by B. V. Larson
“McGill,” she said, “we have matters to discuss in private. Come to my new quarters. Immediately.”
I really wanted a shower, but I’d received orders like everyone else. My eyes, which had been lingering on Lisa as she pouted near the lab equipment, slid over to Turov.
Shrugging, I walked after Turov. I was certain she wanted the key. I wasn’t sure if I was going to give it to her yet or not, but I was the one who’d put this situation into motion so I had to play it out.
Underneath, I was thinking about the plan I’d told everyone I had. Inspiration hadn’t struck me yet, but I figured I would bide my time.
-52-
When I got to Turov’s new quarters and walked inside, she turned to face me.
She gave me that up-down appraisal again. I felt like a bug on a plate. The woman was clever, after all. Could she see through me?
“James McGill….” she said slowly. “You’re my greatest obstacle and my greatest asset. How can you be both at the same time?”
“I’ve heard that one before,” I admitted, “and I’ve never had a good answer.”
She shook her head, bemused.
“We have to get cleaned up,” she said. “We’re disgusting.”
On that point, we were in complete agreement. She walked to the bathroom which adjoined Nagata’s—now Turov’s—spacious living quarters. Without ceremony she removed her garments and tossed them into a chute to be recycled.
A moment later, I heard water running. Looking around, I found a chair but decided not to sit on it. My teleportation suit had been left at the lab, but my uniform was still a sticky mess of squid-stuff. I didn’t want to wreck old man Nagata’s furniture, if only to honor the poor guy’s memory.
The walls were covered with depictions of famous battles from centuries past. I was studying an image of tanks rolling over the yellow wheat fields of Kharkov when I heard the Imperator’s voice again.
“James? Come in here, will you?”
Surprised, I walked cautiously into the bathroom. She was in the shower, but the glass was all steamed-up.
“Uh... what seems to be the problem, sir?”
“My back needs scrubbing. Can you help me with that?”
Now, a man such as myself has a very hard time saying “no” to such invitations. Sure, I knew Galina was a manipulative monster after all, and I’d recently become involved with Lisa. But… there she was—exquisitely youthful and lovely. I knew from recent experience that she was good in bed.
Sighing, I shed my clothes and climbed into the shower. I was washing her back with a cloth within minutes, then her front. It wasn’t long after that before things progressed dramatically to their foregone conclusion.
When we were finished, I lay on the bed beside her, still as wet and naked as a jaybird in a rainstorm.
“Why did that happen?” I asked her seriously.
“You waited until now to ask my motives?”
“Well… I never look a gift-horse in the mouth.”
“As you say, it was a gift, James. You deserved it. You could have tried to get Graves to execute me today. Instead, you saw the light. More importantly, you convinced Graves to follow me again. That’s a trick I know wasn’t easy.”
“Hmm,” I said thoughtfully. I hadn’t seen today’s actions from her point of view. I’d only been trying to save my planet—not Turov. But,… what the hell? A man had to seize life’s benefits now and then.
“Now,” she said, in a soothing tone, “don’t you think it’s time you returned my property?”
“Your what? Oh… you mean the key?”
“Yes James, that’s right,” she said with an air of infinite patience.
“Well yeah, it’s almost time for that. But I need it for one more teleportation trip first.”
She sat up instantly. Her demeanor changed in a flash. I don’t think I’d ever seen a woman go from loving, cooing and playful to spiteful, alley-cat-pissed so fast in my entire life.
“You bastard!” she said, slapping me hard.
I was so surprised that I didn’t even manage to catch her wrist before the slap landed. It stung there, and I blinked at her in shock.
“Look,” I said, “I’m going to give it back. Don’t you even want to know why I need it?”
“No, I don’t need any details. I’m sure you plan to head off into yet another deadly environment. You won’t be happy until you lose my property.”
“Why do you care so much about the key, anyway?” I asked. “Soon, it won’t matter much if our side wins this. You’ll surrender to the squids when they take Central. Then we’ll be under their rule and all this Galactic junk-tech the key opens will be a thing of the past.”
She laughed at me, but with a nasty edge to the laugh. “Idiots: Winslade, you—sometimes even Claver. He thinks he’s some kind of genius, but he dies all the time when his schemes backfire. Why do I surround myself with idiots?”
“Well, I have a theory on that point—”
Wham! She’d slapped me again. This time, I caught her hand before she could pull it back for a third one. I was beginning to get a little pissed off, myself. She’d caught me off-guard twice in a row. Somehow, her delicate, nude body being so close to mine had taken the edge off my reaction time.
“Come on, girl,” I complained, “stop doing that.”
Reluctantly, I let go of her, but every time she moved, I flinched.
“You don’t see the future clearly, not like I do, McGill,” she said after she’d calmed down some. “There are still many examples of critical Galactic tech everywhere on Earth. Even after we end trading with the Core Systems, we’ll still trade with local worlds. Their tech security is handed down by the Galactics and is therefore breakable with the key. The key will be useful for many years to come.”
I nodded, seeing her point. “Okay then, I’ve listened to you. How about you hear me out?”
She curled her lip, but she let me talk.
“Okay, it’s like this,” I began, “you remember the second place I jumped to, the island with the green sea and sky?”
“I saw the vids.”
“You know anything about that world?”
“Not really,” she said. “Claver said it was one of the first of the cephalopod worlds infected by the Wur.”
“Ah… that fits.”
“Fits what?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her bare breasts.
For some reason, that made her realize she was still naked and still within my reach. As she was angry with me, she slid out of bed and into fresh clothes. I was sorry to see her fine shapely figure vanish under a uniform again.
“The second time I went to that planet,” I said, “I took a team. We found a Wur inside the building there, and a Nexus brain-plant in a cavern underneath.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, “I told you I saw the vids and examined the reports since my revival. You were gone for days after the battle in New York, I’ll have you know.”
“Right. Well anyway, there was a lot of equipment in that building. I talked to the brain-plant and before we killed it, I learned it was in communication with others of its kind. Clearly, it was able to talk to them somehow. I think there’s more to that place than meets the eye.”
“What good is such knowledge now?” Galina demanded. “You blew that opportunity. You can’t sue for peace with the Wur at this point. Only utter capitulation will be considered.”
“Yeah… but I’m not looking for the Wur or an opportunity to surrender. I’m looking for Claver. He’s the only one who really knows what the hell is going on. He’s the only one I’ve seen who has real control over these suits. He’s been teleporting wherever he wants to.”
“You’ll never find him there,” she said, snorting at me.
I cocked my head and took a few steps toward her, bringing myself within arm’s reach.
“You know how to find him, don’t you?” I asked. “He even had a preset on the dials that went directly to your
library—but then, you knew that already, didn’t you?”
Her mouth opened in alarm. Slowly turning aside, she put her hands behind her in reaction, leaning back on Nagata’s desk.
“You teleported to my house?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “I didn’t see that discovery in the recent reports. Did someone delete that detail?”
I smiled. “Maybe they did. It wasn’t me, but anyway, Graves knows you’re involved with Claver. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t trust you at all. He only trusts me. Now, what do you think will happen if I turn up dead in your new quarters?”
She glared at me for a moment. I reached for her arm, which had discreetly dug in the desk behind her. She had a needler in that hand, one of the small ones that are shaped like a man’s palm.
Shaking it out of her grasp, I watched it clatter on the floor. I sighed. “You make love to me then you want to kill me?”
“You bring out the best in women.”
“Yeah…” I said. “Hey, about that, don’t tell Lisa about this visit, okay? Or anyone else?”
She looked like she could kill me with her eyes. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I don’t brag about my sexual conquests the way you do.”
“Okay, good. You feel like telling me how to find Claver?”
“Not really.”
I shrugged. “All right. I’ll just have to go teleporting around randomly until I figure it out.”
She made a growling sound in her throat which made me smile. I knew I had her.
After making me swear never to tell anyone how I’d figured it out, she told me how to catch that wily old goat named Claver.
-53-
Catching Claver took a little brainstorming from each of us.
“You mean he’s been operating on Earth for years?” I asked Turov. “All this time, using teleportation suits and the like, to keep one jump ahead of the law?”
“Quite literally, yes,” she said. “Claver’s real talent is for making deals. But he’s not as good at elaborate schemes. They always seem to unravel.”
“Deals like buying contraband tech from deeper in the Galactic Empire and using it out here on the frontier? You mean that kind of deal, right?”
“Exactly. If you think about all his appearances over the years, they’ve begun to seem unlikely, haven’t they?”
“They’ve always seemed that way. Too many coincidences to chalk up to luck.”
“Right. The logic is simple. He’s had to have a way to get around. Something better than a small smuggler’s ship.”
I nodded slowly. Looking back over all the times the rat had surprised me, it was a wonder I hadn’t thought of something like this before.
“So, how do we catch him?” I asked her.
“Ah-ha, now you’ve hit upon the crux of the problem. I don’t know how. He has the power to set these suits to destinations of his choosing, that much I understand. He’s not limited to preset landing spots. But where will he land next? You tell me.”
After thinking about it for a minute, I frowned at Galina.
“That’s all you’ve got?” I demanded. “A hint? I thought you said you knew where he was going to end up next.”
“No I didn’t. Scroll back through your tapper’s audio recordings if you don’t believe me.”
I waved her off, trying to think. She was right about finding Claver. He was critical. No one else knew the things he knew—but how?
“I recall that when he set a trap for me, an ambush,” I said, “he was waiting in your library. Another interesting detail was that when I first met up with him, he was here in this very office, looking for something.”
My eyes scanned the office and landed on the bookshelf. Hadn’t Claver been standing there when I’d found him?
“The key to catching Claver is figuring out where he’ll appear next,” I said. “All I have to do is stake out a spot and wait. The tricky part is knowing where that will be ahead of time. I recall he was interested in these books…”
Turov looked alarmed for an instant, but she quickly recovered, letting her face go slack again.
“Any suggestions?” I asked her.
“No, I’m afraid not. But wherever you’re doing this stake out, it won’t be in here.”
She clearly didn’t like the fact I was thinking of this office as being part of the puzzle. Come to think of it—why had she made such a big fuss about getting Nagata’s office for her own use? I’d figured at first that she’d been living some kind of revenge strategy. I could see how setting up camp here on her dead rival’s territory gave her a thrill. But now, I was wondering if there was more to it than that.
“I’ll have to think about this,” I said, “I’ll go talk to the techs about where more of these teleport destinations might be, and if they can be detected.”
“You do that,” she said, looking relieved. “Make sure you report any further findings back to me.”
“Will do.”
I went for a last kiss goodbye, but she ducked me. At least it wasn’t another slap.
Walking down the passages, I stared outside for a time. The neighboring buildings were filling up with troops. Every rooftop was being fortified. I didn’t have much faith in the untested hog soldiers, but at least they were giving it their best shot. They’d die defending Central in a few short days.
Already, the invading troops had surrounded the city and were tightening up the noose around us. The horizon showed continuous bursts of light, indicating the fighting that was going on sporadically in the surrounding countryside.
“Two days,” a voice said from behind me. “That’s all I’d give them.”
I turned in surprise. It was none other than my skinny-armed commander, Primus Winslade.
“I thought maybe you were dead,” I told him. “Good to see you up and about again, sir.”
“No thanks to you and Graves,” he said. “I was kept on ice for too long. How did you fare in the battle for New York Sector?”
“That wasn’t a battle, it was a slaughter.”
He nodded, stepping to the window and staring down at the streets below.
“You ever wonder why doomed men work harder than anyone else does, despite the fact it’s hopeless?”
“Nope.”
He snorted in amusement. “It’s because they’re self-deluded. They don’t know that they’re doomed—or they won’t allow themselves to know it. They fight on, right until the end, when they finally accept the truth and perish.”
“That’s why you’re up here chatting with me? Because you’ve already accepted your fast-approaching death?”
“Not at all,” he said, “I came to talk to Turov, and you happened to be walking out of her office. For some reason, I’m not surprised.”
“Hey,” I asked as he turned to go, “you know what Claver is looking for? What causes him to lurk around libraries and books?”
He made a mistake then. He flinched. That told me all I needed to know.
I was on him like a stack of bricks one second later. He squawked indignantly.
“Get off me you oaf! What’s the meaning of this? I’ll have you up on charges!”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “The rules have changed. This is the end. Hegemony is going down. All Earth is going down. You stand around looking out windows and sounding like it’s happening to someone else. To me, that means you’ve got an angle.”
“McGill, you’re assaulting a superior officer. That’s a grave error.”
I shook my head. “See this?” I said, pulling out the Galactic Key. “I can erase you with this, Winslade. Turov has considered perming you before, but we didn’t do it. Perhaps now is the time.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re withholding vital information. You’re a traitor, no matter what you told the hogs and Drusus. You’re the smallest man in this rebellion, and I’m making my play against you first.”
Winslade looked very worried. He’d never been a physically brave man. Snotty a
nd arrogant, yes, but not brave.
“I’ll see you in prison for this,” he told me.
“No you won’t. Graves is one step from arresting you and Turov both. The rank and file will follow him, regardless of your ranks. Sometimes things go like that when the chips are down for an army. The most popular officer takes over.”
He looked worried, knowing the truth of my words.
“What do you want to know so badly?” he asked, changing his tune.
“You heard me before, dammit. What’s Claver looking for?”
He glared at me like an angry snake. We’d killed one another a few times in the past, Winslade and I, and that sort of bad blood never clears up completely.
“Scramble your tapper,” he said.
“What?”
He rolled his eyes, and reached into his uniform pocket. I grabbed his hand, expecting that he was pulling out a needler.
But he didn’t. Instead, he had a tiny brick-shaped jammer in his palm. He turned it on, and I knew we’d just transformed into blobs of static for our body-cams and the pin-sized security cameras in the walls.
Letting him stand straight again, but not letting him get out of my reach, I gestured for him to get on with the story.
He smoothed his ruffled feathers and put his nose in the air.
“If you must know, he’s looking for another artifact. He’s spoken of it often—I’m almost surprised that he never told you about it. I suspect he didn’t trust you with the information. Wise, I think now. It would be like trusting a child with a blowtorch.”
“What kind of artifact?” I demanded. “What might be in Nagata’s office or Turov’s library?”
“A book, of course, what else?”
I thought about that then nodded. The story fit. I still had no idea what kind of book we were talking about. After a litany of threats, I didn’t think Winslade knew, either.
“Okay,” I said, “no one will ever get from me where I got this tidbit of information.”
“Unacceptable,” Winslade said sharply. “I want to hear your cover story.”