Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (49 page)

“What?”

“Slave your ‘plants to the mainframe, and I’ll show you.”

Hallows obeyed, grateful for the interruption. The starfield through his visor immediately gave way to a symbolic representation of the probe’s reactivated computer network. The view resembled a scene from an Escher painting, with impossible angles and planes jutting out of a mottled grey valley. A Teutonian spear floated over the surreal landscape: Gehrke’s idiosyncratic icon.

“I was browsing through the d-mat systems when I found it,” said the systems analyst. The spear guided Hallows down into the mainframe. “Here, here and here.” The spear stabbed at structures in the datafield. “This is what’s slowing up the ‘frame.”

“What is it?” Tarasento’s question preempted Hallows’ own.

“One massive file, so large it’s swallowed all the available free memory, and then some. Parts of the core programming have been over-written. It’s not a virus, though. Someone deliberately put it there.”

“Does it have a name?”

“That’s the best bit. Look at this.” The spear dipped lower, into a rift in the massive structure, and came to rest pointing at a slab stamped with the brief message:

PEARCE 0114B4M11

“Pearce? He was one of Prosilis’ team, wasn’t he?”

“Spot on, Jimmy: he
was.
This file is all that’s left of him now.”

“It’s a message from him? Does he say what happened?”

“No, it’s not a message. It’s
him.”

Tarasento’s sharp intake of breath was clearly audible over the radio. “Jesus.”

“The file is in standard holographic crypt,” Gehrke explained, “straight out of the d-mat systems. He must have loaded himself into the capsule and sent the data into
Saul-1’s
mainframe rather than out into space. And here it is, jamming everything around it.”

“Can we download him?” asked Hallows. “Feed the file into the d-mat systems and bring him back?”

“Maybe he can tell us what happened,” Tarasento added.

“We could try, when the shipments from Earth stop.” Gehrke didn’t sound too confident. “But I don’t think he’d thank us.”

Hallows silently agreed; tempting though it was, it would be cruel to resurrect the refitter before they had worked out a way to rescue him.

“Maybe later,” he said. “Keep digging, Roald. See what else you find. Let me know when you break into the comm system.”

“Will do.” Gehrke sounded tired. “I just thought you’d like to know what happened to another of our predecessors.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“But if you come across any other corpses,” Tarasento added, “for God’s sake don’t tell me. I don’t want to know ...”

~ * ~

Hallows found the graffiti on the third day. The probe, for all its sophistication and redundancies, lacked even something as simple as chalk or an ink pen. The message had been physically etched into an interior bulkhead twenty-three years earlier by one of the members of the first refit crew, and signed by them all:

HI, GUYS AND GALS.

LEAVE THE KEY UNDER THE MAT WHEN YOU LEAVE!

—CHAMBERS, MAXWELL AND HARTOG.

An unknown time later, someone else had scribbled cryptically underneath:

THE KEY IS HERE, AND THE CHOICE IS YOURS.

USE IT IF YOU WANT TO.

3:50.

The final ratio might have been a signature—although it was too short for an ident-code—or it might have been a time. Ten minutes to four? March, 2050? There was no way of knowing, without further clues.

Hallows stared at the words for at least five minutes before deciding not to tell the others. The first message was too depressing; the last meaningless. Either could be enough to drive a stake through what little remained of his crew’s morale.

After the discovery of the
PEARCE
file, he and Tarasento had argued over what to do with Prosilis’ body. Hallows had wanted to leave it where it was, but the younger man had expressed extreme discomfort at the thought of a corpse aboard the probe. What the three of them didn’t need was more stress, so Hallows had let Tarasento flush the body out of the drive shaft and into space, where it had vanished almost instantly into the distance.

No one had said anything, not even Gehrke. But the big systems analyst hadn’t needed to; Hallows could read his thoughts like a book:
Go quick, go clean, and don’t leave a mess.
In Gehrke’s personal opinion, Prosilis had been a sloppy bastard for leaving his body behind to torment later arrivals.

Hallows knew what Gehrke would do, perhaps sooner than later. The moment he convinced himself that there was no hope of rescue or escape:
that
would be the time he acted.

Part of him envied the systems analyst’s stubborn surety of mind. Hallows doubted he’d know what to do until the penultimate minute, when the air-processor in his suit winked red for the first and last time.

On the seventh day, Gehrke worked his way into the communication and navigation systems. Instantly he slaved the others to the mainframe and showed them what he had found.

“First things first,” he began. A week of non-stop work leant a thick edge to the systems analyst’s voice. “We’re a little light on the nanos; down by about ten percent optimum, although that’s correcting itself now we’ve set them replicating again. I don’t know why for certain—it might be something to do with the radiation— but there you have it.

“Secondly, there was an impact about a year before Lockley’s team arrived. Not large, but enough to shift course a fraction. It could have been a particle, although that seems unlikely; anything big enough to get through the vanes would probably have destroyed the probe entirely. Whatever it was, attitudes corrected the orientation of the probe and the reception dishes realigned themselves onto the incoming data from Earth. The transmit systems employed their tracking algorithms to relocate Sol. Within twelve hours all systems were back to normal.

“Thirdly ...” Gehrke hesitated. “One year later, seventy-two hours after the arrival of Lockley and Co., the transmit dishes were deliberately sabotaged. Someone over-rode the automatics to point them off target, then erased the tracking algorithms. Why? Again, I don’t know, but whoever did it knew what they were doing. The algorithms are
gone,
and there’s no way of realigning the dishes correctly without them. We could point them in roughly the right direction, but
Saul-1
can’t give us enough sustained power for a wide-beam transmission and a narrow beam could miss the receiving stations around Sol by millions of kilometres. So we really are stuck here.”

“But—”

“Let me finish, Jimmy.” Gehrke changed the view of the mainframe. “There are two more things. Pearce encrypted himself on the nineteenth day. Six days after
that,
someone fiddled with the research systems and commandeered LSM 14—one of the laser spectrometers.”

“Why?” asked Hallows.

“Your guess is good as mine, I’m afraid,” Gehrke sighed. “The obvious scenario, if you ignore the LSM, is that Lockley fucked up the dishes. Maybe he was a saboteur, or just plain crazy. Whatever. When the others realized what had happened, they did exactly what I’ve done. They broke into the comm and navigation systems to see what they could do, but failed to find a solution. So they gave up. They did the work they had come here for, then Prosilis killed himself and Pearce loaded himself into the ‘frame to wait for someone to rescue him.”

“Where do the aliens fit in?” asked Tarasento.

“I don’t know. I can’t account for them at all.”

“And what happened to Lockley?” added Hallows.

“That’s where it really gets weird.” Gehrke’s spear-icon dipped into the mass of communications programs, selecting options too quickly for Hallows to follow. A virtual workbench appeared. “My first thought was that they threw him overboard, but that doesn’t make sense when you dig deeper into the core. For instance, this is the LSM’s control-window. Watch what happens when I enter a command.”

Words flashed across the window, but instantly disappeared. A brief message appeared in their place:

COMMAND OVER-RIDDEN.

READY FOR TRANSMISSION.

“‘Transmission’?” echoed Hallows. “Of what?”

“And over-ridden by whom?” Tarasento asked.

“By Lockley,” replied Gehrke. “He did this. He locked the LSM in place. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t shift it.”

“What about manually?” Hallows asked.

“It’d only move back. And why would we want to anyway?”

“That depends on what it’s pointing at.”

Hallows could hear the shrug in Gehrke’s weary reply. “Nothing, as far as I can tell. Lockley, damn him, didn’t say.”

“How do you know it was Lockley?” Tarasento asked.

“He was the systems officer of the last crew, that’s how.”

“Then he must have known what he was doing.”

“Maybe, and maybe not—but he sure as hell wanted the laser to stay where it is. Just like he wanted to make sure we stayed here by erasing the tracking algorithms.”

“He did that, too?”

“Of course.”

“Why him?”

“What do you mean, ‘Why him?’ Who else could have done it? The goddamn
aliens?”

“Why the fuck not? They must have been doing
something
before the others arrived—”

“Easy, you two.” Hallows leaned forward to study the words in the window, but the virtual image remained a constant distance from him. “Roald, can you give us a view of where the LSM is pointing?”

“I tried that, but—”

“Just do it.”

The window vanished. A red-shifted starscape took its place.

“Can you magnify that?”

“It’s already on full. To get a better look, we’d have to reorient the probe and use the forward sensors. And I don’t think Lockley would let us do that either, somehow.”

Hallows studied the stars for a long moment, searching for anything out of place. “I can’t see anything,” he finally said.

“That’s what I told you,” snapped Gehrke. “There’s nothing there. Nothing for hundreds of light years.”

“What about the wreck itself? Have we checked to see if it’s drifting? Maybe when Lockley aimed the laser, that’s what it was pointing at.”

“Maybe ...” Gehrke grudgingly acknowledged the point. “I can find out.”

“Do that, Roald. And while you’re at it, check the status of the d-mat systems. I want to make sure that, assuming we find a way to realign the dishes, we
can
leave. So much has been screwed up here I’m not willing to assume
anything
any more—except that we can’t give up yet.”

“Like Lockley did?” Tarasento broke in, his voice thin with strain. “He killed himself, just like the others.”

“Jimmy—”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it, Rod? The aliens fucked up the transmit dishes, and Lockley saved us the trouble of trying to save ourselves. Then he beamed himself nowhere, took the easy way out—”

“Not necessarily. I met Bill a couple of times back in the training centre. He didn’t seem the sort to give up
and
force us to do the same.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, I don’t. But that’s what I believe.”
Because I have to believe in something
, he added to himself.

There was an empty pause, then:

“This is bullshit,” Tarasento said. “Count me out until you find some good news.”

There was no click as he disconnected, just deeper silence.

“He’s right, you know,” said Gehrke into the void. “We’re fucked.”

“Not yet.” Hallows disentangled himself from the mainframe. Gehrke sounded dangerously close to making his decision. “We’ll see what happens.”

“You really think Lockley had something up his sleeve?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re as crazy as he was.”

Again, there was no indication that Gehrke had signed off, but Hallows could tell from the silence that he was on his own.

~ * ~

When he had finished the work that Gehrke’s announcement had interrupted, he wandered forward to the nose of the probe, where high-resolution dishes and scanners pointed with unceasing vigilance towards Eta Bootis.

Saul-1
was still on-course; Gehrke had ascertained as much on the first day. It was hard to believe that in a little less than eleven years the probe would become the first human-made artefact to circle the alien sun. Hallows couldn’t help but envy the seventh crew of refitters, who would at least have an historic view before dying. All
he
had seen was one unexplained alien hulk, tantalizingly out of reach. In its own way, that was worse than nothing; given time and the right equipment...

From where he sat, surrounded by the forward sensors, the craft wasn’t even visible, hidden as it was behind the bulk of the probe. He could understand Tarasento’s reluctance to accept the possibility that the aliens had little or nothing to do with their predicament. If they had to die, then it would be better to do so knowing they had played even a minor role in something as important as humanity’s first contact with an alien race.

Suddenly tired, he tethered himself to a nearby stanchion and let his arms and legs hang limp. Residual angular momentum rotated him slowly in the zero gravity until he was facing the carbon alloy of the probe’s skin. Steadying himself with one hand, he used his visor to magnify the scene in front of him. A swarm of barely visible silver dots crawled across a field of matte-black like time-lapse film of an insane night sky. Although the visor was not powerful enough to allow Hallows a detailed view of the individual motes’ activities, he could follow them well enough with his mind’s eye.