Cosmonaut Keep (37 page)

"Who?"

"Grigory, of course." His eyes widened suddenly. "Oh, I see! You may have heard that ESA just assigned him here for reasons of prestige, but that's the kind of envious rumors that spread around in the bureaucracy. No cosmonaut believes them. Grigory is far from just a pretty face."

"But -- "

Driver raised his hand. "You've had your minute, Matt. We do it as EVA all the way. Next business."

Camila was shaking my shoulders.

"Matt! Wake up!"

"Wha'?"

"Your
bleep's
going off. Can't you hear it? Everybody else bloody can!"

I woke and fumbled for my reader and spex. When I thumbed off the
bleep
it became obvious it wasn't the only one sounding in the vicinity. They fell silent one by one as I slid the spex on over eyes grainy with tear-salt.

"Patch me in?" said Camila.

"Yeah, sure." I opened a channel to her spex as the report floated up in front of me.

PERSONAL PRIORITY NEWS:

Opening shot of someone being bundled up the stairs of a United Airlines 777. Zoom and track: Two Scottish WPCs holding Jadey. She seemed to be struggling, but in a theatrical, pro forma way. At the top of the steps they let go of her and just pushed. She stumbled, caught the doorframe, and turned.

She raised an outstretched arm and extended index and middle fingers and a thumb, the current version of a defiant salute.

"Death to Communism!" she yelled, and backed into the aircraft.

SURFACE:

The American spy Jadey Ericson was released at midnight tonight and is now on a plane to the United States. The murder charge against her has been dropped in the light of new evidence, and she leaves a full confession exposing the anti-European, anti-socialist conspiracy in which she was a pawn.

DEPTH:

The subversive Human Rights Federation, financed in part by the military-industrial company Nevada Orbital Dynamics, which recently sent aid to the mutineer-held space station
Marshall Titov,
is linked to the fascist and nihilist gangs behind the violence of the past few days, and with the CIA agent and space mutineer Colin Driver. Driver's partner in the cabal that has temporarily seized the station, to the dismay of its honest scientists and cosmonauts, is Paul Lemieux, long identified with the so-called "Reform" grouping in the CPEU, who was a member of the Trotskyite LPR in his student days at Lausanne. Further CIA influence on factionalist elements in the CPEU and on the Trotskyite LPR have been clearly established by the investigations into the connections of the former MEP Henri Weber. The motivation of the current campaign of disinformation and claims of access to "alien spacecraft technology" appears to be to strengthen the self-styled "Reform" faction in the CPEU, which parades itself in the E.U. as a popular, democratic current and internationally as the only Communists ready and able to "do business with" the United States. The demagogic and contradictory nature of this "platform" should be obvious.

ANALYSIS:

At that point I switched off. Camila's arm was around my shoulders.

"That's great news, Matt! Jadey's free! Wow!"

"Aye, thanks," I said. "It's brilliant, it's a big relief. But, shit, they're saying she confessed all that stuff ... "

"Ah, crap," said Camila. "Nobody'll believe that! Especially when they said she was a pawn. How could she possibly have known all that?"

"She couldn't," I said. "And as far as I know, she didn't."

"It's all commie paranoid gibberish anyway."

I took off my spex and rubbed my eyes and stared at her in the dim light of our alcove.

"It isn't," I said. "Modulo the comical prose of the Party press release, it's exactly what Driver and Lemieux told us the other night."

"It
is?"

"We get used to doing translations."

I grabbed her and hugged her, for no other reason than comfort.

"You don't seem very happy."

"I'm happy," I said. "God, I'm so relieved I could cry. But we're still in a very dangerous game."

"Yeah, you said it." She stroked my back. "Go back to sleep. Jadey should be home by morning. I'll wake you up when the news comes in."

I slid the spex back on and flexed my fingers in their infrared feedback.

"No need," I said. "This thing will."

Before I could take them off and go back to sleep, an incoming message flashed. I accepted it and Grigory Volkov's handsome features filled my view, like a poster on a teenager's bedroom wall.

"I think congratulations are in order, Matt," he said, smiling. It was a canny sentence; nobody listening in could have guessed that he was asking, rather than offering.

"Yes," I said. "Congratulations all around. Thanks, Grigory."

By the time the reader woke me with news of Jadey's debarkation -- at McCarran Airport, Las Vegas, much to my relief -- Camila had gone. She was due in the receiving-bay under the
Blasphemous
from the beginning of the day shift. Slightly miffed that she hadn't even said good-bye, let alone roused me with her usual morning cuddie, I washed and dressed and made for the refectory. Over breakfast (salted rabbit meat and fried-egg sandwich -- not recommended) I scanned the news with the thought at the back of my mind that I'd got very used to Camila's morning cuddle. But it was Jadey who was at the front of my mind. As soon as she'd got out of E.U. airspace she'd put out a statement repudiating the confession, denying she'd made it, and ridiculing its contents as summarized.

Most comments I tracked seemed to agree with her there, but disagreed over whether it was a complete fabrication or whether it was based on some encrypted information the FSB (or some random hacker) had managed to crack, and were releasing in this way so as not to compromise their real sources. To add to the tortuous confusion of the whole labyrinthine affair, the smartest analysts -- whether on
Europa Pravda
or the
Daily Web
-- were pointing out that the FSB itself undoubtedly favored the Reform grouping, and that the CIA usually kept well clear of backing violent opposition in the Socialist Democracies, being far more likely to try to exert its influence on the FSB ... which, of course, itself ...

I switched off. The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission. My own take on the matter was that my heavy hint to Grigory the previous day had led him to believe that Jadey was being held as a bargaining-chip by the Reform faction, and that releasing her would help his cause -- that of the straight-down-the-middle centrist faction, conservative but not outright reactionary like the militarist hard-liners. We would see.

I routed a phone message for Jadey through the station's mailbox. She wasn't online, but it went through to Nevada all right. After a good jolt of coffee, and with my breakfast settling in for a protracted stay in my stomach, I headed for the fabs.

The fabrication units occupied a separate wing of the station. This was my first visit to them outside of VR; for which, after slogging through a dozen airlocks and blast doors and decontamination bays, I was quite grateful.

The control room was crowded with at least twenty people, apart from the five operators, who were mercifully able to ignore it all in their spex and full-body rigs. Most of the people here were familiar to me only as names that had popped up in my workspace, or called me into theirs, with a construction problem. Driver and Lemieux were at the front, Chumakova beside them. Avakian hovered at the back. I jostled in and managed to find a position with a clear view ahead.

The fabrication unit itself lay beyond a thick partition of diamond-laminated glass. The multiple, multiply-subdivided robotic arms of the fabricators -- the closest anyone had got to a Moravec bush robot -- bristled and sparkled. In the tips of their toughest fingers they held the engine and control system of the craft.

Despite all my familiarity with it in VR, there was something of a thrill in seeing it in reality, with actual photons that had just reflected off it entering my own eyes. I greedily absorbed the sight, which in truth was nothing more than a smooth metal bulge with a flat base, attached by three meters of electric cabling to a block of polystyrene cladding which I knew contained an instrument panel and a racked array of levers.

The outer door of the fab was already sliding up, to reveal a ten-by five-meter rectangle of black. This frame was quickly filled by two cosmonauts in EVA suits, deploying a barely visible net around the doorway. Cables trailed behind them. The movements of ropes and net in vacuum and microgravity were different enough from the familiar to give me a sense of unease.

Or to provide a focus for the unease which I already felt. I tuned my spex to the comms channel and listened in to the cosmonauts and the control-room crew. They were speaking Russian and neither my own language skills nor those of the spex were able to make much of it.

The mechanical fingers flicked, and the thing sailed out to be caught in the net. The net was closed at the mouth with a simple drawstring, and was hauled off to the right, out of view.

I patched to an outside camera, and watched the mesh bag and its contents being lashed to a basic sled, the free-fall equivalent of a forklift truck. It consisted of several cubic meters of crate with a fuel tank underneath. At each end, fore and aft, were mounted four jets, a set of controls, and a step for the pilot to stand on, with the jet nozzles safely behind. The bag was now free, except from the sled. The sled, with the kind of belt-and-braces caution alluded to by Telesnikov, was itself tethered. A long, loose cable with one end fixed at the fab and the other just beneath the half-kilometer-distant
Blasphemous Geometries
passed through two sturdy metal half-rings projecting from the sled's side. Five cosmonauts, the tubes of personal rocket-packs curving from their shoulders like the outlines of cherubic wings, were spaced out along the sled's path.

The sled's pilot fired up the jets briefly and the tug moved forward in a straight line at a low speed. It had passed two of the cosmonauts and was halfway to its destination when something went wrong.

The rope snagged and stopped playing through the loops. The abruptly-halted sled swung around and at the same moment its forward jets began to flare, far more intensely than the rear jets had done. It shot backward and away from the asteroid's surface, stretching the rope instantly to a flattened V. As I racked the view into close-up it became evident that the rope had stuck not just along the side but around the front of the crate. As suddenly as it had stuck, the rope broke at both sides of the sled, which soared away at an angle, jets firing for a few more seconds. By the time they stopped, the sled was beyond even the swiftly tracking camera's zoom.

Everybody in the room was either yelling or shocked into silence. The cosmonauts' comms channel remained calm. Discipline was holding. I heard the tug-pilot's voice in crackly, halting Russian:

"The sled's fuel is exhausted and the sled is tumbling."

Volkov said, "We have you on the radar. Jump clear, stabilize with your own rockets, kill as much outward velocity as you can, and we'll pick you up."

"Nyet."

"For the love of God, Andrea! Abandon it now!"

The reply came through, still crackly, in English.

"This isn't Andrea, this is Camila, and I'm not going to abandon it."

I yelled out at that, a completely futile howl because I was unable to transmit to the comms channel. Even its discipline seemed to be breaking up, in a sudden babble. Through the camera I could see cosmonauts jetting about, toward or away from each other.

Camila's voice broke through again, fainter.

"Stand by," she said. "I'm bringing it in."

I tabbed frantically between camera viewpoints until I found one directed outward. In the starfield a point glowed like a blue nova, slowly brightening and becoming fuzzy. Within seconds it was in full view, hurtling straight toward us. The camera back-zoomed and stabilized and I could see the sled and its pilot within the blue nimbus.

She brought it right up to the door and then to a dead halt. In her hands was the engine's control panel. Chunks of shattered polystyrene swirled around her as though in atmosphere, a sight as flagrantly impossible as her spectacularly non-Newtonian arrival. She waved, and skittered the sled off to the side, to bring it to another abrupt stop beside her own ship.

"EVA transfer complete," she said. "Unscheduled flight-test complete. Engine and controls nominal."

By this time the arrests, too, were complete.

Lemieux squatted in his habitual upper corner, practicing a new and irritating and dangerous stunt: He'd place his Aerospatiale 9-millimeter in the air, and then tap the end of the barrel sharply down, making the weapon spin in front of him, and letting it drift away a little. Then he'd grab it from orbit. Over and over again. He seemed to pay attention to nothing else. Short of trimming his fingernails with a combat knife and whistling through his teeth, he couldn't have come up with a less subtle display of instability and menace.

Driver, meanwhile, was hamming the soft-cop role, complete with occasional worried glances at Lemieux. He reclined behind his desk, in front of which Chumakova and Volkov looked as though they were standing to attention, their arms looped through the webbing. They weren't tied; it was all very civilized, apart from Lemieux's routine.

I hung off to one side of them, jammed against some shelving; Camila floated by the door. Almost everybody else on the station, including the forty-seven in detention at various improvised places, was watching the show on their spex.

"Come on, comrades," Driver said. "If this was a goddamn NASA accident inquiry, I could maybe believe that what happened was an overdesigned safety system going wrong. Some chemical deterioration in the cable that made it sticky and easily broken, an unpredictable sloshing of fuel in the tug's engine, a burnout. These things happen, right?"

Volkov shrugged. "So we are told. Sometimes it's a mistake to rely on U.S. tech and NASA procedures instead of our own skill."