Final Inquiries Read online

  The "little hole" swelled larger and larger as the jeep-tug made its slow final approach, then flew straight into it and through a featureless tunnel, with walls the same satiny golden color of the spherical ship's outer hull. The tunnel was about a hundred meters or so long. The jeep-tug exited the tunnel's interior and arrived in a large compartment. Kelly extended the landing gear, engaged the vertical thrusters, and brought the little vehicle into a landing on the featureless golden deck.

  "Checking external environment," Kelly announced, looking at her displays. "Air mix, air pressure, and gravity levels matched to Earth-normal. All the comforts of home."

  "They were matched to Kendal standard when it was just me," Brox said, plainly amused. "It would seem our hosts are more concerned about making you comfortable now."

  When it was just Brox? Hannah frowned. That was just the start of her questions. When had Brox come aboard? And where? And why were the high-and-mighty Vixa chauffeuring Younger Race nobodies around the Galaxy? "Hold it a second," she said. "If the briefing for this operation is supposed to be on a need-to-know basis, then, I think we're there now. I need to know."

  "Yeah, but I don't need to know," said Kelly.

  "The Commandant is quite right," said Brox. "She has been ordered to limit her own knowledge of the situation as much as possible. I can provide a limited briefing to you, soon, after her departure. I am not permitted to provide you full information until we have arrived at the--at our destination."

  "So let's get you off this bus and get your gear out and let me be on my way," said Kelly. "That's the surest way to let all of us get what we want the fastest way possible."

  Commander Kelly popped the hatch and led the way out onto the deck of the Vixan ship. Hannah and Jamie grabbed their Ready-To-Go duffels and got out as well, with the simulant following awkwardly, and Brox taking up the rear.

  A pair of charcoal-grey platforms with rounded-off corners, roughly the size and shape of midsized mattresses, came floating up toward them as they disembarked. They stopped about five meters away from the jeep-tug, hanging in midair about a meter off the ground.

  "Put on there," said the sim, directing a flipper-arm in the direction of what were obviously cargo carriers. Jamie shrugged at Hannah and dropped his RTG duffel on the closer of the two carriers, then went back for the rest of the stuff.

  The three humans did the cargo-lugging, as Brox wasn't really the right size or shape to get in and out of the jeep-tug gracefully, and it was obvious that getting the sim to understand what to do would take far longer than just doing it themselves. It took a trip or two to get the small stack of supplies out of the jeep-tug, but the job was done in a couple of minutes.

  Kelly came out with one last box of rations and handed them to Hannah. "Well," said Kelly, "I could make a long speech telling you how I'm not allowed to tell you anything, but--what's the point?"

  "Agreed," said Hannah.

  "I don't like this," said Kelly. "I've got a feeling that if I knew more, I'd like it even less. But what I do know for certain is that the stakes are high, that this is the right thing to do--and we don't have much choice in the matter anyway."

  Kelly patted Hannah on the shoulder, nodded at Jamie, then gave a mock salute to both of them. "Good luck," she said. "From here on in, you're on your own."

  And she turned and climbed back aboard the jeep-tug.

  TWO

  POWER AND SPEED

  Jamie watched as the jeep-tug lifted off, turned itself around, and flew silently into the access tunnel. The tunnel hatch irised shut so smoothly and perfectly that it was difficult to see where the hatch was after it closed.

  They were standing roughly in the center of a large, cylindrical compartment, thirty meters in diameter and twenty meters high. The cylindrical wall, the deck, and the overhead bulkhead were all made of the same golden-bronze material. There were three large hatches equally spaced around the perimeter of the chamber. Smaller circular hatches were between the larger ones.

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing in the chamber but themselves and their pile of supplies. Somehow, every sound seemed muffled and deadened, though the space was custom-made for echoes. Jamie found himself squinting, his eyes straining, as they struggled to find some sort of detail to focus on in all that featureless bronze. The room was lit by some unseen source of utterly diffuse and shadowless light. He had the odd sense that they were all floating in midair in a strange golden sky.

  "I asked you once," Jamie said to Hannah, "if you ever got used to the sense of disorientation. I'm coming to realize just how dumb a question that was. If you asked me my own name right about now, I doubt I'd be able to tell you."

  "Join the club," said Hannah. She turned to Brox. "Okay," she said. "We're here, wherever that is. We're about to get under way to where we're going, wherever that is. There is no way we can report back to anyone. So can you brief us now?"

  "I can go so far as to confirm the various quite obvious conclusions you have no doubt reached already. A very serious crisis has arisen, under circumstances that involve not only your people, and mine--but the Vixa as well. Beyond that, I regret that I cannot go any further at this time," said Brox.

  "Why not?" Jamie asked.

  "Because there is, at least in theory, a way you can report back. Until we depart Center System, it is possible that you could be carrying some sort of transmitter. It is conceivable that a device hidden in your clothing or supplies is transmitting audio or video or some other sort of data back to BSI HQ." Brox held up his hands to stop Jamie's and Hannah's protests before they could begin. "I know and you know that any such idea is absurd. I also know that you know that it would be virtually impossible for a concealed miniature transmitter to punch a signal through the mass of the ship we are in. And so on, and so on. But there it is. Orders are orders."

  "And paranoia is paranoia, and sometimes orders are absurd orders," said Jamie.

  "I quite agree. But there are certain powerful parties involved," said Brox, and gestured toward the ship all around them. "I think it might be wise to humor them. And before you can ask, I am not so much as permitted to tell you when I can tell you more. For what it is worth, I will stretch a point far enough to say that all parties involved--and, I should add, most especially the human officials--urgently desire that news concerning the case be kept contained, compartmentalized, as long as possible. If certain details were to reach human news services prematurely, it could be very bad for everyone--but especially so for humans."

  Brox hesitated, then spoke once again. "I would also ask you to consider that a failure to cooperate might not merely endanger yourselves."

  Jamie's eyes widened. In other words, Brox was saying, get them mad--whoever, exactly, they were--and they might blame me, or our people for it, and get very unpleasant. "We get the point," he said. "You'll tell us as much as you can, as soon as you can. But that to one side--what do we do now?"

  "You come me with," said a voice from behind them, speaking in an oddly accented, gravelly imitation of Brox's voice. Jamie and Hannah turned to see another Kendari--another Brox. Slightly distorted, not quite right in some subtle details, but Brox all the same. The shape was a little off. The neck was a trifle too short and stiff, and the legs too thick. It was pudgier than Brox, and it had a bulge, almost like a small camel's hump, on its back. At first Jamie thought there was something wrong with his eyes, that he was seeing double. But then he got it.

  "Of course," said Hannah. "Your simulant. But yours is more developed than ours."

  "Quite right," said Brox.

  "You all now come me with," said Brox's sim.

  "Yes, come you all," the humanoid sim agreed, walking stiffly forward to stand by his counterpart.

  "Still working on syntax and word order, obviously," said Brox. "Odd they don't preprogram Lesser Trade Speech, but never mind. Let us follow."

  "Do you think we should just leave all our gear on the floaters?" Jamie asked.

  "No
," said Hannah, in a very sarcastic tone. "We should take everything we just put on the floaters off, carry it ourselves, let the floaters follow us empty, then put everything back on them when we get where we're going."

  "Brilliant repartee, partner," said Jamie. "But let's think about it before we leave our food and clothes and gear behind. We've lost all our luggage before--and we're not exactly communicating perfectly with the locals. Suppose that they carry it off to some storage locker and we don't see any of it again for two weeks? I'd feel better with a change of underwear and a toothbrush and a little something to eat in my pockets. Just to tide us over while the previously scheduled unforeseen circumstances are sorted out."

  He went over to his RTG duffel, zipped it open, grabbed a couple of mealpacks and bottles of water from the crates of rations, and rummaged around inside the bag for a few other things. Next he pulled out a vest that was made mostly out of pockets into which he started stuffing his supplies. Hannah watched for a second, then went over to her own RTG and started to follow suit. "That is unlikely to be necessary," said Brox.

  "No offense, Brox, but Jamie's got a point. We've gotten unpleasant surprises before."

  "All set?" Jamie asked.

  "How could I be when we don't know what comes next?" asked Hannah, stuffing a few more foodbars into her vest. "But let's go."

  Jamie reached into his duffel one last time, as casually as he could, and hoped it looked like he was just squaring away the contents before closing it up. He managed to activate the hidden control without being obvious about it. No, Brox, he thought, we don't have hidden transmitters. But you weren't all that far wrong. He was nearly certain that Hannah had switched on the recorder hidden in her bag as well, but he wasn't about to ask.

  The Kendarian and humanoid sims led the way down the corridor. It was about fifty meters long, and ended in a circular hatch that irised open as they approached. The sims stepped over the edge of the hatch and into a mazelike compartment full of intimidatingly complex fittings and gleaming equipment that was impossible to make sense of at first, other than gathering a general impression of silvery, mirror-bright metal and a whole constellation of glowing and blinking indicator lights. Jamie and Hannah followed cautiously, and Jamie turned to watch Brox entering last of all.

  The hatch whispered shut the moment the Kendari's tail was through it, almost close enough to slice off a bit of it. He flicked it away, almost too late, and looked at Jamie. "Our host would seem to be in a hurry," he said in a low voice, before speaking again in louder tones, to the open air. "As you can see, we are arrived, SubPilot Greveltra. As per our agreement, I now give you formal permission to proceed."

  "Conditions are not yet suitable," said a voice from somewhere inside the compartment. "The human's small transport vehicle ceased acceleration after reaching only a very limited relative velocity. It has not cleared the minimum safe operating distance standard."

  "Then, obviously, proceed when all safety conditions are met," Brox said, a note of irritation in his voice.

  "Your authorization is noted and accepted."

  Brox looked toward Hannah and Jamie. "If you find rule-bound behavior and similar traits as irritating as I do, I fear you are in for an unpleasant journey. Come along."

  The two sims stood--utterly inert, out of the way--by the outer wall of the compartment, drooping over a bit, almost like inflatable toys that had developed slow leaks. Whatever, exactly, they were and were for, they had plainly been deactivated for the moment, and Jamie dismissed them from his thoughts. There was plenty else to worry about.

  He was starting to make a bit more sense of the compartment's interior. They were in a spherical chamber, maybe thirty meters in diameter, and the decking they were standing on cut right through its center. Jamie decided to think of the desk as the equator and the top of the sphere as the north pole. There were conduits and openings on the floor decking. Jamie could see bits of the lower, "southern," half of the sphere below. The skin of the sphere itself was a milky grey that Jamie had seen before on other Elder Race hardware. It was the "neutral" default-setting color of a material that could be adjusted to appear any color, or serve as a video display, or set to full or partial transparency.

  Big, boxy, gleaming cubes and cylinders and other shapes, most about three meters tall or so, were bolted to the midway deck so as to form a series of narrow passageways between them. Jamie had no idea what the machines did, but they looked businesslike enough. Some hummed, one generated a static field powerful enough to set Jamie's hair on end, and several threw a fair amount of heat, while another was cold enough for frost to have formed on it. It struck Jamie that they were in a place meant for machinery, not for people.

  Brox led them out into a central open space, with what was obviously a pilot's station at the exact center of the sphere. Standing by the controls was a--a being of some sort.

  Since they were aboard a Vixan ship, with two simulants that had been created by the Vixa, the xeno in front of them had to be a Vixan as well--but it didn't look like any sort of Vixan Jamie had ever seen or heard tell of.

  The Vixa he had seen resembled giant nine-legged or twelve-legged starfish, though some said they looked more like a cross between a spider and an octopus.

  That sort of Vixa looked enough like certain Stanlarr Consortia components that Jamie wondered if the Stanlarr had borrowed some Vixan genetic material to make them. But, for all Jamie knew, the Stanlarr might have visited Earth, captured some starfish, and used those instead. Radial symmetry was far from an unusual feature of biological design in the galaxy. It had evolved many times, in many places.

  But Stanlarr components, spiders, octopi, and starfish, did not have internal skeletal structures. Vixa were simply too big to get along with just muscle power holding them up. Jamie had seen diagrams of Vixan skeletons. Each limb was supported by a central core of hinged-together bones that resembled a super-flexible human spinal column. On a nine-limbed Vixa, the front three limbs served as arms, shorter and more flexible than the side and rear legs. Each arm ended in a three-fingered hand capable of very fine manipulation. On a twelve-legger, the front four limbs served as arms, and had similar three-fingered hands.

  Vixa were also well equipped with eyes: There was one just above the point on the body where each leg joined to the central body--on the shoulder, if Vixa had had shoulders. There was another eye on the upper surface of each limb, more or less where the knees or elbows would have been. There were also eyes in the manipulator arms, in what corresponded to the wrists.

  According to BSI's briefing books on the Vixa, the eyes on the shoulders and midjoint were barely more than light sensors, able to distinguish light and dark, but not much more than that. It would be very hard for anyone to sneak up on a Vixan, but the Vixan wouldn't be able to give a very good description of the attacker. The eyes in the wrists of the manipulator arms were much more acute, but were really best suited to close-in work. Vixa did not have particularly good distance vision.

  The twelve-leggers were generally stronger and less graceful than the Nines, and their hands seemed better suited to heavy lifting than fine work. Sixes were the social betters of the Nines, an arrangement that both subspecies accepted completely.

  But virtually none of all that general description applied to the being they now faced. It was as if someone had fished around in a bin full of standard Vixan parts and used them to build something else. At first Jamie thought it was three three-legged Vixa standing one on top of another, until he realized that it was all one creature, with a columnar central body core that sprouted three sets of three limbs each. The upper surfaces of the body were all a deep purple or violet, while the lower surfaces were all a pasty bluish white.

  The lower three limbs were short, squat, and muscular, plainly dedicated to locomotion. The middle three were longer and more flexible, with much more developed three-fingered hands. The three upper limbs were shorter, but highly flexible, with the hand-eye structure modified
into little more than oversized eyes on tentacles, the fingers short, stubby, almost vestigial. If on a "standard" Vixan the functions of movement, manipulation, and sight were all present on all the limbs, on this model Vixan the limbs had all been modified to specialize in one job each.

  "I present SubPilot Greveltra, eighty-third known of that designation, of the Founder's Pillar Clanline, Tifinda," Brox said gravely. "He may be addressed as SubPilot."

  "Ah, hello, SubPilot," said Hannah. "I present myself, Senior Special Agent Hannah Wolfson, and my colleague, Special Agent James Mendez. We may be addressed as Wolfson and Mendez."

  There was a long silence, which lasted until Brox spoke. "Excuse me. My error. The SubPilot will not address you at all. My briefing on such matters of etiquette was quite rushed. By the standards of the Vixa, my species, the Kendari, is senior to yours, because it made contact with the Elder Races a few years earlier--but, of course, the Vixa are senior to the Kendari. The SubPilot does not have clearance to address anyone two levels of rank beneath himself."

  "That's going to make it difficult to have much conversation with the natives," Jamie observed.

  "Other Vixa will have greater latitude, or will be granted waivers for purposes of required contact. The prohibition does not apply if there is no one of intermediate rank present, or in the event of emergency."

  "So if you weren't here, the SubPilot would speak to us," Hannah suggested.

  "But I'm going to guess he wouldn't enjoy it," Jamie added.

  "You are both correct," Brox replied, a tone of amusement in his voice. "However, if only one lower-ranking species is present, the SubPilot would address only those of the most senior rank within that species. He would speak with you, Agent Wolfson, but not with Agent Mendez."

  "Right," said Jamie. "Tell me, Brox--do you ever wonder how it is the Elder Races ever get anything done? I mean, besides inventing rules and customs and traditions that prevent anything from happening?"