The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (37 page)

He was parroting something Niles Sarkka had told him, no doubt, trying to get a rise out of me. When I told him that the code was dangerous and had to be secured at once, he shook his head and said again that the code wasn’t any kind of meme.

“I knew, as soon as I laid eyes on it, what that code was. I knew it was information, embedded in a navigation package. And you know what, I was right.”

I could see that he wouldn’t be shifted on that point, so I backed off and tried another angle. “Niles Sarkka took the code and ran off and left you here. Not a great deal, was it?”

Hughes shrugged. “I volunteered to be stranded. The ship doesn’t have enough consumables for two.”

“He could have taken you to one of the farms on the inner belt.”

“He was going to contact them, once he got far enough away. Then they’d come and pick me up.”

“How do you know that Sarkka didn’t leave you here to die, and went off to Libertaria to sell the code?”

Hughes laughed. “You think this is about money? Jason and me, we didn’t get into this for money. The code is way more important than that. It isn’t an executable. It’s information. The kind of information that the Jackaroo wiped from all the navigation programmes of all the ships in all the known Sargassos. But they don’t know everything. They missed the code in the wrecked ship out in the City of the Dead, for instance, the code that gave us the interface. And they missed the code here. And that gave Niles and me the location of something wonderful. Something that will help us win the war.”

“We aren’t at war with them, Mr Hughes.”

“Aren’t we?”

There was something chilling and certain in his gaze. Oh, Sarkka had sunk his claws in deep, all right.

I said, “Tell me what you think the code is.”

“Records, kind of Where the ship had come from. The location of something. We don’t know, exactly. That’s why Niles has gone to check it out.”

“Mr Sarkka could have taken you to the farmers of the inner belt. He could have asked for their help in searching for whatever it is he hopes to find. Instead, he marooned you here. Why? Because of vanity and greed. He wants the glory for himself, and he wants the profit, too.”

“I volunteered to stay,” Hughes said. “If Niles stranded me here, why would he have left a q-phone here? And if you don’t believe me, why don’t you give him a call?”

I told him that it was no kind of evidence that he and Sarkka were equal partners. “Sarkka left it here because he wants to boast about his deeds.”

“Talk to him. See what he has to say,” Hughes said.

“He left you here to die, Everett. And went off to Libertaria to sell the code.”

Hughes laughed. “You’re obsessed with money. Jason and me, we didn’t sell it to Niles. We gave it to him.”

He really believed that Niles Sarkka had done the right thing. That they were still, in some way, partners. That Sarkka was on the track of something wonderful: something that would change history. He led the soldiers and me to the location of the original of the code, about a kilometre from the impact crater on top of the larger of the worldlet’s two lobes, showed us the shaft dug by the prospector who had originally found it, showed us the smashed and scorched pieces of wreckage that, according to him, had once contained the code, and told us a cock-and-bull story about how it had been discovered. Certainly, there were traces of code still embedded in those shards, although it was impossible to tell whether they had ever been active, and Hughes refused once again to tell us what the code really was, where Niles Sarkka had gone, and what Sarkka hoped to find.

And that’s where the trouble began. It was Captain Foster’s idea to ramp up the interrogation, and God help me, I went along with it. We were in the middle of a difficult and dangerous situation, we needed to know everything about it, and because our only witness refused to help us we had to coerce him. It was vital to our security and we needed to know everything he knew right away.

So we cuffed Hughes and made him kneel, right there on the cold black naked rock by the shaft. I explained what we were going to do and told him that he had one last chance: if he answered all of our questions truthfully, if he talked willingly and without reservation, he would be able to walk away from this as a hero. He told me what to do with my offer in language you can imagine. And one of the solders gripped his head while Captain Foster, delicately pinching the plastic straw between two fingers of his pressure suit’s glove, puffed a dose of Veracidin up his nose.

Veracidin is derived from Elder Culture nanotechnology. A suspension of virus-sized machines that enter the bloodstream and cross the blood/ brain barrier, targeting specific areas in the cortex, supressing specific higher cognitive functions. In short, it is a sophisticated truth drug. Its use is illegal on Earth and First Foot, but we were in the field, in the equivalent of a battle situation. We did what we had to do, and we didn’t know – how could we? – that Everett Hughes would suffer a violent reaction when the swarm of tiny machines hit his brain.

Perhaps he was naturally allergic to Veracidin, as a very small percentage of people are. Or perhaps the many, many hours of exposure to code had sensitised him somehow. Within seconds, his eyes rolled back in his head and his body convulsed with what appeared to be a grand mal seizure. He jerked and spasmed and drooled bloody foam; he lost control of his bowels and bladder. We laid him on the ground and did our best, but the seizures came one after the other. His heart stopped, and we got it going again. We managed to wrestle him into the pod carried by one of the scooters, and we all took off for the ship, hoping to treat him there. But he was still fitting, and he died in transit.

Captain Foster was badly shaken by Hughes’s death and wanted to bug out for home. Hughes’s body was in a sealed casket; the original of the code had been located and confirmed destroyed; there was nothing else for us to do but write a report that would justify our actions and absolve us of any blame. I told him that we were not finished here because Niles Sarkka was still at large, and in possession of a mirror of the code. He had not gone through the wormhole throat, or else we would have been alerted, so there was still a chance of catching up with him. If we did, I said, we would be completely exonerated; if not, I would take full responsibility for Hughes’s death.

I already had a good idea about where Sarkka might be headed, and put in a call to our representative with the farmers of the inner belt, asked him if anyone there was an amateur astronomer. Within an hour, I’d been sent a photograph taken through a five-inch reflector, showing a new, small star a few degrees from the crucifix flare of Terminus’s G0 companion. Sarkka’s ship without a doubt.

Captain Foster said that we had no chance of catching up with Sarkka. He had too much of a head start, and in any case we didn’t have enough fuel to put up any kind of chase. “We don’t even know that he’s headed for that star. He’s infected. The meme is urging him to flee outward, towards no particular destination.”

I said that Hughes showed no sign of infection, and in any case, if Sarkka was gripped by a blind outward urge, why was he headed directly for the star?

“You have that q-phone,” Captain Foster said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Oh, I will. In good time.”

I was beginning to formulate what I needed to do. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t see any other way to bring this case to a satisfactory resolution, and bring Niles Sarkka to justice.

And so we headed for the inner belt, and a meeting with the farmers’ council. They said that they knew nothing about Suresh Shrivastav, the prospector who’d found the code, claimed that he’d been working the outer belt illegally. For what it’s worth, I believe them. That kind of piracy is increasingly common, and it would explain why Mr Shrivastav refused to talk to us. The farmers also said that they had known nothing about the little expedition mounted by Sarkka and Hughes, and made it clear that they resented the UN’s intrusion into their affairs, and the danger to which their people had been unknowingly exposed. Luckily, I found an ally in the council’s chair, Rajo Hiranand, a tough, cynical, and highly intelligent old woman. Her motivations were not entirely selfless – she wanted her community to share in whatever profit might be made from whatever it was that Niles Sarkka might discover – but her heart was in the right place.

“I would guess that this is the end of your career with the UN,” she said, after the vote to accept my offer of help had been won. “After all this is over, when you get back, we might be able to find a place for someone like you here.”

I thanked her, but admitted that spending the rest of my life herding sky-sheep and growing corn and pharm tobacco was low on the list of things I wanted to do with my life.

“That isn’t all we do here,” Rajo said. “Think about it. You’ll have plenty of time for that, after all.”

“Before I do anything else,” I said, “I have to explain this to my boss.”

It was a call I had been dreading. Rightly so. The q-phone that linked me to its entangled twin relayed with perfect fidelity Marc Godin’s cold anger across uncountable light years, directly to my ear and brain and heart. I knew there was no point in apologizing, and besides, I agreed with his assessment of the situation. The mission was fubared, and although I had been volunteered for the mission by the Inspector General, I was acting senior officer, and by resigning I was contributing a few extra knots to the intractably complicated tangle of diplomatic and legal problems. But it still hurts grievously to think of how Marc severed every bond, ignored my years of loyal service, and refused to acknowledge the sacrifice I was making.

When he was finished, I asked for a final favour. “Have Varneek do a trace analysis on the burned-out motel room. Have him look for any unusual material. If he finds anything, have him compare it with the fragments from the avatar that was destroyed in the hive-rat nest in the City of the Dead.”

“Sarkka was lying, Emma. There was no avatar. He killed Singleton and the mercenary.”

“I could ask the city police to look into it. But given the diplomatic angle, I think it would be better if you did.”

“I hope that is not a threat,” Marc said, finding a new depth of Antarctic chill.

“I don’t want to go public with this. Too much information has already spilled out. But this is too important to ignore.”

“The Jackaroo would not breach the accord,” he said.

“We don’t know what they would do,” I said, and would have said more, but he cut the connection then.

He called back the next day. I was aboard the largest of the farmers’ ships by then, and Terminus was dwindling astern. Varneek had failed to find any fragments, Marc said, but he had found traces of fused silica and traces of doped fullerenes and an exotic room-temperature superconductor.

“Are they from an avatar?”

“If they were not, I could tell you. As it is, I can neither confirm nor deny that the traces Varneek found in the room matched the fragments of the avatar already in our possession.”

So I had my answer.

“It won’t make any difference,” Marc said, after I thanked him. “Even if we’d caught the avatar with blood on its hands, nothing would have been done beyond lodging a formal protest. Because the accord is useful to us. Because no one wishes to disturb our relationship with the Jackaroo.”

I told him I understood, and asked about the search for the prospector, Suresh Shrivastav.

“The investigation has been closed. I’m sorry, Emma. Even if you capture Sarkka, it won’t save your career.”

“This isn’t about my career.”

“In any case, good hunting,” Marc said, and cut the connection.

And now, six months later, we are chasing Niles Sarkka’s ship towards the coal-black gas giant. He’s just a couple of million kilometres ahead of us and, as we have long suspected, will soon enter into orbit. We caught up with him because we continued to accelerate after his ship turned around and began to slow. Now we must shed excess delta-vee by dipping into the outer fringes of the gas giant’s atmosphere, an aerobrake manoeuver that will subject the ship’s frame to stresses at the outer limits of its tolerance.

The farmers’ ship isn’t equipped for a thorough planetary survey, but the instruments we’ve been able to cobble together during this long chase have not detected any source of electromagnetic radiation apart from the pulse of the planet’s magnetic field, and limited optical surveys have failed to spot any trace of artificial structures on any of the moons. Which does not mean that there isn’t anything there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Our survey capabilities are grievously limited, and if Niles Sarkka is right, if this is where the last remnant of the Ghajar or some other Elder culture is hiding out, it won’t want to be found.

And if the code has given Sarkka the precise location of some base or spider hole, we’ll be right on his tail. Fortunately, he’s no more than a point-and-go pilot. It’s obvious now that he didn’t do anything to counter our tactic because he wasn’t able to. With the end of the chase in sight, I’m beginning to feel that we have a chance of catching him before he can do any real harm.

I think he knows that the game is up. That’s why he has been trying to make a deal with me, and by extension with Rajo Hiranand and the rest of the farmers’ council. In our first conversations, he assumed moral and intellectual superiority, claimed that his actions should be judged by history rather than by mere mortals. Now, he’s offering to share the greatest discovery since the Jackaroos’ fluttering ships appeared in Earth’s skies.