Cosmonaut Keep (16 page)

"Last I saw of her, she was about to be pulled in by the commies."

"Oh!" She stared at me. Sheets of data shimmered between us like a heat haze. "You're saying you were
there?"

"Yeah, in Edinburgh," I told her. "What's it to you?"

Her eyes narrowed, and her expression became calmer.

"I'm going to ping you," she said. "And you just better be who I think you are, else I'll lock you out."

I could feel my kit being interrogated; the sensation was disagreeably creepy. A faint line of light scanned my eyes before I had a chance to blink. Not that a retinal scan was worth much, these days, but it would have been remiss of her not to do it. Meanwhile I sent a crowd of AI agents burrowing past the connection she'd made by opening communications with me. They returned in seconds, flashing up organizational data. A rapid glance before stashing them left me with an afterimage of an organization called the Human Rights Federation, with a stack of letterhead sponsors, each with a string of impressive-looking letters after his or her name: businesspeople, a few token trade-unionists, academics, engineers -- your standard-issue New Money think-tank front.

"Man," the woman said, looking a lot more relaxed, "that biodegradable commie gear is the pits."

"Don't underestimate it," I said smugly, scratching the front of my neck. The throat-mike was days old and giving me a rash like a blunt razor. "So was it the HRF sent Jadey to Europe?"

"Huh, smart," the woman replied grudgingly. "Yeah, we're her backers. And you, Mr. Cairns, must be Thin Red. Her hardware source."

"Isn't this," I asked, "getting a bit beyond need-to-know, at this stage?"

She shrugged. "Ah, the goddamn commies have it all laid open like a book now. But yeah, you might have a point. Just gimme a location, and we'll meet up for some serious talk."

"The Dreamland gate," I said.

"Ah-hah. Nice one. Okay, see you there."

"Where is it?"

"You'll find it."

She blinked out, leaving me gazing at a data structure that my AIs had patiently slotted together in the meantime. It was almost too simple to be paranoid, almost simple enough for a professional paranoid like a security apparatchik to ignore, and it went like this:

The ESA launch-site at Kourou in French Guiana had, a couple of years back, been the locus of a minor scandal, much played-up by the protectionist wing of the Party in Europe. One of the fabricators at Kourou had been buying in launch-vehicle components, not from a duly subsidized plant in some godforsaken corner of Angola or wherever, but from an American company. That company, Nevada Orbital Dynamics, had a vice president on the HRF's letterhead and a production facility at Groom Lake, Nevada.

A place also known as Area 51, and as Dreamland.

Kourou's MEP, Weber, had staunchly defended the fabricators, and after the relevant balance-sheets and quality records had been introduced into the parliamentary debate the deal's critics had made a muttering retreat.

Surely, I thought, Weber's suborning -- if that was what had happened -- couldn't have been as simple and obvious as that. It could hardly be held against him -- he and the fabricators were doing what they were supposed to be doing, both commercially and, in the context of peaceful coexistence (the Party line du jour), politically -- and he might even be able to use it as a defense against any trumped-up charges of "wrecking," as unprofitable deals tended to be called if any recrimination happened to be required retrospectively.

Another part of my mind thought,
Bingo!
I turned with renewed hope to tracking down other information about Jadey. She was in the news, in a carefully obscure way: buried in a bottom corner of an inside page of the online edition of
Europe Pravda,
and blazed on the front pages of utterly unofficial American newsfeeds. WHY, they demanded, was OUR SO-CALLED GOVERNMENT doing NOTHING to free this INNOCENT AMERICAN?

The U.S. government, via small paragraphs in the
New York Times
and
Washington Post,
was making obscure and oblique noises about using "the proper channels." Whether this meant they were making frenzied diplomatic representations at the highest level, or passing token queries from the consulate to the constabulary in Edinburgh, was anyone's guess.

The whole issue of Jadey -- which in other times could easily have been inflated into a cause célèbre -- was completely overshadowed by the fuss over Weber's arrest (the U.S. government's tone on the allegations against him resounded with injured innocence) and the far greater fuss over ESA's alien contact. Over that, the world was collectively and predictably losing its head. Scrolling through the news from the past few days it seemed that every scientist, philosopher, cleric, general, politician, and stand-up comedian on the planet -- and off it -- had been canvassed for their response. I left the resulting cacophony for a batch of freshly hatched AIs to turn into some kind of digest format, and turned away in some relief to the next contract to bubble up my list.

The soothing relief of routine hackwork didn't last. Twenty-five minutes into the job, the AIs started flashing urgently and the ship's cook, Mr. Nguyen, hurried out of the galley and banged the table. I saved-to-server and switched my attention to both interruptions, the human first.

"Big news for you," he told me. "For us all. Check CNN." "Thanks," I said. The AIs were urging me to do the same. I followed their advice. The global newsfeed had no doubt what was the most important piece of global news, shoving the alien-contact debate unceremoniously down the stack:

REVOLT ON ESA STATION

Scientists and cosmonauts on the ESA scientific station
Titov
today appealed to the world community to prevent the "militarization" of their historic contact with an alien intelligence. An apparently bloodless struggle has ousted the five military representatives from the station's governing committee. Former station security chief Colin Driver, hitherto regarded as a totally reliable Communist FSB commissar, has spearheaded the move.

In a personal statement, Driver announced:

Tab to a clip.

Driver filled the view. To me, it was as though he were sitting across the table. Behind him, in the back of the field, a half dozen or so people clung at all angles to stanchions and grinned wildly at the camera. They looked like scientists, all right. Driver was a thickset, muscular man in a much-bemedaled uniform. His face could have been Slavic, but his voice and accent (in the undubbed version I was getting) were unmistakably Southern English.

"I'm not much given to public speaking, so I'll keep this short. Three days ago, General Secretary Yefrimovich made an announcement which shook the world. The timing of that announcement, after what many have rightly deduced must have been years of secrecy, has given rise to widespread and alarming speculation. My friends, I have to tell you that some of this speculation is partly justified. Almost certainly unknown to the General Secretary and to the leading Party of the fraternal countries, sinister and reactionary elements in ... "

Driver paused, and then said, "Oh, the hell with this commie crap!" He convulsively tore the ribbons and badge from his jacket, and took a deep breath.

"Okay," he went on. "Folks, I'll give it to you straight. Some of the hard-line generals in the European People's Army think they can use what we've learned from the aliens to hit the Americans hard -- to win the Fourth World War and complete the world revolution at what they consider the acceptable cost of a few million lives. Sooner or later, and better sooner. You do the math -- they have. But let me assure you, they don't yet have all the information they need. They've got some -- most of your crypto's washed-up, as you've guessed. But they can't yet break the American launch-codes. The announcement was, from their point of view, premature, but that may not stop them from some precipitate action.

"So we -- the scientists, cosmonauts, and security staff of the
Marshall Titov
-- have decided to do what we can to prevent this. We've put our own militarists in protective custody, and we urge the government, armed forces, Party, and peoples of the E.U. to do the same. Until that is done, not a byte of data leaves this station without going instantly to the public nets.

"We're willing to release the military reps on one condition -- that all charges against Henri Weber are dropped, that he is released unconditionally and given the chance to mediate between us and the E.U. government."

Driver smiled thinly. "After all, he
is
the MEP representing this station, via the launch-site at Kourou. As an officer --
a former
officer -- of the Federal Security Bureau, I'm absolutely certain that he's innocent of the charges. He's not a CIA agent. This charge has been trumped-up to discredit him, and us, and quite possibly the FSB as well. I know this perfectly well, because ... "

Another pause, another deep breath.

" ... for the past five years he and I have cooperated closely in feeding disinformation to the CIA and in isolating the real CIA agent on this station, Major Ivan Sukhanov, who is now with his colleagues in the brig."

New York's traffic astonished me. I took a cab from the harbor to JFK and sat back in terrified wonder as it hurtled or idled between and among the biggest, noisiest, shiniest, and smelliest vehicles I'd ever seen in my life. The whole significance of the oil wars suddenly came to life, as well as the difference between the U.S. and the E.U. In the U.S. the internal combustion engine was still dominant; in the E.U., the burning of petroleum fractions was more or less restricted to aviation and the military. The rest of it went straight into new tech. Most civil aircraft in Europe were airships or hybrid vehicles. In the U.S. they were jets. It made air travel faster, but much less comfortable, in ways that you really do not want to know about.

Las Vegas was an exercise in proving that real-life architectural and behavioral excess could still compete with virtual reality; but my strangest moment didn't come from looking out through the vast plate-glass windows of the terminal at McCarran Airport at the vaster plate-glass-and-plastic edifices beyond. I already knew that Dreamland was a place. Standing in the Janet Airlines terminal and looking at the departure board, I felt a sense of untoward excitement and unreality the first time I saw its name spelled out as a DESTINATION.

I walked down the gangway from the little fifty-seater passenger airplane and looked about me with some apprehension as I strolled toward the terminal building, the Base's regular workers striding briskly ahead of me. The flight from McCarran Airport at Las Vegas had taken half an hour. In the early-morning sun Groom Lake's dry lakebed made the airfield's twin runways a blur of dazzling light and dark shadows. A hasty thumbing of the virtuals for my new American-made goggles -- spex, they were called here -- turned the brightness down and the color and contrast up. The place still looked weird. A flat plain surrounded by mountains, on which the products of human technology stood out like just-dropped alien artifacts.

The former Air Force Base was ground zero for an entire fallout zone of myth and secrecy and suspicion. Between the Second and Third World Wars the region had been used for secret testing -- of atomic bombs, missiles, the fabled NERVA nuclear rocket engine, and the U.S.A.'s most advanced and secret aircraft: black projects, from the U-2 through the Blackbird and a series of stealth fighters culminating in the infamous EDSF. The Electro-Dynamic Stealth Fighter had been immensely successful at flying high and fast, at avoiding radar detection, at evading smart missiles, and at generating waves of excited UFO reports. As the Eastern European theater had demonstrated, however, it wasn't at all invulnerable to old-fashioned visual detection and anti-aircraft fire from anyone with the nerve to turn off the aiming computer, look, and trust the force.

After the disasters of the war and the recriminations of the witchhunts, the whole thing had been shut down -- projects canceled, secrets carted off to deep and distant storage -- and the remaining facilities turned over to a plethora of private enterprises.

These had included what were, to be kind, nutcase cults -- organizations that had wasted years scouring the deserts and the deserted buildings for alloys not of this Earth, for scraps of documentation, for evidence that the pickled corpses of the Roswell aliens had once been here. By now I had stacks of this sort of shit on my reader. It made me wonder -- how stupid could people
get!
If unidentified flying objects were seen around secret military aircraft development bases, the obvious inference was that they were secret military aircraft.
But the secret aircraft were secretly reverse-engineered from secretly recovered alien spacecraft ...
No, one would think, this particular rescue hypothesis was not going to fly. William of Ockham had shot it down centuries ago -- but still it flew, piloted by alien entities unnecessarily multiplied ...

More significant, and in the long run more enduring, had been the space companies, some of whose successes were at that very moment making extraordinary maneuvers overhead. Flying triangles and flying discs slid across the sky, shot up and vanished in the heavens.

I entered the terminal past the casual visual and, no doubt, invisible scanning of the camo-clad dudes on the door, and stepped into the air-conditioned coolness. Just across the concourse I saw my immediate destination -- an open-fronted airport bar, with its name spelled in flickering, ironic neon:

The Dreamland Gate.

The postmodern tack persisted inside; the walls were papered with ufological and science-fictional posters, and further decorated with battered, rusted metal signs from various sectors of the old perimeter, most of whose legends concluded with the words, USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED. A model of a Gray alien stood in the corner, and obsessively detailed polystyrene hobby-kit flying saucers hung on black invisible threads from the ceiling, swaying erratically in the ventilator breeze. The girl at the bar wore an aluminum fake space-suit and the lad had a Wackenhut Security ID tag pinned to his camos. Behind them, various flavors and colors of vodka were shelved in large flasks within which nauseatingly realistic Gray fetuses floated as though in formaldehyde.