by Диана Дуэйн
Deep inside the ship, in the administrative center, a tall slender man in a dark coverall sat, looking at the little viewer built into the big shining desk before him and reading a file. He was in no hurry, for he had read the file before and was merely refreshing himself on some of the pertinent details.
Well, the last operative would make no more mistakes. The next one, though. what she would do was another question entirely.
Finally, the call he was waiting for came through.
"RS201 67LEK here," said the man at the other end of the connection. He looked paler than usual, which was an interesting effect in someone so blond to start with. Like the man he was calling, he wore a very plain dark one-piece suit, though in gray rather than black. Probably wise, for black would have made him look positively undead.
The man at the desk looked thoughtfully at the message herald showing across the bottom of the screen. "Took you a while to get here."
"Couldn't be helped. I had other business that kept me closer to home, and I've already been away from Main Office a lot longer than planned. As soon as we recharge, we're off again."
"I must admit, I wasn't expecting to see you. I thought it would be SL223 98MFT."
"He couldn't make it," replied RS201 67LEK.
The man in the dark coverall said nothing. There had been many detentions recently, and the lateness implied by a number of them was more permanent than usual. Company politics was heating up somewhat.
"So," the man at the desk asked, "you'll be heading straight out again?"
"A few starfalls. No more, I'm glad to say. Have you heard anything to the point from Upstairs?"
"No more than I need to. As usual, they're being circumspect and covering their fundaments."
RS201 67LEK sighed in frustration. The man at the desk shared his frustration but was not going to express it, not in front of someone so close to his own grade. Be polite to your underlings on the way up, the saying went. You want to be sure they underestimate you if they meet you again on the way down. He was sure that RS201 67LEK had his own ideas of which each of them was. It was not his business to disabuse the other of those ideas, especially since they were erroneous.
"So what happened to RS881 34PRM?" asked the dark man before the other could bring the matter up and wring even that small satisfaction out of it.
"What do you think?" RS201 67LEK replied. "The Concord wrung her dry and chucked her out. We picked her up afterward, and."
"Contract terminated, then?"
RS201 67LEK shrugged. "It's not like she didn't know it was going to happen. Apparently, they refused her request for asylum, though. That was something of a puzzle."
"They preferred her out of the way," said the man at the desk. "Unusually sensible of them. I'd half thought they'd lock her up to keep us from doing the merciful thing. Never mind. Did the pre-termination debriefing turn up anything interesting?"
"No. Whatever happened on Dan well, she was out of commission for the interesting parts."
"And that's the hot question of the moment, of course," said the dark man. "What did happen at Danwell?"
RS201 67LEK shook his head. The upper reaches of VoidCorp were still buzzing with the strange occurrence that had terminated there. Three VoidCorp vessels had been en route to that planet to take pre-emptive possession of certain alien technology discovered there, but something odd had happened in drivespace. Everybody knew that a starfall/starrise cycle lasted exactly a hundred and twenty-one hours, but those vessels had come out of such a cycle only to find that a Concord cruiser that had left at least two hours after they did had nonetheless arrived at Danwell before them and was now sitting there with its guns hot, spoiling what would otherwise have been a very advantageous and lucrative day.
When it suddenly appeared that natural laws were breaking themselves in favor of one side in a political dispute, naturally a great deal of interest was created, but there was more to this interest than the suspicion that somehow the Concord had found a way to bend the rules of physics in its own favor. Other business had been scheduled to happen near Danwell, and the Concord's presence had disrupted it. A favor in the act of being done for a potential business partner had been derailed, and the upper reaches of the company were now in a turmoil trying to put the situation right.
"Well," said the man at the desk. "We'll find out one way or the other. Meanwhile, the investigation is moving on, since the main suspect has moved on as well."
"Where now?"
"Probably High Mojave."
"Oh?" RS201 67LEK said. "Where does that intelligence come from?"
"You'd be surprised." The dark man laughed. "There's been a change in tactics. No more squabbling between factions, no more Intel against Operations. This comes from way up in the Vs somewhere, up in the rarified airs where they've decided that we're all supposed to be one big happy family." He made a face meant to suggest that this prospect was a less than rapturous one. "The target is to be picked up and 'made safe' by someone senior. No more minor ops are to be involved. People with more seniority, all up and down the line, are taking charge now."
"Oh?" asked RS201 67LEK. "People like you?"
The man in the dark coverall didn't quite laugh. "As if I wouldn't go, if I had time. The whole business is fascinating, but I have my own fires to put out back at the important end of things. The damned administrator has been turning the heat up, and I'm busy keeping the immediate superiors from panicking and turning everything over to Intel. They've been the source of our present troubles as it is. Division in the company isn't a good thing."
"I would have thought they'd be suggesting that the representative you sent was to blame," said RS201 67LEK.
"Spare me your helpful ideas. As for Intel, my branch has seen little enough useful product from any of them, high or low, in the last few months. Thought higher up is shifting in regard to their general usefulness. I'd keep well away from them. Anyone seen to be taking their part is likely to get splashed when the big reorganization happens."
RS201 67LEK laughed. " That's supposed to happen now, is it? What a laugh."
The man in the dark coverall didn't respond to that. Let poor RS201 think it's not going to happen, he thought. Getting splashed will be the least of his worries, and if he can't keep away from the splash, that'll be one less thing for me to worry about. "The company has business to tend to," he said, "and it's going to be tending to it with some vigor. In particular, we have word that the target is after something very
valuable indeed, something we want first." "For development purposes, I would suppose."
You just go on thinking that, thought the dark man. "Stars only know what the policy people will make of it once we've got it," he said. "All we have to do is keep out of sight and stay with the target until he leads us to what we're after."
"Sounds almost too easy."
It was another nasty little jab, for that was what RS881 34PRM was supposed to have been doing on Danwell, and it had all gone wrong. "Confirmation that the target's genuine came along from our big Concord contact. He's not as careful about who sees his communiques as he might be."
"Really?" RS201 67LEK looked genuinely interested for the first time. "How did you manage to—" He stopped himself, and the man in the dark coverall was amused for a second or so, though carefully he did not smile. Even RS201 67LEK knew that it was unwise to ask your superiors how they had managed to get ahead in their work. Too much curiosity could lead to you having the techniques demonstrated to you personally, and your career could suffer.
"So we follow this guy?" RS201 67LEK asked.
"It won't be difficult. He's picked up another set of friends. They're a cozy little threesome of ships now. Some interesting possibilities there for a creative agent, should it be possible to split them up somehow."
RS201 67LEK waved a hand dismissively and said, "Administrivia. Fascinating in its place, I'm sure, but I prefer results. We follow him to High Mojave and then evaluate what he finds. Poss
ibly with help."
That would be one way to think of it, thought the man in the dark coverall. He nodded and said, "There's no rush about it. We wait until we're sure the material the upper-ups are looking for is unearthed, then go in. We get to keep the target and wring him out. Then, if we feel like it, we can toss what's left back to the Concord people as a reminder of who's leading in this particular foxtrot." He smiled slightly.
"Surprised you plan for there to be anything left to toss," replied RS201 67LEK. "Don't want them to get the idea we're going soft."
"I don't think they'll get that idea," said the dark man, "not by the time we're done. In his case, anyway, he'll be done breathing."
"Some satisfaction in that," said RS201 67LEK, making a face, "after all the trouble he's caused us. Be a good thing to make an example of him."
"Oh, I think we'll manage that," said the man in the dark coverall. "What does your timing look like now?"
"Tempting to do an overshoot and meet him there," said RS201 67LEK, "but probably it's safer to follow at a safe distance and give him rope. Amusing if he hanged himself with it before we did anything."
"Follow him by all means. And good hunting."
"Anything else?"
"Not a thing."
RS201 67LEK nodded, and the viewer went dark.
The man in the dark coverall leaned back in his chair and smiled gently, for RS201 67LEK plainly had no idea of what the reorganization was going to involve. It was a good question whether he would survive it.
The man in the black coverall had seen some preliminary images. He knew that things were really about to start moving in these spaces. All hell would break loose while his people were seen to be having nothing to do with it. Until afterwards, he thought, when the situation that remains can be best exploited, but now there was little more to do than watch it unfold. The Concord and the nonaligned worlds would be screaming bloody murder within a few months. Let them scream. The Company had been waiting for this particular shift in the balance of power for a long time—had in fact done a great deal to start bringing it about. Now a lot of people, shirkers and scoffers, the less-than-fully-committed, were going to get the shock of their lives—not that those lives were likely to last long. After that, those people would be made really useful. The technique was enough to make your blood run cold, until you saw the potential of it.
He hoped to see that potential demonstrated on RS201 67LEK and numerous other people who had gotten in his way at one time or another. It was, after all, an ill wind that blew nobody any good.
Chapter Four
When they made starrise at the end of the first of their five jumps to Algemron, Gabriel was still in no mood for one of the three ships' usual get-together dinners. The gathering was postponed, and all three crews went about doing what they usually did while waiting for their drives to recharge: maintenance, systems checks, and the hobbies that were the mainstays of private pilots who had learned the wisdom of structuring their idle time while in drivespace or recharge downtime. Gabriel had thought he would take another look at those ship catalogues, but his heart wasn't in it. He was still too upset by what had happened back at Bluefall. Now, when Enda had gone off to take a nap, Gabriel found himself sitting alone in the pilot's cabin, feeling very much at loose ends.
When the comms circuit chirped, it startled him. Gabriel looked at its control in the display, then stuck his finger in and activated it. " Sunshine."
"Gabriel." It was Angela. "Is Enda available?"
"Napping, but I'll get her."
"No, it's not that important. It's just about a shopping list for Algemron." There was a pause. "You sound so bored. Why not take a break and come over?"
Bored had nothing to do with it, and normally he would have refused politely and gone to take a nap himself, but Sunshine was just too quiet at the moment. If he sat here, he would start hearing that voice saying, "When it's all over, when our name is cleared." Also, there was a peculiar twanging noise in the background, and he wondered if something on Angela's ship was acting up again.
"Sure," Gabriel said. "Why not?"
"I'll put out the tube," Angela said.
A few minutes later he was climbing through Lalique's airlock. That odd whanging sound was coming from down the hallway. Then it ceased, and Angela was coming up the hall toward him, carrying a large jug of some kind.
"New batch just finished," she said. "Want some kvass?"
"Uh," he said, glancing around him to get his bearings as Angela went by him with the jug. He had only been over here a few times, but every time he came, he more envied Angela the room she and Grawl had to roll around in inside Lalique. We are going to have a ship this size, he thought, and sooner rather than later. I swear we are. "Sorry. What's kvass?"
"It's mild booze."
"I'm up for that."
"Come on down here then."
Gabriel followed Angela down the hallway. "What the—" he said, suddenly hearing the strange noise again. "Have you got engine trouble?"
Angela laughed. "No, it's Grawl."
He stared at her. Angela pointed through a doorway, and Gabriel looked through it as he came up with her.
Grawl was sitting on a low couch, in what as apparently her quarters, plucking at a rhin. Suddenly Gabriel understood. He had heard the instrument in recordings but had never until now seen one. It was one of the several different styles of weren lap-harp, half a frame on which strings were strung for plucking, and half a voicebox with tuned metal prongs extending partway across it. The prongs produced the bass notes and rhythm, and the strings were for melody. if that was the word for it. They were tuned in a scale that Gabriel had never heard before, and which to his possibly untrained ears sounded profoundly dissonant, like wild animals having an argument in an enclosed space.
"She doesn't go in for the epic poetry," Angela said. "We should be grateful."
"Should we?"
"You have no idea. It goes on for hours, and the choruses would deafen you. Come on, Gabriel, don't hang over her," Angela said. "She gets self-conscious."
He shook his head and followed her away from the door. "Somehow I can't see her getting all shy and blushy," Gabriel said. "She always seems so self-possessed." As someone might, he thought, who outmasses nearly everyone else around here by a factor of two.
"Well, she's not."
Angela led him into the living space just behind Lalique's piloting compartment. She put down the jug, took down a couple of glasses from a shelf, blew the dust out of one, filled both from the jug, and handed one to Gabriel. He sipped at the kvass and found that it was tart, fizzy, and not all that alcoholic.
"This is good," he said. "How do you make it?"
"Just yeast and fruit juice concentrate," she said. "Low-grade hooch for when you can't afford the high-grade stuff." She sprawled out on the sofa across from him, and Gabriel sat down on the other, looking around.
"Go on, put your feet up," Angela said. "We're not that houseproud. Besides, it's one of those smartfabrics. You'd have to set fire to it to get it to show dirt. Just as well around here."
Gabriel hitched his legs up to sit crosslegged and put his drink off to one side. "You didn't have much to say about your trip to beautiful Bluefall," Angela said. "No."
"Doubtless an indicator that your visit didn't go quite as planned." "Uh, no," Gabriel said. "I guess it didn't."
Then, having said that much, he felt foolish not saying anything more. So he leaned back and slowly started to tell her about it, as much as he could bear to. The original pain was wearing off somewhat, but the memory twinged anew every time he touched it, and in some new place: the bright, brassy way the day had looked, some aspect of his father's expression that he had been too shocked to notice at the time. At the same time, he found himself increasingly able to view it all as if it had happened to someone else.
"The strain on him through all this has to have been horrible," Gabriel said softly when he had finished. "It's such a small p
lace, Tisane. The neighbors are watching you all the time. everything you do. You can't avoid socializing with them. They're all there is, but if something embarrassing happens to someone, everybody knows about it in seconds."
He shook his head and turned away. "It has to have been like a prison for him," Gabriel said, "house arrest. He'll have been lonely, but there wasn't anyone to turn to, anyone to talk to. Even when things were all right with the neighbors, he was never the most social person. When they tried to be with him after my mother died, he never was able to take it the way it was meant. He always drew away."
"Sounds like he may have started doing it now," Angela said. "It'd be convenient, too, for him to blame you for it so he wouldn't be to blame at all."
Gabriel blinked at that.
She shook her head. "I don't know what to tell you," Angela said as she sat up, curling her legs underneath her and reaching out again for her kvass. "You're probably just going to have to let him get over it. I bet he was more upset than you were, just no good at showing it—not that it would have helped. You would almost certainly have made each other worse."
Gabriel nodded slowly, surprised how glad he was to hear this judgment. It made him feel less as if he had fled entirely in panic at the end. "You sound like you've been through this kind of thing."
She shook her head. "No. It's weird, but I had a wonderful childhood." Angela laughed. "I mean, 'it's weird' in the sense that it seems like no one else I know has had one or has a good relationship with their parents now. We always got along really well, our family, even my brother and me. Well, I had to thump him sometimes, but you assume you're going to have to do that with your brother so that he'll at least come out vaguely human." Angela grinned a little. "Since I went out on my own into the big world, I see the kind of things other people have gone through." She shook her head. "I see how they suffer or suffered, and I say, 'God, I was lucky not to have that happen to me. How did I luck out? What did I do right?' It doesn't seem fair, somehow."
She sighed. "This looks like just more of the same, but even now, look at the group of us. Enda. well, you'd know more about her history than I would. Grawl, though. Chucked out from among her own people, almost without a thought, for being the runt. Helm." She paused. "I get a feeling Helm's childhood wasn't exactly a joyous romp. Just say the words 'parent' or 'child' around him and watch him
