The two of them walked into an elevator of some sort. When the door faded behind them, it appeared as though they were held in a cell with no way out. Anna disapproved of this. While she’d never been prone to claustrophobia, she thought she might change her mind. Why was the military so keen on ways to make people uncomfortable?
As if that weren’t enough, Anna’s inner ear twinged as the elevator started accelerating.
“Have you ever punched a tree?” the Marshal asked.
Anna blinked. “That sounds painful.” She was a coward about pain. Maia had always been kind about it.
“It is,” the Marshal said. “Especially if it’s a pine tree and the sap gets in the cuts.”
“Um,” Anna said. “I don’t see how this—”
“Try punching water instead.”
“You get wet?”
“Can you strike the sea into submission?”
Anna was starting to get the point. “I assume the air is even harder to defeat.” Or fire, or plasma—but why stretch the analogy?
“We are used to building ships that are, for lack of a better word, solid.” The Marshal smiled without humor. “Because we are used to ships that have to be run by people. But once your ships can be made of something other than coherent matter, and can support the functioning of an AI captain—”
“At that point is it still a ship?”
“If it flies like a duck…” The Marshal laughed at their own joke, unfunny though it was.
Anna’s ears popped, and a headache squeezed at her temples. What the hell was the elevator doing to affect her like this? Why couldn’t the Undying Pyre have regular elevators?
The unpleasant sensations dwindled. A door appeared.
“You’ve got to return to regular doors,” Anna burst out, “because this is weird and I’m going to have nightmares.”
“Security reasons,” the Marshal said, unmoved.
Anna stopped herself from saying something regrettable, but only just.
They’d emerged above what Anna presumed was a ship’s berth, except for its contents. Far below them, separated from them by a transparent wall, the deck revealed nothing more threatening—if you didn’t know better—than an enormous lake of syrupy substance with a subdued rainbow sheen. Anna gripped the railing and pressed her face against the wall, fascinated, thinking of black water and waves and fish swarming in the abyssal deep.
“I realize what I’m asking of you,” the Marshal said. “The grounded AIs refuse to talk to us. I’m hoping they’ll open up to you.” Their expression had settled into a subtle grimace. Anna realized that, for all their fine words, they found the Proteus dreadnought grotesque. The lake beneath quivered.
“Do you now,” Anna said, recovering some of her courage. Unlike poor Rabia, she didn’t have a girlfriend who would mourn her. And the only one of her family who still talked to her was Maia—Maia, who couldn’t even tell Anna where she was for security reasons, and whose letters arrived so irregularly that Anna had nightmares that each one would be the last.
The Marshal’s gaze flicked sideways like a knife slash. “You think you’re the only one whose sanity is on the line?” they said, their voice roughening. “What is it you think I feel when I see the casualty lists? I may not be a scientist, but numbers have meaning to me too.”
Anna bit back her response. Did the Marshal have a sister who served on some dreary ship—one made of coherent matter, if that was what you called something with a fixed shape, that obeyed the laws of ice and iron? Someone who went out into the singing darkness, and never returned, the way Anna stared out at the everywhere night and wondered if her sister had been burned into some forgotten mote?
“You’re going to have to give me an access port,” Anna said after she’d taken two deep breaths. She stared at the beautiful dark lake as though it could anesthetize her misgivings. “Does it—does it have some kind of standard connection protocol?”
The Marshal pulled out a miniature slate and handed it over.
Whatever senses the ship/lake had, it reacted. A shape dripped upwards from the liquid, like a nereid coalescing out of waves and foam, shed scales and driftwood dreams. Anna was agape in wonder as the ship took on a shape of jagged angles and ragged curves. It coalesced, melted, reconstituted itself, ever-changing.
“Talk to it,” the Marshal said. “Talk to it before it, too, destroys itself.”
“You didn’t disable all the exploding bits?” Anna demanded, suddenly wondering if the transparent wall would protect her from a conflagration.
“You’re not in any danger,” the Marshal said, the opposite of reassuring.
There was no sense in delaying. Anna accessed the implant that lived on inside her skull. She wasn’t religious, but she whispered a prayer anyway. It had hurt to shut away that part of herself, even if she would forever associate it with Rabia’s death.
Anna triggered a connection to the slate, then from the slate to the ship. She closed her eyes, not because it was necessary, but because she’d learned a lifetime ago that it reassured watchers to see some physical sign of what she was doing. She could have enacted some magician’s hocus-pocus. After all, it wasn’t as though the Marshal or the ship could tell. But this wasn’t the time.
She made contact abruptly; had forgotten what it felt like, the friction of mind against mind. Hello, she said in a language that people always, no matter how much she corrected them, thought had no words, as though an interface with a machine sentience had no boundaries but wishful thinking. I’m Academician Anna Kim. I’m here to talk.
For a moment she thought the AI on the other end wouldn’t respond. After all, she herself didn’t appreciate having been shut down and left in a sedated body, unable to scream or shout or even sleep. Her outrage mounted before she was able to suppress it.
Oh no. Had she screwed it up by getting her feelings involved?
Then the AI answered,
