The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (107 page)

He was staring incredulously at the screen. “I … I’ll check.”

“Tarlo,” Paula ordered, “focus all available cameras on the water in the marina.”

“No problem.”

“Deploy the tactical armaments squad right now,” she said. “No boat is to leave that marina. I want every available policeman in Venice down there. Each boat is to be checked individually. Get me a helicopter above the marina now, have them scan the water. And I want a coast guard boat or something with sonar at the mouth of the marina, now!”

The office was suddenly busy, with everyone issuing instructions.

“I’ll have to call you back,” Paula told the Senator. “Things just got a little hectic around here.”

Kazimir stayed out in the house’s little back garden as the sun fell below the horizon. Lights came on all along the canal where the other houses backed onto the water. Half a kilometer away, bright old-fashioned streetlamps illuminated the little bridge with its white railings. The city’s nocturnal noises crept over him, carried by the warm still air. He was very aware of the sirens. So far none of them were close. The timer in his virtual vision kept adding up the minutes and hours since Stig had jumped into the water. Too many. Way too many.

At eleven o’clock the helicopters were still hovering above the marina. Sitting in his seat on the porch, Kazimir could just look through the gap between the low houses opposite to see their powerful searchlights sweeping back and forth, illuminating the rigging of the moored boats. The tension of the wait was screwing his guts up. Waiting on a Charlemagne for the command to charge was a child’s game compared to this.

“Kaz?”

It was a faint, pained voice. Kazimir lurched over the few meters from his seat to the edge of the water. Stig’s face was looking up at him.

“You made it!” Kazimir gasped.

“Just about. I’m not sure I can get out, Kaz.”

Kazimir splashed into the water and grabbed hold of his old tutor. Stig had virtually no strength left, so Kazimir hauled him out in a fireman’s lift and staggered into the house.

Stig lay on the couch while Kazimir locked up the windows and doors, activating the security system. When he’d pulled the drapes shut, he finally switched on the lights.

“I fucking hate swimming,” Stig moaned. A gill mask was hanging from its strap around his neck, its small red low-power warning light gleaming softly.

“Me, too,” Kazimir said. “But I remember who taught me.” He wrapped a blanket around Stig’s trembling shoulders, then started to undo his soaking, mud-smeared trousers.

Stig looked down and grunted a laugh. “Very gay. Let’s hope Myo’s team doesn’t come crashing through the window right this minute.”

“You want a drink?”

“God, no. No fluid. Not now, not ever again. I must have swallowed half of the canal network. I thought Earth had strict antipollution laws. Didn’t goddamn taste like it. I swear I was swimming through raw shit out there.”

Kazimir got the trousers off, and put another blanket around Stig’s legs. He was looking like someone who’d been rescued from the north pole. “Didn’t you have flippers?”

“Only to start with. I lost them along with everything else—” He laughed weakly. “Including the shirt off my back. Let this be a lesson to you, Kaz; doesn’t matter how good your gadgets and fallback plans are, real life doesn’t cooperate. Now for Christ’s sake tell me Adam retrieved the programs I brought back.”

“He got them.” Kazimir drew a breath ready to say:
But,
then thought better of it.

His hesitation didn’t go unnoticed.

“What?” Stig asked.

“The news shows announced it this evening: from now on there’s going to be an inspection of all cargo shipped to Far Away. Elvin and Johansson haven’t said anything, but it looks like we’re screwed.”

The station security people had cleared a big semicircular space around the left luggage lockers in the Carralvo terminal. Curious passengers on their way to catch trains lingered to see what the fuss was about. Eventually they were rewarded by the appearance of Paula Myo. There was a scattering of applause, someone even whistled appreciatively. She ignored them, watching impassively as the forensics team went to work on the locker. Tarlo and Renee stood behind her, fending off questions from the reporters who’d appeared, and the attentions of the CST security officer. They knew how much their boss valued an uninterrupted examination of any crime scene.

“So, is it coincidence?” Tarlo asked. “Or is this their standard operating policy now, do you think?”

“Is what coincidence?” Renee said.

“Underwater getaway. Hey, if they start doing this all the time, maybe the navy will pay for us to be modified. That would be cool, I could handle growing a dolphin sonar.”

“Yeah? I can think of something useless it could replace on you.”

“That’s seen a lot of use, thank you.”

“It isn’t standard operating policy,” Paula said. “Our target today was a Guardian. The Venice Coast operative was working for someone else.” Nigel Sheldon. But how did he benefit from all this? Why allow the Guardians to smuggle arms to Far Away, then attack a merchant they contract? It didn’t make sense.

“Are you sure he was a Guardian today?” Tarlo asked.

Renee shot him a warning look, but Paula didn’t react.

“Our problem is we don’t know what they’re hoping to accomplish next,” Paula said. “This new stage is puzzling. Renee, I want you to put together a new team to study the equipment we know Valtare Rigin was putting together for them.”

“The weapons division report said there were too many unknowns,” Renee said cautiously. “They couldn’t give us a definite use.”

“I know. Their trouble is they’re made up from solid thinkers. I want to go off the scale with this one. We’re in the navy now, there shouldn’t be any problem finding and drafting specialists in weapons physics, especially ones with overactive imaginations. Get me a list of possible uses, however far-fetched.”

“Yes, Chief.”

The navy lieutenant in charge of the forensics team came over to Paula and saluted. Tarlo and Renee tried hard not to smile.

“We’ve got a family match on the DNA residue, ma’am,” the lieutenant said. “You were right, he is from the Far Away clans. We’ve gathered enough samples in the past to confirm the correlation; he’s a seventh or eighth descendant of Robert and Minette McSobel. Given the level of inbreeding, it’s hard to say which.”

“Thank you.” Paula turned to Tarlo and raised an eyebrow.

He gave an elaborate shrug. “Sorry, Chief.”

“All right then, we know there’s another active equipment smuggling operation, probably being run by Adam Elvin. Start putting together some options for tracking it.”

....

The professional’s little office had a desk with an array that connected directly to the Clinton Estate’s network. He moved the corpse to one side, wiped away the blood that had burst from the man’s neck when it was wrenched backward, and put his hand on the desktop array’s i-spot, opening a direct channel into it. Software from his inserts infiltrated the Estate network. The club had extremely sophisticated routines, hovering just under RI level. Given its clientele, it was inevitable that the security would be top-rated. That was what made it the ideal place for the extermination. People were comfortable enough to let their guard down here.

His software identified the nodes that served the club’s squash courts, and infiltrated their management programs as diagnostic probes. The nodes couldn’t be crashed, that would be detected by the network regulator immediately. What he wanted was the ability to divert emergency signals.

When he was satisfied his subtle corruption was integrated and functioning, he changed his clothes, slipping into the white shirt and shorts that was regulation for the club’s sports staff. He waited in the office for forty-one minutes, then picked up a squash racquet and walked down the short corridor to the court that Senator Burnelli had booked for his lesson.

The Senator was already inside, warming a ball up. “Where’s Dieter?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, Senator, Dieter is off sick today,” he said, and shut the door. “I’m taking his lessons today.”

“Okay, son.” The Senator gave an affable smile. “You’ve got a hard task ahead of you. I got beaten by Goldreich’s aide this week. It was humiliating. And now I’m looking for a little payback.”

“Of course.” He walked toward the Senator.

“What’s your name, son?”

His hand came around fast, chopping into the Senator’s neck. There was a loud snap as the man’s spine snapped. The Senator’s body turned limp and fell to the floor, inserts shrieking in alarm.

He paused for a second, checking his software to see that none of the network nodes were relaying the alert. The diverts were working, routing the dying man’s calls for help to a useless onetime address code. He clenched his hand into a fist, and used his full amplified strength to smash it into the Senator’s face. Thompson Burnelli’s skull shattered from the impact.

TWENTY-TWO

We had stories of small strange animals that were not animals who could sometimes be seen in our forests,” Tochee said through the array’s translator program. “There are also stories of forests that have other forests inside them, hidden from normal travelers. But as we entered the age of reason and science, such stories faded into legend. Nobody in modern times has experienced either. Even I treated them as stories generated during our primitive past and used to explain some facet of nature, or act as a warning to younger family members. It was my venerable elder family parent who planted the doubt in my mind. Just before the elder died, it told me it had seen the small not-animals, and even ventured along a path to an inner forest many years ago when it was a youngster, before technology became so widespread. For me, the idea that such legends were not legends, but could actually be experienced, was too much to ignore. I made my plans quietly, without telling my colleagues, and set off to the forest where my elder parent said it visited the inner forest. I spent many days exploring, and eventually realized I was not only lost, but also no longer on my own world. And now I have my own stories to tell which are greater than all of those collected in our archive.”

“Wait,” Orion said, a smile bursting onto his heavily freckled face. “You’re a librarian?”

The array bleeped and said, “Non-equivalent translation inserted.”

Tochee said, “I am a custodian of our culture’s history. I impart the stories of what was and what might have been to the youngsters of many families. This way our knowledge is not only maintained, but appreciated.”

“A librarian!” Orion grinned at Ozzie.

“That’s nice,” Ozzie said pointedly. Now that the translator was relaying everything they said to Tochee, it was becoming both difficult and embarrassing to explain away Orion’s outbursts of laughter. The boy seemed to find a lot of Tochee’s culture amusing. Ozzie had to admit, the alien’s life did seem to be rather, well … prim and proper.

“How did you know you were on another planet?” Orion asked. “Do your people have space travel?”

“I realized the planet was different to my own when I saw the sun in the sky was a different color, and at night the star pattern was different,” Tochee said. “We do not have space travel.”

“Why not?” Orion waved at the gadgets Tochee was holding in its manipulator flesh. “You’ve obviously got the technology level.”

“We do not have the need. We do not have the internal nonlogic which you possess, the constant desire to explore without reason.”

“You wanted to find the legends,” Ozzie said. “Wasn’t that an unreasonable pursuit?”

“Yes. And in that wish I demonstrated a wild aberration from my kind. If verification of my elder parent’s story was required, then my colleagues and I should have begun a systematic investigation. I went by myself because I believed my colleagues would show no interest.”

“Wild!” Orion was giggling again. Ozzie flashed him another warning glare.

“I’m interested that your people don’t consider spaceflight to be necessary,” Ozzie said. “If you’ve reached an advanced technological level, are you not finding diminishing resources to be a problem?”

“No. We do not build anything beyond our ability to sustain it.”

“That’s very admirable. Our species is nothing like as rational.”

“From what I have witnessed on my travels, that attitude seems to be in the majority.”

“Yeah, but there are varying degrees. I’d like to think we’re reasonably restrained, but by your standards we’re probably not.”

“That makes neither of us right, nor wrong.”

“I hope so, after all, we all have to share the same galaxy.”

“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.”

Ozzie gave the big alien a quick thumbs-up. They were approaching another steep incline that was half rock. Tochee could scale such obstacles with the greatest of ease, while he and Orion had to scramble up, sweating with the effort. Ozzie glanced toward the sea on his left. They’d been walking along the top of the coastal cliff for two days. It varied considerably in height, but it was a good twenty meters high here, and there didn’t seem to be a beach at the bottom. Not that there was an easy path down in any case.

“Up we go, then,” he told Orion. The boy pulled a face, and retied the band of faded blue cloth that was holding his long hair back away from his eyes. They both started to clamber up, jamming feet into narrow crevices, hands gripping precariously at strong tufts of grass so they didn’t lose their balance when the weight of the rucksacks pulled at them. Tochee flowed up the incline, its ridges of locomotion flesh clasping at the rock and vegetation as it went. Ozzie hadn’t asked, but he figured the big alien could probably slide straight up a sheer cliff.

Once they were on top, they began walking along the edge of the cliff again. The ground was sloping down again now. He knew they were on an island, the small central hill with its crown of jungle had been in sight on his right for the whole two days of their trek. His array’s inertial guidance unit was plotting their wide circular course around it. He hadn’t told Orion yet, but in another mile and a half they’d be back where they started.

“Is that an island out there?” Orion asked.

Right on the horizon there was a small dark smudge. When Ozzie zoomed in, it resolved into a solid little peak rising out of the sea, much like the one they were on. “Yep, that makes five. This is some kind of archipelago.”

“We haven’t seen any ships,” Orion said.

“Give it time, it’s only been two days.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” There hadn’t been any night since they arrived on this world. In fact, the bright sun’s position hadn’t moved at all. The planet was tide-locked, with one face permanently pointing toward the sun. Ozzie wasn’t sure how the climate could function normally with such a setup. But then the gas halo was hardly a natural phenomenon. Between them, he and Tochee had used every sensor they had to scan the multitude of twinkling specks that were orbiting through the gas with this planet. The other specks weren’t planets, that was for certain, although there was very little else they could discover about them. They weren’t emitting any radio or microwave pulses, at least not strong enough to be detectable at any distance. That just left Johansson’s brief description to fall back on. Giant lengths of some coral variant that was home to vegetation. He wondered if the Silfen used them as cities, or nests, or if they even bothered with them at all. Maybe they were just there to keep the gas in the halo fresh and breathable, as forests and oceans were to planets.

As for their measurements of the halo itself, the best they could come up with was that it had a circular cross section roughly two million kilometers in diameter that orbited a hundred fifty million kilometers from the star. What contained the gas was unknown, but had to be some kind of force field. The idea of building a transparent tube this big was mind-boggling, and introduced a whole range of engineering and maintenance problems. Exactly where the power came from to generate a force field on such a scale was also unknown, although Ozzie was pretty sure the builders must have tapped the star’s power. Frankly, there was little else that could provide the kind of energy level required. Why anyone would create such an artifact in the first place was beyond him. It lacked the practicality of a Dyson sphere or a Niven ring. But then, if you had the ability to do this, you probably didn’t actually need to. And if it was the Silfen home system, he strongly suspected the answer to such a question would be: why not. He didn’t really care, he was just happy someone had done it—and he’d seen it.

“Ozzie, Tochee, look!” Orion was racing on ahead of them through the grass. There was no cliff here, the ground had dipped until it was almost level with the sea. A big sandy beach curved away ahead of them. The boy ran onto the sand. A dead fern frond was standing on top of a low dune at the back of the beach like a brown flag. Ozzie had stuck it in there when they started their exploratory walk.

The boy’s delight crumpled as he pulled the frond out of the sand. “This is an island.”

“ ’Fraid so, man,” Ozzie said.

“But …” Orion turned to look at the small central mountain. “How do we get off?”

“I can swim to another island,” Tochee said. “If you are to come with me, we must build a boat.”

Orion gave the sea a mistrustful look. “Can’t we call someone for help?”

“Nobody’s listening,” Ozzie said, holding up his handheld array. The unit had been transmitting standard first contact signals since it started functioning again, along with a human SOS. So far, the entire electromagnetic spectrum had remained silent.

“If this is where the Silfen live, where
are
they?” the boy demanded.

“On the mainland, somewhere, I guess,” Ozzie said. He stared out to sea. Three islands were visible to his retinal inserts on full zoom, though he wasn’t sure of their distance. If they were the same size as this one, they’d be nearly fifty miles away. Which given he was now only a couple of yards above sea level should have put them far over the horizon on any Earth-sized planet. He wondered if this one was the same size as Silvergalde.

“Where’s that?” Orion asked grouchily.

“I don’t know. In that cloud bank we saw from the other side of the island, maybe.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, I don’t,” Ozzie snapped. “I don’t get this place at all, okay.”

“Sorry, Ozzie,” Orion said meekly. “I just thought … you normally know stuff, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well this time I don’t so we’ll have to find it out together.” He told his e-butler to call up boatbuilding files from his array’s memory.

....

Even in midsummer, the waters of the Trine’ba were cold. Filled with snowmelt every spring, and deep enough to keep sunlight out of its lower levels, it guarded its low temperature jealously. Mark wore a warmsuit as he drifted among the fabulous dendrites, fans, and arches of coral that sprouted from the main reef. So far marine biologists had identified three hundred seventy-two species of coral, and added more every year. They ranged from the dominant dragonback, with its long amethyst and amber mounds, down to beige corknuts the size of pebbles. Unicorn horn formations poked upward from the patches of bright tangerine ditchcoral, seriously sharp at the point. He was pleased to see Barry was showing them due respect. So many people wanted to see if they were as sharp as they looked. Warmsuit fabric gave no protection for fingers and palms. Every year Randtown General Hospital treated dozens of tourist impalements.

Barry saw him watching, and gave the circular OK signal with his right hand. Mark waved back. Cobalt ring snakes thrummed inquisitively in their niches as they swam lazily overhead. Rugpikes crawled over the reef, hundreds of tiny stalk eyes swiveling as if they were a strip of soft green wheat waving in a gentle breeze. Fish were clotting the water around them like a gritty kaleidoscope cloud. Thousands of brilliantly colored starburst particles whose spines and spindles pulsed rapidly, propelling them along in jerky zigzags. They came in sizes from brassy afriwebs half the length of his finger up to lumbering great brown and gold maundyfish, bigger than humans and moving with drunken sluggishness around the lower reefs. A shoal of eerie milk-white sloopbacks wriggled right in front of Mark’s goggles, and he made a slow catching motion with his hands. The palm-length creatures bent their spines back to form a streamlined teardrop and jetted away.

Barry was doing slow barrel rolls, his flippers kicking in careful rhythm. Both hands were clenched around flakes of dried native insects, which he was slowly rubbing apart. Fish followed him, feeding on the tiny flecks. They formed twin spirals in his wake, like intersecting corkscrews. As they ate, their unique digestive tract bacteria began to glow, illuminating them from within. Looking down on them against the murky bottom was to see an iridescent comet tail spinning in slow motion across the darkness.

With the food almost gone, Barry slapped his hands together, creating an expanding sphere of broken flakes. The Trine’ba fish swarmed in, creating a galaxy of opalescent stars around him.

Mark smiled proudly inside his gill mask. The boy was everything he could have wanted in a son: happy, cheeky, confident. He’d grown beautifully in this environment. It was becoming hard to remember Augusta now. Neither of the kids ever talked about it these days, even Liz called her friends back there less and less, and he hadn’t spoken to his father in months.

He kicked his legs, closing in on his son as the shroud of luminous fish darkened and swam away in search of more food. The timer in his virtual vision said they’d been exploring the reef underwater for forty minutes now. He pointed to the surface. Barry responded with a reluctant OK hand sign.

They came up into warm bright sunlight that had them blinking tears against it as they searched around for the boat. The catamaran was a hundred fifty meters away. Liz was standing on the prow, waving at them. Mark took the gill mouthpiece out. “Got a long swim over there. Better inflate your jacket.”

“I’m all right, Dad.”

“I’m not. Let a little air in, huh, make your mom happy.”

“Okay, I guess.”

Mark pressed the pump valve on his shoulder, and felt the warmsuit jacket stiffen as the fabric inhaled, puffing up around him. They rolled onto their backs, and began a steady kick.

Sandy was still snorkeling around the yacht, along with Elle, one of the Dunbavand kids. Lydia and her two lads, Will and Ed, were already back on the catamaran, washing their diving gear. David and Liz were starting to prepare lunch on the middeck.

Panda barked delightedly as Barry swam up to the small dive platform at the back of the yacht.

“Stay,” Liz called. The dog looked like she was about to jump in and swim again.

Barry clambered onto the dive platform and took his flippers off. “Did you miss me?” he asked Panda. “Did you?”