by Migration
It took a second or two for the words to register. Warco blinked. “What?”
“Not the kind that you’re used to working with,” Blue said hastily. “Apparently, it’s a research type, far more advanced. That’s really all I know.”
Warco was still trying to collect his jumbled thoughts together. “I was under the impression that they’re trying to keep this low-profile – whatever’s going on. I mean… having a robot walking around loose isn’t exactly the best way to do that. Isn’t it attracting attention out there?”
“It’s disguised,” Blue said. “Very effectively, too. I talked to it at some length, and even then I couldn’t tell.”
Crazier and crazier, Warco thought. “Well, I’d better get on down there. Is there anything else?”
“That’s all I have. Just keep it out of sight there until you’re contacted again. They should have somebody there in under an hour.”
“Okay. Checking out.”
Warco left the office and made his way down through the rear classroom section, which was still under construction, through the meeting hall and what would be the dining facility behind, to the area at the rear. At least, a robot ought to be easier to hide, he told himself. Just walk it into a closet and tell it to switch itself off.
The door that he had specified opened out into the maintenance corridor and was on the far side of a space being used to store materials. He had barely arrived there, when a couple of raps sounded softly from the other side. Warco checked around to make sure there was nobody in sight, then unlatched the door and opened it. A heavily muffled figure, its face hidden by a hat, dark glasses, and a beard, was waiting on the other side. Warco ushered it inside quickly and poked his head out to look around. A man who had been watching from the corner of a side corridor some distance away sent a quick wave and vanished. Warco turned back inside, closing the door. Even close up, he could have been fooled. It was uncanny.
“I was told that you have important matters to discuss concerning the Dollarians,” Traveler said. “The subject is of extreme interest to me, as you are no doubt aware.” The voice was amazingly realistic, too. It even had a hint of throatiness.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Warco replied. “My job is just to keep you here and out of the way until somebody arrives who does know. It shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
“Very well.” Traveler lapsed into immobility and seemed prepared to remain so for the duration. This really wasn’t the best of places to hope to remain unnoticed for any length of time. Warco realized that telling somebody to walk into a closet didn’t came so easily after all.
“We shouldn’t stay here,” he said. “It gets too much traffic. There’s a place farther along that’s more out-of-the-way.”
“Very well.”
Warco led the way to a little-visited room where drums of sealants, adhesives, and coatings, and lengths of pipes and conduit were stacked. Inside, the air had the sharp tang of a type of solvent that somebody had been working with recently. “This should be okay at this time….” Warco started to speak, then stopped as he saw that Traveler was making strange twitching motions with its head. Then, suddenly, it sneezed explosively, clutching a hand to its nose and in the process dislodging the glasses. Warco gaped in bewilderment. What the hell kind of robot was this? He peered more closely. If that beard was false, then so was Warco’s own head of hair; and the face and eyes were as human as his were.
“So, who are you?” he demanded. “I was told to expect some kind of robot. And excuse me if I sound a bit out of place on Sarc. But just exactly what in hell is going on around here?”
Traveler pulled off his hat and straightened up to reveal himself fully. “I do what I do, in the sacred cause of the Dollarians,” he announced. “It is not my place to question. I merely follow the instructions of ones who are more gifted than I.”
“Oh gods,” Warco breathed. “One of those.” At that moment, his phone announced another call.
“I’m the person that you’re expecting from headquarters,” the voice informed him. “Just to let you know, we’ve commissioned a private hopper since the regular ferry has been delayed, so I might even be there sooner. Is there any sign of Traveler yet?”
Warco gazed at the latest complication to his life and sighed. “Yes, he’s here,” he said into the phone. “So, sure, come on over as soon as you like. But I don’t think you’re going to like what you find here.”
TWENTY-FOUR
A few agitated steps took Korshak across the tiny living area and to the wall of Lois’s cabin on Plantation. He wheeled around and threw up his hands. “We were set up! They figured somebody might be watching Tek, and sent one of their believers to Sarc as a decoy. The real Tek is probably on Etanne already.”
At the seat behind the fold-down table, Lois finished relaying pieces of the news from her contact on Aurora and set down the phone. Korshak had heard enough to get the gist without her needing to elaborate further. “Lubanov’s furious. I guess it all happened too quickly.” She sighed. “He probably isn’t used to losing out.”
Korshak knew the story of Lubanov’s involvement in the Aurora’s hurried departure from Earth, of course. He quelled his restlessness sufficiently to stop pacing and sat down on the stool by the breakfast bar in front of the kitchen space. “It was a chance we’ll never get again.”
“A body inside the Dollarian Academy that nobody would have suspected,” Lois agreed. “I’d like to know why Lubanov is so concerned about them. Do you think…” She saw that Korshak was only half listening, and got up to retrieve their coffees from the autochef, which she had ordered just before her phone rang. “What are you thinking?”
Korshak accepted the mug absently and took a long sip before answering. “If Tek is on Etanne already, maybe there’s still a chance. If we could just get the right message to it somehow.”
Lois waited.
“The Dollarians have done half the work for us already…. There was that other aspiring miracle-worker up at the animal reserve, that Bahoba talked about. What did he say the name of the warden there was? Jor-Ling, that was it.”
“Korshak, what are you talking about?”
Korshak returned gradually to the present. “When I was at Bahoba’s, he told me there’s an animal reservation not far away along the ridge, managed by somebody called Jor-Ling. Apparently there’s another Dollarian hopeful there, waiting for the call to move on to Etanne, just as Tek was.”
“So, what about him?”
“We can’t talk to Tek directly, because it’s shut off its communications. But another Dollarian rookie who was in there with it could.”
“To get Tek to agree to being an inside spy for Lubanov?”
“Yes.”
Lois shook her head perplexedly. “I’m not with you. Why would a rookie hopeful want to do that?”
“He wouldn’t. But someone else taking his place, who got brought into the Dollarian Academy instead, might.”
“An impersonator, you mean? But who…” Lois’s voice trailed off as she realized what Korshak was driving at. “You mean you?”
“Why not? I’ve done worse in my time.”
“How do you even know you look like him?”
“I don’t. But how do we know that whoever’s expecting him on Etanne knows what he looks like? In any case, there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
Lois ran through it in her mind again and shook her head firmly. “It’s got too many unknowns, Korshak. The people on Etanne might not have met him yet, but he has to have some kind of contact here on Plantation. Even if you managed to do a credible job with makeup and disguise, you still wouldn’t know enough background to pass yourself off – things they’d talked about, what the arrangement is.”
“Unless he filled me in on all that,” Korshak said, but the enthusiasm was already fading from his voice.
Lois pressed the point. “But why should he? Why would he agree to step down, when this
is probably a big moment in his life? All it’s likely to do is raise questions and make things difficult for him to get back in line again afterward. I can’t see what line you’re going to take that will persuade him.”
She was right, Korshak told himself. He’d spoken before thinking it through. He drank from his mug and frowned as he searched for a different angle. “Okay,” he announced finally. “I agree. There’s no good reason why he should make way for a substitute. But it doesn’t have to be either him or me, does it? Why can’t we both go?” New light crept into his eyes as he warmed to the idea. “I turn up as another Dollarian wannabe who’s heard that he’s got a ticket to Etanne, and figured maybe I could string along, too. All I’d need is for him to point me to whoever the contact is here, and I can play it myself from there. What do you think?”
Lois faltered. “Shouldn’t we clear this with Lubanov’s people first?” she suggested.
“I don’t see why. What are they going to contribute? How long would it take, and how long have we got? We’ve already seen what happens when too many coordinators get involved. I say we handle it ourselves. Contrition is easier than permission.”
“But do you know enough about the Dollarians to come across as a believable believer?” Lois persisted.
Korshak grinned, his normal level of self-assurance now restored. “That’s the next thing we have to work on,” he told her. “You’ve got a screen over there, and I assume it can access the general Constellation web. Do you feel like being a research assistant for the next few hours, Lois? It’s time for me to take a crash course in the ancient world religion of the sacred Dollar.”
TWENTY-FIVE
A long time had gone by since Andri Lubanov walked out of the Sofian military’s Internal Security Office and drove south to the launch base at Yaquinta to shuttle up to the Aurora. In the years since, he had never changed the name of the vaguely delineated “Research Section,” adopted as a provisional measure to accommodate him into Ormont’s Command Directorate staff. The nebulous title could conveniently cover virtually any activity that might be expedient to preserving the smooth running of the complex web of conflicting human perceptions and interests that the Aurora mission was turning into, without need to seek formal approval.
Disagreement was mounting over interpretations of the degree of autonomy the offspring worlds should expect to enjoy, and what say they should have in the allocation of resources. Scarcity and desirability were what determined value, and in the present condition the commodity in greatest demand was structural material and the support engineering needed to turn it into habitable space. Some of the demands that were being voiced amounted to aspirations to sovereignty, which in effect made some of the activities engaged in by Lubanov’s office exercises in foreign intelligence. While this had the familiar feel of working on home ground as far as Lubanov was concerned, “foreign” wasn’t a word that the Aurora’s original founding charter had used.
He sat in his office in the Directorate center on Astropolis, contemplating the latest message from Lois Iles – referred to by Lubanov’s office as “Pixie” – still on Plantation, displayed on the main screen. The “Magician” – although most of his serious work these days seemed to be with psychologists of both human and artificially intelligent nature – who had gone there in search of the crazy robot had missed it too. The inescapable conclusion was that it had been spirited away to Etanne while everyone’s attention was focused on Sarc. Score one for the opposition, Lubanov conceded grudgingly. Characteristically, he had written the setback off to experience without wasting time on chafing or recriminations. The thing to do when these things happened was learn what one could from them and move on. And the intriguing question raised in this instance was, why? What was so important to the Dollarians about getting Tek to Etanne?
Lubanov had learned enough to know that the Dollarians had political ambitions that went a lot further than dedication to rediscovering a secular old-world doctrine of acquisition and competition – which Lubanov saw as contrived to isolate individuals by setting each against all, thereby empowering a controlling élite who acted very much in concert to promote their common interests. And from the energy they were expending on helping to spread the overpopulation scare and denounce as irresponsible a program that could be invaluable to future generations by informing them on the right preparations for arrival at Hera, he suspected that their design was to delay or disrupt the Envoy program – possibly with a view to gaining control of its resources for their own advantage.
The possibility that he feared most was some kind of physical sabotage. But proving something like that was another matter. If Lubanov could have had his way, he would send in a force from Aurora’s Police Arm, put the whole of Etanne under martial lockdown until Envoy was launched, and put an end right there to all the guessing and the risk. But Ormont was adamant that such heavy-handedness would not be in keeping with the principles that Aurora had been conceived to uphold. In any case, it wasn’t Ormont’s style.
Accordingly, some time previously, Lubanov had persuaded the engineering managers and supervisors involved with Envoy to introduce a system of security precautions – the first time such a thing had been known since Aurora’s departure. These required tighter restrictions on the personnel authorized to work outside on Envoy or as remote telebot controllers, and permanent logs of all telebot operations. In addition, he had quietly instituted a series of background checks on new applicants for work on the construction and modification program.
Beyond that, he could do little without a better idea of what was afoot. He had tried infiltrating two plants of his own among the Dollarians without Ormont’s knowledge – one didn’t involve a superior in matters that would compromise him if they went sour; being prepared to take the bullet was what Lubanov understood by loyalty. Both the plants had been uncovered, the second meeting with a nasty accident shortly after being evicted from Etanne. Whether it had been just that or a message, Lubanov didn’t know, but his suspicions inclined toward the latter. Either way, his enthusiasm for attempting a repeat had been dampened.
Then he learned that fortuity had provided another set of eyes and ears – not to mention various other types of senses that could all prove useful – in the form of Tek, undergoing preparation on Plantation to be sent to exactly where Lubanov wanted them. And if Tek got into some kind of trouble, it wouldn’t be at the risk of any human cost that Lubanov might lose sleep over. He had just needed some way to communicate with it first, convince it that the Dollarians were selling a line, and recruit it to a better cause. But Tek disappeared abruptly before anything could be organized. Either because Pixie or another of Lubanov’s people on Plantation had been spotted, or as a general precaution, the ruse was set up on Sarc, and Lubanov had fallen for it.
But now it appeared that maybe the chance Lubanov had tried to seize might not have been lost after all. Before Tek vanished, Pixie had revealed her involvement to Korshak and explained the reasons for Lubanov’s interest – to the extent that she was aware of them herself, anyway – to prevent him from unwittingly derailing Lubanov’s plans. Now, Korshak had volunteered to help, and concocted an outlandish scheme to follow it. He would pose as an aspiring Dollarian who had exiled himself on Plantation for a period as a means of self-preparation, and in that role introduce himself to another Dollarian inductee that he had identified there. His plan was in this way to meet whoever the inductee’s contact on Plantation was, and thence obtain an interview for himself at the Dollarian Academy on Etanne, which hopefully would result in his admission. Korshak’s appearance would have to be altered to some extent, of course, but his stage experience would enable him to take care of that. Korshak knew Tek from his work with Masumichi. If he did manage to get himself accepted into the Academy, and if he could find Tek and talk to it, there could be a chance of saving what had seemed to be a lost cause.
Lubanov didn’t put the odds of success at anywhere near what he would normally bet on.
But had he believed in any of the old-world gods, he’d have to accept now, he concluded, that they were telling him something. This wasn’t the kind of situation that people like him let go to waste.
“Voice on,” he instructed. “Connect to Hala Vogol.” A window opened on the screen he was using, showing the face of the assistant who was coordinating with Lois.
“Yes, chief?”
“I’ve just read the latest from Pixie. We go with it, no question. But the next part depends on how Magician gets along with this Dollarian newbie that he’s found out about. Now that he’ll be visible, we can’t have him going down to the subsurface anymore. How are you planning on keeping tabs on where he goes from here?”
“He is aware of that, and has arranged to stay with his friends at Jesson,” Vogol replied. “Pixie is an old acquaintance of theirs who’d be expected to visit, so she’ll have no trouble staying in contact.”
Lubanov nodded. “That’s good. Look, if Magician does manage to get himself into the Academy, we’ll need a way of communicating with him. If they take him on board there, it will be as a novice. The novices aren’t permitted to carry regular phones.” Lubanov knew that from the reports of the people he’d tried to insert there. “Can you send some equipment to Plantation for Pixie to pass on to him? Make sure that Pixie can brief him on how to use it.” Various devices existed that enabled surreptitious communications. Lubanov would leave it to Vogol to pick something suitable. “Also, it’s important that we know of anything that occurs there or that he comes across relating to Envoy. The same goes for the robot, if the Magician can recruit him. Make sure that Pixie alerts him to be looking out for the word.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Vogol promised.
TWENTY-SIX
The bear paused in its rummaging beneath a felled log and watched as Rikku moved closer. Rikku moved carefully through the undergrowth, following the line of the fence, which in places was barely visible. Deer, pigs, a few bison, apes, and other kinds of animals that could mix together shared this section of the reserve, but with the restricted space they tended to become intensely territorial. The rule was to keep them well fed, which allayed aggressive instincts. All the same, Rikku kept a firm hold on the stunstick that he carried, and drew reassurance from the solid feel of the firearm holstered at his hip as a backup. The carnivores that couldn’t coexist had to be segregated, which was why it was important to be sure the fences were kept in good repair.