by Mel Keegan
“You make it sound as if it’s alive,” Travers protested.
“It’s … not,” Mark said slowly, “not in any biological sense of the word. But the complexity of its thought processes, and the patterns of them, are the absolute simulacrum of a living mind. A Resalq mind patterned after my own, not out of any sense of ego or vanity, but because my own mind is the one I know better than any other, so it’s the easiest mind to duplicate!” He took a deep breath, held it, exhaled it slowly. “Talking to Lai’a is like thinking aloud. Like talking to myself.”
“You’d trust it.” Travers took a deep draught of coffee.
“I do,” Mark said emphatically. “Lai’a is quite well aware of the Zunshu threat to the human and Resalq populations of the Deep Sky. Its attraction to transspace is partly the desire of the explorer for horizons it hasn’t yet seen, and partly the impatience to get on with its job, find the Zunshu, and deal with them.”
“Deal?” Marin echoed.
“Negotiate.” Mark shrugged. “Its mind is Resalq, after all. It’s not naturally warlike. However, it’s also in possession of every skerrick of information surviving from the days of our own extermination, and it considers itself Resalq. It’s not given to any particular preference for revenge, but it won’t hesitate to show the Zunshu the business end of a gun, if negotiations fail. It has a keen sense of compassion, but little in the way of sentimentality.”
And its power was unspeakable. Marin set aside his mug and frowned at his palms for a moment. “Mark, is there a failsafe?”
“A failsafe?” Mark’s eyes had darkened. “You mean, do I have the means to shut it down, perhaps wipe its memory, erase its mind, bring Lai’a back under complete control, like a glorified drone?” He looked away. “Of course I do. I can terminate it, the way Harrison could have executed any of us, if we had chosen to defy him that day on Saraine. The means to kill Lai’a was hardwired into it, before it came online, and it doesn’t know the device is there.”
“You’re sure?” Travers sounded less than convinced.
“I’m sure.” Mark pushed back his chair, stifled a yawn, and his voice was grave. “Dario and I installed it before the AI core was complete. It’s wired into the chassis itself, not part of the crystal memory matrix. It responds to a certain coded signal, on a certain frequency – just a simple pellet of Demolex, causing a cascade reaction though the power conduits. A little under three seconds, and the crystal matrix shatters and Lai’a is … dead.” He shook his head as he got to his feet. “If you’re wondering if it could go rogue and do us some damage, forget it. If you’re wondering if I would kill Lai’a because of a difference of opinion regarding duty and priorities –”
“Forget that as well,” Marin said wryly. “Could it go play in transspace while we make our final preparations to ship out?”
“It could – and it asked for authorization.” Mark’s hands slid into the pockets of his pale gold slacks. “I told it, no. If anything went wrong, it wouldn’t return, leaving the Deep Sky entirely at the mercy of the Zunshu. It’s not impossible that Lai’a itself might need Resalq or human input to cure some problem. Alone, it wouldn’t have the advantage of insight, imagination, intuition, even sentiment, all the qualities that are impossible to duplicate in the machine mind. It saw the sense of the argument, and it agrees. It’s impatient to leave, but its time won’t be wasted, waiting for us to be ready. It has enough of its own data to process to keep itself busy for weeks.”
“Weeks?” Marin leaned back in his chair and regarded Travers darkly.
“How long do we have, Mark?” Travers asked. “Before we ship out?” Into transspace. He did not have to feign a shudder.
“Not long,” Mark said quietly. “Harrison and I both want to see the Zunshu weapons in practice, which means the battles of Velcastra and Jagreth will take place before the expedition launches. The Chicago will be at Velcastra in seven days at most, and the London should be at Jagreth a week later. Once we’ve seen the Zunshu weapons functioning as they should, there’s no more we can do here. Lai’a appreciates the critical nature of this, too. Any fault in the weapons defending the colonies, and Lai’a itself will be in the front line, tasked to disable or destroy the Chicago and the London.”
“It can do that?” Travers whispered.
Mark’s face was a stony mask. “I pity the human crews. They would be hit too fast for many to escape, or for any offer of surrender.” He set aside the prospect with an obvious effort. “If you want me, you’ll find me in the lab. I’ve asked Lai’a to begin interactive charting of the transspace it was able to map. In a few days, we’ll load up a navtank and begin simulations. Every one of us needs to be familiar with the topography and the pilot’s technique. And that,” he added ruefully, “is going to be Michael Vidal’s class to teach, if he’s up to it, and will have it.”
“Ask him.” Travers glanced at his chrono. “He should be waking in ten or twelve hours.”
“He’ll be sick,” Marin said pointedly. “You’ve forgotten the fun and games after the job at Hydralis University?”
“No. But I also remember, I was eager for anything that took my mind off the garbage my body was going through,” Travers retorted. “If I know Mick – and I do! – the last thing he’s going to want is bed rest, wide awake and listening to every bone grumbling.” He leaned over and dropped a biting kiss on Marin’s ear before returning to the ’chef for a second breakfast of eggs and hash browns.
“He could be right,” Mark admitted, reluctantly amused.
“He is right,” Travers retorted.
With a chuckle, Mark collected a tall glass of grapefruit juice before he headed out of the mess. “Physics lab three,” he called over his shoulder. “Barb’s in one, and Dario and Tor have two.”
With a sigh, Marin settled back and watched Travers eat. The Argos haunted him even now, and he knew far better even than Neil what Vidal would endure. Travers had been in possession of his full health and strength when they went into UOH. What Vidal and Queneau had done, seen, endured, and for how long, Marin could not even begin to imagine, but he had known at a glance, Vidal had not merely been to hell – he was still there.
“Give it a bit more … more … she’ll do.” Ingersol was watching the power levels and directing a drone as the ancient cryogen tank began to purge. This time around they knew what to expect, from the heavy power requirement during the retrieval process to the cocktail of raw, comparatively crude drugs fed by the injectors in the bed. “Looking good,” he reported. “Get in here, Bill.”
Grant shoved a battery of monitors into place and shouldered in between them. As Marin watched, the curved upper surface of the tank popped up by a finger’s width, emitting a rush of icy air, a soft hiss, and the odd, acid smell of augmented cryogen gas.
“Here he comes,” Grant whispered. “I’m starting to see theta waves … brain activity is minimal, but he’s ticking over. Starting to read biosigns.”
Wrapped in a dark blue robe, hands clenched around a cup, Jo Queneau sat at the end of the tank, where she would see into the interior, when the top lifted fully. She was sunken-eyed, with a gaunt, hollow face, and neither her vision nor her tongue seemed to be working properly yet. She hunted for words, blanked out when asked to remember details, grabbed anything, anyone, for balance, and retched at the mention of food. Four times, Grant had infused her with mega-doses vitamins and minerals, and she had been disconnected from the IV only minutes before. Her hair was buzz cut, and the hollows visible in her skull were disturbing.
Marin frowned down at her, and then over her head at the bed where Michael Vidal was swathed in thermal blankets, still on an IV, still deeply unconscious and surrounded by machines. He had not yet moved so much as an eyelid, but Grant was prepared for him to wake naturally in the next hour or three.
Seated beside him, Alexis Rusch was content to watch the procedure as the tank opened. Her face was a study in apprehension, half masked by the professional expression
of the career commander. There was, Marin allowed, a faint chance the occupant in the tank was not Ernst Rabelais. No matter how the question was framed, Queneau could not answer it – the words were not yet there for her to speak properly. At last Grant waved Rusch, Shapiro and Mark Sherratt away. Retrieval syndrome was insidious, and it would subside according to its own schedule.
But she was aware, Marin knew. She was watching the procedure, and though her eyes were dull, she knew what was going on, just as she had seen Vidal brought back from decontamination and placed into the bed, alive. A flicker of something very like pain rushed across her face as she saw him, then she was blank again as her brain lapsed back into the semi-dormant state typical of the syndrome.
“Pressure and temp are coming up nicely,” Grant was saying. “Give me a hand here, guys. We can lift the top now. Alexis …?”
The top section of the tank was not heavy. The kevlex-titanium was layered with insulation and electronics, but it was just an armored sheath, while the pressurized cryogen capsules, power cells, rudimentary AI core and interface were built into the base. Travers and Marin took the two gullwings between them, lifted them up and aside, and set them on a gurney by the emergency cryotank, which had been prepped as the ultimate fallback.
Without a word, Rusch came closer. Marin thought the color seeped out of her face as she looked into the old tank, and her eyes were dark as she made out the face of a man. Portraits of Ernst Rabelais hung in the homes of the Shackletons, Rusches and Vidals, all of whom traced their lineage directly to Rabelais. She should know him on sight.
For a moment Marin could not read her face. It might as easily have been agony as delight that twisted her expression. And then Rusch swore softly, and her eyes flooded. She scrubbed them absently, and Marin relaxed a fraction at a time.
“Alpha waves,” Grant reported. “Brain activity is coming up … he’s dreaming. He’s also malnourished and dehydrated, like Big Jo, and I’m seeing signs of injury. He’s broken some bones quite recently – left arm, both legs. They’re healed, if you stretch a point, but I’d like to fix ’em properly, if he’ll let me.”
Keenly aware of the drum of his pulse, Marin came closer to see the man with his own eyes. A threedee image was only ever a poor substitute. Ernst Rabelais was still unconscious – and thin to the point to gauntness, though not quite as emaciated as Vidal and Queneau. It might mean he had not been in the Drift as long, or his metabolism was slower, and his body made better use of the short rations. Or, Marin thought shrewdly, the bigger, stronger members of this unlikely team had shouldered the physical work and given him more than his share, to get him over the injuries. He wore light blue coveralls, stained and dirty, ripped at the knees, frayed at the cuffs.
Rabelais was in his early forties when the Odyssey launched, leaving two ex-wives and five children behind him on Velcastra. The mission was designed as a three-year haul out to the Drift, and around it, and back to Velcastra via a different route. The Odyssey would crisscross its own course in the pattern of a grid search, at low speeds which enabled the pathfinder to locate and mark navigation hazards.
All this was history – Marin knew it well. The story passed directly into Deep Sky folklore when the Odyssey vanished out of space, and a long, thorough search of the entire zone produced not so much as a twisted hull panel. Hellgate had certainly claimed Rabelais, and in months the region became universally known as the Rabelais Drift. The name would live forever while the man himself swiftly become a legend.
The legend was waking. His eyes moved constantly in the pattern of REM sleep, though his skin was waxen, some shade between yellow and gray. The tank was warming him with heating pads, and the injectors would soon fill him with drugs.
“Lift him,” Grant murmured to the two assistants who flanked him, only waiting for the instruction. Both were so young, they should have been wearing Fleet fatigues and been halfway through their conscription aboard a warship – a boy, a girl, with ordinary looks concealing the kind of talent Richard Vaurien was always searching for.
Hands slipped under Rabelais at shoulders and hips. They lifted him easily off the heating pad, and held him up just enough for Grant to slide a hair-thin kevlex sheet under him. He gestured for them to ease Rabelais back onto the heating pads, and brandished two hypoguns as if they were weapons.
“She’s going to light up red with warning signs,” he told Rusch and Shapiro. “The tank’s going to know when the injectors fail, and it’s going to raise a ruckus. Ignore it. I don’t like the cocktail of drugs it shot into Big Jo, and I’m not going to stand here and let it slam the same monkeyshit into Rabelais.” He beckoned one assistant with a jerk of his head. “Get the handies over here, closer, where I can see ’em.”
He was monitoring biosigns, and he would know to the instant when to inject the modern suite of drugs. Marin trusted Grant implicitly. He had seen and done more during his military service than the majority of civilian, city-based surgeons would see in a whole career.
The hypoguns hissed against Rabelais’s neck and shoulders, two shots each, each loaded with cortical stimulants, electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, drugs to increase heart rate and blood pressure, and encourage the body to warm itself.
The next minute was critical, and Marin listened to the drum of his own pulse as he and Travers stood back with Rusch and Shapiro, mere spectators. Vaurien, Jazinsky and Mark were on the other side of the tank, monitoring the hardware, but the old machine was working well.
On cue, it issued warning chimes and the interface winked red across the recessed panel. The injectors had hit kevlex, not skin, and as far as the simple AI knew, the occupant would now live or die on his own. Grant made dismissive gestures, muttering about ignoring the whole performance, and leaned down over the tank. His voice was soft but clear.
“Captain Rabelais. Captain, can you hear me? Captain Rabelais, it’s time to wake.” And louder, “Wake up now, Captain.”
His eyes opened, an astonishing shade of cerulean blue, far out of focus, blinking repeatedly as he seemed to hunt for orientation, and then he coughed, dragged in a breath, coughed again. Marin was expecting to see the same retrieval syndrome as Queneau had suffered, but Grant’s suite of drugs was vastly different – two centuries more refined.
“Damnit, I’m alive,” Rabelais said in a croak. “This looks nothing like heaven … though that could be an angel.” He was blinking up at Jazinsky, still searching for focus, and he would be seeing little more than white-blond hair, a pale gold skinsuit, and the halo of the worklights behind her.
“I’m no angel, Captain,” she told him. “Do you hear me clearly?”
“Yeah.” Rabelais squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them. “Where am I? There were two others.”
“They’re safe.” Jazinsky came closer, with a glance at Grant, who nodded. “Mick was badly contaminated, but he’s through the procedure and resting. Big Jo has a nasty case of retrieval shock, but she’s sitting right there, watching. She just can’t wrap her brain or her tongue around words yet.”
He was moving now, working his shoulders little by little, flexing his arms, and he lifted up his hands, peered at them as if he had never expected to wake from the cryosleep. “Where am I?” he repeated.
It was Vaurien who told him, “You’re aboard the commercial salvage vessel Wastrel, Captain. Did Mick tell you anything about his baseship?”
The cerulean eyes shifted from Jazinsky’s face to Richard’s, and Rabelais took a moment to focus. “He did.” His voice was beginning to even out. “French accent? You must be Richard Vaurien.” He offered his right hand, and Marin saw the tremors as he extended the limb.
Vaurien clasped it for a second, but spoke to Grant. “He’s like ice.”
“Old tank, old process, boss,” Grant said pragmatically. “There’s a recovery period, a couple of hours at least. I’ve made it a hell of a lot easier with better drug support, but he’s still going to feel like he just walked out of some deepfre
eze.”
“Can you move, Captain?” Vaurien asked. “You’ll be better if we can get you out of there, get some heat into you.”
“And fluids,” Grant muttered. “He’s dangerously dehydrated. I need to set up an IV and do a full set of scans. Look – bugger off, the lot of you. Give me an hour, and I’ll buzz you when you can get back in here.”
“All right.” Vaurien stepped back. “Captain Rabelais, this tyrant is Doctor Bill Grant. You know you need treatment. Work with him, and when you’re a little more recovered …” He smiled ruefully. “You must have a hundred questions, and I assure you, we have a thousand.”
“Two hundred,” Rabelais corrected as he tried to push himself up on his palms and failed. “Christ, I’m weak as a baby.”
“Git … boss,” Grant insisted, “and take the rest of ’em with you.” He moved back into Rabelais’s line of sight and offered his hand. “Call me Bill. This is Craig Wu, and that’s Sharon Ahroni. She answers to Shazz. Now, we’re going to lift you, and then a couple of my drones are going to get in under you, take the weight. Don’t even try to stand. All right?”
Vaurien drove them all before him, and Marin and Travers came to rest in Grant’s office, where the machines were processing a cascade of data from the Carellan Djerun. Marin glanced at it, saw the name of Vidal, M.W., and time stamps. The analysis of the brainscans was thorough to the molecular level, and almost complete.
“You all right, Alexis?” Shapiro rested a hand on her shoulder.
She seemed to shake herself back to the present and gave a savage tug to the black tunic she wore over silver-gray slacks. No Fleet uniform or insignia today. Like Shapiro, she was in civilian clothes. Since the Mercury left Borushek, Marin had watched Shapiro gradually begin to identify himself as a Freespacer. Even his hair was beginning to grow out of the uniform cut.
