by C. J. Ryan
“Uh, Gloria?” he said. “There’s something I have to tell you.” He looked at Petra and said, “I’m sorry, Petra, I meant to tell you first, but as long as we’re here, I think I should just get it over with. I’ve made a decision, and I’m going to accept that job offer on Pelham.”
Petra stared at him and said nothing, but it was clear from her face that Pug’s announcement did not come as a complete surprise to her. Pug looked away from her, pulled his pad from a pocket, and tapped a key on it.
“I’ve just transmitted my formal transfer request to your pad, Gloria. This wasn’t an easy decision for me, and I want you to know that I’ll always be grateful to you for bringing me into OSI in the first place. It’s been a wonderful experience, but this Pelham job is an opportunity I can’t ignore.”
“I understand, Pug,” Gloria said. “I’ll approve the transfer immediately. And I wish you all the best in your new position.”
Both Gloria and Pug turned to look at Petra.
“Petra?” Pug said after an awkward pause. “That offer of an Undersec position on Pelham is still open. Uncle Benedict says it should take three or four months to free up the spot, and if you still want it then, you can come to Pelham. But…there’s something else you should know. Steffany is going to be coming to Pelham.”
Petra’s eyes widened, but before she could say anything, Pug raced ahead. “Uncle Benedict invited her for a visit. You see, he’s her great-uncle, too. Benedict is my mother’s father’s brother, but he’s also married to Steffany’s father’s mother’s sister, so…”
“So you expect me to wait around for three months on Earth while you and Steffany have a high old time on Pelham?”
“Well, I didn’t…”
“That tears it!” Petra’s eyes flashed with righteous anger. “Gloria, can I bunk in here with you?”
“No problem,” Gloria said. “I’ll have them put another bed in Elaine’s room.”
“Great. As soon as I pack up my things…”
“There’s no need for you to do that,” Pug said. “I’ll have the staff collect your things and deliver them here. Petra, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, but I only came to the decision last night and I—”
“Oh, spare me! Just get out of my sight!”
Pug looked around uncertainly. “Uh, Gloria, I can continue working for you as long as you’re here on New Cambridge. I mean, I never intended to leave you shorthanded.”
“Under the circumstances,” Gloria said, “I think it’s best if we terminate your connection with OSI immediately.”
“I understand. Well…uh…look, this doesn’t affect the OSI reception at my parents’ house, of course, so I’ll be seeing you there. We can…well, we can say our farewells then.” Pug looked once more at Petra, then turned and quickly left the room.
Gloria said, “I’m sorry, Petra.”
“Well, I’m not!” Petra insisted. She looked at Gloria and gave a wan smile. “I don’t think I would have been very happy in the Ellison family. Too damn many mother’s father’s uncle’s sisters.”
GLORIA FOUND CORNELL DUBRAY AT THE Convention Center later that morning. He was surrounded by his usual retinue of security guards and aides, but they cleared a path for her as she approached. “Could I have a word with you in private?” she said.
DuBray nodded, and they soon found themselves alone in an empty conference room. “I spoke with Norman last night,” she told him. “He ordered me to discontinue any investigations into your links to the Savoy shipment. Of course, I’ll respect his wishes, but I do have one question for you, and I expect an honest answer. Do you know anything—anything at all—about where those weapons went or where they are now?”
The Quadrant Administrator stared at her for a moment, then offered a bemused smile. “You must have a remarkably low opinion of me, VanDeen.”
Gloria didn’t say anything to that.
“You see me as a villain,” DuBray said. “Understandably so, I suppose. So you assume that I must therefore be villainous in all things, at all times. I’m the Evil Cornell DuBray, so I must be capable of any imaginable form of treachery, treason, or betrayal. I might even know where the missing arms are and remain silent merely to protect myself. PAIN terrorists run riot and slaughter people who work for me, yet I just smile and twirl my mustache like the villainous character in a melodrama that you imagine me to be. Really, that’s quite insulting.”
“So you’re saying that you don’t know anything?”
“What I’m saying, VanDeen, is that I was serving Dexta and the Empire long before you were born. Who are you to question my loyalty?”
“It’s a question that must be raised,” Gloria said. “I know you were linked to that shipment, somehow. Bartholemew couldn’t have gotten it without your help. You must know something about it.”
DuBray turned his back on her, walked a few paces away, then turned around. “You say you spoke to Norman about this? And what did he tell you?”
“Not much. Only that I should let the past remain buried. But those weapons—”
“Are Spirit knows where! If I knew where they were, don’t you think I’d have done something about it by now? Or would that be inconsistent with your image of me as an archvillain?”
Gloria thought about it in silence for several moments and realized that DuBray had a point. She had been so eager to bring him down that she hadn’t considered the possibility that he might be innocent—or, at least, not entirely guilty.
“All right,” Gloria said, “I may have made some unwarranted assumptions about you. But it’s still possible that you could know something that would help us find the weapons, maybe without realizing it. Didn’t Bartholemew say anything about what he was going to do with them?”
DuBray chuckled mirthlessly. “You don’t understand the situation.”
“Then help me to understand it.”
“If Norman didn’t explain it to you, I certainly won’t. All you need to know, VanDeen, is that from my point of view, those weapons vanished as completely as if they had fallen into a black hole. When they started turning up again, I was more surprised than anyone.”
“But they never went to Savoy, did they?”
“Apparently not.”
“They desperately needed those weapons on Savoy,” Gloria said. “They might have made all the difference. I’ve been doing some reading, and—”
“Reading?” DuBray bellowed in evident contempt. “You’ve read a book or two, and now you think you’re an authority on what happened half a century ago? The ignorant arrogance of youth never ceases to amaze me.”
“Are the books wrong?”
“The books are…books! Spirit, VanDeen, I was there! You and the authors of those books were not. You cannot possibly know or understand what happened then. Don’t speak to me about Savoy. You haven’t the right.”
“But I do have a responsibility to find those weapons. They took a shot at me with one of them, you know. That gives me the right to ask you about them.”
“Perhaps it does,” DuBray conceded. “Investigate to your heart’s content. Strategically intervene till the cows come home. But don’t waste your time asking about Savoy. It simply isn’t relevant to your inquiry.”
Gloria nodded. “I’ll accept your word on that, then.”
She started to turn to go, but DuBray stopped her with a look. “I know it may be hard for you to imagine, but we really are on the same side. I want those weapons found even more than you do. Those bastards have been using them in my Quadrant, and they will undoubtedly use them again unless they are stopped. Internal Security is already looking high and low for them, and perhaps your historical inquiries will bear some fruit. I welcome any contribution you can make to the investigation, and I will help you in any way I can. If you have any relevant questions you need to ask me, don’t hesitate.”
Gloria nodded. “Thank you, Administrator DuBray,” she said.
DuBray returned the nod. “Yo
u are very welcome, Ms. VanDeen.”
THE UTILITY CLOSET SEEMED SPACIOUS NOW. IT was amazing how much difference a 50 percent reduction in the population could make. Petra even had an extra console, which came in handy for the work she was doing.
She had pored over the B & Q records and found that the company had owned no fewer than seven ten-thousand-ton freighters in August of 3163. She meticulously checked the logs and cargo manifests of each of them, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Still, the apparent falsification of the records of the sixty-thousand-ton freighter made her suspicious of anything she saw in the records from that period.
She attempted to be logical and systematic. Fact: The weapons existed and had been shipped to New Cambridge—assuming the other records could be trusted. That was a necessary assumption, because if the shipment had never arrived at New Cambridge, then she was wasting her time anyway. Fact: They had been stored, initially at least, in the orbital warehouse of Stavros & Sons. But the relevant records of the defunct Stavros & Sons no longer existed, so it was impossible to tell precisely how long the shipment had remained at New Cambridge. So she made the reasonable assumption that the weapons had been removed no later than the end of 3163. Fact: The weapons had officially been transferred to the custody of B & Q Shipping for transshipment to Savoy. Fact: Gloria’s source said that the weapons had been removed in three shipments.
Therefore: Only B & Q could have removed the weapons from the Stavros warehouse during the specified time frame, and it made sense that they would have used their own ships to do it. So one or more of those ten-thousand-ton freighters owned by B & Q must have done the job. One freighter in three trips, or three freighters in one trip, or some combination that added up to three.
But trips to where?
They had to have gone somewhere. Bartholemew hadn’t simply dumped them in space, because the weapons had shown up again, fifty-five years later. There was a large but finite number of places Bartholemew could have taken them. Using freighters capable of making planetfall, virtually any world in the Empire could have been the destination. But the logs of the seven freighters in question placed a limit on how far away the shipments could have been sent.
Petra made another necessary assumption: that the logs of the freighters could be trusted. Contracts might be falsified, but a vessel’s logs were sacrosanct, or should have been. The information contained in them—hours in Yao Space, light-years traveled—needed to be accurate. Ferguson Distortion Generators and fusion reactors had to be inspected and overhauled at regular intervals. Someone might fudge the destinations and dates that appeared in a log, but it would be foolish—perhaps even suicidal—to tamper with time and distance figures. So hidden in those figures lay the answer to where the weapons had gone.
One more assumption was necessary. She couldn’t prove it, but Petra operated on the assumption that all three shipments had gone to the same place. It seemed unlikely that Bartholemew would have broken up the weapons cache and stored it on three different worlds. If he had, then her investigative strategy wouldn’t work.
But if they had all gone to the same place, and more than one freighter had been used, then a careful examination of the logs of each of the seven freighters could lead to…
Headaches, Petra thought. It all made sense to her, but finding the needles in this particular haystack was going to take a lot of work. If the freighters had gone directly to their secret destination, then immediately returned to New Cambridge, it would have been easy. But she realized that Bartholemew would have covered his tracks. Almost certainly, each freighter would have proceeded from Destination X to one or more additional ports of call before returning to New Cambridge. If they had simply gone to the secret hideaway, then returned, they would have been flying either with empty holds or with cargoes that had originated at Destination X. So they would have gone elsewhere before returning.
Still, the time and distance figures in the logs put limits on how far the freighters could have gone. Petra calculated that the mystery world could have been no more than eighty-five light-years from New Cambridge.
On the second console, Petra called up galactography charts, and was dismayed to discover just how many planets there were in a sphere of space 170 light-years in diameter. There were, it seemed, no less than 146 Empire worlds encompassed by the sphere. But it was worse than that, because that figure included only established, inhabited colonies. The total number of known planets in that volume of space exceeded ten thousand. Conceivably, Bartholemew could have stashed the weapons on some barren rock or methane-shrouded moon.
But, between the ship logs and the galactic atlas, she had a place to start. Slowly but systematically, she fed assumptions into the computer involving journeys from New Cambridge to any two planets—inhabited or otherwise—within the target sphere. The computer quickly kicked out time and distance figures, which she then compared with the numbers in the logs. Any two-legged itineraries that were numerically feasible, she stored in another file for further analysis.
This could take a while, she realized. On the other hand, what else did she have to do with her time?
“AH. MY TAX CROWNS AT WORK.”
Petra looked up and saw Whit Bartholemew at the door of her utility room, grinning.
“What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
Bartholemew shrugged. “I’m not unknown in this city. Getting in was easy enough, but finding you once I was inside took some doing. My word, didn’t they even give you a real office?”
“OSI is not universally popular,” Petra said.
“Figures. The only thing worse than being outside a fascist bureaucracy is being inside one. They eat their young, you know.”
“Look, Whit, I have a ton of work to do, and I don’t really have the time to sit here and listen to you insult Dexta. Why are you here?”
“I thought I might take you to dinner.”
“I’ve already eaten.” Petra glanced at the crusts of the pizza she’d had delivered.
“If you call that eating,” said Bartholemew. “Very well, then, what about a drink? I imagine you could use one after the day you’ve had.”
“You heard, huh?”
Bartholemew nodded solemnly. “Exit Palmer Ellison,” he said. “I like the lad well enough, but nevertheless, I say good riddance—for both of us. You really are better off without him, you know.”
Petra sighed heavily. “Whit, I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Nonsense. Of course you do. You’ve spent all day staring at these consoles, diligently doing your job, and all the while you’ve been thinking of all the things you wish you had said to Pug. Well, you can’t say them to him, but I stand ready to listen in his stead. What kind of friend would I be if I weren’t willing to do that? And as your friend, I insist that you come with me for a drink. I’m much bigger than you are, Petra Nash, and if you won’t come voluntarily, I’m perfectly capable of carrying you out over my shoulder.”
So Petra went out with Bartholemew. He waved away his limo and they strolled along the busy sidewalks of nighttime Central. As they approached the Dexta complex known as Gibraltar, they were herded across the street by harried police and Security personnel.
“I imagine everyone in Central will be happy to see the Quadrant Meeting end,” Petra observed.
“On the contrary. They’ll miss all the money your people have been spending. People will put up with almost any amount of official harassment as long as there’s something in it for them. In any case, blind obeisance to arbitrary authority is the lot of most of humanity. You’ll find more independence and freedom in the average herd of sheep than you will on a city street.”
They came to a sidewalk café that looked good to Petra, but Bartholemew had another destination in mind. He pointed upward toward a lofty skyscraper. “There’s a restaurant up there with a spectacular view of the city.”
“I’m not dressed for a place like that,” Petra protested. She was wearing
jeans and a clinging white pullover top.
“That won’t be a problem,” Bartholemew said, “since I happen to own the restaurant. You know, this is the first time I’ve seen you wearing actual clothes. Very sexy. Makes me want to rip them off.”
“Not tonight, Whit.”
“The night is still young. At least give me a chance to ply you with soft words and strong drink.”
The view from the fortieth-floor restaurant proved to be as spectacular as Bartholemew had promised. From their table, they could see the dark mass of Gibraltar a few blocks away, the variegated architecture of the nearby Old City, and the brightly illuminated vessels plying the harbor. “Central is quite a city,” Petra said as she sipped her white wine.
“So were Sodom and Gomorrah,” Bartholemew said. “And you know what God did to them.”
“Is there anything you don’t hate?” Petra wondered.
Bartholemew thought about it for a moment. “I’m rather fond of my mother,” he said at last. “And I’ve taken quite a shine to you. Beyond that…” He shrugged inconclusively.
“Why?”
“Why do I detest that which is detestable? Why do I loathe the loathsome? I was born and reared in the belly of the beast. Is it so surprising that I would grow to hate it?”
“That’s too easy, Whit,” Petra said. “I was born and reared in a slum, but I don’t hate the Empire that created that slum.”
“You should. But instead of rising up against your oppressors, you joined them. That’s all too common a story. Perhaps if someone had shown you a different path, you might have followed it, instead of the well-worn trail you chose.”
“I’m not sure which bothers me more,” Petra said, “your cynicism or your hypocrisy. If you really believed half the things you say, you’d have gone off somewhere and joined PAIN.”
Bartholemew laughed.
He raised his glass in a toast. “Up the rebels,” he said.
Petra shook her head. “I will never understand rich people. Gloria was the only one I knew, and she always seemed pretty well adjusted. Then I met the Ellisons and discovered what ten generations of inbred arrogance can do to people. And now you, with your ridiculous posing and prosing, damning the establishment while you sip expensive wine in your own restaurant.”