Empery (14 page)

“Not alone,” he said, catching her bare arm with one hand.

She stared at him with eyes still bright with moisture, uncomprehending.“I can help, Blythe,” he said pleadingly. “Please let me.” In a rush of ascetic self-flagellation, she nearly refused him. But the touch of his hand on her skin was a reminder of a closeness she had long forgone, one which at that moment was compellingly appealing. She knew that was not what Berberon was offering; knew, too, that he was not one whom she would have sought out for the role. But there was an earnestness in him that she had not much seen before. And this night, this one time, if he could even just hold her and manage to be tender, he could at least make sleep come more easily.

“Come with me, then,” she said at last, pulling free and leading the way toward the lift node.

Mercifully, he
was
tender. And in the morning, before they talked, he made breakfast for them both.

Brian Arlett sat on the lift flange of his rented skeeter and peered across the deserted flight apron toward the deepyacht. The ship rested in the upright launch position on the apron in front of its berthing bunker, which was the largest of the five strung along the west edge of the port. Several pieces of ground-support equipment were arrayed around the ship, but they were still and silent. The only sounds Arlett heard now were occasional cries from orbiting seabirds; he could not even hear any sound from the sea as it lapped gently at the beach just three hundred metres away.

“Anything yet?” he asked aloud. The words were picked up by the implant mike and relayed through the open channel to 9-Net.

“Sorry, Brian,” came the reply. “No answer. I’m trying to get an overtier to authorize a direct page. That’s not too easy, since you won’t let me tell them what this is about. If Wells was so eager to hear from you, he should have set up a net pass-through.”

“Keep trying,” Arlett said with a sigh.

Standing, Arlett brought his scanner up to eye level and trained it on Berth 5. Over the last hour the steady stream of orange-clad techs making their way between the bunker and the ship had dwindled away to nothing. Now the only people in sight were the officious-looking Customs agent at the foot of the access ramp and the small clot of techs standing idly between the yawning doors of the now empty bunker.

“This is Wells,” a voice said in his ear.

Reflexively Arlett straightened up before answering. “Mr. Wells, this is Brian Arlett. I have an update on Merritt Thackery. There is some urgency to it or I wouldn’t have insisted on a page.”

“Yes, Brian. Go ahead.”

“He took us a little by surprise—left his house this morning before seven in a land cruiser and went straight to the Lancaster County Airport. The spotter notified me, and I caught up with him in Florida. We’re now both at Port Abaco, in the Bahamas.”

“Port Abaco—what’s he doing there?”

“Apparently trying to sneak out the back way, sir.”

“I thought the launch facilities there were shut down several years ago.”

“So did I,” Arlett said. “But if I understand the port manager correctly—he has a damnably thick accent and refuses to repeat anything—under Service space law, no ship that received proper authorization to land and is up-to-date on its berthing fees and taxes can be refused permission to lift again.”

Wells clucked. “That’s correct. That provision was added after there was some trouble with the Daehne trying to appropriate an archaeological vessel. So what you’re telling me is that there’re some ships there that haven’t moved since the port was closed?”

“Yes, Mr. Wells—three of them. Two are antiques. I don’t think they could move even if the port still had the kind of support facilities they require. But the third is another story. It’s a free-landing deepyacht named
Fireside
, and it’s sitting out on a lift pad looking like it’s ready to go.”

“
Fireside
. Well, I’ll be damned. That’s Thackery’s ship. How close are you? Can you see what’s going on?”

“I’m sitting about a half a klick away on the north edge of the field. Thackery was aboard his ship for twenty-five minutes, but then he came out again and talked with some of the tech people before disappearing into the berthing bunker. I haven’t seen him for a quarter of an hour.”

“Where is
Fireside
supposed to be headed? What did the port manager say?”

“I don’t think he knew, and I haven’t been able to get into the right system to find out myself,” Arlett said, pacing alongside his vehicle. “But either Thackery’s having trouble with Customs, or Transport must have rejected his flight proposal. The port manager was expecting
Fireside
to lift at ten local time—which would have been about ten minutes after Thackery got here. But it’s past eleven already.”

“Those are
our
systems that you’re trying to get into,” Wells said dryly. “All flight requests are filed with USS-Transport.” Wells fell silent for a moment, then added, “I’m going to go off-line for a moment. Hold on there while I check this out.”

It was not the call that Wells had been expecting that morning, but he was glad he had been there to receive it live. His lips pursed pensively, Wells muted the link and turned to his terminal. “Quicksearch. Let me have the DFAR abstract on deepyacht
Fireside
,” he said, propping his chin on his folded hands.

The abstract popped up on the display a moment later:

What did you expect, Thackery?
Wells thought.
You know that Arcturus is in the Boötes Octant. Surely you realized that we screen everything going that way—that Transport would have to get permission from Defense to let you go. And we don’t approve much except for the regular packets and our own internal operations. That’s why you’re still sitting on the ground there
.

Shaking his head to himself, Wells reopened the link. “Are you there?”

“Yes, Mr. Wells,” Arlett acknowledged.

“I’ve found out what’s holding him up,” Wells said. “I’m not sure yet how I want to handle it. I’d like you to stay where you are and call back if there’re any developments. I’ll want to know immediately if they start to move Fireside out to the flight line or back into the bunker. If Thackery leaves, you leave with him.”

“I understand,” Arlett said.

Wells broke the link and sat back in his chair.
You could have Stayed in the Susquehanna. I would have seen that you were left alone. But you didn’t know, did you? I threatened the very opposite. But I hoped you would wait until you saw if 1 was really going to follow through on it
.

A quick check with Boötes Traffic Control told him that there were six ships en route to Arcturus, ranging from a freighter less than a cee from grounding at Helixis to a packet barely six weeks out from Boötes Center. Would it make any difference to add
Fireside
to that stream?

Objectively considered, it was not a particularly dangerous run. At a distance of thirty-seven cees Arcturus was barely halfway to the Ursa Major cluster and a full thirteen cees within the Perimeter. Moreover, the trajectory that led to Arcturus lay thirty degrees south and west of the nearest black-flagged star—

The only thing holding Wells back was Thackery himself.
Can I trust him to go there and only there?
All traffic in the octants adjoining the Perimeter was subject to strict lane discipline. Would that be enough to insure Thackery’s compliance?Wells could not keep Thackery on Earth, even if he wanted to. All Thackery had to do was file a new request with a different destination, and he would be gone—

Wells realized belatedly that he was searching for a reason to let Thackery go, trying to justify in his head a decision already made in his heart. The Traffic Office has sound, conservative guidelines. They followed precedent. Why overrule them?

Perhaps it was guilt over having chased Thackery from his hiding place. Perhaps it was yesterday’s victory over Erickson and the anticipation of her surrender that inclined him to be generous. Wells did not know, and it did not seem important enough to wring his hands endlessly. Why shouldn’t he be able to go to Arcturus New Colony if that’s what he wants? he thought.

“Defnet. Traffic Office,” he said.

A woman responded. “Traffic, Lieutenant Lezak.”

“This is Director Wells. Voice Authorization Check.”

There was hardly any pause. “Confirmed, sir. How can I help you?”

“In regard to #DFAR-E122341—”

“Go ahead, sir. I have it up in front of me.”

“You are to approve the request, subject to the normal corridor and communications restrictions for the Boötes Octant. Correct the request to reflect an 1ST 22:00 departure and see that an amended report is sent over to Transport immediately.”

Never having seen a deepyacht lift, Arlett did not immediately know whether, when the techs started returning the support gear to Berth 5, that meant the launch was imminent or had been scrubbed.

The first unambiguous sign was when Thackery emerged from the bunker and began to cross the open pavement toward
Fireside
with brisk, purposeful strides. Arlett immediately paged Wells, but by then things were happening very quickly. The Customs agent gave Thackery a quick, cursory, final inspection, then hurried off toward the cavernous bunker. Thackery scrambled aboard his ship and sealed the hatch behind him. A high-pitched hiss and wail coming from the ship conspired with the growl of the closing bunker doors to shatter the silence of the port.

It seemed an eternity before Wells responded to the page.“Yes, Brian,” he said at last. “What’s happening?”

“Mr. Wells! She’s going to lift—”

At that moment the whistle of the compressors turned into an angry whine, and a fierce but flameless blast of air from the liftjets blew a cloud of limestone dust outward from the base of the ship. The ground shook, sending dozens of speckle-furred agoutis scrambling from nests and burrows they had never had any reason to think unsafe.

Within a minute the leading edge of the jet blast reached where Arlett stood, forcing him to turn his head away and shield his eyes from the hail of tiny grit. When he looked back,
Fireside
was already its own height off the ground, liftjets screaming as they fought the dead weight of the fuselage that enclosed them.

The painfully slow ascent made Arlett wonder if something was wrong, if the ship was about to lose what seemed to be a precarious balance and come crashing down into the sea. But the deepyacht continued to climb, accelerating steadily, if unspectacularly. Arlett tracked
Fireside
with his scanner as long as possible, until the ship seemed to tear a hole through a bank of clouds and then vanish beyond them.

“Did she get away all right?” Wells asked calmly.“I—I suppose so, sir,” Arlett said in a shaky voice. “I can’t see her anymore.”

Inexplicably Wells sounded pleased. “Thank you, Brian,” he said. “Please consider yourself released. You acquitted yourself quite well during this whole matter, and I have decided to put through a recommendation for your promotion to Fifth Tier.”

“Thank you,” Arlett said uncertainly. “But I honestly don’t understand. I thought you would want to stop him—”

“At one time I would have,” Wells said. “But he’s not important anymore.”

A night’s rest or reflection, or both, had put the starch back into Erickson, Wells concluded. After keeping him waiting most of the morning, she had one of her aides call him to her office with a message that was far more like a summons than an invitation. When he arrived, he was shown into an empty conference room and kept waiting again.

Now Erickson had joined him, slate in hand, and he could see by the set of her jaw and the firmness of her mouth that her self-confidence, or at least a convincing substitute for it, had returned. She swept through the room en route to her chair, offering no detectable greeting except to indicate with a wave of the hand that he should sit.

“Do you still plan to ask for a Vote of Continuance on me?” she asked bluntly when they both were settled.

Wells was less surprised by the question than by the tone in which it was asked. Whether she had guessed, or Berberon had told her, hardly mattered. “Has last night’s vote given you any cause to rethink your position on Triad?”

“No.” Her answer was flat and unapologetic.

“In that case, the answer to your question is yes.”

“About as I thought,” she said, nodding. “Tell me, Comité Wells, what did you expect out of this meeting?“He smiled faintly. “I’m afraid I’ve already had to discard my expectations.”

“You thought that I had asked you here to work out the ground rules for an accommodation.”

“Yes,” Wells admitted.

“Under what terms?”

Wells shrugged. “I thought you might offer to allow the construction of Triad—”

“While you allow me to remain Chancellor?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have accepted such a proposal?”

“It would have merited close examination. But it seems you have no intention of making such an offer.”

“True. My principles are not that flexible. I will not preside over your vision of the Service. I would sooner resign than carry out policies I don’t believe in.”

Wells sat back in his chair and folded his hands on his lap.“Then resign.”

“I’m prepared to—if we can agree on my successor here today.”

Wells shook his head. “The time when the head of the Service could handpick his or her successor is past. Why should I strike a deal with you when I can have you removed and then choose a replacement to my own liking?”

“Because it isn’t that easy, and you know it.”

Wells did, but was not about to concede the point. “What will be different from last night, except that I’ll also be voting?”

“Nothing. They will be just as reluctant to remove me as they were to remove you. They may be perfectly happy with you doing what you do best and me doing what I do best, even if we end up fighting because of it.”

Wells shook his head. “I see one vote to retain you, no more.”

“I see three—and one of them should be yours. You wouldn’t have the budget and the program you do if the rest of the Service weren’t well run and fiscally healthy.”