The Baba Yaga (4 page)

“But somebody might,” said Grant.

“Nobody will!”

“But somebody
might
,” Grant said again.

Quietly, Andrei said, “I fear you’re going to have to be more explicit, Adelaide. People here don’t seem to be quite understanding what you mean. And I for one want to hear you say it out loud.”

Grant looked coldly back at him, and suddenly Walker understood what she meant. “You’ve got to be joking—”

“What?” said Kinsella. “What does she mean?”

“Go on,” said Andrei, contemptuously. “Say it out loud.”

Grant turned away from him and addressed Latimer directly. “Braun’s World should be bombarded from space. We can’t afford to let anything that may have been touched by the Weird survive—”

“We can’t do that!” said Kinsella. “There are millions of people there!”

“Let’s be clear,” said Walker. “You’re proposing mass murder?”

“And if somebody infected by the Weird escapes Braun’s World and makes their way towards the inner worlds? What then? How many dead then? It’s no distance from there to the inner worlds. And only a short jump to here. To Hennessy’s World... to Venta. Do you want to see the Weird here, Walker?” Grant gave a short laugh. “Perhaps you do.”

“I am not casual about the lives of others,” said Walker softly. “I would not, for example, recommend the unnecessary slaughter of millions upon millions of people—”

Grant turned away from her, back to Latimer. “We have no time for this. The longer we debate, the more likely it is that somebody, right now, is escaping that planet.” She jerked her thumb towards the visual display. “Do you want to see that happen here?” She leaned in. “You’ve listened to these people, and they can offer you nothing. This is a threat beyond our comprehension. The Weird
will
destroy us, unless we destroy it first.”

Andrei was becoming more and more angry. Coldly, he said, “I have seen many things in my time at the Bureau. I’ve perpetrated a few outrages in my time, too. But nothing—
nothing
—compares to the sight of you trying to make capital from this tragedy in order to secure your power—”

Grant turned on him. “How
dare
you!”

“Be quiet, all of you!” Latimer raised his voice over them all. “This is not the time. Now listen.” He seemed back in command of himself now. “First of all—mandatory scans for everyone within the Bureau. Taking immediate effect. Kinsella—see to that. No, Walker,” he said, raising his hand as she tried to speak, “I’ve heard your case already, and the situation has changed. As for you, Andrei...” He looked at the older man coldly. “Anyone would think that
you
were the using this opportunity to discredit your colleagues from military intelligence. They are making hard choices in an impossible situation—”

“I’ll warn you now, Latimer,” said Andrei, “that if you go ahead with Grant’s obscene suggestion, I will resign with immediate effect.”

Latimer turned to leave. “Then I’ll thank you for your long service, Andrei, and I hope you have many hours’ happy fishing. Commander Grant, I’ll expect to see a detailed plan of action on my desk within the hour.”

“...A
ND
I
TELL
you something else, Mark—Latimer can take his bloody scan and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine—”

“The
scan?
Why are you still talking about that damn scan?”

They were back in Kinsella’s apartment, mere hours after they had left together. Their whole world had remade itself around them in the meantime, and now Kinsella was staring at her as if she had gone mad.

Walker took a deep breath. “I’m still talking about the scan because it matters,” she said. “It’s a symbol of everything we have to take a stand against.”

Kinsella fell back into his big leather chair. “Sweetheart, have you lost track of what’s happening? There’s a Weird portal open right by the core worlds, it is now apparently acceptable policy within the Bureau to recommend the wholesale slaughter of
millions
, and Andrei Gusev has been forced to resign. And you’re baulking at taking a simple scan?”

“It’s not a simple scan! And, besides, it’s the
principle
—”

“Damn the principle! If there’s any chance that someone has got away from Braun’s World carrying that infection, then I say go ahead! Scan everyone on all the core worlds, and start doing it now!”

“You should know better than that!”

“Delia, let them scan you and have done with it! We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“I
can’t
.”

“Why
not?
”

“Why do you
think?
” she said, with some irritation. All these spies, she thought, all watching each other, and not a single one of them had managed to guess what was happening to her. “I’m pregnant.”

He gaped back at her, like one of the fish that swam beyond the walls of their headquarters. So ridiculous. She pressed a hand against her mouth to suppress her laugh. If she started laughing now, she wouldn’t stop until she started to cry. “Fourteen weeks, in case you’re interested. So that’s why not. Because it would mean that people would find out.”

But Kinsella wasn’t at the ‘fourteen weeks’ part yet. “How?” he said. “What... I mean, how?”

“I suspect you had the same sex ed classes that I did.”

“You know I don’t mean that—”

“This,” said Walker, reflectively, “is the exact opposite of how I wanted this conversation to go.”

There was a long silence. She looked at him as he stared at the carpet. After a while, she looked at the carpet too, and she realised how much she disliked the colours. Too pale. Showed the dirt. Not that Kinsella regularly cleaned up after himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’m behaving abominably.”

“No shit.”

He rubbed his forefinger across his top lip, a habit when he was thinking that she had hitherto found quite endearing. Then—gently, almost cautiously—he took her hand. Her fingers curled instinctively around his. “Really,” he said. “I’m sorry. You have my unconditional support. Um, what do you want? I’ll do whatever you want. Do you want me to call Kay?”

Kay Larsen was a colleague of theirs at the Bureau and, more significantly, a qualified doctor.

“She’ll know what we need to do next, surely,” Kinsella said. “Where we can go to... to sort this all out.” He held her hand even more tightly. “I’ll come with you. You won’t be alone.”

“I haven’t decided what’s best yet.”

A flicker of doubt twitched across Kinsella’s face. “You’re not thinking of going through with this?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“It’ll finish you. They’ll fire you.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Delia—don’t delude yourself. If Latimer doesn’t fire you on the spot, you’ll be out within weeks. They have ways and means of doing these things. Altering organisational priorities. Moving your staff away. Internal reshuffling. Particularly right now. This attack—it’s appalling, it’s grim, and it means Grant and her gang will be able to push through whatever they want—up to and including your head on a platter. Don’t give them any more ammunition. Sweetheart, please, listen—”

“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me! Don’t you
dare
‘sweetheart’ me, you bastard!”

They didn’t speak again for a while. They sat in silence, side by side, looking out at the lights of the city shimmering on the dark water. The night seemed oddly, incongruously peaceful. The news from Braun’s World wouldn’t break for days yet. In one thing, at least, the whole Bureau was in agreement: bad news needed good management.

“I don’t want children,” he said, eventually. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I never have. There’s too much I want to do. I thought we felt the same way...”

In fairness, that was what she had always thought too. She was not a romantic: she knew the hard work involved in bringing up a child; the trade-off between time at her desk and time with the child; that one or both of these might suffer, even if she wasn’t fired on the spot. She was not sentimental either, not about a collection of cells, and suspected that a few years ago she would have ended this pregnancy immediately, without even telling Kinsella, and moved on. But something was holding her back. Was it her age? The sense that this might be a last chance? Something tightened in her stomach (
not her, not yet, surely
). After a moment she realised it was anger.

I want what I want
, she thought.
And that’s not what Mark wants, or what the Bureau wants, or even what I myself thought I wanted, or ought to want. I have changed my mind. And that is permissible.

Or should be. But there it was: some people’s bodies had never really been their own to dispose of as they wanted. They had always been something to be policed and controlled. Not even she, amongst the most privileged of the most advanced technological society, really had that power over herself. She remained powerful as long as she obeyed the rules. But now she no longer wanted to obey the rules...

Kinsella, she realised, was still holding her hand; awkwardly, and yet oddly lovingly, as if was trying to reel her back from making a disastrous mistake and plunging into water too deep even for her. Calmly, Walker took her hand away. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“Delia,” he said reproachfully. “That isn’t fair.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I meant it honestly. I’m trying to be honest with you. This is my decision and I’ll live with it. I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
And I hope you’ll pay me the same courtesy.

He hesitated, then: “If you’ll let me give you some advice...”

This should be good
, she thought. “By all means.”

“Please don’t throw away everything you’ve worked for. You’re brilliant, Dee, among the smartest in the room. Andrei’s besotted with you—he always has been. He’s gone now. And you—you were always the heir apparent. You’re meant to replace him. You have”—he stretched out his hands—“you have a
responsibility
to him. Especially now.”

Now that their rivals were in the ascendant. A responsibility to a greater good? When he put it that way, there was only reasonable course of action, wasn’t there? Anything else would be self-indulgence. Anything else would be irrational.

“I’ll think about what you said,” she said. It sounded to her ears as if she was speaking to a colleague rather than to a man she had loved. Kinsella seemed satisfied, however. At least she wasn’t telling him a lie.

“Will you stay?” he said.

She looked out at the dark city, and then back to him. Could she, for old times’ sake? For a moment, she wanted, more intensely than she had wanted anything in her life, to be able to stay here with him, safe in this cocoon. But the world had changed around them, and there was no escaping that fact.

She stood up. “I think I should go home.”

B
Y THE MIDDLE
of the second day, Maria knew they were in far greater trouble than she had bargained for. As yet, she wasn’t sure exactly what that trouble
was,
but she had no doubt that the spaceports weren’t sealed off just for Kit. Something else was happening on Braun’s World and runaway junior officers weren’t the only ones being prevented from leaving.
Nobody
was getting away.

Kit had taken one look at the barriers going up across the road to Dentrassa’s second spaceport and turned the car round again. By dusk of the second day, they were out in the wilds. What greenery there was on Braun’s World tended to be near urban centres and, as the suburbs disappeared, the landscape quickly became scrubland: rough grass and sturdy brown shrubs. The scrub in turn gave way to desert: great red empty plains where the sun beat down and there was little to no cover. Jenny groused from the back of the car; too tired to be awake, too tired to sleep. The aircon buzzed and hummed, and kept the temperature not quite on the right side of comfortable. As night settled and it cooled outside, they threw open the windows and let air gush in as they sped along the empty track. Maria had long since stopped asking where they were heading.

When they were sure that Jenny was asleep, Kit pulled over and got out of the car. Maria got out too, to stretch her legs, but Kit said, “Wait here. Don’t follow me.”

Maria looked around. There was nothing for miles—miles upon miles—apart from the dim light from their car. Overhead the stars were incandescent. “Where on earth are you going?”

“Not far. I’ll be back soon.”

He walked a little way—not far; she could still see the light from his torch quite plainly. He wasn’t quite out of earshot. She heard snatches of his end of a hushed but heated conversation, enough to get the gist of the quarrel: he wanted to get them off Braun’s World; he believed he was owed help. The exchange lasted only a few minutes and, by the end of it, it seemed that Kit’s contact had agreed to offer them some assistance.

“All good?” she said, when he came back.

He eyed her cautiously. “Did you hear all that?”

“No,” she said, which was technically the truth. She hadn’t heard it
all
.

“All’s good,” he said. “Get back in, love. We’ve a way to go yet.”

“Which way?” she said. “East?”

That meant back to civilisation, or at least to Dentrassa. So she wasn’t particularly surprised when he shook his head. “West.”

K
AY
L
ARSEN HAD
originally been Kinsella’s friend (Walker didn’t know whether that was with or without benefits), but over the years the two women had drifted together. If you have to go up two flights of stairs to find the toilets with the skirted figure on the door, you quickly discover who else gets this extra compulsory exercise. In an institution like the Bureau, where women were thin on the ground, you either made friends with each other or else segregated yourself entirely. Even someone as private by nature (and profession) as Walker didn’t care for total exclusion from female company. Larsen provided companionship, and was someone who understood, without having to explain. And here they were again, in the ladies’, where they had shared many a quiet confidence in the past.