Standing in the air lock, he checked the magazine on his rifle. Visibly, so she would see him doing it. Letting her know he had a functional weapon might prevent her from trying anything stupid. Her switch-up had been smoothly done, but he’d memorized the serial numbers of both weapons. An old cop habit, born out of the fact that professional-grade weapons imprinted their serial number on every round they fired. Knowing who had shot who was the sort of thing cops liked to know.
Call it lessons from cop school. Making sure everyone knew the consequences of starting a fight was the best way to stop one. Making sure everyone understood they would be held accountable for every shot they fired was the best way to make them shoot carefully.
Of course, that was on Altair, where squads of SWAT goons were a panic button away and forensics teams would pore over every square inch of the crime scene. Out here, on a primitive planet in the middle of an arctic blizzard, the rules might be different.
The lock cycled, exposing them to the outside. The big one, Jorgun, reached up to toggle his helmet mike.
Kyle put out a hand and stopped him. “Radio silence. Don’t let them know we’re coming.” He had to shout over the howling wind. Jorgun nodded, accepting the rebuke without reacting to it.
They trudged outside, sinking up to their knees. Jorgun stared up at the sky, entranced by the swirling patterns of snowflakes. Melvin was hardly more effective, wading clumsily through the snow.
But she slipped out of the lock, alert and aware, her eyes scanning the horizon carefully, looking up to make sure nothing had crept onto the ship above them.
As tired as he was, he found himself grinning. They should have hired a better actress. Instead, they’d sent a special operative to make sure he did whatever it was the League wanted him to do out here. She was good at her job; too good. She’d given herself away with her industrial-strength wariness, the trained habits of the professionally suspicious.
He’d do whatever they wanted, play his part to the hilt. He had to: she wouldn’t let him get away with anything less. He just hoped that they wanted something other than him dead.
Gripping the mag rifle, he reflexively glanced at the magazine indicator, checking it again.
They spread out into a short line and struggled ahead. She’d given the handheld locator to Jorgun, so they all followed his lead. At first Kyle had thought that was rather coldhearted of her to put the dumb guy in front. But now he saw why. Following him, she could watch over him while still searching for any threat. If he was behind her, trying to keep track of him would just be a distraction.
She managed her crew like a well-trained team. Which surprised him, given that they clearly weren’t operatives themselves. The big one might be putting on an act, pretending to be stupid, but the other one, Melvin, was just plain clueless. Nobody could act that vacuous.
Jorgun was going too fast. The giant plowed through the snow, his eyes locked on his locator unit, unaware that no one could keep up. Kyle flipped up his faceplate to yell at him, but the wind whistled in and drowned his shout. He pushed harder against the snow, but the giant was leaving them behind.
Kyle started thinking about breaking radio silence. It would be better than losing anyone out here in this blizzard. The suits were rated for the cold of space, but that was when they were insulated by the vacuum. He could feel his feet going numb as the clinging snow leached the heat out. A few hours out here would be fatal.
Something flew past him. Instinctively he dropped, spinning to see where it had come from, bringing the rifle to his shoulder.
Prudence was making another snowball. She glanced at him curiously before throwing it. This time her aim was better, and it hit Jorgun in the back of the head.
The giant turned around, and Prudence made a very simple hand signal. Kyle could guess it meant “slow.”
It was too simple. No operative would have such an obvious combat signal. No self-respecting soldier would have charged off without checking on the rest of his team in the first place. It was almost like they were just ordinary people, just a ragtag crew under a young but fiercely determined captain.
Kyle had not survived this long by taking things at face value. There was always a hidden catch, always another angle. There had been a time when he trusted people, but then he’d become a cop. Now he just assumed the hook was there, and didn’t stop searching until he found it. So far, he’d never been disappointed.
He looked back reflexively, checking behind, and froze. They couldn’t have gone more than fifty meters, but the ship was already hidden in white-flecked gray emptiness.
Rapping the rifle against his helmet made a metallic clink that carried through the wind. Prudence heard, glancing over to see what his problem was. Pointing the way they had come, he shrugged a question.
She waved a hand, dismissing his fear, and kept moving.
Damn, but she was a cool one.
Up ahead, Jorgun had stopped. He stood like a tree, the most visible element in the landscape. Melvin floundered up to him and stopped, at the edge of a crater, staring down.
Prudence came close enough to touch helmets, the old spacer’s trick. He could hear her through the vibration of her faceplate on his. “Looks like they found something.”
Even through the weather, the suits, the plexiglass of the faceplate, his body thrilled at the intimate proximity. She was beautiful, in a thin, unusual way, but that wasn’t it. He’d been close to pretty women before.
It was her attitude, her deep confidence masked by extreme caution. She thought about everything before she did it, treated every act like a carefully chosen move in a chess game. It was a way of life he had learned to embrace, once he had gone undercover against the League. A game where one wrong move could spell detection, disaster, and death.
He wondered if the stakes were as high for her as they were for him.
She was waiting for him, patiently. Waiting until he realized he had to go first. She already had committed her crew. She couldn’t join them, stand there in a tight knot where a single burst of auto-fire could kill them all.
So he had to go up there. He had to put himself at risk. And if the crew were just mooks, if they were expendables hired to die with him, whose only role was to get him to commit himself, then he would be dead in the next thirty seconds. Either the enemy lying in wait would blast him out of existence, or she would cut him down with a spray of needle-sized bullets from the mag rifle he’d given her.
Regretfully, he wished he’d only borrowed one rifle from the Launceston.
He didn’t have a choice. He had become used to doing things without choices, but it was difficult to pull away from her, to have to walk forward without seeing her face. If he was going to die, he wanted to see the face of the person who killed him. Or maybe he just wanted to see her face. Too tired to puzzle out the difference, he trudged forward mechanically, continuing on his chosen course long after he’d forgotten why he’d chosen it.
When he got up to where the other two were standing, he knew he was going to live. The wreckage in front of him changed everything.
The ship was small, no more than ten meters long. Battered and cracked like a child’s toy dropped from the sky, but still in one piece. It looked like a bizarrely elongated snowflake: six fat tubes stacked together hexagonally on the inside, and outside a ring of six thin tubes. At the rear was what had to be a fusion nozzle. At the front was a glass pod, like a huge insect eye, multifaceted and staring, shattered on one side. The vessel was still and quiet, but it radiated menace.
Not the menace of a warship, even though it almost certainly was one. The Launceston was far more intimidating, with its bristling gunports and racks of missiles. But the Launceston was solid and sleek, every surface polished and smooth. This ship was like a spider web’s nightmare, the struts and spars that held it together as gnarled and lumpy as wood, unsettlingly organic in their texture.
Alien.
The word came to mind, unwelcome but undeniable. The ship in front of them shrieked it in the sheer incomprehensibility of its design.
In all the centuries since Earth, on all the planets and moons intrepid explorers found and conquered, mankind had never met its equal. Or even the equal of an ant colony. Life was common enough: simple bacteria, plants, the occasional mollusk. But nothing organized. Nothing social.
Man stood alone as a sentient race, looking into the mirror of the universe and seeing only his own reflection. A miracle without explanation, a blessing of no competition or a curse of loneliness, depending on your point of view. Was it improbable that no other planet had been climatically stable enough long enough to make society, or was the improbability that Earth had? Philosophers argued, scientists washed their hands of the insolvable, and ordinary people relaxed in the knowledge that the closet was empty: there was no bogeyman hiding in the dark.
But here the broken eye of alien intelligence stared back at him. And it was hostile. First Contact had come in the form of a lethal attack.
Jorgun shouted above the wind, childish wonder in his voice. “Who made that?”
A fine question, even if the answer was obvious: not us. But Kyle’s mind was obsessed with a different question. A subtle question, one that an untrained or merely unsuspicious mind might have overlooked.
Who had given the League that anonymous tip? The one that had sent him out here, on a twelve-day trip, just in time to discover an attack seven days old.
The tip had been given before the attack had taken place.
Someone human knew this attack was going to happen. Someone human had sent him out here to discover the aftermath. Someone human knew the answer to Jorgun’s question. And they weren’t sharing.
Prudence had come up behind him, and was staring down at the wreck. He studied her face carefully. But the operative was gone, replaced by a frightened young woman. She glared back at him accusingly, demanding that his badge and his authority make sense of the tragedy that lay in front of them. The same look so many victims had given him over the years. No actress could fake that heartbroken glare, that shattered innocence, that instinctive need for someone to explain how ordinary life had suddenly become nightmare. He’d nailed a dozen murderers simply because they had failed this test. When confronted with the body, they could fake the loss, the grief, the sorrow, but they couldn’t fake the outrage that their predictable world no longer made sense. They could pretend to lament the deceased, but not the death of meaning.
She didn’t know the answer.
“Fucking aliens.” Melvin screamed over the blizzard. “Aliens! Pru, what the hell are we gonna do?”
“Is it the Dog-Men of Ophiuchi Seven? Because I thought their ships were shaped like giant wolves.” Jorgun was talking about some space-opera comic show that ran on the low-grade entertainment channels. From a normal man, Kyle would have suspected irrationality born of fear; from a clever mind, satire from much the same source. But Jorgun’s voice was smooth and even. Of all the people here, he was the only one who did not shudder. Protected by his Zen-like innocence, while the rest of them teetered on the brink of the unthinkable.
“This isn’t a fucking vid show, you idiot!” Melvin’s outrage didn’t sting. It wasn’t directed at Jorgun, but at the alien ship, the war-shattered colony, the entire universe itself. Even the simpleminded giant could tell that. He didn’t flinch, but just asked his next question, obviousness having been transformed into insight by the impossibility of the scene.
“Are you sure? It feels like a vid show.”
Yes, Kyle thought, it did. It felt like one of those prank shows, where people were put in ridiculous situations and secretly filmed for their comedic reactions.
Except a lot of people had died to set up this gag.
Prudence’s voice was carefully neutral. “What are we going to do, Commander?” She watched him patiently, wearing a ghost of a smirk, challenging his authority, mocking his confusion, demanding that he lead, follow, or get out of the way.
The men who ran the League would mark her out for that, put her name on the list of Undesirables. The list of people to silence, while they took control. The people to make disappear, once they had it.
That list that was already too short, depopulated not by threats and subterfuge, but by bribery and innate laziness. Sometimes he wondered if anyone would notice when the League finally won and seized absolute power. If the price of a vid and a beer didn’t go up, would they even care?
Prudence was an attitude he had stopped expecting to find. Complacency was easy on a rich world like Altair. Looking the other way when the price of looking deeper got too high. Letting someone else take care of things because they’d always done such a good job of it before.
In the presence of her piercing eyes, entranced by the shapely lips that almost smiled but not quite, trembling as if they could burst into laughter or disdain at any instant, he could not stop his mask from slipping. He spoke honestly, from the heart, without calculation.
“We’re going to go down there and take a closer look.”
Like he could trust her; like she was on his side. Always it was “I” or “the Department” or “the League.” Never “we.” Never himself and another, partners and equals, peer to peer.
A subtle slip, but his life had become a pirouette on the razor’s edge, and subtlety had become the only flavor left.
Trudging down the crater’s edge to the alien ship, he resolved not to make any more mistakes.
Melvin screamed something, but the wind took it.
Kyle turned his helmet mike on. “No point in radio silence now, people. But consider this a crime scene. Don’t touch anything. Do I make myself clear?”
Melvin’s voice rattled in his ear. “We’re not bio-sealed! How do you know it’s safe?”
Prudence answered, the voice of spacer wisdom. “Melvin, we can’t get sick from aliens. For crying out loud, we can’t even eat native plants.”
Everything the human race had, they’d brought with them from Earth, or made since then. Life was a complex orchestra, and one wrong note made it incompatible. It wasn’t just the molecular composition of proteins: it was the shape they folded into. Sometimes the local flora was poisonous, but usually it was just inert, like eating cardboard. The dreaded space-plague was a feature of science fiction, not reality.
Kyle added his own reasoning, trying to reassert control from that one foolish moment he’d let it slip. “If they had a biological attack vector, they would have already used it. None of the colonists were dying from disease.”
Even while he spoke, a thousand warnings rattled through his mind. There were so many ways this could end in death: automated defense systems, a wounded but still living pilot, a booby trap, or just industrial hazard. What if the fuel source was toxic? What if the ship was on fire, internally, and about to explode? What about radiation?
He worried about these things, but he didn’t stop walking. Curiosity and the proverbial cat. Thinking about cats made him think about Prudence, so delicate and reserved in repose, but feral in movement.
He turned to look at her, coming down the slope after him with Jorgun in tow.
“The locator doesn’t read any signal other than the distress beacon,” she said over the radio. “There’s no distortion in our communications. And the snow hasn’t melted. This wreck is cold.”
She had done more than just think about the dangers. She had looked for them.
“Good,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Quite brave of you to assume it was safe.” She was mocking him again.
“No, it was stupid. I’m tired. Don’t let me make any more stupid mistakes.”
Melvin was still standing at the top of the crater, holding a rifle. She wasn’t making mistakes.
“This whole expedition is stupid,” she told him. Floundering in the snow, she leaned on the big Jorgun for support, let him help her through the drifts. Kyle was seized with a completely unreasonable pang of jealousy.
“Then why are you down here?” he asked.
The two of them had caught up to him, close enough that he could see her face.
“I had friends here,” she said softly.
“I have friends on Altair,” he answered. Not that it was strictly true. He had comrades, acquaintances, and enemies. But he was loyal to Altair’s millions of citizens in the abstract, in the sense of duty to the innocent, even if he wasn’t personally attached to any of them as individuals. “Imagine Altair like this. Imagine fifty million targets, not fifty thousand.”
“You have a fleet.”
She put a lot more stock in Fleet than he did.
“Altair would be down by one patrol boat if it weren’t for your assistance. Unless you’re volunteering to be admiral, I’m not sure we should rely on Fleet.”
Jorgun laughed. “Admiral Prudence! Does that mean I get to be a captain?”
Kyle wanted to laugh with him. The image of this slight young woman in full regalia shouting at lines of hardened spacers was incongruous. But the facts were more incongruous.
How had Prudence known how to defeat the mines?
She returned his suspicion. “I can’t take the credit. I’m sure you would have figured it out on your own.” Suave, even dismissive. She had saved his life, and he couldn’t even thank her for it, because she thought he was playing a game. That he was pretending to have asked for help, to make a radio record that looked like he hadn’t already known what to expect.
But that was absurd. The League would never broadcast its own incompetence as a cover-up. How could she be so sophisticated but not understand that basic fact? Unless she was playing deep, making cover stories for herself. If she kept accusing him of conspiracy, it meant she wasn’t the conspirator.
He closed his eyes in weariness. Too much double-dealing, too many possibilities and secrets. Over the years it had worn at him, grinding him down, stripping away everything that was not deception or counterdeception. Here, in the presence of aliens and beauty, in the shadow of violence and strength, it was too much.
He envied Jorgun. For the giant, everything was as it seemed. Too stupid to be suspicious, he could trust—and be trusted. No wonder Prudence had picked him. The perfect tool for the perfect operative.
“Are you all right?” She managed to make her voice sound like real concern.
“I’m tired.” In so many ways. “Let’s see if there’s a body.”
The three of them cautiously advanced on the shattered cockpit. Well, the two of them. Jorgun strode up to it eagerly, while Prudence and Kyle followed.
“Don’t touch anything,” he warned the giant again.
Jorgun peered inside, and shook his head. “I don’t think this is a Dog-Man ship.”
Kyle pushed up against Jorgun, trying to gently shove him out of the way. He might as well have pushed on a tree. Instead, he settled for slipping in front, and leaned his helmet forward to stare into the alien vessel.
Again, Jorgun asked the simple and the obvious. “Where does the pilot sit?”
There wasn’t a chair. The cockpit was a welter of unfamiliar dials and levers all along the edges, but there was no central chair.
“Maybe he doesn’t sit.” Prudence reached with her hand, inside.
“Don’t touch anything,” Kyle repeated automatically. Like she was a child. Or a green recruit.
She didn’t bother to retort to his pettiness. “Put your hand in there, Commander.”
Chastised, he did so. Their arms together, hands almost touching.
“What do you not feel?” she asked.
Dumbly, he shook his head. What he wanted to feel was her hand in his, her warmth and smoothness. But through the insulation of the suit, he couldn’t feel anything at all.
“That’s right. No grav field.” She seemed to think that was significant. Maybe to a spacer, it was.
But Kyle saw something that was significant to a cop.
A blue stain, on the cockpit floor. On the glass. More on the control panel resting on the snow.
“Who flies without passive grav-plating? Even in a tactical craft.” Prudence was shaking her head in disbelief.
“Who has blue blood?” Kyle asked her, pointing to the stains.
She stared down at the little patches of color, silenced.
Jorgun had been thinking his own thoughts. Now he leaned over both of them, reached deep into the cockpit, grabbed part of the floor, and pushed.
It spun, floating freely, a wheel within a wheel. An outer track remained stable, and in the contrast, the pattern leaped out at them.
Eight resting places. Eight kickplates. Eight legs.
Kyle glared at the big man, his suspicion flaring out of control. How could simpleness have seen what they had missed?
Prudence explained, her eyes sparking with secondhand pride. “That’s what he does, Commander. He sees patterns. That’s why he’s on my crew. He can plot a multihop course more efficiently than a computer. They used to call it idiot savant. He’s not stupid. He’s just wired different than the rest of us.”
“Like you told me, Pru, we all have our own special talents.” Jorgun smiled.
“Tell me what you see, Jor.”
Kyle could tell from her voice that she already knew the answer. But she was letting him go as far as he could. Pushing him gently.
“Eight.” Jorgun announced, but then fell silent. That was all it meant to him, but Prudence nodded in agreement.
“Eight places to put your feet. Whoever flew this ship had eight feet. The absence of passive grav-plating tells us they don’t suffer from inertial sickness. And that they’re strong—that fusion nozzle must be capable of at least two or three G acceleration. They could stand up through that acceleration, spinning around, looking for visual contact—that’s why there’s so much glass. Which tells us they have impossibly good eyesight, too.”
“Who has eight feet?” Jorgun asked, confused.
“Nobody we know,” she said.
“Fleet needs to see this.” Kyle found himself hoping that authority would know what to do about it.
“The okimune needs to see this.” Prudence used the old word for the collective human realm, the sum total of civilization, wherever and whatever it might be. A normal person would have said “the world,” meaning his own planet; a sophisticated person would have said “Altair,” the biggest society around. But Prudence thought in wider terms. Like an outsider.
For the first time in his life, Kyle felt provincial, a country rube fresh off the farm. The feeling wasn’t pleasant, but the novelty of it was astounding.
“Fleet first,” he said. “We can’t just put this on the evening news. Can you imagine the panic?”
“Maybe people should be panicking.”
He stared at her. “How would that help?”
She waved her hand, in no particular direction, indicating the ruined world around them. “How did this help?”
“Running scared won’t make it better. You know that.” Was this their plan? To plunge every world within a hundred hops into mindless terror? Oppression always followed fear, like rain after the lightning. He’d studied enough history to know that.
“We don’t know that, Commander. We have no idea what we are up against. This wreck could be the blow that frightened them off, made them retreat in such a rush they only stopped to grab the pilot. Or it could be such an inconsequential prick that they haven’t even noticed it’s missing yet. Maybe running scared is the only thing anybody can do. Maybe Altair is already dead.”
“What about Jelly?” Jorgun’s face was creased with worry and concern. The death of civilizations meant nothing to him, only the death of individuals. Kyle was struck by the difference. There were no individuals for him to mourn. Only the ideal of community, not the fact of it.
“I’m sorry, Jor. We haven’t found her yet. I don’t think we will.” She broke the news to him while he had this shiny new toy to distract him, like a mother to a child.
The giant puzzled over her words, his lower lip trembling, but he did not cry. Like a boy trying to be a man. Kyle started to reach out to comfort him. Like a father, he stopped.
Let the boy show his strength. Let him grow into it.
“Did they take her?” Jorgun asked. “Did they take Jelly?”
But this child would never grow any taller.
“No, Jorgun.” Kyle used his most reassuring voice. “They didn’t take her. They didn’t take anyone.” There had been no reports of sightings from any of the refugees. The attackers had been as insubstantial as ghosts. Bombs from the sky, but no follow-up; destruction, but no looting.
It was inhuman. But that was the point.
“I’m fucking freezing up here.” Melvin, complaining again over the radio. “What the fuck are we gonna do?”
“Can you fit this in the cargo bay?” It was the first thing Kyle could think of.
Prudence stared at him. “How? We don’t have any loaders here. Are you going to fly it in? And then fix my ship when it decides to melt down or self-destruct?”
“If it blows up in the ship, wouldn’t that be bad?” Jorgun didn’t get sarcasm.
“We can’t leave it here. If this beacon turns off, how the hell can we find it again?” Kyle waved his hands at the blizzard. It was getting worse. In a few hours the alien ship would be buried under clean white snow. The evidence would be lost. A cop’s worst nightmare.
“That’s not my problem.” Prudence cradled the rifle, like its weight was unfamiliar in her hands. “If your Fleet can’t find one dead fighter craft on a planet’s surface, what good will they be against a host of live ones?”
That wasn’t the point. He was sure Fleet had the ability to find this ship again, if they really wanted to. It might take days or weeks, but they could just scan the entire continent with short radar.
The point was that he didn’t know if he could convince them to try. What if they didn’t take him seriously? What if they brushed him off as delusional? A snow-vision by an exhausted cop, a flighty girl, and a simpleton.
“Screw Fleet. What if those aliens come back and find us?” And a paranoid stoner. Even filtered through the helmet speakers, Melvin’s whine was annoying.
Kyle would be laughed out of the prosecutor’s office if this was all he could offer in a criminal trial. Altair Fleet would need half as much reason to ignore a League officer.
While he was trying to think of another plan, he saw her move. Subtly, out of the corner of his eye, the casual swing of her hand. But she was dropping something in her pocket, not the other way around. She was taking, not leaving.
He let it slide. Better not to confront her now, in the snow, with her men and so many guns. Better not to let her know he knew at all.
“Then what do you suggest?” he said, giving her the chance to advance whatever plot she and her unknown bosses were trying so hard to make happen.
“That arctic research station has a transmitter. If we give them a ride out, maybe they’ll let you have it. And we can drop it off here on our way.”
“What if the beacon fails in the next five minutes?”
“We can have the autopilot backtrack by dead reckoning. For a short trip, it should get us close enough.”
She’d prepared for everything. Shown him just enough, channeled his every step. He could wreck her plans, search her pockets and seize whatever she’d had to steal to make this whole scheme fly.
But she probably had a plan for that eventuality, too, and it might require his being dead. Better to play along for now.
Like he always did.
“Okay, Captain. We’ll do it your way.”