A Dark and Hungry God Arises (3 page)

For a moment the out-going blip blurred slightly as navigational transmission shifted from one buoy to the next. In another hour, Trumpet would reach her assigned gap range - considerably closer to Earth than other ships were allowed, but well within the priority zone restricted for the UMCP's use. Then she would be gone. And Warden would have to live with the outcome.

Min adjusted her weight slightly; her fingers stroked the butt of the handgun she carried everywhere. Warden suspected that she wore her impact pistol to bed. Without lifting her eyes from the screens, she asked quietly, 'Do you really think this is going to work?'

He glanced over at her. The strictness of her mouth never altered; her jet hair had been marked by exactly those streaks of gray ever since she'd become his most valued assistant. Her gaze was hot enough to scorch men with less iron in their souls — or less scar tissue.

In an oddly impersonal way, he loved her. More personally, he respected her moral clarity, her loyalty to her people in ED; her commitment to the law and power which preserved the fragile integrity of human space.

Years ago those qualities used to swell his heart. Now they made him grieve.

Because he was grieving, he was less cautious than he should have been. 'I think, ' he replied, 'if it doesn't the Dragon is going to force me to commit seppuku. '

That brought her around to face him. Her eyes burned into his - the artificial orb behind its patch and the human one. Her whole body blazed with infrared emissions. Then why are you doing it?'

'Min-' No question about it: he should have been more circumspect; should never have given her this opening. She was already in enough danger, simply because she was the Enforcement Division director - and honest.

What do you suppose my choices are?'

'You could send me, ' she said promptly, tightly. 'Or you could let me put together a team. Instead of sending out a cyborg and a traitor, not to mention sacrificing Morn Hyland' - Min was not a woman who feared to speak her mind - 'you could have let somebody you trust try to do both jobs. Put Billingate out of business and rescue Morn.

'It's suicide to leave her there, ' she pursued before he could respond. The Amnion might get their hands on her. And she doesn't deserve to be abandoned like that.

She doesn't deserve to just be put out of her misery along with that shipyard. If you think Angus and Milos are too chancy to rescue her' - Min's tone was acid; her body, the color of mineral acid - 'if you think asking them to pull her out is too complex, try something else. Let me organize a team. Or go myself. '

Abruptly she stopped. Dios could see the flux of tension along her jaw as she bit down on the other things she was tempted to say.

'Because, ' he replied falsely, hiding his sorrow, 'she doesn't matter now. I don't care whether you understand or not. And I don't care how much it hurts to let go of her. Only Angus and Milos matter. Everything depends on them. If I give them a reason to fail - if I make their job too difficult by ordering them to rescue Morn - they might as well not go at all. '

And if they fail us, we're doomed.

Min must have known that she couldn't conceal her distress from him. Nevertheless she turned her head away so that he couldn't see her eyes, her expression.

He was tempted to ask, Min, do you still trust me?

Are you going to back me up? But he knew she would tell him the truth — for reasons which had nothing to do with his ability to distinguish lies — so he allowed her to keep her answers private. She had that right. Instead he took his next step along the path of culpability and sacrifice that he'd chosen for himself.

There's something I want you to do for me, ' he told her. 'It can't come from me, but it's got to be done. '

She waited without moving.

Stirling a sigh, Warden asked, 'Have we got any supporters on the Governing Council — I mean, supporters who are also opponents of the UMC? I should know the answer, but I have a hard time forcing myself to think about things like this. '

He read her puzzlement as she thought. After a moment she inquired, 'Are you talking about a bloc of votes? Or individual votes?'

'Individuals. Council members. '

She let out a breath like a small snort. Facing him again, she said, 'Captain Vertigus. '

Warden Dios raised his eyebrows to convey the impression that he was surprised. Captain Sixten Vertigus, commander of the SMI probe ship Deep Star, was the first human being who had ever seen an Amnioni.

'He must be all of ninety by now, ' Min went on,

'but he's still able to sit up straight while the rest of the Council natters. By seniority, at any rate, he's the senior member for the United Western Bloc, but he doesn't wield any real power. According to the news broadcasts, he makes periodic speeches denouncing the Dragon's "quest for UMC hegemony". On the other hand, he votes on our side whenever one of our issues comes up.

What do you want him for?'

Warden held himself perfectly still, determined to give the ED director no hint of his urgency. In a steady, conversational tone, he answered, 'I want you to talk to him for me. I want you to convince him to introduce GCES legislation that will sever us from the UMC. We need to be a separate entity, accountable only to the Council itself- we need to be the human police, not just the Dragon's private enforcement agency. I want him to put a bill of severance in front of the GCES, and I want him to do it now. ''

The colors shining from Min's form told Warden that she'd been waiting a long time to hear him say something like this.

'Get everything ready yourself, ' he continued. 'Lay it all out for him. Convince him to put all of his personal prestige, all of his experience, all of his passion behind it. '

He knew Sixten Vertigus to be a man of considerable passion. Otherwise he wouldn't have violated Holt Fasner's direct orders by making personal contact with the Amnion.

'And don't let him get bogged down by details. Write the bill for him if you have to. The big thing he'll want to know - what all the members will want to know - is how we'll be financed. What kind of revenue source can take the place of the UMC coffers. The answer is, tax every company that does any kind of business in space.

Most of the money will still come from the UMC. But if we're separately constituted, if we're an independent branch of the government instead of an arm of the UMC, we'll be able to function the way cops should.

'I want that bill in front of the GCES within forty-eight hours. '

Before Holt learns what's happening on Thanatos Minor.

Min's eyes shone like her aura. Facing him straight, she said softly, The Dragon will never let you get away with it. For one thing, he has the votes to stop you. And when he finds out what you're up to, he'll consider it a betrayal. He's still your boss. He has the corporate authority — as well as the personal clout — to fire you. '

Slowly the director of the UMCP smiled. That's why the whole business is absolutely confidential. If Godsen or even Hashi hears one word about this - if anybody except you, me, and Captain Vertigus so much as smells the truth - all of it, ' all of us, maybe all of humanity, 'will be wasted.

'In fact, it's essential to keep me out of it entirely. Even Captain Vertigus can't know it's my idea. As far as he's concerned, it comes from you. I want him to do it because he believes in it, not because he thinks I'm trying to outmaneuver Holt. '

Min nodded once, sharply. 'Director-' she began, Warden -' But she had to think for a moment or two before she said, 'I'm not going to ask you what this has to do with sending Angus and Milos against Billingate.

But I am going to. ask you to watch your back. You could get killed playing a game like this. '

'Min, Min' - Warden spread his hands in a gesture of humorous helplessness - 'he's only a Dragon. He isn't God. '

She wasn't amused. 'No, and you aren't either. I bet you might even bleed if he cut your heart out. I bet —'

She might have gone on: she was charged with her own passion, and had too few outlets for it. But she was interrupted by a timid knock at the CO Room door.

The door slid open without permission. One of Center's communications techs, looking pale and more than a little apprehensive, ventured her head into the room.

'Director?'

Instinctively irritated, Warden wanted to snarl at her, Don't be such a damn sheep. When was the last time I murdered - not to mention demoted, or even reprimanded - a communications tech for simply doing her job?

He stifled the impulse, however. It was dangerous; symptomatic of a tension he couldn't afford to betray.

Smiling to disguise his vexation, he waited for the tech to explain herself.

'It's the PR director, ' she said, fumbling slightly.

'Godsen Frik. He's trying to get in touch with you. He says it's urgent. I can route it to your intercom. ' She nodded at the console in front of him.

Warden forced himself to continue smiling despite the sting of anxiety in his veins. 'Thank you, technician. '

Damned if he was going to make the effort to remember the woman's name at a time like this. 'Please tell Director Frik that he just missed me. ' When the tech hesitated, he added quietly, 'Dismissed. '

She pulled her face out of the doorway, and the door closed itself.

Min Donner didn't say anything. That was a relief.

Maybe his love for her wasn't so impersonal after all. Or maybe he was just grateful that she still trusted him enough to let him arrange his own doom without hound-ing him with questions.

She should have asked her questions. She had the right.

After all, she was his most valued assistant, his staunchest supporter; occasionally his bodyguard; sometimes his executioner. Unless he was very careful - and unless she did everything he told her to do exactly the way he told her to do it — his doom would almost certainly carry her with it, for good or ill.

That danger was one reason he grieved.

One reason among many.

Milos' scalp itched. In feet, his whole body itched. He was dirty — too dirty. He abhorred having this much grime ground into his hands and shipsuit, this much oil on his face, this much old sweat crusting in his crotch. Even as a kid, he'd been far too fastidious to let himself get into a condition like this.

He felt like he'd had excrement rubbed all over him.

That made him angrier than he'd ever been in his life.

None of this was his fault, of course. Hadn't he played straight with the United Mining Companies shit Police?

Well, hadn't he? Yes, he had. He played straight with everybody who paid him. Even Com-Mine Security, who might conceivably view the matter in another light, had no legitimate complaint against him.

Sure, he'd risked Station supplies to help Succorso trap Thermopyle - on Hashi Lebwohl's orders, not Com-Mine's — but that gamble had paid off handsomely. And once Thermopyle was in lockup Milos had done everything any deputy chief could have done to break him. If Security didn't like the results, let them blame Thermopyle, not Milos.

Milos Taverner played straight. He gave value for the money he received.

Unless his own neck was in the noose. Then he looked after his own safety and let the people who paid him take care of themselves. But no one could hold that against him. It was a pardonable human characteristic. An instinct for survival was as necessary - and as inescapable

- as the impulse to eat and drink.

It certainly didn't justify what Hashi Lebwohl - and Warden Dios, of all people! - were doing to him now.

They were forcing his neck into the noose with a vengeance.

And they had less reason to complain about him than Com-Mine did. Caught between Lebwohl's orders to keep Thermopyle silent and Security's orders to break him, Milos had satisfied the former at the expense of the latter. The fact that Angus had obstinately declined to be broken was beside the point. Milos had met DA's requirements. Neither Lebwohl nor Dios had any reason to criticize the results he'd obtained for them.

Yet here he was: sitting at Trumpet's second's station, at least nominally responsible for communications, scan, and data and damage control; about to go into tach with the same slimy illegal he'd once ambushed; about to face disaster and death in forbidden space - and not only had he been forced into this position by the very people he'd just satisfied, but he'd been forced into it dirty.

So that he would be a believable second for Captain Thermopyle, who was known on Thanatos Minor: so they said. Shit. He knew the real reason, and it had nothing to do with believability. It had to do with humiliation and control.

Milos couldn't remember a time when he hadn't understood such things.

Ever since his childhood in one of Earth's more degraded and pestilential cities, he'd been aware that the only effective way to evade the harm a guttergang might do him was to make himself valuable by passing along information about the plans and doings of some other bunch of thugs; purchase safety with other people's secrets. Then he was thought of as an important resource by the first guttergang: he was protected.

But of course that couldn't last. Eventually the second guttergang would guess what he was doing and come after him. Then the situation would be too dangerous to survive. So the only effective way to keep his skin whole was to pass information both ways: to make himself essential to both guttergangs — or to three or four, or however many there were - and to control as much as possible what the gangs knew, in order to mask his own intricate loyalties.

Yet even that wasn't enough. Guttergangs protected their sources of information - in those days, kids like Milos were called 'buggers' - but didn't respect them.

Whenever the thugs felt like it, they brutalized and tormented their buggers. Like the UMCP, they forced their buggers into dangerous and shaming tests of loyalty.

Humiliation and control.

By the time he was ten, Milos Taverner had learned how to deal with those as well.

It was amazingly easy. A word or two in the right places - not too often, not too obviously—and individual pieces of slime who degraded or scared him were destructed. Guttergangs may not have respected their buggers, but they had too much to lose by letting someone else damage their sources of information.