Those were not signs which Rashuri found reassuring. If Tai Chen was giving up her former presence, it could only be because she felt she no longer had need of it. Rashuri could not overlook that he had placed in her hands weapons which could be used as easily against Earth as by it. And he was not fully persuaded that Tai Chen’s professed fear of the Senders could be taken at face value.
None of Rashuri’s concerns was the product of hindsight. The night on the White Swan Rashuri had made a conscious choice to export his problems into the future, to buy necessary harmony today at the price of greater danger in some unseen tomorrow. With the imminent completion of Gauntlet B, that tomorrow was at hand.
For a second operational platform allowed a terrifying scenario first laid out by Moraji in the weeks following the White Swan accord. With the platform’s complement holding stronger allegiance to Tai Chen personally than to Rashuri or the Consortium, she could order it to remain in Earth orbit, and use it as a wild card to claim greater power. If her fear of the Senders was mere window-dressing as some suspected, she could even recall Gauntlet A from its journey to the realm of Pluto.
Stationed one hundred eighty degrees apart in Earth orbit, with their weapons trained Earthward rather than spaceward, the twin ‘defense’ platforms would replace the abbreviated era of the Pangaean Consortium with an era of Chinese hegemony. And the first target of those weapons would doubtless be Star Rise, for by Moraji’s analysis only a ship capable of AVLO velocities could hope to evade Gauntlet’s computer-guided missiles and energy weapons.
No doubt Tai Chen knew that as well. Rashuri thought it no coincidence that since the AVLO drive had passed its preliminary tests, Tai Chen had stepped up both the frequency and the intensity of her complaints that Gauntlet B was being neglected.
All these matters had been coming to a head when Cooke came to Delhi. And when the Assembly voted two months later to cut off all funds for Gauntlet, Rashuri knew the issue was far from resolved.
“I am dismayed to find that you are not a man of your word,” said Tai Chen’s image on the NETlink monitor. “You made a commitment to me.”
“It’s not reasonable to expect that I can control the actions of others,” said Rashuri. “It was a process technician, a Second Comer, at Assembly Station who broke security. You can understand the First Scion’s objections, I’m sure.”
“I cannot understand why security was so feeble as to allow someone at an isolated outpost to transmit secure information to a fanatical anti-authoritarian organization.”
Rashuri rubbed his temples tiredly. “The men and women at Assembly Station are Consortium members, not prisoners.”
“I will insist that the woman responsible be executed.”
“That will be up to the Assembly. Perhaps you will have better luck influencing that vote than you did the funding vote. I note that the Philippine Republic voted for the cutoff. Wasn’t it their delegate who contributed the slogan ‘Not one dollar more’?”
“The Philippine government has made a fool of itself at the bidding of this demagogue Cooke,” Tai Chen said angrily.
“This vote was not the product of religious fervor alone. Hundreds of millions believe that the MuMans come in brotherhood and friendship. They were equally enraged to find us preparing to greet them not with an open hand but with a mailed fist.”
“The MuMan cultists are also fools.”
“But they are many, and fools in quantity cannot be dismissed or ignored. We should be grateful that they allowed Gauntlet A to remain in place.”
“One platform cannot properly defend us,” Tai Chen said testily.
“The Senders will not necessarily know that.”
“A bluff is not enough. We are left with only one alternative. Star Rise must be armed.”
“I am not surprised to hear you say that. You should not be surprised that I reject your demand. The most you can expect is an opportunity to nominate a portion of the Star Rise crew.”
“You are afraid of the cultists and the god-mongers,” Tai Chen said scornfully. “You have more reason to fear me.”
“I think not.”
Tai Chen laughed unpleasantly. “Tell me who controls the operational platform. Tell me how you would protect yourself from it. It has the best weaponry the Consortium’s engineers could devise.”
“How many agents did you have at Assembly Station when its hull was built?” Rashuri asked calmly. “How closely did you monitor its outfitting?”
“I am not in the mood for your quizzes. I am simply informing you that Star Rise must be armed, and that you will not be able to prevent it merely by loosing your armies of ignorance. For if you do, I will recall Gauntlet. When it appears in Earth’s night skies and levels the building in which you sit, then the Assembly will understand what fear is.”
Rashuri smiled. “My questions were not idle ones. During the construction of Gauntlet A, certain precautions were taken. The presence of your agents precluded the same precautions being taken on B, necessitating the charade just completed.”
Tai Chen glowered at him. “So you admit your complicity.”
“I would think you would be more interested in the nature of the precautions.”
“All weapons on Gauntlet A have been tested successfully.”
“My friend Jawaharlal will be insulted to hear that you think him so obvious,” said Rashuri. “Integral to the hull of Gauntlet A and quite inaccessible to its crew are a dozen self-contained explosive packs. The moment Gauntlet A leaves station to head for Earth, a destruct signal will be sent by PANCONTRAC. It need reach only one of the packs for all to be triggered, and Gauntlet A to become a scattering of space debris.
“So you see, Tai Chen, because from the first I have respected you, it is not necessary for me to fear you.” Rashuri smiled, enjoying the moment. “Within the month an orbital transfer vehicle retrofitted with the AVLO-B will take a relief crew out to Gauntlet A. If they meet with any resistance, they are authorized to send the destruct code. I trust you will instruct your people to act properly?”
Tai Chen made no answer save what Rashuri could read on her stony face: bitter, virulent hatred. She broke the connection without another word, and Rashuri released a long sigh.
Over, he told himself. It’s over at last. He continued to think that until Gu Qingfen showed him otherwise.
It had been a routine PSM, the monthly program status meeting. The PSM was meant to keep a sense of oneness in a bureaucracy already grown well beyond the point where a team feeling could be cultivated. It was meant to bring together decisionmakers who might otherwise have no contact with each other, save for an occasional exchange of cold data. It offered a chance for Rashuri to tap the thoughts of his top echelon and, when necessary, play them off against each other.
As usual, division directors based elsewhere than Delhi were “present” via satellite teleconference links. As usual, most directors overestimated how much of their division’s workings the others wanted or needed to know, and the meeting dragged out to three hours plus.
Not being a division head, Gu Qingfen was not present at the meeting. But he knew its traditions. The formal session was followed by informal discussions which were more social than business, and from which Rashuri was always the first to excuse himself. In the early days, he had left first due to the press of other duties. Now he did it so that his presence would not stifle a free exchange among the others. In either event, it had become a tradition and a point of etiquette that no one left the hall until Rashuri did.
Gu Qingfen knew that, and it was why he had chosen that time and place to assassinate Rashuri.
It had not been difficult to bring the large-bore pistol with its soft-nosed bullets through the security checkpoints. Gu’s face was familiar, his presence expected. Routine and familiarity were the enemies of effective security; Gu was no more considered a risk than Rashuri himself. Tighter security existed over certain technical facilities and Rashuri’s suite; Gu would have ne
eded special authorization to enter those areas of the installation. But he could move freely through the bulk of the administrative area.
Gu had arrived in the area of the teleconference room at the two-hour mark. The progress of the meeting proper he monitored with a small transceiver tuned to the teleconference link. But once the meeting adjourned, there was no way to know exactly when Rashuri would leave except to take up position near the doors and wait.
The straight white walls of the hallway provided no recesses where Gu Qingfen could linger unnoticed. But there was little traffic in the hallway or in the cross-corridors it abutted, and those who did pass did not think it strange someone might be waiting for the meeting to break up.
Neither did they think it strange to stop and talk with Gu Qingfen. The first to stop was Zhang Shaoqi, the Chinese representative to the PANCOMNET board. Anxious not about being seen but by the possibility of being interfered with, Gu Qingfen dispatched him peremptorially. But a few minutes later economist Sanjiva Neelam, whose office was located adjacent to Gu Qingfen’s, called to him from one of the cross-corridors.
“There you are,” called Neelam, who began to walk briskly toward him. “I was wondering if you had plans for lunch?”
At that moment, the double doors of the teleconference room were unlatched and began to swing inward. Gu refocused his attention there and pulled the pistol from one of the many pockets of his jacket. His face became a mask as he raised it. “What are you doing?” shouted Neelam, breaking into a run.
Gu leveled the weapon at Rashuri, whose surprise had not even had time to register on his face, and fired. Droplets of Rashuri’s blood splattered the doors, and he staggered back, a spreading stain on his tattered blouse. A second shot went wide. As Gu Qingfen lined up a third shot, Neelam flung himself headlong into the assassin. But the bullet still found flesh, shattering bone and tearing sinew. Rashuri’s legs buckled and he toppled forward.
From that position, feeling surprisingly little pain or anxiety, he watched as Jawaharlal Moraji pushed Neelam aside, raised Gu up from the floor where he had been held, and with a single vicious motion snapped the assassin’s neck. Then, a haze of pain clouding his vision, Devaraja Rashuri closed his eyes.
When he next opened them, there were many unfamiliar sensations. From the cyclic throb in his left shoulder, the sharp pull of stitches, and the numb weight of his right leg to the stab of the IV in his forearm, the growling emptiness of his stomach, and the spreading wetness around his groin, his body had been transformed. But it was still his body—
“Alive,” he said, in an unsteady disbelieving voice. An instant later, Moraji was leaning over Rashuri’s hospital bed and peering down at him with worried eyes.
“Yes, Devaraja. Your spirit still flies, and your time is far from finished.” He struck himself in the chest with a fist. “I am ashamed that such a thing was possible. I have been punished for my boastfulness.”
“No, good Jawaharlal,” said Rashuri. “This is Tai Chen’s answer to my gloating. She is not a good loser.” He smiled wistfully. “You will tell me more honestly than a doctor would. How long will I be here and in what condition will I leave?”
Moraji grimaced, as though recounting Rashuri’s injuries brought him empathic pain. “One bullet destroyed your knee. When the implant heals you will walk with difficulty. The second bullet passed through until it shattered against your scapula. The major muscles of your shoulder are badly damaged. If you regain use of the arm above the elbow, you will not be able to lift any weight. Your lung was nicked by a fragment, but that has been repaired. Your life is not in danger.”
Rashuri smiled and reached for Moraji’s hand with his own. “The rumor must be true, then, that I have no heart.”
“Devaraja, I await only your word to avenge this atrocity.”
“By assassinating Tai Chen?”
“I will do the deed myself.”
“There is no profit in revenge. Nor for all your skills can I foresee you returning from such a mission, and I still have need of you, my friend.”
“Tai Chen will think us weak. Already she mocks us with false regret, and says that Gu Qingfen acted on his own.”
“And we will accept that,” said Rashuri, closing his eyes. “Please call the nurse. I have need of her skills, and then of sleep.”
“I will bring her immediately.”
But Rashuri tightened his grip on Moraji’s hand, preventing him from leaving, and opened his eyes again. “Promise me there will be no reprisals. I am alive, while the would-be assassin lies dead. The account is more than balanced.”
Moraji nodded gravely. “Very well, Devaraja. I promise.” Rashuri closed his eyes and released Moraji’s hand. “Then bring the nurse now, please.”
Within a week, Rashuri could sit up with only middling pain, and film of him so arrayed was shown on PANCOMNET at the same time the results of the investigation of Gu Qingfen’s connections were announced. Gu was described as an old-line Marxist angered by the “domination” of China by the Consortium hierarchy, and by his own failure to rise within that hierarchy. Tai Chen issued another apology decrying Gu’s “mindless nationalism” and reaffirming China’s support for the Consortium.
“The day of nations is passing. We can no longer afford to hold as our highest value allegiance to the place where we were born. We must ally ourselves instead with the species to which we were born,” said Tai Chen. “Regrettably Gu Qingfen could not accept this truth.”
But that did not soothe the many Hindus whose long-simmering antipathy to China was set boiling. Tensions soared along the intermittent and mountainous border between India and China, and when word came that Chinese nationals using the road south from Saitula through Bharat had been attacked, Rashuri had heard enough.
“The scurrilous attack on me by an unbalanced gunman was not an attack on India,” he said in a surprise address to that nation’s populace. “It was an attack on the Pangaean Consortium, and so an attack on the future. Some have chosen to believe otherwise, and to misguidedly try to reclaim lost honor with violence against the innocent.
“I denounce and renounce such actions.
“This incident has prompted me to now take an action I have long contemplated. Effective today I have dissolved the government, called for new elections, and resigned my position as Prime Minister of India.
“I do this with not inconsiderable regret, for I have been honored to serve in this post for nineteen years. You have celebrated with me the birth of my son and mourned with me the death of my wife. And together we have faced many challenges both from within and without.
“But tomorrow calls, and I must answer while I am still able. I am proud that my nation, guided by the wisdom of five thousand years, played a central role in the founding of the Pangaean Consortium. And it is to the success of that enterprise that I now commit myself fully.”
Rashuri sprang another surprise at a PSM held the day of his release from the hospital. He was brought into the room in a wheelchair to the applause of his eleven division heads; for the occasion, those from the remote centers had flown in to be there in person. With a helping hand from Montpelier, the Chairman acknowledged the applause by coming to his feet and standing stiffly at the head of the table.
“Thank you all,” he said, waving them to their seats with his one functional hand. “As you know, the first test of the full-scale Star Rise drive is scheduled for the first of next week. As you are probably aware, the fallout from recent events has mended some of the fences between the factions contending for control of that project.
“For a time, Cooke will not speak against us, nor will Tai Chen. Eddington continues to preach his MuMan gospel, but his backers’ interests are largely congruent with our own. It is time for us to regain the focus for ourselves. It is time for the Consortium to again set the agenda.
“For this reason, I have decided to move the Consortium’s operational headquarters to Assembly Station. With the termination of Gaun
tlet and major structural work on Star Rise nearing completion, there is presently sufficient room for myself and my immediate staff. Eventually all divisions with global responsibility will relocate to an expanded facility there.
“I intend to be at Assembly Station in time for the tests of the Star Rise drive. On my arrival we will hold ceremonies renaming Assembly Station. Its new name shall be Unity.
“And there I will remain. I do not intend to return to Earth until my ashes are ready to be swept away by the Ganges.”
Both of Rashuri’s decisions caught the cresting wave of sympathy and outrage and were carried forward swiftly. Instead of anger at his desertion, the people of India took pride in Rashuri’s “promotion” as symbolized by the move to Unity. To more than a few, by surviving the attack, Rashuri proved he had been rightly and prophetically named: Devaraja, the god-king.
Elsewhere, the resignation removed a lingering doubt in some quarters about conflict of interest, though most of the world barely took notice. But the new status of Assembly Station was another matter. Convex panels installed on Unity made it blaze brighter than Venus with reflected light; a new, slightly lower orbit carried it around the globe in stately fashion.
For thousands of years, wondering humans had looked to the skies as the home of powerful but unknowable gods. The sight of Unity moving among the stars tapped that fundamental mysticism, and that connection personalized the Pangaean Consortium in a way that a village NET station or a parasite eradication program never could. Though Rashuri was in fact farther away and less accessible at Unity than he had been in Delhi, the reverse seemed true.
A place is real only to those who have seen it. Delhi was real to millions. But in a very short time. Unity became real to billions. That light in the sky was where The Chairman lived and looked out for the people of Earth. Only children expressed the thought so simply, but few were untouched by it on some level.
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