Deadman Switch

Chapter 39

The wind had picked up over the past half hour, cutting between the Butte City cliffs like frigid stirring spoons intent on whipping up the snow into as many miniature spinstorms as possible. Sitting a few meters up the sloping ridge Calandra and I had climbed so long ago, I listened to the wind whistling past the visor of my insulalls and watched as Lord Kelsey-Ramos gestured Kutzko to remain below and then crunched his way up to meet me. "Lord Kelsey-Ramos," I nodded as he came within earshot. "This is a surprise—I would have expected you to call."

"I'd have expected that, too," he grunted, sitting down carefully beside me. A few snowflakes landed on his shoulder and quickly melted; for all the extra cost of his expensive insulalls, they weren't quite as good as my plain Pravilo-issue ones. "But then it occurred to me you'd probably have found the quietest and most private place around, and that I might as well take advantage of that. The encampment still has a lot of madhouse about it."

I nodded. "I take it you have news of my fate?"

"Actually, I'm more here just to talk," he shook his head. "Officially, the Pravilo's still batting your case back and forth between departments; though unofficially, Admiral Yoshida has pretty well conceded that they really don't have any choice but to turn you loose. Much as he'd love to nail you to a wall somewhere for preempting his strike, he's smart enough to know that if he brings you up on charges, he'll have to do the same to Eisenstadt and me."

"And both of you have too many friends in high places?"

He nodded without embarrassment. "That, plus the truism that sailfish attract more attention than guppies. They put us on trial—especially on charges of treason—and the security cover they've so carefully woven around Solitaire would be gone within two weeks. The Patri's not ready for all this to become public knowledge; not yet, anyway." He made a sound that was half chuckle, half snort. "Besides which, the scheme worked. Awfully hard to argue against success, you know."

I grimaced. "So I get off scot-free."

Lord Kelsey-Ramos cocked his head to peer at me. "You wanted to go to prison?"

Quietly, at my sides, I clenched my hands into fists, my eyes drifting to the snow-dusted thunderheads below. Each of them had developed a crisscrossing of thin black lines across their bodies in the past few days—a seasonal occurrence, I'd been told, that had to do with their hormonal response to cold weather. For a moment I watched the subtle changes in the tall white shapes as the souls within them flitted back and forth, and wondered that I'd ever seen them as nothing more than plants. "Have the thunderheads accepted the situation yet?" I asked.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos threw me another look, and I could sense the underlying concern there. "Like the Pravilo, they don't have much choice," he said. "As you so elegantly established, their lives are pretty well entwined with both ours and the Invaders' at the moment. Even if that triangle is no longer exactly equilateral," he added.

The doubt in his voice was impossible to miss. "I gather the commission still isn't convinced of that last point?"

He sighed, the blast of warm air momentarily fogging a spot on his visor. "Afraid not," he conceded. "For that matter, I'm not entirely convinced myself. I don't argue your reasoning, but I also see no guarantee that the Invaders will follow the logic the same way we do."

"They were logical enough to understand the implications of a rocheoid that kept appearing and disappearing from in front of them," I reminded him.

"It was hardly an implication they could miss," he returned dryly. "Especially with you broadcasting the whole time on pseudograv-generator radio frequencies. Even the most fanatical admiral would think twice before taking on a defense force whose Mjollnir drive worked where his wouldn't."

I nodded. "The point remains that they know we could have killed them all—or even just destroyed a couple of ships as a demonstration—but that we deliberately avoided doing so."

"True enough," he shrugged. "On the other hand, though, we did make them abort a campaign that they've already invested nearly a century in. That could put a considerable damper on whatever gratitude they're feeling toward us."

"I suppose that's possible," I admitted. "Still, everything that they've done indicates beings who take a long-term view of things. I really think that our balance sheet with them will work out all right when we're finally able to talk with them."

"Perhaps. Not much we can do at the moment but hope you're right about that, too." He shook his head. "That was still an awful chance you took out there, Gilead."

I looked down the slope to where Kutzko was standing his usual casual-looking guard. "I know. You'll remember, sir, that I tried to keep it down to just Shepherd Adams and me."

He nodded. "Which means that you knew right from the start that the thunderheads might leave you out there to die."

The question in his voice was unobtrusive but obvious. "I deliberately glissed over that point during the debriefing, sir," I told him. "Our relationship with the thunderheads is strained enough; I didn't want to add to that tension by explaining why they were so angry with me."

"Because you'd lied to them?"

I shook my head. "Because they had an alternative scheme in mind. One which depended on them making sure I didn't contact the Invaders."

He frowned. "But you'd already proved to them that the Invaders had to live."

"No, sir," I told him, some of the bitterness in my soul seeping out into my voice. "All I'd proved was that some of them had to live."

For a long moment he was silent... and then he swore, quietly. "You're right," he said, his voice grim. "Absolutely right. And all they really had to do was pretend to cooperate with us; guide all the rocheoids out there, right on schedule... and then allow one of them to miss its target."

I nodded, the image sending a shiver up my back. "And there wouldn't have been a single thing we could have done about it afterwards. As long as any of the Invaders were alive we'd still have had to leave the Cloud in place—otherwise the survivors would escape home on Mjollnir drive with the news of what had happened."

"And before we knew it we'd have had a full-scale war on our hands." Lord Kelsey-Ramos swore again, viciously this time. "A war we ourselves would have effectively started."

His anger was like an almost physical wave of heat. "I'd appreciate it, sir, if you'd keep all this to yourself," I said. "There's no proof, after all, that that's really what they had in mind."

He sent me a hard-edged look. "Besides which, you don't believe in emotions like anger and hatred?" he bit out. "Even honest ones?"

If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat... "We still have to work with them," I reminded him quietly. "Unless you're prepared to abandon Solitaire. Try to remember, too, that we still don't know what the quarrel is between the thunderheads and the Invaders... or what the consequences would have been for the thunderheads if they'd lost."

Slowly, almost reluctantly, the anger faded from his sense. Not all of it, but enough. "Well..." he said at last, "I don't suppose any single example of thunderhead deceit would make the Patri any less vigilant in their dealings with them. Besides, it may not hurt to have something we can hold over their heads again."

"Thank you, sir."

"Don't thank me," he snorted. "I'm considering it an extremely temporary secret, one I expect I'll be using against them somewhere along the line." Moving carefully on the slippery rock, he got to his feet. "Anyway; break time's over. I'd better get back before some blazing fire-eater talks Yoshida into bringing you up on charges and never mind the consequences. You want a lift back to the encampment?"