Cosmonaut Keep (32 page)

"Shit," I said. "They've done it to U.S. military spec."

"By now," said Avakian, "I could believe they wrote it in the first place."

"Dreamland, huh?"

We laughed and saved the ship to our own systems and backed out.

"Let me get this clear," said Driver. "You're telling me we can just rip off the panel and patch in a joystick?"

"Um, no," I said. "The whole control system on this disc is different from the one we have the production plan for. It's not at all obvious how to merge the two."

"Anyone had a look at the control system in the first one?"

"Yeah," said Camila. "I have. It's solid-state all the way down from about a millimeter below the palm-print thingie. I've lowered a viewpoint through that millimeter thickness under high-res, and my best guess is it's some kind of pressure-sensitive pad combined with something that responds to changes in the upper surface's conductivity. For all I know it could be tuned to patterns of heat and sweat."

"Sweaty-palmed aliens," said Avakian. "What a creepy thought."

"And from there," Camila went on, spreading her arms out and upward, "it branches all over the craft, especially to the engine. Nothing as crude as wires, either. It's completely different from the one Matt and Armen have pulled out."

"But you could put a joystick and a viewscreen on that one?"

"Oh, sure." Camila nodded vigorously. "No sweat."

She looked puzzled when we laughed, then joined in.

"The only problem with that is we don't have a plan to build
that
ship."

"Would it be possible to reverse-engineer one?" asked Lemieux.

"Give me a few years," I said. "Mind you, merging the plans would probably take longer."

"Which inclines me to wonder," said Driver, "why they didn't give us the plans for one with human-compatible controls in the first place."

"We could always ask for one," said Avakian.

"Worth a try," I said.

Driver glowered at us.

"Don't hang about," he said.

We ducked out of the office and dived into Avakian's cubbyhole. After ten minutes of discussing the details of the query we dropped into the interface, fired it off, and got nothing but a blank screen for our pains.

"Hmm," said Driver, when we reported back. "Why does this not surprise me?"

"You mean it's some kind of initiative test?" said Camila.

"No," said Driver. "They ain't playing games. They must think they've given us the answer."

Camila poked about in the air in front of her spex, examining our results.

"Something's bothering me here," she said. "The conventions are U.S. mil-spec."

"So?"

She flicked her fingers and looked up.

"You guys -- I mean, you can tell me, right? They're not exactly secret, they're in the goddamn public domain. So was it you that passed them on to the aliens?"

Driver and Lemieux frowned at each other.

"Nobody passed anything on," said Lemieux. "We have not been
entering
information in the alien interface. Well, we can, but there isn't much point."

"So how the hell do they know it?"

"That seems an awfully trivial question," I said. "Seeing as we don't even have a clue how they know our languages."

"It is not trivial," said Lemieux. He rubbed his stubble. "And it is not something they merely tapped from our own communications, because we use ESA conventions and we have had no occasion to refer to yours."

"I'm willing to bet," said Camila, "that the only place on this station that spells out U.S. mil-spec conventions is in the handbooks stored right here."

She held up her palmtop.

"And the only thing built to them," she went on, "is the
Blasphemous Geometries'
onboard systems."

"What about our spex?" I asked. "I mean, face it, everybody here uses them."

Driver shook his head.

"All civilian," he said. "Commercial."

"The U.S. military uses them!"

"That," Camila explained patiently, "is because the kind of spex you can buy in any American hardware store or military-base PBX, for that matter, is better than the fucking clunkers that the Army uses. Even your commie biodegradables are better than -- "

"What are you getting at?" I said, not patiently.

"What I'm getting at," she told us, "is that the aliens can read every bit and byte of data on every computer on this station."

"Ah," said Lemieux. "Since we identified the earlier datastream hack, that has been our default assumption."

"Well, that's that little mystery cleared up," said Driver. "Now, as we were saying -- "

"No!" said Camila. "Wait a minute."

"I'm waiting," said Driver.

Camila, Armen, and I all started saying much the same thing at once. Driver held up a hand.

"Camila."

"You were right a minute ago," she said. "They think they've given us the answer, and they have -- they're telling us to build the controls and the engine into the
Blasphemous Geometries."

There was a moment of silence.

"All right," said Driver. "Nice idea. But if the thing is modular enough to do that, why isn't it modular enough for a merge of the two alien discs?"

I shook my head. "No, no, it's a totally different problem. Just a minute. Camila, could you zap me through to a spec of the
Blasphemous!"

She tugged a cable from her palmtop and plugged it in the port of my spex.

"All yours. Remember not to share this information with anyone from a Communist country."

"I'll keep that in mind," I said, diving in.

First, I checked that the controls on the new disc were compatible with those of our own ship. They were, as was the instrumentation. Then I overlaid the two disc renderings and set tracers on the cables in the new one. They did indeed match up with clearly defined nodes on the engine of the first. When I isolated that engine and backtracked it through the production plan, I found that the plan had a concealed modularity -- it was possible to build the craft's engine independently. It meant a lot more work, but I could see how to do it.

When I'd tried to do something similar with the two craft themselves, I'd bogged down with the problem of not knowing which parts were redundant -- the solid-state control system -- and which weren't. This one, however, slotted together perfectly.

"So, let's go for it," said Driver.

The only problem that bugged me, as I checked off at the end of that long day shift, was the question Driver had raised earlier: why the aliens had first given us a plan for a craft we couldn't fly; a craft designed for another species. Was it their answer, I wondered, to a question we hadn't asked?

"Do you think those two are queer for each other?"

"Who?"

Camila looked at me as though from a much longer distance than the half-meter between our faces, as we hung, each with our heels crooked around the other's buttocks, in our companionable cubbyhole. Then she put her elbows on my knees and leaned forward to speak quietly.

"Driver and Lemieux."

"What?" I laughed. "Can't say I've noticed any flamboyant mannerisms from either of them."

"Lemieux -- "

" -- is French. They all talk like that, except gay men, and
they
sound like Americans.
Très, très
fashionable, I'm told."

"Well," she persisted, "these two have something going on. I'm sure of it."

"Well, what if they are?" I said. "It's not like it's a big deal. Not in sophisticated Socialist Europe, anyway."

"Okay, okay," she said, sounding a little defensive. "What I mean is, if they're not, what are they up to?"

"Now, that is a good question. But come on. They're conspirators, who may have been at it for years. They've just carried out a coup here, one which isn't one-hundred-percent popular on the station. Chumakova's lot are no doubt plotting against them as we speak. When things settle down back home, one way or another they're gonna have a lot of explaining to do. Driver was regarded by the CIA as an asset, and he now claims to have been a double agent all along, but the book's always open on these situations."

"Yeah, tell me about it," she said gloomily. "What are we?"

"In what context?"

She kissed the tip of my nose. "Politically."

"Oh." I thought about it, rubbing my chin, almost surprised at its smoothness; Camila had brought me an electric razor from the commissary, and had been quite insistent that I use it.

"Well, I'm a good European and you're a good American, but not everyone back home might see it that way."

"You said it. I can't begin to list all the laws I've broken just by being here -- technology export and trading with the enemy and shit -- and you're being called a defector. So -- "

She let out a long sigh, and reached sideways for the steam-pipe and the packet of grass.

"So?"

"So it's time we started looking out for ourselves. Making sure we don't get shafted when all this is sorted out. Offered up as a sacrifice to the powers that be, you know."

I shivered in the humid warmth: the phrase "powers that be" seemed strangely inapposite for governments, now that we knew what other powers there were. But I knew this wasn't what she meant.

"I don't see Driver as likely to shaft us," I said. "And not your bosses either."

"It might not be up to them, by then."

She bubbled up the pipe, sucked it, and passed it to me. I inhaled, looking around our den with a sudden surge of paranoia.

"Is it safe to talk here?"

"Sure." She shrugged, reached behind her, and waved a small device like a torch. "There were the usual bugs when we came in, but I've swept them."

"What's that thing?"

"Classified," she grinned, stashing it again. "Take it from me, though, it frazzles millimeter-scale wet tech."

"All right," I said. "What do you suggest we do?"

"Some real spying. Get some information that we can trade with, something that either side might find useful. For a start, find out what Driver and Lemieux are really up to."

"Oh, great." I returned her the pipe. "And how do you propose to do that?"

She grinned ferally at me.

"We listen to them," she said. "Through the alien interface."

I woke and found it was morning in the station's day cycle -- not just from my watch, looped by its strap to the webbing a few inches away -- but by the increased light around the edges of the curtain and the increased sounds of busyness from the corridor. Listening further, I guessed it might even have been a cock-crow that had wakened me. Someone was filling the food-hoppers at the nearest chicken run.

Camila was still asleep, and we were still wrapped around each other. One advantage of microgravity is that you can sleep in a cuddle without waking to find that one of your arms is trapped under your lover and has itself gone to sleep. I nuzzled her shoulder with my chin, now scratchy again, and stroked her short black hair, which had lengthened by a millimeter or two since launch and now had a very pleasant, furry nap to it. She stirred and mumbled and snuggled closer. We'd had more sleep this night than the night before, though not from any loss of interest in each other, having had sex before and after our conversation and having wakened up to some kind of dozy mutual stimulation in the middle of the night. Right now, if her sleepy strokings were anything to go by, Camila was warming up for another session before breakfast.

As I floated there in her arms, all of that erotic intimacy stood vivid and real in my memory, and only our conversation seemed like a dream. But later, after we'd stickily separated, and gone to wash and dry and dress, it all crashed in on me again like a cold shower. Her assessment of our situation was more realistic -- or at any rate further thought-through -- than mine had been, caught up as I was in the fascination of the work.

Camila was showing herself to be cool and clearheaded, like not many other people I knew -- Charlie, maybe, among the old geeks; Jason; one or two Webblies; and Jadey. The thought of Jadey brought a pang, but not guilt. Basically I was working my way back to her, the fastest way I could. Much as I loved her -- and I did -- I had no illusions that she wouldn't do the same sort of thing; whatever was necessary to get her through.

And to get through here, and back to Earth, and Jadey free, I needed Camila. And I needed to think like her, to think like a spy. As I pulled on my jumpsuit I felt the familiar shape of the hand reader in my pocket, and beside it, the datadisk.

It was at that point that I did my first bit of thinking like a spy, and what I thought was:
There's something wrong here.
I unzipped the pocket and ran my fingers around the edge of the datadisk, and as I made for Driver's office I pulled it out and looked at it, and realized that it was the piece of the puzzle that didn't fit. There was no place for it in the picture I'd been shown.

I almost shouted, as around that anomalous object the pieces of a quite different picture clicked into place.

"Ready?" I said.

A word floated across my spex:

Yes.

The interface surrounded me.

I'd spent most of that day finishing the modified production plan and handing it over to the people running the fabs, and liaising with Camila, who was working with the engineers -- Volkov and the rest -- on the
Blasphemous Geometries.
In one slack period I'd jaunted into Armen's workspace and asked him for access to the interface. As though surprised I didn't have it already, he zapped the key-code to my spex. Betweentimes, I'd checked the news channels, forced myself to ignore them, and worked on a query.

Now, my day's work complete half an hour before the usual late-evening debriefing in Driver's office, I had time for a little experiment.

Fighting off the interface's hypnotic distractions, I slotted the query into the search engine. It was a very simple query, for a set of data I knew to be unique to my own handheld reader because I had made it up myself, very laboriously: Test data for a job I'd done several months ago. The sort of low-level programming that really should have been beneath me, and I'd cursed the limited budget that had made me do it myself at the time. "An artist, not a technician," et cetera.