Among Glithwah’s secrets was that the clan had a tactical officer. Carl Rowland and his UPIA lackeys would not approve. Then again, if affairs would proceed according to plan for only a brief while longer, the days of caring what the UPIA thought, or suspected, or knew, were numbered.
That prospect made the upcoming game of b’tok with Carl a bit more palatable.
• • • •
“It has been too long since we played,” Glithwah said. “Not since before your reporter friend came and left. She and I had a good meeting.”
In the clamor and chaos of Ariel Commons surrounding shift change, Carl had to struggle to follow an out-loud conversation, much less to discipline his thoughts for b’tok. Given his supposed recent progress—defeat at a less embarrassing level?—Glithwah had proposed taking the competition up a notch. Championship b’tok was played amid distraction. It was yet another way that b’tok seemed Machiavellian.
Except that, to a Snake, Machiavelli was an adorable naïf and a rank amateur.
Crap. His thoughts already tugged in too many directions. More distraction was the last thing he needed. What had Glithwah commented on? Oh, right. Corinne’s visit.
“She and I are more like old acquaintances,” Carl answered, wondering whether the Interveners were as observant as Glithwah. If Interveners even existed. With each passing day, Corinne’s assertions seemed more, well, fantastical. “Over the years, we’ve gone our separate ways. Apart from mooching a ride from me, we hardly overlapped this visit. Regardless, I’m glad your discussion went okay.”
Glithwah sipped from a bulb of iced lovath, the Snake analogue to coffee, while, in their consensual space, a b’tok “board” took form. She asked, “Do you recognize the configuration?”
B’tok, despite its many rules, had no fixed starting point. Games used any layout and any deployment of opposing forces to which both players agreed. Often, as in this instance, players let the game-management software randomly choose an historical scenario from a library, then adjust parameters for parity between the sides. That fluidity was one more reason Carl struggled. With chess, at least, he could fall back upon standard openings.
Did he recognize anything? Boats. Primitive aircraft. A few specks of land in a vast ocean. Where his game icons lacked visibility, whole regions showed only as featureless gray. Given the stylized representation of b’tok, he wondered if the simulation was on K’vith, Earth, or a fictional world.
As he pondered, three diners, deep in high-pitched, guttural conversation, finished their meals and stood. Winding through the commons, making a path through closely grouped tables, the Snakes nodded deferentially to Glithwah. One trod on Carl’s shoe. All part of championship-level play.
Focus. Carl shook his head. “What is this place?”
“A part of your Pacific Ocean. The Battle of Midway. A sea-and-air skirmish from your Second World War. It appears you have the side that won.”
Carl, although he hadn’t lived on Earth for ages, and had never set foot on an ocean-going ship, still ought to have an advantage over Glithwah. Her entire life had been spent aboard spaceships or on icy, lifeless worlds, like Ariel, in the outer reaches of one solar system or another. But it had been Glithwah, avid student of history—and humans—who identified the setting. That their match was in a terrestrial setting would only serve to make his inevitable loss that much more humiliating.
“Okay,” Carl said. Assuming he had the right conflict in mind, that was more than two centuries earlier. He could not remember the sides, much less a particular battle.
Once the board was set, b’tok etiquette prohibited surfing for historical insight. And if he had had the bad manners to search anyway? Whatever background he might have retrieved would have been rendered subtly wrong in untold ways by the randomization process.
“Shall we begin?”
Her question was rhetorical, because in a corner of Carl’s netted vision, the game clock had already begun to increment. “What’s the latest word about the refinery accident?” He wanted to know anyway, and to ask might distract Glithwah.
He launched aircraft to surveil the unknown regions of the game map. He sent up a few more planes to patrol around his ships, to give warning of any attack. He adjusted the deployment of his ships, dithering whether while bunched up they protected one another or just put all his eggs in one too easily bombed basket. Except for enemy surveillance planes in the distance, Glithwah’s forces had yet to make an appearance.
“Metal fatigue,” Glithwah said. “Tubing ruptured in a cryogenic coolant loop. Our engineers suspect radiation embrittlement in the …”
As Carl considered that diagnosis, and wondered whether embrittlement was a word or a coinage of Glithwah’s, and as the definition popped into his mind’s eye, within the game an enemy sortie burst from the clouds. Waves of planes darted toward one of the islands. He ordered more of his planes into the air, and was dismayed at how slowly they responded.
As his supply icons on the island disappeared in puffs of symbolic flame, as bomb-crater icons marked his runways unusable, he wondered: who’s distracting whom?
Which suggested the possibility the surprise attack, so early in the game, might be intended to divert him from Glithwah’s answer. She wouldn’t lie—about things he could, and would, confirm. The deuterium refinery had had metal fatigue. That didn’t preclude the bad tubing being there on purpose. But sacrificing a third of the colony’s energy supply in an insurance scam? That would be no small thing! Not to mention the loss of life.
Had Glithwah wanted illicit tech that much?
Belatedly, as he launched shipboard aircraft to repel the attackers, one of his long-range surveillance planes radioed in the location of an enemy carrier group. His options and confusion expanded. Should he attack at once, with his reserves? Wait till he could refuel the planes now flying defense? Hold back planes lest Glithwah attack with more aircraft? As he weighed his choices, fighter planes from Glithwah’s carriers chased away his recon planes.
“… Specialized alloys in the tubing,” Glithwah continued explaining. “After a freighter failed to appear, we had to postpone routine maintenance.”
His position deteriorating rapidly, Carl reminded himself the conversation was his purpose here. What did one more embarrassing loss matter after so many?
“What’s the prognosis for repairing or replacing the refinery?” Carl asked. “How long can the settlement operate with just two units before having to ration power? And can I pull a few strings for you regarding replacement parts?”
“Pull strings? I see: to expedite. Yes, that would be appreciated.”
And in swooped more of Glithwah’s planes, wave upon wave.
His aircraft scattered, his ships vulnerable, Carl relegated his play to reflex. As for the larger puzzle, there, too, he saw only unpalatable answers. One: with parts unavailable and maintenance overdue, the Snakes recklessly kept a critical facility in operation. Why not shut it down, at least while their reserve supplies lasted?
Two: Glithwah, playing a longer game, making a point about dependency, wanted the refinery to go boom. She had been pushing him to okay the settlement getting its own long-range ships. She wanted her people to handle at least some resupply runs on their own. The accident investigation would, without doubt, confirm metal fatigue. But maybe Glithwah had had old tubing reinstalled, kept from past maintenance.
(One of his aircraft carriers, its flight deck aflame, dead in the water, racked by explosions, began to sink. “Too bad,” Glithwah netted. Carl scarcely noticed.)
Or, three: the Snakes needed money, lots of it. The disaster was simple insurance fraud.
Or, four. Four was the most intriguing. The most worrisome. The hardest to know how to handle. Four was sabotage, but not of Glithwah’s doing. Factions among the Snakes were nothing new, but rivalries had not yet (to Carl’s knowledge) risen to major sabotage.
But there was yet another spin he could put on the sabotage scenario. Su
ppose Snakes were indeed trying to get their talons into Boater robotics—tech that someone had long tried to keep out of this solar system.
The sabotage might mean Corinne’s Interveners had an agent right here on Ariel, among the Snakes.
CHAPTER 21
Alongside the banded and ringed magnificence that was Saturn, above the potato shaped, much cratered, icy moon Prometheus, against a field of diamond-sharp stars, hung Discovery: a featureless patch of black. Dark as pitch. Surface laser-ablated to a smooth finish. Details lost in the blur of its stately rotation. A dim and ghostly presence ….
And ghostly the starship would remain. Because scrolling across the bottom of the striking image, the repeating message from the project office on Prometheus began, Media access revoked.
It might have been nice to have been told that, oh, say, a half-billion klicks earlier.
“This is nonsense,” Corinne snapped, turning her head this way and that, defying anyone and anything in Odyssey’s cramped bridge to contradict her. Posturing, all of it. She had included Discovery on her itinerary to make the trip less about Ariel. Less, if any Interveners should be watching, about her connecting with Carl.
If someone else chose to seem responsible for redirecting her home—great. With Saturn and Uranus on more or less opposite sides of the Sun, and Earth still lying ahead, she hadn’t yet gone far out of her way. Back sooner with Denise had its charms.
Corinne kept glowering, to keep up appearances.
“It’s pretty damn rude,” Grace said. “I mean, this isn’t a trip anyone would undertake on a whim. Aren’t you offended?”
“I’m sure they have their reasons.” Reaching into the holo—flicking through the verbiage, past the excuses, reading between the lines—Corinne came to their reason. “A shipboard accident. This close to scheduled departure, they’ll be scurrying to clean up.”
“How serious of an accident?”
“They don’t say.”
Nor did any of the hour-old broadcasts within reach of Odyssey’s high-gain antenna. So, most likely: no worlds had shattered this time. No innocents had been slaughtered. Nothing had as much as interrupted the transfer of fuel from the antimatter factory on Prometheus.
The glimpse of Discovery, so like the ship of her nightmares, still made Corinne queasy.
“I’d be hopping mad, too,” Grace said. Misreading the grimace on Corinne’s face? “I mean, you’re a worlds-class reporter. Near-legendary. The voice and face of the Himalia Incident and of the raid to retake Victorious. If anyone has earned the right to cover a story about a starship, that’s got to be you.”
“Only near-legendary?” Deflecting the flattery with humor.
“Well?” Grace persisted. “Tell the truth. Don’t you feel slighted?”
“A bit, maybe.” Well, yes, actually. “Set aside the ship’s tour and the interviews I had scheduled. Any accident aboard Discovery is news in its own right. The project office shouldn’t be turning away the media.”
“And it’s a free solar system. Except for Snakes.”
“Except for Snakes,” Corinne agreed.
“So …?”
“Okay, I admit it. I am annoyed. And curious, too. But they’ve revoked my access.”
“Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?” More: what does your sly smile mean?
“Who’s to say we got their message?” Grace gestured at the main nav holo, in which nothing was anywhere close to this ship.
“So, just show up?” Because after coming about four billion klicks, who could turn them away?
“That’s what I’m thinking.” Grace grinned. “Have I mentioned? I haven’t gotten around to acknowledging the message. It’d be easy enough to clear it from the ship’s log.”
“They know we’re coming from Ariel. If we don’t acknowledge, they’ll simply relay the message through Ariel.”
“Then we ignore messages from Ariel, too.” Grace gestured again at the nav display. “We’re well on our way. Considering the distance, no one will think a thing about us not responding.”
“Maybe.” Something didn’t ring true to Corinne. “I’m surprised you care so much. Don’t I remember you sneering at travel aboard a starship as a lifestyle choice, not flying?”
“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to see a starship. It’s a flying habitat. It’s my taxes at work. It’s a whole freaking manmade world.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Laying it on too thick? When I signed on, I was expecting a longer gig.”
With a bigger payday at the end. So, okay, Corinne could see why cutting the trip short might disappoint her rent-a-pilot. That didn’t make Grace wrong. Because, damn it, she was still journalist enough, or maybe just stubborn enough, to race straight to whatever people didn’t want her to see.
“Okay,” Corinne said. “My wife is bound to hear about the revoked access. She’ll expect me home soon. I’ll shoot Denise word to expect me when she sees me.”
Grace shook her head. “You have to assume they’ll be listening.”
Because only a fool believed that the government never intercepted private communications, at least whenever they could convince themselves they had cause. Odyssey arriving disinvited at Prometheus might go a lot smoother if no one could show she had heard the wave-off. And just as she couldn’t contact Denise, Corinne also couldn’t bounce ideas off Walt. He had long ago returned to Earth, riding radio waves, just as he had traveled to Ariel. “No offense,” he’d said, just before transmitting himself, “but I have more productive ways to spend weeks than cooped up, light-minutes from anywhere.” Walt had promised to beam himself to Prometheus once, finally, she arrived.
So: forward or homeward?
It wasn’t even a contest, because something had struck her. The UP had an interstellar drive only because Snakes had hijacked Victorious to this solar system. Given how the Interveners discouraged some kinds of tech, maybe they weren’t big fans of human-built starships.
Maybe whatever had gone wrong aboard Discovery wasn’t an accident.
CHAPTER 22
“I feel like a rat in a maze,” Danica grumbled. Privately and silently, of course. Over a cosmic ultra link.
In her real-time audio and video feed, collapsed into a corner of Carl’s mind’s eye, nothing seemed all that challenging. Then again, this world was his home. He had lived on Ariel longer than, well, anywhere else. To her, this warren of tunnels was all still new.
“Just souvenir shopping,” he reminded her. Corinne’s pilot had given him the idea. “If anyone asks, someone in the Commons mentioned Banak’s work to you. So when you saw him on the street, you thought you’d ask about buying a piece.”
The sculptor himself could be seen via public-safety cameras making his way down a pedestrian tunnel to the new Snake spaceport. While he retrieved his package, Carl might get fifteen minutes to plant bugs and make a quick search. Infamous recluse that Banak was, known to hole up in his gallery/workshop/apartment for days, even weeks, at a time, they had to make an opportunity.
“I know my cover story,” Danica netted. “It doesn’t make these corridors any less claustrophobic.”
“And me being a head taller than you, it shouldn’t be a mystery why you’re over there and I’m here.”
“Yeah, yeah.” In her vid feed, two Snakes in rumpled jumpsuits, perhaps cargo handlers, glided down the corridor toward her. As they passed, Danica rated only the briefest of sidelong glances. Three minutes later she netted, “We’re here.”
In any event, Banak was there, brandishing a package claim, to be waved into a storeroom by the bored-looking Snake watchman. Danica’s point of view indicated she had hung back, loitering at a window in the passenger terminal. From there she could waylay Banak if he started home too soon.
“Be careful,” Carl netted back.
“Yeah, yeah.”
Ariel’s entire population wouldn’t fill a small town. Local security—originally, by UP insistence—
was correspondingly relaxed. If Carl had known only what Danica knew, he’d have been as dismissive.
Whistling tunelessly, with one hand in his pants pocket, Carl sauntered up to Banak’s gallery. The door’s scrolling display, alternating among clan speak, English, and Mandarin, indicated Closed.
Along the left edge of his augmented vision, four red dots dimly glowed: alarm systems flagged by his gear. The low intensity denoted mere commercial-grade alarms, although to have four systems seemed excessive. Nothing his Agency gear couldn’t handle with ease.
Uh-huh. And what did the Agency wizards know of Intervener tech?
Danica netted, “From what I can see through the doorway, Banak is wandering up and down the aisles of the receiving area. Maybe his package is misplaced?”
“Maybe.” Or maybe Banak was also exploiting an opportunity. “Be careful.”
“That’s twice in two minutes. Something you want to tell me?”
“No.” What he had already shared—that Banak might be behind some of the recent sabotage—should suffice. That the Snake might be blowing stuff up as part of an interstellar conspiracy spanning eons? That was on a need-to-know basis.
And if Danica already knew? He already suspected one Intervener agent. Why not two? All the more reason to treat today’s op as routine.
Indicating success with a slight vibration, the device in his pocket overrode Banak’s alarms and reset the electromagnetic lock. The door unlatched with a soft click.
Low on the hinge-side door jamb, a circle pulsed: an app in Carl’s implant, highlighting something out of the ordinary. A filament of some kind, stretched across the crack. Old school. He captured an image, so that he could restore the filament as he had found it.
“I’m in,” he advised Danica.
Her avatar smirked. “Be careful.”
“I deserve that.”
Banak had left the overhead light panel on in his gallery before leaving to retrieve his unexpected parcel. No reason, therefore, to work in the dark by the unnatural tint of amplified vision. Scouting around back, in the messy, congested, workshop area, Carl found he could dispense with hardwiring his bug. Inductively self-charging cordless tools lay everywhere; Banak would never notice the sip of power a bug would use to recharge. From a deep squat, ducking his head, Carl stuck a bug far back beneath a Snake-low workbench.
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