by Linda Nagata
But the ship’s communications systems had been shut down to prevent any ghosts from escaping, and she wouldn’t compromise that.
She smiled as she reached the welcoming door of her apartment. She would not let Nikko steal her pleasure. No, the only real disappointment in the case was that Marevic’s testimony had offered no links to Fox.
The majordomo program greeted her as she stepped inside, informing her that she had two hundred ninety-seven calls or ghosts waiting, one hundred thirty-four of them coded urgent priority. She returned the greeting with a few choice epitaphs.
After a bath and dinner, she replayed an atrium record of one of Nikko’s visits, then slept contentedly. So another full day passed before she finally turned her attention to the backlog of calls and waiting ghosts. Even then, she failed to notice his presence until she’d worked through nearly half the urgent list. The majordomo program had taken no special notice of the waiting ghost’s identity. But the tag caught her eye, and brought her up sharp.
Leander Bohr.
She blinked in shock that quickly turned to anger, then to cynical amusement.
It was a hoax, of course.
Still, it had got her attention. She called up the ghost, curious to see what cocky bastard would dare use Leander’s name.
The ghost appeared for her.
“You!” she hissed.
He shrugged deferentially. The white-blond hair, the cool blue eyes, the milky skin . . . just the same as she remembered. Just the same.
But it was impossible. He’d died so long ago. He could not have hidden from her all this time.
Fury set in. He’d played her for a fool! But no longer. Now she knew he was extant, she would find him. But she kept these thoughts hidden.
“Leander,” she said coolly. “Or a damn good imitation.”
He seemed confused, but that was always his way. “Kirstin. You look imposing. More grand than I remember. Oh, but you’ve kept me in the tank so long. Have they made it to Summer House? Are you watching closely?”
She shivered at this haunting from the past. But it had to be Leander. The mannerisms were perfect.
“It’s a bit of a surprise to see me, isn’t it?” he went on, when she failed to answer. “Sorry. I hadn’t intended to stick my nose into your business, but the truth is, I’m beginning to doubt you. You let them take the Maker.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I’ve talked with Phousita.”
“You—?”
“I’ve talked with Nikko.”
She went very still. “The ghost, you mean. Marevic admitted that.”
“No, the man. You’re not aware of him? That’s bad. He’ll have taken the Maker from you by now, then. I tried to stop him, but Fox had booby-trapped his atrium.”
“You idiot! Try to make some sense.”
He smiled as if she were an embarrassing child. “Nikko will have taken the Maker from you by now. That’s all. Can’t you stop him?”
The ghost was transitory. It answered her questions about Nikko and about the little craft Nikko had been piloting toward an interception with Phousita. Then it dissolved itself, leaving no trail, no hint of where it had come from, not even a pattern that she could feed to the Gates.
The experience left her shaken. She no longer felt sure of the extent of her powers. Leander had duped her all these years. Now Nikko thought he could fool her too? Her doubt turned to hot anger. She checked the time. The police cruiser had fired its missiles several hours before. They were scheduled to strike the ship in approximately twenty-three minutes. She ordered communications with the ship reestablished. She had to confirm Leander’s warning.
A machine can’t duplicate human senses. This was neither a philosophical statement nor a scientific opinion, but a law within the Commonwealth, and Kirstin experienced its severity when her ghost arrived aboard the police ship. She heard through the ship’s audio pick-ups, saw through its video eyes, smelled through its molecular filters, and felt nothing. She had no body and no fixed position, either mental or physical. She saw the whole ship at once, heard it, smelled it. At once she knew that it was empty.
She wanted to breathe.
Instead, she reviewed the ship’s memory, scrolling rapidly through the days since launch until the moment the visitor was first detected. Now she perused the records more slowly. She watched as the strange craft approached and locked to the hull of the police ship; she saw a familiar figure emerge from it. She listened to conversations aboard the ship.
She wanted to breathe.
Nikko Jiang-Tibayan mocked her. A dead man, now heartily alive. Like Leander, he’d played her for a fool.
She must breathe.
She went home.
Immediately, she convened a closed-door meeting with select members of the Congressional Committee that oversaw police activities. “It’s the genesis function,” she told them. “I filed a report on its potential weeks ago; now my worst fears have been confirmed. Fox has stored illegal code in the function and used it to re-create a proscribed life-form.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” one of the politicians objected.
Kirstin glared at him. “That’s why I’m here seeking a warrant,” she growled. “So I can conduct an investigation. I want a warrant that will allow me to review every line of code in the function. I want another warrant that will allow me to arrest Fox on unspecified charges. I don’t have any proof of his involvement at this point, but if I postpone the arrest, he’s going to disappear. We’re not talking about an ordinary citizen here. We’re talking about Fox Jiang-Tibayan. And he may have already armed himself with the Bohr Maker. We simply can’t afford to wait.”
The Congressional people looked worried. Good. Get them scared enough, and they’d let her do anything.
“All right,” the ranking representative said. “You can have your warrants. But you will take no punitive action without our approval.”
Kirstin gave him a look of open contempt. “I appreciate your delicate moral sensibilities,” she said. “But the situation is critical. We will do what is necessary.”
“Within the bounds of the law!”
“We’ll try.”
Chapter
23
Nikko’s condition steadily worsened as the craft neared Summer House. He couldn’t fool himself anymore. The medical Maker Fox had devised to correct his degenerating nervous system simply wasn’t working, and he could guess why. The journey through the void had been arduous. His metabolic rate had climbed steadily in a furious effort to keep him warm, to power chemical exchanges in the kisheer, to maintain even a lethargic level of motor activity. He was left in a state of perpetual exhaustion. There simply wasn’t enough metabolic fuel available in his body to satisfy the threshold energy requirements of the medical Maker, and so it remained dormant.
His consciousness blurred, so that it didn’t seem so long before he could pick out the winking blue star that would resolve into the rotating body of Summer House. He left his coffin and pulled himself along the tether. The muscles in his hands felt weak. He could hardly close his trembling fingers around the line. He moved slowly, carefully, concentrating on every gesture until he reached the control panel on Arif’s coffin. He battled with his fingers to enter the short sequence that would initiate Arif’s awakening. Guided by its Dull Intelligence, the camera hovered at his shoulder, recording it all.
He went on to Phousita’s coffin and did the same. By the time he managed it, the blue star of the House had resolved into the distinct shapes of the mother asteroid and the blue teardrop of the enclosed ocean, rolling down upon him in a threatening circular motion, like rotating hammers fixed to a nearly invisible spoke.
The sight mesmerized him. He shook his head, striving to focus his concentration. Barely visible beyond the House was the gold metallic glint of the magnetic launch tube. And something else. A gray point. A ship, he realized. Moving out of the shadow of the launch tube. A new arrival.
Robotic merchant ships visited the city every couple of weeks, sometimes more often.
Slowly, carefully, he made his way back to Arif’s coffin. He could sense movement in there, so he popped the lid. Lights fixed on the coffin rim illuminated Arif’s features beneath the clear faceplate of his helmet. He studied Nikko calmly. His gaze narrowed as he watched Nikko reach for the umbilicals and miss, reach for the umbilicals and miss again. Nikko cursed himself. His kisheer went taut against his face in a reflection of shame. He closed his rebellious hand into a tangled fist and slammed it against the coffin hull . . . as if pain might force his muscles to obey him.
But he hardly felt the blow, and that scared him more. He tried again anyway, summoning all his will and this time his fingers closed in a clumsy grip around the bundled umbilical cords. Arif’s gloved hand covered his and together they disconnected the suit from the coffin.
Nikko pulled back, his body quivering in exhaustion. Arif climbed out. He stretched stiffly, while checking his harness to see that it was secure. He looked pointedly at Phousita’s coffin. Nikko nodded. He flexed his hands a few times, then began to make the laborious three-meter journey.
Phousita awoke with a terrible awareness of age, her own age. She’d grown so very old. Lifetimes of experience weighed upon her, pressed upon her. She knew more about the human condition than anyone had ever known before her. She’d lived the lives of men, the lives of women, she’d known poverty and wealth, joy and suffering, she’d been frivolous, melancholy, devoted, treacherous, loving, despairing, curious, petulant—everything that a person could ever be. She’d distilled all this experience until she’d become the paradigm of humanity, the spokesman of a world, the one best suited to judge what path they all should take.
Except that it was not her experience . . . this was her second thought. No, these lifetimes belonged to another, to Leander Bohr. He’d laid the weight of them upon her, transforming her into a lesser copy of himself. This was how he’d tortured her.
She cried out in anguish. She pounded her gloved fist against the transparent plastic shield that kept the void out of her coffin and screamed. Her tampered soul had come home sometime in her sleep, had slipped quietly in through her atrium. She hadn’t even been aware of it as it dissolved itself into her mind. She’d slept on, while the memories it carried became hopelessly entangled with her native mind, until the two could never be separate again. Leander Bohr had colonized her, and she screamed at the agony of his life.
She hit the plastic shield. It bubbled under her fist. She hit it again. The bubble deepened. Again. It broke. A pinhole. Air screamed through the tiny opening. Her ears popped, and then the suit pressurized. She hit the shield again.
Dimly, she was aware of movement eclipsing the stars. Nikko’s passionless face stared at her through the glass. His camera hovered above his head like an intelligent snake. She cringed at the sight of him. His presence repulsed her. This creature isn’t natural, she thought. He wasn’t made of Mother Earth.
An irrational fury began to build in her as she looked at him. Hissing air became the voice of her anger. She struck at the plastic shield again just as Nikko popped the lid on the coffin. She exploded out of her prison.
Nikko recoiled instinctively as Phousita dove at him. But he wasn’t fast enough. Her helmet struck him in the chest, knocking him off the coffin. She clung to him. They shot out together the length of his tether, then snapped back. They hit the seam between two coffins with a thud. He caught an unsteady grip with his toes, arresting their motion. Then he glimpsed Phousita’s face. Her features were twisted in an expression of unreasoning fury. Her gloved fingers found his kisheer. She tore at it, as if she were trying to rip it off his neck. A muffled howl of fury reverberated in his throat. Blinded by pain, he tried to slap at her, to thrust her away. But she clung like a burr. Her strength amazed him. A wispy cloud of minute red ice crystals drifted past her face. He felt the bite of intense cold in his kisheer, and he knew he’d taken damage. He thrust at her with both hands.
She was gone. He threw himself in the opposite direction, scrabbling along the hull until he reached the lead coffin. A searing pain pulsed through his kisheer. His heart hammered in a war-beat and he could hardly breathe. He pressed his face against the hull of the coffin and tried to stifle a scream that threatened to rise from the growing nausea in his belly.
When he finally lifted his head, the coffin’s hull was coated in a rime of red ice.
He looked down the length of the jury-rigged craft. Some five meters away, two space-suited figures huddled at the end of a tether.
“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” Phousita sobbed. Her voice rang shrill inside the artificial confines of the helmet. Arif held her in a strong, steady grip while they drifted at the end of the tether. “I hate him. I want to kill him. He’s not natural. He must die. Help me, help me, Arif. These are not my thoughts. I don’t want to feel this way. I hate him. Let me go. Let me go.”
Her ranting was insufferable in her own ears, yet she couldn’t stop. Tides of hate pumped through her blood. Bohr had poisoned her; polluted her. She was not herself. Her thoughts were not her thoughts. Her feelings were alien. She leaned back against Arif and moaned in heartfelt agony.
“It’s all right,” he kept whispering, his voice a warm buzz in her ears. “You’ll make it all right. It was a nightmare, that’s all. Calm down. It’ll be all right.”
“It won’t,” she cried. “It won’t. Not until he’s dead.”
Some part of Nikko whispered that he’d misread Phousita’s attack. It had been an accident, a nightmare carried into wakefulness, nothing more, and that he should go back and check on her, see that she was uninjured. But a more basic instinct kept him frozen in place. The hate on her face had been focused on him, and him alone.
Motion drew his gaze around. He looked, to see that the rotating hammers of Summer House had drawn appallingly near. They rose overhead and plunged downward like some hellish machine bent on crushing the tiny craft on its slow approach: fist of rock, fist of ocean, in a slow booming rhythm that drew ever nearer, more menacing.
The merchant ship had drawn much closer too. He could make out its shape now: cylinders bundled in a diamond pattern. It was no robotic vessel, he realized. This craft was manned. And too, it was no merchant ship. He stared at the formal Chinese characters on its side that identified it: this was the Galapagos, a ship of the Commonwealth police.
He wanted to believe its presence was a coincidence, but it was too much to ask.
A sense of helpless fury rolled over him. He’d come so close to bringing the Bohr Maker home. So close. But the cops had caught on. How? Suddenly he knew. Bohr’s ghost had turned him in. That sniveling, limp-spined bastard.
The fist of rock came hammering down, occulting his view of the police ship. The rock swept past, less than a kilometer away now. He could see the clawlike pattern of the ceramic pipes that drained the asteroid’s artificial frosting of cometary ice. It plunged away. The police ship had turned its prow to face him. A white light bloomed against its belly.
Nikko jerked in shock. The fucking cops were shooting at them! He scrabbled at his harness, his tangled fingers resisting. But terror had steadied them somewhat. The clasp snapped open. He dove aft. Phousita and Arif were still drifting on the end of the tether. They hadn’t seen what was coming. Probably wouldn’t understand, even if they had seen.
Holding on with his toes, Nikko perched on the rim of the middle coffin and worked at the anchor that held Arif’s tether. Got it loose. Turned his attention to Phousita’s and freed that one as well.
Phousita felt a jerk against her harness. She twisted in Arif’s arms. Nikko had the end of the tether in his hands. Over his head, the huge fist of a blue ocean was plunging down faster than a falling star. “Arif!” she screamed, in a violent combination of rage and terror.
Nikko heaved on the tether. He was holding on by his toes. She felt the harness jerk, knocking the
breath out of her lungs, then she and Arif were shooting helplessly toward Nikko. He let go of the tether and ducked. Her arms flailed as she tried to reach him. Arif was screaming manic threats. They shot past Nikko, past the little spacecraft. Their tethers trailed after them like broken strings from a kite as they swept under the path of the plunging blue fist. She screamed in utter terror, knowing that the hand of God had reached out to crush her from existence.
But the hand swept past. She blinked in amazement. Her perspective seemed to shift. The silvery scars on the receding wall of encapsulated water became distant trees, the airless forest of Sandor’s memories.
Still clinging to Arif, she twisted around to look back.
Nikko had jumped. He dove after them like a blue arrow in the void.
It was a suicide leap. Nikko knew it, but he took it anyway. What choice did he have? The police ship had fired its missile. A sudden wave of light and heat washed over him, and he knew the missile had found its target. He curled his body into a ball as chunks of debris swept past. Smaller bits of shrapnel peppered his back and shoulders, igniting fires of bitter cold. Something struck him hard in the shoulder, sending him into a violent spin. He almost blacked out from the bruising pain.
He caught a glimpse of the distant, entangled figures of Phousita and Arif. A halo of frozen vapors surrounded them. So one of them, at least, had taken damage. But the suits would self-seal.
The fist of rock swept down on them. It looked like a falling world. Nikko had never seen the House from this perspective. It horrified him: this merciless image of stone-cold power. He fully expected to be swept up, crushed, like an insect beneath a rock.
