Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles)

by Jeffrey A. Carver

/// Maybe... ///

  /In fact, now that I think about it, he used an old TV show as camouflage when he fired that first bunch of data to the translator./

  /// Ah.

  That's precisely the sort of thing

  I was looking for. ///

  The quarx shifted in a silent whirlwind to a whole new branch of the datastream, one bearing endless thousands of hours of TV and holo programming.

  /If it helps, he said the program he used for cover was—/ Bandicut stopped, realizing he didn't remember. The name had meant nothing to him.

  /// "Father Knows Best."

  It's right there in your memory.

  I'll check,

  but I doubt he'd use the same cover

  for instructions. ///

  The scanning was a mottled brown blur, the mud of a trillion frames of imagery swirled together in a river of video history.

  /// I didn't think so. ///

  /He liked westerns,/ Bandicut noted.

  /// Westerns?

  Okay, let's check. ///

  The river jumped and billowed, and for an instant, Bandicut thought he saw spinning images of cowboys riding and shooting and dying and rescuing, and then it closed together again—

  /Well, I guess that didn't—/

  —and opened again to reveal a cowboy on horseback, gazing at a sunset from some unnamed mountain ridge. The cowboy turned, grinned toothily, and the viewpoint shifted to closeup, and in the dark pupils of the cowboy's eyes Bandicut saw the exploding fire of a quarx in its native reality. And his heart skipped, because he felt the first Charlie's presence in those fiery eyes. /Hi, pardner,/ murmured the cowboy, in obvious recognition. /I thought you might find your way to me. Let's see if we can help each other out a little, shall we?/

  /Uh—yeah—/

  /I'm guessing that you have a new quarx-manifestation, and you need information. Well, that's what I'm here for—to help you fill in the blanks. Let's go for a little ride, shall we? Come along./

  Bandicut felt himself riding beside the cowboy/quarx—along the ridge, and then suddenly pitching over the edge of a precipice into a bottomless canyon, its walls glittering with points of information. He was falling into darkness, and coruscating fire...

  And voices began murmuring somewhere close to the center of his mind...babbling with information and greetings from one quarx to another...

  *

  /// You okay? ///

  /Huh?/ He blinked in the cool twilight of the normal datastream, viewed from a height. He wasn't quite sure what had happened, or how he had gotten here from where he'd just been.

  /// We got it. ///

  He blinked again. /Got what?/

  /// I guess you really blacked out there.

  He left me the key to the database,

  and told me how he'd managed the uplink. ///

  /Are you serious?/

  /// Why wouldn't I be?

  Do you have any objections if I prepare

  to make the uplink? ///

  /I guess not./ Charlie-One hadn't even bothered to ask. Bandicut squinted at the fuzzy topography of the datanet. He was still trying to get things back into focus; he couldn't quite figure out where he was.

  /// Let me just check a few things here. ///

  The view went black; then he saw orbital projections, and images of spacecraft—moving in orbit, moored at the space station, and waiting on the surface of the dim, icy moon.

  /// This is Triton, isn't it? ///

  /Yah, sure. There's Neptune in the background in that one. Most of these look like monitor images from the Triton orbital station, where the interplanetary shuttles come in./

  /// Orbital station?

  What all do they have there?

  Just big interplanetary shuttles? ///

  /Well, they have a number of scout craft, as well. Big ones and little ones./

  /// Hm. I see. ///

  Bandicut felt drawn to the images. Space—that was where he was supposed to be. He wondered if the quarx could make it possible for him to return someday. Now there were some images of the mining encampment, viewed from orbit with a telescopic lens. There were scars visible on the surface from the mining operations; but on the whole, from space, the human presence looked pretty puny and insignificant. /Does this stuff mean anything in particular to you?/

  /// For the future—perhaps.

  Right now, I'm just filling gaps in my knowledge. ///

  He didn't answer; while the quarx was scanning data-structures, he was enjoying the chance to see Triton from space. Cooped up in these pressurized cans on the surface, it was easy to forget the big picture. One of the images coming in now was from a monitor in polar orbit around Triton. The ice caps gleamed pinkish white in the augmented light of the distant sun.

  /// There's something I'd like to try, ///

  Charlie said, cutting off the images.

  /What'd you do that for?/

  /// We can go back to it later. ///

  A loud buzzing static filled the dataspace. The quarx seemed to be monitoring some sort of communication channel. Or maybe not just monitoring. He seemed to be switching, encoding, and diverting entire streams of data.

  /Charlie,/ Bandicut asked nervously, /are you sure you know what you're doing?/

  /// Well, not altogether.

  But this seems to be working.

  I think...there we go! ///

  Something flickered deep in his mind, and before he could blink or gasp or do anything to stop it, he felt a sudden eruption of data, bubbling up out of his mind like a great geyser of sparkling vapor, streaming into the ether. He reeled, and caught a breathless glimpse of where it was going. It was shooting in a shimmering stream up to Triton Orbital, riding encoded on one of the regular comm beams. It wasn't stopping there, but turning and flashing back down to Triton on another beam—deflected, ever so slightly, toward a silent alien receiver hidden in a deep subsurface cavern.

  It was working, he realized dizzily. All that information from the ephemeris was streaming to the translator. But it was doing more than that. He heard, dimly, the jangling of alarms somewhere in the local datanet. /Charlie,/ he muttered over the hiss of data, /are you setting off those alarms?/

  /// Alarms...? ///

  /Yes, alarms. If you can't shut them off, you'd better stop what you're doing, fast—and get us out of here, before they trace it to our connection. They are not going to be happy if they find us—/

  The alarms cut off abruptly. But instead of relief from the quarx, he sensed great worry. Along with the alarms, the streams of data had cut off. Not just the data from Bandicut's mind, but all the data.

  /// Uh... ///

  /Oh, shit. Charlie, you didn't...just bring the system down, did you?/

  /// Um—

  let's get out of here—okay, John?

  I'm not sure what I did... ///

  Much of the local datanet seemed to have gone dark. Bandicut felt tempted to investigate, to see what the quarx had done, to see if there was any way to undo the damage. But he dared not. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut and willed the connection between him and datanet to part.

  >

  ——

  >

  >>>

  >>>>>>

  >>>>>>>>>>>>

  *

  The sparks in his vision darkened, and he slid the headset from his temples, rubbing his eyes. /Charlie—/ He remembered, suddenly, that Charlie-One hadn't intended to send the data that way; he'd meant to wait until they could go in person.

  /// I've—caused problems,

  haven't I? ///

  /Yeah./ Bandicut got up, wincing from pain in his bad leg. He opened the door to the booth and peered out.

  Somebody was yelling across the rec lounge: "Datanet's down, people! Anybody who's got an automatic linkage, get to your terminals for damage control—right now!" A loud murmur rose, and half the people in the lounge ran out of the room. Bandicut watched them go, clicking his teeth nervously. /Charl
ie—/

  /// I couldn't have...

  caused permanent damage, could I? ///

  /Let's hope not. Let's just mokin' hope not./ Bandicut hobbled over toward the refreshment bar. /And I don't care what damn pills I'm on, I'm having a mokin' beer right now!/

  Chapter 16

  Julie

  As he sipped his glass of the watery stuff that passed for beer here on Triton, he shifted unconsciously into observer mode, guiltily watching those who remained in the rec lounge. There weren't many, to his relief. He felt a profound desire not to interact with anyone. He was angry with Charlie, and angry with himself, for what they had done to the datanet. And he was terrified that he would somehow be connected with it.

  The first half of the first beer went quickly, before he slowed down, remembering the painkillers he was on. His gaze wandered to the far corner of the EineySteiney area, where two women were playing. He blinked, realizing with a start that the two women were Georgia Patwell and her friend, Julie Stone. How had he not noticed them before?

  /// You've been...distracted, ///

  croaked the quarx, who seemed more than a little distracted himself.

  /I guess so./ In truth, this wasn't exactly a time when he wanted to see anyone he knew—though as he watched them play, he found his isolationist resolve softening ever so slightly. Still, there was a weightiness surrounding his thoughts. Oddly, he found himself more interested in the women's EineySteiney shots than in the women themselves. The table-holo was programmed with some fairly sophisticated gravity-well combinations, and the two women were making slingshot banks through the maze of curves and valleys. The tabletop was a vibrant grass-green color, and the balls winked with faces that Bandicut couldn't quite make out; probably it was the cartoon-character program.

  It was strange enough, his choosing to ogle trajectories instead of women—but odder still was the fact that he found himself not only following the motions of the balls, but visualizing practically impossible trajectories for them, with an extraordinarily sharp inner eye. Suddenly he realized what was going on, and it didn't make him happy.

  He turned away and drained his glass and walked around the bar for a refill. /Charlie, quit mokin' with my brain! If I want to look at women, I'm going to look at women! You have any idea how long it's been since I was with a woman?/ He returned to his barstool and continued watching.

  Georgia made a nearly impossible three-body shot, and he found suddenly that he didn't care so much about the shot.

  /// Sorry.

  I guess I got carried away.

  What they're doing is very...

  interesting. ///

  Bandicut grunted. The weight lifted from him a little, and he found a new appreciation of Georgia's graceful movements around the table. She was married, of course, so it was just harmless appreciation; but Julie wasn't married, and Julie moved with a quickness and intensity that he found even more appealing. He watched as she lined up a shot—and missed spectacularly, sending the ball on a loop off the far end of the table, where it vanished in midair with a great burst of stars. Julie laughed good-naturedly. It should have been an easy shot. He liked her laugh.

  He cleared his throat, suddenly self-conscious. /You don't have to go to the other extreme,/ he muttered. /I can generate my own interest without your doing anything. Okay?/

  /// I wasn't doing anything. ///

  /Oh./ He took a sip from his glass and studiously looked elsewhere around the lounge, so as not to be caught staring.

  When next he looked back at the EineySteiney table, he saw Georgia pointing her cue-wand in his direction as she said something to Julie. Julie grinned and looked the other way when she saw that Bandicut was watching. Georgia moved toward the bar, waving her cue-wand at him. What was she going to do? he wondered dimly. Whack him with it?

  He felt a brief flurry of lust, and then embarrassment. Down, boy. Julie was following Georgia now, and he felt different colored sparkles of lust. Now? he thought, remembering what had brought him here to drink in the first place.

  "Hey, Bandie—I have to leave," Georgia said, offering him the wand. "Want to step in for me? Julie's a good player."

  Bandicut swallowed, eyes darting from Georgia to Julie and back again. Say something, idiot.

  /// Aren't you going to say anything? ///

  He cleared his throat. "Uh—yeah! I saw! Looked good out there!"

  Julie rolled her eyes as she stopped her low-gravity lope to stand at the bar. "Thanks for the reminder. That last shot wasn't my best."

  Bandicut blushed. He hadn't been thinking about that last flub, at all. He'd been thinking of how she looked. He felt like an imbecile who couldn't talk to women without tangling up his words. He forced himself to try to relax, and was aware at once of the dopey smile he probably had on his face. "Oh, I didn't mean—I mean, yeah, that last one was—"

  "I know." Julie grinned. "But I seem to remember you popping off a couple like that the other night."

  "Yeah," he admitted.

  Georgia laughed and handed him the wand. "So are you going to play with my friend here or not? I told her you were good company, Bandie."

  "Right, right!" Bandicut slid off the barstool, accepting the wand. "Okay, you're off the hook, Georgia. You can get lost now. That is, if you want to, Julie," he added hastily.

  "Let's go," Julie said, as she loped back to the table.

  /// This I want to watch, ///

  Charlie muttered.

  /You can get lost, too,/ he said cheerfully as he stumped after Julie.

  *

  "You break."

  Julie nodded and split the starting formation with a crack, sinking a dwarf and a mermaid. Bandicut watched admiringly as she sank three more faces in a row. She missed and it was his shot. Sighting down the cue wand at the Cheshire Cat, he found himself focusing beyond the grinning teeth on the ball to Julie's intense gaze, watching from the far side of the table. She smiled and moved out of his sight line.

  The cue was wobbling in his grip. He drew a breath. /Help me out a little, okay?/

  /// I thought you wanted— ///

  /I just mean, help me steady the shot, all right?/

  /// No problem. ///

  He suddenly found his aim, and felt a clear understanding of the gravity path that he was about to try. The wand flashed at the cue ball, and it spun away, looped around a well, and clacked into the Cheshire Cat. The silver cue ball drifted slowly away from the impact, and the Cat's grin skidded and vanished into the side well. /Great!/ he thought.

  /// It's good practice, ///

  the quarx acknowledged.

  "Nice shot!" Julie cheered. "Can you do it again? How about putting Dinky Duck down the table into the end well?"

  He squinted along the path between the cue ball and the diminutive yellow duck. There were two gravity wells in the way of the shot she'd suggested. He'd have to slingshot the cue around both of them, just like a spacecraft picking up a gravity-assist from a planet.

  /// We can do it, ///

  Charlie assured him.

  /I'm trusting you./ He cleared his throat and grinned at Julie. "If I make it, will you stay and have a drink with me afterward?"

  She allowed a smile on one corner of her mouth. "Only if you make it and promise to stay a nice guy..."

  *

  Apparently he managed to retain his vestiges of niceness, because her smile remained as the game continued. He began to lose track of the time, what with one part of his mind lost to a great, flowing tide of hormones, a fresh surge coming every time her lips cracked a smile; and the other part of him entranced by the joy of firing cartoon-faced balls into long, wholly improbable trajectories. He heard himself suggesting, at the end of their third game, that perhaps they ought to let someone else use the table for a while, and retire to a more comfortable spot for that drink. She agreed, with an almost bashful smile.

  "What do you guys really do, down there in exoarch?" he asked, once they were settled in a booth
with a semi-privacy-curtain drawn—enough to feel cozy, but not so secluded as to feel threatening.

  Julie leaned back against the headrest and half-closed her eyes. Her short hair drifted back from her face. She had, he realized, a very small nose, and a pretty neck. Her blue eyes were intense, even half closed. "Oh, you know—mostly we wait for you guys to bring us something exciting," she said.

  "Us guys?"

  She opened her eyes. "Well, I don't know if it's the surveyors or the miners who are more likely to find something bigger than a melted lump of metal—but if any of you ever do, that's when we can really get to work. In the meantime, it's mainly geology for us. And frankly, I'm getting pretty sick of geology." She grinned brightly. "So how about finding us something intact, okay? How about the head of an alien—or at least some nice alien artifacts?"

  Bandicut swallowed, his heart almost stopping. A moment ago, he was reeling with attraction; now he was petrified of speaking. Charlie was ominously silent in his brain. "Well—" he croaked. "I guess—we'd all like to find something... exciting...wouldn't we?"

  /// Careful— ///

  Julie gazed at him as though she heard more in his words than he'd intended to convey. "I guess we would," she agreed. She sipped her drink, and a look of curiosity came over her. "So..." she murmured, "what exactly do you pilot types do for excitement, when you're not on survey missions?"

  Was that a suggestive huskiness in her voice? He realized that he was sweating a little, and he had probably drunk too much beer. He took another sip. "Well, I, uh—" and his voice caught a little, because now, he thought, he was going to have to explain how it was that he wasn't actually flying survey missions anymore, or even driving them, for that matter. And then he thought, no, no, she already knows about that, doesn't she? "Well, I, uh—tried my hand at mining," he joked. "And it got me this—" He pointed to the cast on his left ankle.

  "Ah so," said Julie. "How'd that happen, anyway?"

  He tried not to wince as he groped for a suitable explanation, preferably one that wouldn't make him look like a moron. "Well—I slipped on some ice, and this ankle was the only thing between me and a big laser beam. So the ankle lost."