Hal clenched his teeth. Both Sorenson and Den Tun would have had their way eventually through the natural course of events—not that either of them would have lived to learn of it—but their impatient scheming had damaged Hal’s credibility within the Family and jeopardized the Old Lady’s ability to maintain her office. It was even possible that compromising the Fort’s network had played a role in his father’s assassination, assuming that certain elements within the Family might have discovered Sorenson’s role in the Onjin’s operation and penetrated his security.
“Where,” Hal asked carefully, doing his best to hold his temper, “is Den Tun’s courier?”
“I really haven’t the slightest idea,” Sorenson replied with a shrug.
“I’m not playing games, Sorenson.” Dayuki applied the maki suru at Hal’s signal; McKeon and Tamara tipped the chair forward. Philip Sorenson splashed into the pool and bobbed to the surface face-down.
“Philip!” Sorenson’s snifter of three-century-old whisky shattered on the floor as he bolted toward his son. McKeon’s men seized his arms just short of the edge. “You’ve killed him!”
“Not if he holds his breath,” Hal said. “He’s got thirty seconds or so if he stays calm.”
The man’s face twisted in anguish. “Somewhere along the coast in the Great Preserve!” he cried. “I have people waiting, but until they hear from the Minzoku I don’t know exactly when or where!”
“The submarine carrying Den Tun’s courier will put him ashore in the Great Preserve?” Hal clarified.
“Yes, yes! I’ll inform you the moment I know, just get him out!”
“I think that’s all I need,” Hal growled as he raised his arm and put a needle beam through the back of Sorenson’s head. The man’s skull vented its contents through his eye sockets, spraying chum across the surface of the pool. His body fell into the pool next to his son. Bubbles exploded from around Philip Sorenson’s head. Spasms shook his body as he sucked in water, lost buoyancy, and sank.
“You shouldn’t have done that!” Tamara gasped.
“The gaijin betrayed Hal-san,” Dayuki declared approvingly.
“He controlled most of our supply line!” Tamara exclaimed. “He may have arranged to disclose what he knew about us if he died!”
“Then you’d better arrange to get someone in here to find out,” Hal replied. “In the meantime, we know right about where Reilly is going to be in a couple of hours and we need to get there before Sorenson’s people pick him up.”
Hal slugged down the last of his whiskey and tossed the glass in after the bodies.
TWENTY
Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:18 Standard
The Minzoku sailors did not bother to blindfold Terson at the egress ladder—it was pitch black outside and cold as an icebox. His borrowed clothing offered no barrier to the incessant coastal breeze and the air was heavy with the ominous promise of worse to come. Lineman and Boathook helped him into a waiting inflatable raft. The flat-bottomed little craft rode the swell of each wave as its electric motor propelled it across the water, adding nausea to Terson’s discomfort.
They’d taken Terson back to the submarine after a wait of mere hours. Upon reaching the submarine’s destination—a detail Den Tun refused to reveal—Terson would turn over the old man’s evidence to someone who would ferry him to “sympathetic gaijin.”
It seemed unlikely that the Minzoku or their sympathizers could hatch a feasible scheme to get him off-world in such a short period of time, and he suspected that the Minzoku were under pressure to get the transfer underway as soon as possible, leaving the responsibility of arrangements to their mysterious contact.
Terson wanted an explicit statement to that effect, but Den Tun made it clear that he was not privileged to details beyond those necessary to perform his task, answering his demand for more substantive information with an offer to release him immediately and point him in the direction of the nearest outlaw gaijin colony. If not for what he’d already seen and heard Terson might have accepted the offer, but his practiced cynicism could not ignore the probability of a bullet to the head—some irony, there—within his first ten steps.
He had no choice but to accept Den Tun’s refusal to offer detailed assurances as evidence that he had none to give. At least he proved reliable in one respect: he turned over the documents and small possessions from the hydrojet’s strongbox in their entirety and provided Terson with a smuggler’s belt in which to carry them.
He spent the trip back no less a prisoner than before but moderately more comfortable.
The Minzoku sailors slowed as the sound of surf grew louder. Lineman probed ahead with a pole and Boathook steered carefully, correcting at his pilot’s direction. Then they were among the low breakers and Terson could just make out the shore. A beach of brilliant white sand stretched for a quarter of a kilometer inland from the high tide mark, ending abruptly where the forest sprang up like a defensive wall. The two sailors dragged the raft onto the pebbly shore and turned to launch it again the moment Terson stepped out.
“Wait a minute!” Terson exclaimed. “There’s no one here!”
The men paused. Boathook gave him a gentle push in the direction of the trees. “Yugo now,” he said thickly, then scrambled into the raft. Terson choked off the urge to call out again as they vanished into the darkness. They’d followed their orders; the gaijin was someone else’s problem now.
He headed up the beach seeking shelter for the night. The sand crunched under his feet and a chill spread up his ankles. The shore wasn’t covered with sand, he realized. It was snow!
The sky tore open at the revelation, releasing its burden of moisture in thick, wet clumps of snow. Terson continued on to discover that the shore’s smooth upward slope was an illusion produced by snow suspended atop bushy shrubs. He waded into the mess with a drowning sensation as the undergrowth deepened, dumping slush on him as he thrashed onward. The spindly, interwoven twigs compressed into a nearly impenetrable mat before him, dragging him to a halt several times before he finally crashed through to the other side, emerging wet, cold and shivering.
A beam of light stung his eyes, startling him. “You were supposed to wait on the beach,” stated a reproachful but strangely familiar voice as Terson held up a hand to shield himself.
“Get that thing out of my face!” he growled.
The beam dropped to the ground. “You were supposed to wait,” the voice reiterated. “I almost lost you.”
Again, the feeling that he should know the name behind the voice. Terson made out the form of his surly contact as the dazzle faded from his eyes—tall and bulky in cold-weather clothing, face obscured by a parka hood. “Why weren’t you there to meet me?” Terson demanded.
The figure gestured about with his hands, as if the answer were obvious. “It’s snowing,” he said with a dry chuckle, the final clue to the speaker’s unlikely identity.
“So what got you the shit detail, Zarn?”
The light shot back to Terson’s face. “What the hell are you doing here?” Vondelis exclaimed.
“Flirting with hypothermia,” Terson replied through chattering teeth.
Zarn removed his parka and threw it around Terson’s shoulders, exposing a handgun strapped under his right arm, comforting evidence that he hadn’t come unprepared. “I’ve got transport nearby,” he said. “You can warm up and tell me what the hell’s going on.”
Zarn’s flashlight beam lanced through the forest, illuminating the surrounding trees in a ghostly backwash. Snowflakes that found their way through occasional breaks in the thick canopy overhead drifted down in glistening columns, collecting in small piles on the ground below. Zarn avoided stepping in them and Terson followed suite, unsure if they represented some local hazard or if it was merely an attempt to limit obvious tracks. Fifty or sixty meters back the trees gave way to a meadow. The men tramped through the chilling fluff to a two-seat aircar blanketed with several centimeters of new snow.
�
��Get those wet clothes off,” Zarn ordered. Terson complied and stood shivering in his underwear while Zarn opened the aircraft’s cargo hatch and pulled out a bundle that disgorged an insulated one-piece coverall, boots and mittens. None of it fit well, even after adjusting the straps and draw-strings. It was just as cold as the cargo space, but at least it was dry and presented a barrier to the wind. A hard, heavy lump in a pouch at the right hip turned out to be a power cell. Filaments in the fabric began to heat seconds after Zarn showed him how to turn it on. Terson climbed into the aircar’s rear seat and cupped his leaden hands around a heat vent.
Zarn cleared the snow from the front windscreen, climbed in and pulled the gull-wing hatch closed with a solid thump. “So, Reilly,” he said conversationally, “what brings you out tonight?”
“What did they tell you?” Terson asked.
“Not much,” Zarn replied. “The boss said to fly here and wait for somebody to show up. He said you’d have something for me, and I’m supposed to give you this.” He handed a sealed packet over his shoulder. “Then I drop you off at God’s Saucer and head back to camp.”
Terson broke the seal and looked inside to find a set of Nivian ID with his picture but someone else’s name and a bearer instrument for ten thousand euros. Zarn cleared his throat and snapped his fingers.
Terson handed over Den Tun’s package. Zarn’s ignorance, if genuine, made him nothing but a mule. Whether that meant the information was less significant than the old man claimed, or the risk of transferring it too great to jeopardize someone more informed, it made no sense to endanger his friend with knowledge he didn’t already possess.
“My advice,” he said as he stuffed the new items into the smuggler’s belt, “is to do what they told you and forget you saw me.”
“I figured as much,” Zarn sighed.
“What’s this God’s Saucer you’re taking me to?” he asked.
“A big industrial spaceport about eight hundred kilometers north of Ipswitch. I grew up there.”
Terson wasn’t aware of anything north of Ipswitch. “I never heard of it,” he noted suspiciously.
“It’s our dirty little secret,” Zarn chuckled. “Did you ever wonder how Nivia generates enough income to support the infrastructure down south?” Despite the draconian restrictions, Terson had always assumed that Nivia derived its income from food exports. Zarn shook his head. “God’s Saucer sits on top of a big reserve of petroleum. It was too far into development and generating too much income to abandon back when the Southies went all crazy with environmentalism.
“We were already exporting a hundred times more than we used, so the Legislature promised not to expand it. It already had a spaceport, so they never bothered to connect it to Ipswitch and Saint Anatone by road. We pretty much stay up here, and the Southies pretty much stay down there. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s like being on another planet. I’m surprised they settled you in Saint Anatone instead of up here.”
“Saint Anatone’s got the courts,” Terson guessed.
“I suppose. Take some time to look around; I think you’ll like it.” He applied power to the four ducted fans mounted fore and aft. Vectored thrust blasted snow back into the air and the car rose quickly. Terson tugged the harness over his shoulders as the car accelerated, experiencing the universal anxiety of a pilot reduced to the status of passenger as wind buffeted the airframe.
Terson rubbed a circle in the fog of moisture clinging to the inside of the windows to find that they were just meters above the treetops, a mistake common among those who assumed lower was safer. “Get some altitude!” Terson exclaimed. “A wind-shear will put us in the ground!”
“Sit back and shut up,” Zarn quipped. “I know what I’m doing.” The temperature dropped rapidly as they flew inland. The strength of the storm increased as higher elevations ahead blocked the front’s progress. The atmosphere dumped more moisture in order to rise and what started as wet snowfall on the coast threatened to transform into a roaring blizzard. Despite Terson’s anxiety, the car and its pilot appeared capable of handling it. Eventually his eyelids grew heavy and his head began to nod.
A flash of light bright enough to sting his eyes through closed lids jarred him awake. He straightened up in his seat to question Zarn, but a deafening boom and simultaneous concussion struck the car before he formed the words and all he could do was brace himself while the car spun like a leaf in a hurricane. Zarn’s curses competed with the howl of the fans as he fought to regain control.
Branches beat against the fuselage like drumsticks as the car lost altitude. A glancing blow wrenched at Terson’s straps; the canopy blew out over his head, showering him with fragments of windscreen and tree bark. The car caromed off another tree, snapping it with a crack, then plowed into the ground. Snow exploded through the shattered windows as the car slid across the ground. The safeties finally blew, silencing the fans’ tortured rattle and plunging him into a sudden, eerie silence broken a moment later by the distant rumble of a sonic boom.
He knew then that the light that woke him came from the thrusters of a large aircraft traveling well above mach. The shock wave had proven as effective as weapons fire against the light aircar. Fortunately, the speed of the assault had carried the attacking aircraft several kilometers past its quarry, offering a head start that Terson and Zarn couldn’t afford to piss away.
Terson pushed out clods of heavy, packed snow until he found the door release; once open it took only minutes to completely extricate himself. He hadn’t heard so much as a groan from Zarn and Terson made his way forward to find his worst fears confirmed: the front of the car had taken the brunt of the impacts and the entire right side of the fuselage was missing. The damage had compromised Zarn’s harness anchors, partially ejecting him from the cockpit to be battered to death by the trees.
Terson went to his knees next to the wreckage of his friend’s body—the misfortune clinging to him was intent on destroying everyone around him while leaving him unscathed. A ragged scream of rage and frustration tore at his throat until it drove the last trace of breath from his lungs and he collapsed against the side of the car.
Something in the dark void responded with a predatory yowl.
Terson’s sense of self preservation prodded him to take action to defend himself, but he resisted. What good was his survival if it only doomed those close to him? Wouldn’t surrendering to the wildlife or the elements be more responsible than living only to cause someone else’s death? With that thought came the realization that there was no one else. Zarn’s death removed the last person from the face of the planet that Terson even remotely gave a damn about.
The faint hum of repellers rose above the rustle of branches. A spotbeam illuminated a haze of fine snowflakes in the air as it swept back and forth some distance away. Whoever knocked the aircar out of the sky was returning to check their handiwork. Terson climbed to his feet with a burst of adrenaline singing in his veins.
The possibility that Den Tun or his mysterious gaijin planned to silence Terson permanently after he did their bidding was always in the back of his mind, but he doubted that they would attempt it until after securing custody of the old man’s package. An EPEA patrol would certainly attempt to take out the aircar, but would have employed gunfire or missiles to do so, not a method as dubious as a sonic boom.
The obvious remaining suspects were Den Tun’s Onjin, who cared nothing for the aircar’s passengers but had sufficient motivation to preserve the information it carried; the Onjin, who murdered Virene and hounded Terson beyond the boundaries of civilization. Terson welcomed the chance to confront them on his own terms. They might kill him in the end, but at the very least he would die knowing that Den Tun could confirm another traitor among his people.
First, a weapon: Zarn’s gun was gone; there was nothing left of the shoulder holster but a broken strap. Belted to his hip, however, Terson found a sheathed blade—the local variant of the ubiquitous Bowie knife. He scooped snow from th
e remains of the cockpit as fast as he could, tunneling down to the glove compartment where Zarn had stowed Den Tun’s package. At best he could use it as a bargaining chip; at worst, prevent the sons of bitches from learning anything from it.
He found it, apparently undamaged, and beneath it the flashlight. Terson shoved the package inside his coverall and fumbled with the light. He cupped a hand over the lens allowing only a narrow ribbon of illumination to escape from between two fingers while he did a quick scan for anything else useful in the debris. Nothing—at least nothing he wouldn’t have to dig for. The roving search light was only a few minutes away now and he was out of time.
Hal, Dayuki and McKeon slowly traced the path of destruction left by the shuttle’s supersonic, low-altitude pass. Heavy snow reduced the craft’s scanners to near-worthlessness. All three peered down through the cockpit ports hoping to catch a glimpse of their quarry among the bent, broken and fallen trees illuminated by the landing lights.
“We’ll never see it if it’s buried,” McKeon said.
“The snow is not so deep,” Dayuki responded. “The seedlings would be covered otherwise.”
The security officer offered up an irritated frown that she blithely failed to notice. Hal watched the exchange with some amusement. Proper Minzoku women, like the two McKeon had married, did not contradict men so blatantly. That Dayuki exercised the prerogatives of an Onjin female clearly consternated him.
“There!” McKeon pointed.
Hal brought all floodlights to bear and circled back around to land. McKeon went to the salon and rousted his men. A gust of wind above sent snow drifting ahead of the armed party as it converged on the wrecked aircar.
“All clear,” the leader radioed back. Hal, McKeon and Dayuki joined them outside. “Passenger side is open, just as we found it,” he said. “There are tracks. The pilot’s on the other side.”
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