Mary Rosenblum (35 page)

“So now what?” Noah asked. ”We give this to the CSF commander … and then what?”

“Do you know anything about the Gaiists?”

“Oh. Them.” Noah rolled his eyes. “Some. I surf the downside media for Dane. Did you know they don’t like us? They’re pretty quiet about that, but you can find it if you look for it. I don’t get why. I mean their whole idea is to make the Earth all clean and pristine, right? So why not send a bunch of people up into orbit? But I guess they’d rather see births really really controlled and keep everybody down there.” He shook his head. “Bunch of crazies if you ask me, but pretty harmless I guess.”

Maybe. Ahni touched the holo base. “Just how much do the Gaiists dislike the Platforms?” They didn’t have enough time to chase any more shadows here. ”Noah, can you search this question from here?

Maybe look at the last year of downside media?”

“Yeah, I can.” Noah nodded, his brow furrowed. “I have a really good AI, so I can do a thorough search pretty fast. I’m a good Synthesist. I kept … keep … Dane up on Earthside media about the Platforms.” He looked away, dismayed by his slip of tense.

“See what you can find out,” Ahni said wearily. Holding pain at bay required a lot of energy. “You’re looking for anything the Gaiists have had to say about the platforms for, say, the past two years at least.”

She closed her eyes, allowing the pain to seep into her consciousness. Her foot throbbed with a dull red agony, and she leaned back against the cushions on the futon, forcing herself to relax, putting that pain into the back of her mind, making her body rest. Vaguely, she was aware of Noah speaking commands over his link, the hum of the ventilation system, the rush of blood through her veins. Where was Dane right now? For a moment, an image formed in her head; Dane sitting on a bench, his expression bleak. It vanished, and she wondered what machinery Li Zhen had put into motion.

“AHNI? ARE YOU awake?” Noah’s voice jolted her from a state beetween sleep and waking and she sat up, stifling a gasp of pain.

“Here. I made some tea. And I thawed a couple of sandwiches from the kitchen wall.”

He had unfolded a small table beside the futon. A mug steamed beside a sandwich on a plate. Ahni picked up the mug as he got fresh ice for her foot and replaced the soaked towel with a dry one. The tea helped. She didn’t think she was hungry until she bit into the sandwich. Then, suddenly, she was starving, and bolted the soy cheese and sliced vegetable stack ravenously. The food made her feel a lot better.

She drank some more tea and sighed as Noah ate his own sandwich. He was worried. “What did you find out?”

“The Gaiists say some scary stuff.” Noah popped the last bite of bread and veggies into his mouth. “Not so much to the popular media, but to small, real local meetings. In person. Like our town–plazas.” He shook his head. “Those transcripts are hard to find, too. Nobody much cares about those little grass-roots local gettogethers, so only the fringe media reports on ‘em. And a lot of those reports that do happen seem to have been deleted from meedia archives. Good thing I already had some search paths set up, or I could have been at this for a week. But that’s the kind of thing we keep an eye on up here –

groundswell opinion. We’ve got some media connections, you know, and we can do a little nudging downside when we need to.” He gave her a crooked smile that masked guilt. “How do you think Cleo and the others could do such a good job up here?”

“This is very organized.” She eyed him.

Noah nodded, looked away. “We all share it … Dane’s vision. We all know what our kids are gonna look like. And the Gaiists …” He shook his head. “I should have picked them up before.” He frowned.

“But I sort of assumed that they were a harmless environmental group and since we’re not part of Earth, they didn’t care about us. Boy was I wrong. And they’re covering their tracks, too–blipping those archives … just in the past few months, looks like.”

“‘What do they say about the platforms?”

“That we are going to suck Earth dry, drain the resources. Become enemies and take over Earth. Mine it. Ahni, it’s not rational.” Noah shook his head, his eyes dark. “Why would we take over Earth? We
left
there. And it’s so much easier to drop stuff down from the Belt than drag it up from downside. Why would we become enemies? But you know what scares me? The major media never gets any of this stuff. Why not?” He frowned. “Why have they kept this hatred of the Platforms so quiet? And it’s
hatred
, Ahni. They don’t just want to see the Platforms controlled, or limited, they want us
destroyed
.” He sounded shaken. “Their approval rating is really going up, too. They do all this community service stuff –

right down at that real local level. They’re the big community heros. I put it all on a data sphere. In case we need it.”

”They’re building popular opinion to blindside established politicians.” Ahni squeezed her eyes shut. “If the Gaiists wanted to destroy the Platforms … ” She bit her lip. “Noah,” she said softly. “How would you make everyone on Earth fear us up here? How would you make them hate everyone? Not just Koi’s family?”

“You’d drop a rock on ‘em,” Noah said flatly. “You drop a good sized rock, just big enough to take out a city, and they’ll empty us out–if they don’t just shoot holes in us.” Horror expanded in his eyes. “That can’t happen,” he said, his voice hushed. “We’ve got lookouts everywhere. And the rock jocks can deflect anything in time. Or blow it up.”

“Noah, could someone subvert the Con? Bring CSF up here if you didn’t want them to?”

He paled. “Point taken. You don’t really think … yeah, you do.” He looked away, his face all sharp edges. “Ahni, there are a lot of safeguards in place. I just don’t think it could happen.”

He was pleading, not asserting and that scared her. “Kyros brought me over from his ‘safe place’,” Ahni said wearily. “He said that the security system had been alerted, that we had to be careful because they were running all kinds of scans to find stray ships.” She let her breath out slowly. “They didn’t spot us, Noah. And I think … he has brought rocks down here before. How big a rock would you need?”

Noah looked down at his hands, lmotted in his lap. “I’d like to say no one would do that … not for all the credit there is,” he said slowly. “But you know–the miners–they’re kind of an odd bunch. You don’t go be a miner because you want to get rich. It’s a long way out there and it’s … it’s a long way. I don’t know that … dropping a rock on Earth would mean all that much to some of them.” He shook his head, like someone waking up from a nighttmare. “I just don’t think you could do it. We’d spot it, coming in.

That’s our whole argument for us bringing rocks down to orbit. We
can’t
miss ‘em.” He glared at her.

“Earth has warning beacons all over the place this side of the Belt. We’ve got rock jocks out grabbing every scrap of floating junk.”

“Kyros will know.” Ahni swung her legs over the side of the futon. “I need to talk to Kyros and then I need to find Li Zhen.”

“The Chairman of Dragon Home?” Noah looked aghast. “Are you crazy? He’s totally against secession.”

“No, he’s not,” Ahni gathered herself, the pain threatening to break through her control. “He has a son, Noah. Like Koi. And my brother intends to betray him.”

Noah stared at her, silent and considering. “It’s all out the lock now anyway. I’m not sure anything we do right now is going to save Dane. So hey, why not knock on Zhen’s door and ask him to play?”

Ahni put weight on her foot, fought down dizziness. Okay, she could make it. Took a cautious step.

Another. Noah put his arm around her and she leaned on him, which helped. They made their way out into the hall. “We’ll have to get back up to the hub without getting arrested,” she said as they made their way down the hallway. “I want Li Zhen in on this before we go to the CSF commander. He has more clout here than I do.”

They were lucky and met no CSF in the hallway. Clearly, the force was stretched thin and as long as no crowd gathered, they were probably content to keep track of this level mostly through the vid eyes. The few residents they passed neither looked nor spoke.

They reached the elevators without incident, and Ahni used her implanted hardware to override the lock and send the car clear up to the hub, as she had on that very first trip here. The diminishing weight on her ankle was a blessing, and by the time they donned the straps and Ahni floated free, she was able to relax some of her tight control. Pushing off with only one foot, she made her way back to Dane’s private lock, her senses tuned for anyone who might be watching for intruders, felt a familiar prod of intent behind them as they neared the lock.

”Wait, Noah.” She caught a planted tube. “We don’t have to find Li Zhen. He just found us.” She turned to face him as he arrowed toward them out of the green distance. As he neared, Ahni recognized the small, handheld tracking module in his hand.
Idiot
, she thought.
Of course he had planted a beacon on
her
. She had never thought to scan herself for one.

He spilled his momentum neatly, drifting gently, two meters away. “This is the one who was to find the data for you?” he asked her in Mandarin.

She nodded. “Noah, meet Li Zhen.”

Noah nodded, tense and nervous.

“Li Zhen, Xai is playing a double game with you,” she said harshly. “He intends to betray you the same way he betrayed our father. He means to destroy Dragon Home and all the platforms.”

”What do you know?” the chairman snapped. “Why should your brother betray me?”

“He serves another master, Li Zhen. The Gaiists. I have proof. They mean to empty the platforms. That proof is in public space, and I have the links.”

“Show me.”

She handed him the data sphere on which Noah had recorded his synthesis of his media search on the Gaiist movement against the platforms. Li Zhen pulled out a pocket desk, dropped the sphere into it.

Minutes crawled by as he skimmed through the information. Finally he looked up, humming with reaction.

“I talked to Nilsson,” he said in English.

Ahni’s chest tightened and she drew a labored breath.

“Where is he?” Noah broke in. “Still on NYUp?”

“I do not find that our goals are … dissimilar.” Li Zhen iggnored Noah, switched back to Mandarin. “I will hear what you know about Huang Xai and what you suspect him of.”

“For that we need Kyros.” She pushed off, heading for the lock, flanked by Li Zhen and Noah both. The lock didn’t respond to Ahni’s palm when they reached it. “Kyros?” She felt a moment of fear that he had left after all.

“Who’s with you?” Kyros’s growl rumbled from the speaker.

“Li Zhen, Kyros. We need you. Fast.”

Silence. Ahni held her breath, her eye on the small green telltale that indicated pressure in the lock, waiting for it to turn yellow, then red, as Kyros blew the lock and took off. Said a small prayer to her ancestors that if he had stuck it out this long, he’d stay.

The lock melted open and she let her breath out in a rush of relief. Kyros faced her, his expression hard.

“You owe me a
lot
.”

”Yes.”

Li Zhen pulled himself past her and through the lock without a word. Kyros gave way before him, still nervous, keeping distance between himself and the Chairman of Dragon Home.

“We are here. With your miner.” Li Zhen faced her as the lock sealed behind them. “Explain.”

“Kyros.” Ahni drew a deep breath. “I think there is a plan to … drop a good sized rock on Earth.” She felt rather than heard Li Zhen’s reaction. “Could someone play hide and seek with someething that big?

Like you played it coming over here?”

“A rock?” Kyros’s eyes narrowed. “Why the hell would anybody want to drop a rock on Earth?”

“To shut down the Platforms,” Ahni said. “All of them. Say they dropped something less than 100 meters in diameter. It might explode in the atmosphere, but it would cause enormous devastaation if it came down anywhere near a population center. And it’s our worst nightmare. You’d have the world population calling for the end of the Platforms in one voice.”

“Why, damn it, why?” Kyros looked shaken.

“Because to the Gaiists, the Platforms are an alien cancer, an enemy of the planet and the planet is their goddess,” Ahni said. “They are behind the uprisings in NYUp.” She turned to Li Zhen. “Elder Brother.”

She switched to Mandarin. “Did you know Xai was working with them? Did he tell you that?” She reached into her singlesuit, handed him the data dot. “This needs to go to the CSF commander. It is the data file of the others who are involved with this.” And I will match you betrayal for betrayal, she thought.

“Your agenda will be destroyed if their agenda succeeds. Which master does my brother serve here, Li Zhen? Where will your son grow up, Elder Brother? Will your father welcome him?”

Li Zhen took the data dot from her. Pocketed it. “I will examine this.” His face and tone were cold and closed. He looked at Kyros spoke English. “Miner, you have not answered her. Is it possible for someone to bring a small M-type asteroid into the gravity of Earth without our beacon satellites’

detection?”

Kyros looked from Li Zhen to Ahni. ”Yes,” he said.

“There are some crazy folk out in the Belt,” Kyros went on. “I guess … if you had contacts on Darkside, on the moon, you could find ‘em. Even the real crazies have to come in once in awhile, and everybody knows who they are. We all sort of give ‘em a wide orbit,” He frowned, thinking hard. “There are a few I know of who could pull it off … get a rock through the screen. They … uh … do that already.” He looked away from Li Zhen. Swallowed. “They’re real careful about it–a few people have gone out of their airlock because they got careless. But the money is real good if you do. Real good. A couple of the beacons … don’t reeally work. Looks like it from this end, but it’s a fake picture, you know? There’s some real talent out there in the fringe. You got to stick with small rocks–under 250

meters. But if you know the screen … there are holes. You use hull mounted receptors and every time you come down to Darkside, you record when the scan beams touch the ship. You do that long enough, you swap your data around with like minded folk, and pretty soon you got a nice three D map of the sentry shell.”