But she wasn’t dead. She’d been saved. By strangers. Aliens. It was almost too much. Phil found he didn’t really want to think about it. It was a lot easier to concentrate on what was going on inside Venera’s walls.
“I haven’t written the report for the boss yet,” he went on. “The Venerans are screening outgoing transmissions. Somehow I don’t think our encrypted stuff is going to get through. I’m going to start looking for holes.” He rested his elbows on his knees. “But I don’t think I’m going to find any. The guy is very good.” He glanced at her. The blanket rose and fell with her rhythmic breathing.
She’s getting better. She’s going to stay alive. “I wonder how long it’s going to take Stykos and Wray to file free-speech lawsuits.” He sucked on his cheek thoughtfully. “Actually, the Venerans will probably offer them exclusive coverage of the aliens if they keep their mouths shut until the Venerans are ready.”
He rubbed his palms together, feeling skin against skin, feeling how they were slightly damp. Then his thoughts froze the motion.
“How’d he filter out the communications so fast?” Phil straightened up.
You just said he was good. His imagination supplied Angela’s words.
“Nobody’s that good. He couldn’t just shut down everything; it’d look funny. Someone on Mother Earth would notice.” He touched Angie’s hand. It was warm and dry under the tubes. “A good broad-spectrum communication filter is not something you pluck out of the stream. He must have had them in place.” He turned toward her, eyes shining, despite the fact that nothing had changed with her. “I think Michael Lum’s been less than straight with us about how wired this base is. That means there might be info we could strain out.”
Might be. Maybe. If he was right. But that also meant the not so still waters of Venera ran deeper than he’d believed.
If Michael Lum hadn’t told them how much info he had access to, who else hadn’t he told?
On the other hand, Michael was the one Who’d come to him about the possible fraud involving the Discovery, which made him less likely to be involved in perpetrating that fraud.
“What a mess,” Phil muttered through his teeth. He turned his eyes to Angela’s blanket and its steady rise and fall. “We’re going to have to do some scenario planning here. It’s pretty clear the original Discovery was a fake. They’ve got the guys who actually built it. But I think Michael’s right. There were other people involved in planning the scam. We need to find them.” He leaned back again, a restless, meaningless movement. “And hope for the moment he’s not one of them, although I don’t know….Fake base and real aliens.” Phil shook his head. “I am not buying the coincidence here. Someone is building up to something, and I can’t see what yet.” He frowned, both at his thoughts and at the realization that it was so much easier to think of aliens if they were part of a conspiracy or a cover-up of some kind. That felt strange and a little sad.
Angela stirred, a meaningless, restless movement of her own. “Wake up soon, Angie,” he said softly. “I need you on the beach with me when the wave hits.”
The idiots, thought Su as she surveyed the broken chunks of metal and ceramic tumbling gently through the void. They couldn’t wait. They couldn’t hold back.
She floated upright in the shuttle’s observation compartment, one hand hanging on to a wall handle to keep herself still and oriented. The port window currently showed the small debris field. Here and there she could see the bright-yellow suits of the Trans-Lunar Patrol workers, gathering the debris, strapping it into bundles to be hauled into the shuttles and out of the shipping lanes. Small drones spread out in sweep patterns, vacuuming up the dust and marble-sized debris that could pinhole anything that flew through it.
Twelve hours ago, all that debris had been a shipyard engaged in labor negotiations with a union that had outspoken separatist sentiments. The yard was a space station, and the properly of a wholly owned Terran corporation, which got it around the “no ship building” rules that applied to the colonies.
It also meant that the colonists cared a lot less about keeping the place in good shape.
The bombs had scattered the yards and the ships across kilometers of heavily traveled space. The Trans-Lunars and the insurance people were still calculating the damage. At least five ships had been hit by debris. The majority of traffic between Earth and Luna was grounded until they could get the wreckage cleared up. It would take days and cost millions.