Page 17

17

R ian wakes up slowly, groggy. His gaze focuses on me, and a little smile carves into his lips. Oh, that does something to my heart. Oh, shit. This is going to be trouble.

His eyes widen, and he sits up in the bed, head whipping around.

“Where the fuck am I?” he asks. Realization zips through him like an electric shock. “Am I on your ship?” He’s confused but not panicked, not yet. He knows—he must know—that my ship was docked not more than an hour away from the Museum of Intergalactic History. Whatever scheduled agenda he’s got running through his head, he’s probably figuring out how he many bullet points he can still cross off, depending on how long he was passed out.

“Welcome to the illustrious Glory, ” I start, but he cuts me off.

“Am I in your bed?”

“You don’t have to sound so ungrateful about it,” I grumble. “There is only one bed on this ship.”

“Did we— What did we do?” There’s a manic edge to his voice now. He’s taking it all in—the narrow bed, his jacket crumpled on the floor, my change in clothes from an expensive gown to a serviceable (and comfortable) shirt and trousers.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “You snored through everything exciting, and I don’t take advantage of drunk people. We got back to the docking bay, and you pretty much immediately just fell asleep. You’re welcome, by the way. I slept in the cockpit.”

Disorientation wars with panic inside him, that much is clear, but he also seems pretty relieved that he’s safe and didn’t do anything he’d regret. Which, fair. I’m going to make him work a little harder than this before I let him regret anything he’d do with me. Regrets are more fun when the choices they derive from are made intentionally.

“Wait, drunk?” Rian asks. Those razor eyes are wide awake now. “I wasn’t drunk.”

“Drunk on love?” I suggest.

“What did you do?” Accusation weighs his words down.

“Me?” If I had pearls, I’d clutch them.

“Ada,” he says as he swings his legs over the side of the bed. Feet on the cold metal floor, grounding him, forcing him to focus, to wake up, to realize.

I roll my eyes and tap my lips with my finger. I watch as he looks at my lips, his gaze softening for just a moment. He remembers our kisses.

The first one, when Phoebe noted that no color came off on his skin.

His face pales.

The second one, with red so vivid that even Strom Fetor commented on it.

I reach in my pocket and grab the lip gloss. “Color seal to protect me from the effects,” I say, tossing the tube to him.

He pulls out the wand, looking at the goopy contents. There’s nothing in them to indicate that they’re laced with a Gliese-Earth native plant commonly called “drunk sticks.” The plant looks like a cross between aloe vera and snake plants: thick green stalks that point straight up. Squish the innards and rub them on your skin, and you become highly suggestible. Ingest even a little and you’re walking loopy, cross-eyed and totally blackout drunk for several hours.

Rian’s brow creases as he pulls the applicator out and sniffs the lip gloss. “Drunk sticks?” he guesses.

“Drunk sticks,” I confirm.

“Ada, this shit’s illegal,” Rian says, firmly screwing the tube shut and tossing it back to me.

“Oh dear,” I say flatly. “Illegal. Oh no.”

Rian stands up, shaking his head. “What’s even your end game with this? Fuck me, I thought you were coming to the gala to steal something and—”

“I did,” I say. “I came to steal you.”

He shoots me an exasperated look. You know, it’s nice to see the facade breaking. I didn’t like the way Rian acted at the party, all formal, corsage pinned down with an allegory and jacket buttoned up tight. But now he’s letting his emotions show, even if his emotions are one hundred percent pissed off at me.

“You didn’t have to stage such an elaborate...fiasco just to talk to me in private.”

“ Fiasco , nice.”

“As you have pointed out many times ,” he adds through clenched teeth, “what you did at Roundabout wasn’t technically illegal.”

The best kind of legal: technical.

“You could have literally walked into my office and told me anything. Hell, you could have—”

He stops there, but I can see what he almost said. I could have approached him outside the office. I could be someone who has something more with him than business.

“Yes, but...” I say, trailing off, still half-thinking about what a talk with Rian White outside the office might be, wondering if he envisions a classy bar with expensive wine or an evening walk with twinkling city lights, or maybe his home. His home, like I’ve shown him mine. I would have been more polite about it, though. But I was raised better than he was; I try not to hold that against him.

“Anyway,” I say, standing up. “Would you like a snack?”

“No!” Rian bellows. “I want to know what the fuck is going on!”

“Okay, fine.” I roll my eyes again. “But I’m going to explain with a snack.”

I head to the door, and Rian trudges behind me. I can hear him muttering under his breath, “The damn strawberries.” I couldn’t risk eating anything when I had the gloss on my lips. Our kiss was sloppy enough to make me reckless, but I was able to avoid ingesting any or getting much direct-skin contact from the sticky stuff.

Glory doesn’t have a huge mess hall; it’s mostly just a room with a reheater, a tank of recycler worms, and crates of ready-eats. And, of course, hot sauce on the table. “Yellow or red?” I ask, grabbing two of the boxes of ready-eats.

Rian makes a face that is, frankly, rude, because at least I’ve offered him some variety. I peel back the foil top of a red box and slurp some down. It’s not exactly charity-gala fare, but it’s better than the product of recycler worms, and the hot sauce perks me up a little.

“All right, what was so important that you had to kidnap me?” he asks.

“You’re not a child.”

“What?”

“Kidnapping. Napping kids. You’re not a kid,” I point out. Rian heaves a sigh from the very depths of his soul, so I figure I should let this one go. “Okay, fine. This all circles back to the Roundabout , which is ironic if you consider the name of that ship—”

“Ada.”

“So, you mentioned before that while I stole the plans and the nanobot prototype from the salvage, I only delayed the government’s process of creating them.”

Rian nods.

I gulp down a little more of the red stuff. It has a label identifying it as beef replacement, and the picture on the crumpled-up foil shows a steak dinner, but this is nothing like that. I would have stocked up on better food, but even with the advance in funds on this job, I’m skint. “Did it not occur to you that I wasn’t trying to stop the nanobot production?”

Rian’s face crinkles as he processes that.

“Well, I mean, I wasn’t trying to do anything but the job I was paid for,” I continue. “But they knew better than to assume one theft would stop the whole machine of the government. The bill, as you pointed out, was passed. The Goliath was lumbering into motion.”

“Then why—”

“For fuck’s sake, Rian, just because you’re good doesn’t mean the government is. The government is a for-profit business that has to make the ledgers go from red to black. The more altruistic you think this nanobot production is, the more I question your intelligence.”

That was a low blow, and I regret it the minute I say it. I could call Rian almost anything and he wouldn’t care, but stupid crosses a line that actually insults him.

Still, though.

I wad up the empty ready-eat package. “Look, while you intended for the nanobots you’re releasing on Earth to be beneficial to the climate, you had to hire out Fetor Tech to make them. And Strom Fetor’s not exactly known for his giving nature.”

“I know, but—”

“But you wrapped up this project in lots of legalese, I know; I read the bill.”

“You read—”

“Yeah. The whole thing. I can read,” I say, mildly insulted.

“I know you can. I would never call you dumb.” He pauses, weighing his words. “In either sense of the word.”

Fair. Also, a pointed blow against my insult. “Anyway, I know you think you safeguarded the whole thing. But you may know how to write a proposal or, I don’t know, a memo, whatever you do all day, but you know jack shit about code.”

He opens his mouth to protest, but he remembers the one bad mark on my public profile—I got pinned for hacking the European ad system to deliver anti-government messaging. And, more recently, I read the code from the Jarra hacking in to the hover stage they’d set for a crash landing.

“Strom Fetor isn’t a trillionaire because he gives things away, even for the government label.”

“Of course not,” Rian says, exasperated. “He was paid.”

I snort. “Anyway, I looked at the code. I mean, my client did, too, but I wasn’t going to just hand it over without looking at it myself. Planned obsolescence.”

Rian’s brow wrinkles in confusion, and even though I know he knows what those words mean, they’re so far removed from the context of the illusion he’s created around this program he can’t figure it out.

“Planned obsolescence,” I say again. “The nanobots are coded to malfunction after a certain threshold.”

“Well, obviously, they can’t work forever but—”

“Planned,” I repeat more emphatically. “Planned. They will , without a doubt, stop working the way you want them to, and they’ll start working the way Strom Fetor wants them to. See, it’s like this.” I don’t have fancy holographics to illustrate my point, so I use my hands. “The nanobots are designed to go into Earth’s water system, strip out the pollutants. It’s actually a really clever design.”

Rian nods; he knows all this. The microscopic bots are developed like a virus, attaching themselves to H 2 O and attacking microplastics, carbon, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and anything else that’s negatively impacting the water cycle. It compartmentalizes the microscopic pollutant agents and eventually coalesces them into a slime-like matter that can easily be picked up by cleaner drones and then separated in recycling units. Like a virus, the nanobots will continue with a single-minded goal. And like a virus, it replicates itself.

Once released, it will never be able to be contained again.

Except, within a few years, they’ll start hurting the environment rather than helping. It took some digging, but I found the code systemically embedded into the program, designed to be countered by more nanobots. Code that would require physical updates, a second program, just like this one.

The fact that this program happened in the first place is a marvel. A testament to people like Rian, people dedicated to fighting the good fight, getting bills passed, and scrounging up the funding needed for them to happen.

It’s rare that sort of thing happens.

“Did you see the protest?” I ask him. Rian’s still processing the information I gave him, the code I showed him on my data pad.

It takes him a moment to connect the thought. “The protestors outside the gala? They were paid by Strom, for the story.”

“But the sentiment is real,” I say. “Didn’t you hear all the people who agreed with it? You’re from Rigel-Earth; what do your parents think of the aid tax?”

His lips go hard, a thin white line around the pink.

“Everyone’s fine with saving Earth as a concept, but when it comes to taxes, to action, to money?” I shake my head.

“We can reprogram the bots,” Rian says darkly. “We can hire new outside sources to analyze the code and ensure they’re not designed to fail.”

“In a week?” Because that was the point of Strom Fetor’s speech tonight, the grand closing ceremony of the gala. To announce to the galaxy that this was in motion, that it would not be stopped.

Pausing now would show the entire galaxy that Earth can’t be saved. It jeopardizes the whole program; it gives protestors the footing they need to challenge it. It’s not out of the question that they simply shut it down, but it’s also not guaranteed that climate cleaners will recover if there’s a public mark of shame on them.

Rian looks up at me, and I see panic in his eyes for a second time. First, it was because he thought he’d slept with me while blackout drunk. He thought he’d made a mistake. Now?

Now he knows he made a mistake with the nanobots, and he knows there’s no time to fix it.

“Fortunately,” I say, beaming at him, “I have a plan.”