Deadman Switch (6 page)

“They won't do it.” There was a positiveness in Randon's tone, a clear sense that this one wasn't just a theoretical position for argument's sake. “The authorities won't allow more than two zombis to a ship, except under
extremely
unusual circumstances. You would have to be able to prove that Paquin was innocent before they would even consider sending us a substitute.”

“How can we prove anything like that until we have the trial records?” I growled. “It's a storage loop argument.”

“Yes, it is,” Randon agreed. Not apologetic, not really angry: just agreeing. “I'm sorry, but the system simply isn't set up to allow convicted felons to slide through the net at this stage.”

Or in other words, Calandra's life wasn't worth enough to him to buck established channels. Lord Kelsey-Ramos would have had the courage to do that—

But Lord Kelsey-Ramos wasn't in charge here. Randon was.

I took a deep breath. Rarely had righteous anger hit me with such a surge of emotion, and I had to fight to try and think through the haze. “All right,” I said at last. “If I can … if I can find us a substitute zombi before we're ready to leave, will you, as master of this ship, grant Calandra a temporary stay of execution?”

Randon eyed me thoughtfully. “One life worth more than another? Hardly what I'd have expected of you.”

Hardly what I would have expected of myself. I said nothing, and after a moment he nodded. “All right, Benedar, you've got yourself a deal.” He hesitated. “I don't have to remind you that you have to remain within legal bounds in obtaining this zombi for us, do I?”

The warning felt surprisingly like an insult. But perhaps the knife twist in my stomach was coming entirely from my own conscience. If I could offer a life in trade for Calandra's, was it so big a step to trading a life for profits? “I understand, sir,” I said, my mouth dry. “Thank you, sir.”

I turned to go. “Benedar?” he called after me.

Steeling myself, I looked back. “Yes?”

His gaze was almost physical in its intensity. “You'd better be right about this.”

I swallowed.
Truth? said Pilate. What is that?
“Yes, sir,” I told him quietly, and left.

I
T TOOK ME A
long time to fall asleep that night. So long, in fact, that I was still awake at one-thirty when the Mjollnir drive kicked off and the
Bellwether
was once again space-normal.

There was something eerie about lying alone in the still of the night, I'd long ago learned; something that turned even the most ordinary of daytime noises into something darkly ominous … and the distant
thunggk
of the Mjollnir circuit breakers was hardly an ordinary noise.

For a long minute I just lay in the darkness, suddenly weightless, listening to my heart pounding in my throat and straining to hear anything more. If there was something wrong—if somehow we'd lost our path through the Cloud and been brought out too early …

From the rear of the ship a faint drone became audible, increasing gradually in volume and pitch, and beneath my bed I could feel the faint answering tremor as the living-ceramic deck of my stateroom angled to keep itself perpendicular to the acceleration vector. A measure of effective weight returned, and increased, and it was clear that the
Bellwether's
voyage was progressing normally.

If such a word as “normal” could be used about a voyage piloted by a dead man.

I gritted my teeth and swung my legs out of bed. I knew myself far too well to let this slide. In my mind's eye still lingered a dark, irrational terror: the
Bellwether,
helpless, stranded somewhere out in deep space, light-years from Solitaire.

You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free …

Fortunately, in this case truth was easy to obtain. Padding the two steps to my lounge desk, I picked up my control stick and flopped down into the contour couch. “Wall: front view,” I called, activating the computer. Ahead of me, the pastel blue stateroom wall faded into the black of space—

I took a deep breath, the knots in stomach and psyche dissolving. Off to the left, blazing an artificially muted light against the scattering of stars, was Solitaire's sun.

I watched it for a moment, then turned my attention to the rest of the skyscape, searching for Solitaire itself. It was easy to find: a small crescent, just below and to the right of center, with an identical crescent a few degrees away. We'd come space-normal practically on top of it, astronomically speaking. Incredible precision, especially coming from a possessed dead man—

I shook the thought away. “Wall: grid,” I called. The faint red grid lines appeared— “Wall: section fifty-six: magnification one thousand.”

The picture jumped, enlarging to fill the wall with the two crescents. Solitaire and Spall, all right—the one known exception to the usual rule that double planets were terrible real estate for humans to dig into. Vaguely, I remembered reading somewhere that both of these worlds were habitable, though the specific reasons why Solitaire had been chosen over Spall eluded me. For the moment, though, I didn't care. The crisis was over, we'd made it through the Cloud, and with luck I could finally relax enough to get to sleep. I started to ease out of the couch—

And paused. As long as I was up anyway … “Wall: locate Collet,” I ordered. “Magnification, quarter-fill.”

There was a brief pause as the computer searched for the gas giant and calculated the magnification needed to make the image the size I'd asked for. Then the twin crescents disappeared … and despite knowing what to expect I very nearly gasped out loud.

Not at the planet itself, of course. Filling a quarter of the wall as per request, Collet's hazy green/gray surface was delicately but unspectacularly banded in the normal pattern of gas giants everywhere. At both its poles was an almost cream-colored haze, while at a dozen spots to either side of its equator I could pick out the spiral patterns of huge hurricane storms, some of which had been raging since the first colonists arrived in the system seventy years ago. Perfectly standard planet … until you looked at its rings.

Not the usual gas giant rings, puny circles of dust and ice flakes invisible to all but the most careful observer. These rings literally filled what was left of the wall, stretching outward nearly from the planet's surface in a thousand milky-white bands.

Nowhere in any of the Patri or colony systems did such an anomaly of nature exist, and it had been speculated more than once that if travel to Solitaire weren't so restricted Collet would be a major tourist attraction. Only Saturn, in the old Earth system, could even approach this sight, and those few observers who'd seen both ring systems up close unanimously considered Collet's far more dramatic.

Far more dramatic … and incredibly more valuable.

I gazed at the view for a long time, an odd melancholy filling me. It seemed wrong, somehow, for so exquisitely beautiful a creation of God to be ultimately responsible for the Deadman Switch and the human lives that went to feed it. Even from this distance, the computer could probably get a fairly clear look at one of the huge Rockhound 606 mining platforms out there, sweeping leisurely through those rings. Scooping up the rocheoids of ultra-high-grade ore that made Solitaire system worth so much trouble … and so many lives …

Angrily, I shook my head, forcing the thought away. Here we were, barely within Solitaire system, and already everything I saw was bringing me back to the Deadman Switch and the price that had been paid to get the
Bellwether
here. I was either going to have to learn better mental discipline, or else brace myself for an exceedingly depressing two weeks.

So do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own …

Shutting off the wall, I dragged myself out of the contour couch and plodded the two steps back to bed. Eventually, I fell asleep.

We touched down at Solitaire's spaceport—named, appropriately, Rainbow's End—at mid-morning the next day. Mid-morning ship's time, that is; at Rainbow's End it was already late afternoon. Too late in the day, probably, to get much of anything accomplished; but it might still be worthwhile to start finding my way around the local bureaucracy. And so, fifteen minutes after landing, I was in a rented car, driving down a very modern roadway toward the capital city of Cameo, twenty kilometers away.

The car's computer had been well supplied with cross references, and after a short discussion we decided the place I wanted was the Habrin Tsiosky Office of Justice. I let it do the driving once we reached Cameo's outskirts, and within a few minutes it delivered me there.

Within an equal number of minutes, I was again in the car, on my way back to Rainbow's End.

Kutzko was just inside the
Bellwether's
gatelock when I arrived, supervising the placement of a guard booth. “Mr. Kelsey-Ramos is looking for you,” he greeted me as I stepped aboard. “Hold it a second; I want to give the weapons sensor a test. Here, catch.”

I caught the needler clip he tossed me—puff adders, of course, Kutzko's usual ammunition of choice—and tried not to wince as I stuffed it into my tunic. I'd seen what these needles could do to a human being, and just holding a clip of them made me slightly queasy. “I told Captain Bartholomy I was going into Cameo,” I said as Duge Ifversn stepped over to the booth and flipped a pair of switches.

The archway above me emitted a pig-like squeal. “Looks good,” Duge nodded.

Kutzko nodded back. “He must not have checked with the captain, then. You should have taken a phone with you. Anyway, he's in his stateroom with Aikman.”

Great. All I needed to make the day complete was to have to face Aikman again. “Joy and rapture,” I muttered, returning the clip.

Kutzko peered at me. “You okay?”

“Temporarily, no. But I'm not ready to roll over and give up quite yet.” I gestured at the guard booth. “What's all this for? We expecting company?”

“Company, and lots of it,” Kutzko nodded. “Mr. Kelsey-Ramos has decided we're going to stay here instead of moving to one of the local hotels.”

“Really?” I frowned. “Why?”

He grinned lopsidedly. “You're the expert—you tell me. Real reason, then official reason.”

It was an old game for us, but one I didn't really feel like playing at the moment. “Mikha, I don't have time—”

“Come on, Gilead, humor me. Besides, you look like you could use a cheap victory.”

I made a face at him; but at this point I was grateful for even bad humor. “Oh, all right.”

He put on his best stone face and held it as I, for my part, tried to read past his barriers. It was really pretty easy—despite being in a profession that often attracted the more shady sorts, Kutzko was basically an honest person. “Real reason is that he doesn't trust the hotels,” I said slowly. I glanced away at the guard booth arrangement, noting the particular placement and positioning of it— “Not afraid of attack so much as he is of surveillance?”

Kutzko grinned wryly. “Straight set bull's eye. Yeah, we found a couple of tricky little bugs in our suites back on Whitecliff, as well as a
very
cute one built into the records cyl we got from Aikman.”

“You think Aikman planted them?”

“Do you?” he countered.

I thought back, remembering the sense of Aikman at that first meeting. “No.”

Kutzko nodded agreement. “I didn't think so, either. Aikman's too blazing visible to risk pulling something that underhanded himself. It was probably some faceless assistant hoping to make points. So. How about the official reason?”

I changed gears back to the contest with some effort. “No idea. I suppose Mr. Kelsey-Ramos just claimed none of the hotels here were up to his standards.”

Off to the side, Duge Ifversn snickered gently. Kutzko glanced at him, looked back at me. “Two for two,” he conceded. “I don't suppose you'd like to take a crack at guessing what we all had for breakfast?”

“You'll excuse me if I find something more useful to do with my time,” I said dryly. Still, I
did
feel better. “Thanks, Mikha.”

He understood. “No charge. Don't forget Mr. Kelsey-Ramos wants to see you.”

“I'm on my way. See you later.”

I made my way back through the
Bellwether's
corridors, simultaneously hoping I wouldn't be so late that Randon would be angry but still be late enough that Aikman would already be gone.

I was halfway lucky.

“About time,” Randon growled as I buzzed and was admitted into his stateroom. “Where have you been?”

“Cameo,” I told him. I nodded at Aikman with all the courtesy I could muster. He merely stared at me in return, not acknowledging the gesture. “I told Captain Bartholomy where I was going,” I added.

A flicker of annoyance touched Randon, but it was more annoyance at himself than at me. If Lord Kelsey-Ramos had instilled a single quality in his son, it was that of taking internal responsibility for both his actions and his oversights. “I see. Well, no matter.” He turned back to his computer—

“What were you doing in Cameo?” Aikman asked shortly, vague suspicion radiating from him.

“Business,” I said, deliberately vague.

“More a mercy trip, actually,” Randon put in, looking up and favoring Aikman with a thoughtful gaze. “Benedar thinks our outzombi may have been framed for her crimes.”

If Randon had hoped for a sharper reaction from Aikman, he was disappointed. Aikman's lip twisted, his sense that of a man whose worst expectations had been realized. “Because she says she was?” he asked pointedly, turning a cynical glare on me. “Or simply because Watchers aren't supposed to do naughty things like murder?”

I started to reply, but Randon beat me to it. “You knew she claimed to be innocent, then?”