Spinneret

Chapter 34

Secretary-General Saleh was seated alone at the far end of the conference room table when Meredith and Carmen entered. Passing up his usual seat at the table's head, the colonel moved down to sit directly across from their visitor. The usual unspoken conventions of position and relative power could be ignored in such an informal meeting. "Good day, Mr. Saleh," he nodded as Carmen sat down beside him. "May I present Miss Carmen Olivero, head of the Astran Council."

Saleh nodded with tight-lipped courtesy and looked back at Meredith. "Before we go any farther, Colonel, I must officially insist that the bodies of the UN

commando squad be returned to us."

"You're not in much of a bargaining position, but we have every intention of sending the bodies back. Whether or not the Rooshrike will let you leave the system is, of course, another matter entirely."

"Indeed. Their spokesman informs me that decision is up to you."

"Ah," Meredith nodded. He'd already heard that from Beaeki nul Dies na, but he'd wanted to make sure Saleh knew it, too. "Well, you can't blame them for being touchy. As our supply partners and sort-of sales agents, they have a vested interest in making sure the Spinneret stays in Astran hands. You, on the other hand, are seen as allies of the Ctencri, whom they have no special affection for."

"You need not spell out all the details," Saleh said coldly. "I'm quite aware Msuya's attempted raid has stirred up a great deal of antagonism toward Earth."

Msuya's raid, Meredith thought. The phrase was as subtle as a public hand washing—and almost certainly proclaimed Msuya's political demise. Goal one; check. "All right, then. The races that provide the wonderful gadgets on which your power is based are mad at you. How would you like it if I broke your stranglehold on Earth for good?"

Saleh's face remained impassive. "How would you do that?"

"By opening up direct trade with individual nations, of course. After this fiasco the Ctencri couldn't lift a finger to protect their monopoly with you, and with our cable income we could undercut any price you or they could offer. In no time you'd be back to being the overgrown debating society you were a couple of years ago. I presume you would find that distasteful?"

"Of course—as would you," Saleh said. "Surely you recognize from history that Earth has a better chance for international peace under the sort of economic empire the UN now represents." He waved a hand. "You didn't ask me down here simply to gloat over my impending destruction, Colonel; you're not the sort of man who does. I conclude you wish to make a deal. May we get down to it?"

"Pine. Basically, we want to open up Astra for immediate immigration "

"I see. And the prospective settlers will come predominantly from North America, I expect."

"You expect wrong. We want mostly poor and dispossessed from the Third World countries."

For just a second Saleh's impassive expression cracked with surprise before settling into place again. "The people you speak of are mostly farmers," he pointed out. "What would they do here?"

"Work their butts off, for starters. Don't misunderstand me— I don't want Bangladesh or whoever dumping its street bums and criminals on us. We want people who haven't got much chance where they are but still have the ambition and hope to grab a new opportunity when it presents itself." He leveled a finger at Saleh. "That'll be your job: to make sure this offer gets to those people and to provide information to us for screening purposes. Miss Olivero has a file with all the details."

Beside him, Carmen pulled a cassette from her shoulder pouch and handed it over.

Saleh hesitated a fraction of a second before taking it. He fingered it for a moment, frowning as if he suspected it might explode. "I … appreciate what I believe you're trying to do," he said at last, looking up at Meredith. "But do you think you can truly give vast numbers of people a better life here?"

"No—but most of them won't actually be here for long. Once their education and training are completed they'll be sent out to the neighboring empires to monitor the installation and use of Spinneret cables."

Saleh frowned. "They'll what?"

"Don't look so surprised. One of the major worries we've had all along has been the ease with which the cables can be applied to warfare. I don't want the stuff used that way, and neither do any of the races I've talked to—or at least that's what they say. So okay; from now on each cable is going to be accompanied by a small group of monitors, who'll go with it to the installation site and certify it winds up doing what it was supposed to. Other teams will routinely look at old installations, both to make sure the cable hasn't been moved and to perform long-term studies of strength degradation and such. Sure, there won't be all that much to do for now, but it'll take a while to train the monitors anyway. And we do plan to sell lots of cables."

Slowly, Saleh nodded. "It may work—for a limited number, at least. Very well; you may count on my complete cooperation in this project." He hesitated. "In fact, you would have had my help even without resorting to threats. It appears your vision for Astra is not so different from mine, after all."

"Glad to hear it." Goal two; check. "Then there's just one more thing." Meredith let his gaze harden. "Do you know how your commandos died?"

Saleh grimaced slightly. "I understand they were electrocuted by your Gorgon's Head machines in the Spinner cavern control tower. I don't know how Major Barner managed it."

"Major Barner didn't do a thing. One of the commandos, keying in what he thought was the sequence for authorizing new supervisors, actually typed something that translates roughly as 'supervisor in danger.' The rest followed automatically." He paused, but Saleh remained silent. "I'm sure you see what that means, but I'll spell it out anyway. With the best transmission equipment and most elaborate scramblers the Ctencri could provide your spies, we still could not only monitor their communication with Msuya, but could even inject our own information into their data transfers. That first of all means you can't trust anything Ermakov and company gave you; and it second of all means you'll be wasting your time if you try this sort of trick again. Clear?"

"Clear." Saleh's voice was calm. "Will the scientists be executed?"

"I'm tempted; but no. Instead, I'll trade them to you for Dr. Loretta Williams's two children, whom you've got in protective custody somewhere. Dr. Williams is staying with us, and it would be nice if her family could be here with her."

A dozen questions flickered across Saleh's face, but he merely nodded. "They'll be brought here as soon as possible."

"Good. Well, then, I think that wraps things up for now." Meredith rose and extended his hand. "Read Miss Olivero's proposals carefully and contact us with any questions or comments."

Saleh reached across the table to grip Meredith's hand. "I'll do so … and whether you believe it or not, Colonel, I look forward to working on this with you." He nodded gravely to Carmen, then turned and opened the outside door. There was a brief gust of icy air, and then he was gone.

"Goal three and game," Meredith muttered, feeling the tension draining out of him. If Saleh was even half as sincere as he'd seemed, the whole thing might just work. Taking a deep breath, he looked at Carmen. "Well. I don't know about you, but I still have a mountain of work waiting for me back at Unie. Shall we go?"

Carmen snorted as they headed for the door leading to the rest of Martello Base.

"You make it sound like I have nothing to do."

"It's got to be easier than it was before all the campaign rhetoric started cooling down." He glanced at her as he opened the door for them. "You're still troubled about something, aren't you?"

She nodded. "Loretta Williams. How are you so sure she's really on our side now?

If it's not a secret, that is."

"No secret—I just never got around to telling all of you on our little excursion.

You know how we tapped the spy comm net, don't you?"

"Major Barner said you installed Rooshrike gadgets in the radios that let you receive the signals before they went through the scramblers."

"Right. And since the Orspham could give us copies of the corresponding scrambled conversations, we could break the scrambler code itself, which is why we were able to substitute our own computer sequence at this end when Udani tried to send the supervisor data."

"If you knew they were spies, though, why didn't you arrest them right away?"

"Because we still needed their help to decipher the Spinneret equipment."

Meredith smiled. "Besides which, it was handy to have Msuya thinking he knew more about the Spinneret than we did. You see, Ermakov and his gang were editing out crucial bits of information in their reports to us, bits they naturally passed on to Msuya. With the bugs in place we actually got everything, of course, but as far as Msuya knew we shouldn't have had the means to even look for the supervisor-danger code, let alone find it. So it never occurred to him to plan for such a contingency."

Carmen seemed to digest that. "I take it, then, that Loretta's reports to us were complete?"

"Better than that, actually. After Dunlop's move she started shaving data going the other direction. Msuya never knew the lifeboat's full size, for example, and the location she gave him was down an entirely different tunnel system."

"Odd she never mentioned that."

"Not really. As far as she knew, it would be an improvable and all-too-convenientsounding excuse."

They'd reached the door that looked out over Martello's docks now. Glancing out the small windows as they pulled their coats from the nearby rack, Meredith saw that it was beginning to flurry again. He hoped the major storm the satellites had spotted would miss the area as predicted; the Rooshrike were due to start landing two hundred tons of iron and aluminum early in the morning. Pushing the door open, he squinted against the wind and led the way to the nearest hovercraft.

It wasn't until they were out in the open water that Carmen spoke again. "It won't work, you know. I've run the numbers, and there's no way this cable monitor program can absorb enough people to do any real good. Even with the teachers and community setup people we'll need to support the whole thing, we're not going to be able to give genuine jobs to more than a couple hundred thousand people at the most. Even the embassies we'll be setting up everywhere in sight won't absorb that many more." She shook her head tiredly. "There are more than a hundred thousand unemployed beggars in Calcutta alone."

"True," Meredith nodded. "But on the other hand we aren't limited to Astra and Earth anymore, either."

Carmen frowned … and, slowly, a look of astonishment spread across her face.

"You mean … Spinnerhome?"

"Why not? Surely the Spinners' enemies are long gone by now, and it seems unlikely that the basic soil fertility could have been destroyed. Of course, we'll need to check the place out thoroughly first, and we'll have to learn enough about that black hole drive to build bigger ships. But that's one of the reasons I want to concentrate so hard on educating our immigrants. By the time we're ready to open up Spinnerhome, we'll need a cadre of capable people available to spearhead the effort."

"And what if Spinnerhome is uninhabitable?" she persisted. "What'll we do then?—start checking the other systems on the lifeboat map until we find something?"

"We could," he nodded. "Or we could search the region around Spinnerhome using our own star drive. Between the two of them we've got access to practically the whole damn galaxy." He shrugged. "And in the meantime we'll have spread mankind out as far as we can and have set up on Astra the first crack at a genuine melting pot that anyone's seen since 1776. On the whole, I think the human race is in better shape now than any time in the past century."

Behind them came the roar of the repulsers, and Meredith looked out the hovercraft window as the UN shuttle arced overhead. Going back to Earth … and Meredith chuckled.

"What's funny?" Carmen asked.

He shook his head. "I'd almost forgotten … but one of my most hopeful goals for the whole Astra project was that it would earn me a brigadier general's star. I guess, instead, I'll have to settle for a few of the real thing."