by Jaym Gates
“Plenty of talented engineers sleeved in clankers on Mars, love. Skill’s one thing, but a man does well to have cred in the bank.”
“So much for return on your investment,” Sváfa said, “But for now I’m concerned with Director Ólafsson.”
“Go on, do I look like a jealous scientist? Or a fucking exsurgent?” He’d said the word in English, first pausing for a beat, as if his Skandinavíska skillsoft didn’t know it.
Sváfa tensed. Few people knew the term. Keegan had watched her reaction. So had Januszczak. She sat stone-faced, waiting, letting the silence work at Keegan. She was betting he loved his voice too much for his own good.
But too soon, Januszczak stood and leaned over the desk at Keegan—rather ineffectually, Sváfa observed. What was he doing? “Did you kill Kjartan Ólafsson?”
“No,” Keegan said.
Sváfa believed him.
—
“You made that short,” Januszczak said.
“Your question was badly timed, but it did the work,” Sváfa said.
They’d had to put Keegan in the room with Ólafsson’s corpse for lack of space. She’d detailed Ragnarsson to watch him while Antigua printed more security drones. There wasn’t much chance of Keegan escaping; where would he go? But a desperate man might try something.
“You barely questioned him.”
Sváfa could read lies on a human face like flashing red AR graphics, but she didn’t want to get into an argument about policecraft with an intel man. “He’d be a fool to draw attention to himself by killing someone. And it’s clear he’s not a fool.”
She let Januszczak fume and called in Nikkanen.
—
Magda Nikkanen’s dossier said she’d spent twenty-eight months beneath Iapetus on five different research teams. She’d authored several papers proposing possible architectures for the TITAN hardware—all presently classified.
Nikkanen herself had a round face with high cheekbones. She’d attired herself severely: black bowl cut, unadorned gray vacsuit. Some of the team wore vacsuits with helmets off habitually, but on Nikkanen, it looked buttoned up, clinical—a sterile wall between her and her surroundings.
“You were born on Iapetus,” Sváfa began. This alone made Nikkanen interesting.
“That’s accurate,” Nikkanen said. “It was quite … Titanian, before the Fall.” No wistful look off into the distance; just a statement.
“Your family … early colonists?”
“Yes,” Nikkanen said. “From a city in Finland, on Earth. My older brother was born there.”
“Did you kill Kjartan Ólafsson?” Januszczak put in.
Idiot, Sváfa thought, I should have coached him after the last one. What had been a good closing question with Keegan was a terrible one early in the interview with Nikkanen. Januszczak clearly didn’t know the difference between an interview and an interrogation.
[Thora,] she messaged. [Her reaction on that last question?] Normally, Sváfa would go with her gut and review results from the kinesics software later, but Januszczak’s question might shorten the interview considerably.
[Surprise/alarm,] the AI messaged.
“No!” Nikkanen said. “Who would? Kjartan could be brusque, but he was a good sort. I mean, obviously someone did, but … really, they couldn’t have been in their right mind to do it.”
[Avoidance,] Thora put in. Yes.
Before Nikkanen finished, Sváfa messaged Januszczak, [This isn’t a Fleet interrogation room. She’ll demand counsel if we treat her like more than a witness.]
Sváfa backed her chair up, giving Nikkanen more space, and said, “I’ll be straight with you. Our primary subject of interest is Mick Keegan.” Nikkanen’s posture relaxed almost imperceptibly.
Januszczak said, “Keegan planned to smuggle TITAN artifacts off Iapetus. Did Ólafsson mention any suspicions he might have had, about Keegan or anyone else?”
Nikkanen tensed again. Sváfa suppressed a grimace. Januszczak was making a hash of this.
“I wasn’t in his confidence,” Nikkanen said. “Why? You know, I don’t think I should say anything else to you without an attorney.”
Januszczak bristled. “This is a military jurisdiction!”
Magda was shaking a bit, her voice unsteady. “If you had me up on charges of smuggling TITAN artifacts or compromising security. But you’re questioning me in relation to a civil crime. And I’m not being detained.” She looked at Sváfa. “Am I, Inspector?”
“No,” Sváfa said, not looking at Januszczak. “You’re free to go.”
—
“I apologize,” Januszczak said after Magda Nikkanen left the room, straightening and trying to make eye contact, which Sváfa avoided. “I imagine she was receiving legal advice from her muse. That was stupid of me.”
Sváfa said, “You didn’t help matters, but I don’t think she’s our killer. Though from her reaction to your question, she might know who is.”
“I’ll keep quiet on the next one,” Januszczak said.
“Forget about it,” Sváfa said. Being angry at a Fleet intel man for being forceful in an interview was like being angry at a wasp for stinging you on the thumb. “Let’s talk to Nilsen.” But just before she summoned him, Antigua called.
[I found something,] Antigua messaged. [Oleg Nilsen tampered with the surveillance logs. Not just during the crime, but on multiple prior occasions.]
[How do you know?] Sváfa asked.
[Fleet Intel has an agent loose in the local mesh that tries to double-log every contact between a spime and a mesh ID. Nilsen didn’t know about it.]
Sváfa glanced at Januszczak; did he even know? Fleet security was an onion; it was entirely possible he didn’t have access to all of the layers. [How do you know?] Sváfa asked.
[Hacked it and tossed its logs. Our warrant to search the premises is still active. Fleet’s not immune. It caught Nilsen several times.]
[Please keep that to yourself for now. It could be a headache later; better if we can make a case without you revealing that.]
[Fine. But it’s useful, isn’t it?]
[Maybe.]
—
Sváfa disliked Nilsen immediately. He had a nervous, seeking face. She felt as if he were searching Januszczak and her for both approval and weakness at each question. She tried to swallow her unease with him in order to make an honest assessment of the man, but it was difficult.
Her interviews with the other researchers suggested things had been rocky between him and the director for some time. His work on the TITANs’ use of native Iapetan materials in constructing the matrioshka was brilliant but controversial.
“How was your relationship with Director Ólafsson?” Sváfa asked.
He scowled at her from across the desk. “Strained. Obviously.”
“Be that as it may, you worked closely with him,” she said. “We’ve arrested Mick Keegan for attempting to smuggle sections of circuitry substrate off Iapetus. Do you think Ólafsson suspected?”
Nilsen sneered. “He wouldn’t have cared.”
Januszczak raised an eyebrow but remained quiet.
“What makes you say that?” Sváfa asked.
Nilsen straightened. Here was something new, uglier in his bearing: pride. “I’m a loyal Titanian. Ólafsson didn’t care about our security. He was a damned argonaut—would’ve passed everything he learned down here to them.”
As Nilsen spoke, Sváfa messaged Januszczak, [Nilsen is a radical technosocialist, probably a member of the Interplanetary.]
[I can confirm that for certain, actually,] Januszczak messaged. He cleared his throat. “Even Fleet Intelligence doesn’t consider the argonauts a hostile group, Doctor Nilsen.”
Nilsen stared at Januszczak as if he’d said something indelibly stupid. “Fleet isn’t concerned about dissemination of data on TITAN
technology?”
Sváfa said, “Of course they are, Doctor. Was Director Ólafsson in collusion with Keegan, then? Or releasing data on his own?”
Sváfa could tell Nilsen was about to lie even as he opened his mouth. “I’ve been gathering evidence, yes. Building a case.”
She gazed off into a corner. “Is that why you tampered with hab module surveillance logs?”
“What? What? I did no such thing.” Nilsen was on his feet, drawing Sváfa’s eyes back to him. His face was red, a vein bulging out, and he’d balled up his fists.
Januszczak’s hand went to his stunner. His voice was intimidatingly calm. “Easy, Nilsen. This is still just an interview.”
[He’s telling the truth,] Sváfa messaged. [It wasn’t him.]
Nilsen slowly sat back down.
[How do you know?] Januszczak asked.
Sváfa said, “Mr. Nilsen, let’s put aside your suspicions about the Director for now. I’d like to review the statement you gave regarding the events of two days ago one more time.”
—
They continued with Nilsen for another thirty minutes, during which time Sváfa became convinced that although Oleg Nilsen was a disagreeable ideologue, he’d had nothing to do with Ólafsson’s murder. Her suspicions began to veer back toward Magda Nikkanen.
Then Ragnarsson entered the room, his face grave. “Magda Nikkanen just stunned one of her colleagues and fled out the airlock.”
“Up the elevator?” Januszczak asked, rising. “Where would she go?” Waiting for the elevator on the broken spine of the equatorial ridge when they’d arrived, Sváfa and Januszczak had seen nothing but heavily cratered ice, ghost white under the stars’ faint illumination, stretching out to both horizons.
“No,” Ragnarsson said, “She’s gone into the tunnels.”
—
“PASKA KAUPUNNI,” read the huge inscription on the tunnel wall. The words were blasted into the wall with carbon grit that resembled black spray paint.
[What is that?] Januszczak signaled. They were communicating by laser, but Januszczak, in the rear, trailed a comm tether. Antigua was on the other end, holding down the fort.
Ragnarsson, taking point with his assault rifle, kept his eyes trained on the hallway as they stopped to examine it.
Above the inscription, the white ice had been carved into an intricate bas relief of a small city—clearly on Earth, as the foreground of the carving depicted a harbor. The manic precision of the bas relief was in marked contrast to the grit-blasted words.
[Translation from Finnish: “Shit Town/City,”] Thora messaged.
Sváfa ran a hand over the carving and reached into it with her talent, seeking to understand. A sunny day on the harbor—the last one, ever. They were leaving the old city, half drowned, half frozen. He looked one last time at the painted scrawl on the old feedstock tank. “Oulu: Paska Kaupunni.”
[It’s … graffiti. Art,] Sváfa replied. Sváfa activated her emotional dampers and had her suit inject her with a half dose of phlo. [Let’s keep moving.] The coiling presence of the exovirus was whispering danger to her, but her dampers and the drugs kept her murderously calm.
Things were about to get awful.
Nikkanen had left a heat trail easily followed in the infrared. She’d made straight for the thermal exchange chamber near the site of Ólafsson’s murder but had left it in a different direction from the crime scene. They’d followed her into unexplored tunnels. Januszczak, bringing up the rear, had been marking the ice to leave a breadcrumb trail.
They left the inexplicable ice sculpture behind and soon glimpsed light around a corner.
[Dim your suit lights to near-infrared,] Januszczak messaged. They would attempt stealth.
They rounded the corner, and ten meters away, limned in white light from a torch she’d set on the floor, was Magda Nikkanen. She’d rounded on them, apparently having noticed even the dim sub-visible light from their suits.
Looming behind Nikkanen was a hunched thing, two meters tall at the shoulders. It looked like a giant troll vacuum packed into a spacesuit. It leaned crutch-wise on wiry, elongated forearms that reached to the tunnel floor and ended in huge, padded fists. A second, smaller pair of arms extended wing-like from the shoulders, bracing it against the tunnel ceiling, while a third, even smaller pair extended from the chest.
A dendritic froth of fractal branching digits wreathed the two smaller pairs of hands. Its bloated face mashed up against the inside of the vacsuit’s visor, venous and hideously pallid. It clearly did not breathe through the crushed slit of a nose, but the eyes, set deeper, darted about with agonized intelligence.
A cable trailed from Nikkanen’s suit to the exsurgent.
All three trained their guns on the pair. The exsurgent drone made no move.
[Dr. Nikkanen,] Januszczak signaled. [Unlink from that thing at once.]
Nikkanen raised her hands, open. [Inspector, Lieutenant … this is my brother.]
[That is not your brother, Nikkanen,] Sváfa messaged. [Pull your data jack now. I won’t warn you again.]
She’d seen footage of exsurgents like this before on Firewall’s VPNs, but they’d all been frozen, starved after the TITANs abandoned Iapetus. How had this one survived? There must be autonomous machinery somewhere in this maze capable of sustaining it—which meant there might be more of them.
[Nordqvist?] Ragnarsson messaged. [What if it really is?]
[It may have been, Officer,] she messaged, [but it isn’t anymore. You have my word on that.] Sváfa drew a bead on the exsurgent’s head; it still had a brain in there, somewhere.
[He isn’t hostile!] Nikkanen messaged. [He’s sick. Look! Ólafsson was an accident!]
The part of Sváfa that was still feeling was happy she couldn’t feel anything more.
[Inspector!] Antigua messaged, [Wide-spectrum radio emissions from your position!]
At the same time, Thora flashed up an intrusion warning on Sváfa’s mesh inserts. Sváfa switched her rifle to full auto and opened fire on the exsurgent drone. An instant later, so did Januszczak and Ragnarsson.
The thing closed the distance between them in one leap, knocking Nikkanen to the ground as the access jacks tore free. It trailed a spray of frozen blue gore along the wall where slugs had torn through it.
They’d wounded it badly, but now it was on top of them. It swung at Sváfa with a huge fore-fist. She ducked easily, but a lunge with one of its upper arms caught Januszczak in the chest. The thick, visible fingers of the arm wrapped around his shoulder and upper chest, and then the branching mist of fractal digits flowed onto his vacsuit, pulling it apart.
Ragnarsson and Sváfa backed up, looking for a clear shot. Nikkanen tried to fire her stunner, perhaps not realizing that it wouldn’t function in a vacuum. Sváfa saw her curse inside her helmet and go for another weapon.
Januszczak convulsed as his suit vented, misting the blood and gradue that flowed from the breach, freezing instantly as it drifted toward the floor. The drone advanced, holding him like a shield. Nikkanen had another weapon in hand, probably an agonizer, but Sváfa shot her first.
Ragnarsson held his ground and tried to aim a shot at the drone, but when Sváfa dropped Nikkanen, its crushed face twisted up inside the helmet and it hurled the inert Januszczak at Ragnarsson, knocking the officer to the floor. Then it rushed Sváfa.
Without pausing to think, Sváfa dropped prone and fired her vacsuit’s thruster pack. She avoided the exsurgent but found herself hurtling down the corridor, out of control. Sváfa caromed once off the ceiling and then found herself in open space. This was another big chamber, with a wall of TITAN circuitry substrate looming before her.
She couldn’t avoid crashing into it. Well, why not, then? She put her hands out to touch the circuitry, reached out with her infection. The glassy substrate shattered around her, and she fell into
a quantum foam of numbers expressing a space cold, dispersed, and virtually endless in scope. Was she seeing the end of the universe in simulation—or was that eschaton only one variable in something larger?
—
“Inspector? Nordqvist? Hey!”
Ragnarsson crouched over her, looking about warily. His vacsuit was slightly charred and showed signs of very recent self-repair. Shrapnel, maybe.
“Officer.” They were speaking over a voice channel, breaking radio silence. Probably not the best idea, but the comm tether was nowhere to be seen. “The exsurgent?”
“What?” His voice was ragged.
“The monster. Where?”
“Finished it off with a grenade. Fucking crazy thing to do down here, but I had no other way.”
She sat up. She’d come to rest at the bottom of yet another perfect white shaft, featureless except for the litter of shattered substrate all around them.
She had tasted aleph numbers, cardinalities beyond the transfinite. What had they been calculating, to encompass such expanses of data just in the few meters of substrate through which she’d crashed?
“Nikkanen?” she asked.
“Done for,” he said. “Can you walk? We need to get back to the station.”
She stood, dizzy but otherwise fine. Her vacsuit had taken the impact. It was contact with the circuitry that had caused her to black out briefly. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Keegan hacked the security drones and escaped up the elevator,” he said as he led her back toward the explored corridors.
“Least of our worries.” [Antigua?] she messaged.
[Inspector.]
[Tell the entire research team to prep for evac. All of this activity might have woken something up.]
[Happily, Inspector.]
—
Once the shuttle left the Iapetan radio silence zone, Sváfa Nordqvist opened a Firewall VPN connection and messaged Tara Yu.
[Nordqvist,] Yu messaged, [did the Science Police get their man?]
[Never mind about that, Doctor Yu. I’ve more important matters to report upon.]
[Really?]
[The purpose of the Iapetan matrioshka, Doctor! Answers from beyond the realms of the calculable. Such wonderful things, Yu. Such wonderful things. Wait until you view the files I’m sending.]
