Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  Polian’s Directorate tolerated Legion skips, because little people gone were as good as little people dead. And Yavi lucky enough to survive the Legion and buy a hub scrub usually began a life elsewhere, rather than risk exposure and execution by returning here.

  “Director Polian.” Max turned and saw Ulys Gill enter the bubble, closing the door behind him.

  No wonder the promotion boards had been suspicious. Gill was slight and stooped by age, but even if he had been young he would have stood a head shorter than Polian. His uniform was impeccable, as was his bearing.

  He took the hand of his co-equal ranker, laid his other across it, and smiled beneath a gray moustache that had been out of fashion even among field-grade officers since the Insurrection. “Sir—”

  “Call me Max.”

  “Max, it’s good to meet a man about whom I’ve heard so much good. I’m only sorry about the reason I heard it. Ruberd was proud to be your son. And I was proud of what he did for Yavet.”

  Polian nodded wordlessly.

  Gill had been a passed-over two-leaf, on the cusp of retirement. Then the death on Tressel of that mission’s commander had thrust Gill into command there. Gill’s massive success in the Tressel action had catapulted him past his betters into this post. Yet, if Gill was some sort of late-blooming political kiss-ass, Gill’s humility and his affection for Ruberd seemed genuine.

  Gill motioned Polian to a chair at the table, and they sat across from one another. Gill leaned forward, cocked his head. “Max, you’re only two hours back on dirt. What brings you to External Operations?”

  Polian smiled.

  Gill might be new to this job, but he knew how to pull its strings. External Operations didn’t monitor citizens with the precision that Polian’s own directorate did, but in his new job Gill controlled planetary arrivals and departures, not only of persons but of communications, overt as well as crooked. That control was what made Gill indispensable to Polian’s scheme.

  “Director—”

  “Call me Ulys.”

  Polian nodded, laid his palms on the tabletop. “Ulys, you and I both know that we’ve got cavorite now, thanks to you and to Ruberd. But like the little people say about whisky, unless we can open the bottle, it’s useless.”

  Gill steepled his fingers, frowned. “You know the operation to recover the C-drive unit failed, then?”

  Polian nodded. “I do.”

  Hell, even Cutler knew. At considerable political risk, Gill’s predecessor as Director General of External Operations had inserted a covert team, covered as a nature-film crew, on a remote Trueborn-colonized planet. The team’s objective had been to locate a Trueborn Scorpion fighter that had crashed in dangerous country, extract the fighter’s C-drive power unit, and smuggle it off the planet. The team had perished in the attempt, and the Central Committee had sacked Gill’s predecessor.

  “Ulys, have you developed another option?”

  The new Director General of External Operations shook his head. “As you see, we haven’t even unpacked.”

  Polian leaned forward on his elbows. “I have a suggestion.”

  It took Polian ten minutes to summarize Cutler’s overture, and another ten to summarize the plan that had grown from it.

  Polian paused, leaned back. “Well?”

  Gill sat back in his chair, too. “Max, the little people say that it’s better to stab a shiv artist before he can stab you.”

  Polian nodded at the proverb.

  Cold War II stayed cold only because the Trueborns were smugly certain that their strategic advantage allowed them to merely contain Yavet, rather than destroy it. But if the Trueborns ever became aware that they might lose their advantage, no thoughtful Yavi believed the Trueborns would hesitate to strike Yavet first, and with nuclear weapons. “You’re afraid that this proposed operation could give the Trueborns an excuse to strike preemptively? To destroy us?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one. Max, I got this job because the fellow who sat in this chair before me ordered that attempt to steal that C-drive. He was dismissed because the Central Committee thought he ordered a reckless, provocative plan.”

  “They didn’t think what you and Ruberd did on Tressel was too provocative. They promoted you!”

  Gill shrugged. “Success silences critical tongues. Besides, Tressel’s Yavet’s ally. We were on Tressel with the local government’s blessing. The Scorpion recovery team made a covert armed incursion onto a Trueborn colony.”

  Polian smiled. “Ulys, that’s the beauty of this plan! The actual activity all takes place right here on Yavet. The Trueborns can’t call that provocative.”

  Gill leaned back, steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “But not all the table setting takes place here. Don’t forget, the Trueborns have been manufacturing provocations to justify wars against one another for centuries. If they wanted to nuke us they could have done it yesterday and made up some story to justify it. This Cutler could be planted for just that reason.”

  Polian shook his head. “I’ve not only met Cutler, I’ve researched him. He’s no plant. He’s a venal, unprincipled Trueborn. His government jailed him and took away his empire. He wants to get even.”

  “Assuming for the sake of argument that you’re right about Cutler, what you’re suggesting is a provocation. After the Scorpion fiasco, the Central Committee’s even more gun-shy. They’ll never approve it.” Gill sat stiff and silent.

  Gill was right, of course. Central Committee members achieved their rank by growing ever older and ever more timid.

  As a young up-and-comer, Polian had appeared before the Central Committee once, and presented a plan to smuggle nukes onto the outworlds to blackmail the Trueborns. It was a superb plan. The Trueborns tolerated smuggling even more readily than they tolerated weakness and sloth. But the Central Committee’s old men had stared at him as though a turd had materialized in their witness chair. That moment, Polian still believed, had forever and unjustly disqualified him from consideration for an External Operations post. Not that he wanted one, really.

  “Ulys, I’m not suggesting the Central Committee be consulted. The entire scheme can be handled within our two directorates with minimal resources. It’s well within our respective discretions. In fact, the resources are so minimal that the plan can fail with no one the wiser. And nobody gets the sack.”

  Gill’s jaw dropped. “It may be espionage on the cheap, Max. And technically within our respective discretions. But go around the Central Committee with a plan that could destroy Yavet? Max, what you’re suggesting is closer to mutiny than it is to exercise of discretion.”

  Polian had expected reticence. He could, of course, now simply threaten to air his own suspicions about Gill’s birth status. Gill had dealt with suspicions that he was a scrubbed Illegal throughout his career, but never when they were aired by someone of Polian’s rank and reputation. The threat would provide all the coercive leverage Polian needed to force Gill’s cooperation.

  But Polian needed a willing ally, not a foot-dragging conscript. So he dangled just a hint of the threat.

  “Hell, Ulys, I’ve devoted more manpower to tracking down one Illegal than this whole operation would take.”

  Gill remained silent, fingertips noiselessly drumming the tabletop. If he had taken the hint, he gave no visible sign.

  Finally, Gill sighed. “Max, I don’t want Ruberd to have died for nothing any more than you do. I’m not saying I’m with you all the way.” The small man paused, then cocked his head. “But what do you need from me, for starters?”

  TWELVE

  Three months after Howard Hibble had announced to Kit, Mort and me that Mort was going home and that Kit and I were going into non-combat mothballs, Kit and I floated weightless in the eighty-foot fishbowl that was the cruiser Gateway’s forward centerline observation bubble as the great ship sped away from Earth bound for connections to the outworlds.

  We drifted there along with one hundred forty-eight other wed
ding guests while a live string quartet, which was drawn form Gateway’s resident orchestra, played the processional.

  Ahead of us, guests, the bride, groom and one of the starship’s tri-captains in dress whites drifted like fighters in formation, while flower bouquets formed into globes orbited them like rainbow planets, all against the slowly revolving backdrop of star-salted black space.

  One of the recording holo ‘bot pair hovered just out of its counterpart’s frame, beneath the bride’s feet, lenses-up.

  I leaned toward Kit and whispered, “Now I see what you meant about the pants.”

  She frowned with ice in her gaze. “This may be boring for you, but it’s special for this couple. Try to appreciate that.”

  To say that Howard’s lunch announcement had changed Kit Born understated matters. Howard had forced Kit to contemplate a sedate rest of her life, and she hadn’t adjusted seamlessly.

  For the first week after we got the word from Howard, she had spent every morning kicking all comers’ butts, including mine, as often as I kicked hers, in the hand-to-hand combat pits, until she lay in the sand, victorious but exhausted. Afternoons she spent at the ranges, until she was barred from the close-quarters battle house after she insisted on mowing down every target with a full magazine hosed out on full auto. An adrenaline junkie gone cold turkey is painful to watch, but I gave her her space. Eventually, denial and acting out gave way to acceptance of a more restrained future. Maybe too restrained.

  When we were dressing for this event in our stateroom, Kit had mentioned that women at bubble weddings wore some species of trousers, to avoid unladylike displays caused by drifting weightless.

  Kit, accordingly, wore a blue silk jumpsuit. I had told her it looked “demure yet flattering.” She had smiled, said that I had matured, that in the past I would have said something puerile, like that it would look more interesting if she wore it without panties.

  I now know that the mature response to that is not “Would you?”

  The music stopped and the captain cleared his throat. He was officiating in his capacity as a vessel master, to join said bride and groom in holy matrimony.

  Trueborns, Kit apparently included, loved their weddings, and rich Trueborns loved their exotic destination weddings most of all. Today’s happy couple was proceeding onward for a ski honeymoon on Rand. Connected Trueborns like Kit’s father got invited to so many bubble weddings that, although they could easily afford the ticket, they couldn’t afford the round-trip attendance time. So our little party of two were standing in for Edwin Trentin-Born and guest at Edwin’s request, in order to bulk up the crowd and to earn him a cashable political chit.

  Actually, our party could have bulked up the crowd a lot more. Four hundred yards aft of us, behind the shoot-on-sight marine guards who guarded the engineering spaces against espionage and sabotage, Mort was enjoying the voyage in solitude. With Kit and me assigned as escorts at government expense, Howard was sending Mort back home to Dead End so he could get lucky at his first and last homecoming dance.

  So, for Kit and me, the wedding invitation via her father had come as a coincidental antidote to boredom.

  Mort’s VIP suite far behind us had been created by adiosing the bulkheads separating no fewer than six cargo bays, then reinforcing the cruiser’s structure and outfitting the resultant vastness to suit an eleven-ton homecoming king. Among other expensive peculiarities that resulted from Gateway’s reconfiguration was that Mort, Kit and I had to stay aboard this one particular starship from Earth to Mort’s homeworld, Dead End. That meant that the voyage between Earth and the major hub at Mousetrap, normally relatively direct and short, would now be circuitous and long, because unlike most passengers and cargo, we couldn’t change vessels at intermediate hubs. The cost was prodigious.

  If the other passengers had known they were sharing space with a monster who called six hundred pounds of live meat a continental breakfast, and who had inadvertently destroyed the last starship he rode on, they would have jumped ship like rats down a hawser. If the tax-paying public had known what Mort’s first date was costing them, they would have thrown tea into a harbor somewhere.

  But they didn’t know. Such is the latitude an intelligence community enjoys during a time of Cold War. Glomar Explorer. Look it up.

  I glanced sideways as the couple exchanged rings. Kit’s eyes were leaking.

  I passed her a handkerchief from my tuxedo pocket. “You okay?”

  She dabbed her eyes then honked into the wadded cloth. “I always cry at weddings. You?”

  It was a strangely vulnerable reaction for a woman who never cried at assassinations. Had her acceptance of life without adrenaline rushes gone too far?

  I shrugged. “My first. You know what’ll make an outworlder cry? Hanging this fishbowl on a starship so Trueborns can take home prettier wedding albums.”

  The string quartet struck up the recessional, and the couple drifted aft past us.

  As we swam in behind them, to the reception in Ballroom F, Kit’s eyes were dry. “Actually, the fishbowl’s a vestigial design element. Like a human appendix. The old chemical-fuel transports had a clear nose blister. For astral navigation and piloting if the computers failed.”

  She caught me rolling my eyes.

  The history chips said the first bubble wedding took place when the captain of the first Trueborn ship got married to an enlisted assault soldier in the bubble enroute to the First Battle of Ganymede. Then the captain sacrificed his life, piloting the ship from the bubble, and saved the human race. It was a nice story. But the history chips were written by the Trueborns. The same folks who flooded the universe with those overacted holos about Trueborn cops and robbers.

  Normally my eye roll would have lit the fuse toward an argument about the nature of patriotism, courage and virtue versus snarky cynicism.

  But instead she touched my cheek, and her eyes were soft. “If I’d grown up like you, hunted and hungry every day, I’d be cynical, too. But you’ve never been cynical about us.”

  I had grown up dodging cops by crawling through the utilities where the cops were too big to fit, and stealing food for Orion and me when her business was slow or the heat was on. And only when I grew too big to fit in the smaller-diameter utilities had Orion been forced to let me join the Legion. But to a kid, it was all just life. A two-bean-bar day was a good day, nothing more, nothing less. I considered myself a realist, and lucky to be alive, not a cynic.

  But if peace and a wedding made the hard-ass love of my life wax this sentimental, I would gladly be whoever or whatever she wanted me to be.

  The right response in this tender moment was to tell her how she had never been cynical about us, either. How I knew she never would be cynical about us. Take her fingers in mine, kiss them. Talk far into the night and grow our relationship, bonding at an interpersonal emotional level. Lament that the stress of mortal combat had heretofore denied us this introspection.

  Instead, I said, “I don’t suppose this means you’ve reconsidered about the panties?”

  Kit may have matured, and she may have wished I had matured faster, but she hadn’t traded in all of her sense of humor, or any of her libido. What happened the rest of the night is none of your business. Suffice to say that escorting an unmarried woman to a wedding can reward her date on undreamed-of levels. But, yeah, there was some interpersonal bonding, too.

  The next day we cleared the beltline marine security detachment and went aft to visit Mort face to three-eyed face.

  When we ducked in through the last human-sized hatch into his domain, Mort was standing up on his two hind legs, his back to us. With his mid- and forelimbs he pummeled a plastex-wrapped tilt-wing fuselage that hung suspended from cables, as though he were a four-armed boxer at the heavy bag. The metal screeched and groaned with each blow, as though it were alive.

  He kept punching but spoke in our heads. “You have stopped coitus at last.”

  Kit flushed. “Didn’t you have anything bett
er to do?”

  Mort dropped onto all six, ambled from the swaying fuselage to a water trough fabricated from another fuselage split lengthwise, and drank. “I might ask the same of you. Such vigorous exercise with the expectation of neither improved muscle tone nor the production of offspring seems a waste of food energy.”

  I said, “Trust me, my friend. When your time comes, you won’t stop ‘til she’s screwed your brains out.”

  Kit punched my arm so hard I staggered.

  Mort ignored the post-coital byplay, and said, “Why have you come to me?”

  I shrugged while I rubbed my bicep. “Thought you might want company.”

  “Your physical presence is unnecessary.”

  Mort wasn’t blowing us off, and he wasn’t lonely. He was perpetually in the mental company of all the other individuals in his species, who were all his cousins, even though they were ten jumps away. He could eavesdrop on literally billions of other non-grezzen intellects across the universe. Especially he could eavesdrop on those close to him aboard Gateway.

  Grezzen generally found physical proximity to other living beings distasteful, unless the grezzen was about to eat the proximate being. The only exceptions were grezzen’s mothers, and a mother’s offspring during early childhood, and a grezzen’s mate during heat and rut.

  Kit asked, “Need anything else right now?”

  “Solitude?”

  “You’re getting the hang of sarcasm, Mort.”

  “I did not intend it. The cooks bring me food and water and remove waste. I enjoy conversing with each of you, but we can continue that at any time or distance. Please do not interrupt your relentless coitus on my account.”

  I turned to Kit, shrugged again. “You heard the man.”

  Kit’s and my next few days, weeks and months were, therefore, our own. It was the first time Kit and I had ever travelled together without knowing that at our destination waited folks determined either to debrief us or to kill us. It turns out that a starship’s a movable feast if you aren’t spending your time preparing to get shot at or recuperating.