He looked back at Gundhalinu finally, almost reluctantly. He had what he had come here to get. He should be ready to carry out the next part of the plan immediately, while Gundhalinu and the others were completely off guard …
But now there was the ship, the Old Empire wreckage that Gundhalinu had shown him today. If it had anything like an intact drive unit in it …He couldn’t afford to pass that up. He had to keep things the way they were a little longer; maintain this precarious balance until he found out for certain. He could only study the ship if he had Gundhalinu down there with him, to tell him what he needed to know.
He couldn’t kill anybody now. He didn’t have to kill anybody now. Nobody had to die, today… .
He turned away from the sight of Gundhalinu’s face; spoke brusquely into the communicator, calling Niburu and the others back to camp.
“Kullervo, what are the odds,” Gundhalinu murmured, his voice still strained, “of our vaccinating the entire Lake? We could do it now. The reprogrammed virus should just keep spreading indefinitely. …”
“No.” Reede looked back, hearing a hope and a hunger in Gundhalinu’s voice that might or might not be Gundhalinu’s own. “I mean, let’s take it one step at a time, all right?” he said uneasily. “Let’s make sure this is completely stable, first.” He was almost certain that it was completely stable—and that Gundhalinu was almost certainly right. That would be all he needed—to give the Golden Mean and the Kharemoughis a limitless supply of stardrive. He intended to leave them with exactly what they’d had when he arrived—which was nothing. Less than nothing, if he did the rational thing … He glanced at Gundhalinu again, down again, his hands tightening.
“Niburu!” Reede gestured with his chin, summoning Niburu away from the cluster of bodies gathered around the dully glowing solar cooker.
“Try the stew, boss?” Niburu said, shoveling another mouthful into his face as he stopped and looked up at Reede. “It’s not bad, if I do say so. I thought we all deserved something spe—”
“What the hell are they doing eating with us?” Reede cut him off irritably, pulling him farther around the side of the lab dome into the shadows.
Niburu glanced over his shoulder at the figures he could still just see. “Gundhalinu eats with us—”
“You know what I mean,” Reede snapped. “Those troopers.”
Niburu looked back at him, both uneasy and defiant. He shrugged. “I wanted to invite Saroon, so I had to ask Hundet. It’s kind of a party to celebrate….” Reede realized that Niburu smelled like beer, that they must all have been drinking the local brew.
“What the fuck do you think this is?” Reede caught him by the front of his shirt and shook him once, hard, spilling stew. “Some goddamn social club? A fucking primitive tour? That is the enemy!” That was all he needed, for Niburu and Ananke to start seeing those expendable pieces of meat as individuals, as friends.
Niburu flushed. “They’re not my enemies—”
“Don’t playact that naive bullshit with me.” Reede let him go, seeing the incomprehension on his face, wanting to strangle him. “If they knew why we were really here, what do you think would have happened to us all by now?”
“We’d all be dead. And who could blame them?” Niburu said bitterly. “But they’re still human beings.” The look on his face got dangerously self-righteous. “And it’s too late to uninvite them. You want to eat, or not?”
Reede glared at him. The words that would shatter Niburu’s fantasy world filled his mouth, but his tongue refused to spit them out. Niburu turned and stalked away. Reede sighed, and followed, realizing that it was already too late for Niburu. But that didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t too late for him; as long as his own resolve held.
He followed Niburu out into the open space between the domes. He sat on a sling-stool and ate, smiling an utterly empty smile. The stew was good; full of enough hot spices to burn away any aftertaste of stale freeze-dry. He focused on its texture, the pungent flavors rising up inside his head; relieved that Gundhalinu, who sat next to him, seemed too preoccupied with his own thoughts, or the Lake’s, to make conversation. Reede tried not to watch Ananke letting Saroon take the quoll in his lap, not to watch as it crawled up the sweat-damp front of Saroon’s uniform shirt to huddle, murmuring congenially, under his chin; tried not to see the first smile he’d ever seen form on Saroon’s thin, drawn face, or to feel Niburu’s eyes measuring his own reaction. Only Hundet’s mood seemed to match his own, and so he watched Hundet.
Hundet’s eyes flicked over them one by one, and Reede saw his own alienation mirrored there. Hundet downed the dregs of what was probably not his first bottle of ouvung that day. Hundet hated this surreal wasteland, the strange-looking foreigners, the offworlders controlling his world and his life—anything he didn’t understand, and that covered a lot of ground. He hated what he feared; and so he drank until everyone was as much of an animal in his mind as he was himself. If the law didn’t give him an enemy, he took it out on grunts like Saroon; on his woman if he had one and on his children, with his foot, with a gunbutt, with his fists. The kind of man whose hand would hold you under in the black cold water … Reede swore and spat as an unexpected mouthful of spice made his eyes tear. He took a long, meaningless drink from the bottle of cold, piss-colored beer sitting by his boot.
Hundet looked up and caught him staring, read the expression on his face before he had time to make it noncommittal again. Hundet’s face darkened; his eyes touched on everyone sitting around him again with obvious disgust. He got slowly to his feet, muttering some insult in his own tongue, and started to leave the circle. He turned back as Saroon laughed out loud, oblivious, reacting to something the quoll had done or Ananke had said to him.
Reede watched with a peculiar feeling of deja vu as Hundet’s booted foot swung out to kick Saroon hard in the buttock. The quoll flew out of Saroon’s grasp as he sprawled forward, crashing into the cooker. Ananke caught the quoll in midair with an acrobat’s reflexive lunge. Saroon scrambled to his feet, slapping at his smoking shirtsleeve, his face stupefied with pain and surprise. Hundet snarled an order. Reede went on watching, with unwilling fascination, as the pleasure that had animated Saroon’s face faded until he had no expression at all. His eyes were like holes in his face, black and empty, as he left the circle of silent, staring strangers without a word, and followed Hundet away.
Niburu swore softly. Gundhalinu began to rise from his seat, his mouth opening to call out an angry protest.
Reede caught Gundhalinu’s arm, pulling him back down. “Don’t say anything.”
Gundhalinu’s frown turned to him. “He’s going to stop mistreating his man like that or I’ll—”
“He’s not going to stop,” Reede said flatly. “If you call him on it, he’ll only wait until your back is turned. And then he’ll treat the kid worse because you gave him trouble about it. Leave it alone.”
Gundhalinu stared at him, then settled slowly back onto the stool, all his resistance gone. He nodded, tightlipped with resignation. Reede glanced at the others, saw the resentment fade from their faces, and the helpless anger it left behind. They watched Hundet enter the rover, going inside to sleep it off, leaving Saroon on guard outside, able to see what went on where they all sat, just across the camp from him, but not able to join it.
After an endless moment of silence, Gundhalinu pushed to his feet again. “It’s been a long day.” He disappeared into his sleeping quarters.
“Saroon is in the army,” Niburu said, “because one day a squad came into the village where his family lived and took away all the young men they could find, at gunpoint. He’s been in the army three years. He’s eighteen.”