Well, here we go. Two months where I have to fit in three separate writing projects (two work, one personal); fuck if I know how I'm going to manage, but at least I'm not running all over the place now. Not gonna promise anything just yet--who knows if there's going to be any more shitshow to this shitshow--but at the very least I am planning to be here every day and write in bits longer than just pieces mostly related to future chapters as I set them up. (The disadvantage of working on a complicated storyline: fucking ages with nothing to show for it in sequence!)
Edit: oh wow, Tumblr messed up line breaks while I was away. Give me a few to fix it, if I can!
Edit 2: o...kay, it fixed itself mid-edit. Tumblr, go home, you're drunk.
But in any case--without further ado...
Chapter 40: Circles
The performance reliability jump I felt when Dandelion and Aspen finally linked into ART's workspace was unbelievable. (Nearly 4 percent. Yeah, I know. And it wasn't even because we needed physical backup against the gunships. Yet.)
I see the planning has been going well, Dandelion said, registering the spike and immediately starting her customary diagnostic sweep on us.
The Argument Lounge has been seeing a lot of use over the last three days, ART said diplomatically as the diagnostic came back clear and it exchanged a brief handshake with her.
(I could feel its relief, too, even though risk assessment kept nagging at me that calling in Dandelion and Aspen's humans before Preservation and PSUMNT resolved their part of the strategy might just have stirred the shitshow pot even more. But risk assessment was borked. As always.)
(I had to believe that. Because I didn't know how many more shitshow contributions I could handle before taking a walk out of ART's airlock.)
Aspen and Dandelion exchanged feed glances, then sent us two simultaneous queries.
I said, Come see for yourselves, and we opened ART's cameras to them.
"…We can always go back to the safer route if you don't like our proposal," Friend, call sign Luca, was saying, smiling the Friends' trademark shitty smile. "Scuttling the Palladion outright remains a viable option."
Seth scowled right back at it.
"--will be immeasurably less than if we allow Encephalon to launch this production line, captain. You know this. We know this. We cannot allow them to continue, one way or another."
"We also cannot allow you to be caught," Mensah said neutrally. "And your newest plan heightens those chances considerably."
I could tell Mrinal was making an effort not to glower at her when they replied, "That is solely our risk to take. The entire reason we are proposing to limit the infiltration team to ourselves and the SecUnits is to allow everyone else plausible deniability."
"What plausible deniability?" Pin-Lee snapped. "Your plan isn't going to work without the ships! One way or another, if you go down, you're dragging everyone else down with you!"
"And if we don't commit, then all we do is delay Encephalon, not stop them," Friend, call sign Ilona, retorted. "Your legal attack needs the overwhelming evidence we can provide. If we just deny them the research data and subjects without making sure the scientists can never recreate their work, all it will do is give you a few years."
"Exactly! Years of valuable preparation time!"
Ilona said in its sweetest voice, "Preparation time to do what exactly, solicitor? A few years won't save either Preservation or Starwind Accord in the event of outright corporate war. A few years won't get PSUMNT out of the trade agreements it already has. You need either more time, or the element of surprise, and we can't buy you more time. Surprise, on the other hand--well, if you let us."
Karime made a calming gesture. "Friends. Let's get back to your backup plan for a moment. Even if we take your--safely radical route, there is absolutely no finding out where and how Encephalon keeps its offsite backups."
"This is a new project. They might not even have out-of-system backups, for security reasons."
"Not new enough, don't you think? Even if Dr. Gurathin's reports of their technical incompetence are entirely correct, this is not a mistake a corporation of their level makes. We have been over this--"
Wow, Aspen said, requesting to backburner the argument. (ART complied.) Three days in a row?
Yeah, I said. We have more firepower on our side than ever, and we can't agree on how to deploy it. I can't fucking work like this, Aspen.
I can imagine, they muttered. Logs plus your short version, please.
I sent them the logs, and added, The Friends have been pushing for extracting at least some of the experimental subjects, because now they can have the backup of three ships and think they can do it with your help, and also because Karime and Pin-Lee would have a fucking field day dismantling Encephalon with that kind of evidence. Which they would, except even four SecUnits, three ships, two security officers, and your rootrotting malware probably aren't going to be enough to quietly sneak a gaggle of human victims past whatever the fuck Project Medusa even is at this point. Plus there's Encephalon's own SecUnits and human security, which, according to Tango and its team, are pretty fucking extensive. So there's going to be a fight--
And I really didn't want to even give them the numbers for that fight. I couldn't get it to go without serious casualties, not even if Tango's team did decide to join us. I just couldn't.
--and a fight is always a volatile affair, Dandelion said evenly, then poked at Aspen, who was done with their initial assessment and was now staring at the malware-hosting drone calmly lounging in one of ART's chairs.
(You could easily tell Ghostwheel from ART when it was in control of a drone, because Ghostwheel tended to twine itself around furniture in the least-human manner it possibly could. Right now it had its tendrils tightly wound through the chair's arms, the drone's head swaying back and forth as it followed the discussion.)
Aspen didn't respond, and Dandelion sighed and shook them a little more forcefully.
Aspen. Stop staring. We need your assessment.
Right, Aspen shook themselves a little. The problem is, the Friends are correct. We all do need Encephalon down, and we have two main pathways through which we can do it. We can help the Friends scuttle the Palladion and get away with minimal chances of being caught, victims of the disaster as much as anyone on the station. We can run a rescue effort, even. Help get most of the civilians out, leverage this into a scandal--
They flicked a glance at Dandelion.
--and have a great deal of bystander blood on all of our hands, she concluded. You can stop looking at me like that, Aspen; I will not be standing for this plan, either. I am no longer a Friend, and I will vastly prefer us taking a risk together rather than sacrificing both them and so many people. However, it does seem to be the only secure option available to the Friends if we do not come to an agreement.
And they're using that to push for the more dangerous joint plan, I said. Dandelion, please do something to your dumbass humans that we don't actually have to restrain them, do the fucking bare minimum and leave.
She hummed. Can we pull off an infiltration attempt on our own?
Fuck no. But also I can't overstate how much scuttling the spire on their own isn't the secure option the Friends are presenting it as. Ilona still has the logs of their first infiltration attempt, and they went down so fucking easily that time. If they get Tango and its team on board they might be able to do it, but Ghostwheel will fucking fry your humans if they so much as try to pull the newly-freed MIs into a plan that kills them.
They would not want to do that unless there were absolutely no other options, Dandelion said. Involving rescuees in such an immediately dangerous way would normally be against the Friends' principles.
Normally. And you keep saying these Friends aren't normal, Aspen replied dryly. Not your normal, anyway.
Also I'm pretty sure the Friends and Tango's group have designated each other as clients. Even if they don't committ to a joint operation together, they will try to rescue the fuck out of each other if we try to restrain any one group, and that's a complication we just don't need, I added.
(Yes, Ghostwheel had been right. It was smug about it every time we ran across each other, so I just let it work on refining our feed-based attack options together with Gurathin and Iceblink and left it the fuck alone otherwise. And if it got too smug, I played that one episode, and it would disappear as quickly as ART's drone body let it, which was usually pretty quick.)
Getting the victims out would be ideal, Dandelion said wistfully. But can we do it without starting a war?
Even if we present ourselves as concerned bystanders who just got wind of this while passing through the station, you can count on Encephalon taking note of everyone getting involved and launching an investigation into them, Aspen replied. So not unless the lawyers pull off a miracle and have everyone else turn on Encephalon before it can rally its networks.
The simple denial plan we started this round of negotiations with does seem to be the best possible compromise, ART said. We attack during the conference, as Encephalon's attention will be devoted elsewhere and it is unlikely they will be willing to release Medusa outright with so many important guests on board. We help the Friends infiltrate by suppressing Medusa and running interference against human and construct security. They euthanize the test subjects and delete the research material, which will be much faster than an extraction, and then slip out while we provide an exit point. It is what the PSUMNT would have done.
I knew it wanted that option, because it was the one with the least likelyhood of PSUMNT being implicated in the whole scenario, because ART's crew would be busy making sympathetic noises at Encephalon, participating in the search for the terrorists and mucking it up as much as possible from the inside. But also this was a mission that explicitly had "kill a bunch of humans that are being horribly experimented on as its goal", and I knew ART, for all of its posturing, had never run a mission like that. Or even a "kill a bunch of humans for reasons" mission generally.
I didn't want it to have to run that kind of mission. Ever.
(And I had to keep backburnering the queasy feeling risk assessment gave me about this one. Fuck you, risk assessment, you're wrong. You're always so fucking wrong. Shut up.)
I checked the Argument Lounge feed and things were heating up again, and Aspen was asking ART questions about the middle-road plan that I didn't want to think about anymore, so I poked Dandelion and asked, How long until you dock? I want to get a read on your captains, too.
Not long. But you won't like the options we've been able to think of, either.
Reed and Cypress didn't make the argument that much worse, like I was afraid. But they didn't even agree with each other. Reed was in favor of committing to an operation, whichever operation we found viable in the end, while Cypress, who had no experience in this kind of mission at all, proposed sticking to the original plan--learning as much as we could unnoticed and getting out to shore up our defenses.
That is, for going back to hoping Encephalon would be successful enough with its fucked up project to have bigger fauna to fry than a bunch of non-aligned polities. Which Reed pointed out, which almost started the entire argument all over again.
But it didn't. Because Aspen asked me for an analysis, which I had ready because the thing they wanted to know had been bothering me too, then requested one of ART's speakers once they'd worked through it. They waited for a brief pause and said, "Before we get into the next round of details, I have a question. For Ghostwheel."
The malware raised its head and I could tell it was grinning. "Yeah, ship?"
"What makes you think I have one?"
"You've been quiet this entire time."
"Maybe I just enjoy squabbling humans, ship. Ever consider that?"
"For three days in a row?"
"Maybe I really enjoy squabbling humans. They're kind of endearing like this: beating their head against the box of their programming, as controlled by it as any MI. As our host ship likes to say, it's delectable."
"It's not like you've been able to suggest a better option," Ratthi growled.
(Yeah. Ratthi, growling. And Tarik looking at him with a mix of sympathy and actual wariness. That's how far this whole thing had gotten.)
"Only because none of you would have listened! But who knows? Maybe you've had enough bumping against your own walls by now to hear that there's an option that gets us into the Palladion with ample time before the conference, let us have run of their special little project, and removes suspicion from all involved polities, to boot?"
Seth folded his hands at the drone. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, Ghostwheel."
The malware chuckled. "Oh, it's not too good to be true, believe me. You're going to hate it. But it'll be better than anything you've got."
"We are not corporates, Mg. Ghostwheel," Mensah said tiredly. "You don't need to give us the full sales pitch. Kindly lay out your plan."
"Happily, Dr. Mensah! The plan is very simple." Ghostwheel raised two of its arms to point at Mensah and Seth. "You, and you, are going to be upstanding players of the corporate game." Another arm pointed at the Friends. "And you are going to be the hapless shmucks whose brains are being sold for fun and profit."
