Shadow Puppets (22 page)

This puzzled Peter, because surely Graff could count on his own quarters being secure. But apparently not, because after dinner he invited them on a walk, leading them quickly out of the regular corridors and into some of the service passages. They were lost almost at once, and when Graff finally opened a door and took them onto a wide ledge overlooking a ventilation shaft, they had lost all sense of direction except, of course, where “down” was.

The ventilation shaft led “down”…a very long way.

“This is a place of some historical importance,” said Graff. “Though few of us know it.”

“Ah,” said Father knowingly.

And because he had guessed it, Peter realized it should be guessable, and so he guessed. “Achilles was here,” he said.

“This,” said Graff, “is where Bean and his friends tricked Achilles. Achilles thought he was going to be able to kill Bean here, but instead
Bean got him in chains, hanging in the shaft. He could have killed Achilles. His friends recommended it.”

“Who were the friends?” asked Mother.

“He never told me, but that’s not surprising—I never asked. I thought it would be wiser if there were never any kind of record, even inside my head, of which other children were there to witness Achilles’s humiliation and helplessness.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered, if he had simply killed Achilles. There would have been no murders.”

“But, you see,” said Graff, “if Achilles had died, then I
would
have had to ask those names, and Bean could not have been allowed to remain in Battle School. We might have lost the war because of that, because Ender relied on Bean quite heavily.”

“You let Ender stay after he killed a boy,” said Peter.

“The boy died accidentally,” said Graff, “as Ender defended himself.”

“Defended himself because you left him alone,” said Mother.

“I’ve already faced trial on those charges, and I was acquitted.”

“But you were asked to resign your commission,” said Mother.

“But I was then given this much higher position as Minister of Colonization. Let’s not quibble over the past. Bean got Achilles here, not to kill him, but to induce him to confess. He did confess, very convincingly, and because I heard him do it, I’m on his death list, too.”

“Then why are you still alive?” asked Peter.

“Because, contrary to widespread belief, Achilles is not a genius and he makes mistakes. His reach is not infinite and his power can be blocked. He doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t have everything planned. I think half the time he’s winging it, putting himself in the way of opportunity and seizing it when he sees it.”

“If he’s not a genius, then why does he keep beating geniuses?” asked Peter.

“Because he does the unexpected,” said Graff. “He doesn’t actually do things remarkably well, he simply does things that no one thought he would do. He stays a jump ahead. And our finest minds were not even thinking about him when he brought off his most spectacular successes. They thought they were civilians again when he had them kidnapped. Bean wasn’t trying to oppose Achilles’s plans during the war, he was trying to find and rescue Petra. You see? I have Achilles’s test scores. He’s a champion suckup, and he’s very smart or he wouldn’t have got here. He knew how to ace a psych test, for instance, so that his violent tendencies remained hidden from us when we chose him to come in the last group we brought to Battle School. He’s dangerous, in other words. But he’s never had to face an opponent, not really. What the Formics faced, he’s never had to face.”

“So you’re confident,” said Peter.

“Not at all,” said Graff. “But I’m hopeful.”

“You brought us here just to show us this place?” said Father.

“Actually, no. I brought you here because I came up earlier in the day and swept it personally for eavesdropping devices. Plus, I installed a sound damper here, so that our voices are not carrying down the ventilation shaft.”

“You think MinCol has been penetrated,” said Peter.

“I know it has,” said Graff. “Uphanad was doing his routine scan of the logs of outgoing messages, and he found an odd one that was sent within hours of your arrival here. The entire message consisted of the single word
on
. Uphanad’s routine scan, of course, is more thorough than most people’s desperate search. He found this one simply by looking for anomalies in message length, language patterns, etc. To find codes, you see.”

“And this was in code?” asked Father.

“Not a cipher, no. And impossible to decode for that reason. It could simply mean ‘affirmative,’ as in ‘the mission is on.’ It might be a foreign word—there are several dozen common languages in which ‘on’ has meaning by itself. It might be ‘no’ backward. You see
the problem? What alerted Uphanad, besides its brevity, was the fact that it was sent within hours of your arrival—
after
your arrival—and both the sender and the receiver of the message were anonymous.”

“How could the sender be anonymous from a secure military-designed facility?” asked Peter.

“Oh, it’s quite simple, really,” said Graff. “The sender used someone else’s sign-on.”

“Whose?”

“Uphanad was quite embarrassed when he showed me the printout of the message. Because as far as the computer was concerned, it was sent by Uphanad himself.”

“Someone got the log-on of the head of security?” said Father.

“Humiliating, you may be sure,” said Graff.

“You’ve fired him?” asked Mother.

“That would not make us
more
secure, to lose the man who is our best defense against whatever operation that message triggered.”

“So you think it
is
the English word ‘on’ and it means somebody is preparing to move against us.”

“I think that’s not unlikely. I think the message was sent in the clear. It’s only undecipherable because we don’t know
what
is ‘on.’”

“And you’ve taken into account,” said Mother, “the possibility that Uphanad actually sent this message himself, and is using the fact that he told you about it as cover for the fact that he’s the perpetrator.”

Graff looked at her a long time, blinked, and then smiled. “I was telling myself, ‘suspect everybody,’ but now I know what a truly suspicious person is.”

Peter hadn’t thought of it either. But now it made perfect sense.

“Still, let’s not leap to conclusions, either,” said Graff. “The real sender of the message might have used Major Uphanad’s sign-on precisely so that the chief of security would be our prime suspect.”

“How long ago did he find this message?” asked Father.

“A couple of days,” said Graff. “I was already scheduled to come, so I stuck to my schedule.”

“No warnings?”

“No,” said Graff. “Any departure from routine would let the sender know his signal was discovered and perhaps interpreted. It would lead him to change his plans.”

“So what do we do?” asked Peter.

“First,” said Graff, “I apologize for thinking you’d be perfectly safe here. Apparently Achilles’s reach—or perhaps China’s—is longer than we thought.”

“So do we go home?” asked Father.

“Second,” said Graff, “we can’t do anything that would play into their hands. Going home right now, before the threat can be identified and neutralized, would expose you to greater danger. Our betrayer could give another signal that would tell them when and where you were going to arrive on Earth. What your trajectory of descent is going to be. That sort of thing.”

“Who would risk killing the Hegemon by downing a shuttle?” said Peter. “The world would be outraged, even the people who’d be happy to see me dead.”

“Anything we do that changes our pattern would let the traitor know his signal was intercepted. It might rush the project, whatever it is, before we’re ready. No, I’m sorry to say this, but…our best course of action is to wait.”

“And what if we disagree?” said Peter.

“Then I’ll send you home on the shuttle of your choosing, and pray for you all the way down.”

“You’d let us go?”

“You’re my guest,” said Graff. “Not my prisoner.”

“Then let’s test it,” said Peter. “We’re leaving on the next shuttle. The one that brought you—when it goes back, we’ll be on it.”

“Too soon,” said Graff. “We have no time to prepare.”

“And neither does he. I suggest,” said Peter, “that you go to Uphanad and make sure he knows that he has to put a complete blan
ket of secrecy on our imminent departure. He’s not even to tell Dimak.”

“But if he’s the one,” said Mother, “then—”

“Then he can’t send a signal,” said Peter. “Unless he can find a way to let the information slip out and become public knowledge on the station. That’s why it’s vital, Minister Graff, that you remain with him at all times after you tell him. So if it’s him, he
can’t
send the signal.”

“But it’s probably not him,” said Graff, “and now you’ve let everybody know.”

“But now we’ll be watching for the outgoing message.”

“Unless they simply kill you as you’re boarding the shuttle.”

“Then our worries will be over,” said Peter. “But I think they won’t kill us here, because this agent of theirs is too useful to them—or to Achilles, depending on whose man he is—for them to use him up completely on this operation.”

Graff pondered this. “So we watch to see who might be sending the message—”

“And you have agents stationed at the landing point on Earth to see if they can spot a would-be assassin.”

“I can do that,” said Graff. “One tiny problem, though.”

“What’s that?” said Peter.

“You can’t go.”

“Why can’t I?” said Peter.

“Because your one-man propaganda campaign is working. The people who read your stuff have drifted more strongly into the anti-China camp. It’s still a fairly slight movement, but it’s real.”

“I can write my essays there,” said Peter.

“In danger of being killed at any moment,” said Graff.

“That could happen here, too,” said Peter.

“Well—but you yourself said it was unlikely.”

“Let’s catch the mole who’s working your station,” said Peter,
“and send him home. Meanwhile, we’re heading for Earth. It’s been great being here, Minister Graff. But we’ve got to go.”

He looked at his mother and father.

“Absolutely,” said Father.

“Do you think,” said Mother, “that when we get back to Earth we can find a place with little tiny beds like these?” She clung more tightly to Father’s arms. “It’s made us so much closer as a family.”

Bean measured himself in the mirror. He still looked like himself, more or less. But he didn’t like the way his head was growing. Larger in proportion to his body. Growing faster.

I should be getting smarter, shouldn’t I? More brain space and all?

Instead I’m worrying about what will happen when my head gets too big, my skull and brains too heavy for my neck to hold the whole assemblage in a vertical position.

He measured himself against the coat closet, too. Not all that long ago, he had to stand on tiptoe to reach coat hangers. Then it became easy. Now he was reaching a bit downward from shoulder height.

Door frames were not a problem yet. But he was beginning to feel as though he should duck.

Why should his growth be accelerating now? He already hit the puberty rush.

Petra staggered past him, went into the bathroom, and puked up nothing for about five agonizing minutes.

“They should have drugs for that,” he told her afterward.

“They do,” said Petra. “But nobody knows how they might affect the baby.”

“There’ve been no studies? Impossible.”

“No studies on how they might affect
your
children.”

“Anton’s Key is just a couple of code spots on the genome.”

“Genes often do double and triple duty, or more.”

“And the baby probably doesn’t even have Anton’s Key. And it’s not healthy for the baby if you can’t keep any food down.”

“This won’t last forever,” said Petra. “And I’ll get fed intravenously if I have to. I’m not doing anything to endanger this baby, Bean. Sorry if my puking ruins your appetite for breakfast.”

“Nothing ruins my appetite for breakfast,” said Bean. “I’m a growing boy.”

She retched again.

“Sorry,” said Bean.

“I don’t do this,” she whispered miserably, “because your jokes are so bad.”

“No,” said Bean. “It’s cause my genes are.”

She retched again and he left the room, feeling guilty about leaving, but knowing he’d be useless if he stayed. She wasn’t one of those people who need petting when they’re sick. She preferred to be left alone in her misery. It was one of the ways they were alike. Sort of like injured animals that slink off into the woods to get better—or die—alone.

Alai was waiting for him in the large conference room. Chairs were gathered around a large holo on the floor, where a map was being projected of the terrain and militarily significant roads of India and western China.

By now the others were used to seeing Bean there, though there were some who still didn’t like it. But the Caliph wanted him there, the Caliph trusted him.

They watched as the known locations of Chinese garrison troops were brought up in blue, and then the probable locations of mobile forces and reserves in green. When he first saw this map, Bean made the faux pas of asking where they were getting their information. He
was informed, quite coldly, that both Persia and the Israeli-Egyptian consortium had active satellite placement programs, and their spy satellites were the best in orbit. “We can get the blood type of individual enemy soldiers,” said Alai with a smile. An exaggeration, of course. But then Bean wondered—some kind of spectroanalysis of their sweat?

Not possible. Alai was joking, not boasting.

Now, Bean trusted their information as much as they did—because of course he had made discreet inquiries through Peter and through some of his own connections. Putting together what Vlad could tell him from Russian intelligence and what Crazy Tom was giving him from England, plus Peter’s American sources, it was clear that the Muslims—the Crescent League—had everything the others had. And more.

The plan was simple. Massive troop movements along the border between India and Pakistan, bringing Iranian troops up to the front. This should draw a strong Chinese response, with their troops also concentrated along that border.

Meanwhile, Turkic forces were already in place on, and sometimes inside, China’s western border, having traveled over the past few months in disguise as nomads. On paper, the western region of China looked like ideal country for tanks and trucks, but in reality, fuel supply lines would be a recurring nightmare. So the first wave of Turks would enter as cavalry, switching to mechanized transport only when they were in a position to steal and use Chinese equipment.

This was the most dangerous aspect of the plan, Bean knew. The Turkic armies, combining forces from the Hellespont to the Aral Sea and the foothills of the Himalayas, were equipped like raiders, yet had to do the job of an invading army. They had a couple of advantages that might compensate for their lack of armor and air support. Having no supply lines meant the Chinese wouldn’t have anything to bomb at first. The native people of the western China province of Xinjiang
were Turkic too, and like the Tibetans, they had never stopped seething under the rule of Han China.

Above all, the Turks would have surprise and numbers on their side during the crucial first days. The Chinese garrison troops were all massed on the border with Russia. Until those forces could be moved, the Turks should have an easy time, striking anywhere they wanted, taking out police and supply stations—and, with luck, every airfield in Xinjiang.

By the time Chinese troops moved off the Russian border and into the interior to deal with the Turks, the fully mechanized Turkish troops would be entering China from the west. Now there would be supply lines to attack, but deprived of their forward air bases, and forced to face Turkish fighters which would now be using them, China would not have clear air superiority.

Taking underdefended air bases with cavalry was just the sort of touch Bean would have expected from Alai. They could only hope that Han Tzu would not anticipate Alai having complete authority over the inevitable Muslim move, for the Chinese would have to be crazy not to be planning to defend against a Muslim invasion.

At some point, it was hoped that the Turks would do well enough that the Chinese would be forced to begin shifting troops from India north into Xinjiang. Here the terrain favored Alai’s plan, for while some Chinese troops could be airlifted over the Tibetan Himalayas, the Tibetan roads would be disrupted by Turkic demolition teams, and the Chinese troops would all have to be moved eastward from India, around the Himalayas, and into western China from the east rather than the south.

It would take days, and when the Muslims believed that the maximum number of Chinese troops were in transit, where they could not fight anybody, they would launch the massive invasion over the border between Pakistan and India.

So much depended on what the Chinese believed. At first, the Chinese had to believe that the real assault would come from Pakistan,
so that the main Chinese force would remain tied up on that frontier. Then, at a crucial point several days into the Turkic operation, the Chinese had to be convinced that the Turkic front was, in fact, the real invasion. They had to be so convinced of this that they would withdraw troops from India, weakening their forces there.

How else does an inexperienced three-million-man army defeat an army of ten million veterans?

They went through contingency plans for the several days following the commitment of Muslim troops in Pakistan, but Bean knew, as did Alai, that nothing that happened after the Muslim troops began crossing the Indian border could be predicted. They had plans in case the invasion failed utterly, and Pakistan had to be protected at fallback positions well inside the Pakistani border. They had plans for dealing with a complete rout of the Chinese forces—not likely, as they knew. But in the most likely scenario—a difficult back-and-forth battle across a thousand-mile front—plans would have to be improvised to take advantage of every turn of events.

“So,” said Alai. “That is the plan. Any comments?”

Around the circle, one officer after another voiced his measured confidence. This was not because they were all yes-men, but because Alai had already listened carefully to the objections they raised before and had altered the plans to deal with those he thought were serious problems.

Only one of the Muslims offered any objection today, and it was the one nonmilitary man, Lankowski, whose role, as best Bean could tell, was halfway between minister-without-portfolio and chaplain. “I think it is a shame,” he said, “that our plans are so dependent upon what Russia chooses to do.”

Bean knew what he meant. Russia was completely unpredictable in this situation. On the one hand, the Warsaw Pact had a treaty with China that had secured China’s long northern border with Russia, freeing them to conquer India in the first place. On the other hand, the Russians and Chinese had been rivals in this region for centuries, and
each believed the other held territory that was rightfully theirs.

And there were unpredictable personal issues as well. How many loyal servants of Achilles were still in positions of trust and authority in Russia? At the same time, many Russians were furious at how they had been used by him before he went to India and then China.

Yet Achilles brokered the secret treaty between Russia and China, so he couldn’t be all that detested, could he?

But what was that treaty really worth? Every Russian schoolchild knew that the stupidest Russian tsar of them all had been Stalin, because he made a treaty with Hitler’s Germany and then expected it to be kept. Surely the Russians did not really believe China would stay at peace with them forever.

So there was always the chance that Russia, seeing China at a disadvantage, would join the fray. The Russians would see it as a chance to seize territory and to preempt the inevitable Chinese betrayal of them.

That would be a good thing, if the Russians attacked in force but were not terribly successful. It would bleed Chinese troops from the battle against the Muslims. But it would be a very bad thing if Russia did too well or too badly. Too well, and they might slice down through Mongolia and seize Beijing. Then the Muslim victory would become a Russian one. Alai did not want to have Russia in a dominant role in the peace negotiations.