“Are you and he friends now?”
Carrion smiled slightly for the first time. “We do our best.”
And then Carrion sat up straight and gestured for Barron to wait a moment as new orders came in through his comm implant. He frowned, and rose abruptly to his feet. “I must leave you now. It seems I am to join the Captain’s landing party on Zero Zero.”
Barron rose quickly to his feet. “Ask the Captain to take me too. I’m not afraid. I volunteer. I need to prove myself to the Captain. After ... what happened before.”
“When you tried to kill me.”
“Yes.”
“No one knows what we’ll be facing on Zero Zero. No one knows if any one of us will return.”
“I don’t care. I need to do this.”
“Very well,” said Carrion. “Come with me to the briefing. I will vouch for you. But I can promise nothing where the Captain is concerned. He has always placed duty before friendship.”
Barron looked at Carrion for a long moment. “Why are you doing this? I thought I’d have to get down on my knees and beg you for a second chance.”
“Please don’t. I’d find that very embarrassing. As to why ... let’s just say I of all people understand the worth of a second chance.”
The briefing lounge was a mess. Half the viewscreens weren’t working, and most of the computers were showing their naked guts to the air. The
Dauntless
had been undergoing extensive refitting and upgrading when Silence was suddenly called on to take his ship out again in a hurry, with a lot of the work still left undone. The technicians had been catching up as best they could during the voyage, but the briefing lounge had a priority number so low you couldn’t even see it except in a really good light. So of course the techs had chosen the one day when it was really needed to tear everything apart. When Carrion and Barron arrived, they found Silence shooing out half a dozen techs with firm words and one hand on his gun. They left, muttering, and Silence turned to greet Carrion.
“Techs. Trying to boss me around, just because they’ve got a work chit. Where were they when my cof feemaker wasn’t working, and all I could get on my viewscreen was the damned porn channel?” And then he saw Barron, and his face and voice were instantly cold as ice. “What are you doing here, mister? Why aren’t you at your post?”
“He’s with me,” Carrion said calmly. “We have reached ... an understanding. He wishes to join the landing party on Zero Zero.”
Silence raised an eyebrow. “Really? He doesn’t look crazy.” His mood soured again almost immediately. “Give me one good reason why I should take him.”
“Because I ask it,” said Carrion.
“Ah, what the hell.” Silence shrugged, and led the way into the briefing lounge. “We can always use him as a human shield, if need be.”
Once inside, Carrion nodded to the esper Morrell, who nodded back. Silence gestured at the waiting chairs, and the four of them arranged themselves before the one working viewscreen. Morrell was careful to put the Captain between himself and Carrion. Everyone else pretended not to notice. Silence looked at each of his team in turn.
“I’m restricting this first landing party to an absolute minimum,” he said flatly. “Partly because of the risk, and partly because I want to avoid stirring anything up down there. We’ll have no way of knowing what we’re getting into until we’re well into it, and by then it’ll probably be far too late to call for help. Carrion and I are going because we have the most experience in dealing with strange and dangerous alien territory, and because both of us have ... more than normal abilities. Morrell is going because as ship’s esper he is our most experienced telepath. And Barron; you’re going to be our guinea pig. You get to test the temperature of any strange waters we may encounter before the rest of us dive in. Still want to go?”
“Yes, sir,” said Barron steadily. “I want nothing more than to prove myself in your eyes again. To be the loyal crewman my father was.”
Silence scowled. “I’m not looking for a hero, boy. I want a crewman who’ll keep his head, follow orders, and come back with useful information. Is that clear?”
“Entirely clear, Captain.”
Silence turned back to Carrion and Morrell, dividing his attention between them. “If we die, the Empire will have to decide whether to risk another landing party on Zero Zero, or send the Dauntless on to its primary mission in the Darkvoid. Our mission here is purely information gathering. We’re not here to solve the mysteries of Zero Zero, except where they coincide with our search for something that might help the Empire cope with the current nano plague. If we do turn up anything, and live to tell of it, further scientific teams will arrive later to dig out the details. That’s not our job.
“Now; you three are about to view recorded material that has been Restricted for centuries. It carries the highest possible security rating, as does whatever information we may bring back from our little trip. You are not to discuss Zero Zero with anyone, no matter how high ranking, without checking with me first. Contravening this order may be punishable by death; and even I couldn’t save you then. Pay close attention to the recording, and save any questions till afterwards.”
He paused a moment, to let the seriousness of his words sink in, and then activated the viewscreen. A series of security warnings scrolled up before them. Silence continued his introduction. “You’re about to see a recording of the last log entry from Zero Zero’s scientific Base, made by Base Commander Jorgensson. She downloaded it into a security buoy and blasted it into high orbit, just before everything went to hell.” He paused again, remembering another time like this. Then, it had been he and Investigator Frost, studying the last words from Unseeli’s Base Thirteen. But then, a lot of Silence’s career seemed to consist of cleaning up after other people’s messes. The recording began, and he decided he didn’t really have anything more worth saying anyway.
The viewscreen filled with the head and shoulders of Base Commander Jorgensson. She was a pleasant enough looking woman in her early thirties, her generous mouth set in a grim line. She wore her long dark hair in a single functional braid, draped over her left shoulder. The camera pulled back to show her seated before a desk littered with scattered papers. A hand disrupter lay within easy reach. It looked large and clumsy, compared to the modern-day model. Somebody had taken a shot at the Commander. There was a large scorch mark, darkened with dried blood, on her left side, and there were beads of sweat on her forehead. In the background, alarm sirens blared over and over, drowned out now and again by deafening screams and howls and raised voices that didn’t sound entirely human. Jorgensson looked round sharply as something heavy slammed against the door from outside, but the security seals held. She turned back, staring out of the viewscreen with determination and desperate control.
“Last report from Base Omega, Zero Zero. Security has been breached. The Base is contaminated. Nanotech has spread beyond the Base, and out into the planet’s ecosystem. God knows what it will do there. It’s all Marlowe’s fault. Damn him. He was in overall charge of the scientific team. Impeccable record. But while everyone else was working on the official experiments, he had his own, very unofficial, experiments going on. He had this dream of becoming superhuman, of having the nanos make him over into something far beyond human limitations. He exposed himself to his own specially coded nanos, and unfortunately they didn’t kill him. We have no idea of what he’s become. He disappeared from the Base several hours ago. From what we can understand of his notes, he coded the nanos to rework him from the DNA up, and programmed them for open-ended evolution. He then either released them into the Base, or they escaped. They were programmed to multiply endlessly, using any and all available matter for base material. People inside the Base have been ... changing. They don’t look like superhumans to me.
“I’ve raised the Base force shield, so no one else can leave. I don’t trust what people are becoming. There’s been a lot of killing. Physical transformations. Strange shapes in the corridors. There are monsters and nightmares running loose in the Base, and nothing seems to stop them. Every Quarantine we set up is breached almost immediately. The nanos are everywhere. They’re in me too. I can feel them moving; changing things. So that leaves me only one option. I’m going to download this log into a buoy at the starport, and then launch it by remote control. It’s far enough away from the Base that it should still be uncontaminated. And now I’m going to hit the Base’s self-destruct, and blow us all to hell. Damn you, Marlowe. This is Base Commander In-grid Jorgensson, signing off.”
The viewscreen went blank. Morrell nodded approvingly. “Brave woman. Captain; I know it’s been centuries, but the first question that occurs to me is ... could Marlowe, or whatever he eventually became, still be down there on Zero Zero somewhere? A man full of nanos programmed to eternally repair him could last a long, long time. Theoretically.”
“Everything’s theoretical where nanos are concerned,” said Silence. “Finding Marlowe could give us all the answers we need; assuming he’s still able to understand the questions. But I don’t think we should count on finding him. We don’t know what’s been happening on the planet’s surface. After centuries of nanotech running loose, endlessly multiplying, there’s no telling what we’ll encounter. At one end of the scale, we might find a whole world gone into meltdown, like the people with the nano plague. At the other end ...”
“Yes?” said Barron.
“You heard the Commander,” said Morrell. “Strange shapes. Monsters. Nightmares.”
“Don’t frighten the boy too much,” said Silence. “We’ll be taking every precaution. A pinnace will take us down to the planet’s surface, protected by full energy shields. We will be equipped with personal full-body force shields, and then dropped onto the surface from the pinnace. It will then return to high orbit, well away from the Dauntless, just in case, and stay there until we send for it. Full-body shields use up a lot of power, very quickly. We’ll have a maximum of four hours, and then the shields will collapse. So we’d better not still be on Zero Zero when that happens.”
“Four hours is very short, even for just an information run, Captain,” said Carrion. “Are you proposing several visits?”
“Depends what we find on the first one,” said Silence. “And whether we survive finding it.”
“Couldn’t we improve our odds by wearing hard suits?” said Barron.
The others looked at him pityingly. “The nanos were programmed to interact with all matter they encountered,” said the esper Morrell. “A hard suit would be just another snack to them.”
Barron flushed, and hastily regrouped. “What about the Shub and Hadenman forces? I mean, their ships are deserted, so the crews must be dirtside somewhere.”
“Whatever’s left of them by now,” said Morrell. He cracked his knuckles loudly. Everyone else jumped in his seat, and then tried to look as if he hadn’t. The esper continued smoothly. “They may have had force shields when they went down, but the power must have run out by now. They must have been exposed to the nanotech.”
“We can’t know that for sure,” said Silence. “Shub and Hadenman tech is more advanced than ours.”
“I’m still concerned with that bastard Marlowe,” said Morrell. “What he might have become, after centuries of change.”
“Nanos coded for open-ended evolution,” said Silence thoughtfully. “I wonder what you would find at evolution’s end, for Humanity?”
“You should know if anyone, Captain,” said Carrion. “You’re further along that road than the rest of us.”
Morrell cut in smoothly while Silence was still glaring at Carrion. “Assuming Marlowe is still around, in whatever shape or form, what are our orders, Captain? Do we try and apprehend him?”
“What would be the point?” said Silence. “We daren’t risk taking him offplanet, for fear of spreading the nanos he’s carrying. Sure, we could isolate him behind a series of force shields, but all it would take is one power outage, one slipup in security, and the whole ship would be contaminated. If the Empire even suspected the nanos might have got loose, we’d never be allowed to land again. Hell, they’d probably shoot us on sight, just in case. I would. No; if we find him, he stays on Zero Zero. And I don’t want you trying to read his mind either, Morrell. After all this time, who knows what his thoughts might have mutated into. You go in, and you might not come out again.”
Morrell sniffed. “You’re no fun anymore, you know that? What’s the point of going down there if we don’t take a few risks?”
“This from the man who preferred to mutilate himself rather than join the landing party,” said Silence. “We will only be taking calculated risks, Morrell. You don’t do one damn thing down there without my express permission, in advance. Is that clear?”
“So clear it’s positively dazzling, Captain. Be making me wear a bib next.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing, Captain. Just clearing my throat.”
“All right,” said Silence. “End of preliminary briefing. Morrell; since you’re so keen to be up and going, you get to check out the pinnace and make sure it’s ready for the drop. And take Barron with you; I want him familiarized with all the systems, just in case he has to pilot the ship back.”
Morrell and Barron rose to their feet. Barron saluted Silence. “I won’t let you down, Captain.”
They left together. Silence waited till the door had shut behind them, and then looked at Carrion. “That boy is too keen to be real. Odds are he’ll take the first chance he gets downbelow to shoot you in the back.”
“I don’t think so, Captain. He’s had any number of opportunities to try and kill me since his first attempt, and he has if anything been conspicuous in his absence from the rest of the crew’s silent disapproval.”
“But do you trust him?”
“I don’t trust any human these days, Captain.”
“Let’s change the subject,” said Silence tiredly.