The Quiet Pools

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.”

CHAPTER 2 —GUA— “… for the Homeworld.”

The ESA Pelican Silesia sat at the top of the ramp at the west end of Johnson Field’s runway 1E like an overladen and aging beast of burden. Its twenty-four massive tires were spread wide by their million-pound burden, the delta wings and fat fuselage streaked and stained from five hundred previous missions. Four trunklike umbilicals extended up into Silesia’s underbelly from the ramp, as though the freight shuttle belonged in a hospital ward rather than on the flight line.