Balance Point Page 4

  The old man stiffened, stood. “My son?”

  Cutler paused a heartbeat, then said even more softly, “Director, how much do you know about the circumstances of your son’s death?”

  The old cop narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about—?”

  Cutler raised his palm. “I know he died a hero. And I know the power of the bond between a father and a son.”

  Polian swayed, silent, for ten seconds, then whispered, “It’s my turn to answer a question with a question. Why do you bring up my son’s death?”

  Cutler inched Polian’s glass toward him again. “Sit down. It’s real single-malt. I brought the bottle out from Earth myself.”

  Polian sat, lifted the glass and sniffed.

  After Ruberd’s first off-world posting, Polian’s son had brought home a bottle of Trueborn whisky, purchased duty-free at a hub layover, for the two of them to share. But they had argued on the shuttle down from the Ring. He could no longer remember about what. Max Polian had found the bottle, still unopened, among his son’s effects, when the service had delivered them.

  Max Polian sipped, and the scotch—he was sure it was the scotch—made his eyes water.

  Polian blinked back the tears and peered at his host.

  It seemed to Polian that Cutler was now watching him with the same expression that the Earthman had worn two days before, while he watched a snow leopard taste a bait. Moments later, Cutler had killed the animal with a shot so clean that it tore the trophy’s heart out.

  Cutler nodded. “Here’s what I have in mind.”

  SIX

  The uniformed guard, one hand on the gunpowder pistol holstered at his waist, stepped out and blocked Max Polian’s path up the starship’s embarkation gangway. The guard raised his other hand, palm out. “Hold it right there!”

  Polian froze, held his breath.

  Polian could, if it came to it, claim diplomatic immunity. However, a cabinet-level Yavi reduced to traveling from Rand to his own homeworld incognito aboard a Trueborn starship would be a gross embarrassment, even though the practice was the worst-kept secret in the universe.

  But—had Cutler been a Trueborn Intelligence plant? The meeting a set-up? No ruse was too petty for the shadowy Hibble’s legions. A cabinet-level Yavi caught spying would be beyond embarrassing, it would be a propaganda coup for the Trueborns. To say nothing of the reaction of the Central Committee.

  The guard, wearing the chevrons of a Trueborn Marine Lance Corporal, pointed at Polian’s gut. “Turn ’em out.”

  “What?”

  “Your vest pockets, sir. Would you turn ’em inside-out for me? Please?”

  Please? Polian stifled an eye roll. When, as a young vice cop, Polian had been in the kid’s position, there would have been no “please,” just an order. And a mailed fist to the jaw if that order wasn’t immediately obeyed. Hibble’s minions aside, trusting these people with the fate of five hundred planets was like allowing a child to conduct a symphony.

  Polian reached slowly into the waist pockets of the souvenir leather Rand hunting vest the Lodge had provided, with its crest on the left breast. Polian had worn the thing to flesh out his tourist image. He plucked the linings and tugged them out. With them came a half dozen large-bore cartridges that Polian hadn’t realized were there. Polian left his hands in the fabric so that the guard wouldn’t notice that they quivered.

  “Hunters forget leftover ammo all the time, sir.” The Marine pointed at an open bin alongside his boot. “If you dump no-carry items here, no sweat.” The kid smiled, jerked a thumb at the scanner arch ten paces up the gangway. “If the scanner catches them, there’s paperwork. Strain for you, strain for us. Sorry.”

  Polian exhaled, managed a smile back, dropped the cartridges into the indicated bin. “No apology needed, Corporal. An old man already strains enough.”

  The Marine guard’s earpiece chirped, and the kid turned away, hand pressed to his ear, nodding. He had already forgotten the forgetful old fool in front of him.

  Before he continued aboard, Polian looked up at the vast cruiser within which he would begin his circuitous voyage back to Yavet. The vessel, with the others that comprised Earth’s fleet, connected the five hundred worlds of the Human Union. And—he clenched his jaw at the thought—allowed Earth to dominate mankind in general and Yavet in particular.

  He had seen cruisers before this trip, drifting at orbital mooring, tethered to the Ring, two hundred miles above Yavet. They resembled skeletal, mile-long white whales, and their projected power intimidated him.

  Max Polian, like any vice cop who had worked the downlevels, understood physical intimidation. A head, and usually much more, taller in his armor than the little people, simply raising a mailed fist had usually been enough to get any question answered.

  But here on Rand, one of the worlds where cruisers like HUS Emerald River actually descended from space and hovered at the surface, the enormity of a C-drive star cruiser, the simple reality of a movable object so vast, didn’t merely intimidate, it overwhelmed.

  To his left, the conical C-drive booms tapered down to tips that ended eight hundred yards aft of the vessel’s midpoint. In front of him the vessel’s midsection rose, windowed with thirty-six midpoint bays that had once harbored a full wing of interceptors, ground-attack ships, and transports. To his right, the great tube of the cargo and passenger spaces tapered forward, ending another eight hundred yards distant, in the blunt crystal tip of the forward observation blister.

  With such ships, Yavet would be more than equal to the Motherworld. Without them, Yavet would always be shackled.

  After Polian cleared the embarkation sensors he passed an entry hatch that led aft. A pair of Marines stood guard there, in full Eternad armor with automatic weapons unslung. What lay aft remained a mystery to Yavet’s external intelligence services despite decades of effort. Nano remotes, recruited human agents, open-source research, nothing had unlocked the secrets.

  He looked away as he passed rather than be reminded of his own frustration. Continuing through the vast ship’s decks and sectors to his cabin, he lay rigid on his bunk and stared at the ceiling.

  Ruberd had sacrificed his life to end the Trueborns’ dominance. At least to begin the end.

  Max Polian clenched his teeth. No, his son had not sacrificed his life. It had been stolen from him by Trueborn assassins. And now Cutler had presented Polian with the opportunity to punish the thieves.

  After the great ship lifted, she hung above Rand while her crew prepared her for the nearlight voyage to the first of the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point transits through which the ship would jump. The jump across the TFIP, from one limb of a fold in space to another, connected points that were otherwise centuries of travel apart, even for light itself.

  Polian made his way to the ship’s centerline passage, where rotational gravity was effectively zero, and swam forward through thin air to the observation blister. He emerged into a crystal hemisphere eighty feet in diameter, its inner surface spiderwebbed with handrails at which passengers floated like fish crowded in a bowl.

  The world they were leaving behind filled half the blackness of the view that entranced them. Like most seeded Earthlikes, Rand was a blue and green ball frosted with white cloud swirls. Unlike most seeded Earthlikes, it was a satellite. Beyond Rand glowed the uninhabitable, streaked orange gas giant around which Rand orbited.

  Polian hung in the air, staring. The sight awed even him.

  He found a vacant space along a rail, alongside a group of five outworlders. At least he assumed they were outworlders. Two adults with three children could only come from a place where the problem was underpopulation. The man in the group floated alongside the boy, the woman between the girls. Both adults pointed out features visible on the globe below, compared them to the place to which they were bound.

  Polian rested both hands on the rail in front of him. He had, after all, no one for whom to point out sights.

  On inspection visits t
o the Ring he had often looked down on Yavet from near space. Yavet had, perhaps two hundred years before, resembled the blue, fleecy ball below him. Today, clouds rendered her a burnished gray, an enhancement wrought by industrious purpose and unified government.

  Even the Trueborns conceded that, but for the interruption forced on Earth by the Pseudocephalopod War, Yavet was what Earth would have become. He smiled into his reflection in the crystal. Leave it to the Trueborn historians—no, propagandists—to paint Yavet as ruined, instead of vigorous.

  What did the Earthmen say? History was written by the victors.

  The Trueborns had won the final victory against the alien civilization that had once kidnapped and enslaved the Trueborns’ paleolithic ancestors. Then that civilization had sprinkled those ancestors across the universe like seeds before it returned and tried to destroy mankind’s motherworld. And why had the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony returned to destroy Earth? Only the Slugs knew that. And now, no one would ever know. Because the Trueborns had ended hostilities by some still-undisclosed treachery that had annihilated their opponent without so much as a body left behind.

  But the history of the ongoing struggle within mankind between the motherworld and the seeded worlds like Yavet remained to be written. Polian had lost his son to the struggle. History would never, Max Polian thought, be allowed to forget that.

  Inside the ship’s gravity cocoon, the separation from the orbit of Rand and subsequent rapid acceleration brought with it no sensation of motion. The change was perceptible only because Rand, and even the planet around which Rand orbited, vanished, replaced by blackness salted with cold starpoints. Undistorted by atmosphere, the stars didn’t even twinkle.

  The outworld children whined at the suddenly monotonous experience of floating in the fishbowl, and the family disappeared aft, first among many.

  Thirty minutes later Polian pushed back from the rail and let himself turn slowly through three hundred sixty degrees. The vast chamber had emptied, save for a single figure floating at the rail on the hemisphere’s opposite side, fifty feet away. No longer shielded by the discretion of the Rand, Polian and Cutler had boarded separately, and would limit their overt contact during the voyage now underway which would end at the Mousetrap. At the Mousetrap hub, each man would board a ship bound respectively for Earth and Yavet.

  Polian regrasped his railing and pulled himself along until he and Cutler drifted side-by-side at the rail, staring out at the flat lit stars.

  Cutler didn’t turn his head. “Well? Are you in, Max?”

  Polian glanced around the empty space again, more from instinct than any real concern about eavesdroppers.

  The Trueborns were a conflicted paradox. They continued to maintain themselves as individual nations on their own planet, and even now fought among themselves. Yet those charged with maintaining order handcuffed themselves with absurd rules. On an Earth ship, as on Earth, “privacy,” like being born, was a “right.” Nonetheless, Polian scrolled his wrist ‘puter display to sweep, then waited in silence until the display winked green. This fishbowl was clean of listening devices.

  He said to Cutler, “You’re sure your information is reliable?”

  “If I can buy a presidential pardon, I can buy a junior officer’s personnel records. It’s all there for you, right down to his psych profiles.”

  Polian nodded. “I don’t doubt that you’ve learned what the man did. But whatever the psychologists claim, predicting what a man will do is less simple.”

  “You forget, I know this man. He’s as predictable as water flowing downhill. I’ve given you the concept, and all the information that can be developed from my end. From here on out, it’s your operation.”

  “And if Yavet succeeds, what do you get out of this?”

  “When Yavet’s got its own starships, you’ll establish a sphere of influence within the Union. I want the exclusive communication franchise within the Yavet sphere. And a free hand over commercial development on Downgraded Earthlike 476.”

  “Dead End? It’s worthless. Jungle and bloodthirsty monsters. Why?”

  “It’s the place where my troubles started. Call it unfinished business.”

  Polian shook his head. “I can try to get you your price, but I can’t promise it. The Director General of Internal Security is just a local cop.”

  Cutler rolled his eyes. “A cabinet-level local cop, Max.”

  “Your concept would require cooperation from the Directorate of External Security. That’s not my jurisdiction. And only the Central Committee could approve the rewards you want.”

  Cutler’s fingers whitened as he gripped the rail. “Independent directors! They’ll knife an innovator through his heart before it beats twice. Then steal his birthright. Max, you get starships for Yavet and you won’t be a cabinet-level cop anymore. You’ll be on the Central Committee.”

  Polian stared straight ahead, face as blank as he could manage. If anything, Cutler was understating Polian’s potential reward. Max wouldn’t be on the Central Committee, he would be running it. “General Secretary Polian.” The astropolitical upside for Yavet and the career potential for Max Polian almost outweighed his thirst for revenge. Almost.

  He said to Cutler, “It’s not a simple plan.”

  “It’s simple enough, Max! To catch the biggest fish, use a smaller fish for bait. And to catch the bait, use a smaller fish still. But it all starts with you. If you can’t find the small fish . . .”

  “It’s been thirty years. And the woman, if she’s even alive, isn’t in a fishbowl. She’s in an ocean along with thirteen billion other fish.”

  Cutler smiled. “But Max, that ocean and all those fish are your jurisdiction.”

  Polian nodded, smiled in spite of himself. “True.”

  “Then we have a deal. You take it from here, Max.” Cutler patted his shoulder, drifted back and left Max alone at the tip of the enormous ship.

  Polian knew he wouldn’t see or hear from Cutler again until and unless the plan succeeded. So very Trueborn. Cutler cajoled someone else to do the heavy lifting, then would step in to rob the spoils. Or keep his distance if the weight collapsed and crushed the gullible unfortunate. But the spoils for Max Polian, and for Yavet, were worth the heavy lifting and the risk.

  Polian stared into the blackness, as though he could see the first jump, days away even at the unimaginable speed at which they already moved. Beyond that jump lay seven more jumps, and a transfer at the Ring to a downshuttle, before he reached home.

  Even weightless, he felt sore and tired. Yavet to Rand and return was a long journey even for a man half his age. Just as well, though. He needed time to plan his fishing trip.

  SEVEN

  Three days after l’affaire Mort, I slid down the electric’s driver’s side window and waved my invitation toward the gate guard, who didn’t stand up inside his stucco box when he saw me. To my left the orange Sun sank into the Gulf of Mexico. Ahead, a half-dozen private tilt-wings nested on the ground between the wrought-iron fence and the main house, and beyond them row upon row of parked limos gleamed black on the emerald lawn.

  The gray-haired guard peered in through the Florida twilight at my dress whites and medals and whistled. “HSLD, Captain Parker!”

  I smiled at him. “We’ll see, Leon.”

  “High Speed Low Drag” was the buttoned-down configuration adopted by terrain-independent extralight armored fighting vehicles when maximizing forward progress. Applied by one hovertanker to another, the acronym implied a sleek appearance likely to maximize progress with the opposite sex.

  I eyed the sea of tilt-wings and limos.

  Their male passengers had surely arrived dressed not in brass-buttoned uniforms worn by persons for hire, but in tuxedos. And not tuxes rented from some storefront next door to a fried chicken place, at that.

  Leon wrinkled his nose at the bugs spattered on my four-year-old electric’s windscreen. HSLD my Chyota was not. “The Colonel’s Dad would have sent the plane for
you, Captain. Or at least one of the cars.”

  “Tankers drive themselves, Leon.”

  Especially if the alternative required me to accept an act of noblesse oblige from Edwin Trentin-Born. The Trentins and the Borns had been oblige-ing the less-fortunate classes since long before the hard freeze that followed the Blitz had chased Philadelphia’s society main line permanently to Tampa.

  Not that Kit’s father disliked GIs. On the contrary. Leon hadn’t stood when I pulled up to his guard box because he had lost both legs to an Iridian IED, back before subabdominal regrows.

  Edwin Trentin-Born simply liked GIs who knew their place. Which was in his guard boxes and mowing his lawns, albeit for above-market wages and benefits. But since Edwin’s wife had died and left him only with Kit, one place a GI didn’t fit was alongside Edwin’s daughter, except in a professional capacity.

  Ten seconds after I slid out of my car beneath the porte cochere, a bow-tied valet I didn’t recognize chirped my clunker’s tires and sped it away to invisibility around the side of the house.

  He wasn’t regular staff, because this wasn’t a regular evening with my significant other’s family.

  The fine print on my invitation disclosed that the valet, and everything else about this event, was paid for by The Bradley Weason Initiative. This event was nominally a welcome-home party for a diplomatic mission of which Kit, and Bradley Westphal Weason, had been a part.

  But it was really a campaign fund raiser for Weason, Florida’s brand new junior Senator.

  I should explain. Florida is one state within the United States of America, long Earth’s most powerful and influential nation. America is to the rest of Earth as Earth is to the rest of the Human Union.

  That is, Americans are richer than the rest of Earth, and they think they got that way because they’re morally superior and work harder. The rest of Earth believes the Americans got that way because they had the perverse luck to win, and win the spoils of, a long and terrible war that engulfed Earth during the 1940s. The rest of Earth therefore resents Americans, although it follows Americans’ pop-culture fashions like a dog follows bacon.