This Alien Shore Page 11

  The reaction was immediate.

  “Our own people?” Varsav asked incredulously.

  “Who?” Delhi demanded. “Who is he accusing?”

  “Impossible.” That was Kent. “Simply impossible.”

  Devlin looked more shocked than any of them. “How does he know that?” he demanded. “How can he know that?”

  “The man’s weaving fantasies,” Varsav muttered. “This is the Guild we’re talking about.”

  Ra said nothing.

  “If I knew more about this, I would tell you,” she assured them. “But Director Gaza and I made the decision early on not to trust certain kinds of data to transmission, in order to maintain top security on this project. As a result Dr. Masada is being most circumspect in what he tells me, and I have no way to question him thoroughly until he arrives in person. This much I will share with you: he says that his analysis of the virus has led him to believe that someone from our own Guild is involved in all this.” She paused, studying their expressions with a practiced eye. Nothing seemed out of place ... yet. “That means we must guard all our secrets until he arrives, ten times more carefully than before ... even from our own people.”

  “You’re asking us to believe that one of our own would sell out the Guild,” Ra said quietly. “I find that incredible.”

  “I didn’t say that. All I’m telling you now is that there’s a good chance that someone wearing a Guild uniform has leaked information to the outside. Maybe he did so deliberately. Maybe he was just careless. When Masada arrives, he can give us more details, and we can assess the situation properly. Until then, we’ll function on the assumption that the worst is true. And that means trusting no one. No one,” she stressed. “Not the other guildmasters.” She looked pointedly at Devlin. “And not your own department. I’m sorry, but some of your people have professional contacts outside the Guild. That makes them highly suspect.”

  “I understand.” His expression was dark, and she knew him well enough to guess at the anger seething just beneath the surface. He was a proud man, and the thought that someone in his charge might have done such a thing must surely be eating him alive. “I assure you, if there is any kind of security problem in my department, I will find out.”

  She nodded. “All right, then. You know what we’re up against. You five are among my most trusted officers. All information will be channeled through you and Hsing, and that includes Masada’s work. Anything you have to report to me should come by courier, or else give it to me in person; I want none of this transmitted, not even between our own offices. Remember, whoever is responsible for Lucifer has already bested our security once, let’s not assume that was an isolated incident. Maximize your precautions at every turn. Understood?”

  Looking them over, studying their responses, she knew in her heart that when she went over the tapes of the meeting, she would find a thousand things to question, a thousand places where suspicion might be anchored. She trusted them as much as she trusted anyone, but in matters like this, trust was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She’d watch them all, and the slightest hint that anything was not as it should be would bring all the force of her office down on someone’s head.

  “If a situation arises where you must transmit, you’ll use this for encryption.” She nodded to Devlin, who flashed an icon that would begin loading the proper programs into the guildmasters’ brainware. She listened to the heavy silence as each of her guests envisioned the icons necessary to receive and store them. As she did so, she was intimately aware of the flaws in even that system, of that fragile instant in which the binary codes in one machine would slip through space to contact another. Could they be hijacked in that short a time? she wondered. What if there was an invading program in the room even now, collecting and recording their most private communications?

  So what’s the alternative? she asked herself harshly. Shall we plug wires into our heads, like the ancients did? Isolate ourselves inside our skulls like the Terrans still do, hoping the invader won’t zap our brains the one minute we do connect ? You can’t live in fear like that, she thought. Not every moment. If they get us to the point where we’re feeling that paranoid, then we’ve lost a far greater battle than with this one virus.

  But she could feel the fear, a cold trickle of unease in her heart ... and she knew that the others did, too.

  TENSAN

  The tensan is restless, uneasy. It feels driven to do something, but it doesn’t know what that something is. It feels dread, as if contemplating the loss of something it holds dear, but cannot tell just what it fears losing, or how that thing will be lost. It feels excitement, as if some bright new horizon is about to be revealed, but it lacks any insight into where it may travel once it gets there.

  It senses, in the core of its being, that its life is about to change forever. It cannot know what the process is like, for only those who have submitted to the Changing and come out the other side can understand it.

  It hungers to become something greater than it is.

  It fears unbecoming all that it has been.

  It knows, in its heart, that Change is unavoidable.

  KAJA: An Oufworlder’s Guide to the Gueran Social Contract, Volume 2: Signs of the Soul

  REIJIK NODE REIJIK STATION

  IT WAS HARD to learn to take a back seat in your own head, to let someone else take control of your flesh and allow his sensations to invade your soul. The first few times it happened Jamie was so terrified she could do little more than cower in the one comer of her brain that was left to her, crying and screaming without sound, without comfort. Watching her body move as one might watch a viddie.

  A few of the Others were gentle. A few of them seemed to understand what was needed. Even Derik, in his own coarse way, seemed to sense that this was not the time for macho display, that the fragile mind sharing this body with him could only handle so many challenges. So it was pretty much all right with him, so far. That was a surprise. She had expected him to be one of the worst. But if he was coarse-mannered and violent and full of pent-up rage, that was all on her behalf, and at least he wasn’t self-destructive, like Zusu. No, he wasn’t one of the bad ones.

  Verina helped a lot. She was a cold presence, but she did know a lot, and sometimes when Jamie was most afraid, she would hear that measured voice whispering facts to her, to ease her fears. Like when Zusu took over for the first time, and Jamie watched in horror as her own hand reached for the utility knife, took it up in a trembling grip, and then began to scratch jagged lines into the flesh of her own arm. Self-hate, induced by Shido’s minions, Verina whispered the words into her brain even as the blood began to flow. If not for her existence, it would have no outlet, and you would

  surely be overcome by it. And as she watched in horrified amazement, the cool voice assured her, Don’t worry, we never let her go too far.

  Why did they do it? she begged them all. Struggling to put the pieces together, to understand what Shido had wanted. Oh, she knew now what had been done to her, that was no longer a secret ... but why?

  They never answered that.

  The most amazing part of all was that these Others who shared her body seemed to know each other pretty well. It was like some secret club that everyone belonged to except her ... only now she had been taken in, and she was fighting to learn the rules before the very concept of what the club was about drove her crazy.

  The worst of them all was Katlyn. Not because she was the most unstable; on the contrary, of all the many Others who crowded in Jamisia’s head she was one of the sanest. And she never tried to take control if the moment wasn’t right for it, which couldn’t be said of all the others; in their hunger to experience life at its fullest there were more than a few who demanded prime time, pushing Jamisia to the back of her own brain at a time she most wanted to be in control. No, Katlyn always waited until the moment was right for her to take over. Jamie flushed as she recalled her last escapade, a meeting with the Captain-General’s son in one of the
hydroponic gardens. He’d managed to shut down the main portals so that no one would interupt them, and then, in the midst of all those exotic smells, heady high-ox air filling her lungs, Jamie had felt the raw heat of Katlyn’s hunger filling her.... God, she thought, what shamed her more now, the memory of what her body had done, or the memory of how it had felt to do it? Even now it made her tremble.

  It’s really about power, Verina explained. Sex is just the vehicle. It’s about connection, breaking through the walls that confine us, defying the doctors who meant to stifle our freedom.

  But it was about sex, too, raw and clutching and wholly overwhelming to Jamisia’s inexperienced soul. Yes, she knew now that her body was far from inexperienced, for Katlyn had shared stories of her adventures on the habitat ... but Jamisia had no real memories of those trysts, and so they didn’t affect her. Not like these did.

  We’re a team now, Katlyn whispered, in the same seductive tones she used to draw men into her web. And this is so much better, no doctors to hide from, no more secrets to guard ... so relax. Sit back. Enjoy.

  Hot memories. Shameful memories.

  You’ll have to function as a team, her tutor told her in a dreamscape vision. It was one of many he had planted in her brain, to help her through this terrifying transition. She had them nearly every night now. Workshops in insanity. It’s your only hope.

  I’m trying, she told him. Tears in her eyes. I really am trying.

  Teamwork....

  “Jamie?”

  She looked up from packing and saw him standing in the doorway. As always, his presence brought a flush to her cheeks. For a moment she hesitated, waiting to see if Katlyn would take over—Justin was really her lover, not Jamisia’s —but for once she didn’t. Was that good or bad?

  “Come in.”

  She looked up from the bag she had been packing, one of two that held her meager belongings. Despite the temptations of the metroliner she had purchased very few things, always aware that her resources were limited. Clothing, mostly practical. Jewelry, modest pieces that could be worn with anything. Cosmetics, enough to accent her features without adopting the bright and often hideous fashions that swept through the great ship at intervals. No music beyond that which she had brought with her from Shido. No books. There were libraries for those, from which she could borrow journals for Verina, suspense novels for Katlyn, combat manuals for Derik, space adventures for Raven ... now that she was allowed to share consciousness with the Others it was all a mess in her brain, she could no longer remember who had read what.

  For a moment it seemed that he might come into the room and kiss her. She braced herself not to draw away from him if he did. It wasn’t that she didn’t find him attractive herself, and the few times she’d been with him in her own right she’d rather liked him. But the memory of her involuntary intimacy with him made her skin crawl when he touched her.

  Damn it, where was Katlyn?

  “We need to talk,” he said quietly.

  She started to say something about long good-byes—and then looked up at him, and looked in his eyes, and the words died in her throat. This wasn’t about her leaving the metroliner next E-week. It wasn’t about two lives that were about to be separated, to Katlyn’s frustration and Jamisia’s great relief. They had been through all that, a dozen times over.

  This was about something else ... something more.

  “Okay.” She closed the cover of her bag and sat on the edge of the bed, not quite knowing what to expect. “Go ahead.”

  “Not here.” He glanced around the small room—somewhat nervously, she thought—then gestured toward the corridor outside. “Come with me.”

  Mystified, she followed him. This kind of behavior wasn’t typical of Justin at all. As she left the room, she flashed a quick thought to her Others—?????—but none responded. Apparently they were as much in the dark about this as she was.

  Be careful, Derik warned her, as they walked down the corridor in silence. External silence, anyway.

  One would think that after three years a passenger would know the metroliner by heart, but he took her to a place she had never seen before. Once he used an ID tag to open a sealed door; at another portal he hesitated, and she guessed that the ship’s system was checking his brainware for clearance. Soon they were in a part of the metroliner where no passengers besides themselves could be seen, all stark corridors and simple doorframes with numbers beside them: cold, undecorated, unwelcoming. Something about the place made her skin crawl ... could it be memory? Was this the place they had brought her when she first arrived, where medical tests had been performed on her, to guarantee that she was free of infection? With a start she realized that Verina had been present for much of that testing, her quick mind absorbing every fact within reach. Not an ordeal, for that one, but an education.

  How different Jamisia’s memories seemed, now that she knew about the Others who were part of them. She wondered if she would ever get used to it.

  “In here.”

  The door he opened led to a meeting room of some kind. She hesitated, then went inside. It was a small room, simply furnished, with a table and chairs set alongside one wall and a computer console along the other. No pictures. No labels. No fragments of someone’s business left behind, that she could judge its purpose from.

  He locked the door behind them and then walked about the room, peering into its comers. He had a sensor in his hand, which he referred to periodically, and at last he seemed satisfied with its readings. “It’s clean,” he muttered, and he put the box away. Only then did he turn to her, leaning back against the computer console as he did so.

  “Clean?”

  “Most of the metroliner has surveillance capacity. I shut it down in this room. They won’t discover it till tomorrow at least, not with all the other stuff that’s going on here.”

  “So you mean—” It hit her suddenly; she could barely whisper the words. “My room?”

  “I said capacity,” he stressed. “Under normal circumstances, passenger privacy is considered sacred; we’d have a revolution on our hands if it weren’t. But the Captain-General reserves the right to use surveillance if necessary to safeguard the ship ... so all the rooms are wired, just in case. Don’t worry,” he said quickly, seeing the growing alarm in her eyes. “I know for a fact yours has never been turned on before today. No one’s been watching you, Jamie.”

  “But you thought someone might be.” Her heart had begun to pound in her chest. “Today.”

  He hesitated. “Let’s say ’ I didn’t want to take any chances.”

  He came toward her, drawing a folded plastic sheet from out of his pocket. “This came yesterday. Mom doesn’t know I have it.”

  She looked at him for a minute, then took the letter. And opened it. And read.

  To Viktoria Clarendon, Captain-General of the Earth Metroliner Aurora.

  We have reason to believe there may be a fugitive hiding among your passengers. Her true name is Jamisia Shido, and she has been implicated in the terrorist sabotage which destroyed Shido Station three E-years ago. We are most anxious to find her, and have arranged for all access stations serving Earth to be on guard for her arrival. In addition, we would appreciate your assistance.

  Ms. Shido was not present at the start of your journey, but would have come on board some short time later. She is a young woman, now nineteen years old; attached to this file are pictures of her when she left Shido Habitat, and a computer update of her probable appearance now. We do not know for sure what brainware she carries, thus we regret this cannot be used to verify her identity. Attached are the following additional files for your use: kinesthetic template, fingerprint and retina scans, DNA sequencing, betawave prints. We hope that some or all of this will prove useful to you in your search for her.

  We regret that we do not have an agent on Earth’s access station to take custody of Ms. Shido, which would be our preferred method of dealing with this matter. Instead we ask that you bring her back t
o Earth with you on your return journey, to be surrendered to the proper authorities when she arrives. If this is not possible, we ask that you ascertain which access station she is being shipped to and contact the appropriate authorities; a list of their names and eddresses has been appended to this letter.

  Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

  She read the letter twice, and then finally the signatures and titles scanned in beneath it. Earth Central Security. United Habitat Defense. Two of the most powerful security operations in Earth’s domain. They wanted her, these people, and they wanted her badly.

  Suddenly the old fear was back. She wanted to run somewhere—anywhere—but where was there to go? So she forced herself to take in a deep, deep breath and hand the letter back to him. Waiting.

  “Well?” he said quietly.

  She swallowed thickly. It hurt.

  “Jamie?”

  She whispered it: “What do you want me to say?” God, they had her retina, her betawave ... everything. What effort would it be for the ship’s crew to scan the passengers as they left? Security probably did that anyway. She was trapped, trapped....

  “Tell me about this,” he urged softly. “Help me understand. ”

  How many dreams had she had, in which her tutor warned her about the enemy? How many times had he told her in dreamscapes that her brainware was worth a fortune to Shido’s rivals, that they would come after her if they possibly could ... and she had been foolish, and imagined herself safe here. She had forgotten the first rule of inspace, which he’d drilled into her from childhood: people can only travel so fast. Data moves at the speed of light.

  It had beaten her here.

  “Jamie?”

  She drew in a deep breath, trying to assemble a plausible lie. What could she tell him? How much did she dare trust him? Go for it, Katlyn whispered, but Jamisia wasn’t about to take her advice; Kat’s brain was between her legs.