An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Read online

  “Slower, please,” Tad said woodenly.

  “Oh, you want reading speed,” the AID cooed. “I thought you said ‘dump.’ My mistake. Sir.”

  Why didn’t Tad just disconnect or reprogram the personality codes? Gina suspected that, in some way, he enjoyed being lipped off by impudent machinery . . . Maybe that was why he kept her around.

  The first holopic was a green valley, pierced by an ambling trout stream that flashed like metal in the sunlight. The image jumped back and forth between two frames, faking the ripple of water and the shiver of trees in a simulated breeze. At the center of focus was a white dome, made of prefab hexagon panels. It was a hyperwave relay station, somewhere on Palaccio, probably beyond the Palisades, far upcountry.

  The next image closed in on the dome, showing a maintenance worker, for scale, and a truck sitting on its collapsed skirting to offload a rad-shielded probot. Moving into the image, a two-dimensional red arrowhead flickered across the station’s vulnerable points: access hatches, the plasma tube and power buses, the Shadowbox wave dish for signal inputs.

  A third image went inside, dissecting the station like a tri-D grapefruit: containment shell, suspenders, supporting framework, primary laser injectors, cyber systems, and the probable locus of the singularity.

  “What are we looking for?” she asked.

  “Ways to get in.”

  “Door’s on the left. There.”

  “No, I mean, if we weren’t supposed to.”

  “Break down the door. On the left.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Who would want to get inside a hyperwave station?” Gina asked. “Nothing in there to steal except some industrial-class lasers and an old computer that’s so task-oriented you’d have to rebuild it to reprogram it. Unless you wanted the singularity itself, and you’d need a portable mass synthesizer, a big one, to grapple with it. And if you fumbled it—then you can kiss off this entire planet as real estate . . . No, nobody would break into an HSN station.”

  “They might if they wanted to take control of the Cluster’s communications system.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose they could jack in at one of the repeaters. That would put them in charge, technically, of just the one node and its two-way link. Wouldn’t it be simpler to infiltrate here, through this office, and command the whole system? Our cyber’s a lot more versatile. More cooperative, too.”

  “I heard that!” the AID squawked. Gina rapped its carbon fiber case with her knuckles. She couldn’t hurt it with anything less than a ten-kilo sledge, but the machine shut up.

  “Anyway,” she said, “who’s worried about break ins?”

  “The new D.ofC. has a phobia about it. He braced and grilled me after the meeting at the Palace. Says he wants a proposal for some land of military reaction force, complete with barracks sites, training program, costs and pay schedules—probably even a retirement policy and a marching song—on his desk after lunch.”

  “So that’s why you’re sitting here in a soggy uniform, still hanging with pond weeds, and looking at twenty-year-old structural. The Department decommissioned Delta Station nine years ago, you know.”

  “Um . . .”

  “Look, don’t try to do this thing reasonably, Tad. You’re wasting your time figuring out how to get inside a hyperwave node and, from that, computing the military forces needed to defend it. You’re neither a soldier nor a vandal. Instead, take a guess. Fifty men? A hundred? At each station? On each planet? Then multiply by the number of stations and other faculties.”

  His nose wrinkled. “That’s a big force. There might not be that many trained soldiers available in the whole Cluster, outside of Dindyma’s marines or the Central Fleet.”

  “So you recruit and train them. Takes six months.”

  “Train whom, exactly? We can’t reclassify from our own staff; we’re already short-handed. Other departments would feel the same. And the conglomerates and latifundias are all closed labor systems.”

  “Workers from the dole pool? They’re certainly outside the system.”

  “Yeah, far out. Half of them thieves and the other half spies on retainer from who knows where. They’re just the sort of ragtag army we’d be defending the stations against. Praise would like that a lot.”

  “What about—aliens?” It made Gina feel strange to use the word, especially when talking to a Human . . .

  “Aliens? Can they fight? Even if they could, why would they fight for us?”

  Good question. Still, Gina pushed on. “I think they’re capable of loyalty,” she said slowly. “Great loyalty, sometimes.”

  “Well. Whatever. Put down an unspecified force, the make-up to be determined later. What else do we need?”

  “Ummm—armored carriers to move them in. For weapons, you’d need repulsor rifles, HD coils, stun grenades, and portable plasma pots—”

  “Where can we get them?”

  “Beg them from the Cluster Command, buy them in the bazaar, import them from offplanet. At any rate, once you know the size of the force, just multiply everything else—transport, housing, training, salaries—out of that. The rest is economics. I can punch it up on a wristcalc in ten minutes.”

  “I don’t know. This man Praise is pretty sharp.”

  “Sure. But he’s not omniscient. If you come in with a snowstorm of numbers, it will take twice as long to break ’em as it took us to cook ’em. Gives us lead time to do a solder and patch job on the project.”

  “You want to take a crack at it?”

  “Sure. For what it’s worth . . .”

  “How do you mean?” he asked. “The new Director wants—”

  “The new Director doesn’t know blip about comm theory and practice. To do real damage to the system, you don’t try to disrupt or censor just one node. You’d want to shape the information, skew it, rewrite the text and sculpt the electron flow with your own slant. That’s the subtle, the cool way. A military attack is uncool.”

  “Maybe.” Bertingas stared thoughtfully at the holo projection of the station schematics. Then he shook his head. “It would be too easy to detect. The D.ofC. would clamp down before you got the project even—”

  “Oh, really? Tad, the Director doesn’t pre-sample a tenth of what goes out of here. He doesn’t know or speak to any of the techies. When was the last time you saw one of the upper brass poking around in the equipment bays? We know who really runs the Department. You or I could fake a transmission, stash it in pieces in off-RAM, and spring it whenever we wanted.”

  “You probably could . . . Hmmm. Do you think I’d find out about it?”

  Gina felt a coldness in her lower bowel. She sometimes misread Human thoughts and emotions, having no emphatic waveform for them. However, the trend of Tad’s thoughts was unmistakable.

  “I—I don’t know. Maybe not. Probably not.”

  “But that isn’t what you told the Haiken Maru people, is it?” He swiveled his chair abruptly and lanced her with his eyes.

  Some detached part of Gina’s mind recalled that she could, with one stiff-armed blow, take the top of his head off—right across the weakened structure of a Human skull’s eye sockets. She might even be able to get out of the building after she did it. Once on the streets . . . But Tad was more, to her, than some inconvenient blob of carbon-based jelly. Her shoulders sagged a millimeter or more.

  “How did you know?”

  “Twice in a single morning someone suggests to me, in a subtle way, that the images this department puts out might be doctored. The first person to suggest it goes to a lot of trouble to kill me when I refuse. And he, to be frank, knows less about comm tech than our new boss. I have to consider the possibility there’s a link.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Did you tell them to kill me?”

  “No! I wouldn’t—Tad!”

  “Did they pay you?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. A Deoorti Sister works in the Haiken Maru subculture. She was
asking about my job, and my relationship, with you. We got to talking tech and she asked if I could scramble and fake the system anytime I wanted. I told her maybe, once, on something small. But anything too long, or a major message like a Palace transmission, and you’d be likely to find out.”

  “So they had to kill me.”

  “No—not—never . . .” Gina wailed. She dropped straight down to the floor, her legs folding into what the Humans called a half-lotus. For Deoorti, it was a surrender posture.

  “We made a joke about it. If I had to, I could tie you up and closet you for an hour, for two. Or fuck you one-handed. To get job done. That kind of joke. Not kill, never kill Taddeuz.”

  There were tears, hot tears of lithium salts. Gina could feel them eating into the creme make-up she put on her face every morning to make her look more Human. She had to get control: her body, her language, her emotions were going back to the Deoorti pattern. That would alienate him. Still, she could help none of it.

  “Why are you . . . ?”

  “Oh, be hush you stupid man! I love, have loved you! Not Hive, not Sister, not Right Smells, but loved no less. And you think I would have you killed. Now that you love me no more. Not fair, Taddeuz, not fair to me.”

  He just sat there looking down at the top of her head, clearly wishing he were somewhere else.

  “My—my people,” she began again, “were patterned on you. To kaqulendir—to mesh—with you. How could I not love you? Not stop loving even when you do. Even though, to you, I am just a thing. A soft bitch. An alien.”

  “I don’t—it’s not like that,” he said.

  But she knew from his voice, it was.

  Gina was about to explain how she, too, was loyal to the Pact, why she had to be, when a buzzer from Tad’s desk cut her off. It was the special buzzer, from the 100th floor, which had not sounded in months.

  “That’s the Director. He probably wants to see me,” Bertingas said. He sounded relieved.

  She looked up at him. Her face was still wet with the Human emblem of tears, but her legs were loosening from their reflexive crouch, her shoulders lifting.

  “Your uniform is a mess.”

  “No time to change it, I guess.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you—ah—keep working on those figures? For some kind of military force.”

  “You trust me with that? After talking to Haiken Maru? After getting you killed?”

  He made a small, tight smile. She suddenly understood how near to tears himself this Human had come.

  “Not your fault,” he said, “not intentionally. You’re a good woman, Gina.”

  Good woman, almost Human.

  She wiped the corroded make-up off her cheeks with the palms of her hands and returned his smile.

  Then he was walking quickly out of the office. One dress boot squeaked with the damp still in it.

  Chapter 5

  Taddeuz Bertingas: UNEXPECTED SUPPORT

  Tad’s boots squeaked and his mind spun as he fast-stepped toward the lift tube. His right hand was clutching the startled AID, which he’d swept off the desk as he left . . . fled from . . . his own office. He squeezed the machine once, for reassurance. No good having to go back for it, not now, not there.

  The bodyguard—what was her name? Firkin?—came out of the angle between two cubicularia and tried to fall into step with him.

  “Just business with the bossman,” he tried to smile. “Upstairs.”

  She didn’t break stride. “I should check the—”

  “Back off, muscle lady!” he snapped.

  That froze her, her boot heels actually skidding on the tiles. Tad whirled on, his mind still spinning.

  Gina had collapsed like a broken robot, or a puppet with the strings cut. Mumbling and raving by turns. All about a simple question of who knew what and how much about the Department, and who had tried to kill Tad over it.

  Of course, he and Gina had shared a good relationship. A land of love. Once. He supposed it might have been as pleasurable for her as it was for him. Perhaps not. Aliens were wired differently, he knew. A phenotype so close to Human, as the Deoorti were, of necessity became successful mimics, able to simulate a whole range of Human emotions. Perhaps even feel them. Perhaps not.

  After the scene in the office, Bertingas concluded Gina might be a very sick personality. Or a good actress.

  Yet, who else was there for him to trust? Who else could think as clearly as she could? Who else could do the work? Who else owed him so much? Maybe, just maybe, by the time he returned from this meeting upstairs, she would be back in her sockets and ticking along like nothing had happened. He had to think that, just to get his brain straight for his next encounter with the new Director.

  He stepped into the lift tube and felt its characteristic pull on the long muscles in his body. A leaden ache in the back of his thighs reminded him that he’d already taken a beating this morning.

  The electrostatics pulled the last of the pond moisture out of his uniform, but that didn’t make him look better. The black material was pleated and creased across his groin and armpits, and it chafed. He had a scurf of dried green weed, like tarnished braid, on his cuffs. He smelled like a bog.

  In contrast to the hard surfaces and half-panels, clack and clatter of the ninety-ninth floor, the one above it was carpet and crystal, deep-grained wood and quiet. Sitting at a pulpit desk in the tube entry bay, a young woman wearing the uniform of Building Services checked his face unobtrusively against a holofile concealed in the counter before her. When she had a match, she pressed a button releasing the invisible repressor field that screened the head of the corridor into The Maze, on the far side of the bay.

  She did all this as fast as Tad could walk the four meters from tube lip to corridor. If he chose to ignore her, he might never know he was being cleared.

  That button cap under right thumb, Tad knew, contained a microcircuit set to interpret one set of finger whorls—hers—and one pH balance in the skin oils—also hers. If anyone else touched the button, not only did it lock but the field collapsed, sweeping everything not screwed down inside the bay into the lift shaft. And the shaft reversed to fast-drop. As a security system it was fairly crude, but no one had ever walked unannounced into the offices of the Combined Directors of Cluster Services.

  The Maze was only confusing to first-timers, as it was meant to be. Actually it was just a double-ring of corridors, an inner and outer square, with the Directors’ office suites aligned on the outer, window side; support staff and the building core were on the inner, non-window side. Selwin Praise’s office would be three lefts and a right, unless he’d arranged to switch with one of the other directors. However, since that would involve a certain loss of face by the switchee, for agreeing to the whim of a new man, Tad could trust that the D.ofC. was in the same suite his sixteen predecessors had occupied.

  He was right.

  The secretary in the outer office was a man, possibly Human, possibly another Deoorti Sister. Tad’s internal radar wasn’t functioning too well right then. The man had the signs, wide-set eyes and coppery skin, but they could have resulted from Human genetics and a bad tan. The secretary barely looked up as he waved Bertingas through into the inner office. Behind him, as the door slid closed, Tad could hear a sniff and a chuckle.

  Praise’s head was bent over some work. He was actually writing, on paper, with an ink pen. He did it slowly and made it look hard. Praise didn’t speak or lift his eyes for some minutes, leaving Tad to stand at rough attention in the center of the carpet.

  “I thought I would have a report on my desk when I came in. At least the outline of a report.” Still Praise didn’t lift his head. “Something about security, I remember, which you were going to write for me . . . Or did you forget?”

  “No, Sir. But between then and now I’ve had a rather spectacular accident.”

  “Explain.” Praise lifted his head and Tad got his second really good look at the man’s eyes. They remi
nded him of a cold lizard—sleepy, slow, indifferent, deadly. Those eyes tried to show concern now, and failed.

  “Leaving the Palace, I was the guest of Valence Elidor, the Haiken Maru Trader General.” Tad saw the eyes flicker over the name—with envy? “He took me aside and wanted to chat with me . . .” Twist the knife. “About a communications problem they were having. Anyway, after we dropped him off at the H.M. city offices, the driver was heading back here when the car malfunctioned. Shot six or seven klicks straight up, began sliding around. Then came down inside the Palace Dome.”

  “Was that you?” Praise’s eyebrows raised; the eyes themselves never warmed. “I saw the whole thing. Someone fell out of the car, didn’t he?”

  “The driver. Jumped with a bad ED dragline.”

  “Defective?”

  “Sabotaged.”

  “Oh, dear. Then it was you who brought it down?”

  “Yes—”

  “You might have picked a less public landing spot,” Praise sniffed. “No good having Cluster Communications attacking the Palace grounds. Even by inadvertence.”

  “I didn’t exactly have a lot of choices.”

  Praise looked thoughtful. “No, perhaps you didn’t . . . Sabotage, eh? Someone trying to assassinate the Trader General? That’s bad news for us all.”

  “Or kill me? Elidor was already out of the car.”

  “Why would anyone want to dispose of you, Bertingas? To be sure, I couldn’t do without you. Every minute I’m in this job, I see how much I’ll be depending on my deputy. Still, being career service, you’re hardly a political target, are you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Still, that does raise a question of our vulnerability. To the accidents of time, at least. I’m just writing up a new standing order that will cover that. It calls for all Freevid transmissions originating with this department to be cleared by both you and me. Kind of a double check. How does that sound?”

  Ghastly, Bertingas thought. “More—secure, certainly . . . Sir,” he said.