Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  Kit leaned toward the female. “What’s their problem?”

  “Shifts last six standard months, and we’re four months in. Crew complement is twelve and—”

  “You’re the only female?”

  The lieutenant nodded. “References to disrobing are best avoided.”

  “Got it.”

  Mort returned to the search for Jazen within the mass of humans around which Kit now circled, then briefly pounced upon lunch.

  When he next heard Kit speak, she was again with the lieutenant, the two now drifting within a smaller space, in front of a glowing, translucent gray ball, surrounded by a silver ring no thicker than a hair, which seemed to revolve around the ball, even as the ball itself turned slowly.

  The lieutenant touched her foreclaw to the ball. “The red dots on the holo mark the locations, beneath the cloud cover, of stack cities with populations of one hundred million or more. As you see, they’re located in two clusters, one in the eastern hemisphere, one in the western. There’s not much sub-aerial solid surface left on Yavet since the polar caps melted.”

  Kit stroked her chin with her foreclaw. “If you had to guess where an offworlder might be?”

  The lieutenant tapped with her own foreclaw at a yellow dot larger than the rest. “Yaven. It’s the Capital. The two martial directorates, Internal Operations and External Operations, headquarter there. All the down shuttles from Ring Station land there. Yaven’s our high-value traffic hotspot by a factor of ten. Population at least three billion. Probably more. If the Yavi can find an excuse to ignore a little person, they do.”

  “Could you isolate a particular individual down there?”

  “We track each member of the Central Committee 25/7.”

  “Seriously?”

  “The product we get’s not as valuable as you’d think. Their average chronological age is eighty-one. They mostly text message each other about what foods give them gas and whose proctologist is gay.”

  “I was thinking more about tracking an offworlder. ’Puter locator chip? Hotel registration?”

  “Directly locate?” The lieutenant shook her head. “There are three billion people down there, and most of them have ‘puters or phones. Yavi Internal Security tracks them, but it’s beyond our capacity. The hotel registrations are actually done point-of-sale on physical cards, so you wouldn’t pick up a registrant ‘til the stay’s compiled digitally. By that time, the subject of interest would probably have checked out. Actually, some smugglers sell out of mid-levels hotel Kubes for that very reason, or so we hear. The Yavi don’t pay much attention to smugglers. And we don’t pay much attention to smugglers up here, either.”

  “Nobody does, apparently.” Kit pressed her foreclaws together, and her eyelids narrowed her field of vision. “What can you tell me about the near-planet defense network?”

  The lieutenant’s small mouth turned up at its corners. “Now you’re talking, Colonel! That’s the kind of traffic Teufelsberg Station’s used to monitoring and interpreting.”

  “I thought this listening post was called ‘Utility 5.’”

  The lieutenant nodded. “Officially. But you may have noticed Utility 5 has a, uh, unique aroma?”

  “I’ve lived with worse.”

  “Yavi sensor technology’s so far ahead of Earth’s that Utility 5 emits as little radiation of any type or frequency as possible. And emits absolutely nothing besides radiation, to avoid detection. Raw intelligence, and any intelligence product we’re able to develop here, ships out only once every six months, along with the relieved crew, aboard a stretch Scorpion shuttle. So does our solid waste.”

  Kit nodded, then raised both shoulders toward her ears. “The name?”

  “During Cold War I, the good guys emplaced a listening post called Teufelsberg Station on the border of the Soviet Bloc. To improve line-of-sight reception, they piled up three hundred feet of garbage first, then built the listening post on top. We feel a historical bond.”

  The lieutenant waved a foreclaw and a translucent green bubble made up of a lacing of flickering vines surrounded the gray ball and the silver ring. “Okay. Near space defenses. We call this bubble the “Iron Helmet,” after the two-dimensional Iron Curtain from the Teufelsberg days. It’s basically an extraordinarily dense hunter-killer satellite network orbiting at geosynchronous speed and altitude.”

  Kit pointed at the flickering green ball. “The Yavi being the Yavi, I assume some of the warheads are nukes?”

  The lieutenant nodded her head. “One in twenty, shuffled randomly. The other nineteen are homing mines with conventional warheads.”

  Kit whistled. “That’s—”

  “Six thousand nukes in orbit, Ma’am. The Yavi have a boatload of ’em that they can’t deliver onto anybody else, so they use them to keep us out.”

  “They do know that thing wouldn’t keep us out? Stand-off cruiser weapons and Scorpions would penetrate that like gnats through a tennis net.”

  “That’s why we call it the Iron Helmet. You could hit those codgers on the Central Committee upside the head with a bat and they wouldn’t learn. It’s also why we’ve stopped the drone probes.”

  Kit swam closer to the ball. “Tell me about that.”

  “The cruisers used to drop off autonomous chemical drive drones that would make spoof runs at the Helmet, to try and draw responses and map the nuke versus conventional pattern. We quit partly because it pissed the Yavi off. But mostly because we were afraid the Yavi would detonate a nuke to stop some crappy drone, and accidentally take down the Ring.”

  “Hey. It’s their Wonder of the Universe.”

  “Colonel, a hundred million people live in the Ring.”

  “I know. Poor joke. I am right? A Scorpion-T could get through that bubble easily?”

  “Hypothetically? Definitely. The fighter patrols in the layer between the helmet and the Ring might be tougher to defeat without detection. A scorpion’s faster and more maneuverable, but the Yavi have more fighters up at a given moment than the Teufelsberg garbage mountain had flies.”

  “How about not hypothetically?”

  The lieutenant’s small eyes bulged. “Ma’am? I figured you were here to maybe make a tease flyby? Maybe swing in within fifty thousand miles. See if the bad guys lit you up, gauge their radars.”

  “Actually, the reason to use a Scorpion-T is so the bad guys can’t light you up.”

  The lieutenant straightened and crossed her arms. “Colonel Born, are you seriously proposing that I allow you to fly a Scorpion through the Helmet? Where it could trigger an interplanetary incident? And maybe hand the Yavi a C-drive power plant if your ship’s lost?”

  “No.”

  The lieutenant slumped and smiled. “Oh.”

  “I am seriously assuring you that I am going to fly a Scorpion through the Helmet. Then I am going to parallel park it smack in the middle of downtown Yaven. Nobody asked you to allow it or not. Read your orders, lieutenant.” Kit raised her eyes to the chamber’s ceiling. “Why does nobody get this? What part of ‘render all assistance requested without question’ is hard to understand?”

  The lieutenant floated motionless, her eyes wide, her tiny mouth open in a ring shape.

  THIRTY-ONE

  My father and I walked without speaking, the only sound our footsteps in the slop and the thrum of the machines, closer now beneath our feet as we got into the lower seventies.

  From time to time, we cut through utilities barely wide enough for a full-sized human to crawl through, and far too narrow for a cop in armor, until we emerged into some other pedestrian passage. Then we did it again, and again. Finally, I felt sure we were so deep in the stink that even vice cops couldn’t or wouldn’t follow.

  I stopped, turned and faced him. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came back for you. I’ve been meeting every down shuttle for the last week.”

  “What made you think I—?”

  “Orion sent word. She’s always had an a
ddress where P-mail could reach us. Just in case.”

  “Orion sent you word? Bullshit. I never told Orion I was coming here. I never told Orion anything. She just sent me a P-mail.”

  “You didn’t have to. Mothers know what their children will do. Or they think they know. And she said you did send her a P-mail.”

  “You came all the way to this crappy place because Orion thought her good boy would visit when she was sick?”

  “No. I came because your mother also thought her good boy would show up. And I go where your mother goes.”

  I stood there with my mouth open. Finally, I whispered in the dripping, vibrating silence, “My birth mother’s here? Are you two staying with Orion, then?”

  My father shook his head. “Orion’s—”

  My heart sank. “God. I’m too late.”

  “No. She’s alive. She was in detention but got released because—because she was ill. So at the moment, she’s bunking with us at our hotel.”

  “Hotel?”

  “We’re ‘tourists.’ This time our docs say we’re from Rand. Just like we were ‘tourists’ when we came here while your mother was carrying you.”

  A knot puckered in my gut.

  Nobody in detention got released because they were sick. Or even because they were dying, which is when I realized that my father couldn’t bring himself to tell me. The only fragments of humanity that left the detention blocks were corpses bound for incineration.

  I narrowed my eyes.

  Orion may have been old and feeble. But she was so confused that she thought I sent her a P-mail that I never had? She hadn’t mentioned in her P-mail that she had been in detention, just that she was terminally ill. I had been so moved by the news that it had only fleetingly bothered me that I had never sent her my address. After all, she could have tracked it down. I knew better than most that almost any information was available for a price.

  But now I wondered. Orion would pay to P-mail her son, sure. But would she have blown the price of a lifetime supply of whisky searching for the address of an illegal who was very probably dead?

  I didn’t know my mother, of course. But what had Howard Hibble told me once about her? That she had been not just a pilot, but a starship captain, one of the original ones, during the War. So much for the “fact” that the keel-up starship captains, the ones that knew not just how to fly one, but how to build one, were all dead.

  “You let my mother come back to Yavet?”

  My father snorted as he shook his head. “She’s my wife, not my property! And remember, we got in and out of here once before.”

  I sighed. Sure they did. But when I was born, the Cold War was more like the Cold Disagreement.

  All of this didn’t answer all of my lifetime of questions, not by half. One remaining whopper was, what had my parents done that had been terrible enough to get them expunged from the history of the end of the War?

  But all my other questions were suddenly pushed back by one new question of considerable immediacy. Orion improbably gets out of jail free. Orion improbably finds out I’m alive, and where to find me. From a P-mail I never wrote. But given those two improbabilities, any average student of human nature could bet I would probably come to Orion, and in turn my mother would probably come to me, if Orion knew how to contact her.

  I cocked my head at the old man. “Could the Yavi have set this all up to get at my mother?”

  My father stared. Then he said, “Oh, crap. By the way, I say that a lot.”

  I nodded. “Actually, so do I.”

  “Odd.”

  “Not really, when you think about it.”

  He grasped my elbow. “Orion said she told you why we left you with her?”

  I nodded. “You told her you were tourists. But Orion always figured spies. Mom was eight months pregnant, but I came early. And I was coming messy, so you hired a midwife. And a dozen vice goons found the three of you. They were breaking down the door.”

  On Yavet, parents caught with an undocumented child were summarily executed after watching their newborn suffocated on the spot. The evidence proved prima facie that both parents had managed to willfully violate the sterilization code, and the only “intent” an illegal newborn had to demonstrate in order to be guilty was attempting to breathe. Niceties like non-resident status were resolved after the corpses were incinerated. Oops.

  Orion, literally red-handed after delivering me, escaped with me out the back door. From then on, my best chance of surviving to adulthood lay in all concerned pretending I didn’t exist. There was a bounty on illegals, and few of us grew up, as it was.

  My father said, “I didn’t stay and protect you. I’ve remembered that every night of my life since. And the best I can do today is tell you that I’m sorry.”

  I wasn’t. One versus twelve gunfights end badly for the one. If my father and my mother and Orion hadn’t in that moment done exactly what they did, all four of us would have died that day. I should have told him all of that. I owed it to him to tell him all of that.

  But I had preplayed this moment for decades, even though I never expected it to happen. Now here it was, and nothing was the way I had imagined it might be. So I just stood there.

  “We never heard from Orion. So we had to assume the worst.” My father wiped his eyes. “We always hoped. But after awhile we didn’t really think . . .”

  I stared, tight-lipped, as he spoke.

  A lifetime’s resentment didn’t dissipate with one speech. But hearing the story from his mouth at last was like hearing it from my own.

  “Jazen, we let you go once, and we lived with that mistake every day of our lives. The moment your mother and I knew where you were, the only way to keep us away would’ve been to kill us both. Please believe that you mean that much to us. Anyone who knows us knows that’s the truth.”

  Howard Hibble knew my parents, so he knew that.

  It almost explained why Howard Hibble played fast and loose with what had become the sole walking, breathing repository of the greatest strategic secret in human history. Why he let my parents roam around the universe in some kind of self-directed combination retirement cruise and witness protection program. And why he let them think I was dead, even after he learned differently, because my job took me places crawling with Yavi, places from which two spooks in three didn’t return. Howard couldn’t take a chance that my parents might follow.

  Because in Howard’s paranoid but sentimental mind, his options in order to keep my mother secure from a Yavi interrogation were to have my parents imprisoned for life in some velvet retirement bunker. Or have them killed. Up until now, Howard’s plan had been pretty effective. Plenty of riskier longshots had come home for Howard Hibble over the decades.

  I reached out and laid a hand on my father’s shoulder. “Dad, would you mind taking me home and introducing me to my mother?”

  “Sure.” He reached out with his own hand, and laid it on my shoulder.

  Then, for the first time in my life, I saw my father smile at me.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Mort looked out through Kit’s eyes, and out through the open eye of the Scorpion she flew, at the shining, gray ball that swelled in the distance. Now seen in reality, rather than in the incorporeal replica that had provoked conflict between Kit and the female lieutenant, the silver ring around the ball glistened as fine and as reflective as a web spinner’s silk adrift on the breeze.

  Mort thought, “This is unexpected. The Yavi are as evil as Cutler, yet their nest is beautiful.”

  Kit thought, “Maybe from this far away. But those clouds? Excess greenhouse gases. Fossil fuel and chemical particulates. Atmospheric nuclear test fallout. And that pretty ring? It’s a combination slave-labor colony and prison. But the slaves clamor to go there because stack-city living down below is worse.”

  “Oh. Jazen is within such a city.”

  Kit’s heart took an irregular beat. “You found him?”

  “He is deep within the great nest of w
hich you and the female lieutenant spoke, called Yaven.”

  “He told you?”

  “No. I have been unable to penetrate his consciousness. But those around him know the place where I have located him as Yaven. It is vast.”

  Kit’s heart skipped again. “Who’s around him?”

  “Too many to begin to know. I am sorry. I have accomplished nothing.”

  “You’ve accomplished plenty. You’ve corroborated the listening post lieutenant’s hypothesis. In another hour or so, can you narrow Jazen’s location down more?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Okay. Then I’m playing out this hand while we see if you can draw aces.” She spoke aloud to the Scorpion seed. “Maintain course. Maintain speed. Alarm at five thousand miles to first contact.”

  “You intend to enter the nest of Yaven itself?”

  “Relax. I’m still seventeen minutes away from first contact with the Helmet perimeter.

  “The female lieutenant thought that even penetrating the Helmet would be unwise, although she grudgingly conceded your authority.”

  “Grudging. I knew she didn’t like me. It’s the blonde thing. Wait. Mort, you know what she was actually thinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I did not understand her thoughts, but they seemed uncomplimentary. I would prefer not to share them.” Humans, females in particular, expended extraordinary energy attempting to decipher or discover hidden meanings in the words and actions of other humans. Mort, particularly in this time of stress on himself, found this a waste of energy.

  “Come on! Share! Buddy to buddy. Spill and I’ll tell you anything you wanna know. Deal? It’s a fair trade.”

  No grezzen individually possessed a skill, knowledge or an object that another grezzen needed, so grezzen didn’t trade.

  However, the community by which humans survived in a universe that was stronger than they were depended on division of labor, and division of objects, and so on trading. Mort had learned that human bargaining involved rapid, familiar banter, temptation and interpersonal goading. And Kit possessed something he wanted to know very much.