Queer thing, that. The navy had only one base on Demoth, way down by the equator near Snug Harbor. And navy personnel seldom found cause to venture out to the rest of the planet; the base was mostly a dormitory for safety inspectors who met incoming starships at our orbitals.
A loudspeaker boomed from the skimmer’s belly: "Faye Smallwood?"
Damn. So much for a quiet walk in the woods.
Steeling myself, I did the obvious — stoked up my link-seed and contacted the world-soul. Has the Outward Fleet filed flight plans for craft in the Bonaventure area?
The world-soul didn’t answer with words; but my brain suddenly knew for a certainty, no plans had been filed. Some other time I’d worry how creepy that was, having knowledge planted straight into my head. For now, the skimmer was my immediate problem. Either the Admiralty was running a secret op with my name on it, or I was on the verge of being ambushed by a wolf in fleet clothing.
"Faye Smallwood!" the loudspeaker called again.
"Who’s asking?" I shouted back.
The skimmer was hovering now, its engine wash vibrating the bluebarrels around me. Their fat, hollow trunks began to resonate, producing deep growly notes as pure as a forest of bass viols.
The skimmer’s side hatch opened. A man wearing gold fatigues leaned out with something in his hand.
Yet another pistol. Not a jelly gun this time; a hypersonic stunner, like Explorers use in fic-chips.
In the chips, stunners make an edgy whirring sound. I didn’t stay conscious long enough to hear it.
Headache. Muddy. 6.1 on the Hangover Scale. What you get from mixing wine, tequila, and screech.
I’d had worse. And this time I woke up alone, with no beer-breath stranger lying comatose on my arm, cutting off the circulation.
A tastefully darkened room. A soft cot beneath me. No smell of vomit anywhere.
Compared to the bad old days, this was bubble-bath luxury. Not to mention, I still had clothes on… no need for a head-throbbing pantie search, terrified the other person might wake up before I got out the door.
I stood up. Not all that shakily. More than twenty years since my last debauch, but the rough-and-ready reflexes still kicked in: mining-town girl.
"Would you like something for the pain?" a male voice asked. It came from nowhere — a speaker hidden somewhere in the darkness.
"You call this pain?" I scoffed. "Ya big mainstream crybaby." I could tell this guy was mainstream from his accent: an oh-so-civilized Core-World featherweight who’d shrivel up dead if he ever caught a genuine hangover. "So what’s the point of kidnapping me?" I demanded… keeping my voice loud so my captors wouldn’t think I was some fragile flower on the point of collapse.
A door in the wall opened silently, letting in a dagger of bright light. Two men entered, and the door slid shut again, no noise. Both newcomers wore glittery gold-fabric uniforms; it made them easier to see in the returning darkness.
"You haven’t been kidnapped," one of the men said. "You’re voluntarily helping us with important research."
"What research?"
Neither man answered straightaway. I wished I could see their faces — whether they were looking at me like a person or a piece of raw meat. That might have helped me guess if they were real navymen or killers who had nabbed me for interrogation. Ready to torture me for information on the Vigil, to help them murder more proctors.
And speaking of information…
Protection Central! I called over my link-seed. Kidnappers…
It was like shouting into a pillow. Muffled emptiness. Mentally I yelled, Respond!
Nothing. Silence.
Something electronic beeped in the far corner of the room. Something that must have been listening for radio transmissions from my brain.
"Ah," said one of the gold-suited men. "You’ve finally tried to use your link. So you realize it’s not going to help."
"We’re jamming it," the other one added. "This entire house is insulated from the datasphere."
That shouldn’t have been a great surprise. Anyone who’d studied the Vigil would know to take precautions. "Well then," I said, "what do you want?"
A light sprang up in the middle of the darkened room. It began as a pinprick but fast expanded to a life-size hologram of two androids, a Peacock’s Tail, and a fear-eyed yours truly… a first-rate mock-up that had to be based on the download from my brain. The holo images were projected across my body, across the cot beside me, across the two men who’d come through the door; I happened to be standing half-in/half-out of the female robot. Stubbornly, I stayed where I was — flinching would have made me look like a nelly.
One of the men stepped forward…
Hold on a second. I need some breezy way of distinguishing my two captors — calling one Tall and one Short, something along those lines. But they were both of identical height, both wearing identical uniforms, both sporting identical haircuts: as close to twins as people can get when they don’t actually look the same. All I can think to call them is the Mouth and the Muscle… because one couldn’t stop yapping while the other mostly loomed quiet as a hoar falcon biding its time.
So the Mouth stepped forward. He made a point of walking straight through the hologram of me, briefly disrupting my laser-projected image into a random scramble of pixels. Then he aimed his finger straight at the peacock tube. "Do you know what that is, Ms. Smallwood?"
"No."
The Mouth sneered in disbelief. Not many men can actually manage a sneer — they might glower or grimace, but they don’t have the degree of self-involvement required for an out-and-out sneer. The Mouth looked as if he’d practiced sneering in a mirror till he got something he really liked. "This," he said, pointing to the peacock tube, "is a miniature Worm field. Colloquially called a Sperm-field, or Sperm-tail. Do you know what that is?"
"We use Sperm-tails as transport sleeves to our local orbitals," I answered. "They’re also used in starship drives."
I stared at the peacock again. "But the Bonaventure sleeve is white."
"Sperm-fields look white when they’re stabilized," the Mouth said, "like planetary transport tubes, or a starship envelope after it’s properly aligned. But with an unanchored Sperm, you get flutter around the edges. Makes a characteristic diffraction pattern." He pointed again to the peacock tube.
"Okay," I shrugged, "it’s a Sperm-field. So what?"
"So what?" the Mouth repeated, as if I’d only asked the question to antagonize him. "So where did it come from? There’s no Sperm-field generator in the picture!"
"None that we can see," the Muscle put in. "It could be miniaturized."
The Mouth glared at him. This was obviously a point of contention between the two men… and a precious petulant contention at that. Mouth took a slow and deliberate breath, the picture of a man exercising colossal restraint in the face of grievous tests to his patience. I bet he practiced that look in the mirror too. "The point is," Mouth told me, "current Technocracy science could not create a Sperm-field in the situation you see here. It came out of nowhere…"
"Nowhere big enough to see," the Muscle muttered.
"It came from no discernible field generator," the Mouth said testily, "it immediately shaped itself into a smooth arc without any apparent control magnets, and it ended in a well-defined aperture that held its position for 1.6 seconds without any equipment to anchor it in place!"
He stared at me triumphantly, as if he’d just scored some telling knockout in a political debate.
Ooo. Posturing. As a Vigil member, I’d never seen that before.
I spoke mildly. "I take it those things you listed are unusual for Sperm-fields."
"Unusual? They’re impossible!" the Mouth snapped.
"At least we don’t know how to do them," the Muscle said under his breath.