Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water Read online

  She saw through him, nodding back toward Zone and showing the faintest amusement. "Afraid I'll linger for a closer look?"

  "No, it's just that—"

  "Stand easy, Brother. The things Zone demands I don't give up."

  Stepping off down the passageway, Burning kept his eyes straight ahead to seal his thoughts. If he wound up having to kill Zone, he wouldn't have to worry anymore about letting people down as Allgrave. After a moment he realized that Ghost was still talking.

  "Ufak must be monumentally bored to decide to make it with vile-smelling subhuman Exts."

  "Passin' strange, isn't it?" Daddy D weighed in, the tone of his voice letting them know he was thinking more than he was saying.

  Despite LAW directives against fraternization, there had been isolated cases of organ grinding between Exts and LAWs, but only among the lower ranks. The general's comment started Burning wondering what it meant that a LAW vice field marshal was suddenly looking to swap body fluids with a bunch of lowly parolees. Perhaps Ufak wanted to get them into a locale with excellent tech surveillance, possibly loosen their tongues with drink, eros, or aerosol psychotropics to find out how morale stood or even plant a few ideas.

  AlphaLAW Commissioner Renquald had given Burning all kinds of handlube about how the Exts would remain together, how they were guaranteed unit cohesion and ethnic identity. Just maybe the suspect friendliness from Ufak was another page from Renquald's book of strategy.

  When Burning didn't answer Daddy D, Ghost did. "Who can say how some jaded LAW oligarch gets his wrinkles steamed?"

  Burning shook his head. "Not I. But I don't like our debark being moved up, either." He, too, stopped short of saying anything more.

  * * * *

  When they got back to Ext territory, Daddy D made an excuse to draw Burning away from his sister. Ghost pretended to have no interest in the matter and went her way. In the connected locker-size spaces that served as regimental HQ, the general secured the hatch.

  "One more thing about Zone," he began. "Before you decide to toad-crank him, talk to me."

  Burning tried his best to show no reaction but could feel the heat in his cheeks. "I'm not planning on killing him."

  "Sure you are—someplace in the back of your head, anyway. He's an asset, but a time may come when you'll either have to mow him or watch this whole lash-up come apart. So all I'm saying is, come see me first. He'll be damn near impossible to take single-handed and head-on."

  Before Burning could confirm or deny, Delecado went on. "Now, what about these games LAW's playing with us? I'd like to hear your thoughts on their plans for us when we're transferred down the well. What d' you think they're gonna do with us?"

  Burning was grateful to switch topics. "They mean to boondock us someplace while they puzzle out how to use us. Some remote subarctic base, say, or a desert outpost."

  Daddy D nodded. "No surprise there and not much we can do about it—at least they're not quarantining us in orbit. But suppose the plans have changed since they offered parole. Maybe the Hierarchate feels differently these days."

  "That's occurred to me, too. Too late to turn back, though."

  "Has been since we came down off Anvil Tor. Though there is one variable we can still fiddlefuck with…"

  Burning grinned. "General, kindly get the company commanders together and let them know we'll be sharing out live ammunition."

  "That's roughly eight, ten rounds apiece. But it could make a world of difference."

  Burning nodded. Maybe he didn't have what it took to be a wise leader or even a decent, feeling man, but he knew the minimum the Exts expected of him, and that was the chance to live and die as Exts.

  * * * *

  Astern in Sword of Damocles was a reconstituted short regiment of Broken Country fighters without an implant or pain collar in sight. Burning was confident that if push came to shove, he could arm his people in a formidable fashion, take hostages, and seize control of a good portion of the immense spacecraft, if not all of it, by a coup de main. He likewise knew that it would never happen.

  The last days before Sword of Damocles had left Concordance had been a royal bunglefest. The scramble to requisition the weapons, equipment, and other supplies to see the Exts through their indenture to LAW had been so frantic that it had even made Burning set aside his self-reproach over the Exts' defeat and the loss of Romola.

  He had been escorted to a sprawling depot where First Lander fighting vehicles and aircraft had been impounded, but nobody had been able to find him a single maintenance and repair disk or operating manual. It had been like that over and over in spite of Field Marshal Vukmirovic's promises that night below Anvil Tor.

  In the end the Exts had taken mostly what Ext stuff they could beg or commandeer. They had departed underequipped with a grab bag of hardware that had given the supply and maint people shivering nightmares. Nor had they been allotted much time to gather personal items. By Burning's order, the baggage allowance had been shared equally: one light duffel apiece.

  When Burning had understood Vukmirovic's heavy-handed hint that Commissioner Renquald wanted Lod out of the way, the advantages to the notion had rapidly become clear. There was some retaliation for Lod's siding with the First Landers-LAW coalition, but getting the little schemer offworld would also very likely save the fellow's life. More important, the Exts would need him; he was the nearest thing they could get to an informed adviser on LAW intrigues. Lod might make a much bigger difference than some outmoded fifty-ton blowtanks.

  Haunted by his failure to lead the Exts to victory, Burning had withdrawn into himself as much as possible during the voyage from Concordance, poring over military data and trying to find his mistakes. From Caesar's diaries to the strategist AI Earthmover to the campaigns of LAW itself, nothing had quite prepared him for the subtle ways in which he and his fighters had been manipulated and co-opted.

  Commissioner Renquald's devious brain, that's what I should've studied in transit, it occurred to him late in the trip. Dope out exactly how the AlphaLAW had marshaled the First Landers against the Broken Country and undercut the bastions' militancy.

  Like that planting ceremony presided over by the new Orman sachem. A hermit-fruit sapling from Periapt had been planted, the act accompanied by a lot of high-flown talk about how by the time its first yield was ready to be harvested, Burning and the Exts would be home to taste them.

  Brilliant agitprop, like so many of Renquald's stratagems, but Burning wouldn't get to find out how the commissioner pulled them off because Renquald was far astern, making Concordance dance to his tune. It had gradually dawned on the Exts that there was really no way home even if LAW kept its word and got them back to the Broken Country someday.

  News from Concordance had trickled in, current events turning into irrevocable history right before the Exts' eyes. The planet and the system had become a thriving LAW war factory.

  The Broken Country had been cemented into the new military-industrial supereconomy, its population tripled by forced immigration. Exts had been assimilated like everybody else into the larger new culture.

  Renquald had married Romola.

  Almost every Ext had received news along similar lines. As Renquald must have known they would, those tidings thinned and frayed the exiles' emotional connections to a Broken Country that was no more and reinforced the inescapable fact that their most solid tie and lifeline now was to LAW, much as they might detest it.

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  Cal Lightner gazed on Periapt from his castle in the air and found it good. There was much that needed doing. Any smugness would be unworthy, any complacency dangerous.

  "It must look credible," Lightner was telling his small group of conspirators. "More importantly, it must appall. And it must define those whom it exterminates."

  A bare thirty baseline years after the last major outbreak of Cyberviruses, it had pleased Cal's great-grandmother, Pere-landra, to demonstrate the eminence of the Lightners
by building the new family citadel. An admirer of Old Earth art, she had decreed that the citadel be modeled on Magritte's painting La Condition Humaine. Thus, Periapt technologies had given the project every appearance of a huge gray boulder or small asteroid with a modest keep on its summit.

  Its magnetic field powered by a cleverly concealed superconducting array, La Condition Humaine hung suspended and stationary. Being hollow composite, the monolith was light and had far more living, working, and systems space than its aspect suggested.

  Deft insider exploitation of Periapt's economy in the post-Cyberplague age had made the Lightner dynastic group the wealthiest and most influential of any in the era of LAW, and so, from the citadel spread invisible lines of influence, some few of which Cal Lightner had stroked like a harpist to bring about this morning's council of war.

  His cohorts were on the castle's eastern wall, watching Medusa, Periapt's primary, climb higher over the gilded sea. Cal was framed against a champagne sky and the gray battlements.

  "We're not just orchestrating some gratuitous little scandal to embarrass a rival here. We need to inflame people across the spectrum, especially those who've supported Dextra Haven and the Rationalists. We must make this a warning trumpet to all those good right-thinking voters who need their politics glandular and uncomplicated."

  Doll Van Houten, wrapped in a shawl of neoduchesse wasp lace, nodded once.

  Two other senior Hierarchs were present: Predicant Shack-leford of the Body Teleological and Lepskaya, the Human Preservationist Party whip, who chaired the armed forces appropriations subcommittee. Also present were Lieutenant Wix Uniday of LAW Political Security and the former Hierarch Buchanan Starkweather. The latter two men had refused refreshments from the buffet dumbots and stood with eyes fixed on Lightner.

  "'Glandular and uncomplicated,' " Wix Uniday repeated. "What my contacts have in mind will fill the bill ideally." He flip-flopped a color-coded gas cartridge across his knuckles from one finger to the next, an ancient trick gamblers still called the steeplechase. "Some of the Exts have already sampled Bong and drugs of that sort. Relatively harmless. But we made certain that a good quantity of Bong was laced with inactive trace markers of hecatomb—enough to be detectable after the crash."

  Blond and raffishly handsome, Uniday wasn't wearing his PolSec branch uniform or any sign of his lieutenant colonelcy. His morning suit showed that he could afford to be dressed by a superb tailor.

  "And the tethership, too, will be salted with hecatomb?" Lepskaya asked.

  "Yes, but the Exts' going berserk or not doesn't matter," Uniday assured everyone. "The explosion will make it look like they went synapshit, and so will the telemetry and commo trail we're creating. The markers should be detectable in debris and are already in place in the Ext berthing spaces onboard Sword of Damocles."

  "And if autopsies are conducted?" Lightner asked.

  Uniday flashed an easygoing grin. "There won't be enough left of the Exts or their tethercraft for autopsies. But there'll be hecatomb film on berthing space bulkheads from breath and perspiration and in urine residue in the head holding tanks." He paused for a moment. "LAW's forensic teams have elaborate and exacting means of detecting the stuff, which is precisely why it wouldn't have sufficed to simply plant the Exts' follow-on baggage with the drug, though we've seen to that as well. Independent investigators, including those tiresome saints at the Lyceum General Inquiries Bureau, will want proof that the Exts have metabolized it."

  Buchanan Starkweather had been listening unhappily. Pale, dun-haired, somatically older than Uniday though chronologically younger, he had had a brief career in the military as well as the Hierarchate, though he had not done particularly well in either. Having all the right loyalties and ties to established power, however, he was in line to be nobly rewarded for unswerving mediocrity.

  "I still think we should do this some other way," he commented. When the others' eyes converged on him, he realized that he had only seconds to salvage himself. "That is, rather than sacrifice a tethercraft and crew. After all, the war effort needs everyone and everything…"

  Cal Lightner bristled at having Preservationist dogma quoted at him, but the lowered expectations that attended Starkweather saved him. "Buck, this is part of the war effort," he said calmly as the winds ruffled the silvered locks of his patrician feather-cut. "And it has to be big—a meltdown. All of us here have sanctioned enough covert operations to know that painful sacrifices are sometimes unavoidable. It's one tethercraft and crew offered up now to avoid polluting Periapt with a mob of partisan terrorists and losing control over LAW to hordes of intractable war wogs.

  "Let them serve and die on the frontiers; it's far more than their lives amounted to when we found them. But start bringing them here, enfranchising them, parading them around as coequals? The Rationalists will hand LAW over to them in a generation. Subhumans who haven't the brains, the backbone, or the racial vision to defeat the Roke. But after today there'll be no more of this cobelligerent drool Dextra Haven and her lot have been trying to peddle for a decade. Only LAW can defeat the Roke, and only Periapt can make LAW work."

  Wix Uniday heard him out with a carefully cultivated expression of attention and approval. "That's exactly the way we see it at Political Security. In the wake of this Ext op, no one's going to object when we come down hard on resistance, be it on Hierophant, Tintaginel… or Periapt."

  "Public reaction will support major legal reforms," Lep-skaya put in. "Better press censorship, loyalty oaths, emergency detention powers. We can put all the defeatists on the run and root out these Quantum College pranksters while we're at it. They can run their paranoia games on each other in the Miseria Isle detention camps."

  "Annexed worlds are the engine of LAW," Doll Van Houten said, getting back to the point. "Periapt is the pilot. And when the Roke are eliminated, an unchallenged and unadulterated Periapt must shoulder the burden of guiding the destiny of our species. That's our holy destiny. That's what the teleological energies have chosen us to do."

  "It's clean, taking care of this in orbit," Lepskaya said dreamily. "That way, no wog-worlders set foot here. Besides, the aftermath of the disaster will be the ideal time to start pushing openly for universal conscription. Mandatory service will be the answer to LAW's growing personnel problems, and authority over policy, assignments, and exemptions will give the Hierarchate stupendous new influence and fund-raising opportunities." He glanced at Lightner, only to find him moving toward the small corner tower at the end of the parapet walk. "Cal? Something wrong?"

  "Not at all," Lightner threw over his shoulder. "Minor detail. Please carry on."

  The tower was appointed as an ornate sitting room, but like most places in the floating citadel, it was well wired for quick communications. A few voice commands and Lightner had sealed the chamber from intrusion and eavesdropping; then he brought up his family calendar file on the central holofield to reference Nike's schedule.

  She had said something about visiting one of LAW's assets in near orbit in the company of that freak show of arts and theater vagabonds that had latched on to her. Something about staging a production in the Eden orbital. Even so, Lightner experienced a sudden and uncharacteristic sense of apprehension, an urge to make certain that his daughter wasn't planning to be anywhere in the vicinity of Sword of Damocles.

  He abhorred wasting time double-checking on Nike but decided to put in a call to her nonetheless. A commo glitch somewhere along the line, however, delayed what should have been instant communication.

  He wavered for a moment but reassured himself that La Condition Humaine systems were virus-free and immune to tampering. Leaving the retry function to persist in trying to reach Nike, Lightner returned to his guests and fellow patriots.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  Burning's company was in place outside Damocles's air lock a half hour in advance of the scheduled disembarkation time. The big shuttle could have descended without being unspooled, but it had b
ecome necessary to transfer angular momentum to the starship because Damocles's orbit had decayed somewhat. As the tether's burden was lowered away, the mother ship would receive a minute boost; in that sense the Exts were just so much ballast, Burning had been informed.

  The difference in mass between the tethercraft and the colossal starship was such that it would take a day of tether ops of various lengths and masses to adjust the interstellar vessel's orbit. Damocles could have achieved the same thing with its secondary drives, but LAW engineers felt that the tether ops personnel could use the practice, and the frugality of the solution appealed to the skipper.

  Exts in battlesuits were lined up along either side of the outboard passageway. Many of the mustered troops were trying to recoup some of the sleep they'd been denied by the moved-up debarkation hour; others were making final adjustments to gear or lethargically bullshitting. Some were reading or watching visor vids, and as always with Exts, there was a good deal of gambling going on, with cards, dice, gan-jan-po, and two-ups predominating.

  Zone and his leadership were off sharing out live rounds. There were only enough bullets to equip the senior officers and NCOs with a few apiece, and Zone was getting the ammo into the right hands quickly and inconspicuously. Despite their talk about toad-cranking him, Daddy D had maintained to Burning that Zone was the man for the job because, when on duty, he cut no slack and got things done.

  It had struck Burning as reassuringly true to form that the Exts didn't rate a comfy ride in a conventional passenger shuttle. There had been enough snafus and disorganization since the starship's insertion around Periapt to prove that LAW could trip over its own dong just as any other big outfit could. Burning conceded that hints of LAW betrayal might be in his imagination. He hoped another few hours would find him quietly re-collecting the ammo and sneaking it back into the transport cases before anyone found out it was missing.

  A Logistics Command petty officer reported that the drop countdown had resumed and that the tethercraft was at the air lock. LOGCOM had said the same thing two orbits earlier. Burning decided to wait until he heard the lock cycling before he passed the word to move out.