The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [35]
It would be different this time. It had to be – Talavera had infected her with the nanodust.
She got to her feet. ‘What is the trigger word to suspend the sensory lockdown?’ she said to the dog. ‘And how long before it locks down again?’
‘The word is “continuity” and lockdown will resume after fifteen seconds.’
The dog was now host to the polymote’s limited AI, as was the Catriona shell, and very soon hers too. All they had to do was to keep the performance going long enough for her to make good an escape. Leaving the others was a wrench but a solo breakout stood the best chance.
‘I have incorporated a buffer into this image shell,’ she told the dog. ‘As soon as I speak, copy yourself into it then overwrite any residual code. Then you will maintain a behaviour façade.’ She breathed in deep. ‘Continuity … ’
She almost made it. Awaking in the tank, she crept out into a shadowy corridor. Unobserved, she got to the Sacrament’s evac capsules, hacked into the controls with a polymote-built codegen key, set them all to autolaunch in one minute, long enough to get inside one of them and bypass its survival/nav system. So while the other eleven fired their thrusters and sped away into space, Julia manually steered hers along the Sacrament’s outer hull and latched onto an aft auxiliary hatch.
But Talavera somehow deduced that she was not aboard any of the evac capsules and nearly thirty minutes later the aft hatch’s locking clamps were activated. Then the hatch itself opened and she was dragged into the airlock, where a pair of Henkayans bound and gagged her.
Back in the virtuality chamber they tipped her into the tank, reattached the waste and nutrient tubes and refastened the neural cutout around her head. By now she had abandoned all pretence at composure and was yelling wordlessly behind the heavy tape covering her mouth. Then the cutout was activated and her body grew heavy and numb and misty and distant as her awareness was pulled back into Talavera’s virtual prison.
Julia opened her eyes and saw blue sky. She sat up and found she was back on the beach. Wavelets lapped at the shore, darkening the sand, but there was no beach house, no dog, no Catriona.
‘To say I’m disappointed, well … ’
Talavera was suddenly standing a few feet away, attired in a red lacy bodice, green skin-tight leggings and her trademark heavy boots. As she stood there, black snakelike creatures emerged from the sand and wound up her legs. They had no features and were tapered at either end, so apart from their direction of movement there was no way to tell head from tail.
‘I explained what our work’s for, how important it is,’ Talavera went on.
‘And I don’t believe you,’ Julia said. ‘Don’t believe you, don’t trust you, don’t even … know what you are. What are those things? – why make up things like that?’
‘Hmm, sounds like pride to me. Yeah, the hubris of the oh-so-superior mind.’ Talavera leaned forward and hate glittered in her eyes. ‘But hang on a second – I’m the one who’s foiled your plans and dragged you back three times in a row so I guess that makes me your nemesis, maybe even arch-nemesis.’ She laughed. ‘And I didn’t make up my little snaky friends here – they’re messengers from someone called … ’ She paused, as if deciding what to say. ‘ … called the Godhead. He helped me escape when I was marooned and surrounded by death. You’ve no idea how powerful he is, or how powerful he is going to make me. Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and protect you and save you? I think we both know what the answer is.’
Julia kept her face expressionless and looked out across the placid waters, not knowing who this Godhead was, feeling empty.
‘What happens now?’ she said.
‘There’s still work to be done,’ said Talavera. ‘So we need that magnificent brain of yours in order to finish the project on time. But we can’t risk any more meddling or plotting on your part. In short, it’s time for a Julia-ectomy!’