Deadman Switch (15 page)

Aikman didn't reply, and after a moment of silence Kutzko stepped over and extended his hand. Without looking at him, Aikman dropped the cyl into the open palm. “It doesn't matter,” he said, still with his back to me. “In a week she'll be
dead.
And there's not a putrid thing you or anyone else can do to stop it.”

“We'll see,” I told him, trying to sound more confident than I felt.

Perhaps he sensed that; or perhaps he knew much better than I what I was up against. “Oh, she'll be dead, all right,” he bit out, the confidence in his voice as genuine as the gloating. “And if you don't stay out of my way, I may even arrange to have you as official witness to her execution. Remember that the next time you think about invading my privacy.”

He left. “Probably makes friends wherever he goes,” Kutzko commented wryly. But I could sense that some of the sarcasm in his voice was merely there for cover. Beneath it—

Beneath it, and in his eyes, was a kind of uneasiness I'd never seen in him before.

“Legal reps are often like that,” I shrugged, deciding to ignore the uneasiness I was reading. If what I'd just done really bothered him, he'd bring it up in his own good time. “Just remember that
we
only have to put up with him for a few more days;
he's
stuck with himself permanently.”

Kutzko snorted. “He's welcome to it. I wonder if he's like this with everyone.”

“I doubt it. Not everyone has a Watcher with them.”

Kutzko's uneasiness took on a tinge of guilt. “Yeah. Well …”

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked, gesturing to the cyl in his hand.

“Give it to Mr. Kelsey-Ramos, of course. Why?—you wanted to keep it our little secret?”

I shrugged. “I
did
sort of imply that if Aikman surrendered the cyl we'd keep his squalling to the governor to ourselves.”

“You shouldn't make promises you can't keep,” he growled. “I have to report this, and you know it.”

I just looked at him, and after a minute he sighed. “Oh, all right—I'll gloss over that part if I can. Though I'll bet HTI will be madder at Aikman than Mr. Kelsey-Ramos will—getting Paquin thrown out of the reception meant she was here when the saboteurs tried to get in.”

I hadn't thought of it that way, but he was right,
God has ensnared the wicked in the work of their own hands …
“Good point,” I agreed.

Idly, he rolled the cyl across his palm. “I suppose I'd better get this to Mr. Kelsey-Ramos.”

I nodded. “When I left him he was in Schock's stateroom getting ready to start sifting through the HTI cyls,” I offered.

“Okay.” He hesitated. “Gilead … does Aikman have a real case?”

“In other words, can I really read minds?”

He grimaced. “Maybe I should ask how
much
of people's minds can you read.”

I sighed. “I've been working for Lord Kelsey-Ramos for eight years,” I reminded him. “If I could read anything more than emotions and surface impressions, don't you think I could easily have stolen the Carillon Group out from under him by now?”

“Even knowing you'd have to answer to God for doing it?” he asked pointedly.

“Aaron Balaam darMaupine felt God wanted him to establish a theocracy on Bridgeway,” I countered evenly. “He would have held onto his power a lot longer if he could have read the minds of those who eventually betrayed him.”

“Point,” Kutzko agreed, some of the tension in his sense easing. “Old Balaam's Ass
did
crumble pretty quickly once the Patri woke up to what he was doing.”

I winced to myself at Kutzko's careless, even automatic epithet. DarMaupine's humility name had been an easy one for the Patri to turn against him: Balaam, the Old Testament prophet who'd had to be told by his own donkey that an angel of death was waiting for him in the road ahead. It was probably the only scriptural passage that even the most rabidly unreligious in the Patri and colonies knew. “Yes, he did,” I agreed. “The original Watcher elders didn't unlock any hidden power of the human mind, Mikha. They just learned how to truly
see
the universe around them.”

“Yeah. Well …” Kutzko grimaced, then shrugged fractionally. “You have to admit it gets blazing spooky sometimes. Anyway … I've still got to go find Mr. Kelsey-Ramos. See you later.”

“Right.”

He left. I waited a minute, then followed, heading back to my own stateroom. He was right, of course: Watcher abilities could indeed be spooky to those who didn't understand.

To those of us who
did
understand … there were perhaps dangers the elders had never even considered.
God does not see as human beings see; they look at appearances but God looks at the heart
…

Had we, in our human pride, tried to usurp that role for ourselves? Had that been, in fact, the underlying root of Aaron Balaam darMaupine's treason?—the belief that with God's power to see even partway into men's souls he had also inherited God's power to rule?

Had that pride led to the persecution the entire Watcher sect now suffered under?

I had none of the answers. Not in eleven years of searching for them.

I
'D ANTICIPATED IT, EXPECTED
it, convinced Randon it would happen. Even so, I was still surprised when Governor Rybakov arrived at the
Bellwether
the next morning.

“Let me first state for any record you happen to have running,” she said after the formalities of greeting were out of the way, “that my presence here is in no way an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing or knowledgeable complicity in wrongdoing.”

“Of course,” Randon agreed calmly. “Just as by asking you here to retrieve official property I'm in no way accusing you of any such activities.”

For a moment they eyed each other in cool silence, while I sat at the third point of the triangle and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Rybakov broke first. “May I have them?” she asked.

Wordlessly, Randon reached into his desk and pulled out the customs IDs we'd taken from the would-be saboteurs the previous evening. Equally wordlessly, Rybakov took them, gave each a sour glance, and slid them into a pocket beneath her capelet.

“I presume you have an explanation,” Randon suggested.

“Certainly I have one. Is there any particular reason you deserve to hear it?”

Randon glanced at me, back to Rybakov. “Would it help if I assured you I don't intend to make any of this public?”

It would indeed help, I could tell. Rybakov's tension level decreased noticeably as she decided he was serious. “It came as most things do in politics,” she growled at last. “I owed a favor; it was collected.”

“What kind of a favor?”

“None of your business,” she said evenly.

Again Randon glanced at me. I shrugged in return—all I could tell was that it was something personal, and that it probably really
was
none of his business. “May I ask, then, who it was who collected on the favor?”

“I'd rather not say.”

“It had to be someone from HTI, of course,” Randon continued as if she hadn't spoken. “Chun Li?—or was it Blake or Karash? Or one of the middle-level people doing the managers' dirty work for them?”

“I'd rather not say,” Rybakov repeated, more emphatically this time.

“Blake,” I murmured.

Both sets of eyes turned to me: Randon's with an almost smug satisfaction, Rybakov's with a mixture of anger and resignation. “You sure?” Randon asked.

“It was the name she reacted to,” I told him.

“Ah.” He shrugged. “Well, it can't always be the unobvious one, can it?”

Rybakov seemed to brace herself. “And now … ?”

Randon raised an eyebrow. “And now what? As I said, Governor, I don't intend to either press charges or make this matter public. As far as I'm concerned, it's an internal matter between the Carillon Group and one of its subsidiaries. We'll deal with it from Portslava.”

“I see.” Again, she seemed to measure his words. “May I ask, then, whether or not you've had a chance to examine the records HTI was so anxious to recover?”

It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Abruptly, the sparring-level tension in the room jumped an order of magnitude. A mutually held secret, I decided, reading the identical emotion in both of them. A secret neither of them really wanted to discuss. “My financial expert and I went over them last evening,” Randon told her after a brief pause.

The muscles in Rybakov's face tightened still further. A shared secret, for certain. “And what do you plan to do about it?” she asked quietly.

“That'll be up to my father and the rest of the Carillon board to decide,” he said, his voice heavy with condemnation. “And probably the High Judiciary, as well.”

Rybakov's face darkened with anger … but it was anger tinged with the awareness that she was standing on a warm ice bridge. “Before you pass judgment, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos,” she said, “you should do me the courtesy of listening to my side of the story. And perhaps trying to understand the dilemma Solitaire as a whole is in.”

He cocked his head slightly to the side. “I'm listening,” he invited.

She glanced pointedly in my direction. “Perhaps this is something best kept between the two of us.”

Clearly, Rybakov wanted to get rid of me. Just as clearly, Randon wasn't going to have any of that. “I already told you that my financial expert knows,” he reminded her.

“Who presumably is better able to see the financial and legal consequences,” she retorted. “As well as just the—” She broke off.

“As well as the ethical ones?” Randon finished for her with a snort. He turned to me, and I braced myself for whatever was coming. “We're talking about smuggling, Benedar,” he told me. “The illegal transport of metals out of Solitaire system.”

The mental bracing did little good. For a half dozen heartbeats I still just stared at him, totally stunned. “But that's impossible,” I managed at last. “How do they—?”

And then it hit me, a delayed-action kick, and my mouth went suddenly dry. “They …
kidnap
people for the Deadman Switch?”

“What, is that so hard to believe of our fallen human race?” Rybakov snorted cynically. “I thought you religious types were always weeping and wailing about how wicked we all are.”

Randon's eyes flicked back to her. “You were going to tell me your side of it,” he reminded her.

She glared at him, softened a bit. “Try to understand, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos, that I'm caught between two diametrically opposed requirements here. I'm sworn to uphold Patri law within Solitaire system, yes; but at the same time I'm under a less formal but no less pressing obligation to keep the supply of metals flowing from the ring mines. There's no easy way to reconcile these two goals.”

“When it's a matter of people's lives-—” I broke off as, in her eyes, sour contempt mixed with a sense that she'd indeed been right about not wanting to tell me about the smuggling. The righteously self-blind Watcher, unable to see the Broad Scheme Of Things …

“In case you haven't noticed,” Rybakov told me, “the decision's already been made that Solitaire is worth people's lives.”

“Condemned criminals' lives,” Randon corrected her. “Not those of innocents.”

She glowered at him. “All right, then, fine. You and your Watcher friend want to play God? Tell me how
you'd
go about stopping smugglers from moving in and out of a system this size.”

Randon and I eyed each other. “At the risk of stating the obvious,” Randon said, “what is Commodore Freitag doing about the problem? Between parties, that is?”

Rybakov snorted gently. “So you noticed the commodore's fondness for vodkyas, did you? That's part of the problem right there.”

I remembered back to our brief meeting with Commodore Freitag at the governor's mansion … to my sense that the man wasn't nearly as slowed down as he'd appeared. The same tolerance to vodkyas Lord Kelsey-Ramos had often used to his advantage … “Your father enjoys parties, too,” I murmured to Randon.

He eyed me thoughtfully, and I could see he'd picked up on what I was saying. “The same way?” he asked, making sure.

“Very similar, at least.”

“Um.” He looked back at Rybakov. “What size force does Freitag have to work with when he
isn't
partying?”

“Two Pravilo destroyers and thirteen or fourteen insystem corvettes,” she said. “A shade on the light side for covering two planets and a gas giant ring system, wouldn't you say?”

“I would indeed,” he admitted. “Hasn't he tried to get a larger force?”

“Roughly twice a month. So far the ships aren't available. Or so the excuse goes.”

A sour look flicked across Randon's expression. “As if, you mean, someone high up in the Patri didn't
want
him to have any real chance of stopping the smuggler trade?”

She held his gaze steadily. “You said it. I didn't.”

I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Governor,” I spoke up as they both looked at me, “but you said the force covers
two
planets?”

“Solitaire and Spall,” she said shortly. “Double planet, remember? Or aren't you religious types able to count anything that doesn't come in threes, sevens, or twelves?”

“Spall?” Randon frowned. “Since when is Spall inhabited?”

“Oh, there've always been a handful of scientific parties poking around up there,” she shrugged. “The theory being that every planet has
some
value to it, I guess.” Her sense abruptly hardened. “Though at the moment Spall's primary value seems to be as a dumping ground for Halloas.”