FIFTY-ONE
Hrunkner had been in a dry hurricane once before, during the Great War. But that had been on the ground— underground most of the time—and about all he remembered was the ceaseless wind and the fineness of the snow that swirled and piled, and penetrated every crevice and gap.
This time he was in the air, descending through forty thousand feet. In the dim sunlight, he could see the swirl of the hurricane spread across hundreds of miles, its sixty-mile-per-hour winds brought to stillness by distance. A dry hurricane could never equal the fury of a Bright Time water hurricane. Yet this kind of storm would last for years, its eye of cold widening and widening. The world’s heat balance had paused on a kind of thermal plateau, water’s energy of crystallization. Once past this plateau, temperatures would fall steadily toward the next, much colder level, where the air itself began to dew out.
Their jet slid down toward the walls of cloud, bucking and slewing on invisible turbulence. One of the pilots remarked that the air pressure was less now than it had been at fifty thousand feet back over the Straits. Hrunkner tilted his head up to a window, looked almost directly ahead. In the hurricane’s eye, sunlight glinted off motley snow and ice. There were also lights, the hot reds of Southland industry just below the surface.
Far ahead, a ragged edge of mountains pierced the clouds and there were colors and textures he hadn’t seen since he and Sherkaner took their long-ago walk in the Dark.
The Accord Embassy at Southmost had its own airport, a four-mile-by-two-mile property just outside the city core. Even this was just a fragment of the enclave that colonial interests had held in previous generations. The remnant of empire was alternately an obstacle to friendly relations and an economic boost for both nations. To Unnerby it was just an overly short, oil-smudged strip of ice. Their converted bomber made the most exciting landing of Hrunkner’s career, a rolling skid past an unending blur of snow-covered warehouses.
The General’s pilot was good, or very lucky. They came to a stop just a hundred feet short of snowdrifts that marked the no-more-excuses end of the runway. In minutes, beetle-shaped vehicles had driven up and were pulling them toward a hangar. Not a single person walked about in the open. Away from their path, the ground glittered with CO2 frost.
Inside the cavernous hangar, the lights were bright and—once the doors were shut—ground crews rushed out with stairs. There were a few fancy-looking cobbers down there, waiting by the base of the stairs. Very likely the Accord ambassador and the head of the embassy guards. Since they were still on Accord ground, it was unlikely that any Southlanders would be here….Then he saw the parliamentary ensign on the jackets of two of the VIPs. Someone was eager beyond the bounds of clever diplomacy.
The mid-hatch was opened; a bolus of frigid air spilled into the cabin. Smith had already gathered up her gear and was climbing back to the hatch. Hrunkner remained on his perch a moment longer. He waved at one of the Intelligence techs. “Have there been any more nukes?”
“No, sir, nothing. We’ve got confirmation up and down the net. It was an isolated, one-megaton burst.”
The NCO Club at Lands Command was a bit out of the ordinary. Lands Command was more than a day’s drive from civilian entertainment, and the post had a fat budget compared to most out-of-the-way places. The average noncom at Lands Command was likely to be a tech with at least four years of academic training, and many of the troopers here worked at the deepmost Command and Control Center, several stories beneath the club. So, there were the usual game tables and gym sets and fizzbar, but there were also a good book collection and a number of net-connected arcade games that could also be used as study stations.
Victory Lighthill slouched in the dimness behind the fizzbar and watched the panorama of commercial video on the far wall. Maybe the most unusual thing about the club was that she was allowed in. Lighthill was a junior lieutenant, the natural bane and antagonist of many NCOs. Yet the tradition here was that if an officer covered her rank and was invited in by a noncom, then that officer’s presence was tolerated.
Tolerated, but in Lighthill’s case, not really welcomed. Her team’s reputation for inspection raids and its special connection with the Director of Intelligence made the average cobber uneasy about her and the team. But hey, the rest of the team were noncoms. Right now they were scattered around the club, each with a bulging departure pannier. For once, the other NCOs were talking to them, if not actually socializing. Even the ones who weren’t in Intelligence knew that things were teetering on the edge—and the ever-mysterious Lighthill team must surely have inside knowledge.
“It’s Smith down there at Southmost,” said a senior sergeant sitting at the bar. “Who else could it be?” He tipped his head in the direction of one of Lighthill’s corporals and waited for some reaction. Corporal Suabisme just shrugged, looking very innocent and—by trad standards—indecently young. “I wouldn’t be knowing, Sergeant. I truly wouldn’t.”
The senior sergeant waved his eating hands in a sneer. “Oh? So how come you Lighthill flunkies are all carrying departure bags? I’d say you’re just waiting to hop on a plane for someplace.”
It was the sort of probing that would normally bring Viki into action, either to withdraw Suabisme or—if necessary—to shut the senior sergeant down. But in the NCO club, Lighthill had zero authority. Besides, the point of being here was to keep the team out of official sight. But after a moment, the senior sergeant seemed to realize he wasn’t going to provoke any slips from the young soldier; he turned back to his buddies at the bar.
Viki let out a quiet sigh. She hunkered down until just the tops of her eyes were above the level of the fizzbar. The place was getting busy, the ping of spit in cuspidors a kind of background music. There was little talk, and even less laughter. Off-duty NCOs should be a more lively lot, but these cobbers had plenty on their minds. The center of attention was the television. The NCO cooperative had bought the latest variable-format video. In the dimness behind the bar, Viki smiled in spite of herself. If the world could survive even a few more years, such gear would be as good as the videomancy gear Daddy played with.
The TV was sucking from a commercial news site. One window was a crude image from some rent-a-camera at the embassy airport at Southmost: the aircraft coasting down the embassy runway was a type that Lighthill herself had seen only twice before. Like many things, it was secret and obsolete all at the same time. The press scarcely commented on it. On the main window, an editorialist was congratulating herself on this journalistic coup, and speculating just who was aboard the daggercraft.
“…It’s not the King himself, despite what our competitors may claim. Our coverage around the palace and at the Princeton airfields would have detected any movement of the Royal Household. So who is this now arriving at Southmost?” The announcer paused and the cameras moved closer, surrounding her forebody. The picture expanded to spill over the nearby displays. The maneuver gave the impression suddenly of intimate conversation. “We now know that the emissary is the head of the King’s Own Intelligence Service, Victory Smith.” The cameras backed off a little. “So, to the King’s Information Officers, we say: You can’t hide from the press. Better to give us full access. Let the people see Smith’s progress with the Southlanders.”
Another camera, from inside a hangar: Mom’s daggercraft had been towed all the way into the embassy hangar, and the clamshell doors were being pulled shut. The scene looked like a diorama built from children’s toys: the futuristic aircraft, the closed-body tractors chugging around the hangar’s wide floor. No people were visible.Surely they don’t have to pressurize the hangar? Even at the eye of the dry hurricane, the pressure couldn’t be that low. But after a moment, soldiers popped out of a van. They pushed a stairway up to the side of the dagger. Everyone in the NCO Club became suddenly very quiet.
A soldier climbed to the aircraft’s mid-hatch. It cracked open, and… the embassy rent-a-camera feed went dead, replaced by the King’s seal.
There was startled laughter, then applause and hooting. “Good for the General!” someone shouted. As much as anyone, these cobbers wanted to know what was happening at Southmost, but they also had a long-standing dislike for the news companies. They regarded these latest, very open discussions as a personal affront.
She looked at her team members. Most had been watching the television, but without great interest. They already knew what was going on, and—as Senior Sergeant Loudmouth had speculated—they expected to see action themselves very soon. Unfortunately, the television couldn’t help them with that. At the back of the room, far from the fizzbar and the television, a few hard-core gamers hung around their arcade boxes. That included three of
