The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “If it had been me,” the Titanian snapped back, “I wouldn’t have brought your pet gladiator — and I’d have kept a couple of my own people. I can’t believe that it was anyone on my crew…and even if I could believe it, I can’t believe that they’d bring us to Earth. Only your people would do that. I didn’t think the Cabal had the intelligence, let alone the technics, but I guess you might have sharpened up your act since you accidentally blew North America away and shriveled Garden Earth to mulch. On the other hand, I can’t see how you had the opportunity.” There was a pause while she redirected her attention. “Only you had that,” she added. I knew that she had to be staring at Davida.

  I was beginning to feel left out again, so I decided to sit up. It wasn’t easy, but I managed it. I had to remind myself that I was supposed to be a hard man, a real fighter. I had to tell myself, very sternly, that if we were all equal now, in terms of our clothing and internal resources, then I ought to be vying for leadership of the pack instead of lying flat out and feeling exceedingly sorry for myself.

  “You ought to lie down,” Niamh Horne told me. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, and we no longer seem to have the kind of help that we normally rely on to make such losses good.

  “I’m okay,” I lied, fighting the dizziness. I could see how much blood there was on the gray floor now, and how much there was on the pale blue sleeves of my dead shirt. My trousers were pale blue too, except where they’d picked up bloodstains from the floor. Everybody’s clothes were pale blue. They had to be uniforms of some kind, although they seemed ridiculously casual as well as inert.

  “Better do as she says, Mr. Tamlin,” Solantha Handsel put in, flatly. “I hit you hard. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was. It could have been a hostile.”

  “If I wasn’t a hostile before,” I managed to mutter, darkly, “I am now.” She didn’t seem impressed.

  “Come on, Mr. Tamlin,” said Mortimer Gray. “I’ll help you.” He lent me an arm so that I could raise myself from a sitting position to a standing one. I felt faint, and I had to fight hard against the impulse to lie back down again. I’d sat up because I wanted to keep better track of the argument, but the argument had been suspended now while everyone put on a collaborative show of sympathy. Michael Lowenthal seemed very anxious indeed, although he might have been overacting — or he might, of course, have been projecting an anxiety he really felt for himself. Emortal or not, he knew how vulnerable he was without IT assistance.

  Mortimer Gray continued to hang on to my arm, to make sure that I didn’t keel over again. When he was sure that I wouldn’t he steered me back toward the door from which I’d unwisely emerged on my exploratory mission, obviously intent on seeing me safety back to my bed. I resisted, but I didn’t have the strength to make the resistance stick. In the end, I decided that I could only benefit from a brief interval of rest, and allowed myself to be guided.

  Christine Caine followed us into the cell, with the air of one who thought she had a legitimate claim to the territory. I took that to mean that she had been the person in the upper bunk. I wondered briefly whether I ought to put in for a transfer, but it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to volunteer to trade — not only because no one else would want to share with Christine but also because no one else would want to share with me.

  I figured that I had the rough end of the deal. If I had been deprived of my IT, I reasoned, so had Christine. Whatever internal censors the sisterhood had put in place to ensure that she didn’t revert to type were presumably gone. She didn’t look dangerous at the moment, but I had seen Bad Karma.

  I lay down in the bottom bunk. Mercifully, the dizziness relinquished its hold on my head almost immediately.

  “I’m sorry, Madoc,” Mortimer Gray said, moving toward the door, “but we have to get this sorted out, if we can.”

  I was tempted to tell him that he shouldn’t leave me out of the discussion, and certainly shouldn’t leave me alone with a crazy mass murderer, but I didn’t have the energy. I needed time to recover my wits.

  “Are you okay?” the crazy mass murderer said, looking down at me. “Do you want me to stay?”

  I resisted the temptation to laugh. I tried to shake my head, but it wasn’t the ideal gesture to attempt in my condition.

  She stayed anyway. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked, paying me a compliment of sorts.

  “It looks as if we’ve been kidnapped by space pirates,” I said, weakly. “In fact, one way or another, that’s what it amounts to. Whether the pirates are from Earth, or Titan, or Excelsior, or somewhere else entirely, we’re still kidnapped. I expect we’ll find out soon enough what happens next. Maybe we get held for ransom, auctioned to the highest bidder. There’s only one thing I’m sure of.”

  “What’s that?” she wanted to know.

  “This isn’t a dream,” I told her. “Everything else might have been a trip in a fancy VE, but not this.” I touched my broken nose, very gently indeed. “No matter how preposterous the situation seems, I’m certain now that we’re awake. I wasn’t before, but I am now. And given that this is real, we’re in real trouble. Whatever game we were playing before, the game we have to play now is trying to figure out how to stay alive.”

  “I worked that out for myself,” she assured me, drily. “Is it Zimmerman they want, do you think? Or Lowenthal?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” I admitted. “But this place looks as if it’s Zimmerman’s vintage, whatever that implies. Do you have any idea how long we’ve been here? That is, how long has it been since we stepped aboard Child of Fortune?”

  “Nobody knows,” she told me. “Horne reckons it must have been at least twelve days. She says the real question is why we’ve finally been woken up. They’re all standing around out there waiting for some kind of contact. Nobody believes that the space battle was real, but nobody can figure out how the ship was taken over, if it was taken over. You were unlucky — Handsel probably wishes she’d hit Horne while she had the excuse. Then again, Horne probably wishes she’d had a chance to disable Handsel. Do you want me to go and listen in, to see what I can pick up?

  It seemed like a good idea, although I didn’t know why she was asking. Maybe it was politeness, because we were cellmates or because I’d been hurt, or maybe she was just the kind of person who needed more reasons than she could provide for herself. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I just need a few minutes.”

  She went, leaving me to my own devices.

  I kept telling myself, over and over, that I had advantages over my fellow prisoners, and not just because I had lived without IT before. I had previous experience of jail cells, and uncontrollable pain. Unfortunately, I was badly out of practice. Telling myself that the broken nose was no worse than injuries I had suffered before didn’t seem to help at all. Telling myself that I still had to go through it whether it was bearable or not didn’t help either.

  By the time I had been awake for what seemed like a further hour I had begun to wish that I had never recovered consciousness, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get back to sleep. Lying still with my eyes shut kept the agony to a minimum, but even the minimum didn’t seem tolerable.

  It seemed as if a subjective eternity had passed when Christine Caine came back into the cell and put a tentative hand on my arm. I opened my eyes and tried to focus on her face, although moving my head brought new tears to my eyes.

  “The woman on the screen says they’re willing to take a look at you, maybe give you something for the pain,” she said.

  “What woman?” I asked, dazedly.

  “On the screen,” she repeated, patiently. “They’ve opened communications. I’m not sure they wanted to talk to us this soon, but I guess they’re worried about you. If you can get to the far door while the rest of us stay back, they’ll let you through and take a look at your nose. So she says.”

  Christine kept her hand on my arm while I maneuvered myself off the bunk, but she didn’t actually
help. I managed to stand up without re-starting the bleeding, and stumbled after her as she led the way.

  The others just watched. Apart from Mortimer Gray, they didn’t seem unduly concerned about my state of health, although Michael Lowenthal looked as if he were about to say something until the presence of the others inhibited him.

  It wasn’t difficult to figure out what he wanted to say. Find out what you can. Don’t tell anyone except me.

  Paranoid as I was, I couldn’t quite credit Lowenthal with having had enough foresight to have told his minder to break something in order to create exactly this sort of opportunity.

  Adam Zimmerman looked at me in a way that seemed to say there but for the grace of God go I. I couldn’t remember whether it was the first time we had locked gazes long enough for it to count as communication.

  When I was left alone in front of the relevant door I heard a distinct click, and then the handle turned. The door swung inward, but the darkness beyond seemed impenetrable. I hesitated, but it had to be reckoned a useful opportunity.

  I walked forward into the gloom, which became absolute as the door slammed shut behind me.

  Twenty-Three

  Alice

  Another hand, no bigger than Christine’s, gripped my sleeve. “This way,” said a female voice.

  I hadn’t seen the woman on the screen, so I couldn’t visualize a face to fit the clutching hand. It pulled me half a dozen paces forward, then to the left. I moved clumsily through another doorway, bumping my shoulder as I went.

  When the woman had activated the light switch I saw that we were in a room no bigger than a cupboard. In fact, it actually seemed to be a cupboard, albeit a large one.

  We were surrounded by storage racks, some of them crammed and some of them empty. The shelves had numbers on, which appeared to have been stenciled on the gray plastic in black paint. As in the cells and the room into which the cells opened, everything seemed unbelievably old. There were more rivet heads visible as well as hexagonal bolt heads. Most, but not all, of the packages stowed on the occupied racks looked much more recent. The ones that didn’t seem to constitute fresh stock looked very old indeed, stylistically speaking, but they weren’t showing much sign of dilapidation or decay.

  The woman who was reaching up to test the damage done to my nose was fully matured, but there was no way of telling how old she might be. Her hair was dark and her complexion had a peculiar bluish tint. Her eyes were blue, but a darker shade than I had ever seen before. She was wearing a smartsuit; it wasn’t fashionably cut, by the standards of my time, but it looked — at least to my uneducated eye — far more like the ones commonly worn in the twenty-second century than the one I’d been fitted with on Excelsior.

  “Hold still,” she said, as she rolled back my left sleeve and wrapped something around the bare forearm. It was an elastic bandage made of some kind of smart fabric, connected by bundles of artificial nerves to a box. I didn’t feel anything, but I guessed that it would send feelers into my arm to test the blood pressure.

  “It’s my face that needs the treatment,” I pointed out, ashamed of the thickness of my voice and roughness of pronunciation.”

  “It’s already been reset, albeit crudely,” she told me. “I’ll put a dressing on it to reduce the swelling and apply local anesthetic, but there’s not much I can do at present to compensate for the blood loss. I don’t have repair nanobots ready to hand — it’ll take until tomorrow, at the earliest, to produce an emergency supply. Fortunately, the blood loss doesn’t seem to have been too bad. The spill looked worse than it was.”

  She showed me the dressing she intended to apply. It just about qualified as smart, but it was a kind that had virtually disappeared in my time, even in parts of the world where nobody had decent IT or worthwhile medical insurance.

  “That isn’t going to do much for the pain,” I complained.

  She picked something up from a nearby shelf and handed it to me. It was a plastic bottle containing pills — perhaps twenty of them.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Codeine,” she told me.

  “Codeine! That’s antediluvian. What the hell is this place?”

  “We hadn’t expected you to start trying to kill one another as soon as you woke up,” she countered, drily. Her tone changed, though, as she kept talking. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to serve as an example, to warn the others to look after themselves — and one another — a little bit better. If I had something ready to hand I’d give it to you, but I don’t. All that’s presently in the stores is pre-nanotech medical apparatus — whose evolution, as Mortimer Gray will doubtless be pleased to explain to you, virtually petered out as soon as the first IT suites came on to the market. I can get something better, but it’ll take time. Quiet now.”

  I shut up while she applied the dressing and unwrapped my arm, but as soon as the local anaesthetics in the patch of synthetic skin began to kick in I was able to concentrate my attention much more effectively.

  “I don’t suppose you’d consider telling me who you are and what the hell you’re playing at?” I said, trying to sound conciliatory. “Whatever war you’re fighting, I’m not involved. I only just got here.”

  “I’m sorry you got caught up in this,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “We know that it’s not your fault, and that you can’t begin to fathom the situation. I wish I could explain, but we’re involved in delicate negotiations, and I’ve been forbidden to disclose anything that might affect their outcome. I hope I’ll get permission to explain what’s going on in the near future, but we’ll all need to be patient.”

  “So why not let us go on sleeping?” I asked.

  She actually bit her lip a little as she suppressed the impulse to answer. It seemed to me that she was very unhappy about her own situation, whatever it was. She was just a pawn, no more in control of the bizarre kidnapping than I was — or she was putting on a good act. She couldn’t stop me talking, though, so I made my own guess — hoping, of course, to be able to deduce something from her reaction.

  “If you don’t want to talk to us,” I said, “and it appears that you don’t, you must want to observe us — listen in on our conversation, see how the accusations fly. You want to know how Lowenthal and Horne react.”

  She remained stubbornly silent.

  I changed tack. “Okay,” I said. “How about helping me out by offering me a few hints as to what I ought to ask Lowenthal and Horne, in order to help both of us get what we want. What kind of a war is it that we’ve stepped into?”

  That was a better move. It made her pause, to consider the offer. There were things she wanted to know about Lowenthal and Horne. When I used the word “war” her expression darkened a little, but I couldn’t be sure what the change signified.

  While she thought it over I scanned the racks, trying to pick up clues as to what might be in the packages — especially the ones that looked as if they had been here long before the pirates moved in. Unfortunately, almost all the labels I could see were numbers and meaningless jumbles of letters. Everything was identifiable from the outside, but only if you knew the code. There were only a handful of real words, and all but one of those were etched on the more recent packaging. A lot of those packs — upwards of fifty — allegedly contained manna or water, just like the packs that were stacked up in the room into which the cell doors opened. The only interesting word that I could see on any of the ancient plastic wrap had been scrawled on a piece of sealing tape in ink.

  The word was CHARITY.

  “We’re not fighting a war,” the woman said, eventually. “We’re trying to prevent one. I wish I could guarantee that no harm will come to you, but I can’t. What I can say is that you’re safe while you’re here. My companion and I don’t mean you any harm, and we’ll protect you as best we can.”

  There had been just the slightest hesitation before she pronounced the word “companion,” but I didn’t have time to wonder what it might mean. My
attention was caught and held by the ominous elements of the statement.

  I figured that she wouldn’t answer if I asked straight out who did mean me harm and how likely they were to get the opportunity to do some, but I thought I might get somewhere by making a few more guesses, trying to provoke a less ambiguous reaction.

  “The war you’re trying to prevent must be the one between Earth and the Outer System,” I said, avid for the slightest sign of confirmation or contradiction.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” was all she said at first. After a moment’s hesitation, though, she went on. “There are more sides here than you can probably imagine, Mr. Tamlin.”

  That was patronizing. She didn’t know anything about the scope of my imagination — but I wasn’t about to take umbrage now that I had a chance to get somewhere. “Personally, I think Lowenthal’s just a foot soldier,” I said, talking rapidly in the hope of making the most of my fragile opening, “but he’s probably working for the same people who handed down the instructions to Excelsior. They have to think the big basalt flow was sabotage, intended to upset the balance of power. They must intend to redress the balance, as soon as they figure out a way to do it. Whether or not Titan was responsible for blowing up North America, the Titanians must have been expecting retaliation, and they have control of the traffic. My guess is that Lowenthal’s masters needed bait: something to provide cover for a sizable delegation to go out to Titan. They knew that Titan wouldn’t be able to resist Zimmerman. He’s the only man with a big enough name to trigger a show and a contest. Maybe Christine and I were just trial runs, but maybe not. I think you flushed my IT along with Lowenthal’s and Horne’s because you didn’t know what the sisterhood might have incorporated into it. How am I doing?”

  “It’s really not as simple as that,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. She hadn’t given me the slightest indication that I’d scored any hits along the way. “I certainly can’t blame you for trying to figure it all out, Mr. Tamlin, but I can’t help you while our own negotiations are still ongoing — the situation is difficult and the information is extremely sensitive. The present situation’s not of our choosing, but we have to deal with it as best we can. If we get safely to where we’re hoping to go, you’ll have to be told what’s going on, but nothing’s settled yet and there are factions involved in the discussion who still want everything kept quiet. I shouldn’t be talking to you at all, but we don’t want anyone dying on us if we can help it. Please tell your companions to remain calm, and patient.”