“Why do you think? Because he cared about his friend and his daughter. It was his way of protecting both of you.”
“I don’t understand, Xave.”
“Lyle Merrick was dead meat if he didn’t agree. Your father wasn’t going to risk his neck by sheltering the simulation any other way. At least this way Jim got something out of deal, other than the satisfaction of saving part of his friend.”
“Which was?”
“He got Lyle to promise to look after you when Jim wasn’t around.”
“No,” Antoinette said flatly.
“You were going to be told. That was always the plan. But the years slipped by, and when Jim died . . .” Xavier shook his head. “This isn’t easy for me, you know. How do you think I’ve felt, knowing this secret all these years? Sixteen Goddamned years, Antoinette. I was about as young and green as they come when your father first took me under his employment, helping him with Storm Bird. Of course I had to know about Lyle.”
“I don’t follow. What do you mean, look after me?”
“Jim knew he wasn’t going to be around for ever, and he loved you more than, well . . .” Xavier trailed off.
“I know he loved me,” Antoinette said. “It’s not like we had one of those dysfunctional father-daughter relationships like they always have on the holo-shows, you know. All that ‘you never told me you loved me’ crap. We actually got along pretty damned well.”
“I know. That was the point. Jim cared about what’d happen to you afterwards, when he was gone. He knew you’d want to inherit the ship. Wasn’t anything he could do about that, or even wanted to do about it. Hell, he was proud. Really proud. He thought you’d make a better pilot than he ever did, and he was damned sure you had more business sense.”
Antoinette suppressed half a smile. She had heard that sort of thing from her father often enough, but it was still pleasing to hear it from someone else; evidence—if she needed it—that Jim Bax had really meant it.
“And?”
Xavier shrugged. “Guy still wanted to look out for his daughter. Not such a crime, is it?”
“I don’t know. What was the arrangement?”
“Lyle got to inhabit Storm Bird. Jim told him he had to play along with being the old gamma-level; that you were never to suspect that you had a, well, guardian angel looking over you. Lyle was supposed to look after you, make sure you never got into too much trouble. It made sense, you know. Lyle had a strong instinct for self-preservation.”
She remembered the times that Beast had tried to talk her out of doing something. There had been many, and she had always put them down to an over-protective quirk of the subpersona. Well, she had been right. Dead right. Just not in quite the way she had assumed.
“And Lyle just went along with it?” she asked.
Xavier nodded. “You’ve got to understand: Lyle was on a serious guilt and recrimination trip. He really felt bad for all the people he had killed. For a while he wouldn’t even run himself—kept going into hibernation, or trying to persuade his friends to destroy him. The guy wanted to die.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Because Jim gave him a reason to live. A way to make a difference, looking after you.”
“And all that ‘Little Miss’ shit?”
“Part of the act. Got to hand it to the dude, he kept it up pretty good, didn’t he? Until the shit came down. But then you can’t blame him for panicking.”
Antoinette stood up. “I suppose not.”
Xavier looked at her expectantly. “Then . . . you’re OK about it?”
She turned around and looked him hard in the eyes. “No, Xave, I’m not OK about it. I understand it. I even understand why you lied to me all those years. But that doesn’t make it OK.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking down into his lap. “But all I ever did was make a promise to your father, Antoinette.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
But that did not make the truth of it any easier to take. When she thought of all the time she had spent alone on Storm Bird now knowing that Lyle Merrick had been there, haunting her—perhaps even watching her—she felt a wrenching sense of betrayal and stupidity.
She did not think it was something she was capable of getting over.
A day later, Antoinette walked out to visit her ship, thinking that by entering it again she might find some forgiveness for the lie that had been visited on her by the one person in the universe she had thought she could trust. It hardly mattered that the lie had been a kind one, intended to protect her.
But when she reached the base of the scaffolding that embraced Storm Bird, she could go no farther. She gazed up at the vessel, but the ship looked threatening and unfamiliar. It no longer looked like her ship, or anything that she wanted to be part of.
Crying because something had been stolen from her that could never be returned, Antoinette turned around and walked away.
Buried in the rear of Nightshade were many plague-hardened nanomachine repositories, dark tubers crammed with clades of low-level replicators. Upon Skade’s command the machines were released, programmed to multiply and diversify until they had formed a scalding slime of microscopic matter-transforming engines. The slime swarmed and infiltrated every niche of the rear part of the ship, dissolving and regurgitating the very fabric of the lighthugger. Much of the machinery of the device succumbed to the same transforming blight. In their wake, the replicators left glistening obsidian structures, filamental arcs and helices threading back into space behind the ship like so many trailing tentacles and stingers. They were studded with the nodes of subsidiary devices, bulging like black suckers and venom sacs. In operation, the machinery would move with respect to itself, executing a hypnotic thresherlike motion, whisking and slicing the vacuum. In the midst of that scything motion, a quark-sized pocket of state-four quantum vacuum would be conjured into existence. It would be a pocket of vacuum in which inertial mass was, in the strict mathematical sense, imaginary.
The quark-sized bubble would quiver, fluctuate and then—in much less than an instant of Planck time—it would engulf the entire spacecraft, undergoing an inflationary type phase transition to macroscopic dimensions. The machinery that would continue to hold it in check was engineered to astonishingly fine tolerances, down to the very threshold of Heisenberg fuzziness. How much of this was necessary, no one could guess. Skade was not prepared to second-guess what the whispering voices of Exordium had told her. All she could do was hope that any deviations would not affect the functioning of the machine, or at least affect it so profoundly that it did not work at all. The thought of it working, but working wrongly, was entirely too terrifying to contemplate.
But nothing happened the first time. The machinery had powered up and the quantum-vacuum sensors had picked up strange, subtle fluctuations . . . but equally precise measurements established that Nightshade had not moved an ångström further than it would have under ordinary inertia-suppressing propulsion. Angry as much with herself as anyone else, Skade made her way through the interstices of the curved black machinery. Soon, she found the person she was looking for: Molenka, the Exordium systems technician. Molenka looked drained of blood.
What went wrong?
Molenka fumbled out an explanation, dumping reams of technical data into the public part of Skade’s mind. Skade absorbed the data critically, skimming it for the essentials. The configuration of the field-containment systems had not been perfect; the bubble of state-two vacuum had evaporated back into state zero before it could be pushed over the potential barrier into the magical tachyonic state four. Skade appraised the machinery. It appeared undamaged.
Then you’ve learned what went wrong, I take it? You can make the appropriate corrective changes and attempt the transition again?
[Skade . . . ]
What?
[Something did happen. I can’t find Jastrusiak anywhere. He was much closer to the equipment than I was when we attempted the experiment. But he isn’t there now. I can’t find him anywhere, or even any evidence of him.]
Skade listened to this without registering any expression beyond tolerant interest. Only when the woman had finished speaking and there had been several seconds of silence did she reply. Jastrusiak?
[Yes . . . Jastrusiak.]
The woman seemed relieved. [My partner in this. The other Exordium expert.]
There was never anyone called Jastrusiak on this ship, Molenka.
Molenka turned—so it appeared to Skade—a shade paler. Her reply was little more than an exhalation. [No . . . ]
I assure you, there was no one called Jastrusiak. This is a small crew, and I know everyone on it.
[That isn’t possible. I was with him not twenty minutes ago. We were in the machinery, readying it for the transition. Jastrusiak stayed there to make last-minute adjustments. I swear this!]