She paused and addressed a question to Flynn’s consciousness.
Tetsami could see one of the monitors showing the mine equipment taking position. They fired bursts in turn, low power, but nearly overloading the optics of the cameras watching them; probably calibrating things before they went all out.
Unfortunately, the machines weren’t on the security net like the cameras; otherwise, Tetsami might have been able to stop them from where she was.
Frank/Tony was raising an alarm, but only four guards’ worth. The cameras outside Flynn’s barracks showed no disturbance and gave a full 360 of the area. The doors were sealed and unmolested. As she expected, they were assuming a technical glitch and just sending the guards to make sure.
She sent her attention down the cable that connected to the restraint collar on Flynn’s neck. That connection had some rudimentary security on it, but not enough to even slow her down. In a fraction of a second she was in a much smoother shell program provided by the collar itself; with a few choice menu selections, she had drilled down to the collar’s built-in development environment; left over from whoever designed and built this thing.
She didn’t know the physics of an Emerson field, but the collar had software that allowed her to design the equations for a new field geometry as well as ditch some of the safety protocols as far as power consumption went.
While she jury-rigged the collar, she kept a point of her awareness back watching the cameras. Slowly, to her anyway, four guards walked up to the door of Flynn’s barracks. They opened the door just as she finished rigging her collar.
The quartet showed their lack of understanding of basic security principles by all walking inside at once.
Outside the virtual world, she heard someone shout,
She shouted back, “I’m in the fucking bathroom.”
She waited until she heard pounding on the door to the bathroom.
The door to the barracks hung open, and the guards weren’t visible anymore. “Here I come,” she shouted back with Flynn’s voice, then she fired the restraint collar.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Resurrection
The universe does not go out of its way to conform to our expectations.
Mind moves matter.
The mind was damaged.
It remembered the egg’s short journey. It remembered launch +228.326 years, when it had called upon the inhabitants of the egg to decide on a course of action. It remembered launch +229.528 years when it changed course to bring it close to Xi Virginis. It remembered closing on the disintegrating star and understanding that it was no natural phenomenon.
It remembered the cloud.
It remembered fighting wave after wave of hostile sentience as the cloud tried to envelop the egg. It remembered the panic as the living minds within itself understood that something was trying to destroy the egg. It remembered the horror its passengers felt when they realized that the same thing in the cloud that tried to digest the egg had already done so to a whole solar system, one that had once been inhabited.
The mind remembered its charges ordering the egg to change course for the nearest inhabited system. Spreading a warning of what they faced was more important than any individual’s survival.
