Ajit had fabricated that apology and that replacement data. The actual second minicap would justify Kane’s work, not undo it. Ajit was saving all three minicaps to use for himself, to claim the shadow matter discovery for his own. He’d used the second minicap to discredit the first; he would claim the third had never arrived, had never been sent from the dying probe.
The real Kane, my Kane, hadn’t found the particle from the first ship’s breach because it had, indeed, been made of shadow matter. That, and not slow speed, had been why the particle showed no radiation. The particle had exerted gravity on our world, but nothing else. The second breach, too, had been shadow matter. I knew that as surely as if Kane had shown me the pages of equations to prove it.
I knew something else, too. If I went into the shower and searched my body very carefully, every inch of it, I would find in some inconspicuous place the small, regular hole into which a subdermal tracker had gone the night of the drugged wine. So would Kane. Trackers would apprise Ajit of every move we made, not only large-muscle moves like a step or a hug, but small ones like accessing my bunk display of ship’s data. That was what my intuition had been warning me of. Ajit did not want to be discovered during his minicap thefts.
I had the same trackers in my own repertoire. Only I had not thought this mission deteriorated enough to need them. I had not wanted to think that. I’d been wrong.
But how would Ajit make use of Kane’s stolen work with Kane there to claim it for himself?
I already knew the answer, of course. I had known it from the moment I pattern-blinked at the ceiling, which was the moment I finally admitted to myself how monstrous this mission had turned.
I pushed open the bunk door and called cheerfully, “Hello? Do I smell coffee? Who’s out there?”
“I am,” Ajit said genially. “I cannot sleep. Come have some coffee.”
“Coming, Ajit.”
I put on my robe, tied it at my waist, and slipped the gun from its secret mattress compartment into my palm.
The probe jumped successfully. We survived.
This close to the core, the view wasn’t as spectacular as it was farther out. Sag A*, which captured us in orbit immediately, now appeared as a fuzzy region dominating starboard. The fuzziness, Ajit said, was a combination of Hawking radiation and superheated gases being swallowed by the black hole. To port, the intense blue cluster of IRS16 was muffled by the clouds of ionized plasma around the probe. We experienced some tidal forces, but the probe was so small that the gravitational tides didn’t yet cause much damage.
Ajit has found a way to successfully apply Kane’s shadow-matter theory to the paths of the infalling gases, as well as to the orbits of the young stars near Sag A*. He says there may well be a really lot of shadow matter near the core, and maybe even farther out. It may even provide enough mass to “balance” the universe, keeping it from either flying apart forever or collapsing in on itself. Shadow matter, left over from the very beginning of creation, may preserve creation.
Kane nods happily as Ajit explains. Kane holds my hand. I stroke his palm gently with my thumb, making circles like tiny orbits.
Ajit sat, fully dressed and with steaming coffee at his side, in front of his terminal. I didn’t give him time to get the best of me. I walked into the wardroom and fired.
The sedative dart dropped him almost instantly. It was effective, for his body weight, for an hour. Kane didn’t hear the thud as Ajit fell off his chair and onto the deck; Kane’s bunk door stayed closed. I went into Ajit’s bunk and searched every cubic meter of it, overriding the lock on his personal storage space. Most of that was taken up with the bronze statue of Shiva. The minicaps were not there, nor anywhere else in his bunk.
I tried the galley next, and came up empty.
Same for the shower, the gym, the supply closets.
Ajit could have hidden the cubes in the engine compartments or the fuel bays or any of a dozen other ship’s compartments, but they weren’t pressurized and he would have had to either suit up or pressurize them. Either one would have shown up in my private ship data, and they hadn’t. Ajit probably hadn’t wanted to take the risk of too much covert motion around the ship. He’d only had enough drugs to put Kane and me out once. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have risked subdermal trackers.
I guessed he’d hidden the cubes in the observatory.
Looking there involved digging. By the time I’d finished, the exotics lay yanked up in dying heaps around the room. The stones of the fountain had been flung about. I was filthy and sweating, my robe smeared with soil. But I’d found them, the two crystal cubes from the second and third minicaps, removed from their heavy shielding. Their smooth surfaces shed the dirt easily.
Forty-five minutes had passed.
I went downstairs to wake Kane. The expedition would have to jump immediately; there is no room on a three-man ship to confine a prisoner for long. Even if I could protect Kane and me from Ajit, I didn’t think I could protect Ajit from Kane. These minicaps held the validation of Kane’s shadow-matter work, and in another man, joy over that would have eclipsed the theft. I didn’t think it would be that way with Kane.
Ajit still lay where I’d dropped him. The tranquilizer is reliable. I shot Ajit with a second dose and went into Kane’s bunk. He wasn’t there.
I stood too still for too long, then frantically scrambled into my s-suit. I had already searched everywhere in the pressurized sections of the ship. Oh, let him be taking a second, fruitless look at the starboard hold, hoping to find some trace of the first particle that had hit us! Let him be in the damaged backup engine compartment, afire with some stupid, brilliant idea to save the engine! Let him be—
“Kane! Kane!”
He lay in the starboard hold, on his side, his suit breached. He lay below a jagged piece of plastic from a half-open supply box. Ajit had made it look as if Kane had tried to open a box marked SENSOR REPLACEMENTS, had torn his suit, and the suit sealer nanos had failed. It was an altogether clumsy attempt, but one that, in the absence of any other evidence and a heretofore spotless reputation, would probably have worked.
The thing inside the suit was not Kane. Not anymore.
I knelt beside him. I put my arms around him and begged, cried, pleaded with him to come back. I pounded my gloves on the deck until I, too, risked suit breach. I think, in that abandoned and monstrous moment, I would not have cared.
Then I went into the wardroom, exchanged my tranquilizer gun for a knife, and slit Ajit’s throat. I only regretted that he wasn’t awake when I did it, and I only regretted that much, much later.
I prepared the ship for the long jump back to the Orion Arm. After the jump would come the acceleration-deceleration to Skillian, the closest settled world, which will take about a month standard. Space physics which I don’t understand make this necessary; a ship cannot jump too close to a large body of matter like a planet. Shadow matter, apparently, does not count.
Both Ajit and Kane’s bodies rest in the cold of the nonpressurized port hold. Kane’s initial work on shadow matter rests in my bunk. Every night I fondle the two cubes which will make him famous—more famous—on the settled Worlds. Every day I look at the data, the equations, the rest of his work on his terminal. I don’t understand it, but sometimes I think I can see Kane, his essential self, in these intelligent symbols, these unlockings of the secrets of cosmic energy.