It was more like he was coming back from the dead.
Technically there was no Tannis Valk. There had been a man by that name once, a pilot who had fought for the Establishment, the last great enemies of Lanoe’s Navy. That man had died seventeen years ago, when an antipersonnel round had lit up his fighter’s canopy and burned him alive inside his suit. Somehow he had managed to shoot down two enemy ships and return to base while still on fire. Pilots on both sides of the conflict had whispered stories of the man who refused to die. They’d called him the Blue Devil, a name that had stuck with him ever since. His superiors had recognized a propaganda coup when they saw one, and had made him a hero, a legend. A shining example of the will of the Establishment.
Of course, the truth wasn’t as glamorous. Valk had died instantly when the AP round hit him. Before that he’d programmed his ship for a number of maneuvers and the flight home, and it carried out his instructions posthumously. That story wasn’t likely to inspire the troops, so it was suppressed.
Meanwhile, in an Establishment lab, technicians had worked to recover Tannis Valk’s memories and personality from his roasted skull. They’d fed everything they found into a computer and created an artificial intelligence that could think and talk just like the dead hero.
What they’d done was incredibly illegal. AI was banned across human space—too many lives had been lost to machines that could think clearer and faster than any human. The Establishment had tried to get around this problem by never letting Valk know that he was just a machine. For seventeen years, he’d been an empty suit that thought it was a man. The whole time he’d been in incredible pain, suffering from phantom limb syndrome over his entire body.
It wasn’t until the battle of Niraya that he’d learned the truth. It took an alien machine to show him what he really was.
Since then, Valk had wanted nothing but to die. He was tired of the pain. Tired of being a reflection of a man who’d never asked to be a folktale. Unfortunately, by then he had a head full of information that was too valuable to be lost. Valk knew more about the aliens than anyone living. The same machine that told him what he was had also told him all about the Blue-Blue-White, the only other intelligent species humanity had ever met. That information was far too valuable to lose.
Lanoe had made Valk a deal. If they could just get to the Admiralty—Navy headquarters—and allow his information to be downloaded into the right hands, then he could let go. He could be allowed to die—to be deleted. Freed from the excruciating pain he always felt. Freed from the confusion of learning he wasn’t even a human being.
But only then.
Valk had agreed. The man had agreed anyway. Sometimes the computer, the artificial intelligence, decided to renege on the deal. It would just—cut out. Switch itself off, sometimes at very inopportune moments. Then Lanoe would have to reboot the system and bring Valk back from the peace of death.
He hated himself a little more every time he did it. He knew he would keep doing it, until Valk’s work was done.
“Where are we?” Valk asked, twisting around to look at the void around them. “I don’t recognize any of these stars.”
“Rishi,” Lanoe told him. “It’s not a place an Establishment pilot would ever have seen.” He stretched out his arm and pointed at a shadow rotating in the distance. A cylindrical mass, big enough to block out some of the stars. “It’s a Navy facility, a flight school. They almost blew us out of the sky before I told them who I was. Now we’re just waiting for clearance to land.”
“Navy—”
Lanoe shook his head. He knew what Valk was asking. “Sorry. Yeah, we’re in friendly territory. They don’t have the facilities here, though, to read your memories. At least, I don’t trust them to do it and then keep that information safe. Centrocor’s after us. They might have spies here. I can’t let anybody have your data except the Admirals themselves, and even then there are a couple of them I’m not sure about.”
“So we’re back to square one,” Valk said.
“Not exactly. I know somebody who works here. Somebody who can help us.”
Lanoe had been in the Navy a very long time. He knew a lot of people.
The meeting with Elder McRae dragged on, as the old woman insisted on reading the entire waiver before she signed. By the time the negotiation was finished, Bullam needed a nap. It was the lack of oxygen, she told herself. Only that. She saw the Elder off the yacht—there weren’t many aircraft on Niraya, so the old woman had to be ferried back to the ground in a sedan chair supported by drones—then retired to her cabin, which she could pressurize. As cool air washed over her face, a drone came forward to mop her brow with a damp cloth while another slipped off her shoes.
She turned on some music and closed her eyes, intending to just get a little sleep before she moved on to the next thing on her agenda. There was so much more to do before she could leave Niraya and go somewhere pleasant. Yet before she’d truly fallen asleep, just as her mind began to quiet down, a warbling chirp came from the cabin’s ceiling.
She opened her eyes. That particular tone meant a call she couldn’t ignore. Not when things were still so delicate.
“Accept,” she said. The light in the cabin dimmed as its windows grew opaque—you never knew who might be watching. Maybe someone who could read lips. When you worked for a poly, spies were everywhere. Bullam should know—since one of her many jobs was to act as Centrocor’s head of counterintelligence.
The voice was modulated and flattened by encryption and distance. Words from a dozen light-years away, passed on through relay stations at the throats of half a dozen wormholes. “I have information on activity three-oh-nine-six.” The voice belonged to one of her underlings—it didn’t matter which. “Two employees have returned and filed reports.”
Two? They’d sent four. Well, casualties had always been a possibility, but—
“The activity is reported as unsuccessful. The object of the activity was last sighted exiting a wormhole at Rishi.”
Bullam did not sit up. She did not curse. There was no point. The message had come from so far away that she could not respond to it in real time—nor could she ask questions. She waited in case the message contained any more information, but it stopped there.
She knew what the cryptic message meant. Aleister Lanoe had escaped them. And now he knew that Centrocor wanted him.
He knew more about the aliens that attacked Niraya than anyone. Far more than Elder McRae, more than the Navy scientists currently studying the wreckage of the alien drones. That knowledge could be extraordinarily valuable.
The discovery of alien life could change everything—it could mean potential new markets, or it could lead to a shakeup of the political equilibrium between Earth and the transplanetary polys, an equilibrium that had never been stable.
The polys controlled every human world outside of Earth’s solar system. The six biggest of the transplanetary corporations fought endless wars among themselves, vying to expand their economic empires. The Navy of Earth stepped in on those wars, fighting with one side against the others, to make sure no one poly ever gained a real advantage over any of the others. By playing the polys against each other, the Navy preserved Earth’s self-determination—but in turn, the Navy could never quite break the polys’ economic stranglehold on the galaxy. It was a stalemate that had lasted for more than a century, with every side plotting constantly to try to get the upper hand.
Now a new player had entered the game.
If the aliens were a serious threat, if they planned on attacking more human worlds, the people living on those planets might well turn to Earth for protection—and away from the polys. Away from Bullam’s employers.
Whatever happened, things were about to change, in major and dramatic ways. Centrocor needed information if it was going to come out on top, or at the very least survive that transition. The best source of that information was Aleister Lanoe.
Bullam had been given an unlimited budget to fi
nd him and take him captive. She’d worked very hard putting her plan together, arranging for Lanoe to be ambushed deep in the wormhole network.
According to the message she’d just received, that ambush had failed.
In the quiet she contemplated what that meant. Disaster, potentially. Her job could be in jeopardy. She could lose everything.
Ashlay Bullam had a very good reason why she needed to hold on to her job.
The situation wasn’t apocalyptic quite yet, though. Her people had kept him from reaching the Admiralty. Once he was safely under the protection of the Navy’s top brass, she would never get to him. For now, at least, he was still in play. She could set up a new plan to catch him. But he would be more cautious the second time.
She needed to handle this right away.
“Reply to message,” she said. A drone moved forward through the air, a green light pulsing slowly on the front of its casing. “What assets do we have at Rishi? It’s a Navy system, so probably not much. Give me options. Copy everything we do to Oversight. Make sure every action we’ve taken is logged, and be ready to document the chain of approval. Let Oversight know we have nothing to hide.”
When planning a kidnapping, it was always important to cover one’s ass.
At the center of the system lay not one star but two, a blue giant and a white dwarf that danced as they orbited one another. Gravity around such a pair was a complicated equation, and as a result no planets had ever formed in the system—instead, a thick band of gas and dust surrounded them, glowing with constant tiny impacts and tidal stresses. Far out, at the very edge of the system, lay Rishi, orbiting it all like a marble rolling along the edge of a plate.
Rishi had originally been built by the DaoLink Gathered Economic Concern, one of the big polys. The orbital had been intended as a monument to DaoLink’s success—when construction began it would have been the largest artificial object in human space. In shape it was a hollow tube a hundred kilometers long and fifty in diameter, built of foamed concrete a kilometer thick. It was open to space at both ends, so spacecraft could—and regularly did—fly through it without stopping. The whole thing spun on its axis, so rapidly that its inner surface possessed half of Earth’s gravity. There was a breathable atmosphere inside, held down by centrifugal force and kept from escaping by a rimwall around either opening half a kilometer tall.
It was a triumph of engineering. Utterly simple in design, yet grandiose in scope, a Bach fugue in stone. It was also, at least for DaoLink, a complete debacle. It had taken nearly a hundred years to finish building Rishi, twice as long as expected. As the years went by and new planets were terraformed and inhabited, few had been discovered near enough to Rishi to make it a hub for travel, as had been originally intended. Instead of being the jewel at the center of DaoLink space, it had been shunted off to a mere backwater.
And then the unimaginable happened. Before construction on Rishi was complete, another poly, ThiessGruppe Limited, built an even larger habitat—a ring nearly a thousand kilometers in circumference. Overnight Rishi’s propaganda value had dropped to nil.
DaoLink never even bothered to move in. For fifty years Rishi lay unoccupied, unused, uninhabitable. In the end, for certain unnamed concessions, the poly turned Rishi over to the Navy for use as a flight school. Millions of people could have lived and worked inside Rishi. Instead it was home to a few hundred cadets and their instructors. As Lanoe worked his jets, matching velocity and rotation with the big cylinder, he could see how empty and shabby its docking berths were, how much of the interior was overrun with lush vegetation. It had the air of a magnificent ruin, a place forgotten by the rest of the universe.
It suited him just fine. If Centrocor was after him, Rishi made a great place to lie low for a while. The habitat was off-limits to the polys and while he knew better than to trust everyone in the Navy, he knew he at least still had some friends there. People he could count on for help.
Lanoe let Valk land the recon scout while he worked the comms board. He needed to talk to Marjoram Candless, who had been a squaddie of his in the very old days, back during the Brushfire that followed the Century War. He’d known her since before he’d got his first command—which made her a very old friend indeed. The last time he’d heard from her she’d taken a position as an instructor at Rishi. If she was still around she would be a useful ally.
Getting hold of her took some work, though. She didn’t answer when he pinged her personal minder, and when he contacted the flight school’s offices he was simply told she was out and unavailable. They would be happy to take a message, but Lanoe didn’t want to leave his name. In the end he had to leave a public message with the local server, which he assumed would be about as effective as posting a written note on a billboard in the school’s cafeteria. He couldn’t put any personal details in that message either, so he simply signed it as “an old friend from the 305th Fighter Wing,” a unit that hadn’t existed for a hundred years.
Surprisingly, it worked. Not ten minutes after he posted the message, a green pearl appeared in the corner of his vision, telling him he had an incoming call. Candless’s face appeared on his main display. Sharp features, sculpted by elastomer treatments. She still had the long, severe nose he remembered, the lips permanently compressed to a prim line. Her hair was pulled back in a severe coil that accentuated her already high forehead. Her hazel eyes were the only part of her face that truly showed her age. Sharp, bright eyes that looked right into you and saw everything you tried to hide. The eyes of someone who’d seen everything life had to offer, and found it vaguely distasteful. She was an old woman now, pushing two hundred. Well, he was even older, himself. Modern medicine meant age didn’t slow people down anymore, and she looked just as vital as ever. She would have changed as much as he had, he supposed, but just seeing her face brought back so many memories he couldn’t help but think she was exactly the same person as she’d been when they’d fought together.
“So it is you,” she said. “Your timing, I’m afraid, is terrible.”
“You look surprised to see me,” he told her.
“As far as I know, you and I are the only people left from the 305th. When I saw that message I thought maybe an old ghost was finally catching up with me.”
Lanoe smiled. “I took a wrong turn somewhere. Thought I’d pop in and catch up on old times, maybe over a drink. You have a minute?”
Candless took a deep breath. “Barely. There’s a guesthouse near the habitat’s meridian line. Let’s meet there. I’ll send you the address. It’s been … what? Five years since we spoke? Ten?” She frowned. “You had to wait until just now.”
“Sorry,” Lanoe said. “You know me. Always zigging when I’m supposed to zag.” He tried to give her a warm smile. Her face didn’t change.
“Can you get there within the hour?” Candless asked.
“If I hurry,” he told her. “Why the rush?”
“Well, I might be getting murdered this afternoon. So our best bet is to do lunch.”
Bullam looked over a dossier prepared for her by her assistants, scrolling through page after page of text on her personal minder. There was really only one option available. She didn’t like it at all—she preferred more subtle methods—but if she was going to catch Aleister Lanoe then it had to be done soon, and that meant a brute-force approach.
When she’d seen enough she deleted the file, then rolled the minder up and stuck it inside her desk. “New message,” she said. A drone came forward and she looked down into the three lights and the speaker grille it had in lieu of a face.
“Proceed,” she said. That was all she needed to say. Her people would take care of the rest. “Copy to Oversight,” she told the drone. “I’ll head back to headquarters immediately but I won’t be available for … thirty-seven hours.” She shook her head. That was a long time to go without hearing how her plans worked out. Not for the first time she wished there was a faster way to move from star to star. “By the time I arrive I want to he
ar that we were successful. If not, heads are going to roll.”
Including, most likely, her own.
She bit her lip for a moment. Wondered if she should say anything more. If only there were a better way—but there wasn’t. There were no official Centrocor employees on Rishi, not even a proper spy. There were always ways to get to people, of course, but some were more morally repugnant than others. This one was pretty bad.
One of the drone’s lights pulsed slowly. A gentle reminder that it was still recording.
“Send,” she said. The drone’s light went solid again and it drifted away from her like a footman dismissed by his master.
She stepped through into the yacht’s bridge, a cramped space full of controls and displays that she had never bothered to learn to use. The yacht’s computer was perfectly capable of steering the ship on its own. Time to head home. The planet of her birth—and Centrocor’s central offices. “Take me to Irkalla,” she said.
Behind her, flowglas seeped from the wooden railing of the exposed deck, spreading upward to form an airtight dome. The yacht took on the appearance of an iridescent beetle with its wing cases tightly shut. The engines warmed up with a subdued roar, and then the ship lifted up through Niraya’s atmosphere on a pillar of invisible ions.
Bullam headed back to the cabin. Time for another nap, she thought. She tried to convince herself she was tired only because morally questionable decisions always took the wind out of her sails. This time, she wasn’t as successful. She knew exactly why she felt so exhausted.
Her disease was back. Already she could feel her joints swelling. She could feel the pressure building up in her neck and the base of her skull. She dimmed the lights in the cabin, curled up on her bed in a fetal ball, her inertial sink gently holding her down against the mattress. It looked like she was in for a bad spell, maybe the worst one yet.
Chapter Four
Forgotten Worlds Page 3
