Chapter Twenty-three
MEANS AND MOTIVES
CHRONOLOGICPATROLINTELLIGENCESHIP
BELLEBOYDXI
ENTERINGORBIT OFGLISTER
TheBelle Boyd XI cut her engines and settled down into a standard polar search orbit that sent her arcing high over the ice fields of Glister. Kalani Temblar stared eagerly out the command center’s starboard-side viewport, down onto the first extrasolar world she had ever seen.
A new world.This was why she had joined the Chronologic Patrol in the first place. It made all those endless days spent in her bullpen cubicle, and the endless hours spent in theBelle Boyd XI ’s cramped temporal confinement chamber with Burl, seem worthwhile. Almost. She glanced over at Burl, who was craning his neck to see out her viewport. There was nothing but stars to see from the viewport on his side—and they had both seen plenty of those on approach. A planet, though—even a dead ice planet—was something else.
Even from this high up, Glister seemed a cold and hard place. Glaciers, ice floes, bare rock and frozen rivers, shattered and forgotten cities, all painted the colors of cold and death. There was beauty in it, but nothing warm, or welcoming, or human. It was nature showing her most cruel and unforgiving aspect, shaking off humanity’s efforts to control her, setting her own course and her own way, away from the frantic pace of a living world, and back toward the slow, cold ways of rock and ice and wind.Glister is a warning, Kalani told herself. And yet she could not tear her eyes away. She had studied the case files. Koffield had studied Baskaw’s books on terraforming, so Kalani had done the same. And if Baskaw had it right, there, before her, was the future. All the worlds of humanity would look like that, or like Mars, or like something even worse. And there was nothing that could be done to stop it. The best they could hope for was to slow it down.
“All right,” said Kalani, turning away the mesmerizing view. “Let’s go after that debris.”
“Let’s do it,” Burl said agreeably, and reached for the controls.
TheBelle Boyd XI immediately ejected a remote-operations pod. The op-pod scooted away from the ship, boosting for another orbit, unfolding its four work arms as it traveled.
They had spotted a couple of interesting things on her run in toward the planet, the most interesting being what looked to the long-range sensor system like the debris cloud left by a near-miss nuclear attack on a large spacecraft. The op-pod had been sent off to examine the debris. The other item was an area with a remarkably high level of activity for a dead world. TheBelle Boyd XI carried the Chronologic Patrol’s best sensor systems, and the CP’s best were very good indeed. Those sensors were showing lots of infrared, lots of artificial light in use during local night, lots of air travel between two points about two hundred kilometers away from each other. It had to be DeSilvo—except itcouldn’t be DeSilvo, because he would have sensors good enough to spot theBelle Boyd XI ’s arrival and the sense to hide out from such a ship.
Therefore, it had to be some sort of diehard colony activity—except it couldn’t be, because no diehard colony would be able to afford the simple expenditure of that much sheerenergy.
Therefore, what the sensors were picking up could not exist. But it did.
Therefore, it was worth taking a very cautious look. Cautious, because the debris field in orbit made it seem likely that someone on the surface was touchy about visitors.
Kalani turned her attention back toward the planet—but in a more clinical and technical frame of mind.
Burl Chalmers cursed and pulled his hands away from the manipulator controls. He had never been much good at remote handling, and chasing ship debris that had been slapped around by a nuke didn’t seem to be doing much to improve his skill. He was still aboard theBelle Boyd XI, of course, but his mind was thousands of kilometers away, concentrating on what the op-pod’s cameras and sensors were showing him.
And what they were showing him, one widely separated piece at a time, was spinning junk. Not surprisingly, every bit of scrap was tumbling on three axes—Burl was just about ready to swear some of them were tumbling onfour axes.
Every fragment had, of course, assumed its own highly eccentric—in every sense of the term—orbit. The op-pod had had a hell of a time catching up with any of them—and most of them weren’t worth catching in the first place.
What they were after was identifiable debris. Something with a serial number, a batch number, a bulkhead stencil, or an embedded microcrystal pattern—something they could check in theBelle Boyd XI ’s ship registry database.
So far all he had found were bits and pieces of hull plating. But up ahead, tumbling like mad, was a real prize. It was a main engine, or at least a big piece of one. It would have any number of identifiable parts—if he could catch it.
The op-pod carried exactly one capture net in its tiny cargo hold. The net was in essence a weighted fishnet with rocket engines and a fast-thinking ArtInt. Capture nets were tricky as hell to use, but in theory one would do the job. It was a painstaking job to use the op-pod’s remote manipulator to unpack the net, unfold it, power it up, and aim it at the target. Burl nearly got the thing tangled up in itself a few times before he had it properly deployed, stretched flat in space, with the net’s sensor head positioned where it could see the engine. Then it was time to back the op-pod itself off to a respectful distance.
That accomplished, Burl stabbed a nervous finger down on the op-pod command panel. Several thousand kilometers away, the pod relayed the command to the capture net. The net fired its corner jets to put itself in a slow, stately spin, using the centripetal effect to hold itself flat. Then it fired its forward jets and started moving straight toward the wrecked and tumbling engine. The burn was very tidy, very accurate, but even so it set the fabric of the net rippling, the cables moving in a wavelike pattern. It looked like a giant spinning jellyfish, moving with unlikely purpose, right for the prey it intended to envelop.
Things moved very slowly after that, at least for a while, the net closing in at something like a half meter a second. If it went in any faster, there was a risk that the net would simply bounce off when it hit. There was something dreamlike about watching the slowly spinning, slowly moving net, its loose-knit cables still undulating very slightly as it edged closer and closer to the wildly tumbling engine.
Then, in the blink of an eye, the net touched the engine, and the action shifted from almost imperceptibly slow to fast, violent, hard. Suddenly the net was wrapped completely around the engine, and its thrusters were firing madly, so hard and so long Burl started to think that there had been some sort of major malfunction. But then the tumble rates started to slow, and the jets started to fire shorter, less frequent bursts. Sooner than Burl had thought possible, the engine, with the net wrapped around it, was floating motionless in space, all tumble rates at zero.
Now came the next step, and the next, and the next. Capture the engine with the op-pod, haul it back to theBelle Boyd XI ’s orbit, bring it aboard, disassemble it, analyze it, run any ID numbers or other identifying marks through the database.It’s a good thing they sent Intell people on this job, Burl told himself. The next zillion steps after examining the engine were going to be at least as painstaking as catching it.Regular combat types wouldn’t have the patience for it .
But then, just at the moment, he wasn’t sure he would, either.
Midday a few days later found them both in the wardroom of theBelle Boyd XI . “So,” Burl said as he shoveled in another forkful of lunch, “what have we got? Run it all down for me.”
“Well,” said Kalani, who had finished eating ten minutes before and been waiting since then for Burl to shift from small talk to business, “we launched our latest unmessage probe about two hours ago.”
“My goodness, that’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard,” Burl said in a flat, emotionless monotone. He sighed and shook his head. “Seems like such a damned waste of time sending back message pods with no messages in them.”
“No argument from me,” said Kalani. “If we’re not at the point of doing ourselves more harm then good with security features, we’re teetering right on the edge. Of course it doesn’t really matter yet. We don’t exactly have anything awe-inspiring to report—everythingelse is taking longer than it should.”
“Like hauling that engine here, for example.”
“I was coming to that. It took four days to do it, but the op-pod got that engine aboard. Metallurgic tests and radiation checks confirm it was caught by a near miss of a fusion weapon. Judging by damage to the engine, and how much it was thrown around, the best fit is a clean, low-yield weapon detonating about a kilometer from the ship. We backtracked the trajectories of the engine and the other debris to where and when they all intersect. It looks as if the strike took place about forty-five days ago. But.”
Burl looked up from his food. “But? There’s something you don’t like?”
“Lots of somethings—about the ship, and the groundside evidence too. But I’ll come to that. We had every document pertaining to theDP-IV in the Chrono Patrol archives lasergrammed to us while we were boosting out of the Solar System. The best we can say from the ship registry database is an engine with those markings was purchased by Felipe Marquez for use aboard theDom Pedro IV. There’s no documentation we have with us that says that engine was ever installed—and there’s no way to be sure the markings weren’t forged anyway.”
“You’re saying you think someone’s gone to the trouble of planting evidence outhere on the off chance we’d come looking for it?”
“That ‘someone’ would be Oskar DeSilvo. We’re still working on the assumption that he’s alive and well—and if so, hehad to know it was better than an off chance that we’d come looking, once Koffield pointed the way for us. And who else would have a better motive for deceiving us, or better resources for giving it a try?”
“Youare slightly paranoid.”
“Well, they’re out to getsomebody. I might as well assume it’s me. But all I’m really saying is that we can’t get too far ahead of the evidence. We have records—which come from public documents that anyone could get—saying a starship engine with such-and-such numbers on it was purchased for theDom Pedro IV. We have an engine that matches that description, that has wear and use patterns that would be more or less consistent with what we know about theDom Pedro IV . Wedon’t have sufficient evidence to let us say for sure that the engine we’ve taken aboard was installed in theDom Pedro IV a month and a half ago when that ship was destroyed by a nuclear weapon.”
“And I suppose if we retrieved every bit of that debris, you’d still say more or less the same thing, right?”
“Probably. But there’s other problems. There’s notenough debris. Granted, it was a nuke. Maybe it went off a lot closer and a lot of the ship just got vaporized. Maybe a lot of the debris reentered and burned up. Maybe some of it we haven’t spotted. But even taking all that into consideration, my gut—and my ArtInt’s analysis—say there’s just not enough junk in orbit. It bothers me.”
“Groundside?”
“That’s more straightforward,” Kalani said. “For starters, we can eavesdrop on the diehards chitchatting over the radio. Their conversation dates the impact there from just about the same time as we have for the in-space nuke, which apparently caused an EMP event down there. From the chatter, it seems the two events happened within minutes of each other—and the diehards have been scavenging the impact site ever since. From what they’re telling each other,gloating to each other about, they found enough gear to feed, clothe, and equip an army.”
“You’re not saying that DeSilvo has been planning amilitary strike, are you?”
“What? Oh, no. Not at all. Just a bad choice of words. They found enough stuff ‘for a lot of people.’ ”
“Okay. Justme being careful.” He shoved his plate away, and leaned back in his chair. “So. Paint me a picture. What does it all tell us?”
“What itseems to tell us is that theDom Pedro IV came blasting in here about a month and a half ago, bent on revenge, and fired some sort of kinetic-impact or conventional explosive weapon at Oskar DeSilvo’s fiendish secret headquarters. But, just before he was destroyed, the evil Dr. DeSilvo fired a nuclear missile at his attackers, and, even in death, had his last bloody revenge. The end. A nice, neat little melodrama. It might even be true. But it’svery neat, and it gives us exactly what we’d most like to find: proof that what we were looking for was here, and proof that it’s been destroyed, so we don’t have to worry anymore, or search anymore. Too neat, too pretty.”
“So we gotta check it out,” Burl said, nodding. “Okay. Though maybe I’m not so cynical. You’d have to go to a lot of trouble to fake something like this.”
“That’s almost the point. This isDeSilvo . It’s exactly what he would do. Heloves making things complicated, inventing puzzles. And we’re working on the assumption that he’s stolen half the Dark Museum, plus the forensic-accounting study showed that he must have diverted a hell of a lot of material from the Solace terraforming job. He’s got amazing resources.”
“Point taken—but it still seems like a lot of work just to fool little old you and me. Two other wrinkles, though. One: We haveno other clues as to where he might have gone if itis all a fake. Two: Even if itis all a fake, and it turns out itdoesn’t fool us, maybe that doesn’t matter.”
“Why wouldn’t it matter?” Kalani asked.
“If we’re reading this right, DeSilvo led Koffield here and had to know the odds were good that we’d follow. He wanted Koffield for a reason, some reason. To dosomething . Probably something wewon’t want done. And maybe he doesn’t need to fool us in order to make it happen. Maybe all he needs to do is slow us down.”
Kalani looked at him long and hard, thinking about how long the odds were, how high the stakes. “I think I’ll stick with slightly paranoid,” she said at last. “It’s a lot less scary than downright devious.”
“Maybe so. I can’t tell the difference anymore. Let’s get to work,” he said. “Let’s get down on the ground and check it all out.”
Kalani spent most of the next day trying to think it all through, make sure they didn’t miss anything.
The diehards were profiting tremendously from the incident, and there was no reason to assume they hadn’t been the ones who had launched the attacks in the first place. Besides, even if the diehardshadn’t done the attacking, that by no means meant they could be assumed to be peaceful or trustworthy. After all, diehards were not known for being kind and welcoming to strangers.
That being said, they had to make contact. The trick would be in doing so in a way that might lead to their getting some answers—if possible, without anyone getting killed.
She didn’t want to think about what she’d have to do if thatwasn’t possible.