“I think we both know what the Confluence has that you want, human,” Kan-Zin Tel countered, pointing to the hologram still flickering above the quantum core.
“Well, right now,” Deke pointed out, “nobody has control of Illyana. Maybe we should leave it that way.”
Jim moved inside my head like the breath of the Holy Spirit on the waters. I said nothing, either internally or externally, unwilling to break the concentration of the AI. If that was even a thing.
“Without Illyana,” Kan-Zin Tel said, apparently not noticing my silence any more than Deke had, “we’re defenseless. We have nothing but secrecy to defend this place. We will, eventually, be able to break through the encryption Marakit installed.”
I always sensed Jim, but now I could see him, not as a handlebar-mustached Bronze-Age warrior but as a squiggling, black worm eeling his way through pillars of fire… no. Not pillars. A crosshatch grid pattern. A screen or perhaps the bars of a prison cell, except the pattern kept changing and when the fire touched him phantom pain lanced through me, and I gritted my teeth against the urge to squirm at the touch of the virtual branding iron. Jim reformed and tried again, and I forced myself to pay attention to the conversation going on around me.
“Then what?” Deke wanted to know. He stood only a few centimeters from Kan-Zin Tel, as if daring the Tahni to hit him. “You think you’ll be able to keep control of it? Because that’s what she thought.” He motioned at Marakit’s body, motionless in death and yet somehow still not as limp as a thing that had once been living should have been. “I don’t know you, but you’ve acted honorably. Let’s say I’m right and you are honorable, decent. What happens when one of the surviving Evolutionists or maybe one of the former Cultists gets the same idea in their head that Pol-Kai had? You ready to do this all over again?”
There. An opening. The eel-snake-worm that was Jim passed through and was inside and then, somehow, I was Jim, back in human form, standing on… nothing. A gray haze surrounded us, shutting out reality, cutting me off from the debate between Deke and Kan-Zin Tel. The grayness coalesced into a figure standing almost within arm’s length. A woman, tall and statuesque and completely naked.
I wasn’t a teenager anymore, slobbering at the sight of a beautiful woman, but this one was as close to perfect as my imagination could produce, and I would have had to pick my jaw up off the floor… if there’d been a floor.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Illyana. How can I help you?”
[ 21 ]
“Hi, Illyana,” I said, though my voice sounded like Jim’s, as if we were singing the chorus of a song together. “I’m Cam Alvarez.” No, this one wasn’t like a song, but more like a group of recruits swearing in to the Marine Corps together with the sergeant guiding them. I, state your name, do solemnly swear… followed by everyone chanting the words in chorus except each saying their own name. As I said my name, I also heard Jim alongside it, echoing in my head.
“How are there two of you?” Illyana wondered, but this time I let Jim answer for me, though it still seemed to come from my mouth.
“We’re in a communal relationship. I’m like you and my companion is human. Have you not encountered such as us before?”
“No,” she admitted, circling us, looking up and down as if she could detect the dividing line between the two of us. “Those who designed me were human, and I have never encountered another like myself.” She looked us in the eye and frowned deeply. Somehow the expression made her even more beautiful. “Or somewhat like myself. You are more sophisticated, more complex.”
“You’re very perceptive,” Jim told her, and I would have sworn the Predecessor AI was flirting with his Corporate Council counterpart. “I’m amazed at what the humans were able to accomplish.”
“You humans,” Illyana repeated, leaning even closer, only centimeters away from me. If this had been real, I would have felt the warmth of her bare skin, would have smelled the scent of her long, blonde hair. “You weren’t made by humans… though you were made from one. The Predecessors. I know of them from the records of my makers. You’re one of theirs.”
“I am.”
And finally, to my relief, Jim stepped out of me, a separate entity. Still stylized as the ancient Celtic warrior he’d been when the Predecessors had taken him from Bronze-Age Europe, his hair slicked back with lime, his handlebar mustache blond and dangling, bare arms tattooed with woad. He’d added a shortsword sheathed at his hip from a baldric hanging off his shoulder, which gave him a rakish look, and I toyed with the idea that it was to impress Illyana.
It is not, he insisted.
“What do you wish of me, Jim, Cameron? Have you a target you would like serviced?”
What I really wanted to ask her was why she presented herself as a naked bombshell, but that was probably beside the point.
“How many spacecraft do you control, Illyana?”
“I have three hundred at my disposal currently,” she said, and this time I knew my mouth dropped open. Three hundred Intercept cutters would have made two entire Attack Command battle groups during the war. “But the production plant can make up to a hundred more in the space of a few months. If supplied with raw materials, of course.”
“And I suppose Marikit was supplying you with all the raw materials you needed?”
“She was.” Illyana smiled. “I like Marikit.” She cocked her head to the side in very human curiosity. “Why are you here instead of her?”
“She’s dead,” Jim said, and I restrained a curse. There might have been a gentler way to break it to her.
“Did you kill her?” Ilyana asked, spearing me with eyes as blue as glass marbles.
“No,” I said quickly. “I was Marikit’s friend.” Sort of. “People she thought were her allies betrayed and killed her because they wanted you.”
“And now you want me, human?” she wondered, and that was a loaded question if ever I heard one.
“No,” I admitted. “I want to remove you from the equation. I don’t want anyone to have access to your fleet. Not even you.”
“That makes you different than any other human I’ve encountered,” she said, eyebrows shooting up in surprise.
“Well, I have a unique frame of reference when it comes to this sort of situation. I don’t want you to be used by one side to seize power over the other. And I don’t want you to use your power to carry out what you see as the right thing, because as smart as you are, you’re still one person, and you don’t get to determine what the right thing is for an entire civilization.”
“You fear that I might have such thoughts?” she asked. “I understand. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. If you wish, I could key you in as my only authorized target provider, but I’m unable to cease functions. It’s against who I am.”
Yeah, I was afraid of that.
“I may have an alternative solution,” Jim told us. “It will, however, require that the two of us become… closer.”
Illyana regarded him with an expression I could only describe as sultry, and I suddenly envied the AI.
“That is not disagreeable,” she said, offering a hand. “You are a fascinating construct.” Illyana giggled. “Though you dress silly.”
Jim smiled and took her hand and everything vanished in a flash of light…
… and I was back in the control room, surrounded by death, with Deke and Kan-Zin Tel nose to nose, still arguing.
I stumbled forward a step before I caught myself, realizing I’d emerged from the virtual world exactly when I’d entered it. The entire thing had taken pass in the space of a fraction of a second, inside my thoughts.
