Vigilant lop-3

by James Alan Gardner

  "Oooo, Faye, you used the words emotional breakthrough! I’m so proud. Love you to pieces!" She blew a kiss at the screen before clicking off… and I just knew she was going to run babbling about "spiritual rebirth" to all the others: my husbands, my wives, the kids, even Barrett’s dogs if they’d sit still long enough.

  Angie, Angie, Angie. I know she sounds witless, but here’s the thing: she’s hands-down brilliant when she wants to be. Just that on her fourteenth birthday, she announced she would never let her brains get in the way of her enthusiasms… and she’s had the breathless iron-gripped willpower to keep that resolution ever since.

  A modern miracle. More magic from Sallysweet River.

  If I experienced any angst that night, birthwater or otherwise, it came when I charged my room to the Vigil. Yes, I had an expense account; and yes, I felt guilty using it. My very first expense — checking into a luxury resort.

  So then I spent my time gamely trying to justify the cost by doing as much Vigil work as I could. Tagging along with Bleak and Fellburnie. Scrutinizing the bejeezus out of their plodding methodical questions to staff and guests. Learning nothing new.

  Around midnight, the detectives ran out of people to quiz, so we all returned to the lounge. Cheticamp and Tic sat by the fire… not talking, just staring moodily into the flames. "The ScrambleTacs came back a few minutes ago," Cheticamp told us. "Cuttack isn’t camped at any of the known sites."

  "If you ask me," Bleak said, "the only place we’ll find her is the bottom of Bonaventure harbor."

  "How so?" Tic asked.

  "The woman looks clean," Bleak answered. "No one could say a bad word about her. So the way I read it, she had a fling going with Chappalar. She spent the evening with him, or maybe the night, but eventually the two parted company. All that time, the bad guys were watching… so when Cuttack set off on her own, they snatched her, sweated information out of her, then dumped her into the bay. Or a shallow grave, or a furnace, or a waste-recycling vat. That’s why no one’s seen her since Chappalar’s death — the woman is fertilizer."

  Cheticamp’s expression had gone sour. "I don’t like it," he growled.

  "Why not?"

  "Because it makes sense. And it puts us back to square one: Cuttack isn’t connected with the killers, so we’re no farther ahead than when we came out here. In fact, you’re saying there’s probably another murder victim we haven’t found yet. Bloody wonderful."

  Tic cleared his throat. "Aren’t you forgetting the expensive clothes and perfume we found in her room? In her letter to Chappalar, she implied she didn’t have much money. That’s modestly suspicious, isn’t it?"

  "So she was playing the system," Fellburnie said. "Rich people do. Why pay to go through proper channels if a proctor can arrange it for free?"

  A valid point. God knows, our profs at college warned us against wheeler-dealers trying to exploit the Vigil for private ends. Lots of affluent people are devoted to the belief that every system is built for someone’s personal gain, and the only trick is learning how to use it for yourself. The slimy buggers are often right… which explains how they slithered up to affluence in the first place.

  Cheticamp drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, then pushed himself to his feet. "Nothing more we can do here tonight." He looked at Tic. "You two want to stay or go back to Bonaventure?"

  "Stay," Tic answered immediately. He’d made that decision long ago, when he told me to book a room.

  The captain didn’t waste a glance in my direction; never mind that I was official scrutineer on this outing and should’ve had the last word. "Then stay," Cheticamp said. "I’ll leave you a pair of ScrambleTacs as bodyguards. The rest of us will head home."

  He looked at Bleak and Fellburnie; they both nodded agreement. I could tell all three had decided Maya Cuttack was a dead end… a dead dead end. Which meant that leaving us in Sallysweet River was as safe as anywhere else, and would keep us from walking whatever real investigations might be unfolding in Bonaventure. The bodyguards were just insurance, in case the killer or killers went on another spree.

  We all said good night and the cops galumphed off on their flat-footed way. Leaving Tic and me in silence… except for the dying crackle of the fire. It was late, and the bluebarrel logs had almost burned themselves out.

  I flopped down into a chair beside Tic. "What now?"

  He didn’t answer for several seconds; firelight wavered flickerish on his pouchy face. "We’ll keep searching for Maya," he said at last. "Or at least that promising archaeological site she supposedly discovered."

  "Why?"

  "Because it piques my curiosity. Or because my oneness with the universe tells me this is the right way. Or because I’m a total loon." He folded his hands placidly across his stomach. "We’ll rent a skimmer in the morning and see what we can find."

  "You are a total loon," I told him. "It’s a big country, city boy, and you’ll have to be god-awful lucky to spot a single tent in the wilderness. Especially if the tent happens to be pitched inside a mine that no one’s ever noticed before."

  "Do you have a better suggestion?" he asked.

  "Sure. Instead of flying around haphazard in hopes we stumble across the camp, let’s get some gear that will do the search for us."

  "An hour ago you were anxious about charging a room to your expense account. Now you’re going to tot up a few million for scanning probes? Well-done, Smallwood. That’s what I call settling in."

  "It so happens," I told him in my snootiest voice, "I have a friend in high places. With access to the best survey equipment in the Technocracy. Courtesy of the Outward Fleet’s Explorer Corps."

  A minute later, I was calling the navy base in Snug Harbor and asking to speak with Festina Ramos.

  She arrived an hour after dawn, this time without Oh-God and flying an official fleet skimmer. Not the same skimmer the dipshits used when they kidnapped me. Cheticamp had impounded that one as evidence… not because it mattered bugger-all to the case but just to crank off the Admiralty.

  "It’s freezing out here!" Ramos puffed as she stepped down from the driver’s cab. "Why couldn’t you live someplace warm?"

  Her gray uniform crackled, its smart fibers fattening from flat cloth to a windproof layer as thick as sponge toffee: bristling with air bubbles to act as foam insulation. Even so, Ramos made a major fuss of blowing on her fingers and rubbing her hands together to produce heat. "Snug Harbor was perfectly lovely," she grumped. "Working its way up to a scorcher when I left."

  "On Great St. Caspian," I told her, "this is a scorcher." Which was a lie; the thermometer had scooted below freezing overnight and showed every intention of staying there till it got over the sulks. Grumpy clouds huddled between us and the sun, while the wind had gone gusty with a piercing edge. What we had was a raw, clammy day… but compared to the winter just past, no Sallysweet River girl would ever call the weather cold.

  The rear of Ramos’s skimmer held three probe modules: sleek missiles four meters long, painted gloss black like a widow’s vibrator. At Ramos’s order, the probes rolled themselves out of the back hatch on low wheeled platforms, then sat looking vastly self-satisfied on the dead yellow-grass of the guest home’s lawn.

  "Don’t we think well of ourselves," Tic said, as he crouched to stroke a probe’s casing. "Aren’t we just the cockiest machines on the planet?"

  "They aren’t actually intelligent," Ramos told him; she sounded a titch embarrassed that he’d think otherwise. But somewhere just inside my ears, I could hear the probe purring as Tic petted it. I shifted in closer, moving my thigh to touch another of the missiles. When I reached down to pat its black molded fuselage, mine started purring too. A fat tigery purr, like a cat with its mouth full of blood.

  I gave Ramos a weak smile, trying to pretend I didn’t feel thumbs-awkward. "Sorry, Admiral," I said, "but there are more intelligences in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Tic and I seem to be simpatico with any machine connected to o
ur world-soul."

  "These probes aren’t connected to your world-soul," Ramos said. "They’re military equipment — deliberately designed to be incompatible with civilian systems. Our security gurus guarantee total data isolation."

  "Now, now," Tic murmured to his probe, "you don’t feel isolated, do you?"

  The purr slipped into a giggle, then a whispery childlike voice spoke inside my head. "Shhh… Xe musho jeelent."

  Xe says secret.

  Tic just smiled, but I froze — fingertips still touching the probe’s plastic skin, my leg pressed against its side. Wanting desperately to jerk away, but staying put for fear the probe or Xe would take offense.

  Not only was the missile talking when it shouldn’t be on our wavelength; this thing, manufactured far offplanet in some no-aliens-allowed navy shipyard, spoke Oolom.

  What in blazes did that mean?

  Ramos programmed the probes from a console inside the skimmer… which she told me came down to selecting criteria from a list of search items the probes were equipped to detect. "Every month these things get more sophisticated," she told me as she worked. "Not intelligent," she added, throwing a pointed glance in Tic’s direction, "but better at their jobs. It’s a pity the quality wasn’t this good during your big epidemic — we might have found more of those people who were dying in the woods."

  "You were here during the plague?" Tic asked. His voice was just a hair too controlled.

  "That was before my time," Ramos answered, "but I’ve reviewed transcripts from Explorers who were here. The equipment back then had a bitch of a time finding your people; all of them with low body temperatures, chameleoned to match the background colors, and lying perfectly still from paralysis. We couldn’t even use sniffers to smell out tracks, because Ooloms spent most of their time up in trees. The Explorers were so frustrated: trying to save millions of people from going Oh Shit — uh, that’s an Explorer expression for ‘dying’ — and all we could do was lumber blindly through the woods."

  "They found me," Tic said, voice soft. "Deep in a highland jungle, far into the Thin Interior, and they still found me."

  "Well, good," Ramos replied. "One of our success stories."

  She hadn’t caught the gray bitters in Tic’s voice.

  A crowd came onto the guest home’s veranda to watch the probes take off. Most were Oolom. The few Homo saps among them wore staff uniforms — cooks and cleaners and concierges with time on their hands. Ramos made sure the spectators kept back as the probes extended metal armatures and pushed themselves up to the vertical.

  "Are they going to blast off?" shouted a voice from the veranda — an Oolom boy, maybe eight years old, bouncing with so much excitement his mother asked a nearby human to hold the kid down.

  "Not quite," Ramos called back.

  The boy must have had visions of rockets exploding from the ground in a flurry of fire and steam. Reality didn’t make so much fuss: in unison, the probes sprouted bouquets of spherical black balloons… three at their nose cones, three more round their midsections, and a final three at their bases. The balloons inflated fast, each swelling out more than two meters in diameter. For a moment the morning fell silent; then a cough sounded inside each balloon, and their rubbery surfaces went rigid — truly rigid, like hard plastic shells.

  I had time to think, What the hell? before the explanation came to me. (From the world-soul? Some half-buried memory? Who knows?) The cough was a hardening enzyme getting slap-sprayed against each balloon’s interior. Causing a chemical reaction. Making the balloons’ springy plastic stiffen as solid as steel. Then, with a fierce hiss, the probes began to pump air out of the tough balloon shells.

  Vacuum has no weight — lighter than helium and hydrogen. And the balloon shells were now strong enough to resist the inward crunch of atmospheric pressure.

  Fair gracefully the probes rose, weightless as smoke. The wind caught them, and they drifted toward the trees… each missile still plumb-vertical, ready for action. Floating. Climbing. When they reached a preprogrammed height, some reversal agent got squirted inside the balloon shells, turning them back to rubber again; but by then the probes were far away, more than a hundred meters above the scrubby tundra forest. All we saw was the vac-filled balloons suddenly collapse under outside air pressure. At the same instant, each probe’s engines kicked in, finally gouting out those flames the boy wanted to see. I heard him shout, "Yes!" as the missiles soared upward, north/southeast/southwest, separating to begin their scan of the region.

  "A splendid show," Tic said. "Now how long do we wait?"

  Ramos shrugged. "We might luck onto something in thirty seconds. Or never. Nothing works one hundred percent… especially when we’re looking for an archaeological dig that might not exist. The probes have six hours of fuel; they should find something if it’s there to find." She shivered. "Now let’s get out of this cold, okay? My cheeks are rosy enough as it is."

  The three of us ate breakfast together, Ramos and I making small talk while Tic sat silently… communing with the cutlery for all I know. As for the admiral and me — bright women, brilliant conversationalists — we talked about the weather. I waxed poetic about snow-covered tundra, while Ramos preached the glory of temperatures so sweltering your armpits melted. (She was born on the colony planet Agua, in a region as hot as Demoth’s tropics. "But," said Ramos, "our farm was two-thirds of the way to the south pole. On Agua, even I would roast near the equator.")

  Eventually, talk turned to the business at hand: Maya, killer robots, and such. I’d given Ramos a precis on the phone, but now she wanted the whole story. Even with Cheticamp’s warning not to trust an admiral, I saw no reason to hide anything. Vigil training: tell the public everything, unless there’s strong reason not to. (You can imagine how warmsome that endears us to politicians.)

  "So," Ramos said at the end of things, "killer androids." She sat back in her chair, her expression going dark. "If the probes find Maya’s hypothetical dig, do you think there’ll be robots there?"

  "The police believe Maya had no connection with the killers," I replied. "Me, I’m not so sure."

  "Hmmm." Ramos drummed her ringers on the table. "My training didn’t deal with androids. When a society is advanced enough to build robots, the Admiralty claims there’s no need to send Explorers for first contact. Just ship in diplomats right away." She rolled her eyes. "Let’s not discuss what a pathetic first impression that makes, introducing ourselves to aliens with dipshits rather than Explorers. But getting back to the point… I’m not qualified to go on a robot hunt."

  "You don’t have to go," I said. "Tic and I have ScrambleTacs to bodyguard us. We’ll be fine."

  "But I want to go with you," Ramos growled. Her voice sounded angry. "I don’t have a thing to contribute, but I desperately want to go." She shook her head. "What kind of irresponsible idiot am I turning into? Eager to waltz into danger when I’m not even helpful." Her face puckered sour, and she fingered her shirtsleeve disdainfully. "Maybe it’s the admiral’s uniform. Something in the gray dye is rotting my brain."

  "You can come or not, whatever you like," I told her. "Where’s the problem?"

  "The problem is in my head," she replied. "Look, Faye, people shouldn’t want to walk into unnecessary danger. Especially people who know what danger is. Especially people who serve no useful purpose on the mission. Do you know what I think of thrill seekers? Going someplace you don’t belong, just for a cheap adrenaline high? That’s evil; I honestly believe it’s evil. Decadent. Trying to titillate yourself into some semblance of feeling because you’re numb to the real thing. And me with an important job that the Admiralty would sabotage if I got myself killed."

  "Ah," Tic said. "So you’ve become inexpendable."

  Ramos whipped around to look at him, her mouth falling open as if she’d been slapped. Tic returned her stare with his face composed, eyes hidden behind those blasted goggles. "What did you say?" Festina demanded. (In that moment, she was Festina — not Lieutenant
Admiral Ramos or any other trained-in mask, but her own surprised self.)

  "You heard me," Tic answered calmly. "Do you really think your organization will fall apart without you? Admiral Chee died, and the world went on. His work went on too. If something happened to you…" He spread his hands in a bland gesture. "On and on and on."

  "What do you know about Chee?" Ramos asked. Getting herself under control, back to Ramos the Efficient/Effective.

  "Chee scrutinized planetary governments. Including Demoth’s. Our paths crossed." Tic smiled. "But that’s not the point. The point is you think you ought to be a particular kind of person — sitting at the center of the web, coordinating others but never venturing forth yourself — when all the time, you long to get out into the field."

  "It’s just a juvenile whim," Ramos said. "It’ll pass."

  Tic shrugged. "Perhaps. If it is a juvenile whim. But what if it’s the voice of your soul? Or destiny?"

  Ramos made a face. "I don’t believe in destiny. And I’m not so sure about souls either. Do you give in to every little urge?"

  "I try, I certainly try. The trick is distinguishing your own urges from things people say you should want."

  "No one tells me what I should do," Ramos said sharply. "Not anymore. I’m talking about what I know is right. And I know it’s not right for me to play starry-eyed adventurer just because I’m starved for excitement. I haven’t been trained to confront androids—"

  "Quick," Tic interrupted, "you’re faced with a killer android. What pops into your mind? The very first thing."

  Ramos stared at him with a fierce edge in her eyes. Then her gaze swept away, embarrassed. "It’s ridiculous."

  "What?" Tic persisted. "The first thing you thought of."

  "I thought of something my roommate once said." Her face broke into a rueful smile — very sweet, very young at that second. "At Explorer Academy, my roommate Ullis was a cybernetics whiz. At least compared to me." The same rueful young smile. Pretty. Human.