Playing God(36)

Esmo said nothing, she just kept looking at him. Finally, he cracked. “All right, what is it, Esmo?”

She blinked, picked up her coffee, and took a swallow. “I'm just wondering why you took this job in the first place.”

Ah. Yes. There was that, wasn't there? Keale ran his hand through his hair. Maybe he was too paranoid. Maybe he was too hungry. If something happened, and his team locked it down, there'd be bonuses, praise, promotions, everything you could hope for. He knew it, everybody knew it.

How much did he really need, though? He was already fully vested. He could cash in tomorrow and be comfortable for the rest of his life. What he didn't have was a coup of any kind. No feather in his cap, as the saying went. That had bothered him a lot as a younger man. He thought he'd gotten over it, but when the offer to head up the team going to All-Cradle had come along, he'd jumped at it. Inside him, that young, eager man had woken up and started polishing his boots.

It was not a comfortable feeling. It was also not one he was ready to admit to out loud, not even to Esmo.

So, he gave her the other part of the truth. “When I signed up, I didn't know how many of my requests and suggestions were going to be refused.”

“You could quit, or you could raise a stink in the management courts about dereliction of duty and ignorant endangerment of Bioverse citizens.”

“Yeah, I could,” he admitted. “But all of that will take a lot longer than two weeks. Do you really think they're going to hold things up just to give me time to scream my head off?”

Esmo puffed out her cheeks. He couldn't help thinking she knew what he hadn't said, but then again, he frequently got that impression when talking to Esmo.

“They had you write up the contingency measures, didn't they? What Bioverse can or will do if the Confederation falls apart?”

Her words dropped like stones. Keale took a long drink of coffee before answering. He had treated that part of his assignment as a military exercise. It made good sense. You had to have plans in case the worst happened. It wasn't anything he hadn't done before. It also wasn't anything so many lives had hung on before.

He shouldn't even be thinking about it in that light. The fact that he had was another uncomfortable realization. “Yes, I did have to write up the contingency measures.”

“And you can't tell me what they are, can you?”

“You know I can't, Esmo.”

They stood in silence for a minute, surrounded by the smells of good coffee and fresh bread. “Bad?” she asked.

“Efficient.”

Her eyebrows arched. “More efficient than you've ever had to be personally responsible for?”

His face tightened. “Esmo, my entire career has been about keeping people safe. If we have to oversee any actions in hostile territory, there are going to be a lot of unsafe people around.”

Esmo pursed her mouth. “So, you want any … troublemakers dealt with quickly, and efficiently, before the trouble spreads.”

He nodded. Esmo was very good, she always had been. But then, like him, she'd grown up in Bioverse, and she knew the score, the game, the rewards, and the penalties. “Yes, I do.”

She picked her mug up again and swirled the coffee around for a moment. “I suppose you know the relocation schedule's been set back a week because of this delay in the ID hardware.”

He nodded solemnly. “I'd heard.”

She leaned back against the counter and took a swallow of coffee. “You've got a week then.”

Keale let himself smile. “Thanks, Esmo.”

She focused on something on her spectacles he couldn't see. “I'll give you Chief Engineer Tiege. He's got a niece on staff with him, a junior grade named Marjorie Wilkes. Runs her ragged. It won't look funny if they clock some extra time together.” She turned her attention fully onto Keale again, and a sharp, warning light shone in Esmo's dark eyes. “Keep it quiet, Kaye. Neither one of us needs any garbage from the veeps on this one.”

“You've got my word, Esmo.”

She looked at him over the rims of her spectacles and gave him her slow, broad smile. “I've got a lot more than that on you, Kaye, and don't you forget it.”


The satellite Keystone slid into its orbit. It rotated gently, and its solar panels angled themselves to catch the sunlight.

Lynn watched the completion of the satellite network from the wall screen in her new office. The t'Theria had given Bioverse a set of abandoned buildings. The architects had promptly fed them to the construction jobbers so the raw materials could be reworked into a place Humans would be comfortable with. One of the room's walls was video-capable. The two adjoining walls were actually windows. One looked out over the gleaming new coordinators complex. The other looked across the cliffs and out into Ipetia harbor. Lynn made sure the sound filters were set so she could hear the surf crash against the rocks.