Acts of Conscience (48 page)

I said, “It’s been... interesting, Mr. Pasardeng.”

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, skin around his eyes crinkling, grinning a man-to-man grin. “I sure as hell don’t know what you did to Hiroko! Never saw a dollie try to follow a guest out the door like that before...”

The translator whispered,
Hiroi
plus
ko
. Spacious child.

I shrugged. Stood staring at him.

Blank look, then, “Oh! Right. I almost forgot.” He pulled his hand out of his pocket and held it out to me, palm up, smiling, waiting for me to take the bit of gold-colored plastic he offered. “They tell me it’ll fit into the dongle socket in your control panel. Whatever the hell that means.”

At Earth and Kent, Arous too, I guess, an IFF transponder would be looking for the signal from a licensing dongle, without which, I’d be arrested, at best. “Well. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. Hell, van Rijn told me that little thing didn’t cost a tenth as much as he was expecting. You gave him a bargain-basement price, boy!”

And I’m certain he made sure to let you know, so I’d be certain to find out. I said, “Ah. Well. It’s been nice meeting you, Mr. Pasardeng.”

“Sure. I...”

I turned away, started up the stairs.

“Hey!”

When I got inside the lock, I didn’t look back, just told the ship’s operating system to raise the gangway and start preflighting the engines. From the control room I could look outside, where Timur-Lengk Pasardeng was hurrying away, trailed by his men.

“Gaetan?” The Kapellmeister, already perched in the flight engineer’s chair, was ready, apparently, to go.

“You get your business finished?”

The float of its eyes told me it had, and maybe a little bit more. Something nervous about those eyes. Something has changed.

“You want to tell me about it?”

It said, “I made a visit to the Salieran agent in this star system.”

“A... human?” I couldn’t imagine a Kapellmeister wandering around a relatively closed society like this unnoticed, or able to accomplish much of anything if it did.

“No. There is an Arousian consulate here, associated with the MEI trade legation. We sometimes work with them.”

“So?”

“There was a visit here, some weeks ago, by the Trade Regency’s FTL starship, the same one that later dropped by Green Heaven. I’d previously received a call about this from a... friend back home.”

I wondered if it could read the look on my face then, see my realization that it’d asked to come with me merely as a pretext. So much for the pleasure of my company.

It said, “Gaetan, the ship was carrying representatives of ERSIE, come to hold a meeting with large shareholders, here on Epimetheus. There were other Trade Regency officials at the meeting and... apparently, a move is afoot that will most likely strip B-VEI of its patents.”

Well. So much for political victories and legalisms. So much for
rule of law
.

The Kapellmeister said, “This will add urgency to the Interventionists’ cause, back on Salieri. My friend was quite concerned. What is your phrase? The balloon may go up sooner than we think.”

Do you really care about this, friend Kapellmeister? I wonder why.

It said, “Gaetan, I need to drop by Snow. Can we go there now?”

The navigation subsystem whispered, 22.91 light years from 40 Eridani to Groombridge 1618.

A long haul, most of the way across human space.
Human space
. What a laugh. I said, “There’s about one interstellar crossing left in the system, you know. After that, I’ll have to refuel.”

It said, “There are... facilities on Snow. I can arrange for you to use them.”

“I always wanted to see Snow. Those ruins...” I plugged my license dongle into the ship’s waiting socket, then told the navigator it was time we were on our way. In a moment, blue light sprayed out across Pasardeng’s well-manicured lawn, an array of fantastic shadows, visible for just an instant before we fell into the sky.

o0o

A little more than a day, then the sixth planet of K2 star Groombridge 1618 grew in our viewscreens, a vast, flattened, reddish-orange world hanging against the black backdrop of the sky. Banded, lighter here, darker there, faint swirl of storms, it was a little bigger than Jupiter, a lot less massive, mother to the usual retinue of icy moons.

No habitable planets here. Nothing even close. Two innermost planets barely outside the star’s corona, bare balls of rock. Two more half the size of Mars, differentiated, but never having had water to concentrate their minerals into easily minable veins. A sparse asteroid belt. The standard batch of gas giants. The only reason humans ever came here is because it was relatively nearby, and because we could. Planet Six and its moons would have been useful, had there been a reason to open this star system to settlement, back in the days when people thought extrasolar colonies had some merit. A lot like Jupiter, sans those vast, worthless radiation belts. Organics all over the place, still cheaper to mine than to synthesize, but not so cheap they’d be worth shipping across interstellar space.

I could imagine those first explorers now, just like us, sweeping in through the system of moons, nearly featureless orange world scudding by below, ring of clouds round its north pole like some pale, monochrome target. And look there, moon number four, the big one, has an atmosphere. Sort of like Titan.

6iv was growing in the viewscreens now, yellowish, with distinctly pink highlights. Not exactly like Titan, of course, with its thick, impenetrable cover of smog. More like Titan as Bonestell imagined it, not long after Kuiper’s discovery was announced in 1949.

We fell into orbit around Snow, and I waited while the Kapellmeister used its pod software to talk to someone or something on the ground, inaudible to me, inaudible as well, apparently, to the ship’s AIs.

Through a thick, transparent atmosphere of blue-scattering nitrogen, I could see a whole world of low, rolling white mountains, mountain ridges capped by thick pink ice, ice contaminated with the organics that even a K2’s weak ultraviolet could synthesize. Sinuous valleys that looked like rivers. Things like lakes, even seas, filled with an ethane solution of ammonia.

Once upon a time, people imagined life in a place like this. Never found it anywhere, not here, or on any other ice moon, though worlds like this are common in the universe. Commoner than terrestrial worlds, at any rate.

Hard to imagine what the first bored explorers thought when they orbited 6iv, just the way we were now, looking down past pale, diffuse orange clouds, down at this empty snowscape and...
There
. Right there, in the lee of those mountains, by the shore of that small, irregular sea. Straight lines, angular shadows...

The Kapellmeister said, “I’ve arranged permission to land. You can set down as soon as
Random Walk
makes contact with ground control.”

Without my asking that they make it so, I heard the AIs chatter away on some high-speed channel to a counterpart somewhere down there, getting landing instructions, then the ship began a rapid deceleration, angling downward, dipping into the atmosphere as the landscape began to grow.

“What took so long?”

The Kapellmeister said, “No one was expecting us. The human team is, of course, a thirty year round trip, slower-than-light, from Earth. They had their first visit from the Trade Regency’s only FTL just weeks ago, now we appear, the third such visitor in their sky...”

Third
. The ship skimmed low over pink-topped mountains, flat, tideless gray sea appearing below, came a halt and settled amid blue shadows at a small landing field beside a town of tan domes. From underneath, the sky was deep indigo, a nearly full Planet Six dominating everything, more than a full degree across, bright enough to wash out all the stars.

For a moment, the landscape, a space artist’s dream, caught my eyes and held them, fields of snow, hills, faraway mountains, the flat gray sea, Six’s image caught, upside-down, on its surface... breathtaking. Nearby, closer than the domes, a tractor rolling across the snow, human shapes dimly visible in its cockpit. Three small ships, no larger than this one, probably suited for little more than flying about among Six’s moons.

The scientists, the few hundred manning this base are stranded here, 15.29 light years from Earth, no starship of their own to carry them away at need...

The library whispered, Snow is isolated, away from the main clustering of stars with habitable worlds in this neighborhood. Earth is closest, at just over fifteen light years. Then Arous, at 16.38, then Kent at 18.02... An interesting litany, demonstrating how our perspectives have changed. What if there were another star, with warm, habitable worlds, only light
weeks
away? They could never reach it on their own, even though its star would shine like a brilliant jewel in the sky.

For a moment, lost in wondering, I don’t think I noticed the fourth ship. Just stared at it, details of its boxy, unusual design sinking in. “What the hell is that?”

The Kapellmeister jumped down from the flight engineer’s chair and started across the floor toward the hatch, feet tocking softly on the plastic. Some of its eyes seemed to float in my direction as it said, “A Salieran warship.”

Faint pang of alarm, without substance as yet. “From your... government?”

It paused by the hatch all eyes turned toward me now. “No. Some friends of mine have... taken it.”

“Stolen?”

“There is some disagreement among my people as to whom these ships actually belong.”

“Why? Why are they here?”

It opened the hatch, and said, “Apparently, archival research has suggested the possibility that there may be a telecannon here. That would be... unfortunate.”

“What do you mean?”

Long stare from featureless round eyes. Then it said, “They suspect an operational launcher for a teleport bomb.”

Out of nowhere, a momentary image of stars sparkling fantastically against a rich, deep black sky. It went down through the hatch while I looked once more through the viewscreen at the boxy ship and the ethereal landscape beyond, then I got up and followed.

o0o

We cycled through the airlock of the largest dome, and when the inner door slid open, warm, excessively humid air hit me in the face, making me recoil. Very poor engineering, old equipment inadequately serviced. When I stepped into the room, a deep voice boomed, “What the
fuck
? Who the hell are
you
?!”

A tall, skinny man in powder blue coveralls, some kind of star-and-orbit decal over his left breast pocket. Black hair, pale skin, ragged beard that might once have been a spade-shaped van dyke. Bright mulberry eyes, full of baffled fury just now. Behind him, there was a short, frightened looking young man and a chunky, stiff-faced blond woman.

I stepped forward, holding out my hand, and said, “Gaetan du Cheyne, owner and commander of Epimethean Registry Starship
Random Walk
. Um.” Who else am I? “Solar Regency citizen.” For what it’s worth.

“Are you from the government?” Desperate look in his eyes.

I wonder what the hell government he could be talking about? The Trade Regency? Not much more than a businessmen’s cabal. “No. Who’re you?”

Deflated. “Landau Martínez. Professor Magistrate of the Terran Pantechnological Institute on Crater. I’m in charge of the archaeological dig here. I...”

“TPI. Did you know Roald Berens and Ntanë Vataro?”

Baffled. “What? A little, sure, I...” Martínez seemed to shake suddenly, and shouted, “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” He gestured at the Kapellmeister. “What’ve you got to do with
these
things, huh?”

These things
? I said, “This is a friend of mine. They, uh, don’t have names.”

Eye-rolling exasperation. “I
know
they don’t have fucking
names
, God damn it! Look here, asshole, an armed fucking non-human
warship
landed here three days ago and...”

Snappety-snick
.
Snippy snap, snapple-snicker
.

Sharp, scissory sounds, like so many pairs of primitive garden shears being worked at once. I turned toward the sound, Martínez and his friends spinning round as well, toward an open door at the far end of the room. Kapellmeisters. Six of them, trotting forward on all those little robot crablegs, waving their chelae, chattering away, eyes whirling and bobbing above their backs.

I thought, Something about the way those eyes are moving, the way their stalks twist round each other, then separate. Agitated. That’s it.

My Kapellmeister said, “Ah, now. They seem
very
upset.”

No shit.

The Kapellmeister ambled forward, feet making small sounds that echoed in the room, meeting the leader of these others in the middle. They stopped, eyes bobbing and weaving, chelae raised, like two absurd little monsters about to join battle. I noticed the other Kapellmeister’s eyes were a splendidly pretty shade of teal.

Then they extended their middle hands in unison, wet-looking black palms slapping together with a sound like raw meat, nine tentacles wrapping round nine tentacles. Motionless tableau, the two of them... frozen in place. Cartoon statues.

My Kapellmeister’s black box whispered, “Oh. I’m very sorry to hear that.

More silence.

Then it said, “Really. You must calm down. You’re only making things worse like this.”

Silence.

“You’re mistaken. Without these allies,
we’re
no better than they.”

Much longer silence. “Well then. We’ll see.” It let go of the other’s hand, turned and trotted back to my side, eyes floating very low over its back. It said, “We must go out to the dig. It seems the weapon has turned up, after all.”

“Oh.” I watched the other six Kapellmeisters turn and walk single file, silently from the room. “What did these guys think they were going to achieve by coming here like this? I mean, the jig’s up now, isn’t it? When the next human ship shows up here, everyone will know what’s going on, won’t they?” I gestured at Martínez and his two stunned-looking henchfolk.