by Alex Oliver
So, maybe he could change a batch to gain energy by accelerating the decay of metal. It would have to be a timed action - he couldn't let metal-eating bots out on a spaceship without programming them to auto destruct as soon as the job was done. Nobody forgot the warning of SoftExec, whose whole orbiting space station had imploded when someone set free a batch of overzealous nano. Three million lives lost and the entire system had to be quarantined and cleansed.
But iron-eating bots with a lifespan of five seconds? He could do that.
On the screen, the APiD fairy queen was welcoming Mboge to Snow City. "Weapons must be placed in lock down," she said, gesturing. Mboge was already holding out the rifle to be taken, but he was still swarmed by drones nevertheless, which extruded long sensors to check his pockets and beneath his clothes.
"Thumb-print here." One of the drones extended a data pad and Mboge pressed his thumb down to acknowledge the confiscation. "Weapons will not be reissued without appropriate biometric data. Departure must occur a maximum of thirty Earth minutes once weapons have been reclaimed."
Nori finished his rushed job on the bots. Checking them again to be sure they would die on schedule, he concentrated them in his fingertips and then touched the lock on the door. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the grayish metal took on a brownish cast and began blistering up. A few seconds later it looked like it was boiling, sloughing dry, blood colored dust onto the floor.
It stopped, and as he pulled at the door, the lock disintegrated entirely, the door opened and he stepped free.
Not so stupid, right?
A quick glance at the screen, where the customs fairy was telling Mboge that he must stay where he was while his ship was examined for dangerous weapons, compounds, tech or biologicals.
Nori ran for the safe. He nearly collided with one of the customs drones, crouched in the corridor with what looked like beetle wings extended, though they were probably EM detectors of some kind. Nori froze. The drone poked out another sensor, like an eye on a silver stick and scanned him with a line of lavender light. Shit. It was probably telling the Customs APID that he was aboard. Customs-fairy would ask Mboge about him, and Mboge would know he was out.
Damn. But Mboge couldn't get away until the ship inspection was done. There was time.
Nori jogged up to the tiny cubby, barely big enough to house a bunk and a fresher, that was the captain's cabin. The safe sat smugly closed there, having reset itself after its opening. He could go through the delicate time consuming process of picking it again, or...
He made another packet of nano and ate a hole through the lock, dragged his bag out. It was lighter than it had been. Mboge must have split the haul in half, maybe had some in his pockets? Damn him. Still, half of a fortune was still a fortune. He slung the bag on his back, ran down to the cargo hold. There, he squeezed into an emergency pressure suit, took a bottle of air - half an hour's worth, more than enough - and slipped out of the cargo-bay hatch into the vacuum of one of the comet's cold warehouses.
A cargo hauler, painted with the red and silver stripes of authority, stopped him before he had got two steps from the ship. "Froward," it said, "This is an unauthorized exit for live passengers. Please return to your ship and exit via the hatch."
As they grew up, Nori's gestalt had learned how to navigate some of the nets of data with which they worked. Many things that were heavily encrypted, supposed to be secret, were transparent to them, since theirs were the minds through which they were processed.
"I have authority from Source representative 809805646ALDER52. I am due to meet with hir immediately."
"I will have to check," said the cargo loader, lowering its lifting forks to the packed ice of the ground. Emergency pressure suit or not, Nori was perished with cold already, and didn't relish it getting worse.
"Of course, though quickly please. I believe I am in the process of freezing to death."
"Hop up into my cabin," the loader said thoughtfully. "I will pressurize."
Nori liked machines. They were better people, generally, than biologicals. Pulling open the loader's door, he clambered up its track and into its cabin, which sealed and began to pressurize and warm.
“Establishing contact with 809805646ALDER52,” the loader announced. “You can speak to them yourself on my in-cab com.” A screen in its dash flickered and Nori found himself looking at a polished sphere on which a tangle of reflections and shadows suggested a face. "I am Alder52," it said, "but I have no meeting scheduled today. How did you get my code?"
"That's... ah." Alder52 represented the inner Source systems - Prime, in which actual, real-life Earth lorded it over the tourist trade, Secundas, Tierce and Fourth. They were the kind of people who didn't destroy you only because you were beneath their notice, and now he had attracted it. "That's not the point. The point is this."
He held up the most impressive of the alien computer cubes. The one with their many armed god incised on it and inlaid with some kind of melted diamond compound.
"Some piece of pretty rock?" The sphere scoffed, even its shadows looking satirical. "I don't think you know who you're talking to, but--"
"It's an alien computer." Nori's mouth had dried. He was very conscious of the rough trundle of the loader's tracks over newly cut snow as it bore him away, very much not towards the occupied center of the comet. Its inner lights brightened as it wormed through a rough tunnel in the warehouse wall that still had piles of ice shavings around its base, still snowed a little as the loader's passage dislodged loose flakes from the roof. Trying not to overreact he reached out and tried to open the cabin door.
There was no latch.
"There is no alien life in this galaxy or the next. That's long been known. What kind of scam is this?"
Nori uncoiled the loader's external jacks, pressed the sensitive cells on their ends onto the surface of the cube. "Try it," he said "Obviously the language and the coding is different, but your AIs should be able to make something of it. Enough to see the potential."
The jack usage lights burned on and flickered, and a moment later Alder52 said, "Where did you get this?" in a new tone of voice - sharper, more engaged, no less dangerous.
"I can't tell you that," Nori's first thought was for his profit margins, but his second was for Jenkins and the other nerds with whom he had forged a sort of unlinked gestalt when they had figured out how to work the alien wrecker together. The planet and its riches belonged to them, not to this faceless thing that had too much already. "But I have others. And," he took out a handful of stick rubies, "Some merely ornamental gems to sell."
The impression of a face gave the impression of a contemptuous smile. "I think you still fail to understand your position here," it said. “You can sell me the location of the planet and walk out of here, or you can refuse, and I can strip the location of the planet out of your dead and frozen brain."
Nori ran his fingers over the door again. Still no catch. He could burn through the lock of this door too, but only by taking off his pressure glove. There was vacuum on the other side, and now only twenty minutes of air in his tanks.
He turned back to Alder 52, trying to find some hint of humanity in its simulated face. "You'd murder me? You're an ambassador, a reputable public figure for the source worlds. Do you really want that kind of publicity?"
The sphere lifted from the ground and spun like a pictograph, flicking through frames of laughter just slow enough to make the point that it was artistic. "I am a reputable public figure, and you are a thief who had an unfortunate accident while making off with some of my treasures in a stolen vehicle. That's hardly publicity. My offer stands. Three thousand dinar for the location of the world."
"Three thousand?" It took Nori's breath away. Made him thankfully warm all over with rage. Betray all his comrades for the price of a ticket home? He was not so cheap. Three million and they might have talked. "I think I'll take it somewhere else."
He broke the connection on the call, but as he did so th
e loader's lights flicked out. The sound of its engine whined down to silence.
"Aren't you forbidden to kill people?" He asked, revising his opinion of mechs.
"Snow City considers such a proscription an infringement of our sentient rights," said the loader quietly in the dark. "But I am sorry, nevertheless. I am being instructed to cut power now. It will get very cold. May I recommend simply unsealing your suit to the vacuum. It will be faster."
Nineteen minutes of air and they were twenty seven minutes away from anywhere pressurized that he could jog to even if he could get out. This was not how it had been supposed to go. Why was he so fucking stupid? He hit the dashboard in frustration and fear.
"Please do not be distressed," said the loader helplessly. "Is there something I can do to make it easier? Someone you wish to say goodbye to?"
He thought about Mboge. Mboge with his shiny hair. What the hell could that idiot do? Why would he even try?
Well, he might try because these were his jewels too, because these jewels represented food for everyone on Cygnus 5 and he was a bleeding heart fanatic who cared about that sort of thing. He might try because he would know his Captain Campos would expect it. Maybe even because he was a good man.
"Can you connect me to Felix Mboge? His com will be slaved to the Froward."
The tunnel was newly dug, unpressurized, maybe not even on the maps, and Alder52's people were on their way. He should possibly warn Mboge that he was leading him into a potential trap. "Can you tell him to come and get me? And tell him to be fast. I've only got eighteen minutes left."
~
Felix hoped the customs officer had not chosen her holographic form to mock him. Flying women cut a little close after his paranoia about clouds of adze in ex-space, trying to find their way in. Normally, he would not suspect what was presumably a hard working officer of detecting his fears by some kind of telepathy and using that information to make fun, but he was already beginning to see Nori's point. Nothing about this place seemed normal.
Still, at his request she guided him to the nearest dealer in curiosities. "Freedom" was the man's name - a good name, and a name that had been on the shortlist Bryant had given him as someone who could, more or less, be trusted.
The customs lady had left him there, in an anteroom whose walls were covered with hand woven textiles, both cruder and lovelier than could have been made by any machine. He was just reaching out to feel the thick plush of the periwinkle one with the Takbir medallion in cream in the center when the embroidered curtain behind the desk moved and a thing even Felix's imagination might have balked at came through.
It was about the size of a bear, but naked and the pink of a newborn Caucasian child. Its six limbs bulged as if with fat, and its body was bloated and cumbersome. It had claws on four of its feet that looked like they could grip onto a pane of glass. Those on its front two feet were kept neater, shorter and looked like inflexible fingers made of bone.
Its face was a mere tube, extruding out of blankness. It lumbered in and set itself down on its back legs, bent up like a caterpillar - certainly like something that had no spine - to allow those hand-like forelimbs to take a wire from the desk and fit it to the underside of its feeding tube. "I am Freedom."
The wall was bruising Felix's spine even through the hanging carpet. That was how it finally occurred to him that he had backed across the entire room and was trying to squeeze himself through the wall. Dear God in Heaven! Scuttlebutt had it that Bryant had been imprisoned for killing a boy to whom he was trying to give a pair of gills. That had seemed unbelievable to Felix. Who would want gills anyway? And how could a human body be altered enough to connect them to the circulation, to the blood? One didn't make mermaids, they were born - or hatched perhaps.
But if one could, by surgery, and these bots that Bryant talked about, give Captain Campos a hand that secreted acid, perhaps one could do even more than that? Perhaps one could remake a human being into something like this. But why the hell would anyone want to?
It occurred to him, a little late, that he was being rude. If this was a person, then it was a child of God and deserved his respect. "I'm sorry," he said, peeling himself away from the wall. "I am from Nyame in the Kingdom of the Book. I have never before seen a man such as yourself. I mean no disrespect."
"I've seen many like you," the creature said, in a voice that appeared to come out of a speaker on his desk. "I don't have time to be offended by them all. What do you have to show me?"
He'd brought only a pocket full of rubies and two of the green stones which Bryant had said were computers. The rubies, which had seemed exotic to him before, cut as they were to fit over antennae, no longer held the same punch. He set one of the green stones on the desk, being careful not to cringe away from the presence of those fleshy arms or those talons. "Evidence of alien life."
The creature--Felix corrected himself--the man made a noise probably meant to be interpreted as laughter. "Many a scam artist has made that claim before."
"Perhaps. But I have brought proof. The stone is part of a larger computer system, networked in some way we do not understand. I'm sure you can subject it to many more tests than I can conceive. You should feel free to do so."
With a couple of switches, the apparently wooden desk folded its top back and bristled with fine sensors. Felix, who had wondered how the big body and clumsy, unbending hands could do delicate work, wondered no more. It had been drummed into him as a child how terrible it was, how lazy, that the degenerates in the Source systems used machines for everything, so there was an illicit sense of defiance in thinking how clever this was, how much it would make life easier for people who were disabled in similar ways, through no fault of their own.
A few moments of fiddling and a holographic projection of the innards of the stone appeared above the desk, its tangled complexity of electrical pathways ramifying as the scan picked up more and more detail. It didn't look like any computer Felix had ever seen - looked more like a brain scan, with thoughts flickering through it in bright currents. It occurred to him suddenly to wonder whether the computer had been switched off when the aliens left. If not, what had it been thinking about all the years when it was alone?
"I think this might be..." Freedom's electronic voice took on a tone of reverence. "I think this might be real. Where? Where did you find it?"
"I can't tell you that," Felix swallowed, a little nervous of a sudden as it occurred to him how little power he had here, how much he was depending on this not quite human person to deal fairly with him. "I brought more, though. It's in the safe on my ship. Four larger pieces."
"Bring them to me."
Felix took a deep breath, smelled something like peaches, a cologne perhaps, the sweetness of it comforting even while it made his stomach twist so hard he thought it would burst out of his throat. "My world needs food. Both food for immediate consumption and renewable sources of food for the future. I will sell it all to you for enough money to build an infrastructure that will feed five thousand people indefinitely."
Freedom laughed his breathy, wheezing whine again. "While my computers work out how much money that is, exactly, and where you can obtain immediate sources of food, I suggest you go to your ship and bring them to me."
It sounded good. He scooped the green stone up and put it in his pocket rather than leave it here and have the door locked against him when he returned. As his fingers brushed his com it vibrated violently, almost bruising his leg. That was the emergency frequency.
"Lieutenant Mboge," he answered, forgetting for a moment that he wasn't any more. "What is the nature of--"
"Mboge, it's me, Nori."
Oh God, that voice, that tone, guilty and panicked and verging on the weepy. Whatever this was, it sounded like very bad news. "Go ahead."
"I got out. I took the stuff out of the safe. I thought I knew someone I could trust to handle this - 809805646ALDER52--"
Freedom produced a sound from his mouth tube not unlike blowing
a raspberry. "That dilettante?"
Felix made a hand sign he hoped would be recognized as 'ssh, please'. "And?"
"And he locked me in a cargo loader in an unmapped tunnel. I'm out in the vacuum. I'm in a suit but I've only got nineteen minutes of air and it's getting really cold. He says he's going to download where we got this stuff from out of my frozen dead brain."
"Can he?"
"Yes, of course he can. I've been working with computers since I was born. My brain is optimized for AI contact. It'll be easy. And then he'll kill the rest of them so he can have it for himself. But that's not the point. The point is that I'm dying, Mboge. Please, please come find me. Please.... I'm scared."
Freedom heaved his bulk out from behind his desk and caught Felix's wrist between the unyielding pincers of his bone fingers. Effortlessly, he lifted the com and Felix with it over to his desk and pressed the com's surface to a reader. When Felix let go, he was allowed to back away, rubbing his wrist, breathing hard and wondering what now.
The map of the inside of the stone flicked to a map Felix recognized as the tunnels of Snow City. A flashing cursor embedded in white was Nori, not far away as the crow flew, but inaccessible. Outside the pressurized core, out where there was nothing but packed ice and vacuum.
"Mboge?"
"We're coming," he said, though God alone know how. "Don't worry. We're coming."
Freedom lowered himself onto all six legs and nudged Mboge in the back, pushing him into the room he had come out of. At a touch of his claw, an ornate spacesuit slid out of the wall. A work of art, chased with silver gilt engraving. "Put it on," he said.
Mboge grinned and complied, blessing the drills that had taught him to don any space suit within two minutes. "You are a gentleman, sir."
Freedom wheezed with laughter, and when the final indicator went green he raised himself on his back legs and began to simply dig into the wall, those muscular forepaws like badger's claws, tunneling effortlessly into the ice. A few feet in, his second limbs came into play and he accelerated, squirming into the dense packed comet like a mite through cheese.