‘You want to make your fortune, but have you really thought what you’d do with all that credit? You don’t have the infrastructure to look after it; someone’s bound to take it from you. See, credit’s not the point. If you’re clever enough, you can subvert the system, like the freebreathers.’
Suzy said, ‘Like a bunch of parasites.’ They’d had this conversation about a million times, and here it was again.
Robot said, ‘Parasites are always one evolutionary step ahead of their hosts. Let me tell you about the gene-for-gene hypothesis sometime. So which is more advanced? Forget credit, Suzy. Live in the moment. I’m in love, here. If I could get out of this cocoon one second I’d give you a kiss to remember, this is so perfect.’
Suzy said, ‘Men, they hack their brains in half and still all they can think about is sex.’ But she was smiling.
‘There is something interesting about that moon,’ Machine said.
‘Yeah?’
It was too far away for the ship’s visual system to yield anything but a featureless crescent, dawning beyond the slanting rim of the gas giant. The tracking subroutines she’d initiated by reflex had been locked onto it long enough to calculate its unremarkable posigrade orbit, fairly regular, with an eccentricity of point zero three, a sidereal period of just over a thousand hours, hmm, that for most of the time would mean it was sheltered by the star or by the gas giant from any junk zipping through the system. Small, its diameter not more than a thousand kilometres; that and its orbit gave it a low density, less than water, though it wasn’t cold enough to be a compact snowball of frozen gases, like Charon, for instance.
Suzy saw all this at a glance. ‘I don’t see anything too strange,’ she said.
‘You should deal with your machines more directly. Interfaces get in the way of thought processes. They are barriers—’
Before Robot could get another art critique rolling, Suzy said, ‘So why don’t you tell me what your superior senses show up, huh? If I’m going to make orbit, I have to adjust our delta vee inside a couple of hours.’
‘It is quite simple,’ Machine said. ‘The moon is full of holes.’
‘Show me.’
Suzy looked at the graphic a long time. A shadow sphere whose surface was punctuated by holes, shafts, more than a hundred of them. No pattern to their distribution, but they were all the same size. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’m doing the burn.’
Robot didn’t say anything, before or after the couple of minutes of low acceleration that altered the singleship’s fall through the system by the small amount necessary to bring it close enough to the gas giant. The silence stretched, so long that Suzy thought he’d switched out again, flashing over high art or simply switching himself off, as he’d done from time to time while the ship plunged through the non-linear architecture of contraspace. It was a trick Suzy envied. Sagas, listening to the blues, even playback sleep (which always gave her technicolour nightmares), only stretched the long hours after a while, instead of helping them pass. If Robot had been awake all the time, she supposed she might even have grown tired of sex…
Indicators were lighting up. The Navy appeared to have spotted the singleship at last. Cautious nanosecond low power radar pulses were probing it; there was a brief, crude attempt to interrogate the switched-off computer.
Suzy ran through the checklist of the singleship’s meagre and entirely illegal arsenal. If there truly was nothing here, then she wasn’t going to let herself be caught by the Navy. Plenty of places to go these days, if you were a renegade with a stolen spaceship. A dozen new frontier worlds, for instance, the oldest not three years settled, and by barely more than ten thousand people. No questions asked out there, which is why the Federation wanted to restrict exploration, power like light subject to the square root law of diminishment with distance…
Machine’s uninflected voice surprised her. ‘Seyoura Falcon. I believe that there is something else you should know. Are you receiving any transmissions?’
‘Navy’s probing us. Not trying to talk. Not yet.’
Machine said, ‘Well, I don’t really understand this, but something is trying to talk to me.’
And Suzy said, ‘Wait. You said something?’
5
* * *
Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘I suppose you have come to tell me about your little trip around Colcha.’
‘How did you know about that?’
Barlstilkin only smiled his crooked smile.
‘All right,’ Dorthy said. ‘I suppose that’s another of your secrets. But what do you want me to do if I can’t use my Talent? You want to find out the truth, don’t you? It’s simple. Have one of the lab people synthesize the counter-agent to my implant’s secretions. Then I’ll have my Talent, and I can find out what she knows.’
Barlstilkin considered that for a moment. His bonded servant stood patiently just behind him, eyes on infinity. They were sitting in a corner of the wardroom, away from the others. A serial light fantasy played on the screen that filled one wall edge to edge. On another level of the huge room, a white-jacketed steward was bringing a tray of drinks to a table where off-duty officers lounged in their elegant, gold-trimmed dress blues.
Barlstilkin said, ‘If it were that simple, I would not have needed to come here. Do you really think that you can succeed where Diemitrios, and all the Talents employed by the Navy, failed?’
‘She wants to talk with me. She’s in my dreams, and that’s something new. She’s real, Talbeck, more real than a memory. I just need to bring her into the foreground.’
‘By going down on Colcha, perhaps, and triggering a cue?’
‘You really have been busy.’
‘I do find it odd that a Talent should resent even a small amount of…prying. I need to know what you are doing, Dorthy.’
Dorthy took a cinnamon oatcake from the pile on the crested plate, but put it down again after breaking it in half. She said, ‘I have the feeling that she knows about Colcha. She comes right into my dreams, shows me glimpses of herself. Last time I was back on P’thrsn, climbing the forest on the outer slopes of the caldera…’
And for a moment she was there again, on the slopes she had climbed alone after Arcady Kilczer had been killed by one of the Alea neuter males. Climbing steep rocky slopes amongst sparse, wind-sculpted trees, blue-green pines whose ancestors had been taken from Earth a million years ago, when the Alea had ransacked nearby worlds to repair the biosphere of their new, planoformed home after it had been wrecked by civil war. The dark sky sprinkled with glimmering daystars, dominated by the glowering face of the red dwarf sun. Wind lifting the clean scent of the pine forests that tumbled away towards the dark eye of the lake she and Arcady had crossed using a boat stolen from a gang of newly transformed neuter males. Dorthy had been happy then, despite losing Arcady, despite being lost herself, separated from the main expedition, alone on a wild alien world. Perhaps she would never again be so happy.
‘What are we going to do without my Talent?’ she asked Barlstilkin. ‘I’ve looked around, and I don’t like what I see. They aren’t trying here. On P’thrsn it was the Navy being cautious; here, it’s the scientists. They don’t want to know, most of them. They want to be shown, they sit around and wait for a revelation.’
‘Witnesses,’ Barlstilkin said. ‘And besides, they are a long way from home. And they have all the time they could possibly need, or so it seems. There is nothing to challenge them, not as it was on P’thrsn, or more especially at BD Twenty. There is no war, and so no urgency. No doubt the Navy, or the Navy’s masters, wants it that way.’
‘It must be frustrating for you, coming all this way and finding this. This shabby, run-down ship…’
‘But Dorthy, it is perched on the very edge of mystery. I am playing this by ear,’—one of his curious archaic expressions—‘and when I see the chance, I’ll take it. There are certain…disaffected elements here that I can make use of. You’d better be ready.’
‘Has this
got something to do with the singleship?’
‘I don’t know anything about the singleship. Really, I am telling the truth. It may be something to do with those who I fondly believed were my collaborators. If it is, then I must move as quickly as I can, before things become too complicated.’
‘What are you going to do, steal a ship? Is that possible? Suppose I don’t want to come?’
‘You’ve come this far,’ Barlstilkin said at last.
‘If I’m going any further, I can think of better pilots.’
‘But we are here. I admit that I could have managed the slingshot manoeuvre better, but it worked.’
‘Only because the liner just happened to be in range of us when we phased in here.’ Dorthy was stung by Barlstilkin’s imperturbable confidence, the boundless faith in permanent good fortune that was characteristic of all Golden.
‘We were lucky: I admit it. But what does it matter now we are here? Keep your eyes open, Dorthy, and be ready to act on the instant. The singleship…yes, it will almost certainly complicate matters.’
‘So you want to run back and tell everyone, and get your revenge. Don’t you think it would be just a ten day wonder?’
‘At the moment, yes. But the science team has only just begun its explorations.’
‘It seems to me they’ve stopped before they’ve begun. The shafts are the obvious starting place, and yet they have given up on them. No one goes down to the moon, now.’
‘But you will go, perhaps with your Dr Valdez. You will try and get counteragent if I do not help you. You will get down there any way you can. Oh, please Dorthy, don’t be angry all over again! You need me as much as I need you. I will do my best to help you avoid the attentions of Seyour Ivanov, for instance. He seemed pathetically eager to show me that we are both subject to his surveillance.’
‘We’re not playing the kind of games you Golden play amongst yourselves. The stakes are much higher. It isn’t enough to sit and make clever remarks.’
‘Ah, Dorthy, Dorthy. I apologize. Be patient with me. I’m an old man, after all, still recovering from my recent brush with death. Yes, it has shaken me, more than you realize. I know you think all Golden are too confident, but remember: I no longer have my entourage, my medical back-ups. I have hung myself on the edge and so I move cautiously. You are impatient with me. Have you thought that it might be because the mindset you acquired on P’thrsn is driving you?’
Talbeck Barlstilkin smiled his crooked smile; then his eyes widened a fraction as Dorthy pushed up from the plush couch, so quickly that she almost knocked over the lacquer table and its silver breakfast tray. Her hands were shaking, although she felt very cool inside, quite separate from her anger as it boiled to the surface.
‘Fuck your word games!’ she said, saw the bonded servant shift very slightly. ‘And tell your fucking robot that I’m not going to hurt you!’
‘I don’t think,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘that we should be causing a scene.’
Dorthy looked at the table of officers, who all looked away from her. One said something, and the others laughed.
Talbeck Barlstilkin said mildly, ‘Do sit down. We don’t know who might be listening.’
‘I’ll sit down if you’ll tell me what you’re planning.’
‘Then run along. I do not play those games.’
‘I’m part of it. I ought to know.’
‘The less you know the better. Let’s pretend we’re here for different reasons, Dorthy. You go down to Colcha. I will—’
Music shut off; the light fantasy faded; a voice spoke out of the air, harsh and urgent. ‘Stage four alert!’ it said. ‘All hands to posts! Stage four alert!’ The Navy officers ran for the door, and Valdez pushed through their scrum. He shouted to Dorthy over the relentlessly repetitive announcement, ‘There’s something fucking strange going down!’ and kicked open a section of the wall-wide screen; started to fiddle with the controls.
The screen lit up as Dorthy joined him. The tipped crescent of the gas giant, spattered with swirls of green on green, filled more than half of it. Colcha, the patchwork moon, was a tiny, perfectly circular shadow against the gas giant’s perpetual storms.
‘I can’t get much from this,’ Valdez said, hammering at the keyboard. Sweat beaded his forehead. ‘I can only plug into unrestricted data streams. Here, this is coming down from the high polar satellite.’ Clusters of picts and pointers flickered across the gas giant’s intricate patterns as he scanned through channels.
‘Hold it there,’ Dorthy said, standing back so she could get a better look. ‘There. What’s that?’
A fine straight line of yellow light speared across the gas giant. Flickering, everchanging indices ran along it. Above, an inset showed a concatenation of slim shards of silver and shadow that after a moment Dorthy recognized as a singleship.
‘The Navy will be upset,’ Barlstilkin said. He had brought his cup of tea, and looked across the cup’s tilted rim as he sipped. Green light did strange things to his scarred face.
‘Not necessarily,’ Valdez said. ‘See that delta vee?’ His finger stabbed through ranks of yellow figures, small and sharp, in the, holograph projection above the keyboard. ‘Whoever is flying that has to be some kind of suicide jockey. Relative angular momentum is too great to achieve orbit.’
‘It is going down into the gas giant? Dorthy, here is a pilot even worse than me.’
‘It’s going to impact on Colcha,’ Valdez said. ‘In a shade under ten minutes, too. Watch the decrement there…’
And then his finger, his arm, his whole body was washed in light. Dorthy screwed up her eyes against the glare which beat through her eyelids, beat across the entire room. Valdez and Barlstilkin and the bonded servant were shadows in a storm of light that suddenly cut off as the screen stepped down its intensity. The projected flight of the ship, the attendant indices, the inset view, had all vanished. There was only the serene crescent of the gas giant, the shadow spot of its enigmatic moon. The ship was gone.
6
* * *
Suzy was dozing when the reaction motor fired up: though it woke her, she wasn’t sure at first what had happened. She swam up from uneasy dreams of falling to the familiar enclosed vibration of the ship, glare of the cabin lights, the intimate stink inside her pressure suit.
‘I think,’ Robot’s voice said in her ear, ‘we may have a problem.’
That was when she realized that the vibration was the reaction motor, which she’d shut down after the brief insertion burn. Somehow, it had been switched on again. And after five minutes it was clear she couldn’t turn it off. Her first thought was that Robot had been futzing around with the command sequences, but he blandly protested his innocence, and added that it was nothing to do with the ship’s disabled computer either, which had been his first thought.
Suzy looked over the ranks of indices projected against her three hundred and sixty degree view of frosty starscape. The dim green crescent of the gas giant was directly ahead. ‘I guess maybe the Navy inserted a parasite command sequence. They’ve been probing us on and off ever since we phased in.’
‘I thought of that, too,’ Robot said. ‘They’ve done that, they’re more subtle than Machine. And I don’t think that’s too likely.’
‘I wish I had such a good opinion of myself.’
‘The Navy isn’t interfaced. It’s still third millennium in its outlook. I’m not.’
Suzy sucked water from her suit’s nipple, studied projected vectors. ‘We keep this up, our orbit will widen enough to get us really close to the Navy’s parking orbit round that funny little moon. You still say this isn’t the Navy’s doing?’
‘The Navy isn’t the only thing happening out here,’ Robot said.
‘Machine’s still hearing those mysterious voices, huh?’
‘Not right now.’
‘He does, you tell me right away. Better still, get him to try and track where they come from. Knowing that would suit me just fine.’
/>
‘They spoke to me directly, Seyoura Falcon.’
‘Then ask them. Jesus Christ. And Robot, you make sure you stay in that crash cocoon with your suit sealed up. You hear me? There’s no more impact gel, so the cocoon’s all the protection you’ve got.’
Suzy spent the next hour checking through the single-ship’s weapon systems, while the reaction motor rumbled unsettlingly and the gas giant’s crescent swelled across her vision. Whatever had reached into the ship to jam on the reaction motor hadn’t disabled the one-shot X-ray lasers, or touched the homeostatic cluster missiles: their tiny, paranoid minds were still dreaming of violent trajectories down in their launch tubes. Suzy ran through the indices with a feeling of cool nostalgia, repeating ritual preparations she’d performed so many times during the Campaigns. No anticipation, only the moment. Like a zen koan, it emptied her mind of everything but resolve.
So when Robot interrupted her, chipping into her data streams down the bootleg lines Machine had installed, it was as shockingly intimate as a stranger’s unwelcome caress.
His voice came out of a picture that rippled open across the swirling vista of the gas giant’s frigid storms. It was a picture of the little moon, patchwork globe crazed with jagged dark lines and spotted with holes, gaps…like a clay ball shattered and clumsily put back together, with some of the pieces missing.
‘We’ve been studying this,’ Robot said. ‘No way is it a natural body. Someone made it.’
The inset picture jumped into false-colour, like an illustration of the four-colour map problem. It began to spin, blocks of graphemes flashing over various jagged boundaries. ‘Apart from the holes,’—Machine’s cool voice now—‘there are many other anomalies. There are sedimentary rocks, impossible on so small a worldlet. What looks like an extinct volcano—again impossible. It is too far away from its primary for its core to have been heated up by tidal drag.’
‘Maybe it was closer, once. Where did you get all this stuff?’
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