The Quiet Pools

Except this time, there was a goal beyond mere preservation. A crusade was forming. If the walls held, if the attackers were repulsed, if the will did not weaken or the moment slip past, one day the gates would open, and the crusade would march out with flags flying to claim and conquer a new land.

Was it metaphor, or more? As he stood looking out from the high redoubt of Fort Jesus, Dryke could not say. He knew only that, for him as for the captain of the Portuguese guard, wondering what lay over the horizon and around the point, the waiting was the hardest part.

When he could, Dryke preferred to conduct conversations in person. The nature of his work meant that many of those conversations were sensitive; the nature of the world meant that none of those conversations could be guaranteed secure if any form of telecommunications was employed.

Split encryption, line-of-sight narrowcasting, dead-wiring, path-switching, all could be beaten. True, the message stream was like the Amazon in spring flood, and there was nothing easy about sieving the flow for one particular bit of electronic flotsam, much less decoding it.

But Dryke and Allied knew how, and it was only prudent to conclude that others knew as well. No one was saying, but the likely list included the intelligence arms of the Peace Force and several national governments, a smattering of the most technically inclined corporations, the best—and least principled—of the consulting and forecasting firms, a crime syndicate or two, and almost certainly Jeremiah’s Homeworld as well.

Dryke would go to Houston, or Munich, even halfway around the globe to Tokyo for the company. But Matthew Reid on Takara was sixteen hours and 36,000 klicks away. Dryke had been to the “City of Builders” only twice, to the partially completed Memphis but once.

But those early visits had been sufficient for him to grasp the security parameters and to measure Reid, whom Dryke inherited from his predecessor. The situation and the man were well suited to each other, and Dryke had left them undisturbed.

There had to be communication, coordination, and there was. No less than weekly, reports and directives and updates were ferried back and forth between Prainha and Takara by courier. Twice a year Reid came back for working vacations—briefings and marlin-fishing off Brazil’s Atlantic coast.

And at least once a month, on no fixed schedule, Dryke would call Reid and they would talk. The calls were nominally social, always informal, and quite probably monitored.

“Sounds like you folks had an amusing October,” Reid was saying. “A T-ship fragged, a couple of midnight fire-bombings, half a dozen road shipments hijacked, and that business with the Canadian environmental inspector—I’m almost jealous. All we had up here were a couple of half-baked sabotage attempts and an old- fashioned drunken family murder.”

“Just wait until we start sending you colonists a thousand at a time,” Dryke said, smiling. “You’ll get your share.”

“Now, wait a minute, I was promised angels and Eagle Scouts.”

“Nine hundred ninety-nine angels and one Javier Sala,” said Dryke. Sala was an Ur colonist who smuggled the components of a forty-kilogram cyclotol-aluminum bomb aboard the starship in his personal effects. His plan to destroy the ship before the eyes and cameras of the world was foiled three days before sailing when Ur’s security, monitoring internal communications, uncovered Sala’s ties to Spanish nationalists. Sala was quietly removed, and the incident never publicly revealed, but it remained a cautionary parable for Project insiders.

“Sporting odds, anyway,” Reid said lightly. “You keep the number of fanatics and martyrs down to a round dozen or so, and we’ll take it from there.”

“That’s big of you, Matt,” Dryke said. “Considering that every second warm body—man, dog, and grandmother—seems to be pointing for us down here. And every damn one of them can reach us if they try.”

“You need to recruit a militia. I hear the starheads gave a pretty good account of themselves in the Tokyo riot.”

“Yeah. This time,” Dryke said grimly. “It won’t be the last riot, though. And the next one will be worse, for both sides. Next time both sides’ll be armed.”

“I never thought I’d see the starheads rallying to our cause with steel,” Reid said, shaking his head. “That won a few hearts on Takara, I have to tell you.”

“And probably lost us a few million down here. It’s the old second-punch syndrome. Nobody saw it as five hundred screamers jumping fifty starheads and getting surprised. It played as Allied goons with stingers and blades carving up doe-eyed demonstrators.”

“The media have swung that far over?”

“It’s not what they said. It’s the pictures they have to show.”

“I don’t know why you folks just don’t pull out and move operations up here,” said Reid. “Ninety-five percent of the ship is ready for occupation. And you folks are about as popular as the Plague down there. You’ve got more friends up here, you know.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the company does exactly that for Knossos,” said Dryke. “Can’t run Selection from up there, though.”

“Sasaki could move West to Prainha and Central and East to Kasigau. Let the urban centers go.”

“Maybe,” said Dryke. “Be kind of like turning your back to a wolf, though.”

“I suppose,” said Reid. “Listen, I’d like to get as many of my people as possible some release time before things get crazy up here. Do you have anything that’s going to need special attention programmed between now and the end of the year?”

Dryke considered. “You’ll start to get ship’s staff in two weeks,” he said. “You knew that. They’re finishing up the navigation and drive management software in Munich. That’s the next critical pacing item. It’ll be hand-carried up for installation sometime next month, six copies on three different flights.”

“I hear it’s about ready. Testing this week?”

“Yeah. Munich will put it up on a simulator, and Mission will go live with Prainha and the controllers at Horizon for a mock sailing and test program. Not our headache, thank God.”

“How goes the mole hunt?”

“A couple more pelts in the Logistics Section, and a fistful out in the supplier community—Micronomics turned out to have a whole nest. I keep thinking we should be finding more, though. Houston’s been clean for a year, Munich for two—makes me feel like I’m missing something.”

“Hmm. Speaking of missing something—has this one reached you? There’s a kind of oddball rumor circulating in Takara that Jeremiah is on Sanctuary.”

“I heard.”

“I haven’t been able to put anything hard underneath it,” Reid went on, “but it makes a certain amount of sense. Synthesized image, synthesized voice—no reason really to think that there’s a real Jeremiah anywhere, or that he’s necessarily a he. And the goals of Homeworld certainly are consistent with Sanctuary’s politics.”

“Yeah,” said Dryke. “The thing that keeps me from taking it seriously is I think Anna X would sooner cut out her heart than use a male persona as Sanctuary’s mouthpiece. But maybe that’s my blind spot, so stay with it.”

For the next ten minutes, they wandered off into other topics— a minor drug problem in the high-stress Tokyo office, a thrice-delayed test of Memphis’ shield lasers, a funny story about the starship’s lead architect getting lost during an inspection tour— and then Dryke ended the conversation.

“Well—departmental conference in ten minutes, and I need to make a side stop on the way. So I’m going to let you get back to whatever I took you from.”

“I could use a few more hours sleep,” Reid deadpanned.

“Get it while you can,” Dryke said with a sardonic half-grin. “The kids’ll be home from school soon.”

“That they will,” said Reid. “It’ll be nice to have the family back together again.”

Dryke chuckled, shook his head. “I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and broke the link. Turning away from the blank wall, he looked toward the silent spectator to the conversation, seated in the far corner of the room. “Opinion? Too obvious?”

“Perhaps not obvious enough,” said Hiroko Sasaki, rising and gliding toward him. “The Munich gateway has been open for three weeks without a single attempt at penetration.”

“Trolling for big fish takes patience,” said Dryke. “The bait has to be right, the fish has to be hungry, and you