‘What?’ says Zaine, and Meshner echoes her a moment later.
‘Meshner, step to the controls,’ Kern insists. ‘Zaine, step away.’
There follows a long pause, which Meshner feels they share with the two Portiids back on the Lightfoot.
‘Perhaps Zaine can conduct a brief survey to see what else might be salvaged,’ says Kern-translating-Viola.
Zaine makes a dissatisfied noise but gives up her place at the console to Meshner, which he is none too happy to accept. Kern is in his ear, though, and the jagged thread of anticipation running through him seems to pulse with the rhythm of her voice.
‘Take the controls,’ she directs, and then, ‘Please, Meshner, this is very important.’
He does so, and they feel organic and unpleasant through the tactile receptors of his gloves. The screen flickers and pulses, random bursts of light and colour dancing on it as though he just rubbed his eyes too hard.
‘This is a momentous occasion,’ Kern tells him – and with the words comes a certainty that it is just him she’s speaking to, not Zaine or the others. ‘We are going to contact something here, Meshner. You and I, we are going to speak to a new mind. Are you ready?’
No. But in truth he is too terrified to say even that.
‘Follow my directions.’ He sees a sequence of motions in his mind’s eye, how to operate an alien console to make it do what Kern wants. ‘I am investigating the channel now,’ Kern continues. ‘When it responds, this Lante, we will reply. We will extend the hand of friendship, just as the Portiids did with your people.’
Portiids don’t have hands. But she is doing it, and he’s in no position to stop her. He imagines Kern reaching out through the mediation of his hands, exploring the electronic architecture of this place, searching for the signal-maker, this Lante.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he murmurs. ‘Why set this up for a human, if this is where your computer system is?’
‘Perhaps they had an Old Empire computer that would only respond to humans?’ Zaine asks idly. She is inspecting the lamps on the far wall without any great interest, then crosses the chamber, giving the empty chair a none-too-accidental kick on the way. She obviously feels Meshner has stolen her thunder, which he would be only too happy to return to her if he could.
‘What humans, though?’ he demands. He has activated some kind of archive and Kern is investigating, directing his hands. He can almost feel the twists and turns of her search within the walls of this place.
‘Maybe they found some in cold sleep?’
But Meshner isn’t really listening. He can feel Kern’s exploration. Just turning his mind that way brings a definite rush of sensation, dizzying and strange. The implants. He feels himself slipping into the boxy construct he bolted to the back of his own head, its huge virtual spaces now mapping out what Kern finds, until he stands there with that severe, long-dead woman, somewhere his mind has constructed as a mirror to the real space around him, but far more decayed, half-rotted away and blackened with mould.
‘Where is it?’ Kern asks, not of him, but of herself. He feels frustration seething from her; feels it, because it is being felt through him. His implant throws up a chaining list of errors and usage warnings. Kern is riddled through it like an infection, spinning its every wheel to produce this verisimilitude of annoyance. ‘I don’t understand. There’s nothing here.’
‘No data?’ he asks timidly and she rounds on him.
‘One incomplete archive. Some long-dead natural historian’s travelogue. But there’s barely more than we already received. It’s not complete. And there’s . . . no more than this. Where is the system? Where is the intelligence?’
‘Someone was sending,’ he says. ‘Or something. Like an operator, someone said.’ He can’t remember who. Perhaps it was him. ‘But there’s no operator here.’
‘This does not accord with my theories,’ Kern tells him, as though it is the greatest affront the universe could offer. ‘There should be something persisting from the station’s origin. I wanted to . . .’ She trails off, her virtual avatar staring at Meshner without expression.
‘What’s going on?’ he asks, more pitifully than he had intended. Around them, the non-existent space creaks and groans, as though decay still eats into the heart of it, devouring its structural integrity.
The excitement is gone, switched off and deleted from him. In its place he is momentarily exposed to a welter of negative feelings: bitterness, pride, contempt, desperation, misery. Each one is raised up in his mind, held like a gem to the light and then discarded. Kern’s lips are crooked in a hard smile.
‘Yes,’ she tells him. ‘Even in defeat, even in nothing, there is treasure. You don’t know how much you miss being disappointed until you can no longer truly savour the feel of disappointment.’
In the hollow echo of that, and when he feels that his situation can truly get neither stranger nor worse, Zaine’s voice comes to his real physical ears, saying, ‘I have a signal.’
‘There is no signal,’ Kern insists. ‘There is nothing but a dead recording.’ Again that self-indulgent playing on Meshner’s heartstrings, his implant reconfiguring to deal with the additional load, folding virtual space into more virtual space, straw into gold, until Meshner feels like his poor brain contains whole worlds. He is beginning to understand what is going on, now: the interaction between Kern and the implant and the poor meat within his skull, but now isn’t the time to get too introspective. His introspection has been rented out to his lodger, after all.
‘Meshner, open your channel to the ship!’ Zaine tells him.
I have, I am, I— but then he finds that he has been locked in his head with Kern instead. Did she cut me off from them, or did I do that by going inward to the implant? He resets his comms to find a babble of chat coming from the Lightfoot. Jumping in halfway he can’t work out what has happened. It’s the octopus things, the aliens, he thinks, and checks their progress: still sailing closer across the gulf between planets, moving at quite a rate now, at an angled trajectory that might be the prelude to an interception, but the distances are vast and they are days away. And anyway, everyone sounds too happy about whatever is going on for it to be an attack.
Then he clicks: Helena and Portia have signalled them.
He reviews precisely what had been said in his absence, disconnecting from his implant as much as he can and skimming over the logs. There was a signal. The pair of them are not only alive but have some manner of détente with their captors. Helena is very positive about that, but there is something else she said . . .
When the other signal comes through to his helmet’s display, he barely glances at it: just a line of text, presumably from Zaine, except that Zaine is simultaneously asking, ‘What was that, Meshner?’
And now Fabian is signalling as well, even as Viola replies to the far-off Portia, demanding to know what is going on.
‘Fabian?’ Meshner asks.
‘I am watching you through Artifabian’s eyes,’ the Portiid tells him. ‘Who is that with you?’
‘What?’ Meshner’s eyes stray to the text-line he just received.
We’re going on an adventure.
‘Zaine?’ he asks, turning. Zaine isn’t alone.
‘Apparently there’s something here the locals don’t like,’ comes Kern-translating-Viola, but Meshner isn’t really listening any more.
It’s a suit, an environment suit – not like he or Zaine are wearing, of course. It is the suit that was wrapped about the chair when he first saw this room through Artifabian’s electronic eyes, which he realizes with a start that he hadn’t seen through his visor’s narrow window later, when Zaine was stomping about. It is an ancient piece of technology just like the rest of this place, patched and abandoned, just another fragment of detritus to be seen once and then forgotten. Now it is standing in front of them, like a drowned man weighed down with stones.