I’d wanted to; this station’s security has serious problems, and those problems have not been fixed. If I can find those holes? Guess who else can?”
“He has a point,” Campbell said. “The elevators are all retracted and without them there’s no direct route from here to Admin. Even if Zaladin made it to the other side, he doesn’t have surprise—they’re waiting for him.”
“Certainly, if he went up through the Central Shaft: I’m telling you there’s another way.”
Petrov sniggered. “What? A spacewalk?”
“No. There are laser defense grids on the outside hull,” Merlin said, making a circle with his forefinger.
I turned back to Belisle. “Which has priority? Your original mission or stopping Zaladin?”
Belisle turned cagey. “Original mission?”
“You and your boys have been walking the yard,” I said. “Which makes no sense if you’re here to stop him and don’t think he can get through station security.”
“The colonel was already here when we arrived,” Merlin said. “He has a striketeam here too.”
I didn’t hide my surprise. “You do?”
“Riots, remember?” Belisle snapped, looking less than pleased at Merlin for his admission. “Like I said, why I’m here is something you don’t need to know—”
“I know why you’re here,” I said. “Or rather why you were here. So I’ll ask again: does knowing that Zaladin is here to assassinate the Warden change your orders?”
Belisle started to say “You don’t know—” but something stopped him from completing the sentence. Maybe it was the look on my face. His eyes lost their fake smile, and I could tell that he was wondering if I did know, who might have told me, if I was just guessing, or maybe, just maybe, if I had a gift like Ernak Szabo, who always seemed to know things that no one could possibly know, who knew so often and against such overwhelming odds that Belisle had long since thrown up his hands and learned to simply trust that his boss was always right.
I didn’t have to try to read Belisle’s mind; it was rather like trying not to read a computer screen right in front of my face. I couldn’t help myself. Kovacs and Petrov weren’t any better, although I could try to put them out of my mind, concentrate on their thankfully focused boss, and thus do a better job of not catching stray thoughts. Merlin and Campbell—Campbell of all people—were the ones who were closed off from casual reading. I was grateful for that.
“Of course I know. Pulling people out of this prison is my day job, remember? I know a rescue operation when I see one. Have you found everyone you need?”
He studied my face, then answered: “No. Riots are complicating things. Nobody’s where they’re supposed to be.”
“Help us,” I said, “and I’ll help you.”
“We already have a striketeam down there, I don’t see—”
“I’ll put you in touch with Whisper Jack.”
“What?” Petrov spat out.
Kovacs’ eyes went wide. Even Belisle looked like I’d just dropped a hot rock in his lap.
Campbell looked confused. “Who’s Whisper Jack?”
“The ghost of Deimos,” Belisle offered. “An urban myth. Whenever anything goes wrong or someone takes missing, no matter what the official explanation, somebody’ll blame it on Whisper Jack. He’s a boogie man. He ain’t real. He’s just what keeps the guards jumping at shadows.”
“He’s Kantari,” I corrected. “He’s very real, and he’s been on this station for over fifty years. He knows everyone here. He can find anyone here. You help me, and I’ll convince Whisper Jack to help you.”
“If you can, you mean,” Petrov added, looking uncomfortable.
Belisle looked uncomfortable too, but not for the same reason. Kantari were the Holy Grails of the universe for men like Belisle, at once their greatest prize and worst fear. There was no information, no mental secret, that a Kantari couldn’t ferret out or unlock—and that was the problem wasn’t it? Unlike Sarcodinay, Kantari telepathy could affect humans just fine, and if the Kantari didn’t seem particularly interested in using the information they had undoubtedly learned about the human race against us, well, there had to be a quiet voice whispering that it was only a matter of time. We couldn’t just cut ourselves off from the Kantari—we needed them. Prior to the Janus drives, the ability of the Kantari to communicate with each other instantly—no matter how far apart they were, even separated by entire solar systems—made them a unbreakable, unhackable, instantaneous communications network that the Sarcodinay couldn’t hope to match. They couldn’t even be interrogated—stories said that captured Kantari could suicide through force of will, or fake it so well not even autopsies could stir them. Cocktail pundits might claim that the Janus drives had won the war, but the rebellion would never even have begun if not for the efforts of Marcus Payton and that first fateful contact with the Kantari who would later dub itself ‘Fish.’
Oh, we needed the Kantari, but we couldn’t even pretend to understand them, and Belisle found that justifiably nerve-wracking. Was it worth the quick finish to his assignment to let one of those things near him?
“If you’re taking people off station, he’ll help you. Do we have a deal?”
“I do believe we do.”
I smiled. “Excellent.” I walked over to the monitors and pulled up a large schematic of the space station. “Then allow me to show you just how easy it is to peak up Deimos’ skirt.”
ggg
“The problem with Deimos is the same problem the Sarcodinay have with everything—as a society they believe the map is the territory.”
Belisle cocked his head. “Pardon?”
“They take matters at face value,” I explained. “The label is not determined by the function, the label defines the function.”
“I am sorry, but I don’t follow. If you’re telling me that the Sarcodinay can’t be devious, believe me, I can point to plenty of examples of just how wrong you are.”
Campbell snickered. “Aren’t we here because of a Sarcodinay who is devious?”
I waved off his protest. “For one thing, I’m talking about the generalities of an entire species, not the actions of individuals. For another, Zaladin seems to be the exception to an awful lot of rules.”
“His victims, too,” Merlin said.
I stopped and looked at him.
“They’re all rebels, aren’t they? Doing the unexpected, defying convention…yet getting away with it. Why wasn’t Vana-Nus Lorvan removed from his position after the failure of Kaimer? Why didn’t the High Guard do anything about Maia-Leia Shana’s heresies? Tal-Magra Kelhelion started out as a slave-caste? And ended up in Administration? That’s unheard of.” He stopped, looking apologetic. “Sorry, I’m probably heading off on a tangent.”
“Not an unimportant one though—we should talk about that later.” I said as I looked over the holographic map. “My point is that even if the Sarcodinay can be devious and deceptive, they have also been taught to not question what they’re told by their superiors. If a stick is labeled as a club, they will use it as a club, and not necessarily think that it can also be used as a lever.” I smiled. “To be fair, humans have been known to have the same problem. In the Sarcodinay’s case, it means that although this station is a prison, mine, and ore processing facility, the original schematics are identical to a station intended to be, say, a trading outpost or even a colony. The Sarcodinay have one basic template for a space station this size, and they tend to reuse that template for multiple purposes with only slight modification…”
My voice trailed off as I remembered what Vana-Nus Lorvan had said: I didn’t look at the template. I just used it.
What kind of template? What would Vana-Nus Lorvan use that might have originally had a different purpose? The answer was so obvious that it almost had a physical presence, the weight on my lungs like a body blow: High Guard behavioral conditioning. Which would explain why I could be separate from Rhodes’ hybrids—not a sleeper—but still experien
cing the death memory unlocks, just as it would explain why anyone would go to the trouble of programming those unlocks into the Kaimer school students.
They hadn’t—not on purpose, anyway. These implanted memories weren’t meant for humans or hybrid humans—they were meant for the Sarcodinay High Guard, something that would never have been introduced into the human population until the Kaimer School.
Except…
My mouth went dry. There were mental conditional matrixes that every Sarcodinay telepath is given in childhood, regardless of whether they were destined for the black or the nobility. If Vana-Nus Lorvan had gotten clever and decided to piggy-back his hybrid templates off one of those in addition to the High Guard templates it would mean that not only the High Guard, but every Sarcodinay of noble, priest or High Guard caste under one hundred years old could potentially react. If that were true, then the triggers of these Sarcodinay deaths would affect millions.
But so what? Why would the Sarcodinay care if Shaniran had discovered Earth before or after the Plague struck? After the humiliation of the war, would they even mind if they had “saved” our world under false pretenses? If they themselves had been responsible for the Plague? What would Zaladin accomplish?
“Weaver?” Merlin’s voice cut through my reverie, and I realized that I’d been staring off into space with a hand clasped over my mouth without saying a word for a good thirty seconds.
“Sorry, I—” I