The Dying Light
Page 24
His laugh was loud but forced. “Don’t flatter yourself, Roche. The idea hadn’t even occurred to me,” he said. “Tell me, though, what you would do to ensure my cooperation. Torture me?”
“Anything’s possible,” she said. “I’m determined to rescue Maii.”
“And Cane?”
She hesitated before answering. “Yes, Cane as well.”
Disisto grunted as they swooped past the anchor point. “You know what I think this is?” he said, gesturing around him. He didn’t wait for her reply: “Some sort of covert transportation system. The anchor point obviously led somewhere, once, and the shell of moon around it would’ve absorbed any emissions when it was used. The labyrinth and the gravity trap would have stopped anyone just wandering in. There could be hundreds of these things scattered across the galaxy and no one would ever know about them.”
“But the outriggers got through the traps easily enough. It’s not really that secure. Especially given its location.”
“Maybe the builders just wanted a little privacy.”
“Maybe,” she muttered, turning her attention to the structure they were approaching. It looked like a cannon of some kind, or an elongated funnel, directed at the anchor point. Instead of a barrel, though, it contained a cuplike hollow thirty-five meters in diameter. Despite her instruments saying it was inactive, Roche still regarded the structure warily. There was undoubtedly a connection between it and the anchor point, and until she knew exactly what that connection was, she had no desire to be anywhere between them.
They split up when they reached it. Roche circled its lip while Disisto traveled along its underside. It seemed to be made of the same material as the crust, but whorled and knotted as though eroded by centuries of running water.
The channel between them was thick with their silence. Neither was talking for fear of provoking the other.
“Any theories?” she asked. Anything was better than that silence.
“I’ve never come across anything like this before,” he said. “And I’ve been on plenty of excavations.”
“What about Rufo? Think there’d be anything in his files?”
“He’s covered more of the galaxy than most people,”
Disisto said thoughtfully. “His records contain thousands of examples of Caste-types and divergent engineering and exotic materials and bizarre technologies, but...” He stopped. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this wasn’t even Human.”
“There’s no chance of that, I suppose?”
He snorted. “None. Believe me, if there was any sign of alien life in the galaxy, past or present, Linegar Rufo would know about it.”
“He seems the secretive type to me,” she said, to see if she would get a reaction.
She did: he laughed. “Listen, Roche. Don’t play me for the fool. Making me doubt my boss isn’t going to make me automatically want to help you get your friends back.” She watched as he jetted up to where she floated near the mouth of the giant trumpet. Through his faceplate she could see him smiling humorlessly. “But I may be useful to you in other ways.”
“Such as?”
“I’ve been thinking. Even if I won’t help you fight Linegar, I can tell you some things you probably should know.”
She cleared her faceplate and met his eye. She sensed an internal struggle raging within him. He wasn’t going to betray his boss, but he didn’t want to see her fail, either. How he could possibly hope to succeed at both—and why—she didn’t know, but she was keen to see him try.
“Go on,” she said.
“It’s about Cane,” he said. “And the other one we’re chasing. The Kesh believe they’re something to do with the Sol Apotheosis Movement, but Rufo doesn’t. He’s letting them believe it because it gives him an edge. But he suspects it’s all a smoke screen.”
Roche shook her head. “A smoke screen? What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I say. There might be no connection between the two. And if so, you could be basing assumptions on imperfect data.”
“But we’ve got proof that Cane is a Sol Wunderkind: his genetic design, the control language you’ve been broadcasting—”
“I’m not a biogeneticist, so I can’t argue about his makeup. But I do know the control language didn’t come from any of the historical archives. You must have looked before you came here. Did you find the codes?”
“No. I assumed Rufo had access to other records—”
“The language wasn’t in the records,” he cut in. “None that any of us can access, anyway. I don’t know where the codes came from or what they mean, and I doubt the chief knows either, but I know he was given those codes. He’s deliberately keeping Shak’ni out of the full picture—and he’s letting you believe what you want to believe, too.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Disisto seemed frustrated. “But I think it’s dangerous. We should be sharing information. Otherwise we could all be killed by this thing. Or even Cane, for that matter—whatever the hell he is.”
“No, you’re wrong,” said Roche. “Uri found a correlation in the Ana Vereine’s database. Cane’s face matched that of the man who wiped out the Sol Apotheosis Movement. How can you ignore that kind of connection?”
“Because we have no records of any ‘Adoni Cane’ at all—in the Sol files or elsewhere.”
“What?”
“I can’t explain it, Roche. All I know is that while you were in the meeting with Linegar, he ordered a confirmatory search, and nothing was found.”
“This is insane.” She groped for an explanation that made sense. Either Rufo had corrupted his own files in order to keep the information a secret, or the Ana Vereine’s records were wrong—along with those of COE Intelligence HQ, which had confirmed the match. For the first time, she wished the Box was around to help her work out what was going on.
The Box... It had a habit of manipulating records to suit its own agenda. But why would it encourage her to believe, mistakenly, that Cane’s origins lay with the Sol Apotheosis Movement? What could it possibly gain from that? And where had Rufo’s information come from? The Kesh didn’t know, so that ruled them out, and the Box had been with her for weeks. It just didn’t fit together.
“You disapprove of what Rufo is doing,” she said, trying to clarify Disisto’s feelings on the matter of Cane. “But I suppose you don’t disapprove enough to help me rectify the problem, either.”
Disisto drifted until one hand rested on the alien surface. “Look, I’d rather we were taking an active role here in the system. The Kesh might go along with it, although I don’t really know what they’re after. Rufo’s attempts to contact the warrior give me the creeps, to be honest Whoever gave him the information he needed to do that, whoever knew enough about the warrior to identify his type even though we can’t—whoever that is, I think they know a lot more than they’re saying. And I think Rufo is being used. This ‘whoever’ was too afraid to come here themselves, so we were dispatched. We’re all expendable.”
Roche suddenly felt cold and vulnerable. The Box had something to do with the High Human called the Crescend. High Humans had access to all sorts of information mundanes never even suspected existed. It might have given the control language to Rufo in exchange for firsthand information. And where was the Box now? Jetting around the system in her one and only escape route, while she played xenoarchaeologist with a genocidal clone warrior possibly nearby....
She cursed under her breath and tried to shake the paranoid thoughts. Such a line of thinking was neither helpful nor healthy. Nevertheless, one thing she had learned in recent weeks was that being merely paranoid wasn’t paranoid enough. And she certainly was expendable
No. She couldn’t let Disisto confuse her. She had no reason to believe that the Sol Apotheosis Movement was a smoke screen. Linegar Rufo could be wrong for a change, or Disisto could be lying. Better the latter than the tangled skein of deceit he was proposing in its place.
Disisto seemed unaw
are of the uncertainty he had provoked in her. That only made it worse. If he had done it deliberately, then he was a better liar than she believed him to be.
“Anyway,” he said, “I thought you ought to know about my dilemma. If you can help me out of it, then—”
“That’s not my problem,” she said, pushing herself impatiently away from the alien trumpet. “And there’s too much going on for us to just float around sightseeing. The more I can sort out before the Box gets here, the better.” She switched to a more general frequency. “Byrne? Idil? Can anyone hear me?”
“Is something wrong?” said Idil after a few moments.
“I want to attend the Plenary. I want to hear what you’re saying about me.”
“You don’t have the interfaces required to do that.”
“Byrne said I could sit in on the summary. How much different could it be?”
“Fundamentally.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Roche saw Disisto moving away from her. She froze his suit with a simple command. “Regardless, I want to know what’s going on. Maybe I can contribute.” Or make sure you come to the right decision, she thought.
“I’m sorry, but it just isn’t possible—”
The auditor’s voice cut into the conversation. “Let her,” she said. “It will do us no harm.”
“Very well, Roche. Surrender your suit’s input channels,” said Idil. “Do you have direct inputs?”
“My left eye and ear.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do to make it easier.”
Roche hesitated before handing over control, wondering what she had let herself in for.
She gave Idil the access codes required to patch into her implants. The outriggers would be able to draw upon her suit’s full communication capacity; she could pull out any time she wanted, she assumed.
“Five seconds,” Idil said. “Prepare yourself.”
For what? she wanted to ask.
Then she recalled that Auditor Byrne hadn’t said “harmless” to everyone. Byrne had said that it wouldn’t harm them.
With a click and a flash deep in the underside of her brain, the Plenary of Long Span spine exploded through her.
6
Mok Interior
‘955.01.21 EN
1990
The voice seemed to speak directly into the fissures of Roche’s brain:
___Commander Roche
___has come to us for help
___and to offer us help.
___We have numerous options.
___Which do we choose?
With the words came a blinding light. It felt as though the outriggers were overloading the tolerances of her auditory and optic nerves. But her implants had buffers that should prevent that sort of surge. Somehow the outriggers must have infiltrated the hardwiring of her implants.
The voice repeated its spiel. This time Roche sensed a hidden complexity, a second, more subtle strand underlying the first, somehow mixed up with vivid pulses of light accompanying the sound.
___Commander Roche
/how do we know she is who she says she is?/
___has come to us for help
/or to spy/
___and to offer us help.
/how? /
___We have numerous options.
/believe her/
/don’t trust her/
/trust her/
/kill her/
/send her away/
/help her/
/help her help us/
/help her get away/
___Which do we choose?
The response wrapped itself around the question like a vine. The more the question was repeated the more complex and tangled the response became. Layer by layer, the argument unfolded:
___Commander Roche
/1How do we know she is who she says she is?
/2She has no reason to lie.
/3or reason to tell us the truth.3/
Does it matter?
/3If she’s lying about this, we can’t trust her at all.
/4But we have no way of knowing.4/
True.3/
It’s good to be cautious, but let’s not get out of hand.2/
Agreed, for now.1/
She struggled to keep up as the question cycled and recycled, dragging her along with it:
___has come to us for help
/1More likely to spy.
/2Who for?2/
COE Intelligence
/2She says she doesn’t work for them anymore.
/33And you believe her?
/4She says she heard a distress call.
/5She could be lying about that, too.5/
We’re going in circles!
/5No, you are5/
We must establish a reason for suspicion.
/5That our lives are under threat isn’t enough?
/6We are safe here.
/7Short term only.7/
Perhaps. 6/
Perhaps not, if we let Roche in.5/
Perhaps. 4/
Perhaps.3/
We need to make a decision!2/
But the right one.1/
___and to offer us help.
/1How?
/2Ask her.
/3Again: why should we believe her?/
/2What have we got to lose if we do?
/3Our lives
/4We’ll die if she doesn’t help us!4/
/3We have only her word on that.
/4But we are trapped here.4/
Undeniably.3/
So we can at least agree to give her a chance?2/
That’s what we are doing!1/
Despite the increasing complexity of the argument, she began to recognize voices—or at least patterns of response. There were the skeptics, and there were those inclined to trust her. She wondered how they could ever expect to achieve a consensus to arise from such chaos.
Each time the question reached its conclusion, the eddy of voices threatened to carry her away....
___We have numerous options.
/1don’t trust her
/2send her away
/3trust her
/4help her help us
/5believe her
/6don’t trust her
/7send her away
/8trust her
/9help her help us
/10disbelieve her
/11kill her
/12use her12/
kill her11/
don’t trust her10/
trust her9/help her8/
send her away
/8help her help us/9help her get away
/10send her away10/
trust her9/help her help us8/
kill her7/
send her away6/
let her live5-3/
ignore her2 don’t trust her1/
Gradually, the voices began to cluster into groups. The clamor didn’t ebb, but it became slightly more coherent to Roche’s adjusting senses. Each group made concessions in order to increase its numbers; one, initially prepared to let her go unharmed, eventually allied itself with another group who wanted the resources of Daybreak to remain behind; another began by offering help unreservedly but ended up demanding rescue from the collapsing Gauntlet as a condition for giving that help. Then the boundaries shifted again, hinging this time on her possible allegiance with Linegar Rufo. With each concession came increased complexity, so the Plenary became less of a squabble and more of a debate, although some of the exchanges remained heated.
Woven through the groups were odd loners who initially refused to accept any compromise. One of these in particular caught Roche’s attention, even though the voice at first didn’t contribute much.
/113-117We have to make some kind of decision soon.
/118But what can we do?
/119-125The sensible thing would be to wait to see what happens.125-119/
Do we even have the resources to do anything?
/119-125Exactly our point. For that reason we prefer inaction to action.
/126-129No. The sensible response is to help her.
/130-131Such action would potentially benefit us the most.
/132No—kill her!
/133And miss this chance to avenge my clan?133/
Irrelevant! Her mere presence here puts us in danger!132
We have no proof of that.
/132Yet.
/133But we know she can help me.133/
Must we also die in some futile attempt to make a point?132-131
It would be a meaningless sacrifice.130-126/
Perhaps it is better in this case to attempt neither.125-118/
Unacceptable response! Inaction is not an option!117-111/
At least we’d be alive.110-109/
For how long?108-105/
My people didn’t die so yours could cower here and wait your turn!104/
So let’s kill her now before she has a chance!103/
This is getting us nowhere!102-98/
The outrigger seeking revenge, Roche guessed, was the lone survivor of the attack on Wide Berth spine; the one seeking Roche’s death, however, she couldn’t identify. Perhaps it was one she hadn’t yet met. A couple of times she tried to interject a comment in her defense, but she didn’t know how to. All she could do was feel the currents of opinion ebbing and flowing around her.
___Which do we choose?
Each time that question was asked, argument broke out afresh and the entire process was repeated. Slowly, though, a consensus began to emerge.
/286-291We need more information.
/How do you propose getting that?294-292
By asking.291-286/
And trusting her?285/
We could do worse than try.279-284/