Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 (6 page)

Henry suspected, though, that he had failed both boys.

Dahno, almost ten years older than Bleys, and older than both of Henry's own sons, had come to the farm almost as a wild animal. The psychomedician's reports Ezekiel had sent indicated that the boy, molded by the way his mother had treated him, lived without regard for anyone else, driven by a need to find the freedom and independence he had been denied.

Even those reports had only hinted at the boy's ability to make himself likable, even beloved, by anyone on whom he turned his attention. Henry himself had felt that charm, despite his familiarity with the reports, but it had not prevented him from trying to teach the boy, and to mold a conscience into him. However, Henry suspected—he could not know, for Dahno never let anyone inside— that he had failed in that task.

Dahno, however, had been a vast help around the farm, with his extraordinary size and strength; and if he had not cared for Miriam, Henry's wife, and for Henry's firstborn son, Joshua—and then for Will—Henry had not been able to tell it.

Bleys, when he arrived some years later, was a completely different kind of boy. He had lacked Dahno's ability to charm, but had been a serious, even humorless, boy, intent on finding his correct place in the world, in the universe. He had the ability to love, Henry thought; and Henry believed Bleys loved him and his two sons, as well as Dahno—and now, Toni. But Henry grieved for the boy, and now for the man.

Because it ha
d come to seem to Henry that Ble
ys, for all his desire to love, and to be right with the universe, was more lonely than anyone Henry had ever known. It was as if he observed the entire world, and all of humankind, from behind a translucent wall in his own head.

Bleys had tried desperately to belong to Henry's world, but when his ultimate effort failed, he had gone off to Ecumeny to join his older brother's enterprise. He had gone on to become a philosopher and speaker known throughout the Younger Worlds.

Bleys was now richer, and more powerful, than anyone Henry MacLean had ever known; but he was, deep inside—or so Henry believed—still alone, and still wanting to find his right place in the world—to find his God, or some substitute for the God he could not believe in.

In all his time on the farm, Henry had been acutely aware of the pistol that lay buried in a field, a presence that silently accused him of the imperfection of his own faith. Yet he had preserved it against a day of need, and that day came when he saw clearly the direction of Bleys' life; and so Henry had dug up that pistol, cleaned it, and taken it into Bleys' service—but on his own mission.

In his mission of protecting Bleys until he could save himself, Henry had created a team of warriors, to be bodyguards; for he knew that Bleys walked dangerous paths. Assassination was not uncommon on the Friendly worlds, and Henry had no reason to believe other worlds were any different.

Those bodyguards, however, could never handle the alternative mission Henry had taken on himself.

Henry firmly believed that inside the large, strikingly handsome man, known around the Worlds for his vast intellect and golden tongue, the earnest boy still lived—the boy who had come to Henry's farm wanting nothing more than to be loved and wanted. But the man, Henry feared, might be pursuing a course even the Exotics, that people the Friendlies called the Deniers of God, would find themselves appalled to contemplate.

Henry remembered his thoughts of early morning—it was not hard; the thoughts came to him in many dark moments
...
and yet, the boy was still in there.

More than two dozen of the Soldiers Henry first recruited for Bleys had been lost in their escape from Newton. That planet, which deified scientific accomplishment, had proven to be ruled by people willing to inject Bleys with a substance that, Henry thought, could as easily be called a poison as anything else.

Henry knew little about such things as genetics; Harmony and Association, the poorest of the Younger Worlds, were not able to provide more than a few of their people with much formal education. But Henry came to work for Bleys knowing his own limitations, and his new life had given him facilities and time never before available to him—facilities and time he had tried to use wisely. And he was adept at picking up information just by being around people like Bleys and those he associated with.

They had succeeded in escaping from Newton, although at great cost; and in the time since, while Bleys was recovering from both his poisoning and a wound received during the fight to reach the ship, Henry, although wounded himself, had been trying to find replacements for the men and women he had lost.

Lost
was too innocent a word for what he had done, he reproached himself now. His actions had led directly to their deaths.

Now Henry dropped back behind his latest batch of recruits, as, moving in a straggling group, they neared the edge of the trees and began to cross the grassy apron, beyond which waited the three vans that had brought them here. No one was in sight.

Henry watched keenly as Steve Foster, who had been on one edge of the group ahead of him, slowed his pace for a fraction of a second—before picking that pace back up again while making a casual, angling turn that put him, within seconds, on the other side of a public sanitary facility. He paused there, as if thinking about answering a call of nature.

Ahead of him, four more of the recruits had stopped, raising their heads to look about—and in that moment, seven armed figures rose from behind various vehicles parked in the area, while two more came around from behind the waiting vans. Their weapons were still being raised when the recruits began to scatter, some leaping for the nearest bit of available cover, two reversing their course to dash back toward where Henry stood at the edge of the trees—and those who felt themselves to be too far from concealment dropping to the pavement while reaching into their carry bags—

"All right, all right!" Henry yelled. "It's just another test!" The armed figures who had been waiting in ambush prudently ducked out of sight, in case someone failed to hear Henry's words; and
Henry himself refrained from striding into the midst of his recruits, until he could be sure their brains had all had a chance to override their instincts.

A few of the recruits actually managed to get in a few trigger-pulls, only to find that their weapons had been rendered inoperable; but no experienced Soldier was going to let himself be killed by some sort of mistake in the carrying-out of that particular bit of sabotage. So, in the end, no one was hurt.

Except, perhaps, for some feelings,
Henry told himself. Being ambushed generally caused warriors to feel foolish, and no one liked that, even if the ambush had been totally unavoidable.

Henry wanted people he could depend on, and he knew that picking the right people required more than simply getting those whose alertness might have tipped them to the possibility of an ambush; he also wanted his people to be able to handle sudden floods of the hormones and emotional reactions engendered by alarms and humiliations, without losing their judgment.

Henry, along with all of his senior Soldiers, had been watching the reactions of these recruits—and of the other two sections of recruits, who were elsewhere at the moment—since they arrived; that evaluation process would continue as long as any of them were Soldiers.

It would take more than simply being caught flat-footed by this test ambush to get a recruit dropped from the class; just as it would take more than having done well here—or on any other test—to be accepted.

Henry had the recruits loaded into the vans, and on their way back to headquarters, within moments. He wanted them to be still in the reaction stage as they went back, so that they could be monitored and studied while they thought themselves free to relax.

Henry loved this job.

God help him, he knew that some of these young people would die as a result of his choosing them . . . but then, they were all in God's hands at all times, in any case.

Pallas Salvador, head of the Others' organization on Ceta, was awakened by the shocking shrillness of her bedside communicator's
EMERGENCY tone.
Groggily peering at the time display, she fumbled hurriedly for the control pad, driven by that gut-level, unthinking fear that accompanies any sudden alarm in the night. But the fear gave way to irritation as she saw the call was from her own office.

Before answering she glanced reflexively behind her to be sure her companion from earlier in the evening had indeed left. Then she punched at the
ANSWER
button with a stiff, forceful index finger.

"Pallas Salvador, here," she said. "What is it?"
Professional. Be professional.

She tried to begin some breath-control exercises, recognizing that her irritation was showing.

"My apologies for disturbing you at this hour, Pallas Salvador," a calm, contralto voice said in her ear. There was no reproach in that voice; perversely, that irritated Pallas Salvador even more.

"Gelica? Is that you?" Pallas had recognized the voice as that of her assistant, who was normally in the office during conventional daytime working hours. "What are you doing in the office at this hour?"

"Yes, Pallas Salvador. The night communications officer called me first when a message arrived, in accordance with our procedures."

"A message? Why didn't you—yes, yes, what is it?"

"A communication has arrived, sent ahead from an incoming star-ship. It is from Antonia Lu."

Her irritation instantly wiped away by apprehension—along with her breathing exercises—Pallas took a short moment to think.

A message from Antonia Lu was for all intents and purposes a message from Bleys Ahrens, the de facto head of the Others.

"I'll be right in," Pallas said. Communications from the home office were not to be casually discussed over open comm circuits.

Starships were still the fastest way to send messages at interstellar distances, the now fully awake Other was thinking as she climbed into an automated cab twelve minutes later, but light-speed radio beat a starship that was on its approach to a planet. For that reason, the fastest—and most expensive—way to get a message to a planet under another star was to give it into the care of a ship's communications officer, paying extra to have it radioed ahead when the ship came out of its last phase-shift.

She wondered what could be so important that Bleys Ahrens would have sent her a message in that manner.

The Others' headquarters for Ceta was located in the city of the same name, comprising two floors of a tall office tower within walking distance of the government center, and nestled near the heart of the cluster of corporate campuses that made this city the commercial hub of the planet, and thus of a lot of interstellar trade. Pallas arrived there twenty-one minutes after being awakened.

She immediately learned she had every right to be apprehensive: the superscript on the message indicated it had been sent from
Burning Bush,
one of a number of starships of which the Others' organization was the majority owner. And Antonia Lu's message confirmed that both Bleys Ahrens himself and Dahno Ahrens were on board the vessel.

Bleys Ahrens, the message said, wanted to meet with all of the Others' top leadership on the planet as soon as he landed.
All
of them. A confirmation was required.

This was unprecedented. And unprecedented was invariably bad.

She grimaced, recognizing there was no choice but to comply. "Send a confirmation to
Burning Bush
—just that, no more," she told Gelica.

She looked at her assistant challengingly, almost willing the gray-haired, stocky figure to make some gesture of rebellion. Gelica gave her nothing but a crisp nod.

"I want all the headquarters staff here within twenty minutes," Pallas continued, ignoring the fact that she herself had needed more time than that to make the trip, and her staff all lived farther out. "Then wake the top two caterers and get two spreads set up, one—wait: first call the port and get an estimated arrival time for
Burning Bush—"

"I already have," Gelica said. "They say around ten and a half— and they also say they expect there to be a brief welcoming ceremony."

"Oh, that's right," Pallas said, "Bleys Ahrens is now a political dignitary, isn't he? All right then, the catering: one spread to be fresh at noon and the other at thirteen. Top-level spreads for a minimum of—let's say seventy people, just to be on the safe side."

"Who do you want alerted to attend the meeting?" Gelica asked.

"I guess you can't do it all at once," Pallas said. "When the first staff arrive, start—no, I'll do it. Just forward our complete TO to my screen right now, and then make those calls. While you're doing that I'll draft a list of attendees and send it back to you, and you can get them alerted—some will have to come around the planet, of course, so you'll need to get started."

She strode toward her office, then stopped and turned around.

"While you're waiting for the staff to arrive, start drafting a plan for the layout we'll need in the large conference room."

She closed the office door behind her, but Gelica's intercom beeped almost immediately.

"Yes, Pallas Salvador?" Gelica said.

"You'd better count on spending the day here, too," Pallas said. "I don't know whether Bleys Ahrens has it in mind to see any of our staff as well as the top leadership, but you're senior staff, so you'd better stay close."

"I will," Gelica said.

Alone in the front office, she smiled as she called up from the data
files the table of organization Pallas Salvador had ordered. There was a great deal of trouble on the way, but it might be worth it. . . .