The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (30 page)

Sally McKenzie helped me dress in a pressure suit, and one of the soldiers towed me across the flank of the lifesystem to the cargo pod where the scooters were stored. I rode pillion behind Captain Foster; the soldiers rode three scooters flanking us. They were crude hybrids, the scooters – quad bike frames perched on the skinny tank of a LOX booster, with two pairs of big fans set fore and aft to give them lift in atmosphere – but they were fast and manoeuvrable. The worldlet swelled ahead and we burst through its sky membrane simultaneously, riding through a sudden buffeting wind, sliding down fingers of red sunlight that slanted at a shallow angle across kilometres of air. Cotton trees caught in the raw sunlight exploded like popcorn kernels, spewing tangles of tough threads, creating mats hundreds of metres across that caught in the gales of leaking atmosphere and sailed past us and smacked against the holes we’d punched in the skin of the sky.

Our scooters dodged the last of the mats and swooped down in wedge formation. The surface of the tiny world hurtled towards us, white ice patched with bare black rock curving away on all sides, the spider cable’s dark tower rising towards the bronze sky. One of the soldiers whooped over the common channel. I felt like whooping, too. I was dizzy with fright and exhilaration.

Details exploded out of the landscape as we headed in towards the rift valley that girdled the equator. We skimmed across a lip of bare rock strung with Boxbuilder ruins, mostly roofless hollow cells, and dropped past sheer cliffs towards the black blister where the cable socketed into the floor of the wide valley. The valley’s floor was cut by low wrinkle ridges and short crevasses jagged as lightning bolts; some of the crevasses were flooded with frozen lakes and shone like shards of broken mirrors. Scrub and low patches of thorn trees grew everywhere between the lakes, a waist-high Krummholz forest. I glimpsed a flash of blue at the tip of a long thin lake and then the landscape tilted and my insides were scooped hollow with vertigo as the captain swung the scooter around and brought it down with a jarring bounce.

A man stood beside an ordinary blue nylon camping tent pitched at the lake shore. He was dressed in boots and jeans and a black puffa jacket, raising his hands as the soldiers advanced towards him from two sides. I fell to my knees when I climbed off the scooter, dizzy, grinning like a fool, and pushed up and followed as best I could, unbalanced by the low gravity and the encumbrance of my pressure suit. The ground was carpeted with stuff a little like moss, a thick lace of bladder-filled filaments the colour of old blood that crunched and popped under my boots. Beyond the lake and a steep ridge, the cable sliced the sky in half.

Captain Foster, bulky as a fairytale knight in his white pressure suit, pistol clamped in his gauntlet, marched up to the man and told him to kneel and clamp his hands on top of his head. The man – it was Everett Hughes, black hair falling over a face as pale as paper – obeyed a little clumsily, saying, “There’s no need for this. I’ll tell you everything.”

I said, “Where is Niles Sarkka?”

Captain Foster said, “Are you alone?”

“Niles is long gone,” Everett Hughes said. “He’s on his way to history.”

I insisted on carrying out an immediate field interrogation, recorded by an autonomous drone and witnessed by Captain Foster. I wanted to find out what had happened on the worldlet, I wanted to find out where Niles Sarkka had gone and with what intent, and I wanted it to stand up in court. I was still thinking like that, then.

Despite his getup as the ultimate badass coder – an unruly mane of hair dyed jet-black, silver rings sewn around the rim of his right ear and a skull ring on a chain around his neck, tattoos on his neck and fingers, the leather vest and white ruffled shirt under his black puffa jacket, the tight blue jeans and the cowboy boots – Hughes was young and naive. He told us that we’d find a q-phone in the tent, that Sarkka possessed its entangled twin.

“If you want to know what happened, and why it happened, you should call him. He can explain everything much better than I can.”

His calmness wasn’t anything to do with bravery; it was compounded of youthful arrogance and sheer ignorance. He really didn’t understand how much trouble he was in. He refused to acknowledge that he had been used, abused, and dumped by Niles Sarkka, believed to the end that he and Sarkka had done the right thing, and was proud to have helped him.

What I’m trying to say is that although he appeared to be cooperative, everything he told us was coloured by his loyalty to Sarkka. I don’t offer this as an excuse for what happened, but that’s why I allowed it to happen. Because I thought that Hughes was only telling some of the truth, some of the time, and because he refused to give up crucial information. Sarkka had poisoned that young man’s mind. He’s as much to blame for what happened as anyone else.

In any case, Captain Foster and I agreed that we would defer the pleasure of a conversation with Niles Sarkka until we had learned everything we could from Everett Hughes. And to begin with, the interrogation went smoothly enough. We did it in the tent, Hughes perched on a camping stool, Captain Foster and I looming over him in our pressure suits, the drone hovering at my left shoulder. Hughes readily admitted that, as I’d suspected, he and Jason Singleton hadn’t tried to mirror the code; instead, they’d hacked into the database of the code farm, discovered where the code had come from, and then erased the code and every bit of data pertaining to it. When I told him that it was too bad for him that Meyer Lansky had kept duplicate records in his home, he shrugged and said he’d factored the possibility into his plans.

“I figured Lansky wouldn’t tell you about them because it would have meant admitting to all his black market deals. And I reckoned that even if you did manage to get your hands on them, it would take some time, because you couldn’t just go in and search his place, you’d have to get all the papers in order and so on. Time enough for Niles and me to get out here and do what we needed to do.”

He said that he’d deleted the code because Lansky insisted that every chunk should be checked by three different people, and he knew that the next guy in the line would have seen what it was, and what it meant. And then, because they were worried that their tampering would be discovered, he and Jason Singleton had gone into hiding before reaching out to Niles Sarkka.

“As soon as I laid eyes on that code, I knew that Niles Sarkka was the man to go to. It took a while to contact him, though. And then he had to have us checked out, in case we were part of some kind of law enforcement trap. While all this was going on, a guy employed by Lansky tracked down where Jay and me were hiding out. I don’t know how, exactly, but Jay had a girlfriend – you didn’t know? I guess there’s a lot you didn’t know. Anyhow, I reckon Jay called her one last time, right around when we were getting ready to leave, and the call was intercepted. Maybe the guy had bugged her line, or maybe he’d broken into her place and was waiting for Jay to show. I hope not, I liked her. In any case, the guy turned up at the room while I was meeting up with Niles. Jay managed to lock himself in the bathroom and phone me, and Niles said he’d deal with it. Said that because of what I knew, I wasn’t to put my life in danger. He had a gun – he’d taken a risk coming back to Port of Plenty, he had enemies there. So he took off, and we met an hour later, and he told me Jay was dead. That was bad enough. But he also told me that a Jackaroo avatar had been there. The guy working for Lansky was dead, it must have followed him and killed him, and it was bent over Jay. Doing something to him. Niles shot it, and it exploded and the room caught fire, and Niles couldn’t get to Jay. He said that Jay was already dead, there was nothing he could do.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Sarkka spun you a story, Everett. I’ll tell you how I know. Your friend had particles of soot in his lungs. That means that he was still alive when he burned to death. There was no avatar. Sarkka killed Lansky’s man with some kind of beam weapon, it set fire to the room, and Sarkka let your friend burn to death rather than risk his own life trying to save him.”

“Niles told me there was an avatar, and I believe him,” Hughes said, looking straight at me. “And not only because he wouldn’t lie to me about something like that. There was a break-in at the code farm after we contacted Niles. You know how hard it is, to break into the place? Almost impossible. But someone did it – or something did. Something that heard that we had special code we wanted to hand over to Niles. Something that went to check out what it was we’d taken.”

I told him that I knew about the break-in, but his assumption that the Jackaroo had been involved in it was a fantasy. And I told him, trying to get at him through sympathy, that I understood why he believed it. “You feel guilty about what happened to your friend. Of course you do. But you have to face the truth, Everett. The truth is that Sarkka killed your friend. And the only reason he didn’t kill you is because he needed your help when it came to mirroring and using the code.”

I was doing the right thing, chipping away at Hughes’s misplaced loyalty, trying to isolate him. But he refused to admit that he was in the wrong and became stubborn, saying, “I shouldn’t have left Jay in that room when I went to meet Niles. He wanted to, in case something went wrong, but I shouldn’t have done it. And I’m going to have to carry that for the rest of my life. So yeah, I feel guilty. But I’m not making any of this shit up. And if Niles is such a bad guy, like you claim, let me ask you something. How come he didn’t kill me after we mirrored the code and I ran it through his nav package?”

Captain Foster cut in at that point, and his interference made things worse. “You admit that you located the original of the code, you and Sarkka. And you mirrored it.”

“Well, yes. We didn’t come out to this miserable ball of rock and ice for the skiing, that’s for sure. We mirrored it and then we destroyed the original. I’ll show you where.”

“The code is a dangerous meme,” Captain Foster said. “You are probably infected with it. Mr. Sarkka too.”

Hughes laughed. “You really believe it, don’t you? That’s why you’re still wearing your pressure suits I bet. Well, I don’t know who told you that bullshit, but that’s what it is. Bullshit. Niles isn’t infected. Nor am I. And the code, it’s no meme. I already knew what it was when I came across it, although I didn’t know where it pointed, not until we mirrored it here, and plugged the copy into the nav package of Niles’s ship. I know code,” Hughes said, tapping his temple with his forefinger. “I have this knack. Show me any code, I can tell whether or not it’s viable, whether it’s intact, what it needs to run. People like me know how to make use of all the strange and wild and wonderful stuff that’s lying around out here. We should be hailed as heroes. We should be encouraged. Instead, pygmies like you try to tie us down with rules and regulations. You want to make ordinary human curiosity illegal. You want to control people’s imaginations.”

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.