The Elysium Commission

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  'Thank you. You've been helpful."

  His image vanished.

  I took a deep breath. If I'd read Ruckless right, he wasn't that happy with Dyorr's proposal, but he respected him. He wasn't about to undercut him.

  I decided not to press Elsen, not until after the end-days. I had more than enough to handle. Besides the new clients, I still had to figure out how to deal with Tony diVeau and Sephaniah. I also had to see what their connections to Legaar Eloi might be. Beyond that I needed to find out if there was even a theoretical way I could have been moved from one point on the planet's surface to another.

  16

  Speed and concealment beat power on all occasions... Except the last one.

  Once it got dark, the next step was to use the nightflitter. With the kind of technology someone had used on me, I needed to scout out Legaar's estate... carefully.

  Obtaining the nightflitter had been difficult. Having it was half luxury, half necessity. No one hired out flitters without their own pilots as part of the hire, and no one hired out combat nightflitters. Mine was one templated for the ill-feted Christos Republic by Thurenan Arms. TA had done all the design work and templating for thirty comparatively low-tech flitters that no one wanted. I'd bid just enough for one so that they could recover some costs, and get a write­off that they wouldn't have if they hadn't actually nanofac-tured at least one. They'd accepted my bid, and I'd had to borrow five million creds, mosdy from financiers Krij knew. It took me five years to pay off the flitter and the improve­ments. The Civitas Sorores had been less than pleased, and months had passed before I'd obtained all the permits— with the stipulation that no offensive weapons systems were to be installed. I hadn't, but the shield systems were very in­novative. Except for fam rides and learning the systems, I'd only used it a few times, but I'd gotten it on the basis that, if I ever needed it, I wouldn't have time to get it.

  Besides, I liked having it.

  I went to my quarters in the villa and donned the boots and gray flight suit. The flight suit met all my requirements. Besides providing the interface with the nightflitter, it could handle temperature extremes, gee forces, and would pro­vide visual camouflage should I have to set down some­where.

  Then I took the concealed circular staircase from the of­fice study down two levels to the small hangar. The lights were red there. The reflections off the nightflitter cast shift­ing patterns on the gray walls and overhead.

  The nightflitter was just under twenty meters in length and three in width at its narrowest, six at the widest point of the lifting body. Especially at night or in dim light, looking at the curved black surface planes twisted your eyes. Doing it twisted mine, anyway. The engines were nanojets and burned the same restructured hydrocarbons that all high-performance atmospheric craft did. The one drawback of all flitters was that, like ancient sharks, they couldn't re­main motionless for long, because power was generated by a boosted by-bleed from the engines before the exhaust vec­tor stage.

  There weren't that many piloted atmospheric military craft, not when most of them could be handled by commlinks—without the weight and vulnerability of a pilot But a piloted craft had one advantage. It was self-contained with the most adaptable guidance system available. No one could fry the commlinks or locate the craft through links or guidance systems. The stealth configuration and selective absorption/reradiation properties of the airframe made it ef­fectively invisible, particularly at night, except to the highest-level military systems.

  I installed Lemmy's device in the remote-link section. It checked, and I hoped it would continue to work. Then I climbed into the cockpit, put on the lightweight helmet, se­cured the links between the flitter and flight suit, and suit and helmet. I lowered the visor and went through the checklist—manual, but projected on the visor. All systems were go. Including the self-destruct system. I hating having it, but there might well be times when losing six million credits of nightflitter was preferable to having it inspected or confiscated by unfriendly souls.

  Light-off one. One on-line.

  With one generator up, the flitter came to full life. Hangar doors open. With that command all the lights went out.

  I taxied up the ramp and out through the doors into the courtyard. Once the tail was clear, I sent the command to close the hangar doors. Next came the unavoidable part. I clicked into ACS, requesting a departure vector at low alti­tude. Over Thurene, even private air traffic was controlled. If I went stealth all the way, I probably could have avoided detection. That would have been illegal, and if Javerr and the Garda ever found out, they would have caused trouble and petitioned for a reformatting of my thought processes.

  I inputted Carcassonne as my intermediate destination with a late return to Thurene. In less than a minute, I had a departure vector.

  Shadow-one, lifting off on departure vector.

  Cleared to ACS boundary on departure vector two eight one, immediate climb to one thousand AGL.

  Accept-affirm. One thousand meters was higher than I preferred, but the city sisters disliked extremely low-flying craft, especially those on modified manual, even with a transponder.

  Light-off two.

  With both engines online, I fed all power to the diverters. The nightflitter eased skyward vertically, burning power like credits spent on the South Bank until I dropped the nose slightly and began to transition to forward flight, turning to the northwest in a gentle bank. I leveled out on my depar­ture vector, at exactly 1,001 AGL.

  Below me, the city spread out like light-jewels sprinkled on black velvet. The Nouvelle Seine shimmered like a shiny black ribbon, and Bergerac lay just above the western hori­zon, almost baleful in its redness. I concentrated on the scan­ner reads, but the air was mosdy clear. A long-haul scrammer was setting down at Esthavre.

  Once clear of Thurene ACS, I went manual, blanked the transponder, and activated the stealth active features. Then I banked into a snap turn that left me on a heading of 015. I didn't want to go there, but those hills were the closest.

  After twenty minutes, I dropped to 500 AGL and slid around the Piedmont Hills and into the Somme Valley, fol­lowing the river back eastward. The ACS tracking system had doubtiess alerted the satellite scan and accessed then-feeds what I'd done when I'd gone stealth. That wouldn't help. Nothing short of IS or Assembly SpecOps tech would have even had a chance of detecting me. And my acts weren't illegal. Just out of the ordinary.

  The lights along the Somme were spread apart, like the stars on the fringe, and the hillside vineyards and the forests above were dark.

  I checked course line and plot, called both up for a visual check. Fifteen minutes to the southwest corner of Eloi's Time's End estate. I couldn't help but wonder whose time.

  Satellite scan detected and neutralized.

  I smiled at that. If Officer Javerr wanted to check satellite feeds, he'd find nothing there.

  The nightflitter and I slipped through the shadows of dark­ness.

  ETA in five.

  I checked the plot. Right on course. Bandits on intercept!

  Intercept? How? I'd tested the nightflitter against the best WDF alert systems, and they'd never detected me. I pushed that thought away and checked the vectors.

  Three combat flitters with the low profile of RPs were definitely screaming toward me. I'd worry about the detec­tion later.

  I checked the terrain profile, then ran a quick calculation. The three had moved into a reverse V—an enveloping ma­neuver, designed to force me down into the terrain. That was fine with me. I dived for the deck and activated full restraints.

  The lead flitter followed but stayed above me. They wouldn't use missiles or cannon. Not at first. They'd be pro­grammed to force an "accident." That would mean using nanoshields or something to force "controlled flight into terrain," as the old, old phrase went. I leveled out at less than a hundred meters above the ground. Above the tree-tops, really.

  As the lead RPF accelerated toward my tail, I deployed the air brak
es—nanetic extensions of my shields—then waited just enough that the RPF overlapped my shields, before I dropped the brakes and accelerated up.

  I slammed into the trailing edge of the RPF's shields. The RPF automatically shrank its shields to avoid being destabilized. That allowed me to get on top and behind. My shields were stronger, and my engines more powerful. In in­stants, the first RPF pinwheeled downward. The stabiliza­tion systems operated well enough that it hit flat, making an oval depression in the pine forest. Before long, flames would be flashing skyward.

  Still playing prey, I turned southeast, toward a low ridge-line.

  Instants before I should have crashed into the trees at the crest, I angle-banked right, then flipped back left behind the ridge before accelerating almost out of the trees at the flank­ing flitter. My course looked like a collision course, and that would have been fine with the operator/system controlling the RPF. Except... at the last instant, as programmed and executed by my systems—even my reflexes aren't that fast—the nightflitter angled left and extended shields.

  The impact unbalanced the RPF enough that it slewed and lost lift. Losing lift at a hundred meters AGL at that ve­locity is usually cause for an impact resulting in maximum structural damage to the airframe. That occurred with a sat­isfactory shock wave.

  The third RPF immediately turned and tried to accelerate back toward Time's End.

  That didn't work either, because the nightflitter was faster.

  I just gained enough altitude to use my shields to pancake it into another stand of trees.

  With the three flitters out of the way, I banked the night­flitter and dropped to less than a hundred meters AGL and swept along the southern perimeter of the estate. The read­ings from the remote links indicated that Lemmy's gadget was detecting something, but there were also massive en­ergy sources on the estate. They read like they were dread­nought emanations, or even almost miniature black hole generators.

  As soon as I had what I needed, I banked back south and screamed toward Thurene. There was no point in seeing what other defenses Time's End had. Not yet. Not when every muscle in my body was sore from the gee forces I'd pulled and when my head was throbbing as if being pounded by a heavy rubber mallet.

  I left behind three fires burning in the pines. They'd be traced to Eloi's flitters, and that meant he'd have to pay for containing the fires and/or explain what he was doing with three military-class RPFs. At least, I hoped he would. That wasn't something I was counting on, though.

  As I headed back to Thurene and the villa, I had to con­sider four factors. First, I'd been detected—and I'd been de­tected from a goodly distance. Second, the detector had confirmed that Legaar was using equipment that infringed on Lemmy's patents. Third, there was a massive energy-generation facility on the estate. Fourth, from detection to the RP attack flitters, high-level military equipment was be­ing used. I'd have bet it wasn't from Devantan or Assembly sources, either.

  The results from the energy detectors supported the fact that the research center was no shell. Hidden somewhere on Legaar's estate was a facility producing enough energy to power half of Thurene. Energy generation of that magni­tude didn't take place unless someone was using it.

  Another thing struck me. Why had it been so easy for me to take down the RPFs when they'd been able to detect me so early? Their maneuvering suggested human operators rather than instant AIs, and that didn't seem to make sense. The other problem was that, if Legaar or his henchmen could remove me from a limo... why not from a nightflitter?

  It did make some sense for Legaar to locate whatever he had going with Classic Research at Time's End. If you're going to break the law, do it where no one can prove it. What bothered me about the setup was something else. Legaar Eloi had more than enough credits to pay royalty fees—even exorbitant ones. Why hadn't he? From what I'd discovered so far, he wasn't given to willful Iawbreaking. In fact, all the filings and records suggested that he'd gone to great length to keep everything legitimate.

  All of that suggested I'd gotten involved in far more than I'd ever anticipated.

  As I approached the ACS boundary, I de-stealthed the nightflitter and climbed back to 1000 meters AGL. Then I requested an inbound vector.

  Interrogative origin?

  Thurene. Completion round-trip flight. No landings. Plan on file.

  The system might hiccup inconsistencies to real con­trollers, but what could anyone say? I had done a round-trip. I was returning docilely to the fold.

  As I settled the flitter back down into the courtyard, I vowed I wasn't about to go anywhere on Domen. Not when I was going to need most of Domen to recover from the stress I'd put on my body and system.

  17

  Elysium's grace exceeds them all, the price far higher than fair Satan's fall.

  Despite the freshness and fragrance of the light wind blow­ing out of the west, I'd closed the balcony doors in order to concentrate on the energy-balance calculations. The sounds of the nymphs and satyrs in the sycamore pool—and those with whom they played and pleasured—had been more than a little distracting. I much preferred the gendy teasing invi­tations of Magdalena, far more entreating than the roister­ing of the pseudo-Grecians, but my personal enjoyments waited on the necessities posed by the projections hanging in the air of the suite before me, for I did not ever intend to be held green and dying, screaming in my chains like the sea of time beyond the branes of the present.

  The prime sub-brane core system remained stable, but that stability was maintained only by the power links be­tween the fusactors on Time's End and the one that supplied power to Elysium. Any expansion of the sub-brane required a full Hawking system, and even Legaar couldn't supply anything like that, and for that reason we waited on the off-system delivery of just that system.

  Maraniss, get down here now! Legaar's words burned through the implant and my thoughts like fire.

  Down where?

  The defense control center, idiot!

  I'll be right there. Or as soon as I could get there, although I wondered what was so critical that Legaar was fuming and fretting in the estate defense center. I wasn't about to argue over the link. When an Eloi was angry, there was no reason­ing anyway. Sweet reason overwhelmed by virtue's passion—or the passion of what he felt was virtue, which was not exacdy the same thing, except in what passed for his mind.

  The nymphs must have sensed my anger, or they were all occupied with Legaar's guests, mostly rank and file repre­sentatives elected to the planetary forum that advised the sis­ters, because I got to the grotto that held the maglev without being accosted by the curdling folly of the girls of Legaai's lights.

  I'd had barely gotten to the top of the ramp in the defense center and stepped through the doors, when Legaar turned.

  "You took too damned long! Idiot! You're a complete id­iot. You're a slow idiot! Where are you when you're needed?"

  "I was in the quarters you supplied, going over what's necessary to implement the next phase. What happened?"

  Legaar glared at me, but I just waited for his reply.

  "Your detectors picked up an incoming craft. It didn't register on the standard screens. That means it had to be military. The defense system launched three RP flitters. Be­cause the standard detectors couldn't pick them up, we had to override and transfer input location, using the pro­jection field detectors. That created response delays. I've played back all the data, but the attacker took out all three RPFs, somehow without any energy discharges. I tried to use your beam gadget, but the attacker was gone—or off the farscreens—before I got the hang of it. If you'd been here, it wouldn't have happened."

  "Legaar ..." I kept my voice calm, although with his ir­rational childishness, it was more than a litde difficult. "I was here almost all day. I need quiet and no distractions to plan the logistics and implementation. I don't get it here. That was why I instructed you and Chief Tech Dylane on how to use the beam for defense."

  "Who in the planetary sel
f-defense force had any idea about the project? Who did you let it slip to?" His voice was querulous.

  If anyone had let matters slip, it was likely to have been Legaar, but there was littie point in making that comment. "I've been here for days or in Elysium. Exacdy when could I have let anything slip?" Before he could answer, I went on. "Can we be sure it was the PDF? What about Assembly Spe­cial Operations or the Assembly space force?"

  "They can't interfere with planetary governments."

  "They can if they suspect other systems are involved. If someone has let it out that the Frankans ..."

  "No! Don't even mention the name. Idiot!"

  I was more than a litde tired of his paranoia, but I needed him—as did the Frankans. "It's more likely to be a corpen-tity recon, possibly trying to get you to react."

  He stopped, and his eyes glazed. Unlike most intelligent beings, Legaar could not walk and do anything else at the same time, let alone link to his system.

  Again, I waited.

  His eyes focused. "You were right. We got a backlink and a pattern. It was in the system all the time. We've even identi­fied the source, but not the operator. It doesn't matter, though. This time, we'll take care of the head, not the fingers."

  "A corpentity?"

  "The head of a corpentity. I've got removals looking into a vanishing."

  "Just for snooping?"

  "I should have done it sooner. I've also contacted Lam-oignon. The RPFs went down on Thierry land, and RT will press for damages."

  "Guillaume Lamoignon?"

  "Why not? It's better to have him representing Classic Research than attacking us. He's more ancient regime than any other opponents of the sisters."

  "I see." I had my doubts, and I'd always had them where Legaar was concerned, but whether I had doubts or not, he was the vehicle necessary to assure the eternal solidity of Elysium. More important, once the Hawking system was linked and powered up, I would control Elysium—and its future.