Now Billy became aware of pausing to think about this section, and how it fit into his frustration in getting certain information out of Tobek. Finally returning to the words on the page, he read on. It was a lot of technical information, and he couldn’t understand much of it. On the next page, Tobek wrote, “I was peering through the scope into the strange, silvery beam of moonlight when suddenly it became agitated, and tried to elude my ability to look at it. When I noticed this, I increased the magnascope’s power, which I’d turned down because of the close proximity of the target. With the magnification suddenly increased, I saw an immense horde of tiny creatures inside the beam of light—microscopic creatures of sparkling silver light.
“Even more improbably, the silvery creatures had jagged-featured faces, frighteningly so, and seemed to be both individual and collective entities, at times jumping around on their own and on other occasions moving en masse with their companions, as if they had a single, linked mind. They are the ugliest, most fearsome things I’ve ever seen, and there are decillions and decillions of them, so many as to make counting impractical.
“While I was observing the creatures close-up, they continued to realize I was intruding, and went into a frenzy of disturbed activity. They formed into a large, dark conglomeration that blocked the illumination of the moon, and then streamed toward me at a very high rate of speed. Before I could react, they vanished, and the light coming from the moon looked entirely normal again, with a moonbeam that was softer, and not metallic.
“Everything I have described is, of course, an utter scientific impossibility. And yet, it is an honest account of what I saw, and what happened.”
In the pages of the journal a time lapse ensued, and then the entries resumed six days later, when Tobek wrote in his compact handwriting: “The strange creatures of light have penetrated my ship. They are on board. Upon discovering this, I took certain steps they didn’t anticipate, and managed to trap them, an entire colony of them. Now I am beginning to construct a device to destroy them.”
Tobek had not provided details of how he had trapped the creatures or where they were kept, or what he meant by a device to destroy them, or why he wanted to eliminate them. Was that what he’d been working on in the laboratory when he died? The unfinished, mysterious object that still sat on the laboratory table?
Billy looked back at the journal pages, read a passage in which Tobek wrote, “These silvery creatures—’space devils,’ I’ve started calling them—do not like being confined, and I fear I’ve sent them into a dangerous fury. I’m still able to prevent them from escaping, and can observe them scientifically, and perform experiments on them. In the process, though, I’ve learned some very unsettling facts, some very dangerous facts. My intervention has adversely affected the space devils, to such an extent that they can never be allowed to escape. If they were to ever get away, the consequences would certainly be catastrophic.”
This must be the potential disaster Tobek had spoken of, but details were lacking, in paragraph after paragraph that touched on the subject and warned about it, but without explanation. It was frustrating.
A shiver ran down Billy’s spine. There had been strange silver flashes around Tobek when he died, so the creatures had killed him. And Billy had seen a faint, silvery glimmer outside the bio-lock after he retrieved the journals from the sealed laboratory. It suggested that the creatures had, in fact, escaped from the laboratory.
And if so, had the creatures also escaped from Skyship, or were they still on board? Were they the source of the terrible danger that Tobek said would occur if Skyship were ever destroyed?
It seemed possible, even probable.
Another journal entry followed, from the late inventor: “I intend to annihilate the nasty little devils, every last one of them. It is the only way to assure the safety of Skyship, the biosphere, and AmEarth itself.”
The known facts were accumulating.
Billy thought back, to the first time he’d heard a warning from Tobek about the disastrous result if Skyship were ever destroyed, how it would wipe out the atmosphere and virtually all life on the planet. The warning had come fourteen years ago, and three years later—after Tobek died in his secret laboratory—Billy had passed the general warning on to political leaders throughout the AmEarth Empire, without ever understanding it.
It must have something to do with the creatures....
Anxiously, Billy flipped through pages, looking for more entries about the mysterious space devils. There were several sections (written over a period of years) documenting Tobek’s efforts to destroy the creatures, through radiation, subzero or thermogenic temperatures, hyperbaric pressure, lasers, and other methods. But all efforts failed, and only succeeded in making the creatures more unstable and hyperactive. Only days before Tobek’s death, he made his last entry about them: “I can no longer conduct any form of experiment on the space devils, and I’m barely able to keep them confined. I fear they are evolving as they constantly seek escape, becoming stronger and more angry... and more dangerous.”
Now Billy Jeeling wished he didn’t know as much as he did. The space devils had killed Tobek, and were the reason for his dire warning.
But where were they at this moment? Somewhere on Skyship, not having found a way to escape yet? He hoped they had gotten away into space, and could not really cause any more harm. If they had already gone, maybe Tobek’s warning of catastrophe would never come to pass... and could never come to pass.
He didn’t like having more questions and worries after reading the journals, instead of the answers he so desperately sought. His pile of accumulated troubles had just become larger, substantially larger.
All the while, Skyship continued to go about its rounds over the densely populated planet, cleansing the atmosphere and dispatching skyminers. Nothing had blown up. To any observer other than Billy Jeeling, everything seemed to be precisely as it should be, with the flight characteristics and atmospheric repair features of the immense vessel working perfectly....
CHAPTER 23
Anger is a double-edged sword.
Often, it is a very bad thing.
But used properly, it can have a beneficial effect.
—E. Bert Rhinbar, wandering philosopher during the Final Sweep, the climactic military assaults that unified the AmEarth Empire
Maureen had never been so angry. She was only an hour off the shuttle from Skyship, and had come straight here to Racker Center, the tallest building that had ever been built.
Without asking for an appointment or even knocking, she tapped the code on the keypad, and burst into Jonathan Racker’s top-level office. He sat at his desk, reading a document. Startled, he looked up.
“Did you know that Moore was sending us on a suicide mission?” she demanded.
She noticed that the old industrialist had tears in his eyes, and saw an unframed picture of Paul Paulo lying on the desk, beside whatever he had been reading. Somehow he had already learned that his old comrade was dead. The guardsmen who returned with her must have gotten a quick message over to him.
He wiped his eyes, and a flash of anger crossed his creased face. His flinty eyes glinted. “Do you think I would send my best friend on a suicide mission?” he asked, pointing at the picture of Paulo. “I’d as soon die myself before doing anything like that.”
“Well I might as well have been sent with a suicide vest on, and Paul, too—to blow us both to hell. We were expendable, and you knew nothing about it? Nothing?”
He shook his head sadly.
“Well neither did I, and neither did Paul. After he was killed, the Jeelings put me through a rigorous truthbot interrogation. I passed with flying colors.” She scowled as she slipped, uninvited, into a chair fronting his desk.
He didn’t object, even gestured belatedly with a welcoming hand. “I’m very glad you’re safe,” he said.
“Where is that son-of-a-bitch Moore? He needs to be fired, and put in prison.”
“Believe me
, I’d get rid of him if I could. I was actually trying to reach him for days, to discuss several matters, even before I learned about what happened to your peace mission to Skyship. And to Paul.”
“Peace mission.” She scoffed. “Thanks to our rogue General, there was nothing peaceful about it.”
“I just sent Moore another message half an hour ago, demanding information on what happened. I haven’t seen the General since you left. He’s been spending a lot of time with his troops. There are rumors flying around, about what he’s been up to.”
“What sort of rumors? Not a military coup?”
“No, at least I hope not. I’ve heard that he’s been setting up a contingency plan in case your ‘peace’ delegation failed, a new full-scale military attack against Jeeling. Remember, we all talked about that as a backup plan? And you thought of the peace delegation idea, to slow him down?”
“But we can’t attack Skyship in force! It could destroy the air-purification technology, and we can’t afford to lose it! And the problem of the chain reaction that could be set off in the atmosphere.”
“I understand all that. But you know how General Moore is.”
“Too much testosterone,” she said. “But he could be right that the chain reaction story is only a bluff by Billy. Maybe he just put it out there as a defensive measure.”
“Could be,” Racker said, “but a lot is at stake if Moore is wrong. In my last message I reminded him that he needs my approval before doing anything like a military attack.” His eyes misted over. “And Paul Paulo’s approval was required, too, but that’s not possible now.”
“I’d like to strangle the General,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” Racker said. “There’s something coming in from him now!” The old man tapped a button on his desktop, and a hologram of General Moore floated on one side of the desk. “Can’t see you now,” the officer said, in the eerie projection. “Sorry, but I’m much too busy.”
Maureen sputtered, “Why did you set us up, you bastard?”
General Moore might not have heard this, because suddenly his visage disappeared, leaving only the words “Connection Terminated” in the air, before it all faded, like smoke in the sky.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked. “What can we do?”
“I’ll contact intermediaries, see if we can get him to come to a meeting with us.”
“Intermediaries? Isn’t he supposed to be our close ally?”
“That changed when he pulled his little trick, without approval, and when he got my best friend killed. Even if we can convince him to attend a meeting, that’s no guarantee we’ll ever get him to change his ways.”
“He should be arrested and put on trial!”
“I’ll suggest both to Prime Minister Yhatt. The problem is, I’m afraid that Moore is too powerful now, maybe even more powerful than our Prime Minister. Whatever Moore wants to do, I don’t see how he can be stopped.”
“He’s gone completely renegade.”
“Sure looks that way to me.” Racker slammed a fist on his desktop. His facial expression softened, saddened. “I need to be alone for a while,” he said.
She rose to her feet. “I understand.” She turned and left, feeling betrayed, deeply angry, and frustrated.
CHAPTER 24
When I was building robots with human imprints, I discovered that the mind of the human female is infinitely more interesting than its male counterpart. The female has far more intricate and intriguing passageways in the brain, many of which are linked to the complex workings of her reproductive system.
—From the Jeeling Diaries
A day had passed since Devv assaulted her, and Sonya had been suffering ever since, but not much from the bruises on her face. Instead, it was from a very peculiar internal problem that resulted from the blows, a brain injury she hadn’t even known was possible. She didn’t know what to call it, but she had it nonetheless, whatever it was. She hadn’t slept a moment since the incident, and was having a lot of trouble organizing her thoughts.
She paced back and forth in her apartment, praying for the trouble to go away. She paused in front of a large simulated window that bore an authentic image projected from outside—the morning sun was shining brightly, and she should be starting her day cheerfully, but it wasn’t like that now. She wanted to scream, yet held it back, not wanting to call attention to herself.
The mindwave unit implanted in her brain was acting up from the hard blows she’d taken, mostly from the second one to the forehead, because it was after he hit her there that she started having troubles. The unit was freaking out this morning, shooting loud static noises into her head and generating undesired pop-up VR-bubbles in front of her eyes, with fuzzy, overlapping images inside them, accompanied by the sound fragments of multiple, simultaneous conversations. It was maddening, as if she was picking up audio and visual signals from everyone nearby, all at once.
Sonya had not been able to eat, sleep, or work since Devv assaulted her, and she had asked a neighbor to tell her manager—Lainey Forster—that Devv had hit her a couple of times during an argument, and that she was going to rest in bed for a while, until she felt well enough to go back to work. The neighbor, Bett Jacoby, had been able to see the bruises on her face, but not the worst of it, inside her head—and the VR displays were apparently not visible to Bett, nor could she hear the non-stop static and chatter inside Sonya’s head, because she said nothing about such things either. Without providing details on the complicated mess inside her mind, Sonya had emphasized to her neighbor that it was nothing serious, and that she would report to work when she could. Then, after only spending a few minutes with Bett, Sonya had asked to be alone.
But the effort to recuperate on her own was not working. Sonya was feeling worse and worse with each passing hour.
And she was experiencing something else, in addition to the other, continuing problems. Increasingly sharp lances of pain had been stabbing intermittently into her brain, as if someone was jabbing long needles into her head. She hadn’t felt this for a couple of minutes, though, which gave her a modicum of relief, but not from the overlapping images and sounds, which had continued unabated since the injury, preventing sleep and keeping her from concentrating.
Suddenly an extremely sharp pain penetrated the middle of her brain, worse than any of the previous ones. She cried out, but put a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. Sonya didn’t want anyone to hear her suffering, didn’t want anyone to know what she was going through.
And this was more than a personal matter, far more.
She could not go to a doctor on Skyship and have the mindwave implant removed, or her cover might be blown, if the doctor discovered it was a non-standard unit. This implant wasn’t like anything normal people had in their heads. It was a high-tech military unit, enabling her to communicate with her superiors over a private, ultra-secure frequency. Except now it didn’t seem so secure, and she didn’t know what she was hearing or seeing, whether they were actually signals from nearby people, or whether it was military conversations, coming all the way from General Moore’s headquarters on AmEarth. Whatever it was, she couldn’t understand any of the conversations, and couldn’t identify the images, not even whether they were military or civilian.
Her name was not Sonya Orr; it was Sonya Roméo, and she was one of the General’s operatives, assigned to work on Skyship and collect information for him. She was, in fact, the married younger sister of General Rivington Moore VIII, and was herself a full colonel in the Imperial Army that her brother ran. A colonel and a spy. Her husband, Doncarlo, was a businessman, the empire’s leading manufacturer of marching-band uniforms, both military and civilian.
The two of them were estranged, and had been for some time, ever since she told Doncarlo she was taking this assignment. Even before that their relationship had been tenuous, going back to the early days of their marriage. To a degree it was because they were sexually incompatible: he wanted more, while she wanted
less... at least with him. And there were other issues.
On board Skyship, Sonya had been eluding detection with the aid of her special military-issued implant, one of the mindwave units that sorted thoughts and blocked the detection of any that were dangerous. Her implant had two sets of receiving and transmitting frequencies that she could activate with mental commands. One set comprised the standard, common frequencies used by everyone who voluntarily received an implant. The other set were the supposedly secure military frequencies, on which she communicated with her powerful brother on AmEarth, giving him reports and receiving his instructions.
None of that was working now. Back and forth she paced, worrying and hoping to feel better.
She’d taken a huge chance in coming here, where truthbots periodically checked and re-checked every person, looking for anyone who might pose a threat to Billy Jeeling. Two other operatives with earlier versions of her military implant had been discovered, and had vanished into Devv Jeeling’s prison system. These implants were still experimental and under development, and didn’t always work; that was proven by the captured operatives, although supposedly her unit was safer to use.
She’d been warned of the danger before going on this assignment, but she’d volunteered anyway—wanting to do it for her brother, and for the larger cause of forcing Billy Jeeling to resign. Rivington felt strongly that the Master of Skyship had outlived his usefulness, and she agreed with him.
The Assassination of Billy Jeeling Page 17
