“You really want to leave Gideon here? The building’s still standing — barely.”
“You really want him to come back with us?”
“Good point,” Jamie said. Smiling, he turned and opened his briefcase before the Leelite. “If we can just step into anything you have resembling an office…”
25
Indispensable was a nub, now — a single bangbox transiting through the nonspace between whirlibangs. The passenger segment would have been the only piece of the ship the riders had access to in any event: vessels were dismantled into components small enough to fit in the rings. But while Indispensable had arrived at Mu Cassiopieae as an unconnected chain of many units, it was going back to the Dragon’s Depot as a singleton shuttle. The other units remained back at Leel, along with Surge Two’s living quarters.
For all his troubles in his earlier flights, Jamie felt he was getting the hang of interstellar travel. There wasn’t gravity in the vessel whether inside the whirlibang or not, but he’d found a way to strap himself in so he could rest as he used to at his trading desk — sprawled across the chair, with his back against the armrest and his legs hanging over. If only he had his cowbell.
“This is starting to work out,” Jamie said to Bridget, who was seated across from him and sipping from a food packet. He went over the figures on his hand. “This Leel contract is worth a lot — and it all goes to taking care of what we—”
“Of what you—” she interjected.
“Of what is owed,” Jamie said. “And there’s plenty of time until the end of the quarter.”
“Not so much as you think,” Bridget said. “Remember, while we’re in the whirlibang, time outside is passing at a different rate. By the time we get back to Sigma Draconis, we’ll have just over seven weeks left. And how much money do we need to make?”
“Tens of billions still,” Jamie said. The air went out of him.
“I thought you knew the time calculations by heart,” she said between sips. “Wasn’t it part of your job?”
“Yeah. But I was never the one doing the traveling before.” He sighed.
The whirlibang transit was a brief ride, but the flight from Leel to the jumping-off point was long enough that the rest of the crew was sacked out, with the exception of Trovatelli. Jamie had tried to engage her in conversations several times, but she seemed intent on studying the data she’d gotten from the Leelites.
“There’s a lot here we should send home,” Trovatelli said, hovering nearby.
Jamie liked what zero gee did to women’s bodies. Her dark hair floated freely, and if he had never considered upside-down to be a fetching pose before, now he was considering it. He watched her brow furrow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Were you saying something?”
She growled, aggravated. “About the Xylanx. We’ve got to alert the authorities back home.”
“We will,” Bridget said. “It’s policy. All our encounter data gets uploaded to the knowglobe of the next ’box going home. You know that.”
“I’m still very concerned,” Trovatelli said. “Particularly about this Luk’a reference. Here’s this ancient species — and yet the other Signatory races have told us precious little about them. And they’re supposedly a bunch of interstellar thieves?”
“Thieves we know something about,” Bridget said with a wink that Jamie easily saw. He groaned. “Get some rest, Lissa. We’ll figure it out.”
Reluctantly, Trovatelli returned forward and resumed her vigil over the knowglobe. Jamie leaned toward Bridget and whispered. “She seems more intense.”
“New on the job, wants to do well,” Bridget said. “And you’re really one to say when someone’s being intense.”
Jamie gritted his teeth. “Will you lay off me? I’m playing the game here, aren’t I?” He waved his hands in the air. “And what was that ‘thief’ stuff?”
“Oh, right. Just because you got us into all this trouble, putting the whole expedition at risk, why should we pick on you?”
“I get it,” he said. “Kick me. All of you do. But I’m here.”
“Yes, you are.” Bridget crumpled the food bag and stored it. She studied him. “Look, maybe it would be easier for us all to accept you if we knew why you wanted all this money in the first place. I mean, a hundred billion dollars—”
Jamie pointed his finger in the air. “My cut was only forty.”
“Still!”
Jamie stared at her for a moment, trying to decide whether to explain. “Okay,” he said, finally. “When did you last live on Earth?”
“Seven years ago or so,” she said.
“Oh, that’s right,” Jamie said, scratching his head. “I forgot. You left after things got too hot after Overland.”
“Yes, and thanks for bringing it up. But you were saying?”
“Well, if you lived any time in the US—”
“Canada, mostly,” she said.
“You would have known Senator Keeler,” he finished.
“Elaine Keeler?” Bridget said. Her eyes widened. “Yeah, I know her.” Her voice grew cold. “She was on the Overland committee. She made my life a living hell.”
“Mine, too,” Jamie said. “She’s my mother.”
* * *
Jamie was back in his favorite bar again. Only he didn’t have the immerso goggles on, and his bar was a kitchen — and Bridget was sitting in the accountant’s spot. Norm would be horrified, Jamie thought, pouring her a drink.
They’d both changed to casual clothes since arriving back aboard the Dragon’s Depot, and Bridget had completely changed her treatment of him since his admission back aboard Indispensable. For the last hour, she’d been positively human — and completely amazed at the story of his life.
“So what you’re telling me,” she said, “is that you embezzled all this money so you can get rich and shove it in your family’s faces?”
Jamie took another swig of his drink. “Oh, not just my family. There are plenty of other faces to consider. But the Keelers are right up there in front.”
The Keelers. He’d taken to thinking of them just like that, as a collection, a species. For a century, they’d been the power brokers of the southeast: Boca Brahmins with too much money and a sense of noblesse oblige. Only their noblesse had obliged them to meddle in other people’s lives everywhere.
US Transportation Secretary Jacob Keeler had upended an industry, issuing the regulations requiring all Coandăcars to be retrofitted onto existing auto chassis to conserve metal. Supreme Court Justice Loren Swenk-Keeler had cast the deciding vote prohibiting humans from interfacing cybernetically with data systems. And European Union Vice-President Olivia Keeler had run the commission that decided, ultimately, how the whole world would respond to the Regulan gestures at the dawn of the interstellar age.
The Keelers had sided with no one political party in their sixty years of public life. Their primary loyalty was to the family, and to the goal of making it richer and more powerful. If they had not yet added president or prime minister to the family résumé, it was only because it had served them better at the time to work from someplace else in the system. They just liked messing with things to show they could. If there had been a movement to legislate the spelling of ketchup as catsup, a Keeler would have been somewhere nearby.
It was an old goat of a Keeler that married his mother not long after Marty Sturm flipped out and went into space. The aging senator had never adopted Jamie, nor made the slightest move to make the boy feel welcome. After a few of his antics, Jamie was buried in boarding school and forgotten. Elaine Sturm — Elaine Keeler — did little to intervene, as Jamie saw it. By the time the old man finally kicked off and his mother took over his senate seat, Jamie’s relationship with her was as dead as the old man.
Jamie refilled his glass. “It would take,” he said, “ten billion dollars to get a Keeler to recognize you as a life-form. Twenty to really get their attention.”
“And forty billion?” she asked.
; “Think thousand-dollar pants with piss stains.” He clinked his glass against hers. “Cheers.”
Bridget shook her head. “This is just dizzying. Your family, these numbers?” She chuckled. “I grew up in a town of three hundred people on the tundra.”
“Until my mother hauled you before her committee and ran you off the planet.”
“Yeah,” Bridget said. She shook her head. “I don’t care. They were going to find someone to hang.”
“I guess we’re both refugees from Elaine.”
She emptied her drink and set her glass down. “Still, this is all crazy, Jamie. Jealousy? Sibling rivalry? This is not exactly what I was expecting you were going to tell me.”
“What, you thought I was going to open a children’s hospital with the money?” He shook his head. “Buy a few billion boxes of Girl Scout Cookies? That’s not me.” He chuckled. “Unless doing so would annoy my family.”
Bridget smiled a little. She started to say something when her earpiece beeped. Jamie watched her as she listened.
“It’s Leo,” she said. “The high-grav suits are loaded for Xi Boötes,” she said, getting up. “Yours too.”
Jamie looked back at her weakly. “Mine too?”
“Well, you’d better have one, or you won’t be able to move there.”
“Xi Boötes,” he said, groaning. “I don’t go to stars with umlauts. Sorry.”
She stowed her glass and walked toward the exit. “I’ll see you at the loading tube.”
“Wait, wait,” Jamie said, head buzzing. “Oh, so I share everything and you walk out?” He laughed. “Little town in Canada is all I get?”
“Nothing to know,” she said, shrugging.
“Oh, really?” He looked at her and smirked. “O’Herlihy told me you killed your boyfriend.”
She stopped in the doorway. “He did?” she asked, her back to him.
“Yeah,” Jamie said. He stared at her as she stood there in silence. “Wait. You mean he was serious?”
“We go in an hour,” she said. “You’d better shower and change. And it’s better to throw up here than in zero gee, if you’re going to.”
She closed the door.
26
Kolvax sat beneath the great tree, immersed in the whole of human history. Like most Xylanx space stations, Gharion Preserve had a sizable greenhouse ring. His armor shed, Kolvax luxuriated in his underclothes near an artificial brook, studying from a small crystal display.
Texts and videos translated into the Xylanx language had taken him far away to Earth, which was what the humans called their homeworld. He had followed Homo sapiens from the days of caves and darkness to the discovery of agriculture, through the births of religion and writing to the splitting of the atom. He saw the species become a silly people in the previous century, obsessed with entertainment and squabbling over irrelevancies. And he saw the arrival of the busybody Regulans, and the great awakening that followed.
It was all in the knowglobe, there for anyone to find. The second he returned from Mu Cassiopieae with the humans’ device, his followers within the Severed had gone to work analyzing the information inside. There were so many details to sift through. The humans even had a name for the star the Gharion Preserve station orbited: Pi3 Orionis. Couldn’t they come up with a better name than that?
Humans had no marketing sense at all.
The most shocking thing, however, was that none of what Kolvax had already learned had required any decryption at all. The humans put it all out there for the taking, like something they were proud of. He hadn’t imagined that possible. The Xylanx were champions of obfuscation and self-censorship when it came to their own origins. The grand traditions the Dominium sought to protect were whatever things served its politicos at the moment: the true past was always kept out of sight.
But any time humanity’s representatives met another mercantile species and linked knowglobes, they passed on their complete profile. It was a deranged practice. Slavery, biological warfare, dancing contests — no horror was so shameful the humans would not share it. Kolvax was surprised anyone traded with them at all.
Most tantalizing was the information from the last few years, since the people of Earth reached out to the stars. The speed with which they had integrated into the local commercial scene was truly amazing. And yet there were counterforces at work on Earth. The humans were concerned about contaminating their planet with alien biomaterial: it helped that the whirlibangs were all millions of miles away, in the orbital neighborhood of a planet called Venus. Bangboxes sent through the transit stations underwent standard inspections before being carted to the blue planet.
And then there were the assassinations at Overland carried out by the Walled Garden movement. The Xylanx had heard the filthy Gebrans were involved in a war some eight years earlier, but they didn’t know with whom they’d fought it. The news explained a lot.
The existence of an isolationist movement on Earth was unsurprising: xenophobia was a powerful sentiment among Kolvax’s own people, who had been in space far longer. He himself had done a lot to milk it. But there was no mistaking which side of the argument had the upper hand on Earth: humans would continue to migrate any place they were allowed to go. That was part of why they had to be stopped.
Still, a fifth column of humanity, willing to take extreme measures to cut off their world from the galaxy? That could be useful, Kolvax thought. Fellow travelers to his own silly excuse for a movement. If not usable in his current plans, then maybe such a human group could come in handy some day in the future.
He was sure about one thing, however: the influx of information was certain to feed the Xylanx’s paranoia about the species, and while that served him well, it had its downside. He was reluctant to even visit the scriptorium where his Severed disciples were boiling down the salient points to send back to the Dominium. The flood of facts must be sending his dear fearmongers into overdrive.
And there was one now, Kolvax saw, looking up. An armored figure quivered behind a nearby bush.
Kolvax sighed. “Tellmer, get out here.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” his aide said, barely visible through the branches. “You’re naked—”
“No, I’m not,” Kolvax said. Stupid movement. “If it makes you feel any better, adjust your visor’s settings so my unholy kneecaps will not offend you.”
Tellmer stepped out into the open. “That’s better,” the relieved Xylander said.
“You’re talking to a shrub, you idiot,” Kolvax said. “I’m to your right.”
“Sorry. I can’t see very well.” Sheepishly, Tellmer turned toward him, face-mask darkened. Of all Kolvax’s followers from his Sigma Draconis exile, only Tellmer had kept on wearing the deadly golden collar. The others had removed the booby-trapped devices, but Tellmer had decided to continue to allow Kolvax to have the ability to kill him on a whim.
Of course, Kolvax had that ability in any event: Tellmer was a weakling. Maybe Tellmer was just making things convenient for him. That was an aide’s job, after all. And maybe, after losing and regaining two limbs in the last weeks, the imbecile figured the medics could do the same with his head, should it go astray.
“You have news from Liandro?” Kolvax asked.
“The elder believer has broken the code,” Tellmer said. “The operational data you wished is now yours.”
Kolvax looked at his display. Yes, the information was feeding to it. “You’ve read it all?” he asked.
“Yes,” Tellmer said. “Full profiles on all the members of the trader’s team. Biometric information, principally — they monitor each other’s well-being while in armor.”
“How touching,” Kolvax said, scowling as he scanned. He was more interested in the histories. “What does this mean? About the merchant?”
“Ah. That was the most difficult encryption to break,” Tellmer said. “Evidently, the trader — one Jamison Phillip Sturm — had among his mission dossiers record-keeping about his own goals. As near as
we can figure, he is obligated to obtain what is apparently a vast sum of riches in the next few weeks.”
“Or what?” Kolvax said.
“I would imagine they’d kill him. Or perhaps they would simply mutilate him in some way.” He flexed his gloved hands, uncomfortably. “It’s what we’d do.”
“Hmm.” Kolvax hadn’t studied up enough yet on what the human sanctions were for poor job performance. But in examining the file Tellmer was referring to, Kolvax observed that the trader certainly seemed motivated. A breakneck trading schedule had been plotted out, human visits to several destinations emanating from the Sigma Draconis station that had once been their place of exile.
“This Sturm is in a real hurry,” he concluded. “You’re right. It must be pretty bad, what he’s facing. You’ve seen him, Tellmer: he’s almost as big a coward as you are.”
And now Kolvax had his itinerary.
The Xylander went silent for a moment, contemplating. Yes, he had the resources now for one of his more ambitious plans — and the knowglobe had given him more than enough information to pull it off. He spoke his thoughts out loud. “What…what if we could really take care of the human problem once and for all?”
Tellmer straightened. “I thought the Dominium advocated going slowly on the human matter, Great Kolvax. They just wanted you to investigate.”
“So I’ve investigated,” he said. He waved the crystal display in his hand. “What more do they want me to find out?” He licked his cracked lips. “No, this is perfect. The next time we see Jamison Phillip Sturm, his whole world is going to change.” He looked up. “And so will ours.”
27
“Can we please stop giving cute names to things that can kill us?” Jamie asked.
Bridget laughed. It was true; the Moogles were more than a little frightening. They resembled mammoth muffins: each on three legs, each leg the size of an elephant. Ten slender arms were evenly spaced around their wide muffin-top midsections, and giant mouths appeared as sphincters on the top of their “heads.”
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