The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 6 —ACG— “The trail of Gaea’s pain…”

The Houston police found one of the tramway thugs before Allied’s submersible found the Gulf jammer, but only just. Reports of the two captures reached Mikhail Dryke within an hour of each other. Either would have been sufficient reason to make Houston his next stop; both together were compelling enough for him to set aside his business in Munich and go there directly.

Dryke’s Saab touched down at Houston in pitch-darkness, a few minutes after one. A young driver wearing Allied green picked up Dryke at the hangar and ferried him to the hardware lab, where he found the jammer sealed in an immersion tank and under guard by a gnomish sentry named Donovan. No technicians were in evidence, nor was there any sign that the unit had been touched.

“What’s going on here?” Dryke demanded. “Why hasn’t that jammer been torn down yet?”

“Mr. Dryke, Mr. Francis gave instructions that we were to hold it for your arrival,” the driver said.

“Where is Francis?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Donovan volunteered. “He said that he would be back before you arrived, sir.”

“When was that?”

“About seven o’clock.”

Dryke muttered something unintelligible and stepped forward to look down into the tank. Though only shreds remained of the jammer’s float bladder, the blue-green pear-shaped metal casing gave no evidence of its five-day immersion in 160 feet of warm Gulf brine. Nor did it bear any obvious identifying marks.

But Dryke recognized it all the same. Float jammer, Teledyne-Raytheon K-14 style, military model. Made by fifteen manufacturers in eleven countries. Knock-offs and licensees both. About as generic a piece of hardware as you can buy—

“Who’s the lab director?” Dryke asked, turning back to the other men.

“Dr. Kimura,” they said together.

“You,” Dryke said, pointing at the sentry. “Donovan. Call Dr. Kimura. Tell him I want him in here with his best technician by the time I get back. Tell him I want to know where this came from.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you,” Dryke said to the driver. “You’re taking me downtown.”

The driver nodded, and they started toward the door. But before they could reach it, Jim Francis appeared there.

“Mr. Dryke. I’m delighted to be able to bring you back with good news. It’s in perfect condition—hardly even a scratch from the manipulators—” His voice trailed off as he saw the annoyance on Dryke’s face. “Is something wrong?”

“May I see your gate ID, please?”

Puzzled, Francis retrieved the card from an inner pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Dryke.

“Donovan,” Dryke said, folding the card in half with one hand until it snapped in two with a sharp crack. “Mr. Francis has just left the company. See that he leaves the grounds.”

“What?” protested Francis. “You can’t fire a man for being late.”

“Yes, sir,” said Donovan, stepping forward.

Dryke nodded and turned away.

“Wait just a minute,” Francis said angrily. “You owe me an explanation—”

Whirling, Dryke snapped, “If you were bright enough to be worth keeping, you wouldn’t need an explanation. You’ve made it clear that you don’t really understand what’s going on. You’ve got your head buried in procedures and schedules and you just don’t see. That makes you dangerous, Francis. I want you gone.”

“I have fourteen years experience in corporate security—”

“And you haven’t learned a thing from any of it except how to dot your i’s.” Dryke crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head in disgust. “Get him out of here.”

Mikhail Dryke studied the picture on the security monitor—a high corner view of Brian Elo White slouched with arrogant casualness in the sole chair in Interview 3, Transit Division, Houston Police Department.

“Cocky,” Dryke said at last, looking up at the soft-faced, hard-eyed woman standing beside him.

“He’s street,” said Lieutenant Eilise Alvarez. “Country manners and city morals. Good ol’ boy with an attitude.”

“How did you find him?”

“We picked his fingerprints out of the blood smears on the plaz,” Alvarez said. “He won’t dean on the other two, though. Not even with four years in front of him and a Victim’s Lien waiting for him when he comes out.”

“How is the Martinez woman?”

“Last I heard she was still in intensive care. She got racked.”

Dryke nodded and looked back at the screen. “This one have family?”

“No. Just relatives.”

“Any leverage at all?”

“No,” she said, and shook her head. “Twenty-one and as cold as they come. I don’t think you’re going to get any help from him.”

“I want to be alone with him.”

Alvarez nodded. “But the monitor stays on. I can’t sanction any hands-on. He’s in our custody. He’d walk. And you don’t want that. Besides, this kind has thick calluses.”

“I understand the rules.”

“Okay,” she said, standing. “Let’s go.”

Alvarez led him down the hall to the guard station at the interview suite, and the guard in turn escorted Dryke into Interview 3. White looked up lazily as he entered.

“So you’re the fuck that’s cheating me out of my sleep,” the youth said, his mouth twisting into something that was half-sneer, half-scowl.

“Yeah,” Dryke said, advancing toward the table. “I’m the fuck.”

“You’re no cuff,” White said, squinting. “Must be collar.”

“I’m both,” Dryke said. “Allied Transcon security.”

White pursed his lips and waggled his hand in a mocking gesture. “Little cuff, big collar,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and closing his eyes. “Nothing to me, beershit. Not worth my sleep.”

“I can get you out of here,” Dryke said.

“Scammer.”

“I can. Tonight.”

In a vaguely reptilian manner, the youth’s left eye opened slowly and regarded Dryke curiously. “Why?”

“That’s the magic question,” Dryke said. “Why?”

The other eye opened, wary. “Why what?”

“Why you and your friends came out to the observation platform Monday and racked the starheads.”

White pulled himself up out of his slouch and twisted on his chair until he was facing Dryke. “You cute cuff psych, want to draw a pretty of my head?”

“I told you who I am. Why’d you do it?”

“Didn’t.”

“Scammer. You’re not here for the food.”

A shrug. “Fagging cuffs can lie from A, who catches ’em? It’s their world.”

“Fine,” Dryke said, straightening. “Nice talking to you.” He started for the door.

“Hey,” White called. “Hey, collar. What d’you care?”

Dryke turned and regarded the youth coolly. “It’s none of your business why we care,” he said. “All you need to do is listen to the questions and roll out answers. You scam me, I walk. You help me, you walk. Choose.”

A self-satisfied smirk spread across White’s face. “Sure. Sure, we racked the ’heads. Pure gold Olympic. Fagging top jazz.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“Who d’you think, scammer?”

“What gave you the idea?”

White shrugged. “Saw the hit on the wire, looked like good jazz. Thought we’d join the party and make our own hit.” He laughed to himself. “ ’Heads seeing stars now.”

Dryke’s face was a mask. “Tell me about the ’heads.”

“Bore.”

“Tell me.”

“D’you know what I hate?” White said, coming up out of the chair, his body suddenly a coiled spring. “ ’Heads got going-away eyes.”

“What do you mean, going-away eyes?”

“Like they’re with you but they’re already gone. You seen ’em. They got their fagging noses in the air and their eyes blind with Starshine and they don’t see you. Like you’re a fagging ghost.” His face was hard and prideful. “Well, we made ’em see us. We gave ’em a proper good-bye.”

“They aren’t the ones who are going,” said Dryke. “The pioneers haven’t even been selected yet.”

“They’re all the same,” White said. “All the same to me.”

“Tell me about Homeworld.”

“Nothin’ to tell.”

“What about ‘For the Homeworld’ on the window?”

The youth sank back down into his seat and his casual slouch. “Jeremiah is cool jazz. You know brotherhood? He and me see the straight together.”

“Who is Jeremiah?”

“You know—Jeremiah. Man, he is the fucking Avenger. The knife in the night. And sweet. You can’t touch him.”

“You believe what he believes?”

“You hurt anybody who hurts you or yours. I believe that, aces.”

“Who did the starheads hurt?”

“They’re so fagging greedy. They get nine zeros handed to them and don’t even think about us,” White said. “What makes one of them worth a billion chits, huh?”

Months ago, a popular satiric comedian had added the Project to his list of favorite targets. Taking a recently published—though inaccurate—estimate of the cost per colonist to build and launch Memphis, he began asking his audiences, “So—what did you do with your billion dollars?”

It was inaccurate. It was unfair. Within Allied Transcon, at least above the work circle level, it was worth your life to admit that you found it funny. But outside the company, especially among those under twenty-five, the routine struck a chord. It had taken the comedian from the club circuit to the big arenas, and the question had joined the slanguage as a catch phrase.

The catch phrase had in turn spawned a hundred variations, from “When I get my billion…” to “He/she must have gotten my billion by mistake…” So it wasn’t much of a surprise for Dryke to hear another variation from Brian Elo White. But it wasn’t much of a pleasure, either, and Dryke had to fight off the temptation to give a sharp answer.

“Do you want to go?” he asked instead.

White snorted. “Hell, no.”

“Are you sure about that? What if I came here to offer you a chance to leave on Memphis?”

“Scammer.” White scowled. “You’d never take someone like me.”

“What if, Brian?” Dryke persisted. “Do you want to go?”

For a brief moment, White hesitated, caught between hope and skepticism. His eyes softened enough to admit a hint of wonder, and his face became that of a pensive child. Then the scowl returned, a cloud across the sun.

“You think I’m like them, beershit?”

“Do you want to go?”

“Spend the rest of my life with a bunch of ’heads, going nowhere fast? The hell with that. Fag ’em, fuck ’em, and rack ’em up. That’s all they’re good for. You understand?”

Nodding, Dryke said, “I understand.” Then he sprang forward, catlike. His right foot lashed out, catching the knee of the youth’s left leg and driving it downward. With the limb pinned between floor and chair, the knee hyperextended, then shattered with a horrible wet tearing sound that left the leg bent backward and started White screaming.

Writhing and wailing, White slid forward off his chair to the floor, clutching helplessly at the grotesquery. The steel toe of Dryke’s left shoe swung forward in a swift arc that intercepted the youth’s unprotected groin. White’s screaming ended with an explosive cry and a strangled whimper, and his already pale skin went shocky white. As Dryke stepped back, the youth disintegrated into a huddled, twitching mass on the floor.

“That’s for Dola Martinez,” Dryke said quietly as a furious Lieutenant Alvarez and several other Transit cuffs burst into the room.

“I promised him he’d walk,” was all he said.

They held him for more than an hour, first while they unraveled the status of a Russian-born British citizen carrying Brazilian diplomatic credentials, then while Lieutenant Alvarez balked at accepting the conclusions of that inquiry. He walked out of the station knowing that he had made no friends by what he had done.

But he also knew that only Mikhail Dryke and Hiroko Sasaki could rightly judge him, and that at least one of them believed that he had done nothing wrong.

Yotama Kimura led Dryke to the back of the clean room, where the jammer lay in pieces on a tear-down table. “This is Anna Romay,” he said, introducing the technician hovering over the dissected machine. “Anna, please show Mr. Dryke what you found.”

The technician reached for the articulated arm of the micro-viewer and pulled the screen forward. “There were three identifiers. The first was on the controller chip. The chip had been fried, of course, but they must have used an off-the-shelf bracket—see, here,” she said, turning it over under the lens of the viewer.

Dryke studied the screen, the block lettering stamped into the foillike metal. “Yes, I see it. ‘Inex, S.A.’ South Africa?”

“No. Inex, S.A., is a chip shop in Mexico City. An old Intel subsidiary, specializing in standard X-ray burns. They have a lot of customers, but the South Africans aren’t among them.”

“So this points toward Taiwan or Chile. Or one of the guerrilla shops in California or Arizona.”

“If you’ll be patient, I can do better.” She reached for another component. “Standard hardened hex-head lock screw. Eight-millimeter, forty-thread. Taiwan uses ten-millimeter, forty-thread.”

“So it’s from the West.”

“I thought so as soon as I saw the controller chip. This was the clincher,” she said, punching up a graph. “I did a mass spec on the casing. It came up with a mix that’s in the base as U.S. Government bronze, spec H. Very old formulation. There’s only seven mills around the world that still make it—three of which are owned by the Chilean government’s National Metals.”

“So it’s Chile.”

“I’d say so. Probably right out of military stores.”

Thoughts tumbled through Dryke’s mind. Could be a straight sale, which won’t take more than a bribe to track. The Chileans don’t worry about much past seeing that your money’s good. Or it could be black market, same reason. Or a sympathizer. That’d be the toughest. Give me greed over idealism any day—

“I hope that is adequate, Mr. Dryke?” asked Kimura anxiously.

Dryke nodded, a satisfied expression on his face. “That’s all I needed,” Dryke said. “One step closer to Jeremiah. One step at a time. I hope that you’ve pointed me in the right direction.”

“We share that hope,” Kimura said.

“I want you to document what you’ve shown me, then pack up the jammer and send it down to Brazil for safekeeping.”

“Immediately,” Kimura said. “Is there anything else that I can do?”

In the last five minutes, Dryke’s body had begun to remind him that he had had no sleep in thirty hours. “You can point me toward a bed,” he said.

Kimura smiled. “There are sleep tanks in Flight Operations and in Building 7.”

“Flight Operations, please,” he said. Because when I wake up, I’ll be leaving for Santiago.