Part 29 (1/2)

Popova blinked, then nodded.

”Okay, boss,” she said, looking more ruffled than DeRicci had ever seen her. ”Tell me exactly what to do.”

42.

Flint had been researching the ma.s.sacre survivors for more than an hour. He had his network search for information by family name, starting with the names and addresses listed in that lawsuit against Jrgen. He let the system work on separate screens, tracing family trees, following the public records from person to person to person.

But he handled the details. First, he went through the court records and determined which survivors were descendents of people who had died and which ones were actual survivors. He set the descendents aside, letting the network trace them.

If he could get an actual survivor, one who was related to other victims, he figured that was a lot more powerful than some great-great-grandchild. He figured there had to be a number of actual survivors out there. Somewhere in the body of the case, the text mentioned that children beneath the age of four were taken from their families and sent away before, as, or after the ma.s.sacre happened. Unfortunately, the record wasn't too clear on that part.

And Flint couldn't think about contamination of the survivors. He a.s.sumed that because the Disty used family members in their decontamination rituals, the actual survivor contamination didn't matter.

But he couldn't be sure. He was all in a knot, thinking about a ritual he didn't entirely understand.

Still, he felt the actual survivors were the way to go. And all of them would be between the ages of 100 and 104. Not all of them would still be alive, but some of them would.

Public records, especially from places as far away as the Outlying Colonies, were a mess. Names flitted in and out, identifying data changed, identifying numbers varied from colony to colony, world to world. Flint was dealing with records so old that many of them were encrypted in a fas.h.i.+on he hadn't seen since his early days as a computer tech. He didn't have the time to decode, so he didn't.

Instead, he took what he could, used it as best as he could, and skipped over the gaps in information. If this were a case in which he had months or years instead of hours, he would make a detailed month-by-month account of each survivor's life.

But he didn't have that kind of time. Instead, he had to be happy with year by year, and in a few cases, settle for decade by decade.

And even in those cases, he would have holes-several missing years or an inexplicable jump. At one moment, the survivor lived in the Outlying Colonies; at the next, he was back in this solar system. Flint had found a few like that, and they were all dead ends.

At some point-and he wasn't sure when that was-he would simply have to give all the information he had to Scott-Olson or DeRicci or someone in the Alliance who had contact with the Disty.

At some point, Flint would have to declare this investigation done, and let the experts handle it: Let them send a search team to the Outlying Colonies to bring the descendent of a survivor back for some weird ritual that might mean nothing at all to the descendent. Flint certainly didn't have the authority to do that. He wasn't sure anyone had.

But that wouldn't be his problem. His problem right now was filtering the wealth of information before him, and making it useful as quickly as possible-a problem he wasn't sure he would ever really solve.

43.

Roderick Jefferson sat on a tabletop in a conference room that had been modified to satisfy the Disty's need for weird protocol. The room was stair-stepped upward, and had been designed with long tables that curved toward a main table at the base of those stairs. Behind the tables sat the chairs preferred by most Alliance members. This was a general session room, designed for a hundred delegates or more, all of whom would be discussing one issue. At each place were nodes that allowed the delegate to listen to the debate in his own language without the delegate having to filter the information through his own personal links.

Jefferson loved the formality of the general sessions. He believed in diplomacy, he truly did. It was his one true religion, the thing that kept him going, the thing that made his life worth living from day to day.

But that wasn't to say he found it easy.

Number Fifty-six, a wily old Disty, sat across from him. Jefferson had had run-ins with Fifty-six before. To most humans, Fifty-six looked no different from other Disty. But Jefferson had been around him long enough to recognize the particular bend of his long fingers, and the strange, almost invisible markings along the inside of his arms. Fifty-six also had a particularly raspy voice for a Disty, something Jefferson learned years later came from some sort of accident or handicap, a defect that other Disty found repulsive.

Jefferson's headache was worse. He hadn't entirely gotten rid of his hangover-or perhaps he had, and the fifteen minutes he had spent with his forehead pressed against the table while he waited for Fifty-six to arrive had given him an all-new headache.

Or maybe it was just the d.a.m.n negotiation. Jefferson had no idea how he was going to resolve this.

Ogden had abandoned him. Once she had set up the room-removing all of the tabletop items in the first six rows, roping off the chairs so no human accidentally sat in them, and letting all the parties know that this session would be doubly backed up for posterity, she had vanished. She hadn't even said good-bye-which had been a bright move on her part, because Jefferson would have begged her to stay.

She seemed to be the only competent member of his species who was involved in this mess.

Behind him sat the human representative to Mars, a flaky woman who seemed to believe that diplomacy was about genetic modification, not actually learning the culture. Behind her sat other human representatives, most of whom Jefferson did not know and did not care to know. All he had done after shaking their hands was instruct the group to remain quiet. He would do all the talking for the human populations of the Alliance, just like he had been hired to do.

But it wasn't easy. The Disty were angrier than he had ever seen them. Number Fifty-six was managing to remain calm- at least superficially. But the Disty behind him-representatives of at least two major Disty corporations based on Mars, and the Disty representative from Amoma, the Disty home world-seemed so furious that they refused to sit on the tabletop.

Instead, they stood behind Fifty-six and stared down at Jefferson, something considered beyond rude in Disty culture. He ignored them as best as he could, not sure if that was the right tactic. But no one commented on it, so he supposed he was doing well.

It seemed to be the only thing he was doing well. He had started with denials-the wrong thing to do, apparently-claiming the humans had no designs on Mars and certainly weren't trying to toss out the Disty.

That just made the Disty even more hostile, and one Disty, whose position Jefferson never did get, stomped out of the room.

Fifty-six then calmly told Jefferson that negotiations would be over when Fifty-six was the only Disty left.

”I cannot control them,” Fifty-six said with complete disingenuousness. Jefferson knew that Fifty-six had planned this strategy.

At that point, Jefferson decided that truth was his only weapon. ”I have no idea where those bodies came from,” he said. ”I've got no information on other grave sites on Mars. I don't know if some human group a century ago did this in protest to the growing Disty control of what had once been humancentric Domes. I'll do my best to find out.”

That caught Fifty-six's attention, and actually made the remaining Disty climb on the table and sit down. The table shook while they all took their places ”You acknowledge that this could be a human plot?” Fifty-six said.

”I think anything's a possibility at this point,” Jefferson said. ”But I can unequivocally state that the humans currently represented by the Alliance had nothing to do with this, and actually prefer Disty control of Mars.”

Prefer was probably too strong a word. There was always talk, particularly among Earthbound humans, that the Disty were too close, that their control of Mars was unnatural, and that they had used superior economic power to steal the planet, one Dome at a time. was probably too strong a word. There was always talk, particularly among Earthbound humans, that the Disty were too close, that their control of Mars was unnatural, and that they had used superior economic power to steal the planet, one Dome at a time.

But that was talk, harmless talk. At least, that was what Jefferson used to think. Now he wasn't so sure. As one of his personal links kept the disaster unfolding image by image on a window in the upper corner of his right eye's vision, he wondered if someone had known all along that this kind of thing would cause the Disty to go crazy.

Jefferson chose to believe that ma.s.s grave was unconnected to human-Disty politics, and probably had something to do with humanity's long history of violence against its own kind.

Fifty-six acknowledged that could be possible as well, and finally the negotiations reached a more cordial level. That had been a half an hour ago, and what had seemed like a real breakthrough now seemed like the only breakthrough the negotiations would have.

And then word came through the news that the Moon had decided-unilaterally-to close all its ports and close its s.p.a.ce to incoming vessels.

Jefferson sat up straight, almost committing a major faux pas. It would have been very serious if Fifty-six had noticed it, but he hadn't. He was looking off in the distance as well.

He had also gotten the news.

Jefferson sent half a dozen messages to various sources, demanding to know why he hadn't been informed of this before the media had found out. He ended each message with: It's probably ruined my negotiation with the Disty, It's probably ruined my negotiation with the Disty, and that wasn't far from the truth. and that wasn't far from the truth.

If the Disty wanted to declare the humans uncooperative, now was the time to do so.

Fifty-six turned his s.h.i.+ny gaze onto Jefferson. ”So this entire meeting,” Fifty-six said in his own language, ”has been a ruse to cover your duplicity over the Moon situation.”

In a normal meeting, Jefferson would have feigned ignorance. But the closing of the Moon's ports had already hit the news, and Fifty-six knew that Jefferson was monitoring his links. They had established that open lines were all right, within diplomatic perimeters, at the beginning of this meeting.