Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  ”Perhaps I could draw your attention to—”

  — hot day. “I know, yes. No sign of the Mark One, some indications of recent ecological damage, and two Ostar life-signs.” He scowled. It lacked spontaneity, of course. “I want to know who they are and what they’re doing there, and I want to know now. Understood?”

  The Mark Two, of course, wouldn’t be able to see the two twinkling green dots that indicated the presence of the unexpected tourists. An Ostar fusion bomb could, by law, only be used against other, lesser species. If the target had Ostar on it, the biosignature sensor would detect them across two parsecs and the bomb would be paralysed until they’d been rounded up and removed to a safe distance. A piece of masking tape over the sensor head would put it out of action, of course, but that would be illegal, and so nobody would dream of doing such a thing. But they might, in a moment of unforgivable carelessness, forget to wire the sensor into the bomb’s own brain; in which case, planetside could see the little green twinkles, and the bomb couldn’t.

  “It’s just sitting there,” he said. “Why hasn’t it blown up the damn planet?”

  Someone replied, “It’s gathering data, sir. Assessing the planet’s defence system.”

  The director made a show of studying the figures. “There isn’t one.”

  “Not that we can see, sir. It takes the view that if it can’t see a defence grid, it must be a very good defence grid, and that’s why it’s decided to investigate further. After all, the Mark One—”

  “Yes, fine.” The director tried not to let his frustration show. Deep down, though, he bitterly regretted letting the technical people talk him into fitting the Mark Two with a level-9 artificial intelligence. After all, it was a bomb, military hardware; really, just a flying soldier with fins and an engine, its sole purpose to follow orders without question. It would’ve been far more appropriate to fit it with a level— 10 artificial stupidity. “Well? Can you see any sign of a defence grid?”

  “Sir?”

  He sighed. “It’s a perfectly simple question. We’re seeing what it’s seeing, or what it saw a few hours ago, at any rate. I take the view that a bunch of highly qualified canines like you people are rather better placed to interpret data than a bomb with a camera up its nose.”

  Pause. Then, “Not as such, sir. However, there are some anomalous readings that might indicate advanced technology. Here, sir, and here.”

  A red pointer highlighted some huddles of numbers on the big screen. The director looked at them. He’d noticed them, of course, when he’d taken his private sneak preview, but he hadn’t stopped to analyse them properly. “Could be anything,” he said. “Seen from orbit, I bet my egg timer gives off readings like that.”

  “Your egg timer is advanced Ostar technology, sir,” someone pointed out reproachfully. “It uses the same basic circuitry as an ion disrupter. We would incline towards the view that the Mark Two’s caution is not unjustified.” Whoever it was paused for breath, checked to see his throat was still there (a necessary precaution for a subordinate who’d just contradicted an alpha male) and added, “We should also consider the implications of the lifesign readings. Possible advanced technology and two Ostar on the planet”

  And all for the want of a tiny square of masking tape. If it had just been the tech indications, he could probably have bullied them into overriding the bomb’s tiny but conscientious brain and detonating; just as he’d bullied them into not connecting up the biosignature sensor in the first place. But the tech indications and the life-signs; if he tried to assert his authority he might prevail, or he might not. The essence of being a successful pack leader is not fighting battles you may not win.

  But it was so horribly frustrating. All the pent-up fury in his heart and brain wanted him to shout, I know they haven’t got a defence grid, I’ve been there, just set off the goddamn bomb! He couldn’t, of course. Also, there was the small matter of what had happened to the Mark One. If something had happened to it — not a defence grid because there wasn’t one, but something else; some weird anomaly in the planet’s atmosphere, some freak factor he hadn’t predicted and couldn’t explain — then it was possible the Mark Two would fail as well, in which case he’d face the distinctly unpleasant prospect of persuading the Governing Council to fund a third bomb, with no convincing explanation of what had become of the other two.

  “Fine,” he growled, and it was mildly reassuring to watch his subordinates instinctively arch their backs and flatten their ears. “Get me some answers on those two life-signs, and then maybe we’ll have some sort of a clue what’s going on down there.”

  Ostar literature had a wealth of classic manuals dealing with industrial relations, canine resource management and intrahierarchical interaction in the workplace. Nearly all of them were called The Art of War or something similar, and most of them headed a key chapter by quoting Gr’uuiu’s timeless maxim, Let them hate, so long as they fear. They all agreed that the best way to stop subordinates from thinking for themselves about inappropriate matters was to keep them stressed out and frantically running round in circles. It had worked for General Yk at the siege of H@no’otuk, and the director could see no reason why it shouldn’t work for him as well. Accordingly he snarled a series of orders, most of them impossible to obey or with entirely impractical timescales, scowled at a few key workers, and left them to get on with it.

  Bloody planet, he thought; more lives than a cat. The likeliest explanation was that the Mark One had simply got lost or hit a comet or broken down somewhere; after all, it had been built at the D’swewr shipyards, and the superintendent there was the nephew of the chairdog of the Governing Council; before his sideways promotion, he’d been head of the Arts Commission, a job he’d forfeited after absent-mindedly chewing the corner of S’lk’s Still Life With Biscuits. But he couldn’t be sure. What was certain was that a third request for funding would not be well received. It would mean having to let certain Council members know that he knew where the bones were buried, which in turn would make him an inconvenience. Things happened to inconveniences.

  The teleport took him home in a whirlwind of light and energy. Too late to go back to bed, so he sat at his desk and tried to soothe himself with tedious routine administration. Usually it worked very well, but not this time. Bloody planet. Horrible, bad primates. Grr.

  He heard a soft whimpering noise, coming from the kitchen. He glanced at the clock: time for Spot’s breakfast. He went through and opened a tin of hamburgers, as a special treat.

  12

  Novosibirsk

  In her dream, Lucy was walking in the forest when she met a unicorn. Hello, she said, and the unicorn said, Hello. Aren’t you supposed to by mythical, Lucy asked. I don’t think so, the unicorn replied, I’m characteristic Terran woodland fauna, it says so in the book. Lucy asked, What book? Well, this one, for a start, the unicorn said, producing a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript, loads of me in here, and there’s this one [it waved My Very Best Fairy Tale Book under her nose] and this one [The Unicorns of the Bronx, a minor classic of the urban fantasy subgenre, of which Lucy had once read two pages before giving it to a charity shop], and there’s loads of others. I’m being unobtrusive, see? I’m blending in. Ah, Lucy said.

  And then a green light glowed in the unicorn’s eyes, and it said, “Report.”

  Lucy looked at it, and she was amazed and astonished, because that was what she’d been expecting it to say.

  “Oh-three-one-one-three-six-oh-nine,” the unicorn said. “Report.”

  And Lucy took a deep breath, and she was about to start when something tickled her nose and she sneezed, which made her wake up.

  She opened her eyes. It was dark (Well of course it’s dark, it’s the middle of the night), and all she could see was the red glow of her bedside terminal, whose clock read 03:14:43.

  Lucy stared at it for a second or two, then said, “Lights.” The overhead light flicked on. She sat up and looked around. Nobody there. Wel
l of course there isn’t, silly.

  And then it occurred to Lucy Pavlov that she’d never been awake at 3 a.m. before; not ever, in all her twenty-seven years. She was, by nature and inclination, an early-to-rise-early-to-bed type. Very occasionally, with the help of scintillating company and strong coffee, she’d managed to prop her eyes open till just after midnight. Once, the day after she’d finished work on PaySoft 1.1, she was so exhausted she’d had a really good long lie-in and hadn’t got up till 9 a.m. Once she closed her eyes and her head hit the pillow, however, that was it. Dead to the world. You could stage a Lizard-Headed Women gig in the next room, complete with fire engines and a controlled nuclear explosion, and she’d sleep right through it.

  The room looked the same as when she’d last seen it, but she had a curious feeling of being in a strange place, almost like a different dimension. She yawned. So this is 3 a.m., she thought; hello. You’ve been going on around me all these years, and I never knew what you look like. Well, she thought, and ordered the lights off. They dwindled out, and she lay back on her pillow, staring at where she knew the ceiling to be. Trouble was, she was wide awake now. Usually, as soon as her head went horizontal her consciousness switched off until she woke up, not knowing who or where or what she was. A useful gift, which didn’t appear to be working. She felt as though she’d just stepped off a train in the middle of nowhere, to stretch her legs and get a breath of air, and it had gone on without her and left her stranded. Worse than that: you can’t walk home from 3 a.m.

  Go to sleep, she ordered herself. That didn’t work either.

  She closed her eyes and thought about the dream. It wasn’t hard to analyse. The business with the unicorn (or whatever it really was) had bothered her all day; well, fair enough. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the unicorn should’ve come back in her sleep and asked her an unintelligible question, presumably signifying the baffling mystery its real-life counterpart represented. The frustration of it all had been preying on her mind so much that it had woken her up. You didn’t need a psychology doctorate to figure that one out.

  Report. Wasn’t that what soldiers said? At least, they said it in movies, when someone had been sent on a mission, or when the starship had been hit by polaron torpedoes. In her dream, the mystery was demanding of her that she solve it; so, report. She couldn’t, so she’d woken up.

  Three in the morning; the undiscovered country. And, from what she’d seen of it so far, you could have it. A bit like watching TV with the sound muted out.

  She lay perfectly still, hoping sleep would come back and rescue her, but all that happened was that her feet started to itch. She considered getting up, making a cup of coffee, reading something, doing some work, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Getting out of bed was, for some reason, not an option. Why not? Because it’s not getting-out-of-bed time yet, of course. Stupid question.

  She thought, There’s a thing. I just woke up, and I didn’t have all that who-am-I-where-am-I stuff; I knew straight away that I’m me and I’m here and it’s now. Why was that? The dream; it had made her surface at an unaccustomed point in her REM cycle, or something like that. She felt like a computer that’s had its plug yanked out of the wall before it’s been closed down with all the ordained rituals. Her files were fragmented, her disks were probably corrupted to hell, she was basically a mess. But awake. An awake mess. The worst sort, really.

  She tried relaxing exercises. She’d read about them somewhere, never needed them because she’d never not been perfectly relaxed. She started with her toes and worked gradually upward, with the result that thirty seconds later she was as tense as the strings of a well-tuned guitar and one small step away from biting chunks out of her own arm. Get a grip, she ordered herself, and reluctantly obeyed.

  Sleep; that was what she needed. She closed her eyes and tried counting sheep. She counted fifty-seven, but the fifty-eighth was a unicorn with a huge golden spike between its eyes, so she gave that up in a hurry. No good, she said to herself, it’s no use. The sandman has run away and left me here all alone, so the hell with him. My fault for employing a sandman who’s afraid of the dark.

  She got up and went over to the desk; not the longest commute in the history of work. Nobody really knew how rich Lucy Pavlov was, though there were stories about her accountants endowing a chair of advanced pure mathematics at Princeton so as to train up brilliant young minds who’d be able to discover a way of finding out. But she lived in one room, and that room was just large enough for a bed, a desk and a chair. She logged on to PavNet, called up her Things to Do menu and selected Way Too Difficult. It wasn’t a big file. By the same token, a scorpion isn’t a big insect.

  PaySpeak: her one significant failure. The idea was quite old and quite simple. You dictate your stuff to the computer, and it writes it on the screen. Like all its many predecessors, PaySpeak worked, up to a point; usually the point where the enraged user threw the computer out of a high window. It nearly worked, which was far worse than not working at all. She’d spent hours fiddling with it, fine-tuning it, isolating problems and working out cunning fixes and bypasses, and every time she solved something, something else went wrong; it’d suddenly refuse to recognise the existence of the letter B, or instantaneously translate every ninth word into Finnish. After a year of brutal struggle, she’d finally arrived at the stage where there was nothing for it but to pull the whole thing apart and rewrite the base code; definitely a job for a rainy day, as in Noah’s Ark. She called it up on the screen and went to work. Twenty minutes later, she felt her eyelids droop. Five minutes after that, her head lolled forwards and she was fast asleep.

  Which was a pity, because the last correction she’d made, a tiny tweak to an outlying minor subsystem controlling a trivial auxiliary function, had finally done the job and fixed it. On the screen, therefore, appeared the words Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee, repeated over and over again.

  The screen filled up. So perfectly was PaySpeak running now that it put a full stop after each repetition, with a capital letter for each initial N. After half a page, the PaySoft elf turned up, asked, Are you sure you don’t mean necromantic wheel?, gave up and wandered away. Three pages. Four.

  Lucy woke up. She had no idea where or who or what she was. Ah yes. Oh. Oh wow!

  She opened her eyes and found she was looking at her terminal. She saw:

  Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncncwheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncncwheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Reporting. B’r df yggli’tthp dooplef dwwee’ep ev’sofew weeeem q’opoplds coo bepleem efwefgw 669756 qoqoq 99335 qoqoq 64546997 feptip weeem 53. Eftip? Sqeee! 94353. Oopl. Report ends. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncnc-wheeeee. Ncncncncncncwheeeee. Urgh.

  She blinked.

  Her first thought was, Oh boy, it’s really lost it this time. She scrolled up — five pages, six — then frowned, scrolled back to the end and tried a synthesized snore. It came out as Nicnicnicnicnicnic-weeeeeee; close enough for jazz. She grinned. Then her grin froze. “Reporting”? “Report ends”?

  Of course, the dream. Obviously she’d had a reprise: the unicorn had come back, and this time, when ordered to report, she’d complied. Her report was in gibberish because, well, it was just a dream, and she’d been burbling. Presumably her subconscious mind believed she was making perfect sense, but really she was just making funny noises, which faithful, unimaginative PaySpeak had transliterated as dooplef dwwee’ep and bepleem. Not the most auspicious start, perhaps, but—

  Hey! It works!

  “You work,” she said aloud. The screen started a new paragraph. You work. “Yippee!” she said. Yippee! She beamed, cleared the screen and set about saving her changes.

>   Bepleem, said a little voice in her head. Means “north”.

  Her fingertips hovering a millimetre above the keys, she froze. What was that I just thought? Bepleem. As in bepleem nozdfwthghg foodoop; north, south, east, west, the four cardinal points. Ah yes, of course.

  What?

  Her head snapped up and she stared at the screen, which she’d just wiped clean. Bepleem; the normal, everyday word for north in, in, in, in some language that she knew, or used to know, only she’d forgotten it completely. The same language, in fact, in which dooplef dwwee’ep meant “with-a-bone-on-its-forehead quadruped”.

  Report.

  She remembered reading somewhere that in the early hours of the morning the human brain is at its most vulnerable to worry, stress, things-getting-out-of-proportion. Never having been here before, she wouldn’t know about that. In daylight, which ought to be along any time now (please!), it’d all make sense and she’d laugh at herself for being so stupid. In the warm, friendly sunlight she’d realise that the illusion of understanding some of the gibberish-words was just leftovers from her anxiety dream, and the whole report business was simply her talking in her sleep, in her dream. Any alternative explanations she cared to concoct would be nothing more than wee-small-hours angst forming an unholy alliance with an agile and imaginative brain. In which case, roll on daylight; old Mr Sun, where are you when I need you? Meanwhile-Meanwhile, she’d fixed PaySpeak, which was amazing and a fantastic achievement, and it was really rather sad that she’d contrived to spoil the moment for herself. Also, she’d just proved beyond reasonable doubt that she snored. Damn.

  She yawned. Well, so much for the early hours of the morning. She’d given them a fair trial, and as far as she was concerned they were only fit for sleeping in. In fact, if she had her way, she’d have them taken away somewhere and shot. There really wasn’t any— A thought struck her. She called up the toolbar and clicked on Log Incoming Calls. She saw 03:36:21 Caller ID withheld.