Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

Keeping his pace brisk and his thoughts disciplined, Christopher hiked to the transplex and the tube station. He was invigorated by the freedom that came with action, by the peace that came with purpose. The police might soon be searching for him, Dryke could soon be hunting him, but he did not care. In a few short hours he would be beyond their reach, for Horizon was not his final destination. This journey would not end until he reached Deryn’s arms and Sanctuary.

Prainha had become a prison for Mikhail Dryke.

In the moment he fired the first bullet into Jeremiah’s body, he had understood that Sasaki would not approve. He had recognized that, by passing on the opportunity to simply collect Jeremiah, he was crossing a significant line. He had known that the decision would look different in Prainha than it had in the underground room.

And though Sasaki had said not one word in reproach, her actions argued loudly enough that Dryke had been right. It began with Sasaki’s explicit order that Christopher McCutcheon be left free and alive. She had never interfered with Dryke in that way before, and he read the message clearly: I can’t undo what you’ve done, but I will not permit you to repeat the mistake .

“We can’t kill all our enemies, Mikhail. I do not consider the son a risk,” she had said. “Separate him from us and leave him there.” She neither invited nor accepted Dryke’s counsel on the decision.

Another clue: In the two weeks since the event, no official announcement of Jeremiah’s death had been made, even within the Project. The committee and senior security staff knew, and the Houston center was rife with apparently unsquelchable rumors. Marshall had offered token congratulations; Matt Reid had gratefully welcomed the news. But that was the extent of it.

Even more telling, it seemed as though he was being insulated from the real work of his own department. Part of it was his own doing—there was no place for him in the everyday operation of Corporate Security unless he shouldered aside one of his own handpicked lieutenants.

But Sasaki seemed determined to keep him from his accustomed role as fire fighter, as well. She had placed the entire First Directorate under travel restrictions, meaning that he needed her explicit permission to leave Prainha. And there was always some new reason why he couldn’t leave. He spent his days chasing down problems which were beneath him and sitting through meetings to which he had nothing to contribute. He understood that, too. She wanted him in sight at all times, on his invisible leash.

The maddening part was that there were problems that cried out for his attention.

Item : In the street outside the twenty-six-story building housing the Tokyo training and processing center, the carnival of militant demonstrations continued its daily run. The strategy of the mostly youthful protesters consisted of blocking the street and baiting Tokyo police, Corporate Security, and—in absentia, since they had largely ceded the battlefield—the starheads. The police and security had shown restraint, even in the face of taunts punctuated by hurled bags of excrement.

The starheads, however, had not. There had been fly by shootings, gas grenades lobbed from blocks away, kamikaze drivers. Just three days ago, a small group of starheads had slipped into the fifteen-story tower facing the Allied building, taken over the roof, and rained thousands of marble-sized steel bearings down on the throng. In a particularly vicious twist, the starheads had begun shouting amplified insults down into the walled canyon just before the hail reached the ground.

Five demonstrators were killed and more than a hundred injured by the hail, some horribly so, with cheeks torn open, eyes splattered like eggs, facial bones shattered, skulls fractured as they turned their faces up to look for the enemy. In the riot that followed, the Allied building was breached and a fire set in the main atrium, and seven more died, including one policewoman and three starheads found dead by their own hand on the rooftop.

Item : In Cologne, Greens and Homeworlders together were trying to shut down an Allied-owned specialty metals plant by lying down in front of the haulers trying to leave the plant, which was producing both molded and machined parts for Memphis . More than three hundred had been dragged away from in front of the wheels and arrested, but there seemed to be no shortage of volunteers to replace them, even after a woman and a teenaged boy were crushed when one omni driver lost patience with the game.

Item : Yvonne Havens, director of operations at Kasigau Launch Center, had abruptly and unexpectedly resigned within the week. After the fact, she informed Sasaki that she had done so to “ransom” her mother, who had been kidnapped from her apartment in Cairo by a group calling itself Jeremiah’s Hands. Emboldened by their success, the terrorists had just taken the husband of a HELcrew launch chief and the daughter of the supervisor of Vehicle Manufacturing, making the same demands.

There were mitigating factors in all three situations. The Tokyo center was effectively mothballed, anyway, under Contingency Zero, but it was important to keep up appearances. The metals plant had completed more than ninety-five percent of its Diaspora contract, including all of the critical high-stress system fittings. And Kasigau’s efficiency had never been what it should have been under Havens.

Still, it was not in Dryke’s nature to discount such threats or to entrust others with the responsibility of responding to them. But he was faced with doing both, because Sasaki “needed” him in Prainha.

He would have been more upset, except for the odd conviction persisting that, with Jeremiah dead, it should be over. He did not have the old fight in him; he was merely annoyed, not aroused, by the news coming in. Even so, he would have talked to Sasaki about it, but she had disappeared beyond barriers of bureaucracy. His former access had dried up; he did not see her and could not get to her.

Overlooked and underworked, Dryke was left with time to wonder, more time than he cared for. Had he any taste for alcohol or other drugs, he probably would have used them to shorten the day. But his fetish for control in his life was too strong to permit him that escape. Were he less duty-driven, he might have declared his war over and gone home. But he could not abdicate, even though it was harder each day to see any reason for his being there.

He no longer knew what Hiroko wanted from him or what she wanted him for. At times, he wondered if she was merely keeping him on hand to throw to the wolves when the snarling and howling grew too loud. Dryke had neither expected nor wanted to be greeted as a conquering hero—he felt too much ambivalence himself for that. But neither had he dreamed he would find himself recalled in disgrace, spinning out his days as the pariah of Prainha.

At midmonth, Dryke was granted a brief, tantalizing glimpse into what was happening in the inner circle. It came in the form of a visit from Roger Marshall, one of two outsiders on Sasaki’s seven-member advisory committee.

Though Marshall came and went from Prainha at will, Dryke had had only glancing contact with the billionaire California real estate developer. He knew him only as a well-dressed, well-mannered, well-spoken man. A reasonable man, as Dryke defined the term. Someone who listened before he questioned and thought before he answered.

Dryke knew a little more about Marshall’s company, Cornerstone Management. The problems of building a residential superscraper overlapped a great deal with the problems of building a starship, and Cornerstone had shown itself the reigning master of the former art, with Marshall the financial wizard who made the deals go. Marshall and Co. had put up Daley Tower in Chicago, the Gold Coast complex north of Sydney, and several other headline projects. Of the dozen or so architectural monuments around the globe which rivaled Memphis for cost and complexity, Roger Marshall had had a hand in five.