“Wow, air,” said Lieutenant Stross, waving his hand back and forth in the expanse of the shuttle bay. “I don’t get to feel this much.” Stross was floating lazily in the air he was grooving on, thanks to Zane having cut the gravity in the bay to accommodate Stross, who lived primarily in microgravity situations.
Jane explained it to me and Zane, as we took the elevator to the shuttle bay. Gamerans were humans—or at least, their DNA originated from human stock and had other things added in—radically sculpted and designed to live and thrive in airless space. To that end they had shelled bodies to protect them from vacuum and cosmic rays, symbiotic genetically altered algae stored in a special organ to provide them with oxygen, photosynthetic stripes to harness solar energy and hands on the ends of all their limbs. And, they were Special Forces soldiers. All those rumors in the general CDF infantry about wildly mutant Special Forces turned out to be more than rumors. I thought of my friend Harry Wilson, who I met when I first joined the CDF; he lived for this sort of stuff. I’d have to tell him the next time I saw him. If I ever saw him again.
Despite being a Special Forces soldier, Stross acted deeply informal, from his vocal mannerisms (vocal being a figurative term; vocal cords would be useless in space, so he didn’t have any—his “voice” was generated in the BrainPal computer in his head and transmitted to our PDAs) to his apparent tendency to get distracted. There was a word for what he was.
Spacey.
Zane didn’t waste any time on courtesy. “I want to know how the hell you got control of my ship,” he said, to Stross.
“Blue pill,” Stross said, still waving his hand about. “It’s code that creates a virtual machine on your hardware. Your software runs on top of it, and never even knows it’s not running on the hardware. That’s why it can’t tell anything’s wrong.”
“Get it off my computers,” Zane said. “And then get off my boat.”
Stross held open three of his hands, the other one still cutting air. “Do I look like a computer programmer to you?” he asked. “I don’t know how to code it, I just know how to operate it. And my orders come from someone who outranks you. Sorry, Captain.”
“How did you get here?” I asked. “I know you’re adapted to space. But I’m pretty sure you don’t have a Skip Drive in there.”
“I hitched a ride with you,” Stross said. “I’ve been sitting on the hull for the last ten days, waiting for you to skip.” He tapped his shell. “Embedded nano-camo,” he said. “Reasonably new trick. If I don’t want you to notice me, you won’t.”
“You were on the hull for ten days?” I asked.
“It’s not that bad,” Stross said. “I kept busy by studying for my doctorate. Comparative literature. Keeps me busy. Distance learning, obviously.”
“That’s nice for you,” Jane said. “But I’d prefer to focus on our situation.” Her voice snapped out, cold, a counterpoint to Zane’s hot fury.
“All right,” Stross said. “I’ve just zapped the relevant files and orders to your PDAs, so you can peruse them at your leisure. But here’s the deal: The planet you thought was Roanoke was a decoy. The planet you’re over now is the real Roanoke colony. This is where you’ll colonize.”
“But we don’t know anything about this planet,” I said.
“It’s all in the files,” Stross said. “It’s mostly a better planet for you than the other one. The life chemistry is right in line with our food needs. Well, your food needs. Not mine. You can start grazing right away.”
“You said the other planet was a decoy,” Jane said. “A decoy for what?”
“That’s complicated,” Stross said.
“Try me,” Jane said.
“All right,” Stross said. “For starters, do you know what the Conclave is?”
FIVE
Jane looked like she’d been slapped.
“What? What is it? What is the Conclave?” I asked. I looked over to Zane, who opened his hands apologetically. He didn’t know, either.
“They got it off the ground,” Jane said, after a pause.
“Oh, yeah,” Stross said.
“What is the Conclave?” I repeated.
“It’s an organization of races,” Jane said, still looking over at Stross. “The idea was to band together to control this part of space and to keep other races from colonizing.” She turned to me. “The last I heard about it was just before you and I went to Huckleberry.”
“You knew about this and you didn’t tell me,” I said.
“Orders,” Jane said; it came out snappishly. “It was part of the deal I had. I got to leave the Special Forces on my terms, provided I forgot everything I’d ever heard about the Conclave. I couldn’t have told you even if I had wanted to. And anyway, there was nothing to tell. Everything was still in the preliminary stages and from what I knew, it wasn’t going anywhere. And I learned about it through Charles Boutin. He wasn’t the most credible observer of interstellar politics.”