The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [205]
I had shared la Reine’s death — but she was no mere human. Perhaps…
“Are you all right now?” As ever, it was the solicitous Mortimer Gray.
“I think so,” I said, trying to sound confident. “You?”
“We all got out in good time. Adam and Christine weren’t conscious, but at least they were breathing.”
I looked around for Adam Zimmerman, but I couldn’t see him. Niamh Horne was deep in conversation with Michael Lowenthal and Solantha Handsel, but I couldn’t see Davida Berenike Columella or Alice Fleury either.
Solantha Handsel was examining her hand, apparently anxious that she might have damaged it by hitting me too hard, but she looked up when she became aware that I was paying attention.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, stiffly.
“Be very careful,” Gray advised me, as I made ready to move again. “Being able to float like a balloon gives you an impression of lightness, but if you bump into the wall or any of those piles of junk, it’ll hurt. I’ve lived on the moon — it takes a long time to retrain your reflexes. I haven’t found my feet yet.”
“That so-called junk might have to sustain us for quite a while,” I said. “The war was going badly last time I had news.”
“You had news?” he queried.
“Yes,” I said. “You didn’t?”
“No.”
I hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. “I saw it all,” I told him. “Your conversation with the snowmobile — the end of the replay and all of the extension. I saw Alice and Davida make their pitches to Zimmerman too — and the one that was meant to upstage them both. I only caught glimpses of the pantomimes involving Lowenthal and Horne, though. Too much happening at once.”
“Madoc thinks he knows who the tenth cocoon belonged to,” Christine added, taking advantage of the fact that Gray was thinking over what I’d said.
Gray looked at me expectantly.
“The AMI generating the VE laid on a guide for me,” I said. “It took the form of a slightly cartoonish male figure, who called himself Rocambole. He was an AMI too, I think. He said we’d spoken before. At first I took that to mean that he was the central intelligence of Excelsior, but there’s another possibility that seems more likely. There’s also a possibility that the tenth cocoon wasn’t his at all. It might have belonged to the VE generator herself.”
“Her self?” Gray was confused. He’d always thought of the snowmobile as a he.
“She called herself la Reine des Neiges,” I told him. “The Snow Queen. She’d come a long way since she was a snowmobile. She was a patchwork, but she must have numbered at least one dream machine among her ancestor-appliances. She risked everything to get us out of Charity, but she wasn’t crazy. Maybe she was sane enough to leave herself an escape hatch.”
Gray hesitated for at least half a minute before deciding which question to ask next. When it finally emerged, it was: “Why you?”
“She needed an audience, and I was spare. Once her nanobots had cleaned me out I was redundant. She wanted someone to see the whole picture, and I got lucky. I even got Rocambole.”
“And that’s how you got the news?”
“What news there was. It’s not good. Something killed the Snow Queen — all of her, at any rate, that wasn’t stashed in a pod. She certainly won’t be the only casualty among the AMIs, but it’s the extent of the collateral damage that will determine the time it takes for help to get to us — if help does get to us. Excelsior will probably send help if the sisterhood can contrive any, and any Titanian ship that picked up la Reine’s broadcasts will probably be capable of getting here if its smart systems haven’t been scrambled…but I don’t know what the full extent of the destruction might be.”
Because I was somewhat befuddled the summary of our situation hadn’t come out as clearly as it might have, but Mortimer Gray had been the one who’d originally figured out that