The Duke Of Uranium (27 page)

He thought about seeing it the day before, with the Rubahy, and wondered what Shadow on the Frost might think, seeing his species’s handiwork all over the Earth. He had said it was “much to answer for”

and yet “beautiful.” What did he, or any Rubahy, really feel about it? Did it make him proud—we almost beat you bastards— serves you right for that trick you pulled with our sun? Did it fill him with awe that his ancestors had been able to do that, whereas now a puny remnant of his species clung to a couple of frozen snowballs, far out in the dark, on sufferance of the people they had dreamed of conquering? Did it hurt him to see such wounds in a living world? Were the pocks “just there” to him, something that had happened once and had nothing to do with him? Surely not that. Surely the Rubahy had some feelings.

“The others are moving around and will be up soon,” Dujuv said, sitting down beside him. “I just

reinforced your order, so there’s some more coffee and some rolls coming. And some eggs and meat and bread and cereal. And some other stuff.”

“It’s Uncle Sib’s credit line,” Jak said, “and the good old gwont is loaded, or at least he is until we get done spending it.”

Dujuv vaulted the seatback and sat down next to Jak, comfortably spread-legged, and began unfolding the table. “How long till we get there?”

“A good part of the day, still. Late afternoon. And as close to the equator as Fermi is, it gets dark right around six. So what we want to do, I think, is talk a little bit about what we’re going to do when we get there, and then get long naps and be really up and ready, so that the moment we arrive, we’re in business.

I don’t think I want to be surprised again; ‘Getting surprised is distinctly unpleasant, and it nearly always suggests something is wrong with you,’ as Uncle Sib is so fond of saying.”

Dujuv stretched and yawned, his panth muscles straining against his coverall. “Weehu, that night of sleep felt good.”

“Tell me about it. High gravity agrees with you,” Myx said, plopping down in the forward seating area, her hair a muzzy tangle, a kittenish smile playing across her face. “From the way you slept, I was thinking, toktru, that I had finally killed you.”

Phrysaba slid in beside Jak and rested a hand on his arm; Duj gave him a slight twitch of the eyebrow, which was about as much as he would ever raise the Sesh question—he’d known Jak long enough.

Myxenna would not even lift the eyebrow, ever; unlike her mekko, she not only didn’t have a double standard, she had pretty well no standard at all.

Piaro joined the group a few moments later. He was “very clearly not a morning person—I’ve seen livelier corpses,” Myxenna teased. While he was rubbing his face with his hand, as if either trying to get it on straight or to just wipe it off, Phrysaba added, “Well, he’s never been exactly singingon lucid in the morning, no, but he makes up for it by being completely incoherent later in the day.”

“As soon as I have three brain cells on line, I’ll have a riposte,” Piaro said.

The food came out then, and for a while all anyone did was eat and watch the brown and green of the Sahara roll by. After a while, they passed through pastures, and then grain fields. “This was all desert, a thousand years ago?” Phrysaba said. “That’s what the guidebook said.”

“A lot of it still is, but not like it was,” Myx said. “What they say in school, anyway, is that with more than thirty of the rocks landing in the sea every day for fifty years, so much water got pumped into the atmosphere that—”

“Do you want that roll?” Dujuv asked, through a face full of his.

When all of them had stuffed themselves, they ordered another round of coffee. “There’s no one else in the observation bubble,” Jak pointed out, “and it’s no more likely that there’ll be a hidden microphone here than that there would be back in the compartment. So it’s about four hours till we get to Fermi. Anybody got any ideas about what we should do when we get there?”

Dujuv shrugged. “I noticed a long time ago that things go a lot better when you make the plans and I just supply the muscle and motivation, tove.”

Piaro nodded. “Your mission—your call.”

“Boys are so passive,” Myx said.

Phrysaba giggled. “Let’s give Jak a chance, though. Did you have anything in mind, or were you just asking because you were fresh out of ideas?”

“Almost both,” Jak said. He really wished that he could explain the djeste, and lay out the plan that he still intended to carry out, but he had a feeling that what would happen was that they would veto it, since it involved his being taken prisoner and held for months, not to mention personally delivering a blackmail message to an extremely dangerous criminal. But he had to try it— as far as he could see, getting back on the original plan was still the best hope for getting Sesh released.

While he had been thinking, they had been looking at Jak, waiting for him to explain. They might begin to suspect that something was up, so he temporized. “I kind of have an idea but I don’t seem to know whether it’s a good one or not.”

Myxenna chuckled. “Well, then, you’ve found the right friends. Don’t worry, if it’s not a good idea, toktru, we’ll make sure that you know it’s not.”

Phrysaba leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder. “It’s not exactly like we’re painfully shy or anything, masen?”

Jak nodded and said, “Well, all right, here’s what I was thinking. My Uncle Sib always say, that when you don’t know how to get into a place, you should at least speck knocking on the front door. Now, as I see it, we know nothing about Psim Cofinalez’s palace, where Sesh is being held. None of us is really an experienced fighter, so chances are that we aren’t a match for the guards, not even you, Dujuv.”

“I’d like to find out, though.”

“Well, let’s just say that I don’t want to be there while you’re finding out, because you might not find out what you’re expecting to find out, masen? Anyway, so I think that any attempt to penetrate that palace,

either by sneaking in or by breaking in, is apt to be a disaster.”

“And it wasn’t a disaster that they tried to kill you by shooting down the launch?” Phrysaba asked.

“Or that they were going to hold you in prison forever?” Myxenna added.

“Well, first of all, we don’t know that I was the target of the attack on the launch. There were some other pretty good targets, just among the survivors, and Nakasen knows how many others among the dead might have been the target. So let’s set that aside for the moment, eh? Now, they could have just shot me out in the desert, after they took the others away, or they could have given me a good shaking and destroyed my message and then put me right on a launch back up to orbit. Or they could have even just flown me to Fermi and had me present the message. So it looks to me like, whatever’s in the message I’m carrying, it’s not as important as the fact that there is a message, or the fact that the message gets presented. I think those two facts are what actually change anything. Therefore, what I plan to do is just walk right up to the address I’ve been given, in view of as many petty officials as possible, and present the message.

“I think once the message is formally, publicly presented, they don’t have very many options. Once they’re forced to admit that they’ve received it, they pretty much have to start negotiating publicly with Greenworld, don’t they?”

Myxenna nodded. “That sounds right. Why don’t you give me some time to look that up? I might be able to find something about it in the rules of international diplomacy, or find some precedents in history, or something like that. But so far so good.”

“Well, then, there’s a heet I’m supposed to contact and talk to, and what I’d say is, as soon as we’re in Fermi, we all go get a place in a hotel; then I go to someplace that isn’t the room, because if anything goes wrong—no arguing, masen?—I want you all out of it. If everything goes right, I go see the heet and present the message, and then we see where it goes from there.”

“Well, the djeste makes complete sense,” Myxenna said, “assuming that having delivered the message will be enough to protect you, and that the message will get Sesh freed eventually. Which are two huge assumptions, but I don’t know that I see any alternative to making them. So let’s try it.”

Phrysaba nodded. “I agree, and I’ll run it by Pabrino.”

Piaro sighed. “I probably consume too many intrigueand-adventure stories, but somehow it doesn’t seem tok-tru singingon that this plan involves nothing but telling the truth and dealing directly.”

Dujuv nodded. “It’s probably a good idea but it yellow-lines my creepometer for just that reason.”

Jak smiled. “Suppose I promise that as soon as there’s the least reason to, I’ll lie and cheat

“

“Might help quite a bit,” Dujuv said, and Piaro nodded agreement.

An hour later, Pabrino had seen nothing wrong with the plan and absolutely no way that it might be made better, and Myx’s research had turned up half a dozen rules and cases that seemed to indicate it might really be the best thing to do. With that settled, they all sat back in the comfortable chairs in the observation bubble, talking idly, sipping juice, enjoying the respite from danger and effort, while the central African landscape slid away behind them in the late afternoon sun, grassland alternating with scrub and brush, then yielding to farmland, and at last the farmland shading into tall, dark, cool forests.

It was sunset by the time they were crossing the causeway that ran across the gigantic Lake Ralph Smith; somewhere on its bottom lay the bed of the much smaller Lake Victoria, but in one of the freaks of the Bombardment, this area had been hit heavily and the crater rings had overlapped in such a way as to provide a gigantic dam, just before the worldwide rise in rainfall had hit; by the time the Bombardment had ended, the vast new lake had been well established, and was now thought of as one of the things not to be missed on a tour of Africa. Fermi sat on its eastern shore, a great glowing city, with the sun behind them and the city lights just beginning to shine in the deep twilight shadows.

“Bex Riveroma will see you now,” the voice said, and Jak got up from the bench where he had been sitting by himself for over two hours, according to his new purse.

Jak was trying to be nicer to this one, and so far it was at least giving him information in a nonsarcastic way. A door appeared in the white wall in front of him, and he walked through it.

Bex Riveroma was an exceptionally tall man with very broad shoulders, and if there was any surplus fat on him, it must have been in his earlobes or the tips of his little fingers. He was completely hairless, lacking even eyebrows; his jaw was large and square, his eyes were a deep vivid green, and his full red lips stood out like a gash in his light tan skin.

“Now,” he said, “to begin with, I hope you’ll be willing to repeat what you said to me over the communications link; I have been in touch with Sibroillo Jinnaka, so I’m somewhat better equipped to receive the message.”

“Sure,” Jak said. ” ‘I am carrying information from Sibroillo Jinnaka, and I am authorized to exchange it for a service from you. The information concerns the location of all the extant, court-admissible evidence regarding the Fat Man, the Dagger and Daisy, the business about the burning armchair, the disappearance of Titan’s Dancer, and KX-126, including all such evidence regarding your involvement. The public key has already been sent to you. The private key, along with the way to retrieve the encoded information, has been coded onto an antigen group in my bloodstream. Here are the specifications for the isolation and decoding of the antigen group, and I will cooperate when you draw a blood sample.’” Jak pulled the envelope from his pocket; Riveroma tucked it into his own pocket, zipping it closed as Jak continued. “

‘We will proceed no further than that until you agree to—’”

Riveroma whipped a full-force kick at Jak’s head. Jak blocked and ducked, but Riveroma’s boot heel scraped across his forehead as he was thrown backward. An instant later Riveroma drew Jak’s foot with a neat inside sweep, so that Jak hit the floor hard, and then Riveroma was around him, kicking him hard in the face and the belly, the toe of the black boot snapping into the bridge of Jak’s nose, slamming his fist into Jak’s belly, blows coming too fast for Jak even to know everywhere that he was hit.

He covered up and tried to roll out, but he wasn’t thinking clearly in the blur of pain. Riveroma grabbed his collar, then his wrist, and in a moment had him trussed up completely. He turned Jak over, and before Jak could speak, Riveroma held a ball gag in front of his face and said, “Now, will you open up for this or—”

“What are you—?”

Riveroma’s fist plunged deep into Jak’s solar plexus, and Jak gasped in pain and shock; the ball gag went deep into his mouth, and Riveroma touched the ends together and set them to autotighten, so that they clamped the ball deeper and deeper into Jak’s sore, swelling mouth. When it was thoroughly painful, and Jak was wondering whether he would be able to breathe in another instant, or whether the increasing force of the tightening gag might dislocate his jaw, Riveroma touched it again, leaving it agonizing but not damaging.

“You can tell Sibroillo from me,” Riveroma said, very calmly and pleasantly, as if the two of them were just having a friendly discussion, “that although I may very well want to take whatever deal he is offering me, or I may be forced to bow to whatever threat he is making— whichever it should turn out to be—that I do not accept orders from him and in particular I resent the tone of that nasty little note, and you may remind him that I have told him about this before. His whole way of communicating is extremely rude and unprofessional and he shows no respect for the moral equivalence that is key to everyone’s getting along. Do you think you can repeat that to him?”

Jak nodded eagerly.

“Good. Let me add, young man, that whether by choice or accident, you are working for one of the rudest, most obnoxious, and most egotistical bastards in the business, known to one and all as an arrogant ninny, and you really must try not to pick up any of his bad habits, because not everyone would make the allowances I am making for your youth and inexperience, and of course for your bad training.