Probability Space (34 page)

Fifteen seconds.

Apparently the navy sensors still ignored anything under ninety kilos heading into a space tunnel.

Capelo’s speeding body jerked again. He appeared to be on course. Beginner’s luck? Not if he’d fatally injured himself doing it.

Marbet was the one who mattered the most. She was the only human being who had ever talked … no, you couldn’t call it talking. Who had ever communicated with a Faller. It had taken her months to learn how, and the communication had at best been partial and grudging and inconclusive, but she had done it. Let her have the chance to do it again!

Ten seconds.

Going through a space tunnel in a ship felt like nothing at all. What did it feel like in an s-suit? Kaufman might never have the chance to register whatever his senses picked up from the trip, because the Fallers might very well blow into ions everything that came through to Q space, on their side of the tunnel. No matter how small the intruder’s mass. A very small mass could be a nuclear bomb.

Kaufman was counting on exactly that fact. A bomb that detonated the second it came through could take out guard ships. That’s why you didn’t station your fleet too close to the tunnel. There was space between, enough space to protect the ships, enough space to allow identification of whatever came through the tunnel before you vaporized it. Enough time, perhaps, to see that it was three unarmed human beings, or three human beings anyway. Time to decide, as those three humans continued to speed across Q space, if you wanted to destroy them—or if you wanted to risk one flyer to pick them up and find out why they had tumbled out of a star system hundreds of light-years away into your star system despite the war.

How much curiosity did Fallers have about their enemy? Enough to monitor human broadcasts, which was more than humans had been able to do with theirs.

Five seconds.

The gray “fog” inside the tunnel wasn’t misty, like fog on Earth. It looked solid as stone. Yet Kaufman saw Marbet Grant rush through it as if through vacuum. A fraction of a second later Kaufman followed her. He tried to keep his eyes open, but the blink reaction, at hitting what looked like a solid wall, was too strong. Kaufman blinked.

And sailed through the tunnel into Q space, expecting to die, literally before he knew it.

*   *   *

He didn’t die. The Faller ships didn’t fire.

Kaufman couldn’t see them. He saw Marbet and Capelo ahead of him. Marbet was slowing; she had used her jets, as he was now doing. Capelo was not. That probably meant he was too injured to do so. Helpless, Kaufman watched Thomas Capelo dwindle and disappear into the blackness of space.

The Faller ships still hadn’t fired.

They’d had time to do so. Possibly that meant the Faller craft were conferring, deciding what to do. They didn’t take prisoners, and may or may not have known that one of theirs had been taken prisoner two years ago. Would that change their policy? They had never before been offered humans like this: alive, naked of all spacecraft, in a Faller-controlled area like Q space. In their own empty front yard.

Somewhere in that yard, if the best military minds in SADC were right, floated the Faller’s artifact.

At least the Fallers could see that Kaufman, Capelo, and Marbet hadn’t brought the human artifact with them. It was too big to miss. The three humans might very well be armed with everything up to nuclears, but they didn’t carry the other artifact.

The longer he was left alive, Kaufman reasoned, the better the chances of staying that way. Still, there was a self-imposed limit. The s-suits carried only so much air. The Fallers might prefer to let the humans die and merely harvest their dead bodies for examination.

But they’d harvested dead bodies before. This was a chance for them to acquire living ones, at no cost except a robotic spaceship. If they had such things.

More time passed. Kaufman could no longer see Marbet, nor the tunnel behind him. He saw stars, and one of the system’s distant, lifeless gas giants, and his own thoughts.

Magdalena. Dead.

Tom Capelo. Possibly dead.

Marbet Grant, whom he had loved. Possibly dead.

Admiral Pierce. Possibly sending a force right now to Q space, to set off the human artifact at prime thirteen and thus, from greed and arrogance and stupidity, possibly destroy spacetime itself.

The entire Solar System, wiped free of life as spacetime reconfigured into new fundamental particles.

He checked the wrist display on his suit. Ten minutes of air left.

Kaufman closed his eyes and drifted in mind, sped on in body. There were worse ways to die. He had done what he could. It wasn’t enough. There were also better ways to die.

When he opened his eyes again, it was to see a ship, peculiarly shaped and brightly colored, silently flying alongside him. It matched his speed and trajectory. As he watched, incredulous, a door on the ship slid open and a net emerged, made of thin filaments, and it too matched his speed and trajectory, slightly in front of him. Then the net slowed, and he was caught like a salmon stopped in its wild plunge upstream toward what the poor fish hadn’t the wit or memory to visualize at all.

*   *   *

He came to all at once, with no transition, like a holo snapping on. He sat up, a quick movement that made his vision darken from lightheadedness. The gravity was half a gee or slightly less. His head cleared and he looked wildly around.

Kaufman sat naked in a small, featureless room. Naked … but he was breathing all right, so the Fallers had analyzed and duplicated the air in his tank. Marbet lay unconscious beside him and, against the wall, Tom Capelo watched him.

“Hello … Lyle,” Capelo said, and a sudden wave of gladness swept over Kaufman. Capelo was alive, although he spoke like a man in considerable pain.

Kaufman moved toward Capelo. The physicist tried to grin, failed. “We … made it. Sort of. I think we’re aboard a Faller ship, or station, or whatever.”

“What are your injuries, Tom?”

“Broken arm, for sure. I think cracked ribs—it hurts when I breathe. But nothing’s bleeding, unless it’s doing it inside where I don’t know about it.”

There was nothing in the room to even make a splint for Capelo’s arm, which hung at an unnatural angle. The Fallers were taking no chances with their captives. Kaufman wondered what sort of body searches they’d performed while he’d been unconscious, and was glad he didn’t know.

Marbet stirred. Capelo said, “Go. She’s … the reason for this … lunacy, right? Get her … going.”

Kaufman moved back toward Marbet. She opened her eyes, saw him, and clutched his arm. “Lyle.…” In her voice he heard the depth of her feeling for him, and instinctively embarrassment took over.

“Tom’s here, too,” he said brusquely, “but injured. Are you able to work, Marbet? We don’t know how long before human troops show up with the other artifact.”

“Yes.” As always, she read more from his body than his words, and understood his brusqueness and her task. “Where is the surveillance stuff?”

“Not visible.”

She sat up too abruptly for the lighter gravity, corrected herself, and carefully studied the room, coming to some decision Kaufman didn’t follow. “Go sit by Tom, in that corner. Both of you stay still and quiet. Don’t provide any distraction from me.”

He did as she told him. Marbet stood up and faced an adjacent corner. She gathered herself for a moment, her head down, her small, perfect, naked body alert but not tense. Kaufman heard her take a deep breath.

Then she became somebody else.

He had seen this before, but it amazed him nonetheless. Amazed him, disturbed him, disgusted him. Marbet half crouched, holding her torso and limbs at peculiar, distorted angles. Her facial muscles contorted. Her eyes assumed a different look (
how?
). She began to sway off rhythm, her hands flailing in small, inexplicable gestures. In a few moments she went from a beautiful human woman to something alien and distasteful.

Kaufman knew, but only because she’d told him, that in addition to communicating Faller gestures, Marbet was doing her level best to communicate Faller femaleness. Three years ago, she had tailored her responses to the enemy prisoner in order to provoke lust displays, as she understood them. She mimed submission, pleading, total lack of threat. It was the only way the Faller, xenophobic to a degree unknown even among the most parochial humans, had been able to “listen” to her. This had worked two years ago; Marbet and Kaufman and Capelo were gambling on it working again.

Beside Kaufman, Capelo moaned softly. His eyes had closed. He grimaced in pain.

Was the enemy artifact aboard this ship? Was it a ship they were on, or some sort of station? How much time had passed, time more precious than the enemy could know, since the three humans had been plucked from space?

No answers. And no response to anything Marbet was doing.

She started doing it with more intensity. Her head wobbled, and her feet moved in tiny, trembling patterns. Kaufman had no idea how much of what she was “saying” concerned a simple desire for response, and how much concerned their actual dilemma. How did you communicate that an enemy was in great danger? And why would they believe you?

Still, the Fallers had to be amazed that a human could imitate their body language at all. That had to at least make them take notice.

Marbet had been working for at least thirty minutes. She was visibly tiring. He had almost given up hope when a mesh wall began to descend from the ceiling. It came down swiftly, neatly dividing him and Capelo from Marbet. He forced himself not to react. Then a door on Marbet’s side of the mesh opened and what could only be a robot came through. It held her own helmet and air tank, presumably refilled. Marbet put on the helmet, and Kaufman had a bad moment as he saw it seal itself around her delicate throat. The robot kept the air tank. It encircled Marbet with a mesh gate and led her out the door.

She had succeeded in communicating something. But what, and to whom? And what would the Fallers do about it?

*   *   *

Perhaps another fifteen minutes dragged by. Capelo seemed to be asleep, which was undoubtedly a good thing. Sleep muted pain. But when Faller robots finally appeared, it was Capelo they wanted.

They stood on the other side of the room, two alien robots, as the mesh wall ascended into the ceiling. One robot moved toward Kaufman and Capelo. It handed a helmet and air tank to Capelo, who tried to reach for them but fell back onto the floor with a cry of pain. The robot halted.

Kaufman said, careful to make no sudden or aggressive movement, “He’s hurt.” Kaufman mimed a straight arm and then a bent, dangling one; easy breathing and then labored rasps while he clutched his chest.

The robots froze. Receiving electromagnetic instructions? Probably, because after ten seconds one robot left, returning a few moments later with a second helmet and air tank and a mesh container of what looked like junk. He handed everything to the first robot, who handed it to Kaufman. The junk, he saw, included cloth, metal rods, small circular pillows, shell-shaped objects he couldn’t imagine a use for, and a sharp, oddly curved knife. The robot waited stolidly.

“This is going to hurt, Tom. Try not to faint. It’s you they want, and that has to be a good sign. Either they know who you are or Marbet succeeded in telling them. Now hold still.”

“All right,” Capelo said, and scowled fiercely. Kaufman saw what it cost the physicist to appear weak and dependent. Kaufman could respect Capelo’s pride.

He used the knife to cut the cloth, which was amazingly resistant, into strips. The arm first. Capelo cried out when Kaufman probed it, then forcibly aligned the broken bone and bound it to a metal rod. Fortunately the fracture wasn’t compound. Kaufman bound Capelo’s ribs. Capelo was fading in and out of consciousness.

“Stay with me, Tom.”

“Y-yes.”

“You’d have made a good soldier.”

“N-n-never.”

Kaufman finished. God, for just a single pain patch! “Now I’m going to put on your helmet and lift you.”

“I … can stand.”

“No, you can’t. Commencing operation.” Kaufman fitted the helmet on Capelo, then put on his own. Airflow started automatically. He grasped Capelo around the waist and hauled him to his feet. The physicist was small-boned, not heavy. He leaned against Kaufman.

“Steady, Tom. You can do it. Here we go.”

Half carrying, half leading Capelo, Kaufman followed the robots out of the featureless room and into the heart of the Faller station.

TWENTY-EIGHT

ABOARD A FALLER STATION

S
omething soft and purple underfoot, with tendrils growing up rough walls. No clear distinction between corridor and rooms, just spaces flowing into each other in crazy shapes. Holes halfway up some walls and not others. And everywhere, small flying insects, or insect analogues, landing on his naked skin and hovering in front of his helmet and making a low persistent buzz.

Insects? Something else? If only Ann could see this!

Kaufman saw no Fallers, but the walk was a short one. They stopped in a large space with something huge in the corner. As Kaufman watched, the something heaved slightly, then settled down again. It was an amorphous mass the size of a bus. It didn’t look like cytoplasm, or plant life, or hardware, or anything else Kaufman had ever seen or imagined. Maybe it was a computer. Or a food supply. Or a pet. Or a living bedroll. Impossible to tell, impossible not to feel amazed.

Two actual Fallers walked into the room. They ignored the mass, which continued to heave silently every, few minutes, shifting against the rough wall.

Maybe it was scratching itself.

Kaufman had seen a Faller up dose before, on the
Alan B. Shepard
. He recognized the cylindrical bipedal bodies, the powerful kangaroo-like tail for balance, the tentacled hands and alien faces. These two, in bright-colored clothes (uniforms?), stood on the far side of what Kaufman at first thought was a table. On the near side, Marbet waited, still naked except for her helmet.

It wasn’t a table. It was a horizontal screen, a flat triangular surface on a slim pedestal. Marbet and one alien held curved rods that had to be styluses of some sort.