Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  They hadn’t seen much of each other for most of this leg of the flight. Hana was like that when she worked, a regime she’d established for herself flying long-haul interplanetary missions, playing the hermit while she worked through a problem to its conclusion. However much this structure worked for Hana, Nicole thought the price was too high. Her friend looked tired, the rigors of the spirit taken out on the flesh. Nicole had never seen her so carelessly dressed, a jeans, sneaks, and sweatshirt ensemble that had clearly been lived in for quite a while. As if the two of them had switched public personas.

  “Now who’s not taking care of herself,” she said, too softly for Hana to hear over the surrounding hubbub. She should have known better.

  Hana’s mouth quirked, a ghost flash of humor so brief it was barely noticeable.

  “We have to talk,” was her reply.

  “Where?” Nicole asked.

  “If you’ll excuse us,” Hana said to Pasqua, and pointedly waited until he’d withdrawn. Then she looked around, again with a smile.

  “I’d say right here. With all this crowd and the room’s acoustics, there’s too much ambient noise for any effective eavesdropping.”

  “Are you sure that’s necessary?” from Jenny.

  Hana ignored the question; Nicole knew, if it hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have mentioned it.

  “I found a glitch,” she said, after shifting the three of them towards a corner, making sure to keep her back to the room to mask her face from any possibility of lipreading. She collected three champagne flutes along the way, so that—to all appearances—they were simply enjoying the intermission.

  “In the C3 software?” Nicole asked.

  Hana nodded. “It’s buried deep, and the rewrites are so slight they’re almost impossible to find.”

  “‘Rewrites’?”

  “Scattered to hell and gone throughout the master program, seemingly at random. I’ve tagged about a dozen so far, across roughly ten million elements.”

  “That’s well within the range of acceptable anomalies,” Jenny said.

  “Precisely. That’s why the diagnostics sweeps overlooked them. Jenny, I wrote the program, I know what’s supposed to be there; these go beyond the operational parameters. And their presence isn’t an accident; someone put them there.”

  “Why? What do they do?”

  Hana shrugged. “Dunno yet. The key is in the context, how these elements interact with the main body of the software. They’re dormant now, of that I’m pretty certain; I’ve been trying to provoke a response every which way I know.”

  “Perhaps they’re nonhostile then?”

  “In just the time I’ve been examining the system, I’ve come across brand-new nodes. Nicole, this fucker’s self-replicating; it’s seeding itself throughout the whole Command structure. And that, Dr. Coy, is not an acceptable anomaly.”

  “I stand corrected.” Despite the apology, Jenny hadn’t really backed down a millimeter. Hana was impressed.

  “We’ll have to tell the Captain,” Nicole said, “and pull the tertiary nexus.”

  Hana shook her head, violently. “Big mistake, Ace. We don’t know where this comes from. Did it leave the factory flawed, or was it a corrupted upload, delivered before we left Earth? Was it introduced remotely or by someone aboard?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’re not cops. Our task was to identify the problem; Hobby has professionals to deal with it.”

  “Assuming he can be trusted.”

  “What d’you want from me, Hana? It’s his ship, we got no one else to turn to. We haven’t the status, the skill, or the personnel to run any kind of investigation ourselves, if that’s where you’re heading.”

  “Actually, where I’d like to be heading is to the nearest exit, so I can thumb a ride on the next flight home.”

  “At least your ‘glitch’ is confined to a backup system,” Jenny suggested.

  “You think so?” Hana countered. “Consider this analogous to looking for a cancer on a molecular level. Apply Ben Ciari’s binocular analogy. We’ve come up with a series of infected nodes in a single organ. There’s potential for more. Trouble is, we can’t pull back for a panoramic view of the entire organism; we see everything there is to see in this search, but only a little bit at a time. If I’m right, we’ll only have gross evidence of the disease’s existence when it’s too late and we’re in the middle of an across-the-board catastrophic failure.”

  “There was free and full interaction between the C3 systems before we left,” Nicole echoed. “And the C3 has access to every subordinate network aboard. We have to assume the other systems are at risk. If not already involved.”

  “If it were me,” Hana said, “I’d have the core instructions—the Master Sleeper—hardwired into one of the mother boards.”

  “Surely,” Jenny insisted, “that can be detected.”

  “Why? We’re talking about commands written on an atomic level, gigabytes of ROM etched on a silicon wafer the size of my thumbnail. You keep it simple, you keep it quiet; nothing registers on any diagnostics scan because nothing wrong is happening. Until it gets its cue. One trigger sets off another, in a cascading sequence, each element building on the one before. It’s a chain reaction, only of data. Next to nothing at first,” she paused, thought, spoke a little faster. “There’s the old story about the chess master and the King. Master beats the King, who offers any reward. Master asks for a grain of rice, to be doubled on every square of the chessboard. King thinks this is a hugely witty jest—except, by doubling and doubling and doubling, the master possessed all the rice in the kingdom before the board was half full. Same here. It’s the cumulative effect we have to be afraid of.

  “But not to worry,” she told them, and even the slight quirky smile faded, “that’s the good news.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  Hana took a long swallow of champagne to drain her glass, then switched it with Jenny, who hadn’t touched a drop of hers.

  “I’ve also reviewed Lamplighter. It works.”

  “How?”

  “There are two stages—I’ve got to tell you, Nicole, old poppa Cobri must be choking on the irony. To think what his son was, to think what Alex could have been and then how easily Daddy dearest cast him aside.”

  “I do. Get on with it, Hana.”

  “Two stages, I said. The first is an initializing process, essentially, it’s a marker, it gives the C3 system you’re mated to a beacon to anchor to. It also primes you for what’s to follow.”

  “The second stage.”

  “Which is essentially as Amy described it.”

  “That’s daft,” Jenny said sharply. “You can no more integrate a starship’s C3 nexus into a living nervous system than you can a main line megavolt power cable into an average household grid. The body’d never stand the load. You’d burn up every neural circuit in an instant!”

  “Which is precisely what happened when they tested it.”

  “What are you talking about, Hana?” Nicole demanded.

  “I’ll say this for the kid, she gave us everything. All her research, back to Alex’s notes. She had computer models built based on his original data, but when she tried to apply their findings to a real-world system... ”

  “D’you mean a person?” Jenny asked, shocked.

  “Not quite. There was no point. For the longest time, there was nothing to test. Each critical element of the network worked. The body was the hardware; the neural circuitry could be genetically modified to handle the data load. As well, biological software could be written to establish a gestalt link to shipboard electronics. But they couldn’t find a way to bring them together. Every permutation they tried to run in Virtual blew up in their faces.

  “Then Amy went back to Alex’s notes.”

  “And found the answer,” Nicole finished, in a flat, hard voice that was wholly unlike her. “But why, Hana? What makes me so unique to this project? Why am I so essential? Why the hell will this bloody Lamplighter work
with me and no one else?”

  Something changed behind Hana’s eyes while Nicole was speaking, a look of sorrow that terrified Nicole, because she’d never seen anything like it before. Her hand began a movement of its own accord, until she consciously stopped herself, reaching up to comfort her friend. Instead, she clenched it into a fist, so tightly the tension ran up both arms and across her shoulders, pulling her back taut until she was standing at something like attention.

  All this happened in the few awful seconds it took Hana to reply.

  “Because,” she said, “it’s been done to you before.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  She cries for parents, siblings, for all the family she left behind. She rages against the arrogance that brought her here. She wants to be saved, knowing that won’t happen. She’s so wrapped up in herself, she doesn’t notice the first tickling touch against her foot. The second questioning caress makes her flinch, gathering legs tight against her body. Which makes a hash of her buoyancy and almost drowns her, forcing her to drop them again so that she can continue swimming. In her aching heart, though, she exults, delighted at last to have a foe more to her liking. The sea is like the wind, her natural weapons are of no use against it. Whatever the ultimate outcome, even if the ocean claims her, at least this will be a battle she can win. She can go on to the Shadow with pride.

  She was running, that was memory.

  She was walking, that was fact.

  At least, insofar as her gown would allow. It was designed for form not function; she couldn’t manage anywhere near her proper stride. She didn’t care.

  The theater lobby soared above her, five separate levels, each with its own balcony overlooking the main floor courtyard. It was an exercise in total indulgence, and that made it an altogether human creation. She didn’t see.

  There were people all around her, families, couples, solos, finishing intermission drinks and snacks, discussing work, critiquing the performance, juggling relationships, chasing after children who were chasing after other children, a setting as utterly normal as any on Earth itself. She didn’t hear.

  She threaded her way through them as though she were flying a racing slalom. Cut the corners as tightly as you dare but never ever touch.

  She moved on instinct, eyes unfocused, inner vision set on a wholly different scene. To her, the people she passed, the deck she walked on, barely existed.

  Out the entrance, into the access hallway beyond, take a pause for bearings, she knew she was running, she had to know where.

  Her nostrils flared, with the remembered ozone snap of shock-wave blasters. Hal sound and smell, Hal weapon. And her arms tucked a little tighter to her body, as though she were wrapped once more in a TangleFoot web.

  Then, she shook herself free of the images and started walking again, following her instinct.

  She’d left Hana and Jenny abruptly and was thankful they weren’t following; she wasn’t fit company for friends, she was spoiling for a fight, barely on the edge of control. Those she passed sensed that, even if they didn’t quite realize why, and gave her a wide berth.

  “It’s been done to you before.”

  The words rang in her head, another window opened in her memory, and she saw herself and Ben Ciari, bound up like mummies as they bobbled in the weightless air of the ship’s corridor. Out of her frame of vision, the other direction, were Hana and Andrei Zhimyanov. Before her stood the Hal, Shavrin and Kymri, a clutch of security bods, plus a medtech whose name Nicole never learned. She held a scanner that she passed to her Captain, who swung it back and forth between Nicole and Ben. Nicole caught the reflection of its display screen on Shavrin’s tunic, saw it flash gold when it was focused on her, gold mixed with scarlet when Shavrin aimed it at Ben.

  The Hal dragged him away, and then Shavrin shot Nicole in the head.

  “It’s been done to you before.”

  She couldn’t take a decent breath, had to force her perceptions back to reality and her body to behave. She’d come to a T-junction, where a short dead-end hallway led off the main corridor she’d been following. It was capped by a double-width, double-height hatch, which signified this as another of the cargo holds. But instead of the usual brace of restrictive warnings—text and sigils—there was only the legend GARDEN.

  She fumbled in her bag for her CardEx and slid it through the door’s access slot. With a pleasant chime, her presence was acknowledged and the hatch slid open.

  Within was another indulgence, another compartment whose function had nothing whatsoever to do with the physical operation of the starship and yet—like the theater—pretty much everything to do with its emotional and psychological well-being. It was a standard bay, which made it roughly the same size as the theater, which in terms of raw space meant it was roughly huge. Hobby’s designers had filled it accordingly.

  Because they had more height to play with than floor space, they established a number of levels, linked by ramps and stairs and flying bridges. The ceiling was a lesser version of the overhead display used in both the Primary and Secondary Command Centers, programmed to run a natural day/night sequence; at the moment, it was pretty near the middle of the night and the fantasy sky was filled with stars, the view from Earth without the intervening screen of atmosphere to blur and distort the sight.

  The holographic field extended down the walls as well, creating an equally spectacular wilderness vista in every direction. A brook followed the gentle slope of one platform, casting a small waterfall down to the main floor, which in turn created a stream that was wide enough at one point to require any who cared to ford to hop across a couple of conveniently placed stones. A couple of bowers had been built to provide some privacy—there were no trees, unfortunately, save those manifested as part of the background (which were spectacular)—and around them, separated by grass borders, flower beds that mixed Terrestrial blossoms with those brought back from other worlds. There was color here, and glorious scents, and the reality of growing things.

  It was Jenny who’d found the Garden; she had a love for horticulture that surpassed Nicole’s for sailing, to the extent that a couple of the latest additions to the collection were hers. She said working here was the perfect way to relax and while Nicole couldn’t buy that side of the argument, she also couldn’t deny the chamber’s attraction.

  The Garden was quiet, the status board by the entrance indicating barely a dozen visitors. Nicole’s name had automatically been added to the list when she entered. Instinctively, she swept the room, a spacer rule that had long since become as natural as breathing: know where everybody is around you, in case you have to move them in a hurry. Know all the exits, in case you have to use them.

  There was a spicy cinnamon fragrance to the air that she recognized instantly, and evidence of new plantings just along the wall from where she stood. Her mouth turned down and she thought seriously of leaving—except that the fragrance, as always, was wondrous, and she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. There was no boat at hand, no ocean to sail it on.

  Kymri’d had a few cuttings in his quarters back at Edwards, next door to her own house, and she’d taken care of them after his recall to s’N’dare. The individual flowers were impressive enough but the pictures she’d seen didn’t do justice to the effect of a massed array, a vibrant mix of hot colors that fooled the eye into thinking the ground itself was painted with flame. It was a breed found only on the highlands of the southern continent of the Hal homeworld, in Shavrin’s domain.

  She pulled off her shoes and in stocking feet climbed the incline from the entrance, taking a ramp and a bridge up to the midlevel balcony by the waterfall. In the far distance, a youngster spun a Frisbee into the air, her playmate, a level below, squealing in delight as he raced to catch it.

  She lay back, stretching full length on the grass, trying to lose herself in the sensual delight of the setting. She was glad to be alone.

  “Ah, Christ,” she groaned, and felt the sting of t
ears at the edges of her eyes and an icy hollowness deep in her chest, as though she’d been stabbed.

  And she thought of Maenaes’t’whct’y’a—the Void Between—where souls resided without honor, or Name, or even form.

  She shook her head, telling herself that was wrong and then wondered why she bothered because those boundaries were blurring by the second. No less than the elements of her essential self they were intended to define.

  She sensed an approaching presence, recognizing who it was from the way she walked.

  Hana hunkered down beside her, close enough to reach while still maintaining a discreet distance.

  “I won’t bite,” Nicole said.

  “More’s the pity.”

  “Will you stop!”

  “What, Ace, you can’t take a little banter?”

  Silence followed. Hana took the opportunity to make herself more comfortable. Nicole lay with her arms covering her eyes, teetering on the edge of a good cry.

  Hana recognized that and said, “You should let go.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “True. I don’t have your image to uphold. You might feel better, though.”

  The tears came with surprising ease, as though all she’d been waiting for was permission.

  “I didn’t... ” Hana began, “I didn’t know how else to tell you.”

  “Yah.”

  “Nicole?” She felt Hana’s hand on hers, a hesitant touch, that pulled away a few seconds later when she didn’t respond.

  “I could be wrong,” Hana said.

  “I think I’d beat you bloody if you were,” Nicole said, “but you’re not.”

  “Certain of that, are you?”

  “That word Raqella called me... ?”

  “Waryk something or other, the one we couldn’t translate.”

  “Waryk sk’nai. Literally, it means ‘unevolved.’ The only references that come to mind are beasts that run on the ground. Old paths, old ways. In the Hal lexicon, it’s an obscenity.”