A Talent for War (27 page)

"Yes," I said. Figuring it all in standard time, I decided Kindrel had left her home world almost forty years after the attack. "How do you know she was still here in 706?"

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"We have a document dated by her."

"What's the document?"

"Medical certificate," he said, a trifle too quickly.

"Were there any children?"

"None that I know of."

Chase studied the woman in the holo: Kindrel at an advanced age. "You're right," she said, directing her comment to Lee.

"About what?"

"She looks as if she's had a difficult time."

Yes, I thought: she does. It was not simply that she'd grown older, that her early exuberance had faded, but that her expression had grown distant, distracted, wary.

Chase braced her chin on her fists, and studied the image. "What was her connection with Matt Olander?"

His expression didn't change, but there was a reaction: a tic, a brief flicker in the eyes, something. "I don't think I understand."

"Mr. Lee." I leaned forward and tried to assume a no-nonsense attitude. "We know that Kindrel knew Matt Olander. Why don't you tell us about it?" He sank deeply into his chair, exhaled, and fixed his attention on the holo. I strove for an attitude of disarming candor. "I'm prepared to pay for information." I mentioned a sum that I considered generous.

"Who are you, anyhow?" he asked. "Why do you care about any of this?"

"We're researchers from the University of Andiquar," I said. "We'd just like to know the truth.

If you're worried about something getting out, you needn't be."

"Researchers don't have that kind of money," he said. "What's this all about?" The way he asked the question, I knew he had what we were looking for.

"The money's from a government grant. If you're not interested, there are other avenues open to us."

"Name one."

Chase's eyes narrowed. "I can see we're wasting our time here, Alex."

"No," Lee pressed the control device, and the holo faded. "Listen, you want my honest opinion about all this? I offer it free."

We waited.

"Olander died pretty much like everybody said, and the thing you're looking for is a fraud."

He took a deep breath. "There's no story here." His eyes had grown small and hard.

"I can transfer funds now," I said. "What is it that's a fraud?"

"The money's fine," he said, "though that's not the point. I don't want to be made a fool of."

"Nothing like that," I said.

"I can tell you straight out I don't like what's in it, and I don't think it ought to get around. You follow me?"

"Yes," I said. "I understand."

"There's a statement by Kindrel. I shouldn't show it to anybody. But I let myself get talked into it once, so maybe once more doesn't matter. But you look at it here. Nothing leaves this house.

No copies. If you're going to insist on giving me something, make it cash. I don't want a record."

"Okay," I said.

"Because," he continued, "if anything comes out, I'm going to deny it. I'll deny everything."

Chase leaned across and touched his arm. "It's all right," she said. "We won't cause you any trouble." She switched her position, glanced at me, and looked back at Lee. "Who else came here about this document?"

"Tall man. Dark skin. Dark eyes." He watched us for a sign of recognition. "About three months ago."

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"What was his name?"

He went back to his commlink, spoke briefly to it, and looked up. "Hugh Scott"

XV.

There were few professional soldiers among the Dellacondans. Sim worked his miracles with systems analysts, literature teachers, musicians, and clerks. We tend to remember him primarily as a strategist and tactician. But none of that would have mattered, had he not possessed the capacity to draw, from ordinary persons, extraordinary performance.

—Harold Shamanway, Commentaries on the Late War

Attachment: THE STATEMENT OF KINDREL LEE

Point Edward

13I11I06

I'm not sure who will read this, if anyone. Nor have I any reason for setting down these facts, other than to accept in some visible fashion my own responsibility, which I cannot hope to shed in this life.

I will leave this with my niece, Jina, who is familiar with its contents, and who has been a friend and confidante throughout my ordeal, to do with as she sees fit.

—Kindrel Lee

To ME, ILYANDA has always seemed haunted.

There is something that broods over its misty seas and broken archipelagos, that breathes within its continental forests. You can feel it in the curious ruins that may, or may not, have been left by men. Or in the pungent ozone of the thunderstorms that strike Point Edward each night with a clocklike regularity that no one has yet explained. It is no accident that so many modern writers of supernatural fiction have set their stories on Ilyanda, beneath its cold hard stars and racing moons.

To the planet's several thousand inhabitants, most of whom live at Point Edward on the northern tip of the smallest of that world's three continents, such notions are exaggerated. But to those of us who have traveled in more mundane locations, it is a place of fragile beauty, of voices not quite heard, of dark rivers draining the unknown.

I was never more aware of its supernatural qualities than during the weeks following Gage's death. Against the advice of friends, I took the Meredith to sea, determined in the perverse way of people at such a time to touch once again a few of the things we'd shared in our first year, thereby sharpening the knife-edge of grief. And if, in some indefinable way, I expected to recapture a part of those lost days, it might have been from a sense that, in those phantom oceans, all things seemed possible.

I sailed into the southern hemisphere, and quickly lost myself among the Ten Thousand Islands.

While Kindrel Lee tacked through warm seas, the war was getting close. And when she returned to Point Edward, she was mystified— and frightened—to find it deserted. Sim's evacuation fleet, unknown to her, had come and gone.

She describes her initial shock, her increasingly frenzied attempts to find another human being in the broad avenues and shopping areas. No one's ever accused me of having an active imagination, but I stood puzzled out there, listening to the city: the wind and the rain and the buoys and the water sucking at the piers and the sudden, audible hum of power beneath the pavement and the distant banging of a door swinging on its hinges and the Carolian beat of the automated electronic piano in the Edwardian. Something walked through it all on invisible feet.

The city's lights burned brightly. The air was filled with radio signals. She even listened to a conversation between an approaching shuttle and the orbiting space station, indicating that the
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regular early morning flight into the Captain William E. Richardson Spaceport would take place as scheduled.

Ultimately, she was drawn to Richardson, which was located twenty-two kilometers outside the city. Midway to her destination, she began seeing evidence of the withdrawal. In fact, she literally ran into some of it: at a place called Walhalla, she rounded a curve too fast and crashed into a city carrier that had run off the road and been abandoned.

The shuttle that she'd expected never came. Still unaware of what was happening, and by now in a state of near-panic, Kindrel raided a security office—in fact, the one in which her husband had worked— and armed herself with a laser. Shortly after that, high in the main terminal building, she encountered Matt Olander.

I'm not sure precisely when I realized I wasn't alone. A footstep somewhere, perhaps. The sound of running water, possibly a subtle swirling of air currents. But I was suddenly alert, and conscious of my own breathing.

My first impulse was to get out of the building. To get back to the car, and maybe back to the boat. But I held on, feeling the sweat trickle down my ribs.

I moved through the offices one by one, conscious of the weapon in my boot, but deliberately keeping my hands away from it. I was close to panic.

I'd stopped in a conference room dominated by a sculpted freediver. A holograph unit which someone had neglected to turn off blinked sporadically at the head of a carved table. A half-dozen chairs were in some disorder, and several abandoned coffee cups and light pads were scattered about. One would have thought the meeting had recently adjourned, and that the conferees would shortly return.

I activated the holo and some of the light pads. They'd been discussing motivational techniques.

As I turned away, somewhere, far off, glass shattered!

It was a sudden sharp report. Echoes rattled through the room, short pulses what gradually lengthened into each other, merged with the barely audible hum of power in the walls, and subsided at last into a petulant whisper.

Somewhere above. In the Tower Room, the rooftop restaurant I rode the elevator up one floor to the penthouse, stepped out into the gray night and walked quickly across an open patio.

In the fog, the Tower Room was little more than a gloomy presence: yellow-smeared, round crossbarred windows punched into a shadowy stone exterior; rock columns supporting an arched doorway; a water-wheel; and an antique brass menu board whose lighting no longer worked.

Soft music leaked through the doors. I pulled one partway open and peered in at an interior illuminated by computerized candles flickering in smoked jars. The Tower Room looked, and felt, like a sunken grotto. It was a hive of rocky vaults and dens, divided by watercourses, salad dispensers, mock boulders and shafts, and a long polished bar. Blue and white light sparkled against sandstone and silverware. Crystal streams poured from the mouths of stone nymphs and raced through narrow channels between rough-hewn bridges. Possibly, in another time, it might have been a relatively pedestrian place, one more restaurant in which the clientele and conversation were too heavy to sustain an architect's illusion. But on that evening, in the stillness that gripped the Blue Tower, the empty tables retreated into a void, until the glimmering lights in the smoked jars burned with the steady radiance of stars.

It was sufficiently cool that I had to pull my jacket about my shoulders. I wondered whether the heating system had given out.

I crossed a bridge, proceeded along the bar, and stopped to survey the lower level. Everything was neatly arranged, chairs in place, silver laid out on red cloth napkins, condiments and sauce bottles stacked side by side on the tables.

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I could feel tears coming. I hooked my foot around a chair, dragged it away from the table, and sank into it.

There was an answering clatter, and a voice: "Who's there?"

I froze.

Footsteps. In back somewhere. And then a man in a uniform.

"Hello," he called cheerfully. "Are you all right?"

I shook my head uncertainly. "Of course," I said. "What's going on? Where is everybody?'9

"I'm back near the window." he said, turning away from me. "Have to stay there." He paused to be sure I was following, and then retreated the way he'd come.

His clothing was strange, but not unfamiliar. By the time I rejoined him, I'd placed it: it was the light and dark blue uniform of the Confederacy.

He'd piled his table high with electronic equipment. A tangle of cables joined two or three computers, a bank of monitors, a generator, and God knew what else. He stood over it, a headphone clasped to one ear, apparently absorbed in the displays: schematics, trace scans, columns of digits and symbols.

He glanced in my direction without quite seeing me, pointed to a bottle of dark wine, produced a glass, and gestured for me to help myself. Then he smiled at something he had seen, laid the headset on the table, and dropped into a chair, "I'm Matt Olander," he said. "What the hell are you doing here?"

He was middle-aged, a thin blade of a man whose gray skin almost matched the color of the walls, marking him as an offworlder. "I don't think I understand the question," I said.

"Why didn't you leave with everyone else?" He watched me intently, and I guess he saw that I was puzzled, and then he started to look puzzled. "They took everybody out," he said.

"Who?" I demanded. My voice went off the edge of the register. "Who took everybody where?"

He reacted as if it was a dumb question and reached for the bottle. "I guess we couldn't really expect to get one hundred percent. Where were you? In a mine somewhere? Out in the hills with no commlink?"

I told him and he signed in a way that suggested I had committed an indiscretion. His uniform was open at the throat, and a light jacket that must have been non-regulation protected him from the chill His hair was thin, and his features suggested more of the tradesman than the warrior.

His voice turned soft. "What's your name?"

"Lee," I said. "Kindrel Lee."

"Well, Kindrel, we spent most of these two weeks evacuating Ilyanda. The last of them went up to the Station during the late morning yesterday. Far as I know, you and I are all that's left."

His attention returned to the monitor.

"Why?" I asked. I was feeling a mixture of relief and fear.

His expression wished me away. After a moment, he touched his keyboard. "I'll show you,"

he said.

One of the screens—I had to move the bottle to get a good look— dissolved to a concentric ring display, across which eight or nine trace lights blinked. "Ilyanda is at the center. Or, rather the Station is. The range runs out to about a half billion kilometers. You're looking at a mute fleet. Capital ships and battle cruisers." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"What's happening, Miss Lee," he continued, "is that the Navy is about to blow hell out of the sons of bitches." His jaw tightened, and a splinter of light appeared in his eyes. "At last.

"It's been a long time coming. They've been driving us before them for three years. But today belongs to us." He raised his empty glass in a jeering salute toward the ceiling.

"I'm glad you were able to get people away," I said into the stillness.