Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 4.5 | Peel slowly

Vas Gagarin made a disgusted, frustrated noise like tearing cardboard, and tugged alphaDana further away from Willson House. He was exhausted and stumbling. He lurched toward the fenced cliffside overlooking dark Lawless Bay. He beckoned with thick, useless fingers. "Hurry. Before they see."

alphaDana tapped her plant for a marginally illegal shot of adrenaline and picked Gagarin up. He was lighter than she felt he should be, his bone structure eaten away by lunar gravity. "Over there," he said. "In the trees."

She felt him tapping his own drugs as she picked her way across the rocks. The night was creamily black. She turned up her sensors but still couldn't see. Then she realized he was steering her into another shielded area. "Oh no," she muttered in his ear. "I'm not going over there."

"It's just some encrypted space," he wheezed. "I'll give you access inside."

"Give me access NOW or I don't go in."

"I'll give you the whole damn encryptor if you just go in now!"

alphaDana looked sharply down at Vas in disbelief. "Those things cost--"

"I know what they cost. The dongle's in my back pocket. Take it now if you don't believe me."

alphaDana dropped Vas on the ground, rolled him onto his belly, and stuck her hands into his back pockets. Her left ring finger slid into a smooth plasteen circle and she drew it out, a laser red finger ring gleaming like a volcano against the black shield. The encryptor specs scrolled brilliantly over the shining surface in DNA-like helices. It was real, or a too-expensive fake.

Vas crawled toward the encrypted space. "Come on," he snapped.

alphaDana put the dongle on her finger, picked him up and carried him into the dark. The panic was even worse this time, paradoxically, because she was prepared for it. She anticipated it. It swelled and burst inside her mouth. She stumbled the last few steps past the inside of the shield and fell to her knees.

Vas extruded a keypad from his left inside wrist and punched in a long nonsensical code. The dongle flashed, and alphaDana felt the shield change around her, shimmering like a sundress made of steel.

Vas snapped the keypad off his arm and handed it to her. "You'll need this," he said. "The encryptor's around here somewhere. I can't see it without the dongle."

"It's under the bench," alphaDana said, sitting down heavily on the cold, night-dampened wrought iron. She saw the encryptor's orange glow plainly, and its black circle logo that meant Up There, the Moon.

"So," she said, insinuating herself thoroughly into the encryptor and beginning the semi-random process of locking everyone else out, "what I saw today cost Pijai five hundred nallars. Then it cost Lola, or Tony, fifteen hundred nallars. Now it's cost you, or your backers, the price of a ten meter encryptor. Do you all know what's going on? Or just you?"

"Not even me," Vas said. "But I do know what you saw. Or who, I guess. To most of us Up There it's still a what. We can't even talk to them yet."

Posted by gtaylor at May 03, 2002 02:16 PM