15

 

Habidah had hardly returned to her acceleration couch when her demiorganics jolted with an urgent message from Joao. She inwardly groaned. She braced herself for another scolding.

He sent, “All of our satellites’ sensors are flipping the fuck out. Something’s happening up there.”

Another jolt, this time adrenaline. Though demiorganic transmission didn’t capture emotional cadences, she heard his panic. “In orbit?” she asked.

“Disruptions all over the thermosphere.” Raw data poured through Habidah. She needed a moment to make sense of it. The satellites her team had placed in orbit were intended to study the surface, and had very few instruments looking elsewhere. Those lateral sensors could only pick up a jumbled and incomplete swamp of fluctuating energies, spatial rifts. Most were centered in equilateral orbital bands of varying altitudes, but others had appeared over the poles.

Joao said, “Somebody’s opening a dozen, two dozen, transplanar gateways up there.”

Each was about three meters in diameter. The power needed to open that many large gateways was beyond the capabilities of most industrialized worlds. By comparison, the field base’s communications gateway was less than a micrometer wide, just large enough to transmit information.

“Open our gateway,” she said. “Send an emergency message to the university. This world is being invaded by a transplanar power. We need immediate multiple-site evacuation. There’s no time to get everyone to the field base.” The first thing an invading power would do was target extraplanar interlopers. They could have seconds. Her first impulse was to find Niccoluccio and get him off this world, but that would be placing him in even more danger. The missile targeting her could be on its way even now.

Joao reported, “Our gateway just opened on its own.”

Her heart juddered. “What?”

Their gateway was hard-linked to their university. If nobody at her field base had opened it, that meant somebody from her university had. “We’re receiving a signal from Felicity Core,” Joao said, in wonder.

Habidah settled into her couch, pulse still racing. She knew who she would be speaking to before she answered. “Send it to me.”

All of the cabin’s forward-facing monitors blinked off, replaced by a composite image of Osia. The borders between the monitors fractured her image like stained glass. She stood with her arms folded over her chest, double-jointed fingers bent backwards.

Habidah asked, “What the hell is the meaning of this?”

“An intelligence operation unrelated to your activities,” Osia answered. “I apologize for the lack of warning, but you had no reason to know. We’re depositing satellites, nothing else. This won’t disrupt your assignment. In fact, we need your reports to continue coming in. Our satellites can’t collect the kind of social and political information that you and your team have been gathering.”

The light leakage from gateways that size would be naked-eye visible in the night sky. “You’ve already disrupted our mission. Get those satellites out of here.”

Osia locked her gaze on Habidah’s. Then she looked somewhere to her side. “If you’ll excuse me, we’re in pursuit of other objectives at the moment.”

Her image vanished.

Habidah tried to get her back, but the communications gateway had closed. She slapped her couch’s armrest. It was too cushy to be satisfying.

Osia had been acting when she’d pretended she was being called from off camera. Prosthetics like her had far more advanced communications technologies. They didn’t need to talk aloud, except to ordinary humans like herself.

She told Joao, “Get everyone ready for pickup and flight to the field base. Maybe we’ll be heading home. I don’t know. We need to figure out what’s going on.”

Her harness snaked over her shoulders, tugged tight. All of the paranoia that had dogged her since Osia’s last call crashed through her all at once. It went without saying that none of this was right. Worse, maybe nothing had ever been right. This whole assignment had suddenly taken on an air of fraud.

She tried to scavenge as much information about the intruders as she could, but her satellites’ sensors, even reoriented, couldn’t make out much. The gateways had closed. The objects that had fallen through were too small to hold man-sized creatures. The largest was only half a meter long. There were somewhere between thirty and forty of them. She didn’t have good enough coverage to get an exact count. So far they’d done nothing but squat in orbit, occasionally belching EM static that was either a scan or a signal. If not for the gateways, Habidah’s satellites might never have detected them.

The engines shoved her into her seat. The sun had nearly risen. She only had minutes to get away before the shuttle’s camouflage fields lost the cover of darkness.

Her pulse skipped a measure when her gaze skipped across a monitor looking back at Florence.

 

Her team had last gathered in the conference room scarcely a day ago. Having all of them back was like a recurring nightmare. Feliks and Joao were even in the same costumes. Meloku was here in person this time, dressed as a wealthy Frenchwoman, with several rings, a necklace, and a lacy headdress.

Joao hugged his arms to his chest. Like last time, he and Kacienta had focused all of their attention on her. This time, they were looking to her for direction. Only Feliks remained detached.

Joao started off by going over everything he’d learned. “They’re stealthed, just like our satellites. Light-absorbent hulls, no reflective solar paneling. Nobody’s going to look up and see them now.”

Habidah said, “They care about concealing themselves from the natives. Why?” The amalgamates had never cared about interfering with civilizations on other planes before.

Meloku said, “They care for now. Tomorrow they could drop all pretenses.”

Habidah asked, “But, again, why? What could it possibly matter to them?”

Joao ventured, “What if they’re not here for the locals? They could be hunting an extraplanar target. A fugitive. They did tell you ‘intelligence operation.’”

Habidah said, “They didn’t bother to shield themselves against high-technology observation. Anyone from a culture capable of transplanar travel would detect them as easily as we did. The only thing they’re protected against is visual observation.”

Feliks said, “So they’re concerned with the locals. Not us. Not extraplanar fugitives. Certainly not another planar empire, and that’s about the only thing I can think of that would explain an intrusion like this.”

Kacienta asked, “Could there be some… I don’t know, some natural resource here?”

Meloku said, “Again, if that’s all it was, they wouldn’t bother to shield their satellites.”

Habidah resisted the impulse to lay her head on the table. “What could this place have that the amalgamates – or anyone in the Unity – could possibly want?” Again, her thoughts tended toward Niccoluccio. She had to force them away.

After a moment, Feliks answered, “Labor.”

Meloku said, “Don’t be barbaric. The amalgamates have access to a million more efficient forms of automated labor. If they wanted labor, they could seed a world with self-replicating worker drones. In a month, they’d have a population equal to this world.”

Osia had said she needed her team to keep providing her with “social and political information.” To the best of Habidah’s knowledge, neither she nor her team had concerned themselves with this plane’s politics other than to the extent that it influenced its peoples’ reaction to the plague.

Feliks said, “The real question here is not why they’re doing this. It’s what do we do about it.”

Habidah asked, “What can we do?”

She was sure Osia and the amalgamates were listening to every word. They had the means. The field base’s NAI answered to them. They hadn’t stopped her team from talking about them because they had no reason to. They had nothing to fear from anyone here.

Joao said, “We can pack up and go home. Or we can keep working.”

Kacienta asked, “Can we go home? The field base hardly has enough power to open up a micrometer communications gateway. We’re dependent on the university for transport. That means the amalgamates.”

Meloku said, “The amalgamates don’t care enough about us to trap us here. We’re too small.”

Joao said, “We need to keep from panicking, OK? OK. So – we don’t know why they’re doing any of this. I feel like it’s my obligation to point out that they could have reasons for this that we might agree with if we knew them.”

Habidah said, “Then the amalgamates have no reason to hide those reasons from us.”

“That’s just how they operate sometimes.”

Meloku said, “All of the time.”

Habidah kept a careful eye on Joao. He’d grown up on Providence Core. The amalgamates’ fortresses and planarships filled his skies from the day he was born. Their agents managed everything about life on his world, down to the traffic stops.

She said, “If they thought we’d agree with their reasoning for what they’re doing, they’d tell us. Whatever they’re doing, it’s not something we’d voluntarily associate ourselves with, and they know it.”

Meloku said, “We can speculate all we want, but we’re not going to learn anything new.”

“What else can we do?” Joao asked.

Meloku said, “We didn’t need to come back here if all we’re going to do is complain.”

Habidah looked at Meloku, biting her tongue. But she was right. “Joao,” Habidah said, “find out where the other anthropology teams have gone. Try to get in contact with them.”

Kacienta said, “The amalgamates and their agents could fake any messages we got back.”

Meloku said, “Only if they cared that much about tricking us.”

Habidah nodded to Joao, and added, “See if you can’t get us permission to visit their planes. Say that we want to compare notes.”

Feliks said, “The amalgamates will know what we’re trying.”

“Then let them try to stop us, and at least be honest about it.”

“Is that all?” Meloku asked. “What are you going to have us do in the meantime?”

Habidah said, “Joao is right. Our only two choices are to keep working, or not.”

Kacienta asked, “Does our work even matter after all this?”

After a moment’s consideration, Habidah said, “I believe it does. We signed up for this because we believed we could help ordinary people back in the Unity. So far as I can tell, the amalgamates have no reason to block the reports we’re sending back home. Anyone disagree?”

No one answered, but no one could quite meet her eyes, either.

“That settles that,” Habidah said. “We’ll head back to our assignments tonight, and keep our eyes open for other opportunities.”

 

Daytime kept them all trapped in the field base. Habidah sealed herself in her quarters. She didn’t eat. She wasn’t hungry. It felt like a long time since she had been.

She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. There were observation devices hidden here, she knew. Even with her retinal enhancements, she couldn’t find anything. With her demiorganics lodged in her head, routing her neural impulses, she couldn’t even be sure of the sanctity of her thoughts. She had no way to fight that level of surveillance.

One uncomfortable thought had picked at her since she’d left Florence. If this were really an intelligence operation, the amalgamates could have sent more of their agents, creatures like Osia, to do their work on the ground. Yet the only gateways they’d opened were in orbit.

If the amalgamates had been involved in her mission from the start, they would have been sure to have their interests represented.

Someone here had to be working for the amalgamates. It could have been the base’s NAI, but it wasn’t complex enough. Anyone or anything else could have been put in place long before she and her field team arrived, but Habidah doubted that. The amalgamates would have had no reason to send her survey team if they already had agents here. They shouldn’t have needed to bother with the fiction of her assignment.

Something her team – or the amalgamates’ agent – had found must have prompted this new operation.

Her team’s only way to contact the Unity had been the field base’s communications gateway. If there was a spy here, they would have had to use the gateway just like anyone else.

NAI wouldn’t let her peek inside anyone’s message traffic. But, as the survey team’s leader, she did have the authority to examine her team’s signal traffic in bulk. NAI could tell her how much traffic had gone through the gateway at which times, and to which of the Unity’s network junctions their signals had been routed.

Sure enough, someone on her team had exchanged a great many messages with a network junction that routed to Felicity Core.

Habidah wished she could say that the discovery was satisfying. All it seemed to mean was that her mission had been compromised from the beginning. She curled her fingers. She had to stay calm. There had to be some way to use this. If she could find out who it was – well, throwing them off her team would have to come second.

The first thing she had to do was find out what the amalgamates were up to.