Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  Bottom line? Never hunt bear with a needler. Never bother to hunt peep with anything else.

  I blinked as the cop’s needler flashed blinding blue.

  Hsss.

  The needle carbine’s report echoed simultaneously with a scream, and the touch of a hand on my left sleeve, and I looked down.

  The bulging eyes of the gangsta peep who the cop had spotted trying to pick my pocket stared up at me, and the peep’s mouth was wide and already bubbled blood as he screamed. The cop’s shot had opened a hole the diameter and color of a raw Trueborn hamburger center mass in the peep’s chest, and the little Yavi’s heart would pump him dry long before the Cleaners arrived.

  What had just happened was an everyday occurrence in any stack, and pedestrians, whatever may have been their inner horror, simply rerouted themselves around the thrashing little peep, and hoped they weren’t going to have to remove bloodstains from their clothes.

  I had seen this feature often enough, too. My peep self-preservation reflexes overrode any sensitivity that years among the Trueborns might have rebuilt in me.

  There was nothing I could do for the peep who was dying for attempting to rob me. But there was something he could still do for me.

  While one of the cops was calling for the Cleaners, the other was snapping helmet-cam photos of the suspect.

  Whether or not Headcover had yet called the pair of them to pick me up as a suspicious offworlder, I didn’t want to be found and questioned, even as an innocent offworld victim big, either.

  During the precious window of seconds that the cops were distracted, I walked five yards, then stepped to my right, into the next vertical, and dropped two levels unbuffered by the updraft.

  Then for three blocks left, one ahead, and one up I sprinted and dodged like I had just stolen something. Nobody gave me a glance.

  Except on the uppermost levels, people ignored street crime that didn’t happen to them. So did the system, except when the crime could be dealt with on the spot with a needler, a fist or a boot.

  Still, every moment I expected to hear a needler hiss, then feel the round tear my lung out.

  Finally, puffing like a steam engine escaped from a pre-industrial, I snuck a direct glance over my shoulder. No uniforms. Headcover’s blue balloon had disappeared, too. I slowed, straightened up. Lost ’em.

  Then I spotted him, fifty yards back, and my heart skipped. My tail had shed his headcover and eyewear, revealing steel-colored hair that framed a square-jawed face. But it was still him, alright.

  My shoulders slumped.

  Another lesson spies learn quickly about urban surveillance and evasion is to change appearance on the fly. A headgear change was the school solution, because it yielded the quickest and most dramatic results and was readily reversible if you could pocket the hat.

  Headgear’s quick change squashed any hope of coincidence. He was a pro, and now my evasion antics had confirmed to him that I wasn’t here on Yavet to sell light bulbs.

  I swore again.

  Busted an hour after hitting dirt. If Kit were here she would laugh her ass off.

  No, Kit would never laugh about a Trueborn case officer taken alive by the Yavi. She had survived interrogation once. She talked hard-ass about the experience when we were among those cleared to hear it. But each time the dreams woke her, screaming, beside me, I had to rock her in my arms, like she was a little girl, until she sobbed herself back to sleep.

  The prospect of capture nearly made me run again. Instead I dodged ahead through the crowd, merely like a salesman late for an appointment, and let my mind do the sprinting. The longer I walked along with my tail dragging behind me, the more certain it was that a goon squad would pounce on me. Anything I did would be a bad option, but doing nothing would be worse.

  A peep wearing gangsta leathers, not so different from the one who had died alongside me minutes earlier, passed by me. I jostled him and picked his pocket for the shiv protruding from his shoulder scabbard. He turned and snarled up at me. I flashed the shiv and snarled back, twice his size, and suddenly better armed.

  The gangsta did the math, then moved on, cursing.

  Somewhere ahead of him, somebody was about to lose their shiv.

  I pocketed my new weapon and kept walking. Ahead, the corridor intersected with a smaller tributary transverse, low-ceilinged, sparsely trafficked, and dim, that branched left. On the far side of the transverse, however, a display window of the shop that fronted the main drag wrapped around.

  I sauntered around the corner into the transverse, then pressed my back against the wall on the shadowed near side. To my front, the display window now showed me a mirror image of oncoming traffic that had been following me up the main drag, while from the main drag my own reflection was invisible in the shadows.

  Four heartbeats later, I glimpsed steel-gray hair as the reflected image of my tail flashed into my view. His stride was smooth, and his jacket lapel bulged. He moved left, across pedestrian traffic, so he could turn down the transverse.

  My heart raced. I drew the shiv, and held my breath.

  He was close, now.

  There was something about his face. Lean. Familiar. Maybe he was a uniform cop who I had seen when I was a kid, who had in later years graduated to plainclothes duty?

  He turned in to the transverse passage. I stepped and slashed at his jugular with the shiv as I wrapped my empty hand behind his head, grasped his jaw, and twisted.

  Then in that instant I knew. People rarely see themselves except in mirror image. They say it’s one reason nobody thinks they look like their driver’s license photo. When I saw Headcover’s full face for the first time, I had seen him straight on and direct, as though I was looking at his driver’s license photo. He was a stranger.

  But when I saw his reflection in the shop window, from the same reversed perspective I saw myself every time I shaved . . .

  My blade was already flashing across the shadows, its momentum uncontrollable.

  I hissed, “You’re my father!”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Varden stood at attention in front of Polian’s desk, the boy’s hands trembling in spite of himself.

  Polian waved him to at ease and continued reading the morning reports. But the way the boy fidgeted, it had to be something about the Cutler thing, at last. He had ordered loyal, close-mouthed Varden, and only Varden, to coordinate the operation, but to report only concrete developments.

  Not because the boy was clever, but because he wasn’t. It kept Polian at arm’s length from a plot that offered low success probability, and high jeopardy if it went wrong. And it kept older, wiser heads among Polian’s subordinates from questioning a plot that edged Yavet closer to a Trueborn preemptive nuclear attack. It was a dangerous game, but one Polian thought worth playing.

  “Out with it, boy.”

  “The assassin’s arrived, sir.”

  “You’re sure?

  “Positive. He came in under a damn sophisticated scrub. If I hadn’t alerted General Gill’s people in Immigration and Customs what to look for, he’d be out peddling light bulbs now.”

  “And by that I take it you know what he is out doing?”

  “Well, we know exactly where he’s doing it.”

  “Not by tailing him, I hope. A Trueborn case officer’s not some gangsta. He’d scrape off a tail like garbage off his shoe.”

  “No, sir! I and C diverted him to a special customs line, distracted him, and planted a tracker on him.”

  Polian rolled his eyes. “The first thing he’ll do is find the bug and kill it.”

  Varden raised a finger, smiled. “Yes, sir. The decoy tracker they sewed into his coat pocket lining died before he left the down shuttle station. But the worm transponder they wove into the jacket’s shoulder fabric’s new tech. The Trueborns probably don’t even look for it yet. It’s indistinguishable from sewing thread without a lab-quality microscope or a scanner.”

  Polian raised his eyebrows. Worm transponder
? He really had to spend more time with the tech bulletins. “Good boy, Varden.”

  “It’s transmitting five bars.” Varden’s chest puffed visibly inside his tunic.

  Polian stood, walked to the window and gazed down through the bronze fog of early evening at the city that sloped away below, a mountain slope of burnished metal. Then Polian turned back to his aide. “I don’t suppose we were lucky enough to pick up an arrival of the other Trueborn? The woman?”

  Varden shook his head. “Sir, we had no idea who we were looking for, where she was inbound from, when she might arrive or under what cover. Gill’s people shared a rumor they picked up that Hibble himself chooses not to know where some of his people are. But I had a P-mail cover put on the midwife’s outbound. She wrote roughly what you said to expect, so I had it resealed and sent on.”

  “If she’d written something different, I would have had you substitute a forgery that said what we wanted. All we needed from Orion was the contact information for the assassin’s mother.”

  Varden’s uplifted eyebrows said that hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Where did she send it, son?”

  “The address was a numbered box at the Bank of Rand.”

  Polian sighed. “Cold trail from there.”

  “It was. I’m sorry, sir. But we can still pick up the assassin. Still a coup. Don’t the Trueborns say half a loaf is better than none?”

  Polian rocked back on his heels. He had thought Varden was quicker on the uptake. “Sorry? Pick him up? Nothing of the kind, Varden! We don’t need to find the woman now. She’ll come to us. Or rather, she’ll come to the assassin.”

  Varden wrinkled his forehead. “Sir? How sure are you?”

  Polian turned back to the window and peered down into the deepening darkness, as the workday ended and lights began to twinkle in the residential Kubes of the up levels. Ruberd’s assassin, or one of them, was down there now, in Polian’s grasp as soon as he chose to squeeze. And the prize that would win Cold War II was, or soon would be, also.

  Polian drew a breath before he answered the younger man’s question. “Sure, Varden? As sure as a parent’s unconditional and enduring love for a child.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The gray-haired man had blocked my shiv thrust with his forearm as easily as any close-combat instructor ever had.

  I had staggered back, mouth agape, and stared. At myself, but with wrinkles. His eyes glistened, and he shook his head slowly as he stared at me. “My God.” He paused, swallowed. “So long. I never thought . . .”

  “Long is right, old man.”

  I couldn’t get my head around the idea that somehow he was my father, though his reaction confirmed what my eyes showed me.

  He stood silhouetted against the bright bustle of the main drag. A passerby paused, peered into the gloom, presumed a robbery in progress, and hurried on.

  If the old man wasn’t my tail, one would be along shortly.

  “We better get out of here, Pop.”

  “Yes, yes, I suppose . . . Jazen. Did I pronounce it right?”

  “Perfect. For not having much practice.” I started off down the transverse with him following. It narrowed, the ceiling stepped lower again, and the smell got worse. A utility I had used in the past was clogged. I tried another wide enough for bigs without armor, and we dropped six vertical. Our height made us stand out downlevels, but now I knew where I was going. The little people who passed us hurried by, heads bowed. Bigs could have been plainclothes vice.

  “I guess you know your way?”

  “Too well, old man. I spent a lifetime down these shitholes, thanks to you.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  Then we headed even farther down into Yaven.

  THIRTY

  “Mort?” Kit’s audible voice came to him via her ears, as faint and as raw as the thought came to him indistinct and confused.

  He turned within the shallow shelter he had occupied and eyed the now-bare limb where six meals had hung. “You are punctual. Are you well?”

  She coughed. “I will be, once the wake-up shot circulates.” He sensed her foreclaw digits prod her head above her eyes. “Christ, who crapped a boulder into my skull while I was sleeping?”

  “I do not—Oh. Ha-ha.”

  “Ha-ha? You try it, hairball.”

  Mort stood, stretched, raised his left back two and urinated. “I am sorry. I sense your discomfort is acute.”

  “You find him?”

  “I believe I have found Yavet. It is by far the largest human hive I have encountered. But it is unpleasantly crowded even by human standards, and most of its humans live in misery.”

  “That’s the place, alright.” Kit unfolded herself within the Scorpion seed’s darkness. “Canopy to max visual.”

  The seed’s forward eyelid opened again, and the lights above and below it winked on. Ahead, the light-studded blackness Kit saw looked no different than it had when the great eye had closed.

  Kit’s heart skipped. “Where the hell is—?”

  One of the lights ahead winked out, and Kit commanded, “Forward magnification to max.”

  A disc grew in the center of the Scorpion’s great eye, the way that ripples grew on still water, and the blackness within the disc appeared larger. Now Mort realized that the light ahead had winked because a dark object had passed between it and the Scorpion.

  “Enhance.”

  The dark object grew, continued growing, until it seemed to hang so near that Kit could have reached out a foreclaw and touched it. It was a pockmarked rock, dull gray and slowly tumbling.

  “Gotcha! Come to Mama.” Again Kit rotated the metal bit with her foreclaw and the Scorpion sped toward the object.

  “Kit!”

  “Relax. Objects in windscreen are smaller than they appear.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, how’s that for spot-on astrogation?”

  “That is Yavet? It appears tinier even than Mousetrap. It could never hold thirteen billion humans.”

  “It isn’t Yavet, Mort. It isn’t even a moonlet of Yavet. It’s a big rock in eccentric orbit around Yavet. It’s a half mile in longest dimension. It circles the planet once every three years, in an egg-shaped orbit that takes it no closer to Yavet than one hundred thousand miles and no farther away than six hundred thousand miles. When it’s at apogee, you couldn’t see it from the surface of Yavet without a telescope the size of a silo. But astronomically speaking, it’s in Yavet’s backyard.”

  “It excites you because it proves you are near Yavet?”

  “It excites me because it proves the Yavi aren’t as smart as they think they are.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Kit spoke aloud. “Transmit recognition codes.”

  A row of the green lights winked red, then back to green. Two heartbeats later, the lights winked red again, twice.

  “What does it mean?”

  “That I’m invited for dinner with a bunch of nerds in Utility 5. Mort, Earth hasn’t been able to keep an effectively placed human source,—a spy—native or imported, alive on Yavet since before I graduated from college. The best intelligence we get from Yavet we get by reading their electronic mail.”

  Kit maneuvered the Scorpion closer to the elongate rock, matching the seed’s speed and direction to the rock’s tumbling pattern, so that the seed’s forward end pointed down into one of the hoofprint-shaped depressions that pocked the rock’s surface. The particular depression spanned perhaps four times the width that the Scorpion was long. The floor of the depression shifted, then opened like the iris of a frightened animal’s eye.

  Then Kit edged the Scorpion down, through the opening, into the lit cavern concealed beneath.

  Mort sat back on his rump, middle two forward.

  Humans never ceased to amaze him. The ingenuity and peculiarity of their nests was a marvel.

  In the time it took him to locate, bring down and dismember a mid-sized mite sucker, Kit had climbed ou
t of the Scorpion and floated within the tiny rock, which had been hollowed in the way mites hollowed a fallen tree trunk.

  Mort growled.

  He had experienced weightlessness once, and the sensation had caused him to regurgitate repeatedly.

  Along one wall of the space in which Kit now floated, two rows of humans hunched with their backs to her, peering into bright lit windows that seemed to look out to nowhere.

  One of them, a blue-clad female smaller than Kit, swam toward her. The female had a topknot darker than Kit’s, and tiny dabs of silver shone atop the joints where her forelimbs joined her torso.

  As she drew close to Kit, she touched a foreclaw above her own eye. “Colonel, my pleasure to welcome you aboard. We don’t get many visitors between shift changes. Especially not with engraved invitations like yours.”

  Kit touched her own forehead. “Trust me, lieutenant. Six days alone in a Scorpion? The pleasure’s mine. How’s the eavesdropping business?”

  “Booming, ma’am. Thirteen billion Yavi put out lots of traffic.”

  Kit and the other female drifted behind the others, each of whom kept his head turned toward the window in front of him.

  The one called lieutenant said to Kit, “May I ask how we can assist you, ma’am? We have all the comforts. Galley. Infirmary with state-of-the-art ‘bots. Gym.”

  “For starters, a quart of the coldest water you can spare, then some information about Yavet.”

  “Perhaps a bunk, Ma’am?’

  Kit shook her head. “Just had six days of rack. But I’d kill for a Sanex. I have got to get out of these clothes.”

  The two humans nearest Kit and the lieutenant turned their heads rapidly and stared.