The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (25 page)

At first glance, Meyer Lansky’s code farm was a genuine business, one of more than a dozen that dealt in the stuff prospectors pulled from the shells of ships abandoned by the previous tenants of the wormhole network, the Ghajar. They had been some kind of gypsy species that like all the other Elder Cultures had died out or vanished, and had left behind almost no trace of its civilisation or culture apart from its ships. Most had been left parked in orbital junkyard Sargassos, some dead hulks, others slumbering in deep hibernation; a few lay wrecked on the various planets and moons and worldlets of the fifteen stars. Some archaeologists believed that the crashed ships were casualties of a war between factions of the Ghajar; others that they had beached their ships much as whales and smaller cetaceans on Earth – because of disease or panic or confusion or suicidal ennui – had sometimes swum into shallow waters and become stranded by retreating tides. In any case, whether dead or alive or smashed to flinders, all the ships were to some degree or another infested with code. It was quantum stuff, hardware and software embedded in the spin properties of fundamental particles in the molecular matrices of the ships’ hulls, raw and fragmented, and crusty with errors and necrotic patches that had accumulated during millennia of disuse and exposure to cosmic radiation.

Coders working in farms like Meyer Lansky’s analyzed and catalogued this junk and stitched together viable fragments and spent hours and days trying to get them to run in virtual partitions on the farm’s hypercomputer cloud. Code approved by the licensing board was bought by software developers who used it to patch controls ships reclaimed from the vast Sargassos, manipulate exotic matter, refine the front ends of quantum technology, and so on and so forth. There were theoretical applications, too – four of the so-called hard mathematical problems had been solved using code reclaimed by the farms.

Meyer Lansky’s code farm had been licensed, regulated, and entirely legitimate until he’d run up huge gambling debts and sold control of his business to a shell company owned by a family of Korean gangsters. Now, its legitimate work was a front for black market trade in chunks of viable code too hot and dangerous to ever win a research and development license, and for wholesaling viral fragments to dealers who supplied codeheads with tickets to strange places of the mind, a trade that was growing to be as troublesome as crack cocaine.

Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton had been working in Meyer Lansky’s code farm until they’d suddenly quit without warning and dropped clean out of sight. Ten days later, everything blew up at the motel room. We’d been researching the farm for three months, patiently accumulating dossiers on everyone who worked there, but the grisly double murder ripped our clandestine investigation wide open. We shut down the place before Lansky or the Koreans could destroy evidence of wrongdoing, and brought Singleton’s and Hughes’s co-workers in for interview. Towards the end, I knew more about the two young men than I did about some of my friends. Singleton was from my home town, London, England; Hughes was from Anchorage, Alaska; both were young, white, English-speaking males who were serious computer freaks. They’d bonded when they’d met on the shuttle, stuck together after the shuttle touched down and they were set adrift in the raw hypercapitalism of Port of Plenty. Neither had much in the way of stake money, or any kind of plan. They were flying by the seats of their pants, driven by a mix of arrogant optimism and naivete, confident that because they were young and energetic and talented they were bound to spot some opportunity ripe for exploitation.

At first, they did agency work in the IT department of one of the big multinationals that had set up in Port of Plenty, but the pay was rotten, with no benefits whatsoever apart from vouchers for the subsidised canteen, and it was the kind of boring and frustrating work they’d both been doing back on Earth – Singleton in a university; Hughes for the Russian company that had purchased Alaska from the US government after a failed attempt at secession. In short, it was everything they’d hoped to escape, and after only four weeks they quit and went to work on Meyer Lansky’s code farm.

The pay wasn’t much better than the agency work and the benefits were equally exiguous, but as far as Singleton and Hughes were concerned it was far more romantic than writing object location routines for suits who didn’t really know what they wanted. And his fellow coders agreed that Everett Hughes had a talent for the work. A weird ability to instantly assess the viability of any kind of code, the way some people saw colours in words, or music in numbers. Either it looked good or it didn’t, he said. Meaning that the code should conform to a kind of symmetry or beauty, although he found it hard to explain exactly what that was, and if pressed he would grow surly, hunch his shoulders, sneer that it wasn’t worth trying to explain it because either you had the righteous gift or you didn’t. He had the gift, and he was usually right. Jay Singleton got by through determination and hard work, but Everett Hughes flew.

Apparently, they had been planning to stash away a good percentage of their pay until they had accumulated enough to buy themselves berths on a code-hunting jaunt. They’d have to buy their own equipment, and front the gangmaster fees for transport plus a thirty per cent kickback on anything they made, but they were confident that they would strike a hot lode that would set them up for life. But it seemed that the two of them had grown bored with working and saving and saving and working, and had taken a short cut. They’d stolen something from Meyer Lansky, and either Lansky or the Koreans had found them and killed them and taken the stuff back, or they’d tried to sell it to the wrong people. Those were my working hypotheses, but I was worried that the code itself might have had something to do with the two bodies in the burnt-out motel room – we were running a pool in the TCU on when someone would stumble across true AI, and who knew what else someone might find out there? In any case, Hughes and Singleton must have stolen the code because they’d though it valuable. And if it was valuable, it must be functional: unknown code with unknown capabilities, out there in the world. Recapturing it was suddenly my main priority, and the first thing I needed to do was to shut down Meyer Lansky’s operation and find out what Hughes and Singleton had been working on before they’d bugged out.

Like all the ships we humans use, the reef farmers’ ship is a shell retrieved from one of the vast Sargassos that orbit almost every one of the fifteen stars. Many ships are frozen relics no more functional or repairable than a watch that’s spent a thousand years at the bottom of the ocean; others are merely quiescent, systems ticking over in a sleep deeper than any hibernation, but fully functional once awakened; all are ancient, handed down from Elder Culture to Elder Culture, modified and rebuilt and modified again until scarcely a trace of the original remains.

The farmers bolted the usual translation interface to the ship’s control systems, but weren’t able to customise the lifesystem for human occupation because the ship possesses fierce self-repairing mechanisms that resist any alterations (which was why the farmers could buy it at a knock-down price: few people want a ship with a mind of its own). The lifesystem supplies food that is both unpalatable and toxic to humans, the light is actinic, and the air like the air of a high altitude steel refinery: not enough oxygen or water, desert-dry and hot, stinking of tholines and sulphur dioxide.

The ships’ crew and its single passenger – me – live in a series of pressure tents bolted to the bulkhead near the pool of nanodust that serves as an airlock. The maintenance system treates us as cargo and leaves us alone as long as we do not interfere with other areas of the ship. There is a large commons and a series of smaller rooms, including sleeping niches partitioned by fibreboard like the cells of a wasp’s nest, a communal bathroom, and the small red-lit space – crowded with racks of electronic gear – that serves as the bridge. The commons is cozy enough, carpeted with overlapping rugs and cushions and beanbags and lit by small lamps and strings of fairylights, but even so we live like refugees, the rest of the ship’s chambers looming above us like so many chimney shafts, walls pitted with cells of various sizes, lit by the pitiless glare of the lights, scoured by hot, random winds.

It’s a perfect example of the human experience after First Contact – men and women living like mice in the walls of worlds they barely understand. The ship’s fusion motors, for instance, are sealed mysteries. Very simple things that have been working for a hundred times longer than the existence of human agriculture on Earth, fuelled by deuterium and tritium mined by ancient ramscoop factories that swim through the atmospheres of certain ice giants.

Fuel is the key to the end of the chase.

Ours is a big ship, as ships go: an A3-Class heavy lifter. Even so, it can’t carry enough fuel for a round trip out to Terminus’s neighbouring star, so a drone has been sent after us, loaded with a cargo of deuterium and tritium. A major investment by the farmers that I hope the UN will defray, although the chair of the farmers’ council, Rajo Hiranand, is sanguine about it. Telling me that her people made a huge gamble when they settled the worldlets of Terminus’s inner belt, and so far it has paid off more handsomely than they ever expected. They’ve laid claim to several hundred planoformed rocks where they grow crops and ranch sky sheep, and share the profits from exploitation of artifacts and code unearthed by prospectors – the abundance and variety of artifacts found on Terminus’s worldlets is second only to that of the fifteen stars’ solitary habitable planet, First Foot. And now they have invested in this, a prospecting expedition of their own.

Rajo and I agree that Niles Sarkka may be crazy, but he is not stupid. That he must have good and convincing reasons for heading out to Terminus’s neighbour. It isn’t likely that he will find what he expects to find there, of course. But the fact that the navigation code points to a location close to the star must mean something is there, or was once there, in the long ago when the Ghajar were the tenants of the fifteen stars.

The rational part of me hopes that Niles Sarkka won’t find anything useful, let alone prove that his wild idea is right. But I’m also caught up in this crazy chase: I want to believe – I have to believe – that there’s a pot of gold around that star, something that will justify my refusal to obey a direct order. Something that will redeem me.

Now that we are slowly but surely catching up with Sarkka, I’ve told him several times that we are prepared to rescue him as long as he cooperates. I’m trying to get him used to the idea that, after he reaches his goal, we’ll come alongside his ship and take him off and bring him home. So far, though, he’s having none of it. Sometimes he rants at me; sometimes he’s cool and reasonable, like a patient teacher correcting the error of a particularly stupid but wilful pupil.

He has no intention of returning, he says. He will spend the rest of his life with the Elder Culture that lurks somewhere around that star. Either they’ll take him in, or he’ll settle close by and found an institute or research centre.

“And if you’re wrong?” I say.

“I am not wrong,” he says.

“If there’s nothing there. Just suppose.”

“I do not intend to return.”

And meanwhile the star grows brighter as both ships fall towards it, fusion motors blazing with a pull of a shade over 1.6 g, the maximum acceleration of every ship so far refurbished.

It is the brightest star in the sky now. Blue-white as a chip of ice. There’s a thin ring of rocks close in, but none of them are cased in an atmosphere or are more massive that they should be, and in any case all of them are far too hot to be habitable. And there’s a single planet, a gas giant about the size of Saturn, orbiting beyond the star’s snowline. A somber world whose atmosphere is darkened by vast belts of carbon dust, as if polluted by some vast industrial process. It has multiple rings of sooty ice, and a retinue of moons, the larger ones balls of ice wrapped around silicate cores, the smaller ones captured chunks of carbonaceous chondrite in eccentric and mostly retrograde orbits. Somewhere amongst them, Niles Sarkka believes, is proof that his theory is correct, vindication for every bad thing he’s ever done. Somewhere out there, he thinks, aliens have been hiding for tens of thousands of years.

Although Marc and I did our very best, it wasn’t possible to make Meyer Lansky understand that we were prepared to do a deal with him rather than throw him in jail. Or maybe he understood, and didn’t care. He was angry that his business had been shut down, and he was scared that his boss, Pak Young-Min, would find out that he’d been rolled by a couple of his code monkeys and conclude that he wasn’t up to the job – the usual retirement plan for the Pak family’s gangland employees and associates was a bullet in the back of the head and a short ride down the river to the sea. So Lansky refused my offer of protection when I served papers on him at his house around midnight, and he refused again when he was brought in for questioning. A broad-shouldered man dressed in a white suit, neatly barbered hair dyed the colour of tarnished aluminium, he sat in my office with a grim, shuttered expression and his arms folded across his chest, giving Marc and me the dead eye while his lawyer explained why he couldn’t answer any of our questions.

One of the assistant city attorneys was there, too, and Marc and I knew things had taken a turn for the worse when she asked for a break and stepped out of the interrogation room with Lansky’s lawyer. Marc took the opportunity to tell Lansky all over again why he would be doing the city and the UN a service by telling us where the stolen code was and what had happened to the two coders, repeating the scenario he’d already painted, with Lansky as the innocent party, first robbed by two of his employees, and then involuntarily involved in their murder by his boss.

“You had to tell Pak Young-Min about the theft because otherwise it would come down on your head. I understand that. But after that it was out of your hands and things got out of control,” Marc said. He had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair at the beginning of the session; now, in white shirt and red braces, he leaned forward and stared straight at Lansky. “You are a smart man. You know how much trouble you are in. And you know what Pak Young-Min is capable of But we’re here to help. We can make your troubles disappear. All you have to do is tell us exactly what happened. What was stolen. What happened to the two foolish kids who stole it. Where it is now.”