Roche smiled now.
They stepped out of the clouds and back into the landscape of rolling valleys and trickling waters. Roche groaned inwardly when she remembered the distance they’d come to get this far. Her legs and back were sore from standing for so long.
As though someone had read her mind, an air-car resembling a large silver spoon hummed into view. There were seats for four people in the bowl, all empty.
“I thought you might be weary,” said Nemeth from behind diem. “As attractive as the scenery is, there’s no need to view it on foot twice.”
Roche glanced at Vischilglin, who was frowning. “You arranged this?” Roche asked, suspecting an ulterior motive.
“It is not the council’s will,” said Vischilglin, scowling.
Nemeth shrugged expansively. “Since when did the council start dictating courtesy? I’m offering you all a lift—including yourself, Co-adjutant Vischilglin.” He smiled. “Well, are you coming or not?”
* * *
The air-car sped quietly across the uneven terrain, leaving the steps they had just descended far behind. Although they didn’t move alarmingly fast, there were a couple of moments when the car slued to avoid a jutting ridge, making Roche feel a little uneasy.
Nemeth didn’t appear to be troubled by the craft’s sudden movements. He sat beside her, looking out at the rolling landscape sweeping beneath them, his face split by a seemingly perpetual smile.
As if sensing her staring at him, Nemeth turned to face Roche, and his smile widened.
“Now isn’t this so much easier?” he said. “Perhaps we could even take a more interesting route back to the docks.” Over his shoulder to where Maii and Vischilglin sat, he said: “Do you think the council would approve, Vischilglin?”
The woman grunted an affirmation. She really had little choice now, Roche thought. Nemeth laughed and turned back to look at the scenery.
‘Tell me,” said Roche. “What exactly is it you think I want from you, Nemeth?”
“All, now, that’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “Make no mistake: I can do any number of things for you, Roche.” He glanced over at her. “If I were so inclined, of course.” When she didn’t react, he went on: “You come at a peculiar time, Roche—when the council is desperate for answers that none of us have. It feels constrained by the very precepts that allowed it to come into being so quickly. It is... limited by its nature.”
“You mean it’s for Pristines only,” said Roche.
He nodded. “But some of us fear that ‘Pristines only’ may not be enough to combat this threat.” He watched the view silently for a few moments; when he spoke again, the smile had faded. “I lost my family back home, you know,” he said. “They were caught in an insurrection while I was serving in a completely different system. A local terrorist branch whipped up enough anti-government action—in the form of riots and infrastructure sabotage—to warrant calling in the army. Thousands of innocent people died in the ensuing repression, including my family, and it achieved nothing for either side. It turned out that the enemy was responsible for the whole thing. The terrorists were just a tool—the means to an end. And that end was to cause as much destruction and misery as possible.”
Nemeth looked at Roche, who sat watching him carefully. He remained outwardly relaxed, except for his hands: his knuckles were white where they gripped the armrest. When he realized this, he quickly loosened his grip and his smile returned.
“So, do you have any family, Roche?” Nemeth asked.
Roche felt a stab of pain. Never knowing her parents had been a constant regret throughout her childhood. As an adult, she had aspired to COE Intelligence in order to track them down. Upon reaching that goal, however, she had forgotten about her parents entirely, too busy with her own life to worry about the one she might have had.
“No,” she said. Another part of her was glad that she could forestall his obvious gambit. While she could feel compassion for his loss, he would have to engage her intellect, not her emotions, in order to get what he wanted. Whatever that was.
If he was disappointed by her reply, he made no sign. He simply nodded and changed the subject.
“In a second we’ll be entering one of the main longitudinal ducts that run down the hull from minaret to crypt,” he said.
Vischilglin leaned forward in the cab. “That’s fore to aft to us,” she said.
“Even at the speeds we will be going,” Nemeth continued, “it will take us ten minutes or so. But please don’t be concerned by that,” he added in response to a look of alarm in Roche’s eyes: to travel any significant length along the giant ship so quickly would demand speeds greater than one or two thousand kilometers per hour. “We’ll be perfectly safe.”
They raced toward what at first appeared to be nothing more than a wall, but as they flew closer, Roche saw it for what it actually was: a giant tube lying on its side across their path, suspended by invisible forces ten meters or more above the rolling hills. It was so thick that its top was obscured by the cloud cover, and for a moment Roche wondered how they were going to get past it—or into it, if this was in fact one of the ducts Nemeth had mentioned.
A moment later the craft swept beneath the massive cylinder and into its shadow. Their speed eased slightly as the air-car rose toward an enormous portal on the underbelly of the tube, easily thirty meters across and hanging open like a slack and lipless mouth. From it issued a cold breeze; not strong, but enough to make Roche shiver.
“An air duct?” she said, hearing a faint susurrus coming from within. “Seems a bit primitive on a ship like this.”
“Believe me,” said Nemeth, “it’s purely for aesthetics.”
Then they were inside—and caught by a tremendous, rushing wind. The air-car lurched violently as it began to accelerate along the tube. Roche gripped her armrests as she was pressed back into her seat and knocked from side to side with every buffeting motion. Beside her, Nemeth laughed at her obvious alarm.
Another air-car—this one a single-passenger model shaped more like an egg with two limp, trailing spines—swept past them, barely missing by a meter. Startled, Roche looked around properly for the first time. Inside, the tube was easily wide enough to hold a hundred air-cars. Lines of lights trickled along the walls; every now and again, larger, brighter patches would rush by, too quick to take in. Other air-cars continued to pass theirs, less quickly than before, but thankfully none came as close as the first one.
“Aesthetics, huh?” she said to Nemeth over the sound of the wind; some sort of field-effect was keeping the worst of the turbulence at bay; otherwise he would never have been able to hear her.
He laughed out loud again. But this time it was with an almost childlike delight: he was enjoying the ride.
“You would’ve loved Palasian System,” she said.
Roche looked around her, concentrating for the first time on the bright patches as they went past. Indeed, now that she looked, she could make out brief impressions of the levels as they flashed by: here, deep purple and icy, there, soft pastels. One of the portals was much larger than the others, and through it she glimpsed angular structures in the distance, across flat, metallic plains; levels devoted to the ship’s working, she supposed.
Clearly Maii had lifted this method of looking at the levels from the way Nemeth moved his eyes.
Roche turned back to Nemeth. “Scenery is all very well,” she said, “but when are we going to talk?”
�
�We can talk now, if you like.” He swiveled in his seat to look at Vischilglin, who regarded him stonily. “Do you think the council would object to us having a little privacy?”
Before the woman could answer, the field-effect protecting the passengers from turbulence clove in two, leaving Roche and Nemeth in a bubble of their own. Absolute silence suddenly pressed against her ears.
The air-car had settled itself into a gentle, rocking motion, and swept along the tube with the other air-cars as though on any conventional road. If Nemeth had brought her along the duct in order to unnerve her, Roche refused to let it.
“I want to talk to you in a frank and open manner,” said Nemeth after a few seconds.
“You’ve displayed little intention of that so far,” said Roche.
“Games. I know.” He dismissed her accusation with the wave of a hand. “The council is a bureaucracy; whether one is working within it or despite it, one is necessarily limited in one’s options by this very fact.”
Roche sighed. “Open and frank, remember?” she said, making no attempt to conceal her annoyance. “Can we just get to the point?”
He sighed, too, and looked away for a moment. Behind him, a white landscape flashed by. “Things are not going well for us here in Sol System,” he said. “In that much, at least, Murnane and I agree. The enemy were here before we even arrived, and have made their presence felt in a thousand ways—sometimes subtle, other times not so subtle. Although there has been something of a lull in the last few days, every hour dozens more ships arrive, and with each ship the chances are high that more of the enemy are coming too. And we are not finding any of them.”
He looked at her, then. “I am being completely and utterly frank about this, Morgan. I hope you realize that. Not even Vischilglin knows the depths of our failure. For all the council’s collective experience and wisdom, for all the technology of groups like the Skehan Heterodox, for all that we have been studying the enemy for four and a half years, we are not even close to solving the problem here. Can you understand how galling that is?”
She didn’t have to think hard about that. She had been banging her head against the problem for less than three months.
“So why not take a chance on me?” she asked. “If you’re so desperate, what have you got to lose?”
“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?”
“Do you have an answer?”
“A kind of answer,” he said. “But it starts with a question.”
He paused. “There are more than just Pristines in this system. Do you know what the Exotics are doing here, along with us?”
“Following the flow, I guess,” she said. “Maybe coming to settle old scores. Naturally they’d be swept up in any regional conflict that might have started among the Pristines. I can see how they would be dragged here along with everyone else.”
He nodded. “It’s certainly a valid assumption. According to your theory, the enemy comes from a time in which the Exotic strands of Humanity did not exist, or at least may not have been so prevalent. Indeed, maybe they are a weapon created by an ancient alliance of all Exotics, in response to the age-old grudge that Pristines have it better than the others simply and unjustly because they are more like the original—although why this alliance would wait so long to wreak its vengeance is somewhat of a mystery. And why would a weapon created by Exotics allow the descendants of its masters to be dragged into such a dispute?”
“There may be only one way to find out,” she said.
“Precisely. Here we come to your plan to wait until the fighting starts and see who doesn’t end up dead at the end of it all, apart from the enemy. If anyone is left standing, they must be guilty. Simple.” He raised a hand as Roche started to protest. “I’m sorry for seeming disrespectful. Your plan is ruthless and, perhaps because of that, likely to be more effective than most of the others bandied about. I simply fear that we will find out the truth only when it’s too late.”
“So what do you suggest?”
He shrugged, palms raised—and for the first time Roche noticed that the little finger on each of his hands was missing. “I told you: your plan is better than any of the others I’ve heard—including my own.” He grimaced. “It’s a hard thing to admit. If ever you doubt my sincerity, please recall this conversation—although I’d be happier if you kept it to yourself, otherwise.”
She allowed herself a half-smile. “I don’t know,” she said. “Blackmail has a certain appeal.”
“A kindred spirit.” His own smile was wide and natural. “Perhaps we can come to terms, after all.”
An air-car going the opposite way rushed past them; Roche gripped her seat until the rocking of their own car settled. When it had, Nemeth went on.
“We thought the lull recently might have something to do with you,” he said. “Your ex-superiors in COE Intelligence have kept us up to date with your movements. Ever since we heard about Cane’s existence, we’ve been quite curious to see what would happen next. Many of us expected the COE to start falling apart as a result. In fact many of us felt that the Commonwealth’s proximity to Sol System, the very focus of everything, would put it under much more pressure than other nations farther out. But apart from that brief fracas with the Dato Bloc, nothing much seems to have happened. It’s almost disappointing.” He flashed his grin at her again before adding: “For some, that is.”
“What does all this have to do with me?” she said, conscious that the ride would be coming to an end soon and wanting some answers before it did.
“You’re an anomaly, Roche. An outlier. You claim to have survived two verifiable encounters with two self-declared clone warriors. For that alone you’re worth observing. And—” He hesitated slightly. “And worth having on our side.”
Roche shook her head. “Why? Because you think I’m lucky or something?” She was desperately trying to make some sense of what he was saying.
“No,” he said. “Nothing to do with luck.” Again the smile, but this time forced and uneasy. “But there is something about you. Something that doesn’t quite add up. And, unlike Murnane, I don’t think it’s wise to turn you away without knowing what that thing is.”
“But Murnane has turned me away,” she said bitterly. “The council has already made its decision.”
“It made a decision,” Nemeth corrected her. “It wasn’t necessarily the right one, and it certainly wasn’t unanimous. It needn’t necessarily be the only one it makes. I happen to know that there is enough support to back up the offer I’m about to make you— if only because in hindsight it may prove wise for the council to be seen as having made the other decision it couldn’t officially make, where everyone could see it. By that I mean that the council has to cover every base it sees open, even though here and now it can’t acknowledge even to itself what it is doing. For posterity’s sake—for the sake of the future itself—every chance must be taken.”
Roche was just managing to keep up. “You’re talking about some covert group within the council?”
“One with its own agenda,” he said, nodding. “Does it surprise you that such a thing might exist?”
Roche shrugged heavily. “Every bureaucracy supports such groups,” she said. “I guess I just didn’t expect one here, that’s all. I mean, we all have the one common enemy, right? We have the same aim.”
‘True,” he said. “But we all work differently to achieve those aims. The council has become concerned with method, whereas the Ulterior concentrates on intention.”
Roche laughed at this. The Ulterior... “And every such group has to have a catchy name, right?”
Nemeth ignored the gibe. “We have no firmly entrenched protocol,” he said. “If we see an opportunity, or even the potential for an opportunity, we will take it. We are less... scrupulous, perhaps, than many of our colleagues. And for that reason, we must remain as our name suggests: behind the scenes.”
Roche regarded him steadily. “And you and your friends in this ‘Ulterio
r’ regard me as some sort of ‘opportunity’? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted the council to believe?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I guess it was.”
“Working for us, you would obtain that goal, Roche. Indirectly. If you fail, of course, the council has no knowledge of you, having turned you away from the one and only official hearing it was obliged to give you.”
“Of course,” said Roche dryly.
“But if it looks as if you might succeed, then you will have the full support of the Ulterior—and ultimately the council itself.”
“And why should I believe anything you’re saying?” she asked him. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”
He dismissed the objection with a shrug. “You don’t,” he said. “But you don’t have many other options right now. And we need each other.”
Roche sighed and, despite the apprehension she was feeling, said: “So what exactly are you offering?”
“A deal,” he answered quickly, and with sudden enthusiasm. “We can’t give you any formal protection or recognition, obviously, but we can give you information. This information has to flow both ways—unconditionally. If you learn anything new, we want to know about it. And if you find anything you think might work, we want to know about that most of all.”
She didn’t need the Box to tell her that she should take the deal. If she couldn’t get the full approval of the council, this might be the next best thing. But she still had her doubts...
“It can’t be that simple,” she said.
“Well, there is something else we would like you to do for us,” he admitted. “But I can’t see how it doesn’t fit in with your plans, anyway.”
Here we go, she thought. “Meaning what exactly?”
“That you’re probably going to want to go buzzing around the system, looking for the enemy, right? Poking your nose in here, seeing what turns up there; waiting for the fight to start so you can see who kills who. Well, that’s exactly what we want you to do, too. Specifically, we want you to see what the Exotics are up to. That’s the one area this damned Pristine council of ours can’t see into properly—and any blind spots in situations like this are dangerous.”
The Dark Imbalance Page 7