“Any other—buzz? On me, that is?”
“Lots of shit. Something about the Dutchman and that parked freak show up there, lots of other crap. Hey—where you goin’?”
“I think I have to have a little talk with somebody,” he replied. “It can’t wait. I’ll see you around.”
“Hey—you really gonna ride a keel?”
He felt a mixture of relief and irritation. “Probably not,” he responded.
Commander Tun He Park did not like to be roused out of n sound sleep, and he was in a pretty foul mood when he let Harker into his quarters. He instantly saw that he wasn’t in nearly as foul a mood as Harker himself, though. He instantly leaped to the wrong conclusion. “The ship’s filed a flight plan?”
“Not that I know of, Commander. But when it does, I’ll be the last to know. The whole damned ship, and, for all I know, the whole base will know first.”
“Huh?” Park took out a joystick and pressed it against his arm. In about a minute he’d be far more awake and alert. “What are you talking about?”
“Just had a go-round in the sim with Fenitucci. I got her, so she tracked me down in the club. Turns out just about everybody knows what I’m training for and at least as much detail as I do. You’re G-2 here. If everybody knows I’m supposed to ride the keel of the Odysseus when it moves out, do you suppose that the people on the Odysseus won’t know it, too?”
“It’s possible. Sticking around all this time is what does it. You can’t keep a secret worth a damn on a small port like this when they just sit out there and drop by the local bar every night or two. It was expected, although I don’t think they really believe anybody would actually do it. N’Gana wouldn’t do it, and he’s a first-order psycho. Of course, they’re being so all-fired conspicuous that I almost think they want you along. Or somebody from the Navy, anyway. Maybe as insurance against the Dutchman, maybe for their own reasons. If that’s the case, I expect that they’ll get you inside just before they inject. In the end, it doesn’t matter.”
Harker was incredulous. “Doesn’t matter! That’s my ass on the line out there! Nobody knows what it’ll be like, or what it’ll do, considering the effects on folks like us riding inside through a genhole.”
“Oh, the only problem is keeping you secured against the very strange forces that come into play in there,” the intelligence officer responded with the same casualness as before. “So long as the suit’s integrity holds, and this one’s been designed to do just that, there won’t be any difference to you if you’re inside or outside. Inside the suit, you’re inside, period. Don’t worry. We’ve spent a lot of time and lots of brains have been on this. We’re pretty sure we have it all right this time.”
He stared at the commander. “What do you mean, `this time’?”
“Well, it’s not exactly done all the time, nor does it need to be. We can usually use robots, after all.”
“Maybe you ought to use a robot this time, too,” Harker suggested. “What can I add?”
“On-the-spot evaluation, my boy! Don’t worry so much!” He paused a moment. “Say—you want to see what’s going on in there?”
“Huh?”
“Sure. Have a seat. It’s been a real battle of wits with Madame Krill in there, but even she doesn’t have everything we have. Come! Sit! Visual, security code A seven stroke three tilde bravo two level. Show digest.”
The wall opposite the utilitarian couch in the commander’s two-room quarters flickered on, and for the first time Harker saw the inside of the passenger quarters aboard the Odysseus. It was quite luxurious compared to Navy ships, more like a passenger liner for the very rich in its appointments and comforts. The view was from above and slowly proceeded down a corridor until it opened into a major lounge. Top of the line robotic bar, what looked like real fruit on the tables in tasteful bowls, very plush seating, and at the far end a screen and stage area.
“They have shows? Or does the old lady sing for them?”
Park chuckled. “Want to see the old bat? Visual—show us Anna Marie Sotoropolis, please.”
The scene jumped, and then settled. The scene was the same, only now there were people in there; it clearly had been a bit busier and had not yet been cleaned and freshened. There was only one person visible, a tiny figure sitting in the center relative to the screen and perhaps twenty percent back. She seemed to be listening to something, but there was not at the moment any audio.
“She does this a lot,” Park told Harker. “Sits there for hours and listens to recordings of her old opera gigs. Never visuals, never performances just audio. I think she really loves the music but she can’t stand to be re-minded of what she once looked like. You’ll see why in a moment. Ah—there!”
Even as somebody used to and victimized by the ravages of space, Gene Harker gasped at the sight. She was a mass of tumors, ugly, multicolored, hanging so densely in places they looked like bunches of grapes. The head was deeply scarred, and the face—the face was certainly human, but it looked like that of someone who’d been dead for quite some time, buried, and exhumed. The arms looked like a skeleton’s arms, just brittle purplish skin over clear bone. She was among the most repulsive sights he’d even seen, even on a battlefield.
“She’s built into the cozy,” Park told him. “The integration’s the best money can buy. How much of her is machine and how much isn’t it’s impossible to tell, but you got to figure that the horror you can see is all her. Skull and bones infected by pus bags. Makes you puke, huh? Little wonder she goes out only wrapped from head to whatever she uses for feet.”
Harker looked away in disgust. “She said she was over nine hundred years old.”
“Probably true. And probably she’s over two hundred and fifty chrono, which makes her one of the oldest living humans in either measure. You wonder why she hangs on, don’t you? She goes to mass every day, but she sure still hangs on.”
“And she doesn’t care if she’s seen like—that on board?”
“Oh, yeah, she cares. But it’s her ship, as it were. At least, she’s the ranking family member. When the others don’t need it, she goes in, shuts off all access, removes the stuff so that she can plug into a maintenance and rehab port built in under that place in the deck, and gets her blood changed, her organs checked or worse, her biomechanical parts regenerated as needed, and so on. When they’re close to that old, there’s usually so much biomachine in the brain you don’t even have a big personality any more, just a lot of data, but she’s still in there, somewhere. Otherwise she’d never bother listening to the old performances. She has them, after all, entirely recorded as data in her head. No, when she’s there, she’s eighteen or twenty again, on stage at some famous opera hall, singing the role of Carmen, or Desdemona, or whatever. Kind of sad, really.”
“Anything on the others?”
“Yeah. We have to deactivate these microprobes after a little while, which means completely deactivating, when Krill makes her sweeps, but we have plenty of spares. That’s the negative of sitting in one place so long when your opposition owns the dock, the communication lines, the service department, you name it. We can make ’em a lot faster than she can find and kill them. My techs play a little game with her much of the time. Her ego says she outsmarts us; our egos don’t come into play because we either get transmissions or we don’t. Visual—latest briefing, please.”
The scene changed again, less sad, more menacing. There was N’Gana, enormous and mean-looking, blacker than night and in combat fatigues that made him look like he was about to single-handedly overthrow a small planetary government. His aide, or batman as he was called in the services and by the former Ranger colonel, Alan Mogutu, looked far different—light and reflecting his half-Hamitic, half-East Indian heritage. Mogutu didn’t look at all imposing even in the same kind of fatigues, but he was a nasty fighter who stayed with N’Gana not only out of loyalty but because they were complementary parts of one mercenary machine.