To end in fire earc, p.19
To End in Fire - eARC, page 19
She scowled at the thoroughly useless analysis before her. Despite her fascination with ferreting secrets out of huge piles of data, she’d gotten to the point where she almost—not quite, but almost—wished Admiral Rozsak had just obliterated the PNE fleet when it attacked Congo. If he’d just blown them out of space, the Torch Navy wouldn’t have been able to salvage so many of their records.
Nothing here. Move on, she thought, and pulled up the next screen of no-doubt fascinating data.
“Bored, bored, bored. How many letters can be prefixed to that? Let’s see…Cored. Doored—no, that’s pushing it. Ford. Gored. Horde—hoard’ll work, too. Lord.”
A fresh analysis popped up before her, and she swallowed a groan. Logistic reports on ammunition were less boring than reports on environmental plants. She couldn’t think of anything else they might be less boring than, however.
“Can I get away with ‘moored’? No, that’d be cheating. Oared’s okay, though. So’s poured and roared. Sword…soared, too. Toward? No…don’t think so. Ward—maybe word. I think that’s—”
She broke off, frowning at a single line of the data.
“What the hell? Now, why was there that much discrepancy…?”
She tapped in an additional query, confirming the raw data, and her frown deepened. The PNE’s possession of the Technodyne-designed Cataphract had cost Admiral Luis Rozsak’s defending task force dearly, but she hadn’t realized that the advanced missiles had been delivered to Citizen Commander Luff quite as late in the game as they had been. Or, rather, she’d known when the Cataphracts had been delivered. What she hadn’t noted—and what the computers had just flagged for her—was how much earlier all of Luff’s other ordnance had been delivered. In fact, that big a discrepancy suggested…
She leaned back, cuddling her brain, her ennui vanished as she hunted down the memory she wanted. Where had she stored—?
Aha! She chuckled in triumph and entered the search string that brought up the astrogation data captured along with everything else in the PNE database. Luff’s people had been meticulous about where they’d gone, but deplorably sloppy about recording why they’d gone some of the places they’d been while awaiting their orders for “Operation Ferret.” One would almost think they hadn’t been interested in helping someone like, oh, Ruth Winton, figure out what they’d been up to. Antisocial of them, perhaps, but then again, they had been unregenerate StateSec holdouts working for Mesa and Manpower and bent upon planetary genocide.
She snorted at the thought, but then her eyes narrowed as she found what she’d been looking for.
“I will be damned,” she murmured to herself. “Why would they have gotten their Cataphracts there? I mean, there’s nothing there. I think, anyway.”
She opened another window, brought up L’Ouverture’s astrographic charts, and entered the coordinates from the PNE database, then grinned as the chart blinked confirmation at her.
“Nope,” she muttered in the far more cheerful tone of a Ruth with a puzzle to solve. “This makes no sense at all. Oh, goody!”
“Are you talking to yourself again, Ruth?” a voice asked from behind her. “Better be careful, or people will start thinking you’re screwy.”
“Not a problem.” She never took her eyes from the display. “When you’re Princess Ruth, and your family’s as stinking rich as mine is, the term is ‘eccentric.’ Not ‘screwy.’ Besides, I’m the best conversationalist I can find.”
She gazed at the star chart a moment longer, tapping the tip of her nose with an index finger to help herself think, then turned her head as the person who’d spoken came forward to stand beside her. Even sitting, Ruth’s head was no lower than the young woman’s shoulder. Cynthia X was so short that, combined with her squat torso, she put Ruth in mind of a mini-Anton Zilwicki, female edition. Antonia Zilwicki, maybe?
A lot of the former Ballroom members had changed their surnames by now, but Cynthia hadn’t, and probably never would. Her experiences at Manpower’s hands had been worse than those of most genetic slaves—which was a very low bar to begin with. After her escape, she’d become one of the Ballroom’s most proficient strikers, as they called themselves. (Manpower—the entire establishment of Mesa—had preferred terms like “murderers” and “terrorists.”)
She’d never said it in so many words, but Ruth had grown to know her well enough by now to realize that Cynthia was almost sorry Manpower had finally been driven under. She wouldn’t be able to kill any more of the scorpions. There were plenty who’d survived the recent unpleasantness, but Jeremy X had placed a ban on revenge killings.
It wasn’t often that anyone applied labels like “spoilsport” to the galaxy’s most deadly assassin.
But however lethal Cynthia might be, and however disappointed the young woman might be at having to turn in her hunting license, she was also very smart and had a natural aptitude for intelligence analysis. That was why she’d become something in the way of Ruth’s understudy over the last few months.
“I want you to look at something.” Ruth rose and gestured for Cynthia to take her chair. “Start with—” She leaned over and brought up the logistics analysis which had initially piqued her interest. “This here.”
“What am I looking for?” Cynthia looked over her shoulder at Ruth, then chuckled at the look the princess gave her. “Okay, okay! I’ll find it,” she said, and started through the data. Then she frowned.
“I feel like I’m cheating. If you hadn’t been looking at star charts, it would’ve taken me a lot longer to find. But—” her eyes narrowed—“‘no sense at all’ is putting it mildly. NZ-127-06? There’s no habitable planet in that system. Nothing even close.”
“No.” Ruth shook her head. “Can’t be. It’s an M4V, both its planets are small and so close they’re tide-locked to the primary, and according to the astro database, it produces even more solar flares than most red dwarfs. So why—”
“—did the PNE get its Cataphracts in that system?” Cynthia finished.
“Exactly.” Ruth nodded. “I mean, part of the answer’s obvious. They had to rendezvous with whoever delivered the missiles to them, and NZ-127-06 made a handy navigation beacon. One with no inhabited planets to notice who might be dropping off or picking up cargo. But what’s really interesting to me is that—”
“—it’s nowhere near Mesa, Sol, or Yildun,” Cynthia said, and Ruth gave her another nod.
“Exactly,” she repeated. “We’d all assumed they had to come from Sol or Yildun, although they could have been transshipped through Mesa. But way out there?” She shook her head. “There are a bunch of equally useless stars that would have been more conveniently placed for a shipment coming from any of those three star systems.”
Cynthia swiveled the chair to face Ruth directly.
“Captain Zilwicki needs this information,” she said.
“So do Manticore and Nouveau Paris,” Ruth agreed. “But you’re right that Anton and Victor need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible. So I’m thinking maybe I should—”
“Forget it, Princess. If you want to get onto that courier boat, you’d have to shoot your way aboard—and I didn’t sign up for that.”
Ruth glared at her. Then, at the display. Then, at the universe. As much of it as she could see, anyway.
Which wasn’t much, trapped aboard an orbital habitat.
April 1923 Post Diaspora
“I’m going to have to sit down after all. Victor Cachat thinking is the stuff of nightmares.”
—Yana Tretiakovna
City of Leonard,
Darius Gamma,
Darius System.
“Lucky you.” Gail Weiss leaned over Zachariah McBryde’s shoulder and planted a kiss on his left ear. “Wish I got to work at home.”
“That,” Zach replied with a grin, never looking away from the display in front of him, “is because you are a lowly peon, toiling in the tactical fields, while I am a lofty superintendent of strategic imperatives.”
Gail smacked the top of his head.
“That’s just a fancy way of saying I know what I’m doing and you’re whistling in the dark,” she informed him.
“Well…That’s putting it a little strongly. The ‘whistling in the dark’ part, I mean.” He frowned as he studied one of the items on his display. “Right now, I think ‘whistling past the graveyard’ might be more appropriate.”
“That bad, huh?” She straightened up, and for a moment the hand which had delivered the head slap gently caressed his shoulder. She was tempted to ask him what was causing him problems, but the temptation fled as soon as it arrived.
Partly that was because Gail had only a very general feel for Zach’s occupation, which was quite unlike her own. She was a specialist, whose line of work was tightly focused. Zach was just the opposite: a generalist who spent his time organizing others to develop projects, the specific nature of which he himself often understood only partially. He seemed to be a combination of supervisor, counselor, gofer, and ombudsman.
Think of me as the Spanish Inquisition and you won’t be far off, he often said. Given that he was obviously well-liked by those of his coworkers Gail had met, she took it as a joke. Mostly.
But the main reason she didn’t inquire was because she’d realized, in the six T-months since they’d arrived on Darius Gamma, that the Alignment’s surveillance of its citizens was not only extensive, but intrusive. She was quite sure they had no privacy even in their own apartment.
The personal aspects of that surveillance didn’t particularly concern her. She was far from a prude, and, in any event, whatever AI program monitored them would be quite indifferent to their sex life. The real problem was that the Alignment took what it called “Security” very seriously, and its definition of the term was…expansive. The end result was a regime that, while not a police state in the usual sense, she was certain would be quick to intervene if it felt its citizens—who were also its employees—had wandered too far from their assignments and proper interactions with other citizens/employees.
So instead of asking him what he meant, she simply headed for the door.
“I may be home later than usual,” she said over her shoulder. “There’s a rumor going around that I’m being given a new assignment. You know how that usually goes.”
“Yeah,” Zach grunted, still not looking away from the display. “I sure do. Welcome to your new glorious undertaking. First, we have to figure out what it is. That may take a while, but as soon as we do…”
She smiled as she stepped out the door into the corridor beyond. The corridor was wide enough to allow for a slidewalk down its center, but Gail stayed close to the wall. Slidewalks were always tempting, but she preferred to maintain a brisk stride as a way to keep fit. Many, many things had changed since human beings left Old Earth, but one thing remained fixed and certain: exercise was good for you.
* * *
Zach tried to concentrate on his work after Gail left, but he found himself too restless. He rose and went to the huge window—one entire wall of their apartment, really, programmable for anything from transparency to complete opacity—and looked out over the Darius System’s capital city.
It was a beautiful city, although it looked very little like any other city he’d ever seen.
He’d once visited Old Chicago, the capital of the Solarian League, which was universally considered one of the most majestic cities in human-settled space. He found no reason to dispute the opinion.
To begin with, it was enormous in every respect—down, as well as up. Chicago’s labyrinthine subterranean regions were often called the Fifth Wonder of the League, and only partly in jest. Zach had spent the better part of two days in those depths. Within ten minutes he’d been completely lost, and he’d remained so for the entire length of his stay. The supposedly state-of-the-art navigation app he’d been given for his uni-link had proved just as useless as he’d been warned it would. Fortunately, the man who’d warned him had also served as his personal guide, so the visit had gone smoothly enough, even if he had never known precisely where he was.
The city spread horizontally, as well as vertically. The boundaries of the vast urban stretches west and south of the city couldn’t be seen, even from Chicago’s tallest edifice, the Aspire. But Zach hadn’t spent much time gazing at that landscape. He’d been far more impressed by the man-made archipelago that reached out over Lake Michigan. Kilometer after kilometer of structures: towers, residential and commercial; parks; marinas—everywhere. The enormous towers’ foundations were fixed in the lake’s bedrock, but square kilometers of the spaces between them were filled with more modest structures, many of them floating on the water, instead. Only a civilization with counter-grav architecture could have built and sustained such a place.
Still, that urban beauty had really been beauties—the things in the city, more than the city itself. Chicago was ancient, and like all such human created places, it was also a mishmash. A gorgeous and superbly designed upscale residential tower might find itself sandwiched between two shorter, squatter towers that could most charitably be described as “functional.” And the farther one got from the lake, the…lower-scale stretches of the city became as more and more people were shoehorned into increasingly “affordable” housing.
Not so, Leonard. Leonard was a unitary whole, planned and designed from the very beginning as a single work of art. Its layout was totally unlike the Solarian League’s capital, because Old Chicago had risen from the grid pattern of pre-space, pre-counter-grav, Ante Diaspora history. Leonard was untrammeled by that ancient legacy. More than anything else, it made Zach think of a gigantic snowflake.
Mesa’s capital city, Mendel, where Zach and his family had spent most of their lives, had begun with a similar design—albeit on a less ambitious scale. But the centuries had battered Mendel’s original geometric precision. Battered it badly as slaves became the majority of Mesa’s population, and then battered it still worse once a large number of manumitted slaves became second-class citizens. Throughout human history, anywhere and at any time that such rigid inequalities had arisen, they were inevitably accompanied by slums and tenements. They might be cleaner and less dilapidated slums and tenements on a planet like Mesa than they would be in the Verge or Fringe. But they’d still be slums and tenements. Any comparison with what they might have been only underscored that reality.
But Leonard was…perfect. And the longer Zach spent here, the more oppressive he found that perfection. No, worse than oppressive. Leonard—the whole of Darius, had begun to frighten him.
Badly.
The fact that the entire system population was comprised of proud and open Alignment members—nearly four billion of them—should have been exhilarating. And, in some ways, it had been. There’d been no need any longer to maintain the secrecy he and his brother Jack had lived with for so many years, hiding their true affiliation even from their own family. Every one of the McBrydes had thought of themselves as loyal members of the Alignment. But what only Zach and Jack had understood was that the “Alignment” their parents and sisters belonged to was a shell, a façade hiding the real Alignment from sight.
That Alignment recruited most of its new members from within the shell whose members thought they were the Alignment. But that had required the true Alignment to maintain absolute security. Secrets hidden within secrets, in what was somewhat jokingly—but only somewhat—called “the onion.”
He’d never known Darius actually existed…not until Operation Houdini pulled him and Gail off of Mesa. He’d known something like it had to exist, if only because his position on Mesa had required him to deal with and assimilate R&D which was obviously being conducted…somewhere else. But if there’d ever been something legitimately covered by the Alignment’s iron “need to know” protocols, Darius’s location, its organization, even its true function had to be it.
Now he’d learned a great deal about it—rather more than Gail, in fact. Most importantly, perhaps, he’d also learned of the existence of the star system called Galton, as well. He’d had to because of what he did for the Alignment.
The vast bulk of the Alignment’s research and development, what Zach thought of as the “heavy lifting,” was done not in Darius, but in Galton. Yet the very best of the researchers and engineers Houdini had snatched from Mesa had come to Darius, just as Zach had. At least twelve of the scientists he’d worked with back on Mesa, however, were in the Galton contingent, and Zach was certain that just as he’d known nothing about Darius—or Galton—before Houdini, none of them had learned a thing about Darius, even now.
Zach McBryde’s function, what he was best at, was his ability to…enable research teams. He wasn’t a researcher himself, and he was far too much of a generalist to grasp the true intricacies of any of the cutting-edge specializations which drove the scientific—and technological—frontiers ever outward. But what he did have, partly as a result of the McBryde genome’s improvements, were a phenomenal memory; an ability to…mentally encapsulate the conceptual hearts of theories and hypotheses and evidence, to put “handles” on them; and an intuitive ability to recognize where those “handles” intersected. He couldn’t really describe how it worked, even to himself, but that combination of abilities made him incredibly valuable, because specialists didn’t speak one another’s languages. They needed an interpreter—no, they needed a matchmaker, and that was Zach McBryde.
He was still doing that interpreting and making those matches, but the process had changed. Everything that any of “his” teams—the ones he was assigned to coordinate—produced came to him. Some of it came from people working right here in Darius, and that part of his daily routine was comfortingly the same. But even more came to him from Galton. From people with whom he no longer had—or had never had, in most cases—personal contact. That lack of contact, that inability to sit down with a cup of coffee and bounce ideas back and forth, made his job far harder, and he felt less effective. He also suspected that the memos he produced on the basis of the Galton datastream were thoroughly sanitized before his suggestions and observations went back to Galton. Because none of those people in Galton knew about Darius.
