Song of Scarabaeus (27 page)

He turned the dead shield over in his hands. “Burned out.”

“We can put all our remaining power into two working shields,” Edie suggested. “I think we can get about five hours each.”

“The shields won't hold charge. Your fifteen hours lasted only two. Mine lasted even less.”

“Is there nothing else you can try?”

“This one is beyond repair. The other was already damaged. These systems are just not compatible.” He leaned back against the casing and rubbed his neck. “What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What can you try?” He shone the lamp into the well of biocyph.

“There's nothing that can help us down there.”

“That's all that can help us.”

“No—”

He grabbed her shoulder—the injured one. “What's the matter with you? You're giving up?” His harshness sent a shiver through her. “This machinery can create entire worlds.”

“There's nothing I can do!” She pleaded with him to understand. “I wish I'd never come here. I should never have interfered.”

“Oh, spare me that crap.” Finn pushed her away. “You did what you did. That's the past. Maybe you can convince yourself you deserve to die here, but don't make me the victim of your guilty conscience.” His eyes held more emotion than she'd ever thought him capable of. Fury, even hate, but above all a passion for life.

They faced off for breathless moments.

And then, with the same passion brought firmly under control, he said, “Don't you let me die.”

Edie climbed down into the heart of the BRAT, leaving Finn on the ledge in the dark. She knew the inside of a biocyph seed intimately, could have found her way around without the lamp, but Finn clipped it to her belt anyway.

Here in its underground belly, the BRAT composed its retroviral music. Using the data collected by the airborne cyphviruses, it analyzed the existing ecosystem, creating endless simulations until it hit upon a combination of changes that needed to be made in order to bring each organism closer to the target ideal. It wrote the code for a tailor-made retrovirus, which it transmitted to the target cyphvirus. The cyphvirus was activated, the host cells infected, the genome transformed. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—the simplest of musical scales. Four notes that combined three-by-three to create the arpeggios of life: amino acids to be endlessly shuffled and assembled into proteins that controlled the physiology of all lifeforms.

Perhaps only a slight modification would be made, unnoticeable to the organism. Perhaps a major change. And every change in an organism required multiple simultaneous changes throughout the ecosystem to support it. The biocyph coordinated this global transformation using a plan
that allowed for change over a timescale of decades, until it birthed a world that was safe and nurturing for humans and their kind.

Edie jacked into the biocyph, still with little idea of what she was planning to do. The datastream was a dense, complex cacophony that would take hours to untangle. She searched for something to latch on to. The original specs were still there, along with an accumulation of data gathered over the years by cyphviruses from all the BRATs that had infiltrated every level of the ecosystem, from the mountaintops to the deserts to the depths of the ocean.

And the distorted, mutated instructions were clear now. The biocyph was sending out instructions that changed by the day, feeding back on itself as it sought only to protect the megabiosis from the enemy—the kill-code lock she'd implanted.

She toyed with the idea of dismantling the kill-code, reactivating the initial parameters of Scarabaeus, and reversing the process. It might take a millennium of guided evolution, but the planet could come to resemble the world she remembered from her first visit. The desire to fix the damage she'd caused overrode even her survival instinct.

Hours of work to be done—time she didn't have. She would've done it, let her e-shield dwindle and die while she worked on restoring Scarabaeus…

If not for Finn.

Was everything he'd done for her only to protect his own life? She'd seen enough to believe that wasn't true. He'd tried as hard as she had to save Kristos. He'd risked his life for the serf in the engine room, too. She'd glimpsed beyond that implacable exterior over the past two weeks. She'd witnessed his anger and frustration, his humor. She'd experienced his tenderness. None of that should surprise her—he was human, regardless of what the Crib or the
Hoi
's crew thought of their lag laborer.

He deserved to live. When it came to a choice between Scarabaeus and a man, Edie had to choose the man. She wanted Finn to live. If she could've given him more, restored
all that he'd lost, she would've done that, too. For now, all she could give him was life. And that meant keeping herself alive.

The e-shields were useless. Even without the power bleed caused by the EMP, the physical attacks from the creatures would quickly drain them. They needed to survive without shields, and they needed the aggressive wildlife to ignore them.
We made you disappear.
Haller's words. If she could disappear from the entire Crib, surely she could hide for a few hours from a terraforming seed and its hostile lifeforms.

Perhaps there was a way. She tried to get her head around it. Cyphviruses sampled everything they touched, treating the environment like a single complex organism. The biocyph calculated how to integrate all the components harmoniously, regardless of whether individual components could survive the transformation intact. The e-shields had so far protected her and Finn from that sort of transformation, but their presence, like the flash bomb and the weapons fire, jammed the blades of this massive ecological blender. Jump-started by the bomb, the ecosystem had perceived the physical intrusion and triggered a defensive reaction.

What if they could pass through the blades unscathed?

Edie teased apart a tier within the biocyph's algorithm-processing center and wrote a new tune. Nothing too obtrusive. Nothing the main program pathways would notice for a while. She drew threads from nearby subroutines—whispers and pulses of melody. She diverted them, pegged out a new route and marked the way with glyphs. She lost herself in the rhythm as she created her new tier, bleeding the edges into the surrounding tiers so that it became fully integrated.

She made it sing.

And Scarabaeus whispered back to her. At first she barely listened, too caught up in her plan as she modified the BRAT's instructions so they could escape the jungle. But there was something here, something not buried in code or
hidden between programming tiers. As she lingered in the datastream, the whisper intensified until she could no longer ignore it. Her wet-teck soaked up the music of Scarabaeus and recognized a pattern.

She grasped at the pattern, pulled it apart, studied its details, but it disintegrated. She gathered it together again and realized there was nothing to see unless she viewed the coherent whole. It was not something to be examined note-by-note or even by melody, but to be absorbed as a symphony.

Through manipulating the ecosystem's genetic code in order to defeat the kill-code lock, the biocyph had learned more than just how to survive. Scarabaeus had its own song now.

A new song that would change everything.

 

“Finn.” She gently shook his shoulder. She'd been working for an hour, at least, and he was dozing, the rifle lying across his thighs. “Finn. I've finished.”

“What…?” He rubbed a hand across his face. The lamplight picked out the gold flecks in his eyes.

Edie crouched beside him. “It's safe. As safe as it's ever going to be.”

“How much longer on the shields?”

“Forget the shields. I switched them off.”

That riveted his attention. “You
what
?”

“I needed to let the cyphviruses in.”

Into their bodies, hers and his. She knew the idea would make his skin crawl. That was the standard reaction. But not Edie's—she'd been born with it.

“You mean…” His lip curled. “There's nanoteck running around inside me?”

“I had to give the BRAT a picture of who we are—our biopatterns. The cyphviruses will transmit our biopatterns to the BRAT, but it will recognize us now. I've instructed it to ignore us instead of trying to change us. Even the local bacteria will leave us alone.”

Finn narrowed his eyes as she explained. She could tell he
wanted to believe her, wanted to be convinced. He wanted to live.

“Jezus.” He tilted his head back against the casing, peering into the gloom as if he could see the nano-sized particles Edie had exposed him to. “Couldn't you just take a blood sample?”

“Blood contains your DNA—the template that made you. But it's not
you
. Terraforming biocyph needs the complete picture, all the metabolic pathways. It'll take a few hours to take effect, so we can't leave yet.”

“What about the creatures that attacked us?”

“The jungle should ignore us now. Every aspect of this ecosystem is controlled by biocyph, and I've programmed it to treat us as inert components. We have to stop shooting at it, though.”

His hands closed around the rifle. He wasn't going to give it up that easily.

“There's something else. Something amazing, Finn.” She could've kept what she'd discovered to herself, especially since she had no idea yet what to do with the information, but they were in this together. “The biocyph creating these megabioses—in learning to overcome my kill-code lock, it's evolved. I can
feel
it in the datastream…It's so adaptable, I could develop it for use in any ecosystem. It could be used to crack the locks on the BRATs on other worlds.”

Finn sucked in a breath. “If you're thinking of taking
any
of this mutated mess offworld and spreading it around—”

“It's only mutated because the BRATs lost their target ideal. I'm talking about an algorithm, a cryptoglyph that can be programmed into BRATs on other worlds. It will teach the BRATs how to permanently override their inbuilt annual shutdown. No more renewal keys. No more slapdash keystones.”

“You realize what that would mean?” Finn shook his head, as though it was too much to contemplate. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I don't know. Maybe I should just—” She stopped her
self, because the idea of keeping it secret was unthinkable. “It could free the Fringe worlds forever.”

“The Crib won't stand for it.” Finn was still shaking his head. “This is not your fight.”

With a twinge of disappointment, she realized he was talking himself out of it. She wouldn't let him do that. Once he'd been the kind of man who'd have jumped at the challenge. It was her job to make him remember that.

“We can make it our fight. I
made
this hell, Finn, and it's produced a revolutionary technology—”

“Revolutionary? You don't want a revolution, believe me. You're talking about starting a war.”

She understood then. Finn had already been there—fought for a cause and lost everything.

“Something good will come from this mess that I made. I have to take this to the Fringers.”

“No matter the consequences?”

“It's their chance for freedom. They can refuse, but I have to offer it. I have to try.”

Finn didn't meet her eyes. Was he ashamed of himself for not wanting to get involved?

“I promised you we'd cut the leash,” she told him, “and we will. But whether you agree with my plan or not, I'm taking it with me.”

“How?”

“One of Zeke's stock biocyph modules would be ideal right now, to imprint the algorithm on. I'll have to store it in the wet-teck in my splinter.” She turned to jump back into the well of the BRAT.

“Wait.” Finn touched her shoulder, frowning with uncharacteristic uncertainty as he searched her face. “Use mine.”

“Why? You said this was all a bad idea.”

“Yes, I did. But this thing makes me valuable.”

“You think I'll leave you behind? Is that it?”

“That's not what I mean. I trust you, Edie, even if I don't agree with you on this. But I have no value to the rest of the
crew. If we get out of this place and off this rock, this gives them a reason to keep me alive. Put it in my head, just temporarily, and make sure only you can download it. At least then I have something to bargain with.”

“Okay,” Edie said automatically. She was still absorbing the impact of his admission that he trusted her. It meant more to her than it should—after all, he was talking about his survival, not his feelings.

He followed her into the bowels of the BRAT, sat patiently while she jacked into his splinter. She'd have preferred to create a new tier in which to store the data, to confine and protect it, but she'd already tried and failed to modify the biocyph in Finn's splinter. Most of it was unused anyway, an empty matrix to store the cryptoglyph.

She jacked into the BRAT's core and recovered the dismembered symphony. She had isolated and extracted the algorithm from the biocyph to leave only raw code, like sheet music without an orchestra. There were just enough linkages intact that she'd be able to recreate a functional module later, by recombining the algorithm with fresh stock biocyph that could be coded for use on another world, another ecosystem.

The BRAT knew her now, and Scarabaeus gave up its secret willingly.

 

If Cat's repairs had gone well, she'd have picked up Haller's team by now and ferried them to Finn and Edie's location. They had no way of knowing, and could only hope someone was waiting for them outside the megabiosis. As for the
Hoi Polloi
—if someone up there was responsible for trying to kill them all, would the ship even be in orbit anymore?

There was little point worrying about it yet. It would take a couple more hours for the BRAT to make the necessary changes and transmit its new programming out into the jungle. Until then, the only thing on Edie's mind was rest.

Finn settled against the BRAT casing, and there wasn't
much room to do anything but curl up beside him. The cold from the metal soaked through her jacket, making her shiver.

He watched her with a flicker of concern. “You doing okay?”

She hadn't slept in thirty hours and was tired beyond belief, physically and mentally. He must sense that. “I'll be fine.”

She edged away from the cold, leaned against his shoulder, already drifting, not protesting when he shifted to move his arm around her so that her cheek rested on his chest. The intimacy of the position was at odds with the painful knowledge that he would walk away from her, and her future, as soon as he was able.

He tangled his fingers into her hair, at the nape of her neck, holding her there in a gesture that felt more possessive than tender. She didn't have the energy to think about it, and his heartbeat was a lullaby.