Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

Dryke swore. “Then where is he? Does anyone have anything?”

“Could have been picked up by someone,” Loren said. “You want some company in there?”

Frowning, Dryke tipped the shield of his helmet halfway up. “I suppose. Liviya, baby-sit the Pursuit, will you?”

While he waited, Dryke drifted back to the study, the most interesting room. When Loren joined him, he was sitting in the chair at the comsole, playing with a model of a self-lifting crane.

“Bastard got away from me again,” he said, his voice almost emotionless.

“I did a space inventory on the way through—not a very good house for playing hide-and-seek.”

“No. And I’m tired of that game.” Frowning, Dryke discarded the model on the desk. “I guess we can have Dru take a look at this, anyway.”

“Somebody’s going to have to come pick me up,” Dru reminded.

Under the weight of Dryke’s disappointment, it seemed like a major decision. “Liviya—no, better keep the flyer here. Ah, who’s in Unit Four?”

“Zabricki.”

“Just a moment.” Loren leaned closer and peered at the com-sole. “Dru? You still showing traffic on the lines into here?”

“Sure,” she answered. “The same background stuff—ad frames, financials, junk fax. Intermittent but steady.”

Puzzled, Loren swung his head toward Dryke. “Where’s it going to? This system’s not logging anything.”

“What? There must be an AIP trashing it.”

“Even that would show as activity.”

Loren and Dryke stared at each other for a long moment. Then Dryke stood and flipped his shield back down into place.

“Zabricki, Dru, stay put,” Dryke said. He raised a questioning eyebrow at Loren. “Where?”

“Down,” said Loren. “Has to be down.”

“Let’s find it.”

“Look for natural seams, inside corners. I don’t think there’s any wall volume unaccounted for. Probably in the floor.”

“Kitchen,” said Dryke, his eyes lighting up. “Parquet floor. Come on.”

The seams were almost perfect, the door almost invisible. It filled the rectangular space between the pedestal counter and the sink cabinets along one wall. Dryke stood looking down at it with hands on hips, chewing on his lower lip.

“How much do you want to bet there’s another way in?” Loren asked. “Tunnel to the woods? To the garage?”

Dryke shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. He’s not here.” He sighed. “What do you think, voice command? Through the house AIP?”

“Probably.”

“And what else?” Dryke scanned the kitchen. “A lot of control contacts here. Some unlikely combination—”

“I can’t imagine them taking the chance of someone trying to make some toast and raising the door instead.”

“And I can’t imagine him not building in a safety net. AIPs can be corrupted.”

“We can force this,” Loren said. “There’s a power chisel in my skimmer.”

“No,” Dryke said, walking to the sink at the middle of the rectangle. “If we force it, the files are sure to be dumped.” He turned on the cold water and splashed a double handful on his face. “It wouldn’t be anything you could do by accident.”

“It wouldn’t be anything that would open it while you’re standing on it,” Loren said with a grin.

The water still running, his face still wet, Dryke stared sideways at the other man. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said slowly. He touched the sweep contact on the wall behind the sink and watched as the faucet head swiveled in a circle to sweep away particles loosened by the ultrasonics. “But all you’d need is a little interlock, a pressure sensor—”

As the sweep cycle ended, Dryke stepped back from the sink, retreating past the edge of the door. From there, stretching out across the countertop, he could barely reach the contact behind the sink. But he could reach it.

With a faint whir, the floor began to rise, the first few centimeters straight up, then canting toward Loren. Dryke jumped back and stared.

“He must have longer arms than I do.”

Loren was marveling. “Son of a bitch. How did you know where the switch was?”

“Because I know him better than I want to.”

The panel stopped rising when it made a sixty-degree angle with the rest of the floor. Beneath it was a lighted passage, a carpeted stairway.

“Stay here,” Dryke said to Loren, and started down.

He descended the stairs cautiously, the edge suddenly back in the game. Halfway down, he crouched for a peek into the room below.

Where the walls should have been, he glimpsed a golden-red desertscape, a flash of light on water, the brilliant greens of a fern-filled rain forest. The whole chamber was a tank, ten meters across, with earthscape murals playing on the shell. At the center was a large-scale table display, an interface controller with its multicolored screens, a curved desk.

And, in the high-backed chair beside the desk, a man. He was facing the stairway and looking directly at Dryke.

“Lila, begin,” said the man in the chair.

His breath still caught tight in the binding of his surprise, Dryke descended the last few steps as an automaton. The man in the chair had but a passing resemblance to Jeremiah—his face beardless and too lean, the hair thinner and darker. But there was something in the eyes that was the same.

“I expected you, Mr. Dryke, but not this soon. Take off your hat and stay awhile—”

There was something oddly theatrical about the man’s demeanor, something scripted about his words and tone. But where was the audience?

“Did you get that?” Loren was calling from the kitchen. “Mr. Dryke, did you get that?”

Dryke heard him through the helmet, not the coder. “Get what?” he called back.

But Loren was already descending the stairway with quick steps. “Dru says all the lines from here are lit up. Land and sky—Dru? Dru? Damn, I’m losing her. This place must be shielded.” He stopped short of the landing and blinked. “Jesus Christ. There’s somebody here.”

“Ready,” said a woman’s voice from nowhere.

“Thank you, Lila,” the man said calmly. “This is William McCutcheon, speaking for Jeremiah and the Homeworld—”

The whole chamber is a tank . Dryke spun around and looked at the ceiling behind him. A three-eyed camera limpet hung from the ceiling above the stairway.

“As you can see, I have visitors this morning. As you might guess from the weapons they carry, I did not invite them. Mikhail Dryke, chief of the security forces for Allied Transcon, has invaded my home to arrest me. My crime—”

“No!” shouted Dryke, whirling. “No more fucking speeches!”

Behind him, Loren wordlessly retreated halfway up the stairs. “Dru?” Dryke heard him saying. “Dru?”

“Do you really think that you can stop us?” asked McCutcheon. “That your efforts have made any difference at all? Do you think I count so much, that you have only one enemy? I’m just one link in the chain, one cell in something larger. When I’m gone, someone else will step in to take my place.”

“And someone else will step in to take mine,” said Dryke. Something had snapped inside him, like a switch being thrown.

He no longer cared if his words were being broadcast to the world, no longer could bear to be taunted and lectured.

“You don’t understand what you’re fighting.” McCutcheon’s tone was dismissive.

In that moment, Dryke realized that he had made the decision on the train. He realized, too, that if he let McCutcheon go on talking, the moment would slip away. Later, he would want to tell himself that he had been driven past the edge by rage and fear, necessity and fatigue. But the truth was that it was a willful act. He touched the white fire and let it fill him. Only afterward did it burn.