Way of life, Arc 7 of "Gone with the Sun"
Chapter 93 A distant thunder
…I'm awake now
Miranda didn't bother with a shuttle. Overlord arrived at the island with a whoosh and a wallop, causing an asari guard posted at the jetty to shoulder a weapon, till the airlock opened and a black-and-white skinsuited woman leaped on the beach, then sprinted to the house eighty metres off. The commando had been warned something like this might happen.
The frigate's mass effect core levitated her three metres off the shore. A much more composed little troop exited out the loading bay door; they wandered over to chat amiably about boats.
Changeling
"Thank god for air conditioning, is all I can say." Oriana, propped up on the lounge couch, watched the AI mobile calmly preparing coffee. "Randa. Why have you got Juno to dress up as me?"
"She's about the right size, hair coloring, and face shape as us. Juno picked her own mobile from the Cerberus cache, Oriana. I didn't force it. Makeup does the rest."
The AI came over with a tray. "It was my idea, Oriana. If I can look like you, visibly unpregnant, it would sow uncertainty and doubt in the mind of the curious. Has any footage from your camera showing you been released?"
"Not for more than half a year now. I locked my camera's data stream a little while after the North Cape incident. Shepard warned me 'not for news, only for posterity.' "
"I think he meant coverage of Felicia. And Kelly."
"I know. But it was easier to devote my camera to them and lock it. While I was with Westerlund I could use pool cameras, and they were operated by my offsider, to viewers I was just a talking head or a voice, not 'showing' much back then anyway."
"Good. Where is Kelly?"
"On duty in Russell, she gets off in five hours, Hannah's got Felicia. I've been using syndicate cameras for contract work since Westerlund. Remote controlled or I've been supervising Juno doing reporting, when I began bulging. When I was too tired to work in the field at all, I just wrote commentaries."
"Even better. So there's just us here, now, in the house. I've been thinking."
"About what we do next? We have to bring the child up."
"Maybe if we behave like it's mine?" But Oriana swung bleary eyes at her sister:
"Chloe says it's a him. Sis, you want my baby? Why?"
"I just want to give you options with boys. Still your baby. We pretend, is all."
"Danner Gossimah's gone. Or will be gone. Or something. Who else is there?"
Fishing
As evening descended around the little house, and the comparatively vast frigate hovered over the jetty with its tongue out (so to speak), a soft glow appeared in the windows as the house VI sensed the oncoming dark.
Hadley and Toombs had visited briefly and Juno, smiling, gave them what they wanted – saltwater fly-fishing gear. They took the little yacht a couple of hundred metres into the bay. There was a light breeze from sea to land as the heat of the day rose from the soil and the cold air over the water moved to replace it; just enough air for a couple of knots in the little two-man keeler. They dropped sail and hung their lines on either side, baited with textured CHON protein and blood plasma.
"So what gives with the boss? You've known her longer than me."
"She's obviously looking after her pregnant sis. Beyond, that, how should I know?"
Toombs lapsed into a contemplative silence, then: "Do fish bite on this stuff?"
"Don't even know what fish they've got here, let alone if they like artificial meat."
More deep thoughts from the ex-corporal ensued. Hadley could hear the clockwork.
"She's scheming something. And that ban on talking to the media is still in place."
"Well it's embarrassing, Toombs. Christ, this isn't so hard. Career girl gets pregnant, oh dear. Beyond that, don't even bother trying, mate. You couldn't scheme to save your soul."
"So you try then. What's she thinking?"
Hadley sighed. "Well my best guess is it wasn't the Dad they thought it was."
"You mean, Prangley. Rodriguez has a lock on him now."
"That's a switch, news to me. I was visiting Goldstein at Arcturus when this blew up."
"And what were you doing in private?"
"None of your damn business."
"Come on, son, out here no-one can hear us, not even Juno. You saw Rodriguez blow hot and cold on Prangley for a couple of years. Goldstein ever do that do you?"
"No. And we all saw it, till Ori took Prangley away. Bummer for Rodriguez."
"I think someone was teaching her a lesson. Rodriguez wanted Prangley at a distance but she didn't want to lose him. Hadley, what would your military scientists call her position?"
"Failed to take the high ground. Morally, at least. Untenable?"
Looking ahead
Kilimanjaro's war room held only ship captains, ship AIs, and above, with one exception: Lt. Jeff Moreau. Shepard quickly stepped over to him.
"I won't shake your hand, Flight Lieutenant. Chakwas says you won't have been taking your meds. Why are you here?"
"Awww, crap, Captain. Taking notes. You're not kicking me out, are you?"
"…Maybe not. You've been piloting this dreadnought for months. On reflection, you might be needed. What's going down?"
"We had to make a handful of extra relays for side trips off of N-16. Lots of metal and ³He resources." Helium-three was ship fuel. "Something's bothering the astrophysics boffins about the road ahead. N-17 is the last stopoff for the fleet."
"So I hear."
"N-18's going to be at the North Pole of a whacking great rogue planet the size of Mars, and Boris Mikhailovich calls it a killing ground. Not sure what that's all about but from now on search is by frigate. There's four of you here now, that's two pairs."
"Stealth, huh. Okay. We'll be running two hidden, one scanning till Overlord gets back. I'm not allowed to enter the search bubble till we're at full strength. In fact I'm going back down the chain before we move in force. Let me ask you again, Joker, what prompted you to join this pow-wow?"
"I spoke to EDI on TBS and she's supposed to be here. But I only see top brass."
"Ah. Well she'll be in the lift right behind me. And… here she is."
Moreau didn't respond. EDI did: "Jeff. You've dropped your datapad."
Joker's mouth began flapping. Shepard intervened:
"Pilot. If you leave your mouth open, flies will get in."
"You did this deliberately!"
"I'm taking pictures, yes."
Time as enemy
"…and I'm guessing when Rodriguez found that out, she was what you call 'desperate'."
"Desperate enough to get Jack's attention, yeah. Then I saw them with big boss."
Reflectively Toombs leaned back: "So, she learned her lesson you think?"
"Dunno. But that Dr T'Soni gave her a good talking to, and then she had an appointment with Kelly."
"In other words, big boss called in the Marines. Ho, I got a bite!"
Ten minutes later, two three-foot silvery fish swam in the bucket. All Toombs or Hadley could say of them was:
"That last one dragged us a hundred metres."
"It's not tuna."
"Not salmon, either, but it looks edible."
"Can we go back in now?"
"There's still some light. Bait again, see if big boss wants some."
"She's still too bothered with the kid business, I think. Give it to Juno?"
"I'll cook it. There's no kid problem. Little boss doesn't want baby, big boss will have it, you watch."
"Toombs! I guarantee you, Oriana will want it. And it's not like she's poverty-stricken, she has the means to care for it."
"But she's awful young. Twenty, when the kid was conceived? That's a problem, no? I know she's had a couple of glamorous boyfriends. Baby would cramp her style."
"More than a couple, but I don't think they were for real, except the biotiball guy. She liked him, and his gene scan was clean like Prangley's. The rest were just there for professional decoration, someone to hang on your arm."
"I remember the biotiball guy. Why not latch on to him?"
"He wanted a girl to hang on his arm, but he wasn't really interested in girls."
"Oh."
"He still has her omni-tool code. It's not like they're enemies. Not like the stimsim director. He was going to make a kiss-and-tell about both Lawsons and the Dad."
"Oh yeah. What happened to him?"
"He disappeared for two days. It's not what you think, he ran and hid."
"I know that, but why? That was one time big boss didn't bring me along!"
"I know a little bit more. The director wasn't really the problem anyway. The problem came earlier, the first attempt to stymie him. Lawson bought the production company which had his five-year contract. Should we be talking about this?"
"No. She can feed me to a thresher maw, if she wants. What was the point then?"
"The director was suddenly contractually obliged to do nothing but soft-core Japanese animé porn for the next five years."
"Jeez, Hadley. That's mean."
"But profitable. I thought it was fairly creative, actually. Anyway, he complained to his shady Russian pals who sold Lawson's front company the business, and they demanded it back or else. You'll remember what happened next."
"Silly buggers. This would be the Arbat incident?"
"Yep. As I understand it."
"She called me out on that one. We didn't clear it with Pyotr Mikhailovich, and he was pissed. Till he was shown the director's emails, and the links with the FBU. So why did the kiss-and-tell director run and hide?"
"He woke up that morning with bloody heads on his pillow, including the capo di tutti capi of the Russian mafia."
"Oh yeah. I didn't have a lot of space left in my duffle."
"At least you didn't have to arrange them artistically while he snored. I nearly threw up. Ho, another one!"
…
Moments after they tied up to the jetty, the med school shuttle arrived carrying Hannah and Kelly, with Felicia, who waved at them. They waved back.
"Scuttlebutt a year or so ago was that the boy she really wanted in high school, his family moved to Illium when the Reapers hit. I'm not sure he ever noticed her, mind."
"Oh, f…"
"We're all the way out here, Toombs, Jack can't give you a hard time."
"Not taking risks with Jack. But Illium is a dozen years off. If not, I could see Lawson arranging a little transport problem from the Hermitage ski lodge–"
"With the two in unaccustomed propinquity."
"You have to learn how the daughter of the Prince of Darkness thinks. "
"Might not be a dozen years, if Thessia's making relays at its end too."
"Dick, you're not thinking, it doesn't matter. Even if it's only half a dozen years, he'll find someone else before Oriana can claim him back."
"…That's depressing."
"If you think that's depressing, how does little boss feel? I'm going to fry this lot with cajun seasoning, onion, and I think I saw cucumber on the bench."
"It was zucchini. I want to go inside now."
I'm asleep now…
The door of her Limbo cell softly clicked shut again. It wasn't right. A jail door should clang. Oh well. Redemption had been good while it lasted. She allowed herself a wry smile. Wot prawce selvytion nah? Neither Kali nor Lakshmi was interested.
Rasa/Hope/Maya looked around at the low circle of light on her bed's pillow, but right then didn't feel like more light. She had already seen everything here. There was the library terminal, but there hardly seemed any point to illuminating the mind, either. Perhaps the coffee/tea dispenser? No thank you. Rest seemed best.
She slipped her fatigues down the laundry chute, slipped into bed, slipped into sleep.
Subtle, what's that again?
"So what can we discern at this range, gentlemen?"
The turian and salarian scientists paused and put up a schematic of the last two links in the N-chain, plus the proposed final N-18 in red.
"Beyond N-18," began the Salarian, "about twenty light years past a 'cold' dust fluff, there are gravitational waves consistent with a rotating black hole, but infra-red detects only occasional flashes, there's no obvious residual radiation of matter falling to the event horizon from an accretion disk. We can tell there is a disk of ice remnants, the extremities poke out from behind the dust fluff. But the center is gone."
"What does that mean?" The turian took the podium.
"There are similar entities observable in some galactic cores, though this is on a much smaller scale. Basically, the black hole remnant is so old it has cleared the accretion disk to at least a thousand astronomical units around."
"How old is that?" - asked Boris Mikhailovich.
"Roughly two billion years. Rather more than the age of the Leviathan of Dis." This brought murmurings from the assembled brass:
"That's what we're looking for then."
The turian and salarian looked at each other.
"If you don't mind our asking, Admiral, how is a black hole a threat? And how could you fight one?"
"That's for us to know, and the Reapers to find out. Please continue to monitor your instruments, professor. Dismissed."
…
Once the civilian scientists were gone, Garrus – heading up the turian frigate force, the Primarch had refused to allow the Nest attack to be a purely human affair – got up and asked: "What makes us think the Reapers are there, Admiral?"
"There was a QEC communicator in a Collector body picked up from Noveria, Vakarian. It's handshake was not synchronized, the other node of the pair was suffering severe time dilation."
"Oh. So they're hibernating in the time warp of a black hole."
"From the frequency mismatch, we calculate the other end of the node pair is just outside the event horizon. Not necessarily the whole reaper, could be just the computational focus. Probably an anti-rampancy measure."
"Spirits. That's a risk. They must really want the extended lifespans."
"Demons don't get to heaven, Vakarian. Their time in this universe is limited."
Next chapter: #94, "Nemesis to Archangel"
Sunday, August 23, 2015