Void All The Way Down: The Sliding Void Omnibus

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘How the hell do you do it?’ she asked. ‘Beat a privacy field?’

  ‘The bugs installed inside the tables are supplied directly to Hyperfast by the Triple Alliance Intelligence Service. The very latest technology. The alliance desires for the Edge to be tamed as much as the company does. A little soft money and aid spread around the border systems can work wonders. Our surveillance tech is nothing that mere tramp captains bumping along the bottom of the Edge can be expected to detect.’ Pitor replayed everything that Lana’s crew had discussed from the moment they had first sat down. He couldn’t decrypt her little transmission to the ship, but no matter. He had almost everything he needed to derail Lana’s job, and a little judicial and focused snooping would provide all the rest. ‘So,’ he hummed to himself. ‘Dollar-sign Dillard is still willing to commission free traders? Let us see if he is prepared to do so after his little Lana has lost her cargo. That pickled schemer’s costs of doing business are about to rise substantially higher than the fool can afford.’

  ‘You’re stealing routes and clients from everyone who comes in here,’ said Chacon, ruefully. ‘Just how much is going to be enough for you?’

  ‘The universe is theoretically infinite,’ smiled Pitor Skeeg. And so, naturally, are the limits of my ambition. Skeeg nodded towards the menu animation scrolling along the mirror behind her counter. ‘Talking of which; offer free food with the drinks. There needs to be extra custom in the bar, it is too quiet here.’

  Chacon shook her head, sadly. ‘Greedy . . . crews are going to get suspicious.’

  ‘Everyone needs to eat, my dear.’ Especially the company. They were perpetually hungry. The perfect marriage, really. It almost made up for losing Lana and the Gravity Rose. But that was the thing about greatness… it always demanded sacrifices. The trick was to make sure everyone else made most of them for you.

  ***

  Calder watched Zeno and the legion of robots he commanded swarm over the piled cargo. The Gravity Rose had moved from her original mooring to dock alongside the freight zone DSD rented. After their ship had mated with the side of the station, a vast cargo chamber opened along the hull for Zeno’s caterpillar-tracked robots to carry freight on board. Oblong steel containers were still arriving on the station’s rail system, the chamber echoing with the sound of reversing warnings and flashing with rotating lights on top of loaders. Each cargo-handling robot trundled along the size of a house, its fork-lift arms picking up containers two at a time, piling them on a platform at the droid’s own back, and when it had a full load, rattling away into the depths of the ship. Smaller robots did the checking, supervised by Zeno – and, more nominally, by Calder. Why do I get the feeling the chief just wants me out from under his feet while we’re in dock? In truth, there wasn’t much work in the engine room at the moment. And Calder needed to be rotated through every position on board the ship if he was going to properly understand its workings. He was looking forward to the time when he’d be stationed on the bridge, alongside Lana Fiveworlds. She had shown remarkably bad taste in her previous choice of beau, but she’d raised a valid point inside the bar. Calder wasn’t in any position to judge Lana, given that the treacherous object of his previous affections had sold him out and tried to have him executed before he’d ended up exiled among the stars. Maybe making poor choices in matters of the heart is something we share? Give me a chance, captain, because you’re about to trade up.

  Zeno pointed to a train sliding in carrying a fresh batch of containers. ‘Those are a batch of replacement components for the ship the skipper bought using Dollar-sign’s deposit money. We’ll check them next. I don’t want to install a single part that hasn’t been scanned.’

  Calder stared at the slowing train. ‘But those crates are from the local ship yard, not DSD?’

  ‘And if DSD wanted to sneak something on board the ship, that would be exactly the way he’d do it. Bribe some mope to slip contraband inside our engine parts.’

  Zeno bent down to examine the readout on a squatting robot wired into a twenty foot-long ceramic tube. Calder looked over the android’s shoulder. Its contents were listed as ‘disassembler nano’ – a dark inactive gloop that, when fired into life, could tunnel through rock like a laser knife through cheese. Calder had done enough sim cop shows to know that this was one part of their cargo that warranted thorough checking. Such molecular-level machinery could be programmed to do almost anything, become almost anything. If DSD was planning something unsubtle and tricksy, the programming instructions for this nanotechnology was where they would find it.

  ‘Anything suspicious?’ asked Calder.

  ‘Nope. Exactly what it says on the tin, a mining virus. Powerful enough to level a mountain range. To go along with all the jungle clearance equipment, diggers, excavation tools, food packs and water purification gear.’

  ‘So this is a stand-up job?’

  ‘Well, if you were setting up a development company, this is the gear you’d want to buy off the shelf.’

  ‘That’s a good thing, right?’ asked Calder.

  ‘Kid, I was alive when mankind made its first extra-solar landing on Alpha Centauri. I watched on TV when mankind establish first contact with a kaggen ship. And in all that time, across all the centuries, I haven’t once seen someone like DSD change his spots. If Lana wants to believe a crook like Dollar-sign is moving into honest endeavours, then it’s because she needs to believe. Because our future is at stake. Me, I’ll just keep checking crates until I find the hidden weaponized plague that carries a death sentence for us on four out of five worlds inside the Edge.’

  A small robot swung up to Zeno, rolling across the deck like a unicycle on a single ball. He reached down and tapped it affectionately, listening to the wireless burst of data being transmitted. ‘There we go,’ said the android. ‘That’s what I was hoping for.’

  ‘You’ve discovered a crate of nukes?’

  ‘Nope, your most noble highness. I’ve scored me a capsule with an atmospheric sample from the world we’re travelling to. The professor is shipping it back; along with the full spectral analysis she’s paid a very exclusive laboratory in the alliance to run for her. Extra analysis to confirm her in-situ findings.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Calder. That was a useful discovery, indeed. It wasn’t just criminals who left DNA prints; worlds did too, as long as they had been visited by a survey ship, however briefly.

  ‘I’m going to make a call to a contact of mine in the local Colonial Office,’ said Zeno. ‘See if we can’t find a little more about this Abracadabra before we turn up in orbit.’

  ‘What about the professor?’ said Calder. ‘She’s meant to be arriving soon. And there’s still the delivery from the shipyard . . .’

  The android waved away Calder’s concerns as he hitched a lift on the back of a passing cargo droid. ‘That’s why they pay you the big bucks, your highness.’ He disappeared among the waiting piles of freight.

  Calder snorted. The crew might have saved my life, but if I’ve collected a pay cheque yet, I must have missed it. The nobleman felt a brief pang of regret, of pure homesickness. This was beginning to feel like his real life now. His world, Hesperus, might have been an icy, unforgiving environment. But it had still been home. Calder had forgotten how peculiar feeling warm all the time was. Standing on ground where the wind didn’t hurry along ice particles as a fast-moving mist hugging the land. Where trees that lined the station’s promenades didn’t resemble lines of ice-covered trolls, bowed down by the weight of snow. You’re a fool, Calder Durk. You were hunted, friendless and orphaned with the death mark on your head. You can’t regret leaving, any more than you can regret living. To stay would have been to die. You owe Lana Fiveworlds your life. And perhaps a little more than that too, after Calder had proved himself to her. It was the normal course of events back home for a noblewoman to assign her suitor a number of difficult tasks to complete for him to demonstrate his worthiness. Of course, it was the political fallout of Calder’s at
tempt to prove his worth on Hesperus that had seen him fleeing largely friendless across the snowy wastes, with almost every assassin and soldier’s blade in the land turned against him. Still, what are the chances of something like that happening again?

  When the professor eventually turned up, an automated pod of a taxi carried the woman into the cargo area, mirrored gull-wing doors lifting to reveal her legs swinging out. She didn’t look much like Calder’s idea of what a dusty academic should resemble. Dark auburn hair secured by an ivory Alice band, a bright green trouser suit impeccably tailored to her lithe frame. Her pretty pale face might have appeared the same age as Calder’s on the surface, but the exiled nobleman noticed her snow-white fingernails – not the result of cosmetics, but repeated deep age re-sets. Professor Alison Sebba was an alliance patrician, all right, and the woman could have been pushing five hundred years old for all that Calder knew.

  ‘Professor Sebba?’

  ‘I am. And you must be Calder Durk,’ she smiled, an energetic voice, her aristocratic accent bubbling over with enthusiasm. ‘Don’t look so surprised. Mister Dillard sent me everything he had on the ship and crew. With only six of you on board, it made for a short read. Your file was the thinnest by far, but then Hesperus has been off the grid for a very long time.’

  Calder wasn’t sure he enjoyed being the focus of study of this venerable intelligence. There was something about those too-young blue eyes, depths hidden and dangerous and starkly at odds with her cheerful openness and perfect white smile. I must be imagining it. After being casually betrayed by the beautiful princess Calder had been betrothed to back home, he didn’t find it easy to trust anyone, especially not women.

  ‘It’s a rare thing to meet someone who’s even heard of my home world.’

  ‘I used to be an archaeologist,’ said Sebba. ‘Until the alliance develops functional time travel, collapsed civilizations are as near as we can get to seeing how pre-machine age societies worked.’

  ‘You used to dig up old bones?’

  ‘Rarely. Mostly what I dig up are obsolete file formats in the datasphere. My specialism is marketing archaeology. Studying ancient brands and working out why some still prosper lodged deeply in our current human consciousness, while others have withered and died. Why you can still buy a can of Pepsi from a vending machine on the station, while nobody drinks Coke, for instance, when the converse was more frequently the expected result.’

  ‘Because the taste of coal dust is disgusting?’ The professor had a natural prettiness; soft lines and extended eyelashes, a long distance removed from the obviously artificial perfection Calder had noted in many of the station’s females. It was easy to warm to her open, engaging manner.

  Sebba laughed. ‘You see, you make my point for me. You would be the perfect test example. Unexposed to marketing messages for the majority of your life.’

  ‘There were priests on my world,’ said Calder. ‘They had a message. Worship at our altar or burn in a tar bath.’

  ‘Ah yes, religion, the earliest meme. You are quite correct, of course. I see I shall have to study you more closely, Mister Durk. You are a wonderful breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale universe.’ She pointed towards the gaping hold of the Gravity Rose. Her relatively small exploration ship was visible loaded on one of the shuttle rails. ‘Would you be able to give me a tour of your vessel?’

  Calder indicated the supply crates being shifted by Zeno’s robots, other freight still being opened and searched. ‘Later, perhaps.’

  ‘Of course. I have inspected your ship and crew’s bona fides, it is only fair to expect a little of the same in reverse.’

  ‘Well, you are working for Dollar-sign Dillard . . .’

  ‘Working with him. Much the same as yourself and your crew, I suspect. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. My mining team is still on Abracadabra and they will be running low on supplies before I return.’

  ‘We’ll be there in good time, professor.’ Of course, that’s a fairly hollow reassurance until you give us the world’s coordinates.

  She reached out and touched his shoulder. ‘Then I shall leave you to give the supplies a very thorough going over. Considering the reputation of our mutual patron, perhaps we will both need to “satisfy” ourselves of our intentions later?’

  Calder instructed one on the robots to guide the professor to the cabin reserved for her and watched her board the ship, opening a lock inside the hold leading to the ship’s internal transport system. She had proved a lot more interesting than he had expected.

  Even if Calder’s attention hadn’t been focused on the academic’s willowy figure, it’s doubtful if he would have noticed the addition of an extra robot joining the gang of hundreds labouring inside the station’s cargo chamber. Clambering on top of one of the containers moving toward the Gravity Rose; drilling a hole large enough for a metal tentacle to slip through, whipping around inside. Searching for the perfect place to conceal the very expensive and advanced tracking device that was the highest state of technological art Alliance Intelligence allowed for its co-conspirators . . . including corporate proxies such as Pitor Skeeg and the Hyperfast Group.

  ***

  Zeno walked into the laundry. A single member of staff slouched behind the desk, the same old woman as the last time he had visited. She showed no signs of recognizing him, though, as distinctive as the robot’s golden skin must be to her eyes. That’s the trouble with fleshies, you can never tell when they’re malfunctioning or just trying to get a rise from you.

  ‘I need to use your terminal out back,’ announced Zeno.

  ‘I look like comms tech?’ said the dour-faced woman.

  ‘I’ve only got twenty-three dollars left on my phone,’ said Zeno. ‘And it’s not enough to call my uncle.’

  ‘My terminal is broken.’

  ‘You’re in luck. I’m carrying the spare parts to fix it,’ said Zeno.

  She grunted and raised the counter, without further complaint or conversation. Zeno had rattled through the same series of pass phrases on his last visit, too. He ducked through a low doorway, dozens of specialised cleaning robots ignoring his presence beyond, so narrowly designed that all they could perceive were the clothes they steamed and pressed and ironed. The laundry’s terminal fitted snug into a wall in a little office beyond the main washing chamber, old and rickety and all camouflage, right down to the little faded sheets of paper taped to it (including the passwords into its fake top-level interface). Zeno passed a minute of electronic challenge and counter challenge to get through the security protocols, and then a polymer-thin screen extruded itself from the floor, sealing Zeno off the world outside. Just him and the terminal. After the secure connection was established, Zeno pulsed across the data he had on Abracadabra’s atmospheric sample, and then settled down to wait. It took a while for the transfer to be acknowledged. That was to be expected. Zeno’s data packets were passing along a hideously expensive network of hyperspace communications relays. There was another delay for the sample to be matched against survey data from hundreds of worlds and nations in the Edge, as well as everything the alliance had from its many deep space missions. If there was an answer recorded somewhere within humanity’s almost limitless bulk of knowledge, then he would be able to find it. A silhouette formed on the screen, a male voice scratching out of the terminal’s speakers, its tenor faintly distorted by the tachyon signal bouncing through an impossibly expensive relay of wormholes and comms satellites.

  ‘So, you are leaving Transference Station so quickly? I had thought it would take you a while longer to secure a new contract.’

  ‘That sample was extracted from wherever it is we’re going. Running exploration cover for a deep space development company. Said company part-owned by Dollar-sign Dillard.’

  ‘DSD? That pickled old criminal. Why does this news not surprise me?’

  ‘I need a real coordinates match for that sample and any information you’ve got on the local system. So far
all I’ve got to go on is the name DSD’s given the world . . . Abracadabra.’

  ‘Abracadabra. Now you see it, now you don’t. How fitting.’

  ‘Where the hell are we heading?’ asked Zeno.

  ‘Into trouble, android,’ said the silhouette. ‘Trouble as deep as the space in which you are being paid to venture. I would advise you not to accept this commission.’

  ‘Shizzle, I could have told you that. But Lana’s convinced…’

  ‘No, she’s merely desperate. The economics of the Edge are in flux.’

  ‘The whole galaxy’s been in flux since my metal ass was manufactured, far as I can see it. Change is the only constant. You need to throw me a bone here.’

  ‘Change her mind, then, android.’

  ‘I can’t! Set up one of your cover companies. Get it to offer us an alternative contract that pays more.’

  ‘And then what? Another front company and another fake job after that? Lana will spot my largess and she will want to know from whose charity she has been benefiting. She will eventually trace the paper trail back to me. And then we will all be in danger of Lana remembering who she was before her memories were erased. That cannot be allowed to happen!’

  ‘I need more than being reminded of bad history. Tell me about this world. Is it uninhabited?’

  ‘I hope so, for the crew’s sake.’

  ‘Can’t you give me one straight answer? What the shizzle are you saying, man?’

  ‘What I am telling you is that merely knowing about this world is enough to get you killed if the wrong people find out you are travelling there. And in this matter, there are very few right people.’

  ‘Ignorance is going to get us capped just as easily.’

  ‘Really, and I was under the impression that you were trying to die? Such an inconvenience that your kind are programmed never to commit suicide or allow humanity to do the job for you.’