“I really think that we made one and only one big mistake back there,” Jerry Nagel commented over coffee in the Stanley’s cozy lounge.
Randi Queson looked up from examining her scientific notes and responded, “Yes?”
“I think we should have just brought the damned worm back. Keep it in the base unit, all sealed up, and then drop it on the first bank that shows up.”
She sighed. “And you think that just because it would absorb the bank that it wouldn’t foreclose anyway?”
“You’ve got a point. Too much alike to begin with, banks and worms.”
“Have you thought what you might do?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I’m an engineer without references at this point. Never had any big scores and now I’ve got a major blowout. Still, I’ll make do. The one thing that we’re always short of is people who know how to fix things. God! Who would have thought in the romantic days of interstellar colonies we’d be an economic basket case slowly breaking down? One of these days, or years, or decades, we won’t be able to fix it anymore. When the machines die and can no longer be fixed, people like me will still be around making do. Sark? He’s muscle. Even in the age of machines you need occasional muscle. He’ll make do as well, as somebody’s personal bodyguard or in some private army someplace. Lucky’ll wind up crop-dusting some dirtball, and people like An Li always seem to come out smelling like a rose sooner or later. What about you?”
She sighed. “Going over my notes here. I’ve got enough to keep them going in academia for a while here, from biology to philosophy. I’m the only known human being who ever had any sort of conversation with an alien intelligence, at least as far as we know. That should be good for a position in some minor department someplace, lecturing on the rights and wrongs of containment and whether or not it’s really true that you can’t have a dialogue with a unified intelligence. It’ll drive me nuts after a while, but it’ll be good for eating and sleeping money for a couple of years, anyway. At least it’s Li who’ll have to face the Kajanis, anyway. Better her than me, and she sure as hell deserves it. We’re just the hired help.”
Jerry Nagel nodded and looked up at the ship’s chronometer. “Well, it’s been nice working with you, anyway. It’s about two hours until we have to get out and walk.”
That wasn’t literally true, of course. In two hours they’d be in orbit, and then they’d have to wait until An Li went down and filed the official reports. The entire account of the mission would already be there by now, of course, downloaded as they’d come within range, but face-to-face reporting was the last of it. As team leader, Li would have to find them some kind of quarters and arrange for some sort of holding position until the crew could be taken to various civilized destinations. That wouldn’t take long; there were always ships, big and small, coming in and out of Sepuchus, shopping at one of the sector’s biggest salvage yards for whatever they needed.
The account would be part of the public record, as tradition dictated, so it would spread as well. That would both help and hurt them, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
“You know, I’ve got a virgin fifth of bourbon, really good aged stuff, private label, in my cabin,” she commented. “I was saving it for a little celebration when we got back and could total up the shares. Not much I can do about that now, but even coming back flat broke and a failure again it’s at least an occasion. Want to break a seal and have a few toasts?”
“Real alcoholic booze, huh? No funny pills, no virtual mindblasts, just good old-fashioned good-going-down-make-you-puke-later stuff? You know, you’re a real throwback, Doc.”
“Well, we may as well get used to it,” she responded. “Just in case this is an omen, the spare parts aren’t there anymore, and it’s sooner than we think, that time when you can’t fix things anymore…”
An Li was not a very happy person going down to the surface, nor was she much happier coming back. The chewing-out, screaming, cursing, and threats she expected; par for the course. The accusation that they’d failed to do the job because of cowardice was unacceptable. They’d seen the records and the data, the same that she’d looked at before okaying the abort. There was no way that those greenhouses could have been salvaged entirely by automation, and the loss of Achmed was proof that when you put people back into there, well, sooner or later they would be gotten. It was very easy to second-guess from afar, and long after the fact.
There were twenty-one vessels in orbit with the Stanley at the time she was getting her ass chewed. These included nine capital ships, three large military vessels, and several slick yachts clearly used to move purchasing agents to the wares they needed as quickly as possible, which meant that their employers were desperate and would pay through the nose.
The cost of repairs on the base and the consumables would be stiff, but she’d done the math, and they’d brought the ship and base back intact, when common sense had said to leave that base and smelter and disassembly unit behind. That loss might have broken the company, but not a simple failure to reclaim a site. She would almost wager that more than enough to cover the Stanley’s bills was being paid out just today by those various orbiting ships looking for vital parts to keep going.
Poison the ocean indeed! she sniffed, thinking of the exchange. Like that would have stopped them from becoming translucent units of a greater whole.
Well, she’d get the crew put up at Canyer’s Guild Hostel about a hundred kilometers south of here. That would at least have them out of Kajani territory, so any funds that might be dropped by or on behalf of the crew wouldn’t go back to those bastards.
What she needed was a room, a hot bath with real water, and maybe a few patches of squibs to send her into another and more pleasurable state of mind for a while. Canyer’s had mineral baths, and even if she would have to tap her private account for some privacy, it was available.
She looked around the place for the last time and sighed. We, too, are in the funeral business, she thought sourly. In this day and age, it’s everyone for themselves and if it takes grave robbing, then so be it. These days what was left of civilization maintained itself by robbing the failures of the past and by cannibalizing the rest. Eat. drink, and be merry, for tomorrow… Nobody thought much about tomorrow, herself included. Not in this day and age. No money, no job, you did what you had to do. She’d worked her way up to here from a start in a navy brothel, and she’d do it again if she had to.
Those Kajani bastards! Did they think she’d have let such a threat as that thing in the sea stop her from a profit even if it had cost the whole damned ground crew? She’d authorized the shutdown because it was impossible to salvage without even her becoming a part of that thing. “Dialogue is irrelevant.” What a stupid worm that was! It wasn’t enough to imitate, you had to learn from your victims. She’d have sold out the whole damned human race except for her own private places if that thing had been smart enough to make a deal.
And this would have been a hell of a great base for taking over the rest of the race, too. Everybody came here eventually, everybody who could. Three of the biggest salvage yards in the remnants of the empire were right here. Hell, that destroyer up there… How long would it take the worm to have taken every soul down to the rats and roaches on the damned thing? A few days? Less? And then it goes back and takes a planet destroyer, and the rest of the battle group, and there’s power. That’s what she would have done, but she didn’t have to spread her knowledge over countless cells. It was nice, compact, and in one place for easy correlation.