Riordan said, as she pushed me along, “Now look what you’ve done! Just look! You’ve screwed up everything!”
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and at any rate, there was nothing I could say.
Eclipse slipped back into real space just as Riordan went to shove me into the Brig. It occurred to me — in the way people in dire trouble have a way of thinking about quite unrelated things — that she and I really should have been strapped into some kind of secure harness, the way the safety drills teach us. You never know, when you exit the tube and arrive back in real space, if you might suddenly have to apply a massive blast of boost or braking.
But instead of shoving me through the open cell door, she looked shocked out of her wits. Stunned, you might say. One hand absently fidgeted with loose strands of brown hair. After a moment, she laughed and said, “No, that can’t be right. Can’t be!”
“Miss Riordan? Are you all right?” She was standing there in the middle of the passageway, her other hand holding the Brig cell door, her eyes glazed over. Something, I guessed, was coming through ShipMind.
Which made me notice, for the first time, the quietness of the ship. Other than a faint hiss from the matter pumps shunting raw material through the fab conduit system, and the thrum of the power plant way in the distance… No voices; no system indicator sounds; no voice-prompts; no mail chimes or phone calls. I imagined a ghost ship would make more noise — and then realized I had been on such a ship, and nothing had been the same since.
“Miss Riordan?”
She turned to me, face bemused, all her former fury gone. “There’s this weird thing…”
“Ma’am? I don’t have…”
Not looking at me, still skimming through the material flashing across her vision. “There’s this … message. It’s going everywhere in human space. It’s very odd.”
I was almost too dizzy to care, and using the cell door to hold myself upright. “If you like, I’ll just put myself in here.”
“This message, it says that this ship — us! — just wiped out the whole population of those aliens we met before. That is, it says we went to their home planet and we … oh my God. Oh my God. It says we had nanophage bombs tailored to their DNA. We bombed them, we bombed them into extinction.” She stood there, shocked, mouth open, eyes tracking back and forth across lines of text only she could see. “Nobody told me about this!” she said, talking to herself. “Nobody told me!”
I thought back to the time she had interrogated me, when she had constantly referred to the alien creatures as “animals.” It seemed the better part of valor not to mention this right now.
Deciding not to wait for her, I escorted myself into the cell and made myself comfortable. A narrow cot along one wall was the only alternative to the floor. Sitting was a great relief. My head continued spinning, and my sleeves were filthy with dried blood from constantly wiping my nose. It occurred to me that I had a bunch of nasty bots digging around in my brain, and that they’d keep going until they broke down and turned into poison.
That was fine with me. There was no way I was going to live that long, anyway. We were braking back to in-system velocity. Less than three days to live? Sounded good. I didn’t feel like dragging out the inevitable.
I found myself smiling. There was nothing I could do about my fate, as far as I could see. No way I could even consider starting up a mutiny while I didn’t have headware. No headware; no way to access ship’s systems. Or none that I knew about.
All I had left was to lie there on that narrow bunk in the darkness of the cell, admiring Sorcha’s parting gift to humanity. Hundreds of anonymous infosphere nodes across human space, everywhere, all broadcasting perfect copies of those files to every valid and reachable address. It was a grand thing to contemplate: Sorcha’s informational tsunami, a floodtide of data powered by one junior Service officer’s righteous fury. It would take a while, a few days, for the full impact to spread across all inhabited systems, and for the inevitable eruption of confirmation/denial traffic to go back and forth between systems. But it had begun; she had probably sent the signal to start the broadcast as soon as Service Security picked her up, or she might have had a dead-man switch set up, ready to trigger as soon as it stopped receiving a signal from her headware.
And then I also realized: all those files would still have Service authentication and ownership watermarks embedded in their content for anyone to scan and check. I tried to imagine what goodies there might be. For starters, there would be the documents concerning Eclipse’s special orders to go to the aliens’ home planet and execute the mission. Details of the mission would be included, as well as data on how the home planet was found; its galactic coordinates and relevant system statistics. And there would be images of the world at assorted magnifications, resolutions, and wavelengths. Possibly an appended summary of the report describing the world’s suitability for colonization and resource exploitation, and, perhaps, in a perfect universe, a statement from some Admiralty flunky describing the native inhabitants of the world as “of negligible interest” or “dispensable” or even “non-sentient.” Essentially saying, in other words, that no people lived there. It was too easy to imagine. I imagined documents implicating the highest levels of the Admiralty, the Lords…
Sorcha, I realized, when I paused to think everything through, must now be dead.
The thought, the very idea, tore at me. It felt hard to breathe, without her in my world. I thought about all the times we talked, and how close we’d come to being together.
I kept going back to that week when I’d been stuck on board the damn ship doing Ferguson’s shit work while Sorcha was seeing the sights on Winter City with Alastair. Instead of spying on the captain for all that time, I could have been with her. We could have had a life together. Maybe in some alternate universe we did. Too late now.
Lying there, idly watching Lily Riordan — still standing next to the open cell door, reading — I realized that I hadn’t really taken the time to know Sorcha as well as I might have. I knew only a little about her family, her childhood. Things which now I would have given anything for a chance to ask her.
It also occurred to me that you could say this about anyone you cared about, even someone you’ve known all your life. There’s always more you could or would know, given the opportunity. More time that you could have spent with that person, if you had only known how little time you really had.
In that moment, thinking about the titanic forces Sorcha had unleashed, and the passion that led her to do it, I knew that I loved her.
Twenty-Two
I had missed seeing Kestrel survive its appointment with applied physics, the event that changed the face of human space as we knew it. But I was right there in the front row to see human space explode; even if, right at that moment, I couldn’t see anything more interesting than a basic fab unit in the corner and a bucket.
Riordan took off running once she finished reading enough to get a sense of what was going on. I had to pull the cell door closed myself.
A single small light bar flickered on the ceiling; the whole cell, with its white walls and black floor, seemed designed to strobe at about sixty hertz. The door was solid; there were no windows. I was alone in a little box with my thoughts.
A lot of time passed. I might have slept a little. For the first time since before I went aboard that alien ship, my dreams were calm and straightforward. Not that I recall anything, but I remember not waking up with a terrible sense of dread or of a great danger escaped by the narrowest margin.
At some point I realized I was hungry. I got up and tried the fab. It was rigged only to give me water, which came with a strange smell and a taste like plastic, and dry biscuits that appeared designed to break apart on contact with air, and which were so dry I needed lots of the awful plastic water to get them down. There was
also a chute in the bottom of the fab where I could unload the bucket. A bad smell emanated from that chute.
Could I really avoid using the bucket for the next three days? I seriously doubted it. It was something I could worry about tomorrow.
At another point, I found myself laughing my guts out, with no recollection of how I got started. Tears ran down my face, my belly ached, my cheeks hurt, and I was rolling around on my bunk, legs in the air, laughing like a giddy kid. The idea of the Service taking such pains to keep their murderous plans secret struck me as pretty funny, among other things. Like Ferguson’s power games. He seemed to me now like a cheap comic figure; just imagining his face was enough to make me burst out in a new gust of giggles. After a while, even my unfocussed laughter was funny in itself, and I laughed about my laughter, and Colin was slapping my leg and making fart noises with his armpit and doing these hysterical impressions of his school teachers. Mom would appear at the door in her night robe, looking like death, and tell us to shut the hell up and go to sleep and we’d go “yeah Mom sure Mom sorry” — and as soon as she was gone we’d burst out giggling all over again, laughing at everything!
Janning came by. Riordan was with him; she opened the door, let him in, and said for him to let her know when he was done.
I wasn’t laughing anymore. I’m still not sure where all that came from, or what it meant. I wished Colin would stay dead and I blamed him for what happened to Dad, and hated his guts. And then I’d catch myself thinking like this, and I’d stop and catch my breath, trying to concentrate on what was happening in the real world.
I wondered if I was starting to go mad. My chest still felt tight, and my breathing was not right. There was a sense of feeling distanced from my body. This feeling in my chest was fascinating — the way it would if it were happening to someone else. My limbs were still tingling, and when I stopped to notice, there was a squeezing feeling in my head that, like the chest symptoms, was also fascinating rather than scary.
Janning squatted on the floor by the door. “Hello, James,” he said, frowning in what looked like embarrassment.
I sat up, blinking, trying to get back into the here and now. “Ferguson hasn’t taken care of you yet? I’m shocked.”
“James, I’m … very sorry, about before. That little session was meant for my benefit as much as yours.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
He was holding his forehead, wincing. “They knew I was on your side, that you and me … that we got on all right.”
Riordan’s instruction from long ago, in a previous lifetime, came back to me, telling me to make allies. Except how could I make bloody allies if I spent all my time stuck in the isolation of the simulation eggs? And then with the “stink” of the alien ship always on me, and nobody wanting to know me?
Janning said, “Ferguson was doing a lot to keep me from helping you, especially these last weeks. Kept me pulling double-shifts, extracurricular duties, ludicrous maintenance schedules, tearing apart and rebuilding entire nav systems, doing complete reinstalls of every bit of bloody software!” He shook his head.
I heard myself say, “He said he was going to make me his … personal project. He wasn’t going to stop until he broke me.” And maybe not even then, I thought. Which suddenly made me laugh all over again. I laughed, thinking about chance and timing. Janning looked at me, startled. I don’t think he liked the sound of that laugh.
“The docs had a word with me, son. They briefed me on…” He looked unsure what to say. Scratched at his head and looked embarrassed.
There was a voice within me that got mad, hearing him say that. The voice wanted me to blast Janning, tell him there was nothing wrong, that Ferguson hadn’t done anything, and everything was just fine thanks all the same. This voice was strong, persuasive, and I came close to giving way to it, and saying all that. But the memory was fresh, the anger still scalding. I might not be able to say just what had happened. Maybe I never would be able to bring myself to say exactly what had taken place that night while Ferguson held his knife to my throat. Even now, talking to Janning, I felt my mind trying to hide it from me, to take the whole incident away, leaving a hole guarded by dragons, saying in my mother’s voice, “We’re doing this for your own good.”
I still felt a profound ache. Not just when I sat, but all the time. The doctors had fixed things up good as new, with no visible scars, they said, though I declined the use of a mirror. Everything worked at a hundred percent efficiency. But I knew I would always have this ache, and would always fear men like Ferguson. I would always give in before things got to the point of confrontation.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
“Riordan said there was some interesting news.” Changing the subject.
Janning scowled. “You were involved in that little piece of work, weren’t you?”
“Actually, sir,” I said, unable to suppress a smirk, “no I was not. I knew about it, and I knew it was coming, and I think it’s only fair, considering what happened.”
“Well if not you, who was it? Was it that Riley kid?”
“I couldn’t say, sir.”
“Christ, James! Give us some credit! We know you two were up to something.”
“I really couldn’t comment, sir.”
He shrugged, sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”
After a melancholy silence, I asked, “Why did we do it, sir? The aliens.”
“Community needs to expand, occupy more systems. Cheaper to develop a world to Phase Two occupation standard than build a full-blown hab, start up a biosphere from scratch. I don’t know.”
“But that system is so far away…”
“It is now. But in five, ten years, it’ll probably be considered close to the Home System. Things are relative, son.”
I asked, “What’s happening out there now?” Nodding to indicate human space as a whole.
He snorted, shook his head. “Madness. Chaos. Nothing good.”
“I suppose,” I said, “the Lords are denying everything, while the Admiralty is trying to get its data back from all those other states.”
Janning nodded, “That’s about the size of it. All those other states will be wanting to know if it’s true, and the Lords and Admiralty will say ‘Oh definitely not, it’s an elaborate hacker prank, don’t you know!’ Bloody media’s gone berserk. Intersystem ship traffic’s already up forty percent, just relaying media.”
“Pretty elaborate prank, don’t you think? Even down to genuine Service watermarks all over the documents.”
Janning let out a big rush of air. “Indeed, son.”
“So what happens now?”
“God knows.”
Things got quiet again. I still didn’t feel right, but I didn’t care.
“How long till we dock?”
Janning looked surprised. “Oh. Uh, bit over twenty-one hours. You’ll be going ashore before everyone else, probably. The captain seems keen to unload you ASAP.”
“Nice to be thought of,” I said, remembering that was something my father used to say when the management at his various workplaces screwed him over on a particular issue.
Dad…
In some ways, I still didn’t feel like the news about Dad had hit me yet. I had cried after the big meeting, but that was mainly just sheer fatigue, pain, sickness, and shock…
“Mr. Janning…”
“James?”
“Could you lend me a bit of Active Paper or something, until we dock? It’s pretty quiet in here,” I said, not simply referring to the cell.
He got up. “Sure. I’ll see what I can do.” His tone was quiet, remorseful.
Riordan let him out and closed the door again. He came back what felt like hours later, and gave me a small rumpled sheet of Paper. He said, “Keep it if you want. It’s a
bit crap, so don’t be surprised if it crashes on you.”
I shrugged at him. “Probably won’t need it long anyway, eh?” I smiled.
Janning reached out to shake my hand. It seemed like a very final gesture, like he wasn’t expecting to see me again.
“What’s this?” I asked him.
His face looked awkward in the faint, strobing light. “Just shake my bloody hand, all right? Would it kill you?” He was staring at me with tremendous focus. Like I didn’t dare not shake his hand.
We shook; his hand was clammy.
“Good luck, James,” he said, frowning.
“Thanks, sir. I appreciate what you did for me.”
He went to leave, but stopped at the door. Turning, he said, “It’s the same you know. All over.”
“Mr. Janning?”
“The whole bloody Service. Full of bastards like Rudyard and Ferguson. Everywhere. You would have run into someone like them no matter what ship you’d gotten. It’s…” He stopped, looked tense, perhaps a bit emotional. “It’s just the way it is.”
I nodded, feeling sad.
He went on, looking at me again with that powerful stare that brooked no dissent. “Don’t give up yet, son.”
“Eh?”
Janning crossed the cell, squatted before me. His eyes looking at me hard. He leaned over to me, cupped his hand against my ear. He said, breath warm in my ear, “You’ve still got one chance.”
“Sir?”
He mumbled into my ear again, “Your hand, you moron. I’m trying to help you!” And with that he got up and left.
I knew he had just taken a gigantic risk, considering the walls of this cell probably had a coating of surveillance spray. But what could he have done that would have helped me?
And then I did feel … something.
I looked down at my hand, resting in my lap, holding the page. My palm tingled a bit. Holding it closer, to see it under the bad light, I noticed a bit of moisture in the lines…
Eclipse Page 27