The Rule of Five_Year One

by Melissa Scott

  The door opened and Governor Dilma Ramos strode out, trailed by one of her flunkies. “Artur, good. I didn’t think you got my message.”

  Fuming, he waved through introductions. Dilma bobbed her head with a silly smile. “Yes, we’ve met. I welcomed Hulda and Eskil to Coquimbo right before their concert, don’t you remember?” She winked at the pair. “Artur’s such a scatterbrain when he’s concentrating on business.”

  With an even tone, Artur said, “Business is exactly what I’m not concentrating on right now, Dilma. I brought our celebrities here to enjoy a peaceful night’s rest away from the crowds.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She bowed to Hulda and Eskil. “We have a lovely suite set up for you in Government House. Our best chef is preparing a special meal; he got your preferences from Melody Amative and has a selection of local dishes matching them. And I assure you, lodgings there are far superior to this…shack.” She shook her head. “Besides, if I know Artur, he’ll be up all night working.”

  “I will not. Wait just a—”

  Dilma waved to her aide. “Take our guests back to Government House and see they’re taken good care of.”

  “But—”

  “Say goodbye, Artur.”

  Before his eyes, natural and artificial, the aide loaded Hulda and Eskil into the other aircar. With barely time for a waved farewell, the car rose and sailed off to the south.

  Artur sputtered. “Dilma…those were the Boford twins. I’ll never get a chance like that again.”

  She sniffed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Come on, there’s work to do.”

  “What work? There’s nothing pending. I cleared the whole night and all of tomorrow…”

  A frown. “So you didn’t get my message about the heat shield?”

  “What?! No.” He punched up his status report, which appeared in the air before him. Everything was green. “The heat shield’s working fine, for once. I tell you, I gave it a detailed checkout this morning, it’s—”

  She chuckled. “Not that one. The new generator was delivered half an hour ago.” At his confused expression, she elaborated, “It was shipped on the Melody Amative. That’s why they stopped here to begin with.” She waved a hand in front of his face. “Honestly, Artur, are you listening to me at all?”

  He glared at her. “Honestly, Dilma, don’t you think it’s about time the two of us should get married?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “The way you keep destroying my sex life, we might as well make it legitimate, don’t you think?”

  For a moment her face was frozen, then she laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Oh, Artur, you always make me laugh.” She wiped her eyes. “Now, do you want to see the new heat shield, or not? I wouldn’t let anyone open the container until you got here.”

  Artur sighed. “All right, I guess I ought to salvage what I can from this night. Lead on, Governor.”

  Next to the fenced-off area of the old heat shield generator, a standard cargo container sat, sunk a few centimeters into the grass. “I’ll get a dozer and crane up here to move the thing.” He reached up and tugged on the heavy metal handle. “Unf.” He pulled harder, and the handle finally moved. “We’ll have to keep the old unit going until the new one’s on line, it’s going to be tricky.”

  He stepped back as the container opened, the whole end peeling back to reveal the dark interior, as big as a comfortable house. Lights snapped on, and Artur frowned. Instead of the single large piece of machinery he was expecting, he saw rank upon rank of stacked metal cabinets, each with a multitude of small drawers.

  “What’s wrong?” Dilma said.

  “Wait.” Artur shot an electronic query to the container: what is your cargo? The answer wrote itself across his field of vision.

  “Crap!” With his artificial arm, he pounded the side of the container, producing a teeth-clenching thud and leaving a small dent. “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He turned to Dilma. “This isn’t our new heat shield.”

  The Governor paled. “What is it, then?”

  He spat the word, “Goats.”

  “What?”

  Artur waved at the ranked cabinets with their thousands of drawers. “Goats. Fourteen million goat embryos. In stasis.”

  “Why would they send us fourteen million goat embryos?”

  “Why are you asking me? Maybe the ship sent the wrong container. Probably not, though, I’m never that lucky.”

  Dilma touched her ear cuff. “Get in touch with the cargo master on Melody Amative. Find out if they dropped off the correct shipment. Contact me as soon as you have an answer.” She offered Artur a wan smile. “I’m sure it was an innocent mistake.”

  “Of course it was. Someone heard ‘TC-806 Heat Shield Generator’ and typed ‘fourteen million goat embryos.’ It’s an easy mistake to make. They sound so much alike. I can’t tell you how often I’ve said to myself, ‘Artur, you’d better make another diagnostic check of those fourteen million goat embryos that are maintaining the planet’s heat shield…oh, I mean generator.’”

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

  Artur opened his mouth, closed it, then shook his head. “No, I rather think there’s every need to be sarcastic. I could be sleeping with the Boford Twins, and instead I’m going to be spending the night trying to track down someone’s ‘innocent mistake.’ Not to mention keeping that piece of junk running for another month while it all gets sorted out. If it ever does.”

  Dilma tilted her head, listened for a moment to a voice Artur couldn’t hear. “The cargo master confirms that we got the right container. The mistake was further back in the supply chain.” She put her hand on Artur’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. Do you want to come back to Government House with me? I’m sure there’s time to catch dinner.”

  He took a deep breath. “No. I don’t think I’d be good company tonight. I’ll just bed down at the cabin.” Where, he hoped, the liquor cabinet was well-stocked.

  They settled on one of the smaller bars on the second level, this one decorated in Fourth Plane industrial, all bare metal and carbon fiber and hanging nets carefully arranged to form unexpectedly comfortable lounging spaces. Val steered them firmly away from the netting, and they found an empty table by the wall, far enough from the towering dance stack that conversation was possible. The menu flashed persistently beneath the table’s surface, offering drinks and snacks or a seven-credit table charge, and Val reached for it.

  “You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, but I haven’t eaten.” It was also a good way to be sure that his presence was noted by the club machinery: there were enough cons and hustlers and just plain irrationals associated with the Fifth Ship that it paid to take precautions. With the same thought in mind, he ordered a single-serve bottle to go with the tapas, and slid the menu back to the others. Mac Ivan shook his head, but the woman made a selection, and after a moment Mac Ivan, too, touched a set of symbols and slid a credit chip across the table sensor.

  “So you’ve seen her,” Mac Ivan said again, and Sanrosa laid a hand on his wrist.

  “Adam.” She looked at Val. “We’ve both seen the Ship. Not at the same time, and on different multi-planars, but—we’ve both seen it. You?”

  Val hesitated, but he hadn’t walked away from Iridium Azimuth to run away from even a doubtful contact. “Yes. I’ve seen it, too.”

  “It led us home,” Mac Ivan said. There was no one within earshot, but he lowered his voice until he was barely audible above the music and the wash of voices. “We’d made a bad jump—this was a pure cargo multi, we ran on a tight margin, and the astrogator turned out not to have the papers she claimed, so she couldn’t back up the machines. So we jumped wrong, and got caught in one of the hyperspatial rips you get where the Fissure crosses the Third Plane. I couldn’t see a way out, every single eddy was showing more stress than our fields could hold, and then—there it was. Huge, just like in the pictures
, cube on cube on cube, never meant for atmosphere or any kind of fluid. I thought we were dead then.”

  “You were piloting?” Val asked, when it seemed he wasn’t willing to continue.

  Mac Ivan nodded. “Yeah. I’d been on line for fourteen hours then, I won’t lie, but that’s got nothing to do with what I saw.”

  “Never said it did,” Val said, though you had to wonder about fatigue at that point.

  Mac Ivan eyed him a moment longer. “Well. To shorten the tale, it slowed, took up station in our line of travel, and—I swear to you—she cleared a path for us. She’s big enough, you see, she could take the stress when we couldn’t, and we could just trail in her wake neat as you please, and the next thing you know, we’re through the Drop.”

  Val made a noise in spite of himself, and Sanrosa’s smile widened, showing small sharp teeth.

  “It’s happened to you,” she said.

  Val shook his head. “You first.”

  “We’re trusting you,” Mac Ivan pointed out, and Sanrosa touched his sleeve again.

  “All right. I had something similar happen—and, yes, I was piloting, too, though I hadn’t been on as long as Adam. It was on a intra-Plane Jump, though. Third Plane—you know the Meretizia Slide?”

  Val nodded. It was a tricky shortcut: if you were successful at factoring its geometry into the Jump calculations, you could cut dozens of hours off a Jump, but the math was complex enough that most ships didn’t bother.

  “Yeah. We dorfed it totally,” Sanrosa said. “Ended up caught in the eddies on the edge of the slide, with the same problem Adam was having, stresses too high for the fields. And then she sailed up right out of the chaos and put herself between us as the worst of the eddies, and we clawed ourselves back into the safe-line. If she hadn’t been there —“ She broke off, shaking her head, and Mac Ivan leaned forward.

  “Your turn.”

  “Understand, I can’t name the ship.”

  “No more did we,” Sanrosa said, with another sharp smile.

  Val nodded. “We were attacked coming through the Mouth of Hell. The bolt must have struck just as we Dropped, because we hit the Fissure akimbo, out of the usual range and sliding fast. I tried to correct, but we’d taken up too much potential, and I couldn’t pull us back. Then —“ He stopped, struggling for the words to encompass what he’d seen. “There she was, ahead and left and a little up, and all I could think was to tuck in behind her, because otherwise we were going to be torn apart in the knots. So I did, and we slipped through clean. And she was gone again.”

  “And you had questions, and no one had answers.” Sanrosa showed her teeth.

  “My captain said it didn’t happen.” Val’s tone was flat. “She was there, right next to me, but—it was an illusion. End of story.”

  “And don’t you wonder why?” Sanrosa asked.

  “I wonder first if it was real,” Val answered.

  “It was real,” Mac Ivan said, with a heavy sigh. “It was real.”

  Val nodded in spite of himself. He hadn’t really doubted it, in spite of everything. “And, yes, of course I wonder why. But also how. The Ships—historically, they existed millennia ago, and every lineage claims their Ship is accounted for. So how can this be a Fifth Ship?”

  “The records are terrible that far back,” Mac Ivan said. “And the original Ships were built at the same time, and in the same shipyard.”

  “According to legend,” Sanrosa murmured.

  Mac Ivan ignored her. “It’s certainly possible that two lineages have laid claim to parts of the same Ship. Settlement was scattered, worlds were lost and found and lost again; it’s not really until Consolidation that we’ve had any clear idea how many planets have been settled on each Plane. For that matter, we don’t really know that there were only five Ships. Suppose there were six, or seven? One that went missing before we even reached the Planes?”

  “The Lineage names argue against that,” Val said. “Five Ships, five lineages. It’s hard to imagine that people would just forget another Ship.”

  “There I agree with you,” Sanrosa said. “It’s also a question I don’t think we can answer until we find the Ship—this particular Ship that’s making these appearances. And that means figuring out what it’s doing, and why.”

  “Easier said than done,” Val pointed out, and she grinned.

  “That’s why we’re talking to as many people who’ve seen it as we can find. That’s why we wanted to talk to you.”

  The waiter rolled up to the table at that moment, and Val reached for his order with relief. He took his time arranging the plates and popping the top on the bottle, letting the fizz subside to a drinkable level. From the look on Sanrosa’s face, she was well aware of what he was doing, but he pretended not to see. “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Some of it,” Mac Ivan said.

  “I’m not sure what more there is to tell,” Val said.

  Mac Ivan tipped his head to one side. “Lots. All the details—your positions, angles in the Fissure, entrance vector, exit vector, timing—”

  “I’m not on the ship any more,” Val said. “I don’t have access.” And the more he told, the easier it would be to determine that the multi-planar in question was Iridium Azimuth, though he wasn’t sure why he felt as though he ought to keep that secret any more. “I’ll give you what I remember—if you’ll tell me how it fits with what you’ve already found.”

  “Fair enough,” Sanrosa said, and reached for a databoard.

  They spend the next two hours going over everything Val could remember about the Drop, first as they ate, and then over a second drink, databoards open on the table. Val had thought that the details were burned into his brain, but under Sanrosa’s questioning, he found himself having to admit ignorance more often than he liked. He was able to reconstruct some details from his board, but finally he had to admit defeat.

  “That’s everything I have. I left the ship in a hurry, and the captain wasn’t happy with my interest. I don’t think there’s anything more I can give you.”

  “We could go through it again?” Sanrosa said, looking at Mac Ivan, and the big man shook his head.

  “I don’t think that’ll get us anywhere—no offense, sen.”

  “None taken,” Val said automatically.

  “There’s one more thing we could try,” Mac Ivan said. “If you were willing. We’ve worked with a psych-tech before, she’s been able to bring out more things than subjects can consciously remember. With her help, I’d bet you’d be able to remember the exact vectors. I know it worked with me.”

  Val drained the last drops of his drink, buying time. The request raised all his old fears, even though Mac Ivan said—so casually!—that he’d done it himself. And… when you came right down to it, neither he nor Sanrosa had given much detail about their own encounters or about how these things fit together. Words, word, lots of words, but nothing solid. He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe? I’m pretty booked at the moment, trying to find a new place and all.”

  “Do it now,” Sanrosa said, a little too brightly. “I bet Aracelis could see you, she works nights.”

  “I don’t know. Tell me more about what you’re doing with all of this.” Val waved his hand vaguely, hoping he seemed more fuzed than he actually was.

  “We’re trying to build up a picture of the sightings, see if there’s a pattern to the appearances, and to the kinds of help offered,” Mac Ivan said.

  “It’s a lot easier to see in a multi-D display,” Sanrosa said. “We could show you that once you’re there.”

  “Well.” Val tried to sound as though he was wavering. “Yeah, all right, but first —“ He waved his hand generally in the direction of the toilets, pushing back his chair in the same moment. He scooped up his board—surely that looked ordinary; no one left their boards unattended—and plunged into the crowd, heading for the line of doors. He heard Mac Ivan’s chair scrape behind him, and Sanrosa’s voice saying something he couldn’t quite
hear. And then he was among the crowd by the service bar where it mingled with the line for the toilets, and he edged past them into the service corridor. When he’d been running the clubs, there had almost always been back doors, interior doors that the staff were bribed to leave off the alarms for the underage and the undocumented, and his breath caught with relief as he saw the tell-tale wires hanging beside the press-plate. He pushed, bracing himself for an alarm, but the door swung silently outward, and he slipped into the sudden brilliance of a service stair. It would probably lead down to the main dance floors, and the service corridors behind it; he took the stairs two at a time, knowing it wouldn’t be long before Mac Ivan followed, and slipped through the first unlocked door.

  The music hit him like a punch to the chest, and he gasped, letting the door close behind him. He was on the main floor, all right, on the side and too close to the stacked speakers, the thud of the rhythm section striking to the marrow of his bones. The floor was dark and crowded, though, jammed with dancers with upraised hands that flashed lights back at the ceiling’s thundershow: even if Mac Ivan followed him this far, there was no chance the man could find him in this mob. Val took a breath, and nodded to the nearest stranger, let himself be drawn into the dance. The crowd took him, turned him; he rode its currents like the waves of hyperspace, all his attention turned to seeming no different from any other, until at last he fetched up at the far side of the room, sweating and out of breath. Behind him, the lights flashed and the music rumbled; he watched for a moment, looking for movement against the patterns of the crowd, but there was nothing. Whatever that had been about, he was glad to get away.

  1.07 Blind Justice

  Uenuku’s offices stretched across more than a kilometer of prime tropical beachfront. A high-speed tram carried Nalani and the Apprentices to a low structure of wood, stone, and glass, half on land and half hovering over the surf. Behind, clumps of trees merged into forest, and beyond that blue mountains. The declining sun turned sea and sky to fire, and the sharp smell of salt made Nalani want to sneeze.