The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 1 —GAU— “This is Jeremiah…”

From the elevated guard station at the main entrance to Allied Transcon’s Houston center, a young corpsec monitored the truck trundling up Galveston Road toward NASA Boulevard. With his televiewer, he could see that the rider cabin of the robot tractor was empty. The dull silver tank trailer bore the familiar logo of Shell Chemical.

“Traffic on the board,” his watch partner said suddenly as the truck crossed the security threshold. His watch partner was an artificial intelligence personality named Isaac, one of eight personalities making up the center’s Sentinel system.

“I’ve got it,” said the corpsec. A squeeze on the grip of the televiewer brought the reply to the station’s radioed interrogative into the finder in pale yellow lettering. “ID’s okay. Shellchem local hauler, running empty.”

“I have confirmation from the National Vehicle Registry,” Isaac said. “The registry is valid and current.”

“Okay.” The corpsec idly continued to track the tanker in the glass, trying to read the graffiti scrawled on its flanks. In the course of their four-hour shift, more than a hundred wheeled cargo vehicles would slide by on the old surface road, shuttling between Galveston and Houston. Except for the occasional burst of imagination or artistry in the graffiti, they were hardly worth notice.

Besides, ground traffic was the least of Corporate Security’s concerns. It was far more likely that someone seeking to penetrate Allied Transcon would try to hop the triple fence in a flyer; far more likely that someone trying to destroy it would lob a screamer from the forest of scrapers downtown, or from a boat bobbing somewhere on the poisoned waters of Galveston Bay.

And even those possibilities were hard to take very seriously at all—right up to the moment the Shellchem tanker suddenly veered right and roared up the ramp onto NASA Drive, accelerating all the way. At the top of the ramp, the tanker swept an unsuspecting two-seat flyer aside and hurtled down the entrance drive toward the barbican.

“Jesus,” the corpsec said unbelievingly. “It’s going to crash the gate.”

There was little else for him to do, for the silicon reflexes of Sentinel had already taken over. In less than a microsecond, the AIP declared the tanker a threat, activated the gate defenses, and transmitted an alert to corpsec throughout the grounds.

“Now sending kill-Q,” said Isaac.

A half dozen flyers were queued up in the accumulation lane outside the barbican’s tunnels. They settled to the ground as one as Sentinel abruptly took command of their pilot systems. But the tanker kept coming, its systems refusing the insistent commands. In seconds the tanker would smash into the stalled flyers and their human occupants.

“It’s stall-shielded,” the corpsec realized.

Sentinel had already drawn the same conclusion and made the only possible decision. With almost tangible reluctance, Sentinel exercised what control it had, and the flyers suddenly rose up and scattered like a flock of birds. That ended the risk to life. It also cleared the way to the gate.

“Fire authority,” snapped the corpsec. “Blow it off the bridge.”

“Road sensors show the tanker is fully loaded. There’s no way to know what’s in it,” the construct said. “Sorry.”

The corpsec swallowed hard. “Jesus, I hope they built this tower good—”

At the end of the bridge, spikes rising from the roadbed shredded the tanker’s tires, but could not halt it. The tanker reached the final concrete apron outside the twin tunnels of the barbican, now sealed by heavy doors, and abruptly slewed into a sideways skid. Moments later it slammed into the wall of steel and stone.

The corpsec grabbed for a handhold as the tower shuddered and swayed. But there was no explosion, no alarming creaking and rending. The corpsec looked toward Isaac’s room scanner with a look of relief and drew a deep breath to clear the poison of fear from his lungs.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Isaac said.

“No,” said the corpsec, going to the window. Peering down at the barbican, he saw the tanker crushed sideways against the entrance gates, bleeding a yellow-brown soup from its belly. The fast-running pool of liquid had already reached the east edge of the apron and begun to spread across the hard earth and brown grass.

Grabbing his viewer, the corpsec trained it on the spill. Wraithlike white wisps played in the air above its surface. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

“The HazMat team has been notified.”

“Should I evacuate?”

“No,” was the answer. “Remain at your station. You’ll be given further instructions when HazMat evaluates the situation.”

The corpsec frowned. “I’m not settling for that,” he said. “Let me listen to E-l.”

Emergency channel 1 came on the speaker just in time for the corpsec to hear the chatter of excited voices fade under a storm of static and then vanish beneath the clean white hum of a pirate jammer. Then a voice spoke, a solemn, sonorous male voice that commanded their attention and tugged somehow at the emotional chord labeled father.

“This is Jeremiah, speaking for the Homework!…”

“Shit.”

“This is an unauthorized transmission,” Isaac said.

“Shut up, Isaac,” the corpsec said irritably. “I want to hear what they’ve done to us.”

As always, Homeworld had worked hard to make certain that the corpsec, Allied Transcon management, and as many of Earth’s eight billion as possible heard.

This is what they heard:

“This is Jeremiah, speaking for the Homeworld.

“From the first, I have been a student of history. The truth of the present can be found in the past, if you seek it. Enemies hide their evils in the mists of the past, if you allow it. The winner is the player with the longest memory.

“For more than a hundred years, the bandits of Allied Transcon have insulted the Earth, our gentle mother. The trail of Gaea’s pain begins with Allied Transcon’s sorry heritage, with names to which such shame attached that those names were abandoned and hidden.

“We have not forgotten. Rockwell built weapons of war, abetting the mindless devastation of fragile ecologies. We have not forgotten. Exxon bled the earth of its precious stores and poisoned the waters and the air with chemical wastes. We have not forgotten. Mitsubishi supplied the tools to turn once-beautiful Japan into a mechanized warren and to ravage the grand tropical forests of Indonesia and the Philippines.

“The bastard of the mating of these soulless parasites worships at the altar of the same shallow profit principle. I look on your works and weep. Thirty square miles of the Amazon Basin transformed from lush jungle to dead, sterile pavement. A dozen gigawatt power plants generating million-year poisons. An endless parade of LSD freighters ripping through the atmosphere, carrying away the riches of the Earth.

“And the worst insult of all, that all this is done only so that we might reach out for more worlds to despoil.

“Today, we have returned the insult. We returned to Allied Transcon a tiny fraction of the poisons it creates in a single day— a few seconds of death and disease. At six-fifty this morning, a tank truck emptied five thousand gallons of life-hating industrial pollutants at the main entrance to Allied Transcon’s American headquarters in Houston. We have rubbed their noses in their corporate excrement.

“We have heard it said, even by those who agree with our goals, that we have committed a crime, and become like our enemies. We accept this judgment, with one distinction.

“Allied Transcon’s crimes are crimes against Nature. They harm the body and spirit of Gaea, immanent in the fabric of life. Our crimes are crimes for Nature. We harm only those who bring harm to our common home. We steal their wealth. We destroy their tools. We stand against them, and for the silent Earth.

“This is Jeremiah, speaking for the Homeworld.”

The jammer in the Gulf ran for just over six minutes, pumping two and a half repetitions of Jeremiah’s announcement out over E-l, G-l, and three Gulf State commercial bands before its power cells died. Float jammers in the South Atlantic off Brazil and the Mediterranean west of Sicily delivered the same message to Allied Transcon’s primary launch center at Prainha and the European administrative center in Munich, respectively. Off-planet, Aurora Sanctuary’s official broadcaster carried the announcement for the benefit of the sixteen satlands, following it with a two-hour debate on environmental activism.

There were failures: A relay jammer located across the street from Allied’s Tokyo facility was picked up in a security sweep twenty minutes before the tanker reached NASA Drive. And a reliable old Homeworld trick finally played out its string: The remora on the main feed for ComNet 3 cut in on schedule, replacing the broadcast of “Personal Combat” with Homeworld’s earth-globe logo and Jeremiah’s voice. But a ready controller blacked the net before more than a few words could go out.

A new trick, however, worked very well indeed. A routine stack upload into the Direct Information Access Network for North America suddenly showed itself to be a Trojan horse, commandeering nearly half of DIANNA’s data channels and piping Jeremiah’s announcement out through the terminals of more than six million surprised users.

And the ComNet blackout and DIANNA incursion together ensured the kind of attention Homeworld craved: a minute on the Current News stack, and a moment in the lives and thoughts of uncountable millions of Earth’s children.

On balance, Jeremiah was pleased.

Christopher McCutcheon rose early, escaping from a restless and unrewarding sleep, hoping to escape from encountering either of his wives. He padded softly through the big house on Denham Street as though a trespasser. Which, in truth, was how he felt that Monday, even though he not only lived there but held four-tenths of the fractional mortgage.

The door to Loi’s bedroom was still closed, which helped. It closed out the inevitable sounds of morning—running water and the muted voice of the housecom, the gurgle and hiss of the kitchen appliances. And it screened Christopher from the sight of Loi and Jessie together, though not from the memory of the sight of them last night.

He had stood in that doorway a long time, hammered by the tangled limbs, murmuring voices, and the raw fragrance of sex. The rumpled sheets, tousled hair, and skin-glisten of sweat had told him that what was happening was not a beginning but an encore. He had been in Freeport since midday; they had had more than enough time.

Stunned, silent, Christopher had watched Loi’s experienced hands exploring Jessie’s sleek secrets, her mouth ravening Jessie’s throat and breasts. He watched with pain, not pleasure, feeling as though he should be part of what was happening before his eyes, and yet knowing that he was not welcome. Waiting to be noticed, and yet knowing that to wait one moment longer was to invite more misery.

And then he had been noticed, Loi catching sight of him as she turned her lithe body on the bed, opening herself to Jessie’s touch. Her eyes fixed on him challengingly, reproachfully.

He did not withdraw. He could not move.

“Chris is back, Jessie,” she had said finally. Her voice was empty of apology or embarrassment.

Jessie had twisted her body toward where he stood, showed a mischievous smile. “Hi, Chris.”

Loi gave him no chance to read a greeting as an invitation. “Chris, would you close the door for us? I think Mobius must have pushed it open,” she had said, naming the family’s elder cat. “Oh, and you have some mail on the com.”

There was nothing in her words that he had not already foreseen, and yet he had felt sudden fury at being sent away. He remembered yanking the door shut with all the force he could muster, rattling the framed pictures hanging in the hall. And then fleeing to his room at the opposite end of the upstairs hall, expecting his distress to lure one or both of them to follow.

But neither did. He lay in the dark fighting to close out the sounds of Jessie and Loi’s pleasure—never sure if he was hearing or imagining them—and bleeding from a wound he had thought had closed over forever.

A miserable moment. A miserable night. And in both, more than enough reasons to avoid facing them that morning.

Christopher satisfied himself with a speedshower and a muffin from the warmer, then slipped quickly into his gray two-piece. When he was ready to leave, the house was still silent, Loi and Jessie presumably still cocooned in Loi’s bed. But he felt too acutely that he was running away, and in rebellion against the feeling stopped in the family room to retrieve his mail.

He was glad he had. There were five messages for him on the housecom, the last a brief notice from Allied informing him that the main entrance was temporarily closed, and asking that pools and dropoffs use the north entrance and that everyone else ride the tramline to work. Riding the tram was an annoyance, but less of one than reaching the main gate in his flyer and being turned away.

The price of his rebellion was high, however. By the time he shut down the display, there were footsteps on the balcony behind him. He turned to see Loi descending the stairs in her robe, her eyes sleepy, her short blond hair robbed of its usual sculpted look by her pillow. It was only in the morning that Loi’s true age showed. On the lee side of breakfast and her morning rituals, Loi usually passed for ten years fewer than her forty-six.

“Good morning, sweet,” she said. “I almost missed you.”

“I have to leave,” he said defensively. “I’m riding the tram.”

“You have time for a hug, don’t you?” But he was stiff in her embrace, and she drew back to study his face. “I wanted to see if you were all right this morning. I guess that tells me.”

“You might have thought about it last night.”

“Chris dear, you have no right to be angry with me, or with Jessie.”

“You shut me out,” he said sharply.

“As you do when you and Jessie take time together, as we do to Jessie at other times. Is there any difference?”

He frowned sulkily. “I didn’t know you were interested.”

“Jessie is a beautiful young woman, full of interesting energies,” Loi said. “How could you think I wouldn’t be attracted to her? And how could you not have noticed what’s been happening when the three of us are in bed together?”

For a moment, Christopher was silent. “Look, I’ve got to leave.”

“Not yet,” Loi said, grabbing his hand as he tried to turn away. “Yes, you met Jessie first. Yes, you were the one who suggested her as our third. But you don’t own her—or me, for that matter. I want a family in which we all share our lives and our selves, freely, without contracts, without artificial boundaries. I thought you wanted that, too.”

“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said angrily. “I didn’t think I’d have to fight her for your time. All I thought about on the way back from Freeport was coming home and making love with you. Except you were already busy.”

“Did you think that being the only male in this trine made you the center?” Loi retorted. “We’re not going to work like this, Chris. Not with you reacting to our love with jealousy. If you can’t find a better place to be on your own, maybe you’d better make an appointment with Arty.”

“I’ve got to leave,” he said firmly, pulling away.

This time she let him go. “We’ll talk tonight, then,” she said, “all three of us.”

“I’m not interested in a conversation on the subject of How Foolish Chris Is Being,” he said, his back to her. “Thank you very much, but no thanks.”

She came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist, cuddling close and resting her head on his back. “I had in mind a conversation on how we can all help each other with the hard parts,” she said softly.

Christopher shrugged out of her embrace. “It still adds up to Let’s Help Chris Adjust,” he said bitterly, pausing at the door. “And I’m just not sure that I’m the one who’s wrong.”

Mikhail Dryke hated traveling almost as much as he hated being trapped for days on end in his office suite in the green-glassed administrative warren at Prainha. The former was pure impatience; the latter, the natural resistance of a hands-on field investigator who had been promoted too many times.

The last promotion had left Dryke chief security officer, Diaspora Project, Allied Transcon. His first accomplishment in the new post had been to locate and hijack a triumvirate of lieutenants who could handle the administrative end without him. His second had been to acclimate the Diaspora Project Director, Hiroko Sasaki, to the idea that he would be absent from Prainha more than he would be present.

Sasaki had not needed much convincing. It was trouble that took Dryke away, and Allied Transcon and the Diaspora were facing a full menu of trouble these days. The Homeworld hit on the Houston center was part of a panorama of problems that ranged from labor sabotage at the Kasigau Launch Center to an endless parade of would-be stowaways attempting to make their way onto the starship Memphis.

Named, like its predecessor, for a great city of antiquity, the second of the Project’s five great generation starships was nearing completion in high orbit for a planned 2095 departure. A third larger than Ur, which had sailed eleven years earlier, Memphis was a small city in space, and a world of problems unto itself. Dryke gladly left the protection of Memphis in the hands of Matthew Reid, who was based at Takara, the satland building the ship for Allied Transcon.

But any problems earthbound belonged to Dryke, and this morning Jeremiah and Homeworld were at the top of the list. He had caught the flash alert from Sentinel in his flyer and immediately rerouted from the tower to the field. Jeremiah’s message came through while he was waiting out prep on his Saab Celestron; ten minutes later, he was in the air.

Prainha to Houston was one of those especially annoying intermediate hops—barely six thousand kilometers—that took longer to complete than a trip covering twice the distance. The apogee of the arc traced by Dryke’s pop screamer was well within the stratosphere; the max velocity was a plodding 4,000 kph; the e.t. nearly two hours.

Only the skylink kept the time from being a total waste. The analysis of the spill came in shortly after take-off: dioxin, methylene chloride, benzothiazole, PCBs, chloroaniline. By the time the Texas coast crystallized through the hanging haze, Dryke had collected reports from Munich, Tokyo, and Kasigau, and an excuse from Washington. The Trojan horse’s final act had been to wipe itself from the system, and DIANNA operators were still trying to reconstruct where it had gotten in and how it had done what it did.

Nobody knows anything, Dryke grumbled to himself as the Saab flashed across the center boundary and floated in, nose high, over the end of the runway. An old story. Getting very old. Jeremiah finds us with our backs turned, hits us, and then slips away clean. Very clean. The son of a bitch.

Spinning wheels touched rushing pavement, and Dryke swung the skylink console back out of the way. Six times they’ve hit us. Six times I’ve had to pick through the mess they left. The red dye in the water in the Munich offices. The data center fire in Kasigau. The launch laser that blew up at Prainha. Never anyone killed. No victims except Allied Transcon. No enemies for the friends of the Earth.

The Saab rolled to an open slot in the bunkerlike hangar, and a blue corpsec flyer scooted up alongside. At the controls was the local chiefsec, a bird-necked, mild-tempered man named Jim Francis. I don’t like always being one step behind, Dryke thought gruffly as he climbed down from the cabin. I don’t like being outsmarted. How do they do it? Who the hell are they?

It was unlikely that any answers awaited him at the disabled gate, but Dryke was obliged to go through the motions. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said with a nod.

“Sorry you had to make the trip,” Francis said. “We’ve got the tanker sealed, and we’re about ready to lift it out of there. But there’s roughly thirty-five hundred gallons of a very nasty soup soaking into the ground, and that’s going to be a whole hell of a lot harder to deal with.”

Dryke nodded gravely. “Let’s take a look.”

Running parallel to the highway it had largely replaced, the Harris County tramway was a concrete ribbon on stilts, a fifth as wide as the fifty-seat silver and blue cars which skimmed atop it. From below, it looked fragile, the cars precariously balanced like eggs on a knife-edge. But inside, the ride was stable and smooth, even as the slope-nosed tram car left the main track to Galveston and slowed sharply for the T-spur to Allied Transcon.

Christopher McCutcheon took advantage of the slower speed and his seat on the right side of the tram car to peer out the window at the odd congregation by the main gate, a quarter mile away. He was not the only one to do so. The half-filled cabin grew noticeably quieter for the forty seconds or so that the gate was in view.

They saw two bright yellow mobile cranes standing outside the barbican, their long booms making an X in silhouette against the sky. Two red Flight Services trucks sat at odd angles on the side slopes; Christopher thought one might be a foamer, but he wasn’t sure. A pale blue HazMat van blocked the middle of the bridge, and most of the figures walking among the vehicles seemed to be wearing full-body environmental suits.

“Looks like somebody missed the runway,” he said conversationally to the round-faced woman in the adjoining seat.

“Didn’t you hear the news?” she asked indignantly. “It was those Homeworld people. They tried to blow up the shuttle. What’s wrong with them? Don’t they realize what they’re doing?”

It was then that Christopher noted the binoculars dangling from the woman’s neck. Forewarned, he limited his reply to a sympathetic smile; there was no such thing as a brief conversation with a starhead. He’d learned that lesson very early in his three-month tenure with the Project.

When the tram car came to a stop a few moments later, Christopher watched to see where the woman went. As he expected, she passed by the escalators to the ground level and the base entrance and continued down the platform toward the observation area. By the time Christopher reached the bottom, she had joined the other starheads at the plex, peering out toward the field where a barrel-bodied ESA Pelican sat being readied for launch to orbit.

Not too surprisingly, the line at the staff gate pass-through had stalled, since—always vigilant after the fact—corpsec was not only checking for employee IDs but checking everyone’s ID through the verifier. While he waited, Christopher found himself thinking about the woman on the tram.

There was something simultaneously delightful and pathetic about the starheads. They knew the launch schedule for the center’s one LTO runway better than most Allied staff, knew the difference between a Pelican and its near-twin Martin Rendezvous, knew the nine satlands and the governor of the Mars colony and the latest news and gossip from Ur. They came to the ob deck at Johnson Field as a solemn pilgrimage and then turned into wishful, wistful children, noses pressed to the window on a rainy day.

Christopher had no doubt that the woman and everyone else on the ob platform that morning owned a selection option for Memphis. Those who were old enough had probably owned one for Ur as well, that prized certificate which had been so proudly hung on so many walls when there was no Homeworld to prick at the conscience. Back when being a pioneer candidate conferred status, when even those with no intention of leaving wanted to be able to say, “I could have gone if I wanted to.”

Things were different now. It had been years since Christopher had seen an option certificate on display, and mentioning Allied Transcon, Memphis, or the pioneers among strangers had become a good way to invite a passionate harangue. But nothing had changed for the starheads, except that Ur was already gone. One down, four to go.

Christopher had every reason to doubt that the woman or any of her peers would be selected for Memphis or any of the ships to follow. Anyone that set on leaving Earth would have done so already if they had any skills to offer. There were 200,000 people living off-planet—Technica and Aurora Sanctuary, Takara and Horizon, the Mars colony and Heinlein City on Mare Serenitatis. The starheads were obsessed with dreams they could never fulfill, and so came to touch with their eyes the only piece of that dream they could reach.

Or was it that they viewed the satlands, the Moon, even Mars as shabby substitutes for the only goal that mattered? If so, Christopher did not understand their desperate longing. It did not seem either real or realistic, and he could not quite stop himself from seeing the starheads as fundamentally irrational.

But then, he felt like a curiosity himself sometimes. When he had come to Allied Transcon from the San Francisco offices of DIANNA, it was almost like being an agnostic entering a community of believers. He had come there for the work, a chance to be part of the most ambitious library science project ever, the Memphis, unabridged hyperlibrary. They had come to join a cause.

A curiosity. Oh, he knew where he had been on June 28, 2083, just like everyone else—watching Ur’s long-delayed departure, the unimaginable power of its superconducting metal-ion engines driving it slowly up out of the solar system toward Epsilon Eridani. But he did not own an option for Memphis, would not have even if his father had not so clearly disapproved. It was such a long road, so few would be chosen, and the rewards that awaited the selected seemed so empty.

He just did not understand—any more than he had understood why, two months after Ur left, one Deryn Falconer had abandoned Oregon, her husband, and a fifteen-year-old nurture-son named Christopher for the satland called Aurora Sanctuary.

The environmental suit stank of chemwash and disinfectant, leaving Mikhail Dryke to wonder cynically whether he was really any better off inside it than he would have been going bare-skin. In any case, he was glad to retreat at last beyond the hazard boundary with Dr. Francis, endure the pummeling spray-down, and then strip off the heavy helmet and breather.

“They got us good,” Dryke said, mopping the perspiration from his face.

The local security chief nodded glumly. “My site engineer says three months to clean it all out and open for business again.”

“Nonsense,” Dryke said. “Run a bypass right across there,” he said, pointing and swinging his finger in an arc, “cut a triple gate through the fence, and you can be back in business in a week, flyers only. Nothing wrong with the guard station—you can cover the bypass as well as you covered the drive.”

“Which wasn’t very well, as it turned out,” Francis said. “Do you really want us to go back to sentries and turnpikes? The human factors—”

“Yes, I really do,” Dryke said shortly.

“We can’t leave the spill. They’re telling me we’ve got dioxin, chloroaniline—”

“Don’t leave it. Seal it. Use the old Kansas Technologies method. You inject the whole site with a neutralizing binder—blend it in with augers—and stabilize the spill in place. We had to use it after the fire at the plastics plant in Lyons a year back. Talk to your site engineer. He ought to know who to bring in.”

“People are going to worry about contamination.”

“Then you’ll have to educate them. We’re not going to rely on the north entrance and the tram for three months. We’re not going to let him put us under siege.” Dryke pulled at the neck band of his environmental suit. “I want out of this thing. And then I want a tank so I can face-to-face with the Director.”

“I’ll get someone to run you back—”

“You run me back. You can’t do anything here now. This mess belongs to your engineer now.”

The faintly sheepish look on Dr. Francis’s face betrayed him. “All right.”

But Dryke had already turned and started down the drive toward the flyer. Francis hurried after, the environmental suit squeaking as one surface rubbed against another. “Mr. Dryke—”

“What?”

“There’s people here that need to know. Should we have hammered the tanker on the ramp? Should we have used the rockets?”

Dryke stopped and shook his head. “You couldn’t,” he said bluntly. “That’s where he beat us. You want to do something useful, stop posturing and beating your breast and start figuring out what other ways he’s come up with to fuck us over.”

One moment, the other half of the holo tank was dark, except for the yellow eye of the imager. The next, Hiroko Sasaki sat facing him, seated cross-legged and straight-backed in a large fixed armchair identical to Dryke’s.

The chair made the president of the Pioneers Division look diminutive, but Dryke knew better than to let that deceive him. Sasaki was more of Takara, her birthplace, than Japan, her parents’—an efficient, demanding, uncompromising administrator with tremendous personal energy and intensity. What else she was she kept to herself. Dryke had worked for her for seven years and still could not say if he liked her.

“Yes, Mikhail.”

“Reporting on the Houston incident.”

“Go ahead.”

“It was a blind spot, not a system failure. The tractor was grabbed from a yard in Angleton no more than an hour before the hit, and the report got screened out by a remora somewhere between the cops, Shell, and the NVR. Probably they picked up the tanker in a side-of-the-road swap, dropped the stall screen in it at the same time. We’ve got the box. Black market, police version—take maybe fifteen minutes to install. Nothing on it, but I’m having it shipped to the labs down there just in case.

“The jammer was a float and went to the bottom in five hundred feet of water. They could have dropped it anytime in the last ten days—you wouldn’t want to take a land flyer out over the Gulf, but you could. I’d like authority to send the Gulf rescue unit’s submersible after it.”

“Given.”

“Thank you,” Dryke said with a nod. “Without it, we don’t have much to put into the puzzle. The tractor’s navigator is scrambled. DIANNA’S still backing and filling on the penetration. Sanctuary is being close-mouthed as usual.”

“Do you have an estimate of how many Homeworld activists were involved?”

“On a principal-contribution analysis, six or seven. Physically? It could have been as few as one.”

“Jeremiah.”

“You might as well say so.”

“You continue to reject the opinion of your counterterrorism subdirector that Jeremiah is a figurehead, representing no real person.”

“I do,” Dryke said. “Homeworld has many hands. But it thinks with one mind.”

“Perhaps. See that your prejudice on this matter doesn’t lead you down false trails,” Sasaki said. “As to this incident, what prospect is there for locating the ‘hands’ responsible?”

Dryke shook his head, frowning. “I hesitate to promise. They work very clean. But they can’t be everywhere without leaving footprints. They’ve been forced to use more and more hardware. We’ll go back along that path and try to find out where it’s coming from.”

“That seems to be where they are most vulnerable.”

“Yeah. Except they know that, too. It’s going to be an inch at a time, with no help from outside. We took a hit. We’ll take another, and another, and another, like as not. But one of these times I’m going to get there first. I promise you that, Hiroko. One of these days I’ll bring you Jeremiah’s head.”