No journey through the ship, no matter how brief, lacked for oddities. Pamir described watching a pair of blue-necked ruffians copulating in plain view, and seeing a school of Hackaback squids that had gotten their rolling bubble caught in a shop’s doorway, and mentioned that while his priority cap-car approached the ship’s bridge, he had spotted a lone human male wearing nothing but a simple handwritten placard that declared:
The End Is Here!
Each interrogator recorded every oddity. Later, their staffs would rank these events by presumed importance, and where necessary, investigate.
It was a magnificent, spellbinding waste of minds and time.
The last hatch was opened, and Pamir stepped onto the station itself. And AI staffer glared at him through a rubber face, then with a jittery glee said, “Finally’ It turned all of itself but its face and shouted, “Follow me! At a run!”
Pamir sprinted the length of the station.
The ship’s administrative center was three kilometers long and half as wide, great arches of green olivine overhead, a webwork dangling from the ceiling, captains and their assistants, human and otherwise, clinging to their work stations, chattering in the station’s compressed dialect. They were talking about the missing captains. Pamir heard noise about this sweep and that sweep, all deep inside the ship. Security teams had just finished, and new sweeps were to commence, and when the humans paused to breathe, the AIs continued talking in their own cluttering tongues, manipulating oceans of warm data to find anything that could be confused for a useful pattern.
Ghosts make a pair of holocalls, and look at the mayhem it brings.
The rubber face inflated as they covered the last hundred meters, and the AI warned, “She wants honesty today. Nothing but.”
Normally, the Master didn’t approve of too much truth-telling. But Pamir took a deep breath, then said, “Don’t worry.”
“But that’s my job,” the AI replied, wounded now. “Worryis.”
They pulled up in front of the Master’s quarters. Pamir removed his cap and let his uniform straighten and clean itself of sweat and grime. Then after a calming gasp, he stepped up to the hyperfiber door, and it pulled open, exposing several dozen security generals—men and women cloaked in armored black uniforms, each of their professionally fierce faces regarding the newcomer with a mixture of mistrust and practiced disgust.
In their minds, Pamir would always be the traitor: the treacherous captain who had forced their Master into granting him a full pardon, complete with his old, much dishonored rank.
Towering over her generals, the Master stared in Pamir’s general direction, wide brown eyes seemingly lost. Then she closed her eyes and waved both arms, telling everyone else, “For now, there’s nothing. No one and nothing. But keep searching, and report everything immediately. Am I understood?”
“Yes, madam,” said thirty bowing faces.
In an instant, it was just the two of them, and a thousand hidden AIs, and a multitude of simple instinct machines.
The Master’s quarters were smaller than most. Even Pamir’s apartment seemed spacious by comparison. She required only half a hectare divided into a multitude of little rooms, each decorated with the blandest of living rugs and wall hangings of no artistic worth and potted jungles composed of standard terran species and the jungle-colored furnishings intended for nothing but the uninspired comfort of her visitors.
The Master dominated every room, which was the way she wanted it. She loomed over Pamir now, and from all the possible expressions to show him, she decided on a wide warm smile ending just short of flirtatious.
The smile took him by surprise.
Then a warm voice said, “Pamir,” with fondness.
But he hid his surprise, giving the customary bow and saying, “Madam,” while staring at her long, long feet, bare and fleshy-gold, and the snowy marble floor in which those same feet had worn soft ruts over the course of their voyage.
“How may I help you?” he inquired. Then again, “Madam.”
“I’ve studied your account of events,” she told him. “Excellent, thorough work. As usual. I’m sure you left nothing out.”
“Nothing.” He looked at her uniform, then at the reflection of his own puzzled face. “Have you found either of them, madam?”
“No.”
Would she tell him if she had?
“No,” she repeated, “and I’m beginning to believe that there’s nobody to find. At least not among my missing captains.”
He blinked, considering those words.
“So it wasn’t Washen who spoke to us…”
“It was, I suppose, someone’s idea of a wicked joke.” She wasn’t smiling at Pamir so much as she was smiling at that simple notion. It was a reassuring possibility, and in its contrived fashion, almost rational. “Holoprojections. Synthetic personalities. We’ve traced the source to a certain waystation that was destroyed moments later. Obviously in order to give this fiction even greater credibility.”
Pamir waited for a moment, then said, “You’re wrong. Madam.”
She watched him, waiting.
“I saw Washen,” he assured. “I recognized her, but she had definitely changed. The smokey-colored skin, and that crude uniform of hers—”
“I remember how about both of them looked. Yes, thank you.”
“Besides,” he continued, “why would any person, or alien, or whoever—”
“Fake her and Miocene’s reappearance?”
The Master was playing one of her games. What she believed was secondary to what she wanted from Pamir, and her wishes would be revealed only at her convenience. Or perhaps, never.
“An enemy could have managed this trick,” she offered, nodding with a sudden surety. “Someone who’s eager to make myself and my great office look like utter fools.”
Pamir said nothing.
“Authentic or not,” the Master continued, “these ghosts contacted only the two of us. I can see why I would be singled out. And you, of course. You’ve always claimed to have seen Washen after her disappearance. Haven’t you?”
He said, “Yes.”
Nothing else.
“That shit-world. Marrow,” the Master quoted. Pamir waited.
“Does that word have any significance to you?”
“Where blood is born. And that’s all it means to me.”
She gestured at a bank of AIs. “They’ve listed every known world with that name or some permutation. In alien tongues, typically. But none of our suspects are near us. Not now, and rarely in the past.”
“It’s an odd detail,” Pamir observed. “If you’re making a joke, that is.”
Now the Master decided to remain quiet; it was her turn to wait.
Pamir knew what she wanted. “I don’t know anything, madam. Seeing Washen and Miocene… it was a complete and total shock…”
“I believe you,” she replied, without conviction.
Then with a hard glare, she asked, “What do you believe? Based on your total ignorance, naturally”
With his heart pounding and an invisible hand to his throat, Pamir told her, “They were genuine, these ghosts were. And I think they’re still on the ship. Washen. Submaster Miocene. And presumably the other missing captains, too.”
“Each is free to his opinion.”
He bristled, secretly.
“Twice,” she said. “Once, and again. Twice.”
“Pardon me, madam?”
“I have taken my chances with you. Do you remember, Pamir?” The smile was wide and malevolent. “I nearly forgot the first time. But you remember it, don’t you? In the beginning, when the engineers uncovered your ruined carcass… they wanted to leave you in that state until you could be delivered to an appropriate prison facility…”
“Yes, madam.”