General team from her own family—well maybe she did.
Princeton’s airport was in chaos. There were more flights, more corporate charters, more crazy construction work than ever before. Chaotic or not, General Smith was ahead of the problem; a jet had already been diverted for his use. Viki’s cars were cleared to drive right out onto the military side of the field. They moved cautiously down designated lanes, under the wings of taxiing aircraft. The secondary paths were torn by construction, a craterlike pit every hundred feet. By the end of the year, all service operations were to be conducted without external exposure. Ultimately, these facilities would have to support new types of fliers, and operations in air-freezing cold.
Viki dropped him off by his jet. She hadn’t said where she was bound this evening. Unnerby found that pleasing. For all the strangeness of her present situation, at least she knew how to keep her mouth properly shut.
She followed him out into the freeze. There was no wind, so he risked going without the air heater. Every breath burned. It was so cold he could see clouds of frost hanging around the exposed joints of his hands.
Maybe Viki was too young and strong to notice. She trooped across the thirty yards to his jet, talking every second. If it weren’t for all the dark omens rising out of this visit, seeing Viki would have been an absolute joy. Even out-of-phase, she had turned out so beautifully, a wonderful incarnation of her mother—with Smith’s hard edge softened by what Sherkaner had been at his best. Hell, maybe part of it wasbecause she was out-of-phase! The thought almost made him stop in the middle of the runway. But yes, Viki had spent her whole life out of step, seeing things from a new angle. In a weird way, watching her diminished all his misgivings about the future.
Viki stepped aside as they reached the weather shelter at the base of his jet. She drew herself up and gave him a well-starched salute. Unnerby returned the gesture. And then he saw her name tag.
“What an interesting name, Lieutenant. Not a profession, not some bygone deepness. Where—?”
“Well, neither of my parents is a ‘smith.’ And no one knows which ‘underhill’ Daddy’s family might be ascended from. But, see behind you—” She pointed.
Behind him the tarmac spread away from them, hundreds of yards of flatness and construction work, all the way back to the terminal. But Viki was pointing higher, up from the river-bottom flatlands. The lights of Princeton curved around the horizon, from glittering towers to the suburban hills.
“Look about five degrees to your right-rear of the radio tower. Even from here you can see it.” She was pointing at Underhill’s house. It was the brightest thing in that direction, a tower of light in all the colors that modern fluorescents could make.
“Daddy designed well. We’ve hardly had to make any changes in the house at all. Even after the air has frozen, his light will still be up there on the hill. You know what Daddy says: We can go down and inward—or we can stand on high places and reach out. I’m glad that’s where I grew up, and I want that place to be my name.”
She lifted her name tag so it glittered in the aircraft lights.LIEUTENANTVICTORY LIGHTHILL. “Don’t worry, Sergeant. What you and Dad and Mother started is going to last a long time.”
FORTY-SIX
Belga Underville was getting a bit tired of Lands Command. It seemed that she was down here almost ten percent of the time—and it would be a lot more if she hadn’t become a heavy telecomm user. Colonel Underville had been head of Domestic Intelligence since 60//15, more than half the past Bright Time. It was a truism—at least in modern times—that the end of the Brightness was the beginning of the bloodiest wars. She had expected things to be rough, but not like this.
Underville got to the staff meeting early. She was more than a little nervous about what she intended; she had no desire to cross the chief, but that was exactly how her petition might look. Rachner Thract was already there, getting his own show in order. Grainy, ten-color reconnaissance photos were projected on the wall behind him. Apparently he’d found more Southlander launch sites—further evidence of Kindred aid for “the potential victims of Accord treachery.” Thract nodded civilly as she and her aides sat down. There was always some friction between External Intelligence and Domestic. External played by rules that were unacceptably rough for domestic operations, yet they always found excuses for meddling. The last few years, things had been especially tense between Thract and Underville. Since Thract had screwed up in Southland, he’d been much easier to handle.Even the end of the world can have short-term advantages, Belga thought sourly.
Underville flipped through the agenda. God, the crackpot distractions. Or maybe not: “What do you think about these high-altitude bogies, Rachner?” It was not meant as an argumentative question; Thract should not be in trouble when it came to air defense.
Thract’s hands jerked in abrupt dismissal. “After all the screaming, Air Defense claims only three sightings. ‘Sightings’ my ass. Even now that we know about Kindred antigravity capabilities, they still can’t track the cobbers properly. Now the AD Director claims the Kindred have some launch site I don’t know about. You know the chief is going to stick me with finding it…. Damn!” Underville couldn’t tell if that was his one-word summary answer, or if he had just noticed something obnoxious in his notes. Either way, Thract didn’t have anything more to say to her.
The others were trickling in now: Air Defense Director Dugway (seating himself on a perch far from Rachner Thract), the Director of Rocket Offense, the Director of Public Relations. The chief herself entered, followed almost immediately by the King’s Own Finance Minister.
General Smith called the meeting to order, and formally welcomed the Finance Minister. On paper, Minister Nizhnimor was her only superior short of the King himself. In fact, Amberdon Nizhnimor was an old crony of Smith’s.
The bogies were first on the agenda, and it went about as Thract had predicted. Air Defense had done further crunching on the three sightings. Dugway’s latest computer analysis confirmed that these were Kindred satellites, either pop-up recon jobs or maybe even the tests of a maneuvering antigravity missile. Either way, none of them had been seen twice. And none of them had been launched from any of the known Kindred sites. The director of Air Defense was very pointed about the need for competent ground intelligence from within Kindred territory. If the enemy had mobile launchers, it was essential to learn about them. Underville half-expected Thract to explode at the implication that his people had failed once more, but the Colonel accepted AD’s sarcasm and General Smith’s expected orders with impassive courtesy. Thract knew that this was the least of his problems; the last item on today’s agenda was his real nemesis.
Next up, Public Relations: “I’m sorry. There’s no way we can call a War Plebiscite, much less win one. People are more frightened than ever, but the time scales make a Plebiscite flatly unworkable.” Belga nodded; she didn’t need some flack from Public Relations for this insight. Within itself, the King’s Government was a rather autocratic affair. But for the last nineteen generations, since the Covenant of Accord, its civil power had been terrifyingly limited. The Crown retained sole title to its ancestral estates such as Lands Command, and had limited power of taxation, but had lost the exclusive right to print money, the right of eminent domain, the right to impress its subjects into military service. In peacetime, the Covenant worked. The courts ran on a fee system, and local police forces knew they couldn’t get too frisky or they might encounter real firepower. In wartime, well, that’s what the Plebiscite was for—to suspend the Covenant for a certain time. It had worked during the Great War, just barely. This time around, things moved so fast that just talking about a Plebiscite might precipitate a war. And a major nuclear exchange could be over in less than a day.
General Smith accepted the platitudes with considerable patience. Then it was Belga’s turn. She went through the usual catalogue of domestic threats. Things were under control, more or less. There were significant minorities that loathed the modernization. Some were already out of the picture, asleep in their own deepnesses. Others had dug themselves deep redoubts, but not to sleep in; these would be a problem if things went really bad. Hrunkner Unnerby had worked more of his engineering miracles. Even the oldest towns in the Northeast had nuclear electricity now, and—just as important—weatherized living space. “But of course not much of this is hardened. Even a light nuclear strike would kill most of these people, and the rest wouldn’t have the resources for a successful hibernation.” In fact, most of those resources had been spent on creating the power plants and underground farms.
General Smith gestured at the others. “Comments?” There were several. Public Relations suggested buying
