Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) (22 page)

Switzer clapped him on the shoulder. "Just some hormone and mineral supplements, to help the fastract do its job. Here, try standing up." He grabbed Bandicut's right arm and motioned to one of the medtechs, who grabbed the left. "Swing your legs off the table—atta' boy."

Bandicut nearly fainted as they spun him around and sat him up. Charlie's command over the pain pathways was uncertain, and for a second he felt a searing pain roar up his leg until it tingled in his ear. "Uh—"

"That's it. Can you stand?"

/// Slowly! ///

He slid from the table with a grunt, wincing as his feet touched the floor. Charlie managed to kill the pain just as his weight came down on both legs, so it was mainly the anticipation of pain, rather than pain itself, that made him shudder. Still, he was grateful for the low Triton gravity.

"Okay?" asked Switzer.

"Yeh," he whispered.

"Good. Here's an instruction sheet on the fastract." Switzer waved a paper at him. "You've got to keep it at the right tension level, or you'll be back here in even worse shape. And no centrifuge until I say so."

"Right." What do you think I am, a moron?

"Just follow those instructions, and take these—" Switzer handed him a huge bottle of pills "—and come back in two days so I can see how you're doing." He hesitated. "Sooner—only if you have to."

Bandicut nodded, glancing around at the otherwise empty infirmary offices. He wasn't exactly monopolizing the doctor's time. He recalled that Switzer was rumored to spend extensive periods of leisure time in the VR facilities. Some sort of golf game, apparently. "Right," he answered. "Only if I have to. Wouldn't want to impose upon your services—"

Switzer's gaze darkened almost imperceptibly.

/// Are you baiting him now?

This is a very interesting dynamic. ///

Bandicut sighed. /Oh, shut up, will you?/ To the doctor, he said, "Just joking, you know."

"Yes," said Switzer, who clearly understood exactly what he'd meant, and didn't much like it. He squinted at Bandicut and said, "I wonder if we should have you come back in for some neurological retesting. I wouldn't want to think that you hadn't completely recovered from your prior...unfortunate...accident. Perhaps we should make sure that there's nothing funny going on." He tapped the side of his head meaningfully.

/// What's he mean by that? ///

Charlie asked in a panic.

"What do you mean by that?" Bandicut asked simultaneously.

"Well, you were picked up with a temperature of a hundred and four. By the time you were rolled in here, you were down to one-zero-two. Now you're back to ninety-eight point seven." Switzer shook his head, turning away with his clipboard. "That's just not natural."

/// Oh. ///

Bandicut shifted his attention. /You did that, too? You shut it off that fast?/

/// I, well...

I was trying to give you a cover for the accident.

I didn't think you needed it anymore,

once we were on our way here. ///

Bandicut nodded—and stopped the movement of his head when he remembered he was nodding to the quarx, not the doctor. /I suppose there's no way you could have known./

/// I still have much to learn, ///

the quarx admitted.

Switzer turned back, glaring. "You still here? Go on, get out of here. Go take in...whatever it is you like to do." He coughed and hurried into his office, leaving Bandicut standing, wobbling slightly, with the nurse.

With a faint smile at the nurse's bemused expression, he turned and hobbled with a low-gravity bounce out of the infirmary.

*

/I think I want a beer,/ he said, working his way toward the rec lounge.

The quarx was silent for a moment, before saying,

/// I find I have some pharmacological data

in my memory.

I'm not sure that it would be a good idea,

with that medication you're on. ///

Bandicut frowned. /Can't you just take care of any side effects?/

/// I'm not a miracle worker.

I'm just an alien. ///

/Ha ha./ Bandicut chuckled, then realized that the quarx had not meant the statement as a joke. /Well, okay—if not a beer—what, then?/

/// Well...at some point,

I'd like to see that game again.

EineySteiney pool. ///

/All right./

/// But first,

how about taking me to the place

where my predecessor... ///

/Yes?/

/// ...linked you in. ///

Bandicut smiled and hobbled a little more quickly down the corridor.

Chapter 15

Datafry

Settling into a booth just off the lounge, Bandicut put on the headset and waited for the quarx to begin. /Well?/

Charlie hesitated.

/// Actually,

I don't seem to remember how he did it.

Do you? ///

/Me? Hell, no. I didn't understand it when he was doing it./

/// Well, did he say anything about

how he did it? ///

Bandicut thought back. /He said he was...altering the neural matrix of my brain. He said it was something like the way he talked to me...directly in my brain./

/// Ah. ///

/Does that help?/

/// I'm not sure. ///

He felt the quarx scrabbling in his mind, trying to fit together fragments of memory.

/// Wait, here's something.

Not a direct memory, but a hint.

Altering the matrix—?

Wait...I think I've got it. ///

Bandicut stared at the console, imagining the quarx's face peering back at him.

/// May I try? ///

/Go ahead. You have the con./

/// Stand by... ///

He nodded and closed his eyes. Nothing happened, and he was about to question the quarx, when he was startled by an eruption of sparks in his closed eyes.

>

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

  >>

    >>>>

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>—<
alpha-connect
>—>>>>>>

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>—<
alpha-connect
>—>>>>>>

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>—<
alpha-connect
>—>>>>>>

   >>

  >>>>>>

 >>>

>

——<
mode shift
>>>>>———

>

He shuddered at the jarring entry.

A burst of fireworks expanded in his vision, then crystallized into a network, which hung against the darkness for a heartstopping instant. Then it melted and drained like rivulets of glowing water toward him, into his vision, his eyes, his brain, his consciousness...

*

For several minutes, streams of silvery data branched and flowed and shifted, like mercury flowing over an uneven surface. The quarx dived into the datastream, carrying Bandicut faster than he could follow with his thoughts. He was grateful for the surge and tug of the neurolink, but Charlie was taking the data far too fast for him to follow. The quarx darted from stream to stream, dipping and sampling, siphoning information that left Bandicut dizzily bewildered.

Finally he asked, /Do you know what you're looking for?/

The quarx hummed distractedly.

/// Not specifically.

I have an intuition that he might have

left something for me. ///

/Left something? Like what?/

/// I wish I knew.

If he knew he was dying,

he might have anticipated this situation. ///

/You think he left you some kind of instructions?/

/// I would have, in his place. ///

Bandicut watched the datastream blur. What could Charlie-One have left in the datanet that wouldn't be incriminating? The quarx was now rummaging through Earth history files. A minute later he shifted to a summation of the mathematical proofs of the last two centuries. He riffled through them with blinding speed.

/// Nothing.

I find nothing.

You're going to have to help me. ///

/Okay. How?/

/// Well...there's a lot about him

that you know better than I.

What did he like?

What were his concerns?

What interested him? ///

/Well...the mission, of course./ Bandicut shrugged mentally. /Have you put the pieces of that together yet?/

/// We have to stop something from hitting Earth.

It's quite urgent. ///

/Right. Was that from your memory or mine?/

/// A little of both.

And you have some essential data in your head

which we have to relay to the translator. ///

/Right./ That little detail had almost slipped his mind. /Can you—do you see the data okay? Is it still there?/

/// I haven't actually found it yet,

But that doesn't mean it isn't there.

What else—about Charlie, I mean?

Maybe not related to the mission. ///

Bandicut thought. /Well—he was a big TV nut. He loved the old-time stuff. Was always quoting stupid lines at me. Is that what you mean?/

/// Maybe... ///

/In fact, now that I think about it, he used an old TV show as camouflage when he fired that first bunch of data to the translator./

/// Ah.

That's precisely the sort of thing

I was looking for. ///

The quarx shifted in a silent whirlwind to a whole new branch of the datastream, one bearing endless thousands of hours of TV and holo programming.

/If it helps, he said the program he used for cover was—/ Bandicut stopped, realizing he didn't remember. The name had meant nothing to him.

/// "Father Knows Best."

It's right there in your memory.

I'll check,

but I doubt he'd use the same cover

for instructions. ///

The scanning was a mottled brown blur, the mud of a trillion frames of imagery swirled together in a river of video history.

/// I didn't think so. ///

/He liked westerns,/ Bandicut noted.

/// Westerns?

Okay, let's check. ///

The river jumped and billowed, and for an instant, Bandicut thought he saw spinning images of cowboys riding and shooting and dying and rescuing, and then it closed together again—

/Well, I guess that didn't—/

—and
opened
again to reveal a cowboy on horseback, gazing at a sunset from some unnamed mountain ridge. The cowboy turned, grinned toothily, and the viewpoint shifted to closeup, and in the dark pupils of the cowboy's eyes Bandicut saw the exploding fire of a quarx in its native reality. And his heart skipped, because he
felt
the first Charlie's presence in those fiery eyes. /Hi, pardner,/ murmured the cowboy, in obvious recognition. /I
thought
you might find your way to me. Let's see if we can help each other out a little, shall we?/

/Uh—yeah—/

/I'm guessing that you have a new quarx-manifestation, and you need information. Well, that's what I'm here for—to help you fill in the blanks. Let's go for a little ride, shall we? Come along./

Bandicut felt himself riding beside the cowboy/quarx—along the ridge, and then suddenly pitching over the edge of a precipice into a bottomless canyon, its walls glittering with points of information. He was falling into darkness, and coruscating fire...

And voices began murmuring somewhere close to the center of his mind...babbling with information and greetings from one quarx to another...

*

/// You okay? ///

/Huh?/ He blinked in the cool twilight of the normal datastream, viewed from a height. He wasn't quite sure what had happened, or how he had gotten here from where he'd just been.

/// We got it. ///

He blinked again. /Got what?/

/// I guess you really blacked out there.

He left me the key to the database,

and told me how he'd managed the uplink. ///

/Are you serious?/

/// Why wouldn't I be?

Do you have any objections if I prepare

to make the uplink? ///

/I guess not./ Charlie-One hadn't even bothered to ask. Bandicut squinted at the fuzzy topography of the datanet. He was still trying to get things back into focus; he couldn't quite figure out where he was.

/// Let me just check a few things here. ///

The view went black; then he saw orbital projections, and images of spacecraft—moving in orbit, moored at the space station, and waiting on the surface of the dim, icy moon.

/// This is Triton, isn't it? ///

/Yah, sure. There's Neptune in the background in that one. Most of these look like monitor images from the Triton orbital station, where the interplanetary shuttles come in./

/// Orbital station?

What all do they have there?

Just big interplanetary shuttles? ///

/Well, they have a number of scout craft, as well. Big ones and little ones./

/// Hm. I see. ///

Bandicut felt drawn to the images.  Space—that was where he was supposed to be. He wondered if the quarx could make it possible for him to return someday. Now there were some images of the mining encampment, viewed from orbit with a telescopic lens. There were scars visible on the surface from the mining operations; but on the whole, from space, the human presence looked pretty puny and insignificant. /Does this stuff mean anything in particular to you?/