"An hour ago you were anxious about charging a room to your expense account. Now you’re going to tot up a few million for scanning probes? Well-done, Smallwood. That’s what I call settling in."
"It so happens," I told him in my snootiest voice, "I have a friend in high places. With access to the best survey equipment in the Technocracy. Courtesy of the Outward Fleet’s Explorer Corps."
A minute later, I was calling the navy base in Snug Harbor and asking to speak with Festina Ramos.
She arrived an hour after dawn, this time without Oh-God and flying an official fleet skimmer. Not the same skimmer the dipshits used when they kidnapped me. Cheticamp had impounded that one as evidence… not because it mattered bugger-all to the case but just to crank off the Admiralty.
"It’s freezing out here!" Ramos puffed as she stepped down from the driver’s cab. "Why couldn’t you live someplace warm?"
Her gray uniform crackled, its smart fibers fattening from flat cloth to a windproof layer as thick as sponge toffee: bristling with air bubbles to act as foam insulation. Even so, Ramos made a major fuss of blowing on her fingers and rubbing her hands together to produce heat. "Snug Harbor was perfectly lovely," she grumped. "Working its way up to a scorcher when I left."
"On Great St. Caspian," I told her, "this is a scorcher." Which was a lie; the thermometer had scooted below freezing overnight and showed every intention of staying there till it got over the sulks. Grumpy clouds huddled between us and the sun, while the wind had gone gusty with a piercing edge. What we had was a raw, clammy day… but compared to the winter just past, no Sallysweet River girl would ever call the weather cold.
The rear of Ramos’s skimmer held three probe modules: sleek missiles four meters long, painted gloss black like a widow’s vibrator. At Ramos’s order, the probes rolled themselves out of the back hatch on low wheeled platforms, then sat looking vastly self-satisfied on the dead yellow-grass of the guest home’s lawn.
"Don’t we think well of ourselves," Tic said, as he crouched to stroke a probe’s casing. "Aren’t we just the cockiest machines on the planet?"
"They aren’t actually intelligent," Ramos told him; she sounded a titch embarrassed that he’d think otherwise. But somewhere just inside my ears, I could hear the probe purring as Tic petted it. I shifted in closer, moving my thigh to touch another of the missiles. When I reached down to pat its black molded fuselage, mine started purring too. A fat tigery purr, like a cat with its mouth full of blood.
I gave Ramos a weak smile, trying to pretend I didn’t feel thumbs-awkward. "Sorry, Admiral," I said, "but there are more intelligences in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Tic and I seem to be simpatico with any machine connected to our world-soul."
"These probes aren’t connected to your world-soul," Ramos said. "They’re military equipment — deliberately designed to be incompatible with civilian systems. Our security gurus guarantee total data isolation."
"Now, now," Tic murmured to his probe, "you don’t feel isolated, do you?"
The purr slipped into a giggle, then a whispery childlike voice spoke inside my head. "Shhh… Xe musho jeelent."
Xe says secret.
Tic just smiled, but I froze — fingertips still touching the probe’s plastic skin, my leg pressed against its side. Wanting desperately to jerk away, but staying put for fear the probe or Xe would take offense.
Not only was the missile talking when it shouldn’t be on our wavelength; this thing, manufactured far offplanet in some no-aliens-allowed navy shipyard, spoke Oolom.
What in blazes did that mean?
Ramos programmed the probes from a console inside the skimmer… which she told me came down to selecting criteria from a list of search items the probes were equipped to detect. "Every month these things get more sophisticated," she told me as she worked. "Not intelligent," she added, throwing a pointed glance in Tic’s direction, "but better at their jobs. It’s a pity the quality wasn’t this good during your big epidemic — we might have found more of those people who were dying in the woods."
"You were here during the plague?" Tic asked. His voice was just a hair too controlled.
"That was before my time," Ramos answered, "but I’ve reviewed transcripts from Explorers who were here. The equipment back then had a bitch of a time finding your people; all of them with low body temperatures, chameleoned to match the background colors, and lying perfectly still from paralysis. We couldn’t even use sniffers to smell out tracks, because Ooloms spent most of their time up in trees. The Explorers were so frustrated: trying to save millions of people from going Oh Shit — uh, that’s an Explorer expression for ‘dying’ — and all we could do was lumber blindly through the woods."
"They found me," Tic said, voice soft. "Deep in a highland jungle, far into the Thin Interior, and they still found me."
"Well, good," Ramos replied. "One of our success stories."
She hadn’t caught the gray bitters in Tic’s voice.
A crowd came onto the guest home’s veranda to watch the probes take off. Most were Oolom. The few Homo saps among them wore staff uniforms — cooks and cleaners and concierges with time on their hands. Ramos made sure the spectators kept back as the probes extended metal armatures and pushed themselves up to the vertical.
"Are they going to blast off?" shouted a voice from the veranda — an Oolom boy, maybe eight years old, bouncing with so much excitement his mother asked a nearby human to hold the kid down.
"Not quite," Ramos called back.
The boy must have had visions of rockets exploding from the ground in a flurry of fire and steam. Reality didn’t make so much fuss: in unison, the probes sprouted bouquets of spherical black balloons… three at their nose cones, three more round their midsections, and a final three at their bases. The balloons inflated fast, each swelling out more than two meters in diameter. For a moment the morning fell silent; then a cough sounded inside each balloon, and their rubbery surfaces went rigid — truly rigid, like hard plastic shells.
I had time to think, What the hell? before the explanation came to me. (From the world-soul? Some half-buried memory? Who knows?) The cough was a hardening enzyme getting slap-sprayed against each balloon’s interior. Causing a chemical reaction. Making the balloons’ springy plastic stiffen as solid as steel. Then, with a fierce hiss, the probes began to pump air out of the tough balloon shells.
Vacuum has no weight — lighter than helium and hydrogen. And the balloon shells were now strong enough to resist the inward crunch of atmospheric pressure.
Fair gracefully the probes rose, weightless as smoke. The wind caught them, and they drifted toward the trees… each missile still plumb-vertical, ready for action. Floating. Climbing. When they reached a preprogrammed height, some reversal agent got squirted inside the balloon shells, turning them back to rubber again; but by then the probes were far away, more than a hundred meters above the scrubby tundra forest. All we saw was the vac-filled balloons suddenly collapse under outside air pressure. At the same instant, each probe’s engines kicked in, finally gouting out those flames the boy wanted to see. I heard him shout, "Yes!" as the missiles soared upward, north/southeast/southwest, separating to begin their scan of the region.
"A splendid show," Tic said. "Now how long do we wait?"
Ramos shrugged. "We might luck onto something in thirty seconds. Or never. Nothing works one hundred percent… especially when we’re looking for an archaeological dig that might not exist. The probes have six hours of fuel; they should find something if it’s there to find." She shivered. "Now let’s get out of this cold, okay? My cheeks are rosy enough as it is."