InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Provisional, sir?”

  “Don’t worry. No matter what I do, the formalities always take way too long.” His eyes narrowed. “Or is another shoe waiting to drop?”

  Carl was again tempted. He still had Robyn Tanaka’s cosmic ultra-encrypted briefing file about the Interveners. He was sitting one-on-one with the chief of the whole damned Agency! Of course the man had cosmic ultra capability.

  Uh-huh. And that path, if Carl should go down it, led to the death of another Agency operative. Maybe once Tacitus had processed more of the Intervener recordings ….

  Or not even then. The Agency director made all appointments to inquests into an agent’s death. In Danica’s case, Agnelli had assigned an Intervener mole. Had he known? Robyn’s message had warned of compromise at the highest levels of the United Planets.

  And as always at the oddest moment, the penny dropped. Of course the Charleston PD had back-burnered the Joshua Matthews disappearance. All it would have taken was an off-the-record “We can’t tell you why, and you can’t mention this” contact from someone well-placed within the Agency. Someone like Agnelli?

  “No more shoes overhead, sir. Just asking.”

  McBride, meanwhile, was letting himself out. As the door closed, Carl’s implant got a cosmic ultra ping.

  “We’re shielded in this room,” Agnelli netted.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Agnelli took a seat at the table. “Twenty years without serious trouble from the Snakes, and still you kept requesting more surveillance, more resources, stricter rules. Plenty of people here consider you alarmist.”

  People such as Carl’s immediate boss: conspicuously absent. “Yes, sir,” Carl repeated.

  “The thing is, my statistics gurus concur with your assessment. Reading between the lines of your former deputy’s recent reports, something is not quite right on Ariel. Also, the two freighters that called on Ariel after you left are late in returning.”

  “Are you sending me back?”

  As much as Carl wanted someone watching the Snakes—above all, keeping a skeptical eye on the Foremost—it had to be someone else. But could he decline without raising suspicions? And if he were to object, would Agnelli care?

  “Back into what, Carl? That’s my question. When I do send you back, it may be with shiploads of marines.”

  “You could send in the marines now.”

  “If it comes to a military occupation, a few weeks delay won’t matter. There aren’t that many Snakes, and they’re stuck on Ariel.”

  “For the past couple of years,” Carl cautiously corrected, “they were allowed to operate some scoop ships.” Despite his urgent pleadings. “Harvesting deuterium from Uranus’s atmosphere.”

  “A few scoop ships change nothing. Even if they were stupid enough to grab the overdue freighters. Hell, the Snakes are so rusty they lost their first two ships and crews despite all the training they were provided.”

  Carl knew when to change the subject. “Then when do you anticipate sending me back?”

  “You’ll tell me when.” Agnelli leaned forward, with a flip-of-the-wrist dismissing the topic. “There’s something else to discuss. I believe you’ve met the Armstrong City station chief.”

  “Helena Strauss,” Carl netted. “Yes, she once invited me into her office.”

  “Well, she’s missing without a trace. Nothing’s been heard from her for days. No one up there admits to knowing where she might have gone.”

  “She said nothing to me.”

  “Agents checked her apartment, of course. They discovered no indications she expected to be away. They scarcely found any sign she lived there.”

  “I see.”

  “I wish I did,” Agnelli netted. “Are her people covering for her? Are they involved in something with her? I need to know. I need an outsider to take a look.” Added with a flash of pique, “To judge from the progress we’re not making with the Tanaka Astor assassination, I could use a lot of fresh talent.”

  Nor would they make progress, not with an Intervener-penetrated agency investigating an Intervener murder. He could—

  Uh-uh. No way. Getting himself assigned to that investigation would mean someone else looking into Helena’s disappearance. Carl couldn’t take that risk.

  “I understand, sir.” I understand that a person did not get more outside than by spending his past two decades around Uranus.

  “That station needs someone senior—ASAP!—to fill in, to direct the search for Agent Strauss. You want somewhere off Earth to work while assessing the ambiguous situation on Ariel. The Loonie staff might grumble because none of them got the gig, but no one will question your temporary assignment.”

  “No, sir.” And with the resources of a major Agency field office, he might make faster progress on his own investigation. If his new team didn’t arrest him ….

  “And Carl?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Find Helena Strauss. Whether she’s been abducted or killed or has chosen to disappear, something on the Moon is very wrong.”

  • • • •

  Back on the Moon, Carl soon found he had taken on three jobs: divination, from a very great distance, of Snake scheming. Guiding, and when necessary, misguiding, the expanding investigation into Helena Strauss’s disappearance. Overseeing routine ops of fifty-two agents, almost a third of them AIs, involved in everything from infiltrating gun-runners to battling interplanetary drug cartels, from offering logistical support on pirate hunts (most of the presumed hijacked ships having disappeared far out-system) to investigating a massive, possibly longstanding network penetration on Farside. (If that breach turned out, as Carl half expected, to be illicit AI enhancement, it would be only a Class I violation. Still, any hint of AI runaway was taken seriously—not that he could do much beyond assign AI agents to investigate. It took an AI to catch any AI, much less a rogue.) The silver lining of his massive overload was that no one questioned the crazy long hours he worked—

  And that was fortunate. It helped to cover the few hours he squeezed in for his fourth job: making sense of the Interveners. Joshua, bless him, had fled the alien base with pocketfuls of downloaded data.

  About a tiny subset of that data, sanitized by Joyce, the unsuspecting lip-reading linguist camped outside Carl’s office was eager to talk.

  He motioned her in.

  “It’s very curious, sir,” Faith Horowitz began. She was a recent hire, young and earnest, pretty in a quiet way.

  “Close the door and sit,” he told her.

  “Curious,” she repeated. “Where did you get this vid clip?”

  “That’s need-to-know information.”

  “And the other side of the conversation?”

  That was really need-to-know. Joyce had edited out the medusoid alien, and not merely because of the lack of visible lips to be read. “Sorry.”

  “Hmm,” Faith said.

  “I can tell you this much. The woman”—Grace DiMeara—“was ship’s pilot on a recent flight to Ariel. As far as anyone knows, she is a native English speaker.”

  “Well, I can tell you this much. Your pilot is a linguist.”

  “Because she bothered to learn another language?” With neural implants handling routine translations, and AI specialists for hire to translate the obscure languages lesser software could not manage, few people bothered.

  “No,” Faith said. “Because she learned Basque.”

  “What’s Basque?”

  Straightening in her chair, Faith struck a pedantic pose. “The longest surviving pre-Indo-European language of Western Europe. The Basque region straddles the Pyrenees Mountains.”

  “Take pity on an old spacer.”

  “The border region between the onetime European nation-states of France and Spain.”

  He had heard of those. “Thank you. Proceed.”

  “Linguists classify Basque as an isolate, unrelated to any of the language groups spoken nearby. French and Spanish, for example, are Romance languages, d
erived from the Vulgar Latin. Basque, in contrast, was—”

  “Was?”

  “Was. Apart from historians and linguists, I don’t know that Basque has been spoken in a century or more. You said native English speaker. Where is the subject from?”

  “North America,” Carl said. Grace’s records—swept up among the records of everyone who had visited Ariel in the past standard year—had provided a succession of addresses across that continent. Carl had Agency people on Earth checking out her former residences. “When not off-world, of course.”

  “Hmm.”

  “So: what does our linguist pilot have on her mind?”

  “Hard to say.” Faith squirmed in her seat. “I’m waiting to hear back from the experts.”

  “Aren’t you the expert?”

  “On dead languages? I wish. Much less …”

  “Much less what, Faith?”

  “I’ve analyzed enough lip, face, and tongue activity to be confident that I’ve identified the language, but the match nonetheless is inexact. Your pilot isn’t speaking quite like any extant recording.”

  “You mean she has a lisp? A speech impediment?” On Ariel, Carl had spent the better part of an hour chatting with Grace. He hadn’t heard a trace of either. “Maybe she has an atrocious accent.”

  Faith hesitated. “Languages change with time. Pronunciations, as well. The thing is, before audio recording any estimate as to the rate of such shifts is quite speculative …”

  Before recording? But Thomas Edison (quick Internetopedia look-up) invented the phonograph cylinder in 1878. More than three centuries ago! “Go ahead. Speculate.”

  Faith said, “How this could be so, much less why, eludes me—but you asked. In my best professional judgment, your Basque-speaking spaceship pilot speaks a sixteenth-century dialect.”

  CHAPTER 36

  In the time Joshua took to reheat a mug of coffee, Tacitus had been to Earth, shopped, integrated his purchase, and returned to the Moon.

  Joshua found it a very long minute.

  “That’s the way to travel.” Tacitus netted, announcing his arrival. His avatar, perhaps channeling Mercury, sported winged sandals. “And it seems I’d have been here milliseconds earlier, except for the virus de jour. I got rerouted around two quarantined comsats.”

  Milliseconds. Poor baby. “You were discreet, I trust,” Joshua replied.

  “Who is going to question an historian’s interest in old languages? And to avoid drawing attention to Basque, I acquired information on a half dozen other extinct European languages. Would you care to chat in Etruscan or Sabine?”

  “Maybe later.” Much later. “How about lip reading?”

  “That’s trickier.” Tacitus straightened his toga. “I understand the physiological basis of speech reading. That’s the formal term, you know, not lip reading. The problem is, more than one sound may share outward facial and mouth positions, just as the letters ‘p’ and ‘b’ do in English. Other sounds are articulated deep within the throat; they don’t provide any visual cues. To a speech reader, ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope’ looks identical to ‘where’s the lavender soap.’

  “Ask me if I can speech read English, and the answer is yes. That’s because I understand English idiom, social conventions, and common turns of phrase. I can fill in some gaps and resolve from context many of the aural ambiguities. But spoken Basque? At best, my ability to read that will be spotty. And that’s apart from issues in translating into English from an old dialect of a dead language.”

  “And the Interveners?” Joshua asked, sure he knew the answer.

  “If they even have lips.” Tacitus shrugged. “Suppose we find vids that show them speaking. I still won’t understand their physiology. Until we locate audio files and Joyce figures out how Intervener anatomy produces sounds, we’re not going to know that side of any conversation.”

  They had hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of surveillance. Grandma continued to index and organize the purloined archive. Of all that vid, Joshua had spent—obsessed—the longest time on the very first archival sample he had seen: Grace DiMeara awakening two Interveners. Carl had given a snippet from that vid to his expert.

  The UPIA expert’s eventual, hesitant translation: “Welcome back, my lords.”

  Joshua linked a segment from that vid. “Can you interpret this?” he asked.

  “I have interpreted it. While we’ve chatted, I’ve already processed almost a hundred hours of surveillance vids. My disclaimers denote experience, not pessimism.” Because interacting with a mere human required the merest fraction of an AI’s attention. “Here is a vid I think you’ll find more interesting.”

  Joshua needed a second to spot the difference. This time it was Helena Strauss who genuflected before the two alien hibernation pods.

  “Okay,” Joshua netted. “What does this video say?”

  “Here is the dubbed version. Remember, we have only one side of the conversation.”

  In the vid, Helena knelt before the pods, her eyes sparkling with adoration, her lips moving. And Joshua heard (wondering how Tacitus chose the voice qualities): “Bless me with your presence, oh great ones.”

  Stepping from its pod, an alien raised a “hand,” its “fingers” spread. Perhaps it spoke; perhaps its only communication was the gesture.

  Helena prostrated herself.

  The alien made its way gracefully to a nearby keyboard. It did not walk, exactly, nor did it stride, lope, or glide. The fluid, boneless motion of its lower tentacles failed to match any verb that Joshua could retrieve. Its frenetic keystrokes evoked rapidly scrolling text—in alien characters, undecipherable—on a flat display. Reviewing what had gone on while it slept?

  “Is this playback in real time?” Joshua asked, marveling at the flood of text.

  “More or less,” Tacitus netted. “The vid is just a succession of still images, after all. I’ve approximated the playback rate from the characteristics of human speech.”

  Presented to Joshua’s mind’s eye: more typing on the alien keyboard. Then flashing screens: indecipherable text interspersed with images. Joshua recognized a starship. At the rate the images flashed past, he could not decide which ship. If Victorious, before its destruction.

  (“Terrestrial and lunar broadcasts,” Tacitus commented. “And if you wondered, that ship is Discovery.”)

  The second alien exited its alcove. Its sensor stalks tipped forward, suggestive of listening, and then it gestured to Helena to rise.

  “Welcome back, my lord,” she said.

  The first alien turned. Perhaps it spoke, because Helena cringed. “Our people have sinned,” she admitted.

  (“I infer from body language that she spoke in a low voice,” Tacitus commented.)

  Then, maddeningly, perhaps triggered by the wriggling of fingers/tentacles, the camera zoomed in on just one alien. Were its motions sign language? Joshua wondered. Fidgeting? Some alien mannerism that he could not imagine?

  Whatever the reason, the view remained off Helena and without narration for more than a minute.

  When their viewpoint switched back, Helena cowered lower than ever. “We should not wander,” she whispered.

  To other star systems, Joshua took that.

  Their view returned for a long while to the alien.

  When Helena reappeared to them, her face was ashen, her eyes downcast. “Do not forsake your children. Give”—pause—“chance to work this out, my lord.”

  (“She was muttering,” Tacitus commented. “I can’t interpret that bit.”)

  Several more seconds of the alien silence: eerie.

  “The Xool are wise. Let my lords be merciful, too,” Helena pleaded.

  “Xool?” Joshua asked.

  “Not a Basque word, as far as I know,” Tacitus netted. “From context, that’s the Interveners’ name for themselves.”

  “Be merciful?” What if they weren’t? These beings had shaped the destinies of worlds! “As in, don’t do what?”


  Tacitus had no answer.

  “Your humble servants will stop the starship,” Helena continued. Seconds later, reacting to something not in view, she straightened just a bit. Her voice firmed. “Thank you, my lords.”

  “Pause,” Joshua netted. The playback froze. “There’s a sixteenth-century Basque word for starship?”

  “That word was in modern English,” Tacitus conceded, “nor was it the first instance in the recordings of non-Basque interjections. English tech terms crop up often.”

  “But why target Discovery? It isn’t the first.”

  “True, but Harmony become Victorious was hijacked, and then it got blown up. As for New Beginnings, it’s long out of contact.”

  “Are you suggesting the Xool got to one or both of them?”

  “Can you say for certain that they or their saboteurs didn’t?”

  “No,” Joshua admitted.

  In the case of Harmony, they might never know. As for New Beginnings, it would be years reaching comm range of Alpha Centauri. When it did get close enough, any report relayed by the Centaurs would take more years to reach the Solar System.

  If it got close enough.

  “Enough with the rampant speculation.” Because Joshua felt his head was about to explode. “Let’s stick closer to the hard data.”

  Such as that Grace DiMeara appeared in the alien vids and flew Corinne to Discovery. Such as that Corinne’s regular pilot took ill without warning—just as Joshua had, when the Xool set out to disappear and discredit him.

  He shivered. Helena’s promise had been unambiguous. Your humble servants will stop the starship.

  • • • •

  Joshua yawned. He rubbed his eyes. His med chip yet again scolded him, this time about twenty-six hours without sleep; he banished the nagging from his mind’s ear. In the half-full glass by his side the soda had gone flat and tepid, but he swigged it anyway for the caffeine. Another jolt of meds would be two too many.

  Perhaps the med chip had a point.

  “Where is my grandmother?” he netted Tacitus.