Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (25 page)

“I don’t think so. I was trying just now, but it’s probably too late.”

“Wait,” Benning said. “We’re overstepping the mark here. Even if the kind of intervention he was attempting is right, it’s not our remit to—”

“But we do not have time!” Rory was shouting now, desperation showing through. “Once contact is made they’re done for! Their dealings with us and the rest of the Alliance will only escalate and there’ll be no way I can give them this knowledge and pretend it’s always been there. We have to act now!”

“But what can we do
?
” Jared said.

Rory hesitated; a possibility had clearly occurred to him, but he seemed reticent to share it. “I have a song fragment already scripted that gives the full knowledge in one go,” he said eventually. “But it’s too late to be subtle. Trying to slip it into their emissary transmissions is too slow—the stuff I send doesn’t always get picked up, and I have to resend each stage unless I’m sure it’s sunk in. It’s taken me months just to get this far. To guarantee success we’d have to go there and feed it into a song directly. I mean find a song ritual in progress and go to Caron-c in person, ahead of the official contact event.”

Benning shook his head. “Absolutely out of the question,” he said. “If you think you’re going to upstage this whole effort on your own, then think again.”

Jared knew the next move was in his hands. Though by using his position in a way Alliance Liaison would never sanction, he would be throwing his career and possibly his freedom away. “As an agent of the Office of Alliance Liaison, I have the authority to requisition any equipment or personnel on this station,” he said. “Rory, you’re going to come with me, and we’re going to take a shuttle and go down to the planet.”

“No way,” Benning said. “I can’t allow that.”

Benning was a reasonable man, and Jared felt bad coercing him into acting illegally. But Jared had the will—and the authority—to act.

“This is now OAL business—you know what that means.”

Benning seemed torn between further protest, and giving in to Jared’s authority. “You’ll need access codes to the shuttle,” he said, bowing to the inevitable. “The commander would normally hold those. He’s deputized Sal in his absence.”

For the first time since reaching his decision, Jared hesitated. “She’s going to be trouble,” he said. “Is there any way around it
?
”

“You can’t get off this station without getting past her.”

“Then that’s what we have to do.”

A figure appeared in the doorway. “And just how do you plan on doing that
?
” It was Sal herself; on a station where anyone could be tracked through any access point, it should have been no wonder that Anderson’s designated troubleshooter would find them.

“How much did you hear
?
” Jared said.

“Enough to get a squad of guards up here and have you taken in. And him too,” she added, indicating Rory.

“No, this is too important. If you heard what’s going to happen down there, then you have to help us.”

She shook her head. “No way. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.” Then she reached to her belt, where her Taser was kept.

Jared had received full Operative training when he joined OAL as a field agent. As a roving troubleshooter with the success or failure of Earth’s interplanetary relations in his hands, he had to be prepared for any situation. And even though he’d never had a real-life physical fight since he was ten years old, the Operative combat training and implant-boosted reflexes were there nonetheless, ready to come to the fore when needed.

He found himself running at her before he even knew what he was doing. She went for the Taser, taking aim in slow motion compared to the speed Jared was moving, then fired early, too early for the darts to fly true. He dodged them, then turned his shoulder toward her and barged her to the side. He only intended to push her off balance and disarm her, but as she lost her footing, she stumbled against the doorway and hit the back of her head on the sheet steel floor.

“Damn!” Benning said, running over to her. He checked her pulse, then lifted her eyelids to look at her eyes. “She’s alive.”

“How are we going to get the codes now
?
” Rory said.

“I saw a maintenance office on the way here, one level down,” Jared said. “We can drag her down there and use her palm print on one of the terminals.”

“Are you serious
?
” Benning said, deathly pale.

“Yes, and you’re going to help me.”

Benning was in a cold sweat as he helped Jared move Sal’s unconscious body, but he did as he was told. Rory stepped in to help too, maneuvering her down a stairway and into the empty office. Then Jared activated the terminal, holding her right hand to the reader as he logged in under her name.

“You know how these files are laid out,” he said to Benning. “You find the codes.”

Benning complied, copying the crucial information to his own storage key. Then Jared pulled four chairs together and laid Sal out on them. She wasn’t bleeding or swelling, but showed no signs of moving either.

“We’ll call the med bay once we’re in the shuttle. Come on, let’s do this.”

J
ared looked back as Kaluza Station receded behind them, its needle-like profile all but invisible when looking down its central axis. Behind it, the bulk of Caron-e sat, its vast ring system tilted out of the orbital plane, casting a hundred parabolic shadows over its surface. The shuttle pulled away from Kaluza to a distance of five kilometers, then its grav drives activated, giving it the same fifteen-G acceleration that had taken the Contact Team down to the inner system. It was the fastest they could get there, but as the Contact Team were destined to spend hours in high orbit before landing, they still had hopes of beating them to the planet’s surface. Once the acceleration was underway, Jared stepped away from the window and went over to where Rory was reprogramming the omni, translating the song fragments he’d formulated into as many dialects as possible so they could land wherever they needed and deliver the message without delay.

Two hours later the midway point of the journey was reached and the shuttle began decelerating. Another two hours later, they were there.

Caron-c was so like Earth, the way its blue, brown and green surface lay blanketed in white clouds, the way the light of its parent sun shone off its oceans like a blaze of white fire. Only the shapes of the land masses betrayed the truth: the two main continents running north to south, connecting the two hemispheres like elongated dumbbells with the three smaller continents sitting between them. And above the planet’s horizon hung its only moon, Carpathia, as cratered and airless as Earth’s moon but almost golden in color. They entered an orbit two hundred miles above the surface, with all radio sources and illumination deactivated. There was still a chance that they would be detected though—the Contact Team shuttle was orbiting nine hundred miles higher, and even though its radar was off, it still had sensors that might pick them up as it scanned for the Caronois’ replies to the welcome message. And the Caronoi themselves, watching the heavens just as keenly, might also spot a new arrival within hours of it orbiting their planet.

Jared and Rory scanned the planet from above, tuning into the frequencies the Caronoi used to spread their songs across the globe. What they wanted was a song ritual in progress, preferably only just begun. It took twenty minutes before Rory announced that he’d found one.

“That’s it,” he said. ‘‘Continent C, northern peninsula. Not ideal, but it’s the best we have.”

“Why is it not ideal
?
” Benning said.

“This area doesn’t breed intellectual heavyweights,” Rory said. “It’ll look weird to the Caronoi that this group made the breakthrough. But it’ll have to do.”

They began their descent, shedding orbital velocity fast, preparing for aerodynamic flight as they dropped into the upper atmosphere. They’d lost too much speed to heat up appreciably—no old-style reentries now gravity itself had been harnessed—but the sound of the supersonic airflow rushing over the airframe whistled into the cabin like a distant gale. Then, as they got lower, they turned off to the side, toward the source of the emissions. The sky around them was pastel blue, cloud banks like strings of cotton balls dividing the air into layers of temperature and humidity, with a mottled landscape of green and brown below them. Any temperate zone on Earth could have looked like this.

Then they went low, maneuvering around any known concentrations of population, descending until the treetops looked close enough to touch. The canopies were slightly too dark, too angular in shape to be earthly—for only at twenty meters altitude did the planet start to look like somewhere other than home. Then they encountered a series of undulating ridges with broad valleys between them. In one of them, they stopped as Benning brought them to a hover just above ground level, checking the map display.

“This valley leads to the sea,” he said. “According to this they’re on the coast a few miles up.”

He took them north, following the valley floor as the ridges to either side petered out, leaving them on a broad coastal plain. The land met the sea in a series of rocky ledges, and it was on one of these that the Caronoi had gathered. They could see the Caronoi, not just huddled together, but piled on top of one another in a heaped congregation twenty meters long and three high, standing on each other’s shoulders and flanks like an irregular framework of limbs and torsos.

Benning landed them a few hundred meters inland; then they quickly gathered up everything they’d need, including Rory’s omni and the audio files it contained. Then they opened the shuttle’s rear hatch and stepped out onto the surface of the planet.

The smell was what Jared noticed first, smells of sea spray and salt and ozone, mixed with odors of cut grass and pine sap that seemed to mix in different ways as he turned his head. The air was cold, the light fading, and it felt like an autumn day’s twilight on a chilly seashore back where he’d grown up in Maine. He could hear the sea hitting the rocks, the wind blowing in off the water, but most of all he could hear the Caronoi themselves, that low droning sound pulsing and fluctuating, interspersed with chirps and whistles as whole volumes of information passed between them.

“Come on,” Rory said, dashing around to the front of the shuttle, then onward to the Caronoi gathering. He ran over to them, then stopped just short of the closest ones. Jared ran after him and stopped alongside. The Caronoi were close enough to touch, every mark on their mottled white bodies visible, but locked into their song, trancing, they were completely unaware of their new visitors. It felt like sneaking up on someone in their sleep.

“Amazing,” Rory said under his breath, then reached out and gently touched the closest one. First contact, in this case literally. “Right, let’s get this started.”

“Have they reached the right bit of the song
?
” Jared said.

“It doesn’t work that way, they don’t separate out the subjects like that. The songs are more like audio holograms—as long as we got here early enough we can pipe the information in and give them time to digest it.”

He opened up the omni and selected the song files for this dialect. Then he set them playing, adding his contribution to the close harmony rendition of an entire race’s knowledge. A couple of the nearest Caronoi shifted their posture in response to the new sound, as if trying to locate it, make out what it said.

“Is it working
?
” Jared said.

“I don’t know, maybe,” Rory said. “Give it time.”

As Rory set his plan in motion, Jared looked around the Caronoi settlement. The shelters themselves were further inland, open-sided frameworks roofed with twigs and moss. Alongside them was an emissary tower, a radio antenna fed from probably the simplest transmitter imaginable, named after the emissaries who used to carry songs from tribe to tribe, until one day a song originating somewhere in the south provided the crucial information on how putting copper and iron and lodestone together in just the right way could open up long-distance communication and relegate traveling emissaries to history.

Then he looked back at where Rory was monitoring the output from the omni. Could it really be this easy, he thought, just a case of pumping in the information, then getting back into the shuttle and scurrying back to Kaluza Station
?
No, there would be more to it even if the plan worked—explaining to Anderson why they’d upstaged his contact effort, explaining what he’d done to Sal, explaining to Alliance Liaison why he’d pulled rank on the Kaluza staff in a way which they would never have endorsed, which defied the very Alliance they were at pains to placate. The mission might be done, but the storm was only beginning.

Then Benning emerged from the shuttle and ran over. “There’s something coming this way,” he said.

T
he Contact Team shuttle landed a hundred meters or so from their own. Then the hatch opened and Anderson came out. They could tell even before he stormed over that he was furious. He stopped short and looked from Jared to Rory to Benning and back again, practically on fire with rage.

“Talk. Now.”

Jared stepped forward and gave him the story. By the time he finished, Anderson had barely even started to calm down. He looked to Benning.

“Is all this true
?
”

Benning nodded. “We only have Rory Temple’s word for it, but it appears to be the case.”

Anderson stepped back, steepling his fingers as he always did when digesting difficult news. Jared could see the veins standing out in the man’s neck and head, but he seemed to be taking it all rationally, pulling himself back from the brink of meltdown.

“Those ships in the outer system
are
Alliance,” he said. “One of them entered Caron-c orbit half an hour ago. We switched on our receivers as soon as we saw it and heard a systemwide broadcast to all human vessels, including as they put it ‘both landing craft.’ You’ll understand our concern as to who the other one might have been. That’s when we started scanning and saw you three, down here.”