“Oh? What’s that?”
“If you asked her to. She’ll do anything to demonstrate to you the mistake she thinks you made.”
I grinned, feeling a bit more comfortable. “No chance of that, of course.”
“Of course,” Dumonia agreed.
The torpedoes had been rerouted to Emyasail, where they were supposed to be all along, and my devices were ready. Confident now of Sanda’s complete cooperation, we went down one evening to scout out the place and found it similar in layout to Hroyasail. It would be, I told myself, considering it was built by the same parent corporation at the same time for the same purposes.
Of course there were guards all over the place, and all sorts of electronic security as well, but it was oriented toward the warehouses.
Sanda, like all Cerberans, knew how to swim. When you lived in giant trees with an eternal ocean always underneath, that was one thing you absolutely learned from the start.
We were using just basic wet suits and snorkels. I wanted no giveaways should there be underwater devices for picking up sounds like mechanical rebreathers or an underwater cycle. As a check, we donned the suits and, starting from more than two hundred meters beyond the docks, actually swam up to and under the boats, checking out the lay of the land. We found some small sensors along the docks themselves, but not only was there nothing to keep us from the bottom of the boats but the area was floodlit so they were nicely silhouetted.
But then why should Laroo suspect sabotage? What would be gained? It was sure to be discovered. But even if it wasn’t, it would just slow him down slightly—he could get boats from other places, if need be. The only irreplaceable stuff, the organic robots, would come in from space to his new landing pad. Anybody else would be more interested in the warehouses, which were heavily guarded, than in the boats—since, any good security officer would reason, why would anybody attack them? Not only expendable, but you’d lose the cargo to the depths. Nothing to gain.
They were wrong.
The next night Sanda and I returned, this time with the bag of little goodies I had made up from Otah’s materials and other sources. We easily and silently affixed the devices not only to the gunboats but to several of the biggest trawlers as well.
The work went so easily, in fact, that Sanda was moie than a little disappointed. It was exhausting, yes, but not thrilling. It was in fact as easy as writing a letter.
The devices triggered at different points, and I arranged for them to be triggered from our boats when we came within range during routine operations. Nobody on our boats knew, of course, that they were doing anything like that, but that didn’t matter. The one thing I couldn’t control was when those defective torpedoes would be loaded and used. I could only give them an intermittently bad bork problem that would cause torpedoes to be used up at a fearful rate. Otherwise, all I could do was go about my normal routine and wait it out. I wouldn’t even hear the horror stories. I just hoped that the aftermath of their troubles would, otherwise unbidden, wash right over me. It was the easiest, if least certain, way. The best way of doing what you want to do, of course, is to create a situation wherein your enemy invites you, even commands you, to do precisely what you wanted to do in the first place—which was the plot here. If that worked out, then the solution of how to get into Laroo’s fortress would work out, too. The easiest way into an impregnable fortress is to be invited in by the owner.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Facts About Myself, Some Psych Work, and Fruition
During the waiting period, Dylan began her sessions with Dumonia—and so did I, since convincing her that I loved her no matter what incarnation was at the heart of the whole thing. It was true. I did love her, and if frontier wife was her new goal, then that was fine with me. I wanted her to be happy, and as Dr. Dumonia had noted, under the present circumstances she was not. What was intended was to give her a sense of security—which in its own way was somewhat ironic. I was arranging to kill Wagant Laroo and at the same time trying to make Dylan secure.
What was really interesting about the process was that during a few sessions some of her visions of me and my earlier caper slipped out, as inevitably they would. Although I was paying Dumonia enough to ensure he kept his medical ethics about him, I was more than slightly amused when I discovered that he totally misread this one as another of Dylan’s romantic fantasies in which I had somehow became involved. That computer fraud scheme had been so nutty and unbelievable that even her psych refused to believe it. That, of course, had been precisely why I had done it the way l had.
Naturally, during the process, I had to undergo a bit myself, but I wasn’t really worried. My early training and conditioning automatically switched in under such probes, giving the psychs whatever information I wanted them to have. My probing also wasn’t deep, but was only directed toward my feelings about Dylan and so I was on relatively safe ground. At the end of the second session with the psych and his machines, however, I got one shock.
“Did you know you have two surface-planted command impulses?” He asked me. “Been to a psych before?”
“No,” I answered, slightly worried, “I know of one that should be there. Basic data about Cerberus. It was a, new process they were trying with me to help people get acclimated.”
He nodded. “We got that. Some of it, anyway. Quite thorough. But there’s another.”
I frowned and leaned forward. “Another?”
He nodded. “Actually, as I said, two. Two commands, in addition to the briefing.”
I was beginning to get worried, not only because I didn’t know what these were—all my agent conditioning would be beyond these machines—but also because they might betray me and who I really was. “Do you know what they are?”
“One is treasonous,” he replied, sounding as objective as he did when discussing mundane matters. “It appears to be a command to kill Wagant Laroo if you can. Actually more of a reinforcement—designed to make you detest him enough to kill him. Very nice job, really. I wonder if every new exile is being sent in with this sort of conditioning? Still, I wouldn’t worry about it. The readouts state that you’re really not violent or self-destructive. Though this impulse is enough to ensure that you’re never going to love the state and its glorious leader, it’s no stronger than your common impulses, which would be to damp down the actuality. We’d all like to kill somebody at one time or another, but few of us do. The impulse is no stronger than that. Unless you have a specific pre-Cerberan reason for wanting to do him in? Revenge?”
“No,” I responded smoothly. “Nothing like that. I never met the man, never even heard of him until I was told I was being sent here.”
“All right. But that makes the second one all the more puzzling.”
“Huh?”
“Basically it boils down to an instruction to call your office every so often when the opportunity’s offered you, then forget all about doing so. Do you understand that?”
Instantly I did understand, but the trouble was finding a way to explain it away, all the while mentally kicking myself for not thinking of this before. The sons of bitches! Of course! How could they track me, know what I was doing on Cerberus? The organic transmitter would cease functioning the moment I switched bodies. The answer was simple and staring me in the face, but I’d been too cocky to think of it before.
There were other agents here somewhere. Probably local people, perhaps with something they wanted from outside, or perhaps exiles with close friends, family, something to lose back home. Blackmailable, to a degree. How many times had one of these come to me, perhaps when I was walking alone or on the road, and told me to call the office? Lead me, then, to a transceiver of some sort so I could send my doings up to my other self, sitting there off the Warden system. Done it, then promptly forgot it.
“I think I understand,” I told him. “My—ah, previous activities, well, they involved some complex dealings and some people in high places. These people need certain—codes, basically,
to continue to enjoy what I no longer can. This, I think, is a form of blackmail.”
He smiled blandly at me. “You’re a plant, aren’t you? A Confederacy agent. Oh, don’t look startled. You’re not the first, nor the last. Don’t worry, I won’t rat on you. In fact it wouldn’t matter much if I did, all things considered. Your profile indicates you are highly independent, and that Cerberus, and particularly Dylan, has changed you, as something always does. They keep trying though.”
I sat back and sighed. “How did you know?”
“From the start—Qwin Zhang. Woman’s name. Woman’s body, when you came down. But you’re no woman. You’ve never been one, except for that brief and quite brilliant cover entrance. There are differences in the brain scans between males and females. Not ones you’d really notice, but not only am I an expert, I’m also on a world where such swapping goes on all the time, so I see all sorts of switches. Remember the physiological differences between the sexes. The brain governs them, and while new patterns might emerge, there are always traces of the old. Not in your case, though. So from your appearance here, I infer that the Confederacy’s finally figured out how to do what we can do naturally.”
“Not exactly,” I told him. “The attrition rate’s high. But they’re working on it.”
“Fascinating. They’ll have to suppress the knowledge, you know, except perhaps for the leadership and essential people. They’ll have to—such switching would disrupt their society enormously, perhaps beyond repair.” He smiled at the thought. “Well, it’s no big thing, since the Confederacy still has the unsolvable problem. Anybody capable enough to really cause damage as an agent that they send to a Warden world changes into one of the Warden Diamond’s best and most dangerous citizens. Tell me, do you really intend to kill Laroo?”
“I should kill you,” I noted icily. “You’re the most dangerous man on this planet to me. More than Laroo.”
“But you won’t,” he responded confidently. “For one thing, that would add lots of complications to whatever you’re doing now. For another, it would draw attention to you, even if you got away with it, since you’d be linked to me by your scheduled visits. I doubt if a man like you could stand being under a microscope right now. And finally, I think you realize that I couldn’t care less if you bump off Laroo, or settle down and enjoy life, or take over the whole damned place. If you did, it’d be a change, anyway. You must believe me, Zhang, when I tell you that you’re the seventh agent I’ve met and I haven’t turned one in yet. You surely must realize by now that my own fatal psychological flaw is that I’m a romantic revolutionary anarchist with no guts, but with a taste for the good life. If you weren’t sure I would stay bought, you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place.”
I relaxed, in spite of my old instincts. He was right, of course—and it was unlikely that I could do anything but trust him. This was a smart man who’d protect himself.
“Can you remove that ‘call the office’ command? At least the part about forgetting I did it?”
“Sadly, no. Not with what I have. However, both commands are simple enough that they could be canceled out.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Well, using the level and intensity of the patterns I have here, I could lay on a new set of commands of absolutely equal strength. For example, I could lay on one that said you liked Wagant Laroo and had good feelings whenever his name was mentioned. This would negate the other. If I phrased the command exactly right, you’d wind up in a love-hate relationship that would cancel. As for the other—well, I could give an equal command that you will not use a transceiver for off-planet communication. Same effect. You’d still go when called, but you wouldn’t tell ’em anything.”
“I’m not too concerned about those,” I told him. “At least not now. Later I might want to have that call command negated; right now it might be useful, although I’m not sure how. But I want to remember doing it, and what I did. Any tricks there?”
“After the fact, perhaps. After all, it’s all there, in your memory. You’re just barred from consciously recollecting it. I suspect that with a very strong neutral field under a psych converter, together with a hypnotic series, for example, we might be able to get the information out of you and recorded. When you awoke you still wouldn’t be able to remember it, but you could then examine the recording and get the data no matter what”
“All right,” I told him. “Let’s do it.”
The trick worked, after a fashion. I really don’t know what is being transmitted even now, you bastards, but I now know how it’s done and by whom. And how damnably obvious the whole thing was once the truth was out.
Who better to have such a spatial link with you than old fat, friendly Otah? An electronics shop with black-market connections. No wonder Otah could get whatever he needed in the way of bootleg gear! That’s how you pay him, right? Very clever. I should have thought of it as soon as I figured out that you had something to do with my being sent to Medlam, so close to Laroo’s Island, in the first place. Medlam, and associated with Tooker, a corporation well suited to my talents. And waiting there, where you knew I’d eventually go, was Otah.
Well, it didn’t matter now. In fact it helped. Now at least I knew who—and when.
Three weeks had passed since my dirty deeds at Emyasail, and I was beginning to feel nervous. Something, I felt sure, should have happened by now. I began to turn my mind to more direct, less devious, but more risky alternatives.
The one bright spot was Dylan, whose treatment was really helping. I’ll say this for Dumonia: although he is crazy as a loon and more amoral and cynical than I am, he really knows his stuff. I began to believe that in his own field he was one of the most brilliant men I had ever known. This is not to say that Dylan was anything like back to normal, but she was more comfortable with herself and with me, more like a real human being, and she seemed happier. Dumonia explained that he could do a lot, but the key breakthrough eluded him, the point of her own insecurity regarding me. It was a wall he couldn’t get past, a wall erected of her deep-rooted conviction that without the pity angle I would not like her as she wanted to be and would tire of her and leave. She was very wrong, of course, but her fear was deeply rooted in her understanding of the culture from which I came and the culture of Cerberus in which she had been raised—cultures minimizing close personal attachments and emotional factors. In the Cerberan culture you held your power and position by the favors owed you or by blackmail or by some other hook. So the idea of such things not being necessary was a cultural gap that seemed impossible to bridge. In reversed circumstances, I could see myself having the same hang-ups.
“If she weren’t under judgment, there are things that might be used,” Dumonia told me. “Unorthodox, maybe dangerous things, but quite effective. But as long as she’s trapped in that body we’re stuck.”
That thought depressed me a bit, since I most wanted the old Dylan back, a partner I could deal with as an equal, almost the part of me I’d gotten used to having. It was peculiar that I, the consummate loner, born and bred to be above such things and never before touched by them, should suddenly have this need, almost a craving, for someone else. I instinctively knew that it was my Achilles’ heel. Still, the fact that I had these weaknesses, didn’t matter to me as much as it had, and there was also the corner of my mind that said that everyone, even me at my old top form, had flaws and weaknesses anyway. Nobody was immune. The important thing was to recognize your own and get to know them so that perhaps they could also work for you.
A few days later, when I’d just about given up, my scam paid off. I was visited in midmorning at my Hroyasail office by a big, burly man whose dark eyes indicated an intelligence his general appearance belied.
“I’m Hurl Bogen,” he introduced himself, offering his hand, which I shook, then gestured for him to have a seat.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Bogen?”
“I’m the security coordinator for Chairman Laroo,” he
told me, and my heart almost stopped. This was either very good or bad news. “You know he has an island resort south of here?”
I nodded. “I’m afraid I’ve even taken a vicarious look at it from one of our boats,” I told him honestly. If he didn’t already know that he should have. “Just out of curiosity.”
He grinned. “Yeah, lots of folks do. I don’t blame ’em and I don’t worry about it. Basically, though, we’ve run into a big problem with a project we’re working on over there and we need your help. We’ve contracted with Emyasail to keep steady supplies coming and going to and from the island, and it’s worked out fine until a couple of weeks ago. We got just creamed by borks—never saw so many of ’em in my life. We got most of ’em, but they did a pretty good job on Emyasail’s fleet. We’re down to a dozen trawlers, all smaller types, and just one gunboat.”
I feigned shock. “But hell, how many borks could you have? Those were good crews, and we haven’t had any problems of that sort. Matter of fact, we’ve been pretty damned peaceful around here the last few weeks, with only one or two reported and only one actual engagement”
He nodded ruefully. “No wonder. They were all down our way. The bio boys say that something attracted them down there, possibly a run of some chemical in subsurface currents. Rotten luck.”
I held my breath. “How many people were lost?”
“We were pretty lucky there, although we did lose a dozen or so. Luck of the job, really. You should know that. But the main thing is, we no longer have enough boats to meet our supply needs. We’ve limped along with what we had for a while, using some air supply for the emergency stuff, but we really need some boats. Not trawlers—we’re commandeering some big freighters now—but gunboats. We need a full four to make it out to the island okay.”
“I can understand that,” I replied, “but I’ve only got the four here myself.”
“We need one of ’em,” he told me matter-of-factly. “We’re also pulling one each from two other companies along the coast here. You’ll have to make do with three.” It wasn’t a request but a command.
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