Chapter Twenty-two

ALL THE SKILLS OF TREASON

WILHEMTONDISTRICTAGTRANCENTER
WILHEMTONDISTRICT
THEPLANETSOLACE

Berana Drayax had felt she was due for, and quite entitled to, a long vacation—maybe even one that would merge seamlessly into retirement—after first pulling Ignition Day off against the odds, then dealing with the endless small-bore bureaucratic work of closing out the project and handing NovaSpot off to the engineers who would actually operate and control it.

Her idea of a vacation did not include sitting down, in the dead of night, at a secret meeting, across the table from a bandit chief with delusions of grandeur in a semiabandoned agricultural transfer station.

But then, things didn’t always turn out the way one planned them.

Villjae Benzen, duly praised and promoted after rescuing Groundside Power—and thus the whole Ignition Project—was seated alongside her at the table, and plainly as uncertain of his role as she was unhappy with hers. He had just been settling into his new job managing habitat dome construction and repair when he’d been pulled out of it for this assignment. But that was part of the way things worked, and, Drayax believed, it was time he learned it. Crises and politics were and always would be part of large-scale engineering. Selling the project to the powers that be—and the would-be users of the project—was part of the game he would have to learn if he were to advance much farther in the field. The job would be part of his education.

To her left, on the short side of the long table, as if to moderate—or serve as interpreter—was Elber Malloon. Sotales had warned her that he had underestimated Malloon, and that she should not do the same. He certainly did not seem very impressive. It was plain he did not want to be where he was. Malloon looked as unhappy as Drayax and as uncertain as Benzen.

The only person at the table who was plainly pleased to be there was the quite lupine, even sinister-looking, Zak Destan, who looked downright smug. Berana Drayax regarded it as her first mission to put a stop to that, at any rate. The pleasantries, such as they were, had been gotten out of the way in short order, and it was now time to get down to business.

“All right, Mr. Destan”—not Reiver, not Bush Captain, certainly not Bush Lord—“you’ve got your big upper who can make big things happen. Here I am, and I made NovaSpot happen. So what is it you want? It won’t be what you get, but what do you want?”

Her opening remark had the desired effect—the smirk on his face went away. “Wait a second,” he protested. “That’s no way to open a negotiation.”

“It isn’t? It is where I come from—unless we’re just supposed to hand you the keys and the deeds and leave. So—what do you want, and, while you’re at it—what will you give in return thatwe’ll actually want and thatyou can actually give?”

Her rudeness was sincere—she did not want to be there, and she did not like this man—but it was nonetheless calculated. There were people who viewed courtesy as being weakness, a reasonable attitude as being halfway to surrender. That he had demanded that someone of high status pay this covert call on him, and that she had come, were concessions enough. The mere fact that she was there meant her side knew he had some chips on the table. He had to know her side had some too.

“I thought you were here to make me an offer.”

“I am. At my own discretion. But your demand for an offer ‘I can agree to’ was remarkably broad. I can think of a lot of things I’d agree to—but no one in his right might would offer them to me. So be specific. What do you want? What will you give?”

He stared at her, unmoving, unblinking, for a solid twenty seconds before he spoke. “Greenhouse,” he said at last. “And in exchange, we promise to be good. Mostly.”

Drayax resisted the temptation to laugh out loud, but then wondered if she should have bothered to resist. “I hope that’s a joke,” she said.

“Ah, Zak,” said Malloon, “maybe you ought to clarify that a little.”

“Nah,” Destan said, still staring straight at Drayax, not turning to look at Malloon. “She asked what Iwant . And she promised I wasn’t going to get it.”

Drayax returned his steady gaze—and found herself caught in an old-fashioned, completely childish staring contest. Destan was just the sort topractice his staring, so he could play just this sort of domination game. Well, turn that against him too. “Fine, Mr. Destan,” she said. “You can stare at me until your eyes burn twin holes in my head. For my part, I feel there are other things more worth looking at than you. You win. You’re the very best starer in the whole room.” She glanced down at her datapad and looked up again. “If you’re done, then, is it our turn now?”

Destan glared at her. “Yeah. Sure thing.”

“Very well. Mr. Benzen. If you will offer a quick summing up of the offer?” Drayax was none too pleased with the offer she had been instructed to make. That was part of the reason she wanted Villjae to describe it. And it was also a demonstration of authority. Villjae Benzen did what she said.

“Ah, yeah. Yes,” Benzen began. “It’s simple enough—and generous.”Good, thought Drayax.He listens and obeys . He had been specifically instructed to emphasize how “generous” the offer was.

Benzen went on. “The planetary government will withdraw from the area your people already more or less control—basically Wilhemton District, with a few details to be negotiated. It will become an autonomous region—still part of the overall planetary nation, and ultimately under planetary government control—but all local authority will be ceded to your organization, and all district-level government operations—courts, hospitals, road maintenance, and so on—will be discontinued, in conjunction with an orderly handover to your people. The government will deed over most of the public property in the area to you—with some exceptions to be discussed. The government will provide a one-time-only delivery of food aid, and a one-time financial package. Those who wish to depart the area ceded to you will be allowed safe passage out, carrying any and all of their property with them. Very generous,” he finished up.

“There you have it, Mr. Destan,” Drayax went on. “We name a date, sort out the handover details, and you can declare the autonomous region of Destania, or whatever you want to call it. All yours. You win.”

Zak was silent for a moment. At last he spoke, not to Benzen, but to Drayax. “Last month, I would have jumped at that. Last month, that would be my dream come true, what I would hope to pry loose after five or ten years of fighting and bushwhacking and killing. But it’s not last month anymore. And he”—he stabbed a finger in Elber’s direction without actually looking at him—“has been putting some ideas in my head. Ideas about how the planet’s falling apart. Can’t get fixed, either. That’s right, pretty much, isn’t it?”

The conventional move at such a time would, of course, be to lie, even if her opposite number knew she was lying. Drayax considered the option. But this wasn’t about old politics anymore, about who was up and who was down, about keeping the lid on and keeping the machinery working. And the new politics was going to be about saving lives, as many as possible, controlling the situation to avoid panic and chaos, as they evacuated the planet. Like it or not, Zak Destan and his kind were going to be their partners in that job. They were going to have to trust each other, and someone had to go first.

“Yes,” she said, a long heartbeat after he asked the question.

“So why not sell a house cheap—or give it away—once it’s already caught fire? Is that the idea? But you have to make the offer fast, before the customer can notice the flames.” Zak Destan shook his head. “It’s not last month anymore,” he said again. “What good would it do me to rule a patch of land, or half of Solace, or even the whole planet, if the planet dies? I don’t want to look up ten years from now and realize I’m running a diehard colony. No. I want more—and I’m willing to offer more to get it.”

Drayax cocked her head a bit to one side and shifted a bit closer to Destan. They were movements that indicated gentle, pleasant surprise, and a willingness to listen. Once again, the reaction was sincere—but once again, it was calculated as well. Let the body language send the message. “Go on,” she said.

Destan responded. He leaned forward in his seat, leaned his elbows on the table, and clasped his hands together, his expression suddenly eager. “Elber here talked about your pal Sotales being a chess player. Well, I’ve been staring at the chessboard myself, and I’ve thought a few moves ahead. I think I’ve seen what he’s seen—what you have too: Surrender is the only road to victory.”

A strange way to put it, but Drayax nodded. She understood, even before he explained. “Go on,” she said again, letting her face reveal her careful interest.

“We fight each other, we both lose,” Destan said. “Time is the enemy. Wasted effort is the enemy. Your side sees that too, or else they would have sent a flunky, and then a bigger flunky, then maybe a medium-big hotshot, andthen someone like you—just to show they were bigger than I was.”

Drayax nodded. In normal times they would have played it that way, for that reason—and had chosen not to, precisely for the reasons Destan had suggested. “I’m listening,” she said.

“So if you know that—why offer me, whaddya call it—the autonomous region of Destania?” He looked at her for a moment and answered his own question. “To keep me quiet,” he said. “Let me have the headaches of patching potholes and collecting taxes. Let me find out I can’t fix all the stuff I’ve been complaining that the uppers can’t fix. Let me spend my energy running the place, instead of giving the cops headaches. And why do that? To ease the pressure on the cops and the government, yeah, sure. Give away what they’ve already lost and what’s gonna be worthless real soon. But more’n that, I figure. Wear me down, let me see that there’s no future here—and when the time comes when you’ve gotta—I’vegotta—evacuate ‘Destania’ ”—he managed to get sarcasm into his speaking of the word—“I’ll go along quietly and be glad for what I get. How am I doing so far?”

“Not bad at all.” Sotales should have warned her not to underestimate Destan, either. “Please continue.”

“So let’s pretend all that’s happened already,” he said. “I surrender now, instead of ten years from now. But why would I do that? What would I get?”

“A spot at the front of the evac line.” It was Malloon who spoke. “Instead of one toward the back.”

Destan grinned and nodded at Malloon. “Got it in one, Elber. That’s the deal. If my people are granted early space in the evac operation, and relocation to a high-end habitat on Greenhouse, I’ll place my militia under the covert—and I meancovert —authority of the Planetary Executive. No one on my end is going to know about it, ’cause if they do, the way I’ll find out is when I wake up and notice my throat’s been cut. I’ll call off my reiver troops, and cooperate actively in policing the area—butwithout any public support. Give us what we want, and we promise to be good from now on, even if we don’t admit it.”

“We haven’t even said that thereis an evac plan,” Villjae Benzen protested.

Destan chuckled. “Yeah, you have, Benzen—just then.”

Benzen reddened, embarrassed to be caught.

Drayax let it go. They were far enough along that Villjae’s gaffe was right up there with admitting the sun rose in the east. Besides, the locals were looking at Benzen for the moment, taking their attention off her and giving her time to think. “What makes us trust you?” she asked.

“The gun to his head,” Malloon answered. “Real life, not what people see or think, this won’t be a sellout. But if the deal comes to light, it willseem enough of a sellout that it gets him overthrown—or killed.”

Destan nodded energetically. “What he said. The secret—that I’m cooperating with you—will have to come out atsome point. But that won’t be until later, until you’ve started evacuating us to Greenhouse. Till then, you’ve got a whip hand over me. All you’d have to do is leak news of this meet, here tonight, and I’d be a dead man politically. Maybe a real dead man.” He leaned back in his chair, grinning. “Now. You tell me. What make me trustyou ?”

“The gun you have toour head,” Benzen said. “It works the same way. It would cost the government a lot of credibility to admit to having met with you. It’ll hurt them even more to admit that they had cut a deal for something as big and juicy as an early place in line for the evacuation. The government would lose face—maybe enough to drive it from office. And if the deal came to light, it would set a fatal precedent: Rebel, and the government will give you preferred treatment.”

Drayax allowed herself no external reaction, but she winced, just a little, deep inside, to hear Benzen list all their weaknesses. Still, the answer could do no real harm. It was plain to see Destan was more than smart enough to have worked all that out for himself anyway.

“Let’s see if I have this straight,” Drayax said. “We agree we can destroy each other—and agree not to do it. In exchange for covert cooperation on your part and a cessation of illegal activity and violent attacks, we start the evacuation of Solace to Greenhouse by moving your people. We keep it quiet as long as possible, or until the evac is far enough along, and going well enough that the propaganda effect for both of us would be positive, not negative. About like that?”

“About like that,” Destan agreed.

It was Drayax’s turn to stare at Destan, study his face for signs of what he was thinking, how much he meant of what he said. She didn’t rush her answer. No one would regard thinking this one over as weakness. “Very well,” she finally said. “We might—might—have the start of something here. There are lots of details to sort out. Schedules, follow-up meetings, protocols. But I think—maybe—we might now understand each other. But we have to get some sort of idea of what’s practical. Do you have any worthwhile population statistics?” she asked. “How many in bad enough shape we should evac them soonest but well enough to survive the trip? We need to know how many people we’re talking about moving, and how fast.”

“I’ve got some pretty solid figures,” Destan said. “But it’s not just how many we move and how fast. It’s where do we put them?”

Drayax turned to Villjae Benzen, to call upon his real area of expertise. “Domes, Mr. Benzen. Habitats. Population capacity. What’s the status and schedule?”

 

It was toward dawn before Drayax and Benzen climbed aboard their stealthed aircar and made a very quiet departure. Drayax let Benzen do the flying. Rank hath its privileges, and reclining her seat back all the way, closing her eyes, and relaxing was just such a privilege. The real blessing was that they had gotten away when they had.

Dawn had been their departure deadline; stealthing system or no, neither side wanted to risk a daylight run and perhaps have the aircar be seen. Drayax’s sincere desire not to spend a day cooped up in a decrepit agtran center, not daring to venture out for fear of being seen and having her well-known face recognized, was a great impetus to making the negotiations go rapidly.

The aircar lifted silently and moved out at treetop level. It had been a long night, but a most useful one. They had hammered out most of the major points of the deal, but it was clear more would need to be done—and also plain that Drayax was going to have to talk things over with Planetary Executive Kalzant.

Drayax had exceeded her authority—but the risk was worth the potential reward. Kalzant might fire her, or even arrest her—but if they could get Destan under control and buy some quiet, that would ease a lot of pressure on the local authorities. More important, it would create a model for other agreements, other restive areas. Once they could go public, and all of Solace could see that even such a man as Zak Destan was getting a square deal from the government, then all the rest would follow, and follow willingly. She would risk her career for that, given the odds.

A lot had been done, but there was much to do. Both sides agreed it would be safer all around if the principal figures met as rarely as possible. Benzen and Malloon would have to meet again soon—and, no doubt, frequently, to sort out various technical details.Good, she thought.Let someone else do the work. There’s even the excuse of saying it’s more good training for him. She snuggled down a bit deeper into her seat and started giving serious thought to taking a nap.

“Is it really going to work, ma’am?” Benzen asked. “Do you think so?”

Her eyes came open. So much for her nap. But, this, too, was training for the lad. “It might,” she said. “I’d say it probably has the best odds of working, out of all the choices before us. It’s got a very clear, direct trust mechanism built in, or perhaps mutual threat mechanism might be closer. Each side has a gun pointed at the other’s head. If either side goes public in an effort to hurt the other—well, the usual term isblowback . The gun shoots both ways at once.”

“But why deal with him at all?” Benzen asked. “Why didn’t Sotales have a couple of goons hidden in the trunk of this aircar, or something like that? Destan’s on all the wanted lists, for who knows what crimes.”

“These are cruel times, and Sotales wouldn’t hesitate to use cruel methods if need be. If he had decided to go that way, Sotales would have been more likely to kill him than arrest him. He could have even dropped a warhead in while we were still there, left nothing but a crater, and accepted killing us as a fair price to pay for taking out Destan.”

Benzen looked at her in alarm. “You thought he might do that, and you went in anyway?”

“It seemed very unlikely,” Drayax said calmly. “He would have had to do a lot of explaining to PlanEx Kalzant. Safer to make a try once we’ve served to pinpoint Destan but are out of the way—right about now, say. My guess is that Destan is takingthat possibility seriously and hightailing it out of the area right now, and taking precautions against being tracked. But suppose Sotales did arrest him, or kill him—or vaporize him. Then what?”

Drayax answered her own question. “The mob Destan leads would still be there and would be angrier and less controllable than ever. The mob as an uncontrolled force would be far worse than a mob chivvied into some sort of disciplined group by Destan.

“He might be a criminal leader, but he is aleader —and Sotales argues pretty convincingly that he was already evolving into a revolutionary leader, a political leader—and we’ve just given him a powerful shove in that direction. Yes, he’s no angel—but you know better than most how much time is working against us. We don’t have the luxury of shopping around for someone we like better, or waiting and hoping for Destan to be overthrown.”

“But it can’t last,” Benzen protested. “It can’t last. Something will go wrong, and one side or the other will break the agreement. Itcan’t hold together long. And the precedent it sets is too dangerous.”

“All true—but it misses the point,” Drayax said sadly. “The point is it’s already too late. On Solace,nothing can hold together for much longer. We have to move fast, and not worry too much about the long term. Precedent won’t matter when the planet—and its political and social system—all collapse. We’reall going to Greenhouse, and sooner than most people might think.Everything will be different. It’s absolutely inevitable that the rules of the game—and the game itself—will be different as well.”

A brand-new game,she told herself.Who’ll cheat first?

 

Olar Sotales stood up from behind his desk, stretched, and yawned mightily. He had, of course, been watching the tap on Malloon. It was remarkable how bad the video and audio were when he watched in real time. The ArtInts did an impressive job cleaning up the sounds and images they stored and edited for later playback.

Surprising results. Surprising all around—but not necessarily unwelcome. It moved things forward, a good deal faster than he had expected. And it had another advantage—one that he very much hoped that Destan had not yet thought through. One that would be greatly to Sotales’ advantage, if push came to shove. Destan was thinking of Greenhouse as a world of refuge, a world where his people would be safe. All true, if all went as planned. But Greenhouse was domes and buried habitats, confined and walled in against the cold and the vacuum. It was also a world where people could be confined, very easily.

And, if push came to shove, it was also a world where Zak Destan could be controlled, if need be, simply by cutting off his air supply.

But it won’t come to that,Sotales thought as he powered down his secure systems.At least, he corrected himself,it probably won’t.