“If Reilly’s wife proves disappointing as an informant, she’ll still be useful as a hostage.”
ELEVEN
Nivia System: 2709:06:08 Standard
Hal and Dayuki’s flight out went according to the hastily-altered plan: the yacht dropped into normal space several hundred million kilometers from the sanctioned jump zone used by Malone’s students, a calculated risk and serious offense, if anyone noticed, but one Hal was confident it could be explained away as a navigational error if it came to that. Although the yacht’s countermeasures would have prevented the beacon from identifying it, the Fort’s technical geeks weren’t good enough to prevent it from recording the arrival itself and the last thing he wanted was to leave evidence of an irregular visitation. Ships vanished mysteriously all the time and the fewer the clues, the easier it was to close the case.
It took a few minutes for the navigation system to shoot the stars and determine the yacht’s exact location. Dayuki, sitting in the copilot’s position, watched intently while he programmed a course to the training platform. The girl was curious about everything, down to the most mundane detail. It made him a little nervous. There were lots of things to be curious about on a starship and unsupervised exploration could easily lead her into dangerous places.
So far she’d been strictly obedient to the limits he placed on her movement aboard the ship and she’d brought along an immense volume of material downloaded from the Fort’s network to study during the trip. Hopefully it would be a short trip, thanks to the intelligence collected by Tamara Cirilo.
The thought of his scheming cousin’s reaction to his escape made him smile. “I’ll bet Tammy’s having kittens right now,” Hal thought aloud.
“Kittens?” Dayuki asked dubiously. “Giving birth to animals?”
“Panties in a knot,” Hal explained. “Angry. Upset.”
“Her crown is tilted,” the Minzoku girl offered.
“That’s too dignified.”
“You Onjin wallow in vulgarity,” Dayuki chided. “If I said ‘Her crown is up her ass, sideways,’ you would laugh. It does not become you.”
Hal did laugh. “That’s a thought I can live with.”
Within a few hours they entered into range of the platform’s communication package and established a remote connection on the maintenance interface using the authentication Tamara’s people provided. The Fort’s technical staff had compiled a script file that effectively back-doored the platform’s user interface, did its mischief, and purged itself from memory.
The snare was set. All that remained was for his quarry to walk into it.
The yacht jumped again, this time to a random point in space well beyond the Nivian system. Hal composed a short message informing the Fort of the mission’s progress, encrypted it, and activated the yacht’s short-burst hyperlink transceiver, impressing high-energy data packets onto the fabric of space-time itself. One of the permanent hyperlink taps in the Nivian system recognized the addressing on the packets at virtually the same instant and transferred them to a message server until the Fort downloaded them.
The yacht automatically generated another set of packets, querying the same message server for any outgoing data addressed to Hal’s transceiver and gobbled up the packets transmitted in response. The decoded message, as expected, came from his irate cousin and he deleted it after a quick scan to confirm that it held nothing of importance, glad in this instance that the huge amount of energy necessary to tap into hyperspace made real-time communication with a starship the yacht’s size impossible. She would know he’d received it, of course, and his failure to respond would gall her to no end.
He activated the second account, a ghost identity that would cease to exist a few minutes after the yacht stripped off the only message it would ever contain: a random alphanumeric string generated by the training platform, the digital version of a bobber on a fishing line. Hal and Dayuki would jump back to reel in the fish, then clean up and return to Nivia.
There wasn’t much to do in the meantime, and Hal did not look forward to the coming days with any enthusiasm; space flight was not nearly as glamorous and exciting as the commercial carriers would have the general public believe. The comforts and entertainment advertised were nothing more than diversions from the incredible monotony, and once their novelty wore off the monotony was waiting to take up where it left off.
Hal flipped through the charts, tables and instruments painted onto his retinas by the VR visor mechanically, paying no real attention to the contents, which had gone unchanged every day for over two weeks. He believed, perhaps naively, that any significant variation would catch his attention on its own. In fact, he could have programmed in alarms to notify him without the need to actually look at them, but he relied on a strict regimen of exercise and performance checks, meals and carefully rationed leisure time to get him through his frequent journeys, even the ones that lasted weeks. Of course, there had always been a quantifiable end to those trips. The waiting on this voyage was as torturous as staring at a teakettle trying to anticipate the whistle, knowing it had to come sometime, surely any moment.
McKeon’s plan contained a degree of inherent uncertainty. Nothing said Reilly wouldn’t meet with a delay or change his flight plan entirely. “Barring accident,” McKeon said, “he will arrive sometime during this time frame. We’ll just have to wait.”
Easy to say for the guy that isn’t doing the waiting.
Dayuki accepted the interlude with a remarkable serenity. “My heart beats as well here as anywhere,” she said.
Hal envied her simple world. He wondered how she would feel toward him the day she realized that her association with him had destroyed it. He wanted to protect her from that eventual certainty, but short of cloistering her in a rough plank hut on the outskirts of Sin City there wasn’t much he could do. Her exposure to the world of the Onjin in the Fort, and now in space, billions of kilometers away from home, had awakened her to possibilities she’d never imagined. She could never resume her old life even if he took her home that moment.
Dayuki had summed it up best herself as she hovered over a video screen devouring the contents of the ship’s library at an inconceivable pace.
“How much can you possibly remember?” Hal asked.
Dayuki looked up from her screen and smiled. “I remember everything.”
“It must be overwhelming.”
“Sometimes it is so,” Dayuki nodded. She motioned around the expansive cabin, indicating the universe itself with the gesture. “I have lived my life at the bottom of a well, catching glimpses of a tiny patch of sky. Now I know the sky is larger than I ever imagined. I understand little of what I see, but that is as it must be. If I saw the entire sky at once I would no doubt go mad.”
Hal wondered how many like her through human history had lived ignorant lives as goatherds and peasants, oblivious to gifts that would have made them great authors, mathematicians, composers or philosophers had they been born a few centuries later. And then he wondered how many great authors, mathematicians, composers and philosophers would have lived happier lives as ignorant goatherds and peasants.
Dayuki turned back to her terminal and accessed the mass of files she’d downloaded from the Hypernet before departing Nivia. The Minzoku and Japanese languages shared many words in common, but the grammar followed a different set of rules and most idioms were incomprehensible. As badly as Dayuki wanted to learn about the Japanese through their own words, she was better equipped to learn about them from the gaijin.
The Japanese had not always been a united people, she discovered as she delved into the recorded history. Although they reached an ethnic and cultural purity through isolation, protected by the sea and the kamikaze, the divine wind, the feudal warlords that ruled the islands only stopped fighting each other for as long as it took to repel occasional invasions launched by gaijin on the neighboring mainland.
Outside contact was inevitable, given industrialization and exploration
by other nations. The Japanese resisted the gaijin influences even as they embraced the benefits of industry and it was here, Dayuki felt, that they made their mistake.
Materialism soured pride and honor. Technology and isolationism bred arrogance. The Japanese had never been conquered; honor, sword and the warrior’s heart had overcome every foe that challenged them. With guns, airplanes and navies they were invincible! Old enemies fell before them, their people and lands providing labor and raw materials to further the expansion of the Empire.
The gods punished them for their presumption. How else could a people of such honor and superior spirit be defeated by gaijin? Atomic fire burned their cities; gaijin occupied their soil and stripped the Emperor of his godhead. Their victorious adversaries rebuilt their nation for them, memorializing their defeat in perpetuity. They became an economic power on their own virtues but the warrior’s heart was forever chained.
A few Minzoku words lead Dayuki to her second ancestral parent, a peaceful forest-dwelling people called the Mbuti. Apparently not as prominent as the Japanese there was little information to be had regarding them, but what she found suggested a culture that fared even worse, victimized by the bloody wars and greed of the surrounding gaijin.
Surely, Dayuki thought, Den Tun could see the futility of his actions! The Minzoku embodied the inescapable legacy of their forefathers, a legacy of misery and suffering at the hands of the gaijin. Absent a powerful patron, her people faced certain destruction; observation and strict adherence to the Covenant was the only way to ensure their survival and she would defend the Covenant and her people from Den Tun’s perversity no matter what the cost to her own honor or life.
The communications panel chimed for attention, alerting them to a message downloaded during the yacht’s brief scheduled tap into hyperspace. Dayuki sprang to the console before Hal-san could rise. It displayed text in an alphanumeric jumble, but after a few moments the computer identified encryption algorithms and prompted for a password. Dayuki resisted the impulse to enter Hal-san’s password herself, correctly assuming that he would not be pleased to discover that she had both seen and remembered it.
Hal-san sighed when he saw the prompt. The notification that their trap had sprung would not be encrypted, meaning this was a message from the Toride, probably another shrewish communiqué from Lady Cirilo. He allowed the system to decode it and frowned at the result while Dayuki read over his shoulder.
Abort abort abort. Reply soonest and return ASAP.
“Hal-san, what does this mean?”
“It means,” he sighed again, “that something went wrong.”
Saint Anatone Aerospaceport: 2709:06:08 Standard
Bragg stood in the deserted foyer outside the Portmarshal’s office wearing civilian clothes. Terson didn’t recognize him at first and declined to acknowledge him when he did. The officer fell in next to him unfazed. “God help us if it isn’t Terson Reilly, champion of interstellar law and order!”
“I already talked to the Portmarshal,” Terson said tiredly. “I was outside your jurisdiction.”
“I know; they called me as a courtesy.” He rubbed at his nose and looked Terson up and down. “They wouldn’t let you clean up?”
“I would have missed the shuttle. The next one isn’t until sometime tomorrow.”
“And your copilot is where?”
“He’s not married,” Terson sighed. “Anything else you want to know?”
“How’d that kid get all the way out there?”
“The hell should I know?” Terson shrugged. “The little bastard took a swing at me and spent most of the trip back strapped to the bunk with a sock in his mouth. Ask him yourself.”
“Can’t. He bailed out half an hour after you turned him over.”
“They questioned me for three hours!”
“Tribulations of the righteous. There’s your wife.”
Virene waved as she approached from across the concourse, the pearl dangling from a gold chain around her neck flashing in the light. “Captain, you smell like week-old underwear.”
Bragg stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
“I didn’t mean you,” Virene smirked, “but since you mention it—”
“I’m official now,” Terson said. “Jump certified for interstellar travel—aboard small, non-commercial spacecraft, anyway.”
“That’s not all,” Virene added theatrically. The smile on her face couldn’t have gotten any bigger. “They approved our application, Terson. We’re in the queue. We get to have a baby!”
Bragg choked, thumped his chest with his fist, and swallowed. “Really. That’s—ah, wonderful news. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” she said sweetly. “Now if you’ll excuse us, Captain Bragg, I’m going to take my husband home, clean him up, and welcome him back for a couple of hours.”
“Too Much Information,” Bragg grimaced.
The moist, warm air outside felt like a sauna after weeks in the T-108’s drier climate. The parking lot beyond the two rows closest to the entrance was deserted, but Virene, ever the door ding fanatic, had parked her roadster by itself in the center, across four spaces. A weak breeze fluttered a parking ticket on her windshield.
“Damn meter maids,” Virene exclaimed, glaring around the lot on the slim chance of spotting the offender. “Like a million people need to park now!” A hover van cruised across the lot and pulled up centimeters from her driver’s door before settling onto its skirt. Virene stormed ahead, spine stiff with rage at the interloper’s position relative to her beloved sports car. “I parked out here for a reason moron!”
“That’s a nice pearl she’s got,” Bragg noted. “How much did it cost you?”
“What makes you think I bought it?”
“I don’t. Go to the Game Department and get a recreational harvest permit. Take the pearl back in and get it registered so they can give you a provenance. Don’t tell them you were outside the coastal boundary when you found it or you’ll get nailed for poaching.”
Terson stopped and turned to him suspiciously. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you just tried to entrap me.”
Bragg rolled his eyes. “Reilly, you haven’t had a probation violation worth reporting in over six months. Don’t blow it over a pissant environmental regulation!”
Terson didn’t bother to express his view of Nivia’s environmental laws. Bragg had heard it all before. “Thanks for the tip,” he said instead. “I’ll take care of it.”
Virene reached the van and began haranguing the occupants. “Will you at least move so I can get in?” she yelled. The driver had darkened his windows, refusing to acknowledge her. She stalked around the vehicle banging on the side with her fist, face flushed and nose going pale, signaling the onset of the temper for which she was so well known.
The van’s rear doors crashed open, slamming the side of Virene’s car. Her outraged cry choked off in a gasp of surprise when two men leapt out and grabbed her arms. Virene kicked one of them in the knee and wrenched free. The other caught her around the waist and lifted her off the ground, seemingly oblivious to the bloody furrows she raked in his bare arm. “Terson help me!”
The state psychologists, observing the processes in Terson’s mind, would have been pleased to see that civilized influences interrupted his violent instincts, causing him, for a brief moment, to question the wisdom of his inclination to fly into action fist-first.
In short: he hesitated.
The man Virene kicked punched her in the nose. Her head snapped back from the force of the blow, flinging an arc of blood into her assailant’s face, and then lolled forward, limp, a heavy crimson stream staining her blouse.
Terson sprinted toward them with a bellow. The man holding Virene threw her into the van and jumped in. The other drew a sidearm and fired. Nauseous vertigo set the ground rocking under Terson’s feet; he couldn’t get his arms out in time to break his fall and his face skidded along the pavement, sand and gravel grinding into the flesh
of his cheek and temple. He squinted through the light dancing in his eyes, heard the whine of another stun bolt, a door slamming.
The hovervan pulled away, slipping sideways on its lift field as it sped across the parking lot toward the exit. Terson raised himself on his elbows clumsily, trying to get his knees under him to stand, his muscles cooperating only halfheartedly. He staggered to where Bragg lay sprawled on his side, rendered unconscious by the acoustic pulse, and pried the half-drawn pistol from the officer’s convulsed hand.
The van swam in and out of focus, dancing wildly as Terson fought to center it in the gun’s sights. Although he sensed his fine muscle control improving, each second took the vehicle farther away and it reached the street before he could draw a bead on it, straightened out, and accelerated into the darkness.
A surreal silence fell; Terson stood dumbfounded with a gun in his hand aimed at nothing, an unconscious cop at his feet. Virene was gone. His thoughts raced, trying to attribute meaning or context to events that simply had no precedent or connection to reality as he’d understood it minutes before.
Bragg uttered a long, piteous moan.
Something in Terson’s mind gave way like an eggshell shattering under immense pressure; the civilized attitudes and priorities he’d struggled so long to incorporate into his world view collapsed, swept aside by cold, murderous calculation. He stumbled to Virene’s roadster, fumbling with the combination strip under the lip of the driver’s door handle like a drunk until the latch released and the car’s electronics activated.
He fell into the seat and managed to shut the door without crushing any wayward appendages. Sitting down, the nausea wasn’t so bad and his equilibrium improved tenfold. He shoved the gearshift into drive and mashed the accelerator with his foot; the tires smoked as he roared out of the parking lot.
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