“What’s the hurry?” Paul Czerny sprawled on a patch of mossy ground. “It’s a nice day.” He stretched and inhaled. “They don’t come like this very often. And I don’t get out often enough when they do.”
“It may be nice now,” Jade replied, “but believe me, you don’t want to be descending that cliff face in a gale. I’d like to be down to the flyer by the time the wind comes up.”
“We could spend the night here,” Paul suggested.
“You want to end up as a human cactus?” Jade picked a clump of nightneedles off her pants, being careful not to prick her fingers, and held them for Paul to see. Some of the odd plants were opening, exposing needle-like seeds to be driven by the wind. “Besides, I have to be back by lights out.”
Jade regretted uttering the final phrase even as she said it.
Paul scowled. “Duty calls, is that it? Snapping to attention, spit and polish, following orders. Lieutenant Lafrey, waging incessant warfare on the enemies of civilization-as-we-know-it, be they human or alien? I don’t understand you, Jade. How can a person like you be in the military at all? How can you be the dutiful servant of a repressive regime?”
“Please, Paul, we’ve been through that—”
Paul came over and took her hand. He was a head taller than she, and she suddenly felt even smaller.
“Not really, we haven’t. It’s always ‘not now, Paul,’ or ‘some other time, Paul,’ or ‘let’s change the subject, Paul.’ I want to know, Jade. It’s important to me. How can you willingly work to further the aims of a corrupt, totalitarian government?”
Jade looked away.
Gregory Hotchkiss had asked her the same question—years ago, when she was a raw ensign, months out of the Academy, before the Battle of Felton 114 had stripped her of her youth and innocence. She’d been less cautious than she should have been, dropped too many hints, revealed too much about the resistance movement that wanted the war to end. Gregory had been infected with her enthusiasm—but he hadn’t had the aptitude or the mindset for covert work. One day he’d disappeared—permanently. It took a person with special abilities to survive in the hidden underworld of the Hegemony’s complex political and military apparatus; enthusiasm alone couldn’t make up for the lack.
Jade returned her attention to Paul, and gazed into his brown eyes, willing him to understand. “Paul—you have to trust me on this one. I’d love to tell you, I really would. But it’s for your own good that I don’t.”
“If you cared for me, you’d tell me. Or don’t you trust me?”
“Yes, I care for you, and yes, I trust you. But don’t press me to explain.”
“So it’s like that. Empty words. Go on dates with Paul. Be nice to him. Get the poor fool to fall in love with you. But don’t tell him anything important about yourself.”
Paul dropped her hand as if it had become unclean. He walked a few paces away and stooped to pick up his pack.
“I’m not good at mysteries. I’ve never liked them.”
Jade’s eyes watered. “Please, Paul. Trust me.”
He spoke without looking up. “Trust is a two-way street. Only one of us is walking it.”
He strode to the edge of the cliff face and peered over. The breeze had grown stronger. The strands of light mist that normally hovered around the summit had blown away. The mountain fell sheer to the plain below.
“I suppose I should be thankful you don’t turn me in to the Politicals.”
“That is the last thing—!”
He cut her off. “Are you ready to go, Lieutenant Lafrey, ma’am?”
“Paul—don’t be like this.” She stretched out a hand. “Don’t be angry.”
Paul dropped over the edge. “See you at the bottom.”
Jade squeezed her eyelids shut to hold back tears.
A stronger gust of wind staggered her, and a nightneedle stung her thigh.
With a last look back at the looming face of Meyer’s Mount, she jumped into space, feeling as she did so that she also jumped into a great void in her life…
Now, Jade rolled onto her side, buried her face in her pillow, and clutched her small crucifix.
She’d never dared to search out Gregory’s fate lest her query be detected and lead to increased scrutiny from the Political and Ideological Bureau.
And Paul had never spoken to her again.
It had taken years for the pain to subside, a bitter reminder of the price she paid—that she continued to pay.
She thought she’d dealt with it. Obviously, she hadn’t.
“Troy, you idiot,” she said to herself. “You lovable idiot. Why do you have to come and complicate my life?”
FOUR
Seated in her office chair, Jade watched intently as Lieutenant Rick Emmers compressed his lips, the studious movement making him look years older. He laid Nate Watford’s wafer gently on Jade’s desk, handling it as if he expected it to explode in his face.
As it had in hers, Jade thought. So to speak.
She hadn’t needed to summon Emmers when she arrived at her office in the morning; he’d been there already, hard at work.
She scooped up the wafer. “Well? What do you think of Nate Watford’s little present?”
He hesitated. “This is something, ma’am.”
Jade nodded. “Yes.” She tapped the wafer on the desktop. “Could you make any more out of it?”
“I couldn’t pull off any more than you could,” Emmers apologized. “The files are incomplete and going to remain that way.”
“Too badly damaged, huh?”
“Oh, no!” Emmers’ eyebrows arched.
Jade frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The files aren’t damaged.”
“But—”
“They were made to look as if they were damaged. But I guarantee you that what’s on there is all that’s ever been on there.”
Jade shifted her weight backwards, and her chair conformed to her new position. She held the wafer between the thumb and index finger of her right hand and stared at it. “I never would have guessed.”
“It’s a professional job. Somebody with first-class skills made that wafer.”
“Second class,” Jade corrected. “It didn’t fool you.” She tapped the wafer on the desk again. “Somebody meant for us to know this much, but not one iota more.”
“It certainly appears that way.”
“But why? What does it mean?”
She didn’t expect him to have an answer, and he didn’t. “What are you going to do with the information?” Emmers countered.
“I don’t know yet. But not a word.”
“No, ma’am.”
“As far as other business—”
“I’ll get started this morning. Although I’m thinking that it’s unlikely I’ll get much on Iverson besides his service record from Political files here. I’ll have to back-channel through HQ if you want more in-depth info.”
Jade shook her head. “Only if you have time and it’s safe. For now, I’d sooner you reviewed the surveillance program. We need to keep a very close eye on our friends across the system—and I don’t just mean here. Everywhere. Comings and goings, anything that we pick up from Gara’nesh space that has even a whiff of suspicious about it. Call home and tell Howells to put every available agent onto monitoring Gara’nesh movements. Coordinate with other sectors.”
Emmers made hasty notes.
“If anyone complains, tell Howells to say that Stalker authorized it. I’ll clear it with him.”
“OK.”
“And assign someone to follow-up Nate Watford’s movements.”
“That’ll take a while to produce results, ma’am.”
“I know. But we have to start somewhere.” Jade slid the wafer into her pocket and jumped out of the chair. “I’m off to the session. Call me if necessary.”
She paused at the door. “Has Cheshire Cat reported in?”
Emmers shook his head. “Not directly. Routine data stream.”
Jade waved a hand as she exited into the corridor. “Later.”
Millions of kilometers distant from Covenant, a nearly undetectable object drifted through the dusty blackness of space; not technically beyond the fringes of Gamma Hydra 4's domain, but close enough.
Lieutenant Hal WhiteWolf—tall, high-cheeked, black-haired—paced a tight circle around the cramped bridge of Cheshire Cat. In training, he’d harbored a fear that clumsiness could do irreparable damage to sensitive equipment, but it had never happened, and now he paid no attention to his elbows coming within a whisker of the consoles.
He paused before the scan console and studied the readout.
“Good,” he murmured to himself. “Close enough.”
The spyship probed the Gara’nesh fleet, monitoring ship positions, intercepting communications, and relaying the information back to Intelligence.
A dangerous task. If they were discovered…WhiteWolf preferred not to think of that. Cheshire Cat was not a combat vessel. She had speed—above average for a vessel of her diminutive size, and the best cloaking technology the Hegemony possessed—but nothing else. No armaments. No tricks. No miracles.
If detected, a Gara’nesh star frigate would make short work of her.
He consoled himself with the thought that undoubtedly the Gara’nesh had their own spyships doing exactly the same thing to the Terran fleet.
WhiteWolf settled into his command seat, drew up his long legs, and listened to the comforting hum of Cheshire Cat’s instruments reaching out across the darkness. The surveillance devices functioned on automatic. There was nothing to do but wait.
And worry.
And listen.
The morning passed with abysmal slowness. Her trio of concerns—the negotiations, the computer wafer from Nate Watford, and her relationship with Troy Kuchera—weighed on Jade’s mind as much in the daytime as they had at night. They intermingled into a maddening montage of thoughts and emotions that defied rational analysis. Interpreting Ambassador Halaffi’s increasingly irritable mood for Stalker or Maricic provided only a brief respite.
She wished for clarity of thought, controlled emotions, and fixity of purpose; characteristics that a Stoic philosopher such as Seneca might have envied, but that for the life of her she couldn’t attain. The best she could think of was to try to whittle down the list of problems. Starting with Troy Kuchera.
After a gloomy lunch in her office, when she merely picked at her food, leaving most of it uneaten, she sat through another tedious afternoon session. When it had ended, she returned to her office and put a call through to Kuchera. Judging by the out of focus background visible behind him, he was in his quarters.
“Hi, Troy.”
His moustache flexed as he smiled. “Hi. To what do I owe this unexpected but welcome interruption?”
“Troy, I need to talk to you.”
His face reflected instant concern. The creases of his forehead deepened. “Is something wrong?”
“Concerning, let’s say.”
“Do you want to come over here? Or shall I come to your place? Or the observation gallery—that’s usually quiet.”
“My place. You’re cleared.”
“I’ll be right over.”
He was waiting in the hall outside her room by the time she arrived, his broad shoulders resting against the wall.
“That was quick,” she commented.
“You ever see me waste time when I’m invited somewhere?”
Jade opened the door, placed a hand on his upper arm, and urged Kuchera in. He parked himself in one of the two chairs. Jade took the other.
Kuchera’s gaze wandered around the impersonal room and returned to Jade. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry if I said anything I shouldn’t have. You know me and my big mouth. If my feet weren’t so wide they could find a permanent home there—”
“No,” Jade interrupted. “It’s not that.”
“What is it about, then?”
She studied his face, trying to imagine if his homely features concealed an IID agent, realizing as she did so how futile the exercise was. You could never tell a person’s character from their face. She’d met some rough characters with hearts of gold, and some good-looking, family-oriented people who were cold-blooded killers.
She took a deep breath, and activated her visual implant to make sure the physiological probe she’d just placed on Kuchera by her casual hand on his arm was working. She hated herself for being so underhanded. Spying on friends was a dirty trick. She felt like an IID agent herself.
According to the readout, he was in a normal physiological state.
“How long have you been working for IID, Troy?” she said firmly.
He goggled. “Are you nuts?”
The computer analysis of his reaction was consistent with genuine surprise.
“Level with me,” she urged.
His face darkened. “Is this some kind of stupid joke? Because if it is, it’s not funny.”
“You were approached by IID…”
He frowned. “You can’t really think—”
“I don’t want to think,” Jade said. “I want you to tell me.”
His hands were clenched. “I wondered what was bothering you.”
She didn’t reply. His reactions still seemed to be honest. It had been a calculated risk to confront him like this. Exposing an IID agent could be ruinous. But being exposed by one, even worse.
He shrugged. “It was nothing. I was approached by IID a few months ago. They wanted an ‘in’ into my department—somebody to spy on one of Admiral Van-te-Hoft’s staffers. I told them they could go to you-know-where. If they wanted to peep into the staffer’s bedroom, they could do it themselves.”
“Really?”
“Can you honestly see me as an IID agent?”
“I want to hear it in your own words.”
“I am not and never have been an IID agent.” He spoke stiffly, the words coming from between tight lips.
The probe’s readings were steady. No sign that he was telling her anything but the truth. It would take an exceptionally well-trained and self-disciplined agent to fool the probe. She relaxed and smiled.
“I’m glad to hear it. I had to be sure.”
“Are you satisfied?”
“Yes. No hard feelings?”
“You really won’t trust me, will you?”
Hurt burned in his eyes. She longed to remove it. But she couldn’t.
Later, long after Kuchera had departed, she walked along the observation gallery which wound around the rim of one of the cubes, high enough to allow an unobstructed view over most of the conference center. The corridors swam in darkness, lights dimmed for the arbitrary ‘night’.
Cold, bright pinpoint stars glistened high overhead. The broad band of the Milky Way arched from horizon to horizon, a white river of stellar froth. Or a bridge to heaven, Jade thought, before remembering that primitive peoples had considered the flowing track of stars as just that—the road to the otherworld.
Sol and Earth were out there somewhere, although the Sun was far too faint to be seen from this distance.
She rested a palm against the transparent clearsteel. Somewhere out there, too, was the Gara’nesh homeworld.
And were there others?
She lowered her gaze.
Knife-edge shadows bisected the tumbled buildings of the center, making it appear that each building only consisted of one half. The surface of Covenant formed an eerie grey plain, unreal and insubstantial. Changes in the intensity of shadow gave the only indication of irregularities in the surface—folds, wrinkles, jagged outcroppings. A place for nightmare fantasies to come stalking out of the shadows. It was a hideous, barren world, like many hideous, barren worlds. She supposed that, given the right frame of mind, Covenant might possess a stran
ge kind of beauty. But she didn’t have that frame of mind at the moment.
She had, she thought, solved one problem. She was certain that Troy wasn’t an IID agent. That didn’t address the issue of her feelings for him, or the deeper matter that divided them. Neither did it address the question of what she should do with Nate Watford’s information.
She slapped her palm against the observation port.
Troy’s presence was affecting her thought processes. Deciding what to do with Nate Watford’s information shouldn’t be as hard as she was making it.
Watford implied that one of the sides at the peace conference was not negotiating in good faith. But which side?
His tale of supposedly learning of the development of a new and devastatingly powerful weapon stretched her credulity. Certainly in the Hegemony weapons development was one of the most highly guarded activities—she supposed it was the same with the Gara’nesh Suzerainty. How could a freelance agent gain access to such information? And to do it in the way that Watford claimed…it was insane.
Yet for some reason, she couldn’t just dismiss his claim. The stakes were too high. And there were too many unanswered questions about the business—from the state of Watford’s ship, to the deliberately faked wafer, to the undoubtedly Gara’nesh clothing that Watford had been wearing.
So: should she inform the negotiating team?
Did Stalker or Maricic or Gellner or the others know of one side’s insincerity? If they did, then it didn’t matter what she herself did or said. But the way the info had reached her, she didn’t think they had any inkling. But she couldn’t be sure. Likely, though, Stalker would have told her if he knew, so she assumed that the others didn’t.
If she spoke up, and word leaked out that one side wasn’t playing fair, the negotiations would collapse. Such an outcome would delight the pro-war faction and destroy all that she and Travers and Stalker and many other people had worked and hoped and prayed—and sometimes died—for.
But if she kept silent, the conference could produce a peace treaty which one side had no intention of honoring.
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