Final Inquiries

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "You'll change your mind," said Hannah.

  "'Almost,' I said." He checked the time. "Twenty minutes to go. Let's not cut it too close, people," he said, addressing the embassy in general.

  With obvious vast reluctance, Zamprohna got back into his vehicle, turned it around, and went out the way he had come in.

  Milkowski trotted over toward them, and they stood up as he approached. "Time for me to get aboard," he said. "Listen, Zamprohna wanted me to pass the word. There's at least twenty Vixan defender-caste Sixes out there. It looks like they're just waiting around until the deadline passes."

  "What will they do then?" Hannah asked.

  Milkowski shrugged. "Ask the Sixes when they get here. Zamprohna also said there was a group of about fifty Kendari marching along the road toward here, carrying what looked like portable ramping gear. And before you ask which compound they're headed for, I don't know."

  "Great," said Jamie. "Things couldn't be going better."

  Milkowski checked the time and swore. "Look, I have to go. Thanks. Thanks again. For everything. More than you know. If you're going to change your mind and come along, this is your last chance. I'll hold the hatch as long as I can--but time is running out."

  "Thanks, Frank," said Hannah. "But we've made up our minds."

  "Right," said Milkowski. "Okay then. Good-bye and good luck to you." He made a tentative step toward the ship, then hesitated.

  "What is this--your imitation of Zamprohna's farewell?" Jamie asked. "We're staying. You're going. It's okay--and you have to go now."

  Milkowski opened his mouth, as if to say something more, then shrugged again, turned, and trotted for the ship.

  The outer doors of the joint ops center boomed open again. The embassy comm techs had been working frantically to set things up to work from there, but Jamie had thought they had already finished up and gone aboard.

  Apparently they had--it wasn't the techs. It was Brox. He stepped out of the doors, looked about, and headed directly for them. Jamie poked at Hannah. "Look who's here," he said, and stood up to go over and meet him halfway. "Brox, you've got to get out of here. Your people will be sealing their ship any minute now."

  "They already have sealed it," said Brox. "I am remaining here with you. I have many reasons." He started speaking quickly, before they could object or interrupt. "First, I brought you into all this. Honor requires that I see you through it. Second, without your work, I doubt we would have ever known the truth about how Emelza was killed. That is a debt that cannot be repaid--but it must be acknowledged. Third, it seemed sensible to me that a Kendari be part of what you are planning to do. It can only make the impact greater. And fourth, I felt I had to warn you--"

  "About the Kendari marching this way right now," said Hannah. "We just got the word, but that's about all we know."

  "Then you need to know more. They are part of a group that is roughly as irrational as your Human Supremacy League. The Vixa managed to convince them that you two--not just any human beings, but you two in particular--were at least indirectly responsible for Emelza's death."

  "I think we've got a pretty good alibi for that one," said Hannah. "Being in the wrong star system and all. Not arriving on planet until she'd been dead half a day."

  "Both our species include individuals who will believe what they want to believe," said Brox. "But delusional or not, they are coming after the two of you, and I don't believe the Vixan security forces will be very eager to protect you from them."

  "No, I don't suppose they will," Hannah agreed.

  "But what about the 'all and only' clause?" Hannah asked. "Suppose the Vixa stop your embassy ship and find out you're not aboard."

  "Xenologist Flexdal has prepared a multilayered tissue of lies that should provide an adequate defense. He will cling to each as long as he can, then change his story as required," Brox replied. "It was a misunderstanding. There was a translating error. I was left behind inadvertently in the confusion. If need be, to protect the rest of the ship's company, he will inform them that I was unfortunately killed in an accident just before departure."

  "And when they find you're still alive at the end of all this?"

  "Assuming I am still alive then, we can worry about that problem later. The worst they can do is kill me for real--after our embassy ship is safely out of Vixan space."

  Suddenly they heard a sound like the shriek of a badly annoyed dinosaur. "That's our alert siren," said Brox. "Our ship's departure sequence will start in less than a minute. It will involve the use of various pyrotechnic devices, and there might be some flying debris. I would suggest that we move to someplace less exposed."

  "Inside the main building, I guess," said Jamie, pointing the way. "If we hunker down inside, we should be safe enough, and we'll be able to look out through the windows--and stick the cameras up there too."

  "I was going to suggest that we head to the joint operations center now," said Brox, "but I gather you want to record everything. Very well. Let us go--and hope the explosion debris is well behaved."

  They had no sooner gotten inside the main building when there was a series of sharp reports, hard and fast, that made the floor tremble slightly. Jamie crouched in front of the window, checking the drop-down monitor of his helmet cam to make sure it was getting a good view. There was a series of deeper, more booming explosions--and suddenly the Kendari embassy ship came into view, just over the roof of the joint ops center. It was a big, thick-waisted, unlovely thing, a dull green cucumber shape lumbering up into the sky. But it was a ship. And it was getting away.

  Hannah checked her wrist display. "Our turn in about thirty seconds!" she called. "We're closer, so this is going to be hairier." She went up to the window to kneel next to Jamie, not wanting to miss anything--but not wanting her head blown off, either. "In twenty!" she called out. "Get yourself ready, Brox!"

  "How would I do that?" he asked. "What would make me ready?"

  He's got a point there, Hannah thought. Or is he actually looking for practical advice? Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between Brox being literal-minded and Brox being ironic.

  She checked her countdown clock again. Ten seconds to go. She resisted the urge to chant the passing seconds out loud.

  The charges around the embassy ship went off right on schedule, with a rapid series of short, sharp explosions that shook the main building. The blasts cut the ship clear of all the connections to the surrounding buildings. Two or three fires started up instantly as the destruct sequencers tripped incendiary charge circuits to destroy all the remaining confidential materials in the outlying buildings. Almost certainly all of the secret documents were gone already, but destroying them twice could do no harm. Two or three fire alarms went pointlessly off.

  Hannah and Jamie had been briefed on what would come next. When it had first landed, the embassy ship had been set down in a pit deep enough to bury the propulsion system, so as to bring the main entry hatch down to ground level. Now the ship had to blast free. The buried base of the ship was inside a gigantic protective cylinder, which was in turn surrounded by a ring of empty underground chambers. More shaped charges went off underground, all around the ship, knocking out the supports that held up the cylinder sleeve sections, causing them to collapse outward, freeing the ship. The ground around the ship fell away, dropping the surrounding buildings, and blasting dust and smoke and debris up into the sky. The embassy ship's reactionless thrusters cut in, and the ship began to move, trembling, shuddering, slowly lumbering upward.

  Hannah looked up in the sky to see that the Kendari embassy ship was already almost out of sight, boosting gracefully for high orbit. She hoped mightily that they made it.

  The human embassy ship broke free of the ground, kicking up a shower of dirt and rocks and debris. It moved upward, painfully slowly, moving at only a meter or two a second. If it had boosted at full power, the field distortions produced by the reactionless thrusters would have scrambled the guts of any living thing i
n the compound. The ship had to escape slowly in order to keep from frying Jamie, Hannah, and Brox.

  Twenty seconds after the launch of the Kofi Annan, there was another explosion. The main gate of the compound blasted inward, and a full squad of Vixan defenders was inside almost before the smoke had cleared.

  "Just for the record," Hannah yelled, "I think that's a violation of extraterritoriality."

  Suddenly, there was a giant whirring, whizzing sound that seemed to be coming from everywhere--and a hard, sharp blast of sound, more felt than heard. The reinforced glass of the windows starred and cracked but it held. The hole in the ground where the Kofi Annan had been was suddenly a sheet of flame and smoke and debris thrown upward. The ground shook hard. Bits of the ceiling broke off. The compound was blanketed with dust, and dirt and wreckage thrown up by the blast came rattling down. Something or other smashed into a window elsewhere in the room and managed to punch through with a crash.

  Seconds later, the same whirring noise came again, a trifle farther off, and another giant blast, coming from the Kendari compound.

  "And that's another violation," Hannah shouted for the benefit of the recording her helmet cam was making. "The Vixa just shelled the prelaunch ground coordinates of the embassy ships."

  Giant ramplike things suddenly came over the wall behind the crater where the embassy ship had been. The lower end of the ramps crashed into place, and Kendari started coming over the wall and into the compound.

  "Time to get moving," Jamie shouted in Hannah's ear. She nodded and signaled to Brox, pointing toward the joint ops center.

  "Draw your weapon," she shouted at Jamie. "We're going to make a run for it. Do not fire at any Kendari unless one of them attacks you directly. In that case, fire only at your attacker."

  "What is this, the etiquette of self-defense?" Jamie shouted back. "I might not be able to be that selective."

  "Do your best," Hannah yelled back. "If you want, you can fire over their heads or into the ground or whatever."

  "Oh, I'm going to want to," he said. "Very much indeed."

  "If it makes you feel any better, the Vixa you can shoot at as much as you like."

  "Wrong again," Jamie shouted back. "We don't want them to know we're here, remember? I'm gonna lob smoke grenades between us and them before we leave the building and hope they don't notice us at all."

  "Okay. Get ready with the smoke." Jamie immediately started pulling apple-sized grenades out of his pockets and setting them out where he could reach them easily.

  Hannah peeked out the window again and checked the situation. The Vixa seemed to have gotten themselves distracted by the arrival of the Kendari. Hannah couldn't blame them. It was a confused situation. The Vixa were holding the Kendari back, at least for the moment, keeping their fighting arms held high, their attack talons unsheathed, the neurotoxin oozing very obviously from the stingers.

  Everyone was busy. It looked like a good moment to leave.

  "Jamie! Make with the smoke bombs." He immediately starting pulling pins and heaving the cylinders out the window and into the compound. She turned to Brox. "Okay," she said. "Nothing fancy. We run like hell, we give each other whatever mutual cover we can, and we get through the blast doors, then get them shut behind us. Understood?"

  "Understood."

  "Okay, on the count of three," Hannah said, drawing her own sidearm and checking it. "Ready, Jamie?"

  "Are you kidding?"

  "Close enough. One. Two. Three!"

  They sprang to their feet and starting moving, legs pumping, heads down. Hannah glanced behind them. The embassy ship was still crawling into the air, only a hundred or so meters in the air, clumps of dirt still falling away from it, the reactionless thrusters pulsing violet and purple as they strained to lift the massive vehicle on minimum power. The smoke was a solid, swirling, dirty grey wall that concealed the far side of the compound. It ought to hide them from the Vixa. If it didn't, there wasn't anything they could do about it.

  The noise was not only overwhelmingly loud. It was impossibly complex. The roaring hum of the embassy ship's engines, the crump and thud of secondary explosions, the shouts and cries of the mob, the crackles of the fires that were starting to spread, the dull thuds of debris dropping out of the sky, and any number of other sounds did not merge into one another--instead they seemed to interact, resonating, amplifying each other, weaving in and out so that one would be heard, then another.

  Jamie yelled something toward Hannah, turned, fired at someone or something, then turned back again, all without breaking step--and Hannah couldn't hear any of it at all.

  The smoke was starting to spread, and dust was everywhere, making it hard to see, and a little hard to breathe. Brox was moving faster than any of them and got to the ops center first.

  Hannah reached the ops center's blast doors after Brox and fought off a coughing fit as she worked the lock controls. Jamie put his back to the wall and fired into the ground and into the air, doing his best to add to the chaos and confusion that were their best and only protection.

  The door unlocked, and Hannah hauled it back just far enough for them to scoot through. Jamie followed after, firing off one or two last potshots before he dove in. Brox brought up the rear. Hannah slammed it shut behind and instantly started to work on opening the inner blast door, trying not to think how long they were going to be able to hold out.

  Except that was the wrong question. The Vixa had all the hardware and weapons and cutting beams and so on they could ever need. The question wasn't how long it would take the Vixa to break in--it was whether they would decide to do so, and how hard were they willing to try. So let's hope they don't find out we're in here, she told herself.

  They got through the inner door and rolled it shut, then turned and faced the main ops room. It had been a crime scene, not so long ago.

  "All right then," said Brox in a perfectly calm tone, as if running for his life through a pitched battle were his morning commute. "It's time to go to work."

  TWENTY-FIVE

  UNDERGROUND CELL

  "What do we do first?" Jamie asked.

  "First we think this through," said Hannah. "We threw this together in a hurry, and we're going to be down in the bunker a while. The bad news for you, Brox, is we didn't know you were coming. We set up the gear in the bunker under the human side of the joint ops center--and we didn't think to make any arrangements for Kendari visitors."

  "Plus which, the entrance to the bunker needs to be sealed to give us proper blast protection," said Jamie. "Sealing it is about a five-minute job. Opening it is a little faster, but not much. Once it's closed, it's camouflaged pretty well. The idea is that no one is supposed to know we're in the bunker, or even that the bunker is there in the first place. Given the mob we just left outside, I like that idea. We can't go back and forth through that hatch ten times a day without exposing ourselves to a lot of needless risk. Once we're inside, I don't want to open that hatch again until we're ready to leave for good."

  "Splendid," Brox said sourly. "So I may look forward, not only to being underground most of the time, but to dealing with hallways that are too narrow, tables that are the wrong height, and all the other conveniences of working in areas designed for human use. Needless to say, steep, narrow stairways, such as the one leading to your bunker, are a favorite with Kendari."

  "Not just working on the human side," Hannah said. "Living there. I don't think we can count on being able to come up here to the main level at all. The Vixa could decide at any moment to flatten it, or blow it up, and we're not going to get much in the way of warning if they do. I don't want to be topside if that happens. And what with the two bunker systems being designed to protect us from you and your people from us, no one thought to put in any connecting passages between the underground levels."

  "So I must go over to the Kendari side, collect food and supplies, and take them into the human bunker," Brox said. "I was in need of exercise anyway."

  "I'
ll help you," Jamie said.

  "No," said Brox. "I can manage. You two get started on the reason we're going down there."

  "Fine," said Jamie. "You take the easy job." He watched as Brox headed off to find food and supplies--and couldn't help remembering being locked in with a Kendari once before. The memories were vivid.

  "If it's any comfort to you," said Hannah, "I just happen to know the Kendari have a portable sanitizer in storage on their side. My guess is that Brox wants to do the hauling job alone because he's going to have to haul their portable sanitizer down into the bunker and he doesn't want an audience. He's on the prim and proper side, even for a Kendari."

  Jamie breathed a sigh of relief. Kendari sanitizers were extremely powerful and effective--because they had to be. "Being buried alive just started sounding a whole lot less unpleasant," he said. He was about to say something more when a shudder passed through the whole building, strong enough to kick up a cloud of dust.

  "What do you say we do the rest of our thinking in the bunker?" Hannah asked.

  "Sounds good to me," said Jamie.

  "We have the facts," said Brox, some hours later, once they were settled in and sealed up. "We have absolute proof of many things, and compelling evidence of additional items, that show that the Vixa deliberately murdered Emelza."

  Hannah nodded and let out a weary sigh. "And you care about that, and we care about that--but the Elder Races won't care about the death of one Younger Race cop. How does it affect them?"

  It had been a long argument already, and they had only been underground for a few hours. The bunker had seemed cramped, musty, and unpleasant when they started, and it hadn't improved in the interim. "Look," said Jamie. "I think we're losing track of something. Telling the truth is all well and good, but that's not the point. We're trying to build a case against the Vixan government, against the Preeminent Director. A case that will convict him in the court of Elder Race public opinion, at the very least."