Balance Point Read online

  The rutting male stretched his neck and trumpeted, for the benefit of a hundred as-yet-unmet girlfriends.

  Before the trumpet’s echoes died, the depositor fired.

  Blam.

  The animal lurched and thrashed in an explosion of snow, and within three heartbeats bled buckets. The bull’s masculine trumpet dwindled to a piteous bleat.

  The banker closed his eyes to shut out the mess, and swallowed. Like most Rand born to wealth, he had since childhood hunted big game among the High Rand’s peaks, and not every kill had been sporting. But he had rarely seen worse than this. “Quartermain” had pissed up an unmissable kill shot, and struck the bull not in the thorax but the hindquarters.

  The hired guide, who lay alongside this Trueborn’s guest in a similar blind a hundred yards away, whispered in the banker’s earpiece. “Sir, should I let Mr. Hickok put him down?”

  The banker cocked his head.

  “Quartermain” had chosen his guest’s alias, a name that referred to a Trueborn wild-west sheriff. But “Hickok” had a Yavi accent so thick that he couldn’t be Trueborn. That made “Hickok” not only a Yavi, but a liar, and as bad a liar as Quartermain. However, Hickok could scarcely be as bad a shot.

  The banker winced as the bull’s bleats echoed off the valley walls. “Let him try. Pelt’s spoilt anyway.”

  Two heartbeat’s later, Hickok’s shot cracked across the col. It struck and nearly severed the bull’s right forelimb. Hickok may, like his namesake, have been some sort of sharpshooting sheriff in real life. But Yavi weren’t accustomed to the recoil of gunpowder rifles. “Hickok’s” shot struck the bull above the midshoulder, bloody, painful, but not immediately fatal.

  However, a meat axe still cuts, even if two butchers have to swing it repeatedly.

  The bull stumbled, its chin tusk furrowing the snow, toppled off the spur and tumbled a half mile through the air, its echoing bleats diminishing as it fell. Finally, the carcass bounced off the scree apron that angled out from the sheer valley wall, then the bull slid across the glassy valley floor, leaving a hundred-foot-long blood trace atop the ice.

  Quartermain pounded the heated mat on which he lay. “Damn it! That was my goat!”

  “Ah . . . it wouldn’t have made a trophy, sir.” The banker bit his lip, glanced at the sky. Shooting light was gone for today. He radioed for the pickup skimmer, then shivered in silence as they waited for it.

  He couldn’t bring himself to soothe this idiot, whose stubborn incompetence had caused the bull gratuitous agony. To say nothing of what the bull’s potential lady friends would now be missing. But scolding a Trueborn wasted breath, and scolding any depositor would bring Bank Board discipline.

  A half hour later the skimmer, with the banker, the guide, and the two offworlders aboard, settled on the Lodge’s arrival pad. Autumn twilight arrived abruptly in mountain valleys, as though a tapestry had dropped across a window, and the pad’s landing floods sparkled the powder-snow fog that roiled up from beneath the skimmer’s skirt.

  The banker and the guide tied down the drone in the gloom while the depositor and the depositor’s guest disembarked. The Earthman and the Yavi stalked shoulder-to-shoulder, heads down, hands in pockets. They passed the two Rand without a word, much less the customary tip for the guide.

  The Lodge’s door minders held the twelve-foot-high double doors open, and yellow glow silhouetted the clients for a heartbeat. Then they disappeared into the lodge where brandy, tobacco and warmth waited.

  The guide cocked his head at the closed doors. “What’s their business, do you think, sir? Drugs? Slaves?”

  The banker rubbed his beard as he turned to the guide, whose cheeks were bare as a girl’s, then poked the boy’s chest with a mittened finger. “First rule of Rand hospitality. A client’s business is his, not yours!”

  The boy stiffened, wide-eyed. A guide position for the Bank of Rand was a scarce opportunity, and the boy didn’t want to lose his.

  But good guides were scarce, too. The kid had simply asked aloud what had puzzled and annoyed the banker, himself.

  The banker touched the boy’s shoulder as he shook his head. “Not drugs. Not slaves, either. The gangsters, they always tip big to make a show. A show’s the last thing those two want.”

  The boy wrinkled his forehead. “You don’t think they’re criminals?”

  The banker smiled in the dark. “There are criminals, there are serious criminals, then there are politicians.” He jerked his head toward the Lodge. “Those two are used to traveling with advance parties that see to tipping the locals. They didn’t stiff you. They just assumed someone down the line would take care of you. And I will.”

  “Politicians, sir?”

  “Or tycoons. And important ones, whichever they are. Middling crooks couldn’t wangle bull permits this time of year.”

  “But one’s an Earthman and the other’s a Yavi!”

  The banker rubbed his beard again, narrowed his eyes. “That is a sow in the parlor, isn’t it, boy?”

  The Trueborns said—they had sayings for everything, whether outworlders cared to hear them or not—that politics made strange bedfellows. But a powerful Yavi and a powerful Trueborn meeting face-to-face was beyond strange. Cold War II had grown so frigid that Earth and Yavet conducted no politics with one another at all, in bed or otherwise. Even here in the most exclusive and discreet hideaway among five hundred planets.

  The kid whistled. “Making peace? Or plotting war?

  The boy had a knack for perceiving the obvious, which was ninety percent of what the rich paid others to do for them. He would go far.

  The banker bent and tugged the drone’s tie-downs a final time, as though their solidity would soothe the discomfort that swelled in his belly. “War and peace is somebody else’s business. Your business is tracking goats. Stick to that.”

  The boy tramped on ahead to his guide hut while snow crust crackled beneath his boots, echoing across the darkness. Like whispers in the banker’s head that wouldn’t quit.

  Peace between Earth and Yavet? That was unlikely. But the Cold War between the Human Union’s two nuclear superpowers turning hot? That was unthinkable.

  Only the Trueborns had starships. So they could rain nuclear bombs down on Yavet, or any other planet, with impunity. The Yavi had nuclear bombs in plenty, but no way to deliver them in strategic quantity.

  So Cold War II stayed cold based on counterbalanced assumptions. The Trueborns were assumed to be too self-righteously moral to destroy even an enemy as evil as the Yavi, if doing so would kill billions. The Yavi, on the other hand, were assumed to be quite immoral enough to lay waste to worlds, as they had to their own, if they ever obtained the means. But the Trueborns assumed they could prevent the Yavi from obtaining the means by incremental containment: a patchwork of alliances, a mixed bag of surrogate, brushfire, and clandestine military adventures, and espionage.

  It seemed to Otto a balance as ludicrous as it was precarious. But it was the only balance this agglomeration of civilizations had.

  So despite a code of secrecy that had bound his family, and all the great banking families of Rand, for generations, Carl Otto had long ago chosen sides. And he would do whatever he had to in order to preserve the balance.

  Inside his parka, the banker shivered, and watched until the boy disappeared inside his hut. Then Otto turned and walked toward the communications shed.

  FIVE

  The tuxedoed maître de hôtel behind the polished wood rostrum of the High Rand Lodge’s dining room shook hair as long as a woman’s into place and smiled. “Good evening, Mr. Hickok! Successful day on the Cols?”

  Maximillian Polian, Director General of Internal Security for the Unified Republics of Yavet, let his mute stare melt the man’s grin. Polian knew that his Yavi accent didn’t match his Trueborn alias, and had no desire to further advertise an already obvious lie.

  The man made a small bow. “Yes, sir. If you would be so good as to follow me?” The maît
re d’ swept a hand toward the open double doors that led to the private salon on the opposite side of the chandeliered dining room. The place was empty during mating season. Shooting animals that were about to swell their population was bad policy here. Polian thought that perverse.

  Max Polian didn’t roll his eyes at any of it until the poof turned away and snaked through the silent shoals of linen-draped tables. As Polian followed, he sawed a bony finger between his throat and the stiff collar of the tuxedo shirt that had been hung in his closet for his use. The thing threatened to strangle him. His police mess-dress uniform collar was actually even tighter, but Polian would gladly have traded.

  As he swiveled his head back and forth, Polian ground his teeth at three annoyances. First, poof tuxedos were not just uncomfortable, they were Trueborn fashion, rather than Yavi. Every detail of this overwrought palace of a hunting lodge, from the heavy table silver to the chandeliers glittering beneath the high ceilings, copied Trueborn opulence. Like most outworlds, Rand borrowed its cultural cues from Earth. Second, Polian’s host chose a Trueborn alias for Polian. As a Yavi first and last, Polian chafed beneath the alias worse than beneath the stiff shirt. Third and worst, this entire meeting was mere playing at espionage. It fooled not even these outworlders. Any ten of the thousands of Yavi criminals Polian had spent a lifetime bringing to justice created more credible lies than this overprivileged Earthman had fabricated.

  As the maître d’ ushered Polian into the private salon, Polian’s host stood, crossed in front of the crackling hearth. Like Polian and the dining-room staff, he wore black-tied evening dress. Unlike Polian, his host looked at ease in his Trueborn skin. He shook Polian’s hand with the overt familiarity that marked a Trueborn as clearly as the pearlescent perfection of the man’s smile. “Mr. Hickok!”

  Polian squeezed up the corners of his mouth up beneath his moustache. “Mr . . . Quartermain.”

  Max Polian, like most members of Yavet’s martial services, had been selected over generations and stood a head taller than the civilians they ruled. But the eyes of Polian’s host were level with his own, and set in a tanned face symmetrically handsome even by Trueborn standards.

  Polian turned his gaze to the fire laid in the great stone fireplace that warmed the private dining salon until he heard the double doors click shut behind them. Once the maître d’ bowed out, the only sound in the room was the blazing crackle of logs, which would defeat listening devices. “Mr. Cutler, I understand Trueborns love their melodrama. But can we stop playing spies?”

  Bartram Cutler smiled, nodded. “Sure. It was mostly to make you comfortable anyway. I’ve trusted the Rand all my life.”

  Polian didn’t doubt that. Like any good cop, Polian had done his homework. Bartram Cutler, third-generation owner of Cutler Communications, was the fourth richest man on Earth. Or he had been. Two years ago, Cutler had been imprisoned by his own government for publicly undisclosed crimes. The scandal had cost Cutler not only control of the family business but, presumably, the fortune that business had created. Presumably.

  Polian covered a smile with a cough as he glanced at the padded, silken wallpaper.

  Smart criminals hid a nest egg. Cutler’s nest egg was obviously proportional to his family fortune, and just as obviously hidden in an encrypted account here on Rand.

  From a bottle in the table’s center, Cutler poured amber liquid into two glasses, then handed one to Polian and raised the other. “To the Rand. Where I come from, we say that the Rand can keep a secret.”

  Polian grunted, didn’t drink. He wasn’t in the habit of drinking with crooks, or of trusting them, especially failed Trueborn crooks. “Where I come from, Mr. Cutler, we say that three can keep a secret. If two are dead.”

  Cutler threw back his head and laughed. “I take your point. Director, I asked to meet you here precisely so that we could speak face-to-face. Rand’s the most discreet and secure venue in the Human Union. But as you see, I dismissed the clerks and jerks. Any secrets we share will be between us. No middlemen to reveal our business.”

  “Our business? Mr. Cutler, you and I have no business.” Polian pulled his fingers back from the glass on the tablecloth and sighed. “And you have no business at all these days, from what my people advise me.”

  Polian read the frown that flicked across Cutler’s smooth face. Bart Cutler still had a great deal of money, even by Trueborn standards. But money without influence was almost worthless to someone born to both.

  Polian frowned back. “My sources are unclear about what crimes you committed. But we have it on good authority you were pardoned only because you hired clever lawyers. Who in turn hired an even cleverer elected official.”

  Blood pinked the Earthman’s cheeks. “And neither the lawyers nor the outgoing bitch in the White House came cheap. Director, I was the victim of a power play and trumped-up charges.”

  Polian allowed himself an eye roll. “A policeman’s heard that one before.”

  “You doubt that my government would persecute an honest man?”

  Polian smirked. “Now it is my turn to get your point. A crime committed against Earth hardly bothers a Yavi. But I don’t know how I can help you.”

  “Not you personally, perhaps. But Yavet can.”

  Polian wrinkled his brow. “I carry no portfolio for Yavet, sir. I am here as a private citizen on medical leave.” It was true. The old fools on the Central Committee were always ready to believe that someone nearly as old as themselves had medical problems. If they knew the truth of this they would suffer strokes, themselves.

  Max said, “Yavet can help many people. But why would she?”

  Cutler leaned forward. “How did you get to Rand?”

  Polian snorted. “Sir, if you expect a candid conversation, don’t answer a question with a question. Especially one to which you already know the answer. You arranged my passage, to conceal our meeting.”

  Cutler nodded. “Even so, like every Yavi, like every interworlds traveler in the Union, you were booked aboard a Trueborn starship. Even more unjustly, although you represent the most populous planet in the union, the nuclear and economic co-equal of Earth herself—in fact because of your position—you had to pretend you were a common tourist. Because Earth presumes to dislike the way Yavet runs its own society.”

  Polian’s hands wrinkled the tablecloth as his fingertips whitened. “You pander to a Yavi’s pride. But you’re right. Your government’s patronization of Yavet insults our people and our principles. A great society has the right to the principles that made it great, and to gift lesser societies with them.”

  Cutler hesitated, as Trueborns always did at self-evident truths with which they disagreed.

  Then he said, “First, Director, it isn’t my government any more. Looking out a cell window for twenty-one months changes a man’s world view. Second, Yavet’s problem isn’t obtaining the right to expand, is it? Your problem is obtaining the means.”

  Polian felt himself nod.

  Cutler smiled. “And right now you’re dead in the water on that.”

  Polian’s nod froze.

  Cutler leaned forward, lowered his voice, even in the empty room. “Six months ago your people conducted a covert military operation on Tressel. Yavet came away with enough propulsion-grade cavorite to fuel a fleet of cruisers.”

  Polian’s eyes widened a millimeter. The wretched business on Tressel. His eyes burned, moistened, at the mention, even now. But he swallowed and said nothing.

  Cutler stabbed a finger into the tablecloth. “But starship fuel without starships is useless to Yavet, isn’t it? So you tried to steal a C-drive unit.”

  Polian blinked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Cutler cocked his head, sat back. “Of course not. But I’ll speak hypothetically, as a man who knows industrial espionage. I’d say that even if you had managed to salvage a Scorpion fighter’s C-drive unit from some wreck, reverse engineering a small interceptor’s engine into a strategic fl
eet of jump-capable cruisers would have taken decades.”

  Polian forced his face blank. Cutler might have lost much of his influence, but he still knew how and where to buy accurate information. And he knew how to draw accurate conclusions from that information. Max Polian was not, however, about to concede an inch to a Trueborn.

  He shrugged. “Time favors the righteous.”

  Cutler poured again into Polian’s half-full glass. “Sure it does. But wouldn’t the righteous prefer to get keel-up starship technology delivered to them on a silver platter, instead?”

  Now Polian sat back, narrowed his eyes, even as he felt his heart skip. “Assuming—purely for the sake of argument—that Yavet were interested in acquiring, as you put it, Trueborn keel-up starship technology on a plate, why bring your offer to me? I’m just what you call a flat-footed cop. My responsibilities are internal. Stealing external secrets isn’t a simple policeman’s job.”

  “Director Polian, if you’re just a simple policeman, I’m just a simple salesman. Did you know that my father made me start at the bottom at Cutler, as a field salesman? He said he wasn’t going to turn the business over to a rich bum.” Cutler shifted in his chair. “But tough love taught me plenty. Before I made a sales call on a big client, who do you think I always contacted first?”

  Polian made a show of shrugging again, but he didn’t turn away. “I have no idea, and less curiosity. Peddling disinterests me.”

  “I approached the guy on the inside who I figured had the best reason to buy. Because if I got to him face-to-face first, and sold him, he’d sell the rest of management for me.”

  Max Polian waved his hand at the glittering room around them, snorted. “You think this frosting can sell me? Or buy me?”

  “Bribe you with a hunting trip? My father didn’t raise a fool.” Cutler paused, softened his voice. “And you didn’t raise your son as one, either.”