“They’re just holos,” the third captain announced. With an obstinate certainty, Fattan said, “Holos. Projections. Someone’s little joke.”
But the AIs had checked their reality by a thousand lightspeed means, and following some secret, long-buried protocol, it was the machines that acted. The image swirled and stabilized again. The Master apeared, sitting up in her great bed. Dressed in a nightgown made from shaped light and airborne pearls, she looked exactly as Washen remembered, her skin golden and her hair a snowy white. But the hair was longer, and instead of being worn in a bun, it lay loose over the broad meaty shoulders. Preoccupied in ways that only a Ship’s Master can be, she had to pull her attentions out of a hundred tangled nexuses, then focus on her abrupt guests. Suddenly her bright brown eyes grew huge. In reflex, she touched her own nightgown, probably wondering about their crude, almost laughable imitations of the standard ship uniform. A look of wonder and amazement swept over the broad face, and just as a smile appeared, it collapsed into an instant and piercing fury.
“Where are you?” she snapped. “Where have you been?”
“Where you sent us.” The Submaster refused to say, “Madam.” Approaching the bed, her hands pulled into fists, she said, “We’ve been on that shit-world… on Marrow…!”
“Where?” the woman spat.
“Marrow,” the Submaster repeated. Then in exasperation, “What sort of ridiculous game are you playing with us?”
“I didn’t send you anywhere, Miocene…!”
In a dim, half-born way, Washen understood.
Miocene shook her head, asking, “Why keep our mission secret for this long?” Then in the next breath, she answered her own question. “You meant to imprison us. That’s what this was. The best of your captains, and you wanted to push us aside!”
Washen took Miocene by the arm.
“Wait,” she whispered. “No:
“The best of my captains? You?’ The giant woman gave a wild, cackling laugh.’My best captains just don’t vanish without warning. They don’t stay hidden for thousands of years, doing who-knows-what, in secret!’ She gasped, the gold of her face brightening. “Thousands of years,” she said, “and without so much as a whisper. And it took all of my genius and experience, and every last power at my disposal, to explain your disappearance and steer this ship away from panic!”
Miocene glanced at Washen, her expression astonished. Devastated. In a low, muttering voice, she said, “But if the Master didn’t—”
“Someone else did,” Washen replied.
“Security!’ the giant woman cried out. “Two ghosts are talking to me! Track them! Catch them! Bring them to me!”
Washen killed the link, buying them a moment.
The two ghosts found themselves standing inside the darkened booth, stunned and alone, trying to make sense out of the pure insanity.
“Who could have fooled us?” Asked Washen.
Then in her next breath, she knew how it could have been: someone with resources and access, and enormous ingenuity, would have sent orders in the Master’s name, bringing the captains together in the leech habitat. Then the same ingenious soul deceived them with a replica of the Master, sending them rushing down into the ship’s core.
“I could have done this,” Miocene confessed, thinking along the same seductive, paranoid lines. “Gathered the machinery and fooled all of you. If I’d wished. Assuming that I had known about Marrow, and if I had time, and some compelling reason.”
“But you didn’t, and you didn’t, and you didn’t,” Washen whispered.
“Who did?” Miocene wondered aloud.
They couldn’t answer that brutally simple question.
Washen asked the booth for the roster of Submasters and high-ranking captains. She was hunting for suspects, and maybe for a friendly name on which she could place her frail trust.
In a bitter, low voice, Miocene said, “My seat. Has been filled.”
But the name that leaped out at Washen—what made her legs weak and breath quicken—was the captain occupying her former office.
Pamir.
“Who?” Miocene rumbled.
But in the next instant, she remembered the name. The crime. And with a weak exasperation, the Submaster said, “This just isn’t our ship. It can’t be.”
Washen ordered the booth to contact Pamir. On an audio-only line, she warned who was calling. There was a pause, just long enough for Miocene to say, ‘Try another.’ But then Pamir’s original face emerged from the darkness. Strong and homely, the face smiled with a wild amazement. The reborn captain was standing inside his old quarters, surrounded by a meadow of singing llano-vibra plants. “Quiet,” he told his plants.
Washen and Miocene were standing in the same meadow. The man facing them was bare-chested, tall and powerful through the shoulders, and he was breathing like a sprinter, gasping when he spoke.
“You’re dead,” he managed. “A tragic mishap, they say”
“What about you?” Washen had to ask.
Pamir shrugged his shoulders as if embarrassed, then said, “What with the shortfall of talent, there was a general pardon—”
“I don’t want your story,” Miocene interrupted. “Listen. We have to explain… we need to tell you what happened…!”
But the meadow suddenly turned quiet, and the vegetation grew thin and pale, and Washen could see her own feet through the fading llano-vibra, Pamir’s fine face vanishing along with the rest of the scene.
Miocene asked, “What’s happening, booth?”
Again the booth was dark; it had nothing to say.
Washen eyed the Submaster, feeling a chill in her hard, hungry belly. The booth’s door was sealed, and dead. But the mechanical safeties operated, and with their shoulders they managed to shove the door open. Then together, in a shared motion, they stepped out into the waystation’s lounge.
A familiar figure stood in plain view, calmly and efficiently melting the resident AI with a soldier’s laser.
It was a machine, Washen realized. The machine was wearing a drab bone-white robe and nothing else. But if it were clothed in a mirrored uniform, with the proper epaulets on its shoulders and the proper voice and vocabulary and manners, then that mechanical device would have been indistinguishable from the Master Captain.
The AI’s mind lay in a puddle on the floor, boiling and dead, while an acrid steam rose up and made Washen cough.
Miocene coughed.
Then a third person cleared his throat in a quiet, amused fashion. The captains turned in the same motion and saw a dead man staring at them. He was wearing a tourist’s clothes and a simple disguise, and Washen hadn’t seen the man for centuries. But the way he stood there with his flesh quivering on his bones, and the way his gray eyes smiled straight at her heart… there was absolutely no doubt about his name.
“Diu,” Washen whispered.
Her lover and the father of her child lifted a small kinetic stunner.
Too late and much too slowly, Washen ran.
Then she was somewhere else, and her neck had been broken, and Diu’s face was hovering against the gray sky; eyes and the smiling mouth all laughing as he spoke, every word utterly incomprehensible.
Twenty-six
Washen closed her eyes, and her hearing returned. Another voice descended. “How did you find Marrow?” Miocene’s voice.
“Remember your mission briefing,” Diu replied. “But the telltale impact occurred in the early stages of the galactic voyage. Some curious data were gathered. But there were easier explanations, and your dear Master dismissed the idea of a hollow core. The data waited for me to find it. As you recall, I began as a wealthy passenger. With means and the time, I could afford to chase the unlikely and the insane.”