“You’re starting to sound like Alessandra Baron, always criticizing the Directorate. If anyone invented a memory edit you fired like a laser, we’d know about it.”
“That’s the whole point,” he said, shrugging, his arms held wide. “We did know about it, and the inventor fired it at us.”
“Stop it. You’re getting paranoid.”
He grinned ruefully. “You have to admit, something’s not right about this whole Guardians situation. Hell, you were there on Velaines. Did we make a mistake? Come on, I mean, did we? We played that so by the book we got paper cuts, and they still found out.”
“They got lucky.”
“They’ve been lucky for a hundred and thirty years. That ain’t natural.”
She gave him a troubled glance. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.” He sighed. “Come on, let’s go find out what Forensics turned up.”
“It’ll be nothing.”
“Optimist. Ten dollars that this is the time the Guardians made a mistake and left a decent clue behind.”
“You’re on.”
SEVEN
The CST exploratory division wormhole on Merredin had been down for fifteen months while it was given a class five overhaul—complete energy-focusing structure maintenance and upgrade of all the level beta support systems. It was no small job servicing a half cubic kilometer of high-energy physics machinery. Oscar Monroe had been on-site for ten months, managing the crews as they crawled around the wormhole generator armed with screwdrivers, arrays, programs, and every conceivable type of bot. Three more months had been spent training with his ground crew; after all, most of the systems were new, and that meant learning a whole new set of procedures. Six weeks had been spent with the forward crew as they got to grips with the latest marques of their equipment and software during innumerable simulation runs. That left him with an entire fortnight’s holiday.
He took off for Earth, and spent the first ten days alone, e-butler address deactivated, sitting in a fishing boat on Lake Rutland in England at Easter time. It rained for seven of the ten days, and he caught a total of eleven trout. Those were probably the most relaxing days he’d enjoyed in eight years. Not that he wanted to make a habit of loafing around.
For the last four days he went to London, where he was determined to catch some of the quaint live theater shows amid all the rest of the slightly-too-nostalgic culture that the grand old capital offered its visitors. On the very first night, during the interval of a “reinterpreted” Stoppard, he met a handsome young lad from some aristocratic European family who was curious and impressed with him and his job. With a shared taste for art and opera and good food they were inseparable for Oscar’s remaining three days. They waved good-bye at the CST London station and his express started the thirty-three-minute trip back to Merredin, two hundred eight light-years away.
Next morning, they began the wormhole generator power-up; done correctly it was a slow process. Six days later, Oscar was ready to start planet hunting.
The exploratory division base was visible while he was still eight kilometers away, occupying five square kilometers on one side of the CST planetary station. Such prominence wasn’t difficult. Merredin was the new junction world for phase three space in this sector of the Commonwealth. In anticipation of the fifty gateways that would one day connect it to those distant stars, the planetary station was a cleared area over two hundred and fifty kilometers square, located just west of the capital city. So far, it had one standard-size passenger terminal, a small marshaling yard, and three gateways, one back to the Big15 world, Mito, the other two out to the phase three frontier worlds Clonclurry and Valvida. The rest was just weeds, grass, drainage ditches, and a few roads leading nowhere. A month ago, most buildings had flown the green and blue national flag, but since Merredin’s team had been knocked out of the cup halfway through the first round they’d all been taken down. Disheartened janitors had locked them away, muttering aboutnext time .
The exploratory division base was laid out around its own wormhole, which was housed in a windowless concrete and steel building eight hundred meters long. At one end was the spherical alien-environment confinement chamber, a hundred meters in diameter, two-thirds of which was above the ground. A little town of industrial-style buildings surrounded it, containing offices, laboratories, workshops, training facilities, and the xenobiology department. Power came from the nuclear plants on the coast.
Oscar’s Merc 1001 coupe drove him through the main gate at seven forty-five and slid right into the Operations Director’s parking slot. He smiled at the few envious stares the car earned him from other members of the team as they pulled up outside the administration block. He doubted there were many, if any, others like it on Merredin. It was his one foible; changing the car once every twelve months (or less) for whatever the hottest new sports model was that year. This one had been imported specially from the Democratic Republic of New Germany, the Big15 planet where Mercedes had relocated its factories when it left Earth. He’d never decided, given his first-life background, if that consumerist extravagance was ironic, or if he was subconsciously distancing himself from that very same past. The only reason he hadn’t wiped the memories entirely when he rejuvenated was so he could be on his guard against any kind of relapse into the stupid idealism that his younger self had embraced. These days he was a fully paid-up member of the establishment, and finally at ease with himself and his role.
He made his way through the administration block and straight into the wormhole control center. The prime ground crew was already starting to assemble at the back of the big theaterlike room. He said his hellos and swapped a few jokes as he made his way down the sloping floor to his console at the front. The control center had eight tiered rows of consoles looking toward the broad molecule-chain reinforced sapphire windows that made up the front wall. Beyond that was the alien-environment confinement chamber, in its inactive state a spherical chamber fifty meters in diameter with dark radiation-absorptive walls. The wormhole gateway mechanism itself was directly opposite the windows, an oval fifteen meters wide, with a ramp leading up to it from the base of the chamber. Ranged around the walls were various airlock doors. The ceiling had a bright polyphoto ring, which was currently illuminating the chamber by emitting the same spectrum as Merredin’s sun. Around that were sealed recesses that contained a range of scientific and astronomical instruments. They had also undergone a major revamp during the downtime, and the prep crew had just finished testing them during the night.
Oscar sat at his console and told his PL to log him in with the center’s main array. His console portals lit up, delivering simplified schematics of the gateway, while his e-butler established voice linkages to every console operator as they slipped into their seats and logged in. As he acknowledged their inclusion in the communications loop, the prep crew chief came over and briefed him on the state of play. As the handover progressed the prep crew left the room; several of them went into the observation gallery at the rear, jostling for seats with reporters, CST’s local executives, and various VIPs who’d wrangled an invitation.
By nine-fifteen Oscar was satisfied that the wormhole generator was ready for an opening. He went around the loop one last time, personally checking with his station heads that they were equally satisfied with the situation: astrogration, power, focusing, main ancillary systems, sensors, short-range astronomy, confinement chamber management, emergency defense, forward crew, planetary science, alien encounter office, xenobiology, base camp equipment quartermaster, and finally the medical staff. One by one, they all gave him a green light. Finally, he checked with the Restricted Intelligence array that would handle integrated procedures. It said it was ready.