Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  “Well, it bloody hurts!”

  “‘Cause there’s a lot goin’ on in there.”

  “You sure?”

  Jen chewed for a moment. “Pretty sure. If it gets worse, we’ll get the techs to have a look.”

  “That’s not even slightly reassuring.”

  Jen shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “So what’s the current state of play?”

  Jen took another bite of her sandwich, chewed for a few moments, and said, “Dog is still missing.”

  She swore. “How long was I gone?”

  “Two days.”

  “Right,” Lou said, forcing herself to think about the case. It was time to act. “Show me how phone and mail works.”

  Jen provided the necessary instruction, using the replica of Lou’s old Active Paper to guide her. Soon, Lou had done a search of local space directories, and found Dog’s temporary Orbital phone address.

  “It’s ringing!” she said to Jen, smiling.

  But the call rang off. It did not get fed to an answerbot or messaging system. “Damn. No answer.”

  Jen said, “At least we know his phone is working. And that he’s still on the Orbital, not gone off down some hypertube somewhere.”

  Lou screwed her mouth up, glum. “Yeah. What if I just send him mail, then? I’ll tell him I’m looking for him, beg his forgiveness and ask for a meeting”

  “Sounds good. Do it.” Jen fetched herself some iced water from a jug in the fridge.

  Lou dictated a message and posted it. She waited a few moments. “It’s not bouncing!”

  Jen grinned over her glasses. “Want a sandwich?”

  Later, as Lou was eating a raspberry jam sandwich and some of Jen’s pretty good iced lemon tea, her Paper chimed. Lou stopped cold. “New mail!” she said, looking at Jen. Lou pulled the page out of her pocket, punched up the mailbox. This was better, she thought, so much easier to deal with than those disturbing little cubes and balls and their orbiting labels.

  The mailbox contained two messages. The old one from her mother that she still hadn’t read, and a new one. “It’s from Dog!”

  The subject line read, “Come and get me. I’m sorry.”

  Dear Ms. Meagher.

  I’m so sorry I attacked you that night. I feel so ashamed. It’s all I’ve thought about. I’m such a terrible dog. I have been hiding up in the hills outside the city, but it gets cold and there isn’t much natural animal life to hunt for food. Every time I see a hov go by overhead I think it’s police looking for me. I didn’t even know if it was safe to communicate with you, in case the call could be traced. But tonight I’m afraid and I’m getting desperate. It’s cold and I’m very hungry. The signals I’m getting from Kid are frightening me, too. I think something’s happening to him, but I’m not sure what. I need your help, Ms. Meagher, if you can forgive me for turning on you. I’m so terribly sorry.

  Your friend and (I hope) partner,

  Dog

  PS: If you want to meet me, call back and we can arrange a time and place to meet. And please bring food and water.

  Lou was grinning and sniffling. She read the note aloud to Jenny, who smiled in delight. “Well, what are you waiting for?” she asked. “Call him back!”

  Lou’s finger trembled, touching Dog’s phone address in her private directory.

  “Hello?” Dog’s voice, audio-only. He was whispering. Lou heard forest noises in the background: twigs crackling, and insects chirruping. She heard the wind blowing. It sounded cold, somehow.

  “Dog — it’s me, Lou!” She was also whispering.

  She heard suppressed yelps of happiness. “Ms. Meagher! I’m so glad you called. Did you get my note?”

  “‘Course I did, dummy. Why do you think I’m calling? To sell you insurance?” She grinned.

  “Excuse me for not answering before, Ms. Meagher. It was not a good moment to stop and talk.”

  “Fine, whatever. So, where would be a good place to meet?”

  “Why are you not in prison, if I may ask?”

  “Long story. The Otaru guys produced a legal miracle in court.”

  “I might have guessed they’d be involved.”

  “Listen — how about that waterfront seawall where all this mess started? How would that be?”

  “Agreed. Perhaps about eighteen hundred hours Akane Time?”

  Lou thought about this, weighing the factors. Restaurants would be welcoming early patrons; people out walking, taking in the sunset, exercising; fishing folks setting up to fish off the boardwalk, too. Not too quiet. “Sounds good. I’ll try and bring some food, or at least some money so we can get you something.”

  “Good. I’ll talk to you then, Ms. Meagher. Goodbye. And thank you.” Dog closed the call.

  Lou killed the call at her end, folded the paper and sat for a bit, smiling. To Jen she said, “The old team is back in business!” She clapped her hands for good measure.

  Jen smiled, too. “That’s wonderful! Finally, something good!”

  “Sure is. And about bloody time, too!”

  “What’ll you do once you’ve got Dog back?”

  “I guess the original mission is still on.” She laughed. “Now, how the hell do I get out of this interface?”

  It was late afternoon. Lou, seated at an al fresco café near the waterfront, in the shade of a flowering jacaranda tree, sipped her third espresso from a tiny white porcelain cup. The espresso was excellent, even if it did come at an outrageous price in these ridiculous little cups. She wondered what these guys would charge for a huge mug of the stuff — and then suspected that her rewritten gut tissues might not be too pleased about it, to say nothing of her tricked-out brain. She was still getting the hang of the way the interface looked when it was active and floating in front of her eyes.

  There were only a few tourists around. It was quiet. A heady mix of odors from Skulldugger Row drifted by, and she was impressed that her nose could pick out even the fainter smells.

  Lou was working her new Otaru Paper. Before she left Ocean House, the staff had fitted her with a nice businesslike outfit, a light suit, pastel blue with white linen. She almost looked normal — except for her giveaway lack of hair, and the Otaru owner-logo. She noticed that the crowds had a way of parting around her. Creepy looks, worried. For years people had treated her this way and it had never bothered her. Now that they were avoiding her because they thought she was a disposable, it really bothered her. She was starting to get an idea of how life as a disposable might feel — if such creatures had higher-level awareness. It was something to wonder about when she had more time.

  Her head still felt a bit off, like it wasn’t working quite according to spec; her shoulders were a little sore and stiff. She felt tired, but otherwise fair.

  The view from this old-fashioned café was grand. From where Lou sat, she could look across the boardwalk, the public Plaza with its gardens and fountains, the shady jacaranda and gum trees, the other cafés and souvenir shops, and out to sea. She loved staring at the water, watching the quite unnatural way the sea, in the far distance, curved up into a thin vertical line that disappeared into the hazy sky. She admired, too, the linear sparkle of reflection from the plasma channel overhead, starting to ease closed for the day, simulating sunset. From this angle it was possible to catch a glimpse of the rocky tip of Calibanos Island; the rest of the island was hidden behind the upper horizon of the sky, which was a jarring sight in itself. Somehow the eye could accept the idea of a sea curving up, but it couldn’t accept a sky with a faint convex ceiling, lined with display tiles. The burning-sodium glare of the magnetic polydiamond plasma channel was weird enough, but the fixed ceiling, where the sky should be, somehow made Lou think back to her childhood in First School, drawing pictures in ArtFun class of her house and her family, and how
the sky was always a thick blue stripe at the top of the page.

  Even though she had almost never lived in a house with a blue sky overhead, that was simply the way skies were drawn.

  Surprised at this sudden jolt of memory, Lou blinked, looked around, and tried to get used to the idea that this whole toroid structure, more than thirty kilometers in diameter and seven kilometers thick, was both traveling through space and braking. When she was still, and concentrating, she could feel it. But not today, surrounded by above-average and picturesque port city illusions.

  Lou stretched and breathed deep, still amazed that this didn’t induce a crippling episode of coughing, and called up the file of info she’d gotten a while back from Mitch Coburn at The Orbital Messenger. He’d gone over the data Lou squirted him weeks ago, and sent her a message containing his findings.

  She punched it up, and a playback window appeared with Coburn, his face rich with multicolored mathematical abstractions once again. He said, “Ms. Meagher. I’ve been following your story during your stay. I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough time.”

  Lou was surprised to hear that he’d been reading about her. She felt, for a moment, a little embarrassed. She also wondered how the fact that she was more or less a convicted murderer would affect both Coburn and his newspaper’s involvement with her story.

  Coburn went on. “Listen. I went over all the material you sent me, and to be honest there wasn’t a lot in there that I could make much sense of. Though I did manage to get some useful stuff from that file of cop-transmissions Dog picked up the night of the kid’s abduction. The transmissions were fragmented, but we were able to bring up a lot more material than your own postprocessing was able to do. And, we got the cop-codes and guild-language problems taken care of, too.”

  Lou leaned in, surprised. He was still talking to her like her crimes were not a problem. Did murder not count for anything anymore, at least with some people?

  He went on, giving her the impression that, for media outlets, all that mattered was the story. If anything, she reflected, her notoriety might help sell her story. She hated the thought, but resumed the playback. “Well, it seems the cops were in that part of the StalkPlex because of an emergency report they got from Stalk Sky Control. There was some kind of, and this is the term the cops used, ‘event’ or ‘incident’ that night. Something big happened, and in that very location where the abduction occurred.”

  “Damn!” Lou said, attention back on the case, feeling tense and fidgety, not liking anything involving the use of such sterile terminology as “event” or “incident”. She also thought, I bloody knew there was something going on that night!

  Coburn continued, “There was nothing on the transcript to indicate what this incident might have been, but I do know the cops were doing sensor sweeps of the tarmac and nearby buildings, looking for traces of radiation, specifically alpha decay radiation and other electromagnetic emissions. That burning van, apparently, was just about saturated in radiation of various kinds. That’s about it, though, I’m sorry. If you want to talk to me more about any of this, just call, okay? And watch your step.”

  Lou sat back. She took a big swallow of her remaining espresso, now cold and bitter. She hardly tasted it. Staring up at the curving sea, she felt speechless for a long while.

  She also noticed after a while that she was holding her espresso cup like her life depended on it.

  Lou asked Jen, via her headware, What’s alpha decay radiation?

  Jen said, “Ionized helium molecules. Four hydrogen atoms stuck together, with no electrons. Emitted in the course of unstable substances undergoing radioactive decay, along with beta particles and gamma rays. The process is governed by the weak force which—”

  Shut up, Jen.

  Jen desisted. Lou sat there and asked, Are these alpha particle thingies bad news if you get hit with them? She had images in her head of Dog lying there on the tarmac, all this radiation pouring down on him.

  Jen said, “Uh, yes, actually. Not quite as bad as beta or gamma radiation, of course, but…”

  Lou thought about this, feeling a hollow ache in her chest. Something turned up that night, emitting great blasts of alpha radiation. Somehow Dog wound up unconscious during the whole thing. When Dog woke up, the van was on fire, the Brothers Tourignon were gone, along with the kid. Dog reported seeing nothing in the sky of an unusual nature. Nothing obvious that could have generated all the radiation. Nothing departing the scene.

  How long was Dog out of it? Probably not that long. A few minutes.

  She was feeling queasy. Jen, what would generate so much of this type of radiation? And what about Dog? How badly was he affected?

  Jen said, “I just checked with Otaru’s tech guys. They say the pooch was clean when they had him. They say it fades fast.”

  It does?

  “Uh-huh. Which doesn’t help, I know.”

  It did help to the extent that she felt a little bit better about what Dog had been through, but it didn’t provide much of a lead as to where she might take the investigation next. Particularly since, as she ran out of plausible ideas to explain the events, she found herself considering some distinctly implausible ones.

  For example, there was one troubling thought bubbling and growing at the back of her mind. It was such a crazy thought, so off-the-beaten-track, though. Every time this idea seeped into her conscious mind she laughed and said, “Naaaaaah!”

  But that only left her with more questions that she could not answer. She thought, too, about another weird thing she had seen and couldn’t yet explain: the removal of the Bastard right before it could obliterate Kestrel. She remembered the comment from that media spew she saw, about how the Bastard had been sucked into a higher dimension, or some such lunacy. And the mathematician saying, “We know there are higher dimensions…” Hypertubes. Literal travel via a fourth-dimensional tube, with entry and exit points in our three-dimensional universe.

  Lou remembered that at the time there had been talk of God in one manifestation or another, reaching out to spare the planet of Kestrel in a way that God had not been known ever to do. God worked in mysterious ways, she knew, but could He be this mysterious? Lou wasn’t sure about this idea. It was just that the only other possibility was ridiculous.

  “Aliens?”

  There. She’d said it out loud. Lou hated the idea, and hated most of all its allure. It could explain so much of what had been going on. But, it was such a ridiculous idea! In all the long time humans had been among the stars, pushing out the envelope of human space, settling anywhere they could find suitable, building up trading empires, living and dying, humans had never found any obvious alien beings. And despite exhaustive searches over hundreds of years, there had never been any electromagnetic media signals from distant stars, nor any observations of alien starship drive-signatures, or in fact anything at all that suggested anybody else was out there.

  Humans had reached the point of thinking that this galaxy, at least, was theirs to take as desired.

  It was harder to think about the idea of aliens than she had expected. It was strange enough that she had to deal with characters like Otaru. But … aliens, too? What the hell did these vague alien guys want with Kid? When Lou tried to come to grips with the possibility of aliens, she felt her mind skittering off the surface of the thought, as if her rational brain could not tolerate the idea. It was easier, in a way, to talk about God.

  If it’s aliens, she thought, where’s the evidence?

  So far, she only had some puzzling sounds coming from Dog’s synth-box which she had inferred must be from Kid, and must be something bad happening to him.

  This did not necessarily equal alien abduction, though. The universe, she had always believed, was a lot stranger, and more baffling, and almost certainly would not permit such a trite and pat answer as this. Whatever was causing
Kid to make the unsettling noises she had heard from Dog’s synth-box had to be something else.

  This skepticism, she reflected with chagrin, was almost certainly the influence of her engineer parents, and their ideas about only believing in that which could be measured. They had always trashed the idea of other civilizations and intelligences in the universe. If such civilizations had ever existed out there, her father always said, they would have left evidence, and we would have found it by now. There would be some trace or clue that could not be explained any other way. Her parents, though they drove her nuts a lot of the time, could be very persuasive.

  So, she thought. If not aliens, then what?

  Lou suddenly remembered all those displays in the Orbital transfer shuttle showing the Bastard getting sucked right out of this universe. Something had caused it to drain away into a kind of space, so different from what she knew, that it hurt her brain to think about it. Hmm, she thought, and wondered what her parents would make of evidence like this. Aliens or God or something else?

  She tried to think of alternate explanations. What could emit alpha radiation, cause a kid to vanish, and cause a whole goddamn planet-sized rock to disappear as it hurtled like an artillery shell through space?

  Things were bad when God was among the best explanations she could find. Lou wasn’t sure she was ready to accept that she had witnessed a genuine miracle.

  Something else her parents would say: Just because you can’t explain it, doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.

  Lou tried to concentrate on evidence, procedure, details. What could she find out? Do some detective work.

  Right.

  Start at the beginning: Kid’s abduction. Something showed up emitting alpha radiation. Right. Who would know what happened that night, other than the cops? Maybe the guys at Stalk Sky Control, who must have witnessed the whole thing, and presumably took some kind of sensor readings, vid recordings, and so forth. Lou liked this idea.

  Except, she remembered, there was now nobody there to ask. The Stalk had fallen.