“The vector,” she said.
“Of course there’s a vector,” he said. “There’s always been a vector, several in fact. Ours broadcasts out into space.”
Dr. Dexter shook her head. “That’s just it,” she said. She scooted her chair closer to him, turning the screen so she could show him. “See here?” she said. “There’s the unidentified signal we caught the other day.”
“Keep your voice down,” said Briden in a low voice. “Not everybody in this room has our security clearance.”
Dr. Dexter smiled. “It hardly matters, Briden. With what we already know, we’re all already a huge security risk.” She reached up and traced her finger along the screen. “Now, something else is coming from here, a few dozen systems away. Looks like it could be on Kreemar, or that the signal cuts through it anyway. And here’s us.” She shadowed the other vectors, making them nearly invisible, and brightened this one. Then she scrolled it backward in time. “Watch this,” she said. “Here we are, broadcasting indiscriminately, with an occasional pulse. But the pulses are wide. And then this morning, boom. Sharper focus.”
“It’s just a different frequency,” said Briden.
“Okay,” she said. “Could be. But the other pulses were all directed up into space, off planet. This one is angled differently. Half of it is simply bouncing off the ground. The rest of it travels the planet’s surface pretty closely. It’s never done that before.”
Maybe that explained the pain at the end, thought Briden. Maybe that was what made it different. To Dr. Dexter, he said, “Why would it do that?”
She gave him a look. “You think it’s alive,” she said. “You tell me.” When he didn’t, she said, “Maybe it found what it wanted.”
Briden nodded. “And what would that be?”
Dr. Dexter shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Give me more data and maybe we’ll find out.”
19
A strange veil of light seemed to hang before Istvan’s eyes, tattered and inconsistent, like a curtain made from bits and scraps of rag. In it he could see figures moving, swaying back and forth, hiding and coming forth. They were there and not there at the same time. I’m dreaming, he thought.
But no, he wasn’t dreaming, his eyes were wide open. Through the veil of light, just on the other side of it, he could see the cell around him, and he could feel that he was lying on his cot. Someone was crouching over him, but the light was such it was impossible to see the man’s face. For a moment he thought it was the small gray man, but then the curtain swayed and he saw enough to know it wasn’t him. The man’s head was too large, but still spun over with light, its features difficult to make out. He tried to move his lips to talk but found his teeth clenched tightly shut, his breath hissing angrily through them.
“Just relax,” said the man obscured by light. “It’s all right. Calm down.”
He tried to calm down, but he couldn’t. He could feel the man shaking his shoulder, and then that slowly passed and was gone, as if he no longer had a body anymore. A roaring filled his ears and the veil of light grew brighter and brighter until he could see nothing behind it and there was a buzzing pain where his head used to be. All he could see was the light, featureless and bare, and stretching on forever.
And then, slowly, he began to make out a flexing and falling of different shapes, like water boiling, but still all the same light, barely distinguishable. At first the forms seemed to make no sense, seemed merely random patterns, but then they began to adapt, to adjust. He could feel his mind working with them, making them something different, something he could understand. How did his mind know how to do such a thing? Was this like the voices? But there were no voices, only shapes. It was the opposite of voices, but his mind could make something of it somehow, and he was helpless to do anything but watch.
At first the shapes were geometrical, simple straight lines and then simple forms, slowly becoming more and more complex, dissolving into one another phantasmagorically. But then they began to warp and bend, becoming a collapse of form and then slowly taking on the shapes of faces. They were simple at first, cartoonish and immobile, but gradually they became more and more articulated, more and more human. They were still obscured, nearly lost in the light that created them, but they were more and more convincing. Here a head shot forth, even whiter light pouring out of its eyes, and burst. Another white shape arose and turned toward him and seemed to notice him. It was just a head, without body, but able somehow to move nonetheless, its neck pulsing it forward. It came toward him, its eyes curious, growing larger as it came until it seemed to fill nearly all his vision, as if it were just inches from his own head. It was hard not to imagine that he could feel its breath against his face.
And then it smiled, its mouth opening up jaggedly and too far as if its cheeks had been shut and its jaw dislocated.
He screamed.
The white face screamed back, mimicking his scream exactly, though loudly, too loudly, and then capsized in on itself, dissolving back into the light. He tried to slow his breathing, tried to bring his body back, but it wouldn’t come, he couldn’t find his body nestled anywhere under the light. And then he realized that something was forming again, a head coming up again, the same head as before, but a little more distinct this time, the light shot through with strands that were less illuminated as the muscles and sinews and tendons began to form into a slablike and brutal face, which it took him some time to recognize as his own.
It was a shock to see himself like that, embodied in light. He felt his mind push out against it and the face suddenly began to reform, becoming not his face but that of his brother. No, that was too painful in a different way, and he felt his mind push again until there she was: his mother.
He hated her, but here he didn’t hate her exactly. No, here it was more like he was afraid of her. Seeing her like that, formed all out of light, was terrifying.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, and far away, down wherever his body currently resided, he felt someone squeeze his hand.
“Whatareyoudoinghere,” the mother face repeated, its mouth moving awkwardly, wrongly. It seemed unable to make sense of the gaps between words, just ran everything together and then waited, staring expectantly at him. Which was, he realized, how he must be staring at it.
When he said nothing, the face let out a stream of raw sound, ululations and yelps, clamors and groans, a strange unearthly combination of sounds that left him feeling raw and damaged. And then it stopped, waited.
“What do you want?” he asked, as much to keep the face from sounding off as anything else.
“Whatdoyouwant?” the mother voice responded.
“You first,” he said.
“Youfirst.”
And then, as suddenly as it had gone, the light began to fade again, becoming first that tattered veil that half obscured things and then going away altogether and he was thrown panting, teeth aching, back into the world.
* * *
Waldron was there beside him, gripping his hand. “That’s right,” he was saying. “Just relax. It’ll be okay.” Several of the other prisoners were there, too, gathered around him.
Slowly he disentangled his hand, pushed them away enough to sit up and hold his head in his hands. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again the first thing he saw, in the corner of his cell, was a creeping tendril. Some of that moss or corruption. It hadn’t been there before. But suddenly it was there. Was it real? Would the others see it, too?
“What happened?” asked Waldron.
He just shook his head helplessly, started at the tendril.
“Do you have fits like that a lot? You were shaking so hard it was all we could do to get you into the bed.”
He lifted his head. “It saw me,” he said.
“What?” said one of the other men. “What do you mean?”
“It was staring right at me,” he said. “And then it spoke. But it was saying the things I was saying, only wrong. And then it sp
oke in a way that I couldn’t understand.”
“Istvan,” said Waldron, shaking his head, “none of us know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s out there, you just can’t always see it.”
“You’re crazy,” said Bill.
“We already knew he was crazy,” said Michael.
“But this is a new type of crazy,” said Bill. “It’s worth noting.”
“What is it exactly?” asked Waldron, his eyes narrowing.
“White, all white,” said Istvan. “No, made of light. But maybe that’s not really it, but just what I could see. Changing faces. Hard to remember it wasn’t the person it looked like. For a while, it was me.”
“You’re babbling,” said one of the others.
“For a while, it was me,” said Istvan again.
Waldron patted him on the shoulder. “Well, if it comes back, ask it if it can help us get out of here,” he said. He turned to leave the cell, shooing the others in front of him out. “Come on, boys. Show’s over.”
20
Every indication Jensi had was that Aspera was an unoccupied, uncolonized planet. It was off the beaten track, not even rich in resources, hardly worth a second glance. Which perhaps made it the perfect place for a secret political prison.
But since it was uncolonized and off the beaten track, the question Jensi kept asking himself was how was he to get there. He didn’t have money to pay for passage on a ship, even if there had been a ship going there, let alone enough to charter his own vessel. Any attempt to enter the sector was likely to set off alarm bells—surely it was carefully patrolled and anyone coming close would be turned back.
He spent a few days thinking about what to do. He dug up what information he could, but there was almost nothing to indicate that Aspera was anything but an uncolonized, inhospitable world. Through a stolen pass, an unlocked terminal behind closed doors in the port, and a little of his brother’s creative hacking, he managed to spend a few minutes with closed military records before being locked out, enough to come away with the impression that there was something happening on the planet after all, though what exactly it was remained vague. Some indication that, yes, there was a political prison there, but perhaps more than that: another project was hinted at, but remained very top secret. It was only referred to as Operation Aspera. At first he thought that must be the name for the prison. But no, the prison was called, simply and relatively unimaginatively, Hell. Operation Aspera was something else. But figuring this out brought him no closer to figuring out how to get to the planet.
It took a few days for it to hit him: if the planet was inhospitable then nothing could grow there. Unless they had a hydroponic facility.… But even so, they’d need other supplies, so there must be someone bringing supplies in every few months or so, maybe more often, maybe less. That had to be his way in.
It was, in any case, the only possible way in he could think of.
It would take another trip to the spaceport, a balaclava, and the appropriation of a little more security clearance. He waited until the day shift was ending and then followed the security manager out of his office and forced him from behind into a supply closet, where he gagged and bound him. He took the man’s key cards, used them to get back into his office, and onto a terminal. He had to go back and threaten the manager and his family to get the right passcodes, but in the end he was into the system. From there, it took a while but following what his brother had taught him, he cracked his way from there to the military side.
He was there for just a moment before the system shut him out, but saw enough to find mention of the name of a freighter with security clearance for the sector where Aspera was to be found: the Eibon. From there it was back to port records. He scanned through bills of lading for the Eibon, found it making a trip to a classified location every three months or so, the last one a little over two and a half months previous. That didn’t give him much time. The cargo was as to be expected for a prison camp: food and medical supplies, vast quantities of water as well. But there was other cargo as well—specialized scientific equipment, computer ware, surgical supplies.
It was easy to locate the freighter. It was in a military berth, though, and well-protected. He scanned the vid listings to see if they were looking for crew; they weren’t. From a terminal at his picker job, he could access past manifests for the Eibon, including names and pictures of the crew. There were two freight specialists, basically glorified pickers, one of them a large Swede named Swanson, the other a smaller man named Talbot.
Both were listed in the public directory. Swanson had a small apartment fairly near the spaceport, just a few blocks away from Jensi’s own place. Talbot lived on the far side of the dome. For a few days Jensi followed Talbot home from work, then hung around his place afterward to see where he went. He never seemed to go anywhere; from the street Jensi could see the blue light of the vid flickering on the walls around him. The man hardly seemed to have any sort of life.
So he switched to Swanson, who went directly from the spaceport to a bar called the Martyr almost every night. He would always take the same place at one end of the bar, easing his large body carefully down onto the narrow stool. He was apparently enough of a regular that the stool was always empty when he arrived.
The first night Jensi took a stool around the corner of the bar, a few stools between him and Swanson. He waited until Swanson had ordered his beer and then nodded. The man crinkled his eyes at him in confusion and then nodded back. He watched Swanson order half a dozen beers, one about every ten minutes or so, and then, promptly at the end of an hour, leave. Getting up, he waggled his way off the chair, a slightly waviness to his stride, but basically okay. Jensi considered following him home, but instead stayed where he was.
The next time, Jensi was already seated when Swanson arrived. He nodded once to the man, who nodded back and sat down. Jensi waited until Swanson was nearly done with his third beer and then got himself another beer, ordering a round for Swanson as well. The Swede nodded his thanks and quickly drained the glass, but, taciturn, said nothing to Jensi, made no attempts to start a conversation. And, just as before, after an hour had passed he promptly stood and left, moving awkwardly and ponderously out the door.
Later that evening Jensi began to think, What if this doesn’t work? What sort of backup plan should I have? But he could think of no plan. If he wanted to get on board the Eibon, this had to work.
The third night, when Swanson came into the bar, Jensi had already taken the stool beside his own. Swanson grunted once to him, nodded slightly, and then squeezed his way onto the stool. Jensi ordered himself a beer and turned to Swanson. “Want one, too?” he asked.
“You’re paying?” asked Swanson.
“Sure,” said Jensi. “Why not?”
Swanson nodded.
The bartender brought them their beers and they drank for a while in silence. Finally Jensi said, “You’re at the port.”
Swanson nodded. “You, too,” he said.
Jensi nodded back. “I’m a picker,” he said.
The big Swede cracked a smile. “A picker,” he said. “That’s no kind of life.”
“No? What do you do?”
“Freight, too,” said the Swede. “Not that much different than a picker, but the pay’s a lot better.”
He took a big sip of his drink and for a moment Jensi thought that was all he was going to say. He was afraid to push it. He didn’t want to seem too eager. Indeed, it was all he did say for a while, through the end of his first beer and all the way through his second, until somewhere well into the middle of his third.
“You have to get on a ship going off planet,” Swanson finally said, his speech slightly slurred now. “Somewhere that wants you to load up and travel with the goods and then unload, too. That’s where the money is.”
“Sounds good,” said Jensi. “How do I go about it?”
Swanson shook his head. “Have to just ask around,” he said. “Place I’m at
is full.”
“And where’s that?”
“The Eibon,” said Swanson. “Nice ship. New. Specialized.”
“When do you ship out next?” Jensi asked.
Swanson frowned. “Week and a half,” he said. “More or less.”
That was as far as it went that night. The next night, though, Jensi was back, again buying the beer, and Swanson spoke a little more. “Best pay comes with cargo that you don’t know much about,” he said, and winked. “At least that’s what it seems like on the Eibon.”
“What do you mean you don’t know much about it? Someone’s got to know.”
Swanson waved one meaty hand. “Oh, the captain, he probably knows something,” he said. “But us, all we know are the basic categories listed on the bill of lading.”
“That’s all we usually know,” said Jensi.
“Yes, but you’re a picker,” said Swanson, becoming more loquacious. “You just pick up the job at the beginning or the end. All you have to know is how fragile it is or isn’t. We have to load the cargo and ride with it the whole way and unload it. Usual jobs, they give us pretty specific content listings so that we’ll know what to do if something goes wrong.” He swiveled on his barstool until he was looking directly at Jensi. His eyes, Jensi saw, were slightly glazed. “Something spills, say. Something goes wrong, it’s good to know what you’re carrying and whether it might blow up or explode or burn through the deck. But some of these jobs”—he said, and took a drink—“no, take that back, one job that we keep doing, they’ll put a label on a box that says medical supplies but when it accidentally gets knocked open it isn’t medical supplies at all but sealed vats of some sort of acid. I ask you, how can that be a medical supply?”
“So they’re smugglers,” said Jensi.
Swanson prodded Jensi’s chest with his forefinger. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “These are government men. They just don’t want people to know where they’re going and what they’re prepared to do once they get there.”
“But you’ve figured it out,” said Jensi.
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