19.0

The plate and its colorful decoration had been crushed and warped into an irregular triangle of green, unfolded, like origami, into a vast, poisonous lawn.

The man was there, in his long coat, and buckled shoes, and enormous white wig. Except it wasn’t the man somehow; it was the girl. She was sitting under a tree. An apple fell from the fruited leaves, dropping softly into the girl’s hand. The girl laughed and rolled the apple across the poisoned lawn, which suddenly became grass. It rolled to a stop against the leg of a bathtub. A bathtub that, even in the black-and-white movies, would have been old-fashioned. The bathtub was filled with a king’s ransom of warm, soapy water that slopped over the side because he was sitting in it. He tried desperately to get up, to stop the precious liquid from overflowing, but he couldn’t seem to manage it. And the harder he tried, the faster it flooded over the edge. And now the girl was at the side of the bath, leaning over him, a familiar, slightly crooked smile playing on her lips. Her strange accent was crystal-clear.

“We need your help,” she said.

But he was naked in the bath and needed to cover himself up. . . .

He was sitting upright in his bunk, breathing heavily, a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. It was pitch-black.

“Lights,” he said, using his voice just to be safe. But there was no headache. The prescription was doing its work—finally. He thought about going back to sleep, but it was 0527. His implants were about to wake him up anyway. He stepped into the shower and watched the curved path of steaming water as it made its way down to the recycler. Half-dozing in the moist warmth, he thought about shower scenes in the Homeworld movies and the unnatural way that water fell to the ground, as if all it wanted to do was drop straight down with the least amount of effort. Planetary gravity, he supposed. Homeworlders didn’t need a spinning wheel to keep their feet on the deck.

Gravity. He snapped awake as surely as if the shower had turned cold. There was a gravity meter a little way down the corridor outside. He reached out into the hive until he found it. It was reading 1.003 g, boring and normal. He dug a little deeper, running an engineering diagnostic, digging up more-nuanced data about force vectors. Also boring and normal. There was nothing even slightly off. No outside acceleration to throw the readings off kilter. The only thing acting on the sensors was Ecuador’s slow, endless rotation. Whoever had activated the drive in the middle of the night-cycle must have shut it down again.

Or had Chen Lai put a stop to it?

But if Chen Lai knew anything about the drive, he wasn’t saying. Ravi even broached the subject at the end of trainee briefing, asking if there were any thrust tests scheduled, only to be met with a blank stare and a curt no. His classmates seemed equally ignorant. Unable to tell them what he’d been up to the previous evening, Ravi had tiptoed up to the subject sideways. But once he did so, no one he spoke to admitted to feeling anything unusual. And then, when Ansimov flat-out asked him why he was so interested, he’d had to let the matter drop.

In the arboretum that evening, neither he nor Sofia could concentrate on schoolwork. They huddled under a tree, waiting for the evil eye of the Home Star to set.

“No one in Nav knows anything about it,” Sofia muttered. “Or they’re not telling. I asked Uncle straight out—”

“You did what?”

“—and he said it was news to him, but he would look into it. He said Engineering might have been having an issue with one of the thrusters.”

“If that’s true, nobody told us.”

“I’ll tell you something else. The ship isn’t pointing in the same direction it was yester-sol morning. Either firing on one thruster pushed her off-axis, or someone turned the ship through about thirty degrees.” She gave him an amused smile. “We’re kinda traveling sideways.”

“What about the shield?” Forward of Australia, the shield was a two-thousand-meter-wide disc of super-dense, impact-resistant polymer. It was meant to protect them from ship-killing meteoroids. So long as it was in front of them.

Sofia’s smile disappeared.

“I didn’t think about that.” She looked more than a little worried. “The ship’s got to be exposed. Most of it, anyway.”

Ravi’s mind flashed to long-dead Hungary and its plated-over spokes. And that was with the shield in place. He could almost feel the dust particles ripping through the hull. The blasts of flame and decompression.

“We’ve got to tell someone,” he said.

Sofia just laughed at him, the sound mixing with the rustling of leaves overhead.

“You think you can turn the ship through thirty degrees and the navigators wouldn’t notice?” She had to catch her breath for a moment. “Everybody noticed! Their instruments were pointed the wrong way! You think they’re blind?”

“So, what did ‘everybody’ have to say about it?” Ravi demanded, not the least bit amused.

Sofia managed to look serious.

“Uncle said the ship had been turned to get a better look at the surrounding space, in case we needed to come up with alternative trajectories.”

“And people bought that?”

Sofia nodded.

“It’s probably true. This is a very dirty system we’re dropping into. Uncle will want as many options as possible.”

Hurtling into a dirty system unshielded didn’t strike Ravi as very sensible.

“Someone’s risking an awful lot of lives for a look-see.”

“I’m sure the Captain knows what she’s doing.”

“Sure.” Ravi didn’t push it. He watched the fake Home Star set below the fake horizon instead.

“You have got to be kidding!” Ravi hissed, staring under the table at BozBall. “Why haven’t you destroyed it already?”

Nursing a bottle of the cheap beer that made Abell 386 a favorite MacLeod hangout, Boz was fishing in her pockets for a pack of cigarettes and failing miserably. BozBall, now a muted and inconspicuous gray, lay silently at her feet. Twentieth-century music, a vain attempt to add a touch of class, blared out of period-looking speakers, masking their conversation.

“Sard it,” Boz muttered. “Must have left ’em in my quarters.” She peered mischievously at Ravi. “Why would I destroy it? At least my piece of forbidden tech is home-grown. Who knows where yours came from?”

Ravi pictured the black sphere locked in an armor-plated box at the bottom of his space chest, and winced. But he refused to back down.

“I’m not the one flirting with Dead Weight,” he pointed out.

“Neither am I. I’m Satisfactory now, remember? I have room for a screwup or two—and no curfew.”

“Boz! Ravi!” Uncle Torquil yelled from a neighboring table. “Shut the sard up!” He lurched to his feet, clearly the worse for wear. “I want to say something!”

Boz and Ravi did as they were told, as did half the tables in the place, populated as they were by members of the family. Ravi stole a quick glance at his mother, who was sitting immediately to Torquil’s left. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. “To Ramesh MacLeod,” Torquil said, raising a bottle. “The best brother a man could hope to have. He sarded nobody that didn’t deserve it, and nobody sarded him.” Torquil paused, frowning. “ ’Cepting the officers, of course. Who sarded him real good. And for what? Trading merchandise acquired through . . . entrepreneurial hard work, that’s what!”

“And decking a lieutenant,” Ravi and Boz murmured together.

“. . . and decking a lieutenant,” Torquil added. “Who deserved everything he got!”

A quiet tear was sliding down his mother’s face.

“Happy birthday, brother,” Torquil finished. “The bastards may have mulched you, but we’ll remember you forever! To Ramesh MacLeod!”

“To Ramesh MacLeod!” the family yelled. If some of the other tables looked distinctly uncomfortable, not a single MacLeod gave a broken circuit. Uncle Torquil sat down to thumping applause. Ravi’s mother threw him a brittle smile and touched his sleeve in apparent appreciation.

She hated this whole thing, Ravi knew. But the family insisted. To them, his dad was some kind of under-deck hero. But Ravi and his mom knew Ramesh MacLeod for what he truly was. A sly, opportunistic crook who would still be with them if he could have kept to the circular. Stupid bastard. Stupid, selfish bastard.

He cut himself on a blade-sharp memory: flying along on his dad’s shoulders, laughing high and reckless as they weaved through the corridors.

He took a slow swig of his beer.

“If they find you with that thing,” he told Boz sternly, “they’ll bust you back down so fast, your head will spin.” He failed to keep the worry off his face. “And then they’ll mulch you.”

Boz just grinned.

“No way. I’m too important to them. They need me.” Her eyes were alight with excitement. “You know my . . . encounter with your little black bot?”

Ravi nodded, remembering how pale and fragile Boz looked after it had knocked her out cold.

“Its software is . . . different. It got me to thinking about a different way to code. More like what I saw when I hacked into it. And before it hacked into me.” Boz was bouncing in her seat now, barely able to contain herself. “I think I’ve cracked it, Ravi. The coding problem with the probes. If I’m right—and I am—we can hit every spec on the navigators’ wish list and then some.”

Boz’s joy was infectious. Ravi found himself grinning alongside her.

“Way to go, cuz.” His grin evaporated into a sigh. “Maybe when you’re done with the probes, you could code me back to sanity.”

Boz looked concerned.

“More crazy hallucinations?”

“And dreams. They’re getting nuttier by the sol. If I’m not unglued already, I’m getting there fast.” He told Boz about the latest installment, right the way through to being naked in a bathtub. Boz being Boz, he thought she would laugh at that, but she didn’t. She was staring at him curiously.

“Do you ever look at the ship’s logo?” she asked him. “Not the modern one: the old-style, First Crew version?”

“Sure. They’re all over the place if you know where to look. The engine rooms elevator, the . . .”

Boz cut him off with an impatient wave of the hand.

“And what’s it a picture of?”

“No idea,” Ravi shrugged. “It’s just a lot of curvy lines. The modern one’s a lot cleaner-looking.”

There was a mischievous smile tugging at the corner of Boz’s mouth.

“You’ve lived on this ship your whole life, and you don’t know what our logo is?”

“Like I said. It’s a bunch of lines. If they’re super-curvy, it’s old. If they’re straighter, they’re new. End of story.”

“You are such a sarding engineer,” Boz laughed. “Head’s so far up your own ass with equations and repair schedules, you can’t see what’s right in front of your nose. Except, maybe, more of your ass.”

“So, enlighten me, O Wise One.”

“Our ship,” Boz said with exaggerated slowness, “is the ISV-one Archimedes. Its logo is a man sitting in a bath.”

Ravi just stared at his cousin, blinking slowly. And feeling like a complete idiot. Of course it is, he realized. Now that Boz had said it, the stylized lines he’d been staring at since the day he was born suddenly made sense.

Boz’s smile had turned wry.

“The fleet’s three ships are named after important pre-LOKI physicists,” she reminded him, “Archimedes being far and away the most ancient of the lot. There’s a famous but probably made-up story about him, involving a royal crown that was meant to be made of gold. The king suspected that it wasn’t and wanted Archimedes to find out for sure. It was a crown, so he couldn’t melt it down or cut it up for testing or anything like that. He knew what it weighed, of course, and he knew the volume of pure gold he needed for the same weight. What he didn’t know was the volume of the crown. It was ornate and complex, and he hadn’t a clue how to measure it, and the king was getting impatient.

“But Archimedes lived on the Homeworld, remember. He apparently had more water than he knew what to do with.” Even though she was telling the story, it was clear from Boz’s tone that this was the bit she believed the least. “Anyway,” she continued, “because Archimedes was a zillionaire, he could literally sit in a giant tub of water to get himself clean. And he put so much in that when he hopped in himself, some of it slopped over the side.” She shuddered at the thought. “It was then that he realized the volume of the water he displaced was equal to the volume of his body in the bath. He could do the same thing with the crown: put the crown in a container filled to the brim with water and measure the volume of water that slopped over the edge. He was so excited at solving the problem, he got out of the bath and ran through the streets, shouting ‘Eureka!’ which means ‘I have found it!’ in whatever his native language was.” Boz’s expression became positively wicked. “In fact, he was so excited, he forgot to put his clothes on first.”

“No way!”

“Yeah, well, it probably didn’t happen. But the point is, the story’s been around for literally thousands of years, and it’s why the ship’s logo is a man in a bath.” She allowed herself a smug chuckle. “Not a lot of people know that.”

“I never really thought about it,” Ravi said, staring at the deck. He looked up again, frowning. “But what does it mean? Why, in Archie’s name, would I be dreaming about being part of a logo I never even knew about?”

Boz fumbled once again for her missing cigarettes and swore softly.

“Let’s take a real big leap and assume you’re not crazy.” Her fingers drummed a nervous tattoo on the tabletop. “And let’s take an even bigger leap and assume your discovery of the little black drone wasn’t some insane coincidence. Which means someone wanted you to find that device. Which means your dreams aren’t dreams, and your hallucinations aren’t hallucinations. They’re messages.”

Ravi’s heart thudded heavily against his ribs.

“Messages from whom? And why don’t they make sense?”

“Let’s not worry about who’s sending them. Let’s see if we can figure out what they’re trying to say.”

Ravi remembered the woman’s accented words, repeated more than once.

“She said she needs my help.” He thumped the table in frustration. “But I don’t know how or why or where.”

“We need to take this slowly,” Boz suggested. “Treat it like a coding problem. Let’s start with what we know. In the dream, you are the man in the bath. The ship’s logo is a man in a bath, so our blonde gal is connecting you with the ship.”

“If you say so.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

He meekly shook his head. His cousin, at least, was trying, which was more than he was.

“So, what does the girl represent?” Boz asked, more to herself than Ravi. “Someone old? No one’s dyed their hair since First Crew, but they’ve been in the recycler for decades. Second Gen, maybe?” Even as she said it, though, she was shaking her head.

Ravi shook his head, too. For the same reason. The math didn’t work.

“She’d have to be at least a hundred and seven,” he pointed out. “It’s not possible.”

“Waivers, maybe?”

Ravi shook his head again.

“Everyone turns Dead Weight at seventy-five. Even with waivers, I’ve never heard of anyone making it past eighty.” An old lesson floated unexpectedly to the top of his head. “Come to think of it, wasn’t it Second Gen that made the rule in the first place? Crew numbers were totally out of whack back then, and it was, like, the most humane way of stopping the support systems from crashing.” He found the sudden influx of knowledge perversely pleasing. “I don’t know much history, but I know that. If anyone from Second Gen was still with us, it’d be all over the newsfeeds.”

“Fair point.” Boz took a thoughtful gnaw at her bottom lip. “Forget about the dyed hair. What else about her? You said in the dream she was wearing old-time clothes, not fatigues?”

Ravi nodded.

“How old-time?”

“I’ve no idea. Old. Pre-LOKI for sure. Maybe even pre-industrial.”

Boz raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Well, how the hungary would I know?” Ravi exclaimed, more frustrated than anything else. “When did they stop wearing giant sarding wigs? When did they start wearing giant sarding wigs? I’m not a historian, am I?”

“No,” Boz said, with a soft smile. “What you are is a fan of old Homeworld movies. Have you seen any where they wear stuff like that?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe? Yes.” He brightened considerably. “Let’s access the movie library. Now I think about it, there’s a ton of ’em.” He fastened a key and flashed it over to Boz. “You’d better come in.”

Boz crowded into his head, watching, as he reached out into the hive and looked for movies with really big wigs. It didn’t take long.

“Amadeus,” he breathed. “The Three Musketeers. The Draftsman’s Contract.”

“Saucy,” Boz giggled, racing him through the images. The giggle was echoey, coming from both inside and outside of Ravi’s skull at the same time.

Ravi ignored it, trying to find links between the movies and actual Homeworld history. Normally, history put him to sleep, but this was kind of interesting.

“Okay,” he said after a while, “we’re talking the seventeen hundreds for sure, and maybe the sixteen hundreds. There aren’t wigs before then, and after that they’re too small—and mostly worn by lawyers.”

“Lawyers?” Even though she was laughing, Boz sounded faintly shocked. “In Archie’s name, why?”

“No idea. The point is, our girl is dressed in stuff that’s beyond ancient.”

“And from . . .” Boz hesitated, scrambling to find the name. “From Europe. That should help too.”

“I don’t see how. What’s some long-recycled gal from . . . Europe got to do with what’s going on here and now?”

“It’s got to be something. Whatever’s going on in your head isn’t random. We know that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s got nothing to do with ships’ logos. I may not have been able to recognize a man in a bath, but Bohr’s is easy. It’s an old-style atomic nucleus with a bunch of electrons whirling around it. And Chandrasekhar’s is—”

“Totally boring,” Boz interjected.

“A white dwarf orbiting a black hole. Neither of which has anything to do with a giant Europian wig.”

They were interrupted by a sharp click from the deck. BozBall had shot out a couple of legs, as if it needed to steady itself.

“That’s odd,” Boz said.

Ravi wasn’t listening. BozBall was trying not to roll—and he had a shrewd idea as to why. He reached out to the hive. Somewhere nearby, there ought to be a working gravity meter. It took a while, but he found one, a couple of decks down. It took much less than a while to discover the readings were off kilter.

“We’re accelerating again,” he told Boz. “Just like last night.”

“Last night? What are you talking about?”

“When Sofia and I were in the engine rooms, the drive came on—part of the drive, anyway. It’s happening again, right now. The ship is under power. It’s real gentle, but it’s there.”

He laid a hand against the scratched surface of the table, hoping to sense some kind of vibration. But his hand, threaded with forty-eight named nerves and upgraded by implants, was no match for BozBall’s sense of balance. He couldn’t feel a thing, just the thumping bass of a Steel Age orchestra called Nirvana.