Cold as Ice (11 page)

By Battachariya's fourth success, no one questioned his hobby, or the anomaly of Great War-related expenditures within a transportation department. If anyone had, an economic analysis would have shown investments repaid by discoveries a hundred times over.

But the departmental memoranda were another matter. Looking at the scanty file as she returned through the suspension tube, Magrit had the feeling that Bat's war-relic activities had been not so much approved and planned as simply
grown.
She was too experienced to let nervousness show, but the last steps back into Bat Cave were not easy ones. She paused on the threshold, looking around the chamber and trying to see it through the inspector-general's probing eyes. The granular paneled walls and ceiling, the recessed solar-spectrum lighting, and the soft but impenetrable grey floor did not draw her attention. What Magrit sought were items and emphases exclusively Battachariyan.

She stared along the narrow, ugly chamber that formed both living quarters and office. The Bat Cave was only three meters high and four wide, but it was at least thirty deep. The useful width was diminished by bookcases and file cabinets that ran along both the right and left walls. They carried thousands of unbound sheaves of dusty printouts, the results of Belt Sweeper surveys, all placed apparently at random.

At the far end there was a small, well-equipped kitchen and the great mound of Battachariya's bed. To reach that point, a visitor must pass through a central corridor wide enough to admit Bat's own bulk. That corridor was flanked by tables and benches covered with a chaos of gadgets and machinery, many of them incomplete or fused to uselessness.

It was a unique collection, a cornucopia of Great War relics and debris. The one thing missing—Magrit could see it clearly now, as she had not seen it for years—was any evidence of
passenger transport schedules.
Evidence, in fact, of Bat's official duties. Yarrow Gobel's gimlet eye, no matter how sharp, could not see inside Battachariya's head, where those schedules were securely tucked away. What he could see was evidence of diverted attention, lax supervision, misuse of department funds . . .

Magrit had left the two men sitting at the table where Gobel had stacked the transport requisition reports. She had expected to find them sitting there still. The reports had apparently not been moved, but Bat was halfway along the room. Gobel was at his side, peering into some sort of viewfinder.

"I have the records you requested." Magrit tried to sense the atmosphere as she advanced into the room. She failed. Bat was as impassive as ever, and Gobel's turtle face did not seem built to show human expression. He took his eye at last from the viewfinder and turned to face her.

"Thank you." And now Gobel was suddenly giving off an emotion that Magrit Knudsen could read. Annoyance. He took the folder she proffered and placed it under his arm. "With your permission, Administrator Knudsen, I will take this with me for review and return it to you tomorrow." He walked past Magrit, heading for the door.

"But the review of the supplementary list—"

"—is in my hands." Gobel turned back to Battachariya. "Eight o'clock?"

"Choose the time for your convenience. I will certainly be here."

"Then eight o'clock." Gobel was gone, without a word to Magrit.

"What have you been
saying
to him?" She turned to Bat. "When I left, he was just unsympathetic, but now he's
mad
at you."

"That is untrue." Bat was easing the viewfinder back into its case. His moonlike, swarthy face wore a rare look of gratification. "He is not angry with me, not in the slightest. It was your return that provoked his animosity."

"All I did was bring him the memos he asked for."

"True. It was not
what
you brought that caused annoyance. It was the simple fact of your return." Battachariya had moved to a pile of listings, and he removed one. "Since the inspector-general has left for the moment, may I bring another matter to your attention?"

Bat's sideways mental leaps always lost Magrit. Today he seemed more obscure than usual. She stared blankly at the listing that he handed her. It reported on a Sweeper survey of parts of the Belt. The search had been completed two years ago, but the results had only recently been forwarded to Bat from the Ceres data banks.

"Is this something Gobel asked you about?"

"Not at all. The inspector-general knows nothing of it. I was reviewing this survey before his arrival interrupted my work. Now I wish to draw your attention to this item."

His pudgy finger jabbed at a dozen lines of written description halfway down the page. "Read that. Carefully."

Magrit read. One of the Sweepers, the machines responsible for continuous surveillance of potential hazards to navigation as far out as Uranus, had located and examined a man-made object. It was a piece of a deep-space ore freighter, the
Pelagic
, which had been converted for passenger transport near the end of the war. The vessel had been attacked and disintegrated. The Sweeper had found one small fragment, which happened to include an intact flight recorder. A querying of the recorder showed that the
Pelagic
was a Belt vessel carrying a total of ten passengers and crew at the time of the ship's destruction. The nature of the damage and the weapon that inflicted it were described.

Magrit read it through twice. "So a Sweeper found a bit of space debris left over from the war. What about it? There must be millions of them."

"There are indeed. The Sweeper recorded the approximate position and velocity for future tracking, but it did not recover the fragment from orbit, nor did it destroy it. I would like your permission for recovery to be initiated at once, and the flight recorder sent here."

"What will it cost?"

"That estimate is not yet available. But it will be significant, since the position is poorly known." It was wrong for a supervisor to lose her temper
visibly
with someone who worked for her. Except sometimes. Except like now, when nobody else was here.

"Bat, I don't know why I bother. Where's your goddamned sense? You have the inspector-general breathing down your neck and aching to find something he can stick you with. He hasn't seen one thing in writing that says you ought to have any interest in war relics. So while he's actually poring over your records, you want to stick some new fund request right up his nose. What do you propose to tell him when he comes back tomorrow to go over your requisitions?"

Arrogant was right. Pompous was right. But add
crazy
, too, because Battachariya was smiling at her serenely. "Inspector-General Gobel will not return here tomorrow."

"He sure said he would."

"No. He said that he would return your file tomorrow, and see me at eight o'clock. That is eight o'clock
tonight.
For dinner. I have promised goulash, which, as you know, is a specialty of mine. As for the list that so concerns you, he examined it while you were gone and pronounced himself fully satisfied."

In the inverted world of Bat Cave, where subordinates did what they liked and logic hung by its heels from the ceiling, you took an incorruptible, tunnel-visioned inspector-general and seduced him with promises of goulash.

But Bat was continuing. "Yarrow Gobel is, as should have been apparent to you from the expression on his face when he first saw the items on the discretionary account, a Great War
aficionado.
Far more so than I. He is convinced that the Belt was in the final days developing a secret weapon, a device that would have won the war for them had not something gone dreadfully awry. I will, of course, mention to him over dinner the fragment of the
Pelagic
and my interest in recovering it." He tapped the sheet he was holding. "And given his predilection, it is inconceivable that he will disapprove funding when I show the evidence and explain its possible significance."

Magrit went across to Bat's huge padded chair and plunked herself down in the middle of it. Bat had to be a genius or an idiot. The trouble was, he thought he was a genius. And so did she. "You might start by explaining its significance to
me.
I'm the one who has to find the cash. And I don't see any reason to spend one cent on dragging back a lump of a ship that was blown apart twenty-five years ago."

"That can only be because you did not read the report as carefully as I requested. Rather than asking you to peruse it yet again, I will summarize the salient facts. First, the
Pelagic
was a Belt vessel. Not merely
made
in the Belt, but operated for the Belt during the war. To confirm that fact, I checked Inner System records. There is no evidence that the
Pelagic
was ever captured or controlled by the Inner System.

"Second, the damage report on the remaining fragment of the
Pelagic
leaves no doubt as to the weapon that inflicted it. The
Pelagic
was destroyed by a particular type of smart missile known as a Seeker."

"I've heard of it. Thousands of ships were wiped out by Seekers."

"They were indeed.
Inner System
ships. The Seeker was a Belt weapon." Battachariya moved to Magrit's side and gently laid the listing in her lap. His arrogance and pomposity had vanished, subordinated to intense curiosity. "So a Belt ship was blown apart by a Belt weapon. The
Pelagic
was destroyed
by its own side.
Why?"

* * *

The Great Bat was not the only one with an evening meeting. As the cabinet-level officer in charge of transportation, Magrit Knudsen could not afford to stay away from the evening's General Assembly meeting, although she was already tired. She left the Bat Cave at six-fifteen, allowing herself just forty-five minutes to eat, shower, change, and review her position on the main issue before the Assembly.

Further development of one of the Galileian satellites, particularly on the scale proposed, would change traffic patterns all around Jupiter. Irrevocably. How could that be justified? Not easily. She felt herself tilting toward opposition of the project, but she wanted to hear all of the evidence before she made up her mind.

There were others in the General Assembly, though, to whom evidence mattered not at all.
Snakes
, she thought as she gulped down a few mouthfuls of soup and a handful of crackers. Empire builders, who would publicly oppose development but promote and lobby for it strongly in private. Snakes and
wolves.
Tonight's meeting would be packed with them, because development projects brought them out in packs, scenting profits. She glared at her face in the mirror and brushed her long black hair harder than necessary. Snakes and wolves and
pigs.
They didn't give a damn what happened to the Jovian system thirty years from now, as long as the hogs could roll in the money today. She could name a dozen of them who were sure to be there tonight.

And, like it or not, she had to work with them. It was that, or give up and let them have their way.

Magrit thought of Rustum Battachariya and his goulash. The meal was sure to be delicious. Bat was as much a gourmet as he was a gourmand. No handful of crackers for
his
dinner.

As usual when she came away from a meeting with Bat, she was half irritated and half envious. He didn't care about promotions. He had no interest in political infighting or power struggles. If he were given a line position at Cabinet level, he would not survive for two days. But tonight he was the one who would be working his way through four or five portions of goulash, lounging in the Bat Cave and showing off all his toys to Inspector-General Yarrow Gobel while Magrit was sitting and nodding politely at people whose company she hated.

She checked her appearance, checked the time, and headed over to the assembly hall. Battachariya lived a peaceful, intellectual, stress-free life, doing just what he wanted to do and refusing to consider anything else. Now and then Magrit thought it might be nice to change jobs with him.

Now and then. About once a year. The idea lasted at most for an hour.

She quickened her pace. Her juices were already stirring. Magrit couldn't wait to meet those greedy sons of bitches and jump into the middle of the hassle over the Europan development project.

6
An Offer You Can't Refuse

By the end of the week, Jon Perry had seen too much of Arenas. His meeting at the Admin Center of the Global Ocean Monitor Service had been scheduled, postponed, confirmed, and postponed again. Three times he had appeared with an appointment at Manuel Posada's office, only to learn from anonymous underlings that the undersecretary of GOMS was detained "indefinitely." Twice Jon had been bumped by "the imperatives of highest authority," whatever that meant.

After the fourth day and fifth aborted meeting, he had moved from puzzled to seething. By design or by accident, someone was telling him that he was of negligible importance.

He left GOMS HQ in a foul mood at five P.M., when everyone except the guards at the door had gone. They were itching to leave, too, for it was opening night in Arenas for the Midsummer Festival, and the streets were-already packed with musicians, floats, and noisy celebrants.

Jon was in no mood to participate, and in his plain dark-green uniform he felt conspicuous among the vivid, flower-bedecked costumes. The buildings of the city thinned out to the west and he headed that way, toward the smoky orange eye of the sun. Before it finally clipped to the horizon he had walked to the crest of the line of hills, over the brow, and all the way down the gentle western slopes to the seawall. He reached the embankment, a hundred feet above turbulent water, and stared down at the white-caps in Otway Bay. As he watched, the surface broke to a glittering line of foam.

He had wanted solitude and had expected to find nothing more than sea and sky; but he had arrived when the management team of Plankton Unlimited was assembling to head out to the krill farms. They were in a wild mood, even for professional jokers. As he watched, a score of them started to play follow-the-leader, swimming nose to tail, faster and faster, hurtling toward the sharp-edged rocks before turning at the last moment. Once all of them disappeared for half a minute, to emerge in a giant cascade of spray and blown spume. They had changed underwater from the serial motion of the chase to the parallel efforts of a chorus line. Four hundred tons of gleeful, muscular mammal rose in a perfect arc high into the air, turned, and smashed back in unison into the sea. The thrown water glowed with phosphorescence. Ten seconds later, twenty black heads bobbed up, bowed, and began a stately pirouetting dance in matched pairs.