She had three types of informant. There were the ones she had carefully planted over the years, reliable Cloudlanders who knew what she needed and who understood how to screen important information from rumors and rubbish. Baker took any inputs from them seriously.
The paid informants were another matter. Loyal to no one, they tended to send her any old garbage, hoping that it might somehow be worth money. Their input had to be looked at hard, and almost everything was discarded or given little weight.
Then there were the revolutionaries. Small groups within the Inner System were working for the overthrow of their own government, and they were willing to form alliances with the Outer System in order to do it. They provided information free, and would be outraged at any suggestion of payment. Cinnabar Baker worked with them and used their input. But she had no illusions about their value. Most of her informants on Earth or Mars preached the overthrow of the United Space Federation, but they would never live in the Cloud or the Halo. Worse than that, they saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia.
Cinnabar Baker had inspected Bey Wolf very carefully during their first meeting. Wolf’s reputation for intelligence and insight was extremely high. But Leo Manx had told of a self-destructive, hallucinating man, obsessed with a former lover. That fit the pattern of an Inner System paranoid, one who might someday be converted to form part of her recruited group of unpaid informants.
She had dropped that thought in the first fifteen minutes of their meeting. Wolf was too strong and too skeptical, too cold and analytical. He could not be manipulated in the usual ways.
But there were also unusual ways. At the end of that first meeting Cinnabar Baker had set a high-priority trace on the whereabouts of Mary Walton. So far, she had two things. The first was a recent poor-quality photograph of Mary Walton standing with her arm around the waist of a stern-faced man. Even in that faded image, his eyes were the commanding orbs of a fanatic, blazing out of the picture. Scribbled on the back of the photograph were the coordinates of a location in the Kernel Ring, accompanied by a question mark.
Those coordinate strings had been noted as a place for future investigation, but not as a high-priority item. Baker had no idea how she might use any information on Mary Walton, but patience and foresight were two of her main strengths. She would never admit she was willing to work with anyone and anything to achieve her goals, but she would have found it hard to name a group she would reject.
That night there were ninety messages for her review. Half of them had come from official news reports, the rest from her own network. With Turpin crooning on her shoulder, his black head bobbing or tucked away under one shabby wing, she set to work.
Outer System first—she was not naive enough to believe that informants were needed only for the Inner System and the Halo. Most messages were simple statements of production or equipment problems. She skimmed through them, doing no more than confirm that the pattern of the past year was still present. The Outer System was going to hell. Navigation systems were failing, cargo transit vessels from the Inner System did not arrive, power systems were unstable or running close to failure, harvesters failed their quality control tests, communications were suffering inexplicable glitches, and cargo packages that dropped Solward from the Cloud were disappearing on the way. Aybee had done an analysis for her and had confirmed what she knew instinctively. What they were seeing was far outside the limits of statistical reasonableness.
In the mind of most of the Cloud’s population, that left only one possibility: sabotage. And as the only instigator, the Inner System. Cinnabar Baker did not agree at all. She had her own ideas as to what was going on and who was causing the trouble.
“But it’s how, Turpin. How can Ransome affect all the control systems? That’s the problem, and no one can help me with that.”
The crow made a rattling noise like a set of bone dice being shaken and stared at the sheets of paper with its head to one side. “It’s a bugger,” it said solemnly.
“Indeed it is.” Baker turned to the reports on the Inner System. The profile there had been slower to develop, lagging the pattern in the Cloud by a year or two. Now it was unmistakable to anyone who had watched events closely in both regions. It was the same story of inexplicable failure. Transit ships were disappearing, massive food shipments were failing to arrive on schedule, and power supplies had become unreliable.
And the Inner System was reacting in a predictable way. They were blaming the Outer System. There was anger, and talk of sabotage, and threats of reprisals.
Cinnabar Baker could identify three people in the whole system who knew that the Inner and Outer Systems were not sabotaging each other. She was one. Her counterpart in the Inner System, a man whom she respected enormously but whom she had never met, was another. The third was the person who was causing all the trouble.
More and more, the lines of evidence converged on the Kernel Ring and on the shadowy no-man’s-land of Ransome’s Hole. She was feeling her way toward its location, but her informants in the Ring had a habit of cutting off contact without warning. She had lost half a dozen in a few months. Her adversary seemed to know everything she did as soon as she made up her mind to do it. She had looked unsuccessfully for the leak in her operations. She continued her efforts, assembling fragments, pulsing her web of informants, but she was still a long way from a set of coordinates for Ransome’s Hole.
And when she had them, what then? It was not clear that a direct attack would succeed or, if it did, that the sabotage would cease. Baker sighed and rubbed the poll of Turpin, who was still quietly watching her flip the pages.
“Come on, crow. We’ve earned a break.” She set down the listings and wandered off toward the door, the bird still gripping her shoulder. It was the middle of the quiet period, and every rational person was asleep. Baker met no one as she padded barefoot along half a mile of silent corridor.
As she opened the crèche door, the sounds began. Forty babies were crying, fifty more gulping and grunting as they were fed by the machines. Three hundred others were sleeping peacefully. The solitary human attendant was lying down at the end of the room, eyes closed.
Cinnabar Baker did not wake him. She did not want conversation. When she arrived at any harvester, an unheralded visit to its crèches was a high priority. To her, it was the heart of the world. She had never found a habitat where things were going well in the crèche and badly elsewhere.
She watched and listened for twenty minutes, walking along the aisles and occasionally picking up and holding one of the babies. They ranged in age from two days to two months. One newborn had been placed in a form-change tank for remedial work on a deformed limb. Baker peered in through the transparent port and checked the progress of the change. It was normal. She made a mental note to return in three days to make sure the outcome was satisfactory.
She checked the instruction monitors above each crib, noting the frequency and duration of the parents’ visits. Finally she was satisfied. She stole away, rejuvenated, ready for hours more of tedious work.
The government of the Inner System knew Cinnabar Baker as a powerful, formidable woman. They would have been little comforted to know that she happened to be sterile. She was still the biggest threat to their independence and way of life.
Perhaps they were right. But if so, it was only because she could sense full-scale war looming closer and closer. Cinnabar Baker saw herself as the secret mother of the whole system. Her children could not be allowed to fight each other, to kill each other. She would prevent that—even if the whole system had to be under her control before she could stop them.