by Baen Books
“Which we expect to be—unsuccessful.”
Simovic shrugged. “It is most unlikely that bloc-controlled Tigua will concede to our clients’ military superiority—”
You mean, will refuse to surrender without a fight—
“—whereas we have already assured them of our complete and immediate cooperation.”
You mean, traitorous collaboration offered up to them on a silver platter.
Hoon was smiling now. “How very convenient. For us.”
“Yes, rather a nice reward for patiently enduring the pomposity of the nation-states, don’t you think? Always nattering on about social contracts, and consent of the governed, and the greatest good for the greatest number. I can hardly believe they don’t laugh themselves to death as they spout all that antediluvian rubbish.”
Hoon’s contempt for these same concepts was obviously so great that it exceeded polite articulation: she merely expelled a derisive snort. Then she added, “Well, good riddance to Bloc sanctions and anti-trust restrictions.”
Elnessa delicately swept her wire brush up, up, up, all along the first furrowed row of clay she had set before the city walls, imparting to it an impression of young wheat or corn, just as it sprang from the ground toward the sun. And as she did so, she listened to the unfolding plans for the cool, calculated, and above all, profitable betrayal of her species.
* * *
Once again responding to the gum wrapper Elnessa had inserted into the dead-drop crevice, Reuben approached her hurriedly. He had his mouth open to ask something—
Elnessa preempted him. “Have you heard?”
“You mean, about the aliens?”
“Exosapients,” Elnessa corrected him.
“Whatever. Yeah, I heard. It’s got to be the worst-kept secret there’s ever been. No one seems to be able to shut up about it, even in the military. The word has been leaking out of navy comshacks, out of the commercial transmission offices, everywhere.”
“And you know they’re planning on coming here, evidently?”
Reuben frowned. “Well, amidst all the rest of the panic talk, I’ve heard that rumor, too. But the evidence for it seems pretty vague, pretty much hearsay.”
“Well, it’s not. These exosapients are apparently Indi Group’s newest preferred customers. And they want the kids. For research.”
She thought Reuben would goggle. But like her, his capacity for shock was almost exhausted. All Reuben did was shrug: “Figures. Which makes our mission all the more imperative.” His expression became eager, more focused. “So, how did it go when you went in today? Is everything there, ready and waiting?”
Elnessa shook her head. “I got the payload in, but nothing else.”
Reuben’s jaw dropped open. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that they wouldn’t let me take anything electronic into the office: no independent power supply, and no remote activators of any kind. Like I told you. But even so, I think I’ve found a way to—”
But Reuben was shaking his head. “No, El. It’s finished. Our guy on the inside is strip-searched every day: they’ve got all the usual means of access covered. Without power and a way to trigger the device, it’s no good.”
“I understand your problem. But actually, there’s a pretty simple alternative: you can—”
Reuben stood abruptly. “No, El: I don’t want to know. The less I know, the less I can tell if they eventually root up some pieces of this plot and then try to discover who was involved. I’ve got—we’ve got—to forget about this. Right now. As if it never happened.”
Elnessa looked up at him. “I’m not sure I can forget it, Reuben. Particularly not with what’s at stake, now.”
Reuben looked at her. “Don’t make trouble, El. And don’t make me warn you about coming near the kids again. Vas told me.”
“Told you what?”
“That you made him dinner last night, let him stay until it was way too late—”
“Feeling guilty you didn’t even notice he was missing, ‘Daddy’?’” The moment she said it, Elnessa was sorry: no one knew better than she how hard it was to keep track of almost a dozen kids between the ages of five and thirteen. “Look, Reuben; I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“El, just—just leave it alone. Leave it all alone. And I mean both the mission and Vas. And that’s an order.” His utterance of the word ‘order’ was, laughably, a half-whining appeal, rather than a command.
“Sure,” El answered. “Whatever.”
Reuben turned and walked stiffly into the deepening gloom. About ten meters away, he reached down into a cluster of bushes and gently extracted its hidden occupant—Vas—before resuming his steady march away from Elnessa. Vas looked back, eyes troubled. He waved and was gone.
Elnessa waved, sighed, wiped her eyes, and went home in the dark.
* * *
It was only midmorning of January 2, 2120, when Elnessa stepped back to examine the frieze, in all its finished glory. All that remained now was to put in the prism-projecting Cheops eye, just over the watchtower light, and complete the light fixture itself. Behind her, Simovic and Hoon continued their plotting, as though they had been at it ever since she had left yesterday. And who knew? Maybe they had.
Hoon continued with her seemingly inexhaustible list of questions. “Our personnel—the ones who will gather the children, and the ones who will convey them to the rendezvous point—do any of them, well . . . know what’s really going on?”
Simovic shook his head. “No. They have the necessary timetable, coordinates, and orders, but no knowledge of who our clients are or why we are engaging in this trade.”
“Which is scheduled for when?”
Simovic looked at the digital timecode embedded in the ticker bar of his media-monitoring flatscreen. “Two hours.”
“Short notice,” Hoon commented.
“True. But it’s really quite logical. Even if our new customers trusted us—which they have no reason to do at this point—they have no way of knowing if our communications are secure. Maybe Bloc naval forces have hacked our cipher, know when and where to expect our clients, and will set up an ambush. No, our clients’ prudence is a good sign. It means they are not rash, and, after all, we will need these new partners to be very discreet indeed.”
Elnessa looked over toward the two of them. “Mr. Simovic,” she called.
“Yes, Ms. Clare?”
“Could you please have your security people pull the fuse for the power conduits all along this wall?”
“Why?”
“Well, I need to finish wiring the lights.”
“Can’t you leave the power on while you do it?”
“Only if I want to take the risk of electrocuting myself.”
Elnessa noted Simovic’s hesitation. It didn’t arise from any sense of suspicion—that was manifestly clear—but rather from the inconvenience of her request. Her safety was almost beneath his concern, especially at this particular moment. However, he ultimately signaled his annoyed acquiescence to the guard at the rear of the room, who left to comply with the request.
A moment later, the lights glaring down upon the frieze, along with the rest of the devices which drew their power from outlets along that wall, shut down.
Elnessa nodded her thanks, and limped over to the watchtower, the Cheops eye in hand. She emplaced the round, vaguely Pharaohic piece of multi-hued crystal just above the pointed roof of the watchtower.
Then, picking up the bulb that was to be the watchtower’s lamp, she set it down on the section of the clay ‘wall’ next to the tower, and inspected the two small alligator clips grinning toothily up at her from just beneath the rim of the passage she had bored lengthwise in the tower. She stuck her finger in between the leads, widening the hole slightly, and then buried the two clips side by side into the dense matter surrounding them.
She went to check the switch that provided the manual control for all the lights in the frieze. It was, as she had left it, in
the “off” position.
She turned to face Simovic. “It is finished,” she announced.
“Hmmmm…what?”
“I said, ‘it is finished.’ Can you please have the power restored to this wall?”
Simovic and Hoon looked up: he surprised, she bored and impatient. He nodded for the guard to go restore the power, and then stood straighter, scanning the length of the frieze. Elnessa detected surprise and gratification: despite the fact that she had spent the last two months crafting it literally under his nose, he had never truly examined it until now. Simovic cleared his throat. “That is really . . . ”
“ . . . really quite good,” Hoon finished, with an approving nod-and-pout, and a tone of voice that sounded like a grudging concession. Then she was turning back to her documents and data-feeds.
“But you have not seen it all,” Elnessa said.
Hoon looked back up, Simovic smiled faintly. “No?” he asked.
“No. Several elements light up, and can be set to show different times of the day. The sun light is here, and small spotlights are embedded here and here to make the city roofs gleam during the day mode. These other lights—inside the blue acrylic—make the water seem to ripple and churn.”
“And at night?”
Elnessa turned on the switch. “The city’s watchtower burns a faint, but steady amber, guiding lost travellers to shelter on dark nights and in dark times. And all the while, the great prismatic eye of Cheops judges the worthiness of those within the city, and without.”
Simovic seemed to suppress a flinch at the mention of judgment. Elnessa wondered if perhaps he had enough vestigial soul left in him to feel a faint pulse of guilt. Hoon simply frowned, as though slightly suspicious that they had funded the creation of radical art. She asked, “And just what do you call this piece of art? And why doesn’t the tower’s light work?”
Elnessa smiled. “I call this frieze Jericho Falls Outward. Or, if you prefer a less metaphorical title, you can call it, I Will Not Let You Assholes Kill My Children.”
Simovic did flinch now. Hoon’s head snapped back as if she had been struck—and then her eyes went wide with comprehension. She turned toward one of the guards, mouth open to scream a command—just as Elnessa finished her silent count to ten.
* * *
As Elnessa reached “ten,” the current from the wall had spent that many seconds both illuminating the lights of the frieze, and coursing through the alligator clips that were buried in the side of the hole Elnessa had bored through the length of the watchtower. However, the electricity directed into that substance was neither wasted nor idle.
Concealed inside the block of clay, down where the leads were embedded, was a core comprised of an identically-colored, but somewhat denser, malleable material. With every passing second, the complex nanytes which pervaded that substance had begun changing their chemical composition, and aligning to follow with (and thereby offer less resistance to) the electric current. However, unlike the aligning of atoms in an electromagnet, when the nanytes of this complex compound were all finally aligned, they began to work like a battery—which rapidly soared toward overload.
* * *
As Elnessa Clare realized that her ten-count had come and gone, she thought about continuing on to “eleven,” and felt a pulse of worry shoot through her. According to Reuben, the substance that had been embedded at the core of each of the clay blocks—Selftex—could only absorb ten seconds of standard outlet current from the watchtower’s diverted leads. But then Elnessa realized that this one extra second was a gift, time with which she could recall Vas’ steady, warm brown eyes—
* * *
The Selftex—a recent, self-actuating evolution of the plastic explosive Semtex—had been developed to do away with the need for blasting caps or other explosive initiators. Hooked up to a low electric current, it gave miners and construction workers a long, precise interval in which to evacuate a blast site. However, when the current was as powerful as that running through a standard electrical outlet—
* * *
From almost two kilometers away, Vas not only heard, but felt, the blast. A few nearby windows shattered, people stared around wildly, a few—probably the ones who had heard the rumors of approaching exosapients—looked skyward.
But Vas straightened and looked toward the roiling mass of thick black smoke rising up over the Indi Group’s corporate headquarters like a fist of angry defiance. And, through his tears, he smiled. That was the work of El, his El. He had heard Reuben’s injudicious radio talk, had seen some incoming messages foolishly left unpurged from the house computer, and so knew that El had been helping to resist the Indi Group—and as of yesterday, was the only one still actively doing so.
Vas looked over toward the headquarters again, wondered about the frieze Elnessa had spoken of working on for so long, yearned to have seen it. He knew that, since she had crafted it, the frieze had been, without doubt, a thing of beauty—every bit as much as she herself had been. Then he stared up at the crest of the ugly black plume that marked its destruction, and reflected: this was her gift to him, to all the children.
And therefore, it, too, was a thing of beauty.
An Imperium Pursuit
by Jody Lynn Nye
(The Imperium consists of those thousands of systems in the Milky Way Galaxy to which human beings have spread over the last ten millennia. Over that time, its ruling nobility has become, apart from the Emperor or Empress and those working cabinet ministers and planetary governors, a trifle on the self-indulgent, useless side. Lord Thomas Innes Loche Kinago is one who occasionally applies his intelligence and many talents to be actually helpful, a fact that must be concealed at all costs from his relatives.)
“Yoicks, after him, cousins! Kinago!” I exhorted my companions through my helmet microphone, as I dived toward an imaginary quarry on my skycycle.
“Kinago!” they echoed.
I tightened my long legs about the bronze-enameled frame and wrapped my fingers around the control handles, even though I was safely secured onto my saddle by straps across my chest, hips and thighs.
“Forward, Tybalt! Take me to victory!”
My friends and relatives arrayed themselves in three flanks behind me, one each to right, left and above me. The twenty of us swooped straight down a hundred stories toward the busy cityscape of Nikplig. I narrowly missed colliding with a goods vehicle about to dock on a platform a kilometer or so above the ground. With the expert skill at piloting and hair-trigger reflexes that I am too modest to admit I possess, I pulled aside just in time. My younger and only sister, Lionelle, hurtled past me. Her peacock-blue cycle, Destrier, clipped the edge of the lorry. I burst out laughing. She glanced over her shoulder and made a horrible grimace at me through her transparent, full-face visor. I hauled back on the controls and soared toward the brilliant, clear blue sky. My friends and cousins veered off to follow me, with my sister far back in the van.
We were in between rounds of Foxhunt. The game was based upon what had begun upon humanity’s ancient home of Earth as pest control measures but expanded in the hands of the nobility to a pastime bearing little resemblance to its origins and hence had been alternately, sometimes simultaneously, outlawed, vilified and lauded as part of humankind’s inimitable history. The version which we enjoyed was an offshoot of ‘drag-hunting’ that had taken place in the absence of any actual foxes. The trouble with this method was that the dragger often had no style or skill, and lent less sport to the pursuers than the true animal. Our preferred substitute was no less nor more intelligent than we ourselves. In other words, it was one of us. In this immediate case, it had been me. I had led my pursuers on a ridiculously complicated chase, in and out of what attractions existed in this rather pedestrian town. Within mere seconds to go in the time-limit, my cousin Xanson had trapped me in between two power-radiating antennae four hundred meters above the street and tagged me out. As his reward, he took over my role as quarry.
Even now
, Xan was somewhere in the city below, waiting until the signal was given for the start of Round Two. In the meanwhile, the rest of us took the opportunity for comfort breaks, to lay waste to the sumptuous buffet that had been laid out for us by LAI serverbots on the roof of the tallest building in Nikplig, the Imperium Entertainment Network Center, or to troubleshoot our skycycles to determine if they had sustained any damage during Round One. Since my capture, mine had been emitting an odd noise in its drives.
Echoes of our engines resounded off the local architecture, no doubt exciting commentary on the part of the denizens of the city of Nikplig, four time zones west of our home in the capital city of Taino. They had not known we were coming, and no doubt wished us home and out of their airspace and afternoon traffic patterns as soon as possible. We always tried to keep our arrival in a new city on the QT, owing to the overwhelming chances that we would be met upon our arrival by the local gendarmerie, who, notwithstanding the fact that every one of us was a scion of the Imperium house, would cheerfully impound our cycles, fine us, and send us home in a secure vehicle. They knew that we fully intended to disturb the peace for an hour or so, possibly all afternoon. Owing to our noble status, law enforcement always treated us with respect, but little love was lost between them and us. The trouble was, the technology required for Foxhunt demanded that we play in fresh pastures that we normally did not frequent, and our incursions were very noisy. Hence, our invasion of a new city, or rather, one whose door we had not darkened in some time.
I tested out my trusty flyer on a turn or so around the building, humming as close as I could to the sides of the edifice without tearing out any of its windows by the velocity of my passage. I tuned a fitting here and a restraint belt there, to reduce as much wind resistance as possible and track down the source of that buzz. On the third revolution, I discovered that one of the housings above Tybalt’s power plant was not damaged but had come loose. It was the work of a moment to snap it back where it belonged. Once all was in place, I turned to swoop upward five kilometers, before arching into a tight parabola to hurtle toward the rooftop. With a sigh of satisfaction, I pulled up my cycle’s nose and came in for a landing.
