Easy to Be a God, page 6
“Perhaps it’s better this way,” he murmured. “I’ve got used to this fucked-up world and I’d rather not leave it right now, especially considering I’ve just become pretty rich.”
This time, she bent to pick up her shirt. She put it on and then reached for the panties, which were lying alongside. Nike was amused to see that they didn’t resemble regulation fleet underwear, not in the slightest.
“I don’t get you,” she said, fastening the top buttons of her shirt. “Do you prefer that machine?” she nodded toward the cabin phantomator.
“No, to tell you the truth I prefer real-live women,” he replied with a mysterious smile on his face. She would probably have been surprised to find out which model he usually loaded into the device. “Under different circumstances, at a different time, in a different place, it would be my pleasure—”
“Under different circumstances? Are you counting on your turtle dove waiting for you?” Being a woman, she struck where it would hurt most. But she didn’t hit the target. She was well wide.
“No, I’m not counting on that, actually,” he answered without a second thought. “I’m sure she doesn’t wake up by herself any longer. Who’d wait around for a garbage collector?”
“So why don’t you make the most of the chance to have a real adventure?” Strangely, she sounded honest.
Her nipples, however, may have gone erect from the cold of the nighttime cabin temperature.
“Because it’s a one-way ticket,” he said, resigned. “I’ve tasted forbidden fruit once already—”
“And did it teach you anything?” There was more sarcasm in the question than curiosity.
“Sure …” he said, nodding toward the door.
He didn’t watch her leave. The hiss of the sliding door told him he was alone. For a short while he sat in the same position he had frozen in for a better effect, then jumped down onto the cabin floor, went over to the door, and hesitantly placed his hand on the panel by the lock.
It was much brighter in the corridor and he had to squint. But anyway he saw her almost at once. She was standing right in front of him, hands on hips and a triumphant smile on her face.
“Our lord and master is drowning his sorrows after the loss of the treasure trove in such quantities of booze it would be very risky to light a match near him,” she whispered, lifting her right hand so he would see the lacy panties swinging on her index finger.
“Annata—” he began.
“Call me Smiley.”
Instead of a reply, he just pulled her unceremoniously into the cabin, closing her mouth with a kiss.
Nike opened his eyes and ran his hand over the bare sheet. There was no one beside him. No dent in the pillow, no warmth emanating from the material. He sniffed the air, but couldn’t smell the merest trace of a strange scent. The cabin was as sterile as ever.
“Hm …” he murmured, swinging his legs over the edge of the bunk. A hurried look around the small cabin betrayed nothing of Annataly’s recent visit.
He jumped down onto the floor and stretched. Holy shit! If only I could have such beautiful dreams every night, he thought, moving toward the sanitary facility and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Back to drab reality. There were letters, reports, and terabytes of pure shit about nothing still awaiting him in abundance. He activated the faucet and washed quickly, and then raised his eyes to the mirror to look once more at the gray face of a guy who had literally fucked up his life … Suddenly he smiled. The crimson print of full lips in the very center of the polished crystallite surface left no doubt about the events of the previous night.
“You little …” Muttering under his breath, he smudged the imprint of Annataly’s lips with a wet hand, and then wiped the shapeless smear off with a paper towel.
Morrisey might have never dropped by, but it was better to be safe than sorry, as Carre-Four used to say in the Academy. Christopherasmus was a total dick, but even he occasionally managed to say something smart.
Nike returned to his cabin after popping out for breakfast, collapsed onto his bunk and groped for the reader. When he was shoving the next mobile recorder into the device he noticed it was Major Visolay’s battered notebook. He twiddled with it, hesitating shortly, and then reached for the universal dock. For a second nothing happened; the notebook, which hadn’t been powered for over a hundred years, looked utterly inert. Not too surprising, thought Nike. The data stored on the crystals ought to have survived intact, but the electronics might have flipped after such a long time, even though it was standard military equipment, and supposedly indestructible …
Suddenly there was a soft buzzing and the 3D display lit up for a split second. But no image appeared. There was only a flash after which the device went blank again for a few long seconds. Nike watched in growing fascination as more lights on the casing lit up. Half a minute later, he had in front of him the slightly blurred image of a virtual keyboard and a box for entering a password. A century ago, 512-bit codes seemed unbreakable, but today any computer could unravel them in fifteen minutes. And the Nomad didn’t have just any old equipment, but the most efficient quantum monsters. Even the auxiliary core Nike was using cracked the old notebook’s security in less than thirty seconds.
Over thirty terabytes of data were stored on the device’s crystal. Most of them were archived messages sent by the major to his family and their replies. Nike ignored those files, as well as the countless photographs, and went straight to the memory segment where Visolay stored his text files. Only one piqued the cadet’s curiosity. Chiefly owing to the code used to protect it. Nike waited another twelve seconds for the old protection system to be removed. Then a folder labeled with a long sequence of digits appeared on the device’s holographic display. Nike found two files in it. One extremely small and the other almost a hundred times bigger.
He opened the short one first and whistled under his breath after scanning a few lines of text. It became apparent that Morrisey had been wrong; very wrong.
Nike closed the major’s file and froze with his finger hovering over the other icon. The moment of hesitation was short, though.
“Fuck Theta,” he muttered, dragging the file with the short name Forge into the screen’s field.
A few hours later, Nike stared at the last sentence of the major’s account in speechless disbelief. He might have expected anything of the long-dead officer, but definitely not the salvation from Dredd.
EIGHT
Theta turned out to be an irregular lump of rock with a mass twenty times smaller than Earth’s. It orbited its star at such a distance that it could only be seen as a spot against the constellations of the central part of the Galaxy’s arm with difficulty.
Morrisey, chewing constantly, looked at the planet through bloodshot eyes and listened to the reports as they came up. The probes, sent an hour earlier, should have been transmitting direct information from the libration point any time soon. Nike’s several days long research confirmed that the cluster in question had already existed when the colonists started to populate the V3A13 system. The data obtained from the only probe that had reached Theta orbit before the destruction of the transit station suggested the existence of a wreckage, similar in mass to the one in Delta’s Lagrangian point. A hundred years before, no one had been interested in analyzing these data, which at first had been treated as an indicator of just another asteroid field and then been lost in the terabytes of coming in information, and quite simply forgotten.
“I said it was a pure waste of time!” the captain interrupted after the first officer had barely begun his presentation of the available data. “In a few minutes you’ll see for yourselves that it’s some fucking lump of rock packed with iron ore.”
“I don’t think so,” Iarrey responded with his customary calm.
“Oh?” The amusement flickered across Morrisey’s face.
“I compared the data with similar results gathered from a few hundred asteroid belts, including those from the most high-yield mineral deposits we know—”
“And what did you discover, First Officer?” the captain asked, suddenly interested.
“The content of rare and heavy elements in this place is at least ten times higher than in the most concentrated deposits in open space, sir.”
Morrisey turned around. One might have concluded from his expression that even a hundredfold difference wouldn’t have made an impression on him.
“With all due respect, Mr. Iarrey, even if we’re really dealing with asteroids which consist of metallic ores in their purest form, there’s still too few of them. What company would build an entire mining infrastructure here for such a small amount of raw material?”
“I’m not saying that—”
“I’ve got visuals,” Annataly interrupted, plunging the bridge into darkness again.
First they saw a panorama of the entire L-point. The visual representation of the space surrounding them was filled with small, difficult to identify fragments circulating around the immense irregular shape, which resembled a tuber covered in patches of lichen rather than an asteroid.
“I still think it’s what’s left after some sort of collision,” Morrisey muttered. “Do a close-up of the edge. And now, Ann, choose one of the stones and maximize it.”
“Yes, sir.”
A second later, the cameras of several probes had homed in on the selected target.
“Up clone’s—” They all cursed simultaneously.
On the screen whirled a fragment of some kind of structure. There was no doubt. In spite of the horrible distortions, one could still distinguish several elements. Nature doesn’t create trusses, cables, or pipes inside rocks.
“Home in on something else,” the captain requested.
They looked at around a dozen other similar fragments. Only one of them was an ordinary piece of rock; all the others betrayed their artificial origins to a greater or lesser extent.
“Let’s find daddy,” Morrisey said, suddenly animated. “Let’s see who’s sitting in the middle of that spider’s web.”
The cameras switched to the next target at once. An immense irregular lump occupied the screens’ central fields. It revolved slowly around its vertical axis, in the same direction as all the particles surrounding it. After the general view they moved to close-ups of specific fragments—these, however, came as a disappointment. The object’s surface was uniform and resembled the skin of a prehistoric reptile. An unending sea of blisters covered every bit of the lump except for six bulging rings distributed evenly over the entire surface.
“Weird, but seemingly inert piece of rock,” stated Morrisey after seeing the next few identical images.
“I don’t think so …” Nike said, carefully examining the regular bubbles covering the irregular surface of the object.
“Be more specific, Mr. Stachursky!” The captain graced Nike with one of his habitual looks.
“Have any of you noticed even one impact crater on that … that thing?”
“He’s right!” Iarrey rushed to the control panel and began to enter some commands.
“What do you mean, he’s right?” The disorientated captain glanced at the screen to check what Heraclesteban was doing.
“I mean that in open space there’s only one kind of object that doesn’t have collision scars … and that’s ships protected with deflective field.”
“You’re wrong, Iarrey,” Morrisey said coldly.
“I’m not wrong, sir,” the first officer protested.
“Stars don’t have craters either.”
Annataly was the first to crack, bursting out in loud laughter. She was followed by Bourne, and a moment later, everyone joined in—including the astonished Iarrey.
“I beg your pardon, sir, you’re absolutely right, sir. There are two kinds of objects like that,” he admitted a moment later.
“Three …” Nike managed to utter that word, still laughing.
“What?”
“The effects of impacts aren’t visible on gas giants either. After some time, of course.”
“That’s enough of this yap!” Morrisey pointed at the object on the screen. “I want a full analysis of that shit, right now! If that rebel scum were capable of doing something like this, it can’t—”
“It’s not the work of separatists,” Annataly cut in.
“Who did it then?”
“If I’m not mistaken, Nike has found some data suggesting that the probes registered a cluster near Theta during the colonization of the system.”
“So who could have built something like that?” Morrisey laughed repulsively. “Not Aliens, for sure.”
“Why not?” Nike asked.
No one was able to answer that question sensibly. No one protested either; Father Pedroberto was already sleeping soundly in his cryo-cabin, probably dreaming about the riches he had acquired. The chaplain always ended up in the cooler right after praying for those who had passed on, and counting up the loot. He only made an exception when something interesting was happening. The expedition to Theta’s orbit was nothing special to him; he shared the captain’s opinion on that subject. And anyway: if something were to happen, Morrisey ought to wake him up. However, there was nothing to suggest that the captain intended to do that.
“Look at that, guys!” Iarrey shouted a few seconds later, pointing at the screen.
The close-up showed one of the domed growths adorning the lump’s entire surface. A small fragment of rock, or possibly a broken-off piece of the structure—it was difficult to judge precisely—unhurriedly drifted toward it. When it was still fifty yards away the dome suddenly brightened up a tiny bit and the intruder slowed sedately, coming to a halt, and then—as if repelled by a magnet—moved right toward the belt of similar objects.
NINE
“This was definitely not built by human hands,” said Iarrey six hours later, looking at a holographic model of the artifact. “The technology used to create that … that …”
“Let’s called it a station,” Bourne suggested.
“I don’t think it’s a station, Mr. Bourne,” the first officer argued. “More likely a classic FTL spaceship.”
“Where does your certainty come from?” Morrisey asked.
“It’s not certainty, but a conclusion based on the comparative analysis. I think what we’re looking at is an element of a larger vessel. It was the only survivor of a crash which must have taken place here around fifty thousand years ago.”
The captain whistled and leaned back in his chair.
“Fifty thousand years ago? Are you sure, First Officer?”
“Annataly and I checked it three times on each of the samples we’d taken. The results were similar each time, ranging from forty thousand nine hundred to fifty thousand fifty years. That’s standard error of measurement.”
“If I’ve understood correctly, you’re talking about that junk …” The captain waved an arm, putting his hand through the holographic image of the disc surrounding the artifact.
“According to our findings, a significant part of those remains belonged to the vessel we’re interested in. We spotted pieces whose appearance suggests they come from identical sheathing to this.” He pointed at the central element. “It was most probably an external propulsion module. In the lower part of the object, if we consider the surface around which the fragments are moving as a level plane, we’ve only found cavities and a whole lot of protruding and apparently melted elements. Similar technology was used in pioneer times of space conquest, before the discovery of FTL drive.”
Iarrey changed the holo. This time, the pear-shaped artifact was displayed horizontally, and a long grille extended from its narrower end, on which there was the dome of a huge engine.
“Of course it didn’t necessarily look like that, I used models similar to the ones known from our history; however, I think that it might have looked something like that. The main engines, reactors, and fuel tanks were separated from the main hull, that’s for sure. The radiation is too high for it to be an accident.”
“And what’s that cavity?” Morrisey asked, pointing at the place where the projected girders emerged from the hull.
“No idea.”
A silence fell. They all looked at the slowly revolving hologram.
“So … do we go in by ourselves, or report it first?” Bourne asked timidly.
“Go in?” repeated Iarrey, clearly astonished by the very idea. “What do you mean, go in?”
“Just like we do with every wreck,” the captain responded.
“It’s the first trace of an alien civilization we’ve ever come across, and you want to go right ahead and loot it?” the first officer dug his heels in.
“Who said anything about looting?” Morrisey bridled. “We just want to examine it thoroughly.”
“Yeah, right!”
“You know very well, Iarrey,” the captain continued, “that if we hand it over we’ll never find out what was inside. For the next hundred and fifty years information about the discovery will be more secret than the identities of the joint chiefs of staff. Our artifact will simply disappear, vanish into space. And you’ll be given the order to keep your mouth shut till you die, or else …”
His meaningful gesture left no doubt that High Command knew how to keep its secrets secret. “If I am to be muzzled for the rest of my life I want to know why, at least. I’d also like to have some sort of souvenir, evidence that we were the first people to discover a trace of an alien civilization.”
“Shall we vote?” Annataly decided to put an end to the debate.
“I’m in favor,” Bourne volunteered.
“Of going onboard, reporting the discovery, or voting?” Morrisey asked. “Could you express yourself clearly just this once?”
“I’m for going onboard,” the lieutenant stated.
“Me, too,” the navigator supported him without hesitation.
“Mr. Iarrey?” Morrisey looked at the first officer expectantly.
