“Link to my wrist array,” Ozzie told his e-butler. There were function icons appearing in his virtual vision that hadn’t been there since the day he rode out of Lyddington. His inserts were regaining their full capacity. He shrugged off the backpack as if it had caught fire. His e-butler confirmed that his inserts were receiving a signal from his wrist array. He shook the contents of his backpack onto the ground, heedless of the mess. A tiny red power LED was shining on the side of his burnished wrist array. He slipped it around his hand and the malmetal contracted snugly. The OCtattoo on his forearm made contact with the unit’s i-spot. Lying amid the pile of clothes and packets he’d tipped out was a handheld array. He picked it up and switched it on. Its icons appeared immediately in his virtual vision. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. His e-butler started to back up insert files in both arrays. He let it do that while his virtual hands rearranged icons for the handheld array. Its screen unfurled to its full extent, measuring half a meter wide. “Please,” he prayed, and translucent amber fingers plucked symbols out of the linguistic files he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months.
On the screen, the spiky flower patterns that Tochee used were displayed in the deepest purple that the screen’s resolution could manage.
Tochee became very still. HELLO, its forward eye segment projected.
“Our electronic systems are working again,” Ozzie said out loud. The handheld array translated into a series of patterns that it flashed up.
I UNDERSTAND.
“Are those Tochee’s speaking pictures?” a fascinated Orion asked, peering at the screen.
The array translated, and Tochee produced an answer.
“That is correct, small human one,” the array said. “They sit in an incorrect visual spectrum. However I can read them.”
Orion whooped exuberantly and gave a massive victory jump, punching the air. “It’s me, it’s me, Tochee. I’m talking to you!” He gave Ozzie a radiant smile, and they high-fived.
“I am aware of the communication,” the array translated for Tochee. “I have wished for this moment for a long time. My first true speech is to thank you, large human one, and small human one, for the companionship you have given me. Without you I would remain at the cold house. I would not like that.”
Ozzie gave a small bow. “Our pleasure, Tochee. But this isn’t one way, man. We would have had difficulty leaving the Ice Citadel without you.”
Orion rushed over to Tochee, who extended a tentacle of manipulator flesh that the boy squeezed happily. “This is great, it’s wonderful, Tochee. There’s so much I want to tell you. And ask, as well.”
“You are kind, small human one. Large humans two, three, five, fifteen, twenty-three, and thirty also showed some consideration for my situation, as did other species at the cold house. I hope they are well.”
“Which ones are those, Ozzie?”
“I don’t know, man. I guess Sara is large human two, and George must be in there somewhere.” His virtual hand pulled the translation routines down out of stasis, slotting them into the large processing power of the handheld array. “Tochee, we need to improve our translation ability. I’d like you to talk to my machine, here.”
“I agree. I have my own electronic units that I want to switch on.”
“Okay, let’s go for it.”
The big alien reached around with its manipulator flesh, and removed one of the heavy bags it was carrying. Ozzie, meanwhile, picked several sensor instruments out of his pile, switching them on one by one. “Man, I came this close to leaving these back at the Ice Citadel,” he grunted.
“What have you got?” the excited boy asked.
“Standard first contact team stuff. Mineral analyzers, resonance scanners, em spectrum monitors, microradar, magnometers. Things that’ll tell me a lot about the environment.”
“How are they going to help?”
“Not sure yet, man. It kinda depends on what we find. But this place is different from the others we’ve walked through. There must be a reason the Silfen have stopped screwing with electricity.”
“Do you think…” Orion stopped, and looked around cautiously. “Is this the end of the road, Ozzie?”
Ozzie very nearly told the boy not to be stupid. His own growing uncertainty stopped him. “I don’t know. If it is, I would have expected something a little more elaborate.” He gestured out at the rolling landscape. “This is more like a dead end.”
“That’s what I thought,” the boy said meekly.
Results from the sensors were building up in grids across Ozzie’s virtual vision. He ignored them to give the boy a reassuring hug. “No way, man.”
“Okay.”
Ozzie turned his attention back to the sensor results. He noticed that Tochee had switched on several electronic units. His own scans showed the alien’s systems to be sensors and processor units not entirely dissimilar to his own. Apart from that, there was little for his own units to go on. Strangely, this planet seemed to have no magnetic field. The general neutrino level was above average, though. Local quantum field readings were fractionally different to standard, though nothing like enough to produce the kind of warping necessary to open a wormhole—he thought it might be a residual from the electron damping effect. “Weird, but not weird enough,” he said quietly.
“Ozzie, what’s that in the sky?”
The handheld array flashed the question up for Tochee as well. The alien put aside its own gadgets to follow Orion’s pointing arm. Ozzie followed the boy’s gaze, narrowing his eyes as he squinted almost directly into the vivid sunlight. It looked as if there was some kind of silver cloud at very high altitude, a thin curve that stretched across the sun. When his retinal inserts brought their high-intensity filters on-line and zoomed in he changed his mind. No matter what magnification he used, the little strip of shimmering silver didn’t change. The planet had a ring. He tracked along it, using both array memories to file the image. The scintillations he could see coming from within the cloud were actually tiny motes. There must have been thousands of them. He wondered briefly how their composition differed from the rest of the ring. Then he came to where it crossed in front of the sun. It didn’t. And the scale shifted again, to a terrifying degree.
“Christ fuck a duck,” Ozzie mouthed.
What he could see was a halo of gas that went right around the star. Which meant the planet they were standing on was orbiting right inside it.
“I know this place,” he said in astonishment.
“What?” Orion blurted. “How could you?”
Ozzie gave a very twitchy laugh. “I was told about it by someone else who walked the Silfen paths. He said he visited artifacts called tree reefs. They floated in a nebula of atmospheric gas. Wow, whatta you know, and I always thought his story was mostly bullshit. Guess I owe him an apology.”
“Who was it, Ozzie? Who’s been here?”
“Some dude called Bradley Johansson.”
…
After a five-minute trip, the train from Oaktier pulled up to platform twenty-nine in the Seattle CST station’s third passenger terminal. Stig McSobel stepped out and asked his e-butler to find the platform where he could catch a standard-class loop train to Los Angeles, which was the next stop on the trans-Earth line. It told him the loop trains all left from terminal two, so he hopped on the little monorail car that carried people between the terminals. He slid smoothly along the elevated rail as it took him out over the vast marshaling yard that had spread out over the land to the east of Seattle, while two-kilometer-long goods trains pulled by hulking great Damzung T5V6B electric engine units passed underneath him as they rolled out of the bulk-freight gateway to Bayovar, the Big15 connected directly to Seattle. While trans-Commonwealth express trains flashed along on their magrails like aircraft flying at zero altitude. Down to the south he could see a long line of gateway arches throwing off a pale blue light that produced long shadows across the weed-colonized concrete ground. The Seattle CST station was a junction for over twenty-seven phase one space worlds in addition to Bayovar, routing all of the freight and passengers that flowed among them. Thousands of trains a day trundled across the station, providing the huge web of commercial links that helped maintain Seattle’s high-tech research and industry base.