“The navy has made some progress on the Mars data,” Paula said. “Not that it’s particularly helpful. I asked the Admiral to pursue the matter, and he took that to a level I never expected.”
“I heard they actually went there,” Gore said.
“Nigel Sheldon made a CST wormhole available,” Paula confirmed.
“Which is interesting in itself. Whose interest is he considering, pursuing this lead against the Guardians? In any case, the navy team managed to find out what all the data was that’d been encrypted. It’s purely meteorological.”
“Did they find a key?” Justine asked.
“Unfortunately not, the encryption writing software was a use-expire program. There’s nothing left of it. Forensics are running a quantum scan of the hardware, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to pick out a remnant. The actual data remains beyond us unless the Guardians choose to make the key available.”
“So even if we decrypted it, we wouldn’t know what they wanted it for.”
“I’m afraid not, Senator.”
“This is such bullshit,” Gore said. “If you ask me, the Guardians have just notched up another smart hit against the navy. All that stealing meteorological sensor crap is a clever piece of misdirection. There’s got to be something else hidden on Mars. Some transmission from a secret base or device, maybe a weapon. If they’ve been landing Von Neumann cybernetics on the surface, who knows what they could have built by now.”
“The research packages which robot ships dropped on Mars are well documented,” Paula said. “There is no surplus mass unaccounted for, not in twenty years. And the navy team didn’t see anything unusual at Arabia Terra.”
“Four computer geeks and two characters from ancient history on a nostalgia trip don’t make what I call a decent exploration team. There could have been a missile silo right under their feet and they’d never have known.”
“Or even a hollowed-out volcano,” Justine muttered.
“I don’t believe they would have been able to smuggle anything like a cybernetic factory onto the surface,” Paula said levelly. “We know the Guardians simply purchase whatever equipment they want.”
“Weather!” Gore grunted in disgust.
Justine covered her smile by drinking more of the antacid.
“I believe Mars is something we will have to put aside for the moment,” Paula said. “One of my ex-colleagues in the Paris office may have uncovered another Starflyer agent: Isabella Helena Halgarth.”
“Shit!” Gore said.
Justine took a second to place the name, pleased she didn’t have to use her e-butler to reference it for her. “Damn, do you think that’s their link to the presidency?”
Gore held up a hand. She could see her own distorted reflection in his palm. “Wait,” he said. “I’m analyzing this. I always fucking knew there was something wrong about that weekend we hosted in Sorbonne Wood. Let’s see. Patricia was always willing to accommodate every party; at the time I thought she was doing it to secure endorsement for Doi. But take a look at the weekend from the Starflyer’s perspective. Assume it wanted a human navy for its war between us and the Primes. Yes, goddamnit. Think of the true sticking points we faced. Either Isabella or Patricia was there to oil things along every time. Isabella even slept with Ramon DB.”
“He slept with her?” Justine couldn’t help the indignation. She pursed her lips, vexed with herself for caring. After all, they hadn’t been married for eighty years. Still…he’d done it under her roof, technically.
“It was even Ramon’s parallel development idea which helped the agency move all the starship production facilities to the High Angel with the minimum of fuss,” Gore said.
“Which he produced on Sunday morning,” Justine said coldly. “I suppose we’ll never know who actually came up with the idea.”
“I assumed it was Patricia, who relayed it through Isabella,” Gore said.
“It’s the kind of compromise a presidential aide could come up with in an instant. Now, though, we’ll never know.”
“You could ask him,” Paula said.
Justine finished off the last of her antacid drink, which might have accounted for the little grimace of distaste. “Yes, I could. I’m not sure he’d give me an answer.”
“He will,” Gore said. “You know he will.”
“Maybe, but he’d want to know why.”
“Is he strong enough to join us?” Gore asked. “We need allies.”
“He’d need some very strong proof,” Justine said carefully. “I’m not sure what we’ve got right now is enough.”
“What more can we give him?” Gore asked. “For Christ’s sake, Ramon isn’t stupid.”
“I’m not about to tell him we suspect Nigel Sheldon of being behind the greatest antihuman conspiracy there’s ever been. He’d shoot us down in flames.”
“You’ve got to find a way to get to him.”
“I’ll try.” She thought of how she’d have done that in the old days. A hotel in Paris maybe, a weekend spent together, restaurants, fine wines, coffee on the left bank, talking, arguing, laughing, theater in the evening, long passionate nights in bed. How she missed those simple times now.
“This still doesn’t tell us which of them was pulling the strings, Patricia or Isabella,” Gore said. “And were they working in conjunction with the Sheldons?”
“We don’t know Nigel is a part of this,” Justine said. “Not yet.” She told her e-butler to run a full background check on Isabella and Patricia.
“It would be logical for Isabella to be a courier to the Starflyer network,” Paula said. “Kantil would be working deep cover, taking her time to infiltrate the Commonwealth political structure. The unisphere shows are full of innuendo that Doi is heavily dependent on her advisors and opinion polls.”
“Which is why I was suspicious about her original backing for the Starflight agency,” Gore said. “Spending that much tax money was never going to be a vote winner before the barrier came down. She took a very uncharacteristic risk backing the formation. Something pushed her into doing that.”
“I don’t have any grounds to arrest Kantil and subject her to a forensic neurological examination,” Paula said. “We ran similar appraisals on suspects yesterday, which came to nothing.”
Justine listened to them discussing options while the data on Patricia and Isabella ran across her virtual vision. Patricia’s background was well documented, and verified by investigative reporters eager to find the smallest discrepancy in her official history and so prise open a covered-up scandal. Less information was available on Isabella, primarily because of her youth and the fact that she’d spent a lot of her life on Solidade. The Halgarths’ private world didn’t have public records. Justine started to review associated files which the e-butler’s cross-reference function had thrown up.
“Wait a minute,” Justine said. “Isabella’s father, Victor. Fifteen years ago he was appointed director of the Marie Celeste Research Institute on Far Away. He ran it for a two-year term before moving back to EdenBurg, where he secured a vice presidency in a Halgarth Dynasty physics laboratory.”
“That’s how it got to her,” Paula said with satisfaction. “She was just a child. I didn’t understand how anyone that young could be involved.” She frowned. “Neither did Renne.”
“If Isabella is a Starflyer agent, then her parents have to be as well,” Gore said.
“Yes,” Paula said. “We must watch what they’re doing. However, there is a limit to how many observation operations Senate Security can mount. It is not a huge organization.”
“Our family has a decent-sized security team,” Gore said. “Be good for them to get their asses out of the office and do some fieldwork for a change. I’ll organize something.”
“I appreciate that,” Paula said. “But I can arrange for the Halgarths to be watched. I have a well-placed friend in the Dynasty. There is something else I need you to help me with. Hoshe has established that Bose’s original as
tronomical observation was financed by the Starflyer. Someone in my old Directorate’s Paris office covered up the information when I was investigating him. I’m running several entrapment operations on the personnel to find out which one. But I’d like a proper financial analysis of Bromley, Waterford, and Granku. That could result in some important leads.”
“I know that company,” Gore said. “Legal firm here in town.”
“That is correct. Three of their employees have disappeared, in a similar fashion to Isabella. They set up the Cox Educational charity, which had its account in the Denman Manhattan bank. It would take Senate Security a while to organize a proper forensic accounting review of their records. And I’m sure you’re better able to perform the same function.”
“I’ll rip that goddamn company apart for you,” Gore said. “If they’ve spent a single dime buying the Starflyer a drink I’ll find it.”
***
The good ship Defender was three weeks into her deep-space scouting mission, and her captain was as bored as the rest of his crew. Probably more so, Oscar reflected; while everyone else went off-duty they tended to access TSI dramas, immersing themselves in the racier aspects of Commonwealth culture, so at least they got a break from the tedium of onboard life. He on the other hand spent his rec hours going through the logs from the Second Chance.
It was a waste of time. He knew it was a waste of time. There was no enemy alien spy on board. The reason—the only reason—he kept on going day after day reviewing the logs was because of Bose and Verbeke. He still didn’t understand what had happened to them, nor why. Something was desperately wrong with the whole Watchtower section of the mission. There was no way Bose and Verbeke could have dropped out of contact through simple electronic failure. Their comrelays were utterly reliable. The starship’s sensors and the contact teams must have missed something over there: some Prime device that was still active, an unstable part of the rocky fragment that collapsed on the two explorers. Except…they were in freefall, there was no gravity to collapse anything; and some relic of Bose had warned the Conway. Oscar didn’t have a clue what he was looking for; he just kept on looking.
He’d accessed a dozen TSIs recorded by different contact team members as they fumbled and slid along the eerie curving passages that threaded through the interior of the Watchtower. None of the recordings had revealed anything new. The Prime structure was as dead as any Egyptian Pharaoh’s tomb. None of the physical samples they’d brought back, the crumbling structural material and radiation-saturated fragments of equipment, had helped further their understanding of the Watchtower mechanism’s true nature. It was all too fragile, too old, for any useful analysis to be carried out. The navy still wasn’t sure what the installation used to be a part of, though the best guess was some kind of mineral processing facility. No part of it the contact teams had explored had machinery that was even close to working condition. The tunnel that Bose and Verbeke had ventured down was no different. And it was Oscar who had given them that initial authorization to proceed deeper, to find out what was there. He’d been encouraging, he remembered. Often during the interminable playbacks he’d hear the enthusiasm in his own voice.
Time after time he went through recordings that corresponded to the time they dropped out of communication. Bridge logs, engineering logs, power logs, a dozen other onboard datastreams, flight logs from the shuttles that were ferrying the contact teams between the starship and the rock. Worst of all were the detailed space suit recordings from Mac and Frances Rawlins as they made their frantic, useless rescue bid. They’d gone a long way down the curving tunnel-corridor that had swallowed Bose and Verbeke. Nothing in those decaying aluminum walls gave any hint of danger lurking ahead.
Two nights ago, after his bridge duty was over, Oscar had decided on a slightly different approach to the analysis. He was running every sensor recording he had of the Watchtower rock, and compositing them into a specific overall picture. He wanted to run comparisons between the rock and its wreckage from the time they’d encountered it right through the mission until the time they left. The shape, thermal profile, electromagnetic spectrum, spectrographic composition; each building up to a comprehensive multi-textural snapshot every two seconds. When they were all assembled the Defender’s RI could run a detailed comparison program between all of them, searching for the slightest change.
His cabin’s holographic portal was in projection mode, filling the small area with the image from the shuttle cameras, playing back Mac’s first exploration flight. Oscar sucked on an orange juice drink bag tube as the familiar dialogue between himself and Mac and the shuttle pilot repeated itself yet again. Sensor data from the shuttle was being compiled and added to the starship’s own sensor log record to enhance the snapshots, producing a tighter resolution. He watched as the hangar doors parted, and the ungainly little craft rose off its cradle, belching sparkly cold gas from its reaction control thrusters. The huge bulk of the Second Chance twisted slowly and silently around his cabin, the translucent projection allowing him to see the bulkheads through its main cylindrical superstructure and the giant life-support ring. Oscar felt a pang of nostalgic regret at seeing the starship again. There would never be another one like it. The Defender was sleek and powerful in comparison, but it lacked the grandeur of its ancestor. Everyone working at the Anshun complex had devoted themselves to that first starship, putting in ridiculous hours, ignoring their family and social lives; its assembly had been an act of love. The atmosphere they’d shared back then was lost as well, the naïve excited optimism of launching a grand exploration into the unknown. They’d been full of hope in those days as the adventure loomed close. Simpler, easier times.
The shuttle cleared the life-support ring, and its main engines fired, carrying it toward the Watchtower. Dyson Alpha slipped up across his cabin bulkheads; a distant lightpoint as bright as Venus appeared in Earth’s night sky. The rest of the alien starfield flowed around it. Oscar peered at the image, picking out the dull speck ahead of the shuttle. He’d seen it so many times in so many spectrums that he knew the Watchtower’s exact position against the unfamiliar constellations.
His lips sucked down some air. The bag of orange juice was empty. He reached out to push it into the mouth of the refuse tube at the side of the washroom cubical. Stopped in midmovement. Frowned. Stared at the image of the Second Chance.
“Freeze image,” he told his e-butler. The recording halted immediately.
“Hold this viewpoint, and increase magnification by three, focus center on the Second Chance.” The starship’s gray-silver structure swelled rapidly, covering the washroom cubical and his sleep pouch. Oscar forgot to breathe. “Son of a bitch.” He stared and stared at the primary sensor array, shock like icy electricity shooting along his spine. The starship’s main communications dish was extended, pointing toward the tiny star behind him.
The Defender’s alarm sounded.
“Captain,” the executive officer called. “Sir, you’ve got to get up to the bridge right now. We think we’ve found the other end of Hell’s Gateway. The hysradar has picked it up in a star system three light-years away.”
CHAPTER SIX
Morton was still smiling when his bubble dropped out of the wormhole, fifteen meters above the Highmarsh Valley in the Dau’sing Mountains.
It had been two days since Mellanie’s last visit at the barracks. She’d cut it fine, arriving just hours before Kingsville was closed off and everyone received their final clearance orders. It had been one hell of a visit, the two of them screwing each other senseless in the little rec room, like teenagers who’d unexpectedly found the house empty one afternoon. Hence the long-lasting smile.
That memory of the two of them together was the last one to be loaded into his secure store. So if, as likely, his body was blown to shit on this mission, that would be the strongest memory in his brain when he was re-lifed. Now that was a stylish way to emerge back into reality.
His bubble was a translucent gray-b
lue sphere of plyplastic, three meters in diameter, its surface stealthed against every known sensor type used by the Primes. He was suspended at the center by the transparent impact gel that filled the interior. During training it had seemed like a sensible way to arrive on a hostile planet light-years behind enemy lines. They were neat little machines: tough, highly mobile, and reasonably armed. Actually riding one down as it exhibited all the aerodynamics of a granite boulder pulled the smile off his face. Fear hit him for the first time, making his heart pound and his stomach quake. Life didn’t get any more extreme than this.
The rest of Cat’s Claws had come through the wormhole okay, their bubbles very hard to see in the visual spectrum as they all fell toward the ground. It was only their high-UV IFF beacons that gave him their locations. The three combat aerobots that had led the deployment zoomed away across the grungy landscape, disgorging chaff and decoy drones.
Up above them, the wormhole closed. It had been open for about ten seconds, just long enough to shoot them out. Back on Wessex, the gateway had been surrounded by a giant mechanical loading system, resembling a scaled-up version of an artillery gun magazine, with over a thousand bubbles sitting on conveyor racks ready for the assault. Parallel racks carrying wedge-shaped combat aerobots moved forward smoothly beside them, their separate ranks merging at the gateway amid the weird cluster of lithe malmetal tentacles that was the actual launch delivery mechanism.
Cat’s Claws had joined several hundred other troops lined up on one of five gantry ledges as the bubbles trundled past in stop-start sequences. Along with the rest of them, Morton had finally been given the activation codes for the aggressor systems wetwired into his body. Now the squad were all making nervous, jokey comments about those systems not firing outward, war tourism, which body parts you protected above all else, alien rights lawyers suing them, and other stupid stuff. Trying to bull out the wait.
After a surprisingly short time Cat’s Claws was at the head of the line. Morton pulled his armor suit helmet down, checked his breathing circuit integrity, and slithered through the slit in the side of his bubble. As soon as the straps closed around him, the gel was pumped in under pressure. His e-butler integrated itself with the bubble’s array, confirming internal systems functionality. By then he was already ten meters down the conveyor rack.
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