“I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT I’LL BE leaving tomorrow for New Cambridge and the Quadrant Meeting. I suppose I’ll see you there.”
Gloria stood in front of Cornell DuBray in his plush office, wearing a nearly transparent shirtdress, minimally buttoned. She wanted to give him a good look at her body—the body he would never again touch.
“I guess Erik Manko won’t be making the trip with you, will he?” Gloria added.
“What do you know about that?” DuBray snapped at her.
Gloria shrugged innocently. “Only that he was attacked and badly beaten. Right here on the streets of Manhattan. Shocking, isn’t it, that such things still happen? But I’m sure he’ll recover, in time.”
“A month,” DuBray snarled.
“Well, I hope he’ll be more careful from now on. It would be terrible if something like that happened to him again.”
“You’ve gone over the line, VanDeen,” DuBray growled.
“Which line would that be?”
“You went outside of Dexta to settle a personal matter. You couldn’t handle Manko yourself, so you hired some muscle to do the job for you. I’ve half a mind to have Internal Security look into this.”
“Look into what? Manko’s misfortune happened out on the city streets. It’s a matter for the New York City Police Department, not IntSec. They have no jurisdiction.”
“They do if I tell them they do. Don’t get too clever with me, VanDeen. You’d regret it.”
“More threats and bullying, DuBray? Where’s all that upper-level finesse you’re so proud of?”
“I can break you, VanDeen. Anytime I want.”
“Would you like to try it here and now?”
DuBray offered her a thin, cold smile. “We are of unequal levels, as you are well aware. Don’t think you can provoke me into physicality. I have other means at my disposal.”
“You might give a little thought to some of the means at my disposal,” Gloria suggested. “I’m not some anonymous Ten cowering before the awful power of a Four. The public adores me, Norman Mingus has faith in me, and I have powerful friends and relations—and ex-relations.”
That gave DuBray pause, as Gloria had intended it should. This was the first time in her Dexta career that she had so directly referred to her Imperial connections. She had always been determined to succeed at Dexta without any help from Charles and without trading on her link to him. But DuBray, with or without the services of Erik Manko, was the most powerful obstacle she had encountered, and she had finally accepted the fact that she couldn’t fight him with one hand tied behind her back. Fight dirty, Chandra had told her.
“OSI has work to do in Quadrant 4,” Gloria told him. “We’ll be doing it on New Cambridge, during the Quad Meeting. Don’t get in our way, DuBray.”
DuBray considered her words in silence for a few moments, then nodded slightly. “Very well, then,” he said. “You’ve decided on war.”
“Call it what you want. I’m fighting back.”
“You’re being stupid, VanDeen. I’m not alone in this, you know. All four Quadrant Administrators will be aligned against you.”
“From now on,” Gloria said, “you should think of OSI as the Fifth Quadrant.”
“THE FIFTH QUADRANT? BUT THAT DOESN’T EVEN make sense,” Grant Enright protested. “You can only have four quadrants.”
“You have no poetry in your soul, Grant,” Gloria replied. “I kind of like it. And it exactly describes what OSI must become. In order to survive at all, we have to make ourselves as strong and independent as the Quadrants themselves, and their Administrators.”
“Especially the Administrators,” said Enright, frowning a little.
“It’s not simply personal, Grant. I mean—yes, it’s personal, but it’s much more than that. The Quad Admins mean to destroy or neuter the OSI. They intend to make life as difficult as possible for everyone in this office.” Gloria looked around the room, where the entire OSI staff had gathered. Some were sitting at the big conference table, and more were standing along the walls. All of them were staring at Gloria.
“We are at war for our survival, people,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. I think OSI is worth saving, and I’m going to fight for it.” For a brief moment, Gloria thought she might be able to get away with turning this into a rah-rah, pep-rally speech, stirring the troops’ blood and getting them into a fighting mood. But she thought better of it, and went in another direction instead.
“It’s going to get nasty, and it’s possible that sticking with OSI may not be good for the long-term health of your Dexta career. If anyone wants out, I’ll arrange for your transfer immediately. I won’t blame anyone who wants to make the sane, safe choice. You have a lot invested in being at Dexta, and I won’t force you to risk it for my sake.”
“Oh, Gloria, darling,” Althea Dante interrupted, “don’t be so melodramatic about it. Of course we’ll stay and help you fight the evil Quad Admins! I think it will be delicious.”
Althea was probably telling the truth, Gloria reflected. Althea had some strange notions about what was fun, but Gloria was grateful to her for the strategic support. After Althea had spoken, no one else could think of anything they wanted to say. Gloria let the silence go on for only a few seconds before swiftly moving to change the subject.
“Elaine and I are off for New Cambridge in a Flyer tomorrow. But I really want to show the OSI flag at this meeting, so I’m sending a Cruiser, too. Jill, Althea, Brent, Darren, plus Arkady, and four or five of our Bugs. Our mission will be to assist Petra and Pug in their investigation on New Cambridge. Our real mission will be to sell OSI to everyone at the Quad Meeting. We are going to work that meeting like a local politician working a town fair or a funeral. Althea, when you get there, I want you to plan an OSI reception and dinner some night. Spare no expense, and forget about the entertainment budget. Bill me, if necessary. Just make certain it is the one event that everyone will want to attend.”
“Gloria, darling,” Althea gushed, “I do believe this is the best assignment I’ve ever received at Dexta! I promise you, it will be a party to remember.”
“Jill, Brent, and Darren,” Gloria continued, “will join me at as many of the other receptions and parties as we can manage, and we’ll haunt the committee meetings, general sessions, and the hotels, corridors, and restrooms. We are out to win friends for OSI, so we have to be friendly.”
“Just how friendly?” Jill warily asked.
“I’ve never asked anyone in this office to screw someone for the sake of the job, and I never will. Anyway, we can’t screw everyone, so it’s probably just as well if we don’t screw anyone. We don’t want to make any of them angry because they were left out.”
“Gloria, I hope you are not trying to tell me that I shouldn’t screw anyone on New Cambridge,” Althea complained.
“As the Spirit moves you, Althea, as the Spirit moves you—as always. I’m just saying that it’s not official OSI policy.”
Gloria turned to look at Enright, the OSI Administrator. “Grant,” she said, “I couldn’t help noticing that it’s crowded in here.”
Enright shrugged. “It’s the biggest conference room we have,” he said.
“Get a bigger one,” Gloria told him. “If we are going to be the Fifth Quadrant, we need to look the part. When I get back from New Cambridge, I expect OSI to have twice the office space it does now. Beg, barter, or bully, as necessary, but get it done.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And once we have all that new office space, we’re going to need bodies to fill it. I want you to get us a dozen new Fifteens. Bring them in straight out of training and we’ll raise ’em up right. Also, review all the transfer requests—I know we have a lot of them. See if you can snag half a dozen good Fourteens and maybe a couple of Thirteens.”
“How are we going to pay for all those people? There’s nothing in our budget for anything like that.”
“Initially, we can pay them out of contingency funds. But you’re right; we’ll have to start submitting Resource Allocation Amendments. I know you’ve got friends in the Comptroller’s Office. Wine and dine them, call in old favors, renew old threats. Whatever it takes.”
Gloria turned from Enright and looked around the room at the rest of her people. “What I want,” she said, “is for all of you to analyze the overall structure of Dexta. Look into some of the more obscure and neglected corners of the organization. Office of Weights and Measures, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Exo-Technology Review. Did you know that there is such a thing as the Dexta Ornithological Survey? I want you to identify all the bureaucratic orphans you can find and invite them to join the OSI family. We’ll absorb some of their functions, promise to support them in their core missions, and offer them an ally in the never-ending battle against the tyranny of the Quadrants. There are a lot of offices in Dexta that are not under Quadrant jurisdiction. Consequently, they have little power in intramural squabbles and get rolled by the Quads at budget time. They’re used to that and most of them don’t even bother to fight back. But if we can get them organized and aligned with us and each other, they’ll gain a lot of clout—at least, that’s going to be our sales pitch.”
“Hey, Gloria?” someone at the back of the room said. “It might help a lot if we could promise all these people some…uh…personal attention from the head of OSI.”
“Good idea. Start scheduling lunches for after my return from New Cambridge. In fact, I think I’ll throw a party at my penthouse and invite all our new allies and recruits. Drop some hints about that. Be sure to mention my deep, personal gratitude to everyone who helps us. And it wouldn’t hurt to remind them that I’m an Avatar of Joy now.” She grinned at her troops. “Never can tell what might happen with an Avatar of Joy!”
Grant Enright smiled along with everyone else, but shook his head. “I’m with you on this, Gloria,” he said, “but I hope you realize what you’re getting us into. This is nothing less than an attempt at an internal coup. A power play.”
“Grant,” Gloria said, “we don’t have any choice. It’s a fight we have to make. OSI either grows, or it dies. Think of it as our manifest destiny.”
“Manifest destiny,” Enright mused. “All right, then, manifest destiny it is. When do we invade Mexico?”
THE DEXTA OFFICE COMPLEX ON NEW CAMBRIDGE was a dark, massive structure built out of native rock. It dominated the skyline in downtown Central so thoroughly that the residents referred to it as “Gibraltar”—complete with a colony of baboons inhabiting it. The baboons, Petra and Pug discovered, were not friendly.
After a day of settling in and sightseeing, they approached the Dexta offices with a sense of eager anticipation. They reported to the Regional Office Administrator, or tried to, but soon found that no one was available to see them. It took them most of the morning to track down someone who could officially, if reluctantly, acknowledge their presence on New Cambridge.
“We want to examine old Quadrant records from fifty or sixty years ago,” Petra explained to the administrator.
“Is that so?” said the administrator.
“Yes. Where can we work?”
“You’ll have to find a spot.”
“Can you recommend something?”
The administrator blandly shook his head. “Not really.”
“Well, who can?” Pug asked.
“You’d need to talk to someone in Building Management.”
But no one in Building Management seemed to want to talk to them. Another hour went by before someone’s assistant deputy provided them with the necessary forms to be filled out. Forms completed, Petra and Pug waited expectantly to be assigned office space. They waited more than two hours. Finally, the assistant deputy’s assistant told them to come back the next day.
The following day, after more hours of frustration, they were at last assigned an office. On closer inspection, the office turned out to be a utility closet. It was equipped with two desks, but no chairs, windows, or computers. Getting the computers took the rest of the day. They couldn’t do anything about windows, but they did manage to steal two chairs.
On the third day they arrived early, ready to plunge into their assignment. It was a short plunge. They found that their computers could not access the necessary records. No explanation was immediately forthcoming. They spent most of the day finding someone who could (and would) speak to them on the subject.
“You want records from 3163?” asked a bored administrative coordinator.
“Yes!” cried Petra.
“Don’t have ’em.”
“What the hell do you mean you don’t have them?” Pug exploded. “How could you not have them? The Quadrant Administration offices were right here in this building for over four hundred years. How could those records not exist?”
“Didn’t say they didn’t exist,” the administrative coordinator responded. “Said we ain’t got ’em.”
“Well, who does?”
“Lessee…3163, you say?”
“Yes.”
“That would be over in the Archives Section. Everything up to 3180 is there. That’s when Mingus moved Quad Administration back to Earth, you know.”
“So the records would be in the Archives Section’s computers?” said Petra. “How do we tap into them?”
“You don’t. Not from this building, anyway. Archives Section is a whole separate deal. Just down the block from here, in the Old Annex. Can’t miss it.”
Three days later, Petra and Pug at last settled in to begin their research in another utility closet in the Old Annex. They had uniformly been treated with opaque courtesy and bland indifference by the local Dexta staff, who regarded them not as plague-carriers, perhaps, but certainly as people who carried an unpleasant odor about them. For the first time, Petra understood at a visceral level why so many people throughout the Empire passionately hated Dexta.
She wanted to believe that Dexta got it right most of the time, and most of the time, it probably did. For all its flaws, shortcomings, overreaching, and outright idiocy, Dexta had somehow managed to keep the Empire humming for nearly seven hundred years. Dexta was the most successful bureaucracy in history, so it had to have been doing something right.
But successful or not, it was nevertheless still a bureaucracy, and dealing with it could be a nightmare for the citizens of the Empire. One way in which Dexta served the Empire was by functioning as a lightning rod for all the many resentments of the scattered masses, which would otherwise have focused on the Emperor. Whatever was wrong, it was Dexta’s fault, not the Emperor’s, who stood above the hurly-burly bureaucracy and thought only of what was best for his people. It was generally understood that Dexta thought only of what was best for Dexta.
The radicals of PAIN sought to exploit the popular displeasure with Dexta, but with little success, mainly owing to their anarchist agenda. Their ideological blinders seemed to prevent them from seeing that most people had little interest in overthrowing the established order. What they really wanted was simply a validated tax stamp or an export waiver, processed and delivered with minimum fuss and bother. PAIN’s recent campaign of attacks on Dexta facilities throughout Quad 4 (there had been two more incidents in the past week) had inspired no mass uprisings, only cries for better security.
Still, whatever their political shortcomings, PAIN operatives had at least succeeded in laying their hands on a trove of plasma rifles that had supposedly been destroyed fifty-five years earlier. Now that they finally had access to the Archive Section’s computers (not to mention desks and chairs), Petra and Pug went to work with a will. Petra began tracking the rifles from their point of orgin in the munitions factories on Ostwelt, while Pug pored over the records of shippers, warehouses, and port facilities.
It soon became apparent that the Quadrant’s data storage system had been designed for the convenience of contemporary bureaucrats, not for historical researchers in some nebulous future. Finding what they needed was neither quick nor easy. The computer could call up specific documents, but only by their titles and dates, which Petra and Pug didn’t know. They could zero in on a general place, date, or bureaucratic cubbyhole, but after that they mainly had to inspect every document in a file to see if it was what they were looking for. Eventually, they accumulated enough information to give the computer more specific instructions, and things began to go faster.
The Mark IV plasma rifles, twenty-four thousand of them, were manufactured on Ostwelt by Thor’s Forge, Inc., a division of Imperium Ltd. The shipment earmarked for Savoy was lifted to the Ostwelt Orbital Station on June 22, 3163, loaded aboard a Trans-Empire freighter, and departed for New Cambridge on June 25. The freighter arrived at New Cambridge Orbital Station on August 2 and unloaded the rifles in an orbital warehouse owned by Stavros & Sons, Inc. On August 24, the rifles were loaded aboard another freighter as part of a larger shipment of military supplies, and departed for Savoy on August 27. Since no records were available from Savoy, it was unknown whether the shipment ever actually arrived there. The freighter should have reached Savoy on September 4. The Ch’gnth attacked on September 8. The freighter was not heard from again and was presumed to have been lost in the Ch’gnth attack. An insurance claim for the missing freighter was filed by its owner, B & Q Shipping, Inc., in March 3165, and the claim was paid in full by Centron Assurance, Ltd., a subsidiary of Servitor, in December 3167.
“So we don’t know for sure that the rifles ever reached Savoy,” Pug pointed out that evening as they sat before a blazing fire in one of the industrial-sized stone hearths that populated the Ellison family home. “Maybe they didn’t.”
“Which would make sense,” said Petra as she scrunched around a bit to get comfortable in Pug’s embrace. “Presumably, if they reached Savoy, they would have been destroyed, along with everything else.”
“But the freighter never came back,” Pug said. “If it didn’t go to Savoy, where did it go, and why didn’t it return?”
“There was a lot of other stuff in that shipment. Maybe if we knew what it was and where it came from, that might tell us something.”
Pug nodded. “We’ll need to check records from the warehouse, and lading bills from the shipper. So we’ll have to track down B & Q Shipping and Stavros & Sons and go through their records.”
“Also,” Petra said, “we should get the Dexta documentation dealing with this shipment. Who put the shipment together, who authorized it, who accepted it at New Cambridge, who cleared transfer to Savoy? Fifty-five years isn’t such a long time—some of the people who were involved with that shipment might still be around.”
They fell silent for a while and listened to the crackling of the fire. Then Pug said, “I’ll tell you what worries me about all of this.”
“Me too.”
“Me too, what?” Pug wanted to know.
“What worries you,” said Petra. “Me too. It worries me too.”
“But you don’t even know what I was going to say.”
Petra twisted around to get a better look at Pug. “Sure I do,” she said.
“You mean it’s gotten to the point where you can read my thoughts?”
Petra cackled like a villainess.
“Okay, Ms. Know-It-All, tell me what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking that you were worried about the fact that there were twenty-four thousand rifles in that shipment, plus all that other stuff.”
“Yeah,” Pug said, “that was it, all right. If PAIN has some of the rifles, then maybe it has all of them. And the other stuff. They could have enough military hardware to equip a couple of infantry divisions. That’s what worries me.”
“Me too,” said Petra.