by Tom Holt
“Left it in my other jacket. Sorry, no, I haven’t.”
“Ah. Oh well, not to worry, I can boost the polarities on a standard verteron inducer and recalibrate the drivers.”
“Haven’t got a standard verteron inducer either.”
He nodded slowly. “Right,” he said. “Have you got a lump hammer and a six-inch nail?”
He was enjoying himself. She was pretty sure he didn’t realise. Quite possibly he hadn’t yet evolved to the point where his brain could metabolise the concept of fun. But he was male and he was fixing stuff. Under those conditions, fun is spontaneously generated, like static electricity in cat fur.
“Now,” he said, as she handed him the nail, “all we do is, we pass the nail through the standing verteron field generated by the transmorphic flux capacitors, like this— Yow!” he added, dropping the nail and hugging his right hand to his chest; it was glowing blue and dripping fat blue sparks. “Sod it, forgot to turn off the juice. Can you just—?”
She flipped the appropriate switch. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, just singed a bit,” he replied through gritted teeth, as a tear rolled down his face and blue fire ran along his eyebrows like brandy flames on a Christmas pudding. “Serves me right for not thinking about what I’m doing.” He picked up the nail, yelped and dropped it. “Have you got another nail handy? This one’s a bit—”
“Here,” she said, handing him a nail. “Oughtn’t you to be wearing gloves?”
“Nah.” He grinned feebly; his eyes were still watering. “They’d just get in the way. Right, let’s try again.”
The second nail melted. The third nail got shot through the wall and may well have ended up in planetary orbit. The fourth— “There you go,” he said, as he touched the nail to the panel on his knees, which lit up and began to hum, “piece of cake.” His hair was standing on end like the bristles of a wire brush. “Now then, all we do now is jump the feed across these points here, and we ought to start seeing something.” He touched the bare ends of two wires together. White smoke started pouring out of the seams of the panel. “Ah, right, forgot about that.” He flipped a switch on the panel and tried again. On the bench above his head, a row of monitors lit up, their screens cascading with Ostar numerals.
“You did it,” she said.
Eventually, she didn’t add; she also left out amazingly, considering you practically fried the system three times. In spite of which, she was impressed. There had been a couple of intuitive leaps in his approach that would never have occurred to her. She’d assumed that what he’d just done wasn’t possible.
“Anything?” he asked, hauling himself up off the floor and looking over her shoulder at the screens.
“Just garbage,” she replied, and his face fell so fast and so far it practically burnt up on re-entry. “Hold it,” she added. “What’s that? There, that group on the third screen from the left, near the bottom.”
“That’s a standard military class-7 cipher.”
I know that, she didn’t say. “And there, look. Scroll that one down a bit, there’s more.”
Loads more: pages and pages of it, all in basic easy-to-read class-7 encryption. After a while they stopped talking to each other, too intent on what they were reading to say anything.
Eventually they stopped reading and looked at each other. Their faces were pale and rather scared-looking.
“Who the hell,” Lucy said, “are the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes?”
47
?????
“Fair play,” said the PDF man, smirking slightly. “We didn’t know about your booster station. You don’t know about our latest generation of warships. Personally, I don’t believe government can function unless the front paws are kept blissfully ignorant of what the hind paws are doing.”
They stood on the observation platform of the orbital defence grid control station, with nothing but a forcefield between them and the stars. It wasn’t the same as seeing it on a screen, the director acknowledged. Even the best 3D imaging came nowhere near close.
“Not very big, are they?” he said.
The PDF man grinned, displaying teeth. “ T’erier-class,” he said, “small but vicious. Three-man crew, but more firepower than a type-9 frigate. That lot up there —” he indicated a cloud of small white dots far away in the distance — “could take out the whole of the rest of the fleet put together in about five minutes, and the crews wouldn’t know what hit them.”
“Interesting,” the director said quietly but pointedly. “Just the sort of thing you’d want on your side if you were — oh, I don’t know, planning a military coup or something.”
“You know, that hadn’t occurred to me,” the PDF man replied mildly. “But yes, I can see your point. That’s not what we had in mind when we built them, though.”
“Really.”
The PDF man shrugged. “The really cool thing about them,” he went on, ‘is the dislocation drive.” He lowered his voice, even though they were demonstrably alone on the platform. “You’re a scientist, you’ll appreciate this. We finally cracked U’rrf’s Constant.”
The director nearly fell over. At the last moment, he managed to grab hold of the handrail. “You’re joking.”
“Actually, no I’m not. We found a way round the diffusion shift problem. A T’erier-class can dislocate. You don’t need me to tell you what that means.”
The director looked at him. “Anywhere in the galaxy?”
The PDF man nodded. “Not quite instantaneous,” he said, “not yet. There’s still exit and re-entry times, and of course it can take several hours to do the navigational calculations and programme the guidance computers. But more or less, yes. Anywhere in the galaxy within a matter of hours.”
The director’s tail was wagging; he couldn’t help it. “You can’t keep something like that to yourselves,” he said softly. “I mean, it’s the biggest discovery since—”
“Since nothing. It’s the biggest discovery ever.” The PDF man turned his head slightly and gazed at the white dots. “Of course, U’rrf did all the hard work, rest his soul. We just cleared up that one last niggling little detail. Even so.” His face cracked into a huge, lolling-tongue grin. “That still makes us the cleverest beings ever in the history of the universe.”
The director dragged in a deep breath; his lungs were tight and his throat felt cramped. “Just think,” he said, “of what we’ll be able to do with technology like that. It’ll mean an end to hunger, poverty—”
“Um, no.” The PDF man pulled a sad face. “Pity, but no. That’d mean telling people about it, and then it wouldn’t be ours any more. Much better to restrict it to the military. After all, if an enemy got his paws on it, we wouldn’t have an overwhelming advantage any more, now would we?”
“What enemy? We haven’t got any.”
“Not right now,” the PDF man said. “Not that we know of. Except Earth, of course.”
“Well, yes.” The director hesitated. “Apart from them, though—”
“And they’ve knocked out two of our R’wfft-class missiles,” he went on, “so who knows what they’ve got? Must be something pretty devastating.” He smiled. “That’s how I sold it to my bosses, and they agreed wholeheartedly. Though I don’t suppose they minded having a chance to try out the T’erier class in action. It’s been rather frustrating, as you can imagine. Like a kid with a new bike when it won’t stop raining.”
The white dots could have been stars, except that they were just a little bit too close together.
“So when will you—?”
“Oh, we can’t see any point in hanging about,” the PDF man said. “Ready when you are, basically.”
“When I—”
“You’re coming with us,” the PDF man said. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he added. “You’ll be able to see it happen, after all those years of dedicated work.”
The director moved away from the rail, his back to the ships and stars.
“Yes, thank you,” he said. “That’s exactly what I want, you’re quite right.” But his ears were back and his collar was tight. Details like that weren’t lost on a trained observer.
“Splendid,” the PDF man said. “We’re running the second phase of pre-launch checks, so that gives you an hour. I can let you have room for a small instrument case, but that’s about all. You’ll be flying with me,” he added. “I trust that’s all right.”
“Of course,” the director said, looking straight at him. There was something about his expression that the PDF man couldn’t quite identify; not fear exactly, a little bit of resentment but only by way of orchestration to the main theme. Sorrow, he decided, rather to his surprise.
“Where should I meet you?”
“Here,” the PDF man said. “We’ll teleport to the boarding module, and they’ll get you kitted up there. Don’t eat or drink anything,” he added. “Not recommended before dislocating. Ten cc’s of strepsiadin wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.”
“I’ll be here,” the director said, and he stepped on to the elevator without looking back. He took the teleshift back to his office, where he filled a slim black case with instruments — scanners, collimators, a hi-res thaumaton probe. He took a model-16 therion blaster out of his desk drawer, then reluctantly put it back: he would undoubtedly be scanned for weapons, and it would only cause embarrassment. Finally, he sprang the two locks on the bottom drawer of his desk, pulled out a plastic bag and put it in the case. It contained a lead and a collar.
48
Novosibirsk
“The Global Society,” the female repeated, “for the Ethical I Treatment of Dumb Brutes.”
George frowned. “I know that name,” he said. “They bought me a cup of coffee.”
“You’re welcome,” the male said. “Anyway, that’s us. At least, we work for them.”
“Right,” George nodded. “And the globe as in global would be…?”
“Ostar,” the female said. “You won’t have heard of it. Long way away from here.”
“How far?”
“Seven hundred light-years, give or take,” the male replied.
George nodded dumbly. Aliens, he thought. Way back when, before I addled my brains with booze, people called me a genius for proving they didn’t exist. But I always knew they did, ever since they stole— “That’s where you’re from.”
“Yes.” The male gave him an Earl Grey smile: weak and insipid.
“Yes, we’re both Ostar. Or we used to be.”
“Used to—”
“We can’t go home,” the female said briskly. “Ever. So we’re stuck here, for the rest of our lives, on this—”
The male tried to do a significant warning cough, swallowed air the wrong way and nearly choked.
The female waited till he’d finished and went on, “There’s an Ostar ship in orbit,” she said. “We had to go there, so we teleported up to it. But — well, there’s side-effects. It means we’re stuck in these bodies for ever.”
Using his coffee cup as cover, George pursed his lips. He could sympathise, up to a point. Except for his brief interlude as a creature of pure text, he’d been stuck in his body since the day he was born, and it wasn’t exactly the body he’d have chosen, even before he started marinading it in alcohol. Even so— Then the penny dropped like an asteroid. “Those aren’t your—”
“Real bodies, no,” the male said. “When we came here, we were surgically altered. You know, gene-resequencing, DNA involution therapy, morphic stasis diasporation, the whole bit. So we’d blend in and be inconspicuous.”
George looked at them: the Skywalker twins. Maybe “inconspicuous” had a different penumbra of meanings where they came from. Then something that had been nagging away at his subconscious for a while clicked into place. “You don’t look like you did when I first saw you,” he said. “For one thing, she wasn’t a—”
The female growled, just like a dog. “Bit of a sore point,” the male said quickly. “Let’s just say we had an accident. Anyway, Bro — I mean Sis — is quite right. We’re stuck like this. She’s wrong saying we can’t go home, but—”
“No I’m not. Nobody’s going to see me looking like this, nobody.”
George thought for a moment. “So the Ostar are — well, they look different from us, yes?”
The male shivered. “You could say that. In fact,” he went on, “it’s not too bad, it could be worse. I mean, the Ostar have one head and four limbs, just like your lot, and we see with eyes and hear with ears and so on. I suppose, looking at it from a xenobiological point of view, we’re not so different. Like, you should see some of the creatures there are out there. Some of them don’t even have physical bodies, which is just so weird.”
George, who’d quite recently been a sentence, with a verb instead of a heart and relative clauses where his arms and legs should have been, let that one go. “So,” he said with a slight degree of effort, “what exactly are you doing here? And what’s the Global Society—?”
“We are, like I said a moment ago,” the female replied. “The GSETDB is the biggest animal-rights organisation on Ostar. We found out that our government was planning to destroy your planet.”
George’s mouth fell open, and he made a single gurgling noise. “Why?”
“Ah.” The male smiled grimly. “That’s rather a good question. The government says it’s because sound waves from Earth, relayed through a wormhole that used to link your planet to ours—”
“Used to?”
The male nodded. “Sound travels very slowly,” he said. “The wormhole closed up a long time ago, but the sounds that passed through it are only just reaching us now. Anyway, these sounds, including your Earth music, have reached our planet and they’re driving us nuts. We don’t have anything like music, you see, we’re totally unused to it, so when we get a tune in our heads …” He shrugged. “Parallel from your own history,” he said. “Settlers from one of your continents landed in a distant country, isolated from the rest of your species for thousands of years. The settlers brought a virus with them; their lot were so used to it that it hardly bothered them at all, but the natives in the place they’d moved to hadn’t ever had it, so they’d got no immunity and died like flies. That’s us, when your music reached us. At least,” he added, with a scowl, “that’s what the government told us.”
“We think they’re lying,” the female said. “We think—”
“Hold on a moment,” George interrupted. He was starting to get hangover symptoms, even though his blood-alcohol level was lower than it had been for some time. “You said the wormhole the music reached you through has closed up now.”
“That’s right,” the male said. “But it could open up again at any moment, the scientists say, so you lot have got to go. A question of the survival of our species. According to the government.”
“Who are lying,” the female added. “We believe the sounds that reach us are too quiet to be heard—”
“Even though the Ostar have much better hearing than your lot,” the male put in.
“We believe,” the female went on, giving the male a sour look, “that the government has been deliberately boosting the noise to dangerous levels, just so they’d have a pretext for blowing up your planet.”
George gaped at her. “Why the hell would they want to do that?”
“Another good question,” the male said with a shrug. “But anyway, one thing’s for sure, our lot launched a missile at you. A R’wfft-class, a planet buster. This place should just be a thin cloud of rubble by now.”
George waited, but that was it, apparently. “But we’re not,” he prompted.
“Correct,” the male said. “Something went wrong with the bomb. Either it broke down—”
“Which is really, really unlikely,” the female said.
“Entirely right,” the male said. “Or else your lot managed to shoot it down or defuse it—”
George shook his head, then really wished he
hadn’t. “I doubt it,” he said. “I can’t guarantee that, because our governments tend to believe that interesting news is for hoarding not sharing, but from what I’ve seen, your technology—”
“Quite. You wouldn’t stand a chance.” The male frowned. “But here you all still are. Which is a good thing,” he added, quickly and earnestly. “The Global Society is passionately opposed to the wanton slaughter of living things. We believe that all life-forms, no matter how primitive, have a basic right to exist. Including you.”
“Thank you so much,” George said, with a slight scowl.
“That’s all right,” the male said. “It’s our mission, and we’re prepared to make sacrifices for it. We volunteered to come here, you know.”
“Well,” the female muttered, “our dad volunteered us.”
“Yes, but we—”
“Did as we were told,” the female said crisply. “But we’re here now, for ever and ever and ever, so we might as well make ourselves useful. Save this miserable planet from being annihilated. That sort of thing.”
George took a deep breath. Between wanting to thank them and the urgent need he felt to kick their spines out through their ears, he felt mildly confused. He tried to focus — a bit like trying to build a sandcastle out of semolina pudding. “This bomb,” he said. “I think I know where it could be.”
The male nodded. “So do we. Of course, there’s another one now.”
If George hadn’t changed back, he’d have been a row of dots at this point.
“It’s OK,” the male went on, “it’s just sitting there, not doing anything. We disarmed it.”
“You—”
“Us,” the female said. “At great personal cost,” she added. “But all that means is, they’ll send another one. Or more than one, or maybe even warships.”
Warships. Just a word, and these days he had a special insight into what a word was. But some words are different. Warships. They were going to blow up the Earth. Furthermore, only he knew about it, and there was nothing he could do about it, not by conventional means — telling someone, notifying the authorities, writing to his Congressman, the stuff you’re supposed to do in a modern civilised society. Warships, for crying out loud, as in war. War was a concept he could understand — planet-buster missiles were too remote, too sci-fi; might as well be dragons — and if he could understand he could believe, and if he could believe he could be scared out of his feeble, booze-ravaged mind. There’s going to be a war, and we’ll lose and that’ll be the end of all of us; unless George Oh-you-mean-the-dipso-in-Security Stetchkin managed to stop it…