Awakening

by Margaret Ball

There was more than enough to keep her awake at night until the day when everything changed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  At the end of shift, Lukas stowed his silvery smartcloth uniform and changed into civvies as usual. Beside him, Aleks followed the same ritual. “The Three Ladybirds?” Aleks asked. That was their new hangout, too far north of the Security building for convenience, but at least they hadn’t been recognized as habbers there. Yet.

  “Not me,” Lukas said, “not yet, anyway.” He ran Prettyboy’s new comb through his hair and splashed his face with water.

  Aleks looked at him with dawning suspicion. “Since when do you primp like a girl after shift? And isn’t that your best outfit? Oh ho. You’re going courting! I’ll come along and help.”

  “You will not,” said Lukas firmly. “I barely know her.”

  “Does she have a sister?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A best friend?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Have you even talked to this girl? Or do you just admire her from a distance.”

  “We’ve talked,” Lukas said. “A couple of times.” And you were with me. “Now let me alone, discord it! You know it makes girls nervous if we hunt in packs. If I get to know her better, I might ask if she’s got a friend. As long as you don’t give me any more grief now. And that includes following me,” he added as his mind flagged some previous experiences with Aleks’s sense of humor.

  “I don’t need to follow you to pick up a girl,” Aleks said. “Go ahead to wherever you’re meeting this one. I’ll try my luck at the Three Ladybirds and we’ll just see who does best.”

  “Unless they all fly away home,” Lukas murmured, just too low for Aleks to pick up the words.

  Actually, Lukas reflected as he stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine, Aleks had done him a favor. After his heavy-handed teasing, all the habbers would “know” that Lukas was out trying to scrape acquaintance with a new girl, and that would account for his wanting to be let alone. Nobody would suspect he was deliberately heading to a warren of dissidents and saboteurs. Habbers were selected for a family history of loyalty going back at least three generations, and were supposed to be incorruptible.

  Lukas frowned briefly, then assured himself that he had not been corrupted, nor was he disloyal. He was just… troubled, that was all. He had more and more doubts about whether he’d chosen the right career. Going to an Esilian-run kahve house might or might not give him the moral clarity he sought, but at least he might be able to strike up a conversation with somebody who wouldn’t automatically shut down the moment he voiced his worries.

  And, of course, there was this girl. Spirited, pretty, and shorter than he was; all these characteristics attracted him. And – who knew? If she found out what these Esilians were up to, she’d be in favor again and courting her wouldn’t be the career suicide it would have been when he was supposed to be arresting her.

  Not that he was, exactly, courting her. He’d just like to get to know her a little better. He wasn’t a randy idiot like Aleks, who thought a night on the town wasted if he didn’t finish it with some silly, giggling little girl.

  ***

  Lars Eklund knew something was wrong the minute he stepped into his office. The stacks of paper that usually adorned his desk had been pushed around and some of the taller ones were on the verge of toppling. It could have been the work of an overenthusiastic cleaner, maybe a new one who didn’t know that Professor Eklund didn’t like anybody touching his papers.

  That faint hope died as he saw the clear space that had been achieved by shoving his other papers around. There was just one page lying on the center of the desktop, and it wasn’t neatly computer printed like everything else; it was hand printed in the angular capital letters he used for one thing, and one thing only. And the writing stopped halfway down the page, where he’d abandoned the sabotage suggestions leaflet when Julle told him they had no way to copy and distribute it. He should have destroyed it then, immediately. But at that time he still remembered how much effort had gone into writing it and he hadn’t been willing to throw it away only to start from scratch whenever the copying problem was solved.

  Julle had also told him what to do if something like this ever happened. Lars didn’t even take the three steps forward to his desk; he turned, snapped his fingers like a man who’d forgotten something, and left the office without looking back.

  When he was well clear of the campus, in a shabby neighborhood where streets were narrow and buildings dilapidated, he raised his CodeX to his lips and sent a message to Julle, telling her to meet him “at the place you once told me of.”

  ***

  “Sir,” the desk man said, “there’s been a message sent from that account you told me to start tracking.”

  “To?”

  “A Julle Tavenda.” His CodeX was bringing up her information now. “Graduate student. Said to be having an affair with Eklund, but no corroboration.”

  The Minister for Security drummed his fingers on the desk. “Better pick them both up – no, wait a minute. Is either of them in motion?”

  “The girl seems to be in her dormitory. Probably studying or even taking a nap – I’m seeing no movement at all. The man has left the university and is presently moving east along Peace and Prosperity Street.”

  “Hmm. That’s close to the café Grigg’s been investigating. Let’s bring him in on this. I think he’s got someone placed there; could be useful if that’s our wandering professor’s destination. As for his girlfriend, send a team to pick her up now, nothing to be gained by waiting.”

  ***

  Devra’s eyes widened when Lars walked into the Green Cat just after it re-opened for the evening trade. “Professor Eklund!” She hadn’t seen him since she was at the university. His tall spare figure was unchanged, but there was something different. Belatedly she realized that he looked – frightened?

  “Citizen Fordise.” He took in the clean apron and the cloth knotted over her hair. “You’re not teaching? You work here?”

  “It’s a long story.” She was tired of talking about her lapse and the repercussions.

  “I look forward to hearing it,” Eklund said with his usual, slightly stilted, courtesy “at some time when we are both at leisure. At the moment, however –”

  He broke off as a tall, fair-haired young woman shoved the door back so hard it bounced off the wall. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. How can anybody be that dumb?”

  “Julle.” Lars stood still while she bounced forward and grabbed his hand. “Oh, no,” she groaned, rapidly unbuckling the strap that held his CodeX. “Give me your apron!” she ordered Devra, who complied out of sheer curiosity. Julle quickly folded the apron into a long irregular strip which she wrapped around the CodeX. Devra noticed that the voice sensor microphone was exceptionally well covered.

  “I had to reach you,” the professor protested mildly. “That seemed the quickest way. You did tell me not to wait if something like this happened.”

  “Didn’t you realize –” Julle glanced at Devra. “Who are you?”

  “I work here.”

  “Could we have a moment of privacy, please?”

  “You are standing in a kahve house that has just opened,” Devra pointed out. “Do you expect me to close it for your benefit?”

  “What an excellent idea!” Professor Eklund said heartily. “But then, you were one of my most intelligent students.”

  Devra blinked and recalled her student years. Had the professor been unable to recognize sarcasm then? She wouldn’t know; she had been much too shy to be sarcastic to anybody.

  Vess, sweeping downstairs, broke up the awkward moment and rescued Devra. “Certainly we’re not closing, and why are you bullying my baker?”

  On second thoughts, maybe Vess had only added to the big angular Awkward that was using all the oxygen in the room.

  “Do you own this café?” On Vess’ nod, Julle went o
n, “It’s a matter of the cat and the mice – and the cat is very close.”

  “Then you two mice had better come upstairs,” Vess said. She gave Devra a hard look. “Can you forget that you saw them come with me?”

  Devra pointedly turned her back on the narrow stairway that bisected one end of the café. “I’m not even looking at the stairs,” she said, “so I have nothing to forget.”

  “Take the CodeX,” Julle ordered Devra, “and start walking east.”

  “And who’ll do the baking?”

  Mikal came clattering down the stairs in Vess’ wake. “The cat’s mousing,” Vess said.

  “I heard.” Mikal took the professor’s CodeX from Devra. “I’ll take care of this,” he said. “Devra, you get on with your baking. Vess, you’ll have to run the counter until I get back.”

  “Did you lock the upstairs door?”

  “Not yet.”

  Vess reached into a pocket and handed Julle a key. “You two, upstairs now, and lock up after yourselves. “Go on, go!” She flapped her apron at the bewildered-looking professor. “Shoo, shoo!”

  Professor Eklund and Julle were barely out of sight when one of the café’s regular customers came in. “The usual,” he said to Vess.

  Devra found the extra-large cup he liked to use and filled it with a double portion of kahve while he browsed the pastry display. “I’m sorry, we haven’t had time to put out fresh goods yet,” she apologized, “but I’ll have some plain scones and spice muffins out of the oven in a few minutes, if you want to wait.”

  “What are those puffy-looking things that look like a chocolate volcano just erupted from inside them? Another new goodie? I’ll just have one of those with my kahve, thank you.”

  Devra’s CodeX beeped from the kitchen shelf where she’d left it, and she hurried to take her scones and muffins out of the oven while Vess served the customer. What next? She had a feeling this was not going to be a day for complicated dishes. A honey cake, then, and a tray of bar cookies; she could whip those up without even thinking about it.

  As the day shift ended for most workers, the café began to fill up, and Devra had to split her time between baking and helping Vess at the counter whenever the lines got too long. She was actually relieved to see Mikal again; they really needed another pair of hands. But Mikal only gave her a casual wave and disappeared up the stairs.

  “You stinker!” Devra muttered under her breath.

  “One of the customers giving you a hard time?”

  “No. But your nephew just came in and went straight to your rooms without even pausing long enough to see that we needed help.”

  “Well, he’s probably got things to do up there,” Vess said vaguely. “Anyway, it’s getting slower.”

  It was; the after-work crowd was heading home for dinner, and the after-dinner customers weren’t there yet. As the number of customers dwindled to a manageable trickle, Vess sat down rather heavily in her chair. “Whew! Devra, we’re doing entirely too much business; you’ve got to stop offering them a new exotic pastry every day.”

  “Maybe you could hire somebody to help behind the counter. Just for our busiest times.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Vess said, instead of her usual response that they couldn’t afford another employee. She must be tired. Devra wasn’t surprised, when, a few minutes later, she asked if Devra could mind the counter alone while she lay down for a quick rest.

  “You go right ahead,” Devra said. “I’ve baked enough to hold us until the late rush starts, and there aren’t a lot of people to serve anyway.” And she liked it when Vess left her alone to mind the café; it showed she was trusted.

  Not that I deserve their trust. So far she’d been able to fob Grigg off with brief, vague reports by CodeX. Or, for variety’s sake, with long reports full of every detail that he didn’t need. But sooner or later she was going to have to report in person, and Devra wasn’t sure she’d be able to convince him nothing surreptitious or seditious was going on at the café.

  She was mentally having that conversation with the SecHead when the last person she ever wanted to see again walked into the café.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Henrik Grigg realized that having the hunt for the two university people handed over to him was not exactly an honor. It was more in the nature of a sufficiently long rope – with which he did not propose to hang himself. Security’s record of catching dissidents who’d pre-emptively fled had not been impressive in recent years; the Minister wanted to make sure that he was not personally involved in yet another failure.

  The pointed mention of his agent at the Green Cat could be interpreted as approval. Grigg thought the subtext was more, “You invested how much in setting up this agent? Time for you to show some results!”

  Nevertheless, he thought he had a fair chance of catching these two. One wasn’t moving and the other was still heading for that Esilian-run café. First he’d catch the girl; then he’d instruct the Fordise woman to tell the male fugitive that Security had already taken his girlfriend and that they knew exactly where he was, so he might as well just wait there until they picked him up.

  “Have the habbers collecting the girl report directly to me as soon as she is under control,” he instructed his second-in-command. “But don’t disturb me for anything else.”

  Dunkan Mersi nodded in acquiescence and withdrew from Grigg’s office. He was used to Grigg’s habit of micro-managing cases in which he took an interest, demanding reports that should have gone to Dunkan and appropriating street habbers who were theoretically part of Dunkan’s group. He no longer cared particularly. An aging man who could no longer claim that his growing bald spot was “premature,” he had recognized as soon as the younger, pushier Grigg was promoted over him that his present position in Security was as far as he was ever going to go. Grigg was welcome to take over as much of his work as he liked.

  Alone, Grigg repeatedly tried to reach Devra Fordise via CodeX. No matter how high he raised the importance level of the message, no matter how many annoying notification sounds he attached, he got no answer. He remembered Lukas Pasko’s report that she was in the habit of putting her CodeX on a shelf while she was mixing and baking, and groaned to himself. To be so close to success, and to lose it because some idiot woman was kneading bread! He’d never live it down. Why hadn’t Pasko had the sense to order her to keep her CodeX on her person at all times?

  He set the message to repeat at three-minute intervals and to notify him of any response, then drummed his fingers on the desk. Should he send a pair of habbers to the café? Who was on duty now?

  After dispatching two pairs of habbers with instructions to watch the front and back doors of the café but on no account to enter the premises unless so instructed by him, he still hadn’t had a response from Fordise and had nothing better to do than watch the tracking of the dissidents. His CodeX displayed the tracking as two bright dots on a black and grey city map. Unfortunately the fugitives were now so far apart, physically, that the map was unreadable. On his command, the diverging dots were displayed as two separate screens, one for each fugitive. That was better; now he could see that the woman was still at her dormitory, while the man was… several blocks past the café. Should he call the habbers he’d just deployed and tell them to pursue him?

  “I don’t believe it,” Grigg said aloud. “Discord and Chaos, I won’t believe it.” He told the system to replay the tracking from the point where the man had turned onto Peace and Prosperity.

  The speaker on his Codex crackled to life. Finally, a response from his agent? No, it was the senior of the two habbers the Minister had deployed to the dormitory. “We’ve found Tavenda’s CodeX, sir.”

  An odd way of putting it. “I assume Tavenda is still attached to it?” Grigg asked sarcastically.

  “Well… actually… no, sir.” They had found the CodeX buckled to one leg of Julle Tavenda’s bed. The bed itself was empty.

  During that frustrating conversation he�
��d still been watching the replay of Eklund’s movements. Now he saw an interesting anomaly. Right at the place where Cat Alley intersected Peace and Prosperity, the Codex jiggled around, seemed to jiggle again several feet down the alley, then returned to Peace and Prosperity moving more swiftly than before.

  “It’s another ruse,” Grigg said to himself. “Somebody else took his CodeX to lead us away from the café.” He was morally sure of it. But not quite risking-his-career sure. Well, split the difference.

  Grigg commed both the teams of habbers he’d sent out. One team was to watch the tracker and follow the CodeX east on Peace and Prosperity Street; the other was to split up and maintain a watch on both doors of the café in Cat Alley.

  “Sir,” protested one team leader, “doctrine is that one pair of habbers is to be sent for each individual.”

  “I feel certain that either pair of you can deal with an old man and a girl. Had Mersi not recommended you as his best teams,” Grigg lied, “you wouldn’t be on this assignment in the first place.”

  ***

  When Devra burst into Mikal’s room, she was greeted by four faces as white as her own. The set of shelves at the back of the room had been swung open like a narrow door, revealing a small space behind them.

  “What’s she doing here?” the girl called Julle demanded. She glared at Mikal. “Don’t tell me you’ve been telling our secrets to your Harmony girlfriend.”

  “Not my girlfriend,” and “He didn’t need to,” Mikal and Devra said simultaneously.

  Mikal, in turn, glared at Vess. “Didn’t you lock the door?”

  “I must have forgotten,” Vess said, sinking into the room’s one chair.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Mikal said, heading for the landing.

  “And then we’ll decide what to do with her,” said Julle. She and Professor Eklund started talking, and Vess tried to talk over them.

  Devra was beginning to feel that she might wait forever to get a word in edgewise.

  “That’s enough!” she said; not in a shout that might be heard downstairs, but in her best controlling-rowdy-teenagers teacher voice. As everybody stopped, startled, she went on in the same tone.