Spheres of Influence-eARC (41 page)

Tom’s eyes suddenly narrowed in consternation. “Oh, no—”

“Oh, yes. Thomas Cussler, you are the perfect choice. Heck, you’ve already
taken
the position. I just have to give it a name and make it official. Then you’ll have the authority you’ll need to make the decisions stick when people start thinking they can just go off and do things their own way.”

Tom rolled his eyes, but then nodded. “Yes, I guess I can’t argue with the idea…and truth be told, I really wouldn’t feel comfortable turning over control of this little community to anyone else—at least anyone outside of our little group.” He looked pointedly down the dark side corridor. “But—just to be completely frank—are
you
going to have the authority to make
that
stick? Because I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to fight you on that kind of decision.”

“That’s what I’m coming back to make sure of, Tom,” Ariane answered, and she was gratified to see that he smiled at the words. “With what’s happened in the Arena, and now—we find out from DuQuesne and Oasis—back home, we can’t afford any more screwups.

“They didn’t take me seriously.
I
didn’t take me seriously, and while
we
came out of it well, hundreds…no,
thousands
of other people died because of that failure on our part; the fact that those other people were at the time my enemies doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that if I had kept my eye on things, they wouldn’t have
been
my enemies and we wouldn’t have
had
to kill them. That kind of fumbling around stops
now
.”

Tom nodded. “Glad to hear it. If you have a way of pulling that off, that is.”

DuQuesne chuckled darkly. “Oh, I think we do.”

Chapter 51.

“And what, exactly, do I get from this if I cooperate?”

Oscar Naraj’s voice wasn’t truculent or hostile; as DuQuesne had rather expected, it was completely controlled, a man asking a simple question. Oscar’s glance was focused mostly on Ariane, but did take in DuQuesne, Oasis, Wu Kung, Simon, and Gabrielle, who were the others on board “Arena Transfer Shuttle #3.” The others were staying this time; Laila had looked slightly wistful at the thought of returning, but had chosen to stay rather than discover what might happen to her when she returned and three AISages woke up in a mind that might be far too different from the one they had known.

Ariane smiled very coldly at Oscar. “Not a pardon and not off the hook, if that’s what you’re hoping.” The smile warmed—
just enough to take it from absolute zero to dry ice, but hey, that’s a couple hundred degrees.
“You claim you did not direct what happened to me, and did not want such tactics. You’ve been
acting
like you think you may have screwed up. If you cooperate—
exactly
—I might start to believe you’re more valuable as an asset than as an example.
That
is what you might—and let me stress that word,
might
—be able to get out of this
.
”

Naraj studied her wordlessly for several minutes. DuQuesne could see conflicting tensions in his muscles.
But it’s his decision to make alone
. Ni Deng was locked up in her own separate cell on the shuttle ship; this was Oscar Naraj’s play.

“Very well,” Oscar said after another moment. “I will send the message as you direct, complete with my own key codes and verifications. I am not quite sure what you expect this to accomplish.”

“You’ll also send the appropriate signals to any allies who
aren’t
in the SSC, CSF, or their Arena Research Division—exactly the signals you’d send if you were returning after completely successful negotiations according to
your
standards,” Ariane said. “And if you’ve come to respect us as you claim, I hope you understand that if you
do
try to slip something by, there’s a good chance we’ll catch you right there, and a certainty we’ll catch you out sooner or later—with ‘sooner’ being the way to bet.”

Somewhat to DuQuesne’s surprise, Oscar gave a genuine smile. “Captain Austin, I most
certainly
recognize that. I understand your hostility—and it is deserved—but I hope you realize that I am not an utter fool. I see that your general plan is complete surprise, and to this end I will indeed cooperate fully.”

Ariane looked at him, then the others. “What do you all think?”

Wu Kung nodded. “He wasn’t actually smelling very twisty at all there.”

Oscar failed to suppress a start.

“Yeah, Wu is something of a lie detector. Since you’re always planning
something
he was never sure which way you were jumping, but he was always suspicious of you and Ni Deng, even when the rest of us were starting to relax,” DuQuesne said, grinning. “I’d say go, Ariane.”

The others agreed as well. Ariane nodded. “All right, then everything’s set. DuQuesne?”

“Console’s unlocked. Send away, Mr. Ambassador.”

Naraj concentrated; DuQuesne observed the heavily encrypted traffic streaming to the recording system of the message torpedo. Wu Kung was close by, and DuQuesne could just make out his breathing—heavier, as he carefully scented Naraj for any sign of duplicity in this operation.

“Done,” Naraj announced after a moment. “If you send that torpedo through, it will transmit the appropriate messages. They will then be expecting me at the monthly meeting, and my other allies will not be prepared for you to crash the party, so to speak.” He looked at her curiously. “I admit to not knowing exactly
what
you plan to do. I can see you making a fairly forceful showing, but if I understand what you need to achieve correctly, you will need some sort of additional leverage beyond that which I am aware of.”

“Yes. I will.” She turned to Oasis. “Put the ambassador in his room and lock it.”

Once he was gone, Ariane sighed and sank into one of the shuttle’s chairs. “How sure are we about what he just did? Could you read what he sent?”

DuQuesne shook his head. “Wouldn’t do us any good even if I could. There’s no way to tell if he had personally agreed-upon codes that would allow him to send innocuous-sounding messages to people that actually tipped them off to something being hinky. But I’m going with Wu’s instincts and his sense of smell. Naraj’s a cool customer, a Big Time Operator if there ever was one, but I don’t believe he could’ve stayed completely calm while trying to slip one by both me and Wu, with both of us practically standing right over him. He’d have gotten nervous.
Real
nervous.”

“All right, then. Send it, Simon.”

At Dr. Sandrisson’s direction, the message torpedo dropped away from the docked Arena shuttle and flew off to the safe minimum distance before winking out of existence in a quick double-ended flare of light.

“So,” Oasis said, returning from her mission, “how long before
we
go?”

“If our timing information is correct, the meeting should be gathering now. I’m going to pilot us over to the corresponding location. Simon, have you determined the best accuracy I can expect with the Sandrisson Conversion?”

“I have. Theoretical minimum accuracy—assuming ideal cases—is roughly three kilometers in normal space. If you were to transition out and back immediately, in other words, you could end up anywhere within a three-kilometer radius volume of where you started. Practically speaking, given your piloting skill, the coil designs, and such, I would not expect better than a three hundred kilometer accuracy. For this purpose, you need to consider
this
point,” he marked a specific location slightly behind the central point inside the Shuttle’s main body, “as the center of the craft and the point from which you will judge the transition location.”

“So that’s about…one meter distance in terms of the Orrery?”

“Correct.”

Ariane grinned. “Now this will be fun. Everyone strapped in?”

Oasis sat down and locked herself into a seat. “Now we are!”

DuQuesne watched as Ariane took the shuttle out smoothly, heading towards the near-center of the Harbor.
Piloting is her real element, even if she’s now found her real
calling
, so to speak
.

Watching her helped deal with the loss and strain of the past few days. It didn’t
erase
DuQuesne’s pain—nothing but time would reduce that burning guilt and anger—but seeing that they were
doing
something certainly aided him in pushing the problem to the back of his mind for a while.

“Mind if I ask something, Ariane?” Oasis’ voice was hesitant.

“Oasis, I’m never going to mind if you
ask
. I may or may not
answer
.”

“Right.” The redhead smiled brightly. “Well, it’s what Naraj said. What’s the plan? Those guys on the SSC and CSF, except for Saul and his group—they’re going to be kinda hard to push around, and what you need to get out of them…
whew!
” She made a gesture of wiping sweat off her brow. “That’s gonna be one heck of a trick, you know? So…what
have
you got up your sleeve?”

Ariane smiled, the expression visible from the side and audible in her voice. “Well, remember, Oscar knows we
survived
that betrayal. He hasn’t got a clue as to what we
got
out of it.”

“Oh,
duh
. You’ll be able to point out we’ve got three Spheres now.”

“That’s one biggie, yes. And if I get the timing on the messages right, they also won’t have a good grasp of just how strong our defenses are now. Thanks to Tom, they won’t be able to make a good case that I’ve messed
that
up. And…” she trailed off.

“And…?”

The grin became the savage, killer-instinct smile whose razor-edged danger DuQuesne found irresistably attractive. “And I have a trump card that I just figured out how to play last night.”

She didn’t say any more, and it was obvious that she wasn’t discussing this part of her strategy.
Okay. She’s trying to prove she can do this on her own, and I’ve got to let her do it. And my gut says she
can
.

But I’ll be ready to back her up just in case, anyway.

As they approached the target area, Simon projected the location of Kanzaki-Three into everyone’s perceptions, but especially to Ariane. “There is the location. You
must
center on it very carefully, or else—”

“—or else we may materialize somewhere we don’t want to,” she said with a sharp grin, “like maybe
inside
Kanzaki-Three?”

Simon looked at her with an expression of puzzled exasperation. “I don’t
believe
that it will allow you to materialize inside another physical object—the spacetime exclusion principle tends to forbid it—but I would not care to
test
that belief with my life.”

Ariane slowed the shuttle to a crawl, jockying it around with delicate adjustments of the attitude jets. After a few moments, DuQuesne could see displayed before him the ghostly shape of the shuttle with the brilliant green dot of Simon’s derived “transition central point” slowly approaching a red dot—the point nominally one meter to the zenith of the location of Kanzaki-Three.

“Don’t you want to give us a little
margin
, Ariane?” Simon said tensely. “After all, if I’m a bit off—”

“Oh,
live
a little, Simon!” she said, as the red dot touched the green. “After all—”

Blazing rainbow light flared around them.

“—what could go—well, look at that!”

Kanzaki-Three loomed immense in the forward viewport, scarcely ten kilometers distant.

“Perfect piloting, Ariane,” DuQuesne said.
And lucky. Funny, that
. “Even if you were a bit cavalier about the approach.”

“Great
Kami
, Ariane, you cut that…too fine!” Simon murmured, staring.

DuQuesne grinned at Simon’s momentary discomfiture. His headware sensed Ariane turn control over to the slightly-peeved Kanzaki-Three local control for landing. “But it got us in very close; short enough that I’m now sure we can keep the lid on until we actually enter.”

“Any changes in the basic plan?” Gabrielle asked.

“No, not as long as you can establish communications with—”

“I’ve already got Vincent on my comm. Simon?”

“Mio has responded and understands the situation. Mentor is standing by. Entrance will be clear. As far as anyone can tell, this is a fairly routine meeting with the additional importance that the ambassador has returned and will be addressing the Council and the Arena Research Division directly. No sign that there is any other untoward activity.”

Ariane nodded. “All right, then.

“Here we go.”

Chapter 52.

Ariane stopped, only one door away from the Council Room. The others looked at her; she tried to look unconcerned, but inside, she realized she was
terrified
.

No, not now! I can’t afford this! Dammit!

But it was there, at this eleventh-hour moment; fear that she was making a terrible, terrible mistake, that she
couldn’t
pull this off even if it wasn’t a mistake, that—despite the treacherous way she’d done it—Michelle had been
right
to try to get her out of the way.

She swallowed, and there was suddenly a hand on her arm.

Simon looked into her eyes. “It’s all right, Ariane. We’re all behind you.” The brilliant green eyes were filled with absolute confidence, a certainty that she desperately needed.

“You’re
sure,
Simon?” she asked softly.

“We’re
all
sure, Captain,” DuQuesne said, now on her other side, his ebony gaze reinforcing Simon’s with calm and massive competence. “Now
you
have to be. I know you’re wondering, again, if you’re
really
right about all this—”

“— but that’s pretty much why we’re sure you
are
,” Gabrielle said emphatically. “So long as you’re still doubtin’ yourself sometimes, you’ll still be who you are—and that’s who we need.”

“
PRECISELY CORRECT, GABRIELLE WOLFE OF TELLUS,”
thundered a familiar voice. “
IT IS THE ESSENCE OF WHO SHE IS THAT MAKES ARIANE AUSTIN THE CORRECT CHOICE FOR THIS MOST VITAL OF TASKS.”

“Mentor?” Despite the support of all her friends—
and all very dear to me now
—there was no voice in the universe she wanted to hear more right now. “Where—”

Look to your right, next to the doorframe,
the voice spoke with subdued power through her short-range link.
It was clear within my Visualization that you would use this pathway, and therefore arranged to have my case placed here.

“You have
no
idea how glad I am to see you!” Ariane reached down and picked up the case that had accompanied her for most of her adult life—and quite a few years before. As Mentor’s case
clicked
into place on her belt, she felt everything else click into place as well.
I don’t want to see us go the way of the Blessed…but having constant companions like Mentor is not something I want us to give up, either.

“Okay, everyone. I’m ready.” She took a deep breath, glanced around, and strode forward, DuQuesne and Simon flanking her, Gabrielle in the middle, and Oasis and Wu bringing up the rear.

The Council Chamber doors slid open. The woman speaking—
representative of Mars, I think
—suddenly stopped, and a hush fell over the entire assembly.

“Pardon me, Mr. Chairman,” Ariane said, and heard her voice amplified around the room.
Good work, Mentor.

I am in fact being assisted by Vincent and Mio. Excellent partners.

Then good work to all of you.

Saul Maginot stood slowly. “We had expected Ambassador Naraj…” he began. She could see a twinkle in his eyes that said, as clearly as though he’d spoken,
but you’re what I was
hoping
for.

“I apologize for misleading you,” she said, deliberately injecting barely any apologetic tone into the statement. “But I had, and have, reason to prefer to speak without any opportunity for anyone else to prepare. Mentor,” she raised her voice slightly, “is the Council secure?”

“IT IS SECURE,” Mentor replied, shaking the room with the three words.

“Good. No transmissions out, no transmissions in. And since these councils are now almost all face-to-face, I believe that still gives me the opportunity to speak to most of you.”

“Sealed off…what the
hell
do you think you’re doing,
Captain
Austin?” demanded a woman with green and blue hair and the bearing of a military officer.
General Jill Esterhauer, formerly head of Inner System Security, now Earth Defense Force coordinator,
Mentor informed her. Ariane remembered her vaguely—she’d commented on the need for patrols above the Upper Sphere, as Ariane recalled, back in that first meeting after their return.

“Correcting a mistake I made some time ago, General,” Ariane answered. She strode to the central podium; she could see the speaker from Mars briefly consider arguing with her, then immediately changing her mind. The others stayed back a ways, except for Wu, who followed her like a brightly-colored shadow.

“A…mistake, Captain?” Dean Stout asked mildly.

“A mistake that very nearly cost us…possibly everything, Councillor.”

She looked around slowly at the hundred or so faces—
many curious, some amused, several angry, others…cautious.
Then she set her jaw.
Here we go.

“A few weeks ago, I was kidnapped by the Blessed to Serve.”

The council stared at her blankly for a moment, then murmurs began to grow into shouts.

“
QUIET!
”

The shout shook the walls, echoed around the room three times, and only slowly faded; in the momentary silence, she thought she heard a slight chuckle from Wu Kung. “I expect I’ll be answering all your questions eventually. But I’m telling this my way, and you are all going to listen—because a hell of a lot depends on it.

“Yes, I was kidnapped. Right off the Docks, into one of their flagships, and on course to travel straight to their homeworld, where the
best
I could hope for would be death. Fortunately,” she let her first, very nasty, smile out, “that didn’t quite work out the way they planned.

“But the worst part of that was that it wasn’t the
Blessed
who had planned it all. That was done—
as some of you in this room already know
—by Deputy Ambassador Michelle Ni Deng.”

“My God!” Saul said involuntarily. “Are you—”

“I am not merely
sure
, Commander Maginot, I have absolute
proof
; records from the Blessed themselves tracing her negotiations with Vantak, then the second in command of the Blessed, and her attempt to collect on the bargain with Sethrik—who had been kidnapped along with me because the Minds believed that he was no longer entirely reliable.”

The Council was now utterly silent; shock was written clearly on most faces, but a few seemed…wary.
And maybe you should be
.

“All the evidence will be delivered—along with Ni Deng herself—shortly,” she went on. “But I’m not here to discuss her crime, at least not right now.

“The problem is that in many ways this is my fault.”

One of the other Councillors—
Jeremaiah Britt, CSF Logistics Division
, Mentor noted for her—stirred at that. “I beg your pardon, Captain. How is this horrible event—assuming it is true—your fault?”

“Because I let you saddle me with an appointed pair of ambassadors in the first place,” she said grimly. “Because I let you shove me back into the Arena while you kept trying to do ‘business as usual’ here. Because—honestly? I really didn’t
want
to be running things and in my heart I was hoping something would just come along and make it so I didn’t have to.”

“
Let
us?” The outburst came from a indeterminately-gendered representative of Ganymede Colony identified by Mentor as White Camilla. “You may be designated head of Faction by this Arena—something which certainly
does
need to be changed—but
here
you are a thrill-racing pilot who’s never even—”

“
That,
” Ariane snapped, putting as much steel into her voice as possible, “is
exactly
the attitude I thought I’d get from some of you. And it’s going to get us all
killed
.”

Ariane shoved all her uncertainty back, focused, let her anger come
forward
, the fury she felt at the betrayal some of these people had
known
about, and took one more deep breath. And
just
as some of the others were about to speak, she allowed herself to cut loose.

“Yes,
killed
, wiped out, exterminated! You’ve seen the files, you’ve watched the simulations. The Molothos aren’t playing games out there. They’re not some sim villains you can turn off, and they’re not stuck in the Arena, either. They’re out there, somewhere not too far away—even by real-space standards.”

There was a murmur, and she put a faintly patronizing smile on her face. “Oh, some of you didn’t get that? They travelled through Arenaspace to our Sphere. They’ve colonized
somewhere
not too far away—maybe as close as Alpha Centauri.”

“Captain Austin,” said a respectful tenor voice; the speaker was a man with an impressive white-streaked beard—
Political Simulation Director Robert Fenelon
, Mentor informed her. “Captain,” he continued when she nodded, “while I am not
terribly
competent in the technical areas, my AISage informs me that our current wide-baseline imaging telescopes would be able to resolve objects down to a meter in size in systems that close. That would seem to exclude the possibility of any significant installations in the Alpha Centauri system or, indeed, any relatively close systems at all.”

“Director Fenelon, that would be completely true if all else were equal; unfortunately, we have very good reason to believe things are
not
equal—some of which we discussed in the
last
major meeting I had with all of you. In short, we have evidence that the Arena’s reach is not entirely limited to Arenaspace.” Quickly she summarized DuQuesne’s prior observations and some of the other related facts they had learned. “So, honestly speaking, there is
no
reason to believe that we can trust our own telescopes much past the borders of our solar system, at least for things at the detail level of whether there’s people in the target systems.”

“It should be noted that this fits with the Arena’s basic
modus operandi
,” Simon spoke up. “There are numerous ways in which one can interpret the
purpose
of the Arena’s actions, but it is clear that one of the constant effects is to keep people separated in normal space, barring truly impressive efforts, and to force them to meet
in
the Arena. This also enforces that requirement; if you wish to find out if you have neighbors in your local stellar region, you either have to mount a fully manned expedition through normal space, or find your way to them through Arenaspace. The latter, though far from trivial or without danger, is still much easier than sending a major expedition across stellar distances at slower-than-light speeds.”

“Thank you, Simon,” she said. “Which leads us to this: it is in Arenaspace that we will almost certainly have our initial clash—and perhaps the majority of our battles will be fought there. And we are
hideously
outnumbered and outgunned. No one knows how many Spheres the Molothos control, but the number is
certainly
in the thousands—and that is
full
control. They are well-known for travelling through Arenaspace and colonizing the Upper Spheres of unclaimed systems—as they attempted to do to ours, before DuQuesne and Carl Edlund kicked them off. There is absolutely
no
firm guess as to how many Upper Spheres they currently have colonized, but it is probably in the tens of thousands—and each one of those is the equivalent of a planet the size of Earth. I don’t think we can even
begin
to understand the level of resources that represents.

“That doesn’t mean that it’s a hopeless cause. We have some advantages, and we’re already digging in. We have a significant number of Arena-designed warships already, lent to us by Orphan of the Liberated—and those designs are being looked over by the defense SFGs even as we speak. There are now orbital guard fortresses near each of the Sky Gates, and ground defenses being installed. We also are not without allies.

“
BUT
,” she raised her voice, and Mentor made it rumble around the room like thunder, “
but
there is one thing we absolutely
cannot
afford, and that is a division—a rift—between Arenaspace and our home solar system. I have
no
doubt that a lot of you have had the exact same sentiments as Representative Camilla—that I can go play toy boss off in this ‘Arena’ place, but otherwise I should let the professionals handle it.

“That’s not going to happen. Not any more.”

Saul stood slowly. “I beg your pardon, Captain?”

“I’m saying that I can’t—that
humanity
can’t—afford to have this division between who’s in charge, not when we’re staring straight into the claws of the Molothos—and who knows what else. So until such time as a good replacement, a
damn
good replacement, is available, I am going to be
it
. I am the Leader of the Faction of Humanity, and you are going to
confirm
that, and you are going to
follow my lead
, because this
whole
game’s played by the Arena’s rules. Even here, even in our home system. And by those rules, there is
one
Leader for this Faction, and you are looking at her.”

“That’s…preposterous,” Representative Camilla said, echoed by several others—
a lot of the ones looking wary before
. Ariane could see that Saul’s face was very guarded.
He’s on our side, so he’s playing to the crowd.
“You can’t declare yourself…ruler of Humanity.”

“I’m not the one doing the declaring,” she corrected. “The Arena decided I was the boss. And I spent time trying to get away from that—time that got me kidnapped and could have lost us more than you can imagine.

“I was damn tempted to give it up right there when I realized how badly I’d screwed up, but you know what? The person who’d replace me is someone you’d want
less
in that position. And—just by the way—the first thing you’re all going to do in confirming my position is to confirm my line of succession, so that
if
something happens to me, we’ll still have someone with a clue running things in the Arena.”

“Why should we do that at all?” General Esterhauer asked bluntly. “Why shouldn’t we simply declare someone else our Leader, if necessary?”