One chance, he’d said.
My hand itched. I could feel a warmth working up my forearm.
He couldn’t have just done what I thought he had, could he? In full view of all this surveillance? Then it occurred to me that maybe Riordan was in it with him. Maybe she knew.
All the same, I wondered how I could prevent myself getting obviously excited. Probably peering at the hand Janning just shook would be a bit of a giveaway, if he ever got busted for aiding a prisoner or something similar. What if Riordan wasn’t in on it? Shit.
Glancing down at the paper, smoothing it out, I checked the local time: we’d dock at Ganymede geosynch in twenty hours fifty-three minutes.
That was cutting it too fine. There was only one thing to do: I got up from the cot, and started exercising as hard as I could, strange feelings in my chest be damned.
When I collapsed in a sweaty heap on my cot an hour later in a lot of pain, wheezing, coughing, and woozy, one thing gave me comfort: the strident and rapid pounding of my heart. That and a certain warm feeling above my sinuses.
Once I recovered, I followed the news on Janning’s Paper. He hadn’t been kidding about it being in bad shape.
One headline from the Home System tabloid feed Solar Breeze Today caught my eye:
HUMANITY DISCOVERS
ALIEN INTELLIGENCE!
AND KILLS IT!
I sent mail to Sorcha’s address through the Active Paper. Just checking, on the off-chance she might still be alive. But even a failed-mail bounce message would take at least a full day to get back to me. And in that time I would sit here in my new home, cut off from everything I care about, and think all the sorts of ‘if only’ thoughts people have when they know that things are no longer possible to fix, that time has hurried the world along.
Sorcha was gone, I knew it. She hadn’t been lucky at the last second and overpowered her captors. She hadn’t by a miraculous chance escaped from custody and fled in a stolen ship to rendezvous with Eclipse and bust me out of the brig so we could have a long and happy-ever-after life together. Things in the real world never worked that way. My dad, all those years ago, was right about that.
I sent mail to Trish telling her about Dad, in case she didn’t already know. I assumed she would know after all this time, but I thought it best to be on the safe side. The hardest part, the part I hated, was explaining my current situation. Explaining it to Trish, who had been so against me joining the Service in the first place, who had said, “You can’t replace our brother, Jamie!” And I had wanted to slap her.
I also had to ask her what was being done with Dad’s remains. It seemed unlikely that there would be a lot if the captain of that ship had indeed hit the self-destruct, but there were probably some small personal effects. Then there was the matter of his will. It was only a small letter, but it felt like it took weeks to write. Each word hurt. I sent it off.
Another headline from the same feed:
HOW MANY OTHER
RACES ARE OUT THERE?
WHAT ELSE IS HSC GOVT HIDING?
But there was one article that made me curse, probably along with almost everyone else in human space:
HSC SCORES HUGE
ALIEN TECH BONANZA!
COMMUNITY SET TO LEAP AHEAD!
Janning phoned me about an hour later. At the time he called, I was having another attack of palpitations and breathing problems. I was still feeling that disturbing distance from myself, a weird pull away from the world of James Dunne, disgraced Service officer, and towards a simpler world, where Daddy worked very hard, which was why we never saw him, and Mommy would say that he was like the great and powerful wizards I read about in these old books. Colin told me I was such a girl for liking stories like that and that Daddy didn’t come home because he was hiding from Mommy.
I liked stories; especially ones about heroes and knights and quests and mysterious secrets and riddles in the dark. I liked imagining myself as a brave knight, loyal and true, crusading for justice, smiting the evil hordes and restoring the light and winning the beautiful princess.
In later years, when Dad found me reading much the same kind of thing, aimed at an older readership, he would always threaten to rewrite those stories for me to reflect the world as he knew it, where good men found themselves constantly screwed over by their superiors, and where these superiors denied the good men the use of the tools they needed to carry on their great works. A world, in short, where fairness didn’t count. Dad said a good knight in such a world would have to make do and fight the hordes of evil with a cheap pen and a rubber band and no shining armor, and even if the knight saved the kingdom, his king would take all the credit — and the beautiful princess — while the brave knight was banished, unemployed, into the wilderness.
Janning was talking; he sounded agitated: “James, there’s been a change of plan. We’re not going to Ganymede. I thought you should know.”
I looked at the phone interface on the page. “Mr. Janning? What’s—”
I heard a lot of voice-noise in the background. “We’re being mobilized, son. The orders just came through.”
“Okay,” I said, “fine.” But saying this, I was also rubbing at my chest, and wondering about the shortness of my breath. That pressing feeling in my skull was worse, assuming full-scale migraine dimensions. I should have been worried, but what I wanted right now was a good book, like the ones I used to read — sometimes two a day — when I was little, hiding away into obscure corners of the apartment so I could read by myself and not have to hear Mom and Dad fighting and Trish crying and Colin out in the yard bouncing a cricket ball against the wall.
“James — you okay? You don’t sound quite yourself.”
Sore head, weird feelings in my limbs, palpitations, difficulty breathing without pain, and a rushing sound in my ears. “I’m fine, I think. So how come we’re getting mobilized?”
“You read the news?”
“Oh you mean that everybody thinks we’re sitting on hot alien tech, and we might be a threat?” I laughed. “But we don’t have anything!”
“Well, there’s those glass ball things I suppose, but the point is they—”
I said, “They just want to swallow us up, and this is a good excuse, and besides, the alien technology might be worth something?” It was easy to imagine the government and the Admiralty going crazy blitzing the media with stark denials about any kind of technology or artifacts — saying how could there be any such material when there were no aliens and that whole information blitz had been an elaborate hoax?
Except, as the flood of media reports coming through the page’s buffers suggested, the more the Service denied the existence of the aliens, the more everyone else believed. One report referred to “the Royal Interstellar Service’s well-known creative approach to the truth in past scandals involving systematic cadet abuse…” and went on to list numerous incidents in the past decade alone that had made the Service look very bad indeed. Meanwhile, the Admiralty continued to “stand on the integrity and loyalty of its ancient traditions and fine men and women…”
It was all I could do not to fall down laughing again, but my chest hurt too much.
Janning interrupted: “The Asiatics are putting together a battle fleet. The Lords are appealing to the Unity for treaty-obligation assistance. No reply yet, as far as I know.”
“The Asiatics?” For them it would be like swatting a bug. They could take us over, seize our “secrets”, and absorb all our real estate, all without looking up from their tangled internal affairs.
Which brought me back again to Trish, living on Mars. Mars, including where Trish and Cory lived in the city of Viking One, was predominantly Francophone, and part of Unity Europa, even though the planet itself was in the Home System. Which was part of what made the whole concept of the “Home System Communi
ty” such a fraud. I imagined that the Asiatics would hardly care about Mars’ complex political and security affiliations when the crunch came.
I found myself thinking of Trish and Cory as refugees, scrambling to get out of their house with some clothes and toiletries, heading for the port. They’d be frightened. Trish would already be feeling bad enough. Just lost her father, and fresh weirdness with her dead brother. It was too soon for my latest note to have arrived, but that wouldn’t lighten her load, either. I was trying to deal with the thought of the Asiatics moving in with their typical approach of evacuating the world’s existing population to make way for Metasphere citizens; it was enough to terrify me out of my self-indulgent introspection.
Trish.
Suddenly the pain in my chest, the shortness of breath, the headache — all of it was real. It was happening to me now. Not to someone standing off to one side of the stage, making arch comments about some poor wretch over there.
We were going to war. Those stupid media reports were based on nothing at all! Some “expert” said we could leap ahead with all our new alien technology! Where did these people get such information? They didn’t know anything about the aliens we encountered. According to the reports coming through the Paper, the kinds of advances all sounded like stuff out of old vids! When people thought about aliens they thought about the aliens they knew, popularized through centuries of science fiction. The thought of actual, genuine creatures with intelligence and cultures and their own agenda was still beyond comprehension — and apparently beyond the interest of the sensationalist media, which only wanted a good story to tell and didn’t mind paying for it. I read wild speculations about colossal mind machines that would boost our intelligence to the level of gods, of infinite energy generators, doomsday weapons, and devices that would let us travel faster than light without the need for hypertubes. It was all preposterous.
And now the Home System Community was at ground zero as every other major state and metastate decided to come and get us, just in case there was some small kernel of truth to all the media nonsense.
I said to Janning, my voice tight, feeling a full-blown panic attack boiling up inside me, “So we’re going to fight off the Asiatics?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Dunne. What’s the matter? You sound strange.”
“No, no, I’m … well, I feel kind of peculiar, actually, but it’s this other thing. My sister, she’s on Mars. It’s just…” I didn’t know what to say. I was pacing about in the cell, holding Janning’s page. I was sweating.
“Dunne, you’re not having a bad reaction to the…?”
“Oh, no sir. Not that. I think that’s going to be — look, you say we’re mobilizing now? I can feel the power plant boosting. When do we hit the tube?”
“Shouldn’t be much longer. We’re rendezvousing with the Queen Helen Battle Group. I’ll try to keep you posted.”
The thought of Queen Helen stung, and I felt a fresh blast of pain over that whole wretched business with the late and unlamented Admiral Greaves. Thinking about her, that day, her grand scheme to purify the Service … I had to sit. My head was spinning again. I didn’t feel at all well.
“Sir,” I wheezed, “call the Infirmary for me … I’m…”
Twenty-Three
…light bars scrolling by … immense, towering orderlies clad in surgical greens, faces made of bright planes and dark caverns — all grim expressions. Somebody was holding my hand — trying to hold my hand — telling me to relax, that it was all right. I had the feeling that I had to get off this ship. Somebody was screaming themselves hoarse — hacking gasping sobs — more screaming. I was paralyzed, unable to move, but I needed to get off this ship — walls were squeezing in, the ceiling grinding down, blinding light bars rushing past. Then a lift. The doors hissed shut. Orderlies stood around like Stalk elevators — I had unmatched views of flaring nostrils. Light bars stationary now, humming, blazing down on me. My screams shook the air. The doors hissed again. Light bars scrolling. I wished to Christ I could move, wished I could stop howling. Howling after Dad — I’m so sorry. It’s all I can say. I let him down. Let Colin down. I’m so sorry, Dad. Can you hear me, where you are? An orderly said, “Son, I reckon they can hear you on bloody Mars!” I heard it like something in a dream — and I don’t know what it means and I don’t care. I just want to see my dad, tell him I’m sorry. Hot pain was boiling in my chest — screaming panic — needing NOT TO BE HERE — something’s coming — GOTTA GET OFF THIS SHIP! — gotta find Dad, gotta tell him. Light bars, light bars flashing…
“So we meet again…” I said, trying to focus on Dr. Critchlow. My head felt like something dangerous and noisy wrapped in a cubic meter of construction foam.
Critchlow was studying a clipboard containing a fixed Paper display. “You picked a lousy time to have your little psychotic collapse, Dunne. Things are a little busy.”
“Sorry, doc,” I murmured, feeling the new drugs taking hold, smoothing things out. I was fascinated with the pattern on the ceiling tiles, feeling weak, wrung out, and wanting only to sleep for at least a month. My muscles, every one of them, ached like I had sprained my whole body. In the back of my mind flickered memories of my “collapse”, as the doc called it. Down deep where my heart lay, I felt a cold shame. Service officers don’t have these problems. Service officers grit their shiny white teeth and get on with the job. Stiff upper lip, and all that. We don’t howl for the forgiveness of the dead.
My world spun, slow and heavy; the light was still too bright. I felt weak and fluttery, like I could subside into all that shrieking horror stuff again at any moment. Every time I shut my eyes, even to blink, I saw streams of images: Colin dead on that tree, black tongue sticking out of his purple lips and the stink of cold urine, cold shit, and stale semen in his pants; there was Dad, falling to his knees at the first sight of Colin that morning. I remember the way he collapsed, like he’d been shot. That look on his face. And then there was the look on Mom’s face, when she heard. She didn’t collapse; she stood and quietly imploded. And then the day she left us, looking in a lot of ways like she was glad to be going, to get away. Why didn’t she collapse like Dad? Why couldn’t she cry? Why couldn’t I cry? And Dewey, at the Academy, late at night, when he was pissed, ordering me to suck his skinny little organ and he looked, even as he forced me, kind of vulnerable, like this was something he needed, but didn’t know how to go about it like a normal person. He’d been brought up to bully people into doing things, into forcing intimacy. How often I was tempted to bite the damn thing off and spit it in his face!
The darkness upon darkness of the alien ship’s reticula, winding like a vast intestine through that rock full of doom. I still found it hard to get warm, and sometimes dreamed of that heatless dark. I dreamed of swimming through those rocky tubes, freezing to death, barely able to breathe, terrified I’d be lost forever and become another crypt-dweller, and, breaking free, seeing a planet riding its orbit, and a god-sized Ferguson looming over it, with his knife out, only it wasn’t a knife and…
I screamed, screamed enough to wake the dead. Sitting up on my bunk in the Infirmary, Critchlow and a nurse trying to push me back down, but I was hardly aware of them, just seeing Ferguson, smelling him, feeling his cold hands on my skin, the hot cut of his knife at my throat…
A voice yelled, “Nurse! Now.”
There was a hard point of pressure on my shoulder. A feeling of oily warmth rolled through me. In its wake I slipped into a new comfortable darkness, like the womb.
When I woke later, feeling a little more like my old self but still fragile, a nurse told me the ship was transiting a long tube, headed for a rendezvous with the Queen Helen Battle Group. I noticed, with a weak dread, other Infirmary personnel rushing around, setting up extra beds, laying out sets of instruments, fabbing up supplies of monoblood products and drugs; a bri
sk, calm clatter of activity. Critchlow was distracted when he came to check on me. “Can you stand on your own?”
I got up to a sitting position, head not too woozy, saying, “So far, so good.”
“That’s great. Look, I really don’t have the bed capacity for you if you’re well enough to be ambulant.”
“So it’s back to the big house, huh?” Just what I needed, more solitary confinement, just me and my demons.
Critchlow smiled. “Not necessarily. I’ve got something more interesting.”
And so saying, he glazed over for a moment.
I tried to stand. Standing was fun. I accidentally hit Critchlow as I pinwheeled my arms around. But I soon got the hang of this standing upright business.
I heard a ping in my head. A sign appeared in my field of view:
Installation of Mindstar Interface AC’s product, MINDSTAR EXECUTIVE 3.0, was successful! Miss Riordan, I would recommend that you make a backup of my seed assembly and store it in a safe place. Please confirm that audiovisual display characteristics are within acceptable parameters, according to your preferences file. I hope you will be happy with me.
I stared. And stared some more. I got back up on the bed, and sat there, looking at this message. After some time, thinking, “What the hell?” I blinked my confirmation, and a relatively familiar headware interface presented itself.
Except it thought I was Lily Riordan. Even though at the level of tissue-lock, it should have taken one sniff of my non-Riordan DNA, proclaimed me an impostor, and shot off an army of alarmbots, probably knocking me out in the process.
Yet here I was.
“I know that look,” Riordan said, appearing next to the doctor.
I looked at her, frowning, my pacified mind trying to make the connection. And then…
“Miss Riordan, your headware—”
She put a finger over her lips. “Shhh. Let that be our little secret, okay, Mr. Dunne?”
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