by Janet Morris
Lowe wasn't planning to destroy the thing with the big Customs ship. She was planning to bathe the ball in so many crippling wave baths that it couldn't remember its name, if it had one. Once its systems were jammed, she wanted to snoop it. Once she'd snooped it, she was going to find some reason to impound it right where it was, even if she had to fake one.
She'd told the pilots up front to employ all their AI systerns, and the ship's seven artifically intelligent experts were feeding the master AI their best guesses at how to arrive at the scenario that Lowe had demanded without Keebler noticing anything.
She had no doubt that she could run the ruse past the old scavenger. She wasn't worried about the human pilot and copilot keeping their mouths shut. She was worried about the unimaginable: the errors that killed you were the ones you weren't prepared to prevent, the ones you hadn't thought to protect against.
And this ball of unidentifiable alloy reeked of the unimaginable. In one of the observation stations behind the flight deck, Lowe was monitoring the snoopers' progress. Every time a scan came back from the ball, it either made no sense at all, or contradicted the information collected by some previous sweep. This newest scan she was initiating wasn't coming back at all.
It was as if the ball was eating the k-band she was trying to use to scan its innards.
According to the best sensing packages that Customs had at its disposal, the ball was empty but inert, without even so much as standard 3k emanations. So that meant, if you wanted to think about it reductively, that there was something inside it. Because if there were standard nothing inside it, she wouldn't have a ball-configured area of complete silence in all bandwidths.
Whatever was out there, inside that ball, wasn't your usual conception of nothing. It read on her sensing screen, in this mode, as solid.
But it didn't have the mass or density one expected from a solid. What could scour an area of background radiation, foreground radiation, and normal particle decay?
Thinking about it raised hairs on her forearms. She pushed away from the k-band screen, which showed her a black ball in its center, and swivelled in her chair.
Across from her, Keebler was on his third protein bar, washing it down with a dextrose shake. He belched and slid his arm along a console he wasn't using, spilling empty wrappers to the deck.
"Well, little lady, ready for a bit o' spacewalkin'?" The scavenger was already suited up, his helmet hanging from his chair's arm.
So was she.
"As ready as you are, Captain Keebler." She couldn't put this off any longer. She mustn't seem overtly obstructive or recalcitrant. She needed to get through this whole trip without the scavenger finding any reason to ask for a reevaluation of her findings. And she needed to keep Keebler off the flight deck, where the two pilots and the AI pilot were still working on giving her the data readout she needed to put this ball on ice for the foreseeable.
She picked up her helmet reluctantly, flipped the self-test switch on its faceplate, and waited for the helmet's inboard AI to beep its readiness.
"You realized, Captain Keebler," she said carefully for the record, because everything said in here was being logged, "that none of scans are showing anything like normal readings inside that thing."
"Normal for empty's what you're lookin' fer, right? Well, it ain't empty. I know it ain't empty." Keebler's watery eyes gleamed.
"Normal for anything we know about. If it's not empty, then it ought to show something in one of our frequency ranges. It doesn't. Would you like to tell me why you're so sure it isn't empty?"
"I've had experience with it, is why."
The greed and the determination of this man were beginning to get to Lowe. She said, "What kind of experience?"
"You better come see fer yerself, D'rector. If I was t' tell ya, y' might not b'lieve me. And there's no need o' us gettin' on the wrong side o' each other over this."
Lowe's helmet beeped before she could retort that it was too late to worry about that. Saved by the beep, she said, "Suit up. Systems checks."
Once she'd settled the helmet over her head, Keebler couldn't see her face because her visor was down, completing its self-test.
The inboard AI mated the suit to the helmet, integrated the electronics, checked the cooling, heating, and life-support systems, and read the results out in the left upper quadrant of her visor's heads-up display.
She ignored the process, waiting for the green light to proceed, or a warning or malfunction blinker to appear in its place.
When the green light came on, she said, "Suit freqs," to the AI, and then, "EVA-Alpha to Beta. Captain Keebler, can you hear me?"
"Sure can, D'rector." She could hear the triumphant humor in the bastard's voice. "Dual com constant," she told the AI. Then: "Let's get our tanks and get out there."
The airpacks by the two-stage lock weren't really tanks, but pack harnesses with air and manned maneuvering packages. She plugged her twelve-dins together, and the suit gave her another green: Everything was functioning.
"Shadow Beta's reads," she told the AI. Up came Keebler's life-support system. It, too, was perfect.
No excuse not to go out. And Keebler had heard her ask for a check of his systems, so he knew she was professionally concerned for his welfare.
She hit the lockplate and stepped into the cycler. Keebler followed and the inner lock shut. All she could hear was her own breathing, and Keebler's. His was deep and slow. Hers . . . well, dual com had its disadvantages.
She manually keyed in her optimizer package and the cuff of her suit pricked her wrist, sending stabilizing chemicals into her bloodstream. While it did, she wriggled her shoulders to make sure the jetpack in the MMU/life support was comfortably settled. It hooked to a harness that was integral to her suit, and if it were off center, you got really uncomfortable after a while, because the suit itself would grab you in all the wrong places when you keyed the MMU.
The outer lock opened, and the stars were only a polarized faceplate away.
Riva Lowe told her AI, "Neuron assist, voice command." She hated keypadding the MMU. A little disk came down out of the helmet and settled itself in front of her right eye. She could look through the monocle and see an unobstructed view, but the monocle was necessary to allow the neuron assist travel package to use her eyeball for targeting her destination.
It was almost like flying, as a bird might fly—effortlessly, naturally, thanks to the MMU monocle program. She glanced at her readout of Keebler's suit and saw that he was using a manual keypad control option. The older generation didn't adapt quickly; she could soar circles around the crusty old scavenger, double his efficiency at any extravehicular task, simply because she wasn't afraid to let her AI draw her intent from her muscles and their neural firings.
She said, no longer needing to cue the MMU directly at all, "Straight over there, Keebler. Stop six feet from the outer skin," and felt her jet pack kick in.
If the ball wasn't out there, looming closer and closer, she would have been enjoying herself. But it was, a silvery sphere that was nearly the size of the Adamson, blocking out more and more of the starfield, the closer to it she got.
Lowe was so surprised when the Adamson pilot contacted her on a privacy channel that she jumped at the beep and the appearance of a purple, strobing light.
She shifted to privacy manually, then said, "EVA-Alpha, no log. What's up, guys?" when she was sure that Keebler couldn't hear her.
"Adamson to EVA-Alpha," said the copilot's voice. "Director, we've got an emergency call from an Assistant Secretary Remson. He wants me to patch him through. Can you take it? He doesn't want to leave a recorded message and he says he can't wait."
Oh, no. Her saliva dried up. Her pulse thumped so that her optimization pack pricked her again. What could be this urgent? She said, "Patch him through purple, no log unless he asks for one. And fellas, don't monitor this one except as a bandwidth."
They'd only come on-line if there was an interrupt before the transmis
sion ended.
"Roger, EVA-Alpha."
The ball before her ceased coming closer as her MMU took its cues from her intent and stopped her progress. She hung still in space and Keebler drifted past, his helmeted head turning her way questioningly. He gave an ancient handsignal: Was she in trouble?
She gave one back, ringing her gloved first finger and thumb: A-OK. She wasn't about to coddle him. Let him wonder. Let him wait.
But he kept jetting toward the ball.
And her com channel sputtered to life: "Riva, Remson here. You know your crazy Relic has broken into the docking area, gotten onto his ship, and is, in essence, holding it hostage. He's demanding to talk to somebody in authority and I'm too busy. So's Mickey. Get back here and clean up your own mess, ASAP. Remson, over."
"Come on, Remson, what can he do? Send some port cops in and put him in a padded cell."
"He can do what he just did. He can make waves. He can try to blast out of there. He can probably overload that fusion power plant of his. This is your mess, Director."
"I'll be in as soon as I can. Make sure the port people maintain the status quo. Ask Reice to pick a boarding team and meet me with it when I dock."
"Okay. It's your party. But he wants to negotiate."
"Then have Reice pick a negotiating team and a boarding team and meet me when I dock. As a matter of fact, tell him I hope you'll be among the negotiators." Remson would have to relay the message. "Meanwhile, I'm out here in a spacesuit. The sooner you go back to your luncheon or whatever, the sooner I can get out of it. EVA-Alpha, out."
Things never seemed to happen when you had time for them. She toggled back to the flight crew before she did anything else: "We're going to hurry this up. Be prepared for a little resistance from the scavenger. And get me a priority flight path back. We're going to break some speed limits."
Then: "Dual. Log." And: "EVA-Beta, I'm on my way."
Her suit took cues from her intent and she sped to Keebler's side.
When she'd braked, they were only an arm's length from the sphere. It started changing colors. Or it was reflecting her spacesuit, somehow catching errant light and rainbowing it ...
But there wasn't anything to have caused the effect. Suddenly she could see her spacesuited form in its side. She reached out toward it.
She must have been closer than she thought . . .
"D'rector!" she heard in her com.
Her gloved fingers touched the sphere and, abruptly, she was somewhere else. The voice of Keebler chattering excitedly in her ears was very far away. She was a little girl, with her parents; she was cruising near Earth with a man who looked only vaguely familiar; she was old and somewhere she'd never been before, where a ringed planet hung in a lavender sky. And she was peacefully sleeping with someone by her bed, someone with huge eyes and an aura of wealth beyond material calculation, someone not human or even recognizably alien. . . .
"D'rector, see what I mean?"
She had no idea what Keebler had said, let alone what he'd meant.
But he was between her and the bulk of the sphere, gesticulating excitedly.
Well, she could review her log later.
"I'm still not convinced," she said through sticky lips. "You and I are going back to the ship. We'll look at our scans. We'll discuss this. I'm not sure that anything else I can do out here will help."
Keebler said, "Damn, I shoulda known," and started jetting away, following the curve of the sphere.
"Keebler, come back here!" she shouted. She wasn't going to go after him. She'd leave the scavenger out here with
twelve hours' worth of life support and his foolish sphere, before she'd do that.
Her anger translated into a very speedy approach to the Adamson. Behind her, she could hear Keebler, swearing like a dockworker under his breath, as he followed.
She refused to answer any of his communications until they were both in the lock and it was cycling.
Then, to his insistent queries and demands for his rights, she said only, "We'll see what the scans say. We'll look at the AI readout." The inner lock safety light lit, it cycled open, and she stepped inside.
Lowe felt better almost immediately, as soon as Keebler had followed and the lock closed behind him.
While they racked their packs, she was carefully noncommittal to all his pleas.
Once she got her helmet off, she told him, "I'm going up on the flight deck. I'll be right back, Captain Keebler. Sit down and make yourself comfortable."
The scavenger squinted at her. "You're messin' with me, D'rector, ain'cha? This whole trip out here was just to satisfy some reg'lation. Y'.never intended to let anythin' you saw out there make a bit o'diff rence. An' don't think I don't know it."
"Captain Keebler," she said, putting her hand to her yet-spacesuited heart, "how could you suggest such a thing? I'm so busy that I had to take an emergency call while I was on the EVA with you. I took time to eyeball this artifact of yours in person precisely because I think it is important." Riva Lowe was prayerfully glad that this conversation was being recorded. "So important that I don't want to make an error in judgment, or be hurried into making one. Now you wait here. I'll be right back."
She left him and went forward.
When the flight deck lock closed behind her, she said to the two men who turned in their command chairs, "I've finished. That thing is weird. I touched it and I'm not sure what happened. I'm getting myself full med scans when I get home. That scavenger may need some male convincing.
One of you go back and tell him we're not towing it in with us. We're impounding it right here, under twenty-four-hour guard. I'll cut the orders now. And get us on that full-tilt flight path home."
The copilot stood up. "I'll see to him, Director. Sit here if you want."
They squeezed by each other in the narrow confines of the flight deck.
Once the lock had closed again, the pilot punched up the intercom so that they could hear what was going on back there.
And it did get heated, between the copilot and the scavenger, who was yelling at the copilot that he knew his rights.
The copilot's voice said, "You've got the right to sit quietly while you get a free ride home, buddy, or you've got the right to be restrained and dragged home forcibly. You've brought dangerous material into the Threshold spacedock area, and if you don't want to be arrested, here and now, you'll shut the fuck up so that I can get back to doing my job."
There was what might have been a brief scuffle, but by then Riva Lowe was already immersed in the report she had to write to impound the scavenger's find.
When she got to the part about touching it, she wrote, "Indeterminate temporal effects, which need further investigation."
And as she punched the keys, the tips of the fingers on her right hand tingled with tactile memory so that she put them to her lips and licked them, to see if she still had normal sensation in the skin there.
She did, but that was about all that was normal right now, so far as she was concerned.
That thing out there wasn't going one inch closer to Threshold. And she was going to get the full med scan she'd promised herself. As soon as she finished dealing with the Relic pilot who'd taken over his ship and was terrorizing the ConSec docking bay.
She was never going to hear the end of this from Reice, who'd warned her not to turn the Relic loose. And Remson had let her know that Croft wasn't exactly thrilled with her, either.
She tried not to wonder how these two awful problems were going to affect her personally—her career, her reputation. But she couldn't help thinking about it.
And thinking about it made her hate the scavenger, the unidentifiable ball, and Joe South as well. If she could have justified it, she'd have let the scavenger go back out to his precious ball, and used her pulse beams to blow them both right out of her spacetime. And for all she cared, they could take Joe South with them.
But dreaming wouldn't make it so. She pushed the final entry key that would impou
nd the ball and give three shifts of Customs agents overtime, keeping an eye on it.
Then she sat back. The pilot was just beginning his thrust sequence, and the copilot was coming forward, through the airlock.
"Everything's clear back there. Our passenger won't give you any more trouble, Director."
She gave the copilot his seat and went aft to find out if what he said was true.
The scavenger was sitting by one console, massive head on his gnarly fist, his ponytail askew. He was staring at a screen that showed a realtime view of the spherical object. He looked over his shoulder at her and said, "You win, D'rector. But it's only Round One. I brought that thing here so's I could crack it open, and I'm gonna. And not you nor the whole o' Threshold's po-lice is gonna stop me. It's just a matter of time."
"Perhaps."
"Y' can't keep me from comin' back here. You'll see."
"Perhaps." Lowe sat down at one of the stations and stared blindly at the terminal before her. This was going to be a long, unpleasant ride home. She could try not to listen to the scavenger, but she'd be better off to reason with him.
Unless she could find a way to place him in protective custody, or under house arrest on a technicality, in this mood he could cause her even more trouble than he had so far.
And she didn't need any more trouble. Not today.
"Stations," said the intercom. "Ready for burn. Counting . . ."
She canted her couch back and closed her eyes, as she strapped for the fastest ride home the pilots could deliver.
By the time she got there, she'd better have a plan of action in mind.
CHAPTER 12
Romeo and Juliet
Remson hated to do this to Secretary Croft, who was in the middle of the session debating a proposal to use Hangers instead of terrestrial primates for medical research.
Remson's personal opinion was that organs grown in vitro and DNA substitutes were plenty good for med research, but the researchers kept insisting that you needed complex, living systems if you were going to minimize undesirable side effects.