The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (55 page)

There were compensations, however. At eight o’clock this morning he had arrived at the complex to walk through the gateway. Management staff, construction crew and technicians, designers, medical personnel, and a hundred others lined the last length of path before the wormhole, all applauding as Wilson led the senior officers through the gateway. Now he was sitting in the bridge, about to embark on the voyage that would put him on the same list as Columbus, Armstrong, Sheldon and Isaac.
But not poor old Dylan Lewis.

To be honest, he did consider the bridge to be a bit disappointing. Even the old
Ulysses
command cabin had been more visually exciting, let alone the bustling chambers of a thousand unisphere fantasy drama ships. It was a simple compartment with consoles for ten people, although only seven were currently manned. A glass wall separated off the senior officer’s briefing room—basically, a big conference table with twenty chairs. At least there were a couple of large high-rez holographic portals in their traditional place on the forward wall, although (bad design, this) the consoles right in front of them blocked the lower portion from anyone farther back.

Not that he had much time for the standard images they were relaying from hull-mounted cameras. His virtual vision was on high intensity while his retinal inserts were filtering out most natural light. The result was an almost indistinct room flooded with ship-function icons. He rested his palms on the console i-spots, seeing phantom fingers materialize within the galaxy of graphics drifting through the air around him. When he tapped his customized chrome-yellow fingernail on the airlock icon, it expanded to show him the hull was now sealed. A simultaneous tap on the umbilicals told him all the tanks were full and on internal power. The only links to the platform were a high-band data cable and the mechanical latches.

“Crew status?” he asked Oscar.

“Everyone on board and ready.”

“Okay then; Pilot, please activate our force field and disengage us from the platform.”

“Aye, sir,” Jean Douvoir said. The pilot had spent decades working for several companies at the High Angel, flying engineering pods around the big freefall factories, shifting sections massing hundreds of tons with the casual precision of a bird of prey. Before that, he’d helped develop control routines for spaceplane RI pilots. Coupled with his enthusiasm for the project, it was a background that made him perfect for the job. Wilson counted himself lucky to have someone so competent on board.

A communications icon flashed in Wilson’s virtual vision, tagging the call as Nigel Sheldon. He tapped for admission.

“Captain,” Sheldon’s voice sounded across the bridge, “I’m accessing your telemetry. It all looks good from where we are.”

“And here.” There had been a great many of these pointless official talks on the
Ulysses
, too. All for posterity and media profile. One of his virtual vision digital readouts was showing the number of people accessing the moment through the unisphere: in excess of fifteen billion. “We’re ready to go.” His voice was somber and authoritative as the impact of the event finally hit home. One of the portals showed him a view of the three umbilical gantries swinging away from the starship’s rear section. Little silver-white fluid globules spilled out of the closed valves, sparkling in the sunlight as they wobbled off into space.

“Hopefully, we’ll see you again in a year’s time,” Nigel Sheldon said.

“I look forward to it.”

“Godspeed, Captain.”

Jean Douvoir fired the small thrusters around the rear of the central cylindrical section.
Second Chance
started to slide away from the gateway. Acceleration was so tiny Wilson couldn’t even feel it affect the low-gravity bridge. The dazzling turquoise flames of the thrusters shrank away and vanished.

“We’re now at five meters per second,” Douvoir reported. There was a lot of amusement in his voice.

“Thank you, Pilot,” Wilson said. “Hyperdrive, please bring the wormhole up to flight level.”

“Aye, sir.” Tu Lee couldn’t help the strong twang of excitement in her voice. She began to shunt instructions into the ship’s RI that would handle the enormously complex energy manipulation functions.

Nigel instructed his e-butler to shift down his virtual vision intensity, and took his hands off the console i-spots. One hologram portal showed the assembly platform slowly shrinking behind them. The second had a small circular turquoise nebular glowing in the center. It began to expand, growing more indistinct, although no stars were visible through it.

“Course laid in?” Wilson asked.

“Want to consult our expert navigator on that?” Anna muttered under her breath. She still hadn’t warmed up to Bose.

Wilson ignored her, wondering if the rest of the bridge crew had overheard.

“As agreed,” Oscar said. He had his hands pressed firmly on his console i-spot, his eyes flicking quickly between virtual icons. “First exit point, twenty-five light-years from Dyson Alpha.”

“Wormhole opening stable, Captain,” Tu Lee reported.

“Inject us,” Wilson told her.

The blue haze folded around
Second Chance
like petals closing for the night. Their datalink to the assembly platform and the unisphere ended. Both portals showed the starship bathing in the wormhole’s pale moonlight radiance of low-level radiation.

Oscar canceled the camera feeds. The bridge portals switched to displaying the gravitonic spectrum, sensors around the ship detecting faint echoes resonating within the wormhole. It was a crude version of radar that allowed them to locate stars and planets to a reasonable degree, but that was all. For truly accurate sensor work they needed to drop out into real space.

Wilson upped his virtual vision again, taking another sweep of the starship’s primary systems. Everything was humming along sweetly. He came out and checked around the bridge. The engineers were all still heavily integrated with the ship’s RI, monitoring the performance of their respective fields, but everyone else was already relaxing. Wilson glanced inquisitively at Oscar, who put on a contented expression as he sat back. There wasn’t much left for them to do. Not for another hundred thirty days.

THIRTEEN

Hoshe waited at the side of the street for her to arrive. It wasn’t midmorning yet, but already a small crowd of curious locals had gathered along the sidewalk. Two police cruisers had parked nearby, their constables directing the copbots as they set up temporary barriers around the thirty-story condo building. As he watched, yet another big police technical support van pulled up and slowly nosed its way down into the underground garage. His e-butler told him the precinct commander was on his way, and the city commissioner had asked for the Ice Department case files.

“Great,” Hoshe muttered. It was going to turn into one big jurisdictional free-for-all, he was sure of that. Now all the real work had been done, every other department in Darklake would be after a slice of the credit.

An unmarked police car drew up beside him. Paula stepped out. She was wearing a simple pale blue dress with a fawn jacket, her raven hair tied back neatly. Hoshe thought her skin was a shade darker than the last time he’d seen her, but then Treloar, Anshun’s capital, was in the tropics. She actually gave him a smile as he said hello.

“Good to see you again,” he said.

“And you, Hoshe. Sorry I left you carrying the ball on this one.”

“That’s okay,” he lied.

“But I appreciate the way you carried on, and for calling me today. That’s very professional.”

He gestured her toward the entrance to the garage. “You might yet regret coming, a lot of senior city police officers are on their way.”

“That I’m used to. You know, right now I’d actually welcome some of the old problems again.”

“Tough case?”

“You wouldn’t think so by the number of arrests we’ve made.” She shrugged. “But yes. My opponent is an elusive man.”

“Holmes and Moriarty, yes?”

“Hoshe, I had no idea you read the classics.”

“It was some time ago, but I used to really enjoy that kind of thing.”

“Holmes never knew how easy he had it,” she said as they reached the bottom of the ramp. “So what have you got for me?”

Two white forensics department vans were parked at the far end of the garage. Various sensor patches the size of paving slabs had been stuck to the floor around the walls and thick cables snaked around everywhere, winding back to the open access panels on both vans. Several GeneralPurposebots were moving the sensors around, clustering them in one corner while three forensics officers supervised.

“We found them first thing this morning,” Hoshe said as they climbed into the back of the squad leader’s van. The inside was cramped, a narrow corridor between two equipment benches, the air hot from all the humming electrical circuits. He was more than familiar with all the units. The additional forensics teams Myo had promised from the Serious Crime Directorate had never materialized. In view of what amounted to her withdrawal from the case, Hoshe’s commander had reluctantly agreed to allocate him two of the city’s forensics squads. Hoshe himself had undergone the appropriate skill memory implementation so he could operate the equipment and interpret the results, helping his pitifully small team throughout all the dreary months that had followed. They had worked through the list of sites where construction work had been going on forty years ago, a laborious and terribly tedious task. Sick days and short hours among the team members had been on a steady upward curve from the first week onward. There had been times, especially in the last few weeks, when only the GPbots had turned up at the start of the day’s shift.

Hoshe had been receiving an increasing amount of pressure from both the team and his commander to wrap things up. But he’d kept doggedly to the list, examining the sites one after the other while soothing and cajoling the team and pleading for just a little more time from the police department. Reflective deep scanning had revealed a great many interesting things buried beneath the city, but no bodies. Until this morning.

Paula peered closely at the small high-rez holographic portal with its 3D grid of gentle pink luminescence; right at the center were swirls of darker red, like knots in wood.

“Even allowing for decomposition you can see the shapes quite clearly,” Hoshe said, his finger tracing around denser swirls. “This is a head here, look, and these are arms and legs. Both bodies are inside some kind of box-shape container; there’s a distinct air cavity around each of them.”

“I’ll take your word for it. This looks like a Rorschach test to me.”

Hoshe avoided a smile. “One is slightly smaller than the other; which corresponds to a male/female pairing. But that’s the end of the good news. They’re deep; ten meters down below this level. The developer didn’t cut corners when this condo was built, unfortunately; all the foundations correspond to City Hall regulations.”

“Thank you, Hoshe.”

“We don’t know it’s them yet. We’ll get a slightly better resolution when the sensors have been realigned, but that’s not going to give us a positive ID. Only DNA will do that.”

“It’s them. You know it is.”

“Yeah, well. It’s going to be a bitch to get them out. We’ll have to excavate all the way around, probably need force fields to reinforce the foundation when we chop the block out. The residents will need to be moved out while we do that. Then we’ll need to break the concrete up very carefully.”

“Don’t worry, the Directorate has experienced extraction teams. I’ll have them here before lunch.”

“You said that about the forensics teams.”

She shifted around in the cramped space, and gave him an unnerving look of appraisal. “I know, and I apologize again. I’ve never quite let anybody down like that before. It won’t happen again.”

Hoshe knew he was blushing. Her apology was like some intimate confession. He tapped a knuckle on the portal to distract her. “Are you sure this will get a conviction? I’ll bet you a whole Earth dollar their memorycell inserts have been destroyed; there’ll be no memory of the killer we can ever access.”

“Trust me, Hoshe. We can nail him now. All I need is a judge to issue a warrant.”

It was a hell of a row that broke out in the living room. Loud enough for Morton to hear it from his bedroom, which made him stop what he was doing, which pissed him off no end. His e-butler told him who was invading his penthouse, so he was tying the belt on his dressing gown as he strode out.

Chief Inspector Myo was arguing with his human butler, while Detective Hoshe Finn interjected with angry threats. It was a credit to the butler’s training and character that he didn’t appear in any way flustered by the unwelcome guests and their authority. His loyalty lay solely with his employer; nothing was going to shift that.

“Let’s all take a breath and calm down,” Morton said. He combed his wild hair with his hand, trying to slick it back down. “What seems to be the problem here? Chief Investigator?”

“No problem.” She held out a small memory crystal disk. “I have a warrant for your arrest.”

“On what charge?”

“Two counts of bodykill and deliberate memory erasure.”

Morton couldn’t quite hang on to his peaceable demeanor with that allegation fired at him. “You’ve gotta be fucking joking!”

“No, sir, I am not joking,” Paula said. “As a registered Commonwealth citizen, you are hereby advised not to speak further in connection with the offense you have just been charged with until you are in consultation with your legal representative. Now, please get dressed, sir. You will be taken to the police precinct station for further questioning.”

“This is bullshit.” Morton stood his ground, folding his arms across his chest. Even though he knew, he asked, “Whose murder?”

“Tara Jennifer Shaheef, your wife at the time, and Wyobie Cotal.”

“Shit! I fucking told
you
they’d been bumped off.”

“You certainly did. Thank you for that, sir. Now please get dressed. If you don’t, we will take you as you are.”

A naked Mellanie rushed into the lounge. She threw her arms around Morton. “What’s happening, Morty? What are they saying?”

“Nothing, it’s a police fuckup, that’s all.” He almost shook her off, then thought better of it and returned her embrace. “Everything is fine.”

From inside the circle of his arms, she glared at the two officers.

Hoshe Finn was not looking at the naked teenager. Then he had to not look at the second girl who came to stand in the bedroom doorway, pulling on a white lace robe. Her long elegant face wore a bemused expression as she took in the tableaux, as if she was accessing some low-budget soap on the cybersphere. “What is happening out here?” she drawled in a husky voice. One hand patted languidly at her expensively styled hair. “Is this part of your kink, Morty, to be hauled off to a secret police dungeon where they manacle you to the wall?”

“No,” Morton and Paula Myo said in unison.

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.

“Morty never killed anyone,” Mellanie asserted. She tossed her head, daring them to say different.

Paula gave her a cool glance. “You weren’t even alive when he did this. Take my advice, don’t cause a scene. Morton?”

“It’s all right.” Morton gave the clinging girl a tender squeeze. “My e-butler has already informed the legal department. I’ll be home for dinner tonight. We’ll be suing for wrongful arrest before the fish course arrives.”

Mellanie pushed her face up toward his, entreating. “Don’t go with them, please, Morty. Don’t.”

“This is not a multiple choice situation,” Paula told her.

“I’ll get dressed,” Morton said. He swung around and walked back toward the bedroom. “It’s a shame,” he said to Paula. “You and I could have been quite something together.”

Paula looked from Mellanie to the haughty girl in the lace robe, then to Morton. “I can’t think what.”

....

The daily storm that raced in from the Grand Triad had now passed, leaving the wide valley fresh and gleaming. There were few trees here on the northwestern edge of the Dessault Mountains. The valley was mainly grassland, with boggy meadows along the bottom where the fast river flowed out to the north. Sunlight grew steadily warmer as the last twisting clouds hurried away toward the Great Iril Steppes, and the ground steamed quietly.

As soon as the rains stopped, Kazimir stepped outside. The McFoster village on the western slopes was where he had spent his earliest childhood, a huddle of stone houses with living grass roofs that provided watertight shelter during the rains. They all had broad open windows so the air could circulate. Not that many daylight hours were spent indoors in such a warm climate. It was a farming village, one of the many sheltered refuges where clan children could grow up untroubled by the Institute and the Starflyer. Cattle grazed easily on the floor of the valley, and a few Charlemagnes were trained by fighters no longer able to answer the Guardians’ call to arms.

Scott and Harvey joined him as he walked out toward the memorial garden, more villagers joining in until there were over thirty marching silently along the little-worn path. It ended at a dark wooden gate set in a drystone wall that was overrun by colorful climbing nasturtiums. The wall circled a graveyard that followed the pattern adopted by most small human settlements across the Commonwealth. Saplings that had been planted around the perimeter were now large enough to offer some shade. Gravestones were carved on chunks of local rock. In the middle was an eight-sided memorial made of stone. The base plinth measured three meters across, holding a two-meter sphere of red marble polished to a gleam. Names had been etched into the lower half, forming neat lines that covered nearly a third of the surface.

Everyone gathered around and bowed their heads.

“We have come today to celebrate the life of Bruce McFoster,” Harvey said in a loud clear voice. “Although he has left our clan, he will not be forgotten by us and those who fight with us. When the time comes for this planet’s revenge upon its violator he will hear the song of joy that all peoples will sing, for it will be so loud as to rock the dreaming heavens themselves.”

Harvey placed a small engraver tool against the marble at the end of an unfinished line of names. The little unit buzzed as its tiny blades began cutting the programmed pattern. Fine gray dust started to trickle down.

“I remember your laughter, Bruce,” Harvey said.

Kazimir stepped forward. “I remember your friendship, Bruce, you are my brother and always will be.” It was difficult to get the words out as his voice cracked. Tears were leaking down his cheeks.

“I remember your stubbornness, Bruce,” Scott rasped. “Keep it with you always, lad.”

A woman stepped forward. Kazimir didn’t hear what she said. The infant boy that Samantha was cradling began to wail loudly as if he understood what was happening, that he would never see or know his father.

The tributes lasted for some time. Eventually, the last McFosters had their say and the infant found the comfort of his mother’s breast. The buzz of the engraver fell silent. Kazimir stared brokenly at the new name on the marble, then hung his head, unable to bear the sight any longer.

People drifted away, leaving him and Samantha alone.

“Thank you, Kaz,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I think you and I are the only people who really cared about him.”

“Everybody cared,” he said automatically. Samantha was a few years older than he was, which had always made him kind of awkward around her. Now with Bruce gone, and the baby born, he was even more uncertain.

She smiled, though it was clearly an effort. The infant was only three weeks old, and she looked very tired. “You’re so sweet. Everybody knew him, especially my sisters in all the clans. There’s a difference. But at least he made his mark on this world, I think.”

Kazimir put his arm around her shoulders and they walked out of the memorial garden together. “Have you decided on his name yet?”

“Not Bruce, that would be too much. I’ve chosen Lennox, that was Bruce’s grandfather, and I have an uncle called that as well.”

“Lennox. That’s good. I expect that’ll be shortened to Len.”

“Yes.” She stroked the infant’s head. Lennox had lolled back into sleep again. “You should find someone, Kaz.”