Playing God

by Sarah Zettel

  “As soon as I know, you'll know.” Cabal stood up, flexing his knees to keep his balance as the boat bobbled on the harbor's gentle waves. “Is there anything else, Advisor Tvir? Advisor Cishka?”

  “Not tonight, Trader Cabal. Go with care.”

  Cabal smiled and let his teeth show behind his face mask. “Always.”

  Chapter V

  The command center for the city-ship Ur looked more like an office than a ship's bridge. Captain Elisabeth Esmaraude and her section officers worked at a multiterminal table that had a dedicated AI of its own. The space around the walls had been divided into private meeting rooms, screening facilities, a flash-cook foodstore with an attached coffee urn and bread box, and a lavatory complete with shower stall.

  When Keale stepped through the hatchway, Captain Esmaraude was at the central table, going over something on the screen with her chief gravity engineer, Rudu King. King was an ebony-skinned man wearing tan coveralls with no markings except a small, silver commander's insignia on his collar.

  Keale suppressed a smile. If there was a man who loved his job, it was Rudu King. When Captain Esmaraude brought the Ur in, Keale had asked her for a tour, and she had handed him over to King to see the gravity deck. Rudu had taken him down the work shafts, seemingly oblivious to the weird pushes and pulls of the gravity fields. He'd delivered a nonstop commentary as Keale peered through thick glass at the forests of lozenge-shaped tractor units hanging in the yokes that controlled their slew and pitch. Each tractor contained the toroids or “doughnuts” of neutral particles that turned in on themselves according to equations that King reeled off like other people reeled off plots of simulations or paragraphs of regulations. He talked nonstop about angles of interference, field calculations, the need for constant spot checking of each and every “doughnut holder” in case a charged particle somehow got into the toroid, which would cause the toroid to start breaking down into heat and X rays, or, worse, if some irregularity developed in the particle spin, which could shake the entire doughnut, the holder, and its neighbors, and eventually the whole ship and …

  Keale had watched the man carefully for signs of boredom or attempts to impress, but had seen neither. This was simply King's entire life, down here in this dizzying world of fields, neutral particles, and delicate, precise angles and calculations.

  The only time Keale managed to make King pause was when he asked if one of the tractors could be shut down.

  “Why?” King's eyes narrowed.

  “Security precautions,” Keale had replied.

  “You want a zero-gee section somewhere?”

  “No, no, just a … an area of confusion.”

  Standing on the work platform, King stared at his rows of tractors with his mouth pressed into a long, thin line.

  “Yes, we can do that. Bleed off one of the doughnuts.” He drummed his thick, callused fingers against the platform's rail. “Rotate the field angles on a few others. We won't like it, the captain won't like it, and the ship won't like it, but we can do it.”

  Now, watching the captain and the gravitor together, Keale folded his hands behind his back and got ready to wait. King was methodical in the extreme, and Esmaraude … Keale had known her for a long time. She did not rush for anybody.

  His timing appeared to be good. Rudu's lips moved as he subvocalized something to whatever implants he carried and then stood up, nodding to his captain. Esmaraude nodded back and turned toward Keale. As Rudu disappeared through the hatch in the floor that led down to the gravity deck, Esmaraude waved Keale forward.

  “Keale, so glad you could join us.” She kicked out a chair for him.

  “You're top on my list of priorities, Esmo, you know that.” Keale sat down. Esmo was a short, square woman with thick brown hair cut short to keep it out of her way. Whereas most people who took on eye implants had cameras or video displays you couldn't tell from a natural eye, Esmaraude had a pair of old-fashioned looking wire-and-crystal spectacles connected to terminals at her temples. They gave her greater display range and flexibility, she said, and the extra memory space allowed her to book directly into the ship's info systems if she needed to.

  The corner of Esmo's mouth twitched. “I am top priority only because I have something you want, Kaye.”

  He shrugged elaborately. “I want to do my job and keep your people safe.”

  She sighed. “You really think we're in for trouble?”

  “I really think we could be, yes.”

  All the humor drained out of her eyes. “Where from?”

  Keale knew she didn't mean who'd start it. “Can you get me a schematic up on this?” He tapped the station screen.

  Esmo preferred to give her commands with keys rather than her voice. She typed on the pad for a moment. The screen cleared and showed a 3-D white-line print of the Ur. Keale reached across and hit a couple of keys. The diagram resolved itself to show the ship as seen from above.

  “Right here.” He laid his finger on the space between the city dome and the engineering dome.

  Esmo peered at the screen. “You think they're going to get through the tunnels?”

  “No. We can seal the hatches. The shortest, easiest way between their space and ours is straight across the hull. It's only thirty meters from the city dome to engineering, and us.”

  Now Esmo was looking hard at him. “It's thirty meters of hard vacuum, Kaye. I know the pogos can hold their breath a long time, but …”

  “They're going to have access to pressure suits that we're going to show them how to use.” He frowned at the schematic. “Maybe nothing will happen, Esmo, but if they're going to do anything in the heat of the moment, I don't want to make it easy on them.”

  Esmo dropped her gaze. She pulled the command word out of its slot and studied it. It was a fragile glass and electro-optic key that decrypted all the command systems on the ship. Without it, even if you could get the engines going, you couldn't make any navigation calculations. You could not override any of the artificial intelligence's standing orders. You could not open any locked doors or databases. There were two other keys. Rudu King had one for the gravity systems, and the chief engineer had one for the ship's drive. But it was Esmo's key that controlled the minute, complex workings of the ship. The slender, sparkling artifact represented the real power of the captain. Keale wondered what was going on behind her impassive eyes as she looked at it.

  Esmo returned the key to its place. “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure,” said Keale. He stood up and followed her to the foodstore. What are you not getting at, Esmo?

  Esmo got two plastic mugs out of the cupboard and started drawing rich, black coffee out of the urn. Its scent filled the air. She handed one to Keale and put the second on the counter while she peeked into the bread box. The smell of yeast and baking immediately joined the coffee.

  Finally, she turned around. “Why are you doing this, Kaye?”

  “Because I give a damn about whether the people on this project live or die,” he said irritably. “Which seems to be a major cause for surprise.”

  Esmo shook her head. “I don't mean that. I mean why are you doing this.” She waved her hand toward the command center. “Sneaking around, laying down the emotional blackmail, trying to drum up underground support with the seniors.” She stopped when she saw him grimace. “There aren't that many people on this project yet, Kaye. Word still gets around fairly quickly.”

  Keale took a quick sip of coffee. A good blend, rich but not too bitter. Trust Esmo to get the best for her people, and herself. Esmo took her job seriously, but she liked her comforts. “I'm doing this because the veeps and presies aren't voting me anything to work with. We're getting a thousand multipurpose shuttles, but not one of them will be armed. I'm only getting fifteen hundred security personnel per ship, to cover both Human and Dedelphi personnel, and that includes the admin bodies.” He frowned at his coffee, remembering the last conversation he'd had with Veep Brador on the subject. “It's been ma
de quite clear to me that most of the trouble has been expected to come from the Human side of things, as the Dedelphi do not appear to have problems such as petty theft or drunkenness. They definitely do not have any problem with sexual assault, for obvious reasons, and what brawls they do have are settled in-family. So, none of my fifteen-hundred-per-ship personnel are going to be equipped with lethal-force capabilities.” He set the coffee down and folded his arms. Esmo watched him without a trace of expression on her face. “Since there's no help there, I've got to find it where I can.”

  Esmo said nothing, she just kept looking at him. Finally, he cracked. “All right, what is it, Esmo?”

  She blinked, picked up her coffee, and took a swallow. “I'm just wondering why you took this job in the first place.”

  Ah. Yes. There was that, wasn't there? Keale ran his hand through his hair. Maybe he was too paranoid. Maybe he was too hungry. If something happened, and his team locked it down, there'd be bonuses, praise, promotions, everything you could hope for. He knew it, everybody knew it.

  How much did he really need, though? He was already fully vested. He could cash in tomorrow and be comfortable for the rest of his life. What he didn't have was a coup of any kind. No feather in his cap, as the saying went. That had bothered him a lot as a younger man. He thought he'd gotten over it, but when the offer to head up the team going to All-Cradle had come along, he'd jumped at it. Inside him, that young, eager man had woken up and started polishing his boots.

  It was not a comfortable feeling. It was also not one he was ready to admit to out loud, not even to Esmo.

  So, he gave her the other part of the truth. “When I signed up, I didn't know how many of my requests and suggestions were going to be refused.”

  “You could quit, or you could raise a stink in the management courts about dereliction of duty and ignorant endangerment of Bioverse citizens.”

  “Yeah, I could,” he admitted. “But all of that will take a lot longer than two weeks. Do you really think they're going to hold things up just to give me time to scream my head off?”

  Esmo puffed out her cheeks. He couldn't help thinking she knew what he hadn't said, but then again, he frequently got that impression when talking to Esmo.

  “They had you write up the contingency measures, didn't they? What Bioverse can or will do if the Confederation falls apart?”

  Her words dropped like stones. Keale took a long drink of coffee before answering. He had treated that part of his assignment as a military exercise. It made good sense. You had to have plans in case the worst happened. It wasn't anything he hadn't done before. It also wasn't anything so many lives had hung on before.

  He shouldn't even be thinking about it in that light. The fact that he had was another uncomfortable realization. “Yes, I did have to write up the contingency measures.”

  “And you can't tell me what they are, can you?”

  “You know I can't, Esmo.”

  They stood in silence for a minute, surrounded by the smells of good coffee and fresh bread. “Bad?” she asked.

  “Efficient.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “More efficient than you've ever had to be personally responsible for?”

  His face tightened. “Esmo, my entire career has been about keeping people safe. If we have to oversee any actions in hostile territory, there are going to be a lot of unsafe people around.”

  Esmo pursed her mouth. “So, you want any … troublemakers dealt with quickly, and efficiently, before the trouble spreads.”

  He nodded. Esmo was very good, she always had been. But then, like him, she'd grown up in Bioverse, and she knew the score, the game, the rewards, and the penalties. “Yes, I do.”

  She picked her mug up again and swirled the coffee around for a moment. “I suppose you know the relocation schedule's been set back a week because of this delay in the ID hardware.”

  He nodded solemnly. “I'd heard.”

  She leaned back against the counter and took a swallow of coffee. “You've got a week then.”

  Keale let himself smile. “Thanks, Esmo.”

  She focused on something on her spectacles he couldn't see. “I'll give you Chief Engineer Tiege. He's got a niece on staff with him, a junior grade named Marjorie Wilkes. Runs her ragged. It won't look funny if they clock some extra time together.” She turned her attention fully onto Keale again, and a sharp, warning light shone in Esmo's dark eyes. “Keep it quiet, Kaye. Neither one of us needs any garbage from the veeps on this one.”

  “You've got my word, Esmo.”

  She looked at him over the rims of her spectacles and gave him her slow, broad smile. “I've got a lot more than that on you, Kaye, and don't you forget it.”

  The satellite Keystone slid into its orbit. It rotated gently, and its solar panels angled themselves to catch the sunlight.

  Lynn watched the completion of the satellite network from the wall screen in her new office. The t'Theria had given Bioverse a set of abandoned buildings. The architects had promptly fed them to the construction jobbers so the raw materials could be reworked into a place Humans would be comfortable with. One of the room's walls was video-capable. The two adjoining walls were actually windows. One looked out over the gleaming new coordinators complex. The other looked across the cliffs and out into Ipetia harbor. Lynn made sure the sound filters were set so she could hear the surf crash against the rocks.

  With the sat-net finally in place, she could start getting her office linked to the necessary databases. She felt isolated with just her implants and a portable. Worse, she felt delayed. Trace and R.J. in their shared space out front were already hard at work, reeling out threads for access to progress reports and problem sessions. At the same time, they were tying the incoming threads to their databases and schedules. The rest of the staff was laying out microschedules, arranging transports, working on plans for a real network of roads to be laid down by the engineers, coordinating with the grievance committees, and trying to beg, borrow, or steal badly needed supplies.

  Two new city-ships—the Beijing and the Rome —were in place over All-Cradle's Lagrange point. Another, the Athens, was on its way from Sol. Each had a hundred converted midrange shuttles to work with. She had calls in to the port centers in t'Smeras, Avar Fil, and Usoph. They had room to evacuate, sorry, relocate, the first three million t'Therians, as soon as the ports were ready for them. The selected preparatory personnel would go first and take a week to make sure everything would be comfortable for the main body of citizens. The mass relocation would follow.

  “Lynn?” R.J.’s voice came across the intercom. “Lynn, we've got a crisis.”

  Lynn straightened up. “Already? What is it?”

  “I'm sending you in a thread. Veep Brador wants you to follow it to the knot.”

  Uh-oh. Lynn dropped into the chair in front of her comm station. Who's said what out there?

  “Why didn't he send it straight to me?” she asked with a feeling of foreboding.

  “He's furious, Lynn. This is what he does when he's furious.”

  “Ah.” Lynn nodded. “Thanks.”

  The screen lit up to show the rambling code that made up the thread's spec. “Claude,” Lynn said to activate the room voice, “reel out the loaded thread.”

  “Completing request.”

  The thread spun out into the web. Addresses, keys, and graphics scrolled up on the screen too fast for her to follow. Then, the screen went black except for a line of sedate blue text in shining cursive lettering.

  A Comparison of the Hreshi Degradation and the Bioverse Efforts on Dedelph.

  Lynn swallowed. The listed architect for the knot was Arron Hagopian of Prandth Island, one of the Hundred Isles of Home on the planet Dedelph.

  Arron? What are you doing? “Claude, untie the knot.”

  The text vanished. In its place appeared a group of delicate, gold-furred bipeds wearing beige coveralls. They gazed over a valley that had been ripped up and overturned until there was nothing lef
t but uneven dirt and broken roots.

  Oh, no.

  The voice-over started. “Avitrol scouts discovered the Hresh in the four hundred fiftieth year of the third millennium, according to their major calendar.” Arron had, Lynn noted with some approval, resisted the temptation to make himself sound more sonorous or musical than he really was. This was the same voice that she knew from college. “Seventy-five years later, Avitrol had laid waste to major segments of the Hreshi planet, aided the dispersion of dozens of new infectious diseases.” The scene blended into a crowd of Hreshi crouched outside a square building Lynn assumed was a hospital. Their heads and hands were swollen to grotesque proportions. “And created economic instabilities that caused four major wars which killed millions of Hreshi.” Another valley, this one trampled and torn, with Hreshi bodies left embedded in mud, blood, and offal. Lynn winced.

  Now, the view shifted to a scene Lynn was becoming very familiar with. It was the crowded stage of the Dedelphi Confederation treaty signing with the big screen behind it and the Bioverse execs smiling benignly down.

  “Trillions of miles away, the Dedelphi, an embattled, ecologically threatened race, signed a treaty with the Bioverse Corp in the hopes that Bioverse would be able to reverse the ecological damage on their planet and stop the horrible engineered plagues that had been unleashed during a recent war.”

  The scene split, displaying the sad, static Hreshi on one side and the ceremonious Dedelphi on the other.

  “It will be argued that there are no similarities between these two cultures and their circumstances. The Hreshi were discovered by chance. The Dedelphi are old allies of the Human race and invited Bioverse in. Avitrol had no mission except profit. Bioverse has a clear-cut contract of benefit to the Dedelphi. But there is a binding similarity between both corps and both worlds.”

  The screen showed a single scene: a much-speeded-up look at translucent beads binding together in the double-helix pattern of DNA.

  “Both corps were in search of new life.”

  Oh, come on, Arron. You're not going to say we've got the same mission as Avitrol?