Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  Max lifted out his webbed harness, shortened it round the shoulders where he had lost muscle, let it out round the middle where he had gained girth.

  His ‘puter chimed; he read the display, then answered.

  “Max? Ulys Gill. Did your provi tell you what’s afoot?”

  “It’s all falling into place, Ulys. The Scorpion’s a bonus.”

  “If we can keep it from blowing up. I don’t want to send any of my kids on a suicide mission. But Max, this changes the poko game. This is no longer just some kid we’ve quietly lured in to use as bait to catch his mother, then call her a spy. If the Trueborns have risked a Scorpion, they know the stakes. If we take this agent’s mother alive, we may force the Trueborns’ hand. If we hand her over dead, they’ll think we pumped her dry first. What’s in her head isn’t worth the risk.”

  “Risk?” Max found himself shaking his head at the invisible hand-wringer on the phone.

  “Max, a one-sided nuclear war that could start within months and be over in a day.”

  No. If this worked, and it couldn’t not work now, Max Polian would be Chairman of the Central Committee within weeks. Then the plan the old men had scorned when he had presented it years before could be reality in just weeks more. Yavet could easily smuggle suitcase nukes onto outworlds that the Trueborns valued highly, like Rand and Funhouse. Trueborn smuggling “security” was a sieve. Once the Trueborns could no longer strike Yavet without killing a few hundred million of their bankers and their valued customers, they would be stalemated. Yavet would build her starships. This was no time for hand-wringing.

  Early in the Trueborns’ own Cold War, Russia possessed scant ability to deliver her nuclear weapons onto America, but America possessed the means to annihilate Russia. Russia tried to draw to a poko hand as weak, and as strong, as the one Max and Yavet now held in this moment. Russia secretly began emplacing nukes on an island near America. But when America called Russia’s bluff, her leaders lost their nerve, folded, and removed their nukes from Cuba. Thereafter, as the Trueborn historians overdramatically put everything, Russia sank onto history’s ash heap.

  The Trueborn historians were also fond of saying that those who did not learn from the past were condemned to repeat it. Max Polian had not given his life and his only son to arrive at this moment, then lose his nerve and fold like the Russians had folded.

  “Max? Are you still there?”

  Polian blinked. “Yes, Ulys.”

  Gill would fold. If the little old moustache were allowed to play the game, he would fold.

  Max said, “I agree. Ulys, I’m going to order the cordon around the Trueborn spies to stand fast until further notice. That will give us time to work out a plan. Some accommodation with the Trueborns. They’re not bad sorts, really.”

  Now the silence came from Gill’s end of the conversation.

  “Ulys?”

  “Yes, Max. I think that’s wise of you. Very wise. You’ll let me know if you have additional thoughts?”

  “Of course. Immediately.” Max cut the call, then punched up the major in charge of the cordon. With each unanswered trill of the ring signal, Max fidgeted. Gill sounded uncertain, perhaps even suspicious. If Gill followed up, Max wanted to be sure that Gill found the situation precisely as Max had described it to his weak-kneed coconspirator.

  Polian squeezed his ‘puter, as though he could wring an answer from it.

  The major’s voice came to Max, at last. “Director! How may I be of service, sir?”

  “Major, I want all of your men to hold their positions. No matter what, no one approaches that hotel room. Freeze the punch-down and punch-up teams. I don’t want so much as a sound or sight of our presence to spook the Trueborns. Best shut down the surveillance video and audio feeds, too. Can’t be too careful.”

  “Uh. Yes, sir. What if the Trueborns come to us?”

  “Excellent point, Major.” Max buckled on the last of his armor, tucked his extra magazines into the pockets on his web belt, along with the first aid pack. “Do as I say. Hold your positions. I’m on my way. We’ll discuss it when I arrive.”

  “You’re coming here, sir? Very good, sir.”

  Polian cut the connection, turned in front of the reflective glass on the closet door. Neither he nor his armor were as sleek as the current models of cops or armor. But both would do.

  He rummaged once more in his old chest for a breaching charge, tucked it away then locked on his helmet and walked out to win the Cold War.

  Even without his slider, it took Polian only ten minutes to drop and jink to the major’s command post on foot. The nearer Max got to the cordoned cubic volume, the emptier the passages and verticals grew.

  Even, or perhaps especially, empty of little people. They had realized this wasn’t about them when only bigs were being stopped and questioned. But they knew something was afoot, and if a needler round did go wrong, the peeps knew a cop wouldn’t waste his smother pack to stop their bleeding. So they had taken to the utilities, as they always did, where Polian’s police could not, or now, by long habit, did not follow even where they could.

  The old mail was heavier than he remembered, and by the time he arrived at the Command Post, he was puffing.

  The CP consisted of four sliders arrayed to block a major intersection, manned communications consoles, and a twelve-man tactical ready-response team who milled about, but at a hand wave would do the major’s bidding.

  “Sir!” The major’s salute was crisp, and he smiled out through his open visor. He eyed Polian’s aged armor, his needler, and the Director General’s insignia Polian had affixed over the suit’s original badges. “I didn’t expect to see you tactical, Director.”

  “I’m going in for a look round.”

  “Oh.” The major’s forehead wrinkled, but he motioned for a sergeant to assemble the Tactical team.

  “Alone.”

  At this point nothing good could come of the application of excessive force by Polian’s men. The astropolitical crux of this moment was to take the Trueborn starship captain alive. A nervous trigger finger, a miscalculated top- or bottom-breaching charge, misdosed gas, the slightest error could render the woman worthless meat. And, of course, if Max’s plan failed because she died uninterrogated, he at least retained the chance to spin his version of the story if there were no witnesses to contradict his version.

  The personal crux of the moment was that Max Polian intended to confront one, or in a perfect world, both of Ruberd’s killers, look into their eyes, then end their lives by his own hand. As cold-bloodedly as they had ended Ruberd’s. And if Parker’s own mother watched him die screaming, so much the better.

  Perhaps Max could send a team to take them alive, then interrogate them at leisure. But the risk that too many cooks would spoil the taste of his revenge was too great.

  The major waved the tacticals to stand down. “Yes, sir. If they did try to make a run and you happened across them, the surveillance people estimate they’re four individuals total, possibly one peep, too. Armed with two gunpowder pistols at most, and maybe a couple shivs among them. And no personal armor.” He eyed Polian again. “No match for even . . .”

  Polian clapped the major’s shoulder like the gentle uncle he always was to the men, and smiled. “For even an old man like me? Don’t worry, son, I can still take care of myself. But I may need some target practice. So even if you hear shooting, don’t come running.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  My father shook his head at me, smiled. “It’s not a crock! I was Commodore Metzger’s best man at the first starship bubble wedding. His bride was my gunner, and the two of them were the best friends I ever had,” He reached across the square, gray table in my parents’ hotel Kube at which he sat with Orion, my mother and me, and patted my mother’s hand. “Until I met your mother.” My father’s voice cracked and he blinked. “Neither of them lived to see the War end.”

  Obviously, my mother hadn’t been dad’s date at that wedding. So I studied h
er face as he told the story. She seemed to look not at him but through him, as though there were a part of him missing, a part she had never seen and would never see. Although he didn’t mention it, not in his words, not in his eyes, whoever had been Dad’s date had been more than a one-night stand. A lot more.

  The ten thousand humans aboard that cobbled-together ship on that long-ago wedding day went on to fight and win the Battle of Ganymede. My father wound up commanding the seven hundred who came home. Evidently that person had not been among the seven hundred.

  I cocked my head.

  My father was turning out to be far less jerk, and far more intelligent, funny, noble and astonishingly experienced than he had been in my mind all my life.

  Orion, who sat beside me nodding, smiling as my father told the story, dozed off and slumped against my shoulder. She felt no more substantial than a windblown scarf. I caught her with my opposite hand, then lifted her like a gray-tufted bundle of sticks, carried her to the foldout set along the room’s far wall and laid her on her side.

  Before I tucked the sheet around her shoulders, I lifted the chicken bone that had been her arm and read her dosimeter patch. It had slipped to yellow, and stress had begun to stretch Orion’s face, though the pain hadn’t awakened her yet.

  I frowned, spoke over my shoulder to my mother and father, “Mom? Can you bring me more junk? One blue vial.”

  Just because Orion never let me get within spitting distance of anyone who used or purveyed Ya Ya Cohon’s most first-class opiates didn’t mean I hadn’t learned how they worked. Junk was as much a part of peep life as stealing bean bars and dodging cops. If you grew up peep you saw the junk. You smelled it. You saw it kill good people. You saw bad people kill to get it. And now, perversely, what I had learned about the junk was a blessing and not a curse for Orion.

  My mother pressed a blue into my palm. “There are two more of these. Then three greens. Then nothing.”

  I looked around the Kube.

  Luxuriant to a downlevels Yavi’s eyes, it was just a cheap hotel room to a Trueborn. I was a feeling like a little of both these days.

  Like me, this room could pass for Trueborn, but worn down by too much hard use.

  The floor tiles were the gray of the walls, which were the gray of the ceiling, when it didn’t glow, and the gray of the furniture, when it wasn’t retracted. Compared to a cheap hotel room on Earth, the square footage here was lower, the cubic less due to the lower ceiling, and if you didn’t pay extra, and my parents hadn’t, you didn’t get a window to the passage. So the flimsy door, set in the middle of the room’s short front wall between two benches, was the only feature that relieved the smooth featurelessness of the box. There was the usual Sanex and temp cube at the rear.

  I rolled the blue between my fingers, nodded. “We’ve got the morphine straws. She can suck on those to tide her over even if I can’t make the same connection tomorrow.”

  My mother sat down opposite me on the foldout. There was plenty of room. Curled up asleep, Orion occupied no more space than a rolled throw rug.

  Admiral Mimi Ozawa, star ship captain emeritus, semi-pro spy and my bonus mom, shook her head as she frowned down at sleeping Orion. Mom laid her palm on Orion’s forehead, nodded. “Cool. Good.”

  Mom turned out to be a woman of few words. She also turned out to be a couple inches shorter than Kit, but just as physically trim and mentally and reflexively quick. She had hair as ebony as Syrene’s, streaked with gray and pulled back, and brown eyes with the exotic shape common both to Marini courtesans like Syrene and to Asian-descended Trueborns. She also looked just young enough to be trouble, if she hadn’t been my mother. I wasn’t surprised that my father never seemed to tire of looking at her.

  I plugged the blue into the cat I had installed on Orion’s forearm, when a vein had been less difficult to find than it would become. The cancer was literally eating her alive hour to hour now, and plumbing’s as easy to buy as the junk itself.

  A team’s junior case officer’s the medical specialist. My medical training was here and now as much a blessing for me as the junk was for Orion.

  Not just because my training eased Orion’s pain here at the end, but because ministering to Orion gave me something to do that helped her. If I just had to sit by and watch her suffer, I might have lost my sanity. Not that pumping junk into a woman whose only previous drug of choice had been bourbon filled me with joy. I don’t think even the kick-ass Trueborn doctors Edwin Trentin-Born counted in his circle of friends could have done anything better for her. Even the Trueborns shot their patients with junk to palliate someone in the advanced stage of deterioration Orion had reached.

  My little peep’s chest barely raised the sheet as she breathed, but she would get a few hours of what passed for quality time now.

  I stepped back to the table and sat opposite my father.

  He had field stripped a gunpowder pistol he had bought, and was wiping the parts with a towelette for the third time since he and I had arrived back here. It had been a cheap local street buy, and probably had an effective range of ten yards.

  Orion had always told me he had carried a nice antique Trueborn piece, a real hand cannon, but smuggling it in this time would have been a stupid risk.

  My father turned periodically and peered at a wireless micro-cam receiver that he had also bought. The thing was the size of an old Trueborn paper book, and it showed the feed from the tack cam out in the corridor that had been pinned above this room’s door.

  It wasn’t high-tech stuff. Trueborn children had been throwing away better electronics than that, as soon as the batteries died, since before the War. But what was taken for granted off Yavet was dear on Yavet if the government didn’t want you to have it. Children being the most obvious example.

  While my parents had learned some lessons about surviving on Yavet since their last visit, there was one lesson they had not learned. They had bought a local phone on the street, even though they had no particular need to call anyone. I took it back to the street, set it down and turned away. It was gone in ninety seconds, making it somebody else’s problem and maybe confusing the vice lice who spent their days and nights monitoring phones.

  Not that phones on Yavet were useless or inexpensive. That’s why the one I set down had become gone so fast. The trouble with phones on Yavet was the trouble that spawned P-mail in the rest of the known universe. Little people who were engaged in something illegal, which was pretty much all of them as well as the rest of us, called phones peep traps, because not only did the phone’s internal chip track you as though you had swallowed a vice bug, but anything you said, as the cops in the trueborn gangster holos said, “could and would be used against you.” Of course, the part about “in a court of law” was, on Yavet, replaced by “to kick the shit out of you anytime your government feels like it.”

  No phone meant that changing my plans to meet my abruptly changed circumstances was not as near as every Trueborn’s wrist ‘puter.

  Kit and I had learned to live with the maxim that the first casualty of any battle was the plan. We had learned to live even longer by improvising like bandits when the plan went up in flames during the first fifteen seconds of the battle.

  So I improvised.

  My original plan had involved spending some quality time with Orion, then using the contact Ya Ya’s people had provided me to book return passage, upship, return to Mousetrap and get on with sorting the mess that the rest of my life had become.

  My plan now had to be to make the time I could spend with Orion even higher quality, and to get my parents and myself the hell off this rock pronto. Tomorrow was the soonest I could leave word of my slight intended plan change for Ya Ya’s person at a dead drop at Green and sixteenth, Twenty-seven Lower. And while I was out I would buy junk for Orion.

  My dad worked the slide on his very clean pistol, reinserted the magazine in the butt, and laid it on the table.

  We had time to kill. I had questions. He an
d Mom had answers, and a son who shoots his own life mother up with the junk isn’t going to be offended if those answers revealed ignoble conduct. So I was blunt. “Dad, what the hell happened at the end of the War?”

  My mother, who had been fixing tea paks at the temp box, gathered three cups as deftly as any Shipyard waitress, came and sat with us. Then she raised her eyebrows at Dad. “What do you think?”

  Dad looked into my eyes, pursed his lips. “You’ve had a fine career already. You’re a highly decorated officer. A successful businessman. Does it mean that much to know ancient history about two old folks you never met until yesterday?”

  My mother touched my arm. “You’re even better looking than your father. With a wonderful smile. And Kit seems like the most wonderful woman. The past doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  I canted my head. “Is this another Hibble blow-off?”

  They both laughed.

  Apparently they knew the same Howard I knew.

  I said, “I don’t care if you ran guns or dope or sold us out to the Slugs. I don’t care if you killed all the Slug babies like you were vice cops, then peed on the bodies. I just need to know.”

  My mother stiffened. “My God. You think it was something like that?” She turned to Dad. “All they can do is hang us. Tell him.”

  “Why me?”

  “You did it. I’m just the only living witness.”

  “They’ll hang you too.”

  “They’ll have to catch us first.”

  Did normal children have this much trouble getting a straight answer from their parents?

  I steepled my fingers. “Please? Just the nutshell. I deserve to know.”

  I was starting to think that whether I deserved to know or not, I didn’t want to know. But the Trueborns didn’t hang the child for the sins of the parents. The Yavi owned the patent on doing that.

  My father sipped his tea, like GIs do before they tell a war story, then cleared his throat. “You want the nutshell? Gateway wasn’t a great battle. It was a clusterfuck.”