“This is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.”
Abruptly Holt snorted. As if he were emerging from a trance, he shook his arms and shoulders, rubbed his hands over his cheeks. His eyes blinked rapidly to clear his vision.
“You probably believe that, you blind idiot,” he growled. “Ward Dios, the fucking idealist.” His anger was so vivid that it left afterimages on Warden’s IR sight. “You almost make me regret choosing you for this job. After all these years you still don’t know what you’re for—what the whole goddamn UMCP is for. You still think I invented you because I wanted cops. If this weren’t a terrible time to change directors, I would throw you out on your ass and find somebody with better brains.
“Well, you listen to me, Ward. This is your last chance.
“Do you really think I’ve missed the point?”
A pang twisted Warden’s heart; but he tightened his arms so that the pain didn’t show. “When you start yelling,” he retorted trenchantly, “I don’t know what to think.”
“In that case,” Holt said like a breath of flame, “I’ll keep my voice down. I don’t want to give you any excuse for making a mistake. These are orders, and you”—with the knuckles of one hand, he rapped every word onto his desktops—“are going to carry them out.
“If the Amnion want this Davies Hyland, so do I. I want him delivered here, to me, in person.”
Warden tried not to let himself hope; he couldn’t afford it in front of the Dragon. Holt was taking the bait.
“Why?”
“If you can’t figure that out,” Holt rasped, “you don’t deserve an answer.
“But it does mean Trumpet has to be kept alive. I don’t like anything else you’ve done here—and you as sure as shit haven’t convinced me I can trust you—but I’ll give you that one. Trumpet has to be kept alive.
“Since I don’t trust you, I’ll tell you how to do it. I’m not going to put up with arguments or insubordination or delays. If you give me any grief, I’ll jerk you out of UMCPHQ so fast your vital organs’ll be left behind.”
Warden braced himself behind his arms and waited for the ax to fall.
Rapping the desktop again, Holt said, “I want you to contact Trumpet. Make ‘Director Donner’ do it,” he sneered harshly. “You’re so busy protecting her, I want her to get her hands dirty. I want you to make her get her hands dirty.”
Go on, say it. Warden clasped his chest until he could hardly breathe. Say it and get it over with.
Holt’s aura shone with cruelty and relish. “Tell her to give Joshua’s new priority-codes to Nick Succorso.”
In spite of his grip on himself, Warden flinched. For an instant time seemed to stop. Behind his rigid expression and his flat stare, he went into shock.
Tell her to give Joshua’s new priority-codes to Nick Succorso.
Amagnesium flare took fire in his guts. This was worse than anything he’d feared, anything he could answer. Holt had beaten him. In his most costly nightmares he hadn’t dreamed that his master would go so far.
—to Nick Succorso.
“We’ll let Succorso take Taverner’s place,” the Dragon explained as if he were licking his chops. “That way we can make sure Joshua doesn’t spring any more surprises on us. Succorso can force him to follow my orders when I’m ready.”
Joshua’s new priority-codes—
Whom had he betrayed most, Angus or Morn? They were the offspring of his most secret desires: he’d stripped them of everything they needed or owned in the name of passions they hadn’t asked for and couldn’t share. And those passions had just died as if Holt had driven a stake through Warden’s heart.
“Once Succorso takes command of Joshua and Trumpet—and gives us confirmation so I know I’m safe—we’ll give him the rest of my orders.”
Tell her-
Oh, Min, you are going to, hate me for this.
Without Morn’s testimony the Bill of Severance would never pass. Not now. And certainly not later, when the UMCP would be more vulnerable.
But Warden couldn’t collapse now; couldn’t bear to let Holt unman him entirely. He still had work to do. Damage-control: his last duty when everything had gone wrong, and the Dragon’s rapacity swallowed human space. Shame if nothing else required him to stand up; face the consequences of his arrogance and folly; save what last small things might still be preserved. He refused to fail under the burden until he’d paid for everything.
From somewhere, as if he were digging it out of a grave, he found the strength to ask, “Which are?”
Holt grinned. His aura reeked of pleasure. “Kill everybody aboard except Davies Hyland. Have him bring Davies to me. Let him keep one or two of his people, if he needs them. Make him kill the rest. Especially Morn Hyland and Vector Shaheed. You and those two bastards have done enough harm.”
Through a storm of chagrin, Warden realized that Holt had recognized Shaheed’s name after all.
In a bleak tone, like one of the damned, he murmured, “How am I supposed to make him do all that? He doesn’t have any priority-codes.”
Holt positively gleamed with ferocity. “By Offering him something he wants. We’ll let him keep Trumpet and Joshua. He’ll jump at it. He can’t refuse a ship like that—or the chance to have a welded cyborg for crew.”
Angus, oh, Angus, it was all for nothing, I did it to you for nothing. I told you it’s got to stop, but instead of stopping anything I committed a crime against you that you’ll have to live with until Nick does you enough harm to kill you.
And Morn as well. Nick might agree to kill her, but until the end she would be his to torment and degrade as much as he wished.
Past his arms and his lacerated heart, Warden sighed. “I’m sure you’re right. Nick Succorso is exactly the kind of man who’ll jump at an offer like that.”
Holt leaned forward; pouncing. Sharp with relish, he hissed, “You sonofabitch, you’re mine, mine. I invented the cops—I invented you. You’re as welded as any cyborg, and you’ve had your last chance at getting me in trouble. From now on you’re going to do what I tell you, when I tell you, how I tell you. And you’re going to thank your pitiful ass you aren’t dead.
“Do you really think I’ve missed the point?”
Warden shook his head. Slowly he undamped his arms. Every muscle in his chest and legs ached with cramps: he felt as stiff and unsteady as a cripple. Nevertheless he climbed to his feet. Holt didn’t need to dismiss him: he knew he was finished. Fighting knots and strain, he limped toward the door.
“Follow orders,” Holt said after him. “I’m watching—and you know I can do it. That’s what all those listening posts are for. If you mess with me, I’ll find out. Then you’re dead.”
Warden nodded as if he were beaten.
When Holt unsealed the door, however, Warden didn’t open it. Instead he turned back to the Dragon.
Holt had surprised him with an act of imaginative malice he hadn’t expected and couldn’t match. There were other things he could do, however. He understood power and manipulation; he could still fight. With his hand on the door and no hope left, he replied to his doom with an imaginative act of his own.
“Speaking of your mother,” he said distantly, “I haven’t seen her for a long time. Do you mind if I visit her before I go? It should only take a few minutes. And I can spare the time. We have hours before our best window on the next listening post Punisher is likely to pass.”
“My mother?” Holt was surprised: his face showed it as plainly as his emissions. “Norna? What in hell do you want to visit her for?”
The UMCP director shrugged awkwardly; falsely. “She’s become something of a legend over the years—like an oracle, you might say. I want to ask her what makes her think I’ve been trying to get you in trouble.”
Holt scrutinized Warden hard. The uncertainty of his aura suggested that he felt the threat in Warden’s request, but couldn’t identify it. After only a moment, however, his expression cleared, and he laughed acid
ly.
“You poor, misguided lump of shit, you’re still trying to play games with me. Go ahead”—he fluttered his hands—“visit her. Enjoy it if you can. You two deserve each other. And there’s a good chance you’re going to end up just like her.”
As Warden opened the door and closed it behind him, Holt was speaking into an intercom, instructing HS to conduct the UMCP director to Norna Fasner and let him talk to her for ten minutes before escorting him to his shuttle.
“Privately,” Warden told the two guards who came to his sides. As soon as he left Holt’s sight, his manner became authoritative and sure: he sounded as steady as a rock. “I want to talk to her alone. Check with him if you don’t trust me.”
“Yes, sir.” As far as Home Security knew, Warden Dios was still the second most powerful man in human space. “This way.”
Walking briskly to work the cramps out of his legs, Warden followed the guards. Holt had said, You are mine, but he was wrong. Warden may have lost everything else, but he was still himself.
While any piece of him remained, he intended to go on fighting.
WARDEN
He was at his best when he was ashamed.
He could not have explained that: he was hardly aware of it. Yet it was true. The tension between his unyielding passion for standards of integrity, commitment, and efficacy so untrammeled that they could never be attained and his sense of mortal chagrin when he fell below those standards was fruitful for him. It taught him strengths he might never have known he possessed.
Shame and idealism were the means by which Holt Fasner had manipulated him into becoming what he was: the director of the UMCP, guilty as charged; the man most directly responsible for the corruption of the cops. Holt had focused his idealism—his essential belief that it was the honorable and necessary function of the police to serve and protect humanity—to position him where he would be vulnerable; then had exercised his shame to push him farther and farther from those ideals.
In a sense Warden had accepted this. Presumably he could have refused at any time—could have preserved the man he wished to be by letting Holt fire him. At the worst Holt might have had him killed. So what? Warden knew to his cost that there were many worse fates than death.
Yet he hadn’t refused. At every crisis he’d resisted the Dragon’s cunning up to a certain point; then he’d let it carry him along.
In a sense, the reason he did this was simple.
All his life, he’d considered himself inadequate to his dreams; unequal to the task of making them live. Certainly he’d been too flawed to see Holt Fasner accurately when the Dragon had first hired him to work for SMI Security. Stupid with naïveté, he’d believed that he was being given a chance to do good, valuable work for a good, valuable man. And Holt had encouraged that illusion with every trick at his command. Hungry with dreams and shame, Warden had learned to define himself in terms of law enforcement at its noblest: service and protection for those who needed it most—and could afford it least.
By the time he’d realized that Holt used the cops for no purposes but his own, and that those purposes had nothing to do with idealism, Warden had already acquired a taste for the nourishment his sore heart craved: the food of lawful power.
So who could hope to stop the Dragon, if not an officer of the law? Whose job was it? And to whom did that job properly belong, if not to the man who had helped make the Dragon powerful by allowing his own hopes to blind him?
Precisely because he considered himself culpable, Warden Dios had sworn to take any risk and pay any price which might help him undo the harm he’d caused by supporting Holt Fasner’s ambitions.
Of course he couldn’t undo that harm if he weren’t a cop. The authority of his position as director of the UMCP was all that enabled him to act. He couldn’t afford to sacrifice that authority in the name of personal honor.
Therefore he swallowed the compromises and betrayals necessary to keep his job, earn the Dragon’s trust. When he wasn’t engaged in some dirty business of Holt’s, he developed and ran the UMCP as if his organization were indeed as incorruptible as it should be. And in the dark corners of his mind, through the gaps between his other commitments, he set about the complex, secret task of arranging Holt’s downfall.
Inevitably the Dragon caught glimpses of this. He knew better than to trust his UMCP director too much. So he strove to bind Warden closer to him with new acts of complicity and shame. But there he erred. He misunderstood the true nature of Warden’s dreams. Each new piece of extorted cynicism drove Warden farther away; drove him to imagine more, dare more, suffer more in the name of his real passion. Shame pushed him.
He was no longer the man he’d once been: he’d transcended himself long ago. By will and mortification he’d become more than he or Holt Fasner or anyone else realized.
When Holt outplayed him, demanded that he sacrifice Morn and Angus as well as everything they represented, Warden was left stripped of his hopes; naked with chagrin at all the harm he’d done—and done for nothing.
Intertech’s antimutagen had been denied to humankind—but not to the Amnion. Vector Shaheed, the one free man with the knowledge to replicate Intertech’s work, was about to be killed. Morn Hyland had endured Angus Thermopyle and Nick Succorso, rape and zone implants, for months. Now she would be discarded like a piece of scrap. Angus himself, who carried the core of Warden’s desperation in his welded resources and secret programming, would become Nick’s plaything and tool; the perfect illegal, violent and dehumanized.
What was left, except shame and the price of failure?
Warden Dios was at his best when he asked to see Norna Fasner.
He didn’t try to explain the request to himself. It was purely intuitive—a small gesture to counterbalance what he’d lost—and he accepted the consequences of acting on it. Yet it seemed to make him stronger with every passing moment. As HS guided him into the secure depths of Holt’s headquarters, his heart grew steady and his respiration calmed. Neither his stride nor his composure gave his guards any hint that the Dragon had found a way to deprive him of what he loved most.
There was always something left.
Perhaps that was why he wanted to consult an oracle.
So he followed his escort until the two men delivered him to the specialized cave of life-support systems and video screens where Norna Fasner lived. At the door he dismissed them. They had no orders to accompany him in. And surely the Dragon could eavesdrop on his mother whenever he wished.
Warden entered her sickchamber alone and closed the door.
The lights were off in the high, sterile room; but he could see by the phosphorescent glow of the video screens which filled the wall in front of Norna’s bed and equipment. That wall was all she had, her whole world: the bed held her rigid, as if it were a traction frame, so that her equipment could do the delicate and obscene work of keeping life in her immured carcass. Only her eyes and mouth could move—and her fingers, allowing her to control the illumination and screens. In the flat, heartless light, she looked spectral and bereaved. The medical advances which sustained her son had come too late to do anything more than impose existence on her. Mortality stained her shriveled skin so that it seemed filthy against the clean linen of her bed.
Her equipment gave off so many IR emissions that Warden’s prosthetic sight was effectively useless. As far as he could see, she had no aura; perhaps no emotions; possibly no mind. Yet Holt had told him over the years that she remained conscious—not only sentient but sharp. On one occasion Holt had said, “I keep her alive, you know. I don’t mean my doctors or my orders—I mean me personally. I keep her alive. She would go out like a candle if she didn’t hate me too much to die. She lives for the hope that she’ll get to see me destroyed. And maybe, just maybe, that she’ll be able to see it coming.”
The Dragon had laughed as he said this. Apparently he considered it funny.
Warden was of a different opinion.
He kept it to himself, ho
wever, now as much as then. He wasn’t here to feel sorry for the woman who had taught Holt his hungers. And he had only ten minutes. If Norna couldn’t answer him in that time, the risk of visiting her would be wasted.
Nevertheless he stopped just inside the door, momentarily paralyzed. Holt had told him about the video screens; but he hadn’t realized how daunting they could be: twenty or more of them, all alive, all projecting their images simultaneously, all gabbling at once; and all dead because they had no human IR emissions and therefore contained no life. As inert as Norna herself, newscasts and sex shows vied with comedies, sports programs, and dramas to dominate his attention; voices conflicted with background music and sound effects up and down the audible spectrum. The effect was at once hypnotic and disturbing, like a white-noise rumble which felt soothing, but which presaged some kind of tectonic cataclysm. It created the strange illusion that all but one of the screens offered gibberish as a way of concealing the sole exception; that the exception displayed instead a soothsayer’s version of pure, cold truth; and that it changed places constantly with all the others, so that only the most savage and unremitting concentration could hope to glimpse its wisdom as it passed from screen to screen.
Warden stifled an impulse to curse the Dragon. He didn’t have time for that.
Steadying himself on urgency, he forced his legs to carry him away from the door toward the screens until he entered Norna’s field of view. There he turned; put his back to the video wall and faced her.
“Hello, Norna.”
In the phosphor gleam her eyes looked empty, transfixed by death. They made no apparent effort to track individual images: perhaps she’d learned how to focus on all the programs at the same time. Or perhaps she’d merely forgotten what she was looking for. Her lips and gums chewed constantly, as if she were trying to remember the taste of food. Saliva she couldn’t control drooled into the wrinkles across her chin.
Just for an instant, however, her gaze flicked toward him. Then it returned to the screens.
“Ward.” Her voice barely reached him through the ambient mutter. “Warden Dios. It’s about time.”