Balance Point (26 page)

FORTY-TWO

It took Gill ten minutes to bring his car up.

While he did, I triaged Kit and my father, then shot them both up with syrettes from Gill’s and Polian’s first-aid packs. Both needed transfusions and more. But they were stable enough that if we could get them to Kit’s listening-post moonlet, and if it had a decent infirmary, they each had a chance. Which was better than they had if they stayed here on Yavet.

Gill appeared in the room’s doorway, still blissfully alone. Where does a Director General drive his car? Anywhere he wants to.

He frowned. “Can we move them twenty yards? My car’s too big to get any closer.”

Having now spent time on Earth, I smiled at that.

Actually, there were no “cars” in stack cities, where goods and garbage moved through the utilities and people moved horizontally on jammed sliding pedways, up and down in elevators or updraft tubes. Or just walked or climbed the old-fashioned way. Gill’s “car,” or “slider,” was an underpowered four-place wheeled vehicle that Trueborns would derisively call a “golf cart.”

“Golf,” by the way, involved overlandscaping perfectly good countryside, then contesting upon it a game, played with flails and a small ball, that was so difficult that it was described as a good walk spoilt. The Trueborns fixed that not by taking away the spoilage, but by taking away the walk, replacing it with “golf carts.” As if that wasn’t fix enough, I hear there’s now a full-contact version of golf you can bet on at Funhouse.

Three minutes later, we got my father and Kit into the back seats of Gill’s vehicle. We discovered that, although it was designed for four, it held all of five people. As long as one of the five didn’t feel weird riding with a woman on his lap who looked just young enough to be trouble, but was his mother.

Gill’s car resembled a blacked-out egg on tiny wheels, was normally driven not by Gill but by his aide and bore Director General’s tags.

That last proved critical. Few Yavi could afford sliders. Most wouldn’t bother to afford one if they could. The passage crowds, in the passages wide enough for sliders at all, made sliders into egg-shaped black doorstops.

Unless the slider had Director General’s tags. Then if pedestrians or other sliders failed to yield, the DG’s driver shot the miscreant or had him or her questioned. “Getting questioned” involved the good old chain-mail boot kicking that I remembered so nostalgically. So shooting was usually unnecessary.

Ulys Gill was unaccustomed to driving himself, but he knew where the switches for the flashing lights and siren were.

The human seas parted everywhere we went.

With nine minutes to spare, we made a whooping, flashing, suitably theatrical entrance to the chamber at the base of Stack Fourteen, Eastern, Ninety-six Lower. The stack’s main access door had been rolled open, and the chamber bustled with Gill’s uniformed tech nerds.

Then an armored Yavi, needler in one hand, stepped into the path of Gill’s car with his palm upraised. He was a cop, not one of Gill’s nerds.

My heart pounded faster.

Gill may have been a DG, but his passengers were probably just a little too suspicious to pass muster if the cop peeked inside Gill’s vehicle.

I looked over at Gill, then back at our unconscious cargo, and asked Gill, “Now what?”

Gill hopped out of the egg and slammed the door behind himself, and the guard snapped to and saluted. We sat invisible inside Gill’s blacked-out staff car and I listened to my heart pound.

A fat-lipped kid in internal-security uniform peeled off the bustle, ran to Gill and the guard and joined their discussion.

My mother shifted on my lap. “That boy’s hat looks ridiculous.”

I reached round, took Kit’s wrist and read the timer. “Four minutes.”

Eventually, the kid in the ridiculous hat, which marked him as a provisional lieutenant, said something to the cop, whom he outranked. Then the provi formed up all the personnel, including the armed guard, then led them away, double time.

As soon as Gill’s techs were all out of sight, Gill waved me forward.

I jumped out of his cart, ran toward him, then the two of us dashed ahead into the stack.

The stack had been shut down, but both the floor grate and wall plates remained too hot to touch with a bare hand.

Kit’s Scorpion floated perhaps fifty feet above our heads in the stack’s dimness.

The clock in my head said we had two minutes before our ride home blew itself to pieces.

A wheeled maintenance scaffold unit sat parked and still folded on the floor grate, directly beneath the Scorpion. A WMS was basically what Trueborns, for whom food still grew on trees, called a “cherry picker.”

Gill and I clambered into the cherry picker’s basket, Gill slammed down a lever on the basket’s frame, and the whining machinery lifted the panting pair of us up toward the Scorpion’s open canopy.

I said, “What lie did you tell the provi and the cop?”

“That she was gonna blow any second. Don’t they say that in your holos?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Sometimes the truth
will
set you free.”

The elevator platform lurched, stopped. I leaned into the Scorpion’s interior, looked round the cabin.

Finding the countdown timer was easy. First, because it was a beer-can-sized bolt-on mounted in the middle of the center console above the monitors. Second, because its dinner-roll-sized slap button flashed red and read “ABORT?” in black letters, while the remaining seconds showed below, ticking down. Usually, an explosive timer started flashing only when time zero was less than one minute away.

Forty-four seconds.

I swung into the copilot’s seat, and the seat harness buckles clanked as I landed atop them. Then I hammered the abort button with my fist.

The button kept flashing, but the display changed to five flashing green dashes across the red, and above them the words, “ENTER CODE.”

Thirty-nine seconds.

What the hell had I been thinking? Of course it was password protected. And the Yavi had had no more clue what code Kit had set when she activated it than I did. And she wasn’t talking.

Howard’s cryptographic nerds taught me that the probability of randomly guessing a five-character letter-number password was less than one in fifty million.

“Fuck!” I pounded the button in frustration.

Thirty-six seconds and counting.

The display kept flashing red, but the message changed. “ENTER
CORRECT
CODE. ONE TRIAL REMAINING.”

This time when I yelled “Fuck,” I kept my fist off the button. I waved my hand at Gill, “Get away!”

I could run, too. Like a Yavi needler, the booby trap’s violence was probably calculated to incinerate the Scorpion and its contents rather than to create collateral damage. If I ran this instant, thirty seconds might be enough to save my life.

But what life?

My experience with Ya Ya Cohon had taught me that there was no money in betting favorites. You had to bet the underdog to win big enough to make the game worth playing.

Kit had always wanted me to cross more bridges when I came to them, even if they collapsed. But that had been when the probability of Kit and me having a future together was less than one out of fifty million. I had ceased to be in Kit’s plans for us months ago. Maybe.

I bet the fifty million to one ’dog that in Kit’s mind there was still a chance for us together. I stabbed with my index finger at the keypad and entered D-a-1-s-y.

The timer flashed again.

Eleven seconds.

But the number didn’t change.

Then the red light went dark, except for the words “CODE CORRECT. FIRING SEQUENCE ABORTED.”

I released a breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding, sucked in a fresh one.

After that, at our relative leisure Gill and I moved Kit, and then my dad, into the cherry picker’s basket, then secured them like the invaluable cargo they were in the Scorpion’s two side-by-side rear seats.

My mom slipped into the pilot’s seat and began preflighting the Scorpion, humming as she fingered touchscreens, as though she were mixing cookie batter.

It occurred to me that a man of my age, and of sufficient life experience that he and his girlfriend shared what Mort would call a coital password, ought to be embarrassed that his mother had to drive him on a date. I wasn’t.

Ulys Gill and I faced each other in the still-smoking and crackling stack beneath the flying black pumpkinseed that would, perhaps, carry my mother, my father, the love of my life and me safely away from this hell. Or at least carry us as far as a hollow rock that smelled like garbage, where we could wait for a ride home.

I said to Gill, “This may all be hard for you to explain.”

Gill cocked his head, shrugged. “You think so? What we mistook for a booby-trap timer was an autopilot countdown timer. Trueborns are too cheap to blow up an expensive ship. The ship took off like a homing pigeon. The midwife shot Polian. The two of them have a history, you know. She isn’t the first snitch who tried to shoot her case officer, although she may be the first one to get credit for succeeding. Pity all of you got away, and of course you took the weapon that killed Max with you. You’re all still at large. Until some bodies turn up that will be unmatchable in the absence of DNA evidence.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “Absence?”

“Don’t Trueborns watch their own police holos? Bleach.” Gill made a smile so small that it emerged a frown. “Captain Parker, Illegals like you and me learn to lie for our lives from the day we’re born. It’s risky business, but it’s the only business we have.”

“It’s a business you’re at ease with. My boss will be disappointed if I don’t ask whether you’ll do ongoing business with us.”

“Me? A Trueborn mole?” Ulys Gill shook his head. “What I do here I do for Yavet. She’s flawed, but she’s my home.”

“I understand being a soldier and a patriot. So am I.”

“You and me? The same?” Gill wrinkled his nose as though something rotten had caught in his gray moustache. “Captain, I’m what we call an old moustache. A vestige of the day on Yavet when a soldier served civilians, rather than kicked them like Polian’s people do now. In those days war was decided between combatants on a battlefield. I’m not fond of war at all. But this pretending? What you and Colonel Born call ‘cold’ war? I’m even less fond of that.” He shook his head. “Treachery. Backstabbing conducted in the shadows.”

“You don’t like the way we do things.”

“I don’t like that you have to do them. Or that I do.”

“It keeps mankind at a balance point. We both just saw how easily the balance can tip.”

Gill stared up the stack, into the darkness. “Perhaps. Perhaps we can make it better.”

I shook Gill’s hand. “If Howard Hibble doesn’t have a new mole here on Yavet, will you tell me whether he has a mole problem of his own back home?”

Gill looked down at the smoldering debris that dotted the stack floor, crossed his arms. “I told you I’m a patriot. So, no, I won’t tell you anything like that. I should be insulted that you’d ask. But I will tell you this, only because it’s in Yavet’s self interest. This business was an aberration, not a military or intelligence operation conducted by Yavet. Please assure your boss, and his boss, of that. Max was a cop, not a soldier, and a cop whose sense of duty and of right and wrong was crippled by the loss of his son. He was taken advantage of by a man who was neither a soldier nor a spy of Yavet. In fact, Max got your personnel file, and the concept of this plot, from a Trueborn. An industrialist. The fellow wanted a free hand on DE 476, of all peculiar things, out of the deal.”

My jaw dropped. “Rat bastard Cutler?”

“You know the man.”

“I do. So does an eleven-ton monster who wants to meet him in a dark alley.”

“I wish you both luck with that. And luck to us all for the future.”

Ulys Gill saluted and spun an about-face, and I rode the cherry picker back up to the Scorpion one more time. My mother closed the canopy and rotated the Scorpion’s nose up as easily as if she had backed out of the garage, then the Scorpion hovered motionless there, pointed up toward the pitch-black sky beyond the stack.

She tapped her fingernails on the universal joystick, looked around at the pretty green lights on the canopy.

Whooom
!

The Scorpion shuddered as the stack restarted. Red flame and smoke began roaring around us, and the outside air temperature and windspeed indicators on the console changed from green to yellow to red.

A Scorpion’s built to withstand vastly worse conditions, but even so . . .

Still my mother sat, oblivious. Sometimes I accompanied Kit when she stood in for Edwin and visited assisted living facilities, where elderly human shells sat vacant-eyed and oblivious.

My heart skipped. Then sank.

My mother looked and acted just young enough to be trouble. But in straight-line time, she may have been pushing one hundred years old. She had certainly known how to build a starship. Once. Maybe even fly a Scorpion. Once.

But now? Had we nearly gone to nuclear war, and spilled my father’s and my lover’s blood, to prevent an old lady from being asked questions to which the Yavi could force her to respond, but to which she had forgotten the answers?

The irony of it was bad. The reality of it made it worse.

Now the four of us were stuck hanging here in hell’s basement. Sooner or later the Yavi would pick us up, and all our sacrifices would have been for naught.

But it wasn’t her fault. And she was my mother.

I reached across the console, patted her hand gently, and whispered, “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?”

“Why, no, dear. I believe you have. And you’ve done this before, which makes it more disappointing.”

I opened my mouth, shook my head in tiny strokes. “What?”

“I can wait as long as you can. Your father forgets, too. And I wait for him.”

“Mom?”

“Big spy. Big general. That doesn’t impress an Admiral, you know. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots.” She reached to the canopy, touched a row of overhead keys with her index finger, her lips moving as she counted each one. “But this pilot doesn’t cut corners. Dear, this ship doesn’t budge until you fasten your seat harness.”