Shield of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Chapter Four

  The nudge that finally awakened Lando was provided by a dehydration headache and a stomach knotted with hunger. The dream that lingered in his awareness was of being pursued through a dark city by a soft-voiced, unseen assassin, and he was eager to chase it from his senses. Reaching up, he switched his helmet lamps to the low setting and looked for the others.

  Lando found he was the only member of the team who was conscious. Lobot was floating near the wall below him, a few meters away. His arms were raised beside his face and his legs drawn up and bent at the knees like a child’s. Artoo was still holding Threepio protectively with his grasping claws, and the duo spun slowly in the air at the far end of the chamber as though dancing to music only they could hear.

  Glancing down at the controls on his left forearm, Lando checked the timer he had started before closing his eyes. He was startled to see that the six-hour rest he had proposed had stretched to more than sixteen hours. He and Lobot had both slept through their alarms, and the droids were still powered down, waiting for an awakening touch.

  For a moment he felt a flash of guilt over the lost hours, but he swept that away with the realization of how necessary the rest had been. The body knows what it needs, he thought, looking at Lobot’s blissful expression.

  But sleep had not healed all the insults. Lando’s hunger was keener than ever, and the water from the helmet pipestraw only spurred wishful thoughts about bottomless ice-filled glasses of charde and skoa.

  More than anything, though, he wanted out of his contact suit. The air inside was decidedly rank, and his own breath came back to him off the sneeze-spotted faceplate as a foul cloud. His scalp and a half dozen other unreachable places itched maddeningly. His skin felt greasy, and he craved a hot shower. And the suit was a prison, preventing him from stretching out tight muscles and deep aches.

  The makeshift glove on Lando’s right hand was clinging lightly to his fingers, a sign that the atmospheric pressure in the compartment was slightly higher than the one-normal of the suits. Lando began fingering the helmet release with his other hand, absently betraying his thoughts.

  It’s not as if there’s anything poisonous in the ship’s air—it’s just a bit on the chewy side. I held my breath for six minutes once in a tank test. That’s plenty of time to wipe my face and scratch my—

  Lobot’s voice interrupted Lando’s thoughts. “I would like to know,” the cyborg said, “which agency you used to make the arrangements for this vacation. The accommodations have not been up to expectations.”

  An easy smile creased Lando’s face as he turned toward Lobot. “You’re just cranky because I ate your complimentary breakfast while you were sleeping in.”

  “Which is just one of several hundred reasons why I’m never traveling with you again.”

  “Stop complaining and help me wake up the children,” Lando said. “I hear today’s going to be one of the highlights of the tour.”

  By mutual agreement, they activated Threepio first, so that Lando could have a few minutes to diagnose his status without Artoo’s protective interference. It took only a short conversation with Threepio to discover that the droid had regained most of his verbal faculties—and with them, most of his dignity. All that remained of his vocal injury was a background buzz when he spoke, a rasp in the speech synthesizer that made it sound as if the droid were suffering from a sore throat.

  “Threepio, I’m very glad your language systems came around,” said Lobot. “I may have to raise my estimation of Bratan Engineering’s cybernetic products—my first neural interface was from Bratan, and I had nothing but trouble with it.”

  “Thank you, Master Lobot,” said Threepio. “I, too, am greatly relieved. A protocol droid with a malfunctioning synthesizer is hardly any use at all.”

  “Unless you want to do business in one of the nine thousand fifty-seven sign languages,” said Lando.

  The droid looked down at his damaged arm. “In my present conditon, I would not be able to offer you even that service. If my synthesizer fails, I would be nothing but a burden to you. You might as well cannibalize my power cells and leave me behind. I’ll understand—”

  “Don’t worry, we’re not going to leave you behind,” said Lobot. “I don’t want to have to depend on me to communicate with Artoo.”

  “Why is that?” Lando asked. “You seemed to be doing fine back in the passage.”

  Lobot shook his head slowly. “Artoo thinks in that same binary polyglot he speaks, and I can’t understand a byte of it. He can leave short messages in Basic for me in his memory registers, but that limits us to whatever he knows of Basic. And from what I’ve seen so far, he seems to have learned most of his Basic vocabulary from a nerf-herder.”

  “Oh, he can be quite rude,” Threepio agreed conspiratorially. “He constantly says the most outrageous things—you can’t imagine. I don’t dare repeat half of his comments. Sometimes I think that he means to trick me into embarrassing myself.” Threepio looked past Lando to where Artoo was floating at an angle, his STANDBY lamp still glowing, and added worriedly, “He hasn’t been damaged, has he?”

  “No—he’s just the last one up this morning,” Lando said. “I’m going to take care of that right now.”

  “Perhaps it would be better if I did it,” Lobot said, stopping him with a touch. “Artoo may not have recovered from Threepio’s accident as well as Threepio has.”

  “Just how many diplomats are on this mission?” Lando asked lightly. “No, if Artoo still has a problem with me, he can start getting over it right now. This is my mission, and I’m not handing it over to a petulant droid. No offense, Threepio.”

  “None taken, I’m sure,” said Threepio. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Artoo’s system lights came on all at once, and his sensor dome rotated a half turn in each direction. Rising, he moved away from Lando and jetted toward Threepio, loosing an unusually long chatter of sounds.

  “What’s he saying?” Lando asked.

  Threepio chattered back at Artoo in the same dialect before answering, and Artoo replied at even greater length.

  “Well?”

  A crackle of static made it sound as though Threepio had cleared his throat. “Master Lando, Artoo says that he has the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.”

  “Threepio—”

  “Lando, I suggest you take it at face value,” Lobot said quietly.

  Lando looked hard at Lobot for a moment. Then, frowning, he said, “Thank you. I have trouble sometimes hearing clearly over what’s not being said.” He reached for his control pad and brought his helmet lamps up to full brightness. “Lobot, is there anything going on outside?”

  “All of the limpet’s sensors are clear. The vagabond’s forward speed is negligible.”

  “Just another oblong asteroid, drifting along a long way from anywhere, eh? All right, then. Artoo, can you help us with some light? Let’s see what we have here.”

  What they had was a chamber fifteen meters long and nine meters wide, and as infuriatingly seamless and featureless as the airlock.

  “Kind of have the feeling that I’ve been here before,” said Lando, scanning. “And I don’t mean yesterday, when I burned through here on the way to the hull.”

  “I understand,” Lobot said. “Perhaps the highest form of art on Qella was the locked-room mystery.”

  Lando laughed. “Which would make this ship their hall of fame anthology, I guess. But it wants for variety.”

  “The apparent consistency of design principles should serve our interests.”

  A grin appeared. “You want me to see if I can lose the other glove this time?”

  “The Qella esthetic demands that nothing be evident until it is needed,” Lobot said. “But how does the structure know when a concealed feature is needed? How do the Qella communicate their desires to their creations? We know at least one answer—we know that it responds to touch.”

  The grin faded into a frown.
“The last time I touched this ship, it tried to leave us out as a meal for space slugs.”

  “I am not convinced that this vessel means to do us harm.”

  “What exactly would you consider compelling proof? A fatality?”

  “I’ve been reconsidering the incident in the airlock in light of Threepio’s accident,” Lobot said. “It’s possible that we misinterpreted the message which Artoo found in the airlock. It’s possible that the control you activated was an emergency lock close switch, which functioned exactly as intended.”

  “What? No, that doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s even possible that we asked the vagabond to attempt an escape,” Lobot continued. “The prominence given to the symbology Artoo detected parallels the use of red and yellow as alert and caution colors, and arrows as pointers, in human artifacts.”

  “You’re saying that if Threepio could read Qella, we’d have seen a sign saying ‘In case of emergency, pull here.’”

  Lobot nodded. “Isn’t the most prominent marking on the outside of a snub fighter the canopy release? What if we walked up to one knowing the meaning of an arrow but unable to read the word ‘Rescue’?”

  “Here’s the problem with your theory that we hit the panic button,” Lando said. “The next time this ship had a chance, it tried to spit us out again—without us ever getting near that control yoke.”

  “That ‘next time,’ we were burning a hole in an element of the primary defense system—a hole that the repair mechanisms were unable to close in the usual amount of time.”

  “I take your point,” Lando said. “But after we did that, the ship has to have known we weren’t Qella and we weren’t friendly.”

  “If the ship had the consciousness you attribute to it, and had formed an intent to remove us, it could have done so at any time while we were in the accumulator,” said Lobot. “It could have disposed of us while we slept just now. It could have opened the hull under your feet while you were placing the limpet. Yet it has done none of these things.”

  “Hmm. And what kind of security system would forget about us once we’d managed to break in, eh?” Lando said. “As though once we’d put our weapons away, we were no longer suspect. ‘Terribly sorry, forgot our keycode, had to blow up the entryway’—‘Oh, that’s all right, come in and make yourself comfortable—’”

  “I’ve been asking myself from the beginning what kind of intelligence we were facing,” Lobot said. “It’s the most interesting question before us—”

  “I’m still going with ‘Where’s my next meal coming from?’” Lando said. “And Artoo would probably vote for ‘Who put him in charge, anyway?’”

  Lobot patiently waited out the interruption, then went on. “I have projected how this ship would behave if you, or I, or Artoo, or Threepio were its master. Its real behavior does not match any of these models.”

  “Pardon me, sir, but why should it?” asked Threepio, who had been listening attentively. “This vessel was not built by humans, or droids. We are not its masters. Its behavior can only be properly evaluated in the appropriate cultural context.”

  “I disagree, Threepio. The conditions of the test dictate the form of the answers,” said Lobot. “If that were not so, the millions of species in this galaxy would have so little in common that there would be no need for your services.”

  “He’s got a point, Threepio,” said Lando. “No matter where I’ve gone, or who I’ve been dealing with, the one thing that holds the deal together is that everyone’s looking out for their own end. I call it enlightened self-interest, and it’s the motor that powers the universe.”

  “The conditions of the test are sentience and survival,” said Lobot. “The form of the answer is to identify and neutralize threats. This ship has failed the test. Therefore I conclude this ship is neither sentient nor controlled by sentient beings. It is a work of great ingenuity, but it is not intelligent.”

  “I see,” said Threepio. “Master Lando, should I discontinue my efforts to contact the masters of this vessel?”

  “Just hang on, Threepio,” said Lando. “I’m still not sold on this. Lobot, a ship of this size and complexity, successfully evading capture for more than a hundred years—there must be something or somebody in charge.”

  “Something, yes. But not something sentient. I believe we were deceived by the apparent complexity into invoking a god hypothesis.”

  “A god hypothesis?”

  Lobot nodded. “When we spoke of the masters of this vessel, we assumed there was a consciousness observing us and controlling events in our environment,” he said. “We even turned to these masters to save us, respectfully offering entreaties and hoping for their intervention on our behalf.

  “But there’s no indication the ship is aware of us, beyond its local awareness of our effects on it. Its responses have the character of autonomic functions. I now believe the vagabond is an automaton of great sophistication, employing rule-based responses incorporated into its fundamental structure.”

  “What rule could it have been following when it tried to suck me out into space?”

  “You were using a blaster, and caused a breach which did not heal,” said Lobot. “You could have triggered a rule specifying that fires be extinguished by exposure to vacuum.”

  Lando’s cheeks wrinkled as he weighed Lobot’s argument. “So you want us to start pushing buttons at random, is that it?”

  “We know it responds to touch. We were probably wrong to conclude that it responds negatively.”

  Lando continued to vacillate. “Still quiet outside, Artoo?”

  Artoo chirped a single beep, recognizable as “Yes.”

  Looking back at Lobot, Lando shrugged and gestured with an open hand. “After you.”

  Nodding, Lobot unlocked and removed his gauntlets one at a time, clipping them to tool stays on the contact suit. Then he jetted to the nearest part of the enclosing wall, reached out both hands, and pressed the palms lightly against the surface. When nothing happened, he started sliding to his left. The wall of the chamber began to rise under his hands, as though it were shaping itself to an invisible mold.

  “My goodness gracious!” Threepio suddenly cried out. “Artoo, do you see?”

  Lobot retreated hastily to the middle of the chamber, but the transformation continued. Broad disks appeared and grew into squat cylinders. Ridges defined long arcs across the display, shadowing the rippled patterns spilling down the curves of a hemisphere. Color appeared but did not overwhelm—there were swirls of a pale blue and spikes of a soft yellow, and none respected the boundaries of the geometries they overlaid.

  Lando’s eyes twinkled with delight. “I never thought you were the artistic type, Lobot.”

  Returning to the wall, Lobot touched the drumlike surface of one of the cylinders. The chamber was suddenly filled with music, a haunting duet of intertwined melodies that rose and fell like swells in a gentle sea.

  “I’m not letting you have all the fun,” Lando said with a grin, peeling the makeshift glove off his right hand and jetting to the opposite wall.

  It answered his touch with a great rectangle pierced by two long channels and filled with finer detail than the sculpture it faced. Lando did not know the meaning of the pattern, but he could see the scar his blaster had left in it—a circular bite out of the upper edge of the rectangle, obliterating twenty or more of the myriad smaller cells within it.

  The damage did not dampen Lando’s enjoyment for long. The two men flew about the chamber like nimble, persistent insects until they had tested its entire surface. There was something marvelous about the way a simple touch of the hand brought the empty chamber to life.

  But the most splendid discovery of all—in Lando’s eyes, at least—was the doorway that opened for him at one end of the chamber, and its twin, which Lobot manifested at the other.

  Lando did not know where either might lead them, but he much preferred an uncertain choice to no choice at all.

  In t
he captain’s wardroom aboard Glorious, two pieces of metal rested on a table beside a contact suit gauntlet. The longer of them was badly twisted. The ends of both were scorched with matching burns. Colonel Pakkpekatt held the shorter of the two lightly between two fingers, turning it over for examination.

  “You’re certain?” he asked.

  “Yes, Colonel,” said Taisden. “This is the frame of a Hired Hand CarryAll, a common self-stabilizing equipment sled.”

  “Ownership?”

  “The registry code indicates it is the property of a Hierko Nochet, a Babbet adventure guide and onetime acquaintance of Lando Calrissian. We believe that the general acquired this and certain other property from Nochet in a sabacc tournament two years ago.”

  “Have you had it analyzed for biological identifiers?”

  “It was swept immediately after retrieval,” said Technical Agent Pleck. “There are trace markers consistent with human handling, but I cannot confirm that either Calrissian or the cyborg is the source.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sir, it’s, uh, a bit awkward—we have no bioprofile of the general to compare it to.”

  Pakkpekatt bared his teeth. “A flag officer of the Fleet? To say nothing of his history before joining the Rebellion, and since leaving it. How is this possible?”

  “I don’t know, sir. We have found records that indicate his bioprofile was recorded at least three times, but the profiles themselves have disappeared. And the clerk of records on Cloud City refuses even to answer our inquiries, citing something he called the Founder’s Contract.”

  Shaking his head, Pakkpekatt said, “Under his uniform, General Calrissian remains a smuggler and a scoundrel. Was anything else found in the sweep, Pleck?”

  The agent frowned. “Yes, Colonel—though I don’t know what significance to assign to it.”

  “Tell me what you can.”

  “Yes, sir. We recovered a relatively large amount of an unidentified biological material from the facing of the sled—this area, here,” the agent said, pointing. “The quantity is on the order of two million cells—I should say cell fragments, because most were mechanically damaged.”