Haze

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Roget couldn’t see that much beyond the three men who sat around an old table, except that there was a solid wooden wall on the west end of the chamber. That didn’t mean there wasn’t another hidden doorway or passage, not the way the Saint conspirators seemed to favor them. After a moment he recognized two of the three—Parsens and Sorensen. The third looked like the single image of William Dane he’d been able to find.

  Roget listened.

  “… tried the antidotes with Brendan, but by the time we could get to him he was already gone…”

  Antidotes? Roget had made sure that his wrist-dart had only used paralytic darts, not combat darts that immediately shocked the nervous system into a fatal shutdown. Had Smith had allergies? But if he had, why had the others been prepared with an antidote … unless they were waiting for a security raid?

  “Mitchell… he said he’d be here later. Something came up in his ward…”

  “Something always comes up in his ward, especially if there’s anything possibly inconvenient to do … or decide … unless he knows someone else will do it…”

  “ChinoFed has to be the new E&W monitor … no one else new in town…”

  “… early thirties and a temp appointment… says FSA to me…”

  “… could be a deep agent they activated…”

  “… wouldn’t have two of them here. They don’t think we’re that big a problem…”

  “No … just think that the only good Danite is a dead Danite…” Danites? It took a moment before Roget recalled the religious terrorist organization that had been agitating for local regional rule, based on “cultural differences.”

  “They’ll see.”

  “They might see too soon. They got Brendan, and Tyler says that there’s a Federation inspector at DeseretData already with a military escort. They’ve found the armory.”

  “Not everything was there.”

  “Enough, and enough for proof.”

  “Only against Brendan.”

  “… won’t stop them…”

  “Do we move everything out of here?”

  “Where do we move it? And why? Except for some personal weapons…”

  “The FSA can claim anything they find is illegal. You know that…”

  “Too bad Marni’s stuff doesn’t always work…”

  “… converts some…”

  Converts some? Chemical conversion? There was no way that could work. In any case, Roget didn’t dare wait too long, and he’d heard enough. He lifted his arm and fired the first dart, then the second. Both Sorsensen and Parsens were convulsing before Dane leapt to his feet and whirled toward the panel door, his hand reaching for the nerve shredder on the table.

  It took Roget two darts to get a clean shot, but Dane struggled, then collapsed.

  Roget pushed aside the panel and hurried toward the fallen men. All three were twitching, and Sorensen began to gasp.

  Antidotes? Roget searched Sorensen quickly but couldn’t find anything resembling an inhaler, a syringe, or an injector. He moved to Dane, but found nothing there. Parsens had an injector of some sort, and Roget immediately pressed it against Sorensen’s bare neck.

  Slowly, the gasping stopped—except both other men had begun to wheeze. Abruptly, Parsens shuddered and stopped breathing. Then, so did Dane.

  Roget stood, slowly.

  Had all of them been death-sensitized to Federation paralytics? Why?

  So they couldn’t reveal the extent of the conspiracy or the underground—the Danites? He turned toward the west wall… too late. “I wouldn’t move if I were you.”

  Roget finished turning, slowly, to face the speaker, standing before an open door on the west end of the underground room. The one side of the door matched the paneling, one reason why Roget hadn’t noticed it.

  Marni Sorensen stood there, wearing motion-detecting goggles, with a nerve shredder trained on him. “Stay right there, Keir. You may be in a camosuit, but there’s no one else quite so tall as you in town.”

  “I wouldn’t think of moving. But I do have a question for you before you shred me. What was that business with the false memory?”

  “It wasn’t false. It just a chunk of memory. Not yours, but one picked to give you a chance to understand. To learn what’s really important in life. At worse, it would disorient you. We would have preferred that you understood. Live converts are far better than dead FSA infiltrators.”

  The whole idea of memories inserted into his brain chilled Roget, but he couldn’t dwell on that. Not at the moment. “Whatever it was, it killed an innocent photographer…” That was a guess on Roget’s part.

  “He had the same chance you did. To understand—”

  “And become an unwilling convert?” Another guess on Roget’s part.

  “It doesn’t work that way. It just opens you to understand. He was another Federation spy who couldn’t understand…”

  “He was just an observer.”

  “Just an observer? Like you’re just an E&W monitor.” Her laugh was short and harsh. “It really is too bad you won’t get to relive the rest of the memories. You might understand, then, you traitor…”

  “Traitor to what…?”

  “I couldn’t expect you to be loyal to Deseret, but you could have been loyal to the United States…”

  “There hasn’t been a United States in more than a thousand years,” Roget protested.

  “That’s right. That’s because of cowardly traitors like you, knuckling under to the Sinese to keep yourselves comfortable…”

  “What’s back in the other room, besides more geothermal power units?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She lifted the barrel of the nerve shredder fractionally, so that it pointed directly at his chest.

  Roget stretched his arms slightly, bringing them forward just slightly. “What’s the point? You’ve already killed one Federation agent, and you’re about to kill another. For what? You don’t have the funds or the resources to take on the Federation. Your hidden armory is already under Federation control.”

  “You don’t understand, do you? Faith and knowledge will always triumph. It takes both. The United States thought will and skill and knowledge was enough. It wasn’t. The Republic of Faith and the Islamists thought faith was sufficient. It wasn’t.”

  “Marni…” Roget said quietly. “No one else is coming. The Danites will lose. You won’t get rescued.”

  “Neither will you. The Federation’s weakness is that it doesn’t ever send enough operatives to handle situations. You’re more expendable than I am.” Marni Sorensen smiled coolly as she kept the nerve shredder pointed at his midsection.

  Roget almost felt sorry for her… and her ignorance. “That’s its strength as well.” He stretched, swinging his arms together and locking his fingers.

  The dart took her in the eye, and she stood there, shivering, trying to press the stud on the shredder before it slipped from her fingers and clunked dully on the crimson carpet.

  “… you still have to live with the memories … understand … you will…” She shuddered, then collapsed into a heap, twitching.

  Roget hurried toward her, then bent down and rifled through her singlesuit, searching for an injector that might hold an antidote. There wasn’t one. He rushed through the open hidden doorway to the room from which she had come—and halted. The south side of the long chamber was filled with equipment, including more microfabbers and other devices he didn’t immediately recognize, but the north side was bright and spotless… and looked like a small but equipment-intensive laboratory of some sort. Roget hurried through the laboratory, opening drawers, cabinets, and cases, but amid all the equipment, while he saw a case of unused and unopened injectors, he didn’t see, or couldn’t find* anything that resembled a loaded injector.

  By the time he returned, empty-handed, Marni was dead.

  Roget looked down at her still form, then shook his head.

  He checked Bensen Sorensen, but the innkeeper and Danite was stil
l breathing. Roget used a pair of restraints on Sorensen’s hands and feet, although the dart wasn’t likely to wear off before the Federation inspector appeared.

  Then he walked upstairs and out to the studio, where he used the comm system and his personal monitor to burst-send an urgent report. The reply was immediate: Inspector and team on the way. Vacate and do not break cover.

  Roget slipped his monitor back into its case, then moved toward the door. Marni had been the only one who’d actually seen him, if in the nightsuit, but his cover was still broken, no matter what his controller said. Still, he wasn’t about to argue. Not where he was.

  He hurried back out through the sliding panel, leaving it open, and up the stairs, and then to the studio and up the ramp.

  Likely as not, more than a few members of the Saint Quorum and Presidency would end up vanishing over the weeks and months ahead. Then again, they might not, but they weren’t his problem. Despite what had just happened, he wasn’t an eliminator … unless he was threatened. He was just the one who uncovered the problems and started the resolution.

  He told himself that again as he opened the door at the east end of Parsen’s studio, then stepped outside, leaving it unlocked this time.

  He took three steps out into the full morning sunlight before a wave— or a cloud—of dizziness brought him to a halt, the red rocks and stones to the east of him swirling like solid red clouds.

  He staggered backward, then sat down on the bottom step, just before the blackness rose up and drowned him.

  21

  21 MARIS 1811 p. d.

  That Monday night, Roget sat on the sofa in his guesthouse quarters, sipping what amounted to barely drinkable formulated lager. He looked at the projection of Hildegarde. The cheerful little dachshund helped lighten his mood … a little.

  “All you have to worry about is being loved and fed, little dog…”

  Hildegarde continued to look expectantly out from the projection.

  “That’s the thing about dogs. You’re always happy to see the ones you love, no matter what, and that’s definitely not true of people.” Roget knew that Muffin, his childhood companion, had been that way, but he’d been too young to fully appreciate her faithfulness and affection until long after she died. Was Hildegarde a way of reminding him? Quite possibly, but even from the projection, he could tell that Hildegarde was different from Muffin. There was a hint of seriousness, determination…

  He laughed. Much as he enjoyed the projection, he was also projecting what he felt. As his soft laugh died away in the lowered lights, he turned his thoughts from dogs to his own situation.

  He still hadn’t learned what the colonel really wanted, even if he would never directly request it—and that was a military assessment of Dubiety. Not that Roget hadn’t tried to find out more, but the entire Dubietan society made discovering and accurately assessing industrial, technological, and military capabilities difficult. He would have wagered that his estimations were accurate, but estimations didn’t matter to the FSA, not when the Mandarins wanted hard facts and evidence, as bureaucracies always did. His lack of such hard information would, of course, provide a perfect rationale for instituting military action against Dubiety, and that was most likely what the Federation wanted. What empire wanted rivals that might surpass it?

  The danger was that such rivals might already have surpassed it and that the Federation would refuse to see it. Like Midas of Lydia, for whom the oracles foretold the fall of a great empire, except it was his own.

  Roget shook his head, thinking back over the day.

  Once he and Lyvia had returned to Skeptos, she had taken her leave, right at the central square, and he had roamed through the city, heading more into the eastern sections, where he had found differing architectural styles, and a whole section that might have been lifted, if modernized, out of ancient Crete—at least as the archeological renderings he’d seen had depicted the ancient Minoan civilization.

  Along the way, he had also discovered an opera house, featuring The Wonder Age, a work he’d never heard of, not surprisingly, and an art museum, with a wide range of work, all of it seemingly good, if not great. He’d gravitated to the paintings, especially nautical scenes, and to one deep-space painting, depicting a huge ovoid craft, partly eclipsed by an asteroid, with a small grayish silvery sphere in the distant background. The color of the sphere was wrong for it to be Dubiety, as viewed from farther out in the solar system, unless the artist had taken liberties, which certainly wasn’t unlikely, but Roget hadn’t gotten that feeling.

  While it was difficult to determine the absolute size of the featureless ovoid spacecraft, a comparison to the detailed features of the asteroid suggested that the ovoid was far larger than any Federation battlecruiser and perhaps even as large as a small nickel-iron asteroid. Was it a planoforming craft? But if it happened to be, where had it been built, and where were the facilities for constructing it? And where was it now? The other aspect was the gallery in which the painting appeared. Everything else there was completely verifiably factual, scenes on Dubiety. There was even a scene of a cottage similar to those at Manor Farm Cottages, where a half-clad old woman sat in partial shade looking at a chessboard, while a bearded man wearing a formal jacket over a tattered singlesuit looked blankly beyond her from the other side of a table holding half-eaten food.

  He had not seen anything like Hildegarde in the Sunshine, and that had pleased him, he had to admit.

  He and Lyvia were scheduled to meet again with Selyni Hillis on Tuesday morning. Roget couldn’t say that he was looking forward to it, although he couldn’t have said why. Certainly he’d been treated with courtesy and given the freedom to go wherever he wanted—within certain limits. The problem was that he’d found little direct evidence of Dubiety’s technical or military capabilities within those limits. There were more than a few indirect indicators, such as the engineering and speed of the regional subtrans trains, the quiet sophistication of the planetary economic system and its ability to function as a social control, the capability of the Dubietans to focus energy so tightly that virtually no stray radiation escaped anywhere—not to mention the orbital shields of the planet itself.

  What these all signified—if his interpretations were correct—didn’t bode all that well for his mission, the Federation, and Roget himself. But… they weren’t proof either, and Roget had learned that the Federation tended to value hard proof, even proof that led to the wrong conclusions over accurate intuitive speculation—and that was without considering the hidden, or not-so-hidden, agendas.

  Dubiety certainly wasn’t all that it seemed. The carnivorous butterflies had been one indication, and the Manor Farm Cottages were another, both horrifying in more than one respect. The whole issue of choice nagged at him. The Dubietans seemed to have adopted an almost hands-off attitude—or one of minimal care—for those in their society who refused or who were unable to live by their society’s standards. Yet… all societies needed some way to deal with sociopaths and worse. And he couldn’t argue, not strongly anyway, against the idea that the antisocial and irresponsible shouldn’t live comfortably on the efforts of others or against the premise that meddling with people’s minds against their will was unacceptable. But they conditioned the inhabitants of the cottages against touching others, and that was certainly meddling.

  The odors had bothered him, as well, and he definitely wasn’t sure about the validity of the Omelas idea that the freedom of choice always created some misery. But then, didn’t every society create misery? Wasn’t the question only what kind of misery? And for whom?

  The Federation didn’t have cottages like those at Manor Farm, but it also didn’t tolerate those who didn’t accept the rules—and many of those dissenters died, and the rest certainly didn’t end up with the best of lives, especially with the way the Federation conditioned them. With what Roget had seen during his years with the FSA, he’d never been sure that the Federation had had many better options for social control,
given the range of human nature, passions, and beliefs. Yet the Dubietans had seemingly found a way to handle those without patrollers visible everywhere, but was that just because beneath their velvet-gloved surface lay an even more effective iron fist or an even more silent version of the FSA?

  Or had they found a way to use technology and economics less disruptively?

  He shook his head. He felt as though his thoughts were spinning in circles.

  Finally, he looked back to the projected image. “After all these years, I still wonder about your mistress, Hildegarde. She must have been quite someone for you to look for her so expectantly…”

  Hildegarde didn’t answer. She never had, but that didn’t matter. Roget still smiled.

  22

  26 LIANYU 6744 f. e.

  “Did I hear the mermaids singing each to each, as if I dared to wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach?”

  “Not until human voices wake you,” replied a warm and slightly husky voice.

  “What?” Roget blinked. He sat at a table set with glittering silver cutlery. Crystal water and wine goblets stood just beyond the three knives and the gold and black rimmed white bone china before him. The wine in the goblet was dark red, or looked to be in dim light, and the table linens were brilliant white. The light was soft, from a single candle in a crystal holder.

  Across from him at the table for two a woman smiled. Her mahogany red hair barely touched the collar of the pale green blouse that complemented the darker green jacket. She wore earrings, Roget realized, and her ears were pierced, something he’d not seen in years. There was the faintest trace of a warm smile on lips that were neither too full nor too thin.

  “Your mind is wandering again,” the woman said. “You misquote the old poets when you’re someplace else in your thoughts. What political chicanery or legislative legerdemain are you concocting now?”