Mutineer's Moon

“No, thank you, Major. I’ve been here a couple of times; I can find my own way, I think. Should I just hand this—” he touched the pass “—back in at the security desk as I leave?”

“That would be fine,” Simmons agreed, and Sean headed for the elevators. He walked past the first bank, and punched for a car in the L Block, humming softly and wishing his palms weren’t a bit damp as he waited. A musical tone chimed and the floor light lit above the doors. They opened quietly.

“Here we go, kid,” Sean murmured sotto voce. “Hope it works.”

* * *

Colin lay back on his brother’s bed, hands clasped behind his head, and his unfocused eyes watched sun patterns on the wall. He hated involving Sean—and hated it all the more because he’d known Sean would agree. The odds were tremendously against anyone noticing the scanner relay … but humanity’s very presence on this planet resulted from a far more unlikely chain of events.

It was a strange sensation to lie here and yet simultaneously accompany Sean. There was a duality to his senses and his vision, as if he personally rode in his brother’s shirt pocket even as he lay comfortably on the bed.

His implants reached out through the disguised relay, probing and peering, exploring the webs of electronics around Sean like insubstantial fingers. He could almost touch the flow of current as the elevator floor lights lit silently, just as he could feel the motion of the elevator as it climbed the hollow, empty-tasting shaft. Security systems, computers, electric pencil sharpeners, telephones, intercoms, lighting conduits, heating and air- conditioning sensors, ventilation shafts—he felt them about him and quested through them like a ghost, sniffing and prying.

And then, like a bolt of lightning, a fiery little core of brighter, fiercer power surged in his perceptions.

Colin stiffened, closing his eyes as he concentrated. The impression was faint, but he closed in on it, tuning out the background. His immaterial fingers reached out, and his brows creased in surprise. It was a com link, all right—a fold-space com, very similar to the implant in his own skull—but there was something strange about it…

He worried at it, focusing and refining his data, and then he had it. It was a security link, not a standard hand com. He would never have spotted it if Dahak hadn’t improved his built—in sensors, but that explained why it seemed so similar to his implant. He insinuated his perceptions into the heart of the tiny device, confirming his identification. Definitely a security link; there were the multi-dimensional shift circuits to bounce it around. Now why should the mutineers bother with a security link? Even in a worst-case scenario that assumed Dahak was fully operational, that was taking security to paranoid extremes. Dahak could do many things, but tapping a fold-space com from lunar orbit wasn’t one of them, and no one on Earth would even recognize one.

He considered consulting with Dahak, but only for a moment. None of the mutineers’ equipment could tap his link with the computer, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t detect it. The device he’d found had a piddling little range—no more than fifteen thousand kilometers—and detecting something like that would be practically impossible with its shift circuits in operation. But his implant’s range was over a light-hour, and that very power would make it stand out like a beacon on any Imperial detector screen on the planet.

He muttered pungently, then shrugged. It didn’t really matter why the mutineers had given that particular com to their minion; what mattered was that he’d found it, and he concentrated on pinning down its precise location.

Ahhhhhh yesssssss… There it was. Right down in—

Colin sat up with a jerk. Cal Tudor’s office?! That was insane!

But there was no doubt about it. The damned thing was not only in his office but hidden inside his work terminal!

Colin swung his legs shakenly off the bed. He knew Cal well—or he’d thought he did. They were friends— such good friends he would have risked contacting Cal if Sean hadn’t been available—and the one word Colin had always associated with him was “integrity.” True, Cal was young for his position, but he lived, breathed, and dreamed the Prometheus Mission… Could that be the very way they’d gotten to him?

Colin could think of no other explanation. Yet the more he considered it, the less he understood why they would have picked Cal at all. He was a member of the proctoscope team, but a very junior one. Colin put his elbows on his knees and leaned his chin in his palms as he consulted the biographies Dahak had amassed on the team’s members.

As usual, there was a curious, detached feeling to the data. He was getting used to it, but the dividing line between knowledge he’d acquired experientially and that which Dahak had shoveled into a handy empty spot in his brain was surprisingly sharp. The implant data came from someone else and felt like someone else’s. Despite a growing acceptance, it was a sensation he found uncomfortable, and he was beginning to suspect he always would.

But the point at issue was Cal’s background, not the workings of his implant. It helped Colin to visualize the data as if it had been projected upon a screen, and he frowned as the facts flickered behind his eyelids.

Cal Tudor. Age thirty-six years. Wife’s name Frances; two daughters—Harriet and Anna, fourteen and twelve. Theoretical physicist, Lawrence Livermore by way of MIT Denver, then six years at Goddard before he moved to Shepherd…

Colin flicked through more data then stiffened. Dear God! How the hell had Dahak missed it? He knew how he had, and the nature of his implant was a factor, for he’d never realized how seldom Cal ever mentioned his family.

Yet the information was there, and only the “otherness” of the data Dahak had provided had kept it at arm’s length from Colin and prevented him from spotting the impossible “coincidence.” Dahak had checked for connections with the mutineers as far back as college, but Cal’s connection pre-dated more than his college career; it pre-dated his birth! If Dahak had a human-sized imagination (or, for that matter, if Colin had personally—and thoroughly—checked the data) they would have recognized it, for Cal’s very failure to mention it to one of his closest friends would have underscored it in red.

Cal Tudor: son of Michael Tudor, only living grandson of Andrew and Isis Hidachi Tudor, and great-grandson of Horace Hidachi, “the Father of Gravitonics.” The brilliant, intuitive genius who over sixty years before had single-handedly worked out the basic math that underlay the entire field!

Colin pounded his knee gently with a fist. He and Dahak had even speculated on Horace Hidachi’s possible links with the mutineers, for the stature of his “breakthrough” had seemed glaringly suspicious. Yet they obviously hadn’t delved deeply enough for reasons that—at the time—had seemed good and sufficient.

Hidachi had spent twenty years as a researcher before he evolved “his” theory and he’d never done anything with his brilliant theoretical work. Nor had anyone else during the course of his life. At the time he propounded his theory, it had been an exercise in pure math, a hypothesis that was impossible to test; by the time the hardware became available, he was dead. Nor had his daughter shown any particular interest in his work. If Colin remembered correctly (and thanks to Dahak he did), she’d gone into medicine, not physics.

Which was why Dahak and Colin had stopped worrying about Hidachi. If he’d been a minion of the mutineers, he would scarcely have invested that much time building a cover merely to produce an obscure bit of mathematical arcanum. He would have carried through with the hardware to prove it. At the very least, the mutineers themselves would scarcely have allowed his work to lie fallow for so long. As it was, Dahak had decided that Hidachi must have produced that rarest of rarities: a genuine, fundamental breakthrough so profound no one had even recognized what it was. Indeed, the computer had computed a high probability that the lag between theory and practice simply resulted from how long it took the mutineers to realize what Hidachi had done and prod a later generation of scientists down the path it opened.