Flight of the Vajra (75 page)

I triggered the door to the safe and let the fact
it was now unlocked spur me to get over there.

In the time it took me to turn around from the
now-closed pressure door, shots cracked out. Ioné had gunned down one of the
things—and ruined a display surface in the process, but who cared about that
now—and Enid had another one of them pinned against a bulkhead and was in the
process of electrocuting it. I ran to the now-unsealed vault door and blasted
at a third squirmer as it tried to wend its way upstairs.

Were we moving? With all the shaking and jostling
going on, you’d assume we were, but the
Vajra
told me we’d only risen a
couple of meters before running into something that was irregular enough for me
to assume it was a piece of the ceiling. Bank slightly—there, that pushed the
pie-piece of ceiling out of place enough for us to rise some more. No, more
than just “some”—we were rising freely now, shooting up through the bare sticks
of the superstructure and out into the night air, with the endless stretching
and intersecting lines of the parking field below us.

That field was now in ruins. Some god had reached
down and stabbed at it here and there, allowing smoke to bleed out which was
tinged orange from underneath where fires burned. I leveled out the
Vajra
as best I could—it still listed and shuddered—and looked for a place somewhere
beyond where there was neither smoke nor the slick, glittering white of
squirmers.

Whoever had designed the safe (I’d used an
off-the-shelf variety) had given it a door that pushed outwards slightly when opened,
and then swung to one side on a massive mechanical hinge. That made it all the
more tempting for me to kick it open, but I knew full well if I did that I’d
probably just break a toe no matter what boots I was wearing. I reached down to
pull the door the rest of the way open when I saw slim white fingers curl
around the edge of the door and push it open from the inside.

Angharad reached up, seized my forearms, and hauled
herself up with the vigor of a cliff-climber.

“Grab a couch,” I ordered everyone.

We weren’t leveling out. Every time I tried to
bank the
Vajra
, it dove, too—moderately at first, and then at
ever-steepening angles. I’d managed to get the ship past the perimeter of the
parking field, where there was mercifully nothing but smoothly rolling hills
and the occasional meadow. I pulled myself onto the last remaining couch,
belly-down, and fastened myself onto it that way as the grass rushed up under
us.

The repulsor field sputtered and quit.

We landed hard enough and were moving fast enough to
leave a fifty-meter-long gouge in the ground. One of the landing struts folded
back from the impact; the fact it was designed to do that didn’t comfort me
much. We listed and rocked a bit, then tilted and came to rest with the hole
gouged in the underside of the ship’s hull forward and down like it was trying
to eat the dirt.

Never again, I told myself, will I ever elect to
experience a dead-stick landing from the point of view of the ship.

I spent about a minute lying there, face pressed
against the couch cushions, letting the
Vajra
flood me with damage
reports and repair assessments. The hull was punctured; the deadlight ruined; the
deadlight access tube also scorched and buckled; various internal compartments
compromised in one way or another; sensory surfaces inside and out were shot.

Crew complement: four, all intact.

Secure from general quarters, I thought.

I let the couch relax its grip on me so I could turn
over—only to realize too late how badly we were still listing. I ended up
sliding halfway to the floor and needed to cling to the couch the way a kid
hangs onto his swim-trainer board.

Angharad’s hand shot out and closed around my
forearm once again, letting me regain my footing. Enid dug her fingers into my upper
shoulder and helped me stay standing.

Ioné’s head appeared in the stairwell leading to
the upper deck. “How many pieces are we in?” she asked.

“One each?” Enid said, evidently on all of our behalves.
No one contradicted her.

I grabbed hold of one of the wall’s extrusions to
keep from tilting over (the others had let go of me) and ran the rest of the
damage report. The
Vajra
was unfit for duty except as a gazebo.

“We’re gonna have to redecorate,” I said after a
long moment.

The good news—
I was groping for
anything I could call good news—was the reestablishment of communication, both
generally and with IPS HQ. Further good news: the squirmers didn’t appear to be
on the prowl anywhere nearby, so it looked like we could step outside without
being minced.

Then the bad news came—and came, and came, and
came.

I’d been all too right about the substrate
reservoirs being the breeding grounds for the squirmers. It hadn’t just been the
reservoir under the parking bay; it had been
every single reservoir in the
city

Kallhander played me back a CL feed composited
from a dozen times a dozen different sensory surfaces. I saw how they had boiled
up from beneath roadways; how they’d spewed out of the maintenance rooms of
manufaxture stations; how they’d oozed from every conduit that had a substrate
reservoir behind it somewhere. They’d smashed holes in one side of our villa
and out the other, dumping debris and furniture into the sea. They’d left the
conference hall as a dented pyramid of torn carpeting, abraded cushions, wall
panels splintered into tindersticks. They’d turned the business of one Malek
Pirinçim, bespoke tailor, into a crashed-in crater and knocked holes in the
adjoining bridge just for fun, too.

And they’d done with approximately a hundred other
people (the numbers were still being revised) what they’d tried and failed to
do with Angharad: take hostages. The playbacks for that were like a hundred
horribly successful versions of what we had endured in the docking bay: first,
an image of things squirming at a distance; next, something squirming right at
you; third—blackout.

I had to massage my jaw to get it to unclench.
There would have been far more if IPS hadn’t been on every streetcorner and in
every major square, blasting away. They’d stopped many of Marius’s toys before
they could take hostages, and even a few after the fact, but they might as well
have been trying to stop a waterfall by catching it in their hands.

“Kallhander’s sending a rescue crew out to pick us
up,” Ioné said after I had finished digesting all that. “It should be here in
just a couple of minutes.”

“Let’s get outside,” I said. “Air’s fresher there.”

We daisychained ourselves together and eased out
through the main cargo port, which worked well enough to give us an exit even
if it wasn’t a very wide one. Around us was nothing but trees; below, only
torn-up sod and grass; above, the red-and-blue of Bridgehead’s night sky. At a
great distance, we now sensed the aftermath: a boom here and there; the roaring
of a helio’s VTO; a pinpoint of orange light blooming and fading on a hillside.

The air did indeed taste wonderful, a delicious
cold drink after the suddenly-unpleasant heat and closeness of the
Vajra
’s
insides. I took in a few long lungfuls, taking slightly tottering steps before
turning around and seeing what was left of the ship we’d just walked away from.
It made my skin feel like it was coming loose.

“Hey,” Enid said gently, giving my upper arm a
pat. “You can always ‘fax another ship, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s always
another one,
” I
said. And then she chimed in with me without being prompted:
“You’ll always
know the difference.”

Angharad was off to one side, looking up into the
face of the red moon. I walked over and took her hand without thinking about
it. Enid, not to be outdone I suppose, took my other one.

—
Henré,
Kallhander CLed, as a searchlight
covered the whole of the little meadow we were standing in.
If you’re
preparing to tell us “I told you so—”

—I think we’ve got bigger things to worry about
than who was right,
I CLed back.
Even I didn’t think infesting the
reservoirs was practical, let alone likely. Who’s in the hostage list?

—
Cioran, among many others. Ulli was captured
but almost immediately afterwards released. I suspect because she has a backup
and he does not.

The thundering of the helio—it was at least as big
as the
Vajra
—retreated slightly as it touched down in the field in front
of us, its gangway ringed with light. The four of us set ourselves in motion,
every step I took feeling that much more mired down in the long grass.

Kallhander met Angharad
at the gangway
and, after a discussion with her that raised his eyebrows, reactivated her CL. No
knife, no needle, nothing invasive, nothing that looks like so much as a gentle
tap on the shoulder. The hard part—or, rather, the
dramatic
part—was
Angharad giving Kallhander a variant on the same speech she’d given us in the
helio about what a CL represented for her.

“Well,” Kallhander replied, “it
has
been my
policy to assume you know what you are doing.” Typical understated
Kallhanderian humor, I thought, as he got Angharad online. It was this or a
‘hat, since there was no way we were going to have the next conversation on the
agenda without including her.

We all convened in a CL-space simulation that
resembled a plush cruise ship lounge, and let Kallhander bring Angharad up to
speed on everything else that had happened.

“From everything we’ve been able to gather,”
Kallhander said, “if Marius had made his trade beforehand, he would probably
have unleashed this attack as soon as he was clear of the planet.”

“Or better to say,” I said, “
allowed
it to
happen. I get the impression these drones of his were front-loaded with a lot
of situational programming, and once they accomplished a certain set of
goals—like, for instance, taking a certain number of people hostage—they would
fall back to a safe position and wait. Where are they all now, anyway?”

“They’ve retreated back into the reservoirs. The
people in question seem to have been chosen specifically because they had no
backups. Less than two hundred thousand people total planetwide fit that
description.”

 “Many of the emigrants may not openly identify
with the Old Way,” Angharad said, “but I have seen how many of the same
behaviors and habits will linger.”

“Well,” Enid said, “after this is over, I see that
less than two hundred thousand becoming
zero
thousand.”

“In any case,” Kallhander went on, “we’ve been
ordered to do absolutely nothing to disrupt the equilibrium. No search parties,
no draining of the reservoirs, nothing. The infrastructure reset is continuing
on schedule . . . as best as can be continued with things being
disrupted like that.”

I leaned over him and into his field of vision to
get his attention. If something works out of CL-space, it’ll work in it doubly
effectively, and so far I haven’t been proven wrong.

“You can worry later,” I said, “about how bad all
this makes you boys look.”

“That’s only part of the picture, but—”

“—but that
is
part of it, yeah?” I sat down
across from him, on the corner of the couch that buoyed up Ioné. You made your
point, I told myself; don’t dwell on it. “What’s Arsèni been doing?”

“As little as possible,” Kallhander said. “I
imagine he’ll be deeply pleased to see how far one of his comrades got.”

Angharad looked up from contemplating her hands. “It
might be wrong to call them ‘comrades’. Arsèni sounded as if he was at the
mercy of these other parties rather than in collaboration with them. If he is
taken with them, he will be just as much a hostage as any of those that are now
held. And not merely because he no longer has a backup.”

Ioné leaned in, looking as grim as Kallhander. “Angharad,
much as I hate to admit it, it isn’t his welfare that’s my main concern. It’s
the information he may have. We’ve all but exhausted what we could cobble
together from his lab. If Marius wants to trade him for the hostages, which almost
certainly seems like what he has in mind, it’s unlikely IPS would ever approve
such a thing. We need him too much.”

“Get his buddy Aram to talk.” I suggested. “You’re
working on that, right?”

“We are. His body was badly damaged, but his core
seems to have been left intact. We anticipate being able to get it back online
in a new body, but we need at least a solar day.”

Angharad started to rise to her feet. “Then let me
speak to Arsèni again—”

“Not going to work,” I said, and beckoned for her
to sit. “Fool me once, shame on you, and all that. He’s not going to talk to
anyone
now.” It wasn’t even that I thought her plan was lousy; it was that the last
thing I needed was her locking horns yet again with the IPS over this.

Enid dove in to change the subject; it worked. “Those
things that attacked—you ever seen anything like them?” she asked Kallhander.

“Not as such, no,” Kallhander said. “These are
hybrid designs—several different existing off-the-shelf, open-template models
refitted into something new. It would probably have taken them several days to
manufaxture this many, assuming he was evenly distributing the load across the
available reservoirs and using just enough substrate from each that he could
fake the numbers in retrospect.”

“Are the hostages online?” I asked. Easiest way to
supply proof of life, I thought.

“Some of them, with more coming onto the CL grid
over time. Their CL connections have all been proxied, so there’s no sending
them a direct signal, but they do all seem to be alive and in good health, just
sealed in things that resemble trauma capsules.” He allowed what for him passed
as a smile of real amusement. “The Strategics Office should study this whole
operation. They could learn a thing or two.”

“Demands?” Angharad said.

“Nothing specific yet. Marius asked for a live and
unproxied CL connection as a first request. He claimed he would be making a
full set of demands shortly. We’re still waiting. He’s in IPS HQ sickbay right
now—even without the guards I doubt he would be going anywhere on his own.”

“You mustn’t,” I heard Angharad saying gently,
“you mustn’t—”

I turned and saw Angharad now sitting knee-to-knee
with Ulli, who had just connected. Ulli was bent right in half in her chair,
her face in her hands and some muffled noise coming out from between them that
could only be crying. Kallhander excused himself quietly and engaged Ioné in
some discussion (it was muted to us; only the fact they were talking was
plain), although I saw Ioné throwing constant fretful looks back at us over one
shoulder. Even the bent corner of one mouth, for her, counted as fretful.

Ulli lifted her face out of her hands and spoke in
a watery voice:

“I told him!—I told him, again and again, I don’t
know how many times . . . what sense does it make for someone in his
position to not keep backups? ‘It’s philosophical,’ he says . . . he’s
said it before, I don’t know how many times now . . . but he can’t
afford
to be a romantic in this universe! Especially not someone like him
. . . not with the chance of so many other hostile eyes on him!”

“It has always been his choice,” Angharad began,
but Ulli had much more dammed up and ready to flow out:

“How dare he do that! To throw away his birthright
like that! . . . He doesn’t understand his importance; he’s never
understood his real importance! He’s only thought of himself as himself
. . . ”

Which is how any Highender thinks in the first
place
, I wanted to say, but I knew better then and I know twice as better
now.

“He is still alive,” Angharad went on, “and there
is every sign that he will be released with the others in short order. Although,
I must ask—I cannot imagine that this issue did not present itself before
. . . ”

“Oh, it has. And back when he first told me he’d
expunged his backups, I wrung my hands about it in front of him, and then
somehow put it out of mind. Wrote it off as the price of him being him.” Ulli
rested her head in one palm, her smile wide but embittered. “But now, I
suppose, it’s not something to be tossed aside any longer. I want him alive
however he can be alive, not dead because of some stubborn prejudice. And you
must forgive me, Angharad, but that’s all I can see it amounting to in someone
like him: prejudice. I was drawn to him because he chose to live as he did, to
take all the risks he took. And now that I’m this close to him, I can’t live
with that any longer. You must think me selfish, dreadfully selfish
. . . But is that all it is, selfishness? Surely there’s more to it
than just that? Even you would admit so!”

The entire front half of the lounge simulation flowered
outwards and dovetailed with another CL-space, a ready room. Chairs with tall
headrests, dark wood tables, carpets thick enough to reach up to your ankles.
The back wall sported the IPS shield, and I shook my head at the slogan that
arced around its outer rim:
Amidst Them All.

On seeing they had company, the five officers in
the room turned to us and stood up. Kallhander and Ioné were on their feet
first, marching right up to the divide between the two CL-spaces. They folded
their hands in front of them and let the one officer with the most number of
orange stripes on his shoulder (other than that, his uniform was as suavely
functional as theirs) come forward to inspect them.
Commissioner Hamsun Ralpartha,
IPS, Bridgehead
read his CL tag. There weren’t many other rungs above him
on any ladder here, I thought. Him, maybe Nancelares, and that was about it.

“Commissioner,” Kallhander said, head slightly
down.

Even with one’s image and presentation being as
arbitrary as they are in this day and age, Ralpartha still looked like the kind
of man even Kallhander could only stand in front of with your head down a bit. He
didn’t tower over any of us—he was no taller than Kallhander himself—but just
the way he took three steps across the room towards you made you feel small. Plus
he had features that body catalogues usually cross-label with tags like
patrician
,
chiseled
and
commanding
. Big mane of swept-back black hair;
giant, dark eyes; hands that enveloped yours. Whether he’d been born that way
or had been sculpted into it on the recommendation of
his
own commander
was anyone’s guess. But at least his looks were no CL illusion: the certified
biographical data on file in his CL tags showed he looked exactly like that in
the flesh as well.

“I see that you have the Kathaya party with you,
Inspector,” Ralpartha said. “I thought I’d have a few words with them before we
begin this farce.”

The word
farce
came out of his mouth with
no more malice than anything else he’d said, but it broke over all of us like a
cold wave.

Angharad stepped forward and bowed to Ralpartha.
I’d seen her bow enough times now to know it had nothing to do with her
submitting to him.

“Your Grace,” Ralpartha said, “on behalf of IPS,
I’d like to extend both our thanks and our apologies. The first, for risking
much to come here . . . the second, for enduring as you did earlier
today.”

“Your officers were most selfless with the
protection they gave,” Angharad said. “And I swore an oath to abide any
hardship that came with the fulfillment of my duties. They are not to be blamed
for what has happened to me.”

“I’ll certainly take that into consideration,” he
said, smiling in a way I instantly disliked, “although I’m sure you’ll
understand how under certain circumstances my hands are going to be forced when
it comes to meting out discipline. There are others who have their eyes on us
at all times, and they will want to know a breach of security has been dealt
with appropriately. Still—” He faced Ioné. “The way you handled that disruption
in the docking bay was indeed exemplary, Officer.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ioné mumbled.

“That said, I’m going to recommend, that you and
Kallhander confine your efforts as closely as possible to providing the Kathaya
here with such continued selfless protection—and nothing else.”

“Nothing else?” I said. “Meaning what?”

“Mister Sim.” He faced me in turn. “I should say
I’m also grateful to you for the lengths you’ve gone through to be of service
to her, and the rest of us. And I’m obliged to give you the same advice as
well, if only because the danger no longer consists solely of a threat to the
Kathaya or her retinue.” He gave a pause that I was tempted to label as
fatherly
,
especially given the tone of voice that followed: “You can understand that,
can’t you?”

“Of course,” I lied.

“May I ask,” Angharad said, “what you meant by the
word ‘farce’? I take it that means you do not approve of having negotiations
with Marius.”

There’s that steel of hers, I thought. You don’t
see it most of the time, but when it comes, it ambushes you.

Ralpartha didn’t look flustered; that at least impressed
me. “I most definitely don’t approve,” he said. “I only
allow
this,
without
approving
of it. And only because this situation is too
closed-ended to allow any other course of action.”

“And you blame
them
for that?” I said, and turned
a thumb sidelong to point at the officers. “You blame them for not picking up
on something that had the entire upper crust of this whole city and planet
fooled for months on end? Is that it?”

“Mister Sim—” Ralpartha was a sliver less fatherly
than before. “—I’d like to point out that the only person who has spoken of
blame
thus far has been you, and only just now. Assigning blame is not on the agenda
right now. I’m simply making it clear that the rest of this operation is to be handled
on my level and up, and that no further actions are to be taken on your party’s
behalf without express authorization from me. Besides—I don’t think your
employer would appreciate it either.”

Why don’t you let
her
answer that?
I
wanted to say, but I’d already muzzled myself.

“We will deign to not interfere further,” Angharad
said. “But on behalf of my . . . employee, I would like to ask that
we be at least present during the negotiation, even if we are not speaking. We
might have useful perspectives on what he has to say.”