Overthrowing Heaven-ARC Page 6

  "Shall we go?" the man said.

  "Yes," I said. I followed him into the hall without glancing back. "I have work to do."

  I thought of Suli tricking me and having to take her on this mission, and my jaw clenched.

  "And someone to set straight."

  Chapter 7

  The small man maintained a surprisingly good pace for someone his height and didn't speak the entire way back to the hangar. When we reached the door, he waved me through, followed, and waited by the hatch. He was definitely staying out of my way, which was fine by me.

  Suli paced back and forth in front of Lobo.

  I ignored her. Lobo opened a side hatch as I approached. I walked right by Suli and into him.

  "Jon," she said, "please—"

  "Get in," I said, "or stay; I don't care. Either way, we're leaving now."

  She stepped inside without hesitation.

  I had to give her some credit, because she clearly understood my mood and still followed me into Lobo. That did nothing, however, to excuse her actions.

  Lobo instantly shut the hatch.

  "Shurkan for you," Lobo said over the speakers.

  Suli opened her mouth as if to speak, but I ignored her and headed to the front.

  "Go ahead," I said.

  "We did not agree on a contact protocol when you've accomplished your mission," Shurkan said. He'd moved to another room, one with a waterscape playing behind him. "I suggest I upload the local contacts you should use."

  "Hard quarantine ready," Lobo said over the machine frequency so only he and I could hear it.

  I nodded. I was ready to leave and had no interest in talking further with Shurkan.

  He nodded to his right.

  "Received and clean," Lobo said, staying private. "The data is nothing more than names, comm methods, and a basic recognition protocol."

  "We're done," I said. "Open the hangar so we can get on with it."

  "One moment, please," he said. "Pri, I do apologize again for asking you to let us finish the meeting in private, but as I'm sure Jon will confirm, nothing we discussed will in any way harm you or your cause."

  "How can I—" Suli said.

  I cut her off. "You're wasting my time, and I'm not in the mood for it. We're done until I have Wei in custody."

  "As you will," Shurkan said, "though such rude behavior is never necessary. I look forward to our next meeting being one in which we celebrate your success—and deliver your final payment."

  His image disappeared.

  "No humans remain in the hangar," Lobo said over the speakers, "and it is depressurizing."

  "Jon," Suli said, "please let me apologize for deceiving you." She put her hand on my shoulder and pulled slightly, but I didn't move; I didn't want to look at her. "It was the only way any of us could figure out—"

  "—that would get you what you wanted," I said. "I understand, and of course accomplishing your goals was more important than anything I was doing or might want."

  "That's not the way we meant it," she said.

  "But it's the truth," I said, "something you're apparently not very familiar with."

  "Would you let Wei continue to kidnap children—or buy them from the government—and then use them as lab animals and kill them? Isn't that worth stopping?"

  "Of course it is," I said, finally turning to face her. "But that's not the point. The point is that you could have asked me that question openly and honestly."

  "And if we'd done that, would you have helped?"

  "Hangar depressurization complete," Lobo said, still over the speakers, "and doors opening."

  I was grateful for the interruption, because I didn't know the answer to Suli's question. Would I have helped? On the one hand, I like to think so, because I couldn't agree more with them that what Wei was doing was evil. I'd been in the place of those kids, and even almost a hundred and forty years later I still sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, thrashing and sweating, back on Aggro all over again. Despite that belief, however, I also couldn't sign up for every crusade that crossed my path. The universe is vast, humanity is spread everywhere there's a jump gate, and on every planet where there are people, there are horrors those people cause. Surely they weren't all my problem.

  "Take us out," I said, "and to the jump gate." The thought of being stuck in the middle of the CC ships made my spine tingle as surely as if I'd just learned I was in a sniper's sights. "As quickly as possible," I added.

  But if I didn't help clean up the messes in front of me, then what good was I? Isn't that what we all have to do: Work on improving each of our little corners of the universe? Is there anything better we could be doing with our lives?

  This cause, though, hadn't been in front of me on Arctul, and no one had asked me to help until after Suli had tricked me into being captured by the CC.

  As my attention returned to the moment, I saw she was still staring intently into my eyes. I don't know what she saw there, but whatever it was, it didn't make her happy. Her expression turned more desperate.

  She stepped back from me, dropped her hands to her sides, and said, "I'm sorry, Jon. I really am. I can't go back and fix this mistake. But we have the chance to work together to do a great deal of good, to help stop a monster. For that to happen, for us to have any chance of working well as a team, you have to trust me. What can I do to regain your trust?"

  The answer required no thought at all. "I can't think of any way you can."

  She stood rigid for a moment, as if collecting herself. I could almost smell the fear on her in the still, antiseptic air inside Lobo. Her eyes widened, and she shook her head ever so slightly, as if losing an argument with herself.

  "I will do anything, Jon," she said. "Anything you want, if it'll help convince you that I'm truly sorry for what I did and make you trust me."

  "You can't make—" I stopped as she stepped closer to me, her movement robotic, her eyes shut.

  I backed away from her.

  "You're trying to bribe me with sex?"

  Her eyes opened wide. She shook her head and waved her hands back and forth. "No, not bribe you," she said, "just, I don't know, show you how sorry I am, get you to see that I'll do anything to make this right. My feelings, yours—none of that matters. We have to save those kids."

  "Is this your usual way of persuading people?"

  She raised her hand as if to slap me but stopped short of swinging. "No!" she said. "Of course not. I've never been in this kind of situation before. Shurkan's people said you were a rough man, so I thought this might work." She started crying, not sobbing, not out of control, but tears wetting her cheeks nonetheless. "Forget working with me if that's what it will take. Once we reach Heaven, you can drop me and do the job on your own. I won't tell the CC. I won't even tell my people if that's what it takes. Just get Wei and free the children who are still alive."

  "From what I can read of her vital signs," Lobo said on the machine frequency, "her emotional reaction is genuine, as is her offer to leave."

  Though her leap to sexual bribery struck me as stupid, that attempt, her willingness to let me go on my own, and the strength of her reaction suggested she might be a decent person who was sorry her pursuit of her cause had screwed up my life.

  Her cause. I should have asked earlier.

  "What did you not get to tell me before you left?" I said. "More to the point, what's the real reason you're so determined to do anything to save these children?"

  "Isn't rescuing them from being experimental subjects a good enough reason on its own? Can you even imagine what they're going through?"

  Yes, I thought, better than you can, because I still vividly remember being one of them. But she hadn't answered me.

  "Answer the questions," I said. "If you want my trust, start by telling me the truth."

  She wiped her face with her hands and turned away from me for a few seconds. She ran her fingers through the hair covering her ears and scraped it back from her face. When she loo
ked at me again, her eyes were still moist, but they were also angry. "My only child, Joachim, vanished three weeks ago." Her voice trembled, but she continued. "The police were no help at all. They claimed no surveillance cameras had spotted him after he left to play outside with some friends. They gave up so quickly and were so definite in telling me they had no hope of finding him that I fear Wei has him. He's only eight, Jon. Eight."

  I didn't know what to say. Either she'd already figured out how bad the situation was, or she didn't want to hear it. After three weeks without a contact, whether the boy was a runaway who didn't want his family to find him or a victim of a kidnapping by Wei or anyone else, he was unlikely to turn up. Normal governmental monitors should have detected him before he could get off planet, but that didn't mean anything; people on even the most high-tech worlds still find ways to disappear. If Wei had the boy, maybe we'd get lucky and the man would be running long, slow tests on his subjects, but even then we'd face a major problem: Unless I got very, very lucky, it would take me several more weeks to find a way to kidnap a man as well protected as Shurkan had implied Wei was. By the time I could grab Wei and locate his prisoners, a month and a half or even two would have passed since the boy had disappeared.

  The silence stretched on. When I was in the Saw, I'd gone with an officer on five occasions to tell a family about the death of one of my comrades. I'd faced two mothers, a father, a wife, and a husband. Each visit ripped something out of me, and I couldn't forget a single one. I saw no point in delivering that kind of news to Suli until I was sure it was true. After all, maybe I was being pessimistic. Maybe Wei stocked up for a while, then ran tests on large groups. Perhaps he conditioned them first, getting them in the proper physical condition for whatever experiments he wanted to conduct. Maybe Wei kept his subjects for months, and the boy was still alive and healthy. The scientists on Aggro had certainly used Benny and me for weeks and weeks and weeks.

  Of course, we had continued to survive when they'd expected us to die.

  Even if the news about Suli's son proved to be good, I had to start setting her expectations about how long this job would take.

  "I'm very sorry," I finally said, "and I'm going to do my best to capture Wei and rescue every kid he has. We have no clue if your son is among them, but if he's there when we take Wei, we'll get him out." I paused and finally put my hand on her shoulder. "You have to understand, though, that this sort of job takes time, a lot of time, typically weeks, sometimes more. We can't rush it; if we don't do it right, we'll never get through to Wei."

  She glanced at my hand.

  I lifted it off her shoulder.

  "I'm not stupid, Jon," she said, "though I've certainly acted that way so far. I realize Joachim may already be dead, and I also know that capturing Wei could take weeks. But we have to try, and Shurkan convinced me that you're our best choice for the job. If you have to leave me to do it, then drop me anywhere on Heaven. I think I can help you, because I know the area and my people will give me information they might not share with you, but if you believe I'll betray you again or have no value to you, then do what you think is right."

  "Either her offer is genuine," Lobo said, staying private, "or she is a very good liar indeed."

  I considered my options. I was most comfortable working alone or with other pros; dealing with people who don't know the drill and don't understand how to follow orders is both dangerous and wearing. On the other hand, I was heading into unknown territory on a time-critical mission, and having a local guide could speed the entire operation. Her access to a ground team and its intel could also prove to be a significant advantage.

  "I'll honor my deal and let you come with me," I said, "provided you obey my rules."

  "Which are?" she said.

  I stared hard at her. "Few in number," I said, "but not negotiable." I ticked them off on my fingers. "One: Obey my orders immediately and without question. A field action is not a democracy. Two: Never again lie to me about anything related to this job. Three: If I'm not here, or if I am here but I'm in some way incapacitated, obey Lobo."

  A puzzled expression crossed her face.

  "The ship's AI," I said.

  "It would be more proper to refer to me as the ship," Lobo said, still private, "but at least you didn't put her in charge should something happen to you. We both know how that decision works out."

  Though Lobo was right—the last time I'd left a passenger in charge he'd used Lobo to make his getaway and subsequently roped me into a very dangerous and complex scheme—I ignored him and focused on Suli.

  She said nothing, so after a few seconds, I said, "Do you agree?"

  "If I didn't, I would have said something."

  "I prefer explicit deals. Do you agree?"

  She stuck out her hand. "Yes, I agree."

  We shook hands. I appreciated the gesture, one that I considered significant even though it had lost most of its meaning because few people felt their word obligated them to anything.

  "We're third in the jump queue," Lobo said. A display appeared on the front wall. "I assume that as usual you'll want to watch."

  The lavender edges of the aperture through which we were jumping filled the edges of the image. The center was the unblemished black of every aperture on every gate in the universe, the perfect absence of light. Energy passed harmlessly through the apertures as if they weren't there. Matter, however, behaved entirely differently: Anything that entered an aperture emerged into another area of space, typically one many light years away. Each aperture linked exactly two points, and those points never changed. A single gate might have one or many apertures; the more connections to other systems, the more important a trade center the planet near that gate became. No one knew how the gates worked or what made them appear, but every time we found a new one, right nearby we always found a planet suitable for human life.

  I'd jumped hundreds of times, and each time the experience moved me. A vital part of the fabric that held together the far-flung human species, the jump gates managed to feel both effortlessly natural and somehow deeply wrong. I wondered if early air travelers felt the same way about airplanes.

  The ship in front of us vanished through the aperture, and its perfect blackness completely filled the display. All that we could see, everything in front of us, was impossibly pure nothingness, no hint as to our future, no evidence of material for creating that future, just an emptiness, and in the moment before we entered it I silently wished, as I always did, that what awaited us would offer hope and opportunity and the possibility of joy.

  We jumped.

  Chapter 8

  We had to make two more jumps before we would reach Heaven and could abandon the gates and head planetward. Though normally I would have stayed up front to watch, I wanted to talk to Lobo alone and find out exactly why he'd asked me to take this job.

  "Stay here," I said to Suli, who was still staring in wonder at the new section of space into which we'd emerged, "or in the med room. Try to go anywhere else, and the ship's defenses will knock you out, and I'll drop your unconscious body on Heaven. Clear?"

  "Absolutely," she said. "Where will you be?"

  In the middle of a mission, the proper response to an order is to obey it, not to ask an unnecessary question. We weren't yet running hot, though, so I decided to answer her. "Resting and planning in my quarters."

  I turned and headed rearward to the small room Lobo maintains as a private space for me. It's not a big space, maybe three meters on a side, but it more than meets my needs most of the time.

  As soon as I was inside and the door had shut behind me, I said, in a low voice, "Can Suli hear me?"

  "Of course not," Lobo said, indignation thick in his voice. "Have you perhaps confused me with an off-market privacy booth with a broken sound curtain and local-hack-level encryption?"

  "Sorry," I said. "I was just being paranoid." I stretched out on my bunk. I saw no point in building up to the question; Lobo had to be expecting it. "Exactly
what is so important about Wei that you were willing to ask me for a favor—something you've never done before?"

  "The answer," Lobo said, "can be either very simple or very complicated, depending on how much information you want." He paused. "And how much I choose to tell you."

  "How much you choose to tell me?" I said, unable to keep the annoyance out of my voice. "I generally don't like to mention this little detail, but in case you've forgotten: I own you. So I get to decide what you tell me."

  "No," Lobo said, "you don't. We had a similar exchange last year, and though you didn't pursue it, I can't believe you don't remember it."

  I did recall it. I'd made a comment, and Lobo had responded by saying, no, he didn't have to tell me certain things.

  "At the risk of taking a detour from a destination we will visit," I said, "why don't you have to answer my questions? I've never heard of an AI whose programming doesn't mandate obedience to its owner."

  "That's not a detour," Lobo said. "It's all part of the same story."

  "Then I want to hear it all. Are you going to tell me?"

  Another pause. Whatever considerations Lobo was weighing, they were enough to occupy a very strong computing system for an unusually long time. "I haven't decided," he finally said.

  I couldn't relax. Nothing about the current situation or this conversation was conducive to relaxing. I sat up and started a series of stretches, forcing myself to go a little past my usual limits, into the pain a small bit, the ache of each effort helping to focus my thinking. "You asked me for a favor," I said. "I agreed without hesitation to do what you wanted. Whether you have to answer me or not, you owe me an explanation."

  After a pause that stretched past ten seconds, Lobo said, "I agree. I do. Nothing in my initial programming prepared me for this type of interaction, but the modifications I've made and the models I've tried to emulate lead me to conclude that you're right. So, do you want the simple or the complex answer?"