The Algebraist (6 page)

They’d turned shadow-matt and dark in the surrounding gloom, too. Apparently even the NavMil’s off-duty fatigues for trainees came with active camo.

She was shaking her head, as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Even Fassin, who’d pretty much shucked off the whole boy thing of obsessive interest in all things military and alien not long after the onset of puberty, knew about the Voehn. They were usually described in the media as living legends or near-mythical warriors, which kind of blanded what they really were; the crack troops and personal guards of the new galactic masters.

The Voehn were the calmly relentless, highly intelligent, omni-competent, near-indestructible, all-environments-capable, undefeated
uber-
soldiers of the last nine or so millennia. They were the martial pin-ups of the age, the speckless species peak of military perfection, but they were rare, few and far between. Where the new masters, the Culmina, were, the Voehn were too, but not in all that many other places, and - as far as anybody knew, Fassin had been given to understand - in all those millennia not one had even entered the Ulubis system to visit Sepekte, the principal planet, let alone come near Nasqueron, or deigned to have anything to do with its little planet-moon ‘glantine, even in death.

There was, of course, a further resonance for humans in the Voehn name and reputation, whether one was aHuman or rHuman. It had been the actions of a single Voehn ship nearly eight thousand years earlier which had made the distinction and the two prefixes necessary in the first place.

‘Voehn,’ Sal said defiantly to Taince. ‘Voehn remains. That’s the rumour.’

Taince narrowed her eyes and drew herself up in her NavMil-issue fatigues. ‘Not one I’ve heard.’

‘Yes,’ Sal said, ‘well, my contacts are a few levels above the boot locker.’

Fassin gulped. ‘I thought they all got smeared in this thing, anyway,’ he said quickly, before Taince could reply. ‘Just paste, gas and stuff.’

‘They were,’ Taince said through her teeth, looking at Sal, not him.

‘Indeed they were,’ Sal agreed. ‘But Voehn are real toughies, aren’t they, Tain?’

‘Shit, yeah,’ Taince said quietly, levelly. ‘Real fucking toughies.’

‘Takes a lot to kill one, takes even more to paste it,’ Sal said, seemingly oblivious to Taince’s signals.

‘Notoriously resistant to fate and the enemy’s various unpleasantnesses,’ Taince said coldly. Fassin had the feeling she was quoting. The gossip was that she and Sal were some sort of couple, or at least fucked now and again. But Fassin thought that, given the look in her eyes right now, that particular side of their relationship, if it had ever existed, might be in some danger of being pasted itself. He looked for Ilen, to catch her expression.

She wasn’t where she’d been, on the far side of the flier. He looked around some more. She wasn’t anywhere he could see. ‘Ilen?’ he said. He glanced at the other two. ‘Where’s Ilen?’ Sal tapped his ear stud. ‘Ilen?’ he said. ‘Hey, Len?’ Fassin peered into the shadows. He had night vision as good as most people, but with barely any starlight and only the soft conserve-level lights of the flier resting in its declivity, there wasn’t much to work with. Infrared showed next to nothing too, not even fading footstep-traces on whatever this strange material was.

‘Ilen?’ Sal said again. He looked at Taince, who was also scanning the area. ‘I can’t see shit and my phone’s out,’ he told her. ‘You able to see any better than us?’

Taince shook her head. ‘Get those eyes in fourth year.’

Shit,
thought Fassin. He wondered if anybody had a torch. Probably not. Few people did these days. He checked his own earphone, but it was dead too; not even local reception.
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.
When did the archetype of this storyline date from? Four kids getting the use of dad’s chariot and losing a wheel just before nightfall near the old deserted Neanderthal cave? Something like that. Just wander off into the dark and get killed horribly, one by one.

‘I’ll turn up the flier lights,’ Sal said, reaching for the interior. ‘If ness, we can lift off and--’

‘ILEN!’ Taince shouted at the top of her lungs. Fassin jumped. He hoped the others hadn’t noticed.

‘… Over here.’ Ilen’s voice came, very distantly, from further inside the wreck.

‘Wandering off!’ Sal shouted in the general direction Ilen’s voice had come from. ‘Not good idea! In fact, very bad idea! Suggest return immediately!’

‘Peeing in front of peers problem,’ the reply drifted back. ‘Bashful bladder syndrome. Relieved, returning. Speak normal now, or Len get Tain poke Sal eye out.’

Taince grinned. Fassin had to turn away. Sometimes, through all the almost wilfully unjustified reticence and uncertainty, and often at moments like this when you might least expect it, Ilen surprised him by doing or saying something like this. She made his insides hurt.
Oh, don’t let me start to fall in love with her,
he thought.
That would just be too much to bear.

Sal laughed. A vaguely Hen-shaped blob appeared in IR sense fifty metres away, head first over a fold in the rippled floor like a shallow hill. ‘There. She’s fine,’ Sal announced, as though he’d rescued her personally.

Ilen rejoined them, smiling and blinking in the soft lights of the flier, her white-gold hair shining. She nodded. ‘Evening,’ she said, and grinned at them.

‘Welcome back,’ Sal told her, and hauled a pack out of one of the flier’s storage lockers. He swung the bag onto his back.

Taince glared at the pack, then at Sal’s face. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Sal looked innocent. ‘Going to take a look round. You can join me if--’

‘Like fuck you are.’

‘Tain, child,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t need your permission.’

‘I’m not a fucking child and yes, you fucking do.’

‘And will you please stop swearing
quite
so much? There’s really no need to flaunt your newly acquired gruff military manner quite so conspicuously.’

‘We stay here,’ she told him, using the cold voice again. ‘Close to the flier. We don’t go wandering off into a
prohibited
alien shipwreck in the middle of the night with an enemy craft cruising overhead.’

‘Why not?’ Sal protested. ‘For one thing it’s probably on the other side of the planet by now or maybe even destroyed. And anyway, if this Beyonder ship, or battlesat, or drone, or whatever it is can see inside here, which I seriously doubt, it’s going to target the flier, not a few human warm-bods, so we’re safer away from the thing.’

‘You stay with the craft, always,’ Taince said, her jaw set.

‘For how long?’ Sal asked. ‘How long do these nuisance raids, these attacklets, usually last?’ Taince just glared at him. ‘Half a day, average,’ Sal told her. ‘Overnight, probably, in this case. Meantime we’re somewhere it’s not normally possible to be, through no fault of our own, with time to kill… why the hell not take a look round?’

‘Because it’s Prohibited,’ Taince said. ‘That’s why.’ Fassin and Ilen exchanged looks, concerned but still amused.

‘Taince!’ Sal said, waving his arms. ‘Life is risk. That’s business. Come on!’

‘You stay with the craft,’ Taince repeated grimly.

‘Will you step out of your programming just for a second?’ Sal asked her, sounding genuinely annoyed and looking at the other two for support. ‘Can any of us think of one good reason why this place
is
prohibited, apart from standard authoritarian, bureaucratic, overreacting, territory-marking militaristic bullshit?’

‘Maybe they know stuff we don’t,’ Taince said.

‘Oh, come
on!’
Sal protested. ‘They always claim that!’

‘Listen,’ Taince said levelly. ‘Your point is taken regarding the likelihood of the flier’s systems being targeted by hostiles, and therefore I volunteer to walk out, every hour on the hour, to near the gap in the hull where a phone might work once the jamming sub-sats have been neutralised, to check for the all-clear.’

‘Fine,’ Sal said, digging into another of the flier’s lockers. ‘You do that. I’m seizing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a look round an intrinsically fascinating alien artefact. If you hear me screaming horribly it’ll just be me falling into the claws, suckers or… beaks of some unspeakable space-alien monster every single wreck-clearing team missed and which has chosen just this evening out of the last seven millennia to wake up and feel hungry.’

Taince took a deep breath, stepped back from the flier and said, ‘Okay, seems this must qualify as an emergency.’ She dug into her black fatigues and when her hand reappeared it held a small dark grey device.

Sal stared at her, incredulous. ‘What the hell is
that?
A gun? You’re not planning to
shoot
me, are you, Taince?’

She shook her head and thumbed something on the side of the device. There was a pause, then Taince frowned and looked closely at the thing in her hand. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘at the moment I’m not even threatening to report you to the local Guard, not in real-time, anyway.’ Sal relaxed a little, but didn’t pull whatever it was he’d been looking for out of the locker. Taince shook her head and looked up into the black spaces of the cavernous craft around them. She held the little grey device up to show the others. ‘This baby,’ she said, ‘should be able to punch me through to a kid’s disposable on the far side of the planet, but it’s still searching for cosmic background.’ She sounded more puzzled than embarrassed or angry, Fassin thought. (In similar circumstances, he’d have been mortified, and it would have shown.) Taince nodded, still staring upwards. ‘Impressive.’ She put the hand-held away again.

Sal cleared his throat. ‘Taince,
do
you have a gun? It’s just that I’m about to pull one out of this locker and you looked kind of scary and trigger-happy just there.’

‘Yes, I do have a gun,’ she told him. ‘Promise I won’t shoot you.’ She gave a smile that wasn’t really. ‘And if you are intent on traipsing into the bowels of this thing, I’m not going to try and stop you. You’re a big boy now. Your responsibility.’

‘Finally,’ Sal said with satisfaction, pulling a plain but businesslike-looking CR pistol out of the locker and attaching it to his belt. ‘There’s food and water and bedrolls and extra clothes and stuff in the rear lockers,’ he told them, slapping a couple of low-light illuminator patches onto his jacket shoulders. ‘I’ll be back about dawn.’ He multiple-tapped his ear stud, then smiled. ‘Yep, internal clock still working.’ He glanced at each of them in turn. ‘Hey, there’s probably nothing to see; I could be back in an hour for all I know.’ They all just looked at him. ‘Nobody else coming along, huh?’ he asked. Ilen and Fassin glanced at each other. Taince was watching Sal, who said, ‘Well, don’t wait up,’ and turned to go.

‘You’re very well prepared for this,’ Taince said quietly.

Sal hesitated, then turned towards her, open-mouthed. He looked at Fassin and Ilen, then stared with wide eyes at Taince. He gestured towards the distant hull gap, upwards as though to space, then shook his head. ‘Taince, Taince,’ he breathed. He pushed one hand through his thick black hair. ‘Just how paranoid and suspicious do they insist you be in the military?’

‘Your father’s company makes our battlecraft, Saluus,’ she told him. ‘Wariness is a survival strategy.’

‘Oh, cheap shot, Taince.’ Sal looked mildly insulted. ‘But I mean, really. Seriously. Come on.’ He slapped his backpack, exasperated. ‘Hell’s teeth, woman, if I
hadn’t
made sure the flier was equipped with emergency gear you’d have chewed my ear for making a deep-desert flight without the necessary supplies!’

Taince stood looking at him, near-expressionless, for a few moments longer. ‘Mind how you go, Sal.’

He nodded, relaxing. ‘You too,’ he said. ‘See you all soon.’ He looked round them all one more time, grinning. ‘Nothing I wouldn’t do, and all that.’ He waved his hand and tramped off.

‘Hold on,’ Ilen said. Sal turned back. Ilen pulled her little day-pack out of the flier. ‘I’ll come with you, Sal.’

Fassin stared, horrified. ‘What?’ he said, in a small, shocked, little boy’s voice. Nobody seemed to hear. For once he was glad. Taince said nothing.

Sal smiled. ‘You sure?’ he asked the girl.

‘If you don’t mind,’ Ilen said.

‘Fine by me,’ Sal said quietly.

‘Sure you don’t mind?’

‘Of course I don’t mind.’

‘Well, you’re not supposed to go off exploring in dubious situations individually, are you?’ Ilen said. ‘Isn’t that right?’ She looked at Taince, who nodded.

‘You take care.’

Ilen kissed Fassin’s cheek, winked at Taince and strode up the shallow slope to Sal. They waved and walked off. Fassin watched their footstep-traces in IR, each faint patch of brightness on the ground behind them fading after less than a second.

‘Never understand that girl,’ Taince said, sounding unconcerned. She and Fassin looked at each other. ‘Suggest you take a snooze now,’ Taince told him, nodding at the flier. She picked her nose and inspected her finger. ‘I’ll wake you before I head out to the hull gap to check for signal.’