“Umm,” he said.
“Or maybe thirty years is long enough to stay out of the game?” she said. “Maybe you want to hang around for a while?”
It was hard for him to focus on what she was saying, the line of dead bodies and all the questions coming with it still fresh in his head. And then he realized it had been hours since he had thought about his wife and child. But once he thought this the line of the dead wihin his head immediately began to take on his wife’s and daughter’s features, the past surging up and spilling over the present again.
He realized she was still waiting for a response. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “We can write the report just as well on your ship.”
She shouted instructions to Jolena in the front and Jolena shouted something back. Bjorn turned and smiled. And then, very delicately, Frances fluttered her fingers at something near her face. He looked closer and saw there, on the ship’s wall, a tiny irregularity that, as he came closer, he realized was some sort of microdot data transmitter, transparent, about the size of his thumbnail—perhaps a camera, perhaps only a microphone. He looked up at Frances, a surprised look on his face, and she smiled, pressing her finger to her lips again. She pretended to stretch and he saw overhead another tiny irregularity, another transmitter. She stretched her foot and there was another there, near her toe, nearly lost in the grit of the textured floor. And then, without further prompting, he was seeing them everywhere, on every side, monitoring them.
It’s only paranoia if you’re not actually being watched, he told himself.
“We’ll write the report on your ship,” she said firmly. “That seems best all around.”
* * *
The alarm went off when he went through spaceport security. “Any metal in your pocket, sir?” one of the security guards asked. He thought of the black box, but it hadn’t gone off the first time he’d gone through. He reached into his pocket, fished out the synth’s eye.
“Where did you get that?” asked Frances behind him.
“At the site,” he said.
“This could be very bad,” she said.
He handed the crushed eye to the guard, who took it, holding it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger. “What is it?” the guard asked.
“It’s—” he started to say, but Frances interrupted him.
“We found it just outside,” she said quickly. “We thought we should bring it in, but he must have forgotten he had it in his pocket.”
The guard just stared at it. “It looks like an eye.”
“Do you think so?” said Frances. “Frankly, I can’t see it.”
The guard shrugged, dropped it into a bin. “Go on through,” he said.
Kramm passed through, this time without incident, and waited for Frances on the other side. She was angry, her eyes flashing as she came through. Instead of talking to him, she walked right past him without a glance.
He started after her. Somehow he could see her anger in the tightness of her back as she walked, slowly getting farther and farther ahead of him.
When she reached the doors to the hangars, she stopped, waiting impatiently for him to catch up.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“At the very least you should have told me.”
“There wasn’t a chance,” he said. “I would have told you on the ride back, but since we were being monitored I couldn’t. Besides, we made it through.”
“That’s the least of our worries,” she said. “Now they’ll know we took the eye.”
“Who?”
“Braley,” she said. “The Company.”
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“They’re suspicious already,” she said. “Does it matter? I suppose we’re going to find out.”
* * *
The ship was a safe place to talk, she told him as they started aboard. She’d had a man watching it since the moment Kramm had arrived.
“Are you sure he’s a man you can trust?” asked Kramm. Frances shrugged. “You have to trust someone,” she said. “Besides, I have this.”
She took a small sensor from her pocket, clicked it on, began to run it along the walls. Every so often it would beep and she would stop and get closer to the wall’s surface, scrutinizing it more carefully until, after a few moments, she managed to locate and peel up a semi-transparent disk, as big, at most, as her fingernail. After she had collected a half dozen of these and had torn them to bits she seemed satisfied.
“Well,” she said, gesturing at the pile of scraps beside her. “Apparently you can’t trust everyone. I’ll fire him first thing in the morning, assuming he’s not already gone.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Kramm asked.
“As sure as I can be,” she said. “They may have developed something new and much harder to detect. But barring that we should be okay.”
“What is this all about?” asked Kramm.
“What?” she said. “Planetus and Weyland-Yutani are partnered on this planet. Which means we have to keep an eye on one another.”
“Why?”
“Why?” asked Frances. “You know the Company, how they are. They’ll cheat us blind if they can. They’ll cut every corner they can. They’ll force us out at the first opportunity. They didn’t want to go in with us on this planet in the first place. They only let it happen because of the intergalactic monopoly laws. Which have since become much more lax.”
Kramm nodded. “But do you have to act like them?”
Frances furrowed her brow at him. “We have our investment to protect,” she said. “We do what we can, within limits, to protect it. We needed to know what Weyland-Yutani was doing at that station, for our own safety.”
“But doesn’t that make you as bad as them?”
“Kramm,” she said. “You’re thirty years out of date. We know what we believe in. We’re not a company like Weyland-Yutani even if, for our own safety, we sometimes have to mimic their moves. Do you know the story of the cat and the dog?”
“The what?”
“The cat and the dog,” she said. “Two earth animals. Probably they hadn’t been reintroduced when you were last awake. All you need to know is the dog is the predator, the cat the prey. The dog chases the cat into a corner. The cat, having nowhere to go, desperate, turns and bristles up and arches its back and hisses. The dog doesn’t know what to think. It chased a small, frightened creature into the corner but now it’s facing something enraged and almost as big as it is. Now it has to decide whether to lunge forward and attack or back slowly away.”
“I don’t understand,” said Kramm.
“You really have to see them,” said Frances. “I guess it doesn’t make as much sense if you don’t know what a cat and dog are. Maybe you’ll see them one day. For now you’ll just have to take my word for it. We’re the cat,” she said. “Planetus, I mean. Weyland-Yutani is the dog. Right now we’re backed into a corner. All we can do is puff up and show our fangs and stand our ground and hope for the best.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Kramm after a long moment.
“Good boy,” said Frances. “What else can you do? Can I tell you something else? If there really are Aliens, it means we’re never getting out of that corner alive. Most of what Planetus has is tied up in this planet.”
Kramm felt his heart sink a little. “So if there are Aliens you want me to hide the truth,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t say that or even suggest it. But I want you to be absolutely certain before you say they’re here. Planetus trusts you. Whatever you say Planetus will believe.”
It was strange to Kramm to hear her speaking of Planetus almost as a person. “Why should you believe me?” he asked.
She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the brow, the kiss burning cool against his flesh long after her lips were gone. “You’ve been out of the game for thirty years,” she said.
“You no longer know the rules. You have old-fashioned values that some of us find quite refreshing. Weyland-Yutani hasn’t had an opportunity to bribe you and it is clear you hate them. Who better to trust?”
He stayed looking at her a long moment. She met his gaze with steady, steady eyes. If she was manipulating him, he realized, she was so good at it that there was nothing he could do. He preferred to believe that she wasn’t.
“All right, then,” she said, when it was he, finally, who broke the gaze and looked away. “Shall we get down to business?”
* * *
“What you have there,” said Frances, gesturing to the seamless black case Kramm had removed from his pocket and placed on the table between them, “is simply a device to download and store information.”
“What sort of information?” asked Kramm.
Frances shrugged. “Audio or visual,” she said. “From either a tiny microdot camera or an audio recorder installed somewhere in a room or on a body. If the latter, usually on a synth as a secondary backup to its data processor.” She tapped it. “This one is very special,” she said. “You walked straight through security without any problems; nobody detected it. Which means no metal parts and no magnetic or x-ray image.” She took out her scanner, held it near the case. “And the scanner doesn’t recognize it either,” she said, “though it might if I was scanning while the device was gathering data. This is absolutely high-tech stealth.”
Kramm nodded.
“But what’s on it?” asked Frances. “Why would Darby send it? Who is the message for?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” said Kramm, and explained the brief whirring that had occurred with the synth eyeball, the longer whirring beside the human corpse.
“Ah,” said Frances. “That’s strange.”
“So he was an industrial spy?” said Kramm. “That’s all he was? That’s what you meant by keeping an eye on them: stealing their secrets?”
Frances paused, took a deep breath. “Well, yes,” she said. “We had a spy in there to keep an eye on them, to test radiation levels around the terraformer, to take soil and water samples, to make sure it was safe and that they were operating within reasonable parameters. More that than to steal the secret itself, though I suppose any spy worth his salt wouldn’t have balked at doing that too. Maybe he was even told to do it. If you’re dealing with a wolf sometimes you have to think like a wolf.”
“I don’t know what a wolf is,” said Kramm.
“Sorry,” said Frances. “Those probably hadn’t been reintroduced before you went into cryosleep either. You know how Weyland-Yutani works,” she said. “Would they have bothered to make sure the terraformer was safe before using it on the planet? If something went wrong they could always quarantine sectors of the planet, or even the planet itself, and focus on one of their other developmental projects. If something goes wrong and they have to slow down colonization efforts, they’ll just cut their losses. We had to make sure that wasn’t what they were doing.”
Kramm shook his head. “Everything is justifiable if you think about it long enough. Before you know it you’ll be just like Weyland-Yutani.”
Frances shook her own head vigorously. “We’re light-years away from them and always will be,” she said. “Besides, the spy we sent in wasn’t the human.”
“What? This isn’t your man?”
“It was the synth,” she said. “The one they shredded.”
“Why didn’t you say so before? He’s not your man?”
“If he is, I wasn’t told about him.”
“But no, that doesn’t make sense; Planetus and Weyland-Yutani are the only two corporations with a stake in the planet; it has to be Planetus.”
“All right,” Frances reluctantly agreed. “So there were two spies, then. But I wasn’t informed about the human one.”
“Why?” said Kramm. “Why would they tell you about one and not about the other?”
When she didn’t have an answer, he went on. “Two men out of seven are spies,” he said, “more than twenty-five percent of the total crew. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
“Maybe it was an accident,” she said. “Maybe the human was inside Weyland-Yutani in another area on another investigation for Planetus and ended up being chosen more or less randomly to be part of this crew.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t Planetus tell you about both? Unless they don’t trust you.”
Frances furrowed her brow again, her lip curling slightly. “Why wouldn’t they trust me?” she said. “I’ve always been loyal to Planetus.”
“Maybe it wasn’t that,” he said. “Maybe it was just that they didn’t know if they should trust anyone. Who else knew that the synth was a plant?”
“I knew about him,” she said. “Plus my supervisor. Plus one or two others.”
“And look what happened to him,” said Kramm, remembering the fluid-splattered room. “They took him apart piece by piece, then shredded him, then destroyed his circuits. Obviously Planetus has a spy within it as well, though maybe Darby wasn’t sure about who it was.”
“It makes sense. The synth was a decoy, something they were meant to find. The real data, or at least a backup of it, was with the corpse. It’s illegal to implant a human,” she said. “Not to mention dangerous. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
“The cat playing the dog?” asked Kramm.
“The cat playing the fox in this case,” said Frances.
“So, he figures out a way to send in two spies for the Company’s terraforming project, telling everybody on your staff about one of them and nobody about the other. The synth is bait to keep suspicion away from the other one, the real one.”
“You’re saying they sent the synth in to die?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” said Kramm.
“But that’s so cynical,” said Frances. “Planetus isn’t like that.”
Kramm shrugged. “Seems to me from what you’ve been saying that you back any company into a corner and they act pretty much the same. The code of ethics is the first thing to go. Probably the only difference between Weyland-Yutani and Planetus is that Weyland-Yutani wouldn’t have hesitated to use a human rather than a synth as bait. And that they act this way all the time, not just when backed into a corner.”
“No,” said Frances. “We wouldn’t do that. We wouldn’t send someone knowingly to his death, not even a synth.”
“Have it your way,” said Kramm. It wasn’t worth fighting about, he realized suddenly, particularly since it was much better to have Frances on his side and supporting him than against him. Okay, sure, maybe Darby had assigned the synth and told Frances and a select few about him, and only then realized that Planetus’s own security had been compromised. And then he had sent a second man in secretly. That was the most generous view. Perhaps Darby hadn’t even realized that the synth would be destroyed. But at the very least he knew he was putting the synth in danger, more danger than the human was in, and that he was likely to get in serious trouble. It would take a certain amount of willful blindness for Darby to be able to justify something like that in relation to Planetus’s official public face and policies.
Frances reached out and tapped the black case. “We have a choice,” she said. “Either we send the information back to Darby and wait for his response, by which time it might already be too late to make use of the information. Or we take a look at it ourselves.”
“This has been fun and everything,” said Kramm, “but it isn’t my fight. I’ve done what I was supposed to do. Let’s just draft up the report and let me go back to doing what I was doing before.”
“Nothing?” said Frances, and her eyes flashed. “You want to go back to feeling nothing again? What are you, a quitter?”
“It’s just not my fight,” said Kramm.
“Like hell it isn’t,” said Frances. “You know as well as I do that Weyland-Yutani was responsible for the deaths of your family.”
<
br /> He felt a stab of pain. “That’s none of your—”
“—the hell if it isn’t,” she said. “Don’t crawl off, Kramm. The only thing that life is about is making choices. I’m asking you to live a little, to have a stake in what you’re already neck deep in. Now which is it to be: us or Darby?”
He stayed a long time looking at the floor. It is a mistake to get involved again, he kept thinking. Always a mistake to get involved. It is time to let life go again, and simply fade. But Frances’s kiss on his forehead was still burning like a brand. And there was another voice in him rising to the surface, not the voice from the dark but a voice reminding him firmly what the company had done to him, what it had taken from him, a voice crying for vengeance.
“Us and then Darby,” he finally said.
Frances smiled. “That’s the spirit,” she said. She rummaged through the thigh pocket of her suit and came out with a small, pale blue device, with a flat five-centimeter screen.
“Here’s the player,” she said. “I lifted it from the flitter. Now put it in.”
Kramm reached out and picked up the black case, carefully slotting it into the end of Frances’s device. The screen flashed once and then lit up, showing only static and snow.
“There’s nothing on it,” said Kramm.
“It’s encrypted,” said Frances. “We need to enter a code.”
He felt himself begin to subside into the past again, images of his wife and daughter flashing again across his mind. He began to long again to be frozen.
“Hey,” said Frances. “No need to get glum. I’m a resourceful woman.” She felt around in her hip pocket, came up with an even smaller device, an even smaller screen. She carefully plugged it into the first device. “I borrowed this from my supervisor,” she said, “just in case. I know the first part of the code, and my supervisor’s device knows the second.” She tapped a series of numbers in and leaned back. “For the third part all we have to do is to wait for it to hit on the proper combination.”
“Is this really such a good idea?” asked Kramm.
She gave him a stern, hard look. “You still don’t trust me?” she said. She crossed her arms and glared at the device. “You were the one who made the choice,” she said. “We’re almost there. What’s the point in going back now?”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 27