by Nancy Kress
What if she couldn’t find Laslo? Two people might keep her from him: Admiral Pierce and Laslo himself.
She hadn’t really expected Stefanak’s assassination. Her mistake: She’d overestimated his hold on his power. Somehow Sullivan Stefanak had slipped up, or a brute like Pierce would not have been able to pull off his coup. She, Magdalena, should have foreseen that possibility, should have guarded against it. Definitely her mistake. And Pierce was capable of simply sequestering Laslo somewhere for a very long time, just to make Magdalena crawl and caper and cede territory she otherwise would never surrender to an asshole like Pierce. Well, if she had to crawl, she would. Just don’t let Pierce keep her at it for years.
The other fear was Laslo. Magdalena could easily visualize a scenario in which Stefanak’s most trusted aides, immediately after the assassination, might panic. They’d jettison everything nonessential, including Laslo. And Laslo might then put himself in hiding, away from his mother’s control that he so desperately needed but was too weak to accept. It could take her years to find him, if he’d had time to pull major funds from her account or his father’s and prepare a hiding place. While she was stuck traveling back to Sol System from the backside of the galaxy.
But that had been necessary, too. The first rush of a new tyrant’s power was always the most confused, dangerous time. Pierce could easily have made her disappear. Now, when he must be discovering the limits of his reach, and when her contacts had a firmer sense of the situation, she had a far better chance of playing that situation so that he could not kill her without public notice.
But Laslo …
She had to stop this. Brooding never solved anything. Magdalena despised brooders; they were weak. Action was the only thing that forced the universe into submission. Too few people understood that—although, oddly enough, among them was that otherwise misdirected straight player, Kaufman.
Magdalena swung her long legs against the gravity and off the bed. She sat up, and heard someone screaming.
Instantly Rory, in the corridor, had flung open her door and drawn his gun. “No, I’m fine, Rory. It’s Marbet Grant. Come with me!”
As quickly as her leaden legs allowed, Magdalena moved down the corridor. The bunkroom door was open and Lyle Kaufman was already darting through it in response to the Grant woman’s shout: “Lyle, come quick!”
Magdalena crowded into the room behind Rory, who shielded her. But there was nothing to shield anyone from, only the alien child lying on the floor, clutching her head.
“What is this? What’s wrong with her?” Magdalena demanded. Everyone ignored her.
“It started about a half hour ago,” Marbet said rapidly to Kaufman. “How close are we to the tunnel?”
“About an hour out. Marbet, how can you be sure?”
“Easily,” Marbet snapped. She knelt on the floor beside Essa, scooping her up into her arms and murmuring to her in her native language. “Watch. I just told her that she’s Essa, she’s aboard a flying metal boat in space, that I am Marbet … watch.”
As Marbet murmured, the alien’s face stopped contorting. The ugly wrinkles on her bald head smoothed. She clutched at Marbet, listening, but she no longer looked hurt.
“Now,” Marbet said, “watch this … oh, God, I hate to do it but you need to see!”
She began talking again in World. The child looked at Marbet in consternation, and her skull started to crinkle. Within thirty seconds she was clutching at her head, clearly in pain.
“I told her,” Marbet said rapidly to Kaufman, “that we’re headed back to World, that you and I hate each other, that flowers are not important during a trade. And look.”
“Look at what?” Magdalena demanded but the two of them went on ignoring her. She felt her face harden. How dare they pretend she wasn’t here?
Kaufman said in a strange voice, “I still don’t see how that can be happening. Shared reality only existed in the presence of the artifact. In the field it generated around World.”
“Yes,” Marbet said. “Yes.”
Kaufman stood very still. “McChesney.”
“Hand-picked for the original Faller project by Stefanak,” Marbet said. “How trusted do you have to be for that? And still there.”
“The Alan B. Shepard docked with the Murasaki to take on supplies,” Kaufman said. “I was in brig, but an ensign told me. Docked on this side of the tunnel.”
“And McChesney’s still there!”
The two of them stared at each other until Essa whimpered. Marbet bent her head over the child and spoke comfortingly.
Magdalena said tightly, “Kaufman, what are you gibbering about, both of you? What’s wrong with that kid?”
“She’s experiencing shared reality. Again.”
“So? What does that mean?”
For the first time, Kaufman looked at Magdalena. She recognized the calculation in his eyes. When he spoke, it was with great deliberation: a sum totaled and reached.
“It means, Magdalena, that Essa is once again in the presence of the probability field she spent her life in. It means Dieter Gruber’s insane theory of brain evolution was right. It means that the Protector Artifact isn’t hidden somewhere in the Solar System, under Stefanak’s or Pierce’s control.
“The artifact is right here, aboard the Murasaki.”
SEVENTEEN
AT SPACE TUNNEL #438
Automatically Magdalena said, “It can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“Because it makes no sense, Kaufman. Stefanak had the artifact in the Solar System, set at eleven, to protect the entire system from Fallers.”
Kaufman said, “You don’t know that. Not for sure. The thing was supposedly hidden.”
“But why would Stefanak have done anything else with it? There’s no point!”
“Yes, there is. I’m going to sit down, Magdalena. This gravity.”
He eased his tall body onto a bunk. After a moment’s hesitation, Magdalena did the same. Rory remained standing beside her, but she hardly noticed. A bodyguard was not a person. On the floor, the Grant woman cradled the alien, who seemed to have recovered but whose silly neck-furred face looked as if she enjoyed Marber’s attention.
Kaufman said, “Stefanak didn’t have to actually have the artifact in the Solar System to stop the Fallers from bringing in theirs and frying us. All he had to do was make the enemy think the artifact was in the Solar System. We know they monitor our outpost electromagnetic broadcasts, and that they know a hell of a lot more about us than we do about them. For two years the human media’s stated, discussed, shouted that the Protector Artifact is somewhere around Sol. Just as theirs is around their home star.”
“Still no good,” Magdalena said. “Think, Kaufman. Stefanak had no reason to mislead Fallers—and humans—like that. No reason to keep the artifact in this remote backwater, instead of in the Solar System.”
“Yes, he did,” Kaufman said. The artifact expedition didn’t only include physicists, you know. Ann is a xenobiologist. She has documented exactly how the Worlder brain adapted over fifty thousand years to the strong probability field the artifact generated when it was buried on World—and was permanently turned on at setting prime eleven. They evolved shared reality.”
“So?”
“So there was another part of the first and second expeditions’ reports on World. It wasn’t published because there’s no hard evidence. But I experienced it myself, and I told Stefanak about it myself.”
Magdalena snorted. “You told Stefanak?”
“The one time I met him. He was at the board of investigation to determine if I’d be court-martialed. I wasn’t, so there’s no public record of that, either. Surprised?”
“Don’t play games with me, Kaufman. What did you experience for yourself about the artifact?”
His face changed. Magdalena recognized the look of a man remembering something he’d rather not. Marbet was watching Kaufman closely. Usually Magdalena managed to put Marbet’s abilitie
s out of her mind, but now she wondered what the Sensitive saw that Magdalena did not.
Kaufman said, “I experienced the effect of the artifact on the human brain. Personally, when it was still buried. I went with Tom Capelo and Dieter Gruber into the caves, and my mind just blanked. Emptied completely. If I hadn’t been pulled out of there on a rope, I’d have just stayed standing blankly in the same spot until I starved to death.”
“That’s crap,” Magdalena snapped. “McChesney’s aboard the Murasaki with an entire crew and, supposedly, your artifact, and his mind’s not empty. I spoke to him this morning. And you said Essa was just now affected by this ‘field,’ but we obviously weren’t.”
“No. The field isn’t uniform. It’s toroid … shaped like a doughnut. Only at the thickest section Gruber and Capelo and I blanked. And the alien guide with us never did. She evolved in the field. Her brain can handle it.”
“You’ve no real proof that—”
“I felt it,” Kaufman said, and in his quiet conviction Magdalena heard truth. He’d experienced what he said he had.
He continued. “Stefanak knows all about the toroid field. Gruber had it in his report, and I told him in person. When the artifact is turned on at setting prime eleven, the setting that protects an entire star system from any sort of quantum-weapon attack, you also get the mind-blanking toroid. My guess is that Stefanak didn’t like that. An unknown mind-altering field brought through space tunnels, which we also don’t understand, and installed in the Solar System itself? You probably don’t know this, but an earlier, larger artifact exploded when a warship tried to take it through the tunnel, killing everybody aboard and obliterating the artifact.” He was silent a moment. Remembering Syree Johnson? Soldiers could be such sentimentalists.
“So,” Kaufman continued, “why take the risk if you don’t have to? And Stefanak didn’t have to. He got the same political effect if everyone only thought he’d installed it in the Solar System as if he actually did.”
Marbet said abruptly, “It would fit easily in the Murasaki cargo bay. It’s only twenty-five meters in diameter.”
Kaufman said, “And soldiers don’t come any more loyal than Ethan McChesney. He’s SADC Intelligence.”
Magdalena thought rapidly. It was possible Kaufman was right. She’d known Sullivan Stefanak; his vanity was his brain. He never did fizzies, not even during sex, not wanting to muddy his thinking. He might very well have been reluctant to bring into the Solar System something that could empty human minds. Even if it only affected people within a certain “toroid” range. Maybe especially then, if the range was unclear. Nor would he want to risk the artifact blowing up, like this other artifact Magdalena was hearing about for the first time.
Was Kaufman telling the truth? Yes, he was. She might not be a Sensitive, but she trusted her own judgment.
So if Stefanak had indeed stowed the Protector Artifact aboard the Murasaki … but Stefanak was dead. So—
She said rapidly, “Pierce doesn’t know where the artifact is. If he did, he’d be here already, to kill McChesney and take control. His coup was days ago. There’s been time to get a flyer here, so there would have been more than enough time to order military from Caligula System to capture the artifact.”
Kaufman said, “I add it up that way, too.”
Marbet spoke. “How do you know Admiral Pierce hasn’t done that? Left McChesney in charge and the artifact here, for the same reasons Stefanak did?”
Magdalena laughed derisively. “You don’t know Ethan McChesney. Or Nikolai Pierce. No, Pierce doesn’t know where the thing is.”
“Not yet, anyway,” Kaufman said. “But our question is—what do we do with the knowledge?”
Magdalena said instantly, “Talk to McChesney. The artifact is the most powerful bargaining chip in the galaxy.”
Laslo.
Marbet stood, leaving Essa on the floor. “But what are you trying to bargain for, Magdalena? Or you, Lyle? I don’t understand what either of you is trying to accomplish.”
Magdalena’s eyes rolled. Well, that’s what you’d expect of a dim-witted Sensitive, all feeling and no ability to plan. People like Marbet Grant never understood that you held chips long before you needed a specific bargain. Although Magdalena knew what hers was going to be.
Laslo. Soon. She’d be with him again.
Apparently Kaufman had something different in mind. “It’s not what we want to accomplish, Marbet,” he said slowly. “We want to find Tom, but it’s possible Pierce doesn’t know where Tom is, any more than he knows where the artifact is. What I’m thinking is—”
Magdalena cut in. “If Pierce doesn’t know where Capelo and Laslo are, he’ll damn well be motivated to find out if we tell him we’ve got the Protector Artifact!”
Marbet said acidly, “You don’t have it. McChesney does.”
Magdalena laughed. “Same thing, Sensitive, Ethan’s no fool. He’s got to be shitting his pants wondering what to do now that his boss is dead and Pierce is getting slowly around to having Stefanak’s Intelligence Corps neutralized.”
Marbet said, “I don’t think—”
“Be quiet,” Kaufman said, so harshly that Magdalena turned to him in surprise. “Let me finish my sentence.”
“Finish it, then,” Magdalena said. She had never before heard him rebuke the Grant woman; it was pleasurable.
“What I’m thinking,” Kaufman said, “is that the key point is not what we want to accomplish with the Protector Artifact. It’s what Pierce will want to accomplish. Magdalena, you’ve obviously had: civilian dealings with him. I’ve had military ones, when I was attached to the SADC. He’s not like Stefanak. Stefanak, despite all his faults, was basically reasonable. He could balance risk with conservation of advantage. But—”
“Sure he could,” Magdalena said scathingly. “That’s why humans are losing the war.”
Kaufman ignored her. “But Pierce is a much different organism. As a commander, he goes way beyond daring. He’s not only a risk taker, he’s an insane gambler. There are those who say he’s just insane. I think it’s entirely possible…” He stopped.
Both women had already seen it. Magdalena spoke first. “You think he’s capable of taking the Protector Artifact to the Faller home system and turning it on at setting thirteen. To destroy their entire system. Betting that their artifact is also somewhere else in some other system. Or that they don’t understand the consequences of two artifacts trying to fry each other in the same system. Or maybe that they do understand but, once we’ve set off ours, won’t do the same so that at least the fabric of space will survive.”
“Yes,” Kaufman said. “I think Pierce is capable of all that. Do you?”
Magdalena closed her eyes. Truth tore at them anyway. Laslo … “Yes,” she finally said. “I think Pierce is capable of all that.”
There was a silence. Into it Essa said suddenly in her fledgling English, “We go now? Go in tunnel? Go more stars?”
Marbet pulled the child close. No one answered her.
“We go now? Go in tunnel? Go more stars? Essa go more stars!”
“I think,” Kaufman said, “we should talk to Ethan McChesney.”
EIGHTEEN
LOWELL CITY, MARS
Lowell City crawled with soldiers wearing green bars on their caps.
Amanda shrunk closer to Uncle Martin. She hadn’t had any private conversation with her aunt and uncle at all; Major Harper and his men had stayed close beside her on the flight to Lowell City and in the shuttle bus from the spaceport. The dome had been repaired, but some of the buildings were still rubble. Others stood but still had their windows blown out. And everywhere swarmed these soldiers with green bars.
“The emblem of the Freedom Army,” Major Harper said. He must have caught her staring. Amanda blushed. “Soon we will have Lowell City completely functional again, and cleansed of all its enemies.”
Amanda had thought the Fallers were the enemies.
Guards at the gate pa
ssed them through into the main dome, where a car waited. Military cars, the only kind permitted in Main Sector, were narrow enough to fit through the streets and so never carried more than four. Amanda was afraid that Major Harper would eave Aunt Kristen and Uncle Martin behind, but he didn’t. Instead he left his soldiers, and the car drove him, Amanda, and her aunt and uncle to the Summit.
More soldiers with green bars.
“Major Harper…”
“Yes, Amanda?”
“Could I please have a shower before I see Admiral Pierce? Please?”
Major Harper turned his head to look at her, and it seemed to Amanda that something softened behind his eyes. “Yes, I think that can be arranged, if you can do it in fifteen minutes.”
“I can! Thank you!”
But at Tharsis, she remembered, he’d said there wasn’t fifteen minutes to spare.
She thought she’d be allowed to keep Aunt Kristen with her, but instead she was steered gently but firmly to a door on the third floor and sent in alone. It turned out to be a sort of guest room, small but comfortable, with an attached bathroom. Amanda hesitated. Her father always said every square inch of the Summit was under constant surveillance—did that mean that someone would be watching her if she took off her clothes? The thought turned her hot and uncomfortable.
She settled for showering in her underpants, trying to keep her breasts shielded as much as possible with her arms. Then she took off her wet underpants under cover of a big fluffy towel and pulled on her trousers, without underwear, the same way. Trousers, tunic, and bra were also dirty, but at least she felt a little cleaner. She couldn’t stomach the smell of her socks, however, so she put on her boots without them. They chafed against her bare feet.
On the dresser in the bedroom were a comb and a brush. Amanda untangled her hair and, for the first time in weeks, saw herself in a mirror. She gasped. The black dye had half grown out of her fair hair, with the choppy short haircut Father Emil had given her back aboard ship—how long ago? Months. It seemed like years. Now she looked like a freak, a total idiot.