The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [207]
“Yes,” I said. “Someone will. Someone — or something.”
“He’s right,” said Mortimer Gray, purely for the sake of moral support.
I didn’t know how the war was going, or how much damage had already been done, but I knew we had to think positively. “We’re all famous now,” I told Christine. “Not just Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray. We were there when it all blew up. We weren’t just in the wings; we were center stage. We’re important. Someone will come.”
It was true, so far as it went — but I only had to look around me to see that waiting wasn’t going to be fun. The living quarters improvised on Charity had been crude, but these were even more primitive. Charity had started life as a spaceship, carefully designed and carefully constructed by the standards of its day. Polaris, on the other hand, had started life as an asteroid too small to need a name. The humans who had claimed it had installed a fuser before beginning the work of hollowing it out, but the fact that the fuser was a more advanced model than Charity’s was the only advantage Polaris had.
The microworlders must have worked hard transplanting material from the core to build a new superstructure on the surface, but there was no evidence here that they’d made much progress with the superstructure before circumstances had forced their withdrawal — and when they’d left, they’d stripped their stores and living quarters more thoroughly than Charity’s crew had stripped hers. When la Reine had moved in she’d imported equipment of her own, but her life-support requirements had been less demanding than those of her predecessors. The decision to bring us here had been made without the benefit of any significant planning time, so the provisions she’d made — however plentiful they might be — were very basic indeed.
Mortimer Gray, who seemed to have become slightly more confident of his moon legs, drifted away to spread the news I’d given him, leaving me alone with Christine Caine.
“You could have mentioned that I’m not a crazy serial killer,” she pointed out. “It might help them to look me in the eye.”
“We know we’re clean,” I told her, “but they won’t necessarily take our word for it. It might be better to leave an elaborate account of what we really were until we’re in more comfortable surroundings.”
“Do we know we’re clean?” she asked, suddenly frightened by the possibility that she might not know if she weren’t.
“Yes,” I said. “It was a weird game, but I’m sure that she was playing fair. Believe me, I was in a position to know, at the end if not before. I’m confident that she played it so very scrupulously that the extra escape pod was Rocambole’s. I saw her die, and it felt like death to me. You’ll be fine. When they come to pick us up, you’ll have your whole future ahead of you, and a clean slate.”
She had to fight back tears then, but not before her lips had formed the ghost of a smile. I knew exactly how she felt.
I put my arm around her and said: “It’ll be okay. We’re alive. Whoever loses the damn war, we won.”
I had to hope that I was right, but that wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. For some reason I couldn’t quite fathom, I was in an unusually hopeful mood.
Fifty-Three
Weapons of War
When Mortimer Gray had spread the news around that I’d seen “everything” and might know who the extra passenger was I became slightly more popular than I had been before. Davida and Alice Fleury had already been in conference with Adam Zimmerman, reviewing the experience they’d shared. Mortimer Gray and Solantha Handsel took over the burden of conducting an orderly survey of our circumstances and resources, coopting Christine to help them, so that Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne could cross-question me.
“So what really happened?” Lowenthal wanted to know. He and Horne had worked out long ago that we’d been hijacked from Charity by one of the local ultrasmart AIs, and they had conducted themselves accordingly during apparent rescues and subsequent interrogations, but they were still