The Stalk Read online

  When he opened them, in came the two youngsters who had upended humanity's future, arm in arm, pale of face, and glowing of eye.

  Croft had heard from Remson that the kids' eyes glowed in certain light. Not a lot. Just a little. In reflected light, as if their eyes had become cats' eyes. Yellow lights gleamed and receded as the youngsters approached his desk.

  He didn't stand to greet them. Young Rick Cummings had Dini Forat by the arm as he strode up to the desk, half-dragging the Medinan girl who, before coming to Threshold, had habitually worn a veil over a face that would have done Helen of Troy proud.

  Then the children began to slide. They seemed to slip through the intervening space, rush up to his desk with their eyes preceding their faces.

  Cummings extended his hand over Croft's desk and the desk disappeared entirely. All that existed in the universe was the boy's hand waiting for Croft to take it in his.

  "Thank you for seeing us, sir. We really appreciate all you've done."

  Arrogant. Proud. Knowledgeable. Perhaps smirking, or promising to share the secret of passing across space without traversing the intermittent ground.

  Was this a display of power, or a figment of Croft's rattled psyche?

  Mickey focused on the young man's face. Rick Cummings III was handsome enough to make a likely escort, a Paris to Dini's Helen of Troy, if these children were the Unity's version of the Trojan Horse.

  Meeting the youngster's eyes, Croft suddenly couldn't believe there was any evil intent there, only an odd, slight glint of reflected light.

  Time shifted under Croft. The fossils in his desk lived, and died, and became one with the rock that was their crypt.

  The boy's hand was still outstretched to him, waiting.

  Mickey half-rose to shake Cummings' determinedly out-thrust hand before those glowing eyes could drop to his desktop and make the schooling fossils move again. Couldn't have that. Let go of the hand. Break contact with the eyes. Sit down yourself.

  "Sit down, Mr. Cummings, Ms. Forat."

  "Mrs. Cummings," Rick Cummings corrected sharply, reminding Croft that these two youngsters wanted him to solve their mundane problems, such as getting their parents to recognize their marriage.

  "Sit, please," Croft said again. Dini Forat was already seated in one of the two chairs before his desk, her dark curls cascading down and across one breast. How had it happened? He hadn't seen her take a seat.

  Never mind. Arresting woman. She'd left him nearly speechless the first time he'd seen her. There was nothing supernormal about her extraordinary beauty.

  Now, Croft couldn't afford to be mesmerized, not by her face, not by the way light came and went in her eyes or in the eyes of her young husband. Now he must gain their confidence, enlist them as allies, and somehow save both their lives from Medinan justice and Richard Cummings II's retribution, which would in all likelihood be worse than death.

  Croft was mildly surprised that he hadn't realized how important it was to shield the children from their parents' misplaced fury. It might be the most important thing he ever did.

  He must save them, of course. Fighting for control of his own thoughts, of his focus, Croft reminded himself that he must save these children not because he cared about then-welfare, which he truly did not, but for his own reasons, for his own purposes, for his own needs and the security needs of three hundred colonies.

  Mickey Croft seldom needed help. But he did, today, from these children. He smiled at them.

  Two huge Cheshire cat grins answered his, hanging in space above his desk.

  Croft ignored the phenomena, but his eyes began to throb and he began to perspire at the collar.

  "Well then," he said, and stopped. What should he say?

  The two young people sat silently watching him with infrared eyes, their lips firmly attachéd to their faces now.

  He hoped they would speak. They didn't, just stared at him uncannily.

  Croft began again. "I'm sure we can find a way to solve this problem together." No reaction. "I expect." Croft continued, "that is, I suppose ... we may be able to work out something with your parents, but it will not be simple, and it will require great maturity and compromise on your parts."

  "Just work something out that doesn't mean separating us," Cummings said brashly and craftily, "and we'll be as mature as you want."

  The Forat girl shifted in her chair and said, "Rick means ... we must have our marriage upheld." And she caught him again with those eyes that had cat's glow in their depths. He was falling. He was melting through the floor. He was palming his way along a spherical surface that was flat to the touch and yet never intersected any other surface.... He was back on the alien ship.

  And then he was free of her. But frightened. And sweating again. He was SecGen of the UNE, and he was sweating in front of these two kids. Remson had been right—Croft should have had this meeting with a one-star admiral and five aides in attendance, to take notes and generally support him.

  But Croft had a running log of this meeting, as he did of all meetings—not that anyone would ever see him make such a display of himself, quail before children. ... Croft said, "My dear, I know what you want. You and your ... husband ... must do exactly what I say to have any hopes of coming through this alive, well and together. You must realize that the diplomatic consequences of the incident you caused are substantial and not our only problems."

  Croft didn't look at her again. If he didn't look at her, he would be all right.

  Young Cummings said, "We're willing to work with you, Mr. Secretary. We said that. We have—" Cummings smiled a negotiating smile that was a chilling caricature of his father's "—something in common, don't we? And we've all got the same goals."

  Croft wondered about that. What had he expected from these children? Some humility, perhaps. Contrition. Some fear. Some recognition of the depths of their danger. But not arrogance. Not glowing-eyed arrogance. Not wisdom beyond their years. They shouldn't have realized how much bargaining power they had, when Threshold was desperate for information about the aliens.

  But they did. Clearly, they did.

  Cummings had his father's predatory, blond, handsome, soulless confidence. Croft was suddenly angry beyond measure that the boy was so certain of his ground with the UNE Secretariat.

  "I could have you both—" He stopped. What? Put into protective custody? Yes, that was it. He would rather have put them each in solitary forever and thrown away the key. But they would have demanded to be locked up together. "Put in protective custody of the Secretariat for the time being. But only if you will cooperate with my people and adhere to certain security conditions."

  "What conditions?" Dini Forat-Cummings demanded.

  "What kind of cooperation?" her husband added.

  Maybe Croft was overreacting, attributing qualities and power to them because of their recent history that were greater than they deserved. Perhaps they were both just children, after all; teenagers facing terrible consequences from their forbidden love.

  Croft said, "Place yourselves willingly in my hands. Give appropriate statements to be passed to your embassies. Vince Remson of my staff will help you. Undergo a thorough set of physical and psychological evaluations. And cooperate with my investigators completely, no matter what they ask of you." It was a tough offer, with no guarantees. Temporary safety in exchange for complete access to whatever they knew. But, children or not, they were in a tough situation.

  "All right," Dini Forat-Cummings said softly, but it sounded to Croft like the tinkling of glass bells, not human words spoken from a human throat.

  "You'll keep us safe," Richard Cummings III said, as if that were the agreement and the universe itself would mandate Croft's adherence to it. Or as if the aliens would.

  Mickey Croft's body hair stood on end in a shower of personal static. He said, "Agreed," and once more offered his hand across his desk to the boy who had been six months in an alien spacetime.

  When Cummings' flesh touched
Croft's, the blue spark that jumped between their fingers was the size of a balled fist.

  The snap and jolt of it numbed Croft up to the elbow. He cried out.

  The youngster looked at him curiously, as if nothing untoward had occurred. "Is there anything else, sir?" said Cummings, ignoring the electrical discharge as if it hadn't happened.

  "Ah, no," Croft said with utmost difficulty, managing to sound as if he were in control of this meeting. "Young Dodd out front will have Secretary Remson come and collect you. Stay in the outer office until he does."

  "Thank you, sir," said the Forat girl in her chiming voice.

  "Yes, thanks. I'm sure we'll all get along fine," said Cummings.

  Croft wanted to throw a paperweight at the boy, or call back his offer of aid, but did neither. He just watched them go without a word, out the obedient door that reacted to them as if they were human. From the rear, it was easier to think that they were.

  Poor Vince. Assistant Secretary Vince Remson, fixer extraordinaire, was about to begin the most critical, and perhaps personally dangerous, mission of his life. There was nothing normal about those two youngsters. Croft, who had met them before their flight from Threshold, now knew that for certain.

  But then, there was nothing normal about Mickey Croft anymore, not since his encounter on the alien ship.

  At least his eyes didn't glow. Or did they?

  Croft went again to his window on the stars, and then into his executive bathroom, where he stood for a long time, moving his head before a mirror, staring at his own eyes, trying to catch a glint of cat's glow in their depths.

  CHAPTER 2

  Caution

  Reice wished that somebody else had been given the job of escorting the Cummings and Forat brats to and from their various physical and mental evaluations.

  The kids gave him the creeps. The girl was too beautiful and the NAMECorp heir needed a good punch in his well-bred jaw. But the Cummings boy was a third generation honcho in the making, and the girl was a Muslim from a fundamentalist sect which had nasty prohibitions about intermingling with infidels, let alone marrying one, so Reice was along to put muscle in the SecGen's decision to hold the kids in close quarantine until some diplomatic solution could he worked out by the likes of Croft and Remson.

  Escorting the young couple around the Stalk was no harsh duty, up here where all the lifts worked only on security key cards and handprints and every meeting included a breakfast or a brunch or a lunch or a dinner of real food and good wine far beyond what Reice's salary could buy him.

  He sat in the anteroom of Mickey Croft's private psychometric sampler-modeler installation and waited for the kids to come out. He could see them through the glass observation window.

  They sat tamely enough, beyond the technicians and a second panel of glass, before a console where an audio-video display bank was taking readings from the helmets on their heads, the gloves on their hands, and whatever-all might be in the chairs they were sitting on.

  Straightforward. Nothing to sweat. It was taking them off-Stalk that bothered Reice. The kids had slipped Medinan and ConSec Security before, and ended up stealing a ship and making a break for it.

  Reice ought to know. He was the guy who chased them and got a transcript of their ship disappearing in a spongehole that opened up in front of that infernal Ball that the scavenger had towed in.

  Nothing like that could be allowed to happen again. Reice was under strict orders to keep the kids in the Secretariat zone of the Stalk and not to let them roam Threshold, whatever excuse they offered. He had two goons posted outside every door the kids went through to make sure those orders were followed.

  So no sweat. It was safe. Watch the red and blue lights playing over the modeler bay and relax a little. Keeping the kids upStalk and out of Blue Mid, where they could catch a nonsecure lift to anywhere on Threshold, was the most important part of his job.

  The youngsters seemed to know this was for their own good. They were pretty reasonable, so far, even where this psychometric modeling was concerned.

  Reice wouldn't want his own privy person mapped and modeled so that whatever the Secretariat wanted to do with or to you, they could call up a walking, talking holographic duplicate of you to question or depose at will.

  The only reason these psychometric modelers weren't the subject of massive complaints and legal actions was that they were too technically sensitive and expensive to be available to the rank and file policing agencies of Threshold. Reice wondered what it would be like to be able to access modeled data in a normal ConSec investigation.

  Consolidated Security Command was the agency that ought to have a modeler like this, if anyone did. But rank had its privileges, and this modeler was Mickey Croft's private property, bought with his own inherited money, and permitted only because Croft was the damned Sec-Gen and could write himself any waivers he wanted from rules and regulations meant to protect the Threshold population from invasions of their privacy or infringements of their rights as citizens.

  The kids had had to sign forms giving permission for the modeling before the technicians would even let them in the room. Reice had worried, then, that there'd be some scene, but Cummings was uncharacteristically mellow—polite as you please.

  Now both youngsters were in the modeler bay and the lightshow was revving up. Reice looked at his chronometer. Shouldn't be much longer. Next up on their schedule was a meeting with Assistant Secretary Remson and some legals from the Secretariat's pool, who were trying to set up a negotiation with the mullah about the marriage.

  The mullah, Beni Forat, had this quaint notion that a death warrant issued by his religious court ought to hold I on Threshold, and he'd put a price on the kids' heads—again—to add to the fun. Since the Medinans were not the most reasonable of races, the main threat that Reice saw was being set upon by a bunch of bioengineered Medinan "bodyguards," who were willing to die for the faith in the act of committing ritual murder.

  Although it was unlikely that a bioengineered life-form— or a desperate human from the Loader Zone who wanted to collect the bounty—could reach this far into the Secretariat levels, Reice was armed to the teeth to prevent any surprises he couldn't handle.

  And that was weird: walking around the Secretariat's wood-paneled and carpeted halls with a side arm. Especially carrying a side arm with more than tranquilizer darts in it. The SecGen was deadly serious about keeping these kids alive, well, and under UNE protection.

  Reice pulled out his A-potential gun and checked its charge. Set to narrow beam, medium power, it could blow a four-inch hole in anything—flesh or metal or anything else on Threshold. Set on full power, wide beam, as it was now, it could port into another continuum the entire energy potential of any discrete system it encountered—vegetable, animal, or mineral—that was smaller than a six-foot cube. Reice put the gun back in its holster at his waist, a quick-draw unit low cut and secure on a wide belt in case he needed to get at it fast.

  So Reice wasn't worried about Medinan assassins. Much.

  A technician in a white coat got up from the control room and entered the modeler bay where the kids were. Reice got up, too, and rapped on the window between himself and the tech bay. When one of the techs turned around, Reice made a querying motion, and the tech gave him a thumbs up.

  Inside the modeler bay, the first tech was removing the helmet and gloves from Dini Forat-Cummings.

  The central console of the modeler was flaring colored lights across the visual spectrum. The lights started to form a cone.

  Behind Reice, a door opened. He turned on his heel.

  Vince Remson was standing in the doorway, arguing with someone Reice couldn't see.

  Remson was saying, "There's no reason to be concerned, I assure you. We're proceeding through an evaluation standard for this situation—" Remson put his hand across the doorway, as if to block it.

  Reice instinctively drew his weapon, moved fast to the far wall, and sidled along it. Maybe Remson neede
d help, maybe he didn't, but ...

  Reice could barely hear some muffled response from whoever was standing outside, past Remson, out of Reice's view.

  Remson's stiff arm came down, no longer blocking the doorway. The Assistant Secretary said loudly, taking a backward step into the anteroom, "We're quite sure we're within our rights, Mr. Cummings. And if you don't agree, you are free to take it up with Secretary General Croft, himself, of course."

  The loudness was, for Reice, a warning. He realized he'd better get the side arm out of sight just as Remson took a second backward step into the room.

  Reice holstered his gun and moved smartly away from the wall, up behind Remson. "Is there anything you need, sir?" Reice asked in crisp professional tones.

  "I think I can handle this, Reice. Let's just proceed as directed, shall we?"

  "Yes, sir," said Reice. Remson didn't want to back off? Okay, Reice would hold his ground till hell froze over.

  Now Reice could see Cummings, Jr., current Chief Executive Officer of North American Mining and Exploration Corporation (NAMECorp), and one of the richest and most powerful individuals in all the three hundred colonized worlds.

  Cummings looked like an older, heavier, tired version of his son: blond and seamy-faced and substantial. There were three men behind him, and Reice maneuvered until he could see his own two ConSec guards flanking Cummings' men.

  The ConSec guards looked grim and dangerous. Only Reice knew them well enough to see the uncertainty in their bearing. Remson must have waved them off. Now they were standing down, without moving back.

  Nice mess, this.

  Remson still blocked the doorway, just far enough inside to claim it as his personal turf. Remson was a big, athletic Slav with natural physical ability. Reice wouldn't have wanted to tangle with Remson. In fact, he'd go out of his way not to make the guy mad. One of the reasons Remson was Mickey Croft's XO was the combination of mental and physical skills that cut down the SecGen's need for personal staff.