Shooting the Rift - eARC (28 page)

He was right about that, at any rate: I fired up the bio monitor in my neuroware, looking to check out how bad the damage was, and, to my relief, found it mostly superficial. If anything it seemed to be healing remarkably fast; Ertica must have given me a relatively low dose. Something to be thankful for, anyway: unless, of course, Neville realized I’d recover on my own before too long.

Baines
, I sent, finding to my relief that the Freebooter engineer’s ‘sphere was so close he must have come out of their quarters to back up his skipper—or possibly just to enjoy the spectacle of Guilders brawling among themselves, which I’d no doubt he’d find highly entertaining.
Tell her to say it’s serious.

Why should I?
He was quick off the mark, I’ll give him that.

Skip says no deal. Play along, I might get you some leverage.

That your word as a Guilder?
Sharp, as well as quick. Something I might have realized sooner if Ertica and Rollo hadn’t done most of the talking.

Yes.
There was no time to waste, even if I had been in the mood for a long conversation. Which I most emphatically wasn’t, since my face still felt like it had been dipped in acid. (Which, come to think of it, was pretty much what had actually happened.)

“He’ll be fine,” Ertica said, apparently trying to reassure Clio now, although I was pretty sure that would be more to pre-empt any retaliation by the crew of the
Stacked Deck
than because she actually cared how the girl felt.

“If he gets to the infirmary fast enough,” Baines added.

“Right,” Ertica agreed, not missing a beat, which told me a good deal about how much her crew trusted one another.

“Otherwise he’s a goner,” Rollo added, not wanting to be left out. “Though they sometimes last for hours. Mind you, the way he’s feeling now, he probably doesn’t want to.”

“Not helpful, Rollo,” Ertica said waspishly.

“Make way,” Neville said, probably waving his gun around or something, and the troopers who’d left their stations at the pressure doors took hold of my arms, providing some much-needed support. “Can you walk?” The last addressed to me, in the slightly exaggerated enunciation of someone trying not to let you know how bad things look.

“Just about,” I managed to force past my swollen lips, and staggered a bit, to reinforce the point.

“Simon, I’m so sorry.” Clio sounded really upset, far more so than I thought the accident warranted; which, at the time, I put down to embarrassment at having lost her temper so publicly. “This is all my fault.”

“You think?” Ertica asked acidly.

No, it’s not,
I assured her.
This is all down to me.
Which happened to be true, even if she thought I was only saying it to make her feel better. The troopers began to half-lead, half-carry me away towards the pressure hatch.

“What about me?” Dazed and in pain as I was, it took me a moment to realize the querulous new voice was Deeks. “I need medical attention too!”

“Like me to kiss it better?” Ertica asked, and the ensuing argument lasted until the raised voices were finally cut off by the pressure hatch sliding closed behind me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

In which I find what I was looking for, and discuss politics.

To the Leaguers’ credit, they got me to the infirmary pretty quickly, although for obvious reasons I don’t remember much about the trip; I was bundled into a sled at the end of the corridor on the other side of the hatch, and then out again after a few minutes of rapid changes of direction in all three planes, but since I was effectively blind and in pain the whole time, that wasn’t a lot of help in getting orientated. I was pretty sure from the echoes of our footsteps that we’d moved into a corridor, then on into a room, but other than that I didn’t have a clue.

“This way,” a reassuring voice said, as a hand took hold of my arm. “Can you sit up there for me?”

I emitted a strangulated gurgle of assent, which was the best my swollen mouth could manage, finding shortly thereafter that “up there” meant the kind of examination table common to doctor’s surgeries throughout the Human Sphere.

“Close your eyes . . .” the voice went on, in the same soothing monotone. Which was the single most pointless request I’d ever had, since they were now swollen completely closed in any case. A moment later I heard the hiss of a spray, and something cool began to leach the heat from my burning face. Only as the pain receded, and my muscles spontaneously relaxed, did I realize how cramped and tense they’d become. “Does that feel any better?”

“Much,” I mumbled. I tried opening my eyes, and felt a flare of panic as they refused to respond.

“Take it easy,” the voice said. “It’s not that quick. Although you should recover a lot faster than the other guy.” For a moment I wondered who he was talking about, before the penny dropped: Deeks. “We synthesized a new antitoxin after treating him, once we knew what we were dealing with. Just in case anyone else—“ a short, hesitant pause, while he searched for a tactful phrase, “um, came into contact with her.”

“Lucky me,” I slurred. I checked my biomonitor again, and found the traces of toxin in my system already noticeably reduced. At this rate I’d be clear of the stuff within a few hours. Which was both good news and bad. I needed to be here for a while if I was going to search for a node, and crack it if I found one, but if they knew how fast I was recovering they might just send me straight back to the internment area. I swayed a little, and put a hand down to steady myself against the surface of the couch. “Ough. Still feel a bit groggy.”

“I’m not surprised.” My eyes were open a slit now, and a blurry image of someone in a white coat suddenly filled them. I couldn’t make out much in the way of facial features, but he seemed to have dark hair, and be mercifully free of any visible tweaks. He shone a light directly into each eye, and seemed pleased with my reaction. “Your pupils are dilating and contracting normally. That looks promising.”

“Good.” I might as well attack the problem head on, then, instead of hedging around it. “Does that mean I can go back to my friends now?”

“If you insist.” Damn. It looked like I’d overplayed my hand; perhaps I could counterfeit a seizure or something. But before I could make a complete fool of myself, the medic carried on talking. “I’d rather keep you in for a few hours, though, for observation. Just in case there’s an allergic reaction to the antitoxin.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, hiding my relief. “You’re the doctor.”

“Just a corpsman.” He held out a steadying hand as I hopped off the table, and stood, turning my head in an attempt to see more of the room despite the narrow field of vision left open to me by the swelling around my eyes. “You don’t need that much in the way of treatment.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said, faintly surprised to find that it was true.

“This way.” He led me out of the room and down the corridor outside, steering me with a light pressure against my elbow. After a couple of dozen steps, he opened another door, and ushered me through. “You can rest up in here for a while.”

“Thanks,” I said, entering cautiously, and finding a small, utilitarian room, containing very little beyond a bed and a couple of chairs. Though I could just about make them out, I made a point of bumping into one of the chairs on the way to the bed anyway; it probably wouldn’t hurt to look a bit more incapacitated than I actually was.

“Just call if you need anything. There are plenty of people about outside.” He delivered the veiled warning pleasantly enough, as if it had been nothing more than a piece of casual conversation.

“Thanks. I will.” I pretended to take the remark at face value, and stretched out on the bed. “But I’m going to try and sleep it off.” I even managed a reasonably convincing yawn, which wasn’t that surprising considering how little sleep I’d had the previous night.

“Good idea. I’ll look in on you later.” The door clicked behind him, leaving me alone in the heart of the enemy citadel. Or, if not the heart, one of its organs, at least.

Almost as soon as he left, I dived into the datasphere, immersing myself fully in the flow of information. Baines had been right, there was a node nearby, dense with data, pulsing with it like a dwarf star of undiluted knowledge. I reached out cautiously, fearful of being burned, and deployed the sneakware, meshing with the outer layers as easily as I’d become used to doing with Jas’s visor. No alarms went off, and no roadblocks descended, so at least I’d managed to pass myself off as an authorized user. Heartened by this initial success, which I must admit I’d been expecting, albeit with a little more difficulty, I began trying to access some actual data, deploying the datanomes I’d reverse engineered from the recording of Baines’ fruitless attempt to do the same.

This time it wasn’t such plain sailing, and I had to modify a couple of things as I went along, but after a bit of cautious poking and fiddling I finally broke through into an index. The rush of elation which accompanied my success was so strong I was even able to forget the throbbing discomfort of my healing face.

Right. Time to see what I could find. Prudence dictated that I make the most of my limited time, as the longer I was meshed in the more likely it was that someone would notice my presence, so I’d have to prioritize. I swooped through a nebula of interlocking data trails, looking for something worth filching. Plans of the base seemed like a good place to start, and I snagged one into my ‘sphere, realizing for the first time just how much you could cram into a hollowed-out rock this size.

The place was huge, a termite mound heaving with military personnel: though we’d only met a few in person, there must have been over ten thousand people living and working there, not counting the crews of the ships arriving and departing on an almost hourly basis. The whole moonlet was a honeycomb of living quarters, workshops, power plants, storage areas and weapon emplacements; not just graviton beams, but old-fashioned missile racks too, which could still be fired if the main generators went down. Freedom might be well within the League’s borders these days, but this place had been built when it was a frontier fortress, and hadn’t forgotten the lessons it had learned back then.

The cavern we were billeted in turned out to be surprisingly close to the surface, but almost the entire diameter of the base from the hangar bay where the
Stacked Deck
and the other impounded vessels were docked. Which made perfect sense to me. No one in their right mind would attempt to break out and recover their ships by force, but taking the precaution of making it as difficult as possible anyway certainly couldn’t hurt.

Feeling that I’d got hold of a prize well worth the risk, which Aunt Jenny would be more than satisfied with, I briefly considered withdrawing, then went back to the main index anyway. While I was here, I might as well see what else I could get away with: after all, it wasn’t as though I was likely to get another chance.

I hesitated, wasting precious nanoseconds trying to pick a likely target. The sheer quantity of information was working against me, and I was just about to grab a file at random and cross my fingers that it contained something worthwhile when I noticed a log of ship movements in and out of the base. That would be gold dust if I could get it back to my aunt; I had no doubt that an analyst of her caliber, and the people she worked for, would be able to deduce a vast amount about the League’s strategic aims and state of preparedness from the raw data, especially if it included details of the vessels’ destinations. I grabbed that too, and prepared to cut myself loose.

Then, at the last minute, I remembered my promise to Baines. There had to be something here I could give him to trade with Remington. I dithered again, then pounced on a list of cargo brokers in systems outside the League who were being paid substantial retainers to expedite shipments of materials the Navy wanted to get its hands on—which probably overlapped with parts of their intelligence gathering network too, come to think of it, another welcome surprise for Aunt Jenny. A few quiet words in their offices ought to ensure a steady stream of lucrative cargoes for the
Stacked Deck
if I was any judge of how the skipper liked to do business; something that was bound to occur to him if the list was waved under his nose.

Right, that would do: if I got caught now I’d be in serious trouble, and there was no sense in pushing my luck. I disengaged from the node, stretched out on the bed, and started to sort through my spoils.

As it turned out, I didn’t get nearly as far as I’d expected before my body decided it had had more than enough to put up with for one day, and shut itself down while the toxins got on with working their way out of my system. After half an hour of sifting through the data I’d pilfered I was beginning to yawn in earnest, not just for effect when the corpsman stuck his head round the door to see how I was getting on, and my thoughts were running noticeably slower than they normally did. According to the biomonitor the levels of toxin in my blood were dropping rapidly, something I was able to empirically confirm by the way my jaw was opening more widely with every yawn, and the fact that I could see reasonably well out of both eyes by now. So I decided to give way to the inevitable, and allowed myself to doze off.

I was woken by the sound of the door opening, and sat up, expecting to see the corpsman again; though my eyes opened more or less fully this time, it still took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t him.

“Hi,” I said, blinking in perplexity. “What are you doing here?”

“Guess,” Jas said, walking fully into the room. She stared at me for a moment, then suppressed a smile. “You look terrible.”

“You should see me from this side,” I said.

“Right.” She sat on the end of the bed, and examined me critically. “They tell me you’re on the mend.”

“The corpsman gave me some sort of antidote,” I said. “They had it all ready, just in case Ertica touched somebody else. Luckily for me.”

“The way I heard it, you touched her,” Jas said, her voice carefully neutral.

“Purely by accident,” I said, a little more defensively than I’d intended.

“So I heard.” Jas didn’t sound all that convinced. “And just how do you accidentally get your face stuck down a woman’s cleavage?”

“Believe me, it wasn’t as much fun as it sounds,” I said. “Clio punched me.”

Jas nodded. “Getting a bit jealous, was she?”

“Of course not,” I said, stunned by the absurdity of the idea. “We’re just friends. Most of the time, anyway. What would she have to be jealous about?”

“Oh, Si.” Jas shook her head pityingly. You really shouldn’t be allowed out on your own.”

“Well, I’m not,” I pointed out, with perhaps a little more asperity than I should have done. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

“To escort you back?” Jas nodded. “Do you want something to eat first?”

“Why not?” Now that she came to mention it, I found I was feeling a lot more hungry than I’d realized. I swung my feet to the floor, and stood; rather too quickly, apparently, as a wave of dizziness swept over me. For a moment I thought I was going to collapse back onto the bed, but Jas was suddenly there, moving with the preternatural swiftness I’d noticed before. An arm went round my waist, and she leaned her shoulder in beneath mine, so my own arm draped itself limply around her neck.

I was abruptly aware of the warmth of her body against mine, and the whisper of her breath against my ear. Then I found my balance, standing firmly on my feet again, but neither of us seemed particularly inclined to break free.

“Okay now?” Jas asked after a moment, her voice unnaturally brisk and businesslike.

“Fine.” I could feel her heartbeat throbbing against my ribcage, in almost perfect synchronization with my own. If this was a virt, I thought, we’d stand there like that for moment or two, gazing into one another’s eyes, then lean in for a kiss. But it wasn’t, of course. What actually happened was that we stared at each other for a couple of seconds, then broke apart, looking at the air next to one another’s faces in mutual embarrassment.

“Right. Food.” Jas broke the awkward silence, and held the door open for me.

“Food. Good idea,” I said, trying not to think about the way her body had felt pressed against my own. Once again I found myself wondering how things would have been between us if the circumstances of our meeting had been different, and regretting that we’d never get the chance to find out. I blinked the last of the blurring from my eyes, and belatedly realized that, though dressed in her usual fatigues, she wasn’t wearing her body armor, or carrying a gun. “Are you off duty now?”

“Technically.” She followed me into the corridor outside, and I turned left, back towards the examination room and the entrance I’d come in by. “But I thought you’d prefer to see a friendly face when your vision cleared, so I volunteered to pick you up.”

“I appreciate it,” I said, sincerely.

“Good. This way.” She turned, and started off down the corridor in the opposite direction. I felt a sudden irrational impulse to make a break for it, but suppressed it firmly: there was no point in even trying. She was faster and stronger than I was, and even if she hadn’t been, there were so many other service people around I’d be brought down within a matter of moments. Rather more cogently, though, it would shatter any trust that had started to grow between us, along with our nascent friendship. Which I really didn’t want to think about too closely; it was true I’d started to cultivate her purely as a means to an end, to try to get to a node, but I’d quickly begun to like her, and enjoy her company. If she ever realized how duplicitous I’d been she’d be badly and justifiably hurt, and I didn’t want that on my conscience, any more than I wanted to lose her friendship. And realizing that had just made me feel guilty about exploiting her in the first place.