by Mel Keegan
“Modern tanks,” Travers said doubtfully.
But Marin nodded toward Vidal. “Two very old tanks came out of the lagoon with them, remember. One failed on the mechanical level, but the other was viable.” He brushed a kiss across Travers’s mouth and slid out of the loose embrace. “Any ideas, Mick?”
“Who, me?” Vidal glanced over his shoulder. “What I know about cryogen tanks would go on the back of your hand, in large letters. Ernst might be the one to talk to about it. Or Tor Sereccio,” he added. “Tor’s the engineer specializing in old, old hardware – mind you, not human tech. Old Resalq gear and Zunshu salvage is his field.” Done with the sim, he set down the handy and thrust both hands into the pockets of slacks that were still far too loose on him. “What’s your interest, Curtis? I thought you hated the venomous little sod.”
Marin could only shrug. “I suppose part of me is fascinated to see how the experiment turns out. Caterpillars morph into butterflies, after all.”
“And maggots turn into flies,” Vidal added. “Even if the growth patterns come good, and he wakes up one day as a Pakrani, he’s still going to be a venomous sod – just a bloody great big one who’s harder to handle and quite capable of knocking you flat on your ass!”
“All the more reason to tank him before he gets any worse.” Travers gestured over his shoulder. “I can tell you, Richard’s had more than enough of him. Every time he looks up, Teniko’s watching him.”
“He still loves Richard,” Marin mused.
“Fixated on him. Obsessed.” Vidal shook his head. “This can only end badly. If I was Rick, I’d have him tanked already. Excess baggage, like Bill said. He shouldn’t be here.”
“If he wasn’t so damn’ brilliant, he wouldn’t be.” Travers dropped a hand on Vidal’s shoulder. “We might need him.”
“So Mahak says.” Vidal sighed. “He still seems to think quite highly of Teniko, or at least of his intellect. He owns a lot more patience than I do.”
“Mahak,” Marin echoed. “I like the sound.”
“It’s his name.” Vidal regarded Marin thoughtfully. “You and he were close for a long time.”
“Yes.” Marin chose his words carefully. “There was a time I was where you were, Mick. Anything I am today is built on foundations Mark shored up. I owe him. I always will.”
“He … collects strays,” Vidal said with a wry smile.
“Yes, he does.” Marin shared the painful humor. “When they let him. He tried to help Tonio, and I think it’s the first time Mark ever had a stray kitten turn right around and bite him. He’d probably still help, if he could, if only because Teniko is brilliant, and it’s possible we might need him.” He stirred deliberately. “You know where Mark is?”
Vidal gestured forward. “In Physics 3, with Dario and Tor. They’re still trying to get a line into the Ebrezjim’s AI.”
“We’ll catch you later,” Travers told Vidal. “Take care of yourself, Mick.”
As they stepped out, Perlman and Fargo strolled up from the aft compartments. They were apprehensive, and Marin did not blame them. They had yet to fly a successful virtual mission, though they had managed to survive in the simulator for over 100 minutes on one assignment. They would get it eventually, he was sure, but they had been killed so often in Vidal’s virtual world, and it was never pleasant. He slapped palms as they headed into the hangar, and followed Travers on, forward, to the labs.
Physics 3 was closed but not locked, and no warnings were posted. He buzzed strategically as Travers rolled open the light armordoors, and Mark appeared in the back, around a meter-wide flatscreen. He was alone for the moment, working with sleeves rolled up around smooth brown forearms. A thread of Resalq music played over the hum of machinery and the smell of fresh coffee issued from the ’chef.
The lab was eight meters by ten, and the space was dominated by a containment shell set right in the center. The transparent plastex dome insulated the relative cold of the old computer core, and kept out any stray dust particle that might contaminate it. Ports set every ten degrees around the surface of the shell passed hanks of cable in and out of the quarantined interior, and Marin counted more than 20 assorted flatscreens and handies, each monitoring a different datastream.
By now the matrix of Ebrezjim refuse had been stripped away and the core was denuded. Marin saw a blue-gray cylinder not quite two meters tall, a little more than a meter thick, and rounded at either end. No markings showed on the surface, but eight circular indentations indicated sockets, and four couplers were in place, bleeding bunches of color-coded cables. Somewhere in the middle of this mess of mismatched tech was the remnant of a thousand-year-old AI.
“Any joy?” Travers asked as he pulled up a stool and studied the containment shell with a perplexed look.
“Yes and no.” Mark pushed away from the bench and flexed his hands. “There’s a lot of damage, as you’d expect. In fact, there’s a lot more damage than we’d been predicting.”
“Surprising,” Marin mused. “At those temperatures, it should have been perfectly preserved, shouldn’t it?”
“Perhaps.” Mark stood, hands on hips, frowning at the ancient thing which was defying him. “It’s not quite as simple as that – nothing ever is. Suffice to say, I’d hoped to bring the AI online, but I don’t think we’re going to be so successful. There’s damage to the actual hardware itself, at the core level, that … well, I don’t see how it could be caused by the freezing or recovery process. Damage always leaves a specific fingerprint, and what I’m starting to see here …” He shook himself. “No matter – we can access parts of the database, so we’ll get a good deal of information out of it.”
“Enough to improve our survival odds in Zunshu space?” Travers asked shrewdly. “It was the whole point of going into the lagoon.”
“Oh, yes. What we’ll dig out of the database will give us the edge we always knew we needed,” Mark said without hesitation. “From what we know already, getting into Zunshu space was never going to be the problem. Getting out again is something else – but in any case, we won’t be leaving before a resolution has been wrangled. An armistice, perhaps. Something, anything, to safeguard the Deep Sky.” He nodded at the old, old AI core. “The answers are in there. We just need to get to them.”
The coffee was tantalizing. Marin helped himself to a mug, though Travers and Mark declined. “Have you winkled anything at all out of it?”
“A little.” Mark leaned his hips on the nearest bench, folded his arms on the breast of a bronze and gold tunic. “Most of what we’ve retrieved so far is drawn from image storage. We’re seeing survey pictures of worlds, planetoids, starfields. The most disquieting thing we’ve found is the familiarity of what we’re seeing. Zunshu space is … just space. Not some region of hell, nor a void, perhaps the heart of a dark nebula.” He seemed to mock himself with a faint, rueful smile. “All these years, in one’s imagination it’s been tempting to visualize Zunshu space as something like the ancient humans’ Tartarus.”
“The region beyond Hades,” Marin told Travers, to whom the word meant nothing. “If you thought Hades was bad, Tartarus was worse. Cold, dark, utterly dead and filled with horrors, wasn’t it?”
“Something along those lines,” Mark agreed. “Ancient mythology, at any rate. Why anyone should want to conjecture regarding a place beyond Hades, I can’t imagine, but I suppose we’ve always been inclined to picture Zunshu space as some kind of monstrous pit in the cosmos. First surprise from the Ebrezjim data: it’s just space. A region like Hellgate, surrounded by normal stars, several hundred systems we can pinpoint, within easy reach of the black hole at the hub of the gravity storms.”
Travers’s dark head nodded slowly. “So we’re over the first hurdle. We know there’s nothing weird about Zunshu space itself, nothing Lai’a can’t handle.”
“Which is a modest source of relief,” Mark admitted. “If it’d turned out to be some cosmic Tartarus, well, standing off for weeks or months, long enou
gh to perform a research cruise, is the last thing we’d want to do, with the frontier colonies coming under the Zunshu hammer!” He reached out, laid his flat hand on the curved surface of the containment shell. “We need more – a lot more. The answers are in here somewhere.”
“We might learn more at Orion 359.” Marin drained the mug and set it aside for the little housekeeper drone which took care of the ’chef. “We’re about two hours out from the Orion Gate.”
Mark stirred with an obvious effort. “And we need to set up the lab to run some long processes, get it locked down tight before Lai’a announces the transit. This, I don’t want to miss. I never thought I’d be seeing with my own eyes the region imaged by the Aenestra.”
The story was being told with relish among the younger Resalq who, like Midani Kulich, and like young humans anywhere, yearned for new horizons. Three Resalq ships headed by the science vessel Aenestra traveled years at high velocities to survey the worlds around Orion 359. Their mission was to scout for evidence of Zunshu activity, but none was recorded until they reached the skirts of Hellgate’s malicious twin. Marin felt a faint shiver as Mark turned a screen toward him.
It was streaming the Aenestra data. Jazinsky, Rusch and any of the Resalq would have recognized these skies at a glance. Richard Vaurien was idly studying them – not because he suspected Lai’a did not know exactly where it was in relation to home. A restlessness had begun to stir inside him. Far horizons were beckoning, and Marin knew he felt the longing to reach beyond any shore that had ever known the shadow of war.
“Nothing we can do to help you here?” Travers hazarded as Mark took up a handy and began to wrangle his machines.
“You could find Dario and Tor and tell them to come back to work,” Mark said acerbically. “They stepped out ‘for air’ an hour ago … I know where they are, but I’ll not be the one to call them back!”
“And where are they?” Marin thought he could guess.
“In the arboretum. No surprise.” Mark looked up from the handy. “Give them a gentle nudge, tell them the ‘old man’ would very much like to get out of here some time this century.”
‘Arboretum’ was the wrong term, but it had stuck. The compartment was right above the old, gutted engine deck, fifty meters by thirty and twenty high – fitted as a hydroponic garden, fed by vast tanks of growing carp and tended by gantry-mounted drones. Engineered dwarf trees, shrubs, plants, grew in serried ranks – corn, citrus, cane fruits, legumes, every kind of leafy vegetable and berry, tubers, stone fruits and herbs. As if, Marin thought, Mark Sherratt and Harrison Shapiro were laying the groundwork for long-term survival, in the event Lai’a could not return.
The thought inspired a shiver as Travers cycled the lock-in, lock-out armordoors, before a wave of warm, humid air engulfed Marin. Forty lamps in the ceiling bulkhead created full-frequency daylight conditions; water cannon mounted in each corner misted the fields every six hours, and the gravity in the compartment was set to a full quarter less than the rest of the ship. Three-meter fans gave a constant slight breeze while tiny beebots whirred to and fro on the serious business of pollination, and the gantry drones rolled methodically overhead, pruning, tending. Fresh strawberries, salad and herbs would soon be finding their way to the dining table, and after weeks or months on even the best autochef fare, Marin knew he would be looking forward to them.
Voices issued from the far side of the arboretum. Dario and Tor were talking quietly in their own language, and Marin caught a number of words and phrases he knew, sometimes enough to piece together an entire sentence. They knew they should be working, but tiredness and frustration with the project had made Tor short tempered. Dario had obviously known what he needed, and an hour later Tor was contrite, content. They had the right idea, Marin decided, and he made a mental note to seduce Neil in this direction, and soon.
“Yo, guys,” Travers had called ahead. “You decent?”
“No – so bugger off, as Bill Grant says,” Tor shouted without even looking up over the low foliage of a rank of dwarf citrus trees, each no higher than Marin’s chest.
“Your equero wants you,” Curtis called back.
Dario snorted a laugh. “What a surprise.”
They were sitting on a pile of blankets on the mesh deck in the dappled shade of the berry vines which were shooting up fast in the compartment’s partial gravity. A tumble of beer cans scattered around, and Tor was still naked while Dario had pulled a pair of battered jeans haphazardly around his hips.
“Your equero has a life too, you know,” Marin said, perhaps a little critically. “You need to be tasking the lab to run itself – we’re just short of the Orion Gate. You want to miss this?”
“No,” Dario admitted.
“Yes,” Tor groaned. “I’m an engineer, Curtis, not an explorer. Not even an astrophysicist.”
“You’re still a Resalq,” Dario said, clearly picking up the threads of an old argument, “and we’re supposed to be looking for our own ancestors, survivors off the Ebrezjim. Blood of my blood was on the ship.”
“So let Lai’a look,” Tor argued. “It’s one chance in ten million it even finds anything, and if it does – wake me. I’ll ride to the freakin’ rescue.”
Dario heaved a theatrical sigh and snatched up his shirt. “Okay, be that way. I’ll go give Mark a hand.” He shrugged into the shirt and cast about for the deck shoes he had thrown aside an hour before.
Rebellious, gleefully wayward, Tor sprawled on the blankets and reached for another beer. Dario cast a disparaging look over him and then headed for the pressure doors. They were cycling when Travers wondered, “You guys are arguing? What’s his problem?”
“Aggravation,” Dario said with all due resignation. “We just worked a triple shift, trying to find the Ebrezjim AI, and … damnit, Neil, it’s like it isn’t even there to be found. Sure, there’s structural damage to the computer core – you could expect that. But it’s like stumbling around somebody’s house, looking for the owner, and finding a half-full cup of cold tea, a half-eaten sandwich, a handy with a movie on pause, the dog sleeping off dinner, the bed unmade, and no sign of the owner. Nothing. Like the AI just stopped. Vanished. And you know they don’t do that.” He stepped out into the passage leading back to the service elevator. “Tor can’t stand a mystery, but the thing that really drives him nuts is wasting his time. He can be so impatient, you’d think he was human. I mean,” he added quickly, “with a lifespan like ours, impatience is probably the only unforgivable sin!”
“I know what you mean,” Marin assured him. “You, uh, sweetened him up at least.”
“I humped him good and hard, which was what he wanted, needed,” Dario said with smoldering precision. “And very soon I shall have to be very, very careful about all that, you know?”
It took some time for the sense of what he had said to click into place, and Marin gave a start of surprise. “What? He’s … never! Is he?”
“Well, not yet,” Dario said with a pained look, “but you’ve lived among us, you know how we are, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Marin said darkly, “I do. You, uh, be careful, then. You don’t want that to contend with, not now, not here.”
“Tell me about it,” Dario muttered, and hit the panel with the side of his fist to summon the elevator, “Look, let me go help Mark. I know he needs help, but Tor … shoot. I’ll see you in Ops when it all happens.”
The doors had closed over on him when Travers said in tones of complete exasperation, “What the hell was that all about?”
For the first time in years Marin felt a faint blush warm his cheeks. He beckoned Travers twenty meters forward, to the small lounge off one side of the Bravo gym, where the ’chef was stocked by the company and, predictably, eight brands of beer were on offer. He took two Coopers Lites, lobbed one in Travers’s direction and cracked open his own. The gym was empty. The firing range was still set up at one end, a variety of practice weapons abandoned on a bench, but for the moment he igno
red them.
“You don’t know too much about the fine details of Resalq biology, do you?” he hazarded.
Travers took a long pull on the beer. “They live a hell of a lot longer than we do … one gender; they all look male, but they’re not, and it’s a big mistake if you forget that. Huge, convoluted brain, massive heart and lungs; they don’t get drunk because of the huge liver. Hotter than we are, and they see better than we do, especially in the dark. They actually do reincarnate, but it’s bad manners to mention someone’s previous life … they smell sweeter, when they work up a sweat … and their palate is so weird, they like their wine like vinegar and their food like napalm. What else is to know?”
“A lot, actually.” Marin nodded back in the direction of the garden. “They’re single gender, with a full chromosome set, which means they can all bear young. And when social or environmental pressures shove them around, they start thinking about it. Thinking about it is the first sign of hormonal shift. And Tor’s been talking about it now and then – remember when we reached the Ebrezjim Lagoon?”
“Yeah,” Travers said slowly. “So?”
“So, he’s responding to pressures,” Marin mused. “I should have seen it, but I was too busy to notice. I’m sure Mark and Dario saw it. Humans thrashing through trauma feel the fight or flight reflex, and we respond by pumping out stress hormones, right?” Travers nodded. Marin shrugged. “When young Resalq are backed into a corner, under stress for weeks, months, some of them start to pump hormones, specifically the hormones that’ll ensure the survival of the species in a time of crisis.”
The penny dropped and Travers blinked at him. “You mean Tor –?”
“Is about to become receptive,” Marin affirmed. “That’s the word they use. Not passive, or submissive, or feminized, or any of the human twaddle. But he’s about to become receptive, and Dario already knows he’ll have to be careful. He’s not stupid. Getting his partner naragen right now, right here, would be … damnably inconvenient.” He forced a chuckle. “Don’t worry about them. Dario’ll be watching.”
