Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

Slipping on a pair of shorts, he pulled himself along the drag bars and into the corridor. Because he still heard the water running, Sav went to his stasis cell, the only space on the ship in which he could have a bit of privacy. It occurred to him as he levered himself into the narrow space that it was here he had woken from stasis forty hours ago. Yet, it seemed like weeks had passed. On the ceiling was a small keypad; Sav punched a button to seal the cell. Almost before the translucent door had completed its descent, he was asleep.

Day 2

Sav groaned quietly, then opened his eyes. A handspan above him was the silvered roof of his stasis cell. One of his legs had doubled behind him, and when he tried to straighten it in the cramped space, it ached severely. He cursed himself for not bothering to strap himself into his webbing before falling asleep. He keyed in the sequence to retract his cell door. The panel slid down and faint light spilled into his cell.

Placing his hands on the edge of his berth, Sav levered himself around until he could see the rest of the cabin. Across the room Hebuiza’s cell was empty. “How long,” he asked, his voice rough with sleep. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Six hours, thirty-three minutes,” the Ea answered.

It felt more like six seconds. Sav shook his head to clear it.

“Where’s Hebuiza?”

“The Facilitator is in the galley. He has been transferring equipment from the dropship.”

“What equipment?”

“I’m unfamiliar with it.”

Sav gritted his teeth and launched himself towards the sealed hatch. Cool air licked over the bare skin on his chest as he sailed across the room. He caught a drag bar beside the door, feeling oddly exposed; he realised he was experiencing the sensation of being out of his suit. Suppressing an urge to shiver, he palmed the open switch. The door recessed.

He found the Facilitator strapped into one of the galley’s metal chairs. Velcroed to the table in front of him was the flat, grey case Sav had seen in the back of the dropship, its lid open so that its interior was obscured. Next to it was the black box from the Facilitator’s suit; a clutch of thin, multi-coloured cables ran between the two boxes and to Hebuiza’s neck. The Facilitator glanced up when Sav propelled himself into the room, but otherwise did not acknowledge him. Using the drag bars along the wall, Sav worked his way around until he could see what was in the green case. The base of the unit was a featureless grey square, but on the underside of the lid there were six small screens; on five of them, streams of sharp-edged, multi-coloured characters scrolled right to left. If it was a language, it was one Sav didn’t recognize.

“What is it?”

The Facilitator pursed his lips, but kept his attention focussed on the machine. His long, narrow head began to move from side to side in a small bobbing, arc. “It can be used to sequence viruses,” he said. “Among other things.” Characters appeared on the sixth screen now.

“What’s it doing?” Sav asked.

“Self-test. Running diagnostics. Calibrating.”

Silence hung awkwardly between them, Sav watching the endless strings of alien characters swim past while Hebuiza’s head continued its bobbing motion. “Do you think it will be of any use to us?”

“Perhaps. If I can communicate with it. And after that, if I am able to reprogram it, then yes, it could be extremely useful. But it has been designed on a molecular level. My interfaces are several orders of magnitude cruder.”

“If we can find out where it was manufactured, we should be able to construct a step-up-”

“Impossible.”

“But-”

“It was not built on Bh’Haret.” The Facilitator touched the edge of the grey box and the characters on the various screens froze. “It was manufactured using nanotechnology. If you had bothered to keep abreast of current research you would know our own nanotech program was only in its infancy when we left Bh’Haret, mostly speculation and very basic theoretical work. There was a great deal of debate about which way to proceed. There wasn’t even a satisfactory computer simulation, much less a working prototype. And this is no prototype.”

“Then it’s an adopted technology?” Bartering with other planets for adopted technologies was the raison d’etre for Facilitators. For all Sav knew, the Facilitator had brought it back from their mission from Arcolet.

“Stolen would be more accurate.” The characters began to move again, only this time they crawled across the screens.

“Stolen?”

Hebuiza’s head stilled; he raised his eyes. “Yes. I believe this unit is class five Nexus technology.”

Class five. If Bh’Haret had been an affiliate, this little box still would have been nearly two centuries beyond their tier in the Nexus Ascension Program. “How do you know all this?”

“It is what I do. I trade in stolen technologies.” He tapped Sav on the chest with a long finger. “It is what we were all doing. Whether you knew it or not.”

Pushing the Facilitator’s hand away, Sav frowned. “Did Josua know about this?”

“No,” Hebuiza answered. “Like you, he thought we were engaged in the mundane trade mission on which all of you had been briefed. But the real commerce has always been in proscribed technologies.” Hebuiza slipped a cable from his neck and let it float free. “Like this.” He stroked the side of the box deferentially, almost lovingly. “Normally these sorts of things are disassembled and examined in one of half a dozen labs set up specially for that purpose. Then the principles underlying it are ‘discovered’, over years or decades-until the appropriate technological base has been established to reproduce the item itself.”

“And there’s one of those labs in Temparas? That’s where you went when you left me at the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“And where you got this?”

The Facilitator nodded.

Sav swung himself over to the other side of the table, lowered himself into a chair and clutched the edge of the seat. The grey box sat between the two men, its screens invisible. It seemed to have grown in size, cramping the space on the table.

Hebuiza had dropped his gaze to one of the lower screens. His head resumed its side-to-side motion. “It is fortunate, really, that this was not destroyed or lost,” he said. “I found it sitting in plain view, on a workbench in a low security area of the building. It was surrounded by a clutter of equipment. My guess is that when the plague hit, the researchers panicked. Hoped this might save them.” Hebuiza shook his large head sadly, as if at the idiocy of such a conceit; cables swung wide in the zero gravity. “Who knows. If they’d had time to understand it, it might have helped.”

“Or,” Sav said softly, “perhaps it was the opposite. Perhaps it sealed their fate.”

The Facilitator lifted his eyes, stared at Sav over the lid of the grey box, his expression blank.

“What if Nexus knew we had their little toy?” Sav continued. “Or others like it? Suppose they found out that we were trying to side step their beloved Ascension Program? They collect and disseminate technologies. It’s what the Ascension Program is all about. And then they dole it out in little bits to the affiliated worlds that toe the line. But if we were stealing it….

“They wouldn’t have taken direct action because the last thing they want to be seen as is bullies, showing up with fleets of ships to punish worlds that don’t fall into line. And it would be a massive drain on their resources over those distances. So what they’re left with is more subtle forms of coercion.” Sav tightened his grip on the edge of his seat to keep his arms from trembling. “A convenient plague, perhaps. Who’d be left to figure out where the bug came from? Nexus would deny any involvement, of course, perhaps blame it on our own bio labs. But there would always be suspicions, and that’s what they’d count on to make other non-affiliates think before they borrowed Nexus technology….”

Hebuiza drew another cable from his pocket, let it uncoil in the air in front of him, and slipped it into an opening on his black box. “You are speculating,” he sniffed. “There is no way of knowing.”

“What about the screamers?”

“They prove nothing. The first passing Nexus ship would have dropped them regardless. Or Nexus would have ordered a ship dispatched once word of the plague reached them. Twenty-nine years puts half a dozen affiliates in range.”

“You’ve destroyed Bh’Haret,” Sav said, trying to keep his voice even. “You’ve killed us.”

“Killed us?” Hebuiza repeated, his tone incredulous. “I did as I was told.” For the first time he caught Sav’s eyes, held them. “Just as you did.”

“But I didn’t know what we were doing.”

“If you had known, would you have refused the work? Given up longhauls for supply runs and work on ore freighters?”

The question hung in the air between them; perspiration beaded on Sav’s forehead, crept into the space between his palms and the edge of the seat he gripped. Would I have refused? Sav wondered. He wasn’t certain. And even if he had turned it down, he knew he wouldn’t have raised any flags about the practise of stealing technologies. He would have turned a blind eye to it, pretended it didn’t exist, as he had with so many other things in his life.

“You see.” Hebuiza smiled coldly. “We’re not so different after all.”

Sav went limp; his hands slipped from the seat and he began to drift up. He stared at the innocuous grey box. “I’m going back to cryo Facility,” he said, suddenly anxious to get away from the Ea-and Hebuiza’s toys. He pushed himself towards the door. “I promised Liis we’d be back as soon as possible.”

“Do as you please,” the Facilitator said, his attention back on the screen, his head once more bobbing from side to side. “It was your promise, not mine.” As he spoke a thin tube with a shiny silver tip extruded from the carapace of the machine, bending in its middle so that it looked like the stinger on an insect. Hebuiza held his index finger beneath the tube and it darted down. A bright red dot of blood ran up the tube and disappeared inside the machine. The tube turned milky white for an instant, then returned to its original transparent state. On the screens the speed of scrolling data quadrupled. Hebuiza looked up at Sav. “But before you go I require a blood sample for comparative analysis.” When Sav didn’t move, Hebuiza added, “Or perhaps you do not care about our survival?”

What damage could the Facilitator do?

Sav asked himself that question over and over as he put on his suit and boarded the dropship. Almost reluctantly, he launched the ship, leaving Hebuiza alone in the Ea. Now, arcing towards the planet’s surface, a