Priam's Lens Page 10

  Harker was incredulous. “Doesn’t matter! That’s my ass on the line out there! Nobody knows what it’ll be like, or what it’ll do, considering the effects on folks like us riding inside through a genhole.”

  “Oh, the only problem is keeping you secured against the very strange forces that come into play in there,” the intelligence officer responded with the same casualness as before. “So long as the suit’s integrity holds, and this one’s been designed to do just that, there won’t be any difference to you if you’re inside or outside. Inside the suit, you’re inside, period. Don’t worry. We’ve spent a lot of time and lots of brains have been on this. We’re pretty sure we have it all right this time.”

  He stared at the commander. “What do you mean, ‘this time’?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly done all the time, nor does it need to be. We can usually use robots, after all.”

  “Maybe you ought to use a robot this time, too,” Harker suggested. “What can I add?”

  “On-the-spot evaluation, my boy! Don’t worry so much!” He paused a moment. “Say—you want to see what’s going on in there?”

  “Huh?”

  “Sure. Have a seat. It’s been a real battle of wits with Madame Krill in there, but even she doesn’t have everything we have. Come! Sit! Visual, security code A seven stroke three tilde bravo twolevel. Show digest.”

  The wall opposite the utilitarian couch in the commander’s two-room quarters flickered on, and for the first time Harker saw the inside of the passenger quarters aboard the Odysseus. It was quite luxurious compared to Navy ships, more like a passenger liner for the very rich in its appointments and comforts. The view was from above and slowly proceeded down a corridor until it opened into a major lounge. Top of the line robotic bar, what looked like real fruit on the tables in tasteful bowls, very plush seating, and at the far end a screen and stage area.

  “They have shows? Or does the old lady sing for them?”

  Park chuckled. “Want to see the old bat? Visual—show us Anna Marie Sotoropolis, please.”

  The scene jumped, and then settled. The scene was the same, only now there were people in there; it clearly had been a bit busier and had not yet been cleaned and freshened. There was only one person visible, a tiny figure sitting in the center relative to the screen and perhaps twenty percent back. She seemed to be listening to something, but there was not at the moment any audio.

  “She does this a lot,” Park told Harker. “Sits there for hours and listens to recordings of her old opera gigs. Never visuals, never performances—just audio. I think she really loves the music but she can’t stand to be reminded of what she once looked like. You’ll see why in a moment. Ah—there’.”

  Even as somebody used to and victimized by the ravages of space, Gene Harker gasped at the sight. She was a mass of tumors, ugly, multicolored, hanging so densely in places they looked like bunches of grapes. The head was deeply scarred, and the face—the face was certainly human, but it looked like that of someone who’d been dead for quite some time, buried, and exhumed. The arms looked like a skeleton’s arms, just brittle purplish skin over clear bone. She was among the most repulsive sights he’d even seen, even on a battlefield.

  “She’s built into the cozy,” Park told him. “The integration’s the best money can buy. How much of her is machine and how much isn’t it’s impossible to tell, but you got to figure that the horror you can see is all her. Skull and bones infected by pus bags. Makes you puke, huh? Little wonder she goes out only wrapped from head to whatever she uses for feet.”

  Harker looked away in disgust. “She said she was over nine hundred years old.”

  “Probably true. And probably she’s over two hundred and fifty chrono, which makes her one of the oldest living humans in either measure. You wonder why she hangs on, don’t you? She goes to mass every day, but she sure still hangs on.”

  “And she doesn’t care if she’s seen like—that on board?”

  “Oh, yeah, she cares. But it’s her ship, as it were. At least, she’s the ranking family member. When the others don’t need it, she goes in, shuts off all access, removes the stuff so that she can plug into a maintenance and rehab port built in under that place in the deck, and gets her blood changed, her organs checked or worse, her biomechanical parts regenerated as needed, and so on. When they’re close to that old, there’s usually so much biomachine in the brain you don’t even have a big personality any more, just a lot of data, but she’s still in there, somewhere. Otherwise she’d never bother listening to the old performances. She has them, after all, entirely recorded as data in her head. No, when she’s there, she’s eighteen or twenty again, on stage at some famous opera hall, singing the role of Carmen, or Desdemona, or whatever. Kind of sad, really.”

  “Anything on the others?”

  “Yeah. We have to deactivate these microprobes after a little while, which means completely deactivating, when Krill makes her sweeps, but we have plenty of spares. That’s the negative of sitting in one place so long when your opposition owns the dock, the communication lines, the service department, you name it. We can make ’em a lot faster than she can find and kill them. My techs play a little game with her much of the time. Her ego says she outsmarts us; our egos don’t come into play because we either get transmissions or we don’t. Visual—latest briefing, please.”

  The scene changed again, less sad, more menacing. There was N’Gana, enormous and mean-looking, blacker than night and in combat fatigues that made him look like he was about to single-handedly overthrow a small planetary government. His aide, or batman as he was called in the services and by the former Ranger colonel, Alan Mogutu, looked far different—light and reflecting his half-Hamitic, half-East Indian heritage. Mogutu didn’t look at all imposing even in the same kind of fatigues, but he was a nasty fighter who stayed with N’Gana not only out of loyalty but because they were complementary parts of one mercenary machine.

  In much lighter, more casual wear was Admiral Juanita Krill, a woman who was not only tall, taller than Harker’s one-fifty centimeters, but also large-boned. She wasn’t so much fat as imposing, and the fact that she had a bony crest going from above the eyes back and over the skull and terminating near the back of her neck made her look almost alien. The crest was actually a fairly common effect, as were the tumors, but on her it didn’t look like a deformity. It, well, worked.

  She wasn’t known for her brawn or fighting abilities, though. She was known as The Confederacy’s greatest expert on planting and finding eavesdropping and other such devices. In an age when these might be nanomachines created in the food preparation modules and inserted in your morning coffee, this was impressive. So, of course, was Commander Park.

  “You worked with her, I believe,” Harker commented.

  Park nodded. “I was one of her protégés. She made me an offer when she left the service to do all the things we wouldn’t allow her to do and get better paid for it, but I turned it down. I was impressed that she was here. I actually sent her an open invitation to get together in town or up there or anywhere else to talk about old times but I never got a reply. Of course, she’s prohibited from all service facilities and installations, but there’s plenty of places beyond the Cuch. Too bad.”

  “The others?”

  “The little twitch who looks like a chicken is van der Voort, you know the good Father Chicanis, the lady who looks like an Oriental bowling ball is Doctor Takamura, our physicist, and the thing slithering in that looks like a furry snake with pop-up eyes and sharp pointy teeth is our Pooka. Last, but not least, the fairly pretty lady with no growths and her own hair is Doctor Katarina Socolov, a recent graduate of Mendelev University who specializes in cultural anthropology of all things. You make any sense of the group?”

  “I’ve been trying. You?”

  “I think they’re going to attempt a landing on a Titan world. In fact, I’d stake my professional reputation, which is nonexistent for the most part, that they are go
ing to attempt a landing on Helena, the Karas family’s home in the preinvasion days.”

  “But that was two, three generations ago! What could possibly be left there for them now?”

  “Something very important. Something that’s so important they’re willing to bet that the impossible can be done, and that they can get in and somehow get out again with it. Something that would have survived the Titan-forming of the planet, which means it’s well underground.”

  “Money?”

  “Does that family look like it needs money? I don’t think so. And, as you point out, probably not family members, either. So—what? We’ve run through the entire panoply of things that it might be, and some of the best analytical and psychoanalytical computers have combined every piece of information relating to the family or the world, and we’ve come up with nothing likely that’s worth this kind of risk.”

  Harker looked over the motley crew. “It’s a device, that’s for sure. One that they can move but aren’t sure how to get working. That’s why there’s a brilliant mathematician and a top physicist along. To figure it out, or make it do what it’s supposed to. The mercenaries are for protection as needed, the anthropologist just in case there is some semblance of humanity that can be contacted, and the priest is there in case divine intervention would help. The old lady knows where it is but won’t be going. She’s bankrolling the operation and overseeing it. God knows what the Pooka’s for, but they have really good vision in near total darkness and can squeeze into holes and crevices we can’t. Ten to one it’s the bag man. How am I doing?”

  “Oh, great. As good as our best computers, in fact. Thing is, now tell me how the hell they expect to get back? Once they’re down there, their best automated stuff won’t work. The Titan power grid will drain everything from them in a matter of seconds. That’s why there are no robots or biorobotics in this batch, so they understand that. It’s the old-fashioned way. Fist and kick and knives and the like. Mogutu will be essential there. Black belts in five disciplines, among other capabilities. N’Gana is more the brute force type, but he’s effective. He was accused of strangling an entire squad with his bare hands. Unfortunately, they were on our side.”

  “He didn’t know?”

  “He knew. He just didn’t care. They screwed up and pissed him off.”

  “Sounds like he deserves to be stuck down there.”

  “Could be. But how’re he and the others going to get back up? The only way you can do that is to shut down the entire Titan planetary grid. We don’t even precisely know what they are or how they work or how they live, but we do know that the humans they deign to ignore they consider local fauna to be allowed to roam, or maybe be captured and bred for some quality or another. Nobody comes out who goes in. Maybe their genes do, but not them. If we could blow up the power grid, even make a dent in it, we could beat them, but if it drains all power from anything it doesn’t recognize and if we don’t know what it is exactly or how it works and the best minds we have just can’t make a dent in it, then how the hell do they expect to shut it down? Those types aren’t suicidal, and all the money in the universe can’t compensate for being stuck down there living the life of a savage until something kills you.”

  “What are they talking about?” Harker asked, looking at the assemblage and noting that the old diva was there, now again looking like she had in the Cuch, under a hood and veil and baggy dress that made her, well, social again.

  “Audio up to normal,” Park commanded. “Begin at briefing start.”

  All the people in the lounge now were suddenly seated except for Father Chicanis, interestingly enough, who stood to one side of the screen.

  “Isn’t the priest a Karas?” Harker asked. “Maybe he’s more than divine intervention. Maybe he’s the family’s man on the expedition. True faith in God would help on that score here.”

  “He is and you’re right.”

  The priest was speaking.

  “Good day, ladies, gentlemen, others,” he began in his sermonizing voice. Harker had heard that kind of voice before; it seemed to be taught by seminaries throughout The Confederacy and perhaps since the beginning of religion. He’d grown up being hauled to church every Sunday morning to hear that. “I apologize for the lengthy lay-to here, but we have had some coordination problems with the last member of the team. We are now awaiting word on whether to wait longer or to proceed and rendezvous en route. That is beginning to sound like a more practical course. It’s not that our objectives mean anything less if they are accomplished next month or next year rather than now, although word has come that a new force of Titan Ships is incoming, and this will increase our journey through hostile space and possibly get us mixed up with the inevitable refugee flights if we don’t proceed before that begins. It is also boring here, and they are going mad, I think, trying to figure out what we are up to here. Every new day we lay to in this port is one more day they have to compromise us.”

  “You got that right,” Park muttered to himself.

  “Not to mention the fact that you haven’t told us squat about just what our objective is,” N’Gana commented in his deep and imposing bass.

  “You knew that from the start, Colonel. We will reveal nothing more than we must. We had to reveal a bit too much just to get all of you on board, but we dare not discuss that here. While Commander Krill is the best at what she does, she informed you all two weeks ago that her Navy counterpart here is up to the task, too.”

  “I just love that part,” Commander Park commented. “I play it over and over.”

  “So when do you expect word on this last person?” Takamura asked the priest. “It is not the most pleasant of things to just sit here and dwell upon the odds against us on this mission. I have many research projects I could be working on or returning to. Nothing but something of this enormity, which I must see to believe, would take me from them as it is.”

  “A hundred percent funding on all your projects and all those able associates of yours and your students should make what you left behind bearable, Doctor,” the old diva put in. “We’ll have no more of this sort of talk. If you were not here, most of those projects would not have been funded anyway. We are coming to the end of humanity’s road, Doctor. I will do everything in my power, so long as I can hold myself together, to do anything at all that will ensure that, somewhere, sometime, somehow, there will be humans about who are not only capable of appreciating Aida but are able to hear it sung. We all have our crosses to bear, as it were.”

  “Well put, Madame Sotoropolis,” Father Chicanis responded. “We’ll have no more division at this point. It’s the price of having sat here too long, I fear. I shall pray that we will get our instructions to move as early as those instructions can reach us. In the meantime, we will use the simulator aboard to hone our skills in a nontechnological environment. Any questions?”

  “Yes, one,” Katarina Socolov, the youngest and newest, put in. “Can I, or we, just go down to the port for an afternoon? We train and train, and I’ve even gotten the simulator program running with far more realism than anything you had before, but you can be overtrained. We need a break. Or, at least, I need a break.”

  “Audio and visual terminated,” Park commanded, then sat back in his dressing gown and munched on a candy stick. “So, seen and heard enough?”

  “They have a simulator up there?”

  He nodded. “State of the art. Same corporation that made ours, in fact. Only their program is to drop you on a Titan world wearing nothing but a smile and a machete or similar weapons, no food or water, no nothin’, and set scary but artificial Titan globes after you if you do anything to attract attention. That was the basic program, anyway. You just heard that our cute little anthropologist there has made it a lot more realistic.”

  “They’re gonna mutiny if they don’t move soon. I’ve seen that kind of fidgeting among those kind of folks many times before.”

  Park agreed. “They’re more than ready. You know, they’ve agr
eed to let Socolov and Takamura come down and just have dinner in town, relax and unwind. You think you can spend a little time in makeup today and become irresistible? Neither of them saw you before; you might just have a pleasant evening and also learn something. A nice dinner, a few drinks, maybe a neurostim or so, walk by the river under the stars—who knows? Two bored, lonely girls with a good-looking guy like the one we can simulate with you, and maybe they’ll spill their guts out.”

  It wasn’t the kind of thing Harker felt all that comfortable doing, but it was worth a try. “If I can get some sleep while they work on me, sure. Why not? Any idea who they’re waiting for?”

  Park shrugged. “For all I know it’s the Dutchman. Would you recognize him? Would I? I doubt it. It’s a nasty disguise by somebody who’s really good, that’s all.”

  “You don’t think he’s just a code here?”

  “Why bother? With the trillions of possible codes they could use, why use one that attracts all this official attention? No, I think the Dutchman is very much involved in this. I just don’t know how or why. Maybe you can get the ladies to tell you.”

  “Or maybe the ladies will tell me where to go or give me a judo chop to the groin,” Harker responded pessimistically.

  “Ah, you’re such a romantic!” Park sighed.

  He got Harker off to makeup not long after that, and then cursed the fact that he was now, and would remain for a few more hours, one hundred percent wide awake. Might as well get dressed and go to work.

  At least, Commander Park reflected to himself, he’d gotten Harker’s mind completely off the subject of the original cause for their meeting.

  • • •

  The scars on Harker’s face were minimized, the growths that inspired them gone, and the hair and eyebrows all firmly planted, although nobody had ever figured out a way to keep them from itching in the short term. The neatly trimmed beard, though, was something of a giveaway to anybody who knew much about the Navy, since it was a standard man’s disguise of the scars of repeated space travel. Because of that, he’d decided not to disguise his affiliation or rank at all, but instead wore a standard dress uniform with his warrant insignia on the shoulders and his service stripes and ribbons prominent. It had been so long since he’d put the damned thing on that it surprised him he had so many legitimate decorations. It was another reminder that he was getting old for the kind of active duty he was putting himself back on.