InterstellarNet- Enigma Page 19

  And still, Carl marveled, their progress remained halting. Joyce had yet to deduce the Intervener indexing principles. Many clues—the drift of continents, the literally glacial advance and retreat of ice ages, occasional views of night sky—permitted the rough dating of selected images. Whatever the aliens’ organizational scheme, it wasn’t chronological.

  With a start, Carl realized they had surfed image files for hours. These glimpses into Earth’s ancient past were hypnotic! Neither a techie nor an historian, he could not contribute a thing to the effort beyond alleviating the crowding.

  He exited the cramped enclosure, pacing to stretch his legs, looking around. Nothing caught his eye. The two front rooms were as sterile, as devoid of personal touches, as Grace DiMeara’s apartment on Earth. That did not mean he hadn’t overlooked something.

  Methodically he rechecked the rooms without finding as much as a scrap of paper, let alone another hidden compartment. When he sat back at the table for another go at the pocket comp, its encryption continued to mock him.

  Carl moved on to the rear corridor. Had the Interveners hidden anything but data back here? Would he spot it if they did? He stared for a while at one of the coffinlike things. In one rim of the person-sized cavity, about waist-high, was a cluster of finger-sized indentations that might be controls. If so, he had no idea how to operate them.

  Affixed to the top of the tall hollow was what could be a self-destruct device—an interpretation that might be only painful experience talking. In that device, what he took to be a status LED did not glow. If this was a bomb, it was not armed. He guessed.

  He started back up the long corridor, past rack after rack of Intervener electronics. No matter how primitive this computer was, it had to store a lot of data. Joyce continued to skim her trial download, a mere few gigabytes.

  He reentered the shielded enclosure. “How much data is in that back corridor?”

  Joyce frowned in concentration. “Best estimate? Fifteen petabytes. Of course I can’t say how much of that capacity has been put to use.”

  And they should copy it all. Carl netted, “We’d best change tactics. Stop looking and start downloading.”

  Joyce countered, “You might want to check out this first.”

  • • • •

  An image of this very room—with the back of a human-looking head. From the wavy, shoulder-length hair, a woman. The scene was in gray scale, so Carl could not discern hair color beyond dark. More of the cryptic alien script along the left edge. A label, logic suggested, maybe a timestamp, only they couldn’t read it.

  Damn! He netted, “We’re going to appear in the surveillance system.”

  Joyce replied, “Unless we can erase part of the record.”

  “A gap in the recordings will still show them that someone was here,” Joshua netted. “Whoever they are.”

  “Better that than they know who was here,” Carl answered. “And maybe they won’t find out till their next visit. But it could also be that we triggered an alarm and they’re on their way. Let’s get out with the data we have, not push our luck.”

  Joshua netted, “Carl, can you gather up our stuff? I watched Grandma get her trial download. I can copy more while you pack.” He paused. “I guess first I should print off more interfaces. Then I can be downloading data into all our comps in parallel.”

  “Tacitus and I will keep surfing till you’re ready,” Joyce netted. “If we find a way to cover our tracks, we’ll use it.”

  No one came looking for us after our first visit, Carl reassured himself, cramming instruments, hand tools, and empty meal wrappers into satchels and backpacks. Probably there had been no alarm, the first time or this. Any transmission from this hidden place would be a security hazard in its own right.

  Was he reduced to hoping for the best? That would be a hell of a thing. He continued packing.

  “Carl?” Joyce called aloud. “You need to see this!”

  Within the shielded enclosure, Joyce’s comp now projected a pressure-suited figure loping down the lava tube. The camera feed from inside the pitch-black tube had to be infrared, though it lacked the telltale greenish cast of human IR sensors. More Intervener high tech, Carl supposed. But the far bigger surprise was behind the helmet visor.

  That was—Grace DiMeara!

  “Shit!” Carl said with feeling.

  “You know her?”

  “She’s Corinne’s pilot.”

  “That’s not why we called you,” Tacitus netted. The perhaps-timestamp blinked along the image’s left edge. “You know these annotations? Time-sorting enough Earth images according to paleo models let me crack the annotation.”

  “Like separating year, month, and day fields within a date?” Carl guessed.

  “Something of that nature, although the slowest changing field must count something closer to millennia than to years. Having identified that field, reviewing values of lots of time-sorted Earth imagery, I was able to derive the Intervener numbering scheme. They count in octal, if you wondered. Once I could read one field, I could read all the fields.”

  “So when was this image taken?” Carl asked.

  “Unclear,” Tacitus netted. “We don’t yet know their time units. I tried to correlate the changing symbols and images with Earth’s day and year, without success. I can tell you a few things. The Earth observations are made on a sampling basis, not continuously, the sampling intervals getting shorter and shorter in modern times. Camera shots from inside this shelter are likewise bursty, but they aren’t regularly spaced samples.”

  “Triggered by motion sensors?” Carl asked.

  “It looks that way,” Joyce netted.

  “And this is the most recent visit, apart from ours?” Carl guessed. As much as he hated the notion of an Intervener agent lurking near Discovery—and Corinne—it would mean that no one had visited this base in months. If so, they could take their time snooping around.

  “No,” Tacitus netted. “It’s not even the most recent within this particular memory sample. It is a sequence you’ll want to see.”

  Grace’s still image came to life. As the viewpoint shifted from camera to camera, she let herself in through the air lock, stripped off her pressure suit, disarmed and opened the hidden panel. By the second her expression became ever more … blissful.

  It gave Carl the creeps.

  She hurried down the corridor, indifferent to the alien technology until, at the end of the passageway, she turned and knelt. From the alcove a warm, golden glow washed over her. Her lips moved, but the Agency lip-reading upgrade to Carl’s implant could make no sense of her speech.

  Whatever she said, she was … worshipful.

  The surveillance system, motion sensitive, took no notice of what she saw!

  Her devotions continued until—

  The golden radiance brightened. Grace tipped up her face into the light. Her already rapturous expression waxed beatific.

  The glow abruptly dimmed, and their perspective again shifted. They had a direct view into the alcove at the two coffinlike objects. Obscuring the cavity of the left-hand unit, a translucent field shimmered. An indistinct, man-tall shape tantalized through the luminosity. Atop the “coffin,” a red lamp shone. A bomb: armed. Then the lamp blinked off and the glow began to ebb.

  The right-hand unit must have begun the process somewhat earlier. In it, the last glimmers of light already ebbed. This vessel, too, held a figure. Its twitching had triggered the cameras.

  This alien, they could see.

  It had two upper limbs and two lower—and with that, any sense of the familiar ended. The alien had no head, its eyes and ears mounted on stalks that protruded from its shoulders. If shoulder was even the correct term: its arms and legs, like tapered tubes, without visible joints, appeared as boneless as an octopus’s tentacles. Each limb ended in a cluster of lesser tentacles.

  Apart from a broad, chest-high belt with many dangling pockets, the creature was naked (and if that body exhibited gender, Car
l missed the clues). Its torso was a leathery, platinum gray; its limbs, mottled in shading, ranged from taupe to charcoal. Its mouth(s) and nostril(s), if it had such, were not evident. Perhaps they hid beneath the waist-level, fluttering band of fringes. In overall effect, the alien was more medusoid than humanoid—and not of any InterstellarNet species.

  Stepping from the container—clearly, no coffin—the alien raised an “arm,” its “fingers” spread.

  Grace prostrated herself.

  Tacitus netted, “An Intervener, I presume.”

  CHAPTER 34

  “We should get moving,” Carl said. “Can you erase our visit from the surveillance system or not?”

  Her lips pursed, Joyce considered. “Maybe,” she finally allowed.

  “Decide. Every minute we stay risks us getting caught.”

  “I think so. That’s the best I can give you till I try.” She flung aside the door flap of the metal-mesh enclosure. “I’ll have to work in the back.”

  “Okay, you do that while I finish packing.” He had the enclosure’s cover off its framework and had begun to fold the latter sooner than she could shuffle to the back corridor. “And tell Joshua to hurry up.”

  A few minutes later, as Carl crammed the last of his gear into his backpack, he heard Joyce call, “I have the most recent surveillance video. Do you want to see it?”

  “Can you erase back to when we arrived?” Another complication occurred to him. “Oh, and can you deactivate surveillance for a half hour or so, give us time to clear out unnoticed?”

  “Yes, to both. I think. You ready for me to try?”

  “How are you coming, Joshua?”

  “Still copying.”

  “Why is this taking so long?” Carl asked.

  Joyce glanced up. “Not Josh’s fault. The Intervener equipment barely creeps along at one gigahertz.”

  “Ten more minutes,” Carl said. “We’re already pushing our luck.”

  He set down his backpack. Other than odds and ends, their gear, including Tacitus’ server, was packed and in an untidy heap by the air lock. Apart from getting into pressure suits, Carl saw nothing more to do.

  He returned to the back corridor. Joyce sat on the floor, a pocket comp on her lap. A cable with a bulge near one end, like a snake digesting a mouse, drooped from a rack of Intervener electronics to her comp. The holo projecting from the comp showed Carl approaching. He waved. His likeness waved back.

  She had tapped into the real-time feed.

  He said, “Why don’t you hold off till Joshua finishes before you try erasing? Whatever you’re going to do might interfere with his downloading.”

  “Okay.”

  She sat waiting, looking weary, her fingers interlaced. Joshua stood, watching a pocket comp of his own, still copying. Carl stood, watching them.

  In Joyce’s holo, the motion-sensitive surveillance feed cut to an exterior camera.

  Her face unmistakable through a helmet visor, Helena Strauss was bounding down the lava tube.

  • • • •

  For a moment Carl dared to hope the UPIA was after him. The Agency, when they could, took prisoners. The possibility this was an official op faded as he realized Helena was alone.

  That clinched it: she was an Intervener mole—and people who as much as speculated about historical anomalies tended to get killed. How would an Intervener operative take to intruders in their secret facility?

  Not well.

  “What now?” Joyce asked.

  Good question. Bluff? Try to talk their way out of this? That could get them all killed. Take on Helena as she came through the air lock? He’d have the element of surprise. But she was born to this gravity, likely combat trained, and many years his junior. The only training he’d done in, well, ages had anticipated fighting meter-tall Snakes in Ariel’s pathetic gravity.

  Suppose he somehow prevailed? Then they would learn the hard way whether, like Banak, she had a cranial bomb.

  Which left what? The air lock offered the only way out.

  In the holo, Helena skidded to a halt. She peered down at something off-camera—some bit of detritus or a boot scuff left by one of them?—then whipped a handgun from her holster.

  So much for the element of surprise.

  The first thing through the air lock was apt to be a flash-bang grenade. That’s what he would do. They would be helpless when she followed.

  “Joshua!” Carl called. “Stop whatever you’re doing. Help me shift everything into the back corridor. We’ve got maybe four minutes till company arrives. Joyce, erase our digital tracks now.”

  On Carl’s third trip—pressure suit draped over one arm and helmet in hand; Tacitus’ server dangling from his other hand—the world lurched. Suddenly, he weighed a ton!

  No, he weighed about what he would on Earth. Either way, the Interveners had some sort of artificial gravity! Somehow he made it across the threshold into the back corridor without dropping anything, set down his load, and latched the panel/door behind him.

  “Sorry.” Joyce, wide-eyed, sagged from the unaccustomed weight. “I must have done that, erased beyond the end of the memory buffer, clobbered some program.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Carl said. He had more immediate problems. Her diddling with the computer had also killed the surveillance feed.

  Helena wouldn’t know whether the intruders had come and gone. When she arrived, though, she couldn’t help but notice the high gravity. Loonie that she was, she would not have turned it up for herself.

  Still, they knew Grace had had access to this place. It was possible Helena wouldn’t question finding the gravity left at Earth’s level.

  Uh-huh. And how possible was it Helena wouldn’t check here in the back?

  “Suit up,” Carl ordered. Just maybe, he had a useful idea. Taking Joshua by the arm, he strode to the far end of the corridor. Together they dragged one of the coffinlike devices from its alcove, taking up the bit of slack in its cables, and turned it to face into the passageway.

  Faintly, through the closed panel, Carl heard the cycling of the air lock. “To the front of the corridor,” he whispered. “Then down flat on the floor.”

  Carl crouched behind the mound of their gear. Even from mid-corridor the shot would be challenging, but he did not dare try from any nearer. How far had he been from Banak’s coffin when it went off? He had to hit the detonator. Maybe—it all depended on the explosive—the bullet’s impact would trigger a blast.

  And maybe they were screwed.

  Taking a deep breath, Carl aimed. The red dot of the handgun’s laser designator lit his target. He fired.

  The end of the corridor vanished in a fireball, smoke and flames sucked backward and out. The gale tugged at him even as the earsplitting roar faded. And something fiery punched into his arm!

  “Run!” he net-texted. His ears, and doubtless theirs, were ringing. He took a moment to slap a patch over the dime-sized, blood-soaked rent in his suit sleeve. “Out through the back.”

  Joshua grabbed Tacitus with one hand, half guided, half carried Joyce with the other. Carl helped them scramble over rubble through the hole he had blasted. Then he was through, into the lava tube, air whistling from some lesser puncture to his pressure suit. Joshua and Joyce were a few steps ahead.

  When the next explosion came, Carl sensed the tremor through his boot soles more than heard anything through the wisps of escaping air or with his still-ringing ears. That had it be Helena blasting open the hinged panel, rendered immovable by the outer room’s air pressure.

  Perhaps ten meters into the lava tube, Carl went soaring. Sparks erupted from the tunnel floor where, absent the abrupt restoration of lunar gravity, he would have been. Helena, shooting at him.

  He was helpless, a floating duck, until he landed. The next shot would kill him.

  There was no next shot.

  When, at last, he settled to the ground, he saw that the lava-tube roof behind them had collapsed.

  • • •
•

  The lava tube ran straight, intact and unobstructed, all the way to where they had hidden their ship. Wearily, they climbed aboard.

  Taking a deep, calming breath, willing his hands not to tremble, Carl settled into the pilot’s seat.

  “Where to?” Joshua asked.

  “Hold that thought,” Carl said. “Meanwhile, buckle up.”

  With a bit of altitude, it was obvious. For at least a hundred meters the lava-tube roof, twenty-five meters thick, had come crashing down. The Intervener base was buried, if not crushed.

  Helena Strauss would not be walking out of that.

  Carl turned their ship toward Tycho City. “Let’s take you two home.”

  CHAPTER 35

  “Thanks for coming by,” Agent McBride said.

  Coming by did not begin to describe a no-notice recall to Earth and Agency headquarters, but Carl let the euphemism slide. Rather than a mirrored wall, this room—situated on an upper floor, not the dungeon level of his previous visit—offered two cubist oil paintings, a teak sideboard on spindly legs, and a small refrigerator. He settled deep into the lone hydraulic-assist chair, relieved to have it. He hadn’t been offered such amenities at their previous encounter.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” McBride continued. “Water? Coffee? Juice?”

  Carl said, “What can I do for you, Agent?”

  “The Agency is concluding the inquest into Danica Chidambaram’s death. To be thorough, do you have anything to add or amend regarding your previous statement?”

  “No.” It was an answer Carl could as readily have given from the Moon.

  “I see.” McBride pushed away from the table. “Well, then, I guess that wraps things up.”

  That’s it? “And?”

  For an instant of déjà vu, as the door began to swing open, Carl expected Helena Strauss. Rather than the most recent dead woman to weigh on Carl’s conscience, the cocky, charismatic figure striding through the door was a man Carl had never met but knew on sight.

  Richard Lewis Agnelli: the long-time director of the UPIA.

  “No, sit,” Agnelli commanded, as Carl struggled to rise from his chair. “You just got here. As for the deaths on Ariel, consider that unfortunate matter closed. You have a provisional reinstatement. How does that sound?”