by Roger Levy
‘Never as far.’ His voice had steadied, but I could feel the suspicion. ‘Never as close to Ligate as that.’
‘You won’t be on your ship, so there’s no risk to you.’
Drame said, ‘Go on.’
‘Ligate won’t be able to resist it. He’ll get there ahead of you, and Belleger will be there ahead of him, waiting.’
He pushed back in his chair. ‘Ligate might resist it,’ he said, slowly. ‘Or he might send a dummy, like last time.’
I tried to put the last time from my mind. ‘You think he will?’
He smiled, considering it. ‘No. He knows I never use dummies. And his dummy failed. He’ll want to kill me face to face.’
‘I think so, too. And he knows you take risks.’ I returned his smile, but carefully, adding, ‘You’re even considering this one.’
His expression faded. ‘Still, he might not bite. What if he doesn’t?’
‘We have your spies to tell us. But I think he’ll bite. I think it’s in his nature.’
‘Yes,’ Drame said with abrupt certainty. ‘It is.’
‘And if, after all, he doesn’t head for the trap, we leak that you’re aborting your trip and giving up on the area’s businesses altogether. And you do that; you let it go completely. By then, Belleger and his team will be in place, remember. As war gets closer, Ligate will be developing a long focus. He’ll forget what’s close to home.’
‘And Belleger will be sitting behind his front line,’ Drame whispered, half to himself.
‘Exactly –’
‘– And goodbye, Spetkin Ligate.’ Drame laughed, an extraordinary sound. I had never heard him laugh like that before. ‘You are more than your father, Alef. Oh, you are so very much more.’ The joy in his face was like some kind of lust momentarily satisfied. I had a glimpse, in that expression, of what drove him. I thought sharply at that moment of my mother, of what she might think to hear her husman and son spoken of in that way, and what I saw on her face was despair.
I shook away that image and said, ‘It could fail.’
‘Oh, no. I see Spetkin Ligate as well as I see myself.’ Drame turned his face to the window. I couldn’t tell if he was staring at the stars or at himself. He said, ‘Ligate and I know each other so perfectly that his death will be in every mirror I ever look into.’
He inspected his fist as if it were made of gold. ‘No. It won’t fail, Alef.’
* * *
SigEv 24 The mission
A few weeks passed. Now that I was aware of Ligate’s intentions, his preparations were easier to identify. I never made any actual enquiries and made sure no one else did, but I monitored the movements of his transport fleets, noted the additional fuel he bought and where he stockpiled it, and recorded the weaponry his companies bought as middlemen but failed to find a seller for. I noted where he stored it. I began to be able to guess where Ligate himself might be, and then, as my data accumulated, I began to be able to predict his movements.
In order not to alert Ligate, we had to send our people to their deaths, but we did so judiciously. I was careful to display mistakes not only in the Eden String but elsewhere too. Everyone knew Solaman was ill, and I let them think his replacement was proving inadequate.
Ligate grew more and more confident.
Belleger was not keen on my plan. He called it our alpha option, but I knew he was prepared for my plan to be his beta.
Belleger and I considered options for a large-scale physical response in the event that my plan failed. His military strategies were impressive and detailed. It was strange to see the unsaid planet’s space mapped at all, let alone as a solid barrier. Not for the first time, I wondered how they lived. I went over the plans with Belleger, adjusting them where necessary to facilitate supply and other problems. I also made plans to adjust Drame’s business structures in preparation for war. No action was taken, nothing discussed or documented, but I readied myself to free money and call in debts of allegiance.
The situation was not yet as bad as I had initially feared. While Ligate had already built up considerable reserves of transport and weaponry, at this point he had far less infrastructure than he’d need to mount an overwhelming attack that might carry him swiftly here to Peco. If it started now, the most likely outcome would be a huge initial loss on our part, followed by a slow attritional battle from which we would be slightly more likely to emerge victorious after the forced involvement of neutral planets. Ligate’s real hope would be that his primary surge would be sufficient to gain sudden victory. Right now, he had a forty-eight per cent chance of this succeeding, but I was sure I’d be able to predict the launch of his attack with a few days’ notice, and that would cut a few per cent off the probability. And while Ligate waited and prepared, we’d soon have Belleger in place.
It was a risk, of course: in order to give Belleger a chance of reaching his destination in secret and assassinating Ligate, we had to give Ligate more time to prepare. And Belleger might fail.
There was a brief exchange of views between Drame and Belleger. The soldier didn’t want to lead the assassination team in person. He felt he was needed here, preparing for the beta option. Drame said it had to be Belleger leading the kill team. That way, there were only three of us, Drame, Belleger and myself, who knew precisely what was happening. And Drame trusted Belleger.
In the end, Belleger agreed. He could see the beauty of my plan, that Ligate would imagine he couldn’t lose, that there was little risk and huge advantage in his leaving the security of Vegaschrist.
Belleger was a professional commander of soldiers, and what he dealt in were not deaths but statistics. He and I were not so very different. He and his three-man team quietly departed Peco. Only Belleger knew precisely where they were going. Even I and Ethan Drame were unaware of the detail.
We waited two weeks for Belleger to be in place, then prepared for Drame’s ‘departure’. I began to organise the logistics of it on The Floor, stating the destination but not the passenger’s name. It was clear enough that such security could only mean that it was Ethan Drame.
Drame’s spies reported no leak reaching Ligate. I went on to arrange Drame’s fastship along with a fiercely armed escort that Belleger himself had assembled, and I organised security on the ferry station.
After five days, coded word came back from Drame’s spies that Ligate was aware of Drame’s trip and was making his own preparations.
Drame and I were jubilant.
On the day of his ‘departure’, a small, armed convoy left the building as the sun rose, sweeping away into the pale sky. Even I didn’t know how or at what point Drame was smuggled secretly onto it and then – far more secretly – off it again. Everyone was told he was uncontactable. I carried on working on The Floor, as usual, where everything was a little subdued. This was partly because Drame wasn’t around and partly because Madelene wasn’t either.
Madelene. There were, of course, not three, but four of us who knew.
Nineteen
TALLEN
There was nothing in the anteroom but a high green counter. As Tallen came through the door, a tinted glass safety screen slid up from the front of the counter to meet the ceiling, barring the secretary from him.
‘I’m here to see Veale,’ Tallen said. He glanced at the notices. RONEN – ARE YOU READY FOR THE ULTIMATE TEST?
The man behind the grey glass looked down. ‘You’re Tallen?’
‘Yes.’
‘I heard you looked bad, but not this bad. Go through.’
The room wasn’t anything like Hoob’s office. It looked like a cross between a medician’s surgery and a physics laboratory. The man surveying him from behind a dull grey metal desk wasn’t anything like Hoob either. He was short and fat-faced, his hands plump, fingers nailbitten.
‘I’m Doctor Veale, Mr Tallen. Director Hoob’s cleared you through to me, which usually means you’re effectively a Ronen employee. But not always.’ Veale scribbled something, then looked up at Tallen
and said, ‘I’ll take the blade in your right palm, please, and the other one in your pocket. Thank you. Do you feel anxious without them?’
‘No. I adapt.’
Veale closed the blades into a drawer and said, ‘We like that, Mr Tallen. We can also adapt.’ He wiped a slick of hair from his forehead. There was something shadowy at the edge of the high hairline that his palm bumped over. Tallen wondered whether it was tech or tumour.
‘I understand you’ve got some implants,’ Veale said. ‘I’ll need to check there’s nothing untoward been slipped inside you. Sit, would you?’
Veale came round the desk and held a scanner up to Tallen’s eyes. ‘Look at the light, please. Thank you. And now the other eye. Good.’
He indicated a bank of screenery and said, ‘Follow what happens carefully. Say anything you feel like saying, please, at any time. Ignore me.’
Veale’s voice was so empty of emphasis that the man himself seemed to have disappeared from the room. Tallen concentrated on the main screenery, which was split by a thick horizontal line. After a moment, the line swayed and separated into two lines, one travelling up and one down, so that he had to choose which to follow. He followed the upper. This also split in two.
Veale’s voice continued. ‘You’ll be remotejacked into the rig’s putery. No, don’t look at me. I don’t like your implants, Mr Tallen. Hoob does, but he’s thinking of his budget.’
‘I have no motive –’
‘Your implants may have some element of recording or memory function. I’m checking they’re no more than they seem and that they aren’t pre-loaded. I’m going to take you through a series of repeats and prompts to check your reactions. See how you react and how much you assimilate, consciously, unconsciously and maybe otherwise.’
Tallen grew aware of his eyes flicking up and down, from line to line. Had the line split this way a moment ago? Had he then looked at the upper or the lower? ‘Why would you tell me that while I’m doing it?’ He took his eye from the line, focused on a blank area. Was he anticipating something? The blank area remained empty. He felt hot. ‘You want me to screw it up. You want me out. Is that it?’
‘If you’re tainted, yes, Mr Tallen. Are you tainted?’
There were words on the lower screen. Tallen’s attention went straight to them.
IGNORE ANY WORDS. JUST CONCENTRATE ON THE LINES
He went back to the lines, aware of the words fading and returning at the periphery of his vision. He couldn’t prevent himself from glancing at them again.
DO NOT READ THIS OR WHAT FOLLOWS
‘This is stupid, Veale. You’re making me fail.’
‘Keep going, Mr Tallen. Now, everything I tell you in here is confidential. It will be scrubbed from your memory should you fail the assessment. You may lose other brain function along with it. If necessary, I will also disable your implants. Do you know how we get to the core? How we process it?’
The lines changed colour, from black to blue and yellow. Tallen said, ‘Do I need to?’ The colours switched round. Tallen stuck with blue.
‘For practical purposes, no. For psychological, yes. As you know, there are reservoirs of gas beneath the sea floor. At the base of these reservoirs is often a stratum of rheotite. Have you heard of rheotite?’
‘Everyone’s heard of rheotite, Veale.’
THE YELLOW LINE REPRESENTS RHEOTITE. DO NOT FOLLOW RHEOTITE
The line he was following disappeared. He flicked his eyes to the other line, which seemed to elude him, jumping and weaving. He said, ‘What do you want from me?’
‘Reactions. Do you know more than I might expect, or less? Tell me, are the lines on repeat-patterns? Are you following them identically at each repeat? Tell me about rheotite.’
‘The hell with you. Rheotite’s peculiar to Bleak. It’s a thermal insulator. It’s used to line furnace walls. Firefighters have suits of rheotite alloys. The newest spaceship engines rely on it.’
FOLLOW THE BLUE LINE
‘Indeed, Mr Tallen. The thermal conductivity of rheotite is extraordinarily low. Rheotite is the reason why a cool reservoir of gas, barely beneath the sea floor, can be a matter of a hundred metres from liquid core. A temperature difference of about seven thousand degrees. Follow the line, Mr Tallen. Am I telling you something you ought already to know? Did you know this?’
YOU ARE NOT FOLLOWING THE CORRECT LINE
‘Do you follow me, Mr Tallen?’
Veale’s monotone seemed to have merged with the words on the screenery.
REMEMBER TO IGNORE THE WRITING
‘Go to hell.’ The line became seven threads, crossing and swelling at random. Tallen let his eyes lose their focus.
‘What about this? The floor of a gas reservoir is often very close to the upper boundary of an upflux of core. The presence of rheotite is diagnostic of this.’
Tallen couldn’t remember whether he’d known any of this.
‘What we’ve found is that if we drill through a gas reservoir and find rheotite, we will almost certainly go on to access core.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous, once the rheotite is penetrated?’
‘Don’t you know, Mr Tallen?’
YOU KNOW, DON’T YOU?
‘No.’
‘Really? The core would cool very rapidly and self-seal. The problem is actually not so much that the core would flood out, as that it would cool swiftly in the reservoir cavity to leave a thick and impenetrable mantle. Solid core is not what we want.’
‘Then why doesn’t that happen when you penetrate the rheotite with your drill?’
‘Because we line our casings with rheotite.’ Veale leaned forward. ‘Core is our aim, but rheotite is the key. The pipes still occasionally blow.’
‘But surely the temperature drop when they blow simply makes them set solid, like you just said.’
‘Not instantly, Mr Tallen. There’s a significant discharge of back pressure before this happens. Dense, superheated material at high velocity. In a gas reservoir, it usually gets absorbed. Not in a casing. It rarely happens, though. If it should happen, there’s nothing you can do. You’d be dead and the rig would cease to exist. In an extreme case, depending on where along its length the pipe blows, the sea would be vaporised in the area. We have satellite images of such an event. A localised, point-focused inrushing tidal wave, like a plug being pulled. I won’t show you. What Hoob impressed you with was nothing to this. The coriolis effect was interesting.’
Tallen followed the line. Just the one, now, and flickering black to green along its length.
‘So. The core fills the tanks – rheotite-lined – and is processed for temperature stability. The process is designed to be efficient. Should we have a problem with the tank, there are emergency disconnect systems.’
‘Don’t the tanks change the rig’s stability once they start to fill?’
‘The tanks are initially filled with a special mud, an inert material precisely as dense as core. As the core fills the tank, it displaces the mud to the sea bed. The stability of the rig never changes. Once the rig is running, the fresh core displaces the processed material. This is, of course, before the destabilising effect of the sea is taken into account.’
‘And what happens to the processed core?’
‘It’s piped back along the sea bed to shore-based shipping plants. Contrary to common knowledge, it’s never used to power the rigs. It would be too dangerous to release exposed core. Are you going to ask me how we power the rigs, or do you know?’
There were words somewhere on the screen. Tallen looked away from them. There was an image of snow in his mind. Snow and… It was gone.
He said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’
‘I’ll remind you. When we take core through the reservoir, it comes up with a gas cap. The gas is diverted and used to power the rig and all the processes. It’s an elegant system, no waste. That’s how and why rigs are self-sufficient. Except for food, but there’s only one human to cater for.’
>
The screenery went abruptly grey.
‘You can relax, now, Mr Tallen.’
‘Is that it?’
‘I’ll tell you when that is. You know what can go wrong on a rig?’
‘Remotejack failure?’
‘Secondarily, yes. Try again.’
‘Rig hardware failure.’
‘Secondarily. Try again.’
‘Overwhelming weather. Drill fault.’
‘All secondarily. Human error is the main primary problem. Mood, Mr Tallen. You get depressed, you don’t think so efficiently. That’s no good to us. We need stable people on rigs, and we need to keep them stable. We favoured the high-functioning autistic spectrum personality, but some couldn’t sift the minor from the major, couldn’t prioritise effectively.’
‘You put someone alone on a rig for five years and more, how do they not get mood swings?’
‘There are two specialised humechs on the rig. These humechs aren’t just the rig’s fault gauges. They’re for you, too. They are loaded with theraputery, and will monitor and assess your neurological state. They will examine your mood and correct you.’
‘How do they do that?’
‘If you get to the rig, you’ll find out.’ Veale sat down. ‘This is a closed room, Tallen. That means it’s entirely private and unmonitored.’ He stretched out his arms and yawned. The sudden modulation in his voice surprised Tallen. ‘Nearly done. Listen to me. Everything isn’t quite as I’ve told you. You still may not get to a rig, but you can’t get out of Ronen now.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘No.’ Veale linked his hands behind his head. ‘You aren’t typical, Mr Tallen. Ronen have taken you, but I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know why you want to be, and I don’t know why Hoob’s let you get through to me. I know about the suicide impulse. I can’t work that out.’
‘Nor could the people who left me with it.’
‘You know how long most people last on a rig?’
‘If they survive their first tour, they don’t ask to go back, do they? They have enough money.’