“This is politically dangerous,” Conrad warned. “I hope these people don't know what they're doing, or why.”
“Let me worry about that,” Mack said with a wave of his hand.
“Yeah? And what about you personally?”
“None of your concern, Boss.”
“The hell it isn't! I needed trustworthy help, so I called you. I'm not going to leave you hanging when I'm through.”
“They don't do that anymore. Hanging.”
“Not that specifically,” Conrad said, “but what happens when you're caught?”
“If I'm caught,” Mack corrected. “Don't worry. I love a good lie, a good sneak behind the bushes, and if it falls apart and I'm standing there with my trousers down, well, that's a challenge of a different sort.”
“But—”
“I can take care of myself, Conrad. Think who my teacher was.”
Well, that was hardly reassuring. But what could he say?
Soon the cargo pods were stripped and ready, and it was time to get things moving again. Conrad had considered swiping the Data Morgue as well, but its memory cores were much more valuable than the Cryoleum, much harder for the colony to replace, and for the most part the images contained inside them were of people who were not, in point of fact, dead. Including Conrad himself, for what little that mattered. Perhaps Bascal would find a way to print that copy out, and punish it for what Conrad was about to do, but it was a risk he would just have to live with. He had no access to the records himself, could not simply delete his image.
It would be nice if Xmary could meet him at the top of the tower, but the orbital mechanics of P2 and its environment forbade this. If Newhope came to rest on the top of the tower, it would not be orbiting, and the mass of the ship itself—to say nothing of its ertial shields—would crumple the tower like a tube of paper. Instead, a complex system of orbital rendezvous was necessary, and herein lay one of the great risks of Conrad's plan. Newhope's failure to be in the right place at the right time would strand the pods in useless, unlicensed orbits where they would eventually bang into each other, or into the tower itself. Or worse, into something moving along a different orbit with much higher relative velocity.
That is, if Naval Security didn't get them first.
The first pod climbed away from the ground with a sonic rumble—never a boom, as booms were a symptom of wasted energy, of sloppy design—and was, within minutes, a mere gleam of sunlight on the tower's black face. The second and third pods quickly followed, and then the fourth. Twenty-five thousand frozen corpses. Twenty-five thousand children, bound for a kind of heaven. If he could save more, he would. If he could think of a better plan, he'd implement it without a second thought. But Conrad had always believed it was better to salvage something than to salvage nothing at all. And if those were the only choices, then his conscience was as clear as the path ahead of him.
“You should come with us,” Conrad said, in a last-ditch effort to save Mack from himself.
But Mack just snorted. “Will you stop already? Locked in that ship I'd go crazy in a week. Besides, I've eaten at the king's table, and partaken of his daughter. There are limits to how far my treacheries extend, you know? That's no reflection on you, sir—I admire what you're doing here—but this place is my home. I'll stay. I'll cope.”
“Jesus,” Conrad said, with a hand on his brow. “You be careful, Mack. Do you hear me? You live a good life.”
“Always have,” the troll said simply. “And when death comes for me, as it surely will someday, why, then I'll be back with my princess again. What could be finer? Quite frankly it's you I'm worried about.” He paused a moment and added, “I'll miss you, Boss. I hope you make it.”
People say a troll cannot weep. People say a lot of things.
Conrad rode up with the fifth and final pod, in an acceleration couch Mack's team had installed in the big, empty chamber that had been the Cryoleum's reception hall. Conrad wished he could fill this space with frozen corpses as well, but that would have been impossible without drawing unwanted attention. So the chamber, which had been designed to hold as many as two hundred live, grieving people, instead held only one.
If the walls had been of wellstone, then he might have seen the spectacular view as induction motors yanked him up the side of the tower for two and a half hours, shrinking the ground beneath him until its curvature was apparent and the atmosphere was just a thin yellow haze clinging to the ground far below. But instead the walls were made of titanium—one of the commonest metals in the silicate crust of P2—and through a crude material like that, Conrad could see nothing.
Thus, weightlessness was a bit of a shock when it came, and even a seasoned space veteran like Conrad was not above releasing some globs of vomit to float in the air around him like smelly, brightly colored ornaments. If he weren't maintaining radio silence, Conrad might have called Xmary to see where she was, to find out when exactly she would be retrieving him. But instead he sat in the glare of artificial lights, afraid to leave his seat for fear of being slammed without warning into the walls or floor when Newhope's grapples finally took hold and reeled him in.
He sat like that for a long time, contemplating the fact that he should have brought a jacket. In the old days, such considerations had been unnecessary, since the shipping containers would be insanely well insulated and his own wellcloth clothing would have kept his skin temperature constant anyway. But Conrad had only two wellcloth outfits left—one a formal suit and the other a Polar Rangers uniform—and he stupidly hadn't thought to wear either one today, possibly because neither one would have felt appropriate for the occasion. So, as the metal cargo pod bled its heat away into the cold vacuum, he huddled and shivered and cursed himself, wondering what else he might have overlooked. Sadly, years of planning were not always enough to prevent these stupid oversights.
Did the cold, in some way, make him hallucinate? Did it trick his eye, his optic nerve, his brain? For he saw a flickering at the corner of his eye, and turned to find himself staring straight into the face of a ghost.
He knew it was a ghost, for it was pale and translucent, all but colorless, and hung in the air just above the floor in exactly the way that ghosts are supposed to. But there were problems with this theory as well. First of all, Conrad had always understood ghosts to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, a sort of quantum imprint in the area where an event—usually traumatic—had taken place. Detecting them took sensors of incredible power and subtlety.
And yet, what good was a word like “ghost” if it couldn't be applied to a thing which fit it so precisely? Had there ever been an era, a time or place or society, where people didn't claim, at least occasionally, to have seen them? With their own eyes, in a moment of shock and horror, when contact with the dead had in fact been the farthest thing from their minds?
The second problem with the theory was that ghosts were, science insisted, merely a recording, not unlike the patterns of a chemical photograph or the acoustically etched grooves in a medieval phonograph record. They could be reconstructed, played back . . . but not interacted with. And yet this ghost of Conrad's appeared to be looking right at him, its tear-streaked face pulling down into a mask of horror at the sight of him. And the mask was one he recognized: Raylene Pine, who had died years before in the Polar Well.