The New Space Opera 2 (67 page)

“McKnight is the leader, then?”

“Wan is the leader, Mr. Bishop, whoever's foot may seem to go first.
As for the women, neither of them is involved in this plan except by accident. It is simply unfortunate that they were in this team when Wan met McKnight. I am certain that McKnight was the catalyst for what occurred here. Wan is too poor, too badly connected, and too ignorant to plan this venture alone. Possibly he didn't think of it until McKnight arrived to put the idea in his head. He isn't creative.”

“You're quite the detective.” Bishop didn't mean it quite as bitter as it sounded.

“I would like to be. But it isn't my intuition working so much as the patterns that I see.”

Bishop gave a cursory glance at his screen. A twisting tube of colors, some bleeding, others sharp, was all he could see; bad art on a tiresome landscape. “If you say so.” In spite of himself, he had no trouble believing the Greenjack now. “Are the girls all right?”

“They are physically unharmed at this point. They are talking here…” The shaman indicated their way and the stretch ahead. It moved off alone for some distance, then narrated, “I feel terror and anger. I believe they were attempting to bargain an escape or discover the real plans. McKnight is all for telling them. He is enjoying the action. Wan forbids him. McKnight doesn't mind this, but Davis is getting edgy. He has never liked the involvement of the Terraform. His fear of retaliation is keeping him quiet now.”

Bishop stopped suddenly, rooted in the unmade earth. He had realized that he was walking through time, and his sudden confidence in the shaman's analysis made him fear where the future led, even though it had already happened. He attempted to rally some criticism, some countermeasure to the rigorous story unfolding, to prove at least to himself that there was a chance that most of it was simply the shaman's whimsical interpretation of some very dry facts, but he struggled to do so.

Ahead of him, the large creature stopped in its own dusty tracks and turned about. It seemed patient and concerned. Every time he looked into its peculiar yellow eyes, he expected the disturbance of an alien encounter, but instead he felt that he was understood, and the feeling made him desperately uneasy. Who knew what confidence trickery it was capable of, after all? But for the life of him, he couldn't figure out a motive.

“When we get to the end of this,” Bishop said hoarsely, coughing, “what will we do?”

“That depends on the end.”

“I mean, if she isn't dead, if she was taken somewhere…will you help
me? You said you'd ask for a Unity ship. I guess that means you know someone.”

“I will find your daughter, Mr. Bishop,” Hyperion said. “I already promised to. If you prefer I will say no more about the events that passed this way. No doubt you must wonder how I can know, and there is no way to tell you how, any more than you can explain how you do most things you do that are your nature. I expect that some greater analysis will help to detail the process, but I am not interested in doing it myself. I see these people and I feel what they have been feeling, as if I can watch it in a moving storybook. There are other things present, besides the people now. These disruptions in such a quiet area have acted as an attractor, and some of the energies I spoke about earlier are beginning to converge on the scene. As yet, they are only circling. You may see…”

“These stains? I thought they were just bad rendering or the light or something. They're so faint. Watermarks.”

“They are the ones. You will see them circle and converge, then scatter and reform. They may merge. Ignore them. They are not important.”

“But they…” But the Greenjack was already moving on. The shadows were lengthening into early evening, and a slight cooling was in the air. Bishop kept one eye on the trail and the other on the screen, but the silence was too much for him. “Talk,” he said.

“They are not speaking here,” the shaman replied over its shoulder. “Yang is looking for a way to escape. Bishop is locked in her thoughts. She is angry with McKnight for his betrayal of their friendship, or what she thought was their friendship. She is questioning her assessment of the others. McKnight is leading, he is content. Wan and Davis are in the rear, pushing the women on. Wan is excited. Davis is starting to lose trust in him. Davis has a weak personality. He believes that he ought to be leader and Wan is beginning to annoy him. He is starting to form a strong resentment.”

“What is that cloud?”

“He is forming negative energy vortices. This kind of personality often does. Their energy scatters out from the holes in their energy bodies. It is an interesting feature of humans that they create negative energy attractors much more readily and strongly than positive ones. I am not sure why this is, but I believe it is because damaged individuals are
leaky
, prone to influence and loss, whereas healthy types do not shed these frequencies without some deliberate effort. They are impervious to wild influence and create almost no disturbances. I must consult with the other Greenjacks when they are done traveling.”

Bishop was silent for a while and they plodded on some quarter-kilometer more as he checked his recordings. It was an ecology he was seeing, if it were true. A psychic kind of ecology. He couldn't help but notice it, even as it wasn't part of his concern. Just a peripheral. If the Greenjack had tried to convince him about all this any other way, he could probably have thought of a good hole or two to poke in things, but as it was…he shook his head and struggled on. He wasn't fit, and although gravity was lighter and walking easier, it was a long time since he'd hiked farther than his backyard. He found himself stopped suddenly, almost walking onto Hyperion's tail. The Forged was still as a statue.

Bishop looked at the screen quickly. A darkening storm of purples and reds like a miniature cyclone was all around him. He waited, then Hyperion said:

“They stop here. McKnight signals off-world. Wan and Davis start arguing again. Yang tries to escape. She just runs. Bishop tries to stop her. McKnight notices. Davis starts to run after her, but Wan says no. He is willing to leave her. He wants to. Davis catches Yang. Wan says to McKnight they should leave them both. He knows Davis is trouble, Yang he doesn't want anyway; they have some history…it's minor…he'd rather leave her for some reason I don't…Anyway. Bishop protests. Yang becomes hysterical. McKnight knocks her unconscious. Now Wan gets angry with McKnight. Davis's antagonism toward Wan crystallizes. He threatens to turn them all in. McKnight doesn't like that. McKnight threatens Wan and Davis. Wan tries to calm things down. Bishop is raging. Wan ties up both women, hands and feet. Yang is injured, there is blood here. They wait. Quite a long time. I think an hour must pass or so. Davis is now focused entirely on Wan. Hates him. McKnight is the only calm one. Wan is furious but he's too smart to let it out. A ship comes. It lands over there…”

Mark Bishop got up and followed the Greenjack over to the place across the long shadows that had nearly covered the whole ground.

There was no sign of a landing, but then, given the weather, there wouldn't be. He recorded dutifully. The colored waterworld had gone. He watched the Greenjack circle and look, and pause. It returned from a small exploration and said, “This is the end of the trail here. The ship has come. It's a Forged craft. I don't know its name, but if I ever meet it, I'll know it by its energy signatures. It is one of three types of Ironhorse currently operating between the Far System and Earth. Can't say more. They all embark, except Yang. She's dead.”

Bishop half-wanted to ask for more, certain it was hiding things, but then he decided that it was enough, he didn't want to know. Everything inside him had stopped, waiting. What the shaman had just said was a testable claim, unless it meant some kind of spiritual residue. Beneath his coat, he felt the hairs on his neck stand on end. His heart gave an extra beat. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Hyperion paused and then made a brief gesture with its head. Bishop followed the line, recorder in hand first. He saw nothing, just the usual Mars stuff, but then the shaman walked him out another hundred meters to a small mound that Bishop or anyone else would just have taken for one of the billion shifting dunes. “She is here.”

Bishop took measurements, readings. They were still technically well within Thorson's Gullies. Nobody would have come here for a long, long time. Perhaps never. The land was bad, useless. This zone had already been mapped. There were no deposits of use. Then, with the shaman's help, he set up his recorder and began the process of moving the sand aside. He used his shoe as a spade. It didn't take long before he bumped something. Without ceremony, they uncovered a part of a desiccated human body, just enough to see the identifying badges on the suit, and then they covered it up again.

Bishop moved away a short distance and sat for a while, drinking water and watching the sun go down. It got very cold. His feet and hands ached. He wished for the scotch again, fervently, avidly, relentlessly. Hyperion sat beside him like a giant dog.

Bishop's hand strayed to the machine but he left it alone. He stumbled over the words, “Do you see her?” He was braced for any fool answer. He wanted there to be one, a good one.

“She was here,” it said. “But now she has gone.”

Bishop nodded. He wasn't going to ask for the details. He wasn't ready yet. Leave it at the cryptic stage until…“We should go.”

“I suggest we walk back to the capsule rather than make any transmissions the Terraform might interpret. Also we must now consider this a murder investigation. What would you like to do? We could report it to the police and let them…”

“No. They got it all wrong the first time.” Bishop was surprised by the force of his own hatred, but the shaman didn't skip a beat.

“Then we should not discuss this with the Valhalla. We need help from sources that don't mind being accomplice to criminal acts.”

Belatedly, Mark realized that by this it meant their failure to inform.
Anything that wasted time now didn't matter to him. “Can you track them from here?”

“Not directly, but their intentions are reasonably clear. McKnight is at least guilty of manslaughter and kidnap. Wan and Davis of kidnap, misuse of corporate properties, perversion of the course of justice. The Terraform is on their side. They have every chance to make a good escape, but they couldn't head sunward—there's nothing there except Earth and the high-population satellite systems, full of officials and the law. They have gone to the Belt—no Forged ship could take them farther without at least stopping there for supplies. We will find something out that way.” It seemed completely confident, almost resigned to its own cold certainty.

Bishop ignored the bleakness in its tone and waded forward grimly in its wake, a squire to a weird and uncomforting King Wenceslas of the sands.

It was a long, hard, cold, and lonely passage. Bishop struggled all the way not to ask all the questions that were haunting him, but he didn't ask them, and at last they retraced all the path, and the Valhalla's Hand opened its thousand eyes and let them in. He couldn't afford to indulge his fears.

“Where to?” the Valhalla asked as it left orbit, swinging away in an arc that would return it to the sunward side so that it could pick up extra heat.

“Just to the lift station again,” Hyperion said with a sigh, as though the journey had been tiring and a disappointment.

It made some small talk with the Valhalla as Bishop settled himself in. He intended to check his recordings and prepare some method for transmitting them safely in case something happened to him, but before he was able to do any of that, exhaustion took over and he fell asleep. He slept all the way to the port, and woke feeling drained and thin. Hyperion led him through their formalities, and then they were sitting in the cafeteria, Bishop facing a reconstituted dinner with a dry mouth.

“An ordinary journey to the Belt is a three-year stretch,” the shaman said. It was lying like a giant dog on the smooth tiled floor next to Bishop's table, resting its head on a plastic plant pot beneath the convincing fake fronds of a plastic grass. “The fastest available transport can make it in one year. But Unity ships can make it instantly.”

“Interference,” Bishop croaked. He had managed a mouthful. It wasn't bad but he was so hungry even cardboard would have seemed delicious. Hungry or not, he was loath to think about Unity travel. They said it interfered with you at a fundamental level. They were not sure what the long-term implications would be.

“I will search here, perhaps they came this way.” It was unconvincing. Nobody in their right mind would come this way if they wanted to get the hell out of Earth's influence.

Bishop surrendered to his curiosity and need. “You said you could get a Unity ship.” He said it quietly. They weren't illegal, but they also weren't allowed this close to Earth space.

“I can ask a favor,” Hyperion agreed. “I feel convinced that they have taken that route. I do not see how any legally operating taxi would be involved, and the illegal ones all come from midspace, and most have Unity drives. The most likely destination is Turbulence, the port on Hygeia. The majority of transfers takes place there and there's only lip service paid to the law at any level. It is Forged space and mostly rebel Forged at that.”

“You think Wan wanted to remake himself?” Some humans wanted to experience add-ons that were better than just a comms set. It seemed ludicrous to Bishop, insane, an extreme form of self-mutilation beyond tattoos and piercings, some kind of primal denial of one's self. It frightened him.

“I think there are lots of opportunities for all kinds of profit out there. Especially for those already on the run.”

Bishop crumpled the wrapper his cutlery had come in. Unity technology was infectious. Even passengers aboard craft operating the technology were at risk. So far, in the years it had been around, its effects had proved relatively benign, but theorists guessed that this might be a product of a much more significant infiltration process. To use it was to risk something that could be a living death. Fanatics spoke of puppetry and zombies, aliens operating behind the scenes. He'd heard…“Perhaps they'd just abandon her.”