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Gallow set his spoon down carefully and dabbed at his lips with his cloth. He knit his smooth brow in an expression of concern.
“If you choose not to eat, you will be fed,” Gallow warned. “Spare yourself that unpleasantry. You won’t starve yourself out of my care.”
“Choice has nothing to do with it,” Keel said. “You snatched inferior merchandise. Eating causes pain, and the food merely passes undigested.”
Gallow pushed himself back from the squat table.
“It’s not catching, Mr. Gallow.”
“What is it?”
“A defect,” Keel said. “Our bioengineers helped me up to this point, but now the Greater Committee takes matters out of our hands.”
“The Greater Committee?” Gallow asked. “You mean that there is a group topside more powerful than yours? A secret clan?”
Keel laughed, and the laugh added frustration and confusion to Gallow’s otherwise perfect face.
“The Greater Committee goes by many names,” Keel said. “They are a subversive bunch, indeed. Some call them Ship, some call them Jesus—not the Jesus Lewis of your school-day histories. This is a difficult committee to confront, as you can see. It makes the threat of death at your hands not much of a threat at all.”
“You’re … dying?”
Keel nodded. “No matter what you do,” he said, smiling, “the world will believe that you killed me.”
Gallow stared at Keel for a long blink, then blotted his lips with the napkin. He extricated himself from the table.
“In that case,” Gallow announced, “if you want to save those kids, you’ll do exactly as I say.”
Chapter 38
… it comes to pass that the same evils and inconveniences take place in all ages of history.
—Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses, Shiprecords
From his position at the foil’s controls, Brett watched the late afternoon sun kindle a glow in the cloud bank ahead of him. The foil drove easily across deep storm swells, picking up speed on each downslope, losing a bit on each advancing wave. It was a rhythm that Brett had come to understand without conscious attention. His body and senses adjusted.
A gray wall of rain skulked a couple of hundred meters above the wavetops to the right. A line storm, it appeared to be rolling away from them.
Brett, his attention divided between the course monitor above him and the seas ahead, abruptly throttled back. The foil dropped off its step and moved with minimal headway beside a kelp bed that stretched away into the storm track.
The change in motion aroused the others, who, except for Bushka and the captive Merman, whom Bushka had locked in the cargo bay with the survivors of the LTA, were sprawled around the cabin catching what rest they could. Bushka sat in regal isolation on the couch at the rear of the cabin, his eyes oddly indrawn, his face a mask of concentration as he stroked a fragment of kelp that lay across his lap. The bit of kelp had come up from the sea on Twisp’s rescue line and had attracted little attention until Bushka plucked it off and kept it.
Panille spoke from the copilot’s seat as he came abruptly alert. “Something wrong?”
Brett indicated the green glow of their position on the course monitor. “We’re only a couple of klicks out.” He pointed at the line squall. “The outpost is in there.”
Twisp spoke from behind them: “Bushka, you still going through with this?”
“I have no choice.” Bushka’s voice carried a distant tone. He stroked the fragment of kelp, which had begun to dry and crisp. It rasped under his hand.
Twisp nodded at the net of weapons Bushka had taken from the LTA survivors. “Then maybe we all better be armed.”
“I’m thinking on it,” Bushka said. Again, his hand rasped across the drying kelp.
“Panille,” Twisp said, “how are outposts defended?”
Scudi, seated on the deck across from Twisp, answered for him. “Outposts aren’t expected to need defenses.”
“They have the usual sonar, perimeter alarms against dashers, that sort of thing,” Panille said. “Each outpost has at least one LTA for weather observation.”
“But what weapons?” Twisp asked.
“Tools, mostly,” Scudi said.
Bushka nudged the netful of captured weapons at his feet. “They will have lasguns. Gallow arms his people.”
“But they’d be effective only inside the outpost compound,” Panille said. “We’re safe in the water.”
“Which is why I stopped here,” Brett said. “Do you think they know we’re here?”
“They know,” Bushka said. “They just don’t know who we are.” He peeled the dried kelp from his dive suit and dropped it to the deck.
Scudi stood and moved to Brett’s side, resting an arm on the back of his seat. “They will have welders, plasteel cutters, some stunshields, knives, pry-bars. Tools are very effective weapons.” She looked at Bushka. “As Guemes should have taught us.”
Panille swiveled and looked at the passage that led back to the cargo compartment. “Some of those people back there might know some details about what we can expect down there—”
“This is stupid!” Brett said. “What can we do against Gallow and all his men?”
“We will wait for nightfall,” Bushka said. “Darkness is a great equalizer.” He looked at Scudi. “You say you’ve worked at this outpost. You can draw up a plan of the access hatches, the power station, tool storage, vehicle bays … that sort of thing.”
Scudi looked at Brett, who shrugged.
Twisp glanced once at the lasgun in Bushka’s hand, then at his face. “You really mean for us to attack them, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Unarmed?”
“We will have the inestimable arm of surprise.”
Twisp let out a barking laugh.
“Let me talk to Kareen,” Panille said. “She can’t be one of them. She may have learned—”
“She’s not to be trusted,” Bushka said. “She belonged to Ryan Wang when he was alive, and now she belongs to Gallow.”
“No, she doesn’t!”
“Men are so easily manipulated by sex,” Bushka sneered.
Panille’s dark face darkened further with anger, but he held his silence for a blink. Then: “The kelp! The kelp can tell us what we need to know!”
“Do not trust the kelp, either,” Bushka said. “Every sentient thing in this universe thinks of itself first. We don’t know what the kelp fears or desires.”
Panille glanced at the bit of dried kelp on the deck. “Scudi, what do you say about the kelp? You’ve worked in and around it more than any of us.”
“She is Ryan Wang’s daughter!” Bushka blared. “You ask the enemy for advice?”
“I ask where I might get an answer,” Panille said. “And if you’re not going to use that lasgun, quit waving it around.”
He turned from a flabbergasted Bushka to Scudi. “What’s the kelp’s range, from your experience?”
“Worldwide,” she said, “and almost instantaneous.”
“That fast?”
Scudi shrugged. “And what it learns, it never forgets.” She noted the look of surprise on Panille’s face and went on. “We’ve made reports. Most supervisors don’t go out there, so they write this off to narcosis and keep us out of deep water for a week.”
“What else might help us?”
“There are weak spots,” Scudi said. “Immature kelp is strictly a conductor. Mature kelp carries a presence all its own.”
“What do you mean?” Twisp asked.
“If I touch a young patch of kelp and you touch a mature one, we sense each other. But now … it is doing something more. Bushka’s right that it may do things on its own.”
“It has learned to kill,” Bushka said. Scudi said, “I always thought it could transmit, but not translate.”
Bushka asked, “How many people can the outpost support?”
