Up Against It - M. J. Locke [95]
“What’s happening?” one of Tania’s people asked.
“It’s gotten into the spin generation system,” Jane replied. A horrible grinding resounded through the walls, confirming this: Jane lost her grip on the railing and smashed against a cubical wall. She flailed in the darkness, crashing into people, cables, debris, unable to stabilize herself. The grinding and shaking continued—she felt and heard others moving as the habitat’s momentum slowed and the shaking stopped. Phocaea’s gravity became a faint, steady pressure pulling them all toward one wall. Someone swore.
The emergency lighting came on, feeble pools that cast long shadows. Marty propelled over, wild-eyed.
“Report! Has it finished copying itself to Upside-Down’s systems yet?”
“Don’t know. We’re on backup life support,” he gasped. “It’s got control of the main network!”
“Easy,” she said. “Stay cool. Tania will have planned for this. Is the communications network still up?”
“Only partially, and it’s swamped with medical calls.”
“All right. Stay here and stay on top of communications. Prioritize my calls. Brief Benavidez and the mayors as soon as you can.”
Jane sought out Tania. The smaller woman was climbing up across the wall webbing. Her programmers, assorted objects, wiring, and globules of liquid floated around the room in the air currents, settling slowly toward the wall where Jane and Marty clung.
“Get to your stations!” Tania snapped. “We’re out of time. Move your ass, Damian, Perry—you too, Vicki. Wire us up. Now.” She spun. “Mbara, report! What was the status on the gateway when we crashed? Open or closed?”
Her people shouted back. Pandemonium reigned, but briefly. A field of assembler tubes dropped, spinning gold wiring from clusters in the shadows. Jane snagged a wire as it streamed past, and plugged it into the processor at her ear. Her waveface blinked and rebooted: Tania’s countdown clock appeared, as did the map of the sapient. The shouts quieted as people’s conversations went back online.
Tania’s avatar appeared in Jane’s wavespace. “Are you ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
To shut down life-support systems required a series of joint code entries by her and Tania. Tania brought her into the emergency shutdown area. Jane looked down at herself. Her avatar sat in something that looked like a flying kayak. Beside her, another neuter avatar rode a kayak with Tania’s name and ID emblazoned on the side. Around them was the life support space, filled with streams of light and arcane machineries. It reminded Jane of an impossibly complex and beautiful clockworks. Other kayakers were working in different parts of the clockworks. They were within Zekeston’s computer system.
“Follow me.” Tania led Jane through this mechanic’s cathedral. The hum and the team’s crisscrossing commands buzzed around them. The clamor made Jane feel dizzy. Was that an echo of her Voice she heard in the machine’s grindings and murmurs?
A horrifying possibility occurred to her: what if the Voice was, or was caused by, the feral sapient? She didn’t see how that could be—the feral was barely even aware of what humans were, much less comprehend their highly complex biology. How could it even begin to hack her neurochemistry? Still, she sensed a connection. She would have to ponder the question later. When there was time.
“There are five crucial systems we need to verify redundancies for before we lock them down.” Tania spoke loudly. “The rest we can crash. Stand by while I run the checks, and then enter your code when I say to.”
Once, twice, three times she waited while Tania tugged the machinery into lockdown; three times the “waiting” signal crept across her vision; three times she entered her own code and took another system offline. With each disconnection, more portions of the clockworks cathedral went dark and still.
She had expected an attack from the sapient. She mentioned this to Tania, who shrugged. “Distracted. It’s resource-starved