by Bill Adams
Captain Marius caught my eye a few moments later. He shrugged to demonstrate how hopelessly trussed he was. “Mind scratching my nose, old man? Driving me crazy.”
After a glance around to see if there were any objections, I crossed the deck to him. His feet had enough play to swivel his chair, and he chose to face me at an angle that put my back between him and anyone else who might be looking at us.
I scratched his nose. His middle-aged face remained as bland and slack as usual, but the keen eyes darted downward meaningfully several times. I followed their cue, and looked at his tightly bound hands. One of them opened, seemingly empty; then thumb and fingers flexed and a little white ball appeared. I managed a reasonably smooth steal of the ball as I withdrew my hand from his face, and as an old magician I palmed it at least as well as he had. “Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t let that cut on his chin fool you,” the Pretender said, suddenly at my side. “We didn’t rough him up; he tripped.”
“How’d you take the ship, then? No, let me guess,” I said, turning to face him. “You were with Julia when she came out to visit this afternoon—you memorized the access codes she used. Why did she take you along?”
“So we could use her very own bed in her parents’ ship, of course,” he said with a sad smile. “I told her it would give me a thrill. Oh, please, Chris. Of course it’s cruel. I’ve always been on a course to kill her father and destroy her way of life. What would be the point of sparing her feelings along the way? To obtain a better judgment from history? Screw that. I belong in Hell anyway, for abandoning the Barbarossa if nothing else. If I had stayed with my crewmates, the world would have been different. When you come right down to it, Julia was never meant to be born, and all of you are ghosts…and that was a poetic observation, not a psychotic one.”
He read my face too well. “Think of the French Revolution, Chris. All the blood and famine that has to follow when governments fall. And all for nothing, if a France hands itself over to a Napoléon. Is that what you want? The Consultant is Napoléon. I’m sorry I can’t offer you the safe berth of player to the king anymore. But there shouldn’t be any kings, and you know it. Maybe it was selfish of me to take you along, but you’re the one who always wanted me to behave responsibly. Well, I’ve taken the whole world on my shoulders. Must I go it alone?”
“No, Boss, no.” I exhaled heavily and bent forward with my hands on my knees. “You’ve had a lot more time to think about this than I have, that’s all…”
“Drugs still bothering you?” he asked, a hand on my shoulder.
“Maybe just the low g. Always takes the guts out of me at first.” Once I felt the blood reach my head, I straightened up, hoping the still-pale mask above flushed jaws would reinforce my sick expression. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“The head is this way,” the officer of the deck said. We called it that back in the Federal Alignment navy, too, but one must stay in character.
Alone in the head, I carefully unrolled the little white note Captain Marius had slipped me. It was a short length of toilet paper—which explained how he got the opportunity to write it. He had formed the largest block letters that would fit, a precaution against the inevitable smudging, probably using a thumbnail and blood from his chin:
GET J AND D TO
DETENT’N 1700
Not crystal-clear, but enough to go on. Summerisle must have told him to trust me. I wondered if he’d been right to do so.
From the mirror, Chris Sly’s face looked to me for direction. Could we go over that steak-knife scene again?
Chapter Twenty-four
When I returned, Foyle and the Pretender were talking about the planet Hel, its dim sun and cold climate, and whether it could ever have acquired life and an oxygen-rich atmosphere naturally. An odd interlude, but she tended to fall back on science when she didn’t know what to say, and the Pretender always loved to play Renaissance man. I took a moment to set my wristcomp to shipboard time: 1633. Too late for comfort, if I was right. Captain Marius had probably made his plans and written his note several hours before.
“Well?” the Pretender asked as I approached.
“All I know about the revolution is you,” I said. “And I’m glad to see you’ve been smarter than I knew. I’m your man, Boss, but I’m nervous as hell. Is the Consultant just going to let us land on his own field?”
“He’s expecting the Raven back today, and here we are,” the Pretender said with a shrug. “But I admit it feels too easy. Not even a radio greeting for us to sweat through.”
“What about Julia and her mother? Where are you holding them?”
“ ‘Holding them’? They’re under house arrest in Domina’s stateroom. There’s a man outside their door. Gives him something to do, anyway.”
“And the room was searched first?”
He looked irritated, but turned to the OOD. “Ed, your boys made a sweep for—I don’t know—handguns and so forth?”
“They gave it the once-over, sure, Boss.”
The answer lacked confidence, and I followed up fast. “A luxury yacht’s stateroom. Could be a hidden wall safe. Access to the radio. Who knows? Can’t we move them someplace with bare walls? A cargo hold, maybe.”
“Ed?”
“There’s a detention locker.” One of the other helmsman had spoken, the youngest Hard Man I’d seen. He flashed the ship’s plans up on the holo tank with a kid’s eagerness to back his words.
“Sure enough,” Ed conceded; the picture was clearly labeled. “I’ve never seen a kite so customized and rebuilt. What’s all that crap rimward of the locker?”
“ ‘Refit in progress,’ it says.” The kid massaged the controls, and our view of 3-D blueprints rotated, zoomed out, and panned sideways. “Used to be a backup coolant system…going to be an extra shuttle.”
“The whole ship’s reinforced for gravity, and they want to cram in a third shuttle,” Ed said. “Rich people. They can’t make it work, either, not and keep the locker.”
“A detention locker, in a private yacht,” the Pretender marveled. “Quite an insight into the Consultant’s mind. Are there surveillance cameras?”
A moment later we saw a few foreshortened views of an almost empty room: three benches with enough padding to sleep on, and straps for a landing. A flushbox with a folding screen next to it.
“Good enough for a drunken sailor, I guess,” the Pretender said. He thought a moment longer and went over to a bank of communications screens. He keyed in the master bedroom. “Domina?” The screen remained blank.
“No security override, Boss?” Ed asked.
“What, so the captain can spy on the owner’s wife?” The Pretender tried to raise Domina a few more times, then swore.
“Let me go and take a look, Boss,” I said. “I’m not you and I’m not a soldier—I don’t think she’d waste a tantrum on me.”
“And maybe a woman along…?” Foyle added.
“If you want to,” the Pretender said. “I don’t really think they’re up to anything, and we’ve nearly reached approach orbit anyway.”
“Isn’t that a crucial time?”
“Okay, okay, go ahead…‘Dad.’ If I didn’t want to be nagged, I shouldn’t have brought you along.”
Ed gave us directions. And a password; some of the Hard Men standing guard would not know the Boss had cleared us yet.
◆◆◆
Out in the corridor, I set a fast pace.
“Whose side are we on?” Foyle asked.
“That’s the question,” I said—glancing around for cameras first.
“Look, you’re the only one who really knows them both,” she said. “I have to depend on your judgment. I’m not happy about it, but that’s the way it is.”
“You’ve seen enough of the Boss to know you can’t trust the fate of the galaxy to him.” I never called him the Pretender with Foyle; I don’t know why. “He doesn’t even intend to come out of this thing alive—it’s all in t
he Manfred play, I see that now.”
“I’ll buy that. But there’s a lot to what he says about the Consultant. Power corrupts, and absolute power might corrupt even your Summerisle. If the Consultant is Summerisle.”
“Do you doubt it, after that description?” I asked.
“So you didn’t notice,” she said. “When that boy first flashed up the ship’s plans, there was a registry on the title screen. House name: West. Family name…Kostain.”
1640, and she’d brought me up short.
“I remembered right, didn’t I? There was a Luc Kostain in your Nexus U. Kanalist lodge—”
“But he can’t be the Consultant. I killed him a century ago.”
“I did see the name.”
I started moving again. “Okay…I’ve got it. Kostain had no family to notice he’d disappeared. So his identity was still available when Summerisle needed an alias, forty-odd years ago…Yeah, Kostain was of ‘good family,’ one of the original Columnards, the sort of person the House of West might adopt. And he’d been penniless—people could believe he’d spent decades in the fringe worlds, seeking his fortune. Summerisle could play him as an embittered old outsider, bailed out by a lucky inheritance. A recluse. That would leave him free to create the other identity, the naval officer who became Consultant for Intelligence Affairs. But once he reached the totally anonymous phase of his Consultancy, Summerisle would still have the Kostain/West front—for Domina to use, for instance.”
“You spin a good story,” Foyle said, “but suppose Kostain did wander the fringe worlds for decades, become a different person, maybe a Master—a Kanalist can always start over, any time. Maybe he linked up with Summerisle early on, studied with him—”
“He couldn’t have changed that much,” I interrupted. “He’d be ancient now—and mainly it’s just crazy. He fell a hundred meters with a knife in his back. He couldn’t have survived.”
“But if it’s only Summerisle,” she went on relentlessly, “then it’s a Summerisle more ruthless than your old teacher. Maybe as corrupt as the Boss fears.”
“We’ve got to at least give him a chance to defend himself. We can’t just let the Boss smash everything up. What about the revolution? What if Summerisle was telling the truth about the Few?—the integrity of the universe and all that?”
“Okay,” she said. “I said it was up to you. But what’s the hot concern over Domina’s bedroom?”
◆◆◆
1643. A bored Hard Man let us into the stateroom. It was a small suite, simple but plush, like a jewelry case.
Domina and Julia were sitting on the bed in the main room, half-veiled by crash netting. Domina had been speaking in a low voice when we entered. Her daughter was facing away from her, but they were holding hands. Julia looked desolate, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how she felt. Her adulthood, her womanhood, so hard-won, lost again. She was the child who had let the sweet-talking burglar in, and now she had to accept her mother’s forgiveness even though it was a sort of prison. Domina hardly reacted to my presence—Chris Sly was no one to her—but Julia’s eyes widened in sick horror, and she turned entirely to the wall rather than see me working for him.
I considered telling them about the captain’s note, but I didn’t know the whole story, whether they were in on whatever it was. And I didn’t need their cooperation, and thought they would play their parts more naturally this way. So Foyle and I made a pretense of searching the place for two minutes.
Domina continued as if we weren’t there, telling her story. Perhaps it was just the impulse to hold nothing back now that ignorance had hurt Julia so badly; perhaps she just wanted Julia to know of her own youth, her own terrible mistakes, and how they had been survived. But she cast a broader spell than she knew; I didn’t miss a word.
“And then that night they came for me, Von Bülow and De Bourbon, and told me they’d spoken with the Ad—with my father, that he was behind them, that he was…ashamed to hear I was associating with a traitor to his class like Evan. Evan had to be stopped, they said—he was Summerisle’s chosen successor, he would use the secrets of the Vice Book against them. Oh, Von Bülow was terrified of that, poppet. It was up to me to clear my name with them. When I heard what they wanted me to do, I was terrified; I thought they’d kill me if I refused. So I agreed to write a note to draw Evan into a trap. But first I made them promise that I could leave afterward, go somewhere far away to establish an alibi, as they meant to do.
“They asked me to make the note personal, so he would know it was from me. We talked about various places, and they said the footbridge over the gorge would be perfect. I’d told them it was the first place Evan ever touched me, which was true, and that’s where the note asked him to meet me. But I lied to them about which side of the bridge it was, so they would put their killer on the wrong side. And I would have a chance to see Evan first, and warn him.
“I brought a kitchen knife, the only weapon I could find, because I came from a military line, and I was at war. And I went to the bridge, and I waited, wondering if the killer on the other side could see me.
“But Evan was too smart, as always. Too smart for everyone, including himself. He sneaked the wrong way around. I wasn’t even looking that way until it was too late. And then I saw the killer was Luc, the Luc I told you about, who loved me. I called out to Evan, told him Luc was right beside him. And then they were fighting. I ran to them. I had the knife, I meant to use it, but I was never as tough as Evan thought I was. He is the tough one, the survivor—someday there will be no one left alive but him. He took the knife from my hand and used it, and Luc went over the side, and then—and then Evan’s hands were around my throat.
“He thought I was in on it. He could think that, he could hate me so much that I spat in his eyes and dared him to kill me. But he didn’t care enough even to do that. I already was dead for him, and he left me.
“And it ruined me, poppet. Evan made his enlistment the next day and Luc had disappeared, and Von Bülow couldn’t be sure I’d had anything to do with it, but I had not cleared myself with them. And the Admiral tried to question me about it—my own father—and I hated him for that so much that I wouldn’t speak to him, and he died that year and disinherited me, so I only had Mother’s money to pay for the deep-suspend.
“Because there was no life for me in society. I let the decades pass by on news screens. It lent a horrible perspective, poppet. It was not the Camelot of the strong and the beautiful, those early Column years; it wasn’t what I’d told Evan it would be. It was ugly and it was wrong, and I’d helped to bring it into the world. And when your father finally came for me, I was ready to do anything I could to help him destroy it.”
I wanted to hear the rest, but it was 1650, and I turned on the stateroom comm and reported in to the Pretender. “We can’t tell what might be hidden in all this frou-frou. Let’s move them to the detention locker.”
He shrugged and looked about to say yes when Domina turned and shouted, “Why not just strangle us with bowstrings, you petty assassin?” and I saw his eyebrow twitch in the monitor. Maybe he’d expected her to go without a protest, coolly disdainful, like an aristo to the guillotine—it would have been more her style.
“Check the locker first. Check it carefully,” he said.
◆◆◆
It took five minutes to find the locker in the snarled-up layout of the lower ship. I immediately reported that it checked out as suitable, and the Pretender said to wait there and have Foyle strip-search the women as soon as a guard brought them. Foyle and I were left staring at each other in the empty cell, afraid to say anything because it was open to surveillance. We wound up checking the tiny room after all, but there was nothing to find, nothing to use, and I began to wonder if I’d got the Captain’s message wrong.
At 1700 I looked at my wristcomp and muttered, “Come on, come on.”
“I hear you, and recognize your authority.”
The voice, at conversational volu
me, seemed to issue from an invisible person only centimeters from my ear. I flinched, and Foyle asked, “Did you hear a faint buzzing sound?”
“It is seventeen hundred hours, the last round hour before programmed descent to Hel. Confirmed?”
“Confirmed,” I said. It was a female voice of exactly that cool, sensible, nonthreatening timbre they so often give to computers and robots, and I never doubted for an instant that I was speaking directly with the Raven itself.
“What?” Foyle asked me. She was only a meter away from me, but the sound cancellation was so good she didn’t know what was going on.
“Are enemy forces still in command of the ship, and do you wish me to take action?”
“Yes.”
Foyle was staring at me now. I twitched my eyes at her, and she went back to fake searching.
“Are all friendlies present?”
“No.” But I didn’t say Wait, two are coming. If I had been a little bit sharper, a little bit faster—
“Taking Action B accordingly. No harm to those left behind.”
Foyle and I were knocked off our feet as the floor swiveled ninety degrees beneath us. Cockpit dashboards rolled out of the walls next to the benches. The ceiling contracted into a tight curve. The far wall irised open to show a holoscreen virtual window on space, with Hel a big blue-white ball to one side.
“Strap in!” the voice said, and I shouted, “Strap in!” to Foyle, diving for a bench. The walls lurched and rang with baleful metal-on-metal contacts, and everything began to vibrate. I thought at first we had to lie on our bellies to face the control panels, but once I stretched out on the bench it began to fold; it could adjust into a crash seat, and I was on it upside-down. Foyle understood faster; I saw her pulling a control yoke out of her panel as I worked the buckles on my safety straps. The chamber’s motion within the ship felt like a primitive railroad car until it locked into launch position. The moment I was secure in place, I tried to shout something about waiting for others—though of course the Pretender wouldn’t be sending Julia and Domina now—but the words were lost when the general vibration became a roar and we were slammed back in the crash seats by the acceleration as the disguised shuttle blasted free of the Raven.