The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Sasaki had not needed much convincing. It was trouble that took Dryke away, and Allied Transcon and the Diaspora were facing a full menu of trouble these days. The Homeworld hit on the Houston center was part of a panorama of problems that ranged from labor sabotage at the Kasigau Launch Center to an endless parade of would-be stowaways attempting to make their way onto the starship Memphis.

  Named, like its predecessor, for a great city of antiquity, the second of the Project’s five great generation starships was nearing completion in high orbit for a planned 2095 departure. A third larger than Ur, which had sailed eleven years earlier, Memphis was a small city in space, and a world of problems unto itself. Dryke gladly left the protection of Memphis in the hands of Matthew Reid, who was based at Takara, the satland building the ship for Allied Transcon.

  But any problems earthbound belonged to Dryke, and this morning Jeremiah and Homeworld were at the top of the list. He had caught the flash alert from Sentinel in his flyer and immediately rerouted from the tower to the field. Jeremiah’s message came through while he was waiting out prep on his Saab Celestron; ten minutes later, he was in the air.

  Prainha to Houston was one of those especially annoying intermediate hops—barely six thousand kilometers—that took longer to complete than a trip covering twice the distance. The apogee of the arc traced by Dryke’s pop screamer was well within the stratosphere; the max velocity was a plodding 4,000 kph; the e.t. nearly two hours.

  Only the skylink kept the time from being a total waste. The analysis of the spill came in shortly after take-off: dioxin, methylene chloride, benzothiazole, PCBs, chloroaniline. By the time the Texas coast crystallized through the hanging haze, Dryke had collected reports from Munich, Tokyo, and Kasigau, and an excuse from Washington. The Trojan horse’s final act had been to wipe itself from the system, and DIANNA operators were still trying to reconstruct where it had gotten in and how it had done what it did.

  Nobody knows anything, Dryke grumbled to himself as the Saab flashed across the center boundary and floated in, nose high, over the end of the runway. An old story. Getting very old. Jeremiah finds us with our backs turned, hits us, and then slips away clean. Very clean. The son of a bitch.

  Spinning wheels touched rushing pavement, and Dryke swung the skylink console back out of the way. Six times they’ve hit us. Six times I’ve had to pick through the mess they left. The red dye in the water in the Munich offices. The data center fire in Kasigau. The launch laser that blew up at Prainha. Never anyone killed. No victims except Allied Transcon. No enemies for the friends of the Earth.

  The Saab rolled to an open slot in the bunkerlike hangar, and a blue corpsec flyer scooted up alongside. At the controls was the local chiefsec, a bird-necked, mild-tempered man named Jim Francis. I don’t like always being one step behind, Dryke thought gruffly as he climbed down from the cabin. I don’t like being outsmarted. How do they do it? Who the hell are they?

  It was unlikely that any answers awaited him at the disabled gate, but Dryke was obliged to go through the motions. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said with a nod.

  “Sorry you had to make the trip,” Francis said. “We’ve got the tanker sealed, and we’re about ready to lift it out of there. But there’s roughly thirty-five hundred gallons of a very nasty soup soaking into the ground, and that’s going to be a whole hell of a lot harder to deal with.”

  Dryke nodded gravely. “Let’s take a look.”

  Running parallel to the highway it had largely replaced, the Harris County tramway was a concrete ribbon on stilts, a fifth as wide as the fifty-seat silver and blue cars which skimmed atop it. From below, it looked fragile, the cars precariously balanced like eggs on a knife-edge. But inside, the ride was stable and smooth, even as the slope-nosed tram car left the main track to Galveston and slowed sharply for the T-spur to Allied Transcon.

  Christopher McCutcheon took advantage of the slower speed and his seat on the right side of the tram car to peer out the window at the odd congregation by the main gate, a quarter mile away. He was not the only one to do so. The half-filled cabin grew noticeably quieter for the forty seconds or so that the gate was in view.

  They saw two bright yellow mobile cranes standing outside the barbican, their long booms making an X in silhouette against the sky. Two red Flight Services trucks sat at odd angles on the side slopes; Christopher thought one might be a foamer, but he wasn’t sure. A pale blue HazMat van blocked the middle of the bridge, and most of the figures walking among the vehicles seemed to be wearing full-body environmental suits.

  “Looks like somebody missed the runway,” he said conversationally to the round-faced woman in the adjoining seat.

  “Didn’t you hear the news?” she asked indignantly. “It was those Homeworld people. They tried to blow up the shuttle. What’s wrong with them? Don’t they realize what they’re doing?”

  It was then that Christopher noted the binoculars dangling from the woman’s neck. Forewarned, he limited his reply to a sympathetic smile; there was no such thing as a brief conversation with a starhead. He’d learned that lesson very early in his three-month tenure with the Project.

  When the tram car came to a stop a few moments later, Christopher watched to see where the woman went. As he expected, she passed by the escalators to the ground level and the base entrance and continued down the platform toward the observation area. By the time Christopher reached the bottom, she had joined the other starheads at the plex, peering out toward the field where a barrel-bodied ESA Pelican sat being readied for launch to orbit.

  Not too surprisingly, the line at the staff gate pass-through had stalled, since—always vigilant after the fact—corpsec was not only checking for employee IDs but checking everyone’s ID through the verifier. While he waited, Christopher found himself thinking about the woman on the tram.

  There was something simultaneously delightful and pathetic about the starheads. They knew the launch schedule for the center’s one LTO runway better than most Allied staff, knew the difference between a Pelican and its near-twin Martin Rendezvous, knew the nine satlands and the governor of the Mars colony and the latest news and gossip from Ur. They came to the ob deck at Johnson Field as a solemn pilgrimage and then turned into wishful, wistful children, noses pressed to the window on a rainy day.

  Christopher had no doubt that the woman and everyone else on the ob platform that morning owned a selection option for Memphis. Those who were old enough had probably owned one for Ur as well, that prized certificate which had been so proudly hung on so many walls when there was no Homeworld to prick at the conscience. Back when being a pioneer candidate conferred status, when even those with no intention of leaving wanted to be able to say, “I could have gone if I wanted to.”

  Things were different now. It had been years since Christopher had seen an option certificate on display, and mentioning Allied Transcon, Memphis, or the pioneers among strangers had become a good way to invite a passionate harangue. But nothing had changed for the starheads, except that Ur was already gone. One down, four to go.

  Christopher had every reason to doubt that the woman or any of her peers would be selected for Memphis or any of the ships to follow. Anyone that set on leaving Earth would have done so already if they had any skills to offer. There were 200,000 people living off-planet—Technica and Aurora Sanctuary, Takara and Horizon, the Mars colony and Heinlein City on Mare Serenitatis. The starheads were obsessed with dreams they could never fulfill, and so came to touch with their eyes the only piece of that dream they could reach.

  Or was it that they viewed the satlands, the Moon, even Mars as shabby substitutes for the only goal that mattered? If so, Christopher did not understand their desperate longing. It did not seem either real or realistic, and he could not quite stop himself from seeing the starheads as fundamentally irrational.

  But then, he felt like a curiosity himself sometimes. When he had come to Allied Transcon from the San Francisco offices of DIANNA, it was almost like
being an agnostic entering a community of believers. He had come there for the work, a chance to be part of the most ambitious library science project ever, the Memphis, unabridged hyperlibrary. They had come to join a cause.

  A curiosity. Oh, he knew where he had been on June 28, 2083, just like everyone else—watching Ur’s long-delayed departure, the unimaginable power of its superconducting metal-ion engines driving it slowly up out of the solar system toward Epsilon Eridani. But he did not own an option for Memphis, would not have even if his father had not so clearly disapproved. It was such a long road, so few would be chosen, and the rewards that awaited the selected seemed so empty.

  He just did not understand—any more than he had understood why, two months after Ur left, one Deryn Falconer had abandoned Oregon, her husband, and a fifteen-year-old nurture-son named Christopher for the satland called Aurora Sanctuary.

  The environmental suit stank of chemwash and disinfectant, leaving Mikhail Dryke to wonder cynically whether he was really any better off inside it than he would have been going bare-skin. In any case, he was glad to retreat at last beyond the hazard boundary with Dr. Francis, endure the pummeling spray-down, and then strip off the heavy helmet and breather.

  “They got us good,” Dryke said, mopping the perspiration from his face.

  The local security chief nodded glumly. “My site engineer says three months to clean it all out and open for business again.”

  “Nonsense,” Dryke said. “Run a bypass right across there,” he said, pointing and swinging his finger in an arc, “cut a triple gate through the fence, and you can be back in business in a week, flyers only. Nothing wrong with the guard station—you can cover the bypass as well as you covered the drive.”

  “Which wasn’t very well, as it turned out,” Francis said. “Do you really want us to go back to sentries and turnpikes? The human factors—”

  “Yes, I really do,” Dryke said shortly.

  “We can’t leave the spill. They’re telling me we’ve got dioxin, chloroaniline—”

  “Don’t leave it. Seal it. Use the old Kansas Technologies method. You inject the whole site with a neutralizing binder—blend it in with augers—and stabilize the spill in place. We had to use it after the fire at the plastics plant in Lyons a year back. Talk to your site engineer. He ought to know who to bring in.”

  “People are going to worry about contamination.”

  “Then you’ll have to educate them. We’re not going to rely on the north entrance and the tram for three months. We’re not going to let him put us under siege.” Dryke pulled at the neck band of his environmental suit. “I want out of this thing. And then I want a tank so I can face-to-face with the Director.”

  “I’ll get someone to run you back—”

  “You run me back. You can’t do anything here now. This mess belongs to your engineer now.”

  The faintly sheepish look on Dr. Francis’s face betrayed him. “All right.”

  But Dryke had already turned and started down the drive toward the flyer. Francis hurried after, the environmental suit squeaking as one surface rubbed against another. “Mr. Dryke—”

  “What?”

  “There’s people here that need to know. Should we have hammered the tanker on the ramp? Should we have used the rockets?”

  Dryke stopped and shook his head. “You couldn’t,” he said bluntly. “That’s where he beat us. You want to do something useful, stop posturing and beating your breast and start figuring out what other ways he’s come up with to fuck us over.”

  One moment, the other half of the holo tank was dark, except for the yellow eye of the imager. The next, Hiroko Sasaki sat facing him, seated cross-legged and straight-backed in a large fixed armchair identical to Dryke’s.

  The chair made the president of the Pioneers Division look diminutive, but Dryke knew better than to let that deceive him. Sasaki was more of Takara, her birthplace, than Japan, her parents’—an efficient, demanding, uncompromising administrator with tremendous personal energy and intensity. What else she was she kept to herself. Dryke had worked for her for seven years and still could not say if he liked her.

  “Yes, Mikhail.”

  “Reporting on the Houston incident.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It was a blind spot, not a system failure. The tractor was grabbed from a yard in Angleton no more than an hour before the hit, and the report got screened out by a remora somewhere between the cops, Shell, and the NVR. Probably they picked up the tanker in a side-of-the-road swap, dropped the stall screen in it at the same time. We’ve got the box. Black market, police version—take maybe fifteen minutes to install. Nothing on it, but I’m having it shipped to the labs down there just in case.

  “The jammer was a float and went to the bottom in five hundred feet of water. They could have dropped it anytime in the last ten days—you wouldn’t want to take a land flyer out over the Gulf, but you could. I’d like authority to send the Gulf rescue unit’s submersible after it.”

  “Given.”

  “Thank you,” Dryke said with a nod. “Without it, we don’t have much to put into the puzzle. The tractor’s navigator is scrambled. DIANNA’S still backing and filling on the penetration. Sanctuary is being close-mouthed as usual.”

  “Do you have an estimate of how many Homeworld activists were involved?”

  “On a principal-contribution analysis, six or seven. Physically? It could have been as few as one.”

  “Jeremiah.”

  “You might as well say so.”

  “You continue to reject the opinion of your counterterrorism subdirector that Jeremiah is a figurehead, representing no real person.”

  “I do,” Dryke said. “Homeworld has many hands. But it thinks with one mind.”

  “Perhaps. See that your prejudice on this matter doesn’t lead you down false trails,” Sasaki said. “As to this incident, what prospect is there for locating the ‘hands’ responsible?”

  Dryke shook his head, frowning. “I hesitate to promise. They work very clean. But they can’t be everywhere without leaving footprints. They’ve been forced to use more and more hardware. We’ll go back along that path and try to find out where it’s coming from.”

  “That seems to be where they are most vulnerable.”

  “Yeah. Except they know that, too. It’s going to be an inch at a time, with no help from outside. We took a hit. We’ll take another, and another, and another, like as not. But one of these times I’m going to get there first. I promise you that, Hiroko. One of these days I’ll bring you Jeremiah’s head.”

  CHAPTER 2

  —GUA—

  “… for the Homeworld.”

  The ESA Pelican Silesia sat at the top of the ramp at the west end of Johnson Field’s runway 1E like an overladen and aging beast of burden. Its twenty-four massive tires were spread wide by their million-pound burden, the delta wings and fat fuselage streaked and stained from five hundred previous missions. Four trunklike umbilicals extended up into Silesia’s underbelly from the ramp, as though the freight shuttle belonged in a hospital ward rather than on the flight line.

  The notion that in a few minutes it would be in orbit was as ludicrous as the prospect that a corpulent, comatose man might leap out of bed to perform a breathtaking pas de bourrée. Yet that was exactly what was to happen. Like its namesake, the Pelican was a different bird in the air than on the ground. Aloft, it was stable and tireless, even graceful, equal to both the leap of faith and the leap to space.

  In the shuttle’s cabin, the three-man crew laughed and joked among themselves as the autopilot counted down through the preflight checklist. Flight controllers in the tower warned all air traffic away from the field and from Silesia’s flight path with the call “LTO red, LTO red, five-mile interdiction now in effect.” Around the perimeter of the field, suppression teams checked their screens and weapons one last time.

  A half mile from where the Pelican waited, Dola Martinez waited patiently on the obse
rvation platform for the launch. Nearly a dozen waited with her, watching the runway for the first sign. When a puff of white gas appeared under the shuttle’s wing and quickly dissipated in the hot breeze, there was a muted cheer. With binoculars, televiewers, or merely squinting with eyes sun-shielded by a hat brim, they watched as Silesia’s umbilicals detached themselves one by one and retracted below ground.

  But three late arrivals to the platform showed only cursory interest in the shuttle. Dola had noticed them, two men and a girl, none older than twenty, and marked them as virgins—idle curious, drawn there by what they thought was chance. The two men took seats high on the bleachers; the girl lingered near the entry, looking back down the platform toward the tramway, as though she were expecting someone. Just like virgins to keep themselves apart, uncomfortable with the camaraderie of the regulars.

  Dola remembered her first time, thirty-eight years ago in Florida, at the then-verdant Cape. Dragged there by the family to visit the museums, and remaining at her father’s insistence that they witness a fortuitously scheduled launch. It was the most inconsequential flight possible, a robot heavy-lift full of specialty metals bound for Horizon, then under construction. And yet, watching it—no, feeling it—roar into the cloud-dotted sky on a triple column of fire, she truly grasped for the first time where it was bound, and understood what that meant.

  “It’s rolling!” someone cried, and Dola forgot the virgins. The stay cables had been released, and the Pelican lumbered down the ramp, gravity providing the initial acceleration. At the foot of the ramp, the idling transonic engines came to life, the boiling schlieren in the transparent exhaust the first clue, a thunderous roar the confirmation.

  There was applause, there were tears. Dola felt her own heart soaring as the Pelican rumbled ever faster down the runway, half bouncing and half floating as it teetered at the balance between lift and gravity. She lowered her binoculars and watched with naked eyes as Silesia rose and the ground fell away, ten meters, a hundred, the massive landing gear vanishing swiftly to trim the shuttle’s ungainly profile.