Manta's Gift

by Timothy Zahn

Faraday took a deep breath. Maybe she was used to instant cowering everywhere else she went. But not here. Not here. "You haven't answered my question, Arbiter," he said.

  Liadof turned back, her eyes narrowed as they probed his face. Faraday forced himself to hold her gaze; and after another pair of seconds her lips twitched in a cold smile. "You don't flinch easily, do you, Colonel Faraday?" she asked, her tone almost conversational. The earlier anger was gone, or least buried away out of sight. "I can see how you wound up becoming a hero."

  "Thank you," Faraday said, as if the compliment had been genuine. "What about Raimey?"

  The smile vanished, the lines around her mouth settling into their more normal pattern. "Mr. Raimey is what he always was to this project," she said quietly. "A means to an end."

  "Are you saying this new probe of yours renders him expendable?"

  She turned back to the displays. "Let me put it this way," she said. "You should hope that Ms. McCollum is right, that he takes longer than expected to get back to his herd. He may not find it pleasant to be in the vicinity when the probe arrives there."

  "That sounds rather disturbing," Faraday said cautiously. "We have agreements with these people—"

  "We have nothing," Liadof cut him off. "No treaties, either signed or recorded. The only even marginally official agreement we've ever had was getting their permission for Raimey to enter their world as he did. That one has already been satisfied."

  "So what you're saying is that the Qanska are fair game now?"

  The lines around Liadof's mouth became even deeper. "We need that stardrive, Colonel," she said softly. "And we're going to have it. The Qanska can cooperate, or not."

  She threw him a speculative look, then turned away again. "So can you."

  Faraday looked over at the techs. All four were minding their boards now, studiously ignoring the conversation.

  Carefully guarding their own careers, and their own futures.

  And with a sinking feeling, Faraday realized that Sprenkle's warning had been right on the mark. Push had come to crunch; and Faraday's neck was stuck out here all alone.

  So be it, he told himself firmly. If he was the only one who dared to stand up to Liadof and the Five Hundred, then that was how it would be. He owed Raimey that much.

  And if it cost him his career, that was all right, too. After all, there wasn't that much left of it, anyway.

  FIFTEEN

  With one last bite, Raimey finished off the last trailing bit of ranshay. It was the first run of that particular plant he'd seen in a long time, and he guessed that it would likely be the last.

  And Beltrenini was right. Without jeptris along to give it tang, the stuff was pretty bland.

  He thought about that as he turned his right ear into the eddy winds again and continued his journey south. Why would plants like ranshay and jeptris be absent from the equatorial regions where he'd grown up? There was certainly a higher concentration of Qanska here than farther north; had they overgrazed the plants to extinction?

  But that didn't make any sense. As he'd already seen, there was plenty of both types just a few ninedays' travel off the equator, plus at least five other species he'd never seen before. Was there simply not enough mixing of the atmosphere to bring them to the equator? That didn't seem likely. But then, he was hardly a meteorological expert.

  For that matter, he was hardly an expert on anything, at least not anything that was of any use here. Why in the world had Faraday picked him for this mission in the first place?

  He had no idea. But whatever the reason, the fact remained that he was the man on the spot. He was all they had; and when they found out that the stardrive really did exist, they would know he'd done his job.

  At least, the first part of it. Now the real task would begin: actually finding the thing, wherever in the Deep they had hidden it.

  In the gloom ahead, a dark shape moved. Raimey froze, letting the winds carry him as he peered at the figure. It was a Vuuka, probably about five-size long, laboriously working his way upward. Probably heading up toward some herd above on Level One, hoping to snatch a newborn or to take a few bites out of a careless Youth straying too far from the edge of the group.

  He smiled to himself with bittersweet memory. It had been a Vuuka of just about that same size who had attacked him his first ninepulse out of his Qanskan mother's womb. His introduction to this wonderful world he'd volunteered to go to.

  Of course, there wouldn't be anyone with Counselor Latranesto's mass and bulk to trap and absorb this particular Vuuka. For a moment he considered taking the predator on himself, seeing if he could at least discourage it from raiding the nursery up above.

  But no. There would be plenty of ten-size Protectors up there. The children would be safe enough.

  Not that he really cared. He was a human, he reminded himself firmly, not a Qanska. He didn't care anymore what happened here, as long as it didn't happen to him.

  Ahead, the Vuuka disappeared upward into the swirling air, and Raimey resumed his travel across the winds. He was seeing more Vuuka lurking around now, more than he'd run into while he was with Beltrenini and her Counselor friends. More Vuuka, while at the same time a smaller variety of food plants. Coincidence?

  And fewer of those compact little Brolka things, too, come to think of it. In fact, he couldn't recall having seen any of them for the past nineday or so. He'd meant to ask Beltrenini about them, but somehow he'd never gotten around to it. Where did they fit into all this?

  Impatiently, he shook the thoughts away. There was no point straining his brain on this one. McCollum was the xenobiology expert, and she'd probably already figured it out. As soon as he got within hailing range of the station, he'd simply ask her.

  Until then, it was find food, avoid predators, and keep swimming. That was his life now. Probably all the life he'd ever have.

  Still, it beat sitting paralyzed in a walking chair with voice-actuated robotics doing everything for him. Probably.

  "Colonel?"

  Faraday looked up from his tasteless eggplant parmigiana to find Jen McCollum standing across the table from him, holding a meal tray of her own. "Good evening, sir," she said with strained politeness. "May I join you?"

  "Ms. McCollum," he nodded back, his immediate reflex being to politely tell her he wasn't interested in company. Last week's confrontation with Liadof was still fresh in his mind, as was the memory of those four turned backs as Liadof verbally took him off at the knees.

  It was a confrontation whose echoes still reverberated through the entire project. A formal stiffness had replaced the more casual atmosphere that had once existed in the Contact Room. The techs were walking on duck eggs, afraid to make any comment outside the narrow range of their specific duties. Afraid of even challenging or arguing with each other.

  Afraid of drawing Liadof's attention in their direction.

  Bad enough that Liadof's presence had poisoned the Contact Room. Even worse was that the venom had also spilled over into off-duty relationships. Before her arrival, Faraday had had occasional meals with one or more of the techs, and had almost always paused to chat with them when they happened to bump into each other in corridor or meeting room. He'd never actually become friends with any of them, but he'd certainly considered them his colleagues.

  Now, even when they were in the same room together, the others seemed completely unaware of his existence. The message had been sent and received: Colonel Faraday was on notice, and those who didn't wish to join him had better keep their distance.

  And Jupiter Prime had become a very lonely place to be.

  McCollum was still standing there, waiting for his reply. "Certainly," he said with a private sigh. Personal feelings aside, he could hardly hold this against any of them. In their place, at their age, he probably would have been equally reluctant to make an enemy of someone as powerful as Liadof.

  "Thank you, sir," McCollum said, pulling out the chair across from him and setting her tray on the table as
she sat down. "I'll just take a moment of your time."

  "No rush," he assured her. She wasn't planning on spending an entire meal with him, anyway, he saw now. Her tray contained only the remains of her own dinner: empty plates, a mostly empty cup, and a standard-issue cloth napkin, carelessly folded.

  She might be willing to risk being seen with him, but she wasn't willing to push it.

  "I just wanted to apologize for not speaking up in your defense last week," she said. "It wasn't very brave of me. Not very loyal, either."

  "Don't worry about it," Faraday assured her, his resentment abating somewhat. At least she recognized what she'd done and felt guilty about it. If I can't have loyalty, he'd told Sprenkle, at least give me honesty. "I'm less worried about myself than I am about Raimey," he added. "I can at least stand up and defend myself. Raimey can't."

  "I know." McCollum pursed her lips, her gaze avoiding his eyes. She'd slowed down a lot these days, he'd noticed, her movements more deliberate, even leaden. A far cry from the early days, when Beach had with perfect seriousness dubbed her the station's FMSO: Fast Moving Singing Object. She didn't seem to be singing anymore, either, at least not in his presence.

  "I see you got the parmigiana," she said. "How is it tonight?"

  "Adequate," he said, cutting off another corner with his fork. So that was it for Raimey, at least as far as tonight's conversation was concerned. Hardly surprising: If they weren't going to stand up with Faraday the Living Legend, they certainly weren't going to do so for Raimey the Expendable Sacrifice. "Not as good as mother used to make; and she was Scots-Irish, without a drop of Italian in her. But I've tasted worse."

  "Possibly even on this very station?" she suggested.

  "Very definitely on this very station," Faraday confirmed, eying her closely. She seemed to be running a mix of deference and restlessness tonight, a very odd combination for her. "It was back during the Skydiver program, well before your time. One of the cooks couldn't make Italian to save his life, but insisted on weekly attempts at it anyway. For a while, every Thursday night brought serious talk of mutiny."

  "Pretty grim," McCollum said. Picking up her napkin, she dabbed delicately at her mouth with it. "Still, I'd be willing to bet the meat loaf tonight could have given him some competition."

  "Still not getting the right proportion of spices?" Faraday hazarded, remembering her standard complaint about the cooking here.

  "I don't think they even got the right kind of spices this time," she said, laying the folded napkin back down again.

  Only instead of laying it down on her tray, she set it on the table beside the tray.

  "Probably supply problems again," Faraday said, feeling his heartbeat pick up as he carefully avoided looking at the discarded napkin. In five years of the close observation that naturally came of living in such confined quarters with these people, he had long ago pegged McCollum as a neatness freak. Never in those five years had he ever seen her leave so much as a stray spoon behind her in the cafeteria.

  If that napkin was still there on the table when she got up to leave, he might just owe her an apology.

  "Probably," she conceded, glancing casually around. "I guess you can't blame the cooks for that."

  "Not really," he agreed, forcing himself back onto this innocuous train of thought. "You could try blaming the security crackdown on the Inner System, though. That's probably what's slowing down the shipments."

  "Or I could blame the protesters on Mars and Ceres," she suggested. "That's what inspired the crackdown."

  "Or you could blame the overall System economy for not creating the unlimited wealth that would let us do anything we wanted to," Faraday said, getting into the game now. "With infinite money, we could develop Saturn's moons, colonize Pluto and Charon, and give every Martian their very own individual gold-plated dome home."

  "Or I could blame God for only putting nine planets into the System to begin with," McCollum said.

  Faraday made a face. "You win," he conceded. "Once you blame God, you've gone as far back as you can."

  "And usually overshot the real target anyway," McCollum said.

  "Indeed," Faraday said. "Well..."

  "Maybe this scheme of Arbiter Liadof's will work," McCollum said. "If we can get a stardrive, the whole universe will be open to us."

  "We can hope," Faraday said, nodding. "So. What have you got planned for the evening?"

  "Not much," she said with a little shrug. "Probably read for a while and then go to bed. At some point soon, I'm guessing we're all going to be pretty busy. Might as well get caught up on my sleep before that happens."

  "Sounds like a plan," Faraday said. "Maybe I'll do the same."

  "Might be good for you." Picking up her cup, she drained the last sip. "Well. Good night, Colonel," she said, standing up. "See you in the morning."

  "Good night, Ms. McCollum."

  They exchanged nods, and she picked up her tray and headed toward the drop-off rack.

  Leaving the folded napkin on the table.

  Faraday returned to his meal, forcing himself to eat slowly and casually. McCollum's abandoned napkin seemed as visible and obvious as a smoking assault rifle, and it seemed to him that every eye in the cafeteria must surely be locked on it. On it, and on him.

  But the buzz of conversation never faltered, and no one strode up to his table and demanded to know what was going on. Either Liadof's agents were playing it very cool, or else there really wasn't anyone watching him.

  Still, there was no point in taking chances. He finished his meal, gathered his dinnerware back onto his tray, and stood up. Then, almost as an afterthought, he casually picked up McCollum's napkin.

  It was heavier than a simple square of linen had any right to be. Setting it on top of his own napkin, he headed off across the room.

  And as he leaned over to place his tray on the drop-off rack, his body blocking the view from the rest of the cafeteria behind him, he slipped the folded napkin and its unknown contents inside his jacket.

  No one leaped up, shouting in triumph. No one suddenly appeared in front of him, ready to slap a pair of cuffs across his wrists. No one even yelled at him for stealing a napkin.

  Still, he could feel the sweat gathering across his forehead and the back of his neck the entire way to his quarters. There, behind a locked door, he pulled out the napkin and carefully unfolded it.

  There were two items inside. One was a folded piece of paper. The second, the one that had provided most of the weight, was a piece of heavy metal mesh about fifteen centimeters square.

  And he definitely owed McCollum an apology.

  He started with the mesh. He had seen such things before, on the old experimental "open-skin" probes that allowed Jupiter's atmosphere to flow freely in and out of noncritical areas so as to equalize pressures during rapid descent and ascent. The wires of this mesh were thinner than those had been, though, no more than three centimeters in diameter, and with larger interstitial spaces between them. The mesh seemed more flexible than the open-skin version, too, though with a sample this size it was hard to say for sure. He couldn't identify the metal, but from the slight raggedness of the edges of his sample where it had been cut, it seemed to be pretty tough stuff.

  Setting the mesh aside, he unfolded the paper. At the top were five lines of precise script he recognized as McCollum's handwriting:

  I managed to finagle myself a short visit to Bay Seven. The probe looks something like this: I scrounged the mesh for you from a junk bin. Sorry I can't tell you more, but my new friend was pretty close-mouthed about his work and most of this tech stuff is way beyond me. Hope it helps.

  The rest of the sheet contained a rough sketch of a pair of connected ovoid shapes, the smaller one atop a much larger one, like a fat torpedo riding a dirigible. The upper ovoid had what looked like tether grab-rings fore and aft, a set of two large turboprop propellers inside protective ring-shaped cowlings, and a cluster of transmission and sensor antennae on its upper surf
ace.

  The lower ovoid, in contrast, had what looked like a hundred antennae dangling from its underside. The wrong place for antennae; but what else could they be? In addition, assuming he was interpreting McCollum's crosshatching correctly, it was the lower structure that was made out of the metal mesh.

  He smoothed out the paper, frowning at it. A small probe, possibly a modified Skydiver, riding on top of a definitely nonstandard open-skin one. Was the upper one designed to push its way down to Level Three or Four, with the lower one then to jettison and go deeper, either flying free or tethered to the upper one?

  Problem was, there was no tether shown between the two shapes. No tether rings, either. And while the upper probe had those massive free-flight turboprops, there was no indication of any engines at all on the lower ovoid. Nor did the lower one show any sign of floats, stabilizers, or airfoil surfaces.

  On the other hand, as he studied the drawing more closely he realized it was amazingly short of details of any sort. Aside from the general shape of the external structure, there was basically nothing. There wasn't even a scale to give him an idea of the overall size of the thing.

  McCollum hadn't been kidding when she said that tech stuff was beyond her, he realized with a flash of annoyance. Someone like Milligan or Beach could have gathered more data with a single glance than McCollum probably could have with a sketch book and half an hour to study the problem.

  Which was, he had to concede, probably why her new friend had been willing to risk letting her see it in the first place. Briefly, he wondered what that glimpse had cost her, then put the question out of his mind. He probably didn't want to know.

  Still, it was a start. Maybe there would be time for McCollum or one of the others to gather more data in the week and a half that remained before Liadof's current target date.

  The door chime buzzed. "Colonel Faraday?" an unfamiliar voice called.

  Reflexively, Faraday turned McCollum's paper over and laid it over the mesh, even as he recognized how unnecessary the move was. The door was locked, after all. "Yes?" he called.