“Sporting odds, anyway,” Reid said lightly. “You keep the number of fanatics and martyrs down to a round dozen or so, and we’ll take it from there.”
“That’s big of you, Matt,” Dryke said. “Considering that every second warm body—man, dog, and grandmother—seems to be pointing for us down here. And every damn one of them can reach us if they try.”
“You need to recruit a militia. I hear the starheads gave a pretty good account of themselves in the Tokyo riot.”
“Yeah. This time,” Dryke said grimly. “It won’t be the last riot, though. And the next one will be worse, for both sides. Next time both sides’ll be armed.”
“I never thought I’d see the starheads rallying to our cause with steel,” Reid said, shaking his head. “That won a few hearts on Takara, I have to tell you.”
“And probably lost us a few million down here. It’s the old second-punch syndrome. Nobody saw it as five hundred screamers jumping fifty starheads and getting surprised. It played as Allied goons with stingers and blades carving up doe-eyed demonstrators.”
“The media have swung that far over?”
“It’s not what they said. It’s the pictures they have to show.”
“I don’t know why you folks just don’t pull out and move operations up here,” said Reid. “Ninety-five percent of the ship is ready for occupation. And you folks are about as popular as the Plague down there. You’ve got more friends up here, you know.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the company does exactly that for Knossos,” said Dryke. “Can’t run Selection from up there, though.”
“Sasaki could move West to Prainha and Central and East to Kasigau. Let the urban centers go.”
“Maybe,” said Dryke. “Be kind of like turning your back to a wolf, though.”
“I suppose,” said Reid. “Listen, I’d like to get as many of my people as possible some release time before things get crazy up here. Do you have anything that’s going to need special attention programmed between now and the end of the year?”
Dryke considered. “You’ll start to get ship’s staff in two weeks,” he said. “You knew that. They’re finishing up the navigation and drive management software in Munich. That’s the next critical pacing item. It’ll be hand-carried up for installation sometime next month, six copies on three different flights.”
“I hear it’s about ready. Testing this week?”
“Yeah. Munich will put it up on a simulator, and Mission will go live with Prainha and the controllers at Horizon for a mock sailing and test program. Not our headache, thank God.”
“How goes the mole hunt?”
“A couple more pelts in the Logistics Section, and a fistful out in the supplier community—Micronomics turned out to have a whole nest. I keep thinking we should be finding more, though. Houston’s been clean for a year, Munich for two—makes me feel like I’m missing something.”
“Hmm. Speaking of missing something—has this one reached you? There’s a kind of oddball rumor circulating in Takara that Jeremiah is on Sanctuary.”
“I heard.”
“I haven’t been able to put anything hard underneath it,” Reid went on, “but it makes a certain amount of sense. Synthesized image, synthesized voice—no reason really to think that there’s a real Jeremiah anywhere, or that he’s necessarily a he. And the goals of Homeworld certainly are consistent with Sanctuary’s politics.”
“Yeah,” said Dryke. “The thing that keeps me from taking it seriously is I think Anna X would sooner cut out her heart than use a male persona as Sanctuary’s mouthpiece. But maybe that’s my blind spot, so stay with it.”
For the next ten minutes, they wandered off into other topics— a minor drug problem in the high-stress Tokyo office, a thrice-delayed test of Memphis’ shield lasers, a funny story about the starship’s lead architect getting lost during an inspection tour— and then Dryke ended the conversation.
“Well—departmental conference in ten minutes, and I need to make a side stop on the way. So I’m going to let you get back to whatever I took you from.”
“I could use a few more hours sleep,” Reid deadpanned.
“Get it while you can,” Dryke said with a sardonic half-grin. “The kids’ll be home from school soon.”
“That they will,” said Reid. “It’ll be nice to have the family back together again.”
Dryke chuckled, shook his head. “I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and broke the link. Turning away from the blank wall, he looked toward the silent spectator to the conversation, seated in the far corner of the room. “Opinion? Too obvious?”
“Perhaps not obvious enough,” said Hiroko Sasaki, rising and gliding toward him. “The Munich gateway has been open for three weeks without a single attempt at penetration.”
“Trolling for big fish takes patience,” said Dryke. “The bait has to be right, the fish has to be hungry, and you have to be lucky enough to run it past his mouth without him sensing the hook.”
“You spoke of Javier Sala,” she said. “We cannot allow Jeremiah such an opportunity. I am reluctant to permit any pioneers to board Memphis until Jeremiah has been found.”
Dryke shook his head vigorously. “Delaying habitation would be a mistake. The closer we are to succeeding, the bolder he’ll be in trying to stop us.”
“But will he be more reckless, or merely more ruthless?”
“Truthfully? I expect both.”
“Memphis is not replaceable, Mikhail.”
“I know,” he said. “But there’s no safe way to gamble.”
CHAPTER 17
—CAU—
“… the voice of the banished…”
The Call icon popped up in one corner of Christopher McCutcheon’s work space, accompanied by a polite cheep.
“Who is it, Dee?” he asked his secretary.
“Lenore Edkins, Section 15,” answered the AIP. “You last talked to him on November 8.”
Edkins was a senior archaeolibrarian in the Culture Section. “I remember. I’ll take it,” McCutcheon said, suspending the error audit he had been conducting on the pre-Columbian thread of the North American Mythology stack. “Hello, Lenore.”
“Morning, Christopher,” said Edkins, a monk-haired black man with soulless eyes. “I’ve got some answers for you on that inquiry about your hyper entry. The Tunnel Visions telecast hadn’t been reviewed, now has been. It won’t be added to the hyper. Sorry.”
Crestfallen, McCutcheon asked, “Any idea why?”
“You play well enough, at least so I’m told by people more accustomed to hearing antique instruments. But the quality of the recording is only fair, and the auditor says that, taken as a whole, the music you three performed on the broadcast has ‘no significant entertainment or ethnomusicological value.’ Pretty standard phrasing. I’m afraid your Project connection wasn’t enough to swing the decision.”
“No value? We did the Bach cello suites in the Segovia arrangement—”
“Which are apparently in the hyper, as performed by Segovia, Parkening, and the e-pop version by Helix.”
“—’Mountain Storm,’ by Michael Hedges—”
“Also in the hyper by the composer’s own hand.”
“—and Kristen’s ‘Elegiac,’ which had everyone in the studio in tears.”
“A nice piece. But it was never professionally recorded, never published, and this Kristen Carlyle doesn’t come up in the stacks as either a performer or a songwriter. As near as I can tell, Tunnel Visions was as high as she ever got—thirty minutes on a regional arts showcase funded under USDC.”
Christopher gritted his teeth. In the smug economic classism of the Los Angeles ent-art world, Department of Culture grants were viewed as welfare handouts, and the work they supported little more than vanity indulgences. He hadn’t expected Edkins to show such colors. “What does any of that have to do with the music?”