The Serrano Succession (37 page)

When he put it that way, he had to wonder what she could have done with a prisonful of guards and convicts on the mainland, or in space . . . and the answer chilled him. Lepescu's protégés, he was sure, had not become exemplars of sweetness and light since Lepescu's death. Indeed, Methlin had warned the family against having anything to do with any of them. Next thing to traitors, she'd said. So involved with their own game that nothing else mattered.

What he should do was find out what Bacarion was doing, and report it. But how? He was not in Bacarion's confidence and he had no access to the administrative offices anyway. That would just get him killed faster.

As the days passed, Gelan found that acting normal stretched his nerves almost past bearing. Inspections, chores, guard duty . . . wondering which of the guards and which of the prisoners were in on the plan, and yet again what the plan was. It had to be more than just killing him. Bacarion might take pleasure in killing Methlin Meharry's little brother, but she would not have finagled an assignment here just for that. If only he knew what was going on . . . but although it became increasingly obvious that something was—that he was being left out of meetings and plans—he could not find anything out.

He had not considered himself a trusting soul, but now, trying to trust no one, he realized that he had the normal human desire to be part of a group, not a complete outsider.

Margiu Pardalt had accepted a position as junior instructor in the Schools, and discovered that she enjoyed teaching. As the weather eased, bringing the occasional cool breath from the far north, her spirits lifted. Xavier had never been quite as hot as Copper Mountain in summer, and she looked forward to winter here. Unlike some of the others, who never took to planetside life, she enjoyed learning more about the world she was on. The Regular Space Service had facilities scattered around the planet, from the frigid polar caps to the balmiest of tropical islands. Most were used for training of some kind, or testing equipment; it did not occur to Margiu to wonder why a space force would do so much training and testing on a planet. Instead, she hoped she would have a chance to see the steppes near Drylands, so much like her homeworld, and maybe climb a mountain when she had some leave coming.

Her first chance to travel came in the break between class sessions, and she didn't even have to use leave time. Priority directives of very high classification had to be hand-carried from base to base. Ensign Pardalt was the obvious choice.

So on a morning that was not quite crisp, but at least not stifling, she accepted a case full of the directives, locked it to her belt, and climbed aboard one of the regular supply aircars headed for Camp Engleton. She sat on a sack of something lumpy and uncomfortable for two hours—the supply aircars had no passenger slings—and watched the red-sand brush country give way to dirty-green coastal grasslands and then dark-green trees standing in brown water.

She had only fifteen minutes to deliver the directives to the base commander, but fifteen minutes of the sticky heat and sulfur stench of the swamp forest was more than enough to quench her curiosity. She was glad to climb back into the aircar, now headed for Drylands. The lumpy sack she'd been sitting on had been unloaded, along with others, and the crew chief now had room to rig a seat of sorts.

That flight took several hours; she fell asleep in the noisy cargo compartment, waking when the aircar came down through the late afternoon sun. This far north, a chill wind rattled the few fading leaves left on the trees planted around the base's central drill field, and the short prairie grass had turned various shades of russet and maroon. She handed the base commander his copy of the directives, and signed into the TOQ for the night. When she walked around outside, she could almost believe she was on Xavier—until dark, when the night sky looked very different. Were they really that close to the Scarf?

Next day, she was scheduled for a long-distance flight to the west coast bases, Big Trees and Dark Harbor (she wondered again who had been allowed to name these places) and then she would embark on the more dangerous journey to the Stack Islands bases.

The long distance flight was not by aircar, but in a pressurized aircraft flying much higher than the 'cars; beneath her the land faded into a dim patchwork of dun and wrinkled brown, with white tips on the tall mountains she hoped to see in person some day. Also on the flight were replacement officers and enlisted; she was crammed into her seat with only a brief glimpse through the window whenever the neuroenhanced marine beside her leaned back for some reason.

Still, it was travel. She had come to learn, and this was learning. She memorized everything she could about the inside of the aircraft.

They landed at Big Trees, the runway a long gash in the forest. She had grown up among trees, clumps and woodlots and scattered groves on the meadows, but those trees had been rounder, softer. She had seen more, and taller, trees during her years at the Academy. But the trees had always had space around and between them. Despite the pictures, she had not really imagined what this forest would be like—great spires many times the height of the buildings on base. After delivering her package to the base commandant, she found she could not get transport to Dark Harbor until the next day.

"You should see our trees," she was told. "There's nothing like them anywhere else."

So she wandered out into the afternoon light, and up to the margin of the forest. Behind her mowers buzzed, trimming the emerald grass in the quadrangle; she could hear the closer click of feet on the walkways. Looking away from all that, she faced a massive dark bole like a slightly curved wall. Ferns the height of her head grew near it, trimmed back in a straight line on the base side. Between the chinks of its bark—she thought it must be bark—other plants grew, mosses and ferns and something with bright yellow flowers like tiny fireworks.

She edged around the tree, following a vague path. Under her feet, the ground felt spongy, and when she had cleared the curve of the great tree's bole, she realized she could not hear the base . . . the great tree lay between, soaking up the sound. Uneasy in the thick growth, she went back the way she'd come, and then back across the quadrangle to base housing.

Her flight up the coast the next morning, again in an aircar, revealed how little of the land had been touched by humans—the great forest lay green and unbroken from the base to the foothills of the mountains, and almost all the way to Dark Harbor, where it eased gradually into smaller trees, and then into broken shrubland.

In Dark Harbor, she had to wait several days for a transocean flight to the Stack Islands bases. A storm system had moved in, and no one was going to risk a flight during it, not for a mere courier. In the meantime she was supposed to familiarize herself with cold water ocean survival techniques. It was already early winter in the northern Big Ocean. Margiu learned to wriggle into the PPU and fasten the hood with one hand; she went over lifeboat drill and abandon-craft drill at least four separate times.

Corporal Asele Martin-Jehore stood satellite watch at the remote Blue Islands facility. Unlike Stack Islands, the archipelago known as Blue Islands lay in warm equatorial waters. Assignment to Blue was as coveted as Stack Islands was feared: the big sea predators which lay in wait for escapees from Stack were force-netted away from the beautiful white beaches and turquoise lagoons of Blue. All the permanent personnel onplanet tried to wangle at least a week's leave time on Blue.

Martin-Jehore had worked years to earn this assignment, but help from a friend in Personnel didn't hurt. He had proven himself time and again—he had recalibrated the number four signal array after a seastorm, when his senior supervisor was out with gut flu. And—because he showed talent with recalcitrant electronics—he had been permanently assigned to MetSatIV, the weather and surveillance satellite responsible for covering the northern third of Big Ocean.

MetSatIV had been a problem since it was installed. The contractor had replaced it twice, and each time found nothing wrong. The second time, the contractor's project engineer had made the unwelcome suggestion that someone in Fleet was screwing up the software. That had been Jurowski, who held the position before Martin-Jehore. It hadn't, in fact, been anything Jurowski did which bollixed the bird, but in the interest of satisfying the contractor that all steps had been taken, Jurowski had been taken off the roster for MetSatIV.

MetSatIV was still buggy. Martin-Jehore was sure it was an AI glitch—so was Jurowski, but Martin-Jehore had one vital piece of information Jurowski lacked: the command set for MetSatIV's AI.

In theory, every transmission from Blue Islands was logged. In practice, a very good communications tech could tightbeam a satellite without detection. Not often, but occasionally. Martin-Jehore had chosen his moments carefully, gradually gaining control of MetSatIV's AI at a level no mere communications tech was expected to reach.

Now he needed only the cover of a routine test transmission to cause the desired failure.

MetSatIV's AI compared the instruction set to those previously received, and agreed that they matched in syntax and content. Then it turned off its IR scan, and tipped itself 30° around its z-axis.

In the observatory below, one of the dozen screens in satellite surveillance went from a clear visual of a seastorm in progress, a vast swirl of white, to an eye-wrenching jiggling blaze of hash.

"Blast. There goes Watchbird again." Martin-Jehore glared at the screen. "I'll bet it's a clock problem."

"Nah—it's too random." Jurowski wasn't going to agree with anything Martin-Jehore said. Eighteen months, and he was still sore about losing his place as Watchbird's senior tech.

"Well, let's see if C-28 will get it back." Sometimes command C-28 would bring Watchbird back online, and sometimes it wouldn't. This time it wouldn't, but Martin-Jehore punched in that command sequence, anyway. The hash on his screens remained. "Not this time." When C-28 didn't work, the problem usually took longer to fix, but so far he had always been able to do so.

"Try the 43-120 set," Jurowski suggested. While he could not resist the initial jibe, he was a generous-hearted man, and always willing to help. Martin-Jehore nodded, and entered it. It wouldn't work either, but it would eat up several minutes while not working. The screen hash changed to a finer grain, but nothing else happened.

"Somebody rejuved its AI," Jurowski said. The whole room chuckled appreciatively. Headquarters might not know about any connection between rejuv and mental problems, but the lower ranks had figured it out long since.

As required by regulation, Martin-Jehore reported to his superior that MetSatIV was ineffective within the hour, when the first three standard interventions didn't bring it back online. CPO Gurnach sighed, and told him to keep trying. Martin-Jehore could tell she wasn't really worried. Big Ocean was mostly empty, and the storm MetSatIV had shown was already in the model. Stack Islands already knew about it—in fact, it was just clearing them now—and it wouldn't reach the mainland for days.

MetSatIV's other capability, that of detecting small craft atmospheric penetration, didn't concern CPO Gurnach either. At last report, the only ships insystem were, as always, Regular Space Service vessels. A hostile landing would have to come from a hostile deepspace ship, and there weren't any. Why worry about a hostile landing? Besides, Polar 1, now at the south end of its orbit, carried sensor arrays designed to spot any intrusive traffic; MetSatIV was really redundant.

Martin-Jehore knew it was crucial to keep MetSatIV offline for five hours or more. He did not know why, nor did he care. He had convinced himself that it was probably a matter of smuggling something really profitable (given the size of his payoff), and he didn't think smuggling actually hurt anybody. So what if some porn cubes got past customs without paying duty?

The attack came on a dank gray afternoon, with thin rain spitting out of a low sky and visibility just reaching from the parapet of the exercise courtyard to the administrative offices. Gelan Meharry had outside duty, and had checked the first three posts when he found that number four was missing. Even as he thumbed the control on his comunit, he felt the prickles rising on his arms. Not at night after all, but with enough daylight to see if his body caught on any of the rocks.

"Spiers here," came the answer to his call. Spiers, whom he had not seriously suspected.

"Number four outside post's empty," Gelan said. "Should be Mahdal—has he called in?"

"No, Corporal. Want me to check sickbay?"

"Request backup at this post," Gelan said. "And run a com check on the others, would you? Then check sickbay."

"Sure thing." Spiers's voice sounded normal, with only the slight concern appropriate to a missing sentry.

Gelan looked around. Number four post gave its occupant a view of the prisoners' exercise court, the entrance block beyond, the upper part of the administrative block overlooking the forecourt, which was itself out of sight, and the peak of the stack itself rising beyond that. To his left he could see the helmet of number three post; to his right and down, on the outside of the entrance block, he should have seen the bright dot that was number five.