by Tom Holt
Covering his head with his arms and yelling (cultural reference found), “Geronimo!”, the probe designated Bob charged through the doorway, ran headlong into the banister at the foot of a staircase, bashed his head on the handrail and fell over.
A moment or so later, he ran a status check and opened his eyes. A tactical sitrep revealed that he had underestimated the offensive capability of the staircase by 100 per cent, but otherwise he was fine. His reinforced skull had saved him from what could have been a mild concussion, and his armoured epidermal layer was unbroken. The only obvious threat he could detect was that pesky staircase, and a single shot from his therion blaster reduced it to inoffensive matchwood and rubble. The best Dirt had to offer, he thought: well, that’s fine by me.
He consulted the tracking scanner. The Ostar tech power signal was no more than seventy-five metres away, directly below him. It was contained in a cellar-like structure. Access to the target area was by means of the staircase he’d just demolished.
Oh, he thought.
The discharge of his therion blaster appeared to have triggered an archaic audio alarm system. He considered the implications. Guards, civilian, possibly unarmed; a general lockdown of doors and gates; a call for back-up, presumably more of the same. Nothing to worry about. He peered down through the splintered wreck of the stairs, estimated the drop to be no more than twelve metres, and jumped.
He landed securely, immediately found his balance, and looked down. He was about a third of the way down what remained of the stairs. Getting down, of course, was the easy part. Gravity was on his side. Getting back up again, hauling with him the errant type-6, would be a little more challenging. To save time later, he unlooped a micrograpple from his belt, threw it up to the floor above and tugged gently on the microfilament line to make sure it was firmly fixed. Then he consulted his scanner again. No more than twelve metres to the hub.
Of course, he reasoned as he approached a solid-looking steel door, it didn’t necessarily follow that the type 6 was still here. Quite some time had passed since the disruption of the unicorn probe. But the fugitive was a type 6, just as he was. Were he in Mark Twain’s position, he’d make for the best-defended place he could find and stay there. Moving about would just make him vulnerable; besides, if he was wandering about the city, the scanner would have picked him up. No, he was still somewhere inside the compound, in which case he was certain to be on the other side of this plain steel door. The probe designated Bob hefted his therion blaster, set the yield to 2.1 to avoid excessive collateral damage, and aimed at the crude mechanical locking system.
The alarm bell stopped ringing.
The probe designated Bob hesitated. He could see no reason why the alarm should have been deactivated, and any development he couldn’t account for merited attention, in case it presaged an unforeseen situation. He lowered the blaster and reached for his scanner.
The Tannoy system started to play music.
It was on him and into him before he had a chance to react. Before he could cover his ears with his hands, the tune had found his cerebral cortex and penetrated his concentration centres. He swung round, desperately seeking the output speakers, but by then it was too late: Tumpty-tum, tumpty-tum, tumpty tumpty-tum.
He froze, scanner in one hand, blaster in the other. Numbers and intervals flooded through his brain, washing away subroutines, seeping through into data archives, drowning command functions, demanding to be counted, analysed, calculated, multiplied and divided and square-rooted. Scanner or blaster —frantically he tried to decide, to remember what he’d been doing the instant before the music started, but all he could process was tumpty-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty tumpty tumpty tum. He could feel himself growing too confused and preoccupied to remember how to breathe. Tumpty-tumpty-tum, tumpty-tumpty-tum. He tried to press the blaster’s trigger, but he no longer had control over his right index finger. He heard himself singing along, with his last reserve of breath. Darkness veiled his eyes as his empty lungs convulsed— The music stopped. A few seconds later, PaySoft security personnel were lowered down the stairwell on ropes. They tied the intruder up, winched him back to the ground floor, loaded him on a stretcher and took him off to the company infirmary. Several of them were whistling “Jingle Bells”. After all, it’s an infernally catchy tune.
The security chief called Lucy Pavlov in the cafeteria and told her what had happened; all according to plan, they reported, situation now contained, reverting to security level taupe. Lucy couldn’t remember offhand what taupe was — higher than yellow, obviously, and a long way below red — but she thanked them anyway, her mouth full of cheesecake.
“It won’t stop a bomb,” Mark Twain said.
“I never said it would,” Lucy replied. “I said it’d stop a type-6 probe, and it did. You’re supposed to say how clever I’ve been.”
Mark Twain nibbled at the corner of his slice of cheesecake, pulled a face and put it back on his plate. “You’ve been clever,” he replied. “But it won’t stop a bomb. Not even if you play Ravel’s Boléro at it.”
“Cultural reference found.” She thought for a moment. “It might, you know.”
He shook his head. “Only works on organics,” he said, “not computers.”
She shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “now we know how to deal with type-6 probes. Cheer up, that’s a good thing.”
“It’s a very small good thing.”
“Also,” she went on, ignoring him, “we’ve captured an enemy spy. That’s good too.”
“Accessing strategic database. Yes,” he conceded, “up to a point. We can put him on trial and use him as a pretext to expel all their diplomats. Well, that’s a weight off my mind.”
“Don’t be such a misery,” Lucy said, spearing his cheesecake with her fork. “We can reprogram him to send back disinformation. That’s what you do, apparently.”
He sighed. “You do realise that the ship’s got exactly the same strategic database as us,” he pointed out. “It’ll be expecting—”
“Exactly.” She smiled at him. “So, we programme the spy to tell the ship there is no defence grid, there aren’t any incredibly sophisticated hidden weapons, and there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t complete the mission and detonate immediately.”
“But that’s true—”
Lucy nodded. “Mm,” she said through a cheesecake filter. “And the ship won’t believe it, for the reasons stated.” She smiled again. “Say I’m clever.”
He raised both eyebrows. “You’re clever,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“But it’s still just buying time,” Mark Twain said gloomily. “Sooner or later, it’s going to figure it out. Or it’ll get fresh orders from Homeworld. Or they’ll send another bomb. Or a fleet of warships.”
“Don’t be annoying,” she said. “By then we’ll have thought of something.”
“Will we?”
“Oh yes,” said Lucy. “We’re clever.”
43
Portland, Oregon
“Hello,” the customer said. “Would you like to buy a computer?”
The shopkeeper took a moment to reply. “That’s not a computer”, he said, “it’s a squid. And why are you both dressed up as—?”
“It’s a computer,” the customer said. “Trust me. I’ll show you, if you like.”
“And it’s not a squid,” the female said. “It’s an octopus.”
The shopkeeper turned his head away and groped for the button that operated the extractor fan. “Thanks,” he said, “but I think I’ll pass. We sell computers, you see, not marine life.”
“Oh, it’s not alive,” the customer said reassuringly.
“I can see that,” the shopkeeper said. “And smell it too,” he added, with feeling.
The male customer took a deep breath and smiled. “Yes, it’s an octopus,” he said, as if explaining macroeconomic theory to a seven-year-old. “But we’ve figured out a way to modify it and turn it into a computer. A really,
really good one. Better than anything you’ve got in your store. If you give us money, we’ll show you what we’ve done, and then you can modify more octopuses and make lots of these really, really good computers, and then you can sell them to people and become extremely rich. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
The shopkeeper thought about it for a moment. “Tell you what I’ll do,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’ll count to ten,” he said. “Then, if you’re not out of my store, taking your dead fish with you, I’ll call the cops. Do we have a deal?”
The female, who’d been drawing on the back of a flyer all this time, made an exasperated sort of a noise and elbowed the male out of the way. “Look at this,” she said, shoving the piece of paper under the shopkeeper’s nose. “Go on, it won’t bite you.”
“One,” the shopkeeper said, but he couldn’t help glancing at the paper. “Two. Three. Four. Five. Oh my god.”
“Interested?”
The shopkeeper made a grab for the paper, but the female snatched it away. “Money,” she said.
There was a brief, fraught silence. “How much?”
“Enough for two airline tickets to Siberia.”
“Deal.”
“And,” the female said quickly, “two suits of inconspicuous clothes, underwear, shoes and stuff. And how much does it cost for a sex-change operation?”
They left the store with $3,000 and the octopus (the shopkeeper said thanks but he’d get a more up-to-date model) and went to the airport by way of Walmart. Everything went very smoothly until a man in a smart uniform asked them for their passports.
“Sorry?”
“Passports,” the man in uniform repeated. “Can’t go beyond this barrier unless I see them.”
“What’s a passport?”
A difficult situation then arose, which they eventually resolved by running away. That wasn’t so bad, because they hadn’t had a really good run for some time. But, when they were finally sure they weren’t being followed any more, and they’d sat down on a bench in a park somewhere to consider their position, they had to agree that things could have been better.
“We’ve still got some money left,” the male pointed out. “And the octopus.”
“Big deal,” his sister replied. “And I’m still not sure we should’ve sold that man advanced technology. The Principal Directive would seem to apply.”
The male said something vulgar about the Principal Directive. “If we’ve got enough money,” he went on, “we can buy electronics, upgrade the octopus and call Dad. He’ll know what to do.”
His sister didn’t seem convinced. “What’s he going to do?” she said. “Send us two tickets to Siberia and a full set of travel documents? I don’t think so. He’ll just get mad at us and shout.”
Her brother thought about that for a moment, and winced. “All right,” he said grudgingly. “You suggest something.”
“We buy the electronics, upgrade the octopus and use it to get money out of a bank. Then we can buy an aircraft of our own and fly it to Siberia without all this mucking around with bits of paper. It can’t be difficult,” she added, as her brother looked at her. “Else they couldn’t do it.”
There was a brisk difference of opinion, followed by a compromise. They’d buy the electronics, upgrade the octopus (which was starting to smell irresistibly delicious; humans were crossing the street to avoid it), use it to get money out of a bank, and then go to the appropriate store and buy a couple of passports. They tried that, and everything went beautifully according to plan until they tried to find a passport vendor. They tried a Pavoogle search, but there were no passport sellers listed in Portland, Oregon. They went back to Walmart, which had impressed them as being a high-class establishment where you could get practically anything you wanted (and at sensible prices). However, when they asked the clerk in the household-goods department if they could buy a couple of passports, with visas for Siberia, a difficult situation arose, which they were forced to resolve by running away. This time, owing to the intervention of store security and a couple of peace officers, they had to dump the octopus before they could make good their escape.
“I’ve had about as much of this stupid planet as I can take,” the male said, peeping out from under the lid of the dumpster in which they’d judiciously taken cover. “Is it just me, or are all humans completely irrational and dangerously paranoid?”
His sister scowled at him, though of course he couldn’t see her. “Not the sort of place you’d want to be stranded for the rest of your life, you mean.”
“I keep telling you, when this is all over, we’ll go home.”
“And grow old eating our dinners out of a bowl on the floor. It’s a great choice, isn’t it?”
The hissing noise her brother made probably wasn’t the last of his patience leaking out through his gritted teeth, but it could well have been. “Yes, well,” he said, “looks like there’s a third option after all. The one where you keep on moaning at me, we do nothing, and we both get blown away when they detonate the bomb. You know,” he added savagely, “the one that’s most likely to happen, ever since you dropped the octopus. The odds-on favourite, in fact.”
Sibling bickering is like tennis; there’s an almost infinite variety of shots that can be played, but both players know better than to cross the clearly marked lines. There was, therefore, a brief silence. Then the female said, “So what do we do now?”
The male shrugged. “We’ve still got a thousand US dollars left from what we took out of the bank. Even on this stupid planet, that’s got to buy a whole lot of bones.”
His sister thought about that. “And decaying octopus,” she said.
“You know, I’ve kind of gone off that.”
“Well, decaying something else, then. Cuttlefish washed up on beaches. Dead birds.”
Her brother hesitated. “Or we could buy more electronics and another octopus and try and call home.”
“Not enough money,” his sister said firmly. “We need at least thirteen hundred dollars. We only have one thousand.”
“True,” her brother said, and there was a kind of fatalistic joy in his voice. “Right, then. Screw duty and the hell with the mission —let’s. party.”
They scrambled out of the dumpster, brushing unidentified bits of stuff off their clothes. “Shopping,” said the male.
“Not Walmart.”
“Agreed. What we need,” her brother said firmly, “is a really good butcher.”
They walked in silence for a while. Then, at the corner of a busy street, they hesitated just long enough to flex their nostrils, as their Ostar brain centres did their best to identify the smells they sought using their sadly inferior human noses. “That way,” said the male.
“Agreed.”
They’d gone about fifty metres when a human stepped out from a doorway. He was short, middle-aged, shabby and wild-looking. They recognised him immediately.
“Hey, it’s—”
“Shhh!”
Too late. He’d seen them. He smiled, and from his jacket pocket he drew a grey plastic contraption which they’d last seen in their hotel room in New York.
“Greetings,” George Stetchkin said, and shot them.
44
?????
“One hundred million years ago,” the director said, “the first Ostar emerged on this planet.”
The female cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said, “we know that. Look, about this illegal booster station—”
“The first Ostar,” the director repeated firmly. “Our ancestors. From whom we are all descended.”
“Quite,” the female said. “Only, when you bullied us into letting you build the wretched thing, we had no idea—”
The director turned his head and looked at her. She had to fight quite hard to keep herself from rolling on her back with her legs in the air. “Your ancestors and mine,” he said quietly. “Would you be interested in knowing their names?”
The
others shared an oh-no-he’s-finally-flipped look. “That’s not possible, is it?” the young male said. “I mean, a hundred million—”
“On the contrary,” the director said. “I know their names. It’s a recorded fact. They were called Millie and Prince. They were a pair of pedigree beagles, born and raised at the Sunshine Valley Dog Ranch in Albuquerque, New Mexico. On Earth.”
It was the sort of silence into which noise is sucked and utterly destroyed. Finally, the PDF man said, “Earth?”
“Yes.” The director gazed at him for a moment, then nodded. “That Earth. The planet we’ve been talking about.”
The older male coughed nervously. “That can’t be right,” he said. “We know for a fact, humanoid life didn’t originate on the planet until—”
“Millie and Prince,” the director went on, “were acquired by an organisation called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an adjunct of the government of America, one of Earth’s numerous autonomous states. They were placed aboard a crude missile powered by chemical explosives and fired into planetary orbit. The object of the exercise was to find out if living creatures could survive in space. According to Earth records, this took place in year 1956 of the human calendar.”
“Hang on, I’m confused,” said the younger male. “It said in the briefing notes you gave us last year that the current Earth-calendar year is 2015. But you’re saying that these beagles were on Ostar a hundred million—”
“Yes.” The director smiled at him. “The missile project went wrong. The missile itself disappeared without trace twenty Earth hours after it was launched. It emerged just inside Ostar’s gravity well, at which point its rocket motors failed and it crash-landed on the surface. The missile itself was wrecked, but by some miracle Millie and Prince survived and escaped unharmed from the wreckage. That,” the director continued, “is the limit of what we know for certain. But DNA testing and advanced genetic analysis have proved beyond doubt that the Ostar species is descended from Earth dogs. We have in fact secured a dog from the Sunshine Valley Dog Ranch — the bloodline has been maintained intact for commercial reasons — and compared his DNA with samples taken from the wreckage of the missile, which my archaeologists discovered in the jungles of G’wrzt thirty years ago. As far as I’m concerned, there can be no other explanation. We as a species are directly descended from Millie and Prince.”