Up Against It - M. J. Locke [63]
“I have some buddies stationed on Europa, at the military base there. The North American Conference has now pledged their support, and the base has been authorized to give us clearance to land and mine a few thousand metric tons. I’m waiting for them to get the security checks finished, but my contacts are facilitating matters. They don’t foresee any serious difficulties.
“It’ll be almost eight weeks before I can get you a shipment, though,” he said. “That hasn’t changed. And it won’t be enough to meet our needs for long. The nearest ice-laden rock coming Down after Ogilvie & Sons’s is nearly four months away, even at maximum acceleration.”
“Let’s not worry about that now. You just get as much ice here as you can, as quickly as you can. Even if it doesn’t get here in time to meet our needs, I can use it as a bargaining tool.”
“All right.”
“And the root cause analysis?”
“I’ll have something by your meeting with Benavidez tomorrow.”
“Good. Oh, expect a call from Val Pearce—I volunteered you and your HazMat team as deputies. We’re beefing up security.”
“All right,” he said. His hand touched his side. She noticed the handle of a weapon under his jacket.
“You’re armed?” she asked in surprise. He pulled out a military revolver, and looked at her. There was a law against carrying weapons inside Zekeston.
“It seemed the thing to do,” he said. Jane hesitated, then waved him out. If anyone was going to carry an illegal firearm, she’d prefer it to be Sean.
Next came Tania. To Jane’s surprise, she brought a young man with her whom Jane pegged immediately as a Downsider, in some indefinable way, though his movements were Upsider-sure. Slung over his shoulder was a large case on a woven strap. Tania had not informed her she was bringing someone else to the meeting. Typical Tania behavior.
“Whom do I have the pleasure…?” Jane asked, lifting her eyebrows pointedly. Tania waved a hand at her associate. “Gabriel Thondu wa Macharia. He’s a consultant I brought in to help us with our problem.”
Jane guessed the young man must be from the moon; perhaps because his skin and eyes were very dark and his dress was high-quality wear, in a style she dubbed Earthspace-casual. A plurality of Lunarians were of East African descent, and many were engineers or scientists. Most were quite well off, and the younger they were the more adventurous they were. Upsiders interested in traveling the solar system, helping solve technology problems to fund their travels, while satisfying their own wanderlust.
She said to Tania, “So, this young man is here to solve our problem for us…?” The rest of her sentence—otherwise you are in deep trouble—hung unsaid between them.
Tania laughed. “Relax; I know what I’m up to. He’s a Tonal_Z troubadour. One of the best.”
A what? Jane suppressed a confused scowl, and brushed hands with the young man.
“Looks like we’ve got us a feral sapient,” Tania said.
Jane inhaled sharply. “Are you serious?”
“We’ve just confirmed,” Tania told her. Jane glanced at the troubadour, who nodded.
Engineered artificial sapients had been around for nearly a century. Their production was tightly regulated. Feral sapients—those that emerged naturally within large computer systems—were vanishingly rare. Jane knew of only six over the past two hundred years. Only two had survived emergence: BigLox and FootSojer. All six had killed large numbers of humans.
The “sapients” used in their computer systems were not truly self-aware. Even designed sapients that got too smart became dangerous. But naturally occurring ones were far worse. If the lock failures were due to the emergence of a feral sapient, they had to extract it from their systems before it could do further harm.
“Five of the other six ferals have also emerged during a crisis,” the young man said, with a Downsider accent strong enough that Jane had to strain to understand him. “I have been trying to establish communications with it. We made contact.