The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  The house lights dimmed, Rand’s overture began, and Jay forgot anything as trivial as trillionaires.

  The first half went very well. Emerging from his warm fog to the realization that he must make small talk during the intermission was like being dumped from a snug bed into an icy vacuum.

  And indeed it developed that the intermission chatter of uips was every bit as inane and clumsy as that of the mere vips Jay was used to. They all liked it so far, of course, and said so—but for all the wrong reasons, some that Jay would never have thought of in a million years. Intermissions always made Jay wish he had taken up engineering, or any trade where the customer’s wishes were possible to fathom. Talking to civilians usually reminded him forcefully that no artist ever succeeds save by dumb luck. Since he believed the purpose of art was to communicate, this tended to depress him slightly.

  Five minutes before the end of the interval, he excused himself from the gathering, saying that he needed to check something with his technician backstage. Rand seized the opportunity to accompany him, ignoring his wife’s brief look of dismay, and they jaunted back into the empty theater together.

  There were four “wings,” short cylindrical tunnels of invisibility created by Rand’s shaping gear, at the four cardinal points of the terminator that divided audience from stage. Dancers seemed to materialize as they entered, vanish as they exited. Knowing that two of the wings would be blocked by knots of dancers nerving themselves up to go on for the second act, Jay and Rand picked one of the other two at random.

  And nearly got themselves shot by trigger-happy guards. “Jesus, folks, relax,” Jay said. “There won’t even be anybody out there to protect for another five minutes yet. Why don’t you safety those damned things until then? I don’t want you drilling one of my dancers on their way to the can.” Shaking his head, he passed on until he came to the tech hole, which was located at the farthest point of the theater, so that its one-way glass looked out past the dancers toward the audience. In fact, he and Rand had nothing to accomplish here; Nika had this piece on tracks by now. The tech hole was simply the nearest place to hide for a few minutes.

  Not wanting to risk being shot again, he paused at the door and touched the intercom button. “It’s me and Rand, Nika,” he said. “Coming in.”

  The door opened on horror.

  Five bodies, drifting limp in free-fall crouch. Jack-in-the-box effect made them move toward him as the door swung open. Nika was one of them. A barely perceptible bitter odor preceded them; Jay could not identify it but knew it was trouble. “Oh, shit,” Rand said behind him.

  “Hold your breath,” he snapped, and leaped into the hole. The room’s air system had already scavenged up most of the bitter gas, but who knew how much it took to immobilize a man?

  He did not have time to find out if any of the floating bodies were alive; more urgently he needed to know who was missing. Sure enough, the worst possible: the Shimizu’s man. His brain raced. The assassin had planned to kill from here, firing through the one-way glass into the house. At Jay’s announcement he had bolted out one of the other two doors from the hole—seconds ago. His only move now was to cut through another six-pack somehow, enter the theater through one of the four wings, leave by the audience entrance, and try to kamikaze whomever his intended victim was out in the foyer. But which wing? Presumably he knew which two were mobbed with dancers; he had been hanging out in the hole. And if Nika had had her mikes hot…he knew which wing was guarded by a six-pack who had just been told to safety their weapons. By Jay! The son of a bitch could have circled around behind them while they were gaping in the open door of the hole…

  “Make an announcement,” he brayed at Rand, and pointed to Nika’s board and mike.

  “What do I say?”

  “Run for your fucking lives!” He left the hole at full thruster power.

  He began deep breathing as he left the hole—can’t have too much oxygen in a crisis—but within seconds he held his breath again as he detected more of that bitter smell ahead. The assassin had had a second gas-bomb—and kept it to use where it would do him the most good. As Jay came around the curve he saw the six-pack he had passed moments earlier, drifting with the air-currents. He wanted to decelerate to a stop and peer cautiously into that magic tunnel before entering it—but he was traveling so fast he’d have had to overshoot it and beat back, and he just didn’t have the time. Instead he threw himself into a power turn and rocketed right into it at max acceleration.

  That probably saved his life. The assassin was still in the tunnel, waiting to scrag Jay the moment his head showed. But Jay arrived like a right hook, smashing solidly into him before he could fire. They recoiled from each other violently, and the assassin lost his grip on his weapon, a hand laser. But there was no gravity to take it away; it kept station with him as he tumbled, and he grabbed it again on the second flailing try.

  The assassin was a very good shot. But Jay was a very good dancer—and fortunately the gun was a pulse job rather than a garden-hose-type continuous-beam laser. He twisted, arched, feinted, leaped, contracted, and bolts of shining death missed him by centimeters. He had one further advantage: he could use all four thrusters, while the assassin had to reserve one wrist for aiming. Thank God the man seemed to be out of knockout bombs.

  But Jay could not hope to close; it was all he could do to stay alive. And any second his luck must run out. He could leap through the imaginary wall of the tunnel, but the killer would only follow. Any minute now the nearest six-pack would arrive behind him, and none of them would hesitate to fire through him even if they identified him as a friendly. Jay had time to realize that he was going to die protecting people he did not like or even respect, and then the tunnel had a blowout. A hole the size of a Frisbee appeared in its wall with a plosive phuff, jagged metal teeth pointing outward; the shriek of escaping air tore at their ears and pressure began to drop.

  Of course it is impossible for a holographic cylinder to have a blowout, and in any case the nearest vacuum was hundreds of meters away. But both men were spacers; they reacted quite instinctively, dropping their quarrel and leaping for the hole together to seal it with their bodies if necessary. Only one of them remembered on the way that the greatest shaper in human space was presently in the tech hole, and that this tunnel belonged to him.

  11

  EVA WAS THE FIRST TO ENTER THE TUNNEL; nearly at once she reversed thrust and recoiled backward into Reb, who was at her heels. A weapon she was not licensed to possess vanished from her hand. Jay had clearly coped. Even her atrophied sense of smell could detect the odors of burned metal and burned meat.

  “Nice work,” she said. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

  Jay’s eyes met hers, but it took him a second or two to recognize her. “I got him,” he said wonderingly.

  That much was clear. The body that floated between them was so obviously a corpse that Eva’s subconscious had ignored the gun it still clutched in one hand. Boiling brains leave a skull any way they can. Jay had a small smear of suet on his right cheek that must have burned him as it struck, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Eva threaded her way through horrid drifting tendrils of brains and blood and took Jay in her arms. “That you did,” she said soothingly, wiping his cheek. “That you did.”

  Rand arrived just then; at Eva’s signal he left Jay to her. She gestured again, and he and Reb took charge of the body, towing it backstage, shooing its gore along with it.

  Sure enough, Rhea and Colly were the next to arrive. At the alarm, all five uips had ducked for cover and their guards had clustered around them, and mere vips had struggled to get away from them, and Tokugawa and Martin had called for information—but Rhea and Colly had both realized they had family in the firezone. Rhea hadn’t been able to stop her daughter, but had gotten—barely—ahead of her to shield her from possible fire. Eva moved so that she and Jay blocked their way. “He’s fine,” she said quickly. “Wait here for him.”

  Rhea wa
s frantic. “I’ve got to—”

  “You’ve got to wait here,” Eva said, indicating Colly with her eyes.

  “I—yes, okay.” She got a firm grip on Colly. “He’s really all right?”

  “Not a scratch, truly.”

  “He saved my life,” Jay said.

  “And others,” Eva agreed. “Both of you did. I’m surprised at you, Jay—I thought you had more sense than to be a hero.”

  “I had to,” he said. “It was partly my fault.”

  She put a hand over his mouth. “He’s delirious,” she said to Rhea. “All the adrenalin.” She turned back to Jay, put her lips to his ear. “As your attorney, I advise you to shut the hell up. You are not competent to assess blame.”

  He blinked at her. “You’re not an attorney, Eva.”

  “The hell I’m not. I’m licensed for the High Court—and if you don’t start zipping your lip I’m going to need to be. When they get here, you tell them facts only, get it? Facts only. You can draw conclusions when you’re thinking more clearly. Okay?” She shook his shoulders. “Okay?”

  “Sure, Eva. Facts only. That’s good.” She studied him carefully, decided he was not quite in shock in the medical sense—but close.

  The tunnel went away; Rand must have reached the tech hole. Almost at once they were hip-deep in people, all talking at once—all five uips, assorted assistants and bodyguards, the Shimizu’s security chief, the house physician. The loudest by a good margin was Martin. Eva bellowed for silence, but her tired old lungs weren’t equal to the task.

  Reb’s amplified voice filled the theater like the voice of God. “Ladies and gentlemen, please compose yourselves. There is no longer any reason for alarm. An attempted assassination has failed, and the situation is under control. Please return to the foyer as quickly and quietly as you can; emergency personnel will be arriving and you are in their way. You will all receive a detailed report when things have clarified.”

  Rand’s voice joined him. “Dancers, please join our guests in the foyer and escort them to the reception room. The rest of tonight’s concert is canceled.”

  The tumult of attempted conversation became even louder—but at Martin’s physical insistence, they at last began moving away, with Tokugawa in the lead. Rand told Rhea to take Colly back to their suite, and she agreed without argument. Dr. O’Regan and Chief Cruz remained behind. “Who was it?” Cruz asked.

  “One of yours,” Eva said. “Dunno which—he didn’t have his face with him.”

  Cruz’s face darkened. “I know which. Shit. Where’d they take him, the tech hole?”

  “I think so.” She turned to Jay. “Can you stand another look at the son of a bitch? Chief Cruz needs you to show her what happened.”

  “Oh sure,” he said.

  As they left the tunnel, they had to duck around tumbling bodies and a few severed limbs—but fortunately no more horrid trails of blood, as laser amputation tends to self-cauterize. Eva noticed how hard Cruz had to work to ignore the one in Shimizu livery.

  Cruz made them wait briefly outside the tech hole. Two crime-scene technicians and three interns all arrived at once; she and the doctor went inside with them. The security chief emerged with Rand in less than a minute, scowling blackly. The conference took place there in the corridor. Cruz—mortified that one of her own people had been the killer—obviously wanted Eva gone, but did not dare try to chase her out. Eva did not even have to claim status as Jay’s attorney of fact; a steely glance was all it took. She and Cruz had taken each other’s measure a long time ago.

  So she was able to ride herd on Jay. She was fond of the boy, and his raving about the attempted assassination being partly his fault had unsettled her. If Cruz had heard that, the questioning might well have taken place under drugs. At Eva’s direction, Jay gave a baldly factual account of what had occurred. She spotted what he had meant as soon as he said it—“I told them to safety their damned weapons and continued on to the hole”—but of course no one else saw any blame in that. It was what anyone might have said in his place. She was glad she had gotten to him first.

  “Pity you couldn’t have taken him alive,” Cruz said, when Jay had finished the story and Rand had added events from his perspective. “I hate to let someone kill a dozen people in my care without asking him who paid for it.”

  “I was dead,” Jay said, “and then Rand gave me a split-second advantage. I didn’t think about it. I grabbed his gun hand and made him shoot himself under the chin. I’d do it again.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t criticizing! Do it again, if there’s a next time.”

  Eva snorted at that. If Jay had not gotten lucky, Cruz would have had more dead—and perhaps a dead uip or two as well—and would have been looking for work tomorrow.

  “I wish he was still alive too,” Jay said. “So I could kill him again. Nika’s…Nika was special.” Suddenly he shook his head with great violence. “Jesus! Did that really happen?” He giggled.

  “You’ve got everything you need for now, right, Chief?” Eva said.

  Cruz frowned, but nodded. “I may want to hypno him tomorrow.”

  “Gotta wait for it to seep into long-term storage for hypno to do any good,” she agreed. “Jeeves—”

  “Yes, madam?” He shimmered into existence, urbane and unflappable.

  “Take Mr. Sasaki home. My place, not his. Bunk him down in my bed and make me a doss in Guest Room Two.”

  “Very good, madam. If you would be good enough to follow me, sir…”

  “Half a mo.” She motioned Jay close and murmured in his ear. “Want Jacques to join you?”

  He blinked at her and struggled with the question. Jacques’s job description read, “hedonic technician”—but Eva happened to know that he was more artist than technician, a natural healer and comforter. “No,” Jay said, and then, “I don’t think so,” and then he blushed slightly and said, “Uh…yes. Please.”

  She nodded. “Tell Jeeves. Run along now.”

  Once he was gone, she turned back to Cruz. “How did you know who the assassin was?”

  “Eh?”

  “You said, ‘I know which.’ How did you know?”

  “Oh. Savannavong only joined the force a month ago. I wouldn’t have used him on this job, for that reason—but Hanh came down sick this afternoon and I was stretched thin.”

  “Savannavong was real good at making people come down sick,” Rand said bitterly. “Hanh got lucky.”

  “So did you two,” Cruz said. “You both reacted like trained cops. Either of you ever in service?”

  “I did two years with NYPD. Draftee. But that was over twenty years ago, and I never drew my weapon in the line of duty. Jay’s never had any kind of combat training, to my knowledge. We just kept making mistakes until the bastard was dead.”

  “You’d better get home,” Eva said. “Your wife still doesn’t know the details.”

  “Chief?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Rand threw her a grateful glance and made his escape.

  People were coming and going from the tech hole now, bringing in forensic equipment and taking out corpses. But they gave the glowering Chief Cruz a wide berth; for the moment Eva was effectively alone with her. “Does your thumb hurt, Chief?” Eva asked suddenly.

  “Eh? Yes it does—why? How did you know?”

  “Because I figure you for an honest cop. The moment that alarm sounded, an honest cop in your shoes would have pushed a button and flooded the whole damn theater and backstage area with sleepy gas.”

  “I did! Some son of a bitch had—”

  “I know. It didn’t work, so you kept pushing; that’s why your thumb hurts.”

  Cruz nodded slowly. “I see.” She thought some more. “Well, it wouldn’t have helped anyway; the bastard obviously had nose filters in.”

  Eva nodded. “Like you do. But you didn’t know that at the time. An honest cop couldn’t have.”

  “But why disable the sleepy gas if he had filters?”


  “So he’d have maximum confusion to escape in after he made his kill? Squawking civilians in all directions.”

  “God dammit, Eva—”

  “Relax, Rani—I’m on your side. I know this whole episode makes you look like a horse’s ass, but I can’t think of anything you could’ve done better. And I’ll tell Kate Tokugawa that, if you like. But if I were you, I’d have Dr. O’Regan document that thumb sprain.”

  She left Cruz and went to the reception, curious to see how the ultimately rich responded to a brush with death. Six cronkites ambushed her just outside the door, looking like children who needed to urinate; the first in line named a figure. “No comment,” she said. He named a second figure, and when she refused that too, a bidding war developed. She brushed through them grandly and entered the hall. Guards prevented them from following; frustrated, they all jaunted off to file what little they already had.

  The party had that slightly forced gaiety which screams of fear just past. But the uips themselves seemed the calmest people in the room—except for Reb, of course. In fact, the only person who still showed any overt signs of fear was Evelyn Martin, grinning and sweating and talking even faster than usual. He spotted her, detached himself and came over.

  “Hi, Eva,” he said loudly. “So glad you could make it.” Sotto voce he added, “Anything else gone wrong out there? Any more assassins come to squeeze my ulcers? Fresh stiffs? Other major felonies? Chief Cruz find out the assassin is a High Council member or anything like that?”

  “Good news,” she said. “No news.” Louder, she added. “Awful to see you, Evelyn. You’re looking uglier than usual tonight.”

  He beamed. “Thank you, dear—have you met our honored guests? Chen Ling Ho, for instance?”