The Omega Expedition (27 page)

I counted, and decided that there were five standing figures. Then a sixth hove into view, and finally a seventh.

There was little comfort to be gained from the fact that they all looked frightened, with the possible exception of Christine Caine. Adam Zimmerman looked very frightened indeed. He hadn’t had any time at all to adjust to the world into which he had been reborn before it turned bad, and he had to be figuring that he was now even further removed from his objective than he had been on the day he stole the world for the Hardinist Cabal. Davida Berenike Columella seemed more terrified than her emortal companions, but that may have been an illusion fostered by the fact that she was so tiny and so seemingly immature.

Of the party that had been on the guided tour of Niamh Horne’s ship only the two other cyborgs were missing. Suddenly, the assumption that Niamh Horne had been behind our kidnapping, if we had indeed been kidnapped — and it certainly looked that way at present — didn’t seem quite so natural. It wasn’t just the fact that she was here with us that made it seem less likely — it was the fact that we’d all been deprived of our smartsuits, the most vital components of our internal technical support, and our dignity. That, and the gravity. Wherever Niamh Horne would have taken people she’d kidnapped, it wouldn’t be Earth, or anywhere that simulated Earth gravity.

On the other hand, I thought — still trying hard to demonstrate my presence of mind — Niamh Horne was the only one among us to have retained a considerable fraction of her intimate technology.
Her
intimate technology had included a great deal that was far too intimate to be removed without leaving great gaping holes in her head and body. She still looked whole, if not quite human.

I made no attempt to get up, but I muttered and stirred, expecting that somebody would take notice and kneel down. They weren’t in any hurry to oblige, but one of them eventually took the hint. It was Niamh Horne again, and I flinched reflexively.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “It seemed to be the right thing to do. I didn’t realize. Sorry.”

Mortimer Gray knelt down with her. Like Lowenthal and Zimmerman, he now had a beard of sorts, but his looked more remarkable than theirs because its dark brown color clashed with his silver hair. “I think you’ll be okay, Mr. Tamlin,” he said. “It looks worse than it is. Very unfortunate, but not mortal.”
Not mortal
was easy enough for him to say — even without his IT, he was engineered for emortality at the cellular level. I carefully refrained from touching my nose to investigate how badly out of shape it was.

“Where are we?” I contrived to ask.

“We don’t know,” Gray said. “The simple answer is that we’re in a cluttered room with seven doors. Four of them open into cells like the one you woke up in. The other three are locked. There are several antique wallscreens, but only two control panels, both of which seem to be inactive. Like all the other equipment, they seem ridiculously primitive. The gravity seems to be Earth-normal, but nobody’s ready to conclude, as yet, that we’re on Earth. If it’s not spin, it might be acceleration — but if it’s acceleration, we don’t have any clue where we might be headed. We don’t know how long it’s been since we were aboard the Titanian ship, although it must have taken between eight and ten days to flush our IT, and the growth of our body hair can’t have begun until that process was at least halfway through. The means they used to keep us asleep seems to have been rather crude if the way we feel is a reliable guide. Did you see the thing that seemed to capture
Child of Fortune
?”

“Yes,” I said, thickly, unable for the moment to say more.

“We don’t believe in it either,” he said, picking up the skepticism in my tone. “Opinions are sharply divided, however, as to what kind of real story the fake was covering up. Accusations have been flowing freely, but I think Niamh and Michael have called a truce for the time being. At least nobody’s suggested that
you
were to blame. That gives you an advantage over the rest of us.”

It was obvious that he had not been excluded from the riot of accusations.

“Who stands to gain from taking us prisoner?” I said, thickly but just about comprehensibly.

“We haven’t been able to figure that out either,” Gray said, looking at Niamh Horne — who was obviously suspect number one in everyone’s eyes but her own.

“The greater enigma,” the cyborg said, grimly, “is
how
someone contrived to take us prisoner. Taking control of
Child of Fortune
’s AIs should have been impossible.”

“Impossible for outside agencies, maybe,” another voice put in — I guessed that it was Lowenthal’s, although it sounded far less smooth than it had before — “but if it were an inside job…”

“If it had been me,” the Titanian snapped back, “I wouldn’t have brought your pet gladiator — and I’d have kept a couple of my own people. I can’t believe that it was anyone on my crew…and even if I could believe it, I can’t believe that they’d bring us to Earth. Only your people would do that. I didn’t think the Cabal had the intelligence, let alone the technics, but I guess you might have sharpened up your act since you accidentally blew North America away and shriveled Garden Earth to mulch. On the other hand, I can’t see how you had the opportunity.” There was a pause while she redirected her attention. “Only
you
had that,” she added. I knew that she had to be staring at Davida.

I was beginning to feel left out again, so I decided to sit up. It wasn’t easy, but I managed it. I had to remind myself that I was supposed to be a hard man, a real fighter. I had to tell myself, very sternly, that if we were all equal now, in terms of our clothing and internal resources, then I ought to be vying for leadership of the pack instead of lying flat out and feeling exceedingly sorry for myself.

“You ought to lie down,” Niamh Horne told me. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, and we no longer seem to have the kind of help that we normally rely on to make such losses good.

“I’m okay,” I lied, fighting the dizziness. I could see how much blood there was on the gray floor now, and how much there was on the pale blue sleeves of my dead shirt. My trousers were pale blue too, except where they’d picked up bloodstains from the floor. Everybody’s clothes were pale blue. They had to be uniforms of some kind, although they seemed ridiculously casual as well as inert.

“Better do as she says, Mr. Tamlin,” Solantha Handsel put in, flatly. “I hit you hard. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was. It could have been a hostile.”

“If I wasn’t a hostile before,” I managed to mutter, darkly, “I am now.” She didn’t seem impressed.

“Come on, Mr. Tamlin,” said Mortimer Gray. “I’ll help you.” He lent me an arm so that I could raise myself from a sitting position to a standing one. I felt faint, and I had to fight hard against the impulse to lie back down again. I’d sat up because I wanted to keep better track of the argument, but the argument had been suspended now while everyone put on a collaborative show of sympathy. Michael Lowenthal seemed very anxious indeed, although he might have been overacting — or he might, of course, have been projecting an anxiety he really felt for himself. Emortal or not, he knew how vulnerable he was without IT assistance.

Mortimer Gray continued to hang on to my arm, to make sure that I didn’t keel over again. When he was sure that I wouldn’t he steered me back toward the door from which I’d unwisely emerged on my exploratory mission, obviously intent on seeing me safety back to my bed. I resisted, but I didn’t have the strength to make the resistance stick. In the end, I decided that I could only benefit from a brief interval of rest, and allowed myself to be guided.

Christine Caine followed us into the cell, with the air of one who thought she had a legitimate claim to the territory. I took that to mean that she
had
been the person in the upper bunk. I wondered briefly whether I ought to put in for a transfer, but it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to volunteer to trade — not only because no one else would want to share with Christine but also because no one else would want to share with me.

I figured that I had the rough end of the deal. If I had been deprived of my IT, I reasoned, so had Christine. Whatever internal censors the sisterhood had put in place to ensure that she didn’t revert to type were presumably gone. She didn’t look dangerous at the moment, but I had seen
Bad Karma
.

I lay down in the bottom bunk. Mercifully, the dizziness relinquished its hold on my head almost immediately.

“I’m sorry, Madoc,” Mortimer Gray said, moving toward the door, “but we have to get this sorted out, if we can.”

I was tempted to tell him that he shouldn’t leave me out of the discussion, and certainly shouldn’t leave me alone with a crazy mass murderer, but I didn’t have the energy. I needed time to recover my wits.

“Are you okay?” the crazy mass murderer said, looking down at me. “Do you want me to stay?”

I resisted the temptation to laugh. I tried to shake my head, but it wasn’t the ideal gesture to attempt in my condition.

She stayed anyway. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked, paying me a compliment of sorts.

“It looks as if we’ve been kidnapped by space pirates,” I said, weakly. “In fact, one way or another, that’s what it amounts to. Whether the pirates are from Earth, or Titan, or Excelsior, or somewhere else entirely, we’re still kidnapped. I expect we’ll find out soon enough what happens next. Maybe we get held for ransom, auctioned to the highest bidder. There’s only one thing
I’m
sure of.”

“What’s that?” she wanted to know.

“
This
isn’t a dream,” I told her. “Everything else might have been a trip in a fancy VE, but not
this
.” I touched my broken nose, very gently indeed. “No matter how preposterous the situation seems, I’m certain now that we’re awake. I wasn’t before, but I am now. And given that this is real, we’re in
real
trouble. Whatever game we were playing before, the game we have to play now is trying to figure out how to stay alive.”

“I worked that out for myself,” she assured me, drily. “Is it Zimmerman they want, do you think? Or Lowenthal?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I admitted. “But this place looks as if it’s Zimmerman’s vintage, whatever that implies. Do you have any idea how long we’ve been here? That is, how long has it been since we stepped aboard
Child of Fortune
?”

“Nobody knows,” she told me. “Horne reckons it must have been at least twelve days. She says the real question is why we’ve finally been woken up. They’re all standing around out there waiting for some kind of contact. Nobody believes that the space battle was real, but nobody can figure out how the ship
was
taken over, if it was taken over. You were unlucky — Handsel probably wishes she’d hit Horne while she had the excuse. Then again, Horne probably wishes she’d had a chance to disable Handsel. Do you want me to go and listen in, to see what I can pick up?

It seemed like a good idea, although I didn’t know why she was asking. Maybe it was politeness, because we were cellmates or because I’d been hurt, or maybe she was just the kind of person who needed more reasons than she could provide for herself. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I just need a few minutes.”

She went, leaving me to my own devices.

I kept telling myself, over and over, that I had advantages over my fellow prisoners, and not just because I had lived without IT before. I had previous experience of jail cells, and uncontrollable pain. Unfortunately, I was badly out of practice. Telling myself that the broken nose was no worse than injuries I had suffered before didn’t seem to help at all. Telling myself that I still had to go through it whether it was bearable or not didn’t help either.

By the time I had been awake for what seemed like a further hour I had begun to wish that I had never recovered consciousness, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get back to sleep. Lying still with my eyes shut kept the agony to a minimum, but even the minimum didn’t seem tolerable.

It seemed as if a subjective eternity had passed when Christine Caine came back into the cell and put a tentative hand on my arm. I opened my eyes and tried to focus on her face, although moving my head brought new tears to my eyes.

“The woman on the screen says they’re willing to take a look at you, maybe give you something for the pain,” she said.

“What woman?” I asked, dazedly.

“On the screen,” she repeated, patiently. “They’ve opened communications. I’m not sure they wanted to talk to us this soon, but I guess they’re worried about you. If you can get to the far door while the rest of us stay back, they’ll let you through and take a look at your nose. So she says.”

Christine kept her hand on my arm while I maneuvered myself off the bunk, but she didn’t actually help. I managed to stand up without re-starting the bleeding, and stumbled after her as she led the way.

The others just watched. Apart from Mortimer Gray, they didn’t seem unduly concerned about my state of health, although Michael Lowenthal looked as if he were about to say something until the presence of the others inhibited him.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out what he wanted to say.
Find out what you can. Don’t tell anyone except me
.

Paranoid as I was, I couldn’t quite credit Lowenthal with having had enough foresight to have told his minder to break something in order to create exactly this sort of opportunity.

Adam Zimmerman looked at me in a way that seemed to say
there but for the grace of God go I
. I couldn’t remember whether it was the first time we had locked gazes long enough for it to count as communication.

When I was left alone in front of the relevant door I heard a distinct click, and then the handle turned. The door swung inward, but the darkness beyond seemed impenetrable. I hesitated, but it had to be reckoned a useful opportunity.

I walked forward into the gloom, which became absolute as the door slammed shut behind me.