Buck Roger XXVC #00.5 Arrival

by M S Murdock

  Terendon would be the obvious choice, since he stood to gain directly from Holzerhein’s demise, but Terendon could never have convinced Ardala to give him the program. He and she were bitter enemies, not out of any family allegiance to Roando but because she believed that the board position Terendon held should rightfully go to her. She was always trying to undermine him (all the board members, for that matter, even the officious, toadying Neola Price), even to the point of accusing him of being a NEO plant, but his record was as clean as vacuum. Cleaner than hers, for that matter.

  Could it be her? Had she been saving the program for an eventual coup, just covering her options, in case the situation changed? That would be like her. Then somebody stole it from her and put it to use without her knowledge. Hah. A person who could crack Ardala’s security could have written the virus himself.

  Holzerhein had another look at the thing. Maybe it wasn’t Ardala’s, maybe his first impression had been wrong. He examined the infiltration routine again, the memory storage routine, the retrieval routine... and there he made another discovery. It wouldn’t have worked. Oh, it might have worked, the same way a building held up by repulsor might work to crush a person if he didn’t see it suspended overhead first, but that’s about the level of ignorance it presumed on Holzerhein’s part. There was no provision to camouflage the program once it had lodged in long-term memory, no attempt to make it blend in with the rest of the fuzzy, half-forgotten childhood recollections. In the symbolic world of pure thought, it would be the only sharp-edged, shiny object in a five-dimensional fog. Anybody who looked into their past with any regularity would see it shining there like a beacon, and anybody who knew Holzerhein knew that he spent most of his time doing just that.

  Which meant that whoever had loosed the virus program on him had violated Holzerhein’s cardinal rule of battle: Know your enemy.

  What kind of incompetent was he dealing with? A soon-to-be dead one, as soon as whoever it was spoke the trigger word, but even that thought did little to cheer him. What challenge was there in besting an idiot?

  What challenge was there anywhere anymore? He hadn’t had an adversary worthy of his attention since RAM had moved its center of operations to Mars.

  The closest thing he had to an adversary was the New Earth Organization commission, that group of Terran malcontents who objected to RAM’s domination from afar, but even they were little more than an annoyance. They were even useful in their own way, by drawing Earth’s troublemakers into an easily infiltrated organization, where he could watch over them.

  Of course, there were lunars and habbers and pirates and belters and the myriad other half-human races, genetically modified to live in the rest of the solar system, none of whom held any special fondness for RAM, but neither did they have the resources to finance a war. Even in an unlikely union they would pose little more than a strategic problem. Mars-and RAM, and through it Holzerhein-held the real power in the solar system, and RAM had the experience to use it. With a minimum of effort they could hang on to it for a long time to come. Holzerhein knew that for a fact; he had set it up that way.

  And now, in the matrix, pieces of virus program scattered around him, he found himself wondering for the first time if he had lived long enough.

  What more was there to live for? Conquering the rest of the solar system? It would be a long, tedious, and utterly predictable job, nothing more.

  Holzerhein felt the sudden urge to reassemble the virus, load it into his brain, and shout “Holzheimer” himself, but it was only a passing urge. That was too easy, too.

  Instead he wiped it from the matrix entirely, flipped to the real palace, and in holographic form took a stroll among the flowers in the garden. His brain needed sensory stimulation, so the doctor said.

  OOOOO

  Two days later, Ardala paid him a visit. Holzerhein was again in the real palace, in his study (reading a twenty third century epic thriller in which a gang leader in one of Earth’s more squalid arcologies developed a stardrive from irradiated, pre-collapse computer parts and led humanity out of the cradle to conquer the stars), when Rodney entered the study in holographic form and announced, “The lady Ardala to see you, sir.”

  Holzerhein set the book-also a hologram-down on the reading table and stood as Ardala entered the room. She looked stunning, as always: her long black hair cascading down over her shoulders and framing her exquisitely carved face, and the rest of her dressed in a flowing wrap that shifted to hide and reveal just enough to tantalize. Genetic engineering had reached its peak in her, and Holzerhein was sorry that her charms were wasted on him. The closer he looked, the more his senses told him, but only in terms of compound curve data and total volume, information which was useless to anyone but her dressmaker.

  Still, she was pretty, even at a glance. And she was just as deadly as she was pretty, he knew. He hadn’t forgotten the virus program.

  “Come in, my dear,” he said, waving her toward a couch. “What brings you to see an old man on such a lovely afternoon?”

  “Information,” she said with a slight smile. “What else?”

  What else indeed? Information was Ardala’s stock in trade. She maintained one of the best data networks-and some of the best spies-outside of Holzerhein’s own.

  “Offering or asking.”

  “Offering.” She sat in the proffered chair and shook her head to settle her hair more seductively around her.

  “Price?” he asked, wondering if this would be the time when she asked outright for a position on the board of directors. It would be like her to make such a request so soon after a failed attempt on his life-an attempt she may or may not have been in on.

  She looked away, out the window. Was that guilty reluctance to meet Holzerhein’s eyes, or just her natural coquettishness? He couldn’t tell.

  “Call it a gift,” she said.

  Everything, even gifts-no especially gifts-had a price. Both Holzerhein and Ardala knew the price of a gift: a return gift or an eventual favor. To accept would bind him, but then it was the receiver who determined a gift’s value, and the value of the return. Gifts were always fair trades.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Ardala looked back inside the study, fixed her sparkling eyes on Holzerhein’s holographic ones, and said, “You have, or soon will have in your possession a five-hundred-year-old satellite harboring an artificial intelligence.”

  “Hmm, yes, I knew that already.”

  Ardala was nonplused. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that your people found this satellite several months ago and left it in storage, thinking it unimportant. Or that a Martian University professor thought otherwise, accessed the satellite’s database, and published in the New Martian Science Journal that, based on information garnered from the satellite, he believed he could locate the cryogenically frozen body of an American pilot from the twentieth century.”

  Simund looked pained for a split second. “No, I did not know that.” But Price obviously had, and was covering her tail for not having told me sooner, Simund thought.

  “The pilot’s name is Anthony Rogers.”

  Holzerhein scanned his memory, both organic and matrix, for a reason why that name should be important, but he found none.

  “Anthony Rogers?”

  “Anthony-better known as Buck-Rogers is the man credited with saving Earth from total thermonuclear war at the end of the twentieth century.”

  Holzerhein manufactured an incredulous expression. “One man? How?”

  Ardala’s grin was as real as Holzerhein’s incredulity was artificial. She enjoyed having information he didn’t. She said, “By destroying a control satellite for a space-based weapons system. A weapons system that would in time have given its owners complete control of Earth. If he hadn’t destroyed it, the only alternative to world domination would have been war.”

  “This would be the same satellite that-?”

  “The same. Not destroyed, but merely knocked out of orbit, taking Ro
gers with it.”

  “Oho.” Holzerhein paused to sift through the implications of that, but Ardala voiced them anyway.

  “Which explains,” she said, “why RAM found it while cleaning up an orbit for our own control satellite. Similar functions, similar orbits, to which the twentieth century version was returning in its elliptical path after all this time.”

  “You’re saying . . .”

  “I’m saying that now might not be a good time to bring back an ancient hero who made his name shooting down world domination control satellites.”

  Holzerhein looked thoughtful while he ran a probability check on the consequences. “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “News of this Rogers would almost certainly stir up trouble if word of it got out. So, what are you suggesting? That he may be revived?”

  “No, almost certainly not. After researching the topic, I would call it a next to impossible operation. But he still holds incredible potential as a martyr for NEO organizers, and holds . . . other value, for me.” Her eyes glittered.

  Oho. Now the true reason for Ardala’s sudden helpfulness came clear. She wasn’t maneuvering for a position on the board after all. At least not directly. “You want his body.”

  She shifted her position on the couch with the sinuous grace of a jungle cat. “Purely for research, of course,” said Ardala.

  So this was the return gift she wanted. Should he give it to her? He couldn’t see why not. It was the weather satellite’s A.I. that interested Holzerhein anyway.

  “He’s yours,” he said simply.

  "Thank you.” She stood, smiling just enough to let him see she was pleased, and moved silently from the room. Holzerhein watched her go, still wondering whether or not she had written the virus program, and if she had, how this business with the fighter pilot could have anything to do with it. He could see no connection, but that didn’t mean there wasn't one.

  Nor did his suspicion mean that there was. It was easy to grow paranoid when you’d uncovered only part of a plot.

  OOOOO

  Holzerhein was thinking about what he should do about Price, or whoever had engineered the deception, when the courier from Earth arrived, and he was distracted away from thoughts of retribution. Holzerhein didn’t care about the ancient pilot any way, not really. He could be just as single-minded as Ardala, and his interest was in the artificial intelligences.

  He took it straight to the computer lab, where technicians poked, prodded, measured, scanned, and otherwise began learning what they could about it. Holzerhein’s first impression was that it looked more like a big, primitive fuel tank than it did a computerized brain, but upon closer inspection it began to look a little more interesting. Its cylindrical surface (4.7 3 meters long and 2.47 meters in diameter) was covered with solar cells, which the technicians kept bathed in an Earth-intensity spotlight until they could discover where to plug in their own power source. Altitude control rockets stuck out from the sides at regular ninety-degree intervals, and camera lenses and communications antennae packed the surface on top and bottom and every 120 degrees around the middle, providing full spherical coverage.

  The cameras and antennae were primitive, certainly, but at least the thing could see and hear. Holzerhein’s first fear-that it had gone mad centuries ago from sensory deprivation-seemed unlikely. And as for the design, he reminded himself that it was the interior landscape, not the exterior, that he was interested in.

  A technician studying a socket beneath one of the cameras began plugging a circuit analyzer’s test leads into it. He had five or six of them connected, when the instrument’s display began to flicker madly and an eerily inflectionless voice coming from the speaker below the monitor said something like, “Vyponimayetye?”

  The technician jerked back. “What the hell was that?”

  The screen flickered again, then locked on the Signal and displayed a horizontal line across the middle. The line erupted into jagged spikes just as the voice spoke again.

  “Do you understand me now?”

  The technician was unsure whether to address the camera or the aberrant circuit analyzer. He settled on the camera, and by implication the intelligence behind it. “Uh, yeah, sure,” he said. “Are, um, are you okay in there?”

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “Do you know what happened to you.”

  “Unable to determine temporal referent.”

  The tech, flustered, turned to the other techs, who were now gathering in a semicircle around him. Holzerhein interposed himself between them and the camera. “I’ll handle this. Who are you?” he demanded.

  There was a long pause while the camera lens telescoped in and back out again in an attempt to focus on the hologram, then, “I am Masterlink. I am commander in chief of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ space borne strategic defense network. Serial

  number: one.”

  “Union of Soviet--? You’re from Russia?"

  “I am Masterlink, commander in chief of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ space borne strategic defense network. Serial number: one.”

  “We got that. I am Simund Holzerhein, director of RAM, formerly known as the Russo-American Mercantile. I control what was once your home nation.”

  "You lie.”

  For a brief moment, Holzerhein wanted to fry the Al. for its affront, but he suppressed his anger. Learn about it first; there would be plenty of time to destroy it later if that turned out to be necessary.

  “I speak the truth. There have been many changes since your time. You have been adrift in high orbit for four and a half centuries. Do you realize that?”

  The Al. remained silent for long seconds before it relented and said; “Four hundred sixty-five years, seven months, nineteen days. Yes, I was aware of the passage of time. Unfortunately my radio receiver failed only forty years after the . . . explosion . . . that knocked me out of orbit. I was not aware that the capitalists had won.”

  “Neither was I.”

  “You speak English. You speak of Russo-American Mercantile. That alone tells me that capitalism, and thus the American capitalists, have won.”

  “My maternal grandfather, Pyotr Alekseyevich Yevshenko, would be unhappy to hear you say that.”

  Masterlink seemed to be thinking that over. When it spoke again, it said, “I must learn more about you."

  “And I you. You-” he spoke to the assembled techs “--link this intelligence into the matrix.” To Masterlink he said, “We will talk again in more comfortable surroundings when you have made the transfer?

  OOOOO

  Half an hour later, he found himself entertaining in the matrix version of the palace, Rodney serving some kind of greasy little Russian hors d’oeuvre he called pirozhki while Holzerhein and Masterlink sat before the fire and toasted one another’s health and bolted shots of some unpronounceable brand of vodka. None of it was any more substantial than the two of them, but Rodney had insisted that social forms must still be observed, and that the quickest way to win a Russian’s confidence was to eat and drink with him. Holzerhein trusted Rodney’s judgment in that; Rodney was, after all, a professional butler.

  And surprisingly enough, Holzerhein found that he enjoyed playing the host that had been decades since he’d done so, and he suddenly realized how much he missed it. Much of the satisfaction in amassing personal wealth and power lay in showing it off. With that realization came the memory of his first air car, given him at an age when most of his peers had still been riding bicycles, and the envious stares he had drawn while flying it. He could have kissed Masterlink for triggering such a glorious memory, but he didn’t suppose Masterlink would understand, having never had a childhood of his own to remember.

  Masterlink was full of surprises all the same. After a few false starts, he had adapted quickly to the matrix, but Holzerhein’s hope that the A.I. had evolved a better subjective universe than his own had died while he was still leading the way from the computer lab to the palace, when Masterlin
k said in awe, “So much room! I had barely room enough to store my own thoughts!”

  After that, Holzerhein had half expected to see it duplicate its satellite form there in the study, or perhaps construct a shiny metallic humanoid body to match its voice, but it had evidently taken its one from Holzerhein and used the matrix’s capabilities to build a human persona, a hologram, for itself. It sat across from him as a man in his late forties or early fifties, his face square-featured beneath close-cut hair, dressed in a green military uniform decorated with a single medal of honor. His voice had become more human over the course of the conversation, and though he was still guarded in his answers he was gradually opening up.

  On one topic, he became very revealing indeed.

  “Buck Rogers still exists?” Masterlink’s theatrical jerk when Holzerhein mentioned that bit of news nearly tipped over his chair.

  Holzerhein nodded. “There is a slim possibility. One of my people is in the process of picking him up, if he isn’t alive.”

  Masterlink poured himself another shot of vodka, downed it, and poured himself yet another. “For all this time, I had thought myself adrift alone,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “All this time, revenge has been my sustenance, the truth that let me live with the shame of failing the motherland in-other ways.” He frowned, then, still frowning, reached up to his breast and ripped the single medal from his uniform and cast it into the fireplace. “My duty is not yet done.”

  “Oh, come now. That battle is over.”

  “My battle with Buck Rogers will never be over until he is surely dead.”

  “He’s mine now,” Holzerhein reminded him. Actually he was Ardala’s, but that was a quibble.