Cosmonaut Keep (42 page)

"Wish me luck," she whispered.

"You'll be fine," I told her. "You're the best. Good luck."

"You too," she said, and turned away like a fish. She vanished through the hatch. Her routine checks and messages began to come through on the comm, until they were complete.

"All systems nominal."

Driver glanced over at a tech by the wall. "Shut the airlock," he advised. "Okay, everybody out of the bay."

"Why?" asked Kahn. "It's safe enough."

"We don't know that." He scratched his throat, making noises in the mike. "There might be some, uh, electromagnetic phenomena."

"What makes you think that?" I asked.

If he hadn't been standing in the air at an angle to me I could've sworn he shuffled and looked down.

"If, well, what one hears about close encounters with these kind of machines is anything to go by."

Oh.

We all went out of the bay and patched to the surface cameras. The ship was outwardly unchanged, its aspect as improbable as ever. The sounds of disengagement clicked and banged through the walls and floor.

"Ship is clear to go."

"Firing secondary jets," said Camila.

A two-second burn took the ship clear, another stabilized its position a kilometer out from the asteroid.

"Engaging AG."

No blue nimbus was visible this time, nor any change in the ship.

"Okay," came Camila's cheerful voice. "That's it powered up in neutral. I'm going to ease it forward."

The ship moved. One moment it was there, the next it had stopped dead a kilometer away. Even those of us who'd seen the performance of the sled could hardly believe it. Roxanne Khan, who hadn't seen it, actually covered her eyes for a second. She saw me looking, and her briefly paler cheeks reddened.

"Rest in peace, Sir Isaac," she said under her breath. Then, in a clear voice:

"Cosmonaut Hernandez, take it away."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Camila. "Engaging forward motion."

The
Blasphemous Geometries
went away.

An instant replay of the view in the cameras, then of that on the radar, showed only the briefest dwindling glimpses before it vanished from both.

Driver let out a long breath.

"Like a bat out of hell," he said.

He turned to the technicians.

"Can we raise her?"

"Sure."

He nodded at Kahn.

Very formally, she said: "Space station
The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star
calling
Blasphemous Geometries.
Report, please."

No reply. Kahn repeated the call.

After another second, Camila's voice came back.

"Blasphemous Geometries
to
Bright Star.
Craft operation is nominal, systems are nominal."

"Very good," said Roxanne. "Disengage forward motion, reverse direction, and return to station."

"Blasphemous
to
Bright Star,
uh, that's a negative."

"Is there a problem?" Roxanne asked.

This time the delay was about two seconds. It suddenly dawned on me that the craft was already a light-second away: three hundred thousand kilometers.

"No problem," said Camila. "I'm returning to base -- Groom Lake, Area 51."

Sometimes it's only when an assumption is destroyed that we realize what it was, or that we'd made it all. I had assumed that if Camila were to go home she'd take me with her. I'd also assumed that because I was in love with Jadey, I couldn't be in love with Camila.

I alternated between rage at Camila and hope that she would come back. That was a dream. Camila and Jadey were both -- very definitely and for the foreseeable future -- in the real Dreamland. A voicemail message from Jadey came in a few minutes after Camila landed there.

"Uh, Matt, there's something I've got to tell you. The disk I gave you wasn't the one I got from Josif.
That
disk had the information Driver leaked to one of our agents in the ESA apparat, about the alien contact and the alien math and what it meant for crypto. I zapped it across to Nevada from my office at work that morning.

I didn't know what was on it, natch, but I doubt it was even encrypted. No point, right? And the FSB must've read it, which started the whole ball rolling, bounced the E.U. into making the announcement. The data on the disk I gave you is on sites all over the Net, and has been for over a year. I downloaded it from one of them.

"We think the aliens spammed the space-drive info to widely dispersed sites without the knowledge of anyone on the station. It was in the form that the ESA systems on the station defaulted to for production specs. Nevada Orbital Dynamics has people who do web searches for flying-saucer stuff. This is because the company has turned up a few, uh, anomalies in the records. You know what I mean. Enough to make this sort of thing worth at least keeping half an eye on. Most of it's total crap, of course. They found the data in all that clutter and checked it out and it looked interesting, but they didn't have the necessary skills to deal with the ESA conventions and to actually run the systems analysis and production-planning because, as you know, these actually require hairy, kludged combinations of U.S. and E.U. tech.

"However, they knew a man who did -- you, via me. And we always knew you could be counted on, politically. They hung back, though, until the thing could be authenticated. I'd already taken a download, lightly encrypted -- I didn't know what it was. When I sent them Driver's message confirming the alien contact, they replied with a prearranged phrase which meant I should take the flying-saucer datadisk to you, and once you were convinced, to get you to America. The data wasn't important --
you
were important. If it hadn't been for Josif getting killed, which was sheer bad luck, and the crackdown, I'd have gone with you. As it was, my arrest at least served as a distraction.

"Because it was you we needed, and it was you the cops should have gone after. The data was out there all along."

I hung in the webbing for a while, on the side of a busy corridor, watching people pass like fish, their mouths working almost silently as they talked in the other, invisible web. I took out my hand reader, pulled down the completed production plans, and routed them through the station's transmitter to as many nodes as possible.

It wasn't really necessary, but it gave me some small satisfaction.

I wasn't the only one who'd made false assumptions. The entire ship watched agog as recriminations flew around the science committee.

"None of us imagined that Hernandez would take the craft to Earth," said Roxanne. "Because we
assumed
that our security expert had good reason to trust Hernandez, or he'd never have allowed her to make the test!"

"Oh, I trusted Camila, all right," Driver said. "I absolutely took it for granted that she'd be off at the first opportunity. Like a bat out of hell."

"So why did you allow it?"

"Because that's what I wanted."

After the noise had died down, Lemieux said:

"Colin, my friend, please tell us, now there is nothing more to lose or gain -- are you, after all, an American agent?"

"No," said Driver. "Hand on heart, mate, I'm not. I'm not now, nor have I ever been."

"So what
are
you?"

"I'm an Englishman," said Driver.

The CNN bulletins showing shaky amateur video from Groom Lake had barely faded when Major-General Oskar Jilek appeared on an E.U.-wide broadcast.

"A grave situation has arisen with regard to the rebel-held space station
Marshall Titov.
The scientific knowledge obtained by its historic achievements, which by rights should have been used for the benefit of all humanity, have been usurped by foreign agents and unilaterally applied to endanger the peace. The Emergency Committee of the European Union regrets to announce that its patience with the rebels is exhausted. Their escalating provocations and insolent demands have crossed a threshold. From this moment, the European Union is in a state of war with them. Their actions equally endanger the United States, and we urge upon that nation's government a course of action appropriate to the gravity of the situation.

"We have nothing to negotiate with the rebels. Any further communications to ESA, by anybody on the station other than Major Sukhanov, will be regarded as another hostile act. Major Sukhanov and his fellow hostages must be unconditionally released, and full authority over the station returned to Major Sukhanov within one hour. Otherwise, the Special Forces of the European Peoples' Aerospace Force will respond with all necessary force and without further warning."

Driver, too, didn't waste time. He ignored the scientists' committee. His face and voice filled the ship.

"Jilek is bluffing," he said. "We now know when the expedition left Earth orbit. An astronomer in Kazakhstan caught the picture, and some hacker in Sydney has just zapped it through to us. The burn was seven days ago. We have five days to build the engine and disengage the station from the asteroid. And then, people,
let's jump."

21

____________

The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star

"She never came back?" Elizabeth's voice sounds sad.

The hour is late, even for New Lisbon. The pithkie and the gigant at the bar are almost asleep, but they pride themselves on outlasting their customers. The pub is empty except for them, us, and few saurs, and who gives a fuck what they overhear?

I've told them my story, in a long wander that has taken us from the One Star Hotel through a succession of bars. We've eaten, at some point. I've kept the parts of the story I don't want humans to hear for our swift staggers through the streets, or the dives of the sister species.

"Of course she fucking never came back," I say. She flinches slightly, and I soften it. "She contacted me. We talked. She loved me, I think, but there was no way she could fly off in the gods-damned hell-spawned
Blasphemous Geometries.
The U.S. Air Force was all over it like flies on a shit."

"You still haven't told us," says Gregor, "what went wrong with the navigation. Did you miscalculate, or what?"

I stare at him. Sometimes I wonder, I really do. The myth of our navigation has served us well, but it must have served the locals too. It must fulfill some deeply-felt needs, to survive so long in the face of its brazen unlikelihood, to say nothing of its falsehood.

"We didn't navigate anywhere," I tell them. "The data I recovered might have been authentic, for all I know, but maybe only a kraken -- or your artificial squid -- could have made sense of it. Or it might have been complete garbage, intentionally or not. Whatever. I suspect the engine had a preset instruction to go here. All I know is that we set up what we thought was a jump across the Solar System, and we found ourselves in polar orbit around Mingulay. We'd just figured out that it was definitely not Earth and definitely not the Solar System, when Tharovar's skiff turned up. A skiff -- that wasn't the scary bit, we kind of expected that. The scary bit was when he dropped out of the airlock."

I fix on Salasso what I hope is a hard stare, but which is probably just a bleary look.

"You people have a lot of explaining to do."

The saur spreads his long hands. "I can't help you there. None of us knows anything of what any saurs in the Solar System may have done in historical times."

I wonder how much you would know if I stuck a probe up your arse.

I hope I didn't say that.

"I wonder," says Elizabeth, "if the computers on the ship still work."

"They probably do," I say. "Radiation-shielded, you know? All the equipment to reboot them. Hell, I could do it now. Except that Tharovar and his mates took us off the ship in a great hurry, and made a big fuss of us, and never, never let us back."

"That should not be a problem," says Salasso, "now that we know you can navigate. We never believed you had found Mingulay on your own, though we never contradicted you. We believed the gods had sent you here, and wanted you to stay here. Perhaps they did. They have some purpose in setting up this Second Sphere, but neither we nor the krakens know what it is. However, now that the krakens have given their judgement, there is no reason to stop you."

Gregor grabs the saur's arm.

"You mean we could try out the navigation on the
Bright Star?"

"Yes."

He grins at Elizabeth, and even in my drunk and stoned state I can see that she, perhaps, does not entirely share his delight.

He turns to me.

"What's it like?"

"Come on out," I say.

We haul ourselves up and, arms around each other's shoulders, sway into the street. I lead them away from the streetlights, into a square where no lights burn. We look up at the Foamy Wake, at the blazing god, and we wait awhile, until we see the shuttling spark cross the sky from north to south, the
Bright Star.
"You go there," I say. You make your way through the ship's long corridors, with nothing in your hands but numbers. Your shipmates, your colleagues, your comrades clap your back and congratulate and encourage you, with an anxiety in their eyes that you hope you are not showing, yourself.

You approach the engine, diving down to its base, and you hope that what you are doing is entering the numbers in its alien mind. You confirm that everyone is ready.

You press what you hope is the right switch, and you --

-- jump, becoming light.