‘Doing our submarine impression,’ the drone said crisply. ‘Landfall in fifteen minutes.’
She turned the screen back on, got it to adjust for a sonic display, and watched the rolling sea floor speed by beneath. The module was manoeuvring hard, swinging and diving and zooming all the time, avoiding sea creatures as it followed the slowly rising slope of continental shelf towards the land. The view on the screen was disconcerting; she switched it off again, turned to the drone.
‘He’ll be all right, and he’ll come with us; we still know where that woman is.’
‘Livueta the Contemptuous?’ sneered the drone. ‘Short shrift she gave him last time. She’d have blown his head off if I hadn’t been there. Why the hell should Zakalwe want to meet her again?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sma frowned. ‘He won’t say, and Contact hasn’t got round to doing the full procedure on the place we think he came from. I think it must involve something from his past… something he did, once, before we ever heard of him. I don’t know. I think he loves her, or did, and still thinks he does… or just wants…’
‘What? Wants what? Go on; you tell me.’
‘Forgiveness?’
‘Sma, given all the things Zakalwe’s done, just since we’ve known him, they’d have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start forgiving him.’
Sma turned away to look at the blank screen again. She shook her head and said quietly, ‘It doesn’t work that way, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.’
Or any other way, the drone thought to itself, but didn’t say anything.
The module surfaced in a deserted dock in the middle of the city, amongst the flotsam and jetsam. It roughed the texture of its outermost fields, so that the oily scum on the surface of the water stuck to it.
Sma watched its top hatch close, and stepped off the back of the drone, onto the pitted concrete of the dock. The module was ninety-per cent submerged; it looked like some flat-bottomed boat turned turtle. She straightened the rather vulgar culottes which were, regrettably, the height of fashion here just now, and looked up and around at the crumbling empty warehouses which all but enclosed the quiet dock. The city – she was oddly gratified to find – grumbled beyond.
‘What was that you were saying about not looking in cities?’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired.
‘Don’t be crass,’ she said, then clapped her hands and rubbed them. Looking down at the drone, she grinned. ‘Anyway: time to start thinking like a suitcase, old chum. Make with a handle.’
‘I hope you realise I find this every bit as demeaning as you think I must,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with quiet dignity, then extended a soligram handle from one side, and flipped over. Sma gripped the handle and strained at it.
‘An empty suitcase, asshole,’ she grunted.
‘Oh, pardon me, I’m sure,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered, and went light.
Sma opened a wallet full of money displaced only hours earlier from a city-centre bank by the good ship Xenophobe, and paid the cab driver. She watched a line of troop carriers thunder past, heading down the boulevard, then sat on a bench which formed part of a stone wall bordering a narrow strip of trees and grass, and looked out over the broad sidewalk and the boulevard beyond, to the large and impressive stone building on the far side. She place the drone beside her. Traffic roared past; people hurried to and fro in front of her.
At least, she thought, they’re fairly Standard. She had never liked being altered to impersonate the natives. Anyway; they had inter-system travel here, and were fairly used to seeing people who looked different, even alien on occasion. As usual, of course, she was very tall in comparison, but she could live with a few stares.
‘He’s still in there?’ she said quietly, looking at the armed guards outside the Foreign Ministry.
‘Discussing some sort of weird trust set-up with the top brass,’ the drone whispered. ‘Want to eavesdrop?’
‘Hmm. No.’
They had a bug in the appropriate conference chamber; literally a fly on the wall.
‘Wa!’ the drone yelped. ‘I don’t believe this man!’
Sma glanced at the drone, despite herself. She frowned. ‘What’s he said?’
‘Not that!’ the drone gasped. ‘The Very Little Gravitas Indeed just worked out what the maniac’s been up to here.’
The GCU was still in orbit, providing back-up for the Xenophobe; its Contact procedures and equipment had provided and were providing most of the information about the place; its bug was monitoring the conference chamber. Meanwhile, it was scanning computers and information banks over the entire planet.
‘Well?’ Sma said, watching another troop carrier rumble past on the boulevard.
‘The man’s insane. Power mad!’ the drone muttered, seemingly to itself. ‘Forget Voerenhutz; we have to get him out of here for the sake of these people.’
Sma elbowed the suitcase-drone. ‘What, dammit?’
‘Okay; here, Zakalwe’s a goddamn magnate, right? Mega-powerful; interests everywhere; initial stake what he brought with him from the place he junked the knife missile; the loot we gave him last time, plus profits. And what is the core of his business empire, here? Genetechnology.’
Sma thought for a moment. ‘Oh-oh,’ she said, sitting back on the bench, crossing her arms.
‘Whatever you’re imagining, it’s worse. Sma; there are five rather elderly autocrats on this planet, in competing hegemonies. They are all getting healthier. They are all getting, in fact, younger. That oughtn’t to be possible for another twenty, thirty years.’
Sma said nothing. There was a funny feeling in her belly.
‘Zakalwe’s corporation,’ the drone said quickly, ‘is receiving crazy money from each of those five people. It was on the take from a sixth geezer, but he died about one-twenty days ago; assassinated. The Ethnarch Kerian. He controlled the other half of this continent. It’s his demise that has led to all this military activity. Also, with the exception of the Ethnarch Kerian, these suddenly rejuvenated autocrats were showing signs of becoming uncharacteristically benign, from about the time they started getting so suspiciously frisky.’
Sma closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. ‘Is it working?’ she said, through a dry mouth.
‘Like hell; they’re all under threat from coups; their own military, as a rule. Worse than that, Kerian’s death lit a slow fuse. This whole place is going super-critical! And we are talking tootsies on the event horizon; these meatbrained loonies have thermonukes. He’s crazy!’ the drone suddenly screeched. Sma hissed to quiet it, even though she knew the drone would be sound-fielding its words so that only she could hear. The drone spluttered on: ‘He must have cracked the gene-coding in his own cells; the steady-state retro-ageing that we gave him; he’s been selling it! For money and favours, trying to get these monomaniac dictators to behave like nice people. Sma! He’s trying to set up his own contact section! And he’s fucking it! Completely!’
She whacked the machine with one fist. ‘Calm down, dammit.’
‘Sma,’ the drone said, voice almost languid, ‘I am calm. I’m just trying to communicate to you the enormity of the planetary cock-up Zakalwe has managed to concoct here. The Very Little Gravitas Indeed has blown a fuse; even as we talk, Contact Minds in an ever-expanding sphere centred right here are clearing their intellectual decks and trying to work out what the hell to do to tidy this stunningly ghastly mess. If that GSV hadn’t been on its way here anyway, they’d have diverted it because of this. An asteroid belt-sized pile of shit is about to hit a fan exactly the size of this planet, thanks to Zakalwe’s ludicrous good-guy schemes, and Contact is going to have to try and field all of it.’ It hesitated. ‘Yeah; I just got the word.’ It sounded relieved. ‘You have a day to haul Zakalwe’s loop-eyed ass out of here, otherwise we snatch him; emergency displace, no holds barred.’
Sma took a very deep breath. ‘Apart from that… everything all right?’
‘This, Ms Sma, is no time for levity,’ the drone said, soberly. Then; ‘Shit!’
‘What now?’
‘Meeting’s over, but Zakalwe the Insane isn’t taking his car; he’s heading for the elevator down to the tube system. Destination… naval base. There’s a submarine waiting for him.’
Sma stood. ‘Submarine, eh?’ She smoothed the culottes. ‘Back to the docks, agree?’
‘Agreed.’
She hefted the drone, started walking, looking for a cab. ‘I’ve asked the Very Little Gravitas Indeed to fake a radio message,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw told her. ‘A cab should pull up here momentarily.’
‘And they say there’s never one around when you need one.’
‘You’re worrying me, Sma. You’re taking all this far too calmly.’
‘Oh, I’ll panic later.’ Sma took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Could that be the cab?’
‘I believe it is.’
‘What’s “To the docks”?’
The drone told her, and she said it. The cab sped off through the largely military traffic.
Six hours later they were still following the submarine, as it whined and whirred and gurgled its way through the layers of ocean, heading for the equatorial sea.