Blonde Bombshell (28 page)

46

Novosibirsk

“That ought to do it,” Mark Twain said, pressing the Send button of the communicator they’d taken from the probe designated Bob. “I’ve told it there’s nothing down here to worry about and everything’s fine.” He put the communicator down on the concrete floor, stepped back half a dozen paces, aimed the therion blaster and fired a burst. There was nothing left of the communicator except a little dribble of melted titanium alloy.

“Nice touch,” Lucy said.

Mark Twain grinned. “I left the channel open,” he said. “With any luck, the ship’ll pick up a trace of the weapon’s beam frequency, so it’ll know the communicator was destroyed by a therion blast. That’ll give it one more thing to think about.”

He sounds different, Lucy thought. He’s talking… well, almost like a human. Like me. Also, he doesn’t smile all the time, which is a relief. You could get sunstroke, being around a smile like that.

“Right,” she said. “Now what?”

And that was a very good question. The answer she longed to hear, on one level, was,
Let’s take a break, chill out, maybe crack open a bottle of Chablis.
Instead she got, “I suggest we tear down the central data-storage node and run a level-9 refrag-and-retrieve protocol. You never know, there may be a few scraps left that we could retrobuild from.” Well, she thought, it was a good answer in its way: positive, energetic, quite an intelligent approach. Sensible, in other words. And maybe there’d be a time for Chablis later, when they’d saved the planet and all.

“Good idea,” she said. “You carry on with that, I’ll clear some space in the main drive buffers. We’re going to need a lot of memory for something like that.”

Mark Twain’s idea (she’d already thought of it, but she wanted to let him think it was all his very own) was to comb through the main computer of Lucy’s ship, now concealed and cannibalised as the central control hub of PaySoft, in the hope of finding back-up copies of the wee-small-hours conversations Lucy had had with the ship after she’d bleached her own memory. Needless to say, they’d already looked and found nothing; but they had noticed disturbances in the computer’s file architecture that suggested that large chunks of stuff had been deleted. If those chunks had been Lucy’s chats with the computer, it might be possible to piece together a word or two here and there, a couple of whole sentences if they were really lucky; and that might just be enough to give them some clue as to why Lucy had aimed the bomb at Homeworld before giving herself amnesia. Privately, Lucy didn’t hold out much hope. Even if it worked, she couldn’t really see how it’d be likely to solve the problem of the other bomb,
his
bomb, lurking in orbit overhead. On the other hand, Mark Twain happily, frantically engaged in displacement activity was far less likely to get on her nerves while they waited to see what the bomb did next than Mark Twain with nothing to occupy himself with. It was, in effect, a hi-tech equivalent to painting the spare bedroom and fitting a new shower curtain in the bathroom.

He was lying on his back on the floor, half under the skeleton of a dismembered console, grunting and doing things with screwdrivers. She thought about that. He was getting more and more male with every hour that passed; likewise more idiomatic, more emotional, more human generally. Presumably she’d been through the same process of going native, but she couldn’t remember, of course. Convenient. She could see a lot of good reasons why she should have chosen to blank her memory, quite apart from the obvious one of not wanting to be aware she wasn’t actually human, hadn’t had a home, family or childhood, that she’d originally come here not to settle down and make a life for herself but to turn the entire planet into space-dust and loose chippings. Memories, she told herself, are what give organics their identity; but mostly they don’t have any say about what happens to them, so their memories aren’t of their own choosing. Lucy Pavlov had no past, which was one of the main reasons why she’d had such a wonderful future to look forward to — before he came along, at least.

Not him: the bomb. She was pretty sure he’d stopped thinking of himself as part of it, started viewing it strictly as the enemy, or at best an estranged parent he was determined to defy. She very much hoped so. It was, of course, frivolous and irresponsible of her to let herself think ahead, to beyond the bomb, to what might happen as and when they’d sorted it all out. The phrase “and they lived happily ever after” kept sneaking in through the cat-flap of her mind, and when she’d found the cultural reference, it made her wonder what was going on inside that funny little hybrid machine/organic head of hers. Still, she thought, if not him, then who the hell else?

Bad logic. She finished the job she’d been doing, then wandered over to the coffee machine and drew off two cappuccinos. It was only after she’d given him his and sipped her own that she remembered she didn’t like frothy coffee.

“No promises,” he gasped, crawling out from under the console, “but we may be on to something here. You wouldn’t happen to have such a thing as a phase-inverted tricameral verteron inducer?”

“Left it in my other jacket. Sorry, no, I haven’t.”

“Ah. Oh well, not to worry, I can boost the polarities on a standard verteron inducer and recalibrate the drivers.”

“Haven’t got a standard verteron inducer either.”

He nodded slowly. “Right,” he said. “Have you got a lump hammer and a six-inch nail?”

He was enjoying himself. She was pretty sure he didn’t realise. Quite possibly he hadn’t yet evolved to the point where his brain could metabolise the concept of
fun.
But he was male and he was fixing stuff. Under those conditions, fun is spontaneously generated, like static electricity in cat fur.

“Now,” he said, as she handed him the nail, “all we do is, we pass the nail through the standing verteron field generated by the transmorphic flux capacitors, like this— Yow!” he added, dropping the nail and hugging his right hand to his chest; it was glowing blue and dripping fat blue sparks. “Sod it, forgot to turn off the juice. Can you just—?”

She flipped the appropriate switch. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, just singed a bit,” he replied through gritted teeth, as a tear rolled down his face and blue fire ran along his eyebrows like brandy flames on a Christmas pudding. “Serves me right for not thinking about what I’m doing.” He picked up the nail, yelped and dropped it. “Have you got another nail handy? This one’s a bit—”

“Here,” she said, handing him a nail. “Oughtn’t you to be wearing gloves?”

“Nah.” He grinned feebly; his eyes were still watering. “They’d just get in the way. Right, let’s try again.”

The second nail melted. The third nail got shot through the wall and may well have ended up in planetary orbit. The fourth— “There you go,” he said, as he touched the nail to the panel on his knees, which lit up and began to hum, “piece of cake.” His hair was standing on end like the bristles of a wire brush. “Now then, all we do now is jump the feed across these points here, and we ought to start seeing something.” He touched the bare ends of two wires together. White smoke started pouring out of the seams of the panel. “Ah, right, forgot about that.” He flipped a switch on the panel and tried again. On the bench above his head, a row of monitors lit up, their screens cascading with Ostar numerals.

“You did it,” she said.

Eventually,
she didn’t add; she also left out
amazingly, considering you practically fried the system three times.
In spite of which, she was impressed. There had been a couple of intuitive leaps in his approach that would never have occurred to her. She’d assumed that what he’d just done wasn’t possible.

“Anything?” he asked, hauling himself up off the floor and looking over her shoulder at the screens.

“Just garbage,” she replied, and his face fell so fast and so far it practically burnt up on re-entry. “Hold it,” she added. “What’s that? There, that group on the third screen from the left, near the bottom.”

“That’s a standard military class-7 cipher.”

I know that,
she didn’t say. “And there, look. Scroll that one down a bit, there’s more.”

Loads more: pages and pages of it, all in basic easy-to-read class-7 encryption. After a while they stopped talking to each other, too intent on what they were reading to say anything.

Eventually they stopped reading and looked at each other. Their faces were pale and rather scared-looking.

“Who the hell,” Lucy said, “are the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes?”

47

?????

“Fair play,” said the PDF man, smirking slightly. “We didn’t know about your booster station. You don’t know about our latest generation of warships. Personally, I don’t believe government can function unless the front paws are kept blissfully ignorant of what the hind paws are doing.”

They stood on the observation platform of the orbital defence grid control station, with nothing but a forcefield between them and the stars. It wasn’t the same as seeing it on a screen, the director acknowledged. Even the best 3D imaging came nowhere near close.

“Not very big, are they?” he said.

The PDF man grinned, displaying teeth. “
T’erier-class,”
he said, “small but vicious. Three-man crew, but more firepower than a type-9 frigate. That lot up there —” he indicated a cloud of small white dots far away in the distance — “could take out the whole of the rest of the fleet put together in about five minutes, and the crews wouldn’t know what hit them.”

“Interesting,” the director said quietly but pointedly. “Just the sort of thing you’d want on your side if you were — oh, I don’t know, planning a military coup or something.”

“You know, that hadn’t occurred to me,” the PDF man replied mildly. “But yes, I can see your point. That’s not what we had in mind when we built them, though.”

“Really.”

The PDF man shrugged. “The really cool thing about them,” he went on, ‘is the dislocation drive.” He lowered his voice, even though they were demonstrably alone on the platform. “You’re a scientist, you’ll appreciate this. We finally cracked U’rrf’s Constant.”

The director nearly fell over. At the last moment, he managed to grab hold of the handrail. “You’re joking.”

“Actually, no I’m not. We found a way round the diffusion shift problem. A
T’erier-class
can dislocate. You don’t need me to tell you what that means.”

The director looked at him. “Anywhere in the galaxy?”

The PDF man nodded. “Not quite instantaneous,” he said, “not yet. There’s still exit and re-entry times, and of course it can take several hours to do the navigational calculations and programme the guidance computers. But more or less, yes. Anywhere in the galaxy within a matter of hours.”

The director’s tail was wagging; he couldn’t help it. “You can’t keep something like that to yourselves,” he said softly. “I mean, it’s the biggest discovery since—”

“Since nothing. It’s the biggest discovery ever.” The PDF man turned his head slightly and gazed at the white dots. “Of course, U’rrf did all the hard work, rest his soul. We just cleared up that one last niggling little detail. Even so.” His face cracked into a huge, lolling-tongue grin. “That still makes us the cleverest beings ever in the history of the universe.”

The director dragged in a deep breath; his lungs were tight and his throat felt cramped. “Just think,” he said, “of what we’ll be able to do with technology like that. It’ll mean an end to hunger, poverty—”

“Um, no.” The PDF man pulled a sad face. “Pity, but no. That’d mean telling people about it, and then it wouldn’t be
ours
any more. Much better to restrict it to the military. After all, if an enemy got his paws on it, we wouldn’t have an overwhelming advantage any more, now would we?”

“What enemy? We haven’t got any.”

“Not right now,” the PDF man said. “Not that we know of. Except Earth, of course.”

“Well, yes.” The director hesitated. “Apart from them, though—”

“And they’ve knocked out two of our
R’wfft
-class missiles,” he went on, “so who knows what they’ve got? Must be something pretty devastating.” He smiled. “That’s how I sold it to my bosses, and they agreed wholeheartedly. Though I don’t suppose they minded having a chance to try out the
T’erier
class in action. It’s been rather frustrating, as you can imagine. Like a kid with a new bike when it won’t stop raining.”

The white dots could have been stars, except that they were just a little bit too close together.

“So when will you—?”

“Oh, we can’t see any point in hanging about,” the PDF man said. “Ready when you are, basically.”

“When
I—”

“You’re coming with us,” the PDF man said. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he added. “You’ll be able to see it happen, after all those years of dedicated work.”

The director moved away from the rail, his back to the ships and stars. “Yes, thank you,” he said. “That’s exactly what I want, you’re quite right.” But his ears were back and his collar was tight. Details like that weren’t lost on a trained observer.

“Splendid,” the PDF man said. “We’re running the second phase of pre-launch checks, so that gives you an hour. I can let you have room for a small instrument case, but that’s about all. You’ll be flying with me,” he added. “I trust that’s all right.”

“Of course,” the director said, looking straight at him. There was something about his expression that the PDF man couldn’t quite identify; not fear exactly, a little bit of resentment but only by way of orchestration to the main theme. Sorrow, he decided, rather to his surprise.

“Where should I meet you?”

“Here,” the PDF man said. “We’ll teleport to the boarding module, and they’ll get you kitted up there. Don’t eat or drink anything,” he added. “Not recommended before dislocating. Ten cc’s of strepsiadin wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.”

“I’ll be here,” the director said, and he stepped on to the elevator without looking back. He took the teleshift back to his office, where he filled a slim black case with instruments — scanners, collimators, a hi-res thaumaton probe. He took a model-16 therion blaster out of his desk drawer, then reluctantly put it back: he would undoubtedly be scanned for weapons, and it would only cause embarrassment. Finally, he sprang the two locks on the bottom drawer of his desk, pulled out a plastic bag and put it in the case. It contained a lead and a collar.