That's where the challenge would begin, of course. For Indian supply lines would stretch all the way across Burma by then, and the Thai Air Force was formidable, especially since they had been observed testing a new temporary airfield system that could be built in many cases during the time a bomber was airborne. Not really worth it, bombing airfields when they could be replaced in two or three hours.
So even though the intelligence reports from inside Thailand were very good--detailed, accurate, and recent--on the most important points they didn't matter. There were few meaningful targets, given the strategy the Thai were using.
Petra knew Suriyawong, the Battle School grad who was running strategy and doctrine in Bangkok. He was good. But to Petra it looked a little suspicious that the new Thai strategy began, abruptly, only a few weeks after Petra and Achilles arrived in India from Russia. Suriyawong had already been in place in Bangkok for a year. Why the sudden change? It might be that someone had tipped them off about Achilles' presence in Hyderabad and what that might mean. Or it might be that someone else had joined Suriyawong and influenced his thinking.
Bean.
Petra refused to believe that he was dead. Those messages had to be from him. And even though Suriyawong was perfectly capable of thinking of the new Thai strategy himself, it was such a comprehensive set of changes, without any sign of gradual development, that it cried out for the obvious explanation--it came from a fresh set of eyes. Who else but Bean?
The trouble was, if it was Bean, Achilles' intelligence sources inside Thailand were so good that it was quite possible Bean would be spotted. And if Achilles' earlier attempt to kill Bean had failed, there was no chance that Achilles would refrain from trying again.
She couldn't think about that. If he had saved himself once, he could do it again. After all, maybe someone had excellent intelligence sources inside India, too.
And it might not be Bean leaving those Briseis messages. It might be Dink Meeker, for instance. Only that really wasn't Dink's style. Bean had always been something of a sneak. Dink was confrontational. He would go on the nets proclaiming that he knew Petra was in Hyderabad and demanding that she be released at once. Bean was the one who had figured out that the Battle School kept track of where students were by monitoring transmitters in their clothing. Take off all your clothes and go around buck naked, and the Battle School administrators wouldn't have a clue where you were. Not only had Bean thought of it, he had done it, climbing around in airshafts in the middle of the night. When he told her about it, as they waited around on Eros for the League War to settle down so they could go home, Petra hadn't really believed him at first. Not until he looked her coldly in the eye and said, "I don't joke, and if I did, this isn't particularly funny."
"I didn't think you were joking," said Petra. "I thought you were bragging."
"I was," said Bean. "But I wouldn't waste my time bragging about things I hadn't actually done."
That was Bean--admitting his faults right along with his virtues. No false modesty, and no vanity, either. If he bothered to talk to you at all, he never shaped his words to make himself look better or worse than he was.
She hadn't really known him in Battle School. How could she? She was older, and even though she noticed him and spoke to him a few times--she always made a point of speaking to new kids who were getting the pariah treatment, since she knew they needed friends, even if it was only a girl--she simply hadn't had much reason to talk to him.
And then there was the disastrous time when Petra had been suckered into trying to give Ender a warning--which turned out to be bogus, and in fact Ender's enemies were using Petra's attempt to warn Ender as the opportunity to jump him and beat him up. Bean was the one who saw through it and broke it up. And, quite naturally, he leapt to the conclusion that Petra was part of the conspiracy against Ender. He had continued to suspect her for quite a while. Petra wasn't really sure when he finally believed in her innocence. But it had been a barrier between them for a long time on Eros. So it wasn't until after the war ended that they even had a chance to get to know each other.
That was when Petra realized what Bean really was. It was hard to see past his small size and think of him as anything other than a preschooler or launchy or something. Even though everyone knew that he was the one that would have been chosen to take Ender's place, if Ender had broken under the strain of battle. A lot of them resented the fact. But Petra didn't. She knew Bean was the best of Ender's jeesh. It didn't bother her.
What was Bean, really? A dwarf. That's what she had to realize. With adult dwarfs, you could see in their faces that they were older than their size would indicate. But because Bean was still a child, and had none of the short-limbed deformations of dwarfism, he looked like the age his size implied. If you talked to him like a child, though, he tuned you out. Petra never had done that, so except when he thought she was a traitor to Ender, Bean always treated her with respect.
The funny thing was, it was all based on a misunderstanding. Bean thought Petra talked to him like a regular human being because she was so mature and wise that she didn't treat him like a little kid. But the truth was, she did treat him exactly the way she treated little kids. It's just that she always treated little kids like adults. So she got credit for being understanding, when in fact she was just lucky.
By the time the war was over, though, it didn't matter. They knew they were going home--all of them, it turned out, but Ender--and once they got back to Earth, they expected they wouldn't see each other again. So there was a kind of freedom, caution tossed to the wind. You could say what you wanted. You didn't have to take offense at anything because it wouldn't matter in a few months. It was the first time they could actually have fun.
And the person Petra enjoyed the most was Bean.
Dink, who had been close to Petra for a while in Battle School, was a little miffed by the way Petra was always with Bean. He even accused her--obliquely, because he didn't want to get frozen out completely--of having something romantic going on with Bean. Well, of course he thought that way--puberty had already struck Dink Meeker, and like all boys that age, he thought everybody's mental processes were infused with testosterone.
It was something else, though, between Petra and Bean. Not brother and sister, either. Not mother-son or any other weird psychofake analogy she could think of. She just . . . liked him. She had spent so long having to prove to prickly, envious, and frightened boys that she was, in fact, smarter and better at everything than they were, that it took her quite by surprise to be with someone so arrogant, so absolutely sure of his own brilliance, that he didn't feel at all threatened by her. If she knew something that he didn't know, he listened, he watched, he learned. The only other person she'd known who was like that with her was Ender.
Ender. She missed him terribly sometimes. She had tutored him--and taken a lot of heat from Bonzo Madrid, their commander at the time, for doing it. And as it became clear what Ender was, and she joined gladly with those who followed him, obeyed him, gave themselves to him, she nevertheless had a secret place in her memory where she kept the knowledge that she had been Ender's friend at a time when no one else had the courage. She had made a difference in his life, and even when others thought she had betrayed him, Ender never thought that.
She loved Ender with a helpless mixture of worship and longing that led to foolish dreams of impossible futures, tying her life with his until they died. She fantasized about raising children together, the most brilliant children in the world. About being able to stand beside the greatest human being in the world--for so she thought he was--and having everybody recognize that he had chosen her to stand with him forever.
Dreams. After the war, Ender was beaten down. Broken. Finding out that he had actually caused the extermination of the Formics was more than he could bear. And because she, too, had broken during the war, her shame kept her away from him until it was too late, until they had divided Ender from the rest of them.
Which is w
hy she knew that her feelings toward Bean were completely different. No such dreams and fantasies. Just a sense of complete acceptance. She belonged with Bean, not the way a wife belonged with a husband or, God forbid, a girlfriend with a boyfriend, but rather the way a left hand belonged with the right. They simply fit. Nothing exciting about it, nothing to write home about. But it could be counted on. She imagined that, of all the Battle School kids, of all the members of Ender's jeesh, it would be Bean that she would remain close to.
Then they got off the shuttle and were dispersed throughout the world. And even though Armenia and Greece were relatively close together--compared to, say, Shen in Japan or Hot Soup in China--they never saw each other, they never even wrote. She knew that Bean was going home to meet a family that he had never known, and she was busy trying to get involved with her own family again. She didn't exactly pine for him, or he for her. And besides, they didn't need to hang out together or chat all the time for her to know that, left hand with right hand, they were still friends, still belonged together. That when she needed someone, the first person she should call on was Bean.
In a world that didn't have Ender Wiggin in it, that meant he was the person she loved most. That she would miss most if anything happened to him.
Which is why she could pretend that she wasn't going to worry about Bean getting folded by Achilles, but it wasn't true. She worried all the time. Of course, she worried about herself, too--and maybe a little more about herself than about him. But she'd already lost one love in her life, and even though she told herself that these childhood friendships wouldn't matter in twenty years, she didn't want to lose the other.
Her desk beeped at her.
There was a message in the display.
When did I designate this as naptime? Come see me.
Only Achilles wrote with such peremptory rudeness. She hadn't been napping. She had been thinking. But it wasn't worth arguing with him about it.
She logged off and got up from her desk.
It was evening, getting dark outside. Her mind really had wandered. Most of the others on the day shift in Planning and Doctrine had already left, and the night response team was coming in. A couple of the day shift were still at their desks, though.
She caught a glance from Virlomi, one of the late ones. The girl looked worried. That meant she probably had done something in response to the Briseis posting, and now feared repercussions. Well, she was right to worry. Who knew how Achilles would speak or write or act if he was planning to kill somebody? Petra's personal opinion was that he was always planning to kill someone, so there was no difference in his behavior to warn you if you were next. Go home and try to get some sleep, Virlomi. Even if Achilles has caught you trying to help me and has decided to have you killed, you won't be able to do anything about it, so you might as well sleep the sleep of a child.
Petra left the big barn of a room they all worked in and moved through the corridors as if in a trance. Had she been asleep when Achilles wrote to her? Who cared.
As far as Petra knew, she was the only one in Planning and Doctrine who even knew where Achilles' office was. She had been in it often, but was not impressed by the privilege. She had the freedom of a slave or a captive. Achilles let her intrude on his privacy because he didn't think of her as a person.
One wall of his office was a 2D computer display, now showing a detailed map of the India-Burma border region. As reports came in from troops in the field and from satellites, it was updated by clerks, so Achilles could glance at it any time and see the best available intelligence on placement. Apart from that, the room was spartan. Two chairs--not comfortable ones--a table, a bookcase, and a cot. Petra suspected that somewhere on the base there was a comfortable suite of rooms with a soft bed that was never used. Whatever else Achilles was, he wasn't a hedonist. He never cared much about personal comfort, not that she had seen, anyway.
He didn't take his eyes off the map when she came in--but she was used to that. When he made a point of ignoring her, she took it as his perverse way of paying attention to her. It was when he looked right at her without seeing her that she felt truly invisible.
"The campaign's going very well," said Achilles.
"It's a stupid plan, and the Thai are going to cut it to shreds."
"They had a sort of coup a few minutes ago," said Achilles. "The commander of the Thai military blew up young Suriyawong. Terrible case of professional jealousy, apparently."
Petra tried to keep from showing her sadness at Suriyawong's death and her disgust at Achilles. "You're not seriously expecting me to believe you had nothing to do with it?"
"Well, they're blaming it on Indian spies, of course. But there were no Indian spies involved."
"Not even the Chakri?"
"Definitely not spying for India," said Achilles.
"For whom, then?"
Achilles laughed. "You're so untrusting. My Briseis."
She had to work at staying relaxed, at not betraying anything when he called her that.
"Ah, Pet, you are my Briseis, don't you realize?"
"Not really," said Petra. "Briseis was in somebody else's tent."
"Oh, I have your body with me, and I get the product of your brain, but your heart still belongs to someone else."
"It belongs to me," said Petra.
"It belongs to Hector," said Achilles. "But. . . how can I bear to tell you this? Suriyawong was not alone in his office when the building was blown to bits. Another person contributed scraps of flesh and bone and a fine aerosol of blood to the general gore. Unfortunately, this means I can't drag his body around the walls of Troy."
Petra was sick inside. Had he heard her tell Virlomi, "I am Briseis"? And whom was he talking about, saying those things about Hector?
"Just tell me what you're talking about or don't," said Petra.
"Oh, don't tell me you haven't seen those little messages all over the forums," said Achilles. "About Briseis, and Guinevere, and every other tragic romantic heroine who got trapped with some overbearing bunduck."
"What about them?"
"You know who wrote them," said Achilles.
"Do I?"
"I forgot. You refuse to play guessing games. All right, it was Bean, and you knew that."
Petra felt unwanted emotions welling up--she suppressed them. If those messages were posted by Bean, then he had lived through the previous assassination attempt. But that would mean Bean was "HectorVictorious," and Achilles' little allegory meant that Bean was indeed in Bangkok, and Achilles had spotted him and tried again to kill him. He had died along with Suriyawong.
"I'm glad to have you to tell me what I know. It saves my having to actually use my own memory."
"I know it's tearing you up, my poor Pet. The funny thing is, dear Briseis, Bean was just a bonus. It was Suriyawong that we targeted from the start."
"Fine. Congratulations. You're a genius. Whatever it is you want me to say so you'll shut up and let me get some dinner."
Talking rudely to Achilles was the only illusion of freedom Petra was able to retain. She figured it amused him. And she wasn't dumb enough to talk to him that way in front of anyone else.
"You had your heart set on Bean saving you, didn't you?" said Achilles. "That's why when old Graff sent that stupid request for information, you tipped that Virlomi kid to try responding to Bean."
Petra tasted despair. Achilles really did monitor everything.
"Come on, the water fountain's the most obvious place to bug," said Achilles.
"I thought you had important things to do."
"Nothing's more important in my life than you, Pet," said Achilles. "If I could just get you to come into my tent."
"You've kidnapped me twice. You watch me wherever I go. I don't know how I could be farther in your tent than I am."
"In . . . my . . . tent," said Achilles. "You're still my enemy."
"Oh, I forgot, I'm supposed to be so eager to please my captor that I surrender my volition to you."
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"If I wanted that, I'd have you tortured, Pet," said Achilles. "But I don't want you that way."
"How kind of you."
"No, if I can't have you freely with me, as my friend and ally, then I'll just kill you. I'm not into torture."
"After you've used my work."
"But I'm not using your work," said Achilles.
"Oh, that's right. Because Suriyawong is dead, so you don't need to worry now about having any real opposition."
Achilles laughed. "Sure. That's it."
Which meant, of course, that she hadn't understood at all.
"It's easy to fool a person you keep living in a box. I only know what you tell me."
"But I tell you everything," said Achilles, "if only you were bright enough to get it."
Petra closed her eyes. She kept thinking of poor Suriyawong. So serious all the time. He had done his best for his country, and then it was his own commander-in-chief who killed him. Did he know? I hope not.
If she kept thinking of poor Suriyawong, she wouldn't have to think of Bean at all.
"You're not listening," said Achilles.
"Oh, thanks for telling me that," said Petra. "I thought I was."
Achilles was about to say something else, but then he cocked his head. The hearing aid he wore was a radio receiver tied to his desk. Somebody had just started talking to him.
Achilles turned from her to his desk. He typed a few things, read a few things. His face showed no emotion--but that was a real change, since he had been smiling and pleasant until the voice came. Something had gone wrong. Indeed, Petra knew him well enough now that she thought she recognized the signs of anger. Or maybe--she wondered, she hoped--fear.
"They aren't dead," Petra said.
"I'm busy," he said.
She laughed. "That's the message, isn't it? Once again, your assassins have piffed it. If you want a job done right, Achilles, you've got to do it yourself."