Chapter 5
Taddeuz Bertingas: UNEXPECTED SUPPORT
Tad’s boots squeaked and his mind spun as he fast-stepped toward the lift tube. His right hand was clutching the startled AID, which he’d swept off the desk as he left . . . fled from . . . his own office. He squeezed the machine once, for reassurance. No good having to go back for it, not now, not there.
The bodyguard—what was her name? Firkin?—came out of the angle between two cubicularia and tried to fall into step with him.
“Just business with the bossman,” he tried to smile. “Upstairs.”
She didn’t break stride. “I should check the—”
“Back off, muscle lady!” he snapped.
That froze her, her boot heels actually skidding on the tiles. Tad whirled on, his mind still spinning.
Gina had collapsed like a broken robot, or a puppet with the strings cut. Mumbling and raving by turns. All about a simple question of who knew what and how much about the Department, and who had tried to kill Tad over it.
Of course, he and Gina had shared a good relationship. A land of love. Once. He supposed it might have been as pleasurable for her as it was for him. Perhaps not. Aliens were wired differently, he knew. A phenotype so close to Human, as the Deoorti were, of necessity became successful mimics, able to simulate a whole range of Human emotions. Perhaps even feel them. Perhaps not.
After the scene in the office, Bertingas concluded Gina might be a very sick personality. Or a good actress.
Yet, who else was there for him to trust? Who else could think as clearly as she could? Who else could do the work? Who else owed him so much? Maybe, just maybe, by the time he returned from this meeting upstairs, she would be back in her sockets and ticking along like nothing had happened. He had to think that, just to get his brain straight for his next encounter with the new Director.
He stepped into the lift tube and felt its characteristic pull on the long muscles in his body. A leaden ache in the back of his thighs reminded him that he’d already taken a beating this morning.
The electrostatics pulled the last of the pond moisture out of his uniform, but that didn’t make him look better. The black material was pleated and creased across his groin and armpits, and it chafed. He had a scurf of dried green weed, like tarnished braid, on his cuffs. He smelled like a bog.
In contrast to the hard surfaces and half-panels, clack and clatter of the ninety-ninth floor, the one above it was carpet and crystal, deep-grained wood and quiet. Sitting at a pulpit desk in the tube entry bay, a young woman wearing the uniform of Building Services checked his face unobtrusively against a holofile concealed in the counter before her. When she had a match, she pressed a button releasing the invisible repressor field that screened the head of the corridor into The Maze, on the far side of the bay.
She did all this as fast as Tad could walk the four meters from tube lip to corridor. If he chose to ignore her, he might never know he was being cleared.
That button cap under right thumb, Tad knew, contained a microcircuit set to interpret one set of finger whorls—hers—and one pH balance in the skin oils—also hers. If anyone else touched the button, not only did it lock but the field collapsed, sweeping everything not screwed down inside the bay into the lift shaft. And the shaft reversed to fast-drop. As a security system it was fairly crude, but no one had ever walked unannounced into the offices of the Combined Directors of Cluster Services.
The Maze was only confusing to first-timers, as it was meant to be. Actually it was just a double-ring of corridors, an inner and outer square, with the Directors’ office suites aligned on the outer, window side; support staff and the building core were on the inner, non-window side. Selwin Praise’s office would be three lefts and a right, unless he’d arranged to switch with one of the other directors. However, since that would involve a certain loss of face by the switchee, for agreeing to the whim of a new man, Tad could trust that the D.ofC. was in the same suite his sixteen predecessors had occupied.
He was right.
The secretary in the outer office was a man, possibly Human, possibly another Deoorti Sister. Tad’s internal radar wasn’t functioning too well right then. The man had the signs, wide-set eyes and coppery skin, but they could have resulted from Human genetics and a bad tan. The secretary barely looked up as he waved Bertingas through into the inner office. Behind him, as the door slid closed, Tad could hear a sniff and a chuckle.
Praise’s head was bent over some work. He was actually writing, on paper, with an ink pen. He did it slowly and made it look hard. Praise didn’t speak or lift his eyes for some minutes, leaving Tad to stand at rough attention in the center of the carpet.
“I thought I would have a report on my desk when I came in. At least the outline of a report.” Still Praise didn’t lift his head. “Something about security, I remember, which you were going to write for me . . . Or did you forget?”
“No, Sir. But between then and now I’ve had a rather spectacular accident.”
“Explain.” Praise lifted his head and Tad got his second really good look at the man’s eyes. They reminded him of a cold lizard—sleepy, slow, indifferent, deadly. Those eyes tried to show concern now, and failed.
“Leaving the Palace, I was the guest of Valence Elidor, the Haiken Maru Trader General.” Tad saw the eyes flicker over the name—with envy? “He took me aside and wanted to chat with me . . .” Twist the knife. “About a communications problem they were having. Anyway, after we dropped him off at the H.M. city offices, the driver was heading back here when the car malfunctioned. Shot six or seven klicks straight up, began sliding around. Then came down inside the Palace Dome.”
“Was that you?” Praise’s eyebrows raised; the eyes themselves never warmed. “I saw the whole thing. Someone fell out of the car, didn’t he?”
“The driver. Jumped with a bad ED dragline.”
“Defective?”
“Sabotaged.”
“Oh, dear. Then it was you who brought it down?”
“Yes—”
“You might have picked a less public landing spot,” Praise sniffed. “No good having Cluster Communications attacking the Palace grounds. Even by inadvertence.”
“I didn’t exactly have a lot of choices.”
Praise looked thoughtful. “No, perhaps you didn’t . . . Sabotage, eh? Someone trying to assassinate the Trader General? That’s bad news for us all.”
“Or kill me? Elidor was already out of the car.”
“Why would anyone want to dispose of you, Bertingas? To be sure, I couldn’t do without you. Every minute I’m in this job, I see how much I’ll be depending on my deputy. Still, being career service, you’re hardly a political target, are you?”
“I suppose not.”
“Still, that does raise a question of our vulnerability. To the accidents of time, at least. I’m just writing up a new standing order that will cover that. It calls for all Freevid transmissions originating with this department to be cleared by both you and me. Kind of a double check. How does that sound?”
Ghastly, Bertingas thought. “More—secure, certainly . . . Sir,” he said.
“Ahh, and that reminds me.” About the security report, Bertingas prompted silently. “About the report on security—you are working on it?”
“Of course.”
“You’ve given thought to the composition of our fast-reaction force, haven’t you? I thought we could make good use of some of the alien population. Here on Palaccio and elsewhere in the Cluster, perhaps.”
“Why, that was our—my—thought exactly! The dole Humans are too unreliable, unmotivated. However, the guest species—”
Praise was nodding, all but the eyes. “Some of them do look very efficient, with excellent reflexes and, um, physically powerful.”
“Yes, and with the right approach—”
“How do you feel about aliens, by the way?” There was a hook in that question, somewhere. Bertingas could sense it.
“I suppose I like them. Well enough. I don’t know that many of them. Or not all that well.”
“You have no residual phobias, do you?”
“No, no. Quite the contrary . . . I think some of them get treated very badly, especially on the agricultural holdings. The Zergliedern system applied to labor gangs, for example, is—”
“Zerglee—?”
“Punitive dismemberment, sometimes disfigurement, for infractions of house rules. It started just with the species who had fast regenerative powers, but I’ve heard of cases where a symbiotic personality got severed. That’s sadistic—and too brutal for any Human civilization.”
“Ah, well, now. We can’t change the world, can we? But I don’t suppose you have many aliens in the Communications Department. Not above the solid brain level, anyway . . .”
“One or two,” Bertingas said. “There are limited opportunities in our field, what with this Cluster being so heavily demographed to the Human.”
“Yes, exactly.” That nod again. “It almost reminds me of Central Center. Not a lot, but in some ways . . .”
“About the plan, then, you would pre-approve using—and arming—aliens?”
“Of course. I suggested it, didn’t I? And you should take your original estimates and quintuple them. We’ll move right into training cadres with twenty percent of the first inductees. Get me estimates on your requirements for barracks space and material. We’ll fund this out of your program planning budget, to start with.” A grim smile. “That’s usually over-allocated in an operation like this.”
“If you say so, Sir. Quintuple—that’s a lot—”
“Don’t worry about where the bodies will come from. We’ll draw levies from the latifundists, if we have to.” A dry chuckle. “You’ll make the primary contacts and recruiting arrangements, yes?”
“I have an assistant who would be better—”
“I’m sure you have a whole platoon of mother’s little helpers down there, but I want you to handle this yourself. Ponimayesh? If nothing else, it will get you familiar with the quality of troops you’ll, um, command.” Another chuckle, which Bertingas didn’t like. “Now parallel your AID with the desk here. I have some contacts for you.”
Bertingas set his unit on the contact studs and it handshook with Praise’s artificial intelligence. The Director tapped in a dump code on his deskpad and the two AIDs duplicated certain memories. There wasn’t much to file: their transfer was over in a fraction of a second.
“You have two names there.” Praise must be reading minds this morning. “One is a gentleman of the warrens here in Meyerbeer. The other has a following, of sorts, in the rural precincts. From all reports, they should be able to help you.”
“I may have to bargain for good-quality trooper stock. Even offer them individual inducements. What’s our upper limit?”
“Oh . . .”A shrug. “Tell them whatever you like. Whatever you think they’ll accept. Of course, if the governor decides she can’t support it, she’ll hang you out to dry like a hankie.” More chuckles. “Fair enough?”
“Ahh . . . I guess.”
“Good. Then you have your work cut out for yourself, don’t you—Commander?”
“Yes, Sir.” Praise was, of course, being ironic. He had no more authority to hand out Central Fleet commissions than Bertingas did to make his recruits Pact citizens. Still, the implications—would it be fun to play at soldier? For a week or so? Somewhere, of course, where the glass beads weren’t flying . . .
Bertingas gave a mock-sloppy salute and turned on his heel. As he heel-and-toed across the carpeting, Praise called out to him.
“By the way, Commander.”
Tad turned. “Yes?”
“No Cernians.”
“Cernians?”
“Yes . . . You know: little fellows, green skin, bad eyesight, worse breath. Don’t take ’em.”
Now that was strange. “Why not, Sir?”
“Call it a whim. Say my sources indicate their loyalties are not above suspicion. Whatever. But . . .”
“No Cernians.” Bertingas shrugged. “Whatever you want.” He walked quietly from the office.
As he stepped into the drop tube’s retarding field, he felt his thoughts rise in a jumble—along with his stomach.
They were thoughts of Selwin Praise, and when they settled again Bertingas had a pattern: the cold, grinning superiority; the cat-and-mouse conversations, with their hooks; the obscure whims and jealousies. The man reeked of secrets. Halan Follard was right. Praise was a Kona Tatsu agent, definitely, and this preoccupation with security forces was either a smokescreen or a deeply veiled plan.
Where did Taddeuz Bertingas’ advantage lie? In playing along, just following orders? Or in dragging his feet, sabotaging the effort? Should he tell Follard about his guesses? And was the Department really in danger? How did the Haiken Maru assassination attempt—for that’s how he thought of it—how did that fit in? Would the firepower of a regiment of alien fanatics have helped him any in that aircar crash?
Down in the ninety-ninth floor’s tiled tube bay, Bertingas was brought up short. The bodyguard was waiting for him at exactly the spot he’d left her. He might have expected Firkin to be sitting on the bench there, working a puzzle, doing some knitting, reading a book, but no. She stood roughly at attention, or maybe just at ready. Waiting for—what?—half an hour while he was topside with Praise. Once again Bertingas asked himself if this wide person was exactly Human. If not, then a squad of her phenotype would be worth a legion of bubble-fingered agricultural workers.
She fell into waddling step beside him as he left the bay.
“Firkin, what do you know about the Cernians?”
“Trolls, Sir?” In that flat rumble. “Or that’s what some call them. They aren’t exactly in the Pact. Well, there’s a lot of bugs that aren’t. But these Cernians have their own little cluster, about five worlds, outside the Pact. Who knows what they might have built it into, if they hadn’t met the Pact coming the other way.”
“Are they warlike?”
“Not particularly. Just hard to kill.”
That appraisal, coming from a body as solid and tough as Firkin’s, made the Cernians seem indestructible.
“Are they friendly, then? Say, with any political force inside the Pact?”
“Rumors, Sir.” Firkin shrugged.
“What do they say?”
“That the Cernians are mixed pretty deep in Harmony Cluster. General—now Governor—Merikur seems to have them under his spell. Or they him. Hard to tell, at this distance.”
“Just rumors, eh?”
“That’s all I hear, Sir.”
They walked side by side up to Tad’s office, then Firkin pushed ahead. To check out this most familiar room.
Gina was nowhere in sight, neither in the office nor at her cubicularium. Any sign of their encounter this morning—scuff marks on the floor, the silvery tearstains—had been removed.
Bertingas found her AID, which she’d named Squeaker, sitting on her desk. It was talking to itself in alien whispers. He left a verbal message for her with it, giving Praise’s approval of their plan to use aliens for the strike force. He also relayed the Director’s order to quintuple their original estimates—whatever those might be. So Gina should think big in her planning. He then told her he was going back to his apartment, to change out of his ruined uniform and perhaps take the rest of the day off-.
And that was about all there was to say. Except . . .
“Oh, and Squeaker—tell her I’m sorry. Really sorry.”