Probability Space (7 page)

She imagined it all, eyes closed, until she fell asleep.

*   *   *

When she woke, it was ship’s night and all the lights were dimmed. Amanda looked at her watch: 0300 hours. She’d slept so much of the day that she woke up in the middle of the night.

No—something had awakened her. Sounds. Someone was in the common room. Someone pulled aside the curtain to her bunk. Salah, with something in his hand.

Amanda screamed. Frantically she scrabbled to the far side of the bunk. Salah cursed and reached for her. She kicked at his hand, and now she could see what was in it: a patch. He was trying to drug her.

“No! No!” She went on screaming, knowing it was hopeless. Her kick hadn’t deterred him at all. He was too big and too strong and he’d said to the others,
“She must just disappear … the life of one child does not outweigh the lives of the thousands…”
But they had all yelled at him! Father Emil and Captain Lewis and Lucy, they’d all yelled at him and so Amanda had thought she was safe—“No! Get away!”

He grabbed her arm with one huge hand and effortlessly pulled her toward him. She hit him in the face, which seemed to have no effect at all. He was going to
kill her
—

Salah’s head rolled off his body.

Blood gushed in a huge fountain from his neck, spattering on the ceiling and soaking Amanda. At the same time, alarms started to shriek and the ship system said loudly, “The hull has been breached. The hull has been breached. The hull—”

In a moment it stopped. The nanocoating extended itself to make a thin, temporary cover over the hole, which was so small Amanda couldn’t see it.

“It won’t hold!” Father Emil said. He stood there, incredibly, with a laser gun … you
never
permitted a laser gun to be used aboard ship!… in front of an open storage cabinet. “I don’t know how to do a permanent patch—do you?”

Of course she did. Amanda scrambled down from the bunk and yanked open the bright red cupboard found in every chamber aboard every ship. She grabbed the permanent patch and ripped it from its bag, but then slipped on the blood covering the floor. Wildly she grabbed at something, anything. Father Emil caught her and pulled her to her feet. Gagging, she made herself climb back into the bunk. Then she couldn’t find the hole.

“The hull has been breached,” the ship began again, but not as loudly. “You are advised that a temporary patch must be replaced with permanent sealing. The hull—”

“The hole will be long and thin,” Father Emil gasped. “I swung the gun to cut off his head, I didn’t know how else to be sure…”

“The hull has been breached. You are advised that a temporary patch must be replaced with permanent sealing. The hull has been—”

Amanda found the gash. It now glowed bright red from the temporary nanos, a beacon. It was only the blood that had made it hard to see. She slapped on the patch and the expensive, highly engineered nanos began to fill in the minute breach. Ship stopped nattering.

In the silence, Amanda and Father Emil looked at each other.

“I was hiding in the storage closet,” Father Emil said quietly. The violence seemed, strangely, to have steadied him. He had seen so much of it. His calm, in turn, steadied Amanda. “I guessed he would try to kill you and then put your body out the airlock. Once it was actually done, the others wouldn’t have turned him in to the cops, because they couldn’t have done that without admitting they’d had you. And the problem would be solved.”

“Wh-where are the others?”

“Undoubtedly patched out. He would have patched me, too, but he couldn’t find me. Salah wasn’t a trained killer, just a fanatical believer in his cause. He probably decided I was praying in the cargo hold or something, and that by the time I got back, he’d be finished anyway.”

“There’s all this blood,” Amanda said.

“Don’t start crying, Amanda.”

“I’m not crying! Do you see me crying? I’m—” What was she? “—disgusted!”

A small smile curved his mouth. “Oh. Then get a scrub brush.”

She did, carrying herself on trembling legs into the galley. By the time she returned, Salah’s head was gone. His body was wrapped in the heavy, dark blue bunk curtain torn free of its hooks.

Father Emil said, “This is nothing for a child to be doing, Amanda. Go get in the shower. Just don’t empty the entire water tank.”

In the shower she began to shake. That man had tried to
kill
her! If it weren’t for Father Emil … oh, she wanted Daddy! She wanted to go home!

She clasped her hands in front of her, water streaming over them, until the shaking stopped.

When she finally left the shower, the common room was spotless. Not only from hand scrubbing but also from cleaner nanos, she guessed, which ate organic molecules and then swiftly died of them. The dead nanos had been sucked up as well. Salah’s body was gone. Hidden? Out the airlock? She didn’t ask.

Father Emil’s eyes looked so tired; Amanda hadn’t known eyes could look that tired. He motioned her toward an empty bunk, not the one she’d had before. “Go to bed, Amanda.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“I know. Do it anyway. You’re safe now.”

Safe? Oddly, she believed him. “Where are we going?”

“Cleopatra Station.”

Cleopatra Station orbited Earth, out beyond the Moon. It was a major solar transfer point, as well as a big city in its own right. “I want to go to Mars to find—”

“Go to bed, Amanda! Now!”

Lying in her new bunk, she waited, every muscle tense. She knew what Father Emil would do. She knew from the way he’d said “Go to bed! Now!” And she knew because Daddy would have done the same thing. Father Emil crept in just a few minutes later, and the sleep patch kissed her neck softly.

“Thank you,” she whispered. It might not give her a very long sleep, but any sleep was better than none.

“Sleep well,” Father Emil said. “You’re a brave girl. The bravest and stubbornest and stupidest child I ever met.”

She would have answered him, but she was already asleep.

SIX

SPACE TUNNEL #1

T
he ship
Cascade of Stars
left Mars in July, cleared as a merchant vessel to Titan and an emigration ship from Titan to the remote world of New Canaan. She was a huge ship, chartered to Liu Wang Interplanetary, New China Republic, Earth, although she had never been near Earth and probably never would be. Large enough to carry two flyers and two shuttles, her passenger manifest numbered eight thousand. Six thousand of these were Amish settlers bound for New Canaan, that quixotic attempt to create a non-technological civilization after first arriving on a high-tech starship. The crew was mostly Chinese. The cargo included plows and anvils for New Canaan and a near-AI for the government geological station on Titan.

The other two thousand passengers were a mixed group of business people, techs, scientists, government leaders, adventurers, and the unclassifiable group that travels around the Solar System displaying a polite detachment that never gives away their reasons for journeying. Some of these were crime leaders, some fugitives, some spies. Ship etiquette, demanded that you accept whatever identity a traveler chose to present. This etiquette did not, of course, apply to the government agents aboard who checked passports and itineraries.

Two of the unclassifiables were Lyle Kaufman and Marbet Grant. Lyle traveled under the name “Eric James Peltier,” a retired army colonel turned physical-security consultant. Marbet traveled under no name at all, since none of the passengers or government agents knew she was there. Instantly recognizable as the Solar System’s most famous Sensitive, she could not travel openly. However, she didn’t have to.

The
Cascade of Stars
included two small cabins built off the flyer bay and unknown to most of the ship’s officers, including the captain. The security chief had had them built, and rented them out at a fabulous profit shared only with such hand-picked crew as might discover it anyway. The profit provided plenty of funds for necessary operating expenses, such as bribes. No one at Liu Wang knew the vessel had been altered. There were advantages to being chartered in a different place from where you operated.

Marbet, confined to her cabin for the long, tedious journey from Mars to Space Tunnel #1, chose not to spend the time in drugged deep sleep. She had a freestanding terminal, books, some dumbbells, a music cube. Kaufman knew he couldn’t have stood it, week after week of solitary living, seeing no one except the steward in the pay of the security chief, who brought her meals. Marbet said it wasn’t a problem. She had all the data cubes from their previous expedition, and she was going to learn to speak World. “Last time, you know, I only went down to the planet once, and I had minimal contact with Worlders.”

Lyle remembered.

He couldn’t communicate with her during the voyage out; those were the rules. He played his part well, participating in shipboard conversation but never becoming personal. Probably most of the other passengers thought he was an important crime figure. Well, let them.

The key conversational pastime wasn’t personal, anyway. In the first-class dining room, in the common rooms, in the gym, the game was “Guess Where General Stefanak has hidden the Protector Artifact.” This game went on in several languages. It was a safe way to discuss General Stefanak even if there were government spies around; Stefanak himself proclaimed often that the Protector Artifact, activated at “setting prime eleven,” was the savior of the Solar System. It protected “each and every one of our precious habitations from the kind of planet-destroying attack that the enemy used to fry the helpless planet of Viridian.” The mixture of pompous rhetoric and street slang was pure Stefanak.

The artifact, discovered two years earlier, had been decoded by the brilliant, missing scientist Dr. Thomas Capelo. None of the gossipers aboard the
Cascade of Stars
understood the first thing about the physics that Capelo had worked out, or why the physics mattered. But everyone knew what the artifact’s seven settings could do. Thanks to the media, even schoolchildren could recite the litany:

Setting prime one: a directed-beam destabilizer of all atoms with an atomic number higher than seventy-five. (Never mind that to human math “one” was not a prime; humans had not built the artifact.)

Setting prime two: a shield against settings one and three.

Setting prime three: a spherical destabilizing wave affecting all atoms with an atomic number higher than seventy-five.

Setting prime five: a shield to protect a whole planet against the artifact.

Setting prime seven: a wave to destroy a whole planet by destabilizing all atoms with an atomic number higher than fifty.

Setting prime eleven: a shield to protect an entire star system.

Setting prime thirteen: a wave to destroy an entire star system, turning civilizations into radioactive waste.

Now this Protector Artifact had been hidden somewhere in the Solar System by General Stefanak, its location known to no more than a dozen people.

“I’ll bet it’s in the Belt,” said a woman, dazzlingly genemod beautiful, at the English-speaking dinner table. “Has to be. The largest number of floating bodies to hide it in.”

“No,” said a young man with a beard barbered into an amazing shape Kaufman had never seen before. Ah, the civilian young. “Too much traffic in the Belt. Settlements, trade, miners. No, it’s hidden underground on a major planet. Maybe even Mars … that way Stefanak can keep a closer eye on it.”

“What’s to keep an eye on?” lazily said an older woman wearing huge antique emeralds. “It’s automatic, isn’t it? Set the thing at ‘eleven’ and it protects the whole Solar System. It isn’t like you have to reset it, or get it serviced.”

The young man said, “No, but you do have to keep it protected from those fucking antiwar groups. Those bastards would probably just as soon turn it over to the enemy.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” said another man, not as well-dressed as the others, who looked at the young man disapprovingly.

The teenage girl traveling with the beautiful woman said, “Why keep it in the Solar System at all? As long as the Fallers believe it’s here, the Protector Artifact is doing its job. They won’t bring theirs here to attack. Meanwhile, we could take ours to their system and wipe them out.”

Her mother said impatiently, “Alva, you don’t know what you’re talking about. If you bring our artifact to their system and set it off, and theirs is protecting
their
system, it will destroy the whole of spacetime. Dr. Thomas Capelo proved that. Honestly, I don’t know what you learn in school!”

“Not that,” the girl said hotly, “because it’s not true. Both artifacts have to be set to destroy a whole system, at setting prime thirteen. Maybe
you
should study things more carefully.”

The shabbily dressed man intervened to avoid war. “That will never happen—setting them both off at thirteen. If one side did, the other would be protected at setting eleven, so why would the second people ever go to thirteen?”

“I agree,” said a man who’d been silent ’til now. “It’s a nonviable scenario.”

Spy
, Kaufman thought,
or journalist
. Marbet would have known which from simply looking at the man. But after years attached to the Solar Alliance Defense Council, Kaufman recognized the technique: make a provocative statement, or agree with one, and see who reacts and how.

The young man with the fantastic beard scowled. “It could happen. How about this: We don’t bring our artifact to their home system, but to one of their major military systems, and we set it off at thirteen to destroy the whole system. They see us bring the thing in, and try to beat us to the punch by setting
their
artifact off at thirteen to destroy our fleet. So both are broadcasting, or whatever they do, at thirteen, and bam! There goes spacetime.”

“But,” the young girl, Alva, said, and her whole manner was different debating him than debating her mother, “why would the Fallers have their artifact at a military system instead of protecting their home system, like we do?”