Limbo System

by Rick Cook

  What the hell that bastard expects to see from here I don’t know, Jewett thought as he placed the box against one of the burners. Still, this was the place where the boss wanted a box, one in the same place in each of the four shuttle bays. According to Jewett’s alien friend, the boss still hadn’t come across with the gold, so Jewett didn’t have a lot of choice.

  The tacky surface of the box adhered instantly when Jewett snugged it against the burner. Relieved, the rock jack turned and pulled himself back to the access ladder.

  I wish to God I’d never seen that damn gold, he thought.

  “Hey Steve, time to get moving,” Walt Jacobs yelled as he pounded on his friend’s door. He looked at his watch again. Today was duty day for both of them and most of their gang of vacuum jacks was already suited up and headed for the airlock.

  “Hey Steve, time to get a move on,” Walt Jacobs called from the door. Bustamonte didn’t move.

  “Come on, you lazy fucker. Get your ass in gear before Padilla comes down here and kicks it between your shoulder blades.”

  Still no sound from the huddled mass on the bed.

  “Steve?” Jacobs called again. “Steve?” He stepped across the room and reached out to touch his bunkmate’s shoulder.

  There was a low animal moan from beneath the blanket and the mass jerked and moved spastically. The blanket fell away and Bustamonte’s head thrashed against the pillow. Blood ran from his mouth where he had bitten his tongue and his eyes rolled back in his head so nothing but white showed. Again he moaned.

  Jacobs slammed the communicator button next to the wall screen. “C-23 medical emergency,” he yelled. “Medical emergency C-23.”

  “Do we have any idea what happened to him?” Jenkins asked the doctor.

  “Not really. Obviously he suffered a seizure of some kind. There is evidence of severe neural deterioration and his cognitive processes as well as his motor function appear to be affected. We’ll know more in a couple of days, of course . . .”

  “Of course. Meanwhile, what’s your best guess?”

  The doctor pursed his lips. “If I had to guess now, I’d say it’s a toxic reaction of some sort. Probably a drug.”

  “Do we have anything on this ship that would produce that kind of reaction?”

  “Oh yes, but how he could have come in contact with it, I cannot imagine. His bunkmate appears to be completely unaffected, you know, and there are no other symptoms anywhere else in the crew.”

  Jenkins turned to DeRosa who had been standing silently by. “You’re the ship’s Provost Marshal. I want you to deputize as many reliable people as you need and search this man’s cabin and locker.”

  Jenkins was still at his station on the bridge when DeRosa swam through the door. Her lips were pressed into a tight, white line.

  “Did you find anything in Bustamonte’s locker?”

  “These,” she said, holding out her hand. Cupped in the palm, were five shiny capsules filled with what appeared to be golden oil.

  “Are those standard?”

  DeRosa shook her head. “Medical’s got one for analysis, but they don’t match anything on any of the manifests. I’ll tell you something else. I don’t think they came from anywhere on this ship.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Jenkins agreed. “Okay, that’s it. I want you to deputize enough people to search this ship from one end to the other. Parties to work at least in pairs with pairings chosen at random. Each searcher is to watch the others and each part of the ship is to be searched at least twice. I want to know what the hell else is on this ship.”

  “Right,” said DeRosa and turned away.

  “Oh yes. Break out those pistols in the PM’s locker and issue them to crewmen you can trust. Two to guard the bridge, two to guard the drive and two for life-support control. And put those guards in spacesuits.” He shook his head. “Al, I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.”

  It didn’t take long for Jenkins’ premonition to start coming true. Within forty-five minutes, there was a call from C.D. MacNamara acting as vice-president of the Ship’s Council.

  “I understand you have ordered a search of the ship,” MacNamara said without preamble.

  “That is correct.”

  “By whose authority?”

  “By my authority as captain.”

  “Your authority as captain does not cover the non-military people on this ship,” MacNamara said tightly, “and it most assuredly does not run to searching their personal belongings.”

  “Doctor, my authority runs to anything that affects the safety and proper functioning of this vessel. Would you care to see the relevant regulation?”

  “Why was not the Ship’s Council consulted about this?”

  “Because there wasn’t time.”

  “Surely, a matter of an hour or two—”

  Jenkins cut him off. “Dr. MacNamara, I already have one man in sick bay apparently suffering from God-knows-what kind of drug reaction. I have reason to believe there is other contraband on this ship. I did not have an hour or two to convene the Council.”

  “So you intend to violate the civil rights of every person aboard without so much as consulting their representatives? No consultation, no attempt to win their cooperation, just, boom, pry into everything.”

  “I intend to protect my ship.”

  “Captain, the Ship’s Council will take a most serious view of this matter.”

  “I certainly hope so, Doctor, because believe me, I am very serious about this.”

  He broke the connection and DeRosa’s face replaced MacNamara’s.

  “Well, I was expecting that,” Jenkins said.

  “Yeah,” Iron Alice agreed. “But I expected Aubrey to deliver the message. Wonder where he is?”

  “Probably lining up Council votes to have my head on a platter.”

  “That going to stop you?”

  Jenkins grinned. “Hell no. They can’t do that until we get back to Earth. Meanwhile, this ship is my responsibility.”

  MacNamara sat in front of the blank screen, drumming his fingers on the console. Dr. Aubrey was off somewhere and unavailable and this would require an emergency meeting of the Ship’s Council. That meant he would have to be the one to call it. But first he made another a quick call over a private channel.

  What in the hell? Fawn Wilson went over the wiring in the riser again and checked it against the image on her hand terminal for the third time.

  With an effort, she wiggled backwards out of the access hatch. At 157 centimeters and 84 kilos, Fawn was spectacularly misnamed. No one with her build had any business trying to fit into the riser access spaces. But she was also a very good internal maintenance tech and there weren’t enough of them to be choosy about who went where.

  “Hey Henry, take a look at this.”

  Her partner, a slender blond man with a beak of a nose pulled his head out of the panel he had been checking and came to peer over her shoulder.

  “Looks normal to me,” he said, playing his light up and down the riser.

  “What about that?” Fawn put her own light on a black metal box fixed to the wall of the riser.

  “Standard mod box.” He punched it up on his own terminal. “It’s on the schematic.”

  “Yeah, but what the hell’s it doing there? There’s no reason to cut anything into the circuits here. If you want to make a mod, the place to do it is in the wiring cabinet up on the next level.”

  Henry just shrugged. “It’s listed, isn’t it? That’s good enough.”

  “Bullshit,” Fawn Wilson said, punching up a number on her terminal.

  “Well, it’s listed here as an authorized modification,” Clancy told the chunky woman on the screen, “but I don’t remember it.” He called up another document in a window and scowled. “This doesn’t look right to me. Stay where you are and I’ll be right up.”

  He spun away from the screen and made for the door. “Maintenance found something funny in a riser up on Spin-3,” h
e called over to his boss. “I think someone’s been tampering with the ship’s drawings.”

  “Shit,” Ludenemeyer said without any particular heat. “The way this day’s going that wouldn’t surprise me. But get the hell back as fast as you can, will you? We’ve got people all over the damn ship and just about no one left in engineering.”

  Clancy waved and kicked off down the corridor.

  “Well,” DeRosa said, “so far we’ve turned up two caches of drugs—Earth-type, a vacuum still, several gallons of moonshine and a submachine gun.”

  “A submachine gun?”

  Iron Alice smiled. “DeLorenzo brought it aboard in his luggage. Maybe he sleeps with the damn thing instead of a teddy bear.”

  “Anything else?”

  DeRosa turned grim again. “Yeah. Eight items of indeterminate function but probably alien origin and about a kilo of gold that isn’t on the manifest. We’re questioning a couple of the technicians, a lab worker and one of the scientists now.”

  “One of the scientists? That’s going to rile the Council even more.”

  She shrugged.

  “Hell, ask me if I care,” Jenkins told her. “Anyway, where are you finding these things?”

  “Most of it wasn’t in living spaces. In the last few hours, all that we found has been stashed outside quarters, some obviously hastily.”

  “Making them nervous.” Jenkins nodded. “Good. Now what have you done with the contraband?”

  “The alien stuff’s in the labs being examined—being very cautiously examined. The rest of it we gave back to the owners or left where it was.”

  “Even DeLorenzo’s submachine gun?”

  “I figure we’ve got bigger fish to fry. We can worry about DeLorenzo and his toy later.”

  The search of the Maxwell did not go unnoticed elsewhere.

  “Something has gone wrong.”

  “I don’t know, but they are searching the ship.”

  “That topples the tree. Tell our agents among the humans to act immediately.”

  “What happened to stir them so?”

  “Apparently, 312 was giving drugs to some of the humans and one of them became ill.”

  “Maladroit idiots! We must move now.”

  “Quickly! The others are moving. Strike before it is too late.”

  “Strike now!”

  “Now!”

  “Now!”

  Nearly twenty humans get messages over the communications channels. “Now! You must act now.”

  PART V: SENTE

  Once again, Billy Toyoda floated in cyberspace and watched the patterns of information converge, melt and flow away in neon swirls against the blackness. Heavy action today, the computerman thought as he watched the rise and ebb of shapes.

  It was all information, he knew. Each of those shapes and lines indicated a different kind of information flowing into or out of the ship’s computers, or control signals rippling out over the ship’s nervous system. He could put names to nearly all of them, but he preferred not to. To Billy, the patterns themselves were reason enough.

  He shifted, relaxed—and then tensed again as a flash of movement caught his eye. Off in a neon cage skyscraper at the far reach of his vision something had flickered where there should be no flicker at all.

  There! There was another one out in another direction, an instantaneous bit of wrongness disturbing the pattern he knew intimately.

  And there! And there! Bright bits of information glimmered and flashed in ways that were totally, dangerously wrong. The whole structure of the ship’s cyberspace was being subtly distorted.

  Billy Toyoda had never seen anything like it before, but he knew what they were. “Security breach! We have a breach of the computer systems!”

  All through cyberspace, the dark forms were multiplying.

  Lulu Pine was grumbling over a series of images when her terminal chimed. With a muttered curse, she flicked the incoming call onto the screen. There was her Owlie.

  “Now Lulu. The time has come. The Judgment is at hand.”

  Lulu dropped the papers in her hand and her face lit up with a pure, clear joy that the alien had never seen before. As the papers fluttered to the floor unheeded, the Colonist realized they might have trouble with this one.

  Further aft, the shuttle bays were racked by a violent explosion as William Jewett’s “observation devices” blew up with enormous force.

  The charges were directional and the explosions sliced through the shuttles’ plug nozzles like so many knives. Composites shattered, metal warped and tore and control electronics were reduced to dust. In milliseconds, all four of the Maxwell’s shuttles were put out of action.

  But that was only the beginning in Bay One. Unlike the others, Shuttle One was kept fueled for trips to Meetpoint.

  The blast slashed through the ablative coating of the plug nozzle and ruptured the hydrogen and oxygen lines beneath. A gout of colorless flame erupted as the hydrox ignited.

  Normally, the fuel in the cooling lines running through the nozzle would have been only enough to scorch the paint and warp the bulkheads in the shuttle bay. However, the blast had ruptured the main valves and hydrogen and oxygen from the main tanks fed unobstructed into the fire.

  Alarms screamed in the bay and trouble lights blossomed red on the panels in engineering and the bridge.

  “What the hell?” Ludenemeyer yelled as his board lit up.

  It took him only a few seconds to decipher the warnings and only seconds longer to grasp the import of a fire in Bay One. He blanched and hit the general alarm.

  Like some comic book avenger flying through a city of neon skeleton skyscrapers, Billy Toyoda zoomed in on the dark skittering things that threatened his realm.

  He reached into a crevice between two glowing constructs and yanked out one of the invaders. Heedless of its struggles, he opened it up and turned it inside out, exposing its full workings. He paid special attention to the shape of its “mouth” parts, designed to suck information and to the “egg sacs” beneath which would encapsulate the stolen data and send it back along the glowing paths to where the thing’s masters waited.

  The design was alien and very clever, but Billy started weaving a defense almost instantly. First a gesture and dark portals dropped across the furthest extensions of the neon rivers, isolating the Maxwell’s cyberspace from the outside world. Next he raised a series of internal barriers like walls of smoke to separate the cyberspace into parts.

  In the back of his mind, Billy was aware that he was sitting at a terminal pounding keys and manipulating other input devices, but he ignored that as much as he possibly could. The secret to working in cyberspace was to keep your visualization of the whole intact and not get distracted by the physical forms of input and output.

  Ruthlessly he forced his attention even more completely into his glowing neon city under siege.

  Major Autro DeLorenzo was asleep in his room when Toyoda sounded his alarm. Normally, he wouldn’t have gotten it, but one of his “modifications” had taken care of that.

  DeLorenzo was awake and out of his bunk like a cat. He grabbed his compad to check as the fire alarm from the shuttle bays came through. That was enough. DeLorenzo hit the button that activated his sabotage devices.

  Then he got dressed and started loading magazines for his submachine gun.

  Thousands of kilometers away, an alien snapped his beak in frustration. The Master of the strangers’ computers was fighting back with unusual effectiveness. The thing shouldn’t even have detected the invasion yet and already half the Colonists’ approaches had been shut off.

  And he was not alone. There were at least two other sets of worms loose in the ship’s computers, interfering with his own and making it harder to locate the data he needed.

  Worse, his worms had not yet located the critical data. Even though the enemy’s entire cyberspace seemed to be open to his probes, he could not find what he sought. Somehow, primitive as they were, the visitors had come
up with a way to seal off part of their cyberspace. Well, he would find that hidden information space nonetheless. He had his own skill and thousands of cycles of his culture’s experience behind him.

  Grimly, the Colonist set his worms to coursing back along the information paths, seeking the one that led to the treasure he sought. It never occurred to him that a culture that had used computers for less than two centuries might not keep everything online at the same time.

  “Engineering, what’s going on back there?” Jenkins yelled into his screen. But the screen stayed blank.

  “What the hell?” He punched an alternate circuit. Still nothing. “Communications, what’s wrong?”

  The communications officer came on the screen. “I don’t know, sir. The circuits have been interrupted all over the ship.”

  A window opened in the corner and Iron Alice DeRosa broke in. “That’s not all that’s been interrupted. We’ve lost control to engineering, life-support and just about every place else.”

  “General quarters,” Jenkins snapped. “Pass the word any way you can—relay through suit radios if you have to. Or use runners.” He turned back to the communications officer. “And get me some circuits!”

  He looked up at his second-in-command. “Al, I want you to go back to the secondary bridge in engineering. As soon as you’re established there you have command. Get us out of this system and do it fast!”

  DeRosa nodded and the screen blanked. She got up from the pilot’s station and passed Jenkins wordlessly as she headed aft. The two guards at the door moved aside to let her pass.

  One of the ships hovering off Meetpoint suddenly fired its engines and swooped toward the Maxwell. In the confusion, no one on the starship noticed. The ship scooted in close to the hull of the starship and stopped over the lock with a quick burst of braking rockets. Two dozen figures in shiny suits tumbled from the hatch and dove for a lock in the hull.