Time Past (31 page)

“What does it do?” I said to Stone.

He sniffed superciliously and said nothing.

“The last person to use this kind of Invidi device on this station died,” I said. “Do you want to end up the same?”

He drew himself up straight, his gaze flickering anxiously at the guard. As if he’d just realized security could be used against him. “Are you threatening me?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” growled Murdoch. “She’s telling the truth. You can’t trust them.”

“Where was it?” I said to Murdoch.

“He was trying to stick it on the hull. In an inconspicuous corner. It doesn’t match anything in our files, including what little we got on that thing Quartermaine used.” Murdoch glared at Stone.

“We couldn’t analyze Quartermaine’s thing,” I reminded him.

Murdoch adopted what he seemed to think was a jovial tone. “Come on, Rupert. We’re all in this together. An Barik’s not here. We are. Tell us what’s going on.”

“I’m acting under orders from my superior,” said Stone. He shifted uneasily and pulled his suit coat closer across his chest. “You people seem to forget that we need the Invidi. We need their protection. Think how much they’ve given us. We owe them.”

“Did An Barik send a message buoy directly back to you?” I said. “Or did this order come through the Bendarl cruiser?”

Murdoch met my eyes and rubbed his head in frustration. Whichever the case, Stone had got the message past Security’s communications monitoring. It was galling, the way the Invidi could skip around inside our systems.

Stone said nothing.

“What if it’s a bomb?” said Murdoch.

I handed the small oval back to him quickly.

“You could endanger everyone,” he continued. “For what? A chance to play spy.”

I thought of Dan Florida’s suspicions of my own spy activities. He’d got the wrong person.

“Not a bomb,” said Stone, “he said it was a disabling device. Nothing violent.”

“So we can’t fly the ship away until he gets here. You believed him?” I said.

Stone glared at me.

Murdoch glared at him. “We can expect An Barik back soon then, can we?”

“I don’t know,” said Stone sullenly.

It made sense. The Invidi don’t do their own dirty work. When they need to fight, they have the Bendarl and Con-Fleet do it for them. When they need someone on the ground, people like Quartermaine and Stone are keen to oblige. And, until recently, myself. In pre-blockade days, if An Barik had asked me to help him, I would have agreed without question. As Stone said, the Invidi helped us, we should help them. My memories of pre-Contact Earth nagged at me—Stone was partly right. The Invidi saved us from destroying ourselves, we owed them something.

“Bill, why don’t we forget this whole thing,” I said.

Murdoch frowned. His expression shifted rapidly from
are you mad?
to
what the hell are you up to?

“I mean,” I said slowly, “Mr. Stone believes he’s doing the right thing...”

“I
am
doing the right thing,” Stone almost shouted. “It’s you two who are endangering the station.”

“... however much it may look like sabotage,” I finished.

Stone blinked and was silent. Let him work out we’re at a stalemate. If he didn’t push about Murdoch’s involvement in our being on the Invidi ship, Murdoch wouldn’t push about Stone’s private communications with An Barik.

Murdoch had worked it out, too. And hopefully he’d keep a closer watch on Stone from now on. “Yeah, well, I reckon we can be generous this once.” He jerked his head at the door. “Come on, Rupert. You and I have got work to do. Residents Committee meeting, fire drill, concern about the cruiser...”

“You’re going to leave Halley here?” Stone resisted Murdoch’s hand on his arm.

“She’s got her job to do,” said Murdoch.

“But she’s in custody.” He sounded so frustrated, I almost sympathized.

“Yeah, and I’ve got her formally on bond, if it makes you feel any better.”

“It doesn’t,” said Stone. But he allowed Murdoch to usher him out of the bay.

Twenty-three

T
hey left me alone with the ship. A relief, in a way. I’ve spent most of my life alone, and much of that time in pursuit of some technical problem. Longer in the company of ships than with people. Sometimes I think I’m more comfortable with the former.

Could that be why your personal life is such a mess? asked an annoying internal voice.

It’s not a mess, I told it crossly. My marital problems with Henoit came from his activities as a terrorist with the New Council. Nothing to do with my job.

I shook my head to clear it of that thread of thought, and walked around the ship, reconfirming my memory of its outer configuration. A bulbous diamond shape, no distinguishing features on the outside, no protrusions from the smooth hull.

I wished Heron and the others who’d worked on
Calypso II
were still here to see this. If they were, I’d ask them to help me go over it. As soon as we’d worked out this present mess, I promised myself to look up where they’d been transferred and tell them what happened. And I couldn’t ask any of the present engineering staff for help—they’d either be arrested with me or end up transferred like the others.

I reached out a hand to the ship, palm up. It seemed expectant, somehow. Perhaps I was more attuned to it now, but I could feel tension humming in the air. The name popped into my head immediately.
“Farseer,”
I said aloud. And the ship listened. Like a dog with its ears pricked, waiting. What a ridiculous simile. Ships don’t have ears.

Farseer
it is, then.

I considered asking Murdoch for the tool An Barik had given Stone, in order to try gaining quicker access to
Farseer,
but the risk was too great that the ship would be completely immobilized. Better to stick with my own methods. I checked the control panel just inside the dock’s air-lock entry. Outer space door, inner space door locks activated. Atmospheric controls green.

From the maintenance locker beneath the control panel I took a Level One toolkit then brightened the lights around
Farseer
before returning to its side. Setting my handcom to voice record, I began.

“The hull looks smooth, but tactile examination reveals indentations that feel approximately one millimeter in depth and width. These indentations follow no easily discernible pattern and seem to continue across the entire surface.”

I paused and took out a gauge from the toolkit. It should pick up any information the handcom’s more limited sensors missed.

“The first time I used this vessel, it opened without direct command when I traced one of these trails with my bare hand and thought of entry hatches. I’m trying the same thing now...”

And it worked again. Part of the hull moved, and suddenly an opening existed.

“It’s not a sliding door. The opening part seems to actually dissolve back into its surroundings, rapidly. It leaves an entry of”—I glanced down at the gauge—“one hundred twenty by eighty centimeters. I’m going in now.”

It looked the same as last time. Small cabin, floor-to-ceiling consoles or control surfaces. A definite floor, which showed its Invidi genealogy—they always used the gravity field. Dim to moderate lighting, orange-tinted.

“I’m trying access with the sensor gauge first.” This was totally unsuccessful. The ship refused to recognize any of the gauge’s universal access codes. In fact, it refused to recognize the gauge itself. All console and wall surfaces remained stubbornly unlit. This could be because the universal codes hadn’t been developed when
Farseer
was built. But as the codes were based on Invidi access methods, I’d assumed
Farseer
would find something familiar in them.

“Next I’m trying the same method of access as last time. That is, direct physical contact with one of the control panels.”

This was more successful. Successful in the sense that the panel lit up and began to show me information, but less so in that the jolt of whatever it was up my arm sent continuous needles of pain through neck, head, and shoulders.

On any ship with an Invidi jump drive, whether K’Cher, Melot, or Bendarl—I’d never been on an Invidi ship—the jump drive itself is inaccessible. On most of them, the drive is in a separate, sealed section. Only the master can activate it.

When I worked as a ship’s engineer my job had always been to maintain the flatspace engines. Using the jump drive destabilized fuel ratios and the entire engine system required recalibrating after each jump. As even a minute antimatter leakage would finish the ship’s journey very quickly, this was an important task. And always rushed, as ships’ masters pressured engineers to get quicker and quicker after jumps. The only time I’d ever been able to take my time was when I piloted
Calypso II
from the jump point to Earth in 2023, and then I’d been worried about my supplies running out.

Jump-capable ships have thrusters of a particular configuration. That is, the flatspace engine has a drive-enabling connection—the gate. It seems to draw energy from the thrusters, hence the slight imbalance after each jump that we have to recalibrate. In all my previous attempts to understand the jump drive, because I couldn’t actually get into the drive system itself, I’d been forced to concentrate on why the gate causes this imbalance. The gate was the closest I’d get to the drive itself.

Even with
Calypso II,
all we’d done was buy an old freighter that had had its jump drive chamber removed. Into that we put what seemed like a similar chamber from the wreckage of
Calypso,
and linked what we hoped was its gate connection with the freighter’s thrusters. We hadn’t actually opened the drive chamber. I had to recalibrate
Calypso II
’s thrusters after I arrived in 2023 in the usual way, which seemed to indicate
Calypso
didn’t have a special drive of any sort. That is, it behaved the same as did ships traveling on the Central network. And yet it jumped to a point off that network. Whatever the secret of the off-network jumping, I didn’t think it had been in
Calypso
itself.

Farseer
’s drive might be accessible. I wanted to see into that system. I wanted to take it apart and see how it worked.

First I had to map out what was in the system so I knew I was taking the right things apart, and so that if there were any Tor surprises in there, I’d know. I had to do it properly, through an interface, because I didn’t trust the mental link to give me all the information. And I had to set up safeguards both for myself and for the station. Especially given
Farseer
’s Tor elements.

I didn’t trust those Tor elements. We’d had so much trouble with Tor hardware in the early days of the station when I was still only site manager, before Jocasta was even named.

We’d used the Tor structure of the core and Alpha ring because the alternative was to build a station from scratch and the Confederacy didn’t have the resources or the desire to do that. So we tiptoed around the booby traps and explored the mazes and tried to make it work to our directions. It did work, but even now, seven years later, the core was never trustworthy—you could go into it and find meter-wide sections encrusted with new connections, impassable. Not with live Tor technology, of course, more like our Invidi-designed connections were trying to prevent a revival of Tor activity.

This didn’t seem to disrupt our systems, perhaps because everything was backed up in the rings and we ran regular observation teams to the core. But some systems, water circulation and atmospheric monitoring, for example, had to be coordinated from the center. Viewed as a whole, the Tor elements in the opsys were no more than one variable, but they could interfere significantly in an emergency by diverting power and information from important functions. As had happened during the Seouras blockade. Some of the other variables—the “extra” adjustments that half the population illegally made, for example, had been reduced since the end of the blockade.

But the Tor bits were still there. I didn’t like it, this building a station on top of hostile hardware, however much we’d irradiated and restructured and overlaid the Tor systems with Invidi identity. In the early days of construction I’d often dreamed of being lost in a maze, booby traps on all sides, endlessly rewriting commands to overlay Tor systems, but the commands would unravel as I watched and the maze would close in.

Invidi technology is also “alive,” of course, in the sense that it has active neural architectures and strong learning matrices. But the Tor codes try to rewrite each Invidi matrix, by using the Invidi ability to learn, and make it learn to be Tor. So why couldn’t we just live in a station built with Tor technology and not Invidi? Because Tor interfaces were not safe for humans. They were supremely xenophobic and rejected anything non-Tor.

If the technology was like that, I hated to think what the Tor themselves might have been like. Hating all other life forms, probably. The Invidi must know, but they weren’t telling.

In any case, I had to hurry and both set up a map of
Farseer
’s system and make sure its Tor elements couldn’t affect the station’s opsys. I kept going with what I was doing—trying to get the system to send information to my handcom. And soon it did, although I wasn’t certain of the content of the information. The physical connection made it easier for me to comprehend it, but I couldn’t keep this connection up for however many hours the process would take.

“The panel is giving me what I think is diagnostic information. It’s going to take a while to process this.” I kept talking to the handcom. Made it seem less like I was talking to myself.

The physical effect of using the connection grew worse. If I got a migraine each time I connected, I couldn’t do much research on the ship. I tried taking a break, but the ache merely dimmed slightly. The ship didn’t read that as a proper disconnection. I moved my fingers the opposite way and thought about finishing. The connection dissolved and I slumped back, delightfully free of pain.

As the information loaded into my stack of handcoms, I kept investigating the cabin. Wherever the drive chamber was, there must be an access door to it from here. But the walls remained smooth, except for where they carried indentations, which I prodded and tweaked as I looked.