The captain looked at him with sad eyes. “You cannot be serious. You’re a Harmonizer. What could anyone on this ship—even if she or he were in T.E.—do to help someone like you?”
“Eydis’s message is encrypted,” Tarkos said, “and I currently have no access to intelligence resources.”
“Why not?”
“The only AI that I know that might be able to help me is incarcerated because it either malfunctioned or committed treason. My commander is incarcerated on Savannah Runner, charged with killing a ship of OnUnAn ambassadors. And I am currently a fugitive, because the Neelee want to lock me up to be sure I am not complicit in either of those events.”
“Are you?”
“No. But I don’t have time to wait while they figure that out. Something bad, but very unexpected, is going to happen.”
Her jaw set hard. “Just what I expected.”
“What?”
“I know you. I remember you. Our AI recognized you when you dropped the suit, and I immediately remembered you and knew you were trouble. You see, Harmonizer Tarkos, I was part of the clean-up crew that had to manage the mess you left at Verrt. They sent you home for a court martial.”
Tarkos nodded. “They did. But I got sidetracked. Into the Harmonizer Corp.”
“Strange choice of the Galactics, to recruit you: a pilot known to be out of control.” She stretched, giving the appearance of standing. Her tone turned officious and final. “I don’t appreciate you playing with the lives of my crew. You can’t bully us. I’m going to turn you over to the Neelee right now.”
“Captain, I’m not ashamed of what I did on Verrt. And I am not here to bully you.” Tarkos met her eyes and let the implication sink in: he could bully her, if he wanted. His armor could destroy this ship without their own weapons being able to even slow it. And the captain did not seem to know that the ship’s AI would follow his orders, if he told it he were there on an official Harmonizer mission. “I did not come to make demands or threats. I came here to beg.”
“Because you honestly believe that you alone are going to stop this secret attack? Just like you believed on Verrt that you alone could save the Hmnarouts?”
Tarkos leaned foward, about to shout that he had indeed saved the Hmnarouts. But then he closed his mouth. He would not let himself get distracted into a different argument. He waited till he was sure his voice would sound more calm, and then he said, “No, I don’t think I can do this myself. I think you and I—and my commander, and the AI that I mentioned—are going to stop the attack.”
She waved at the door. “You’re a fool. Even if I believed you, I couldn’t do as you ask. Humanity won’t survive without the favor of the Neelee. You know that. We cannot help you, because if you’re a fugitive from the Neelee, then you ask us to defy the Neelee. We need Kirt and the Neelee ships, just to get out of Earth’s gravity well. I’m not—”
An alarm began to howl through the ship. It rang for several seconds, and then the volume sank down so that the AI’s voice could be heard over it. “High-energy engine discharges are occurring in proximity,” it said. “High-energy engine discharges are occurring in proximity.”
_____
The captain kicked expertly off her chair and sailed with one hand outstretched toward the door. It parted at her command and she sailed through into the wide, low bridge. She did not object when Tarkos followed.
Tarkos found the bridge configuration familiar: back up human controls mounted on desks allowed the crew to interface more directly with ship systems. The Kirt designers preferred everything to be virtual, but humans had a well-earned distrust of depending solely on virtual interfaces. The four bridge crew looked at Tarkos with interest and—because of his bruising, he assumed—dismay. But they turned back to their stations in seconds. A well disciplined crew, like its captain.
One wall had been set to show a tactical view of the space around Savannah Runner. Ships pulled away, first seeming to drift from the crystal flag ship, but then gaining speed, their acceleration accelerating. In minutes they were gone, out of the tactical view.
“No danger, Captain, though I admit some of those ships passed close,” a young man at the tactical controls explained. “They’re heading to the deep system. Right now, nothing is visible in front of their trajectory. They likely received warning by hyper-radio. There’s a lot of encrypted hyper-radio traffic starting.”
In another minute it was over. The ships shot beyond the reach of their tracking abilities. Quiet, empty space surrounded Savannah Runner.
“That’s it, then,” the captain said.
“That’s only the beginning,” Tarkos said. “They’ll be fighting soon. And if that is all the Neelee have for defense, we can expect the Ulltrian ships to soon come visit us, down here in the inner system. The Ulltrians are far more prepared for this war than we are.”
The captain turned to look at him, her eyes cold and hard.
“I’m sending you to the medical bay. Then you go.”
“Do what you have to do,” Tarkos said, trying to keep his voice quiet and not knowing if that slurred his words. “But before you kick me out, take a look at Pala Eydis’s last message. She died getting it to us, and you may be the only person within light years who can tell us what it means.”
The captain did not answer. She called an ensign over, a thin person with pale skin and pale eyes, of indeterminate sex or perhaps no sex. “Escort Harmonizer Tarkos to the medbay,” the Captain said.
Tarkos followed the ensign quietly, though he already knew the way.
_____
The doctor was a quiet English woman with brown hair that she kept in a messy bun. Many loose strands floated around her head as she bobbed in the microgravity. She barely looked at Tarkos as she mumbled that her name was Doctor Winters. Then she pointed him at a treatment room and indicated he should “lay” against the bed there. Velcro straps floated from the edges of the bed, and Tarkos tied himself down with a strap under his arms but across his chest.
Before he had a moment to question the doctor, she shoved a cold metal tube in his ear. He flinched back but she kept the pressure on, keeping the nozzle in place as it injected a group of small robots into his drum. She did the same on the other side of his head, drifting over him, her shirt just above his nose. The smell surprised him: antiseptic, a neutral soap and, just barely, a hint of perfume, a heady reminder of Earth’s flowers. Skin fragments fell into his nose, and in a minute he had sequenced her genome, marvelling in its homey similarity to this own.
She roughly pulled something like headphones over the top of his head, covering his ear lobes. Then she pushed herself behind a table in the room’s corner, reflexively attempting to sit in the chair there, while she stared at screens.
Tarkos had to twist his shirt in his fists to stop himself from shoving a finger under the ear coverings and into each ear. The robots scraped away at dried blood, their small metal limbs causing an insufferable itching and crawling sensation. It seemed to take an hour, but eventually they climbed up the canal, their small legs causing a sensation like water dribbling from his ears as they pushed the scabs and free tissue and flakes of blood out, before they leapt away themselves. He felt a tugging: some kind of gentle vacuum activated in the ear covers. The doctor came over, pulled the ear covers off, and with a small vacuum collected any remaining refuse and robots floating in his ear canal.
“Your drums have been cleaned, and a regrowth matrix put in place. In a few days you should be able to hear as well as before.”
“Thanks, doc,” he said.
She nodded. “You have a kip, take a shower if you like, and we’ll bring you some food.” She pushed off, leaving him alone in the room.
Tarkos found her lack of curiosity disappointing. He wished he could make a little small talk with some of the crew. But of course, for them he was nothing unusual: they had not, like him, lived for several years without human company.
The door slid closed behind the doctor. Tarkos immediately
transmitted a priority Harmonizer protocol to the ship’s AI.
“I acknowledge your request,” the AI transmitted back. Harmonizers were the most trusted police force in the Galaxy. Most AIs built in the Alliance were programmed to obey them.
“Lock the door to this room,” Tarkos told it. “Tell no one you are communicating with me. I need a ship-to-ship personal protocol message to Savannah Runner, requested recipient Dockmaster Pietro Danielle.”
“Transmitting,” the ship said.
The AI did not reply for long minutes. Tarkos began to despair of it making the link, but then a voice sounded in his head, Galactic with a mix of Neelee and human accents.
“This is Dockmaster Danielle,” he said. “It is a pleasure to hear from you again, Zoroastrian.”
“Actually,” Tarkos said in English, “this is a personal call, Pietro. Do you recognize my voice?” The implants in his head picked up and transmitted the sound straight from his jaw bones. They should recreate his voice’s characteristics. “Don’t say my name.”
“If I do recognize it,” Danielle said, “then I owe you that bottle of wine I promised you on your return.”
“That’s right!” Tarkos smiled with relief. As the only human on Savannah Runner, Danielle had met Tarkos before his mission to the Well of Furies. Danielle had promised Tarkos a bottle of Earth wine, if he managed to return alive.
“We’ll drink it yet,” Tarkos said. “But right now, I’m in trouble, Pietro. I need a little help. It won’t be….” Tarkos hesitated. He had sent secretive messages to Danielle before, using Earth slang and cultural references that he gambled Savannah Runner’s AI or anything else listening in would struggle to understand. But it took him some thought. “It won’t be on the up and up. I need a way to disappear from your HAL.”
“I see.”
“Things are about to get bad, and I think only my buddy and I have a chance of find out where the bad is going to be worst. But I need to talk to my buddy. And we’ll need our… car. So I need HAL not to notice me.”
Danielle was silent a long time. Tarkos assumed he was thinking it through, trying to remember that old twentieth century film in which a ship’s AI was called “HAL.”
“I think it can be done. You are sure about this?”
Tarkos sighed. “I’m sorry, Pietro. I really am. I don’t want to involve you. But I believe that this is necessary.”
After a pause, Pietro said, “Where?”
“My car. Another thing, too. I might need the help of my own… mechanical man. The one that you warned me about before we left the ship.” He hoped that Danielle would catch the reference to Tiklik’al’Takas, the AI astronomer that had accompanied them on their mission, though Tiklik looked nothing like a man.
“That is beyond my… abilities here. Your mechanical man is in a special holding cell.”
“Where?”
“About a sixty kilometers up orbit.” Danielle sent an identification code and location coordinates.
Tarkos grunted in frustration. That was too far. He would have to do without Tiklik’s help somehow. He would have to leave the AI where it was. “Meet me in four hours,” he said, not sure how long he would be here on this ship.
The line went dead.
Tarkos unlocked the door to the room. He closed his eyes.
_____
“Don’t get comfortable,” a voice said.
The voice was too distant to much bother Tarkos. But then a prodding of his arm woke him. He opened his eyes, and found the captain floating before his bed.
“I said, don’t get comfortable. You’re leaving.”
Tarkos reached up and pulled the velcro strap. The pain in his arms surprised him: his limbs and chest were sore and had stiffened when he stopped moving. He groaned slightly, trying to stretch.
“You should at least look at the message,” Tarkos said.
“You can send it when you get back into Neelee custody, if they let you.”
“You misunderstand,” Tarkos said. “I have the encrypted message here. Her records, years of data on Ulltrian technological history, her work on Ulltrian cryptography, a cryptographic key she found—all that is on my cruiser. But the last message, the one I want your help with—” Tarkos pressed an index finger against his head. “That’s right here.”
“You carry sensitive data in your head?” the captain said, with evident disapproval.
“Not by choice. When Pala—when Dr. Eydis was… when she was dying, she sent me several personal messages. I kept them. They were the last thing I had from her. Just a few snatches of conversation. But she put a data packet into one of those messages.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think she planned it. Her brain was dying. She was doing a dozen things at once. She sent the message along with her other message, and I just was too stupid to find it till later.”
The captain hesitated. “I should send you back now.”
Tarkos lost his patience. “Goddamnit, the galaxy is about to descend into hell. This is no time for all this handwringing. Decode the message. Neelee-ornor, and Earth, might depend upon it.”
The captain’s jaw muscles worked. It had probably been years since someone had talked back to her. And she clearly thought of Tarkos, who had left the UN Fleet as a Lieutenant, as her inferior.
Too bad, Tarkos thought. I’m not a Lieutenant, I’m a Harmonizer, a member of the most feared and respected police force in the Alliance. A Predator, as most Galactics called them. Get used to it.
“Right,” Tarkos said, “You want to suit me up and shoot me out the airlock? Do it. But first, show some respect for Pala Eydis and decode her message.”
The captain’s face remained unreadable and hard. He thought she might not relent, but then her implants transmitted a data exchange protocol to his own implants. Tarkos sent her the short message.
They both listened to it. I’m losing this fight, Eydis said. It made Tarkos’s stomach sink, to hear Eydis’s voice again, even if it was distorted because transmitted from her implants. Then a strange electric buzz followed her words.
“It’s in that hiss,” Tarkos said.
The captain nodded. “It’s very short.”
“I know. That makes it even harder to decode. Can you decode it?”
She got a faraway look. After a minute, she furrowed her brow and looked back at him.
“It doesn’t make sense. It has two protocols. One is an audio recording.”
“What did she say?”
“There is something in a language I don’t understand. Uh… Kash Ik Nazk.”
“Ulltrian,” Tarkos whispered.
“It’s followed by three words of English. Ice sky storm.”
“A translation?”
Captain Shirazi shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“Ice sky storm,” Tarkos whispered, considering it. “And the rest of the message?”
“Radial coordinates.”
“To what?”
“It could be anything. They’re just relative coordinates. Locations in relation to some central point.”
“Can we get your navigation people to run through some possibilities?”
“No. Now get the hell off my ship.” She pointed at the door. “And don’t come back.”
“Does this mean I can’t eat some human food, and use a shower?”
The Captain left without answering.
CHAPTER 4
Tarkos gambled that Captain Shirazi would not turn him over to the Neelee. He was right. The same two women who had escorted him into the ship now escorted him to the airlock, where his suit still stood, its feet magnetized and gripping a metal panel in the floor.
Tarkos nodded to his escort. “Thanks.” His armor parted and he backed inside. As it pressed closed, sealing him in its tight embrace, he released the boots and drifted into the airlock.
He turned on the stealthing of his suit before the airlock had fully cycled out. When the door opened, he pushed off the inner hatch and
waited till he floated a few meters from the Kirt ship before he ignited the rocket pack with a single burst, just to push him toward Savannah Runner at a few meters per second.
He considered the decoded message and the coordinates that Captain Shirazi had given him. He needed a navigator, or access to a good AI. In the best of all worlds, he would have both. And he knew an AI that was specifically designed for navigation and cartography. Tiklik’al’Takas. Made mind of the Kirt, ancient AI of a bygone era when the Galactics still made highly autonomous AIs, before the war against the Machines made the Alliance members distrustful and cautious. The AI had betrayed Tarkos months before, because of a virus that Ulltrians had put into its mind. Tiklik claimed to be free of that influence now, but the Neelee had not trusted this judgment.
Tarkos sighed, blowing a white cloud of condensation across his face shield. He had very few options here. The AI of Savannah Runner might be able to help, but it would report him to the Executive, who would promptly put him back in a “waiting cell.” He’d tried the AI on the Zoroastrian as he’d drifted down the hall, but it was not smart enough to consider salience issues, and found instead millions of possible matches. He expected a similar performance of the AI in the cruiser. He needed Tiklik.
He opened the coordinates that Pietro Danielle had given him for the holding facility where Tiklik’al’Takas had been taken. It was, as the Italian had explained, about a sixty klicks farther along in their orbit. Tarkos changed his orientation, aimed himself head first at the coordinates, and engaged the rocket pack at full burn.
_____
At first, Tarkos feared nothing orbited at the location that Danielle had given him. He emerged into the sunrise, and Neelee-ornor’s super-stable red dwarf shone warm, blood-colored light over him. His suit shuddered from the change in temperature. But nothing glittered before him. He was about three kilometers out from the position given, and should now be able to see a sparkle of white and reflected red; the crystal designs of Neelee ships and Neelee stations always sparkled diamond bright where they turned in the rays of alien suns.
Ice Sky Storm Page 4
