Death Wave (41 page)

“No one else in two worlds for me,” he replied.

Slowly, reluctantly, she disentangled from his embrace. “You've got a full day tomorrow, back in London.”

Jordan nodded, but said, “Let's wait here a while. The stars will be out soon. I'd like to watch Sirius rising.”

But he knew she was right. There was still so much to be done.

 

MOSCOW

“I had expected some snow,” Jordan said as the sleek black sedan purred almost silently into the city along the special highway lane reserved for government vehicles.

“Snow will come,” said Dmitri Kalnikov, their Russian host, in accentless English. “We will have a white Christmas, I assure you.”

“But it's already December…”

“Global warming,” said Kalnikov with a smile. “While you English worry about rising sea levels drowning you, we Russians enjoy a milder climate. Khrushchev's old idea of cultivating virgin lands in Siberia has come true. Russia is now the world's leading exporter of grains.”

Jordan nodded understanding. “It's an ill wind that blows no good.”

Kalnikov nodded back. He was a short, stocky man bundled into a black fur-trimmed overcoat. His glistening bald head was uncovered, though, and the coat was unbuttoned. His face was round, jowly, with a snub of a nose and thick lips that seemed curled into a perpetual smile. But his pale blue eyes were icy cold.

To Aditi, sitting beside Jordan, Kalnikov said, “We have arranged a suite for you in the best hotel in Moscow, right next to Red Square and the Kremlin.”

“And the others?” she asked, meaning Motrenko and his two female companions, plus Cree and the trio of Unicorn agents the Russians had allowed to enter their country.

“Same hotel, different floor. They will be quite comfortable, I assure you.”

“That's good,” said Jordan.

“Tomorrow you address the Duma,” Kalnikov told Jordan, “but tonight you dine with the president of all the Russias, and a small group of his closest advisors. They are very eager to meet you.”

Jordan understood the message behind his words. The head of government wants to see me face-to-face and hear what I have to say.

*   *   *

Vladimir Balakirev was the Russian president, a career bureaucrat who had slowly, patiently worked his way to the top of the government. Despite his years, he looked youthful, vigorous, thanks to rejuvenation therapies. His full head of hair was dark brown, his face lean and angular, his body trim. He wore lifts in his heels, though, and always sat in a chair that was a few centimeters higher than those around him. Driving his slow progress through the Kremlin was an insatiable ego.

“I know you have just arrived in Moscow,” Balakirev said to Jordan, seated beside him at the big circular table. “You must stay long enough to allow me to show you and your lovely wife the city.”

Jordan interpreted mentally, He wants to be seen in public with us.

“I'd be happy to,” Jordan replied. “Aditi would especially appreciate a chance to see the ballet.”

“Of course! Tomorrow night, after your address to the Duma.”

One of the men halfway around the table moved his lips. Making reservations for us, Jordan realized.

There were several toasts before dinner was served. Toasts to interstellar friendship, to peace and understanding, to a glorious future. Jordan, aware of Russian drinking habits, had fortified himself with a thick slab of butter before starting out to the Kremlin.

“Coat the stomach,” he told Aditi, remembering his old days as a diplomat. “Helps you from getting drunk.”

After the vodka came the food. Caviar from the Caspian Sea, reclaimed from the pollution that had nearly poisoned the sturgeon into extinction; bloodred borscht, grilled caribou steaks.

As dessert was being served in delicate glass dishes, Balakirev asked, very casually, “So you want us to build starships and save alien civilizations?”

Jordan put down the gold spoon that had been halfway to his mouth. “I think it's important,” he said. “It's a moral imperative.”

“Let me tell you about moral imperatives,” Balakirev said. “For more than a hundred years Russia fought a war against Islamic extremists, a war that we eventually won. Not because we slaughtered our enemies, but because we showed them that we would not allow them to change our way of life.”

“Many were killed, on both sides,” said one of the men across the table.

“But we persevered,” Balakirev continued, waving a stumpy finger in the air. “Year after year, decade after decade. We showed the people of the Islamic states on our southern border that they could live as they wished, but they could never subdue the Russian people.
That
was a moral imperative.”

Jordan dipped his chin in acknowledgment. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

Balakirev's stern expression relaxed into a guarded smile. “Now you want to save alien races on distant worlds. As a moral imperative.” His smile widening, the Russian president said, “That's the way the Jesuits felt about the Aztecs. And the Incas. And the Chinese. And so many other civilizations that the West emasculated.”

“We've come a long way since then,” Jordan countered. “We're going to these worlds to save them from extinction, not to colonize them.”

Balakirev's dark eyebrows rose. “Still, the question remains, why should we go to the expense of trying to save people we know nothing about?”

“Because we know they exist,” Jordan replied, “and that they will be wiped out unless we help them.”

“But what's in it for us?” asked Kalnikov, sitting on the president's other side. “Why should we go to the expense—”

“The expense is trivial,” Jordan snapped. “You spend more on vodka each year.”

“Ah, but vodka is important,” said one of the men halfway around the table. Everyone laughed.

Jordan made himself laugh, too. But then he said, “It would be criminal if we just sat by and let those other worlds die.”

“Criminal?” Balakirev challenged. “You are a judge now?”

“I am a human being, and I believe it would be inhuman to allow whole civilizations to be wiped out when we have the means to help them.”

Balakirev reached out and patted Jordan on the shoulder. “Yes, yes. Perhaps so.”

He was testing me, Jordan realized. Taking in a calming breath, he added, “Besides, the starship building program could provide many jobs for your best and brightest scientists and engineers.”

“So there is profit to be made for Russia?”

“I can't imagine the starship program going forward without Russian participation. After all, it was Russians who made humankind's first steps into space.”

“That was long ago,” said Balakirev.

“It's time for Russia to be great again. Time for Russia to reach for the stars.”

Balakirev nodded, then turned to Kalnikov and said in Russian, “You can see why Halleck is so worried about this one.”

Jordan understood every word.

 

SEEDS OF DOUBT (1)

“I miss Walt,” said Dee Dee.

She was sitting with Rachel and Nick in the corridor of a cheerless government building near Red Square. Hamilton Cree stood at the end of the corridor, with two Russian security guards, dour heavyset men who seemed incapable of smiling.

They had spent almost the entire morning seeking permission from the Russian government's communications bureaucracy to transmit Nick's daily blog from Moscow to the Otero network, as he had done in the other European cities they had visited. The stony reception he'd gotten from the bureaucrats sitting behind their formidable desks had not been encouraging.

The door across the hallway opened and a youngish blond woman came out, smiling brightly at them.

“I have good news for you,” she said as Nick got to his feet. “The World Council has approved your request to broadcast your daily interviews with Mr. Kell from Moscow, and our communications department has endorsed their decision.”

Breaking into a rare grin, Nick said, “That's great! Thank you.”

“However,” the blonde went on, her smile diminishing, “you will not be allowed to broadcast Mr. Kell's address to the Duma this afternoon. Tass will cover that event exclusively.”

“But I can interview Mr. Kell afterward?”

The blonde nodded. “Along with all the other news representatives. A group interview.”

*   *   *

Jordan stood before the members of the Russian legislature and pleaded his case for rescuing the worlds threatened by the death wave. Their response was polite, but hardly enthusiastic.

It wasn't until President Balakirev followed Jordan to the podium and pronounced, “It is time for Mother Russia to be great again. It is time for us to lead the way to the stars!” that the Duma rose to its feet as one person and cheered long and loud and lustily.

*   *   *

Sandwiched in with more than fifty other newspeople shouting questions at Jordan, Nick felt like a very small fish in a very large pond.

That's okay, he told himself. I'll interview him one-on-one when he gets back to the hotel, just him and me.

But Jordan was whisked away from the Kremlin by Russian security personnel, together with Aditi, Balakirev, and a handful of other Russian bigwigs.

To see the ballet, the same bright-eyed blonde explained when Nick complained to her. She shrugged. “I understand that Mrs. Kell wants to see our ballet.”

Defeated, Nick returned to the hotel with Rachel and Dee Dee—and Cree and his cohorts.

Once in their suite, Nick tossed his minicam onto the desk and slumped on the long sectional sofa, dejected.

“This stinks,” he grumbled. “Jordan shoulda told me he wouldn't be able to do the interview today.”

Before either of the women could reply, the phone announced, “Incoming call from Mr. Edgerton.”

Surprised, Nick said, “Put him on.” The holographic viewer across the room lit up to show Walt sitting in what looked like a condo unit's living room in California.

“Hello, friends,” said Walt, smiling warmly. He was dressed casually in slacks and a pullover shirt, clean-shaven, as he had been when he'd appeared in London, rather than the seedy, unwashed guru he'd been when Nick had first met him.

Goggling at him, Rachel gasped, “You shouldn't be phoning us! They'll trace the call, find out where you are.”

With a relaxed wave of his hand, Walt said, “Not to worry, sweet one. No one is monitoring my phone.”

“How can you be sure?” Nick demanded.

“Friends in high places,” said Walt. “And speaking of friends, I see that your starman was too busy to be interviewed by you today.”

“He went to the ballet,” Nick growled.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Makes a good cover story.”

Rachel asked, “What do you mean by that?”

With a nonchalant shrug, Walt answered, “Suppose he's meeting with his Russian friends, in private?”

“You mean in secret,” said Dee Dee.

“He's been with them all flickin' day,” Nick said.

“All right, then,” Walt rebutted, still smiling, “suppose he's meeting with some others?”

“Like who?”

“Like his friends on New Earth. I'm sure they want regular reports on how he's succeeding. And they'll want to give him his orders, of course.”

“He hasn't been talking to anybody on New Earth,” Rachel countered. “We're with him all the time, we'd know.”

“All the time?” Walt challenged. “Like you're with him now?”

Nick frowned at Walt's image. “We can't be with him twenty-four/seven.”

“That's that I mean.”

“But we're with him enough to know that he's not a traitor.”

“And you're sure about that? Absolutely positive? There's no way the man couldn't be fooling you? No way he couldn't be selling us out to the aliens?”

Nick snapped, “No way.”

Walt's smile vanished. “That's an awfully big claim. Especially when the future of the human race depends on it.”

 

SEEDS OF DOUBT (2)

Nick couldn't get to sleep that night. Even making love with Rachel didn't help: he felt tense, almost angry.

After an hour of tossing fitfully, he got out of the bed, pulled on the thin robe that the hotel supplied, and paced across their bedroom. Through the diaphanous curtains of the room's only window he could see the onion domes of the Kremlin across Red Square, brilliantly lighted against the gray, starless sky.

“What's the matter?” Rachel called drowsily from the bed.

Turning back toward her, Nick said apologetically, “I didn't mean to wake you up.”

She sat up in the bed, blanket tucked under her armpits. “I wasn't sleeping anyway.”

“I'm sorry.”

“What's wrong?”

“Walt says Jordan's working for the aliens. How's he know that?”

Rachel shrugged her bare shoulders. Ordinarily the movement would have enticed Nick.

“I mean, how's he know that Jordan's working for the aliens? We've been with him for weeks now, and he seems to be just what he says he is.”

“He's trying to get the government to save those other worlds from the death wave.”

“Yeah. And us, too.”

“But Walt doesn't believe him.”

“But we know more about Jordan than Walt does. We're with him every day.”

“Not all the time, though,” Rachel pointed out. “He could be working with them when we're not with him. Like right now.”

“You believe that?”

“I don't know. I guess not.”

Nick sat on the edge of the bed. “I mean, I tried to
kill
the guy and he takes us under his wing. My blog's a big success, thanks to him.”