Balance Point (4 page)
Authors: Robert Buettner
SIX
The uniformed guard, one hand on the gunpowder pistol holstered at his waist, stepped out and blocked Max Polian’s path up the starship’s embarkation gangway. The guard raised his other hand, palm out. “Hold it right there!”
Polian froze, held his breath.
Polian could, if it came to it, claim diplomatic immunity. However, a cabinet-level Yavi reduced to traveling from Rand to his own homeworld incognito aboard a Trueborn starship would be a gross embarrassment, even though the practice was the worst-kept secret in the universe.
But—had Cutler been a Trueborn Intelligence plant? The meeting a set-up? No ruse was too petty for the shadowy Hibble’s legions. A cabinet-level Yavi caught spying would be beyond embarrassing, it would be a propaganda coup for the Trueborns. To say nothing of the reaction of the Central Committee.
The guard, wearing the chevrons of a Trueborn Marine Lance Corporal, pointed at Polian’s gut. “Turn ’em out.”
“What?”
“Your vest pockets, sir. Would you turn ’em inside-out for me? Please?”
Please? Polian stifled an eye roll. When, as a young vice cop, Polian had been in the kid’s position, there would have been no “please,” just an order. And a mailed fist to the jaw if that order wasn’t immediately obeyed. Hibble’s minions aside, trusting these people with the fate of five hundred planets was like allowing a child to conduct a symphony.
Polian reached slowly into the waist pockets of the souvenir leather Rand hunting vest the Lodge had provided, with its crest on the left breast. Polian had worn the thing to flesh out his tourist image. He plucked the linings and tugged them out. With them came a half dozen large-bore cartridges that Polian hadn’t realized were there. Polian left his hands in the fabric so that the guard wouldn’t notice that they quivered.
“Hunters forget leftover ammo all the time, sir.” The Marine pointed at an open bin alongside his boot. “If you dump no-carry items here, no sweat.” The kid smiled, jerked a thumb at the scanner arch ten paces up the gangway. “If the scanner catches them, there’s paperwork. Strain for you, strain for us. Sorry.”
Polian exhaled, managed a smile back, dropped the cartridges into the indicated bin. “No apology needed, Corporal. An old man already strains enough.”
The Marine guard’s earpiece chirped, and the kid turned away, hand pressed to his ear, nodding. He had already forgotten the forgetful old fool in front of him.
Before he continued aboard, Polian looked up at the vast cruiser within which he would begin his circuitous voyage back to Yavet. The vessel, with the others that comprised Earth’s fleet, connected the five hundred worlds of the Human Union. And—he clenched his jaw at the thought—allowed Earth to dominate mankind in general and Yavet in particular.
He had seen cruisers before this trip, drifting at orbital mooring, tethered to the Ring, two hundred miles above Yavet. They resembled skeletal, mile-long white whales, and their projected power intimidated him.
Max Polian, like any vice cop who had worked the downlevels, understood physical intimidation. A head, and usually much more, taller in his armor than the little people, simply raising a mailed fist had usually been enough to get any question answered.
But here on Rand, one of the worlds where cruisers like
HUS Emerald River
actually descended from space and hovered at the surface, the enormity of a C-drive star cruiser, the simple reality of a movable object so vast, didn’t merely intimidate, it overwhelmed.
To his left, the conical C-drive booms tapered down to tips that ended eight hundred yards aft of the vessel’s midpoint. In front of him the vessel’s midsection rose, windowed with thirty-six midpoint bays that had once harbored a full wing of interceptors, ground-attack ships, and transports. To his right, the great tube of the cargo and passenger spaces tapered forward, ending another eight hundred yards distant, in the blunt crystal tip of the forward observation blister.
With such ships, Yavet would be more than equal to the Motherworld. Without them, Yavet would always be shackled.
After Polian cleared the embarkation sensors he passed an entry hatch that led aft. A pair of Marines stood guard there, in full Eternad armor with automatic weapons unslung. What lay aft remained a mystery to Yavet’s external intelligence services despite decades of effort. Nano remotes, recruited human agents, open-source research, nothing had unlocked the secrets.
He looked away as he passed rather than be reminded of his own frustration. Continuing through the vast ship’s decks and sectors to his cabin, he lay rigid on his bunk and stared at the ceiling.
Ruberd had sacrificed his life to end the Trueborns’ dominance. At least to begin the end.
Max Polian clenched his teeth. No, his son had not sacrificed his life. It had been stolen from him by Trueborn assassins. And now Cutler had presented Polian with the opportunity to punish the thieves.
After the great ship lifted, she hung above Rand while her crew prepared her for the nearlight voyage to the first of the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point transits through which the ship would jump. The jump across the TFIP, from one limb of a fold in space to another, connected points that were otherwise centuries of travel apart, even for light itself.
Polian made his way to the ship’s centerline passage, where rotational gravity was effectively zero, and swam forward through thin air to the observation blister. He emerged into a crystal hemisphere eighty feet in diameter, its inner surface spiderwebbed with handrails at which passengers floated like fish crowded in a bowl.
The world they were leaving behind filled half the blackness of the view that entranced them. Like most seeded Earthlikes, Rand was a blue and green ball frosted with white cloud swirls. Unlike most seeded Earthlikes, it was a satellite. Beyond Rand glowed the uninhabitable, streaked orange gas giant around which Rand orbited.
Polian hung in the air, staring. The sight awed even him.
He found a vacant space along a rail, alongside a group of five outworlders. At least he assumed they were outworlders. Two adults with three children could only come from a place where the problem was underpopulation. The man in the group floated alongside the boy, the woman between the girls. Both adults pointed out features visible on the globe below, compared them to the place to which they were bound.
Polian rested both hands on the rail in front of him. He had, after all, no one for whom to point out sights.
On inspection visits to the Ring he had often looked down on Yavet from near space. Yavet had, perhaps two hundred years before, resembled the blue, fleecy ball below him. Today, clouds rendered her a burnished gray, an enhancement wrought by industrious purpose and unified government.
Even the Trueborns conceded that, but for the interruption forced on Earth by the Pseudocephalopod War, Yavet was what Earth would have become. He smiled into his reflection in the crystal. Leave it to the Trueborn historians—no, propagandists—to paint Yavet as ruined, instead of vigorous.
What did the Earthmen say? History was written by the victors.
The Trueborns had won the final victory against the alien civilization that had once kidnapped and enslaved the Trueborns’ paleolithic ancestors. Then that civilization had sprinkled those ancestors across the universe like seeds before it returned and tried to destroy mankind’s motherworld. And why had the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony returned to destroy Earth? Only the Slugs knew that. And now, no one would ever know. Because the Trueborns had ended hostilities by some still-undisclosed treachery that had annihilated their opponent without so much as a body left behind.
But the history of the ongoing struggle within mankind between the motherworld and the seeded worlds like Yavet remained to be written. Polian had lost his son to the struggle. History would never, Max Polian thought, be allowed to forget that.
Inside the ship’s gravity cocoon, the separation from the orbit of Rand and subsequent rapid acceleration brought with it no sensation of motion. The change was perceptible only because Rand, and even the planet around which Rand orbited, vanished, replaced by blackness salted with cold starpoints. Undistorted by atmosphere, the stars didn’t even twinkle.
The outworld children whined at the suddenly monotonous experience of floating in the fishbowl, and the family disappeared aft, first among many.
Thirty minutes later Polian pushed back from the rail and let himself turn slowly through three hundred sixty degrees. The vast chamber had emptied, save for a single figure floating at the rail on the hemisphere’s opposite side, fifty feet away. No longer shielded by the discretion of the Rand, Polian and Cutler had boarded separately, and would limit their overt contact during the voyage now underway which would end at the Mousetrap. At the Mousetrap hub, each man would board a ship bound respectively for Earth and Yavet.
Polian regrasped his railing and pulled himself along until he and Cutler drifted side-by-side at the rail, staring out at the flat lit stars.
Cutler didn’t turn his head. “Well? Are you in, Max?”
Polian glanced around the empty space again, more from instinct than any real concern about eavesdroppers.
The Trueborns were a conflicted paradox. They continued to maintain themselves as individual nations on their own planet, and even now fought among themselves. Yet those charged with maintaining order handcuffed themselves with absurd rules. On an Earth ship, as on Earth, “privacy,” like being born, was a “right.” Nonetheless, Polian scrolled his wrist ‘puter display to sweep, then waited in silence until the display winked green. This fishbowl was clean of listening devices.
He said to Cutler, “You’re sure your information is reliable?”
“If I can buy a presidential pardon, I can buy a junior officer’s personnel records. It’s all there for you, right down to his psych profiles.”
Polian nodded. “I don’t doubt that you’ve learned what the man did. But whatever the psychologists claim, predicting what a man will do is less simple.”
“You forget, I know this man. He’s as predictable as water flowing downhill. I’ve given you the concept, and all the information that can be developed from my end. From here on out, it’s your operation.”
“And if Yavet succeeds, what do you get out of this?”
“When Yavet’s got its own starships, you’ll establish a sphere of influence within the Union. I want the exclusive communication franchise within the Yavet sphere. And a free hand over commercial development on Downgraded Earthlike 476.”
“Dead End? It’s worthless. Jungle and bloodthirsty monsters. Why?”
“It’s the place where my troubles started. Call it unfinished business.”
Polian shook his head. “I can try to get you your price, but I can’t promise it. The Director General of Internal Security is just a local cop.”
Cutler rolled his eyes. “A
cabinet-level
local cop, Max.”
“Your concept would require cooperation from the Directorate of External Security. That’s not my jurisdiction. And only the Central Committee could approve the rewards you want.”
Cutler’s fingers whitened as he gripped the rail. “Independent directors! They’ll knife an innovator through his heart before it beats twice. Then steal his birthright. Max, you get starships for Yavet and you won’t be a cabinet-level cop anymore. You’ll be
on
the Central Committee.”
Polian stared straight ahead, face as blank as he could manage. If anything, Cutler was understating Polian’s potential reward. Max wouldn’t be
on
the Central Committee, he would be running it. “General Secretary Polian.” The astropolitical upside for Yavet and the career potential for Max Polian almost outweighed his thirst for revenge. Almost.
He said to Cutler, “It’s not a simple plan.”
“It’s simple enough, Max! To catch the biggest fish, use a smaller fish for bait. And to catch the bait, use a smaller fish still. But it all starts with you. If you can’t find the small fish . . .”
“It’s been thirty years. And the woman, if she’s even alive, isn’t in a fishbowl. She’s in an ocean along with thirteen billion other fish.”
Cutler smiled. “But Max, that ocean and all those fish
are
your jurisdiction.”
Polian nodded, smiled in spite of himself. “True.”
“Then we have a deal. You take it from here, Max.” Cutler patted his shoulder, drifted back and left Max alone at the tip of the enormous ship.
Polian knew he wouldn’t see or hear from Cutler again until and unless the plan succeeded. So very Trueborn. Cutler cajoled someone else to do the heavy lifting, then would step in to rob the spoils. Or keep his distance if the weight collapsed and crushed the gullible unfortunate. But the spoils for Max Polian, and for Yavet, were worth the heavy lifting and the risk.
Polian stared into the blackness, as though he could see the first jump, days away even at the unimaginable speed at which they already moved. Beyond that jump lay seven more jumps, and a transfer at the Ring to a downshuttle, before he reached home.
Even weightless, he felt sore and tired. Yavet to Rand and return was a long journey even for a man half his age. Just as well, though. He needed time to plan his fishing trip.
SEVEN
Three days after
l’affaire
Mort, I slid down the electric’s driver’s side window and waved my invitation toward the gate guard, who didn’t stand up inside his stucco box when he saw me. To my left the orange Sun sank into the Gulf of Mexico. Ahead, a half-dozen private tilt-wings nested on the ground between the wrought-iron fence and the main house, and beyond them row upon row of parked limos gleamed black on the emerald lawn.
The gray-haired guard peered in through the Florida twilight at my dress whites and medals and whistled. “HSLD, Captain Parker!”
I smiled at him. “We’ll see, Leon.”
“High Speed Low Drag” was the buttoned-down configuration adopted by terrain-independent extralight armored fighting vehicles when maximizing forward progress. Applied by one hovertanker to another, the acronym implied a sleek appearance likely to maximize progress with the opposite sex.
I eyed the sea of tilt-wings and limos.
Their male passengers had surely arrived dressed not in brass-buttoned uniforms worn by persons for hire, but in tuxedos. And not tuxes rented from some storefront next door to a fried chicken place, at that.
Leon wrinkled his nose at the bugs spattered on my four-year-old electric’s windscreen. HSLD my Chyota was not. “The Colonel’s Dad would have sent the plane for you, Captain. Or at least one of the cars.”
“Tankers drive themselves, Leon.”
Especially if the alternative required me to accept an act of
noblesse oblige
from Edwin Trentin-Born. The Trentins and the Borns had been
oblige
-ing the less-fortunate classes since long before the hard freeze that followed the Blitz had chased Philadelphia’s society main line permanently to Tampa.
Not that Kit’s father disliked GIs. On the contrary. Leon hadn’t stood when I pulled up to his guard box because he had lost both legs to an Iridian IED, back before subabdominal regrows.
Edwin Trentin-Born simply liked GIs who knew their place. Which was in his guard boxes and mowing his lawns, albeit for above-market wages and benefits. But since Edwin’s wife had died and left him only with Kit, one place a GI didn’t fit was alongside Edwin’s daughter, except in a professional capacity.
Ten seconds after I slid out of my car beneath the
porte cochere
, a bow-tied valet I didn’t recognize chirped my clunker’s tires and sped it away to invisibility around the side of the house.
He wasn’t regular staff, because this wasn’t a regular evening with my significant other’s family.
The fine print on my invitation disclosed that the valet, and everything else about this event, was paid for by The Bradley Weason Initiative. This event was nominally a welcome-home party for a diplomatic mission of which Kit, and Bradley Westphal Weason, had been a part.
But it was really a campaign fund raiser for Weason, Florida’s brand new junior Senator.
I should explain. Florida is one state within the United States of America, long Earth’s most powerful and influential nation. America is to the rest of Earth as Earth is to the rest of the Human Union.
That is, Americans are richer than the rest of Earth, and they think they got that way because they’re morally superior and work harder. The rest of Earth believes the Americans got that way because they had the perverse luck to win, and win the spoils of, a long and terrible war that engulfed Earth during the 1940s. The rest of Earth therefore resents Americans, although it follows Americans’ pop-culture fashions like a dog follows bacon.
And the rest of Earth continues to look to the Americans, like the Human Union’s outworlds continue to look to the Trueborns, to lead the bleeding and cough up the treasure when really bad stuff threatens.
Tonight was about American politics, an engine of such peculiar complexity and apparent contradiction that it beggars the complexity and apparent contradictions of C-drive. About both of which I know only that they exist, and they work, and the less said the better.
Inside, the Senator himself stood in the house’s foyer, sleek and handsome at the base of the great staircase. The burble of two hundred conversations mingled with a live band somewhere beyond the foyer. Weason radiated a thousand-watt smile, pulling a stream of paying guests past himself one handshake at a time.
I looked past him and stretched my neck, straining to find the only guest who mattered amid a sea of of bobbing gray heads and sparkling tiaras.
I saw her hand first, waving at the end of her tan, bare arm as she dodged through the rich and famous toward me.
Kit squeezed past the last captain of industry that stood between us and planted one that, if it had continued another ten seconds, would have gotten embarrassing.
I held her back by her shoulders at arm’s length and stared. The first day I saw Kit Born, she was sweaty and dusty and wearing bush shorts and field boots. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the universe. The years and the scars, inside and outside, never changed that for me.
Her blonde hair was still practically short, her eyes as vast and blue as the Gulf that twinkled beyond the windows behind her. Her earlobes and a band that embraced her neck glittered with stones that would unquestionably appraise for more than my car’s trade-in value.
I raised my eyebrows at her dress, which was black and tight in the best places, and sparkled.
She smiled, turned for me. “I picked it up in Paris.”
I raised my eyebrows higher. “There’s no back.”
She faced me again and smiled.
I said, “Not much front, either.”
Her eyes twinkled like her diamonds. “Jazen, the right thing to say is that it’s graceful. Or elegant.”
I eyed the guest of honor, who was still showing shiny teeth to a procession of donors. “I suppose Weason said the right thing.”
I clamped my jaw too late.
She rolled her eyes. “Really? Jesus, Jazen!”
I needed a subject change like a man on fire needed water. “You heard about Mort?”
My heart thumped twice while she looked away and shook her head. Finally, she turned back to me, nodding, brow furrowed. “He found out about our friend?”
I nodded. “Yeah. But Mort’s okay with it for now.”
“Our friend” Bart Cutler had plotted to enslave half of the only other remaining intelligent species in the universe, and to exterminate the other half. He had also been responsible for the death of Mort’s mother, and of my best friend, and in the process had left Kit and me for dead in a jungle full of monsters. Kit and I needed to talk about what Bart Cutler might be up to now that he was out of prison. But neither of us dared mention him by name because, in this crowd, the mention of one of their own might have attracted an attentive ear. “Mort,” on the other hand, sounded like just another boring human.
Which, of course, he was not. Mort was the only living repre-sentative of his species ever to leave his planet, or even to accept the reality that his cloud-shrouded planet was not the entire universe. He was the only one who had ever revealed to a human that his species, which the xenobiological nerds had named
Xenoursus nutritor mortis
(roughly, “alien bear who brings death”) were more than just apex predators. Grezzen were, in fact, the sole remaining intelligent species with which man shared the known universe.
After Kit and I had persuaded this grezzen to come to Earth with us, Kit and I had started calling him “Mort.” Not so much to preserve his race’s secret of its intelligence, or the even bigger secret that grezzen could read minds. And not because he had ever needed a name. Telepaths don’t use names. We named Mort, and he accepted the name, because he was an individual who had become a friend.
Friendship hadn’t come easily among the three of us. It hadn’t yet come at all to most of mankind and grezzenkind. Actually, the xenobiologists of the Downgraded Earthlike 476 First Colonial Expedition had named the species before Howard’s nerds had. However, Mort’s ancestors had eaten the invaders before they could publish, so
Xenoursus nutritor mortis
became his species’ official name.
By whatever name, Mort’s ancestors slaughtered the Second Colonial Expedition, too. But that time the humans took some grezzen down with them. Hard feelings remained on both sides.
Kit smiled at me and slid her fingers up and down the lapels of my mess jacket. “You don’t wear full dress enough. You look gorgeous.” She narrowed her eyes as she traced my medals with one finger. “And I’ve never seen you wear these. Ever.”
I frowned. Medals were just ways that armies hid their mistakes. I hated mine.
Kit leaned close and breathed in my ear. “I could rip ’em off your chest with my teeth.”
Maybe my anti-medal bias bore reconsideration. And our discussion of Cutler could wait.
Kit took my hand and towed me through a sea of tycoons and holo producers to the grand staircase.
Kit’s father, the ringmaster of this black-tie circus, now stood alongside his guest of honor like they were a pair of penguins.
Kit tapped Bradley Weason’s shoulder and he turned away from some guy wearing a sash. “Brad, this is Jazen.”
Up close, the golden boy looked tanner and more square-jawed than his holos. “Captain Parker! An honor to meet you at last.” He shook my hand and somehow made me believe that the pleasure really was all his. Which, come to think of it, it was.
The annoying thing about really good politicians is that they actually make whoever they’re talking to feel like the most important person in the room for forty-five seconds, then manage to drop the sucker like a spent magazine without disappointing anybody.
Senator Weason unwrapped one finger from the glass in his left hand and pointed at the Star of Marin, probably because it glittered brighter than the Earth medals. Then he leaned close and lowered his voice. “Was that for saving Kit’s life?”
He laid his right hand on my epaulet and stared into my eyes like he was ready to cry. “We all owe soldiers like you so much. But I’m especially grateful for that on a personal level.”
I would have been grateful to remain unreminded that there had ever been a personal level between Kit and Brad Weason. Kit had assured me it was totally over, just dating during undergraduate school. Under hovertanks at armor school was the highest formal education I ever had, so I wasn’t assured.
I said, “I never got a medal for that.” Which was true, though I had saved Kit’s life more than once. Most of what Kit and I did never happened, officially. But it was nice of him to mention it.
The Senator raised his eyebrows at Kit. “Kitten? Did you misspeak?”
Kitten. Just when I was starting to not hate his guts.
Kit’s father wrapped an arm around the Weasel, one patrician to another. I think the Weasons fled Philadelphia aboard the same refugee yacht as the Trentins and the Borns. “Brad! You know Catherine can’t be specific about her work.”
Same mud, same blood, Edwin. It was
my
work too, thank you very much.
But neither could Edwin Trentin-Born be specific about
his
work. Which tonight, political fundraising aside, consisted of hooking his daughter up with a mate of better breeding and prospects than some mutt officer three ranks her junior. Brad Weason was on his way to becoming President of the United States. President of the United States is like King of the Earth, but with an expiration date. And Edwin Trentin-Born wanted his daughter to be queen. At least that was how I saw it.
A fat man wearing a thin blonde oozed up to The Weasel.
Kit’s father lit up. “Ernesto! Shake hands with Florida’s newest senator!”
The Weasel excused himself from Kit and me and picked Ernesto’s pocket for the next forty-five seconds.
Kit took my arm while she tapped her father’s elbow. “Daddy, we’re going down to the boathouse to check on Daisy. I bet her bright work hasn’t been polished for a month.”
Daisy was a boat Kit had sailed since she got it as a ninth birthday present.
Her father nodded without glancing back.
The Trentin-Born boathouse stood on pilings above the waters of the Gulf, at the end of a two-hundred-foot-long pier that was lit by flickering kerosene lanterns. The night was still, and the two of us walked alone, listening to the waves lap the pilings as distance faded the sound of the band and the crowd.
When we got halfway out along the pier I said, “Your father still hates me.”
It was cooler out over the water. Kit hugged my arm tighter. “No, Daddy just hates my work. Two administrations ago Daddy was Secretary of freakin’ State, Jazen. The most civilized public servant in America can’t accept that his daughter serves the public by doing unspeakably uncivilized things.”
I shook my head. “No. He can’t accept that you do them
with
somebody who’s unspeakably uncivilized. Kit, my only family was a downlevels midwife who delivered me illegally.”
“Your parents are still alive.”
“If you believe Howard Hibble. But not even Howard knows where they are now. Compared to people like you and Weason I’ve got the heritage of pond slime. Weason even has a silver medal.”
“Equestrian? Jazen, that’s more poof than the one I got for sailing.”
I shrugged. “I thought Trueborns were proud of their Olympics.”
Her eyes widened. “Omigod.” She poked my chest. “That’s why you wore these!”
“No.”
“Yes!” She stood back, rolled her eyes. “God, you’re so insecure.”
“It was Howard’s idea. So I
wouldn’t
be insecure.”
She smiled. “Jazen, I don’t care rat shit for Brad Weason. Or whether your parents are A-List.”
“Your father does.”
“You think I care rat shit for what Daddy thinks?”
I tucked my hands into my pockets and shrugged. She had a point. “If you did care you’d stop shooting bad guys for a living.”
Demure as Kit looked with her diamonds glittering in the moonlight, I had watched through a spotting scope while she exploded a bad guy’s head at twenty-two-hundred yards. Then did the even-badder guy crouching next to him without a hitch in her breathing. Daddy couldn’t have envisioned
that
when he tickled her, pink and naked, in the delivery room.