City of Pearl (4 page)

It didn't even bear thinking about. But she did.

“Show me the point of origin,” she said to the AI.

UNABLE TO LOCATE POINT OF ORIGIN
.

“There's nothing out there,” said Bennett. “But if they had wanted to shoot, they'd have done it by now, wouldn't they? They wouldn't just rattle our bars. Not if they were serious.”

He had a point. It didn't stop her mouth going dry, or the sweat prickling on her back, though; and in zero gee, sweat just stayed where it formed. “Maybe they're just pinging us,” she suggested. “Testing us out.”

And maybe not. Three sides of the faceted panel that wrapped around the two pilot seats were now black and dead. Only life-support and cryo panels showed activity.

“Bennett, have we been hit at all?”

“Not as far as I can tell. No hull breach. We'd feel it. Shit, we'd
see
it.”

Lindsay was crammed in a cockpit with one other person, in space, with no visible enemy and no tangible damage and yet there was every sign that her ship was under attack. She had nothing to indicate the
Thetis
warranted evacuation—to where, anyway?—and no way of returning fire. She couldn't even make a run for it.

Sheer impotence made them both lower themselves into their seats.
Thetis
was dead in the water, if there had been any water, and Lindsay checked the systems again, pressing the panels. How long before their orbit decayed?

“Bugger,” she said. “We can't even land this thing.” She turned to the AI. “Revival and evacuation time please.” There was a
ticker-ticker
noise but no response from the AI. Damn: a manual job. She activated her bioscreen and began calculating to see if she had time to revive the payload and the rest of the detachment and get them into the shuttles before
Thetis
hit the atmosphere. The figures didn't look good.

“What if it
is
just a malfunction?” she said. “Maybe there's no external threat.” She tapped the AI controls and waited. It took a second or two more than she expected, a very long time in her book just then. Its test-and-repair programs must have been working flat out. “Can you confirm malfunction?”

NO SOURCE IDENTIFIED
, it said again.

“It's screwed,” said Bennett.

“Okay.” There was nothing she could do: the AI was trying to restore power, and there was no damage that any emergency team could tackle, no hull damage to seal or fires to extinguish. “Time to revive Superintendent Frankland, I think.”

“If we're seriously in the dwang, Boss, an extra pair of functioning lungs might be just what we don't need.”

“Well, I'm fresh out of ideas, and she's in command. Orders say wake her up on establishing orbit.”

“Wouldn't the AI know what was in her confidential briefing?” asked Bennett.

“You watch too many movies,” she said.

On the way through to the cryo tubes, nausea gripped her and she grabbed a bag from her pocket to throw up. Odd: fear had never had that effect on her before.

 

Something went
thwapp
on the bulkhead. It was like the
clack
the day before.

Shan Frankland, still disoriented from chill-sleep, passed her swiss from hand to hand, deriving some comfort from fidgeting. “That's something attaching itself to the hull.”

“What do you base that on?” Lindsay asked.

“Because it sounds like it,” Shan said. She regretted her waspishness but felt an apology was out of order right then. Something started tugging at the back of her mind. It was just a hint, a fleeting moment of feeling like an obscure memory. She tried to grab it as it dissolved, but it was gone, behind the inner door, and there were no handles to grasp. She shut her eyes tight for a second and forced the sensation away. “Say our lost tribe made it after all and they've got some interesting tech after all these years.”

“No external vid feed, but I could go EVA and check,” said Bennett.

Shan shook her head. “I'd really rather have the qualified pilot where I can see him breathing, thanks. Have you tried flashing anyone?”

“The AI's been looking for signals. Nothing.”

“Maybe they're not sending. Try calling on a radio frequency. You know, voice traffic.”

Bennett swung himself into the seat without a word and plugged himself in to the console. It was nothing as graphic as inserting a jack into his skull, but just knowing he had implants sitting under his skin made Shan feel slightly queasy. He fiddled with the little crescent-shaped receiver that latched on behind his right ear. The AI obliged by selecting a range of frequencies.

“What would you like to transmit?” he asked. In a world where AIs spoke silently to each other to share battlefield data, the art of radio conversation was long lost.

Shan got the feeling Bennett was looking for a line fit to record in the archives. She disappointed him without meaning to. “Just say, ‘Constantine, this is Thetis calling Constantine, respond.' If they're out there, it'll get their attention.”

Bennett began a nervous monologue. After a few repetitions he appeared to settle into it. Then Shan looked into the face of a woman she'd read about in briefing notes but never really met.

Lindsay Neville was horribly young. She looked like she was wearing her older brother's uniform for a lark.

She was twenty-seven. Shan had spent her own twenty-seventh birthday behind a riot shield, sick from the smell of petrol, conscious of her brand-new sergeant's stripes. She'd needed ten sutures in her calf. But the bloke who gave her the wound needed forty.

“All I can say is that we're probably not in the shit,” Shan said. “And that we should wait for a response.”

“I know some of this mission is classified, ma'am, but it really would help to know what we're facing here.” Lindsay looked irritated. Maybe she shouldn't have made the reference to qualified pilots. “We're on the same side.”

“I'm not being secretive, and I'm not a spook. I've had a Suppressed Briefing. You know what that is, don't you?”

“Yes.” Lindsay's expression told Shan she rated it marginally below water divining and reading runes. “Not something I've experienced, not at my rank.”

“It's not a perk, Commander. It drives you crazy trying to work out what's niggling at the back of your mind, so you just let it drive you. If I seem vague, it's not by choice. It's the only way you can share intelligence without the risk of revealing it at the wrong time.”

“It's our job to give you whatever support you ask for, ma'am. But we do work better with knowledge.”

“I'll share what I know with you when I know it. And right now I recall knowing that at the time we went extrasolar, there were indications that the colony had survived. Let's assume they also survived our flight time and we can make contact.”

“If we don't plummet in flames, of course.”

“Has the orbit decayed?”

“No, we're still stable.”

“We've probably been immobilized as a precaution. A sort of vehicle stinger on a big scale. That's what I'd do if I were them. Not that I know who
them
is.”

Lindsay raised her eyebrows. “Well, that's a handy piece of kit. Some useful tech we can take back.”

“Might not be ours to take.” Was this the time to…Jesus. The thought was suddenly solid in her head, a real memory the Suppressed Briefing had let loose.

There are nonhumans involved
.

Her surprise must have shown on her face, because Lindsay spoke.

“Are you all right, Superintendent?”

“Just thinking.” No, it wasn't quite the time to mention aliens. She'd have to understand more herself before she could do that. “Trust me. I'm as motivated as you are to make sure we don't land the hard way.”

Bennett glanced at her briefly and then at Lindsay. If he was looking for a reaction from his CO, he didn't get one. It couldn't have been easy for them. Shan couldn't imagine any military personnel being reassured to wake up from chill-sleep to find that they were answering to a copper, a copper they didn't know, a copper who was so far out of her depth right now that she almost didn't care if her numb fear showed on her face.

Apparently it didn't. Bennett gave her a quick smile and went back to repeating his mantra.

Something mentally tapped her on the shoulder and reminded her she had a job to do. The SB whispered that doing this job would put something right.

Whatever it was, it was something she had wanted to put right for a long, long time. The fear retreated.

 

Josh Garrod flinched in his seat as if someone had let off a charge behind him.

“Constantine, Constantine, this is European Federal Ship
Thetis,
repeat this is
Thetis
.”

The voice was male; the accent was odd, and some of the words were unclear, but it was understandable. It didn't sound as if they were used to communicating by voice. The speaker didn't have the throwaway tone Josh had become accustomed to through entertainment videos.

“We are Constantine,” Josh said carefully. “Why are you here?”

“Request permission to land our party, sir. We have a systems failure, we're unable to maneuver and we're not sure if we can sustain life-support.”

Land? Could they bring that monster down here? Josh had never made a decision like this in his life. There was no emergency to force him back to instinct and no time to discuss the matter sensibly. He glanced at Aras, who mouthed “quarantine” at him. It helped bring him back to plan.

“We need to discuss quarantine arrangements—we've been isolated from terrestrial bacteria for generations. Wait and we will contact you shortly.”

He broke contact and turned to the wess'har. His heart was pounding and he felt sick.

“What now, Aras?”

“Allow them to send down an atmosphere-capable vessel. They'll have at least one. Insist that they bring a blood sample from each crew member so we can screen for pathogens, and that just one representative lands to discuss the next step.”

Josh wrote it down carefully on a coarse sheet of hemp paper. If he could see it, he could do it. “Is their ship really damaged?”

“The sentry is programmed to neutralize any system it detects that appears redundant to life-support. They shouldn't be in any danger. Or present any.”

“This isn't what we intended.”

“Josh,” Aras said soothingly. “If they present any threat whatsoever, I'll remove them. I have to. It won't be your decision or your responsibility, and you need not fear them.”

Aras could make anyone believe. A slight rumbling, like a cat's purr but nearer the boundary of hearing, swept away all fear. Josh felt his shoulders relax and his voice returning to normal. He could swallow. He pressed the button.

“
Thetis,
this is Constantine,” he said. “
Thetis,
I have instructions for you. Please follow them.”

 

“Are you sure you can handle it?” Bennett asked, floating at the hatch of the shuttle.

Shan checked the panel. The biohaz suit creaked as she leaned forward against the restraints. “No.”

“I could come along.”

“Wouldn't look good, disregarding their first instruction, would it?” She tightened the restraints round her and gave him a thumbs-up. “Let's trust the automation and South American workmanship.”

Her last view of Adrian Bennett was his worried face as he swung the hatch shut and the automatic locks took over. There was a small cut on his chin where he had shaved the old-fashioned way. If she died, she thought, it would be a banal image to take with her. She had always imagined her last sight would be a spray of small-arms fire or at least a half-decent sunset. She decided to trust the mechanics anyway.

Silence surrounded her, pressing on her eardrums. She hoped the onboard AI could fly the thing: trusting its piloting skills was worse than the SB. She kept her eyes shut from the time the small vessel shuddered out of the launch bay to the time she felt the vibration stop.

She opened them again. The viewplate was full of a blue-and-white planet at an angle that made her feel as if she were falling forward, and instinct made her raise her arms in front of her to take the fall that never came. She felt sick. It was only concentrating on the fact that Perault's briefing was unfolding on schedule within her that stopped her stomach yielding to the inevitable.

The planet beneath resolved into finer detail, fast and overwhelming. She was dropping towards an island in a clear turquoise sea.

 

The cryo panel went dead. The biosignals of the sleeping crew and team were still within safe margins, but there was no indication that the systems were intact.

“Here we go,” said Bennett. “That's all we need.”

“Have we lost cryo?”

“Possibly. We have to assume we have.”

“Okay. Frankland or not, we have to revive them. Let's do it.”

Bennett tried the manual override and waited. It was a long five seconds. Then the alarm on the biosigns panel turned amber. “I'll go and lift the lids,” he said. “They'll be conscious in a few minutes.”

It was all turning into a cock-up. Lindsay could feel it. She braced herself against the bulkhead and let the wave of nausea peak and subside. She could hear the buzz of conversation in the aft section. At least three of the research team had revived fully, and she decided that if she didn't imprint favorably upon them now, she would never have any sway over them. She pulled herself through the hatch and tried to float down to a steady position.

“What's happening?” It was Mohan Rayat, the pharmacologist. He kept shaking his hand as if it had gone numb.