Balance Point (8 page)
Authors: Robert Buettner
TWELVE
Three months after Howard Hibble had announced to Kit, Mort and me that Mort was going home and that Kit and I were going into non-combat mothballs, Kit and I floated weightless in the eighty-foot fishbowl that was the cruiser
Gateway
’s forward centerline observation bubble as the great ship sped away from Earth bound for connections to the outworlds.
We drifted there along with one hundred forty-eight other wedding guests while a live string quartet, which was drawn form
Gateway
’s resident orchestra, played the processional.
Ahead of us, guests, the bride, groom and one of the starship’s tri-captains in dress whites drifted like fighters in formation, while flower bouquets formed into globes orbited them like rainbow planets, all against the slowly revolving backdrop of star-salted black space.
One of the recording holo ‘bot pair hovered just out of its counterpart’s frame, beneath the bride’s feet, lenses-up.
I leaned toward Kit and whispered, “Now I see what you meant about the pants.”
She frowned with ice in her gaze. “This may be boring for you, but it’s special for this couple. Try to appreciate that.”
To say that Howard’s lunch announcement had changed Kit Born understated matters. Howard had forced Kit to contemplate a sedate rest of her life, and she hadn’t adjusted seamlessly.
For the first week after we got the word from Howard, she had spent every morning kicking all comers’ butts, including mine, as often as I kicked hers, in the hand-to-hand combat pits, until she lay in the sand, victorious but exhausted. Afternoons she spent at the ranges, until she was barred from the close-quarters battle house after she insisted on mowing down every target with a full magazine hosed out on full auto. An adrenaline junkie gone cold turkey is painful to watch, but I gave her her space. Eventually, denial and acting out gave way to acceptance of a more restrained future. Maybe too restrained.
When we were dressing for this event in our stateroom, Kit had mentioned that women at bubble weddings wore some species of trousers, to avoid unladylike displays caused by drifting weightless.
Kit, accordingly, wore a blue silk jumpsuit. I had told her it looked “demure yet flattering.” She had smiled, said that I had matured, that in the past I would have said something puerile, like that it would look more interesting if she wore it without panties.
I now know that the mature response to that is not “
Would
you?”
The music stopped and the captain cleared his throat. He was officiating in his capacity as a vessel master, to join said bride and groom in holy matrimony.
Trueborns, Kit apparently included, loved their weddings, and rich Trueborns loved their exotic destination weddings most of all. Today’s happy couple was proceeding onward for a ski honeymoon on Rand. Connected Trueborns like Kit’s father got invited to so many bubble weddings that, although they could easily afford the ticket, they couldn’t afford the round-trip attendance time. So our little party of two were standing in for Edwin Trentin-Born and guest at Edwin’s request, in order to bulk up the crowd and to earn him a cashable political chit.
Actually, our party could have bulked up the crowd a lot more. Four hundred yards aft of us, behind the shoot-on-sight marine guards who guarded the engineering spaces against espionage and sabotage, Mort was enjoying the voyage in solitude. With Kit and me assigned as escorts at government expense, Howard was sending Mort back home to Dead End so he could get lucky at his first and last homecoming dance.
So, for Kit and me, the wedding invitation via her father had come as a coincidental antidote to boredom.
Mort’s VIP suite far behind us had been created by adiosing the bulkheads separating no fewer than six cargo bays, then reinforcing the cruiser’s structure and outfitting the resultant vastness to suit an eleven-ton homecoming king. Among other expensive peculiarities that resulted from
Gateway
’s reconfiguration was that Mort, Kit and I had to stay aboard this one particular starship from Earth to Mort’s homeworld, Dead End. That meant that the voyage between Earth and the major hub at Mousetrap, normally relatively direct and short, would now be circuitous and long, because unlike most passengers and cargo, we couldn’t change vessels at intermediate hubs. The cost was prodigious.
If the other passengers had known they were sharing space with a monster who called six hundred pounds of live meat a continental breakfast, and who had inadvertently destroyed the last starship he rode on, they would have jumped ship like rats down a hawser. If the tax-paying public had known what Mort’s first date was costing them, they would have thrown tea into a harbor somewhere.
But they didn’t know. Such is the latitude an intelligence community enjoys during a time of Cold War.
Glomar Explorer
. Look it up.
I glanced sideways as the couple exchanged rings. Kit’s eyes were leaking.
I passed her a handkerchief from my tuxedo pocket. “You okay?”
She dabbed her eyes then honked into the wadded cloth. “I always cry at weddings. You?”
It was a strangely vulnerable reaction for a woman who never cried at assassinations. Had her acceptance of life without adrenaline rushes gone too far?
I shrugged. “My first. You know what’ll make an outworlder cry? Hanging this fishbowl on a starship so Trueborns can take home prettier wedding albums.”
The string quartet struck up the recessional, and the couple drifted aft past us.
As we swam in behind them, to the reception in Ballroom F, Kit’s eyes were dry. “Actually, the fishbowl’s a vestigial design element. Like a human appendix. The old chemical-fuel transports had a clear nose blister. For astral navigation and piloting if the computers failed.”
She caught me rolling my eyes.
The history chips said the first bubble wedding took place when the captain of the first Trueborn ship got married to an enlisted assault soldier in the bubble enroute to the First Battle of Ganymede. Then the captain sacrificed his life, piloting the ship from the bubble, and saved the human race. It was a nice story. But the history chips were written by the Trueborns. The same folks who flooded the universe with those overacted holos about Trueborn cops and robbers.
Normally my eye roll would have lit the fuse toward an argument about the nature of patriotism, courage and virtue versus snarky cynicism.
But instead she touched my cheek, and her eyes were soft. “If I’d grown up like you, hunted and hungry every day, I’d be cynical, too. But you’ve never been cynical about us.”
I
had
grown up dodging cops by crawling through the utilities where the cops were too big to fit, and stealing food for Orion and me when her business was slow or the heat was on. And only when I grew too big to fit in the smaller-diameter utilities had Orion been forced to let me join the Legion. But to a kid, it was all just life. A two-bean-bar day was a good day, nothing more, nothing less. I considered myself a realist, and lucky to be alive, not a cynic.
But if peace and a wedding made the hard-ass love of my life wax this sentimental, I would gladly be whoever or whatever she wanted me to be.
The right response in this tender moment was to tell her how she had never been cynical about us, either. How I knew she never would be cynical about us. Take her fingers in mine, kiss them. Talk far into the night and grow our relationship, bonding at an interpersonal emotional level. Lament that the stress of mortal combat had heretofore denied us this introspection.
Instead, I said, “I don’t suppose this means you’ve reconsidered about the panties?”
Kit may have matured, and she may have wished I had matured faster, but she hadn’t traded in all of her sense of humor, or any of her libido. What happened the rest of the night is none of your business. Suffice to say that escorting an unmarried woman to a wedding can reward her date on undreamed-of levels. But, yeah, there was some interpersonal bonding, too.
The next day we cleared the beltline marine security detachment and went aft to visit Mort face to three-eyed face.
When we ducked in through the last human-sized hatch into his domain, Mort was standing up on his two hind legs, his back to us. With his mid- and forelimbs he pummeled a plastex-wrapped tilt-wing fuselage that hung suspended from cables, as though he were a four-armed boxer at the heavy bag. The metal screeched and groaned with each blow, as though it were alive.
He kept punching but spoke in our heads. “You have stopped coitus at last.”
Kit flushed. “Didn’t you have anything better to do?”
Mort dropped onto all six, ambled from the swaying fuselage to a water trough fabricated from another fuselage split lengthwise, and drank. “I might ask the same of you. Such vigorous exercise with the expectation of neither improved muscle tone nor the production of offspring seems a waste of food energy.”
I said, “Trust me, my friend. When your time comes, you won’t stop ‘til she’s screwed your brains out.”
Kit punched my arm so hard I staggered.
Mort ignored the post-coital byplay, and said, “Why have you come to me?”
I shrugged while I rubbed my bicep. “Thought you might want company.”
“Your physical presence is unnecessary.”
Mort wasn’t blowing us off, and he wasn’t lonely. He was perpetually in the mental company of all the other individuals in his species, who were all his cousins, even though they were ten jumps away. He could eavesdrop on literally billions of other non-grezzen intellects across the universe. Especially he could eavesdrop on those close to him aboard
Gateway
.
Grezzen generally found physical proximity to other living beings distasteful, unless the grezzen was about to eat the proximate being. The only exceptions were grezzen’s mothers, and a mother’s offspring during early childhood, and a grezzen’s mate during heat and rut.
Kit asked, “Need anything else right now?”
“Solitude?”
“You’re getting the hang of sarcasm, Mort.”
“I did not intend it. The cooks bring me food and water and remove waste. I enjoy conversing with each of you, but we can continue that at any time or distance. Please do not interrupt your relentless coitus on my account.”
I turned to Kit, shrugged again. “You heard the man.”
Kit’s and my next few days, weeks and months were, therefore, our own. It was the first time Kit and I had ever travelled together without knowing that at our destination waited folks determined either to debrief us or to kill us. It turns out that a starship’s a movable feast if you aren’t spending your time preparing to get shot at or recuperating.
Howard had booked us first class, and first class aboard Trueborn starships was designed to please the likes of, well, Trueborn royalty like the Trentin-Borns. Kit signed us up for ballroom dancing lessons; wine tasting class, where she learned that a bartender knew as much as a rich girl did about cabernet sauvignon, Trueborn bowling, where I learned that sparing the seven-ten split is as hard for a rich girl as for a bartender, and yoga.
I expected to hate it all, but enjoyed myself immensely. Maybe it was the company.
One afternoon Kit and I were stretched out side by side on chaises beside the deck twenty-four pool. Except for a few other passengers reading and sleeping, and a steward who periodically delivered cocktails and little silver bowls filled with nuts, we had the place to ourselves.
Kit said, “What if the war really is over for us?”
“Sorry. I dozed off.”
“What are you going to do if it is?”
I woke so completely that I sat up and spilled my nuts. “Me? Singular?”
She smiled. “I was hoping you’d react like that.”
I propped myself on one elbow and faced her. Without the stress, she looked more like a girl in a bikini and less like a soldier every day. “I suppose we could try mercenary work. With five hundred twelve planets, there’ll always be a war on someplace.”
Kit shook her head. “Killing for peace is enough of a moral contradiction. Killing for money’s worse.”
To say nothing of getting killed for money, a result that my beautiful amazon rarely considered.
I said, “I guess robbing banks is off the short list, too, then.”
She reached across the table that held our drinks and took my hand. “We don’t have to do anything, you know. At least not anything that could get us killed. The family owns a wildlife holography company. It’s a nonprofit. Conservation, species protection. We could still travel, do rewarding work.”
I frowned. Kit the marksman as my commanding officer was one thing. Kit the heiress as my sugar mama was another.
She shook her head. “I know. You’re always going to be hung up because we each chose the wrong parents.”
She swung her legs off the chaise, sat up across from me, and slapped her palms on her bare thighs. “Hell, Jazen. If you want to buy another bar somewhere, you pour and I’ll mop the floor. All I want is that we do it together.”
I bent forward, kissed her, and one thing began to lead to another.
She pushed a hand against my chest, laughed. “Somebody’s gonna tell us to get a room.”
“We have one, remember?”
She stood up, took my hand, led me toward our stateroom and grinned over her shoulder. “Don’t you ever get tired of checking on Daisy?”
“Would that be a problem on a going-forward basis?”
Kit fixed me with a look that was the last thing many people ever saw, then she smiled. “Not as long as it’s my daisy.”
I said, “If this is the first day of the rest of our life, I’ll take it.”
THIRTEEN
“Sir, we’ve got it!” Varden stood in the open doorway to Polian’s office, his fool provi cap ajar as he grinned and held a reader out in front of himself. Polian had once owned a cat that displayed rat carcasses that way.
Polian dimmed the file flickering before his eyes. Then he rested his elbows on his desktop and rubbed his face. “Got what?”
“The woman. The surname you gave me when you got back from your trip. When General Gill’s aide and I compared notes, we figured it out.”
Polian dropped his hands and straightened. He had almost forgotten it himself. He glanced at the calendar in his display. It had been, what? Three weeks?
He waved Varden forward, and his aide stepped across the office and propped the portable on the desk at an angle so they could both read the display.
“Sir, it was a homophone error. Trueborns commonly mistranscribe Standard when it’s spoken with a Yavi accen—” Varden caught himself.
Theoretically, Varden didn’t know that the name that Polian had provided had been supplied to Polian by a Trueborn. Varden’s principal military virtue was loyalty, not cleverness. But the boy was bright enough that he had realized that anything his boss held this close had to involve the Trueborns.
Varden ran a finger across the display. “Someone with a Yavi accent said ‘Orion.’ To a Trueborn, it sounds like ‘O’Ryan.’ That’s a common Trueborn surname. But it turns out it was actually what you or I would instantly recognize as the common first name for a downlevels Yavi woman.”
Polian ran a hand through his thinning hair.
This should have taken three hours to figure out, not three weeks. But internal security people like Varden had different expertise than Gill’s external security people. Over the course of history, compartmentalized, unshared intelligence had probably lost more battles than a thousand incompetent generals. It could have lost
this
battle before it even started.
“Sir, the note on that scrap you gave me said this woman was a midwife, actively delivering illegal children about thirty years ago.”
Polian raised his eyebrows. “And?”
“Once we came up empty on every other inquiry line, we just ran the first name, ‘Orion,’ against convicted, suspected, or fugitive midwives named Orion who fit the age window. We got nine matches.”
Polian frowned. “Nine?”
Varden nodded. “Five of the nine were incarcerated during the period in question. One was theoretically still working, but she had lost one hand during an attempted robbery. I gather that makes her line of work difficult.”
Polian sighed.
“That leaves—”
“Three, Varden.”
Varden nodded. “But two of those were KRA last year.”
Polian sighed again. “Killed Resisting Arrest” was a leading cause of death downevels. It was common banter in vice locker rooms that peeps could resist arrest in their sleep. Then Polian frowned. “So there’s only a one-in-three chance that the person we’re looking for is the one who remains alive?”
Varden shifted his weight. “Well, actually, sir, I kind of figured it’s for sure that the survivor is the one you’re looking for. I mean, what are the odds?”
“The odds of what?”
“You don’t remember her? According to her record, Orion Parker was an informant of yours when you were a downlevels patrol officer.”
Polian sat back, stared into space.
He hadn’t worked vice hands-on for thirty years. He had utilized tens, maybe hundreds, of snitches. They ran together in his mind now, no more distinct than potatoes in a bin. “Image?”
The mug shot Varden pulled up was flat and grainy, but, yes, now Polian recognized the little she-gnome. Large blue eyes, the spiky black hair they all wore then. And, by the background grid behind her, short even amongst her peers. She had been feisty and clever. No wonder she had stayed alive.
Polian stroked his chin. “She was damn good at disappearing from us. How can you be sure she’s alive down there still?”
Varden smiled, pulled up a second mug, this one sharp and recent. The same face, now worn and gray. Even thinner, skeletal. And wearing detention fatigues.
Varden pointed at the image sidebar. “She went down for the long one eight years ago. Third strike. Her sentence was commuted from termination to life because of the work she did for you.”
Polian nodded. This was better than he could have hoped for. “Draw release documentation for this inmate. Compassionate release for health reasons.”
Varden’s eyes widened. “Sir? Lifers aren’t eligible for—”
“They are if I say so.”
Varden seemed to have trouble keeping his jaw from dropping, but managed, “Yes, sir.
“I’ll go down and handle her exit interview myself.”
If a Director General had ever visited a detention facility before, Polian himself had never heard of it. But Varden was either learning to keep his reservations to himself, or simply numb by now.
The younger man just nodded.
Polian took out a paper orders form and a physical pen, wrote for three minutes, then folded the paper and sealed it in a tamperproof. He slid it across the desk. “And drop this off with Master Sergeant Creter in Graphics. His instructions are inside.”
Varden cocked his head. “I thought Sergeant Creter retired, sir.”
“Some skills are too valuable to be retired, Varden.”
Varden picked up the envelope like it was a grenade and stood, brow wrinkled.
“Varden? Off you go. Dismissed.”
The boy saluted, spun on his heel and was gone.
Three days later Polian’s bed woke him a half hour before virtual sunrise. He dressed in the sort of cheap civilian one-piece a downlevels advocate might wear to an inquest, stepped onto the pedway outside his residential on Eightieth and Park, Seventy Upper. Traffic was so light that early-rising joggers wove around him without a touch, panting. Three minutes later he transferred to the express downtube for Ninety-six Lower.
The car was half empty, mostly engineers bound for early-shift supervisory jobs in the heavys on Ninety-six Lower. He let them exit before he stepped out.
Max Polian hadn’t been this deep, indeed hadn’t been into the lower levels at all, in ten years. And never to Ninety-six Lower. Vice cops went where the weak and the dishonest went to indulge their vices, and that wasn’t on a manufacturing level.
The dim, cheap light, low ceilings and narrow warren of the traffic grid were nonetheless all too familiar.
The ceaseless, floor-shaking mechanical rumble, the hot stink of machine lubricant, and the empty, pedway-less passages were unfamiliar. Not that Ninety-six Lower, or its counterparts in Yavet’s other stack cities, was deserted. Behind the sliding doors that lined the passages the little people toiled and sweated in their burgeoning billions.
It took Polian ten minutes to cross the industrial zone of Ninety-six Lower to the entry gate of City of Yaven Detention Block South.
The bored gate guard didn’t recognize Polian in the one piece he wore, but when Max leaned in to the retinal, and his ID flashed up, the man sprang to attention.
Polian had been sweating from the heat in the corridor, but moments after he entered the block he was blinking away a torrent. Detention blocks were always sandwiched between the basic industry fabrication facilities where the inmates worked. The blocks functioned as heat sinks because even the vast exhaust stacks couldn’t vent every byproduct of the furnaces, fabricators and forges to the atmosphere.
The guard who guided Polian along the cell-lined corridor to the interview cubicle wore a head lamp, because the block’s minimal lighting came from the red-hot glow of the ancient, riveted iron common wall panels, where they were left exposed to provide illumination.
As the guard walked he turned his head, and his murky beam shone through the bars into each of the gang cells as he and Polian passed them. Every other cell stood empty and silent, its shift of inmates laboring a half day, every day, in the furnace spaces, the even less hospitable world of molten metal, din and danger adjacent to each block.
The occupied cells were floored with a cobbled pavement of sleeping inmates, curled like a squirming, snoring, farting mass of root vegetables dumped into an iron bin. The stench of too many humans permeated the walls and floors and ceilings and bars of the place deeply. But not so deeply as did the absence of hope.
He snorted to himself even as he breathed through his mouth. The Trueborns made up myths about hell in another life to encourage good behavior in this one. All that the Trueborns had encouraged by doing so, so far as Polian could tell, was libertine chaos. The Yavi made palpable, actual hell in
this
life to encourage good behavior. And the resultant society was the most efficient mankind had yet created.
Ten minutes later, Max sat alone, wiping his brow, at the center table of a windowless, steel-gray interview Kube. The door through which he had entered was closed, as was the other to Max’s front. In his pocket rested the Kube’s sensor link chip, which Max had removed when he entered. The block’s commander probably wouldn’t dare eavesdrop, but Max Polian hadn’t risen from downlevels vice cop to Director General by being careless.
Polian started at the metallic thump when the door he faced opened, and the guard thrust a spindly, limping figure through into the Kube. As the guard shut the door and left Polian and the inmate alone he said to Polian, “There you are, sir. Four triple zero two two.”
Before Max Polian stood not so much a person in detention fatigues as a bundle of sticks jumbled in a dirty sack that had once been orange. The person shielded its eyes against the Kube’s dim lighting with a skeletal hand.
The note of her cough rather than her face or figure identified her as a woman.
She stood motionless, hairless head down.
“Parker?”
The woman looked up, and for a moment Polian thought she recognized his voice. Then he realized she was simply surprised to be called by a name and not by her number.
She squinted at him through eyes sunken deep in dark sockets. “Who’re you?”
“Long time no see, Parker.”
“You know me?” The small woman cocked her head.
He motioned her to the chair opposite him. “Have a seat.”
She shuffled to the chair opposite him, dragged herself up onto it.
He poured water from the thermal carafe on the table into a clear tumbler, and the cold liquid sweated the glass in seconds. He pushed the tumbler toward her.
She seized the glass in trembling hands, sipped, then coughed. Finally, she looked up at him. “You know me. Should I know you?”
He nodded. “Parker, I’m Max Polian.”
She gulped the water this time, then shivered.
It was probably the coolest she had felt in eight years.
She turned the glass in her hand and shook her head. “If you were Polian, you would’ve brought bourbon I could chase with this.”
“You’re lucky the guards let me give you water.”
Her drawn face twisted into a diminutive smirk. “So it is you, Polian. Lying your ass off as usual. I heard you got made Director fucking General. The goons here would let you give me anything you wanted to.” She snorted, spat water out. “Asshole.”
He smiled. “Appreciative as always, Orion. To tell you the truth, I assumed you had been dead for years.” Polian had figured it right. Not one in a thousand lifers lasted as long as she had, and by the look of her she wouldn’t last much longer.
Orion Parker had always been a hard case. So hard that, in her current failing condition, even enlightened interrogation methods would have killed her before she told him the single, critical fact that Max needed to learn, assuming she even knew it.
If she knew what he thought she knew, and if she acted on that knowledge in the way he expected her to, that would be perfect.
If she
didn’t
behave as he expected she would, he would pull her back in and take the risk of getting the information that he needed to know in the conventional way.
It was a humane strategy. Either way, she would live slightly longer and far more pleasantly than she would down here.
She stiffened and her eyes widened. “You found out I got commuted to life?”
“I did.” He nearly smiled as he understood her reaction.
Orion now thought that her original commutation from termination to detention had been an undiscovered error. She thought he had discovered it, and had come here at this moment to have her executed. Well, good. Fear of imminent death always increased a subject’s malleability.
He poured water for himself, drank, while he let the fear build in her.
He said, “You delivered thousands of Illegals. That’s a lot of capital crime, Parker.”
“Not as many as you killed. That’s a lot of murder, Polian.”
“The difference is you were breaking the law. I was enforcing it. And if I were you I wouldn’t be so quick to condemn my job. You helped me do it.”
She sat silent, eyes glaring out from deep sockets.
Some snitches informed for money, for drugs or to avoid pain. She had given him information only because it kept her free. Free to commit the crime of delivering and hiding illegally born infants. Polian estimated she had saved a thousand illegals for every hundred she gave up. Hell, by Trueborn moral standards, she was a heroine.
He sat back in his chair. “We both did what we did, Parker. But we’ve both gotten old.”
“Me maybe a little faster down here, you prick.”
“And I’m maybe getting soft in my old age.” He laid his hands, palms down, on the tabletop. “Parker—Orion—I’m here to tell you that I’ve ordered you released.”
At first she just sat there. Finally, her eyes widened and her mouth opened. “What?
“Released. Freed.”
“Why?”
Because once she was free, she would have access to the sub rosa network of offworld smuggling and communication that criminals like her knew so well.
But Polian said, “I think someone like you has suffered enough.”
“Bullshit. God, how did such a lousy liar get to be Director General? Polian, making someone like me suffer is what you live for.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I
did
just get soft when I got old.” He slid his chair back. “If you’d rather stay here . . .”