Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

Karyl noted the slip, but didn't say anything.

  "You looked at them or you did not, it is all the same to me," Barrett said. "And you did not recognize them, and you did not recognize their names when you documented them."

  "No."

  "I suppose there is no reason why you should," Barrett said. "However, I am sure that you have heard of Avernus."

  "Who hasn't?"

  Avernus was the best and most famous gene wizard in the Outer system. She was at least two hundred years old. One of the people who helped found the cities and settlements on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, after Karyl's great-grandparents fled the Moon. She created many of the vacuum organisms that grew out on the surface of the moons, and many other things, too. Plants and animals, gardens . . .

  "Before the war, she was perhaps one of the most important people amongst the Outers. But now no one knows where she is," Barrett said. "Does that surprise you?"

  "I suppose she has something to do with one of those dead people we found on the shuttle."

  "She was arrested before the war. She had taken up residence in Paris, Dione. The self-proclaimed centre of resistance to our quite legitimate presence in the Saturn System. She was part of the peace movement, and because of her prominence the mayor of Paris arrested her and put her in a prison outside the city. She escaped from the prison when the war started, and we chased her to Titan, where she escaped again." Barrett took a sip of coffee and said, "She had a daughter. Well, she called the little girl who accompanied her everywhere her daughter, but who knows. Perhaps she was a clone, or some other monstrous creation. Still, Avernus treated her like a daughter, and no one knows where she is, either. She was put in prison with Avernus, and most people think that she went to Titan with Avernus. It is quite possible. But there is one problem with that story. The person who caught up with Avernus on Titan saw no since of the so-called daughter. It may mean nothing. Titan is a big moon. Perhaps the daughter was there, but hiding somewhere else. Or perhaps the daughter went somewhere else, after the prison escape."

  "It was a confusing time," Karyl said.

  "You're wondering what this has to do with your work. Well, I'll tell you." Barrett pushed away from the sling chair and floated across the small room and caught hold of the wall next to Karyl. "Those people you found on the shuttle may have known what happened to the daughter because they were part of Avernus's entourage. They were put in prison with Avernus; they escaped when she did. But they did not go with Avernus to Titan. Instead, they got away from Dione on that shuttle, the shuttle encountered an EMP mine, and the rest you know."

  "I know we didn't find the body of a little girl," Karyl said. He was thinking of the foodmaker and the missing yeast, the missing fuel cells. Tell Barrett now? No. Wait and see where this was going.

  "No, you did not. As far as I know you did not."

  Barrett's dark brown eyes, pinched by folds of flesh, were fixed on Karyl from about a metre away. Karyl could smell the stale tang of garlic on the man's breath.

  He said, "You sent in the drones before you sent us in. You know what was there, and what wasn't."

  "Let me confess something," Barrett said. "After I found out who those dead passengers were, I made a personal visit to the shuttle. The drones had already checked everything in the lifesystem, but I wondered if Avernus's daughter might still be alive, hiding somewhere. So I went out myself and performed an infrared scan of the wreck from stem to stern. Do you know what I found? Not a fucking thing."

  "Even if she had been on board, she would be dead now," Karyl said. "The shuttle was killed stone dead. The EMP blast fritzed every circuit. No lights, no air conditioning, no heat, no communications, no hope of rescue."

  "Alive or dead, if she was on that shuttle, I want to know," Barrett said. "It would be far better if she alive of course. I think you know why."

  Karyl knew. The Three Powers Authority badly wanted to capture Avernus and mine her for every one of her secrets. So far she had eluded its search parties, but if the TPA had her daughter, it would have leverage. It could try to persuade her to surrender.

  Barrett's gaze moved over Karyl's face and he smiled when he saw what was there. "You understand completely," he said. "That is why I'm going to make you an offer. I will forget about the delay. I will eat it if I have to. But only if you agree to strip that shuttle to its frame. I want every possible hiding place ripped open and exposed. If she is not there, I want to be absolutely certain. And if she is hidden somewhere, well, you and your gang could benefit handsomely."

  "Even if she's dead?"

  "Even if she's dead. I have put my trust in you, Mezhidov. Do not fail me. Do not betray me. If I find out that you have been hiding anything from me, I will punish you and your gang. You can be sure of that," Barrett said, and turned and swam out of the room.

  7.

  When Karyl got back to the cluster of living modules, he had to stand outside his cell while two guards made a show of searching it. He cleared up the mess they'd left and ate his usual solitary supper of lukewarm soup and black bread and a carbohydrate bar and lay awake most of the night, thinking about everything Barrett had told him. He wasn't able to tell the others in the gang about Barrett's punishment and warning until the next morning, in the big locker room where the thirty-odd members of the salvage gangs were suiting up for the day's work.

  Karyl, Somerset, Bruno and Ty hung in a tight huddle in one corner, checking the seals and lifepacks of each other's suits, checking their tools, while he told them that Barrett had extended their sentences by a day and threatened more punishments if their work continued to fall behind schedule. He waited until Ty had finished complaining about this, then said that Barrett knew that some of the dead had been part of Avernus's entourage, that he believed that Avernus's daughter might be hidden somewhere aboard the shuttle.

  "I told you," Ty said. "Didn't I tell you?"

  He was a raggedy young man, scrawny, pale-skinned, thick black tattoos squirming over his shaven scalp. He chewed gum incessantly; he was chewing it now behind a wide grin, a tendon jumping on his neck.

  "Just because Barrett believes it doesn't mean it's true," Karyl said. "And I really do hope he's wrong. Because if he is right, and if we do find the girl, we will be in serious trouble."

  Bruno shrugged. "If this girl is on the shuttle, she is surely dead. So what harm can we do to her by finding her?"

  Somerset said, "Because she's Avernus's daughter. She might know all of Avernus's hiding places. Her secret gardens. Or the Three Power might threaten to kill her if Avernus doesn't surrender. And if Avernus surrenders, it will be a huge coup for the Three Powers, and a big loss for us."

  "We have already lost the war," Bruno said. "Nothing can change that. But if we find Avernus's daughter, perhaps we will be rewarded. Perhaps we can go home to our families."

  Karyl said, "Let me ask you something. Where your cells searched last night?"

  The three men nodded.

  "We were strip-searched, too," Bruno said. "So? They are always on the lookout for stuff we might try to keep."

  "Barrett wants us to know that he doesn't trust us," Karyl said. "And we can't trust him, either. He wants this girl for himself. Otherwise he would have done the right thing, and had the ship towed to the dock and searched under close supervision. But if he did that, he would have had to tell his commanding officer, and share the glory, and any reward. Instead, he snuck out to the ship himself, hoping to find her. He didn't, and now he wants us to do his dirty work. And if we find the girl, alive or dead, we can't trust him to let us live. He knows that we will be questioned. And he can't allow that, because then everything about his little scheme to enrich himself would come out."

  Karyl had thought this through during the night, examined every angle. Now he watched Ty and Bruno and Somerset think about it.

  "If we found her, we could tell Barrett's boss," Ty said.

  "There's a chain of command. I report to Barrett, not his commanding officer,"
Karyl said. "If I wanted to talk to her, I'd have to ask him for permission. And even if I found a way around him, why would she believe anything a prisoner told her? No, our best chance, if we do find this girl, is to keep her hidden. If she'd dead, we can move her body to one of the other ships. If she's alive, we'll have to keep her hidden. When the ship goes for refurbishment, she'll have a chance to escape."

  Bruno said, "What if she's caught?"

  "I expect Mr Barrett will be very unhappy," Karyl said. "But as long as she's caught at the docks he won't be able to do anything about it. If we deny any knowledge of her and stick together we should be all right."

  "Karyl is right," Somerset said. "If we find the girl, we must do our best by her."

  Bruno shrugged. "I miss my wife and kids. I don't want any trouble and I don't want to spend a day longer here than I have to."

  "Neither do I," Somerset said. "Which is why I want to hear you say that you agree to Karyl's plan. You too, Ty."

  "I don't like Barrett any more than you do," Ty said.

  "Is that a 'yes'?" Barrett said.

  Ty popped his gum. "Why not?"

  Somerset looked at Barrett. "And you?"

  "I've been on this team longer than you. I always pull my weight."

  The two men were staring at each other, floating a couple of metres apart. Helmetless in their pressure suits. Others in the cold spherical space turned to look, sensing the possible excitement of a fight. Karyl saw that the two soldiers by the airlock were watching too, and told Bruno and Somerset to knock it off.

  "If we're lucky, the girl isn't on that shuttle at all," he said. "Meanwhile we will do our work and we will make sure we stick to the schedule from now on. Ty and Bruno will work inside, pulling out the control systems. Somerset and I will finish up stripping that vacuum organism from the fusion motor. When we have finished, we'll come give you two a hand. Okay?"

  "We'll all stick together," Somerset said again. "Because we all want to go home."

  "We all know what you want," Bruno said, and flinched but held his ground when Somerset moved closer.

  Bruno was a chunky fellow and Somerset was as slightly built as Ty, but he possessed a calm intensity and a formidable reputation. He'd been incarcerated in a correctional facility for ten years before the war, after he'd taken a hitchhiker on board his tug and raped and killed her and dumped her body somewhere in churning vastness of the rings. Despite extensive therapy, despite joining a Buddhist sect that believed in gardening microhabitats whose health and harmony were reflection of their spiritual states, he'd had no chance of ever being released, but then war had come and gone, and the Three Powers Authority had made him the same offer they'd made every other prisoner with experience of working on ships: join the salvage crews in exchange for commutation of his sentence.

  He said now, his face a scant half metre from Bruno's, "I can never atone for my crime, but I want the chance to go out into the world and heal damaged gardens and make new ones. To do my best to do good. This is my only chance, so I will do anything I can to secure it."

  Karyl got between them and pushed them apart, just as one of the soldiers sculled up and asked if there was a problem.

  "We're discussing our work schedule," Karyl said. "Right, boys?"

  "How to get back on target," Somerset said, still looking at Bruno.

  "Absolutely," Bruno said, looking back at Somerset.

  8.

  Karyl and Somerset sculled over the shuttle's hull, up and over the flared skirt of the fusion motor's radiation shield. Saturn's fat crescent hung way out there in the vast black sky, bracketed by the delicate line of its ring system and crescents three of the inner moons Epimetheus, Tethys, Dione strung in a line beyond. In the opposite direction was the life module cluster and the Greater Brazilian ship. And all across the sky, near and far, were the differently shaped stars of dead ships awaiting salvage.

  Following Somerset down in the absolute darkness of the shield's shadow, Karyl switched on the light on top of her helmet, and Somerset turned neatly, his face pale behind his visor, eyes squint-shut in the glare of Karyl's light. He offered a patch cord and as soon as Karyl plugged it in Somerset told him it would be a good idea to switch off his light.

  "Barrett doesn't have any drones watching the shuttle," Somerset said. "If he did, his commanding officer might suspect something is up. But he might be watching us from the ship. In fact, I would be amazed if he wasn't. It's only a couple of hundred kilometres away. Any telescope could easily pick us out."

  Somerset was always courteous and scrupulously polite, but Karyl could never quite shake off the feeling that the murderer he'd once been still lived somewhere inside him. A monster biding its time. He said, "Tell me what's on your mind."

  "You're the only one I can trust," Somerset said. "And I'm not even sure if I can trust you completely, but I have to tell someone because I can't do this by myself."

  "If you're planning to escape," Karyl said, "I don't want to know."

  "I found her hiding place," Somerset said, with such straightforward simplicity that it took Karyl a moment to work out what he meant.

  "When? When did you find it?"

  "Two days ago."

  "Where is she? Is she still alive?"

  "Switch off your light and I'll show you."

  Somerset had set a tether line around the cylindrical housing of the fusion motor. In absolute darkness, Karyl felt his way along it until Somerset told him they had gone far enough, they were on the far side of the shuttle from the Greater Brazilian ship.

  "We have about ten minutes before the shuttle's rotation carries us into sunlight and line-of-sight view," he said, and switched on his helmet light, aiming it at a spherical tank tucked against the radiation shield.

  It was one of the two tanks that held water used as reaction mass for the motors that adjusted the shuttle's trim. Like the most of the fusion motor's bulbous cylinder, it was coated with the black crust of the vacuum organism, smooth as spilled paint in some places, raised in thin, stiff sheets and vase-shapes like mutant funeral-flowers in others.

  "In there?" Karyl said. "But the water inside it will frozen hard. No, wait, she vented the water, didn't she?"

  "That's what first raised my suspicion," Somerset said. 'There are simple mechanical indicators as well as the usual electronics. One tank was empty, one half-full. I had to wonder why."

  Like Barrett, he'd checked the tank's temperature, and found that it was the same as the rest of the vacuum-organism growth covering the fusion motor assembly, just a few degrees warmer than the rest of the shuttle.

  "I thought the temperature difference was due to the vacuum organism's metabolism, or because it retained heat from sunlight," Somerset said. "But then I tried to peel away some of it, and found fine threads running through it. Superconducting threads."

  "She's inside the tank, and she's using the vacuum organism as a radiator," Karyl said.

  "The vacuum organism also generates electricity. Something like ten point six watts over its entire surface. Not very much, but enough to keep her alive," Somerset said.

  "You looked inside, didn't you?"

  "Karyl, I can't trust the other two with this. I know you can't either. Because Barrett knows that she might be alive. That is why he came out to the shuttle."

  "He knew that the other passengers were part of Avernus's entourage. He knew that her daughter was missing, that there was a good chance she was on the shuttle."

  "Barrett is a lazy man, unskilled in freefall vacuum work. Yet he came out here and scanned the shuttle for anomalous temperature gradients. I don't think he would have gone to that trouble unless he had hard evidence that she might be alive. I think someone told him about the foodmaker, and the missing fuel cell."

  "You think Ty or Bruno told him?"

  "I am certain someone did," Somerset said. "The ship will be in line-of-sight in less than two minutes. We should get to work, in case Barrett is watching."

  "W
e can't scrape up the vacuum organism. It is keeping her alive."

  "It is supplementing the fuel cell. She won't need it much longer," Somerset said, and pulled the patch cord.

  They worked for an hour. The shuttle slowly rotated, bringing them in sight of the Greater Brazilian ship, taking them out of sight again. Karyl tried to think things through as he worked, and kept coming back to the same conclusions. He'd have to tell Ty and Bruno, swear them to secrecy. They'd have to find some way of keeping the girl hidden. He'd have to lie to Barrett . . .

  The shuttle slowly revolved and at last the cluster of life modules and the Greater Brazilian ship sank beneath the sharp edge of the motor pod. The sun's pale disk was dropping towards the edge of the pod, too, and in the last of its light Somerset sculled over to the spherical tank and showed Karyl a clear spot in the otherwise ubiquitous coating of the vacuum organism, hidden behind one of the triangular struts that secured the tank to the motor's spine. It was like a dull grey eye surrounded by ridged and puckered black tar. In its centre, a fine seam defined a circle less than a metre in diameter.

  "That is what gave me the clue," Somerset said. 'The tank was pressurized with ten millibars, standard nitrox mix. There was a slight leak, I believe deliberate, and the vacuum organism must be an oxygen hater because it hasn't grown over the hatch."

  "She thought everything through," Karyl said. "Wait, you said that tank was pressurized. Does that mean what I think it does?"

  "I admit that when I discovered this, I had to know if I was correct in thinking I had discovered the missing passenger's hiding place. So I opened it," Somerset said. "With your permission?"

  "Go right ahead," Karyl said. His mouth was dry and he could feel her heart beating quickly and lightly.

  Somerset unhooked a tool from his pressure suit's utility, a pry bar with a sucker-like adhesive seal at one end, comprised of millions of nano-scale elements that gripped as tightly as a miser's claw. He applied the seal to the clear patch, thumbed the switch that activated it, and in a smooth motion lifted away the circle of composite.