Infinity gate, p.33
Infinity Gate, page 33
Unfortunately, Supervisor Astor did notice what was going on under his nose and confronted Vemmet about it. Where was the money coming from, he wanted to know, and why was none of it going to him? He was prepared to keep his silence, but only for a thousand stars a month. That kind of outlay would have put a serious dent in Vemmet’s resources, and Vemmet despised haggling. Chulluque and two other ursid selves encountered Astor in one of the factory’s squalid bathrooms – an encounter that was brief but decisive. They dumped the body into a skip designated for food waste and a new supervisor, with a clearer sense of his market value, was promoted from the assembly line.
So far, Vemmet’s only goal was to come out of this experience alive. Anything beyond that was still nascent and formless. Possibly Baxemides would relent at last and allow him back into her favour, although it had to be said there was little sign of a change of heart. She had sent him two further drones to add to his collection, each time with a message reminding Vemmet that she was monitoring the count and would punish him with exemplary severity if he was late or lax in his assigned duties.
Then again, perhaps he could subvert a local official on a backwater world to take him on-staff in exchange for ready cash. Or wait things out until Baxemides fell from grace in some palace coup at the Itinerant Fortress. Or… or… He would think of something soon. He would have to, because life expectancy on Tsakom wasn’t long.
But in his fifth month at the factory he made two discoveries in rapid succession that altered his perspective.
He made the first discovery when he was trying to plug some of the holes in the walls of the insta-build with a silicon sealant. To do that he had to clear away some of the weeds that grew up around its base. Low down on its rear wall, close to the corner, he found an ident plaque, so blackened with rot and weathering that it was almost unreadable. Almost, but not entirely: he could read three of the characters clearly. They were digits: a 3, then a 6, then a 2. The next character looked like a capital S.
Vemmet refused to hope, but he set to with a scraper and a wide range of toxic solvents. After an hour or so he’d uncovered the rest of the plaque. The insta-build’s ident string was NV4i7362-SE. He fells to his knees in front of it, his mouth open. He traced the last two characters with the tip of his finger. “Thank you,” he whispered at last, although he was not a religious man. Baxemides had thrown him into the pits of the Demshoi, but it turned out the pits had an emergency exit.
Before he used it, though, he made the second discovery. This one came not through his own efforts but through what seemed at the time to be the purest chance. A fourth drone had just been delivered, identical in design to the other three but less extensively damaged. A single shot from some kind of force weapon had dropped it out of the sky, crumpling but not rupturing its outer casing. The Cielo forensics team had gutted its logical core and disabled its drive functions, but otherwise had left it intact.
And three days after it arrived, it talked.
It wasn’t talking to Vemmet but to another drone, and very briefly. He would have missed it altogether if he hadn’t been in the insta-build at the moment the message came through. In fact, he had been enjoying a private moment, lying on his cot bed staring at the ceiling and imagining the death by various grotesque eventualities of Coordinator Baxemides, when out of nowhere his array registered one of the new arrival’s subsystems activating. The drone was responding to an incoming signal modulating at roughly one hundred and fifty thousand cycles per second. Thinking on his feet, Vemmet instructed his array to listen in on the same frequency.
What he heard was just atonal whistling, but obviously if this was a message of some kind it would be coming through encoded. Vemmet still had access to the decryption and translation suites he and his colleagues had employed routinely during his tenure at Contingencies. He fed the drone’s message into the various programs and waited – still lying on his back but now rigid with tension – to see what would come out at the other end.
“Hello,” the message began.
The convulsive start that single word induced in Vemmet caused his bed to overturn and deposit him, sprawling, on the insta-build’s fibra-mat floor. He was hearing the affectless tones of the translation software, but a small adjustment allowed him to hear the original words underneath it. A woman’s voice, cultured and warm.
“I’d like to help you,” it went on. “At least, if you’re who I think you are. I’m reading you, Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, as organic. The anima beside you is wearing a G7 shell registered at this address…”
A second voice, sounding like a child, said, “We don’t have to tell you anything. And you don’t have any right to follow us.”
Vemmet momentarily forgot how to breathe. He stared in open-mouthed amazement at the drone, taking in less than half of what he was hearing. A third voice joined in. It denied being an Ansurrection agent, but the first speaker seemed far from convinced. Vemmet wrung his hands in an access of emotion. It was impossible to say exactly what this was, but his every instinct told him it was – had to be – momentous. His array was automatically recording everything that was being said by the original speaker and by her two interlocutors. He instructed it to make multiple copies, both of the original signal and of the decrypted file, terrified that something might be lost to mechanical error.
Vemmet wouldn’t have recognised the voice, because he had never heard Hadiz Tambuwal speak. But she identified herself only a few minutes into the conversation. After that, Vemmet didn’t even breathe. He strained to catch every syllable, even though he knew his array would record it anyway and play it back whenever he needed it.
The conversation took the best part of half an hour, mostly due to the long pauses that preceded and followed every speech. It was the pauses that told Vemmet what it was he was hearing. The speakers were in different continua, and some kind of physical relay system was being used to ferry their messages back and forth between the two respective worlds. Most likely the intermediary was a drone, or perhaps more than one, from this same fleet, and by default all the other drones were picking up the signal too. Multiple redundancy was a useful feature when you were conversing across the gap between universes.
As soon as the conversation ended and the drone’s transponder switched itself off, Vemmet listened to the entire recording again. And again. And again. By the fourth repetition he finally understood the full ramifications of what he had heard. Hadiz Tambuwal was alive, and making common cause with the Ansurrection. He had overheard her offering sanctuary to one of the sleeper agents who had somehow evaded capture or immolation. And she had given an actual address. Vemmet had the unique ID string of a world – U5838784474 – where the two would meet. More, he knew within a few tens of miles where on that world the meeting would take place. Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills’ address was a matter of public record, and the voice had promised that if she used a local Step station she wouldn’t have too far to go on the other side of the jump.
The message was three days old. The girl had almost certainly Stepped by this time, so it was too late to intercept her. All the same, he had the location of Tambuwal’s home world at last, or at least the place where she had gone to ground after her encounter with Sostenti and Lessix. And the Ansurrection spy had gone there to meet her. To claim sanctuary.
Vemmet considered. In fact, he agonised. By rights he should simply report his find and leave Coordinator Baxemides to decide for herself what to do about it. If he was found to have done anything else he would be severely punished. But he had little expectation of being rewarded for his acumen or his honesty. The drone would be taken away, the mission of interception and retrieval given into other hands, and he would be left in exactly the same situation he was in now.
But there was another option. He could mount his own operation, to apprehend and bring back the Ansurrection fugitive and at the same time put right the mistake that had led to his exile here. Obviously the two were not of equal importance. The drones were a problem only because all unlicensed and unregulated Step technology was a problem. The Ansurrection was a threat of an entirely different order, potentially an existential crisis for the entire Pandominion. Consequently, the sleeper agent was an invaluable prize. If Vemmet retrieved it intact he could offer it up not to Baxemides but to the Omnipresent Council itself, purchasing the gratitude and goodwill of those who had the power to reinstate him.
He climbed to his feet slowly, brushing the dust and dirt of the floor off his clothes. His own audacity awed him: it even brought him strange but welcome comfort. He was seriously contemplating an unsanctioned paramilitary raid on a sinkhole planet. Only a fool or a genius would attempt such a thing, and he was nobody’s fool.
He would need a strike team, and weapons. Fortunately, thanks to Coordinator Baxemides, he had access to an entire planet full of desperate thugs working in the manufacture of munitions.
The survey report on world U5838784474 was accessible through his array even on his reduced clearance. With the drone’s conversation playing on a loop in background, he downloaded it and began to read.
44
Paz scrambled to her feet and backed away from the detached arm with a squeal of horror and disgust.
Dulcie did the exact opposite. Et jumped down from Paz’s shoulder and approached the arm to examine it from closer up. Et turned the limb over – with some difficulty because of ets diminutive size – and ran ets fingers across its smooth surface.
“What are you doing?” Paz protested.
“There’s a laser weapon here in the cuff,” Dulcie said. “Look. It’s called a plasma stylus. I was thinking I might try to detach it so we could use it, but I’d need tools I don’t have.”
Paz’s gaze went back very much against her will to the severed arm. The cut, across both flesh and armour, was clean and linear. It had the kind of precision that would be difficult to achieve even in an operating theatre. But then it hadn’t been made by a bone saw or a scalpel: the inconceivably fine edge that had cut through both flesh and armour was the edge of the Step field. The ground around the truncated limb was only fractionally darker than elsewhere: the sand had drunk the blood and more sand had blown over it. The arm itself would be buried soon.
“Do you think he’s all right?” Paz asked, in a faltering voice.
“He?”
“The soldier.” Then since there was no mistaking that red armour she made herself say the word. “The Cielo.”
Dulcie’s head tilted a little as et considered the question. “That’s smart armour,” et said. “It would have sealed the wound and pumped his system full of anti-shock. The limb’s easily replaced. Do you really care?”
“Yes,” Paz said. “You don’t?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Because he’s your enemy.”
“He’s our enemy. But his well-being wouldn’t matter any more to me if he wasn’t. It’s enough of a miracle that I care for you, Paz. Caring is a thing I learned very recently and it doesn’t come easily to me.”
Paz shied away from examining this statement. Her own feelings for Dulcie – for the two Dulcies, the one who had looked like a girl her own age and the one who was squatting in the vacant shell of her old anima – were too tangled to unpick right then. She stared around her. The sand stretched away to the horizon in most directions, unbroken except for what seemed to be a few humped grey shapes off to her left that could be rocks or fungal growths or even crude shelters. Behind them, the ground rose precipitately to a range of jagged peaks that looked like a mouthful of broken teeth. The sky was the yellow-white colour of an unripe avocado, so uniform that it was impossible to tell where the light was coming from. There was no sun to be seen.
The air was bitingly cold. Paz’s breath roiled in front of her like a living thing.
“Where are we?” she whispered.
Dulcie glanced to left and right, scanning the horizon. There was a faint whir of servos as ets eyes zoomed to maximum magnification. “I don’t believe we’re at our intended destination. The field began to fluctuate several thousandths of a second before we Stepped. It might have been trying to default us back to Oenin, but if so it failed.”
Paz’s mind was still catching up to the situation. “The soldier’s arm,” she said at last. “It threw us off.”
“I think so. Most objects would have been repelled by the soft field, but Cielo armour is proof against almost anything. The plate was propagating around an anomalous object most of which was outside its operating radius. Really, we’re lucky we fetched up here in one piece. Arriving where we were meant to be would have been too much to ask. This world appears to be uninhabited. At least nothing is moving out to the limits of my sensors, I don’t detect any built structures and there’s no signal traffic at all. The air’s not good. Toxicity rating comes in at 4.3, which as far as you’re concerned is survivable but far from healthy. Mostly methane and carbon dioxide, but there are some suspect biotics too. The temperature is the most concerning factor right now. If we’re going to stay here for long, you’ll need to find some shelter.”
“How are you doing all this?” Paz demanded. “Tricity didn’t have chemical diagnostics.”
“I’ve made some changes to this shell to improve its functionality. The raw material was there. I just repurposed it.”
Paz wrapped her arms around herself. The cold seemed to be soaking into her. A wind sprang up, and she winced as the sand was blown into her face. It felt like tiny needles stabbing into her.
“Too many silicates,” Dulcie said. “Mostly quartz, but a surprisingly high percentage of metal ores. Again, that’s not too good for you even in the short term. And the air pressure is falling, which means a storm is most likely coming. We should get out of the open as quickly as we can.” Et pointed towards the grey shapes. “If those are rocks, we might find a cave or a hollow we can shelter in.”
Paz tried to stand. Her stomach heaved and she sat down again quickly. Dulcie put the severed arm down again and rejoined her, climbing back up onto her shoulder.
“Are you all right?” et asked. Et touched Paz’s cheek with the tips of ets outstretched fingers. “Do you need meds, Paz? I’ve got a wide range on-board, and I can synthesise a lot more. Tricity had a good med kit.”
All animas had first responder capability, but Paz didn’t bother to point that out. She wasn’t sure the words would come out right. Her head was throbbing, maybe because the air pressure and humidity here were different. Or perhaps she was just in shock.
“Paz,” Dulcie said gently, “I meant what I said about getting out of sight. That trooper wasn’t alone. There was at least one more, and as soon as they’ve worked out where we—”
There was a sound like a soft handclap, and abruptly they were no longer alone.
Perhaps twenty yards away, on the far side of Paz’s overturned suitcase, stood a figure in red armour, the vivid colour shocking in all that pale yellow immensity. The Cielo soldier was enormous: twenty hands tall, and as wide across the shoulders as any two Uti standing abreast. The self-repairing armour had such a high sheen that Paz could see her own movements reflected in the figure’s breastplate. The helmet was long and tapered, though the clean line of the muzzle was disguised by a cluster of slender sensor modules along one side – as if someone had flung a handful of darts at it and they had stayed where they hit. The sensor modules whirred and clicked and shifted as the armoured figure took the measure of their surroundings. It was carrying a gun with two barrels of unequal length, the shorter one sitting under the longer. Having spent a large part of her life wanting to join the Corps herself, Paz recognised the gun at once as a Sa-Su assault rifle, standard issue for troopers on general combat and pacification assignments.
“Hey,” the Cielo said. “Girl.” It was a man’s voice, gruff and hoarse.
Paz took a few steps back, her body moving of its own accord. The trooper was a frightening presence. Cielo were recruited from across the entire Pandominion, so she had no idea what was under that armour. Her mind conjured up a carnivore, all fanged mouth and bulging muscle.
The trooper raised his hand in a calming gesture. The effect was a little spoiled when Paz glimpsed the row of black skulls along the upper surface of his cuff, signifying combat kills. She tried to calm herself anyway, even though she felt her heart’s drumbeat hammering inside her head. It was out of her hands. There was nothing to do now but surrender.
Light-headed with disappointment and relief, resignation and despair, she raised her hands.
The soldier’s gun swung around so its two barrels were pointing at her face. The hand that had been beckoning her a second ago slid under the gun’s stock to cradle it as the Cielo took aim.
Dulcie yelled a warning, but et was delivering very late news. Paz’s reaction to the threat was instantaneous.
She ran.
45
All the various races of humankind bear the thumbprint of their evolutionary forebears on the soft clay of the bodies they wear now. That’s just the way it is and there’s no point in carping about it – although you organics often do. You’d like to be your own authors, not the accidental end point of a bunch of survival strategies. It’s almost endearing, but it’s still nonsense.
The gifts of natural selection are never evenly distributed. Ape-descended hominids like Hadiz Tambuwal and Essien Nkanika have the cleverest fingers for fine manipulation. They come to tool-use early and they learn quickly, but they’ve also got the most highly developed aggressive and competitive instincts. Very few ape worlds survived long enough to join the Pandominion. The felids and canids have the most robust metabolisms, the mustelids the greatest physical flexibility, some of the avians the keenest minds, and so on.
