Free Orphans of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix Page B

shady deals and favoritism—but Axford had never been on the survey team register. He hadn’t been at entrainment camp. There was no way Hatzis could think of that could have brought Frank the Ax to Vega. Alander, of course, had to hear the explanation.
    “It’d be criminal not to,” he said. “We have to know what he’s doing here—and how he knew about the hole ships merging. And the weapon systems he has...” He stopped, waved his hands as though lost for words. “The system is a Spinner drop,” he said instead. “We’re obliged to make contact.”
    That was an argument she could accept, if not wholeheartedly.“ Pearl, you have a destination?” she asked.
    “Yes, Caryl.”
    “Can you tell us where it is?”
    “I have been instructed not to.”
    She shook her head, resigning herself to the fact that she couldn’t leave in good conscience. “Take us there, then.”
    Barely a minute later, they relocated in hell.

    * * *

    Light of every frequency assailed the hole ship. Giant upwellings of gas or liquid—Hatzis couldn’t tell which— circulated around her with surprising turns of speed. If the information Axford provided was accurate, then the scale of what she was seeing was enormous. And while she didn’t believe everything he said, she was sure he had no reason to lie about this.
    Hermes Base was inside the largest planetary fragment, close in to the pounding brightness of Vega. Its immediate surroundings consisted of a turbulent mix of elements, stirred by the tides and its own internal collapse. Torn between coalescing into a new planetoid and breaking apart altogether, it seemed the most unlikely place in which anyone would ever consider hiding a base. Which was exactly why Francis Axford had chosen it, she imagined.
    She and Alander followed him via conSense deep into the fragment’s churning interior, letting him take her on a sightseeing tour designed more to impress than to actually inform. Hermes Base turned out to be not so much a base as a distributed network of work points that combined to perform all the functions of something more rigid. Parts failed constantly, but there were so many replacements at hand, and more constantly being built by nanomachines, that the loss was barely noticed. The fierce melting pot of the fragment was a rich source of elements and energy for the manufacturing process.
    “I’ve been here over seventy years,” Axford was saying as he showed them around. His image was of a slight, gray-haired man dressed in a loose-fitting black suit, with a lined face that belonged to someone’s grandfather, not a high-echelon hatchet man. “Seventy years; remember that. I had all of this in place long before the Spinners arrived.”
    “And when was that, General?” asked Alander.
    “Two weeks ago,” he said.
    Seventy years , Hatzis thought, and not a trace of senescence .
    “What happened to the crew?” she asked.
    ‘They never even made it on board,” he answered. “It was all faked. We made it look like the Thornton left with a full complement, but there was no one else aboard except me and the others, and I soon got rid of them.”
    The offhand manner in which he spoke about killing sickened Hatzis. “You make it sound as if you did little more than delete some unwanted data.”
    He laughed at this. “Well, it could hardly be regarded as murder,” he said. “They were only copies, after all. Look, this was a one-man mission from the start; that was the way I’d originally intended it, and I indulged attempts to change my mind only as a temporary measure.”
    “So you’re basically a stowaway and a mutineer, is that it?”
    He laughed again. “Absolutely,” he said. “But I prefer to think of it in terms of expediency. We were all in this for ourselves. I just acted first.”
    “Who were the others?”
    “Entrainment techs, policy makers, a senior ministerial aide, a dozen or so people from within UNESSPRO itself. No names. I needed them to get me