The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (31 page)

And that’s where the trouble began. It was Captain Foster’s idea to ramp up the interrogation, and God help me, I went along with it. We were in the middle of a difficult and dangerous situation, we needed to know everything about it, and because our only witness refused to help us we had to coerce him. It was vital to our security and we needed to know everything he knew right away.

So we cuffed Hughes and made him kneel, right there on the cold black naked rock by the shaft. I explained what we were going to do and told him that he had one last chance: if he answered all of our questions truthfully, if he talked willingly and without reservation, he would be able to walk away from this as a hero. He told me what to do with my offer in language you can imagine. And one of the solders gripped his head while Captain Foster, delicately pinching the plastic straw between two fingers of his pressure suit’s glove, puffed a dose of Veracidin up his nose.

Veracidin is derived from Elder Culture nanotechnology. A suspension of virus-sized machines that enter the bloodstream and cross the blood/ brain barrier, targeting specific areas in the cortex, supressing specific higher cognitive functions. In short, it is a sophisticated truth drug. Its use is illegal on Earth and First Foot, but we were in the field, in the equivalent of a battle situation. We did what we had to do, and we didn’t know – how could we? – that Everett Hughes would suffer a violent reaction when the swarm of tiny machines hit his brain.

Perhaps he was naturally allergic to Veracidin, as a very small percentage of people are. Or perhaps the many, many hours of exposure to code had sensitised him somehow. Within seconds, his eyes rolled back in his head and his body convulsed with what appeared to be a grand mal seizure. He jerked and spasmed and drooled bloody foam; he lost control of his bowels and bladder. We laid him on the ground and did our best, but the seizures came one after the other. His heart stopped, and we got it going again. We managed to wrestle him into the pod carried by one of the scooters, and we all took off for the ship, hoping to treat him there. But he was still fitting, and he died in transit.

Captain Foster was badly shaken by Hughes’s death and wanted to bug out for home. Hughes’s body was in a sealed casket; the original of the code had been located and confirmed destroyed; there was nothing else for us to do but write a report that would justify our actions and absolve us of any blame. I told him that we were not finished here because Niles Sarkka was still at large, and in possession of a mirror of the code. He had not gone through the wormhole throat, or else we would have been alerted, so there was still a chance of catching up with him. If we did, I said, we would be completely exonerated; if not, I would take full responsibility for Hughes’s death.

I already had a good idea about where Sarkka might be headed, and put in a call to our representative with the farmers of the inner belt, asked him if anyone there was an amateur astronomer. Within an hour, I’d been sent a photograph taken through a five-inch reflector, showing a new, small star a few degrees from the crucifix flare of Terminus’s G0 companion. Sarkka’s ship without a doubt.

Captain Foster said that we had no chance of catching up with Sarkka. He had too much of a head start, and in any case we didn’t have enough fuel to put up any kind of chase. “We don’t even know that he’s headed for that star. He’s infected. The meme is urging him to flee outward, towards no particular destination.”

I said that Hughes showed no sign of infection, and in any case, if Sarkka was gripped by a blind outward urge, why was he headed directly for the star?

“You have that q-phone,” Captain Foster said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Oh, I will. In good time.”

I was beginning to formulate what I needed to do. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t see any other way to bring this case to a satisfactory resolution, and bring Niles Sarkka to justice.

And so we headed for the inner belt, and a meeting with the farmers’ council. They said that they knew nothing about Suresh Shrivastav, the prospector who’d found the code, claimed that he’d been working the outer belt illegally. For what it’s worth, I believe them. That kind of piracy is increasingly common, and it would explain why Mr Shrivastav refused to talk to us. The farmers also said that they had known nothing about the little expedition mounted by Sarkka and Hughes, and made it clear that they resented the UN’s intrusion into their affairs, and the danger to which their people had been unknowingly exposed. Luckily, I found an ally in the council’s chair, Rajo Hiranand, a tough, cynical, and highly intelligent old woman. Her motivations were not entirely selfless – she wanted her community to share in whatever profit might be made from whatever it was that Niles Sarkka might discover – but her heart was in the right place.

“I would guess that this is the end of your career with the UN,” she said, after the vote to accept my offer of help had been won. “After all this is over, when you get back, we might be able to find a place for someone like you here.”

I thanked her, but admitted that spending the rest of my life herding sky-sheep and growing corn and pharm tobacco was low on the list of things I wanted to do with my life.

“That isn’t all we do here,” Rajo said. “Think about it. You’ll have plenty of time for that, after all.”

“Before I do anything else,” I said, “I have to explain this to my boss.”

It was a call I had been dreading. Rightly so. The q-phone that linked me to its entangled twin relayed with perfect fidelity Marc Godin’s cold anger across uncountable light years, directly to my ear and brain and heart. I knew there was no point in apologizing, and besides, I agreed with his assessment of the situation. The mission was fubared, and although I had been volunteered for the mission by the Inspector General, I was acting senior officer, and by resigning I was contributing a few extra knots to the intractably complicated tangle of diplomatic and legal problems. But it still hurts grievously to think of how Marc severed every bond, ignored my years of loyal service, and refused to acknowledge the sacrifice I was making.

When he was finished, I asked for a final favour. “Have Varneek do a trace analysis on the burned-out motel room. Have him look for any unusual material. If he finds anything, have him compare it with the fragments from the avatar that was destroyed in the hive-rat nest in the City of the Dead.”

“Sarkka was lying, Emma. There was no avatar. He killed Singleton and the mercenary.”

“I could ask the city police to look into it. But given the diplomatic angle, I think it would be better if you did.”

“I hope that is not a threat,” Marc said, finding a new depth of Antarctic chill.

“I don’t want to go public with this. Too much information has already spilled out. But this is too important to ignore.”

“The Jackaroo would not breach the accord,” he said.

“We don’t know what they would do,” I said, and would have said more, but he cut the connection then.

He called back the next day. I was aboard the largest of the farmers’ ships by then, and Terminus was dwindling astern. Varneek had failed to find any fragments, Marc said, but he had found traces of fused silica and traces of doped fullerenes and an exotic room-temperature superconductor.

“Are they from an avatar?”

“If they were not, I could tell you. As it is, I can neither confirm nor deny that the traces Varneek found in the room matched the fragments of the avatar already in our possession.”

So I had my answer.

“It won’t make any difference,” Marc said, after I thanked him. “Even if we’d caught the avatar with blood on its hands, nothing would have been done beyond lodging a formal protest. Because the accord is useful to us. Because no one wishes to disturb our relationship with the Jackaroo.”

I told him I understood, and asked about the search for the prospector, Suresh Shrivastav.

“The investigation has been closed. I’m sorry, Emma. Even if you capture Sarkka, it won’t save your career.”

“This isn’t about my career.”

“In any case, good hunting,” Marc said, and cut the connection.

And now, six months later, we are chasing Niles Sarkka’s ship towards the coal-black gas giant. He’s just a couple of million kilometres ahead of us and, as we have long suspected, will soon enter into orbit. We caught up with him because we continued to accelerate after his ship turned around and began to slow. Now we must shed excess delta-vee by dipping into the outer fringes of the gas giant’s atmosphere, an aerobrake manoeuver that will subject the ship’s frame to stresses at the outer limits of its tolerance.

The farmers’ ship isn’t equipped for a thorough planetary survey, but the instruments we’ve been able to cobble together during this long chase have not detected any source of electromagnetic radiation apart from the pulse of the planet’s magnetic field, and limited optical surveys have failed to spot any trace of artificial structures on any of the moons. Which does not mean that there isn’t anything there. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Our survey capabilities are grievously limited, and if Niles Sarkka is right, if this is where the last remnant of the Ghajar or some other Elder culture is hiding out, it won’t want to be found.

And if the code has given Sarkka the precise location of some base or spider hole, we’ll be right on his tail. Fortunately, he’s no more than a point-and-go pilot. It’s obvious now that he didn’t do anything to counter our tactic because he wasn’t able to. With the end of the chase in sight, I’m beginning to feel that we have a chance of catching him before he can do any real harm.

I think he knows that the game is up. That’s why he has been trying to make a deal with me, and by extension with Rajo Hiranand and the rest of the farmers’ council. In our first conversations, he assumed moral and intellectual superiority, claimed that his actions should be judged by history rather than by mere mortals. Now, he’s offering to share the greatest discovery since the Jackaroos’ fluttering ships appeared in Earth’s skies.

“A straight fifty-fifty split, Emma,” he tells me, as we cross the orbit of the gas giant’s outermost moon. “I can’t do better than that.”

“Fifty per cent of nothing is nothing, Niles.”

“I will find them. They led me here, after all.”

Niles Sarkka claims that he talked to Suresh Shrivastav before he left Libertaria to meet with Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton on First Foot. He says that the prospector told him that he hadn’t stumbled on the code by chance. No, he’d been heading home after searching a couple of world-lets in Terminus’s outer belt when he’d detected a brief, transitory pulse of broad-spectrum radio noise – a squeal like a God’s own fire alarm, he said. It had grabbed his attention and he’d swung around and made landfall on the worldlet and hiked across its arctic surface to the crash site, following a faint but steady pulse. No other code has ever been so marked, and Niles Sarkka is convinced that someone or something led Shrivastav to it. Not the Jackaroo, but one of the Elder Cultures. He also believes, without a shred of evidence, that this Elder Culture wants us to find them. That they want to help us, and tell us all they know about the plans of the Jackaroo, and the true history of the wormhole network.

I’ve told him many times that I think that this story is nothing more than a fabulous fiction, and I tell him that again now, adding, just to needle him, “If there is something out there, how about we take all of it, and send you to jail?”

“You have to tell the farmers about my offer, Emma. You are obligated, as their guest. Also, you should tell your bosses back on First Foot, too. Talk to all parties concerned, why don’t you, and get back to me.”

Well, I don’t want to talk to my boss, of course. I’m in deep trouble with the UN, and haven’t been in communication with Marc Godin or any other UN official since the chase began. But I call Rajo and tell her about my latest conversation with Niles, and his offer, and she says that she must consult with the council. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long.

“We are not varying our agreement,” Rajo says. “We will capture him, and whatever you find out there, we will deal with it then.”

I tell her that I’m relieved that she and the council see Sarkka’s offer for what it is.

“Did you think that we would renege on our deal? Have faith in us, Emma. As we have faith in you.”

I call Sarkka. His ship is close to the edge of the cold, carbon-black limb of the planet now, and we are in the middle of preparations for aerobraking. He doesn’t answer for more than ten minutes, and when he finally picks up, and I start to tell him that he can’t make any kind of deal with the farmers, he says that it doesn’t matter. There’s something in his voice I haven’t heard for a while. An unsettling manic glee.

“It’s too late to make a deal. I’ll take it all. Everything here. You are not my nemesis after all, Emma. You are my witness!”

He signs off and won’t answer when I call back, and then his ship drops out of sight beyond the limb of the gas giant. We won’t see him again until after aerobraking.

I help the crew finish tying everything down, and then we all strap into crash couches and plug into the interface and watch the black-on-black bands of the gas giant swell towards us. And just as the ship hits the fringes of its atmosphere, and begins to shudder and groan as deceleration piles on the gees, and the view is washed with violet light as friction with the atmosphere heats the hull of the ship and wraps it in a caul of ionised plasma, one of the crew posts a snatched shot of a shaped rock orbiting at the edge of the ring system. A cone with a flat face. A wormhole throat.

A moment later, we enter the terminal phase of the aerobraking manoeuvre. Plasma as hot as the surface of the gas giant’s star envelopes us and gravity crushes us. I’m trying to breath with what seems like a full pirate crew squatting on my chest, my heart is pounding like crazy, black rags are fluttering in. The ship quivers and groans and is filled with a tremendous roar as it scratches a flame 10,000 km long across the face of the gas giant. And as the plasma dies back and the pull of deceleration fades there’s an alarming bang: the flight crew has fired up the solid fuel motors, finessing our delta-vee as we climb away from the nightside of the planet and head out towards the edge of the rings.