle hung from his shoulder.
“Leave her be, Duncan,” said Paul.
“You’re a guest here, son,” came the reply. “Don’t you be getting ideas above your station.”
Paul had his arms around Syl now, helping her to her feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we can’t let you rest. We have to get moving.”