Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  Kona appeared unimpressed, but in his aura Lot caught a sense of wry amusement, marbling low-key pride. He grunted in an offhand way. “Huh. Maybe you’re not hardwired after all.”

  But Sypaon objected. Her warden shape sparkled like the tactical holos as she slipped away from the wall. “He’s afraid,” she accused. “He would say anything.”

  Kona shrugged artfully. “Maybe. We’ve time to give it some thought.” His words were laced with clouds of subterfuge, but in her warden-fragment, Sypaon couldn’t recognize it.

  Neither could Urban. His temper exploded again. “There is no time, Daddy! We have to get Lot out now, or the Communion will happen. This is about obsession. That’s what the neural parasite is for.”

  Scowling, Kona beckoned to two security officers. “Get him out of here.”

  They moved toward Urban. Lot closed his eyes, determined to keep his suspicions firmly locked inside him.

  “Don’t give up, fury!” Urban shouted. “There’s no other way for us.”

  Sooth. But Kona already knew that.

  THEY KEPT HIM SITTING ON THE FLOOR FOR NEARLY THREE HOURS. In the prolonged cold an implanted survival routine kicked in, causing his metabolism to slow and his body temperature to drop. His mind drifted on languid waves. The face of his guard changed, then changed again. This concerned him, until finally he observed the substitution of personnel and understood that they were minimizing individual exposure to the hazard of his presence. Sypaon’s warden-fragment had been sent out into the tunnels on some errand.

  An eerie silence dominated the command chamber. Despite the shifting complement of security personnel and council members, not one word was uttered aloud. Communication had been relegated to atrial links, and Lot could only guess at what was going on in the city by reading the tides of anxiety that puffed around him. As time passed, the density of concern mounted. He guessed the ados knew his situation and were protesting it. Once, Kona looked up from his deliberations to meet Lot’s gaze. Regret plied his aura. Lot stiffened, suddenly sure Kona would buy peace by turning him over to the ado mobs.

  No.

  He set the thought adrift on the air like dust, charismata of negative intent. Kona’s gaze faltered. He shook his head, as if dizzy, or perplexed. Then he left the room for a while, and when he came back, Clemantine was with him. “Take him to the shuttle,” Kona said, nodding at Lot. The sound of his voice was startling after the long period of silence. “Make ready to leave before Sypaon is aware of you. This is not something we can learn to live with.”

  IT TOOK LOT LONG SECONDS TO REAWAKEN his muscles, a delay that drew angry accusations from Clemantine. But gradually a numb warmth flushed through him as his body woke. He stood on stiff limbs. Ord shifted under his hair. Silently, Lot willed the little robot to be still. So far, city authority had overlooked its presence, or perhaps hadn’t attached any importance to it. Lot wanted to keep it that way. Clemantine frowned at him with a hint of suspicion. Then she nodded toward the door. “Out.”

  His suit had really begun to reek. As he passed Clemantine, she rolled her eyes at the stench. “That thing is definitely dead.”

  In the narrow passage outside she told him to strip it off; she wasn’t going to spend three days in a closed ship with him smelling like that. She gave him some clothes and he changed. By the time he was done, her mood had lost some of its edge. “You’re being awfully quiet,” she observed.

  He blinked, thinking the ceiling lights must have shifted color somehow. Her skin seemed highlighted in tiny points of silver.

  “You were always a quiet child. You might have turned out okay if Urban had just left you alone.”

  Not likely.

  She put her arm around his shoulders again. It seemed she liked to touch him. “You’re a nice boy, Lot. I want you to know that no one here has anything personal against you. It’s what you are that makes you dangerous. It’s that we have to deal with.”

  The air shimmered silver. He felt the tug of it and the warning tap of Ord’s soft tentacle against his throat. He closed his fist. Clemantine. She was as old and as tough as Kona. Her vulnerability now felt like a betrayal. Deliberately, he sought the vindictive state he’d used on David. One quick lesson would keep them both safe… .

  The charismata of his anger flushed across the space between them. She breathed in the artificial construction—and recoiled. He felt the sharp spike of her fear. But it fell back, giving way immediately to the fury he knew must come. Her face twisted. Then to his surprise her fist darted out, catching him hard in the throat. He choked and went down on his knees while she swore at him, “You dirty little son of a bitch! I don’t know why Kona’s giving you even this chance.”

  He coughed on the floor, struggling not to puke, chastising himself for not having the foresight to stand farther away. She jammed the muzzle of her rifle up against his head. “Thank you,” she told him, in a soft voice that slid through the air like a razor. “Thank you for the warning. Really, you have my deep appreciation. And if it ever needs to be repeated, I’ll kill you. Understand?”

  He nodded against the pressure of the rifle, seeing specks of silver on her still. He could take her. He was pretty sure of it and the knowledge left him shaking. It was all he could do to stand, to walk docilely on, to pretend he did not want this at all.

  THEY WERE FAR CLOSER TO THE CITY WALL than Lot would have guessed. Only three pressure doors separated them from a narrow receiving bay. Past glass windows he could see the shuttle craft Captain Aceret had flown into the city fully ten years ago: one of Nesseleth’s shuttles. Silk had no other transport.

  A cadre of security officers eyed him warily as he entered just ahead of Clemantine. To his surprise, Yulyssa was with them. She approached him tentatively, caution laid out cool around her. “I came to say goodbye.”

  He nodded shortly, not trusting himself with anything more.

  She walked in parallel with him, her aura steeped in a welling sense of loss. Lot knew its cause, and that—as Clemantine had said—it was nothing personal. He tried to comfort her with that: “The parasite’s been identified. It can be gotten rid of.”

  She shook her head, sending flecks of sharper emotions impacting against him. “The Old Silkens tried that.”

  “They tried to eliminate it from the Well. You can be more selective.”

  “And even if we succeed, you’ll be gone.”

  He shrugged. “It won’t matter then.”

  Her desire lapped at him. “It’ll matter to me.”

  “That’s just the charismata.”

  “It’s more, Lot. I know it.”

  “That’ll change.”

  They’d come to the ribbed tubeway that led to the shuttle’s door. Now she hung back. Dark emotions seeped from her: regret and pain and purpose and other things he could not readily identify. “You’re very young, or you would know this,” she said, her voice hoarse and whispery. “But there is no end unless we choose it.”

  Her desire sparkled in the air, and suddenly it seemed absurd, unfair, disrespectful of the proud and independent being she’d been … and he had done it. The realization left him feeling as foul as the pockets of a gutter doggie.

  Clemantine nudged him in the shoulder. He felt her impatience with a sense of relief. With a last glance at Yulyssa, he walked down the tubeway and boarded the little ship.

  CHAPTER

  34

  THE STATIONS OF HIS LIFE SEEMED OPEN FOR REVIEW. Over the previous days he’d stumbled in a chaotic procession from one monument of his past to another: the tunnels, the loading bay, the gathered dead in the elevator car, and Nesseleth herself. Now—as he stepped aboard the shuttle craft that had brought him into this city—he felt a circle of ten years begin to close. He’d reached the final station of his pilgrimage, though he did not know yet if a new cycle would open.

  The interior of the shuttle didn’t fit his memories. The partitioned cockpit with its complex control boards was gone. Instead, the forw
ard cabin had been pushed all the way into the bow. Four acceleration couches sprouted from the deck, their long seats folded upward in graceful U’s like unopened flowers. “Sit down,” Clemantine said. “It doesn’t matter where.”

  She was probably right.

  He chose a rear seat, by the closed cargo doors. Touching a likely-looking green pad, he got the chair to open for him. Ord slid off his shoulder, disappearing under the seat.

  Kona came in a few minutes later. He wore beige armor, just like Clemantine, though he looked so natural in plated skin that Lot felt shaken by a resonant sense, as if he’d glimpsed Kona’s past and seen only a landscape of scars. Who had he been, the day the swan burster took Heyertori?

  Kona conversed with Clemantine a moment; then he took a seat beside Lot. “My better sense tells me we should simply destroy you, by the quickest, most thorough method, and let the political repercussions fall as they will.” His hand closed over the armrest of the chair. “Maybe it’s the influence of the parasite, but I can’t do it.”

  “Sypaon will be angry.”

  “Sypaon can be soothed.” Then, after a minute. “You know Null Boundary has no crew. You’ll be alone.”

  “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  Kona studied him closely, while moving his head slowly back and forth, as if he could sift the dust of moods from the cabin air and read in them Lot’s intentions. “Null Boundary’s a strange ship. The entity inhabiting it is not the ship’s original persona. I’m not sure he even came to the position voluntarily. He’s very old. Yet he has never fully integrated with the body of the ship. He sustains a separate identity. Indeed, he prefers it. Null Boundary is his metal jacket. Inside, he’s still the man he used to be.” Kona frowned and shook his head. “I wish I could tell you more about him, but we despised him in those years we were aboard. We blamed him for Heyertori … and still I don’t know if he was part of it or not.”

  Lot shivered as he remembered the sense of wrongness he’d experienced. No one knew where Null Boundary had been in the millennia since his manufacture. No one knew what he had done.

  “Strap in,” Kona advised him. “We’ll be leaving soon.”

  Kona moved to a forward seat beside Clemantine, but the door didn’t close. Lot realized they were waiting for someone. A minute later, Urban hurried in.

  Lot stared at him, astounded. Joy kicked through his system—but only briefly. Urban had discarded his skin suit for a security officer’s plated armor. He had a bead rifle in his hands and a peculiar look on his face.

  Stiffly, he took the empty seat beside Lot. At a reminder from Kona, he strapped himself in. The lock sealed. The forward screens winked on. Lot could feel the vibration of the engines as some silent command urged them to life. Urban felt armored in aloofness. “Did they draft you?” Lot asked him.

  “I volunteered.”

  “For … ?”

  Abashment broke through his brittle shell.

  “Say it,” Clemantine urged. But Urban would not, so she explained it herself. “Urban has volunteered to be our Executioner.”

  Urban’s aura hardened, as if Lot had physically assaulted him. “It’s gotten too easy for you, fury. When you played that game with Clemantine—”

  “I was warning her off!”

  “And next time?”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “It’s not always a rational choice,” Kona said. “If things get out of control, we’re vulnerable. Urban’s not.”

  Lot looked away, feeling the severance of time flowing between them like an ever-widening river. He told himself they were not at cross-purposes. Not yet.

  The shuttle edged out of the city on rollers, then plunged in a heart-stopping maneuver, before the engines finally fired. Thought seemed a luxury in the fierce acceleration.

  “MESSAGE, LOT.”

  They’d been aboard less than an hour when Ord slid up onto the armrest. The hard acceleration had crushed it to little more than a gelatinous blob, though it could still form words.

  “From who?” Lot asked.

  “The sculpted entity Sypaon.”

  His heart seemed to swell in his chest. “Cut the connection.”

  “No,” Kona said quickly. “Let her speak. Lot, I promise you, we won’t turn back.”

  Urban’s knuckles paled as he gripped the bead rifle.

  “Okay,” Lot said grudgingly. “Let her speak.”

  Ord’s voice changed. “Child, you must reconsider.” It was the voice Sypaon had used with her warden-fragment. The change struck Lot as mere ornamentation, for Sypaon had no real voice of her own. “Null Boundary is a corrupted entity. You know this, child. You’ve felt it yourself. He is older than the Hallowed Vasties, and quite insane. You risk your life with him. Return to Silk. Nothing will be done that you do not approve of.”

  “Shut it off,” Lot pleaded, feeling the fragility of his position. Just a little more pressure, and Kona might change his mind.

  But again, Kona countered his command. This time he spoke to her directly. “Sypaon, what do you really know of Null Boundary? You have not communicated with him.”

  “He will not answer my queries. But we all know he is the ship that betrayed Heyertori. He will betray you too.”

  Lot felt his position crumble. “Shut it off!” he shouted, knowing it was too late.

  This time, Ord obeyed. But to Lot’s surprise, the shuttle continued on its planned course to rendezvous.

  THEY’D BEEN ABOARD SIX HOURS, LONG ENOUGH for Lot to figure out it was Clemantine commanding the navigation DI through her atrial link. They were still pulling over two gees, so moving around was no pleasure. He remained in his chair, watching the image on the screen through half-closed eyes. There was little else to do.

  The nebula hazed the darkness with a milky luminescence that suppressed all but the brightest stars. It appeared to be a stationary cloud, shot through with denser whorls and lanes of dust, ever-poised at an unchanging distance in front of them. Yet it rattled them, hurling bits of dust-shrouded stony matter against the hull.

  Dust. It clung to the nebula’s pebbles through static attraction, forming clumps that were too large to be carried off by Kheth’s mild stellar wind. At relativistic speeds, every pebble was a potential bomb. Yet no clump could accrete to more than a few ounces in size, before attracting the attention of the butterfly gnomes that lived within the cloud. They would descend upon the aggregate, lashing it apart with an electric charge.

  Dust clung to hulls too, and to the hides of any object that ventured within the system.

  It seemed likely the nebula was an artificial construction. Yet Sypaon had overlooked it. She’d come here only for the swan burster, its weaponry and its promised secrets dazzling her into a debilitating tunnel vision. There was so much more here than Chenzeme fossils. Information streamed in slow chemical currents through the dust, flashing occasionally into the electromagnetic spectrum astride erratic signals barely distinguishable from the static. Halfway down the sheltered Well, human lives burned in the warm infrared, oblivious of the whispered exchange. Dust sifted past them, falling through the atmosphere, into oceans, taken into the colloidal flow, perhaps rising again with storms, escaping the atmosphere aboard some unknown ferry. Information was traded and adjustments were made in feedback reactions working on alien protocols encoded in the dust, long ago, while the Communion waited: alert, patient… .

  The dust was alive. Lot wondered why he hadn’t understood that before.

  HALFWAY THROUGH THE SECOND DAY, Clemantine announced: “That bitch Sypaon may have been right.” Fear popped in sensual bursts around the dead calm tone of her voice. “Null Boundary has begun to accelerate.”

  “Within the nebula?” Urban asked. “It’ll tear itself apart.”

  “Not this far in,” Clemantine said. “Inside the Well’s orbit the nebula is thin.”

  Kona had his eyes closed, an intense expression on his face. “Modify our course to match—”

/>   “That would be suicide. We’re operating on no fuel margin.”

  KONA RADIOED THE GREAT SHIP AND RECEIVED REASSURANCES that seemed nonsensical, given the circumstances. He contacted Silk, and was informed that Null Boundary’s new course would bring it deep within the orbit of the elevator column.

  At that point, Null Boundary ceased to respond.

  Clemantine cut the engines to conserve fuel. Their rendezvous was blown and it was a fair question now if they’d have enough reserves to carry them back to Silk. A sheen of sweat began to accumulate on her face, as—with eyes closed—she frantically ran calculations, seeking a workable course.

  Kona threw off his straps and turned to Lot. “You warned us about this ship before. What do you know of it?”

  Lot shook his head helplessly. “Not much. It seemed wrong. Different. Not like the city. Or even the ring. I thought … maybe it was an enemy of the cult.”

  “And now?”

  He shrugged. “It still could be. I don’t know.”

  Urban had been uncharacteristically silent for most of the trip, but he stirred now. “It’s hard to tell sometimes what things really are on the inside. When you want to hide, you try to look like your enemy. Sypaon lives inside the burster. The cult virus lives inside Lot.” He stared at the seat back in front of him. “It’s easy to get close to your enemies if you look and feel and smell exactly like them.”

  Kona’s teeth clicked together. “Damn the Chenzeme! Damn even their memories—”

  “Then you think the ship’s been infested?” Clemantine demanded.

  Kona glared at Lot. “It fits, doesn’t it? A Chenzeme neural system inside it, mimicking something human.”

  “Then the Well will neutralize it,” Clemantine declared with rather artificial optimism. “It neutralized the swan burster.”

  They both looked at Lot, as if he had some magic atrial access to that era of prehistory and could confirm her speculations.

  He shook his head. All he had was doubt. “It’s different from the ring.”

  “You don’t think the Well will interfere with it?” Kona asked.