The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Martinez glared from the window of his office on the station down at the blue-and-green planet below. His own reflection, heavy-browed and scowling, glowered back at him. Chee rotated slowly in the window frame as the station wheeled on its axis.

  “They’ll be safer,” Martinez said, “until they try to leave.” He felt his voice rising in frustration. “How are they going to get their families down from the mountain over bridges that are brittle as icicles? On vehicles floating on electromagnets that may explode the second a current runs through them?” He looked at Allodorm and spoke with finality. “The railroad workers go into the bunkers like everyone else.”

  “Yes, lord inspector.” Allodorm’s beautiful voice showed no sign of agitation at any point in the crisis. Martinez had to give him credit for that.

  And even if he was a thief, Allodorm was working as hard as anyone to shelter Chee’s inhabitants. Martinez had to give him credit for that, too.

  “I’ve heard from the Lady Mayor of Port Gareth,” Marcella said from around the cigarette she held fiercely between her teeth. “She has a plan to save the shuttles.”

  The shuttles were designed to ferry cargo from low orbit to the surface, and were unable to achieve escape velocity and get far enough from Chee to avoid the pulsar. They would remain on the ground, with most of the other heavy equipment, and be subjected to x-ray bombardment and probably ruined.

  Martinez hoped the Chee Company had good insurance.

  He left the window and dropped heavily into the chair behind his desk. Pneumatics gave an outraged hiss.

  “Is the Lady Mayor any kind of aeronautical engineer?” Martinez asked. “Has she actually consulted with the shuttle pilots?”

  Marcella smiled. “The answer to the first question is no, and as for the second, I doubt it. She wants to put the shuttles in geosynchronous orbit on the side of Chee away from the pulsar.”

  “That won’t work,” Martinez said. “The pulsar beam isn’t coming in along the plane of the ecliptic, it’ll come at an angle from galactic north. Anything in geosynchronous orbit will be fried. In order to get the planet between the shuttles and the beam, they’d have to go into a polar orbit and get the timing exactly right . . .” He paused for a moment. “Wait a minute, that’s a good idea. Tell the shuttle pilots that they can proceed with the polar orbit, but they’re forbidden to take passengers. It’s too dangerous.”

  As the provisional governor had declared a state of emergency, Martinez as the senior Fleet representative had become the absolute ruler of the Chee system. It was as if all the power of the Shaa conquerors had become invested in his person.

  If the situation hadn’t been so desperate, he would be really enjoying himself.

  “By the way,” Marcella added, “can you make use of the Kayenta? I’m happy to offer it, though it won’t hold very many refugees.”

  “Thank you,” Martinez said. “Let me think about it.”

  At another meeting, with Lord Ehl and the captains of the two merchant vessels, there was a discussion of who was going on the ships and who wasn’t.

  “We should bring off the representatives of our company,” one of the captains said. “And then paying passengers, of course.”

  “You will bring off gravid females,” Martinez said, “and children under the age of fifteen, each of whom will be accompanied by one parent. If there’s any room left, we can discuss allowing slightly older children aboard.”

  There probably would be extra room: there weren’t many children on Chee, as the workers had been recruited chiefly from the young and unattached, and settler families hadn’t really started arriving yet.

  “My owners will protest!” the captain said.

  “That will be their privilege, after this is over.” Martinez turned to Lord Ehl. “You will place members of the Military Constabulary on the ships’ airlock doors and hatches,” he said. “I don’t want unauthorized people sneaking on board.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Martinez thought he heard satisfaction in Ehl’s voice.

  “No Fleet personnel will leave Chee till this is over,” Martinez said to Ehl later, after the captains had left. “It’s our job to stand between the citizens and danger, and if that means sucking up x-rays, so be it.”

  “Er – yes, my lord.” Martinez thought he detected rather less satisfaction in Ehl’s tone than had been there a few moments before.

  “I’m going to be the last person off Chee Station,” Martinez said. “You’ll be the next to last, so we’ll share an elevator.”

  “Yes, my lord.” A question glowed in Ehl’s golden eyes. “We’re not staying in Station Command? It’s shielded.”

  “There might be a structural failure of the station. If there isn’t, we’ll be able to get from the ground back to the station easily enough.”

  Then Martinez recalled Marcella’s offer of Kayenta. “No, wait,” he said. “You’ll take the last elevator with the control room crew. I’ll see you off, then depart in Kayenta. That way I’ll be able to return to the station once the pulsar’s passed and make certain everything’s in order before you bring a crew back up the elevator.”

  The plan pleased him. Last off the station, and first on again. It was a role that was not only proper for the senior officer in a crisis, but would reflect well on him.

  It wasn’t as if he minded looking good.

  It wasn’t until he left his office for the walk to the grandeur of the Senior Officers’ Quarters that he found out about another problem. A Terran with a wispy blond mustache and a jacket with a gray stripe came up to Martinez as he walked, and introduced himself as Hedgepath, a stockbroker.

  “There are brokers on Chee?” Martinez asked.

  “Yes,” Hedgepath said, “though most of what I do is invest workers’ pay elsewhere in the empire. But Port Vipsania has its own little stock market, for locally raised issues. We even have a futures market.”

  “Congratulations,” Martinez said.

  “Perhaps congratulations aren’t precisely in order.” Hedgepath touched his slight mustache. “There has been an, ah, problem with the market. The futures market in particular. In the hours before the announcement of the threat from the pulsar, there was a lot of selling. Agricultural futures in particular, though there was some selling in industrial and fishery futures as well.”

  Martinez found himself nodding. “After word about the pulsar came out, the futures turned worthless.”

  “You might understand that my clients have been complaining. And since you now seem to represent the civil authority as well as the military, I thought I’d pass the complaints to you.” He touched his mustache again. “I couldn’t seem to make an appointment, by the way. I’m sorry I had to stop you on the street.”

  Martinez considered this. Hedgepath’s lack of an appointment wasn’t necessarily an element of a deep conspiracy – a lot of people were trying to set meetings with him, and the Lai-own secretary that Lord Ehl had assigned him might well have assigned Hedgepath a low priority.

  “I’ll look into that,” Martinez said. “In the meantime, I’d like to give you some names. Ledo Allodorm. Lord Pa Maq-fan. Lady Marcella Zykov.”

  Hedgepath seemed surprised only by Marcella’s name “I can assure your lordship that Lady Marcella hasn’t done any selling that I know of,” Hedgepath said. “But there were sell orders from other Chee Company officials – Her-ryng and Remusat, for two.”

  Martinez couldn’t put any faces to the names, though he’d very possibly met them at one or another of the banquets in his honor.

  “I’d like you to retain all information of the trades,” Martinez said. “Things are urgent right now, and I won’t be able to deal with this till after the pulsar’s passed. Make sure the data is in hard as well as electronic form.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Can you give me contact information?”

  Hedgepath sent his information to Martinez from his sleeve display, and Martinez told him that he would be in touch
.

  “By the way,” he said. “How’s Chee Company stock doing?”

  “It’s worth about a third of what it was worth two days ago.”

  Martinez told Terza this over supper. “I’d been starting to think well of Allodorm and Lord Pa,” Terza said. “They’ve been so responsive in the crisis.”

  “And all the more responsive for knowing their money’s safe. And of course they’re working to save their own skins, and their company’s assets.”

  There was a low chime from Martinez’s sleeve display. He gave a snarl; he’d forgotten to turn it off at dinner.

  “Apologies,” he said to Terza, and answered.

  The orange eyes of his Lai-own secretary gazed back at him from the display. “I beg your pardon, my lord. A communication has arrived from Lieutenant Severin, logged as personal, confidential, urgent, and immediate.”

  Martinez exchanged glances with Terza. Severin wouldn’t use such a bundle of impressive adjectives without reason.

  “Send it,” Martinez said.

  When Martinez’s display indicated that the message had been downloaded, he broke the connection to his secretary and played the message.

  “This is going to be complex,” Severin said, “and I’d be obliged if somewhere along the line you could check my math.”

  Severin had considered not telling anyone of his plan to use Titan to shut off the pulsar. He was afraid that someone, frightened of the super-powerful bursts of x-rays that would both precede and follow the pulsar’s brief time of quiet, would refuse him permission to act.

  He certainly knew better than to ask his own superiors on Laredo. The Exploration Service was an organization that had been starved of funding for ages: every time the government was reminded that the Service existed, it had only inspired them to trim the budget still further. The entire institutional culture of the Service was based on not calling attention to themselves, and the culture hadn’t changed even though the budget had grown. Throwing away a whole ship full of antihydrogen was calling for attention, and with a vengeance: if Severin approached them with his scheme, their first instinct would refuse to do anything.

  Yet it would be hard to carry out the operation secretly. Titan wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and when its crew took to the lifeboats while the giant ship itself burned for the pulsar at an acceleration that would have killed anyone aboard, someone might well take notice.

  So Severin had decided to contact Martinez personally, trusting that the relationship that had developed in the war would continue to work. In the meantime he had told Titan’s crew to prepare to abandon the ship and to place it under remote control, and also ordered them to keep their orders secret for the present and not to transmit anything but routine messages to Chee or to anywhere else.

  Severin didn’t want Titan asking their superiors for advice, either. He was sleeping in his cabin when Martinez’s reply arrived. Severin was dreaming of warships that were also, secretly, submarines, submarines that fought a lonely covert war in the chill seas of watery planets like Hy-Oso, and he slowly became aware that the insistent chiming he heard wasn’t the sound of sonar, but his sleeve display.

  The comm unit in his cabin was still nonfunctional, which was why the sleeve display had to be used. Severin called for lights, then remembered that fuse hadn’t been replaced either, and groped through the dark cabin for the uniform jacket that had been hung over the back of a chair. He triggered the display, heard from Chamcha that Lord Inspector Martinez had send him a message logged personal, urgent, and confidential, and told Chamcha to send it.

  “Permission is tentatively granted to proceed with your project,” Martinez said. His face appeared upside-down in the display, and Severin craned his neck to get a better view.

  “I’m ordering complete secrecy on this matter,” Martinez said. “You will censor all communication off Surveyor and order censorship on Titan as well. Absolutely nothing must get out. I’m going to explain Titan’s movements as a maneuver ordered by the Exploration Service high command.”

  Severin could only stare at the inverted image.

  Martinez’s eyes took on a more confiding glance. “Let’s hope you’re right about all this. I’ll check the math, and enjoy talking with you when it’s all over.”

  The orange End Transmission symbol flashed into place on Severin’s sleeve. Thoughtfully he felt his way across the cabin and turned on the lights manually.

  Total secrecy, he thought. Now that was interesting.

  Clearly he wasn’t the only one here with a scheme up his sleeve.

  “Total secrecy,” Martinez told Shon-dan. “I want this to be strictly between the two of us.”

  “Yes, my lord.” The astronomer clacked her peg teeth in thought, then spoke hesitantly. “May I ask the reason for the secrecy?”

  “People might be less than committed to the evacuations and the shelter-building program if they thought the shelters weren’t going to be needed. Even if the math checks there’s still too much that can go wrong with this scheme, and if the plan blows up, those shelters will be necessary.”

  Shon-dan hesitated again. “Very good, my lord.”

  “I want you to check these figures,” Martinez said, “and I’ll check them as well. And no one else is to know. Understand?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Because if anyone else finds out, I’ll know who blabbed, and I’ll throw you into that x-ray beam with my own hands.”

  After hearing a series of heartfelt assurances from Shon-dan, Martinez ended the conversation. His dinner lay cold on the table before him. Terza lowered the cup of coffee from her lips and said, “I hope this means I’m not going to have to take that refugee ship.”

  Martinez considered this. “No,” he decided, “you’re going aboard.”

  Her mouth tightened. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because you’re the Chen heir and mother of the next Chen heir,” Martinez said. “And so you will go on board the refugee ship and be gracious and accepting and thoughtful and considerate of the other passengers, because that’s what people expect of the next Lady Chen.”

  Terza looked cross. “Damn,” she said.

  “Just as I’ll be last off this station,” Martinez said, “and first on, because it’s what people expect of a war hero.”

  Reluctant amusement tugged at Terza’s lips. “I haven’t noticed that you find being a hero much of a hardship.”

  Martinez sipped his cold coffee. “Well,” he said, “not yet. But when I’m old and mumbling in my rocking chair by the fire, and multitudes of citizens come to me begging to be rescued from some cosmic menace or other, I’m probably going to find it all very inconvenient.”

  “No doubt,” Terza said.

  Martinez signaled to Alikhan to fill his coffee cup.

  “You’ll have to excuse me for the next few hours,” he told Terza. “I have to confirm all of Severin’s calculations.”

  Terza rose from her chair. “I’ll start the job of being gracious and accepting, then, and leave you to your task.”

  Martinez’s calculations supported those of Severin, and more importantly Shon-dan’s supported them both. Martinez called Ring Command to tell them that Titan and Surveyor would be engaged in a series of maneuvers, and that the sensor operations should be told to disregard them. “Put a memo on the sensor display,” Martinez said. “I don’t want to get a call from Command whenever a new sensor operator goes on watch.”

  Then it was back to the endless series of planning meetings. Shelters were being dug with furious efficiency, roofed, and then covered with dirt. The accommodations were primitive, but few conveniences were required by a population that would be in the shelters for less than an hour.

  The first of the two refugee ships was sent off, with four thousand aboard, mostly children. The ship would boost far enough away to be safe from the pulsar, and could then return to Chee or continue on to Laredo, depending on whether Chee Station survived or not.


  The second ship left two days later. Martinez kissed Terza goodbye at the airlock door, and watched her drift aboard in an elegant swirl of grace and gallantry. Martinez paused for a moment of admiration, and then turned to go past the long lines of refugees patiently waiting to board, each tethered to a safety line as they floated weightless in the great docking space.

  Some unused to weightlessness looked green and ill. Martinez sped past them before the inevitable consequences began to manifest themselves.

  He made his way to Command, and encountered Lord Ehl leaving Ehl braced in salute as he drifted past, then recovered in time to snag a handhold on the wall. He made a nervous gesture with his free hand, then stuffed a sheet of paper in a pocket.

  “Is something wrong?” Martinez said.

  “No,” Eh 1 began. “Well, yes. There have been some arrests, people who got onto the refugee ship that weren’t supposed to be there. Officials of the shipping company, apparently.” He lifted the paper from his pocket, then returned it. “I have their names, but they’ll have to be checked.”

  “Do you need my help?”

  “No, my lord, I thank you.”

  “Very well. Once you find out for certain who they are, ship them down the skyhook and put them in the deepest dungeon on Chee.”

  There were no dungeons on Chee, so far as Martinez knew, but perhaps they’d build one.

  From Command Martinez followed the saga of the stowaways, who were marched off the ship by the military constabulary. The refugee ship was given permission to depart, and the enormous vessel gently backed from the station until it reached a safe enough distance to light its torch.

  Martinez said another silent farewell to Terza as the displays showed her ship building speed, then took a covert look at Titan. Titan itself was boosting at nearly twenty gravities toward its rendezvous with the pulsar, a speed that would have killed any crew on board. The icon representing Titan on the sensor displays had a large text box attached to it, saying the ship was engaged in maneuvers. The two lifeboats containing its crew were on their way to their rendezvous with Surveyor, and had been given the cover of a mission to resupply the crippled craft.