Authors: Robert Buettner
Balance Point (22 page)
He felt her rock forward as the Scorpion paused. “Level Thirty Lower. All passengers transfer here for hell. Thank you for flying Air Born.”
As his mind touched human minds with increasing urgency and decreasing efficiency, he scraped the soil, recovered a few grubs, and smeared them inside his mouth. He tried to pound the soil in frustration, but could no longer curl his foreclaw into a fist.
He could no longer save himself. Worse, he feared that, despite his sacrifice, he could not save his friends.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Sonuvabitch!”
The voice in his head startled Mort out of his weakness. The faint afternoon shadows before him had scarcely shifted since he had last communicated with Kit. “Kit?”
“There’s no hatch at Thirty Lower! Or anywhere else down to Ninety-two Lower, ‘cause that’s where I am now. And that’s as low as the Scorpion can go. There are structural transverse braces across the stack at Ninety-three Lower that the ship can’t fit between.”
“How can all that be?”
“Spying’s an inexact science. Teufelsberg Station hacks into these maps from a half million miles away.”
“The plan has failed?”
“The plan is every battle’s first casualty, Mort.”
Despite her confident words, he felt her anxiety and fear swell, then heard through bone conduction in her skull the sound of her grinding her teeth across one another. The sound now seemed amplified in the Scorpion’s confined space. The sound was replaced in Kit’s ears by metal jingling against metal, and he saw in her hands bundles of multicolored vines around which dangled irregular wire bits.
“What are those?”
“Rappel ropes. I can extend the ramp tow hook and anchor one of these to it. The Scorpion will hover here on auto indefinitely, solid as houses. Basically, I can make a controlled fall down this rope to Ninety-Six Lower. There’s a grating across the stack at that level that catches crap that fizzles and falls back down the stack. I’ll crawl through one of the grate’s clean-out ports, then I’ll be through clean and safe into the industrial levels. Simple backup plan.”
“You said you would be toast in the stack if you were outside the Scorpion.”
“I said I’d be toast in ten minutes. I can be out one of those ports in five, tops.”
“Are you sure these clean-out ports exist? The hatch did not. And when you return, will you be able to ascend your rope in the same way that you descended?”
Kit sighed again as she plucked at the multicolored vines. “I said it was a simple backup plan, not a complete one.”
When she had finished with the vines she grunted, then manipulated a round, red stone that protruded from the Scorpion’s forward interior space until it chirped rhythmically, in time with a similar chirp from a tiny vine that she fastened round her foreclaw.
“What is that sound?”
“Countdown timer.”
“So you will know when ten minutes have elapsed?”
“I won’t need a timer to know I’m toast. Howard almost handed one Scorpion to the Yavi already. He wouldn’t let this one get within a half million miles of Yavet without booby trapping it. If I’m not back here in three hours, this ship will burn itself to ashes. All the Yavi will have to analyze will be cinders. So when I get out the bottom of this stack, I’m gonna need a rock-solid location for Jazen and company. And I’m gonna need it fast. Deal?”
Deal? He blinked to clear his head, because he could no longer shake it. Had he not made a deal with Kit before, to resolve a question that had troubled him greatly? She still owed him, and the matter seemed vital, but he was too weak to insist, and closed all his eyes as he said, “Deal.”
Through Kit’s ears, he heard a hiss, then a great roar as the Scorpion opened like a shelled nut, and she climbed out into the blast and heat of the stack.
Chee-chee-chee
.
He opened his left eye slightly without turning his head.
Scroungers? A trio of the vile beasts scuttled toward him, bellies down and each propelled by six muscular legs. Smaller, black-furred, and stupid grotesques of his own race, they were the size of creatures Trueborn humans visualized as lions. But unlike lions, the scroungers’ mottled red-and-blue snouts were hairless, the better to poke into the carrion they scavenged to survive.
If he had been healthy and undistracted, they would never have been able to approach so near undetected. More to the point, they would not have dared.
The largest of the pack rose onto all six, trotted forward, sniffing.
The scrounger’s bravado startled Mort. Did he really appear to them to be that near to death?
Mort steeled himself against the revulsion he felt when the pack leader nudged Mort’s flank with his snout, and Mort stifled even his shallowed breathing.
When the leader’s exploration yielded no response, his two minions capered forward, black eyes aglitter, chittering and careless.
It was over in a violent instant.
The leader lay sprawled beneath Mort’s left midlimb, his skull crushed by a single punch. The smallest still whimpered as it lay immobilized alongside the leader, licking obscenely at its own intestines, which had spilled from an underbelly ripped by a slash from the claws of Mort’s left rear leg. The third scrounger’s head rested within Mort’s mouth, severed cleanly by one bite.
Mort dropped his jaw slightly, then used his tongue to position the head between his upper and lower right molars, bit, then felt the skull crackle deliciously as the sweet taste of brain flooded his mouth.
He lay still a moment after swallowing, devoid of joy or remorse at the simple act of being what he was. He felt strength and mental energy begin to return even as he tidied the rest of his windfall meal into piles with his forelimbs.
“Kit?” As his confidence swelled, he reached out to her mind.
“Sonuvabitch!”
It was the same expletive she had employed when she had discovered the nonexistence of the hatch, and his heart sank. “There are no clean-out ports?”
He saw by the light of a tiny artificial beam, which humans affixed to their foreheads at the place where their third eye should have been, that Kit was struggling to move irregular slabs and branches piled around her that rose as high as the hinge joint of her rear limbs.
“You’d think when somebody installs clean-out ports, they’d come and clean out once in a while.”
Her breathing was labored, and her limb muscles burned with lactic acid. He saw her pause, straighten, then direct the beam at the small vine that encircled her forelimb.
“How long do you have remaining?”
“Two minutes. But I feel like toast already. Mort, I can
see
the goddam way out!” She growled, kicked a battered, cubiform object as large as her torso, and pain shot up from the tip of her hind limb. She screeched aloud, limped in circles on the heel of the injured claw, and again he heard the sound of her grinding her teeth.
She said, “But I can’t budge this big hunk of Yavi junk. And now I broke my fucking toe.”
Mort paused.
To his knowledge, the injured appendage and coitus were unrelated, but now hardly seemed the moment to address his question.
He thought, “When I need to move a rock to access food beneath, I prise it up with a tree trunk.”
The tiny light jerked across jumbled debris that flapped in the scalding gale thundering up through the openings beneath Kit’s feet.
“A lever? Mort, where in hell would I find a—oh.” Kit dug an elongate, tubular metal root from beneath rubble, wedged its tip beneath the object she had kicked, then shifted all her tiny body weight onto the root’s far end. “Ahhh!”
The object atop the lever’s short end remained stationary.
Kit stepped back, folded forward, foreclaws on her upper hind limbs and panted. “’S no use.”
“Kit, reascend your vine and recover inside the Scorpion seed.”
“Nope.”
“You must! Or you will die there. And so perhaps will Jazen. If you will not try for yourself, try for Jazen.”
“My suit’s sleeve patch is already in the yellow, Mort. I’d never finish the up rappel.” She gasped, then whispered aloud, “I’m cooked.”
But despite her words, this time she stepped back four paces, sprang forward toward the root, then leapt up and twisted her body so her hindquarters landed on the root.
The root bent beneath her weight, then snapped, so that Kit landed on her hindquarters amid the debris. But when her light swung back, the object had shifted, exposing a long passage tall enough for a human to crawl through.
Kit yelped, then scrambled through the opening.
Mort had picked the carcass of the first scrounger clean to the major bones by the time Kit had recovered sufficiently from her ordeal to direct a thought to him.
He saw that she sat with her bare hind limbs sprawled ahead of her, visible by the beam of her forehead light. The cubic space in which she rested was vast, but dull gray, calm, and no longer scaldingly hot.
As she thought, she pulled a replacement integument from the bag she had worn on her shoulders. It was the shade of tree bark, and she pulled it up over her hind limbs and torso. “Yavi civvies. Not my color, but now I blend.”
“Your final effort was most impressive.”
“It had nothing to do with the size of my ass.”
“I said nothing. Kit, if you are prepared to continue, I am prepared to assist.”
Kit stood, slipped one of the small stingers that humans carried into a pouch in the Yavi civvies that she now wore, then stepped to the closed hatch that separated the chamber from the rest of the Yaven hive. “How far do I have to go, Mort?”
“Forward one half of the
Gateway
. Upward one fourth of the
Gateway
. Forward again one half.”
“A mile and a quarter? Piece of pie.”
“Ha-ha.”
Kit touched one foreclaw to the chirping vine that wrapped the other, silenced it then tugged the civvie down so that the vine was concealed. “Two hours, twenty minutes and counting. Have you been able to contact Jazen, let him know I’m here?”
“No. It is unlikely that I will. It is easier to maintain contact as I have with you than to reestablish it, even with Jazen.”
“When I get to Jazen, where will he be?”
“In a chamber much smaller than the one you occupy now. Some around him that I have touched think of it as a crummy hotel room. Others think it represents good value for money.”
“Is he alone?”
“Three humans share the space with him.”
“Three?” She grasped the hatch latch with a foreclaw, then pulled the hatch toward herself, opening a slit perhaps as wide as the diameter of a human forelimb. Then she pressed her cheek against the hatch edge, in the way that a coot peered round a tree trunk to avoid detection.
Through Kit’s eyes Mort saw a dimly lit, featureless passage that stretched ahead perhaps one-tenth of the length of the
Gateway
, then ended where it intersected another.
Kit opened the hatch and looked in one direction, then the opposite direction, down the passage that crossed immediately to her front.
When she saw it was also empty, she sprang out into the long passageway, then ran as though pursued until she reached the far intersection.
Breathing heavily, she rounded the first corner, and he felt her elation. Even the pain in her coital toe appeared to have diminished.
“Kit, you appear rejuvenated.”
“Damn right! I’ve still got two hours and fifteen minutes to get to Jazen, get everybody out, get them back aboard the Scorpion. Then it’s adios freakin’ Yavet. The foot traffic ahead will slow me down, so I blend, but the Yavi have no clue I’m here. Mort, I hit a little speed bump back there, before. Maybe even got a little down. But from here on out, this job is a piece of pie.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Max Polian woke in the middle of the night and felt pressure in his bladder.
He was, regardless of how he felt otherwise, an old man, and he woke for that reason every night. Then his bed quivered, and he swore. It had not been an old man’s need to pee, but the damn bed that had awakened him. He could have sworn he had set it to do-not-disturb. But he must have forgotten. Another curse of aging. In body, if not in spirit, Max fit the profile of a Central Committee member already.
And who the hell was calling in the middle of the night?
When the notification buzz came again, this time accompanied by a chime, Max realized that the notification was not of a message, but a warning of movement in the passage outside his doorway. At least that meant he hadn’t forgotten to set the do-not-disturb.
Max swung his legs onto the floor as he squinted at his ‘puter, and the fringe of hair remaining at the back of his neck rose.
Three hours past midnight. Someone or something was moving in the passage outside his front door in the middle of the night.
Foraging little people, who wormed into even the better uplevels neighborhoods like this one through the utilities, were more nuisance than danger. But he was paying for peace and quiet up here.
Max shrugged into his robe. Then he lifted the hand needler he kept on his nightstand, thumbed off the safety and padded out of his bedroom and across his main living space. As the foyer felt him, its flat screen alongside the passage door flicked live and displayed the outside passage’s monitor feed.
A lone figure stood in the dimness, shifting weight, foot to foot. Polian recognized the provi cap, then exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and spoke into the microphone beneath the screen. “Varden!”
Polian safed his needler, then rubbed his wrinkled forehead. Had he somehow forgotten something? It was hell to age. “Varden, by some chance did I tell you to bring the slider?”
“Uh, I pick you up on the odd days, sir, and today’s even. And it’s actually much earlier than pick-up time.”
Polian closed his eyes, shook his head. “Why, thank you, Varden. I hadn’t noticed the hour.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, sorry, sir.”
“You should’ve called. I could have mistaken you for a forager and shot you through the door.” Not really. A needler couldn’t penetrate a Yavi door like a gunpowder pistol could. But if he could frighten Varden a little, the boy might think more clearly next time.
“Sir, I couldn’t have called. Your bed was on do not disturb. Sir, may I—?”
Polian squeezed his eyes shut again for a beat, then opened the door.
Varden stepped in.
“I take it you didn’t come over to tell me to turn on my bed?”
“Uh. Not exactly, sir.”
Polian shuffled back in to the living space, waved on the lights, then sat on his divan, bent forward, elbows on knees.
“Then what, exactly?”
Varden stood there, fumbling a folded handheld. “Sir, an hour ago air flow out of Stack Fourteen Eastern dropped two percent.”
Polian flattened both palms across his eyes, rubbed his face, exhaled. It was an unconscious movement he had made a thousand times. Now he realized why. He hoped that when he removed his hands from his eyes Varden would be gone.
He said to the boy, “Next time you get a call that should have gone to the Directorate of Industry, just transfer it.”
“Uh. I didn’t get that call. Industry
did
get it. So they sent an inspection crew with a wall crawler ‘bot to check.”
“That sounds appropriate. And still nothing that concerns Internal Operations Directorate.”
“The ‘bot found an aircraft in the stack just above Ninety-six Lower.”
That surprised Polian. But then he nodded.
Smugglers used aircraft more often out in the hick stacks, where over-water travel made flying the practical way to transfer inventory. But crickets full of junk had crashed and burned inside the stacks of Yaven before. Once maintenance dragged out the wreck, he’d send an investigator to have a look. “Varden, next time tell them to just call you the following morning.
“Actually, Industry didn’t call me, sir. They called External Operations.”
“Gill’s people?” Polian dropped his hands into his lap.
Varden nodded.
Polian stiffened. “What the hell for? Inter-city smuggling’s
our
jurisdiction.” He hadn’t expected Gill to be a turf poacher.
Varden opened his handheld, clicked a flat image then rotated the device so Polian could see its screen. The image was a still frame from a ‘bot feed.
Polian leaned close, squinted at the grainy frame. “This is the best image you can bring me, Varden?”
“It’s the only image, sir. The ‘bot’s insulation failed. Apparently it’s over two hundred degrees inside a stack.” The boy shrugged. “I never thought about how a city works. I suspect most of us never do.”
“But why External Operations?”
Varden said, “Somebody thought it looked like something.”
“Well. There’s a reason.”
“External applied some of their software to the image.” Varden reached and keyed the display.
A green, teardrop-shaped, three-dimensional, skeletal outline faded in, then rotated itself and settled over the grainy image. A red label flashed on screen. “Identification Positive. Probability ninety-nine percent.”
Polian’s jaw dropped and he gripped the handheld and stared. “That’s impossible.”
“External Operations claim they used the same image-matching software for after-action reconnaissance of that wreck on Dead End last year. The mass and the shape are laydowns. The ‘bot did get a mass and motion reading before it failed. There’s nothing alive inside the aircraft.”
Polian stared at the grainy black teardrop that hung in thin air while smoke and flame roared up past it, his mouth still agape. Then he turned to Varden. “A Trueborn Scorpion falls in my lap and that son of a bitch Gill doesn’t even call me?”
“He tried, sir. When he couldn’t get you, that’s why he called me. Remember? Your bed was on do-not—”
“I remember. What did he tell you, precisely?”
“Precisely?” Varden shuffled again.
“I’m old, Varden. Best make your points before I die.”
“Director Gill told me I had ten minutes to get my provi ass over here and bring you up to speed. Or he would put a field boot up it. I think he meant figuratively.”
Polian coughed into his fist.
So Gill realized the importance of this development to their plan, and wasn’t withholding information. Good.
Polian looked up at Varden. “So what’s Gill doing now?”
“Trueborn hardware’s External Operations’ exclusive jurisdiction. The Director’s scrambled a wreck-recovery team with a mobile inspection unit to Stack Fourteen Eastern. They’re shutting the stack down.”
Polian sat a moment, narrowed his eyes. “Wreck? No, Varden. Trueborn case officers sometimes insert themselves into hostile environments in Scorpions. A C-drive craft, whether it’s a Scorpion or a starship, can simply hover indefinitely. That ship’s not wrecked, it’s parked.”
Varden shook his head. “No, sir, the Trueborn case officer didn’t park it. Remember? The way we got the transponder on him was when he went through customs.“
Polian cut Varden off with a raised palm. “Parker. The lightbulb salesman’s real name is Jazen Parker. He’s a Trueborn
junior
case officer.”
Max Polian’s normal business had always been maintaining order within Yavet. Securing her against external threats had been the business of others. Until the Trueborns killed Ruberd. Max now knew Trueborn covert operational methods as well as any counterespionage instructor knew them.
“Parker didn’t park that Scorpion, his partner did. Trueborn case officers work in two-officer teams, a junior and a senior. The book on this Parker was that his personal emotional compass overrode his professional compass once too often. He resigned his commission after his senior case officer downchecked him. He was too sentimental. Protected her to the detriment of accomplishing their missions. He reentered service only to rescue her when she was stranded on Tressel. Our plan assumed he would follow his heart again if the bait was strong enough, and come here alone.”
“But he didn’t?”
Polian nodded. “Present evidence suddenly suggests we underestimated the Trueborns’ ability to keep Parker on their leash. He didn’t come here on his own. He came here as a decoy.”
“Then what do we—?”
“Lock down a cubic three vertical levels and four horizontal blocks centered on that hotel room you said his transponder’s stationary in. If either he or she tries to get in or out, pick ’em up.”
“She? Sir, about the woman, I also need to tell you—”
“That Parker’s senior case officer partner’s a woman? Oh, I know that, Varden. I also know that, among other things, she’s a pilot. I’ll bet my pension she’s the one who flew that Scorpion in here.” Polian shook his head. The Trueborns were a devious lot. “We think we’ve got their presence under control because we’ve got Parker tagged. And all the while, he’s a decoy, so his partner runs free, doing God knows what.”
“What would she do, sir?”
“Nothing good. She’s already confessed to more war crimes than a Trueborn Nazi. We know that because Director Gill’s staff intelligence officer—” Polian paused, swallowed. The officer was Polian’s son. “—interrogated her on Tressel. But the Tressens let her get away.”
“Oh. I didn’t know about any of that, sir.” He shifted, foot to foot, again. “When I mentioned the woman, I meant the
other
woman. The older one. The one we couldn’t find, who you’ve been so concerned about.”
Polian’s breath hitched, and he reached out and grasped his aide’s forearm. “What about her?”
“Well, the detail just came in from the surveillance team that dogged Parker’s worm transponder. He was down and up and all over the place. Slippery as a peep. He knows the utilities like he was born here.”
“He was. That’s beside the point right now.”
“Frankly, he embarrassed his surveillance team a little. By the time they finally got a visual on him, he was in the vicinity of this hotel, and in the company of a middle-aged male big. The two of them entered the hotel room when a middle-aged female big opened the door. If the team hadn’t been looking for something out of the ordinary, nothing would have seemed unusual. But all of the subjects’ movements were executed tactically. Not the way a lightbulb salesman and a middle-aged tourist couple would behave.”
“Tourist couple?”
“The room was taken by a medical technician and a bank vice president from Rand. They arrived on a cruiser a week ago. We’d never have looked at them twice. They just got fifty-hour bugs implanted in their clothing, like normal arrivals. Their bugs have already died. Even knowing what to look for, their legend’s impeccable, right down to the retinals.”
“I told you it would be. That’s why we needed to get Parker the lightbulb salesman here in the flesh. To bring us together with them. Did the surveillance team check with the hotel?”
“Yes, sir. The couple prepaid their stay in cash. Smugglers sell out of that hotel, so the management saw nothing unusual in that. All the desk personnel remember is that these two carried in all their meals. And the man went jogging every morning.”
“But the only tail he had was a snitch tail, who lost him. So we have no idea what he was up to.”
“Why, yes, sir. Also, the couple called down for a foldaway, but the desk clerk says a lot of their guests rent foldaways to display goods that they sell out of the room.”
Polian raised a hand, smiled. “Don’t tell me. The day they rented the foldaway is the day Orion Parker slipped her tails and dumped her bug.”
“Why, yes, sir. Exactly.”
Polian shook his head. “We lost a dying she-gnome older than I am. Varden, tomorrow get me the files of the officers who lost her. No. The
former
officers.
Varden swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
As Polian sat on the divan and thought, he realized that he still hadn’t urinated.
Varden sat patiently, finally said, “Sir, it looks like we’ve got the high-value old woman, and Parker the case officer, and maybe even Parker’s partner the war criminal, and the old midwife all in the bag right now. Shouldn’t we mobilize a horizontal tac squad, and a punch-down team to blow the roof, and a punch-up team to blow the floor, and go pick ’em all up? Before something changes?”
Polian smiled.
Maybe he had underestimated Varden. From most perspectives, the provi’s plan had things just about right. But the only perspective that counted right now was Max Polian’s own.
He stood and shuffled toward the bedroom.
“Sir?”
“Varden, what I want you to do is to go liase with Gill’s team that’s pulling that Scorpion out of the stack. But keep your distance. They won’t know a Scorpion from a bathtub, and the thing’s undoubtedly booby-trapped to blow itself to hell and take them with it.”
Varden’s mouth hung open. “Alright, sir. But what are
you
going to do?”
Polian looked back over his shoulder. “Me, Varden? I’m going to go take a leak.”
The boy stood like a statue once again, until Polian shooed him, with a hand that Max thought suddenly looked less old and less bony. “Off you go, Varden!”