Haze

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Roget turned to his right and continued. LeClub Henois was furnished in fifty-first century—or twenty-fifth century by the western Gregorian calendar—Vietnamese decor, which was, in turn, an offshoot of earlier French colonial. Roget doubted that many knew or cared about that, not after more than a millennium of Federation one-worldism. Those who might care, in the still radioactive and glassy ruins of Trans-Islamia or in the scattered eco-isolates of Afrique, were in no position either to object or to do anything about it.

  Few people looked directly at him as he wound his way through the tables toward the northwest corner. From below the low stage, under the shifting multi-images, some of which were real, and most of which were not, a small combo played, and scents and sounds wafted across the club. Roget winced as bitter lime clashed with pepper cinnamon and oversweet bergamot, amplified by three wavering and atonal chord lines playing through each other.

  As he neared the corner table with the two couples—and the two vacant chairs—he glanced around casually. He didn’t see Sulynn, and that wasn’t good. Yet he hadn’t heard anything from Kapeli.

  Roget slipped into the chair across from Huilam. “Very lively place.”

  “It will do,” replied Huilam. “It’s not authentic in the slightest, but any orbit in a flux. It is amusing, in a degrading sort of way.”

  “Degrading?” Roget raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t imitation the sincerest and noblest form of flattery?”

  “Good imitation is, but that is infrequent. The Sinese merely absorb, without true regard for the subtleties of other cultures, while demanding full respect for all the meaningless subtleties in their own.”

  “That’s been true of all dominant cultures in history,” Roget replied.

  “Except for your own. When the old Americans had power, there was no subtlety at all. That was refreshing at first, until the world realized that the lack of fine distinctions reflected a corresponding lack of depth and an innate contempt for true culture.”

  “That’s what history says, but it’s always written by the winner. Look at Ramses the Great.”

  “All, yes. Part of the longest-lived imperial culture in history, the most stable, and the one with almost no technical and scientific advancement from beginning to end. Your American ancestors redeemed themselves for a time by their scientific advances, many of which they stole but made available to the world. Then, conformity and that contempt for true education stifled even their science. That always happens in empires.”

  “Even the ancient Sinese fell prey to that,” Roget pointed out.

  “But of course. One expects that of empires, without exception. That is why they should not last forever.” Huilam’s lips twisted into a momentary sardonic smile. “You have the entertainment card?”

  The “entertainment card” meant the specs and keys to certain proprietary economic accounts in the Federation Bank of Taiyuan. Theoretically, use of that information, as planned by Huilam and Sulynn, would cripple banking functions, if not disable them permanently, until the entire system’s architecture was restructured and reformulated. It would also allow them short-term access to billions of yuan to fund their “revolution.”

  Roget slipped the thin leather folder onto the table, making certain it was in plain sight of whatever monitors Kuang had arranged. “Both hard-copy and molecular-key. You should be able to enjoy yourselves immensely and most profitably with the subjects appearing there. They’re absolutely without cover. Quite amazing.” Roget smiled, not quite lewdly. “I expected to see Sulynn here.”

  “You just missed her,” said Pryncia, from beside Huilam. “I’m most certain she’ll catch up with you.”

  “She had something to tell you,” added Moriena from across the table.

  Huilam nodded, half-smiling.

  “Payment?” asked Roget.

  “You’ll be paid, just as agreed. We have the proxy-drop.” Huilam lifted his goblet and sipped, as if to dismiss Roget. “Within the day,” Roget emphasized. “Of course.”

  Roget stood. “If you need any more special entertainment, you know how to reach me.” He did not move, letting his greater height emphasize the point.

  “That we do,” Huilam nodded. “We will he in touch.”

  “Until then.” Roget inclined his head, then turned and began to wind his way back through the tables. Once he left the LeClub, he’d have to be most careful. Leaving a drop was one of the most dangerous parts of any operation, and especially of this one, he feared. But what choice did he really have? What real choices had he ever had?

  The doorman didn’t even look in his direction as Roget stepped back out into the moderate warmth of the late summer evening … and under the shifting lights of the promenade. He’d taken less than ten steps, deftly avoiding close contact with anyone, still mulling over Huilam’s point about how empires stifled scientific advances, when he heard a voice.

  “Keir!”

  Roget recognized Sulynn’s voice. Should he ignore her? He’d completed his immediate part of the operation. That would be the safest, but it would also make her more suspicious, and the rest of the team could use more time to round up all the terrvert group.

  He turned slowly to his right, as if trying to locate the caller.

  Sulynn stood alone, a good ten meters away, between one group of young women and another of two couples, her black hair up in a stylish twist.

  As a young man hurried past leaving the space between them open, Sulynn offered an embarrassed smile, then shrugged. Roget saw the glint in her left hand too late. Blackness slammed into him.

  3

  15 MARIS 1811 p. d.

  Roget scanned the controls one last time, then nodded, before triggering the link.

  DropCon, this is three. Checklist complete and green.

  Stet, three. Estimate one seven to release.

  Even through the link, Roget could sense the warmth of Major Zhou. Too bad more of the Federation officers weren’t like the scoutship’s pilot. She was also far and away the best pilot on the WuDing, certainly better than he was, he had to admit.

  DropCon, two here. All green.

  DropCon, four here. Green.

  DropCon, five here. Green and good.

  Waiting, his dropboat in the exterior cradle, Roget nodded as Fierano reported, the last of the five survey operatives, and the only woman. All he could do was wait. The dropboat’s systems wouldn’t kick in until it was clear of the scoutship.

  One five to drop one.

  Roget swallowed. All he could do was wait … and review the drop procedures. He tried not to think about his options after he completed his survey evaluation of Haze—if he completed it. If the landing boat survived the transit of all the objects in the three orbital shells, he could take off and attempt to reach low orbit where a scoutship could retrieve him. Or he could program the boat to climb as far as it could, far enough into or beyond the haze to burst-send his report. Or he could commandeer local transport, assuming any such existed. None of the options were optimal. But, after his last two missions, his situation had been anything but ideal. Not because he had failed, but because he had been expected to fail, and had managed at least limited success. The FSA had been forced to take over governing Khriastos station because of the degree of corruption when all the colonel had really wanted was the removal of Station Administrator Sala-Chung.

  Roget took a long slow breath. In a fashion, all of his independent assignments had ended that way. Was it because the FSA hadn’t wanted success? Or because they’d only defined success in limited terms.

  Roget forced his mind back to the drop. Dropboats, stand by. Standing by.

  Another five minutes passed. Then the scoutship shivered once. Another five minutes passed before the second shiver. Then another interval passed, not quite five minutes.

  Drop three, stand by … ten, nine, eight…

  With the linked one!, Roget was pressed back in the half-cocoon for a moment before weightlessness took over. He swallowed t
o keep the bile in his stomach, rather than let it creep into his throat, then used his implants to link with the dropboat—now fully powered.

  The farscanners showed no ships above the planet—except for the scoutship returning to the WuDing and the five dropboats, spaced far enough apart and with enough difference in course, velocity, and trajectory so that they would not land all that close to each other.

  Roget gave the steering jets a quick squirt to orient the dropboat to the planned courseline.

  “You won’t like the entry.” The colonel’s words went through Roget’s thoughts as he waited for the dropboat to encounter the outer orbital shell. Theoretically, the first shell shouldn’t be too bad, because the scoutship had dropped all the boats on trajectories that would ensure they entered the shell at a velocity only slightly slower than that of the outer level of orbiting objects—whatever they were.

  After that, it was up to the operative and the dropboat’s nav systems and shields … and luck.

  The farscreens showed nothing but the other dropboats… and the grayish haze. Was that haze something totally alien, perhaps even alive? Or was it a form of technology that comprised the planetary defense system? And what lay below it? Were the readings correct in assuming a breathable atmosphere, or was the whole operation a way to remove him and the other FSA agents?

  It couldn’t be the last. Cold as they could be, even the upper-level Federation Mandarins wouldn’t have sent a battlecruiser and its escorts across the stars and dispatched five operatives and dropboats to their death to remove one operative whose attitude had been less than exemplary. Nor would they have forced the FIS and FSA into a semicooperative joint effort.

  Colonel Tian’s nonanswers suggested much more was at stake, and that the Federation regarded the Thomists as far more than an historical curiosity.

  Roget continued to watch the closure with the planet below looming ever closer. All he could do was wait until the outer fringes of the atmosphere began to impact the shields. The screens and systems still registered nothing in any energy spectrum except some reflected light and emissions from the boats.

  Then … what could only be called noise appeared, concentrated in the orbital layers, creating three levels of smokelike spheres. That was how his implants registered the data.

  The dropboat neared the outermost sphere, the one whose shardlike components appeared to orbit from polar south to north, unnatural and implausible as it was. As the dropboat entered that outermost layer, angled to go with the apparent flow, the outside temperature sensors went blank.

  The dropboat seemed to skid sideways, then drop, slewing sideways to the courseline.

  Roget knew that couldn’t happen, but the instruments confirmed what he felt, and the system pulsed the port steering jets. When nothing happened, Roget overrode the controls and then fired them full for an instant. Sluggishly, the dropboat returned to courseline and orientation.

  The dropboat shivered, and a chorus of impacts, like metallic hail, reverberated through the craft. Cabin pressure began to fall, and Roget closed his helmet, letting the direct suit feed take over.

  The EDI flared. Drop one was gone.

  More impacts battered Drop three, and Roget eased the nose down, adding thrust. He’d pay later, but there was too much of a velocity differential between the dropboat and the orbital shards or whatever they were.

  The intensity of the hammering decreased. But even inside his sealed suit, Roget could feel the heat building in the dropboat.

  The hammering vanished, and the screens showed that the dropboat was below the outer orbital layer. They showed nothing except Drop three and the two layers, one below and one above.

  The nav system, as programmed, increased the thrust and began a course correction to bring the dropboat onto a courseline at right angles to the previous heading. Roget watched intently, ready to override again if the dropboat did not complete the heading and orientation change before it entered the second orbital shell.

  Heading, course, orientation, and the smokelike shell all came together at once.

  This time the hammering was louder. Was that because there was some atmosphere or because the dropboat and its shields were being punished more? Roget couldn’t tell. He was just glad when they dropped below the second level. By then he was sweating heavily inside the pressure suit, and he hoped that he didn’t fog the inside of his helmet.

  The third level was worse. By the time the dropboat was clear, the shields had failed, and the craft had no atmospheric integrity. The automatics had dropped offline, inoperative, and Roget was piloting on manual. The dropboat shuddered and shivered.

  Roget eased the dropboat’s nose up fractionally to kill off more speed and decrease the rate of descent. That might bleed off some of the excess heat that was close to cooking him, even within his suit, and the dropboat’s remaining functional systems.

  His entry and descent had to have registered on every planetary tracking system. Yet the screens showed no aircraft, no missiles, and no energy concentrations. Roget concentrated on maintaining control of the systems and holding as much altitude as possible, especially given the ocean directly below. The waters were silver green. He thought the screens had shown small islands, but he was still too high and too fast to try a landing there. Besides, getting off an island might be more than a little difficult, given the failing state of the dropboat.

  Before long, the screens registered a mountainous coastline ahead. In moments the dropboat was approaching a coastal range and passing through twenty thousand meters in a gradual descent. Less than five minutes later, the dropboat had descended to twelve thousand meters and was passing over the tallest of the peaks, less than three thousand meters below.

  Roget’s scans showed that the mountains were the center of a peninsula. To the east water stretched as far as the screens could show. He immediately banked to the north, paralleling the lower hills because of the short distance between where the hills ended and the ocean began.

  With that sharp a turn, the dropboat’s glide ratio began to approximate that of a flying brick hurtling downward toward the forested slopes below. Roget hurried through the landing checklist while scanning the terrain ahead, finally settling on a long brushy area some three klicks ahead.

  When the radalt alerted him at five hundred meters AGL, he eased into a partial flare, using the dropboat’s lifting body form to trade off speed to kill his rate-of-descent—but not enough to stall.

  Less than a hundred meters above ground, the dropboat shivered with a sudden crosswind. Roget corrected, angling the nose to the wind and easing the nose up just a trace.

  The power levels were at less than 7 percent when the dropboat’s tail touched the ground. Roget let the nose drop slowly, and the boat skidded and bounced across the uneven ground. It came to a stop less than a hundred meters from the tall evergreens to the north.

  The farscreens were fading. They showed no one and no large animals anywhere nearby. Given the sonics that had preceded the dropboat, that didn’t exactly surprise Roget. The diagnostics did tell him that the atmosphere composition was T-norm, or close enough that it made little difference. He doubted that the dropboat would be useful for much of anything after the descent and rough landing. Still, he went through the standard shutdown checklist before he unstrapped his bruised and sore figure from the pilot’s couch and eased himself out through the narrow lock hatches, one after the other. Once he was clear of the still-warm hull, he cracked his helmet. He could smell evergreens and charred vegetation. For all that, there were no fires around the craft. That suggested that the area wasn’t all that dry.

  For several moments, Roget stood beside the dropboat. All his implants and systems checked, despite the rough entry. There was one problem. They registered nothing beyond himself and the fading residual energies within the dropboat.

  No emissions. No signals. Nothing. Was there no intelligent life on the planet? Or had all his implants failed, despite the internal telltales
that indicated they were functioning? That couldn’t be. He was getting indications from the dropboat.

  He shrugged.

  One way or another, he had a mission to complete. He needed to retrieve his gear from the sealed locker and get on with it—preferably before any locals showed up. If there were any.

  After a last set of scans of the area around the dropboat, Roget moved quickly, stripping off his pressure suit and helmet, then retrieving his gear and the modest backpack to contain it, and finally locking the boat. If the locks were forced, certain key parts of the controls would melt down. Since the screens and shields had been tried to their limits on the descent, the boat didn’t have enough power to carry Roget more than a few klicks, let alone return to orbit.

  He checked his equipment a last time, then paused, taking a deep breath. The air was heavy and damp and carried a faint scent, somewhere between a sultry perfume and the clean dankness of a virgin forest. He had a feeling that the sea-level atmospheric pressure was higher than T-norm, possibly as much as 10 percent. The oxygen content was a bit higher, and that might offset the slightly higher gravity.

  Finally, he strode into the forest, heading north. There certainly hadn’t been any signs of technology or habitation farther south on the peninsula. He decided against powering up the camouflage capacity engineered into his singlesuit. That burned power, and he saw no reason to drain his limited supply, especially since the background melding capability was only useful for optical detection. Even had he used the camo feature, the last thing he wanted was to be caught in the open. The tall pines, while spaced in a way that suggested a natural and mature landscape, provided enough cover that an attack from something like aircraft or even an advanced flitter would be difficult. If there happened to be a local culture with nanotech capabilities, they wouldn’t need anything that crude to deal with him.

  That was what he hoped.