She waved. The projection unit’s image slowly faded, until after twenty seconds Bey could see nothing but the ghostly glimmer of the kernel ruby. Finally that, too, was gone. The sleeping chamber was again in perfect darkness.
Bey was sweating hard, and his heart was pounding. He was filled with a mixture of excitement and amazement. Mary’s final words had been a grim joke—he would not sleep now, not for hours. He loosened the straps that had held him snugly in position and made his way across to the projection unit. It should hold a recorded copy of that whole message.
The recording storage was completely blank. Naturally. Bey was not even surprised anymore. After the Negentropic Man, after the projected images that were filling the Outer System, and Mary’s ability to leave a message for him wherever she apparently chose, no other anomaly of the communications system could be ruled out. It was all impossible.
But one impossibility throbbed in his head harder and harder the longer he thought about it. If Mary knew where he was, then perhaps she could find a way to send a message. But how, in a total region of space so large that the whole Inner System was no more than a dot at its center, had she known where he was?
She had known of his trip to the Sagdeyev space farm. She had learned of his return. She had tracked him to these quarters within a few hours of his arrival there. How? How did she know?
He would never get to sleep. Never, never, never, never, never. With that single word resounding in his head, he went drifting irresistibly toward the slumber of total exhaustion.
And it was in those final moments, swimming down toward new unconsciousness, that Bey had a first inkling as to how Mary knew what was happening so quickly. He tried to catch the thought, to study it; but it was too late.
He was asleep.
Chapter 17
Aybee had a problem. He wanted his captors to think he was from the space farm and not a representative of the Cloud’s central government. On the other hand, he could not afford to meet any other farmers. They would know at once that he was not one of them, and they would have no reason to hide that fact from the Podders. For the moment, at least, he seemed safe. There were plenty of Podders, easily recognized from their suits, visible near the lock of the cargo vessel, but he could see no sign of farmers.
Steered along by the woman behind him, Aybee went drifting on into the interior. From the outside, the ship had been an inert, lifeless hulk, a derelict abandoned in the early days of Cloud colonization. Within, the airless enclosure was filled with activity.
Aybee looked around with a professional eye. They had entered through one of the ship’s forward ports. The outer hull arched away from them, a great curved span of carbon fiber sheet with strengthening beams of hardened polymers. From the inside it seemed much more than six hundred meters wide. There was enough interior space for whole cities, complete with everything from food and power production to swimming pools and game fields. But there were signs that the ship was more than a simple colony.
The first giveaway was the bracing struts and massive electric cables. They ran through the whole interior, and there was no reason to have them unless the ship had to withstand acceleration. Aybee did a quick mental calculation and decided that the mechanical and electromagnetic stiffening was consistent with about a two-g thrust.
That at once told him something else. At two g’s, the ship was over a year’s run away from the Podders’ natural home in the Halo. There had to be some way of moving people and materials faster than that. Aybee looked again around the cluttered and dimly lit cargo shell and saw the expected equipment far away near the outer wall. A high-acceleration ship hung there, its McAndrew drive off. Its design suggested that it would allow up to three hundred g’s before the gravitational and inertial accelerations were in balance. Aybee studied that ship very closely. With it, the Marsden Harvester was only twenty-four hours away.
The second oddity was the presence of transparent internal partitions and numerous internal air locks. Cargo hulls were rarely pressurized, and the Podders had no interest in living within an atmosphere. Their suits were all the air supply they cared to have. So who wanted parts of the ship to be air-filled, and where were they?
Finally, there were the kernels. Aybee could see a dozen places where the local spherical structure implied housings for shielded kernels. That suggested a monstrous power demand. One kernel would be sufficient for normal operations of a volume this size, even if it were a full-scale colony ship. The alternative explanation, that the kernels were being used for some other purpose, made no sense without more data.
Aybee turned back to the woman behind him. Inside the ship, she had put her gun away. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Just keep going. You’ll find out in a few minutes.” She relented. “Don’t worry. We don’t kill people without a good reason.”
But we do kill people with a good reason? Aybee wondered what a good reason was. Trying to escape? Lying about one’s identity? Being a spy for the Outer System government?
They were entering a new section of the ship, passing through an interior lock into an enclosure with opaque walls. Aybee heard the hiss of air and looked questioningly at the woman.
She nodded. “Transition point. Here’s where I leave you. Get out of your suit and go through the inner lock.” She switched to some other transmission frequency, had a conversation that Aybee could not follow as he was removing his suit, and gestured him forward. “Move it unless you like to breathe vacuum. I’ll be exhausting this lock again in thirty seconds.”
Aybee had been worried when he took off his suit, because underneath it he was not dressed like any of the farmers he had seen. But apparently the Podders were no experts on space farm attire; certainly the woman did not give his clothes a second glance. He went on through.
A man and a woman were waiting for him on the other side of the lock, facing him across a curved table.
More mystery. Neither of them had the stunted form and compact build preferred by Podders or the elongated shape of a Cloudlander. Aybee was in about a twentieth of a g field, which suggested that the room had to be close to a kernel. Both the people in front of him appeared comfortable with that, which meant they were not likely to be from the Inner System.
The woman gestured him to a seat opposite her. She had black hair, black skin, and a wary look in her eye. “Leila tells us that you talk,” she said. “Good. That’s a nice change from your buddies.”
Aybee sat down, hunching low in the chair. “All right, so I know how to talk. What happens to me now?”
“That depends on you. I don’t suppose you know any physics?”
“I know a bit.” It was no time to act insulted.
The other two people looked at each other. By this time Aybee had decided what they were. They had the build of Inner System inhabitants but not the Sunhugger look. Both of them hailed from farther out, yet both of them were used to gravity. That meant the Kernel Ring, living in close proximity to shielded kernels.
“We’ll test that in a little while,” the man said. Aybee noticed that he was wearing a kernel ruby in his shoulder epaulet. “D’ you know math, too?”
“Some.” There was a fine line to be walked. Too much knowledge might be as dangerous as too little.
“Then if you know an adequate amount, you’ll have a choice. Either you can go to a Halo development project, a long way from here, and work with no one but a few of the other farmers and a lot of machines. That’s what all your friends will be doing, helping to build a new farm—the Halo is short of metals, too. Or if you’re really willing to work with people, we have a more interesting prospect to offer you.”