Mighty Good Road

by Melissa Scott

  The young woman seated behind the podium’s triple keyboard looked up sleepily at Heikki’s approach, heavy lids lifting slightly to reveal slit pupils. The cat’s-eye lenses, Heikki knew, were a recent fashion.

  “Can I help you?”

  Heikki returned the lazy stare, lifting an eyebrow at the lack of title. “My name’s Heikki. There should be someone meeting me.”

  At the sound of her voice, pitched a little too loud for ‘pointer convention, she saw several of the lounging figures straighten, heads turning into their collars. Corporate touts, all of them, she thought, and allowed her lip to curl in open contempt, set to wait and watch in the entrance lobby, ready to report any interesting or unusual arrivals to their employers. Well, boys and girls, here I am. Make what you want of it.

  “Gwynne Heikki?” The cat-eyed woman’s metallic voice gave no hint of emotion.

  Heikki nodded.

  “Just a moment.” The woman swung sideways in her chair, and touched keys on a different board. Out of the corner of her eye, Heikki saw a man in a neat, very plain suit straighten abruptly and start toward the podium. As he came closer, she could see the thin wire running along his cheek from the plug in his ear.

  “Dam’ Heikki. I’m Pol Sandrig. Director Mikelis sent me to meet you.”

  “That was kind of him,” Heikki said, and put out her hand in greeting. Sandrig took it with a deferential little half bow.

  “If you’ll follow me?”

  “Of course,” Heikki murmured. Sandrig was not quite what she’d expected: the cloth of the suit was much too good for a high-ranking secretary, but a person of higher status should not have been sent on such a menial errand. Of course, Mikelis might be sending him in order to convey a message to his rivals—everyone knew the floor lobbies were full of touts, and staged their meetings accordingly—but that didn’t explain what that message might be. She eyed Sandrig warily as he moved ahead of her through the maze of corridors. No, not a secretary, she thought, and I don’t like not knowing what this may mean.

  Sandrig paused in an inner lobby, where another woman sat at a multiboard podium, and said something in a low voice, his mouth half hidden behind his collar. As was polite, Heikki took a half-step backward, making sure she did not hear. The woman—she was older, her face unpainted, and there was a slight bulkiness in the breast of her otherwise perfectly tailored jacket that marked her as a private securitron—nodded, and touched keys. Sandrig glanced over his shoulder then, and smiled.

  “Director Mikelis is waiting,” he said. “This way, please.”

  Mikelis’s office was a two-room suite in the heart of the office complex, the outer room carpeted and lit in tones that reflected palely from the polished, almost-white wood-grained furniture. Yet another woman sat behind an electronic desk, a second, dark-haired woman in a brocade suit leaning over her shoulder. As the door opened, the dark-haired woman straightened, frowning, and Sandrig said quickly, “This is Gwynne Heikki, Electra.”

  “Ah. Good.”

  The woman at the desk touched a button, cooing into her filament mike, “Ser Sandrig and Dam’ Heikki are here, Director.”

  The inner door slid back instantly, and a voice from the desk speaker said, “Come in, please.”

  Sandrig gestured politely, and Heikki stepped into the inner office. To her surprise, both Sandrig and the dark-haired woman followed her, the latter still frowning moodily.

  Mikelis’s office was almost aggressively plain, the lighting frankly artificial, curtains drawn across the media wall, the plain desk littered with printouts and a crooked stack of datasquares. Mikelis himself was equally plain, a stocky, grey-eyed man in a dark suit trimmed at collar and cuffs with nailhead opals. He rose politely at their entrance, but his eyes were still on the workboard lying on the desk.

  “Dam’ Heikki, I’m glad to meet you. I’m Rurik Mikelis, If you wouldn’t mind waiting just a moment—”

  “Of course not,” Heikki said, and took the seat she had not been offered. To her surprise, none of the ‘pointers seemed offended by the gesture—Mikelis, in fact, looked almost relieved. He stooped over his board for a moment longer, fingers busy on a hand-held shadowscreen, then flipped off the workboard. He reseated himself behind the desk then, sweeping papers and datasquares indiscriminately aside.

  “Thank you for inquiring about the bid, Dam’ Heikki,” he said, “and for being willing to give us a consultation. You’ve met Pol Sandrig, my research liaison, and this is Electra FitzGilbert, director of operations.”

  The dark-haired woman gave a curt nod. Heikki smiled back, deliberately overpolite, and murmured, “Delighted to meet you.” Behind the platitude, however, her mind was searching. Director of operations: she would be the person responsible for the lost ship, while Sandrig was at least partly responsible for its cargo. An interesting combination, she thought, and folded her hands neatly in her lap.

  “I understand from Dam’ Santerese that you’re generally familiar with the course of events,” Mikelis went on. “Before we go into any more detail, however, I would have to ask you to sign a bond of silence.”

  “Of course,” Heikki answered. “And while I’m looking at your terms, perhaps you’d like to look at our rough-estimate bid? Based of course on the first information we have.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Mikelis slid a viewboard across the table, the screen lighting at his touch. Heikki fished the correct datasquare from her belt and laid it on the desk, then turned her attention to the viewboard. The lens setting blinked in the upper corner; she slipped her data lens from her belt, adjusted the bezel until the numbers matched, then squinted through the lens. Letters sprang to life on the screen: it was a standard form, pledging her to silence regarding the subjects discussed at this meeting—time, date, and place were specified in excruciating detail—for a year and a day, and named a heavy fine for breaking the agreement. She nodded, and reached for the stylus clipped to the board.

  “This seems reasonable,” she said aloud, and scrawled name and verification code at the bottom of the form.

  “Excellent,” Mikelis said, and even FitzGilbert looked a little less thunderous. “So, to business, then. As you know from the various reports, we lost a latac—an LTA—over the back country, on what should have been a routine flight from Retego Bay to Lowlands. Under normal circumstances, we’d expect to have a record of the course from the automatic locators, or at least to be able to home in on the beacon after the craft went down. The locators failed in-flight, and the beacon did not function. The latac was carrying a new crystal matrix, which was potentially extremely valuable. But I should let Electra tell you about the latac, first.”

  What, no mention of Foursquare even now? Heikki thought. She looked at FitzGilbert, who grimaced.

  “The crew has not walked out, which, coupled with the mechanical failures, begins to look like sabotage to me. Mik tells me you lived on Iadara—then you know what the set-up is.”

  Heikki nodded, suppressing her impatience. Mikelis —or one of his underlings—would have gone through her records as a matter of course; the point hardly seemed worth making. When something more seemed to be expected of her, she said, “There’s triple redundancy in the locators, or there was thirty years ago, and the crash beacons are the type used all over the Loop and the Precincts. I’d have to agree, it’s suspicious.”

  “Iadara’s weather is peculiar,” Sandrig murmured. “Electrical storms alone—”

  “Do not affect the beacon, damn it,” FitzGilbert retorted, and made no apology for her immodest language. “The beacon should’ve gone off.”

  “What did you do when the latac failed to come in?” Heikki asked. She had used the Iadaran dialect word out of old habit, and Mikelis gave her a rather startled glance.

  FitzGilbert scowled again. “Not one hell of a lot, at least not at first. There was a storm brewing—we assumed that brought the latac down, and that delayed us. Like Pol says, the weather’s something fierce. We do lose a lot o
f transmissions, and we did think that it was just normal interference cutting out the locator. When the latac didn’t dome in, and we didn’t get a beacon signal, we sent out a search flight, working from both the projected flight path and the wind data we’d gotten from station blue—that’s the nearest recording point, weather station blue northwest. And we didn’t find a damn thing. That’s when I started getting worried, and I pushed the panic button.” She nodded to Mikelis. “That’s why it’s on Mik’s plate now.”

  “So you’d be hiring us not just to find the wreck,” Heikki said, “but to tell you why it went down.”

  “Yes,” Mikelis said, and added, before Heikki could speak, “I accept that it’s going to cost us more for that.”

  “I’m afraid it will,” Heikki murmured, but in spite of herself felt the stirrings of a salvage operator’s curiosity. Hijacking or sabotage, one or the other, and from FitzGilbert’s story the two possibilities were evenly balanced— She curbed her enthusiasm sharply. There was still the matter of Foursquare’s attempt at the contract to settle, and the question of the cargo; better to deal with the lesser of the two first. “I take it that the cargo—you said a crystal matrix—was something fairly small and portable?”

  “Yes.” Sandrig leaned forward in his chair, his hands sketching a cube perhaps half a meter square. “About so big—I don’t know if you’re familiar with crysticulture, Dam’ Heikki?”

  “Only with what everybody knows. And I’ve seen the fields.”

  “Ah, this is something different. It was the matrix— the seed for first-stage growth—for what we hoped would be the universal center crystal.” Sandrig managed a sudden, deprecatory smile. “We hoped! But the indications were promising.”

  Heikki nodded. Anyone who spent time on the Loop knew that the great stumbling block to intersystems trade and to the expansion of the Loop lay in the way in which the Papaefthmyiou-Devise Engines were constructed. The Engines “folded space”—which was not what really happened, of course, but was the closest undisputed analogy—around an FTLship or Exchange Point, warping hyperspace until the points of origin and destination lay side by side. At the heart of the Engines were the crystals, the common crystals focusing the energies from the generators onto the crucial center crystal, whose interior geometry was crudely analagous to the “geometry” of the hyperspace it manipulated. Each of these center crystals had to be grown specifically and exclusively for the Engine in which it would eventually be mounted; the PDEs that drove the startrains had two such crystals, mirrored twins, to hold open a permanent fold in space.

  Mikelis nodded as if he’d read her thoughts. “The failure rate for growing center crystals runs between sixty and seventy-five percent—for the common crystals we lose maybe one in a hundred as too flawed for use. A universal matrix….” He let his voice trail off.

  “A universal matrix—a matrix that would fully and truly reflect the geometry of hyperspace—could be used in any PDE,” Sandrig said. “It could be grown in mass lots—and you heard what Mik said, common crystals have a one percent failure rate, and they’re grown from a universal seed. More than that, it would make it possible to build FTLships quickly and cheaply. Shipbuilders wouldn’t be held up while they waited for an unflawed crystal, they wouldn’t have to make expensive last minute changes to accommodate the center’s peculiar resonances.” His voice took on an almost evangelistic fervor. “It might even eliminate the problems with the startrains’ PDE, allow us to put more than three terminals into an Exchange Point. After all, the problem seems primarily to be one of interference…. But can you imagine, an infinite number of Exchanges within each point?”

  “It’s been tried before,” FitzGilbert said. Her voice was not unkind, but it broke the spell. “They’d only just started testing, Pol.”

  Sandrig looked away, blushing fiercely.

  “I do have one more question,” Heikki said, into the sudden silence.

  “Of course,” Mikelis answered, and seemed grateful for the change of subject.

  “What happened to FourSquare?”

  The question was verging on the immodest, but Heikki was not prepared for the vehemence of FitzGilbert’s response. “You tell us, you’re one of them. We signed a contract, made a first payment, then they backed out, said they couldn’t handle the back country, that we hadn’t given them all the information.” Her smile was a baring of teeth. “This when they’d been in contact with local talent from the beginning, even if we hadn’t been honest enough to give them all the details—”

  “Electra.” Mikelis’s voice held a warning. “It’s a reasonable question.” He looked back at Heikki. “What Electra’s said is perfectly true, though. We hired them in good faith, and they broke contract without offering us any rational excuse. When they refused to turn over their survey tapes—which will be made available to the winning bidder, of course—we sued, and eventually obtained the material. Does that answer your question?”

  I suppose it will have to, Heikki thought. “I think so, thank you,” she said aloud, and glanced down at the viewboard. Lab and analysis fees—we’ll have to add a clause to the final contract allowing us to send back to the Loop for molecular work, if we need it, she thought, at Lo-Moth’s expense—and money to cover the hire of extra ground equipment…. She touched keys on the calculator inset beside the screen, and nodded at the new total.

  “Bearing in mind that you are hiring us to find out why the latac crashed, as well as to locate the crash site, I’ve added recovery expenses and the costs of a Loop analysis to our estimate. The new total will be K49, pounds-of-account.”

  “Do you think that’s necessary?” Sandrig asked. “Loop analysis, I mean. After all, we have excellent facilities on Iadara.”

  FitzGilbert sighed audibly. Heikki said, with caution, “If it is a matter of sabotage, I think you would be better off getting a completely independent analysis.”

  “Oh, of course.” Once again, Sandrig flushed to the roots of his thinning hair.

  “If you feel it will be necessary,” Mikelis said, “I see your point.”

  “Then you have our bid,” Heikki said, and the director nodded.

  “We will be in touch with you, Dam’ Heikki. Thank you very much for coming.” It was an unmistakable dismissal, and Heikki rose to her feet just as Mikelis added, “Pol, would you see Dam’ Heikki to the entrance?”

  There was a jitney waiting at the level entrance: Lo-Moth was expensively efficient in the small matters, it seemed. Sandrig walked her to the craft and handed her in with punctilious courtesy, wishing her good luck on her bid. Heikki thanked him, but wondered, as she folded herself into the cramped passenger space, if he was really eager to see her win the contract. He seemed remarkably unwilling to face up to the possibility of sabotage, or an enemy within the corporate ranks…. Hold it right there, she told herself. You have absolutely no evidence that there is an inside agent, or even that there was sabotage. It could have been a hijacking, even an accident; leave the speculations for when—and if—you get the contract.

  “Pod 19, suite 2205,” she said aloud, and leaned back as the jitney creaked into motion.

  When she finally reached her home suite, she was not surprised to find Djuro waiting for her, feet propped up on the table that held the status cube. “I ran into Jock Nkosi while I was making your inquiries,” he said without preamble. “He asked if we had anything going, and I told him about the Lo-Moth bid—in confidence, of course. Was that all right?”

  Heikki nodded, shrugging herself out of her tight jacket. “Yeah, that’s good. If we get the job, I want him.”

  “I told him that, too,” Djuro said. “You want a drink? I’ve made a pitcher.”

  “Thanks,” Heikki said, and subsided into the chair that stood waiting for her. It tilted back, programmed to the proper angle; she kicked off her own slippers and rested her bare feet on the low table. “Did you find out anything more?”

  Djuro appeared in the kitchen doorway, a tall
glass in each hand. He gave one to Heikki, saying, “Not really. Nobody reliable seems to know anything more, so I tried to get back to Fang, but she’s left already—off on a three-monther, out past Precinct Twelve.”

  “Fang’s a miner?”

  “Yeah.” Djuro reseated himself, sipping cautiously at his own glass. “She doesn’t usually make mistakes. So what did Lo-Moth say about it?”

  “They just said that FourSquare broke contract for no good reason, and then made difficulties about handing over the tapes,” Heikki said slowly. “Which does sound suspicious to me.”

  Djuro nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, if you have to break contract, you don’t give your employer that kind of trouble, not if you want to keep your license.”

  “I wonder. …” Heikki let the sentence trail off, and swung herself out of the tilted chair. She grabbed the remote from its place by the door to the workroom, and stepped inside, running her fingers across the touchface. The media wall lit, filled abruptly with names and numbers that vanished and were replaced by others at the touch of a key. She flipped hastily through the data base, not bothering to put the data through to a workscreen, but without result.

  “Well?” Djuro asked, at her shoulder.

  “I thought maybe if FourSquare’d been bought out, they’d’ve made arrangements to reconstitute themselves under a new name—after the old company lost its credit and licenses, that is. But the Board doesn’t list any new applications from them.” Heikki looked down at the remote, and made an adjustment, sending a new list of names flashing across the screen. “I guess now the question is whether they did go out of business.”

  “Yeah, there it is,” Djuro said, after a moment. Heikki touched the key that would freeze the data, and they both stared at the glowing letters. “FourSquare, declared license-void 005/492, declared disbanded 105/492. That settles that.”

  Heikki nodded, though privately she was not so sure. Still, she told herself, it does mean there’s no evidence of anything wrong beyond incompetence, and that’s something.