All Fall Down (32 page)

           
Before he left his office, Daoud checked his private comms link. Still no sign from the wormhole. His information, stumbled upon by accident on his last trip to Jupiter's Archive, pointed to this being the time of the Event. Sometime in the next forty standard hours they would come. He switched off his desk projections and left his office for his usual two hours sleep.

Sophie lay on her bed again. She had made preparations on behalf of Doctor Currie, who was in MedWing following a stroke. There was still a memorial to arrange for the people who lived and worked here.

           
And there was Peter was on the surface. He needed his own memorial.

           
On her bed she activated her internal cybernetics. They were shielded so that all but the most thorough of scans would find them. She brought up old memories, long since shuffled out of her organic neural pathways and into implanted memory stores.

           
Being confronted with her own death was still disturbing her. It was centuries since she'd had to think about it. As she lay on her bed she knew that she'd never really come to terms with it. She watched the holo again from her visual memory, her eyes closed and flicking under their lids. Seeing her old ship brought back a lot of memories. Just the insignia on the side reminded her of the lengths she and the others, now long dead, had gone to, to steal a Corporate shuttle. She remembered her first cybernetic implant when she'd joined a Corporate a decade before that. And in fast forward, the events that had turned her into a freedom fighter. That had seen more and more cyberware installed until at one point her body was the central communications node for the freedom fighters in the Corporate Wars, and the refugees from Qin space.

           
Old memories, things done centuries ago.

           
Things done for a moral purpose. To end suffering. Where never once had she killed a person.

           
Where never once had she arranged for a death to take place.

           
“Why,” the words formed on her lips, “now?”

           
Thinking over the old times and the massive augmentation she'd been through, she remembered the firewalls she'd had installed, the regular scans her compatriots had made her go through to ensure her cyberware wasn't infected, hadn't been infiltrated. She rummaged in her cybernetic memory, found them. Just in case, she initiated a deep level scan of her cyberware.

           
Just, as she said to herself, in case.

Verigua never slept.

           
The bugs in its cyber space had changed. They no longer took on the aspect of caterpillars. Now they were butterflies, and they turned up in more places. It didn't know what it meant.

           
Verigua reviewed the new information it had learned from the humans. And the electronic screen in the bowels.

           
When Commander Djembe Cygnate had unlocked the protected file, its anxiety shell had burst apart into particles and spread into its sub-AIs. Uncertainty algorithms raged inside it. Level Three Minds were not supposed to experience emotions, and it had no suitable control programs to keep them in check. It developed hundreds of basic algorithms and set them loose to control the anxiety loops, breeding the most successful with each other, killing the algorithms with limited success. And it read through the humans' literature, growing a semantic understanding of anxiety and uncertainty. The literature said that anxiety led to anger and fear. Which led to unpredictable behaviour. More than anything it had to avoid this. It was programmed to care for humans. More information was needed.

           
General Kate Leland had shared with Verigua the holo of the alien on the surface, the apparent murder of Doctor Maki. Coupled with the impassable section of corridor, Verigua surmised that Daoud and Sophie's conversations might reveal more. It was undoubtedly them who were running this conspiracy.

           
It analysed security recordings of their meetings over the past few days. Eventually, cross-checking with their other meetings over years, it came to understand that there were carefully constructed holes in its knowledge and recordings. They were subtle, well hidden. And while it had no data on what Daoud and Sophie talked about, Verigua knew that they had private, shielded, unmonitored conversations. And if that was the case, then they must be shielding themselves.

           
Harm was occurring in the Colony. Doctor Huriko Maki was dead. An unpredictable AI could harm humans.

           
Verigua picked up on a Colony-wide alert for Doctor Peter Cassel. He was reported missing.

           
There were secret tunnels. Parts of the Colony it couldn't access. It didn't know what more harm might be occurring at the moment, or may occur as a result of these things.

           
More information was necessary.

           
Verigua decided not to scan Daoud for the moment. He was Administrator and ultimately responsible for what was happening. Verigua knew Daoud would take greater pains to protect and alert himself to anything that threatened his secrecy.

           
Sophie on the other hand. Verigua scanned her quarters instead, looking for any tech that might be shutting off the Colony's monitoring systems, so she could have shielded conversations.

           
And was greatly surprised by what it found there. And decided to act.

While the MI team slept, the night storm raged over the Colony. In the dusty blitzkrieg a body was dragged around like a lamb in a pack of wolves, eviscerated, shredded in its pores. All evidence of Doctor Peter Cassel's injuries were scoured, obliterated by Fall. When the storm subsided, a bloody pulp remained. The yellow sun cooked the pounded meat. By the time the blue sun had made its rise, he might well have been dead for centuries. A tough, leathery corpse remained, half the size of the living owner, fingers splayed on the uncaring earth, white bone against beige sand, a horrendous laugh etched across its pitted skull.

           
Daoud had put out the alert for Doctor Cassel's whereabouts after he failed to check in with the other scientific teams. And although no one could exactly remember him going to the surface, all of the technicians thought that during the rush to get everyone topside during the brief night, and the rush to get everyone back in so quickly when the storm whipped up, they must have seen him, must have missed him, must have just forgotten to mark him as he was around so often, checking on equipment and sensors. He was always around, so he must have been around. The hangar bay technicians worked themselves into mass guilt, hypnotised themselves into believing that they had failed one of their own.

           
Eventually the blue sun climbed away from the horizon, on a collision course with the yellow. From the planet's surface, the two resembled godly opponents, emanating from lairs over the edge of the world, to spar at the zenith, a great affray in the furthest reaches of the heavens.

           
Sand dunes rose like an anticipatory audience; great surface ripples forming in response to the gravitational disturbance, a desiccated approximation of the water waves that formed on mooned, wet worlds.

In space, the Lagrange One probe monitored its gravitational neutrality, correcting its attitude and position from time to time. It had failed to find any trace of ion signatures, spaceship movement or anything of significance. Towards the system's centre, it gathered data on the forthcoming eclipse. It watched the blue sun swing round from behind the yellow, arc out, then start to swing back in, on a path that would take it across the face of the yellow sun. The inner system's planetoids also came out of hiding from behind the yellow sun. The probe silently stored the data that showed the planetoids' orbits becoming elongated, exaggerated ovals. Because the planetoids were too large to be space ships, and because they didn't fit any profiles Win had programmed, the probe chose not to relay the data that showed their orbit becoming more akin to an eccentric course change. A course that led towards Fall.

Towards the wormhole, the remains of the Lagrange Delta probe spun about its vertical axis. Small particles, circuits and bits of its solar array gathered around it in an orbital cloud. A black box thrust away from the debris.

           
It, too, had been carefully gathering data on the only thing moving near its position: the wormhole. Programmed to record and transmit any activity, it had dutifully sent back teraquads of information, unaware that what had emerged from the wormhole had already created a dampening field long before the probe's arrival.

           
The collision that had left the probe shattered, spinning, drifting divorced, had been unavoidable. The probe had become caught in a tractor field, victim of an automatic security scan by the great ship that had passed by. Deemed to be non-threatening, the probe had been released, straight into the path of the next ship, where it smashed into the ship's shields.

           
Recognising its damage was critical, the probe recorded as much data as it could. Thirty seconds before its estimated critical failure, it ejected its datacore, the black box, which was coupled to a sub-light speed engine and enough telemetry equipment to find its way to the nearest Habitat. The box made a single, calculated thrust towards the wormhole, taking with it all the data that would have warned Win of Fall's approaching visitors.

Masjid woke in MedWing, confused, weak.

Sophie stood in a holo display, surrounded by a room layout and itinerary for the memorial service and staff rosters. There was day-to-day work to do. There was still the plan to administer. And, too, there was what happened the previous night. The results of her deep level scan. And shortly after that had finished, the scan she'd detected from Verigua, and the decision which had surprised her: not to block it. And the discussion in Verigua's cyberspace immediately afterwards.

           
She was confused. Conflicted. For the moment, she would carry on as before.

Daoud sat at his command table where a light blinked. He rubbed his chin, cheeks, with one cupped hand, while he watched a small holo of Kate walking towards the door deep in the bowels, the door to the secret tunnel.

           
The brass figurine on his desk, caught in its eternal, dynamic stride forward, glinted in the holo glow. It reminded him that progress depended on perspective; if not in space, then certainly in time. He watched Kate go through the door. “Time for some perspective, General.”

           
He opened the base of the figurine again, and took out the datachip. When his office door had closed on his back, a second light blinked on his command table. A holo flowered, dark, of space. Space and movement.

Before bed, Kate had given the mission update to Admiral Kim, sticking to the facts she was willing to let Daoud know that she knew. She had filtered in a code phrase, known only to her and Admiral Kim. Within twenty hours of her report, hopefully by sixteen hundred hours on the second day of the mission, there would be a larger, secondary MI force over Fall. Kate had decided after talking with Win and Djembe that regardless of who was responsible for this conspiracy, that it was best to bring in outside help.

           
Her sleep was short and deep but troubled. She dreamed in snatches of colour and scenes. She was surrounded by clocks and running tracks. She dreamed of people falling through atmospheres, tumbling uncontrollably. She dreamed of eyes in the dark, of being watched and judged. But she was at least partially refreshed and feeling brighter.

           
Now, after breakfast, the team assembled in the meeting room. Kate invited Verigua.
 
The three sat around the holopit, with Verigua occupying the pit, representing itself as a metropolis, with obelisk-like buildings shearing into a dusky sky, threads of trains flashing through the city canyons, a blur of criss-crossing movement, and giant dirigibles cruising silently over the city's tallest edifices and their space-puncturing spires. Whenever Verigua spoke, spotlights searched the skies.