Shooting the Rift - eARC (5 page)

Abruptly I broke through, extending a cautious tendril into the wider datasphere, and found the answer. Carenza. She’d been meshed in to my ‘sphere when the roadblocks descended, and hadn’t broken the connection from her end. After all, why should she, when there was nothing there to connect to? But it had left a hole I could use.

And use it I did. My experience trawling the datapools of Summerhall stood me in excellent stead, and I lost no time in finding the files containing the questions and answers. They were encrypted, of course, but barely more heavily than the ones I’d so cheerfully rifled at the university, and my customized sneakware made short work of that.

I’d have to be careful, I reflected, mindful of my earlier downfall. If I used enough of the purloined data to make a clean sweep of the test I’d be bound to raise suspicions, let alone set up expectations for my future performance I’d struggle to maintain. Somewhere around eighty-five percent should be a high enough mark to ensure my acceptance, without standing out too noticeably from the pack.

Before I could begin to siphon off the information I needed, though, a jolt of heavy-duty counter-intrusion code bit off my tendril, and a pair of invigilators began weaving their way between the seated candidates with an air of grim determination. I cut the link from my end, and focused entirely on the question floating in my personal ‘sphere, in a desperate attempt to look innocent. Giving up on the problem I couldn’t solve I skipped it, and began working away at the next, which, thank God, I found a lot more tractable. If I’d broken the connection in time I might still be able to salvage this . . .

“Come with us, please.” The leading invigilator spoke quietly, but her voice still carried in the large, quiet space of the hall. I glanced up, my heart hammering, to see her and her colleague flanking Carenza, who was gazing up at them in complete bafflement.

“Excuse me?” She glanced from one to the other, her brow furrowed. “I’m busy at the moment. Can’t this wait?”

“No.” The senior invigilator reached down, and yanked her unceremoniously to her feet. “Outside, now.”

I stared at the drama I’d unwittingly provoked; fortunately I was far from being the only one, or I’d be signaling my guilt to the entire hall by now. I breathed a silent sigh of relief. By using Carenza’s open link as a springboard, and cutting the link from my end so quickly, I’d fortuitously pointed the finger at her, rather than myself, when the breach was discovered. All I had to do was sit tight, and wait for the fuss to blow over.

“But I haven’t done anything!” Carenza protested, trying and failing to wrench her arm free. Big mistake, as anyone who’d grown up with a sibling could have told her, simply making it easy for the invigilator to apply an arm lock. Expostulating loudly, her feet slipping on the wooden floor, my nemesis was bundled ignominiously towards the nearest exit. “You’re making a mistake!”

“If I had a farthing for every time I’ve heard that . . .” the junior invigilator said, with a sardonic glance at her superior.

Though it does me no credit, I have to admit that my main feeling at that moment was one of vindictive satisfaction. Not only had I got away with it, I’d ensured that Carenza wouldn’t be anywhere near the campus during my own tenure. Or ever, come to think of it. Proving her innocence would take a great deal more intelligence and expertise than she possessed, of that I was sure.

But not the Proctors. They’d go over every scrap of data in the nodes I’d penetrated, tracing back the path I’d taken. They’d analyze every crumb of Carenza’s datasphere, and it wouldn’t take them long to realize she didn’t have anything like the sneakware required to access their system, or the knowledge to use it even if she had. They’d find traces of the link she’d left open to me, and draw the obvious conclusion.

I could still brazen it out, though. If I purged my ‘ware thoroughly, erased every trace of the sneaker, they could suspect all they liked, but they’d never be able to prove anything . . .

And then I made the mistake of taking a final glance at the scuffle by the door, and found myself looking Carenza full in the face.

I just couldn’t do it. However much I detested the woman, I couldn’t lay waste to her life, or her future. My conscience wrestled free of the chokehold I’d been trying to put on it, and kneed me in the groin.

“Wait.” I watched myself stand as if from a distance, feeling every eye in the hall turn in my direction.
It was me
, I pinged.
Not her.

Then, without waiting to be asked, I turned and walked numbly to the nearest exit.

CHAPTER FIVE

In which my luggage falls more slowly than usual.

“What were you thinking?” Aunt Jenny asked, not for the first time.

I shrugged. “What can I say? I got stuck on a question, and I panicked. That’s all.”

“Oh, I get that.” My aunt picked up the bag I’d dropped in the hallway on entering her apartment, and slung it through the door of her miniscule guest room, where it teetered for a moment on the edge of the narrow single bed before falling unnaturally slowly towards the carpet. Either her last houseguest had been from somewhere outsystem, and she hadn’t got around to adjusting the gravity in there back to Avalonian standard yet, or the household environmentals were as scrupulously maintained as her groundside runabout. “But you had a good chance of getting away with it, and still fessed up. Beats the hell out of me.”

“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” I said, although I’d spent most of the last week asking myself the same question, with an equal lack of understandable answers.

“If you say so.” Aunt Jenny still sounded completely baffled. “You don’t even like the girl.”

“That’s not the point,” I said, although to be honest I was some way past wondering what the point actually was by this time.

“I guess not.” Aunt Jenny pushed past me into the apartment’s kitchen, which was almost large enough for the two of us to stand in together, and began boiling a kettle. “Tea?”

“You’re a lifesaver,” I said, and mooched into the living room, where the large picture window gave me a heart-stopping view of Avalon rotating gently below, and the curving flank of the orbital itself. Aunt Jenny’s skyside
pied a terre
clung to the edge of one of the older docking arms, part of the latest layer of accretion under which the original structure had almost entirely disappeared, like an outcrop of rock lying beneath a coral reef. Skyhaven was the oldest, and by now quite possibly the largest, of the orbital harbors, supporting a population and a range of amenities most cities on the surface of Avalon would be hard pressed to match: which of course made it particularly attractive to anyone wanting a home beyond the atmosphere. My aunt certainly seemed to find it more congenial than whatever quarters she might be able to find at the navy yard where she worked, and spent a good deal of her time here. (There was also a modest estate dirtside, where she and Dad had grown up, but we seldom visited my paternal grandparents, so I had no idea how often and for how long she resided there.)

“You’re family. What else am I supposed to do?” my aunt asked, handing me a steaming mug, which I took absently, still absorbed in the spectacle.

“Shame none of the others felt like that,” I retorted. True to form, the Forresters had wasted no time in turning their collective backs on me, in an effort to limit the damage from the scandal. Or, to be more accurate, Mother had turned hers, which meant the others had had little option but to go along with it.

Nevertheless, Dad had done his best to keep up some semblance of awkward conversation while I stuffed what necessities I could salvage from my room into few enough bags to carry away in one go, but his heart clearly hadn’t been in it. He’d regarded me throughout with an expression of hurt bafflement, which disinclined me to reply in much beyond monosyllables, and impelled me out of the home I never expected to see again with almost indecent haste. I’d tried pinging Tinkie a few times since the Naval Academy debacle, hoping for a chance to explain things properly to her, but had received no response beyond a terse
Twat
in reply to my first attempt.

Needless to say, I’d made no attempt at all to contact my mother. Quite apart from the fact that she’d made it perfectly clear she wanted nothing whatever to do with me for the foreseeable future, I was, quite frankly, too scared to even try.

In short, then, thank God for Aunt Jenny, even if I strongly suspected she’d only taken me in as a favor to Dad, and because she knew how much it would wind Mother up. (Even after her real motives had become clear, I was still pretty sure my original guesses had featured in there somewhere.)

“So. Any plans yet?” my aunt asked, sipping her own tea as she settled on the sofa facing the window. The view was undoubtedly spectacular, and ever-changing; from here we could see uncountable lights speckling the surface of the orbital, windows like our own spilling their little firefly flickers of life and warmth into the void from the habitation areas, or larger viewports in the recreational and utility zones. Other motes swirled around the artificial horizon, blurring the boundaries—the unceasing swarm of traffic hopping back and forth between Skyhaven and Avalon, or to the other orbitals, the vessels riding at “anchor” in the distance (easily distinguishable from the stars by their slow, relative drift), and, in a few cases, simply taking a short cut around the hull to avoid the frustrations of the internal transport network. Mingled in and around these were innumerable work pods, maintenance drones, and void-suited hulljacks, too many for all but the most complex infomatics to keep track of. When I expanded my datasphere it was almost overwhelmed by the background hum, billions of nuggets of information whirling around like dust in a nebula, which, now I came to think about it, wasn’t that unapt a metaphor: perceived in the aggregate, rather than trying to isolate individual elements, it formed elaborate patterns that were both elegant and organic. Order from chaos, fractals of information . . . “Am I boring you?”

“What? No, sorry.” Lost in the patterns, I’d missed most of what Aunt Jenny had been saying. I shrank the ‘sphere, and refocused on the conversation, seizing on the last remark I’d caught. “No plans.”

Which was hardly surprising. All my hopes and ambitions had been reduced to a smoking ruin, which effectively barred the way back to the old life I’d never felt that great about in any case. “Enlisting in any of the services is right out, of course. Even as a ranker.”

“Word gets around,” Aunt Jenny agreed, sipping her tea. “And it’s not as if your mother’s family has much pull outside the Navy, so . . .”

“Like she’d lift a finger to help me anyway,” I said. The one truly bright spot I could see in the mess I’d made of things was that the storm front of scandal my actions had unleashed had pretty much swept away any prospect of being married off to get rid of me, at least to anyone Mother would have considered a suitable match. “I suppose I’ll just have to do the best I can for myself.”

“Just like that.” Aunt Jenny chuckled indulgently. “You talk a good fight, I’ll say that for you. But you Forresters don’t even know you’re born. It’s dog eat dog out there.” Her outflung arm took in the rest of the orbital, the planet beyond, and a fair chunk of the Western Spiral Arm.

“And the Worrickers do, I suppose.” So far as I could tell, my aunt’s family was cut from much the same cloth as my own, although perhaps a little shabbier. Which made Mother’s choice of Dad as a husband faintly surprising, now I came to think about it: perhaps it had been a love match after all. A concept which, knowing her as well as I did, I must confess I struggled with a bit.

“We’re not afraid to get our hands dirty if we have to,” Aunt Jenny allowed, with a faintly self-satisfied sip at her tea, then she grinned at me unexpectedly. “What couldn’t I have done when I was your age with something as neat as that sneakware you put together. Evading a military grade block, even a low level one like that, was a pretty neat trick.”

Help yourself
, I sent, kicking a copy across to her personal ‘ware.

She chuckled again. “I’m a bit too old for hell raising these days. But it’s a neat bit of work, right enough.” She poked at it, disentangling one of the datanomes I’d helped myself to from Tinkie’s decrypt.
I won’t ask where you got this.

“Good,” I said.

My aunt nodded, thoughtfully. “So you can be discreet if you have to.”

I shrugged. “Never said I couldn’t,” I said.

“Don’t play games, Simon.” The bantering tone had slipped out of her voice, and for a moment she seemed hard and businesslike: I had a sudden mental image of her talking like that to a Guilder captain trying to weasel some extra advantage from the small print of a charter agreement, and smiled in spite of myself. It would be a very astute skipper indeed who managed to put one over on Jenny Worricker. “You need to get a lot better at sneaky if you’re going to get by in the real galaxy.” Then her smile reappeared, as abruptly as it had vanished. “But then you’re a good-looking lad. I’m sure you can find some well-off lass who’ll take care of you instead, if you’d rather go down that route.”

“I’d rather starve,” I snapped back.

“No you wouldn’t.” My aunt shook her head. “Only people who’ve never really been hungry say that.”

“And only rich people say ‘Money isn’t everything,’ I suppose,” I retorted.

She smiled at my naivety. “Mostly the poor ones, in my experience. And it’s generally true, too. But I still wouldn’t turn down a sack full of guineas if I fell over one.”

“Neither would I,” I admitted, and laughed, restored to something approaching good humor, much to my surprise. “Don’t suppose you know where there’s one been left lying around?”

“‘Fraid not.” Aunt Jenny’s expression grew serious again. “You want anything in this life, you have to work for it.”

“Which is where it all falls down,” I said. My upbringing had left me with no skills worth having, beyond making polite conversation without seeming as bored as I actually was. Which, as I pointed out, was hardly a marketable one, especially since the diplomatic service only accepted women.

“Good God, Simon, surely you don’t think diplomacy’s only practiced by diplomats?” Aunt Jenny gesticulated for emphasis, discovering in the process that her tea cup wasn’t quite as empty as she’d thought it was, and dabbed at the resulting stain on the sofa with her sleeve. “Interworld commerce would completely fall apart without the ability to tell bare-faced lies with conviction.” She paused for a moment, and looked at me appraisingly. “If you can keep a muzzle on your conscience, you might do well on a merchant ship.”

“A merchant ship?” I sipped at my own drink, finding it had gone cold while we talked, and disposed of it as discreetly as I could on a nearby occasional table. “You mean—as part of the crew?”

“I don’t mean as part of the cargo,” my aunt said, still rubbing absently at the stain.

I considered this new and startling idea. There was nothing left for me on Avalon, of that I was sure. My reputation was irrevocably tarnished, and with it the family name. Tinkie’s grandchildren would still be trying to live down my dishonorable conduct, if she ever had any.

“I suppose it’d get me out-system,” I said cautiously, rediscovering a little of the thrill I’d felt at the sight of the starship in its cradle at the Academy. Then I spotted the obvious flaw in the suggestion. “Except Avalon doesn’t have much in the way of a merchant fleet.” And what there was of it was so intimately entangled with the Fleet Auxiliary that word of my misdeeds would undoubtedly have preceded me, poisoning any chance I might have had of getting taken on.

“That it doesn’t,” Aunt Jenny conceded, “but there are other options.” She looked at me with an air of faint expectancy, as if she was waiting for the coin to drop, but I only shrugged.

“Can’t see ’em myself,” I said.

“No, you probably can’t.” My aunt shook her head in a faintly pitying manner, and put her tea cup down next to mine, registering the amount I hadn’t actually drunk. “Sod this stuff, I need a proper drink.” She stood, and made for the door, leaving me sitting on the sofa in a state of some confusion.

I supposed I could find something to eat in the kitchen if I got hungry while she was out, although just helping myself might be seen as overstepping the bounds of etiquette more than somewhat . . .

Then she glanced back at me with an air of mild surprise. “Coming?”

If I’d known what that seemingly innocuous invitation was going to lead to, I’d probably have—well, done exactly the same thing, I suppose. But I’d definitely have thought about it for a lot longer.

As it was, though, I didn’t have a clue, so . . .

“Why not,” I said, thereby consigning what little was left of my future to chaos and catastrophe.