"To check things out," she continued, "I radioed the base commander in Snug Harbor. He couldn’t tell me anything about the dipshits; they’d never contacted him. But he did say how glad he was that an admiral had finally deigned to drop in — he thought I was following up his report about a mysterious Sperm-tail seen during an assassination attempt. As a new wrinkle, the intended victim of that attempt, one Faye Smallwood, had just been reported missing and the civilian authorities were going bugfuck." Ramos shifted my weight on her shoulder. "Basically, the commander gave me a crisp salute, said, ‘You’re in charge, Admiral,’ and declined all further responsibility."
Step by step we continued to cross the moving-picture carpet — Ramos’s feet scuffing past the blue rim of the planet and into starry blackness speckled with parked spaceships, then the brick orange expanse of the terminus itself. The resolution of the rug’s image was so finegrained I could see tiny dockworkers in tightsuits, skittering over the space station’s hull… as if I were looking down on everything from far above…
Ooo, Christ. Vertigo. Just what my stomach needed.
"So I concluded," Ramos went on obliviously, "that the dipshits from the sloop had been sent by the High Council to investigate this strange Sperm-tail. If the prime witness was missing, the dipshits had probably snatched her; precisely their style. So I asked myself where they’d take you. Most likely answer: an Admiralty safe house. The fleet owns property on every planet in the Technocracy, secret hideaways where admirals can entertain government officials or have sordid little trysts because they think that’s what powerful people do. I decided to pay a visit to the house nearest where you disappeared… and you can fill in the rest."
Abruptly, Ramos stopped and bent over to set my feet on the floor. My stomach lurched like a bucket, then settled. I felt a wall behind me; a moment later, I was leaning ass-against it, wondering when my knees would buckle. They didn’t. And after a while, I even felt the blood stop draining from my face.
Ramos watched a few seconds, then said, "See? You’re stronger already. Wait here while I scout ahead."
She disappeared through another doorway. Now that I was upright, now that I was merely nauseous rather than prevolcanic, I had a chance to survey the room; before, all I’d seen was carpet and chair legs. Expensive legs attached to expensive chairs. Every piece of furniture was made of Grade A smart-stone: cores of depleted uranium topped by a simulated marble foam of nanotech that molded itself snugly to the shape of your rump. Looked like solid rock, but felt like comfy cushions. Farcical when you thought about it. From your butt’s point of view, these were just cozy easy chairs… but built obscenely chunky and ponderous (depleted uranium, for Christ’s sake!), purely so guests knew you paid top dollar.
I glared at the chair nearest me — letting myself build up a snooty blue-collar resentment, mostly just to keep my mind off the continuing rockiness of my stomach — when suddenly I heard a whisper-faint yipping in my mind. Yes, yipping: like when you accidentally step on a beagle’s tail. Suddenly the whole surface of the chair cringed under my gaze… flattening out against the frame, cowering, nanites fleeing around to the chair’s underside, hiding there, even peeking fearfully out from the edges to see if I was going to come after them.
You could almost hear their worried little hearts going pit-a-pat.
"Sorry," I mumbled. "Didn’t mean to scare you." Jumbly-mumbly sounds coming out of my mouth, not words; but the nanites began to creep timidly back, slug-slow in case I’d glare at them again…
I shook my head hard, then shut my eyes. Faye, I silently told myself, nanites don’t have pit-a-pat hearts. They’re teeny soulless machines, the size and intelligence of bacteria. They may be programmed to make a plushy surface under someone’s butt, but they are definitely not programmed to act like whipped puppies just because you stared at them harsh.
Hesitantly, reluctantly, I opened my eyes. The chair was back to normal. Stony-surfaced. Stony-faced. And there was no yipping/whimpering to be heard.
Well, I thought, that sure took my mind off the queasy stomach.
Ramos hurried back into the room. "The coast is clear, at least for the moment. Should I carry you again, or can you walk?"
Concentrating hard, I tried to move my feet; they responded, though I could scarcely feel them. Ramos shifted in to help me, taking my right arm over her shoulders and wrapping her left arm around my waist. When I started forward it was more a babyfied toddle than a walk, but we found a rhythm after a few paces — faster than a tortoise, slower than a hare. Somewhere about the speed of a dog with worms as it drags its ass across your best broadloom.
Have I mentioned our family has pets?
Ramos and I shambled down a short passageway into a kitchen, the place sparkling-clean except for two dirty plates on the counter. By the looks of it, Mouth and Muscle had made spaghetti while they waited for me to wake up… and, of course, they were just the type to leave dishes for someone else to clean.
Cavalier buggers.
The kitchen led to a back-porch area, too spotless to call a mudroom. Through the windows I saw black night, as dark as a miner’s boot: clouds hid the stars, and thick forest crowded up within ten meters of the porch steps.
"We’re still on Great St. Caspian," Ramos said in a low voice, "but a long way from Bonaventure. The air’s a little thin outside… not that you can tell inside this pressurized house. We’ll be all right out there if we don’t try anything energetic — and we don’t have to go far, I’ve got a skimmer parked five minutes away. How are you holding up?"
"I’m fine." This time the words actually sounded like words — slurred words spoken by some pisshead drunk, but at least they had consonants.
"Amazing powers of recovery." Ramos gave me a faint smile. "Hang on, while I make sure we’re alone."
She bent down to a small machine that sat on the floor beside the door. It matched the size of a paint can, but its top was a flat glass screen. Ramos picked up the machine and swept it through a slow scan of the yard outside, keeping her eyes on the screen. "The Bumbler shows nothing on IR," she said, clipping the machine to her belt. "Let’s go."
The way out was a double-door arrangement: an airlock between the house and the skimpier atmosphere outside. My ears popped as the outer door opened, but it wasn’t a fierce hurt; either my neurons were too dizzy to register pain, or the pressure differential wasn’t so scary as Ramos thought. I leaned toward the second alternative. Offworlders always get overexcited about the threadiness of our atmosphere.
We hobbled across the dark yard and entered the darker woods. This wasn’t a sparse, well-spaced tundra forest — these trees were wild boreal. Instead of demure carpet moss, you got angry snarls of underbrush; instead of don’t-bother-the-neighbors bluebarrels, there were cactus-pines thorned up for war, reaching out to strangle each other with as many branches as possible. It all added up to show we were in the south half of the island… just a fraction warmer year-round, but enough to shift the ecology from tightly contained order to every-bush-for-itself chaos.
The only route forward was a game trail, narrow enough that Ramos and I had a devil of a time walking two abreast. Lucky for us, we didn’t need to go a long way — just over a ridge and down to a creek gully where Ramos had her skimmer waiting.
In the dark, the skimmer was blessed near invisible — not just camouflaged but chameleoned, its hull perfectly mimicking the nearby terrain. No identification markings either… which was mildly illegal, in a Class II misdemeanorly way. Ramos carried me to the back hatch, which opened as we reached it.