Victoria frowned but she nodded. “I hope this isn’t a mistake.”
“Victoria!” Sal said, in his exaggerated reassuring voice. “Don’t worry. We’re going to make some great TV.”
“That’s what you always say,” she whispered.
“And isn’t it always true?”
The galactic camera settled down on the table, inert. It too would wait.
_____
Bobby called her at 1:23. She had a headache. She had not eaten. She felt strangely lonely and purposeless, sitting the whole morning just waiting, without a single camera on her. But then the call.
“He just pulled up in a car,” Bobby said. His slovenly voice sounded almost excited.
“Did he see you?”
“No, I’m inside the coffee shop. He didn’t even look in this direction. But I got a good zoomed shot of him coming in.”
She snatched the new camera and tossed it into the air. The ball hit apogee and began to fall, but then bounced up and stabilized at the height of her eyes. She hurried into the strange, small office, and the camera followed.
She had opened the door in the morning, and entered the room a dozen times, checking again and again her hiding place. She had tried to change nothing. Nothing lay on the desk top but a sculpture of a horse and a few cryptic pages covered with numbers and what looked, to her, like alien writing. She did not move any of them. Rows of drawers flanked the chair, but she feared that if she opened a drawer, it would be obvious somehow that she had meddled. She resisted the temptation to even touch them.
She pushed the door closed. The camera, hovering by her shoulder, let out a beep.
“Unable to transmit,” it said.
“What?” she hissed.
“Unable to transmit.”
She looked around, wondering what that meant. The door, she realized. When she came in before, she had let the camera follow her. But she had not closed the door. The door must be, what, radio-proof?
“Can you just record and transmit later?” she asked the camera.
“Yes.”
“Well do that then. And shut up. Don’t make any beeps or any noises. Don’t talk. Just be silent till I tell you otherwise.”
The book shelves did not go quite to the wall. A narrow slot between the shelves and the window left enough room for her to slip in and get behind the open curtain. She could see only half of the room from there: the strange cube and the desk. The camera floated at her shoulder, silent and observant.
It seemed to her that an hour passed. Her ears twitched as she waited to hear the outer door to their apartment, but she knew she probably would not be able to hear, through the heavy door to this office, the turn of the apartment’s locks. She wished she had gone to the rest room. Thinking about it made her feel she desperately needed to urinate. Would she have time to sneak out and go now, and then get back in here? She considered it, and even took a step forward, pushing the curtains aside—
A thud against the door made her start and cry out. In the long silence, the sound of a hand on the door came to her as loud, almost violent. She held her breath. She began to sweat. Am I doing something wrong? She wondered. Would Alfonso ever forgive her? This was a mistake. A mistake. She would tell the producer to cut this plot line. They had to delete it.
The camera floated away, moving smoothly upward. She almost snatched it out of the air in surprise. But then it was beyond reach and near the ceiling. Dark, invisible in the corner beside the rigging for the curtains.
The door clicked open. She heard Alfonso step into the room. Her shoulders lifted in shock as steel shutters closed down over the windows with a clang.
“Start transmission,” Alfonso said.
She could not see him, but she could see the strange box in the center of the room. It opened now, a flower unfolding. A metallic cylinder inside began to hum.
And then. And then.
She pressed both her hands over her mouth, horrified by what she saw. A hideous centipede, red and as big as a horse, appeared in the room. It just materialized there.
No: not there in the room. She could see through parts of it. A hologram then. But so real. She’d never seen one like this. Not Earth technology.
The alien made a noise like clattering silverware. And then the dull mechanical tones of a software translator said, “Again you request unscheduled transmission.”
“I told you not to fuck with me,” Alfonso said. He sounded so furious. She had never heard him sound so angry. She saw his finger then, jabbing forward at the alien. It twitched back from the gesture. “I told you.”
A long delay, full of the clinking sounds the alien made. It listened to a translation also, she realized. Then it replied. “Please explain the nature of your concern.”
“No attacks in New York. No attacks in my city. That was our deal.”
“The attack on the Harmonizer outpost on your planet, in a city distinct from your location, has failed. Your city contains the only other official Galactic facility that can be accessed.”
“There’s Beijing.”
This caused a long delay. While she listened, Victoria felt her whole body grow impossibly hot. What had Alfonso done? What was he doing now? Dear god.
Her breath seemed so loud to her suddenly. She was panting. Alfonso would hear her. Or that alien would hear her. She suppressed her breathing, but it made her light headed.
The translator spoke finally. “That facility is well guarded and no compliant humans are near it.”
Alfonso’s voice came slow, guttural, and furious. “I warned you. You think I can’t hurt you, but I can and I’m going to do it. If anything happens in New York, you will suffer. I swear it. Do you understand? I swear it. I will retaliate.”
More delays in translation. But finally the centipede said, “I will discuss this with the Ulltrians.”
“No discussion. This is not a discussion. I am telling you, and you are going to tell them. Nothing in New York. Nothing. Cut transmission.”
The centipede disappeared. “Fucking bug,” Alfonso said, his voice this time nearly a shout. He panted, out of her view still, while the box folded closed again, shielding the cylinder. She heard him at the door, as he kicked it or hit it. The shutters slid up from the windows.
She almost shouted, as she realized that he would open the door now. If he opened the door, the camera would transmit. It still floated in the corner of the room. It saw everything.
But she couldn’t face Alfonso. She couldn’t tell him what she had done. It would be too terrible. She saw now that she had betrayed him. And, also, in this moment, she felt afraid of him. She held her breath.
The door opened. It closed. The camera floated down to her shoulder.
“Don’t transmit,” she hissed at it.
“All recorded data has been synchronized with remote servers,” it said.
Ah, she realized. It had transmitted everything, in that moment when the door opened. She had betrayed Alfonso twice.
_____
She waited half an hour before she raised the courage to crack open the door and listen. Silence. She slipped through, pulled the door closed, and ran into her bedroom and straight into her bathroom, her bare feet silent on the floor.
She closed the door and called Bobby. Voice only on her end, but she let his visuals through.
“Did he leave?” she whispered.
“Who?”
“Alfonso!” she hissed.
“Yeah, a long time ago. Man, what the hell was that?” His face was red. He seemed, she realized, frightened. For the first time she saw him express some emotion other than carefully cultivated boredom. Fear.
“You saw that?” she asked.
“How could I miss it? I reviewed the footage ASAP. Sal is editing it I think.”
“Why did you do that?”
“You think I want to be the only person who saw that? That was something heavy. Something huge. I can’t hold that myself. Woman, I’ll be dead if we don’t
get that footage out.”
“Idiot,” she said. She hung up. What could she do? Only one option left. She called Sal. The line rang and rang. He answered only after twenty rings.
“Victoria, are you alright?”
“God, Sal,” she said. “You can’t use that. You can’t use that video.”
“It’s already on the daily preview boards,” he told her.
She sobbed once. “Sal, you have to pull it. It’s in our contract. You can’t put business up on the show. That wasn’t an affair. We don’t know what that was.”
“Victoria, honey,” Sal said. “We know what that was.” He smiled and leaned forward. “That was great TV.”
CHAPTER 7
Tarkos made it back to the dining room in the Harmonizer Headquarters, and had just sat down to an early dinner, his stomach growling, when Doctor Murakami appeared beside him. The dining hall was nearly empty of humans now; humans ate on a regular schedule. But the Kirt ate at random, and so the big gray crabs surrounded Tarkos and Bria, their chitin clicking as they spoke Galactic in hard staccato tones. The room smelled like a beach, like sea wrack.
Tarkos held his fork halfway to his mouth, desperate to take a bite, but Murakami seemed excited. Papers slipped from her hand and fluttered onto the table.
“We found her! We finally found her!”
Tarkos set down his fork and nodded. “Yes. I thought you knew as soon as we arrived. We sent her to your medical center.” He noted with a pang of jealousy that Bria went ahead and bit into her huge steak of vat meat.
“No!” The Doctor said. “I mean, yes, thank you. It’s wonderful that you found our patient and brought her back. Perfect. She’s stable now. Sedated. I can’t believe she left on her own.”
“Great purpose,” Bria grunted through grinding teeth.
Murakami leaned over the table and nearly shouted: “I mean: we found out who she is.”
Tarkos stood. “Who is she?”
“Her name is Sabrina Calvino. She’s a scientist. It took a long time to identify her because she is rather an… unusual person. Not in many databases. Not in the UN registry. She lived mostly off-planet, since the original lifting of Galactic Quarantine, in fact. She was one of the first people off planet at that time. In any case: she has been out of contact with Earth for more than four years. She was last heading to a quarantined planet, something called the Shroudworld—”
Bria huffed aggressively. Tarkos looked over and saw that his Commander’s fur stood up on her neck. But before he could ask Bria what upset her about the mention of this Shroudworld, Murakami continued, “She was on some kind of charting expedition. With her husband and her daughter.”
“Her daughter? She mentioned her daughter. So her daughter was with her out there. But what’s her last known location?”
“They were last leaving on an expedition to an unexplored area, where they believed that occlusion observations had revealed some unexplored large stellar body. They were heading toward the core.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Tarkos whispered.
“Exactly. They were heading away from Earth. ”
“So what is she doing here? What’s she doing here then?”
“How here?” Bria added.
Murakami nodded her head and pointed at Bria, poking her finger in excited agreement. “That’s right. That’s the question. How did she get here?”
Tarkos couldn’t resist his hunger anymore. He picked up his fork again. But before he had the taken a bite, Murakami looked back at him.
“But that’s not the biggest news. She said she lost this child out in space. But, just on a whim, I asked our AI about her. I just thought, you know, I’d get her age, other details. The AI ran a search. And, it found a message from an Enforcer AI.”
“And?”
“The Enforcer AI says it’s in communication with Margherita Calvino.”
“Who?”
“Our patient’s daughter.”
“What? She’s on Earth?” Tarkos asked.
“She says she’s not. She says that she’s hundreds of light years from here.”
_____
They moved to a conference room with a smart wall, and Murakami quickly opened her personal account. Using the link that had come to her earlier, she called the Enforcer AI. It answered immediately, giving priority to a call from the Harmonizer Corp.
A figure that looked like a human woman appeared, although its features were a little too smooth and monotone to be real. An avatar that looked like some vague mix of people from around the world. Neutral. Murakami greeted it as “Marinne,” and then looked to Tarkos.
“I’m Amir Tarkos. This is Commander Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess. We are Harmonizers. We need to know about your communications with Margherita Calvino.”
“Greetings, Harmonizer Amir Tarkos and Harmonizer Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess. I am called Marinne by my human coworkers. I have not been in contact with Margherita Calvino.”
Tarkos looked to Murakami and frowned.
“Tell them about the ship,” Murakami said.
“I have been in contact with the ship, Gambit, registry 8A4327BB0A1,” the AI said. “This is the ship of Margherita Calvino.”
“How do you know she is there? That she’s alive?”
“The ship has shared internal video feed with me. She is present on the ship. She does not wish to speak to an AI.”
Tarkos looked over at Bria.
“Talk with us,” Bria said.
The AI was smart, Tarkos found: it understood Bria’s compressed command. The wall image flickered and a black panel appeared with “8A4327BB0A1” in the center of the field. They waited, and then the black stuttered and turned pale white. A hand drew away from the screen. The panel grew till it covered the wall.
Tarkos stood. A small girl looked at them. She had pale skin, dark hair cut roughly at her shoulders, and big, dark eyes. A red scar cut across one cheek. She seemed sickly to Tarkos. Too thin, too pale, and her lips had a purple tint.
“Hello,” he said softly. “My name is Amir.”
“Are you real?” she said.
“Yes. Yes. I am real.” It struck Tarkos then: this girl’s mother had asked him the same thing, just hours before. This realization pained him; two human females separated and lost and doubting everything. “I’m not a machine. I’m a man. I grew up on Earth—in California. I work for the Harmonizers now. This is Doctor Murakami. Suzanne. And this is my Commander, Bria.”
Margherita looked at Bria with her mouth agape. “Wow. A Sussurat. You’re as big as a polar bear. Could you crush a Rinneret?”
Bria did not hesitate. “Yesssssss,” she hissed.
“There’s a Rinneret here that wants to kill me. Slowly. For experiments and stuff.”
“Will come now,” Bria said. “Will crack its shell.”
“Good,” the girl said. She smiled, showing crooked teeth.
“Margherita, we’re on Earth. Your mother is here. She is very very eager to find you.”
The girl stood unmoving. For a moment, Tarkos thought the transmission had failed and the image had frozen. Then the girl began to weep. “She’s alive?”
“Yes.”
“She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive. Can I see her? She’s alright? She’s alright? Is my dad there?”
“I don’t know about your father,” Tarkos said. “I’m sorry. We haven’t learned anything about him. But your mother is going to be fine, we hope. She’s not here right now. But we’ll bring her to talk with you, very soon. But right now, you need to tell us, so we can help you: where are you?”
“I’m at the Second Green Disk.”
Tarkos frowned and looked at Bria. The Green Disk system was one of the most strange wonders of the known galaxy: a whole system of pulverized planets, where rock formed a broad ring around a g-class star, and small animal-machine symbionts bred on the cold stones, leaping sometimes between the asteroids.
“There’s only
one Green Disk system,” Tarkos said. But as he said it, his mouth fell open with surprise. In their last several years, he and Bria had repeatedly encountered Green Disk symbionts being illegally transported, and also used as a weapon. They could not discern how the symbionts had been smuggled away from the Green Disk system. And now they had a potential answer. There was another source. Another system.
Margherita sighed with exasperation. “Didn’t my mother tell you? The Wells Occlusion? It’s a Green Disk. Another Green Disk. With the space symbionts and everything. It’s hidden. Only, there are tons of Rinneret here. Maybe other species too. I’ve seen these weird black ships. All spikey.”
Tarkos started to speak and then thought better of asking. But he knew Bria thought the same thing he did: Ulltrians.
“You have to get me out,” Margherita said.
“AI,” Bria asked, in rushed Galactic. The face of the Executive AI appeared in the corner of the image. “Transmission time delay?”
“Approximately 0.34 seconds,” the AI answered.
“That’s the thing,” Margherita said, switching to flawless Galactic. Tarkos lifted an eyebrow. This child was full of surprises. “The Rinneret must have some kind of superhyperradio or something. Only, the signal is not hyperradio, so I can’t make sense of the whole thing.”
“Triangulate,” Bria said.
“I have triangulated the message source,” the AI said in response. “It is a location approximately 6,000 kilometers above the Earth.”
“Send ship,” Bria said.
“I am not authorized to order a ship to investigate, although there is a high orbit robotic ship within 2,000 kilometers of the source.”
“Send ship,” Bria commanded.
“Margherita,” Tarkos said, “we place you in Earth orbit.”
“That’s wrong. Totally wrong. I’ve looked outside. I’m like way light years from you. I’m in distant orbit of the Second Green Disk.”
Bria huffed. Tarkos wanted to huff too, just to agree with her. None of this made sense. The girl put it perfectly: he couldn’t make sense of the whole thing.
“Listen, there’s something important,” she said. “There’s this human, on Earth, who’s working with the Rinneret. A man. An old guy. In New York City. His name is Alfonse DiAngelo. His wife’s on TV. He’s like a traitor and—”
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