It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Tranquillity would have informed Ione Saldana about all those agency-teasing meetings with starship captains. The girl was erring on the side of caution, which was quite acceptable. She did have the rest of the population to think about, after all.
Alkad peered ahead, out over the huge grey valley of water to the southern shore, searching. There, to the right, twenty degrees up the curve. The Laymil project campus was a unique splash of opal light on the darkened terraces of the southern endcap. Such a shame, really, she thought with a tinge of regret. The work had been an interesting challenge, interpreting and extrapolating xenoc technology from mere fragments of clues. She had made friends there, and progress. And now the whole campus was animated with the discovery of the Laymil sensorium memories that young scavenger had found. It was an exciting time to be a project researcher, full of promise and reward.
In another life she could easily have devoted herself to it.
Alkad reached the water’s edge as the light-tube cooled to a smirched platinum. Ripples sighed contentedly against the sand. Tranquillity really was a premium place to live. She shrugged out of her backpack, then touched the seal on her boots and started to pull them off.
Samuel, the Edenist Intelligence operative, was six metres from the foot of the scarp path when he saw the lone figure by the water bend over to take her boots off. That wasn’t part of the humdrum formula which governed Mzu’s activities. He hurried after Pauline Webb, the CNIS second lieutenant, who had reached the beach ahead of him. She dithered in the grove of palm trees which huddled along the base of the escarpment, debating whether to break cover and walk openly on the sands.
“It looks like she’s going for a swim,” he said.
Pauline gave him a cursory nod. The CNIS and the Edenists cooperated to a reasonable degree in their observation.
“At night?” she said. “By herself?”
“The doctor is a solitary soul, but I concede this isn’t the most sensible thing she’s ever done.” Samuel was thinking back to that morning when the news of Omuta’s sanctions being lifted had appeared in the AV projection at Glover’s restaurant.
“So what do we do?”
Monica Foulkes, the ESA operative, caught up with them. She increased the magnification factor of her retinal implants just as Alkad Mzu pulled her sweatshirt off over her head. “I don’t know what you two are panicking over. Nobody as smart as Dr Mzu would choose drowning as a method of suicide. It’s too prolonged.”
“Maybe she is just going for a quick swim,” Pauline suggested, without much hope. “It’s a pleasant enough evening.”
Samuel kept watching Mzu. Now her boots and clothes were off she was removing the contents of her backpack and dropping them on the sand. It was the casual way she did it which bothered him; as if she was without a care. “I somehow doubt it.”
“We’re going to look particularly stupid charging over there to rescue her if all she’s doing is taking a dip to cool off,” Monica groused.
The middle-aged Edenist’s lips pursed in amusement. “You think we don’t look stupid anyway?”
She scowled, and ignored him.
“Does anyone have any relevant contingency orders?” Pauline asked.
“If she wants to drown herself, then I say let her,” Monica said. “Problem solved at long last. We can all pack up and go home then.”
“I might have known you’d take that attitude.”
“Well, I’m not swimming after her if she gets into trouble.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” Samuel said, without shifting his gaze. “Tranquillity has affinity-bonded dolphins. They’ll assist any swimmers that get into difficulties.”
“Hoo-bloody-rah,” Monica said. “Then we can have another twenty years of worrying about who the daft old biddy will talk to and what she’ll say.”
Alkad datavised a code to the processor in her empty backpack. The seal around the bottom opened, and the composite curled up revealing the hidden storage space. She reached in to remove the programmable silicon spacesuit which had lain there undisturbed for twenty-six years.
Ione,tranquillity said urgently. We have a problem developing.
“Excuse me,” Ione said to her cocktail party guests. They were members of the Tranquillity Banking Regulatory Council, invited to discuss the habitat’s falling revenue which the massive decrease in starship movements was causing. Something needed to be done to halt the stock market’s wilder fluctuations, so she had thought an informal party was the best way of handling it. She turned instinctively to face her apartment’s window wall and the shoals of yellow and green fish nosing round the fan of light it threw across the dusky sand. What?
It’s Alkad Mzu. Look.
The image fizzed up into her mind.
Samuel frowned as Mzu drew some kind of object from deep inside her backpack. It looked ridiculously like a football, but with wings attached. Even with his retinal implants on full magnification he couldn’t quite make it out. “What is that?”
Mzu fastened the collar round her neck, and bit down on the nozzle of the respirator tube. She datavised an activation code into the suit’s control processor. The black ball flattened itself against her upper chest and started to flow over her skin.
Both the other Intelligence operatives turned to look at the sharpness in Samuel’s voice. The two serjeants began to walk forwards over the beach.
Ione!tranquillity’s thoughts rang with surprise, turning to alarm. I can sense a gravitonic-distortion zone building.
So?she asked. every starship emerging above Mirchusko registered in the habitat’s mass-sensitive organs. There was no requirement for the usual network of strategic warning grav-distortion-detector satellites which guarded ordinary asteroid settlements and planets, Tranquillity’s perception of local space was unrivalled, making threat response a near-instantaneous affair. Is the starship emerging too close? Arm the strategic-defence platforms.
No use. It’s—
At first Samuel mistook it for a shadow cast by an evening cloud. There was still enough pearly radiance coming from the light-tube to give the circumfluous sea a sparse shimmer, a cloud would produce exactly that patch of darkness. But there was only one patch of darkness; and when he glanced up the air was clear. Then the noise began, a distant thunderclap which lasted for several seconds, then chopped off abruptly. A brilliant star shone at the centre of the darkness, sending long radials of frigid white light into the habitat.
Mzu was silhouetted perfectly against the white blaze reflected off the sea, encased in the black skin of the spacesuit, a consummate monochrome picture.
Shock immobilized Samuel’s body for a precious second. Out of the centre of the fading star a blackhawk came skimming silently over the sea towards Mzu; a compressed ovoid one hundred and thirty metres long, with a horseshoe life-support section moulded round the rear dorsal bulge. Its blue polyp hull was marbled with an imperial-purple web.
“Jesus wept!” Pauline said in an aghast whisper. “It jumped inside. It’s come right into the fucking habitat!”
“Get her!” Monica cried. “For Christ’s sake stop the bitch!” She ran forwards.
“No, stop! Come back,” Samuel yelled. But Pauline was already charging out of the trees after the ESA agent, boosted muscles accelerating her to a phenomenal speed. “Oh, shit.” He started to run.