The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “If we have to shoot to stop someone—” Liviya began.

  “Then shoot straight,” Dryke said. “Any more questions?”

  In the silence, Loren handed back the slate.

  “Dru, anything?” Dryke called to the texpert.

  She shook her head. “Outside lights went off a minute ago. Two comlines active, looks like background traffic. Might be there. Might not. Nothing conclusive.”

  “Do you have the tracer ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Send it.”

  “Will do.”

  With the skylink’s cellular narrowcasting and active message routing, every personal receiver sent regular updates to Central Addressing, so that the net would know where to “forward” the owner’s messages. Trace queries—ordinarily not processed without a court’s “order to locate”—retrieved the current address in the system.

  “For whatever it’s worth, the tracer’s still pointing here,” Dru announced a few seconds later.

  Dryke nodded grimly. “Let’s go find out if it’s worth anything.”

  Like chrome hummingbirds waking to the dawn, the team’s three cars rose from the muddy track of Lawrence Road and fanned out over the forested slopes.

  Loren and Liviya’s skimmers stayed at treetop level, swinging north and west in snaking arcs that kept them below Fort Jesus’ horizon. Dryke took the Pursuit straight up along the slope of Hoffman Hill and exploded skyward, clawing for the altitude he would need in a look-down shoot-down scenario, showing Fort J only the armored underbelly of the flyer.

  But there was no response from Peterson Ridge—not when the skimmers flashed over the boundary fences, not even when the Pursuit’s climb flattened out and turned over into a heart-stopping dive.

  “No delta,” said Dru, watching the comline traffic. A burst coder carried her words to all three vehicles. “Repeat, no delta, nothing to squash.”

  As the double dome of the house grew larger before him, Dryke saw the two skimmers slow and drop down into invisible gaps in the trees and disappear.

  “Unit Four on station, all clear,” said Loren. A breath later, Liviya logged in a near-echo.

  Still there was no response.

  The purr of the Pursuit’s engines climbed to an annoyed whine as it braked for touchdown. With a last-second sideslip, Dryke dropped it on the concrete scorch pad in front of the garage, blocking the middle half of the double-wide door.

  “System lock,” he said. “Code Eben-Emael.”

  “Locked,” said the autopilot AIP.

  Dryke flipped down his own bug-head and climbed out on the left side of the flyer, keeping its bulk between him and the house. He looked to see if Loren had come up the road into position and was answered with a wave.

  “Liviya?”

  “Ready.”

  “Going in.”

  Crossing the yard to the front door under the gaze of the house’s many windows was an act best done without thinking. Once on the porch, Dryke waved Loren forward and waited until the black man was alongside the Pursuit.

  “Dru?” asked Dryke.

  “No change.”

  “What?”

  “No change?”

  “Ramond?”

  “Nothing is happening here, Mr. Dryke.”

  “This is bad. This is very bad,” warned Loren. “Maybe we ought to wait until we know it’s clean.”

  “Goddamm it, he’s gone,” Dryke fumed, reaching for the door. “We’re too late.”

  “Oh, man—”

  Dryke touched the controls and received a shock—the door was unlocked.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, staring. “Dru?”

  “No change.”

  “Not even a fagging burglar alarm?”

  “Nothing.”

  Dryke puffed out a breath. “No one else comes in,” he said, and stepped through the doorway.

  Inside the Fuller were the ordinary private places of a man of some means, but few affectations. A gentleman’s kitchen, tidy and highly automated. A morning-facing breakfast nook, with a hummingbird feeder hanging outside the windows. A working study dotted with motion toys and engineering models. A dark bedroom with an empty, neatly made bed.

  Stinger in hand, Dryke moved warily from room to room, wrestling with a mixture of heart-thumping fear and squeamish embarrassment, waiting for a nasty surprise and fearing he had already received it. The house felt empty, like a set piece, a fabrication.

  “Nothing yet,” he said. “Loren—check the garage.”

  In a moment he had his answer. “Got one Avanti Eagle and one Honda SD-50, as registered.”

  Dryke swore. “Then where is he? Does anyone have anything?”

  “Could have been picked up by someone,” Loren said. “You want some company in there?”

  Frowning, Dryke tipped the shield of his helmet halfway up. “I suppose. Liviya, baby-sit the Pursuit, will you?”

  While he waited, Dryke drifted back to the study, the most interesting room. When Loren joined him, he was sitting in the chair at the comsole, playing with a model of a self-lifting crane.

  “Bastard got away from me again,” he said, his voice almost emotionless.

  “I did a space inventory on the way through—not a very good house for playing hide-and-seek.”

  “No. And I’m tired of that game.” Frowning, Dryke discarded the model on the desk. “I guess we can have Dru take a look at this, anyway.”

  “Somebody’s going to have to come pick me up,” Dru reminded.

  Under the weight of Dryke’s disappointment, it seemed like a major decision. “Liviya—no, better keep the flyer here. Ah, who’s in Unit Four?”

  “Zabricki.”

  “Just a moment.” Loren leaned closer and peered at the com-sole. “Dru? You still showing traffic on the lines into here?”

  “Sure,” she answered. “The same background stuff—ad frames, financials, junk fax. Intermittent but steady.”

  Puzzled, Loren swung his head toward Dryke. “Where’s it going to? This system’s not logging anything.”

  “What? There must be an AIP trashing it.”

  “Even that would show as activity.”

  Loren and Dryke stared at each other for a long moment. Then Dryke stood and flipped his shield back down into place.

  “Zabricki, Dru, stay put,” Dryke said. He raised a questioning eyebrow at Loren. “Where?”

  “Down,” said Loren. “Has to be down.”

  “Let’s find it.”

  “Look for natural seams, inside corners. I don’t think there’s any wall volume unaccounted for. Probably in the floor.”

  “Kitchen,” said Dryke, his eyes lighting up. “Parquet floor. Come on.”

  The seams were almost perfect, the door almost invisible. It filled the rectangular space between the pedestal counter and the sink cabinets along one wall. Dryke stood looking down at it with hands on hips, chewing on his lower lip.

  “How much do you want to bet there’s another way in?” Loren asked. “Tunnel to the woods? To the garage?”

  Dryke shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. He’s not here.” He sighed. “What do you think, voice command? Through the house AIP?”

  “Probably.”

  “And what else?” Dryke scanned the kitchen. “A lot of control contacts here. Some unlikely combination—”

  “I can’t imagine them taking the chance of someone trying to make some toast and raising the door instead.”

  “And I can’t imagine him not building in a safety net. AIPs can be corrupted.”

  “We can force this,” Loren said. “There’s a power chisel in my skimmer.”

  “No,” Dryke said, walking to the sink at the middle of the rectangle. “If we force it, the files are sure to be dumped.” He turned on the cold water and splashed a double handful on his face. “It wouldn’t be anything you could do by accident.”

  “It wouldn’t be anything that would open it while you’re standing on it,” Loren s
aid with a grin.

  The water still running, his face still wet, Dryke stared sideways at the other man. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said slowly. He touched the sweep contact on the wall behind the sink and watched as the faucet head swiveled in a circle to sweep away particles loosened by the ultrasonics. “But all you’d need is a little interlock, a pressure sensor—”

  As the sweep cycle ended, Dryke stepped back from the sink, retreating past the edge of the door. From there, stretching out across the countertop, he could barely reach the contact behind the sink. But he could reach it.

  With a faint whir, the floor began to rise, the first few centimeters straight up, then canting toward Loren. Dryke jumped back and stared.

  “He must have longer arms than I do.”

  Loren was marveling. “Son of a bitch. How did you know where the switch was?”

  “Because I know him better than I want to.”

  The panel stopped rising when it made a sixty-degree angle with the rest of the floor. Beneath it was a lighted passage, a carpeted stairway.

  “Stay here,” Dryke said to Loren, and started down.

  He descended the stairs cautiously, the edge suddenly back in the game. Halfway down, he crouched for a peek into the room below.

  Where the walls should have been, he glimpsed a golden-red desertscape, a flash of light on water, the brilliant greens of a fern-filled rain forest. The whole chamber was a tank, ten meters across, with earthscape murals playing on the shell. At the center was a large-scale table display, an interface controller with its multicolored screens, a curved desk.

  And, in the high-backed chair beside the desk, a man. He was facing the stairway and looking directly at Dryke.

  “Lila, begin,” said the man in the chair.

  His breath still caught tight in the binding of his surprise, Dryke descended the last few steps as an automaton. The man in the chair had but a passing resemblance to Jeremiah—his face beardless and too lean, the hair thinner and darker. But there was something in the eyes that was the same.

  “I expected you, Mr. Dryke, but not this soon. Take off your hat and stay awhile—”

  There was something oddly theatrical about the man’s demeanor, something scripted about his words and tone. But where was the audience?

  “Did you get that?” Loren was calling from the kitchen. “Mr. Dryke, did you get that?”

  Dryke heard him through the helmet, not the coder. “Get what?” he called back.

  But Loren was already descending the stairway with quick steps. “Dru says all the lines from here are lit up. Land and sky—Dru? Dru? Damn, I’m losing her. This place must be shielded.” He stopped short of the landing and blinked. “Jesus Christ. There’s somebody here.”

  “Ready,” said a woman’s voice from nowhere.

  “Thank you, Lila,” the man said calmly. “This is William McCutcheon, speaking for Jeremiah and the Homeworld—”

  The whole chamber is a tank. Dryke spun around and looked at the ceiling behind him. A three-eyed camera limpet hung from the ceiling above the stairway.

  “As you can see, I have visitors this morning. As you might guess from the weapons they carry, I did not invite them. Mikhail Dryke, chief of the security forces for Allied Transcon, has invaded my home to arrest me. My crime—”

  “No!” shouted Dryke, whirling. “No more fucking speeches!”

  Behind him, Loren wordlessly retreated halfway up the stairs. “Dru?” Dryke heard him saying. “Dru?”

  “Do you really think that you can stop us?” asked McCutcheon. “That your efforts have made any difference at all? Do you think I count so much, that you have only one enemy? I’m just one link in the chain, one cell in something larger. When I’m gone, someone else will step in to take my place.”

  “And someone else will step in to take mine,” said Dryke. Something had snapped inside him, like a switch being thrown.

  He no longer cared if his words were being broadcast to the world, no longer could bear to be taunted and lectured.

  “You don’t understand what you’re fighting.” McCutcheon’s tone was dismissive.

  In that moment, Dryke realized that he had made the decision on the train. He realized, too, that if he let McCutcheon go on talking, the moment would slip away. Later, he would want to tell himself that he had been driven past the edge by rage and fear, necessity and fatigue. But the truth was that it was a willful act. He touched the white fire and let it fill him. Only afterward did it burn.

  “Wrong, Jeremiah. I do.” He raised his gun and pointed it at the middle of McCutcheon’s chest. “This is for Malena Graham.”

  He fired four times, four neatly spaced and carefully aimed shots, then lowered his arm slowly to his side. He stood, swaying on his feet, and watched the shattered shell of William McCutcheon die, and felt cheated because triumph tasted as bitter as defeat.

  Ripping his helmet off, Dryke threw it aside, turned his back, and started up the stairs. Loren was staring at him. “Dru?” Dryke said as he reached the kitchen. “How much got out?”

  “Just the first ten or twelve seconds,” she said. “I jammed the skylinks and Ramond got the lines through Pacific. What happened?”

  “Can you put a message up for me to the Director?”

  “I can do better than that. I can get her direct.”

  Dryke shook his head, aware of Loren’s watching eyes, though he would not meet them. “I don’t want to talk to her,” he said. “Just tell her for me that Jeremiah is dead.”

  CHAPTER 25

  —CUC—

  “…the footprints of lost souls.”

  Dr. Meyfarth’s counseling room had been a comfortable space, an almost cluttered space. But since Christopher’s last visit, the clutter had vanished, and everything that remained was now pure eggshell white—the cradle couch, the low table with the recorder ball, Meyfarth’s molded chair, the padded corner pit, the carpet, the ceiling, the walls.

  It was now a confrontational environment, offering no distractions and allowing only one focus—the interaction between technologist and client. Christopher wondered briefly if Meyfarth had made the change with him in mind. But this time, he needed no encouragement to talk.

  “She wants me to believe that my father bullied my mother to the point that she killed herself, and then went ahead and did what he had to, to get what he wanted. I’ve been thinking about this since Saturday night, and I just can’t accept that picture.”

  “Then don’t,” Meyfarth said. “The facts aren’t clear, and you’re not obliged to share her beliefs.”

  “I think the facts are clear. My father loved Sharron—my mother.” The amendment was a conscious jab at his sister, whose cutting words were still playing in his thoughts. “I know he did, no matter what Annie says.”

  “The point is, that’s your sister’s particular family grief. Accurate or not, it doesn’t have much to do with you.”

  “Lynn-Anne thinks it does.”

  “None of us is responsible for the circumstances of our birth. That doesn’t heal your relationship with Annie, I know,” said Meyfarth. “But you don’t have to make peace with her to come out ahead.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You can take away from this the understanding that she’s bracketed you and your father together and that the hostility she shows you is only partly your fault. In fact, it’s safer for her to vent that hostility on you than on him, so you can probably expect more of the same if you try to press contact.”

  Christopher nodded slowly. “If she could learn to separate the two of us, then maybe we could work out whatever real grievances she has with me.”

  “It would be a good starting point, at least.”

  “And I’m sure there are some,” Christopher added.

  “There almost always are, between siblings,” said Meyfarth. “In any case, I think we can let this go for now—unless you’d rather not.”

  Christopher crossed an ankle over his knee as he ans
wered. “No. This doesn’t feel like it touches my problems with Jessie and Loi.”

  “On the whole, I agree,” said Meyfarth. “What is the climate in the house now? When we talked Saturday, you led me to think that it wasn’t very pleasant for you.”

  A wry smile formed on Christopher’s lips. “Not very pleasant for any of us, I guess. Loi surprised me this weekend—kind of took pity on me. But Jessie—I can’t get near her. I can’t even get her attention. Almost as though she has her back to me, if that makes any sense.” He gazed intently at the carpet beyond his feet. “And it hurts,” he added quietly.

  “Is she still seeing John?”

  Christopher’s head bobbed slowly in affirmation. “I expect her to tell us any day now that she’s moving out,” he said. “I’m not quite sure why I didn’t see it before, but she’s never been as serious about the trine as Loi and I were.”

  “Are you sure you’re being fair? She wanted to have a baby with you.”

  “But only as long as it looked like it’d be easy,” Christopher said, raising his head and looking plaintively at Meyfarth. “She wants a lot, you know? But what is she giving back?”

  “What does she want? ‘Listen to me. Tell me your feelings. Be affectionate.’ That’s too much?”

  “This was the first bump we ran into, and she’s already given up on me.”

  Meyfarth cocked his head and said nothing, inviting Christopher to follow the thought.

  “It’s almost like we were a comfortable place to light, and she was paying her keep by running the house and being cuddly. But it’s not comfortable anymore, so she’s ready to move on. A butterfly. Pretty, but—”

  “No commitment?”

  “No commitment.”

  A skeptical smile flickered across Meyfarth’s face. “You opted out of your marriage at the three-year option. So what do you know about eternal love?”

  The dig was neither unexpected nor unfair. “I’ve been thinking about my marriage, too,” said Christopher. “Trying to learn from experience, you know? Maybe there’s no mystery here. Maybe it’s just like the first time—right idea, wrong people.”

  “I think that lets you off the hook too easily, Chris.”