Flight of the Vajra (91 page)

“—unless they didn’t have to share it with any of
their ‘immigrant’ friends,” I said out loud.

“Come again?” Ulli said.

“Where’s the allocation budget in that thing? For
the IPS compensation payout—the breakdown for how much of who gets what for
resettlement and such. Do they even
have
the budget in there?”

Ulli’s face went blank for too long for me to
expect good news.

“Bear in mind,” she said, stumbling over her
words, “it’s not mandatory to have the allocation budget for ratification. It
just states that ‘a budget shall be apportioned’, but it doesn’t
. . . ” She trailed off there, maybe because even to her own ears she
sounded like she was delivering an apology. A moment later she muttered, “I’m
very glad I don’t work for these people anymore.”

“What’s that mean?” Enid had one eye on me, the
other on the mess of news she was sifting through.

“It means,” I said, “the Prince and his other
top-tier cronies don’t have to apportion that budget to anyone but themselves.
Everyone below them can go hang.”

“How is this possible?” Angharad said. She looked
over at Ulli and Cioran—maybe at least as much at the bottle sitting between
them, too. “How could such a thing escape oversight for so long?”

“Because there was nothing to oversee!” I said. A
guess on my part, but no one contradicted me. “It’s all legal; it’s all done by
the book. Besides, who in this cosm expects their sun to go nova—sorry,
‘early-onset red giant stage’—who expects
that
in the course of any
space of less than fifty years? If it did happen, or something at least that
bad, odds are it would be over the course of months or years, not days, so
you’d have plenty of time to pack your bags.”

“That’s the other thing that’s bugging me,” Enid
said. “I’m picking up a lot of people talking in that vein. Why this is
happening so fast, that kind of thing. And there’s theories galore. Number three
is, ‘These things just happen.’ But it’s a
really
distant number three.
Number two is ‘Marius did it.’ Number one is ‘The Prince did it.’
 
”

“Yeah. Never mind
how
,” I groaned. “And
something else just crossed my mind: those few Highenders are not going to
settle for anything less than what they left behind.”

“This is exactly what I was about to point out
myself,” Cioran said, his voice echoing from the inside of his glass. “In
theory they could all get tourist visas and park themselves someplace nice and
bucolic . . . but they’d be paying tourist taxes, not citizen taxes,
and soon they’d want to
live
somewhere—”

“—and there’s no way to do that without actually
buying land,” I went on, “and they’re not going to settle for parking
themselves in space when there’s a perfectly good world somewhere for them.
They’re probably going to get some world to break its population quota. They
could pay them out of pocket more than the fine would be for going over quota
anyway.”

“And why not? That’s what
I
would do.”
Cioran capped the bottle with his glass.

“As would I,” Ulli said, “but there are two other
problems. The first is expectations. Have you ever heard of a Highend, any
Highend—you and me included—who would deign to share a world with anyone that
wasn’t truly ‘them’? I haven’t.”

“It is what sets them apart,” Angharad said. “In
their own minds, it is how they know they are not Old Way. They can afford to
live wastefully enough that a thousand of them fulfill an entire planet’s usage
quota.”

“That sounded almost venomous!” Cioran looked over
Ulli’s shoulder at the Kathaya. “Have
you
been drinking?”

“Is what I say untrue?”

“Well—sadly, no, not at all. She’s right, Ulli.
They’ll want a planet for themselves. Not even a continent would do.”

“And if they’re anything like either of us,” Ulli
said, “they’re not going to shove everything into escrow and wait for a planet
to open up with ninety-nine point something percent of them in pre-restore
limbo. They’ll want a world, and they’ll want it
now
.”

“And since they can’t get one,” Enid said,
scrubbing through a dozen conversations at once where the words
nova
and
solar output
and
conspiracy
all jumped out at both of us, “they’ll
up and just buy one wholesale, is that it?”

“And then everyone else who’s ever waited in line
for a place to live,” I said, “everyone who ever paid out part of their
planet’s profits into an IPS fund, is going to be mad enough to smash something.
You tell me if anyone’s going to sit still for that. Any government that let
that happen would be shown to the door at gunpoint.”

And maybe such an armed revolt would have
you-know-who lending his—
its
—services to help put it down, I thought.

This kind of insight—it’s not like turning on all
the lights at once in a room, I thought. It’s more like dawn: at first,
everything is the same distant, shimmering grey. Then the edges of objects,
then their details, then their colors, until finally the sunrise touches
everything equally.

No. Stop speculating, I told myself. The truth
will out in its own time. Get back to what’s in front of you. Get back to the
problem that needs solving here and now.

I brought my attention back to the people around
me right as Kallhander blew out a sigh and rubbed at his face. Next to him,
Ioné sat back, looking like she’d lost a bet to her worst enemy.

“There is,” Kallhander said, “from all we can
tell, precisely one D-4 class transport within ten hops. It’s not a temporary
elevator, either. It’s an orbital satellite repair dock, which is itself being
decommissioned and overhauled.”

“I checked for others,” Ioné said, “maybe for
cargo originally rated as D-4 that had been composited into an E or even F
class shipment. There were a few, but again, they’re not elevators.”

Kallhander waited for someone else to say
something. When no one did, he put what little hope I had to rest.

“There are no elevators on the way, nor ships, nor
surplus engines. There is no rescue in progress. Not for anyone with no
backups, certainly. And—” He hesitated, making me realize he was about to pound
in yet another nail. “—all ships with domestic registrations have been
impounded.”

And once again,
I heard everyone else
shouting except for myself. I should have been shouting along with them, but
there was too much else filling my head, demanding energy and attention that
didn’t deserve to be wasted. They can’t possibly get away with that, Cioran declared;
why would they toss their own greatest natural resource, their own people? No,
Angharad insisted, it is all too easy for them to do such a thing; they believe
they can always find more people to come to them. Enid and Kallhander shot back
at each other about whether or not it would make sense to commandeer a luxury
liner in IPS’s name and use that (she said why not; he said it wasn’t that
simple, and from all we saw there wasn’t one close enough to matter); I
couldn’t tell which of the two of them was clutching at more straws.

“Angharad,” I said, loud enough to get her
attention and more than a few other peoples’, “I’m going to need you to certify
the ship in your name before we leave port. Not the Achitraka;
your
name.”

“We’re leaving?” Enid said.

“Not the planet. Not just yet. Not unless she says
so.” I pointed at our illustrious leader. “I’m pretty sure your own name
carries clout even without the title attached to it.”

Angharad looked at all of us for a moment, then
shook her head. “As long as there remains hope of something being done, we
shall stay. But let us continue to exhaust the possibility that something is,
in fact, being done. Kallhander—if you can grant me a moment’s time with Ralpartha—”

“If there is any one of us he would still be
willing to speak to,” Kallhander said, “yes, it would be you. This may take a
moment.”

“Folks, I think the word is out for keeps,” Enid
said. She sent everyone a trifold view—top-down tactical, local sensory-surface
mosaic, and at least one run-and-gun first-person POV—of a crowd massing at the
southern edge of the dock lot, a spot no more than a couple of kilometers from
where we were parked. “A couple hundred people just converged in. Looks like
they’re trying to break into the launchpads, but . . . ”

“IPS First Response just got on the scene too,” I
said. “That and the whole place is pretty heavily locked down anyway.” Whoever
was broadcasting the view in the POV panel fell over as a glob of Type D fired
from a riot gun glued him to the ground; the next POV broadcaster backed away
fast as the person in front of him cried out and doubled over from a blow to
the kidneys. Someone in the crowd had body armor and was trying to gate-crash
right through the guards, but they globbed him too, then sliced open his helmet
and ‘hatted him for good measure to shut him up.

“And that’s just one of a bunch of them,” Enid
said, passing around another trifold. “Physical graffiti in the little
roundabout that was outside of the villa, banners off one of the bridges—hey,
Henré, that’s the bridge where we hung out!—and also, someone reprogrammed one
of the windows of a rooftop restaurant. All the same message. ‘THE SUN’S NOT
COMING UP ON US.’
 
”

“I think that speaks for itself,” Ulli said. “By
the way, I’ve tried raising everyone I could get my hands on. Even Farhouad
Tjelma and Lycullis. They left after Marius did. All had their own private
vessels. Seems a great many people were in a hurry to not witness firsthand
what might happen after something of
that
magnitude.”

“Don’t you hate it when they’re right?” Cioran
refilled both their glasses.

“Wait a second!” Enid sent us yet another set of
grids. “There’s at least one guy—oh, three now—they cobbled up some kind of
weird ram or drill or something—they drove it straight into one of the access
tunnels around the perimeter . . . no, wait, there’s a
bunch
of them doing this! It’s all one fakeout after another—IPS is now trying to
lock the whole place down, looks like.”

“A lot of chatter on both sides,” Ioné said. “IPS
is only able to lock down those tunnels so much because they’re used to feed
and drain the protomic reservoir for the whole field.”

“No. They’re not trying to break
into
the
launch field.” I zoomed in on the underground feeds courtesy of what Ioné was
feeding me. “They’re trying to get at the reservoir
under
it.” I started
cross-correlating a few things.

“What, to steal from it?” Enid said.

“That’s just the beginning.” I showed her one of
the stock elevator designs I’d found—a common quick-and-dirty model called the
RBF Winch—and ran it against some of the venues where she’d been harvesting all
that what-the-cosmos-is-going-on chatter. “Best guess is they’re trying to
build an elevator themselves, or a ship. Never going to happen as long as
they’re having guns pointed at them, of course, or that it might take longer to
prop up such a thing than we all have, but I think they felt the same wind blowing
we did.”

“I have Ralpartha waiting,” Kallhander said, in
the compressed way someone did when admitting to a dirty secret. He bent his
head back down, and in that second Ralpartha himself appeared twice—once in the
middle of the room facing Angharad directly, and a second time kneeling down
next to Kallhander as if to whisper into his ear.

When the first one said, “And to what do I owe the
pleasure of this call?”, the second one muttered, “I really hope this was
her
idea and not
yours
.”

“I will come right to the point,” Angharad said,
crisply enough that everyone’s heads, not just Ralpartha’s and Kallhander’s,
were brought to attention. “We have assembled evidence we believe reflects an
indifference to human life on the part of the governing bodies of Bridgehead
and IPS as well.”

Ralpartha—the courteous Ralpartha speaking
directly to Angharad, no less—looked as if he were about to hang up on her.
“You’re going to have to explain that accusation, especially if you plan to go
public with it. Last I checked diplomatic immunity isn’t a license to commit
defamation.”

“Our own independent investigation shows there is
no rescue effort for the timely evacuation of all Bridgehead citizens without
backups. Why is that?”

“I said this before. Rescue efforts are proceeding
for those IPS are obliged to rescue
, according to the terms in the
planetary charter.”

“There is no rescue effort of any discernible size
under way. This has been confirmed.”

“From what evidence did you conclude that? This is
bordering on being offensive, Your Grace.”

“Cargo traffic manifests from the neighboring
systems—”

“Cargo traffic manifests don’t register shipments
that are being IPS-prioritized in the first place!” (The Ralpartha kneeling
next to Kallhander: “Did
you
give her this idea? Was
that
it?”)
“For the sake of operational security, among other things—”

“Her source,” Kallhander said out loud, “was me.”

“Excuse me?”

“We provided her with the unexpurgated manifests,”
Ioné said, just as inappositely quiet and composed as her partner. “None of
them showed IPS-prioritized traffic of the class needed.”

Both Ralparthas turned to stare at them. His
words, when they finally arrived, were so quietly delivered I found myself
waiting with each one of them for the explosion that never came. Not outwardly,
anyway.

“None of us in my echelon,” he said, “ever doubted
for a minute that this whole IPS-advisory, associate,
whatever-you-want-to-call-it position with
her
,
would be
exploited in both directions. We did our best not to mind. We
counted
on
it. It generated a great deal of intelligence. And now it’s clear to me that my
suspicions about the ultimate utility of this partnership were all
well-founded. I was in a minority with my suspicions and I was voted down, but
all that’s in the past now. You can inform Her Grace that she is expected to leave
Bridgehead immediately so that rescue operations can be conducted without any
outside interference. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we already have people out in
the streets making more trouble than we need right now.”

It would have been better if he had just shouted
at us, I thought.

“They have come to the same conclusions we have,
then,” Angharad said.

“Do yourselves and everyone else a favor,”
Ralpartha told her over his shoulder, “and call on them to stop this nonsense. Because
if they don’t listen to
you
, they’re not likely to listen to anyone.” He
turned back on Kallhander. “You can both consider yourselves suspended,
effective immediately, but don’t think that means you don’t still owe us a
report.”

Ralpartha’s last volley was aimed at me. “You might
want to think twice about landing on any other IPS-signatory world as long as
you’re with
this
crew.”

“I like my friends just fine, thank you very
much,” I said.

He disconnected. The whole time he’d been talking,
I’d nursed the urge to pipe the whole conversation through Enid’s MemoCel, the
better to wad it up and symbolically stomp it under my heel after he was done.

“Officers—” Angharad pushed herself off her seat,
walked over to where the two officers were sitting, and to the surprise of
absolutely no one but Kallhander, knelt at their feet with her hands together.

Kallhander reached out, put a hand on her
shoulder, and tried to urge her to stand back up. “Please.”

“I owe you far more than just that,” she said.
“You did just sacrifice an entire career for me.”

“It’s not a sacrificed career. It’s an unpaid
suspension at most, a retraining period—”

“I do not believe you,” she said, with all the
bluntness she had reserved before for Ralpartha. Then, gentler: “Perhaps you
are right, and you have lost little but opportunities you would not have taken
anyway. But until I see otherwise, I cannot make myself believe that for all
this you gave up nothing more than a few pay periods.” Pause. “I cannot
guarantee
anything, but I will strive to not waste this gift.”

She didn’t wait and see if the breath had been
knocked out of them or not. She sat back down and picked up where she had left
off. “Are crowds still attempting to break into the launch area?”

“Best I can tell,” Enid said, “they’re looping
back out and looking for other ways in. IPS already has plenty of ground and
air units on the move, so that probably won’t work either.”

“Cioran, Ulli. Do we still have some way of
contacting the Prince?”

“There is,” Ulli said, “but . . . I
don’t think he’ll want to say much to
me
. Or you, for that matter.”

“I could always say it’s me,” Cioran said. “After
we first showed up here, he whined at me not once but
twice
about why I
didn’t drop by his place in the flesh. Well, now that we
did
—”

“Contact him,” Angharad said, “and find a suitable
pretext. Ask where he plans to go after this so that you might drop by, perhaps
provide an evening’s entertainment.
And
ask him if he would be willing
to close a business deal.”

“Business deal? With you?”

“No, with
you
. See if he would be willing
to sell off the North Loop dock and its protomic reservoir. Specifically the
reservoir and its contents, but having the dock area as well would be
advantageous. I believe all of that is his sovereign property and would not be
subject to IPS appropriation without his approval.”

Cioran opened and shut his mouth a few times in
succession, as if the right answers could just be allowed to fall out, but
settled for just saying, “Well—let me knock at his back door, then. Can’t
imagine he’s packed himself up yet.”

“No,” Ulli said, “after all, would
you
bother dragging a body around if you didn’t have to?”

“You want to tell me what that plan’s all about?”
I asked Angharad.

“Buying both time and space.” Angharad showed me a
projection of the dock area, flooded about four-fifths full with red. “The
shaded area is an estimate for how much room would be needed to hold the entire
unprotected Old Way populace, assuming one-and-a-half cubic meters per person,
absolute minimum.”

 “Right,” I said, “but how do we get the whole
gang of them out of this system on our one piddling little engine? Okay, two—I
added a second one to this design because I figured it would come in handy, but
you need at least one engine for every four, maybe five of those cargo modules
we’re cramming them into, or you can’t generate an entanglement envelope big
enough.”

“What is the solution?”

“What else? A shitload more engines!” —
Cioran,
if you get through,
I CLed him,
see if he’s got engines stockpiled that
he’s willing to sell off as well.

—Eh, doubtful. Last I remember he doesn’t bother.
Plus, with the rich, it’s all about bragging rights. A substrate mountain that you
can sculpt into the ski trail of your choice—that’s bragworthy. A spare
stockpile of engines? Yawn. You see?

—Worth a shot, still. I’ll beat some bushes on
my end, too. Is Prince Precious answering?

—Grudgingly, yes. Looping Her Grace in now.

I let Angharad devote the full measure of her
attention to listening in on that conversation. Better for both of us, I
thought: it gives us each a chance to think our way out of this. Time for me to
dig out a name or two on my own and work a few fresh miracles.

“Anjai?” I called. “Henré here. You’re still
planetside?”

“I am, but . . . I’m seeing the same
things you are, I take it.” Anjai’s CL link revealed he was near a window in
what looked like a first-floor residence, with a wide, lazily-curving,
cobbled-pavement street outside. A bulky shape that couldn’t have been anything
but an IPS troop transport shambled past. “They turned off our substrate supply
anyway, so no point in staying. I have a ship out first thing this coming
morning. Some friends of mine are also leaving—they got lucky in the exit
lottery, picked a low number.”