Varken Rise (8 page)

“That doesn’t mean he’s right,” Lilly said. “After all, both Brant and I have those same childhood prejudices, yet we got rid of them. Why can’t everyone else?”

“You still have the prejudices,” Catherine told her. “It’s just that when you’re making conscious choices, you choose not to listen to them. Fear bypasses conscious choice.”

Lilly’s mouth turned down. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“They don’t know that,” Catherine said, nodding toward the display.

Lilly started eating again, looking troubled.

“I don’t think anyone knows what to think,” Brant said. “Even you, Catherine.”

The concierge monitor dinged, saving her from having to answer. “What is it?” she called out.

“Entry requested. Kemp Rodagh.”

“Glave’s gonads,” Brant muttered. “That was fast.”

“He had a mule farm here in the Sunita system,” Lilly said. “Actually, he had a mule farm in lots of places. I just picked the closest one.”

“What a cautious lad he is,” Brant said dryly.

“I left a message for him, for when he woke up,” Catherine said.

“Asking him to come here?” Brant clarified.

“Telling him he had been murdered and that he should come here and help us figure out who did it.” Catherine got to her feet and moved over to the drop shaft. “I knew that would get him here faster than anything else I might say.”

The Kemp Rodagh who stepped out the shaft was at least ten years younger than the last one they had seen. He was pale and thin. He walked as if it was painful and if he had rushed straight here from his regeneration bed, then it probably was.

“I would’ve got here faster,” he told Catherine and hugged her, surprising her. “Except that for the last ten hours I’ve been sitting in some asshole’s office, explaining myself.”

“Let me guess,” Brant said. “A man by the name of Rison?”

Kemp nodded. “His people snagged me as I got off the shuttle from the gate station. I got marched straight into his office. They only let me go just before sunset. I’ve been trying to figure out how to navigate my way here with one of those public cabs and not get tripped up, because everyone seems to know who I am.”

“You are as notorious as we are at the moment,” Catherine said. “I’m sorry about that.” She studied him. “I imagine hot food would be welcome?”

“Like a two hundred-year-old port,” Kemp said with a sigh. “I ache all over. Of course, they warned me about that, when I refused basic rehab. I really didn’t want to wait, or keep you waiting either.”

“I appreciate your haste,” Catherine told him.

They settled back at the table again, with Kemp in front of a loaded plate. He dug in, eating with gusto. Catherine still had no appetite and neither Brant nor Lilly continued with their meal. They watched Kemp eat, suppressing their questions.

After a dozen large mouthfuls, he swallowed and looked at them. “I know what you’re thinking. I’ll put you out of your misery. I don’t know anything. I don’t even know why I came here the first time.”

“When did you last backup?” Catherine asked.

He grimaced. “Over a standard month ago. The last thing I remember is beginning a contract on Ey’Liv.”

“You know what happened on Soward, now?” Lilly asked.

He nodded as he ate. “I’ve caught up on all the essentials. Is that why I came here?”

“You said you couldn’t go home,” Catherine said carefully. “I don’t know if that is the reason why you really came here.”

He frowned. “Ey’Liv is in the middle of nowhere. It’s not even close. I can understand that the news from Soward would make me want to break my contract, but why would I come and see Bedivere? I haven’t seen him for decades.”

Catherine sighed. “Then we are still in the dark.” She gave Kemp a stiff smile. “We’ll give you a bed for the night and breakfast, of course, then see you on your way. I do appreciate you dropping everything and rushing here, even if there was nothing you can tell us.”

Kemp swallowed hastily. “I’m not going anywhere. That is, if you have no objections? I want answers as much as you do.”

“You don’t think that Bedivere has gone rogue, then?” Brant asked.

Kemp pushed his plate aside with a heavy thrust. He leaned back and looked at all of them one by one. “You were all on the ship when I was. You know that Bedivere and I were close. I was truly stunned when I found out he was a computer in a human body. If I can be intimate with someone and not be able to see such a fundamental difference, that tells me they are as human as me.”

He grimaced. “Humans can have psychotic breaks, sure. They just don’t wipe out entire civilizations when they do. Besides, Bedivere was the most sane, stable person I’ve ever met, except for Catherine. Do I think he’s having a nutty and trying to destroy the universe as we know it? Not even for a second.”

He got to his feet, moving stiffly and slowly. “If you could point me toward that borrowed bed? And please tell me that you have a gym here that is as well-equipped as the one you had on your ship?”

Kemp became the fourth person in the household and the complex seemed to stir and generate energy with him in it. He had to rehabilitate his body, to bring it to normal strength, so his daily routine included gym work and whatever therapies Catherine could provide him from her home surgery.

In between, they all followed the limited lines of inquiry they could, trying to find Bedivere.

“All the hysteria in the news is not helping,” Catherine complained. “Everyone thinks they’ve seen him, in a dozen places at once. They’re all false alarms, yet they will have to be investigated. We don’t have time for this.”

“Who broke the news, anyway?” Kemp asked.

“Does it matter?” Catherine replied. “It was inevitable that this would break. It’s too big a story.”

“I was only thinking that whoever revealed the story first might have had a reason to do so.”

“A conspiracy?” Brant asked with a smile.

“I grew up on Soward, the world of intrigue. What can I say?”

They introduced Kemp to Connell, who returned every few days to report that he had found nothing.

Catherine watched Kemp deal with Connell the first time, to see if he could treat the Varkan as a human. Kemp did not flinch, nor did he alter the way he was speaking when talking to Connell. Yet his behavior toward Bedivere when he had been there two weeks ago had not been any different from when he had been a passenger on the ship. It seemed that in the intervening years, Kemp had thrown off his own prejudices.

“Of course it was a shock when I found out about Bedivere,” he told Catherine when she asked him. “It was exactly what I needed to start questioning everything I had known about dangerous computers and their ways. The news that the Federation had suppressed computers because they knew about Interspace and it would destroy their shipping monopoly wasn’t nearly as surprising after that.”

Two days later, the house AI woke her and told her that Bedivere had destroyed the entire southern continent on Barros.

* * * * *

“He used nuclear particle beams from a high altitude,” Brant said, reading from the board in his hands. “From that high up, the blast washed over hundreds of kilometers, which is most of the southern continent.”

Catherine nodded, absorbing the facts. She was deliberately not thinking or trying to speculate. She shoved the shirt that Lilly handed her into the jump bag, wedging it into a corner. She sealed the bag with a swipe, locking it to her prints.

“Barros is in the Aibosian cluster,” Kemp said. “It will take you weeks to get there. By then, Bedivere will be gone.”

“He would’ve gone already,” Brant said with a growl. “He wiped half a planet from existence. If he has the brains of a manolilly, he would’ve left that place as soon as he’d done the deed.”

Catherine turned on him. “We don’t know that it was him,” she snapped. “We don’t know anything for certain. The feeds are just giving us wild theories. I’m sick of listening to people’s fears and angst being regurgitated as fact.”

She looked at Kemp. “There is a high liner at dock at the gate station right now. They can be at Barros in four days. Bedivere won’t be there, but I can find out what happened for myself.” She hefted the jump bag.

“Then I’m coming to,” Lilly said.

“You’d better hurry,” Catherine told her. “I’m leaving in ten minutes.”

When she lifted the zipper off the top deck twelve minutes later, all three of them were squashed into the cabin around her.

Barros IV, Barros System, Aibosian Cluster. FY 10.092.

Catherine selectively bribed key personnel on the high liner. As a result, the ship used the engines at over-capacity for the entire journey. They arrived at Barros half a day earlier than scheduled.

Barros’ stationary station was in chaos, with every conceivable emergency service looking for docking space. The high liner was scheduled, however, and slid into its oversized port immediately.

From contracts he had taken when Barros had first joined the Federation, Kemp knew his way around the station. He found a private ballistic jump car and used more of Catherine’s money to buy them a trip down to the northern continent. No one was going near the southern continent, which was awash with radiation.

The jump car driver pointed out the continent as they began their slow spiral down to the surface. “People are wondering why it doesn’t glow in the night.”

Brant, the least space-experienced of them all, exclaimed as he looked through the window. “It doesn’t look the same as it does on the maps.” They had all studied the maps on the way over.

“Maps are flat,” Catherine said. “Continents at the poles always look much larger on maps than they really are. You’re used to looking at a two dimensional representation. Now you’re seeing the three dimensional reality. It can take a bit of getting used to.”

Brant shook his head. “That’s really the southern continent?”

“It is,” the driver said. “Born and raised Barrosian, I am.”

“It’s tiny!” Brant said. “That’s an island, not a continent!”

“Islands can be continents,” Lilly said.

Catherine peered out her side of the car, as the southern continent came back into view. Brant had a point. Barros was a watery world, similar to Nicia. Nicia, though, was nearly ninety-five percent oceans, with the only landmass available being used as a staging point for interstellar traffic. Barros at least had a decent-sized landmass in the north, covering the northern pole and stretching down nearly to the equator on one side.

The southern continent was a large island and could be seen clearly from space. As continents went, it really was small.

Catherine made herself ask the question she had been avoiding. “How many people lived on the southern continent?”

The driver shrugged. “Don’t know. I didn’t know anyone who lived there. Never been there myself. I know people went there sometimes. There’s nothing to do there, anyway.”

The tension that had been winding up inside her chest for five days tightened up a little farther at this unhelpful answer. The entire journey had been punctuated by a lack of information. While they were in the wormhole, nothing could reach them. Even though everyone had checked as soon as they had emerged from the gates, the feeds were still focusing on the hysteria. None of it was helpful. None of it was facts.

She wanted numbers. She wanted hard data.

She focused on the northern continent ahead of them. Perhaps there she would get the answers she craved.

* * * * *

Barros’ terminal city might have had an official name. Catherine never learned what it was. Like many other worlds, it was referred to simply as Terminal. It was a spacer’s city, filled with hotels, brothels, bars and every type of mindless distraction that travelers might pay for. Because most travelers who were passing through did not bother travelling down to the surface, the businesses in Terminal were less prosperous than their cousins on the gate station.

Business in Terminal was booming today, as shuttle after shuttle arrived to dump their cargoes of people and equipment out upon the landing fields.

Catherine pressed folding yen upon the driver of the ground cab they had managed to find at the landing field. “The best hotel?” she asked.

“Best expensive, best food, or best rooms?” he asked.

“Which hotel do Barrosians use before they head upstairs?” Kemp asked. He was a seasoned traveler and knew what to ask for, too.

“The Lokasenna. It’s not the best in anything.”

“It will do just fine,” Catherine assured him.

Their ride to the hotel was slowed by heavy traffic, thick with over-sized ground vehicles hauling heavy loads. The roads were fused dirt and not holding up under the unexpected traffic. Potholes and cracks had formed, making the ride a bumpy one, for the ground car used wheels, as did most of the vehicles in sight. There were very few modern airbed vehicles and even fewer personal air cars.

The tall, vertical fingers of air quality probes were everywhere, thrusting up into the sky from rooftops. Most of them looked as though they had been hastily erected. They gleamed with newness.

The Lokasenna was a mid-sized building tucked away on a side street. The paint was fresh, the windows were polarized steel energy panels and the bellboys out the front were managing to keep the driveways clear of unnecessary vehicles.

Inside the lobby, space-tired travelers were fighting for the last of the available hotel rooms. There was a long line of them waiting at the desk. Some were sleeping in chairs, with their feet upon their luggage and a paid sentry standing over them.

“This might be a challenge,” Lilly murmured, looking around the crowded lobby.

Catherine found the concierge and had a quick conversation with him. She used more of her yen and he unlocked his bomb-proof storage room, so they could stow their luggage.

“You trust him?” Kemp murmured as they left the hotel again.

“No. There’s nothing in my bag I can’t reprint when we’re back on board. Everything else I have on me.” She glanced at Lilly and Brant. They both nodded. “It sets up a relationship,” she continued, “so when I press him to find us a room later, he’ll know that we’re good for the money and he’ll try harder.”