Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  A thought reared up out of the long grass in the savannah of her subconscious mind.

  If it’s not aliens, who on Earth would have the wealth, the power, the resources, the intelligence to create a viable teleporter and use it to remove aposiderium from all those banknotes? It’d have to be someone incredibly rich, with the ability to conduct stupendously high-level research projects in total secrecy, so you’d be talking about a top industrialist, almost certainly in the digital technology field; that would tend to limit the field of potential candidates to three, maybe four people in the whole world. And who would be most likely to have a motive for wiping out all data about Lucy Pavlov’s early life — which, for all Lucy Pavlov knows, might have been indescribably traumatic and horrible, the sort of thing you’d go to any lengths to get rid of for ever?

  That did seem to suggest that the field could be narrowed to, well, one.

  I’m doing this to myself?

  Why would she want to do a thing like that?

  In spite of herself, she grinned like a dog. There could quite easily be a reason, something so loathsome and soul-destroying about her origins or early history that she couldn’t bear the thought of anybody knowing it, not even herself; but of course she’d never find out what it was, because she’d already extirpated every last trace of it. And if she’d seen fit to do that, she must’ve had her reasons. So, who was she to argue with herself? Lucy knows best.

  Yes, but— To have invented teleportation, for crying out loud. That was, well, impossible. It was just sci-fi, a device to get people on and off the planet without the cost of filming the shuttle. True; and so were personal communicators in little boxes like powder compacts that you could talk to people with, and get data from the computer network, and use like a cine camera; and she had one of those on her desk in front of her at that very moment. One thing Lucy Pavlov had never done was underestimate her own intelligence, although it should be said that she’d never taken pride in how much cleverer she was than anybody else. If anything, she tended to reflect on how sad it was that everybody else in the world wasn’t even as smart as her. So, maybe she’d done it. Now, of course, she’d never know, because if she had done it she’d have shut down the program and eradicated every trace of it, to make sure she never found out and got suspicious.

  Teleportation? It was worth inventing it and then throwing it away, just to wipe out her past?

  Lucy knows best; it must have been.

  In that case, what about the—?

  As if she’d ordered it from room service, the unicorn stepped through the window into the room. Since she was on the thirty-sixth floor, the event was remarkable in itself. What concerned Lucy, however, was the timing.

  She looked at it. Not a white horse with a horn glued to its nose. The horn grew out of a gnarled corona of bone formed from the central ridge between the eyes, which was thicker and more pronounced than on any normal horse, even My Little Pony. It was about a metre long, tapered and twisted out of two distinct strands of dark cream horn, polished, in places almost translucent. There was a tiny chip out of the side of the point, slightly smaller than a child’s tooth.

  She waited. The unicorn swished its tail. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Report,” said the unicorn.

  She sucked in a deep breath. It was like drinking custard. “What are you?”

  “Report.”

  Its voice was deep, a monotone, like a recorded message. “Are you —” She felt really, really silly saying this — “are you real?”

  “Report.”

  At this point, a spark of irritation started the engine of her intellect. She picked up the nearest available object, which happened to be a TV remote, and threw it at the unicorn’s head. It bounced off and clattered on the floor. The unicorn didn’t seem to have noticed.

  “Report what?” she said.

  “Report.”

  It’s a machine, she decided. It’s solid, it may even be organic, but it’s a machine. A flood of relief swept through her, washing away drifts of anxiety and log-jams of self-doubt. It’s real, it’s not magic, somebody built it and sent it here, and I want to know who and why.

  “Who built you?”

  “Report.”

  “Did I build you?”

  “Report.”

  Fine. She’d never had much joy trying to chat to her kettle, either. Well, if it couldn’t answer her questions in words, there was only one thing for it. Without breaking eye contact, she fumbled for her Warthog and found the right button.

  “Security,” she said. “Get up here right now.”

  “On our way, Ms Pavlov.”

  “Bring a gun. And a net. And some hay or a carrot or something,” because if there was a batch number or a serial number or a manufacturer’s symbol or even just MADE IN CHINA in tiny letters on the inside of its small intestine, she was going to find it, always assuming she could keep it here until Security arrived.

  Unless— Staring at the unicorn, which had shuffled sideways a little and was trying to eat the corner of her desk, she made herself ask the question, What if I built it? After all, who else could? Little green men, or me. And why would little green men be interested in making me forget my childhood?

  Report what, for crying out loud. She hit the button again. “Security.”

  “On our way. The elevator’s out, we’re having to use the stairs.”

  “False alarm. Forget it.”

  And if I made it, and went to all that trouble to make sure I didn’t know I made it, I must have had my reasons.

  Lucy knows best, damn her.

  “Report,” the unicorn said.

  “Can’t. Nothing to report. Please be more specific.”

  The unicorn stood perfectly still for one, possibly one and a half seconds. Then it lowered its head and lunged.

  She didn’t have time to register the threat, but an automatic system made her flinch. The tip of the horn, which would have gone straight through her heart if she hadn’t tried to jump out of her skin, grazed her arm, drawing a single drop of blood. She screamed, squirmed away without stopping to think about tiresome everyday things like chairs, found herself sitting on thin air and dropped, bottom first, on to the floor. The unicorn lifted its head, so that the drop of blood ran down inside the spiral flutes of its horn, then turned gracefully right round and leapt through the window, which didn’t break.

  25

  Novosibirsk

  “He must be somewhere,” the man who wasn’t a werewolf snapped. “He can’t just have vanished into thin air.”

  His colleague refrained from pointing out that that was precisely what people and things did when subjected to a teleport beam. “I’ve tried a wide-beam all-functions scan,” he said, twiddling knobs on a thing that looked a bit like a battery charger but almost certainly wasn’t. “There’s a residual burn on the CM band, but that’s all.”

  The other man looked at him. “On the what?”

  Awkward for the knob twiddler: he’d just made up the CM band, to make it sound like he was doing something. In actual fact, there were no traces of anything whatsoever, anywhere. “Could just be sensor mist,” he said blithely. “You know, false input readings. Anyhow, I can’t find him.”

  “Bugger.”

  They looked at each other. The Ostar have a sort of low-level telepathy, the last obsolete appendix-like vestige of the pack mind. Both of them were saying, without the need for words, We’re going to get into so much trouble.

  “It may not matter,” said the knob twiddler cautiously. “After all, what’s one human more or less?”

  “The planet’s leading expert on electronic security.”

  “Yes, but that’s not saying much.”

  “Personal security adviser to the head of PaySoft Industries.”

  “Only because we—”

  The other man shook his head. “Him.”

  No arguing with that. They both knew perfe
ctly well that George Stetchkin was unique, the one and only.

  “You sure you haven’t just—”

  “Yes.”

  The other main sat down on the hotel-room bed, causing a sudden anguished squeak from the ancient springs. “Great,” he said. “Fantastic. We’ve killed him.”

  “We may not have.”

  The knob twiddler got an extra-special Look for that. “Oh really. We dematerialise him, store him in the pattern buffer, then when we try and rematerialise him he’s not damn well there. What do you reckon? He fell down the back? Sort of leaked out and got absorbed by the battery?”

  “All right, we killed him. So …”

  There was no “so”, and they both knew it. There was a long silence. Then the other man said, “We’re going to have to report this.”

  That went down about as well as a dead mouse in a bottle of vintage champagne. “I don’t see why. We could just—”

  “If we don’t, he’ll find out. And then we’ll really be screwed.”

  “Yes, but we could say he just died. All those high-toxicity beverages. Or we could say he got hit by the transport infrastructure. Lots of people die of that, it says so on the newscasts.”

  “He’ll find out.”

  “I’ll try remodulating the collector pulse capacitors,” the knob twiddler said. “Maybe if I can rig up some sort of coherent reverse-phase antipolaron wave—”

  “Stop drivelling,” snarled the other man. “And put in a call.”

  “What, now?”

  The other man nodded. “Now,” he said, “before we both completely lose our nerve and go all to pieces.”

  “What, save that for later, when he gets his paws on us?”

  The other man sighed. “We never should’ve come,” he said. “See the galaxy, they said, an opportunity to travel to seek out new life and new civilisations. I should’ve stayed home and asked my brother-in-law for a job at the bonemeal plant.”

  The knob twiddler looked at him sadly. “Still,” he said, “it’s been fun, hasn’t it? All in all.”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  No arguing with that, either. The knob twiddler turned the gadget over, pressed a switch on the back and slid open a panel. Out of it rose a short aerial. “He’s going to be seriously pissed off, you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  There were a few more buttons to press, and a slider to slide across and then back a bit, and a toggle to adjust and a code to enter into a keypad. Then a high whistle, inaudible to the human excuse-for-an-ear, told them that they were through to the home-world.

  They’d used the direct number. There was no waiting, or messing about with intermediaries. The whistle stopped, and a deep voice barked, “Yes?”

  The knob twiddler closed his eyes. “Hi, Dad,” he said.

  26

  New York

  The unicorn stood in the circular white marble bath, allowing jets of warm water from the five-position shower head to soak into its mane. It was looking at itself in the mirror.

  “You could have killed her,” Mark Twain said angrily.

  “Lethal capability confirmed,” the unicorn said. “I am equipped with a wide range of offensive and defensive combat protocols.” It turned its head, examining its left profile.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Mark Twain snapped. “You exhibited excessive aggression. If she hadn’t got out of the way in time, you’d have gored her to death. I sent you to get a sample of her genetic material, not murder her.”

  The unicorn arched its neck a little. Vanity, Mark Twain realised, slightly shocked: it enjoys preening itself in front of the mirror, just as it enjoys the feel of the warm water. It’s acquired that just by being that shape for a few hours. In that case, what has being Dirter-shaped been doing to me?

  “Our mission is the total extermination of her race,” the unicorn pointed out reasonably. “We are a weapon of war, not a scientific research facility. The only good Dirter is a—“

  “We need her alive,” Twain snapped. “We need to find out where she got hold of Ostar computer code components.” As he said the words, he knew he was lying; to the unicorn, therefore by extension to himself. Fortunately, the unicorn was too wrapped up in seeing how the light glinted off its horn to notice. “Unless we know that, we daren’t proceed to Phase Three. We have no idea what defensive capabilities they may have.”

  “Dirter female Lucy Pavlov has 0.4mm organic textile armour, shear factor 0.1 N/cm3, defensive capability negligible. Other Dirters encountered during mission similarly vulnerable. Tactical prognosis: this probe’s horn would go through them like a knife through r’wwwrt .”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “This probe is a component of a weapon.” The unicorn was looking at him. “All tactical options to be kept under constant review, standard operating procedure, section 56, paragraph 22/4.”

  “Give me the sample.”

  “Sample to be taken to the orbital vehicle for analysis.”

  “I’ll do it here,” Mark Twain said.

  The unicorn hesitated for just under a fiftieth of a second. In context, that was long enough to grow stalactites.

  “Now,” Mark Twain said.

  The unicorn lowered its head, until the tip of its horn rested in the exact centre of the soap dish. A single bead of blood trickled down. He stared at it.

  “All right,” he said. “Dismissed.”

  But the unicorn stayed where it was. “This probe has detected a malfunction,” it said.

  “Understood. Run a diagnostic when you get back to the vehicle.”

  “The malfunction is affecting the probe designated Mark Twain.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the blood sample. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “The malfunction comprises a recursive degeneration of the motivational and ethical imperatives directory,” the unicorn said. “Action to be taken: complete shutdown of affected systems, followed by format and reinstallation of programs from core memory.”

  “Mphm.” Mark Twain stood up slowly, still staring at the drop of blood, and groped for the electric razor on the wash-stand. “Such a course of action would result in loss of research data.”

  “All relevant data has been backed up in permanent bulk storage. Initiating shutdown in five seconds.”

  Mark Twain flipped on the razor and threw it over his shoulder. It landed in the bath, where the unicorn was standing in six inches of water. There was a sizzle, and the lights flickered. When he looked round, the unicorn had gone.

  “Countermand systems shutdown relating to probe designated Mark Twain,” Mark Twain said quickly and loudly. “Reporting malfunction of type-6 ground tactical probe resulting from accidental electrical interference. All data received from type-6 probe in the last five minutes to be considered suspect due to data corruption caused by said interference; delete data and format type-6-probe memory-storage device.” With the stem of his toothbrush, he levered the shaver’s plug out of the wall socket. “Reintegrate type-6 probe’s component molecules with deck plating in section SB and commence construction of replacement probe module.”

  Then he took a deep breath and sat down heavily on the toilet seat. His hands, he noticed, had begun to shake. He put that down to ionic discharges triggered by the disruption of the unicorn. A bit too close for comfort, he told himself; he’d have to be more careful from now on. He switched on the extractor fan to get rid of the stench of ozone, and quickly designed a shell-and-filter system to collect his sensory input and store it inside his head rather than sending it direct to the bomb vehicle. He heard the bomb asking him why, and replied that it was for security, just in case the Dirters were monitoring communications. It sounded painfully implausible, but the bomb appeared to have taken it at face value.

  That was a new development, he realised. Now, in his mental nomenclature, the titanium-and-polymer structure in geosynchronous orbit was “the bomb”; so what did that make him? The answer that came back from lo
gic processing was “me”.

  Me. As opposed to it. As opposed to the incredibly sophisticated weapon of mass destruction hovering a few miles overhead. Implacably opposed to it.

  He moaned and slumped forward, his head sliding between his cupped hands. It was all going horribly wrong. Somehow, at some point, he’d stopped being the bomb and turned into — what? Not an Ostar, as witness the stupid useless nose, the pitiful little stub ears. Not a Dirter. Not even an organic; if he disconnected from the bomb’s power source for more than three seconds, his memory would be wiped, his systems would crash and his body would instantly decompose into its component molecules. Defecting, in other words, wasn’t an option, even if that was what he wanted to do— Was it?

  He found he couldn’t answer that. Instead, he ran the mission statement: to destroy the planet at galactic co-ordinates 399087:66989:44664:37/87. It was beautiful in its clear simplicity. That was all he had to do, and then he would find peace.

  Somehow, he doubted that.

  No, he told himself, I believe in the mission. I am what I am. I can do no other.

  It was how the mission was to be carried out, that was all, a difference of opinion as to the most efficient method. The central data-processing unit in the orbital vehicle wasn’t in full possession of the facts. It had insufficient data to enable it to interpret the subtle nuances of the situation, which called for a deeper understanding of Dirter technology and society. All the bomb wanted to do was blow up; it didn’t seem to appreciate the need for further research, to find out what had happened to the Mark One. Yes; that was the key issue. Until he’d solved that mystery, implementing Phase Three would be recklessly precipitate, and would endanger the success of the entire mission. For some reason, the bomb didn’t seem capable of grasping the significance of that; and therein lay the sum total of their disagreement.