Lost in Transmission (31 page)

chapter twenty-three

by tuberail to the stars

Mechanically speaking, Conrad's plan was simplicity itself
.
Over a period of several years, the Cryoleum had become five separate structures, each mounted on tuberails and capable of traveling across the face of Planet Two. And for various historical reasons, the tuberails of the ground network were fully compatible with those running up the sides of the Orbital Tower, which by now was itself a historical anachronism that no one paid much attention to.

Traffic there was less than a tenth of what it had been in the glory days, even though it was cheaper than the Gravittoir. The Gravittoir was simply faster, and also more comfortable, with no sense of acceleration and none of the vibration or loud noises associated with tuberail travel. So when P2's morning was over, and with it the funeral season, it was very easy for Conrad to clear the Cryoleum's personnel on the trumped-up excuse that he needed to refinish the interior surfaces.

Then he simply stole the entire facility.

From a control station in the Orbital Tower itself, he whisked the buildings to Tower Base so quickly that it would be a day or two before anyone even realized they were gone. He did this neatly and with precision, allowing no interruption to the structures' power supplies or other services. From there things got even easier, since Murskitectura owned and operated the Orbital Tower. The Cryoleum buildings had been designed to fit side by side in Tower Base's large maintenance hangar, where Mack and his small team of loyalists tore the facades off them, revealing the more-or-less ordinary cargo podships beneath. Then, these pods were simply scooted up the tower like any other cargo.

“This is politically dangerous,” Conrad warned. “I hope these people don't know what they're doing, or why.”

“Let me worry about that,” Mack said with a wave of his hand.

“Yeah? And what about you personally?”

“None of your concern, Boss.”

“The hell it isn't! I needed trustworthy help, so I called you. I'm not going to leave you hanging when I'm through.”

“They don't do that anymore. Hanging.”

“Not that specifically,” Conrad said, “but what happens when you're caught?”

“
If
I'm caught,” Mack corrected. “Don't worry. I
love
a good lie, a good sneak behind the bushes, and if it falls apart and I'm standing there with my trousers down, well, that's a challenge of a different sort.”

“But—”

“I can take care of myself, Conrad. Think who my teacher was.”

Well,
that
was hardly reassuring. But what could he say?

Soon the cargo pods were stripped and ready, and it was time to get things moving again. Conrad had considered swiping the Data Morgue as well, but its memory cores were much more valuable than the Cryoleum, much harder for the colony to replace, and for the most part the images contained inside them were of people who were not, in point of fact, dead. Including Conrad himself, for what little that mattered. Perhaps Bascal would find a way to print that copy out, and punish it for what Conrad was about to do, but it was a risk he would just have to live with. He had no access to the records himself, could not simply delete his image.

It would be nice if Xmary could meet him at the top of the tower, but the orbital mechanics of P2 and its environment forbade this. If
Newhope
came to rest on the top of the tower, it would not be orbiting, and the mass of the ship itself—to say nothing of its ertial shields—would crumple the tower like a tube of paper. Instead, a complex system of orbital rendezvous was necessary, and herein lay one of the great risks of Conrad's plan.
Newhope
's failure to be in the right place at the right time would strand the pods in useless, unlicensed orbits where they would eventually bang into each other, or into the tower itself. Or worse, into something moving along a different orbit with much higher relative velocity.

That is, if Naval Security didn't get them first.

The first pod climbed away from the ground with a sonic rumble—never a boom, as booms were a symptom of wasted energy, of sloppy design—and was, within minutes, a mere gleam of sunlight on the tower's black face. The second and third pods quickly followed, and then the fourth. Twenty-five thousand frozen corpses. Twenty-five thousand children, bound for a kind of heaven. If he could save more, he would. If he could think of a better plan, he'd implement it without a second thought. But Conrad had always believed it was better to salvage something than to salvage nothing at all. And if those were the only choices, then his conscience was as clear as the path ahead of him.

“You should come with us,” Conrad said, in a last-ditch effort to save Mack from himself.

But Mack just snorted. “Will you stop already? Locked in that ship I'd go crazy in a week. Besides, I've eaten at the king's table, and partaken of his daughter. There are limits to how far my treacheries extend, you know? That's no reflection on you, sir—I admire what you're doing here—but this place is my home. I'll stay. I'll cope.”

“Jesus,” Conrad said, with a hand on his brow. “You be careful, Mack. Do you hear me? You live a good life.”

“Always have,” the troll said simply. “And when death comes for me, as it surely will someday, why, then I'll be back with my princess again. What could be finer? Quite frankly it's
you
I'm worried about.” He paused a moment and added, “I'll miss you, Boss. I hope you make it.”

People say a troll cannot weep. People say a lot of things.

Conrad rode up with the fifth and final pod, in an acceleration couch Mack's team had installed in the big, empty chamber that had been the Cryoleum's reception hall. Conrad wished he could fill this space with frozen corpses as well, but that would have been impossible without drawing unwanted attention. So the chamber, which had been designed to hold as many as two hundred live, grieving people, instead held only one.

If the walls had been of wellstone, then he might have seen the spectacular view as induction motors yanked him up the side of the tower for two and a half hours, shrinking the ground beneath him until its curvature was apparent and the atmosphere was just a thin yellow haze clinging to the ground far below. But instead the walls were made of titanium—one of the commonest metals in the silicate crust of P2—and through a crude material like that, Conrad could see nothing.

Thus, weightlessness was a bit of a shock when it came, and even a seasoned space veteran like Conrad was not above releasing some globs of vomit to float in the air around him like smelly, brightly colored ornaments. If he weren't maintaining radio silence, Conrad might have called Xmary to see where she was, to find out when exactly she would be retrieving him. But instead he sat in the glare of artificial lights, afraid to leave his seat for fear of being slammed without warning into the walls or floor when
Newhope
's grapples finally took hold and reeled him in.

He sat like that for a long time, contemplating the fact that he should have brought a jacket. In the old days, such considerations had been unnecessary, since the shipping containers would be insanely well insulated and his own wellcloth clothing would have kept his skin temperature constant anyway. But Conrad had only two wellcloth outfits left—one a formal suit and the other a Polar Rangers uniform—and he stupidly hadn't thought to wear either one today, possibly because neither one would have felt appropriate for the occasion. So, as the metal cargo pod bled its heat away into the cold vacuum, he huddled and shivered and cursed himself, wondering what else he might have overlooked. Sadly, years of planning were not always enough to prevent these stupid oversights.

Did the cold, in some way, make him hallucinate? Did it trick his eye, his optic nerve, his brain? For he saw a flickering at the corner of his eye, and turned to find himself staring straight into the face of a ghost.

He knew it was a ghost, for it was pale and translucent, all but colorless, and hung in the air just above the floor in exactly the way that ghosts are supposed to. But there were problems with this theory as well. First of all, Conrad had always understood ghosts to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, a sort of quantum imprint in the area where an event—usually traumatic—had taken place. Detecting them took sensors of incredible power and subtlety.

And yet, what good was a word like “ghost” if it couldn't be applied to a thing which fit it so precisely? Had there ever been an era, a time or place or society, where people didn't claim, at least occasionally, to have seen them? With their own eyes, in a moment of shock and horror, when contact with the dead had in fact been the farthest thing from their minds?

The second problem with the theory was that ghosts were, science insisted, merely a recording, not unlike the patterns of a chemical photograph or the acoustically etched grooves in a medieval phonograph record. They could be reconstructed, played back . . . but not interacted with. And yet this ghost of Conrad's appeared to be looking right at him, its tear-streaked face pulling down into a mask of horror at the sight of him. And the mask was one he recognized: Raylene Pine, who had died years before in the Polar Well.

What can be said about it? No man is a stone. Conrad let out a shriek, and the ghost beside him vanished before he could so much as tap the releases on his couch restraints and flail away in terror. Even so, he drew back, gasping and shaking. Then, with a trembling hand, he probed the air where the thing had been, and felt nothing. No ripples or vapor or cold spots. A shiver ran through him.

Had the walls been of wellstone, he might have dismissed the apparition as an accidental hologram, an anomalous burping of stored data released by the flash of a cosmic ray. But he had built this room himself, or overseen it anyway, and he'd conducted a thorough inspection just a few hours ago. So he knew—he
knew
—there was nothing in here that could produce an effect like that.

“Ah, mystery,” Rodenbeck had written once. “That things should feast themselves before us which have no rightful cause! If living long means seeing much, then I fear we shan't escape it, this whimsy of the gods that writes its scorn upon us.”

Fuff. There were too many goddamn Rodenbeck quotes kicking around. You could frame your whole life in them, knowing an infinite supply of new ones waited just around the corner. But they didn't keep you warm.

When the docking came, it was much gentler than Conrad had feared.
Newhope
had nice, old-fashioned gravitic grapples, like smaller versions of the graser beams at the heart of the Gravittoir, and the movements they imparted did not feel like acceleration. More like falling, which he was already doing anyway since he was in zero gravity—that state of never-ending fall. Rotation, of course, could not be masked in this way, and he did feel the pod wheeling around at one point, and then the bump and clatter of physical docking clamps taking hold. And then, because the pod was wider than
Newhope
's ertial shields, there came a series of handclap noises as the explosive pins in the pod wall blew, and the left and right thirds of the pod, under considerable spring tension, folded in under it. Now it was shaped less like a building, less like a tuberail car, and more like a manta ray with its arms wrapped around a wellstone piling, where the piling was the cargo spindle of
Newhope,
within which lay the central staircase and the narrow air, water, and power conduits.

Finally, Conrad's ears popped as the air systems mated. The pressure inside the pod—starting out at sea level, which for Planet Two meant just over three bars, had bled down to less than half that much over the course of the launch, and as it equalized with the much thinner, cleaner air of
Newhope,
it halved again to just seven hundred millibars. Technically speaking, a person could get the bends from such a dramatic pressure change, but that was rare, and time was short.

Fortunately,
Newhope
's internal gravity was turned off; otherwise Conrad's floor would have become a wall, and he would be dangling from his straps. But it was in the actual floor, directly in front of the bishop's podium, that a metal hatchway opened, connecting him at last to the interior of
Newhope
. He unmoored from his seat, launched himself at the hatchway, and caught himself on a cold metal handgrip mounted on the open hatch's inside.

Once free of the chamber, he found the matter of the ghost a bit easier to dismiss. It was just too quiet in there, too cold and still, where stepping into
Newhope
was like coming home. With practiced ease, he pulled himself into the stairway, placed his feet against the handrail, and launched himself up toward the bridge.

Ah. Once your balance adjusted, there really was nothing like zero gravity. As he glided up the stair shaft, correcting his course with occasional pushes from feet and hands, the levels slid past him one by one. He could fly, yes, in this space where gravity normally reigned! It was a feeling he never got tired of.

At the top of the shaft, on the bridge, he found Xmary in her captain's chair, and Useless sitting over at Information. Useless' actual name was Eustace; she was the painfully young wife of the ship's only other crewmate: the Facilitator, the superlative spaceman, the one and only Yinebeb Fecre, who was presently down in Engineering. There were people who were competent to run a starship, and there were people whom Conrad could trust; and of the dozen or so who were both, there were only these two, Xmary and Feck, who were so firmly attached to
Newhope
—and so loosely to the colony itself—that they would make this sacrifice. That he would even consider asking it. Poor Eustace was just along for the ride.

“Welcome aboard,” Xmary told him, motioning him toward his old seat. “You
look . . . shaken.”