“It wasn’t a spider?”
“No. Not one of those wretched beehives either. We didn’t see what it was until we went to get her.” He cleared his throat, cleared it again. That low scrape of sound in the darkness made me painfully aware of how thirsty I was. “It was a riot rover. A small one. Right outside the fucking door. We didn’t hear it roll up. Clever of it, wasn’t it, to wait until we had our helmets off?”
That endless conveyor belt of gas canisters, unmarked and gleaming, had been bad enough. It was worse to know they were mounted on rovers and roaming the facility, and they had been activated well before Sigrah arrived.
“Why didn’t it get you?” I asked.
“Apparently good genes are still the best defense.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“It’s a fast-working and extremely powerful sedative,” van Arendonk said. “Developed by some secret research team at Grimaldi Labs for the Yuèliàng military about a century ago, but the UEN picked it up quickly enough when they offered the right price. Brought it out of retirement, so to speak. I recognize the smell. Rotten roses.” He sniffed and let out a huff of laughter. “I can still fucking smell it. It’s just one of the dozens of unpleasant compounds my forebears genetically altered us to be unable to absorb or metabolize. Which does rather make it obvious who Parthenope intends to use it on, does it not?”
“No shit. It’s not as though they built this entire fucking facility because they want to go to war with Yuèliàng. You were always going to be safe.”
Van Arendonk was quiet a moment. “I didn’t know what they were doing here, Marley. I had no idea.”
“You knew something was going on. You assigned yourself to this investigation.”
“You did the same,” van Arendonk pointed out.
“That’s not the same. I came here for a friend.”
“So did I,” he said. Then, more quietly, “For all the good it’s done.”
I rubbed my forehead; the combination of flashing lights and my prosthetic eye had given me another throbbing headache. “Did you already suspect that it had something to do with Aeolia?”
“Not precisely,” van Arendonk said. “I still don’t know what this place has to do with Aeolia, but I know the story of what happened there is bullshit. The same flavor of bullshit as all the PR about Nimue’s productivity—and, yes, of course I knew something was going on here. Everybody in the fucking company knows something is going on here. Parthenope has called in too many favors and thrown too much money into building a furnace that has no hope of ever paying for itself. Everybody goes along with the polite fiction because the company has an uncanny knack for making its allies very rich and making its enemies very uncomfortable.”
“And you help them,” I said, “as one of their lawyers.”
“So do you,” he countered, “as one of their investigators.”
I was never given a choice, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak the words aloud. It was true, and it was a comforting lie. We always had a choice. It was just that the companies we worked for were very good at making sure all of our choices were bad ones.
Of all the positions Parthenope had offered to me, none had come even remotely close to being what I would be most qualified to do. Overseer wrangling, David had called it. I had assumed the company simply didn’t want to pay me what I would be worth in an AI-adjacent job.
I sat up a bit straighter, trying to ease the ache from my hip that was radiating up my back.
These machines would bore you. I had thought David was trying to be kind, trying to explain away why he was in the sysadmin job that should have been mine. But he had also said, Maybe they’re your style after all. Platitudes, or so I had believed. Fuck. He wouldn’t have wasted his time with small talk. He had one chance to contact me, one chance to tell me what he had learned without Mary Ping or Sigrah knowing. Everything David said in his message had a purpose. He had chosen his words carefully.
I just hadn’t listened carefully. Not until it was too late.
“The virus on Aeolia wasn’t a virus,” I said, slowly, working it through, trying to piece together David’s puzzle. Remembering Mary Ping’s knowing smile. “It was an AI. It was a test run.”
“What would they be test . . . Oh. Oh, fuck me sideways.”
“They sent an AI to see if it could overtake Aeolia’s Overseer. What’s the point of building an entire fleet of illegal weapons if you can’t be sure it’s going to be able to attack like you want it to? But it went badly. They didn’t expect the Overseer to react by shutting itself down and letting the entire crew die.”
They should have. That was exactly the sort of thing an AI put in an impossible position might be expected to do. Humans tended to forget that for an AI, shutting itself off counted as protection, not surrender. Ceasing to exist was the perfect way for an AI to guarantee its functionality could not be further compromised.
“That infiltrating AI is here now,” I said. “That was the test. This is the real thing. But it’s already gone wrong. It killed Mary Ping using one of the mech suits, and none of them expected that. It’s not listening to Sigrah anymore. I’m not sure it ever was. AIs don’t kill their sysadmins and build themselves giant creepy nests in the middle of their factories if they trust their handlers.”
There was a brief silence before van Arendonk said, “Half of the stations in the belt are run by AIs based on the Overseers.”
“Half?” I said, surprised. I had known Parthenope’s steward design was popular, but I’d
