The Omega Egg [A Fictionwise Round Robin Novel] Read online

  Spencer smiled. “You know, I don't believe you've heard a word I said.”

  “Oh, I heard,” said Ktonga. He pulled out another sheet of paper and laid it beside the first.

  “What's that, another contract?” asked Spencer.

  “In a manner of speaking. It authorizes me to recall you to active duty, at the reduced rank and pay of Ensign Second Class.”

  “You're drafting me?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Ktonga. “Sign the other paper and I'll tear this one up—but one way or the other, you're going to Leonardo.”

  “It'll never hold up in court.”

  “Well, if you can find a court on Leonardo, you can test your theory,” said Ktonga. “But there are only two ways you're leaving this office—as a millionaire subcontractor or as an underpaid ensign. Either way, you're going to Leonardo.”

  “You actually sound serious.”

  “If the galaxy is at risk...”

  “It's a big galaxy. What the hell do you think could threaten it?”

  Ktonga shrugged. “Maybe nothing. But the three best operatives I've had since you left the Service have all turned up missing. That wouldn't happen if there was nothing going on.”

  “And you won't be happy until I'm missing too?”

  “No false modesty, Spence. If anybody can crack this open, you can.”

  “You just don't listen,” said Spencer. “I keep telling you: no one can crack it open.”

  “Just find out what the hell they're planning. We'll take it from there.”

  “May I assume those are precisely the comforting words you gave your other agents?”

  “I would be court-martialed and tried for treason, and rightly so, if having heard there was a threat of this magnitude I chose to do nothing about it, and you know it,” said Ktonga. He gestured to the two papers. “Are you going to sign the one, or am I going to enforce the other?”

  “You really mean it, don't you?”

  “I really mean it.”

  Spencer sighed deeply, walked over to the desk, and signed the contract. “At least I know what happened to Boganda, Kelvin and Plibix.”

  “What?” asked Ktonga.

  “After dealing with you, they all went over to the other side,” said Spencer. “I figure I'll join them as soon as I touch down on Leonardo.”

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  Chapter 2: Conversation with a Dragon

  by David Gerrold

  Spencer kept his face hard as he left Ktonga's office, not even the slightest hint of a smile.

  The decision itself hadn't been hard, but he'd needed Ktonga to believe he'd won the moment.

  This moment had been five years in the making; Spencer had been planning, rehearsing, preparing so thoroughly and so methodically that the actual achievement seemed almost anti-climactic. At one point, he'd considered crossing out the part where the contract said one million and writing in twenty-five million instead, then passing it back for Ktonga to initial—just to see Ktonga's reaction. But he already knew that Ktonga would have signed it, would have signed anything, because he already knew that Ktonga had no intention of paying. And Spencer had no desire for monetary compensation of any size anyway. That wasn't the goal. So how much or how little was irrelevant.

  The dropshaft delivered him to a sub-lobby, somewhere underground, no way of knowing just how deep. A blank-featured robot stood beside a table. On the table, neatly laid out, an array of files and reports, travel documents and identity chips, currency and expense cards, goods and tools, clothing and accessories, and of course ... weapons. Spencer left the weaponry for last.

  First, he sorted through the other materials, selecting some, pushing most of the rest aside. He took the files and reports, of course, even though he intended to discard most of them unread as soon as he could. He took the travel documents and identity chips, of course, even though he intended to discard most of them shortly after debarkation. He took the currency and the expense cards; he would loot the expense cards as rapidly as possible, then discard them when he disposed of the identities they were attached to. The goods and tools ... they had to be tagged, so he only selected the few he would normally have taken. The clothing—everything from the soft silver underwear to the black travel cloak was hypered, he didn't dare wear any of it; too bad about that, the cloak looked useful.

  The weapons—tempting—but they were likely to be tagged as well. He'd take what he could easily conceal, but he knew they had to go into the disposal too. Spencer would have to go through extensive decontam to make sure that none of this stuff was tagging him just by his handling of it, but he didn't dare not take it. It was part of the plan.

  An hour later, an ordinary-looking businessman left the building at the pedestrian-mezzanine level, two stories above the growling street-level traffic. The man carried a gray briefcase, and two pieces of luggage trailed obediently behind him. He looked to be in his early 90s, and somewhat unkempt. He looked harried and worn, he had a bald spot, a growing paunch, scuffed shoes, and a coffee stain on his kilt. He looked like he'd been scrambling for the better part of a century without ever getting any traction. By this age, even an average citizen would have earned enough for basic rejuvenation—so this gentleman's sloppy demeanor was clear evidence of his inability to produce a long-term result.

  His name was Snorkin Mibble-11 (the eleven was silent) and his identity chips proved beyond doubt that he was the eleventh clone of the original Snorkin Mibble. He was a jobber for a colloquium of small specialty firms whose combined efforts could provide broad spectrum data-mining of allied niche markets. He himself was a specialist in actuarial archaeology for multi-dimensional data-sets. Unfortunately, although the risk-to-return ratio for his specialty should have provided significant cash flow, it apparently did not. Had a disinterested observer performed actuarial archaeology on Mibble-11's life, he would have found a textbook example of the famous dictum: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”

  Mibble-11 arrived at a public loop station, just as the last available vehicle departed. The system promised to deliver empty cars to the stations at such frequency that the average user would see a personal transportation unit arriving just as he or she arrived at the platform. But the way you compute an average to measure the distance between the extremes—and Mibble-11 was apparently closer to the edges of the bell curve than safely in the middle. He was always stepping onto the platform, just as the car was leaving to pick up someone else at another station.

  If anyone had approached Mibble-11, he would have sensed a disquieting odor of stale food, bad teeth, and unwashed flesh, not distinct enough to be offensive, but just detectable enough to create an additional feeling of unattractiveness. That, plus his posture, his flaking scalp, his blotchy skin, his nervous manner—that was enough to keep other human beings at a careful distance. In other words, Mibble-11's demeanor had been deliberately constructed to subtly dissuade people from closer examination. He didn't quite stink of failure and despair, but he suggested the possibility strongly enough that he was a walking disenrollment.

  While Mibble-11 waited, he fumbled his connect out of his pocket. Laboriously grappling with his briefcase under one arm, he shielded the device from view while he punched in an old-fashioned numerical code. After a moment, a woman's face appeared on the screen—it was not a live connection, but an avatar. Mibble-11 said, “Oops. Sorry. Wrong number.” He broke the connection, shifted around again, and redialed, this time more carefully. He connected to a blank screen—an anonymous message drop. He recited carefully, “Smelly tofu. Pickled mongoose. Feathered mastodon.” Then he broke the connection and pushed the device back into his coat.

  If anyone had been monitoring, and Mibble-11 was certain that at least three different agencies were monitoring, they would have determined that the first call definitely was a wrong number. And in fact, it was. But they would probably spend hours, pe
rhaps even days, determining that he had not sent a coded signal through a carefully constructed mail-drop. The second message was also a decoy. The three agencies would assume that Mibble-11 had spoken specific code phrases, designed to trigger prearranged actions. They would not waste much time trying to crack the code—these were clearly phrases from a one-time pad. Instead, they would monitor the mail drop to see if and when the messages were received or forwarded, and to whom. They would specifically look to see what actions occurred afterwards. But that was a decoy too.

  Mibble-11 had a foolproof way of sending his signal. He didn't send any signal at all. His silence was the message. The decoy phone calls were merely to waste the time and energy of those who might be monitoring him. He would do other things as well. In his wake, he would leave behind a branching forest of dead ends, false trails, empty possibilities. His actuarial skills projected that the three agencies combined would likely waste a quarter of a million credits determining that these were fruitless avenues of investigation. And even then, they would never be fully certain that their information was accurate. The nature of such agencies was to be suspicious of everything. Nothing was ever a fact, it was always an allegation. The additional avalanche of data that Snorkin Mibble-11 was triggering now would clog the system with enough erroneous material to degrade the confidence of all other data-conclusions by several percentage points. While that was never his primary intention, it was certainly a favorable side-benefit.

  Meanwhile, elsewhere, far away, Kendell Spencer's past life had already begun to evaporate.

  The woman who had lived for the past three years as his mate had packed their two children into the car and headed toward her mother's for a visit. Somewhere between the entrance to the harbor tunnel and its exit on the far side of the bay, the vehicle ceased to exist. The tracking tags simply stopped broadcasting. Likewise, the tracking tags embedded in the flesh of Carol Spencer, Todd, and Timmy, also stopped broadcasting.

  Twenty minutes later, in the warehouse district, a van of roughly the same size and shape as the Spencer vehicle pulled into an underground delivery bay. An unkempt teenaged boy in bagaloons, boots, and sweatshirt, popped open the rear of the vehicle to reveal two crates, each one large enough to hold a child-sized suspended animation capsule. The crates were not labeled. Two men came out of the warehouse and hand-loaded the crates onto a dolly. One of them got into the vehicle and drove off with it, the other pushed the dolly into the warehouse, followed by the teenaged boy.

  Several hours later, a perniciously persistent software bot assigned to track the movement of every vehicle exiting the harbor tunnel subsequent to Carol Spencer's disappearance, would finally assemble aerial, satellite, and ground surveillance footage on this particular van. While there was little to distinguish this vehicle from the thousands of others that had also exited the tunnel, the bot had judged the similarity of its size and shape to the target vehicle as sufficient to warrant further investigation of its route both prior to and after its transit through the harbor tunnel. Because there was no evidence of the vehicle entering the tunnel, the assembled footage of its course was examined for additional anomalies.

  By the time ground agents could arrive at the warehouse, it would already have been emptied and triple-cleansed, leaving no detectable evidence of habitation by anything larger than a stray dust-mite. While that in itself might arouse suspicion, additional investigation would reveal that level of cleansing as standard procedure for this particular venue. Additional route-tracking of all vehicles leaving the warehouse district would not produce any further leads; the number of possible destinations, connections, transshipments, and tracking branches would quickly escalate beyond the point of practical investigation, no matter how many software bots were generated. That fact, however, would not stop the effort. Software bots were tireless. Who knew what a dogged bot might turn up, given sufficient time and processor cycles? But the effort would eventually be reduced to lower and lower priority as more significant investigations were generated.

  Meanwhile, by that time, Snorkin Mibble-11 would already be off-planet, more than halfway up the orbital elevator on an express capsule. His ticket would have him headed toward the fourth moon of Gabrielle, the local system's bloated gas giant. But somewhere between sea level and the station at geosynchrony, Snorkin Mibble-11 would disappear even more completely than Kendall Spencer—because where there had been some record of Spencer's prior existence, there would be no record at all of Snorkin Mibble-11's, because he had never existed at all.

  Passenger records would later show that Dame Hester Brint, formerly of Malice Springs, transshipped on the Lady MacBeth, a small starliner of somewhat dubious reputation. The Lady MacBeth's flight plan was clearly false, and no further record of the vessel was found for several years until—but that's a different story.

  None of this mattered, because Snorkin Mibble-11 had never become Dame Hester Brint. Instead, somewhere in transit, he had exchanged identities and appearance with another passenger—a passenger who conveniently matched his general size and shape and who had enough of the same skills of disguise and impersonation to fool the station's surveillance bots for the few hours necessary to facilitate this leg of Mibble-11's outward journey. Mibble-11 became Zunida Clash, and Zunida Clash had become Hester Brint. But even if someone tracking Mibble-11 had figured this out, it wouldn't have mattered at all, because Snorkin Mibble-11 had also been a doppelganger. Kendall Spencer had never begun this journey.

  By the time Admiral James Nathan Ktonga realized he had been decoyed, conned, snookered, and flim-flammed, it was too late. Kendall Spencer, or whoever it was who had stood in his office representing himself as Kendall Spencer, was far off-planet and effectively beyond his reach. Likewise, his wife—if she ever really had been his wife—and children had also vanished.

  Nevertheless, despite whatever annoyance he might have to publicly demonstrate to his underlings, he was secretly very pleased. Commander Kendall Spencer had taken the bait. It didn't matter how Spencer got to Leonardo as long as he arrived, one way or another. Promises were promises—and there were people waiting for this promise to be kept.

  Meanwhile, less than three city blocks away from Ktonga's office, in a tiny windowless room, located in one of a cluster of squat bell towers left over from a previous era of history, Commander Kendall Spencer sat quietly with a cup of hot tea. The towers had, in their 1,400 years of existence, served as a monastery, a shrine, a pilgrimage, a museum, a warehouse, a museum again, and now as a site marked for preservation or reconstruction or demolition, depending which way the winds of change might blow in the next century. The nice thing about the bell towers was not just that they were made of very heavy stone, but that they were also conveniently blocked on all sides by a variety of industrial confections that conveniently provided all manner of shielding from prying eyes and probes.

  On the other side of the table were a dragon and a fairy.

  From the waist up, the dragon was vaguely human; he still had some small essence of humanity in his facial structure; but from the waist down, he was saurian. He had leathery skin, a restless reptilian tail, and two solid stumpy legs. His feet were three-toed claws and he shifted his weight restlessly from side to side in perfect rhythm with the slashing of his tail. Spencer had encountered saurians in the past: most wore little or no clothing, but this one wore a tattered kilt and a vest—probably to hide the disfiguring scars of previous battles. Spencer had never been curious enough to ask.

  The fairy was a small green sprite, slender and agile; it leapt nervously from perch to perch around the room. Naked, it was male in general appearance, with puckish curiosity—but its genitalia were female. The possibility that the saurian and the fairy were sexual partners crossed Spencer's mind, but it was not a thought he wanted to dwell on. Once upon a time, Spencer might have wondered why human beings would reinvent their physical forms so drastically, but that had been very early in his career. By the end of his first mission, h
e'd learned that there were far more important issues than corporeal reconstruction.

  “So?” said the dragon-man. The floor boards creaked beneath him.

  “He took the bait,” Spencer reported. “He thinks I'm on my way.”

  “Good.” There was a small egg-shaped package on the table, next to the tea pot. The dragon pointed to it with one giant claw. “Take it now. It's time.”

  “No,” said Spencer. “I told you at the beginning. I won't do that. Not that.”

  “We don't need to have this conversation, do we, Commander?” The dragon-man held up his left arm. The fairy dropped easily onto his wrist, as gracefully as a hawk returning to a falconer. It hissed and bared its shiny bright teeth at Spencer.

  “Easy, boy,” the dragon cautioned his tiny partner. “Be patient and I'll give you a special treat, just the way you like it.” To Spencer, he said, “Impetuousness is deadly. Don't you agree?” He leaned forward, his muzzle partly open. The stench of his most recent meal—three-day-old carrion—was still on his breath. He stretched out his right arm and laid a giant claw on Spencer's shoulder. The weight of it almost knocked him to the ground. “You and I both know that you have no choice in the matter. You got on board at the beginning, you cannot get off before the end.” He removed his claw; then laboriously, he began turning around in the cramped room, so he could duck out through the narrow door and down the spiral stairs.

  Commander Kendall Spencer stood up slowly. Reluctantly, he picked up the egg and hefted it in his hand. The dragon was right. There was nothing left to say. Then suddenly, a loud crash came from below. The tower shook. Spencer and the dragon-man had just enough time to exchange a look of horror, then—

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  Chapter 3: Dreams and Nightmares