Edward M. Lerner (8 page)

“…and behind this door is a bank of fuel cells, providing emergency backup power on this deck. Not very interesting, I think. Standard Leo technology, the same as humans now use.”

Pashwah-qith’s commentary rumbled unintelligibly in human frequencies, the clan-interspeak version scrolling up the virtual display in a corner of Mashkith’s mind’s eye. He had no
certain
way to know an agent’s translation was accurate, but doctrine had an answer for that.

Mashkith and an AI had worked on interspeak drafts until he was confident the lecture disclosed nothing critical about the ship, and the AI had assured him the vocabulary and its connotations were wholly unthreatening. His only choices had been interspeak or the language of a Great Clan—trade agents were not burdened with the “minor dialects.” It grated—but after this quest succeeded, Arblen Ems would
be
a great clan. The greatest clan.

“These double doors open into storage holds. They contain such items as spare parts, chemical supplies, emergency seeds for restarting aeroponics, sheet and bar metal.”

“Excuse me.” (“Arthur Walsh, chief technologist of their Interstellar Commerce Union,” read a pop-up icon in Mashkith’s augmented vision.) “I’m approximating from the distance between doors, but that fuel-cell room is clearly quite narrow. Judging from the gravity, we’re fairly near the ship’s surface. So that’s a shallow room, too.”

At least that was what Mashkith believed to have been said. Just as three agent clones had independently translated the prepared speech back to interspeak as a check, three clones monitored everything now being said to and by the humans. Lothwer would switch translators the instant two or more AI observers questioned anything being said to the humans or about the accuracy of the translations.

“Foremost, my apologies. Dr. Walsh, as a reminder, you will recall we agreed earlier that as a courtesy to our hosts we would gather, organize and prioritize our questions.” (“Ambassador Chung. Voice stress analysis indicates annoyance.”) Pause, then, “You will
not
bring your customary lack of discipline into these meetings.” Whatever had elicited the rebuke was unknowable, radioed to Chung by encrypted channel. Chung’s reply was returned in the same way—but his inexplicable use of a helmet microphone rather than a neural implant allowed eavesdropping. “I don’t
care
about fuel-cell efficiencies.” (“Controlled anger.”)

Mashkith addressed only the public comments. “We find merit in your structured approach, Mr. Ambassador.” Mashkith, too, was quietly furious. At himself. He had approved the path through
Victorious
and the description to be given of their route. Any course through the ship inevitably passed some key subsystem or potential vulnerability he had preferred not to disclose. The cabin now receiving unwanted attention actually contained a key secondary backup comm node, not fuel cells. Walsh was correct: Standard fuel cells in a room that size would not be much of a back-up. But which lie did the human suspect? One about fuel-cell technology or one about how the ship was being described?

That question must wait; the designated Pashwah-qith had resumed the prepared script. Mashkith still needed to concentrate—even translated, English seemed to require explicit verbs. He hoped in time to become accustomed to it.

“We have arrived at our conference room. I apologize for the long walk, but we have few rooms tall enough for you.” The centerpiece of the chamber was a newly constructed table. Hard, backless stools allowed the humans to sit despite backpacks and oxygen tanks. In almost one Earth gravity, the unsupported weight hanging behind the stools would be uncomfortable. Distractingly so, was the theory.

Soon standing crew and seated visitors were almost eye to eye. “Please make yourselves comfortable. My officers and I welcome you aboard. As our species come physically together for the first time,
Victorious
has earned her name. We have indeed conquered interstellar space.”

An unattractive bass growl ensued. (“Chung clears his throat. No meaning.”) “We would like once more to express our admiration and appreciation for your great journey. The worlds of the United Planets look forward to a new level in an already long and fruitful relationship.”

“I propose that we introduce ourselves briefly,” Mashkith said. “If that is satisfactory, Ambassador, will you begin?”

Chung and his people droned on. Whenever the presentations lagged, Pashwah-qith encouraged them with requests for an additional detail, or drove them to repetition and circumlocution with assertions of difficulties in translation.

All the while, hidden cameras behind the humans watched their backpack tell-tales. Mashkith watched their oxygen reserves ebb. When encrypted radio traffic ramped up, Mashkith did not need the humans’ codes to understand the gist: time to go.

Which meant almost time to get to the point.

What advantage, wondered Art, did this faceplate-to-face meeting have over ship-to-ship broadcasts? The tour had certainly been a disappointment. He was on an
alien starship
, but all he had seen were tunnels like those in habitats across the solar system. His first attempt to get a little useful information—the blistering reprimand Chung had delivered over a private radio band made clear how impolitic the remark had been—had gotten him nowhere. Now his mission colleagues were extemporizing life stories, although bio files could be zapped across in a moment.

And why the circuitous route through the ship? The Foremost had said there were few rooms tall enough for humans. But if the goal were to scale things for the Snake crew, why not build the meeting room near the on-axis airlock? Why build a long, convoluted, human-height path that meandered through the ship?

Arrrgh. “Are you getting
anything
useful from this?” Art asked Keizo on a private channel. “Please say you are.”

“These ritualistic ceremonies? Ordinarily I might, for example by interpreting individual reactions to the repetitions, but dialoguing through AIs filters out much of the cultural context.”

In short: no. “They came six light-years to be here. When do they plan to actually talk about it? I mean, how did they
do
it? How long was the trip? Why visit
us
, rather than, say, the equally close-to-them Centaurs … or did they also send a ship to Alpha Centauri? Where do they want to visit in our solar system? What was the accident? What help do they need?”

The sulfur dioxide-tainted atmosphere nearly balanced the pressure inside their spacesuits; this time Keizo accomplished a recognizable, if awkward, shrug. “Patience, Art. In many cultures, including that of my Japanese ancestors, to open a discussion with business matters is extremely rude.”

“I’ve dealt for years with Pashwah, from whom this translator was evidently cloned. She is always direct and business-like. Hell, she’s brusque by my standards and I have
no
manners.” Just ask Chung. “The ICU was told that she is based on Snake psychology and culture, the better to represent them.”

“The K’vithians may have multiple cultures, just as we do,” Keizo suggested. “Perhaps the Foremost is from a tradition less mainstream than most. Ambassador Chung, after all, maintains a quaint resistance to the use of neural implants.”

“Whatever differences exist between the team members, we all represent the UP as a whole. No one’s behavior differs radically from that of Talleyrand,” the UP’s trade agent to the Snakes, Pashwah’s distant counterpart. “It just seems odd to me that
these
Snakes behave so different than their own long-term representative.” Art zapped yet another unsolicited message to Chung, urging specific topics to be raised.

The curt response came quickly: not now.

Rambling introductions continued until Chung began squirming in his seat. “I’m afraid we must return soon to our shuttle. Our oxygen tanks have a limited capacity, of course.”

“How unfortunate, Mr. Ambassador.” The Foremost gestured towards the door. “As fruitful as this has been, I will not keep you. Please, let us escort you to the lock.”

Fruitful? Try “certifiably content-free.” Their closest approach to an accomplishment, interpreting that term generously, was an in-passing conceptual agreement on the merits of cultural exchange. Art dismounted from the uncomfortable stool, a foot long ago fallen asleep prickling in protest. Had the Snakes
wanted
a session this boring and unproductive? Could they have been wasting time until the humans had to leave?

Why had they come so far only to be reticent?

At the doorway, the Foremost stopped. “Ambassador Chung,” the Pashwah clone said on the alien leader’s behalf. “There is one final matter I had hoped to address today. You will recall our radioed mention we would require help. You have seen the injury to our hull; you can understand how such a need has arisen. There are replacement supplies we wish to acquire.”

Oxygen warning lights on several spacesuits glowed amber, Chung’s among them. They had to leave. “Yes, of course,” Chung said hurriedly. He pointed to an assistant. “Mr. Caruthers will facilitate your resupply. Please let him know your needs.”

Substance, finally! How interesting that the Foremost had waited until his human counterpart was rushed and distracted. “I’d like to help. My ICU connections should prove useful in expediting commercial arrangements.”

Art got a very public and disapproving glare. On the private radio band, Chung added, “Caruthers picked his
own
staff.”

Which, while surely intended as a rejection, wasn’t explicit. Good enough.

Space near the starship began thinning out for the most mundane of reasons: consumption of maneuvering fuel. Helmut grunted his approval. It had gotten far too congested out here. As ships continued to leave, he decided that station-keeping was finally within the capabilities of the
Odyssey
‘s autopilot.

Best to take advantage before the tourists refueled and returned.

He tugged his captain’s cap down over his eyes, relaxing for the first time in days. Corinne murmured
sotto voce
behind him, dry-running another broadcast. Her Nielsen-Sony ratings were astronomical. He drifted off to sleep to the soothing purr of her voice.

He’d worn the battered hat more or less forever, since his first command. It was his only physical memento of those days. Never cleaned, the cap did not lack for odors—and smell is the most basic and evocative of senses, wired to very primitive parts of the brain. Including to memory centers….

The bastards had sneaked up on the
Lucky Strike
, owned and captained by Willem Vanderkellen. Vanderkellen was his name then, a name he was proud of. Willem Vanderkellen IV, to be precise. Whether or not he ever had children, there would be no V.

He had thought he had been oh, so clever. After the initial, hasty, solo exploration of a surprisingly ore-rich asteroid, he’d gone on for show and misdirection to prospect four more planetoids. He’d quietly taken out a second mortgage on the
Lucky Strike
by encrypted radio negotiation with the First Interplanetary Bank of Ceres, telling his long-time banker only that he planned to expand his operations. Then he had resupplied on Ganymede, splitting his purchases across a dozen stores but buying everything for a fully equipped, ore-assaying and claim-registering trip. The three rock hounds he brought aboard were old buddies whose loyalty he would have staked his life on.

It turned out they had staked their lives on
him
, and it was a sucker bet.

With its traffic-control transponder illegally silenced, the
Lucky Strike
should have been invisible. For good measure, much of that second mortgage had gone into the paranoid prospector’s favorite gadget: a radar nuller. Its mere possession was highly illegal except aboard military vessels. Its electronics estimated the reflections from detected incident RF pulses (from up to three concurrent sources, for his black-market model, although supposedly military-grade ones could fool a dozen or more sources), then emitted phase-reversed versions of the calculated echoes. Black-market nullers were never quite perfect—proper tuning for a specific ship required calibrating the entire hull’s reflectance within a huge, and hugely expensive, RF-anechoic chamber—but to anything other than a well-equipped naval vessel, the
Lucky Strike
was radar-stealthed. The nuller likewise suppressed any transmitters that might somehow have been smuggled aboard. Only signals from the ship’s antennae, properly integrated with the nuller, could get out.

He still didn’t know how
they
learned of his plans. Probably he never would, and that still ate him up inside. His banker may have put two and two together. One of his friends might have had a fatal case of loose lips at a spacer bar. Maybe the fence who sold Willem the nuller also sold him out.

Or perhaps simple credulity had done Willem in.

How, he wondered years after the fact, by then with a new name, did common knowledge
become
common knowledge? It was holy writ among asteroid prospectors that the shipyards in the Belt were too small, too mom-and-pop, to afford any anonymity. When you had a big score, they whispered to one another, you prepped at one of the big outfitters in Jupiter system. Then came the second bit of revealed wisdom: the down-and-around Jupiter swoop.

Could a reasonably well-financed group of claim-jumpers have planted those seeds in countless apparent drunken conversations? Enough great fortunes came from asteroid lodes to motivate such a conspiracy. Say you
could
lure to Jupiter a few Belters with particularly good prospects. A few radar-nulled satellites could continually monitor all Jupiter-region departures; any ship leaving Jupiter far off its announced flight plan would merit closer investigation.

But how to detect a radar-stealthed ship? Easy as pie: from its heat. The firing of ship engines could not be masked. Any ship that slingshot around Jupiter and, within IR-view of the hypothesized satellites, changed course to reemerge on a substantially different track than the one pre-filed, was betrayed by its own fusion drive. And the surreptitiously re-vectored ship that also disabled its STC transponder and didn’t appear on radar? If he was correct in his speculations, the supposedly hidden
Lucky Strike
had practically screamed “Follow me!”