wondered what the man would say if he told him he’d been a denizen of the Ruins just five years before. That fact, he decided, would not help his case.
“Let’s just say I have business there. With some friends in the TriBeCa Tower.”
“What friends?”
Gray smiled. “Would their names really mean anything to you?”
“No.” He grinned. “No they wouldn’t. To tell the truth, we don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on in there. And we don’t want to, either. As long as the squatties stay out in the Ruins, as long as they don’t cross the line and come up here, bothering decent folks here in the meg”—he shrugged—“then they can have the place, so far as I’m concerned.”
Which was the attitude Gray had long since come to expect of the Authority. Of course, the idea of one side not bothering the other only applied to the squatties staying out of the New City megalopolis. There were the hassles and the raids by Authority personnel, the periodic attempts to clear out sections of the Ruins—why, Gray had never been sure. Simple abuse of power, a flexing of Authority muscles just because they had the power to use them? Or a misguided attempt to help people who didn’t want to be helped?
It didn’t matter. The “decent folks” didn’t care.
“Then there should be no problem letting me go see my friends,” Gray said.
His internal time read just past 2130 hours shipboard time, about 1630 local. It hadn’t taken him long to process through SupraQuito and take the high-velocity elevator straight down-cable to Quito. When the space elevator was first built in the early twenty-second century, that trip would have been a two-day journey; with grav thrusters the 36,000 kilometer drop from synchorbit only took a couple of hours now.
Quito had been much the same as he remembered it from his first trip up-cable after joining the Navy—big, sprawling, crowded, and impossibly busy, one of the three major port megalopoli, the Equatorial Jewels, the biggest and richest cities on Earth.
From Quito’s elaborately decorated Estación Grande Central de la Tierra he’d taken a subsurface shuttle for the 4500-kilometer leg north to new New York, hurtling in silence through the vacuum gravtube that, at midpoint, passed nearly four hundred kilometers beneath what was left of the West Indies, a straight-line chord running point-to-point beneath the curving arc of the surface. Gray knew that titanic energies had been mustered to keep the deepest tubes stable as they passed through the Earth’s upper mantle, and that the temperature of the mantle rocks surrounding the tube approached 900 degrees Celsius. He could see none of it directly, however, for the shuttle had no external monitors. His choices were watching a mindless romance on the simfeed, striking up a conversation with other shuttle passengers, or sleeping. Like military personnel the world over and since time immemorial, he’d chosen sleep.
The passage, in any case, only lasted forty-five minutes. He’d arrived in Morningside Heights at 1320 local, 1820 ship time. Three hours he’d been here, waiting in waiting areas, talking to bored bureaucrats and minor officials, being sent down brightly lit passageways to see other bored bureaucrats and minor officials. It was actually taking him longer to get from the Columbia Arcology to TriBeCa, just eleven kilometers away, than it had taken him to travel 36,000 kilometers down-cable from SupraQuito, and 4500 kilometers more from Quito to the New City.
“Look, Lieutenant,” the Authority captain told him, shaking his head. “I’d like to help you. I really would. But I gotta put down a reason for your visit. Who the hell do you need to see in the Ruins, fer chrissake?”
A good question.
What, he wondered, was he looking for? Why had he come?
Oh, he knew why Fifer had wanted him to come. He needed to face his fears, needed to face directly the fact that, if he didn’t belong in the Navy, he no longer belonged here either.
He decided to risk telling the man the truth.
“My family.”
The man’s eyes widened slightly, then he nodded. “Oh. Sorry.” Gray couldn’t tell if he was apologizing for forcing the admission, or showing sympathy at Gray’s origins.
“Family … business …” the peaceforcer said, making an entry. “Palm me.”
“Pardon?”
“Give me your hand.”
He pressed the network of circuitry exposed against the heel of Gray’s right palm against a data feed. Gray felt the inner flag go up that told him he’d just received new data.
“What was that?”
“Your pass. If a monitor or an Authority ship or anybody else pings you, that’ll flash back your ID and my personal seal of approval on you bein’ there. You won’t be bothered.”
“Then I can go?”
“You got transport?”
“I’ve already lined up a broom.” There’d been a gravcycle rental shop outside the Authority Center.
“Then you can go.”
“Thanks.”
“Just one thing, though, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah?”
“You’ll be on your own in there. There’s no Net-Cloud in there, so you won’t be able to call for help. And things can get rough in the Ruins, know what I mean?”
“I lived there for most of my life, Captain. Remember?”
“Well, there’ve been some changes. They’ve been killing each other a lot more enthusiastically lately. Migrations. Political fighting. That sort of thing.”
“I think I can handle myself, Captain.”
“On your own head be it, then.” The peaceforcer went back to his console, effectively dismissing Gray.
But as he walked out, he distinctly heard the man mutter, “Damned squatties.”
Koenig’s Office
TC/USNA CVS America
Mars Synchorbital, Sol System
2148 hours, TFT
Koenig came to what passed for attention in his office chair as the inner commconnect came through. He’d been working on a request for two new fighter squadrons—replacements for the fighters and pilots lost at Eta Boötis—when his personal AI had announced a call from the Senate Military Directorate.
He’d half been expecting it.
“Sir.”
“Relax, Alex,” Rear Admiral Karyn Mendelson said, her image appearing on a newly opened in-head display window. “It’s just me.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
