Balance Point (7 page)
Authors: Robert Buettner
If a man and a woman have been together long enough, neither needs a grezzen to read the other’s mind.
I dunno. Some days I wondered how many teams among the missing sixty-eight percent went dark not due to enemy action but because the idiot’s contrasting temperament and viewpoint annoyed her so much that she shot him.
Howard removed his glasses, then polished the lenses with his napkin. “Regardless of the numbers, Kit, you were right in recognizing that this new administration has new priorities. We’re pulling the teams out of the field.”
“You’re taking us out of the war?” Kit’s eyes bugged.
I suppose mine did, too.
TEN
Kit and I sat open-mouthed, staring at one another for what seemed like minutes. Then the two of us turned on Howard, with what I suppose looked like mutinous blood in our eyes.
Howard raised his palms. “The President was a history professor before he entered politics. He refuses to preside over Cold War II deteriorating into the second phase of Cold War I.”
I cocked my head. Over the last months of babysitting Mort, I had time to burn, and had burned it reading lots of Trueborn history myself.
At the middle of the last century the American Trueborns won a massive war started by some of the other Trueborns. That war was so long and so devastating that it was divided into chapters, World War I and World War II, separated by a halftime show called a depression.
The Americans won that war so thoroughly that when the second chapter ended they were the only ones with the capacity to nuke the crap out of everybody else, who had all pretty much stuffed one another down the economic toilet during chapters I and II.
The Americans thought their preeminence was earned, because they were the demonstrated good guys. The people in the toilets thought the Americans were naïve opportunists who had simply come late to the brawl, were insufferably full of themselves, and would fuck them, just like the future always had.
Surprisingly, the Americans thereafter lived up to their own fine self-image. They helped the rest of the Trueborns climb out of their toilets, and then prevented them, in the main, from restarting the stuffing-one-another process. After World War II ended, nobody else got nuked. Almost everybody was getting rich, although the Americans made sure that they were getting richest of all. It was the time that Howard had just described as the first phase of Cold War I.
Then the Soviet Union, the part of everybody that was managing to
not
get rich, stole the capacity to nuke the crap out of people from the Americans. The Soviets had been both big stuffers and big stuffees during the World Wars, and remained comfortable stuffing people, including their own, down the toilet.
This changed everything. Phase two of Cold War I became an ever-escalating pissing contest between two superpowers. Nuclear missiles by the tens of thousands were planted in the ground like seeds, were floated beneath Earth’s oceans, and were loaded into the bellies of airplanes, that circled the skies like nervous hawks. Neither the Soviets nor America wanted to be second on the draw. Inevitably, an itchy trigger finger somewhere was going to blow Earth to hell. Pundits drew up an imaginary clock that counted down the day before Doomsday. The hands were always set just minutes before midnight.
Kit said, “But Howard, the Soviet Union imploded. Not a single nuke out of all those thousands was ever detonated. The good guys’ strategy won.”
“True.” Howard shook his head. “But luck and a belief in the folly of collectivist economics is hardly a strategy to bet the farm on.”
I turned to Kit. “Howard actually could be right. One fuck-up from Armageddon’s no way to run a universe, Kit.”
Kit’s lip curled. “Jazen, that’s not the way we’re running it. The Yavi can’t nuke anybody but themselves. So we’ll never have to nuke them or anybody else.”
Howard nodded. “This administration wants to keep it that way.”
Kit said, “That’s what the teams have been doing for the whole Cold War! Keeping it that way. Containing the Yavi with a poke in the ass here, a slap on the wrist there. Hell, it was your idea, Howard.”
Howard shrugged. “This administration thinks the teams and the rest of the strategy are too expensive. The nonaligned worlds hate our meddling, and even our allies aren’t crazy about it.”
I raised my palm. “Howard, during Cold War I, in the first phase before the Russians got nukes, plenty of American planners wanted to nuke the Russians first. If you pull the teams down, that’ll be the only strategy that’s left.”
Howard raised his palm back at me. “There’s no reason to think it will come to that. The Yavi don’t have starship technology.”
“But if they
get
starship technology, this administration will nuke them?” I rolled my eyes. “To save money? And suck up to a bunch of outworlders who take that money? But still they hate our guts.” I heard my voice quaver.
The quaver, I realized, resulted less from righteous political indignation than from fear. Fear that Howard’s announcement might change my crummy life, or more accurately, change my relationship with Kit, which was the only thing that made my life uncrummy.
Kit turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Since when does Mr. ‘Trueborns are pricks’ take the side of us against the outworlds?”
“Us? Kit, I grew up on Yavet. So did thirteen billion other people who don’t give a shit about Cold War politics. Killing them and claiming premature self-defense is fucked up.” I pointed first at Kit, then at Howard, and snorted. “I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, you people exterminated an entire intelligent species and call yourselves heroes for doing it.”
Howard leaned forward, eyes hard behind his glasses, “Jazen!” Howard stabbed a bony finger at me so hard that it quivered. “Jazen, your own parents fought that war right alongside me. Don’t judge people and events about which you know practically nothing!”
I pointed back at Howard, and my finger shook, too. “And why do I know practically nothing? Because you won’t
tell
me, you mendacious old paranoid!”
I knew Howard didn’t know where my parents were in the universe at any given time, or at least he claimed he didn’t.
I knew, because they had both been enlistment age when the War started, that their straight-line chronological age now could be pushing one hundred. But I knew from what Orion told me about the way they had looked, and my mother’s condition when she gave birth to me, that their subjective physical age was now more like fifties. That partly reflected Trueborn medical care, and partly reflected a lifetime of war spent traveling time-slowed near light speed.
I knew my father had been a hero, a dumb grunt like me, who had risen through the ranks. And my mother had been a kick-ass pilot all her professional life. Then they had both been involved in something that happened at the war’s end, something so bad that the two of them disappeared from the history books, and now wandered the universe as clandestine exiles. Profiteering, atrocity, who knew? If you can do something terrible even in the context of something as terrible as war, it had to have been unspeakable. And it was unspeakable. Only people at Howard’s clearance and above knew the details.
My parents’ disappearance from history meant I’d never even seen so much as a paper photograph of either one. Hell, I might have passed them on the street and never have known it.
And so I was a downlevels mutt with no speakable pedigree, born illegally and raised in poverty in a culture that the Trueborns despised. So I clung to my relationship with a woman out of my league the only way I knew how, which was by risking my life for her.
With uncharacteristic restraint I shut my big mouth for once. Partly because I had just backtalked a general officer who outranked me by seven grades. Mostly because I’d never, ever seen Howard angry before.
All three of us sat back and took deep breaths. Sixty feet away, Mort dozed after his meal, the rasp of his snore mingling with the drone of flies that swarmed his leftovers.
Finally, Howard drew another breath, laid his palms on the checked tablecloth, and stared at Kit, then at me, as he spoke. “Jazen. Kit. Neither you nor I can predict American policy. Nor as members of the military can we set it the way we prefer. You may think I’m some goofball professor, but I’m soldier enough to know my place.”
On the rare occasions when I saw Howard in uniform, I noted that he wore the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Just because I didn’t care for medals, they proved to me that Howard Hibble was soldier enough, alright.
Howard sat back, folded his arms across his scrawny chest. “If either of you have trouble knowing your place, file your discharge forms.”
Kit and I shared a glance. Discharge? Yikes.
The two of us had most recently been party to one of those poke-and-slap outworld actions that Kit had just mentioned. A spaceport had been destroyed, a neutral shuttle had nearly been shot down, a Yavi major and hundreds of Yavi troops had been killed, and the Yavi had gotten away with enough cavorite to fuel a fleet of starships. To say nothing of torturing Kit and nearly killing us both. But cavorite’s useless without C-drive technology.
Since that dustup, the Yavi had bungled a high-risk attempt to salvage a power plant from a Scorpion that had crashed on Dead End last year.
The Trueborn intelligence community had failed to sustain reliable human sources on Yavet for years, and so relied by necessity on electronic eavesdropping to produce predictive intelligence product. Howard’s tea-leaf readers, wherever they were hiding, believed that the Yavi External Operations Directorate, his and Kit’s and my blood enemy in this Cold War, was currently in disfavor and disarray, and harmless for the forseeable future.
My rant, however righteous, seemed mismatched to real-world probabilities. Especially if it required me to resign in protest.
I hazarded a question. “Uh. Howard?”
“Yes, Jazen?”
“If this place is shutting down, and the teams are standing down, is this an exit interview? Do the two of us still have jobs?”
He smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
ELEVEN
The orderly behind the desk in the outer office of the Director General of External Operations sprang up and saluted when he saw Polian’s shoulder boards. “Sir!”
“Keep your seat, sergeant. I need to see the director.”
Polian glanced around the vastness of the outer office. Unopened shipping plasteks were stacked along one wall, and the other walls were bare of the usual tiling of unit citations, statements of general orders, notices of promotion boards, and chain of command portraits common to such places. What Varden had told him about EOD’s upset looked to be true.
The orderly stared into his screen and poked at it. “Ah—sir, Director Gill’s so new here—we all are—your appointment must have gotten—”
“I don’t have an appointment.” Polian pointed at a door set in the opposite wall of the directorial suite, which was a twin to his own eight miles away. “I’ll meet him in the bubble.”
Four minutes later Polian stood alone, hands clasped behind his back, and stared out through the single, multilayered window set in the curved wall of the suite’s secure conference room. It had been three hours since he had left the Trueborn cruiser, ten minutes since he had shown up here unannounced. Cops were used to waiting, and he still thought of himself as a cop.
Polian stretched again as he stared across Yaven. Vented smoke from Yavet’s capital hung like a delicate veil between him and the brass toned pyramids of the other directorates that studded the main pinnacle. The directorate offices were all at level Eighty Upper and above, and the executive levels sparkled with optical windows, like the snow he had seen on the peaks of the High Rand. Through the shimmer of vented heat, he made out the pyramid that housed the Internal Operations Directorate, with his own suite at its apex.
It was a grand sight, but one to which he had become accustomed. He yawned, turned away from the window. His only prior contact with Ulys Gill had been the condolence letter Gill had sent after Ruberd’s death, as Ruberd’s commanding officer. Max didn’t know the man personally. But cops were used to knowing a person of interest by what they didn’t say. What the room, bare, silent, businesslike and anonymous, said about Ulys Gill was consistent with the man’s story.
Ulys Gill had a flawless up-through-the-ranks external military record. On merit, Gill should have risen higher than he had before now. But Gill had been held back by the suspicion that he was born and raised illegal in the downlevels, skipped offworld by joining the Legion, and returned with a phony—albeit perfect—identity bought at Mousetrap or one of the other cesspool hubs where Trueborn starship routes intersected.
Polian’s Directorate tolerated Legion skips, because little people gone were as good as little people dead. And Yavi lucky enough to survive the Legion and buy a hub scrub usually began a life elsewhere, rather than risk exposure and execution by returning here.
“Director Polian.” Max turned and saw Ulys Gill enter the bubble, closing the door behind him.
No wonder the promotion boards had been suspicious. Gill was slight and stooped by age, but even if he had been young he would have stood a head shorter than Polian. His uniform was impeccable, as was his bearing.
He took the hand of his co-equal ranker, laid his other across it, and smiled beneath a gray moustache that had been out of fashion even among field-grade officers since the Insurrection. “Sir—”
“Call me Max.”
“Max, it’s good to meet a man about whom I’ve heard so much good. I’m only sorry about the reason I heard it. Ruberd was proud to be your son. And I was proud of what he did for Yavet.”
Polian nodded wordlessly.
Gill had been a passed-over two-leaf, on the cusp of retirement. Then the death on Tressel of that mission’s commander had thrust Gill into command there. Gill’s massive success in the Tressel action had catapulted him past his betters into this post. Yet, if Gill was some sort of late-blooming political kiss-ass, Gill’s humility and his affection for Ruberd seemed genuine.
Gill motioned Polian to a chair at the table, and they sat across from one another. Gill leaned forward, cocked his head. “Max, you’re only two hours back on dirt. What brings you to External Operations?”
Polian smiled.
Gill might be new to this job, but he knew how to pull its strings. External Operations didn’t monitor citizens with the precision that Polian’s own directorate did, but in his new job Gill controlled planetary arrivals and departures, not only of persons but of communications, overt as well as crooked. That control was what made Gill indispensable to Polian’s scheme.
“Director—”
“Call me Ulys.”
Polian nodded, laid his palms on the tabletop. “Ulys, you and I both know that we’ve got cavorite now, thanks to you and to Ruberd. But like the little people say about whisky, unless we can open the bottle, it’s useless.”
Gill steepled his fingers, frowned. “You know the operation to recover the C-drive unit failed, then?”
Polian nodded. “I do.”
Hell, even Cutler knew. At considerable political risk, Gill’s predecessor as Director General of External Operations had inserted a covert team, covered as a nature-film crew, on a remote Trueborn-colonized planet. The team’s objective had been to locate a Trueborn Scorpion fighter that had crashed in dangerous country, extract the fighter’s C-drive power unit, and smuggle it off the planet. The team had perished in the attempt, and the Central Committee had sacked Gill’s predecessor.
“Ulys, have you developed another option?”
The new Director General of External Operations shook his head. “As you see, we haven’t even unpacked.”
Polian leaned forward on his elbows. “I have a suggestion.”
It took Polian ten minutes to summarize Cutler’s overture, and another ten to summarize the plan that had grown from it.
Polian paused, leaned back. “Well?”
Gill sat back in his chair, too. “Max, the little people say that it’s better to stab a shiv artist before he can stab you.”
Polian nodded at the proverb.
Cold War II stayed cold only because the Trueborns were smugly certain that their strategic advantage allowed them to merely contain Yavet, rather than destroy it. But if the Trueborns ever became aware that they might lose their advantage, no thoughtful Yavi believed the Trueborns would hesitate to strike Yavet first, and with nuclear weapons. “You’re afraid that this proposed operation could give the Trueborns an excuse to strike preemptively? To destroy us?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one. Max, I got this job because the fellow who sat in this chair before me ordered that attempt to steal that C-drive. He was dismissed because the Central Committee thought he ordered a reckless, provocative plan.”
“They didn’t think what you and Ruberd did on Tressel was too provocative. They promoted you!”
Gill shrugged. “Success silences critical tongues. Besides, Tressel’s Yavet’s ally. We were on Tressel with the local government’s blessing. The Scorpion recovery team made a covert armed incursion onto a Trueborn colony.”
Polian smiled. “Ulys, that’s the beauty of this plan! The actual activity all takes place right here on Yavet. The Trueborns can’t call that provocative.”
Gill leaned back, steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “But not all the table setting takes place here. Don’t forget, the Trueborns have been manufacturing provocations to justify wars against one another for centuries. If they wanted to nuke us they could have done it yesterday and made up some story to justify it. This Cutler could be planted for just that reason.”
Polian shook his head. “I’ve not only met Cutler, I’ve researched him. He’s no plant. He’s a venal, unprincipled Trueborn. His government jailed him and took away his empire. He wants to get even.”
“Assuming for the sake of argument that you’re right about Cutler, what you’re suggesting
is
a provocation. After the Scorpion fiasco, the Central Committee’s even more gun-shy. They’ll never approve it.” Gill sat stiff and silent.
Gill was right, of course. Central Committee members achieved their rank by growing ever older and ever more timid.
As a young up-and-comer, Polian had appeared before the Central Committee once, and presented a plan to smuggle nukes onto the outworlds to blackmail the Trueborns. It was a superb plan. The Trueborns tolerated smuggling even more readily than they tolerated weakness and sloth. But the Central Committee’s old men had stared at him as though a turd had materialized in their witness chair. That moment, Polian still believed, had forever and unjustly disqualified him from consideration for an External Operations post. Not that he wanted one, really.
“Ulys, I’m not suggesting the Central Committee be consulted. The entire scheme can be handled within our two directorates with minimal resources. It’s well within our respective discretions. In fact, the resources are so minimal that the plan can fail with no one the wiser. And nobody gets the sack.”
Gill’s jaw dropped. “It may be espionage on the cheap, Max. And technically within our respective discretions. But go around the Central Committee with a plan that could destroy Yavet? Max, what you’re suggesting is closer to mutiny than it is to exercise of discretion.”
Polian had expected reticence. He could, of course, now simply threaten to air his own suspicions about Gill’s birth status. Gill had dealt with suspicions that he was a scrubbed Illegal throughout his career, but never when they were aired by someone of Polian’s rank and reputation. The threat would provide all the coercive leverage Polian needed to force Gill’s cooperation.
But Polian needed a willing ally, not a foot-dragging conscript. So he dangled just a hint of the threat.
“Hell, Ulys, I’ve devoted more manpower to tracking down one Illegal than this whole operation would take.”
Gill remained silent, fingertips noiselessly drumming the tabletop. If he had taken the hint, he gave no visible sign.
Finally, Gill sighed. “Max, I don’t want Ruberd to have died for nothing any more than you do. I’m not saying I’m with you all the way.” The small man paused, then cocked his head. “But what do you need from me, for starters?”