Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water

by Brian Daley

  Quant nodded, recognizing that Haven's real motive was to keep Mason out of LAW's hands and use him to discomfit the Preservationists, though she wasn't about to acknowledge it publicly. "The airlimo's ready to go, Hierarch," he said simply.

  "Thank you, Mr. Quant. I know you don't like having the Exts aboard, but I don't believe they constitute a danger to you or your ship."

  Quant mulled it over briefly. "How a person plays the game tells a lot about his character, Madame Haven, but how that person loses tells all. For losers, I'd say, they seem to be comporting themselves well."

  Dextra narrowed her eyes slightly. "Are you acquainted with my aide, Tonii?"

  Quant frowned but limited his response to "I've never met the… individual."

  "Then why did you look ready to strike 'erm with that billy club?"

  Quant's gaze became polar, and he turned back to his duties.

  "I'm not through talking to you yet, Mr. Quant!"

  He looked her up and down one last time. "With all due respect, Madame Hierarch, you are for now. I suggest you direct these questions to your square-and-schooner Tonii."

  * * * *

  Dextra told Burning, "I've got to get back to Abraxas. I can't pull any strings from here."

  Kurt Elide was standing by the airlimo, which now held Nike Lightner and her set along with Claude Mason.

  "Captain Hall will see to it you're not bothered; I have an understanding with him. But keep a tight rein on your people and make no public statements except what we've discussed."

  "Understood."

  "Burning, for your own sake, no violence. No incidents at all or you'll play into LAW's hands."

  There was a discreet throat clearing at her elbow. "What's really needed is someone to serve as liaison with you, Hierarch." Lod, looking well scrubbed and chivalrously eager to please, had his helmet under his arm. "I volunteer, since my experience with AlphaLAW Commissioner Renquald on Concordance—"

  "Makes you indispensable here, Cousin," Burning said, heading him off dryly, "Where we won't lose track of you."

  "That's for the Allgrave to decide, of course," Dextra seconded. Lod showed only a decorous acceptance.

  Dextra took another glance at Burning. It was good that he was sharper-witted than his size implied. He was going to need all the edge he could get.

  * * * *

  What had been a slow news day in Abraxas became one of breaking drama and looming political spin war as reports gushed in of the Exts' planetfall and Claude Mason's transfixing plea regarding Aquamarine. Caught unprepared, the Preservationists were slow getting into action and consequently fast losing ground. Ignorant of Lightner's hand in the mix, their instant response teams lacked ammunition or even a compass heading. At the same time leaks about the suppression of the Aquamarine findings were beginning to surface.

  The last straw was an announcement that Cathartoys Inc. would be offering a line of Ext tie-ins the next day, including games, costumes, and action simulacrants. Cathartoy's stock was climbing.

  In the situation room of his levitating citadel Calvin

  Lightner made a jabbing motion at the news holos with an ivory walking stick. "Kill the audio," he ordered.

  Lightner had stopped caring about upset. The only aspect of the whole imbroglio that continued to interest him was that Dextra Haven had risked Nike's life to checkmate him. Did Haven think that by doing so she was making some moral point? Was she offering a cautionary lesson on the perils of escalating political struggle? If so, she'd been uncharacteristically foolish, for all she'd done was raise the ante.

  Lightner reminded himself that the goal of retribution was seldom advanced by fixating on rage. He made a summoning motion to Buck Starkweather, Doll Van Houten, and the select few who had come to La Condition Humaine to celebrate the Exts' elimination only to bear witness to Calvin Lightner's mortification.

  "I'm not sitting still for this," he told them. "I want to review all contingency files and dark-ops proposals."

  Reluctantly, his coconspirators found their way to the room's levi-table for what promised to be a long council of war. Lightner felt that strategy sessions were no place for self-indulgence or relaxation, and the chairs were unyielding and nonadjustable.

  "Our first order of business is to silence those involved at the operational level," Lightner declared. "Especially that bungler Wix Uniday." He looked at Starkweather. "Buck, that's your job."

  While the former Hierarch was trying to blink his bulging eyes back into his head, Doll Van Houten spoke up. "That's bound to have a rather chilling effect on current and future hired help, Cal. Uniday's smart and capable, and we may need him before this is over."

  Starkweather managed to find his voice. "Besides, the bloodbath was caused by the officer in charge of the Manipu-lants. He shouldn't've just attacked like that."

  "That one paid the full penalty in the Damocles's passageway," Hierarch Lepskaya noted. "LAW will be writing off his death and the deaths of his troops as a training accident—unless anyone here has a better idea." No one did. "The surviving Manipulants are of course incapable of talking to anyone outside their unit or Special Troops chain of command."

  All Lightner's instincts told him that it was too late to transmogrify the carnage in the starship into something the Preservationists could use to crucify the Exts. Any attempt now might even contradict or indict Nike's conduct and veracity.

  "What about deleting the Exts in situ aboard the MatsyaV Starkweather suggested.

  The others decried the idea, Lepskaya clenching his fists as if he would have liked to have Starkweather's lapels in them. "Try a surgical strike now that they've had time to prepare defenses? Are you mad?"

  "But they've no access to live ammunition."

  "They have the same knives they used to gut and clean our Manipulants! Plus tons of aviation fuel and other flammables, and who knows what they could improvise? Not to mention the hundreds of potential hostages aboard or the fact that they're sitting just offshore in a ship with a fusion reactor! And unlike the Damocles, there'll be journalists all over the place."

  "Subject closed," Lightner said, thumping the arm of his chair. "Before we're done, we're going to talk about the press's responsibility in this affair. But there's something more crucial to discuss at the moment: the mole in our most secret councils. It's clear that Dextra Haven didn't show up on Damocles by accident. We cannot move forward until someone here, or someone very close to our inner group, is disposed of."

  There was no assigning suspicion by the expression of shock, because all Lightner's guests exhibited it. They all knew that having said it, he wouldn't be satisfied until a life was offered up on the altar of security. Before he could advance his inquiry, a communications deputy entered to show him a hooded-screen palmtop display. Lightner accepted the interruption as a necessary evil and read the message. When he surfaced to ask the deputy if the message had been verified, the others knew it was grave.

  Lightner sent her off and glanced around the circle. "LAW signal intelligence and radio astronomy officials will announce in one hour that Trinity has gone silent. That's as of late this morning—relative—when the planet emerged from occulta-tion behind its primary." He checked the hooded-screen text again. "That includes all of Trinity's SATs, orbital installations, and so on."

  They all turned to see how their neighbors were reacting. Trinity was twenty-one light-years away, and to date there had been only telecomm contact between it and Periapt As far as was known, the planetary system had never been visited or even approached by the Roke. With its industrial infrastructure, resources, and modest space-ttavel capability, Trinity had been deemed to have high potential as an annexed world, although LAW had kept that from the Trinitians.

  Starkweather licked his lips to get them unstuck. "Perhaps this is unconnected with the Roke—-"

  "Don't sell yourself uncertainties," Doll cut him off. "They're even more painful than bad news. The Roke knocked Trinity completely off-line
, and they've had twenty-one years to deploy copies of whatever weapon they used to do it. Sweet Teleos help us if that's time enough."

  "Sweet Teleos has helped us," Lightner echoed. "With a clarion call to fight for our survival—just when humanity needs it most." He gazed at one face after the next. "Don't you see? Trinity's silence rubs our face in the fact that we're in a war for human destiny. Whoever won a war by going down on their knees and begging for peace? The pacifists, the isolationists, the salary proles besotted on effortless prosperity—this will wipe their comfortable assumptions away, even galvanize some."

  "But if the opposition manages to frame this event in their terms"—Lepskaya worried, plucking his lower lip—"if they manage to sell people on fear and defeatism and the cease-fire initiative gains momentum—"

  Lightner quashed him. "That's no longer a tolerable concept. Henceforth it's total war with Haven's Cravens, just as it shall be with the Roke."

  * * * *

  The human-Roke conflict was being fought over such immense distances and long intervals of time that few combat actions were alike. The stupendous starships took years crossing the deeps, where conditions and strategic situations changed in manifold ways during their journeys. Circumstances encountered at the destination were often different, sometimes lethally so, from what had been foreseen when a given LAW ship set out.

  The opposing sides were often compared to the Dark Ages armies of Old Earth, which marched forth frequently to attack foes of whose whereabouts they knew little or nothing. The histories said that they wandered lost until finally stumbling home or made war on the wrong enemy altogether.

  That level of uncertainty plagued humanity's first inter-species war as well, along with flukes, surprises, mismatches, and an obligatory fatalism.

  The Roke's preemptive gamma-X-raying of the peace delegation orbiting Queensland could have been repulsed by LAW DEADtech and Helwep offensive technology if those factors hadn't been a decade's transit time away, although the same weapons were used a few years afterward to obliterate an alien ship approaching Bushelsworth.

  Why proposed treaty talks with the Roke had broken down, no human being knew. There had been some skirmishing and even pitched battles between space contingents, but nothing that couldn't be resolved. The only hint of a possible provocation on the part of Homo sapiens lay in recovered data from initial negotiating contacts monitored on Queensland and later by an incoming LAW ship. Experts suggested that somewhere in the complex transmissions intended to give the two races a common, neutral language lurked a miscoding or signal error whose distortion had led the Roke to a disastrous misinterpretation. Others suggested that an inert Cybervirus had once again enabled itself to spread calamity.

  Regardless, there had been no face-to-face talks between the two species. Humanity had yet to gain an understanding of the Roke's physiology or social structure. The vessel sent to rese-cure Queensland found the aliens, inexplicably, long gone. But in the Chang Jiang system another LAW megaship blundered into a pair thought to be the same vessels that had struck at

  Queensland, and in the course of a twenty-three-day running battle all three ships were obliterated.

  A long-lead-time offensive was never tried again by either side. The gargantuan starships went out to annex or colonize and were of necessity on their own in dealing with whatever they encountered.

  It was an absurd if unavoidable way to run a war. That aspect of the conflict wasn't enough to make Periapt sue for peace, because for LAW the struggle was more about a land grab than about all-out species cleansing.

  Old-time Earth pundits had come up with any number of reasons why interstellar conflict would be impossible and insuperable: economic, logistical and technical, motivational, and psychological reasons. What none of them seemed to have taken into account was humanity's chauvinism and simian covetousness. LAW shrewdly motivated Periapts to make sacrifices and lose lives in a war for the possession of planets the race would not need for millennia, all for the sake of keeping the Roke from having them.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Six

  "Driver—Kurt, is that your name?"

  "Driver Kurt Elide, Madame Hierarch."

  "Kurt, dear, while I admire your exuberance, I'll ask you to save the stunt flying for another time. Schedulewise, today would be an extremely inconvenient day for me to die."

  The airlimo abruptly decelerated and leveled off. "Sorry. Won't happen again, Madame Haven."

  "Commander Quant said that Kurt did a good job landing on the Matsya," Tonii remarked openly.

  With Nike and her set of theater peripherals having been offloaded at her triplex atelier, there was no one to listen in but Claude Mason, who, buckled in on the other side of the passenger compartment, was gazing out at the city, lost in thought.

  Dextra shrugged in Elide's general direction and said for Tonii's ear only, "Care to tell me why Quant referred to you as 'square-and-schooner'?"

  Tonii considered it, then smiled faintly. "The phrase refers to a certain arrangement of masts and sail, what mariners call a hermaphrodite rig."

  Recognizing evasiveness in the gynander's tone, Dextra fell silent, settling in for the quick hop to HauteFlash. Once there, she could intensify the public opinion English Ben had started putting on the issue of the Exts. She also could get Tilman Hobbes and the major Rationalist agitprop organs to start beating the drums about Aquamarine.

  The airlimo's intercom tootled staidly, and Kurt Elide announced, "Incoming chirp for you, Madame Haven. Rationalist executive offices."

  Dextra used her commo ancillary to encrypt the line, and shortly the weathered face of Tilman Hobbes came on-screen. Senior Hierarch and vice chairman of the party, Hobbes snapped, "Dex! Finally! There's been a calamity. Trinity."

  Data began aladdining up on the displays as Hobbes explained Trinity's utter telecom silence.

  "LAW issued a statement without the direction or permission of the Lyceum?" Dextra asked.

  "What would be the point of waiting?" Hobbes's voice took on a punctilious tone. "The fact was already glaringly apparent. Would you rather the public think us paralyzed or let the press run with the ball?"

  Silence did not necessarily mean catastrophe, but she knew that was how Trinity's quietude would be played by the ratings-hungry news media. "How long ago was the statement released?"

  "Going on two minutes now. Without official word from Preservationist headquarters, by the way."

  Then it was doubly unlikely that Lightner had vetted the announcement, Dextra told herself. If he had, the Preservationists would have been all over the spectrum and fiberlines. All the stuff the news crews were being fed about Exts and Aquamarine would suddenly take a backseat to Trinity.

  "What about us, Til? We have to say something"

  "I'm still soliciting input and reviewing options," he said.

  "NeoDeos! Why don't you just tell our entire public information apparatus to go work for Cal Lightner?"

  Hobbes put on a martyred look, rolling his eyes upward. He was less amicable to Dextra than he had been in former days. She chalked it up to the time when, during her second term in office, she had finally let him get her clothes off but he had been so far hoisted on vermouth and rhapso that his erection had been off duty.

  Now he shifted as if to sever the connection. "I'll keep you advised as events take shape, Dex."

  "Til," she said quickly, "if you cut me off, I'll support the new nepotism guidelines and your kids 'll lose their jobs and have to move back in with you. Consult the think-tankers if you're looking for input. Parfit and Ibis, they're savvy. I'll call you back from HauteFlash in three minutes."

  "Dex, we cannot ignore a massacre."

  "What massacre? We've temporarily lost contact with Trinity. Could be a Cybervirus, could be some natural phenomenon. Maybe the Trinitians have opted for telecom silence. The point is, we can't allow Lightner's crowd to bury the Exts and Aquamarine and stampede Periapt into a state-of-siege decree. If LAW re
ceives emergency powers, we'll be, as the Exts would say, toad-cranked. So come on, Til: Be the LOX-nerved, steadfast Lyceum demigod I get all humid over."

  Half a grin broke through his reserve. "Perhaps if you wore the red spindle heels again and that pheromone cologne… I do believe we could make a go of it next time."

  "You back me on Trinity and one or two other matters, Tilman, and I swear I'll walk up and down your back in golf shoes if you want me to." Watching his startled expression, she saw that she'd pushed some button she hadn't known was there.

  But he recovered in a heartbeat. "You'd better be this winsome at the Lyceum ball, Dex. The news feeds are in a lather about your promised media event. If the entree you toss them doesn't go down well, I suspect they and Cal Lightner are going to dine on raw Haven." He paused in self-amusement. "What's that amusing little tag line of yours? 'How now, foul Tao'?"

  * * * *

  "Everyone who's not on guard or ready-reaction force stays on standby alert," Burning told Daddy D. "When the gambling starts, it's the same rules as on Damocles. I don't want anybody betting away their knife, medkit styrettes, or codcup."

  Daddy D nodded in a way that let Burning know he had it covered. Nearly all Exts were chronic gamblers, but they could play for IOUs for a while longer.

  "They're all fairly rested," Burning said, running down his mental list, "so we'll see how the next few hours play before we start setting standout rotas."

  All sentries and the ready-reaction squads assigned to the passageway choke points leading to the Exts' space were keeping their breathers sealed. Troops that had their menpo masks open could be observed sniffing the air periodically. They had been sensitized and Skills-trained to detect the low-concentration precursor scents of LAW bioagents.

  The bloodletting in the starship and the confrontation on Matsya's flight deck had jolted the Exts out of their voyage tedium. Even the inevitable bitching had rheostatted down to almost nothing. But if they were now back to marking time in the SWATHship's belly, Burning knew that they would have to be ready for all the headaches garrison life was heir to.