tonight.”
“Fine. Can you let them know I’ve arrived?”
A short pause. “Done, Michael.”
“Thanks, Mother.”
With that, Michael turned his attention to the next thing on his very long list: space-suit setup. He commed the duty safety equipment operator, one Senior Spacer Carlsson, and arranged to pick up his suit. Setup would take an hour or so, and then lunch would be a damn fine thing.
Michael set off to find Carlsson, who according to Mother was testing one of the lifepods right aft and down on 4 Deck.
Sunday, August 30, 2398, UD
Digby stood, as he had done on so many dark mornings, alone on the Avenue of Heroes.
Running away from him all the way down to the Grand Corniche that fronted the eastern shores of the Koenig Channel, carefully shaded streetlights threw sharply distinct pools of orange light, stretching away like a long double string of exotic pearls. Massive trees flanked the road, visible only as ink-black shapes against the star-studded sky; well set back, the anonymous shapes of government buildings loomed gray and forbidding.
As he hung back from the street safe in the deep shadows thrown by the trees, Digby was beginning not to care whether Kumar appeared. He’d seen the bloody man only once in the last ten days, and then in the company of two other men. Thank Kraa, he’d decided to get his wife out-system; confirmation that she’d made it to Scobie’s World safely had come as a huge relief. The risks he had been taking had been hard enough to bear; they would have been infinitely harder to take knowing that Jana, too, would suffer if he was arrested loitering close to the diplomatic compound for no good reason.
He did have his running gear on. Even brigadier generals of marines were supposed to stay fit, after all.
Digby comforted himself with the knowledge that for all its fearsome reputation, Doctrinal Security was as slack as most security organizations without an immediate and obvious threat to deal with seemed to be. Its supposedly random patrols were far from random, and Digby would have sworn before Kraa that at least half of them wouldn’t have seen an elephant standing at the side of the road unless it was painted bright pink and floodlit with a strobe light nailed to its head. He’d been a marine for far too long not to recognize the signs of low morale, poor discipline, and weak leadership at a glance. He’d even had to dodge the shattered remains of a beer bottle thrown from a jeep as it sped past.
Then, all of a sudden, there was activity at the compound gate. A light came on to reveal a man talking to the gate guards, but it was too far away to tell if he was Kumar. Please, let it be him and nobody else, Digby pleaded, his heart thudding. Please let it be Kumar and let him be alone. Digby waited in impatient agony. They must know him well, he thought, as the faint sounds of laughter came down the avenue. They seemed very chummy; maybe it was not Kumar.
Finally, the man was off and running. Kumar. Please Kraa, let it be Kumar. Nerves jangling, Digby turned and moved down the road to a position 50 meters short of the first cross-street, turning every so often to track the man coming toward him.
And Kumar it was, and thank Kraa, he was alone.
Almost before Digby knew it, Kumar was on him.
“Captain Kumar, it’s Julius Digby,” he hissed. “Don’t slow down. Keep running and turn right at the cross- street and stay close to the trees. I must talk to you.”
And with that, Digby was off through the shadows, hoping like hell that Kumar wouldn’t do what common sense would tell him to do: turn around and go straight home.
Moments later, Kumar rounded the corner, jogging steadily up the Avenue of Martyrs toward the sea some 3 kilometers in front of him, hugging the curb, running in and out of the shadows. Suddenly he stopped, bending down as though to adjust an overly tight shoe.
“You’ve got twenty seconds, Digby, and then I’m gone.” Kumar’s voice was harsh. No Sylvanian would ever trust a Hammer, and for all Kumar knew, this could be entrapment.
“Ashok, you must trust me. I have a message capsule here for you. It will open only when you say the passphrase ‘concurrent,’ that’s ‘concurrent.’ Please repeat.”
“Concurrent,” Kumar replied shortly. “Five seconds.”
“Okay. Meet me 100 meters down the road and I’ll hand the capsule over. Then I’m gone. You’ll know what to do when you read it. If you’re stopped, for Kraa’s sake, wipe it or I’m a dead man.”
The Sylvanian ambassador’s normally deep ebony face was gray with anger. He had lost family and friends when Jesmond had been nuked by the Hammer and had little reason to put any faith in them or their works. And now this.
“Ashok, we have to give the Feds time to stop this insanity.”
“I wish we could.” Kumar’s frustration was obvious. “Our next starship courier is, uh, yes, September fifth. The
Ambassador Kwashomo’s hands went up. “We don’t even know if this is just an elaborate hoax. And if we do confront them, then what? We have no proof, and everyone involved will be dead by the end of the day. And even if they did believe us, Merrick would go in the usual Hammer bloodbath, to be replaced by God knows which councillor. Probably that devious man Polk. And then the usual Hammer bullshit: We didn’t know, it wasn’t our fault, blame Merrick, it was his fault, we are so sorry.” The ambassador stopped, conscious that he had come close to losing control. “So what do we do?”
Kumar was emphatic. “I think that we have to sit on it at this end. Toppling Merrick, much as we all despise the man, on the basis of a single unsubstantiated report is not our decision to make. I think that it is ultimately up to the Feds to decide what they want to do. The
“I agree.” Kwashomo was equally emphatic. “We cannot stop the project from going ahead, so let’s not add any new variables by forcing any changes at this end. Merrick is a madman, but better the madman we know than somebody new. A new madman, dear God! Imagine Polk-the man is such a xenophobe, even for a Hammer. Just what we don’t need. The
“I’ll get on it.”
Monday, August 31, 2398, UD
Michael fidgeted as he waited for his captain to arrive.
Just his luck, he thought, for his first formal task onboard
