by Mel Keegan
For some time Vaurien digested this without a word, and the tired eyes brightened with tears. “Harrison –?”
“Coping the way he does. He’s shut it out, clamped it down, gone back to work. But I don’t know how much he’s going to be able to do here – worry about all that later, Richard. You need to rest. Harrison’ll find a way to get through, same as we all do.”
Vaurien struggled to push himself up against the pillows. “I don’t feel anything down my left side. Nothing.”
“The nerves were severed to stop pain,” Travers told him, “or you’d be doped right up to the eyeballs.”
He was lucid – certainly dizzy, hot, nauseous with the after-effects of so much nano therapy and the shock that had actually killed him several times while he was in surgery – but he was thinking. Nothing short of his actual, final death was likely to stop Vaurien thinking for long.
“You said … two,” he whispered. “We lost two.” Travers nodded. “Who?” Vaurien’s mouth compressed, the lips whitening.
“Tonio. He got into the fallout off the transspace drive, pulling you out of the deck. The Aragos were fluttering, you were already dead, Bill couldn’t even get into Ops, Bravo had to cut through the armordoors. It was … bad,” Travers said thickly. “But Tonio was in there so fast, all he wanted to do was get you out, away from the radiation stream. He didn’t live long after …”
“Oh, Christ.” Richard passed his right hand over his face. “I didn’t want that, Neil. I cracked down hard on the kid on account of the drugs, the mess he was making of his life, everything, but …”
“No one would have hurt him,” Travers said with a stoicism that surprised himself. “Every time he was read the riot act, it was to help him – protect him from his own nasty habits.” He took Vaurien’s hand again. “Be proud of him. In the end, he did good. You’re alive because of him. Or,” he added, “I am. Somebody had to be the one to get into the radiation stream. Tonio or me, Curtis or Mick. The four of us were pulling the deck apart, but someone had to pull you out. There was no time, no way to get equipment in there, and the only place to reach you from …” He shook himself hard. “I owe Tonio. Big time. Four hours in surgery, and you’ve patched up nicely, and me –? I’m still here, gods help me. It was Tonio or me, Richard.” His throat clenched. “Nobody should have to make the choice. But he did – he made it, and all I feel for him right now is respect.”
The tears shed, and Vaurien closed his eyes. “He has parents, back on Lushiar. I’ll contact them. There’s a load of back pay and bonuses … and they need to know he died well. They can’t know where, but they can know how, and why.” He stirred fretfully. “I want to get up.”
“Bill would paralyze me if I let you,” Travers protested.
“Why? I’m not in pain,” Vaurien growled, once again struggling to sit up properly. “There’s no bruises. Look.” He threw back the sheet to display his left leg, and Travers was impressed. Only a faint mottling of old blood remained, and the faintest swelling around the knee and ankle, both of which were reconstructed. The long scar left by the tissue weld was a silver line that might fade away, or might not. If it lingered Vaurien would wear it like a badge of honor. “I’ve had transfusions by the bucket,” Vaurien said hoarsely, “and the nano’s deactivated. The nerves are severed – if you’re thinking I’m in pain, relax. I can’t feel any damn thing.”
“Just wait there,” Travers insisted. “Richard – wait. I’ll get Bill.”
In fact Grant was already awake and sitting on the side of the bed where he had snatched perhaps an hour of sleep. His voice was thick, his tongue uncooperative. “If he wants to get up,” he grumbled, “he can ride a hoverchair. He shouldn’t try to stand – you hear me, boss? No standing. No solid food. No booze. And when you turn tired, dizzy, sick, you come back and rest in zero-gee, or I’ll cuff you to a bloody bed till you do.”
Vaurien blinked at him. “You’re quite the dungeon master.”
“Don’t push your luck,” Grant said tartly. “I can order you to zero-gee bed rest and make damned sure you stay there till I decide you can twitch!” He gave Travers a smug look. “I’m the CMO of this flying asylum. I have the authority.”
“Flying asylum?” Travers echoed. “It’s what we used to call the Intrepid.”
“Yeah.” Grant sobered. “And this ship ain’t much better. Christ, Neil, every time I think about where we are –”
“Where are we?” Vaurien asked sharply. His head was clearing as he got moving, forced his thoughts to order. His energy levels would not last long, and when they crashed he might sleep for hours, but was awake now and Travers had known his mind would click back into gear.
“We’re parked in the sensor blind of one of the two moons we hit with gravity swarm strikes,” he said baldly. “Lai’a estimates engines and ordnance are close to optimum. Ammunition stores and drone bunkers are at capacity, all three generators are purring and all three drives are available.” He took a breath, lifted a brow at Richard. “You haven’t been told anything about the, uh, the mission?”
“Mission?” Vaurien was exploring his left side with careful fingers.
“Ah.” Travers shot a glance at Grant and then set one light hand on Vaurien’s shoulder. “I’m going to ask Harrison to come in and bring you up to speed. Mark and Dario are buried in work – they called Barb into the lab, or she’d have been here with me. Curtis, Mick and I were along, but Mick’s asleep, and – Harrison needs something to do. He doesn’t have time to grieve. None of us does. Not here.” He leaned over and drew a kiss across Vaurien’s lean face. “Stay where you are. I’ll call him.”
A frown creased Vaurien’s brow. “Tell me you people didn’t do something really bloody stupid.”
Travers permitted an acid chuckle. “We did what had to be done, with every safety and security protocol we could lock in place.” He returned to the door, which stood open now, and hesitated for a moment. “Hey, Richard …”
The too-dark eyes looked hauntedly at him. “I know.”
“Welcome back,” Travers whispered, and stepped out.
Voices issued from Ops and Physics 1, the big lab where the Sherratts, Jazinsky and Rusch were taking apart the ocean of data, but Shapiro was not there. Travers wondered if he had gone back to the quarters he had shared with Jon Kim, until he heard other voices from the crew lounge.
“We’ll find them,” Marin was promising. “You have an address?”
“In Marak City. Actually a property just outside the city,” Shapiro remembered. “It’s Mariel and Matt Kim, and Jon had a sister, much younger … Amanda, I believe.” He sighed heavily. “They’ll probably flay me alive.”
Marin was less certain. “A lot of people were killed in the war. Ulrand suffered a great many casualties, like Omaru. Jon was killed on a covert assignment in the service of the Deep Sky. His family should recognize duty and service; it’s pride they ought to feel, and honor.”
“And anger,” Shapiro added.
“It’s only natural,” Marin allowed as Travers stepped into the lounge. “But Jon’s name can be inscribed on the veterans’ memory wall, and that’s quite a turnaround from him being on Ulrand’s most-wanted list. The last the family knew of him, he was on the run with a bounty on his head. They might have disinherited him; and you … you gave him back his honor. Or at least the chance to earn it back, and die as a veteran of the Deep Sky security forces, on assignment.”
“That’s one way of framing it.” Shapiro was in the recliner, nursing a brandy balloon in one hand, a coffee in the other. “And I’ll give them the option of treating Jon’s memory with respect – or flaying me alive.”
“Which would be damned disrespectful to Jon’s memory.” Marin touched Travers’s hand as he passed by to the ’chef. “It wasn’t their call to make, Harrison. Jon fled to stay out of prison, and he did good work with you. He earned his freedom, and his honor.”
“At the cost of his life.” Shapiro lifted the b
randy, paused to inhale the vapors, and drank. “And I’ll blame myself, Curtis, no matter how you rationalize it.”
“Then, shoulder the responsibility willingly,” Marin said slowly. “Carry it like the burden of a penance you’ll pay – carry the memory of him along with the burden. But I can’t believe Jon would want you to punish yourself.”
Travers had taken coffee for himself, and a second for Marin. As Curtis took it from him he said, “Richard’s awake. Wanting information. I told him about Teniko and Jon and Tor, but there’s a lot more.” He gestured with his mug. “I thought you might like to brief him, General.”
Shapiro’s face darkened. “Of course.” He finished the brandy and drained the coffee to the dregs. “Lai’a is estimating three or four hours before a preliminary collation is available – that, and a working model of the language in translation. I was talking to it not fifteen minutes ago, and … Lai’a?”
“General Shapiro?” The AI was everywhere.
“Your early analysis of the spoken language,” Shapiro prompted, “as you were telling me.”
“Samples recorded in the Zunshu city,” Lai’a said without preamble, “demonstrate that the language spoken by the Zunshu people is not the same as the language of the messages transmitted by the warning beacons marking the defense zones in orbit and at the edge of the system.”
“So … two languages,” Travers guessed, “like Richard’s French and the Scandinavian spoken by Barb’s grandparents.”
“Unlikely,” Lai’a was emphatic. “Creation of the audible sounds of the language in the warning messages is beyond the physical apparatus of the Zunshu. I have performed a virtual dissection of the species, using deep scan imaging. They have no organs capable of generating this sound.” Its voice was replaced by the wheedling, warbling single tone, wind in a crevice, oscillating in tiny increments, all of which represented the myriad sounds of a very different form of speech. “This next,” Lai’a went on, “is the range of sound permitted by the Zunshu organs of speech.” Now Travers heard the gurgling, whopping, thrumming, an occasional croak, a rhythmic sputtering which might have been bubbles escaping from a spout. “The two languages,” Lai’a concluded, “depend on very different physical characteristics. There are two possibilities –”
“One,” Shapiro mused, “the planet we’re calling Zunshu 161-D evolved two highly intelligent life forms, as different as birds and frogs. Give me the odds of one world giving rise to two species, each of which has the intellect to comprehend transspace! Or two … the orbital warning beacons are not Zunshu.”
“Not Zunshu?” It was Mick Vidal, arriving in the lounge in time to hear what Shapiro had said.
Shapiro was on his feet. He slid both hands into the pockets of deep blue slacks and frowned thoughtfully at Vidal. “Life is commonplace in the universe. Intelligence isn’t. In a millennium and a half, the Resalq encountered only two intelligent species. Humans and the Zunshu. We’ve come more than halfway across the galaxy and identified just one more species – the civilization in hiding at Orion 359. Life is everywhere, but intelligence is so rare, the chances of technology of this sophistication arising twice, in radically different species in one biosphere, must be about a billion to one.”
“More in the order of a trillion to one,” Marin guessed, “based on the fact the galaxy has a hundred billion stars, but only stable, long-lived suns can host planets with the right conditions for life, and even then, the chances of it all coming together are long … and when life does get started there’s a nasty tendency for it to be snuffed out again in extinction events, cometary impacts, asteroid collision. The theory is, not one intelligent species in fifty that develops nuclear technology also survives the critical time of territoriality, racial and religious elitism.”
“My point exactly.” Shapiro’s head shook slowly. “The languages tell us clearly, it’s two species. One posting orbital warnings, the other guarding its nests in a world of glorious shells, shimmering bioluminescence, forests of filter trees, and machinery that’s been neglected for so long, it’s probably irreparable.”
“So,” Travers suggested, “which are the Zunshu? The primitives we saw on the platform don’t know enough to fix their own machines.”
“Safe bet, the Zunshu posted the warning beacons.” Marin’s brows arched. “So who – what – are the timid little guys guarding the nests? A lower caste, a captive species being used as slave labor? But they retain the fangs, the venom. If they were captives, surely they’d have been defanged, or the venom glands would have been removed to make them dependent, docile.”
“That’s good thinking.” Shapiro gestured toward the lab. “Barb and Mark are reasoning along the same lines.”
“Not captives then.” Marin stopped to think it through. “Low caste levels might be allowed to keep their fangs. Especially if the means to hunt are the very characteristics that define these people. And there’s one other nasty possibility. They could be mutoids.”
“Mutations?” Vidal’s eyes brightened. “How about this: ten thousand years ago the Zunshu flew transspace at a price. They wound up with a mutant strain, descended from their pioneers. Say, bodies and minds deformed by radiation off drive engines in test. But these guys were the trailblazers – rather than being ostracized they were revered, cared for ...”
“Kept here in comfort, at the old homeworld,” Marin went on. “I could see that happening. But they’re not being cared for Mick. The place is falling to pieces, the machines are decaying, the lower levels are silting up, the AI is almost dead for want of basic service work. Any drones they ever had would have perished centuries ago – it’s plants filtering their water, and unless I’m way wide of the mark, they have food animals out to pasture in spaces that were probably once malls, arenas, theaters!”
“Not to mention a tiny population,” Travers added, “unless you count millions of eggs literally kept on ice. And here’s the thing, Mick. If the guys we saw on the platform are mutoids, they wouldn’t be allowed to breed. The next generations on would only breed worse – it’s the whole reason the likes of us, you and me and Curtis, are sterile.”
“But we definitely saw a generation nest,” Marin said quietly. “There’s nothing else it can be. So … if the guys we saw are mutoids, they’re just caretakers for viable eggs laid by genetically sound Zunshu.”
“Makes a nasty kind of sense,” Travers admitted.
“These caretakers store fertilized eggs,” Marin mused, “and when the time’s right they can adjust the temperature, salinity, whatever, and the eggs develop. The species can be reborn.” He nodded slowly. “They’re probably waiting for something, someone – some condition or event.”
“Waiting for a miracle?” Vidal’s voice was bleak. “It looks like they’re going to have a bloody long wait. They’re living in a city that’s crumbling from the inside out. That platform’s full of machinery, but ninety percent of it’s busted. Just a pump still running here and there, or a convection fan, or a dribble of power left in a cell like the one keeping the AI just barely alive. And here’s the problem with this scenario: no race relying on a generation nest would store it in a filthy, silted-up junkyard.”
Shapiro lifted both hands. “Gentlemen, this is fascinating but it’s speculation. Science fiction. Every answer is in the data Lai’a transferred from the old computer core. Four hours – less – and we’ll know. I’m going to brief Richard, and then I need to rest.” His face clenched. “I don’t say sleep, but I feel …” He shook himself. “I could use rest.”
So could Travers. Shapiro had stepped out in the direction of the Infirmary when Neil draped an arm over Marin’s shoulders and suggested, “The man made a good point. Sleep?”
“More likely meditation,” Curtis sighed. “Mick?”
He gestured toward Physics 1. “I’m waiting for Mahak. They’re building some kind of virtual model in there, but it’s beyond me. A scientist I ain’t. Sometimes I wish I was.” He gave Travers a brief
, tired smile. “I’ll catch you later, at this show-and-tell they’re promising.” He gave a bass groan. “Answers. I guess I can wait another four hours.”
Especially if they would be spent asleep. Travers guessed Marin’s mind was likely racing, though his body was tired, but for himself the need for sleep had begun to override all other functions. He did not even bother to undress. Barefoot, he sprawled across the bed and Marin dimmed the lights. He was barely aware when Curtis settled beside him, and only shuffled closer, enfolded him for the pleasure of holding onto another warm, living body, before he plunged into a wild millrace of dreams.
A chime intruded, seemingly moments after his eyes closed, and he jerked back to full consciousness with a curse. Marin was sitting up, the threedee had begun to brighten, and Joss’s voice announced,
“Data is being streamed to the crew lounge. The Doctors Sherratt and Jazinsky request your presence; a presentation will begin in twenty minutes. Breakfast will begin serving immediately. Doctor Sereccio has een transferred to the UCU after surgery.”
“What time is it?” Travers groped for his time sense and blinked at the threedee.
“Just after 06:00.” Marin leaned over with a kiss that fastened, leech-like, on the back of his neck. “You hungry?”
“Starving,” Travers admitted.
Marin bounced off the bed and threw open the closet.
Coffee and croissants were set out along the mess table, while the autochef churned out a rough approximation of breakfast food. Travers might have remarked at the amount of imagination required by the Eggs Benedict, but he had wolfed the food before Marin returned with a stack of waffles. They were seated halfway down the table with a good view of the two-meter flatscreen, and just waiting while the others gathered.
Only four places remained vacant, and Travers frowned over them. Jon Kim. Tonio Teniko. And Tor Sereccio, who was in Recovery – Bill Grant’s was the fourth empty chair. He had been in the OR for the procedure, a mere spectator at the surgery, but assisting with the nano that had become his specialization since he worked with Rabelais, Queneau and Vidal. Mick was at the ’chef as Travers helped himself to a waffle from Marin’s plate; and behind him, between Jazinsky and Shapiro, was a hoverchair in which Richard Vaurien looked profoundly uncomfortable.
