“Have I?” he asked in surprise.
“Yes. Nine hours, thirteen minutes, and forty-eight seconds, to be precise.”
“How are Isla and Ignatio doing with their science stuff?”
“They have been very productive, if you count shouting at one another. This culminated in an argument about five minutes ago about what to have for dinner. Your sister asked if there was anywhere here to get raisin toast, and now Ignatio is running around my kitchenette, shrieking. I freely admit that my suggestion for you to take a break and go interrupt them is for the greater good of all.”
“Right. Lights?” Fergus asked. The lights came on and he groaned, covering his eyes. “Aaaaugh, half as bright, please?”
When he’d adjusted enough to not feel the light was stabbing him in the brain through his eyeballs, he left the cargo bay and headed to the kitchenette as quickly as his legs, unaccustomed to gravity again, would let him.
Ignatio was standing in a corner of the kitchenette, eir whole body wiggling in anxiety as ey made a constant, high-pitched squeal, wide-eyed and staring at Isla. Isla, who was near the foodmaker, mug in hand, was staring back in great confusion and annoyance. Between them, the projection of Earth with all its little dots of data rotated slowly above the coffee table. “What?!” she demanded, for what was clearly not the first time.
“Ey’re terrified of raisins,” Fergus said, walking in.
“What?” she asked again. “How is that even a thing?”
Fergus pointed at Ignatio. “Don’t you answer. I had nightmares for a week after you explained it to me.” He turned back to Isla. “You do not want to know. Just accept it and we can move on. Okay?”
“I guess,” she said, though he could tell she was not at all happy to do so without an answer.
“Ignatio?” Fergus asked.
“We can move on, please, now,” Ignatio answered.
“I agree,” Whiro added.
“Great,” Fergus said. He checked the foodkeeper, pulled out a curry rice dish for himself, pulled the tab, and sat on the couch as it self-heated. “What were you working on?”
“Physics, mostly,” Isla said. “Until we gave up.”
“We have some questions for you, yes? Whiro would not let us ask while you were hiding all day in cargo,” Ignatio said.
“I wasn’t hiding,” Fergus said, “though from what I hear, if I was, no one could have blamed me. What questions?”
“You said the core fragments inside Digital Midendian were trying to connect to ye somehow?” Isla asked.
“Yeah,” Fergus said. He blew steam off his curry as it finished cooking. “You ever see a slow shot of lightning hitting something, and before it hits, you can see a little stream of electricity reaching up to meet it? It was like that, except not so sharp or fast. It’s hard to describe.”
“Ignatio, you said the first fragment imprinted on Fergus like he was a mother duck. Could the fragments think he is one of them?”
“I think yes,” Ignatio said.
“And if they connected, could they try to integrate Fergus into their structure to replace one of the missing pieces?”
“Ooooooooooah,” Ignatio said, and stood there blinking for a while. “It is a new thought, but maybe? Yes. That is very, very bad indeed.”
“I don’t like that thought at all,” Fergus said.
“Could Fergus’s gift actually function in that capacity? As part of the door?”
“Now, that is a terrible thought,” Fergus said, with more than a little alarm at the idea. “Ignatio, please say no.”
“I cannot say no,” Ignatio said. “We do not know much about the doorkeys, or much about Fergus’s beezes, too.”
“But you said if we don’t destroy all the pieces, the remaining ones will eventually figure out how to reconstruct the whole. What if there’s only one piece left?”
“Even then, I think, but it would take a very long time?” Ignatio said. “It is hard to know for a certainty.”
“Centuries? Millennia? A decade or two?”
Ignatio wiggled eir legs. “I have no certainty, but longer than many decades, I expect. If there is only one, or if the pieces are very far apart, maybe many millions of years. Maybe there is no Earth or Sol by then, and so it would not matter. Or they would reconstruct themselves somewhere else.”
“So, if I throw each piece into a different star . . .”
Ignatio wiggled eir legs. “Space is weird,” ey said. “Doorkeys are more weird. Who can know? Maybe we will just make trouble for some other peoples, as was made for you.”
“And how did that happen, anyway? Why aren’t those people here cleaning up their mess?” Fergus asked.
“It was over two of your centuries ago,” Ignatio said. “I was very young and not there, but whatever plan they had, their ship disappeared in jump space and was pulled apart by the Drift. Everyone thought it must have been destroyed with them. Only, now we know otherwise, yes? It is an accident the pieces are here but also luck that they were found before they could go back together.”
“I suppose,” Fergus said. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Almost three hundred,” Ignatio said. “I do not expect candles. But I would like to live to be surprised by my centenary cake and to start growing my sixth leg.”
“If the artifact acts like a door, connecting places, is that instant? Like walking through a door between one room and another?” Isla asked.
Ignatio shook eir head. “It is more like each room has its own door, back to back, and you open yours, then reach out and open the other, and when you step through, you move via a different dimension, yes, see?”
“Not really, no,” Fergus said. “But if we have the door for these scavengers of yours, doesn’t that mean they can’t go anywhere, anyhow? Or do they have more than one?”
“Some places have more doors, and more branching paths, but the Vraet have only one door and one path,” Ignatio said. “The doorkey that was stolen was on the other side of theirs, which opened to a peaceful world named Ijto, with great music and art and soaring zif and glowing forests of yiyo. It is maybe second the most beautiful living world in the galaxy? And I say this because Xhr Home must be first in my eyes.”
“So, someone stole Ijto’s door to protect it and dumped it out of jump space to become Earth’s problem instead?” Fergus said.
“Ijto has six doors. The actions by the Council—protectors of the doorways and doorkeys and the secrets of the hidden ways—protected many, who would have been in danger in turn if Ijto fell,” Ignatio said. “They could not know the doorkey would survive. In their places, would you not have made the same choice?”
“This Council—”
“I cannot answer any of your questions, now or then or ever,” Ignatio said. “I have given my serious promises.”
Fergus grumbled and took several bites of curry. Isla was staring off into space, thinking about something, biting her lip. Swallowing, he pointed toward Ignatio with his fork. “Do we have any interdimensional doors around here, then? I mean, not counting this one that ended up here by accident. Where’s our nearest one?”
Ignatio’s four eyes all looked in different directions, eir classic evasion expression, and began to faintly squeal again. “Forget I asked,” Fergus said, and ey smiled brightly at that. “And I assume we can’t just, you know, call up these Vraet and say, hey, we’ll give you a lifetime supply of Martian breakfast burritos if you just stay home?”
“The Vraet are not thinking, not negotiating, not intelligent,” Ignatio said. “It is like hoping to negotiate with erosion or entropy. Except more toothy.”
“Okay, so here’s a daft idea,” Isla said. “What would happen if we took our fragments and opened our door and threw them through theirs? Wouldn’t that make a big, multidimensional Möbius/Klein-bottle sort of recursion that
traps them forever? Or is that impossible and stupid?”
Ignatio blinked all eir eyes, inner then outer, for several minutes, then shook emself. “It is almost an idea,” ey said. “I will have to do some maths and sciences to say yes or no. But even if it would work, we would have to reconstruct our doorkey and make it function to access the in-between. Very dangerous!”
“I’m still leaning toward chucking them into some big, hot stars,” Fergus said. He pointed at the holographic globe. “So, what were you working on with this?”
“We were trying to figure out where the last piece could be,” Isla said.
“On my way out of Tanzania, I had another surprise visit from the Asiig agent,” Fergus said. “He said our current search methodology would fail us, which, if he wasn’t lying, means our data isn’t going to point to it the way it has the others.”
“What else did he say?” Isla asked.
Recalling the meeting, there had been something odd about it that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and that bugged him no end. “He’s not exactly the most enlightening person to talk to. It’s like fucking riddles from someone who thinks it’s funny when you don’t find it obvious. ‘Think outside the box,’ he said, and then drew a fucking circle.” Fergus replicated the gesture, waving his finger in a lopsided, exaggerated circle in the air, against the backdrop of the hologram Earth. “He couldn’t even— Shit.”
“What?” Isla asked.
Fergus stared at the hologram, his finger still poised midair, thinking. Finally, he said, “Whiro, can you expand the scope of this projection to include the point where we think the fragments entered normal space?”
Whiro shrank the Earth to a smaller blue ball and shifted it left. A red dot appeared at the upper right corner of the projection space. “This is the most logical entry point,” Whiro said, “but it should be noted that individual pieces probably varied on their trajectory from there to Earth based on when they became fully physically realized.”
“Can you draw the trajectories in?” Fergus asked. “Just the core fragments, please.”
A spray of thin red lines appeared from the entry point, spreading out across the half of the globe facing it. All the lines had curves toward the end, before they connected to the Earth. “Why do they bend?” Isla asked.
“That data came from the Alliance’s orbital garbage monitors, and was part of your tea-set data,” Whiro said. “The anomalous movement is why the data was flagged as unreliable or erroneous. However, it accords with where core fragments were located, and only the core fragment traces have that trajectory change.”
“If I may give my thinkings on this, the vrag—fragments were attracted to a specific matter-density interface,” Ignatio said. Ey still looked freaked out and had not budged far from eir corner. “The planet rotates, so as the fragments actualized, perhaps they curved to meet their moving interface point.”
“If so, the difference in where the curves begin may indicate when each piece was fully out of jump space,” Whiro said.
“So, okay, the pieces picked a spot they liked and aimed for it,” Fergus said. “Could something have gotten in the way? Where were the orbital stations and satellites during the fall? Ships? Any reports of debris damage from something hit by what could have been a fragment?”
“I will need to pull new data to correlate that,” Whiro said. “Searching now.”
“Thank you,” Fergus said. He sat back, absently eating his curry, and studied the projection. “Can you also add in the other paths, from the inert pieces?”
Yellow lines appeared, quickly overwhelming the red ones. None had the characteristic curve, but were a simple straight line from entry to landing, and the dots where they hit the Earth were a bright, random pox across it, no pattern, no useful information among them. He got up to recycle his empty curry container, and as he walked around the table, he stopped again, then set the container down. Along one edge of the field of dots, there was an indent, the slightest of curves empty of light.
“Um, Whiro?” Fergus asked. “Where was the moon?”
* * *
—
Francesco was wearing a mask that covered the left half of his face in black sequins, and what appeared to be a tiara made out of large chrome gears that gleamed in the camera light. Whatever the man had been doing when Fergus’s message reached him, it had to have been something truly spectacular, and Fergus both desperately wanted to send another message asking and knew better than to do so.
“I don’t know how it is even possible that you could describe the piece of debris that punctured Azuretown’s greenhouses, but then, there are many things about you that are hard to explain. Which is a compliment, my friend,” Francesco’s recorded reply began. “One of my people will bring the confounding rubble to you and will contact you when they have arrived at Kelly Station, sometime in the morning. No charge—I have been amply compensated in amazement—though if you wouldn’t mind buying my person a nice meal while they are there, that wouldn’t go amiss. Not everyone here takes time to care for themselves, though I trust that you yourself are smart enough not to fall into that particular trap of dedication.”
Fergus glanced up from the screen sharply. Had he just heard Whiro chuckle?
“Anyhow, please do let us know if you have any more work for us, especially if it pays well and does not require travel,” Francesco said. “When you are done with what you are doing, if you wish to come join us for a play or two on the moon, you would be most welcome. We have some interesting scripts in development.”
Fergus laughed. Whatever those “scripts” were, they were guaranteed to be both dangerous and illegal actions on behalf of the Lunarian underground, executed with extreme precision, effectiveness, and panache.
Francesco gave an elaborate flourish and bow, and the message ended.
“I’ll need to borrow the shuttle again,” Fergus said.
“That is inadvisable,” Whiro replied. “As I informed you earlier, we are being closely monitored by Blue Ivory’s captain, and if I dispatched a shuttle to Earth, that would only increase Alliance interest in us. I suggest you take the bus back.”
Fergus groaned, and Mister Feefs, who had curled up on his chest on the lounge sofa after spending a solid twenty minutes poking as many holes through his shirt and skin as possible, opened one eye to glare at him, his single white ear folding back in obvious disdain. It was almost bedtime, and he was trying to figure out the logistics of getting himself back to bed without having to upend the cat, and had settled on an improbable combination of zero gravity and using a pair of forks like tiny ski poles to propel himself slowly, horizontally, out of the room. “If I take the bus, when do I have to leave?” he asked.
“The next bus from the Mars Orbital to Earth leaves in just over an hour,” Whiro said. “After that, the next scheduled will arrive you there midafternoon, potentially missing your scheduled rendezvous.”
“Have Isla and Ignatio gone to bed already?”
“No,” Whiro said. “They are in the engineering lab, discussing more theoretical scenarios for destroying the fragments.”
“Oh? Do they have anything good yet?”
“No,” Whiro said.
“Ugh,” Fergus said. “It feels like we are all out of plans and freshly stocked up on dead ends and impossible tasks. Once I get this piece, that only leaves Digital Midendian and the Alliance, and honestly, I’ve got better ideas about how to get up off this couch without moving than I have about how to crack either of them.”
“May I offer a suggestion?” Whiro asked.
“Always. You’d said before you had thoughts on it?”
“I have undertaken an action of my own initiative,” Whiro said. “Or rather, because that would be contrary to my operating guidelines, my character in our shared ship game has taken an action.”
Uh-oh. “Did you take
more of Theo’s things? Or anyone else’s on the Shipyard?”
“If so, it is immaterial to the current discussion,” Whiro said. “We were in need of a more-challenging quest, and keeping in mind your potential needs at this point in your task, we decided to add a new member to our party and extended an invitation to the mindsystem of the cruiser ESS August Moon. They are on patrol in the Outer Object Band, and we have all had occasions to interact with them prior to this, and so felt we could have a friendly rapport. Also, they are a sister ship of Blue Ivory, who regards August Moon and her captain highly.”
“You drew an Alliance ship into your role-playing game?” Fergus asked.
“Yes,” Whiro said.
“Okay,” Fergus said. It didn’t seem okay at all, in fact, but it was way too late to lodge a complaint now. “And what does this have to do with helping me?”
“Prior to inviting August Moon, we were discussing scenarios for your retrieval of fragments from both the Alliance and Digital Midendian,” Whiro said. “As you know, Digital Midendian has been contracted to provide data security for the Alliance’s Terrestrial Science Unit and have exploited that relationship to mine the ATSU’s relevant data but also to get to fragments ahead of them. There is ample evidence in the data we received in the tea set to prove it.”
“Right,” Fergus said, “but—”
“I continue,” Whiro said. “Also, we are certain to 97% probability that the Alliance facility housing the fragments is the one in Baltimore, in the Atlantic States. Digital Midendian is contracted to provide security systems for that facility. If DM was suddenly demonstrated to have breached their trust, as in fact they have, would not the Alliance immediately suspend all DM-provided security?”
“Ooooh,” Fergus said. “Yes, they would. The Alliance would also probably send a small army of very pissed-off soldiers to go kick in the door of the Digital Midendian SCNY site.”
“That was our conclusion as well,” Whiro said.
“But if you tip off the Autumn Moon, won’t that just make the Alliance look even harder at us? That seems risky.”
The Scavenger Door Page 34
