“Kchula-Tzaatz.” Stkaa-Emissary turned to Scrral-Rrit and performed a perfunctory claw-rake. “Patriarch.” He turned to Rrit-Conserver. “Honored Conserver.” His courtesies were all appropriate to their recipients by virtue of their own rank and his, but he had addressed Kchula-Tzaatz first, a fact lost on no one in the room.
“Stkaa-Emissary. You gave me fealty when I most needed it.” Kchula’s eyes were wide, ears swiveled up in focused attention for the other’s response. Putting it in those terms assumed the submission of Stkaa Pride to Tzaatz Pride, not yet a reality. But so I define the power relationship, and dare him to defy it. Let Rrit-Conserver be witness to this. “Tzaatz Pride honors its obligations. Your reward is the vanguard of the greatest conquest in eight-cubed generations. Are the fleets of Stkaa ready to leap on Earth?”
“If you compel the support of Cvail, and offer your own, we cannot fail.”
“The entire Patriarchy will be behind you.” Kchula turned to Scrral-Rrit. “Will it not, Patriarch?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” It was the function of Scrral-Rrit to confirm the edicts of Kchula-Tzaatz as he was required to. Kchula felt pleasure at that. While he was obeying the letter of tradition in deferring to his puppet, the real power relationship was obvious to all.
“Sire!” Stkaa-Emissary’s tail stiffened, his whiskers bristling in the thrill of the hunt. “The Heroes of Stkaa will leap at your command!” Who he addressed the “Sire” to was open to question.
Kchula growled. “We have trifled with the kz’zeerkti for too long. Conquest is our destiny.”
“Yes, sire! I request permission to leave at once to tell Tzor-Stkaa! We have ships at the ready.”
“Granted.” Kchula purred deep in his throat. There was no longer any question as to who was being addressed as “Sire.” “Tell him to leap on K’Shai as soon as preparations can be completed. Retake your world and reclaim the honor of Stkaa Pride. Our fleet will be behind you, and the fleets of all the Great Prides. We shall stage from K’Shai to Earth itself, and then its colonies will be easy meat. Ch’Aakin and the others we will retake at our leisure”
“I shall send news of our victories.” Stkaa-Emissary left at the leap, and Kchula turned to Rrit-Conserver.
“You see now what will happen? The Lesser Prides are quelled by my puppet. Now the Great Prides will be quelled by the thought of spoils, and the need for solidarity in the face of the kz’zeerkti enemy. We shall finish this upstart race, and by the time the war is done my own position as the undisputed power in the Patriarchy will be secure. This matter of First-Son-of-Meerz-Rrit is a triviality. If my brother does not kill him the jungle will. Even if he somehow survives his position will be irrelevant.”
Rrit-Conserver remained silent.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
—Robert Frost
Was it better to go in person or just make a comcall? Colonel Quacy Tskombe stood in front of the UNF Personnel Command building, considering. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the call booth glass and looked away. The tabs of his new rank no longer looked new; his face looked decidedly older. He considered the options. Go inside and his presence there would be registered as soon as the cameras saw him, but there was little chance his conversation would be monitored. Make a call and he might well get monitored, but if he didn’t, there’d be no connection between him and Jarl—at least, not until later, when someone scanned the call logs. And if he did get monitored, it would be an accident. He hadn’t done anything illegal yet. There was no reason for there to be a tag on his ident.
In person is better when you need a favor. But he would be asking Jarl to put himself on the line, and the less implicated he was the better, once Quacy Tskombe vanished and people started trying to figure out how that had happened, once Marcus Tobin in particular started looking. That wasn’t a pleasant thought. Tobin was more than his commander, he was his mentor, and a friend. But the UNF was not his future. His future, if he had one, was Ayla Cherenkova, and he was going to get her off Kzinhome or die trying.
Comcall is best, and keep it short. Keeping Jarl safe had to be a priority, if only because the other would be less likely to refuse to help in order to protect himself. Jarl Nance was another old friend, a UN Military College classmate, and a man who, like Freeman Salsilik, he had not seen in years. His name was first on the short list Tskombe had made of people who might be able and inclined to help him, names culled from memory and searched on the ’net. Where Tskombe had chosen the infantry and life among the stars, Jarl, despite a reputation as a daredevil and rule breaker at school, had chosen administration and a career in New York. Now he ran the Transit office for Personnel Command, which gave him a certain amount of indirect power. Tskombe had protected Jarl more than a few times, saved his career from ending before it began over cadet pranks, and now it was time to call in the favor.
He’d spent most of his enforced vacation trying to get approval to go back to Kzinhome to get Ayla off it. It was becoming clear that neither Marcus Tobin nor the military bureaucracy were going to yield on their position. They had, not unreasonably, given her up for dead. The only problem was, Quacy hadn’t given up and he wasn’t feeling reasonable about it. The mission he wanted was out of the question for the UNF, so he was going to do it himself. To get to Ayla he needed to get to Kzinhome, which meant getting to Wunderland. Those were problems he’d face when he had to; the immediate difficulty was getting off Earth. Jarl might be the solution to that.
So next decision: call on his beltcomp or use a call booth? One less trace if he used a public screen, but they’d be more likely to monitor the call. A harried-looking man came up, jumped in the call booth and started dialing. Tskombe watched as the strain on his face grew tenser as the call went through, and then the man was almost instantly in the middle of a heated debate with whoever was on the other end. It would be a while before he finished; that simplified the decision a lot. He tabbed Jarl’s dialstring into his beltcomp and thumbed CALL. The screen flashed its wait pattern, then Jarl looked out of the screen. He had aged visibly, lost a lot of hair and gained a lot of weight. Do I look so different after fifteen years? That wasn’t an important question right now.
“Jarl, Quacy Tskombe.”
“Quacy!” The face in the screen smiled in recognition. “How are you? Where are you?”
“I’m in New York. Listen, I need a favor.”
“Name it.” That was the old Jarl, ready for any adventure, and Quacy’s hopes rose. If anyone could get him on a ship it would be Jarl.
“I need to get to Wunderland.”
“Just thumb your orders over and I’ll set you up.” Jarl smiled, happy to help an old friend. “We should get together before you go.”
“I’d like that, Jarl, but listen, I don’t have any orders.”
“Well, as soon as you get them…”
Tskombe cut him off. “I’m not getting any orders, Jarl. I need to get on a ship.”
The other man’s eyes widened. “That’s illegal.”
“I need you to do it.”
“You know I can’t do that.” There was fear in Jarl’s eyes now, the friendliness gone.
“It’s important. I have to get to Kzinhome, at least to Wunderland so I can find my way from there.”
“Quacy! For Finagle’s sake! Going off-planet without orders, that’s desertion.”
“There are lives at stake.”
Jarl half turned, as if to see if anyone was watching over his shoulder. “It’s not even safe to talk about that kind of thing.”
“You owe me, Jarl.” Tskombe hadn’t wanted to say it. And when you have to say it there’s a problem.
Jarl looked away. “I…I’ll do what I can. I can’t promise anything.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure, anything.” Jarl smiled again, some semblance of his
old self returning. “You know that.”
“I know, Jarl.” And Tskombe had believed him, right up to that final line, but he knew Jarl was lying now; he had heard the fear in his voice, seen the way his eyes had slid away from the cam as he spoke. There would be no travel documents downloaded to Tskombe’s beltcomp, no authentications to clear him through customs and port security, no berth on a ship boosting for Wunderland. He was going to have to find another way, because Jarl was not going to do anything that might be dangerous, no matter what loyalty he owed old friends, not even to level old debts. Fifteen years was too long.
Which was why he was pushing buttons in an office and not commanding a combat team. A commander had to be willing to take risks for those he led or lose the ability to lead. Jarl was not a bad man, but his character did not include risk taking. His stunts in school had been attention getters, risking school discipline but no serious consequences, and when it came down to choosing a career path, he’d chosen the safest he could. Tskombe left the call booth and got back on the slidewalk. Would Jarl turn him in? For a moment the question turned Tskombe’s veins to ice water, but then he relaxed. No, that would involve more trouble for him than staying silent. Jarl would just forget the call, deny all knowledge if anyone asked him. That was his way. He’d only take action if he had to do it to save himself.
A cold sweat suddenly beaded on Tskombe’s back. And what if Jarl felt he had to do it to protect himself? On a colony world the thought wouldn’t have entered his mind, but this was Earth, where personal privacy was centuries out of fashion. What was the statistic? Ten percent of every data channel was dedicated to the ARM for monitoring purposes. He’d kept the call short to lessen the odds of an intercept, but low risk didn’t mean zero. So if the ARM already knew and Jarl didn’t report him, Jarl would be in serious trouble.
Would he do it? One way to find out, perhaps. He punched redial on his beltcomp, and got a busy screen. He punched disconnect as the system started to ask him if he wanted to queue the call. Jarl was talking to someone. Was it ARM, or was it coincidence? No way of knowing, but the question wasn’t going to go away now. Tskombe leaned against a building wall, thinking. He should have thought this through before hand, should have made a clearer plan. He keyed the screen to replay the call. He muted the audio, watched Jarl’s eyes as the conversation progressed. The beltcomp’s small display made it hard to see, but it was written there on Jarl’s face as he mouthed the promise, in the way his eyes flicked to the dialer by the pad even before he’d rung off. Jarl was looking to his next call, he had already decided he needed to report Tskombe purely to protect himself.
Tskombe cursed low under his breath and looked up. There was a hoverbot there, just floating. It was impossible to say which direction its scanners were facing. Had it been there before? Could the ARM really respond that fast? He looked long and hard at it, and after a long moment it floated away. If it had been following him it wasn’t paying attention anymore. Which meant nothing of course. There would be other bots with broad-spectrum zoom cameras higher up. There were cameras in the corridors, cameras on the streets. Earth didn’t even have anonymous money, you had to thumb your account for every transaction. He couldn’t so much as take a skycab or use a call booth without having it logged. He would be tracked, if anyone felt like tracking him. This was Earth.
He let the slidewalk carry him toward Central Park. He needed a drink, and he needed time to plan, preferably out of sight. The first problem was easy enough to solve. He let the slidewalk carry him along to the next hotel, he didn’t catch the chain name but it didn’t matter. The lobby was grandiose in marble, polished brass, and crystal, designed to impress, but it was interchangeable with any other designed-to-impress lobby in any other chain hotel in known space. Only the gravitational field told him what planet he was on. Half a millennium of cheap transport and instant communications had homogenized Earth’s culture, and since the hyperdrive had become reality, that culture had inexorably permeated the colonies as well.
The hotel bar was classy in the same way, a real live piano player with a real live piano playing light jazz, well-dressed men and expensive women, UN politicos and business players. He bought a drink that claimed to be single malt scotch distilled from pure-strain grain and was priced accordingly, and sat down to think. He had acted hastily in contacting Jarl, and he’d done it without a backup plan, a serious violation of military planning procedure. He’d been overconfident that a call to a friend would solve his problems, get him a berth on the next shuttle boosting. He was used to the colonies where state control was less total, and used to the front line military, where rules were meant to be broken. Earth was a different ballpark, and just because he still knew his way around Manhattan didn’t mean he knew his way around. He’d had nagging doubts about Jarl and had suppressed them. That is because I’ve been avoiding the truth about what I’m doing. He downed half his whiskey at once, taking the burn in his throat as punishment for the ultimate sin of lying to himself. I am deserting, nothing more, nothing less. It was a violation of his oath as an officer, his own personal creed of duty and integrity, his self-identification as a commander. It would transform him in an instant from a war hero on his way to a general’s bar to a hunted criminal, but it was what he had decided to do, and half-measures would only make him fail at the transformation. Unacceptable.
So how much damage had his conversation with Jarl done? Assuming Jarl reported it he would get no more than a slap on the wrist from Marcus Tobin, maybe not even that much. It was unlikely Jarl had the conversation recorded. If the ARM hadn’t monitored it at random then there would be no evidence. Except what I’m carrying here. He pulled out his beltcomp, called up the recording and erased it, then purged the empty memory. No need to provide that evidence himself. At the same time, he could well have his ident tagged, and that would make getting away in the future a lot more difficult. Flatlanders had too little privacy. He had never noticed that when he’d been a Flatlander himself, nor had he noticed it when he left for space. Only on his return was it clear how tightly the ARM controlled Earth’s population. Their badges read Maintient le droit, but they said nothing about whose rights were maintained. Outside the gray zones, Earth had a very low crime rate. Petty criminals tended to get caught, major criminals and syndicates simply got the laws changed to redefine whatever they did as legal. Muro Ravalla was widely accused of colluding with an industrialist cabal who siphoned billions out of the defense budget into their own pockets. Ravalla simply stood up and invited his opponents to demonstrate that he’d broken the law, while his faction slipped through amendments that made what he did legal.
Not a helpful thought train. Quacy Tskombe had already broken the law and he had no political clout to save him if he got caught. He planned to break it again; the only question was how. It was clear he wasn’t going to get on a ship with a UNF clearance on his ident. If he was getting off-planet, he was going to have to find someone who could make it happen, and that meant finding some criminals. He sipped his drink, considering. He had a limited amount of time to make that happen, and he had to be more careful now, just in case Jarl had gotten his ident tagged. He looked up at the camera bubble in the piano bar’s ceiling. Whatever he was looking for, this wasn’t the place to find it.
He paid for his drink, and took the opportunity to download his credit balance from his bank to his beltcomp. Money, at least, would not be a factor. Fifteen years soldiering added up to a lot of accrued pay and bonuses, with dividends piling up in his investment fund. With so many years living with the UN forces off-world he’d had little need to make major purchases. Doing the download meant assuming the risk that he’d lose the beltcomp and his savings with it, but it also meant the ARM couldn’t freeze his assets. That wouldn’t make much difference on Earth, where they could tell the financial system not to accept credit tagged with his ident, but if he could make it to a colony world he could convert his balance to cash and spend it without trace. Outside
the long summer dusk was fading slowly. He’d spent longer than he’d thought in the bar. He avoided the slidewalk, went back down to the pedestrian level, walked up toward Central Park, looking for…what? He couldn’t hope to find a connection to a smuggling syndicate wandering the streets at random; the best he could hope to do would be find someone who could point him in the right direction. His skill set wasn’t particularly adapted to navigating the underworld.
Another hoverbot whirred overhead, a common enough occurrence, but newly disturbing. Was it looking for him? When he’d been at the academy the accepted truth was that the ARM had a thousand cameras per block in the City. It was hard to know if that was true. Certainly it took the cops only minutes to show up at any crime in progress that could be visually identified as such. Desertion wasn’t that kind of crime, but the computers could recognize his face, if anyone told them to look for it, and there were other indicators, like downloading his entire net worth to his beltcomp. Did Jarl really turn me in? What could anyone do about it if he did? If Jarl had agreed to get him off-planet then the crime was conspiracy to desert. If he actually tried it then the crime was desertion, but neither of those things had happened. So why am I feeling so edgy? If they were tracking him they’d know where he was from his bar transaction, so they might have sent a hoverbot to pinpoint him. On the other hand, hoverbots were everywhere, a fact of life.
Overhead a gravcar broke out of the traffic pattern and headed down toward him. Another common occurrence, but a thrill of fear ran through him. Why? The gravcar hadn’t been in the eight-layer traffic pattern; it had been underneath it, on the level reserved for emergency vehicles. Cop! Instinctively he ducked under the slidewalk and turned to run back the way he’d come. In response a siren wailed and a spotbeam split the gathering darkness. An amplified voice told him to halt, but he ignored it. The spotbeam swung and pinned him, and then he was pelting down the pedestrian way, dodging startled citizens as the gravcar pursued him. Dimly he was aware of the stupidity of trying to outrun a gravcar, of trying to outrun the ARM at all, but as long as he kept moving they couldn’t get out of the car and take him.