Sassinak (12 page)

"A quad? Never saw one. Let's take a look—" He called up the reference system on his own screen. "What's the code?"

Sassinak read it off, waited while he punched it in. He whistled. "Code itself is Fleet IG's office . . . who the dickens is getting mail from the IG, I wonder. And quad duplication. That's . . ."

She heard his fingers on the keys, a soft clicking, and then another whistle. "I dunno, Ensign. Some kind of internal code, I'd guess, but it's not in the book. Who're they to?"

Sassinak read off the codes, and he looked them up.

"Huh. Tenant Achael and Weapons Systems Officer . . . and that's 'Tenant Achael. Tell you what, Ensign, someone sure wants to have Achael get that signal, whatever it is." He gave her a strange, challenging look. "Want me to put a tag on it?"

"Mmm? No," she said. Then more firmly, as he continued to look at her. "No, just the receiving code tag. It's none of our business, anyway."

Still, she couldn't quite put it out of her mind. It wasn't unknown for the IG to pull a surprise inspection—and not unheard of for a junior officer to be tipped off by a friend ahead of time. Or someone—presumably 'Tenant Achael—might have made a complaint directly to the IG. That also happened. But she couldn't leave it at that. She was responsible, whenever she was on duty, for spotting anything irregular in the Communications Section. Two messages from the IG's office—two messages sent to the same person by different routes, and with an initiating code that wasn't in the book. That was definitely irregular.

"Come in, Ensign," said Commander Fargeon, seated as usual behind his desk. She wished it had been some other officer. "What is it?" he asked.

"An irregularity in incoming signals, sir." Sassinak laid the hardcopy prints on his desk. "This came in with a regular mail batchfile. Two identical strips for Lieutenant Achael, one direct to his E-mail slot, and one to Weapons Officer. The same originating code, in the IG's office, but repeated four times. And it's in code . . ." She let her voice trail off, seeing that Fargeon's attention was caught. He picked up the prints and looked closely at them.

"Hmm. Did you decode it?"

"No, sir." Sass managed not to sound aggrieved: he knew she knew that was strictly against regulations. She hadn't done anything yet to make him think she was likely to break regs.

"Well." Fargeon sat back, still staring at the prints. "It's probably nothing, Ensign—a friend in the IG's office, wanting to make sure he'd get the message—but you were quite right to bring it to my attention. Quite right." By his tone, he didn't think so—he sounded bored and irritable. Sassinak waited a moment. "And if anything of a similar nature should happen again, you should certainly tell me about it. Dismissed."

Sassinak left his office unsatisfied. Something pricked her mind; she couldn't quite figure it out, but it worried her constantly. Surely Fargeon, the most rigid of captains, couldn't be involved in anything underhanded. And was it underhanded to be receiving messages from the IG? Not really.

She mentioned her inability to feel comfortable with Fargeon's attitude to the Weft ensign, Jrain.

"No, we don't think he's bent," was Jrain's response. "He doesn't like Wefts, but then he doesn't like much of anyone he didn't know in childhood. They're pretty inbred, there on Bretagne. A bit like the Seti, in a way: they have very rigid ideas of right and wrong."

"I thought the Seti were pretty loose," said Sass. "Vandals and hellraisers, always willing to start a fight or gamble it all on one throw."

"They are, but that doesn't mean they don't have their own rules. Did you know Seti won't do any gene engineering?"

"I thought they were primitive in that field."

"They are, but it's because they want to be. They think it's wrong to load the dice—genetic or otherwise. But that's beside the point: what matters is that Fargeon is straight, so far as Wefts can tell. Even though he doesn't like us, Wefts choose to serve on his ship, because he is fair."

Only a few shipdays later, they had their first break in routine since leaving Base. The cruiser had orders to inspect a planet in the system which had generated conflicting reports: an EEC classification of "habitable; possibly suitable for limited colonization" and a more recent free scout's comment of "dead—no hope."

From orbit, the remote survey crews backed up the free scout's report. No life, and no possibility of it without major terraforming. But Fleet apparently wanted a closer investigation, some idea of who had done it—the
Others
, or what? Commander Fargeon himself chose the landing team: Sassinak went as communications officer, along with ten specialists and ten armed guards.

It was her first time since the training cruise at the Academy in full protective gear. This time, a sergeant checked her seals and tanks, instead of an instructor. The air tasted "tanky" as they put it, and she had to remind herself where all the switches were. Carefully, very aware that this was no training exercise, she checked out the main and backup radios she'd be using on the surface, made sure that the recording taps were all open, the computer channels cleared for input.

She didn't see the planet until the shuttle cleared the cruiser's hull. It looked exactly like the teaching tapes of dead planets. Sassinak ignored it after a glance and ran another set of checks on her equipment. Although the planet had once had a breathable oxygen atmosphere, sustained by its biosphere, it had already skewed towards the reducing atmosphere common to unlivable worlds.

Besides, whatever had been used to kill its living component might still be active. They would be on tanks the entire time. She had hardly cleared the shuttle ramp on the surface, and felt the alien grit rasping along her bootsoles, when the landing team commander called a warning.

At first Sassinak could not judge the size or distance of the pyramidal objects that seemed to grow, like the targets in a computer simulation game, from nothing in the upper air. Certainly they didn't follow the trajectories required by normal insystem drives, nor did they slow for the careful landing the shuttle pilot had made. Instead they hovered briefly overhead, then sank apparently straight down to rest firmly on the bare rock.

Sassinak reported this, hardly aware of doing it, so fascinated was she by the display. Half a dozen of the pyramids now sat, or lay, in an irregular array near the shuttle. Theks, the landing party commander had said; apart from teaching tapes, she had never seen a Thek and now she saw many in person, if such designation was accurate for those entities.

Another member of the landing party beeped the LPC and asked, "What do we do about them, sir?"

The LPC snorted, a splatter of sound in the suit com units. "It's more what are they going to do about us. For future reference, this looks to me like the beginnings of a Thek conference. Meanwhile, look your fill. Not many of us ephemerals get a chance to see one forming."

His suit helmet tilted; Sassinak looked up, too. More of the pyramids appeared, sank, and landed nearby.

"If that's what they're doing," LPC said after a brief silence, "we might as well go back in the shuttle and have something to eat. This is going to take longer than we'd planned. Inform the captain, Ensign."

More and more pyramids arrived . . . and then, without sound or warning, the ones already landed rose and joined the others to form a large, interlocking structure of complex geometry.

"That," said the LPC, sounding impressed, "is a Thek cathedral. It's big enough inside for this whole shuttle, and it lasts until they're through. The Xenos think they're linking minds. Humans who have been
in
one don't talk about what happened."

"Humans get drawn into one of those things?" someone asked, clearly unsettled by the notion.

"If a Thek calls, you come," replied the LPC.

"How would you know a Thek wanted you?"

"Oh, there's evidence that the Thek recognize individual humans from time to time . . ."

"Their time?" a wise guy quipped.

"It does look a lot like the Academy Chapel right now," said Sassinak softly. She didn't think this was a time to be clever but people reacted differently to something they couldn't quite understand.

"Most people think that. You're lucky to see one, you know. Just try to keep out of one, if you've got the option. No one says 'no' to one Thek, let alone a whole flotilla."

"Does anyone know more about them than the Academy tapes?"

"Did you take Advanced Alien Cultures? No? Well, it's not that much help anyway. An allied alien race, co-founders of the Federation, we think. Wefts are one of their client races, although I don't know why. They're mineral, and they communicate very . . . very . . . slowly . . . with humans, if at all." Although they were back in the shuttle now, the LPC kept his voice low. "Have a taste for transuranics, and they're supposed to remember everything that ever happened to them, or a distant ancestor. Live a long time, but before they dissolve or harden, or whatever it is they do that corresponds with death, they transmit all their memories somehow. Maybe they're telepathic with each other. For humans they use a computer interface or modulate sound waves. Without, as you can see, any mouth. Don't ask me how; it's not my field, and this is only the second time I've seen a Thek."

Hours later, the Theks abruptly disassembled themselves and flew—or whatever it was—back into the darkening sky. The landing party, now thoroughly bored and stiff, grumbled back into action.

Sass followed them to the outcrop that had been chosen for primary sampling. They set to work as she relayed their results and comments back to the ship. Worklights glared, forming haloes at the edge of her vision as the dust rose, almost like smokehaze in a bar, she thought, watching suited figures shift back and forth. Suddenly she stiffened, wholly alert, her heart racing. One of them—one of the helmeted blurs—she had seen before. Somewhere. Somewhere in a fight.

It came to her: the night of Abe's murder, the night of the brawl in the bar. That same bold geometric pattern on the helmet had then been on the jacket of one of the street gang. That same flicking movement of the arm had—she closed her eyes a moment, now recognizing something she had never quite put together—had aimed something at Abe.

Rage blurred her vision and thought. She opened her mouth to scream into the com unit, but managed to clamp her teeth on the scream. Abe's murderer here? In a Fleet uniform? She didn't know all the landing party, but she could certainly find out whose helmet that was. And somehow, some way, she'd get her revenge.

Through the rest of the time on planet, she worked grimly, determined to hide her reactions until she found out just who that was, and why Abe had been killed. She wondered again about the mysterious duplicated message to 'Tenant Achael. Could that be part of the same problem?

Back on the ship, Sass made no sudden moves. She had had time to think about her options. Going to Fargeon with a complaint that someone on the ship had murdered her guardian would get her a quick trip to the Medical Section for sedation. Querying the personnel files was against regulations, and even if she could get past the computer's security systems, she risked leaving a trace of her search. Whoever it was would know that she was aware of something wrong. Even asking about the helmet's assigned user might be risky, but she felt it was the least risky . . . and she had an idea.

Partly because of the Thek arrival and conference, the LPC had permitted more chatter on the circuits than usual, and Sass had already found it hard to tag each transmission with the correct originating code, as required. She had reason, therefore, to ask the rating in charge of the helmets for a list of occupants, "just to check on some of this stuff, and be sure I get the right words with the right person."

The helmet she cared most about belonged to 'Tenant Achael. Gotcha, thought Sass, but kept a bright friendly smile on her face when she called him on the ship's intercom. Sorry to bother you, sir, she began, "but I needed to check some of these transmissions . . ."

"Couldn't you have done that at the time?" he asked. He sounded gruff, and slightly wary. Sass tried to project innocent enthusiasm, and pushed all thought of Abe aside.

"Sorry, sir, but I was having trouble with the coded data link while the Theks were there." This was in fact true, and she'd mentioned it to the LPC at the time, which meant she was covered if Achael checked. "The commander said that was more important . . ."

"Very well, then. What is it?"

"At 1630, ship's time, a conversation on the geo-chemical sulfur cycle and its relation to the fourth stage of re-seeding . . . was it you, sir, or Specialist Nervin, who said 'But that's only if you consider the contribution of the bacterial substrate to be nominal.' That's just where the originating codes began to get tangled." Just as she spoke, Sass pushed the capture button on her console, diverting Achael's response into a sealed file she'd prepared. Highly illegal, but she would have need of it. And if the shielded tap she'd put together didn't work, he'd hear the warning buzz on her speech first. He should react to it.

"Oh—" He sounded less tense. "That was Nervin—he was telling me about the latest research from Zamroni. Apparently there's some new evidence that shows a much greater contribution from the bacterial substrate in fourth stage. Have you read it?"

"No, sir."

"Really. You were involved in installing the new environmental system, though, weren't you? I'd gotten the idea that biosystems was your field."

"No, sir," sald Sassinak firmly, guessing where he wanted to go with this. "I took command course: just general knowledge in the specialty fields. Frankly, sir, I found most of that environmental system over my head, and if it hadn't been for Chief Erling—"

"I see. Well, does that give you enough to go on, or do you need something else?"

Sassinak asked two more questions, each quite reasonable since it involved a period with multiple transmissions at a time when her attention might have been on data relay. He answered freely, seemingly completely relaxed now, and Sassinak kept her own voice easy. He was still willing to chat. Then she cut him off, making herself sound reluctant. Did she want to meet for a drink in the mess next shift indeed!