Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  While Meloku and Fiametta slept, Osia watched the stars. Electromagnetic activity boiled in the skies. Radio rippled off the horizon and back. Filtered through the right spectrum, the horizon seemed lit by a deep red aurora. The brightest flame shone at the base of the taller hills. Their destination.

  Xati’s station was one of dozens upon dozens like it on this world. Ways and Means’ satellites provided a communication network, but its exile had been a rude awakening. It realized that there were greater powers in the multiverse than it. Its satellites could be killed. It believed in redundancy.

  It had seeded this world with backup communications stations, spaced thousands of kilometers apart. They had transmitters powerful enough to bounce signals off the atmosphere far enough to reach each other. If something happened to the satellites, they could provide a backup network. Their transmitters were also powerful enough to reach Ways and Means, even at the most distant point of its orbit.

  By next midday, they were close enough to Xati’s home for Osia’s passive sensors to detect the buzz of its electronics. Osia pulse scanned. Meloku sensed it. She stiffened, gave Osia a sharp look.

  “There are sensors all over these hills,” Osia said. “There’s no way we haven’t already been spotted.”

  Meloku said, “You could have let me know beforehand.”

  She seemed to believe that this was a partnership.

  The pulse scan was not encouraging. Xati’s hideaway was like Meloku’s and so many other agents’: a door built into the side of a rock face, camouflaged. A sealed one-room environment inside. The communications equipment and towers were all above, hidden in rock or disguised as pines.

  Osia’s scan could not penetrate the rock. But there was nobody outside, and no sign that anybody had been recently. There was also no shuttle. Xati was supposed to have a shuttle on hand to loan to agents who needed one.

  Meloku pulse scanned, too. “Fuck,” she breathed.

  Fiametta had stopped, turned. Though she couldn’t have understood what they’d said, she seemed to realize that something had changed. When they reached the nearest of the hills, she hopped off her palfrey and led it.

  “Stretching my legs,” she said.

  Getting limber, Osia realized. She expected there to be action, a fight. Meloku hopped off hers, too.

  Meloku’s breath grew tighter as the land grew rockier, rose around them. More pulse scans reflected off Osia’s skin. All pointless anxiety. Meloku wouldn’t find anything they didn’t already know about.

  The entrance to Xati’s hideaway sat halfway up an ice-slicked rocky ledge. It spent half of the day in the shadow of the mountain above it. A strip of a ledge ran outside it, just barely wide enough to walk – Xati’s only means of egress.

  Fiametta and Meloku left their horses at the bottom of the ridge. Osia stopped holding back. She leapt up the escarpment meters at a time.

  She didn’t bother with the hideaway’s camouflaged entrance. She strode right past. She went around the ridge and up, to a patch of dead weeds and grass and a wide expanse of rocks. The most natural spot for a shuttle to park.

  None of the snow had been disturbed. There was no shadow where the shuttle would have sat, not even a dimple. Osia knelt and brushed away a handwidth of snow. Some of the rock and sand underneath had been blackened. Thruster burn. She hadn’t missed her guess as to where the shuttle would have been parked. But this snowfall must have been weeks old, at least. It had been a long time since anything had been here.

  Fiametta caught up first. She stood at the edge of the escarpment, watching. Her hand opened and closed over the empty air at her waist, where she might have had a weapon. Osia didn’t think she was aware she was doing it.

  Meloku plodded on to the rocky field, saw all the same things Osia had.

  She asked, “Ways and Means got Xati, didn’t it?”

  As with so much else Meloku had said, Osia felt no need to answer.

  She turned back, walked past Fiametta. Meloku struggled to catch up.

  The hideaway’s door was all but invisible, but a pulse scan found the minute cracks outlining it. No infrared or visible light spilled out. The door would not respond to her transmitted command to open. She did not waste time trying to force an override.

  She braced her foot against the earth, drew back her fist, and smashed it into the rock. The false door splintered and fell inward, crashing in a cacophony of metallic clangs and pealing. Fiametta jumped. Even Meloku, coming around the ridge, winced.

  Osia shook her hand out to reseat her finger bones. From the corner of her eye, she caught Fiametta staring wide-eyed. If she was still contemplating attacking her or Meloku, that ought to have given her a second thought.

  Meloku pushed past Osia while Osia was still shaking her fingers back into place. Osia followed her into the cloud of settling dust. There was no hurry. She knew what they would find.

  Xati’s quarters were a single-room hideaway, sparse and utilitarian. Bare lights. Xati had needed no bed, no heating. A small machine shop, knobby metal cabinets full of spare parts and neatly sorted tools. There was a cooling and ventilation system, to keep the systems here from overheating, but it had been years since it had been turned on. The air was thick with dust. Meloku held an arm over her mouth and nose, coughing viciously. Fiametta didn’t venture past the door.

  Only one thing said that Xati had ever been here: a small model of a fungal farm, a relic of a home plane e had told Osia about only once before. Xati seemed to have lived little differently than e had aboard Ways and Means: tucked inside er quarters, lost inside er mind.

  The cabinets, the heater, and the sides of the farm were all covered in transparent sheeting. Dust shields. When Xati had left, e had expected to be back, but not for some time.

  Osia ran a hand along a piece of sheeting farthest from the door. Not much dust there. She guessed that Xati must have left only weeks ago. That would have been about the same time that she had left her boat on the Iberian coast. When it would have become clear to Ways and Means that Osia was headed here.

  Meloku said, “Ways and Means took your friend away.” She turned. The fury and despair rising to her cheeks gave them an infrared halo. “We lost before we ever got here.”

  “Of course we did.” Osia pulse scanned the cabinets, tallying a list of their contents. She had expected to find this. Meloku hadn’t thought far enough ahead. It still hurt to discover, though. More evidence that Ways and Means was behind this. It had been well within Ways and Means’ power to order Xati somewhere else. It wouldn’t even have been suspicious.

  She queried the post’s NAI. It wouldn’t answer. Locked down, just like the door. Nothing had been damaged. The NAI would not respond to orders, but it would to simple diagnostics. Everything was in perfect condition, standing by.

  All of the radio towers outside were, so far as she could tell, intact.

  She said, “I’ll need your help isolating one of the towers outside from the base NAI. A generator, too.”

  Meloku’s eyes had reddened, from the dust and something else. She took a ragged breath. “What are you going to do?”

  Osia stepped out. Fiametta stood well clear of her.

  Osia started scanning the towers hidden among the trees. The faster she got this done, the better. The longer she took, the greater the chance that something would go wrong. And the more time Meloku would have to argue with her about it.

  From inside, Meloku called again, “What are you going to do?”

  Meloku went apoplectic when she figured it out. It did not take her long. There were only so many things Osia could do with a radio tower.

  The tower could transmit quite a distance, reach a number of agents in this hemisphere. But it was also powerful enough to reach directly into deep space.

  “You’re going to contact Ways and Means,” Meloku said, as if she couldn’t quite believe what her demiorganics were telling her. She was repeating herself. Th
e first time Meloku said the words, her voice had been clenched tight. And the time after, livid.

  She actually laid her hand on Osia’s shoulder. Osia had to dissuade her defensive combat programs from automatically responding.

  Ways and Means had risen over their horizon not long after they’d gotten here. If it had been night, she could have looked up, focus-scanned its parcel of sky, and seen a flicker of infrared. But it was daytime, and there was nothing there. Nothing even she could see. Just her knowledge that there ought to be.

  Ways and Means was coasting on an outward trajectory, back to its resting solar orbit. Millions of kilometers out of reach. Osia’s personal transmitter did not have the power to reach it.

  Meloku’s eyes flicked over the tower and the boxy, head-sized microfusion generator they’d hauled beside it. Then she turned to Osia. Osia figured she was weighing her chances of damaging either one before Osia could stop her. Osia’s combat programs had already charted those possibilities. They weren’t in Meloku’s favor.

  The generator was silent as it spun through its warm-up routines. Osia ran diagnostic after diagnostic. If Ways and Means had set a trap for them, it would be here. A sudden failure of containment. An out of control reaction. There would be nothing she could do if she saw either of those coming.

  Meloku said, “If you contact it, I’m gone. You’ll have to do everything on your own. I’m not coming back to rescue you again.”

  Osia said, “As you would like.”

  Fiametta had disappeared while Osia had been busy, though her horse remained below. Heat traces in the ice led through the hideaway’s broken door. The air inside was several degrees warmer. She’d gone in to shelter.

  Meloku remained beside her. Osia said, “If you’re going to go, then go.”

  “I’ve got nowhere else,” Meloku said.

  “Neither do I.”

  Osia did not take her eyes off the generator until it was fully warmed up. Then she turned her attention to the tower. It was disguised as a straight-trunked, slender pine. A shimmer of copper played across its branches.

  Meloku said, “After all that you’ve gone through, all the evidence you’ve seen, you still don’t want to believe Ways and Means tried to kill you.”

  “I don’t ‘want’ to believe anything.” Even to her, Osia’s answer sounded hollow.

  Meloku wouldn’t let her get away with it. “You’re not as high above the rest of us as you like to think.”

  Interesting words for someone with Meloku’s personality profile, and with her history. It was increasingly plain that her profile was out of date, though. Meloku had changed in the thirty years they’d both been down here. Unlike Osia, she hadn’t kept herself in stasis.

  “You’re doing this as an act of faith,” Meloku accused.

  “Yes,” Osia said.

  Faith in Ways and Means. Faith in the life she’d had in the centuries before all of this had happened. She had nothing left to turn to.

  She and Meloku and Fiametta were alone. Ways and Means could foil any other plans they made as easily as it had reassigned Xati.

  But that wasn’t the end of her reasons. This wasn’t so much an act of faith, Osia figured, as a confrontation. She needed to face this down. They’d put it off long enough. And this tower gave them the means.

  “We’ve already tried contacting it,” Meloku said. “It’s going to ignore us.”

  Again, Meloku wasn’t thinking this through. “It won’t. I don’t think it can.” Ways and Means wasn’t the only one that could pick up her signal.

  Thousands of its crew remained aboard. All of their demiorganic bodies had independent transmitters and receivers, just like she did. They could surely receive a signal as strong she was about to send.

  If Ways and Means was going to betray them again, it would have to do so with its crew listening.

  Osia was going to force the issue. One outcome or another. If, as she and Meloku thought, Ways and Means wanted to keep what it had done to them a secret, it was going to have to deal with them.

  Meloku paced between the pines. She looked at the generator. But she did not act. Nor did she leave.

  When the tower was ready, Osia did not wait. This had taken long enough already.

  Her signal was wordless, just a ping, a request for acknowledgment. She appended her identification tag. She did not need anything more.

  The perigee of Ways and Means’ pass had not taken it any closer than the moon. It had been heading away for weeks. It was three light-seconds away now. Six total for a transmission to get there, and a response to come back. Osia counted the seconds.

  Meloku leaned against the trunk of the nearest tree, staring. Her mouth worked. Osia lip-read. She was rehearsing what she would say when nothing happened.

  Ways and Means’ answer came the instant it should have, and strong enough that atmospheric scattering would carry it for kilometers around.

  “Osia.” Ways and Means sounded pleased with her. “You ought to call home more often.”

  29

  The fury came to Osia quickly. She had not felt anything like it since the day she’d killed Coral. Maybe even that had not been so bad.

  She sent, “After everything that’s happened, after all you’ve done, you’re starting out by being light?”

  She made sure to broadcast her signal with enough power to reach Ways and Means’ crew, too. The seconds waiting for an answer were agony. Her demiorganics stifled her instinctive responses, trying to reestablish an emotional equilibrium. They did not have much success.

  It said, “We hardly know what’s happened.”

  A data package poured down the transmission, riding along with Ways and Means’ words. Osia turned it over in her mind, regarding it skeptically. It was large enough that it could have been anything. But, after all this time on the run, to finish the kill with a simple virus did not fit Ways and Means’ behavior.

  Meloku received it too. She hardly had time to look to Osia, to start shaking her head, before Osia opened it.

  It was a new encryption key, and updated security programs, anti-eavesdroppers. If anyone else had been tapping in, those programs wouldn’t have done them any good. They had been tailored for Osia’s demiorganics. They would only operate for her.

  Ways and Means’ next transmission was only decipherable with the aid of the key. Osia decrypted for Meloku.

  Ways and Means said, “You’re much farther afield than we thought you’d be.”

  Osia did not encrypt her reply. She wanted Ways and Means’ crew to hear, to understand. “You knew we were coming here.”

  “The last time you spoke to us, you were on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Now you’re half a world away, and hundreds of kilometers inland. Clearly, we have a lot to catch up on.”

  “You said you maintained satellite tracking of my position.”

  “Our tracking has been unreliable of late.”

  Osia waited. It did not elaborate. She said, “I tried to call you. You wouldn’t answer.”

  “We tried to talk to you. You didn’t understand.”

  At the edge of her vision, Meloku mouthed the word trick.

  Osia did not want to believe her. When Meloku had called this an act of faith, Osia had brushed her off. Maybe she’d been wrong.

  She ought not to be calling Ways and Means except to inform its crew what it had done to her. She could still do that. Anyone aboard Ways and Means could hear her. If they wanted to.

  Ways and Means said, “Until ninety seconds ago, our tracking placed you at sea, hundreds of kilometers east of the Korean peninsula.”

  A prickling traveled down her arms. Another psychosomatic side effect, her demiorganics trying to cope with primate fright response. She felt hairs she didn’t have, rising from follicles she’d never been given.

  She could not manage anything more eloquent than, “What?”

  “We would greatly appreciate it if
you could use the encryption package we sent you.”

  She shook her head, not that it could see.

  Ways and Means went on, “You said ‘we.’ Are you not alone?”

  “Meloku of Antera is with me,” Osia said. Meloku winced and palmed her forehead. Too late, Osia realized she did not want any attention drawn to her. “And a native. I think she’s become involved.”

  Ways and Means said, “If you continue to transmit unencrypted, think carefully on what you say before you say it. Remember our last conversation?”

  Osia’s memory of it was as clear as if it had just happened. She felt the sea air on the back of her neck. She flash-forwarded through its condescension, her prickliness. It had said, “We know you cannot, and should not, believe what we tell you.”

  It had told her this after noting that her security programs were out of date.

  Ways and Means repeated, “We tried to talk to you.”

  A new star flared in the sky. A speck. It was not visible to the naked eye, but it shone brightly in infrared, even at this distance. White-hot engine exhaust. A strong, clear source of it.

  It was not big or bright enough to be Ways and Means’ own engines. The source was something smaller. A shuttle. Or a missile. It was accelerating hard. Very hard. If it had carried any crew, even demiorganic crew, they would have been crushed by the g-forces.

  Ways and Means said, “We don’t need to hear anything more at present – unless you would like to use the programs we sent.”

  The prickling spread from Osia’s arms to her legs. She was a damned idiot.

  Ways and Means had been afraid of eavesdropping. Not just now, but back then. It had tried, in as veiled a way as possible, to get her to update her security and encryption programs. It wanted her to know that it believed something was listening in.

  She had been so focused on other things that she had not listened.

  The source of the problem had to be the communications satellites. She had spoken to it through its satellites. After Ira had attacked her, when she had called for help, her call had gone through satellites. The satellites had not forwarded her message to it.