the object Zhi was pointing to—a small hexagonal thing made of black glass—and brought it over to the cockpit. The formerly featureless space around Alpha Zero’s control chair was now occupied by a layer of humming infotech, boxes and boards with whirring fans, connected by colored conduits. To Kas’s eye, it had the clunky, primitive look of Eighth- or Ninth-Empire technology, which was presumably why it functioned at all in Earth’s vicious datasphere.
Two long leads stretched out of the collection of boxes and attached to pads just behind Zhi’s ears. Kas raised her eyebrows.
“I didn’t know you had jacks,” she said. “I thought Earth natives couldn’t use them.”
“They’re not like yours,” Zhi said, gesturing to the protective pads covering Kas’s own interface. She’d gotten so used to them she almost forgot they were there. “These are safe-an’-stupid, yeah? Input/output only. No processing for malware to infect, nothing for nits to grab on to.”
“What good is that?” Kas said. “Without processing, how can you image anything?”
Zhi tapped the side of her head. “Wetware. You get the hang of it, yeah?”
“I guess.” Kas leaned over to examine the hardware Zhi had assembled. “So what’s giving you trouble?”
The girl sighed. “OS layers. Whatever’s native in Alpha Zero’s processors got slagged way back, yeah? Don’t know the protocols anyway. So we gotta build a layer out here, override at a lower level, and run it that way. Not as fast, but it should work, but . . .”
“But?”
“Slagging things don’t want to work together.” Zhi glared at the recalcitrant machines. “The old code’s weird, and it ’ent playing nice with the new stuff.”
“I wish I could see it,” Kas said. “I might be able to help.”
It was painful, being this close to a treasure trove like Alpha Zero and not being able to look inside. But connecting to the warbot would mean opening up her own jacks to the malware that lurked in every microscopic wireless router, and unlike Zhi’s, Kas’s wetware was smoothly integrated with the neural lace that had been implanted when she was only a few weeks old. She wasn’t certain what would happen if it crashed and burned, but it wouldn’t be good.
Zhi was giving her an odd look. “What?”
“You really think you could help?”
“Probably.” Kas straightened up. “My specialty is archeocode, exactly the old stuff that’s giving you problems. I’m a scholar, not an engineer, but I imagine I’d be able to contribute something.”
“Wanna try, then?”
“I can’t.” Kas touched her jacks protectively. “You have no idea what it’s like.”
“Have some, yeah?” Zhi was rummaging around on the floor. “You’re not the first off-worlder I’ve worked with. Here.”
She handed over another pair of leads. Examining the ends closely, Kas saw they were pads of the same shielding gel she had on, but with a tiny conduit threaded through the center.
“Even if this protects me from what comes over the air, the machines themselves are dirty,” Kas said. “It’s not safe.”
“You don’t connect direct,” Zhi said. “You connect to me, and I connect to the box, yeah? Then everything’s filtered through my bone-an’-brain, and no nasties can get through.”
Kas’s brow furrowed. It was certainly unlikely that any malware would be able to transcode through human brain signals, but there was still a risk. She’d be more or less handing control of her sensorium over to Zhi—if the girl wanted to spike her nervous system, she probably could.
Zhi grinned. Not Gneisin’s knowing, condescending smile, but something more genuine. She held out the leads. “Trust me, yeah?”
Fuck it. If Zhi wanted to hurt her, she had a knife, she didn’t need any fancy tricks. Kas climbed down into the cockpit, squeezing awkwardly in beside the chair.
“Okay,” she said. “What do I do?”
* * *
It turned out there was a slight complication.
The leads had to run from the box to Zhi’s neck, and the secondary set from there to Kas’s. Neither pair was very long. There wasn’t really room for someone to stand up in the cockpit, not without constantly endangering Zhi’s equipment. Certain inevitable geometries, therefore, meant that the only reasonable position the two of them could occupy was the control chair, one atop the other. Given their relative sizes—Kas had never thought of herself as large, in a world of two-meter-plus first-waves, but she outweighed the slight-framed Zhi by some margin—that meant Kas sat back as far as she could and let Zhi sit on her lap.
It was . . . distracting. Zhi had a tendency to go limp when she was