The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (104 page)

“Nice to talk to you, too,” he replied. “It must have been six months.”

“Don’t be an asshole, access it now. I’ll call you back when it’s over.” She ended the call.

“What?” Liz asked.

“Not sure.” Mark turned around. “China,” he called to the barman. “Can you access Alessandra Baron’s show for us, please?” He normally stayed away from accessing Alessandra and her haughty show, which always criticized and never did anything constructive, he felt it was like being lectured by snobs who specialized in satire.

The ancient little man behind the bar obliged, putting the show on the big portal.

“Oh, fuck,” Mark whispered. It was his own face dominating the image, magnified one meter high. “… we’re devoted to living a simple, clean, green life,” he was saying.

“She was a reporter,” he told his wife. “I didn’t know, she never said.”

“When was this?” Liz asked.

“This afternoon. She came up to me when I was getting the lunch. I though she was from town.”

The image switched back to the studio where Alessandra Baron was sitting at the center of a big couch, her classically beautiful face holding an amused expression, the way adults responded to a precocious child. Mellanie Rescorai sat beside her, looking even more sophisticated than she had up on MtZuelea, wearing a simple clinging scarlet dress and a black jacket with a little silver M on the lapel. Her hair had been elaborately tousled.

Liz gave Mark a long sideways look. Her eyebrow rose several millimeters. “That was the reporter?”

“Uh-huh.” Mark waved her quiet.

Yuri and Olga swapped a knowing look.

“So what did he say next?” Alessandra asked.

“By this time I think he wanted to say: can we go to a motel for the rest of the day?” Mellanie laughed. “But I managed to keep his hot little hands off me for a while by telling him the navy had no intention of wrecking his simpleton lifestyle. Can you guess what he said to that?”

“He was grateful?” Alessandra suggested archly.

“Oh, yes. Take a look.” The image shifted back to Mark at the blockade.

Sitting on the settee in front of the fireplace, a glass of wine in hand, and hindsight showing him what to watch for, it was all rather easy to realize that the smile he put on that afternoon for the girl was somewhat forced. Anxious, even. The one a man used when trying to impress. Eager to impress, possibly.

“It’s the principle of what they’re doing,” his image said. “They didn’t ask us about this, they just barged onto the highway and set out to build their station without our permission.”

“Did they need permission?”

“Sure they did.”

The show went back to the studio. “Incredible,” Alessandra said, shaking her head in saddened bewilderment. “Just how backward are they in Randtown?”

“That was edited!” Mark protested to the bar at large. “I … That wasn’t what I meant. I said other stuff, too. I told her about the nuclear micropiles. Why isn’t that in there? She’s making this—Christ, I look ridiculous.” He felt Liz take his hand and squeeze reassuringly, and shot her a desperate glance.

“It’s okay,” she whispered.

“The kind of backward you get from three generations of marrying cousins,” Mellanie confided to Alessandra.

The Phoenix bar was totally silent now.

“So in his view, not only do we, the Commonwealth, not have the right to put vital defense equipment on an uninhabited mountain,” Mellanie said. “But wait for this next bit.”

“Oh, God,” Mark said. He wanted the program to end. Now. The universe to end, actually.

Earlier that day up at the blockade, Mellanie asked, “Surely if you oppose that then you’re taking an antihuman stance?” in a fully reasonable tone.

Mark’s giant face smiled goofishly. “If this is being antihuman, then bring it on and give me more.”

Back in the studio Mellanie gave a what-can-you-do shrug to Alessandra.

“Bitch!” Mark yelled furiously. He jumped to his feet, his wineglass tumbling to the stone flag floor. “You fucking bitch. This is not the way it happened.”

Everyone in the bar had stopped drinking and talking to look at him. Alessandra Baron’s show vanished from the portal to be replaced by the New Oxford invitation open golf tournament. “Enough of those smartmouth whores,” China growled, several OCtattoo curlicues glowing scarlet on his bald head. “You sit yourself back down there, Mark. We can all see it was a stitch-up job. I’ll get you a refill for that glass, on the house.”

Liz put her hand around his wrist and tugged him back down. “That can’t be legal,” he said. “Surely?” Anger was giving way to shock.

“Depends what you can prove,” Yuri said earnestly. “If your memory of the event is replayed to a court, then you can demonstrate they produced a detrimental edit.” He trailed off under Olga’s sharp stare.

“Don’t worry about it,” Liz said soothingly. “Everyone here knows you, they can see that the interview is a phony. It’s the navy’s response to the blockade. They’re putting the pressure on Simon to let the convoy through. Newton’s law of politics.”

Mark put his head in his hands. His e-butler was telling him Carys Panther was calling again. So was Simon Rand. Messages were coming in from the unisphere at the rate of several thousand a second, directed at his public code. It seemed that everyone who had accessed Alessandra and Mellanie wanted to tell him what they thought of him. They weren’t being kind.

....

The heat seemed to be increasing with every step, along with the humidity. Ozzie was surprised by that. He’d walked enough Silfen paths between worlds now to know when the tracks were taking him over the threshold. The signs were subtle and very gradual. Not this time.

They’d been walking through a deciduous forest on the second world since the ghost planet; it was midsummer, with wildflowers providing a gentle carpet of pastel colors across the forest floor. Palm trees and giant ferns began to intermingle with the doughty trunks of the forest. There was a strengthening scent, too, which took Ozzie a while to place. The sea. It had been a long time since he’d seen the sea. No Silfen path had ever led close to one.

It was growing brighter as well; strong sunlight tinged with a hint of indigo. He fished in his top pocket for his sunglasses.

“We’re somewhere else, aren’t we?” Orion asked eagerly. He was looking around with an entranced expression at the thick fronds crowning all the trees. Even the undergrowth had become thicker, with grass growing higher and turning a darker green. Creeping vines rose up to wrap themselves around the trees, sprouting white and lemon-yellow flowers.

“Looks that way,” he said reassuringly. When he turned to look at the boy he could see that the path curved sharply behind them. He’d been walking in a more-or-less straight line for hours. Orion hadn’t noticed; he was holding up his friendship pendant, studying it intently. Since the ghost world he’d reclaimed it from Ozzie. The experience there had changed the boy’s opinion of the Silfen once again. They’d never be unquestioned idols again, but he was starting to accept them as true aliens. Ozzie supposed it was a sign of maturity.

“Are there any of them nearby?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Orion said, troubled. “I’ve never seen it like this before. It’s turned green.” He held it up to show Ozzie. The small exotic gem was shining a bright emerald as it dangled on the end of its chain. “Do you think it means something else is here?”

“I’ve no idea what it means,” Ozzie said truthfully.

The palm trees were thinning out, the thick grass coming up to their knees. Tochee was having to produce large powerful ripples along its locomotion ridges to shove its wide body through the clingy blades. Ozzie slowed in confusion, there was no path anymore, only the grass they’d trodden down behind them. Without the floppy fronds above his head, he could feel the star’s heat on his bare skin. Below his booted feet the ground was sloping downward. There were a lot of undulations ahead of them as the slope dipped away, but several kilometers in the distance was the unmistakable blue sparkle of the sea.

NOW WHERE? Tochee’s eye patterns queried.

Ozzie faced their alien friend and shrugged—a gesture that Tochee knew only too well by now.

“We never walked through that,” Orion said abruptly. He was facing back the way they’d just come. Behind them was the rounded top of a modest mountain, its crown roughly covered by a jungle of palms and big ferns with a few spindly gray trees that might result if pines were crossed with eucalyptus. The whole patch couldn’t have been more than a kilometer across.

Ozzie was working out what to say when an electronic bleep emerged from deep inside his backpack. The sound, so integral to Commonwealth society, was profoundly shocking here. He and Orion looked at each other in surprise.

“Link to my wrist array,” Ozzie told his e-butler. There were function icons appearing in his virtual vision that hadn’t been there since the day he rode out of Lyddington. His inserts were regaining their full capacity. He shrugged off the backpack as if it had caught fire. His e-butler confirmed that his inserts were receiving a signal from his wrist array. He shook the contents of his backpack onto the ground, heedless of the mess. A tiny red power LED was shining on the side of his burnished wrist array. He slipped it around his hand and the malmetal contracted snugly. The OCtattoo on his forearm made contact with the unit’s i-spot. Lying amid the pile of clothes and packets he’d tipped out was a handheld array. He picked it up and switched it on. Its icons appeared immediately in his virtual vision. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. His e-butler started to back up insert files in both arrays. He let it do that while his virtual hands rearranged icons for the handheld array. Its screen unfurled to its full extent, measuring half a meter wide. “Please,” he prayed, and translucent amber fingers plucked symbols out of the linguistic files he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months.

On the screen, the spiky flower patterns that Tochee used were displayed in the deepest purple that the screen’s resolution could manage.

Tochee became very still. HELLO, its forward eye segment projected.

“Our electronic systems are working again,” Ozzie said out loud. The handheld array translated into a series of patterns that it flashed up.

I UNDERSTAND.

“Are those Tochee’s speaking pictures?” a fascinated Orion asked, peering at the screen.

The array translated, and Tochee produced an answer.

“That is correct, small human one,” the array said. “They sit in an incorrect visual spectrum. However I can read them.”

Orion whooped exuberantly and gave a massive victory jump, punching the air. “It’s me, it’s me, Tochee. I’m talking to you!” He gave Ozzie a radiant smile, and they high-fived.

“I am aware of the communication,” the array translated for Tochee. “I have wished for this moment for a long time. My first true speech is to thank you, large human one, and small human one, for the companionship you have given me. Without you I would remain at the cold house. I would not like that.”

Ozzie gave a small bow. “Our pleasure, Tochee. But this isn’t one way, man. We would have had difficulty leaving the Ice Citadel without you.”

Orion rushed over to Tochee, who extended a tentacle of manipulator flesh that the boy squeezed happily. “This is great, it’s wonderful, Tochee. There’s so much I want to tell you. And ask, as well.”

“You are kind, small human one. Large humans two, three, five, fifteen, twenty-three, and thirty also showed some consideration for my situation, as did other species at the cold house. I hope they are well.”

“Which ones are those, Ozzie?”

“I don’t know, man. I guess Sara is large human two, and George must be in there somewhere.” His virtual hand pulled the translation routines down out of stasis, slotting them into the large processing power of the handheld array. “Tochee, we need to improve our translation ability. I’d like you to talk to my machine, here.”

“I agree. I have my own electronic units that I want to switch on.”

“Okay, let’s go for it.”

The big alien reached around with its manipulator flesh, and removed one of the heavy bags it was carrying. Ozzie, meanwhile, picked several sensor instruments out of his pile, switching them on one by one. “Man, I came this close to leaving these back at the Ice Citadel,” he grunted.

“What have you got?” the excited boy asked.

“Standard first contact team stuff. Mineral analyzers, resonance scanners, em spectrum monitors, microradar, magnometers. Things that’ll tell me a lot about the environment.”

“How are they going to help?”

“Not sure yet, man. It kinda depends on what we find. But this place is different from the others we’ve walked through. There must be a reason the Silfen have stopped screwing with electricity.”

“Do you think …” Orion stopped, and looked around cautiously. “Is this the end of the road, Ozzie?”

Ozzie very nearly told the boy not to be stupid. His own growing uncertainty stopped him. “I don’t know. If it is, I would have expected something a little more elaborate.” He gestured out at the rolling landscape. “This is more like a dead end.”

“That’s what I thought,” the boy said meekly.

Results from the sensors were building up in grids across Ozzie’s virtual vision. He ignored them to give the boy a reassuring hug. “No way, man.”

“Okay.”

Ozzie turned his attention back to the sensor results. He noticed that Tochee had switched on several electronic units. His own scans showed the alien’s systems to be sensors and processor units not entirely dissimilar to his own. Apart from that, there was little for his own units to go on. Strangely, this planet seemed to have no magnetic field. The general neutrino level was above average, though. Local quantum field readings were fractionally different to standard, though nothing like enough to produce the kind of warping necessary to open a wormhole—he thought it might be a residual from the electron damping effect. “Weird, but not weird enough,” he said quietly.

“Ozzie, what’s that in the sky?”

The handheld array flashed the question up for Tochee as well. The alien put aside its own gadgets to follow Orion’s pointing arm. Ozzie followed the boy’s gaze, narrowing his eyes as he squinted almost directly into the vivid sunlight. It looked as if there was some kind of silver cloud at very high altitude, a thin curve that stretched across the sun. When his retinal inserts brought their high-intensity filters on-line and zoomed in he changed his mind. No matter what magnification he used, the little strip of shimmering silver didn’t change. The planet had a ring. He tracked along it, using both array memories to file the image. The scintillations he could see coming from within the cloud were actually tiny motes. There must have been thousands of them. He wondered briefly how their composition differed from the rest of the ring. Then he came to where it crossed in front of the sun. It didn’t. And the scale shifted again, to a terrifying degree.