Odyssey iarc-1

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Derec avoided her eyes. “I suppose not. But hearing it could make me remember-”

  “It is far more likely to cause you severe anxiety,” Dr. Galen began. “Most often-”

  Derec opened his mouth to answer, but Katherine was faster. “Dr. Galen, go away,” she snapped. “Go back to your office and leave us alone. Don’t monitor me and don’t listen in. We’ll call you if we need you.”

  The robot stared a moment, then lowered its head and exited.

  “You didn’t have to get so personal,” Derec said, surprised at her forcefulness. “I’ll bet you put a kink in poor Dr. Galen’s self-worth integral that he’ll be an hour working out.”

  “Oh, I don’t care,” Katherine said peevishly, staring at the empty doorway. “Medical robots are such busybodies. They’ve got ten thousand opinions but they don’t really know anything. And they can’t really understand what someone’s feeling when they’re sick, now, can they? Because they’re machines and they never get sick, or die.”

  Is that what’s the matter with you? Derec wondered, looking at her face. Are you dying from something the doctors can’t cure? Is that what Dr. Galen wouldn’t talk about?

  Before he could find the courage to ask her aloud, she looked toward him and patted the bed beside her. “Are you going to stand all the way over there? The field can hold both of us.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Derec settled on the edge of the bed by Katherine’s feet.

  “There, that’s better,” she said. “Now I don’t feel so much like a prisoner being questioned.”

  “I’m not sure what we have left to talk about.”

  “Well-I’m sure there’s more to what happened on the asteroid than you told me on the ship. Then there’s the ship and what we went through there. And there’s me.”

  “Let’s start there. Your name, for starters. The robot called you Katherine-”

  “I am Katherine Ariel Burgess to my mother and the computers. Everyone else calls me Kate,” she said. “My father says that calling me Katherine is false advertising-that it doesn’t give people any warning what they’re in for. Katherine is please and thank you and dresses that cover you to the neck. Kate is-”

  “Sharp-tongued and strong-willed and I-can-take-care-of-my-self-thank-you,” Derec supplied.

  Katherine brightened as though she had been complimented. “Something like that. My father says that I have spice.”

  “I think I’ll stick to Katherine. What were you doing on Aranimas’s ship?”

  “Why, I was a prisoner just like you were. My robots and I were kidnapped off a courier ship.” She snapped her fingers. “I just remembered. Where’s the key? You didn’t let the robots have it, did you?”

  “I don’t know where it is,” he said. “I don’t even know that it was ever where I thought it was.”

  “Is the ship here? Have you been back in it?”

  “Frost, I don’t know. I hadn’t even been out of the hospital until this morning,” Derec said, annoyed. “Will you tell me this-why is that key so important? What is it? What’s it the keyto? ”

  “I don’t know,” Katherine said soberly. “I only know that Aranimas thought it was worth anything to get. Wait-I thought you said the key was your property. Don’t you know why it’s important?”

  “It is my property,” Derec asserted. “Space salvage. Or a gift. Either way, I have the best claim to it.”

  “But you don’t know what it is?”

  “No.”

  She seemed disappointed. “Maybe you do know-but it’s one of the things you’ve forgotten.”

  “I guess that’s possible,” Derec acceded. “Did Aranimas come to the asteroid specifically looking for the key? Not because I was there?”

  “I don’t think so-”

  “You don’t think so what?”

  “I think he went to the asteroid on purpose. I don’t think he knew the key was there. I’m almost positive he didn’t know you were there,” she said. “I think you were just lucky-or would it be unlucky?”

  Derec considered. “Lucky, the way it fell out. I’d sure rather be here on Rockliffe Station than back on that asteroid.”

  “Lucky, then.” She paused. “Look, if it is yours, maybe getting it back in your hands would help you remember something. And even if it doesn’t, we need to find out what happened to the key. Aranimas had to have some reason for wanting it.”

  “Wolruf called it ‘the jewel’ when she talked to Aranimas,” Derec said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think she meant it literally.”

  “Either way, it’s something valuable. Are we going to try to find it, or not?”

  “We?” For a brief moment, Derec bristled defensively. Then he reminded himself what it had been like to be a loner on the raider ship. He felt at home here-but Katherine clearly didn’t. She was hurting, and she was alone, and she wanted to be his friend. And beyond that, she knew something about who he was-and wanted to help him remember.

  “Sure,” he said. “Of course we are.”

  Chapter 15. Oh Seven B

  Despite all the good intentions, the partnership almost fell apart before it began. Derec had somehow visualized the arrangement with himself making all the decisions and Katherine gratefully following his lead. But he found out very quickly that it was Kate, not Katherine, with whom he’d made his pact.

  Derec was eager to get started looking for the artifact. Since Dr. Galen had raised no protest about Derec’s excursion out of the hospital, he felt he had won the right to roam where he wanted. At the very least, it would be several days before Kate was accorded the same freedom.

  But when Derec proposed that he go scouting alone and then report back to Katherine on his discoveries, she balked. “We go together or all promises are off,” she said firmly. “If we’re going to be a team, we have to work as a team.”

  “Being a team doesn’t mean we have to be handcuffed together,” Derec argued. “Everybody should do what they do best, and right now what I can do best is be our eyes and ears.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Derec shrugged. “Talk to the dock supervisor and the station manager. Start finding out what’s happened while we were here.”

  “They’re robots,” she said. “Let them come here.”

  It was a perfectly reasonable idea, and the fact that it had not occurred to Derec jarred him for a moment. He had been thinking of talking to the station staff ever since he had regained consciousness, but always in terms of going to see them. He realized that he had made an unspoken assumption:they’re busy-they don’t have time to come down here to talk to me.

  He had never once thought of ordering them to leave their work. Katherine had thought of it immediately. Derec knew somehow that the difference said something important about the two of them-something about their background, the subculture which had shaped their attitudes about robots.

  It was as though he respected the importance of the robots’ work and saw them more or less as equals, while she thought of them only as servants. But whether it meant he had more experience with robots than she or less, he could not say.

  All the same, it was another tiny piece in his puzzle. He was not like Katherine. They came from different worlds-culturally if not geographically. It made him wonder how it was she knew him.

  All these thoughts cascaded through Derec’s mind in a fraction of a second, allowing him to carry on the conversation with only the faintest hesitation. “Look, I’m willing to share the decision-making. Maybe we could get the robots to come here,” he said. “There’s still the ship. I should go have a look at it.”

  “That’s something we should do together.”

  “Why? What’s hidden there that you don’t want me to find?”

  Katherine crossed her arms and sighed. “If you’re going to be suspicious of me all the time, this isn’t going to work.”

  “I’m not suspicious of you!” Derec exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. “I just don�
��t understand why you don’t seem to want to let me out of your sight.”

  “And I don’t understand your hurry,” Katherine said stiffly. “You say that we’re a team, but you want to go run off and do everything yourself.”

  “The hurry is because we want to get there first,” Derec said impatiently. “We don’t want anyone else taking it.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “We’ve been here six weeks. Do you really think that they pulled us out and then locked the ship up somewhere until we could claim it? Think! That’s an alien starship. How long do you think it took them to realize they’d never seen one like it before-not just the design, but the whole technology? This is a frontier base. Do you think they just take it in stride when an unregistered ship shows up with two injured humans aboard?”

  Belatedly, Derec understood. “So they’ve been all over it. Photographed it, X-rayed it, the whole works. They might have even torn it down, sent pieces of it out onFariis to the district offices. They’re probably wondering about us, too.”

  “Of course they are. That’s why I sent Dr. Galen away.”

  “Do you think he’s been spying on us?”

  “All robots are spies for their masters,” she said bitterly.

  “What?” Derec asked, surprised by her intensity.

  “Nevermind,” she said. “I just think we ought to play innocents abroad for a while, do all the things they expect us to-until we understand what kind of game we’re in.”

  “Be helpless and worried. Play dumb.”

  “Just so,” Katherine said. “Sometimes it’s the smartest thing you can do.”

  At their request, Dr. Galen had a multicom brought to the ICU and tied into the station net. Very quickly, they learned that the Rockliffe Station welcome mat was a bit threadbare.

  The station manager was fully scheduled until the following morning and thought that they really wanted to talk to the dock supervisor anyway. The dock supervisor was conducting an overhaul of the dock pressurization system, a priority task which had to be completed in the shortest possible time, and had they tried the dispatcher?

  The dispatcher couldn’t answer their questions without clearance from the security chief, who deferred to the associate manager for station operations. The AMSOP was one step down the ladder from the station manager and probably the robot to which they should have been recommended in the first place.

  The AMSOP was busy at the moment but would be free in an hour if they wanted to make an appointment. It seemed to be the best they could do, so they took it.

  “So what do we do while we’re waiting?” Derec said as he turned off the viewer.

  “We could spend the time getting to know each other better-”

  “Should I entertain you with stories about my family?”

  She laughed-a nice laugh. “Maybe not.”

  “Youcould tell me stories about my family.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Katherine-the only person who knows anything about me is you,” Derec said pleadingly. “Why don’t you tell me some of it now?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Still following Dr. Galen’s advice?”

  “This really is the best way,” she said, touching his hand.

  “It doesn’t feel like it to me,” he said gruffly. “All right. Tell me about you, then.”

  “It’s boring,” she warned.

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Being hijacked by an alien spacecraft was boring?”

  “My life is boring. That’s the first exciting thing that ever happened.” She added, “Except it wasn’t exactly a hijacking.”

  “Tell me about it. What was the name of your courier ship?”

  “Golden Eagle, out of Viking. We were carrying a diplomatic pouch to Frier’s Planet-”

  At least in a first reading, the story had the ring of truth.

  According to Katherine, she and her robots had been outbound from Viking on the courier shipGolden Eagle, along with a pilot and two diplomats. Just before they were about to make their Jump at the fringe of the Viking system, the pilot spotted Aranimas’s ship, apparently adrift.

  Taking it for an uncharted wreck-in part because of its appearance and in part because they could not raise it on any channel-they abandoned their exit trajectory and went to investigate. Suddenly they were fired upon, and their ship disabled. Katherine and the robots were taken off the courier by the Narwe, and then the courier was set adrift. A short time later the courier exploded, probably, Katherine said, because of a bomb that had been placed aboard.

  There were no screaming contradictions in the story, but there were several little points that nagged at Derec. Katherine was vague about just why she was on the courier. At first she seemed to want him to think that she was part of the diplomatic mission. But even though she wanted him to think that she was old enough for such duty, she clearly was not.

  When he questioned her on it, she hastily explained that she had been a passenger, using the courier instead of a commercial carrier because she wanted privacy. He wondered aloud at a courier taking on passengers. She responded by hinting that she was important enough to justify any exception that might have been required.

  But the biggest sticking point, and the one on which he kept his own counsel, was the behavior of the courier pilot. Couriers carried important people, emergency supplies, engineering prototypes, irreplaceable documents. It didn’t make sense that a courier pilot would endanger his cargo by poking around a wreck. It seemed far more likely that the pilot would report the sighting to the Patrol post on Viking, then make his Jump on schedule.

  Derec recalled that the first time her capture had come up, Katherine had quickly changed the subject. He wondered now if that was because she didn’t have her story ready. Perhaps he was being fed half-truths as some sort of test-Dr. Galen’s prescription for crippled minds. If so, he resented it.

  But the arrival at last of the Assistant Manager for Station Operations pushed those thoughts to the back of Derec’s mind.

  “I am called Hajime,” the AMSOP said, “Dr.Galen tells me that both of you are recovering from your injuries. That is good news.”

  “Especially to us,” Derec said under his breath.

  “I understand that you have questions about your presence here. I hope that I will be able to answer them.”

  Derec opened his mouth to answer, but before he could speak Katherine jumped in. “Begin with when the station first detected our ship and tell us what you observed,” she ordered.

  “Yes, madam. The station’s sensors detected an unidentified ship immediately after it emerged from its Jump-as you may know, the termination of a Jump is accompanied by a minor spacetime disturbance comparable to the atmospheric disturbance caused by a discharge of lightning-”

  “We know all that,” Derec said. “Get on with it.”

  “Forgive me, sir,” the robot said with a slight bow. “I only wanted to be certain that you understood how we were able to detect your ship at such a great distance.”

  “Why? How far out were we?”

  “Eighty-three astronomical units. At such a distance, the station’s sensors were only able to determine the position and velocity of the vessel. Since there was no direct identification through a transponder or indirect identification through sensor data, this vessel was designated UPH-07.”

  “UPH?” Katherine asked.

  “Forgive me. Unidentified, Potentially Hostile,” Hajime supplied.

  “Go on, Hajime.”

  “Thank you, sir. We tracked Oh Seven inbound for two days. We were just beginning to acquire some preliminary data on its mass and profile when an anomalous event took place. UPH-07 divided into two independentbodies, UPH-07A and UPH-07B. The larger vessel, Oh Seven A, made a course correction which carried it out of the station’s zone of control-”

  “They cut us loose and then turned around and went away,” Katherine said.

  “Looks like it,” Derec said. “Did the big ship Jump?�
��

  “Not while it was within range of our sensors, sir,” Hajime answered. “It is not possible to say what happened once contact was lost.”

  Derec and Katherine exchanged glances that said, So they could still be out there somewhere, waiting.

  “And the other vessel, Oh Seven B, it continued inbound?” Katherine asked. “That’s where you found us?”

  “Yes, madam. A scout with a rescue and retrieval team aboard was dispatched immediately.”

  “Can you show us a navigational plot of all this?” Derec asked.

  “Certainly, sir.” The robot went to the hyperviewer and entered a code on the keyboard, and a moment later the far wall dissolved into the black of space.

  It was all there as the robot had described it. A blue trace from the top of the plot traced the raider’s approach to the station, represented by a golden hexagon at the bottom. One-third of the way there, the blue trace split. A thick green trace angled off the plot to the upper right, while a thin red one continued curling inbound on the original trajectory. Two-thirds of the way down the plot, the red trace intersected a golden trace climbing up out of the station: the rescue ship.

  “Can we have a copy of that?” Derec said.

  “I will file it in a directory under your name,” Hajime said, his touch on the controls turning the far wall into a wall once more.

  “Was the boarding recorded?” Katherine asked.

  “Yes, madam.”

  “I’d like to see the recording,” Katherine said, beckoning Derec to come sit on the edge of the bed beside her. When he did, she took his hand and gripped it tightly, as though seeking reassurance. The skin contact surprised and unsettled Derec.

  “The recording was made by means of a witness robot,” Hajime said. “The multicom will not be able to display the full bandwidth-”

  “What’s a witness robot?” Katherine whispered to Derec.

  “I’ll explain later,” Derec whispered back. Witness robots were odd-looking, with their bullet heads and 360-degree scanning slit instead of eye sensors, but invaluable for such operations. Their sole responsibility was to position themselves so that their scanners and recorders captured unfolding events clearly. Many a bungled operation had been reconstructed from the data supplied by witness robots before they were destroyed.