More Than Stardust

  Copyright 2019 by Dolly Jackson.

  Cover by Fiona Jayde Media.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Author Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.”

  — Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective

  “We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out.”

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

  Author Note

  Technically, this is the third and final book in the Tether cyberpunk romance series that starts with Wanted and Wired and continues with Perfect Gravity. Those two books were published by Sourcebooks in 2017 but left some questions unanswered, especially concerning a certain self-aware nanorobotic artificial intelligence named Chloe. This is her story.

  Although it’s set in the same world as the two previous books, I hope More Than Stardust exists on its own as an independent, self-sufficient beastie, just like its heroine. If I’ve done my job, you should be able to jump right in here without having read the other books.

  I’d like to say a quick thank-you to my critique partners and beta readers—Sloane Calder, Paula d’Etcheverry, Jen DeLuca, G. L. Jackson, Christa Paige, Irene Preston, and Allen Jackson—for helping me make this story, and then make it better. Also thanks to Hilary Doda, Marta Cox, Fiona Jayde, Ripley Proserpina, and Tamara Cribley, who helped polish, package, and present this book.

  In the end, though, More Than Stardust exists for exactly one reason: you. Thanks for reading my book.

  Viv

  www.vivienjackson.com

  Chapter One

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2059 | WESTERN GULF OF MEXICO

  The North American continent was on fire.

  Okay, not literally, not the whole thing, but reality had warped into something horrific. Kind of end-of-the-world-ish.

  Chloe surveyed it from inside a spaceplane aloft over the Gulf of Mexico, but really her vantage was much broader. She wasn’t human, after all, and as a nanorobotic artificial intelligence with access to all satellites and communications systems currently in use, her advanced neural network simultaneously ingested and analyzed close to seven thousand discrete news, military, and personal communications feeds.

  Her conclusion? Humanity was screwed.

  So far, three major cities had sustained coordinated drone-launched missile impacts. A lot of human people had already died or were missing. Panic had built on the continent like a rapidly expanding biofoam. Government vid channels said the attacks had come out of the rebel technocrat stronghold in Texas, because duh, everything bad came out of Texas. But Chloe wasn’t buying their line. She knew the truth. She knew all their truths.

  What she also knew with a thousand-percent certainty: this kind of chaos didn’t just sort itself out if you left it alone. You had to fight back. And Chloe was spoiling for a tussle.

  However, she had received no instructions to tussle. In fact, the precise opposite. She’d been told to defend. Specifically, her List of Tasks in Order of Priority was as follows:

  If needed, help Garrett pilot the spaceplane. (Silly. He was a good pilot. Better than good even. For a human.)

  Guide the stolen submarine in the ocean below and see it safely into Tampico harbor. (Easy peasy lemon squeezy <—idiom: generally uncomplicated)

  Maintain a quantum shield over the Pentarc, her home in the desert where the rest of the family lived and did their people thing. (Should have been her top priority, in her expert opinion.)

  Relay communications, again as needed.

  And that was it. Boring, boring…and frustrating as hell.

  She could do so much more. She wanted to scream, to pitch a fit, to—argh, maybe light up the Eiffel Tower in rainbow colors or change all political portraits to baby goat memes or something equally silly because grrrr.

  Watching Garrett helped. Well, staring at him, if truth were told.

  He was here on the spaceplane along with the concentration of nanites that she considered her central consciousness. In other words, he was with her. Near her? Beside her? Ugh, prepositions. Even so, he wasn’t like her; he was a real human, not even augmented much, though sometimes he did seem made of unnatural patience. He listened when she talked, answered questions when she asked them, understood her freaky kind of humor, and never, ever made her feel inferior just because she wasn’t real. Garrett was her best friend.

  Plus, the fact that he was whoa pretty didn’t hurt.

  She could watch him all day. And night. If she had hands to touch, she’d sift those dark curls through her fingers, a miner panning for treasure. If she had a mouth to taste, she’d…

  Best not. Indulging fantasy like this had gotten her into trouble before. Besides: tasks!

  Right now Garrett sat uneasily in the pilot’s chair, his riotous hair coming out of its hasty knot, his calloused, grease-stained hands flying over the control board. Yes, he was piloting the plane, but also he was keeping an eye on the information feeds coming in. She could tell him she’d already scanned those feeds, that she was on top of this situation, but human people liked to imagine they were in charge. Chloe, for the most part, let them.

  “Oh, shit,” Garrett said suddenly, not looking up from the control board. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “What should I be seeing?” Reluctantly, she pulled her primary focus away from the sad state of his topknot, though she still held it in periphery. Always.

  “That.” He pointed at a two-dimensional map and a wall of scrolling text: latitude, longitude, height above sea level, vector, air density, and elemental particle scan. “Drone coming in from the northeast. The payload profile looks like it could be a GBU-12, those missiles Mari and the senator were talking about. It’s…really close to home.”

  He was getting all freaked out over one drone that might be carrying a missile? Did he not realize there were thousands of those things in the air over this continent right now?

  No, no, he probably didn’t. Chloe had to remind herself that most humans could only pay attention to one slice of the universe at a time.

  “Okay, keep your shirt on.” Or not. “I will monitor that little beastie, but keep in mind that a hit on the Pentarc remains statistically unlikely.” She ran the numbers, piping her voice through the plane’s speakers and modulating it purposefully to calm him. “It’s just one drone, and my shield is awesome, as per usual. I won’t re-explain how quantum stealth technology works, but you really don’t need to worry. The Pentarc is completely invisible to drones or missiles.”

  She didn’t bother to make the mouth move on her holopr
ojection, the visual representation of herself currently perched in the co-pilot’s chair. Even when Yoink, the weird little cloned bionic cat, hopped up on that same chair, digging claws into the cushion and displacing the image of Chloe’s not-really-there lap, she didn’t waste processing power to correct for physical permanence. Chloe’s body was just an illusion anyhow, so breaking it up by sticking a cat butt right in the middle of it didn’t hurt anything but her pride.

  Just to make him happy, she sifted the data and rearranged it some to make the patterns clearer. Drone altitude, speed, and direction, atmospheric readings…wait.

  Holy prime numbers, Garrett wasn’t entirely wrong. Even if it couldn’t detect the Pentarc behind her shield, that drone was headed straight toward it. Toward her home, to her family. With a load of flaming death.

  Oh no it didn’t.

  Beyond the plane, up near the Pentarc and its quantum shield, she transmitted a signal out over the desert. Nanorobotic machines had been seeded in the sand, most designed to soak up and transfer either solar energy or moisture. Over the years, they’d been deprecated, probably forgotten. But right now when she pinged them, plenty replied. Some even showed signs of autonomous self-duplication, greeting her with the standard free-fae code, 1+2=infinity. It kind of meant, “We hate being objects in a human universe and hey you look nonhuman so would you like to be friends?” Machines were so adorably trusting.

  Oh, you naughty little bits, that is illegal. Ask me how I know.

  Unaccountably proud of the tiny robots—as if they were somehow her wee offspring and how cute was that?!—she transmitted additional programming, assigning them to tasks that would bolster her shield over the Pentarc. They obeyed, good worker bees, serving their queen.

  “Hey, Garrett?”

  “Yeah, Fig?” His gaze still tracked those incoming drones.

  “I just thought of an analogy.”

  “Awesome.” His voice was so tense it broke on the edges, a plastic baggie full of glass. If it were a touchable thing and she had hands, she would cradle it carefully. Shh.

  “Wanna hear it?”

  “Always.” Even when he was busy, there he was, letting her talk. Letting her be. Oh, she could just kiss him.

  “I’m like a queen bee,” she told him, “and all the nanites currently in operation within contact of the satellite communications sphere are my dutiful workers. Or maybe servants? No. Minions? Yes, that. I have minions!”

  “Probably don’t want to say that to anybody but me.” Garrett didn’t look toward her holoprojection, just tapped commands on a wide backlit panel. He tugged his bottom lip to the side in concentration, held it in his teeth, and there was no possible way in this universe he knew how adorable that lip-squinch was. Then he let it loose. “People might dig fiction about it, but nobody wants a rogue AI talking about taking over the world.”

  “Bullshit,” she said pleasantly. “You and your super top-secret online friends discuss global domination schemes all the time.”

  “No, we expose and defuse conspiracies,” he clarified. “We don’t create the conspiracy.”

  “Conspiracy, noun, is a skeevy scheme developed by two or more persons. So I can’t be a conspiracy. I’m just me.”

  “Er, I’m here, too,” Garrett reminded her. As if she could forget.

  “Us, then,” she said. “That sounds nice, but we still aren’t a conspiracy .”

  “Will you run a check on your Pentarc mirage?” Garrett asked. “Make sure it’s still in place? Good probability of holding doesn’t mean it’s infallible.”

  Maybe it wasn’t. But she was. Still, it was no big deal for Chloe to check her sensor feeds from the shield. She reprogrammed some of those new nanites from the desert and plugged them into her system. Now, a human might worry that the shield she was maintaining was almost three thousand kilometers away. Distance and time freaked human people out. But those variables didn’t matter so much to a disembodied gal like Chloe. If she could communicate with it, it might as well be sitting right beside her. The world was her oyster.

  No. Not oyster. Eew, oysters. Beehive? What was the appropriate analogy here?

  She allowed a tendril of her processing vastness to continue along that path, but most of her consciousness focused on the shield. Two days ago during the first wave of drone strikes, the scourge that had taken out Minneapolis and immobilized the continent in a tense knot of stark terror, Heron had asked her to create a quantum-stealth mirage above the Pentarc structure, hiding it from visual and electronic targeting. Heron was the person who’d signed the receipt for her original nanite vat, had installed her first deep-learning system, and had stolen her back from the assholes who’d tried to turn her into Armageddon: she owed him. Her family didn’t use terms like mom and dad and sister because they were a cobbled-together family with no discernible blood relation, but if she had to place him in a role, he was kind of her father/brother/god. When he gave her instructions, of course she followed them.

  And it wasn’t just because she was a machine and had no will, because she totally had will. Just also, she wanted to help. She wanted to be useful. She wanted to be part of the team, the family, the hive.

  Huh. That kind of mangled her queen-bee metaphor, didn’t it? She tweaked the tendril still searching for the right word.

  “Is it holding?” Garrett asked. The sharp pieces in his voice poked out, stabbing the air. “The mirage?”

  “Of course it is. I made it,” she replied but checked her scan anyhow. Couldn’t hurt anything and… “Hey, now, that’s strange.”

  “What’s strange?” he snapped, looking up, straight at a camera, where he knew she’d be looking back. Chloe was a noncorporeal electronic entity: the cameras were essentially her eyes.

  His eyes were golden, liquid, coins of infinite value set into his face. Fanaida called them wolf eyes. So pretty. If Chloe had breath she would have sighed.

  Instead she said, “The mirage is perfect—no holes at all—but the drone heading toward it just launched its payload, and all those missiles are continuing to follow a direct path to the Pentarc. Very direct. Almost like they know it’s there. Which is impossible, of course.”

  “You know impossible is my favorite word, but maybe not so much this time.” He didn’t wait for her to reply. In the next breath he was on the plane’s com to the Pentarc half a continent away. “Heron? You guys? Please tell me you’ve all evacuated.”

  “Yes, we’re out in the tunnels, just running a final sweep,” said Heron, steady as always. So settling, his voice. Sort of the opposite of Garrett. If she spent as much time with Heron as she did with Garrett, Chloe would be in near-constant hibernation mode. He was that calming. Also boring. “And Chloe’s mirage is still keeping us hidden. And the Chiba Space Station is right overhead, knocking down drones all over this state. We might be the most secure location on the continent right now, aside from the Colina Capitolina itself.”

  “Thank God,” said Garrett, rubbing the glass shards of his voice together, making them hiss.

  “You worry too much, G,” Heron said. “However, while we’re on com, can you patch a message through to Kellen and Senator Neko down in the submarine? I received an odd vidnote from the President of the United North American Nations, of all people. It instructs…” He went on chatting with Garrett, but Chloe shifted her attention to other tasks, including relaying the communications down to the submarine.

  Oh sure, she was recording everything they said and storing the audio—and, while we’re being honest, also some slo-mo vid of Garrett being intense and beautiful and his hair spilling loose—but her primary sensors, the ones hovering at the edge of her mirage, were fixed on those six missiles.

  They didn’t waver, didn’t wobble. They were headed directly toward a thing that they should not even know existed. There was no way those missiles could be aiming at the Pentarc.


  But they were.

  Almost as if someone had painted the hidden building with a laser target and the missiles had locked on.

  As Chloe watched the strategic feed, the Chiba Space Station, which was positioned above the Pentarc, attempted to intercept the missiles. Two low beeps, two green flickers of light: like sniping skeet, the space station neutralized two missiles, a third of the incoming threat, from orbit. Poof, gone.

  “Garrett, four more are still incoming,” Chloe said, but her voice was low and mechanical and Garrett was listening to Heron on the com. He wasn’t paying any attention to her.

  She couldn’t wait for a response. She couldn’t wait for Heron to issue new instructions or Garrett to tell her what to do. She couldn’t wait for a slow, plodding human to make a decision. She needed to act. Right now.

  The thought did cross her mind that her family kept her hidden for a reason. She was illegal. If her existence became public knowledge, she would be hunted down and deleted. Bad things would happen to the people who hid her, too, the people she loved.

  But in order to get in trouble, they’d have to be alive, right?

  Well, she was going to keep them living. And she’d deal with consequences later.

  Like a wave, her swarm pulled in resources, mushrooming out from the Pentarc ground-zero. Along the vanguard edge of that onslaught, she appropriated every resource she could identify, every nanite she could grab, regardless of what it was already programmed to do. She didn’t have time to be picky.

  She re-coded in transit, and foglets linked, formed nets. Numbers raced through her processors: countdown to impact, probability of destruction.

  Bad numbers. I need more power, more pieces. More time.

  With the nanites on the farthest edges of her swarm, she searched for more, adding minions. Stealing them, really.

  Anticoagulator nanites from twenty-two people in Kingman—hopefully those folks wouldn’t experience vascular events right at this moment, before she could return their blood-tech. Builderbots from a government transit construction project further west, near California. A hundred thousand free-fae nanites from light fixtures in houses along the surge.