“Really, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to connect me to your captain.”
Silence again.
“What if they attack us?” whispered Stone, his hand over the pickup again.
Wait. The sullen voice disappeared but the connection was maintained.
“And what do you mean, help us to understand the jump drive?” continued Stone in a whisper. “We already know what the jump drive does.”
“We don’t know how,” I said, keeping my voice low as well.
“Think of the publicity,” Stone moaned, almost to himself. “Harboring criminals. That’s not going to be good for business.”
“She’s not been proved a criminal yet,” said Murdoch, not bothering with the whisper. “Let them appeal in the proper way. We go through due process.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Veatch. “Perhaps we could do the filework now, then. Including your leave forms, Chief Murdoch. You failed to fill out the correct ones before you left.”
Murdoch groaned. “Later, please. And what is the time?”
“2308 hours.”
A different Bendarl voice interrupted. Cruiser Vengeful to Earthstation Jocasta.
I coughed to get Stone’s attention and pointed to myself, then the comm link. Stone hesitated, nodded.
I stepped over beside the link. “This is Jocasta.”
Who are you?
“Commander Halley, former head of station. You are?”
Captain, she said with heavy finality. My second level told you to surrender a vessel and its occupants. Why have you not complied?
“There are no Invidi-owned vessels docked at this station,” I said. “That ship belongs to me.”
It is stolen property.
“Who made the complaint? When and where was it stolen? I deny it categorically.”
We will take it.
“If you try, we will complain to the highest level of the Confederacy Council. You have no docking permit for this station.”
“Commander,” Sasaki whispered excitedly. “Dan Florida’s just brought a group of Confederacy Council delegates to the station. They’ll be in danger if the cruiser attacks us.”
I nodded thanks. “Captain, were you aware that members of the Confederacy Council itself are on the station at this time? Perhaps you should reconsider your options.”
There are no options. You give, we leave. You don’t give, we take.
“Sorry. No deal.” I cut the link, prickles of sweat under my arms and down my back.
“Quite the prodigal, aren’t we?” said Stone. “Arrive out of nowhere in a stolen ship, endanger the station, and expect us to be delighted? We should give them the Invidi ship, at least.”
“No,” I said.
“That ship is material evidence in a case not yet tried before an Earth court,” said Veatch thoughtfully. “In my opinion we should not tamper with it in any way for fear of affecting the verdict.”
Stone shot him a look of annoyance.
“Why didn’t you tell the Bendarl I had you in custody?” said Murdoch.
“I didn’t want to give away too much information too early,” I said. “Knowing An Barik’s political clout, he might be able to come up with some sort of waiver for the agreement.”
Lee called Stone again from the Bubble. Vengeful was still idling near the system boundary closest to Jocasta, but it had sent a scout back through the jump point to Central.
“Calling up reinforcements?” Murdoch met my eye.
“Getting a second opinion, more likely.” Would An Barik or any of the other Invidi advise them to break our neutrality agreement to take the ship? Was a Tor-Invidi experiment that important to them? And why wasn’t An Serat here to meet us? He’d been waiting nearly a hundred years, I was sure.
“Well, Chief?” said Stone. “Aren’t you going to take your prisoner to the brig?” Murdoch flexed his shoulders. “Yeah, guess I should do that.”
Sasaki frowned. “With respect, Mr. Stone,” she said. “They look like they should go to the hospital first.”
Dried blood still crusted Murdoch’s shirt, and one eye was puffy from his fight with the guard. I must look even dirtier after being on the ground after the explosion.
For a second I was back there. The artificial lighting and low ceiling became a cloudy sky stretching all around, sea and seagulls, wind burning into my lungs as I tried to reach Will. Will, riding all the time too far away, riding away from me and I didn’t even say good-bye...
I gulped back a huge lump of tears and then Jocasta solidified around me again. Sasaki was looking at me strangely but nobody else seemed to have noticed. Stop it, I told myself. Five hours but nearly a century ago. Forget it.
“I concur with Lieutenant Sasaki,” said Veatch. “This matter can be resolved in the morning. In the meantime, I will consult with the Magistrate’s Department regarding the legality of Commander Halley’s position and that of the station itself.”
“Bill, we need to put the ship away somewhere.” I didn’t trust the Bendarl not to take it from under our noses.
“Yeah.”
We nodded at each other. I couldn’t think of anywhere. I couldn’t even remember the layout of the station.
“How about in one of the old fighter bays?” suggested Sasaki. She eyed us anxiously. “I’ll put a tug on it now. Why don’t you two go see the doctor?”
As we moved off, Murdoch looked back at her. “Nice of you to get a welcome party together.”
Sasaki laughed in an embarrassed way. “We came up here to look at Mr. Stone’s observation lounge,” she said. “And I wanted to make sure everyone up here knew about the extinguisher test tomorrow. Then when the Bubble called us to say an unidentified Invidi ship was coming into this dock, we came up to see who it was.”
“Just good timing, then,” said Murdoch.
“Yes, sir. And I can’t take credit for that.” Her laugh sounded more comfortable this time.
Dr. Eleanor Jago, head of the Medical Department on Jo-casta and also of the hospital, welcomed us back with perfunctory kisses “in case you’re infectious—you smell infectious,” requested that next time we returned unexpectedly could we do so during the day shift, and made us lie down to be tickled with diagnostic tools until she was satisfied we could be let loose on the station in safety.
She finished examining Murdoch first, so he could go and arrange for secure quarters for me, then took me off to her consulting office, a small room with one low bed, a row of panels, and a desk. She ran her instruments over me, then waited for the data to process. I sat on the bed and waited for the questions.
Jago was a little older than myself, and we’d been friends for three and a half years, four if you counted the missing five months. We didn’t always agree on matters of station policy—she thought the administration should put more effort into securing medical supplies and expertise. For a while during the Seouras occupation I thought she blamed me for the death of her partner, who was killed when one of the gray ships shot at a team repairing one of the outer reflectors. We’d cleared that up, but something remained between us, and I wasn’t sure if it was only my guilt.
“What have you been doing to your lungs?” she said, her eyes on a monitor.
“Breathing nonrecycled air.”
“Well, go on,” she said after a moment. “Where? You’ve been gone for five months. Give me an idea what happened.”
“I’d prefer to wait and get your unbiased opinion based on the facts.” I dangled my legs over the side of the bed, feeling better than I had for months. Body clean, clothes clean, breathing easy. No H’digh echoes—not yet, anyway.
“What facts?” she said. “You haven’t given me any.”
“I mean the medical facts. You’ve taken tests, right?”
“Yes, but we usually listen to the patient’s history, too.”
“Okay. I was in a place without atmospheric quality controls and generally low standards of hygiene.”
/> Jago folded her arms and raised one neat eyebrow at me. “Halley, you were doing a test run for a new type of engine, right? How did that take you to a polluted junk heap for five months?”
She and the rest of the station’s general population knew only that we were testing a modification of the standard flatspace engine. That’s what our engineering team’s project proposal said, and it was partly true, in that to install the fragment from Calypso, we had to modify the flatspace engines. We used a small freighter that Jocasta’s Customs Department had impounded, and paid the bond from the general research budget.
But only myself and the three other engineers on the team knew what we were really doing. The rest of the station followed Dan Florida’s occasional stories of the project on his news service. It had been damn difficult to keep him from discovering the truth, and we were all relieved when he agreed to head the neutrality lobby team to Central.
“It’s a bit sensitive,” I said. “But what concerns me at the moment...” I slid off the bed, found my legs nice and steady, and went to stand beside her. “I was exposed to what I think is active Tor technology, although not hostile.”
“Then it can’t be Tor technology.” She looked at me. “Right? I thought Tor stuff by definition was hostile.”
“Well, yes.”
“Where was this?”
“I’d rather not say.” There was no reason to keep our journey to Earth’s past secret from Eleanor, other than in the interests of objectivity, as she’d find out soon enough when she checked the results of our tests. But, as we walked down from the center, Murdoch and I had agreed we would keep information on the Invidi ship confined to as small a group as possible. “The thing I want to know is whether this technology could interact with my Seouras implant.”
She sighed through her nose and brushed past me to tap up another monitor on her desk, a smaller one. She was a big-boned woman, but her economical elegance always made me feel... overdone. Uncouth. She stared at the monitor, her eyes moving rapidly as she used the visual interface. “I’m looking at those records now. But why should the Seouras implant have anything to do with Tor things?”
“Because the gray ship—the Tor ship—also used it to communicate with me, remember? And the Seouras were in the gray ship. Anything they used to communicate with my implant must have been Tor. You know how Tor programs corrupt anything else.”
“Hmm.” She blinked in silence for a while.
I fidgeted and adjusted the light range on one of the diagnostic panels. Already rumors would be flying about the arrival of the former head of station and chief of Security in an Invidi ship. An Invidi-looking ship, to be exact. It was outwardly Invidi, but inside, the Tor elements were obvious. Whichever of the Invidi built it, and I was willing to bet it was Serat, he had wanted to keep it secret from the others and also had no fear of anyone entering it accidentally.
“The trouble with that implant,” said Eleanor finally, “was that we couldn’t find any direct, measurable effects. There were plenty of indirect, long-term effects, including,”—she read from the screen—“decreased olfactory sensitivity, headaches, nausea, weight loss, mild paranoia...”
“I don’t remember the paranoia,” I interrupted. “You’re saying you can’t tell if the implant’s been activated?”
“Yes. Unless you want to take me wherever you found this Tor technology and we can monitor your reactions to it in a controlled way.”
“Which will take days, right?”
“At least.”
“I haven’t got days. I might not have hours,” I said gloomily.
“What’s all this about an Invidi ship?” Eleanor tapped the screen shut and looked at me again. “It’s not the same ship you left in?”
“No, and before you ask, we merely borrowed it.”
“And you’re going to give it back?” She raised her eyebrows at me quizzically.
“After I’ve had a look at it.”
She clicked her tongue. “ConFleet won’t be keen on that. What’s your status? Bill Murdoch said something about you being wanted for questioning.”
“He’s going to hold me here. It’s temporarily neutral ground, and if the vote goes through, it will stay that way.”
She scraped her chair back roughly. “I don’t understand why you think neutrality will be any better than being in the Confederacy.”
I stared at her. “But you supported us in the application.”
“Personally, I think it’s a good idea. Not so sure in my professional capacity.”
“But we’ll be free to choose policies that are better for the station.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” She tisked at my puzzlement. “In concrete terms, how is it going to be better?” She ticked off items on her fingers at me. “We’ve established a steady supply of medications and treatments. New personnel are settling in. For the first time since I arrived here four years ago we’ve actually got a medical record for everyone on the station. All this is possible because ConFleet is offering protection. If the neutrality vote goes through and Central withdraws technical support as well as withdrawing ConFleet’s protection—worse, if Earth admin withdraws too, what’s going to happen to the infrastructure here?”
“ConFleet let us down when the Seouras came. How do we know they won’t let us down again?”
She shrugged. “We don’t, I suppose. But we’re looking at an immediate interruption in trade as well—what happens to the contract workers, the businesses dependent on Confederacy materials and supplies?”
Pride prevented me admitting I didn’t have answers to details. And if I didn’t fix up my personal problems, I wouldn’t be around when the neutrality vote went through. But there was one thing I did know.
“Eleanor, we need to be able to decide these things for ourselves. That’s all. We might decide to continue with ConFleet protection. We might decide to provide businesses with bridging loans. We might decide to ask all traders to bring medical supplies as a condition of station use, I don’t know. The important thing is that we decide these things for ourselves.”
She sighed, unconvinced. “You could be right. And sorry to hit you with it when you’ve just come back.”
“Believe it or not, it’s something I thought a lot about when I was away.”
“You’d better go and find Murdoch. He’s not really going to arrest you, is he?”
“I don’t think he’s got much choice,” I said gloomily. “If he doesn’t, we can’t support his claim to have brought me back, and he may be charged with possession of jump-drive technology as well.”
“Was he in the same place you were?” She emphasized “the same place,” obviously annoyed at my secrecy.
“For a couple of weeks.”
“Thought so. Physically, he’s not as affected as you.” She raised her eyebrow speculatively at me, obviously wanting a report on our personal relationship, too, but I was tired and my mind was full of other, less pleasant things. Like the ConFleet cruiser waiting at our front door.
“Good night, Eleanor.”
“Good night, Halley.” She watched me go, one finger tapping the monitor frame.
I wish she wouldn’t do that. It confuses the input sensors.
Nineteen
I left the hospital by its Alpha ring exit. Jocasta’s corridors seemed very enclosed after the skies of the out-town. The wide throughway glowed blue in the night light. We kept diurnal rhythm on the station by tilting the side mirrors on Gamma and Delta rings, and by tilting the main reflecting mirrors above Alpha ring. Most species needed the illusion of some kind of day and night, and on Jocasta we kept a rhythm of twelve hours daylight, one each of dawn and evening half-light, and ten hours of darkness.
The Security constable who had waited outside Jago’s office told me Murdoch had prepared one of the guest officer’s quarters on Alpha. Better than the brig, I quipped, but he simply said yes, ma’am, and looked straight ahead. He had a large nose that he kept wiping with a
cleanchif and his collar was done up crooked below an unfamiliar face. Perhaps he’d come to the station while I was away. It increased my out-of-place feeling, and I didn’t say anything more as he escorted me back through Alpha ring. We passed through the neat streetscape of the sleeping business quarter, far removed from the bustle of lower-ring commerce, then along the Bubble’s main corridor with its maze of offices to either side. Our destination was the Con-Fleet and EarthFleet officer and guest quarters on the other side of the Bubble.
It was warm after Sydney’s winter, and the humidity up here in Alpha was comfortable, unlike down in Delta ring. The gravity was less, too, one of the benefits of living in the upper ring. Another benefit seemed to be satisfaction in being able to afford living where most of the station could not. Most of those who could afford it were from the Four. This caused much resentment despite the revenue that Alpha rent brought to the station.
It seemed so familiar. From the out-town, we could see the spires of the city and the highways curling across the skyline to the eastern coast, where those who could afford it lived a life that hadn’t changed significantly for fifty years. We’d never be able to do anything about similar divisions here until we got out of the Confederacy. Neutrality wasn’t an option, it was a necessity.
Small things caught my eye; a loose conduit that rattled, alien writing, the scents of food plus alien body odors, whiffs of cold machinery from maintenance panels, the rich, repellent smell of a recycling vent. In the Bubble, what seemed like kilometers of EarthFleet-blue walls, section headings, door signs, noticeboards. All familiar, but somehow removed from myself.
I kept remembering things from the out-town that I’d forgotten to do—a letter I forgot to give Florence, the milk bill that I was supposed to remind Grace to pay, Will’s science project that we’d only half finished... a band of grief tightened around my chest and made me stumble on nothing, because my vision was blurred with tears... surely this would pass?
My grandmother said grief doesn’t go away, it just gets older with you.
Murdoch had put my photoimage from Las Mujeres out on the desk of the guest quarters. The small rectangle stood alone on the polished surface; the interface monitor was built into the wall beside the desk and the controls into its top. The rest of the room was as impersonal as the desk. A small living area, a single sleeping room with narrow bed, a door off the sleeping room that contained a hygiene cubicle.
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