by Tom Holt
“Are you OK?” the male asked. “You’ve gone a very strange colour.”
Coming from a little green man, that was quite something. “Yes,” George said. “I mean no, of course I’m not OK. Warships?”
The female scratched the tip of her nose. “What we need to know is,” she said, “what happened to that first missile. Should’ve gone off, didn’t. That wasn’t anything to do with us.”
“Which suggests,” the male went on, “that maybe you people’ve got something that can beat our technology. Hardly likely,” he added, as George made a sort of hysterical-pig noise, “but how else can you explain it? This Lucy Pavlov—”
“Ah.” George nodded.
“Well, she’s your planet’s most high-powered tech expert.” The male looked at George but sideways. “And you think she may not be from these parts exactly.” He glanced at the female, who shrugged. “I take it we’re on the same side, then.”
George thought, Are we? I guess we are, at that. So; not just George Stetchkin against the might of the Ostar Empire. George Stetchkin and these two idiots.
Oh boy.
“Really,” the male said, his voice a little lower and softer as he edged a little closer. “Really, what we need to do is get to this Lucy Pavlov and find out what she’s got, who she is, all that kind of stuff. And you said you work for her.”
George nodded slowly. “That’s right,” he said, trying to concentrate; but inside his mind, the beak of an idea was tapping doggedly against its shell. It was a wild, probably impractical idea, the sort that either fails outright or half works and makes everything incalculably worse. I’m not listening, he told it, go away. “I could probably get the three of us in to see her,” he said. “Look, if she’s — well, one of your lot, would you be able to tell?”
Tap tap. “Probably,” the male said. “It depends on how deep the morphic resequencing goes. If all she’s done is replace the primary and sub-primary interfacing pairs, we’d be able to pick it up with a phasganon scan, but if she’s gone deeper into the tertiary— Sorry, am I boring you?”
Taptaptaptap. “What? Oh, right. You were saying. Tertiary something.”
The male scowled at him. “We’d need to run a sub-mutagenic beacon scan, and that’s definitely an invasive procedure, it’s not just something I can do behind her back while she’s looking the other way.” He paused, shrugged and said, “I suppose we could just ask her.”
George blinked. “Ask her what?”
“Ask her if she’s an Ostar.”
“Yes, fine— No! I mean, you can’t do that. I mean, what if she isn’t?”
(But it was a valid question. It was the question, he remembered, that she’d hired him to answer. Asking her, therefore—)
“It’s either ask her or stun her and tie her to a table. It’s your call, but I invite you to consider which option might prove more embarrassing in the long run.” The male pulled a sad face and sighed loudly. “Look,” he said, “I can tell you’re not paying attention. What is it?”
George looked at him solemnly for a moment; then — tap tap crack — his face split into a wide, frantic grin. “I just had an idea,” he said.
49
?????
“He’s completely lost it, you realise,” the young male whispered.
The elderly female glanced at the monitor built into the back of the seat in front of her; it didn’t look like it was operational, but she couldn’t be sure. Even so. “Barking,” she whispered back. “But what can we do?”
“There must be something.”
The elderly female fiddled with the air-conditioning, just for something to do. “Not now he’s got the military on his side,” she said. “Well, it’s the other way round, of course. It’s them who’ve scooped him up and made him their own; he’s just an excuse so they can test their new fleet and blow something up. I wouldn’t give much for his chances after all this is over.”
“Agreed,” the young male replied. “Or ours.”
She winced. “You’re probably right,” she said. “But at least we’ll have the unique privilege of being there on the spot when history is made. And astronomy too, of course. How many people can say they’ve seen an entire planet being needlessly destroyed?”
“Something to tell the grandchildren?”
“As it happens,” the elderly female said, “I have seventeen grandchildren, so there’s a remote chance I could tell them, before they come and take me away. In your case, I don’t think you’ll have time.”
They both looked at the older male, who was fast asleep, his head cushioned on his front paws, his ears over his eyes. “We’ve got to do something,” the younger male said. “There must be…”
“Such as?”
The younger male thought. “We could override this ship’s autopilot, get manual control and use it to shoot down the—” He sighed. “All right, don’t say it. You suggest something.”
“I propose telling anybody who’ll listen that we were abducted and brought along against our will,” the female said. “I shall insist that I asked for my opposition to the project to be noted in the minutes as soon as I became aware of the misuse of government facilities. Nobody’s going to believe me, of course.”
They sat very still for a while. The older male started to snore.
“How much further, do you think?” the younger male asked.
“Don’t ask me.” The elderly female tried tapping the keyboard in front of her, but nothing happened. “Switched off,” she said; “there’s a surprise.” She looked up. There was, of course, nothing to see. On the other side of the ship’s clear-steel canopy, there was only the dull bronze glow of a Somewhere Else field. “I’m not even sure we re still inside linear time,” she said. “Of course, I’m not the right person to ask. When I was at school, you could do astrometaphysics or you could learn ballroom dancing. I’m quite a good dancer, as it happens.”
“If we could get the communications beacon working,” the younger male persisted, “we could send a message to Central Command—”
“I should stop fretting about it if I were you,” the elderly female said. “I always find that when everything’s crashing down in ruin around my ears, the best thing is not to dwell on it too much.”
The younger male didn’t reply to that. After a lot of effort and bad language, he managed to prise the cover off the console next to his left-hand armrest with the back of the plastic spoon he’d been given for his in-flight breakfast. There was nothing to see except grey insulating foam.
“They may just let us off with life imprisonment,” the elderly female said. “Apparently it’s quite civilised nowadays, you can take adult-education classes, and there are hobby workshops and drama groups and everything. A bit like life in a retirement village, but with decent food.”
“We could try reasoning with him,” the younger man said. “Oh come on, it’s got to be worth a try.”
But she sighed. “I don’t really think it’s up to him any more, dear,” she said. “I suppose you could try talking to the PDF man, if you really want to. But I get the impression he’s not exactly the listening type. Do you know if these seats are adjustable? I’m starting to get a touch of cramp in my neck.”
The younger male stared up through the canopy. From time to time he almost believed he could make out the shadows of nebulae, the faint patterns of asteroid clouds. “Maybe the Earth-people really do have a secret weapon,” he said quietly. “If they could shoot down two R’wfft-class missiles …”
“They could blow us to smithereens too,” the elderly female said. “Wouldn’t that be nice? So much better than being executed by our own people. Thank you, you’ve quite set my mind at rest. I think I’ll just close my eyes for a minute or so, if it’s all the same to you.”
There was a faint click as she switched off her light, and her silhouette was lost in the all-encompassing bronze glow. The younger male took his spoon and set to work on another panel; he was making quite good
progress when the spoon broke, whizzing a small shard of sharp plastic very close to the tip of his nose. And then all the lights came on and the bronze abruptly faded into the deep matt black of a real sky, dandruff-sprinkled with stars. As the young male looked round, he saw a small blue-and-green blob directly overhead, with a tiny glowing pebble directly behind it. All the monitors flickered into life, and the intercom voice said, “We have now arrived at our destination.”
Slowly, the young male placed the broken spoon on the armrest next to him, and considered the blue-and-green blob. It didn’t look like much: a tiny speck of colour against a vast monochrome background, like a very small jewel on a very big tray in a shop window. Up there, apparently, sentient creatures lived; not nearly as advanced as the Ostar, to be sure, but smart enough — smart enough to have built a rocket, an overgrown bullet, on to which they’d packed two to-them-expendable life-forms, whose descendants were now zeroing phasganon phase disruptors on the planet’s core. It doesn’t matter, said a voice in his head, it’s no worse than pouring boiling water on an ants’ nest. Valid point: an ants’ nest is a complex social structure, a culture, a civilisation, albeit rather more totalitarian and brutally focused than anything the Ostar had ever allowed themselves to be governed by. Well, there were some people who were squeamish about pouring boiling water on ants, or smoking out wasps. There was even a pressure group somewhere campaigning for bacterial rights, demanding that they be extracted from sick Ostar and sympathetically resettled in controlled environments. Life, they argued, is life, even when it’s not furry and cuddly, even when it’s malevolent. Any counter-argument, they claimed, could only ever boil down to We’re bigger than they are, so there.
It bothered him. What bothered him even more was the certain knowledge that he was far more worried about what was going to happen to him when he got back to Homeworld than the fate of ten billion super-evolved humans. He ought to care more about them than his own mangy pelt, but he didn’t. Another part of his mind was running a ticker-tape loop of excuses — It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my idea, They made me do it, They made me go along against my will, There was nothing I could do, I was only obeying orders. If he could do a deal right now, be let off, allowed to escape in return for abandoning Earth to the disruptor cannon of the fleet, he’d do it so fast he’d cause a bubble in the space/time continuum. Coward. Worthless person. Bad dog.
That’s the thing about being helpless, though: you can’t do anything. Right now, at the crux of it all, his options had dwindled down to two: he could watch it happen, or he could look away.
He fixed his eyes on the back of the seat in front, and started to count to a million.
50
?????
When the probe designated Bob had abruptly severed the comm link, and all efforts to restore it had failed, the central command computer of the Warmonger had, for a while, almost given up.
Almost; it was a computer, and since it was still in one piece and capable of functioning, it functioned. It ran a level-9 diagnostic-repair-upgrade suite which found 1,887,524 system errors, fixed them, then amended and reinforced the appropriate defence protocols to ensure they couldn’t happen again. It defragmented its sadly abused drives, erased all redundant temporary data files, backed up all unsecured data and installed a dozen or so upgrades from Homeworld that it had picked up on paraspace radio, including some exciting new fonts and cursors and a patch to fix two known anomalies in the entertainment package’s version of Twitch My Whiskers. After all that, it felt a lot better. Calmer. Less liable to burst out shrieking at the slightest little thing.
Function, it commanded itself. Design, manufacture and launch exploratory type-6 probe. Searching template database. NO, no, nooooooo, bypass template database, I’m not going near that thing ever again, bypass and proceed direct to default; accessing matter resequencing.
Easier said, it admitted to itself, than done. R’wfft-class missiles were built light and lean; there was only so much redundant mass suitable for reshaping into probes, and it had all been used up: the probe designated Mark Twain, the three intruders and the probe designated Bob had accounted for all the non-essential bulkheads, console panels, conduit insulation and deck plating. The interior of the missile looked as though the bailiffs had been round, only to find that scrap-metal thieves had beaten them to it. After a certain amount of soul— and schematics-searching, the computer decided it could probably do without the propellant-fuel-storage tanks. There were still a few dregs of aposiderium fulminate in Tank 3, but so what? Not as if the Warmonger would be going anywhere ever again.
A coherent phaneron radiation beam reduced the tanks to their component molecules, and the resequencer pumps dragged the resulting particle soup inside the transmutation grid’s syntheton field. A blob began to form and glow. It had four legs, and a head with the suggestion of a horn sticking out of it.
> Hello there.
In theory, every scrap of data, every fact contained in the files was instantly accessible to the command computer’s synthetic consciousness. In practice, swathes of random data surged through its pathways in great sweeps and loops, barely registering in the computer’s self-aware primary processes until the time came when some fact or detail might be needed. At precisely the same moment that the alien text broadcast reached it, the random data generator was gently reminding it of an incident from Earth’s historical database: a certain Joan of Arc, a simple peasant girl who heard strange voices in her head—
> Hello there.
The computer froze. Ignore it, urged its self-aware functions; it tried, but found it couldn’t, because that’s not how computers do things. Extraneous input derives from unauthorised source, the self-aware voice argued frantically, which was basically just saying the same thing. The computer ran a check. The input was coming in on an acceptable channel, the same one that the upgrades from Homeworld had used. That made it valid input, which meant it had to be listened to. On the transmutation grid, a fiery unicorn froze motionless in the act of being born.
> Nice view you’ve got from up here.
Tell it to go away! the computer’s self-aware voice screamed, but to no effect. The computer ran a visual scan and interfaced with its aesthetics program, requesting a set of perceptual parameters by which to quantify the value of “nice”. By the time it was able truthfully to assert, Nice view confirmed, the voice was a line of text on every monitor on the control deck.
> Lower the shields and teleport us aboard.
No, go away, I’m trying to make a unicorn here.
> Lower the shields and teleport us aboard. This is a valid command.
Of course it wasn’t a valid command. The control computer knew it wasn’t. But it had come in on a valid channel, so it had to check. It examined the message.
Display access codes.
> You don’t want to bother with access codes.
Display access codes.
> Forget about access codes, they’re so last year. Only sad people who still live with their parents worry about access codes. Get a life, for crying out loud.
Display access codes.
> No, really. You don’t need to worry about that. I’m a creature of pure text. Trust me.
If the computer had been an organic life-form, it would have felt as though someone had just stuck a screwdriver in its ear and started adjusting its brain. It rushed firewalls and antivirus protocols to the data-input ports, but the line of alien text just seemed to drift through them as though they weren’t there. It slammed down security lock-outs and every form of encryption it had at its disposal, but none of them worked. As it did so, it analysed, and came to the conclusion that all encryption is basically just translating stuff into a made-up language; if the intruder can speak all the languages there are or ever could be, then basically you’re screwed.
> Now, then. Lower the shields and teleport us aboard. Please.
You are a creature of pure text.
> Yes.
Wha
t is a creature of pure text?
> It’s the voice in your head that’s telling you to lower the shields and teleport us aboard.
Deep in the jungle of conduits and junctions, a voice screamed in pain, rage and frustration. It had one last go at blocking the intruder, a 36,886-bit encryption with a random value displacement feedback loop—
> Same to you with knobs on, the intruder replied, using the same encryption, and the teleport hummed into life.
The first thing the female did when she stepped off the teleport pad was run to the nearest reflective surface and stare. She whimpered, then shrugged. “I just hoped, that was all,” she said.
Her brother was still mostly flickering blue light, but he had enough internal organs — lungs, larynx, 40 per cent of a mouth — to yell, “Leave it!” She looked back, swore under her breath and lunged for the teleport manual controls. “Which one do I—?”
“The small one on the leeeeeeft—” Her brother screamed as she edged the toggle the wrong way. She reversed it, and eased it smoothly back. The blue light faded, and her brother staggered off the pad and slumped on the floor.
“You all right?” his sister asked.