Orphan's Triumph Page 15

  On the way back to the BOQ, we passed level twenty. It was sealed off, had been since the Second Battle of Mousetrap. Five thousand missing in action were entombed there, unrecoverable except at unacceptable risk to the excavators and to the fabric of Mousetrap. Jude’s mother was among them.

  I pointed at the fused iron wall and the plaque inscribed with five thousand names. “Jude, your mother, and before her your father, gave their lives to this war! You’re going to let someone else pull the trigger that ends it?”

  He stopped the Crawler, and he looked over at me as we hung there in Broadway’s vastness. “They did. And you’ve given most of yours to it, too, Jason. Ending this war may define their lives. It may define yours. But my life will be defined by something else, something out in my future. Something you found but I’m still looking for.”

  I shook my head.

  Jude leaned on the center console. “You can’t dictate what I make from my life, any more than Ord could dictate what you made of yours, Jason.”

  “No. But I learned from him that I should do the right thing.”

  “And I’ve learned that from you.”

  “I hope so.”

  Nevertheless, three days later we reboarded the Tehran , outbound for Tressel, where we both fully intended to make a deal with the devil.

  FORTY

  I SAT WITH A PLASTEEL CRATE IN MY LAP, on my bunk in my double-wide stateroom aboard the Tehran , outbound for Tressel. Tehran ’s accommodations were more generous than older cruisers’, some already mothballed relics like me.

  “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” Howard leaned against my stateroom’s bulkhead and pointed at the object in the crate.

  Jeeb stretched his ultratanium limbs like a waking, six-legged Siamese. A vintage Tactical Observation Transport looks like a turkey-sized metal cockroach, coated in radar-absorbent fuzz, with dual forward-directed optics that pass for eyes. Compared to cold, sleek modern surveillance ’bots, a TOT passes for cute.

  Jeeb rolled onto his back and flailed all six legs like a newborn. According to the engineering texts, the machine was running through its joint-flexibility test program. According to me, and the other diehards who believed that TOTs imprinted their human wranglers’ personalities, he was glad to see me and begging for a belly scratch.

  I said to Jeeb, “You’re fine. Knock it off.”

  He kept wriggling.

  I added, “Please.” He quit.

  It’s ridiculous to program precatory language into commands to a mere machine. But Jeeb’s not a mere machine to me.

  Howard sighed. “At least we won’t need him to translate.”

  Like so much of what had once made Jeeb useful, translation of human language, on or off Earth, was now handled by personal clip-ons no bigger than an Oreo. Old TOTs like Jeeb, in their day, not only observed the battle-field, they intercepted and deciphered communication. A TOT could even teach a code or a language it had monitored, and then decrypted or learned, overnight.

  “Howard, my worry isn’t that the Tressens won’t understand us. My worry is that they will.”

  “The Pseudocephalopod threatens them as much as it threatens the rest of the human race.”

  “Which won’t make them less pricks.”

  “Aud Planck always struck me as a decent sort.”

  “Aud’s only a third of the Chancellery. And his opinion probably counts for even less than a third because he is decent.”

  Jeeb sat up, telescoped out his wings, then tested them by fluttering across my cabin and perching on Howard’s shoulder.

  Howard scratched Jeeb behind his optics. “You have flexibility. Your orders are to secure permissions to prospect for and extract Cavorite. The price is open.”

  “Howard, I’m the last person I’d give a blank check to.”

  “No, the last person would be either of Aud Planck’s colleagues. Just do what you can. Talk it out with them.”

  “What if I make a deal? How long until the prospecting starts?”

  “I think we could start within a month.”

  “Shouldn’t I know where the stuff is?”

  “Of course. When negotiations reach the stage where you need to know.”

  Frankly, Howard was right. I’ve never had a poker face, and if I betrayed the location of the deposits with a twitch, it could cost us if we ended up having to go in and take it.

  Jude rapped on the hatch frame, then stepped through. He had changed back into his neo-Gestapo Tressen black. Nonetheless, Jeeb’s optics whined as they widened, and then he hopped from Howard onto the shoulder of another old friend.

  Jude tickled Jeeb alongside the underside of the ’bot’s carapace. After years in a box, Jeeb was getting spoiled rotten. “Downship leaves from Bay Twenty-two in an hour.”

  I set Jeeb’s Plasteel cage on the deckplates. “I’ll be dressed in twenty minutes.”

  Jude smiled at Jeeb as the ’bot preened his antennae for the first time in three years. “In spite of everything, you must be looking forward to seeing Aud Planck, just like Jeeb. Old friends are old friends.”

  We landed in the capital, Tressia, in a fern-grass town-center park tricked out with a yellow windsock that snapped in the breeze to aid our landing. Also snapping were two hundred Republican Socialist flags. The flags all flew at half-staff.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE TRESSENS GREETED US with one black-uniformed honor guard company, one chancellor, one military band, and one multilingual soloist.

  The band maestro jerked his baton, and the band played the Human Union Anthem, which was actually “O Canada” expanded to include a verse for each planet of the Human Union, in the planet’s principal language. French, Russian, and Chinese stood in for planets like Weichsel that hadn’t developed a principal language. If you think standing through two anthems before an international soccer game is long, try fourteen verses of the same song.

  Jude stood to my right, in Tressen dress blacks. Howard and I wore our own Class-A’s, and our host wore his, while he stood facing us at attention as his nation’s band played.

  However, Berbek Zeit’s black jodphur-pants uniform differed from the ground up. I had studied a Spook intel report during the trip to Tressel, a few weeks old and prepared by the Spook who fronted as Human Union cultural attaché in Tressia. Chancellor Zeit’s black jackboots were custom-made to add three inches to his five-foot, six-inch height. How the Spooks got into Zeit’s closet I didn’t need to know. The Spooks also reported that the decorations on Chancellor Zeit’s chest were phony, except for one he got for taking an enemy position in a one-room school. The position was defended by an old man armed with a cane and two dozen children. The defenders perished after the school doors were sealed from the outside and a fire accidentally broke out. In nine places simultaneously.

  The Spook report concluded that Zeit “suffers from megalomania and multiple latent antisocial pathologies, exacerbated by adolescent trauma, presently manifested in authoritarian behaviors and trappings.”

  In other words, he was a sadistic runt who in high school got more wedgies than handjobs and was now getting even with the world.

  The Republican Socialists had emerged from Tressen’s postwar chaos to rule through a troika of chancellors. My comrade-in-arms, Audace Planck, was chosen as one chancellor because he was a hero people trusted, not because he knew politics. Zeit was chancellor for interior affairs, which had encompassed everything from rebuilding shelled-out hospitals to restoring calm on the streets. According to the Republican Socialists, Zeit was doing a great job of both.

  According to our Spooks, however, Zeit was restoring calm by shipping everybody who disagreed with the RS to “pioneer” settlement camps above the Tressen Arctic Circle. The camps would “push back the frontier” and allow “those with pioneer spirit to be free.”

  History credits the Nazis as “efficient,” but Zeit rendered them amateur. Poison gas and crematories were so much more complex and expensive than quietly
hauling dissenters north, then herding the survivors of the journey into windswept, barbed-wire pens in the snow until they froze into ranks of meat. The operation took place out of sight, because the only way to Tressel’s Arctic was by government transport. And the RS didn’t have to dispose of the bodies. They just left them there until the snow covered them, then moved the fences and guard barracks and opened a new “pioneer settlement.”

  “O Canada,” part fourteen, faded to welcome silence. The bolts of one hundred Tressen rifles crackled, then the honor guard boomed a salute that echoed off the old city’s stones.

  Zeit stepped forward to greet me, and I saluted first. His complexion resembled unbaked dough, cheeks peened by acne or smallpox. His eyes, as black and frigid as the orbit of Pluto, hid behind steel-rimmed bottle-bottom spectacles.

  Zeit clicked his elevator heels as he returned my salute and nodded toward Jude. “My most profound condolences, General and Vice Marshall. I know both of you and Chancellor Planck were close.”

  The Spooks’ recent update had reached us only as we boarded the downship. Ten days earlier, Iridian separatists had detonated an enormous roadside bomb that had obliterated the limousine in which two-thirds of the Chancellery had been riding. Among the two chancellors, one hundred bystanders, and security troops affected, only Chancellor Audace Planck had survived, although gravely wounded. He was now clinging to life in an undisclosed location. A massive manhunt throughout Tressen would soon bring the cowardly perpetrators to justice.

  Spook translation, estimated with a probability of ninety-one percent: Zeit’s Interior Chancellery goons had literally frozen the Iridian insurgency in its tracks months earlier. Therefore the Resistance no longer had the military capacity to steal a second grader’s lunch money, much less coordinate a massive car-bomb, ambush. Planck’s staff had finally snooped uncomfortably close to the genocidal truth about Zeit’s Arctic new frontier. Therefore, Zeit had bombed the rivals with whom he shared power, and blamed the Iridians. But Aud Planck had survived the bomb, wounded, had figured out who was behind it, and had gone to ground. Zeit couldn’t risk declaring Aud dead just yet, lest he pop up. So Zeit was ransacking his nation for his rival, under the handy cover of the search for the assassins.

  “Thank you, Chancellor.” I raised my eyebrows. “But I understood Aud Planck was alive.”

  “Yes, by God’s grace. But his injuries…” He removed his spectacles, drew a hankie from his gold-braided sleeve, then wiped his eyes. The hankie came away dry.

  “How soon can I visit my old friend?”

  Zeit sighed as deep as a deflating tire while he retucked his hankie and shook his head. “I’m afraid his attending physicians believe any disturbance could be fatal.”

  I smiled. “To whom?”

  Zeit stared at me.

  I smiled again. “Aud’s a hard man to keep down. I’m sure he’s been making his physicians’ lives miserable.”

  Zeit pressed his lips together in a smile and nodded. “My first experience with your sense of humor, General. A soldier salvages a light remark in the darkest moments, hey?”

  I stared back at Zeit. “The dark moments lie ahead for whoever tried to kill him.”

  Zeit turned his eyes down while he tugged a pocket watch on a chain from his waistcoat and read it. “Of course. Well, I assume you will wish to rest after your voyage.”

  “You’re very understanding. But let’s do lunch. My diplomats will call your diplomats.”

  Our motorcade through Tressia rolled from the old quarter onto boulevards scrubbed as white as bone by Republican Socialism. Jude sat with clenched fists, staring out the chugging limousine’s window as new stone buildings flashed by us, as identical as marble boxcars on a train bound in the opposite direction. “Zeit’s always been cold. But I never believed…”

  Honest people believe what they’re told. I drew a deep breath. “Is he cold enough to bargain with?”

  Jude spun away from the window. “You’re not serious? We can’t deal with-”

  “You didn’t have a problem dealing with the RS until now. Aud’s a sand grain compared to what your RS has done to the rest of Tressen.”

  He shook his head. “The RS you think you see-”

  “Finally, you see it, too.”

  “I don’t. A power play by Zeit doesn’t prove all that stuff about the camps. The RS you think you see could never be my RS.”

  I stared out the window, at a crew of thin, bent women picking up roadside trash under guard. Each woman wore a scarlet Iridian identifying medallion. I turned away from the window. “Well, now it has to be all of ours.”

  FORTY-TWO

  THE HUMAN UNION CONSULATE squatted like a gray marble toad, part of the new quarter of Tressia that the Republican Socialists had built. Like most everything else about the multinational Human Union, the consulate was principally paid for and staffed by Americans.

  To demonstrate the Human Union’s outrage at Republican Socialist internal policy, the building had been downgraded to consulate from embassy. The Tressens cared less. The ambassador got downgraded to consul, too. Again, the Tressens cared less. But I cared because the ambassador’s paycheck shrank, and he was my friend.

  Human Union Consul Eric Muscovy greeted us at the consulate’s double doors, waddling. More charitably, he was walking slightly splay-footed, and his lips protruded.

  He hugged me, then frowned. “I hear you smarted off to Zeit today, Jason.”

  “Next time I’ll punch his lights out, Duck.” I told them not to send me. Time for a subject change. “Got your message. Thanks.”

  “I was sorry to hear. Ord was a good man.” So was the Duck. He and Ord together had sprung me from China, once upon a time. The Duck wasn’t a Spook under diplomatic cover, though. He was an Asian-studies major who accepted backwater and offworld assignments that his peers rejected as disamenable, because distance from the home office conferred a measure of diplomatic autonomy. But the Duck was no privateer. “Rogue diplomat” is an oxymoron.

  After greetings among Howard, Jude, and the Duck, Consul Muscovy peered across the wide boulevard. On the opposite sidewalk a brown-trench-coated Tressen in a slouch hat leaned against a lamppost reading a newspaper. The Duck smiled and waved. The man ignored him.

  When the doors closed behind us, Jude jerked his head behind us toward the doors as he asked the Duck, “Ferrent?”

  Ferrents were anvil-headed, beady-eyed brown amphibians the size of Gila monsters. Their most notable contribution to Tressen’s pseudo-Paleozoic ecology was one singularly off-putting habit. They nosed around in other animals’ dung. The Republican Socialists’ Interior Police, with their sore-thumb-brown “civilian” trench coats and slouch hats, came by their nickname honestly.

  The Duck smiled and nodded. “Mister Air Vice Marshall, take a glimpse of life on Tressel for citizens who aren’t highly placed Republican Socialists. Jude, there’s a Ferrent slouching against that lamppost twenty-six hours every day. There’s another in the alley behind us, across from our back door. A Ferrent team tails everyone who goes in or out.”

  Jude shook his head. “Duck, the consular staff are aliens. Outer space, hostile aliens. Foreign Service personnel get surveilled in every capital-Washington, Paris, Marinus. That doesn’t make the Ferrents the Gestapo.”

  “Oh? Last week our regular shellfish monger got replaced. The new guy couldn’t catch fish with dynamite. A plant. We checked. The old monger’s house was vacant. Neighbor said the family went north.”

  Jude furrowed his brow. “Pioneer camp?”

  The Duck nodded. “And his wife and kids.”

  Jude shifted his weight, then shrugged. “Anecdotal evidence.” I shrugged, too. Tressen’s wealth, compared to its conquered rival, Iridia, came from mineral deposits in Tressen’s north. It was marginally credible that a family might seek a new life on the frontier.

  I eyed the walls. “Can we talk in here, Duck?”

  He smiled. “The Tressens have rudimen
tary crank-toring telephones. They invented the telegraph only a couple years ago. No bug problems. On the other hand, their human intelligence collection’s aggressive. Like Stalin-era KGB. So we don’t let locals penetrate farther than the kitchen door out back. Like the phony fishmonger. ’Bots handle everything an embassy or consulate would normally hire out locally. We do our own dishes and change our own lightbulbs.”

  I nodded. “How many Spooks you got in the house?”

  “None, of course.” The Duck stared at me. Then he shrugged. “The cultural attaché’s staff are Spooks. Don’t change the subject. You’ve been here an hour and you’ve set relations back a year.”

  “Duck, even if we hold our noses, Zeit will never cooperate. Besides, he’s dirt in a uniform.”

  The Duck cocked his head and pursed his protruding lips. “Economically put.”

  “Is Aud Planck a viable alternative?”

  “Let’s ask.” The Duck led us down the consulate’s center hallway to a door marked “Cultural Affairs” and buzzed us through a locked door.

  The office was normal, but to a Tressen, or to any other non-Earthling citizen of the Human Union, the place would look like black magic, with translucent holographic images animating the space above desks. Two desks were occupied. Nearest to us a middle-aged, chipmunk-cheeked guy in a business suit glanced up from his keyboard as we entered. He looked like a hotel clerk.

  When he saw Jude in neo-Gestapo black, he came up out of his chair with an aimed pistol, quicker than Wyatt Earp.

  The Duck pumped his palm toward the floor. “Relax, Bill.”

  Bill’s pistol remained sighted at Jude’s forehead.

  The Duck said, “The air vice marshall here’s been seconded to the Human Union Space Force. His clearance at the moment is as high as yours.”

  Jude, stock-still, said, “I’m getting an education since I’ve gotten back on Tressel.”

  Bill dropped the pistol to his side but kept staring at Jude. “Pretty hard not to have gotten one while you were here before, Vice Marshall.”