Deceit

by Peter Darvill-Evans

  Some of the townspeople were brightly dressed, but this young man was a peacock. His velvet doublet was slashed to reveal the silk shirt beneath, His coat was brocaded, and trimmed with lace. He wore gold and jewels on his fingers, round his throat, at his waist, and on the buckles of his shoes.

  Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Bernice thought. And they used to tell me it was a waste of time studying history. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Give me a hand up, would you. I seem to have lost the use of my legs.’

  ‘It pains me to be so discourteous,’ he said, ‘but there is a chance that you are contaminated with plague. I must ask you to rise by yourself.’

  Bernice struggled to her feet and beat the dust out of her jeans. He wasn’t speaking Common, she realized, but some antiquated dialect. It was like twentieth century English, but not exactly the same. The TARDIS’s instant translation systems were undeniably miraculous, but Bernice found that because of them she almost failed to notice when she was hearing and speaking languages other than her own.

  ‘This sounds a ridiculous question,’ the man was saying, ‘but I assume you are from another planet?’

  ‘I think I must be,’ Bernice said. ‘Home was never like this. Where is this, exactly? And what year is it?’

  ‘This is the town of Beaufort, in the province of Verdany. The year is three hundred and seventy-nine.’

  ‘Oh,’ Bernice said. Very helpful, I don’t think. She looked again at the turrets of the castle towering over the town’s battlements. Medieval, without a doubt. But he knew I could be from another planet.

  An ornate, four-wheeled carriage trundled out of the gateway. The black gelding pulling it was the largest horse Bernice had ever seen.

  ‘My coach will take you to my villa at the edge of the town,’ the young man said. ‘It is both secure and secluded. I will ride and interview you there shortly.’

  The coachman muttered agitatedly about plague as Bernice reached up to pet the horse’s nose. ‘And who are you?’ Bernice, turning on the step of the carriage, addressed the young man. ‘From the top drawer, I’d say, judging from the fancy duds.’

  ‘Duds?’ He was momentarily nonplussed. ‘Young woman, I am Gerald, Lord Delahaye, Privy Councillor to his Highness. Have no fear: you are under the protection of one of the noblest families of Verdany.’

  Struggling to free herself from Lacuna’s insistent towelling, Britta caught site of her reflection in the mirrored wall.

  Shivering, hunched, limbs white with cold, face red from weeping, hair hanging damp in strands. A miserable, pale doll. Bathtime plaything of the tall, thin woman with the misshapen head.

  ‘Are they seeing me now, Lacuna? Are they?’

  ‘Hush, pretty one. Let me dry you. Softly, gently. There. And there. They are pleased with you, don’t worry. I am pleased with you.’

  ‘You’re showing me to them now, aren’t you? And you let them feel what I feel, don’t you? Why, Lacuna? Why don’t you show them things that are really beautiful? Why don’t you show them nice things?’

  ‘Nice things!’ Lacuna spat. She shuddered, as if the concept of niceness disgusted her. ‘I am above such considerations, silly little Britta, and they are more above me than you can imagine. They concern themselves with abstracts and absolutes. Power. Structure. Theory. My role is to provide the element of the senses. I cannot hope to reach their level of pure thought. But I strive to give them sensual clarity.’

  ‘But why – why that sort of thing? Like,’ Britta’s voice faltered, ‘like what you did to me in the bath?’

  ‘They chose me to be their eyes, ears and senses. I was – I am – the strongest intellect on this station. I show them what pleases me.’ Lacuna’s voice became a warm purr. ‘You please me, Britta. See? I can make you smile, can’t I, little one? I can make you blush so prettily.’

  Lacuna cocooned Britta in the towel. Britta rested her head against Lacuna’s shoulder and closed her eyes. It was so peaceful and comfortable – afterwards. She couldn’t analyze her emotions.

  ‘So you’re in charge of them, in away, aren’t you?’ she said sleepily.

  Lacuna shook her gently. ‘Not a bit of it, silly Britta. They are the collected brains of the Corporation. From this station, they control the most successful businesses in human space. And that is as nothing compared to their research activities here. They are the mind; I am but their hands, eyes and ears. And the mind always controls the senses.’

  Britta turned her head and stared up at Lacuna’s visionary eyes. Did she really believe that? ‘No,’ Britta said. ‘Not always. I don’t think so.’

  ‘It must be so!’ Lacuna pushed Britta away, tearing the towel from her body. Britta stumbled and fell, naked to the tiled floor. Tears filled her eyes.

  ‘The mind controls the senses. It must be so. If it were otherwise...’ Lacuna’s voice weakened. ‘If it were otherwise, then I would be responsible for – for all that. And for... No! They chose me. They control me. This must be what they require.’

  Britta sobbed. Lacuna smiled suddenly, and held out her arms. ‘Come here, pretty one,’ she said. ‘Let’s show them something else now, shall we?’

  The lights went out. A second later they flared again. Britta saw that Lacuna had dropped the towel and was standing as still as a statue, with eyes closed. Sniffing, Britta pulled on and belted her costume.

  Lacuna’s eyes snapped open. ‘Dressed? Good. I must work. Our guests are arriving. And there is something on the planet.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Yes!’ Lacuna hissed. Britta had never seen her worried before. ‘Something has appeared on the planet. It’s too big – too complex – for Pool to analyze. We’ll have to rely on the droids at Landfall. And this time Pool will have to rely on us.’

  Britta followed Lacuna into the central area of the chamber. Conical spirals of tracery-thin metal had grown from the ceiling almost to the floor. They chimed dissonantly and shattered into tiny shards as the two women brushed past them.

  Lacuna plucked a leering, statuette from an alcove and started to smash it against the faces of an obsidian pyramid. ‘Don’t just stand there!’ she shouted at Britta. ‘Help me. The two-D screens are somewhere behind, those purple curtains. Get them clear.’

  Great flakes of stone fell from the pyramid. Through the thinning obsidian, Britta could see indicator lights winking dimly in the heart of the structure.

  ‘We need manual communications, you silly girl,’ Lacuna grunted between swings of the statuette. ‘The link won’t be enough. Clear those screens!’

  Britta ran to pull down the curtains. The chamber filled with sounds of crashing stone and tinkling metal. Everywhere, carvings were toppling to the floor as stone archways lurched like drunkards. The lighting pulsed erratically.

  A hologram of the Arcadia system coalesced in the shadows beneath the ceiling. Britta felt drops of moisture fall on her hair and shoulders. Looking up, she saw that in place of the planet Arcadia, a strange blue box was rotating slowly in orbit about the representation of the system’s sun. And where there should have been a hologram of the space station, a tiny image of Britta’s face was orbiting the planet, and weeping real tears.

  The bridge of the Admiral Raistrick was a typical, three-tiered circle. Ace had seen dozens like it. The lowest of the three concentric rings was the hologram display, and it was still dark as Ace, with the DK cursing behind her, pushed through the opening doorway and into the controlled excitement of the crowded bridge.

  The ship’s officers, along with Agent Defries and Jerval Johannsen, the auxiliaries’ elected spokesman, occupied the wide, middle tier. Captain Toko sat at his command console, isolated on a lip of blue carpet that rose slightly from the manned deck and protruded over the hologram pit, giving him a view of the entire bridge. The voices of the men and women seated at the control modules all round the deck were subdued and efficient, but the atmosphere was electric with excitement.

  ‘Two minutes, Captain,�
�� one of the officers said.

  ‘Belts, everyone,’ said Toko’s amplified voice, and the officers strapped themselves into their seats without taking their eyes from the banks of instruments.

  Above the control consoles, the circular wall of the bridge sloped away to give all the personnel a view of the third tier, which consisted of a plain screen like the inside of a shallow drum. The domed ceiling of the bridge rose seamlessly from the third tier. The drum and dome made up the visual screen. It was dark and blank now, as the ship was still in warp space.

  ‘Coming in like a dream,’ announced a voice over the comms net. ‘Drop-out now at two-forty mill kilometres. Closing to two-thirty.’

  ‘Get strapped in, you two,’ Toko called to Ace and Daak, who had moved to stand behind Defries and Johannsen. Ace sat in an armchair next to Defries’s.

  ‘I’ll stand,’ Daak growled.

  Ace caught Defries’s glance and lifted her eyes to the ceiling in mock despair. ‘Can’t we re-freeze him until we’re on the planet?’ she said, loudly.

  ‘You woke him up, trooper,’ Defries said. ‘He’s your responsibility now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ace said, and then called to Toko. ‘Hey, Captain! Let’s have the screens on.’

  ‘Against regulations until we’re out of warp,’ Toko laughed. ‘But the hologram’s on auto. Warp status, Lieutenant Rikov?’

  ‘Steady, Captain.’

  ‘Estimated distance, Henriks?’

  ‘One ninety mill kilometres, sir.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’ There was a moment of absolute silence. ‘Ion drive on.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Close down warp systems.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Lights flickered all round the bridge as the ship’s processors issued thousands of interrelated commands and responded to millions of feedback signals. In the pit below the bridge deck, a hologram of the Arcadia system twinkled into existence. That, and a slight tremor, were the only signs that the Admiral Raistrick had materialized in real space.

  Ace had time to spot the tiny red light that represented the ship, just inside a band of white cloud that circled the entire system. Then the ship bucked like a ketch in a tempest, and the Dalek Killer fell across her chair.

  Red warning lights were flashing on every console, but Toko and his crew appeared unconcerned.

  ‘Rikov?’ the Captain said.

  ‘Thrusters cut in, sir. We dropped out too close to that asteroid belt.’

  The dot of red light in the hologram display was now visibly moving further into the planetary system, away from the cloudy ring.

  ‘Damage report,’ Toko said.

  ‘Negative, sir.’

  ‘You can get up now,’ Ace said, trying to shift her legs under the weight of the recumbent Daak..

  He moaned theatrically, and tried to lift himself off her chair. He succeeded only in jamming his right hand between her thighs and giving her a broad grin before he collapsed again.

  ‘Re-freeze him!’ Ace hissed at Defries.

  Defries smiled sweetly. ‘I think he likes you,’ she said.

  With a grimace of distaste, Ace moved aside Daak’s mane of hair and placed her wrist against his exposed neck. ‘Off,’ she said, ‘or I’ll blow your head away.’

  Daak wriggled the fingers of his trapped right hand, and slowly pulled himself upright. He had a wide smile on his face. He moved his right hand, slowly and ostentatiously, only after he was standing again, and he shook it and blew on his fingers to indicate that his hand had been somewhere very hot.

  Every one of Toko’s officers was watching his or her console.

  ‘A couple of years ago I would have killed you for that,’ Ace said to Daak. ‘You’re just lucky no-one saw it. Don’t ever touch me again.’

  Daak grinned. ‘You’re a hell of a girl,’ he said. ‘Remind me of someone, too. I think it was –’

  ‘Spare me,’ Ace said. ‘Captain, can we have the screens on now?’

  ‘My pleasure, Ace.’

  Light flooded the bridge as the panorama of space appeared across the drum and dome. The Captain’s chair faced the front of the ship, and all eyes turned in that same direction.

  The system’s sun was almost directly ahead, a startlingly bright disc with only a hint of yellow. Experienced travellers – in other words, almost every person on the bridge – immediately classified it as an F8 or F9 main sequence star, a little smaller and brighter than Earth’s sun.

  There were two planets between the Raistrick and the sun. The innermost planet was too small to see on the screen: according to the hologram display it was on the far side of the sun. The second planet was, according to Starfleet’s limited intelligence, the site of the Spinward Corporation colony.

  ‘There it is!’ someone shouted, and fingers all over the bridge were soon pointing to the greeny-blue sphere just to the right of the sun. ‘Arcadia!’

  But Ace had a rule never to enter an unknown room without first checking behind the door, and as soon as the screens had come on she had looked backwards, over her shoulder. Daak, Defries and Johannsen had done the same. All four of them were now transfixed by what they saw.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Ace said at last. ‘Captain, take a look at this asteroid belt we almost hit.’

  Toko, and then everyone on the bridge, turned towards the rear of the ship. The gasps of shock were audible, and were the only sounds to break the silence for several minutes.

  The asteroid belt was a wide ribbon lying at a slight diagonal across the entire breadth of the screen at the rear of the bridge and thinning as it curved forwards until on the front-facing screens it was a barely-visible line that disappeared behind the sun. The Raistrick had now moved sufficiently far inside the parabola of the belt for the individual rocks and boulders to be indistinguishable. And therefore the larger patterns were all the more obvious.

  The lumps of space rock had been arranged.

  It was impossible. But they could all see it.

  Rough chunks of stone and metal, some as big as a planet’s moon, most no larger than boulders, had been grouped together into distinct aggregations.

  And each aggregation of rocks had been organized to resemble a human face.

  And each face was grotesque and contorted.

  The closest face, the one directly behind the troopship, the one they had almost hit when dropping out of warp space, was lopsided, with huge filigree ears and an expression of mournful anguish.

  Sick, Ace thought. Elephant man.

  ‘Rikov,’ the Captain said quietly, ‘cut acceleration. Steady speed.’

  Isabelle Defries unbuckled her seat belt. ‘Battle stations, Captain?’ she said as she stood.

  ‘No, Agent. I don’t want your gunners to see this yet. Let’s find out what it is. Henriks, radar scan. Materials analysis. Throw some radiation at it and see what bounces off, eh?’

  Ace was out of her seat now, and scanning the length of the asteroid belt. All of it, as far into the distance of its orbit as she could see, had been arranged to make faces staring inwards at the sun.

  It wasn’t impossible, she realized. You’d need a lot of big ships, and a mega-computer – and force-field technology that humans wouldn’t discover for hundreds of years.

  But someone had done it.

  ‘Zoom in on the nearest face,’ Toko said.

  The screen blanked, and came to life again with the lopsided face filling half of the drum and dome. But it was no longer a face: seen this close, it was just a collection of rocks.

  ‘Scan report, Captain,’ Navigator Henriks said. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. They’re typical asteroids. Solid. High levels of silica, iron and nickel.’

  ‘What’s holding them together, Henriks? What’s keeping them in those – shapes?’.

  ‘Gravity, Captain,’ Henriks said. Amplified over the comms net, he sounded almost offended at having to state the obvious. ‘I mean, there are no structures or fields that I can detect between the asteroi
ds.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ Taka said. ‘It would have been so much easier to accept if they’d just been glued together.’

  Ace turned towards Taka’s command console. ‘Captain,’ she said, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder at Daak, ‘isn’t this the right time to launch a completely futile, suicidal, one-man expedition in an unarmed shuttle?’

  ‘You volunteering, Ace?’ Toko said.

  Daak spun round. ‘I’ll go,’ he shouted. ‘Where’s my chainsword?’

  ‘Nobody’s going,’ Taka laughed. ‘Our business is on Arcadia. There’s nothing here.’

  ‘There’s something further out, Captain.’ It was Henriks, frantically checking the figures that had appeared on his console screen. ‘Some sort of barrier. No detectable mass, but it reflects most forms of radiation. And it’s closing in.’

  It was Ace who realized first. ‘The stars,’ she said, staring up at the dome. ‘The stars have gone.’

  ‘It’s the barrier,’ Henriks said, his voice an eerie whisper. ‘Jesus, Buddah and Lenin, it’s a complete sphere. All round the system.’

  ‘How fast is it contracting, Navigator?’ Taka said.

  Henriks ran a finger across his screen, and visibly relaxed. ‘Nine hundred kilometres a second, approximately. No problem.’

  ‘Unless it starts to accelerate,’ Taka said. ‘And the longer we stay in the system, the less room we have to manoeuvre in.’

  The Captain didn’t need to state the obvious. Everyone on the bridge knew the dangers of jumping into warp while travelling towards a nearby sun. And by the time the ion drive could turn the ship to face out of the system, the contracting barrier would be upon them.

  ‘Well, Rikov, Henriks. What do you think? Could we get through it in real space?’

  The two officers looked at each other across the hologram pit. Rikov shook his head. Henriks shrugged. ‘We don’t even know what it is, Captain.’