Gidden had been commander of the Federal Police garrison at Saint Anatone when Cai joined the force. He was elevated to Commissioner shortly thereafter, serving five more years before retiring from the Federal Police and embarking on his career as an appointee. Currently he was Undersecretary of Economic Development. Ten years prior he’d been Director of Reclamation. If anyone doubted his influence, they had only to recall what the man responsible for garbage collection and recycling had done to the career of a certain popular and powerful political aspirant.
Cai performed the rest of her morning ritual with less economy than usual, buying time to compose herself, just as the man occupying her chair intended. Gidden took his cane in hand when she turned back to her desk. “Once more I relinquish the throne, madam.”
Cai waved him down. “It’s no bother, Mr. Undersecretary. Do you care for coffee?”
“Please. And thank you for indulging me,” he said with a gesture to her chair. “These old bones no longer appreciate steel and plastic.” He accepted the cup and saucer gingerly and took a sip as he set them down. “Very good, thank you.” He nodded toward the chair that she reserved for subordinates. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“Thank you, Mr. Undersecretary, but I prefer to stand.”
“But I,” he replied with a mischievous glint in his eye, “prefer that you sit.”
Cai sat. His amusement at waving her own stick at her did not make the situation any less serious, and she did not attempt to feign guiltless innocence as Maalan Bragg had some months before.
“Our partners in this sordid arrangement of ours occasionally express a degree of dissatisfaction with the quality of our support,” Gidden said. “I take pains to ensure that we fulfill our obligations to the best of our abilities so that they have no excuse to shirk theirs, but a situation has come to my attention that lends their claim credibility. It involves your department, Colonel, however indirectly, and I feel it necessary to discuss the issue with you personally.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Undersecretary.”
“Am I correct to assume that you have some idea of what I’m talking about?”
“Something to do with Captain Maalan Bragg,” Cai guessed without hesitation.
“Correct. And?”
“Maalan was a peripheral victim of an assault against a young couple he monitored as part of his ancillary duties,” Cai told him. “He developed a personal interest in the case as a result. Certain irregularities led me to suspect that our so-called partners might be involved and I attempted to redirect his attention, but ultimately it became necessary to place him on personal leave due to performance issues resulting from post-traumatic stress.”
“Not so-called at all, Colonel,” Gidden interjected. “Our organization and theirs are inexorably linked whether we like it or not.”
“They overstepped their bounds!” Cai shot back, unable to conceal her anger. “They bypassed established protocols and exposed themselves with sloppy trade-craft! An investigator half as sharp as Maalan Bragg couldn’t help but see the tracks they left, and I’ll be damned if I sit back and let one of my people pay the price for their incompetence!”
“Duty may require you to do just that,” Gidden warned, “though I will bring the infraction to their attention, if that is any consolation. Continue.”
Cai swallowed her anger. Another outburst wouldn’t aid her career or improve Bragg’s chances of survival. “Several weeks ago he accompanied a young man named Terson Reilly on an unsanctioned voyage beyond the coastal boundaries that resulted in an altercation with a Coast Guard vessel. There were several deaths. Reilly vanished, and Maalan was severely wounded. He is currently being treated at Saint Anatone General Hospital.
“I should point out, Mr. Undersecretary, that he has yet to be interviewed, and the capacity in which he acted is unknown. Mr. Reilly has a significant criminal history, and I believe that Maalan was acting under duress or coercion.”
“Then you are unaware of the sanction issued against Maalan Bragg and Terson Reilly?”
The revelation stunned her; a sanction virtually condemned Bragg to death. “Apparently so.”
“Then let me enlighten you,” Gidden said gravely. “Terson Reilly engaged in activities that our partners felt endangered their position, activities that Captain Bragg appeared to participate in willingly. Further, I determined that those activities endangered Nivian security and issued directives to your counterpart in the Coast Guard instructing him to take adverse action against Maalan Bragg and Terson Reilly. I was notified of the action’s successful prosecution and thought the issue closed.
“Imagine my consternation when I learned that this was not the case. I consider myself a fair man; I understand that circumstances beyond human control occur, that ‘shit happens,’ if you’ll pardon the indelicacy of the phrase, but misinformation of this magnitude verges on criminal.
“Your counterpart at the Coast Guard regaled me with excuses when I called on him yesterday morning to discuss his retirement. Unfortunately, he thought to salvage his career with threats, and it became necessary to have him removed during the night. I will attend the funeral, of course.”
Gidden’s friendly blue eyes regarded her with great interest. “Will you regale me with excuses as well, Colonel?”
“As I just stated, Mr. Undersecretary, I was ignorant of the existence of a sanction until this moment,” Cai said with the confidence of manifest blamelessness, though dread began to mount with the turn the conversation had taken.
“Your enlightenment obligates you to act, Colonel. This will not be a problem, I’m sure.”
“Captain Bragg is in critical condition, his survival in question,” Cai said. “It may not be necessary.”
“You are being evasive, Colonel.”
“And you are asking me to have a fine police officer, a good man, killed!”
Gidden’s face softened. “A course of action to which you object.”
“Absolutely!”
Gidden raised his hands imploringly. “What would you have me do? You know the stakes.”
“He doesn’t know anything,” Cai said with as much assurance as she could muster.
“He suspects the existence of something worth knowing,” Giddens countered, “otherwise he would not be in this position.”
“The best way to keep a hungry man from searching for food is to feed him,” Cai said. “The same is true of curious men. We’ve inducted those who acquired condemning information without malice before.”
“But once fed, he may lead others to the trough,” Gidden pointed out. “People like us require a particular flaw in our moral character to function, Colonel; a certain self-interest that allows us to rationalize the enforcement of contradictory values.
“Captain Bragg has already demonstrated a steadfast moral character that demanded he risk his life and career in pursuit of the truth—despite evidence that ignoring it would benefit him far more. It is not likely that he could endure the hypocrisy inherent in our existence.”
“His own life, perhaps,” Cai said.
Gidden grimaced. “Holding the lives of a man’s family over his head is a distasteful business, Colonel, even for a jaded old man like myself. It would be more merciful to simply kill him.”
“Frankly, Mr. Undersecretary, it disturbs me that your solutions always seem to default to the taking of life,” Cai said lightly. “It would be disappointing to learn that you’re too jaded to entertain other options.”
Gidden chuckled. “It’s been a long time since anyone offered me such pointed criticism, Colonel. I find it refreshing.” His eyes drifted to the side thoughtfully for a moment before returning to her. “Very well. I lay the situation at your feet, to deal with as you see fit.”
“I’d expected to do more convincing,” Cai said cautiously. His easy acquiescence suggested the existence of a snare. “I may need some latitude to make promises not ordinarily within my power.”
“You have it,
” Gidden smiled, “though I remind you that by accepting this responsibility you also accept the consequences of the outcome.”
“Of course.”
“Then I shall be on my way,” Gidden said, leaning on his cane to rise. “It has been a pleasure.”
“Likewise, Mr. Undersecretary.”
Gidden winked at her as he passed. “You are an excellent liar, Colonel.”
Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:21 Standard
Sheila O’Brien sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, eyes drinking up the stunning view beyond the cave mouth. Bright sunlight streamed out of the clear, cobalt blue sky, spilling across jagged peaks topped with curls of snow that trailed wisps of sparkling crystals into the air as the frigid breeze worked to ablate what the storm had deposited.
The snow-covered slope below the cave stretched unbroken for nearly a kilometer before the first puffed mound of a buried tree cast its long shadow toward the bottom of the valley. O’Brien longed to strap on a pair of skis, plunge into the powder outside and race through the crisp, clear air as she had during her childhood on another planet a long time ago.
The glint of sunlight from an object hurtling through the sky reminded her why she couldn’t. The object came on quickly, resolving into an airsled before it buzzed overhead, past the poachers’ hideout. Now she regretted her soft heartedness, which stood to cost them all dearly. If Grogan hadn’t had a hard-on for a fur, if the storm hadn’t lasted as long as it had…
If she’d just left the guy where they found him.
The wind and early snowfall both protected and trapped them now. The path they’d worn up the slope to their hideout over months of hunting was hidden under a meter of virgin snow, but the pristine surface would betray them if they ventured outside, even to drag their inadvertent charge into the open where his friends could find him. The Embustero could not delay its departure for too long, and would not return to Nivia for several months.
Another airsled appeared for a moment before dipping out of sight again. As near as she could determine, the search area ended at the ridge just west of their hideout.
Jerrell Mackey squeezed between the Embustero’s cargo sled and the cave wall to squat next to her. “They still at it?”
“Haven’t let up since the snow stopped,” she told him. “How’s the dirtsider doing?”
“Liz says he’s got pneumonia.”
“Guess I screwed him all the way around. And us,” she sighed.
“Maybe so. Maybe not,” he said. “Help me set this up, then I’ve got something to show you.” Together they assembled the tripod and fanned out the antenna dish, aiming it toward the sky where the Embustero’s orbit broke the horizon every eight hours, permitting thirty minutes of tight-beam communication before it passed beyond line-of-sight again. O’Brien plugged the cable into the remote head and spooled it out behind them as they picked their way back into the guts of the mountain.
The irregular walls cast nightmarish shadows in the lights and O’Brien experienced a healthy unease as they descended. Their hideout had been formed not by centuries of water eroding limestone, but a catastrophic landslide. They padded through spaces formed by slabs of rock the size of buildings jumbled together like a child’s building blocks. The chaotic mass seemed ready to tumble the rest of the way to the bottom of the valley at the least provocation, though what she and the others had stumbled upon during an early expedition suggested that it had been stable for centuries.
Their path took them steadily downward through a series of difficult, claustrophobic passages interspersed with openings to side passages. Some led to useful voids where the poachers stored equipment or bushmeat, but the hand-written chalk signage and stacks of rock outside others warned of hidden pits, unstable strata or dead ends.
The main passage finally ended at a pit descending straight down another ten meters. Light from below illuminated an A-frame spanning the void. An electric winch for supplies dangled from one side of the crossbeam, a rope ladder for personnel from the other.
What began as a hole in the floor of a cave ended as a hole in the ceiling of a man-made tunnel lined with tool-worked stone and buttressed by reinforced concrete pillars. The passageway predated the landslide by an indeterminate number of years, but all evidence pointed to the cataclysm as the cause of its ruin. Branching corridors suggested that it was a small portion of a larger complex, but they all ended abruptly where crushing weight overcame structural integrity.
The portion they’d stumbled upon while searching the voids for hibernating furbeasts during one of their earliest expeditions consisted of four corridors, each roughly thirty meters in length, arranged to form a square; branch corridors extended beyond the corners in both directions for varying distances before ending at cave-ins. Interconnecting rooms of varying dimensions occupied the central square.
Artifacts implying some kind of communication and administrative facility filled the rooms. None of it had been disturbed since the disaster—since the last survivor died, rather. The spacers found the skeletal remains of seventeen individuals huddled in a single room, and interred them permanently beneath the contents of other offices as they cleared them for their own use.
O’Brien still felt queasy whenever she passed that doorway. It wasn’t the thought of human skeletons just meters away that disturbed her, it was the thought that what had happened before could happen again; that she and her fellow crewmen might become the next to survive long enough in the darkness to suffer death by suffocation, dehydration, or starvation. The possibility alone was enough to discourage the Embustero’s crewmen from disturbing the collapses despite the possibility of finding other portions of the complex intact.
Mackey and O’Brien continued down the tunnel toward the entrance to the main room guided by battery-powered illumination installed on previous expeditions. Inside they found the other members of their party gathered around three radiant heaters, silent and worried. There hadn’t been much to do after packing up the cargo sled except worry, though O’Brien noticed that someone, probably motivated by their space-bred dislike of dirt, had swept the floor clean enough to eat from.
O’Brien bore them no malice for their fastidiousness. It was easier for a dirtsider to adapt to space than it was a spacer to adapt to a planet. Even so, after years in space she, too, had to remind herself that wind was not an atmosphere leak and soil not a detestable source of contamination or waste of delta-v.
She plugged the antenna cable into the encryption module of their receiver and turned on the alarm that would alert them when it detected the Embustero’s carrier wave. “What did you want to show me?” she asked Mackey.
He led her from the common room to the adjoining space they used as a bunkhouse and withdrew a belt made of small linked pouches from under his cot. “Liz found this when she stripped him down to cool the fever,” he said. He lay out the contents: miscellaneous personal effects, a bearer instrument for ten thousand euros, two identical envelopes.
A wad of personal documents slid into O’Brien’s hand when she opened the first. The face on the Nivian identification card was that of the dirtsider, clean-shaved and unmarked by frostbite and deprivation. Joseph Pelletier. She opened the second envelope to find documents identical to the first, from the ID card to the basic starpilot’s certification, but under the name Terson Reilly. Both sets were stained and water damaged, making it impossible to tell if one were newer than the other.
“I don’t know what he needs two sets of ID for,” Mackey said, “but I can tell you one thing: it ain’t legal.”
“And the people looking for him aren’t his friends,” O’Brien groaned. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“They can’t search forever,” Mackey shrugged again. “We can wait them out if we have to.”
Which meant nothing if the Embustero left without them. Shadrack might be inclined to set up an account for them with enough credit to survive on until the ship returned, but then again he had
to consider the possibility that they’d get caught, in which circumstance a paper trail leading back to the ship wouldn’t be the best idea. Even if he was successful in disavowing knowledge of their activities, the scrutiny might reveal secrets that made poaching a minor footnote.
They had to leave soon, if for no other reason than that a truly significant snowfall would trap them for good if it buried the entrance to the cave before they got the sled out. O’Brien strode back to the common. “Where’s Grogan?”
Lad Hussein pointed to another doorway. “In the trap room.”
Dozens of snares and springtraps hung from spikes in the walls, clean, oiled and ready for the next expedition. Grogan and Berriochoa hovered over a workbench with a toolkit trying to rebuild the cargo sled’s FLIR pod, though it was roundly accepted by the rest of the party that the blow it took when Grogan hit the trees—again—was irreversibly fatal.
“How’s it going,” O’Brien asked.
“Just about got it,” Berriochoa replied with the same conviction as the last four times she’d asked. “We need a little more time.”
“A little time might make the difference between getting back to ship and getting stranded here,” O’Brien told him. “We have to be ready to go when Shad gives the word, and we can’t fly with a hole in the hull. You need to have that thing installed, working or not.”
“Quit bitching!” Grogan growled.
It was hard to ignore the man’s incessant barbs, so most of the crew pretty much did whatever it took to elude them, which often meant giving in to his petty demands and withholding valid criticism. It was the effort to avoid a confrontation that led O’Brien to hold her tongue when he let the sled’s altitude drop uncomfortably close to the treetops, even though she knew that his irrational self-confidence often resulted in his repeating the same mistake.
“It goes back in when the link with the ship comes up,” O’Brien told them. “You’ve got until then.” Both men studiously failed to acknowledge the ultimatum, and O’Brien opted not to play the game by insisting they do so.
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