The tunnel did turn. She headed up a climb and down again onto concrete, and it was still dark.
Something—!she thought, just before she got to it and the Ambush grabbed her.
She elbowed it and twisted and knew it was an Enemy when she felt it grab her, but it only got cloth and twisting got her away, fast, fast, hard as she could run, heart hammering.
She hit the wall where it turned, bang! and nearly knocked herself cold, but she scrambled up and kept going, kept going—
The door opened, white and blinding.
Something made her duck and roll through it, and she landed on the floor in the tiny room, with the taste of blood in her mouth and her lip cut and her nose bleeding.
One door shut and the other opened, and the man there was not the Instructor. He had the brown of the Enemy and he had a gun.
She tried to kick him, but he Got her, she heard the buzz.
The door shut again and opened and she was getting up, mad and ashamed.
But this time it was her Instructor. "The Enemy is never fair," he said. "Let's go find out what you did right and wrong."
Catlin wiped her nose. She hurt. She was still mad and ashamed. She had gotten through. She wished she had got the man at the end. But he was an Older. That was not fair either. And her nose would not stop bleeding.
The Instructor got a cold cloth and had her put it on her neck. He said the med would look at her nose and her mouth. Meanwhile he turned on the Scriber and had her tell what she did and he told her most Sixes got stopped in the tunnel.
"You're exceptionally good," he said.
At which she felt much, much better. But she was not going to forget the Enemy at the end. They Got you here even when the lesson was over. That was the Rule. She hated being Got. She hated it. She knew when you grew up you went where Got was dead. She knew what dead was. They took the Sixes down to the slaughterhouse and they saw them kill a pig. It was fast and it stopped being a pig right there. They hauled it up and cut it and they got to see what dead meant: you just stopped, and after that you were just meat. No next time when you were dead, and you had to Get the Enemy first and make the Enemy dead fast.
She was good. But the Enemy was not fair. That was a scary thing to learn. She started shaking. She tried to stop, but the Instructor saw anyhow and said the med had better have a look at her.
"Yes, ser," she said. Her nose still bubbled and the cloth was red. She blotted at it and felt her knees wobble as she walked, but she walked all right.
The med said her nose was not broken. A tooth was loose, but that was all right, it would fix itself.
The Instructor said she was going to start marksmanship. He said she would be good in that, because her genotype was rated that way. She was expected to do well in the Room. All her genotype did. He said genotypes could sometimes get better. He said that was who she had to beat. That was who every azi had to beat. Even if she had never seen any other AC-7892.
She got a good mark for the day. She could not tell anyone. You were never supposed to. She could not talk about the tunnel. The Instructor told her so. It was a Rule.
It was only the last Enemy that worried her. The Instructor said a gun would have helped and size would have helped, but otherwise there was not much she could have done. It had not been wrong to roll at the last. Even if it put her on the floor when the door opened.
"I could have run past him," she said.
"He would have shot you in the back," the Instructor said. "Even in the hall."
She thought and thought about that.
iv
"Vid off," Justin said, and the Minder cut it. He sat in his bathrobe on the couch. Grant wandered in, likewise in his bathrobe, toweling his hair.
"What's the news tonight?" Grant asked, and Justin said, with a little unease at his stomach:
"There's some kind of flap in Novgorod. Something about a star named Gehenna."
"Where's that?" There wasno star named Gehenna in anybody's reckoning. Or there had not been, until tonight. Grant looked suddenly sober as he sat down on the other side of the pit.
"Over toward Alliance. Past Viking." The news report had not been entirely specific. "Seems there's a planet there. With humans on it. Seems Union colonized it without telling anybody. Sixty years ago."
"My God," Grant murmured.
"Alliance ambassador's arrived at station with an official protest. They're having an emergency session of the Council. Seems we're in violation of the Treaty. About a dozen clauses of it."
"How biga colony?" Grant asked, right to the center of it.
"They don't know. They don't say."
"And nobody knewabout it. Some land of Defense base?"
"Might be. Might well be. But it isn't now. Apparently it's gone primitive."
Grant hissed softly. "Survivable world."
"Has to be, doesn't it? We're not talking about any bail of rock. The news-service is talking about the chance of some secret stuff from back in the war years."
Grant was quiet a moment, elbows on knees.
The war was the generation before them. The war was something no one wanted to repeat; but the threat was always there. Alliance merchanters came and went. Sol had explored the other side of space and got its fingers burned—dangerously. Eetees with a complex culture and an isolationist sentiment. Now Sol played desperate politics between Alliance and Union, trying to keep from falling under Alliance rule and trying to walk the narrow line that might leave it independent of Alliance ships without pushing Alliance into defending its treaty prerogatives or bringing Alliance interests and Union into conflict. Things were so damned delicate. And they had gotten gradually better.
A generation had grown up thinking it was solving the problems.
But old missiles the warships had launched a hundred years ago were still a shipping hazard. Sometimes the past came back into the daily news with a vengeance.
And old animosities surfaced like ghosts, troubling a present in which humans knew they were not alone.
"It doesn't sound like it was any case of finding three or four survivors," he said to Grant. "They're saying 'illegal colony' and they admit it's ours."
"Still going? Organized?"
"It's not real clear."
Another moment of silence. Grant sat up then and remembered to dry his hair before it dried the way it was. "Damn crazy mess," Grant said. "Did they say they got them off, or are they going to? Or what are they going to do about it?"
"Don't know yet."
"Well, we can guess where Giraud's going to be for the next week or so, can't we?"
v
Ari was bored with the offices. She watched the people come in and out. She sat at a desk in back of the office and cut out folded paper in patterns that she unfolded. She got paper and drew a fish with a long tail.
Finally she got up and slipped out while Kyle wasn't looking, while maman was doing something long and boring in the office inside; and it looked like maman was going to be talking a long time.
Which meant maman would not mind much if she walked up and down the hall. It was only offices. That meant no stores, no toys, nothing to look at and no vid. She liked sitting and coloring all right. But maman's own offices were best, because there was a window to look out.
There was nothing but doors up and down. The floor had metal stripes and she walked one, while she looked in the doors that were open. Most were.
That was how she saw Justin.
He was at a desk, working at a keyboard, very serious.
She stood in the doorway and saw him there. And waited, just watching him, for the little bit until he would see her.
He was always different from all the rest of the people. She remembered him from a glittery place, and Grant with him. She saw him only sometimes, and when she asked maman why people got upset about Justin, maman said she was imagining things.