For all his years at Bury’s side, Renner was a pilot. He plotted a course, then reacted to events. It gave him a headache, thinking through this mess.
He called Blaine. It was never the same as in person, no matter how high-end the holo-D. It wasn’t just the blotches and delays. It was the absence of subliminal input: body language in peripheral vision; changes in odor and breathing. But they had been friends, on and off, for so many years, that Kevin could fill in the gaps. Rod was pissed off and edgy, even though he wasn’t saying.
It began amicably enough. “Rod, why’d you pick Quinn?”
Blaine shrugged. “Originally? The first Jackson Delegation? Simple, really. That Mormon thing. It was all muddy Church politics, and Quinn was handy.”
“No, this time.”
“Precedence, really. And this time I had Bury’s testament about past and future reliability.”
Renner was confused. “If Quinn was unreliable, why send—”
Blaine burst out laughing. “Quinn? Unreliable? You are joking?”
“Well, who then?”
Blaine sobered. “Oh, for Christ’s sake Kevin, do try to keep up. You were even in on it. Jackson, of course. And Lillith. Though I can’t say Lillith surprised me, really.”
Renner sat back, blinking. “But Jackson fought the Outies. That’s what earned him his Knighthood. And the Governorship.”
Blaine snorted. “I know you think I’m just being an elitist prick, but Jackson played the oldest hand in the book. Bury would have found it himself, if you all hadn’t gotten sidetracked with the Motie scare and the real threat at the Sister. For all I know, he did. You remember what he said: There was too much money flowing through that system. Jackson allied himself with Lillith Van Zandt—or, should I say, Lillith spotted Jackson’s ambition early on—then he invented an Outie threat—bankrolled by Lillith—and defeated it. Handy, really. As you say, it earned him a title and Governorship. I no longer recall in which order. Of course the Emperor knew some of it even then, but he admired Jackson’s ambition, tenacity, and capacity for accommodation. And there was the original Motie angle, of course. ”
“His prior service.”
“Yes, in my first command.”
Renner chewed on this. “Then along came Bury.”
“Yes, Kevin, along came Bury, but more to the point, along came you, and your incredibly inconvenient dedication to creating and investigating the Motie Scare on Maxroy’s Purchase. You nearly got my children killed, you know.”
“That’s unfair. You know that—”
“Oh, of course Kevin. It all worked out in the end. Children intact, Empire saved, alliance patched to blockade the second jump point, and now you arsing about on pins and needles waiting for Senate confirmation of your Mote System governorship. But think a moment. What did any of that actually have to do with New Utah? And who supplied the ship for Jackson’s first accession delegation? That was Bury. You got lucky, because you were along for the trip, which put you in the right sector to go and have your second joyride through Motie space. But regarding New Utah, it was Bury who was right in the end: There was too much money flowing through that system. Bury, who’d had a stake in purchasing unregistered ships from New Chicago. Who better—”
“—to spot a world where somebody had a stake in manufacturing unregistered weapons systems.”
Blaine answered by way of silence.
“So, this will cost Jackson his governorship.”
“Oh, I should think so. He can hardly claim to be the innocent. He may have thought using Lillith as proxy would keep it all at arm’s length, but no arm is long enough to distance him from this.”
Renner saw doors opening and closing. For himself; for Imperial Autonetics. He also saw a quagmire of politics. Who would become his enemies at the fall of Lillith Van Zandt? Aside from Jackson, of course. “Rod, I’m not sure what to do here. I don’t want to lose that Governorship. I’ve got to get back to the Mote.”
And now Blaine was white-lipped. “You are asking me for advice? Kevin, advice is your responsibility. What will secure Acrux? What will secure my House? What will secure my family? A poke in the Emperor’s eye for backing the wrong horse? A running feud with the House of Van Zandt? Welcome to real politics. Some of it is talk, not action. You are sitting on the fence chewing your nails, scared to death of what you might not get. What do you have that you care to defend? Your own ass? Your ship? Your stake in Imperial Autonetics? Our friendship?”
Bonneville, New Utah
The True Church Elder muttered hostile prayers as Ollie Azhad escorted him from the room. He’d been dragged from his bed and flown to this godforsaken wasteland, and at his own expense to boot. The corridors of Bonneville Citadel were ugly and crude. Its windows faced east, the view across the endless Barrens a reminder of the waste from which Heaven had been hewn.
He thought the use of the old Founder’s Bowl a bit of cheap theatrics. Beyond the stage, there was nothing but the dusty plain stretching to infinity. Across the tiered semicircle, Bonneville whites predominated, but the ecclesiastical garb was many-hued. They’d brought a small delegation from Saint George, including the Mayor with that female Captain as escort, but he suffered no delusions. Planetary government my eye, he thought. Constitutional convention be screwed. This was about him: about how far he’d bend; about Church and State and what he’d do.
He’d not been in Bonneville these past days. He’d arrived by night. His hubris might be excused.
Sinbad, above Maxroy’s Purchase
A human might have paced, or drummed fingers, or raided the food locker. Ali Baba hummed, in a range inaudible to humans. It was a thrumming pitch, like a drawn-out groan, that both expressed discontent and soothed.
For the thousandth time, he played the recording of Bury’s voice on the testament cube. It helped him forget how afraid he was; how alone; how misused. He desperately needed something to do.
So he did what he always did when bored: he hacked. There wasn’t an onboard system he couldn’t break into. Everyone had long since learned that the only encryption immune to his many prying fingers and miraculously accurate imitations of voice were a triple combination of biometrics and randomly-generated codes.
So, obviously, Kevin meant him to find this. He might as well have drawn circles and arrows. Ali Baba called up the files, and listened transfixed to a medley of non-human voices. They were nothing he’d heard from the Mote. They were everything he’d heard from the Mote. He found the translation packets. He worked through those. They mimed the words, but they missed all the notes. They were right, sort of, but all wrong. He listened to the originals, and then the translations, over and over, and trembled. “I would know my enemy.” “Legitimate government.” “Allies.” “From the stars.”
Bonneville, New Utah
The hoppers floated on transparent albatross wings, their descent rippling toward them from the horizon in a rolling mirage. As they approached, the Elder felt a vague trembling in his seat, and craned his neck, trying to make sense of the non-relationship between the ground vibration and the approaching gliders.