InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Carl said.

  “I think you do.” Glithwah bared her teeth. “And you should also know that my time and patience are limited.”

  With fleeting glances and all but imperceptible nods, the humans consulted about … something. Whether to be more forthcoming, she assumed.

  “Okay,” Carl said. “Send the bots elsewhere. Convince me this room isn’t bugged and that you’re as off the grid as we.”

  Did the warden suppose her become drunk with success? Insane? Why else, in time of war, would she agree to be alone and incommunicado with a cunning enemy agent of three times her mass?

  At her netted command, the big robots herded the prisoners toward the door. “You will not enjoy your stay here,” she promised.

  “Banak had allies,” Carl hissed.

  “Halt!” Glithwah ordered.

  CHAPTER 44

  Bound tightly to her chair (again!), the chair bolted to the deck, to the atonal and arrhythmic droning that Snakes considered music, Corinne pondered a spectrum analyzer through its clear, shrink-wrapped covering. The controls and labels were human. The dust film on the plastic suggested months undisturbed inside some musty storeroom.

  Carl, helpless in his own chair, was also studying the device. The safeguards for this private conversation had been his suggestions. “Turn it on.”

  A writhing, fat-and-fuzzy-caterpillar-like band popped onto the display. Did it signify a broad-spectrum jammer? Corinne had no idea. Her implant, drenched in suppressive neurotransmitters, had had nothing to offer her but static before the so-called jammer came on.

  All must have been satisfactory, because Carl nodded his approval.

  Glithwah, laser pistol in hand, massive desk separating her from the rest of them, settled into her own chair. “About Banak.”

  And Carl talked and talked. And talked. Of Banak reinventing himself, generation after generation, to disguise having far exceeded his reasonable lifespan. Of technology in Banak’s studio on Ariel matching devices in the clandestine alien base on the Moon. Of Joshua’s abduction, Robyn Tanaka Astor’s assassination, the corruption of Astor’s recent memories, and infiltration of the UPIA itself. Of the conspiracy the Xool labored so hard to hide: eons spent steering developments on Earth and the other InterstellarNet home worlds. Of solemn oaths to stop the very starship they were on.

  Carl tried to keep his presentation to an overview, but Glithwah, again and again, drew him into details.

  “Stop us?” Glithwah once more interrupted. “Grace DiMeara tried, and the damage was minimal. You saw it in hangar bay three. Your Xool, or at least their agents, do not seem so formidable.”

  “Minimal?” Tacitus said. The mesh enclosure it had worn lest it tap local wireless networks also shielded its server from the jammer. “About 450 million years ago, Earth went through its second-largest mass extinction.”

  “The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction,” Joshua interjected, pedantically.

  “I know that,” Tacitus said. “It wiped out about half the multicellular species in Earth’s oceans.” Interrupting one another, the two historians launched into competing speculations of the cause, or causes, of the massive die-off. Quarreling like an old married couple, Corinne decided.

  Sharper than any knife, fiercer than any laser, the guilt pierced her. She had been off Earth for months. When she had had the opportunity to send messages home, all too often she’d found reasons not to. Then—as though somehow it mattered—she’d filled her implant with recordings that Denise, it became clearer and clearer, was never going to see.

  And Corinne felt even guiltier admitting: the past few months, chasing aliens and conspiracies, had been … exhilarating. If she were to be honest, she hadn’t felt as alive in years.

  Glithwah didn’t let the bickering pair get far. “I fail to see the relevance.”

  “K’vith had an ice age about the same time,” Tacitus said. “No, more than an ice age. A total snowball phase, the continents wiped clean of life.”

  A dangerous growl sounded deep in Glithwah’s throat. Was it from anger or impatience? “Why do these things? What can these Xool hope to gain?”

  That had been Corinne’s question, too. She’d never come up with an answer. Neither, when she’d had the chance, had Robyn.

  “I don’t know,” Joshua admitted. “But it’s no coincidence that things—catastrophes—like this befell K’vith, Earth, and almost a dozen other worlds at about the same time. And at other times, too.”

  “And from mass extinctions your Xool switched to telling ghost stories? To influencing interstellar trade?”

  “It’s all true,” Carl insisted. “We have proof.”

  Glithwah double-blinked: Snake condescension. Or maybe it was skepticism. Without Walt’s knowledge of Snake body language, she couldn’t decide. “You have a clever story, nothing more. Why don’t you—”

  “We’ve been inside a Xool facility,” Joshua reminded.

  “So you say. Conveniently, your evidence is more than a billion kilometers distant—and buried beneath tonnes of rock.”

  “We have proof here,” Carl said. “In Tacitus’ files.”

  Another double-blink. “Warden, you disappoint me. No matter how inventive this tale, you can’t expect me to network with your AI. Suppose you explain why you really came?”

  “The Xool are why I came,” Carl said.

  “What has any of this to do with your friend here?” Glithwah asked.

  Did it have something to do with me? Corinne frowned, stymied. It could not be anything she had contributed to the conversation. She had been out of the picture since Ariel—except, of course, for traveling billions of klicks alone with a Xool mole. As for that, she had been oblivious.

  “It has everything to do with Corinne,” Carl said. “I don’t know who I can trust. Not my agency, clearly. Telling the wrong people will just get us killed.”

  “So suddenly you trust me?” Glithwah asked. “Even now?”

  “I trust that Banak chose not to let you take him alive. Since you’re not a Xool mole, I have to hope you’ll listen.”

  “You have yet to explain how this relates to the woman.”

  Carl said, “I’ve explained why I don’t dare tell just anyone. Instead, to expose these Xool, I plan to tell everyone. Except it won’t be me telling.”

  Finally, Corinne understood. “It will be me.”

  “When we set out,” Carl said, “Discovery was in UP hands. I planned to play the Agency card, grab time on this ship’s big transmitter. Between your worlds-wide audience and that radio, we’d spread the word to so many planets and moons, asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects, it could never be suppressed, no matter how deeply Interveners have penetrated Earth’s comm networks.” He stared at Glithwah. “We still can, Foremost. We must.”

  “Give it up.” Glithwah stood. “I have work to do. You have withdrawal terms to finalize with your admiral. Robots will escort you back to your ship.”

  Me, too? Corinne dared to hope.

  “Wait!” Carl said. “Just entertain the possibility I’m telling the truth. You had questions about Banak, even before he blew his head off. Right? So let me bring Corinne. I need her.”

  “Even entertaining the possibility, the last thing I’d help with is public disclosure. That these Xool don’t suspect you know of them is your sole advantage.” Another double blink. “But of course I don’t believe any of this.”

  “What if you had proof?” Corinne asked. “What if you had a Xool agent?”

  “Proof.” Yet another double blink. “This wouldn’t happen to be the saboteur you and I both saw blown to dust and gas?”

  Grace hadn’t just happened to end up on Prometheus, any more than she happened to move to New York, to hang around till she met Corinne. Any more than she had happened to be available when Corinne happened to need a substitute pilot. When some mundane weld giving way on Discovery had led the mission office to cancel press invitations, it
had been Grace—playing Corinne’s ego like a violin—who convinced her to drop out of comms and show up anyway. And it had been Grace, this time playing Donald With The Ridiculous Sideburns like a fiddle, who had gotten Corinne—and herself—a guided tour of this very ship.

  Having gotten back aboard this ship, would Grace have run amok and gotten herself blown out of the sky? Uh-uh. No way.

  “No,” Corinne said, “it’s the saboteur who remains aboard this ship. The saboteur who only wanted you to think she was dead. And I know how to find her.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Bruised and bloody, her clothes in tatters, almost mad from the stress of avoiding thousands of Snakes, Grace doggedly shoved a bulging knapsack before her through Discovery’s labyrinthine network of ventilation ducts. The only illumination was what seeped through widely separated vents. Without gravity her sweat did not drip; instead, whenever she brushed against the ductwork, accumulated moisture dissolved more of the ubiquitous filth into yet another dollop of slimy paste. Only air, and perhaps the occasional cleaning bot, was intended ever to move through the ducts, so there was no reason to burnish every seam. Every few meters some screw tip or metal edge, hidden by gloom and muck, would snag her rags or inflict another wound on hand or knee or scalp. Every hundred meters or so she stopped to override control circuits, whether to interrupt the slice-and-dice whirl of some giant fan or to manually open a damper.

  The circuit bypasses, at least, were straightforward, because until the Snakes arrived this had been a civilian mission. Within the ducts, she had yet to encounter a single security sensor. It was not a vulnerability she could expect the Foremost to tolerate for long.

  She gave her knapsack another shove, slit yet another finger scrambling after it. Dodging killer robots was supposed to have been the difficult part of this plan. But her dash across the hangar bay, though scary, had proven anticlimactic, the smoke and heat of her improvised explosives having blinded cameras and IR sensors alike. Within seconds she had been through the hangar-bay air lock. Within two minutes, tops, she had made her way deep inside Discovery, decks away from her point of entry. By then the lash of the shuttle’s fusion-drive exhaust would have melted the air lock to slag. Any notion of an intruder should be unimaginable.

  Shove. Wriggle. Another meter forward. Another painful whack on a many-times-bruised knee. Shove. Wriggle. Shove. Rip. Free snagged knapsack. Shove.

  “Soon,” she mouthed to herself. It had become her mantra. “Soon.”

  Because one way or another, this would all end soon.

  This ship stocked almost unbelievable quantities of fertilizer. No one would miss what she had appropriated, a little each from a dozen separate farm decks. Volatile hydrocarbons were scarcer, but between solvents and lubricants she had accumulated enough for her purposes. (Among the tasks she had underestimated: liberating enough containers to transport all those chemicals.) The fertilizer/hydrocarbon mix was not a high explosive, but that just meant she needed more.

  A few tonnes of the stuff, in the right places, should more than do the trick.

  And it all stank. She couldn’t transfer the explosives—especially not through air ducts!—without first hermetically sealing each load. And without scrubbing herself raw before every single trip (holding her breath for however many immersions it took, in remote ponds restrained by taut rubber sheets), so that she would not stink.

  No matter how much she scrubbed and scraped, the stench never left her nostrils.

  For the umpteenth time her knapsack strove to go its own way, the wrong way, where a feeder duct split. As weightless as everything else, and as she herself, her cargoes nonetheless had inertia. She had the screamingly sore muscles, smashed fingers, and (though she couldn’t prove it without a med scanner) the torn ligaments to prove it. Gritting her teeth, Grace tugged loose her knapsack and started it moving along the correct branch.

  More than supplies and rude sanitary facilities, the farm decks provided food. No one would miss the fruits and vegetables she scavenged, never enough from any single plant to be noticeable. The way her body craved more, no matter how much she ate, had to say something about the need—in her mind, if not her belly—for protein.

  She wouldn’t be hungry much longer.

  Unlatching a vent cover, she wriggled into a between-decks crawlspace just forward of the engine room. This stash of explosives, one among many, must mass close to a tonne, and the mere sight of it reminded every muscle in her body to protest.

  She removed a detonator from her knapsack, positioned the device among the sealed bags and jars of explosive, then gathered her strength to move on. For detonators, as with everything else, she had had to improvise. As a high-impact shock device to set off the bulk explosive, she had a bottle of acetylene from a welding torch. A radio-controlled irrigation valve—modified to overload and spark—would first release the gas into the air and then ignite the mix.

  Not even tonnes of explosives could destroy a ship this large, but that was all right. Her bombs needed only to destabilize the magnetic fields that isolated and contained Discovery’s antimatter fuel. Just for an instant. Once the slightest trace of antimatter escaped to make contact with normal matter …

  She checked her work, tied shut her knapsack, and wriggled back into a duct branch. Place a few more detonators and she would be done. Thank the lords, because she was so tired.

  For only a moment, Grace let her eyes close.

  • • • •

  With a shudder, Grace came alert. She had no time to sleep! She stretched—or tried to, anyway.

  Lights came on all around her.

  “You used me,” Corinne said.

  Grace ignored the accusation, ignored her inexplicable nausea, to survey her surroundings. She was alone in an orchard, seated in a metal chair, the chair chained to sturdy trees. The trees would have been out of reach even if her wrists had not been taped to the chair’s arms and her ankles to the chair’s front legs.

  The trees (apple?) were in full bloom, and bees flitted about. No one was within sight, either Snake or human. Apart from trees, chair, and the grassy field/deck beneath her feet, the only things nearby were an ordinary pocket comp and what might be a medical scanner. Duct tape kept both devices from floating away on an errant draft.

  “And now you’re trying to kill me,” Corinne continued, her voice emanating from the comp.

  Streaming video showed four faces: Corinne; Glithwah, the Foremost; Carl somebody, the warden on Ariel; and—Grace ransacked her memory to put a name to the final face, which she recognized from old reports—Joshua Matthews. She had no idea how, when, or why the two men had come aboard.

  Grace’s isolation suggested her captors knew of her cranial bomb. What else did they know?

  “Not so,” Grace said, her face turned toward the comp, addressing only the second indictment. “It’s not my doing that you are aboard.”

  Damn it, she had been so close. In another half hour she’d have been done. Nothing would have remained of this ship but gamma rays and glowing gas.

  Her interrogators’ next question must be: why did she want to destroy the ship. Only it wasn’t.

  Carl said, “Why do the Xool want this ship stopped?”

  Grace’s heart thudded. How could he know of the lords? She had failed to stop this ship, and the lords’ wrath against humanity would doubtless be harsh, but she was sworn to die before betraying their secrets. She focused her mind on the autodestruct sequence and—

  Static, nothing more.

  “While you were still under the gas,” Carl said, “I gave you a hypo of neural suppressant. That’s why your implant is offline. From that flash of dismay you just showed, more than your implant is refusing to work.”

  Her lords, when first she had begun to serve, had honored and entrusted her with a cyanide capsule and the hollow molar in which to hide it. For centuries after, merely to die when captured would have been enough.

  No more. Not when, even in death, secr
ets might be gleaned from her neural implant. For the time had come when human adults who remained unnetworked were marginalized, drew unwelcome attention. As abhorrent as her lords found neural interfaces, they required their human servants to be so equipped. Immediately after Grace had had her neural interface implanted, a lord had replaced the suicide pill with a more robust failsafe.

  The bomb within her skull that refused to arm.

  Her captors would have X-rayed her while she was under, confirming their suspicions that there indeed was a bomb. Would have convinced themselves that the device was inoperable—at least for as long as they objected to repainting an operating theater with her gray matter. Damn their thoroughness!

  “How did you find me?” Grace asked.

  A security sensor she had failed to spot? Maybe. Or, by sheer bad luck, someone had come upon her buried pressure suit and begun a search. How hardly mattered, other than as an excuse with which to stall.

  “Biometrics,” Corinne said. “Remember our tour of this ship?”

  Grace thought back. Donald With The Ridiculous Sideburns. The short flight from Prometheus. Donald’s apologetic insistence after their shuttle had docked that his guests wear visitor badges. Visitor badges electronically mated to their medical ID chips. Since that day, she had been registered with the starship’s security system—and of everyone aboard, no one but Corinne would have known that.

  And so they had located her in the ducts and then gassed her. Grace still felt woozy.

  “In the interest of efficiency,” Carl said, “I’ll share a little of what we know. The Xool have been around for ages. They’re more than a little strange-looking: headless, with sensor stalks protruding from their shoulders; tentacles for arms and legs; a band of fringes at their waists. They had”—he paused, emphasizing the verb tense—“a secret base on the Moon, within a lava tube, in the foothills of Montes Carpatus. Their trusted servants, like you and Helena Strauss, meet with them to make reports and receive your orders.”