by Webb, Nick
“So.”
“Where’s the Admiral?” Parees scowled as he looked up from where he was placing supplies under the seats. He did not bother to hide his dislike.
“Not here right now.” In fact, he didn’t know where she was. Nhean left that question for later. He still wasn’t sure what to do about Walker, and the obsessive circling of his mind was getting him nowhere. “Tell me about Ka'sagra.”
Parees frowned. “You just met her.”
Nhean stared at him silently. He’d been glad to find Parees looking healthier than he had been two weeks ago, but his aide seemed to have turned idealistic in that same time. It was, in his experience with Parees, an unexpected turn of events. And Nhean had no time for idealism. Idealism was a black hole where logic went to die.
Parees noticed the silence. He hunched his shoulders and kept packing, a thin figure in borrowed clothes, no different from any one of the miners in the halls.
“You saw her,” he said finally. “That’s how she is.”
Nhean did not believe that for a moment. “You’re telling me that in two weeks, you haven’t seen any other side to her than that?”
More than anything else, he was annoyed. What had Parees been doing this whole time? Whenever Nhean studied someone, the aim was to see beneath the surface. Parees knew that. In two weeks, he should have ingratiated himself to Ka'sagra and played the role of an ardent supporter while he waited for the mask to slip.
Because it was a mask, Nhean was certain of that. It could be that Ka'sagra's equanimity hid nothing more than a fear that life was not as smooth and preordained as she claimed to believe it was. But if that were the case, Nhean needed to know it. Whatever was behind the mask, that was where his leverage lay.
Something flickered in Parees’s eyes, but it was gone a moment later and the younger man’s jaw set. “No.” His cheek twitched.
Nhean drew in a breath slowly and prayed for patience. “You’re sure there’s not anything you can think of?”
Parees pushed himself up abruptly. His slim form wove between the crates and he tossed a glance over his shoulder as he started stocking the cupboards above the seats. The rigid set of his shoulders said that he knew he was being watched, and that he knew Nhean was displeased with his results.
“I was alone here,” he said defensively. “I was on my own, and I’ve never done this before.”
Nhean blinked. “I know,” he said carefully. “And surely you know that I would not have asked you to stay if I did not feel it was necessary.”
“You shouldn’t have.” There had been a time when Parees had barely spoken a word to Nhean. Everything had been bows and whispers: yes, sir; of course, sir. It was only in the past months that Parees had become confident enough to speak aloud, and then it was only when there was no one else to hear. His deference had become normal. This, in turn, was jarring.
“I know it was asking more of you than I generally do.” Nhean hefted a block of protein gel in one hand and stole another glance at Parees before stowing the food. “Asking different things of you,” he corrected himself. “You have been invaluable to me.”
Parees said nothing to that.
“But I cannot be everywhere,” Nhean explained, “and there are pieces of the world into which I have no access. Telestine society is one of those places. We could not afford to wait two weeks to begin seeking an audience with Ka'sagra.”
“She would have seen you as soon as you arrived.” Parees’s voice was barely a mutter. “She knew who you were. She knew who I was.” His hands had slowed. “You shouldn’t have asked me to do this alone,” he repeated. “I wasn’t ready.”
“Parees. Enough.” Nhean slid the last item into the cupboard and collapsed the crate. “So what do you think her aim is?”
“To bring about the ascension. She told you that.” Parees sounded frustrated.
Nhean considered this as he pulled another crate close. The Koh Rong was a small enough ship that every piece of space had to be utilized. Even the shuttle was used for storing supplies, and was unloaded only when it would be taking a trip onto a planet. These aspects of life—efficient space, double checking pressure seals, triple checking valves, the endless rituals of staying alive in space—had fallen away over the years as he climbed the ranks of human society and landed, at last, on Venus. Returning to them felt strangely comfortable. He wondered why Parees did not feel the same.
Perhaps because Parees had not been playing at normal station life, but instead living as a miner here. Mining was comfortable for no one.
“And you think Ka'sagra truly believes all of that?” Nhean asked finally. He could not contain his skepticism. Religious zealots, in his experience, wore their unlikely beliefs like an ill-fitting coat, and—aware on some level of how shaky their ideas were—they were eager to turn any disagreement into a fight. Ka'sagra, however, seemed to welcome other points of view. In fact, she welcomed them to a disturbing degree. She embraced both Walker and Tel’rabim as being essential to peace, when both wanted only war and destruction.
“She believes it,” Parees said. “She’s not worried what happens tomorrow or next year or even in five years. She wants the ascension.” He seemed desperate now. “Don’t you see?”
“I see,” Nhean said impatiently. “I just don’t believe it.”
“I didn’t believe it, either.” Parees had dropped onto one of the seats. His eyes were focused faraway. “Now I do.”
“You believe in the ascension?”
“Yes. No.”
“Which is it?”
“Both.” A whisper. “It is peace. I believe in peace.”
“And so you want to believe the person who claims they can give it to you,” Nhean said. He tried to keep his voice gentle. “Parees … she can’t create peace. If there was a way to do that, someone would have done it by now.”
“No. That’s not true.” Parees shook his head. “It takes a long time. They’ve been trying since before they left their own system.”
Nhean blinked. “Really?” He had simply assumed that the Daughters of Ascension had arisen after the conquest of Earth—or at the very least, in the aftermath of the Telestine disaster in their home system.
“Yes.”
“Huh. Guess they’re not very good at it, then.” Nhean pulled another protein block out.
Parees was staring at him, dark eyed and silent. “They’re better than you know.”
He’d gone off the deep end. Nhean sighed. He shouldn’t have sent Parees to Vesta, that much was clear. He wasn’t even sure he could undo the damage that had been done, but he would give it a shot.
“I want you to go to Bollard Station.”
“What?”
“I want to know more about the Daughters of Ascension.”
“So ask Ka'sagra!”
“I’m not going to ask her anything I want a straight answer to,” Nhean said patiently. “Ka'sagra is not a priestess, she’s a politician.”
“So sic Essa on her if that’s what you think,” Parees muttered.
Nhean stifled a snort. “Or sic her on him.” He watched the corners of Parees’s mouth twitch. “My point is that she’s spent a long time rehearsing her answers to things. She has a way to make everything they do sound good.”
“And you think that just because you’ve never seen anything that was all good, it couldn’t be real?”
“Yes,” Nhean said flatly. “I think that no sentient being is like that. I think that no religion is that simple. And you know how you find the rough edges of a religion? You ask its newest clerics. So you are going to go somewhere that Ka'sagra will have sent the least trained among her number. You will ask questions until they show you where the logic doesn’t add up, because it is there somewhere.”
“And if it’s really nothing?” Parees challenged him.
“Then we’ll know that. I don’t deny that it’s a possibility. Their flaws might be harmless.”
“Then why waste our time search
ing for them?”
“Because I like to know people before I make them my allies,” Nhean said flatly. “And she’ll make a powerful ally. She’s stronger than she claims to be, or she’d be in prison—she’s openly defying Tel’rabim’s dictates, and even with his own fleet, he doesn’t want to attack her. I don’t know exactly what leverage she has in their society, but it’s more than she says.
“The question I have to ask first, though, is whether or not I want to help her in the first place—because someone who’s been around that long and still believes Tel’rabim is a necessary part of a peaceful world? She’s either crazy, or she sees something I don’t.”
“She’s telling you everything,” Parees said simply. His eyes were locked on Nhean’s.
“We’ll see,” Nhean said grimly.
Parees did not answer that, but his head turned. “Oh. There’s a message for you from Herbert Schroeder.”
Nhean stopped, halfway out of the room. “Schroeder? What did he say?”
A fellow denizen of Venus, Schroeder earned his money through industry instead of information. The man owned more tiny-but-essential factories than Nhean could count, producing everything from graphene filters to intercom systems. And at the moment, he was the best hope he had of placating the Funder’s Circle while Nhean himself was away from Venus.
The Funder’s Circle. The richest of the rich, the organization that had funded his little fleet. And they still had the power to take it away from him.
“He said he could only speak to you,” Parees said, with a shrug. “I told him you would be in contact.”
Nhean took the stairs to his cabin two at a time, opening an FTL comm channel and encrypting it with practiced movements.
“Tang,” Schroeder said genially, when he answered.
“Schroeder. How did the meeting go with the Funder’s Circle?”
“Poorly,” he replied, with an annoyed wave of a hand. “The Mormons are threatening to pull out if we don’t supply them with a few ships to settle Mimas, the Pope wants us to head up another drone rescue mission to Earth, the Baptists are mad we aren’t proclaiming the Venus fleet as an explicitly Christian fleet and send a contingent off to protect Neptune of all places, and the Rothschilds are demanding a higher interest rate. You know. The usual.”
“Did you buy me some time?”
“Enough. They’re going to hold off on the vote to pull the fleet away from you for, oh, a week. But that’s not why I called.” His eyes focused behind Nhean, checking the cabin. “You’re alone?”
“I am.” Nhean frowned. “Why?”
“I can’t explain over this channel,” Schroeder said carefully, “but you should come to Venus. There’s something you should see. I can’t explain it. But no matter what the explanation is, it is not good.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Asteroid Belt
Vesta Station
Lower level 2F
“I didn’t expect to see you here for a while. You’re sure you weren’t followed?” Dr. Sargent’s eyes met Walker’s for a split second as they made their way through the halls.
“I’m sure,” Walker said tightly. Now that she was here, in the sweltering back corridors of Vesta, the panic she’d been repressing for days was beginning to break loose.
It had taken the better part of two hours to get free of Nhean after the meeting with Ka'sagra. She had stayed glued to his side as if by choice until he finally excused himself to see to Parees. Even then, she’d dawdled, making a show of introducing herself to workers and inspecting the defenses of the facility. When she finally disappeared into the back corridors, she kept a sharp lookout for any members of Nhean’s crew. He didn’t hire fools. They’d mention it to him if they saw her disappearing into the mining facilities.
But she couldn’t wait any longer. She had to know what was going on.
“It’s going well,” Sargent offered, once they were through another set of doors and farther into the hidden corridors.
“Nothing … missing?” Walker heard the too-casual tone of her own voice and could have kicked herself for it.
But from Sargent’s evident surprise, he hadn’t been expecting the question, and so he hadn’t been guarding himself against it. He stopped in the middle of opening a door to stare at her. “Missing? Like what?”
“Material,” Walker said bluntly. “A ship left Vesta not long ago. Possibly carrying a bomb. Maybe a nuke, or maybe something like what took out Io. Honestly, we don’t know.” She stepped forward, trapping him against the locked door. She was short, and he outweighed her by a significant amount, but she did not let herself waver. Her eyes bored into his and she raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure nothing has left here without you knowing about it? The only shipments are to the Exile Fleet?”
The possibility had been itching at her since Nhean first spoke of the ship. A bomb from Vesta. Surely that bomb could have come from only one place—from the secret weapons program that hadn’t been destroyed on Io, because it had never been on Io.
It had been on Vesta.
But if someone had stolen a bomb from her facilities, surely they would have made a big deal about it. Surely they would have stolen an Exile Fleet ship to deliver it. That was what had kept her sane.
And Sargent, much to her relief, was shaking his head. “It’s not possible,” he said simply. “There isn’t a way into or out of the holding chamber without suffering irreparable damage, and the procedures to bring material out could not have been accomplished without me knowing. They take too long, and an override would have damaged the machinery. It would be obvious—not to mention, there would be less material now. We’ve produced enriched uranium at a very steady rate.”
“I heard you’ve been skimming off the production of the main mining facilities. Things like iridium for your detonator tips.” She gave him a smile which was not at all pleasant. “I didn’t authorize that. It’s risky.”
“We haven’t.” He held up his hands. “Look, I’ll show you everything. The refinement numbers, the material, the weights, the progress. We’ve had a few streaks of low-quality ore, and a few streaks of higher than expected quality, but I can point those out to you. All of what we have is coming from this.”
He unlocked the door, hands shaking, and ushered her into a pleasant waiting area. A laboratory could be seen beyond, air-locked for contaminants—a standard procedure in space, where even the smallest cloud of poison could be sucked into the air systems and be all over a station before there was time to react.
A desk clerk nodded to Sargent, and to Walker, and Walker looked around herself appreciatively, momentarily distracted from her worries. The refinery was hidden behind a front of illicit research into ore properties and the creation of better air filtration techniques. While it was technically forbidden by the Telestines, no human was going to turn them in, and would become complicit in hiding the facility if they ever stumbled across it. From the laboratories to the waiting room, Sargent had committed to the deception admirably. A uranium enrichment plant, hiding in plain sight.
He smiled when he saw Walker’s appreciation. “We ask people if they have any talents we could use,” he confided. “And they get even more invested in helping to shield us.”
Walker smiled as he led her through the airlocks and alongside the laboratory.
“They’re doing real work,” he explained. “But all of it can be tied easily to the filtration systems or power generation.”
“Any progress on yield?” Walker laced her hands behind her back and tried to keep her tone light.
“Nothing good yet.” Sargent grimaced. His quick look took in her disappointment. “I’m sorry. We have reason to believe we’re approaching—or perhaps exceeding—what we were capable of on Earth, but it’s nothing extraordinary. Would be wonderful if we could switch tracks to plutonium. That’s where we’ll get into the megaton explosive yield range. But implosion is so much more complicated than gun-type uranium designs. It would take a
modern Manhattan Project to figure it all out again.”
“It’s not your fault.” Walker gave a sigh. “It’s just that after Io….”
“I know.” Sargent shook his head. “It’s frustrating enough not to have something that powerful ourselves, but for them to have it….” He shook his head.
“Who is ‘them’?” Walker asked.
“Ah.” He shrugged. “I guess I assumed it was a set up. I haven’t told anyone that,” he assured her quickly. “But if we’re your only weapons research facility, then there’s no way that bomb was of human design. I don’t know how a human got roped into it, mind, but he had to have Telestine help.”
Walker only nodded. “No gossip about that, though?”
“If you’re looking to stop people from gossiping, you’re going to be disappointed. This is one of the biggest events since the exodus. Moses’s exodus, mind you, not just ours. And I wish I could tell you that everyone’s on your side, but they’re not.” He shook his head. “There are a lot of people who think you’re bringing Tel’rabim’s anger down on all of us, even the ones following the rules. Of course, there are plenty more who point out that we didn’t have it great when the Telestines were happy, but people are scared. They’re helpless. For them, following the rules seems safest.”
Walker only shook her head at that. It was the sort of defeatist thinking she had been fighting for years, and she had no idea how to get people to stop believing it. Humanity was dying because the Telestines had forced them into space stations, and because the Telestines didn’t care to make sure they had enough food and medical supplies, but the second any human tried to change things for the better, there was an outcry, with people yelling about how everything had been fine. They were content to die slowly, it seemed.