Josep reached one of the unoccupied bays and moved forward. Just to the side of the massive sliding doors at the front was a smaller door. He reached it and put his palm on the sensor plate. The lock buzzed, and he pushed it open.
Twenty meters away, the sculpted nose of a Xianti pointed at the maintenance hangar. Solar cones shone far overhead, glinting off the pearl-white carbon-lithium composite fuselage. There was a service truck parked on either side of the spaceplane, with hoses plugged into various umbilical sockets along the underbelly. An airstair led up to the forward airlock.
Josep walked over the tarmac, concentrating more on the icons being relayed from the spaceport network than his eyesight. Four cameras covered the spaceplane. His Prime had infiltrated each one, eliminating his image from the feed to Z-B's AS. Three rings of sensors were arranged concentrically around the sleek machine. None of them registered his presence as he walked across them. No Skins were within five hundred meters.
The airstairs were protected by both a voiceprint codeword and a biosensor that registered his blood vessel and bone patterns. It was an effective security device, but only ever as good as the patterns that were loaded into the system's e-alpha fortress. Josep's codeword and body map corresponded to one of those on file, and the airstair door slid open. He took the steps two at a time. The airlock at the top had a simple manual latch. Pull and turn.
Secondary lighting came on, illuminating the small cabin with an emerald glow. This Xianti was one of the cargo variants. Its cabin was cramped, with minimum facilities and room for up to five seats for the systems officer and payload managers. At the moment there were only two bolted to the floor, with the brackets for the others covered in plastic sleeves. Josep went forward and sat in the pilot's seat. The curved console in front of him was surprisingly compact, with three holographic panes angling up out of it. The two narrow windshields allowed him to see down the length of the nose, but showed very little else. He could understand that. Technically there was no need for any controls or windshields at all. The human pilot would always be fitted with a DNI. And that was only used for efficient communication with the AS pilot, which really controlled the spaceplane. The console and its displays were emergency fallbacks, although many people preferred pane graphics to the indigo icons of DNI. Windshields were there purely for the psychology.
Josep took a standard powered Allen key out of his belt pouch and hunched down in the seat to examine the base of the console. There were several inspection panels underneath. He opened two of them and found what he was looking for. The neurotronic pearls that housed the AS were sealed units buried deep in a service module, but they still had to be connected to the spaceplane systems. He wormed his dragon-extruded desktop pearl into the narrow gap toward the fiberoptic junction, and waited while the little unit morphed itself, extending needle probes into the unit. Prime flooded in.
They might have managed to infiltrate a spaceplane AS pilot through a satellite relay, but the risk of detection was too great. It was a single channel, easily monitored for abnormalities by secure AS's on the starships. Either they attempted to take over every Z-B AS, or they established a direct physical link. The first option wasn't even considered.
The dataflow reversed, dumping the entire AS pilot program into the desktop pearl. They would examine it later, learning the minutiae of ground-to-orbit flight in the strange vehicle. Its communications traffic. Docking procedures. When the time came, Zantiu-Braun would never know that someone and something else was on board until it was far too late.
The desktop pearl card informed Josep that it had copied the entire AS. Prime began to withdraw from the space-plane's pearls, erasing all evidence of its invasion. Needle probes slid out of the fiberoptic junction and melted back into the casing. Josep replaced the panel and tightened it up.
Despite all his preparation, planning and caution, the one thing they all accepted was that there could be no protection against chance.
Josep had already opened the secure door at the bottom of the airstair when his relay from the cameras around the parking apron showed him a man emerging from the maintenance hangar. He was dressed in the loose navy-blue coveralls worn by all the spaceport's engineering maintenance staff. Prime immediately ran identification routines. Dudley Tivon, aged thirty-seven, married, one child, employed by the spaceport for eight years, promoted last year to assistant supervisor, fully qualified on Galaxycruiser hydraulics. He didn't have DNI, but his bracelet pearl was on standby, connected into the spaceport network. Prime moved into the communication circuit, blocking his contact with the data-pool.
There was a moment when Josep could have ducked down behind the airstair, out of Dudley Tivon's sight. But that was an unknown risk. He didn't know what direction Dudley Tivon would walk, or how long he would be milling round outside. Every second spent crouched down was a second of exposure to anyone else who came along from a different direction. There were three Skins currently in the vicinity.
Instead he walked straight for Dudley Tivon. That reduced the outcome to two possibles. Either Dudley Tivon would assume he was just another night-shift worker going about his business, and do nothing. Being seen didn't concern Josep. So far his visitation had left no traces. Z-B didn't even know they had to look for evidence of anyone penetrating their security. Or Dudley Tivon would question what he was doing. In which case...
For a few seconds, as he drew close, Josep thought he'd got away with it. Then Dudley Tivon's pace slowed to a halt. He frowned, looking first at Josep, then back to the foreign spaceplane.
Prime in the surrounding cameras immediately began generating a false image, showing four different viewpoints of Dudley Tivon walking on uninterrupted across the parking apron.
"What are you doing?" Dudley Tivon asked as Josep drew level.
Josep smiled, nodding at the hangar. "Gotta get over to bay seven, Chief."
"You came out of that spaceplane."
"What?"
"How the hell did you get in it? You're not from Z-B. Those things are wired up eight ways from Sunday. What were you doing in there?" Dudley Tivon began to raise the arm on which he wore his bracelet pearl.
Information trawled from the datapool came into Josep's mind. Dudley Tivon's wife had been fitted with a collateral collar.
The assistant supervisor was making an issue of seeing where Josep had emerged, and he could never allow acts of sabotage or dissent against Z-B. It might well be his wife's collar that was activated in retaliation.
"I was just—" Josep's right arm shot out, stiffened fingers slamming into Dudley Tivon's Adam's apple. The man's neck snapped from the force of the blow. His body lurched back, but Josep was already following it. He caught the limp figure as it collapsed and lifted it effortlessly over his shoulder.
The Skins were still out of sight. Nobody else was outside the maintenance hangar. Josep jogged quickly to the door he'd used on his approach to the spaceplane and slipped through.
There was an office fifteen meters away from the door, shut for the night. He reached it in five seconds, bundled the corpse inside, then checked to see if anyone had noticed. Neither the maintenance crews nor Skins had reacted, and no alarms were screaming into the datapool.
They even had a contingency for an incident like this. Priority had to be given to getting the body out of the spaceport for disposal. No suspicion must be attached to the area.
Josep called up a menu for cargo robots currently in the maintenance hangar.
Camera feeds outside continued to show Dudley Tivon walking across the parking apron. He opened a door into the neighboring hangar and disappeared inside.
* * *
"After eight years of flight, Mozark had traveled halfway around the Ring Empire, stopping at over a hundred star systems to explore and learn what he could in the hope of inspiration. He could no longer see his own kingdom; that little cluster of stars was lost from sight behind the massive blaze of gold, scarlet and dawn-purple light that was the co
re. Few of his kind had ever ventured into this part of the Ring Empire, yet he felt comfortable amid the races and cultures inhabiting this section of the galaxy.
"Mozark might not have seen any of these species before, but everywhere he traveled he was able to communicate with his new hosts and eventually able to learn their separate philosophies and interests and goals and dreams. In many ways this heartened him, that he had so many ideas at his disposal, all of which he was eventually able to understand. Some he regarded as magnificent, and he looked forward to introducing them to the kingdom when he returned home. Some were simply so alien that they could never be adopted or used by his own kind, although they remained interesting on a purely intellectual level. While some were too hideous or frightening even to speak of."
Edmund immediately stuck his hand up, as Denise knew he would.
"Yes, Edmund?" she asked.
"Please, miss, what were they?"
"The hideous and frightening ideas?"
"Yes!"
"I don't know, Edmund. Why do you want to know?"
"Coz he's horrible!" Melanie shouted. The other children laughed, giggling and pointing at the beleaguered boy. Edmund stuck his tongue out at Melanie.
"Enough," Denise told them, waiting until they'd quietened down again. "Today's story is all about the time when Mozark meets the Outbounds. Now this wasn't a single race: like the Last Church, the Outbounds attracted a great many people to their cause. In many ways they were the opposite of the Last Church. The Outbounds were building starships. Not just the ordinary ones that the Ring Empire used for trade and travel and exploration. These were intergalactic starships." She gave the children a knowing look as they ooohed with wonder. "The greatest machines the technology of the Ring Empire could devise. They were the largest, fastest, most powerful and sophisticated ships that this galaxy has ever known. The effort to build them was immense; the Outbounds had taken over an entire solar system to serve as a construction center. Only a star with all of its circling planets could provide them with the resources necessary. Mozark spent a month there, flying his own small ship around all the facilities, playing tourist amid these tremendous cathedrals of engineering. The Outbounds proudly told him of the ocean-sized converter disks that they'd dropped into the star, where they'd sunk down to the inner layers to settle amid the most intense fusion process to be found within the interior. That was the only place to generate sufficient energy to power the tens of thousands of industrial bases operating through the system. Behemoths in their own right, these bases were partially mobile, allowing them to swallow medium-sized asteroids in their entirety. The rocks were digested and separated into their constituent minerals, which were then fed into refinery towers. Biomechanical freighters that only operated in-system would collect the finished products and ferry them to manufacturing facilities where they would be fabricated into components for the starships.
"The shipyards they were built in were the size of a small moon. Each individual intergalactic ship was miles long, with silver-and-blue hypermorphic hulls that would gather up every speck of starlight falling on their spinshifted molecules and radiate it away again in a uniform coronal shimmer. When they were parked in orbit, they were smooth and egg-shaped. Then, when their engines came alive, flinging them into the nullvoid at hundreds of times the speed of light, they would instantly convert themselves into sleek rapiers sprouting long, aggressive forward-swept tail fins. It was as though the nullvoid where they now traveled possessed an atmosphere of elementary photons through which only their metasonic profile would fly.
"Mozark, of course, was enthused by the whole project. The Outbounds were the Ring Empire's final and greatest pioneers. The intergalactic ships were taking colonists to other galaxies. New empires would be born out there on the other side of the deep night. That would be a wondrous future flowering out there amid the unknown, replete with challenges and struggle. Life would not be smooth and complacent as it was amid the Ring Empire.
"He watched the ordinary passenger starships dock, bringing the tens of thousands of colonists who were searching for a new life for themselves and their descendants. They had come from kingdoms right across the neighboring section of the Ring Empire, hundreds of different species united by wanderlust. The first time he saw an intergalactic ship launch itself into nullvoid he felt nothing but envy. They were his soulmates, and he was being left behind. But such was his duty; he had to return home to his own kingdom. There and then, with his own ship still floundering for stability in the energy backwash of the intergalactic ship's drive, he wanted to bring word of this enormous venture back to his people. He envisaged the kingdom's resources being turned over to a similar project, carrying them all on a magnificent voyage to the future. It was only after the massive ship had vanished from his sensors that doubts and disillusionment began to creep into his thoughts. He had undertaken this quest voyage to find something that would benefit and inspire all of his people. Yet how many of them, he wondered, would really want to discard everything they had and gamble on a wild trip into uncharted reaches of the universe? Many would: millions, perhaps hundreds of millions. But his kingdom was home to billions of people, all of them leading a relatively happy existence. Why should he make them abandon that? What right could he possibly have to tear them away from the worlds and society they had built, and which served them so well?
"That was when he finally began to understand himself and his own dissatisfaction. Looking out of his own ship at its proud, giant cousins orbiting a nameless barren Out-bounds planet he now saw only a difference in scale. Both he and the colonists were prepared to fly away into the unknown in order to find what they hoped would be a worthwhile life. They were probably braver than he, taking a bigger chance with what they would find and where they would end up. But for them it would be the flight itself that was the accomplishment. When they reached that far shore, they would have every ability and material advantage at their disposal that they had in the Ring Empire itself. There were no new ideas waiting for them out there, only space that was—one hoped—a little less crowded. They were taking the primary Ring Empire culture with them in the form of the technology and data that were their heritage. Just as the similarity that pervaded the Ring Empire was due to its monoknowledge base, so these fledgling seeds would sprout identical shoots. If anything, he decided, the colonists weren't as brave as he was: they were just running away. At least he was trying to help his people back in the kingdom."
Denise stopped, conscious of the way the children were regarding her with faintly troubled expressions. One or two of them were even resentful and impatient, picking at the blades of grass and throwing the occasional wistful glance out at the white town beyond the wall. This was no longer the story they thought it was going to be, a quest with terrible hardships to overcome and monsters to battle. All they were hearing was how Mozark kept turning his nose up at wonders and sights beyond anything they would ever know. A fine hero he made.
She rebuked herself for losing sight of whom she was telling this to and gathered up her memories of the story. There was much that she could discard: shorn of its abstracts and philosophizing, it could still be made to work for them.
"So when he was standing there in his starship, thinking all these thoughts about the Outbounds and the Last Church, and The City, and even the Mordiff, Mozark suddenly knew what he had to do."
"What?" one of the girls asked avidly.
"He had to go home," Denise said. "Because he knew then what he was going to say to Endoliyn, the thing he was going to devote the rest of his life to."
"What!" the chorus was yelled at her.
"It's a beautiful day," Denise said with a mischievous laugh. "You should be out there playing and enjoying it I'll tell you what happened when Mozark returned to his kingdom soon."
"Now!"
"No. I said soon."
"Tomorrow, then."
"Possibly. If you're good."
They promised her they were and
would always be.
She let them scatter and fling themselves about on the school's small, protected lawn. There was no need for her to check her big old watch; she knew what the time was. The goodwill soccer game was about to start.
Clusters of d-written neural cells connected Denise with Memu Bay's datapool. Several reporters were covering the game—not that there was much interest. Public access figures for the game were minimal. They were already lining their cameras up on the pitch, bringing the two teams into focus as they went through their prematch kickabout routines.
Lawrence stopped the ball firmly and tapped it with the inside of his right foot. It bobbled along the ground, rolling to a halt a couple of meters away from Hal, who gave him a disgusted look. The maneuver was supposed to be a deft pass, landing just so for Hal to kick into the defenders' goal area.
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