The Relativity Bomb

by Arlene F. Marks

  Karlov strolled to the chair Drew had indicated and lowered himself onto it. His expression was guarded, but Townsend could guess what was going through his mind. He’d sat across a table from looks like that many times in Security interrogation rooms back in New Chicago.

  In the voice he’d always reserved for such occasions, Drew now said, “It has come to my attention that you’re not who you claim to be.”

  “You reviewed my biofile—”

  “—and you’re not who it says you are either. I warned you when you first arrived that holding back information from me was not a good idea, Max. Or whatever your name really is.”

  Karlov’s face darkened. “We made an agreement. You accepted my protection and I told you the whole story.”

  “You told me a story,” declared Townsend. “Half-truths at best.”

  “Better than the lies that someone else is obviously feeding you,” growled Karlov.

  “It’s someone I trust, and that’s more than I can say about you. This is not a conversation, Max. It’s your last chance to come clean and save yourself.”

  “Why should I bother if you’re not going to believe anything I say?”

  “I will if it’s the truth.”

  Townsend paused to let the implications of that statement sink in. Meanwhile, the two large men beside him, Ozzie to his right and Sky to his left, were playing their roles to perfection. Standing with their legs braced and their arms crossed over their chests, they were a quiet, menacing presence. Karlov had to believe that whatever fate Townsend decreed for him, there was enough muscle aboard the Hub to ensure that it was carried out.

  Watching for a tell, Drew waited until the first shadow of uncertainty crossed Karlov’s face, then leaned forward and said, “You never knew Bruni Patel, and you never had to fight off his murderers. So tell me, how did you really lose your eye?”

  Silence.

  Townsend had encountered this before as well.

  “You don’t want to talk? Fine. I’ll talk and you can listen. There’s a lot about you that doesn’t add up. For example, all those half-healed head lacerations you had when you arrived on the Hub. They weren’t inflicted by anyone trying to kill you. Assassins with knives tend to go for the neck or the torso. Or maybe the femoral artery in the thigh. So, either you have the clumsiest barber in creation, or somebody was digging for something under your skin. Was it some sort of implant, Max? Was your eye part of it? Was that why it had to come out?”

  Karlov shifted his weight.

  Inwardly, Townsend smiled.

  “And then there’s your apparent fixation on killing Nandrians. They’ve never visited Earth, which is supposedly where you were born, so there’s no way you should know about them. And yet, you do, while knowing next to nothing about the culture of your alleged home world. Frankly, Max, your handlers ought to be ashamed of themselves. They sent you here woefully unprepared. You set so many red flags waving that your cover was certain to be blown.”

  Karlov had stiffened in his chair. “Are you done?”

  “That depends. Are you ready to talk?”

  “I wasn’t sent here to spy. As I told you, I was sent to protect.”

  “Yes, by someone calling himself my friend on Earth. But there was another mission that brought you to him so that he could send you to me. We know a lot more than you think. We know you came here to steal, and we know what you came to steal. The question is, for whom? Tell me who you work for and I may let you keep your body and soul together.”

  “I’ll tell you something much more important. The rat that I brought you has escaped from her cage.”

  “I know.”

  “What you don’t know is that she carries a message inside her, something that could change the course of Human history. It’s vital that she be located and safely confined, immediately.”

  Before Townsend could respond, the tube car door opened and Fritz Jensen bustled out onto C Deck. “Oh, my goodness, I forgot to bring you folks your java! I’m so sorry, Mister Townsend!” All apologetic smiles, he carried a pot of steaming brew in his right hand. Three empty mugs dangled from the curled fingers of his left hand. And directly behind him came the Doc, carefully keeping Jensen between herself and Karlov.

  Jensen stopped beside Karlov and leaned forward to put the pot and the mugs on Drew’s desktop. At once, Ruby appeared and poured herself a java. She picked it up and took a sip. “Thanks, Fritz. It’s wretched, as always.”

  “We aim to please,” he replied, taking a step back.

  She drank again, then spun and returned to her console, carrying her beverage. Townsend filled the second mug and brought it to his mouth, noting with satisfaction that Karlov’s gaze hadn’t moved from the pot. They had him. He loved Jensen’s java, and they’d just shown him that there was no way this batch could have been doctored.

  “Lydia’s not here,” said Drew casually. “You can have hers if you want.” And he poured the third mugful before leaning back in his chair.

  Karlov hesitated only a moment. As he reached forward to hook the handle of the mug, the Doc made her move, with a quickness that caught even Townsend off guard. There was no time for Karlov to react. They heard the hiss of an injector, together with his exclamation of surprise. In the space of no more than a second, he went limp and rolled head first to the floor, bouncing off the front of Townsend’s desk with an audible thump on his way down. Jensen and the Doc could have grabbed his shoulders to prevent him from tumbling over, but neither one of them had made the effort. In fact, Townsend couldn’t help noticing the smile of satisfaction on the Doc’s face as she watched Karlov fall. It appeared that Max himself had provided the “damned good reason” she needed to stop protecting him.

  “Whatever you gave him, it’s certainly fast-acting,” Drew remarked, leaning across his desk to stare at the unconscious man sprawled on the deck.

  “I wasn’t sure how his blood chemistry would react to the sedatives in our pharmacy,” replied the Doc. “So, for safety — ours, not his — I just pumped enough into him to bring down a bull elephant.”

  “You weren’t afraid of overdosing him? Not that I disapprove, necessarily, but we do have to keep him alive,” he pointed out.

  Her smile evaporated. “Mister Townsend,” she scolded him, “I am a medical practitioner, bound by the Hippocratic oath.”

  “My apologies. How long do you think he’ll be out?”

  “He’s not an elephant, so it’s hard to say. At a minimum, though, I would estimate five to seven hours.”

  That was plenty of time for the ratkeeper to work his magic. Townsend signaled to Deniro and Tate. “Take him down to the SPA room and hook him up. Doc, would you give them a hand at the other end, please? And wake him up as soon as O’Malley is ready to run the program.”

  She’d been about to say something, but changed her mind. “Since you asked nicely,” she replied instead, and followed them toward the tube car.

  “Ruby, get me O’Malley on the comm. And Lydia. They’ll need to work together if we’re going to pull this off.”

  “Right away, Chief.”

  It wasn’t the con he’d originally planned. In fact, it was the Doc’s idea, and it was much better. When Karlov came to, he would be trapped in U-Town with no memory of putting on a skin and no way of exiting the program on his own. The ratkeeper’s avatar would convince him that his consciousness had somehow been uploaded out of his body and into the Hub’s intranet. While Karlov was busy dealing with that reality, Lydia and the Doc would be monitoring his vital signs, ensuring that he could be interrogated at greater length later on. At the same time, Townsend and the rest of his crew could turn their full attention to the pressing real-life problems at hand.

  — «» —

  Thirty-three hours.

  After a fruitless search of the station for two wayward rats who obviously
didn’t want to be found, Townsend stepped out of the tube car and into the middle of a heated argument between Gouryas and Singh on an L Deck that was still far too turquoise for his comfort.

  “No matter what you do, there won’t be time to test it,” exclaimed Gouryas.

  “That’s all the more reason to focus on something that will prevent the battle,” Singh declared. Then, noticing Townsend, the engineer turned and informed him loudly, “All he wants to do now is create repulsion fields.” Thanks to you. The words hung unspoken in the air.

  “Gentlemen, the clock is ticking down,” Drew reminded them patiently. “Have you made any progress at all?”

  “Some,” said Gouryas.

  “But I understand you’ve been working individually on two separate projects because you can’t agree on which direction to take, is that right?”

  “Yes,” they said reluctantly, more or less in unison.

  “Then I’m going to change your assignment. I want you to drop everything and build me a bomb powerful enough to blow this station to tiny bits. If there’s no Daisy Hub then there will be nothing for the Rangers and Nandrians to fight over. It will be a huge sacrifice, but at least we’ll have prevented an interstellar war.”

  Two pairs of eyes went saucer-wide with shock.

  “What? You don’t like that assignment? Then figure out which of the other two gives us the best chance of success and work together to make it happen. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” mumbled Gouryas.

  “Singh?”

  “Clear.”

  “I’ll be back to see how you’re doing in a couple of hours. Please try to have some good news for me.”

  Townsend turned his back on the two dazed engineers and returned to AdComm.

  — «» —

  Thirty-two hours.

  “Anything I can do to help, Chief?”

  Waiting was not something Drew Townsend did well. Slumped behind his desk, he glanced up and saw Ruby’s sympathetic face perched atop his filing cabinet partition.

  “You can tell me I’m on the right track,” he told her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just keep having this horrible feeling that our tekl’hananni might not actually be about solving the problem. What if it’s about having the common sense to realize that we can’t do it without the Nandrians’ help, even with the manual?”

  “There’s a manual?” she said with poorly feigned astonishment.

  “Don’t you start that,” he warned her, his lips quirking involuntarily into a smile.

  Ruby walked around the end of the partition to join him at his desk. “Okay. If this whole exercise has been about knowing when to ask for help, I’d say you’ve got your plan D.” She made a face. “Or maybe it’s E. There are so many going on that I’ve lost count.”

  Townsend straightened in his chair. She was right. He hadn’t been formulating a plan — he’d been following multiple leads. Presented with a mystery, his inner field investigator had taken over, compelling him to explore all the various possible ways to solve it, and unwittingly turning Townsend himself into an obstacle for his crew to overcome.

  He had no time to kick himself. The tube car door to the left of his desk chose that moment to open, and out barreled the Hub’s resident wildcat, Teri “Tiger” Mintz, under a full head of steam.

  “Mister Townsend!” she blustered. “I just tried to visit U-Town, and it’s not there! It’s gone! Unavailable, says my screen! Where the hell are my characters? If O’Malley has lost a single pixel of my family—!”

  Townsend hardened his face and pointed imperiously to a chair. “Sit!”

  She was obviously in no mood to follow orders. When her chin had risen to a thirty-degree angle, he pointed again and repeated, “Take a seat, Teri, and I’ll explain.”

  She folded her arms over her chest, remaining defiantly on her feet.

  Ruby just rolled her eyes and walked away, shaking her head.

  “You showbiz types are so damned temperamental,” muttered Townsend. He turned his attention to his computer screen and began mentally counting the seconds, determined to ignore her for as long as it took her to calm down.

  When he got to twenty-four, she huffed loudly and dropped into the chair he’d indicated earlier.

  “Your characters are stored in protected memory, just as I promised,” he told her, still staring at the display on his light screen. “U-Town was completely backed up. The backup copy was modified and is now running non-stop in the SPA room as a virtual reality experience for Karlov. And for O’Malley, who’s skinned up and sitting right beside him, playing the part of a fellow prisoner,” he added, finally turning to look her in the face. “The original files are all sitting safe and untouched on the SPA server. When the con is wrapped, everything will be restored to the way it was.”

  “So I can’t access the original files because they’ve been put in storage?”

  Hearing this, his brain pounced on an idea: Original files in storage. Of course!

  But again, it was just one of many possibilities, perhaps worth exploring, perhaps not. If Daisy Hub was going to come out the other end of this situation in one piece, then his first order of business had to be getting himself out of everyone else’s way.

  “Ruby,” he called across the room, “set up a senior staff update meeting in half an hour, my office. O’Malley and the Doc may be tied up, but make sure Lydia and Soaring Hawk attend.”

  “Roger, Chief.”

  “And, Teri…? I can’t tell you how glad I am that you dropped by.”

  He gave her the sunniest smile in his repertoire, holding it until the nonplussed diva finally got to her feet and left the deck.

  — «» —

  Thirty-one hours.

  Townsend watched a dozen or so confused and curious people wander into his workspace and mill around for a few moments before finding places to sit. He did a rapid attendance check: Gouryas and Singh, neither of them looking happy; Lucas Soaring Hawk, come straight from one of the thruster wells, it appeared, and still wiping something off his hands with a rag; Lydia, her brow just as furrowed as it had been the last time he’d seen her; Gavin Holchuk, standing in a back corner and surveying the room with a faintly amused expression on his face; Vera Beale and Ray Oolalong, fidgeting restlessly and probably present only at Singh’s behest; Jason Smith, kept out of the loop so far but clearly not anticipating any good news; Orvy Hagman, most of his earlier hostility dissipated now that Karlov was temporarily out of the picture; Fritz Jensen, no doubt wondering what a chef could contribute to the discussion but looking pleased at having received the summons; and Ruby, watchfully monitoring the proceedings from her console and ready to jump in whenever necessary.

  Townsend stood up and raised a hand to get their attention.

  “I’ve called this meeting because it’s time to put our heads together and compare notes. Each of you needs to hear what the others have been doing. Each of you may have information that someone else in the room can use. Working together, we’re going to fit all our individual efforts into one master plan to resolve our situation, at least for the time being. Let’s begin with update reports. I asked Soaring Hawk to look into two things: breaking the Hub out of orbit if we have to remove ourselves from harm’s way, and separating the three parts of the station if it should become necessary. Mister Soaring Hawk, how is that investigation coming along?”

  The propulsion wizard stood up, one fist tightly clenched around the rag he’d been using, and cleared his throat. “I’ve only had time to inspect our main thrusters so far. Those are the ones at the south end of the Hub. Despite the fact that they’re hardly ever used, the mains appear to be in good shape. In my opinion, they’re all we’ll need to achieve escape velocity and get Daisy Hub and everyone on it away from the battle zone. That’s provided we keep the stat
ion all in one piece.”

  “And if we break it into thirds?” asked Hagman, frowning.

  “Then everything south of J Deck leaves orbit, and anyone caught higher up heads for an evac pod and gets religion.”

  Silence dropped like a boulder into the middle of the room.

  “Maybe you’d better elaborate on that,” Townsend advised him.

  Hawk sucked in a breath and explained, “The attitudinal thrusters on each section of the Hub can be repositioned to speed us up or slow us down when needed, in orbit. It’s how they were designed to operate. We’ve been doing a good job of maintaining them, and it’s possible to reinforce them, up to a point. Problem is, they’re physically smaller than the main thrusters and can’t generate the same amount of power. Give me half a year and strike Zulu and all the Rangers blind and I can shift the mains around so that each section has a couple. But that would create another problem.

  “Earth’s government doesn’t want us getting any ideas about taking the station for a joy ride, so they’ve made sure we never have sufficient fuel on hand to actually go anywhere. I keep enough in reserve for the main thrusters to break the Hub out of orbit and send us into space in a direction of our choosing, holding back a ten-second burn so that we can apply the brakes. Divvying up the fuel among the three parts of the Hub would make it impossible for even one of them to escape.”

  “So, the thrusters at the north end of the Hub can move that section forward and backward?” mused Lydia aloud. “In and out of range of the sensor field, for example?”

  She had figured it out, Drew could tell. Her frown was gone and there was a thoughtful set to her mouth.

  “Spill it, girl!” called Ruby from her console.

  “We got Rodrigues’s short-hopper through the sensor field by having him shut down his weapons as he approached,” Lydia recalled. “Wouldn’t he have turned them off anyway, once he’d docked? Wouldn’t any ship have to do that?”

  “Brilliant!” exclaimed Gouryas. “We just have to make sure the portal section can be precisely reconnected and the tube car shafts perfectly aligned.”