Deadman Switch

"Yeah. Well..." Kutzko grimaced, then shrugged fractionally. "You have to admit it gets blazing spooky sometimes. Anyway... I've still got to go find Mr. Kelsey-Ramos. See you later."

"Right."

He left. I waited a minute, then followed, heading back to my own stateroom. He was right, of course: Watcher abilities could indeed be spooky to those who didn't understand.

To those of us who did understand... there were perhaps dangers the elders had never even considered. God does not see as human beings see; they look at appearances but God looks at the heart...

Had we, in our human pride, tried to usurp that role for ourselves? Had that been, in fact, the underlying root of Aaron Balaam darMaupine's treason?—the belief that with God's power to see even partway into men's souls he had also inherited God's power to rule?

Had that pride led to the persecution the entire Watcher sect now suffered under?

I had none of the answers. Not in eleven years of searching for them.

Chapter 11

I'd anticipated it, expected it, convinced Randon it would happen. Even so, I was still surprised when Governor Rybakov arrived at the Bellwether the next morning.

"Let me first state for any record you happen to have ru

"Of course," Randon agreed calmly. "Just as by asking you here to retrieve official property I'm in no way accusing you of any such activities."

For a moment they eyed each other in cool silence, while I sat at the third point of the triangle and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Rybakov broke first. "May I have them?" she asked.

Wordlessly, Randon reached into his desk and pulled out the customs IDs we'd taken from the would-be saboteurs the previous evening. Equally wordlessly, Rybakov took them, gave each a sour glance, and slid them into a pocket beneath her capelet.

"I presume you have an explanation," Randon suggested.

"Certainly I have one. Is there any particular reason you deserve to hear it?"

Randon glanced at me, back to Rybakov. "Would it help if I assured you I don't intend to make any of this public?"

It would indeed help, I could tell. Rybakov's tension level decreased noticeably as she decided he was serious. "It came as most things do in politics," she growled at last. "I owed a favor; it was collected."

"What kind of a favor?"

"None of your business," she said evenly.

Again Randon glanced at me. I shrugged in return—all I could tell was that it was something personal, and that it probably really was none of his business. "May I ask, then, who it was who collected on the favor?"

"I'd rather not say."

"It had to be someone from HTI, of course," Randon continued as if she hadn't spoken. "Chun Li?—or was it Blake or Karash? Or one of the middle-level people doing the managers' dirty work for them?"

"I'd rather not say," Rybakov repeated, more emphatically this time.

"Blake," I murmured.

Both sets of eyes turned to me: Randon's with an almost smug satisfaction, Rybakov's with a mixture of anger and resignation. "You sure?" Randon asked.

"It was the name she reacted to," I told him.

"Ah." He shrugged. "Well, it can't always be the unobvious one, can it?"

Rybakov seemed to brace herself. "And now...?"

Randon raised an eyebrow. "And now what? As I said, Governor, I don't intend to either press charges or make this matter public. As far as I'm concerned, it's an internal matter between the Carillon Group and one of its subsidiaries. We'll deal with it from Portslava."

"I see." Again, she seemed to measure his words. "May I ask, then, whether or not you've had a chance to examine the records HTI was so anxious to recover?"

It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Abruptly, the sparring-level tension in the room jumped an order of magnitude. A mutually held secret, I decided, reading the identical emotion in both of them. A secret neither of them really wanted to discuss. "My financial expert and I went over them last evening," Randon told her after a brief pause.

The muscles in Rybakov's face tightened still further. A shared secret, for certain. "And what do you plan to do about it?" she asked quietly.

"That'll be up to my father and the rest of the Carillon board to decide," he said, his voice heavy with condemnation. "And probably the High Judiciary, as well."

Rybakov's face darkened with anger... but it was anger tinged with the awareness that she was standing on a warm ice bridge. "Before you pass judgment, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos," she said, "you should do me the courtesy of listening to my side of the story. And perhaps trying to understand the dilemma Solitaire as a whole is in."

He cocked his head slightly to the side. "I'm listening," he invited.

She glanced pointedly in my direction. "Perhaps this is something best kept between the two of us."

Clearly, Rybakov wanted to get rid of me. Just as clearly, Randon wasn't going to have any of that. "I already told you that my financial expert knows," he reminded her.

"Who presumably is better able to see the financial and legal consequences," she retorted. "As well as just the—" She broke off.

"As well as the ethical ones?" Randon finished for her with a snort. He turned to me, and I braced myself for whatever was coming. "We're talking about smuggling, Benedar," he told me. "The illegal transport of metals out of Solitaire system."

The mental bracing did little good. For a half dozen heartbeats I still just stared at him, totally stu

And then it hit me, a delayed-action kick, and my mouth went suddenly dry. "They... kidnap people for the Deadman Switch?"

"What, is that so hard to believe of our fallen human race?" Rybakov snorted cynically. "I thought you religious types were always weeping and wailing about how wicked we all are."

Randon's eyes flicked back to her. "You were going to tell me your side of it," he reminded her.

She glared at him, softened a bit. "Try to understand, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos, that I'm caught between two diametrically opposed requirements here. I'm sworn to uphold Patri law within Solitaire system, yes; but at the same time I'm under a less formal but no less pressing obligation to keep the supply of metals flowing from the ring mines. There's no easy way to reconcile these two goals."

"When it's a matter of people's lives—" I broke off as, in her eyes, sour contempt mixed with a sense that she'd indeed been right about not wanting to tell me about the smuggling. The righteously self-blind Watcher, unable to see the Broad Scheme Of Things...

"In case you haven't noticed," Rybakov told me, "the decision's already been made that Solitaire is worth people's lives."

"Condemned criminals' lives," Randon corrected her. "Not those of i

She glowered at him. "All right, then, fine. You and your Watcher friend want to play God? Tell me how you'd go about stopping smugglers from moving in and out of a system this size."

Randon and I eyed each other. "At the risk of stating the obvious," Randon said, "what is Commodore Freitag doing about the problem? Between parties, that is?"

Rybakov snorted gently. "So you noticed the commodore's fondness for vodkyas, did you? That's part of the problem right there."

I remembered back to our brief meeting with Commodore Freitag at the governor's mansion... to my sense that the man wasn't nearly as slowed down as he'd appeared. The same tolerance to vodkyas Lord Kelsey-Ramos had often used to his advantage... "Your father enjoys parties, too," I murmured to Randon.