by Tom Holt
31
?????
The fiery red heat of Homeworld’s binary suns had shaped Ostar society rather more than they cared to acknowledge. At noon on Coincidence Day, when both suns hung together in the sky like two cherries on one stem, nothing moved on the surface. The herds of p’fift made themselves tunnels in the three-metre-high k’pt grass, while their herders retreated to the hills and found safety in deep caves, or huddled and panted in the meagre shade of an ulp’rtr tree. In the air-conditioned cities, it was just possible to ignore the twin noon, provided your office had no window, but the streets below were utterly deserted until the Dog had passed its zenith.
In the magnificent city-centre building occupied by the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes, the Executive Subcommittee on Human Welfare was in emergency session.
“My boys are down there,” the chairman repeated forcefully. “If they blow their cover and the government find out what they’ve been up to, I wouldn’t give a bent credit for their chances.”
There was a brief, awkward silence. Then an elegant middle-aged female in a diamanté collar said, “Yes, but that’s hardly likely to happen, is it? As far as they know, only one Ostar’s ever set paw on the surface. They have no idea what we’ve been doing. They think we’re just a collection of dotty old women shaking collecting tins on street corners.”
“Besides,” a sharply dressed young male on her left added, “with all due respect, our paws are tied. They’ve got two R’wfft-class flying bombs in planetary orbit, all ready to go; we have absolutely no idea what’s preventing the second one from detonating; our only asset is an unreliable human drunk; and now it would appear that your operatives” (it just went to show how much venom you could pack into a simple noun if you really tried hard) “have managed to lose him. We’re hardly spoiled for choice, are we?”
“It’s too early,” the chairman said, and if stone walls could talk, they’d sound just like that. “If we break the story now, the public will simply shrug and say, so what? Look, we agreed all this. Timing is crucial.”
“Fine,” the female snapped. “Alternatives? You have our full attention, Mr Chairman.”
“We must attempt to disarm the bomb.”
For something essentially negative, silence can be eloquent and richly textured. This one said, The old man’s finally lost it, and smirked. “You mean,” said a middle-aged male with long trailing ears, “your sons should attempt to disarm the bomb.”
“Yes.”
“Your sons who managed to lose the human scientist inside a small box.”
The chairman growled, and the fur on the back of his neck rose. It should have been enough. It wasn’t. “That’s right,” he said. “My two highly trained and motivated sons, who volunteered for this incredibly dangerous mission, and whose father happens to be the alpha male of this committee. Would you like me to put it to the vote?”
The middle-aged male just smirked at him, and the chairman couldn’t help but be reminded of the old Dirt proverb about giving someone enough rope. Still, too late now.
“Our priority,” he said in an oppressively calm voice, “is to save the humans. If my sons fail to disarm the bomb, we’ll still have the option of going public, as you suggest. Also, I will immediately resign as chairman of this committee. Will that do? Let’s get this sorted out, shall we? It’s too hot to argue.”
“I think we can dispense with a formal vote,” the elegant female said smoothly. “Now then, as to timescale. Shall we say forty-eight hours, local time?”
The chairman shrugged. “Why not?”
“And in forty-eight hours, if they haven’t succeeded, you’ll step down.”
“Agreed,” the chairman growled.
“In that case,” the female said (and under the table, where nobody could see, her tail was wagging furiously), “I suggest we adjourn until the day after tomorrow.”
After the rest of the committee had gone, the chairman stood alone in the centre of the room. It could, he felt, have gone better. His sons, amiable boys and desperately anxious to please, but not the sharpest teeth in the jaw, were almost certainly going to die, alone on a distant planet far from their own kind. Everything he’d worked for was about to collapse in ruin, and an entire alien civilisation would be wiped out. Worse still, he’d have lost. Even worse than that, his enemy would have won. On the other three paws— He tried to finish the sentence, but nothing would fit. He went back to the table, switched on his computer and put through a call. It was long-distance — very long-distance — so he kept it short. Then, since there was nothing else he could do, he retired to a corner of the room, turned round three times, lay down and went to sleep.
32
Novosibirsk
“You ate it.
“Sorry.”
“You ate the computer.”
“I couldn’t help it,” his brother replied sadly. “It was the smell.”
In spite of everything, the senior non-werewolf couldn’t find it in his heart to blame him. Even though they’d had the air-conditioning on Maximum Chill, it hadn’t taken the octopus long to progress from mature to ripe, and thence to a state guaranteed to fill any canine nose with unendurable longing. For an Ostar, from a planet where every beach is lined with racks of dead seagulls mouldering to gourmet perfection, it had all been too much.
“What about the transtator coils and the hyperspace inversion field chips? I was up all night building those.”
“You mean the crunchy bits?”
The senior brother sighed. “You can’t have eaten half a million credits’ worth of microcircuitry,” he said. “For one thing, they’d be completely indigestible.”
“I know.” His junior sibling looked at him out of his great big brown eyes. Over his shoulder, the elder brother noticed a little heap of organic matter on the carpet in the middle of the room. It was still steaming slightly.
“Wonderful,” the senior brother said crisply. “I had to dismantle both our neutron blasters, the spare communicator and the backup teleport key to get the parts to make up that lot. Now we’re completely cut off from our ship.” He pulled an expression that only a human face could have been contorted into. “For all the good it can do us, we might as well not have a ship up there. Unless I can jury-rig replacement parts out of the local junk, we’re screwed, you know that?”
“I was hungry,” his brother pointed out. “And human food…”
It was a fair point. Thanks to the transmutation field they both had human stomachs and digestive systems, but the signals the human taste buds relayed went to Ostar brains. “I hate this place,” the elder brother said with feeling.
Junior grinned feebly. “Sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right,” Senior replied, with the exasperated sigh of elder brothers everywhere. “We can get another octopus, and with a bit of luck we might be able to salvage— Oh shit.”
“What?”
“The transceiver’s beeping.”
They looked at each other. That could only mean one thing: more instructions from home.
“Your turn.”
“No it isn’t.”
“I answered it the last time.”
“Yes, but you just ate—”
“You’re the eldest.”
An unanswerable point. “Halfway across the galaxy just to get away from the old bastard, and he won’t leave us— Hello? Dad? Really great to hear from you. Look, it’s going really well, we’ve nearly—”
After that, he said very little, just the mumbles and cheeps of someone failing to get a word in edgeways. Finally he said, “Yes, Dad. Yes, right. Will do. Love to Mum,” winced, and flicked the toggle to cut the power.
“Well?”
Senior looked away. “The good news is,” he said, “it doesn’t matter that you ate the computer.”
“Well?”
“Our orders,” Senior said, without expression of any kind, “are to teleport on to the missile vehicle in planetar
y orbit and disarm the warhead.”
“What? You must be—”
“And we’ve got forty-eight hours to do it. Failing which, Dad’s going to tell everything he knows to the newsweb, which means the government’ll know for sure we’re here.”
“What?”
“Quite,” Senior said with feeling. “There was a reason. Politics, I guess. Can’t say I took much of it in.”
“Go on board the bomb?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll never make it,” Junior yelled. “There’s defence systems, anti-teleport scramblers, EM forcefields. If we make it through them, we’ll be going back to Ostar in a bottle. Or rather we won’t, because the bomb’ll blow and we’ll be vaporised. A crack special forces team with physics doctorates couldn’t get aboard that thing. We’re—”
“Screwed, yes.” Senior nodded grimly. “On the other hand, Dad did sort of make it clear we don’t have any say in the matter. No excuses. “My brother ate my homework” isn’t going to cut it this time.”
They shared a long, silent look. There are things language just can’t say.
“Oh well,” Junior said at last. “I’d just like to say, being on this mission with you… It’s been fun.”
“Thanks, bro.”
“I’d like to say that,” Junior went on, “but I can’t, because I promised Mum I’d always tell the truth. Actually it’s been hell, it’s been one disaster after another, and it’s all your fault.”
“Me? Screw that. I’m not the one who lost the human.”
“I’m not the one who thought the Eiffel Tower was a very tall lamp—post.”
“You ate the computer.”
“You said that didn’t—”
“I was trying,” Senior said bitterly, “to be nice. Of course it matters. If we’re going to stand any chance at all of getting aboard the bomb, we’re going to have to hack into its teleport, since we can’t use ours any more.” Pause for significant silence; waste of time. “We need a really good computer.” He made a combination sighing-growling noise. “We’ll just have to build another one.”
“I’m not going back to that Sergei’s place. I don’t think the people in there were right in the head. They were acting really weird, you know?”
Senior nodded. “We’ll get one from the fish market,” he said. “Doesn’t seem to make any difference if they’re dead anyway. Correction: you get one from the fish market, while I stay here and try and fix up the circuit blocks you ate.”
Junior had the grace to look guilty. “Sorry.”
“You should be.” He crossed the room, knelt down beside the small heap of half-digested octopus and machine parts, and sniffed. “You know how Mum used to say, ‘Don’t play with that, you don’t know where it’s been’?”
“Mhm.”
With the tip of a pencil, Senior probed the nearest mound and teased out a small, glittering crystal. “In this case,” he said, “I think I’d have been happier not knowing. Are you still here?”
Junior left quickly, while Senior spent a fairly wretched ten minutes retrieving everything he could salvage and wiping the bits clean with a piece of toilet paper. He put them all together, looked at them sadly and shook his head. In spite of what his father thought of him, he was a competent engineer with a flair for improvisation, but this mess was too far gone. His brother, bless him, had chewed up the #5170 transtator, and bitten the calibration relay in half. There was a #5170 in the main communications transceiver, but if he cannibalised that they’d have no way of contacting Homeworld. With the proper equipment, he might just be able to bodge a bypass for the relay, but the proper equipment was hundreds of light-years away. It might just be possible to do without the relay altogether, but that’d mean— He made a sad whimpering noise. Nobody had ever called him too clever by half, but that was exactly what he was. He was clever enough to jury-rig the calibration without the relay, but that would mean that, once they’d passed through a teleport beam regulated by a computer lacking said relay, there’d be a 0.1 per cent chaotic anomaly in their biomolecular patterns. You could live with 0.1 per cent, if you were lucky and weren’t too fussed about the risk of waking up one morning to find you’d grown an extra ear, but there were certain things you most definitely couldn’t do. One of them was pass yourself through a biotransmutation field — which was what an Ostar who’d turned himself into a human would have to do in order to turn himself back into an Ostar. Bottom line: if they used the rig to beam themselves on to the missile using the missile’s own teleport, when the mission was over they’d be stuck as humans for the rest of their lives.
Senior picked up the bitten-through relay and laughed. When he was just a pup, he used to look at Jumble, the family’s pet human, and wish he was a human too. After all, humans had all the fun. People fed them and played with them, took them for walks (Dad always found time to walk Jumble; his sons were a lower priority when it came to time management), cuddled them and gave them treats, and never yelled at them, even when they did something really bad. I wish I could be a human, he’d thought, instead of a rotten lousy Ostar.
Someone, he couldn’t help thinking, had sharp ears, a long memory and a really nasty sense of humour.
Too clever by half. The idea of doing without the relay wouldn’t have occurred to an incompetent mechanic, or if it had it’d have been sent packing. But he could do it; and because he could, he knew that he must. In which case, assuming that by some miracle they survived and managed to get the bomb defused, what would the future hold for the pair of them? If they went home— Well, the GSETDB would look after them, presumably, after a fashion. People would be understanding. Arrangements would be made. But it’d either be a lifetime in a quiet place a long way from anywhere, with no visitors apart from scientists and dutiful family, or else an existence as a circus turn (come and look, he can talk and walk on all fours, just like a real person!). Or they could stay here, on this dismal little planet, and be animals for the rest of their lives.
The only comfort, he thought as he started work on the coils, was that their chances of survival were slimmer than size zero. Defuse the bomb, son. Sure, Dad, and when I’ve done that I’ll mow the lawn and put out the trash. How could he do that to them?
Junior came back with an octopus. It was bigger than the last one, and the early stages of decomposition actually increased the conductivity of the copper salts in its nervous system. If only Junior hadn’t crunched up the parts, he could’ve built a computer that would’ve put them in with a chance. Even as it was, the extra capacity would give him an additional two, possibly three decimal places of precision when it came to penetrating the missile’s shield modulations; an important advantage, which meant he’d now be trying to find the gaps with a needle rather than a carrot tied to a stick (but still blindfold, wearing boxing gloves, upside-down and facing the wrong way). Marvellous, he thought. The less incentive I have to succeed, the better my chances get of succeeding.
“How’s it going?” Junior asked.
“Could be worse. Pass me that probe, will you? No, not that one, the other one.”
“This?”
“Yup.”
“I’m really sorry,” Junior said. “And about the Eiffel Tower. You weren’t to know.”
“Thanks.”
“And it has been fun. Really.”
Senior grinned. “Liar.”
“Well, yes. But it wasn’t your fault.”
He touched the head of the probe to a circuit block and heard the tiny click of closing shunts. Fine work, though he said it himself. Too clever by half? Make that three quarters.
“Will it be OK?” Junior asked.
He thought carefully about his answer. He really ought to tell him. After all, the kid had a right to know. On the other hand, since it was still overwhelmingly likely that they’d die in the attempt, why upset him needlessly? If they survived, he’d tell him then.
Very carefully, he inserted the electrodes into the octopus’s head. The
tips of the tentacles twitched, and the eyes started to glow green. “Yes,” he said.
33
Novosibirsk
“Report,” the unicorn said.
“Oh no,” Lucy said. “Not you again.”
The unicorn stamped its foot. “It’s all right,” Mark Twain said, “it’s just a low—intelligence probe from the bomb vehicle. I expect it just wants to tell me something.”
She swung round and scowled at him. “You’ve been sending the unicorns?” she snarled.
“Well, yes. It’s just your basic data-collection drone.”
“A unicorn?”
“The database chose it, not me,” he said defensively. “I think it was meant to blend in unobtrusively with the rest of the indigenous fauna.”
“You bastard,” she shouted, reaching along the desktop for something to throw. Unfortunately, she was out of ammunition. “I thought I was going crazy, and all the time it was just—”
The unicorn moved. It covered a lot of ground in a very short time. When it stopped, its horn was a centimetre from Mark Twain’s throat.
“The question is,” Lucy said quietly, “if you’re the one who’s been sending them, what’s this one doing here?”
“Um.”
“It doesn’t look very friendly to me.”
“Report,” said the unicorn.
“If it does stab you,” Lucy went on, “I don’t suppose you’d actually die. I mean, you can’t, you’re just a synthetic body. You can’t, can you?”
“Not sure,” Mark Twain said, and his voice sounded a bit funny because he was trying to move his throat as little as possible. “Bit of a grey area, really.”
“By the same token,” Lucy went on, “if I were to shoot it with this gun I keep in my desk drawer, I don’t imagine anything would happen. What do you think?”
“I think something would happen.”
“What?”
“I think the projectile would go straight through it and hit me.”