All Fall Down (31 page)

           
Kate sat back and listened while the conversation turned to sports, one of the few SysNet entertainments that suffered minimal censorship. She watched Kiran, studied him. He was remarkably normal considering where he lived; though Kate asked herself what else he should be. He was a young man who'd taken one of the jobs available to him on his home planet. This environment was normal to him. She wondered if he could last a lifetime on Fall. He was as old as the main Colony, about half the age of the first settlement on the planet. If he lived out his natural life, he'd be here, in this same cylinder of secrecy, for another twelve decades. Could anyone stand to see such little change? To accept such a limited, buried life?

           
While Kiran talked with her team, Kate let her eyes roam over the mess hall. Each group sat in its own sound bubble, distant in their muteness. The air was perfumed with drink and scent. The dim lighting gave a false colour, making the space a crowded cinema of small scale dramas. The people of Fall were representative of the Settled Quarters. There were groups of post-clones, distinguishing themselves with wild hairstyles, body adornments, clothes that ran the history of human civilisation. Mixed among them were the squat, muscular forms of Tau Settlers, among the original wave of peoples to leave Old Earth. Kate also saw the platinum blonde hair of Sagittans, numerous Qin, some Rastafarians, the willowy humans of the Faro Belt of worlds and even a few Celtish Feydans, from the moons of her own system.

           
They sat, talked, gesticulated, looked deep in thought, tipped their heads back in laughter, acted without a care in the world. Like Kiran, they were either children of Fall and knew no different, or had come here through MI channels, giving up their former lives, their families and loved ones.

           
How long would it be before it all came to an end? They sat over the galaxy's greatest secret, frogs in a kettle of slowly boiling water.

           
Anxiety pinched her chest again. She rubbed it with the heel of her hand, trying to massage it away.

           
“Kate, are you OK?” Djembe had seen her, seen something in her face.

           
“Fine, fine,” she blinked away the question, “just drinking juice on an empty stomach. It's too acidic,” she waved her glass lazily. “Perhaps we can have our de-brief before the hour gets late.”

           
Kiran caught the suggestion, “I need to be going anyway.” He picked up his drink, “It was good to talk to offworlders again.”

           
When he'd gone, the three of them ordered food through the table. Djembe activated a privacy bubble around, so they were obscured from the rest of the space. Kate felt her weariness grow as she thought about how to approach telling them her news.

           
“Djembe, can we start with you? How was your investigation into the new tunnels?”

           
Djembe looked annoyed; he tapped the table with his fork, “Something is not right in this Colony, Kate.”

           
“You can say that again.”

           
“You can say that again.”

           
Djembe described the computer lock-out in the corridor.

           
Afterwards, Win described the intrusion onto the ship. He brought up the data he'd collected and overlaid it on a map of Fall's surface. The fresh, more detailed data showed a mass of movement in a cavity along a tunnel, which connected to the door Djembe had visited.

           
“What's there, Kate? Is it the biological research?” Djembe asked.

           
“I,” she started, but an alert beeped on Djembe's wrist pad.

           
“Sorry,” he checked the holicon projected from it. “Looks like I've managed to crack that file.”

           
Kate nodded at him, “Let's look at it in a moment. It can't be more disturbing than what I've discovered. I know what the biological research programme is.” She went on to describe Doctor Currie's confession and subsequent memory wipe.

           
They sat in silence for a minute, digesting the news.

           
Djembe broke the silence, “I have a very bad feeling about this.”

           
“Aliens?” Win's eyes were bright with curiosity, “Like xenomorphs?”

           
“That's all I know,” Kate shrugged. “Alien DNA. I don't know where from, or what the source creature looks like. Whether it's intelligent.”

           
Djembe's wrist pad went gave a reminder alarm. “Do you mind?”

           
“Of course, we should see its contents,” Kate waved at the flashing alarm. “It might distract us while the news sinks in.”

           
A hologram was projected from Djembe's wrist pad onto the table between them.

           
“What is it?” Kate peered the different sides.

           
“Looks like a sand storm.” Win pointed at flickers, “Look, these are like sand particles.”

           
The three watched the sand storm, a confusion of static in the holo. A time stamp counted in the bottom corner. “This is the day of Doctor Maki's death,” confirmed Djembe.

           
Mathematical symbols appeared on the holo, and as they grew and integrated into each other, the sand storm cleared. A juddering, ghosting image of a figure appeared. It was obviously struggling through the gale. A biotag annotation appeared, “Doctor Huriko Maki.”

           
“What the hell? This is the security recording of her death.” Kate looked from Win to Djembe, “The file says this doesn't exist, that the storm was too bad.”

           
They watched as Huriko walked along the side of the inselberg. The image was mostly black and white, with occasional flashes of a sickly yellow and browns. Huriko stopped at the entrance to the valley.

           
“What's that?” Djembe pointed into the holo. “That shadow?”

           
They watched as Huriko took off her face covering and glove and reached out. A glow of energy grew along her arm. Her clothes incinerated, and within another two seconds her flesh evaporated and her skeleton crumbled to dust.

           
Win looked on, horrified. “I feel sick.”

           
“What. What is that thing?”

           
The holo continued. The thing rose out of the shadows, above the inselberg. It stretched and accelerated out of the holo frame.

           
Kate rubbed her face, “Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to get much sleep?”

           
Outside their encrypted bubble, in the mess hall, a band took to the stage, singing settler songs. Many of the sound bubbles were lowered, or the music was piped in and the occupants sat back and listened in private. A solo performer took the stage afterwards, a single woman playing a musical instrument powered by Compound X, the music coming directly from her mind. It burbled in alpha waves, its melody set by synapse bursts, emotional intensity manipulated by the woman's inner most thoughts and memories. As a keen wailing ascended in tears through the space, Kate, Win and Djembe sat back, unnoticed in their encrypted bubble, staring at each other.

           
Dread settled over their table.

           
They agreed to go back to their quarters and get some rest. Djembe decrypted the bubble.

           
The singer had finished, and a tone like an out-of-tune piano hung in the air. They glanced as one to the stage, which was lit, empty, waiting for the next act.

Chapter 10 – Something Wicked This Way Comes

Daoud needed little sleep. He was in his office while much of the Colony slept, working through reports, looking over mining production figures and maintenance information from the Colony's water and sewage systems. Finished, he turned off all the holos and flat screens in the room. He disabled the room's monitoring and called up the recent holo recording of the pods. In their hexagonal cells he watched them variously floating, spinning, glowing or creating light bursts. He sat back in his chair.

           
The pods still needed something extra. The experiment with the researcher, Doctor Maki, had been a success by and large. It was a shame her behaviour had become erratic. Maybe he could extract some DNA from the pods now they were active and try again. “What would have become of you,” he flipped the holo to one of the surface, Huriko's death, and watched the herald kill her again.

           
Perhaps there was another way. Perhaps the pods could be trained, if they were showing behaviour. The data on their intelligence level – if any – was missing, and now he'd removed Doctor Cassel permanently and sidelined Masjid, it would be difficult to gather in a short space of time.

           
Daoud looked through Sophie's reports from the day. Doctor Cassel's body had just been put on the surface. The night storm would ravage it. Sun rise later would burn it. Sophie showed no sign of wavering. He had taken a risk showing her the footage of her death. It had been part of her agreement of working with him that they never discuss that event, her death and resurrection by his hand. At the time he had readily agreed to it. He had not wanted any prying questions from her. Even way back then there were things to hide, certain procedures he'd performed that were best left in the darkness of ignorance. He'd needed to remind her what she was, what she owed him. They had become lazy, waiting in the dark. War was approaching, and he needed her to command again. To be the one who knows all, sees all, as she had once been.

           
Daoud surmised that his gamble had paid off. Sophie had arranged for Doctor Cassel's death and personally disposed of the body, a task she could have assigned to a robot. It made it easier to influence her through her cybernetics.

           
With her on side, he now only had to wait for the next phase.

           
There would soon be an Event. He used the word as a proper name, “Event.” It would come to be recorded in the history books. And after it had passed, he calculated that he would need to apologise to Sophie for showing her the footage, citing the pressure of the approaching situation. Maybe he'd do it once they were clear of the system or several wells away. It would reinforce her ties to him, he would admit error, say sorry, create a sense he was vulnerable. But he wasn't sorry, he remained clear why he'd shown her the footage: despite his influence over her, she could still break away. Once she had been formidable, had almost single-handedly stopped the Corporate Wars. He wanted to direct that power, not be in its way.

           
Finally he looked over the MI team's progress from the day. The systems man, Commander Cygnate, had not found what he was expecting: a leaky comms system and a chance for MI to clean up after an itinerant Colony. Instead he'd found a system that showed just how carefully Daoud picked his staff. Jonah's control of the system was better than anything MI had ever come up with.

           
Inevitably Verigua had asked for help with its bugs and the anxiety loops which kept forming in its substrate AIs and its virtual reality space. Daoud decided to keep a close eye on Commander Cygnate's investigations. It was a phenomenon no one in the Colony had been able to crack. It didn't seem to affect anything, but Daoud knew AIs well enough to know that evolution was not constrained to the organic world.

           
General Leland ran her team well. He watched the parts of her team meetings which weren't encrypted, observed how she balanced the team's personalities, listened to her tone with each of her commanders and how she changed it to get the best out of them. He followed her body language in security recording clips during her interviews with the Colony's directors. Certainly she was skilled and there was something there. Daoud was still undecided if he agreed with Admiral Kim's assessment. The Cadre had grown soft by the time he'd parted ways with it, could it be softer yet? Or was there something more to experience from this Kate Leland? She didn't exhibit the hunger that he expected. There was passion, certainly. But officers needed ambition to be naked in their pores to reach the Admiralty, and thence the Cadre. He wasn't sure it was there.