PART THREE
NOT SINGLE SPIES
by
Joseph E. Swift
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
--Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V
FOR LORIS
Who can I call on, where will I turn
To quench the fire that I fear may burn?
How many tears must now be shed
To save the world from the fate that I dread?
No easy answer: I know you too well.
Still I must try, though you’ll never tell.
Who can I ask for, who send away?
How many hearts must be broken this day?
Tell me, my love, what will suffice?
Count me the sorrows which will be the price.
What will I need to see through your lies?
Not single spies.
--Ali Karil
The Dark Lord’s Kingdom and Other Poems
THE MISSION
It was slow-going through the tangled undergrowth. Hacking at the thick foliage with machetes, Karil and Loris pushed on despite their exhaustion and pain. Loris, captain of the freetrader ship Atalanta, was tall and black and magnificently muscled, as revealed by the cut-off shorts and cropped top she wore. On her hip, like most Free Traders, she wore a pistol-grip laser in a leather holster. On a belt across her back was a steel rod that would telescope into a modern kendo shinai--her favorite weapon. Karil, her astrogator, was compact and tightly muscled, dressed in little more than Loris was. His skin was brown, and so were his expressive eyes, as opposed to the black, penetrating gaze of Loris, which could be as frightening as her obvious strength and cat-like movements. On his hips, Karil wore both the standard laser-pistol and an antique revolver, and a bow and quiver hung on his back. They both wore beaten wide-brimmed hats under the Terran sun. Oh yes, and excellent boots.
The jungles of Virginia were sweltering in the hothouse Earth, but Atalanta assured them through their earpieces that they were nearing their goal, the overgrown city of Washington. Soon the buildings began to loom out of the forest--monumental porticoed architecture covered in ivy and creepers, looking like Roman ruins. Karil wondered if any humans at all had trod here since global warming had driven the population northward and into orbit nearly a hundred years before.
“There is a pack of dogs approaching from the southwest,” Atalanta told them. Sometimes they could see her flying-wing shape above the treetops.
“Jesus Christ. How many are there?”
“About ten or a dozen warm bodies. They haven’t begun to circle you yet. If you could find a reasonably open space, I could hit them from above, but there is still nowhere I can land.”
“This way,” Karil said. “I can see a plaza of some kind.” They emerged from tree-cover into an open area filled with crumbling stone steps. Inside a vine-draped portico was a huge statue of a bearded man sitting on a throne.
“Do you know who that is?” Karil began.
“Right now, I’m thinking about the dogs,” Loris grumbled. They waited.
“I hate like hell to kill these creatures,” Karil said. “I’ve seen wild dogs in High Africa. When my great-grandfather stocked the place, lions and leopards were nearly extinct, and the cheetahs were long gone, but the hyenas and wild dogs were still thriving on Earth. I loved watching the dogs when they hunted, and when they played with their pups. There was a kind of nobility to them—more so than the lions, I’m afraid.”
If pressed, Loris would have said that these were among her favorite moments—talking quietly with Karil just before they went into action. “Well, my childhood experiences were with the feral street-dogs in India. Nobility is not the word that pops into my head.”
“I know, but the dog was with us for thousands of years, and when the end came, we abandoned so many of them, and they interbred back to the original wild dogs they had been bred from. So, we’re to blame for what they became.”
“If it was a gang of armed men coming after us, would you hesitate to shoot them?”
“No,” Karil said, “I guess not.”
The dogs began to appear one by one at the edge of the forest. There were at least a dozen of them. They exchanged glances as they crept, growling, into the clearing. Karil and Loris drew their lasers. There was no point in taking chances.
They sent several beams of light into several dogs, who collapsed instantly. The others hesitated but kept coming.
“They’re not that afraid of lasers,” Loris said. “Looks like they’ve run into human beings before. Atty, where the hell are you?”
They heard the ship’s calm and mellifluous voice in their ears. “I will be there, Loris. My entrance will more effective if they are out in the open and not sheltered by the forest.”
“Oh, well, we wouldn’t want to spoil your big entrance.” Loris snatched the kendo pike from her back, tapped it on the ground, and it extended to its full two-meter length. Karil grabbed his bow and nocked an arrow. The trouble with lasers was that they killed the dogs instantly, without the squealing and whimpering in pain which could discourage the rest of the pack. But if Karil could put some arrows into them and Loris could break a few backs, it might demoralize the others, as it would human beings.
Karil sent a few arrows into canine bodies and the result was gratifying, though painful for Karil to watch. Loris stepped forward, spinning the pike around her and fracturing legs and spines. Half a dozen dogs lay whimpering and broken, and the others paused, contemplating retreat perhaps, lest the pack be reduced to less than viable numbers, but again moved forward.
Suddenly, Atalanta’s great flying wing shape appeared over the monument behind them. The dogs crouched as her shadow fell over them, and suddenly the clearing rang with sirens and klaxons and the crash of thunder. The creatures paused for a moment and then bolted for the woods. Karil and Loris returned their weapons to their places, after euthanizing the permanently injured dogs. Karil fought back tears he would never have shed for attacking men.
“That was a hell of a show, Atty,” Loris said.
“You didn’t hear the ultra-sonics,” the ship replied. “I believe your goal is not far away, now. It appears the structure is sound enough for me to land on the roof, so I can pick you up.”
“Does this mean you could have landed there in the first place and saved us the slog through the jungle?”
“No, Loris. As I passed closely over the various buildings, I was able to find them on the crude map Professor Kelley provided, using radar, and I am only now certain of the location. It appears that the front façade is reduced to a pile of rubble, but there is a freight entrance at the rear, where I believe you can gain entrance near the room you wish to examine.”
It was not long before they found the entrance she had mentioned. Their lasers opened the doors and they crept into the relatively cool interior. Atty’s voice was cut off as they penetrated deeper into the building. They took down a floorplan from the wall, and using that, they made their way through the echoing corridors and stairways until they found the reading room the Professor had heard of. As the planet warmed and the jungle spread inexorably over the South, the most precious of the Smithsonian and Library of Congress collections had been moved to the provisional American government location in Nueva York and remained there until they were seized and removed to orbit by the High Company families. But lately Kelley had run across evidence that several small collections had been left behind, and he used his influence with Galilean Security to get Karil and Loris loaned to him.
They found what they believed was the reading room the Professor had told them about, and discovered the huge wooden doors sealed. Karil used his laser to remove the lock, creating a small rectangular hole in the door. He peered inside the room, sealed for perhaps a century.
“You see anything?” Loris asked.
“Yes,” Karil replied. “Wonderful things.”
They opened the door and crept inside. There were not only tapes and chips, but leather-bound books on glass-doored shelves and piled on library tables. The Professor would be having orgasms, Karil thought. He picked out a judicious sample of obscure texts he believed Kelley would love and tucked them in a leather bag. They made their way up the stairs to the roof, and found Atalanta sitting there, her drivers rumbling. They climbed into the bridge, Karil took his place at the astrogator’s panel and Loris buckled into the pilot’s acceleration couch, where she could look down over Karil’s head to see the data spread out on his screens.
Atalanta rose in thunder and streaked up into the blue sky. Loris engaged the scramjets and the ship leaped for space. Once they were comfortably far from the High Company colonies and their spy-satellites, Loris sent a coded message to Kelley’s Asteroid Belt worksite, to arrange for a full-on archaeological expedition. Eventually, a response came, but from a computer and not from him.
“A rather strange thing has happened,” Atalanta said as she unscrambled the coded message. “It appears Professor Kelley is not at the Heracles site, nor is he anywhere else in the Belt that we know of, or in Jupiter orbit, as far as Galilean Security can tell. He seems to be missing.”
***
Saturn’s golden magnificence filled the forward port as the Professor’s ship, Celestial Intelligencer, approached. It may have been foolhardy as well as exhausting to travel from Jupiter to Saturn orbit at high speed in a small ship, secretly, with his pilot Rocky his only company, along with Celeste herself, but already too many people knew what had happened.
“Professor,” Celeste asked in her dulcet voice with the Irish accent, “do you wish to land at Titan and confer with the Council, or go directly to Tethys?”
“We’ll put in at Ithaca Canyon first,” Kelley replied, “and then I’ll know what to report to the Council.”
“Copy,” Rocky said. His metallic arms darted over the controls as he watched the data flashing on Celeste’s screens. Rocky was a man of few words, to say the least, which was why the Professor got on so well with him.
The tall, red-bearded councillor sat in his acceleration couch like a Viking king—or like the Statue of Lincoln in the ruins of Washington—and watched the glorious scenery of the Saturn system drift by. The surface of Titan, the largest moon in the Solar System, lay hidden beneath its thick, red atmosphere, though ships could be seen coming and going through the cloud-cover to and from the mining-works on the hellish surface.
The colony of Nova Terra hung in orbit above it, slowly revolving in the light of the distant sun magnified and reflected by the structure’s enormous mirrors. Through the transparent solars, Kelley could see the landscapes within—forests and plains and deserts. Through the drifting clouds, he could see herds of animals, roads and farms and houses, one of them his own. Though thousands of men and women, not to mention robots, had labored in its design and construction, the colony was Kelley’s greatest creation, as far as the solar system was concerned. Until, of course, his next project, the starship Wily Odysseus, could be launched.
Leaving Nova Terra behind, Celeste fell toward Saturn, which grew in size and glory as they approached. Kelley never tired of seeing it. His current home near the asteroid Heracles was filled with pictures and models and holos of it. But before reaching the great ring system, Celeste turned toward the moon called Tethys. Halfway round its circumference stretched the great crack in the world that was Ithaca Canyon—2000 kilometers long, 100 wide, and five deep. Celeste dropped down into the icy cleft and approached the great space doors, locked and sealed under Kelley’s orders. His little ship approached the small lock beside the doors and hovered outside.
“Councillor Professor Charles Kelley,” he said, and the spaceport tower analyzed his voice as Celeste sent his personal code.
“Welcome, Professor,” said a voice, either a human or a superior robot.
The hatch irised open and the ship nosed in. Once the lock had been pressurized, Kelley kissed Rocky and climbed out of his ship to be greeted by the Titan Security Chief in charge.
“Captain Pierce,” he introduced himself. “A pleasure to greet you, Councillor. I’m only sorry it’s under such circumstances.”
“Thank you for contacting me so quickly,” Kelley said. “This is a serious matter.”
“I’ll show you what we found. This way.”
He was led out onto a glass-walled observation deck that afforded a view of the hangar hollowed out of the icy moon. Below them were two enormous spaceships and three empty cradles. There had been five such ships, built in secret by the brilliant engineer and arch-criminal al-Zubair some ten Earth-years before, in an attempt to seize control of the Outer Worlds with the use of antimatter-powered warships. His plans were defeated by Kelley and the Titan Council, by Galilean Security, and by Karil and Loris. Many had died, including Atalanta’s first captain Shagrug, Loris’s first ship Anais Nin, and Loris and Karil’s lover Johanna.
Two of the antimatter-drive ships had been destroyed—Kalkeos Akmon or the Brazen Anvil and Mjolnir, or Thor’s Hammer—and their cradles were empty. Kelley had taken much of two others, including the drivers—Zill Allah, or Shadow of God, and al-Mansur, or The Victorious--to build his starship, which was his Titanic version of beating swords into plowshares. The hulks of those two ships sat there now, impressive but toothless. Drammavijaya, or Victory of Righteousness, was entirely missing and its cradle now sat empty.
“We found all the humans dead and all the robots fried,” Captain Pierce said. “It must have been a monumental operation to fly it out of here on auxiliary fusion power.”
The antimatter drivers were unfinished and would not function. It was believed that only al-Zubair could have made them work and he died in the Brazen Anvil explosion, along with a number of his antimatter-drive experts. In typical fashion, he did not confide in anyone and kept most of the secret of his antimatter drive to himself, taking it to his grave.
“There are only two possibilities,” the Professor said. “Either someone has figured out al-Zubair’s secret, or they plan to refit the drivers into weapons.”
“That,” Captain Pierce said, “is why I have not slept well since I discovered this.”
***
Karil and Loris could see Jupiter swelling like a great banded pumpkin for days as they approached out of the Asteroid Belt. It seemed a harbinger of home to them as it filled the sky, its swirling superstorms racing about its great circumference in its ten-hour day, the black shadows of the major moons like beauty-marks on its painted face. They descended upon the glittering icefields of Ganymede. Atalanta was lowered into the icy surface to Ganymede City’s busy Rim District.
The conversation between Atalanta, privy to the Security codes, and the spaceport authorities was largely silent because it took place at computer speed. Having mated with a lock and battened down, they left the ship and travelled the crowded corridors and slidewalks of the colorful, clamouring district. It was a relief to find themselves in one-sixth gravity again, after laboring in the full gee of Earth and enduring the long space-journey in weightlessness. It was not long before they had re-learned the gliding pace of moon-walking again, as if they had never left.
In the spaceport business district, they signed into the Security building and took the elevator deeper into the ice to Galilean Security Headquarters. Before being allowed to leave the elevators, they were interrogated, irradiated, and inoculated. Finally, they were allowed to enter the office suite of the current head of Galilean Security. The big tri-dee on the wall of a scene from The Wizard of Oz was an affectionate company joke on the commanding officer, Auntie Em.
First, of course, they had to cool their heels in the outer office of Penelope, the Director’s Secretary.
“Penelope, My Love,” Karil declaimed. “It is I, Odysseus, returned from the wars.” He embraced her in his strong arms. “Even when my mind wanders Odysseus-like upon a sea of sign and symbol, I am there, beside you in my dreams.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Loris laughed.
“I know very well,” Penelope said, “that you didn’t write that poem for me but for a certain blonde on Mars. Am I right?”
“Penelope, you wound me. Look, we brought you a gift—a rare and valuable item from Earth.”
It was a small glass dome labelled Washington, containing a miniature domed building in water. When he handed it to her, a tiny snowstorm rose about the building. A moment of sadness crossed her face, and then she smiled. She placed it on a credenza behind her with all the other tiny objects brought to her by returning agents. Two things hardly anyone knew about this collection: It was rather valuable for historical reasons, and many of the items would trigger sad memories of agents who would never return again. To hide the tear-glint in her eyes, she embraced Loris and lay her head on the woman’s breast. Loris held her in a crushing embrace.
“Miss Cash,” said a woman’s deep voice, “if you are finished flirting with my agents, please send them in.”
Karil and Loris pulled away from Penelope’s embrace and entered the inner office. Auntie Em was in her sixties, with short grey hair and an expression that was somehow stern with laughing eyes. Karil and Loris sat respectfully before her desk. Naturally, she got right to the point.
“I have something for you on Professor Kelley’s disappearance,” she said. “This is his report.”
They watched the report on the screen—Ithaca Canyon, the missing ship, and Kelley’s chilling conclusion of its meaning. Karil found his heart beating faster at the sight of the empty cradle. Victory of Righteousness, indeed! He and Loris had nearly died aboard Thor’s Hammer.
Auntie Em noticed his agitation. He never could hide his emotions like Loris could, and the Head of Galilean Security missed nothing.
“Professor Kelley is on his way back from Saturn,” she said. “As soon as this came to light, we did an exhaustive search for evidence of the ship and its passing. The antimatter drive is not functional—yet—but the fusion auxiliary drive is extremely powerful. We found nothing. It could be anywhere in the solar system by now.
“For some time, we’ve had our eyes on a certain Zhang Shen-Yi, a businessman on High China with interests in mining and shipbuilding. Lately, he has been buying ship-grade titanium and other ship-building materials in unusually high quantities. We thought he might be setting himself up as a middleman in titanium, but that seems inconsistent with his character. He loves ships and building ships. But if he’s building a ship, where is he doing it? There’s no room in High Asia for a factory of that size. He has several factories in Earth orbit, but they’re easy to monitor with a simple telescope, and there’s been no such activity. Only shuttles and other small vessels are under construction. If he’s building on the surface of Luna or Earth, despite the expense of construction under gravity, it can only be because he wants to keep it secret. Also, in his employ is a certain Doctor Marjorie Suzuki, an expert on antimatter drive and containment. Now, suddenly, this partially complete antimatter-drive ship goes missing.
“He has also been buying construction materials like lunacrete in large quantities—enough to build a huge hangar, with accompanying factories, residences, and outbuildings. If he is producing antimatter, he would need a collider and that is an enormous construction problem. He actually owns kilometers of wild land in the Eastern Seaboard Forest of the Americas, where he used to have mining interests. We have an agent in Zhang Industries on High China, who has seen ships coming and going from that district. Our analysts think the deep forest there would be a good place for the High Companies to hide such construction, because they control access, and most of us in the Outer Worlds would find it an exhausting place to work.”
“Whereas we were born in that gravity and visit it regularly,” Loris said.
“Yes.”
“And Free Traders are experts at surreptitious planetary entry, as they say.”
“Exactly. We’re sending many agents to check out many places, but there is really only one team perfect for that location.”
“Not forgetting,” Karil added, “that we have a personal stake in the matter. We had friends who died in the effort to keep ships like this out of the wrong hands, and Professor Kelley must be devastated that it was stolen out from under his nose.”
“He wasn’t there,” Auntie Em said.
“No, but he hired most of the people who were, and he won’t rest easy till that ship’s back under his control or destroyed.”
“Well,” Auntie Em said, “be careful what you wish for, because my people tell me that no-one knows what might happen if something triggered an explosive release of antimatter.”
“Really?”
“If it’s in the location we think, it could take out the entire Eastern Seaboard.”
Now that she had scared the living daylights out of them, Auntie Em described her plan. Karil and Loris hated it because it required them to separate, Loris to travel undercover to High Asia and Karil to search for the mysterious landing place on Earth’s surface. This team had always bordered on insubordination, but this time they argued so loudly that Penny, in the outer office, began to worry. They threatened to quit, which of course was their right, but Auntie Em didn’t believe it. There were too many advantages in their support from Galilean Security. Maintaining a ship like Atalanta was expensive, just thinking of the fuel she required. And when Auntie Em described the little extras she proposed from the Quartermaster’s office, they began to come around. Besides, they were clearly as worried about these developments as she was. She had listened with amused forbearance, and now her face turned to granite.
She pointed out that Karil could hardly go undercover, since he was something of a celebrity on three planets. But Zhang Shen-Yi was looking for highly trained security guards on High Asia for a rather mysterious project, and Loris could pass any test they might give her with flying colors. In the end, Karil and Loris had to admit this was a promising lead. They could see why Auntie Em was head of the company at her young age. And they knew, like every other agent, that she actually cared for them. Not every boss had such an affectionate nickname. But they left with heavy hearts. They simply did not want to be separated.
***
When Karil and Loris returned to Atalanta’s berth, they found Honey waiting for them outside. Free Traders had their admirers, and Honey had wormed her way into their bed a while ago.
“I heard you were back,” she said.
Karil and Loris both kissed her. “Let’s go out for dinner, then.”
They took her to Sharkey’s in the Rim, which she enjoyed immensely because it was a dangerous place and very exciting, but she felt perfectly safe sitting between them. When they returned to Atalanta, she immediately began to undress them and made passionate love to both of them, then contentedly drifted off to sleep between them, safe in their arms.
In the morning, Karil told her, “We’ll be gone for a while.”
“Really? I’ll miss you.”
“We’ll miss you too. But we’re going all the way to Titan.”
“Really? How exciting.”
“Well, most of the trip will be tedious. But our old friend Professor Kelley wants to see us on some important matter.”
“I’ll be here when you get back,” Honey said.
“We know,” Loris said. “We’ll look you up as soon as we arrive.”
She left, happily kissing them good-bye.
“You think it worked, Atty?” Loris asked, when the lock was sealed.
“I think she believed what you said,” Atalanta replied. “I have no doubt she’ll report it to her handlers in the Quasi-Police, and when you disappear, they’ll likely conclude you’re on route to Titan. It should be some time before they start looking for you.”