Transference Station (8 page)

Zeno pointed to a train sliding in on the rails carrying a fresh batch of containers. ‘Those are some of the replacement components for the ship the skipper’s brought using Dollar-sign’s deposit money. We’ll check them next. I don’t want to install a single part that hasn’t been scanned.’

Calder looked where he was pointing. ‘But the crates have come from the system’s ship yard, not DSD?’

‘And if DSD wanted to sneak something on board the ship, that would be the way he’d do it. Bribe some mope to slip contraband inside an engine part.’

Zeno bent down to examine the readout on a robot he had wired into a twenty foot-long ceramic tube. Calder looked over his shoulder. Its contents were listed as disassembler nano – a dark inactive gloop that when fired into life would tunnel through rock like a laser knife through cheese. Calder had done enough sim cop shows to know that this was one part of the cargo that warranted heavy checking. The molecular level machines could be programmed to do almost anything, become almost anything. If DSD was planning something unsubtle, the programming instructions for this nanotechnology was where they would find it.

‘Find something suspicious?’ asked Calder.

‘Nope. Exactly what it says on the tin, a mining virus. Powerful enough to level a mountain range. To go along with all the jungle clearance equipment, diggers, excavation tools, food packs and water purification gear.’

‘Kid, I was alive when mankind made its first extra-solar landing on Alpha Centauri. I was watching on TV when mankind establish first contact with a kaggen ship. And in all that time, across all the centuries, I haven’t once seen someone like DSD change his spots. If Lana wants to believe a crook like Dollar-sign is moving into honest endeavours, then it’s because she needs to believe. Because our future is at stake. Me, I’ll just keep checking crates until I find the hidden weaponized plague that carries a death sentence for us on four out of five worlds inside the Edge.’

A small robot swung up to Zeno, running across the deck like a unicycle on a single ball. He reached down and tapped it affectionately, listening to the wireless burst of data being transmitted. ‘There we go,’ said the android. ‘That’s what I was hoping for.’

‘You’ve discovered a crate of nukes?’

‘Nope, your most noble highness. I’ve scored me a capsule with an atmospheric sample from the world we’re travelling to. The professor is shipping it back; along with the full spectral analysis she’s paid a very exclusive laboratory in the alliance to run for her. Extra analysis to confirm her in-situ findings.’

‘Ah,’ said Calder. That was a useful discovery, indeed. It wasn’t just criminals who left DNA prints, worlds did too, as long as they had been visited by a survey ship, however briefly.

‘I’m going to make a call to a contact of mine in the local colonial office,’ said Zeno. ‘See if we can’t find a little more about this Abracadabra before we turn up in orbit.’

‘What about the professor?’ said Calder. ‘She’s meant to be arriving soon. And there’s still the delivery from the shipyard…’

The android waved away Calder’s concerns as he hitched a lift on the back of a passing cargo droid. ‘That’s why they pay you the big bucks, your highness.’ He disappeared among the waiting piles of freight.

Calder snorted. The crew of the ship might have saved his life, but if he had collected a pay cheque yet, he must have missed it. The nobleman felt a brief pang of regret, of pure homesickness. This was beginning to feel like his real life now. His world, Hesperus, might have been an icy, unforgiving environment. But it had still been home. Calder had forgotten how peculiar feeling warm all the time was. Standing on ground where the wind didn’t hurry along ice particles in a fast-moving mist hugging the land. Where trees that lined the station’s promenades didn’t resemble lines of ice-covered trolls, bowed down by the weight of snow.
You’re a fool, Calder Durk. You were being hunted, friendless and familyless with the death mark on your head. You can’t regret leaving, any more than you can regret living. For to stay would have been to die. You owe Lana Fiveworlds your life.
And perhaps a little more than that too, after Calder had proved himself to her. It was the normal course of events back home for a noblewoman to assign her suitor a number of difficult tasks to complete for him to demonstrate his worthiness. Of course, it was the political fallout of Calder’s attempt to prove his worth on Hesperus that had seen him fleeing largely friendless across the snowy wastes, with almost every assassin and soldier’s blade in the land turned against him.
Still, what are the chances of something like that happening again?

When the professor eventually turned up, an automated pod of a taxi carried the woman into the cargo area, mirrored gull-wing doors lifting to reveal her legs swinging out. She didn’t look much like Calder’s idea of what a dusty academic should resemble. Six foot-tall, dark auburn hair secured by an ivory Alice band, a bright green trouser suit impeccably tailored to her lithe frame. Her pretty pale face might have appeared the same age as Calder’s on the surface, but the exiled nobleman noticed her snow-white fingernails – not the result of cosmetics, but repeated deep age re-sets. Professor Alison Sebba was an alliance patrician, all right, and the woman could have been pushing five hundred years old for all that Calder knew.

‘Professor Sebba?’

‘I am. And you must be Calder Durk,’ she smiled, an energetic voice, her aristocratic accent bubbling over with enthusiasm. ‘Don’t look so surprised. Mister Dillard sent me everything he had on the ship and crew. With only six of you on board, it made for a short read. Your file was the thinnest by far, but then Hesperus has been off the grid for a very long time.’

Calder wasn’t sure he enjoyed being the focus of study of this venerable intelligence. There was something about those too-young blue eyes, depths hidden and dangerous, and starkly at odds with her cheerful openness and perfect white smile.
I must be imagining it.
After being casually betrayed by the beautiful princess Calder had been betrothed to back home, he didn’t find it easy to trust anyone, especially not women.

‘It’s a rare thing to meet someone who’s even heard of my home world.’

‘I used to be an archaeologist,’ said Sebba. ‘Until the alliance develops functional time travel, collapsed civilizations are as near as we can get to seeing how pre-machine age societies work.’

‘You used to dig up old bones?’

‘Rarely. Mostly what I dug up were obsolete file formats in the datasphere. My specialism was marketing archaeology. Studying ancient brands and working out why some still prosper and have lodged deeply in our current human consciousness, while others just wither and die. Why you can still buy a can of Pepsi from a vending machine on the station, while nobody drinks Coke, for instance, when the converse was more frequently the expected result.’

‘Because the taste of coal dust is disgusting?’ The professor had a natural prettiness, soft lines and extended eyelashes, a long distance removed from the obviously artificial perfection Calder had noted in many of the station’s females. It was easy to warm to her open, engaging manner.

Sebba laughed. ‘You see, you make my point for me. You would be the perfect test example for me. Unexposed to a marketing messages for the majority of your life.’

‘There were priests on my world,’ said Calder. ‘They had a message. Worship at our altar or burn in a tar bath.’

‘Ah yes, religion, the earliest meme. You are quite correct, of course. I see I shall have to study you more closely, Mister Durk. You are a wonderful breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale universe.’ She pointed towards the gaping hold of the
Gravity Rose
. Her relatively small exploration ship was visible loaded on one of the shuttle rails. ‘Would you be able to give me a tour of your vessel?’

Calder indicated the crates of supplies being shifted by Zeno’s robots, other freight still being opened and searched. ‘Later, perhaps.’

‘Of course. I have inspected your ship and crew’s bona fides, it is only fair to expect a little of the same in reverse.’

‘Well, you are working for Dollar-sign Dillard…’

‘Working
with
him. Much the same as yourself and your crew, I suspect. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. My mining team is still on Abracadabra and they’re going to be running low on supplies by the time I return.’

‘We’ll be there in good time, professor.’
Of course, that’s a fairly hollow reassurance until you give us the world’s coordinates.

She reached out and touched his shoulder. ‘Then I shall leave you to give the supplies a very thorough going over. Considering the reputation of our mutual patron, perhaps we will both need to “satisfy” ourselves of our intentions later?’

Calder instructed one on the robots to guide the professor to the cabin reserved for her and watched her board the ship, opening a lock inside the hold that led to the ship’s internal transport system. She had proved a lot more interesting than he had expected.

Even if Calder’s attention hadn’t been focused on her willowy figure, it’s doubtful if he ever would have noticed the addition of an extra robot joining the gang of hundreds labouring inside the station’s cargo chamber. Clambering on top of one of the containers moving toward the
Gravity Rose
; drilling a hole large enough for a metal tentacle to slip through, whipping around inside. Searching for the perfect place to conceal the very expensive and advanced tracking device that was the highest piece of technological art alliance intelligence manufactured for its co-conspirators… including corporate accomplices such as Pitor Skeeg and the Hyperfast Group.

***

Zeno walked into the laundry. There was a single member of staff slouched behind the desk, the same old woman as the last time he had visited. She showed no signs of recognizing him, though, as distinctive as the robot’s golden skin must be to her eyes.

She grunted and raised the counter, without further complaint or conversation. Zeno had rattled through the same series of pass phrases on his last visit, too. He went through a doorway, dozens of specialised cleaning robots ignoring his presence, so narrowly designed that all they could perceive were the clothes they were steaming and pressing and ironing. The laundry’s terminal was built into a wall in a little office beyond the main washing chamber, old and rickety and all camouflage, right down to the little faded sheets of paper taped to it (including the passwords into its fake top-level interface). Zeno passed a minute of electronic challenge and counter challenge to get through the security protocols, and then a polymer-thin screen extruded itself from the floor, sealing Zeno off the world outside. Just him and the terminal. After the secure connection was established, Zeno pulsed across the data he had on Abracadabra’s atmospheric sample, and then settled down to wait. It took a while for the transfer to be acknowledged. That was to be expected. Zeno’s data packets were passing along a hideously expensive network of hyperspace communications relays. There was another delay for the sample to be matched against survey data from hundreds of worlds and nations in the Edge, as well as everything the alliance had from its many deep space missions. If there was an answer recorded somewhere within humanity’s almost limitless bulk of knowledge, then
he
would be able to find it. A silhouette formed on the screen, a male voice sounding from the terminal’s speakers, its tenor faintly distorted by the tachyon signal bouncing through an impossibly expensive relay of wormholes and comms satellites.

‘So, you are leaving Transference Station quickly. I had thought it would take you a while longer to secure a job.’

‘That sample was extracted from wherever it is we are going. Running exploration cover for a deep space development company. Said company part-owned by Dollar-sign Dillard.’

‘DSD? That pickled old criminal. Why does your news not surprise me?’

‘I need a real coordinates match for that sample and any information you’ve got on the local system. So far I’ve got to go on is the bullshit name he’s given the world… Abracadabra.’

‘Abracadabra. Now you see it, now you don’t. How fitting.’

‘Where the hell are we heading?’ asked Zeno.

‘Into trouble, android,’ said the silhouette. ‘Trouble as deep as the space in which you are being paid to venture. I would advise you not to accept this commission.’

‘Shit, I could have told you that. But Lana’s convinced…’

‘No, she’s merely desperate. The economics of the Edge are in flux.’

‘Fuck it, the whole galaxy’s been in flux since my metal ass was manufactured, far as I can see it. Change is the only constant. You need to throw me a bone here.’

‘Change her mind, then, android.’

‘I can’t! Set up one of your cover companies. Get it to offer us an alternative contract that pays more.’

‘And then what? Another front company and another fake job after that? Lana will spot it and she will want to know from whose charity she has been benefiting. And she will eventually trace the paper trail back to me. And then we will all be in danger of Lana remembering who she was before her memories were erased. That cannot be allowed to happen!’