“You’re asking me questions about a local incident which I’ve never heard of. The office of President doesn’t exist as a research facility for news shows. I can only suggest you direct your queries about gunfire to the local police.”
“Fair enough, Madam President. Finally, can you tell us if it’s true your chief of staff Patricia Kantil was called in for questioning by Senate Security?”
“I can tell you that Patricia Kantil has my complete confidence. Thank you.” Elaine Doi turned on a heel and marched away.
“Thank you, Madam President,” Michelangelo called after her. There was a great deal of mockery in his voice.
The presidential bodyguard fell in around Elaine as she left the control center, her face a perfect image of contentment. Patricia walked beside her, saying nothing, equally happy-looking. Once they were back in the presidential limousine Elaine checked the screening was on, then kicked the door.
“Where the fuck does that dickhead get off asking me those questions?” she yelled. “Egotistical shit! I’ll fucking have him shot if he pulls a stunt like that again.”
“Don’t say that, even in private,” Patricia said. “One day you’ll slip and say it in public.”
“Right.” Doi kicked the door again, with feeling. “Bastard! Who gave him all that information, for Christ’s sake? And was it true about the Boongate wormhole?”
“Someone’s leaking badly. I suspect it’s being done to soften the shock impact when the public finally gets to hear the Starflyer is real. That would indicate the navy was behind Michelangelo’s illicit briefing. Specifically Columbia, the bastard. He’s building a perception in the public mind that they’re on the ball.”
Doi gave Patricia what amounted to a guilty look. “How much damage can the Starflyer do us?”
“It’s been manipulating Commonwealth politics for decades. Seventy planets have been destroyed, and millions of people killed. We almost lost the war because of cost considerations. Voter mistrust of politicians has never been stronger. Frankly, there’ll be a bloodbath at the next elections. Our assessment team estimates around seventy percent of the current senators will lose their seats.”
“And my reelection chances?”
Patricia drew a breath. “I’ll resign as your chief of staff as soon as Sheldon wipes out Dyson Alpha. That should give you some distance from the Starflyer.”
“Only in a fair and just universe. Nobody’s going to forget the shotgun about me being one of its agents, not now.”
“It was black propaganda. The Starflyer sent it. Isabella …” Her mouth flattened in anger.
Elaine put a sympathetic hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“They said it corrupted her mind when she was a child. Jesus. Can you imagine that? A little girl having her brain invaded by that monster. What she must have gone through, the suffering.” Tears began to well up as she bent over, her head falling into her hands.
“It’s over now,” Elaine said, rubbing Patricia’s spine as the uncontrollable sobbing began.
“What I saw of her, they were glimpses of what she could have been like. How beautiful her life could have been. I should have known, should have realized something was wrong. A teenager giving me advice on political strategy. Me! Of all people. But I loved her, so I never questioned.”
“She can still be that person you thought you saw. They can root the Starflyer out of her memories, turn her back to a full human being.”
Patricia sat back up, dabbing at the moisture on her face. “I’m sorry. This is stupid of me.”
“I understand. And I don’t want your resignation. We’ll face this together.” Elaine sighed. “If there’s going to be a future we can face it in. God alone knows what is really going on. Sheldon’s got himself a little bunch of cohorts who’re calling all the shots. I mean, we didn’t even know about the Boongate wormhole. What the hell did happen there?”
“None of my sources knew about it.”
“Damnit, I’m the President.”
“That doesn’t mean a lot to Sheldon, or the other Dynasties.”
“He is going to wipe out Dyson Alpha, isn’t he?”
“For all he’s a ruthless bastard, he does have a sense of honor. If he said he’ll do it, he will.”
“Hell, I hope you’re right.”
Illanum wasn’t like a normal town. It was founded to act as a supply depot for all the estates that the Sheldon Dynasty scattered over the planet; coupled with a small airport for the hypersonics that flew the ultra-wealthy to their extremely private homes. There was also housing, and a few select malls, for the thousands of technicians and specialist construction workers and household staff who helped maintain the estates. Urban expansion also extended to schools for the children of senior Dynasty members, stores promoting the most expensive designer items to be found in the Commonwealth, and a few high-class low-morals leisure clubs whose existence was a constant source of semi-envious rumor on the tackier unisphere gossip shows. Not all the Dynasty members invited by Nigel to build a residence on Cressat favored the splendid isolation route; they preferred a tighter community that had some interaction and built themselves town houses instead.
The district Ozzie drove through didn’t exactly suffer from population pressure, or a shortage of space. Houses were vast, set inside huge open grounds. His Mercedes cab was the only vehicle on the road that seemed curiously narrow amid such ostentation.
“Who are we visiting?” Mellanie asked.
“Old friend,” Ozzie said reluctantly. He thought he recognized some of the ridiculous buildings they were driving past, like the crimson pyramid and the Scottish baronial castle inside its own moat, but it had been a long time. And he didn’t want to check the location with the local net. Nigel and Nelson might well have discovered his backdoor authorization codes by now. He also knew his disappearance would be noticed at some point, sooner rather than later. When that happened all hell would break loose. Dynasty security would run a forensic audit through the mansion’s network, and discover traces of the SIsubroutine. Nigel would go apeshit about that; he’d never really trusted the SI. Infiltrating a copy into his Dynasty’s secure world was essentially a declaration of war.
A ghostly white building that was all vertical curves and long balconies slid into view on the top of a small rise where it commanded a view right across the surrounding district. “Ah, here we go,” he said, and turned off up the drive.
Ozzie knew the house array’s sensors had seen him; he just hoped he was still cleared for authorized entry. In fact, he hoped it was still her house—reasonable enough assumption, people here didn’t sell up and move like they did on ordinary worlds. With his aversion to establishing a link to any part of Cressat’s net still riding high, Ozzie didn’t try to call ahead to see if anyone was inside; instead he rapped on the tall metal door. When Mellanie put her hands on her hips and gave him a maddened stare, he just shrugged lamely.
There was a sound of bare feet walking on a wooden floor. The door swung open, revealing a pink and orange hallway. A woman was standing there, dressed in a black robe, her hair in disarray.
Ozzie squinted. “Giselle?”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Hi, babe.” Ozzie smiled brightly. “Surprise!”
“Dickhead, why are you here?”
“I missed you. Can we talk inside?”
Giselle Swinsol glowered at Mellanie. “Who’s this? You look familiar.”
“Mellanie.”
“The media bitch. Try recording me and I will personally rip your throat out, reach down the hole, and pull your dying heart out so you can watch it stop beating.”
“I don’t record ugly, boring people.”
“Ladies.” Ozzie held his hands out to both of them. “Please, come on. A little civility here. Giselle, Mellanie is a good friend. She’s not working on a story, are you?”
“Probably not,” Mellanie said querulously.
<
br /> “There, see. Everything is cool.”
Giselle glared at him again. “Cool? You think this is cool?” Her arm came up fast, and she landed a perfectly aimed slap on Ozzie’s cheek. She stomped off back into the house, leaving the door open.
Ozzie tried to wriggle his jaw back into place. It hurt. There were red blotches interfering with his vision.
Mellanie’s smile had returned. “Old girlfriend?”
“Wife,” Ozzie explained wearily. He ventured inside. Crockery was being slammed around in the kitchen. “Did we interrupt dinner?” Ozzie asked. The decor had been changed sometime over the last century, he noticed. The kitchen fittings were now all jet-black, with glass doors. Scarlet worktops glowed faintly, casting a hazy hue on the ceiling. Chic antique Miami bar stools surrounded the long breakfast bar.
“Breakfast,” Giselle snapped. She tugged a coffee mug from a maidbot’s tentacles and shoved it in the dishwasher cabinet. “I’ve been working twenty-six/seven and I’m tired, and I’ve got to get back in another hour.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not telling you that.”
“I knew Nigel would give you a senior post in the Dynasty starship project, after all it’s practically your planet. You were the best choice to head the research team into the Planters. How is all the gigalife, by the way?”
“Like me, it survives perfectly well without you.”
“I need a favor.”
“Then you should ask someone who cares about you. There must be one person in the Commonwealth, surely.”
“Okay, bad approach, I’m sorry. I’m here because I need to get up to the starships.”
“Ozzie!” She grabbed a side plate.
He didn’t think she’d throw it. “I see you kept the memories of us, then.”
Giselle tipped her head to one side as her expression turned menacingly calm. “Oh, yes. Won’t get fooled again. Thank you.”
“I need help, man. Please, Giselle.” He was surprised at how shaky his voice had become. This really was the final throw of the dice; if Giselle didn’t come through it was truly all over. He wasn’t sure he could live in a universe in which such a crime had been committed. “I know what I did before, I kept the memories of us, too; but please please trust me this one last time. I have to get to the starships. You know what Nigel is going to do, don’t you?”
“What has to be done.”
“It doesn’t.” Ozzie thought he caught a tiny flicker of doubt. “There’s a chance,” he persisted. “A small, pitiful, weak chance that I might be right, and genocide can be averted. Let me take that chance. It’s only me that will be at risk. I’m not going to drag anyone else down with me. Just let me do what I have to do. That’s all I ask. Please.”
“God damn you.” Giselle’s free hand thumped the scarlet worktop. “God damn you, Oswald Isaac.”
Mellanie’s smile had been in place the whole drive from Giselle’s house to the gateway. She kept seeing Orion’s face. His astonishment. Delight. Laughing. Awestruck. She looked up curiously as soon as they emerged from the other side of the gateway. The sun on this world hadn’t quite risen yet, a thick gentian light was only just sliding up out of the eastern horizon to diminish the stars. Something moved quickly high overhead. Something huge.
“Oh, wow!” Mellanie exclaimed, pressing herself to the car’s passenger window. The spaceflower traversed the sky, almost invisible it was so dark. “It was so big.”
From the driver’s seat, Giselle made a dismissive sound.
“More secrets locked away in a single molecule here than Newton and Baker ever figured between them,” Ozzie said.
“Really?” Mellanie said, all mock attention. “Oswald,” she sniggered.
Giselle chuckled disrespectfully.
Ozzie folded his arms across his chest, and glowered out at the sterile landscape. Mellanie grinned again. They were following an Ables forty-wheel transporter carrying a big sphere swathed in polythene and orange wrap straps. The truck behind them was laden with standard cargo pods, gray-white cylinders with environmental hoses plugged in to the end. Mellanie had been surprised by how many vehicles were on the road and the size of their loads. The Sheldon Dynasty’s lifeboat project was clearly pitched an order of magnitude above all the others.
Giselle drove them along the unnamed town’s ring road until they approached what appeared to be a medium-sized industrial park. Pylons rose above the highest roofs, floodlighting the whole area. Under the intense blue-tinged light Mellanie could see that most of the warehouses were joined together in a fishbone pattern. She recognized the wormhole generator building at one end, larger than all the others, its dark paneling more substantial. Behind it were four big fusion generators. A circle of concrete conical towers stood guard around the whole area.
The road took them in toward the complex, passing through a broad arch that seemed to be made from silvery scales. “Here we go,” Giselle said in a nervous whisper. “If the RI hasn’t accepted my personnel updates you can kiss your ass good-bye, Oswald. The smallest perimeter weapons here are atom lasers.”
They drove under the arch. Mellanie’s inserts reported a scan that was almost sophisticated enough to detect them.
Giselle held her breath; she was hunched up over the steering wheel expecting the worst.
“I never could figure out that insecurity of yours,” Ozzie said. “Nobody ever questions the boss.”
“The corporate management expert speaks,” Giselle sneered. “Do you have any idea how … oh, forget it.” She relaxed her hold on the steering wheel.
Giselle parked in her reserved slot outside the administration block and led them directly to the locker room on the ground floor. Mellanie pulled on a shapeless green jumpsuit of semiorganic fabric, which then contracted around her. Its knees and elbows puffed out, providing her with protection against knocks in freefall. Giselle handed her a white helmet. Ozzie was already trying to stuff his hair into one. Eventually he gave up and left the straps dangling down.
The wormhole leading to the orbiting assembly platform cluster was a standard commercial model, the type CST used for its train network, with a circular gateway thirty meters wide. Even that was only just large enough to swallow the spherical compartments that rode into it on a broad malmetal conveyor system. Mellanie stood on the walkway at the side of the transfer hall that led to the gateway, and watched two of the spheres slide past. All their polythene and protective webbing had been removed, leaving the silver-white surface exposed. Given that the exterior was designed to withstand the rigors of deep-space exposure, it seemed relatively delicate. She wondered what Paul would give to see this. It was strange thinking these modules were designed to fly halfway across the galaxy, never to return, that the starships which they would form could actually seed a whole new civilization. She’d looked at paintings in the Great Moments history book that showed the colony boats arriving in Australia; this must be the modern equivalent.
The spheres gave way to a whole series of much smaller cargo pods.
“All right,” Giselle said. “We’re on.”
The three of them moved along the walkway to the gateway. On the other side, Mellanie could see the assembly platform’s reception module; first impression was the inside of a globe that had been covered with the raw architecture of factories. It was an intricate orb of girders that seemed to be rippling constantly. She realized that the grid was host to hundreds of bots scurrying about, while on the underside manipulator arms were in permanent motion. Bright scarlet holograms flashed over half of the girders, warning people off the mechanical systems. The spheres and cargo pods passed sedately along branches of the conveyor to disappear down metallic tunnels leading out to various starship bays.
Ahead of her, where the walkway ended at the gateway, people were grabbing on to handhoops that skimmed along an electromuscle rail which took them inside the reception module. “I’ve programmed the system to take us to the frigate dock,” Giselle said.
“Just hang on.”
When she reached the end of the walkway, Mellanie imitated what she’d seen Giselle do, and simply grabbed one of the hoops. Its plyplastic handle responded by flowing securely around her hand, and it moved forward along the electromuscle band, hauling her along. Gravity vanished abruptly, and Mellanie clamped her mouth down hard as every instinct told her she was falling. After a minute she got her breathing back under control, and tentatively began to enjoy the ride. The only thing preventing her from the full novelty was her stomach, which seemed uncomfortably queasy. Orion had told her about that sensation when the Pathfinder fell over the water worldlet. She smiled fondly. Crazy boy.
Mellanie was carried around a quarter of the reception module where the mechanical sounds of the bots and manipulator arms reached stadium crowd volume. Then they curved around to travel along one of the big tunnels. It branched, then split into five. The handle carried her down the smallest passage at the junction, only four meters wide.
There was a malmetal airlock door at the end. An orange hologram illuminated the air in front of it, reading: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Giselle anchored herself on a fuseto patch and put her hand on the i-spot control. The airlock door peeled back in five segments. They moved forward, and the segments closed behind them.
Mellanie suddenly felt claustrophobic in the chamber. It took a lot of willpower not to snap out: Hurry up. A few seconds later, the outer door peeled open.
The frigate dock was a metal cylinder three hundred meters long and seventy wide, with an open end sealed off by a pressure curtain that glowed electric purple. Unlike the assembly bays, the interior was almost devoid of manipulator arms. Three weapons loading cradles were resting on the solid end, their telescoping lift-limbs fully retracted. Two ellipsoid frigates were docked opposite each other halfway along the cylinder, the Charybdis and the Scylla. Scylla was enclosed by curving mesh platforms that gave bots and technicians access to every square inch of the infinite-black hull; several people were working on her. The Charybdis was almost clear, except for three umbilical arms and a plyplastic access cage over its open airlock.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 214