Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(6)

She paused, as if she were calculating the likely effectiveness of this conversation thread in calming him, and then said, “My research into your history has led me to one essential conclusion about you, though. Would you like to hear it?”

He didn’t, but sometimes listening to her crazy was the only way to shut her up. And he did have a fondness for Chloe. Might not want her in his ear right now, but there wasn’t a mean line of code in her. “Go ahead.”

“I believe that you will allow yourself to go into the room, turn on the connection, and ask for whatever boon Heron wants you to wrest from Angela Neko,” she said. “And then you will agree to every single one of her stipulations without letting her realize that she had you at word one.”

Jesus. Shucked like corn. Was he really that obvious?

“Because I’m weak.” He acknowledged fact right where he found it. He never had been good at telling Angela no.

“Actually,” said Chloe, “the opposite. You’ll cave because you are super strong and super committed to your rules and one of those rules is that you must always protect the people you love—which is us, Heron and the crew and me. But the other rule, the one that takes precedence, is that head to head you must always let her win.”

“Why would I ever agree to such a shitty rule, if I’m as smart as you say?”

“Because as much as you love all of us, you love her more,” the nano-AI concluded in a tone that implied no judgment.

Oh no, more of Chloe’s love theories. She had a thousand, possibly a million of the suckers. Human emotion was a mystery for an entity like her, and she’d been pecking at that nut for years now. Kellen was just her latest pecan. She didn’t mean it nasty. For her, painful analysis was part of her self-recursion routine. Programming. She didn’t know how much it could sting.

“Chloe, you are cracked,” he said gently. “And sweeter’n marshmallow pie. Now get on back to the plane before Garrett starts missing you.”

“He is composing a rebuttal for a, quote, fuckface moron, unquote, in Argentina who claims that the moon landing in 1969 was faked by Hollywood commies,” she replied. “The conversation is, um, somewhat heated. I have eleven minutes and three seconds yet before he calms down enough to miss me.”

Kellen didn’t have any electronic feelers out, was just relying on his gut, but he’d seen how Garrett looked at Chloe’s holographic image when she bothered to project one. Garrett had missed her the moment she sneaked up the space elevator. Kellen was willing to bet his boots on that. And he liked these boots.

It did bug Kellen that the only critter who missed him on a regular basis was his cat, and even then in a very cat-specific manner.

“Eleven minutes and three…? Y’all are nothing if not exact.” The y’all being bio-hacked humans, transhumans, post-humans, and whatever the hell Chloe was. Basically everybody he loved. Of all his crew, Kellen was the only one who hadn’t implanted tech in his body in one way or another. He didn’t regret the lack, not one bit, but he also didn’t denigrate those who’d made such choices. Was their bodies. Or not, in Chloe’s case.

“Based on the progression of his current conversation and logical paths it might take,” she said. “I monitor him closely.”

Did she, now? So maybe that affection went both ways after all.

The trail of lights ended at a circular door. Kellen stood in front of it for a second or two, not wanting to passkey right away. Not wanting to say what he had to. Not wanting to see her, even in digital. It wouldn’t be like watching her on newsvids or politics channels. This time she would be seeing him right back.

Angela.

“Kellen?” Chloe again.

“Yeah?”

“If, after this meeting, you need…whatever people need when they need things like hugs, give us a ping down on the plane, okay?”

She could be aggravating at times and unpredictable pretty much all the time, but Chloe sure was technology gone sweet.

“You ain’t coming back up the tether. I mean it,” he said.

“Of course not. I’ll send Garrett or Yoink.” She paused, and he could feel her moving out of his head. Something shifted in the air pressure or temperature. Her next words were out loud but super soft and moving away. “Good luck.”

He wouldn’t call for back-up, not now and not after this meeting, but damn if the offer didn’t choke him up some. There was comfort in being part of a team, part of a mission. Part of somebody else’s vision of what the world ought to be.

Was that what had happened to Angela? Had she bought in to somebody else’s vision, and sacrificed her own?

He cleared his suddenly tight throat and keyed in his passcode. The station door whorled open like a lens iris. He stepped through, and it closed behind him.

This chamber was small and spherical, like it had been built before they got the artificial gravity working real good, with no corners to get stuck in. The walls were lined with electronic equipment, lots of dark carbon fiber and blinking lights. An open-grate floor had been welded through the center of the sphere, and in the middle of that was a lone chair. The ceiling was netted with telepresence equipment, including several headsets, but he didn’t see a camera or holo projector.

His bootheels clanked steady on the grate. The air in here was uncomfortably cool to keep the electronics happy, but that wasn’t the reason goose bumps rose on his forearms.