Chapter Forty-Five Sadie
Forty-Five
Sadie
When Arturo called the next time, I leaned to the side and pressed the button to reply. “Nedder?” Arturo called. “Sentry? This is Amphi. Do you copy?”
“That’s our flightleader,” I said to Ivy. “The one that crashed through the wall. Can I answer him? He hasn’t heard yet about how you protected us. I think he should know.”
“Do you think it will change anything?” Ivy said. “It’s so hard for you humans to comprehend my benevolence.”
“Arturo is all about benevolence,” Nedd said. “It’s like his favorite thing.”
Arturo was quiet, so I hoped he could hear us and had wisely decided to listen in.
“Talk to him while you can,” Ivy said cheerfully. “It’s the last you’ll speak to anyone for a long while.”
Stars, that was terrifying. “Amphi,” I said, “we’re here with Ivy, the AI who’s been building a human army and cryogenically freezing them. She’d like to tell you all about it, but she’s worried you won’t be suitably impressed.”
There was a beat of silence, and I worried I hadn’t gotten my radio turned on after all, but then Arturo responded. “You’ve also got an impressive flight of pilots out here.” The sound of destructor fire blasted over the radio. Oh, stars. He was in combat. “Any chance you could call them off?”
Ivy laughed. It was an unnatural sound, more like someone pretending to laugh than actual laughter. “I have more than just one flight of pilots,” she said.
I supposed this was our chance to learn exactly what she’d amassed out there. “You have…two flights?” I asked.
“Seven thousand pilots,” Ivy said. “Five armies. Two navies. A few battalions of marksmen, four hundred elite strike forces, and another hundred ballistics experts. You need fewer of them, since they don’t carry the bombs in person.
Less messy that way. One hundred four cytonics of various specialties.
And forty-five tacticians. Better not to have too many of them awake at one time, as they get in each other’s way, but it’s important to have a few redundancies. ”
That sounded like a nightmare. The Superiority had suppressed violence, which was good on the surface, but it left us unprepared to defend against an enemy like this as a united galactic front. Scud, I wasn’t even sure we were a united galactic front yet, even if we did have the firepower.
“You hearing this, Amphi?” I asked. “Are you impressed yet?”
More shooting came over the radio. “Very impressed!” Arturo said. “Let me know where you are so I can come tell Ivy how impressed I am in person.”
For all her supposed brilliance, Ivy hadn’t noticed that I’d turned off the flow of gas into the unit. I stole a glance down at Nedd’s panel. He had it angled just right and was easing the grate against the side of his boot, sliding it up against the wire connections.
“We’re back in the facility where you took out the wall!” I said. “You kind of abandoned us here, sir.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Arturo said. “We’ve had a little bit of excitement up here.”
“It’s always fascinating what you humans find exciting,” Ivy said. “And by fascinating I mean incredibly dull.”
Nedd eased the grate panel back and forth, back and forth. I could see the wires shifting, though the power to the unit remained on.
More destructor fire sounded over the radio. “This planet we’re on,” Amphi said. “It’s Earth.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?” I said.
“This place. It’s Earth, Sentry. You’re on Earth right now.”
That didn’t seem right. If I were on Earth, I would know it, wouldn’t I? Though I’d never been on Earth, and neither had my parents, or my grandparents. No one had seen it for a hundred years. How would I know it from anyplace else?
“We’re in the nowhere,” I said, trying to still my body’s shaking, to concentrate on the words, meditate on the words, be the words. Oh, stars. No wonder no one had been able to find it, not for centuries. “Earth is in the nowhere?”
“Yes,” Arturo said. “And it looks like it took some damage coming in. Several continents have been destroyed.”
“You’re welcome,” Ivy said.
“We’re welcome?” I said, letting my rising hysteria bleed into my voice. “Is that how you saved us? Did you suck Earth into the nowhere?”
“You’re welcome!” Ivy said again.
“Yeah, thanks,” Nedd said. I could hear the shock and panic behind his words. “Did Amphi just say half of it was destroyed?”
“Amphi is incorrect,” Ivy said. “None of Earth was destroyed. Parts of it were simply propelled into the riftwake above the surface and around the planet Blightfall.”
Stars, so that was the debris field we’d flown through. “It was turned into a mass of floating rocks!” I said. “That seems pretty destroyed to me.”
“Your definition is dubious,” Ivy said. “But even if we accept it, only twenty-three and three-tenths percent of the surface of Earth was destroyed in its transition from the somewhere to the nowhere. So it would be more correct to say that less than one-quarter of Earth was destroyed when I saved it, if you insist on using inflammatory terms and inexact generalities.”
“Scudding hell,” Arturo said. “Saved it from what?”
“From the amassing armies of the Superiority during the Third Human War,” Ivy said. “They were going to destroy you, once and for all. And I saved you.”
Our Defiant ancestors had already left Earth before that attack, so we hadn’t personally been saved by whatever Ivy had done.
The only outcome I knew was that Earth had disappeared, never to be found no matter how many scientists searched for evidence of it.
Many had theorized it had been entirely destroyed.
It was here all along, in the nowhere.
“Like hell you did,” Nedd said, and he jammed his foot to the side, as hard as he could against his restraints, sending the corner of the grate jabbing into the wire connections.
The humming noise immediately ceased. The light-line restraints winked out, and my hands and feet were suddenly free. They still tingled slightly, but I threw myself forward against the unit’s glass doors.
The doors held tight. Ivy’s avatar smirked at me, though she didn’t comment, as if our disabling of her cryogenic freezer was beneath her notice.
“If my creators could not escape from me,” Ivy said, “neither will you.”
Stars, I hoped she was wrong about that. Nedd slumped against the back of the unit behind me, while I beat my fists against the glass. It was still scudding cold in here, and we were still trapped.
“Your creators really asked you to do this?” I said. “They told you to, what, save Earth? And they weren’t specific about how you should do it?”
“Why should they have been specific?” Ivy asked. “They knew I was smarter than they could ever hope to be. They knew I would be able to calculate the exact odds of Earth’s survival and figure out the best possible way to save it.”
“The best possible way?” Nedd asked. “You said it destroyed a quarter of the planet!”
“Twenty-three and three-tenths percent! This is why they left the decision to me. Humans are so emotional. So unwilling to accept losses, to accept the cost of survival. I was designed to calculate those risks, to make that decision so you wouldn’t have to!
My math was impeccable, my judgment beyond reproach.
This was absolutely the very best outcome for Earth given the unchangeable parameters.
None of you were willing to make the call.
You lack courage! And then when you learn how I saved you, do you thank me? ”
“We did, in fact,” Nedd said.
“No!” Ivy said. “All you worry about is the damage and the deaths.”
So many deaths. Stars, with that much of the planet destroyed, how many could have survived? Physics worked differently in the nowhere, but I was pretty sure people could still die from environmental conditions, or, you know, a quarter of their planet exploding.
They’d asked her to save Earth. But what about its people?
“This facility is staffed by varvax,” I said. “Not humans. Is that because…Ivy, when you saved Earth, how many humans survived?”
Ivy, for the first time since she’d revealed herself to us, was completely silent.