Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water

by Brian Daley

  When Daddy D left, he got on a ship's comline handset and blundered through the maneuver and docking and air ops circuits before finding the command channel. He conveyed to the officer of the deck a request for a face-to-face with Hall that same afternoon. In short order, however, Hall relayed word that scheduling would make it impossible but that a representative would arrive at the Exts' berthing spaces in due course.

  When part of the message mentioned medevaccing the wounded Exts to better-equipped shoreside facilities, Burning cut the OOD off. "They live with us or die with us. Fly the doctors and equipment in instead or the Hierarchate'll blame you for what happens next." He couldn't afford to have Exts fall hostage to LAW's hands ashore even if it meant casualties dying.

  Hall's avoidance troubled him. Under the pretext of surveying berthing arrangements and establishing shipboard routine, the Exts' best scouts, scroungers, and bilkos had fanned out to reconnoiter. With no one sure of their status or proper place in the codified microcosm of the ship, they enjoyed a broad latitude of opportunity. Burning considered using the Discards, but he didn't trust the kids out on their own, especially in the alien cultural milieu of the Matsya.

  Those on standby alert were set to work making the berthing spaces in and around 32-01-L livable. The shipboard quartering was practically a hostelry after their experiences in the Broken Country.

  Patting his pockets down to double-check the things he'd brought, Burning felt the small, flat container that sustained him—Fiona's black lock of Hussar Plait, given to him back on Anvil Tor. They'd figured on dying that day, yet they'd gotten this far. Now it was up to him to see that they got the rest of the way.

  Back from the ship's infirmary, Zone was relentless in bringing order and establishing unit coherence. Even his severalmates were not spared. In another social context it would have earned him hatred, maybe a bullet in the back somewhere along the line, but among the Exts it only enhanced his status. Subordinates did not have to worry about the future; they only had to appease the wrath of Zone.

  Tap water was carefully tested. A cull team of the outfit's best engineering people got a few of the sonics weapons working with power units five-finger requisitioned from Matsya equipment. Other details were removing door kick plates, utility access covers, and some sealed overheads with an eye to exploration and fortification. Tunnel rats went crawling and worming. Burning thought again of the Discards and again decided that they were too prone to react with all-out lethality.

  Countertech teams began sweeping for antipersonnel systems. Hatch servos that would have let Hall seal the Exts in belowdecks were among the first things to be disabled. If the captain knew about it or about the surveillance cams and A/V pickups they had deactivated, he chose not to come down to protest.

  One backwater space became the interim command post, with communications, tactical displays, and field computers set up and carefully shielded. The Exts were especially vigilant about their comps, extreme cyberphobes even in a cyberphobic age. Telecom sappers tapped into the ship's lines and accessed the planetary TechPlex.

  Thanks to an anonymous source in Sword of Damocles, all the news show emcees were referring to the Exts as "the Growlers." That aside, the coverage was almost unsettlingly positive. The drumbeat was building for follow-up coverage at the Lyceum ball, which was also claiming a lot of screen time.

  Burning couldn't help but be impressed by the sprawling grandeur of the milky palace the narrators invariably referred to as "the fabulous Empyraeum."

  They picked up word of Trinity's silence as well. Burning didn't know what to make of it and saw that the Periapts didn't, either. If the Perries got jittery about the Roke, it might make them more cordial toward the Exts.

  The scouts and scroungers began to filter back with reports, along with mementos. Flammable substances, power tools, and an infinitude of means and materials for improvised weapons were available everywhere. The hangar deck was devoid of aircraft, but the ship contained modest stores of conventional aviation fuels as well as Liquid oxygen and slush hydrogen. The power plant and other sensitive areas had demonstrated surprisingly good security. Still, there were plenty of ways to exfiltrate the ship quietly, including the desalination intake and a lockout in the science sponson, though how to do so in great numbers and where to go remained moot.

  Estimates of the SWATHship's company numbered fewer than six hundred souls, including the Science Side, though the ship obviously had been built to accommodate four times as many. Automatics let her function, but she was only a facade of a real naval command.

  As on the Damocles, the more certain Burning felt that he could take the ship if necessary, the more emphatic was the feeling that he should not do anything of the kind. If the bars around the Exts were not very strong, conceivably that was because the Exts were not prisoners.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Seven

  In the starboard sponson, with its Science Side maze of labs, berthing spaces, and support facilities, Raoul Zinsser sat at a sorting table in a tightly restrained fit of resentment while news of Trinity, the Exts, and Aquamarine played in the background. Mocked by a smelly, self-mutilating slut, he thought. And laughed at—he was certain of it—by her vampiric beast children.

  He would even the score with Ghost—inevitably. And his sexual and social tutelage was exactly what she needed. As his pulse rate normalized somewhat and he considered the pleasant prospect of a tamed and more tractable Ghost, he reached out idly to toy with a scale model of the device he had been refining and testing aboard Matsya for the better part of two months.

  Pitfall, he'd christened it until he came up with a name that had a more dynamic ring. The device was a major facet of his effort to soar back to glory and professional preeminence, riding the wave of LAW's current preoccupation with tether technology, skyhooks, and space elevators.

  Useful technology, Pitfall would be an important tool on Periapt, but even more so on Hierophant or Illyria. He had originally pinned much of his hope on its importance to an AlphaLAW mission to Aquamarine, but with the Hierarchate so adamant against a return voyage and the Scepter team's findings subjected to such merciless—

  Unless, of course, Claude Mason's unexpected appearance on the Matsya would have an impact on LAW's decision regarding Aquamarine…

  With the scale model in one hand, he brought the nearest terminal on-line to access the civilian news menus, and seconds later he was gazing at Administrator Mason's electroshock-pale face framed against Allgrave Burning's battlesuit.

  "—we must return to Aquamarine," Mason was saying. "Only the Oceanic knows…"

  He watched the whole loop twice before taking the terminal off-line. He was staring at the scale model and thinking once more about Aquamarine when footfalls and loud griping in the passageway heralded the return of his grad students and teaching assistants. Shortly, the hatch opened and bare feet sounded on the floor behind him.

  When he turned to the sound, Freya Eulenspiegel was peeling off her sweatband and bikini bottoms, leaving her naked except for a wristband dive-data computer.

  "The gear is made fast," she said, shaking out long sun-gilt hair. "Recovered every last piece." She was tawny and taut from outdoor work and diving and so full-bosomed that she always wore a jockbra on dives.

  His chosen concubine among the current lot, Freya was only marginally promising as an oceanographer. Gifted in cyber-lingua, however, she had devoted countless hours to helping him create the Pitfall software.

  Displeased at the interruption, he swung back to the model, but she padded up behind him and leaned over him, perspiration-wet hair brushing his face. When she kissed his ear, he drew his head away sharply.

  Accustomed to his moods, she became cautious but tried to sound genial. "So what's all the fustercluck with the shuttle? And Concordances, somebody said? Pwui, I hope they've been deloused or the whole ship'll be crawling with—"

  He slammed the Pitfall model onto the sorting table so loudly that she j
umped. "You stink," he said, pivoting around to face her. "I can smell you from here. Don't you ever shower? And if you're going to blubber, do it on the bidet."

  She was speechless for a moment, then shouted "Prick" and fled into the passageway.

  With his annoyance vented—as well as his earlier frustration with Ghost—he found it easier to concentrate on a course of action. He'd never actually considered employing Pitfall to plumb the depths of Aquamarine's Oceanic. He held those who had studied Aquamarine thus far fools and bunglers, worse than amateurs. Their failure to penetrate the secrets of the Oceanic only went to show that none were in the same class with Raoul Zinsser. But the path to real wealth and primacy lay not on Aquamarine but on Periapt, controlling the organs of government that doled out resources and awards and divided the spoils of others' work.

  However, if he could interest LAW in taking Pitfall to Aquamarine… It did not perturb him in the least that someone else would get to use his creation to solve the enigma of the Oceanic. By then Raoul Zinsser would be well positioned to turn the revelations to his professional advantage and personal profit.

  There would be some risk in approaching LAW about utilizing the device. Fortunately, though, it couldn't simply be commandeered from him; safeguards installed in Pitfall's cyberlingua 'wares ensured that it answered exclusively to Zinsser.

  He glanced out a porthole at Medusa's rays falling on the sea. Oceanic, you're a boon to me no matter what you are, he said to himself.

  A pity we'll never meet.

  * * * *

  The robing area of Dextra Haven's bedroom suite in Haute-Flash was in a state of advanced disarray, with clothes, shoes, and jewelry scattered about. In searching for accessories, she had discovered bric-a-brac she'd completely forgotten about, such as the matching hermetic-seal lockets that had been sent to her by the Young Rationalist League from her home O'Neill, Crapshoot, when she had won her first reelection.

  While Dextra was dressing, Tonii recapped from the bath what 'e had gleaned from one LAW ethnographer's report on the Exts.

  "Most are archetypal middle class," the gynander said in a loud voice. "Apprehensive about falling too low, joining the underclass, being denied a respectable place in society. Although they're almost equally mistrustful of wealth or estrangement—anything that might erode their core values and virtues. Born citizen-soldiers."

  Dextra didn't comment on the note of admiration in Tonii's voice. To be an accepted part of a larger, conventional community was a concept that fascinated the gynander and made 'erm wistful. She thought back to the Quantum College caller's puzzling assertion that the Exts were linked to Dextra's push for a mission to Aquamarine. Had the caller meant to imply a literal connection or a passing one?

  "If I could, I'd take more of them inside Empyraeum with me tonight," Dextra shouted back. "The public has to see them as a team, a unit identity that would lose its value if broken up. One that's on our side, as well. The only Periapt I'd add would be Claude Mason, if not for these aphonic spells he goes into."

  She had already tried to get a line on Mason's Aquamarine survey teammates, but LAW had stonewalled her. The only reliable information she had was that the entire crew had been moved from Blades Station to a new holding facility.

  Dextra studied herself in an imager. She had settled on a black sheath that made her look as if she had been dipped in licorice. It bared her left arm, shoulder, and breast, which in her unbiased opinion passed muster now that she had mirrordusted the aureole and inserted a nipple ring, a slim eternity band sporting a fifty-carat rose-cut blue moonfire three times as expensive as diamond.

  While Tonii went on about how a bushido-like aspect of the Skills made for less friction and harassment among the mixed-gender Ext units, Dextra touched up her cosmetics and rechecked her coiffure. It had to be celebrity hair that night, power configurations with volumization. She was making minor adjustments when Tonii emerged from the bath chambers, wearing Dextra's glamour, a pricey semiconducting gel containing countless artificially grown voxel crystals. Even Tonii's quilled alleyboy-cut blond hair and sheathed male genitalia were coated. Neo-Thai choker, wristbands, and ankle bands were the key to the vaporwear.

  Dextra watched the play of Tonii's body, the curved grace combined with cords of muscle. She indicated the genital gaff. "Afraid to leave them dangling?"

  "The whole point, for me, is to leave people guessing, Dex." 'e hit a control tile on the left wristband—the main programming unit—and was instantly transformed into a creature of living light, ablaze with starflame luminosity. It was how Dextra had always thought an angel or fire elemental would look. A human form moving in effulgent glory, details hard to make out—except that the anatomy seemed to combine genders—and so bright, she had to squint and shield her eyes.

  "I realize you have protective contacts on, but I don't."

  "Sorry!" Tonii tapped the little tiles on the wristband, and the coruscations dimmed to a glossy crimson. "Better?"

  "Perfect for the display window at some love-arts studio."

  Tonii experimented with a different scheme. Now 'e was an astral being of rippling polychromatic radiance, throwing off spears of crystal brilliance a meter long. Patterns and light-shapes shifted and flowed across the beacon body, making it hard to tell the gynander's true features and form.

  "I think it's close to what you're looking for, Tones," Dextra said approvingly. "But you'd better rheo down a smidge more lest the skycops think our limo's signaling for an emergency landing."

  * * * *

  "What d'you think?" Ghost asked, gesturing to the airlimo Dextra Haven had dispatched to the Matsya flight deck to collect her, Burning, and Lod. "A trick to separate us from the troops?"

  "If it looks like a very involved trick, it's probably not one," Lod suggested. "I mean, why bother? All the murder holes and Molotov cocktails we could come up with wouldn't save us if the Perries wanted to scuttle this tub. We've landed splat in the middle of a political showdown, and if we don't keep Haven on our side, sic transit gloria Exts."

  "That's the feeling I get," Ghost said, measuring each word.

  Burning, glancing vigilantly about the carrier's deck, could hear the ambivalence in her tone; the prospect of violent conflict appealed to her.

  Ghost's qualified support made Lod preen a bit. "This is an astute move by Haven. The Periapts are close to a war panic over what's happened to Trinity, and it's just possible that they'll decide to seize on us as allies and fellow human beings instead of outworld parolees."

  "I've been thinking along the same lines," Burning offered. "But I'm not comfortable with staging a show at this Lyceum ball. We'll be in the planetary spotlight with no idea what moves to make."

  Lod pulled at his chin. "Haven won't hitch us to her star without coaching us. But you're right; it behooves us to find out what we can about the finer points."

  "Hall won't talk to us," Burning reminded him.

  "What about Quant?" Ghost asked.

  Lod mimed shock. "You? Implying there's a Periapt we can trust?"

  "Not trust. But there's something about that one. At least if he sets out to do us harm, it won't be with social games or bad-faith advice."

  They found Matsya's executive officer on the hangar deck in front of a formation of officers and senior CPOs. He was wearing his headset, one earcup flipped open and his visor in clear mode. His thickly muscled arms were folded on his chest, and he kept to one spot, letting his eyes rove over the silent men and women.

  "Everybody here'd better hearken to the word of God," he was saying. "Captain Hall states that overall readiness will be brought up to snuff before any hand sees a biscuit, a bath, or a bunk. We'll likely be receiving more media and VTPs aboard, which surely means the brass bodhissattvas from naval HQ."

  Quant's manner held no sympathy. "All leaves and passes are canceled. All hands will turn to and keep at it until our ship's up to flag-rank inspection. Dr. Zinsser and his debutantes are about to receive the s
ame enlightenment.

  "Make sure your new personnel know the ropes. If it moves, salute it; if it doesn't move, heave it over the side; if it's too big to heave over the side, paint it. Any questions?" There weren't, although Quant's diatribe elicited some resentful looks. "Division chiefs, take over."

  Seeing the Exts, Quant went to meet them halfway, replacing the severe expression he'd worn for the formation with one of unblinking neutrality.

  After summarizing what little the Exts knew about the Lyceum ball, Lod asked, "May the Allgrave solicit your advice, Commander?"

  Quant's ebony face went hard for a moment. "I'm to render ship's amenities to you, Allgrave. Your request arguably qualifies."

  Burning nodded in appreciation.

  "The ball is people at the pinnacle, plus their politicosocial adjuncts. But that doesn't mean there won't be a lot of jockeying for position. They'll condescend to you. Some will laugh at you behind your back or even to your face, no matter what you do. Live with it. You'll need their goodwill or at least their sufferance."

  Burning heard the voice of experience and wondered what Quant's story was.

  "If they think you're gaining cachet or the press is going to stay on your side for a while, they'll try to siphon off some of your reflected celebrity. Let them, but remain uncommitted—except to Haven, I suppose."

  Burning absorbed it. "Anything else?"

  "Be careful about casual invitations and watch for bugs. Stick with the food and drink the caterers provide and don't sample anybody's high. Or anybody's sex adjuncts—bio or techno. Under no circumstances—"

  He stopped, listening to his closed earcup. Whatever he heard made him glance off in the direction of the superstructure, where Regis T. Hall was in plain view. Then, wholly impersonal once more, Quant took a step back.

  "No further questions. I'm to require your imminent departure in Hierarch Haven's aircar. Before you leave, however, you'll command your personnel by direct order not to stray outside the designated boundaries." He about-faced and left them there.