Chapter Thirteen
SLEEPING DOGS
AND TETHERED GOATS
CHRONOLOGICPATROLINTELLIGENCECOMMANDHEADQUARTERS
(CHRONPATINTCOMHQ)
KOROLEVCRATER
LUNARFARSIDE
Kalani Temblar stood in the airlock, willing the inner door to open sooner rather than later. She desperately wanted to get out of her pressure suit—and, for that matter, just plain getout . Of course, they could never let her go. Not after what she had already found. But still, a girl could dream.
At last the inner door slid open, and she lumbered through it into the ready room and slapped the seal-door button behind her. She sat down on one of the curved benches spaced around the walls of the compartment, unlatched her suit helmet, and set it down next to her on the bench. She leaned back, setting the back of her head against the cold metal wall of the ready room, and closed her eyes. The trip out to the asteroid belt and Ceres, largest of the asteroids, had been nothing, no effort at all—especially compared to the trip to Mars and back. She shuddered just thinking about that one. But even if this last trip had been far easier on her than that one, she still felt exhausted.
Rest. If I can only rest for a little while, that will help so much. . . It was not her body that was tired, not even her mind—but her spirit. She had put all she had, and all she was, into the Chronologic Patrol. But even before she had started on this case, she had started to wonder if the organization was moving in the right direction. After what she had learned—on Mars, on Earth, at the Grand Library, at Ceres—her niggling doubts were edging closer and closer to becoming unpleasant certainties.
But it was cool and quiet there in the ready room. No duties to perform, no one to interview, no files to study, no leads to pursue, no spacecraft to pilot. Just a few minutes of quiet, by herself, and then maybe she could—
“There you are! I was out on the surface. Saw you put down. Very nice.”
Kalani did not open her eyes. She did not have to. She knew it was her commanding officer, Burl Chalmers. She kept her eyes shut. She heard him moving closer, felt the bench shift slightly as he sat down next to her. Judging by the sound of stiff, creaking fabric and the metallic clicks and clacks as he set himself down, he was still in his pressure suit. Burl in a pressure suit, Burl being out on the surface—for that matter, Burl being out of hisoffice —was an odd enough occurrence that she was almost tempted to open her eyes and actually see it.
No, better to imagine it. Would he somehow have managed to get gravy stains on the front of the suit, the way he had on every shirt he owned? If she opened her eyes, she would find out it wasn’t so, and that would spoil everything. Life was so much more pleasant when you could keep your eyes shut, and not see what you didn’t want to, and imagine things to be the way they ought to be.
“Good morning, sir, Lieutenant Commander Chalmers,sir, ” she said without moving, putting a brisk parade-ground tone in her voice.
Chalmers chuckled. “That’sa strangely official form of address, considering you didn’t salute me,” he observed placidly.
“I only have to salute you if I see you,” she said with a yawn. “I don’t see you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not really all that worth looking at,” he said. She heard him shift on the bench again, and felt a pat on the shoulder. “But we do need to talk. Soon. Very soon. It is now exactly 1103 hours, mark. Grab a shower, get some coffee and something to eat, and be in my office in one hour, max.”
Kalani groaned. “I couldn’t get you to make it ninety minutes, could I?”
“It’s only because I’m taking pity on you that I didn’t make it twenty minutes. Seriously. One hour. And be ready for real work.”
Eyes still shut, she gestured out behind her, at the landing field and her scout ship, and all the worlds she had visited. “What was all that?” she asked. “A warm-up?”
“’Fraid so,” he said. “Now you have fifty-nine minutes. Use them well.”
The bench creaked again, and she could hear him standing up and leaving the compartment.
With infinite reluctance, she stood up, opened her eyes, and started peeling off the suit. Shower first, food second. Maybe the shower would wake her up enough to have an appetite.
Kalani was somehow annoyed with herself for feeling so much better when she arrived in Burl’s office—a full one minute and forty-five seconds early.
His office didn’t look any better than the last time she had been in it—or the time before that, or the time before that. It had been said of his working habits that there was untidiness, and then there were archeology sites. Burl Chalmers’s office was definitely in the second category.
At least the food stains on his shirt hadn’t gotten any worse. Kalani recognized one tomato-sauce splash pattern that had not faded at all since the last time he had worn the shirt. One story had it that Chalmers had chosen the Intelligence Service so as to avoid wearing uniforms. He certainly didn’t treat his civilian clothes very well.
Burl was reading as she came in, intently studying a datapad. She knew better than to interrupt him. Instead she picked up a familiar stack of papers off the visitor’s chair and set it on the floor. She had noted the migration of that particular stack of files about the office over the last few months. It had been shifted from the floor to the desk to the table to the chair to the top of the file cabinet to the floor to the chair, and on and on and on, over and over again. To her all-but-certain knowledge, no one had ever consulted any of the papers in that particular stack since Burl’s very tidy and organized predecessor had left them for him in the precise center of his desk two and a half years ago.
She turned to the one spotlessly clean area in his office—the coffee service on the chest-high table just inside his office door. She poured herself a cup of the superb fresh-brewed coffee that was always there, sat down, and waited. It surprised her not at all that he looked up from his work at precisely 1203, the exact moment he had ordered her to be there. “So,” he said, tossing aside the datapad he had been studying so intently, as if it were no more interesting than a ten-year-old obituary. “How was Ceres?”
“Weird. Creepy. Marginally useful. Tracked the two crewmen who jumped ship off theDom Pedro IV from the Grand Library. Both still there. Both more or less safe and comfortable, but not so comfortable they weren’t just a little afraid of ChronPat Intell. They talked, but they didn’t know much we didn’t know. Confirmations. And on the second matter, I was able to confirm that DeSilvowasn’t on Ceres any of the times his bios say he went there.”
“So?”
“So line up the dates he was supposed to go, and the orbital positions, and what his ship could do, and where we have confirmed records of him before and after when he was supposed to be on Ceres—well, it boils down to that he pretty much had to have been on Mars at those times. Only place he could have reached that wouldn’t have produced some kind of record of his visit.”
“But we knew he got to Mars.”
“Now we have a better handle on when, and how often. Besides—” Kalani pointed straight down at the floor, the universal gesture for Intell Central Command at ChronPat Intell HQ. IntCentCom was buried deepest under the lunar surface. As the duller wits of Intell were fond of pointing out, Command was literally beneath them all. “—Yeahwe knew. Didthey ? Did theywant to know?”
“We had evidence.”
Kalani shrugged. “Now we have more—and we’ve eliminated all the possibilities that could explain it away. And we have the Mars angle confirmed in case any of the brass in the bunker don’t want it to be true. We can stick their noses in it if we have to.”
“Point taken,” Chalmers said. “But let’s remember you said it, and I didn’t.”
Kalani snorted. Chalmers stuck his neck out a lot farther than that, a dozen times a day. “We can now show definitely DeSilvo was on Mars, at specific times—and also show additional evidence he was probably there at other times.”
“You’ve done a lot,” Chalmers said. “No doubt about it.”
“Yeah,” she said bitterly. “I’vedone a lot. Burl, from what I know, the thefts from the Dark Museum represent the single gravest threat to, to, I don’t know what—to interstellar civilization, I guess—since the Chronologic Patrol was founded. I couldn’t understand why some of it was suppressed—but there were some pieces of hardware where even I could see why the Patrol has sat on them. If it all got loose—I don’t even want to think about it. But the Dark Museum angle is justpart of this case.”
She set down her coffee on a small clear spot on the edge of his desk and leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped together, staring at Chalmers, intent on what she was saying. “The bunker brass ought to be in full-blown panic mode, pulling investigators off every other case and putting them allover this thing. Instead they’ve got a field rookie like me out looking for clues, a few favors called in from places like Asgard Five, and you doing what you can to cadge research and tech support out of headquarters.” She leaned back in her chair again, slumping against the cushion. She gestured behind her, at the big room they called the bullpen, and the clusters of workpods, an investigator in each pod. “Meanwhile you’ve got sixty officers working full shifts every day checking to make sure all the tariff rules are being obeyed! What the hell is with the priorities around here?”
Chalmers looked at her sadly and was quiet for a long time before he spoke. “If it will make you feel better, I can tell you theyare panicking down below,” he said at last. “They’re just doing it very quietly. The split second they heard that you’d found connections between theDom Pedro IV, DeSilvo, and the Dark Museum, Central Command—not Intell Central Command, but thereal Central Command—decided this had to be kept very, very, quiet—and I agreed with them. They considered the danger from leaks so grave that they toyed with the idea of not investigating at all, of letting sleeping dogs lie.”
“Who are they keeping it from? DeSilvo? Are they that afraid he’ll find out we’re after him? Andwhat danger? What kind of danger?”
“You said it yourself,” Chalmers replied in a chillingly calm tone of voice. “The gravest threat ever to interstellar civilization. And it’s not DeSilvo they’re afraid of. It’s your colleagues in the bullpen. It’s you. It’s me. I know more of the big-picture story than you do, and the big brass knows more than me—a lot more. And what they’re scared of is that one of us will find out everythingthey know—maybemore than they know. They’re scared someone will talk. They fear that the danger of the story, thewhole story, getting out to the public, might well be greater than the danger of letting DeSilvo do whatever the hell he’s trying to do.”
Kalani frowned and knitted her brow. “Wait a second. We know—weknow —he’s had access to some of the most dangerous and powerful technology in history. And they think it might be safer to let him do whatever he wants with it because the ultimate results of a possible investigative leak might beworse ?”
Chalmers nodded. “That, Lieutenant Temblar, is an excellent summing-up. Exactly right.”
“Stars in the sky,” Kalani said. Suddenly her heart was racing. “That’s forreal ?”
“For real. That’s why it’s just you out there. A compromise between no investigation, and the all-out effort you’re talking about—which is what a lot of the War Council wanted.”
“They called aWar Council ?”
“Yeah. It’s that big.” Chalmers stood up, collected her cup, and walked across the room to the coffee service. He poured her a fresh cup and made one for himself, heavy on the cream and sugar. He handed her coffee to her, then padded quietly back to his own chair. “Let’s pretend that last part of the conversation didn’t happen,” he said. “Otherwise, we’ll both go nuts. Okay?”
“Okay.” Kalani held her cup in both hands and stared down into the dark, steaming liquid. What else was there to say? How could anyone deal with something that size?
“Good. Real good,” Chalmers said, nodding vigorously at nothing at all. He set down his coffee without so much as taking a sip. “So. So—give me a sum-up of what else you got,” Chalmers said, leaning back in his chair. He put his hands behind his head, cradled his head in them, and looked at her, frowning thoughtfully. “Shopping list of evidence in hand.”
“Ah, yeah. Yeah.” Kalani gave herself a moment to force other matters from her mind and focus on the investigation itself. “We’ve got my reports on events at the Grand Library and the Permanent Physical Collections, the action reports I pried loose from Interdict Command, the arrival and departure times of the ‘Merchanter’s Dream,’ which is a 99.99 percent probable match withDom Pedro IV . We’ve got statements from people who talked to people who were all but certainly our friends when the subjects were in Berlin, Rio, Haiti. There was anotherDom Pedro IV crew member who went over the side in Rio, but we haven’t found him yet. I don’t want to try any harder than we have, just yet. I don’t think he could tell us much new—and we don’t want to attract attention. And we’re still waiting on interrogation reports on Hues Renblant, the officer of theDom Pedro IV who was left behind at Asgard Five.”
“Nope. That came in while you were gone,” Chalmers said. He leaned forward, reached over, picked up the datapad he had discarded earlier, and handed it to her before resuming his previous position. “Glad we didn’t send you all the way the hell outthere just to get his statement. Asgard Five’s station manager was only too glad to help us out by asking friend Renblant a few questions. Read between the lines, and you’ll see Renblant isn’t exactly winning popularity contests up there. He’s been stranded there since theDom Pedro IV left him—and he has not been enjoying himself. Read it later. It’s got a few tidbits in it—but not many.”
“Can you give me the short version?”
“Oh, he’s the hero and the victim, theDom Pedro IV was crewed by archfiends, and Koffield was the worst. He, Renblant, knows the whole story and has just been aching for someone to ask him. My read is Koffield and company sat on him pretty hard—and probably paid him a reasonable amount—to keep quiet when they dumped him. It’s taken until now for Renblant to get bored and angry and frustrated enough to break his silence contract—or maybe he just stopped being afraid of whatever they threatened him with to keep him quiet.”
“So Renblant confirms that the ‘Merchanter’s Dream’ really was theDom Pedro —and that Koffield was aboard?”
“Those were the tidbits,” Chalmers agreed. “Beyond that, his statement fleshes out a few things, gives us details on the back story, but doesn’t really tell us anything directly on topic that we didn’t know from other sources. And, oh, by the way, the station manager took the hint—Renblant’s going to be stranded there a while longer.”
“How far can we count on the station manager?”
“He’s retired Chronologic Patrol and still a true believer. Drew the job on Asgard Five because he likes his peace and quiet. Psych projection is about 98 percent that he wouldn’t spread the story around, even if he got the chance. We’re about as safe as we could hope to be on that end.”
“Same thing other places. We’ve gotten lucky on keeping it all quiet, so far.”
“It’s those last two words that worry me,” Chalmers said with a frown. “But, anyway.” He pulled one hand from behind his head and pointed down, then put his hand back behind his head. “Pretend I’m one of the leaders of the brain trust down there. Sum up. What story do all the findings tell us?”
Kalani shook her head. “All I know for sure is that we don’t know all of it. Here’s the real fast version of what we’re pretty sure on: Something like 150 years ago, and maybe long before that, while he’s still working to terraform Solace, DeSilvo breaks into the Dark Museum on Mars and starts stealing hardware, and, we’re pretty sure, making copies of lots of datasets—on how to build this or that gadget. Probably a lot more data than actual hardware. He keeps that up for a long time, making lots of trips to the Museum and probably working via remotes and teleoperators for a lot of it. He builds himself a whole operation down there.
“There’s no sign of his everusing any of his new toys—until one fine day, when the terraforming project is winding down—a very weird fleet of ships that gets to be called the Intruders hits two of our ships and wrecks the timeshaft at Circum Central. Anton Koffield commands the surviving Chrono Patrol ship. He limps back home and provides a lot of evidence that suggests the Intruders were using a faster-than-light drive, which, of course, everyone knows is impossible. Except that the Dark Museum seems to have had at least two or three FTL drives tucked away down there. Burl, do you have anyidea what sort of suppressed technology the Patrol has filed away down there?”
“No,” he said flatly. “And I don’t want to. That stuff’s classified kill-yourself-before-reading-further.”
“Thatmakes me feel better. Anyway, Circum Central is the first connection between Koffield and DeSilvo.”
“Ifwe assume it was DeSilvo running the Intruders.”
“That’s the way Occam’s razor would cut. Otherwise, you need to come up with real alien intruders, or else have someoneelse steal or invent FTL—and show a penchant for using robots and ArtInts to do everything. Those ships were almost certainly uncrewed. Plus there’s another, admittedly much weaker link—Circum Central is—was—in the same part of the sky as the Solace system. Not next door, but not too far off.”
“I agree the odds are very high that Circum Central was DeSilvo—but the big shots might have some reason for wishing it were otherwise. You might have to be ready for that. Go on.”
Be ready for that when, exactly? Burl hadn’t told her everything yet. “So you’ve got the file on how they meet again, later—but still a long time ago. Something like 130 years ago. Koffield does some research for DeSilvo, and then, for some reason, sets off for Solace on theDom Pedro IV . The ship never gets there. Listed as missing, then lost. Very sad, but it happens. Except the ship shows up—120-odd years or so late for the party. Turns out the ship was sabotaged in a very particular way. There’s no hard evidence that DeSilvo did the sabotage, but, again, there are no other likely suspects, and he would have had means, motives, and opportunity.
“Anyway, Koffield pops up in the Solace system and starts warning everybody that he can prove a collapse is coming. He gets sent to some terraforming center on Greenhouse—that’s a satellite of a gas giant in the Solace system. While he’s there, he visits DeSilvo’s tomb, of all things. He finds something that we don’t know about that must be pretty amazing—then starts a crash program to lead an expedition to the Solar System—apparently to look for DeSilvo.
“Something he found in the tomb convinced him that DeSilvo wasalive —and maybe even waiting for Koffield to show up.There’s a relationship I don’t understand. DeSilvo attacks his ship—though Koffield doesn’t know it’s DeSilvo doing the attacking. Then DeSilvo hires him to do some research.Then Koffield charges off to warn everyone that the world DeSilvo made is going to crump, DeSilvo sabotages his ship, then, best we can figure, more or less leaves a trail of bread crumbs for Koffield. Koffield follows that trail through the Grand Library, through several cities on Earth, through the Dark Museum on Mars—and then off again for parts unknown.” She let out a sigh. “And that’s just part of what’s got me thrown.”
“What do you mean?” Chalmers asked.
“We know a lot about what both of them did—but not the least idea in the worldwhy they did those things. We know that something big is up, but we don’t know what. We don’t know what this case isabout . I spent the whole run back from Ceres staring at the bulkheads, trying to come up with some sort of logical motive that would explain it all.”
“Maybe throw out that part about logic,” said Chalmers. “Just because someone does a thing on the grand scale, that doesn’t mean he’s thought it all the way through, or planned it all out very sensibly. And motivations aren’t carved in stone. The reason you’re doing something will change as you go along.”
“I know, I know,” Kalani said wearily. “But I can’t even make astart on the why and wherefore on these two. And I can’t get much further without it. I’ve run out of meaningful leads to follow. God knows where either of them went off to.”
“If God knows, he’s not the only one,” said Chalmers, unable to repress a smile.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we’ve got ourselves a lead—and you got it for us. You got images of some weird plaques in the Dark Museum. These.” He reached into a pile on his desk and pulled out a color print. It showed two plaques, each about ten centimeters by twenty-five. Each had a yellow background, with a blue line drawn around the border. The lettering was in red, and the type was raised. They were very much meant to be seen. The first read
and the second
He handed them to her. Kalani took them and shook her head. “I took the pictures, but I never could make heads or tails out of the plaques. Math formulae?”
“Don’t feel bad. It took our crypto people a lot longer than it should have to figure them out. They cracked them just after you boosted away from Ceres. I had to wait until you were here to tell you about it—the big shots are so paranoid they forbade any electronic communications on this matter. Turns out the plaques aren’t mathematical formulae, exactly. More like mathematical puns. And it would help if you were conversant with pre-near-ancient dramatic literature as well.”
“Sorry. I must have been out sick that day at school.”
“Yeah, me too. Anyway, if you parse through the math symbols,and read part of it as a sort of shorthand for DeSilvo’s name,and read the last part as a chemical symbol, you get something like ‘Belongs to Oskar DeSilvo at the set of all values of X such that X does not equal gold’ and the second would be something like ‘Go to the set of all values of X such that X does not equal gold.’ ”
Kalani beetled her brow at Chalmers and chortled. “Yeah, terrific. Real breakthrough.”
“It is if you brush up your Shakspur,” Chalmers said loftily. “Or was it Sharkspar? Some name like that. Anyway, some hotshot managed to remember a quote that said something about not everything that glitters is gold—except he got it kind of wrong. The right quote is ‘All that glisters is not gold.’ ”
Kalani’s eyes lit up. “If you go to the place that is not gold—you go to Glister.”
“Right. So that’s where we’re going. Tomorrow.”
“What?”There were too damned many surprises in this conversation. “Why tomorrow?”
“Because they can’t prep a ship in time to leave today,” Chalmers said. “If you were asking why so fast—the top brass has spent every minute since crypto cracked this wondering what the delay was. They would have launched me alone and had me intercept your scout coming back from Ceres if it would have saved any time.”
“You’re getting me very nervous, Burl,” she said. “And no offense—but whyyou ? When was the last time you did any field work?” She had been about to ask when he had last left the base for any reason, but that seemed too untactful, even under the current circumstances.
“Let’s just say it was within your lifetime and leave it at that,” Chalmers said evenly. “As to why me—they had to send somebody. One person can’t fly an interstellar ship alone. Two can barely do the job. I agree that I’m not exactly the Chrono Patrol’s action hero poster boy—but this whole operation is all about need-to-know. If they brief someone else with what I know, that’s one more person who knows. But if they send me, that’s oneless person—and it gets usboth well away from civilization. If we go to Glister and spill the beans, who are we going to tell? The ice?”
“Maybe the frozen corpses,” Kalani said. “It’s not supposed to be a nice place.”
“No, it isn’t,” Chalmers said.
“What are we supposed to do when we get there, anyway?”
“Not much. Find DeSilvo, find Koffield, see what they’re up to, and stop them doing anything they shouldn’t.”
“That’s all?”
“One other thing. We’re supposed to make sure Central Command knows about it if we get killed. We’re supposed to send back regular messenger pods. Lots of them.”
M-pods were basically miniature timeshaft ships, programmed to fly back through the timeshafts, carrying urgent information. “I thought they were being paranoid about security. M-pods aren’t exactly the most secure form of communication,” Kalani objected.
“These won’t carry information, of any sort. That’s a direct order from on high. We send them back with nothing but date, positions, and the message ‘We’re still not dead yet.’ ” Burl frowned, stared at the wall for a moment, and spoke again. “Let me make it sound even better. We’re going to be the tethered goat.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“It’s an old idea. If there’s a wolf causing you trouble—don’t go hunting for the wolf. Set out a nice fat goat on a good strong tether, hide in the bushes, and wait for the wolf to sniff out the goat and come to you. If you can kill the wolfbefore he kills the goat, that’s a nice bonus—but you can always get another goat.”
“You don’t have to keep trying to make me feel better, Burl.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it was all she had left.
“Sorry, Kal, but that’s about where we are. If we get ourselves killed, but they know when and where, that’ll tell them what they need to know—and then they’ll mount the full-scale operation—a military operation, not just an investigation.”
“An operation to do what?”
“They’ll decide when they get there. It depends on what DeSilvo’s doing—and we haven’t the faintest idea about what that is. Whatever DeSilvo’s up to, he’s simply accumulated too much hardware. He’s dangerous—dangerous enough that he might be able to take on a full military assault. Part of the idea in sending in such a small team is to keep the stakes from getting that high. Send in an invasion fleet, and you’ll probably start a war. Send in two cops to snoop around, and probably you won’t. And if you lose the two cops, but in exchange you prevent a war—well, that sounds like a pretty reasonable bargain, even to me. How’s it sound to you?”
“I don’t think I want to answer that question,” Kalani replied. She was surprised she was even able to speak that clearly. Things had come at her too fast, from too many directions. She was scared, more scared than she had ever been in her life. Even more scared than she’d been on Mars—and only someone who’d been down there could understand how scaredthat was. “Burl?” she asked. “What do Ido ?”
“Get some rest, Kalani,” Chalmers said gently. “Tomorrow’s going to be a hell of a day.”