Pliocene Exile - The Adversary Part 47

VEIKKO: Seems like.

HAGEN: [Doubt.] Listen, Veik. I've got a bad feeling about those Firvulag you contacted on the way up. The ones you bought the slimies from.

VEIKKO: Yeah. You think they might have betrayed us to spook HQ. But Elizabeth is supposed to be watching out for Little People pulling a sneak on us, and she hasn't reported any movementHAGEN: I wouldn't rely on her overmuch. These days, she's got more interesting things to do than play wetnurse to your lot.

The lady has been entertaining Papa in her chalet!

VEIKKO: ?!.

HAGEN: She admitted it to the King, cool as you please. She says she's anxious to reconcile Marc with all of us ...

VEIKKO: Some hope! Any more sightings of your old man around Goriah?

HAGEN: Not since the King spotted him sampling the night life a week ago. But we're ready if he tries to attack the project.

The castle dungeon is carved from bedrock, so he can't jump in, and all the access points are sigma-wrapped and guarded by armed troops. Cloudie has the mind-idents of every person authorized to enter the restricted area and checks them in and out on the castle computer. Papa won't be able to pull a simple masquerade. The really irreplaceable workers are being guarded as carefully as the component store, so he can't hit us that way.

VEIKKO: How's the materials search coming?

HAGEN: We managed to scare up a lot of good stuff. It looks like the only real sticker is the one we antic.i.p.ated all along-the dysprosium-niobium wire for the microa.s.sembly in the taugenerator mesh stacks. The Little King sent a scouting crew off to the Northland hunting ore, but that could take months.

We need those aircraft, Veik. And not just for mineral scrounging ... I tried to talk the King into flying out over the ocean and blasting Kyllikki out of the water with his wonderful psychocreative powers. But he turned the suggestion down flat. No reason. I knew there was some trick to the way he zapped us!

VEIKKO: Is Kyllikki still coming strong?

HAGEN: Sailing fair in the westerlies, about halfway between Bermuda and the Azores. She'll be here in nineteen days at the earliest.

VEIKKO: [Fear.] With the X-zappers charged and ready. We sure better bring the birds home to Goriah before then.

HAGEN: How right you are. They're looking more essential every day. For instance-with Papa on the loose, how could we ever hope to carry the Guderian device to the gate site without air transport?

VEIKKO: Tell the truth, I was surprised you didn't just build the dingus there at Castle Gateway.

HAGEN: I pushed for it but the King vetoed. He wants us under his thumb, of course. And Goriah is a superior manufacturing locale from a security and logistics standpoint, aside from being too close to the sea. The real problem with Castle Gateway is that it's been pretty well abandoned since the Flood. Last winter a Firvulag raiding party got in past the skeleton guard force and did a lot of damage. The place is being fixed up now, ostensibly as a kind of hostel for travellers bound for the tournament that they're having up north at the beginning of November. The King sent Cloud's Tanu boyfriend off last week to oversee the Castle Gateway rehabilitation.

VEIKKO: Hard luck for her.

HAGEN: Um. She says she and Kuhal are finished. But I notice they still keep fairly regular head-skeds. No doubt having serious discussions about the meaning of life and suchlike dreckola.

VEIKKO: How's Diane?

HAGEN: Giving me a hard time, if you must know. Suddenly she has qualms about the kind of reception we might get in the Milieu. Because of Gibraltar. Because of ... who we are.

She's half convinced herself it would be better to stay here.

VEIKKO: G.o.d! After all we've been through?

HAGEN: And a way to go y e t ...

VEIKKO: She might be worrying about her father.

HAGEN: Alex can take care of himself. Now that Papa's started d-jumping, he needs Manion more than ever. Still-have you tried to farspeak Walter in Kyllikki recently?

VEIKKO: It wouldn't have been much use, with us camping in valleys every night to keep out of easy fa.r.s.ense range of the Firvulag. Would I try for Walter when I couldn't even raise you?

HAGEN: Well, do it. Now that you're parked halfway up the highest mountain on Earth, you might have a chance of making contact.

VEIKKO: All right. If my brain cells haven't blunk out from oxygen starvation. Anything specific you want to know?

HAGEN: Morale conditions aboard s.h.i.+p. Whether the magnates still favour snuffing us. Whether Papa still leans toward the steel-fist-in-velvet-glove approach. Hints on how he plans to use the X-lasers. On his d-jumping itinerary and manoeuvring with the King and Elizabeth ... Would Walter tell you the truth about any of that?

VEIKKO: Jeez, Hagen, I don't know. He wants us to get away just as much as Alex does. ButHAGEN: Uh-huh. I'd be more inclined to trust him if he wasn't driving that schooner so efficiently, VEIKKO: I'll try to farspeak him tonight. In the wee hours of the morning, that is. He usually took the midwatch in the old days. But don't get your hopes up. I'm not the farspeaker Vaughn Jarrow was.

HAGEN: You're not the f.u.c.king idiot Vaughn was, either. Do your best.

VEIKKO: One other thing.

HAGEN: ?.

VEIKKO: Now that we're camped in an exposed position, we're liable to be spotted by more than Firvulag ... Hagen, what if Marc shows up here? I know he can't carry any weapons.

But he wouldn't need to. If those mountain climbers are mus.h.i.+ng along in a tricky place, just one little pushHAGEN: G.o.d, yes. At that conference tomorrow, warn Basil and the others of the possibility.

VEIKKO: And?

HAGEN: Don't take any chances. If Papa comes onto that mountain, kill him on sight.

Irena O'Malley carried a fresh load of steaming plates out of the cook-hut, plopped them onto the buffet table, checked the coffee urn, then decided to take a short break from her ch.o.r.es to see how Veikko was getting along. She climbed the slope above the camp to where he was sitting, alone on a flat rock in the suns.h.i.+ne, among scattered patches of old snow. He was still immured in misery, his slight body hunched in an untidy lotus posture while he seemed to contemplate the precipitous foreslope, which reared above them like a petrified tsunami wave crested with hanging glaciers. To the east was the huge Gresson Icefall; and beyond it, the cloud-plumed summit of Monte Rosa.

"Headache still bad, sweetheart?" Irena inquired. Veikko responded with a wan smile. She gestured at his nearly untouched breakfast. "Didn't you care for the squiche?"

"It tasted great, Rena. Really. I'm just not hungry. Alt.i.tude, maybe."

She knelt beside him among tufted alpine plants, a tall and robust young woman with glossy black hair done up in nononsense pigtails. Laying a solicitous hand on his shoulder, she tried to slide her redaction into his mind, only to come up against the same barrier of mysterious grief that had frustrated her earlier attempt at comfort. "If you'd only let me in, I could help! What is it with you this morning? And don't you try to fob me off with rubbish about alt.i.tude sickness."

He bit his lip and refused to meet her eyes. As she put her arms around him, he shed the last vestiges of self-control, struggling like a trapped wild creature. "Tell me," she insisted.

He had shut his eyes, and now tears forced their way beneath trembling lids. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But you'll have to know sooner or later. They all will!"

"Veikko, tell me."

"Last night I finally managed to farspeak Walter on Kyllikki.

He told me-something terrible's happened. Helayne Strangford went over the edge. Turned violent. Ten days ago, she-she-Marc was away d-jumping and none of the others on board suspected what she was up to. You know what a clever screener she is. And-she killed people."

Irena's fingers dug into Veikko's shoulders. "Who?"

"Barry Dalembert's father. And the two Keoghs-not that Nial will give a d.a.m.n, that coldhearted swine!"