Easy to Be a God, page 28
When all was calibrated, the sergeant informed Primus of the successful completion of the task. He sent a plain text message instead of holo. At this point he preferred not to see that sullen woman again, and was pretty sure that she didn’t have a great desire for further contact with the command center, either. In any case, she didn’t even bother to acknowledge the receipt of the message.
As time passed, little by little, only Suhurs conducting the executions changed. By the shift changeover, Darski had witnessed the putting of three more young Suhurs into cages. Shaking his substitute’s hand, he glanced at the dais. Colonel Rutta stood there with his arms folded across his chest, looking in his direction.
One nightmare is over, time to start another, Darski thought, stepping on the wide stairs. Now he understood why this part of the bridge was called a scaffold. Before he reached the command post, Colonel Rutta had already sat in his chair. He also activated the force field, separating his console from the rest of the platform.
“Sergeant Prydeinwraig reporting as ordered!” Henryan clicked his heels and saluted.
“At ease.” The old man’s voice was less virulent than he expected.
“Thank you, sir!” Henryan placed his feet apart, put his hands behind his back, but quickly let his arms hang by his sides, remembering the images from the caves.
Rutta noticed his embarrassment.
“Don’t take it too hard, Sergeant,” he said.
Henryan swallowed nervously. He had heard so much about the maliciousness of the old man that he started to wonder whether it’s not a trick of some sort.
“Yes, sir!” he yelled, not knowing what else to say.
“Do you know why I called you here?” Rutta got to the point.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’m all ears.” Rutta leaned back in his chair.
“Dr. Godbless—I—” Darski didn’t know where to start. “I am sorry, sir! I thought she had terminated the connection—”
“A soldier, son, doesn’t think,” Rutta cut in. “We have eggheads for that. Your job is to check, double-check, and then check once again.”
“Yes, sir!”
“And you were thinking, instead of checking.”
“It won’t happen again, sir!”
“I know …” Rutta smiled to himself.
This tone, that smile … Henryan felt shivers run up and down his back. The old man was up to something. The only question was—what?
“I should order you to scrub the toilets, and believe me, Sergeant, we have thousands of those. Unfortunately, I need you here. Well, and here we have a problem …”
“A problem, sir?” Darski asked cautiously.
“Yes, a problem. If I punish you properly, you could screw up on your watch as a result sleep deprivation. But if you don’t get punished after this—this—”
“Old bag,” Henryan offered.
Colonel Rutta winced at the sound of his own words, and Darski immediately thought it would be better for him to shut up and let the superior finish his tirade.
“—after this old bag,” continued Rutta, “made a fool of me in front of everybody, I will lose my authority among the crew.”
“I see, sir.”
“I’m glad you do, Sergeant, but this doesn’t cut it. So—”
“Colonel!”
Both of them flinched when Valdez’s voice came from the speaker. Rutta reluctantly activated a hologram of the caller.
“Can’t you see, Lieutenant, that I’m talking with Prydewi … Preyd … Prywe … with the sergeant?” he asked, additionally irritated by the fact that he couldn’t pronounce the difficult name.
“I am just calling about him, sir!” Valdez replied.
“Yes? Well, tell me.”
“We’re carrying out the restoration work of sector one and the observation deck before the visit of the Senate delegation,” Valdez said. “I supervise all the work done in that area. You could reassign the sergeant to there, so that …”
His voice trailed off.
Rutta rocked in his chair for a moment, silent and somber.
“Both the wolves have eaten much and the sheep have not been touched,” Henryan said quietly.
“These archaic proverbs of yours.” The colonel groaned before he turned to Valdez. “That sounds reasonable, Lieutenant.” Turning back to Henryan, he added, “You may go, Sergeant.”
“One moment, sir!” Darski said.
“Well, Sergeant … ? You have a problem with that?” A look of surprise crossed Rutta’s face. Valdez was no less shocked.
“Not at all, sir! I deserve to be punished.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s … it’s about what’s going on in the caves.”
“Do you think, son, that I like this massacre?” the Colonel asked. “Unfortunately there is nothing we can do.”
“But there is, sir,” Darski assured him.
“Like what?”
“If Suhurs receive a message from the Spirits of the Mountains, they will leave.”
Rutta jumped up from his chair, outraged.
“You have misunderstood me, sir!” Henryan added quickly, stepping back.
“On the contrary, Sergeant. You have expressed yourself damn clearly!”
“I’m not talking about a message like the one Gods have in mind …” Darski tried to get out of the tricky situation. “We’ll tell the Warriors of the Bone something … anything … that the Spirits of the Mountains love them immensely, that they will win the coming battle, anything that will end this carnage. Colonel, they are going to murder several thousand inkblots in the coming days.”
“Gurds, son,” Rutta corrected him, gritting his teeth. “Gurds!”
“Yes, sir. Gurds.”
“It is not such a stupid idea,” Valdez interjected.
“I can’t believe my ears!” Rutta dropped heavily into a chair. “Lieutenant, you advocate another intervention in the history of this planet? You?!”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, I’m not for intervention as such, but the sergeant’s idea seems to make sense to me. Let me explain in person …”
The colonel deactivated the force field momentarily, and Valdez passed quickly to the command post and stood next to Darski.
Rutta turned the energy barriers back on, separating the three of them from the rest of the command center.
“Do continue, Lieutenant.”
“The only way to neutralize Gods is to penetrate into their structures. This is what we’ve wanted since the beginning, right?” The colonel nodded. “As you know, sir, those bastards are pretty damn suspicious. And such a move could inspire Gods’ trust in the sergeant, and—”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow, Lieutenant,” the old man interrupted him.
“If Sergeant Pry stops the carnage, Gods will see him as a potential ally.”
“An ally, you say …”
Valdez nodded.
“But what exactly do you want to do?”
The question was greeted with silence.
“Can this even succeed with the increased security measures?” Rutta waved his hand. “Even if we let go of locating the source of the message, Security Department will sniff it out in a few hours. No. No way. I refuse!”
“Godbless will explode if Suhurs stop making offerings and leave,” Henryan interposed casually.
Colonel Rutta winced when he heard the name of the head of the scientific department. And then his face broke into a smile. A spiteful smile.
“Okay. Use your head, but remember: I don’t know anything. Figure something out before the next shift starts. Understood?”
“Yes, sir!” they replied in unison.
“And one more thing,” the colonel added. “I want a holo with this old bag’s face when she finds out.”
“I think I know how to approach it,” Darski said a moment later, when they already stood in the empty corridor, waiting for the train.
Valdez looked at him carefully.
“When taking over Seifert’s duties, I made a thorough analysis of the security systems and found something that probably escaped everybody’s notice,” explained Henryan. “No one pulled back the nanobots sent to the caves by Seifert. They were inactivated, but they’re still down there.”
The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed. A look of embarrassment crossed his face. It was him who was responsible for bringing the equipment back, thus the oversight was his fault.
“Go on,” he said reluctantly.
“I could send them a short message.”
“How?”
“Using the external transmitter. For example, from one of the ships stationed at anchor.”
“No way.” Valdez shook his head firmly. “Since Treb’aldaledo, esdees have been monitoring all connections between the ships of the Fleet.”
“Then I’ll connect directly to the main antenna of the station,” Darski suggested.
“How do you intend to do that?”
“If I can get to the technical levels, I will gain direct access to the antenna circuits. Outside the system, you see. The message gonna go straight to the nanobots, together with a command to self-destruct after completing the task. No control will show anything. No message will go through our communications links.”
Henryan was confident; a dealer on Epsilon of the New Bolivia System had communicated with his partners the same way. If it hadn’t been for his loose tongue, no one would have caught him smuggling drugs into the local base.
Valdez licked his lips nervously. The sergeant just showed him one of the system’s vulnerabilities, the existence of which no one even suspected. A vulnerability that Gods could take advantage of …
“Clever, very clever,” the lieutenant admitted thoughtfully. “I’ll contact you in an hour, after I have something to eat. Then we’ll work out the details.” He held out his hand.
Darski had not expected this. As a reflex reaction, he shook the proffered hand, and winced immediately. He felt a cold angular shape in his palm.
“Show it to the esdees,” Valdez whispered, seeing his worried look. “We’ll gain some time and leeway.”
“Okay.”
The train car’s door opened, but the lieutenant didn’t get inside.
“I have to discuss the details of your assignment with the old man,” he explained before the door closed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Only every third light was on in the closed area, and despite the air conditioning being turned off, there was a pleasant coolness here. Darski didn’t sweat with every movement, and the empty corridors gave him a sense of greater freedom, which made a nice change after his visit to the crowded mess hall. If not for the fact that extra duty took almost all his free time outside of the required six hours of sleep, it could be considered an escape from the daily routine.
Henryan stopped next to the five unfortunates like him, taking place at the end of a neat row. The other soldiers looked around the empty corridor uneasily, but he waited calmly for Valdez. Unlike them, he knew what kind of job awaited him. A large toolbox lay by his feet, given to him a moment ago by an obese noncom from the quartermaster’s office.
It’s a small world, after all, Henryan thought, realizing he could see a familiar face among his comrades. Corporal Tregvas, standing at the other end of the row, was studying the plan of this level with a neutral expression. Could it be a coincidence … ?
The lieutenant was a minute late. He didn’t come by train as they anticipated, but emerged suddenly from a side corridor. Surprised by his unexpected appearance, they stood at attention a second later than they should have.
“At ease!” he said, and immediately began to assign tasks. “Bodko and Ramirez, the main corridor. Stuyvesant and Kimmie, zone three. Tregvas and Pry, follow me.”
Reaching for the toolbox, Darski glanced at the corporal. Another coincidence?
They went down the same corridor from which lieutenant had come a moment before. They were preceded by the pair of soldiers walking to zone three until the first fork; then they were alone. Stuyvesant and Kimmie had turned right. The lieutenant led Darski and Tregvas left. He did not say a word until they reached their destination, which was a technical airlock in the heart of sector one.
Valdez stopped by an armored hatch. Farther on there was a staircase connecting all levels of this sector of the rim. Through it, they would reach the airlock at the top level of the station. This room adjoined one of the eight arms extending from the hub to the residential area, and only from there one could go to the technical corridors that circled the entire rim, in order to get to the hydroponics farms, or warehouses and engine rooms, which ensured the proper functioning of the entire sector.
“Corporal,” Valdez turned to Tregvas, “you will take care of the settings of the control modules in all the elevators in this arm. The elevator cars are to stop only at selected residential levels, at the observation deck, and at the gate of the spaceport. Lock the doors on all other levels. Electronically and mechanically. Understood?”
Tregvas nodded.
“I’m on it, sir.”
Lieutenant Valdez looked at Henryan.
“Sergeant, you’ll perform the diagnostics of the technical elevators within this compartment. A pressure suit is over there,” he pointed to the hatch.
“I need to wear a suit to check the elevators?” Darski asked, surprised.
“We’re trying to save every last credit. That’s why we don’t maintain an atmosphere in the technical corridors,” Valdez explained hurriedly as if caught doing something shameful. “You will start from the rooms on the other side of the arm.”
“Yes, sir!” Darski replied duly, and that ended the short briefing.
After the lieutenant left, Henryan picked up his toolbox and went to the hatch. He activated the lock with a card and waited calmly until a small room filled with air. The panel of the lock slowly changed color from red to green.
“Why did they send you to forced labor? What did you do?” Tregvas asked suddenly.
“Nothing,” Henryan said, without turning his head.
“Just like we all. Colonel Bruttal has a heavy hand,” the corporal summed up, and fell silent.
Apparently, he lacked the idea how to get to the point. Darski decided to put him out of his misery.
“If you gonna approach me again with some kind of a proposal, just skip it,” he said when the panel turned dark green and a massive hatch popped off with a hiss.
“A simple ‘thank you’ would be enough,” Tregvas grumbled.
“For what?”
“For the warning, to begin with.”
“Seriously?” The sergeant started to walk up the narrow stairs. “I’m to thank you for warning me of the esdees coming to take some shit that you had planted on me earlier? Maybe it’s you who should say ‘sorry.’”
The corporal looked down.
“We did our damnedest to pass you the crystals, buddy—”
“I’m not your buddy, Corporal!” The last word sounded like an insult in Darski’s mouth.
“I’m sorry, Sergeant.”
“For the crystals?”
“No, for the buddy.”
They walked in silence. When they reached the top level, Tregvas kept his distance from Darski. He stood against the wall, scowling as if someone had hurt him.
“Because of you, the esdees kicked the shit out of me,” Henryan said, irritated by his behavior. “I still piss blood. You could apologize for that, too.”
“We didn’t know, not really—”
“You didn’t know that esdees would have an eye on Seifert’s successor?”
“We didn’t know that esdees would get violent. They never laid a finger on any of us.”
Darski examined the data on the airlock’s display. Putting a pressure suit on would take about three minutes, so they had time to clarify a few things. After sealing the helmet, he was going to take care of the task at hand. With each passing moment, more inkblots died … Gurds, he corrected himself.
“Say what you have to say. You’ve got as much time as it takes to put on a pressure suit. Then I’ll take the toolbox and disappear.”
Tregvas licked his dry lips. Sweat beaded on his forehead, even though it wasn’t hot in the airlock. Apparently, the situation was stressing him out …
“I’m just a pawn,” he said cautiously, inserting his feet into a spacesuit, stretched on a rack. “One of many. They told me to raise hell in the canteen, so that I would end up here. Just like the other four guys. We wanted to make sure that Valdez wouldn’t assign any outsiders to you.”
He lowered his voice confidentially. “Soon, you’ll be able to talk to someone more important, Sergeant.”
“What are you talking about, man?” Darski looked at him like he was crazy.
Tregvas nodded toward the door leading to the technical level.
“There is someone waiting in there who knows more than I do. Someone, who really can apologize.”
The technical corridor at the top level of the rim was much narrower than those in the residential area. Also—no less importantly—its plasteel walls always remained transparent. Behind them stretched hydroponics and meat farms and evenly spaced oval tanks. The green ones contained water, the white ones—oxygen.
Seeing the enormity of this place, Henryan understood why the command had given up maintaining an atmosphere at the technical level of the station. The plantations were fully automated, service staff appeared there once in a blue moon, usually in the event of a serious failure that robots were not able to deal with. The corridors, circling the rim, were many miles long. Savings on heating and aeration of such a large space had to be gigantic.
Now, however, the Admiralty decided that technical part of the station could make a perfect, isolated transport route for the VIPs. Blocking the access to the elevators from several intermediate levels of the arm was all that was needed to form an independent alternative byway, allowing for fast movement of large numbers of people between the residential area, the observation deck, and the spaceport. The closure of the entire sector created apt conditions for the reception and accommodation of hundreds of tetchy parliamentarians; however, the bottleneck of the project was the elevators—or rather, lack thereof. Only eight shafts had been built in each arm, not enough for transporting at the same time everybody who would like to get from the rim to the observation deck—or to the spaceport, if the Admiralty would agree to send so many spartans over the battlefield.
