Buried Deep Part 22

"A hatchling?" Bowles asked. She didn't know a lot about alien cultures, preferring to focus on human frailties. She only learned what she needed to understand her news stories.

Levenbrook nodded. "We didn't know about them either. Or maybe I didn't. Noelle, she knows a lot, but she doesn't always understand. Hatchlings are Disty offspring. They are the great secret of the Disty, and their great shame."

That seemed dramatic to Bowles, but she said nothing, preferring to hear his version of this. "The Disty have three kinds of children-male, female, and hatchling. They're like gender-neutral, only how can you tell with the Disty? But the Disty can tell, and I guess it's a shameful thing to birth one. The hatchlings are kept inside the family home. They grow up to be glorified servants, never interacting outside the family, especially not with aliens."

Interesting that he chose the word alien alien to describe humans in this context. That showed a bias of his to describe humans in this context. That showed a bias of his as well.

"So they never learned English?" Bowles asked.

"I got the sense they barely knew Disty. But I learned all of this at the same time as the case. Never could tell about Noelle. She might've known before."

"If the hatchlings aren't supposed to interact outside the family, how did this Malone teach one English?"

Levenbrook smiled. "Now you're getting it. Apparently, the kid grew up next to this family of Disty, and got to know the Disty children his age. He befriended the hatchling and taught the creature English, but n.o.body found out until years later, after the kid and his family had moved to Armstrong. The hatchling thing screwed up somehow and talked to somebody in English, understood some English program, read some English text. I can't remember the details. The important thing was that the hatchling, before it died-" "Died?" Bowles asked.

"The Disty don't take kindly on anything that breaks their laws. I saw pictures of the thing. It was a vengeance killing at some gathering place. The parents got to see it, then take the image home to those trapped hatchlings, supposedly as a deterrent. It'd deter me, I tell you."

Levenbrook shuddered. Then he looked at her. Bowles hadn't moved. She hadn't seen a vengeance killing and could only imagine one. Apparently, her imagination wasn't as powerful as the real thing. "Now, you gonna stop asking questions or am I gonna shut up?" Levenbrook asked. "I'm sorry," Bowles said, working to keep the sarcasm from her voice. "I'll be quiet." "Good," he said, and continued.

Before the thing died, it ratted out Malone, saying the kid-who wasn't even ten yet-had taught it how to speak and maybe even read the forbidden language. Levenbrook never understood the finer points of Disty law, and it wasn't his job to. He just had to execute the warrant, arrest the kid, and give him to the Disty representatives for deportation.

DeRicci didn't like any of it, and when she realized that she didn't have all the evidence in front of her, she liked it even less. First she argued that the Disty could have the wrong kid. Anyone would give up anything under torture.

Then she claimed the case was invalid, even thought it had gone through one of the Multicultural Tribunals. She liked the kid and didn't want to give him to the Disty.

Levenbrook tried to reason with her, showing her the entire warrant. The kid wasn't going to die for his crimes, just suffer exemplary justice Disty style. Since he'd committed cross-cultural contamination, a major crime in Disty-world, and had done it with his mouth, the punishment was simple: They wanted to cut out his tongue.

When DeRicci realized the deportation and mutilation was inevitable, she started talking about getting the kid an enhancement, regrowing the tongue when he got back. Levenbrook overheard that, and put a stop to it right there.

Exemplary justice, Disty style, meant that whatever happened was irreversible, even if the technology existed to reverse it. The kid had to be mute for the rest of his life.

Everything escalated to the point of screaming matches with the chief and a few lawyers. Levenbrook got the kid from DeRicci, but she managed to find him before Levenbrook could give the kid up. The Disty took the poor kid, screaming his lungs out, right from DeRicci's arms.

The Disty recommended punishment for Levenbrook and DeRicci, which the Armstrong P.D. took under advis.e.m.e.nt. Finally, they promised to reprimand Levenbrook and DeRicci in a human way, but a very public way.

Both got demoted. They got separated as partners, and Levenbrook, for protesting his sentence, was nearly fired.

DeRicci continued to fight for the kid. She said some horrible things about the Disty, some even worse things about upholding unjust laws, and got a suspension. She felt that alien laws had no place in human society, and she repeated that for countless folks to hear.

Levenbrook smiled at Bowles. "There weren't pretty reporters like you then, folks with brains and looks who really wanted to take on the whole basis for Alliance law. Good thing for Noelle. She wouldn't be so d.a.m.n powerful if that scandal had become public."

Bowles waited for a moment. When it became clear that Levenbrook was finished, she asked, "I'm not sure I understand your problem with Security Chief DeRicci's new position. It sounds like she's very unsympathetic to aliens, which is, I believe, where the Moon's Governing Council believes our problems lie." Levenbrook shook his head. "The Governing Council might believe that, but the people don't. That's why Noelle's in so much hot water, why she let in that human criminal the Disty wanted. Noelle doesn't believe in Alliance Law. She'll make the Moon a refuge for all of the criminals in the solar system, especially the ones whose cases sound minor to humans but really matter to some of our alien allies." Bowles didn't believe that, but she wondered if others on the police force did. Maybe a few of DeRicci's other partners might have similar stories.

Bowles, of course, would research this whole thing and find out if it was true. If it was, she had a hook for her story on DeRicci, if she didn't find anything else.

Still, Bowles had one question to ask, one that she knew would anger her host, so she saved it until she knew the interview was done.

"Let me make sure I understand this," she said, putting on her best dumb-reporter act. "You believe it's all right to cut out a human child's tongue because he spoke English to another child from a different culture."

Levenbrook's face flushed. "What I believe don't matter. And it shouldn't've mattered to Noelle either.

As police officers, we're supposed to uphold the law-whatever the law is, whether we believe it or not.

There's reasons for those laws that other people have already thought out, and reasons we're upholding them, for a greater good than we probably know."

"But still," Bowles said. "A child. We don't usually prosecute children in our culture. Had anyone even told him that this behavior was wrong?"

Levenbrook's face grew even darker. "Does it matter? We were supposed to arrest and deport, not cause an interspecies incident. We could've ruined human-Disty relations if we hadn't upheld that law, and Noelle nearly did that single-handedly. Did I like handing that kid over? h.e.l.l, no. He was smart and sweet as h.e.l.l. But it wasn't my call. Dealing with the alien stuff is never our call. We just suffer through it." He looked away from her as he said that last. Bowles frowned. She had expected more vitriol from him.

"Is that why you retired early?" she asked gently.

"What, the kid?" He seemed confused.

Bowles shook her head. "The injustice of having to enforce laws you don't believe in." He stared at her for a long time. She stared back, unwilling to take back the question. After a few minutes, his right eyelid began to twitch. Finally, he put a finger against the corner of his eye, trying to stem the movement.

"I did my job," he said.

"I know." Bowles kept the gentle tone. "I'm just asking how it made you feel."

"Like a G.o.dd.a.m.n idiot," he said. "Just exactly what Noelle said I was. A stupid, G.o.dd.a.m.n idiot." And then he stood and walked away, leaving Ki Bowles alone in his beautiful living room, designed in the style of Old Earth, without any alien artifacts, any hint at all that he lived in a multicultural world.

34.

Bella Ogden climbed out of a very sound sleep. She blinked, feeling grit in her eyes. Two weeks of twenty-hour days made sleep an incredible luxury. She would need some enhancements to continue working this hard. She was sleeping too deeply to do her job well.

Her bed shook slightly, and a light grew brighter in the corner of the room. So something had awakened her. This gentle wakefulness came from her a.s.sistant. There was a crisis in the Alliance, one Ogden would have to deal with, but not something that required her to leap from her bed.

She at least had a few minutes to gather herself.

The light continued to grow brighter, and now a Mozart piano concerto started playing faintly on her sound system. Ogden glanced at the clock beside her bed, set to Earth time.

Only an hour after she had gone to sleep. No wonder she had so much trouble waking up.

And with the alarms going off this way, she knew she wouldn't come back to the bed any time soon.

Ogden sighed, got up, and crossed the large bedroom to the en suite bathroom. At least the facilities here in Earth Alliance North American Headquarters were luxurious. She wasn't sure she could work this hard in places as primitive as the North African Headquarters, where she had started her career. The building there had been under construction, and she had slept for two years on a cot with a paper-thin mattress.

Of course, she had been young then.

And a lot more naive. Now she knew that with a summoning like this, she would have more work than any human could possibly do. She would have to make decisions quickly, and she would have to pray they were right.

She got into the shower and set the controls on cool, to wake herself up. The cold water hit her and sent a shiver through her system. She soaped off quickly, then rinsed and got out. By the time she reached her dressing room, one of her a.s.sistants had laid out the proper clothes for her meeting.

A long robe, no sleeves, no socks and no shoes.

Ogden cursed softly. She was going to deal with the Disty.

The Disty always tested her skills as the chief protocol officer for the Earth Alliance. They didn't like her height or her round figure. They objected to her round face and her relatively small eyes. They didn't like the way she spoke their language-her words were perfect, but her accent somehow offended them, in a way that she and her coaches could never quite figure out.

Ogden sighed, dressed, and sent a message through her links to make sure she had both coffee and some kind of healthy breakfast. No sugar for the next few days, no alcohol, and certainly nothing too heavy. She was going to have to stay alert as best she could without many stimulants.

Ogden double-checked her links for any messages about the possible crisis, but she got only a series of increasingly urgent summonses to a variety of meetings. Her a.s.sistant had clearly filtered through them, because many of the messages had been flagged. Ogden didn't care about the actual content. What she had learned in her early days working protocol was that words mattered a whole lot less than tone.

And at the moment, everyone's tone held an undercurrent of panic.

She let herself out of her apartment. The corridor had floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides-something her grandmother might have called a breeze way-which was one of the dumbest constructions in the North American Headquarters.

The headquarters were located on what was still known as the U.S.-Canadian border, sitting partly in Ontario and partly in Minnesota. Ogden didn't know her history well enough to know which part-Minnesota or Ontario-belonged to which former sovereign nation, and she really didn't care. What she did know was that this was considered one of the most isolated yet accessible areas on the continent, hence its choice for a headquarters.

The compound had been designed when the Alliance hadn't protected Earth s.p.a.ce. Back then, attacks on Alliance buildings had been common. At first, the original headquarters had been placed in the Yukon, but after delegates got snowed in for one long and rather tense month, the Alliance had moved its headquarters to a less remote area.

This compound had been the Alliance's first headquarters. Now the meeting areas were spread all over Earth, with more than a dozen headquarters on each of Earth's seven continents rotating the t.i.tle of "main." Only the headquarters on islands were left out of the rotation, and only the Executive Committee knew which headquarters would get the "main" designation next.

Right now, that designation belonged here.

Unfortunately.

Ogden hurried through the chilly corridor. Snow pressed against the windows, bathing everything in clean white. Some of the permanent staff of the facility loved the deep, cold winters, but Ogden hated them, particularly at times like this when she had to go barefoot just to fulfill her duties.

The marble floor felt like it was made of ice. She had been pressing for carpeting for this area for some time now, but she doubted she would get it before she moved to some other base headquarters.

Finally, she made it out of the residential corridor and into the main part of the building. Here the floors not only had carpet, but also the carpet was heated from below, just like the chairs were.

A real fire burned in the great stone fireplace at the end of the hall. One of Ogden's a.s.sistants, Sven Sorenson, stood near it, clutching a large information screen.

"Have you linked up?" he asked without any pretense at a greeting.

"I downloaded the last hour's news," Ogden said, reaching for the information screen, "but I haven't sorted it."

"Sort Mars," he said.

She did. The Disty were having some sort of crisis, fleeing Domes in the north and heading south. Someone had ordered the bullet trains stopped and the Domes closed. Only the ports seemed to be working, and not all that well. More than a dozen s.p.a.ceship accidents had occurred, many during simultaneous liftoffs.

"What the h.e.l.l?" Ogden asked. "How come we didn't know about this sooner?"

Sorenson shrugged. "Apparently, the news thought it was a Martian problem. No one paid a lot of attention until the ships started colliding."

"Good Lord," Ogden said. "I don't have time to sort everything. Do we know what caused this?"

"We don't, at least not accurately. The Disty believe they do. Number Fifty-six is inside, along with his team. I've never seen him so angry."

Ogden clutched the screen. She needed it for protocol updates made in the past hour that she might not have gotten or that might not, for reasons of clarity, have found their way into her personal systems.

She swallowed hard and glanced at the closed metal door in front of her. Number Fifty-six, the Disty's head delegate to the Earth Alliance, always intimidated Ogden. Unlike his previous counterpart, Number Eighty-eight, Number Fifty-six hadn't even wanted to reveal his gender when he first joined the diplomatic core. When told that would cause problems for a variety of species, not just the humans, he still didn't acquiesce. Only when most of the Alliance protested his appointment did he reveal what he considered private information.

The Disty were incredibly secretive about personal matters. That was one of the things that made them so difficult to deal with. The treaty between the Earth Alliance and the Disty Universal Government even stipulated that the Disty representatives not be required to reveal their names. Names were a form of currency on Amoma, the Disty home world, and to bandy them about casually, the way that so many other species did, offended the Disty so deeply that they felt they couldn't partic.i.p.ate in most interstellar events.

Finally, an earlier chief protocol office had come up with the solution. On an interstellar scale, the Disty had to refer to themselves by number. They chose the number, and the number could not be repeated, for clarity's sake.

What concerned some members of the Alliance was that the Disty had started with high numbers-the first delegate to the Alliance was called Number Three Hundred, and gradually had worked their way down to Number Fifty-six. Some believed that the Disty would pull out of the Alliance once they hit zero.

"Anything else I should know?" Ogden asked.

"No one's talking around me," Sorensen said. "I just heard the shouts coming through the door, and I saw Number Fifty-six when he entered. The lines along his back had turned gray."

Ogden tensed. Disty showed emotion in a variety of ways, most of them hidden to the average human. When the emotion became visible, it was considered out of control. The lines in the back functioned like a human's face-the lines turned white, pale, or gray depending on the subspecies of Disty.

That Number Fifty-six was this out of control, especially when he had been trained to remain in control among alien races, was a very bad sign.

"I'm going to need the team," Ogden said. "I also want you to contact Disty experts and have them tell me their interpretation of the crisis. Feed me the information on my sub-vocal private link. I'm not going to be able to read anything or view vids. I'm going to have to observe every movement."

Sorenson nodded. "You want the other a.s.sistants on this?"

"I want everyone, down to the most junior intern," Ogden said. "If this has Number Fifty-six upset, then we are facing a major crisis. I want every tool available before I get in too deep."

"Done." Sorenson went to the door and grabbed the long metal handle. "Ready?"

"No," Ogden said, "but when has that stopped me?"

She nodded. He pulled open the door, and she stepped into the overheated conference room. This conference room was the smallest in the compound, with the lowest ceiling, designed with the Disty in mind.

Number Fifty-six sat on the blond wood table in the center of the room, his long feet pressed together. His team stood behind him, a breach of normal protocol.

Ogden had never seen anything like it.

Carly Ammer, the human delegate from Mars, sat opposite Number Fifty-six. She'd been genetically altered to look as Disty as a human could. Her legs and feet were proportionally too long, and her trunk too short. Her face was too narrow, and her eyes too large.

She had her feet pressed together as well, and her hands folded in her lap.

Three other humans hovered behind her. They all had higher rank than she did, but none of them were at Number Fifty-six's level. For that, the head human representative for all the Allied Human Worlds should have been in the room.

"Where's Roderick Jefferson?" Ogden sent along her link to Sorenson.

"His a.s.sistant claims that he can't be located."

"Well, go around the a.s.sistant," Ogden sent. "This is an emergency."

She walked deeper into the room, and bowed from the upright position. It wasn't the most polite move she could make-the most polite would have been to place her forehead against the tabletop-but she had learned long ago that she had to be invited to the table first.

"Rise," Number Fifty-six said. He was speaking Spanish, which meant that he was being extremely formal-using the dominant language of Earth rather than English, the required diplomatic language of humans.

Ogden stood up.