Two bloodshot, docile eyes looked out at her from holes in the package smothering his face. “Who are you?” he datavised. There was no opening in the package for his mouth, only a ventlike aperture over his nose.
She datavised her identification code, then added: “Lieutenant Li Chang, CNIS. Hello, Captain, we received your notification code at the Navy Bureau.”
“Where the hell have you people been? I sent that code yesterday.”
“Sorry, sir, there’s been a system-wide security flap for the last two days. It’s kept us occupied. And your shipmates have been hanging around the ward. I judged it best that they didn’t encounter me.”
“Very smart. You know which ship I came in on?”
“Yes, sir, the Villeneuve’s Revenge . You made it back from Lalonde.”
“Just barely. I’ve compiled a report of our mission and what happened. It is vital you get this datapackage to Trafalgar. We’re not dealing with Laton, this is something else, something terrible.”
Li Chang had to order a neural nanonics nerve override to retain her impassive composure. After everything he’d been through to obtain this data . . . “Yes, sir; it’s possession. We received a warning flek from the Confederation Assembly three days ago.”
“You know?”
“Yes, sir, it appears the possessed left Lalonde before you got there, presumably on the Yaku. They’re starting to infiltrate other planets. It was Laton who alerted us to the danger.”
“Laton?”
“Yes, sir. He managed to block them on Atlantis, he warned the Edenists there before he kamikazed. The news companies are broadcasting the full story if you want to access it.”
“Oh, shit.” A muffled whimper was just audible from behind the package over his face. “Shit, shit, shit. This was all for nothing? I went through this for a story the news companies are shoving out? This?” An arm was raised a few centimetres from the mattress, shaking heavily as though the package coating were too burdensome to lift.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered.
His eyes were watering. The facial package sucked the salty liquid away with quiet efficiency. “There’s some information left in the report. Important information. Vacuum can defeat them. God, can it defeat them. The navy will need to know that.”
“Yes, sir, I’m sure they will.” Li Chang hated how shallow that sounded, but what else was there to say? “If you’d like to datavise the report to me I’ll include it on our next communiqué to Trafalgar.” She assigned the burst of encrypted data to a fresh memory cell.
“You’d better check my medical record,” Erick said. “And run a review on the team who operated on me. The surgeons are bound to realize I was hardwired for weapons implants.”
“I’ll get on to it. We have some assets in the hospital staff.”
“Good. Now for Heaven’s sake, tell the head of station I want taking off this bloody assignment. The next time I see André Duchamp’s face I’m going to smack his teeth so far down his throat he’ll be using them to eat through his arse. I want the asteroid’s prosecution office to formally charge the captain and crew of the Villeneuve’s Revenge with piracy and murder. I have the appropriate files, it’s all there, our attack on the Krystal Moon .”
“Sir, Captain Duchamp has some contacts of his own here, political ones. That’s how he circumvented the civil starflight quarantine to dock here. We could probably have him arrested, but whoever that contact is, they aren’t going to want the embarrassment of a trial. He’d probably be allowed to post bail, that’s if he doesn’t simply disappear quietly. Culey asteroid is really not the kind of place to bring that kind of charge against an independent trader. It’s one of the reasons so many of them use it, which is why CNIS has such a large station here.”
“You won’t arrest him? You won’t stop this madness? A fifteen-year-old girl was killed when we attacked that cargo ship. Fifteen!”
“I don’t recommend we arrest him here, sir, because he wouldn’t stay under arrest. If the service is to have any chance of nailing him, it ought to be done somewhere else.” There was no answer, no response. The only clue she had that Erick was still alive came from the slow-blinking coloured LEDs on the medical equipment. “Sir?”
“Yes. Okay, I want him so bad I can even wait to be sure. You don’t understand that people like him, ships like his, they’ve got to be stopped, and stopped utterly. We should fling every crew member from every independent trader down onto a penal planet, break the ships down for scrap and spare parts.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go away, Lieutenant. Make arrangements to have me shipped back to Trafalgar. I’ll do my convalescing there, thank you.”
“Sir . . . Yes, sir. I’ll relay the request. It might be some time before you can actually be transferred. As I said, there is a Confederation-wide quarantine order in effect. We could have you taken to a more private area and guarded.”
Again there was a long interval. Li Chang bore it stoically.
“No,” Erick datavised. “I will remain here. Duchamp is paying, perhaps my injuries along with the repairs his ship needs will be enough to bankrupt the bastard. I expect Culey’s authorities regard bad debts as a serious crime, after all that’s money which is at stake, not morality.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The first ship out of here, Lieutenant, I want to be on it.”
“I’ll set it up, sir. You can count on me.”
“Good. Go now.”
Feeling as guilty as she’d ever done in her life, she turned quickly and datavised the screen to open. One quick glance over her shoulder as she left—hoping to ease her conscience, hoping to see him relaxing into a peaceful sleep—showed his eyes were still open at the bottom of their green pits; a numbed angry stare, focused on nothing. Then the screen flowed shut.
Alkad Mzu exited the Nyiru traffic control sensor display as soon as the wormhole interstice closed. At fifty thousand kilometres there hadn’t been much of an optical-band return, the visualization was mostly graphics superimposed over enhanced pixel representations. But for all the lack of true visibility, there was no fooling them. Udat had departed.
She looked out through the observation lounge’s giant window which was set in the rock wall just above the asteroid’s docking ledge. A slender slice of stars were visible below the edge of the bulky non-rotational spaceport a kilometre and a half away. Narok itself drifted into view; seemingly smothered in white cloud, its albedo was sufficient to cast a frail radiance. Faint elongated shadows sprang up across the ledge, streaming away from the blackhawks and voidhawks perched on their docking pedestals. They tracked around over the smooth rock like a clock’s second hand. Alkad waited until Narok vanished below the sharp synthetic horizon. The swallow manoeuvre would be complete now. One more, and the resonance device she had secreted on board would be activated.
There wasn’t really any feeling of success, let alone happiness. A lone blackhawk and its greedy captain were hardly compensation for Garissa’s suffering, the genocide of an entire people. It was a start, though. If nothing else, internal proof that she still retained the ardent determination of thirty years ago when she had kissed Peter goodbye. “Au revoir , only,” he’d insisted. An insistence she’d willed herself to believe in.
Maybe the easy, simple heat of hatred had cooled over the decades. But the act remained, ninety-five million dead people dependent on her for some degree of justice. It wasn’t rational, she knew, this dreadful desire for revenge. But it was so sadly human. Sometimes she thought it was all she had left to prove her humanity with, a single monstrously flawed compulsion. Every other genuine emotion seemed to have disappeared while she was in Tranquillity, suppressed behind the need to behave normally. As normal as anyone whose home planet has been destroyed.