The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [90]
“Sorry about that,” she said. “It seemed to be the right thing to do. I didn’t realize. Sorry.”
Mortimer Gray knelt down with her. Like Lowenthal and Zimmerman, he now had a beard of sorts, but his looked more remarkable than theirs because its dark brown color clashed with his silver hair. “I think you’ll be okay, Mr. Tamlin,” he said. “It looks worse than it is. Very unfortunate, but not mortal.”Not mortal was easy enough for him to say — even without his IT, he was engineered for emortality at the cellular level. I carefully refrained from touching my nose to investigate how badly out of shape it was.
“Where are we?” I contrived to ask.
“We don’t know,” Gray said. “The simple answer is that we’re in a cluttered room with seven doors. Four of them open into cells like the one you woke up in. The other three are locked. There are several antique wallscreens, but only two control panels, both of which seem to be inactive. Like all the other equipment, they seem ridiculously primitive. The gravity seems to be Earth-normal, but nobody’s ready to conclude, as yet, that we’re on Earth. If it’s not spin, it might be acceleration — but if it’s acceleration, we don’t have any clue where we might be headed. We don’t know how long it’s been since we were aboard the Titanian ship, although it must have taken between eight and ten days to flush our IT, and the growth of our body hair can’t have begun until that process was at least halfway through. The means they used to keep us asleep seems to have been rather crude if the way we feel is a reliable guide. Did you see the thing that seemed to capture Child of Fortune?”
“Yes,” I said, thickly, unable for the moment to say more.
“We don’t believe in it either,” he said, picking up the skepticism in my tone. “Opinions are sharply divided, however, as to what kind of real story the fake was covering up. Accusations have been flowing freely, but I think Niamh and Michael have called a truce for the time being. At least nobody’s suggested that you were to blame. That gives you an advantage over the rest of us.”
It was obvious that he had not been excluded from the riot of accusations.
“Who stands to gain from taking us prisoner?” I said, thickly but just about comprehensibly.
“We haven’t been able to figure that out either,” Gray said, looking at Niamh Horne — who was obviously suspect number one in everyone’s eyes but her own.
“The greater enigma,” the cyborg said, grimly, “is how someone contrived to take us prisoner. Taking control of Child of Fortune’s AIs should have been impossible.”
“Impossible for outside agencies, maybe,” another voice put in — I guessed that it was Lowenthal’s, although it sounded far less smooth than it had before — “but if it were an inside job…”
“If it had been me,” the Titanian snapped back, “I wouldn’t have brought your pet gladiator — and I’d have kept a couple of my own people. I can’t believe that it was anyone on my crew…and even if I could believe it, I can’t believe that they’d bring us to Earth. Only your people would do that. I didn’t think the Cabal had the intelligence, let alone the technics, but I guess you might have sharpened up your act since you accidentally blew North America away and shriveled Garden Earth to mulch. On the other hand, I can’t see how you had the opportunity.” There was a pause while she redirected her attention. “Only you had that,” she added. I knew that she had to be staring at Davida.
I was beginning to feel left out again, so I decided to sit up. It wasn’t easy, but I managed it. I had to remind myself that I was supposed to be a hard man, a real fighter. I had to tell myself, very sternly, that if we were all equal now, in terms of our clothing and internal resources, then I ought to be vying for leadership of the pack instead of lying flat out and feeling exceedingly sorry for myself.
“You ought to lie down,” Niamh Horne told me. “You’ve