Juggler of Worlds Page 14

  “Why,” Sangeeta echoed. “I don’t know why.”

  “Someone very savvy has gone into the coercion business.” Sigmund waved off her objection. “We’ll get to who someone is.”

  He fished his pocket comp out from under his armored vest. “Medusa.” The gorgon’s head appeared, her crown of snakes writhing. “Access Archive AE Two.”

  “AE Two?” Sangeeta asked.

  Alter Ego Two. It was one of six identities Sigmund maintained, fully realized personae who existed only in databases around Sol system. He took special pride in AE Two, an ARM agent who lived beyond his means. “The code name for a source,” he said. “Medusa, play back the recent delivery to AE Two.”

  The gorgon vanished, replaced by a surveillance-camera view into a parcel-delivery transfer booth. Panel lights flickered and an envelope materialized. Projecting from the envelope, in an animated hologram, snarled a three-headed beast.

  “Cerberus, the eternally watchful guardian of Hades,” Sigmund offered. Did Sangeeta remember that Puppeteers took names from Greek mythology? “My source got it two days ago.”

  Feather frowned. “What kind of source?”

  “A financially disadvantaged ARM,” he answered. “That’s why he was approached.”

  Sangeeta turned to gaze out the window. “Help me, Sigmund. A scary envelope. By implication, delivered to someone who can be coerced or bribed. What does this have to do with the riots, or why you’re not in an autodoc where you belong? Or with Puppeteers, for tanj sake?”

  “I asked Medusa to trace the envelope. That should be easy. As you saw, it came by transfer booth. Medusa?”

  “I couldn’t.” Snakes thrashed and hissed. “The originating coordinates were nulled. The authentication check on the sender ID appears to have been bypassed. And there’s no payment record for the teleportation.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Feather said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Oh no.” Red-faced, Sangeeta turned toward him. “I see where this is going. The transfer-booth system was meddled with, and Gregory Pelton’s family owns a controlling interest in the company. Sigmund, I’m not going back to Calis . . . the Secretary-General with wild accusations about the Peltons. You know she won’t tolerate that.”

  He started shaking his head; it hurt and he stopped. “The general public only suspects transfers are traceable. Pelton certainly knows it. There’s ARM gear integrated throughout his network. Subverting the system points right back at him. He wouldn’t do it. Someone hoping to implicate him might.”

  Sangeeta crossed her arms across her chest. “Then who?”

  He shrugged. Who hadn’t heard the rumors that Puppeteers first sold a Pelton the underlying technology?

  “What was in the note?” Feather asked.

  The stims had started to fade. “An enumeration of AE Two’s debt. A list of questionable deposits made into his accounts.” Sigmund smiled wearily. He took a perverse pride in the traps he’d set. Each, in its own way, was a thing of beauty.

  “That’s it?” Sangeeta said. “No demands?”

  “They’ll come later,” Feather guessed. “In the next letter. First, someone wants AE Two to sweat.”

  That would be a neat trick, Sigmund thought. Words grew harder to find, and even harder to get out of his mouth. “Back to the Puppeteers. Feather, I’m going to make a confession here, lest you start a witch hunt while I’m in the autodoc. AE Two is a computerized figment—I wrote him—but as far as personnel records are concerned, he’s an ARM who reports directly to me.

  “Who but a Puppeteer would work so hard to get a secret source into the Puppeteer task force?”

  26

  Blue and brown and white, the planet hung above the horizon like a priceless jewel. Two small continents and part of a third presented themselves. Cyclonic storms dotted the sea-girt equatorial band. Large ice caps gleamed. The narrow night-side rim glimmered by moonlight.

  The cratered moonscape from which Achilles stood observing could not have been more different.

  Under other circumstances, the pristine globe overhead would have made an excellent new farm world for the Concordance. It would prove as alluring to Kzinti and humans. By drawing human and Kzinti attention, it would shelter all Citizens in their flight. The herd would never learn what happened here, of course, but he did not doubt their approval. Any Citizen would opt for safety over a bit less synthesized food in his diet.

  Achilles busied his mouths with the apparatus before him, its controls awkward through his pressure suit. He had precalibrated all the units aboard Remembrance, but each required final tuning on-site. The geometric and geophysical constraints were exacting. He took every factor into account: the precise slope at each position, the exact altitude, the tiny perturbations in surface gravity due to subsurface mass concentrations.

  Each painstaking adjustment took time and intense concentration.

  The horizon loomed eerily near; the little moon’s gravity seemed inadequate to hold him to this spot. Cosmic rays sleeted down. Here outside the impregnable hull of his ship, a meteor might strike at any moment. . . .

  A strident polyphony in his headsets jerked Achilles to alertness. “Attention. Danger. Respond,” bellowed the synthesized voices of the shipboard computer. “Attention. Danger. Respond.”

  The terminator line had visibly shifted on the beautiful world overhead, its changing phase a crude but serviceable timepiece. He had lapsed into catatonia too quickly even to notice. The computer had recognized his immobility.

  “Acknowledged,” Achilles intoned. He made his final, minuscule adjustments. “Apparatus readout?”

  “Aligned within tolerance,” the computer answered.

  He cycled through the air lock. He still wore the pressure suit, since every point on this small moon was close. Three more units to put into position.

  The planet set behind the horizon as Remembrance arced to where he would emplace the next unit. Fear and worry tugged at him—but so did excitement. What he attempted had never before been done. He was at the boundaries of science. To accomplish what he hoped to achieve here, Nature exploded entire stars. He had a defter touch.

  How odd it was that the timidity of Kzinti had brought him to this threshold! How odd to realize that Maintainer-of-Equipment was among the bravest of the current generation. Six disastrous wars had rendered the “Heroes” impotent as a counterweight to the humans.

  With a featherlight touch of thrusters, Achilles lowered the ship onto the pale regolith. Dust clouds raised by the landing slowly cleared. Most settled glacially onto the powdery surface; the weak gravity allowed some to dissipate into space.

  Clutching a stepping disc, Achilles stepped down gingerly from the air lock, leaving its outer door open. He positioned the disc and stepped back. “Computer, transfer the next unit.”

  The equipment materialized before him. Disc and device alike embodied technology not meant for other races. It hardly mattered. All would soon be beyond recovery.

  He busied himself with delicate adjustments. Sun and planet were absent from the sky, and he worked by the faint light from the open air lock.

  Stars shone down, diamond bright and too numerous to count. They were set in blackest night, and the darkness drew his eyes like a bottomless well. Gravity’s feeble hold seemed so inadequate. . . .

  “Attention. Danger. Respond,” the ship wailed.

  “I’m fine,” Achilles exaggerated. He had to finish soon. The wonder was that he had not yet gone irreparably mad. Surely no other Citizen could bear what he had borne: alone, in perilous surroundings, attempting this unprecedented transformation. Who else could have conceived this experiment? Who else fully understood the implications of the BVS-1 expedition? (Not that scientists on Hearth hadn’t asked, but he offered them only hints. This would be his triumph. No one would try this experiment before him.)

  Who else will protect a trillion lives on Hearth? Nessus?

  Somehow Achilles managed to complete the d
eployments. He flew Remembrance for safety to the opposite side of the nameless planet. If he had miscalculated, not even an indestructible hull would protect him from the forces he was about to unleash.

  The equipment array continued to report its status through relay buoys. In the bridge’s main holo tank, a dodecahedron framework enclosed the image of the moon. Each of the twenty vertices marked a precisely configured device.

  His limbs shook. Stress and trepidation and loneliness could not be denied for much longer. He must attempt the experiment now. Then, success or failure, he would fold into a comforting ball of self to reinvigorate himself.

  Or he’d be dead.

  “Extra scent,” he trilled. The ship thickened the stew of artificial herd pheromones that already permeated the ship’s living space. He inhaled deeply, allowing the spiciness to calm him. “Instrumentation status?”

  “All instruments online,” the ship acknowledged.

  “Activate.”

  A GRAVITY WAVE passed through the pristine world, but the single-celled life-forms that were its only occupants took no notice. The instrumentation aboard Remembrance registered a flux of gravitons.

  Softly crooning optimism, Achilles sent off a deep-radar ping. Neutrinos scarcely interact with normal matter, and the planet behind which he took shelter appeared in the scan display as the very palest of shadows. Beyond that translucent sphere, however, hung an ebony dot: a tiny region that stopped neutrinos in their tracks.

  Achilles warbled in triumph.

  He had learned much during his long exile among Kzinti and humans. He understood concepts incomprehensible to even the most sophisticated Citizen on Hearth. They lived too far from nature; they were too many generations remote from a world with predators. But not he.

  And so, with the collapse of that moon into a compact mass of neutronium, he had baited his first trap.

  27

  Sigmund stirred scrambled eggs with his fork, while Ander took another pass at the food-laden sideboard. Ander was newly home from Jinx, and to a point Sigmund sympathized: Bulking up for that gravity built a hearty appetite. A colonial-style hunt breakfast in Olde Williamsburg might fill him up.

  Ander had dominated most settings even at his previous size. He now moved through this dining room like a force of nature. Other diners squeezed their chairs close to their tables to make way. The host and hostess, dressed in scratchy-looking woolen colonial garb, stayed out of his path.

  Ander eventually returned and set a heaping plate onto the table. More eggs, sausages, bacon, ham, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy. He scraped back his chair and sat. “Maybe it’s because they eat so tanj much, but Jinxians have practically made food into a religion. I’ve had my fill of new cuisine, nouvelle cuisine, neo-cuisine, and fusion cuisine. This isn’t cuisine at all. It’s just good, hearty, natural food.”

  And thus hideously expensive, Sigmund thought, not that any food could compare in price to interstellar travel. “So how is Jinx?”

  “Booming again.” Ander paused to devour a chicken leg. “Puzzled by flatlander stupidity.”

  “The riots?” Sigmund guessed.

  “The riots,” Ander agreed. “The universe is plenty big, they say, and Earth isn’t its center. Go elsewhere, they say, and have all the children you want.”

  Ander’s opinion notwithstanding, this inn was hardly genuine colonial. In a bow toward authenticity, it had banished 3-V. Of that, Sigmund approved. It was a relief not to hear about Fertility Board corruption, or lynch mobs, or rallies for reproductive emancipation, or pitched battles with protestors. Or about proposals that birthrights be sold openly, on the grounds it would minimize corruption. Or the newest madness in the zeitgeist: gladiator fights. The winner gets a birthright; the loser gets dead; the population stays balanced.

  And though, try as he might, he still could not prove it, Sigmund knew Puppeteers had caused it all. He shoved away his plate.

  “How’s Feather?” Ander asked.

  Distant, bitter, and driven. Gone from his life but at his side every day at work. Obsessed with the children she was not allowed. Angered by the denial of her emigration application. None of which he would discuss. What had possessed him to ever say anything to Ander about his personal life? “She’s not on Jinx.”

  “Just being sociable.” Ander shifted his weight, and his chair groaned in protest. “Back to work then.

  “For starters, a lot of Jinxians love Gregory Pelton. Well they should. The money he’s dropping on Jinx is a big part of why their economy turned around faster than Earth’s. Elephant, they call him. Do you know that’s his nickname?”

  After years of surreptitious watching, Sigmund knew everything about Pelton—except what he was up to on Jinx. “I do.”

  Ander wasn’t deterred. “To a Jinxian, a Bandersnatch is a big land animal. Elephant is a diminutive, a term of affection. I find that droll.”

  “So tell me what Pelton is doing on Jinx,” Sigmund prodded.

  “It’s big,” Ander answered. “He employs hundreds on West End. West End was always primitive and poor; that makes Pelton one of the biggest employers.”

  On Sigmund’s long-ago visit to Jinx, West End had had no resources to offer save vacuum. “Paying those hundreds to do what?”

  Ander demolished several sausages before answering. “That, I’m afraid, isn’t entirely clear. They’re very loyal.”

  A picture emerged through patient question-and-answer. Through intermediaries, Pelton owned a large dome on West End. He was stockpiling provisions for a deep-space mission, destination unknown, bought from enough suppliers to obscure the quantities. The employees didn’t talk, and the suppressor field in the dome rendered useless the few sensors Ander managed to smuggle in. Pelton staffed his security team with moonlighting Jinxian police. That was smart, Sigmund conceded, effective in its own right, a guarantee of harmonious relations with officialdom—and a deterrent to any extralegal methods he might otherwise consider.

  Whatever Pelton planned, it was big.

  There were no indications, however, that it was imminent. When the time came, Sigmund guessed, ships would be brought inside Pelton’s security perimeter for outfitting.

  Taking comfort in that conclusion, Sigmund left Ander, still eating, to address more pressing—and official—matters.

  THE ENORMITY OF events sometimes made Sigmund’s head spin: All the plots and possibilities, the alliances and marriages of convenience and cynical manipulations, among Earth’s numerous adversaries. Outsiders and Jinxians allied with Gregory Pelton. Aggrieved flat-landers unwittingly abetting Puppeteers, even as Puppeteers spied on Sigmund. Pinprick raids by Kzinti renegades on obscure, backwater worlds. Beowulf Shaeffer on a tour, it seemed, of every human-settled world.

  It all meant something, surely, and too often the truth of things taunted and eluded Sigmund.

  But not today.

  FOR HIS EIGHTH birthday, more than anything, Sigmund had wanted a kitten. His normally indulgent parents said no. Dad claimed Sigmund was too young for the responsibility of a pet. Mom didn’t want to deal with the mess. He remembered keeping his room clean and orderly to show responsibility. He promised to faithfully put out food, change the water, and empty the litter box. They still said no.

  And then, when the day came, the package they brought him mewed. Something inside scratched and thumped. The box had air holes.

  A century and a half later, a simple observation filled him with the same elation.

  Setting aside the wars and skirmishes with the Kzinti, all human worlds combined had lost twelve hyperdrive ships. Twelve starships lost in two and a half centuries weren’t many. Most incidents happened near Sol system, just as most flights started or ended here. It made sense.

  The most recent three losses happened somewhere far to the galactic north, two within the last year. All three ships had vanished without a trace.

  Two years ago, it was from galactic north that Gregory Pelton’s hull-less ship had hurtled a
t Jinx at 80 percent of light speed. Something very important there awaited discovery.

  Sigmund intended to find it.

  28

  “You’re the head of Special Investigations,” the message from Calista Mellenkamp said. “This is your case.” Her first subtext was that she couldn’t not assign this to him and still maintain the cover for the Puppeteer task force. Her second subtext was that the assignment was not open to discussion.

  That suited Sigmund fine. Getting his marching orders electronically also avoided any discussion about how soon he’d arrive in London. Transfer booths would get him there near to instantly, but he had avoided transfer booths since the Cerberus affair began. Redirecting a teleporting passenger en route seemed no more improbable than delivering an envelope without leaving a trace. A suborbital hop and a cab ride would have to be fast enough, Sigmund looking for all the world like another tourist admiring the sights. If anyone asked, he’d allowed the local authorities a few hours to secure and study their crime scene.

  No one asked.

  Flashing his ARM ident got Sigmund past a line of bobbies and into the British Museum. He showed the holo badge three more times before he reached the burgled exhibit hall. A bobby at its entrance pointed out the man in charge.

  Sigmund’s footsteps echoed as he walked the length of the hall to where two men stood in conversation. They turned at his approach.

  The taller man was sweating copiously despite the exhibit-preserving cool of the museum. Sigmund guessed this was the museum’s director of security. If so, he had ample reason to sweat.

  “Ah, our ARM expert from New York,” the nervous man said. “Cecil Braithwaite, with the museum. Call me Cecil.”

  “Special Agent Ausfaller.”

  Cecil winced but took the snub in silence.

  “Senior Inspector Owen Bergen, the Yard.” Offering his ident, Bergen spoke over Cecil’s embarrassment. Bergen’s broad forehead and wide-set blue eyes conveyed a mature and observant intelligence.