The Stone Dogs (67 page)

Only for you, my brother
, she thought, controlling the impulse to shudder. The message had been like none she ever received. Far longer. Not just instructions on a new drop, a new contact-code; orders to
do
. The thing she carried at her belt.

Something is very wrong here. Freds never been in the loop
before, neither of us would dare.

The screen flicked light at her eyes. A laser read the pattern of her retina; the information sped away as modulated light.

Another scanned her palmprint, the abstract of her voice.

Information flowed into a central computer's ready-storage peripheral; embedded instruction sets were tripped. Data from deep storage was copied, run through a translator into analog form, compared. Another code-phrase tripped a set in the response machine.

"Confirmed. Marya E77AI422, property of Arch-Strategos Ingolfsson, Commandant. Literate Class V-a. Delay, query." The idiot-savant routines would be calling her owner's private quarters. Marya breathed in, calmly. That was where the interception loop she had established would work; or not. The machine spoke again: "Query, confirmed. E77AI422, proceed."

The guard nodded. "Confirmed. Present, wench," he said.

Marya turned and bent back her head to bare the serf-tattoo beneath her right ear. There was a box clipped to the serf policeman's waist; he pulled free a light-pencil on a coil cord and ran the tip down her tattoo. The box chirped, encoding her ident on a dataplaque within; another footprint.

With a slight hiss, the door opened. Marya noted the thickness of it, featureless sandwich-armour alloy. The corridor beyond was plain, but there would be instruments and weapons in the walls. Another door, and she was out into a vestibule of the factory; more guards, crewing control-desks. They waved her through. She walked on, past color-coded doors and more corridors. Through a transparent tube, over a long room where workers bent to their micromanipulators and screens. They were assembling circular electrowafers in tubes, building the preceded stacks that contained the instruction sets for major computers and their closed-access internal memories. Others fitted the pillars of wafers into the rectangular platforms of the logic decks; she could imagine the submicroscopic tools soldering their gold-wire and optical-thread connections.

All familiar enough; the basic technology had not changed in a generation, despite vast improvements in detail.
And I've
heard Draka complain the Alliance isn't introducing as many
refinements for them to
steal lately
, she recalled. Exterior data storage, translator/interfacer unit, memory, instruction sets, logic deck. And beyond this complex, the most crucial area of all, where the design teams' compinstruction data was turned into physical patterns for embedding in the cores…

"Hello," she said to the receptionist in the office area. Polite but not servile; she was a command-level officer's personal servant. Not as formally high-status as this expensively trained technical secretary, but they were both Class V-a's, and her owner outranked the Faraday Combine exec who ran this facility. "Is Master MacGregor in? The plant manager?"

The receptionist looked up from his keyboard, looked Marya up and down. "Your message?" he said. "Master MacGregor can't be interrupted, he's in conference."

He's checking my clothes,
Marya thought. Silk shirt, pleated trousers, jeweled clasps on the sandals and belt. Obviously a houseserf, equally obvious from someone not to be offended.

"It's an invitation," she said. "From the Commandant." Marya held out a folded parchment sealed in gold with the Drakon signet, then pulled it back when the man reached for it.

"Personal service." That was one of her duties, keeping track of the obligatory social functions Yolande hated, and seeing that the invitations were in harmony with the relative status of each participant. A personal hand-delivery to a Commandatura reception was just slightly more than MacGregor rated; just enough that no underling of sense would endanger it.

"Oh, excuse me." The serfs heavy Arab features knotted.

"Ahhh…" There was a waiting area behind the desk, but that was for Citizens. "Here, I'll take you to his office. You can wait there, and give the invitation."

"Will he be long?" Marya said, with a frown of concern.

"Mistress the Arch-Strategos Ingolfsson expects me back."

Sometime this evening, probably, but the rank ought to make
you sweat.
Marya's owner took her lunches at her office, and it was vanishingly unlikely that her absence would be noted. Even less likely that anything would be made of it, Marya was authorized to leave the household and entitled to do so at discretion, so long as her work was done.
But every minute is
another chance to be missed.

"It's right this way," he continued. She followed; there was carpet here, muffling even the light sound feet made under Lunar gravity. He touched the wall, and a section slid upwards; that's right, lay on the courtesy. He could have made her wait in the hall, but it was never wise to antagonize one who had the ear of your superior's superior. She stepped through. A typical office chamber, big enough for pacing, with a holowall landscape, desk, workstation. That was activated, notes and papers left carelessly around the terminal. The release of tension was like nausea or orgasm. She turned that into a one-two-kneel motion, sinking down on her heels and closing her eyes, hands and invitation folded in her lap. The Perfect Servant, concentrated on the task in hand.
Go away
, she thought with deadly concentration at the receptionist.
Don't try to make polite conversation, don't offer
me refreshment, go away.

He did; she waited until the door closed, and sixty heartbeats beyond. When she rose, it was with a smooth economy of motion that wasted no second of time, time that she was buying with her life. There was no turning back; it could be months before she might have to use the pills carefully hoarded in her room, even years, but the clock was running from this moment.

Exec MacGregor had been careless, leaving his terminal up. A violation of procedure, even here in the heart of a guarded facility. Even behind a door only those with authorization could access. She took the dataplaques from the pouch at her waist and touched the keyboard.

-
Work in progress
-, she typed.

[Core memories. Actuation sequences.] A long string of codes; she picked out the ones she knew, the ones on the plaque she should have wiped but could not bear to, the one with her brother's image.

Cr-ex 5-5 Btstation orbital: launch sequence. IFF.J
There
.

Her fingers moved. -
Halt. Memcheck, active
-. Then the only time embedded sets were held in access memory. While they were being
transferred
to the cores. Feverishly, she checked the work-in-progress table on the status of the sets; they were finished, ready to be templated for the master-pattern in the assembly hall.

-
Modification
,- she typed.

[Delay.] Seconds of white terror. [Accepted. Load sequence.]

Marya stared at her hand until the slight tremor disappeared.

She pushed the first of the palm-sized synthetic rectangles into the receptor.

-
Create parallel file
temp:l-

[File standing.]

-
Load receptor D: seq-

An almost inaudible whine, as the reader/translator loaded the contents of the plaque into the virtual space she had created.

Another. Another. There were five of the plaques. Three minutes in all; now for the difficult part. She gave silent thanks that the Domination used a standard working compinstruction language.

There were three in the Alliance, not to mention illegals.

-
Run temp:l comparison workfile: Cr-ex 5-5 keyphrase com;
master-The screen flickered, as the computer matched the sets.

[Congruence sector core: code exe.] The master recognition commands, friend-foe.

-
Mergeset:
modify
workfile:
Cr-ex 5-5 keyphrase com:
master-

[Merging.] Long seconds, while the machine knitted the new symbols with the old, matching smoothly where the coded ends fitted the set. [Complete. Workfile 2temp:1]

Shit,
she thought. It was making duplicate drafts, not substituting.

-
Compare
workfile / workfile 2temp:1-

[Congruence 99.73 abs.]

-
Wipe
workfile-

[Query?]

-
Wipe
workfile-

[Query?]

"Oh, shit, shit, shit!
" she said.
Think. Think, damn you,
wench. What are you,
Draka cattle or a
human being?
The station and the table around it were littered with paper notes; this MacGregor was a worrier. Hated to do anything irrevocable.
Calmly. There are only a few ways you can alter
the procedures.
Designer compinstruction sets were embedded as well, after all. A single note at the bottom of a stack, old and faded, in pencil.

Mary a gave a shark-grin and returned her hands to the keyboard.

-
Wipe
workfile-

[Query?]

-coverass-

[Execute -
wipe
workfile-]

-
Load
workfile
seq all mainmem-

[Unfind: query? namefile.]

"I got it, I got it!" Quickly now, but carefully.

-
dename
workfile 2temp:1 /
rename
workfile-

[Execute -
dename
workfile 2temp:1 /
rename
workfile-all.

Wipe wordfile 2temp:1?]

-
command aff-

[Execute
-wipe
workfile 2temp:1-]

Now to check; only an anal-retentive of the first order would log under a code like this, but…
-time/work log coverass
perscode/master-
[Query? coverass unrec Logtime/work MG-A1?] Marya looked at the time display in the lower right corner of the screen; 09:41, exactly eleven minutes since she entered the fabrication complex.

-time/work log thisdate MG-A1-
[Inlog 08:00 01/07/98

lastsrk 09:29 dto MG-A1] "Exactly why only designers get these free-access memories," she muttered to herself. "Too easy to cheat a little." Her handkerchief dusted across the keyboard, no use making it easy for the greencoats if things blew soon. A quick pass across her face left it damp; nothing she could do about the trickles from her armpits down her flanks.

I have just condemned myself to death
, she thought, as she fettled back on the floor—
can't pollute the
Race's holy chair with
my serf ass
—and folded her hands. "And I haven't felt this alive in decades."

"No, I don't want anything." Yolande snapped, then forced herself to calm.
The housegirl isn't to blame
, she thought. It would be alarming enough that she was back here at the Commandant's quarters at 1200, only four hours after she left.

The serf was looking at her wide-eyed.
Be gentle. They're
frightened
when the routine is upset.
"Run along, Belinda. I'll call later if I want lunch."

The memory of the message from Archona was a sour taste at the back of her mouth as she stalked past the fountain into the lounging room.
No party planned. Invitation superfluous.

"
He isn't going to do a fuckin' thing,
" she told herself, lost to rage and wonder. Months past saturation point on the Stone Dogs, and no action whatsoever.
Be honest with yourself,
she thought, flinging herself down on a couch and staring at the ceiling. Throwing yourself down was curiously unsatisfying on the Moon; like punching pillows, there was no thump.

It's two months into Gwen's voyage. She's out of the inner
system, out of any possible combat
. And Gwen was the only one of her children old enough for military service. Short of a catastrophe that wrecked the planet, the others would be safe.

The Draka prided themselves on being a foresighted people; since before her birth they had been building deep shelters, every plantation and school, city and town in the Domination was
ready.
And the facilities had been improved constantly. They would work, provided there was a living world to return to.

"All right," she asked herself, coldly realistic. "What can yo'

do, Yolande?"

Very little
. It was bitter knowledge. She knew of the Stone Dogs, now; perhaps two dozen others did.
Could I get in touch
…

No. The only others she knew of for certain were Gayner and the two Militant leaders; they would not trust a niece of the Conservative boss man.
And it would be like shooting Uncle
Eric
in the back
. Morally unthinkable, and… you did
not
betray Eric von Shrakenberg and enjoy the consequences. Perhaps it would be worthwhile, if there was no alternative. Not
until
there was no alternative. She had a year until the
Lionheart
returned from the edge of the System. For that matter, Gwen would not thank her for being sheltered from danger.
So she's as stupid as anyone
else that age. No
more essential to the State than a hundred
thousand other junior officers
. A fine balance, duty to the Race and to family, but clear in this case.

"I'll have to fuckin'
wait
," she hissed to herself, and then clamped down on her own mind. The Will is
Master
, she repeated. Breathe… Presently she won to a degree of calm.

"Belinda," she said to the air; the housecomp would relay it.

"Lay out a fresh uniform in my changin' room."

"Marya!" she said, pushing open the door. It had no lock, of course. "Yo'—"

The room was empty, and there was no sound from the others. Yolande stopped, blinking slightly in surprise.
Could have
sworn the comp said all servants present
, she thought in puzzlement, looking around. It was a fairly standard upper-servant's suite, bedroom, sitter opening off the corridor through a nook, and a bathroom at the rear. The lights had come on as she entered, but the air had the slightly dead feel of space not used for several hours.
I wonder where she is?
It was annoying; grabbing a quick nooner was not something she did all that often, and there was nobody else in the household right now she would feel that relaxed with; Jolene was down dirtside, visiting her daughter and Nikki back at Claesrum.