Chapter Fourteen

TO CATCH A LOWDOWN

SOLACECITYSPACEPORT
SOLACECITYTRANSPORTCOMPLEX
THEPLANETSOLACE

The rain roared down, beating on the landing field, slapping at Elber as he stumbled out of the orbital transport and onto the upper platform of a set of mobile stairs. Elber Malloon breathed in the air of his native world for the first time in nearly a year, and almost drowned in the process, as the wind blew the storm right into his face. He was none too pleased to be back.

The rain was hard enough that he could scarcely see the bottom of the stairway. Holding tight to his travel bag, he moved as quickly and carefully as he could down the steps, leaning into the wind as he forced himself forward toward the waiting ground shuttle.

He lunged inside the vehicle and climbed up into a seat, gasping for breath, feeling half-drowned. He could not have been out in the weather more than thirty seconds, or traveled more than twenty meters, but still he was soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone. He had been the first off the orbital transport, but the other passengers were right behind him, staggering up the stairs and finding themselves places to sit.

“Not so bad this trip,” said a friendly voice from over Elber’s shoulder.

He turned to see a drenched, but cheerful, young woman, pale-skinned and clear-eyed, smiling at him. Her blonde hair was bedraggled, and her clothes were as wet as Elber’s, but none of that seemed to bother her.

“What’s not so bad?”

“The rain,” she said. “Every trip, the locals tell me that it comes and goes—but it never goes when I’m down.They can tell you all the exact dates when it didn’t rain in the last three months. But never when I’m around.”

“And it gets worse than this?”

The woman shrugged. “Well, maybe this is abit above average—but it sure as DeSilvo was heavy last time. The landing pads flooded out so bad they had to shut down the spaceport right after we landed. Water was ankle deep.”

“Oh,” said Elber. The water hadn’t seemed to be much shallower than that when he went through it, but his new friend seemed to be the sort to look on the bright side, no matter what.

“So this is your first trip down?” she asked.

“Ah, no, actually. I was born on Solace. But it’s been a while.”

“So what brings you here now?”

Elber was far from being a suspicious sort, but somehow this woman seemed a littletoo friendly. Why had she singledhim out? Why was she taking so much interest in him? Perhaps it was just old-fashioned warmth and openness—or perhaps it wasn’t. But his mission—and his situation—were already delicate enough as it was. And, come to think of it, he didn’t remember seeing her on board. It was possible he had missed her, or that she had been on another deck—but Elber was usually pretty good at remembering faces. His own instinct, born of a lifetime lived down on the farm, was to be just as open and friendly as she had been—but it was no time to trust to instinct. “Business,” he said, and left it at that.

“What sort of business?” she pressed.

It was not hard to imagine a very slight change in her tone, to hear a little bit more steel in her voice and a trifle less silk. “Nothing particularly interesting,” he said. “Just a few matters that have come up, now that they’re done with NovaSpot’s Ignition. I have to sort out some details for supplies on a new project on Greenhouse.” It was a bald-faced lie, from top to bottom. Elber was astonished at himself for being able to invent it on the spur of the moment. “What about you?” he asked the woman.

“Me?” she asked, plainly not ready for the question. Her smile suddenly seemed fixed, forced, as if she were determined to keep it in place no matter what. “Oh, nothing interesting at all. Just—just a small shipping operation, that’s all.”

“Oh. Well, good luck with it.” Elber smiled blandly and calmly turned forward again in his seat, but his heart was pounding. Maybe he had just been rude to a very nice lady. Or maybe someone was working very hard, and very fast—if not all that skillfully—to find out what Elber had been sent to do.

Another group of sopping-wet passengers rushed aboard the ground transport, one of them carrying a large and awkward package. Elber took advantage of the moment to move “helpfully” out of the way of the package, then shift to a seat as far away as possible from his new friend.

He caught a glimpse of her expression as he sat and saw that her smile was gone, replaced by a hard and determined frown. Either he had been a lot ruder than he thought, or her mask had slipped completely away.

The ground transport’s ArtInt seemed to decide that no one else was going to get aboard. It closed the passenger door and started the drive toward the main transfer terminal, the rain sheeting down on all the half-fogged windows.

 

The transport pulled up inside a roofed-over vehicle concourse, and the passengers stepped out. The concourse led toward the air/sea/land terminal proper on one side, but on the other three it was open to the weather—and there was a lot of weather. The wind had picked up, and was managing to drive the cold rain nearly sideways, right into the faces of the passengers. Elber staggered inside with the rest of them and paused just inside the entrance to catch his breath. Elber stood under one of the powerful hot-air blowers angled down from the ceiling for a minute, but it didn’t do much good. It got him a bit warmer, but it would take something more than that to get him remotely dry.

He suddenly noticed that his friend from the ground transport had vanished as mysteriously as she had arrived. Did she have a flight she had to catch in a hurry—or was she already reporting in to—well, somebody? Elber shrugged and forgot about her. There was nothing he could do about her, and he had plenty of other troubles to deal with.

He looked around. Once away from the puddles and streaks of mud and sodden floor mats by the entrance, the terminal was clean, warm, dry, well lit, dotted with well-behaved, well-dressed travelers.A little different this trip, Elber could not help thinking. The last time—for that matter, the only other time—Elber had been at Solace City Spaceport, he had been with his wife Jassa and his daughter Zari, and they had been part of a mob, swept up in the panic that had seized their village and most of the rest of the planet’s rural settlements.

He remembered those days. The muddled, conflicting stories came up out of nowhere: The spaceport would be shut down, the planet abandoned, they were evacuating uppers from the cities but leaving everyone else behind. The wild ride on whatever transport would get them to the spaceport, the scramble to force themselves onto a ship, any ship. Then, as now, the driving, endless rain. The shouts. The screams. The smell of fear and filth and unwashed bodies and blood. The crushing weight of the boost to orbit—and their confused, terrifying arrival at SCO Station. It was a wonder his family had managed to stay together. And now, SCO was home, and his wife and daughter were still there. Captain Sotales had not exactly said they were hostages to Elber’s good behavior—but then, he didn’t need to. No matter where Elber’s thoughts started, it seemed as if they always ended up with Jassa and Zari.

He forced himself back to the problem at hand. He had been here before, but his experience of the place wasn’t going to do him much good. You don’t learn how to hire surface transport while part of a rioting mob. It didn’t help matters that he had only the vaguest idea of where he needed that surface transport to take him. Nor could he seek advice on the topic. He could scarcely wander up to the traveler’s advice booth and ask the best way to travel to the hidden camp of one of the most wanted men on the planet.

Well, half the reason Sotales had recruited Elber was that he and Zak Destan were from the same district—and Reiver Destan was widely reported to be active in that area. Plainly, the best thing to do would be to return to his old hometown—or what was left of it—and ask his way from there.

 

A confused hour later, Elber, reunited with his baggage and laden down with maps, receipts, tickets, transit transfers, schedules, seat checks, and a whole stack of other bits of paper he could not readily identify, found himself all alone in a private top-class compartment, aboard a sleek, fast, levtrain as it pulled smoothly out of the transit terminal and gathered speed for the run south. Elber had never been on any sort of train before, let alone in top class, and he was not entirely certain what he should do, or even what he was allowed to do.

He sat at the edge of one of the luxuriously wide armchair-style seats, trying to take up as little room as possible on the upholstery, for fear of getting it wet. The train was already climbing up Parrige Mountain toward Long Tunnel before Elber noticed a printed card lying on the small table under the window compartment’s door. It listed the services available.

Apparently Elber was not the first traveler to come aboard soaking wet. He was delighted to find a complete, compact, private refresher behind a small door at the rear of the compartment, including a pocket-size autolaundry. There was even a warm full-length robe for him to wear while his clothes were being washed and dried.

Elber locked the door, opaqued all the windows, and set to work. He gloried in the shower and shaved carefully. Then he put his sodden clothes in the laundry chute, pulled on the splendid robe, and sat down in the other still-dry armchair, feeling warmer and drier than would have seemed possible to him an hour before. He flipped the view window back to transparent just as the train was diving into the darkness of Long Tunnel. Two minutes later, the train burst forth into a blaze of sunshine and blue sky on the other side of Parrige Mountain.

Some years back, Elber had read somewhere, without fully understanding it, that Parrige Mountain was in large part responsible for the seemingly endless rain in Solace City. Something about a “rain shadow,” whatever that was, and an abrupt shift in weather patterns that had shifted a persistent low-pressure air mass and left it parked for good over Solace City.

The train began the long run down the other side of the mountain, and Elber read over the service card more carefully, with an eye toward what to order for lunch. Ten minutes later, a server-bot wheeled itself in and delivered one of the best meals of Elber’s life. Things were looking distinctly up.

They stayed that way all through coffee, and until after the server-bot cleared away the dishes and left Elber to himself. He sighed contentedly and leaned back in his chair, snuggled deep in his robe, watching magnificent scenery roll by as the train flew onward, down into the low plains of the continental interior.

It might be his last chance to review his briefing material for a while. Elber had been quite pleased to receive a new, highly sophisticated datapad from Sotales, with full data on Zak Destan already loaded in. Well,nearly full data. Elber had done some data-cruising of his own, pulling down insurance claim reports, district tax receipt reports, police incident files, and a number of other information sources. His time in the insurance office had taught him the value of pulling data from lots of places, how to keep from getting swamped in the data, and the importance of mastering the file, studying it in detail until you understood all the pieces and could really make them fit. He didn’t haveall the pieces yet—but he was starting to see the picture. Maybe more of the picture than Sotales had intended him to see. Elber wasn’t entirely sure, just yet, that he wanted to see quite so much.

But it was hardnot to see. And once he saw, it was harder still to avoid acting.

Elber thought back to his conversation with Raenau and Sotales, the lords of creation, with the power to do what they wanted to him and with him. How big a chance did he want to take on going past what they had intended, on doing more, on donig better?They had pushed him into this, poked and prodded him to do their bidding—and they hadn’t had to poke very hard. But would it really be safe, or wise, to exceed his instructions?

The one bright spot was that they didn’t seem to suspect Elber of any crime—but Elber had no faith in that, either. Not after his time in Commander Raenau’s office.

“We got a job for you,” Captain Sotales had said then. “We want you to contact the character in the middle of the pictures. Zak Destan.”

“Except these days,” Raenau had put in, “Zak is respectfully addressed asReiver Destan—or even Bush Captain Destan—even Bush Lord Destan. He’s done all right for himself since we booted him off the Station and dumped him back on-planet.”

Sotales nodded and went on. “We got reports from the planet-side cops that Destan has been leading raids and stirring up trouble—enough trouble that he has to be dealt with, rather than ignored or destroyed. Some of the planet-side cops think Destan’s criminal gang is trying to turn itself into a semipolitical group. Do that, and all of a sudden his gang of crooks turns into—what did they call it?” He had glanced at a piece of paper “—‘the core cadre of what might well become a powerful paramilitary organization.’ Fancy words they use,” he said, and dropped the paper. “They figured it might help if they could talk to him, establish a dialogue, or whatever the hell they call it. They checked his file, saw he was part of the Big Run up to SCO, and they called us. So we’re doing a favor for the planet-side cops, trying to help them establish a backdoor contact with Destan—through you. Set a thief to catch a thief.”

Sotales laughed at his own joke, noticed that Raenau was not smiling, and forced his expression into a bad imitation of a solemn frown. “But that’s only half-right,” he went on. “Right, Elber? You’re no thief.”

Elber had receivedthat message loud and clear. Sotales couldn’t have made it plainer. He could invent crimes for Elber to be guilty of just by waving his hand.

By the time the scenery stopped being quite so magnificent Elber’s former happy mood had collapsed altogether, turned as dried-up and blown-away as the world outside. The train rushed along through the flat, featureless plain, and with each kilometer that passed, there seemed to be fewer trees, scrubbier grass, and greyer skies. High water had been there recently and debris was still caught in the trees, caked mud was still stuck to everything, and the landscape was dotted with pools of standing water left behind by the receding flood. This was Elber’s part of the world, and it was in bad shape.

Again, his thoughts flitted back to Jassa and Zari. He could bear it, or at least try to bear it, if he were cast out of SCO Station and sent back down here, so long as they were safe. But what about them? Things on-planet were plainly much worse than they had been before, and things had been bad enough then that their first child Belrad had died. If Mistvale had gotten hit as hard as the landscape he had seen so far, then life was very hard there. Hard enough maybe to kill his wife and daughter. He was almost glad they had been kept behind to serve as hostages to his behavior. At least it meant they were out of harm’s way. The land he was traveling was no place for a mother and a toddler.

He dared not fail. Not when Sotales could send his family back to this place. Or someplace worse. And if he was not to fail, he was going to have to go beyond what Sotales had wanted—and do what Sotales needed.

The sights outside the window and the fears in his heart were enough to put Elber in his place. He’d been playing the part of an upper ever since he strapped himself into the shuttle for the ride from orbit down to Solace, ever since he took a job in an office where his hands stayed clean and his muscles didn’t ache at the end of the day. But that was just pretending, things on the outside. Deep inside, he still was what he always would be—a lowdown dirt-poor peasant farmer.

The train slowed and came to a halt at a small-town station, a tired, mud-caked place where everything seemed used up and worn-out. Elber could spot a dozen things that told him the high water had been there many times in the last few years and that the town had long since given up any serious attempt at holding it back.

And then, with a start, Elber recognized the place, a split second before he read the name off a sign. Brewer’s Station, two stations up from Mistvale. He had been there as a boy, going along with his father on a business trip as a special treat. The journey was more than a hundred kilometers, an impossibly long distance from home. Brewer’s Station had seemed a huge and sophisticated city to him then, after a life on the farm.

He had returned to Brewer’s Station a time or two as a teenager, and he remembered walking the streets of a clean, well-kept place. By then he had known enough to realize the big city of his childhood was really just a little town.

The two images of the place had remained fixed in his mind, side by side. But there was nothing left that was remotely like either the big city or the small village he carried in his memory. This Brewer’s Station was more than half a wreck, with no sign that it was ever going to recover itself.

Brewer’s Station had been the central receiving point for all the valley’s farmers, the depot through which all finished products came, and it had always prospered off trade. If Brewer’s Station was like this—what could his own little village of Mistvale be like?

The train pulled out of the station. The next stop was Wilhemton, the closest station to Mistvale.

Elber stood up, opaqued the window, and pulled his cleaned, dried clothes out of the autolaundry. He shed the splendid robe and pulled on his own plain clothes once again. He smoothed down the fabric and wondered how plain his outfit would appear to the Mistvale farm folk. Would these clothes that now seemed very ordinary to him seem very fancy and special back home? No point worrying about it. Clothes like these were all he had anymore.

Moments before, he had been enjoying all the pleasure of life as an upper, soaking up all the top-class goodies. But one look at Brewer’s Station was all that was needed to remind him where he came from, and what he really was. That place had been way up-class from where he came from, and what he had been. Now it had been brought low, and here he was, coming back, looking grand while everyone else had gone poor. Rubbing their noses in it. Putting them in shame. And what did that make him but lower than lowdown?

 

Not long after, he disembarked from the train at Wilhemton, and then had a lonely two-hour wait. Wilhemton was smaller and even more decrepit than Brewer’s Station. The sun beat down there as hard as the rain had struck him in Solace City. Elber knew he had to be far from the first person to wonder why something could not be done to bring some of the sunshine to one place and some of the rain to the other.

Wilhemton was all browns and greys, little more than a collection of shanties. He did not see a soul while he waited there. Were they all hiding behind the shutters of their houses, fearful that the man in the spaceside clothes was there to cause trouble somehow—to take the last of what they had left? Or, worse, were the houses truly empty, abandoned? He couldn’t bring himself to go and check, to peek in the window of a building that seemed cast aside. What if it justlooked that way, and the occupants—a man, a woman, worst of all, a child—caught him peering through the glassless window and understood what he was expecting to see? Better, far better, not to look, not to know.

At long last the local ground bus—really just a midsize delivery van—came around the corner, bumping along the washed-out road. It came to a jerky stop and pulled up to the bus stop right in front of him. Elber was not surprised to see the bus did not have an ArtInt driver. Instead, there was an actual human being behind the controls. The door swung open, and Elber looked inside.

The driver was a wizened old man, his deeply tanned face lined and worn, a three days’ stubble on his face, and two or three teeth missing from his wide and friendly smile.

The driver sat at what appeared to be an old wooden chair out of someone’s kitchen. It had been bolted to the floor of the bus. The enclosure for the ArtInt driver had been ripped out, and a complicated set of hand controls, plainly built out of whatever spare parts had been to hand, had been installed in its place. Elber recognized a pump handle and a couple of old doorknobs, but nothing else on the jury-rigged control panel was readily identifiable—though it looked as though the driver operated the brakes by pulling on a rope that went down through a hole in the floor.

“Hello to you!” said the driver, climbing down from his perch and coming out the door. “Lucky day for you. I don’t come by here more’n twice a week. Usually just fetching and carrying packages from the depot here. Packages, not people. That’s the workaday of this bus. Then I got word on th’ link we had us an actual transferpassenger off the train today. Didn’t hardly believe it, cause no one’s gone up to City from here for a while—socouldn’t be no local coming back. Figured it was likely a mistake. But no it weren’t, and here you are.” The driver stuck out his hand and smiled again. Elber offered his hand, and the old man shook it vigorously. “I’m Sandal Abbleman.”

“Hello,” Elber replied, glad the torrent of words had subsided. “Elber Malloon. Call me Elber.” He had forgotten that part of it, the neighborliness that was instinct, reflex—and sometimes, relentless. Knowing all about each other, about all your neighbors, and all their neighbors—that was survival in a place like this.

And the bus driverhad to be the most neighborly—the most nosy, if you wanted to put it that way. In Wilhemton and Mistvale, the bus driver would also be the main conduit for news, for rumor. He would hear all the stories first. He would know, wouldhave to know, who was feeling poorly, who was behind on their bills, who was visiting whom. Every now and again—when a shut-in’s mailbox just kept getting fuller, when he saw a little boy he knew on a road far from his home, when he knew the Reivers were about to stir, it would be one of the tidbits of news or gossip that he heard, his knowledge of the habits and routines of all his customers, that saved lives.

Not that Sandal Abbleman would ever think of it in those terms. Such things just came with the job. “I’ll do that, Elber,” he said. “Don’t get many City uppers coming down this way.” Abbleman cocked his head and looked thoughtful. “Malloon. That’s a name we hear local-like. Not a City name.”

“Born twenty kilometers from here,” Elber said proudly.

“Elber—Elber Malloon . . .” Abbleman looked out into the middle distance for a moment. Then his eyes brightened, and he pointed a gnarled finger at Elber. “You’re Eli and Suza Malloon’s boy! You lived over near Mistvale.”

Elber grinned. “That’s right. But Father and Mother passed away a long time ago.”

Abbleman nodded. “I ’member the funeral. I don’t get over that way much—no reason to, that’s the sad thing. But I don’t think I’ve heard news of your folk—since—since that, uh, Big Run about a year ago.”

Elber grimaced. “Yes, we—my wife and child and I—got caught up in that.” Not something he was very proud of, but there it was.

“Yeah,” Abbleman said, drawing the word out sadly. He patted Elber on the arm, trying to comfort him. “Things was bad when you left, but they’ve gotten worse. The old Mistvale folk like to say the mists are twenty meters deep in places. Half the land is flooded. Including your old place, I’m afraid.”

“I know,” Elber said, and thought, for the thousandth time, of his little boy Belrad, dead, buried in back of the house, his grave drowned forever by the water that had never receded. “Things must have gotten mighty hard around here.”

Abbleman nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir, they have, and that’s the truth.” He paused, then smiled suddenly. “But let’s not fret about that now. They say, now that that Greenhouse and NovaSpot business is all done, maybe the uppers on Greenhouse can do something to fix the problems around here. So maybe they’s hope. And you’rehome, that’s the main thing. They’ll all want to hear your story, back in around Mistvale.”

“Yes, well, but I’m just here for a vis—” Suddenly Elber stopped short. Suddenly he saw it, saw how he was going to make contact with Zak. He had been looking at the whole thing all wrong, looking with City eyes, with SCO Station eyes. He had been trying to come up with a way to track down a well-hidden, well-protected Zak in the middle of his well-hidden territory. He had come up with nothing better than a vague idea about trying to search out old friends who might to be able to connect him with Zak—an idea that seemed unlikely to work, to put it mildly.

Suddenly, looking at it with Mistvale eyes, he could see that all was completely unnecessary. If Zak Destan—ReiverDestan, Bush Lord Destan—wanted to stay hidden—well, no one was going to find him. But if, as Captain Sotales seemed to think, Reiver Destan wanted to talk with someone from the outside, wanted to get a message sent—then Elber Malloon had already finished all the work he needed to do.

People talked about each other back here. Someone coming back from the Big Run had to be Big News. Every friend of Sandal Abbleman would know about Elber’s arrival by nightfall—and every one of them would pass it along as well. It would be impossible for Zak not to hear word of his arrival—and Zak would know perfectly well, better than any of the locals, that no one came all the way from SCO Station just to call on the old neighbors in Mistvale.

“What were you about to say, Elber?”

Elber blinked and came back to himself. “Sorry. I just thought of how to do something I need to do. I said I’m just back here for a visit.”

“Well, that’s fine. Bet you’re hoping to see all the folk from the old days.”

“Oh, yes,” said Elber. He looked to the east and spotted a fat dot of light low in the sky, rising quickly up into the gathering twilight. SCO Station, swinging around the world on its orbit. Jassa and Zari were up there. Probably just sitting down to dinner. Probably praying for him. “Yes indeed,” Elber said again. “I’m hopin’ that harder’n you could ever know.”

“Well, help me tote the coming-and-going cargo off and on the bus, and we’ll get there all the sooner.”

Elber grinned and nodded. “Glad to do it, Mr. Abbleman. Just like the old days.” He followed the old man back toward the clapped-out shed that served as the Wilhemton transit station.

SCO STATION
ORBITINGSOLACE

Captain Olar Sotales smiled broadly at the soon-to-be-former prisoner, and pushed the release form across the table at him. “Once again, Mr. Brantry, my apologies. It was all such a terrible misunderstanding,” he lied.

“Sure it was,” Brantry replied, snatching up a pen and scrawling his name across the bottom of the paper.

Sotales cocked his head to one side and shrugged, very slightly. That was the way the game got played sometimes. He knew that Brantry knew that Sotales knew that Brantry knew the charges had been deliberately invented. But still the scene must be played. And, in a sense, justice had in fact been done, for Brantry and his friendshad been guilty—though, perhaps, not of the crimes with which they were charged.

Brantry jabbed his thumbprint down in the ID box and shoved the paper back across the table. Sotales added his own careful signature—no need for him to apply his thumbprint; only the prisoner had to do that—then looked to Brantry again and gestured down at the table. “Both copies, if you please, Mr. Brantry. You’ll want one for yourself.”

“Yeah. I really want a souvenir. Something to help me remember the last two months.” Brantry snatched at the second copy, and, if possible, signed it with an even poorer grace, and even more illegibly, than the first, and stabbed his thumbprint down with even more violence, hard enough to shake the table.

Sotales took the second form, signed it, and slid it back across the table. “You’re free to go,” he said with a smile. He made no attempt to stand or to shake the man’s hand. There would have been no point. Brantry scooped up the paper, snarled at Sotales, and stomped out, slamming the door behind him.

Good. That was the end of that. So far as Sotales was concerned, the release of Brantry marked the formal end of his own very private effort to support the NovaSpot Ignition Project. Sotales had detained a good two dozen troublemakers on SCO Station and made arrangements for three times that number to be detained on-planet, and in other habitats. Any or all of them could have stopped or delayed the project—and, of course, given the rigid deadlines and technical requirements, delay would have been the same as outright cancellation. The public was by no means aware of it, but the Ignition Project had succeeded by the narrowest of margins. One more featherweight on the wrong side of the balance, and it would have failed.

Sotales unlocked the file drawer of his desk, picked up the paper Brantry had signed, and carefully filed it with the others. He thought for a moment, then pulled out the complete file. It seemed a good moment to review the whole operation—an operation of which there were no computer records, no ArtInt storage, no datapads, nothing except this file and the far more detailed and far-ranging records Sotales kept in his head.

Brantry was one of the featherweights that Sotales had kept out of the Ignition equation. In the case of Brantry and his cargo company, it was simple corruption, overbilling and undershipping. Brantry had played that game just a trifle at first, and then gotten more and more greedy. A trumped-up morals charge had taken him out of circulation—and also sent a very clear message to his competitors. The rest of the cargo support operations had proceeded, not honestly, but at least with a level of theft and fraud that was kept within the bounds of reason.

There had been others who threatened Ignition one way or another—factory owners who jacked up prices, leaders of worker groups who tried to renegotiate one time too many, politicians who thought to gain fleeting advantage in some other game they were playing by holding some part of the Ignition Project hostage for a while in this committee or tangled up in that appropriations measure.

Though in theory Sotales was merely commander of SCO Station’s Security Force, in practice his reach extended much farther than that. SCO Station was the center of trade and commerce in the Solacian system, and Sotales had followed in the tradition of his predecessors, leveraging the station’s economic clout, using it to enhance the SSF’s own power, assisting other habitats with their security needs, even cooperating with planet-side security to the point where it wasn’t precisely clear where the Solacian Planetary Police Force ended and SCO SSF began.

By Sotales’ rough calculation, for every Brantry he had fined or jailed, or even merely threatened or blackmailed, Sotales had managed to discourage fifteen or twenty from getting out of line in the first place. But the most artistic part of it was that no one knew what he had done. Brantry was one of the few he had dealt with directly. All the others had been managed from a distance, by this or that subordinate on SCO Station, or through some colleague on-planet, or even a few private citizens who owed him favors.

He shoved the drawer smoothly shut and locked it carefully. He hadn’t added or subtracted anything to the file beyond adding Brantry’s release form, but that didn’t matter. He knew what came next without looking at bits of paper. And that was just as well. There wasn’t even a paper file for what he intended next.

The long and the short of it was that he planned to do what he could to support the restoration of Greenhouse. He was no engineer, of course, no scientist. But the director of the most powerful secret police force in the Solace system could still do his share, quietly, behind the scenes. In large part, he expected his role to be a continuation of his effort in the Ignition Project—using manipulation, misdirection, threats, bribes, encouragement, and, if and when necessary, plain old-fashioned violent force to keep the jackals at bay and the project on track.

Sotales also had a longer-range goal in mind. Greenhouse was important—everyone knew that—but Sotales had his own opinions as towhy it was important. The official line focused on how a revived Greenhouse would mean a revived Solace. With Greenhouse back in business, it wouldn’t be long at all before the whole Solacian ecosystem was back in working order, and all was lovely in the garden once more.

But Sotales had seen the most secret versions of the reports on the Solacian ecology, and those reports made it plain that there was no hope at all.

It took very little effort on Sotales’ part to understand what the effort to revive Greenhouse was actually in aid of, and not much more to confirm his theory with a few very quiet inquiries. Greenhouse was to be the way station for the eventual evacuation of Solace, a place of refuge until more permanent places could be found in other star systems. There simply was not enough transport capacity available to move everyone off-planet and directly out of the star system quickly enough. There weren’t enough ships, the ships weren’t big enough, and the ships weren’t fast enough.

Even once they were out of the Solacian system, it was far from likely they could dump that many refugees in any one inhabited star system—Solace had learned that lesson the hard way when it had absorbed most of the surviving population of Glister—and the population of Solace was far larger than Glister’s. Other worlds had seen how much upheaval the resettlement of the Glisterns had caused—and some were of the opinion that the collapse of Solace had been caused by the sudden arrival of so many new mouths to feed. For those reasons, it would likely also be politically infeasible to resettle the Solacians quickly out of system. And then, of course, there was the question of how much money the operation would cost.

But Greenhouse could be the holding tank, potentially supporting the entire population of Solace—though in very spartan quarters. With NovaSpot making thousands more habitat domes available, Greenhouse could hold out for years, perhaps even decades, until the political situation made it possible for people to be resettled more gradually on other worlds.

And so Sotales had set himself the additional task ofguiding Greenhouse’s revival, seeing to it that more time and money went into building and restoring more and bigger habitat domes, and less into research facilities that were just for show and would likely never see use before the coming crises swept over them. Leave enough in the way of research facilities to serve as window dressing, and nothing more. That was Sotales’ goal, his ideal. He doubted he could reach it, but it was useful to have something to aim at.

He knew that it would be far more difficult to steer construction policy from this far off than it had been to squash inconvenient station- and planet-based corruption, but there were several things working for him. Chief among them, he had not the slightest doubt that Planetary Executive Kalzant was working toward the same goal, though she couldn’t admit it openly. He was going to try to ease the way for the goal the most powerful person in the whole star system wanted to attain. Thathad to help.

But Sotales had more agenda than those two in play, and not all his schemes and plans involved such long-range, long-distance do-gooding.

It was essential that the existing social patterns, with the uppers still on top, and the lowdowns and peasants still down below, be maintained as long as possible, simply because that was the best way to keep order. Maybe he was just thinking like every secret policeman in history, but he believed order was going to matter a great deal more than justice in the days to come. The peasants had many legitimate complaints, but what point in land reform or building schools or fixing roads when the whole planet was about to be abandoned?

The trick was to keep the lid on the existing social order for as long as possible, and, somehow, at the same time, to find a way to keep the pressures on it from building up to explosive levels.

Sotales did not know or care if the reivers and bush lords were a source or a symptom of social pressure. All he knew was that they were destabilizing the situation, and needed to be shut down, or, better still, co-opted, before things got completely out of control.

Friend Malloon was a part of that project—a bigger part than he knew. Sotales switched on his secure hardwired datapad, the one that was literally chained to his desk. The actual physical data cable—a heavy-duty, multishielded cable—was snaked through the links of the chain and vanished into his desk. His datapad neither sent nor received any sort of data via radio or any other form of electromagnetic frequency. Sotales’ people had snooped—and cracked—enough supposedly “secure” wireless datapads that he knew not to trust them. His hardwired pad was immune to such problems—though he also knew no data channel was ever absolutely secure. There were always ways to get in. Even so, his secure pad was as close to safe as it was practical to get.

He endured the pad’s retinal scan and thumbprint check, and the rest of the biometrics, and at last got to what he wanted to see: Elber Malloon—or more accurately, what Malloon was seeing, and hearing.

The implants had gone in during Malloon’s premission medical checkup—and in fact putting them in had been the whole point ofdoing the checkup. Simple, really. They had him come in the night before the physical check, under the pretext of monitoring what he had eaten and drunk for twelve hours beforehand. Once he was already asleep, they anesthetized him and injected the nanotaps beneath the skin—two vision taps at his temples and the audio taps at the base of each earlobe. Each was about the size of a smallish grain of rice, and somewhat rubbery in consistency. The mike heads and lenses themselves were about the diameter of human hairs, and protruded no more than a millimeter or so through the skin. The implants were colored to match Malloon’s skin and hair, and, once properly implanted, they were virtually undetectable.

Two slightly larger units, a primary and a backup recorder-transceiver, were likewise implanted into Malloon’s upper arms. All the units powered themselves off body heat.

The taps did not attempt anything so complex as actually hooking into his nervous system. They were merely very small mikes and cameras, tied in to even smaller transmitters with a range of only about thirty centimeters, just enough for their signals to be received, recorded, and relayed by the transceivers in his upper arms. Nor was the sound quality or the visual resolution particularly good—but then, they only had to be good enough.

The transceivers were able to record audio and visual data during periods where it was impossible to transmit, and then do “burst” transmissions when such were possible. The implant transceivers in Malloon’s upper arms were also of severely limited range, of only a few tens of meters. The system could only work if a larger transceiver was nearby, ready to receive data and pass it on. The exterior unit also had to be able to detect snooper-scans, and shut them down before getting caught. And then, the subject of the taps had to be induced to carry the exterior transceiver along with him.

That part hadn’t been hard. They gave Malloon a bright and shiny new datapad, a very stylish pen, and a wristaid with more functions and displays than most commerically available datapads. Any or all of those, or any of the other exterior devices he was unknowingly carrying, could manage the dataflow from the nanotaps. They all worked in concert with each other, sharing the data storage and transmission loads, encrypting the datastream, storing it, then passing it up the line through the existing radio datanet until it was beamed to SCO Station.

Sotales—or rather the ArtInt monitoring the transmissions for Sotales—would see and heareverything that Malloon saw and heard. Most of what the system detected, would, of course, be crashingly dull. The ArtInt would edit the raw inputs down to something worthy of being watched by Sotales—and even most of that would likely be drivel.

But, with any luck at all, there would be diamonds he could sift from the dross. If Malloon managed a face-to-face with Zak Destan—what couldn’t be learned about his Reiver band from that? And Sotales had watched and studied long enough to be sure Destan’s Reivers were the alpha group down there. They were the key to the whole reiver crisis. What Destan did, the others would do. Manage Destan and he would manage all of them.

And all he had to do was sit and watch.

Sotales’ secured, hardwired, snooper-proof datapad came to life, playing realtime sound and images direct from a human being who had no idea he was transmitting. Sotales felt a real moment of triumph. It was all going to work.

At the moment, it appeared that Elber Malloon was looking through the grimy front windshield of some sort of rickety vehicle, reminiscing with the driver about some long-ago outbreak of corn spore blight.

Not the most vital or up-to-date intelligence—but never mind. Sooner or later, Sotales would get what he was waiting for.

And then the rules of the game would change.