Timothy Zahn: Spinneret

A dozen questions flickered across Saleh's face, but he merely nodded. "They'll be brought here as soon as possible."

"Good. Well, then, I think that wraps things up for now." Meredith rose and extended his hand. "Read Miss Olivero's proposals carefully and contact us with any questions or comments."

Saleh reached across the table to grip Meredith's hand. "I'll do so … and whether you believe it or not, Colonel, I look forward to working on this with you." He nodded gravely to Carmen, then turned and opened the outside door. There was a brief gust of icy air, and then he was gone.

"Goal three and game," Meredith muttered, feeling the tension draining out of him. If Saleh was even half as sincere as he'd seemed, the whole thing might just work. Taking a deep breath, he looked at Carmen. "Well. I don't know about you, but I still have a mountain of work waiting for me back at Unie. Shall we go?"

Carmen snorted as they headed for the door leading to the rest of Martello Base.

"You make it sound like I have nothing to do."

"It's got to be easier than it was before all the campaign rhetoric started cooling down." He glanced at her as he opened the door for them. "You're still troubled about something, aren't you?"

She nodded. "Loretta Williams. How are you so sure she's really on our side now?

If it's not a secret, that is."

"No secret—I just never got around to telling all of you on our little excursion.

You know how we tapped the spy comm net, don't you?"

"Major Barner said you installed Rooshrike gadgets in the radios that let you receive the signals before they went through the scramblers."

"Right. And since the Orspham could give us copies of the corresponding scrambled conversations, we could break the scrambler code itself, which is why we were able to substitute our own computer sequence at this end when Udani tried to send the supervisor data."

"If you knew they were spies, though, why didn't you arrest them right away?"

"Because we still needed their help to decipher the Spinneret equipment."

Meredith smiled. "Besides which, it was handy to have Msuya thinking he knew more about the Spinneret than we did. You see, Ermakov and his gang were editing out crucial bits of information in their reports to us, bits they naturally passed on to Msuya. With the bugs in place we actually got everything, of course, but as far as Msuya knew we shouldn't have had the means to even look for the supervisor-danger code, let alone find it. So it never occurred to him to plan for such a contingency."

Carmen seemed to digest that. "I take it, then, that Loretta's reports to us were complete?"

"Better than that, actually. After Dunlop's move she started shaving data going the other direction. Msuya never knew the lifeboat's full size, for example, and the location she gave him was down an entirely different tunnel system."

"Odd she never mentioned that."

"Not really. As far as she knew, it would be an improvable and all-too-convenientsounding excuse."

They'd reached the door that looked out over Martello's docks now. Glancing out the small windows as they pulled their coats from the nearby rack, Meredith saw that it was beginning to flurry again. He hoped the major storm the satellites had spotted would miss the area as predicted; the Rooshrike were due to start landing two hundred tons of iron and aluminum early in the morning. Pushing the door open, he squinted against the wind and led the way to the nearest hovercraft.

It wasn't until they were out in the open water that Carmen spoke again. "It won't work, you know. I've run the numbers, and there's no way this cable monitor program can absorb enough people to do any real good. Even with the teachers and community setup people we'll need to support the whole thing, we're not going to be able to give genuine jobs to more than a couple hundred thousand people at the most. Even the embassies we'll be setting up everywhere in sight won't absorb that many more." She shook her head tiredly. "There are more than a hundred thousand unemployed beggars in Calcutta alone."

"True," Meredith nodded. "But on the other hand we aren't limited to Astra and Earth anymore, either."

Carmen frowned … and, slowly, a look of astonishment spread across her face.

"You mean … Spinnerhome?"

"Why not? Surely the Spinners' enemies are long gone by now, and it seems unlikely that the basic soil fertility could have been destroyed. Of course, we'll need to check the place out thoroughly first, and we'll have to learn enough about that black hole drive to build bigger ships. But that's one of the reasons I want to concentrate so hard on educating our immigrants. By the time we're ready to open up Spinnerhome, we'll need a cadre of capable people available to spearhead the effort."

"And what if Spinnerhome is uninhabitable?" she persisted. "What'll we do then?—start checking the other systems on the lifeboat map until we find something?"

"We could," he nodded. "Or we could search the region around Spinnerhome using our own star drive. Between the two of them we've got access to practically the whole damn galaxy." He shrugged. "And in the meantime we'll have spread mankind out as far as we can and have set up on Astra the first crack at a genuine melting pot that anyone's seen since 1776. On the whole, I think the human race is in better shape now than any time in the past century."

Behind them came the roar of the repulsers, and Meredith looked out the hovercraft window as the UN shuttle arced overhead. Going back to Earth … and Meredith chuckled.

"What's funny?" Carmen asked.

He shook his head. "I'd almost forgotten … but one of my most hopeful goals for the whole Astra project was that it would earn me a brigadier general's star. I guess, instead, I'll have to settle for a few of the real thing."