Cosmonaut Keep (12 page)

"Positive pressure," I said. "The windows blow, they don't suck. Besides, the place does not have ECM. Not state-of-the-art, but not bad." I smiled at Jadey. Her toes were exploring the top of my foot, under the table. "Good enough for government work. No, seriously, I think our only problem is reverse social engineering, and as Alec says, that's a political problem, not a physical one. We're as safe here as anywhere."

Jadey looked dubious. "Surely there are places where you can have a bit more privacy? Up in the Highlands, maybe?"

Curran nearly choked; the rest of us just smiled. "The Highlands are the worst," Curran said when he'd got his breath back. "The land reform really bought the Party a lot of support up there."

"Oh well." Jadey dismissed the matter. "I guess that computer room looks safe enough. We're doing it from there, right?"

"Right."

"So what are we doing there, anyway?" Tony asked.

"Basically," I said, very carefully, "We're doing some work on a contract I got yesterday. I need a bit of help from you three, and you're all subcontracted at the standard rate if you want." I waved a hand. "We'll sort out the screenwork later. Okay so far?"

Nods all round.

"Fine," I went on. "However, Jadey here has come across a set of files from ESA. And you all know how important that's suddenly become, and how ... Well, you remember what Charlie was going on about last night."

I really had their attention.

"I'd like to know what it is. You all warm with that?"

The two old code-geeks responded with piratical grins; Jason nodded soberly.

I looked around. "Okay. Everybody ready?"

We gathered up our final coffees and trooped off up the stairs to what Jadey had called the computer room. Alec remarked how funny that was, how it took him back ... but it was a thoroughly modern toolkit of readers and VR goggles and contacts that we all deployed as we clustered around the old-fashioned keyboards and screens. I'd already roped in my suite of AIs, had copies of all of them and of my usual software libraries safely corralled in the building's own cores; I'd double-checked with the agency first thing in the morning (over Jadey's mumbled protests; over Jadey's legs ... ) and confirmed that the ESA contract was still valid, even after last night's surprising and historic announcement.

I'd brought in the two code-geeks, Tony and Alec, in case we needed to deal directly with the antiquated underlying software of the ESA system. Jason's specialities, honed in his various ID-forgery sidelines, were in VR work and security systems. VR work looks easy, but without a good grip on indexing and shortcuts and search methodologies it becomes like a physical search for a small object in a large space -- not so much a needle in a haystack as a needle on a prairie.

I paused, the goggles on the bridge of my nose. Jadey was sitting on the next workbench along, swinging her legs like a bored kid and doing something delicate to her fingernails with a disproportionately large lock-knife.

"Want to join us?"

She shook her head. "I'll keep lookout."

Hardly necessary, I thought, but if that was how she wanted to play it --

"Fine by me," I said. "Okay, guys, just follow me in."

I slid the goggles up the final quarter-inch and fitted them snugly over my eyes. A blink, and I was in, my viewpoint floating in front of an abstract rendering of the project as a monolithic closed book. The others hung behind my shoulders; I could feel them on the back of my neck, though if I looked behind, I couldn't see them -- an odd, uncanny sensation, like being watched by a ghost. My AIs swooped around us like excited birds as I opened the book. Cascading dominoes of indexes unfolded across the virtual space.

The real information necessary for a material-requirement planning system was a barely detectable fraction of what was available here. What I most urgently wanted to find out was whether the end product of the process was defined or described anywhere, and if so, what it was. Fortunately, this was the sort of thing that project-management software and skills were ready-made for, so I led my troops into the jungle with a mental shout of
Banzai!

The refinery-complex arrangements that Jadey and I had seen earlier were the obvious place to start, so I did. Meanwhile I sent the AIs on a trawl of the documentation, using conceptual search criteria to look for any references to output or completion.

The first thing I realized, now that I had time to look properly, was that I had been quite mistaken about the scale -- the "refinery" was in fact only a roomful of incredibly fine machinery. I immediately began thinking in terms of the machinery and supplies required to make such machinery -- to bore pipes of that diameter to the necessary tolerances, the expense of supplying even a few molecules of transplutonic stable isotopes -- rare artificial atoms from the "island of stability" with atomic weights well into the low hundreds -- and set up a production process, or at least a supply schedule, whose product would be this machine, whose own product I didn't know. Close up, the machinery looked almost organic -- it had that evolved complexity, unplanned and serendipitous, that you can see in electron micrographs of cells and in flowcharts of mitochondria.

"Looks like the fucking Kerbs cycle," Alec muttered, somewhere far behind my right ear. At the same time a flurry of agitation from one of the AIs caught my attention. I zoomed in on it; my companions and the other AIs followed. The excited AI did the equivalent of brandishing a sheaf of papers, and I grabbed them.

The title page read:
Construction Projects 1 and 2
--
Overview and Recommendations.
It was overstamped with ESA EYES ALPHA and a date: 24 July 2048.

"Bingo!" I said. "Have a look at this on the screen, Jadey."

"Okay." Her voice came from a long way off.

I started paging through it; before long I felt an ache in my chest and a tightness in my throat, and my hands were shaking. The plan for the refinery, or fabrication unit, or whatever it was, had come from the alien intelligences within the asteroid. How this had been accomplished was left unexplained. Two final products were mentioned.

The outcome of Construction Project 1 was referred to as
the engine,
and that of Project 2 as
the craft.
The first instances of the words were highlighted and hyperlinked. I touched them, and the references expanded out into pictures that shone like devices seen in a dream.

The engine
-- it looked like a model of a jet or rocket engine turned out on a lathe, its fluted surfaces smooth and flowing, but with no visible inlet or outflow, just a peculiar inturning of the surface, unbroken but -- as I rotated the view -- somehow giving the eye-deceiving impression that there was an unseen opening somewhere inside it, like a Klein bottle.

The craft
-- this was, in a crazy, eerie way, recognizable. It was a shining lens of metal, with -- just inward from the rim -- tiny rounded protuberances that in a bad light might have been mistaken for rivets. The exploded view showed the ulterior hatch, the telescopic legs, the internal controls, and the seats curving around the inside, and at the core something like the machine called
the engine
but differently proportioned and integrated into what superficially might be called the hull of
the craft.
It was blatantly, embarrassingly, unmistakably, a flying saucer.

We all backed out of VR and sat or stood looking at each other and talking in a confused, vehement babble. Alec Curran stopped it by banging his fist on the table.

"This is
it,"
he said. "The Rosetta Stone. The Holy Grail. It's like the Majestic Twelve documents."

To my surprise Jadey laughed at this and said: "Remember, MJ-12 was disinformation!"

They bickered rapidly for a minute, slinging references at each other; I had no idea what they were talking about. The idea that flying saucers had been built by aliens, rather than by Americans, belonged as much to the twentieth century as sea-serpents did to the nineteenth. Over the past few decades even sightings had fallen off, the whole UFO cult relegated to white-trash backwoods and the waste, howling wildernesses of the Web.

"Isn't it funny," Alec concluded heavily, "that we get the first proof of secret government contact with aliens the day after the government announces it?"

"Well, we got it the day
before,"
Jadey pointed out, reasonably enough but without making much impression on Alec. They weren't really debating, I realized -- they were both so excited at what we'd found that they each wanted to test to destruction the almost unbearably amazing possibility that it was real. Both of them evidently took the UFO mythos more seriously than I did -- something I unkindly attributed to Alec's age and Jadey's probable background. The popular base of the New Money faction -- the white-trash backwoods, to be blunt -- was notoriously prone to conspiracy theories, enthusiastic religions, and such-like eccentricities, according to
Europa Pravda.

"Guys, guys," Jason said finally, reaching out as though to knock their heads together, "this isn't getting us very far, is it? I mean, the disc shape is kind of logical, in a way, for some kinds of flying machine. Hell, they were used in the war. Doesn't mean anything about the old UFO crap, one way or the other. If this stuff has turned up in a genuine ESA work-docket, I reckon we assume it's there for a reason."

"It could still be disinformation, even if the project is genuine," Jadey insisted. "But you know, I don't think that matters. If the
cover-up
is that it's an alien blueprint for some kind of spaceship technology, whatever it
really
is must be pretty important."

I could see some problems with that theory, but discussing them would be a waste of time. One can twist the cable of paranoia only so many times before something gives way, and not necessarily the cable.

Tony, the other old code-geek -- the one I'd pulled in for his MS-DOS experience -- was chewing gum with his mouth half-open, his yellow fingers wending through his strands of white beard and his nails making unpleasant rasping noises on his chin. I got the impression that he was a little tense.

He wiped his lips on his wrist.

"So -- what you planning to do with this?" he asked, looking back and forth between me and Jadey and then glancing at Alec. "Sell it to the Yanks?"

"No, of course not," I said, indignantly and perhaps too quickly. "We're just thinking of ... spreading it around."

"Presumably you don't think the E.U. should be the only people with access to this tech, whatever it is." Jadey said.

Tony shook his head. "No, no, but you don't know it will be.

Yefrimovich said last night that they wanted scientific cooperation. How do you know that doesn't include this thing?"

"We don't." Jadey shrugged. "But some of the circumstances around how we got hold of it suggest otherwise."

"Hmm," said Alec. "That sounds fair enough, I suppose. Information wants to be free, and all that." He stood up and grinned at us rather sheepishly. "Excuse me a moment, folks. Nature calls. Back in a few minutes, okay?"

"Sure," I said. "See you then."

He ducked out. It was twelve-thirty, rather to my surprise -- time flies when you're in VR. We went on talking for a bit. After ten minutes, Jadey looked around.

"How long does it
take
to take a leak, anyway?"

My phone rang. I tapped the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Alec here. Uh, Matt, I'm in the bar, and from here it looks like the cops are having a very serious argument with Reception. I'd expect them up in the lift in about a minute."

He rang off.

"Alec says the cops will be here in a minute!"

Jason calmly leaned forward and hit the emergency DELETE. Every trace of our morning's work, and the data I'd downloaded the previous night, would be wiped from the cores. Tony's face showed a flurry of conflicting expressions, then he shrugged.

"I won't run," he said.

Jadey jumped up. "They're here for me," she said. She caught my hand and dragged me to my feet. "You go." She slapped the datadisk into my hand. Her lips brushed mine, for a fraction of a second. "Go now! I'll be fine."

Jason was already at the door, looking back at me impatiently. I joined him on the instant, then looked back myself.

"See you in America," Jadey said.

"Where?"

"The Dreamland gate," she said.

Jason hauled me out bodily.

Jason knew the building better than I did. He darted along the corridor, opened what looked like a cupboard door and jumped in. I followed, and found myself in a sort of dumbwaiter lift which immediately began dropping with alarming speed. I braced my hands against the ceiling of the thing just before it came to a jaw-jarring stop that almost buckled my knees.

I was still checking my neck for whiplash as we stepped out into a low-ceilinged, concrete-floored basement. Sagging fluorescent tubes fizzed and flickered. The damp air smelled faintly of motor oil and cement.

"Used to be the car park," Jason said wryly. "Also an emergency exit."

We sprinted across to a ramp which swung us down and around to a wide metal door, apparently sealed shut. Jason slid back a bolt and a smaller door -- or vertical hatch -- opened, and we stepped through to find ourselves in Leith Walk, under a showery sky. Half a minute later we were sitting at the rear of a trolleybus going down the road toward Leith.

"
Don't
look back," Jason said.

I flushed and hunched my shoulders, then fished out my reader and jiggled my thumbs on its knurled controls. Most of the channels were snow. Jason glanced at it, then his arms seemed to stiffen. He took out his phone, looked at it, then stooped and placed it on the floor between his boot. He straightened up. I heard a crunch and some scuffing.

"Right," he said. He stared ahead with a look of frantic calm.

"What?"

"Look outside the bus, man. It's like the fucking
Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
His voice was quiet, although the only other people on the bus were a couple of old women sitting up at the front.