Falcon's Egg

Chapter 2-1

Chapter Two

Six hours later, Lorn sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag, tucked inside his tent, which in turn was tucked beneath an overhanging cliff face, hidden from the unfriendly gaze of any passing aircraft or satellites. The heated frame had warmed the interior to the point he had taken off his white winter outerwear and was comfortable in his regulation State Security Intelligence Network black T-shirt and pants. He held the netlink in his right hand, regarding it warily.

It was currently powered down, which was supposed to mean that it was untraceable…although Lorn knew full well that commercially sold netlinks in fact contained secret hardware and code to enable the government to track them anywhere, anytime, powered down or not. But this didn’t look like a commercial netlink: it looked like a black market version, neither company logo nor serial number marring its black matte finish. Come on, Lorn chided himself, this is Javik we’re talking about. There’s no way he handed you something that could be traced.

But…if he turned it on, would it link to the ’Net? And then could he be traced?

He had another option, of course. He could simply throw it in the snow and hike away without ever looking at it. Javik was crazy. Even his Mom had said as much. Getting mixed up in whatever had killed Javik would make him equally crazy.

On the other hand, that bloody robot had tried to kill him.

He thumbed the power button.

The netlink’s screen lit instantly. He saw at once that it was not connected to anything, which was a relief. That made it nothing more than a data storage device…but what data?

The device answered that question almost as he thought it.

“Lorn Kymbal,” said Javik’s voice, though the screen displayed nothing but the usual status icons against a blue background. “I have chosen to give this to you for two reasons. One, as a part of this planet’s security apparatus, you have the necessary knowledge and training to potentially investigate the information contained herein, with at least some possibility of surviving that investigation.”

“Hello to you, too,” Lorn muttered.

“Two,” Javik’s voice continued, “although you are part of the security apparatus, you also have connections to Art Stoddard, the young woman known as Shadow, and the former revolutionary Avara Morali. These connections could serve you well, depending on how you choose to deal with this data.”

This is sounding more ominous by the minute, Lorn thought.

“If you are hearing this, I am dead,” Javik said. “I signed my death warrant the moment I downloaded this data. I thought it a reasonable exchange. My life has meant very little to me for years. I trust my death may be more meaningful.” His voice stopped.

And I guess that’s your epitaph. I’ve heard worse.

A new voice spoke: a generic voice, a computer voice. “To unlock this device, please press your thumb against the screen.”

Biometric lock, Lorn thought. Not perfect, but way better than a password. Then he frowned. How could Javik have my thumbprint?

No answer to that, and no one he could ask. He pressed his right thumb to the screen.

The device beeped. “Identity confirmed. Corporal Lorn Kymbal, State Security Intelligence Network, you are authorized to view the data on this device. Have a nice day.”

A new icon appeared on the screen, a green circle. Lorn thumbed it. Javik’s voice began speaking again. “The first anomaly to impinge on my consciousness was an encrypted message transmitted by satellite to a strangely indeterminate address that resolves to one of the secure servers of the planetary government. The encryption was of a type I have never seen before and unbreakable with any of my usual tools.

“My netlink algorithm has deteriorated over the years, and there could well be new military-grade encryption schemes with which I am unfamiliar. However, what heightened the anomalous nature of the message was its point of origin. It came, the transmitting satellite insisted, from the far side of the planet: specifically, from deep within the jungles of Margaret’s Land.”

Lorn touched the pause button and stared at the netlink. Margaret’s Land (named, the story went, after the back-on-Terra girlfriend of the scout who had originally identified Peregrine as habitable) was the sole continent on the far side of the world. There were only two continents, in fact, although there were a number of significant island chains, mostly uninhabited, scattered around the planet.

Margaret’s Land had only a few permanent settlements, all clinging to the more temperate southern coastline, where the temperature and humidity were sauna-like for only eight months of the year instead of all twelve. Aside from some fishing and a modicum of agriculture, needed simply to support the population, the settlements’ sole business was catering to the wilderness adventurers who liked to test their mettle against the jungle. A distressingly high percentage of the time, the jungle won. But the fact hundreds of adventurers had vanished without a trace into the continent’s interior over the past few decades seemed only to encourage more to mount their own expeditions. The driving force for such suicidal foolishness was a single sentence in the original recorded-audio scouting report, which conspiracy theorists had ever since been claiming indicated an alien city had been seen in the jungle, a city which supposedly vanished between one orbital pass and the next.

In the transcript, the sentence in question read more like gibberish than anything else—“City sighted…beamslice matter forget I can’t…buildup ruins/not?” was the most coherent version of it Lorn had seen—but of course, every official attempt to point out that the sentence was almost certainly nothing more than the product of a solar-flare-garbled transmission, or a slightly tipsy scout celebrating his first habitable planet, was simply more grist for the conspiracy-theorist mill. No one who had ever emerged from the jungle alive had produced any evidence that there was anything in the tangled wilderness other than thorny undergrowth, twisted trees, and wildlife armed with a truly alarming variety of natural defenses of the claws/teeth/spines/deadly poison variety. Those who had not emerged alive hadn’t produced any evidence either, of course, but somehow the mere fact they had vanished was taken as proof there must be something to the tale—especially since the government had long ago made clear it would not make the slightest effort to rescue anyone foolish enough to risk the jungle.

Now Javik claimed he had detected a strange signal emanating from the middle of Margaret’s Land? It was enough to make a conspiracist hyperventilate…or, in the case of some of the more excitable ones, orgasm.

But those spiderbots were nothing alien. They were too similar to the maintenance robots on Mayflower II to be anything other than human-made.

Which raised an even more disturbing possibility. Someone was up to no good in Margaret’s Land…and on a planet that had just recently narrowly escaped both all-out civil war and bombardment from orbit, “no good” could be very no good indeed.

“s**t,” Lorn said. It was becoming the theme of his day. He resumed the playback.

An hour later, he was no happier. In fact, he was so much less happy that his initial trepidation might well have been mistaken for jumping for joy. Because although the messages coming out of the jungles of Margaret’s Land were encrypted in a way Javik had never been able to break, the messages going the other way used SSIN military encryption…and Javik knew how to get through that.

Someone with access to the highest levels of the Peregrine government, and an extensive clandestine network within the government, seemed to be doing nothing less than laying plans for a coup. And the timeline was frighteningly ambitious: the trigger would be pulled in less than six months.

That much was clear. But the details of the plan were presumably hidden in the unbreakably encrypted messages from Margaret’s Land. Certainly, the quantity of data in those messages was enormously greater than that in the terse acknowledgements from the government servers.

The question was, what was he going to do about it?

As a corporal in the State Security Intelligence Network, his duty was clear. He should immediately hand over the netlink to his immediate superior, Lieutenant Stanford Molitor.

Lorn snorted. Like that was going to happen. Lorn was currently on leave because of Molitor, a by-the-book academy-trained martinet with all the imagination and people skills of a rock. A very dense rock.

Their latest falling out had occurred after a Molitor-organized raid on a handful of diehard Skywatchers holed up in an abandoned factory on the edge of Stepperville, a nondescript city of about 20,000 people where nothing interesting had ever happened before.

The raid had been a disaster. Twenty-seven Skywatchers, including six women—two of them pregnant—and eight children, had died, some in the crossfire, most when the building caught fire and the ceiling collapsed on them. Six SSIN agents had also died. And two civilians had been killed and eleven wounded when an old fuel tank had exploded, hurling shrapnel through a crowd of onlookers Molitor had failed to keep at a safe distance.

Sickened and furious by what he had seen—and done—Lorn had confronted Molitor in full view of witnesses. He’d been arrested for it. Locked up for a while. Finally released but kept on “stress leave,” required to report every day for two hours of “therapy” with a soft-voiced noncommissioned nincompoop who was supposed to be helping him deal with his “issues” and instead had only made him angrier.

Javik’s summons had seemed like a lifeline, something real to do, a reason to blow off Molitor and the therapist and the whole stupid rigamarole. He’d left a message that he was taking his saved-up leave. He’d earned some time off, after all. Maybe he hadn’t exactly followed Standard Operating Procedure to have it granted, but he’d told them where he was going and when he’d be back. So he wasn’t AWOL…exactly.

Anyway, that was one reason he had no desire to hand over the explosive data Javik had bequeathed him to the next-highest link in the chain of command. The other was more sinister. The messages had made one thing clear: the SSIN itself was compromised. Compromised again, Lorn thought bitterly. His own father had been cashiered out of the SSIN years ago because he had recognized the growing influence of the Skywatcher cult as a threat and had said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Lorn had no way of knowing who was or wasn’t part of this new conspiracy, and this time around, it seemed clear, both from the messages and from the deadly spiderbots, revealing his knowledge to the wrong person wouldn’t just get him kicked off the force, it would get him killed.

But there was someone he could give the information to: Art Stoddard. The erstwhile Conqueror of Time and Space must still have trusted channels through which he could pass along something like this. The government had given him the Starred Cross of Honor, after all, and tasked him with the important—Lorn supposed, though it sounded deadly dull to him—work of helping to integrate the former passengers and crew of Mayflower II into Peregrine society.

What Lorn found hard to swallow about Art, though, was that he simply wasn’t the man he used to be.

Or maybe, honesty forced him to add, he aas never the man Lorn had built him up to be.

Truth was, no one could have lived up to the level of admiration his teenage self had felt for Art Stoddard. Art had arrived from outer space, had offered excitement—a little more excitement than Lorn had bargained for, culminating in his being shot and then blowing out an airlock to save Art and his companions from the Crew out to kill them—and a chance to do something that mattered. But Art, for all his good qualities, and all he had accomplished, had turned out to be just an ordinary man after all. Once the extraordinary circumstances that had made him great had faded into the past, he had resumed being an ordinary man, doing ordinary work, much of it in cooperation—and occasional conflict—with the woman who still called herself Shadow but whose real name was Cynthia Nikos. The daughter of the Captain of Mayflower II, Shadow had led the young Crawlspacer rebels who had seized control of the ship and helped prevent all-out war.