*
/// You okay? ///
/Huh?/ He blinked in the cool twilight of the normal datastream, viewed from a height. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened, or how he had gotten here from where he’d just been.
/// We got it. ///
He blinked again. /Got what?/
/// I guess you really blacked out there.
He left me the key to the database,
and told me how he’d managed the uplink. ///
/Are you serious?/
/// Why wouldn’t I be?
Do you have any objections if I prepare
to make the uplink? ///
/I guess not./ Charlie-One hadn’t even bothered to ask. Bandicut squinted at the fuzzy topography of the datanet. He was still trying to get things back into focus; he couldn’t quite figure out where he was.
/// Let me just check a few things here. ///
The view went black; then he saw orbital projections, and images of spacecraft—moving in orbit, moored at the space station, and waiting on the surface of the dim, icy moon.
/// This is Triton, isn’t it? ///
/Yah, sure. There’s Neptune in the background in that one. Most of these look like monitor images from the Triton orbital station, where the interplanetary shuttles come in./
/// Orbital station?
What all do they have there?
Just big interplanetary shuttles? ///
/Well, they have a number of scout craft, as well. Big ones and little ones./
/// Hm. I see. ///
Bandicut felt drawn to the images. Space—that was where he was supposed to be. He wondered if the quarx could make it possible for him to return someday. Now there were some images of the mining encampment, viewed from orbit with a telescopic lens. There were scars visible on the surface from the mining operations; but on the whole, from space, the human presence looked pretty puny and insignificant. /Does this stuff mean anything in particular to you?/
/// For the future—perhaps.
Right now, I’m just filling gaps in my knowledge. ///
He didn’t answer; while the quarx was scanning data-structures, he was enjoying the chance to see Triton from space. Cooped up in these pressurized cans on the surface, it was easy to forget the big picture. One of the images coming in now was from a monitor in polar orbit around Triton. The ice caps gleamed pinkish white in the augmented light of the distant sun.
/// There’s something I’d like to try, ///
Charlie said, cutting off the images.
/What’d you do that for?/
/// We can go back to it later. ///
A loud buzzing static filled the dataspace. The quarx seemed to be monitoring some sort of communication channel. Or maybe not just monitoring. He seemed to be switching, encoding, and diverting entire streams of data.
/Charlie,/ Bandicut asked nervously, /are you sure you know what you’re doing?/
/// Well, not altogether.
But this seems to be working.
I think . . . there we go! ///
Something flickered deep in his mind, and before he could blink or gasp or do anything to stop it, he felt a sudden eruption of data, bubbling up out of his mind like a great geyser of sparkling vapor, streaming into the ether. He reeled, and caught a breathless glimpse of where it was going. It was shooting in a shimmering stream up to Triton Orbital, riding encoded on one of the regular comm beams. It wasn’t stopping there, but turning and flashing back down to Triton on another beam—deflected, ever so slightly, toward a silent alien receiver hidden in a deep subsurface cavern.
It was working, he realized dizzily. All that information from the ephemeris was streaming to the translator. But it was doing more than that. He heard, dimly, the jangling of alarms somewhere in the local datanet. /Charlie,/ he muttered over the hiss of data, /are you setting off those alarms?/
/// Alarms . . . ? ///
/Yes, alarms. If you can’t shut them off, you’d better stop what you’re doing, fast—and get us out of here, before they trace it to our connection. They are not going to be happy if they find us—/
The alarms cut off abruptly. But instead of relief from the quarx, he sensed great worry. Along with the alarms, the streams of data had cut off. Not just the data from Bandicut’s mind, but all the data.
/// Uh . . . ///
/Oh, shit. Charlie, you didn’t . . . just bring the system down, did you?/
/// Um—
let’s get out of here—okay, John?
I’m not sure what I did . . . ///
Much of the local datanet seemed to have gone dark. Bandicut felt tempted to investigate, to see what the quarx had done, to see if there was any way to undo the damage. But he dared not. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut and willed the connection between him and datanet to part.
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Neptune Crossing Page 30
