The Relativity Bomb

by Arlene F. Marks

  Jensen had brought over mugs of his famous sludge to wash everything down. When the Ranger had cleaned his bowl and pushed it to the center of the table, Drew said hopefully, “Can we consider this the new commander’s inspection tour? I mean, it’s not like you’ve never been here before.”

  Rodrigues leaned back in his chair. “What’s the matter, Townsend? Have you got a one-eyed man hiding out on the station or something?” he teased.

  “Actually, we do,” said Drew, pretending to share the joke. “His name is Ahab and he’s in the SPA room right now, hunting for Moby Rodent.”

  The other man laughed.

  In the end, Captain Rodrigues received the same orientation tour as Ruby had given Townsend the day he’d first arrived. Thankfully, the one-eyed man, Yoko, and the as-yet-nameless black and white rat all remained safely concealed the whole time. The Ranger could now be satisfied that every part of Daisy Hub was present and accounted for and was being used for its intended purpose — other than the field generator, of course, which seemed to have an agenda of its own — and that every crew member would recognize him the next time they met.

  The moment Rodrigues was back inside his shuttle, Drew made for the tube car, activating his wristcomm on the way.

  “Lydia, set up a meeting for me with senior staff, an hour from now, in AdComm. And have O’Malley report to me there right away. We’ve got a problem.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Lydia stood in the triage area of Med Services, surveying an empty room and frowning in confusion. The Doc had asked for a private consultation with her before the staff meeting. In the more than seven standard years that they’d been aboard Daisy Hub together, the Doc had never made a request like this. Intrigued, Lydia had dropped everything and hurried down to H Deck. Now what?

  She heard the Trauma room door hum open and a familiar voice behind her: “Good! You’re here.”

  Turning around, she saw a sheaf of printout being thrust at her and automatically held out her hands to receive it. “What’s this?”

  “That’s what I need you to tell me,” declared the Doc. “Come inside.”

  Lydia followed her into the pale green alcove that served as Doc Ktumba’s office, just off the Trauma room. When both women were seated, the Doc stared silently at her desktop for a moment, her lips pressed tightly together. Then she raised her eyes to meet Lydia’s curious gaze and said in a rush, “I told you earlier that both Yoko and the black and white rat had been infected with retroviruses. I’ve since taken a closer look and discovered that the retroviruses are quite different from each other. I think the one in the rat that Max Karlov brought with him contains an encrypted message, and I need your help to decrypt it.”

  Lydia glanced over the bars and blanks on the first page of the printout. “And this is the retrovirus’s genome?”

  “Yes. RNA takes the shape of a single helix, with bases consisting of cytosine, guanine, adenine, and uracil. ‘C’, ‘G’, ‘A’ and ‘U’. Put that together with the ‘G’, ‘C’, ‘T’ and ‘A’ of DNA and you have a pool of base pairs on which to build a cipher. Can you create an algorithm that will search for patterns and groupings and convert them into bits of information?”

  “I can try, Doc, but this sort of thing is really O’Malley’s forte. Shouldn’t you be talking to him?”

  She huffed impatiently. “In truth, I’d rather not even be talking to you. If I had the expertise, I’d decrypt it myself. But I don’t. My only consolation is that you, at least, know how to keep a secret.”

  “You aren’t planning to let Townsend know about this?”

  “It depends on the content of the message. Until we know that, you and I must be the only ones who are even aware that it exists.”

  — «» —

  “You’re going to love this,” said O’Malley with a smug grin. He’d arrived in AdComm ten minutes early for the meeting, strutting like a peacock as he stepped out of the tube car and made his way to a seat directly in front of Townsend’s desk. One of these days, thought Drew irritably, the ratkeeper was going to reach too far while patting himself on the back and dislocate his shoulder.

  “What did you find?”

  “First of all, hats off to whoever created Karlov’s creds, because they’re brilliant.”

  “And yet, you spotted the forgery.”

  O’Malley gave a shrug that Townsend guessed was supposed to convey modesty. “Only because I’m paranoid in addition to being brilliant myself. And because there are advantages to living on the edge of Earth space and receiving database updates bundled into packages. I’ve configured our system to segregate each package as it arrives, scan it for worms and viruses, and then run a comparison with all our previously recorded data, flagging duplications or discrepancies. That was how I knew your creds were bogus when you first arrived.”

  “So Karlov wasn’t there until suddenly he was?”

  “Like Athena, sprung full-grown from Jove’s forehead. It’s a brand-new identity and it’s flawless. Fully cross-referenced. Whoever spliced it in was a pro, probably working for some government agency. And if we were on Earth, where updates are constantly streaming through the system, we’d never have twigged to it. This Karlov guy is a plant, boss, I’m sure of it. The only question is, who sent him?”

  “No,” said Townsend slowly. “The first of many questions is, who the hell is he? Any ideas?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t got a clue. I checked for people who died at about the time Max Karlov would have appeared, but none of them matched his age or physical profile. And there’s no record of anyone remotely resembling him taking passage on an Earth-bound transport from any of the colonies. My guess is that he’s a ‘ghost’ — someone who, for one reason or another, never got entered in the database to start with.”

  Except that Karlov had supposedly been born and raised on Earth, where not being in the database meant not having a credit account, which in turn meant not having access to housing, proper nourishment, or regular medical care. On a colony world, it was possible to drop off the grid and still have a decent life. People on the margins of Earth’s society, however, tended to either die young of illness and neglect or get scooped up and mercilessly exploited by the criminal element. The few that Drew had encountered while working cases for New Chicago Security had been wraith-thin and trailing an aura of despair. Certainly, nobody would describe Max Karlov in those terms. So, he probably hadn’t been born on Earth or any of its colonies. And the Doc’s genetic testing had effectively ruled out the possibility that he might be an alien.

  Townsend felt a sudden tightening in his midsection as a third alternative occurred to him.

  According to the message Rodrigues had just delivered, the one-eyed man was looking for a rat. That could only be Yoko. The European gene brokers who had coerced Naguchi into signing over his patents knew how valuable she was. They wouldn’t stop trying to acquire her just because their first agent, Nestor Quan, had been thwarted. They would send someone else, giving him a strong incentive to complete the mission successfully — in Karlov’s own words, his life. The Doc was convinced that Karlov had been created in a laboratory. What if she was right?

  But there was also the matter of that black and white rat which, according to the Doc’s theory, must have come from the same lab as Karlov. And what about his disturbing request to practice killing Nandrians in the SPA room?

  Nothing about this man was adding up. Which was he — a soldier, as Lydia suspected, or a victim in need of protection, as the Doc maintained? In any case, what was the story behind the condition in which he had arrived on the Hub?

  Unanswered questions spun restlessly inside Townsend’s mind, threatening to turn the itch in his brain into a full-blown headache and reminding him of an ancient Indo-Asian curse: May you live in interesting times.

  These were interesting times, indeed. Drew dropped into the chair
behind his desk and watched the rest of his senior crew arrive for the meeting. At this point, he knew three things for sure. First, he couldn’t tell his crew what he’d been told about Karlov without also revealing its source, and that would blow his EIS cover and very likely cause a mutiny. Second, Rodrigues had said all the right things during his visit to the Hub, but he was still too “by the book” for Townsend’s liking. There could be no further sharing of secrets with this man, or of information that might lead him to uncover any. Unfortunately, that included warnings about how the Nandrians would most likely respond should he decide to flex his EIS muscles on or around the station. And third, the Ranger captain must never be shown a reason to believe that there was a threat to the Hub. The Nandrians couldn’t be allowed to think so, either. Nor Earth, for that matter. In the unpleasantness to come, there was no one to whom House Daisy Hub could turn for help without starting an interstellar war.

  That thought alone was depressing to contemplate, and the grimness was contagious. Each time someone glanced over and met the station manager’s eyes, a conversation halted. By the time he got to his feet to address the assembled group, the silence in AdComm was thick enough to spread on a cracker.

  “Some new information has come to light,” he told them.

  “From Rodrigues?” Lydia cut in.

  “Most of it, yes. He’s now officially the new commander of Zulu. I’m hoping we’ll be able to work with him, but only time will tell. Meanwhile, he repeated something to me that Bonelli had also pointed out, using different words: as long as an enemy can plot our location based on our orbit, invisibility alone isn’t going to protect us from being fired on or boarded. We have to be able to defend ourselves at a distance. Since we already know that Earth’s government is never going to outfit this station with heavy weapons, that leaves us with three alternatives, two of them unacceptable. We are not going to ask the Rangers to be an armed presence aboard Daisy Hub; and we don’t dare become a participating House in tekl’hananni by asking Trokerk to do it. The first of these is just inviting trouble. The second would be suicidal.”

  Townsend paused to gauge the reactions of his officers. As his gaze swept the room, he saw Holchuk sitting with his arms crossed and wearing an unreadable expression.

  “And the third alternative, Chief?” Ruby prompted him.

  “This was suggested by something Rodrigues said. A repulsion field strong enough to deflect weapons fire. If we can make it work, it will at least buy us some time. Repulsion field technology isn’t new; every enclave on Earth is surrounded by a one-way barrier to keep out intruders, and every vessel in the Fleet can throw up shields to protect against space dust and debris. Odds are, we already have something like it on the Hub.”

  Townsend gazed meaningfully at Gouryas and Singh. Gouryas was nodding enthusiastically. Singh’s features had contracted, pulling his habitual smirk into a hyphen of disapproval as he slowly shook his head back and forth.

  “Which is it, yes or no?” Drew demanded.

  “Yes, we have the technology,” Gouryas declared. “Our field generator on M Deck establishes a dome-shaped area of gravitational attraction that is stretched northward by amplification relays. Bubbles on top of bubbles. If we reconfigured the Hub’s gravity field to free up the relays, we could theoretically repurpose them to create a shield for the outer hull.”

  “Theoretically,” echoed Townsend.

  “It would dig into our spare parts locker and reverse the direction of gravity on Decks I through M, but I think it could be done,” said Gouryas.

  Singh’s complexion had visibly darkened. With some asperity he now pointed out, “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here? We still have a Nandrian device to figure out—”

  “—and a repulsion field could be all that saves us if we’re not able to turn off our invisibility cloak before the next ship full of Nandrians shows up and they get offended and start firing on us,” Gouryas retorted.

  Uttering an exasperated syllable, Singh shot Townsend a look.

  Lydia cleared her throat loudly, drawing everyone’s attention. “Would it help you to know how we got the Rangers’ shuttle through the sensor field without tripping the invisibility switch?” she asked demurely.

  “Yes!” both engineers replied.

  She told them.

  “So, all we need to do for now is program the sensor field to recognize the codes of any approaching Nandrian ships,” Singh summed up drily. “Just two small problems: first, we don’t know how to program the field; and second, we don’t have the codes.”

  “Not yet,” Lydia supplied. “Not until I request them from Nagor.”

  “Brilliant!” said Gouryas. “And if you can get him to give you a bunch of them at once, we can analyze them—”

  “—and maybe use them to figure out how to calibrate the field using the molecular paintbrush,” Singh concluded. “It’s a slim chance, but it’s better than none at all.”

  A self-satisfied grin had taken up residence on Lydia’s face. She’d clearly been spending too much time around the ratkeeper — some of his cockiness had rubbed off on her.

  Meanwhile, Gouryas was so excited he could hardly sit still. “Mister Townsend?”

  “Yes, go!” he replied, shooing the two engineers toward the tube car door. “Invent! Create!” Save all our lives, he added privately.

  “Was that it, boss?” asked O’Malley.

  He knew it wasn’t. With a covert glance at the forbidding features of Security Chief Orvy Hagman, Drew turned his attention to the second major puzzle of the day, the mysterious one-eyed man who, according to Rex Regum’s message, had come to the Hub to steal Yoko.

  “I had O’Malley here do some digging,” he said. “We now know for certain that Max Karlov was added to Earth’s database shortly before his arrival on Daisy Hub. It’s not his real name.”

  As Hagman was opening his mouth to speak, the Doc sprang to her feet and cut in ahead of him. “People travel under assumed names all the time. It doesn’t mean there’s anything sinister going on.”

  “It might if his true identity was never in the system,” said Townsend, matching the sharpness of her tone.

  “Never?” Ruby sounded intrigued. “So someone has sent us a one-eyed ‘ghost’? This just gets better and better.”

  “Could he be an alien?” Lydia wondered.

  “Absolutely not,” declared the Doc. “I’ve mapped his genome. He’s Human, no question.”

  “This was not an amateur job,” O’Malley added. “Not like Major Cisco. Whoever put Karlov’s creds online knew exactly what they were doing.”

  “Now you’re saying he’s a spy?” bristled Hagman, rising from his chair.

  “Can you say for certain that he’s not?” O’Malley shot back.

  Townsend rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and silently prayed for strength. “Calm down, everyone. We’re not ready to stick any labels on this man. We’re only saying that the mystery surrounding him seems to be deepening, and until we have answers to our questions we need to be even more cautious around him.” He turned to Lydia and asked, “Where is Karlov right now?”

  She consulted her compupad. “In the SPA room, sparring with Muhammad Ali. Well, boxing is a form of combat,” she went on defensively, “and I wasn’t about to—”

  “Understood,” said Drew. “How is he doing?”

  “Too well,” she told him, troubled. “According to my readings, he’s been hard at it for more than an hour and is barely breaking a sweat.”

  “What happened to extreme skateboarding and white water rafting?”

  Casting a sympathetic glance at Hagman, she replied, “He’s given them up for now. When he isn’t baking with Nora or interfering with the characters in U-Town, all he wants to do is fight. It’s as if he’s training for something.”

  Training for battle? Against Nandria
ns? A throbbing headache began punctuating Townsend’s thoughts.

  As an agent, he had two options: turn Karlov or terminate him. Termination was looking a lot more practical at the moment, even though it would polarize the crew and make a permanent enemy of Doc Ktumba.

  “Chief?” Ruby prompted.

  Everyone was watching him. Townsend cleared his throat and told them, “There’s no more that we can do for the moment. You’ve been brought up to date. Keep doing what you’ve been doing and remain vigilant for anything worth reporting. Meanwhile, I’m going to try to get some straight answers from Karlov. Lydia, as soon as he’s done in the SPA room—”

  “—send him to Med Services for a check-up,” commanded the Doc, her eyes resting like targeting lasers on Drew’s face. “Failure to perspire under stress could be symptomatic of a glandular condition, and I want to verify that Max is in perfect health before the interrogation begins.”

  Her tone fairly dripped ultimatum. This was the Doc he’d met on his first day on Daisy Hub, the one who could make a charging rhino stop and rethink its plan.

  “All right, then,” he said irritably. “First the exam, then the questions.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “Drew? Gouryas and Singh are asking to meet with you on L Deck. They sound excited,” Lydia called to him from her station on AdComm.

  “Are they excited with good news, or excited because we’re all fried?” he called back.

  “Excited with good news, I think.”

  It was probably just wishful thinking on her part.

  “Tell them I’m on my way. And what about Karlov? Is he in Med Services yet?”

  “Nope. Still in the SPA room, still going strong. I programmed the boxing match to end in a draw, so it will last as long as he does.”

  “It’s been three hours. Shouldn’t he be getting a little tired by now?”

  She gave him a helpless shrug. “I’ll notify you the moment the Doc is finished with him,” she said, and returned to staring intently at the display on her computer screen. Whatever it was, she didn’t look happy about it.