Cherryh, C J - Alliance-Union 08 (16 page)

Maybe Jordan can.

He reached the couch and sat down, lay back and shut his eyes.

What if I'm not alone?

Ari's voice, soft and hateful:

I planned your father's actions. Every one of them. Even if I couldn't predict the microstructures. Microstructures aren't that important.

Tape-designer's aphorism: macrostructure determines microstructure. The value-framework governs everything.

I even planned you, sweet. I planted the idea. Jordan has this terrible need for companionship. Am I lying? You owe your existence to me.

He imagined for a heartbeat that Grant would walk in from the other room, Grant would ask what was the matter, Grant would help him unweave the maze in which he found himself. Grant had experienced deep-tape. God knew.

But it was only a ghost. A habit hard to break.

And Grant, certainly, I planned. I made him, after all.

He had to go to the lab. He had to get out of the isolation in which the tape-structures could fester and spread before he could deal with them. He had to get about routine, occupy his mind, let his mind rest and sort things out slowly.

If the body could only have a little sleep.

"Messages, please," he murmured, remembering he had to know,
had
to know if he had calls from Jordan. Or elsewhere.

They were generally trivia. Advisories from the wing. From Administration. A note of reprimand about the illicit entry. He drifted in the middle of it, woke with a start and a clutch at the couch, the erotic flush fading into a lightning-flash clinical recollection that he was going to have to wear long sleeves and high collars and put some Fade on the bruises: he could put Jordan off with a claim that Ari had him on extra lab duty, logical, since Ari had no reason, in what he had told Jordan, to be pleased with him. He could
not
face Jordan at close quarters until he had better control of himself.

In the next heartbeat as the Minder's half-heard report clicked off, he realized that he had lost track of the playback, and that two days ago he had defaulted the Minder's message-function to play-and-erase.

Grant could see the plane long before they reached the strip—not the sleek elegance of RESEUNEAIR by any stretch of the imagination, just a cargo plane with shielded windows. The car pulled up where people were waiting. "There," the driver said, virtually the only word he had spoken the entire trip, and indicated the people he was supposed to go to.

"Thank you," Grant murmured absently, and opened his own door and got out, taking his lunchbag with him, walking with pounding heart up to total strangers.

Not all strangers, thank God, Hensen Kruger himself was there to do the talking. "This is Grant. Grant, these people will take you from here." Kruger stuck out his hand and he was supposed to shake it, which he was not used to people doing: it made him feel awkward. Everything did. One of the men introduced himself as Winfield; introduced the woman in the group, the pilot, he supposed, in coveralls and without any kind of badge or company name, as Kenney; and there were two other men, Rentz and Jeffrey, last name or first or azi-name, he was not sure. "Let's get going," Kenney said. Everything about her was nervous: the shift of her glance, the stiffness of her movements as she wiped her hands on her grease-smeared coveralls. "Come on, let's move it, huh?"

The men exchanged looks that sent little twitches through Grant's taut nerves. He looked from one to the other, trying to figure whether he was the object of contention. Arguing with strangers was difficult for him: Justin always fended problems for him. He knew his place in the world, which was to handle what his employer wanted handled. And Justin had told him to object.

"We're going to Merild?" he asked, because he had not heard that name, and he was determined to hear it before he went anywhere.

"We're going to Merild," Winfield said. "Come on, up you go. —Hensen—"

"No problem. I'll contact you later. All right?"

Grant hesitated, looking at Kruger, understanding that things were passing he did not understand. But he knew, he thought, as much as they were going to tell him; and he went ahead to the steps of the jet.

It had no company markings, just a serial number. A7998. White plane, with paint missing here and there and the spatter of red mud on its underside. Dangerous, he thought. Don't they foam it down here? Where's Decon? He climbed up into the barren ulterior, past the cockpit, and uncertainly looked back at Jeffrey and Rentz, who followed him, a little ahead of Winfield.

The door whined up and Winfield locked it. There were jump-seats of a kind, along the wall. Jeffrey took him by the arm, pulled a seat down and helped him belt in. "Just stay there," Jeffrey said.

He did, heart thumping as the plane took its roll and glided into the sky. He was not used to flying. He twisted about and lifted a windowshade to look out. It was the only light. He saw the precip towers and the cliffs and the docks passing under them as they came about.

"Leave that down," Winfield said.

"Sorry," he said; and drew the shade down again. It annoyed him: he very much wanted the view. But they were not people to argue with, he sensed that in the tone. He opened the bag the Krugers had fixed for him, examined what he had for breakfast, and then thought it was rude to eat when no one else had anything. He folded it closed again until he saw one of them, Rentz, get up and go aft and come back with a few canned drinks. Rentz offered one to him, the first kind gesture he had had out of them.

"Thank you," he said, "they sent one."

He thought it would be all right to eat, then. He had been so exhausted last night he had only picked at supper, and the salt fish and bread and soft drink Krugers had sent were welcome, even if he had rather have had coffee.

The jet roared away and the men drank their soft drinks and took occasional looks out under the shades, mostly on the right side of the aircraft. Sometimes the pilot talked to them, a kind of sputter from the intercom. Grant finished his fish and bread and his drink and heard that they had reached seven thousand meters; then ten.

"Ser," someone had said that morning, opening the door to his room in Kruger's House, and Grant had waked in alarm, confused by his surroundings, the stranger who had to be speaking to him, calling
him
ser. He had hardly slept; and finally drowsed, to wake muddled and not sure what time it was or whether something had gone wrong.

They had taken his card last night, when the night watch had brought him up from the dock and the warehouses, into the House itself, up the hill. Hensen Kruger himself had looked it over and gone somewhere with it, to test its validity, Grant had thought; and he had been terrified: that card was his identity. If anything happened to it, it would take tissue-typing to prove who he was after that, even if there
was
only one of him, which he had never, despite Jordan's assurances, been convinced was the case.

But the card had turned up with the stack of clothing and towels the man laid on the chair by the door. The man told him to shower, that a plane had landed and a car was coming for him.

Grant had hurried, then, rolled out of bed, still dazed and blurry-eyed, and staggered his way to the bathroom, rubbed his face with cold water and looked in the mirror, at eyes that wanted sleep and auburn hair standing up in spikes.

God. He wanted desperately to make a good impression, look sane and sensible and not, not what Reseune might well report to them—an Alpha gone schiz and possibly dangerous.

He could end up back in Reseune if they thought that. They would not even bother with the police; and Ari might have tried some such move. Justin would have answered to Ari by now—however he was going to do it Grant had no idea. He tried not to think about it, as he had tried to send the thoughts away all night long, lying there listening to the sounds of a strange House— doors opening and closing, heaters and pumps going on, cars coming and going in the dark.

He had showered in haste, dressed in the clothes they had laid out for him, a shirt that fit, trousers a bit too large or cut wrong or something—given his hair a careful combing and a second check in the mirror, then headed downstairs.

"Good morning," one of the household had said to him, a young man. "Breakfast on the table there. They're on their way. Just grab it and come on."

He was terrified for no specific cause, except he was being rushed, except that his life had been carefully ordered and he had always known who would hurt him and who would help him. Now, when Justin had told him he would be free and safe, he had no idea how to defend himself, except to do everything they told him. Azi-like. Yes, ser.

He dropped his head onto his chest while the plane droned on, and shut his eyes finally, exhausted and having nothing to look at but the barren deck, closed windows, and the sullen men who flew with him: perhaps, he thought, if he simply said nothing to them the trip would be easier, and he would wake up in Novgorod, to meet Merild, who would take care of him.

He waked when he felt the plane change pitch and heard a difference in the engines. And panicked, because he knew it was supposed to be three hours to Novgorod, and he was sure it had not been. "Are we landing?" he asked. "Is something wrong?"

"Everything's fine," Winfield said; and: "Leave that alone!" when he reached for the shade, thinking it could surely make no difference. But evidently it did.

The plane wallowed its way down, touched pavement, braked and bumped and rolled its way, he reckoned, toward the Novgorod terminal. It stopped and everyone got up, while the door unsealed and the hydraulics began to let the ladder down; he got up, taking the wadded-up paper bag with him—he was determined not to give them a chance to complain of his manners—and waited as Winfield took his arm.

There were no large buildings outside. Just cliffs and a deserted-looking cluster of hangars; and the air smelled raw and dry. A bus was moving up to the foot of the ladder.

"Where are we?" he asked, on the edge of panic. "Is this Merild's place?"

"It's all right. Come on."

He froze a moment. He could refuse to go. He could fight. And then there was nothing he could do, because he had no idea where he was or how to fly a plane if he could take it over. The bus down there—he might use to escape; but he had no idea where in the world he was, and if he ran beyond the fuel capacity in raw outback, he was dead, that was all. Outback was all around them: he could see the land beyond the buildings.

He could hope to get to a phone, if they got the idea he was compliant enough to turn their backs on. He had memorized Merild's number. He thought of all that in the second between seeing where he was and feeling Winfield take his arm.

"Yes, ser," he said meekly, and walked down the steps where they wanted him to go—which still might be to Merild. He still hoped that they were telling the truth. But he no longer believed it.

Winfield took him down to the waiting bus and opened the door to put him in, then got in after, with Jeffrey and Rentz. There were seven seats, one set by each window and across the back; Grant took the first and Winfield sat beside him as the other pair settled in behind them.

He scanned the windows and doors: elaborately airsealed. An outback vehicle.

He clasped his hands in his lap and sat quietly watching as the driver started up and the bus whipped away across the pavement, not for the buildings: for a line road, probably the one they used to get to the precip towers. In a little time they were traveling on dirt, and in a little time more they were climbing, up from the lowland and onto the heights beyond the safety the towers maintained.

Wild land.

Perhaps he was going to die, after they had stripped his mind down for what he knew. They might be Ari's; but it was a very strange way for Reseune to handle its problems, when they could easily bring him back to Reseune without Jordan or Justin knowing, just land like one of the regular transport flights and send him off in the bus to one of the outlying buildings where they could do whatever they liked till they were ready (if ever) to admit they had him.

They might, more likely, be Ari's enemies, in which case they might do almost anything, and in that case they might not want him to survive to testify.

Whatever had happened, Kruger was involved in it, beyond a doubt, and it could even be monetary . . . perhaps everything rumor had said about Kruger's humanitarian concerns was a lie. Reseune was full of lies. Perhaps it was something Ari herself maintained. Perhaps Kruger had just fooled everyone, perhaps he was engaged in a little side business, in forged Contracts whenever he got a likely prospect. Maybe he was being sold off to some mining site in the hinterlands, or, God, some place where they could try to retrain him.
Try.
Anyone who started meddling with his tape-structures on a certain level, he could handle. On others . . .

He was not so sure.

There were four of them, counting the driver, and such men might well have guns. The bus seals were life itself.

He clasped his hands together and tried desperately to think the thing through. A phone was the best hope. Maybe stealing the bus once they trusted him, once he knew where civilization was and whether the bus had the fuel to get there. It could take days to get a chance. Weeks.

"I think you know by now," Winfield said finally, "this isn't where you're supposed to be."

"Yes, ser."

"We're friends. You should believe that."

"Whose friends?"

Winfield put his hand on his arm. "Your friends."

"Yes, ser." Agree to anything. Be perfectly compliant. Yes, ser. Whatever you want, ser.

"Are you upset?"

Like a damned field supervisor, talking to some Mu-class worker. The man
thought
he knew what he was doing. That was good news and bad . . . depending what this fool thought he was qualified to do with tape and drugs. Winfield had mismanaged him thus far. He did not give way to instincts simply because he reckoned that they did not profit him in this situation, and because there was far more profit in keeping his head down . . . reckoning that his handlers were not stupid, but simply too ignorant to realize that the Alpha-rating on his card meant he could not have the kind of inhibitions born-men were used to in azi. They should have drugged him and transported him under restraint.