Chapter 3
Taddeuz Bertingas: STRING PULLER
For half an hour they sat and watched the twenty-meter black egg on the stage as if it were an important but boring ritual. No one among the aides and assistants, the second secretaries and deputy directors who filled the audience seats felt so self-assured that he or she would stand up, move around, trade gossip, break out a deck of five spot, or otherwise pretend they were all cut off from the action by a wall of energy as thick as syncrete. But there was a lot of whispering, side to side.
Tad Bertingas had folded his hands between his knees and spent the time with his future. Having seen the new D.ofC. from a distance of forty meters, Tad loathed him on sight. Small, slick, furtive, prissy, mean—all those adjectives rushed forward to describe a man who would steal a chair and then argue about it. The man’s low forehead, waxed hair, pale complexion, and rat teeth all supported those adjectives. The way his shoulders had hunched down when the Protocol Master tried to eject him implied a stubborn, ungracious soul. Tad could read signals, if not auras, and Selwin Praise was no leader. He would push from behind instead of striding out in front. Not a man to die for.
Oh, well. What else had he expected?
Bertingas had just reached this satori of acceptance when the dome dropped. Voices around him cut off in mid-whisper. No one expected Governor Sallee to emerge from the side of it like a great flapping bird. Her cloak fluttered around her shoulders as she charged off the edge of the stage. Her elbows jerked up as her foot came down unexpectedly on the air over that first step.
Her pace never faltered, her face never broke its mask of anger, as she almost broke her neck on the way down. There was a scramble in the orchestra seats as Regis Sallee and the rest of the governor’s entourage recovered from their surprise and rushed to follow her, already halfway up the aisle.
Amid the standing and the shuffling, the breaking and the running, Tad took a long look at the figures remaining on stage. Most still sat around the council table. A few had risen with the governor’s exit and now stood awkwardly, as if unsure whether the meeting was really over. Some faces were set in grim lines. Others looked woeful, like witnesses to a natural catastrophe. Halan Follard was staring into the middle distance, thinking, probably plotting, possibly amused. Only one face was actually smiling, and that was Valence Elidor’s, the master trader.
How was Praise—? Oh, yes. He was sitting, head down, doing something with his hands, reaming under his fingernails, one by one, with a small knife. It winked and flashed in a subtle spotlight from an odd corner of the hall. Praise’s mouth was set in a sneer of concentration.
Would this be a good time to approach and introduce himself? Well—when would ever be a good time? Like a man going into battle, Tad made his legs work to climb the steps onto the stage and approach the head of the table. The council members were leaving now. Some gave him a nod, others just pushed past him. Selwin Praise went on cleaning his fingers.
“Excuse me? Sir? Ah . . . Citizen Praise?”
The frosty eyes looked sideways up at him. The sneer changed to a half-smile. “Yes?”
“I am Bertingas. Your deputy. From the Ministry?”
“Oh?” The eyes clouded. “Yes. I remember reading about you. Born here in the Cluster, came up through the local admin, long time in the ranks. Yes. You’re Bertingas.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I’ve read a lot about the organization you’ve been mismanaging in my absence, Bertingas. I have to tell you, quite frankly, that I am not pleased. Not pleased at all.”
“In what way?” Tad felt a tremble—but whether of fear or anger he couldn’t decide.
Praise pursed his lips. “What would you say the monetary value of the system in my charge is worth? In round numbers?”
“Well, that’s hard to—”
“Just one, just start with one node in the Hyperwave Network, shall we? Would you say a million . . . ? A billion New Rands?”
“Closer to a billion.”
“And we have thirty-two stations in the Cluster as of the last audit. Haven’t misplaced any, have I?”
“No, Sir—”
“And the Freevid? The Shadow Box? A lot of hardware there? A couple of billion in each system, maybe? All told?”
“Yes, Sir, although General Accounting would know the exact—”
“I’m asking you to know, Bertingas. So, we have a communications system valued, by my quick estimate, at fifty-seven point three giga-Rands. Now, what’s your expenditure on security, Bertingas? Don’t waste my time with a guess because you don’t know, do you? But I know—”
Fifteen point seven, Bertingas remembered. In millions.
“—that you don’t spend more than twenty million New Rands a year. Mostly on guards who double as messengers and light clericals. It’s there in your reports. A ‘cost saving’ measure. Which means that any terrorist or rogue trader or peeved alien can walk up to one of my nodes and own it. Now, how do you think that makes me feel? Do you think I sleep well at night?”
“I really couldn’t guess about your sleeping habits, Sir.”
“You’d better start worrying about them, Bertingas. From now on there is one person in your life who can make you feel very fine or very not. That’s me . . . Now, after I finish some business here at the Palace, I am going to take my lunch, then I am going to inspect my nice new office in the Government Block. The one thing I hope to find there, on my nice big desk, is a report from you with a plan, fully costed, for a high-security force, paramilitary and quick-reacting, that can keep the creepers and the peepers out of my nice clean systems. Do you ponimayesh, Bertingas?”
“Yes, Sir!”
A cold smile came to Praise’s face. He looked at his fingernails again. “Very good. Good-bye, Taddeuz. It was nice meeting you.”
Bertingas turned on his heel and walked off. His stomach was squirting hot acid. His teeth were grinding pale enamel—he could feel flakes of it on his tongue. He forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down.
Now, where was his friend, Halan Follard? On the other side of the stage, talking to the old woman from Greengallow Holding. Tad approached them, hoping he could beg a ride back to the Block.
Follard broke the line of conversation and quickly introduced him to Amelia Ceil, then went back to what seemed like small patter about the Haiken Maru quote for metasheep at the Klondyke Lift Center. In the middle, Follard suddenly paused and wagged a finger at Bertingas.
“Reminds me,” he said. “I’ve arranged a bodyguard for you.”
Bertingas felt he’d slipped hypersideways and dropped into a war zone. Everyone was talking security now. In sunny old Meyerbeer, City of Fountains. On white-cliffed Palaccio, where nothing ever happens.
“I don’t need a bodyguard, Halan. Honestly.”
“You don’t want one, but that’s not the same as you don’t need one. She’s waiting in your office right now. Treat her kindly.”
“Her?”
“You’ll see.” Follard turned back to Amelia Ceil and stock prices.
Tad still needed to get back to Government Block or, considering the number of hours he’d already been awake—and ignoring Praise’s promised report—to his apartment.
He walked up the aisle to the four o’clock door and out into the deep, false darkness of the Palace Dome. The space around the Golden House, however, was bright with the hidden lights that illuminated its arches and buttresses. Water played around him, cooling sprays from the petal pools. He could smell grass being cut by the green techs. Bertingas remembered that public aircars sometimes paused in Krasniye Square and, failing that, a well-camouflaged monorail stop was just beyond. He started in that direction when a fast set of footsteps came up behind him.
“Ah! Citizen Bertingas!” The voice was deep and strong and jovial. Tad turned to see Valence Elidor, minus his cluster of staffers.
“Yes?”
“An exciting morning, hey? Lots to think about. You look like a man afoot. For the pleasure of the walk? Or do you need a lift? After all, you came with—”
“I would very much appreciate riding with you. At least as far as Government Block.”
“No farther?” Elidor winked as if that meant something. He made some hidden signal then, he must have, because with a soft swoosh a large, black car dropped out of the darkness and hovered, half over the plaza, half over one of the pools. Its airskirt flattened one of the fountains and kicked up its own curtain of water. None fell on the two men. The side doors pistoned open, and Elidor waved him aboard.
Haiken Maru did well for itself. The interior was faced with unblemished gray Dowda leather, soft as Human skin. Because the Dowda, of planet Kraal in Arachne Cluster, had an intelligence potential of point nine three, hunting or farming them as animals was a capital offense.
The side panels pulled down to make a communications console better than the one in Bertingas’ office. His didn’t have a wet bar with refrigerator. The tongs were silver, the glasses fused crystal.
The overhead was painted—by a living artist, not a reprobot—in a scene that, after some staring, Bertingas interpreted as The Execution of the Traitor Rydin. With a sense of shock, Tad realized that this wasn’t even a copy but an offwork by Poreeter himself.
The rest of the car came into focus: patterned carpets, gold filigree, beveled quartz, matched mahogany from Earth. The appointments inside this vehicle were worth the lifetime salary of a government bureaucrat, even at Bertingas’ level.
While he frankly gawked, the car rose silently and passed through the Dome into bright sunshine. Without being told, the chauffeur took it to 800 meters, outside the pattern, and made slow circles.
“Do you mind if we orbit the city for a bit?” Elidor asked. “I get so little chance to talk with someone in your fascinating profession.”
“That’s funny,” Bertingas said. “For the second time in one morning my host would rather talk than fly . . . Well now, I didn’t know Communications was so interesting.”
“I mean the technical end, the casting of illusions, the shaping of information, the creation of entertainment . . . ”
“Does a man in your position need much entertainment?”
“Well put.” Elidor stroked the Dowda skin beside his thigh. “But I do need information. Often.”
“I am fully conversant with the Baseform Scatter—”
Elidor barked out a laugh. “What I need isn’t optically encoded. Oh no . . . Ah, hmmm . . . It’s my impression that a man in your position juggles a lot of electrons, visual images, backgrounders, ‘sound bytes’ do you call them? You would also have access to files on just about everything that’s gone out over the last, say—two weeks?”
“That’s a fair assumption.”
“Including the original, and possibly a dozen outtakes, of Governor Sallee’s first Freevid address upon planetfall, the archival copies of her formal council sessions, and, presumably, some record of what we just witnessed this morning?”
“Most of that, yes.”
“Your technical section, presumably, could blend some of these electrons so that, on the wire, in theory at least, Governor Sallee might appear to pledge her support for Chairman Borking’s claim to the High Secretariat?”
Bertingas put his obvious answer aside and instead asked his own question, however audacious.
“What is the basis of Borking’s claim? Why would he have a chance?”
“Cultural dynamics, Tad.” Elidor didn’t seem at all offended. He smiled with real pleasure. “The Pact is rotten at the core, from Central Center outward. We all know that. The authority of the high secretary, the power to expand the Pact’s spheres of domain, its markets, its knowledge, its technical capabilities—all of this is wasted in the palsied hands of congenital halfwits. Which is exactly what the Holcomb regency has become. To remain loyal to them is to remain loyal to chalk pudding. It costs you almost nothing and it nourishes you not at all.
“Villem Borking is a decisive man, Tad. He has a program to restructure the Pactwide economy along more vital lines. Put banking under the control of people who know how to use money, instead of just sit on it. Put the military on a paying basis. Put the unique capabilities of our alien populations to more creative use.
“With a strong economy and a unified political structure, we can begin again the outward expansion that is the heritage of every Human. The stars can be ours again!”
“I see.” Bertingas nodded. “And Deirdre Sallee’s support—or the appearance of it, at least—could really help?”
“One cluster governor backing our Chairman will be like dropping a seed crystal into a supersaturated solution. The other governors, who now lack direction, will unite behind her, behind Borking. The advance on Central Center will be quick and bloodless.”
Bertingas shook his head. “An—impromptu—broadcast could be denied later, by the governor, in person.”
“Not if the technical quality were—um—convincing. If you feel your people are unable to achieve that, be sure that Haiken Maru’s facilities and staff are at your disposal. They are capable of quite a lot.”
“I’m sure, but still—”
“The governor’s position is uncertain. She has not yet decided where her own advantage lies. That’s what bred such confusion and disruption at this morning’s special meeting. By helping her decide, you would be doing her a service. Anyway, even if she were to change her mind—again!—and repudiate the transmission, that would be politically . . . nonviable. No other force in contention for the secretariat would be able to trust her. Governor Sallee will be obliged to honor the commitments you will be . . . clarifying for her.”
“I’m sure she would still find a way, in private, to reward me for forcing her hand. Administrative terminations on Palaccio begin with a hyperinjection of nepenthe, I believe? Beyond that, the details are usually clouded, but she might make an exception in my case.”
“Not if a successful Haiken Maru promoted her to some capacity at Central Center—say, the Interspecies Commission on Commemorative Stamps?—and appointed a more sympathetic governor for Aurora. Not if that new governor made a startling discovery of who, in the Communications section, actually did all the work. There might then be a new director. Even a new planetary administrator.”
“That’s a prodigious collection of ‘ifs,’ Sir. The future might not be that assured.”
Elidor shrugged. “A bold man must take bold risks.”
“You make it sound easy. And attractive. However—and please understand that I mean you no offense—there is a certain sense of professional ethics and trust that one acquires after spending a decade in an organization. To turn all of that on its head, even in the name of fine-sounding things like ‘cultural dynamics’ and ‘spheres of domain,’ is just not in me. I’m sorry.”
Valence Elidor pursed his lips and stared ahead for a long minute, then nodded. “I can understand that. Yes, I can appreciate your sentiments.”
With the gentlest of bumps, the aircar grounded on the avenue outside Haiken Maru’s offices in Meyerbeer. Bertingas could not recall any signal from Elidor to the chauffeur, nor even when they had stopped orbiting and started descending. The hatch popped up on Elidor’s side. As he moved to step out, he paused, leaned forward and spoke into a metal grille. A silver one, Tad noted.
“Take the Deputy Director wherever he wants to go, Andre.” With a faint smile and a wave that was almost a brushing gesture, Elidor completed his exit.
“Citizen?” the grille asked.
Bertingas asked to be taken back to the Government Block, and the aircar surged upward.
It climbed too fast, too long, too high.
“What’s wrong?” Tad demanded of the grille.
The voice that came from the front was under strain: “I don’t know—the controls—malfunction—”
Bertingas had no eye for heights, but the ground was a long way down. Maybe 3,000 meters? The Palace gardens looked like the pattern on a playing card, with a black stone in the center. All of Meyerbeer would soon disappear under his hand. So were they at 4,000 meters? Higher . . . ? And was the aircar’s cabin pressurized?
When the chauffeur blew the bolts on the forward escape hatch, Tad thought the whole car was coming apart. The front end split in three sections like a melon, and the plush partition at the head of his compartment automatically folded back.
The chauffeur was a small man with wide shoulders, like an over-muscled monkey. He buckled on an escape harness, climbed out on the front skirt, closed his eyes, and threw himself off backwards, like a skin-diver tumbling into the water. Tad knew how the harness worked: as soon as the person was clear, it would unreel a hundred meters of braided metal pigtail; the battery pack would discharge itself, creating an electrostatic drag just like a personal drop tube. You fell from the sky with the crack of a thunderbolt. It was so exciting, some people did it for fun.
Not this time.
The harness trailed only three meters of its pigtail. Either it had jammed or someone had cut it. The pack gave one feeble blue spark then shorted out. Tad could hear the man’s scream above the hum of the car’s ducted fans. It went on a long time.
By the time the scream faded, the fans themselves had changed pitch. Above 5,000 meters, the air became too thin to support the car. In a second or two it would begin to sideslip. If it rolled beyond a certain degree . . .
Bertingas climbed into the open steering compartment and found the other escape harnesses. His eyes saw what the chauffeur’s had missed: abrasions on the reel mechanism, cracked plastic, broken wires. Someone had worked them over with the blunt end of a hatchet.
The floor started to shift under his feet. The final sideslip was starting. He started to grapple with the control yoke. It was frozen; the driver hadn’t been faking. So, either the personal aircar of the Haiken Maru Trader General was suffering an unbelievable set of malfunctions—throttle, steering yoke, guidance and escape systems—or someone had been willing to sacrifice a presumably trusted employee and a vehicle worth five times a deputy director’s annual salary to do Taddeuz Bertingas in.
Damn it, these vehicles were made to be safe! Almost crash-proof! Just for instance, if the fans cut off or the rubber skirt collapsed, the car’s underside was shaped like a lifting body. It was supposed to glide down to a low-speed, nose-up landing. So . . .
Bertingas found the turbine switches and banged them down. Whatever gremlin or Human agent had messed up the controls hadn’t thought of a simple shutdown. The fans cut off, feathered, and braked abruptly; the skirt closed with a whump; and the aircar stabilized on its keel. He strapped himself tightly into the driver’s position. The descent was at first invisible and silent—until the blown panels around the front cabin began to whistle, then moan, then shriek as the car picked up forward speed.
Did he have control now?
Some. The linkages between the yoke and a set of spoilers on the blunt end of the lifting body were entirely mechanical, and they were working. The best Bertingas could do, however, was pick his landing spot within about five degrees either side of straight ahead.
Straight ahead, however, and growing larger with every second, was the black bubble of the Palace Dome.
“Hello? Help?” He thumbed buttons across the traffic control comm set. He also flipped the switch labeled “Emerg Trans”—whatever good that did.
“Help? Anyone? This is—um—” He read the registration. “Haiken Maru 681 Staff. I’ve got a runaway aircar, here. Over the Palace. Can anyone hear me?”
Would the antimissile systems pop up and deal with him in their own blind way? He prayed the car’s automatic transponders were saying the same things electronically that he was gabbling into the voice circuits. Only more coherently.
“Don’t shoot! Please! I am not attacking anyone. I have a total systems failure. Please don’t—!”
The Dome seemed to be rising to meet him, giving him the illusion that it was inflating, expanding, creeping outward to cover and darken the surrounding gardens. Just as he thought it was going to swallow him, the Dome began to color and swirl. Not just a single iris was opening in the blackness before him, the entire Dome was falling. The opaquing particles dropped like smoke being sucked underground. Below him were the embassy buildings, the Golden House, the three wings of the Residence, broad avenues, trees, and people looking up in wonder.
Try not to hit the people, Bertingas told himself as he twisted the control yoke. His line of descent now seemed to include a strand of ancient elms, a green knoll, and a lake. As good as he could do . . .
The underside of the car banged through the trees in a cloud of green leaves. One of the spoilers was unhinged and dug a furrow of turf across the top of the knoll. The body lurched forward into the lake, falling with a bellyflop that threw up a shower of water. The lake was deeper than it looked; the return wave sloshed into the open compartment around Tad’s waist and kept coming. The car was going to sink right there.
There were three buckles on the straps holding him to the seat. His head was under water before he found and worked the last one. Then he swam to the surface.
Not two meters away from him was a flat-bottomed punt, carrying two guards in livery. One worked a sweep off the stern. The other held a military-issue repulsor rifle, aimed more or less at Tad’s face.
Bertingas swam over and grasped the gunwale. The weapon did not move aside particularly fast.
“Who is it, Lieutenant?” A crowd had gathered on the lakeshore, and the voice that called out was familiar, almost known to Tad.
“He has a Communicator’s uniform, Ma’am. It looks like . . . it is Deputy Director Bertingas.”
“Well, bring him in, you fool!”
It was the governor’s voice. The guard put aside the rifle and reached big hands down into the water. He lifted Tad, sloshing and dripping, straight into the boat. The other began working the sweep toward shore.
The flat bow grounded in the green reeds that lapped the water, and Bertingas stepped off. People pressed around him but, careful of their fine clothes and mindful of the duckweed and water still dripping off him, did not come too close.
“What a frightful experience, Deputy Director,” the governor said. “How did it happen?”
“Some kind of mechanical failure,” Tad stammered. The morning breeze was cold. “It was the Haiken Maru Trader General’s own car and, after he got out, somehow . . . Luckily only I was aboard . . .”
A murmur of gossip and speculation arose in the crowd. One voice cut through it.
“What about the driver?” asked Halan Follard. So he was still on the Palace grounds.
“The chauffeur, he—had an accident with the escape harness. Somewhere over there.” Bertingas gestured vaguely off to the southwest, back along his line of descent.
More gossip. More questions were called out, but the governor cut them off.
“That’s quite enough, citizens! We’ll know everything we need to, once the trader’s car is raised and the Kona Tatsu technical people have a chance to examine it. In the meantime, the Deputy Director is cold and wet and probably suffering from shock. Halan, will you help him?”
With a grim nod, Follard took Bertingas’ arm and led him across the grass, onto the ring avenue, and over to the Kona Tatsu building. There they went up to the second floor and the infirmary, where Follard got out a first-aid kit for his scratches and a fluffy white towel for his wet hair.
Follard called up for dry clothing, but when the duty officer brought it, he shook his head.
“Can’t have you walk out of here in a prisoner’s singlesuit. Wrong image. Can you stand that wet tunic and pants for another ten minutes, till we can get you home?”
“They’re all right. Be dry by then and, really, I should get over to the office.”
Follard shook his head again and took him up to the landing stage. When they stepped out on the roof, it was dark. The Dome had been raised once more.
“Don’t you want to know what I think happened?” Tad asked as they settled into the little black car and Follard boosted the turbines.
“Not particularly. You told everyone enough coming in. I was even picking up your signals on my AID. As for the truth, we’ll know that as soon as we pull that aircar apart.”
“Funny,” he went on. “I know how Elidor dotes on that luxury car of his. Shows it off. Even inflates the cost in his tax reporting. So, he must have been under a lot of pressure if he’d consent to using it for a murder.”
“Then you do think it was planned.”
“Of course. Didn’t I say you needed a bodyguard?”
Bertingas was about to ask “Why me?” when the car grounded on the jutting airlip of Government Block. Follard popped just the one door on Tad’s side.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“You’ll be in good hands in a minute.” Halan smiled. “Try not to get killed on the way down to your office.”
Tad climbed out, and before he was two steps away, the car had lifted, spun, and darted off.
The ED drop tube had the effect of beating some of the water out of his uniform. As he stepped out at the ninety-ninth floor, the faint globe of mist surrounding him continued its own descent. His boots still squeaked as he walked down the corridor.
When he entered the bullpen, the people of his section rose almost as one from their desks and gathered around him. After the early morning call, the senior staff meeting, rumors of an aircar out of control over the city, anxiety about a new director—and now their deputy arriving with weeds on his uniform and scratches on his face and hands—everyone looked nervous and unhappy.
“Is it true, Sir? . . . About the high secretary . . . Will there be a war, Sir? . . . Were you hurt? . . . Is the new man any . . . Have the . . . ?”
Tad put up his hands.
“Please, people! It’s been a long day—already—and most of us haven’t had our coffee break yet.” That brought a few smiles.
“Yes, the high secretary has been assassinated. So we have our work cut out for us there. No, there isn’t going to be any war. So those of you hoping to escape this place into a general conscription are out of luck.” More smiles, some laughs. “I’m not hurt, but crash-landing an aircar from 5,000 meters does put me out of sorts. For those of you interested in details, I’m planning a series of lunchtime lectures on the subject—mandatory attendance”—groans, hisses—“over the next three weeks. With holovids.” Outright booing, chorus.
“I’ve met the new man . . .” Tad turned his voice serious. “His name is Selwin Praise. He’s from Central Center; of course . . . He seems to be—um—a stickler for details. That’s okay. That’s parfait. We can all work with a director who wants everything done right, because that’s the way we do things here.”
Relaxed looks and a few knowing nods moved the faces around him. The tension had gone out of them—or gone underground.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” He picked a strand of green weed off his sleeve, held it out for inspection. “I think I’ll go plant these things.”
The crowd broke before him, all but Gina Rinaldi. She matched pace with him on the way to the corner office.
“Tad!” she whispered. “What really happened?”
“Someone tried to kill me. Took a lot of trouble over it, too.”
“Then don’t go into your office.”
That made him pause. “Why not?”
“Because there’s a person in there who could complete the job. One handed.”
“Oh. Then let’s meet her, shall we?”
Gina stared at him. “How do you know it’s a ‘she’?”
He had already gone in.
The person was standing at ease on the other side of the desk, by the window. The blunt body was either the most out-of-norm Human he had ever seen, or some new order of Humanoid alien. Almost a meter wide and half a meter thick, but scarcely 130 centimeters tall. A walking lump, with wrists like ankles and ankles like tree stumps. Flat slabs of heavy muscle concealed any trace of breasts, hips, or other secondary sex characteristics. The person wore no trace of make-up, and its—her—reddish blonde hair had been cut back to a thin bristle that showed golden against her scalp. She wore a singlesuit of monofiber. A hint of alien background there—possibly intentional? And a weapons belt.
“Good morning, Sir,” she said, stepping forward and putting out a hand that looked like a shipside docking grapple. Her voice came from deep in that wide chest, a flat rumble, although the voicebox modulating it might, in another person, have produced a pleasant contralto. “My name is Patty Firkin. Halan Follard thought you would need my services.”
He took the hand, felt it close gently.
“Thank you, Miss Firkin. I think we all do.”