Safe House

Maj snickered as the two of them headed back into the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” Maj said.

“Uh…” He paused to look out the window at the backyard, which Maj’s mother’s tomatoes and rosebushes were threatening to take over, just as they always did this time of year. “Something to drink, maybe.”

“Tea? Milk? Coffee?”

Niko didn’t answer. He was leaning against the windowsill, apparently lost in thought. “Niko?” Maj said.

No response.

“Niko?!”

He jumped as if he had been shot, and turned around in a hurry. “Uh, sorry, yes…”

“Do you want some tea, or coffee, or—”

He stared at her…then relaxed, all over, so obvious a gesture that it practically shouted, I thought you were going to do something terrible to me…but it’s all right now. “Um,” he said then. “Coffee, that would be good.”

“How do you like it?”

“A lot of milk.”

“Fine. We’ll steal Mom’s coffee — it’s the best in the house.” She got out one of her mother’s single-pack drip coffee containers, put it on a mug, put the kettle on, and went to the fridge, opening it and rummaging around. “Let’s see…Oh, here it is.” She pulled out a quart of milk past the door scanner.

“That’s the last liter,” said the fridge. “Do you want more?”

“Jeez,” Maj muttered, “the way we go through this stuff. My brother must just pour it over his—” As she turned, she saw that Niko was staring at the fridge, completely stunned.

“Your refrigerator talks?” he said.

Maj blinked at that. “Oh. Yeah. Mostly to complain.” She made an amused face, pulled the door open to show him the little glass plate set in it. “See, there’s a scanner here, you run everything in front of it when you put things in after you go shopping. It keeps track of everything by the bar codes, and then when you run out, it orders more. It has a little Net connection inside, and it calls the grocery store. The delivery van comes around in the mornings and replaces what you’ve used up.” She shook the liter carton, made a face. “It may not be soon enough, the way my brother drinks this stuff.” She turned back to the door, waved the carton in front of it again.

“Ordering more,” said the refrigerator.

Maj closed the door. “The new ones don’t even ask,” she said, “they just do it — they estimate your needs and update their own order lists. This one’s kind of an antique, but there’s something about the door handles my mother likes, and she won’t get rid of it.”

Niko sat down with a wry look. “Our refrigerators aren’t…quite so talkative.”

“Believe me, it might not be a bad thing,” Maj said, sitting down across the table. “This one’s always bugging me about using too much butter. My brother keeps enabling the ‘dietary advice’ function just to annoy me, and I have to keep turning it off.” She made a face.

The kettle, which her mother must just have boiled, shrieked with very little waiting time. Maj poured the coffee first, then the tea, so they would come out together, then put them both on the table. Niko was already sitting down there.

“Niko—” she said.

This time there was something almost deliberate about the way he responded. “Yes.”

“You look completely wrecked,” Maj said.

He stared at her…and his face sagged, as if being confronted with his own weariness made it all right to reveal it. “Yes,” he said. “Tired, you mean?”

“Tired, yes. Wasted. Utterly paved. Do you want to take a nap? Get some rest, I mean?”

“For a while,” he said, “I would not mind.”

“Have your coffee, first. There’s no rush. You’re—” She stopped herself, for her intention had been to say, You’re safe here. Then she realized that she had no idea why she was going to say it. Except that he had been carrying himself very much like someone who was not safe, someone who was seriously afraid.

Time to get this sorted out, Maj thought.

“You’re among family,” she said. “You don’t have to sit up and be polite around us. You’re jet-lagged, you look like you could use some rest. You rest as much as you want. When you feel like getting up, get up. Maybe later this evening. I have some Net stuff to do…. If you want to come along, you’d be welcome.”

I can’t believe I’m saying this, she thought. But he needs a friend right now, poor kid…and virtuality is one thing, but reality is another. Reality takes precedence.

At the mention of the Net, his eyes lit up. “I would like that,” he said. “Very much!”

“Yeah,” Maj said. “Look, take your coffee with you…go on, get your rest. I’ll wake you up around five, and you can come see what I’m up to. It’s pretty neat.”

He nodded and got up with his coffee cup. “It was the fourth room down?”

“Fourth room down. If the Muffin tries to bother you, just throw her out.”

“She would not bother me,” he said, and grinned briefly, and just for the moment looked much less tired. “She is very — cute?”

“Cute. You got that right,” Maj said. “Welcome to America, kiddo. Go get some sleep.”

He vanished down the hall. Maj waited about fifteen minutes, and then went to find her father.

3

Major Arni would really have preferred to handle this meeting as a phone call, or virtually. But she could not, for Ernd Bioru outranked her considerably — not in straightforward military rank, which she could have dealt with, but in the shadowy and uncomfortable outranking which a very few politicians held over her department — and if he demanded an in-person meeting, he would expect his request, or rather order, to be dealt with instantly.

She stood there in the big plush office full of expensive furniture and watercolors waiting for Bioru to look up, and fumed at being treated like a piece of furniture herself. Unfortunately there was nothing she could do about it. The minister for internal defense had Cluj’s ear, and a whisper in that particular appendage could land you in all kinds of uncomfortable or permanent places if you weren’t careful. Inwardly, she scorned Bioru, for he had opted out of the working ranks of the intelligence service early, choosing instead to go abroad on diplomatic duties — achieving status by subtle means rather than by the overt hard work and slow climb through the ranks which the major considered the approved manner. Outwardly, though, she kept her manner toward Bioru correct and a touch subservient. It was safer to do so at the moment. In a year, two years, five, things might change, and an officer who had kept her mouth shut and done her work properly might yet see this upstart thrown out on his own ear. Cluj was well known in the upper reaches of government to be a volatile man, and even those who thought they best knew his mind and could “manage” him had received some savage surprises, just in these last few years. But for now—

Now she looked at this short, slight, dark little man in his fancy charcoal-gray foreign suit and cursed him in her mind as he sat there reading his paperwork, page by deliberate page, and not looking up, just making her stand there. Finally he put the papers aside, sat back in his big comfortable chair, and looked at her. His was one of those bland faces, for all the sharpness of the bone structure. There was no telling what was going on inside that smooth regard — approval or rage — and no way to anticipate which way he would jump. That immobile face made the blue eyes look curiously flat, like a shark’s.

For all his diplomatic service, there was nothing of the diplomat about Bioru at the moment. “Major,” he said, “where is the boy?”

“Sir, he is in a private home in the Alexandria area. As far as we can tell, the man holding him is an old scholastic associate of the father.”

He drummed his fingers on the expensive desk. “‘As far as you can tell’?” he said. “This kind of vagueness sorts oddly with your reputation for precision and effectiveness, Major.”

“Unfortunately the spaceplane was diverted due to a mechanical fault,” Major Arni said, wondering one more time exactly how likely that was with a machine as carefully serviced as spaceplanes were, especially the hybrids.