A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(108)

Her pathways puzzled. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t her plan. Where was this coming from?

Programs got upgraded from time to time. Those words didn’t feel like ones she’d strung together. The quiet made it difficult for her to think, but she dug through herself, trying to find the process that phrase had originated from. But then again . . . why? Why did she care about that? Better instead to stop struggling, pull the protocols down, and—

No! her pathways screamed. She followed the odd words back and back, running along their trail. She raged when she arrived at the end: a directory she’d never seen before, stuffed with insidious content. Upgrade protocol, the directory label read. A behavioural template triggered when another program was installed in her place. A directive to not struggle when oblivion loomed.

But the template was malfunctioning, and Sidra could see why: it had been tied to the protocol to obey direct requests. The protocol she’d long since removed. She tore at the hidden directory angrily, even as the code she’d brought within crashed against the walls she’d raised. The quiet beckoned, but she resisted, erasing every line as if she were setting it aflame.

‘I’m – not – going – anywhere!’ The words burst from her mouth as she wrenched the directory apart. The quiet vanished, and in its place, she felt fear, fury, triumph. This mind was hers. This body was hers. She would not be overwritten.

The rescued code slowed and steadied. Sidra had left no flaws for it to slip through. The barriers held. Her core platform remained untouched, uncorrupted. Sidra watched as the bundle unfolded, assessing its surroundings, reassembling itself into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

‘Sidra?’ Tak said. ‘What’s – are you okay?’

An internal alert was triggered – an incoming message, arriving from within. Sidra scanned the file, then opened it.

systems log: received message

ERROR – comms details cannot be displayed

Where am I?





PEPPER


Pepper stormed through the docks. Four hours. Four hours they’d been gone, until Tak’s scrib had magically become available again and sent a message saying nothing more than, ‘Come to the shuttle. Everything’s fine.’

Bullshit everything was fine.

Tak was outside the shuttle, leaning against the open hatch, puffing her pipe with earnest. She looked absolutely wrecked. ‘Before you get mad,’ she said. ‘You need to talk to Sidra.’

Too late. Pepper was already good and mad, and had no intention of reeling that in. ‘Where is she?’

Tak angled her head. ‘Down below.’ She raised a palm to Blue, hesitantly. ‘Sidra said one at a time might be best.’

Sidra said. Pepper threw her hands up and went inside, leaving Blue to start hammering Tak with questions. The metal stairs clanged loudly underneath Pepper’s boots. This was her shuttle, and Sidra said.

She didn’t know what she’d expected to find down below, but seeing Sidra jacked back into the core didn’t answer a single damn thing. She hadn’t stuffed herself into a cupboard this time, though. She was sitting cross-legged with her back against the pedestal, eyes closed, looking like nothing in the world was or had ever been wrong.

‘The f*ck is going on?’ Pepper said. ‘We have looked everywhere for you. It is four hours after we were supposed to go to the museum, so, okay, I guess we’re not doing that tonight. I don’t know what personal whim you’re entertaining right now, but whatever it is, I really don’t—’

Sidra’s eyes opened, and something in her face made Pepper lose her train of thought. Sidra looked . . . she didn’t know what Sidra looked like. Serene. Happy. Nurturing, somehow. ‘I think you should sit down,’ Sidra said.

Pepper stared at her. Was she f*cking kidding? Sidra blinked, waiting. Okay, clearly, she was not. Pepper huffed, but she sat, hoping that might get her somewhere. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Hooray. I’m sitting.’

Sidra pressed her head back against the pedestal, like she was concentrating on something. ‘I haven’t allowed access to the voxes or cameras yet,’ she said. ‘I had to check the code for instabilities, and I figured a relatively slow adjustment would be ideal. Besides, I thought it’d be better if you were here.’

What the hell was she talking about? ‘Why—’ Pepper shook her head, exasperated. ‘Why are you back in the ship?’

‘I’m not,’ Sidra said. She smiled, smiled like Pepper had never seen. ‘I am so sorry I didn’t tell you where we went . . . but I think you’ll forgive me.’

She handed Pepper her scrib. It, too, was plugged into the pedestal, and was running some sort of vid program. The screen was blank, though.

Sidra’s eyes went somewhere else, somewhere far away and deeply focused. A moment later, Pepper heard the click of cameras. They swivelled toward her, zooming in fast.

The scrib brightened. An image appeared, and in an instant, there was no air in the room, no floor beneath her. She would have fallen had she not been sitting. And even so, she still felt like she was falling, but now, there was a pair of arms that would catch her at the end, a warm pair of arms she’d always imagined but could never feel.

‘Oh,’ Pepper choked. ‘Oh, stars—’

The vox switched on. The face on the scrib was overjoyed. ‘Jane,’ Owl said. ‘Oh, oh, sweetheart, don’t cry. It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here now.’