The Stone Dogs (28 page)

"Bettah," he said. "But remembah, don't drawl too much.

Brains is
buh'rains
, not
braaains.
The dialect has roots hereabouts, but it's changed in different directions since the 1780s. Over to the cycle."

She groaned and swung herself up, walking over to the fixed exercise cycle. Her sweatsuit was soaked and chafing; she wiped her face on the corner of the towel around her neck. Her brother was using the Unitorso machine beside it, with his forearms against the vertical spring-loaded bars, pressing them in to his chest, holding, then slowly out again. The muscles of his chest and stomach stood out, moving fluidly beneath the fair skin.

Marya felt a sudden sharp stab of affection, oddly mixed with the sort of aesthetic admiration you might feel for a statue or a sunset.

Damnation,
she thought dismally. The number of eligible males around was small, and seemed either gentlemanly or disinterested. A man could marry outside the field, as long as the wife didn't mind not being told a lot of things. For a female agent, another agent was about the only game in town.
It's like
being tall, she thought. You have to go for the tall boys, but the
short girls poach on them, too.

Of course, she could start asking them herself… Her mouth twisted wryly. Sex was a tool of the trade, and she was sure enough she could do anything required in that line, but somehow it was different in a social setting.
Benefits of a Catholic
upbringing. Shit.

The instructor had finished his second sequence of fifty and dropped lightly to the ground, landing silently on the balls of his feet. He was dressed as they were, in loose felted cotton exercise clothing and soft shoes, but he seemed to flow as he walked.

"Get to it," the Draka said. "Yo' wind needs it." He stopped by Fred, looked him up and down appraisingly. Then he seemed to blur, and his fist struck the man low in the belly. Marya winced at the hard
smack
, and her brother doubled over with a grunt.

His hand had come down to block and stayed suspended three-quarters of the way to completion.

"Better," the Draka said, then chuckled. "Back home, they'd envy me mah chances, gettin' to beat up on Yankees fo' a livin'."

Marya pedaled grimly. "If yo' loves us so much, why're yo'

heah?" she enunciated carefully.

The Draka looked at her. "Good. Treatin' yo'r's' right, now."

It isn't a lack of expression,
she thought, puzzled. Like most Draka she had seen, the instructor somehow gave an impression of stillness even when he was moving.
Ah. No unintentional
gestures,
she decided. The hands moved only when he wanted them to, and the body stayed rock-still unless ordered to move.

No twitches, jerks, shifts.

"It was a mattah of circumstances, luck an' opportunity," he continued. "I's an only chile, and mah mothah died early. Pa away most all the time, no relatives near. Raised by serfs mo'

than most, didn't fit in well at school. Eventually realized that all the people I really cared about had numbahs on they necks, and that I was spendin' my life grindin' them down." He grinned, a gaunt expression. "Had an opportunity to get out, took it.

Doesn't mean I've got any particular affection fo' Yankees or Yankeeland. The air stinks, everythin's ugly, there's no decent huntin', and the people are soft an' contemptible."

He checked the medical readouts built into the cycle: heartbeat, respiration, neurological profile. "Good enough. Two of you are gettin' as near passable as yo' ever will in the time available; toward the top of the bottom one-fifth of Citizens. Pity, yo've both got good potential. Bettah than average."

Fred was using the Unitorso again, the mark of knuckles a fading red mark on his stomach below the solar plexus. "If…

that's… so… why're we… so… godsdamned… rotten?" he asked, careful to keep his tone neutral.

The Draka looked up at him. "Time," he said. "Y'all didn't start early enough; that affects y' whole system. Bone-density, fo'

example, basic body-fat ratios, metabolic rate an' so forth. Mah genes is no more than middlin', athletics-wise, but y'all will never catch up. If yo'd been in the
agoge
from age five, yo'd be notable excellent."

ABOARD AIRSHIP DOULOS

APPROACHING NANTES AIRHAVEN

LOIRE DISTRICT, TOURAINE PROVINCE

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

APRIL, 1973

Frederick Lefarge had not flown by airship since he was a child; in the Alliance countries lighter-than-air was used mainly for freight, these days. The Domination had its own turbojets and scramjets, but simply attached less importance to haste, and neither of the Powers allowed overflights by aircraft of the other.

London-Nantes was the sole passenger link between the Alliance and Europe, maintained by the Transportation Directorate; the Alliance had accepted the arrangement, but insisted that only slow and easy-to-monitor dirigibles be used.

"Welcome home, Mastah, Mistis," the serf customs clerk said, handing him and Marya the forms.

The ferry dirigible was still at five thousand feet, time enough to complete the paperwork and to spare, but the American agents had come early to the lounge. That was in character for their personas, Draka eager to be home.

It is a comfortable way to travel,
he mused.
But it gives you
too much time to think
. He had been learning something of the nature of fear, this trip. Swift flashes, like the moment they passed the barricades in London and stepped onto territory that was Draka by treaty. The first green Security Directorate uniform, with the skull patches on the collar. Watching the Channel dwindling away below. A slow gnawing; every moment increased the danger, and there were
a lot
of moments to come.

Still, dirigibles are comfortable
. Particularly compared with being strapped into a windowless hypersonic tin can, boring through the stratosphere at Mach 12 with the leading edges cherry-red. The Doulos was a teardrop of fiber-matrix composite five hundred meters long; near the bow a semicircular strip of the lower hull had been made transparent, as windows for the main lounge. The clear synthetic curved sharply outward for nearly two stories above his head, and from his seat at the edge of the deck he had a view that would have made an agroaphobe cringe, straight down. Countryside for the last few hours, and now the broad greenbelt that always surrounded a major Draka city. There were a quarter million people in Nantes.

None of the jumbled mixed-use fringe you saw in the Alliance; plantation fields, then parks and public gardens and manicured forest. Transport-corridors, more rail and less highway than he was used to. The industrial sector was to the east, along a section of the river that had been dredged for shipping. Anonymous factories with their labor-compounds of three-story flats grouped around paved courts. Shipyards bristling with overhead cranes, warehouses, all along an orderly gridwork of paved streets and rail sidings. Some of the streets were tree-lined; that grew more numerous towards the west, in residential districts reserved for the serf elite of technicians and bureaucrats. Then the Citizen quarter, a cluster of public buildings and a scatter of homes wide-spaced amid gardens.

He turned his attention to the paper:

Name
. Antony Verman

Place and Date of Birth.
Archona, 1947: a Citizen population of over two million, which cut down the chance of meeting someone who should know a personality that existed solely as pits and spots in a read-only optical memory bank. Quite a good cover; they had worked hard to slip it into the files.

"Flagged,"
the instructor had said.
"If the Security
Directorate checks it, they'll get a warning you're War
Directorate Military Intelligence; the War Directorate will be
told you're a krypteia hotshot.
"

The Domination's two armed services liked each other only marginally more than either loved the Alliance, and talked no more than they had to. Of course, the cover would still not stand up to detailed investigation; there were too many records, in too many separate files.

Military Service
. Infantry, XXI Airmobile; as close to anonymous as you could get.

Occupation.
Ceramic design consultant; luxury manufactures like that were generally handled by small businesses, not the omnipresent Combines. A designer was doubly independent, was more free to be a rolling stone with no connections. Better still to have no occupation, but without a good excuse a person who just lived on their Citizen stipend was a figure of some suspicion and contempt, and would attract attention when traveling.

Purpose of visit abroad.
Reviewing samples of American ceramics, of course. There was an interesting collection in the memory of the impeccably Draka
Helot-IV
analogue/ digital personal comp in his attache case, and anyone making inquiries would find a string of design studios and shops with perfectly genuine memories of the two young Draka. That had been the beginning of their assignment, seeing if they could fool Americans first. And pass the critical gaze of the Draka defectors who had been their final instructors, in everything from etiquette and gossip to fighting-style and sexual technique.

He glanced aside at his sister.
Tradecraft's good enough to
fool me,
he thought. They had both had minor cosmetic implants to make their faces unrecognizable to anyone who knew their genuine identities, hormone treatments to change their body-fat ratios, but it was more than that. Most of all the look, the hard-edged glossy
feel
of one of the Domination's elite. Not even just Draka; looking at her with his persona's eyes he could place her, city-born, probably from the southern provinces.

He finished the form and snapped his fingers for the serf. The lounge was growing a little crowded. Two hundred or more; thirty or so Draka, settling in around them, and the rest from the Alliance, mostly Americans and English. Some on business, others well-heeled tourists prepared to pay highly for sights and experiences only the Domination could offer; Fred looked at them with a distaste most of the Citizens around him seemed to share. The Domination allowed a trickle of closely-supervised visitors, as much for the Intelligence opportunities as for the Alliance dollars they brought.

There was a subliminal change in the vibration of the hull; he looked back and saw the big turbocompound engine-pods swiveling. Distant pumps went chunk-
whir
, compressing hydrogen to liquid and draining it into the insulated tanks along the keel. Fred's mouth was dry as he felt the slight falling-elevator sensation of descent; he sipped at his glass of sparkling mineral water. They were over the airhaven now, passing rows of dirigibles in their cradles, acres of concrete and rail. The tall cylinder of the docking tower was ahead of them, and the
Doulos
slid toward it with the calm precision of computer piloting.

Contact, and a dying of machine-noise that had been imperceptible before. More movement but with a different feel, heavier than the cushiony grace of lighter-than-air, as the airship established negative buoyancy and sank into its cradle; more chunking noises, as the fuel and gas lines connected. The scene outside sank to four stories above ground level, then pivoted slowly as the cradle turned the airship and drew it toward the waiting terminal. There were three others with their noses locked into the huge cone-shaped depressions in the giant building's wall. The
Doulos
glided into the fourth docking bay and halted; there was a whine as a ten meter broad section of the forward window slid up.

"Let's go," he said.

Home—In a way
, Marya thought, as they walked through the gate into the terminal. France.
The
country where we were conceived.

Although this terminal was post-War, pure Domination.

Probably built in the early '50s to a standard pattern. A huge barrel-vaulted passenger terminal, the coffered ceiling in pale blue and silvergilt tiles; the walls were murals, landscapes, the floor streaked gray marble. Pillars around the walls, trained over with climbing plants. The Citizens' section of the great building was relatively small; most of the traffic was over the other side of the low stone balustrade.
There
it was busy, swarming even.

Most of the serfs there were in overalls of varying cut, livery, color-coded Combine suits with identifying logos on the backs.

Or uniform, green for SD internal-security, dove-gray for the serf component of the Directorate of War. Management level, authorized to travel alone.

And a coffle, forty or fifty people crouched within a rope barrier. Young adults with children, and a few ranging up to middle age, in cheap cotton overalls or blouses and skirts. They were mostly dark, with high cheeks and slant eyes: Asians, brought in from the main resevoir of surplus labor in the Far East. Nantes was a shipbuilding center, and Intelligence said that the submarine yards were being adapted to produce components for the second generation of Draka pulsedrive spaceships. the nuclear-powered deepspace vessels were more like ships than aircraft, no need to shave ounces when total payloads were well over five thousand tonnes.

Enough. Not your mission.
She forced herself not to notice how a woman grabbed her child and winced as a guard walked by with a shockrod. They walked across to an information kiosk.

The clerk covered his eyes and bowed, then smiled.

"Yo' will, masters?" He pronounced it mastaire; a Frenchman.

A little overweight, unremarkable. The number stood out below his ear, glaring. His fingers hovered over a keyboard below the stone-slab counter; there was a screen on their side as well.

"Hotel Mirabelle," Fred said. "And a car, please. Fourseater, suitable fo' country drivin'. And a weapons store."

"Phew,"
Fred muttered. His sister could read his thought: Made it. Another milestone: nothing flagged on the Security net attached to their identities.