Authors: Robert Buettner
He turned in to the transverse passage. I stepped and slashed at his jugular with the shiv as I wrapped my empty hand behind his head, grasped his jaw, and twisted.
Then in that instant I knew. People rarely see themselves except in mirror image. They say it’s one reason nobody thinks they look like their driver’s license photo. When I saw Headcover’s full face for the first time, I had seen him straight on and direct, as though I was looking at his driver’s license photo. He was a stranger.
But when I saw his reflection in the shop window, from the same reversed perspective I saw myself every time I shaved . . .
My blade was already flashing across the shadows, its momentum uncontrollable.
I hissed, “You’re my father!”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Varden stood at attention in front of Polian’s desk, the boy’s hands trembling in spite of himself.
Polian waved him to at ease and continued reading the morning reports. But the way the boy fidgeted, it had to be something about the Cutler thing, at last. He had ordered loyal, close-mouthed Varden, and only Varden, to coordinate the operation, but to report only concrete developments.
Not because the boy was clever, but because he wasn’t. It kept Polian at arm’s length from a plot that offered low success probability, and high jeopardy if it went wrong. And it kept older, wiser heads among Polian’s subordinates from questioning a plot that edged Yavet closer to a Trueborn preemptive nuclear attack. It was a dangerous game, but one Polian thought worth playing.
“Out with it, boy.”
“The assassin’s arrived, sir.”
“You’re sure?
“Positive. He came in under a damn sophisticated scrub. If I hadn’t alerted General Gill’s people in Immigration and Customs what to look for, he’d be out peddling light bulbs now.”
“And by that I take it you know what he
is
out doing?”
“Well, we know exactly where he’s doing it.”
“Not by tailing him, I hope. A Trueborn case officer’s not some gangsta. He’d scrape off a tail like garbage off his shoe.”
“No, sir! I and C diverted him to a special customs line, distracted him, and planted a tracker on him.”
Polian rolled his eyes. “The first thing he’ll do is find the bug and kill it.”
Varden raised a finger, smiled. “Yes, sir. The decoy tracker they sewed into his coat pocket lining died before he left the down shuttle station. But the worm transponder they wove into the jacket’s shoulder fabric’s new tech. The Trueborns probably don’t even look for it yet. It’s indistinguishable from sewing thread without a lab-quality microscope or a scanner.”
Polian raised his eyebrows. Worm transponder? He
really
had to spend more time with the tech bulletins. “Good boy, Varden.”
“It’s transmitting five bars.” Varden’s chest puffed visibly inside his tunic.
Polian stood, walked to the window and gazed down through the bronze fog of early evening at the city that sloped away below, a mountain slope of burnished metal. Then Polian turned back to his aide. “I don’t suppose we were lucky enough to pick up an arrival of the other Trueborn? The woman?”
Varden shook his head. “Sir, we had no idea who we were looking for, where she was inbound from, when she might arrive or under what cover. Gill’s people shared a rumor they picked up that Hibble himself chooses not to know where some of his people are. But I had a P-mail cover put on the midwife’s outbound. She wrote roughly what you said to expect, so I had it resealed and sent on.”
“If she’d written something different, I would have had you substitute a forgery that said what we wanted. All we needed from Orion was the contact information for the assassin’s mother.”
Varden’s uplifted eyebrows said that hadn’t occurred to him.
“Where did she send it, son?”
“The address was a numbered box at the Bank of Rand.”
Polian sighed. “Cold trail from there.”
“It was. I’m sorry, sir. But we can still pick up the assassin. Still a coup. Don’t the Trueborns say half a loaf is better than none?”
Polian rocked back on his heels. He had thought Varden was quicker on the uptake. “Sorry? Pick him up? Nothing of the kind, Varden! We don’t need to find the woman now. She’ll come to us. Or rather, she’ll come to the assassin.”
Varden wrinkled his forehead. “Sir? How sure are you?”
Polian turned back to the window and peered down into the deepening darkness, as the workday ended and lights began to twinkle in the residential Kubes of the up levels. Ruberd’s assassin, or one of them, was down there now, in Polian’s grasp as soon as he chose to squeeze. And the prize that would win Cold War II was, or soon would be, also.
Polian drew a breath before he answered the younger man’s question. “Sure, Varden? As sure as a parent’s unconditional and enduring love for a child.”
TWENTY-NINE
The gray-haired man had blocked my shiv thrust with his forearm as easily as any close-combat instructor ever had.
I had staggered back, mouth agape, and stared. At myself, but with wrinkles. His eyes glistened, and he shook his head slowly as he stared at me. “My God.” He paused, swallowed. “So long. I never thought . . .”
“Long is right, old man.”
I couldn’t get my head around the idea that somehow he was my father, though his reaction confirmed what my eyes showed me.
He stood silhouetted against the bright bustle of the main drag. A passerby paused, peered into the gloom, presumed a robbery in progress, and hurried on.
If the old man wasn’t my tail, one would be along shortly.
“We better get out of here, Pop.”
“Yes, yes, I suppose . . . Jazen. Did I pronounce it right?”
“Perfect. For not having much practice.” I started off down the transverse with him following. It narrowed, the ceiling stepped lower again, and the smell got worse. A utility I had used in the past was clogged. I tried another wide enough for bigs without armor, and we dropped six vertical. Our height made us stand out downlevels, but now I knew where I was going. The little people who passed us hurried by, heads bowed. Bigs could have been plainclothes vice.
“I guess you know your way?”
“Too well, old man. I spent a lifetime down these shitholes, thanks to you.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
Then we headed even farther down into Yaven.
THIRTY
“Mort?” Kit’s audible voice came to him via her ears, as faint and as raw as the thought came to him indistinct and confused.
He turned within the shallow shelter he had occupied and eyed the now-bare limb where six meals had hung. “You are punctual. Are you well?”
She coughed. “I will be, once the wake-up shot circulates.” He sensed her foreclaw digits prod her head above her eyes. “Christ, who crapped a boulder into my skull while I was sleeping?”
“I do not—Oh. Ha-ha.”
“Ha-ha? You try it, hairball.”
Mort stood, stretched, raised his left back two and urinated. “I am sorry. I sense your discomfort is acute.”
“You find him?”
“I believe I have found Yavet. It is by far the largest human hive I have encountered. But it is unpleasantly crowded even by human standards, and most of its humans live in misery.”
“That’s the place, alright.” Kit unfolded herself within the Scorpion seed’s darkness. “Canopy to max visual.”
The seed’s forward eyelid opened again, and the lights above and below it winked on. Ahead, the light-studded blackness Kit saw looked no different than it had when the great eye had closed.
Kit’s heart skipped. “Where the hell is—?”
One of the lights ahead winked out, and Kit commanded, “Forward magnification to max.”
A disc grew in the center of the Scorpion’s great eye, the way that ripples grew on still water, and the blackness within the disc appeared larger. Now Mort realized that the light ahead had winked because a dark object had passed between it and the Scorpion.
“Enhance.”
The dark object grew, continued growing, until it seemed to hang so near that Kit could have reached out a foreclaw and touched it. It was a pockmarked rock, dull gray and slowly tumbling.
“Gotcha! Come to Mama.” Again Kit rotated the metal bit with her foreclaw and the Scorpion sped toward the object.
“Kit!”
“Relax. Objects in windscreen are smaller than they appear.”
“Oh.”
“So, how’s that for spot-on astrogation?”
“That is Yavet? It appears tinier even than Mousetrap. It could never hold thirteen billion humans.”
“It isn’t Yavet, Mort. It isn’t even a moonlet of Yavet. It’s a big rock in eccentric orbit around Yavet. It’s a half mile in longest dimension. It circles the planet once every three years, in an egg-shaped orbit that takes it no closer to Yavet than one hundred thousand miles and no farther away than six hundred thousand miles. When it’s at apogee, you couldn’t see it from the surface of Yavet without a telescope the size of a silo. But astronomically speaking, it’s in Yavet’s backyard.”
“It excites you because it proves you are near Yavet?”
“It excites me because it proves the Yavi aren’t as smart as they think they are.”
“I don’t understand.”
Kit spoke aloud. “Transmit recognition codes.”
A row of the green lights winked red, then back to green. Two heartbeats later, the lights winked red again, twice.
“What does it mean?”
“That I’m invited for dinner with a bunch of nerds in Utility 5. Mort, Earth hasn’t been able to keep an effectively placed human source,—a spy—native or imported, alive on Yavet since before I graduated from college. The best intelligence we get from Yavet we get by reading their electronic mail.”
Kit maneuvered the Scorpion closer to the elongate rock, matching the seed’s speed and direction to the rock’s tumbling pattern, so that the seed’s forward end pointed down into one of the hoofprint-shaped depressions that pocked the rock’s surface. The particular depression spanned perhaps four times the width that the Scorpion was long. The floor of the depression shifted, then opened like the iris of a frightened animal’s eye.
Then Kit edged the Scorpion down, through the opening, into the lit cavern concealed beneath.
Mort sat back on his rump, middle two forward.
Humans never ceased to amaze him. The ingenuity and peculiarity of their nests was a marvel.
In the time it took him to locate, bring down and dismember a mid-sized mite sucker, Kit had climbed out of the Scorpion and floated within the tiny rock, which had been hollowed in the way mites hollowed a fallen tree trunk.
Mort growled.
He had experienced weightlessness once, and the sensation had caused him to regurgitate repeatedly.
Along one wall of the space in which Kit now floated, two rows of humans hunched with their backs to her, peering into bright lit windows that seemed to look out to nowhere.
One of them, a blue-clad female smaller than Kit, swam toward her. The female had a topknot darker than Kit’s, and tiny dabs of silver shone atop the joints where her forelimbs joined her torso.
As she drew close to Kit, she touched a foreclaw above her own eye. “Colonel, my pleasure to welcome you aboard. We don’t get many visitors between shift changes. Especially not with engraved invitations like yours.”
Kit touched her own forehead. “Trust me, lieutenant. Six days alone in a Scorpion? The pleasure’s mine. How’s the eavesdropping business?”
“Booming, ma’am. Thirteen billion Yavi put out lots of traffic.”
Kit and the other female drifted behind the others, each of whom kept his head turned toward the window in front of him.
The one called lieutenant said to Kit, “May I ask how we can assist you, ma’am? We have all the comforts. Galley. Infirmary with state-of-the-art ‘bots. Gym.”
“For starters, a quart of the coldest water you can spare, then some information about Yavet.”
“Perhaps a bunk, Ma’am?’
Kit shook her head. “Just had six days of rack. But I’d kill for a Sanex. I have
got
to get out of these clothes.”
The two humans nearest Kit and the lieutenant turned their heads rapidly and stared.
Kit leaned toward the female. “What’s
their
problem?”
“Shifts last six standard months, and we’re four months in. Crew complement is twelve and—”
“You’re the only female?”
The lieutenant nodded. “References to disrobing are best avoided.”
“Got it.”
Mort returned to the search for Jazen within the mass of humans around which Kit now circled, then briefly pounced upon lunch.
When he next heard Kit speak, she was again with the lieutenant, the two now drifting within a smaller space, in front of a glowing, translucent gray ball, surrounded by a silver ring no thicker than a hair, which seemed to revolve around the ball, even as the ball itself turned slowly.
The lieutenant touched her foreclaw to the ball. “The red dots on the holo mark the locations, beneath the cloud cover, of stack cities with populations of one hundred million or more. As you see, they’re located in two clusters, one in the eastern hemisphere, one in the western. There’s not much sub-aerial solid surface left on Yavet since the polar caps melted.”
Kit stroked her chin with her foreclaw. “If you had to guess where an offworlder might be?”
The lieutenant tapped with her own foreclaw at a yellow dot larger than the rest. “Yaven. It’s the Capital. The two martial directorates, Internal Operations and External Operations, headquarter there. All the down shuttles from Ring Station land there. Yaven’s our high-value traffic hotspot by a factor of ten. Population at least three billion. Probably more. If the Yavi can find an excuse to ignore a little person, they do.”
“Could you isolate a particular individual down there?”
“We track each member of the Central Committee 25/7.”
“Seriously?”
“The product we get’s not as valuable as you’d think. Their average chronological age is eighty-one. They mostly text message each other about what foods give them gas and whose proctologist is gay.”
“I was thinking more about tracking an offworlder. ’Puter locator chip? Hotel registration?”
“Directly locate?” The lieutenant shook her head. “There are three billion people down there, and most of them have ‘puters or phones. Yavi Internal Security tracks them, but it’s beyond our capacity. The hotel registrations are actually done point-of-sale on physical cards, so you wouldn’t pick up a registrant ‘til the stay’s compiled digitally. By that time, the subject of interest would probably have checked out. Actually, some smugglers sell out of mid-levels hotel Kubes for that very reason, or so we hear. The Yavi don’t pay much attention to smugglers. And we don’t pay much attention to smugglers up here, either.”
“Nobody does, apparently.” Kit pressed her foreclaws together, and her eyelids narrowed her field of vision. “What can you tell me about the near-planet defense network?”
The lieutenant’s small mouth turned up at its corners. “Now you’re talking, Colonel! That’s the kind of traffic Teufelsberg Station’s used to monitoring and interpreting.”
“I thought this listening post was called ‘Utility 5.’”
The lieutenant nodded. “Officially. But you may have noticed Utility 5 has a, uh, unique aroma?”
“I’ve lived with worse.”
“Yavi sensor technology’s so far ahead of Earth’s that Utility 5 emits as little radiation of any type or frequency as possible. And emits absolutely nothing besides radiation, to avoid detection. Raw intelligence, and any intelligence product we’re able to develop here, ships out only once every six months, along with the relieved crew, aboard a stretch Scorpion shuttle. So does our solid waste.”
Kit nodded, then raised both shoulders toward her ears. “The name?”
“During Cold War I, the good guys emplaced a listening post called Teufelsberg Station on the border of the Soviet Bloc. To improve line-of-sight reception, they piled up three hundred feet of garbage first, then built the listening post on top. We feel a historical bond.”
The lieutenant waved a foreclaw and a translucent green bubble made up of a lacing of flickering vines surrounded the gray ball and the silver ring. “Okay. Near space defenses. We call this bubble the “Iron Helmet,” after the two-dimensional Iron Curtain from the Teufelsberg days. It’s basically an extraordinarily dense hunter-killer satellite network orbiting at geosynchronous speed and altitude.”
Kit pointed at the flickering green ball. “The Yavi being the Yavi, I assume some of the warheads are nukes?”
The lieutenant nodded her head. “One in twenty, shuffled randomly. The other nineteen are homing mines with conventional warheads.”
Kit whistled. “That’s—”
“Six thousand nukes in orbit, Ma’am. The Yavi have a boatload of ’em that they can’t deliver onto anybody else, so they use them to keep us out.”
“They
do
know that thing wouldn’t keep us out? Stand-off cruiser weapons and Scorpions would penetrate that like gnats through a tennis net.”
“That’s why we call it the Iron Helmet. You could hit those codgers on the Central Committee upside the head with a bat and they wouldn’t learn. It’s also why we’ve stopped the drone probes.”
Kit swam closer to the ball. “Tell me about that.”
“The cruisers used to drop off autonomous chemical drive drones that would make spoof runs at the Helmet, to try and draw responses and map the nuke versus conventional pattern. We quit partly because it pissed the Yavi off. But mostly because we were afraid the Yavi would detonate a nuke to stop some crappy drone, and accidentally take down the Ring.”
“Hey. It’s
their
Wonder of the Universe.”
“Colonel, a hundred million people live in the Ring.”
“I know. Poor joke. I
am
right? A Scorpion-T could get through that bubble easily?”
“Hypothetically? Definitely. The fighter patrols in the layer between the helmet and the Ring might be tougher to defeat without detection. A scorpion’s faster and more maneuverable, but the Yavi have more fighters up at a given moment than the Teufelsberg garbage mountain had flies.”
“How about not hypothetically?”
The lieutenant’s small eyes bulged. “Ma’am? I figured you were here to maybe make a tease flyby? Maybe swing in within fifty thousand miles. See if the bad guys lit you up, gauge their radars.”
“Actually, the reason to use a Scorpion-T is so the bad guys can’t light you up.”
The lieutenant straightened and crossed her arms. “Colonel Born, are you seriously proposing that I allow you to fly a Scorpion through the Helmet? Where it could trigger an interplanetary incident? And maybe hand the Yavi a C-drive power plant if your ship’s lost?”
“No.”
The lieutenant slumped and smiled. “Oh.”
“I am seriously
assuring
you that I am going to fly a Scorpion through the Helmet. Then I am going to parallel park it smack in the middle of downtown Yaven. Nobody asked you to allow it or not. Read your orders, lieutenant.” Kit raised her eyes to the chamber’s ceiling. “Why does nobody get this? What part of ‘render all assistance requested without question’ is hard to understand?”
The lieutenant floated motionless, her eyes wide, her tiny mouth open in a ring shape.