Authors: Robert Buettner
THIRTY-SIX
Mort felt Kit peek around another corner, again, with the technique employed by a nervous coot.
“Sonuvabitch!” She whispered it aloud.
Two humans, backs to her, stood thirty human paces from Kit. They were wrapped in hard shells, similar to the type John Buford, who brought his meals, wore. These two also carried the long black stingers that frequently went together with such shells. Small humans surged around them, but the two blocked the way such that Kit could not pass them without being seen. And the hard-shelled pair intercepted all larger humans who attempted to pass them.
“What has happened, Kit?”
“Dunno. This is the fourth passage I’ve tried. The Yavi have locked down the area above and below and around Jazen’s location. They’re pulling over all the regular-size pedestrians. That either means they know where Jazen is, or they know I’m here in Yaven, or probably both. I’m good at disguises, but I can’t shrink. That was Jazen’s problem once he got grown up here.”
“It is no longer a piece of pie?”
“Now it’s a piece of something else. I’m two hundred yards from Jazen, and I still have twenty minutes to get to him and get him out and headed back to the Scorpion. But I might as well be two hundred light years away. Goddamn it, I’d kill for a phone that worked in this goddamn hive. And Jazen’s number.”
“You do not seriously mean you are going to kill not for food?”
“Correct. A gunfight would just announce me. A couple hundred thousand Yavi wearing body armor against one Trueborn wearing clothes that aren’t even her color are bad odds. You’re sure you can’t phone Jazen for me?”
“As you say, one among hundreds of thousands are bad odds. It is certain that I cannot contact him soon enough. But if I could contact him, what would you have me ask?”
“He knows his way around. Ask him where I can get a piece of pie.”
“Ha-ha?”
“Yeah.” Mort felt in Kit a surge of hope, an idea that came, and was stored, before he could understand it. But then, emotionally, she plunged again.
“Mort, I could never have gotten this far without you. But I think we’ll both be happier if you stay out of my head from here on out.”
“But I may be able to assist! And I wish to know how this matter resolves. Have I not earned that?”
“You’ve earned the right
not
to know. Just leave me alone!” Kit turned and followed the throngs of small humans who were moving away from the Yavi with the stingers, rather than toward Jazen. It was as though Kit had given up trying to reach Jazen.
Her anxiety pressed against him now. He knew few jokes to lighten a human’s mood, so he thought, “Kit, if you cannot be good, be careful.”
She continued her progress with a huntress’ singlemindedness that kept him from reading her intentions clearly. Rather than lightening her mood, the restated joke had turned her sullen and angry.
Exactly as it had the last time he had made the same joke to her.
He felt a woog nearby, and began to stalk it. He remained weak, and hunting was that which he did best. Kit, also, knew that which she did best. So had Mort’s mother known. He had always done as his mother had bidden him, because she knew best. He remained puzzled and disappointed at Kit’s secrecy and remorse. But he decided to do as Kit had bidden him.
So, despite reservations, he left Kit alone, as she had demanded, and resumed his pursuit of the woog.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Once Varden had left and Max Polian had relieved himself, Max walked to the utility closet off the study, opened the double doors wide, and unloaded cartons until his back ached. When he at last uncovered the wheeled, sealed plastek he sought, he dragged it into the center of the room, unlocked the lid, then stood, stretched and rested.
He hadn’t worn his tactical armor since he had been promoted to his first desk job twenty years earlier. But the container had preserved even the seals and the batteries, which winked green on the tester, as though the suit had been hanging in his closet overnight, waiting for him to slip it on like an old friend, and begin pounding his beat.
As soon as he lifted his helmet out and turned it in his hands, memories, both muscle memory and the other ones, washed over him like the sea had the day he first took Ruberd to stand waist-deep and feel the water’s chill through his resistant waders.
Baryl hadn’t been there to see it, of course. She had never seen their son at all. She had never regained consciousness after Ruberd’s birth, leaving Max to raise the boy alone. Sometimes it seemed almost wrong that a man whose wife had died giving birth to a legal child spent his own life hunting down women because they gave birth to an Illegal.
He lifted the first-aid pouch, checked its contents. Even in so menial an object Polian saw the contradictions in his life. The Expansion Compress was intended to stop the bleeding that a needler was built to maximize. But it was more commonly called a smother pack because it worked so well when repurposed to smother newborns. And so Max Polian had learned to keep his personal life and his professional life sealed in mental boxes as perfectly insulated as the one he had just opened.
Until now. Now was a time to serve Yavet, to do his duty. But it was also a time to avenge his son’s murder.
Max lifted out his old needler, charged the cylinders, cleared, locked and loaded. Then he raised the weapon until its receiver rested cool against his cheek, then sighted down the barrel. He flicked the selector to “Test,” then squeezed the trigger.
The familiar hiss and accompanying blue flash lit the dim room, then faded. The single zeroing dart quivered in the scarcely damaged far wall, an inch left of his point of aim.
Max dialed the windage knob right one click, then set about shrugging into the rest of his uniform.
Unlike the brutal gunpowder bludgeons the Trueborns still wielded, needlers were the elegant weapons of disciplined warriors. That was what he had been, what Ruberd had been, what the Trueborns could never be.
Max lifted out his webbed harness, shortened it round the shoulders where he had lost muscle, let it out round the middle where he had gained girth.
His ‘puter chimed; he read the display, then answered.
“Max? Ulys Gill. Did your provi tell you what’s afoot?”
“It’s all falling into place, Ulys. The Scorpion’s a bonus.”
“If we can keep it from blowing up. I don’t want to send any of my kids on a suicide mission. But Max, this changes the poko game. This is no longer just some kid we’ve quietly lured in to use as bait to catch his mother, then call her a spy. If the Trueborns have risked a Scorpion, they know the stakes. If we take this agent’s mother alive, we may force the Trueborns’ hand. If we hand her over dead, they’ll think we pumped her dry first. What’s in her head isn’t worth the risk.”
“Risk?” Max found himself shaking his head at the invisible hand-wringer on the phone.
“Max, a one-sided nuclear war that could start within months and be over in a day.”
No. If this worked, and it couldn’t
not
work now, Max Polian would be Chairman of the Central Committee within weeks. Then the plan the old men had scorned when he had presented it years before could be reality in just weeks more. Yavet could easily smuggle suitcase nukes onto outworlds that the Trueborns valued highly, like Rand and Funhouse. Trueborn smuggling “security” was a sieve. Once the Trueborns could no longer strike Yavet without killing a few hundred million of their bankers and their valued customers, they would be stalemated. Yavet would build her starships. This was no time for hand-wringing.
Early in the Trueborns’ own Cold War, Russia possessed scant ability to deliver
her
nuclear weapons onto America, but America possessed the means to annihilate Russia. Russia tried to draw to a poko hand as weak, and as strong, as the one Max and Yavet now held in this moment. Russia secretly began emplacing nukes on an island near America. But when America called Russia’s bluff, her leaders lost their nerve, folded, and removed their nukes from Cuba. Thereafter, as the Trueborn historians overdramatically put everything, Russia sank onto history’s ash heap.
The Trueborn historians were also fond of saying that those who did not learn from the past were condemned to repeat it. Max Polian had not given his life and his only son to arrive at this moment, then lose his nerve and fold like the Russians had folded.
“Max? Are you still there?”
Polian blinked. “Yes, Ulys.”
Gill would fold. If the little old moustache were allowed to play the game, he would fold.
Max said, “I agree. Ulys, I’m going to order the cordon around the Trueborn spies to stand fast until further notice. That will give us time to work out a plan. Some accommodation with the Trueborns. They’re not bad sorts, really.”
Now the silence came from Gill’s end of the conversation.
“Ulys?”
“Yes, Max. I think that’s wise of you. Very wise. You’ll let me know if you have additional thoughts?”
“Of course. Immediately.” Max cut the call, then punched up the major in charge of the cordon. With each unanswered trill of the ring signal, Max fidgeted. Gill sounded uncertain, perhaps even suspicious. If Gill followed up, Max wanted to be sure that Gill found the situation precisely as Max had described it to his weak-kneed coconspirator.
Polian squeezed his ‘puter, as though he could wring an answer from it.
The major’s voice came to Max, at last. “Director! How may I be of service, sir?”
“Major, I want all of your men to hold their positions. No matter what, no one approaches that hotel room. Freeze the punch-down and punch-up teams. I don’t want so much as a sound or sight of our presence to spook the Trueborns. Best shut down the surveillance video and audio feeds, too. Can’t be too careful.”
“Uh. Yes, sir. What if the Trueborns come to us?”
“Excellent point, Major.” Max buckled on the last of his armor, tucked his extra magazines into the pockets on his web belt, along with the first aid pack. “Do as I say. Hold your positions. I’m on my way. We’ll discuss it when I arrive.”
“
You’re
coming
here
, sir? Very good, sir.”
Polian cut the connection, turned in front of the reflective glass on the closet door. Neither he nor his armor were as sleek as the current models of cops or armor. But both would do.
He rummaged once more in his old chest for a breaching charge, tucked it away then locked on his helmet and walked out to win the Cold War.
Even without his slider, it took Polian only ten minutes to drop and jink to the major’s command post on foot. The nearer Max got to the cordoned cubic volume, the emptier the passages and verticals grew.
Even, or perhaps especially, empty of little people. They had realized this wasn’t about them when only bigs were being stopped and questioned. But they knew something was afoot, and if a needler round did go wrong, the peeps knew a cop wouldn’t waste his smother pack to stop
their
bleeding. So they had taken to the utilities, as they always did, where Polian’s police could not, or now, by long habit, did not follow even where they could.
The old mail was heavier than he remembered, and by the time he arrived at the Command Post, he was puffing.
The CP consisted of four sliders arrayed to block a major intersection, manned communications consoles, and a twelve-man tactical ready-response team who milled about, but at a hand wave would do the major’s bidding.
“Sir!” The major’s salute was crisp, and he smiled out through his open visor. He eyed Polian’s aged armor, his needler, and the Director General’s insignia Polian had affixed over the suit’s original badges. “I didn’t expect to see you tactical, Director.”
“I’m going in for a look round.”
“Oh.” The major’s forehead wrinkled, but he motioned for a sergeant to assemble the Tactical team.
“Alone.”
At this point nothing good could come of the application of excessive force by Polian’s men. The astropolitical crux of this moment was to take the Trueborn starship captain alive. A nervous trigger finger, a miscalculated top- or bottom-breaching charge, misdosed gas, the slightest error could render the woman worthless meat. And, of course, if Max’s plan failed because she died uninterrogated, he at least retained the chance to spin his version of the story if there were no witnesses to contradict his version.
The personal crux of the moment was that Max Polian intended to confront one, or in a perfect world, both of Ruberd’s killers, look into their eyes, then end their lives by his own hand. As cold-bloodedly as they had ended Ruberd’s. And if Parker’s own mother watched him die screaming, so much the better.
Perhaps Max could send a team to take them alive, then interrogate them at leisure. But the risk that too many cooks would spoil the taste of his revenge was too great.
The major waved the tacticals to stand down. “Yes, sir. If they did try to make a run and you happened across them, the surveillance people estimate they’re four individuals total, possibly one peep, too. Armed with two gunpowder pistols at most, and maybe a couple shivs among them. And no personal armor.” He eyed Polian again. “No match for even . . .”
Polian clapped the major’s shoulder like the gentle uncle he always was to the men, and smiled. “For even an old man like me? Don’t worry, son, I can still take care of myself. But I may need some target practice. So even if you hear shooting, don’t come running.”