Medusa in the Graveyard Read online

  “The Weapons Clan regrets the loss of life from Titania,” he continued. “They invested enormous resources into Titania and Olympia. They wish to propose a contract with the survivors on Olympia. If you will accept employment with the Weapons Clan, all debts will be paid. You will find their patronage beneficial. You need fear no reprisals for any destruction of property belonging to the Weapons Clan. You may show your good faith by declaring Olympia to be an outpost of the Weapons Clan when you establish orbit around Graveyard. Details of your employment will be negotiated once you have done so.”

  Lee dipped his head. “That is the full message.”

  The Security Council studied Lee and Thomas. Each Medusa unit wore her own expression. Some of them looked amused. Others seemed concerned. One of them curled her lips in a scornful smile. Their tentacles continued to move to the same slow current.

  “Did you memorize the message?” Terry Charmayne asked at last. “You spoke it exactly as it was delivered to you?”

  “Sir, I did,” said Lee.

  “Do you endorse it, Representative Lee?”

  “It is not my place to endorse the message,” said Lee. “Most Union officials would advise you to think carefully before you sign any contracts.”

  I wondered how the Weapons Clan would react if they learned that Lee had added that caveat. They might not be so eager to pay him. At least—not with credit.

  Did he imply that the Union was more honorable? I doubted the Weapons Clan placed their highest value on that quality.

  “We will consider the offer,” said Terry Charmayne, “and the advice of Union officials. Oichi will take you back to your ship now.”

  “Thank you,” Thomas and Lee said together. We pivoted and walked back up the central aisle.

  * * *

  The aery Habitat Sector contrasts starkly with the narrow tunnels that riddle the hide of Olympia. Movers can take you far, but quite a lot of worming is required to travel between the House of Clans and Lock 212. Our passages are lit only at intervals. Darkness pools between the lights, and I wondered each time Thomas and Lee followed us into another shadow, did they think it might be their last?

  When we escorted them into a mover, Lee cleared his throat. “I’m assuming the people responsible for the destruction of Titania were prosecuted, according to your laws?”

  “You could say that,” I replied. If you don’t mind stretching the definition a bit.

  Thomas and Lee didn’t look at us the rest of the way back. They seemed preoccupied. Representative Lee wore his bland expression as comfortably as I wore Medusa. Captain Thomas had frown lines between her brows. I thought I should do something to ease the tension, and I doubted my conversation would do the trick, so I played Rachmaninoff in the mover. I’m not sure the music made them feel any better, but it certainly improved my mood.

  A few suites and one piano concerto later, we emerged near the pressure door of the air lock that housed Merlin.

  “I will see you to your door,” I said.

  Even Lee’s heart rate jumped at that prospect.

  Nostalgia buoyed me as we walked them in, traveling on my feet. Medusa’s tentacles towered over us, casting serpentine shadows on Merlin’s hide. Their movement calmed me. I felt prepared for the task at hand.

  I let myself savor a few memories as we walked past seldom-used equipment and tow cables. Just over here we broke Percy O’Reilly’s neck. Over there, we pulled Ryan Charmayne off his feet and had a nice (if brief) conversation with him.

  When we had reached Merlin’s ramp, Captain Thomas paused and turned to us. “Thank you for letting us deliver the message.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, my tone warm.

  Perhaps a little too warm. Thomas frowned. We suffered an awkward moment until they finally turned and walked up the ramp.

  That left us at their backs. We watched them for a moment, then started up after them.

  Startled, they looked over their shoulders at us. Lee said, “Medusa—please…”

  Medusa stopped dead. Without her, I couldn’t move, which was awkward.

  I didn’t want to rethink it. Once again, I tried to move forward, to thrust her tentacles at the emissaries of the Weapons Clan, but Medusa wasn’t budging—at least not in that direction. She had no problem with reverse.

  “We’ll talk again,” I said, and made the most dignified exit I could.

  Thomas and Lee stayed frozen while we moved away. The pressure door spun shut behind us, taking our light with it. We used the Security surveillance cameras to watch them as they backed up, all the way into Merlin’s air lock.

  Through their intercom, I heard Lee say, “We almost got killed.”

  Captain Thomas closed their outer door. I imagined her typing the security code as fast as her fingers could go—that’s what I would have done. She said, “Her tone was too friendly at the end, there. That mask over her face made it hard to tell what she was thinking.”

  “That mask is Medusa,” said Lee. “I think that mask talked Oichi out of killing us.”

  Except that Medusa hadn’t talked me out of it. She simply hadn’t cooperated.

  I said,

  2

  Itzpapa-whozit

  In the cycles before Merlin made her first approach, we expected to encounter someone else entirely. An asteroid belt stretches midway between the gas giants in the outer solar system of Charon and its rocky inner worlds. We had been told that the belt hosted an extensive colony of miners. Such an intrepid vocation must attract adventurous people. Could they fail to notice us? How long would they wait to say hello? How long should we wait to do so? We debated the protocols.

  Medusa told me.

  She referred to the fish and flowers embossed on the doors. I wondered if the Belters of Charon made similar use of the materials they mined. I would ask them, once we made formal contact.

  Olympia had been in-system for a year by then, on a course that would allow us to assume a parking orbit around Graveyard, the fourth world out from Charon. We had passed four gas giants on the way in, gorgeous monsters with moons that were small worlds in their own right. We marveled at the visible storms on two of those giants, cyclones large enough to swallow ten Graveyards.

  Would we seem a marvel to the Belters? Had they seen a generation ship before? Was Olympia just another wonder in a place already swamped with them?

  Judging by the warning beacons we passed, it might be more amazing that the Alliance of Ancient Races who guarded Graveyard had decided to allow Olympia to travel so far in. The spare communications we received from system officials informed us that everyone else from out-system had to wait years for permission—and when that was granted, they could visit only in small, unarmed ships.

  Merlin had been that sort of ship. She didn’t approach Olympia until we neared the occupied space of the asteroid belt—but she hadn’t come from the belt. She came from out-system, from space through which we had already passed.

  I was pretty sure which clan had sent her.

  “This is Union Ship Merlin,” Narm hailed Olympia, calling the language we had used all our lives Standard Dialect. “Requesting permission to dock. Our captain and a representative would like to meet with your clan leaders. We will comply with your security and medical protocols. Do you copy?”

  He repeated his message in more dialects, including two labeled Tagg and GenParl that included some recognizable words. We sent our reply in Standard before he got all the way through them.

  “We have received your message. Stand by.”

  Stand by was a bit of an understatement. We argued for hours while Merlin maintained a steady distance from Olympia.

  said Nuruddin Jackson,
our cinema expert. Movies and music play oversized roles in our lives on Olympia, so Nuruddin’s opinion always carries weight.

  Nuruddin’s Medusa unit, Nefertari, disagreed.

  Our visitor might be a powerful trickster or a clever little raptor. Either way, she should not be underestimated, but I wasn’t sure everyone on the Security Council grasped that.

  said Jonquil Schickele.

  That provoked a flurry of opinions concerning spies, germs, and gravity bombs, yet I doubted Merlin was on a mission of destruction. She had come to establish contact. Such things are better done in person.

  You could say the same thing about assassination. It’s possible I was letting my curiosity get the better of me. I decided to ask the opinion of a person whose life was consumed with ensuring the survival of our generation ship. I paid him a visit in Ship Operations (the location of which is still unknown to most of my fellow citizens).

  “Nemo, you are captain of Olympia,” I said. “If you are opposed to these visitors, I won’t allow them to set foot on our ship.”

  Nemo didn’t have to ponder it for long. “I can list pros and cons either way. If you want to allow the visit, specific protocols must be observed. I can communicate those protocols to Merlin, if that’s what you decide, but if you’re asking me what I think—I vote for letting them visit. Once they’ve linked with our auto-approach system, we’ll have access to their docking history. We can find out who they are and where they’ve been. We can get quite a lot of information out of them without asking, just because of that link.” He shrugged. “We may also be subject to security breaches, but sometimes you have to sacrifice information to gain information.”

  To me, that was the real point.

  That’s not what I told the Security Council. You can argue with officials for only so long before it becomes circular.

  I said.

  Terry Charmayne replied.

  I remained in Operations while Nemo and his crew handled the approach. Barring Weapons Clan operatives, these were the first outsiders I had ever seen. The prospect of meeting them was both exciting and disturbing.

  “What are your decontamination procedures?” our communications officer asked Merlin.

  Narm responded with a list.

  “That should be sufficient,” said Nemo. “Permission granted. We’re sending auto-approach guidelines.”

  Merlin accepted our link. Nemo was proved right when we were able to access a ship’s roster of biographies and profile pictures of the crew. For outsiders, they looked remarkably similar to us.

  Narm’s full name was Narm Ha-neul. From his picture, he appeared to be twenty-something, and he reminded me of a Weapons Clan operative who once tried to kill me—Tetsuko. Unlike Tetsuko, Narm wasn’t wearing a perpetual smirk. At least, he wasn’t wearing one in his profile picture.

  As to other information we might gain, Nemo was proved right again when we heard Narm exclaim, “Wow!” in what sounded like genuine astonishment.

  Along with the auto-approach link (and our spyware), we had sent a general diagram of Olympia and her specs. “Wow,” Narm said again. “Cap, come look at this.”

  There was a pause while Epatha Thomas joined Narm at his display. In her profile, she appeared to be in her midforties. When her picture had been taken, her hair was carefully coifed. Her expression suggested she thought something was funny or possibly strange—she couldn’t decide which.

  Later I would see quite a different expression on her face, but this one intrigued me.

  “Have you ever seen a ship this big?” said Narm.

  “Not a ship,” said Captain Thomas. “Sunbusters are that big. See those towers on the leading edge? That’s where the injectors would be on a sunbuster.”

  I said.

  replied our own COMMO.

  “You’re sure they’re not weapons?” Narm said, presumably referring to our research towers on the leading edge.

  “I’m sure they’re not injectors,” said Thomas.

  “They’re not weapons,” said another voice, this one bland. “They could be harboring weapons.”

  This third person turned out to be Representative Lee. I thought his tone suggested he knew more about us than Narm and Cap. “The scale of Olympia is like nothing you’ll see outside a city-class space station, and it beggars most of those.”

  I don’t know if Narm found that information useful. I certainly did.

  * * *

  Olympia spins to simulate gravity, so Merlin would have to match the speed of the spin, fly into an access canyon, and pivot so the top of her fuselage turned toward Olympia. Once they linked with the tow structure, Merlin’s belly would be exposed to the stars until we towed her into an air lock.

  said Nemo.

  I replied.

  My order was executed without a ripple of awareness of the mayhem that had occurred inside (and outside) Lock 212 in the past few years. Only Medusa and I shared that knowledge. I wondered what she would say when she found out which air lock I had chosen.

  I didn’t wonder for long. said Medusa.

 

 

  I said.

  said Medusa.

  Her tone was mild, but I think she was a little annoyed with me. Before I could compose an answer, Nemo said,

  I said.

  Our communications officer sounded excited. One of the large displays hanging over the center lit up with an image.

  We all stared at it. I’m not ashamed to say my mouth was hanging open.

  Nemo reminded me.

  I stared at Itzpapa-whozit a little longer. I said at last,

  Size was the only thing that ship had in common with Olympia. She looked like an alien cathedral that had somehow become spaceborne. Our generation ship had gigantic engines on our Aft Sector, but Itzpapalotl had nothing remotely like that. She possessed structures that defied explanation.

  Medusa interrupted my survey.

  That did not put my mind at ease.

  I dutifully pronounced the name.

  agreed our COMMO.

  Better security features than Merlin appeared to have, I could have said, but I saw no reason to cast more suspicion on our visitors than we already entertained. After all, I wanted to meet them, to learn everything I could about them—and about
the people who sent them.

  “Look at the tow structure,” we heard Narm say over the link.

  I frowned.

  “It looks new,” said Captain Thomas.

  “I don’t think it’s new,” said Representative Lee. “I think it hasn’t been used very often. I’ll bet it’s spent most of its time retracted, waiting for ships that never came.”

  Well, now! Wasn’t he Mr. Know-It-All?

  He was right about those ships, though. I wondered what other insights he might have.

  * * *

  Nuruddin’s son, Ashur, called.

  Ashur was part of my inner circle, so I answered his question truthfully.

 

  I’m sorry he had to ask that question.

  I assured him.

 

  I promised.

 

  I showed him Security footage of the newcomers as they docked. He watched the process long after most people would have gotten bored with it. he said.

  Once it was in the lock, I gave him a look through Merlin’s view windows at the people moving inside.

  he said.

 

 

  I felt a twinge of pain when I remembered Gennady. True, he had blown me out of an air lock, but I don’t think that was personal. I hoped Wilson wouldn’t turn out to be quite so scheme-y.

  The visitors fascinated Ashur, but his mood changed once he got a good look at them. Perhaps he knew what circumstances might force me to do to them.