Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

‘You have good instincts. But if you do hear anything more concrete let me know. Anything else?’

‘No, Captain. Thank you.’

When he’d gone, Shi-mi jumped back on to the desk. The cat asked, ‘So what do you think of that?’

‘What do you think? I assume you know more than either me or Nathan about this.’

‘Not a great deal more, I assure you.’

‘So there’s something in it? Cutler has some kind of secret assignment – something Davidson is keeping even from me?’

‘Davidson himself may be acting under orders from above.’

‘Why did you say you thought Nathan wanted to talk about weapons? – Oh. You’re thinking of Cutler as a weapon?’

‘Well, isn’t he? A man with unshakeable beliefs and a profound loyalty. At Valhalla, suppose Davidson had had to order you to open fire on the peaceful crowds that day . . .’

‘Umm.’ Sometimes, in wakeful nights, Maggie had pondered that, among other unpleasant might-have-beens of her life. ‘I guess we would have obeyed his command. But Cutler—’

‘Cutler would have been the first to fire. Without hesitation and the most enthusiastic. Wouldn’t such a man be a useful weapon? Captain, Cutler is here as a means of controlling you , in certain circumstances.’

‘Hmm . . .’

Maggie had no way to check this out, not without turning the ship around. The only long-range communications system that spanned the inhabited Long Earth was the outernet, a kind of mixture of internet and drop-boxes mediated by the chance passage of travellers and twains – reliable, but slow and in no way secure, and it didn’t function too far out anyhow. And there was no ship faster than the Armstrong itself to serve as a courier. Maggie was going to have to continue with her mission without access to her command chain, for better or worse.

She took out her frustration on the cat, not for the first time. ‘You’re damn suspicious, for a bunch of random sparks of electricity in a half-pound of Black Corporation gel.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment. But I’m right to be suspicious. You should be. There are all sorts of secrets being kept from you on this ship. And if you admitted that to yourself, you might have an evens chance of spotting some of them.’

WITH THE STEPPING RATE upped to two a second during operational hours, and with plenty of downtime for testing and system shakedown, the Armstrong and Cernan were able to cover the best part of a hundred thousand steps a day. So, ten days after Cowley’s speech in Madison West 5, the airships were already passing Earth West 1,000,000, and were entering the more exotic band of worlds known to the early explorers as the High Meggers.

Cautiously Maggie allowed herself to relax. Her in-tray of problems both technical and human was dwindling. Despite Mac’s gloomy analysis that the true purpose of the mission was power projection by the federal government, she was collecting no issues from the ground either. And after five long years of labour in the Low Earths and the Datum, she was no longer locked into the huge, ongoing and utterly dispiriting relief effort that still spanned much of Yellowstone-blighted Datum America.

She was thinking, in fact, of giving Harry Ryan his head and letting him open up the throttle to full, ahead of the test schedule, and see just what this baby could do.

That was when Douglas Black knocked on the door of her sea cabin.

After an embarrassed introduction by Nathan Boss, Black sat down opposite her, stiffly. The man who stood behind him, no more than thirty years old, close-shaven, glared at her like a recruiting-ground sergeant at a private.

Nathan got out of there as fast as he could.

Maggie hadn’t even known Black was aboard, and she resentfully remembered Shi-mi’s hints of secrets on this voyage. She had only ever seen this man, Douglas Black, the most powerful, indeed probably the richest industrialist in all the worlds of mankind, from a distance: on stage with the President like back in Madison, or on some media channel, plugging his latest technological initiative, or testifying to yet another senate committee investigating allegations of corporate malpractice. He was smaller than he looked on TV, she thought immediately. Slimmer, older. He wore a plain-looking black business suit and tie. He might have been handsome once, but now his bald pate was liver-spotted, his features, his nose, ears, were old-man prominent, and his eyes were rheumy behind the dark glasses he continued to wear indoors.

Black caught her studying him, and laughed. ‘You needn’t pull your punches, Captain. I know I’m no oil painting, and a let-down compared with the way the TV people prettify me digitally. Still, check out my youthful smile.’ He grinned widely, showing her rows of perfect teeth. ‘Decent choppers – one thing money can buy, these days.’

His accent was Bostonian, she thought, old school, like JFK in grainy black-and-white TV clips. Old school, but not particularly old money. Everybody knew Black’s story, how he had parlayed a grandfather’s oil-money bequest into fortune and power through dazzling technological innovations, and had acquired a comet-tail of enemies in the process.

‘Mr Black,’ she began.

‘Call me Douglas.’

‘I’d rather not. You can call me Captain Kauffman. I had no idea you were even on this vessel until you announced your presence to my wretched XO.’

‘Ah, yes. I’m afraid we rather caught that young man by surprise, didn’t we? Couldn’t be helped, I’m afraid. I was smuggled aboard before launch and locked into my private cabin, tucked away in a corner of the gondola – you must come visit. The issue is security, as you can imagine. You must know I am rather, well, vulnerable , and I have accreted rather a lot of opponents. So this unhappy subterfuge was cooked up – with the cooperation of your Admiral Davidson and my security people, all mediated by staff from the office of President Cowley. Everybody’s been very helpful.’ He smiled again, self-satisfied.

Maggie was coldly furious. ‘Helpful? Mr Black, from my point of view you’re a stowaway.’

He was quite unperturbed. ‘How exciting! And at my age. In that case I should say that I do come with some baggage.’

‘Baggage?’

‘There’s Philip here, and a small staff – my personal physician, a few scientific advisers, a planetologist, a climatologist. And some specialized equipment. In addition to the general fragility of age, I have endured a number of transplants, and my regime of anti-rejection drugs compromises my immune system. I need protection, you see. Luckily you have a roomy hold.’

‘Good grief. How many tons of deadweight does all that represent? And all smuggled aboard without my knowledge.’

‘True. Yet here we are. I don’t imagine you’re about to throw me overboard?’

‘No. But I may do that to this goon of yours, if he doesn’t stop staring me down.’

‘Philip, be polite.’ The man Philip dropped his eyes, but otherwise didn’t move a muscle. ‘I’m afraid he must stay at my side. Another condition of my security people concerning your kind offer of a berth. Well, not your offer, rather the President’s . . .’ He smiled again after dropping that ultimate name, evidently content to wait while she absorbed all this.

‘Well, Mr Black, I can’t say I’m not surprised – astonished – to find you here, aboard my ship.’

‘That’s because you don’t know me, yet. I’ve always been rather more adventurous than my public persona might suggest.’

‘I know you pumped a lot of money into these vessels.’