“When the relief finally got there, one of them handed me a canteen of water. It was the best thing I ever tasted in my whole life. You used yours to wash your hands.”
“Still had wounded to tend.”
Blocker sat down again. “In a way, so do I. Ayliss Mortas isn’t going to let Rittle get away with what he did, and she’s not discreet when it comes to killing.”
“So you’re going to bear the backlash, instead of her.”
“I abandoned her when I went to the war, Chief. Lately I’ve been thinking she might have turned out differently, if I’d stuck around.”
“You were her bodyguard, not her father.”
“She doesn’t have a father anymore.”
The PA gave a slight shrug. “I’ll carry you as long as I can. You should have been shipped out of the war zone long before now. So you better make your move soon.”
“It’s probably better if you don’t know any of the details.”
“All right.”
“Chief, there is one more thing.”
“There always is.”
“Yeah, we been real busy these past few months. Sam’s taking advantage of things out here, and some of the ships have come in with big-time damage. A lotta new faces, too. I swear, half the civilians this side of the CHOP Line have decided to ride out the storm right here.” The man was of normal height, but walking next to Blocker made him look short. His bright orange coverall bore the logo of one of the corporations that moved supplies in the war zone, and his identification badge said his name was Deek Orton.
“You’re better off busy,” Blocker answered Orton, turning slightly to let a civilian in a business suit slide by. Though large, the corridor was filled with people of every type. All around them were Human Defense Force members wearing different uniforms, office workers speaking cryptically into headsets, and maintenance people dangling everything from tools to oxygen tanks. “Whenever I couldn’t find enough for you to do, you always got into trouble.”
Orton laughed. “That’s true enough. I gotta hand it to you, Sarge. You took a young knucklehead who thought he was a tough guy, and turned him into an old knucklehead who finally realized what the tough guys were all about.”
“Old. What are you—thirty?”
“I’m offended. I just turned twenty-seven. You’d think my former platoon sergeant would know my age.”
“So you figured out what the tough guys were all about?”
“I did.”
“Good. You’re gonna have to explain it to me sometime.”
They slid out of the throng in the main passageway, and into an orange-colored corridor. The walls were marked in several places with warnings about personal safety and authorized access, but none of the security alarms activated when they passed through. Weaving their way through several twists, turns, and hatches, they finally ended up in a darkened cargo hold. Orton led the way through a maze of tall racks holding an eclectic array of repair parts, finally stopping in front of a dark hatch set into the back bulkhead.
“This is a good spot for stashing things. All the stuff you see around us? Outmoded. Almost nobody comes back here.” Orton stopped short. “What the—”
A slim figure emerged from the shadows, a young woman dressed in black fatigues. Her dark hair was cut short, but even in the gloom it was apparent that her almond-skinned features were extremely pretty.
“Relax,” Blocker growled. “I arranged for her to be here.”
Orton tried to sound suave. “Oh, Sarge. You shouldn’t have. I know I’m doing you a big favor, but—”
“Careful. She’s an ex-Banshee. You know what they do to men who get out of line.”
The technician covered his crotch with both hands and took a step back. Blocker turned to the woman.
“How’s the leg, Tin?”
“You know.” Without a sound, she twisted sideways and swung her right leg up so that her boot stopped an inch from Orton’s face. “Continuing weakness, attributed to the patient’s lousy state of physical fitness prior to getting shot on Quad Seven.”
“Switch legs.”
The right boot disappeared, replaced by the left one a second later. Tin stayed in that position, perfectly balanced, looking into Orton’s eyes with a mischievous smirk.
“Good enough.” The Banshee dropped her leg, gracefully pirouetting until she was looking up at Blocker.
“Sarge?” Orton had recovered just a bit. “How’d she get in here?”
“She spent too much time around a Spartacan Scout deserter. Picked up some bad habits.” Blocker nodded toward the hatch. “Show her our little surprise.”
Grinning proudly, Orton deactivated a pair of contact locks that he’d attached to the opening. After entering an access code, he extended an open palm like a magician. The black plate moved upward, and a dull light turned on in the closet-sized compartment.
Looking slightly battered but functional, one of the full-body armored suits used by the Banshees stared back at them from its support frame.
Tin stepped up to it, the glow reflecting off her eyes and her teeth. She ran light fingers down the front of the suit, and then Blocker felt her other hand doing the same on his arm.
“Oh, Dom,” she cooed. “You shouldn’t have.”
Chapter 3
Though seated in a large room on Earth, Reena Mortas floated free in the universe. She’d always hated this chamber, the way her missing husband had spent so many hours alone inside it, the terrible way it had hurt him that one time. And yet now, sitting in his chair both literally and figuratively, she’d come to understand the attraction.
The room was in the center of the tallest tower of Unity Plaza, the sprawling political headquarters that had been her home for many years. All around her was pitch darkness, and Reena knew that if she just scooched forward a few inches she would plummet from the raised seat to the hard floor twenty feet below. Her right hand rested on a rectangular control panel, and she tapped the buttons from memory.
The void came to life, planets and asteroids and comets flashing by in a sophisticated light show. It was impossible not to feel a thrill, charging through space as if enclosed in an unbreakable air bubble shot out of a colossal cannon. She hurtled along for another few seconds, and then the preset voyage ended in a gentle deceleration that once again put her nowhere.
The darkness closed in again, but Reena knew this spot and waited for her eyes to adjust. Distant stars provided flecks of light, and then spectral waves of dust began their lazy circuit. Many of the spectacular sights offered in this room were merely laser-light-show representations of the charted portions of the galaxy, or simply good estimates based on long-range observation. But other spots, where machines and spacecraft were at work, showed her live feed on a modest delay.
The empty spaces at the end of each leg of her daily trip were such spots. Closely observed by probes or robot spacecraft, they were the destinations her husband Olech had intended to briefly visit when he’d disappeared. Twenty consecutive Step voyages, round trips from one point bouncing off of ten others in succession. The Step had been suspended across the galaxy—which meant it was suspended across the universe, as the Sims did not have this technology—so that Olech’s there-and-back movements could attract the attention of the entities that had anonymously given mankind the Step in the first place. Asleep in his special capsule, Olech had believed he would receive some kind of communication during that circuit.
Only he hadn’t reached any of the ten selected locations. He’d barely started out, his craft approaching the very first Threshold, and then the capsule had vanished. The Chairman of the Emergency Senate, the most powerful politician in humanity, had simply disappeared.
“Where are you?” Reena whispered to the space dust. “I know you’re alive. I know it. I’ve got so many people looking for you, they have to find you. Won’t you help me find you?”
Of course the void didn’t answer.
After waiting for some time,
Reena activated the room’s voice controls. A technician located elsewhere in the towering building answered immediately.
“Ready, Madame Chairwoman.”
“Show me Celestia.”
Dim lights came up, revealing the bare gray walls and the hard floor, but then the darkness descended again. It brought with it an image she knew intimately, that of the planet where she’d been born and raised. It grew larger and larger until she felt like the pilot of a ship reluctantly coming into its orbit.
“Start the briefing.”
A recorded voice began the daily update of the upheaval on the mineral-rich planet.
“Good morning. As always, the briefing will start with the status of Fortuna Aeternam.” Reena’s head shook once, minutely. The eternal fortune of the planet’s capital had ended several months before, in an explosion of mindless violence that she’d accidentally triggered with the assassination of Horace Corlipso.
“Recovery efforts continue in all sectors of the city.” The planet rotated and enveloped her, as if she were floating down on the metropolis. Its outline was the same as she remembered, and she noted the broad boulevards and curving canals as she descended. As a child she’d loved to walk along the blue waterways, the air filled with the scent of fruit trees planted on the banks. The picture below her showed a brown river choked with debris, bordered by trampled dirt. The fruit trees that hadn’t been destroyed in the fighting had been chopped down for firewood long before.
“Electric power has been reestablished in sixty percent of the areas outside the Seat of Authority. Unimpeded food delivery is occurring in forty-five percent of the areas outside the Seat of Authority. Violent crime has been reduced by six percent over the last month.”
“Outside the Seat of Authority,” Reena muttered, and the briefing stopped. The SOA’s walls loomed not far from her, encompassing a compound covering several square miles and protected by Human Defense Force troops. What remained of Celestia’s upper crust was safely ensconced there, continuing their luxurious existences as if the slave revolt had never happened. While that was obscene, at least it kept them out of Reena’s hair. Many of the oligarchs had fled the planet at the first sign of trouble, and she’d worked overtime to find them sanctuary somewhere other than Unity. A hardcore element of Horace loyalists had managed to secure lodging with her, largely because no one else would take them.
“Shall I continue?” the voice asked.
“Skip to the latest developments.”
The presentation whirled like a silent tornado, and then stopped far from the city.
“The Dracilipine mining complex has been declared free of rebel forces after three months of nearly continuous fighting.” Reena now looked down on a denuded mountain range, its brown soil covered with buildings, pipelines, roads, and rail lines. So much of those had been wrecked that for a moment Reena thought she was looking at an elongated garbage dump. Armored vehicles and assault aircraft stood in clusters or defensive rings, military convoys were freeze-framed on the roads, and dense clouds of smoke smudged several acres of the mine.
“The bulk of the rebel troops withdrew two weeks ago, leaving small groups of holdouts behind. The holdouts set fire to the richest veins in the complex, and these are currently burning underground. Command estimates that getting Dracilipine back in production will require a minimum of one year at maximum effort, after the fires have been extinguished. Command intelligence suspects that many of the rebels were former workers at the mines.”
“Slaves.” The term came out unbidden, and the briefing stopped again. Raised amid the luxury of the Corlipso family, Reena had been subtly indoctrinated in the wordplay of the elite when it came to their labor force. She remembered the gray-haired woman whom she’d believed to be her mother, gently explaining that the mines produced important minerals for the war against the evil Sims and that someone had to work them. That people flocked to Celestia from all the other settled planets, attracted by its greatness, and that some of those people refused to do their fair share for the war effort. That was why they weren’t slaves—they were workers.
By the time Reena had been old enough to doubt that logic, she’d had bigger questions for her mother. Questions about how none of Reena’s many siblings had red hair like hers, or how Mother and Father were so much older than her schoolmates’ parents. It had been a difficult day when they’d explained that her eldest brother Horace was actually her father, and that her biological mother had been a worker who had died giving birth to her.
Despite this revelation, the charade had continued. Horace Corlipso had gone on to become Celestia’s ruler and one of the shrewdest politicians in the alliance against the Sims. He’d instructed Reena in the subtleties and brutalities of power politics, and she’d flourished under that tutelage. Horace had dispatched her to Earth to work with the widowed Olech Mortas, in the belief that the two politicians would eventually pair up.
Though a resident of Earth for many years, she’d known that slavery had been extended into every part of Celestian society under Horace’s rule. The slaves outside the mines had been called servants, and one of them, Horace’s latest sex slave, had murdered him at Reena’s command. Olech had planned the assassination just before his fateful voyage, having already arranged for Reena’s appointment as Chairwoman if he didn’t return. She’d secretly given the go-ahead shortly after taking her husband’s place at the head of the Emergency Senate.
It was fitting that Horace’s execution would be carried out by the latest girl forced to warm his bed, and a small revenge for Reena’s true mother. The girl’s name had been Emma, but she’d gotten carried away. Stabbing Horace to death on a balcony overlooking Fortuna Aeternum’s crowded square, Emma had kicked off the rebellion that had taken Celestia and all its vital minerals out of the war. If anyone ever linked this debacle to Reena, she’d quickly be removed from the position that controlled the search for Olech. Rumors were already circulating, and one of the loosest of loose ends from the assassination was still untied.
“Madame Chairwoman?” It was the voice of Nathaniel Ulbridge, the security operative who was second-in-command to Hugh Leeger. Leeger directed the spy apparatus created under Olech, but he was away on a delicate mission. Having worked with both men for many years, Reena welcomed the distraction from her dismal thoughts.
“Yes, Nathaniel.”
“I need to speak with you.”
“Come in.” The lights came up slowly, taking her away from Celestia and back into the chamber which some people had derisively called Olech Mortas’s throne room. Ulbridge strode across the floor while Reena’s chair descended to meet him.
“Apologies for interrupting you, Madame Chairwoman.” Short and blond where Leeger was tall and dark, the powerfully built forty-year-old already knew all the secrets.
“This must be serious.” Reena tried to sound unconcerned, but knew better. The throne room was one of the most secure spots in Unity Plaza for delicate conversations.
“It is, ma’am. I have a coded message from Hugh.”
Reena felt her muscles relax a notch. Far too many urgent messages carried bad news these days, but Leeger’s mission held extraordinary potential. She’d memorized the full range of code phrases he might send, and tried not to anticipate the one she wanted.
“What did he say?”
“It’s good news, ma’am.” Ulbridge softened his normally formal manner, almost smiling. “The jogger has qualified for the race.”
“Really, sir, you do need to eat something.”
On a Force space station not far from Earth, Gerar Woomer’s personal assistant looked down at an untouched tray of food. In front of him, the famous Step physicist sat at a giant console, right where he’d been for hours.
“That’s all right, Jerry. Please take that away.” The aged voice was tired, but calm.
“Forgive me for saying this, sir, but perhaps you need a break.”
“I’ll get some sleep in a bit.”
&n
bsp; “That’s not what I meant. You’ve been studying the same data for the past six months, trying to figure out what happened to Chairman Mortas. And now, with the news about your grandson . . . you should get away from here.”
Woomer tapped a single button, causing one of the console’s screens to come alive. Lines jumped across the monitor for only a few seconds before Jerry shut it off. “You’ve been staring at those readings long enough. We’re never going to identify the source of the . . . accident that claimed the Chairman.”
The words echoed in his mind. Source. Accident. Claimed. As much as Woomer appreciated Jerry’s concern, his assistant was wrong about what he was studying. He no longer paid any attention to the energy spikes associated with the Threshold they’d been generating when Olech disappeared. Months ago he’d discovered the blip at the bottom of the screen, the tiny Threshold that had snatched the Chairman’s capsule just as it launched.
Before it could even begin the daring series of Steps that he, Gerar Woomer, had plotted. A series of Steps that should have ended with Olech’s capsule crushed in what appeared to be a freak mishap. He’d plotted that, too.
“You should be with your family,” Jerry went on. Despite his intellect and training, like everyone else he’d missed the blip entirely. The Threshold that was so powerful and so focused that its source could only have been the entities Olech had been trying to contact. They had snatched him, when Woomer had meant to kill him. “There’s still time for you to attend your grandson’s funeral.”
His grandson. Roland. Rollie to the family. As he’d done countless times over the many long weeks, Woomer studied the earnest young face in a photo set into his workstation. Motionless amid the screens with their jumping data, the picture of his grandson in the HDF had provided some small respite from the guilt and fear. He’d done it for that face, betrayed a man he’d respected and admired, to save the boy. He saw another face now, his colleague Timothy Kumar, who had been Horace Corlipso’s science adviser before the assassination. He heard Kumar’s silky words again, vaguely commenting on the dangers of the war zone. Promising a safe posting if Woomer helped them, and darkly suggesting that refusal would seal Rollie’s fate.
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