“Is that a Starflyer joke?”
“I’m serious. We’re going to get to Dyson Alpha, what? Six hours before Nigel arrives and turns their star nova. So what exactly is this Starflyer agent going to achieve with that? Is six hours enough time for MorningLightMountain to build a fleet of frigates like this? Tell me, come on, you’re the frigging expert on assembling these babies. Can it be done in six hours?”
“I’m not playing this game.”
“Scared I’m right?”
“You’re such a child.”
The kind of willpower that could only arise from living for three hundred sixty years managed to keep Ozzie’s voice calm and clear. “I am Ozzie Fernandez Isaac; I built the first wormhole generator and I was a midwife to the Commonwealth society that you and your children enjoy. Even if you really believe that part of me is buried under Starflyer conditioning it is still entitled to some respect. And Ozzie Fernandez Isaac is pretty fucking sure that you cannot duplicate this frigate in six hours.”
Mark sighed with reluctance. “No, you can’t.”
“Thank you. And if you can’t do that, you can’t figure out a nova bomb either.”
“You might get a handle on the principles.”
“You might indeed. Good point. The physics is all derivative of existing theories, so yes. You understand how the theory works, like knowing e-equals-m-c-squared is what makes an atom bomb work, not that it tells you how to build one. But you have the notion, and then half an hour later you get to see one in action as good old Nigel turns your star into an expanding sphere of ultra-hard radiation and plasma. So I repeat: What’s the point?”
“MorningLightMountain has other outposts.”
“Which are currently being targeted by the remaining frigates in the firewall operation.” Ozzie took a breath. He was almost in pain from the way Mark was slowly mellowing. “Nigel is going to commit genocide on behalf of our species, and the terrible thing is most of us are going to be cheering him on. We’ll still be alive; well, whoopee-do on that front, but the human race will no longer have a soul. That dies along with MorningLightMountain. Mark, this flight is the only chance we have to retain our humanity. It is hugely risky. Crazy even: I admit that. I’m gambling my life on it because I have that right, and once again I apologize for making you personally part of that gamble. The thing is this is such a gamble that Nigel is totally opposed to it, and I even respect him for that. These are very frightening times, Mark. But I cannot let this tiny little chance slip away from us. I have to try and get the barrier generator up and running again.”
“I see that, sure, but …”
“If I’m a traitor, it doesn’t matter because the human race will survive thanks to Nigel and the ships following us. But, man, think on this: if I’m not a traitor and we reestablish the barrier, then we win, too, and win the right way. Isn’t that worth something to you? Anything?”
The answer was a long time coming; and when Mark did finally speak the words sounded like they were being ripped out painfully. “I dunno. This restarting the generator idea, it sounds like a long shot.”
“Longest in human history. That’s why I’m the one doing it. Come on, dude, you don’t think anybody with a grain of sense is gonna be busting his balls like this, do you?”
“Guess not.” There was the faintest grin on Mark’s face.
“My man.” Ozzie put his hand out for a high-five. Mark stared at it mystified. “Okay,” Ozzie said. “So, like please tell me how I get the quantumbuster launch mechanism to work? Goddamn, it’s been killing me.”
“You mean you couldn’t launch the missile anyway?”
“No,” Ozzie admitted.
There was another long pause, then Mark gave a confident chuckle. “Well well. That makes me captain, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“Okay, maybe not captain. We split the duty. You keep control of the drive. Give me control of the missiles.”
“What?”
“I can fix the launch mechanism, but if you want me to do it, you first have to give me fire authority.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“If you take us to the Dark Fortress and find a target inside it, I’ll launch a quantumbuster at it, and I’ll even cheer it on. If you try to deliver this ship and its technology to MorningLightMountain I blow us up. That’s the deal. You trust me, don’t you?”
“Son of a bitch. How close are you to Nigel, a genetic doppelgänger?”
“Do you want your chance at the barrier generator or not?”
Ozzie couldn’t see a way out. “Have you found a solution to the launch system problem?” he asked the SIsubroutine.
“No. According to my analysis routines the system should function. It does not. This is a paradox beyond available processing power to resolve.”
“All right, Mark, you can have access to the weapons systems.”
“You mean control of the weapons systems.”
“Whatever, yeah.” Ozzie’s virtual hands moved across symbols, granting Mark access to the weapons. He watched Mark establish connections into the network, then encrypt the whole weapons section.
“Can you break that?” he asked the SIsubroutine.
“No. It would require more processing power than the ship possesses.”
“Figures,” Ozzie muttered. Data was flowing out of the magazine mechanism control arrays to Mark’s insert.
“What’s that?” Mark queried.
“Just figuring out how you’re going to fix the launcher.”
“It was at an angle.”
“Excuse me?” Ozzie’s virtual vision followed a few small files Mark was now downloading into the array governing the electromuscle arms.
“Everyone thinks electromuscle segments are the same,” Mark said. “They’re not. Two identical lengths nearly always have different traction ratings. It’s down to minor instabilities in the manufacturing processes. Some batches come out weak, some strong, so the producers always build in a five percent traction overcapacity. That means they have to be balanced, especially in cases like this when you’ve got a missile being gripped by seven different arms. There, see? When they latched on to the missile in the magazine at different strengths they were actually tilting it.”
“Uh huh,” Ozzie said weakly.
“No wonder it wouldn’t slide into the launch tube, it was at a hell of a slant. There we go, that fix should recalibrate and equalize the traction. I wrote it years ago to balance the hoist arms on a friend’s tow truck.”
Ozzie’s virtual vision showed the quantumbuster missile slide into the launch tube amid a flood of green symbols. “Son of a bitch.” A patch for a tow truck! “It works.”
Mark gave him a slightly apologetic grin. “It’s what I do.”
The timer in Ozzie’s virtual vision had counted off forty-two seconds since Mark took command of the weapons. Two days smashing my head against a rock and I got nowhere; and I’m supposed to be a fucking genius. “Mark, thank you, man. You do realize we’ll have to go through with the flight into the Dark Fortress now?”
“Yeah, I know. But my survival chances haven’t been terribly high for a while now, have they?”
“I guess not. Uh, is there any of that lunch box left?”
“No. But there’s all the meals in the emergency survival lockers. They taste quite good, actually.”
Ozzie smiled. It was a good way of preventing the stressed whimper rushing out of his throat.
Oscar came out of the memory implant the way he shook off his nightly bad dream. Head rocking from side to side, trying to rise up off the couch, not quite certain where he was and what was real. He was sure his hand was still closed around a joystick while long flexible white wings curved up on either side of him as the wind raged outside. He blinked against the strong light, making out blurred figures standing at the end of the couch. Faces came into focus.
Something wrong.
Jamas and Kieran looked both scared and
angry, never a good combination especially as they had their ion carbines jabbed into Wilson and Anna. Wilson’s emotions were under complete control, allowing him to put out just the right amount of tolerant dismay. Anna was quietly furious, her OCtattoos flexing in and out of visibility like a carnivore’s fangs in the prelude to a kill. If Kieran’s carbine muzzle ever slipped away from her ribs he’d probably wind up very dead very fast. By the look of him, he knew that, too.
“What’s happened?” Oscar asked. The feeling of flying was smoothing out, leaving him with a bad headache.
“Adam’s dead,” Wilson said flatly.
“And one of you Starflyer fucks killed him,” Kieran shouted; the carbine was shoved harder into Anna’s side.
The falling sensation returned to Oscar’s limbs with a rush. He gave Wilson a dumbfounded stare. “No.”
“You were here in the hangar with him,” Jamas said.
Bring the joystick back carefully, allow the wings time to respond as you plummet down helplessly in a microburst. Airflow around the fuselage changes as the plyplastic adjusts in long twists. “Where is he?” Oscar demanded hoarsely.
Jamas jerked his head toward the door into the hangar office. “You saying you didn’t hear it?”
“It was a knife,” Wilson said in undisguised contempt. “There was nothing to hear.”
“I couldn’t hear a thing,” Oscar said. “I was having the memory implant.”
“Yeah, right,” Kieran sneered.
Oscar ignored him and swung his legs around off the couch. He was unsteady on his feet.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Jamas asked.
“To see him.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Oscar straightened, one hand holding the side of the couch. Lights throbbed in time with his headache.
“Careful,” Anna said. “Memory implants affect neuron function for several minutes afterward.”
“I have to see him.” Because I don’t believe you. Not Adam. It can’t be.
Jamas and Kieran exchanged a glance, then Kieran nodded. “Okay, Rosamund will be here in a minute.”
With the others following, Oscar walked through into the office, then out into the hangar. It wasn’t just the effects of the implant that made his movements unsteady. He could see a pair of legs sticking out from behind one of the gliders, and slowed, not wanting to see.
Adam lay on the dark composite floor, legs and arms akimbo, the handle of a harmonic blade sticking out from the nape of his neck. A small puddle of blood had pooled around his head.
Oscar’s legs very nearly gave way. He clung to the fuselage to support himself. All he could think of was the look on Adam’s face when they saw the Abadan crash. The ghosts will be happy tonight.
“You okay?” Anna asked. She’d come up beside him.
“This can’t be right,” he said in a hushed croak. “Not here. Not like that. It’s not right. It can’t happen like this.”
“Well, it did fucking happen,” Jamas spat. “And one of you traitors did it.”
“Just kill them all,” Kieran said. He moved back from Anna to stand beside Jamas, his carbine covering Oscar and Anna. “That way we’ll be sure we got the bastard.”
“Where were you when it happened?” Anna asked.
“Shut the fuck up, bitch.”
“I mean it,” she said, her eyes alight with cold wrath. Her gaze flicked over to Jamas. “Was he with you?”
Jamas shifted uncomfortably. “No.”
“Jamas!” Kieran protested.
“That means neither of you can vouch for the other,” Wilson said. He walked over to stand with Anna and Oscar.
“We were only apart for a couple of minutes, that’s all,” Jamas said.
Wilson gazed down at Adam’s corpse. “And how long did that take?”
“Are you saying we did it?” Kieran asked.
“Can you prove you didn’t?”
Kieran snarled at him, shifting the muzzle of his ion carbine around. Jamas’s hand slowly pushed the weapon down. “He’s right.”
“What? You can’t be serious!”
Jamas looked even more unhappy.
Rosamund barged in through the hangar door, dragging Paula Myo along. The Investigator was still wearing Adam’s cherry-red woolen sweater, her face was beaded with perspiration, while her lips had turned almost black. Oscar and Wilson automatically went to help carry her. Paula groaned as they took her weight; she was barely conscious. They lowered her to the floor with her back resting against the hyperglider’s cradle. She shuddered violently, her head lolling about. Then she saw Adam’s body and gasped. Her hands came up to rub at her eyes; she was blinking almost continuously. “Is he dead?” she asked.
“It pretty much fucking looks like it to me,” Kieran shouted.
“Shut up,” Wilson snapped. He was kneeling beside Paula, hand feeling her forehead. “Paula, can you understand me? Do you know where we are?”
Her eyes closed for a long blink as she switched her attention from Adam to Wilson. “Far Away, we’re on Far Away.”
“Do you remember the sabotaged crates?”
“Yes.”
“We need your help. Whoever did that has now killed Adam.”
“What if it’s her?” Kieran asked.
“Well?” Wilson asked Rosamund, who was staring down at Adam’s corpse.
The Guardian woman stirred herself. “We were in the Volvo the whole time.”
“So you say,” Oscar barked. He knew he shouldn’t have said it, they were already drowning in hostility, but he still couldn’t believe it was either Wilson or Anna, and that sounded way too much like a convenient alibi for comfort.
Rosamund’s hand went straight to her holster. She was glaring at Oscar.
Paula coughed feebly, and brought her hand up to her throat. “I can’t confirm Rosamund was there with me.”
“You bitch.”
Paula waved her silent. “But she can for me.”
Rosamund gave the Investigator a suspicious glare. “What do you mean?”
“There is only one door to the Volvo rest cabin. If I was the Starflyer agent, I couldn’t have got out to do this without Rosamund knowing. She says I didn’t. It wasn’t me. It also makes it unlikely that it was her, but not impossible.”
“Okay,” Jamas said. “So who did murder him?”
“I don’t know. Yet.” Paula tipped her head back. “Wilson, where were you?”
“I went over to the generator building. I managed to start it up, as you can see. The town has power, the hypergliders are charging up.”
“It is not far to any building. Is the generator difficult to start?”
“No, it isn’t. It was primed ready. I had to physically press three buttons. It started straightaway.”
“Did anyone go with you?”
“No.”
“We left the hangar together,” Anna said. “I went to find the tether cables for the hypergliders.”
“Did you find them?”
“Yes. There’s a stores building at the end of the hangars. They’re kept in there.”
“Oscar?”
“Memory implant. The induction systems are at the back of this hangar. I didn’t know anything going on outside. In fact, the killer could have been in there with me, I wouldn’t have known.” The thought made him clammy with nerves.
“I see. Jamas?”
“Kieran and I went to find the jeeps to tow the hypergliders.”
“I called Adam and told him we found them,” Kieran said. “Their tanks were just about empty, so Jamas went and found the main tank. I stayed with the jeeps to take a look at their radio modules. We need them for the observation. I was going to look for the tether anchor drill, but I hadn’t heard from Adam for a while. Jamas came back, we headed right over here and found him.”
“And then the others arrived,” Paula said.
“Yeah, these two came in together.” His carbine pointed out Wilson
and Anna.
“Is there any sign of anyone else here?” Paula asked.
“No,” Kieran said. “I’ve not seen anyone.”
“Me neither,” Wilson said.
“You and Adam were talking together in the Volvo after we found the sabotage,” Rosamund said to Paula. “Did you have any idea who the traitor was?”
“No.” The Investigator seemed to be losing interest.
“Adam was only going to take two gliders,” Kieran said; he gave Oscar a strange look. “That’s what he told me.”
“When?” Paula asked.
“It was just about the last thing he said. I’d told him we’d found the jeeps, and he said we only needed two.”
Jamas smiled brutally. “He knew it was one of you.”
Oscar held back from saying anything. The Guardian trio were so hyped up and trigger-happy they probably would shoot someone if they had half an excuse.
“He didn’t say that to me,” Paula said. “We were still trying to work it out.”
“Then there’s nothing else we can do right now,” Wilson said. “We need to get the hypergliders over to Stakeout Canyon. There’s not much time left.”
“Are you fucking insane?” Jamas cried. His carbine swung around to point at Wilson, finger tight on the trigger.
“This changes nothing,” Wilson retorted. “We kept going after the crates were sabotaged, we keep going now. Only this time we do not split up again. From now on we do everything in groups of at least three. Everything.”
“You’re not flying up that mountain,” Kieran snarled. “You’ll wreck the planet’s revenge.”
“There won’t be any planet’s revenge without the observation from Aphrodite’s Seat. All three of us will fly. That way the odds protect us.”
“Dreaming heavens!” Kieran appealed desperately to Jamas and Rosamund. “What do we do?”
“He’s right,” Rosamund said bitterly. “They have to fly.”
The control center for the planet’s revenge was huddled at the back of a cave in Mount Idle, named so because it was a lot smaller than the surrounding peaks. It had slumped over the millennia since the Dessault range had been formed, its rocky pinnacle crumbling away into a lackluster mound, while its sides were liberally smeared with long swathes of loose scree. Even the cave wasn’t worth the Guardians using as one of their forts: too small, too visible with its yawning mouth.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 222
