by Janet Morris
Vince Remson had always been a master of understatement. It was Remson's way of emphasizing things. When Remson would get to the heart of his matter, the part a ConSec commander would yell at full voice, Remson would nearly be whispering.
So when Remson murmured, "Threshold won't support violent demonstrations in its streets," Reice knew what he was hearing.
Either ConSec found those kids before the Medinan hitmen did, or all hell was going to break loose.
Half of Consolidated Security was out looking for the lovers. Reice's commander had broken out six standard search teams for street work. Remson had augmented that with a dozen of his information jocks who were straddling hot computer terminals round the clock. If the kids were on Threshold, somebody would turn them up in short order. On the Stalk, you used services, and services were computerized. You went places, and to get there you went through locks and tubes and doorways. You were seen by human and electronic eyes when you did.
That was the problem: The Medinans couldn't be allowed to see the kids first.
Even Consolidated Space Command was lending a hand, supplementing the on-Threshold search with its remote sensing capabilities throughout the inner solar system. If Cummings, Jr., tried to smuggle the kids to his estate on Earth, ConSpaceCom would catch them—coming or going. Consolidated Space Command had more hardware in the inner system than it knew what to do with, hardware that made the protection of Earth's sanctity a certainty.
No one had turned up those damn kids. Not hide nor hair. Not even a false alarm. If they didn't try to leave Threshold to get to Earth, and they didn't try to sneak into this or that private club for a good time, and they didn't try to use their credit cards, they could hold out, wherever they were, for a long time. It was movement that got you nailed.
So maybe conventional wisdom was right: maybe the kids weren't moving. Maybe they were simply somewhere else on Threshold under NAMECorp security. NAMECorp security was the best money could buy. So good that nobody could get hold of Cummings, Jr., for comment. Not even Remson.
But if none of those suppositions were true, then Reice had his work cut out for him.
Remson had given him carte blanche, which was always nice.
With it, Reice was doing the impossible: trying to comb the missing kids out of the Stalk's innumerable nooks and crannies, using his connections and his wits. And that entailed putting together a surveillance net that included not only the Customs facilities, but the distance between Threshold and the jump belt: the outer solar system.
Space was a big place. Nobody these days needed to be reminded how big. You could mine it and you could launch marker buoys until you died of old age. You could send out multiband electronic snooper packages and you could scatter lidars and synthetic aperture image-return spacecraft, and it was all about as effective as sending out notes in bottles if you were trapped on a desert island on Earth in the old days.
Space was just too damned big.
So you watched the sensible routes and you let the rest go.
Reice had decided to try some less sensible routes today. He was following his instinct as he called in his flight plan.
You couldn't do anything until you checked in with ConSec headquarters, even with carte blanche.
When he got to Blue South, there were uniforms and civilians everywhere. People had to elbow each other out of the way to turn around. The ConSec HQ looked like somebody'd said there were two tickets for an all-expenses-paid trip to Io hidden somewhere on the premises.
The confusion was a result of the all-out search coupled with the beefed-up security, but it bothered Reice as he threaded his way through the melee of personnel until he realized that there was method in the apparent madness.
Men and women in street clothes were huddled before the commander's office, and Reice recognized them as an infiltration team when he got close enough to cut through to his boss's door.
Mickey Croft's people weren't missing a trick. Half of these folks in slightly antiquated clothing were wearing the collarless shirts of Medinan pilgrims; some of the women had scarves around their necks, which would double for veils when they got out on the streets. Each person was being issued a lapel transceiver disguised as a button or a flower or a Medinan-style ornament.
They'd fan out among the pilgrims and take a pulse on the demonstrations that the Medinans were planning. They also might be able to identify the hitfolk and the Ali-class bodyguards among the less dangerous element.
Reice said, generally, "Remember, guys, there's no such thing as a noncombatant in civil disobedience."
Somebody groaned and made an obscene gesture. Somebody told him to come out on the streets and see if he still felt that way. A woman said, "Reice, how's the hunt for the kids?"
As he brushed past the ConSec undercover staff, he tossed back, "My chances of finding the kids are about as good as yours of arresting the crazies looking to murder them."
And that was true enough to make everybody feel bad. You could arrest a perpetrator only in the act or in the process of planning a conspiracy.
It was one of those times when law and order was at the mercy of lawlessness and disorder. You had to wait until somebody did something wrong. You couldn't arrest somebody for wanting to do something wrong.
Reice pushed through into the commander's office and there, looking as if he'd been vat-grown in place, was his boss, in the middle of an electronic horseshoe. The ledge of the command center was strewn with empty drink containers and food wrappers.
The Old Man looked twice as harried as usual, today.
When he saw Reice, he leaned back with a sour look on his face, elbows splayed on the terminal bumpers around him: "So, hot stuff. Got any more bright ideas?"
"What was my last one?" Reice knew how to play the Old Man.
"Having those Space Command idiots turn on all their toys in case Sir Richard the Second tried to trundle his kids off to Earth."
"No luck there. Well, I'm going out the other way, today."
"What do you mean, the other way?"
"Spacedocks and such. And on out." Reice tried to make it sound casual, as if it weren't the only remaining logical possibility, and therefore, the truth. Because they'd missed the boat. All of them. They'd never thought, beyond having Customs raise security at the port, to check what was going out-system.
"You're not telling me you're going to troll for those kids in patrol cruisers?" The crotchety, overworked commander leaned forward. "You do recall just how big an area we're talking about, Reice? And how few people we've got. ..."
"Yes, sir. I'm just going to take the Blue Tick out and have a look at some likely sites. Maybe ask for a few data pulls while I'm out there. Who knows, maybe I'll come up with something."
He wasn't about to proclaim that he knew the answer, that he'd realized that all of them had screwed up.
You didn't walk into the Old Man's office and say it was too late to close the barn door. You let events do that.
"All right, Reice, you've got Remson's approval. And mine. Go waste some time and money."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," he said and got out of there before the Old Man thought to ask him why he was taking this tack.
He wasn't sure why, yet. He just had a suspicion.
As he took the priority tube down to the ConSec docking bay, he busied himself figuring out how to ask the questions he wanted and get the answers he needed without incidentally indicting anyone else's performance.
You had to be careful, when you smelled a screwup of royal proportions.
The Blue Tick was ready and propped, in the pursuit craft bay. All he had to do was log his purported itinerary and go aboard.
Inside her, he started up his emergency-priority departure module and let the ship clear its own way through traffic and red tape.
There were times when he loved his job, and this was one of those times.
While the ship was clearing her flight patterns and sliding out of her slip and int
o the police emergency tube that would convey her out of Threshold Terminal, Reice started a search program running.
The program would collate every departure for eight hours prior to the search programs run by everybody else. And it would flag every NAMECorp vessel to have logged out of the Stalk's docking facilities, no matter the ship's purpose, in that time frame.
If Reice was right, those kids couldn't be found because they weren't around. And if they weren't around, then they'd gotten out somehow.
. And if they hadn't gone to Earth, as ConSpaceCom swore, then they'd gone the other way.
As Reice's hot little pursuit cruiser picked up speed in the tube that would spit her out of the Blue South police exit, he waited for verification.
Getting it might take awhile. Getting Riva Lowe to release Customs data to him, en masse, wasn't the problem. Getting to her to get the data was the problem.
Reice knew that nobody in her office was going to do what Reice wanted done without a personal okay from the boss.
And he wasn't going to ask for it himself: she wasn't going to be thrilled when she saw the request come up. It would look, at first glance, as if he were trying to lay the error-chain at her doorstep.
Which Reice wasn't. Not even after the fiasco over the Relic pilot, no matter how bad it had been, would he go looking for some way to blame Customs for losing the kids.
But the kids were lost. It was just that nobody else was willing to admit it yet. And to find them, you had to admit that what you were doing wasn't working.
Since Reice wasn't doing anything else—had been relieved of all other duties to concentrate on this one—he had a cleaner plate than most.
He leaned back in his seat when the warning light lit and closed his eyes as soon as he'd strapped in. He loved the feel of complete and constant interaction with a ship as good as this one was.
He settled his head into the headrest, which electronically fed him data, much in the way an EVA helmet did, and closed his eyes. The mnemonic/electroencephalographic transducer in the headrest beat the hell out of an EVA helmet. Using it was like being at one with the ship.
The AI expert program did most of the work, but it had to be targeted. It had to know what you wanted it to do. And no matter how big a place space was, it seemed a lot smaller when you could look at it through the relayed integrated data systems that a ship like this could access.
So Reice started searching, grid square by grid square, all the space around him as he instituted his own search pattern that should eventually bring him to the spacedock area.
He was looking for anything anomalous, because the kids' ship might be using some sort of masking device.
But only a little while after the Blue Tick had reached cruising speed, his data request from Customs came through.
And then he knew exactly where he was going.
NAMECorp had a freighter that had left less than an hour before the Customs alert. That freighter had a pickup at Spacedock One in three hours. After that, it was scheduled into a jump lane.
If Reice could catch it before it jumped, he could board it and search it.
And if he did that, he was nearly sure that he was going to find two fugitive teenagers aboard.
If he could catch it before it made its spacedock to take on additional cargo, he was completely sure he'd find them.
So he reached up and let his hand trail with easy familiarity across the control panel above his head. Then he went back to work.
Given the Blue Tick's top speed, and the freighter's innocuous progress, he might just do it.
But the only way to ensure that he didn't have a real problem on his hands was to preserve the element of surprise.
So he didn't alert anyone, not even ConSec HQ, that he thought he'd found the kids.
He just broke every traffic regulation in the book, and worked on bending the laws of physics.
He had to get there in time. And he'd always said that the laws of physics were different for pursuit craft.
Blue Tick was flashing all her lights; every warning meter she had was alive. Cowboying around like this, you never knew when you were about to punch right through the envelope into disaster. But you had to try, every once in a while, to do the job your way, because otherwise it wouldn't get done.
And if those kids figured out he was coming after them, with the lead they had, he might not be able to catch them before they jumped for Pegasus's Nostril, the freighter's logged destination.
Or, worse, for parts unknown.
CHAPTER 22
Enough Rope
Vince Remson was almost out of ideas. And that scared him. Sitting with Mickey on the rooftop of the Secretariat, looking down at the gathered throng of fundamentalist crazies out front, Remson couldn't understand how Croft could be so calm.
"They're exercising their right of free assembly," said Mickey Croft between two bites of a scone loaded with marmalade. "Don't worry so much, Vince. Eat your breakfast. Who knows when we'll have time for another decent meal, instead of all this ethnic slop we've been swallowing at the receptions." Croft took another bite and swallowed it with a swig of breakfast tea.
There was nothing wrong with Croft's appetite. To look at the impeccable diplomat, you'd have thought there was no crowd of fist-waving demonstrators chanting slogans outside his door.
So maybe Remson was overreacting. No, overreacting would have been sending in riot police with pressure hoses and rubber bats.
"I don't know how you can eat like that, Mickey," said Remson, picking a raisin out of his scone and putting it in his mouth to see if he could jumpstart his salivary glands.
"You should have seen me last night, when the Ho delegation decided that I was the one to get the honoree's portion: stewed eye of worble, including the socket, served from the entire head that they brought with them for the purpose." Croft shuddered and his mouth collapsed into a prune of distaste. "Tasted like a rubber glove with lemon sauce and a filling of worms."
"I'm glad I missed it. Are you ready to hear the upshot of the Ali situation?"
"That's why you're here, dear boy—to brief me."
"I just wondered if you wanted to finish eating first."
"If I could eat only when the news was good or nonexistent, I'd have starved to death by now. Tell me about the Ali situation." Croft put both elbows on the white tablecloth. "I'm all ears."
Sometimes Croft seemed rather overendowed in the ear department, but Remson hardly ever thought of Mickey in terms of physical pluses and minuses. Still, the turn of phrase made him stifle a grin.
And that relaxed him somewhat. "Sir, we're reasonably sure that at least one of the top mullahs—perhaps even Beni Forat himself—will attend the session on the 'sentient service personnel' matter. It's our position that, since the Alis meet the standards of human as described in the UNE Code, Title—"
"Spare me the specifics, unless the citations aren't going to come up on my terminal at my seat when I need them, the way I've come to expect when you're running the show."
"Oh, you'll have all the data, sir."
"Good, then you can call me Mickey again and we can stop pretending that this is really much different than any other crisis."
"If you say so ... Mickey. The data will support a claim of full human citizenship: They've been psychologically conditioned and bred for generations to perform the bodyguard tasks without question, but they're as human under a microscope as any of the rest of us."
"Slave mentality? Are you sure the Alis want this review, Vince?"
"I'm sure they don't, as a class. But nobody wants to die, not really. And at least three of them will die over this Forat girl mess. Even without 'decommissioning deaths' through error, they're expected to die when their masters die as a matter of course."
"Are you going too fast with this, Vince?"
"For the Alis themselves? Probably. If they get their freedom, they'll have the freedom to starve and the freedom to fail and the freedom to make e
rrors, just like the rest of us. They have a decision-free system, presently. They won't like having to make so many choices at first. But it's unacceptable to condone by implication the perpetuation of human slavery just because the slaves, on the whole, are comfortable being slaves."
"Can I quote you on that, Vince?"
Remson nearly blushed. "Sorry, sir. These men are perfectly capable of picking their own wives, of siring female children as well as males, of seeking gainful employment in a number of areas on Medina and in security forces and armies off-planet. So I don't see that we can do anything else but petition for status on their behalf."
"Oh dear, Vince, you are a crusader. You realize that crusaders make enemies?"
"As long as one of those enemies isn't you, Mickey, I can live with it," Remson said very softly, watching the other man.
"Not me. I agree with you. You have this Ali-7 person at hand?"
"Yes, sir. That's . . . probably part of the reason that the crowd's down there." Part of the reason that Remson felt so bad about the crowd being there. "Ali-7's a strong individual. I've offered him a job with my service, so he knows he has some kind of future and we're not just going to do this and then let him be shipped back to Medina for whatever consequences may follow."
"A job? Vince, are you sure that's wise?"
"No, Mickey. I'm not sure. But it didn't make any sense, otherwise: he needs some incentive, a way out, at least. I don't know that he'll take the job. He may go back with the Medinans if the guarantees are sufficient. Remember, as I told you, the bodyguard class has been conditioned to do that job for generations. They'd be as lost without the Medinans as the Medinans would be without them. And the Medinan culture itself is too different from ours to allow Alis to be comfortable here."
"That's an understatement." Croft picked up his scone again, looked at it critically, and put it back on the plate. "Well, crusader, let's get to it. You realize that this has as much chance of igniting this situation as any other of our . . . problems."
