“I’ve been doing some surveillance on Witcher,” Stoner said. Adding: “With Steinfeld’s permission.”
“Steinfeld’s permission?” She looked at him in a way that made him shrink back in his seat a little. “Witcher is registered personnel on the Colony. How about my permission? How about Russ’s?”
Russ cleared his throat apologetically. “I’ve been working with him on this.”
She removed her hand from his. “Who the hell do you people think you are?”
Russ winced. “I’m still head of Security, Claire. I never had to approve every move I made with Admin before.”
“But this is bugging someone’s quarters.”
“Not exactly,” Stoner broke in. “We’re listening in on his unauthorized communications with Earth.”
“Still…” She sighed. “You had a good reason?”
Both men nodded hastily. Like naughty boys.
“And what did you find out?”
“Witcher made some contacts with certain people in the SA, through intermediaries,” Stoner said. “Making purchases from them. I don’t think they know who the buyer really is. The Second Alliance has some kind of viral genetic-engineering program going on in secret. A secret most of the officials in SPOES and the Unity Party and the rest don’t know about. Apparently they’re trying to develop a racially selective virus. I don’t know how successful they’ve been. They developed one that’s not racially selective—but does have one quality they were after. It dies out after it spreads in a roughly predictable epidemiological pattern. It’s called S1-L. Apparently, Witcher has purchased samples of S1-L. Seems he’s planning to use it some way.”
She blinked. “On the Colony?”
“I don’t think so. He seems to be deploying it for specific areas of Earth… We think he’s planning to use it on Earth while he’s on the Colony. While he’s safe here, you see.”
She shook her head in amazement. “I don’t believe it. That’s—beyond megalomaniacal. It’s crazy. He seems perfectly sane. A little neurotic maybe, but—Well, what the hell is he doing it for? Who exactly does he want to kill? The SA?”
“No, uh-uh,” said Russ. “Not specifically. The instructions he gave for distributing the things… I’d say he wants to kill a large part of the world. In general.”
“What do you mean, ‘a large part’?” Russ asked. “What exactly does that mean?”
“What it says. A majority.”
Russ said, “Holy shit.”
Claire stammered for a moment and then managed: “Well—alert people on Earth. Arrest him!”
“We need you to sign a warrant,” Russ said, taking a printout and a pen from his pocket.
She looked it over. And signed.
Stoner chewed a thumbnail. “But as for alerting people—our information is too nonspecific. It’s more or less hearsay. We’re going to inform people, but… how seriously they’ll take us”—he shrugged gloomily—“I just don’t know.”
“I was shot in the leg?” Torrence said sleepily. “I thought I was just shot in the head.”
“No. Leg, too. Zuh head wound,” Levassier said, “zis is superficial.”
“I don’t remember that. Being shot in the leg. I didn’t feel it.”
“Zuh back of zuh left leg,” Levassier said. “Thigh.”
“Move the leg, Torrence,” Steinfeld said a trace mischievously.
Torrence tried. The pain expanded from the wound like a hot ripple in cold water, spreading through his body. “Ouch! Shit! Now I feel it. But at the time… nothing. ”
“It happens zat way sometimes,” Levassier said. “You still have head pain?”
“No. Long as I don’t move, I’m almost too comfortable.” The bed in the private clinic room was small but soft, tilted up a little. There was a TV, and a bathroom within hobbling distance. The room was the perfect temperature. His Arab nurse, he saw now, as she took his blood pressure, wore a veil and a long black gown, so he didn’t know if she was pretty, but otherwise it was ideal.
He didn’t like it that way. He understood Roseland a little better now. The shame of survival.
“Hand got through all right?” he asked.
“Yes. His assistant was killed. The technicki. A stray round. But Hand got through. With all the digi-vid, everything.”
“That’s something any—shit!” A white bolt of pain sizzled through Torrence’s head—and then vanished. He felt a little strange. Unreal. “I didn’t get any brain damage?”
“I do not sink so,” Levassier said, looking into Torrence’s eyes with a small, cylindrical optical instrument. “There was some danger of it, some concussion, but head wound, c’est seulement un—what word. A graze. A little trauma—we control it with some nimodipine. You feel… normal?”
“Mostly. A little out of it, maybe.” He’d only just woken, was still a little fuzzy—the trip to Malta and then to Egypt was all a fog. He was forgetting something. Someone. A sense of someone important, crying near him, whimpering with pain…
Bibisch.
He grabbed Steinfeld’s wrist. Tightly. “Where is she?”
The weariness in Steinfeld’s eyes spoke before he did. “She’s gone, Danny. Died this morning in surgery. They tried everything. Badoit had the best people flown in, waiting for her. But she had six wounds…”
Torrence’s eyes burned, but the tears didn’t come. Choking on the words, he said, “I don’t fucking think it’s worth it, Steinfeld. Chances are, we’re going to lose. We’re outnumbered. And a virus—what the hell do we do about that? It was all wasted. She’s wasted.” Feeling a great relief and at the same time a growing emptiness as he said it. “She was wasted. Rickenharp, wasted. Yukio, wasted. Danco, wasted. All the others. How many on that train? Forty? Fifty? We’re fucked anyway—we should just try to find some little corner of the world and live there… Until the virus hits…”
“We do matter—we liberate concentration camps. We give people hope. It matters. And the race-selective virus—they are far from being ready to deploy it, so far as we can tell. There’s still time. I understand how you feel, Danny. We all feel that way sometimes. But we’ve saved lives. We’ve saved other lives by destroying their computer files. We’ve delayed them seriously. And Bibisch saved Hand and the other witnesses. They’re important—especially Hand. He could make the difference. We’d never have got him through if she hadn’t taken out that gunship when she did. It would have shot the transport out of the sky—the SA reinforcements would have come. We’d all be dead and all Hand’s witnessing would be lost, if not for her. She was the only one who reacted fast enough. She wasn’t wasted, Dan. Her sacrifice mattered.”
Torrence leaned back and closed his eyes. And tried to believe it.
Steinfeld went on. “Listen—she asked for something just before she went into surgery. It’s kind of… perhaps a little grotesque. But it seemed important to her. She said if she didn’t make it…”
Torrence opened his eyes, saw Steinfeld looking confused and embarrassed. “Well?”
“She wants you to have one of her ears.”
“What?”
“With her love.”
“Her ear?”
“Something about Van Gogh. And you missing an ear. She said you looked like an alley cat after a bad fight all the time, with that ear shot off. What I mean is—she wanted to have one of her ears transplanted onto you, to replace the one you lost. The visible ear. They’ll mold it with surgery to make it symmetrical with your other one, use grafting and tissue-bonding agents to get it to, ah, take once it’s implanted and… You see, it would actually be quite helpful. We’re tired of looking at you. Frankly”—he smiled grimly—“we’re sick of your face.”