“You.” Oscar pointed at him with a trembling finger. “OhmyGod, you attacked the Second Chance. It was you.”
Adam smiled with faint pride. “None other.”
“You crazy fucked-up psychopath!” Oscar bunched up his fist, ready to pound, smash… “That terrorist attack nearly killed half of my friends. You ruined millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and facilities and delayed our launch date by months.”
“I know. I think I’m slipping. In the old days I would have got the lot of you, and blown up the starship.”
“You are crazy. People died, Adam.”
“They were all re-lifed. Just like your friend Dr. Bose.”
“I’m calling navy intelligence.”
“Ah, the universe’s greatest oxymoron. How long do you think they’ll give you in life suspension?”
“I don’t care about myself. Not anymore. You have to be stopped.” Oscar almost did it, almost told his e-butler to make the call. He was going to do it. He was really going to do it. Any second now.
“No, Oscar. It’s you and your navy who are in the wrong now, you who are the danger to humanity. Look where your precious Second Chance flight led us.”
“What is wrong with you? You don’t believe that Guardians crap: President Doi is an alien agent. Come on! Not you.” He studied the old man’s round face, hunting for some sign of guilt.
“What I believe doesn’t matter, does it?” Adam said. “It’s what I want from you which is important. We want the log data reviewed, and you’re the perfect choice. You have unrestricted access, and it’s your field of expertise.”
“Oh, now I get it. If I study the data and don’t find your evidence, then someone makes a call to Rafael Columbia. Right?”
“No, Oscar, this is on the level. I want you to run a genuine, thorough search.”
It was only the alcohol flowing sweetly through his head that prevented Oscar from laughing outright. “Dear God, I never thought you’d be reduced to this. I mean, I always had this image of you carrying on the Party’s agenda. Every time one of those seccession movements hit the unisphere I would think: I bet Adam’s there, working away behind the scenes, urging the troops on, giving their leaders advice whether they want it or not. Then you’d slip back into the Commonwealth before CSI closed the gateway, and build up underground cell networks on every world; you’d have thousands of loyal activists ready for the day your word would come and the whole Commonwealth would be plunged into civil war and revolution. That you’d be some kind of Gandhi, or Mandela, or maybe just Napoleon. But certainly you’d be somebody. Not this though, God, look at you. Just another fat aging rebel who lost sight of his cause decades ago. So desperate you joined up with the saddest bunch of losers this universe has to offer.
“It’s not real, Adam, there is no alien. I was on board that starship for over a year, I never bumped into it in the showers, never caught it stealing a late-night snack from the canteen, there was no ghost on deck thirteen. This is where your conspiracy theory runs slap bang into the solid wall of reality. You and Johansson can sit at home pulling every rumor you want from the unisphere and build them into a tower of your Fact. It’s all bullshit. There is no evidence to be found. So before you go just leave the little crystal memory on the table, and I’ll politely ignore it, then when you’re gone and I’m even more drunk I’ll access the file your friends have forged and decide if I’m going to splice it into the official log for you so that I can save myself from life suspension because I’m too much of a pitiful coward to take responsibility for what I did once.”
“You need to get a shrink to take a good look at that self-loathing. It’s not healthy.”
“Fuck you,” Oscar said. The pain he felt was close to physical now. “Just leave the memory crystal and go.”
Adam struck him across the cheek. The blow was almost powerful enough to knock him off the couch.
“Shit.” Oscar dabbed at his mouth, blinking back tears from the stinging pain. A trickle of blood was oozing out from the corner of his lips. He gave Adam a wild look. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I said I’d do it. What more do you want?”
“There is no forged file, you motherfucker. This is as real as it gets. And I said there was an influence on board, not a bug-eyed monster. The Starflyer works through humans. Somebody on board the Second Chance turned the barrier off—don’t even try telling me that was coincidence. The same somebody who fixed it for Bose and Verbeke to be left behind. You don’t think it was remotely suspicious that of all the supertechnological, multiple-redundant, fail-soft gadgets you had on board that a simple communicator failed at exactly that critical time? Because I fucking do.”
“Somebody?” Oscar asked cynically. “A crew member?”
“Yes. One of your precious crew. One of your friends. Or maybe more than one. Who knows? But that’s what you’ve got to find out.”
“That’s even worse than an alien stowaway. Do you know how much training and back-history investigation we went through to get on board? Nobody remotely suspect ever got close to the ship.”
“You mean like you and Dudley Bose?”
Oscar stared at him for a long, chilling moment. “Look, Adam, what you’re asking, it can’t happen. Physically, it’s not possible for me to do it. Do you realize how much raw data is in those logs?”
“I know. That’s why we could never steal it and analyze it ourselves. You don’t have to go through every byte yourself. You know the critical segments of the flight; that’s where you look. Not at the main events, what happened on the bridge or in engineering, they’ll be clean. It’s what went on in the background that’s important. Who was haunting deck thirteen when the barrier came down? Find them, not just for us, for yourself, for everyone. We need to know what really happened out there.”
“This is… I can’t…”
“The alien is becoming more active now. You have to admit, there’s some weird shit going down these days. That explosion on Venice Coast which took out our arms supplier; the murdered Senator.”
“Bullshit. That was some covert operative from the government, or an Intersolar Dynasty. Everybody knows that.”
Adam smiled maliciously. “Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.”
“You are so wrong. Why can you never admit that?”
“Then prove it. Exactly who are you betraying by looking at the data? If we’re wrong you lose nothing. If God forbid, we’re right, we need to know. And you’ll be a hero. That’s big enough to absolve all your past sins.”
“I don’t need absolution.”
Adam stood. “You know I’m right. And I know you can never admit that to my face. So we’ll stop macho posturing now, and I’ll contact you every fortnight or so to check on your progress.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Yeah, I said that very same thing when Johansson told me to get in touch with you. But it’s not like either of us have a choice, is it? Not after Abadan station. Take care, Oscar, there’s a lot of people depending on you.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Carys Panther took the metallic gray MG metrosport into New Costa Junction, then drove it straight onto the car-carry train to Elan. The carriage was completely enclosed, a tube of aluminum with a bright polyphoto strip along the ceiling and a couple of narrow windows along each side. Her MG was so low-slung they were above her eye level. The car’s drive array edged her right up to a big BMW 6089 four-by-four before engaging the full brake lock; a Ford Yicon saloon pulled up behind her.
She ordered the seat to recline and settled back for the trip. Her e-butler brought up a whole raft of story ideas and plot sequences into her virtual vision, which she started to fill in, joining them together in complicated loops. At the moment there was a big demand for the long slightly fantastical sagas that were her preferred genre. Ant, her agent, was keen to exploit the market. He said that it was the uncertainty of the Prime situation that was putting people off gritty realism at the moment; they wanted escapism. He should know; Ant was actually older than Nigel Sheldon, and he’d been doing the same job for century after century, he’d seen every creative fad there was, living through the fashion cycle as it spun the genres around and around.
It was twenty minutes before the train started to move forward, pulled by an electric Fantom T5460 engine. Augusta led straight to New York; from there the trans-Earth link took them to Tallahassee, Edmonton, Seattle, LA Galactic, Mexico City, Rio, and Buenos Aires, before finally crossing the Pacific to Sydney, which routed the train out to Wessex. Earth took about an hour; they stopped at five of the stations so more vehicles could roll onto the car-carry. Once they reached Wessex, there was a longer stop as six extra carriages were added, then it took five minutes to cross the planetary station’s yard to the Elan gateway. A minute later and they were pulling up alongside the long road-platform at Runwich, the planet’s capital.
The MG’s drive array connected itself to the city’s road routing manager, paid the local car tax, and drove through the outskirts to the airport. For once the connection timing worked out in practice the way it was listed on the timetable. A Siddley-Lockheed CP-505 was waiting for her on the apron, a big six-duct fan plane. She drove up the rear ramp into the gaping cargo hold, where electromuscle clamps gripped the car’s tires. There were another fifteen cars in there, along with two coaches. The plane could carry sixty-five tons of cargo in total, in addition to a hundred twenty passengers on the upper deck.
Carys spent the next three hours sitting in a comfy first-class seat being served champagne by a nice first-life steward as they cruised across the equator at point nine five Mach. Ant called twice for script conferences and permission to crank up her contract negotiations. It was sort of flattering that he dealt with her personally; his client list had been closed for over a century now. If all went well her latest saga should hit the unisphere in another six months.
They landed at Kingsclere airport on Ryceel and she climbed back into the MG. As she drove out of the southern continent’s capital she could see the Dau’sings rising out of the horizon.
The toll booth at the start of the Randtown highway had a big new sign across the front, reading: No Military Vehicles Permitted. Someone had spray- paintedDEATH TO ANTIHUMAN FUCKHEAD TRAITORS over the top of it in glowing orange.
“This should be fun,” she muttered as she drew up outside the booth and put her thumb credit tattoo on the pad. The reinforced barrier slid up, and she drove onto the start of the highway. The broad strip of enzyme-bonded concrete seemed completely deserted as it stretched out ahead. Carys thought it looked like the start grid of some giant racetrack, which was an interesting challenge. She brought the full range of drive array program tools up into her virtual vision, and supervised its integration with the highway’s simple traffic management system. The speed regulator was a small old program that was easily susceptible to the fix that came as standard in the MG’s modern aggressor routines. She removed the offending software’s inconvenient monitoring of the car, and pressed her foot down hard on the manual accelerator.
There was a surge of power into the axle engines that pushed her deep into the seat. She locked the speed, tied the radar and navigation functions into the steering program, and assigned full control to the drive array. Electromuscle bands in the tire walls responded to the buildup of speed by changing their profile,
