Final Inquiries (3 page)

It shuffled awkwardly toward the second pair of passenger seats and positioned itself so it was standing, facing forward, directly in front of the starboard seat. It paused for a moment again, then abruptly folded itself at the knees and waist and dropped heavily into the seat.

Brox laid himself down on his cushioning pad and strapped himself in. "You will observe that our new friend is already adapting to human behaviors. Although it has no visible eyes, it has started to point its face at things it needs to look at. And I am fairly certain that is the first time it has ever actually sat in any sort of human chair or seat or bench."

"How exciting," said Jamie. "Our little android is all grown-up."

"I suppose that's nice to know," Hannah said. "Though I don't see what good it does us."

"Not a great deal--yet. But it would be worth bearing in mind that our friend is changing, developing--and doing it rapidly. You would be wise not to take it for granted or underestimate it."

"So noted," said Hannah. Brox had a point. The simulant was, in effect, learning to move like a human being, to act like a human being. And the more it moved like a human, the more likely they were to accept it, ignore it, perhaps even speak openly in front of it. They would have to assume it was capable of remembering or recording vision and sound and could transmit it or play it back later for its masters.

"Time to get moving, people," said Kelly. "I'm going to close the hatch. Everyone strapped in? I mean, except for the simulant?"

"We're all secure. What about the sim?" Jamie asked. "Should I try to latch its belts? It's just got those flipper things where its hands should be. I don't think it could work the mechanism, even if we managed to give it the idea."

"No," said Kelly. "It would probably just sit there passively if you tried--but it might have some sort of hair-trigger self-defense programming. Get too close and it might go nuts on us. I'll just fly us nice and easy. With a little luck, it won't need a seat belt. Besides, it looks like it would be pretty hard to damage. Here we go. Sealing the hatch."

The ramp retracted, the hatch swung itself to and sealed itself, and Kelly cast the little craft off from the side of the Center Transit Station. She moved them slowly away, piloting with the self-conscious precision of a senior officer who was not only out of practice but also nervous about making a spectacular mistake in front of subordinates and visitors.

Hannah had one thing at least figured out. The normal procedure would have been for them to board a BSI interstellar-capable ship from one of the docking bays and depart directly for their transit-jump point. But Brox 231 must have come from somewhere, on some sort of ship--presumably his own. And if Kelly had been a little twitchy about having a Kendari Inquirist in the BSI Bullpen, she no doubt would have been ten times as unhappy to have a Kendari Inquiry Service starship docking to BSI HQ. Brox must have left his ship in a parking orbit and come to the station on this or some other jeep-tug.

But Hannah didn't even know for sure that Brox had arrived via starship. There were Kendari installations on Center, the planet that Center Transit Station orbited. They might be about to dock with some sort of ground-to-orbit vehicle.

The jeep-tug boosted away from the station. Hannah checked the time. "Well, that's a new personal record for me," she said. "We're departing forty-two minutes after the completion of briefing."

"What briefing?" Jamie asked. "We haven't been told anything."

"All right," said Hannah. "
Two
personal records. Fastest departure, and departure with the least information."

"The second one is going to be tough to break," Jamie said sourly. "How can you get less than zero?" He swiveled around in his seat to look back toward Brox. "What more do you know that you can tell us?"

"I know a great deal more," said Brox. "In fact, it's safe to say that I know all there is to know at this stage. But I cannot tell you any of it--or even tell you why I cannot tell you. There was no time to work out a nuanced agreement that considered how much or how little information I could give out, or how much detail I could provide."

"All or nothing, huh?" Jamie said.

"Can you at least tell us when you'll be able to say more?" Hannah asked.

"No. Absurd, of course, but there it is. There simply was no chance to work out how I should respond to any such perfectly sensible questions. In fact, I was specifically instructed to make the most literal-minded possible interpretation of the agreement."

It was obvious that there wasn't any point in asking with whom Brox had negotiated, or when, or where. Hannah gave up--and shook her head to Jamie when he opened his mouth to prod further. No point in pushing Brox too far and getting him feeling put-upon and out of sorts before the case had even begun.

The only viewports on the jeep-tug were at the forward end, in the pilot's station, and Hannah couldn't see a great deal. She turned her head to look forward and peek over Kelly's shoulder through the pilot's viewport.

At first there was very little to see besides the background of stars rolling past as the jeep-tug came about to its new heading. Then the lateral movement stopped, and the stars stood still in the viewport. One bright dot of silvery light, right in the center of the field of view, seemed larger than the others. It had to be the ship that they were heading toward. Hannah was mildly surprised that she was able to spot it with her naked eye so easily. It must either be awfully close to Center Transit Station--a lot closer than they usually permitted uncleared ships--or else it had to be big. She craned her neck around to check Kelly's nav display and gasped. Very, very big. For it to be visible at their present range, the ship would have to be at least as big
as
Center Transit Station itself, and CTS was something like a kilometer across.

"Caught you peeking, Hannah," Kelly said, glancing over her shoulder. "That's enough backseat driving for now."

"Ah, yes, ma'am. Sorry."

"Don't apologize. I want my Senior Special Agents to be inquisitive. But I'm under some to-be-taken-literally orders myself. However, now that we're all safely aboard and clear of the Station, I
can
tell you a few things that aren't covered by those orders--information from sources other than those covered by the keep-quiet orders."

Kelly checked her controls, locked them, then swiveled around in her seat to face her passengers. "Seems that about three hours ago, Center System Defense Command got a QuickBeam message from a certain party, a trusted party, on Tifinda, the Vixan home world. All sorts of authenticators and encryption sequences and so on, to prove it was from who it claimed to be from, and warning us that a very big, very fast ship was about to arrive, and that it was not, repeat not, an attack. The message included coordinates for the ship's arrival in system and flight-path data for its transit through the system to planetary orbit around Center.

"It was obvious that there was some sort of mistake, as the data showed that the ship would arrive about five times closer to CenterStar than any possible transit point, and showed the ship accelerating to more than ninety percent of the speed of light just about instantaneously, heading straight for the planet Center, then stopping dead, decelerating to orbital velocity in less than a heartbeat.

"Then, sure enough, a ship arrived exactly at the predicted, utterly impossible, coordinates and flew right down the middle of the couldn't-be-right flight path--and, to make a long story short, it's the ship you see straight ahead of us. If not for the warning message from the certain party, Center System Defense Command would have--and should have--opened fire. My guess is that there were plenty of twitchy fingers near the triggers even with the warning." Kelly frowned thoughtfully. "It's damned lucky they didn't fire. Their weapons probably couldn't have hit anything moving that fast anyway, but just shooting at that ship could have made things about six times worse than they already are."

"More than six times worse, I assure you, Commander Kelly," said Brox. "It would likely have meant war with the--ah, owners of that ship. That war would not have lasted long, or gone well for you. It was likely lucky for my people as well. In my opinion, at least, whatever advantage there might have been for us Kendari, if humanity
were
eliminated, it could only have been short-term. It would have been a question of
where
and
when,
not
if,
there would be a flash-point incident for us as well."

That
was a bit of cold-blooded analysis that Hannah could have done without hearing.

"You, ah, used the past tense there," said Jamie. "So if Defense Command had taken a potshot at that ship earlier today, humanity would already have been
eliminated
?"

"Oh, no. Not yet. Not so quickly. It would likely take the Elder Races almost a quarter of an Earth year, at the very least. But, as I said, that would do us Kendari little good if they next turned their attention toward us--and the odds of some peripheral incident or another getting out of hand and causing that would be very high indeed. Or else some Elder Race species might just decide on its own that getting rid of one Younger Race species was really just a good start--and why not wipe out both of the dreary little nuisances, so long as they were at it?"

Jamie furrowed his eyebrows. "So you believe it's likely that both of our species avoided extinction this morning, and nobody knows about it?"

"A
few
beings know about it," said Brox, "and one can never be
certain
what would have happened, but yes, that is essentially the case."

"Well, no point, and no time, to worry about it now," said Hannah. She pointed out the viewport. "The Kendari don't have ships like that. Up until five minutes ago, I'd have said nobody does. Where did it come from?"

"It's a Vixan ship," said Kelly. "And nobody knew about it--except the Defense Command--until it showed up. Apparently, they don't use it much. They can't afford to. Requires too much energy expenditure. Too expensive to operate, except in emergencies."

"A ship the
Vixa
can't afford to fly?" Hannah asked. "Ouch." Both the Younger Races, humans and Kendari alike, had, over the years, come to assume that the myriad Elder Races had the technology to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

In a way, even the apparent exceptions proved the rule. The Reqwar Pavlat might be incapable of decrypting genetic kill switches--but only because they had deliberately renounced whole fields of knowledge in deference to their traditions. And it was not that the Metrans were unable to extend their own life spans, so much as that they so firmly believed it was impossible that they did not try--and once they did try, they succeeded.

And even those were examples of cultures that were
unwilling
to alter themselves--not unable. The belief in Elder Race omnipotence had more to do with outward-looking technology--physics, power generation, transportation, speed, manufacturing. The idea that any such thing might be difficult or expensive for
any
Elder Race species was startling, but for the Vixa, it was only more so.

If there was a superpower among the Elder Races, it would have to be the Vixa. Their ships, their machines, their cities, were the gleaming exemplars of what humans, at least, expected of a race of all-powerful aliens. The idea that any sort of spacecraft would be difficult for
them
to afford was daunting enough. That someone, presumably the Vixa themselves, had dispatched a Kendari aboard such a ship, and sent it to collect not just a couple of BSI agents, but, specifically and by name, Senior Special Agent Hannah Wolfson and Special Agent James Mendez, went well into the overwhelming and intimidating range.

The ship out there was getting closer--and larger. Hannah watched as it grew from a point of light to a fat dot to a featureless golden sphere, gleaming in the darkness. It was obvious that she had grossly underestimated its size. It was far, far bigger than any such paltry object as Center Transit Station. Some objects that size were classified as minor planets.

No one aboard the jeep-tug spoke as the Vixan ship swelled in the viewport, and filled it completely. There, at last, at its center, there was a tiny flicker of movement as an access hatch irised open. "Second time today I've had to fly into that little hole," Kelly grumbled as she swung her seat around, locked it down, and concentrated on her controls.

The "little hole" swelled larger and larger as the jeep-tug made its slow final approach, then flew straight into it and through a featureless tunnel, with walls the same satiny golden color of the spherical ship's outer hull. The tunnel was about a hundred meters or so long. The jeep-tug exited the tunnel's interior and arrived in a large compartment. Kelly extended the landing gear, engaged the vertical thrusters, and brought the little vehicle into a landing on the featureless golden deck.

"Checking external environment," Kelly announced, looking at her displays. "Air mix, air pressure, and gravity levels matched to Earth-normal. All the comforts of home."

"They
were
matched to Kendal standard when it was just me," Brox said, plainly amused. "It would seem our hosts are more concerned about making you comfortable now."

When it was just Brox?
Hannah frowned. That was just the start of her questions. When had Brox come aboard? And where? And why were the high-and-mighty Vixa chauffeuring Younger Race nobodies around the Galaxy? "Hold it a second," she said. "If the briefing for this operation is supposed to be on a need-to-know basis, then, I think we're there now. I need to know."

"Yeah, but
I
don't need to know," said Kelly.

"The Commandant is quite right," said Brox. "She has been ordered to limit her own knowledge of the situation as much as possible. I can provide a limited briefing to you, soon, after her departure. I am not permitted to provide you full information until we have arrived at the--at our destination."