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yesterday, and said that delivery of the next batch of ungulates would be delayed. And the person I talked to seemed to know you were on Kopernik. How did you get back, anyway? I didn’t think anyone was getting through the blockade.”
“I got a little back-channel help,” Derec said. “Elin, I need to talk to Miles again.”
She nodded. “See you tomorrow.”
When Miles was back, Derec said, “Miles, I’m going to look for Ariel. If I do not contact you in the next four hours, contact Mia Daventri. Tell her that I was going to Gernika because I believed Ariel’s life to be in danger. Once you have done that, consider my prohibition on contacting the NLBI rescinded. Is the priority clear?”
“It is, Derec.”
“All right,” Derec said. “Four hours.”
He tweaked the autopilot to accelerate up the Bogard Valley.
The flier’s console comm chirped ninety minutes later. Before Derec could accept the call, the signal overrode his receiving privileges.
“Attention civilian vehicle,” an automated voice said. “You are entering a zone considered hazardous. You are advised to evacuate this area by the Terran Military Command. Should you remain within this area, the Terran Military Command assumes no responsibility for your safety or that of your property. Ping this message to acknowledge receipt and understanding; if you do not ping this message, it will repeat until you do.”
Before the message had begun to repeat, Derec was calling Ariel on the datum he’d gotten from Hofton. There was an interminable pause, and then a visual message: CONNECTION FAILED.
“What!?” Derec shouted. “Hofton, dammit, if you’re eavesdropping you need to do something about this.” He stabbed Ariel’s code again, and again got the CONNECTION FAILED return.
“Should you remain in this area,” the automated voice said, “the Terran Military Command—” Derec punched the automated-response 207
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key and the voice shut off. Five seconds later it started up again. “You have acknowledged receipt and understanding of a message from Terran Military Command advising you to evacuate this area. In the event of personal injury or property loss, the Terran Military Command is indemnified from all claims of loss.”
“Shut up already,” Derec said. The message did not repeat.
All right, Derec thought. You’re heading into an area declared hazardous by the Terran military, which shouldn’t even be here; you can’t get in touch with Ariel; you may or may not be under observation by a group of robots who are taking human survival into their own hands; and there is a conspiracy of uncertain extent between Nucleomorph and a group of cyborgs. The only thing working in Derec’s favor was that nobody knew where he was—except perhaps Hofton, and whoever Hofton chose to tell, and whatever elements of the Terran military appeared to have presented themselves in Nova system.
So what made sense? Derec would go on. He would call Masid Vorian when he was so close to Gernika that even someone monitoring the call wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. If Masid hadn’t found Ariel, he’d likely know where she’d gone, and for all Derec knew, Ariel had figured out what was happening and taken her own action. The worst thing that could happen was for the three of them to chase each other in circles; so until he got a better idea, he’d go on to Gernika and find Masid.
The kilometers flew by, but not quite fast enough. Derec overrode the autopilot and accelerated again, leaving a wake of twisting leaves on the forest canopy below.
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They didn’t hit Masid after that first time, and they didn’t even rough him up when he’d been installed in a small, slant-roofed shed on the outer fringes of Gernika. Instead Gorka, the cyborg who had leveled him back in the woods, stayed by the door while Filoo offered Masid a chair. He took it, both out of gratitude to relax while he tried to get the pain in his head under control and because he couldn’t think of any reason not to cooperate with Filoo while he figured out what exactly the drug kingpin was after.
“You looking for Ariel Burgess?” Filoo appeared only mildly interested, and Masid figured the question was designed just to get him talking. Fine. He would talk. The longer he talked, the longer Filoo wasn’t killing him, and the longer Masid had to assess his chances of getting out.
“Yeah. She here?”
Filoo shook his head. “Missed her. She’s gone off with Brixa to the borg lab. Lucky find for Basq and Brixa both; she’s exactly the kind of person they need to make them seem credible.”
“I gather she’s had her own problems with credibility. Maybe she’s just looking for a way to get back in the game.”
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“She’ll get in a game, all right,” Filoo chuckled. “You make me laugh, Vorian. You thought you could just walk away from everything after taking a shot at Parapoyos and nearly getting me killed, and now you stroll back into the lion’s den looking for your damsel in distress.”
If that was Filoo’s impression of Ariel, Masid thought he was in for a shock.
“And you’ve got no idea what’s really going on,” Filoo continued,
“which is the funniest thing of all. Come on. Spill it. What do you think you’re saving Ariel from?”
“For starters, the robot that has Parapoyos in it.”
“You think he’s after Ariel? Not so, gato. If Parapoyos is worried about settling a score, it’s with you. Especially after you fried part of his puppet’s head the other night. He was starting to like that shell, I think. It sure helped him out on Kopernik.”
“Let me guess,” Masid said. “He went up there to kill Taprin figuring that the Managins would blame Spacers and the Spacers would be rattled by even the hint of the possibility that a robot could be involved. Then Pon Byris came along and it was too good a chance to pass up. Now that he’s got Earth and the Fifty Worlds eyeball to eyeball, he can get things back under control here without worrying too much about who’s watching.”
Filoo sat down, clearly enjoying himself. “You got part of it. The obvious part. Sure, Parapoyos wanted to distract the Terrans and Spacers. But he’s already in control down here, at least of what matters. Who do you think sent me to recruit dying baleys for transformation? Who had me cook up symptom mitigators to help convince people that we knew what we were doing? Gato, we’ve been making most of the bugs that Derec Avery spends all of his time listing. Some of them we send out into the hinterlands to work their way into the ecology, others we just wipe on a few doorknobs in Stopol. You thought all that was gone just because you wrecked the original lab 210
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and saw Parapoyos carried off, but he’s smarter than you or I will ever be. He had it all figured out.”
“Which is why he let me get to a gun when he could have just pinched my head off.”
Briefly, Masid thought he’d made a mistake. Filoo, who appeared to have no other emotional attachments in the world, was fiercely devoted to Parapoyos, and if Masid hadn’t been sitting in a prefab shack with his head throbbing and the clock on his life probably ticking out its last few minutes, he’d have chosen his words more carefully.
The drug dealer’s face reddened, and he started to stand. Then he caught himself, resettled his ample frame in the chair, and forced a smile onto his face. “Think big, Vorian. You don’t have much time left, so you might as well occupy yourself with the long view. This goes way beyond cooking up bugs to dupe idiots on Nova Levis. Basq and his people are serious. They’re going to get the citizenship drive done, one way or another, because once it becomes clear how powerful they are the Triangle’s going to roll over and let it happen.
And then some of them are going to emigrate to other Settler worlds to start legal fights over reciprocity of citizenship under interplanetary law. Don’t be surprised if Nucleomorph puts a little money into those fights, and don’t be surprised
when the borgs win.
“See where this is going? Once the tech is a little firmer, they’ll live forever, or at least longer than any human. How much power can someone accumulate just by being in one place for a hundred years?
What if that person runs for an office? And then what if that person uses his sway to make things a little easier, a little more lucrative, for Nucleomorph when the company comes to that new planet? It’s a sweetheart of a deal all around: Nucleomorph gets to legitimize its cyborg procedure, collect royalties on the patents, and license all the subsidiary tech; the cyborgs get to work themselves from what you see to positions of power all through the Settled worlds. They’ll be 211
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rich, and once a few human generations have passed, they’ll be respected, and Nucleomorph will keep making more of them.”
“Come on, Filoo,” Masid said. “Are any of these people really that naïve?”
Holding up a hand, Filoo said, “You should watch what you say.
Gorka, why don’t you wait outside for a minute?”
When the cyborg had shut the door behind him, Masid said, “What’s to stop the borgs from making deals with other people? Nucleomorph can’t keep a hold over them forever.”
“Oh, yes they can,” Filoo countered, nodding. “Because Nucleomorph is on the track of the one thing the cyborgs want worse than they wanted to live before they were transformed.”
Masid knew what he was going to say before he said it. Still the word rocked him.
“Reproduction. It’s the cyborg Holy Grail, and Nucleomorph is closer than you might think.”
It hit Masid from two sides: one, the realization that a breeding population of cyborgs would put Homo sapiens at an insurmountable disadvantage; and two, the horrified suspicion that even Filoo might not be getting the whole story. If cyborg tech was improving that fast, how long would it be before they were indistinguishable from the regular human population? What might not be available through force typically was through stealth, and if cyborgs could sneak into positions of power on Settled worlds, and begin reproducing, by the time they announced themselves it would be too late for anyone to do anything about it without resorting to a war that would lay waste the precarious culture of any Settler planet.
He forced himself to approach the question from a less adversarial perspective. What if no such takeover was planned? What if the integration of man and machine was just the next step in human progress? Was anything to be gained by resisting it? Humans had never been very adept at choosing not to do what was possible, even 212
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when they suspected the consequences would be different than their expectation.
“Now I think you’re starting to get it,” Filoo said. “Nucleomorph will be the shadow government on a hundred worlds as long as they can keep the borgs waiting for the Grail. Hell, as soon as this thing gets off the ground, I’m signing up myself.” He stood and opened the door. “In case you were wondering, Basq won’t let me kill you unless you refuse the transformation. He’s going to stop by later today, and if I were you I’d have my answer ready.”
With that, he left Masid alone. As soon as the door shut, and Masid was sure Filoo or Gorka weren’t going to come back in, he flipped his datum out of his pocket. They hadn’t searched him, which could only mean they didn’t care who he called. Some threshold must have been crossed—Brixa and Basq must have figured that their project had reached a critical mass. Masid wondered if it had something to do with Ariel, or if there was news from Kopernik. A war in Terran space would sure free up Nucleomorph to stop looking over their shoulders.
The other thing to consider was that no one in the Triangle was likely to answer Masid’s call. He was on his own, in the position of knowing a truth that very few people on Nova Levis would have believed or wanted to hear. Derec Avery was possibly the only exception, and he’d called from an anonymous datum whose code Masid couldn’t backtrack. Masid swore, thought furiously, and was about to call Mia at Kalienin’s office—careers be damned all around—when she called him.
“It’s on, Masid,” she said. On the tiny screen her face looked ghostly, all eyes and pale skin and twitching mouth. “A Terran strike force is already in-system. They didn’t tell anyone they were coming, and our satellites just picked them up. Kalienin and Lamina are both tearing out their hair because no one in the Terran military command will talk to them, but there’s no public awareness. The policy of the Tri-213
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angle seems to be that whatever happens to Gernika isn’t their concern.”
“Have you talked to Derec?”
“No. I didn’t even know he was back from Kopernik. I’ll call him too, but if you’re in Gernika, you need to get out. Now. The whole place might disappear within an hour.”
“Or they might wait to see how the Spacers react to Terran military positioned over a Settler world where the government is a Spacer-Terran coalition,” Masid said. “You can bet that Lamina has been in touch with everyone who will take her calls. I wouldn’t bet on a strike happening right away.”
“Would you bet your life against it?” Mia snapped. “Masid, get out of there.”
“Will do,” he said. It wouldn’t do any good to mention that he wasn’t exactly at liberty to get out of anywhere. “If you talk to Derec, tell him to get in touch with me. Ditto Ariel, although I’m guessing she won’t answer her com right now. She’s gone with Zev Brixa to Nucleomorph.”
“She’s safer there than you are at Gernika,” Mia said.
Maybe, Masid thought. He wasn’t willing to bet on that, either. At best, Ariel was a useful public voice; as soon as she was no longer suited to that role, Nucleomorph would—
That was when it all came clear.
“Mia,” Masid said, “try like hell to get in touch with Derec. I’m going to be on the move here. Wait for me to call you.”
He snapped off the call and immediately dialed the personal com code Ariel had given him. Only three days late, he thought. And could be you would have been worse off if Basq or Brixa—or Filoo—knew I was looking for you.
Right.
A message scrolled across the screen: CONNECTION FAILED.
Masid tried again.
CONNECTION FAILED.
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Shit, he thought. Was her datum disabled? Did Nucleomorph have screens in place? Those were the only two reasons he could think of for why he wouldn’t even have gotten a message server, or been forwarded to Ariel’s robot back in Nova City—and he didn’t like either of them.
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Brixa’s office was walled entirely with projections of various units of the laboratory/hospital complex. He and Ariel sat in plush armchairs and sipped expensive Terran bourbon. When enough time had passed that the silence was about to become uncomfortable, Brixa said, “A big enterprise demands the use of people we might not otherwise employ.”
“Do you mean Basq, or are we talking about Weil and Jan?”
Brixa shrugged. “General comment—could be any of them. Basq is a bit of a zealot, Weil is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a robot wearing human skin, and Jan has his head in the clouds. He doesn’t know it, but he’s right in line with the ancients who believed that the first networked communications would lead to archived personalities and so on. Left to their own devices, the three of them would kill each other before too long. It’s my job to keep them all pulling in the same direction, for the sake of the project.”
“And now you add me,” Ariel said. “With my own set of stubborn beliefs that don’t square with yours. You just keep making problems for yourself.”
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“If you’ll pardon an old entrepreneur’s canard, most things that look like problems at first glance turn out to be opportunities.”
“So I’m an opport
unity.” Ariel looked over the rim of her glass at Brixa, and thought: Incredible. I’m practically flirting with him.
Brixa held up a hand. “Apologies if I made it sound like you’re just a cog in some plan. That’s not the case at all. Listen, Ariel. I meant it when I said we lose too many. It’s easy for you to think of me as a soulless operative, so you do. The truth is that every time we recruit someone and that person dies, I take that as evidence of a personal failure to oversee this project properly. Every one of their deaths is on my head.”
Ariel couldn’t decide whether to believe him or not. She sipped her whiskey, feeling that a crux was approaching. She had committed herself to something in front of Basq, and here in Zev Brixa’s office she was about to find out exactly what that something was.
With a smile more rueful than any she’d yet seen, Brixa went on.
“We lose more adults than children. Their bodies are less resilient.”
“More orphans,” Ariel said, and let it hang.
“Nothing I can do will convince you that I believe in this,” Brixa said. “But you’re still willing to speak for us.”
“Not for you. For them.”
Brixa nodded, accepting the implied rebuke and moving on. “As it should be. This is an early stage. In twenty years, or fifty, you’ll look back and realize you were part of something wonderful.”
“Will I?” Ariel asked. “What interest will cyborgs have in working with unaltered humans? They’ll live longer, they won’t get sick—why would they even consider themselves human?”
“As long as they can’t reproduce,” Brixa said, “they’ll want to be a part of human civilization. After all—if you’ll permit a fairly cold-blooded assessment of the situation—it takes a constant supply of humans to ensure a fresh supply of cyborgs.”
“Unless you figure out how to make them fertile.”
“Please, Ariel. We are doing some research into fertility, but it’s 217
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just for the sake of image. As long as we keep them believing that we’re going to discover a way for them to reproduce, they’ll do whatever we want. That includes my old friend Basq, however convinced he may be that he’s the senior partner in our little project.
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