. . .”
Asala was no longer listening. Across from them, a series of snaps and ticks emanated from the rectangle as it reoriented itself.
“. . . the people on the Vela . . .” Niko was prattling on. The robot slanted itself and then stopped, as if it had attained the view it wanted.
The general’s ubiquitous AIs . . . which she took everywhere with her. Which everyone knew she took everywhere with her.
The AI spiders she’d sent farther afield for intelligence reports, specifically because of the escalating attacks on her life.
Whoever had hacked the general’s ship to mask the mass of the refugees must have also been able to hack her AIs. They would have needed to in order to block surveillance of this cargo area.
An indirect method . . .
“We have to get back to Khayyam.” The words spun out even before the answer had fully unraveled in Asala’s head, certainty slicing her to the marrow. “I know where the next attack is going to come from.”
She scrabbled for her handheld. She had to get word to the general, to the president—
The display fizzed and blinked with a connection error. “Dammit!”
Niko was on their handheld too, presumably also trying to contact the surface. They looked up. “Do you have any signal? I—”
Asala grabbed them by the collar and hauled them after her, back down the corridors, past the watching and whirring AIs. The AIs whose siblings on the surface had been programmed to kill. “You’re good with computers, right?” she ground out as they moved. “Get me a signal, get me something!”
“I’m trying—”
The two of them blasted back through the security checkpoints. The first time they caught sight of a human guard, Asala cornered him and snarled a command about the nearest console interface, but the confused guard only stammered something about the system being down.
“Tell the president it’s an emergency!” Asala shouted over her shoulder, at a dead sprint for the elevator.
When they reached the platform, she yanked Niko inside with her as soon as the heavy carriage doors opened.
“If we’re not too late, you’re going to have a chance to show me just how good at computers you really are,” she said to them. “Start thinking about how to counter-hack the general’s spiders. Because I’d bet all the glow you found on that Khwarizmian that they’re going to attack us as soon as we get there.”
• • •
Asala slapped the first interface she came to on the surface, but that was out too—was the whole damn city down?
After that she made only one stop—an arms locker where she grabbed an electric riot gun. Niko sputtered something political and judgmental about Khayyami riot-control tactics when she did, but Asala paid no attention. An electric spread was the best possible way she could think of to combat dozens of tiny metal bugs.
“Are you sure?” Niko gasped out, trying to keep up with Asala’s grip on their arm down the last darkened hallway. “What if—it still could be something else—”
Asala didn’t stop to explain. Long ago, one of her mentors had told her that her best quality as an investigator was her nose for it. Once everything fit together, once it clicked, then she knew. And this fit, this fit perfectly—two attacks in quick succession, designed to fail. Designed to provoke the general into sending her spiders farther afield until someone could capture one and reprogram it, give it a far more thorough hack than the AIs on the ship, a virus that would spread to the others . . . something deadly . . . after all, it didn’t take much to puncture a woman’s jugular in her sleep.
“Get on your handheld,” Asala ordered Niko. “See if you can find whatever wireless signal the bugs are on—oh fuck.”
They’d rounded the last corner. In front of them, between the oblivious human guards, a steady stream of the general’s spiders marched back under the door into the suite.
“Out of the way!” The startled guards had barely even registered her voice by the time Asala was plowing past them, palming her scan into the door and diving through in one move.
Spiders swarmed over every surface of the anteroom. In the center of the floor, they had begun to coalesce, to climb over one another’s backs in a seething, swirling mass, rising to half the height of a human—higher—
Asala didn’t wait. She let loose with the riot weapon.
Arcing blue lightning crackled into the tower of robots, and the column toppled with the buzzing of an angry horde. Some fell inert to the anteroom floor, but only a few, too few. The others began to swarm and regroup . . .
“Get past them!” Asala shouted to Niko, and slammed across to the opposite wall, her boots catching metal legs—or the metal legs catching at her. She blasted again and again, but it seemed to take the robots less and less time to recover. Behind them, slow on the uptake, the human guards had entered, but they didn’t seem to know where or how to point their weapons.
“General!” Asala yelled. “Let us in!” The inner rooms weren’t airtight—the bugs could be coming in anywhere, windows or cracks or—how many of the damn things were there?
They were climbing into a tower again. A black tornado of chittering metal carapaces. It had no face, but somehow it seemed to turn to them.
The general’s door slid open. Asala plunged through, dragging Niko with her before palming it shut. Through it, she heard the guards shouting in the outer room, desperately fighting to contain the robots.
Then screams.
Then silence, save the whispering chitter of metal on metal.
“Barricade any entry points,” ordered an imperious voice. General Cynwrig, taking control as if she’d known all along that her bugs were to betray her. “Here.” She tossed blankets and plast cushions at Niko and Asala. Then she split open a portable med kit and started spraying field sealant over the sides of the windows.
“Niko, stay on trying to hack them,” Asala countermanded, jamming a blanket into the crack under the door. None too soon; something pulled at it from the other side almost immediately. “Are you getting anywhere?”
“Yes—I can’t stop it in time, the sequence is HPM-encrypted, but I got in and I can see how it’s set. It’s—this is so crude. Why is it so crude?” Niko had gone so pale their face was a moon in the dim light, and they sounded genuinely furious, though at the situation or the bad programming Asala had no idea. “There’s no recognition system. They’re programmed to brute-force kill the person with the remote, or, or whoever last had it, and—and anyone within a radius of her. This could have gotten my father, or anyone; they just want to kill everyone in the area—”
“General,” Asala said.
The general didn’t even hesitate. She slipped a silver cylinder out of a pocket, the very pocket that had held some of her trusted bugs the first time they’d met, and tossed it to Asala.
“What are you doing?” cried Niko.
“My job,” Asala answered, and ran.
• • •
The riot gun got her back through the anteroom, but barely. She had to get somewhere unpopulated and stay there, somewhere the bugs wouldn’t catch anyone else in their target net.
She wouldn’t have to outrun them forever. Once the spiders had taken her bait and followed, Niko and the general would be able to get a message to Ekrem even if they had to do it on foot. Someone on the president’s staff had to know how to disable an AI, and Ekrem would send a squad to find her and take down the bugs. She just had to outlast them.
But she wasn’t