27
Linley’s direction had Trace ask the whereabouts of an engineering tech, whom she then asked about ‘Mr Turner’. That brought her here, down a long tunnel walk between several habitats, occupied by huge pipes and the whine of great pumping engines. The air here was hot, generators throbbing in confined space, the huge pipes thudding rhythmically as they pulsed with liquids used in the extraction of minerals far beneath the surface.
The access gantry was a steel walkway along the pipes, lit by sodium yellow light. After ten minutes of low-G bouncing they emerged into the main pumping station, where pipes from five different directions converged into a massive tangle of machinery, pumps and engines. Workers examined controls, and shouted conversations above the noise amid the multi-level gantries. Trace climbed two flights to the top gantry level beneath the domed ceiling, and saw an office door built into the lower part of the dome.
She indicated to Kono, who indicated in turn to the marines. They spread across the gantries, weapons casually to hand and not threatening. A few struck up conversations with curious plant workers, who understandably wondered what was going on. She brought Kono with her to the office door, and considering there was no hope of her knock being heard above the noise, turned the handle.
Beyond was a makeshift office. The outer wall was curved to match the outer wall of the plant below, with several large portholes offering a wide view of the silver ice horizon, some near Crondike buildings alive with light, and Heuron V’s huge gas hemisphere looming large beyond. The floor beside and behind the door arced upward, the ceiling of the domed plant behind, its irregular space lined with storage shelves and access steps. Crates filled the shelves, and some odd artefacts, clearly alien. Some long, decorated poles that might be weapons, a box on a frame that might be an instrument… and numerous other things Trace had never seen before, and could not guess at.
Down the sloping floor before her were chairs, tables and several large transparent display screens. Writing in alien text raced across each of them, and on a table in the middle, light scanners raced back and forth across the pages of a big, bound leather book. A little robotic manipulator turned the page, the light and screen writing paused, then raced on once more across the new page.
To one side, a man looked up from another small screen upon a table filled with odd screens, tables, even some scrambled paper files. Behind him, a small kitchen in an even more cramped corner, obviously far less important than all these big screens dominating the room, and the artefacts across the shelves behind. He looked up at Trace and Kono in alarm. “What do you want?” he growled at them.
“Stanislav Romki,” said Trace. “Are you him?”
The man looked them up and down, eyes narrowed. His head was shaved, perhaps purposely. His stare was baleful, intense, with large dark eyes. “Who’s asking?”
Kono circled left, rifle half raised. “If you’re thinking about a weapon under that table, please don’t,” he said.
The bald man held both hands cautiously where they could be seen. “I’m not quite that stupid, Staff Sergeant. You’re Phoenix, aren’t you? Which would make you Major Thakur.” Looking hard at Trace.
Trace nodded. “That’s correct, Mr Romki.”
He didn’t dispute the identity. “How did you find me?”
“I won’t reveal sources,” said Trace. “But my Captain told me about you. He said he’d never met anyone who knew the things you knew.”
“He’s right,” Romki said darkly. “No one else does.” He got up, swinging his bodyweight easily from the chair in the low-G. Over his jumpsuit, he wore a leather vest with red and black markings. Chah'nas, Trace thought. With only two armholes. A custom made thing, and if it was anything like the real ones, it would have inlaid armour and hidden weapon sheathes. “Why is Phoenix in Heuron? Shouldn’t you be at the parades?” Romki was middle height and not especially imposing, and had the smooth, educated tones of a sophisticate. But from his manner, Trace got the impression of a man who spent his life studying aliens because humans didn’t agree with him.
“There’s quite a few people in Heuron at the moment who you’d think would be at the parades,” said Trace. “Yet somehow managed to end up here.”
Romki considered her for a moment, some of the tension fading. An air of grim resignation crept into his expression. “Here, um…” he looked around at his cluttered kitchen. “Would you like a drink? Either of you? Coffee, beer, water?”
“Water please,” said Trace, with a surreptitious gesture at Kono to lower the rifle. “Staff Sergeant Kono has coffee, white, sugar if you’ve got it.”
“Oh I’ve got sugar,” said Romki, moving lightly to his kitchen. “I know people who can get me real sugar, minus the inspections. Please, take a seat.” Neither of them did. In low-G, standing was no burden anyway. Trace strolled to the big leather books before the display screens. “They’re chah'nas,” said Romki, glancing her way. “I got them my last time in chah'nas space. The screen on the left is doing the literal translation, and then the other one is doing the contextual… you know the thing with chah'nas tongues, the grammar is all contextual, you need to know which frame-setting you’re in or else you’ll get the whole meaning wrong. So one for the literal, and one for the contextual, then I cross-reference them at the end and see what we can sort out. All my own design.”
“You travel there a lot?” Trace asked.
“There, lots of places,” said Romki with a shrug, as the coffee machine gurgled. “I’m supposed to be there now.”
“Fleet don’t know you’re here?”
“Not today,” said Romki, warily. “They know about this little hidey-hole, of course, but I’m hardly ever here, and I wasn’t supposed to be back for months yet. I come here so I don’t have to put up with all the bullshit customs at Apilai — this way if I want to just pop in and out, I don’t have to bother customs or Fleet or anyone. And these tough mining boys outside?” He pointed at the door. “They’re all unionised and they don’t take shit from Fleet, so no spies. No surprise they let you guys through though, half of them have either family in the marines, or were marines themselves.”
“Fleet command, and rank-and-file marines, are two very different things,” Trace acknowledged.
Romki nodded knowingly. “And since you’re not here to arrest me, I guess there’s something else going on?” He leaned on his bench, waiting for the coffee machine. “Something to do with your Captain? Finally ended up in trouble with his own Fleet, has he?”
“You could say that,” Trace conceded. The problem with someone who was not a people-person, getting a feel for where he stood on things could be like extracting teeth. And if she assumed he was somehow ‘on her side’, whatever her side was, and it turned out he wasn’t… well she wasn’t in the mood to start killing civvies just to shut them up.
“Smartest Fleet captain I ever met,” said Romki. “That’s not saying much, mind you. Pack of pole-climbing square heads, most of them. But Pantillo sought me out. Had lots of ideas about chah'nas and tavalai, about the empire and the uprisings… a lot of them wrong, but he was on the right track. And he actually listened when I corrected him — incredible how many smart people refuse to do that, even confronted with people who know a lot more than they do. We’ve kept in touch since, but we do it quietly. As you’d know, given you’re here.”
“So you’re not allowed to talk to anyone?” Trace surmised.
Romki chuckled tiredly. “No. I’m not much of a conversationalist, apparently. I’ve been told I talk but don’t listen.”
“So why stay employed by Newtown University? If you can’t take students, teach, lecture, publish, give interviews? Surely if your research is that secret, Fleet would just employ you in some Intel department?”
“You don’t think they’ve offered?” Romki snorted. “They’ve offered all right, with all the generosity of a crime lord suggesting you do business together. Or else, you know?” He made the shape of a pistol with
one hand.
“So why don’t you?”
“Because fuck them,” Romki snapped. “Fuck all of them. They don’t want me to work, they want to shut me up. They’ll disappear me into some little cubicle if they can, and that’ll be the last anyone ever saw of Stanislav Romki. Sixty years I’ve been doing this. I’ve lived with chah'nas, I’ve even lived with tavalai, I speak the languages… I have five volumes of history on the Chah'nas Empire, two million words, all blocked from publication under the security laws. Too sensitive, they say. These people are scared of facts. And there’s nothing in all human space that scares me like human leadership scared of facts.”
The coffee machine stopped gurgling, and Romki poured, controlling his anger with difficulty. Then he came with coffee to Staff Sergeant Kono, and water for Trace.
“Thank you,” said Kono, noticing a decoration on Romki’s sleeve. “You know the blades?”
Romki glanced at his sleeve. “Yes. Do you know kon-dra-kis?”
“I know a little. I know you need four arms to do it properly.”
Romki shook his head. “There are many different forms, the good instructors make allowances.” He indicated his storage shelf. Up against the wall on a rack rested a pair of sheathed blades, above red-and-black body armour. “It’s an amazing art. I’m not all that good but I hold my own against their kids. Misunderstood people, the chah'nas. I’ve many friends there, and I miss them whenever I’m here.”
“We’re about to be seeing a lot more of them,” Trace suggested, watching him carefully.
Romki’s eyes darted a little. “Perhaps.”
“You’re hardly ever here, but you somehow managed to be here for this.” Trace indicated back toward Hoffen Station, and the unfolding mess of Fleet Command’s ordinances. “You knew it was coming, didn’t you? And you’re a student of history, and you couldn’t miss it. Did your chah'nas friends tell you that humans were about to open their territory to chah'nas ships?” Romki gazed at her, unblinking. “I bet a lot of rank-and-file chah'nas aren’t thrilled at having to open their territory to humans, either.”
Romki folded his arms. “Why don’t you just tell me why you’re here, Major? What trouble is your Captain in? I know Fleet High Command have never liked him. I was given a list of people I’m especially not allowed to talk to, people they said flat out they’d destroy me if I was caught talking to them. His name was right at the top.”
“We’ve been in Merakis,” said Trace. “Chah'nas beat us there. Unopposed by Fleet. Bunch of tavalai historians and others were there waiting for humans to arrive, they got a face full of chah'nas instead. All massacred.”
Romki barely blinked. “Well that was always going to happen. What was Phoenix doing in Merakis?”
“On the way to Merakis,” Trace added as she ignored the question, “we ran into a hacksaw nest. We took some of their corpses for salvage.”
Now Romki looked amazed. “You destroyed a nest single-handed?”
“Just now we pulled up alongside an alo warship at Hoffen Station dock. And wouldn’t you know it, our hacksaw corpses reactivated and started moving, like some reanimated bodies from a horror movie.” Romki stared. Not astonished at the revelation. Just stunned, Trace thought, that someone was confronting him with it. “You knew,” she said pointedly. “There’s a connection between hacksaws and alo, isn’t there? Is there also a connection between hacksaws and chah'nas? Because I figure that if Fleet Command were going to threaten to shut you up over anything, that would just about do it.”
Romki exhaled hard, eyes closed. “Son of a bitch,” he murmured. And took a deep breath. “Look, come and sit. Sit!” he insisted, beckoning them over to the kitchen. He pulled a couple of chairs from the table, a low-weight skid on the floor, then took one and sat. Kono sat on his sideways, while Trace turned hers backward and rested hands on the back, both seeking easier ways to stand up fast if necessary. Romki leaned forward intently.
“I’ve had this place scanned for bugs, I’ve revealed confidential information before and not been arrested for it, so it’s clean.” He took another deep breath. “You should understand. Half of Fleet don’t want me shut up, they want me dead. The other half love my work and keep me funded, it’s always a guessing game to know which half is in the ascendency at any time. But I’ve a civilian profile and I’ve told certain trusted journalists about it — it would be incredibly damaging for them if I mysteriously vanished, and they don’t dare the publicity. Yet. You wanted to know why I stay employed by the university — that’s why. Friends, contacts, public profile. Newtown has some of humanity’s best scholars, they’d miss me if I vanished. Mostly I go there to cultivate contacts who’d make life difficult for Fleet if they killed me. I’ve also got little data bombs out on various worlds and stations. Trusted people will release that data if I go missing, and it will be… hideously embarrassing for Fleet if that happens. It’s one big reason I was happy to talk to your Captain, he’s yet another person who’d cause Fleet difficulty, thus making me safer.”
“Why?” asked Trace. “What are you studying that could make you that much of a target?”
“How about,” Romki said with methodical clarity, “a linguistic link between alo and hacksaws?” Trace blinked. “We’re speaking English. Do you know where English came from?”
“Not my area of expertise,” Trace admitted.
“Wasn’t it, like, the regions around old England?” Kono suggested, frowning as he strove to remember something he’d read. All kids had some old Earth history thrown at them in school. A few even remembered it.
Romki looked encouragingly at the big Staff Sergeant. “Britain,” he corrected. “Go on.”
“Well there were the local English, then the… wasn’t it the Vikings? And the French.”
“The Angles, the Saxons and the Normans, yes,” said Romki. “That language group used to be called ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a long time ago. But there’s an even older ancestor, because that whole European family, with both Latin in the south and the Scandinavian tongues, all actually have some common roots they shared as far south as India. Your people, Major.”
“If you say so,” Trace said mildly.
“An English fellow named Sir William Jones first postulated it in the seventeen hundreds, old Earth time. It was called the Proto-Indo-European language, and it explained why Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit all had these intriguing commonalities. Now you have to go back… well, thousands and thousands of years to get to that common protolanguage, and back then, most humans weren’t keeping very good records, so it all becomes very vague. But Spiral history has been recorded with modern computers for tens of thousands of years, the biggest loss of historical knowledge has been all the damn wars destroying records.
“Now there are records in chah'nas space that the chah'nas don’t touch — for all their good points, the chah'nas are not curious like humans are, they like to leave established understandings alone and look to the future. Another reason why they never got along with the tavalai, of course. And these records are of the very first linguistic recordings of the alo, when they first made contact with the chah'nas. For a long time the chah'nas were the only race the alo talked to. Since then, alo language has changed drastically — alo are not a static people, they’re constantly transforming, and their current tongues are nothing like their old tongues. You almost can’t make a transition map from old to new languages, they’ve changed that much… in humans you’d say it’s like English turning into Chinese in just a thousand years.
“But I’ve found a treasure trove of the old stuff. It’s safe, no one else knows where it is. And it has clear similarities to Ceenyne, which was the primary tongue of the deepynines, who were one of the main factions of the AIs, the hacksaws, who disappeared in the general direction of alo space during the AI civil wars, twenty five thousand years ago. With the deepynines it was a machine language, it’s based on numeric code but after a while they began expressing it audibly because direct
data-transmission doesn’t allow time lag for group consideration, which was causing them to make poor decisions in complex scenarios. The audible variants are similar to that early alo speech in the same way that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were similar. Suggesting a common ancestor. And when I try to trace just how similar, and look at how fast alo language has changed between their present and their past speech, and I overlay that onto what the deepynines spoke twenty five thousand years ago… I get an almost precise match in the degree of expected variation.”
And he gazed at the two marines, who stared at him, and tried to force their brains around all those unfamiliar concepts.
“Wait,” said Kono. “Are you saying the alo… are the deepynines?”
“I don’t know,” said Romki, with the amusement of an intellectual who could only laugh at the seriousness of it all. “Twenty five thousand years ago, one of the most vicious and devastating branches of the AI race disappears into what is now alo space. Twenty three thousand years later, just one thousand before humans appear in space, the alo appear and become friends with the chah'nas and chah'nas only. Alo today claim they killed all the deepynines. But what kind of species adopts the language of its enemy? Because they weren’t just influenced by it, this isn’t like the influence that American English or Indian English had on what we’re speaking now — this is structural.
“How could the alo have wiped them out, given that they only got AI-level technology after they beat them? Alo won’t say. And we sure as hell aren’t allowed in to look for ourselves, I know of at least three adventurous scholars who have tried and never been seen again, and the alo openly admit they’ll fire on anyone not-alo whom they find in their space. Maybe the deepynines built themselves an organic species from scratch. Maybe they adopted one that they found, and altered it in various doubtless unpleasant ways. All kinds of horrors present as possible. Or maybe they’re just friends, but you need an odd sense of humour to buy that one.”
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