GEODESICA: ASCENT

by Sean Williams with Shane Dix

+Prelude

10 years before:

The Palmer Cell Jaintiapur was a long way off its usual course. A regular on the Eliza and Whitewater Detours, it had struck out even further from the Arc Circuit in response to a plea for help from one of humanity's most distant colonies. Eliza, that colony's nearest neighbor, was over ten light years away, but weather had been favorable in the Local Bubble and the journey took less than a year.

Palmer Horsfall, chief officer of the Jaintiapur, didn't begrudge the long journey. It could have been worse. Humanity's exploration of the galaxy had advanced rapidly through regions with the least amount of matter between the stars. The frontier world of Scarecrow--recently annexed as Mei-Shun-Wah by the Exarchate, around a star identified as 59431 in the Hipparcos catalogue--was the present holder of the record for most distant. Not far behind were Hipparcos 59432 and the Jaintiapur's destination, Hipparcos 66704. The former had been known as Severance before the Exarchate christened it Newbery-Vaas. The latter's new name, White-Elderton, would never stick. Ten years after the Jaintiapur docked, eighty-two long light-years from Sol, people would still call it Sublime.

The Jaintiapur came at speed in response to a request for scientific assistance from the colony's Exarch. Since that request had been lodged, the news had spread along the Arc Circuit: of a hitherto unknown type of ROTH artifact that had drifted from deep space into the colony's gravity well. People as far away as Little Red began to whisper about what that might mean. A working alien machine offered more than just interesting xenarcheological relics. All of the seven alien races known to have passed through the Local Bubble at various points in the previous million years had been more advanced than humanity.

Palmer Horsfall, chief officer of the Jaintiapur, didn't have orders to move the artifact or to take samples elsewhere. She was simply bringing instruments and personnel from the better-equipped Eliza colony to its frontier neighbor. Among those personnel was her sister, a vacuum physicist normally stationed in Alcor. Deva Horsfall wasn't a xenarcheologist, a fact not lost on the people aboard the Cell.

"Maybe it's a diversion," one of the crew suggested.

"For what?" Deva Horsfall was determinedly pragmatic. Probing the empty places of the universe soon leeched the romance out of life.

"Something they've made, rather than something they've found."

"Invent a better VOID drive," quipped the ship's wit, "and they'll beat a path to your door."

"It's more likely to be the other way around," Deva said. "Would they wait for us this long if they didn't have to?"

"You get your kicks where you can, I guess, on a frontier world."

Palmer Horsfall didn't like to encourage speculation until she had the facts in front of her. In that respect, she was much like her sister. She thought it perfectly conceivable that a find could relate to her sister's field of expertise. The details could wait until they reached their destination.

Within twenty-eight hours of the arrival of the Jaintiapur, Deva Horsfall and the rest of the payload were delivered safely to the colony. The alien artifact, if such it was, had been carefully sequestered within a containment facility of Exarchate design. The Cell's sensors couldn't penetrate its outer shell. What lay within was a mystery to those outside. The discovery was being treated with great secrecy.

"I hope this doesn't turn out to be a waste of your time," Deva had said when leaving the Jaintiapur.

"We've been well paid," said the Palmer, meaning the words in more way than one. The trip had been an opportunity for them to reacquaint themselves with each other. Long absences and light-speed delays had stretched a formerly close sibling relationship almost to irrelevance. "I have no regrets."

"I'm just trying not to get too excited." The feverishness in Deva's eyes belied her words. "This wouldn't be the first time people have got worked up over nothing.

"What's the worst that can happen? If you do find nothing--well, that's your specialty. It's a win-win situation."

"Either way, I'm about to find out."

They had embraced and said farewell.

Sublime's Exarch took the scientific payload and put it to immediate effect. The crew of the Jaintiapur watched from a distance as arcane sensors stirred and strange energies brewed. Deva Horsfall disappeared into the artifact's containment facility to conduct her investigation under the tightest of security, so what she and the Exarch did was never known precisely.

That they did something, however, was of little doubt. The footage of the colony's final moments soon became familiar to every citizen of the Exarchate. It was broadcast across the whole of colonized space, leaving a horrified, stunned silence in its wake.

As though a detonator had been tripped, the artifact suddenly and without warning disgorged devastation on a scale never before witnessed by humanity. A raging, luminous ball of plasma spread rapidly across the Jaintiapur's forward sensors in a blaze of golden light, devouring everything in its path. The containment facility went first, then the colony's main base. Nothing stopped it. The more it consumed, the more it propagated, exploiting a terrible arithmetic progression to gain total dominance of the system. Within hours it had destroyed not just the colony, including Exarch Elderton and everyone under her care, but four of the system's inner worlds as well.

The Jaintiapur barely outran the fatal front, capturing images of the destruction as it fled. The expanding bubble of hostile alien replicators left a fine mist of vicious nanotech in its wake. As soon as it was safe to do so, Palmer Horsfall turned her Cell about to consider her options. Endlessly breeding and vigilant, the alien replicators devoured anything that strayed too close, and buried everything within its borders in a howl of electromagnetic noise. Palmer Horsfall sacrificed numerous Cell components in a vain attempt to penetrate the borders of the affected area. She pursued every possible means of communication. A dozen members of her crew lost their lives when the unpredictable ROTH tech took offense at the Cell's continued presence and swatted at it as a human might an irritating fly.

Eventually the chief officer of the Jaintiapur decided that nothing could be done for the people of Sublime, if any remained in the infected mess of the system at all--her sister included.

Despairing, the Jaintiapur turned tail and fled.

In the following years, other Cells attempted to breach the boiling borders of the alien-infested system. None were remotely successful. Overtures of communication continued to be rebuffed. The theory prevailed that the Exarch of the colony had inadvertently triggered a sophisticated defense mechanism that blindly destroyed everything within a certain radius of the artifact. The artifact made no other response to the civilization that had poked its doorbell and run away--and neither did the defense mechanism, except to strike out every now and again at the automated monitors stationed around the system, ready to sound the alarm should the contagion show signs of spreading.

The Palmer who had obediently delivered her sister to the maelstrom resigned from the Jaintiapur and took charge of Horsfall Station, in a deep elliptical orbit around Sublime's primary star. There she waited, maintaining a grim vigil for the many who had died in the budding colony, victims of unknown killers. She would find those responsible, she swore to herself. And she would make them pay.

No matter how long it took...

+1

According to the map the pipe was rated for humans, but Melilah Awad, one-eighty centimeters long, only just fit into it. Curved, cream-colored walls veined in yellow rushed by as she hurried to the next hub, pushing herself along with hands and feet in the negligible gee. Lights in visible spectra were few and far between, and she navigated by infrared when the darkness was complete.

An air current blew from along the pipe at roughly her velocity. She imagined a bubble of her exhalations accompanying her like an unseen shroud, and quickly quashed the thought. It made her throat tighten as though she were actually suffocating.

She pushed on, conscious of time ticking away fast. Her watchmeter told her she still had work to do. Fourteen people were observing her from afar, locked onto her trace as she plumbed the innermost regions of the giant habitat. Seven of them she knew well: fellow gleaners, keeping tabs just in case she'd caught a whiff of some new, rich vein of overlooked information. Four were friends she'd asked to tag along for the ride, until the time was right. Two of the remaining three were unknown to her, possibly pseudonyms for the Exarch and therefore of some concern. And the last...

She checked the time. Thirty-two twenty. Another three hundred seconds.

"I told you, Gil: leave me alone." She spoke aloud. The echo from the pipe's smooth walls gave her words extra substance, if only to her ears.

"Now, don't be like that, 'Lilah."

She cringed at the use of the nickname. "Why do you go to so much trouble to track me when you're not even prepared to listen to what I've got to say?"

"And why do you resent my surveillance of you? Seems strange for one who expends so much energy on defending the openness of our society."

"It's not the surveillance I mind, Gil. It's you."

The distant man chuckled. "Could be worse," he said. "You could be so dull that nobody would want to watch you."

"Sounds like heaven."

"I know you're lying."

Gil Hurdowar was right, but that didn't make him any easier to tolerate. Melilah could picture him, a scrawny figure jacked directly into the Scale-Free Bedlam feed. His face was lined and his hair possessed a disconcertingly piebald quality that spoke of badly maintained anti-senescence treatments. She had learned from her one and only in-person confrontation that his cubicle smelt of burnt sugar, as though a saucepan of ruined toffee had been hidden in a cupboard and forgotten months ago.

She--elegantly youthful, in appearance at least, and meticulously clean--took offence at his interest in her, and she made no bones about showing it. That was how the system worked. He could watch her if he wanted to, but she didn't have to like it. Especially at moments such as these, when being observed was exactly what she didn't want.

One hundred fifty seconds. Her watchmeter was down to twelve. At the hub, she kicked right then almost immediately right again. The new pipe was slightly wider along one axis, giving it a squashed feel. Although there was no real indication that this area of the habitat was experiencing undue structural load, Melilah was distinctly aware of how near the center she was getting. With thousands of kilometers of pipes all around her and unknown cubic hectares of chambers piled high above, it was no wonder that the heart of Bedlam had long ago collapsed into a solid core. What had once been perfectly habitable spaces were now flattened foundations for new architecture. That new architecture would in turn one day collapse on top of the layers beneath, if Bedlam kept growing at its current rate.

Melilah sincerely hoped she would be well away from these pipes when that day came.

"Looking for something in particular?" Hurdowar pressed, voicing the question that was undoubtedly on the minds of many of the others watching her movements. "Data cache? Hard copy store?"

"Who says I'm looking for anything?"

"You only come down here when you are."

"That's not exactly true." Bedlam's basement was vast and, for the most part, empty. The habitat's many citizens naturally tended to gravitate upwards, resettling as fast as each new layer could come online. This constant migration left a labyrinthine vacancy in its wake. She wasn't the only person looking for things left behind, and she knew for certain that she wasn't the only one who used it as a repository for her own private data. The core of Bedlam was a graveyard for many things best left forgotten.

Melilah didn't have to justify herself, but she wanted her cover on public record. "Since when has amateur archeology been a crime?"

Hurdowar snorted. "If that's what you're doing, then I'm your guardian angel."

"The information laws are there to protect us all. I'm doing the community--and the Exarch--a service by upholding them."

"And making a tidy profit while you're at it. Hell, you don't need to explain it to me. I'm just jealous. Why else would I be snooping at you every waking moment?"

"I thought that was because you're an insensitive asshole."

"Some would say that. Consider the rest a bonus, then."

Twenty-five seconds. The pipe ended at a chamber large enough to have earned a warehouse rating, way back when. She took a moment to get her bearings. Five exits led from it, two deeper still. She took one of the latter, following her internal map.

"I'll ask you again, Gil: will you please leave me alone for a while?" The irritation in her voice was real.

"When the show's just getting interesting? I don't think so, 'Lilah."

Her internal timer hit zero. Far above the lowly tunnel, the system's primary flared. Magnetic fields flexed and snapped like whips. Huge gouts of supercharged particles poured through interplanetary space, frying every unshielded object in their path. The poles of magnetically active worlds and moons flickered blue. With the uncanny promptness of a vast machine, the symptoms of Hipparcos 62512's grumpy restlessness overtook the lumpy, half-made skin of Bedlam's outermost layers--and would have rendered them and what lay beneath utterly sterile, but for the sudden opacity of PARASOL in orbit between the station and the sun.

Melilah's watchmeter noted the departure of her four friends, as planned. Five of the gleaners went with them, and both of the unnamed traces. That left just two gleaners and Hurdowar.

"Is it a big one?" she asked them, knowing what the answer would be. She'd checked the solar weather reports in advance.

"Huge," said Hurdowar. "Pretty, too."

One of the two remaining gleaners took the bait. Melilah slipped into a pipe too narrow for her to stand in and shot along it like a bullet down a barrel. Close, now. She stretched in her crawl-suit, enjoying the physicality of her quest.

"Not as pretty as what I see right now," Hurdowar added.

She swallowed revulsion. "Give me a break, will you?"

"No can do, 'Lilah. But please, feel free to watch me back if it makes you feel any better."

"Thanks, but I think I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a blunt spoon." The pipe constricted to the point where she had to put her arms at her sides and let her feet kick her along. "Listen, Gil: you may have your rights, but so do I. I'm not some animal in a zoo; I'm not your property. Try to corral me, and I'll take whatever means necessary to stop you."

"But I keep an eye out for you. I give you leads!"

"My gratitude has its limits. I can cope just fine without you."

"Really?" A sly tone entered the man's voice. "Did you realize that the Nhulunbuy requested permission to dock fifty minutes ago?"

At Bedlam? The words were almost past her lips before she could stop them. She hadn't known, and the news took her by surprise. "What business is that of mine?"

Hurdowar chuckled again. "You don't fool me, 'Lilah. You know as well as I do who's running the Nhulunbuy these days. And you know he wouldn't come here unless he had absolutely no choice."

"Damn you, Gil," she cursed. The last gleaner winked out, perhaps from embarrassment. "My relationship with Palmer Eogan is none of your business."

"Can't blame a guy for being curious--especially when you still call it a relationship."

She brought herself to a sudden halt. Here.

Calling up a series of virtual displays, she scrolled rapidly through them and launched a package of countermeasures, prepared in advance against just such a contingency. If Gil Hurdowar wouldn't go away voluntarily, she would just have to make him. There wasn't a hell deep or hot enough for someone like him--and to hell with penalties. The Exarch could cut her off completely for all she cared. At least she'd be alone.

"I'd love to continue this engaging conversation, Gil, but--"

Hurdowar's channel died with a squawk. Her watchmeter clicked to zero at last.

Zero. She focused her thoughts on the task at hand. No one was watching her. This was her chance--and it wouldn't last long. The Exarch would be onto her in moments for shutting Hurdowar up like that. In Bedlam, there were many crimes, but few were as fundamental as restricting a citizen's right to information. Loathe him though she might, Hurdowar was a citizen and the Exarch imposed the laws protecting him with the same rigor he imposed those of the Gentry.

Damn them, too, she added to herself, but didn't allow herself to dwell on it. The seconds were flying by. She had brought herself to a halt by a narrow niche that only appeared on the most fastidious of maps. Most importantly, it was out of sight of the nearest CCTV feed. She'd checked it some years earlier and found it to be empty. A scan of the area since then showed no signs of anyone moving in. But just because no one had, didn't mean that she shouldn't.

Reaching into a pocket of her crawl-suit, she produced a flat packet as round as her palm. Colored to match the pipe's milky wall, it was designed to stick unobtrusively and remain out of sight forever. Should anyone trace her path to the niche, they would assume that she had already cleaned it out and might not bother taking a second look. Even if they did look, the camouflage would probably still fool them.

Melilah reached inside the niche to stick the disk in place, and was startled to find something already there.

What the hell? She pulled her hand away. The niche should have been empty; she was certain of it. Putting her disk back into its pocket, she leaned into the hole and examined what she'd found more closely. It was standard model data fiche, solid state, unsecured. She pulled it loose and held it up warily in front of her. Some data caches--like hers--were booby-trapped, rigged with viruses or EMPs designed to take out both the idly curious and the deliberately invasive alike. She swept it while she had chance, while Hurdowar was off-line and the others were busy with the flare.

The fiche was clean of traps. Accessing it, she brought up the contents in an internal window and scanned through them.

Old letters. Some pictures. Two faces recurred: a pair of women, one with brown hair and a square jaw, the other skinnier, shorter, a redhead. They had been lovers, had gone surveying together; there were maps of a tangled, convoluted space Melilah assumed was Bedlam. Most of the photos portrayed happy times, snapshots of contentment; they had holidayed at Sublime on at least one occasion, before the Catastrophe. But Melilah sensed sadness lurking behind the smiles. People didn't bury good memories without a good reason.

In this instance, it looked like someone had beaten her to it.

She tossed the fiche in her hand, momentarily indecisive. The data she had found was valueless on the open market. It was no business of hers, of anyone at all except the person who had put it there. She would be doing them a service by replacing it and moving on.

But that would leave her business unfinished. The simplest thing, she told herself, was to replace the fiche and do as she'd originally intended. She doubted the person who had placed it would ever come back--and if they did, they probably wouldn't notice hers, tucked away behind it. Most likely both of them would remain there, untouched, as this layer of Bedlam compacted around them. Both repositories would be buried physically as well as mentally.

So that was what she did. She replaced the fiche and stuck her disk nearby. Then she kicked herself away, pretending to be heading elsewhere just in case someone happened to glance at her at that moment and wonder what she was doing.

The flare had been roiling around Bedlam for two full minutes. Her surprise package had kept Hurdowar busy all that time, forcing him to untangle knotted data lines and unclog stodgy feeds before he could get out. She didn't care what he thought of her, what weird sort of kick he was getting, following her around as he did. But pretending it didn't affect her was the surest way of letting him know that it did.

The Nhulunbuy requested permission to dock fifty minutes ago...

She opened a link to Gil Hurdowar. It would look good for her if she made the first overture, make it appear as though the breakdown in comm was a genuine accident. Worth a try, anyway.

"You there, Gil?"

Silence. The link registered as being open, but nothing came along it.

"Gil?"

She tried another line, and another. More nothing. She dialed an acquaintance at random with the same result. Frustrated, she punched in the code for the Exarch himself, and only echoes of her frustration returned to her down the pipe.

"Is anyone out there?"

The feeling of claustrophobia returned as one by one all the lines she had opened shut down. For the first time in years, Melilah Awad was truly cut off.

+2

The alarm, once triggered, spread rapidly through the colony's infostructure. Exarch Isaac Deangelis normally skimmed the surface of temporal flow like a stone over water, experiencing individual days as though they were minutes, riding the ebb and flow of the economy, watching Palmer Cells come and go like darting pond creatures, embracing the sure vantage point of long time as was his birthright.

When the alarm reached the outer layers of his distributed consciousness, however, his entire self jerked abruptly to a temporal halt. It felt like a transport collision in slow motion. A single moment crystallized around him, spreading out in branched waves of supersaturated connectedness; what had once been liquid and smoothly flowing suddenly coalesced into an incredibly complicated snapshot of the colony as a whole, caught in the seed crystal moment of the alarm. As he changed gears from very long-term overview to minutely micro-focused, he sought the source of the disturbance and critiqued his agents' autonomic reactions to it.

The first name he saw prompted a sigh of resignation: Her again. He didn't need to see the footage in detail to recognize Melilah Awad's elegantly angular features or her naturally grown hair, dyed brown and white in geometric streaks parallel to her fringe. Her tight-fitting semi-pressure suit accentuated her Natural physicality with a brazenness that unnerved him only slightly more than her resentment of him. She seemed to be at the heart of every disturbance in his domain. When the Exarchate had annexed the colony, forty-odd years earlier, Awad had been Deputy Counselor, second only to the system's nominal head. Although the annexation had been conducted with the same swift efficiency as those in other habited systems, with very little loss of life or material assets, the after-effects were pervasive and tenacious. Awad, left with no functional role to play in the system's new government, made a point of encouraging anti-Exarchate demonstrations whenever she could, and would, he was sure, foment active dissent were it not for the system's anti-privacy laws that would immediately finger her as the ringleader. Deangelis couldn't stop her from talking, not if he wanted to maintain the system's unique character, since imposing absolute rule would prompt even greater resentment than he already experienced. He tolerated the rumblings and he was proud that, so far, the situation had never flared into open revolt as it had once or twice elsewhere.

Even if it had, the outcome would have been the same. The Exarchate was unassailable. That was the one, pure fact that Awad had never been able to digest.

She appeared to be on another prospecting mission, inveigling herself deep in the belly of the habitat. That, he assumed, was what had triggered the alarm. Foraging under cover of an attention-grabbing flare was a common tactic, as a great number of observers directed their attention towards the celestial event. Despite it being two hundred years since a similar flare had expunged all life from the system, this was still a significant event and worthy of close study. Deangelis scrolled back through Awad's movements to confirm that her behavior matched that of someone engaged in a secret-retrieving pursuit. There was no discrepancy. She had even launched a software guillotine to cut off the one remaining viewer watching her when the time came, so what she found would remain unseen by anyone but herself.

Ultimately her destination revealed her intent, and he would have been alarmed for that reason alone had he seen her coming in advance. Luckily for him the deeper layers of deception seemed to be holding. The fiche was back in its place, read but not recorded. At least one of the habitat's few secrets was still concealed from prying eyes.

He was about to reinforce the good judgment of his agents--rewarding them so their complex decision-making nets would respond similarly next time such a circumstance arose--when he realized that it wasn't Awad who had triggered the alarm at all. It was in fact a more complex juxtaposition of names and words. The object of Awad's software guillotine had dropped the names into their conversation with the clear intent of provoking her, and those names--innocently in one sense--combined with a comment from Awad had been enough to set alarm bells ringing.

A chill went down his many spines when he examined the data. The agents had made a spot-decision based on weightings he had given them, and based on the conclusion they had come to their response was--again--absolutely correct. If his secret had been sprung, if word of what was slouching to Lut-Deangelis got out, it would undo everything he had worked for. Everything.

He immediately set in motion an emergency shutdown of all of the habitat's communications networks. He couldn't let word spread any further than it already had. This was too inflammatory to hesitate over. Even with his relative time slowed to a near standstill, he worried at his tardiness. Awad was busy replacing his cache back in the niche; Hurdowar was still trying to untangle the software bomb. But who else knew? How many other lips were spreading the terrible truth? How fast had incriminating light sped along which optical fibers?

Silence spread like ice through the habitat. Conversations were cut off in mid-sentence. Data flows ceased without warning. A normally thriving semantic space devolved into a multitude of truncated termini, spasming futilely to reconnect.

Exarch Deangelis reassured himself that he was doing everything he could, that no one could blame him if it wasn't enough. Word was bound to get out eventually, and contingencies were in place to deal with it when it happened. He had his orders, just as his agents had their key words, Nhulunbuy and Palmer Eogan among them.

He examined the exact instances in which each trigger word had been used, dreading to see precisely how much damage had been done but knowing he had to in order to begin repairing the damage. Part of him was already drafting an explanation to send to Sol, detailing the instance in which the leak had occurred, the precise mechanisms--once he isolated them--by which the leak had been allowed to happen, and the many ways in which he was already beginning to heal the breach. If the ftl network was decoherence-free, he could have a response within minutes. The swiftness with which judgment could fall both appalled and relieved him. Abrogation of responsibility always came at a price. Sometimes the price was worse than the circumstance from which one was trying to escape.

Even as data flows staggered to a halt all through his domain, a second realization--that he had been wrong twice in as many microseconds--struck him a near-physical blow.

Try to corral me, Awad had said, replayed for his benefit by the software agents, and I'll take whatever means necessary to stop you.

He thought of the fabled king who, for the want of a pin, lost his kingdom. Would Isaac Forge Deangelis lose his kingdom, now, over an accidental pun?

No, he told himself, torn between relieved laughter and despair at the stupidity of the situation. The agents had misread a critical word on which he had placed, perhaps, too much weight. Erring on the side of caution was, he supposed, sensible, but on the basis of that error he had just down shut down a habitat containing over forty thousand people, of whom many already resented his interference and all valued their connectivity. His crystalline moment had gone from bad to worse--then back to bad, with a side order of chaos.

He forced himself to view the situation philosophically. Mistakes happened, and in this instance this one could be corrected swiftly and simply. Problematic though it was, it was definitely better than if the truth had got out. In the case of such a leak, shutting down the habitat would have been only the beginning. The truth, as ever, was as volatile as a genie, and once released would not be easily recaptured.

Exarch Deangelis reprogrammed his agents to avoid a similar mistake in future, and put into motion the lengthy process of reconnecting the many millions of severed lines. This he oversaw personally, even though the grunt-work was usually performed by more specialized agents, thereby ensuring that no further mistakes would be made. Indeed, if the reconnection went smoothly, many people might not even notice the sudden glitch. The task also gave him something to keep his mind off the disaster he had avoided through no quick thinking of his own.

He had been complacent, content to rule from the privileged position of Exarch, even though he knew the coming days to be critical. He understood now that he could no longer afford that luxury, that agents were insufficient to handle the minutiae of day-to-day governance in such critical times, that from now on he was going to be furiously, relentlessly busy--at least until the initial crisis was past. The truth remained buried under layers of deception, behind multiple falsehoods all resembling the truth. Balancing so many lies was a task worthy of a master-juggler.

He was confident that, despite this bad start, he was more than up to the task. It was what he had been born to do. From his first conscious thought, the Archon had refined and fine-tuned his every capacity and instinct in order to create the perfect head of governance. He and the other Exarchs were the pinnacle of human evolution, the potent products of evolution both random and self-directed. No matter what the universe threw at him, he was certain he could handle it. In the long term, if not the short, the future was assured.

Still, part of his mind, no matter how furiously he occupied the rest, stayed firmly focused on the imminent arrival of the Nhulunbuy. The Palmer Cell and its contents descended upon him with all the deadliness of an axe. The next slip-up might result in much worse than a slight inconvenience to the casual telecommuters of his domain.

+3

The Nhulunbuy hove to around Bedlam in a graceful arc, strung out like pearls in a necklace. Each of its seventy-eight components was spherical and perfectly reflective. Each reflected the solar storm's radiation--that which wasn't absorbed and put to non-destructive use--back into space, lending them a flickering, brilliant shine. Ranging in size from drones barely the size of a fist to bulky freight containers large enough to contain a small house, each of the Palmer Cell's components had the capacity to function as a completely independent starfaring vessel. Linked by protocols capable of withstanding the stresses of high-velocity space deformation, together they formed a single VOIDship under the command of one man.

Palmer Eogan crouched in the womb of the Nhulunbuy's second largest component, N-2, and watched gloomily as Bedlam loomed large and silent in his instruments. It had been a long and stressful journey; normally he would have been glad to be coming out of the Dark and into port. This time, though, he felt far from glad. He would find no rest as long as he remained around Bedlam; of that he was completely certain.

While his thoughts should have been on the thing in N-1 and the wreckage they'd found around it, compacted and sealed in every available compartment throughout the Cell, instead his mind was on Melilah Awad.

I'm so sorry, he thought. I didn't ask to come here like this. I didn't ask for any of it. If I could make it any other way, I would.

He knew better than to call her. Forgiveness was not--and had never been--an option. But he wanted to anyway. Even after so long, he still missed her.

Fortunately, the communications blackout currently gripping the colony put paid to any suggestion of breaking his vow. The silence from the colony was as ominous as it was unexpected. Could something have gone wrong with PARASOL? Or was the cause more sinister? Reflexively, he tightened the distance between the Cell's components, drawing the Nhulunbuy close around him in case it needed to move suddenly.

The thing in N-1 resisted the change in momentum as it had throughout the entire trip. He felt as though he had a tiger by the tail--a very heavy tiger that might wake at any moment and bite the hand pulling so insistently at it.

With a snap of static, the lines were suddenly open again.

"This is Lut-Deangelis Traffic Control," said the smooth androgynous voice of a routing AI. "Nhulunbuy, your approach is noted and your vector has been approved. Stand by for further instructions."

Eogan confirmed receipt of the transmission by opening data channels. "What happened back there, LDTC? You went awfully quiet."

"Interference from the flare," supplied the AI. "An EMP took out a major communications hub. The problem has been rectified." Without changing tone, Traffic Control continued: "In accordance with Lut-Deangelis Information laws, you are required to open all memory and channels to public scrutiny. Please immediately supply access codes and encryption keys. Upon verification, you will be allotted temporary citizenship and allowed full access to local systems."

Palmer Eogan hesitated only momentarily before sending the requested codes. Once they were verified, anyone in Bedlam would have access to every piece of knowledge he and his crew had gathered on their journey from Mizar. Theoretically, he would be unable to keep secrets from anyone.

He had no choice but to accept the condition of entry into the system. Without doing so, he would be forced to go elsewhere, and that was simply not an option. Carefully, with no evidence of obvious deception, he had configured the data in the Cell's stores so it wouldn't point directly at the truth. Convenient and very plausible deceits stood in the way of anyone curious about what lay at the heart of N-1. Even the persistent would be hard-pressed to penetrate to its core.

"Codes and keys verified," said the AI. "Welcome to Lut-Deangelis System, Palmer Eogan."

He didn't respond. It would have been a lie to say that he was glad to be there. He felt exposed and vulnerable, and conscious of a large number of games tangled around him. The AI's explanation for the blackout was a little too pat. To take out the communication web enclosing not just Bedlam but the entire system would require more than just the destruction of a major hub. That would require hitting at least a quarter of the hubs at once, or shutting down the Exarch himself.

A flood of information swept over the Cell. His crew broke radio silence to inquire about friends and colleagues last visited many years before. It had been a long time since the Nhulunbuy had been this way.

"You have an unusual manifest," said a new voice over the comms. "How intriguing."

Eogan checked the ID before replying, even though he thought he recognized the warm, contralto tones. The ID confirmed his suspicion.

"That was quick, Luisa. Good to see you're still on the ball."

"Quick nothing. Every snoop in the system will have checked you out already. I'm just the only one who can get past your firewall and speak to you directly." He could hear the welcome in her voice, and couldn't help a slow smile in return. Luisa Pirelli had flown several legs around the Arc Circuit with him before settling down on Whitewater, years ago. It was good to hear her voice again, even if she was asking all the questions he wanted to avoid.

The features of her diamond face and the cast of her round eyes were deliberately neutral. He knew that look. "Want to tell me about 2358M1S willingly, or will I have to come up there and find out for myself?"

"There's nothing to find out," he said. "You have all the data we have."

"Yeah, right. It's big, whatever it is. Much bigger than anything else found on a sweeper run. Could it be a ROTH artifact?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, Lu. I'll leave the answers to the experts."

"No experts here, Eogan. We're just a bunch of amateurs--and starved of excitement, to boot. Expect to be thoroughly probed in the coming minutes." A thick edge leant her choice of words a prurient double meaning. "You should be used to that, working for the Gentry."

"How's James?" he asked, ignoring the jab. The Palmers were theoretically independent of the Exarchate empire, although in practice it was the only organization with the resources to pay for interstellar travel, and therefore wielded a great deal of influence over the guild of starfarers.

"The same," she said. "Still as crazy as coat hangers in freefall. But you know: he occasionally makes sense. The latest glitch will have him jumping."

"The blackout?"

"No. You." She was still smiling, but the comment wasn't entirely playful. "Will you be staying long?"

He hoped not. "I don't think so."

"Drop in, if you deign to come down to our level."

"I will, if you're offering dinner."

"You'd better believe it. I'll keep the vodka on ice. By the sound of your voice, you need it more than ever."

He didn't know how to respond to that. After so long plying the trade lanes, his social skills were rusty. He'd thought he was being perfectly affable to Luisa, and he was genuinely glad to hear from her.

"Just call her, Dominic," Luisa said into the conversational void.

"Call who?"

"You're not fooling anyone, you know."

The line shut with a click.

Eogan sighed and forced himself to concentrate on the Cell as it locked into orbit and assumed new symmetries reminiscent of an ancient model of a molecule. Independent fragments drew together; some of them touched, merged into one. He tapped into an external feed to admire the ballet, and was startled at how obvious it looked that the Cell was hiding something. He tweaked the distributed intelligence guiding the maneuver, moving N-1 out of the heart of the formation and putting it on the edge, as though it was nothing important. He downgraded the shields, now the Cell was under the shelter of PARASOL, and they dimmed to a reflective brown-black. Instead of a collection of highly polished ball bearings, the Cell now resembled a clump of Christmas ornaments made of smoked glass. Angular, indistinct shapes lurked within.

"Palmer Eogan," said a third voice. Brisk and authoritative, this one radiated no welcome. There was no visual.

"Exarch Deangelis," he sent back, wondering if the chill was an act put on for those observing. He had expected the Exarch to call earlier. Now that the moment had come, he was more aware of being watched than ever before.

"You've posted some irregularities in your mission log," said the Exarch. "These will require explanation."

"I am aware of that." He fought the urge to add sir. "I'd like to discuss the details with you at your earliest convenience."

"That might be sooner than you were expecting. An envoy is on its way to you as we speak."

Eogan checked telemetry and noted a small vessel powering toward the Nhulunbuy from behind the giant habitat. Bedlam occupied the heart of the Trojan point trailing the system's largest gas giant, Ah Kong. PARASOL, the flare-shield, hung like an improbably large contact lens between Bedlam and the sun, assuming full opacity only when solar radiation was at a maximum. Numerous vessels and other structures huddled beneath its black shadow, jostling each other under the influence of Bedlam's weak gravitational pull. The flare painted the edges of PARASOL bright orange, casting a peculiar light over the assembly. Magnetic field lines, PARASOL's second line of defense, rippled and swayed like the tentacles of a luminous jellyfish, hundreds of kilometers long.

"I'll have my data ready for your inspection," Eogan said. Telemetry put the envoy's ETA at five minutes.

"Do. There are a number of issues that need to be clarified immediately. I trust the occlusion is adequately contained."

Eogan caught the slight emphasis. "Inasmuch as I can tell."

"Good. Let's keep it that way."

"I have no intentions of doing otherwise," he said, realizing only at the end of the sentence that he was talking to himself.

Damn him, Eogan thought, allowing himself no external display of anger. Damn them all to hell.

His gaze drifted to N-1, and idly toyed with the idea of opening it to the vacuum and dumping its contents unceremoniously onto Bedlam. Or Lut-Deangelis, as the Exarch had insisted it be called since annexation. Let them deal with it, whatever came out of its hellish throat. Without that particular albatross around his neck, Eogan would be free to run again.

But even as he thought it, the question "Where to?" surfaced, as it always did. He could no more flee the Exarchate than he could his guilt. Both would always be there, until he confronted them head on.

The comms bleeped, indicating that he had a personal message waiting for him. He took it with a sinking feeling, knowing who it was from before he opened it.

DE

Let's talk.

MA

A mixture of hot and cold rushed through him. The overture barely comprised a single sentence, but it was the first in one hundred and fifty years, and more than he'd dared hope for. It should have been a good thing.

So why did he feel so terrified? Why did he reach out to his peripherals and give the command to delete it? Why didn't the fact that he knew she was watching him do it give him any kind of satisfaction?

It wasn't about revenge or shame or fear or any such simple emotion. It was none of those and all of them. Until he was certain exactly what he was feeling, his history with Melilah Awad was one Pandora's Box he preferred to leave shut.

One out of two, he thought as the Exarchate's envoy accelerated steadily closer to the thing in N-1. That was the most he could hope for.