"People on other worlds buy less of the Exotic specialty exports—medical technologies, environmental tools and so on—" He broke off, purposely leaving a hanging silence.
"A lot of this can be traced here," he said. "I mean, to Ceta. Why didn't you tell us?"
There was silence in the room for a long moment. Most of the faces in front of Bleys were stunned and dismayed, but there were a few that were reacting in wariness and fear... and most of those faces were seated as a group in the back of the gathering.
"It was your job to further the progress of our movement," he went on, "by extending our influence on this planet and sending back to the rest of us information that would be of use to us all in furthering our work elsewhere. But it's impossible to believe that none of you managed to pick up on the fact that a large and powerful group on this planet was exerting its efforts to alter the balance of interstellar relationships."
He paused again, to let them draw the inevitable conclusion for themselves—and just as he was about to resume, a tiny rivet set in the underside of his wrist control pad vibrated silently against his skin in three short bursts.
Bleys broke off his remarks and turned to Toni, on his right.
"Toni," he said, "would you go out to Henry and ask him for the disk I left with him?"
As Toni nodded and rose from her seat, Bleys turned back to his audience.
"We have a recording that will illustrate what I'm talking about," he said—and in that moment Toni, who had been passing behind the head table on her way to the door, produced a small needle pistol and laid its muzzle softly against Gelica Costanza's temple, whispering something that caused the woman to freeze her startled reaction.
At the same moment the four Soldiers placed along the wall brought their void pistols back up, to point directly at Bleys' audience—and Bleys noticed that three of the four were concentrating their attention, and their aims, in the area of the group that he himself had earlier noticed.
Bleys kept his attention on the audience while this action occurred, watching their reactions, and was pleased to note that only a few showed signs of disabling shock. They might have gotten complacent over the course of their long, quiet term on this planet, but for the most part they seemed—given the upset that had marked the last few weeks—to be recovering the abilities they had been schooled in during their training.
A few of the audience had also noted where the attention of the Soldiers was directed; those Others were holding themselves very still, he saw, but several were unobtrusively bringing their feet into a position of readiness. He made a note of their faces.
"Stay calm," he said now to the whole room, projecting his voice to reflect authority; and then repeated the command in a quieter, soothing tone, making a slow, downward patting motion with his left hand.
As he spoke, his right hand had been under the table, unclipping a void pistol that had been stealthily placed there the preceding night. He had not wanted to bring it in himself—void pistols, although silent weapons that killed without leaving a mark on a body, were necessarily rather large—but he wanted this one for the immense psychological weight it would lend him. Everyone knew that the charge emitted by the long, coil-wrapped barrel was almost invariably fatal.
He swiveled in his seat and pointed the pistol at Gelica from a distance of less than a foot. Her eyes fastened on his face, but she made no move.
"I've got her," Bleys said softly to Toni. "Watch the seats."
Toni pulled her small pistol away from Gelica's head and stepped quickly to her left, passing behind Bleys and around the end of the head table to take up a position against the wall and near the front of the seating area. From there she pointed her pistol in the direction of the same group the Soldiers were watching from their places along the opposite wall.
"Sit absolutely still, all of you," Bleys said to the room at large. He put into those words every ounce of the ability he had developed to project a feeling of authority, but he never took his eyes off Gelica. "Make no sounds at all."
"You know what this pistol is," he said, now speaking softly to the woman beside him. "A void pistol doesn't wound."
He gave her a moment, and then ordered her to raise her hands and rise slowly from her seat, taking care to touch nothing, including the table and her chair.
"I want you to back up," he said, "always keeping your hands in the air."
In a moment her back was against the wall behind the table. Bleys had risen to move with her, and now, from a position slightly to her side and a half-arm's length away, he placed the pistol at her temple.
"We know your people have entered the building," he told her now, speaking loudly enough that everyone in the room could hear him. "But if you, or your people here in this room, make any move to reach for a weapon, or to communicate, you'll all be killed instantly."
He took a moment to speak more loudly, never taking his eyes off Gelica.
"You in the seats should know that not only are there five weapons aimed in your direction, but they're held by people very skilled at observing and interpreting the slightest movement that might hint of danger. If you want to live, sit still."
There was a dead silence in the room behind him. Gelica's eyes remained fixed on his, a hint of extra redness showing in her face.
"We began to suspect you some time ago," Bleys told her, now speaking in a much lower voice. "Now we've baited a trap for your friends."
"There're too many of them for you," she said, her voice husky. There was a hint of moisture in her eyes, but he did not make the mistake of taking that as a sign of weakness.
"I don't think so," he told her. "We knew that by scheduling this appointment, we'd give you an appealing target. But we have many more Soldiers here than you saw. Some of them entered this building and even these offices, last night—they planted this pistol for me—and have been hiding nearby, waiting for our signal—"
He broke off; his wristpad had once more prodded him, in a series of short coded touches.
"Your people have gotten on the elevators," he told her. "Our Soldiers now hold the lobby behind them, and will disable the elevators once your people get to this floor. When your people get off the elevators, they'll be trapped in the foyer and covered from all sides by experienced fighters firing from good cover."
He gave her a few seconds to think about it.
"It would be a futile slaughter," he said. "Will you call it off?"
The door to the conference room opened, and Henry stuck his head inside.
"There are sixteen of them," he reported, after taking a moment to assess the situation in the room. "They're on two elevators that should arrive at just about the same time, and they're not carrying their weapons in sight."
"Which gives us a further advantage," Bleys said to Gelica. "What about it?"
She looked up into his face, the moisture gone from her eyes and her color back to normal.
"Will you trust me to call them?" she asked.
"What will you say?"
"I'll tell them to stay in the foyer with their hands in the air, and wait to be disarmed," she said. "But I can't promise you they'll obey me—they aren't my people, and I don't think they'll want to give themselves up to you."
"They don't have to," Bleys replied. "We don't demand they give themselves into our power. Once disarmed, they can simply leave, if they wish, and we won't hurt them." He paused to emphasize his next words.
"It would be good if they knew we could have killed them."
She looked at him for a moment, her eyes assessing him anew.
"You have to hurry," he pointed out.
"Yes," she said. As her hand began to reach toward her jacket, his left hand reached out and pulled one side of her jacket open, exposing a harness that held a pistol holster under her right arm, balanced by a small electronic device on the other side. She smiled at him, and carefully pulled out the electronic device; then she activated it, tapping out a series of numbers on its pad befor
e raising it to her lips. She explained the situation and gave the instructions just as Bleys had dictated them.
"Henry—" Bleys began—
"I heard," Henry said; and the door closed behind him.
"They don't like it," Gelica said a minute later. The communication device evidently had a HUSH function, which was logical considering its clandestine purpose—he had not heard any response to her words.
"Will they do it?"
"Yes," she said. "They've reached the foyer and have seen enough to be convinced this won't be the walkover they were expecting."
"Now tell your people here in this room to raise their own hands," Bleys said. She hesitated.
"We think we know who they are," Bleys said, looking into her eyes. "In any case, we have no more reason to kill them than we'd have to kill your allies in the foyer."
After a moment she nodded.
"Do as he says," she called down the length of the room. "Let yourselves be disarmed. We gain nothing by getting ourselves killed here."
As movement began behind him, Bleys kept his attention on Gelica. She smiled once more, and wordlessly, slowly, reached under her jacket again, being careful to use only the thumb and forefinger of her right hand—her arm had to bend awkwardly—to pull her small pistol from its holster. As she pulled it out it swung like a small pendulum from her two-fingered grip, its unbalanced weight almost pulling it from her fingers. Bleys reached out with his free hand and took it from her.
"Would you take your pistol away from my head now?" she asked, after a moment.
"You know I can't," he said. "You're too clever. You just might have some other surprise. Let's just relax and wait for Henry."
They did just that, while Gelica's self-identified confederates in the room were disarmed and lined up, kneeling, along the side wall.
"The rest of you remain in your seats," Toni announced to the remaining group of conference attendees. "We can't be sure we've gotten all of them yet, so we have to keep you all where we can watch you, until we can finish sorting you all out."
Eventually, they were all sorted out.
CHAPTER 19
"Would you tell me your real name?" Bleys asked, looking across the length of Pallas Salvador's office from his seat at the absent Other's desk. He and the woman he had known as Gelica Costanza had moved there for privacy, leaving her friends, the Others and the Soldiers behind.
The woman, who had been standing with her back to him, turned, and looked at him for a long moment.
"Deborah," she said quietly, finally. "Only Deborah."
"Then you really are an Exotic," he said, referring to that culture's tendency to use single names.
"Of sorts," she said. "And from Kultis rather than Mara."
"You're also an Other, I think," he said.
"No," she said. "Not as you now use the term."
"What do you mean?"
"Like you, I'm a crossbreed," she said, "as are all of my comrades—"
"Exotic," he interrupted, "and—Dorsai?"
"That's the sort of deduction I'd expect you to make," she said, sounding exasperated. "I know about your bunch by now: you only anoint people as 'Others' if they're crossbreeds from the three main Splinter Cultures, the Exotics, the Friendlies or the Dorsai."
"'Anoint'?" he said. "Why the hostility?"
"As it happens," she said, ignoring his question, "I was raised on Kultis, but my mother was actually from Newton." "And your father?"
"I never knew him," she said. "He was a wanderer, and he vanished soon after I was born." The words were delivered
expressionlessly, without defiance or challenge, but he felt as if she had spit them into his face.
"I never knew my father, either," he said. "But I don't think that's what you're upset about."
She only looked at him.
"We don't designate—'anoint,' as you put it—Others, by their ancestry," he went on. "You've repeated a common misconception."
She rolled her eyes upward for a brief moment, as if disgusted. "I never said—"
"For us," he said, overriding whatever she had been about to say, "'Others' are cultural crossbreeds."
"All right," she said, after a moment, "I'll accept the correction. It makes little difference."
"That's true, too," he said, nodding. She started to say something more, but stopped herself.
"Being 'Other' is a state of mind," he explained. "And it's a state you and I have in common."
"You're trying to butter me up," she said.
"If trying to get you to listen to me with an open mind amounts to buttering you up, then yes," he said. "But right now your thinking is being influenced by your reaction to what's just happened to you and your people—can you listen from beneath that?"
Her eyes narrowed, and he thought he detected a glint from beneath their lids; but after a moment some of the tension went out of her.
"All right," she said. "I suppose there's a chance you have something worth hearing. Go ahead."
"You were raised on Kultis," he said, "so you probably were put through some of those tests the Exotics like to measure people with."
"Yes, I was." Her expression had hardened slightly at his mention of the tests.
"They didn't say you tested out as full Exotic, did they?"
"They didn't tell me anything," she said. "They told my mother I tested at about forty percent Exotic."
"And the rest?"
"Undifferentiated was the term they used," she said. The hostility was still there, he thought, but she was hiding it better. "What they said makes little difference," he replied. "What do you know about not fitting in?"
"Everything," he said. "I know everything about not fitting in. That's the state of mind I was talking about."
She moved over to a chair; but rather than seating herself, she turned to look at him again.
"All right, maybe I've underestimated you," she said.
"Again," he said.
"Again, yes."
He rose and walked across the room, trying to keep his body language unthreatening; and sat in the chair next to the one before which she was standing. He looked up at her, still on her feet and looking down at him. Her eyes were narrowed; but even as he watched, her face recovered its neutral expression. After a moment she sat next to him, turning at an angle so she could look directly at him.
"You're one of the original Others," he said. "And you're all angry at those of us who've appropriated your name."
"Oh, not really," she said, almost sighing. Her shoulders slumped a little, and he reminded himself she was a good deal older than he.
"I suspect you know perfectly well," she was continuing, "that the Others groups you and your brother took over were only what they seemed—social clubs of sorts."
"But they were set up by you and your friends," Bleys said. "To cover your own activities."
"How much do you know?"
"Not everything, by any means," he said. "But I know you and your friends formed the nucleus of a criminal syndicate on this planet, thirty years ago and more."
He was watching for a reaction to his use of the word criminal, but she gave him nothing but her words.
"All right," she said, "suppose that's true: so what?"
"You did a very good job, once you decided to cover your tracks," he said. "But I know your group started here on Ceta, and was always strongest here."
"Well, it was natural," she said. "Ceta's where the money is—it's been a major center for interstellar banking and commerce for generations."
"How did you, personally, get involved in the Others?" he asked.
" 'Involved'?" She grinned, and he found the sudden change from her usual imperturbability—which had kept him searching her face for the smallest of clues—a little shocking. But there was little humor in her grin.
"I started the group," she said; and laughed. The laugh had a slight edge to it, and he had to restrain his sudden inclination to lean back, away from her.
"It brought us freedom. It was a natural step from there, to start putting people we could trust inside various organizations—it gave us opportunities we never had before."
"It worked very well, didn't it?"
"Very well. We could work in secret to help each other—at first, just to help each other get jobs, or do business, but later we helped our friends take advantage of information we had access to, or make decisions that helped each other—and in time, we took control of some companies, and used those to branch out into other fields . .. some people would have said we were guilty of everything from smuggling to securities fraud." She shook her head. "We weren't a gang that coordinated our actions for a single purpose. We were just independent actors who knew there were people they could count on for help if needed."
"So the stories about a secret criminal organization—" "Exaggerations," she said. "Rumors about our existence began to show up, and we ended up getting blamed for things other people did. At first that was disconcerting—we didn't really see ourselves as bad people—but in the end we decided that our best interest lay in sticking together.... The rumors even turned out to work to our advantage, in some dealings. We prospered."
Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 Page 19