by Vernor Vinge
Viki touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry…about Daddy.”
She would know much better than he how far Sherkaner had fallen. “How long has he been into this? I remember him speculating on space monsters, but it was never serious.”
She shrugged, obviously unhappy with the question. “…He started playing with videomancy after the kidnappings.”
That far back? Then he remembered Sherkaner’s desperation when the poor cobber realized that all his science and logic couldn’t save his children. And so the seeds of this insanity had been planted. “Okay, Viki. Your mother is right. The important thing is that this nonsense not get in the way. Your father has the love and admiration of so many people”—including me, still. “No one will believe this crap, but I’m afraid that more than a few would try to help him, maybe divert resources, do experiments he suggests. We can’t afford that, not now.”
“Of course.” But Viki hesitated an instant, her hand tips straightening. If Unnerby had not known her as a child, he would have missed it. She wasn’t telling him everything, and was embarrassed by the deception. Little Victory had been a great fibber, except when she felt guilty about something.
“The General is humoring him, isn’t she? Even now?”
“…Look, nothing big. Some bandwidth, some processor time.” Processor time on what? Underhill’s desktop machines, or Intelligence Service superarrays? Maybe it didn’t matter; he realized now how much of Sherk’s low profile was simply the General keeping her husband from interfering with critical projects. But pray for the poor lady. For Victory Smith, losing Underhill must be like having your right legs shot off at the hips.
“Okay.” Whatever resources Sherk might be pissing away, there was nothing Hrunkner Unnerby could do about it. Maybe the best wisdom was the old soldier on, soldier. He glanced at Young Victory’s uniform. The name tag was on her far collar, out of sight. Would it be Victory Smith (now, that would catch a superior officer’s attention!), or Victory Underhill, or what?
“So, Lieutenant, how is your life in the military?”
Viki smiled, surely relieved to talk about something else. “It is a great challenge, Sergeant.” Formality slipped. “Actually, I’m having the time of my life. Basic training was—hmm, well you know as well as I. In fact, it is sergeants like you who make it the ‘charming’ experience it is. But I had an edge: When I went through BT, almost all the recruits were in-phase, years older than I am. Heh heh. It wasn’t hard to do well by comparison. Now—well, you can see this isn’t your average first posting.” She waved at the car, and the security around them. “Brent is a senior sergeant now; we’re working together. Rhapsa and Little Hrunk will go through officer school eventually, but for now they’re both junior enlisted. You may see them at the airport.”
“You’re all working together?” Unnerby tried to keep the surprise out of his voice.
“Yes. We’re a team. When the General wants a quick inspection, and needs absolute trust—we’re the four she sends.” All the surviving children except Jirlib. For a moment, the revelation just added to Unnerby’s depression. He wondered what the General Staff and midrankers thought when they saw a troop of Smith’s relatives poking into Deep Secret affairs. But…Hrunkner Unnerby had once been deep in Intelligence himself. Old Strut Greenval had also played by his own rules. The King gave certain prerogatives to the chief of Intelligence. A lot of midlevel Intelligence people thought it was simply stupid tradition, but if Victory Smith thought she needed an Inspector General team from her own family—well maybe she did.
Princeton’s airport was in chaos. There were more flights, more corporate charters, more crazy construction work than ever before. Chaotic or not, General Smith was ahead of the problem; a jet had already been diverted for his use. Viki’s cars were cleared to drive right out onto the military side of the field. They moved cautiously down designated lanes, under the wings of taxiing aircraft. The secondary paths were torn by construction, a craterlike pit every hundred feet. By the end of the year, all service operations were to be conducted without external exposure. Ultimately, these facilities would have to support new types of fliers, and operations in air-freezing cold.
Viki dropped him off by his jet. She hadn’t said where she was bound this evening. Unnerby found that pleasing. For all the strangeness of her present situation, at least she knew how to keep her mouth properly shut.
She followed him out into the freeze. There was no wind, so he risked going without the air heater. Every breath burned. It was so cold he could see clouds of frost hanging around the exposed joints of his hands.
Maybe Viki was too young and strong to notice. She trooped across the thirty yards to his jet, talking every second. If it weren’t for all the dark omens rising out of this visit, seeing Viki would have been an absolute joy. Even out-of-phase, she had turned out so beautifully, a wonderful incarnation of her mother—with Smith’s hard edge softened by what Sherkaner had been at his best. Hell, maybe part of it was because she was out-of-phase! The thought almost made him stop in the middle of the runway. But yes, Viki had spent her whole life out of step, seeing things from a new angle. In a weird way, watching her diminished all his misgivings about the future.
Viki stepped aside as they reached the weather shelter at the base of his jet. She drew herself up and gave him a well-starched salute. Unnerby returned the gesture. And then he saw her name tag.
“What an interesting name, Lieutenant. Not a profession, not some bygone deepness. Where—?”
“Well, neither of my parents is a ‘smith.’ And no one knows which ‘underhill’ Daddy’s family might be ascended from. But, see behind you—” She pointed.
Behind him the tarmac spread away from them, hundreds of yards of flatness and construction work, all the way back to the terminal. But Viki was pointing higher, up from the river-bottom flatlands. The lights of Princeton curved around the horizon, from glittering towers to the suburban hills.
“Look about five degrees to your right-rear of the radio tower. Even from here you can see it.” She was pointing at Underhill’s house. It was the brightest thing in that direction, a tower of light in all the colors that modern fluorescents could make.
“Daddy designed well. We’ve hardly had to make any changes in the house at all. Even after the air has frozen, his light will still be up there on the hill. You know what Daddy says: We can go down and inward—or we can stand on high places and reach out. I’m glad that’s where I grew up, and I want that place to be my name.”
She lifted her name tag so it glittered in the aircraft lights. LIEUTENANT VICTORY LIGHTHILL. “Don’t worry, Sergeant. What you and Dad and Mother started is going to last a long time.”
FORTY-SIX
Belga Underville was getting a bit tired of Lands Command. It seemed that she was down here almost ten percent of the time—and it would be a lot more if she hadn’t become a heavy telecomm user. Colonel Underville had been head of Domestic Intelligence since 60//15, more than half the past Bright Time. It was a truism—at least in modern times—that the end of the Brightness was the beginning of the bloodiest wars. She had expected things to be rough, but not like this.
Underville got to the staff meeting early. She was more than a little nervous about what she intended; she had no desire to cross the chief, but that was exactly how her petition might look. Rachner Thract was already there, getting his own show in order. Grainy, ten-color reconnaissance photos were projected on the wall behind him. Apparently he’d found more Southlander launch sites—further evidence of Kindred aid for “the potential victims of Accord treachery.” Thract nodded civilly as she and her aides sat down. There was always some friction between External Intelligence and Domestic. External played by rules that were unacceptably rough for domestic operations, yet they always found excuses for meddling. The last few years, things had been especially tense between Thract and Underville. Since Thract had screwed up in Southland, he’d been much easier to handle. Even the end o
f the world can have short-term advantages, Belga thought sourly.
Underville flipped through the agenda. God, the crackpot distractions. Or maybe not: “What do you think about these high-altitude bogies, Rachner?” It was not meant as an argumentative question; Thract should not be in trouble when it came to air defense.
Thract’s hands jerked in abrupt dismissal. “After all the screaming, Air Defense claims only three sightings. ‘Sightings’ my ass. Even now that we know about Kindred antigravity capabilities, they still can’t track the cobbers properly. Now the AD Director claims the Kindred have some launch site I don’t know about. You know the chief is going to stick me with finding it…Damn!” Underville couldn’t tell if that was his one-word summary answer, or if he had just noticed something obnoxious in his notes. Either way, Thract didn’t have anything more to say to her.
The others were trickling in now: Air Defense Director Dugway (seating himself on a perch far from Rachner Thract), the Director of Rocket Offense, the Director of Public Relations. The chief herself entered, followed almost immediately by the King’s Own Finance Minister.
General Smith called the meeting to order, and formally welcomed the Finance Minister. On paper, Minister Nizhnimor was her only superior short of the King himself. In fact, Amberdon Nizhnimor was an old crony of Smith’s.
The bogies were first on the agenda, and it went about as Thract had predicted. Air Defense had done further crunching on the three sightings. Dugway’s latest computer analysis confirmed that these were Kindred satellites, either pop-up recon jobs or maybe even the tests of a maneuvering antigravity missile. Either way, none of them had been seen twice. And none of them had been launched from any of the known Kindred sites. The director of Air Defense was very pointed about the need for competent ground intelligence from within Kindred territory. If the enemy had mobile launchers, it was essential to learn about them. Underville half-expected Thract to explode at the implication that his people had failed once more, but the Colonel accepted AD’s sarcasm and General Smith’s expected orders with impassive courtesy. Thract knew that this was the least of his problems; the last item on today’s agenda was his real nemesis.
Next up, Public Relations: “I’m sorry. There’s no way we can call a War Plebiscite, much less win one. People are more frightened than ever, but the time scales make a Plebiscite flatly unworkable.” Belga nodded; she didn’t need some flack from Public Relations for this insight. Within itself, the King’s Government was a rather autocratic affair. But for the last nineteen generations, since the Covenant of Accord, its civil power had been terrifyingly limited. The Crown retained sole title to its ancestral estates such as Lands Command, and had limited power of taxation, but had lost the exclusive right to print money, the right of eminent domain, the right to impress its subjects into military service. In peacetime, the Covenant worked. The courts ran on a fee system, and local police forces knew they couldn’t get too frisky or they might encounter real firepower. In wartime, well, that’s what the Plebiscite was for—to suspend the Covenant for a certain time. It had worked during the Great War, just barely. This time around, things moved so fast that just talking about a Plebiscite might precipitate a war. And a major nuclear exchange could be over in less than a day.
General Smith accepted the platitudes with considerable patience. Then it was Belga’s turn. She went through the usual catalogue of domestic threats. Things were under control, more or less. There were significant minorities that loathed the modernization. Some were already out of the picture, asleep in their own deepnesses. Others had dug themselves deep redoubts, but not to sleep in; these would be a problem if things went really bad. Hrunkner Unnerby had worked more of his engineering miracles. Even the oldest towns in the Northeast had nuclear electricity now, and—just as important—weatherized living space. “But of course not much of this is hardened. Even a light nuclear strike would kill most of these people, and the rest wouldn’t have the resources for a successful hibernation.” In fact, most of those resources had been spent on creating the power plants and underground farms.
General Smith gestured at the others. “Comments?” There were several. Public Relations suggested buying in to some of the hardened enterprises; he was already planning for after the end of the world, the bloody-minded little wimp. The chief just nodded, assigned Belga and the wimp to look into the possibility. She checked the Domestic Intelligence report off her copy of the agenda.
“Ma’am?” Belga Underville raised a hand. “I do have one more item I’d like to bring up.”
“Certainly.”
Underville brushed her eating hands nervously across her mouth. She was committed now. Damn. If only the Finance Minister weren’t here. “I—Ma’am, in the past you have been very, um, generous in your management of subordinate operations. You give us the job, and let us do it. I have been very grateful for that. Recently though, and very likely this is without your precise knowledge, people from your inner staff have been making unscheduled visits”—midnight raids, actually—“on domestic sites in my area of responsibility.”
General Smith nodded. “The Lighthill team.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Your own children, running around as though they were the King’s Inspectors General. They were full of crazy, irrational demands, shutting down good projects, removing some of her best people. More than anything, it made her suspect that the chief’s crazy husband still had great influence. Belga hunkered down on her perch. She really didn’t have to say more. Victory Smith knew her well enough to see she was upset.
“On these inspection visits, did Lighthill find anything significant?”
“In one case, ma’am.” One fairly serious problem that Belga was sure she would have pounced on herself inside of another ten days. Around the table, Underville could see that most of the others were simply surprised by the complaint. Two nodded faintly in her direction—she already knew about them. Thract tapped an angry tattoo on the table; he seemed about to jump into the fray. It was no surprise that he had been targeted by the chief’s nepotistic crew, but please God, grant him the cleverness to keep his maw shut. Thract was already in such poor standing that his support would be about as much help as a steel anvil to a racing-climber.
The chief inclined her head, waited a polite moment for anyone else to comment. Then, “Colonel Underville, I understand that this can hurt your people’s morale. But we are entering very critical times, far deadlier than a declared war. I need special assistants, ones who can act very quickly and who I understand completely. The Lighthill team acts directly for me. Please tell me if you feel their behavior is out of line—but I ask you to respect their delegated authority.” Her tone seemed sincerely regretful, but the words were uncompromising; Smith was changing policy of decades’ standing. Belga had the sinking feeling that the chief knew all her cobblies’ depredations.
The Finance Minister had looked almost bored so far. Nizhnimor was a war hero; she had walked through the Dark with Sherkaner Underhill. You might forget that when you saw her; Amberdon Nizhnimor had spent all the decades of this generation climbing up the Other Side of the royal service, as a court politician and arbitrator. She dressed and moved like an old coot; Nizhnimor was a cartoon caricature of a Finance Minister. Big, lank, frail. Now she leaned forward. Her wheezy voice sounded as harmless as she looked. “I fear this is all a bit outside my realm. But I do have some advice. Though we can’t have a Plebiscite, we are very much at war. Internal to the government, we are moving to a war footing. Normal chains of appeal and review are in suspension. Given this extraordinary situation, it’s important for you to realize that both I and—more importantly—the King have complete faith in General Smith’s leadership. You all know that the chief of Intelligence has special prerogatives. This is not outmoded tradition, ladies and gentleman. This is considered, royal policy, and you must all accept it.”
Wow. So much for “frail” finance ministers. There were sober nods from all around the table a
nd no one had anything more to say, least of all Belga Underville. In a strange way, Belga felt better for getting so definitively squashed. Things might be on a road straight to Hell, but she didn’t have to worry about who was on the driver’s perch.
After a moment, General Smith returned to her agenda. “…We have one item left. It is also the most critical problem we’re up against. Colonel Thract, will you tell us about the Southland situation?” Her tone was courteous, almost sympathetic. Nevertheless, poor Thract was in for it.
But Thract showed some hardshell. He bounced off his perch and walked briskly to the podium. “Minister. Ma’am.” He nodded at Nizhnimor and the chief. “We believe the situation has stabilized somewhat in the last fifteen hours.” He poked up the recon pictures that Belga had seen him studying before the meeting. Much of Southland was shrouded in a swirl of storm, but the launch sites were high in the Dry Mountains and mostly visible. Thract tapped away at his pictures, analyzing the supply situation. “The long-range Southlander rockets are liquid fueled, very fragile things. Their parliament has seemed insanely bellicose these last few days—their ‘Ultimatum for Cooperative Survival,’ for instance—but in fact, we don’t think that more than a tenth of their rockets are launch-ready. It will take three or four days for them to get all the tanks topped off.”
Belga: “That seems awfully stupid on their part.”
Thract nodded. “But remember, their parliamentary system makes them less decisive than either us or the Kindred. These people have been tricked into thinking that they must either fight a war now, or be murdered in their sleep. The Ultimatum may have been a mistake in timing, but it was also an attempt by some in Parliament to make the prospect of war so frightening that their colleagues would back down.”