In days they had gone from too little data to, the case could be made, way too much. The challenge was in winnowing any useful information from all these downloaded petabytes.
The major find so far that day, trawling at random, seeking—as yet in vain—for the organizing principle of the archive, was the record of another Grace DiMeara visit to the Xool base. Her purpose that time, as Tacitus’ lip reading made clear, was to report to her masters on the Snake Subterfuge.
That was eighty-three years ago! And Grace seemed little changed. Grandma hadn’t commented, but he could see it made her feel ancient.
Joshua poked and prodded his latest excerpt of the data. Much was fascinating. Most only mystified him. Nothing answered what he most yearned to know, where the Xool had gone and what their purpose was. And then he stumbled upon—
The mother lode: decade upon decade of intercepted terrestrial and lunar news broadcasts, talking heads speaking straight toward the camera. Well-known events and English screen crawls provided exact Earth dates even when lip reading failed them. Tacitus had already inferred the Xool numbering scheme. Now, matching known dates with Xool annotations, the AI derived the time units implicit in each field of the alien timestamps.
“Dig!” Joshua netted. “Date the earliest record in the archive.”
“I already have,” Tacitus replied. “Call it 580 million years ago.”
• • • •
When Tacitus followed the trail forward they got their biggest surprise.
The surveillance segment showed Grace and Helena together at the Xool base. Whatever the aliens had to convey took a long while, a camera switching to the women only for the occasional obeisance or deferential murmur of acknowledgment. With each reappearance, the women’s faces were more grim.
“When, Tacitus?” Joshua asked.
“About six months ago.”
In the vid, the last color drained from Grace DiMeara’s face. “When will you return, my lords?”
The aliens’ answer, maddeningly, was unknowable.
“We shall await your return,” Grace said.
“We know what we must do,” Helena added. “Have a safe journey home.”
Return from where! Joshua wanted to scream at the vid. Where is home?
With heads bowed, the women stood by as the Xool wriggled into their vacuum gear. The aliens went out together through their base’s air lock. After several hundred meters along the lava tube, they had left the range of cameras.
A half hour later the aliens reappeared to cameras strung along a different expanse of lava tube. Scorch marks dotted the tube floor. A short distance inside, perched upon spidery trusses, sat a flattened ball. Pointy protuberances festooned its bulging waist. By comparison with the aliens, the—whatever—was perhaps ten meters high and fifteen across.
A retreat? A place more comfortable than the human-friendly rooms? Then why the pointy things? Whatever the object was, it had an air lock. The aliens went in. The outer hatch closed—and the timestamp digits jumped.
“About fifteen minutes have passed,” Tacitus interpreted.
What motion had triggered the camera? Had the object somehow shifted? Vibrated? Joshua stared, trying to decide—
Until, atop a brilliant column of flame, the Xool ship lifted off. In seconds, it had vanished from the camera’s sight.
Gone … home?
CHAPTER 37
Agnelli’s meeting was running late.
“The director will be with you in a minute,” the perky blond executive assistant told Carl. That would have been a welcome reassurance if he hadn’t already heard it five times. And if intel crises were not unscheduled and unscheduleable.
In theory, he could be using the time to organize his thoughts. To an extent, he did. More, he struggled to stay upright in the anteroom chair. Damned Earth gravity.
He would scold himself another time about allowing his exercise regimen to slide.
When, at last, Carl got to enter the inner sanctum, whoever had last seen Agnelli had exited by a rear door. Digital wallpaper showed only Alpine scenery. Agnelli looked harried.
The director was not one for chit-chat. Within a few sentences, including the pro forma question whether Carl would like something to drink and a more sincere offer (that Carl likewise declined) of a mobile hydraulic-assist chair, Agnelli got down to business. Over a cosmic ultra link he netted, “You didn’t come all this way just to chew the fat. Did you discover something about Helena Strauss?”
“We continue to turn over rocks.”
Because whether from Agency training or Xool, Helena had been a pro at covering her tracks. Her many cover IDs—although neither Carl nor anyone he had assigned to the case believed all had been found—made Helena’s disappearance appear planned.
The cover IDs he had built for her appeared to trace back to the same computer break-in that had trashed the backup memories of AIs and Augmented, including Robyn Tanaka Astor’s. Until this oppressive gravity began compressing his spine, he had appreciated the poetic justice: Intervener sabotage used to mask his penetration of the Intervener conspiracy.
Carl continued, “I came to update you on the situation on Ariel.”
“Snakes being Snakes?”
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Carl netted back. “The deeper I dig into comm logs, even back to my departure, the surer I am. Bruce Wycliffe”—Carl’s erstwhile deputy—“isn’t being himself. Glithwah must be up to something.”
“Despite pols going on about bygones and new generations, it’s the rare person in this building who trusts the Snakes.” The secure connection broke. Aloud, Agnelli continued, “But there hasn’t been a duress code in any of the reports. Correct?”
“Correct,” Carl said. “And the regular authentication codes are present. I still stand by my conclusion.”
Agnelli would connect the dots: the Agency’s remaining asset on Ariel had been compromised or coerced.
“And the experts agree?” asked the director.
“I’m the expert for Ariel. I’m the expert on Snakes and Bruce Wycliffe. Forget that analysts say the variances from earlier messages are statistically inconclusive. Don’t ask me to put my finger on specific words or phrases”—because specifics would risk giving those analysts proof he was fudging—“but reading between the lines ….”
“Understood. You’ve sent your own challenge messages to Ariel?”
“Of course. And received the proper canned response to each one.”
“As you would whether or not your man Bruce were compromised.” Agnelli frowned. “What’s your recommendation? Send in the Navy? Because they’re busy hunting and not finding pirates.”
“Not yet. I could be mistaken.”
“And we don’t need an inter-world, inter-species incident.”
“I’d think not, sir.” Carl was counting on that reticence. If the marines did go to Ariel, he’d surely be sent with them, and he had other places to be. If the implication of creating grief within the InterstellarNet community hadn’t done the trick, he would have mused about how the do-gooder lobby would react to military reoccupation of Ariel. The do-gooders already felt the Ariel population were the victims of collective punishment.
That’s what you get when you collectively invade the Solar System.
But for once, the Snakes weren’t Carl’s biggest worry. Not even close. And at a loss whom at the UPIA he could trust, he had settled on the next best thing: getting out word about the Xool to everyone.
Sad to say, he was the worst possible choice for making the announcement. Skeptics—and who wouldn’t be?—would see only a disgruntled employee. The Agency would point to Carl’s involvement in a fellow agent’s death, his recall under a cloud from Ariel, and the weeks he’d spent cooling his heels on administrative leave. Two decades earlier, the Agency had buried his troubled past; they could as easily leak a few details if it served them. (It would serve Xool moles he had to assume yet remained inside the Agency.) Meanwhile, cynics ou
tside the Agency could disparage the digital “proof” copied from Xool archives as fabricated with the sophisticated UPIA tools he had at his disposal.
No matter that Corinne sometimes fretted she was a has-been, in her day she had broken huge stories. She was rich, famous, and widely known. The general public would far sooner believe her than some unknown spook with a sketchy background, or an infamous drunk, or the drunk’s elderly grandma.
Only Corinne—and with her Discovery’s long-range transmitter, at intra-Solar System distances all but impossible to jam—was far, far away.
At least he knew Helena had not lied about Corinne ending up on Prometheus. When, leveraging his temporary authority as station chief, he had reached out to Prometheus, the Discovery mission office there had relayed both his message to Corinne and her reply.
In the brief recording Corinne had been allowed to send, gatecrasher that she was, she hadn’t say much. The vid clip itself, though? It said lots.
Carl had played that clip, studied it, over and over. Corinne and Grace, seated side by side, drink bulbs in hand, in a noisy dining area. Both seemed healthy. In the curved window wall behind them, Saturn and its rings served as a spectacular backdrop.
Two men and a woman were visible behind Corinne, seated at another table. When he’d run their images through facial-recognition software, all three showed up in public files as Discovery construction workers. The snippet of their conversation that audio enhancement separated from the background din was innocent, having to do with overtime pay.
But Carl hadn’t allow himself truly to believe the vid authentic and Corinne safe until the best analytical tools he had—which were the best tools the Agency had—could find nothing digitally manipulated in the vid clip.
He had to get out there—only apart from mission personnel and naval forces, no one was welcome anywhere near Prometheus. On a chartered ship or a stolen one, Carl arriving in a private capacity would do no good. But if he could get to Prometheus under the apparent imprimatur of the UPIA …
And get the word out before Grace accomplished whatever she had had in mind when a “parts failure” stranded her and Corinne there. (Your humble servants will stop the starship.)
The stakes were too damned high!
Agnelli cleared his throat. “I assume you have a recommendation?”
“I do, sir.” Carl took a deep breath. “I make a surprise inspection of Ariel, arriving unannounced aboard the fastest, stealthiest courier the Agency has.”
“And suppose the Snakes coerce you? Suppose they’ve compromised your man and he reviews or fakes your reports?”
“If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know to send in the marines. If you get a report purportedly from me, it had better be in new protocols, that we’ll define unique to this inspection. Protocols that Bruce can’t know.”
The words meant: you’ll know, one way or another, sooner than they can coerce me.
“Okay,” Agnelli decided. On one office wall, ship’s specs had displaced the digital scenery. “Hermes is on standby at Basel Spaceport. Good enough?”
A top-of-the-line courier. Top-of-the-line Agency stealth gear. Full comms and crypto, too. “That will do,” Carl said.
He and Joshua would arrive in the Saturn system, unannounced and unsuspected, aboard an official UPIA vessel, before Carl could be expected at Ariel. On the way he’d work on ways to take Grace into custody that didn’t give her the option to go out like Banak.
CHAPTER 38
Standing tall, standing proud, Arblen Ems Firh Glithwah, Foremost, bestrode the bridge of her temporary flagship. Champion, she had renamed the vessel. Its original name had scarcely befitted the freighter this had once been, much less a mighty Hunter warship. Any objections the ship’s erstwhile human crew might have had had ceased to matter.
Glithwah gave her tactical display a glance.
“At full readiness across the fleet,” summarized Rashk Pimal, the chief tactical officer. He had to raise his voice above the earnest whispers that emanated from a dozen duty stations.
Twenty-seven icons clustered in the holo, one for each ship of her fleet. The vessels ranged from tiny and agile couriers to huge mining ships. Some carried armed warriors. Others conveyed battalions of combat robots. After the initial two ships, condescendingly bestowed, their reported “loss” much sneered at, her navy had been honorably and cleverly seized. And every ship—however modest its origins, no matter how defenseless in its original form—now bristled with missiles and laser cannons from the clandestine factories on the moon Caliban.
But more precious than armaments, these twenty-seven vessels carried the future of clan Arblen Ems. The entire clan, apart from a few noble volunteers, had squeezed onto these ships. A handful of veterans too old to survive the coming migration had stayed behind on Ariel to maintain the charade of normalcy. To greet—and as necessary, to neutralize—any unannounced visitors. So that the clan could rid itself of United Planets paternalism and rules. So that all could be free.
If this fleet prevailed.
Moment by moment, day by day, her gamble looked more promising. As deep into space as passive sensors could peer, not a single enemy vessel was detected. The UP navy had scattered—all according to her plan—across the Solar System. Chasing pirates. Chasing ghosts. Maneuvered off the game board.
Naïfs.
“Recent changes in deployment?” Glithwah probed.
Pimal detailed the latest subtle reconfigurations, the real-time jostlings and rearrangements, and the recoveries from same, inevitable when most crews had trained only on simulators. In the days since departing Ariel, most crews had already shown improvement. He concluded, “Confident, Foremost, of preparedness for battle.”
“Excellent,” Glithwah said, although she did not expect much of a battle. The clan would have in their favor surprise and local numerical superiority. Not to mention her unsuspected robot army …
Baring her teeth in joy and anticipation, raising her voice to be heard by everyone across the bridge, Glithwah asked, “And offensive preparations?”
At Pimal’s netted directive, the view in the main tactical holo zoomed outward. Far ahead of the main fleet, icon clusters marked three waves of the strike team. The raiders were radar stealthed. Dark as space. Scarcely detectable in infrared—if one were looking straight at them—by the waste heat of their idling reactors. And if, like Champion, one’s line of sight to the raiders did not point straight into the glow of the sun.
If sensors in the Saturn system saw anything headed their way, the dim heat signatures of the onrushing forces would be dismissed as the diffuse traces of a spent solar flare.
Before the duty shift ended, the front wave would begin decelerating full-out. Even then, with their fusion drives operating at full capacity, they would be difficult to spot with the sun behind them.
Until it was too late.
• • • •
This nightmare was of the up-close-and-personal variety: of desperate combat, hand to hand, cabin by cabin, deck by deck, for control of Victorious. The battle that all sides had lost.
Corinne tossed and turned, flailed and moaned. Time and again she drifted just close enough to consciousness to know that, yet once more, the old ordeal—more vivid than ever—held her in thrall. Time and again, she fell back into the nightmare.
A dozen or so marines, the survivors of a failed rescue attempt. Carl, too: their pilot. Prisoners, Centaur crew and human kidnap victims alike, stressed and stretched beyond endurance. Snakes, warriors and civilians, fighting for their lives. Charge and countercharge. Lasers and crowbars, Molotov cocktails and sheer rage.
Chaos.
Klaxons shrieking and alarms strobing. Smoke tickling her nose. The sizzling of laser strikes. The tooth-rattling boom of explosions. Shaking. Trembling. Corinne held her pillow over her head, whimpering.
Her eyes flew open as, directly over her head, a siren pulsed and wailed. She didn’t recognize the pattern. Make that two
patterns, alternating. Grace wasn’t in her cot to ask, nor did her friend answer a netted query. The public-safety channel, when Corinne netted in, advised without explanation: Emergency personnel report to duty stations. Everyone else, remain where you are.
She had no assigned duty station, and didn’t need one. A reporter’s duty station was wherever news happened. Delaying only to strap on magnetic slippers and clip on her ID badge, Corinne was out the door and into the hallway—and almost run over. “What’s going—”
Two naval enlisted shot past her, headed, she guessed, for the base main air lock. Seconds later, a rumpled-looking naval lieutenant running in the opposite direction, without slowing, without speaking, shoved her back through her open door.
Flynn, the lieutenant’s name was. He liaised between the local naval brass and the civilian project office—and also, with evident disdain, after the restrictions on her had been relaxed, twice with Corinne. Given his mundane duties, neither the military types nor the civvies had any respect for the man. For his perpetual-and-annoying smile, behind Flynn’s back many called him Dimples.
He wasn’t smiling today.
The sirens wailed again, from a ceiling speaker a scant half meter from her head. Signifying what? She netted to the base public-service database. Of the alternating tone patterns that continued to throb, in the once more empty corridor and in her cabin, only one of the sequences was listed. Emergency lockdown.
With her heart pounding, she looked up the navy’s alert codes. Battle stations.
Habit kicked in, and Corinne set her implant to record. With luck the blaring alarms could be digitally removed later. After a few seconds, blessedly, the klaxons warbled and died.
Dimples had gone off in the direction of the base main control room. Not allowing time for second thoughts, Corinne dashed after him. Here and there along eerily deserted corridors, behind doors just slightly ajar, faces peered out. Most looked terrified.
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