by Clarke,Neil
“You know who told me about this?” he asked, as if reading my mind. “You know who just had to rub my face in the shoddy way this sector, which is under my jurisdiction is being run?”
“Ryan Charmayne?”
That was a tactical error. I was right about who it was, but his question had been rhetorical; he hadn’t expected me to know the answer. I had just revealed to this nasty little man that a Servant was paying attention to politics at the parties of Executives. But that wasn’t the biggest problem, because I had just realized something else. Glenn Tedd had mortally insulted the Charmayne family at the last Executive party, and Ryan Charmayne’s favorite method of murdering rivals was to . . .
“The lock!” The Penitent voice made my cry sound downright mournful. But the warning came too late. The inner lock spun shut.
“Hey!” Glenn threw himself at the door. “Open that door! Do you know who I am?”
I didn’t waste my time calling him an idiot. I tore off my Servant’s mantle, and at the same moment all of my sensory feeds went dead. I wasn’t surprised by that development—after all, we were in full disaster mode, with everything that could go wrong absolutely doing so, and things were about to get a lot worse. I used the surveillance feed in the lock to find a pressure suit. I knew I had less than a minute.
Back in the infancy of space travel, space suits had taken up to four hours to put on. We had one of those on display in our history museum, along with a checklist of the protocols that had to be observed before Ground Control would let an astronaut out for a space walk. Our suits were vastly more streamlined, and began the pressurization process as soon as you sealed them. Maintenance workers usually got them on in five minutes.
But paranoia had ruled my life for as long as I could remember, and that’s what saved me, because I had practiced getting the suits on quickly. My best time so far had been just under a minute. But this time, my hands shook. I fumbled things I had done smoothly during practice.
The suit’s automatic systems signaled green when I sealed it. I hooked my safety cable to a ring next to the outer door. I had just let go of the clip and was reaching for the rung that would prevent me from being blown out of the lock along with the atmosphere when the outer door spun open—before I could grab it, I exploded out of there. As I reached the end of the cable fastened above my navel, I flipped around to face the ship, and Glenn Tedd collided with my right shoulder. I had only half a second to see his contorted face with my helmet cam, but I could tell he was sorry he hadn’t done what I had done. He was suit-less and cable-less as he drifted away from the ship, going from 1atm of pressure to 0atm with unhappy consequences.
But I had no time to watch his last struggles. His collision with me had knocked me out of alignment with the door. I moved in an arc at the end of my tether, toward Olympia’s massive hull. I could see the tether stretching through the opening, and I very much wanted to switch on the motor that would reel me back in. But I was afraid it would fray as it rubbed against the edges of the lock. My fears were probably irrational, but I congratulate myself for trying to think at all under the circumstances.
Olympia’s hull is not a smooth terrain. It bristles with ladders, safety rungs, valves, and other equipment, especially around the maintenance locks. As I sailed toward those protrusions, I stretched my hands out, eager to connect. The seconds flashed by. I struck the side of a ladder and held on for dear life.
The other end of my cable sailed past me, its end cut cleanly.
I looked for the airlock, but couldn’t see it with my suit’s helmet cam. I felt lightheaded, and realized I was breathing too fast.
Little sips, warned a calm voice from the back of my mind.
Little sips my ass! I screamed back at it.
But I tried to calm down. When I had managed to slow my breathing a little, I realized my senses had all come back. It was as if the program that had controlled them had already been deleted. As if I had been as much a target of this murder as Glenn Tedd. And that presented me with a real conundrum. I had planned to wait a half hour or so, and then open the outer lock and go back inside. I figured whoever had killed Glenn would be gone by then.
What if they were waiting for me? What if they had seen me put on the suit and knew I was out here?
I checked my air supply. These suits were designed for short-term use, which translated to eight hours of air with a full tank. But this unit was down to 27% capacity. So I had about two hours, which might be plenty if I wanted to get into one of the locks in this sector. But if I needed to get to another sector, I might not have time.
Out of curiosity, I opened a link and looked at the operating systems for the Series 100 locks.
Off Line was the status. Estimated duration of denial of service, 24 hours.
Someone wasn’t taking any chances.
I thought about going around the order and getting one of the locks to open manually, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that on the 100-series locks without creating an alert. If I could get to the 200-series sector, I might be able to get one open, for the simple reason that those locks weren’t used regularly, and no one paid any attention to them. They were too big for executions. But I’d have to get there first, and it was three miles away.
Olympia is a Galaxy-Class Generation Ship. What that means is that conceivably you could travel from one end of our galaxy to the other (if you had time and a heck of a lot of patience). It spins to simulate gravity, and the habitat sectors are so large, they have minor weather events in there. If you’re a worm like me, and spend most of your time walking or crawling through the miles of tunnels at or near the end of the spin arm, your universe is both small and limitless. It’s small because the space is confining, and limitless because you have no perspective about where it begins and ends.
But the outside of the ship is a different story. It’s a landscape full of valleys, peaks, and plains, and its sky is full of dazzling stars. From my new perspective I could see the blazing heart of our galaxy. I could see the Andromeda Galaxy too, its spiral shape more apparent. The beauty and grandeur of this view was beginning to overtake my panic—and possibly to cloud my judgment, because I started to crawl toward the Series 200 sector. Lacking another plan, I decided I may as well go for it.
I couldn’t see that sector from where I was; I relied on schematics that I accessed through my links. While I was at it, I did a little research about my current condition. I used the cameras in the tunnel outside Lock 113 and saw a guard posted at the inner door. I didn’t recognize him, but I recognized his military stance. Oddly, I felt comforted to see him there, because it validated my decision to venture into unknown territory and look for another way in.
But a quick inspection of my pressure suit revealed another problem. My jet packs were even lower than my air tanks. And since Olympia was spinning, I feared I could end up in a spot without a proper handhold when it ran out. I would have to pull myself along and use the jets only when I had no other choice.
That was probably going to take longer than I had. But I didn’t have a Plan B, so I stopped debating the point and aimed myself for the 200 Series locks, keeping my body close in and parallel to the ship. It was very slow going.
One hour later, I checked my status. I was less than one third of the way to my destination.
I wasn’t going to make it.
So I stopped and took stock of my situation. A quick check of the guard in the maintenance hall revealed that he was still there. Worse—I had gone past the halfway point for my air supply, and the math did not look good for a return trip.
Yet I felt calm. I regretted that I would never be able to share the gift my parents had given to me. But I didn’t regret this mode of death. The view of the outside of our generation ship was magnificent; it made me wonder why I had spent so much time wanting to see the inside of the ship. From my new vantage point, I could see the distant sensor array on one end and the colossal engines at the other. I only had to consider
for a few seconds before I realized what music I should play in my head: Gustav Holst’s Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. As I listened to the sound of that grim and majestic procession, The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies wheeled overhead. I accessed a chart and identified more distant galaxies in the star field.
Who ordered the hit? I suddenly thought to wonder. I poked around communication records, looking for messages that might be pertinent. While I was in there, a new pathway appeared—the same one I had used to trigger the alarm when Nuruddin had been in trouble. I recognized a link there.
I touched the link. Medusa stirred.
A schematic of Olympia’s exterior appeared in my mind’s eye. I found my spot on it and highlighted it for her.
I wondered why that would be sufficient, but I didn’t question her. Instead, I used the secret pathway that had led me to Medusa to look for my name in security memos. It didn’t pop up, but I got a red flag for top-secret documents. When I wiggled my way around the security protocols, I still didn’t find my name. But I did find a name I recognized: Titania.
The message was short. It said, Eliminate all immigrants from Titania, then erase their names from directories. It was signed B. Charmayne.
Connected to that communication were two responses: So far have only located one immigrant, Servant Oichi Angelis. Will use Lock 113. It was unsigned. But a scan of the original directive revealed two recipients, P. Schnebly and R. Charmayne. So I thought the first response might have come from P. Schnebly. He might be the fellow standing guard in the tunnel.
The second response sounded more like something Ryan Charmayne would say: I think I know how we might kill two birds with one stone.
So, in a way, I was responsible for Glenn Tedd’s death. True, Ryan would have looked for other chances to kill him, but I had accidentally expedited the affair. When I searched for the status connected with both our names, Tedd’s read deceased. Mine didn’t, but I assumed P. Schnebly would update it once he had confirmed his kill by waiting for my air supply to run out.
P. Schnebly had not discovered any more names of Titania immigrants yet. When I re-traced the inquiries connected with my profile, I could see it had not been easy for him, and that puzzled me. He had been forced to plod through each file individually. So it was a minor miracle (if one was inclined to look at it in that light) that he had found me at all.
Yet when I searched for immigrants from Titania using the secret pathway, thirty-seven more names popped up. I scrubbed any mention of immigration and Titania from their records. I did this while still listening to Holst and gazing at the glorious man-made landscape and the stars, and within seventeen minutes I saw Medusa in person, for the first time.
She used her tentacles to propel herself across Olympia’s hull. She seemed made for that sort of activity, though her body hung oddly limp. It wasn’t until she got closer that I realized the limp body was a pressure suit. Medusa was meant to be worn.
She disengaged me from my handhold and enfolded me with a membrane that sealed and pressurized itself. Once that was complete, she removed my pressure suit and expelled it from the membrane in a way that seemed almost organic. The suit would drift away from Olympia in much the same way Glenn Tedd had.
Throughout this process her beautiful face hovered before mine. She saw me with eyes that could stare into the heart of a sun without flinching.
I slipped into her pressurized suit. It was unlike anything I had worn before—it seemed to feel me as I entered it. Once on, it felt like an extension of my own skin. Her face rotated and settled over mine.
Inside my head, the implants my father had given me came completely awake, and I saw his face.
An image of Lucifer Tower appeared inside my head. The blueprints listed it as a research center within a sensor array—it was among the towers on the leading end of Olympia. It really was a research center, but no human had ever used it.
No human.
It was not currently pressurized and heated. But it wasn’t empty.
How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? Sheba Charmayne had asked. “She wasn’t talking about the people on Titania,” I said aloud. “She was talking about you, Medusa.”
I saw it then, what my father and his collaborators had intended.
FIVE
Vengeance Is Not Mine
Medusa smiled for me. Her expression can be surprisingly tender. I closed his skull with instruments extended from Medusa’s tentacles, and Nuruddin tugged his scalp back into place and glued it together so one could hardly tell it had been opened.
His face lit up with wonder.
I lifted him gently with our tentacles, and Nuruddin received him with his own. He had been using his unit for almost ten years, and his interface was remarkably graceful. Of the other thirty-seven immigrants from Olympia, he was the one who had grasped my offer the most quickly, the one who required the least explanation. But they already possessed the same brain implants that I had. All of them were the children of conspirators.
/>
Nuruddin’s son returned to his mother, and we reported to service in Baylor Charmayne’s garden. His table was set for twenty, and these were no ordinary guests.
I filled Baylor’s glass with the same carafe from which his guests drank. He raised it. “A toast to the new congress. Halfway through our voyage to our new home, we’ve got a lot to be proud of.”
The new congress was not an accurate description. These senators had been elected to the same offices they had always held, by members of their own class. They had jockeyed with each other their whole lives for power, stabbed each other in the backs numerous times when they weren’t conspiring together. Now they hoisted their glasses and toasted each other. I stood at their backs with nineteen other Servants.
In all the years since I was supposed to have died, these Executives had never looked directly at me. All I had to do to disguise myself was change my name.
“And to Sheba Charmayne,” added Baylor. “She was a tough old bird. But she came through for the children. Thanks to her, they will always have music.”
Since they had all supported his bill for the Music in Education initiative, they drank to this toast as well. Many of them had sincere smiles on their faces. They had discovered, once their own children received the music and image database (which some of them really believed had been designed by Lady Sheba herself), that their children had become experts in the most intellectual music ever created by human kind. Their math skills had improved, and improvements in other areas had been noticed. Now, even the most stubborn opponents to the initiative were applauding the woman my mother had named the Iron Fist.
In some ways, I couldn’t help but pity her son. Especially when she continued to chide him long after her death.
