Ordinarily, Bruno would have pressed for a more detailed explanation, but he’d been drawn into a royal game of doubles poker and dared not let his attention wander too far for too long lest young Vivian kick his armored shin with the remarkably armor-rattling toe of her space boot. They’d all taken a quiet dinner and fresh-air break back on Tongatapu before coming here, but they’d been back in suits and helmet domes for over two hours now, and it had been getting somewhat tiresome. Finally Vivian had faxed up a set of magnetic playing cards and convinced Tamra to make their use an Official Business of the Royal Committee.
Ordinarily, Bruno would have objected to such gross misuse of his person at a time like this. He’d done so often enough in his days at Tamra’s palace, when matters were—to put it mildly—a good deal less urgent. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to refuse Vivian Rajmon; if the Queendom could put its children to work in such hazardous circumstances, chasing after their elders’ banes and suchlike, then said Queendom should at least indulge, when possible, said children’s need for play. He’d even surprised himself by enjoying the game a little. He and Vivian had narrowly won the match with three games out of five, although Deliah and Marlon had won the other two, and the odd pairing of Tamra with Cheng Shiao had presented substantial resistance throughout. Vivian seemed more childish than ever, or perhaps the term would be childlike, since she manifested it mainly in pleasant ways. Even Tamra seemed to notice the difference, and to look on her little Commandant-Inspector a bit more thoughtfully.
But another hour later even that was finished, and the SWAT robots were strapping them all into recessed acceleration couches as the final rendezvous and boarding action approached. The ship’s bulkheads swam with wellstone designs, hypercomputers forming and reforming and vanishing and forming again, their innards no doubt buzzing with strategic and tactical analyses. Ironically, this superficial turmoil required nothing of Bruno and was in fact his first real chance to sit still and think. He took full advantage of it by refining, in his mind, the exact scenario by which a single ship, with a single nasen beam projector, might weaken and contaminate nearly a third of the Ring Collapsiter’s arc. He came up with a number of plausible mechanisms and finally settled on one that best fit the observed facts: the ship had sat up here in the asteroid belt and fired almost tangentially, the most glancing of blows, cutting a chord about half a kilometer sunward of the collapsiter’s rim.
At that range, the beam would be about twice as wide as the collapsiter itself, but the sun’s gravity—and indeed the collapsiter’s own gravity—would pull the beam out of true, curve it around like a stream of water firing out of a hose. If the top of the beam’s arc touched the Ring Collapsiter just so, then instead of punching two neat holes through the ring, as it had through Marlon’s house, it would instead follow the ring’s curvature around, plowing a swath right through it, perhaps for millions of kilometers. Hmm. He’d have to work the actual math on that one; curiosity aside, the results might be needed as evidence in court.
Cheng Shiao settled into the berth across from his and was instantly immobilized by straps and webbing.
“So,” Bruno asked him, “if you don’t mind my asking, how does one rise to the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Constabulary?”
Shiao, still attempting to settle into a more comfortable position, looked puzzled. “Rise, sir? I was appointed to this rank directly.”
“Truly? With no prior experience?”
“Correct.”
“How strange. On what… basis was this appointment made?”
“Exam scores, sir. And general inclination. I won’t bore you with the story.”
“No, indeed, I’m asking you to. I begin to realize how little I know about the modern Queendom.”
Shiao met his gaze. “Are you certain you want the full details? Because there’s some violence involved. I was in Qingdao, walking along the Yanan Lu on my way to the job interview, which was well outside the business district, in a warehouse area I didn’t know well. It was two-ten in the afternoon; there wasn’t much traffic. As I was walking, I passed what appeared to be an abandoned building, with two males standing on the front steps. They were dressed in reflective jackets and sunglasses, and appeared unusually alert.”
“Nervous, eh?”
“No, sir, just the opposite. My strong impression at the time was that they were guards. Not professional security, you understand—they were kempt and well dressed, but there was no impression of legitimacy about them. It seemed to me that they were posted there explicitly to intimidate passersby. I suspected that some business was going on inside the building, and there was a desire to prevent interruptions.”
“Or witnesses.”
“Exactly, yes.”
“So what did you do? You weren’t a police officer at all at that point, were you?”
“I belonged to a neighborhood watch organization in Xingtai. But you’re correct: I had no official standing in the city of Qingdao. I wasn’t licensed to carry weapons or interfere with lawful enterprise. But the situation looked bad, like someone could easily get hurt.”
“Including yourself,” Bruno noted.
“Yes, sir. I was acutely aware of the fact—any suspicious action on my part could tip them off. Even simply walking past might do it; the smart thing would have been to just turn around the moment I saw them. But I believe in the law. I believe that no one has the right to violate it, especially in flagrant ways that breed disrespect. Calling the police would have been an option, but I worried the suspects would be long gone by the time an officer materialized.”
“A curious worry. What did you do?”
Shiao shrugged. “I called myself at home, and then while the line was open I rapidly approached the two suspects. ‘I need your help,’ I said to them. ‘Someone is chasing me.’ It’s doubtful they would have believed this story for long, and possibly they saw at once what I was doing, which was capturing their coordinates and their images to a remote location. But what certainly gave me away was my own voice on the telephone, screaming that I should get out of there immediately. I was younger then, more impulsive, but it turned out to be good advice: the nearer suspect drew a laser pointer and burned the left side of my face straight through to the bone.”
“Good gods!”
“He was aiming for the phone,” Shiao explained, “and he hit it. At that moment I myself was still an incidental target. Since I was already running, I took advantage of the distraction to engage the suspect physically.”
Bruno didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled. “Surely you must have been in agony!”
Again, Shiao shrugged. “I assume so. By the time the city police arrived, I was dead, so I never did learn how it all turned out. We didn’t have the kind of scene reconstructions that we do nowadays; it became something of a town mystery. AH I can say is that one suspect was picked up at the scene, having been detained there by an injury, and the other was identified and arrested later based on the video I’d captured. No other associates were ever explicitly identified.”
Shiao’s voice had never once wavered from the precise, restrained, overpolite monotone that had marked good police officersJor centuries, perhaps forever. There was no room for boast or modesty in that tone: the account was purely factual and devoid of emotional overtone, laid out plainly for Bruno’s evaluation. Shiao’s eyes had not looked clouded or sentimental as he told the tale of this major turning point in his life.
“I daresay these gentlemen benefited from the lesson,” Bruno ventured.
Shiao nodded. “I like to think so, sir. A policeman’s job is to chill and frustrate crime—merely punishing it is a symptom of failure.”