Cyteen

But it was all too likely Jordan would go straight to Ari to negotiate Grant free of her. Then Ari might play other cards, like tapes of those office sessions—

  —O God, then Jordan would go straight to the Science Bureau, and launch a fight that would break all the careful agreements and lose him everything.

  Query the House computers on the law—but there was nothing he dared use: every log-on was recorded. Everything left traces. There was no way that Reseune would not win a head-on challenge. He did not know the extent of Ari’s political power, but it was enough that it could open new exploration routes, subvert companies on distant star-stations and affect trade directly with old Earth itself; and that was just the visible part of it.

  Beyond the archway, he heard the sounds of the closet door, saw Grant piling his clothes onto the bed.

  He knew suddenly where Grant was going—the way they had dreamed of when they were boys, sitting on the banks of the Novaya Volga, sending boats made of old cans floating down to Novgorod, for city folk to marvel at. And later, on a certain evening when they had talked about Jordan’s transfer, about the chance of them being held until Jordan could get them out.

  It was that worst-case now, he thought, not the way they had planned, but it was the only chance they had.

  He walked into Grant’s room, laid a finger on his lips for silence, because there was Security monitoring: Jordan had told him it went on. He took Grant’s arm, led him quickly and quietly out into the living room, toward the door, took his coat from the closet—no choice about that: it was close to freezing outside, people came and went from wing to wing in the open, it was ordinary enough. He handed Grant his, and led him out into the hall.

  Where to? Grant’s worried look said plainly. Justin, are you doing something stupid?

  Justin took his arm and hauled Grant along, down the hall, back to the lift.

  He pushed T, for the tunnel-level. The car shot downward. God, let there be no stops on main—

  “Justin—”

  He shoved Grant against the wall of the lift, held him there, never mind that Grant was a head taller. “Quiet,” he said. “That’s an order. Not a word. Nothing. Hear?”

  He did not speak to Grant that way. Ever. He was shaking. Grant clamped his jaw and nodded, terrified, as the lift door opened on the dingy concrete of the storm-tunnels. He dragged Grant out, backed him against the wall again. Calmer this time.

  “Now you listen to me. We’re going down to the Town—”

  “I—”

  “Listen to me. I want you to go null. Deep-state, all the way. Right now. Do it. And stay that way. That’s an order, Grant. If you never in your life did exactly what I said,—do it now. Now! Hear me?”

  Grant took a gulp of air, composed himself then, expressionless in two desperate breaths.

  No panic now. Steady. “Good,” Justin said. “Put the coat on and come on.”

  Up another lift, to the Administration wing, the oldest; back to the antiquated Ad wing kitchens, where the night shift staff did dinner clean-up and breakfast prep for the catering service. It was the escape route every kid in the House had used at one time or another, through the kitchens, back where the ovens were, where the air-conditioning never was enough, where staff from generation to generation had propped the fire-door with trash-bins to get a breeze. The kitchen workers had no inclination to report young walk-throughs, not unless someone asked, and Administration never stopped the practice—that routed juvenile CIT truants and pranksters past witnesses who would, if asked, readily say yes, Justin Warrick and his azi had gone out that door—

  —but not until they were missed.

  Shhh, he mimed to the kitchen azi, who gave them bewildered and anxious looks—the late hour, and the fact they were older than the usual fugitives who came this way.

  Past the trash-bin, down the steps into the chill dark.

  Grant overtook him by the pump shed that was the first cover on the hill before it sloped rapidly to the road.

  “We’re going down the hill,” Justin said then. “Taking the boat.”

  “What about Jordan?” Grant objected.

  “He’s all right. Come on.”

  He broke away and Grant ran after him, pelted downslope to intercept the road. Then they strolled at a more ordinary pace down through the floodlit intersections of the warehouses, the repair shops, the streets of the lower Town. The few guards awake at this hour were on the perimeters, to mind the compound fences and the weather reports, not two boys from the House bound down toward the airport road. The bakery and the mills ran full-scale at night, but they were far off across the town, distant gleam of lights as they left the last of the barracks.

  “Is Jordan getting hold of Merild?” Grant asked.

  “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Justin,—”

  “Shut up, Grant. Hear me?”

  They reached the edge of the port. The field lights were out right now, but the beacon still blipped its steady strobe into the dark of a mostly vacant world. Far off, the freight warehouses and the big RESEUNEAIR hangar showed clear, brightly lit, night-work and maintenance going on with one of the commercial planes.

  “Justin,—does he know?”

  “He’ll handle it. Come on.” Justin set out at a run again, leaving Grant no breath for questions, down the road that passed the end of the runway to the barge-dock and down across the concrete bridgeway to the low-lying warehouses at the edge of the river.

  No one locked the doors down here at the small boathouse. No one needed to. He pushed at the door of the shabby prefab, winced at the creak of the hinge. Inside, an iron grid whispered hollowly under their feet. Water splashed and slapped at the pilings and buffers, starlight reflecting wetly around the outlines of the boats moored there. The whole place smelled of river-water and oil and the air was burning cold.

  “Justin,” Grant said. “For God’s sake—”

  “Everything’s all right. You go exactly the way we planned—”

  “I go—”

  “I’m not leaving. You are.”

  “You’re out of your mind! Justin!”

  Justin clambered aboard the nearest boat, opened up the pressurized cabin door and left Grant nothing to do but follow him aboard with his objections.

  “Justin, if you stay now, they can arrest you!”

  “And if I take you out of here there’s no way in hell I’ll ever get certified to be near you, you know that. So I’m not down here tonight. I don’t know a thing about this. I just go back up there, say I never left my room, how am I to know where you went? Maybe a platythere ate you and got indigestion.” He flipped the on-switch, checked the gauges, one toggle-switch and another. “There you go, everything’s full, batteries all charged. Wonderful how the staff keeps things up, isn’t it?”

  “Justin.” Grant’s voice was shaking. He had his hands in his pockets. The air was bitter chill near the water. “Listen to me now, let’s have some sense here. I’m azi. I was listening to tape in the cradle, for God’s sake. If she runs something on me I can handle it, I can rip the structures apart and tell you if there were any bugs in it—”

  “The hell you can.”

  “I can survive her tests, and there’s no way she can axe my Contract, there’s no axe-code. I know for a fact there’s not—I know my sets, Justin. Let’s just forget this and go up the hill and we’ll figure out another way. If it gets bad, we always have this for an option.”

  “Shut up and listen to me. Remember how we mapped this out: first lights you see on your right are still Reseune: that’s the number ten precip station, up on the bluffs. The lights on your left two klicks on will be Moreyville. If you run completely dark you can pass there before Ari gets wind of this, and it’s a clear night. Remember, stay to the center of the channel, that’s the only way to miss the bars, and for God’s sake, be careful of snags. Current comes from the left when you get to the Kennicutt. You turn into it, and the first lights you see after that,
two, maybe three hours on, that’s Krugers. You tell them who you are and you give them this—” He turned on a dim chart-light and scribbled a number down on the pad clipped to the dash. Under the number he wrote: MERILD. “Tell them call Merild, no matter the hour. You can tell Merild when he gets there—tell him Ari’s blackmailing Jordan through me, dammit, that’s all he has to know. Tell him I can’t come until my father’s free, but I had to get you out of there, you’re one more hostage than Jordan can cope with. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Grant said in a faint voice, azi-like: yes.

  “The Krugers won’t betray you. Tell them I said sink the boat if they have to. It’s Emory’s. Merild will handle everything else.”

  “Ari will call the police.”

  “That’s fine. Let her. Don’t try to go past the Kennicutt. If you have to, the next place on down the Volga is Avery, overnight, maybe more, and she could intercept you. Besides, you’d get caught up in Cyteen-law and police down there, and you know what that could be. Krugers is it. It has to be.” He looked back at Grant’s face in the faint glow of the chart-light, and it struck him suddenly that he might not see him again. “Be careful. For God’s sake, be careful.”

  “Justin.” Grant embraced him hard. “You be careful. Please.”

  “I’ll push you out of here. Go on. Dog the seals down.”

  “The other boat—” Grant said.

  “I’ll take care of it. Go!” Justin turned and ducked out of the door, hopped up on the deck and onto the echoing grating. He cast off the ties then, threw them aboard, shoved the big boat back with his foot and with his hands till it drifted clear, scraping the buffers.

  It swung round sideways, inert and dark, then caught the current off the boathouse and drifted, following the sweep of the main channel, turning again.

  He opened up the second boat and threw up the cover on the engine.

  The starter was electronic. He pulled the solid state board, dropped the cover down, closed the hatch behind him, and dropped the board into the water before he made the jump between the boat and the metal grid of the dock.

  In the same moment he heard the distant, muffled cough of Grant’s engine.

  Solid then, chugging away.

  He cleared the boathouse, latched the door and ran. It was dangerous to be down here on the river-edge, in the dark, dangerous anywhere less patrolled, where something native could have gotten in, weed in the ditch, stuff carried in the air—God knew. He tried not to think about it. He ran, took up on the road again, walking as he caught a stitch in his side.

  He expected commotion. He expected someone on night shift at the airport to have seen the boat, or heard its engine start. But the work at the hangars was noisy. Maybe someone had had a power wrench going. Maybe they thought it was some passing boat from Moreyville or up-Volga, with a balky engine. And they had the bright lights to blind them.

  So far their luck was a hundred percent.

  Till he got to the House and found the kitchen door locked.

  He sat down a while on the steps, teeth chattering, trying to think it through, and gave it a while, time for a boat to get well on its way. But if he sat there the night, then it was unarguable that it was conspiracy.

  If he gave them evidence of that—

  It would land on Jordan.

  So there was nothing to do finally but use his key and trip the silent warnings he knew would be in place by now.

  Security showed up to meet him in the halls by the kitchens. “Ser,” the azi in charge said, “where are you coming from?”

  “I felt like a walk,” he said. “That’s all. I drank too much. I wanted some cold air.”

  The azi called that in to the Security office; Justin waited, expecting the man’s expression to change then, when the order came back. But the azi only nodded. “Good evening, ser.”

  He walked away, weak-kneed, rode the lift up and walked all the lonely way to the apartment.

  The lights came on inside. “No entries since the last use of this key,” the dulcet voice of the Minder said.

  He went into Grant’s room. He picked things up and hung them back in the closet and put them in drawers. He found small, strange things among Grant’s belongings, a tinsel souvenir Jordan had brought back from holiday in Novgorod, a cheap curio spacer patch of the freighter Kittyhawk that he had brought back from Novgorod airport, for Grant, who had not been allowed to go. A photo of the pair of them, aged four, Grant pale-skinned, skinny, and shockingly red-haired, himself in that damned silly hat he had thought was grown-up, digging in the garden with the azi. Another photo of them, at a mutually gawky ten, standing on the fence of the livestock pens, barefoot, toes curled identically pigeon-toed over the rail, arms under chins, both grinning like fools.

  God. It was as if a limb had been cut off, and the shock had not quite gotten to the brain yet, but it had hit his gut, and it told him it was going to get worse.

  Ari would call him now, he had no doubt.

  He went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, hugged his arms about himself and stared at the patterns in the veneer of the table, anything but shut his eyes and see the boat and the river.

  Or think of Ari.

  Only Grant? Merild would ask, when he got that phone message. Merild would take alarm. Merild might well call Reseune and try to talk to Jordan; and he could not afford that: he tried to think what he would say, how he would cover it. Grant could tell Merild enough, maybe, to set Merild working on a rescue of some sort; but, oh, God, if something got to Jordan about Ari and him, either from Grant, from Merild, or from Ari—and Jordan blew up—

  No. Jordan was too cagy to do something without thinking it out—

  The time passed. The air of the apartment felt cold as the chill outside; he wanted to go in to his own bed, and pull the covers about him, but he asked the Minder for more heat and kept to the living room, fighting to stay awake, afraid he would sleep through a Minder call.

  None came.

  Small boats went out of one port and never got to another, that was all. It happened even to experienced pilots.

  He thought about every step he had taken, every choice he had, over and over again. He thought about calling Jordan, telling him everything.

  No, he told himself. No. He could handle it with Ari. Jordan needed help, and Jordan not knowing was the only way it worked.

  iv

  A plane flew over. Grant heard it even above the steady noise of his own engines, and his hands sweated on the wheel as he ran down the clear middle of the river, his meager speed boosted by the current. He had no lights on, not even the small chart-light on the panel, for fear of being spotted. He did not dare increase the speed of the engines now, for fear of widening the white boil and curl of wake that might show to searchers.

  The plane went over and lost itself in dark and distance.

  But in a little time it circled back again: he saw it coming up the river behind him, a searchlight playing over the black waters.

  He put the throttle up full, and felt the easy rock of the boat become an increasing vibration of waves as the bow came up. To hell with the wake, then, and with the floating snags that had sunk many a boat in the Novaya Volga.

  If they had sent boats out from Moreyville, or from the other end of Reseune, and if someone on those boats had a gun, shots could go through the cabin, breach the seals fatally even if they missed him, or go through the hull and maybe hit the fuel tanks—but they had rather put a hole in the boat and slow it with waterlogged compartments. They would not, he was sure, want him dead if they had a choice.

  He did not intend to harm Justin, that was his first determination: not to be used against Justin, nor against Jordan. And beyond that, even an azi had a right to be selfish.

  The plane roared directly over him, throwing the decks into bright light, blinding glare through the cabin windows. The beam passed on a moment, leaving him half blind in the sudden dark. He saw it light the trees on the far side of t
he river, pale gray of native foliage against the night.

  Suddenly the bow fell off to starboard and that floodlit view of the bank turned up off the bow, not the beam. In a moment’s fright he thought the propeller might have fouled, and then he knew it was current he had run into—the Kennicutt’s effluence into the Volga.

  He put the helm over, still blind except for the fleeting glimpse the searchlight had shown him of the wooded ground on the far side. He could run aground. He dared not turn the lights on.

  Then he saw the shadow of the banks, tall trees black against the night sky on either side of an open space of starlit water.

  He drove for it; and the boat shuddered and jolted to impact along the keel, scrape of sand and a shock that threw him violently as the boat slewed out of control.

  He caught himself against the dash then, saw a black wall in front of him and swerved with everything the boat had.

  Something banged against the bow and scraped portside. Snag. Sandbar and snag. He heard it pass aft, saw the clear water ahead of him and hoped to God it was the Kennicutt he was in after that sort-out and not the Volga. He could not tell. It looked the same as the other, just black water, glancing with starlight.

  He risked the chart-light for a second to sneak a look at the compass. Bearing northeast. The Volga could bend that much, but he thought it had to be the Kennicutt. The plane had not come back. It was even possible that the maneuver had confused it, and he was not, God knew, running with the Locator beacon on. Ari’s power was enough to get Cyteen Station in on the hunt, and that plane’s beacon could guide the geosynchronous surveillance satellites to a good fix, but so far as he knew there was no strike capacity on the Locators, and he could still, he hoped, outrun any intercept from Moreyville or further down the Volga.

  First lights after that, Justin had said. Two, maybe three hours further on, up a river that had no further development on its banks. Krugers’ Station was a mining outpost, largely automated, virtually all related to each other: what azi they brought in all got their CIT papers within the year, and a share of Kruger Mines on top of it—a dream of an assignment, the kind of place azi whispered among themselves did exist, if one were very, very good—