“What?”
“He is in the employ of unknown forces and is unpredictable. I want him restrained in a cabin, and I want you guarding him during the jump. Tsoravitch will handle your station.”
“But—”
“Now! I’m not going to allow this to delay our jump!”
Less than a minute after Mosasa had said, “Stop testing me, priest,” The door to Mallory’s cabin slid open. Nickolai turned and saw Wahid and Kugara standing on the other side.
“Yeah, I was fucking paranoid.” Wahid shook his head and gave the two of them a thin little smile. He pointed the brick of a gamma laser at Nickolai’s midsection. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Unholster that slug thrower and toss it over here.”
Kugara pointed her needlegun at him and looked at him with a hard expression that told him nothing.
Nickolai knew that he could easily take out the two threats in front of him, disarm them before they fired, if he cared to. But what point was there to it? He could take over this ship, and then what? Drift until the abyss claimed him?
Better to accept his fate with what little dignity he had left.
He took Mr. Antonio’s gun from its holster and gently tossed the weapon to Wahid. It felt blasphemous, watching one of the Fallen catch the icon.
“We’re going back to your cabin, tiger-boy.” Wahid told him.
Nickolai nodded.
Wahid grimaced and gestured with the gamma laser. “Move it.”
The two of them allowed him to take the lead, and as he passed them he noted his last chance to overpower both of them before getting shot.
“What the hell were you trying to do?” Wahid said from behind him. “Why didn’t you just strap a bomb to your chest, you morey fuck? It’d be quicker.”
Nickolai didn’t answer. For himself, he knew the answer. If Mr. Antonio had told him the consequences of his sabotage, he never would have agreed. Suicide was the ultimate cowardice, and while Nickolai might have been damned for many things, cowardice would never be one of them.
But why did Mr. Antonio wish Mosasa dead in this particular fashion? Nickolai was a warrior and had access to the whole mission. Had he been given simple instructions to eliminate the AI—or even the whole crew here—he could have done so. Even if there was some doubt about the location of Mosasa’s AI brain while they were planetside, once they were on the Eclipse the nature of interstellar communication meant that the thing had to be on board.
Nickolai went quietly to his cabin. Kugara stepped in behind him. “Arms behind you.”
“What?”
“Do what she says,” Wahid told him.
Nickolai complied. He felt her grab his wrists and start wrapping something around them. He glanced back, and saw her pulling a roll of emergency sealant tape around his limbs, the same material that you’d use to seal tears and punctures in an environment suit or a ship’s hull in a pinch. It bonded to itself and other synthetic materials instantly.
“My arm . . .” Nickolai began to say. But it was pointless. Did it matter that the tape binding him permanently fused to the pseudoflesh of his arm?
His real arm felt the warmth as the tape bonded to his artificial limb.
“Legs,” she told him.
Nickolai complied, bringing his two digitigrade feet together. She started taping below the ankle, and stopped a little below the knee. Nickolai now stood, immobile.
Kugara grabbed his shoulder, spun him so he faced the door, and pushed. His back hit the wall next to his cot.
With his back to the wall, Kugara pulled one last strip of the sealant tape across his neck, attaching him to the wall.
Wahid shook his head. “You think you got him tied up enough?”
“If he wanted to, he could have disemboweled you five times while we came up here. One thing I learned in the DPS, if you arrest a morey, you restrain them. They were engineered to tear you apart hand-to-hand.”
DPS?
Nickolai stared at her, wondering. The DPS was Dakota Planetary Security, the secret police, and the main enforcers of the planetary government. Kugara wasn’t a typical refugee from Dakota, of which there were plenty on Bakunin. She was what the refugees were running from.
He suddenly wished he had asked her more about her past.
“Well you certainly have restrained him. Though you might want to strap his legs to the wall, too, unless you want his neck to snap if something goes funny with the jump.”
She turned around and ran several strips of tape across his torso, waist, and legs. “There,” she said. “Happy?”
Wahid shrugged. “Hell, I’d shoot the furball right now if it wasn’t for the fact our boss will want to talk to him after we tach into civilization.”
Kugara subvocalized so Wahid wouldn’t hear, but Nickolai could make out her saying, “If we tach into civilization.”
“Speaking of which, we got thirty minutes if Mosasa didn’t push back the jump.” He looked Nickolai up and down. “You’re okay sitting on this particular package until after the jump?”
“Yeah, the bridge is short-staffed as it is. Get back up there.”
Wahid shut the door and Kugara leaned against the wall opposite Nickolai. “This is going to be long half hour,” she said.
Nickolai was inclined to agree.
Parvi sat at the pilot’s station fifteen minutes before jump and ran though all the scenarios she could think of. Having power reserves so low made her uncomfortably aware of the differences between a fighter pilot and a tach-ship pilot. If something went wrong with the Eclipse, there was no bailing out. They didn’t have the resources to compensate for any navigational errors.
Worse, they were taching completely blind, with half the sensors gone from the drive systems. Those were the last line of defense for the engines if they had the bad luck to tach into the wake from another ship. They allowed the engines to modulate and keep things from overheating or blowing up like the tach-comm.
Of course, that was unlikely to happen. While another tach-ship could cause a disturbance that could affect their engines, such wakes were short-lived and propagated only a few AU. They would have to tach right on top of another ship in astronomical terms for it to be a worry, sensors or no sensors.
Much worse was the more likely prospect of more sabotage.
We’ve gone over the ship with every diagnostic we have; everything’s in working order . . .
At eleven minutes to go, Wahid came in, holstering a gamma laser and sat himself at the nav station. He started going through the checks without a word to anyone else.
Tsoravitch sat at the comm station, not that the Eclipse had much communication left. She had slipped into the seat when Mosasa had ordered Kugara and Wahid to restrain the tiger. For all the distaste Parvi had for Nickolai, she still had yet to wrap her head around that one. How the hell did Mosasa’s pissant little adventure rate two spies?
Were there people back home who knew what they’d find here?
Eight minutes. The bridge was disturbingly silent. As a precaution, Mosasa had ordered all the nonbridge crew to the cabins which doubled as escape pods, just in case.
Of course, if it came to that, the people on the bridge were screwed, along with Bill, trapped in the cargo hold by his massive environment suit.
Mosasa came in, completing the bridge crew. Just the four of them, Parvi, Tsoravitch, Wahid, Mosasa. Rotating in the central holo glowed a schematic description of their route. Eight light-years to the closest colony and a habitable planet.
If it is still there.
Six minutes and the door to the bridge slid shut with a pneumatic hiss. Parvi watched the display as her readout on the ship’s systems showed each compartment isolating itself. In a few moments each segment of the ship with people inside was on an isolated life-support system.
Just in case.
“Bill’s given the computer models the all clear,” Wahid said.
Three minutes, and Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch. “Give the bridge feed to the rest o
f the ship.”
Tsoravitch nodded, tapping a few controls, releasing a small snap of static across the PA system. Parvi did the final checks on the power plants to the tach-drive and heard her voice echo around her when she said, “Drive is hot. The systems are on-line and within acceptable ranges.”
Wahid tapped a few controls and the schematic on the main holo stopped its subtle rotation and began to glow slightly more solid. “Target fixed. Course window opens in one hundred seconds.”
Tsoravitch nodded and stared at her own readouts. “No problematic mass concentrations within five AU.” Sweat beaded on her forehead. Parvi wished Kugara was at her station.
Parvi asked the rote question, “Okay to fire the tach-drive?”
This time, the question didn’t seem so rote.
“Yes,” Mosasa said mechanically.
Wahid announced, “Sixty seconds to window.”
“Our tach-drive is on auto,” Parvi announced.
Wahid’s voice sounded distressingly calm. “Twenty seconds to window. Fifteen seconds to last-chance abort.”
There was little calm in Tsoravitch’s voice. There was a little vibrato in her voice when she said, “Mass sensors still clear.”
“Ten seconds. Five to commit,” Wahid said. “The drive is committed. Three . . . Two . . . One . . .”
For the first time in her life, Parvi physically felt when a ship fired its tach-drive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Relic
Nothing moves a State quicker than fear, and nothing a
State fears so much as change.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
What governs men is the fear of truth.
—Henri FrÉDÉric Amiel (1821-1881)
Date: 2526.5.29 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
In the month since the egg landed, a small village of temporary buildings had sprung up around the egg. Most of the buildings had been moved from one of Robert Sheldon’s mobile logging camps.
It wasn’t long after Frank and Tony landed and took Flynn into custody before the first of the portable outbuildings arrived. They shoved him into one of the barracks buildings shortly after it landed. The building was little more than a large modular container that could mate with the bottom of a large cargo aircraft. The skin was heavy and well-insulated enough to survive a wildfire in the dry season. The people inside would survive, too, if they didn’t run out of air.
The structure could house twenty or thirty people. But it also made a fairly good impromptu prison. Even without cuffs or a restraint collar, Flynn would have had an impossible time trying to get out of it without someone opening the armored, fireproof doors for him.
Fortunately, they removed the cuffs within the first forty-eight hours, and provided relatively decent food and clean clothing. But they wouldn’t remove the restraint collar, and the comm units were completely isolated inside the new camp’s network. He could call security, and that was about it.
At least it had something of an entertainment library, since it was designed to support a working camp, though about half was porn and 90 percent of the rest was thinly disguised work-safety tutorials. Flynn and Tetsami spent most of their time playing chess against each other, and replaying variants of the same conversation.
“I don’t believe that thing is here.” Tetsami rubbed her neck, mirroring the placement of the restraint collar. “I don’t even remember how far we are from Bakunin here—”
“One hundred and fourteen light-years,” Flynn said. “You’ve told me often enough.” He moved a rook on the small comm screen.
“Those things don’t have tach-drives. It’s been traveling for a couple of centuries at least.”
Flynn shook his head. “I find it hard to believe that such an advanced society would settle for sub-light speeds. Your move.”
“The Proteans were a little weird,” Tetsami agreed, castling. “Very much kept to themselves. But I think the word ‘seed’ covers what they’re doing, propagating themselves.”
“That slow?”
“Think of the energy a tach-drive requires for each jump. That thing is what, three meters long? They get it to speed and coast and it requires the same energy to get here as it does to get to the next galaxy. All it takes is time.”
“A lot of time.”
Tetsami shrugged. “I can see a little of their perspective. I mean, back when I first heard of them, I never expected to be in lockup with my great-to-the-seventh-power grandson one hundred and seventy-five years later, waiting for him to move something.”
“Yeah.” Flynn moved a knight behind his rook and smiled. “Check.”
“Christ on a unicycle,” she muttered at the screen.
“One hundred and seventy-five is one thing, millions is another—”
“Millions of what?” Robert Sheldon asked from the doorway to the barracks.
Flynn blinked Tetsami’s image away and looked at his boss. The man had sandy hair gone half gray. He had four glyphs on his forehead, and like most of the people with four or more, he had a somewhat flat voice and an expression that Flynn thought of as mechanical.
“Years,” Flynn said without any explanatory comment. “Are you going to explain why Ashley security has locked me up for nearly a month?”
Sheldon walked up, shaking his head. “You’re an impulsive young man.” He sat down on the bunk opposite him and next to the comm still showing the game in progress, almost precisely where Tetsami had been sitting. “And naive as well, even for knowing one of the Founders.”
Flynn squirmed a little inside at Sheldon’s language. He never liked the way people used the word “knowing” someone to refer to what Flynn had come to see as ritualized psychic cannibalism. Having Tetsami with him as a separate person made the way it was supposed to happen, the merging of personalities, seem so wrong. Who the hell was anyone to deny her her own identity, or that of any of the millions of people archived in the Hall of Minds? Everyone looked at Flynn the singleton as having no respect for the ancestors of Salmagundi, but was it more respectful to see their ancestors as little more than an undifferentiated data source? No more individuals than they were themselves?
Flynn did something he usually avoided in conversation; he looked Sheldon in the eye. “Why did you have me locked up here?”
God, his eyes look dead.
Please, Gram, let me talk to him.
“Mr. Jorgenson, you did not have authorization—”
“That’s bullshit.” Flynn stood up, and the move was fast enough for the restraint collar in his neck to send a warning pulse that fired a nasty wave of numbness down his legs and arms. “There was an impact in my survey zone, and it turns out that I had some particular knowledge—”
“Any investigation needed to be cleared before—”
“So I broke a regulation; you don’t imprison someone for that. Sure, fire me. But what the fuck is this?”
Sheldon reached up and clasped Flynn’s hands, lowering them. Sheldon’s hands were cold and hard, like being touched by a headstone.
“Lower your voice, son. I am here as a favor to your father.”
“My father’s dead.”
“Sit.”
“Are you going to explain—”
“Sit!” Sheldon’s voice changed, making Flynn realize that, up to this point, Sheldon’s voice had still retained a trace of human warmth and character to it; characteristics that evaporated in the single command.
Flynn sat.
“Mr. Jorgenson,” Flynn noticed this time that Sheldon seemed uncomfortable using the address.“Do you realize what would happen to you if I did not intervene on your behalf?”
“My behalf?”
“Quiet!”
Flynn shut up.
“You may know one of the Founders, but you seem to have forgotten why they came here.”
No, Bobby, Flynn remembers just fine. It’s you assholes who decided to misinterpret and take things out of context—
Gram, not
now.
Sorry.
“Contact with the decadent cultures beyond this planet is a grave assault on our purpose here. A violation of the commandments of our Founders.”
“But—”
“Please listen.” Sheldon placed his hand on Flynn’s shoulder and almost sounded human. “The thing that makes us what we are, our communion with the past, that would be the first thing they take away from us.”
Inside Flynn’s head, a quiet voice whispered to itself, Christ on a crutch, I’m going to be sick.
“I told you what this is. You know it isn’t some Confederacy artifact.”
Sheldon shook his head. “You are young and haven’t known enough of our history to understand. We cannot allow this kind of disruption to our way of life. It matters little where this thing is from.”
“Disruption?” Flynn shook his head. “This thing is from a culture that’s so far beyond the Confederacy the Founders escaped that it’s nearly inconceivable. Just understanding the smallest bit of it could—”
“It could destroy everything we’ve built here.”
“What?”
“This arrival is too dangerous to be made public knowledge. By association, the Triad has decided that you are too dangerous as well. I intervened, out of respect for your father, to spare your life.”
Flynn opened his mouth, and nothing came out.
“You see the gravity of this now? The Triad was prepared to erase you, completely, without archival—”
Flynn could care less about the Hall of Minds. But the thought that the Triad considered killing him—the current, flesh-and-blood person—just to avoid some sort of “disruption,” that was worse than appalling. But, thanks to his boss, Flynn had stayed alive, under house arrest in the barracks by the fallen seed.
“Why are you here?” Flynn asked.
“I wanted you to know that this will be over soon.” He looked into Flynn’s face. “When things return to normal, I want your promise not to make any waves. Don’t make me regret helping you.”
“I—”
“Please, Flynn. Your father was my friend.”
Do you even have friends? Flynn thought.