Scale, p.25
Scale, page 25
Loretta’s phone rang, and she excused herself.
Jake said, “Congratulations. On the win, and on your new appointment.” He sounded sincere, but oddly tense.
“Thank you.”
“I need your help,” he said.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Loretta had a vision of him standing in the police station, caught up somehow in the raids on Spotlight.
“There are still twenty people being held in the river base.”
“Okay.” Loretta recalled the boy at the debate saying something like that, but she’d given up trying to decide how much of what he’d claimed was true. “Can’t the police sort that out? You’d think the people they’ve arrested would be trying to talk the others into freeing all the hostages, to lighten everyone’s sentences.”
“I’m sure some of them want that,” Jake replied, “but it’s complicated. There’s no direct communication with the base; the navy cut the phone lines a while ago.”
“They couldn’t just tap the lines, like proper spies?”
“Apparently not. So the only way to get these people released is if the impetus to do it comes via the submarine, and it really has to be the genuine crew delivering it. After what happened last time, anyone else is just going to inflame the situation.”
Loretta decided against grilling him on the details of last time. “What is it you think I can do about any of this?”
Jake said, “The submarine is at a dock right now, and Beech and some of her people are on board. I gather she wants to go down to the base and start planning her comeback. I don’t really know what that means, but we’ve heard indirectly from people who split from her that she’s talked about making more weapons, and trying to turn a few generators into actual bombs.”
He paused, as if expecting a response, but Loretta could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t be redundant.
“The navy have blocked their way for now,” Jake continued, “but I don’t know how long that’s going to last. What we really need is for someone to talk sense into the crew; get them to eject Beech and go down and retrieve the hostages.”
Loretta said, “Can’t the police put some repentant Spotlight executive in touch with the crew, to break the news to them that the game’s over?”
“They’ve tried. It isn’t working.” Jake hesitated. “You have a direct line to Wendale, but you’re not taking orders from them; you’re acting in our interests, not theirs. You’ve already made progress on the blockade. Whatever promises you make, the crew are more likely to believe them, coming from you, than from anyone else.”
Loretta was skeptical. “If the police think this is such a good idea, why aren’t they the ones calling me?”
Jake said, “Because I’m standing here with some of the hostages’ relatives, and it was my idea to drag you into this.”
“Are they hostages, or hijackers?”
“Both,” Jake admitted. “They weren’t kidnapped at random; they hijacked the submarine. Spurred on by the navy. But if Beech goes down there and rallies her diehard supporters, they could keep making trouble for months. How can any talks on the peaceful use of this technology go ahead, when there’s a weapons factory no one can control whirring away at the bottom of the river? For the vote to count for anything, this all needs to end right now.”
Chapter 40
“Well, this is different,” the taxi driver marveled, as they took a corner and headed south along a pristine black ribbon that ran straight toward the river.
“It certainly is.” Loretta had never experienced such a smooth ride. Jake had warned her that the access road would not be marked at all on the current street directory; she just hoped that the tires of an ordinary car would be able to maintain their grip on it.
“I guess the Council managed to complete some of those roadworks they were talking about, before they self-destructed,” the driver suggested.
Loretta asked to be dropped off well before they reached the dock that no one was meant to know about, then she walked the rest of the way, gingerly at first as her joints and muscles accommodated to the unyielding surface. As she came over a rise, she saw a dozen or so ships clustered together in a semicircle near the shore, their hulls presumably reaching close enough to the riverbed that they blocked the path of the submarine out into deeper water. “Blocked” might be too strong a word for any contest between timber boats and a Scale Seven submarine driven by a fusion-powered turbine, but maybe the sub was too hemmed in to build up much speed. Or maybe the crew remained undecided as to whether they wished to sink a naval vessel, and escalate the current standoff all the way to a full-on act of war.
There were two police cars and three other vehicles parked on the road; beyond them, Jake was standing among a small group of people. Loretta had almost reached him before she noticed the submarine itself, or at least a small part of it, protruding from the water.
Jake saw her and approached. “Anything new?” she asked him.
“No.” He introduced her to Sergeant Voss, the police negotiator.
“We’ve been talking to someone who calls himself ‘Poseidon,’” Voss told her. “He claims he speaks for the crew, and he was able to move the sub when we asked him to prove it.” He handed her an ordinary phone. “Just hit redial whenever you want to call him.”
Loretta was surprised. “They can talk to us with this?”
“So long as they don’t submerge,” Jake said. “If they do, it gets more complicated.”
“Have they made any specific demands?” she asked.
“Only to get the ships out of their way,” Voss replied.
“In exchange for what?”
“For not forcing their way through.”
“Okay.”
Loretta took out her own phone, and called Lisa Braun again. “Any luck?” she asked.
“Not yet. I think Wendale’s still trying to choose the right person to speak to you about this.”
Loretta tried her best to remain diplomatic; there would inevitably be other scales involved in the decision, so she couldn’t judge the process by her own parochial standards. “Can you have them call me on this number, when they’ve made up their mind?”
“Of course.”
She hung up. The people she’d seen Jake with as she approached were gathered further down the road, staring out across the water; she recognized the boy and his mother from the debate.
“Have you offered to clear the way, if they give an undertaking to return with the captives?” she asked Voss.
“No,” he said. “For a start, I don’t believe they’d honor it. Why would they? I can’t promise them they wouldn’t be imprisoned for a very long time, if they did come back.” He glanced toward Jake. “But your friend seems to think you can work some magic there.”
Loretta said, “It will be magic if I can even get Wendale to talk to me.”
But if she just stood here waiting for that, she might wait forever. She called the sub.
A man replied warily, “Hello?”
Loretta introduced herself, and explained her role in the talks with Wendale.
“I heard you on the radio,” Poseidon said. “During the campaign.” His tone was neutral, not contemptuous; if he was fanatical about the separatist cause he was managing to conceal it well, but she was hoping he was just a pragmatist who’d stuck with the belief that he’d picked the winning side a little longer than he should have.
“We need to get the people who are imprisoned in the base back to the surface,” she said. “Can you help with that?”
“Do you know what they did to us?” Poseidon asked angrily.
“I do,” Loretta replied, glad that Jake had finally come clean with her. “And I believe they ought to stand trial for that. But they need to be in police custody, not Spotlight’s. Restraining them immediately after the attack can probably be justified, but holding them any longer than necessary would still be a crime. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine that the complexities of the situation could be treated as extenuating circumstances, up to a point. I wouldn’t count on that stretching out much longer, though.”
Loretta heard some muffled voices in the background, then Poseidon said, “I wouldn’t count on anyone executing an arrest warrant, where we’re headed.”
“Do you have a family?” Loretta asked.
“I’m single,” he said. “And I can live without seeing my parents for a while.”
“Just ‘a while’? What do you think is going to happen to change things in your favor?”
Poseidon didn’t reply. Had he really fallen for Beech’s fantasy of building some kind of super-weapon that would reverse their fortunes? Anything might have been possible if they’d still had unfettered access to supplies, and half a dozen facilities on the surface, but even if the submarine was capable of reaching the base and departing at will, what could it actually bring from the outside world if it was under constant scrutiny?
“What is this about?” Loretta asked him. “Avoiding prison, or kidding yourself that you can conquer the planet from the bottom of the Mauburg River?”
“I’ve seen what this technology can do,” he said. “Don’t underestimate it.”
“I won’t,” Loretta promised, “but don’t underestimate what else is needed. I’m pretty sure that an entire country – with mines and farms and, you know, the ability to step outside without being crushed by water pressure – can make some marvelous things with lepton engineering. Do you really think nothing worthwhile can happen unless it’s in Beech’s hands alone?”
Loretta’s own phone started ringing; she explained the situation to Poseidon and muted the sub call before answering.
The second call was through a rescaler, from D3 in Wendale. “My name is Martin Tyne,” Loretta heard eventually. “I’ll be leading the government team in negotiations with your Council.”
“Do you know about the standoff with the submarine?” Loretta asked him.
“Yes, I’ve been fully briefed on that.”
“And what are you willing to offer, to help resolve it?”
Tyne said, “I don’t think it will be necessary to offer anything. Action is already underway to deal with the sub.”
“What do you mean, deal with it?” Loretta looked out across the water. Some kind of machine with a platform on top was being lowered over the far side of one of the boats; it looked a bit like a hydraulic lift. The navy vessels were a mixture of scales, and it was hard to judge the size of things from the jumble of cues, but the platform might well have been as big as the submarine.
“It will either stay contained where it is,” Tyne replied, “or it will be encouraged to take a route where we can intervene and raise it out of the water.”
Was he bluffing? Since when did the navy have anything that could lift a submarine made of Scale Seven metal? But if G8’s surface facilities had been captured, the navy could be in possession of machines that had been used for the sub’s manufacture and maintenance.
“Can’t they see what you’re doing with their sonar?”
“There are curtains blocking the view.”
Loretta wasn’t sure what that meant, but she supposed the ships could be dangling something from their hulls that obscured sonar echos, and reached all the way to the riverbed. She said, “Containment won’t solve anything. They need to go down to the base one more time, at least, to get the captives released.”
“Once they’ve surrendered the sub, we’ll retrieve the captives ourselves,” Tyne replied.
“That’s not a solution,” Loretta insisted. “If the navy try to enter the base, they’ll just risk everyone’s safety.”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t allow the base to retain a capacity for force projection. We need to get control of the sub.”
Loretta said, “What if we can get the crew onside, and resolve this all peacefully?”
“How?”
“The only reason they’re clinging to Beech’s nonsense about prolonging the fight is because they’re afraid they’ll spend the rest of their lives in prison. If you can guarantee that there’ll be no charges of insurrection, I think they’ll come around.”
“I can’t do that,” Tyne replied.
“You’re not willing to, or you’re not authorized?”
“Both.”
Loretta said, “What if it’s conditional on everyone but the crew leaving the sub immediately, and the crew returning with the captives in a reasonable time?”
Tyne said, “I can’t agree to that. And there’s no need. The lift is almost in place.”
Loretta was skeptical that the sub could be tricked into breaking the cordon in just the right location to fall into this trap, but she wasn’t going to waste her time debating naval tactics.
She said, “These are my terms: we make the offer, and if they hand over Beech and her gang, we trust them to go down and get the captives.”
“You’re setting terms now?” Tyne managed to sound condescendingly amused, even through the rescaler.
“I’m serious,” Loretta replied. “Or do you want me to tell the whole of D7 that Wendale sabotaged these negotiations, because they don’t care about the lives of the citizens the navy conned into an illegal paramilitary action? Talk to your superiors and get back to me when you can offer the amnesty.”
She hung up the call.
Jake was smiling, but Voss looked a little stunned. Loretta unmuted the call to Poseidon.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m working on something,” she said. She described the proposal she’d put to Tyne.
Poseidon was not impressed. “But they haven’t agreed to anything, have they?”
“Give them a minute,” Loretta implored him. “I was talking to a negotiator, not the President. Can you at least tell your crewmates what I’ve asked for, so they can start thinking about their own response?”
“You’re on speaker. We can all hear you.”
“All right.”
Poseidon said, “What’s going on behind the sonar curtain?”
“I don’t know the details,” Loretta replied, treading a delicate line; she didn’t want to lie to anyone, but she wasn’t going to sabotage the navy’s efforts – least of all when they were probably listening in to her calls. “And you must be more familiar with the possibilities than I am. But whatever they’re doing, it started before my discussions with you began. Please, just think about the simplest way out of this, where you bring the captives home, and you have a chance to get on with your own lives.”
“Call us back when you have an actual deal to offer.” Poseidon hung up.
Loretta lowered the phone and looked around. The ships were moving, reconfiguring the cordon – maybe offering what looked like a temporary weak spot that would prove irresistible. Did anything she was doing have the slightest chance of affecting the outcome here? The Option Three team had persuaded more than four tenths of D7’s voters to support negotiations, but swaying a small number of obstinate people who actually had their hands on the levers could still prove to be impossible.
Jake offered her a flask of water, and she accepted it gratefully. “So are all of these people your clients now?” she asked, nodding toward the anxious relatives.
“No. I’m just trying to help them.”
“You’ve been inside the base,” she said. “Do you think Beech can really make a bomb there?”
Jake said, “Maybe. Not her personally, of course. And she might have trouble delivering it. As far as I know, they can’t launch rockets from down there.”
“As far as you know?” Loretta hadn’t even thought of that. “But there must be a lot of things that could be done in principle that they aren’t actually equipped to make happen.”
“Yeah.”
Loretta’s phone rang. Tyne said, “That’s a no on the amnesty.”
“Why?” she demanded. “What does Wendale have to lose, by showing some restraint? The separatists have no political traction now.”
“It’s not so much about the charges,” Tyne replied, “as giving up control of the sub. Even if we offer pardons to everyone, that’s no guarantee that they won’t stay down there and help mount an insurgency.”
“To what end?” Loretta countered. “If they’re not facing prison, what would they be fighting for?”
“Power,” Tyne suggested bluntly.
“A few of them,” she conceded. “Beech, for sure. But how much power was anyone else going to end up with, under the great new Scale Seven regime?”
Tyne said, “There are scientists down there who’ve worked hard to develop this technology, and expected to gain a lot of money and prestige.”
Loretta pondered that. “Then offer them money and prestige. We’ll still need them, to make any of this work. The more serious we are about spreading the benefits of lepton engineering across the scales, the more we’ll need the original inventors onside. And you can tip the scales further if all the benefits are contingent on people surrendering voluntarily. That should go for the crew as well: if they cooperate in ending this peacefully, they can be offered jobs as consultants helping the navy run their own fleet of Scale Seven subs.”
“I did my best to sell your plan,” Tyne said. He was sounding defensive and harried now. “But it’s not going to happen.”
Loretta paused, trying to summon up her courage, hoping the speed difference would mask any sense that she was floundering.
“If you pressure these people, they’ll just smash their way through every ship around them,” she said. “Do you really think they’re going to let you lift them right out of the water? If they have to drown your sailors to get away, they’ll do it. The fact that they haven’t is the clue you should have picked up on, a long time ago. They don’t want to fight. Make it easy for them to surrender, and you’ll have an experienced submarine crew, and all the lepton engineers you could ask for. Take the sub and the base by force, and they’ll destroy everything they can, and tell you nothing about the pieces you can salvage. The last time people tried smashing their way into the base, a whole module got flooded and it was a miracle no one died. If you do it again and the captives drown, that will be entirely on Wendale – and even if I’m willing to keep talking to you, my prospects of retaining any popular support for these negotiations will be zero. Talk to your superiors again and get back to me.”
