She had sent her first message early last night and received its reply after supper. She’d asked for the confirmation from the Sea House within minutes, but hadn’t waited for a reply; there was a three hour round-trip signal delay and it was then very early morning on Golter. She doubted the Seigneur was an early riser.
She read the two replies again, waiting on a traffic island while cars whirred and trams clanked past. She raised her face to the sunlight, seeking the weak warmth with a kind of hunger after the weeks in Pharpech’s perpetual gloom. The light shone down the canyon of city street, reflecting off high glass-fronted buildings on either side, pouring onto the river of traffic and the crowds of people. NG, soonest, she read once more, and then stuffed the pieces of flimsy into a pocket.
“Why there?” she said to herself. Her breath smoked in front of her face. She pulled on her gloves and fastened her jacket as the traffic stopped and she crossed the road in the midst of the crowd.
She watched a big seaplane roar overhead; it banked above the city as it started its approach. The plateau lake must still be ice-free. She watched the aircraft disappear behind the buildings with an expression on her face somewhere between wistfulness and bitterness.
Nachtel’s Ghost. They wanted her to deliver the book to Nachtel’s Ghost; outward to the limits of the system, not inward, not toward Golter, where the Sea House was. She walked back to the hotel, stopping and looking in shops and displays, making sure she wasn’t being followed. Her reflection, seen in one window, had a pinched, pale look about it. She inspected her face and saw again the message in the dust that was all that was left of the Universal Principles: THINGS WILL CHANGE.
She drew her jacket tighter still, recalling the chill granite surface of her grandfather’s tomb when it had still been at Tzant, and the freezing cold of the Ghost; the remembered fall in the remembered fall. She shivered.
16
The Ghost
Physically brave, she thought as the hired ship shuddered its way into the thin, cold, evaporating atmosphere of Nachtel’s Ghost. Physically brave.
She had left the others in SkyView. They would wait there until she had finished in Nachtel’s Ghost and decide where to rendezvous later. They’d had news from Golter; all Miz’s assets had been frozen while the Log-Jam attempted to have a warrant issued for his arrest in connection with an unspecified offense within its jurisdiction. Miz had lawyers working on the case, and anyway had emergency funds he could access, but not until he was actually present on Golter. Sharrow had used up most of the rest of the contract expenses allowance chartering a private spacecraft to take her from SkyView to Nachtel’s Ghost; comm net gossip and news reports both had it that the Huhsz were waiting at Embarkation Island, and she’d been traveling as Ysul Demri long enough for there to be an even chance they knew her pseudonym.
* * *
She had not been back to the Ghost since the crash-landing that had both saved her and almost killed her. The crippled ex-excise clipper had fallen like a meteorite through the wasted air of the small planet-moon, slowing and slewing as it spun and wobbled and disintegrated on its long arcing plunge toward the planet’s snow-covered surface. She couldn’t remember anything after she’d shouted to Miz about wanting any crater she made being named after her. Miz hadn’t heard her, anyway.
The crash report later concluded she’d probably run out of gyro-maneuvering power ten kilometers up, while the craft was still traveling at over a kilometer a second. It had started to tumble and tear itself to pieces immediately afterward and only luck had saved her after that. The central section of the ship—containing the combat pressure hull, life-support systems and central plasma power plant—had stayed relatively intact, reduced to a jagged, roughly spherical shape that had continued to slow as it somersaulted and shed further small pieces of wreckage like burning shrapnel through the air.
She could recall nothing of those final minutes, and nothing of the crash itself, as the piece of wreckage containing her buried itself inside a snow-wave, one of the thousands migrating across the surface of the planet’s equatorial snow-fields like sand dunes across a desert.
A crawler carrying mining supplies had been within a couple of kilometers. The crew had found her, a few minutes before it would have been too late, crushed and folded inside the steaming, radiation-contaminated wreckage of the ship, buried two hundred meters under the surface of the snow-wave at the end of a collapsed tunnel of ice and snow.
The crawler’s crew had cut her out; the medics at First Cut mine had treated the physical injuries, while specialist war-embargoed systems were brought in from Trench City, the planet’s capital, to treat the radiation sickness that had brought her even closer to death.
It had been two months before they’d even thought it worthwhile restoring her to consciousness. When she awoke the war had been over for a month and the military standard interface wafer buried at the back of her skull had been removed. The effects of the synchroneurobonding virus were irreversible, while the nanotechnology and tissue-cloning techniques that repaired the ravages of the radiation pulse were only withdrawn after the course of treatment had finished.
And—perhaps—something else had been added; the crystal virus that had grown over the years and then lain dormant within her skull until a few weeks ago, when she’d been running with the others through the dried-up tank of the ancient oil-carrier, in the Log-Jam.
Her memories of the hospital in the mine complex were hazy. She remembered the Tenaus military prison hospital much better; gradually recovering, waiting for the final peace deal to be worked out, beginning to exercise her body in the gym to restore her lost fitness, and exercising her brain whenever she could, remembering—obsessively, the prison psychologist had worried—every detail she could dredge from her memory from the age of five onward, because she’d been terrified that the treatment had altered her, made her somebody different by destroying some of her memories.
She wanted to recall everything, and to try to assess if the memories she found buried in herself were the ones she could remember from before; it seemed like a check on the kind of alteration she feared that the act of recalling a memory itself left a memory, and that that could be compared with the experience of remembering in the present.
In the end there was no sure way of telling, but she found no obvious holes in her memory. When she’d been allowed to send and receive communications, the people who wrote to her seemed to relate to her the way she remembered. Nobody seemed to notice any change; certainly they didn’t mention any.
They had to write to her because visits were not allowed and the light-delay from Tenaus Habitat to almost anywhere else was too long for real-time conversations. She had had one phone call with Miz, calling from HomeAtLast, in orbit above Miykenns. In a way it had been the best phone conversation of her life; the minutes-long gaps while the signal carrying the words you had just spoken traveled to their destination meant that you just had to sit there looking at the screen and the other person. Calling anybody else, she’d have watched screen or read something in between, but with Miz she just sat and stared at his face. They’d had an hour; it had only really been ten minutes and had seemed like one.
Had they put the crystal virus into her there, in Tenaus? Nachtel’s Ghost seemed like the more obvious place, while she’d been hovering close to death in a state more like suspended animation than anything else, beyond stimulus, sensation or dreams…but perhaps it had been done in Tenaus. Why would a Tax-neutral mining company want to implant a transceiver virus in a near-dead crashed military pilot?
But then, she thought, why would somebody in a military prison hospital want to do that either?
Why would anybody?
A cold, keen wind cut out of a sky the color of verdigris. The sun dangled like a hopeless bauble dispensing thin amounts of light. Leeward, the dark train of a departing storm trailed its snowy skirts high into the swiveling tides of light. The snow-cliff at her back reared like an enor
mous wave, poised ready to break on the sloped black beach of the shield volcano’s flanks.
The crawler which had brought her here rumbled back on its tracks, over the clinker and the wind-drifted ramps of ash, reversing into the snow-tunnel. She watched its glinting metal carapace and maser-nostriled snout slide back into the base of the snow-cliff and trundle back and up until the slope of the tunnel removed it from her view.
She turned and looked up the barely discernible slope of the volcano through veils of lifting steam and vapor toward the tumbled remains of the old geothermal station buildings, a set of fractured concrete blocks strewn haphazardly across the darkly gleaming lava field. Snow-covered pools dotted depressions in the lava, and in the distance—maybe twenty kilometers away—the latest of the volcano’s vents piled white steam and smoke into the sky. She looked straight up. Overhead, the gas giant Nachtel hung hemispheric, pale gold and hazy orange in the sky, filling a quarter of it.
She pulled the hood of her jacket tighter against the thin, freezing wind, and set off across the fractured, gray-black lava field toward the ruined concrete buildings up the slope, clutching the empty book to her chest.
She was breathing hard when she got to the smashed block-houses; the atmosphere was desperately thin, even though comparatively little effort was required to walk in the Ghost’s weak gravity. Agoraphobia was endemic in visitors to the planet-moon who ventured into the open; the air felt so thin and Nachtel could loom so huge above that it seemed each floating step must send the walker bounding away from the surface altogether, swept away into the green, subliming sky.
“Hello?” she called.
Her voice echoed round the concrete walls of the first collapsed concrete building. Quakes had left all the thick-walled, windowless structures canted and listing, and the concrete apron they had been built upon had split and sundered, leaving jagged chunks of material sticking up like broken teeth, their rusted reinforcing rods tangling or torn out like failed brace-work.
She held the book to her chest and walked over the tilted slabs of concrete from building to building, having to stoop and use her free hand in places where the fractured geography of the ruins made walking, even in that low gravity, impossible.
The building furthest upslope was the largest in the complex; she stepped over the fallen lintel of its broad doorway.
Though the structure’s walls were intact, its roof had folded in the middle, then caved in and fallen to produce a shallow “V” of concrete which slanted down into an ice-rimmed pool of standing water, which—perhaps still connected to the network of abandoned thermal pipe-work buried in the volcano—was warm enough to produce lazy strokes of steam in the calm, sub-zero air.
There was a narrow beach of black clinker gathered in one corner of the ruin, against the far wall.
There were two men there. She recognized them.
They were dressed only in swimming trunks and sat in the same two deck-chairs she remembered from the tanker. A flowery parasol stuck at a jaunty angle out of the black beach behind them, and between their seats there was a small folding-table holding bottles and glasses.
The one on the right stood up and waved to her.
“Delighted you could join us!” he called, then took a couple of steps forward to the water and dived lithely in with barely a splash. The waves looked tall and odd as they moved across the pool.
She stuck her left hand in her pocket and walked along the gentle slope of the collapsed roof. The young, bald-headed man who’d dived into the water swam past her, grinning and waving. The other was drinking from a tall glass. He watched his companion as he reached the far end of the pool, where the doorway was, and then turned and started on his way back.
“Have a seat, doll,” the young man said pleasantly, pointing at the deck-chair his twin had vacated. She looked at it, then looked around and sat. She kept her left hand in her pocket. The book was on her lap. She pushed the jacket’s hood back.
“Ah; red,” the young man said, smiling at her hair. “Very attractive; it suits you.”
His pale body looked trim and well muscled. She couldn’t see any cold bumps. His trunks were opti-cloth, and showed a few seconds of a tropical beach scene; golden sand, a single big roller and one graceful surfer, forever climbing up onto her board and riding into a curling blue tunnel in the wave.
The other young man rose dripping out of the water and strolled up the beach, his skin streaming. His trunks showed somebody heli-diving, throwing themselves from a helicopter into a great fissure on some rocky coast, just as a huge pulse of surf surged frothing up the channel.
The surfer-trunked man reached under his deck-chair and threw his companion a towel. He dabbed at himself, then sat cross-legged on the dark clinker of the beach in front of them with the towel draped over his shoulders. He grinned at the other man.
“A pleasant journey here, I trust, Lady Sharrow?” the one in the deck-chair said.
She nodded slowly. “Acceptable,” she told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, tapping his forehead. He lifted a glass from the tray of spirit bottles on the table between him and her. “May I offer you a drink?”
“No, thank you,” she said.
“May I…?” the other one said, leaning forward and nodding at the book on her lap.
She tipped the thick book in her lap so that she could hold it with one gloved hand, and then handed it to him. He smiled tolerantly and accepted it.
“It’s all right, Lady Sharrow,” he said, opening the book’s metal casing. “You won’t be needing your gun.”
She left her hand in her pocket anyway, gripping the HandCannon. The one sitting on the beach looked briefly at the interior of the book, studying the title page and the diamond-leaf plates for a couple of seconds each. He smiled as he read the words engraved in the back of the casing, and held the book up so that his companion in the deck-chair could read the inscription too. They both laughed lightly.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” the one in the deck-chair said to her. “Such a waste. Ah well.”
The one holding the book tipped it upside down so that the paper-dust fell out and drifted down to coat the black beach with a single swirled streak of gray.
“We are so careless with our treasures,” he said. He closed the book and set it to one side.
“We mistake the priceless for the worthless,” agreed the one in the deck-chair, topping up his glass from a bottle of trax spirit.
“I must say,” the one on the beach said. “You don’t seem terribly surprised to find us here, Lady Sharrow.” He sounded disappointed. He accepted a tall glass from his twin, then drank and smiled up at her. “We’d rather hoped you might be.”
She shrugged.
“Typical, isn’t it?” said the one in the chair to his twin. “Women only go quiet when you’d actually quite like to hear what they have to say.”
The other one looked at her and shook his head sadly.
“Anyway,” the man in the deck-chair said, “on behalf of the agency, and our clients—the Sad Brothers, in this case—thank you for the book. But now, as you can probably guess, we want you to look for the final Lazy Gun, if you don’t mind.”
She looked at him.
“No questions?” he asked her. She shook her head. He laughed lightly. “And we thought you’d have so many. Ah well.” He smiled broadly, waving his glass. “Oh, by the way, you did get our message, back in…?” He frowned, looked at the other young man.
“Pharpech,” the one on the beach provided.
“Ah yes, Pharpech,” the young man said, pronouncing the word with exaggerated care and a sort of conspiratorial grimace. “Was our signal received?”
She thought before answering. “The necklace?” she said. “Yes.”
The young man in the chair looked happy.
“Super,” he said. “Just so you didn’t think that being off-net meant being out of touch with us.” He put his drink down and lay back in the chair, hands behind his
head. His underarms were bare and smooth. The hairs on the rest of his body looked thin and white; only his blond eyebrows held any hint of color. She looked at the one on the beach. Sunlight gleamed on the dome of his skull. He didn’t seem to have any cold bumps, either.
“Well, don’t let us detain you, Lady Sharrow,” he said. He patted the book. “Thank you for delivering the piece, as per contract. We’ll be in touch, perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“Try not to take too long,” the one in the deck-chair said, still lying back soaking up the sparse sunlight, eyes closed.
“And don’t get caught,” the other one chipped in.
She rose slowly to her feet. The one with the girl surfing on his trunks lay there, hands behind his naked scalp, eyes closed, legs slightly spread. The one sitting cross-legged on the beach leaned forward, whistling, and started trying to build a little tower of black clinker, but it kept falling apart.
“Bon voyage,” the one on the deck-chair said without opening his eyes.
She walked away for five steps, then turned. They were as they had been. She drew the HandCannon out and pointed it at the one with the heli-diving scene, which was playing across the stretched rear of his trunks just as it had been across their crumpled front.
She stood like that for nearly half a minute. Eventually the one she was aiming at glanced round at her, did a double-take and swiveled to face her.
He shaded his eyes, looking up at her. “Yes, Lady Sharrow?”
The one on the deck-chair opened his eyes, blinking and looking mildly surprised.
She said, “I was thinking of finding out the messy way whether you’re both androids.”
The two young men looked at each other. The one on the chair shrugged and said, “Androids? Why should it matter whether either of us is an android?”
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