"Gregor," he said, stepping across and smiling. "How can I be of help?"
Karr came to the point directly. There was a strange sourness in his face as he spoke. "There are copies in the Enclave." "Copies? You mean . . . ?"
Karr nodded. "Like the ones DeVore sent in from Mars that time. But these are much better. These are almost indistinguishable. Not even a surgeon could tell the difference."
"Aiya . . . And are there many of these . . . copies?" Karr shifted uncomfortably. "Who knows? We were fortunate to stumble on the one we found. But if there's one, then you can be certain there'll be more."
"And the one you found . . . who was it a copy of?" Karr frowned. "That's the strangest thing. The man was a nobody. An accounts manager from the Mids. No connections, no importance. A cog, that's all."
"I see. . . ." Nan Ho went to his desk and sat, then gestured for Karr to sit across from him. He was silent awhile, thinking, then he looked up at Karr again. "Okay. What action have you taken so far?" "The copy body is isolated. We're testing it right now to determine whether there's any way—however small—to distinguish it from the original. In that vein I'm also having the original brought in for a medical. That may help speed up the process."
"Good."
"I've also taken the step of placing all those who've had any contact with this matter under house arrest until further notice. I feel it's of crucial importance we keep this under wraps. If this gets out—"
"They would panic." Nan Ho nodded vigorously. "I agree. And what else?"
"I've got two teams working separately on the original's files—to try to work out just why he was targeted, and whether there might be any connections with other copies."
Nan Ho sat forward slightly. "But I thought you said this was the only one you had?"
"It is. But we're looking for more. I've got another two teams looking at the camera records for the stacks bordering the Rift. They're looking back a month to begin with. Anyone who hasn't a good reason for being there gets pulled in. If we can find a pattern . . ."
Nan Ho smiled tensely. "You seem to have covered all the angles, Gregor. Even so, we have little to go on. We are like blind men fishing in the dark, neh?"
Karr shrugged. "It's all we can do. That and pray we have another stroke of good fortune. One good thing has come of this, however."
Nan Ho raised an eyebrow.
"We have a coat," Karr said, smiling. "A magic coat, you might call it. It makes its wearer radar invisible. It's what the copy was wearing in the Rift."
"A magic coat! That's good!" Nan Ho shook his head in astonishment, then sat back, weary suddenly. "There is another matter, however. One that is almost as urgent as this matter of the copy. Li Yuan has a job for you, Gregor. He wants you to arrange something for him."
Karr sat forward. "Name it."
"He wants Minister Chang Hong assassinated. And he wants it done tonight." * * *
KARR WAS CLIMBING aboard his cruiser when one of the guards from the palace ran up and hailed him.
"What is it, Sergeant?"
The sergeant knelt, his shaven head bowed low, and held out a folded printout. Karr took it and read, then let the breath hiss from between his teeth.
The Plantations. Lehmann was attacking the Plantations!
"Get up," he said. Then, handing the man the paper back, urged him back toward the palace. "Hand this to the Chancellor. Tell him I'm going there right now. And tell him this. Tell him I'll deal with the other matter when I can."
karr's CRUISER was flying northwest at top speed, heading for the garrison at Kiev. Things were bad. Reports had come in of incursions by Lehmann's ground forces right along the line, with major invasions at Katowice, Ternopol, and Kishinev. If this was true, then it was serious indeed. He had already committed all of his available cruisers—more than eighteen thousand in all—to fight off the threat in the air, and to fight three separate major land engagements without air support could prove extremely costly.
He leaned forward, chewing at a nail. Far below plantation workers had formed a straggling line from one of the large irrigation canals to the edge of a burning field, passing buckets from hand to hand, urged on by their supervisors, but the fire was burning fiercely and black smoke rolled out across the sky. From the blackened look of it, much of the huge, ten-thousand-mou field had already been consumed. Moreover, it was one of many such fires he could see as he scanned the fields from horizon to horizon. Lehmann's craft must have penetrated their defenses deeply to inflict such damage—either that or his agents had infiltrated the plantations themselves.
Karr sighed, pained by what he saw, knowing it would be worse farther south toward the border with Lehmann's lands. So much destruction would take a long rime to repair, and that would put a severe strain on the Enclave, but to lose it all would be catastrophic, for they could not survive on what the orbitals produced. This was a battle they had to win.
His stomach tightened with anxiety. It was six months since Lehmann had last made a concerted effort to destroy the Plantations; six months in which he had had time to build his strength. Over the same period Karr's own forces had diminished.
The balance is swinging away from us again, he thought, watching as a hostile swept by below, pursued by two of his own ships, the curved wing shape of Lehmann's new craft unmistakable. Yes, and he's winning the technological race too.
"Sir?"
He turned, looking to his Communications officer. "Yes, Radow?"
"There's been an attack on the Ansbach Sector, sir. It looks like we've been overwhelmed there. Major Fiedler is leading a counterattack, and reinforcements are being sent down from Bremen, but things look bad."
"Patch me in," Karr said, a cold certainty gripping him. Ansbach was where he'd been only that morning. Where the copy had been found.
The copy, he thought. He knows we've got the copy and he wants it back. Maybe that's what all of this is about!
But even as he thought it, he realized that it couldn't be true. The copy may have precipitated things, but this had the look of a long-prepared campaign. Lehmann could not possibly have organized all this in a matter of hours.
"Fiedler?" he said, as the Major's voice sounded in his head. "What's the situation there?"
"Bad, sir, but better than it was. Looks like Lehmann's put in an elite battalion. The way they're fighting, you'd think our friend the White T'ang wanted something desperately."
He does, Karr thought, deciding not to commit his thoughts to the airwaves, just in case Lehmann was listening in, and glad at the same time that he'd ordered the copy removed to Bremen.
"Who knows?" he said, noncommittally. "For now, contain him. Evacuate the surrounding stacks and fall back if he attacks again. Reinforcements will be there soon enough. If it's a foothold he's after, we'll know soon enough."
"Sir."
"And keep me advised of developments, Walter."
"How are things there?"
Karr looked out, noting the smoking wreck of a cruiser—one of his—in the field below. "Bad." He said. "But it's early yet. I'm going to make the fucker pay for this, believe me."
"Good. And good luck,"
"And you."
He cut contact and sat back, closing his eyes a moment, thinking things through. If this was the Big Push, then they could expect a major campaign of disruption within the Enclave itself. Lehmann would be looking to destabilize things on every front, to try—almost literally—to kick the props away from under Li Yuan. So far, however, there was no news of any trouble within the Enclave itself. So maybe this was part of a longer-term strategy. Maybe Lehmann had decided that he couldn't topple the Enclave at a single go.