The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (68 page)

“Mine too.” Mallove tapped his fingers on the glass. “The treason charges against you are laughable, Max. I’m sure Drozhin locked you up because he knows you’re one of the key men in my Department.”

Yes, why had Drozhin’s department locked him up as soon as the ship landed? Disregarding the captain’s official charges against him, Max was still trying to figure that one out. He’d gone from being the prisoner of one boss to the prisoner of another. What did the Bible say about serving two masters?

He rattled the links on his cuffs. “If the charges are so laughable, maybe we could take these off.”

Again, Mallove ignored his request. “Let’s speak frankly. Drozhin’s old, he’s sick, he’s going to die soon. Maybe within days. Without him, Intelligence will be in complete disarray.”

And the people he’s protected, like me
, Max thought,
we’re all compost
.

Mallove picked up the gun. Max tensed, ready to take the bolt.

But Mallove didn’t notice him flinch; he was too intent on swiveling his chair to point the gun out the window. “The fact is, Intelligence is done for once the old man dies. Drozhin never promoted anyone smart enough to replace him. So when he dies, there will be a battle for power.”

There was more than some truth in that. “You think it’ll be a physical battle?”

Mallove pretended to shoot people out the window, as if he wanted a physical battle. “There won’t be soldiers in the streets,” he said. “Those days are long behind us. Yes, men will be discredited, forced to leave their positions, and senior officers will go to prison. But if I surround myself with enough loyal men, all that power will be mine.”

Which would be a disaster for the planet, and all their attempts to change it for the better. “You think there’s a traitor within Education?”

“I’m sure of it, at least two.” Mallove spun around, pointing the gun directly at Max.

This time Max didn’t jump. Mallove paused a moment, then set the gun down. The metal clicked hard on a slab of coloured glass depicting the assassination of Brother Porluck.

Mallove chuckled to himself. “‘I’ll be disloyal if you order me to, sir.’ Now there’s loyalty for you. Drozhin doesn’t have anyone like that.” He tapped the intercom. “Anatoly, bring in the key.”

Max released a sigh of relief. For the first time, he thought he might survive this interview.

The door swung open quietly. The admin entered and unlocked Max’s cuffs. Anatoly was a competent, scholarly officer, the kind who plotted out military campaigns on spreadsheets instead of maps. His gaze lingered on the desk, on the gun backlit by bulbs behind the stained glass image of the fall of the Temple, and on Mallove’s hand, which rested with deliberate casualness by the pistol’s trigger.

Max rubbed his sore wrists, and wondered what part of this tableau was for him and what part was for Anatoly. With Mallove, there were always wheels inside of wheels.

“Anything else, sir?” Anatoly asked.

“There are some things still up in the air – kinda like clay pigeons.” Mallove barked out a laugh at his own joke and pretended to shoot one. “Get reservations for three down at Pillars of Salt. The booth across from the door.”

Anatoly said, “Yes, sir,” and reached in his pocket for a phone.

Max’s mouth watered at the prospect of dinner from Pillars of Salt. He had lamb medallions on a bed of saffron couscous the last time he was there, a few years ago, and hadn’t eaten that well since. That had been with Meredith, to celebrate their wedding anniversary –

He shut down that line of thinking. He kept his life strictly compartmentalized, different parts of it sealed behind bulkheads. This was no time to weaken the seals.

Mallove capped the vodka and put it in a drawer, along with the weapon. Scene over, time to put the props away. The second glass, intended for Max, had been forgotten.

“I want you to help me find the traitor, Max,” Mallove said. “Let’s root out Drozhin’s spies.”

“I’m the man to do it,” Max said, without a hint of irony. Maybe he could cast suspicion on Mallove’s best men, and weaken Education in the process.

“Anatoly has already compiled a short list of suspects. The two of you together will find Drozhin’s moles.”

Max carefully avoided meeting the admin’s gaze. “Are you sure Anatoly has time for this, with all his other duties?”

“He’ll make time,” Mallove said. “This is the most important job I have and you’re the two best men I’ve got.”

That’s what Max feared. Anatoly was smart, and Max didn’t want to risk being caught by him. The admin stared at Max over the rim of his glasses, as if he were already trying to peer through his facade. He maintained eye contact the whole time he tapped out reservations and made a call to Mallove’s driver to bring around a car. He looked like he wanted to say something; Max wondered what it was.

Anatoly’s gaze flicked to Mallove. “They have the booth ready, sir.” Then he held out his hand to Max. “It’s good to have you back, Nick.”

Max forced a grin. Nick was short for Nikomedes – Anatoly had always called him Old Nick, said he was as ugly as Satan and twice as mean. He clasped Anatoly’s hand, hard. “It’s damn good to be back, Annie.”

He knew the admin hated the girly contraction of his name, but he grinned back. Max’s first order of business would be getting Anatoly off this assignment.

They left the office together, bootsoles echoing on concrete as they stomped down the main stairwell, which was plain and unpainted. The architecture was plain for a moral as well as a practical purpose. The settlers of Jesusalem had called themselves Plain Christians, twenty-first-century religious fundamentalists who feared the advances of science and considered all genetic engineering abominations. After all, if man was made in the form of God, any changes in that form amounted to a renunciation of the divine. They’d started in the old United States, in North America, but had found many of their converts later in Europe, especially the former Soviet republics.

Ironically, it was the technology the Plain Christians feared that allowed the survival of their religion. When biocomputers created the singular new intelligence that made space travel possible, they sunk all their resources into a mass migration out to the first marginally habitable planet no one else wanted, a primitive place with surface water and just enough ocean-algae-cognate to produce breathable levels of oxygen. Everything beyond that was rock and sand and struggle, a desert for the devout. Publicly they claimed to keep their buildings austere and luxuryless as penance; the truth was that terraforming went slowly and poorly, and plain was all they could manage.

When they exited the stairwell and crossed the main lobby, the Adarean rose from his bench and came toward them.

Max looked at him more closely this time. The Adarean was too tall, with joints and proportions that were off, inhuman even before you noticed the green colour.

“Willem,” the Adarean called out to Mallove, coming forward. Like they were old friends. Adareans hated hierarchies. “I’ve been waiting days to see you.”

“Ah,” Mallove said, his face momentarily blank as he thought about which script he was performing. Then he smiled, cold, frosty, as blinding as the sun on a comet. “How good to see you again, comrade Patience.”

For a second, Max wondered if the
Patience
were a joke; the Adareans who came to Jesusalem sometimes named themselves for traits they admired, but
Patience
?

Mallove didn’t offer his hand.

“I’m here to protest recent acts of violence against innocent Adareans and ask for a halt to today’s execution, late though it may be,” Patience told Mallove. He seemed very agitated, looking up as if he expected to hear other voices.

Mallove took the stern role now. “But you chose to come to Jesusalem, knowing the history between our planets and accepting the personal risks.”

“
Between our planets?
” The Adarean’s voice rose into that unsettling mid-range that could be either male or female. “What does that mean? Planets don’t interact – individual people do. You know that we have nothing to do with the Adareans who came here before us. They were different people.”

A group of Adareans had come before the revolution to join the Plain Christian church. When the old patriarchs were losing the war in the cities, a few radical Adareans showed them how to fashion nuclear weapons from the fissionable undecayed uranium-235 sometimes found in the young planet’s surface. They’d nuked the revolutionary stronghold of New Nazareth, almost reversing the war.

The surviving leaders declared war on Adares, although they were in no position to prosecute it at the time. And the people, even those not originally for the revolution, had rallied in their hatred of the impure, genetically-altered Adareans. The pig-men. The abomination. The Beast. It gave all the people of the planet a common enemy to hate besides each other. A rallying cry that saved the planet.

“Look,” Max said. “What happened to your friend, it’s nothing personal. It’s just politics.”

Mallove opened his hand with a dramatic flourish. “Exactly. It’s politics. Perhaps you should go protest at the Department of Intelligence.”

“I did!” Patience said. His hair bristled, moving like grass in the wind. “They said they couldn’t do anything to stop the execution and told me that I needed Education.”

“Well, there you have it,” Mallove quipped. “Consider today’s execution educational.”

Mallove walked toward the door, Anatoly in his wake; guards blocked the Adarean to prevent him from following. Max sniffed something sour in the air – the briefing was that Adareans communicated with scent, but no one had any proof.

“I’ve been looking over your files while we were fighting to get you out of that prison cell,” Mallove was saying as Max caught up.

“Trying to decide if I was worth the effort?” Max asked.

Mallove grinned. “You must be. Drozhin did everything in his power to keep us from knowing that he held you prisoner. Fortunately I have my own sources. Of all the senior officers I have, Max, you’ve spent the least amount of time at headquarters.”

“Yes, sir,” Max said. The guard opened the door. Hot air from the plaza washed over them.

“For over twenty years, you’ve gone from one field posting to the next,” Mallove said. “Never a desk rotation. That’s not typical at all.”

He was asking for an explanation.

“It’s been easier to keep fighting the revolution that way,” Max said, knowing it was the right thing to say, but more than half-believing it. “To change the planet, we have to change one mind at a time, until everyone’s transformed.”

The cost of terraforming a primitive planet was too high; it required too much sacrifice. People had to be true believers in
something
to do it.

“That’s been good so far, Max,” Mallove said with an almost avuncular tolerance. “But we’re moving the battlefield to another level now and we need a bigger vision.”

Max made a mental note: Mallove repeated his earlier war metaphor – he wanted to be seen by history as a great general, even though he came to the revolution late, after the fighting was over.

Max scanned the courtyard and reminded himself that the fighting was over. The Department of Political Education sat on a peaceful street. Headquarters was an old school building: the ostensible symbol was that Education was part of the people, right out in the neighbourhood, not set off behind barricades like the secret police in Intelligence. Older, smaller buildings bunched up around it, with windowbox gardens and colourful banners hanging from the rooftops.

Their limousine pulled up to the curb.

Mallove’s personal bodyguard jumped to open the door. Mallove paused, lifted his head to the sky, and said, with a grin like a vid general’s, “Into the battle!”

Which is when Max noticed the armed gunmen – soldiers for certain, special forces, but in street clothes, nondescript browns and greys – step out from the alleys and doorways. Education’s goons always made extravagant gestures, eager to be seen and feared. These moved smoothly, almost gliding, with a distinct lack of threat that made Max’s skin prickle.

He grabbed Anatoly’s shoulder, out of reflex, one comrade to another, and hissed, “Run!”

The first of the soldiers lifted his gun and shot Mallove’s driver in the back of the head with a sound no louder than a muffled pop.

Max raised his hands above his head, turned away, dropped his chin toward his chest.
Look, I’m no danger, I don’t see a thing.
He walked toward the nearest corner.

Another muffled pop, and a shout to “Get down! Get the hell down!” and Anatoly’s voice, or maybe Mallove’s, shouted his name. One of the grey men stepped out from the corner, gun aimed pointblank at his eye.

Guards burst out of Education’s lobby at the same moment, firing wildly. Automatic gunfire, old-fashioned ballistics, blasted from the windows directly overhead.

The grey man lifted his eyes for a split second as the shots sounded above him. Max attacked, closing his hand over the barrel of the gun and turning it back into the man’s chest, squeezing the trigger with his finger over the other man’s. Volts shot through the body, dropped him twitching to the ground. Max’s arm went numb to his elbow.

For the next few seconds everything dissolved in the chaos of crossfire and men diving for cover. With the gun still in his hand, Max emptied the man’s pockets into his – a little cash, nothing more. He rounded the corner, ran to the next one, turned. Shopkeepers and residents were coming out into the street at the sounds of fighting.

So Mallove had been wrong. Intelligence did mean to have a battle in the streets. And Max had let himself get trapped on the wrong side of the front lines. He would have been safer in his original prison cell.

He dodged down another alley, buttons flying as he ripped off his telltale charcoal-coloured uniform shirt. His plain tee would draw less attention from snipers looking for the other colour. Jamming the gun into his pants, he shoved his way into a group of old women with shopping bags full of bread and produce. He slouched, keeping his head down as he crossed the street in their midst.