Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

"Or in other words," Chi cut me off, "you want the Patri to make a nova-class fuss over this, simply on the strength of a Watcher's word. Let me explain something, Benedar: I have a reputation and a career, and chasing ghosts is not how I got them. If we find some evidence—hard evidence, I mean—in the next couple of days, then we'll see."

"And if you don't?" Randon asked.

"Then we pack up and go back to Solitaire." Chi's lip twitched knowingly. "And you'll have to make some other kind of deal to get your Watcher back."

Beside me, Kutzko stirred. "Hard evidence, huh?" he asked.

We all looked at him... and again I shivered. He was preparing for action... "Mikha—"

He turned hard eyes on me, and I shut up. "Your permission, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos?" he asked.

Randon frowned, but nodded. "Go ahead."

Kutzko nodded back and turned to the Pravilo officer still standing nearby. "Sir, I'll need my needler. Please signal your men not to react."

The other eyed him thoughtfully, gave a brisk nod. "Guards!—clear weapon!" he shouted.

"Thank you." Carefully, Kutzko eased his needler from its holster, keeping it pointed at the ground. "Dr. Chi, would you say that the smarter something is, the faster it ought to learn?"

Chi licked his lips nervously. He had no idea where Kutzko was headed with this, but already he didn't like it. "I suppose it would be a fairly accurate generalization."

"Fine." Kutzko looked at me. "Which ones are the most awake, Gilead?"

I swallowed. "Pretty much all of them, except the ones being monitored."

"That one, for instance?" he asked, raising his needler to point it at a nearby thunderhead.

I studied it a moment. "Yes," I acknowledged.

"No change right now?"

"No."

"Fine." He lowered the weapon again and took a quiet preparing breath. "Keep watching it. See if it learns that a needler is something to be afraid of."

He took a few steps toward the thunderhead. Beside me, Chi and Randon were both watching him unblinkingly; from the tight silence in the hollow, I could tell everyone else was doing the same. Lifting his needler, Kutzko aimed at the far bluff and fired twice.

The shots shattered the silence, their ringing echoes almost covering the faint insect-whine of the needles ricocheting harmlessly off the distant rock. The silence returned... and Kutzko lowered his aim deliberately to the thunderhead he'd indicated—

An icy hand grabbed my heart. "Stop!" I shouted. "Don't shoot!"

The gun didn't move. "I'm not going to," he frowned. "Did it leave?"

I took a deep breath. "Yes, it did," I told him. "Please—lower the gun."

He held the pose another moment, then returned the needler to its holster and started back toward us. "What's wrong?" Randon murmured at my ear.

I shook my head, my brain scrambling to sort out the sensations that had jolted me into shouting my warning. "I don't know, exactly. I felt a sudden surge of emotion from the entire city, directed at Kutzko. And there was a... it was like a flicker of light, only too short to really see."

"A flicker of light you couldn't really see, huh?" Chi said dryly. "Well, that makes sense."

My stomach knotted with frustration. Peripherally, I noted that the threatened thunderhead had now returned to full consciousness. "The flash was there," I insisted.

Kutzko reached us and stopped. "Well, Doctor?" he asked coolly. "That convince you?"

Chi grimaced. "Not especially. I'm sorry, but again all we've got here is one man's impressions, without a shred of hard evidence anywhere—"

And a hunch clicked. "Mikha, give me your needler," I cut Chi off.

Kutzko's forehead furrowed slightly. "Sir?" he asked the Pravilo officer.

The other nodded. "Go ahead."

Drawing the gun from its holster, Kutzko offered me the grip. I took it and, gingerly, looked down the muzzle.

A centimeter down the barrel, a spiderweb had appeared, blocking the opening. A spiderweb composed of a dozen ultrathin filaments of metal...

Wordlessly, I handed the weapon to Randon. He looked... raised his eyes back to mine. "It's blocked," he said, his voice hollow as he offered it to Chi. "Like it'd been... spot welded or something."

I nodded, feeling cold all over. "They thought Mikha was going to start shooting at them. This was their way of stopping him."

Chi looked up from the gun, a haunted look in his eyes. "But it wouldn't really have blocked the shot. Would it?"

Kutzko took the needler back, and his face hardened as he gazed in at the metal spiderweb. "Probably not," he said. "Does it blazing-well matter?"

Chi took a ragged breath, his gaze drifting almost unwillingly to the thunderheads. To the thunderheads; who in the space of a few seconds had observed, evaluated, and taken precise action... "No," he told Kutzko with a shiver. "I don't suppose it matters at all."

I was returned to Solitaire and placed under what seemed to be a form of house arrest aboard the Bellwether... and for the next six weeks nothing happened.

Or at least, nothing that I expected to happen did so. No one came to charge me with any crimes, or to take me before the judiciary or even to a more official prison; the Bellwether made no attempt to leave the planet, let alone the system; and from what I could gather from my limited information sources, there was no reaction at all from the general Solitaran populace over the news that an alien intelligence had just been discovered on their sister world.

All of which implied that, even as courier ships were undoubtedly burning their way through Mjollnir space to bring the news to the Patri hierarchy, somewhere the decision had been made to keep the discovery secret. A bad idea, I thought, for several different reasons. But no one was asking my opinion.

I didn't see Calandra at all during that time. From the face and body language of the guards who brought me my meals I gathered that she too was back aboard, though no one would verbally confirm that. They also wouldn't tell me what, if anything, was happening with her case, and I spent many of the long hours replaying all that had happened and brooding about whether my fumbling attempts had made things any better for her. There was no way to know, and I could only console myself with the knowledge that I certainly hadn't made them any worse.

And finally, six weeks to the day after my imprisonment began, they came to get me.

—

We landed near the Butte City encampment where I'd first awakened from my pravdrug interrogation, an encampment that had changed drastically in the time I'd been locked up on Solitaire. The ship that had been at its center was still there, but the handful of soft-wall structures had been replaced by ten gleaming prebuilt sectional buildings, including what looked like a clean-room lab and two military-style barracks. The whole area had been cordoned off by a sensor fence, a fence that also enclosed our landing area and stretched out to define a wide corridor to the buttes. From my angle I couldn't tell if the buttes themselves had been fenced off, but I rather thought they had.

I was taken into the lab, and to a large office/workroom already starting to show signs of cluttering... and there I met the new head of the thunderhead project.

That he was the head was instantly clear. His manner, his bearing, the subtle exchange of body language between him and my guards—all of it pointed to absolute authority, and to a man accustomed to wearing it. From the way he looked at me—the thoughtful, probing way he sized me up as I walked with my Pravilo escort from the doorway to his desk—it was similarly clear that he was a man of science and not simply some Patri official or bureaucrat.

Just as it was clear that he didn't especially like me.