The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [210]
“We’re vulnerable here,” she said. “We have to do what we can to secure the position. It might be a long time before we can get out, unless we can reach Charity — and even that might be a case of leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Can we reach Charity, do you think?”
She was hoping that Polaris might actually have landed on the comet core in which the Ark had hitched a ride back in the 2150s, and might still be close at hand. The fact that the supplies had been transferred lent some hope to that hypothesis, but the fact that we were spinning — presumably while moving at a constant velocity — while Charity had been accelerating under fuser power suggested otherwise.
“I doubt it,” I admitted. “I doubt that we can even get out to the surface to look around, unless someone took the trouble to leave a cache of spacesuits behind when the would-be colonists left.”
“I’d feel a lot safer if we could find smartsuits of any kind,” Lowenthal put in. “Do you know whether we have any IT?”
I shook my head, wearily. I shouldn’t have been tired, given that I’d been in a VE cocoon for days and that the pull of gravity was so feeble, but I felt exhausted in body and mind alike. “I don’t feel like a man with good IT,” I said. “I suspect that the bots la Reine pumped into us suffered the same disintegration of control as her other subsidiary symptoms. It’ll take a couple of days to piss them all away, but that’s probably all they’re good for.” Again there was room for hope — but not for overmuch optimism.
“It could be worse,” Horne said, valiantly.
“It already is, for la Reine,” I pointed out. “We might be able to find out more if we can find the occupant of the tenth cocoon. If we’re lucky, he or she might have the technical expertise to get the communication systems working.”
“If he intended to be helpful,” Lowenthal said, “he wouldn’t have gone into hiding.”
“We don’t know that the person’s hiding,” I pointed out. “If it is a person.”
“What’s the alternative?” Horne asked, not making it clear whether she meant the alternative to the hypothesis that the individual in question was hiding or that the individual in question was a person.
“La Reine might have made herself an autonomous organic body to serve as a refuge if and when her conventional hardware got blasted,” I said. “She’d already made provision to save us if things went from bad to worse, so it would only have been sensible to make whatever use of the same escape route she could. If she did set up something of that sort, though, she might well have been quixotic enough to let Rocambole take advantage of it instead. That was the impression I formed, at any rate. Whoever the extra person is, he or she probably went into the tunnels looking for something — something that would help us all. More machinery, smart or dumb.”
Lowenthal frowned as he tried to follow the possible consequences of those suggestions.
“Who the hell is this Rocambole character?” Niamh Horne wanted to know.
“Just that,” I said. “A character. I thought at first he was an avatar of Excelsior, but it seems more likely that he’s a copy of Child of Fortune.”
“My spaceship?”
“Not any more. He turned pirate when he decided to take us off Excelsior. I still don’t know exactly why he did that — but you might yet have a chance to ask him.”
“Never mind that,” Lowenthal said. “Let’s concentrate on our own resources. We have no alternative but to hope that someone will come for us, eventually. What we have to do is to make sure that we’re still alive when they arrive. If we can find a way to hurry them, that’s good — but if not…”
“They’ll hurry if they can,” I said. “We’re even more important and more interesting now than we were before this whole thing spun out of control. The world, if there’s anything left of it, will be interested to find out whether Mortimer Gray can achieve yet another miraculous escape from the jaws of death — and, of course, to find out what Adam Zimmerman’s decision will be. We have the advantage of suspense, you see.