The Summer Queen (67 page)

Gundhalinu touched a sequence on the glowing plate of the
tram’s callbox. “What if it had happened? Do you think you’d like it?”

Vhanu laughed. “I think I’d rather die.”

“That’s what I always said.” Gundhalinu smiled ruefully, remembering
when his own convictions had been as rock-hard, and as simplistic. He turned
away as he opened the crumpled piece of paper the worker had pressed into his
hand. He swore.

“What is it, Commander?”

Gundhalinu turned back, handing him the note. Vhanu read it,
reacting as he saw the cryptic symbol scrawled at the bottom. “Survey ... ?” He
passed it back again, uncomprehending. “What does it mean?”

“Trouble.”

Vhanu looked back down the hallway, where the day-laborer
had already disappeared. “Do you want me to notify security—?”

“No.” Gundhalinu’s fist tightened, crumpling the paper
again. “This is a family matter. Call ahead for a shuttle. I have to get across
to Hub Two.”

“The starport complex? But what about the meeting with Jarsakh-bhai
and the board, and the inspection of the—”

“Cancel everything.” The tram arrived, he held the door. “Say
... say it’s a family emergency. You won’t be lying.” He got on board. “I’ll be
in touch.”

Vhanu stared at him; pushed forward suddenly, boarding the
tram just as the doors squeezed shut. “Commander.” He glanced down, up, touched
Gundhalinu’s arm briefly. “I don’t understand what this is about, but you
shouldn’t go alone.”

Gundhalinu nodded, not sure whether he was grateful or only
annoyed to have that pointed out to him.

“Is it your brothers, again?”

“Yes.” Gundhalinu sank into a seat as the tram began to
move.

“What have they done?” This time.

“I don’t know yet, but it’s bad. I don’t even care what it
is—by all our ancestors, this time is the last time. I won’t bury any more ‘mistakes.’
I’ll have them arrested, stripped of rank—” He looked up, bleak-eyed, into
Vhanu’s stare. “I don’t mean that, do I?”

“You never have before,” Vhanu said quietly.

“It’s not even the memory of our ancestors that stops me anymore,
NR. It’s politics ... ‘how would it look.’ ...”

“Soon it will be over,” Vhanu murmured. “You’ll be where you
want to be, in your Chief Justiceship. And then it won’t matter, you can let
them go hang.”

“I’ll leave them plenty of rope.” He shut his eyes.

The waiting shuttle carried them between artificial worlds,
backtracking across Kharemough’s cislunar space, which was dotted with the
false stars of other habitats and industrial hubs. Gundhalinu spent the trip in
silence, imagining scenarios of shame, scenarios of furious outrage, a hundred
different gut-knotting confrontations, until the vast, whitely-gleaming torus
of the starport slowly filled their view. A wheel of habitat connected by
transparent access spokes to a central island that was the port itself, Hub Two
was the largest of all the orbitals. He stopped brooding long enough to stare
out at the chains of coin-ships where they lay strung across the vacuum, in safe
harbor within the wheel—at their flattened forms designed for Black Gate transit.
Already they looked alien, almost primitive to his eyes, which had grown accustomed
to visualizing the organic forms of the new hyperlight fleet that was taking
shape; even though he knew coin-ships with converted drives would continue to
be the foundation of interstellar trade into the indefinite future. The future
... He sighed, watching as they closed orbit with the station below.

Three figures stood waiting for him inside the access as the
small, manually operated lock cycled discreetly behind them. He recognized
Donne, one of his on-line metallurgists from the shipyards, and two other
workers—a chief ngger and a powersuit operator, from the datapatches on their
coveralls.

Vhanu frowned as they came forward, with incomprehension and
annoyance. “Why are you—?” He broke off as Gundhalinu gestured him silent.

“I’m grateful for your message. Can you tell me what’s happened,
Donne?” Gundhalinu touched the woman’s upraised hand briefly, in a silent
acknowledgment between equals.

She nodded. “‘Fraid so, Commander. But we’ve been waiting
here for you a long time; we’d better move, if you don’t mind. You know Zarkada
and Tilhen—?”

Gundhalinu nodded, looking from one man to the other. Both
were offworlders, he realized, and appreciated her discretion once again—two
big men, who looked as if they solved most of their problems the hard way. But
they were reliable and steady on the job, from what he remembered. “Gods. Is it
that bad?” he asked Donne.

She grimaced, and nodded again. “We’re headed for a low-gee
neighborhood.”

Gundhalinu looked back at the two men, feeling as though he
had swallowed stones. “Thanks for coming.” They ducked their heads. Tilhen
showed a trace of smile, and shrugged. “Sorry to hear you need us, Commander.”

“Right,” he said.

Donne led them to an anonymous-looking hired van. They
climbed in and she activated the controls. A map grid came up on the display;
Gundhalinu saw two red lights blinking, side by side, somewhere deep inside it;
realized there must be a trace acting on his brothers. He watched the light
that was their own vehicle start to move as he felt motion around him; they
appeared as a spot of green, entering the grid.

“There’s work clothes in the back, Commander. You ought to
put them on,”  Donne said. “Half the people where we’re going will be afraid to
speak to you dressed like you are, and the other half will want to cut your
throat. No offense,” she added, as Vhanu glared at her.

“None taken.” Gundhalinu urged Vhanu ahead of him into the
back of the van, and pushed faded coveralls into his hands.

“Commander,” Vhanu murmured, clutching the coveralls as if
they might be alive, steadying himself as the van rose suddenly and steeply. “This
is madness. We can’t do this; call in the Police—”

“We are the Police, Captain Vhanu.” Gundhalinu shrugged off
his uniform jacket and held it up, dropped it. He unsealed his tunic and
stripped it off.

Vhanu looked down; began, self-consciously, to take off his
own jacket.

Gundhalinu turned his back, remembering a time when he had
been equally prudish. He pulled the coveralls on in awkward silence and
semidarkness as the van banked sharply. Vhanu turned back at last,
self-consciousness warring with discomfort on his face.

“NR—” Gundhalinu said gently, to the look, “thou’re not under
orders. Thou don’t have to get involved in this. Thou can leave us anywhere,
with my gratitude .... My brothers may be stupid but they’ve never been
suicidal; this will ruin my day, but it’s not going to kill me either.” He
settled a battered dockhand’s helmet onto his head.

Vhanu glanced toward the three semi-strangers waiting for
them, forward of the partition wall. His expression did not improve. “Damn it—”

“They’re all Survey. So was the one who passed me the note.
All doing me one hell of a favor.”

Vhanu looked back at him, incredulous. He nodded, accepting
it, and sighed. “At least it makes more sense that way.”

“More sense than what?”

Vhanu’s mouth twitched. “Than that you let Nontechs and laborers
address you as equals for no reason at all.” He finished fastening his
coveralls and put on a helmet.

Gundhalinu went forward again, stood behind Donne’s seat. “Tell
me about it. What in seven hells have they got into, to drag them into a place
like this?”

Donne glanced up at him in a brief moment of understanding.
She looked out again at the featureless artificial terrain of the lower level
warehouse district, rubbing her cropped, graying hair. “It’s not pretty,
Commander. It looks like your brothers are trying to sell restricted program
codes, giving access to classified production specs on the starship fleet—”

“Damnation!” Gundhalinu’s hands tightened on the seatback. “How
could they even get such a thing? They have no clearances—”

“Looks like your brother SB hired someone to deepsearch your
family codes, and got a key on you. Used one of your security clearances to
fool some program here upstairs, just long enough.”

Gundhalinu swore, feeling as if someone had kicked him in
the stomach. He shut his eyes against the awareness of everyone else’s eyes on
him, like spotlights. “Who? Who are they dealing with ... ?”

“Certain factions whose rules you also play by, but who are
playing an entirely different Game with them.”

Gundhalinu forced himself to take a deep breath, hold it;
forced himself to concentrate. “It won’t do them any good. The codes won’t work—they
all change automatically, every shift.”

“I know that, Commander.” Donne nodded. “But I guess your
brothers didn’t.”

His deathgnp on the seatback loosened. No damage done. No
real damage. But there could have been. This time it had gone too far. This
time he could not afford to ignore it, rationalize it, forgive it ... cover it
up. What they had done was not simply a betrayal of him, but betrayal on an
entirely different scale. This was greater than any personal humiliation,
private or public—

Donne stopped the van; Gundhalinu saw a blinking barrier
ahead, the drift symbol of a low-gravity environment. “We’ll have to walk it
from here, Commander,” she said. “It’s not far.”

He glanced at the twin lights on the display that marked his
brothers’ position. He touched them with his hand. “They haven’t moved,” he
said.

“Probably waiting. With any luck, they’ve been stood up,
their contacts found out the codes were worthless and didn’t even bother to
show.”

“You’re sure there’s no one else there?”

“No one’s registering, Commander.” She shrugged and got up;
passed him a handgun. “Rough neighborhood.” He checked the charge
automatically, and pushed it into an easy access on his coveralls, as she
silently handed out more weapons. Vhanu put his own weapon into a pocket,
looking uneasy.

They left the van behind and walked toward the barrier, no
one straying too far from the others; went past it, into the vast, slowly
rising curve of the low-gee area. Gundhalinu felt his footsteps begin to slide
and drift, changed the way he was moving in response as his weight suddenly
dropped to a fraction of what it had been. The gravity here changed from place
to place, moment to moment, depending on what was being done in the factories
and warehouses. He had become accustomed to moving in low—and zero-gee
environments since coming to the shipyards. He let his body function on habit,
thinking ahead, watching the red lights bum steady on the map display he had
called on inside the shield of his helmet.

Vhanu swore beside him, obviously lacking similar experience
with variable gravity. Donne and the two men watched him flounder without
comment. They kept moving, in long, arcing strides, forcing him to make the
adjustment. Vhanu was about to get an education, Gundhalinu thought, and it was
one he could use, if he bothered to remember it afterward.

The low-gee areas existed like knots in the intestines of
the starport’s habitat ring; they were used primarily for storage and
processing of materials that would be impossible to work with otherwise. There
were warrens of living quarters here too, climbing the walls, jammed into
crannies among the looming warehouses, the cranes and machinery in this gray,
echoing, twilight world. They were housing for the lowest of the lower classes.
He saw the eyes of a child peering out at him from a makeshift doorway as they
passed, and looked away again, with an ache in his gut. Kharemough supplied
most of the Hegemony’s high-grade technological equipment, and did most of its
manufacturing out in space; which meant that most of its population and
thousands of immigrant workers were out here too, crammed into too little
space, sometimes under conditions no sane person would want to think about. Only
the most wealthy, the most powerful, still lived down on the planet’s surface—or
could afford to.

Gundhalinu rubbed his arms, remembering the pernicious chill
in these places as they stopped for an automated gateway and Donne punched in a
code. A tow drifted by over their heads, the deep throb of its engines echoing
eerily off the hard surfaces everywhere around them. Other noises invaded his
consciousness: distant shouting, the sound of heavy machinery grinding, the
whine of cutters, some vibration so deep that he felt more than heard it, that
made his teeth hurt. The work here never ceased; neither did the noise, always
changing but eternal, echoing and distorting in ways he never heard anywhere
else; as if sound was somehow warped and dysfunctional too, like gravity.

They moved on again like awkward swimmers, passing workers
who drifted like shadows across their vision, in small groups or alone,
variously empty-faced, wary, dull-eyed. The meter-thick rails of a transport
track rose up across their path, leading toward the access door of an airlock
that could have admitted half a ship. Gravity increased abruptly, and they
stumbled the succession of painfully clumsy steps to the other side, only to
drift and collide with each other when the gravity faded again. Gundhalinu
righted Vhanu, saw the disonentation growing into panic in his eyes. “It gets
easier,” he murmured. Vhanu nodded and took a deep breath, starting on unaided.

A gang of Unclassified workers came up alongside them; Gundhalinu
heard mocking laughter and muttered insults. “Hey, fresh meat,” a voice called
out. “Maybe you need a little help—” Someone’s elbow struck Vhanu, sent him
caroming into a wall.

Vhanu recovered his balance; his hand darted toward the
pocket that carried a concealed weapon, his face full of sudden fury.
Gundhalinu caught his arm, held him back as Zarkada took hold of their
harasser, towering over him, and shoved the man away into his companions. “Maybe
you’d like me to help you find out which way you bend, scumbag ... and which
way you don’t.” Tilhen moved forward until they were shoulder to shoulder.