The Fifth Quadrant

by C. J. Ryan

  The radicals of PAIN sought to exploit the popular displeasure with Dexta, but with little success, mainly owing to their anarchist agenda. Their ideological blinders seemed to prevent them from seeing that most people had little interest in overthrowing the established order. What they really wanted was simply a validated tax stamp or an export waiver, processed and delivered with minimum fuss and bother. PAIN’s recent campaign of attacks on Dexta facilities throughout Quad 4 (there had been two more incidents in the past week) had inspired no mass uprisings, only cries for better security.

  Still, whatever their political shortcomings, PAIN operatives had at least succeeded in laying their hands on a trove of plasma rifles that had supposedly been destroyed fifty-five years earlier. Now that they finally had access to the Archive Section’s computers (not to mention desks and chairs), Petra and Pug went to work with a will. Petra began tracking the rifles from their point of orgin in the munitions factories on Ostwelt, while Pug pored over the records of shippers, warehouses, and port facilities.

  It soon became apparent that the Quadrant’s data storage system had been designed for the convenience of contemporary bureaucrats, not for historical researchers in some nebulous future. Finding what they needed was neither quick nor easy. The computer could call up specific documents, but only by their titles and dates, which Petra and Pug didn’t know. They could zero in on a general place, date, or bureaucratic cubbyhole, but after that they mainly had to inspect every document in a file to see if it was what they were looking for. Eventually, they accumulated enough information to give the computer more specific instructions, and things began to go faster.

  The Mark IV plasma rifles, twenty-four thousand of them, were manufactured on Ostwelt by Thor’s Forge, Inc., a division of Imperium Ltd. The shipment earmarked for Savoy was lifted to the Ostwelt Orbital Station on June 22, 3163, loaded aboard a Trans-Empire freighter, and departed for New Cambridge on June 25. The freighter arrived at New Cambridge Orbital Station on August 2 and unloaded the rifles in an orbital warehouse owned by Stavros & Sons, Inc. On August 24, the rifles were loaded aboard another freighter as part of a larger shipment of military supplies, and departed for Savoy on August 27. Since no records were available from Savoy, it was unknown whether the shipment ever actually arrived there. The freighter should have reached Savoy on September 4. The Ch’gnth attacked on September 8. The freighter was not heard from again and was presumed to have been lost in the Ch’gnth attack. An insurance claim for the missing freighter was filed by its owner, B & Q Shipping, Inc., in March 3165, and the claim was paid in full by Centron Assurance, Ltd., a subsidiary of Servitor, in December 3167.

  “So we don’t know for sure that the rifles ever reached Savoy,” Pug pointed out that evening as they sat before a blazing fire in one of the industrial-sized stone hearths that populated the Ellison family home. “Maybe they didn’t.”

  “Which would make sense,” said Petra as she scrunched around a bit to get comfortable in Pug’s embrace. “Presumably, if they reached Savoy, they would have been destroyed, along with everything else.”

  “But the freighter never came back,” Pug said. “If it didn’t go to Savoy, where did it go, and why didn’t it return?”

  “There was a lot of other stuff in that shipment. Maybe if we knew what it was and where it came from, that might tell us something.”

  Pug nodded. “We’ll need to check records from the warehouse, and lading bills from the shipper. So we’ll have to track down B & Q Shipping and Stavros & Sons and go through their records.”

  “Also,” Petra said, “we should get the Dexta documentation dealing with this shipment. Who put the shipment together, who authorized it, who accepted it at New Cambridge, who cleared transfer to Savoy? Fifty-five years isn’t such a long time—some of the people who were involved with that shipment might still be around.”

  They fell silent for a while and listened to the crackling of the fire. Then Pug said, “I’ll tell you what worries me about all of this.”

  “Me too.”

  “Me too, what?” Pug wanted to know.

  “What worries you,” said Petra. “Me too. It worries me too.”

  “But you don’t even know what I was going to say.”

  Petra twisted around to get a better look at Pug. “Sure I do,” she said.

  “You mean it’s gotten to the point where you can read my thoughts?”

  Petra cackled like a villainess.

  “Okay, Ms. Know-It-All, tell me what I was thinking.”

  “You were thinking that you were worried about the fact that there were twenty-four thousand rifles in that shipment, plus all that other stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Pug said, “that was it, all right. If PAIN has some of the rifles, then maybe it has all of them. And the other stuff. They could have enough military hardware to equip a couple of infantry divisions. That’s what worries me.”

  “Me too,” said Petra.

  GLORIA EMERGED FROM DEXTA HQ ONTO THE teeming streets of Manhattan. It had rained earlier in the day, and the streets and sidewalks were still wet, but a fresh breeze from the north had blown the clouds away and the late-afternoon sky was a deep, clean blue. Shoppers and workers on their way home competed for navigation rights on the jammed sidewalks, and the high-pitched whine of a thousand skimmers contributed an air of urgency to the scene. Gloria sensed but scarcely noticed the ripple of attention that accompanied her as she made her way through the throng. Even in her raincoat and rain hat, pulled low over her brow, people recognized her. She was used to it; on a typical day, the three-block walk to her home might produce half a dozen requests for autographs, plus a smattering of smiles and friendly calls of “Hi, Gloria!”

  She was well accustomed to the burdens of her celebrityhood by now and simply accepted the attention as a fact of life. On some days, she actively embraced it and paused to chat and pose for pictures with starstruck tourists. Today, however, she was preoccupied with more practical matters, like packing for her trip to New Cambridge and making certain that she had accomplished every chore that needed to be done before her departure. With Petra gone, she felt oddly vulnerable and disorganized.

  She had walked less than a block when a young woman abruptly stepped in front of her. Gloria stopped short and stared at her. She was wearing a long black leather coat and had very short, spiky black hair and intense green eyes.

  “Gloria VanDeen!” the woman cried.

  Before Gloria could respond, the woman raised her right arm and extended it toward her. Clutched in her hand was a plasma pistol.

  “Gloria VanDeen,” she repeated. “In the name of the Peoples Anti-Imperialist Nexus, I hereby—”

  Her speech was cut short by a swarm of Bugs. One of them stepped between Gloria and the woman, blocking Gloria’s view. She didn’t see exactly what happened, but a second later the woman was facedown on the pavement, with three Internal Security men piled on top of her. The plasma pistol skittered away from her.

  Gloria instinctively stepped back, as did everyone else on the crowded sidewalk. The woman twisted and squirmed beneath the Bugs and tried to bite one of them on the finger. “Pigs!” she cried. “Fascist swine!”

  The Bug who had stepped between them bent down and collected the weapon. He turned and looked at Gloria. “You all right, ma’am?” he asked shyly.

  Gloria managed to nod.

  The Bug was a very young man, fresh-faced and fuzzy-cheeked, with short blond hair and innocent blue eyes. Gloria remembered his name. “Thank you, Reynolds,” she said.

  Reynolds nodded, almost as if he were embarrassed. It occurred to Gloria that stepping between her and the woman with the pistol had been nothing less than an act of suicidal self-sacrifice, yet Reynolds had acted instinctively in a split second. Gloria also realized that, at such close range, a plasma burst would have burned straight through Reynolds and killed her, standing behind him. Reynolds must have known that. So his action had been purely symbolic; but that didn�
��t make Gloria appreciate it any less. She was going to have to stop taking her retinue of Bugs for granted.

  The three other Bugs manhandled the young woman to her feet. She spat at them, but missed.

  “Better get back to HQ, ma’am,” Reynolds said.

  “I guess so,” Gloria agreed.

  SHE INSISTED THAT HER NAME WAS KRUPSKAYA, but her DNA said that it was actually Eloise Howell, of Greenwich, Connecticut. She was twenty years old, and she couldn’t shut up.

  “It doesn’t matter that I failed. Others will succeed! VanDeen and all the rest of the Imperial oppressors will fall, like autumn leaves before the hurricane of justice! History demands it! The masses demand it, three trillion of them! PAIN is the revolutionary vanguard, and our sacrifice, our example, will inspire the masses to storm the ramparts of Imperial arrogance and bring down the fascist overlords and their running-dog lackeys. That means you, Bug! Nothing you do can prevent it. Liberation is inevitable!”

  “Pretty blabby, for an assassin,” Arkady Volkonski observed. He and Gloria had been sitting before a view-screen in an observation room for an hour, watching and listening as Eloise Howell declaimed.

  “Lucky for me,” Gloria said. “If she had just pulled the trigger instead of stopping to make a speech…”

  “I think the speech is what mattered most to her,” Volkonski said. “Radicals live on rhetoric. What else have they got? It’s more real to them than action. It is to her, anyway.”

  The Bugs had quickly hauled Eloise Howell back to Dexta HQ and turned her over to Counterintelligence. Three CI agents shared the small interrogation room with her and had taken turns browbeating, threatening, and tempting her with offers of leniency in exchange for information. That was purely routine. Eloise liked to talk, so they had let her talk. Eventually, she would run down and begin to realize that all the revolutionary rhetoric in the galaxy would not help her. At that point, they would begin administering the drugs that would wring her dry and extract every secret she knew, every name, every plan, every dream.

  “What will happen to her?” Gloria asked.

  Volkonski shrugged. “Dicenzo Four,” he said. Gloria nodded. Dicenzo Four was where the Empire deposited its political prisoners, a world of high gravity and low expectations. Eloise Howell, late of Greenwich, Connecticut, would spend the rest of her life there.

  “I almost feel sorry for her.”

  “Don’t,” counseled Volkonski.

  “I know. But she’s just a kid.”

  Volkonski raised his single, unpunctuated eyebrow. “How many middle-aged assassins have you seen? Booth was twenty-six, Oswald twenty-four, and Tancredi was only nineteen. Young, stupid, and idealistic.”

  “Lots of us were young, stupid, and idealistic once,” Gloria pointed out. “But most of us didn’t turn into assassins. Why did Eloise?”

  “By the time our friends in CI finish with her, we’ll know the answer to that. I’ll see to it that you receive a summary. But don’t expect anything profound. Her father probably forgot her birthday when she was eight, and that turned her to a life of radical activism. Or radical rhetoric, anyway. You want to know why Eloise stopped to make her speech? It’s because she wasn’t able to pull that trigger. She wanted to be stopped. This way, she gets to make more speeches.”

  “Why would PAIN have chosen someone like her?”

  “She probably chose herself. Or drew the short straw. My gut tells me that Eloise probably isn’t connected to what happened on Cartago or the other terrorist attacks. She and her little cell of would-be terrorists probably heard about the other incidents and revved themselves up to strike their own blow for galactic liberation.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Can’t be sure at this stage,” Volkonski said, “but I’d bet on it. For one thing, her pistol is a recent model, the kind you can get anywhere. No connection to the Savoy shipment. No reason to think this was part of some grand conspiracy. I doubt that we’ll get anything useful from her.”

  “That’s disappointing.”

  “It’s typical. PAIN is not some sophisticated subversive cabal, Gloria. Until lately, they’ve never been more than a loud but minor irritant. People with a gripe against the Empire gravitate to it, but their anarchist ideology is self-limiting. How do you organize a bunch of people who reject the very concept of authority?” Volkonski shook his head. “PAIN has never posed a real threat to the Empire.”

  “But if they have the Savoy shipment…?”

  Volkonski sighed heavily. “That,” he said, “would require a reevaluation of the threat level. Somewhere, somebody a hell of a lot smarter and more dangerous than Eloise Howell must be calling the shots.”

  “Today’s pig, tomorrow’s bacon!” cried Eloise Howell.

  Volkonski smiled slightly. “Oink,” he said.

  MRS. ELLISON HAD INVITED PETRA TO TEA. Petra equated “tea” with “coffee,” and, therefore, with relaxed informality. Mrs. Ellison seemed to equate it with something entirely different. Petra sat next to her on the gold satin couch in what she assumed was the Tea Room, feeling uneasy about her jeans and tee shirt. Mrs. Ellison, as always, looked as if she were about to chair a meeting of the Well-Dressed Ladies Society.

  They engaged in idle chitchat for a while. Mrs. Ellison was much better at it, since Petra had nothing to talk about except Dexta and Pug, and Mrs. Ellison’s eyes tended to glaze over whenever Dexta was mentioned. That left Pug as their only point of common interest, and Petra sensed that Mrs. Ellison would not be pleased to hear about what a wonderful lover her son was.

  Eventually, Mrs. Ellison’s supply of idle chitchat was exhausted, and she fixed Petra with a cold, level gaze. “Ms. Nash, forgive me for being blunt, but may I ask, just what are your intentions regarding my son?”

  “Intentions?” Petra asked, playing for time. “How do you mean?”

  “Your intentions. Surely, that must be clear.”

  “I intend to stay with him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And if he were to leave Dexta and return here to assist my husband?”

  “I don’t know,” Petra replied. “But I do know that Pug doesn’t want to do that. He told me so, himself. He likes Dexta, and he’s proud of what he’s accomplished there. It’s the first thing he’s ever done on his own. Do you know how much that means to him?”

  “Better than you, my dear. I’m not unmindful of Palmer’s desire for independence. Within limits, it’s a healthy thing and I quite approve of it. Just as I approve of his relationship with you, in case you were wondering—also within limits.”

  “And those limits would be…?”

  Mrs. Ellison frowned silently for a moment, as if deep in thought. Then she said, “Don’t expect too much, Ms. Nash. You seem like a fine young woman, and I can understand my son’s attachment to you. But his home and family are here—just as his future is here. If you expect to be part of that future, you must accept that fact. And you must learn what it means to be an Ellison.”

  “It means dressing for tea,” Petra said. “I’ve learned that much.”

  Mrs. Ellison barely smiled. “That’s a start,” she said.

  ELI OPATNU SAUNTERED INTO CORNELL DUBRAY’S office and found the Quadrant Administrator staring at the console on his desk. A million lights twinkled through the windows behind him. You could see a long way from the 110th floor.

  “Someday I’m going to have an office like this,” Opatnu said. “Maybe even this office.”

  DuBray looked up and regarded the young Sector Administrator for a moment. “Everyone is in such a hurry these days,” he said with a hint of bemusement.

  “Weren’t you?” Opatnu asked.

  DuBray leaned back in his chair. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “no, I wasn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “Fix us a couple of drinks,” DuBray said, gesturing toward the bar to the left of his desk. “My usual.” Opatnu did as he was instructed. DuBray got to his feet and stretched.

>   “When I was your age,” DuBray told Opatnu, “we were in the middle of the war with the Ch’gnth. And the truth is that after those first, awful months, I had the time of my life. There I was, still a young man, paticipating in decisions that affected the fate of billions. It was heady stuff. I was almost sorry to see the war end. And, of course, I knew that when Norman moved up to Dexta Secretary—and the war guaranteed that he would—I’d take over Quadrant from him. So I really wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t have to worry about my future.”

  Opatnu handed DuBray his drink, then took a sip of his own. “Must have been nice,” he said, “not having to worry.”

  “But I get the impression that you are worried.”

  “Not worried, exactly. Just say that I’m concerned. This Wendover business could still blow up in our faces.”

  “I doubt it,” DuBray said with unforced confidence. “In-house investigations can always be controlled, one way or another. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Comptroller or Internal Security, or even the newly minted Office of Strategic Intervention. It’s simply a matter of knowing how to play the game.”

  Opatnu shook his head. “Maybe. But VanDeen won’t be easy to control.”

  “I was under the impression that you had already accomplished that.”

  “One quick fuck isn’t going to be enough. Not with Gloria.”

  “What’s this? Are your powers slipping, my friend?”

  Opatnu shook his head. “I have my enhancements; Gloria has hers. For Gloria, sex is always great. She doesn’t need me to find fulfillment.”

  DuBray considered this as he swirled the ice cubes around in his glass for a moment. “Perhaps so,” he said. “But VanDeen is not the only woman in OSI.”

  “True,” said Opatnu. “I’ve already got my eye on someone else who could be useful. But Gloria’s people are remarkably dedicated. This isn’t going to be easy.”