Path of the Fury

Chapter Fourteen

"My remotes could do that a lot faster."

"I know they could, Megarea." Alicia had developed the habit of speaking aloud to her electronic half—and Tisiphone—more often than not. Not because she had to, but because the sound of even her own voice was welcome against the silence. She wasn't precisely lonely with two other people to "talk" to, yet too much quiet left an eerie, empty sensation in her bones. "But I prefer to do this myself, if I'm going to be wearing it."

"Indeed," Tisiphone put in, "I have never known a warrior who truly cared to have another tend to his personal weapons."

"I know that," the AI huffed, "but they're my personal weapons, too, in a sense. And I want to know they're in perfect shape if she needs them."

"Which is why you're watching me like a hawk, dear," Alicia said, gri

The AI and the Fury had come to a far better mutual understanding than she'd originally hoped—indeed, it was Tisiphone who'd suggested the perfect (and, she thought, inevitable, under the circumstances) name for the AI—but there was a tartness at its heart. Megarea remained wary of the Fury, mindful of the way she'd imposed control on Alicia during their escape and suspicious of her ultimate plans, and Tisiphone knew it. Knew it and was wise enough to accept it, if a bit resentfully. Fortunately, prolonged exposure to a human personality had waked something approaching a genuine sense of humor in the compulsive Fury. She wasn't immune to the irony of the situation, and Alicia more than suspected that both of them rather enjoyed sniping at one another—and she knew each was jealous of the other's relationship with her.

"And it's a good thing I am watching you, Alley. You're overloading that tank. You'll jam the ammo chute if you put in that many rounds."

"I was doing this before you were a gleam in your programmer's eyes, Megarea. Watch."

Long fingers manipulated the belt of twenty-millimeter caseless with effortless familiarity, rucking it up into the ammunition tank behind her combat armor's right pauldron. She wasn't surprised by Megarea's warning—she'd heard it from every recruit she'd ever checked out on field maintenance. Like the computer, they were fresh from total submersion in The Book and hadn't learned the tricks only experience could teach. Now she doubled the linkless belt neatly and cheated the last few centimeters into place with an adroit twist of the wrist and a peculiar little lifting motion that slid it up into the void created by a few minutes' work with a cutting torch.

"See? That upper brace is structurally redundant; taking it out makes room for another forty rounds—as we've told the design people for years."

"Oh. That's a neat trick, Alley. Why isn't it in the manual?"

"Because we old sweats like to reserve a few tricks to impress the newbies. Part of the mystique that makes them listen to us in the field."

"And it is listening which allows a young warrior to become an old one. That much, at least, has not changed, I see."

"Neither has the fact that some of them never live long enough to figure that out, unfortunately." Alicia sighed and closed the ammo tank.

She moved down the checklist to the servo mech that swung her "rifle" in and out of firing position. There'd been a sticky hesitation in the power train when she'd first uncrated the armor, and isolating the fault had been slow, laborious, and irritating as hell. Now she watched it perform with smooth, snake-quick precision and beamed.

It was a tremendous help to be able to watch it in all dimensions at once, too. She'd taken days to get used to the odd, double-perspective vision which had become the norm within her new ship, but once she had, she'd found it surprisingly useful. The perpetual, unbreakable link between herself and the computer meant she saw things not only through her eyes but through the ship's internal sensors, as well. It was better than 360° vision. It showed her all sides of everything about her, and she no longer lived merely behind her eyes. Instead, she saw herself as one shape and form among many—a shape she maneuvered through and around the shapes about it as if in some complex yet soothing coordination exercise.

Learning to navigate with that sort of omniperceptive view had been an u

Indeed, she often found herself smiling as she recalled her earlier panic. To think she'd been terrified of what the alpha link might do to her! She'd been afraid it would change her, depreciate her into a mere appendage of the computer, yet it was no such thing. She'd become not less but ever so much more, for she'd acquired confidante, sister, daughter, protector, and mentor in one. Megarea was all of those, yet Alicia had given even more to the AI. She'd given it life itself, the human qualities no cyber synth AI could ever know. In every sense that mattered, she was Megarea's mother, and she and Megarea were far more than the sum of their parts.

Yet for all that, she suspected her alpha synth link wasn't what the cyberneticists and psych types had had in mind, and Megarea agreed with her. It could hardly help being ... different with Tisiphone involved, she supposed. Megarea had never impressed before, and Alicia couldn't provide the information a trained alpha synth candidate would have possessed, so they couldn't be certain, but everything in Megarea's data base suggested that the fusion should have been still closer. That they should have been one personality, not two entities, however close, with the same personality.

All in all, Alicia rather thought both of them preferred what they'd gotten to a "proper" linkage. There was more room for growth and expansion in this rich, bipolar existence. Already she and her electronic offspring were developing tiny differences, delicately divergent traits, and that was good. It detracted nothing from their ability to think as one, yet it offered a synthesis. As she understood the nature of the "proper" link, human and AI should have come to a single, shared conclusion from shared data, and so she and Megarea often did. But sometimes they didn't, and she'd discovered there were advantages in having two different "right" answers, for comparing them produced a final solution better than either had devised alone far more frequently than not.

She returned the rifle to rest and shut down the servos, then turned to drag out the testing harness, but Megarea had anticipated her. A silent repair unit hovered beside her on its countergrav to extend the co

"Go ahead and set up for a sensor diagnostic, would you?"

"Already done," Megarea replied with a certain complacency Alicia knew was directed at Tisiphone.

"Even Achilles allowed servants to pass him his whet stone," the Fury riposted so deflatingly Alicia chuckled. Megarea opted for lordly silence.

Alicia made the last co

But Alicia had something better. Tisiphone still couldn't access Megarea's personality center without the AI's permission (and, Alicia knew, Megarea watched her like a hawk whenever she was allowed inside), but she formed a sort of conduit between her and Alicia. It was, Alicia suspected, something very like telepathy, and all the more valuable because she didn't even have to ask Tisiphone to maintain the link. It was as if having once been established the immaterial co

Whatever it was, it wasn't something human science was prepared to explain just yet, for Megarea's tests had conclusively demonstrated that it operated at more than light-speed. Indeed, if the AI's conclusions were accurate, there was no transmission delay at all. They had no idea how great its range might be, but it looked as if she and Megarea would be able to communicate instantaneously over whatever range it had.

The diagnostic hardware a