Space Eater (17 page)

“Attention.
Twll d’un bob saes
. Query FACTOTUM carries laser spotweld gear.”

“AFFIRMATIVE.”

“Open program title DEFEND. Program: Use laser spotweld gear and any other suitable resources to neutralize any weapon within Corvus Station used or likely to be used offensively against (a) hull integrity, (b) computer systems and FACTOTUM, (c) personnel now present, (d) minigate unit, (e) equipment and material necessary to reconstruct regrowth tanks and their ancillaries, (f) life-support systems, (g) anything else needed for station functioning. Enter.” I hoped the thing was clever enough to cope with all that; I felt quite proud to have input it all without rehearsal.

There was a longish pause while the console lights blinked and raced twice as fast as normal.

“AFFIRMATIVE conditions (a), (b), (d), (g) not implemented as duplicating existing programming.”

Now that was interesting: Tunnel had its own priorities in this place, still. I went on to hammer in programs to defend—if possible without too much death and destruction—against any other fiddling (except by myself or Rossa) with the minigate, the access panel behind which I’d stowed the nullbomb material, and even ourselves. That time, after the AFFIRMATIVE, I got back a mysterious comment:

“REQUEST ACTION LIST PROGRAM LASTDITCH BEFORE ANY ACTION INVOLVING

MINIGATE.” I requested it. Seemed the minigate plinth wasn’t just a plastic block but a chunk of plastic explosive—you had to put in a special temporary override before it was safe even to think about unclamping that wizard’s staff.

Rossa had come up behind me: “There’s more to our supposedly simple little computer system than meets the eye,” she said.

“I’d like to check right through the banks, but those microbubble units are
big
-- big storage, I mean.

God knows what kind of junk there is lying around in there. I wonder...”

“So do I. May I?” She bent over the mike grid herself. “Attention. Request full list program titles locked against change at this password status.”

“AFFIRMATIVE. AARDVARK, AMANITA, ANSIBLE, ASTERISK—“ The list went on and on and on. LASTDITCH was one of them. There was a hell of a lot of stuff we couldn’t change in the damn machine’s instructions. Rossa looked at me. “While I’m being intellectual—Attention. Request full program titles locked against any inspection at this password status.”

“AFFIRMATIVE. DBUILD, DEVOURER, MTCONTROL, PASSWORD, ZYMURGY.”

“Be intellectual about that,” I suggested to Rossa.

“I hardly dare to try ... Obviously PASSWORD is simply the program which accepts our little string of gibberish and controls access status. ZYMURGY ... can’t you feel Wui at work there? That esoteric sense of humor. Zymurgy, the last word in the dictionary, a final word, a mission-abort sequence...”

“Another nullbomb in the guts of the station, yeah. Birch and his bloody contingency plans wouldn’t have forgotten that one. I suppose MTCONTROL handles the minigate operation—bound to be classified till the pips squeak. Which leaves, maybe, two more little contingency items. DBUILD could be just about anything, I guess, something that builds Ds, ugh. But after what we were talking about just now I’m not, I’m not quite happy about DEVOURER.”

“Nor I. But what can we hope to do about it?”

“ATTENTION. TWO HOURS TO RENDEZVOUS, REPEAT, TWO HOURS.”

We poked around, playing word-and-number games with the machine without finding anything more.

That sort of thing has a slow deadly fascination, like chess, and it soaks up time.

“ATTENTION. ONE HOUR...”

After the fifteen-minute warning there was a footnote: “ATTENTION. TO ONCOMING CRAFT: THIS IS AN AUTOMATIC WARNING. ANY OFFENSIVE ACTION TAKEN AGAINST THIS

EXPLORATION VESSEL WILL RESULT IN YOUR DESTRUCTION. ANY ATTEMPT TO

BOARD, LIKEWISE, UNLESS SAFEGUARDS ARE OVERRIDDEN BY THIS VESSEL’S

CREW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.”

“Now they tell us,” I said in disgust and dictated a temporary override to cut
that
off.

The accented voice: “_Please_ maintain radio silence. Will signal acoustically through hull on contact.

We will
not
take offensive action—“

That was the last we heard from them over the radio channels. There was an endless wait while, as far as we could tell from what the speaker announced, the stranger out there juggled with attitudes and velocity vectors: then three massive clangs which must have been the loudest noises in Corvus Station since we’d got there (“And so the loudest ever,” Rossa said: “Before, there was nobody to hear—“).

The whole cylinder bonged like a kettledrum. The computer rather thought that magnetic clamps had been attached. Another wait. Then fainter noises up at the far, twilit end, by the giant airlock—

“Request patch from acoustic pickup to main speakers,” Rossa said before I’d thought of that point.

“—Hello. Hello. Hello. Can you accept one person aboard? If so please signal by opening lock. If not please explain on acoustic link. Hello. Hello. Hello.”

We told the computer to cycle exactly one person through the lock.

“AFFIRMATIVE.”

“Now here’s where we really start telling lies,” I said, following Rossa through the gray and white wilderness of metal and plastic. FACTOTUM paced us overhead, whirring and clicking, hanging from its rail at an angle just too far off our vertical to look sane. Its lenses glinted.

Sixteen

He came in a bright orange pressure suit, and all you needed to know about space flight in this system you could tell by the holster growing smoothly from the suit’s right thigh. Rossa had already climbed behind her own ice-walls of defense and it looked about time for me to batten down as well. Something had been coming into the open, inside me, and had to be stuffed back into the tight-disciplined Force mold.

The guy did a calm survey, taking in ourselves and FACTOTUM and the empty spaces behind: I looked back, though it was hard to see past the solar shielding of that golden faceplate. What was inside seemed a thin, youngish face that I could shove straight into a familiar pigeonhole—the pale fellow in the ranks who doesn’t say a lot and surprises you by being a slicker killing machine than half a dozen of your loud roughnecks. A guy who enjoys the killing best of all. You could almost see telesight crosshairs etched on his eyeballs.

“Welcome to the Corvus expeditionary craft. I am Rossa Corman, he is Ken Jacklin, and our credentials will show that we represent the United Government of Earth.” The bigger the lie the better.

The reply came from the p-suit’s belt, very clear and good—it was a beautifully made suit.

“3rdLieutenant Grainger, P.S.S.
Silverfish
. My orders are to request you to enter sync orbit in a designated neutral zone, to supervise required course corrections and to act as onboard liaison for the duration.” The voice
was
funny, even with a sound system better than anything we had aboard—a kind of slushy slur as if the words were coming through a mouthful of Tunnel-base porridge. The Pallas accent.

Grainger didn’t take his helmet off; at least he didn’t know what we smelled like, yet. Maybe he was the kind who likes to hide behind mirror sunglasses and play “I can see you, you can’t see me.”

Rossa and I swapped quick glances: no objection. “That sounds reasonable,” she said, and we both stuck our hands out formally. Grainger hesitated a second before shaking them through his right pressure glove.

Then two hours of routine this-and-that; extra food and kit transferred onboard from
Silverfish
, which probably didn’t look anything like the picture I got from the name; fixing temporary couplers so our comp could pull course data from theirs; agreeing, when that was over, that
Silverfish
could escort us in.

Grainger ran his side of all this without saying a syllable more than mathematically necessary, as if there were an editing computer stowed in his head to boil out every last drop of redundancy from his talk.

When the last slow lap of the journey had started, Grainger did take off his damned helmet and straightaway looked and acted more human as he wrinkled up his nose and choked at the smell of Corvus Station and/or us. His hair was the sort of dead blond that goes to gray almost without you noticing, his eyes were very black and his neat machine-trimmed shave made me a lot more aware of my own stiff hair and beard. “Tell us about the war,” I said.

“I have no orders,” he said.

“Look, there
is
a war, they told us that much. We just want some background, nothing classified—remember, we’re something like a century out of touch.”

“Yes. There is a war.”

“Why is it being fought?” said Rossa.

“I have no orders.”

We pried and poked for a long while, and put together a skimpy story that went something like this: Pallas (they didn’t
call
it that any more than we called our place Earth—it was “the world,” “this planet,”

or, I suppose, “home”) was a watery place, one respectable-size continent, one long island chain.

Crawling with stupid livestock. They’d set up shop where the gate put them, on a biggish island, and spread over the others. Now the continent they called New Africa was thicker with animal and vegetable nasties than the worst of the islands, but there were oceans of fossil fuel underneath. Even from Grainger’s bare comments the steps were clear enough: a colony of a colony set up on New Africa, hassles about how well the oil people should be treated by “world government” on Gate Island, high technology sprouting everywhere from the first big seeds they’d taken through the stargate with them (like Corvus Station growing to what it was from a few bits shoved through a keyhole), something like a declaration of independence from the continental mob, hysteria in the archipelago at the thought of oil shortages, massive research programs, limited war—

“How limited? Like the c-20 rules where you could use anything except nukes?”

Grainger shook his head hard. “No nukes.”

Rossa: “What about the possibilities of anomalous physics, MT, all that complex of destructive forces

...?”

“I have no orders. This is a classified area.”

I moved in again: “Yes, sure, but we
know
there’s MT research going on here somewhere. That’s the main reason we’ve come, to warn you about it.”

“Please. No. I’m not cleared for this information.” I noticed his fingers were getting restless and playing with the flap of what I’d spotted right away as a holster. FACTOTUM clicked twice overhead. It seemed like a good time to suggest we had something to eat instead.

We couldn’t drag much more out of Grainger. He was a hundred percent militiaman with no ideas and no opinions outside his duty. There was something familiar enough in that description that I turned it over in my head and found I was looking at myself, or me as I’d been in the Force. Maybe I’d changed too much now. Maybe I’d never be able to go back and be the way I was before. There was a kind of cold shock when I realized I’d let Grainger toy with his holster without ever running over the moves that would send my hand or foot smartly into his unprotected head and convert him to so many kilos of limp meat...

One snippet of data:
Silverfish
had been heading for L2 to check the satellite business—they’d extrapolated the various falling curves backward through much the same point. (Which meant we’d arrived and hid at L2, sending satellites before moving in ourselves, which was almost true and part of the tale.) Grainger changed the subject again by asking some fool question about the radio facilities—had to ask the comp to find it was all FM in such-and-such bands. But the tidbit didn’t entice any more facts from our visitor.

There were a couple of incidents on the long drift toward Pallas. One was a tiny, funny thing. Grainger climbed out of his orange armor to use the lavatory hole, and stood there in his one-piece thermawear, blushed, and got even less talkative until we caught on and found some struts and plastic sheets to curtain off the area. The second was different. One sleep-shift, with Rossa and me on the usual hard sheets and Grainger on a comfy-looking foam mattress he’d unrolled from his kit, I woke suddenly. There’d been a shout, not too close. Half a second later Rossa poked me in the side. And there was no sign of Grainger.

“ATTENTION,” the speaker called. “RESTRICTED ACCESS ZONE VIOLATION.” Nothing by the computer console or the minigate almost overhead—but up the curve of the station, there was Grainger dangling a meter off the floor, under FACTOTUM.

Rossa got onto the override and had him brought back, dumped next to us.

“I was restless,” he said sullenly. “There isn’t much space for exercise in
Silverfish
. The attack was wholly unprovoked. I shall report this. That machine has damaged Archipelago property.”

He’d gone wandering, I guessed, to search for FTL drive motors in obedience to his orders. Grainger would never have done anything that wasn’t in his orders. And he’d poked around machine after machine, baffled by it all as we were, until he’d neared my cache and been grabbed by FACTOTUM.

Silly fool had pulled out his gun; it was a very slick, high-velocity needlegun and we found it later on the deck. I hated having to give it back. The spider-robot had cheerfully followed
its
orders and Grainger had a second-degree burn on his gun hand. He was not pleased. As for our own security ... “Might just as well have painted the thing bright red and put a flag on it,” I whispered to Rossa after we’d bandaged him up.

“What do you think he thinks it is?”

I told her and she nodded. “The most reasonable deduction. Poor fellow.”

We bolted the stable door, as they say, by reprogramming the computer to shout if Lt. Grainger did anything odd while we were asleep. Two hours later, a bit embarrassed, I modified those instructions enough to let him visit the toilet without being loudly reported in tones that echoed from end to end of the station. Damn all computers, and Zurich Central’s most of all.