by Robert Reed
Then the harum-scarum belched with a solid thud, and drawing everyone's attention, he promised, 'I have a better question than theirs.'
'By all means,' said the woman.
'May I join the Waywards?'
That brought a nervous little silence. Then the woman smiled with a genuine serenity, and she gave the honest answer.
'I don't know,' she told the alien. 'But when I find myself in Till’s company again, I will certainly ask—'
She was interrupted by a sudden motion.
Abrupt, and small. But the motion was noticed. Patrons at other tables looked down in astonishment, watching as the faces of their drinks rippled, as the ceiling and walls and rigid stone floor trembled.
A sound followed after the motion. There was a low, low roar that came sweeping from above, racing down the avenue and passing deeper into the ship.
Washen feigned surprise.
Pamir did it better. He straightened his back and looked at the woman officer, and with a voice edging into terror, he asked, 'What the fuck was that?'
She didn't know.
For a long moment, the five Waywards were as lost as anyone. Then Washen offered the obvious explanation. 'It was an impact.' She looked at her companions, telling them, 'It was a comet. We're closing on that next star and black hole ... it must have been one of their comets hitting us . . .'
Word spread through the cafe, merging with the same explanation as it was generated up and down the long avenue.
The Wayward was trying to believe Washen. But then she heard a general announcement coming through an implanted nexus, explaining enough that she winced as if in pain, and she growled under her breath, then turned to her companions and announced, 'One of the engines . . . has failed . . .'
Then she seemed to realize that she shouldn't have spoken so freely. A conjured smile framed her next words. 'But everything is very much under control,' she told everyone, her expression and tone saying the precise opposite.
Human faces looked wounded, or they laughed with a giddy nervousness. Aliens digested the news with everything from calmness to a pheromonal scream, the cafe's air suddenly thick with odd stinks and piercing, indigestible sounds.
Another message was delivered on a secure channel. The woman tilted her head, paying rapt attention. Then to her team, she shouted, 'With me. Now!'
The five Waywards ran, pushing into a full sprint.
If anything, that made the panic worse. Patrons began searching through official news services as well as the rumor oceans, holo projections covering tabletops and slick granite floor and dancing in the air. One of the ship's two firing engines had fallen into a premature sleep. Nothing else was certain. A thousand self-labeled experts promised that no combination of mistakes could cause a malfunction, certainly nothing this catastrophic. Again and again, voices mentioned the pointed word, 'Sabotage.'
Within three minutes, sixty-five individuals and ghostly organizations had claimed responsibility for this tragedy.
Washen gave Pamir a brief look.
He did nothing. Then after a few moments, he announced, 'We need to be leaving,' as he rose to his feet. Looking up the avenue, he seemed to be deciding on their route to the next hiding place. Then he said, 'This way,' and took the harum-scarum under its spiked elbow, coaxing it along.
Perpendicular to the avenue was a narrow, half-lit tunnel.
Pamir and the false alien were walking side by side, passing through a demon door into a thicker, warmer atmosphere. Where the tunnel bent to the right, a figure appeared, small and running hard, the black of the uniform making it blend into the gloom.
There wasn't space for three bodies.
The collision was abrupt and violent, and utterly one-sided. The security officer found himself on his back, gazing up at an unreadable alien face.
Pamir started to kneel, started to say, 'My apologies.'
He was offering the officer a big hand.
The Wayward gave a low, wild scream. And that's when the rest of his squad appeared, rounding the turn to find one of their own apparently being assaulted. Weapons were deployed. Curt warnings were shouted. The loudest Wayward told everyone, 'Stand back!'
The harum-scarum kept true to its nature.
'I stand here,' he rumbled. 'You stand there.'
A kinetic round entered the neck, obliterating flesh and ceramic bones, nothing vital damaged and the automation barely wavering, long hands thrust up against the ceiling while the translation box cried out:
'No no no no!'
In a wild panic, every Wayward fired on the monster.
The head dropped backward, riding a hinge of leather, and the legs were dissolved with lasers, the great body dropping hard onto its stumplike knees. Then an explosive round cut into the body itself, exposing a human tied into a secret bundle, wrapped inside a transparent silicone envelope.
Locke stared out at the armed officers. His expression was simple. A pure withering terror had taken hold of him, the surprise total and dismantling.
Standing nearby, Washen saw his enormous eyes and little else.
Every weapon was pointed at him. There was a slippery instant when everything was possible, and maybe they would set down their lasers and free him. Maybe. But then Washen threw herself toward her son, screaming, 'No—!'
They fired.
What Locke would see last was his mother trying to cover him with her inadequate body, and then a purple brilliance stretching on forever.
Forty-two
A CHAIN OF tiny, almost delicate explosions had smashed valves and pumping stations. No target was vital. The Great Ship was nothing but redundancies built on sturdy redundancies. But the cumulative effects were catastrophic: a lake of pressurized hydrogen gathered in the worst possible place, and a final sabotage caused a magnetic bottle to fail, a mirroring mass of metallic anti-hydrogen dropping into the sudden lake, the resulting blast excavating a plasma-filled wound better than twelve kilometers across.
The vast rocket coughed, then stopped firing.
Within seconds, security forces were on full alert, gathering at predetermined disaster-management stations.
Within minutes, using lasers and hyperfiber teeth, a scuttlebug worked its way through the thinnest part of the slag, a spare head shoved out into the open, its mouth blistered by the residual plasmas and the eyes seeing a rainbow of hard radiations.
Miocene saw nothing but the rainbow. Then she closed that set of eyes and opened her own, seeing her son's hard gaze. And with a calmly low voice, she said, 'It's nothing.'
She told Till, and herself, 'It's just an inconvenience.'
Then before he could respond, she assured both of them, 'Our burn resumes in seven minutes. Using backup pumps, and at full strength. I'll extend the burn to allow for the delay, and the ship will be back on course.'
He had assumed as much. With a heavy shake of the head, he asked, 'Who?'
What she knew, she told.
He repeated the critical word. 'Remoras,' he said, a painful disappointment wrapped around it. Then, 'Which ones? Can we tell?'
Miocene fed him compressed gouts of data, including coded transmissions and visual images culled from distant security eyes. The presumption of guilt was just that. Nothing was perfectly incriminating. But the innocent break-down of the skimmer was too perfect to be believed. She admitted as much, then concluded with the cold, perfectly honest comment, 'I've never particularly trusted Remoras.'
Between them, Till showed less emotion.
'Our enemies,' he said calmly. 'Where are they now?'
A replacement skimmer had rendezvoused with the Remora crew, then continued out onto the ship's leading face. 'I've ordered its capture,' Miocene mentioned. 'But my sense is that they won't be on board.'
Her son agreed, seeing the best alternative. 'The disabled skimmer—'
'Was towed back to the city.'
Till was silent for a long moment.
Through a security nexus, Miocene felt a r
ipple, a tremor, and her breathing quit abruptly. 'Did you—' she began.
'Wouldn't you?' was his response.
Before Miocene could offer her opinion, he assured her, 'We'll use a minimum of five-person teams. And they'll only search for that one crew. Isn't that the reasonable course?'
'Reasonable or rash,' she answered, 'it's the Master's responsibility. Which means that it's my decision to make.' Till sighed heavily, then forced a wide smile. 'Make it,' he coaxed.
A universe of data begged to be noticed. In a mostly thorough, near light-speed fashion, Miocene assigned degrees of importance to each bit of news, real or rumored, then absorbed and digested what seemed critical. Small protests were being held in scattered parts of the ship. Weapons had been discharged in half a dozen public venues. But mostly as warnings. With billions of passengers, there was the guarantee that a few of the fights were simply criminal. There was always a perfectly normal trickle of violence. Locke was still missing, a thousand little whiffs of evidence implying that he was killed on the first day. Then she focused on the teams that Till had dispatched to the Remoran city: their makeup; their training histories; their inadequate experience. They were as good as some units, no better than most. But wouldn't this work demand the best? Sending a few bodies into an enemy-held city seemed like such a blatant waste, and dangerous . . .
She lingered on that one telling word. Waste.
Then again, she examined the damage through the scut-debug's eyes. She took a deep breath of the blistering plasmas, thinking about the ancient machines that had been slaughtered for no worthy purpose, and she calculated the numbers of engineers and drones that these repairs would demand. Wayward engineers, probably. Since she still didn't yet trust her own corps. And when she was angry enough, her living mouth dropped open, remarking to her First Chair, 'I'm going to let your orders stand.'
'As you wish, madam.'
'Also,' she continued, 'I want a full weapons array positioned nearby. In case our troops are attacked. Where we were when the rockets fired . . . that would be a natural vantage point, and nicely ironic. Don't you think?'
Till's face brightened, and he said, 'All in your service, madam.'
Then he bowed.
Bowed to Miocene, she could only hope.
Forty-three
AN ARMY OF tiny bone-white toadstools stood on a carpet of something dark and wet, with warm, feathery vapors rising into the bright damp air.
For a long while, nothing happened, nothing changed.
Then a fissure opened, and a filthy hand and wrist pushed up into the light, the elbow exposed, the arm bending one way, then the other, fingers obliterating the delicate toadstools with groping motions growing more desperate by the moment.
Finally the hand retreated, vanished.
A half-instant passed.
Then with a sloppy, wet sloosh, the ground spilt wide, and a naked body sat up, spitting and gasping, then coughing with a choking vigor that after several painful minutes fell away into a string of quiet moans.
The man stared at his surroundings.
Surrounding him was a forest of thick-bodied mushrooms, each as large as a full-grown virtue tree. His face was amazed and dubious and frightened, and even when he should have recovered from his suffocation, his breathing remained elevated, and his heart rattled along with an anxious gait, and no matter how many times he wiped his eyes with the dirty heels of his hands, he couldn't make sense of what he was seeing.
Under his ragged breath, he muttered, 'Where? Where?'
At the sound of his voice, a tall man stepped from the mushroom forest. The man was wearing the uniform of a Submaster, but the mirrored fabric was wrinkled and tired, the sleeves frayed, a vertical gash exposing one of his long pale legs. He was smiling, and he wasn't. He approached to a point, then knelt and said, 'Hello.' He said, 'Relax.' He said, 'A name. We usually start with a name.'
'My name . . . ?'
'That might be best.'
'Locke.'
'Of course.'
'What happened to me?' Locke sputtered.
'You were there,' the other man remarked. 'Better than me, you would know what happened.'
Like a person suddenly cold, Locke pulled his knees out of the stinking black earth, grabbing them and holding tight for a long moment. Then he quietly, quietly asked, 'What is this place?'
'Again,' said the man, 'you would know that answer, too.'
Locke's face seemed quite simple, and for the moment, very young. After a thoughtful gasp, he said, 'All right,' and forced himself to look up with a mixture of resignation and hopefulness. 'I don't know you,' he admitted. 'What's your name?'
'Hazz.'
Locke opened his mouth, then closed it again.
'I'll take that as a sign of recognition,' the long-dead man responded. Then he stood and beckoned, telling the newcomer, 'Clean yourself. Tell me what you want for clothes, and they'll appear. Then if you wish, follow me.' The dead man smiled in a knowing fashion, saying, 'I know someone who very much wants to see you.'
LOCKE MUST HAVE been hoping for someone else.
Wearing a Wayward's leather breechcloth, he followed Hazz out of the mushroom forest, and the simple young face vanished abruptly. He was angry now. His back stiffened. His voice failed on its first attempt. Then he forced himself to say, 'Father,' with a pure, unalloyed bitterness.
Diu sat on a petrified toadstool outside a simple shelter, wearing the same gaudy clothes in which he had died. Gray eyes danced. A mischievous look came over his craggy features. Quietly, mockingly, he asked, 'So who murdered you? One of your sons, I can hope.'
Locke stopped short, his mouth grim and determined.
Diu laughed and slapped his knees, then said, 'Or it wasn't. But I bet it was some distant relative. Your own blood, almost assuredly.'
'I had to do it,' Locke grunted. 'You were killing Mother—'
'She deserved to die,' Diu replied, framing the words with big shrugs. 'Escaping from Marrow that way. Too soon, and without warning anyone. Nearly alerting the Master to our presence. How did that help the Wayward cause?'
Locke opened his mouth, and waited.
'She was dangerous,' Diu assured. 'Everything you want and deserve was at risk because of her and because of Miocene.'
A deep breath filled Locke's chest, then lay there growing stale.
'But let's forget your mother's despicable, endurable crimes,' Diu continued. 'There's another offender. Someone who's potentially far more dangerous to the Waywards, and to the Builders' great cause.'
'Who?'
Diu growled, 'Please,' and shook his head in disgust.
Then he rose to his feet, saying, 'You had an assignment. A clear duty. But instead of doing your duty, you rushed off to that alien house as soon as you had the chance. And I want to know why, son. Why was it so fucking important to go there?'
Locke turned in a quick circle, but Submaster Hazz had vanished.
'Tell me,' Diu pressed.
'Don't you know why?'
'What I know,' he replied with a rasping voice,'is inconsequential. What I don't know, and what matters here, is your response.'
Locke said nothing.
'Were you hoping to find your mother?' Nothing.
'Because you couldn't have. You and Till couldn't recover her body more than a century ago. What good could you accomplish by going there alone?'
'I don't need to explain—'
'Wrong!' Diu interrupted. 'You do! Because I don't think you know what you want. For this last horrible century, you've been nothing but lost.' His father shook his head, saying, 'I'm not asking these questions to soothe my arrogant soul. I'm asking for the sake of your miserable one.' Then he laughed in a large, tormenting way, adding, 'What? Did you think that being dead was easy? That the Builders would simply ignore your last-breath crimes . . . ?'
'I did nothing wrong!'
'The old Master was digging her way toward Marrow, but the Waywards never knew how she found t
he old hole. Chances are, a routine search had turned up that hidden doorway' Diu closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he opened them again, acting angry to find his son still standing before him. 'You went to that leech house . . . you went to see if the old Master had been there first. Because if she had been, then she might have realized where Washen was. And maybe, just maybe, your mother had been rescued. Admit that much to your father, Locke. Go on.'
'Fine. I admit it.'
'Maybe you were afraid that nobody had found your mother, and you wanted to help her. A noble sentiment, always.'
Nothing.
'Because a long burn was coming,' Diu continued. 'The longest in many centuries. And what if her remains were piped into one of the engines, then incinerated? What if that happened before you, the dutiful son, could pull her to safety?'
Locke took a new breath, holding it close to his panicking heart.
'Tell me that's the truth,' Diu snapped.
'It's true.'
The Diu said, 'You're lying,' with a crisp, dismissive confidence. 'Don't try to fool your old father, Locke. I know a little something about telling lies.'
Trembling hands tugged at the breechcloth.
'The fuel tank is a vast ocean of hydrogen - one of several - and what are the odds that Washen would be yanked out of her grave?' Diu rose and took a step toward Locke, and with the gray eyes staring, he asked, 'What are the odds that she would ever be found? Shattered and scattered like she was .. .Washen could have lain in the depths forever, and except for you and Till, and Miocene .. . who would have known . . . ?'
Locke didn't reply.
'About your mother's little clock,' said Diu.
Locke's eyes grew large and simple, and exceptionally sad. Softly, almost too softly to be heard, he asked, 'What do you mean?'
'You and Till cleaned the leech house. It took days and you had minimal resources, but you did an exemplary job of things. Considering.' Diu smiled as if he could see everything, and he remarked, 'It's so very odd, isn't it? Such a good job of hiding your tracks, yet that one critical clue went unnoticed. Left behind, buried deep in the plastic leech wall—'
Locke gave a low, pained moan.