“Target acquisition in progress. X-ray laser battery coming online. Be advised current orbital inclination is not favorable for surgical excision. Cover your eyes.” He threw an arm across his face. Bones flashed in red silhouette, followed a split second later by a crash of thunder and a blast of heat, as if someone had opened the oven door of hell right in front of his face.
His skin prickled as if Mrs. Hedgehog was embracing him, only all over. Trees falling in the forest, a flapping of panic-stricken wings. The flash and bang repeated itself a second later, this time behind him; then three or four more times, increasingly distant.
“Incident Control stand down. Threat terminated. Be advised you have received an ionizing radiation dose of approximately four Greys, and that this will be life-threatening without urgent remediation. A medical support package has been dispatched. Remain where you are, and it will arrive in twenty-two minutes. Thank you for your custom, and have a nice day.” Felix lay gasping at the base of his tree. He felt dizzy, a little sick: afterimages of his femur floated in ghostly purple splendor across his eyes. “I want Mr. Rabbit,” he mumbled into the phone, but it didn’t answer him. He cried, tears of frustration and loneliness. Presently, he closed his eyes and slept. He was still asleep when the spider slipped down from the stars and wove him into a cocoon of silvery not-silk to begin the task of dissolving and reforming his radiation-damaged body yet again. This was the third time so far; it was all his own fault for making that third wish. Youth, true friends … and what every little boy wished for in his heart, without quite grasping that an adventure-filled life isn’t much fun when you’re the person who has to live it.
Martin sat on the thin mattress in his cell, and tried to work out how many days he had left before they executed him.
The fleet was six days out from the final jump to Rochard’s World. Before that, they’d probably transfer supplies from the remaining support freighters and put any supernumeraries— conscripts who’d gone mad, contracted crippling diseases, or otherwise become superfluous to requirements — on board.
Maybe they’d move him over and send him back with the basket cases, back to the New Republic to face trial on the capital charge of spying in the dockyard. Somehow, he doubted that his defense (of shipyard necessity) would do him much good; that snot-nosed assistant from the Curator’s Office had it in for him, quite obviously, and would stop at nothing to see him hang.
That was one option. Another was that he’d be kept in the brig aboard ship until it arrived. At which point they’d realize that the cumulative clock-delay he’d bodged into the Lord Vanek’s fourspace guidance system had screwed the pooch, completely buggering their plan to sneak up on the Festival via a spacelike trajectory. In which case, they’d logically assume sabotage, and they’d have the saboteur already in the cells, trussed like a turkey for Thanksgiving.
Somehow, the fact that he’d succeeded, that his mission was accomplished and the threat of a wider causality violation averted, did not fill Martin with happiness. There might, he supposed, be heroes who would go to the airlock with a spring in their step, but he wasn’t one of them; he’d rather be opening Rachel’s bedroom door than opening that other door, learning to breathe in her muff rather than learning to inhale vacuum. It was, he supposed dismally, typical of the pattern of his life to fall in love — the kind of annoying obsession that won’t go away — just before stumbling irremediably into the shit. He’d been around enough to think he had few illusions left; Rachel had edges rough enough to use as a nail file, and in some ways, they had very little in common. But being banged up alone in a tiny cell was a frighteningiy lonely experience, all the lonelier for knowing that his lover was almost certainly less than thirty meters away — and completely unable to help him. Probably under suspicion herself. And however much he needed her, he didn’t, in all honesty, want her in here with him. He wanted to be with her on the outside — preferably somewhere many light-years from the New Republic, acquiring a long history of having absolutely nothing to do with it.
He lay back, rolled over on his stomach, and closed his eyes. Then the toilet began talking to him in a faint, buzzing voice.
“If you can hear me, tap one finger on the deck next to the base of the toilet, Martin. Just one.” I’ve lost it, he thought. They won’t bother executing me; they’ll put me in one of their psychiatric zoos and let the children throw bananas. But he reached out a hand and tapped at the base of the stainless-steel toilet that extruded from the wall of his cell.
“That’s—” he sat up, and the voice went away abruptly.
Martin blinked and looked around. No voices. Nothing else had changed in the cell; it was still too hot, stuffy, with a constant background smell of bad drains and stale cabbage. (The cabbage was inexplicable; the menu had long since shifted to salt beef and ship’s biscuit, a recipe perversely retained by the New Republic’s Navy despite the ready availability of vacuum and extreme cold millimeters beyond the outer pressure hull of the ship). He lay down again.
“—just one. If you can—”
He closed his eyes and, as if at a stance, rapped once, hard, on the base of the toilet.
“Received. Now tap—” The voice paused. “Tap once for each day you’ve been in the tank.” Martin blinked, then rapped out an answer.
“Do you know Morse code?”
Martin racked his brains. It had been quite a long time— “yes,” he tapped out. A mostly obsolete skill, that low-bandwidth serial code set, but one that he did know, for a simple reason: Herman had insisted he learn it. Morse was human-accessible, and a sniff for more sophisticated protocols might easily miss something as mundane as the finger-tapping back channel in a video call.
“If you lie with your head up against the side of the toilet bowl, you will hear me better.” He blinked. Bone conduction? No, something else. The induction wires around his auditory nerves — some high-frequency source must be shorting out against the metal of the toilet, using it as an antenna! Inefficient, but if it wouldn’t carry far …
“Identify yourself,” he signaled.
The reply came in Morse. “AKA Ludmilla. Who watched us over dinner?”
“The boy wonder,” he tapped out. He slumped against the floor, shivering in relief. Only two people could reasonably be on the other side of the pipe, and the Curator’s Office wasn’t likely to authenticate his identity that way. “What’s your relay?”
“Spy drone in sewage system jammed against effluent valve. One of batch accidentally released by idiot subcurator. Told them to find you. Fuel cells in drone very low, drained by conduction telephone. Prefer Morse. Martin, I am trying to get you out. No luck so far.”
“How long till arrival?” he tapped urgently.
‘Ten days to low-orbit arrival. If not released first, expect rescue day of arrival. Attempting to assert diplomatic cover for you.“
Ten days. Rescue — if they didn’t stick him on a freighter under armed guard and ship him back to execution dock, and if Rachel wasn’t whistling in the face of a storm. “Query rescue.”
“Diplomatic life belt big enough for two. Power level approaching shutdown: will try to send another relay later. Love you. Over.”
“I love you, too,” he tapped hopefully, but there was no reply.
A miriad of tiny gears whirred, clucked, and buzzed in a background hum of gray noise beneath a desktop. Optical transducers projected a magic-lantern dance of light on the wall opposite. The operator, gold-leafed collar unbuttoned, leaned back in his chair and dribbled smoke from his nostrils: a pipe dangled limply between his knuckles as he stared at the display.