Use of Weapons (14 page)

Ten
days out, the
Just Testing
sent news
that Gainly had been delivered of twins; mother and pups doing well. Sma
prepared a signal that her stand-in was to give the hralz a big kiss, from her,
then hesitated, realising that the machine that was impersonating her would
doubtless already have done so. She felt bad, and in the end just sent a formal
acknowledgement.

She
kept up on recent developments in Voerenhutz; the latest Contact forecasts were
getting gloomier all the time. The brush-fire conflicts on a dozen planets each
threatened to ignite a full-scale war, and - while getting a direct answer was
proving difficult - she formed the impression that even if they found and
convinced Zakalwe almost as soon as they landed, and hauled his ass out on the
Xenophobe
with the ship pushing its
design limits, the chances of getting him to Voerenhutz in time to make any
difference were at best fifty-fifty.

'Holy
shit,' the drone said one day, as she sat in her cabin, reviewing cautiously
optimistic reports on the peace conference back home (for so she had started to
think of it, she admitted to herself).

'What?'
She turned to the machine.

It
looked at her. 'They just changed the course schedule for the
What Are The Civilian Applications
?'

Sma
waited.

'That's
a Continent class GSV,' the drone said. 'Sub-class Prompt, one of the
limiteds.'

'You
said it was a General; now it's a Limited; make up your mind.'

'No,
I mean it's a limited edition; the go-faster model; even nippier than this
beast, once it gets going,' the drone said. It floated closer to her, fields
set a weird mixture of olive and purple, which she seemed to remember indicated
Awe. She'd certainly never seen
that
expression on Skaffen-Amtiskaw before. 'It's heading for Crastalier,' it told
her.

'For
us? For Zakalwe?' she frowned.

'Nobody'll
say, but it looks like it to me. A whole General Systems Vehicle, just for us.
Wow!'

'Wow,'
Sma mimicked sourly, and pressed the screen for the view forward of the
Xenophobe
, still charging through the
star systems for Crastalier. In their false representation on the screen, the
stars ahead blazed blue-white, and - at the right magnification - the overall
structure of the Open Cluster was easily visible.

She
shook her head, went back to the peace conference reports. 'Zakalwe, you
asshole,' she muttered to herself, 'you'd better fucking show up soon.'

Five
days later, and still five days away, the General Contact Unit
Very Little Gravitas Indeed
signalled
from the depths of the Open Cluster Crastalier that it thought it had picked up
Zakalwe's trail.

The
blue-white globe filled the screen; the module dipped its nose, plunging into
the atmosphere.

'I
just get the feeling this is going to be a complete debacle,' the drone said.

'Yes,'
Sma said, 'but you're not in charge.'

'I'm
serious,' the machine told her. 'Zakalwe's lost it. He doesn't want to be
found, he won't be talked round, and even if by some miracle he can be, he
can't do the same thing with Beychae. The man's washed up.'

Sma
had a sudden, strange flash of memory then, back to the horizon-wide beach, and
the man who'd sat at her side for a while, watching the wide ocean roll its
waves up and down the glistening slope of sand.

She
shook herself out of it. 'He's still together enough to junk a knife missile,' she
told the machine, watching the hazy, cloud-shadowed ocean scroll beneath the
dropping module. They were approaching the cloud tops.

'That
was for him. For us, it'll be another Winter Palace job; I can feel it.'

She
shook her head, apparently hypnotised by the view of cloud and curving ocean.
'I don't know what happened there. He got into that siege and just wouldn't
break out. We warned him; we
told
him, in the end, but he just wouldn't... couldn't do it. I don't know what
happened to him, I really don't; he just wasn't himself.'

'Well,
he lost his head on Fohls. Maybe he lost more than that. Perhaps he lost it all
on Fohls. Maybe we didn't quite save him in time.'

'We
got to him in time,' Sma said, remembering Fohls as well now, as they plunged
into a bulging cloud-top and the screen went grey. She didn't bother to adjust
the wavelength, apparently content to look at the glowing, featureless interior
of the cumulus.

'It
was still traumatic,' the drone said.

'I'm
sure, but...' she shrugged. The view of ocean and clouds burst clear onto the
screen again, and the module angled steeper, powering down towards the waves.
The sea flashed up towards them; Sma turned the screen off. She looked
bashfully at Skaffen-Amtiskaw. 'I never like watching that,' she confessed. The
drone said nothing. Inside the module, all was peace and quiet. After a moment,
she asked, 'We in yet?'

'Doing
our submarine impression,' the drone said crisply. 'Landfall in fifteen
minutes.'

She
turned the screen back on, got it to adjust for a sonic display, and watched
the rolling sea floor speed by beneath. The module was manoeuvring hard,
swinging and diving and zooming all the time, avoiding sea creatures as it
followed the slowly rising slope of continental shelf towards the land. The view
on the screen was disconcerting; she switched it off again, turned to the
drone.

'He'll
be all right, and he'll come with us; we still know where that woman is.'

'Livueta
the Contemptuous?' sneered the drone. 'Short shrift she gave him last time.
She'd have blown his head off if I hadn't been there. Why the hell should
Zakalwe want to meet her again?'

'I
don't know,' Sma frowned. 'He won't say, and Contact hasn't got round to doing
the full procedure on the place we think he came from. I think it must involve
something from his past... something he did, once, before we ever heard of him.
I don't know. I think he loves her, or did, and still thinks he does... or just
wants...'

'What?
Wants what? Go on; you tell me.'

'Forgiveness?'

'Sma,
given all the things Zakalwe's done, just since we've known him, they'd have to
invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start
forgiving
him.'

Sma
turned away to look at the blank screen again. She shook her head and said
quietly, 'It doesn't work that way, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.'

Or
any other way, the drone thought to itself, but didn't say anything.

The
module surfaced in a deserted dock in the middle of the city, amongst the
flotsam and jetsam. It roughed the texture of its outermost fields, so that the
oily scum on the surface of the water stuck to it.

Sma
watched its top hatch close, and stepped off the back of the drone, onto the
pitted concrete of the dock. The module was ninety-per cent submerged; it
looked like some flat-bottomed boat turned turtle. She straightened the rather
vulgar culottes which were, regrettably, the height of fashion here just now,
and looked up and around at the crumbling empty warehouses which all but
enclosed the quiet dock. The city - she was oddly gratified to find - grumbled
beyond.

'What
was that you were saying about not looking in cities?' Skaffen-Amtiskaw
inquired.

'Don't
be crass,' she said, then clapped her hands and rubbed them. Looking down at
the drone, she grinned. 'Anyway: time to start thinking like a suitcase, old
chum. Make with a handle.'

'I
hope you realise I find this every bit as demeaning as you think I must,'
Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with quiet dignity, then extended a soligram handle from
one side, and flipped over. Sma gripped the handle and strained at it.

'An
empty
suitcase, asshole,' she
grunted.

'Oh,
pardon me, I'm sure,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered, and went light.

Sma
opened a wallet full of money displaced only hours earlier from a city-centre
bank by the good ship
Xenophobe
, and
paid the cab driver. She watched a line of troop carriers thunder past, heading
down the boulevard, then sat on a bench which formed part of a stone wall
bordering a narrow strip of trees and grass, and looked out over the broad
sidewalk and the boulevard beyond, to the large and impressive stone building
on the far side. She place the drone beside her. Traffic roared past; people
hurried to and fro in front of her.

At
least, she thought, they're fairly Standard. She had never liked being altered
to impersonate the natives. Anyway; they had inter-system travel here, and were
fairly used to seeing people who looked different, even alien on occasion. As
usual, of course, she was very tall in comparison, but she could live with a
few stares.

'He's
still in there?' she said quietly, looking at the armed guards outside the
Foreign Ministry.

'Discussing
some sort of weird trust set-up with the top brass,' the drone whispered. 'Want
to eavesdrop?'

'Hmm.
No.'

They
had a bug in the appropriate conference chamber; literally a fly on the wall.

'Wa!'
the drone yelped. 'I don't believe this man!'

Sma
glanced at the drone, despite herself. She frowned. 'What's he said?'

'Not
that!' the drone gasped. 'The
Very Little
Gravitas Indeed
just worked out what the maniac's been up to here.'

The
GCU was still in orbit, providing back-up for the
Xenophobe;
its Contact procedures and equipment had provided and
were providing most of the information about the place; its bug was monitoring
the conference chamber. Meanwhile, it was scanning computers and information
banks over the entire planet.

'Well?'
Sma said, watching another troop carrier rumble past on the boulevard.

'The
man's insane. Power mad!' the drone muttered, seemingly to itself. 'Forget
Voerenhutz; we have to get him out of here for the sake of
these
people.'

Sma
elbowed the suitcase-drone. '
What
,
dammit?'

'Okay;
here, Zakalwe's a goddamn magnate, right? Mega-powerful; interests everywhere;
initial stake what he brought with him from the place he junked the knife
missile; the loot we gave him last time, plus profits. And what is the core of
his business empire, here? Genetechnology.'

Sma
thought for a moment. 'Oh-oh,' she said, sitting back on the bench, crossing
her arms.

'Whatever
you're imagining, it's worse. Sma; there are five rather elderly autocrats on
this planet, in competing hegemonies.
They
are all getting healthier.
They are all getting, in fact, younger. That
oughtn't to be possible for another twenty, thirty years.'

Sma
said nothing. There was a funny feeling in her belly.

'Zakalwe's
corporation,' the drone said quickly, 'is receiving crazy money from each of
those five people. It
was
on the take
from a sixth geezer, but he died about one-twenty days ago; assassinated. The
Ethnarch Kerian. He controlled the other half of this continent. It's his demise
that has led to all this military activity. Also, with the exception of the
Ethnarch Kerian, these suddenly rejuvenated autocrats were showing signs of
becoming uncharacteristically
benign
,
from about the time they started getting so suspiciously frisky.'

Sma
closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. 'Is it working?' she said, through a
dry mouth.

'Like
hell; they're all under threat from coups; their own military, as a rule. Worse
than that, Kerian's death lit a slow fuse. This whole place is going super-critical!
And we are talking tootsies on the event horizon; these meatbrained loonies
have thermonukes. He's crazy!' the drone suddenly screeched. Sma hissed to
quiet it, even though she knew the drone would be sound-fielding its words so
that only she could hear. The drone spluttered on: 'He must have cracked the
gene-coding in his own cells; the steady-state retro-ageing that
we gave him;
he's been selling it! For
money and favours, trying to get these monomaniac dictators to behave like
nice people. Sma! He's trying to set up his own contact section! And he's
fucking it! Completely!'

She
whacked the machine with one fist. 'Calm down, dammit.'

'Sma,'
the drone said, voice almost languid, 'I am calm. I'm just trying to
communicate to you the enormity of the planetary cock-up Zakalwe has managed
to concoct here. The
Very Little Gravitas
Indeed
has blown a fuse; even as we talk, Contact Minds in an
ever-expanding sphere centred right here are clearing their intellectual decks
and trying to work out what the hell to do to tidy this stunningly ghastly
mess. If that GSV hadn't been on its way here anyway, they'd have diverted it
because of this. An asteroid belt-sized pile of shit is about to hit a fan
exactly the size of this planet, thanks to Zakalwe's ludicrous good-guy
schemes, and Contact is going to have to try and field all of it.' It
hesitated. 'Yeah; I just got the word.' It sounded relieved. 'You have a day to
haul Zakalwe's loop-eyed ass out of here, otherwise we snatch him; emergency
displace, no holds barred.'