The Eleventh Gate

by Nancy Kress

  The only alien structures he’d ever seen or heard of were on the planet sealed behind the eleventh gate, and those had been as dead as the Dagny Taggart.

  DiCaria said. “We could board her, sir, and investigate.”

  “No.” Some instinct, deeper than reason, warned Martinez. “We’ll board the intact ship, if possible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  For the better part of a day they moved toward the Galaxy, keeping the hull of the drifting and dead Dagny Taggart between them. The Skyhawk was not fired on. The Galaxy had no visible hull damage. It did not answer hailing messages. It flew on, serenely silent, toward New Utah.

  Martinez grew increasingly sure that it was traveling under inertia, not command.

  He fired an old-fashioned torpedo, of which the Skyhawk still carried a few, to miss the ship. No reaction. Nothing.

  Martinez said, “Prepare to board. Standard boarding party. No, belay that—two crew members only. Volunteers. Full EVA gear.”

  The OOD glanced at him. EVA gear would inhibit the boarders’ movements, including the use of sidearms. “Yes, sir.”

  Three hours later, Lieutenant Carol Gonzalez and specialist Jordan Wilson left the Skyhawk, now close to and matching the trajectory of the Galaxy. They rode a vacuum sled to the Landry ship, docked, and laser-cut the airlock door. Martinez had spent a long time with both, explaining hazards and their possible consequences. They were the eighth and ninth volunteers he’d talked to; the others had all backed out after hearing Martinez’s theory.

  Gonzalez said, “We’re in, sir.”

  “Proceed with caution.”

  Both wore recorders. Martinez watched the inner airlock door open, releasing the ship’s breathable air. “Alarms sounding, sir, but no other response. We’re in a suit-storage area with benches and cabinets—ship design is similar to ours. Moving through a far door…okay. Yes.”

  Her voice had become strained. Two bodies lay on the floor, dressed in military uniforms with Freedom Enterprises badges. Their faces were a mass of purplish pustules; their hands had partly rotted. Impossible to tell their gender, how long they’d been there, or anything else. When the ship had been pressurized, the smell must have been terrible.

  Gonzalez said, “Sending images for database matching…proceeding through the next corridor.”

  Wilson said nothing. He knew. They both knew.

  Most of the corpses lay in their bunks. Some had undressed, perhaps preferring to die out of uniform. The captain had died in her chair on the bridge. It took Wilson, the software specialist, nearly two hours to get into the ship’s computer. All files were heavily encrypted, but Wilson sent them to the Skyhawk anyway, everything that he could find. Everything physical was photographed.

  Gonzalez said, “Sir, I can’t see any way to discover the source of the infection.”

  “We’ll probably never know,” Martinez said. His own voice sounded thick. “I don’t think it was on this ship. I know this isn’t what you expected, Lieutenant.”

  “I knew it was a possibility. You were clear on that, sir.”

  A possibility, yes—but not a probability. The Dagny Taggart had clearly been disabled by the comet breach, and then survivors transferred to the Galaxy, which now carried more corpses than beds. But the comet was not what had killed both Landry ships. The disease had been carried by a transfer of something—food, personnel, hardware—from one ship to the other. The pathogen had gone along with the transfer.

  The blood and tissue sample analyses that Gonzalez had sent back from her hand-held lab, the photographs of the purple pustules, what had to be a very fast incubation period since one or the other ship had all been infected before the captain knew enough to not contaminate the other vessel—all of it was given to Dr. Mary Glynn, ship’s physician. She informed Martinez that none of it matched known diseases in the Skyhawk’s medical data base. “This pathogen may have been genetically engineered, sir.”

  It wasn’t natural, and it hadn’t been created aboard either ship. Gonzalez and Jordan found no biolabs, nor any record of one, on either the Dagny Taggart or the Galaxy. The Landry ships had been transporting the pathogen from somewhere else, to somewhere else.

  How had it gotten loose? An accident, or a deliberate act by the same sort of crazed, half-starved spacer that had tried to cut a hole in the Skyhawk? Or—the most chilling idea—had the Landry captain known that he didn’t have enough supplies to make it to New Utah and so he infected both ships in hopes that a Peregoy vessel would investigate, and then carry the pathogen to the Peregoy worlds?

  The Landrys, not satisfied with the meta-beam, were planning biowarfare. And pathogens, unlike radiation weapons, could pass through newly opened gates.

  Gonzalez said, “Anything else we can do here, Captain?”

  “No,” Martinez said. “Lieutenant, if there were any other way…”

  “I know there is not, sir.”

  “I’ll personally deliver both of your Distinguished Space Service Medals to your parents.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Specialist Wilson said nothing. Martinez heard a soft sound, but the boy—God, he couldn’t be more than twenty-one standard—straightened his spine. On the bridge of the Skyhawk, all heads bowed. Everyone understood that Martinez had no choice. Nothing was known about this vile weapon—not if it could cling to the EVA suits, not if it could survive the decon procedures built into Peregoy airlocks. Martinez had no choice.

  The Skyhawk and Green Hills of Earth moved away from the two Landry vessels. At a great enough distance, Martinez said, “Fire.” A second later, the torpedo with a nuclear warhead fired, and both the Dagny Taggart and the Galaxy were vaporized.

  Sometimes these archaic weapons, which most ships no longer carried, had their uses.

  Martinez turned to the data files from the Landry ship, blinking to clear his eyes enough to see them.

  34

  * * *

  EVERYWHERE

  Fields interact, ceaselessly, ceaselessly. Quanta changes from matter to energy, energy to matter. Particles appear, exist for the briefest of moments, disappear. Out of the quantum interaction of fields comes time, which both does and does not exist at the quantum level. “Slower” near large concentrations of matter, “faster” away from them, time has no objective meaning in the quantum flux. Time becomes space, space becomes time, and neither is local.

  Except to the Observer.

  Millennia pass. A minute passes. No time at all passes; the equations governing quantum fields can run in either temporal direction.

  Except in the field of consciousness. Because it is consciousness that creates time, even when It cannot measure it.

  Something is happening to the Observer.

  Interacting fields change each other, even the field of consciousness. The Observer is not as It was. Quanta have been affected, changed, destroyed. The Observer is more diffuse. It is weaker.

  Fields can decay.

  35

  * * *

  TWO LANDRY WORLDS

  As soon as she landed on Galt, Jane came to Rachel’s office, sweeping in with gale force. Despite her commander-in-chief uniform, Jane seemed a wild woman inexplicably dressed in an overly elaborate military uniform. She had lost more weight during her enforced stay on Rand and now looked like an erotic drawing from some artist’s fevered imagination: tiny waist, full breasts, black curls foaming above glowing green eyes. Too glowing, too green.

  Jane said, “Where’s Caitlin? She should be at this meeting, too. I might need research support from the university.”

  Rachel said smoothly, “She’s on Polyglot. I sent her there to try to hire some key scientists away from the Berlin Medical Institute. Neuroscientists. Caitlin hasn’t come back yet, but of course she will now that the gates are open. These neuroscientists—”

  “All right, we’ll go ahead without her,” Jane said. Jane was not interested in neuroscientists—as Rachel had known.

  Annelise said
, “Go ahead with what, Jane? You said you think the war will resume now and you think we can win it.”

  “I don’t think so, I know so. Fuck, Annelise, you’re always so cautious!”

  Annelise didn’t take the old, old bait, for which Rachel gave her credit. God, these granddaughters of hers!

  Rachel forced herself to say calmly, “So tell us what’s on your mind.”

  “No radiation weapons can go through gates, right? But those aren’t the only kinds of weapons. Now, Grandma, don’t protest before you hear me out. These are desperate times, and that calls for desperate tactics. We must win the war or Freedom Enterprises is finished, and I don’t intend to be finished. Samuel Fucking Peregoy is not going to annex Galt to his private dictatorship.”

  “I asked,” Rachel said, “what you plan to do, not your motives for doing it.”

  “I’m going to threaten New California until Peregoy surrenders. Threaten him with biowarfare.”

  Annelise gasped. She was a poor actress. If Jane had not been concentrating so hard on Rachel, she wouldn’t have believed her sister’s pretense of shocked ignorance. Rachel said quickly, “Biowarfare? With what?”

  “Joravirus. Genetically altered for both increased virulence and airborne transmission.”

  Rachel said, “No.”

  “Yes,” Jane said, and in the calmness of that denial, a calmness so at odds with Jane’s hectic expression and clenched fists, Rachel saw how completely she had lost her. “Grandma, I know you’re CEO again. Fine. But I run the space and security division, and my captains are behind me. I can do this.”

  The eternal strategy of palace coups—whoever controls the army can seize the throne. Rachel didn’t think Jane wanted the throne. Ruling wasn’t her goal; conquest was.

  Annelise, her shocked ignorance now genuine, said, “But…but where did you alter the joravirus? How? And how would you threaten New California with it? Jane—”

  “You don’t need to know that.” Jane said brutally. “Don’t worry, Annelise, Galt won’t be in any danger, and neither are you as heir. You’re just going to have more worlds to administer, is all. Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Not sure. But you’ll know. Tell Caitlin when she returns from Polyglot. Send a scout message to Celia, if you like. But now I have to go. People are waiting for me.”

  Jane turned to leave. Rachel thought: I could have my own security grab her right now. I could shoot her down. I could beg and plead and cry. I could threaten something she cares about.

  None of those would work. Jane was not stupid. Viruses were not massively engineered overnight. Jane had planned carefully, and for a long time, to alter the pathogen that had caused one of Rand’s periodic plagues. If Jane were imprisoned, her military would storm Freedom Enterprises and rescue her. If she were dead, others would carry out her biowar. Emotion would not sway her, nor threats to something she cared about. This was what she cared about, with the same singleminded obsession that Tara had brought to her pursuit of Philip.

  Philip—who, whatever he was now, would neither know about nor stop viruses.

  Jane strode out. Into the suddenly dead air of Rachel’s office, Annelise quavered, “Rachel, even if we destroy her lab, what if she’s moved virus samples elsewhere…”

  “One issue at a time,” Rachel said.

  One part of her mind registered irony: Of all her granddaughters, now only Jane, the dangerous warmonger, still called her by the childish and affectionate name “Grandma.”

  • • •

  Julie Hampden’s rogue virologist had lied about Jane’s biowarfare facility.

  Caitlin left Galt with the virologist, Jenna Derov, for Rand. Caitlin hadn’t wanted to go, but her grandmother said there was no one else. Rachel, resuming the leadership of Freedom Enterprises, couldn’t leave Galt, and anyway Caitlin didn’t want Gran jaunting around the galaxy, not after her heart attack. The woman was ninety-six standard! Annelise had been running Galt since the gate closings, and Rachel needed her information and advice. And Caitlin was the only one who could understand the science anyway.

  “I don’t think you have to understand science to destroy a lab,” Caitlin said grimly. All of this still felt unreal to her—an engineered bioweapon? Would even Jane do that? “Gran, I wouldn’t have the first idea how to go about it.”

  “You don’t have to know,” her grandmother said. “I’m sending someone with you who will contact the right people to do it.”

  “Then why do you need me?”

  Her grandmother made a little moue of impatience. Caitlin had seen that mouth twitch since she’d been a child, and she’d flinched at it for two decades. It meant that Caitlin was not grasping some essential point, was being naïve about how the world worked.

  “I need you because you and Annelise are the only people I know who are always honest. Most people can be bought, Caitlin, and most people will lie if it’s to their advantage. You need to learn that. I’ve worked with the man I’m sending with you, Eric Veatch, for a long time. But that doesn’t mean I can ever fully trust him. It’s your job to make sure that Jane doesn’t learn from Veatch—or anyone else—that we’re going to destroy her monstrous lab.”

  What a bleak way to live! But Caitlin said only, “Then how do you know you can trust Jenna Derov to be telling you the truth? Maybe there isn’t even any bioweapons lab on Rand.”

  Her grandmother smiled. “Very good, Caitlin. You’re learning. I don’t know for sure that the Derov woman is telling the truth. That’s another reason you’re going, in order to find out. You know, dear heart, you and I are not as far apart in thinking as you believe. I know Galt has to change, that pure Libertarianism isn’t going to work anymore.”

  “Is that a trustworthy statement, given everything you just said?”

  Rachel laughed, suddenly seeming much younger. “Even better. You are learning. But, yes, I mean it. We’re going to face insurrection otherwise. One of the things I’m going to do while you’re gone is meet with Ian Glazer, if he’s still a leader of this rebellion.”

  “If you can find him.”

  “I can find anything, including the lab on Rand. Or at least Eric Veatch can. It will take me a few weeks to arrange this and—”

  “Why?”

  “There are arrangements to be made,” her grandmother said evasively. “And I’m sure you will have things to tie up at the university, too. But this takes priority over everything else, Caitlin—I know you can see that. I’m just sorry that your traveling companions aren’t more pleasant.”

  They were two of the most unpleasant people Caitlin had ever met.

  The ship was a luxurious personal craft, newly stripped of weaponry so it could pass through the Galt-Rand gate. The Princess Ida had four small staterooms, a common area, crew quarters, and a bridge. Eric Veatch and Jenna Derov didn’t seem to sleep; whenever Caitlin went into the common area, one or both were there. Veatch worked at a computer, humming constantly, loudly, and off-key. When asked to stop, he snarled, “No.” Derov paced around the perimeter of the room, nervous and twitchy as a cornered bukcat. Occasionally she stopped to hurl a bitter statement at Caitlin: “It’s different for you rich,” or “People like my family have no control over our lives so fuck Libertarianism.” Caitlin spent the two days of the voyage, one on each side of the gate, in her room.

  Until a few hours before they landed on Rand. Then Veatch took over.

  “Okay, Jenna, we’re going to talk. Ms. Landry, you need to hear this.”

  Caitlin, on her way after lunch back to the sanctuary of her cabin, stopped. The common room was suspiciously empty, and the door to the bridge, which usually stood open, was closed. “Hear what?”

  “What’s going to happen on Rand. And how this bitch has been lying to you.”

  Jenna Derov whimpered and bolted for her stateroom. Veatch caught her, shoved her into a chair, and stood over her, three hundred pounds of bully.

  Caitlin said, “Stop that immedi
ately.”

  “No. Rachel’s orders override yours. I’ve been contacting people on Rand ever since we passed the gate. People who know you, know Rand, know what goes on. There’s no secret bioweapons facility on Rand. Is there, Jenna?”

  “Yes! There is!”

  “Tell me the truth,” Veatch said, and hit her.

  “Stop!” Caitlin cried. Veatch ignored her. Caitlin dashed to the door to the bridge and yanked on it. Locked. They were all in there—pilot, copilot, engineer, steward—and of course they could hear over the intercom. They knew. Rachel had ordered this, or at least had told the crew to not interfere with Veatch.

  Caitlin strode over to Veatch. “If you hit her again, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. I’ll see to that.”

  Veatch hit Jenna again. Caitlin picked up a chair and raised it. Before she could smash it over Veatch’s head, Jenna sobbed, “Okay, yes! The facility isn’t on Rand. But it exists! It does!”

  Veatch’s voice abruptly went soft. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Ms. Landry, don’t. I’m not going to hurt her anymore. Jenna, where is it? Tell me and you can go. We land in a few hours and you can go home to your kids and we won’t bother you anymore. But if you don’t tell me, and tell me the truth, you’re going back to Galt and I guarantee you’ll never see your family again. They won’t even know what happened to you.”

  “Okay! The lab is on Prometheus!”

  “And you know this how? Be very, very specific.”

  Jenna babbled between sobs. At times Caitlin could hardly understand her, but Veatch seemed to have no difficulty. Jenna’s tale was long and convoluted, with names unfamiliar to Caitlin, but one part she understood. Jenna had lied in saying the facility was on Rand because if she’d said that it was on Prometheus, Jenna would have had nothing to hold over the Landrys so that she could go home. Prometheus, cold and rocky, had only one human habitation, a bleak research station that had been leased to the Peregoys until Landry warships captured it.