The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  Done what, where?

  Ryan wanted to live here, not die here. He did something that he could get to and undo if he got what he wanted. Therefore, inside? Something he could get to from inside? Had to be, because when the thrusters were on nobody was going out the locked seals.

  Oh, shit. That meant he had six years of time, both of Ryan’s tours, to dissect and a surface area of too much to examine. Too much squared, with too many crevices, corners, that could hold a control box. If Ryan planted something long ago, it would decrease the search area, a little. There had been less interior surface thirteen years ago, fewer places to be.

  But the past three years was a better time to stash something away. An interface. It could be something that small, that simple. Ryan couldn’t depend on an interface he’d left twelve, eleven, even ten years ago. The thing would need new batteries from time to time, and code had changed too much. The thing would have to be reprogrammed from the bottom up.

  So a new interface, or something that looked like one. A simple, everyday thing; if someone found it, big deal. Yes, there were more places to hide things now, but Ryan would want to be able to get back to where he’d left his control box.

  Triggered from inside, but he’d worked outside. Something outside controlled from inside. Cash Ryan wanted to live here, not die here. He would not put the interior of Kybele at risk; he wouldn’t want to risk his own precious hide. But he wanted to offer a real threat to Doughan, something—a threat to the external systems. A crippling but not lethal threat, something that would take years, decades, a lifetime to repair, rebuild.

  So he could tell Doughan how valuable he was. How he, Cash Ryan would protect the ship from dangerous saboteurs, like the fake Seed Bankers.

  And then the future was his. Rewarded for finding and disabling the threat, he could live happily ever after, with Elena, except what that twisted mind might do to the concept of “happy” made Helt shudder. The man had blackmailed his own mother.

  This office was too small, SysSu was too small. Helt wanted the relief of seeing an infinite horizon; he wanted to Gå på ski i fjellet and look out at distant peaks, at moonlight on snow. Because he couldn’t do that, he walked out through the lobby to the agora.

  The agora was deserted. The hut in the mountains was long ago, the securities of mor and far and childhood forever unreachable, and this was the future he wanted to live in. It was in danger, and Doughan hadn’t showed up yet, damn him. Doughan wasn’t coming across the agora toward SysSu.

  Doughan’s interface was still in Nav, on the floor. The IA’s trail tonight was clearly marked, if Doughan would only look. The IA had set out all the bait he could think of. Invading Doughan’s private space, his office, should have been enough to bring him out. What was he waiting for?

  The spectrum display in the lobby was in reverse order now, violet to red. Nothing else had changed. Helt had to keep moving. Lobby to lounge, lounge to lobby, with stretches and bends, and his muscles felt better, but the designated Special Investigator was still building endangered castles in the air, structures built of wild associations, improbable coincidences, hopes and nightmares. The only thing to do was to see how high they got before they toppled.

  So okay, Ryan had messed with something outside, something that was vulnerable. Helt didn’t have a clue, not an engineer’s clue, not a commander’s clue about what it might be. He wished he could ask Doughan what he needed to be looking for.

  * * *

  Because he was a careful man, Helt had checked the heat pack in the Nav jumpsuit before he put it on again and took the elevator down to Level Two. By the time the projections of Kybele’s surface were glowing in the Mission Control room, he’d sorted out that Ryan would want to set up his sabotage near Nav, near the shuttle port, somewhere near the waistline exit, the drop tunnel, where departing craft fell through Kybele into the Big Black. New colonist former contract worker Ryan would want to keep working on Nav projects.

  The drop tunnel was close to the changing room. The tunnel was the most direct route to the surface there was, four kilometers of nothing that went straight down and out. Shuttles loaded and unloaded passengers and freight, closed their airlocks, were towed around a nice gentle curve and then dropped nose down through the longest polished black stone tube ever imagined.

  Helt wanted a close look at the surface near the drop tunnel.

  The nearest outside cameras were mounted near the periphery of the hole. There were others on the spinning struts of the plasma shield that would travel by every seven minutes. Because traffic was still leaving from time to time, the frame was stationary for now, floating in place over Kybele’s black and barren surface. The nearest strut was tethered a kilometer away from the shuttle bay.

  Doughan’s command chair was beginning to feel comfortable. Helt trawled visuals of the surface near the drop tunnel, staring at one square meter of rock at a time, circling the perimeter. He didn’t see anything in the first circuit, so he went a meter out and began again. Whatever was out there was probably black. It was probably black and hidden in a pit. Black night on black stone for three and a half minutes, blue earthlight on black stone for three and half minutes; the movie was boring and this wasn’t the way to scan it anyway.

  Shape recognition was faster. Straight lines, squares, rectangles, curves sized at, oh, one meter, generous, to five centimeters, wimpy, and that meant the program might tag some pebbles, but.

  Find.

  Black, blue, black, blue, the fast-forward made Mission Control look like the inside of a crazed lighting storm. Helt reached out to thumbnail the flickers to a corner of the screens so he could look at something else, anything else. He needed sharp vision and his eyes were getting tired.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?” Doughan asked.

  Helt felt himself jump in a startle reaction he hoped didn’t show. He had expected, planned, hoped for Wesley Doughan to show up, and still, he was surprised by the behavior of his own right hand. It hovered immobile, frozen in place, flickering blue, above the keyboard. Doughan rolled a chair back from the next station and calmly began to sit himself down. Helt forced his hand to move and clicked the search display down to a thumbnail. Officer Evans was live in NSS, listening in. He hoped.

  Helt took a deep breath. He started to tell Doughan he had no idea, really, what he was looking for, but he didn’t. He’d been looking for Doughan, because he figured he’d come here, sooner or later. He didn’t say that, either. “Something small enough to haul out in a tool kit, drop—”

  “Or throw,” Doughan said.

  “Along with a wrench or something.”

  “Tools are tethered. You take a wrench and a clamp. You clamp the something and release the tether on the clamp.”

  “Even better,” Helt said. His terror didn’t make his voice quaver, and he would forever be proud of that when he got old. If he got old. “You clamp the something and leave the clamp on it. Then you say, ‘Oops. I forgot something,’ and you go back and get the wrench. And leave the something behind. I figured I’d start looking close to the shuttleport.”

  “Why?” Doughan asked.

  “So Ryan could trigger whatever’s out there on the skin without much power, and without checking out a closed suit.”

  “That’s the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Doughan didn’t use the f-word in situations of ordinary stress. That he had now didn’t increase Helt’s sense of personal safety.

  “I wish I’d thought of it.” Doughan rolled his chair closer to the workstation. It was quiet in here. Helt heard his own pulse hammering in his ears. He had enough adrenalin flowing that any trace of fatigue was completely washed away.

  “So what do you think it could be?” Doughan asked.

  “Probably not an explosive,” Helt said. “That would do some damage, sure, but turning rock into rubble wouldn’t hurt us much. And I don’t know what’s vulnerable this close.”

  An unf
amiliar “Meep, meep” came from the thumbnail. It had stopped flickering.

  No matches.

  “What was your search perimeter?” Doughan asked.

  “Half a k.”

  “You’re looking in the wrong place. Let’s try the drop tunnel.”

  Views of slick, curved black rock scrolled by, a starscape behind them. “Why?” Helt asked, but the cameras finished their sequence and he saw a ladder, a substantial one with big fat steps, carved into a channel in the wall. Cables and pulleys flanked it on the right, a line of dull charcoal track between them. Doughan started at the skin end of the tunnel and focused on the ladder. There were shadows behind every rung of it, plenty of potential hiding space.

  The view froze. The line of shadow at the left side of the ladder was irregular, thicker at the back. Something was fastened behind it. Helt reached to zoom it. Doughan was quicker. About five centimeters of black rod, the thickness of Helt’s thumb, was fastened behind the left side rail of the ladder, just below one of the steps. The rod’s end hung about five meters up from the big black outside.

  “Antenna,” Doughan said.

  Helt went to site archives. The cameras were set to capture images every three days. Motion sensors, sure, but they cycled every three days in addition to that. The last set of images had been taken yesterday. He clicked back; the rod was there on October 6. It wasn’t there on October 3. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  “That recent,” Doughan said. “It’s a relief in some ways. That thing wasn’t there to be missed for very long.” Doughan pulled his hands away from his keyboard and spread his fingers wide, made fists, stretched out his hands again. “It’s really tempting to send a camera bot up for a closer look. It’s really tempting to do that right now. Let’s not.”

  Helt hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until he started to answer. He exhaled. “Okay.”

  “I don’t want to jiggle the damned thing or set off a motion sensor, if it has one. Do you?” Doughan asked.

  Helt shook his head. “I guess Ryan figured we wouldn’t find it before the shuttle goes by on its way out.”

  “We might not have.”

  “Heh. We did. But he had to know that unless things worked out the way he wanted, he’d be on that shuttle. Or maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he was so sure of himself that he had no doubt at all he’d be staying.”

  “I wish I knew what it was.” Doughan frowned at the screen. “Okay, so there it is. The question is, what is it supposed to do?”

  “It’s supposed to mess up something.”

  “Helt. I have to know what it is. I’m going to send a bot down with a sensor to tell me whether it’s live or not.”

  “Then you’ll call the bomb squad?”

  “Let me see if it’s live first.” Doughan picked up a driver console. Call it by any fancy name you wanted and what Doughan held in his hands would still give you an advantage in any video game you cared to play.

  “How long is it going to take this bot to get there?” Helt asked. He watched Doughan play with the controller. Sure enough, even if you were Kybele’s Navigation exec, controllers seemed to work better if you stuck out your tongue a little.

  “Two, three minutes,” Doughan said.

  Helt shut up and watched the bot descend the line of track beside the ladder. It had manipulators and cameras on flexible stalks. It had a hitch behind it for hauling a platform. It could bring supplies up and down in the unlikely event that a departing craft developed trouble on its way out.

  Doughan probably didn’t know about the extra minutes that had to have been added to the SM hour. He’d come here without an interface because his was outside the door until and if he’d picked it up.

  On one level, Helt’s fingers busied themselves with the network that kept communications live and found that interface access was no problem in the drop tunnel. If you were in a closed suit, you could call home. No problem. On a different level, he watched himself working beside Doughan, both of them determined to get Kybele out of danger before they dealt with anything else. Time had stopped in here. No past, no future, existed until this job was done.

  It was precisely the mind-set he got from time to time, the one that had kept him from looking for the real length of the SM hour.

  Helt leaned back in his chair and looked at the trapdoor in the ceiling.

  “It’s not live,” Doughan said.

  Helt was very glad to hear that.

  “It’s not leaking charged particles, either. Here’s a view.”

  Helt watched the bot hold up a manipulator arm and shine a light on the little box. A camera stalk wavered back and forth, focused itself, and sent its images to Mission Control. The best close-up was a sharply focused view of a rectangular black box with a raised bar code on its otherwise flat surface. Helt asked a program to read it. “It’s a microwave transmitter, printed in the industrial park, here, on October 1.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving. It could be filled with explosive. I can’t think of a bomb that size that could do anything more than scar the pleasant symmetry of our exit tunnel.” Doughan still held the controller.

  “You don’t want to call the bomb squad,” Helt said.

  “Not yet.”

  If the thing blew itself to shards it would be hard to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Cash Ryan had put it there. There probably weren’t biologic traces on it, though, anyway. It had been placed by a mittened hand, or a bot.

  Helt looked at the specs on the bot’s camera stalks. “You could X-ray it.”

  “Good idea.”

  The radiogram showed circuit cards and wiring that matched a slice of transmitter programmed into the 3-D printer specs Helt pulled here from David II’s territory. Helt sighed. “Okay, it’s a microwave transmitter-receiver.”

  “Aimed at nothing,” Doughan said.

  Helt had spent days trying to tease sense out of an hour that had just turned into an hour and ten minutes and looked very different because of it. He’d scanned screen captures that didn’t show Cash Ryan stalking women until he moved the time frame. There was nothing on the surface that could be damaged—now. Not yet.

  There had to be a visual somewhere in Nav files.

  “What are you looking for?” Doughan had his elbow on the desk and was using his fist as a prop for his chin.

  Time stops when you’re busy. Helt tried to remember that, and never did. “A cross-section of Kybele that shows the ice layer in place.”

  “There won’t be one over the exit port. A dome goes over that. We don’t want to have to plow out to launch the landers and we want to keep that ice around for a long, long time. All the way home, actually. We’ll be running excess heat out beneath it, freezing and thawing that ice, all the way.”

  “So no ice there to damp down the signal.” Helt filled Mission Control with a projection of Kybele en route, a dirty white ball with the tiny glass eye of the drop tunnel at her waist. The snowball nestled inside a spindle of struts, struts that supported a gossamer net made of coils of superconducting wire.

  “No ice there, but enough ice on Kybele to insulate the surface from some of the heat we’ll be making, because the surface has to stay cold,” Helt said.

  “To protect the superconducting coils,” Doughan said. “Because if a point on the mesh heats up—not much, just a little, because a puny microwave transmitter’s been hitting on it every time it goes by, it transitions out of the superconducting state.”

  “‘And vaporizes the coil with a satisfying burst of energy.’ I read that somewhere once.” Because he could, Helt blew up the shield, well, the projection of it, in a satisfying display of multicolored fire. For a very fast job, he thought it was pretty good. Doughan leaned back in his chair to watch it fade.

  “Yeah,” Doughan said. “That little toy could do that. That bastard took a long-term view, didn’t he?”

  Build the plasma shield and deploy it. Turn it off around Saturn and scoop up ice. De
ploy it again when we’re leaving Saturn. Kybele could not even get to Saturn without that shield in place.

  “I still want some solid proof,” Helt said. “I want to find what generates the signal he planned to use to turn the thing on.”

  “He could have sent it a wake-up call from his interface.”

  “That’s instant ID,” Helt said. “I think he wanted something a little harder to trace.”

  “Like a transmitter, a duplicate of that transmitter-receiver out on the skin. I still want to bring that one in,” Doughan said.

  “I know you do. But I want the complete picture,” Helt said. “I want unmistakable physical evidence that connects this to Ryan. When we present this, I want the narrative complete. I want the controller that turns this thing on and I think I know where it is.” Helt leaned back and stared at the trapdoor in the ceiling.

  “Up there?” Doughan asked.

  “Yeah,” Helt said.

  * * *

  Doughan’s interface was not at the door of Mission Control. This time, while Doughan was climbing into a coverall in the changing room, Helt found some gloves and put them on. The camera on his interface would serve to photograph the interface or controller or duplicate transmitter-receiver in situ. He didn’t plan to touch it, and he didn’t want traces of Helt on anything he might find nearby. He found a plastic-lined canvas sack and stowed it in a pocket. There might be other evidence around.

  Elena was home, far out of range of anything that might blow up here, he hoped. Evans knew they had gone into Mission Control. If Doughan killed him tonight, he’d have to destroy Helt’s interface to hide what he’d done, and Evans would be listening until that happened. If only one of them came back …

  All hell would break loose.

  He would die fighting if he could.

  Helt pulled down the staircase, the one right here in the corner of the changing room. This was going to take some acting. He had to cover how hair-triggered he felt. He had to move with caution and stay alert, and hide his fears, if he could.