All Fall Down (33 page)

           
Kate summarised her conversation with Admiral Kim. Djembe and Win both nodded along to her summary, Verigua lanced the air with lazy beams.

           
Win mentioned that the Colony news service was reporting Doctor Peter Cassel's apparent suicide that morning. A note had been found in his office. The memorial service today would have greater poignancy, relevance. And they all shook their head at the lie, knowing what Doctor Masjid Currie had told Kate.

           
Kate formally ended the meeting, and immediately activated an encryption field for the room. Now she was sure Daoud wasn't to be trusted, she wanted everything classified beyond his reach.

           
She told the team she had planted a code phrase in her conversation with Admiral Kim to call in an MI occupation force. However capable she was at disaster management, Doctor Currie's information required a stronger response than her small team was able to effect. The time was coming when Daoud would need to answer some direct questions about the hidden events on Fall. But she felt that asking him straight out whether he was part of a conspiracy would force his hand, that they would lose control. There were too many opportunities for accidents to happen. She decided that she wanted him contained in a web of silence until back-up arrived. They briefly discussed imprisoning Daoud – staging a coup – but agreed that would only complicate matters. Suspicion would escape and return its own conclusions, like a nest of ants foraging for food, picking up whatever morsels they could. There would be no way to enforce authority. The Colony was small and would be easily contained by a modest occupation force and an Admiral planetside.

           
Djembe brought up the alien. “What about this... thing... on the surface? Have we seen it in Win's sensors?”

           
Win frowned, “I thought I'd detected something yesterday, but the storm was overloading them. I'll have to check.” He pulled out his datapad and ran the data graphically in the air. There was fresh activity in the old Colony, and along the hidden tunnels. “Something's out there. I can't say what. And in here, below us.”

           
Whitened Yeddic faces flickered across Verigua's buildings, mouthing words of deception and regret, “You need a distraction, so he won't notice you poking your nose in where it's not wanted. That's presuming he knows anything about this, of course. He may still be innocent. I do hope so, we go back a long way, he and I.”

           
“I think we have one,” Win tapped into an old fashioned keyboard, a long antenna swayed from its casing. The antenna swirled an orrery in the air. Fall's bodies – the suns, planets, wormhole – were drawn into existence, and spun into their correct orbits. “There's an eclipse in a few hours. And early tomorrow morning, the planet's storm will sweep in. That means a huge amount of preparations today. The wormhole may be inaccessible during the eclipse. I'm not sure if anyone's modelled its effects yet.”

           
“Is it important?” Kate looked at the swirling bodies above her, and over to Win.

           
“The blue sun will pass in front of the yellow, and form a line through Fall directly to the wormhole. There's bound to be some gravity-induced seismic activity, changes to satellite communications, that sort of thing. I can spend the next hour modelling it and take it to the Administrator. Maybe exaggerate any risks?”

           
Searchlights swept across the orrery from Verigua's metropolis, slicing through each celestial body, “We're a mining and biological research facility. Xenological, I beg your pardon. My how things change over a night time. Solar physics and wormhole mechanics tend to be beyond our day to day concerns. We have satellites that warn of incoming solar flares, of course, and an array that looks for larger asteroids, that sort of thing, but not the work you are talking about. Seismic risks will affect mining. Our Administrator will be interested, I assure.”

           
Kate nodded, “Very well, Win, good idea. Djembe, continue looking for these biological presences inside the AI. They must be linked to this avatar intruder Win had yesterday. See if you can find it. Take over the holo suite in the Central Operations Room.

           
“Meanwhile, I'm going to find out what's behind that door.”

The Central Operations Room was quiet, with only two staff members present: Jonah and a technician. Jonah sat with his feet up on a control panel, scratching a stylus across a slate.

           
“Mornin', Captain Cygnate. Commander, sorry,” he glanced over his shoulder, “Back again?”

           
“I need to use your room to run some simulations. Please.”

           
“Plenty holo suites on the other floors, Commander. Need my suite. Got lots of stuff goin' on, 'case you hadn't noticed. Memorial upstairs, lot of my staff there. Dependin' on my boys to keep tabs, see if anyone knows about this suicide. And the vendetta, obviously. Emotional time. You never know, someone might say something. Reveal themselves as a murderer. Then gotta keep an eye on the upstairs, got an eclipse later today. Not really a priority, but you never know. Suppose I should be monitoring it. You know what people are like. Eclipse, emotions runnin' raw. Can't always predict how people'll behave. Don't want anyone thinkin' they can just pop up for a quick look, as pretty as I'm sure it'll be.”

           
Djembe fisted his hands behind his back, clenched, unclenched.

           
“Then there's your General's transmission. Authorised, I know. Some decent encryption 'round it, too. Didn't try to break it, don't worry. Did have a look at the security, though. MI've been busy since I last checked. Haven't seen ice like that before. Just looking at it damn near frazzled me. You can't stop me reverse engineering it, you know,” Jonah swung round on his chair, finally facing Djembe properly, a big smile on his face. He cocked his head to one side, put his slate on the control panel, “You're still here. I'm joking, obviously.” Djembe stared at him, impassive. “Yeah, alright. If you want to use my room, that means you want to access my holos, my consequence planning. Usually you'd use your own, wouldn't you? Suppose I should be flattered. My boys are never going to tell me what you talked about though, are they?”

           
“Not even a hint, I'm afraid. There are rules, even here on Fall.”

           
“Go on then. But if there's an emergency, I have to use that room. Colony defence and all that.”

           
“Thank you, Jonah,” Djembe looked at the floor, sucked his lips in, “When we leave the day after tomorrow, you may want to consider coming with us. What you've created,” he motioned with his head toward the holo suite, “could take you across the galaxy, revolutionise the way society is run.”

           
“Could do,” Jonah's eyes widened, his lips pushed out, “Not great for the little ones, though. Got a wife and kids here, you know. They've got friends, things they like here. Not always easy to make that sort of decision so quickly, with a family and all.”

           
Bowing his head respectfully, in acknowledgement, Djembe moved towards the holo suite. He looked back from the door, “Think about it. Discuss it with them, at least. I'll help.”

           
Jonah watched the door close on Djembe's back, the wall display change to red: “Locked”. He turned to his technician, “Rosie, why'd you come to Fall?”

           
Her voice was distracted, she continued to move icons around her screen, “Peace and quiet, Jonah, same as you. Galaxy's beautiful, but at the end of the day, you want somewhere you can call home, somewhere that's yours, where no one's going to bother you.”

           
“Tell my kids that,” he picked up his slate and stylus, “they want to be archaeologists, go off exploring, uncover buried alien artefacts.”

           
“Isn't it about time they learned to tell fantasy from reality?”

           
“Plenty time for that, Rosie. If whatsisface upstairs gets his way, they'll be living five hundred years, maybe more. Might as well let them be children for a few more decades. There's plenty time for the harsh realities of being an adult.”

Blackness. A few bright stars gave lie to the depth of space. A starsail swept past, majestic in the driving solar wind, golden in its butterfly-wing symmetry. As it passed, its white, circular crew pod came into view, clinging onto the sail with taut white struts. In the cockpit window, a helmet turned. Jonah's face peered from behind the visor, a silent hand raised in a wave. Djembe heard a distorted voice, “Ground control [beep] We are learning to fly [beep] I repeat [beep] We are learning to fly.”

           
The starsail diminished, dwindled, became a star. Vanished.

           
Djembe wondered if Jonah was running a private programme. The environmental situations were becoming more outlandish every time he entered.

           
“Computer, place me in a lab situation, please. Multiple holo programming points. Keep the Jonah simulations at low volume, and please don't let them bother me too much until I say so. Classified lock down.”

           
A door framed itself, a patch of black limned by celestial white. When the door opened, a gleaming lab shone beyond. In three steps he was through the doorway. He turned to close the door, in time to see a rocket from Old Earth history thunder away on a vapour trail. Glittering scales fell from its body. Djembe recognised it as an Ariane-series vehicle. He marvelled at it before he closed the door. The historicasts in school said it had taken Old Earthers over one hundred years to improve on the technology, and for the first crewed flight to Mars. Yet in the same timescale they'd progressed from valves to solid state computers to quantum computers.

           
At his command, the lab created a series of holos representing intelligence code. Much of it consisted of the holicons used to create consequence maps. Like an artist he started to build and combine and meld and deform them, squeeze them into the paint of their new tasks. He called up a surprising menagerie of holo-animals and what looked like a chemistry set. Dry ice flowed from a beaker. Coloured liquid bubbled through tubes. Wooden cages rattled with hissing vipers, pouncing spiders, Bloodhound dogs, insects large, small, hived, winged.
 
The designers of these programs - these intelligences created to perform specific tasks in Minds, computer systems, and neural nets – created them as metaphors, to make it easier for their end users to sort through them. He would have preferred neat depictions of code, efficient holicons of geometric forms. It was the part of his expertise which ventured too far into Win's idiosyncrasies. But he knew how effective the forms were. There could be no mistaking why you'd set a Bloodhound loose in a data network: because you wanted to sniff out something interesting.

           
Djembe stared at the mediæval lab around him. What was the best programme to spot something that didn't exist? That nothing else could see? He rummaged through cages of whiskered mice, spectacled weasels and curious crows, until he came across it. Its wild green eyes and alarmed ears were fixed on an empty volume of air just over his shoulder. “Of course,” he picked the cat up by the scruff of its neck, “now let us see if you can find Win's ghost.”

In the meeting room, the Fall solar system brought light to the ebony of space. Win stood wreathed in a dusty cloak, pulling astrometric holicons into the system. The suns and planets moved around. He watched a simulation of the last ten thousand years of movement, to test the model. The yellow sun was not stationary. The real centre of gravity was a balance between it, the blue sun and the wormhole. The yellow moved in a constrained volume of space, always within one AU of the centre of the solar system. The blue star careened wildly, sometimes shooting further out than the wormhole, although never in the wormhole's arc of the system. The wormhole's gravity signature obviously repulsed the blue star. The planets moved in crazy, sick figure-eights, their orbits highly eccentric.

           
“Verigua, please refine the model at T minus ten thousand years. Triangulate the positions of the two stars with astrometric data from all available sources on file in the ship.”