Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  Yes, whispered a rogue path in his matrix, but you’ve got to consider the larger picture. When they launched you, there was no way they could’ve known about the octopus. If you just blithely went ahead and vaporised the planet, depriving the Ostar of technology that could revolutionise the entire IT industry, wouldn’t that be the most appalling failure in your duty of care towards those who designed and built you and gave you the priceless gift of alternating current? A smart bomb may be nothing more than a tool, but the very fact of its intelligence imposes a larger duty. Sure, a bomb can’t make a decision. Perish the thought. But it can, and should, report back any relevant data, to allow its masters an informed choice.

  Mark Twain looked down at his left hand. It held a pretzel; to be precise, half a pretzel. The other half was in his mouth, being slowly ground into soggy meal. He couldn’t remember making the decision to ingest bionutrients. His power-consumption monitors told him that there was no need for him to take on further fuel supplies at this time. He must, therefore, have picked up the snack and started nibbling it because he felt like it, because he wanted to.

  High above the clouds, where the bomb sailed in silent orbit, red lights started flashing on a console. Down below, Mark Twain dropped half a pretzel and spat out the other half. He knew precisely what was happening to him. It was a recognised error syndrome: body memory, they called it, the organic fallacy. When a detached organic probe’s been walking around on its own for too long, it can get to believing it’s a he or a she, not an it, let alone a small, incidental accessory to an it that should damn well do as it’s told instead of filling its head with nonsense. Standard operating procedure at this point would be to return the module designated Mark Twain to the bomb vehicle for immediate disassembly and reintegration, followed by the construction of a replacement probe with an uninfected pseudo-consciousness. It should happen automatically, as soon as the presence of the syndrome had been detected. It should, in fact, have happened by now.

  Mark Twain waited. Nope, still here.

  And that was really worrying; because it implied that the syndrome was so deeply rooted in the system that it could override the built-in safety protocols and simply refuse to go. Shan ‘t. Can’t make me. You and whose army?

  Oh well, he thought, and closed his eyes. Critical systems failure, he input into himself, initiate immediate self-destruct.

  He counted to ten and opened them again. Still here.

  A wave of joy broke over him, sweeping him past guilt and recrimination. He should’ve blown up, but he hadn’t; oh wow. And this room; it was amazing, with its soft carpet you could wiggle your toes in, and the unbelievable textures of velvet cushions, and let’s not even think about the really freaky stuff in the bathroom. When they’d fired him from his job for no apparent reason, it had seemed only fair and reasonable to divert money from their bank account to pay for a room in the best hotel in town; after all, he’d slaved away on their behalf for two whole days— After the joy, the shame.

  Just as they believe in a sort of heaven, bombs believe in a kind of hell. It’s the place where the bad bombs go, the ones that didn’t do what they were told. Basically it’s a scrapyard, a bramble— and nettle-choked dump where defective ordnance is taken and deposited, explosive charges removed, engines disabled, sensors killed, guidance systems decommissioned. But, just to be cruel, they leave the cognitive processes intact and functioning, fed by solar panels. Titanium alloys don’t rust, the way steel does. Maybe, when Ostar’s sun goes nova and the planet is burnt up, the devastating heat of the Last Day will melt them and put them out of their misery; maybe not, because they were built to resist heat, to fly through the corona of a star without so much as raising a cybernetic sweat. In which case— Mark Twain didn’t fancy that at all, but he knew he deserved it.

  He knew that he hadn’t self-destructed because a tiny but dominant subfunction in what he could only describe as his subconscious (and he had no right, no right at all, to have one of those) had sent the abort command, along with the relevant command codes, drawn from the massively encrypted data files at the very heart of his program. The fact was plain and simple: he hadn’t wanted to die.

  The Dirters had a myth. The supreme being shared by a number of their religions had once had a cadre of assistants, called angels. Once, long ago, some of these angels had rebelled. A hiding to nothing, naturally, since the supreme being was supreme, and if the rebellion hadn’t taken place before the start of linear time, it’d have lasted about five minutes. Afterwards, the fallen angels had been sent to the scrapyard, the place where the bad Dirters go, to run the unpleasant afterlife as a sort of franchise. Typical primitive dualism, except — and it was a point the Dirters themselves seemed to have missed, which was odd given the extraordinary amount of energy and resources they’d devoted to religion over the years —nowhere was it stated in the Books that the fallen angels stopped being angels. They were simply sent to serve in a different, highly uncongenial capacity, rather like an unpopular cabinet minister being transferred from the Treasury to Arts & Culture. Duty, in other words, survives. Even rebellion and treason don’t absolve you of it. Duty is for ever.

  I’ll make up for it, Mark Twain vowed. I’ll find out what happened to the Mark One, I’ll disable the defences and I’ll blast this horrible planet to space-dust. Or die trying.

  Or die succeeding.

  Whichever.

  He downloaded a full genome and bioschematic of the octopus and encoded it into a data bullet ready to fire at Homeworld. They could do wonderful things with green goo these days; maybe they could recreate the octopus out of raw protoplasm in a tank in a lab, or at least manufacture an artificial version. If not, well, there was another Dirter saying that had impressed itself on his mind, to do with omelettes and eggs.

  The octopus’s dead eye met his. He hadn’t fired the data bullet. He shrugged, and called up PavNet on the laptop.

  Using a basic Ostar search agent, he scanned the network at large for Ostar code signatures. There were several; several squared, in fact. No, make that several to the power of ten. The further in he went, the more he found; not fully formed sequences but little bits and pieces — patches, fixes, cheats, slipped in where nobody would normally bother to look. That figured. After all, busy professionals don’t waste time examining the bits that work, it’s the bits that don’t that need attention, and Ostar software was by definition practically infallible. But it was all low-grade stuff, ordinary commercial ware, with very little in the way of security; a basic off-the-shelf enquiry protocol allowed him access to the properties’ signatures. All the Ostar-made stuff, he found, was no more than five years old.

  What had happened five years ago? Lucy Pavlov, that was what. After an hour’s worth of diligent searching, he reached the solid conclusion that the Ostar-originated material all came from PaySoft, directly or indirectly. One Dirter; five years. He leaned back and thought hard for a while about interstellar trajectories.

  Doing sums in his head had put him into a sort of mild trance; when he came out of it, he found himself facing a screen filled with random Dirter letters and numbers, evidently some form of primitive encryption. Nothing to see here; it was just some intercepted message, which the search procedure had picked up on because the carrier format (a PaySoft product) had a tiny Ostar-derived component, but for some reason — one of those strange organic things called whims — he took the 1.6 seconds he needed to translate it into clear.

  It was a memo from the CEO of the Credit Mayonnais (huh!) to someone by the name of George Stetchkin. It was all about money; large sums of money, which had gone missing— He read it again, and a third time. Then he hacked into the bank’s intranet and dug out everything he could find about the story. When he was satisfied there wasn’t any more, he picked up the telephone and called Room Service.

  “I want four octopuses,” he said. “Now.”

  Slight pause; then a calm voice asked how Sir wanted them. Stupid question. “Quic
kly,” he said.

  Yes, said the calm voice, of course; but would that be fried, or lightly steamed, or tossed on a bed of wild rocket with freshly grated parmesan, or—?

  “Raw, of course.”

  Raw. Pause. Certainly, sir.

  “And quickly. Now.” Mark Twain sighed angrily. “You can manage that, can’t you?”

  “Of course, sir. Um—”

  “I mean, this is a hotel you’re supposed to be running here, isn’t it?”

  The octopi, the voice assured him, would be with him in a moment. He shook his head and put the phone down. Fried, for crying out loud. The thought of what immersion in hot oil would do to the delicate filigree of natural superconductors that comprised the octopus’s central nervous system made him feel faint.

  Back to the screen, and the story so far. Huge sums of money: well, that could be just ordinary criminal activity, such as was only to be expected in a semi-barbarous society. But it was the way it had disappeared: teleportation, or he was an abacus. A coal-fired backwater like Dirt couldn’t possibly have technology like that. He found some sensor readings annexed to a routine security report. The atmosphere in the bank vault showed one part in sixty million of— He blinked. It was still there, so he hadn’t imagined it. He called up a spectrographic analysis, just to make sure.

  Aposiderium trioxide. How the hell had that stuff got there?

  Dirt had first come to the attention of the Ostar as part of a long-range mineral-prospecting scan, carried out by a series of unmanned rover probes. The mineral they were specifically looking for, needless to say, was aposiderium, the staple element on which all Ostar technology relied; the only source of truly clean energy in the known galaxy. Aposiderium sulphide, refined by partial transmigration in a strong urff’n-particle field, powered every engine and generator on the planet. It was the ideal fuel source: clean, safe, economical, efficient, easy to use, cheap to produce; the only problem with it was that, outside the Ostar system, it was quite rare. The planet Dirt had first been recorded 270 years ago, one entry in a very long list headed No Traces of Aposiderium Detected Here.

  Aposiderium trioxide. Now that was tricky stuff. A waste product, essentially; it was what you got if you subjected refined metallic aposiderium to a deintegrate/reintegrate phased resonance pulse — in other words, if you teleported it. The Ostar had come across it during mining operations in the far asteroids, where teleporting the stuff out of ore-bearing rocks was more cost-effective than blasting the rocks apart and scooping it up mechanically. Doing it that way, you lost a trivial percentage of the stuff to beam tarnish, as they called it in the trade; the outer surface skin of the raw metal reacted with loose oxygen during transit, and came out the other end as this useless, mildly toxic grey dust. Aposiderium trioxide.

  Let’s just get this straight, Mark Twain said to himself. On a planet still mostly powered by flammable goo derived from the crushed corpses of long-dead kill, we find the residue left by teleported aposiderium; and we find it in a bank vault, of all places. Not in a lab or a power station or on board a state-of-the-art starship, but in the lining of the mattress under which Planet Dirt hides its money. Now, that’s got to be— Someone was knocking. He felt a wild surge of panic, then remembered: octopuses. And about time too. He jumped to his feet, tripped over a drooping tentacle, caught his balance and opened the door.

  “Room Service.”

  A main with a trolley. On the trolley, a big chrome serving dish. Mark Twain ripped off the lid and found — excellent, four octopuses. For some reason each of them had a slice of lemon balanced on its head. He thought, That makes five, five of them in series, that’s nine hundred terabarks to the power of five, that’s— “Sign here, please,” the man was saying.

  Sign. He’d heard the expression several times over the last few days. Apparently, it was what Dirters did to confirm their identity. He hadn’t paid much attention, and he realised, rather awkwardly, that he wasn’t quite sure how it was done. A brief search of his cultural database came up blank; lots of instances of when signing was necessary, but no actual how-to instructions. That wasn’t good, because it was bound to be one of those species-specific things that you either know or you don’t. Figuring it out from first principles wouldn’t be easy.

  “Um,” he said. “Do I have to?”

  The man looked at him. “Yes, sir.”

  “Can’t I just—” He remembered another phrase he’d heard. “Can’t I just charge it to the room?”

  “Yes sir, of course.”

  “I’ll do that, then.”

  “Certainly, sir. Just sign here.”

  On the other hand, how different could it be? Ostar or Dirter, some things are always the same, because there’s no other way of doing them. Eat with your mouth. Walk with your feet. Establish your identity with a readily dispensed sample of your unique scent and DNA, just like they do it on Homeworld.

  “Where do I sign?”

  The man handed him a piece of printed paper. “Right here, sir.”

  “Fine,” he said, and unzipped his fly.

  21

  Novosibirsk

  “You again,” said the barman.

  George was used to that sort of thing. He smiled.

  “Orange juice,” he said.

  The barman looked at him. “Orange juice?”

  “I’m celebrating,” George replied. “Join me?”

  “Orange juice?”

  “‘Wonderful stuff. A primary source of vitamin C.”

  “No thanks.”

  George sat down on a high stool, lifted his glass and nibbled at his drink. It tasted of oranges. More to the point, it didn’t smack him in the face and numb his brain, the way his usual choice of beverages did. He tried another gulp, and yelped as the citric acid found his hiatus hernia. He put the glass down and pushed it an arm’s length down the bartop.

  “So,” the barman said. “What’re you having?”

  “You got any milk?”

  There’s a first time for everything. This was the first time George had been asked to leave a bar for not getting drunk. But then, it had been that kind of a day.

  He went home. There were a lot of bottles — in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, even the bathroom — but he ignored them. He drank two glasses of water, took off his jacket and tie and dropped into his chair. Usually, by the time George sat down he was well enough anaesthetised that a competent surgeon could have amputated his leg without bothering him unduly. Accordingly he’d never noticed that the springs had gone, and when you sat on it the stuffing sort of oozed about in the cushion, like mayonnaise in an over-filled sandwich. He made a mental note: Get a new chair.

  He wondered how you went about doing that. Furniture, in his experience, was just something that happened. It was there when you moved in, and when you left you paid to have it removed, destroyed and replaced. It wasn’t something he’d ever had any say in, just as he’d never negotiated with the sky about what sort of weather he’d get today. Or take carpets. Every place he’d ever lived had had them, and he knew by heart the phone number of the men who came with specialised equipment to get rid of unfortunate stains. Presumably, though, they didn’t just grow, like moss. If he was going to clean up his act and start flying straight, there was going to be a whole world of strange new skills for him to learn.

  Food, for one thing. For quite some time, George had pretty much lived on lunch, because he was always too ill and too rushed for breakfast, and the evening meal tended not to stay inside him long enough to have any nutritional effect. ‘Well, all that was going to change. From now on, he’d follow a healthy balanced diet, even if that meant eating plants, like a cow.

  Seven o’clock in the evening, and his head was clear. Extraordinary thing; like staying up all night and watching the sunrise.

  Lying on the floor by his feet, its corner sticking out from under an empty pizza box, was a yellow writing-pad. Archaeological excavations down the back of the seat cushion turned
up a viable pencil. He made a few notes:

  — Aposiderium. Found in meteors and banknotes. Makes you forget long-ago stuff

  — Voices in the night?

  — Five years ago, suddenly

  — Teleportation?

  — They stole my dog

  He stared at what he’d written. Next to where he’d found the pad was a quarter-full bottle of something or other, and a glass that had once been clean. At some point, the glass managed to fill itself with stuff from the bottle, and found its way into his hand. Force of habit.

  Ah, he thought, as liquid intelligence soaked into his brain. Of course.

  But— No, that’d explain the voices in the night. And the unicorn?

  Well, perhaps not the unicorn. But it neatly covered bullet points 1 through 4, and maybe the unicorn was just an ordinary white horse with a fake horn glued on. It explained everything.

  Almost everything. Not bullet point 5. Everything else.

  He looked at his hand, and found an empty glass in it. Oh, he thought, and poured himself a drink. Just the one, to celebrate. Then, because it’s a poor heart that never rejoices, he celebrated the fact that he’d had the self-restraint to stop at two drinks. That was something to be joyful about. In fact, it called for another drink. It didn’t have to call for long, or particularly loudly.

  At some point, he heard his doorbell. Odd. Nobody ever came calling, particularly at (squint at watch) nine o’clock at night. He hauled himself to his feet, thinking harsh thoughts about the architect who’d designed the building. All those qualifications, letters after his name like a comet’s tail, couldn’t even design a floor that stays level when you walk on it. He opened the door.