SEVEN
Reaching the fringes of the system took a bit longer than Annataly had predicted. After two hundred standard hours, they had only passed Zeta’s orbit. Captain Morrisey visited the bridge less and less frequently. He concentrated on doing what he liked most. He, Iarrey, and the chaplain began to catalogue their haul.
Two days later, the first officer announced—albeit only unofficially—that provisional estimates of the value of the objects found in the wreck led them to conclude they had gathered a veritable fortune aboard the Odin. The sum he mentioned after he’d arrived in the mess hall stunned Nike. The cadet almost choked on a piece of meat cultured on the Nomad when the confidential whisper reached his ears. The news didn’t make quite such an impression on the other members of the crew, however. He left them in excellent humor and went to his cabin with another set of data to analyze and his vacuum-packed supper. He slept on the lower deck, as did the other cadets, except he had been given a cabin in the central section, a long way from the still sleeping “numbers,” as he had begun to contemptuously call his recent companions in misfortune.
Everything aboard the Nomad revolved around money and antiques. Nike had never been interested in antiquities before. As far as he could recall, in his house there were no remnants of the distant past. No portraits of his ancestors or mementos from before the war. As was the case with most current inhabitants of Earth, Nike’s forebears had come from distant sectors and in acknowledgement of their service had been transferred right after the war to a deserted center of civilization. Nike was born into a wealthy family, but spent his early childhood far from Earth, on planetoids, where his father was on the board of a mining company. Life was mundane there. The miners generally came from poor planets where no one cultivated traditions, or knew stories about events preceding their birth. He spent a lot of time among those people, as hard as the rocks they crushed. Oftentimes he checked the contents of personal containers before they ended up in the incinerators following their owners’ bodies. Apart from a few old holos, mostly stills, showing their family or their homelands, he never found anything special. He wondered why the miners didn’t leave any valuable stuff behind, considering they made good money. Although rumor had it that the other miners divided up the belongings of their dead colleagues, and only threw useless junk into the containers, he didn’t quite believe it. Now such behavior seemed to him more than probable. And possibly in its own way understandable. However, he still wasn’t prepared to accept it, for moral reasons.
Immediately after receiving his orders, Nike plunged into the archives again. He did not show up in the open-access area of the ship for several days in a row, apart from at mealtimes and during rare briefings. He chose the privacy of his cabin, where he could examine virtual files. As work it was unproductive, to say the least. Delta had been settled five years before the outbreak of war, and only owing to the ideal location of the transit station, the construction of which became necessary following the start of the colonization of the Galaxy’s new sector. The planetary system had not been thoroughly researched, except for a narrow band of the habitable zone which embraced two planets of a, to be honest, secondary category; also, fairly cursory reconnaissance flights had been carried out around the three—nearest the system’s center—of altogether five gas giants. They were not even given proper names, as was customary, but were left with the catalogue numbers from the general astrophysical atlas.
Several probes had indeed been sent to the periphery, but they had not transmitted much data before the war broke out. The archives contained scarce information confirming the existence of Theta, the most distant planet of the system, but that was it. Nike did not find any detailed reports or any remarks. A few months after the planet, or actually the planetoid, had been added to the central register, further exploration of system V3A13 ceased to have any importance for anyone on either side of the conflict.
Scouring the terabytes of private correspondence of the transit station’s crew, even with such incredible search engines as High Command’s operating systems possessed, didn’t yield any results either. The colonists were more interested in the fate of the distant worlds they originated from than in their nearest surroundings. Even Delta did not arouse their interest—although in their defense it could be added that in the initial phase of terraforming it cannot have been especially hospitable—never mind the most distant recesses of the system.
Nike looked at the clock; it was already long after midnight according to ship’s time. He’d spent hours poring over the records. His eyes were stinging, his eyelids drooping. He was unable to focus on the contents of further letters, memos, and reports selected by the computer. He put his reader down on a pile of mobile recorders, turned off the light, and settled down on his bunk. In the surrounding gloom, again he saw the stone wall and narrow bay window, and behind it: the sky and dragons frolicking among the clouds …
“Move over.”
He didn’t react. He never reacted the first time Monicatherine provoked him.
“I said, move over.”
This time, the words were accompanied by a light nudge to his shoulder. He obediently turned over on his side. He heard the slight rustling of the bedclothes and a moment later, felt the gentle touch of her fingers, which glided over his thigh drifting over each hair. The familiar warmth of her skin spread over his legs and back, where their bodies were pressed together most tightly. That familiar warmth he yearned for so much, and that unmistakable scent of warm skin …
He got up, reaching for the light switch. Astonished by his sudden reaction, Annataly fell out of the narrow bunk, in spite of the railing around it, and landed on the floor with a loud thud. Nike heard her stifled cry.
“What are you doing, you jerk,” she hissed a moment later, trying at the same time to rub her bruised elbow and shield her eyes from the bright light in the cabin. “Turn that damn thing off.”
He didn’t react. He looked at her with his eyes wide open. She was sitting completely naked in the center of the cabin, now sucking a grazed finger for a change. He saw her clearly in the bright sub-xenon light. In spite of her fifty-something standard years she still had a young woman’s figure. A narrow waist, long slim legs, flat stomach, and quite ample and still firm breasts: everything that an attractive woman ought to have in order to attract a man’s attention. Perhaps she was just a little too muscular, lacking that layer of fat beneath the skin, which made Monicatherine’s body seem so …
“Had a good enough look, Roaring Romeo?” she asked in a whisper, having stopped sucking the index finger she had cut during the fall.
“What are you doing here?” he parried her question with one of his own.
“What do you think?” she burst out laughing as quietly as she could manage. “I’m just checking if it’s not worth swerving off course a bit—”
“Not a chance.” Nike sat up in a corner of his bunk and pulled his knees up. “You’d better don your clothes and evanesce before the old man starts looking for you.”
The navigator got up, but didn’t reach for the loose-fitting shirt lying by the door.
“Don’t you feel like finding out why I mean so much to Morrisey?” she asked, and stretched herself sensually.
Too sensually …
He forced himself to look away. It was difficult particularly now, when the part of her body most exciting men’s imaginations was framed in the gap between the railing and the top bunk.
“What I feel like doing doesn’t matter much,” he replied cautiously and licked his lips, which she fortunately did not notice.
“You surely aren’t afraid of Henrichard’s threats?” she asked, leaning forward to see his face. He was still staring at her breasts. They were swinging right in front of him.
“Of course not. He’s just a softhearted old guy. What could he do to me?” Nike giggled. “In which case, why are you whispering?”
The expression of amusement vanished from her face. If looks could have killed …
“You won’t get a second chance,” she hissed, but didn’t move an inch.
He would have sworn that the closely trimmed triangle of her pubic hair was as black as the hair on her head. And it was also there for the asking.
“Perhaps it’s better this way,” he murmured. “I’ve got used to this fucked-up world and I’d rather not leave it right now, especially considering I’ve just become pretty rich.”
This time, she bent to pick up her shirt. She put it on and then reached for the panties, which were lying alongside. Nike was amused to see that they didn’t resemble regulation fleet underwear, not in the slightest.
“I don’t get you,” she said, fastening the top buttons of her shirt. “Do you prefer that machine?” she nodded toward the cabin phantomator.
“No, to tell you the truth I prefer real-live women,” he replied with a mysterious smile on his face. She would probably have been surprised to find out which model he usually loaded into the device. “Under different circumstances, at a different time, in a different place, it would be my pleasure—”
“Under different circumstances? Are you counting on your turtle dove waiting for you?” Being a woman, she struck where it would hurt most. But she didn’t hit the target. She was well wide.
“No, I’m not counting on that, actually,” he answered without a second thought. “I’m sure she doesn’t wake up by herself any longer. Who’d wait around for a garbage collector?”
“So why don’t you make the most of the chance to have a real adventure?” Strangely, she sounded honest.
Her nipples, however, may have gone erect from the cold of the nighttime cabin temperature.
“Because it’s a one-way ticket,” he said, resigned. “I’ve tasted forbidden fruit once already—”
“And did it teach you anything?” There was more sarcasm in the question than curiosity.
“Sure …” he said, nodding toward the door.
He didn’t watch her leave. The hiss of the sliding door told him he was alone. For a short while he sat in the same position he had frozen in for a better effect, then jumped down onto the cabin floor, went over to the door, and hesitantly placed his hand on the panel by the lock.
It was much brighter in the corridor and he had to squint. But anyway he saw her almost at once. She was standing right in front of him, hands on hips and a triumphant smile on her face.
“Our lord and master is drowning his sorrows after the loss of the treasure trove in such quantities of booze it would be very risky to light a match near him,” she whispered, lifting her right hand so he would see the lacy panties swinging on her index finger.
“Annata—” he began.
“Call me Smiley.”
Instead of a reply, he just pulled her unceremoniously into the cabin, closing her mouth with a kiss.
Nike opened his eyes and ran his hand over the bare sheet. There was no one beside him. No dent in the pillow, no warmth emanating from the material. He sniffed the air, but couldn’t smell the merest trace of a strange scent. The cabin was as sterile as ever.
“Hm …” he murmured, swinging his legs over the edge of the bunk. A hurried look around the small cabin betrayed nothing of Annataly’s recent visit.
He jumped down onto the floor and stretched. Holy shit! If only I could have such beautiful dreams every night, he thought, moving toward the sanitary facility and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Back to drab reality. There were letters, reports, and terabytes of pure shit about nothing still awaiting him in abundance. He activated the faucet and washed quickly, and then raised his eyes to the mirror to look once more at the gray face of a guy who had literally fucked up his life … Suddenly he smiled. The crimson print of full lips in the very center of the polished crystallite surface left no doubt about the events of the previous night.
“You little …” Muttering under his breath, he smudged the imprint of Annataly’s lips with a wet hand, and then wiped the shapeless smear off with a paper towel.
Morrisey might have never dropped by, but it was better to be safe than sorry, as Carre-Four used to say in the Academy. Christopherasmus was a total dick, but even he occasionally managed to say something smart.
Nike returned to his cabin after popping out for breakfast, collapsed onto his bunk and groped for the reader. When he was shoving the next mobile recorder into the device he noticed it was Major Visolay’s battered notebook. He twiddled with it, hesitating shortly, and then reached for the universal dock. For a second nothing happened; the notebook, which hadn’t been powered for over a hundred years, looked utterly inert. Not too surprising, thought Nike. The data stored on the crystals ought to have survived intact, but the electronics might have flipped after such a long time, even though it was standard military equipment, and supposedly indestructible …
Suddenly there was a soft buzzing and the 3D display lit up for a split second. But no image appeared. There was only a flash after which the device went blank again for a few long seconds. Nike watched in growing fascination as more lights on the casing lit up. Half a minute later, he had in front of him the slightly blurred image of a virtual keyboard and a box for entering a password. A century ago, 512-bit codes seemed unbreakable, but today any computer could unravel them in fifteen minutes. And the Nomad didn’t have just any old equipment, but the most efficient quantum monsters. Even the auxiliary core Nike was using cracked the old notebook’s security in less than thirty seconds.
Over thirty terabytes of data were stored on the device’s crystal. Most of them were archived messages sent by the major to his family and their replies. Nike ignored those files, as well as the countless photographs, and went straight to the memory segment where Visolay stored his text files. Only one piqued the cadet’s curiosity. Chiefly owing to the code used to protect it. Nike waited another twelve seconds for the old protection system to be removed. Then a folder labeled with a long sequence of digits appeared on the device’s holographic display. Nike found two files in it. One extremely small and the other almost a hundred times bigger.
He opened the short one first and whistled under his breath after scanning a few lines of text. It became apparent that Morrisey had been wrong; very wrong.
Nike closed the major’s file and froze with his finger hovering over the other icon. The moment of hesitation was short, though.
“Fuck Theta,” he muttered, dragging the file with the short name Forge into the screen’s field.
A few hours later, Nike stared at the last sentence of the major’s account in speechless disbelief. He might have expected anything of the long-dead officer, but definitely not the salvation from Dredd.