Cosmonaut Keep (33 page)

But I was glad of it now. I had to restrain a whoop when the screen returned a blank, almost the instant my thumb left the virtual switch that fired off the query.

Next I scanned around for a data-input port, and found one -- eccentrically but appropriately -- at 180 degrees around from the search-engine slot. I zapped the test data in, rotated my viewpoint, and repeated the query.

The data I'd just entered scrolled before me, like another boring chapter in the Book of Numbers.

The sight of it sent chills down my back.

With a sense of satisfaction alloyed with a certain sadness, I said: "Finished?" and the interface said yes and went away.

I joined Camila on the way to Driver's office. Her hand brushed mine, like a wing in flight.

"Hi, Matt." Warm smile. "Did you have time to -- ?"

"Yes," I said, quite truthfully. "Didn't find anything though."

"Ah. Shit. Worth a try though, anyway. Guess they're being real cautious. Smart guys."

"Yes," I said. "They'd have to be."

But not as smart as you, Camila,
I didn't say.

"So that's it," said Driver, after taking the reports. "We can start production tomorrow."

"Hell, we can start it now," said Avakian. "For this job I'd be happy to pull an all-nighter."

This meeting was bigger than our unofficial cabal; the various team leaders were patched in through their spex and ours, filling the cramped room with an unreal crowd and forcing the graphics into surrealism. Driver, probably unwilling to let Avakian show off his skills in yet another frivolous and manipulative manner, had declined the offer of a full-immersion conference space.

The overlapping phantom shapes of Sembat, Telesnikov, and Chumakova all became simultaneously agitated at Avakian's remark.

"We can't do it," Sembat said. "Be realistic. The team is exhausted, we've been prepping the fabs all day -- "

"And we've been on EVA hauling materials," said Telesnikov, on behalf of the cosmonauts. "Anything more, and we'll start having accidents. Out there, that means possible fatalities."

Driver took the last point with the bored skepticism of a manager listening to a union rep, but he raised his hand and nodded, glaring for a moment at Avakian.

"Okay, okay, Mikhail, there's no question of working further tonight. It's hardly a matter of urgency. Paul."

Lemieux, shaved and spruce again, smiled down at us.

"However," he began. "There is a growing urgency to the entire project, which I'd like to impress upon you and urge you to communicate to your teams. You've all heard the news today, unless you have been even more dedicated than you appear to have been."

Solemn nods all round. Chumakova looked as though she were about to say something, then thought better of it.

"I must thank all of you for your discipline in continuing to work, regardless of the ... distraction and anxiety and indeed indignation which the news has doubtless provoked. We must hope that our political intervention will help toward a political solution, and in the meantime we must work harder to demonstrate that much of the political and military conflict is now obsolete, as Camila said."

This seemed to soothe and impress most of the people present and telepresent, but it only made me wonder further just what game he was playing. The day's events were a savage reminder that we weren't playing games; that the strategy of releasing the code-crackers and flooding the world with secrets was not without consequence. People no longer knew what to believe, and a lamentably large number were ready to believe anything.

The news reports I'd put firmly from my mind throughout the day replayed themselves in flashback. Only yesterday it had seemed that the political crisis in the E.U. was easing off into negotiation. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- this, a rash of riots had broken out across Western Europe. Mostly in the poorer areas, the ones where the mafias had more influence than the Party. (Parts of Leith, I'd noticed, were literally in flames.) Apolitical, apocalyptic slogans accompanied the trashing and looting; a lot of people seemed convinced that the governments, all governments, were somehow in league with the aliens. Not just our aliens, but the aliens of popular nightmare, the sinister, satanic Grays.

"Matt? You with us?"

Avakian's nudge brought me back to the moment. The others had gone, and we were back to the small cabal. I took off my spex and rubbed my eyes, looking around at Armen, Camila, Driver, and Lemieux. We didn't seem such a cozy little clique anymore, now that I knew a bit more about what was going on.

"You're very tired," said Driver.

"Yeah," I said. "And worried. I know a lot of people in the area of the rioting in Edinburgh, and Jadey's still in a jail just a couple of kilometers away from it."

Driver nodded. "We all have worries, we all have people back home. There's nothing we can do, except get on with the job."

I considered confronting him then and there, but decided against it. There was Camila to consider, and I didn't quite have her angle figured out yet.

"Okay," I said. "Let's get some sleep."

Sleep was not on my mind, though it was on my brain. As soon as we'd secured the curtain Camila started climbing out of her clothes, and I did likewise. We bumped and rolled, laughing. She caught me and held me.

"I need this," she said. "I need you. Otherwise I'd get very tense."

"Well, thank you," I mumbled. "So would I."

For a while I forgot about whatever reasons she might have for being tense. Then, as we hung in a contented, conjoined orbit of our own around the sun, the question came back.

"Have you swept up?" I whispered.

"I do that as regular as brushing my teeth," she said. "Why?"

I pulled my face away from her shoulder.

"Could you put some music on?"

She fished out a player, and I adjusted the volume carefully so that it would cover our voices against direct eavesdropping.

"You took a risk," I said, "playing that little game with the mil-spec stuff."

Her arms tightened, her legs clenched for a moment, then she relaxed again. She frowned at me.

"What 'little game'?"

"You ported the specs across yourself, zapped your handbooks into the interface, right?"

She screwed up her eyes and shook her head.

"What makes you think that?"

"I found out today that the interface doesn't actually have access to all the data held on this station."

She pushed me away, herself back. We fetched up on opposite partitions of the space, facing each other.

"Shit," she said. "This is serious. Don't you trust me?"

"Yeah, I
trust
you," I said. "But I don't expect you to always tell me everything. I'm just letting you know that I've figured out what you're doing, and to warn you -- because I do trust you, see -- that at least one of our friends will have figured out the same thing. Driver or Lemieux knows it."

She closed her eyes again, then stared at me.

"Let's take it from the top, okay?" she said. "How did you find that the interface can't access every computer here?"

I told her about my little experiment.

"And you concluded for that, that I must've zapped in the mil-spec data myself?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, I didn't! I really don't believe in lying, Matt. Not like this. Why would I do that, anyway?"

"To get first dibs on testing the AG engine, and maybe ... taking it home?"

She laughed. "It's a neat idea. Wish I'd thought of it."

"All right, so how d'you explain how the interface knew U.S. military conventions for labeling diagrams?"

"No idea at all," she said. "I'm as baffled as you are. What made you wonder about that, anyway? Was it because you found you couldn't eavesdrop through the interface?"

"No." I omitted telling her I hadn't even tried out her suggestion. "No, it's because I realized that Driver or Lemieux or both of them were bullshitting us the day we arrived. They told us there was no way the project data could have got to ESA without them knowing, and I thought this meant that the aliens had hacked the datastream. But I wasn't thinking properly. There was something I hadn't taken into account."

"What?"

I fumbled behind the webbing and in the pocket of my fatigues, and pulled out the datadisk that the Russian officer had given to Jadey.

"This," I said. "It was passed to Jadey in very dangerous circumstances. Now, I can just about believe that was the result of information being inserted in the data outflow from this station, with an ESA address attached, and that it just sort of rattled around in various automated systems. But getting this thing out would have required deliberation, decision, organization. This was no accident -- as the commie saying goes."

"Okay," she said. "Go on."

"Which does rather strongly suggest that it was released deliberately from here, and not by aliens either. By Driver, Lemieux, or both of them, in liaison with whatever organization on the ground they're working with -- probably the same one that got the disk to Jadey."

I grinned at her, across that five-foot gulf.

"And Jadey is connected to an organization financed by -- among others -- Nevada Orbital Dynamics. Your employer's company. Which means you and I, my dear, have been connected all along. Now, isn't that sweet?"

Camila smiled back at that.

"And of course the company sent us here," she said. She described a circle with her finger. "It's all a big chain, and it's all come back to here."

"Yes," I said. "And we know what's at your end of it, the American end, but we don't know what's at the European end -- this end. We don't know who's pulling it. We don't know who's hauling it in."

The following morning the news was slightly better, if shots of gutted buildings and talk of firefighting and arrests and casualties counts as "good." The damage ran into billions. The rioters were duly denounced, or carefully
not
denounced, and analysis of the nuances of such pronouncements kept a lot of heads talking. Camila and I were called to Driver's office for a pre-work meeting.

"Just stand by," he told me, "and keep channels open to the fabs. No doubt there'll be glitches when it comes to actually running it. Just keep out of the way the rest of the time, maybe get started on the big 'engine' plan when you have a chance. And Camila, you hang out with the crew working on your ship, make sure they know what to take out and what to leave. Armen, stick close to the production teams. Give them anything they need on the science front, and keep track of progress on the second project."

"Fine," said Camila. "That's what we were going to do anyway."

"Before you go," said Lemieux. "And you too, Armen, please stay."

He glanced over at Driver.

"We have something to tell you."

Camila clapped her hand over a giggle.

The two men looked so serious and embarrassed, I could for a moment almost believe they were about to declare their longstanding love for each other.

"We've been listening to you," Driver said. "Sorry about that."

"How?"

"Camila," Lemieux said, "I know you are not a spy, because if you were, you would know that your anti-surveillance device works very well against E.U. wet-tech bugs, but not, unfortunately, against the latest U.S. microbots."

"The Federal Security Bureau," said Driver, "never uses anything else."

"Well, I hope you had fun," I said.

They exchanged another embarrassed glance.

"We are sorry to have violated your privacy," said Lemieux. "But it is the political and not the personal element in your conversations which was of interest to us. We think misconceptions may arise if we don't take you into our confidence, and we can't afford that."

He looked over at Armen. "And you, too, are clever enough to figure things out eventually, and clever enough to get them wrong. We all have to trust each other, because the next few days are going to be very dangerous indeed. Matt, you spoke of a chain of links, and you were right. You said you did not know what is at our end of it. It's time you did."

17

____________

Judgement of Krakens

Night had fallen, with the suddenness characteristic of that latitude, while they had been in the bar. Lights marked out the long street around the shore. Gregor hurried through the now denser crowd on the esplanade's pavement, and fell in beside Lydia. Elizabeth and Marcus walked quickly ahead of them.

Lydia smiled and caught his hand, swinging it as she strode along.

"It's good to see you again," she said. "Even in such a difficult situation for your friend Salasso."

"How did you come to find out about it?"

She took a small rectangular box from a deep pocket in the side of her skirt, then slid it back.

"Radio. On shore, most of us carry them. I was out shopping this evening when I got a call from Bishlayan, one of our saurs. She knows Salasso, and they were talking when the trouble started. She lent her radio to Salasso, who gave me a list of places where I might find you."

"What kind of trouble is Salasso in?"

"Nothing violent. The saurs are not like us -- they do not
brawl.
As to what it is, best you see for yourself. It is very tense. I'm really glad I found you as quickly as I did. It was such a relief to see you and Elizabeth."

Gregor couldn't hear any hint of irony or reproof.

"Uh ... About Elizabeth, she and I -- "

"Yes," said Lydia, "I see that you like each other."

Again the same uncomplicated note. Gregor frowned.

"You're not ... upset?"

She gripped his hand tighter. "Why should I be? I could see that she liked you back in Kyohvic, that day at the lab. I'm pleased that you have someone to be with."

"I still don't understand."

"It's possible to love more than one person at once," Lydia said earnestly. "My father does."

"Yes, but that's
different
-- "

She shot him a look. "Don't be so naive."