Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(56)

But she’s thinking, Then why the extra seven-percent hazard commission, if terras are the same as all the rest? Nix would never ask such a question aloud, anymore than she can avoid asking it of herself.

“Your Oma, she’ll—”

“Fella, I’ll see you later,” she says, and walks quickly towards the cafeteria door before he can get another word or ten out. Sometimes, she’d lay good money that the solitudes are beginning to gnaw at the man’s sanity. That sort of shit happens all too often. The glare in the corridor leading back to the housing module isn’t quite as bright as the lights in the cafeteria, so at least she has that much to be grateful for.





6.


Muddy, sweat-soaked, insect-bitten and insect-stung, eyes and lungs and nostrils smarting from the hundreds of millions of gametophytes ? 175 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

she breathed during her arduous passage through each infested isotainer, arms and legs weak, stomach rolling, breathless, Nix Severn has finally arrived at the bottom of the deep shaft leading down to Oma’s dormant CPU. The bzou has kept up with her the entire, torturous way. Though she didn’t realize that it was a bzou until halfway through the second ’tainer. Sentient viruses are so rare that the odds of Oma’s crash having triggered the creation (or been triggered by) bzou has a probability risk approaching zero, at most a negligent threat to any transport. But here it is, and the hallucination isn’t a hallucination.

An hour ago, she finally had the presence of mind to scan the thing, and it bears the distinctive signatures, the unmistakable byte sequence of a cavity-stealth strategy.

“A good quarter of an hour’s walk further in the forest, under yon three large oaks. There stands her house. Further beneath are the nut trees, which you will see there,” it said when the scan was done. “Red Hood! Just look! There are such pretty flowers here! Why don’t you look round at them all? Methinks you don’t even hear how delightfully the birds are singing! You are as dull as if you were going to school, and yet it is so cheerful in the forest!”

Oma knows Nix’s psych profile, which means the bzou knows Nix’s psyche.

Nix pushes back the jumpsuit’s quilted hood and visor again— she’d had to lower it to help protect against a minor helium leak near the shaft’s rim—and tries to concentrate and figure out precisely what has gone wrong. Oma is quiet, dark, dead. The holo is off, so she’ll have to rely on her knowledge of the manual interface, the toggles and pressure pads, horizontal and vertical sliders, spinners, dials, knife switches . . . all without access to Oma’s guidance. She’s been trained for this, yes, but AI diagnostics and repair has never been her strong suit.

The bzou is crouched near her, Shiloh’s stolen eyes tracking her every move.

“Who’s there?” it asks.

? 176 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

“I’m not playing this game anymore,” Nix mutters, and begins tripping the instruments that ought to initiate a hard reboot. “I’m done with you. Fifteen more minutes, you’ll be wiped. For all I know, this was sabotage.”

“Who’s there, skycap?” the bzou says again.

Nix pulls down on one of the knife switches, and nothing happens.

“Push on the door,” advises the bzou. “It’s blocked by a pail of water.”

Nix pulls the next switch, a multi-boot resort—she’s being stupid, so tired and rattled that she’s skipping stages—which should rouse the unresponsive Oma when almost all else fails. The core doesn’t reply. Here are her worst fears beginning to play themselves out.

Maybe it was a full-on panic, a crash that will require triple-caste post-mortem debugging to reverse, which means dry dock, which would mean she is utterly f*cking f*cked. No way in hell she can hand pilot the Blackbird back onto the rails, and this far off course an eject would only mean slow suffocation or hypothermia or starvation.

Nix speaks to the bzou without looking at it. She takes a tiny turnscrew from the kit strapped to her rebreather (which she hasn’t needed to use, and it’s been nothing but dead weight she hasn’t dared abandon, just in case).

Maybe she isn’t through playing the game, after all. She takes a deep breath, winds the driver to a 2.4 mm. mortorq bit, and keeps her eyes on the panel. She doesn’t need to see the bzou to converse with it.

“All right,” she says. “Let’s assume you have a retract sequence, that you’re a benign propagation.”