Killing Time

again. 'Father'd bred me to be smarter and prettier than Mother — so I suppose it shouldn't have been much of a surprise when he decided that he'd rather have sex with me than with her.' I winced in shock, but Larissa proceeded with a detachment not uncommon to victims of such trauma. 'She thought it was my fault — he'd have sex with me, and then she'd beat me for it. Malcolm always tried to stop both of them. But he's never had any real physical strength.' Her eyes glistened with profound love and admiration. 'You should have seen him, though — swinging those crutches at them, calling them every evil name imaginable.'

'Which they deserved,' I said. 'You know that, don't you?'

She nodded. 'Cognitively, as they say. Emotionally — it's a bit trickier. So — eventually we decided we'd just have to get rid of them. Mother first, because she was not only vicious but completely useless. Father — well, we had to wait, to let him finish building the satellites.'

'You went on enduring that,' I said, once again stunned, 'because you wanted him to finish the four-gigabyte satellite system?'

'Well, I knew how much it would be worth to Malcolm and me once he was dead,' Larissa replied. 'The reinvention of the Internet? Yes, I could endure his touch a few more times if it meant that my brother and I would get those profits. Then, once the system was in place and working smoothly, Father was called in on the '07 economic summit. So we waited until after that. Right after. We went to Washington with him — even got to meet the president. On the jet back to Seattle it was just the three of us. He was very pleased with himself — why shouldn't he have been? He and his friends had just become the most powerful people in the country. He got drunk. Fell against the emergency hatch and released it during descent. Apparently.' Letting out a brief sigh, Larissa held up one finger. 'Fortunately, his loving children were smart enough to be wearing their seat belts and to keep their heads while the copilot got things back under control.' She shook her head. 'I never will forget the look on his face…'

As she said all this, the objective detachment I'd been feeling began, without my quite realizing it, to deteriorate, overcome by a set of powerful empathetic reactions that were remnants of my own troubled past. And so, at that crucial moment, I simply put my hand to her face and said, 'I suppose it made the assassinations easier— having already done, well, that.'

She shrugged. 'I suppose it must have. But more than making it easier, I think it inspired me. It was quite a feeling, destroying people who so thoroughly deserved it. I got to have quite a taste for the experience. I remember that when I shot Rajiv Karamchand—'

'You shot him?' Karamchand, of course, was the Indian president who had authorized the use of the first atomic weapons in the Kashmir war. Despite the best efforts of many intelligence agencies, his murder had remained a mystery.

Larissa smiled and nodded. 'And when I did it, I felt just the way that I had watching Father fall out of that plane. A man who takes responsibility for the lives and well-being of others and then betrays that trust so completely — I really can't think of anything quite as vile. Plus' — she turned over onto her stomach, her words coming faster—'think about this: Why has there always been such a taboo against assassination? It's ludicrous. A political leader can order people to their deaths or to kill others, and corporate executives can commit any kind of crime in the name of trade — yet they're all considered untouchable. Why? Why should Karamchand have felt any safer when he went to bed at night than one of his own soldiers or than the Pakistanis he slaughtered? Why should an executive who profits from slave labor be immune to the terror his workers feel? The odd assassination is the only way to make people like that start to think a little more seriously about what they do. As for making the rest of the world think a little harder about whose orders they decide to follow and what they choose to believe — well, that's the whole point of what we're doing now, isn't it?'

I weighed the statement. 'Yes, I can see that,' I answered slowly. 'Though I still don't get what part I'm supposed to play in it all.'

Larissa threw her arms around my neck, again looking very pleased. 'Keeping me happy — isn't that enough?' Seeing the continued look of inquiry in my face, she feigned a frown. 'No? All right — the truth is, Malcolm wanted a psychological profiler. We made up a list, and your background in history put you at the top of it. Then' — she moved in to kiss me—'when I saw that picture of you…'

As she pulled her lips away again, I asked, 'But why a profiler?'

'Our various opponents,' she whispered. 'They've been responding in fairly inscrutable ways. The Americans, for instance, with that ridiculous raid on Afghanistan. They had suspicions that the Khaldun footage was doctored. We even gave them hints. But they went ahead anyway. Malcolm wants you to try to predict things like that. And, of course, perform the odd little job like the one in the tunnel back there—'

Larissa was cut off when the entire ship suddenly shook more violently than it had at any time since I'd been aboard. I spun toward the tinted transparent panel in the hull near the bed and saw dim, eerie light outside: apparently, we'd once again climbed to a very high altitude. Against the mists of the stratosphere and the darkness of space beyond I could see dozens of glowing objects streaking toward us. Most of them were fairly small, I saw as they passed; but some, as they approached, grew to a considerable and disturbing size.

A second explosion lit up the sky around us and rocked the ship again, knocking me off the bed. When I righted myself I saw that Larissa was already halfway into her bodysuit and had one hand to her throat, activating the surgically implanted communicator that linked her to Malcolm. 'Yes, Brother dear,' she said, looking more annoyed than concerned at the peril into which we'd suddenly been thrown. 'I can see them — it would be a little difficult not to. I'm on my way to the turret now with Gideon. Tell Julien to divert whatever power he can to the external fields — you know how damned unpredictable these things are.'

I started to hurry into my own clothes. 'What's happening?' I said, trying to match her calm.

'Our admirers in the Defense Department,' she muttered, looking outside. 'One of their pilots must've caught sight of our ship in Afghanistan. Looks like they've deployed their whole collection of toys: EKVs, LEAPs, ERIs — there's even an SBL out there.'

'Larissa,' I said, doing up my coveralls, 'arcane acronyms really aren't going to reassure me right now.'

Even in the midst of such an attack — or perhaps because of it— Larissa became playful and coy: 'No, but you'll need to memorize these things, Doctor,' she said, giving me a quick kiss. 'Believe me, there will be a test.' She began to point around the sky at the streaking objects. 'Lightweight exoatmospheric projectiles, or LEAPs — they're the smaller ones. Then there are the extended range interceptors, or ERIs, and the exoatmospheric kill vehicles—'

'EKVs,' I said, watching the wild display outside.

'And the really troublesome bastard,' she finished, pointing to some sort of satellite or platform in the distance. 'An SBL— space-based laser. All part of THAAD, the 'theater high-altitude area defense' against ballistic missiles. You know, the Star Wars nonsense.' She grabbed my hand, and we rushed out into the corridor.

'How accurate are they?' I said.

'It's not their accuracy we have to worry about,' Larissa answered, moving toward the ladder that led up to the ship's turret and the big rail gun inside it. 'The THAAD boys have never managed to hit anything intentionally. But that doesn't keep them from throwing all that firepower around the atmosphere like they're in some kind of high-tech spitball fight — and an accidental hit could do real damage.'

We reached the ladder and started up. 'It's a little like skeet shooting,' Larissa said with a laugh as we entered the turret to find Eli Kuperman waiting for us. 'And don't worry, they're all unmanned vehicles, so you won't actually be killing anybody.' She climbed into the seat of the rail gun and smiled at me in a devious way that hours earlier would have seemed very disconcerting.

Now, however, I found myself smiling back.

CHAPTER 21

As Larissa began to direct the rail cannon's fire in every direction, pounding away with glowing bursts at the midsize and larger interceptors that were being sent against us (the ship's magnetic fields deflected the smaller ones), the stratosphere was lit up by dozens of explosions, as well as by the indiscriminate but no less dangerous fire of the space-based laser. My job during the encounter was to help Eli try to determine just which long-range radar station was giving our position away to the American THAAD command. Apparently there were only a few