Finally, they turned into a perpendicular passage and vanished from sight. Then all Call could perceive of them were their retreating footfalls, which eventually faded to nothing.
Had she been working with someone else, she would have turned then and relayed the information. But in this case, it wasn’t necessary. Her companion didn’t need to see the guards to know they had left their post.
After all, her name was Ripley. She could do a lot of things other people couldn’t.
Since Ripley was the one with the burner in her hands, she led the way into the passage. Her progress was graceful and economical, her stride the stride of a hunter.
Call tried to walk the same way, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t been built with stealth in mind.
Halfway to the next intersection, just past where the guards had been posted, Call and Ripley came to a circular seam in the deck. Had they not known to look for it, they would almost certainly have missed it.
But they did know. And, having seen its like on dozens of stations before this one, they knew what to do with it.
Placing her burner on the deck outside the seam, Ripley got down on her knees and pressed her palms against the circumscribed surface. Then, with a ripple of her jaw muscles, she twisted with both hands in a counterclockwise direction and—eliciting a brief, high-pitched shriek of metal against metal—began unscrewing what turned out to be a cover.
When Ripley had twisted it off completely, she set it to the side as if it were a dinner plate. It left her with an opening slightly greater in diameter than the width of her shoulders, and an unobstructed view of the well-lit passage below.
Retrieving her weapon, Ripley got to her feet. Then, without warning or hesitation, she took a step forward and plummeted through the opening. A moment later, her boots made a reassuringly solid thunk as she landed.
Giving Ripley a chance to get out of the way, Call hunkered down beside the hole, planted her hands on either side of it, and lowered herself though. Only after she was hanging full-length from the higher deck did she relinquish her grip, allowing herself to drop the last half-meter or so. As she came down beside Ripley, she looked around.
They were at the nexus of six corridors, each projecting from the next at an angle of sixty degrees. All six passages were lined with gaudy little red and green computer readouts, each one flashing data in accordance with a different function.
There didn’t seem to be anyone around, but flesh and blood wasn’t Call’s expertise. She turned to her companion for her assessment.
Ripley’s nostrils flared as she cast her senses out like a net, searching the vicinity for company. After a moment she nodded—apparently satisfied.
We’re clear, Call thought.
She started down one of the corridors, seemingly at random. But without question, it was in that direction that she and her companion would find the unit they wanted— an older one kept strictly as backup in case one of the newer ones failed.
Call was certain because she had seen this layout many times before, stamped out as if with a cookie cutter. In the years when these stations were built, it was cheaper to manufacture them with only one set of specs in mind.
The strategy hadn’t helped the company that manufactured them stay in business. Not that Call would be shedding a tear for it any time soon. She didn’t have much use for corporations—or for that matter, the governments that sanctioned them.
As she moved down the corridor, she felt as if the computers on either side were calling out to her like prisoners in an old-fashioned cellblock, flashing pleas for help instead of codes.
Stupid, she thought, ascribing emotions to data-crunchers. Next you’ll be organizing a breakout.
A moment later, Call found the particular little red readout she was looking for. Ripley, who had seen these places as often as Call had, flipped open a panel just below the readout and removed a tightly coiled cord with a long, slim needle at its terminus.
Call scowled at the sight of it. But Ripley, who had never had much patience with her companion’s feelings in this regard, thrust the needle at her nonetheless.
“Do it,” she said.
“I’m doing it,” Call assured her.
First she unfastened the button on her cuff and rolled her sleeve up past her elbow. Then she used her other hand to remove a mole from her forearm—or rather, what looked like a mole. In fact, it was a cap for the access port in her arm, anchored by the slim white string now dangling from it.
Call cursed under her breath as she accepted the needle from Ripley. “I hate this,” she said.
Ripley nodded. “I know. You’ve only told me a hundred and fifty times.”
Not so long ago, Call could have accessed the computer just by blinking. That was one of the abilities with which she and her fellow second-generation androids had been equipped. But after her model rebelled against its makers, Call and her comrades burned their modem drives so as not to be located through them.
Now she had to gain access to the computer manually. But that wasn’t why she hated doing so. It was the way she felt when she interfaced with a machine—like her insides were turning to liquid. Like she wasn’t real.
It was hard to explain to a human being. She knew because she had tried. Only another android might have understood her, and for all Call knew there weren’t any other androids. Considering the fervor with which the authorities had hunted them down, she might well have been the last of them.
There’s a cheery thought.
Gritting her teeth, Call slipped the needle through the hole in her artificial skin, inserted it snugly into her hidden port, and closed her eyes. Instantly, the rush of incoming data swept her away, immersed her, became her.
It was brilliant, blinding, terrible, relentless. A ponderous, clashing interplay of forces unlike any she had known in the real world.
The android struggled to assert her identity, her separateness, while leaving herself open to everything around her. It wasn’t easy. It made her sick to what would have been her stomach if she were half as human as she looked. Still, she endured the sensation and forced herself deeper into the data storm.
Resistance. Layer upon later of it, insisting that she yield to the logic of her environment. It wanted her to be a logarithm, accomodating all its other logarithms in vicious, lockstep perfection.
No, Call thought. I’m more than that, dammit. But she didn’t think it too hard because it would have slowed her progress.
Carefully she descended, negotiating a path around one data explosion after the other. Picking her way, first with the current and then against it, conserving herself, expending herself, until at last—in an incendiary burst of effort—she got to the place she was looking for.
And the information she sought. Finally, she thought, glad beyond words that an end was in sight.
But no sooner had the android reached her objective than she realized there was more—much more. A whole abyss full, she thought, marveling at its brilliance from the brink overlooking it. And it was exactly the kind of stuff they needed.
Unfortunately, Call would have to delve deeper to get it, and that made her already fritzing nerves fritz a little more. But she couldn’t turn her back on a lode like this one. Not when it might give them the last precious piece of their puzzle.
Hell, she asked herself with cynical abandon, what’s the worst that can happen?
Deciding it was a better idea not to think about it, she steeled herself and dove. And the deeper she went, the brighter and more insistent grew the data currents, picking at her like scavengers, trying to take bloody chunks out of her psyche.
But Call couldn’t let herself worry about it. She had to concentrate on what she was doing.
When she reached the first node, she picked it clean. The same with the second and then the third. And she kept going, into places where the data was forgotten and even incomplete, though there was invariably enough remaining to serve her purpose.
Laboriously
, painstakingly, Call gathered every tidbit in reach. And though the task seemed interminable, she eventually got it all.
But she paid a price, though. Her dedication forced her to drop her guard against the predations of the currents, and they left the edges of her consciousness in cold, wet tatters.
The question then was whether there was enough left of Call to fight her way back to the real world, where what she had gathered could be of use. She didn’t know, but she was damned well going to find out.
Closing her eyes against the light, she climbed. And she kept at it, arms and legs pumping, regardless of what buffeted her in the course of her ascent.
Her burden was heavier and more unwieldy than she had imagined. It threatened to drag her back every time she made some progress, conspiring to keep her trapped in the deepest parts of the abyss. More than once, she thought about cutting some of it loose so she could bring back the rest.
But she hadn’t made it that far by playing it safe. So she battled that much harder, pitting her strength against the fury of the storm. And an eternity later, cradling her last shreds of self-awareness, she found herself reaching for the blessed darkness …
And with a final burst of determination, emerging into the real world again.
Slumping against the computer she had accessed, Call felt its hardness, its truth, its undeniable existence. Damn, she thought, gasping for identity, taking in long, ragged draughts of it. That sucked.
She never wanted to go that deep again. Never. But it had been worth it. If she was right about what she had collected, it would be the last time she had to go in at all.
Abruptly, Ripley’s face loomed in front of her, her expression one of impatience. “Got it?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Call. Out of pique, she decided not to say yet just how much she had gotten. “And I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”
Giving into her revulsion, she plucked the needle out of her arm and thrust it back at Ripley. Then she recovered her “mole” and stuffed its string back under her flesh.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
But Ripley was on the move already, heading back for the intersection of corridors with long, purposeful strides. Swearing softly, Call fell in behind her. It was a difficult thing to keep up with someone so manically single-minded.
The android was just glad Ripley was on her side. After all, she had briefly had a taste of the alternative.
It was years earlier, on the Auriga. Call had intended to kill Ripley because she believed Ripley had a monster inside her. As it turned out, the monster had already been ripped out.
But the monster’s genes were still present in Ripley, slithering through her tissues, accelerating her metabolism. She was strong enough to put a knuckle-shaped dent in a bulkhead, durable enough to survive a bolt from a shock rifle at point-blank range. And her blood, given enough time, could eat its way through a meter-thick section of hull.
Yet the monster’s influence was most evident in Ripley’s mind. At her core she was a stone-cold predator, her every move designed to bring her closer to a quick and efficient kill. It was only by controlling her murderous instincts—no easy feat, at times—that she was able to exist among humans.
Funny, thought Call. Ripley’s alien heritage couldn’t be seen in her appearance. She looked as human as any other healthy, athletic woman who had spent some time in the gym.
But then, Call added inwardly, so do I, and they put me together on a damned assembly line.
2
Nice, thought Benedict, as he followed a narrow but well-worn path through the fragrant, flower-dappled jungle.
He watched a river of stars burn above him, fierce and insistent, easily visible through the unfiltered transparency of an overarching plastiglass dome. With a little effort he could imagine he was back on Earth, looking up at the midnight sky.
Even though it had been decades since he set foot on his home world. Even though he had forgotten which constellations were visible there, and at what times of year.
Of course, most of his colleagues hadn’t seen the stars from Earth at all. They had been conceived and born light years distant from it, on one far-flung colony planet or another.
Proserpina. Tsuronomai. Samhain. Brother-of-Darkness …
The names were romantic, even if the planets were just ore-laden balls of filth. But the colony in which Benedict labored had no exotic name because it wasn’t on a ball of filth.
It was close to one, if one could call orbital altitude “close.” However, it was tied to its host world only by a few fragile strands of gravity, which allowed it to remain in a predictable place so supply vessels could find it without trouble.
More importantly, the colony’s location in high orbit gave it unfiltered access to sunlight half the day, and freedom from the pests and airborne toxins plants hated. Which was why the Domes had been built in the first place.
Earth had gotten too crowded for growing things— especially those that could thrive only in rainforests or other rapidly dwindling environments. A sprawling, multi-domed botanical garden was an ingenious way to preserve and nurture endangered flora for a variety of useful pur-poses, most of them pharmaceutical, without incurring a lot of cost.
That was still the thinking as recently as thirty years ago. Since that time, Earth had become less and less concerned with preserving its endangered flora, developing a host of synthetic drugs that could do the same job as natural ones. The garden colonies—all six of them, spread out across regulated space—became afterthoughts.
Were it not for the considerable expense of dismantling and demolishing them, they probably would have been trashed. Fortunately, it was cheaper and easier to let them go on. So they remained in operation—as much a haven for people like Benedict, who didn’t seem to fit anywhere else in the galaxy, as for the flora they strove to preserve.
And now I don’t fit in here either, he thought.
Benedict had long ago grown tired of the other botanists with whom he shared the Domes—a bunch of pedantic asses with no idea how boring they were. He still huddled with Philip over a Chianti now and then, but even that was largely a matter of habit.
Had he known what it would be like to live in a Dome colony, to look across the same dinner table at the same bland faces for years on end, he would have taken a different route in life. An Earthside job, a berth on a survey ship, anything but this.
When he was younger, he thought it would be romantic to work in a lonely, faraway place. It had taken him a while, but he had learned otherwise. And now it was too late to make a change. Benedict was too old, too trapped in his routine.
So he went through the motions, doing the work assigned to him but finding no inspiration in it. And with each passing year he surrendered a little more of him-self, ceding his hopes and dreams slowly but surely to the ether.
Even sex had lost its appeal to him. Given a choice between Hendrickson, Gogolac, and Angie, he had decided years earlier not to choose at all. Besides, Philip wouldn’t have approved of his old school friend wallowing with his daughter.
Not at all, he added silently, with a smirk.
Of course, that didn’t leave Benedict much to live for. Just an untrammeled view of the stars, which still managed to move him somehow, and the sort of comfort one could find in the leaves of the sinjaba.
Unlike most of the other specimens in the Domes, the sinjaba had been found on an alien world—one called Kali, after the mother goddess of Hindu mythology. But then, Kali was the most hospitable planet humans had found to date, the only extraterrestrial environment even remotely capable of supporting Terran life forms.
Otherwise, the sinjaba couldn’t have been introduced to the Domes, which all maintained an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere suitable for human consumption. Benedict was grateful for that compatibilty.
Most grateful.
A moment later, Benedict saw what he had been looking for—a proud framework of white branches, not unlike the antle
rs of a fully grown deer, from which hung several lush cascades of pulpy, bubble-covered black leaves. Smiling to himself, he approached the lowest and most accessible branch.
Up close, the botanist was reminded that the sinjaba’s leaves weren’t really black—just such a dark green that they looked black from a distance. Taking the branch in one hand, he used the other to pluck from its foliage an especially promising-looking leaf, its flesh as thick and bubbly as any he had ever seen—a sure indication of its maturity.
It’s got to be mature, he thought, grinning with almost childlike anticipation.
Then Benedict tucked the leaf into his mouth and began grinding its flesh between his molars. Each little bubble-pop released a concentrated burst of warm, bittersweet juice.
It wasn’t the best taste in Creation, and it never had been. But then, it wasn’t the taste that brought Benedict back to the sinjaba stand every chance he got. It was the fact that sinjaba leaves contained a rather ample supply of hallucinogens, and lovely hallucinogens at that.
The kind that made his bones melt. The kind that turned his face into a bright, blazing sun.
Everyone in the Domes thought Benedict was the mellowest person this side of regulated space. And truth be told, he had always had a good store of patience. But even he couldn’t have tolerated the place for so long without help from his friends.
He ran his hand over another cascade of meaty, black leaves. “And you are my friends,” he said out loud, his words garbled by the leaf already in his mouth. “My very good friends.”
It was then that he began to feel the hallucinogen. It started out with a warm flush of languor in his belly, and slowly spread outward in the direction of his limbs. He congratulated himself on having made a very good choice of leaf.
I’ll have to remember this branch, Benedict told himself. But even as he made the vow, he knew in his heart that he wouldn’t keep it. Half the fun was in the hunt.
3
Normally, Bolero’s choice of vista would have been limited to what she could see through her cockpit’s heavily framed observation port—the clanking darkness of Byzantium’s docking bay, relieved only by the ghostly, gray-green outlines of a neighboring vessel or the yellow glow of an occasional safety beacon.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 2