He shrugged, doing his best to look neither interested nor surprised. “That’s your problem, not mine.”
“Hardly the gratitude I was expecting, Thorn. But we’ll let it pass. You don’t know the big picture yet, so it’s understandable.”
“What big picture?”
“We’ll come to that in good time. But let’s talk about you for a moment.” She patted a fat government folder resting at the edge of the desk and then pushed it over to him. “Go on, open it. Have a gander.”
He looked at her for several seconds before moving. He opened the folder at random and then thumbed back and forth through the paperwork jammed within. It was like opening a box of snakes. His whole life was here, annotated and cross-referenced in excruciating detail. His real name—Renzo; his personal details. Every public move he had made in the last five years. Every significant antigovernment action he had played any significant part in—voice transcripts, photographs, forensic evidence, long-winded reports.
“Makes interesting reading, doesn’t it?” said the other woman.
He flicked through the rest of it in horror, a plummeting sensation in his gut. There was enough to have him executed many times over, after ten separate show trials.
“I don’t understand,” he said feebly. He did not want to give up now—not after so long—but anything else suddenly seemed futile.
“What don’t you understand, Thorn?” asked Vuilleumier.
“This department . . . it’s External Threats, not Internal Threats. You’re the person in charge of finding the Triumvir. I’m not the . . . Thorn isn’t the one you’re interested in.”
“You are now.” She knocked back some coffee.
The other woman puffed on a cigarette. “The fact is, Thorn, my colleague and I have been engaged in a concerted effort to sabotage the activities of Internal Threats. We’ve been doing our best to make sure they don’t catch you. That’s why we’ve needed to know at least as much about you as they do, if not more.”
She had a funny accent, this one. He tried to place it and found that he couldn’t. Except . . . had he heard it once before, when he was younger? He racked his memory but nothing came.
“Why sabotage them?” he asked.
“Because we want you alive, not dead.” She smiled, quick and fast like a monkey.
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
“You’ll want to know why next,” said Vuilleumier, “so I’ll tell you. And this is where we start drifting into the arena of the big picture, if you get my drift, so please do pay attention.”
“I’m all ears.”
“This office, the department of Inquisition House called External Threats, is not at all that it appears to be. The whole business of tracking down the war criminal Volyova has always been a front for a much more sensitive operation. Matter of fact, Volyova died years ago.”
He had the impression she was lying, but still telling him something that was far closer to the truth than he had ever heard before. “So why keep up the pretence of searching for her?”
“Because it’s not her we really want. It’s her ship, or a means of reaching it. But by focusing on Volyova we were able to follow much the same lines of inquiry without bringing the ship into the discussion.”
The other woman, the one he thought had called herself Irina, nodded. “Essentially this entire government department is engaged in recovering her ship, and nothing else. Everything else is a smokescreen. A hugely complex one, and one that has involved internecine warfare with half a dozen other departments, but a smokescreen all the same.”
“Why does it have to be so secret?”
The two woman exchanged glances.
“I’ll tell you,” said Irina, just as the other one started to say something. “The operation to find the ship had to be kept maximally secret for the simple reason that there would have been intense civil disorder if it ever came to light.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s a matter of panic,” she said, waving her cigarette for emphasis. “The government’s official policy has always been pro-terraforming, right back to the old Inundationist days under Girardieau. That policy only deepened after the Sylveste crisis. Now they’re fully wedded to it in ideological terms. Anyone who criticises the programme is guilty of incorrect thought. You of all people shouldn’t need to be told this.”
“So where the does the ship come in?”
“As an escape route. One branch of government has determined a singularly disturbing fact.” She puffed on her cigarette. “There’s an external threat to the colony, but not quite the kind they originally imagined. Studies of the threat have been ongoing for some time. The conclusion is inescapable: Resurgam must be evacuated, perhaps within no more than one or two years. Half a decade at the optimistic side—and that’s probably being very optimistic.”
She watched him, undoubtedly waiting to observe the effects her words would have. Perhaps she assumed that she would need to repeat herself, that he would be too slow to take it all in at first go.
He shook his head. “Sorry, but you’re going to have to try better than that.”
Irina, or whoever she was, looked pained. “You don’t believe my story?”
“I wouldn’t be the only one, either.”
The Inquisitor said, “But you’ve always wanted to leave Resurgam. You’ve always said the colony was in danger.”
“I wanted to leave. Who wouldn’t?”
“Listen to me,” Vuilleumier said sharply. “You’re a hero to thousands of people. Most of them wouldn’t trust the government to tie their shoelaces. A certain fraction of those people have long believed that you know the whereabouts of one or two shuttles, and that you are planning a mass exodus into space for your believers.”
He shrugged. “And?”
“It’s not true, of course—the shuttles never existed—but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they might have, given everything that’s gone on. Now.” She leant forwards again. “Consider the following hypothesis. A special covert branch of government determines that there is an imminent global threat to Resurgam. The same branch of government, after much work, determines the whereabouts of Volyova’s ship. An inspection of the ship indicates that it is damaged but flightworthy. More importantly, it has a passenger-carrying capacity. A vast passenger-carrying capacity. Enough to evacuate the entire planet, if some sacrifices are made.”
“Like an ark?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, clearly pleased by his answer. “Exactly like an ark.”
Vuilleumier’s friend cradled her cigarette elegantly between two fingers. Her exceedingly thin hands reminded Thorn of the splayed-out bones in a bird’s wing. “But having a ship we can use as an ark is only half of the solution,” she said. “The question is, might the government’s announcement of the existence of such a ship be viewed with a trace of scepticism? Of course it would.” She stabbed the cigarette in his direction. “That’s where you come in. The people’ll trust you where they won’t trust us.”
Thorn leant back in his seat until it was balancing on only two legs. He laughed and shook his head, the two women watching him impassively. “Was that why I was beaten up downstairs? To soften me into accepting a piece of drivel like this?”
Vuilleumier’s friend held up the packet of cigarettes again. “These came from her ship.”
“Did they? That’s nice. I thought you said you had no means of reaching orbit.”
“We didn’t. But now we do. We hacked into the ship from the ground, got it to send down a shuttle.”
He pulled a face, but could not swear that such a thing was impossible. Difficult, yes—unlikely, very probably—but certainly not impossible.
“And you’re going to evacuate an entire planet with one shuttle?”
“Two, actually.” Vuilleumier coughed and retrieved another folder. “The most recent census put the population of Resurgam at just under two hundred thousand. The largest shuttle can move five hundred people into orbit, where they can transfer to an in-system craft with a capacity about four times that. That means we’ll need to make four hundred surface-to-orbit flights. The in-system ship will need to make about one hundred round trips to Volyova’s ship. That’s the real bottleneck, though—each of those round trips will take at least thirty hours, and that’s assuming almost zero time for loading and unloading at either end. Better assume forty hours to be on the safe side. That means we’re looking at nearly six standard months. We can shave some time off that by pressing another surface-to-orbit ship into service, but we’ll be doing very well if we get it much below five months. And that, of course, is assuming that we can have two thousand people ready and waiting to be moved off Resurgam every forty hours . . .” Vuilleumier smiled. He could not help but like her smile, for all that he felt he should be associating it with pain and fear. “You begin to see why we need you, I think.”
“Assuming I refuse to offer my assistance . . . just how would the government go about this?”