She tells him what he already knows. “Another forty-two minutes, sir.”
“Perfect!” The groping hand releases her, with effort. “By the way. What am I eating here, Nagel?”
“Cultured horse and blood onions, sir. Your favorites.”
“Yes.” He laughs, watery eyes closing for a long moment. Then he takes a huge breath and wills the eyes to open again, and he turns, addressing the nearby scientists. “A word to the brilliant!” he cries out. “This is how to please your tyrant. Satisfy his basal urges! Satisfy them, and he’ll be your defender and your finest friend!”
Only six weeks ago, Callene Nagel was transferred from Seattle Command, replacing another young woman who had unfortunately drowned herself in the cold Pacific. Within an hour of her arrival, she was taken to the project manager’s private quarters and told to wait. “For what purpose, sir?” She asked for an explanation, already knowing the answer, and not just because any woman of her rank and appearance would sense what was happening. “I’ve barely had time to unpack—”
“Enough,” her new captain snapped. He was a small, disgusting man with a small plain face. Showing a mixture of amusement and cool concern, he told her, “There’s the chance that you won’t have to unpack, provided things go badly.”
“Sir?”
“Unless of course you want to be posted to some orbiting shithole. Then I suppose bad is sweet, and sweet luck to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“At ease, Nagel.”
She obeyed, watching the captain making his brisk retreat.
Most of the underground facility was cramped, but, by contrast, Kaybecker’s quarters were enormous and luxurious. The room surrounding Callene was long enough to feel huge, yet narrow enough to inspire intimacy. Its walls and high ceiling were battle-grade armor disguised as teakwood, and one long wall was lined with mock-windows, each window projecting an image piped in through a thousand meters of ancient stone and anti-kinetic barricades.
Callene looked out at a long meadow flanked by Douglas firs, and, far beyond, a purplish trace of sunshine vanishing into the ocean.
She refused to think about Kaybecker.
And she couldn’t risk thinking about him, even in passing.
So she remembered another man’s touch—a surgeon’s—and his silky promises. He would be gentle and quick, and when Callene could see again, soon, she would have an eagle’s vision. Then, with an expert violence, the surgeon yanked her living eyes out of their sockets and tossed them into the trash, replacing them with a pair of machines, and, with a smooth voice, he told the blind recruit, “It’s almost too bad. You had rather lovely eyes.”
Security troops were required to endure such improvements. New eyes opened on worlds built out of relentless details. They could peer into the infrared and high, high into the ultraviolet. The feeblest glow was like day, yet nothing was so brilliant that it could make them blink. And when the eyes focused on a human face, they absorbed every flaw and whatever beauties lay between….
Callene closed her perfect eyes, and sighed.
On bare feet, Kaybecker strode into the room, and with a simple, firm voice observed, “You’re still in uniform.”
In uniform, and armed. Callene turned and looked, finding soft lights burning and her host wearing nothing but a long satin bathrobe, his unhandsome face smiling, his living eyes pale, and his intentions obvious in the glint of the eyes and in the wagging bulge that showed in the robe’s blue-silver fabric.
“Nagel, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You look like you’d rather be elsewhere, Nagel. Anywhere else, I’m thinking.”
No response was accurate and safe. He once told her that when she had doubts about what to say, she should say nothing, using dignified silence. “People fill silence with whatever they want to hear,” he had promised. “Let them mislead themselves. They’ll only be too glad to do it.”
That’s what she did.
Kaybecker’s home was furnished with twentieth-century antiques, worth fortunes and arranged like trophies. The long sofa was sewn together from animal hides. The low table in front of it had been carved from an extinct species of tropical tree. On its butchered red wood lay an assortment of paper books, their covers decorated with photographs of vanished wildernesses and dead sports heroes.
A fat glass was suddenly handed to her, half-filled with an aromatic, piss-colored liquor. Callene’s nose was augmented, inlaid with the olfactory cells of a Malaysian night moth, leaving her able to sniff out ten thousand separate explosives, plus poisons and every known psychoactive drug, including the crude female aphrodisiac swirling in her glass.
“Don’t smell it,” was Kaybecker’s advice. “Drink it.”
Carried on his breath were the smells of stomach acids, half-digested meat, and the male-equivalent of the same inadequate drug.
Callene took two sips, then turned away, setting her glass beside the antique books. The aphrodisiac was useless. Her nervous system had been secretly conditioned to ignore chemical coercions. But Kaybecker expected some reaction, and to mollify him, she pretended to shudder, glancing back at him and telling the truth. “You have a lovely home.”
“Better than the dorms,” he replied.
Better than any bureaucrat could afford, she knew. But Kaybecker’s career had been built on unlikely success coupled with a shameless abuse of power. What museum did he raid in order to collect these treasures…?
“Take off that uniform,” Kaybecker ordered. Then with a tenth-hearted attempt at tenderness, he added, “Officer Nagel. Please.”
She was wearing an indoor helmet and a partial flash-mask. Callene removed the straps and let herself look out the nearest window, glancing north, at a column of milky light standing above Seattle.
Against every order, she was thinking about him.
There was no helping it.
Kaybecker’s patience ran dry. Stepping close, he took the helmet and tossed it to the floor with a sharp thud. Then he grasped her shoulders and spun her, Callene resisting just enough to let him know that she was at least his strength and nearly his will, and that when she relented, it was her decision. Not his.
Tactics shifted. Another broad smile made the face boyish. Then he said, “Look,” as something bright flashed across the sky. Falling, shattering. Gone. “Did you see?”
Her peripheral vision was spectacular.
“It was square,” she offered. “Part of a solar panel, maybe.”
“Not maybe,” Kaybecker confided. “We lost another orbital farm today.”
She feigned concern. “I don’t remember any attacks.”
“Wasn’t one,” he promised. “It was pure sabotage. Rebel infiltrators planted finger-nukes along the farm’s spine.”
She shut her eyes, for just an instant.
“We aren’t doing so well up there.” He spoke with a calm, grave force. “But that’s not exactly a secret, is it? With eyes like yours, you probably watch the war every night.”
“They tell us not to look,” she replied.
“And you obey them?”
“Yes.” As strange as it might sound, she did.
“I would watch, if I had your vision,” Kaybecker promised. “But of course, the UN won’t dare fuck with me! Not after everything that I’ve done for them…!”
Callene looked at the walls and ceiling. But even with her heightened sense, she couldn’t find the nanophones or security cameras embedded in the armor. As part of a secure facility, everything that happened, no matter how trivial, was recorded in full, and the recordings were sent off for AI analysis on the half-second. Which was the weak link, as it happened. What if someone could tinker with the dangerous recordings, editing them, misleading the machines and the machine-like officials whose duty it was to trust them?