Medusa Uploaded
Page 35
She was so far ahead of me. And I didn’t have Medusa to work the entry codes. The null zone remained in effect, so I couldn’t consult with wiser heads.
Yet the sight of that tiny light prodded me to blast my jets at full power. I couldn’t make myself do the cold equation that would have made me see the chase was over. I aimed myself at the rim, and once I reached it, I knew I would spend what resources I had to hurl myself at Escape, hoping to get to it before Sultana could use it, and then …
And then what? Crash into the hull? Grab on to a ship that was probably about to warp space when it engaged its drive? What would happen to someone clinging to the outside of Escape under those circumstances?
The engine rims loomed ahead of me. No majesty music played in my head—instead I kept replaying conversations that had given me clues to a big picture I should have seen sooner.
Put your damned boot on their necks and keep it there, Baylor.
If we want to destroy them, they can’t appear to be our main targets.
Their pathway is not part of the known network.…
Unless you’re willing to become what you were engineered to be, your dedication to tradition will forever leave you in the dark.
Within two years, the Weapons Clan will claim their resource. Do you suppose you will get to vote about it?
Those voices and others clamored in my head until they were eclipsed by something Nefertari had said, something that clarified everything for me:
We examine our sense of reality, of memory, and we must conclude that it’s flawed.
Baylor and Sheba blew up Titania to get rid of Medusa units that would give worms more autonomy, but also to get rid of the operatives from the Weapons Clan who saw them as worms. Sheba built an escape vessel that relied on a technology that did not officially exist, so she could throw the rest of us to the hungry wolves who intended to claim their resource. Sultana and Tetsuko and, yes!—Gennady! Moved us around on their stupid chessboard like pawns, sacrificing as many of us as it took.
I’m going to stop you, I swore. I’m going to shut you down. Your Big Investment is going to fail. This resource is going to bite you in the ass.
I heard something on my suit comm—static.
But there. Again. Static, and then, “—ichi, don—”
I couldn’t see anyone ahead of me. I perched on an access ladder and turned so I could see what was behind me. Someone in a pressure suit was following me. “—ait for—” said the voice from my comm.
“Who are you?” I sent back.
“—nebly—” said the voice.
Schnebly. And he was closing on me.
But he had been honest about who he was. He could have refused to answer until he was close enough to nab me. “—imited—on—adio—” he was saying, and I guessed that was limited range on helmet radios, or something close to that, which he demonstrated as he got closer and the signal got stronger.
“Stop chasing Sultana,” he said when he was within a few meters.
“Schnebly, you’re a company man, you can’t want our children to—”
“Oichi, just listen to me.”
“She’s headed for Lady Sheba’s ship!”
“Let her go.” He grabbed my ladder and held on. “Let her take the ship. She can’t claim us if she’s not on Olympia. The Weapons Clan won’t accept it.”
“She’ll come after our children! I’m not sure we can protect them from her!”
“Actually,” he said, “we have two gravity bombs we can use to protect them. I figured they might come in handy. I strapped them to Escape. Once she activates the drive—let’s get to the top of the rim. You’re going to want to see this.”
Schnebly made no effort to seize me, or to do me any violence. He may have been trying to lull me into a false sense of security, but that had never been his style. “Truce?” I said.
“We’re on the same team, Oichi. Come and see my demonstration.”
So we jetted toward the man-made mountains that drove Olympia. This time around, I didn’t have room for vertigo as we crossed the gap and hurtled for the edge of the rim. Once we reached the terminus, we looked into the valley in which Escape had been hidden.
“Do you think she’s detached from us by now?” I said. “What do you think her trajectory will be?”
“I’m gambling,” said Schnebly, “that she’ll put some distance between Escape and Olympia before she engages that drive. She wouldn’t want to do any harm to her asse—”
Lightning flickered at the edge of my vision. I craned my neck and saw a blue orb that swelled and then collapsed on itself.
39
Captain Nemo
Schnebly had been shadowing me since my expedition to recruit Adem. But, he said, “I lost track of you when they instigated the shipwide null zone. I had to guess where you might end up. Good thing I discovered the Escape after Gennady Mironenko disappeared.”
The two of us emerged from Lock 177 in the ass end of the Ass End. “Mironenko was out in the open until he executed you,” Schnebly concluded. “And then I couldn’t find him anywhere.”
I confess I was only half listening as I dabbed antiseptic ointment on all the spots from which I was bleeding—so many spots, I was running out of ointment. But I heard enough to ask, “You found the ship while you were looking high and low for Gennady?”
“Right.” He handed me another pressure bandage. “That’s also how I found the gravity bombs. There were just two of them, but they were placed in spots that would have done a lot of damage to Olympia if they had gone off. I’m assuming they would have been triggered remotely once Baylor and his cronies made their escape.”
“Wait”—I stopped wrestling with the bandage—“Baylor was going to destroy Olympia, too?”
“Not destroy it. Damage it. Cripple us so we would have been easy pickings for the Weapons Clan when they came to collect us.”
His remark reminded me of a hard fact. “They’re still coming.”
Schnebly smiled. It was a spooky sight. “If I understand their long-term plans, yes. But they were expecting to have operatives on Titania and Olympia. Now that there’s radio silence, who knows how they’ll approach us? Maybe they’ll want to negotiate.”
He unwrapped another pressure bandage for me and waited patiently while I stuck it in place. The adrenaline that had sustained me in my pursuit of Sultana was rapidly wearing off, and I staggered. The man who had worked with such dedication to kill Oichi the Immigrant steadied me. I looked into his emotionless face for a long moment. “Schnebly—you’re a company man. I would have thought Baylor would offer you a spot on Escape.”
Lo and behold, Schnebly was capable of emotion after all: surprise. “He didn’t invite me. To him, I was just another pawn he could sacrifice. But I wouldn’t have gone along with his scheme anyway. He had nothing to offer that was more desirable than what I’ve already got.”
“Your job with Investigations?” I said.
“It keeps me busy. It’s the best use of my abilities.” He fished more pressure bandages out of the medi-kit.
I felt as if I were trying to patch a leaky dam, but I seemed to be making progress with the mess Sultana and Tetsuko had made of my skin. “Now that Baylor is dead—whom are you working for, Schnebly?”
He handed me another bandage. “I’m working for Terry Charmayne. Which means that I’m really working for you, Oichi Angelis. I have been for some time.”
I accepted the bandage. “Glad to hear it. And I think you’ll find I pay better.”
“There’s just one catch,” said Schnebly. “You’ve got a boss you don’t know about.”
I paused with my patching. “Excuse me?”
“Captain Nemo. It’s time for you to meet
him.”
* * *
We collected Terry Charmayne for the meeting, but Schnebly did not try to explain who Captain Nemo was on the way. He didn’t even tell us where we were going, though it was in the general location of Fore Sector. “You will find this area on your Security overlay,” said Schnebly, “but it’s not what it appears to be, and it’s not connected to anything else the way it’s represented on the overlay.”
Hiding in plain sight, if you cared to look at it from a blueprint perspective—though the nerve center for Ship Operations was literally hiding, too. It was in the same general area you would expect to see In-Skin Command Centers or Executive compounds, but its maintenance tunnels weren’t connected to anything else, and the space on the other side of the bulkheads that concealed it was theoretically full of storage tanks.
We approached a maintenance hatch that likely had never been accessed (or even seen) by Maintenance.
A brief silence followed, and then Kitten said,
The null zone had been turned off.
I sent a private message to Medusa.
Schnebly opened the hatch. Two brawny guards waited on the other side, both of them armed with weapons most ordinary folks on Olympia never saw. I figured that if those guards didn’t have a chance to shoot intruders, they could block the entrance with their bulk.
But they were expecting us, so they got out to allow us entry. Then they got in after us and sealed that hatch.
This tunnel was well lit. It really was a maintenance tunnel, but its complement of cables and related equipment was a lot bigger than anything I’d seen previously. I sent a message to Terry and Medusa.
We halted in front of another hatch. It opened from the other side. Light poured into our tunnel, but it wasn’t like the simulated sunlight that shone in the Habitat Sector, or even like the lights we enjoyed in our living spaces. This was more like the multicolored lights you would find in a large Security center—times ten.
We exited the tunnel, into the biggest space I had ever seen inside Olympia’s skin, bigger even than Lock 212. It was filled with tactical displays that represented every corner of Olympia, but also with tactical representations of the space through which our generation ship was passing, local star systems, and even our galaxy. It was much like the virtual space that had grown inside my head after the ghosts of Sheba and my mother contacted me. I was so dazzled, at first I didn’t see the man who had approached us.
He was about forty, of medium size and height—in fact, just about everything about this man’s physical appearance was medium, including his skin tone. His hair was cropped close to his skull, and his eyes were almost black. But there was nothing medium about his demeanor—or his authority.
“Oichi,” he said, “I’m glad to meet you. I am Captain Nemo.”
I had seen a few movies in Nuruddin’s database that featured a Captain Nemo. “Captain Nobody?” I said.
He nodded. “Every captain of Olympia has taken on that name. What we used to be called is irrelevant. We lose our names along with any claim we have to families or private lives.”
I let my eyes wander to graphic displays that depicted vital services. “So this is why you had Kalyani Aksu blown out of an air lock. Her investigations would have brought her too close to one of your secret areas.”
“True,” said Captain Nemo. “But in our defense, we didn’t interfere when you rescued her. We made alterations in those areas, and by the time Teddy showed up, there was nothing to see.”
I could see graphics for the research towers on the leading edge. I could see words below images that said MEDUSA UNITS along with the number of unassigned units still in each tower. My heart sank. “You work for the Weapons Clan?”
“We did for the first hundred years,” said Nemo. “Then Baylor Charmayne blew up Titania.” An anger crept into his voice. It sounded deep and wide, like the ocean of stars around us.
“Baylor did that,” I said. “I can’t imagine it made the Weapons Clan happy.”
“It didn’t,” said Nemo. “Mironenko neglected to tell Baylor that the Weapons Clan had been following us in a ship of their own. The Titania debacle almost cost Baylor his life. But Mironenko talked them into letting the Charmaynes stay in charge. He argued that they were effective politicians.”
“Right up until Baylor killed him,” I said. “But what about you, Captain? Will you turn us all over to the Weapons Clan now?”
He studied me before he answered. “You and I have a lot in common, Oichi. We had to play the long game.”
I frowned. “But you had me at a disadvantage. You knew about me all along, but I didn’t know about you.”
Nemo shook his head. “All of us knew things that we didn’t tell others. For instance, the Weapons Clan has known about you since your father gave you the first implants. But they never talked about you to the Charmaynes, or Mironenko, or to any of their operatives. And they never told them that you had contacted the clan from Escape. They didn’t want them to kill you.”
That made me feel special. But it didn’t make sense. “I wanted to spoil all their plans. Why wouldn’t the Weapons Clan want me dead?’
“Because they thought you were doing the opposite of spoiling their plans. They thought you were preparing the way for an interface with the Three. Because they didn’t know you already had one.”
It took all my willpower not to say, Oh, like a kid who has learned an operation in mathematics that should have been obvious.
“And there were plenty of things we in Operations never told anyone,” said Nemo. “I’m going to show you two of those things now. Look here.”
Nemo walked farther into the gigantic room, and we followed. Technicians stood under displays that were bigger, more complex versions of what we had worked with in the Charmayne In-Skin Command Center. They seemed unaware of us, but when Nemo spoke to a woman, she used her gloved hands to shift the scene on one of the displays, like a conductor directing an orchestra. The graphic it had been displaying of a solar system (possibly Charon’s system) was replaced with an object that might have been meters across or kilometers. It was round, and blunt, and seemed to consist mostly of a communications array.
“What is it?” I said.
“A warning beacon.” Captain Nemo nodded to the woman. “We’re replaying the message for you now.”
“ATTENTION, TRAVELERS.” The voice sounded neither male nor female. “YOU ARE ENTERING THE CHARON SYSTEM. THIS SYSTEM IS PROTECTED BY THE ALLIANCE OF ANCIENT RACES. IF YOUR SHIP CARRIES WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, IT WILL BE DESTROYED. YOU MUST RECEIVE PERMISSION FROM THE WORLD AUTHORITY ON GRAVEYARD TO VISIT THIS SYSTEM. TRESPASSERS WILL ALSO BE DESTROYED. YOU WILL RECEIVE NO FURTHER WARNING.…” And the message began to repeat itself in another language.
Terry spoke up. “Did we get permission?”
“Yes,” said Captain Nemo. “The Weapons Clan did not. They are no longer following us.”
Terry and I stared at him, then back at the beacon. The woman had muted the message, but we could still hear it in the background. “If they’re not following us,” I said, “what are they doing?”
“Waiting.” Nemo nodded to the woman again, and she conducted with her gloved hands. Now we saw chunks of wreckage. “This is what’s left of an old ship that belonged to the Weapons Clan. We were able to access fragments from its databases. It’s over two hundred years old.”
Terry and I exchanged wondering looks. Terry said, �
�But we got permission to visit.”
“We did,” said Nemo. “We’re headed for Graveyard, the third planet out from Charon. It’s in the Goldilocks zone—habitable, and Earth-like. With atmosphere, water. Its mass is about eight-point-nine that of our fabled Homeworld—”
“Our nonexistent Homeworld,” I felt compelled to say.
Nemo shrugged. “Unless our Homeworld was Earth. That’s where our ancestors came from. Or at least, our human ancestors.”
The woman quirked her gloves and swept the scene of wreckage away. What replaced it was a small blue dot. Beyond it, Charon glowed bright. “I’ll leave it to you to decide how to tell everyone we’re two years away from our destination instead of one hundred years,” said Nemo. “Soon we’ll begin braking. Our trajectory will take us into an orbit we can maintain around Graveyard. I suspect we’re supposed to stay there.”
I gazed hungrily at that blue dot, amazed that my shipbound soul could yearn for something that might prove both dangerous and disappointing. “And the Weapons Clan will sit outside the system and—wait? For what?”
“I think they intend to negotiate with us,” said Nemo. “It wasn’t their original plan, but they’re like you and me, Oichi. They’re patient.”
Nemo turned to me again, and took a deep breath. When he let it out again, he looked years older. “My counterpart on Titania was a good captain. He trained me.”
I supposed that made him a father figure to Nemo. So we had that loss in common, too.
“There is a section of this Command Center that has never been used,” said Captain Nemo, looking first at me and then at Terry. “It is supposed to be used when we’re ready to contact the Three. That time is now. Are you ready?”
Terry sure looked ready. I felt like I was going to throw up. I had begun bleeding again from several spots, my head hurt, I felt dizzy, and I was overwhelmed.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
The three of us followed Captain Nemo across that gigantic room, past displays that depicted everything that kept Olympia running smoothly, past people who were descendants of technicians who had looked after Operations on our ship since it was built. Nemo walked to the edge of a platform. Beyond it, the display screens were dark, making that end of the room look as if it opened into a starless void. Nemo stopped and indicated that we should mount the platform. “Keep walking,” he said, “until the displays come to life.”