Scale, p.8
Scale, page 8
“All right.” The riverbed was the riverbed; Sam couldn’t see why it shouldn’t have whatever kind of mounds it wanted.
Lea went to the wheelhouse, then returned with a chart. “It’s not in the survey,” she said, holding up the sheet of contour lines as if she expected Sam to confirm the disparity himself.
“Isn’t the water carving up the riverbed all the time?” he asked. “Changing the shape?”
“Not that rapidly,” Lea replied. “And this is something added, not removed.”
Sam was on the verge of suggesting a deposit of silt washed down from the hills, but they were in deep water with all eight layers; no natural mineral could sink to the bottom here. Either it was part of the bedrock, or it was something denser than Scale Seven water.
Lea pored over each of the screens in turn. “The echo is so damned sharp at every frequency; whatever the pulse is hitting is harder than rock.”
“How big is this thing?” Sam asked. The traces gave him no sense of scale.
“A hundred meters one way. At least fifty in the other direction, but I’m not sure of the full extent yet.”
“And how high?”
Lea frowned. “Well, it rises about three meters above the rock around it, but ... ” She pointed to the edge of the bump in one trace. “It could be partly buried, rather than just sitting on the rock.”
Sam spent a moment grappling with the notion of a vessel this large sneaking into the D4 harbor, but that was absurd. The whole of D7 was a quadrant a hundred and fifty meters wide; to the right people, the source of these echoes would be the size of a town. He said, “It’s not a submarine. It’s a fixed structure. Some kind of base.”
Lea was incredulous. “Built out of what?”
“I don’t know,” Sam replied, not entirely dishonestly. He had no reason to believe that the material in use here was the same as Loretta’s sample; it might be some other Scale Seven substance. “Can you record this, in a way that other people will find authoritative?” He’d already taken out his camera, but he wasn’t sure that the sonar traces would register clearly.
“We have a chart printer,” Lea said. “I’ll make a plot.”
Sam took a few photos anyway, while she was fetching the machine from the wheelhouse. The traces still didn’t mean much to him, but this wasn’t a fantasy Loretta had talked him into believing. An entirely disinterested third party had just concluded that something large, heavy, and impossibly durable was sitting on the riverbed. Perhaps with people inside. Perhaps with Cara inside.
Sam rose to his feet and looked down into the water, as if some visible evidence of the structure might reach all the way to the surface, but all he could see was a reflection of the sky.
Lea plugged the chart printer into one of the boxes of electronics, and after she’d hit a few buttons, a swathe of strange smelling paper began emerging from a slot. She was smiling now, but she also seemed shaken by the discovery, unsure if she should find the utter strangeness of it delightful or unnerving. “So you’re looking for someone inside this ... base?” she asked Sam.
“Yes. Though they might have moved her by now. I don’t know how I’ll find out, but this is a start.”
“She could be down there against her will?” Lea was horrified. “If I can do anything more ... ”
“Can you dive?” Sam asked.
“Not that deep!” she replied. “No one can.”
“And yet someone built this.”
Lea checked the chart, then moved on to the second box to record the signals at another frequency. “If there are people down there,” she asked, “how are they getting their air? What’s running the machinery? What’s lighting it all up?”
“Electricity?”
“From batteries? From generators? Either way, how do they keep it supplied?”
Sam had never had reason to ponder the logistics of aquatic habitats before. “I suppose the submarine makes a lot of trips.”
Eugene came out from the wheelhouse and joined them; he had to see the sonar traces with his own eyes.
“Who are the charts meant to convince?” he asked Sam.
“I’ll try the navy,” Sam replied. “They didn’t listen to me before, but I don’t see how they can ignore this.”
“And what do you think they’ll do about it?”
“I don’t know. They must have some way to investigate.”
Eugene said, “Their own submarines can’t operate down there. They can take their own sonar traces, to confirm that yours are genuine, but they won’t be knocking on any doors.”
“Maybe they can sit here and wait for the resupply submarine to arrive, then follow it back to its port,” Sam suggested. “I mean ... all alleged kidnapping aside, even a surface vessel needs to be certified and licensed, so it must be a crime to build a submarine and operate it without a permit.”
Eugene took no issue with this last point, but he said, “Do you really trust the navy to hang around for days, just observing, if they think there’s an enemy base in the middle of the Mauburg River?”
Sam was bemused. “What else are they going to do? Like you said, they can’t reach it.”
“They can’t knock on the door,” Eugene corrected him. “That doesn’t mean they won’t try to blow it open.”
Chapter 15
Sam had told Noor to expect he’d be home late, so after the Cyclops returned him to the docks sooner than he’d allowed for, he sat in his office staring at the sonar traces.
A few lines on some sheets of paper would not have impressed him if he hadn’t witnessed their origin firsthand, but Lea had signed the documents and stamped them with her license number, so he supposed they would have some evidentiary value to any competent naval officer. If he handed them over, something would happen. But he’d have no say in what it was.
Did the navy have explosives that could tear open an underwater building made of Scale Seven steel? Sam had no idea, and quite possibly the navy would have no idea either; it wasn’t as if they’d ever had a chance to run tests. But what mattered was whether he could trust them to put Cara’s safety above whatever urge they felt to rid Mauburg of a perceived threat.
He’d left the cipher machine switched on, ready to pick up any transmissions from Loretta, but she was the one waiting for his report. He drafted it carefully, trying to keep it brief without risking ambiguity.
Artificial structure as big as D7 found on riverbed. Could tell navy but afraid for Cara if they act rashly. What do you think about negotiating with G8 for her release? We hold off disclosure and they return her safely?
When he arrived home, Idris was asleep and Noor was working in the front room. Sam prepared some food and sat opposite her.
“Something’s bothering you,” Noor said eventually.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.” He never sat and ate alone, though, so that would probably have unsettled her even more.
“So it’s something confidential?” Noor put down her papers and regarded him with good humored exasperation.
“Yeah. I think I made the right choice, but I don’t know. All I can do is wait and see how it turns out.”
Noor grimaced.
Sam laughed. “I know: I would think that, wouldn’t I? How else could it be?”
“You could be certain you’d made the wrong choice,” Noor suggested. “And desperately trying to reverse it.”
“That’s true.”
“So when will you know?” she asked.
“Eight times sooner than if it was in my hands alone,” Sam replied.
“Well, that’s something,” Noor replied. “At least it’s not eight times longer.”
Chapter 16
“You’ll give the signal if you think there’s any danger?” Jake fretted, as they entered the park.
“Sure. But I’m counting on you to notice the threat before I do.” Loretta remained deadpan for a moment, then laughed. “Nothing’s going to happen!”
“You’re the one who asked me to come,” Jake protested, anxiously scanning the pedestrians ahead of them.
“Dahlia made me promise I wouldn’t do this alone,” Loretta replied. “But seriously, the fact that they know you is probably more of a deterrent than having some stranger looking on. They know you’ll make trouble if they try anything.”
“If I see it in time.”
Loretta said, “Sneaking up on a woman from D1 when you’re smaller and faster might be child’s play, but whatever new technology they’ve brewed so far, I don’t think it stretches to shrinking actual people any further.”
Jake could think of plenty of ways to kill someone rapidly in public that required no new technology at all, but there was no point listing them; for all her breeziness, he knew Loretta would be scrupulously careful throughout the encounter. And on the bright side, if G8 had wanted them dead, it didn’t need to set up a meeting to make that happen.
“That’s Patrick Kozul,” Loretta said, pointing to a man in the distance, coming down the path toward the meeting place. “And I think that’s Marie Finch with him.”
“You didn’t get the Director, but Finch is pretty high up,” Jake noted. “If I photographed you with her, that would be proof that there were discussions between us. No one could pretend that it had never happened.”
“No pictures,” Loretta replied. “Let’s not inflame things when there’s no need for it.”
“All right. It’s your call.” Jake didn’t want G8 to believe that if the meeting failed to go their way they could lash out with impunity and then deny any connection with their victims. But he could see why Loretta was still focused on ensuring that they didn’t feel as if they were backed into a corner.
Loretta said, “Don’t get alarmed if they want me to walk around a bit. If I was Kozul, it’s probably what I’d ask for, just to minimize exposure to external listening devices, or bystanders overhearing too much.”
“You won’t leave the park, though?”
“No.”
“So if I see you walking out, that’s involuntary?”
“Yes. But they’re not going to kidnap me; we’re too far from the river.” Loretta squared her shoulders. “Okay. Who knows how long this will take. But if we lose sight of each other for some reason, I’ll meet up with you at the south entrance.”
“Sure.” Jake had no intention of letting that happen.
He watched Loretta walk toward the bench beside the fountain, reaching it just before Kozul and Finch did. Kozul managed to sweep her body for electronics without making a spectacle of it, pretending to kneel down and retie his shoelace beside her. Then the three of them set off together, like friends going for a pleasant stroll in the morning sunshine.
Chapter 17
“The bottom line,” Loretta said, “is that you need to release Cara Leon immediately. Nothing can indemnify you against the consequences of having taken her in the first place, but if you turn her over voluntarily before the authorities get involved, I believe that would serve everyone’s interests.”
Apparently Finch was satisfied that Loretta was her only audience, because she made no attempt to deny anything. “Cara is perfectly safe. Give us ten more days, and she can go home.”
Loretta was astonished, but there was nothing to be gained by spluttering with outrage at the brazenness of the proposal. “That’s not acceptable,” she said calmly.
“To whom?” Finch retorted. “Why don’t you put that offer to her sister? Ten days is nothing to Scale One.”
“Why don’t you put it to Cara? Or are you claiming that she’s with you by choice, and she’d be delighted to extend her stay?”
Finch said, “Cara tried to blackmail us.”
“If that’s true, you should have filed a complaint with the police.”
“And yet we didn’t,” Finch replied dryly. “We had good reasons not to want our research to become public knowledge prematurely.”
“Why would it become public knowledge? The police are perfectly capable of respecting trade secrets.”
Finch said, “Don’t be disingenuous. The only way to keep these results quiet was to get Cara out of circulation for a while.”
“Maybe. But now you’ve ended up drawing attention to yourself anyway, and the only hope you have of keeping the results quiet for even one more day is to release her.”
For a moment Loretta wondered if she’d been too blunt, but then she realized that Finch had stopped because she was waiting for a dawdling pedestrian to go past them. Though Kozul was acting as a buffer to their left, and they were sticking to the right edge of the path, this man had fallen in behind them.
“We need ten days,” Finch insisted, once the man had moved on. “When the news gets out, there’ll be a backlash. That can’t be avoided. But it can be delayed, and we need to be in the strongest position possible to deal with it, for everyone’s sake.”
“Everyone’s sake? Really?”
“All of District Seven will be affected. Maybe all of Scale Seven, worldwide.” Finch turned to her imploringly. “Nothing we’re building is for hostile purposes, but the other scales have always been afraid of us becoming ... unmanageable. We don’t grow up with the same fears as they do; we don’t have any neighbors smaller, faster and stronger than us to haunt our nightmares. But this is like their darkest fable come true: the people they’ve tolerated living beside them – because they thought we were useful, and they thought they understood our disadvantages and weaknesses – turn out to be impossible to control.”
Loretta had no patience for these vague rhetorical flourishes. “Are you talking about land allocation?”
Finch said, “That’s one of the things they might fear we’ll want to renegotiate from a position of strength. The company has no such agenda, but we can’t speak for everyone.”
“You should have been more open from the start,” Loretta replied. “If you’d published all your work, people would be much more likely to accept that there was nothing to worry about.”
Finch snorted. “So, we should have taught people in D1 the kind of methods that would let them make weapons against us, before we had a chance to find ways to defend ourselves?”
Loretta was unswayed. “Anyone who really wants to harm us can do it right now with an arrow made of Scale Seven bone. Sure, the supply is limited, but how quickly do you think people in D1 could build a factory making knives or bullets out of Scale Seven steel?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Finch said darkly. “The fact is, Cara forced our hand. But we haven’t harmed her, and a few more days won’t make much difference after everything she’s been through already.”
“What do you think would actually happen, if we gave you ten more days?” Loretta pressed her. “When you finally let Cara free, do you think the police will just stand by and applaud you for bravely defending District Seven from a misguided woman who hoped you could cure her friend’s cancer?”
“We’re prepared to live with the consequences,” Finch replied.
Loretta didn’t believe that for a moment. Even if they had one or two people willing to take the fall and go to prison, the entire submarine crew and everyone working in the riverbed base would also be implicated. And that was just the bare minimum; it would stretch credulity to claim that the decision to kidnap their blackmailer had not been approved at the very highest level.
The only way this didn’t end with Generation Eight eviscerated and every executive on trial was if the law could no longer be enforced against them. And the only way Loretta could imagine that happening would be if District Seven seceded, declaring itself an enclave independent of the nation. If that was the plan, it could hardly have been something that they dreamed up in the wake of what they’d done to Cara. It must have been their intention all along.
Loretta glanced back and caught sight of Jake, who was following inconspicuously a meter or so behind them. If she was right, she had to make G8 believe that all their wild fantasies for creating a Republic of Scale Seven could proceed unhindered, whether or not they surrendered Cara a few days before the revolution.
She said, “Surely Cara’s come to terms with the fact that you can’t help her with any Scale One cancer research. Can’t or won’t, but either way she has nothing to gain by talking about your other technology. She’d risk being prosecuted herself, and for what? I’m sure she’s mightily pissed off with you for grabbing her off her boat, but I expect she has no actual proof of that. Nor do I, or this would all be in the hands of the police. The only thing I have to hold over you is whatever you’ve built on the riverbed, and if you let Cara go, my job’s done. The same goes for Sam Mujrif. We have no interest in any of this other nonsense for its own sake.”
Finch said, “It’s not that simple. Cara has copies of documents of ours, and she’s still not willing to tell us where they are. Does that sound like someone we can trust to keep quiet?”
“Okay. That’s news to me.” Spotlight must have stolen the documents, then passed the copies on to Cara before G8 persuaded them to turn against her. But why was Cara holding out, when it was clear that her original plan had imploded completely? “Maybe she sees this as a kind of insurance, and if she tells you where they are she’ll be in even more danger.”
“She’s not in any danger,” Finch insisted.
“She’s imprisoned at the bottom of the river, with enough water pressing down on the roof of her jail to crush every structure ever built until now. I’m sure she’s completely relaxed about her prospects.”
Finch said, “If you want her released early, we need to know where the documents are.”
Loretta was suspicious. “Is this a serious counter-offer, or are you just trying to buy time? If we return the documents to you, what’s to stop you claiming that we’ve made copies? Or that Cara made copies, and we haven’t returned them all?”
“We don’t believe Cara got around to making copies,” Finch replied, “or she would have tried to fob us off with them by now. And there’s no need for you or your colleagues to handle anything in person; if you can tell us where the documents are, we’ll send someone we trust to retrieve them.”
