'I think it's the same with Whitecloud. That means he's his own man at least some of the time.' He nodded towards the jury-rigged chair. 'All this tells us is that Trader's planning something and, whatever it turns out to be, we're probably not going to like it.'
Chapter Thirty-two
Another jump, at only 50 per cent capacity, carried the Mjollnir several hundred light-years further across the gulf separating the spiral arms. The Perseus Arm grew to fill more of the sky, while patterns of dust and light began to reveal themselves to the Mjollnir's crew over the next several days, as they worked to keep the frigate's jump capacity above a certain critical level.
Ty's dreams became stranger and more frequent whenever he slept, sometimes almost taking on the nature of visions. At one point he dreamt that a powerful storm roared out of the Mos Hadroch, where it sat in its cradle, commanding him in a voice expressed in the form of thunder and gales.
Now she was back on board, the prognosis for Nancy was far from good; the radiation had caused deep and irreversible cellular damage. He found he dreamt of her also, suited and tumbling out of his reach, until she was lost in the depths of interstellar space. He had visited her in the med-bay a couple of times, and gazed at her through the transparent lid of her medbox, wishing his need for her could somehow bring her closer to life.
He studied his personal logs of the tests he had run on the artefact, and in them found inexplicable gaps. He was by nature a meticulous record-keeper, going so far as to date and time-stamp even his personal observations and thoughts on the tests he ran. But the more he dug, the more he discovered periods where the logs and his own memory now clearly disagreed. He found no records of certain procedures on days when he would have sworn that they had been carried out, but the more he tried to recall the specific details of what had taken place, the more his memory failed him.
Ty experienced a cold tightness in his chest when he discovered that these inexplicable blank spots displayed their greatest frequency around the time of Olivarri's murder.
He sat for a long time, his right hand splayed on the surface of a greyed-out console, the data-ring on his index finger gleaming dully in the low light of the laboratory. Then he activated the console and, from the lab's dedicated fabricator, ordered up a dozen micro-surveillance cameras with broad-spectrum capability. The request would be logged, and he might have difficulty explaining it if it was ever questioned, but that was another risk he was willing to take.
The cameras were manufactured within the hour, whereupon he spent the afternoon positioning the tiny devices in dark and secluded corners of the lab where he was sure they couldn't be spotted at a casual glance. A short time later, Ty found himself back out on the hull as part of another repair shift. He watched Corso drill a hole into the hull itself with a custom-made mechanism he had ordered up from the fabs. The frigate was bathed in the ruby light of dozens of young stars shrouded in nebulae that marked the nearest edge of the Perseus Arm. It was a tremendous spectacle but, after nearly twelve straight hours on EVA, nobody was in a mood for star-gazing.
Once the plate-like Meridian field-generator had been plugged into the hull, Corso stepped back, allowing Lamoureaux room. Ted squatted beside it, laying the flat of one gloved hand on its slightly convex surface. A moment later, a flickering dome of light flared into life around them, which had to be at least fifty metres across.
'All right, I guess that's the last one for today,' Lamoureaux announced over the shared comms, fatigue reducing his voice to a dull monotone. The field shut off once more as he stood upright again.
'How much longer before we get the last one into place?' asked Corso.
'If we can keep to our schedule, it'll be another two days before the last of them is fitted to the hull,' Lamoureaux replied. 'With the spider-mechs doing a lot of the prep-work, we can speed things up, but we're still going to have to spend some time calibrating them.'
'And how long is that going to take?'
'Another day, maybe.' Lamoureaux turned and gestured at the newly installed field-generator. 'They're powerful, mind you. Whole orders of magnitude stronger than anything the Shoal let us get our hands on.'
Corso nodded. 'Ted, I need to check some diagnostics with you. So Nathan, if you don't mind-' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, then pointed at Lamoureaux, signalling they were going to talk over a private channel.
'By all means,' said Ty, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. 'Don't let me stop you.'
Ty simmered in silence while the other two men got to talking about whatever it was they didn't want him to hear. Paranoia made him sure that he was the subject of their conversation, and he wondered if they had finally picked up on his long-range tach-net communication with the avatar.
The two men's comms icons changed back to public mode a few minutes later.
'I'm going to take a look at the rest of the field-generators we planted,' Lamoureaux announced. 'Might be able to speed up the calibration if I double-check them.'
Ty frowned behind his visor. 'You could do that just as well from the bridge.'
'Well, since I'm out here, I might as well grab the opportunity,' Lamoureaux replied, trying so hard to sound casual that it aroused Ty's suspicions further.
Lamoureaux moved away from them, carried along the hull by the thin silver wires of his spacesuit's lanyard, and followed by a small retinue of spider-mechs.
'Ty,' Corso tapped the side of his helmet, 'switch to a private channel, please.'
With some reluctance, Ty switched to a one-on-one channel with Corso.
'I wanted to talk to you about Nancy, Ty. Word gets around.'
Ty opened his mouth and closed it. He almost blurted out a denial, then relented. 'It started long before we even got to Redstone. I-'
'Forget it,' said Corso. 'That doesn't matter. When I told you to stay away from the rest of the crew, I didn't know you were already involved with her.'
'Is she…?'
'She didn't make it, Ty. I'm sorry.'
Ty nodded inside his helmet, his throat suddenly tight. 'I see. There was never really any hope of recovery, was there?'
'No,' Corso admitted. 'But you have to make the attempt, anyway.'
Ty listened to the sound of his own breathing, close and loud within his helmet. Corso moved as if to turn away.
'Then there'll have to be a funeral service?' Ty asked.
Corso stopped and looked back at him. 'No, not yet, anyway.'
'Why not?' Ty demanded, scandalized.
'This isn't the time to be burying any more of our dead. Not when we're this close to our goal. The last thing the others need is to be reminded just how dangerous this job is. There's a real chance none of us is going to come back alive.'
'You have to hold a service,' Ty rasped. 'There was one for Olivarri.'
'That was different,' Corso snapped. 'He was murdered. Nancy's death is a direct result of our mission. We'll mark her passing properly, but not until this is over.'
'And is that what the others think, too?'
'I'm not here to debate the issue with you. I'm just telling you how it is.'
'Good of you to let me know,' Ty replied sarcastically.
'She had no idea who you really were, did she?'
'It wasn't the kind of thing that came up in conversation,' he replied, unable to keep the acid out of his voice.
'Ty, didn't it ever occur to you what you were actually doing by deceiving her like that? Did you really think I instructed you to stay away from the crew just to punish you? I've been deceiving people who would give their life for me, and for this mission, by not telling them who you really are. I wanted you to stay away because I didn't want to make that lie any bigger than it already is.'