Natural Selection

by Michael A. Stackpole

  As much as he wanted to push her away, he could not. She was addictive and his only solace came from seeing that she seemed equally ensnared. They both knew that it could only lead to their mutual self-destruction, yet they laughed in the face of coming disaster. It was as if the paradoxes heightened the pleasure and the futility of it all made them hunger even more.

  Then, as the bandits prepared for another raid, she began to distance herself from him in order to concentrate on the tasks they faced. He knew that the rejection was only temporary—she had said as much in words and deeds—but the hurt still surprised him. All this time I've been wanting to be free of her because, deep down, I really do hate her, yet the separation is eating me alive.

  In an attempt to reestablish control over his emotions, Nelson descended to the deepest level of the main building, and headed for the corridor and doors that had caused him trouble on the eve of the Deia raid. If I visualize her and get a shock, maybe I can start my own crude form of aversion therapy. He smiled at the thought and turned the corner.

  He braced for a shock, but none came. Instead he felt his head expanding like some cartoon character sucking on a compressed air hose. It grew larger and larger, with the world he saw before him splitting into two parallel views, then shrinking away to pinpoints. Bright white light surrounded the black dots and he tried to shut his eyes against the glare, but it seemed to feed directly into the vision centers of his brain.

  As if drawn back into a slingshot and then released, the twin vision pellets shot forward. They expanded and rushed at him. He tried to duck away as they sailed in, but no matter what he did, they never deviated from their course.

  He felt himself hit the right rail on the treadmill, then the moving rubber ribbon pulled his feet out from under him. He fell and slipped off the treadmill to the side. What happened? As he struggled to free himself from the goggles and earphones, he heard a siren signaling a call to battle stations.

  He tried to roll up to his feet, but his head swam in familiar waves of nausea. We jumped. We jumped into the next system. Where we are ?

  As he lay on his back on the deck, the world stopped spinning. He tugged at his gloves and started to peel the markers off his body, but the siren died arid three tones sounded. Hearing them, he reached out and grabbed one of the treadmill posts. We're jumping again!

  The universe blew up like a bubble, then exploded. At once Nelson Geist saw himself as a quark in some ultra-large molecule and also knew that molecule was but a tiny part of himself. Those sensations fed back and forth, reflecting each other like facing mirror images repeating ad infinitum.

  The hatch leading into the Red Corsair's cabin swung open and she lurched into the room. She laughed aloud, then crossed to where he lay, and kneeled to kiss him full on the mouth. "It was wonderful, Nelson. Almost perfect!"

  "What?"

  "They were waiting for us at Great X. They could have had us, too, had they waited until we'd committed ourselves to a raid." She lifted her head, baring her throat, and laughed again. "Trust the Wolves to be overeager. When we appeared, they immediately issued a challenge. We jumped to our secondary destination and left them wondering where we had gone!"

  She lowered her faced toward his again and the fire in her beautiful eyes inflamed him. "A narrow escape," he said.

  She smiled devilishly. "On the razor's edge, Nelson. To come so close to annihilation and to dodge it so handily. To be at the brink of death and get a reprieve." She reached out her hand and helped him to a kneeling position opposite her. "There is only one thing that can make this day more perfect. Come with me and we shall both have it."

  * * *

  Chris saw the JumpShip icon vanish from the screen. "Where did it go?"

  "They jumped again." Dan punched up a closed line to his JumpShip captain. "Janos, get your navigators working on where a ship could have jumped from here. Correlate that data with our list of probable targets."

  "That will be a fairly long list, Colonel."

  "I don't care. If we're still sitting here when they hit a target, there will be hell to pay. Our lithium-fusion batteries are at 100 percent, so we can make two jumps if we have to, right?"

  "Affirmative. We hit two stars, so does the Bifrost and that Wolf ship. That's six out of thousands."

  Chris nodded as Janos's statement sank in. A jump could take an FTL ship thirty light years in any direction, and the lithium-fusion batteries allowed each ship to store two jumps' worth of energy. Though the number of inhabited worlds within the jump range of Great X was limited to five, the number of uninhabited star systems approached triple digits, and the bandits could recharge their ship at any one of them.

  "Colonel, it's not going to be an easy hunt. If they hit an inhabited world, we'll know and can react."

  "True, Chris, but what if they take a week to recharge for one jump and go. That could put them beyond our range." Dan shook his head and punched up the communications officer. "Korliss, any clue as to why the bandits jumped out?"

  "Nothing positive, sir, but I think they got a tight-beam message from the Wolves."

  "Oh, really?" The surprised look on Dan's face melted into a deep scowl. "Lieutenant, do me the favor of getting Star Colonel Ward back in communication with me."

  "Yes, sir."

  Chris pointed to the screen's image of the system. "We have another ship in."

  Dan nodded as the new icon flashed on the screen, then the whole system image vanished, to be replaced by Conal Ward's face. "Yes, Colonel Allard? What is it, I have to prepare for a jump."

  "Oh, you do? And where would that be?"

  "In pursuit of the bandits, of course."

  "Of course." Dan's voice took on an edge that Chris had heard only once before and it gave him a start. "Star Colonel, we seem to have detected a broadcast from your ship to the bandits."

  Conal nodded perfunctorily. "Yes."

  "What would that have been, Star Colonel?"

  "A standard combat inquiry, Colonel Allard. You must have gotten the same from the Smoke Jaguars on Luthien."

  "We did indeed but we were not looking to ambush the Smoke Jaguars."

  Conal's head came up. "Real warriors do not wait in ambush."

  Dan snarled.

  "Real warriors follow orders."

  "Another signal coming in, Colonel, from the new ship," announced Korliss' voice. "It's going to the Wolves, too."

  "Split the screen." Dan continued to stare at Conal. "Understand these orders, Star Colonel—you stay where you are until I tell you where you are going."

  "I take no orders from any mercenary!"

  "Then you will take them from me, Star Colonel," a new voice commanded as Phelan's face joined Conal's on the screen. "The ilKhan sends you greetings, Colonel Allard. We are here to destroy bandits and we will do whatever it takes to accomplish our mission."

  26

  Caledonia

  Federated Commonwealth

  10 July 3055

  The assassin abandoned his Carlos Negron identity at Lamon. Ar the planet's space station union hall, he sent messages that ComStar would eventually carry to his confederates. All similarly worded, the messages said that he had met a woman and would be staying with her for a while on Lamon. He asked that communications be sent care of the union hall, where he would pick them up.

  That was a lie, of course, because he expected no messages. The few friends Carlos Negron had were among his fellow workers, who also liked to keep to themselves. Any messages to Negron would be from agents who had somehow tied him to the assassination, and those were communications he definitely did not want to answer.

  On the Lamon station Carlos underwent a startling transformation from a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed longshoreman to a black-clad member of the neo-Puritanical Wildmon sect. Wearing a crisply starched black suit and black hat that hid most of his face, he boarded a DropShip for the short hop to Caledonia. Fearing a dressing-down for almost anything, no one aboard ship spoke to him during
the trip, which he did not mind at all.

  At Caledonia the assassin again changed his identity, once more using a room held for a dummy corporation. The fearsome Wildmon vanished and was replaced by Chuck Grayson. Grayson, bound for a gaming junket on Solaris, dressed in gaudy clothes that would have sent a Wildmon member into convulsions. Chuck booked passage on the DropShip Lady Luck, stowed his gear in his cabin, and immediately headed for a lounge.

  In the lounge his garish clothes were like tiger stripes in a jungle. Worming his way through a press of merrymakers, he ended up shoulder to shoulder with a stunning brunette wearing a sarong made from the same patterned cloth as his shirt. "You have wonderful taste in clothes, Miss. ..."

  Her green eyes studied him going up and coming down again. "Calley. I'm Judith Calley, but my friends call me Jude. And your taste is impressive, Mr . . . ?"

  "Charles Grayson, and my friends call me Chuck." The assassin saw the bartender hand her two thick, slushy drinks with a paper umbrella stuck in each one. "Are those good?"

  Jude nodded. "Delicious." She sipped one and licked her lips. "I'd give you one, but the other is for my cabin-mate. Join us over in the corner when you order."

  As she moved away, the assassin told the bartender to get him one of the same, then pressed a thumb to the bar tab, which immediately logged the price of the drink to his account. Taking the drink, he cut back through the crowd and found the corner table. Jude moved over so he could sit next to her on the edge of the semicircular booth.

  "Chuck, this is Ronda, my cabin-mate, and John and Toni and Georgie and Mike."

  "Chuck Grayson. Hi." He sat down and smiled politely as he felt Jude's right leg press against his left. "You all seem to know each other. Did you just meet here, or . . . ?"

  John, a tall, muscular man—the group's alpha male-leaned back and looped his arm over Toni's shoulders. "We all work for Fennic-Dobbs, in the electronics sales division. The figures for sales last Christmas finally came in, and our department had the highest sales and the highest collection rate. Because of it, we won a two-month junket to Solaris."

  "Very nice." Chuck raised his glass and smiled. "Congratulations."

  Ronda gulped a bit of her drink. "What do you do, Chuck?"

  The assassin forced a blush on Chuck. "I'm a ghost writer. I work with celebs and other bigwigs and help them write autobiographies. I also do some of those instant-bio things on celebs who hit big."

  John's dark eyes sharpened. "So is this trip business or pleasure?"

  "It's supposed to be the former, but I hope for a bit of the latter." He smiled easily. "I'm going to see if I can get an interview with Kai Allard-Liao. ..."

  Ronda squealed delightedly. "Oh, he's such a dream. "

  Everyone at the table laughed a bit and Ronda turned a brilliant shade of red. "Well, he is."

  "I hope you're not alone in feeling that, Ronda. I could use the sales." The assassin tasted the fruity drink and immediately realized the thing was packed with alcohol. He set it back down and resolved to nurse the drink for a long time. "He's never talked about what he did on Alyina, and my publisher hopes I can get him to spill the story."

  Ronda smiled like a cat that had caught a whole flock of canaries. "I heard that after Prince Victor tried to kill him, Kai led the planet in a revolt that threw off the Clans and that he killed the Clan leader in single combat—thereby becoming the ruler of the world."

  Toni, the petite blonde beneath John's beefy arm, spoke in a quiet voice. "I don't think the Prince tried to kill Kai."

  Mike laughed aloud. "Toni, you don't believe Victor killed the Archon, either."

  "He didn't."

  Jude leaned over and stage-whispered to him, "Toni met the Prince once, years ago. She grew up on Tharkad and went to one of the Nagelring dances."

  Toni's head came up and her lower lip thrust out defiantly. "I did meet him, and I even danced with him. He's too nice to have killed the Archon. He wouldn't do it."

  The assassin shook his head. "I've been buried in writing a book for the past couple of months. The Prince killed his mother?"

  John waved the assertion off. "Nothing official."

  "You think they'd say if there was?" Ronda asked.

  Mike pushed his glass of beer aside, and began to draw on the table with his left hand. "It's like this, Chuck. Victor ordered his sister to let his mother lie in state for only two days and then had her buried in a funeral he didn't attend. Now they say he's personally working at directing the investigation of his mother's death and that he keeps viewing all the films about it. If his sister Katrina wasn't running interference for him, the whole Federated Commonwealth—or at least the Lyran part of it—would be in chaos."

  Chuck nodded thoughtfully. "Mind you, I'd not put it past any ruler of the Inner Sphere to kill his predecessor. Face it, the average person lives to be a hundred, but if you're a ruler, you die at least twenty years shy of that mark. I also, seem to remember some very short-lived rumors that the Archon had her husband knocked off so she could rule the Federated Commonwealth, but those proved groundless."

  Ronda shook her head. "Yes, but remember—it was Victor who found his father. Who's to say old Victor didn't kill Hanse, too?"

  "With his mother in line to rule?" John frowned. "No motive."

  "Hanse was going to strip the Tenth Lyran Guards from Victor because of a confidential report from Kai Allard saying that Victor had tried to murder him on Alyina. Besides, Hanse was going to disown his son because he couldn't stand the fact that Victor married Omi Kurita while he was in Drac space."

  Georgie rapped her knuckles on the table top. "You're wrong about Victor, all of you. The Archon was killed by a member of the Nature First movement. They killed her with the mycosia pseudoflora to protest the warping of genetics for human whim and pleasure. That official line about a nut is just a diversion."

  "If you're right," Ronda challenged, "then why are so many questions still not answered?"

  "Because the government doesn't want folks to know how widespread Nature First really is. It would cause a. panic."

  Jude gave him a little nudge. "They'll go on about this for hours. I want to stretch my legs. Care to tour the ship?"

  The assassin nodded. "My pleasure."

  "That can be arranged." Jude took his hand in hers and turned to her friends. "We'll see you later, much later."

  27

  Tharkad, Donegal March

  Federated Commonwealth

  17 July 3055

  Victor's steady hand and practiced manipulation of the holovid remote control slowed the image to near immobility. The picture of his mother remained clear, as if, cell by cell, it had been etched on the inside of the holovid viewer screen. With every little movement or shift in her facial expression, a horde of memories surged up into his thoughts. You are too young to have died, Mother.

  Victor cringed as she raised her right hand to emphasize a point. Like a signal to someone outside the picture, her gesture seemed to call forth an intense brightening of the light in front of her. It burned away all the shadows and fatigue lines, the next moment burning away her whole image, leaving the screen filled with only fire and destruction.

  Hearing a sharp rap on his door, Victor hit the Pause button. "Enter," he said impatiently.

  Galen Cox opened the door, then closed it behind him with a military crispness that Victor had not seen in the man since their first meeting. He snapped his hand up in a salute and held it until Victor returned the gesture. "You sent for me, sir?" Galen remained standing at attention like a cadet braced for a dressing-down.

  The Prince nodded and swiveled away from the screen and toward the spread of folders on his desk. He picked up a single sheet of paper. "What is this supposed to be, Galen?"

  "It's a Form 342881-A, Request for a Transfer of Duty, sir."

  "Enough of that, Galen." Victor wadded the request and tossed it into a wastebasket. "Request denied."

  "In that case, sir, I will resign
my commission immediately. "

  Victor's head came up, realizing from Galen's tone that this was not some joke. "What's going on here, Galen? You're my friend. I need you."

  The blue-eyed MechWarrior looked down at his commander. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

  "As always, Galen."

  "No, sir, not as of late." Galen's stiff posture shifted and his hands settled on his hips. Victor knew his friend was preparing to blast him, and though he wanted to forestall it, something made him hold his tongue.

  "Highness, with all due respect, you don't need me at all. You're not listening to my advice, nor that of anyone else. You're not doing your job and you're headed for disaster. I like you too much to want to hang around and see that."

  Victor felt the sting of Galen's words and knew his criticisms echoed doubts stuffed away somewhere in his own mind. "What are you talking about?"

  "Highness, in the years we've known each other I've seen two things in your personality that identify you as accurately as any retinal pattern. The first is that you're incredibly judgmental. You look at a person and think you've got him or her pegged after hearing a few sentences out of the person's mouth. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred you're dead right. That sometimes makes you a bear, and coupled with your willingness to speak your mind, it also makes you a diplomatic nightmare."

  "I have to judge people. I need to know who is using me and who isn't."

  "I know that better than you, Highness, but the problem is that you're not perfect. That one time out of a hundred when you botch it up is when you hurt people. Worse yet, you can overlook treachery that's well-hidden."