Shadow Puppets (The Shadow 3)

Uphanad turned his face to the wall. The soldiers would have turned him back around, but Graff gave them a gesture: Let be. He knew how proud Uphanad was. This shame in front of the people he had tried to betray was unbearable. Give him time to compose himself.

Only when the Wiggins were sitting did Graff invite Uphanad also to take a seat. He obeyed, hanging his head like a caricature of a whipped dog.

"Sit up, Uphanad, and face this like a man. These are good people, they understand that you did what you thought you must for your family. You were unwise not to trust me more, but even that is understandable."

From Theresa's face, Graff could see that she, at least, was not half so understanding as he seemed to assume. But he won her silence with a gesture.

"I'll tell you what," said Graff. "Let's make this work to our advantage. I actually have a couple of shuttles at my disposal for this operation--compliments of Admiral Chamrajnagar, by the way--so the real quandary is deciding which of them to send when we actually allow your email to go out."

"Two shuttles?" asked Peter.

"We have to make a guess about what Achilles planned to do with this information. If he means to attack you upon landing, well, we have a very heavily armed shuttle that should be able to deal with anything he can throw against it from the ground or the air. I think what he's planning is probably a missile as you're overflying some region where he can get a portable launch platform."

"And your heavily armed shuttle can deal with that?" asked Peter.

"Easily. The trouble is, this shuttle is not supposed to exist. The IF charter specifically forbids any weaponization of atmospheric craft. It's designed to go along with colony ships, in case the extermination of the Formics was not complete and we run into resistance. But if such a shuttle enters Earth's atmosphere and proves its capabilities by shooting down a missile, we could never tell anyone about it without compromising the IF. So we could use this shuttle to get you safely to Earth, but could never tell anyone about the attempt on your life."

"I could live with that," said Peter.

"Except that you don't actually have to get to Earth at this time."

"No, I don't."

"So we can send a different shuttle. Again, one whose existence is not known, but this time it is not illegal. Because it hasn't been weaponized at all. In fact, while it's quite expensive compared to, say, a bazooka, it's very, very cheap compared with a real shuttle. This one's a dummy. It is carefully designed to match the velocity and radar signature of a real shuttle, but it lacks a few things--like any place to put a human being, or any capability of a soft landing."

"So you send this one down," said John Paul, "draw their fire, and then have a propaganda field day."

"We'll have IF observers watching for the boost and we'll be on that launch platform before it can be dismantled, or at least before the perpetrators can get away. Whether it ends up pointing to Achilles or China, either way we can demonstrate that someone on Earth fired at an IF shuttle."

"Puts them in a very bad position," said Peter. "Do we announce that I was the target?"

"We can decide that based on their response, and on who is getting the blame. If it's China, I think we gain more by making it an attack on the International Fleet. If it's Achilles, we gain more by making him out to be an assassin."

"You seem to have been quite free about discussing these things in front of us," said Theresa. "I suppose now you have to kill us."

"Just me," whispered Uphanad.

"Well, I do have to fire you," said Graff. "And I do have to send you back to Earth, because it just wouldn't do to have you stay on here. You'd just depress everyone else, slinking around looking guilty and unworthy."

Graff's tone was light enough to help keep Uphanad from bursting into tears again.

"I've heard," Graff went on, "that the Indian people need to have loyal men who'll fight for their freedom. That's the loyalty that transcends your loyalty to the Ministry of Colonization, and I understand it. So you must go where your loyalty leads you."

"This is...unbelievable mercy, sir," said Uphanad.

"It wasn't my idea," said Graff. "My plan was to have you tried in secret by the IF and executed. But Peter told me that, if you were guilty and it turned out you were protecting family members in Chinese custody, it would be wrong to punish you for the crime of imperfect loyalty."

Uphanad turned to look at Peter. "My betrayal might have killed you and your family."

"But it didn't," said Peter.

"I like to think," said G

raff, "that God sometimes shows mercy to us by letting some accident prevent us from actually carrying out our worst plans."

"I don't believe that," said Theresa coldly. "I believe if you point a gun at a man's head and the bullet was a dud, you're still a murderer in the eyes of God."

"Well then," said Graff, "when we're all dead, if we find that we still exist in some form or other, we'll just have to ask God to tell us which of us is right."