The New Space Opera 2 (66 page)

“There are very few true disappearances in human history, these days,” Hyperion said after a moment when they both cast about in search of a direction. It moved closer to one of the markers and read the tags left there. “And this is not an unusual place, like those twisty spaces close to black holes for example. It is just a planet with a regular geology. The common assumption about this team's fate is that they absconded with the help of the Nikkal. From there, a number of possible avenues continue, most leading to the far system frontiers, where they were able to drop off the networks.”

Bishop licked his lips, already starting to crack. The news was full of the asteroid bayous beyond the sphere of Earth's police influence and the renegade technology that festered there, unregulated. There was a lot of Unity activity. A lot of illegal, unethical, criminal work. “She had no reason to go.”

“Perhaps not, but if the rest of them wanted to go they could hardly leave her behind. What would be easier for you, Mr. Bishop, to have her forcibly made into one of the Frontiersmen, or to have her dead here somewhere?”

How odd, he thought, that the 'jack had no trouble voicing what inhabited his own awareness as a black hum beyond reckoning. Hearing the words aloud was startling, but it diminished the power of the awful feelings that gripped him inside.

“Let's start looking,” Bishop said, standing still. All around them, their small dip radiated gullies that twisted and wound. The sun was beginning to go down and the high rocky outcrops cast sharp-edged purple shadows.

Hyperion was exacting, its research both instantaneous and meticulous in a way that made Bishop simply envious. “The marker, as the police report indicates, says they started southwest with a view to making a loop trail back here within a six-hour period, the route is marked in the statutory map.” The shaman sniffed and the nosebag huffed. “All the searches have concentrated on following this route and found a scatter of personal belongings and the remains of a Finger of the Terraform, which was car
rying the survey equipment. All of that was recovered intact.” It held the two wind-beaten Tags in its paw and rubbed them for a short time, thoughtfully. “But they did not go that way. Only the Finger took the trail.”

“How do you know?”

Hyperion turned. “I can see it. I think it is time I showed you.” It came across to him and held out one large, scaly arm. “Please, your screen viewer. I will adapt it to show some of the details I can see over its normal camera range. This will not be what
I
see, you understand, as I don't see it with my eyes. But it is the best I can do for you.”

Reluctantly, Bishop handed over the precious viewer. It was his recorder too. His everything. “Don't mess up the record settings. It's on now.”

The Greenjack inclined its head politely and slid one of its broad, claw-like nails into one of the old-style input ports. Bishop felt a chill. He'd never get used to how capable the Forged were with technology. They could interface directly with any machine.

“The signals I use to communicate with the device will cause some interference with my tracking,” Hyperion said calmly. “So I will not use it all the time. If you see nothing, you may assume I am watching and listening. I will also shut the device down if its working interferes with the process, and I may ask you to move away at times.” It handed the screen back, and Bishop checked it, panning it around in front of him. The camera showed whatever he pointed it at, recording diligently; it was really just like holding a picture frame up over the landscape. “I don't see anything.”

“Look at the markers and the route.”

He turned. From the tag line, he could now see a strange kind of coloration in the air, like points of deep shade. They were small. It was really almost like broken pixelization.

“That is the pattern left by the output of the Finger's microreactor projecting microbursts of decaying particles into the energy field. Radiation containment is generally good these days, so this is all you can find. It is also in the standard police procedurals. They mistakenly assumed it confirmed that all the travelers took the same path, since the Finger was carrying all the technical equipment and the others had only their masks and gas, their personal refreshments and devices. I would say it is certain that they
intended
to disappear here, as in fact all their individual communications gear has been accounted for along the Finger's trail.”

Like a path cut with three-dimensional leaf shadows, the trail wound into the first gully, followed the obvious way along it, and vanished around the first turn.

“We can follow that and verify there was no other person with the Finger if you like,” the shaman suggested.

“Parts of a Forged internal device unit were found,” Bishop said, brain clicking in at last.

Hyperion shrugged.

“Or?” Bishop started to pan around. He soon found patches and bursts of odd color washes everywhere, as if his screen were subject to a random painting class.

“Or we can follow the others and find out what they did, starting here.”

“What is all this?”

“This is energy field debris.”

As he moved around, Bishop could see that there was a huge glut of the stuff where they were, but traces of it were everywhere in fact, even in the distance. “Why so much of it?”

“There was a lot of activity here. The rest is down to regular cosmic interference, or perhaps…I am not actually sure what all of it is. The energy fields transect time and space, but they are linked to it, so while some of this is attached to the planet's energy sphere, some of it, as you see, is moving.”

Streaks shot across the screen. A readout indicated that he was not seeing them in real time, as that would have been too fast for him to notice. The simulation and the reality overlay each other on the image, however, and the difference there was undetectable.

“I believe that the streaks are bonded to the spatial field, and that they are therefore stationary relative to absolute coordinates in space—thus as Mars traverses, so these things pass through.” The creature cocked its head, a model of intellectual speculation.

Bishop relaxed his tired arms so that the screen pointed at the ground, saw the streaks shooting through his feet. “Through us?”

Hyperion nodded. “As with much cosmic ray debris. It moves too fast for me to say anything about it. I would need to move out into deep space and be on a relatively static vessel, in order to discover more about them.”

“No such ship exists.” Bishop snorted. “Well, only…”

“Yes, only a Unity ship perhaps,” the shaman said. “I shall ask for one soon.”

They shared a moment of silence in which the subject of Unity, the newly discovered alien technology, rose and passed without further comment. Bishop would have loved to go into it at any other time. The surge of hysteria it had engendered had almost died down nowadays, with it being limited to off-world use, restricted use, or use far enough away from Earth and her concerns that it wasn't important to most humans, whatever strange features it possessed. FTL drives, or whatever they were, were only the half of it. It was under review. He'd seen some of the evidence. Now he let it go, and lifted the screen again. If Tabitha had gone on one of those ships, she could be anywhere. It would take years to get into Forged Space by ordinary means. Even an Ironhorse Accelerator couldn't go faster. She could have been there since the day it happened, almost a year ago. “This is just a mess.”

“No,” Hyperion said. It lowered his head and sniffed again, a hellish kind of hound. “There were four individuals here, all human, and one Forged, Wayfarer Jackalope McKnight.”

“Bread Zee Davis, Bancroft Wan, Kialee Yang…” Bishop said, the names so often in his mind that they came off his tongue like an old catechism.

“…and Tabitha Bishop.”

“I am sure which is the Forged,” Hyperion said, “but the humans are harder to label. They are distinct, however.”

“They'd worked together almost a year,” Bishop said, wishing he'd kept his silence, but it was leaking. “No trouble. She sent me a postcard.”

“May I see it?”

He hesitated, then fiddled the controls and handed over the screen. It had been shown so often during the inquest that he knew every millimeter of it better than he knew the lines in his own hand.

The object was small, almost really postcard-size in the Greenjack's heavy paw. “Kialee is the Han girl, I am guessing.”

“And Wan is the one with the black Mohawk. Davis is the wannabe soldier in all that ex-military stuff.” He knew every detail of that postcard. What most mystified him about it was how friendly they all seemed, how relaxed, the girls leaning on each other, the guys making silly faces, beer in hand; around them, the dull red of the tenting, and, in the background, a portable generator and a jumble of oxygen tanks. It could have been a snap of two couples on holiday, and not of students on work assignment. He wasn't sure if they'd been dating, or if dating was a concept that had gone out with dinosaurs like him.

The Greenjack was stock-still. It looked intently and then handed back the screen. “Thank you. In that case, I can now say that there was a struggle here. Bishop and Yang are surprised, but Davis and Wan are both agitated throughout. Only McKnight is calm.”

“He was new. Newish. Their old Wayfarer went to another job.”

The colors illumined as the shaman talked, showing Bishop warped fields of light that were as abstract as any randomly generated image. “McKnight and the men remain close together. There is a conflict with the women. There is a struggle; I think at this point the women are forced to give up their personal devices to Terraform Raven's Finger. I believe they are tied, at least at the hands. McKnight is armed with explosive charges for the survey. But he's also more than big enough to overpower and threaten them. I guess this is what happened. Davis and Wan dislike the events a great deal but they are willing participants. That's what I see. Then there's another argument, here, the men and McKnight. It's brief. Blood and flesh scraps from McKnight are found near here.”

Bishop saw the oddest nebula of grays, streaked with black and bright red. “There was some kind of struggle…the Wayfarer was defending…” But the gargoyle shaman was shaking its head.

“He cuts out his own external comms unit,” Hyperion said precisely. “In the Wayfarer, this is located at the back of the skull and embedded in the surface beneath a minor chitinous plate. To remove it would be painful and messy, but it is perfectly possible and certainly not lethal. But all communication is cut before this, so there is no official account of how it was removed. The only person who can account for that is Raven, and she claims that there was a local network dropout. I would have to question her directly to be sure of her account.” The implication was stark.

The air, already bitter, felt suddenly colder. “So Davis and Wan made him do it?”

“I cannot say for certain. But he does it. Any other method risks it being hijacked by signals that would give away his position. He's hidden it somewhere around here, I'd bet. Or given it to the Finger, who lost it in the gullies way before it signaled a breakdown. We should look for it. Then they leave.” Hyperion pointed northwest. “That way.”

Bishop thought of the evidence of the Finger's call. Raven's voice said, “They've gone. Just gone.” And with that phrase, she'd ushered in an entire cult of people convinced that Mars harbored ghosts, or aliens, or fiends. As if their numbers needed adding to! But Bishop couldn't keep up his anger. The pictures continued.

There was a faint coloration, like a long tunnel or a tube made of the faintest streaks of yellow, gray, and ashy-white. It was almost pretty against the deepening red of the Martian afternoon. The tunnel down which Tabitha had vanished. So the shaman said.

“I hardly know anything about these people,” Bishop protested with distress. He didn't understand how the creature drew its conclusions.

“It is all right, Mr. Bishop,” the shaman said calmly, setting off in this new direction. “I know everything about them that I need to know.”

For the first time in the time that he could remember lately, Mark Bishop had enough energy to hurry in the Greenjack's wake. “But how? Just from some picture?”

“Yes.”

“But you can't tell anything just from a picture!”

“You can tell everything from a single look. For instance, I know that you, Mr. Bishop, had it in mind that if you found me a fraud here, you might use your gun to shoot me dead. And then yourself. We would be a memorial in this unpleasant spot, the monument of your surrender to despair and your inability to remain rational in the face of my abominable supernatural exploitation of both your grief and reputation.” It continued walking steadily.

Bishop had no answer to that. He'd never verbalized or reified that intent, but he couldn't entirely dismiss it. His gun was in his holster pocket. Everyone had them. He couldn't say that the thought hadn't been his secondary insurance. That and the recorder, of course. It would have told the sad tale to those who came to find out what happened. The notion had been discarded a long time before they even landed though, he realized, and now the recorder was instead preserving this vision of Hyperion's skinny ass slowly wandering along a trackless gully through soft dirt and Bishop's labored breathing.

“Anyone can see these things,” Hyperion mumbled as it went. “But they don't know how to tune in, to refine and translate and
know
them.”

“Don't start on the psychic stuff.” What the hell had those boys and that monster done with his little girl? “Tell me about Wan.”

“Bancroft. He is idealistic, practical, yet ordinary. Bread is determined, focused, and he has been somehow thwarted in the past, which has made him bitter, though he hides this with great charm. McKnight is an entrepreneur, comfortable with criminal ways.”