The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “If we make an exception for Malena because of the way she died, we are raising a memorial not to her, but to her murderer, for making her unique. And that I will not do.”

  This time, the applause was spontaneous, spirited, and strong. She had won them back.

  Sasaki continued, “A meaningful memorial to Malena Graham would respect her commitment to the Project and preserve her contribution to our community. It would leave her joined to the Memphis family as more than a memory. It should be a living memorial.

  “I can tell you now that we have an opportunity to create just such a memorial.”

  Dryke, knowing what was coming, marveled at Sasaki’s flawless control. The auditorium was absolutely still, spellbound, all attention focused on the woman on the stage.

  “All of you who have endured it know how thorough Selection’s biomedical testing is,” Sasaki said. “Many of you also know that Malena Graham was a childhood victim of poliomyelitis. She did not think that remarkable, and it was clearly no obstacle to her selection.

  “But it did make her different, and that difference is now a blessing. Because of her polio, when Malena Graham came here, she was among the several dozen new arrivals subjected to an additional battery of tests to evaluate their reproductive health,” said Sasaki. “She was given a hormonal accelerator, and a few days later, eight ova were collected. Two of those eggs were consumed in the testing. But the remaining six were not needed and were placed in cryostorage for future tests, if necessary.”

  As those listening began to realize where Sasaki’s words were leading, Dryke began to see heads bob and joy-tearful smiles appear on the faces of those standing near him. The funeral spell was shattered, the blanket of gloom dispelled. The applause grew from scattered knots to spreading waves as the audience came joyfully to its feet.

  “That future use will come, time willing, on the first colony world you found,” said Sasaki over the rising tumult. “For I direct that Malena Graham’s eggs be added to the gamete bank aboard Memphis, and ask you to take her essence with you to Tau Ceti—not as a memorial, but as a legacy. And when the first child is born of her line, then you may give her an epitaph worthy of the dream she dreamed, and a fate better than that which befell her here:

  “Non omnis moriar.

  “ ‘I shall not altogether die.’ ”

  It was a challenge to reach Sasaki in the friendly crush that followed, and a greater challenge to separate her from it. Finally, Dryke resorted to deception and professional prerogative, catching her arm to tell her that there was a security alert in the complex, and then hustling her away to a private room on an upper floor.

  “I’m sorry, Director. There is no threat,” he said when they were alone. “I have to leave the center shortly, and I needed to talk to you before I did.”

  “Does this have to do with your disappearance from the convocation?”

  “Hugh sent up a package from the data analysis lab at Prainha, eyes-only. I went out to collect it from the courier and to find a tank.”

  “And?”

  “And I have some news that I hope will do for you what your eulogy did for those people downstairs. We’ve located Jeremiah.” He said it pridefully, looking at her expectantly.

  But Sasaki’s reaction was disappointing. Her eyes widened briefly—surprise?—and then narrowed into a questioning, almost disbelieving gaze. “Located or caught?”

  “Located. That’s why I have to leave. I’m taking four locals from security and the two top systems texperts with me.”

  “Where is he? Is it a he?”

  “The Pacific Northwest. Oregon. I’m not sure on the other.”

  She frowned. “Then this is hardly an authoritative identification, is it?”

  “No. Not yet. We have two addresses, one a business. We’ll sort it out when we get there.”

  “He tracks you,” Sasaki said, fretting. “He will be gone before you arrive.”

  “He tracks my screamer,” said Dryke. “Which is leaving any minute for Chile, with appropriate disinformation on the bounce. I’m going off the net until I have him. There’ll be nothing out there to point to where I am, and I’m telling no one but you.”

  “He may already be gone.”

  “The line’s been active within the half hour.”

  She nodded, accepting the point. “What was the break? Was it Katrina Becker?”

  “No. Becker has been—immovable.” Dryke smiled coldly. “No, it was the bragging that got him. We backtraced his rant over the Munich hit past the Albuquerque node which had stopped us the last time. This time we had more ears to the ground and matched to a dedicated line.”

  “How easily?”

  “What?”

  “I remind you of your discourse on the art of fishing, and the lesson of the great fish.”

  Dryke stared, the self-congratulation leaving his face. “I have a good feeling about this, Hiroko.”

  “You are too valuable to lose to a feeling,” she said. “If an Evan Silverman was willing to kill a Malena Graham for such little gain, would a Jeremiah hesitate to kill you?”

  “I won’t give him that chance.”

  Frowning, she wrapped her arms around herself. “Mikhail, I am most serious about insisting that you examine your judgment. You received the failure of the Munich operation and the death of Malena as personal defeats. You may have perceived them as blows to your prestige. Am I unreasonable to think that Mikhail Dryke might be so eager to restore himself in my eyes that he would alter the equation of risk?”

  He looked away, up toward one corner of the ceiling, and sighed. “No,” he said finally. “You’re not unreasonable.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you’re wrong,” Dryke added. “This is Jeremiah, and I can get to him.”

  Her hands slid down the sleeves of her kimono until her arms were crossed over her chest in a more forceful pose. “Despite the week’s events, I do not require vindication of your competence, Mikhail. And I do not welcome assurances spoken by the voice of personal pride.”

  Dryke felt himself bristling. “We’ve been closing in on him all year. Every time he spoke, every stunt he pulled. There were already signs pointing in this direction. This is consistent with all of them.”

  “And it is exactly when all is as expected that the wary may become inattentive, and a trick most effectively employed. I ask only that you exercise prudent caution.”

  To be reminded by Sasaki of such an elementary principle stung Dryke’s pride. “If you really believed in me, you wouldn’t need to ask that.”

  “Have I lost the right to question you, Mikhail?” she asked, eyebrow arching. “What message should I read in your defensiveness—insecurity, or impatience? Either would be reason to send someone else in your place.”

  Drawing a quick breath, he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then looked at her and nodded. “You’re right. My apology.”

  “Not necessary,” she said, relaxing. “But accepted.”

  “It is personal. I don’t deny it,” said Dryke. “I want him. But that won’t make me reckless. Just the opposite—I’ll be that much more careful. I’ve been chasing Jeremiah long enough. I want it to be over.”

  “As do I,” Sasaki said. “As do I. May your journey be fruitful. Report to me at first opportunity.”

  “I will. But there’s something else we need to settle. Do I still have authority? Will you support me?”

  She studied him for a long time, her eyes deep crystal black and unblinking. “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But be sure. Be very sure.”

  “I will.” He glanced at his watch. “The others should be ready. I have to go,” he said, and started for the door. Then he paused and added, “I nearly forgot—”

  “Yes?”

  “Word came in while you were in the convo. The command and navigation package is safely aboard the ship.”

  That earned a smile. “I am glad to hear it.”


  “Feist says that the virus turned up with every archive copy of the package on site in Munich. All five of them. Every time they tried a restore, the virus would come up, look for its parent on the main net, and go crazy when it came up missing.”

  “Then consider yourself vindicated,” said Sasaki. “Can you tell me now where the operational copy was stored?”

  Dryke grinned. “In a bulk cargo cask in the holding yard at Palima Point, waiting for a cheap ride to orbit.”

  “Tagged as what?” Sasaki’s eyebrows were frowning.

  “As the personal freight of a new Takara immigrant, one Atsuji Matsushita.”

  “Did he know?”

  “The only person who knew was Matt Reid, who had to make the intercept.”

  “And the awkward questions from Mr. Matsushita, wondering what’s become of his socks?”

  “For the price of his immigration fee, Mr. Matsushita was prevailed upon to help smuggle some contraband up to the colony,” said Dryke. “Believe me, he’ll be too scared to ask any questions about its disappearance.”

  An hour later, Dryke’s team boarded the tube at the DFW transplex. Already dispersed through the waiting line, the five men and two women ended up scattered between six different compartments on the two-car train.

  Dryke, with an end seat in number 9 of the second car, was able to watch through the window as the containerized cargo and luggage slid on board below his feet. He wondered if the team’s kits had passed railway scrutiny; the bags did not carry the Federal Weapons License scanner tags to which he and the corpsecs were entitled. Although that limited their options, it also avoided a verification call-out, which could alert Jeremiah of their approach.

  At the Phoenix interline station, the team separated into two groups. The texperts drew the longer route, the Midlands tube back to Chicago, then west again to Seattle, where they would wait for Dryke’s call. Dryke and the four corpsecs stayed on board for the coast run to Portland.

  The elderly woman at his left was garrulously inquisitive, but Dryke was not interested in conversation. Before long, he detached the eyecup display and earpieces from his slate and donned the slender headset which held them, pointedly withdrawing to the artificial reality they created.

  But it was hard to make the time pass quickly, impossible to calm his inner restlessness. The correlation files and quicksearch reports stored in his slate were dry as a brittle leaf. And the DBS link of the expensive Korean-made slate was useless a hundred meters underground. The train was isolated from the direct broadcast skylinks, except for what the National Railway chose to relay from surface antennas—and to sell by the minute to its captive audience. But Drake could not afford to have his account show any activity, especially not aboard a tube.

  He realized suddenly that he was tired. The adrenaline that had sustained him through the preparations was gone, leaving him weary-limbed and energyless. His kit contained antifatigue tablets, but it was just as well that they were out of reach. Watchman worked as advertised, but exacted a horrible price when it finally wore off.

  He realized, too, that he had missed two meals that day and had nothing with him to fill the void. The thought was enough to awaken an empty-bellied hunger which had lain dormant to that point.

  Extracting the stylus from his holder, Dryke began to doodle idly on the slate—filling the frame with patterns of nested diamonds, blanking it to fill it with concentric circles, then with the squares of a chessboard grid. It did not amuse him, but it occupied him, and that was almost enough.

  He thought ahead to Jeremiah, ahead to the mission. There was little doubt in his mind that the team would succeed. The end of the chase was in sight, if not yet in hand.

  But, oddly, there was little pleasure in the anticipation. After all the travel, all the trauma, he would have thought he’d be happier. Even his curiosity had been dulled. He no longer cared to know what moved his adversary, what tricks and tactics had prolonged the siege. The weariness ran deeper than blood and muscle. It had infected his spirit as well.

  It’s time to move on.

  The thought surprised him. Move on to what? To serving Mikhail Dryke. To carrying on a normal life. But he wondered if he knew how to do either. To keeping all those promises consigned to the future—Castillo de San Marcos, Loches, Peveril Castle. To walk the ruins of the Great Wall from Shanhaiguan to Jia-yuguan and the edge of the desert—

  “Are you a historian?” asked the woman beside him.

  “Eh?” He turned toward her. “Excuse me?”

  She pointed toward his slate. “I was wondering if you were a historian?”

  Dryke looked down at his lap and laughed despite himself. The last sketch that had come from his deft fingers and idle mind was a half-completed plan for an assault on a mountain redoubt he had labeled Fort Jesus.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, his voice soft and weary. “Not a historian. Just a boy playing soldier.”

  She left him alone after that, even though he might have ultimately welcomed the distraction. The thoughts that possessed him were black and joyless. Victory is a more difficult art than war. Which American President had said that? Wilson? Roosevelt? Gingrich? Dryke could not remember. Others had learned the same lesson. The Duke of Wellington explaining to Lady Shelley: I always say that, next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. An old secret, indeed, now being revealed to Dryke.

  It was a decision he did not want to make, wrapped in questions he did not want to answer. If there was a Katrina Becker in Munich, an Evan Silverman in Houston, a Javier Sala in Madrid, who might there be in Prainha, or Kasigau, or Takara? How long would it take an organization which had intercepted company mail and jammed Newstime to find where their Prophet was hidden?

  Would the people who had knocked down a T-ship and spilled poisons on the ground be any less bold in trying to reclaim their leader? Could he rest easy knowing that his enemies played breathless electronic tag on the nets unimpeded, and found the Project’s defenses as intimidating as the Maginot Line?

  There were a hundred questions, and yet they were all the same question: How long would it go on if he let it go on? He hoped that circumstance would save him from having to find an answer, save him from touching that place inside where white fire lived and no act was forbidden.

  All of the decisions were coming hard.

  They had two targets, each difficult in its own way: the Peterson Road house, a hundred klicks outside the city, and Pacific Land Management, ten stories up in the heart of Portland’s financial district. Dryke had too few troops to cover both at once— the small size of the team was part of the price for moving quickly and quietly. Nor could they touch local law enforcement for help. There was no way to control what went out into the net. There was no way to know who was Jeremiah’s friend.

  One or the other. It had to be one or the other. But if they chose wrong, Jeremiah would have a chance to run. And a man like Jeremiah with a network like Homeworld could run for a long time.

  But which one was Fort J?

  It came down to probabilities. Pacific Land Management had nineteen registered partners, twenty-eight comlines (counting eight on the building’s Sky LAN), and its fingers in half a billion dollars’ worth of land and real estate in four countries—a splendid foundation for the infrastructure of a revolution. By contrast, the Peterson Road house had a modest four comlines, an overdue property tax bill, and a reclusive owner with legitimate connections to most of the state’s business and political leadership.

  Dryke chose the Peterson Road house.

  He hedged his bets by calling the texperts down from Seattle and leaving one, the brooding man named Ramond, to play stakeout at Pacific Land Management. But the rest went with him to Hoffman Hill, a six-hundred-meter summit just six klicks from Peterson Ridge and belonging to the same whorl of valleys and steep-sloped tree-covered fold mountains. Hoffman Hill was a nearly ideal staging area—just a one-minute dash from the target for the armed and armored B
eech Pursuit that Ramond and Dru had leased for them in Seattle.

  By that time, all of them were well into their second dose cycle of Watchman. While Dru set up sky monitors and spotting snoops on the ridge line, Dryke huddled with the others in the predawn chill to lay out the logistics. They made a skeptical audience.

  “We come in from the top, he’s got a lot of room to hide. We come up the road and hit his gate, and he’ll sky,” said Loren, the most senior of Dryke’s recruits.

  “I know,” said Dryke. “That’s why we’re going in both ways.”

  “I’d sure rather be doing this with fifty bodies than five.” Loren’s frown was dyspeptic. “What do you know about the defenses?”

  “Boundary fenced and a hailer. That’s all that’s on the books. I’m sure that’s not all there is.”

  “Anti-air?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How many people up there?”

  Dryke reached down to the open kit by his feet and tossed the corpsec a clear-skinned frag helmet. “Can’t tell you. So flash goggles, bug-heads, and torso armor for everyone. And keep your fagging heads down.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to just pump a rocket or two into the house from here?” asked Liviya with a grin. She was cradling her frag helmet under her arm like a basketball while she checked her pistol.

  “I’m sure,” Dryke said. “Dru will do battle management from here if it comes to that. But I really don’t want this drawn out. If it’s not over in five minutes, we’re going to be in more trouble than I want to think about.” He looked up through the trees at the brightening sky. “Any questions?”

  “I want another look at this guy’s picture,” Loren said.

  Dryke keyed the frame and wordlessly handed Loren the slate.

  “With five minutes warning, they’ll be able to dump all their files and break both ends of every link,” Dru called to them without looking up from her work. “Five seconds would be enough if it’s all volatile storage.”

  “We’re not going in for files. We’re going in for Jeremiah— or whoever speaks with his voice.”