by Nancy Kress
“No, even though I’m allowed to speak freely.”
Martinez understood. Berman would not have minded if she’d agreed that yes, Sophia was responsible for everything Berman said she was. But Halstead, loyal to the Peregoys, would not speak out against Sophia. This was the best Halstead could do to agree with Berman without disloyalty.
Berman said, “That’s enough, Captain Martinez. Commander Halstead doesn’t know any more than she’s told you. Kowalski, take her back.”
Kowalski, another young man with intense eyes, appeared on screen and grasped Halstead’s arm. She shook him off. Kowalski took a second to glare at the screen and say, “Free SueLin!”
SueLin Peregoy? What the hell did she have to do with this?
Berman said, “You don’t really have options, Captain. If you approach the planet, we’ll fire on you again and this time it won’t be a deliberate miss. The Zeus can proceed through the gate, but you can’t, not with beam weapons. You’ll have to strip yourself of radiation weapons, and then you can’t attack us.”
“Unless, of course, I’m carrying weapons you don’t know about. Such as a version of the Landry K-beam, which could hit you before you could hit me.”
“You would have used it already.”
“No. Real military officers assess the situation before attack. The Skyhawk, unlike the Zeus, is a fleet flagship. Are you positive that I’m not equipped with a K-beam and won’t use it when the Skyhawk arrives at New Utah? And are you sure that trying to push around an armed warship is in your best interest?”
Berman’s face didn’t waver—he was too good for that—but Martinez felt the young man’s hesitation. If the Skyhawk had been armed, Martinez knew a half dozen ways to attack planetary defense. But he wasn’t armed, and he wasn’t going meekly through the gate to New Yosemite. Nor was he sending the Zeus through; he didn’t trust Berman not to fire on her. Martinez was going to extract the captured PCSS officers. He was also going to act on what Caitlin Landry had told him.
Berman said, “Where would you have gotten a Landry K-beam?”
“From Landry defenses installed on Prometheus. We’ve retaken it.” Too bad that wasn’t true.
Scott Berman said nothing.
“Mr. Berman, neither of us wants to fire. You don’t want your rebellious movement destroyed, and I don’t want to kill as collateral casualties the thirty-eight loyal Space Service soldiers that you’ve illegally imprisoned. Nor am I going to just go away and leave you in illegal control of Peregoy property. I suggest instead that we negotiate. I have information you want to know.”
Silence, except for intense, indecipherable whispers in the background.
Martinez waited.
Finally Berman said, “There is nothing to negotiate. The offer of safe passage through the gate is withdrawn. Approach New Utah or the gate to New Yosemite, and we will shoot you out of the sky. That’s if you have no beam weapons. If you do, then attack us, and your thirty-eight officers die with us. But you may lose your ships, and at least some of us in the countryside will survive.”
Berman broke the link.
46
* * *
NEW CALIFORNIA
“Father, what are you doing here so late?”
Sloan looked up from his desk. “What are you doing back from New Yosemite? Weren’t you supposed to return tomorrow?”
“Yes, but something has developed and I wanted to discuss it with you.”
Sophia looked just the same, and this struck Sloan as the most monstrous thing of all. Composed, beautiful, her hair in its usual smooth chignon, her tunic expensively cut to her slender figure. She didn’t look like his idea of a mass murderer, although he now knew that all his ideas needed revision. Nothing was as he’d supposed. He was lost in a dark wood, and right now, at this moment, the most important thing was to keep Sophia from seeing that.
He had not told her that he knew about the murders on Horton Island.
Long, long habit helped. His face stayed calm, his manner decisive. “What has developed? Do you mean on New Yosemite?”
“No. New Utah. Several weeks ago, I was on New Yosemite when one of our warships, the Leonardo da Vinci, came through the gate from New Utah. Stripped of her weapons, of course, and carrying planetary defense troops from New Utah, all but thirty-eight officers. New Utah has been taken by the rebels. Scott Berman is there, in charge. He’s been joined by many—too many—of the Peregoy soldiers, who’ve joined his treasonous ‘Movement.’”
Sloan digested this. Several weeks ago—He had been cut off from major intel for several weeks. Nothing could have made it clearer how much power he had lost to Sophia. Finally he said carefully, “The entire planet is in rebellion?”
“There weren’t actually that many people left. I moved most of the population to New Yosemite to work in the shipyards.”
“Did you know Scott Berman was on New Utah?”
“Yes, of course. But I thought he’d fled there to avoid arrest here.”
“Why didn’t you have him arrested there?” And why didn’t you tell me?
“I would have, but then this happened.”
“And now—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“And now,” she said, putting her hands on the far edge of his desk and leaning forward earnestly, “I don’t think it’s worthwhile just now to try to retake New Utah. Any warships we send through the gate will have to be deweaponized, and the rebels are in possession of both orbital and surface-to-space weapons. The planet is pretty worthless except as a gateway to New Yosemite, and we’re better off guarding that from invasion by stationing warships on the New Yosemite side of the gate and shooting at anything, Landry or rebel, that comes through. Berman’s pathetic band can be dealt with later, and meanwhile he’s removed from New California. Maybe that will weaken his ridiculous rebellion. What do you think?”
She was so convincing. That kind of conviction sprang only from genuine belief. She believed everything she’d just said, believed it was as much of the truth as he needed to know, believed she was doing the right things for Peregoy Corporation. Believed that New Utah was worthless, inhabited only by expendable rebels. And the thirty-eight space fleet officers the rebels held—did Sophia believe they, too, were expendable for the good of the greater cause?
Did she believe her biowarfare needed additional testing?
Sloan couldn’t look at her. He gazed down at his folded hands, as if in deep thought. When he could manage it, he said the only thing he could.
“Yes, my dear, I think you’re right. That’s how we should proceed.”
“Good.” She straightened and smiled at him. “My ship for New Yosemite is waiting for me. It’s better if I personally oversee shipyard production. This time I’ll be gone quite a while. You go to bed, Father. It’s late.”
“Yes. I will.”
He watched her leave: her graceful walk, her tiny wave to him at the doorway, her mind that he had not understood, not ever, not at all.
How had it happened? How had Sophia, this beloved daughter, come to this? Had Sloan done too good a job of emphasizing the supremacy of Peregoy Corporation’s interests as being for the good of all? Had Sophia inherited the same strain of selfishness that animated Sloan’s other daughter, Candace, and Candace’s daughter SueLin—and kept it hidden all these years? Was it Sloan’s parenting or his genes that were responsible for Sophia’s horrific beliefs?
In the darkness, Sloan clung to the one of Sophia’s beliefs that she had not even mentioned. She must believe that Martinez’s fleet had been lost, either in a space battle or behind the eleventh gate. She must believe that Luis was dead.
Was he?
No. Sloan needed Martinez too badly for that to happen. And Martinez, the child that Sloan should have sired, was too competent to let it happen.
So why wasn’t he here yet?
But Luis would come home. He had to.
47
* * *
DEEP SPACE
/> During the long nights while the Kezia Landry traveled through space between stargates, Rachel paced. A quotation sat solidly as a huge boulder in her mind: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Werner Heisenberg, that old-time Terran physicist who had known quite a bit about war, having lost one. She couldn’t remember just which Terran war it was—Caitlin would have known—but it had been a big one. It was his physics, not his history, that had interested Rachel, all those decades ago when she’d been a student.
But Heisenberg had been right about history, too. Everyone on both sides of this war had been using wrong methods of questioning. The key was not K-beams, nor biowarfare, nor military strategy. The key was the gates.
Rachel had thought obsessively about Philip since the gates closed, then opened again. She, nor anyone else, hadn’t been able to find any explanation for those phenomena. The timing of gate changes coordinated with Philip’s vague descriptions of having “touched something”—but why? Rachel had combed through journals, followed on-link debates, talked to the most important physicists on Galt. There were theories, but none of the theories stood up to the facts.
When only one explanation did, then you went with that, at least provisionally, no matter how weird. The only thing Rachel had that fitted everything was Philip. It didn’t get any weirder than that. Still—Occam’s razor.
She went over and over the ideas behind an ultimate substrate of reality made of a field of consciousness, or something like consciousness, or something not like consciousness but able to be controlled by consciousness. After all, the knowledge of an observer affecting quantum events had been known for two hundred fifty years. Terran physicists had dipped at least one toe in the waters that Rachel was now drowning in.
John Wheeler with his “participatory anthropic principle,” citing human beings as “participator in bringing into being not only the near and here but the long ago and far away.”
Roger Penrose, linking quantum events in the human brain with quantum events in space.
Bernard Haisch, Gregory Matloff, Anna Varennes. Had Philip read all of these same theories? Of course he had.
Rachel couldn’t stop Jane’s monstrous pathogen if it had already gotten loose in the Eight Worlds. It seemed that biology, not mechanical engineering, would be humanity’s undoing. But Philip, if she was right about him, no longer had any biology. She would have to reach him some other way. And she needed to reach Philip before Jane reached New Utah.
Because that’s where Jane was going, yes, after first traveling to Prometheus. She may or may not have more stored pathogen there, or elsewhere. But Veatch and Caitlin had expected to destroy a biological facility on Rand, not on Prometheus. They had the ordnance to destroy the facility on Prometheus, but not to also take out all the surface-to-space weaponry that Jane had undoubtedly installed there. Perhaps even including a K-beam. After all, Prometheus was the only place she’d used a K-beam so far, when she’d taken the dwarf planet from the Peregoys.
Then, armed with weapons scavenged from Prometheus, her ship could set out across deep space for New Utah. She wouldn’t need to pass through a gate to reach that Peregoy planet, which meant she could take the scavenged radiation weapons with her. With a K-beam, she could take out any Peregoy warships and planetary defenses, and then either obliterate New Utah or easily infect it with her pathogen. Probably the latter. The inhabitants of New Utah would be her expendable lab rats.
Rachel couldn’t overtake Jane before she reached Prometheus, and wouldn’t have been able to do anything useful if she had. That wasn’t her plan. Instead she had what was perhaps the most desperate, and possibly stupid, plan in a time of desperation and stupidity.
Heisenberg, Wheeler, Penrose, Haisch, Matloff, Anna Varennes—
“Gran, what are you doing?”
Tara, emerging sleepy and wild-haired from her cabin. Since Rachel had told her where they were going, Tara’s hopeless indifference had been replaced by some of her old wire-taut animation. Some, but not all. This was a Tara not quite so obsessive, not quite so unbalanced. Some of that was the drugs. Doctors had installed deep in Tara’s skin, where she couldn’t easily remove it, a med-drip that calmed her down. She hadn’t wanted it, but Rachel had insisted.
“I won’t take you with me otherwise,” Rachel had said. She’d been lying. She needed Tara. Tara knew this area of space, as Rachel’s crew did not. The crew and techs were people Rachel trusted, paid an exorbitant amount for this trip, and Rachel had told them they couldn’t access any flight records or navigational charts. Annelise would have discovered what they’d scanned or downloaded. And, given her spy network, so might Jane’s people.
“Tara, go back to bed. I’m just walking myself tired. Old people have a much harder time sleeping than you youngsters, you know.”
Tara nodded but didn’t move. She slept in a flimsy short top with nothing underneath, her lovely young body on full display, and Rachel was glad it hadn’t been any of the crew prowling the corridors. Tara and modesty had always been strangers.
Tara said, “Gran, do you think he’ll answer us?”
No doubt whom she meant. Rachel said gently, “It won’t work like that. I explained it to you, dear heart.”
“I know. But maybe…”
“No.” Best to be firm about this, and to go on being firm.
“Then do you think he’s okay?”
“Tara, there is no ‘he’ anymore. It’s not a human being.”
“But he closed the gates and then opened them. You said so. You’re the only one who said so.”
“I said I think that’s what happened. It’s incredible, I know, but—”
Tara was not interested in the incredibleness of Philip’s injection into the field of cosmic consciousness. She was recovering from her psychotic episode, but she was still Tara, interested only in what concerned her directly.
“I just want to know he’s okay. You explained about the decay.”
“It’s not decay, exactly, the…Tara, it’s the middle of the night. Go to bed.”
“Just one more thing.” Tara grimaced, looking in that quick moment uncannily like her father. It never went away, that lance of pain over the lost child.
“Well, then, what?”
Then Tara surprised her. “Gran, I didn’t just come with you because I’m hoping for…something from Philip. I came because I know I’m responsible for this war with the Peregoys. It wouldn’t have started at all if I hadn’t tried to create an alliance against aliens that maybe aren’t even there. It’s my fault. I want to do whatever I can to help you end the war.”
Rachel put her arms around her granddaughter. If this new maturity was the end result of a psychotic break, too bad Jane didn’t have one, too.
“I know, dear heart. Now go to bed. I will, too. We both need our sleep.”
Tara went into her cabin and closed the door. Rachel switched on the waterfall holo in the corridor, which ordinarily annoyed her, and raised the volume high enough to mask the sound of her footsteps. She paced the twenty steps down the corridor, past closed cabin doors, twenty steps back to the commons area. Twenty steps to circle that. Repeat.
All her tests on Galt had failed. After running the equations, she’d half expected that, which was why she’d already been equipping the ship and bribing the crew. Tomorrow they would repeat those tests, here in deep space. If those, too, failed, then she would have no choice but to try the test again at their final destination.
She had to reach Philip before Jane reached New Utah.
48
* * *
NEW UTAH
As the Skyhawk and Green Hills of Earth traveled closer to New Utah, the rebels on the planet ignored all attempts to communicate. Scott Berman had stated his position, calling Martinez’s bluff: Martinez’s ships could not approach the gate. They could engage in a battle with the planet or not. If Martinez possessed beam weapons and fired on New Utah, the planet would
return fire. Cascade might be vaporized, but so might Martinez’s ships. He had no doubt that even now Berman was dispersing his people away from the city. The Movement would go on.
If Martinez possessed no beam weapons—which was in fact the case—Berman would wait until everyone aboard the PCSS fleet starved.
Berman’s big gamble was that Martinez did not possess a K-beam. Martinez’s only ace was that Berman couldn’t be sure one way or the other.
The Skyhawk and Green Hills of Earth voyaged on toward New Utah. The Zeus had been ordered to hold position out of weapon range. On all three ships, DiCaria reported, the mood was grim. The lowest-ranked spacer knew what was at stake.
Caitlin Landry did not. Martinez went to her cabin, taking Dr. Glynn with him. He wanted to learn as much about the weaponized Landry pathogen, Joravirus randi, as he could.
“I don’t think there’s anything more I can tell you,” Caitlin said.
“I want to be sure I understand what you’re proposing be done to the virus on New Yosemite, and make sure Dr. Glynn understands as well.”
“Are we still going to New Yosemite?”
What had she heard, and from whom, for chrissake? He said, “Yes.”
Her eyes, brown-flecked green, bored into his. “Is that the truth? It doesn’t…doesn’t seem like it. Or at least, not all of the truth.”
He felt, rather than saw, Mary Glynn’s surprise: How does a prisoner know enough about the captain to know when he’s lying? The doctor studied them both intently.
Abruptly, Martinez ended the interview.
• • •
A day out from New Utah, Martinez sat on the bridge when the OOD said, “Sir, contact with—”
Scott Berman’s face burst onto the viewscreen, tears of fury unabashedly on his young cheeks. “They’re all dead!”
Martinez said, “Who’s dead?”