Reunion (9 page)

Hope and confidence returning, Flinx resumed his pursuit. “Where is the indicated recorder now? What is its present location?” Clearly, if he wanted the syb, he was going to have to confront the crewmember in whose possession it presently resided. As he contemplated his next query, he wondered if the individual was even aware of the sensitive nature of the information he or she was toting around.

For a change, the AI’s reply did not surprise him. “Following recent disembarkation, all crew departed on shuttle drop for the surface of the world called Pyrassis, presently located—”

“I know where Pyrassis is,” Flinx interrupted briskly. “I can see it out the nearest port. I need specifics. Touchdown coordinates.” He tensed slightly. “Was disembarkation voluntary, or coerced?”

“Voluntary,” the
Crotase
replied without hesitation.

Some of the tenseness flowed out of him. Whatever the crew of the freighter was up to, or involved in, or dealing with on the surface of the dry, remote world below, they had not been captured by the AAnn. That greatly enhanced his chance of recovering, by whatever means, the information he sought. But it still begged the question of what humans were doing here.

Time for one more highly sensitive question. Whoever they were and whatever their intentions, the one thing the landing party would not dare to do would be to lose contact with their ship. Which meant that if they were in regular contact with the
Crotase,
then the freighter would also be in contact with them.

“You have the present coordinates of all absent crew, including the individual in possession of the personal recorder containing the sybfile in question?”

“I am continuously monitoring the location of the landing party,” the ship responded readily. “However, I do not supervise electronics on the personal level. There is no guarantee that the individual transporting the particular recorder under discussion is still in possession of it. In its absence from my presence, it may have been manually transferred to any other individual.”

That was reasonable enough, Flinx concluded. No matter. He would locate the recorder when he located and confronted the crew. They might share several dozen such devices among them, but the freighter’s AI had thoughtfully provided him with its identifying code.

Adopting his most assured tone, he once more addressed the
Crotase’s
AI. “Request that you transfer last known coordinates of landing party to navigation submodule of . . .” and he provided the necessary coding and security-pass information to the AI of his own shuttle, presently resting in the freighter’s bay.

He breathed a small sigh of relief when the voice of the
Crotase
replied, “Complying,” and seconds later, “Requested information transferred.”

Rising from the seat, Flinx took a last look around the deserted command chamber. Strange that whoever was in charge of this eccentric mission had not chosen to leave even a skeleton crew aboard. It suggested that everyone might be needed to fulfill whatever purpose was intended. Or that whoever was in charge did not trust their own crew sufficiently to leave even one member of the company behind in charge of the ship. The absence of any evidence for discord prior to disembarking hinted at another possibility. Whoever Larnaca Nutrition had sent here might be cooperating with the AAnn.

Even this remote prospect still did not answer the question, Why Pyrassis? Though percolating natural curiosity demanded an answer, it was one he was willing to forgo if he could just obtain the information locked in the appropriated syb. Some kind of confrontation with the absent crew appeared inevitable. He smiled to himself. It might be direct, or accomplished by stealth. If the latter, then he would be on familiar territory. He was something of a master at concealing his presence from others.

Just as there had been when he had come aboard, there was nothing to stop him, either verbally or physically, from leaving the freighter. Safely back aboard his shuttle, he checked to make certain the
Crotase’s
AI had actually provided his craft with the requested landing coordinates. They were there, forthright and conspicuous, in the shuttle’s data bank. Reaching down to unseal and slip out of the survival suit’s confines, he decided to hold off doing so until he was clear of the hulking freighter.

Agreeable as before, the
Crotase
obediently acknowledged his request to disengage. The shuttle was gently released and allowed to drift clear of the bay. Addressing his own craft’s onboard AI, he directed it to program in the newly received set of coordinates and set down within three kilometers of the identified locality, leaving it to the shuttle’s nav system to choose the best site.

He could have returned to the
Teacher
and ridden his own ship to the surface. Thanks to several unprecedented and carefully concealed modifications built into her by the Ulru-Ujurrians, his vessel was, to the best of his knowledge, the only one in the Arm capable of advancing to within five planetary diameters of a target world—much less actually landing upon it utilizing its KK-drive. Commonwealth engineers would have been confounded by the revelation. It was only one of many secrets he had resolved to safeguard. In order to do so he was compelled to utilize, like everyone else, a shuttle for traveling between ship and surface. Thus far no observers had deduced this unique ability of the
Teacher,
and he was determined to keep it that way.

Noting that it was nighttime in the projected landing zone, he added the additional instructions that the forthcoming touchdown was to be carried out without external lights or power. Automatically trimming and adjusting the little vessel’s delta wings to account for local climatic conditions, the shuttle would glide to a landing in virtual silence. With luck, its arrival would not be noticed by those on the surface. Obviously, this would greatly enhance his chances of approaching their camp unnoticed and on foot. It was and had always been his favored means of approaching the unfamiliar.

Should it prove possible to do so, he would much prefer to steal what he had come for.

The shuttle’s engines fired, attitude control rotated the craft eighty-five degrees, and as steady acceleration pushed him back into the command chair, it began to move out from behind the shadow of Pyrassis’s nearer moon. Very quickly, the familiar bulges and lines of both the
Crotase
and the
Teacher
fell behind. Ahead loomed a lambent beige and rust-red world against which white streaks and tufts of cloud appeared even starker than they did against the blue-brown backdrops of planets like Earth and Moth and Alaspin.

As soon as the shuttle’s AI assured him they were on course for arrival, he reached down to release the increasingly uncomfortable survival suit’s seals. Conducted to his ears by the suit’s pickups, a faint hissing stopped him in midreach. Frowning, he glanced down to where his lower body lay secured in the seat’s harness.

The hissing sound was not coming from his suit.

“I’m hearing what sounds like an atmospheric precipitance.” His fingers moved away from the suit’s seals. “Confirm and identify.”

There was a pause. It was brief, and might not have been noticed by others less sensitive than Flinx. But he did notice it, and the hackles went up on his neck. Instantly, Pip poked her head out from within her brightly colored coils. The small, bright-eyed, triangular green shape rose up into his headpiece, obscuring a small portion of his vision. He was too busy and too anxious to admonish her. This was not a problem in which, however well-meaning, she could assist.

“I sense no disturbance,” the shuttle’s AI responded. “There is nothing to identify.”

The hiss continued. He was not imagining it. “There is a barometric anomaly present. Confirm and identify.”

The voice of the shuttle did not change. “I sense no disturbance.”

Reaching out and over, Flinx activated a heads-up display. It appeared in front of him, frozen in midair. A few taps on manual controls brought forth the information he sought. It was chilling in its contradiction of the AI’s declaration. Very plainly, with numbers as well as words, it indicated that atmospheric pressure within the shuttle was down to less than 0.5 PSI—and continuing to fall steadily.

The leak would have to be located later. Right now he was far more concerned with the AI’s seeming incognizance. “Instrumentation indicates we are bleeding air. Confirm, and if possible, identify the source of the leakage.”

“I sense no seepage of the kind you imply. Hull integrity is sound. All systems are operating normally.”

It did not take long for the hissing sound to cease. According to the manual sensors, this did not come about because corrective measures had been applied to recalcitrant instrumentation. It occurred because there was no longer any breathable air within the shuttle. He could quickly confirm this by unsealing and removing any part of his survival suit. He elected not to do so because if the instrumentation was right and the AI wrong, he would perish quickly and unpleasantly.

Which is exactly what would have happened to him if, as was normally the case, he had been sitting confidently in the shuttle’s command chair clad in nothing but his daily coveralls.

Something had caused the supposedly fail-safe shuttle to inexplicably vent its internal atmosphere. A check revealed that the AI’s response had been at least partially correct: hull integrity had not been violated. Which meant that something had directed the ship’s systems themselves to void the air. Only a command delivered directly to the AI could induce that kind of reaction. He had given no such command. It was inconceivable that it could have come from the now distant
Teacher.
Where could it possibly have originated? The shuttle had received only two recent external directives. One from him, ordering it to program in a touchdown proximate to recently acquired planetary coordinates. The second from the AI of the
Crotase,
providing those coordinates.

And just possibly, he realized with a sudden chill, supplying something else along with them.

No wonder he had been allowed free and easy access to the freighter. No wonder nothing had been denied to him, including access to the vessel’s main AI. No wonder no door had been programmed to seal itself behind him, no explosive device to go off beneath his booted feet or at his approach. There was no need. Whoever had programmed the freighter’s response to intrusion had done so with exquisite subtlety. The booby trap it had been trained to plant was designed to go off only
after
an intruder departed. While he had been tunneling into the
Crotase’s
AI, it had silently been doing the same thing to the controlling intelligence of his shuttle.

He ought to have anticipated something of the sort. The Shell blowback at Surire should have habituated him to the mind-set of the kind of people he was dealing with.

Lamenting the oversight now would do him no good at all, and would only waste time. “You are experiencing a malfunction,” he announced solemnly. “Your cortex has been invaded. I direct you to execute all emergency clear, cleanse, and nullification programs and restore your system to health. If required, temporary shutdown of all functions may be permitted.” A risky command, but no less so than allowing whatever had burrowed deep within the AI to continue to do damage with impunity.

The shuttle’s reply was not encouraging. “All systems are functioning normally. There is no need for shutdown, or to perform cleansing procedures.” Thoughtfully, it advanced a time frame for touchdown.

Safe within the self-contained environment of the survival suit, he and Pip could ignore the insidious evacuation of air from the shuttle’s living quarters. The trouble was, given the blithe, blissful, persistent ignorance of the craft’s AI, he had no way of knowing if that was the only problem he could anticipate having to deal with. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, others began to make themselves known with unnerving regularity.

Most disconcerting of all was the unsettling realization that as it entered Pyrassisian atmosphere, the shuttle was making no attempt to moderate its velocity. Well after deceleration ought to have begun, the little craft was doing nothing to brake itself preparatory to landing.

“Teacher!
Priority override!” Silence shouted back at him from the suit’s speakers.
“Teacher,
acknowledge! Shuttlecraft emergency failure, all systems unresponsive.
Acknowledge!”

Uttering an uncommon epithet, he found himself admiring the skill with which the pathocybergen had been implanted in the shuttle’s shell, even as he fought to identify and disarm it. A major complication manifested itself when he realized that trouble was spreading through the system as fast as he could isolate individual components. Working furiously with manual directives, he managed to segregate and fix the command string that had caused the internal atmosphere to be evacuated from the shuttle. That proved easier than his frantic attempts to reestablish communication with the
Teacher.
If he could just make contact, he could direct its far more advanced AI to correct the problems the shuttle’s shell continued to insist did not exist. All such attempts, however, came to naught.

Meanwhile, one onboard system after another continued to shut down, or fold into cross-purposes, or otherwise defeat every attempt by him to disentangle it from whatever treacherous pathogen the
Crotase
had cunningly inserted into supposedly safeguarded depths. And all the while, the shuttle continued to plunge surfaceward at an acceptable angle but at a decidedly inappropriate velocity on a vector designated for death. During which frenzied time the onboard AI continued to cheerfully insist that nothing was wrong, all systems were functioning normally, and that touchdown would occur within the specified time. That was not what troubled Flinx. What concerned him was the specific celerity with which the scheduled landing would take place. An efficacious touchdown was one in which everything involved, both animate and otherwise, retained its individual integrity. The long-sought-after sybfile would not do scattered shreds of him any good.