Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“As do I,” Sasaki said. “As do I. May your journey be fruitful. Report to me at first opportunity.”

“I will. But there’s something else we need to settle. Do I still have authority? Will you support me?”

She studied him for a long time, her eyes deep crystal black and unblinking. “Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“But be sure. Be very sure.”

“I will.” He glanced at his watch. “The others should be ready. I have to go,” he said, and started for the door. Then he paused and added, “I nearly forgot—”

“Yes?”

“Word came in while you were in the convo. The command and navigation package is safely aboard the ship.”

That earned a smile. “I am glad to hear it.”

“Feist says that the virus turned up with every archive copy of the package on site in Munich. All five of them. Every time they tried a restore, the virus would come up, look for its parent on the main net, and go crazy when it came up missing.”

“Then consider yourself vindicated,” said Sasaki. “Can you tell me now where the operational copy was stored?”

Dryke grinned. “In a bulk cargo cask in the holding yard at Palima Point, waiting for a cheap ride to orbit.”

“Tagged as what?” Sasaki’s eyebrows were frowning.

“As the personal freight of a new Takara immigrant, one Atsuji Matsushita.”

“Did he know?”

“The only person who knew was Matt Reid, who had to make the intercept.”

“And the awkward questions from Mr. Matsushita, wondering what’s become of his socks?”

“For the price of his immigration fee, Mr. Matsushita was prevailed upon to help smuggle some contraband up to the colony,” said Dryke. “Believe me, he’ll be too scared to ask any questions about its disappearance.”

An hour later, Dryke’s team boarded the tube at the DFW transplex. Already dispersed through the waiting line, the five men and two women ended up scattered between six different compartments on the two-car train.

Dryke, with an end seat in number 9 of the second car, was able to watch through the window as the containerized cargo and luggage slid on board below his feet. He wondered if the team’s kits had passed railway scrutiny; the bags did not carry the Federal Weapons License scanner tags to which he and the corpsecs were entitled. Although that limited their options, it also avoided a verification call-out, which could alert Jeremiah of their approach.

At the Phoenix interline station, the team separated into two groups. The texperts drew the longer route, the Midlands tube back to Chicago, then west again to Seattle, where they would wait for Dryke’s call. Dryke and the four corpsecs stayed on board for the coast run to Portland.

The elderly woman at his left was garrulously inquisitive, but Dryke was not interested in conversation. Before long, he detached the eyecup display and earpieces from his slate and donned the slender headset which held them, pointedly withdrawing to the artificial reality they created.

But it was hard to make the time pass quickly, impossible to calm his inner restlessness. The correlation files and quicksearch reports stored in his slate were dry as a brittle leaf. And the DBS link of the expensive Korean-made slate was useless a hundred meters underground. The train was isolated from the direct broadcast skylinks, except for what the National Railway chose to relay from surface antennas—and to sell by the minute to its captive audience. But Drake could not afford to have his account show any activity, especially not aboard a tube.

He realized suddenly that he was tired. The adrenaline that had sustained him through the preparations was gone, leaving him weary-limbed and energyless. His kit contained antifatigue tablets, but it was just as well that they were out of reach. Watchman worked as advertised, but exacted a horrible price when it finally wore off.

He realized, too, that he had missed two meals that day and had nothing with him to fill the void. The thought was enough to awaken an empty-bellied hunger which had lain dormant to that point.

Extracting the stylus from his holder, Dryke began to doodle idly on the slate—filling the frame with patterns of nested diamonds, blanking it to fill it with concentric circles, then with the squares of a chessboard grid. It did not amuse him, but it occupied him, and that was almost enough.

He thought ahead to Jeremiah, ahead to the mission. There was little doubt in his mind that the team would succeed. The end of the chase was in sight, if not yet in hand.

But, oddly, there was little pleasure in the anticipation. After all the travel, all the trauma, he would have thought he’d be happier. Even his curiosity had been dulled. He no longer cared to know what moved his adversary, what tricks and tactics had prolonged the siege. The weariness ran deeper than blood and muscle. It had infected his spirit as well.

It’s time to move on.

The thought surprised him. Move on to what? To serving Mikhail Dryke. To carrying on a normal life . But he wondered if he knew how to do either. To keeping all those promises consigned to the future—Castillo de San Marcos, Loches, Peveril Castle. To walk the ruins of the Great Wall from Shanhaiguan to Jia-yuguan and the edge of the desert —

“Are you a historian?” asked the woman beside him.

“Eh?” He turned toward her. “Excuse me?”

She pointed toward his slate. “I was wondering if you were a historian?”

Dryke looked down at his lap and laughed despite himself. The last sketch that had come from his deft fingers and idle mind was a half-completed plan for an assault on a mountain redoubt he had labeled Fort Jesus.

“No, ma’am,” he said, his voice soft and weary. “Not a historian. Just a boy playing soldier.”

She left him alone after that, even though he might have ultimately welcomed the distraction. The thoughts that possessed him were black and joyless. Victory is a more difficult art than war . Which American President had said that? Wilson? Roosevelt? Gingrich? Dryke could not remember. Others had learned the same lesson. The Duke of Wellington explaining to Lady Shelley: I always say that, next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained . An old secret, indeed, now being revealed to Dryke.

It was a decision he did not want to make, wrapped in questions he did not want to answer. If there was a Katrina Becker in Munich, an Evan Silverman in Houston, a Javier Sala in Madrid, who might there be in Prainha, or Kasigau, or Takara? How long would it take an organization which had intercepted company mail and jammed Newstime to find where their Prophet was hidden?

Would the people who had knocked down a T-ship and spilled poisons on the ground be any less bold in trying to reclaim their leader? Could he rest easy knowing that his enemies played breathless electronic tag on the nets unimpeded, and found the Project’s defenses as intimidating as the Maginot Line?

There were a hundred questions, and yet they were all the same question: How long would it go on if he let it go on? He hoped that circumstance would save him from having to find an answer, save him from touching that place inside where white fire lived and no act was forbidden.

All of the decisions were coming hard.

They had two targets, each difficult in its own way: the Peterson Road house, a hundred klicks outside the city, and Pacific Land Management, ten stories up in the heart of Portland’s financial district. Dryke had too few troops to cover both at once— the small size of the team was part of the price for moving quickly and quietly. Nor could they touch local law enforcement for help. There was no way to control what went out into the net. There was no way to know who was Jeremiah’s friend.