The Omega Expedition (32 page)

“I made a few suggestions,” I retorted, “but she didn’t react to any of them. She said things were more complicated than Earth versus the Outer System. I believed her — but I’m in no position to guess how complicated things might really be. That’s your province.”

He wouldn’t play. “I agree with Niamh and Mortimer,” he said, stubbornly. “No one wants a war. No one would be so foolish as to start one.”

I shrugged my shoulders theatrically. “I guess we’ll have to wait until they decide to tell us who they are and what they’re up to,” I said. “But there is one more thing we ought to consider.”

“What?” said Niamh Horne, bluntly.

“I was involved in a kidnap once before,” I said. “Fortunately, I wasn’t the one kidnapped — but I remember it as if it were yesterday. They flushed his IT just as they’ve flushed ours. They did it because they wanted to interrogate him. Personally, I don’t have any information that anyone nowadays would want to extract by force — but if I had, I’d be a little nervous. If any one of you does have any valuable secrets tucked away in your head, I wouldn’t rely on being able to keep them secret for long.”

I could tell that Michael Lowenthal had already thought about the possibility. Niamh Horne was still expressionless. Davida still seemed to be so terrified that she could hardly speak. Solantha Handsel was the only one who looked mortally offended by the suggestion, and it was she who said: “They flushed yours too. Are you so certain that you haven’t got anything they might want to know?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I’m also certain that if there was anything they wanted to know, I wouldn’t try to hold out on them. In my experience, though — and I really do have experience — torturers never settle for what you tell them straight away, even when it’s the truth.”

Maybe it was a seed that would have been better left unsown. Maybe it was what provoked our careful hosts to make their next move. If so, they might have done better to resist the provocation.

The biggest of the wallscreens flickered into life, and Alice’s face appeared. “If Mr. Tamlin would care to make his way to the same door as before,” she said, a trifle impatiently, “and the rest of you would please stand clear, I can now give him something that will further reduce his pain and help his injuries heal.”

In a different context, it wouldn’t have sounded ominous at all. In view of what I’d just been saying, nobody was about to take the offer entirely at face value — but I was the only one who knew how much I could have told the others and hadn’t, so I was perfectly prepared to play along.

“Sure,” I said, rising to my feet without the slightest hesitation. “Whatever you’ve found, it has to be better than codeine. I’m on my way.”

I didn’t know what to expect as I walked towards the door, while my companions obediently held back, but I was looking forward to another opportunity to talk to Alice. I didn’t suppose that she’d answer my questions any less guardedly than before, but I figured that the mere fact of my having a second session closeted away with her would increase my advantage over my fellow prisoners. Even if I couldn’t contrive actually to become an officially designated go-between, I figured, I could at least pretend.

Like a fool, I was too busy formulating my own grand plan to anticipate what actually happened next.

I had reached the threshold and was just about to cross over into the waiting darkness, when I was struck down from behind. I was shoved hard, and cleverly, so that I went down face first, sprawling across the open doorway.

If I’d had even half a second’s warning I’d have been able to get my hands spread, in such a way as to prevent my nose coming into contact with the floor, but I didn’t. Once I’d actually been hit, mere reflexes weren’t up to the job.

As the pain exploded in my mind I lost track of everything, except that two feet came down in the small of my back, one after the other. They didn’t belong to the same person; two people bounded over my fallen body, each one using it as a springboard as they hurled themselves through the doorway.

That seemed to me to be adding insult to injury, twice over.

I fought with all my might to recover my presence of mind, and the capacity to act in spite of the agony, but I still needed to be picked up and helped to my feet. Yet again, it was Mortimer Gray who took the lead in rendering assistance, but this time Adam Zimmerman had come to help him.

I couldn’t reply immediately to their inane inquiries as to whether I was “all right” but it must have been obvious that I wasn’t. I was incandescent with pain — and with rage.

I still couldn’t see properly when Solantha Handsel dragged a struggling Alice through the doorway, but I knew that the person still missing had to be Niamh Horne — the only member of our tiny community fully kitted out to see almost as well in near darkness as she did in ordinary light.

The sane and sensible thing to do would have been to stand clear and get myself into proper fighting trim, but fighting isn’t a sane and sensible business. I was still near enough to the door to get in the bodyguard’s way, although I had to shake off a couple of restraining arms to make a good show of it.

“Let her go,” I said to Solantha Handsel, with all the menace I could muster.

She actually looked surprised.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I had to do it that way, or we’d have lost the opportunity.

“Just let her go,” I said.

“Don’t be stupid,” she retorted, undiplomatically. She couldn’t help the reflex that made her hold on to her captive just a little more tightly. That was when I hit her, right between the eyes.

Her nose didn’t break, and I had the impression that it wouldn’t have broken even if I’d hit an inch lower, at the most vulnerable point. My knuckle was probably a good deal more vulnerable than any part of her — but she was used to the protection of state-of-the-art IT, and she wasn’t expecting the uninsulated shock and pain that followed the punch. She wasn’t expecting the kick in the belly either, but it would have hurt a lot more if I hadn’t been barefoot.

The bodyguard let go of Alice, and collapsed in a heap that must have seemed even more undignified to the astonished observers than the heap I’d been in when she hit me from behind.

Nobody else surged forward to grab Alice when Solantha Handsel let her go, but Niamh Horne had already returned from her excursion. The cyborg was blocking the doorway, so there was no opportunity for Alice to run into the darkness.

I did the best I could to get between Alice and trouble, but it wasn’t possible to cover both directions at once. Solantha Handsel came slowly to her feet. Her wrathful anguish was a joy to behold.

“You’re insane,” she told me, in what might conceivably have been a dutiful manner. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“No, I don’t,” I agreed, “and neither do you. You might be the best trained fighting machine in your unviolent Utopia, but I’ve actually been in real fights, without IT to help me. You’ve proved that you can hit me in the dark and from behind, but I’m still willing to find out what you can do when I’m actually looking.”

“This isn’t necessary, Tamlin,” Lowenthal’s voice swiftly cut in. He probably intended his tone to be soothing.

Solantha Handsel wasn’t listening. She probably figured that she had given fair warning, and was now at liberty to tear me apart. She got up and made as if to come at me, with her deadly hands ready and willing to chop me into little pieces, figuratively if not literally.

And that was when Christine Caine hit her from behind, with a full water bottle.

As improvised weapons went, the plastic bottle wasn’t very useful, and Christine hadn’t anything like the body mass or musculature of Lowenthal’s bodyguard — but the blow was delivered with a will and the cyborg hadn’t been expecting it. The most surprising thing about it, from my point of view, was the expression on Christine’s face, which faded almost immediately from sheer astonishment to something much more peculiar: a far deeper sense of puzzlement.

Solantha Handsel went down again, but she was hardly injured at all except for her dignity. I kicked her a second time as she sprawled, but without any kind of footwear to protect my toes I had to be careful not to inflict more damage on myself than I could on her.

I think Niamh Horne might have come forward then to settle the matter if it had been her call, but she and Lowenthal had already exchanged glances. She had shaken her head to indicate that she hadn’t been able to get out of the corridor into which the door opened, and hadn’t found anything useful there.

Lowenthal must have calculated that there might be more to be gained by letting me run with the ball than by trying to hold on to it by force. When Solantha Handsel rose to her feet again he was quick to say: “That’s enough. Let them go.” He paused for a significant couple of seconds before saying: “Do you need medical attention too?”

Solantha Handsel was too angry to speak, but she shook her head in a suitably derisory fashion.

“Right?” was all that Lowenthal said to Alice.

It was enough. She nodded her head.

Niamh Horne stood aside and let us pass through the doorway unimpeded. The door closed behind us, leaving us in the darkness.

“That wasn’t necessary,” Alice said, as she guided me back to the cupboard.

“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed, nursing my pain. “It wasn’t even sensible. But there was no way in the world I was going to resist the temptation. I’m the barbarian from the dawn of time, remember.”

“I’m older than you,” she reminded me, as the lights came on again.

This time she had a hypodermic syringe ready, and a vial from which to draw liquid.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“Nanobots,” she told me.

“I thought we weren’t allowed privileges of that sort.”

“They’re making an exception.”

“They?” I queried. “Not
we
?”

“
We
’re making an exception” she said, a trifle wearily. It didn’t sound like a wholehearted correction. “We didn’t want you here, but now you are here you’re our responsibility. I know it’s difficult, given that you don’t know what’s going on, but it would help us all if you were to be patient.
Please
don’t do anything else to make things worse than they already are.” I gathered from this speech that the negotiations in which she and her companion were involved were proving almost as frustrating and unhelpful as Lowenthal’s conference.

“How am I supposed to know what might make matters worse?” I asked her, without having to feign annoyance. “You can’t blame Handsel and Horne for trying to find out more about their situation. Maybe it would have been a stupid move to try to beat the truth out of you, but if you wanted us to stay quiet you should have let us sleep.”

“I agree,” she said. “But we have all kinds of conflicting demands coming in. We have to keep a lid on things until we’ve set a meeting place. It’s all spinning out of control, and we have to do everything possible to keep the game going. You have to calm things down back there, if you can.” She jabbed the hypodermic in as she pronounced the final phrase, as if to emphasize it. Maybe she thought the note of challenge would get results, but I needed a better incentive than that. I wasn’t prepared to believe that I was better off not knowing what kind of “conflicting demands” she and her mysterious companion were trying to satisfy.

The nanobots were good. The injection itself hurt like hell, but the condition of my nose wouldn’t have allowed me simply to snort the stuff, and the needle got the bots to the site in no time at all. Once there, the pain dwindled away.

“It’ll take an hour or so for the swelling to go down,” she told me. “A couple of hours more to knit the tissues. Don’t get into another fight, though — they’re limited.”

“How much longer will it be before we get to where we’re going?” I asked.

She looked me up and down. I figured that she had to have some kind of private data feed, like the one Davida had had while we were on Excelsior, but I had no way to know how tightly she was confined by orders, or what scope she had for using her own initiative.

“It’s not settled yet,” she told me. “Locations are symbolically loaded — ask Lowenthal and Gray about
their
peace conference experience. However it works out, this showdown will be a defining moment in the history of the solar system and all the different humankinds — perhaps
the
defining moment. We have to establish the principle that it ought to take place now before we can determine where and how.”

“I’ve bought you a little extra breathing space” I reminded her. “If I knew what I was fighting for, I might be able to buy you a little more. If you’re prepared to trust me, I’ll try to get whatever information you need from Lowenthal and Horne.” I was feeling a
lot
better, and was entirely ready to be proud of my tactical skill if she decided to reward my quixotic gesture by giving me further clues as to what the hell was going on — but she wouldn’t play.

“I can’t,” she said.

“In that case,” I told her, “I can’t help you. I have to play the game as I see it.”

“So do they,” she said, bitterly. “That’s the problem. They’re very fond of games — and they’re determined to play this one to the end, despite the lack of time. They’re very fond of stories too, so they’ll delight in keeping you in suspense if they can. You might need to remember all that, if things do go awry.” She gave the impression of someone who was trying hard to pass on some good advice under adverse conditions.

“Who the hell are we talking about?” I asked, plaintively.

“They won’t play if we don’t handle it their way,” she said, doggedly. “If it were up to me, I’d tell you everything now — but if it were up to some of them, they’d have kept you in blissful ignorance forever. We all have to compromise. That’s the thought you have to hold in mind, Madoc. We
all
have to compromise. If we can’t get together, we’ll
all
lose — and by lose, I mean
die
. However crazy this gets, the end is real. It’s all play, all drama…but it’s for real. The cost of losing might be as high as extinction.”