The Stardance Trilogy

by Spider

  Jay found the manual doorlatch and released it. He was greatly relieved when this one worked; he had not been sure he would find pressure in Management—and had had no idea what to do if he didn’t. They scrambled in together, then resealed the door to keep out guests who wanted a refund. There was nobody at the front desk, nor in the outer offices beyond it. “Where the hell is everybody?” Rand snarled.

  “I don’t know,” Jay snapped, even more nervous than his brother. This was wrong, wrong—“Wait a minute.” He doubled back, went to the front desk. “I filled in for a guy once or twice,” he said as he got there, and began tapping code on a drawer under the counter. “Let’s see if they still…ah!” He got the drawer open—and took from it a totally illegal police-issue GE hand-laser. “Sometimes Security doesn’t show up fast enough when you call them,” he said, checking the charge and clicking off the safety. “Now let’s go see what’s in back.”

  “I’ll go first and draw fire,” Rand said. He and Jay exchanged a glance. It became a grin. “The Hardy Boys in High Orbit,” Rand said.

  “And in a big-ass hurry.”

  They worked their way back through the outer offices to Kate’s door cautiously but quickly, Rand preceding his brother through every doorway. Finally they floated outside her office.

  “No point in listening at a soundproof door,” Jay said.

  “No point in knocking, either,” Rand agreed, and opened the manual release compartment. “I’ll go first, again.”

  “No need. I’ll know where the target is, if there is one.”

  “Okay. If there’s trouble in there, you go right and I’ll go left.”

  “Which way is that?” They happened to be upside down with respect to each other.

  “You go away from me and I’ll go away from you.” Rand unlatched the door. It let go with a pop, and opened a few centimeters. He gripped the release latch to brace himself, and slid the door the rest of the way open. He and Jay entered together, and stopped.

  And then both began to laugh.

  They knew it was inappropriate; that only made it worse. Facing them was one of the most ridiculous sights they had ever seen: Evelyn Martin, holding a gun.

  Laughing, Jay tried to move away from Rand as agreed—and remembered that his thrusters were dry. He still was not worried; he and his brother could outjaunt a spastic like Martin with muscles alone.

  Then he saw Katherine Tokugawa well to his left, also armed. His laughter died away. They were outgunned. He shook Rand’s shoulder and pointed her out. After a microsecond’s thought, his own gun steadied on Martin. If he were going to be killed by one of these two, he preferred Kate. More dignity.

  “Drop it,” Martin yapped.

  Jay thought hard for a whole second, then opened his fingers. The gun, of course, stayed where it was.

  “Lose it,” Martin corrected, expressing his exasperation by putting a bolt into the wall beside the doorway. The smell of burning bulkhead plastic filled the room faster than the air-conditioning could suck it away. Jay gave his own gun a finger-snap, like a child shooting marbles; it drifted away toward Martin. Ignoring the man, he turned and addressed Kate.

  “I should have figured you’d have to be in on this,” he said. “But I’m damned if I can see how you expect to come out of it with your job.”

  “Oh, I’ll probably lose that eventually,” she agreed. “But by then I’ll have a better job.”

  “A better job than this?”

  “Much better. I’ll be running something a little more prestigious than a hotel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “High Orbit,” Martin said, and snickered.

  “Shut up, Ev,” Tokugawa snapped.

  He stared. “What the hell are you talking about? Nobody runs High Orbit.”

  “No,” Martin said. “The UN wouldn’t let them. But the UN isn’t going to be around much longer.” He giggled nervously.

  “Shut up, Ev,” Tokugawa barked. “You can tell them things like that after they’re dead. Not before.”

  Jay tried to restart his laughter; it didn’t catch. “You seriously think you can take on the UN—and the Starmind—and win?”

  Kate couldn’t resist answering. “Not me,” she said. “But I know people who can. I’ve been working for them all my life.”

  “You artists are always yapping about your ‘vision,’” Martin said, and brandished his gun. “Ha! You assholes don’t know what vision is! We’re gonna reshape the future.”

  Jay felt the universe shifting in his head, crushing his brains beneath it. Surely this was lunacy. Even the UN itself could not have defeated the Starmind. He could conceive of nothing human that could.

  “Come in, gentlemen,” Tokugawa said then. Jay glanced over his shoulder, and saw two Security men enter with guns drawn. Each, he noticed, wore an unfamiliar earplug and an unobtrusive throat-mike. Communications gear that did not use the house system. Turning back, he saw that Tokugawa and Martin both had them too.

  “So,” he said to Kate, “you already know more about what happened in Fat Humphrey’s room than we do.”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes. Much more.”

  “Of course. You assigned Fat his room. So this is where you gloat, and tell us what’s going on, so we can be awed by your cleverness?”

  “No,” she said. “This is where you get taken away and killed. Goodbye, Sasaki.” She sketched a gassho bow. “It has always been a pain in the ass to work with you. Martin, you go along with them—make sure it looks pretty; that’s your line of work.”

  Jay opened his mouth to say something, but never got a chance to learn what it was going to be. Something touched the back of his neck, and he slept.

  It was a very troubled sleep, full of unpredictable accelerations that triggered horror-dreams of falling from his terrestrial past, and unfamiliar voices shouting incomprehensible things in the near and far distance, and the nagging certainty that something he couldn’t quite recall was terribly, terribly wrong.

  You were meant to come out of the drug confused. But his surroundings when he finally did certainly enhanced the effect.

  He was in a corridor. Not a public one, a…the term took awhile to surface. A service tunnel, that was it. The lighting was even lousier here. Things were floating in his vicinity—important ones, he sensed. First he counted them: four. Then he classified them: human beings. Next he laboriously identified them. Evelyn Martin. His third-grade gym teacher—no, that was…was…right, one of the security guards who was going to kill him. Sure, there was the other one. And the extra one…hell, know him anywhere: that’s my bro. Like a brother to me.

  So now he had them broken down into two groups. Friends: one. Foes: three. That didn’t seem like a favorable ratio. On the other hand, one of the guards seemed to be lacking a face; that evened things up a little. And Ev Martin’s head hung at a funny angle…

  A few more foggy seconds of contemplation and he had a second breakdown he liked much better. Rand was breathing; the rest were not.

  The example inspired him; he breathed deeply, stoked his brain with oxygen and felt the cobwebs begin to melt away. This is great, he told himself. How did I do this?

  As Rand began to show signs of recovering consciousness too, a hatch opened nearby and Duncan Iowa appeared. “Good,” he said. “You’re awake. I ditched their comm gear on the assumption it’s trackable, but we ought to move anyway. No telling which systems they have up and running.” He moved to Rand, started to slap him awake…then thought better of it, and instead spun him, to centrifuge blood into his head. “Take this and keep lookout,” he added.

  Jay got his hands up in time to catch a laser considerably more powerful than the police-issue job he’d liberated from the front desk. He blinked at it for a moment—then snapped out of his fugue. He checked charge and safety, assessed the tactical situation, and assigned himself a guard post. “You’re something else, kid,” he said wonderingly. Duncan ignored him, busy with Rand.

&n
bsp; Rand spent less time in stupor than Jay had. Groundhogs and new spacers usually shook off drug effects faster; their blood pressure was higher. He looked around at the drifting bodies, shook his head like a horse shooing flies, glanced at Jay and turned back to Duncan.

  “I punched you in the mouth,” he said wonderingly. “And you let me live.”

  “I had it coming,” Duncan said tightly. “Look, we’ve got to move. I don’t need to know who we’re running from or why just now, but if you know anything that would suggest where to, I’d love to hear it.”

  “Shit,” Jay said. “I wish I knew more about riot-control procedures…”

  “What do you need?” Duncan asked.

  “For a start, a large tank of sleepy gas with a hose on it.”

  “Come on,” Duncan said, jaunting away. “I’m an Orientator—I know this dump better than Kate Tokugawa.”

  I hope you’re right, Jay thought. Rand jaunted after Duncan, and Jay took up the rear, gun at the ready.

  In the discreetly unmarked riot-control compartment Duncan led them to, they found the tank Jay wanted, fresh thrusters, and a sonic rifle for Rand. While they swapped the new thrusters for their exhausted ones, they also exchanged information.

  “I was heading for Deluxe country, I knew the panic would be worst there, and I took service corridors to make better time. Then I saw Martin and those two goons go by at an intersection ahead of me, guns out, towing you two. They didn’t see me in the lousy light.”

  “What made you decide to butt in?” Rand asked. “And how did you know which side you were on?”

  Duncan didn’t duck the question. “I’m in love with your wife, and she’s in love with you. I didn’t want her hurt.”

  Rand didn’t duck the answer. “I understand. How did you ever manage to take all three of them?”

  Duncan shrugged. “All three were earthborn. Taking Martin’s gun wasn’t a major challenge. Actually the other two didn’t do too badly; I was trying to keep one of them alive to question, but they hurried me. So tell me: who are the bad guys and what do we do about them?”

  “Anybody could be a bad guy,” Jay said. “But the one we know about is Kate Tokugawa herself.” Duncan’s eyebrows raised, but he made no comment. “And what we’re going to do is take her alive for questioning. But I almost hope she hurries us. She’s behind the system crash—she’s using it to cover a kidnapping.”

  Duncan’s eyes widened, then shut tight. “Jesus.”

  “You think they’re alive, then?” Rand said.

  “Have to be. There are much easier ways to kill somebody.”

  “Easier ways to kidnap people too. They could have snatched us off the shuttle without all this hooraw.”

  “The Space Command keeps a careful eye on moving objects in High Orbit,” Jay said, “but they hardly ever look at the Shimizu. Doing it here cost the bastards, but it probably bought them enough lead to get away clean.”

  “Who got kidnapped?” Duncan asked.

  “Fat Humphrey Pappadopoulos, Reb Hawkins, Meiya and Eva Hoffman. Possibly others, but I’m sure of those. They snatched them right out of a suite: right out the goddam window and into a stealthed ship, long gone by now. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but it has something to do with a coup against the UN.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Duncan said. “An honest-to-God old-time coup d’état?”

  “I think coup du monde is more like it, from the way Ev was talking. I don’t care what historians call it, as long as they put ‘failed’ in front of it. So we need Kate—alive, and with her vocal cords intact; everything else is optional. She’s in her office…and I think I know how to get her out, if we can get there alive. But that might be a problem. I’m sure she has a private surveillance-and-defense system. She let us approach the last time because Martin didn’t want to have to explain embarrassing laserburns on our corpses to the cronkites—but if she sees us coming again, I don’t think she’ll hesitate.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Rand asked.

  Jay sighed. “I was hoping one of you would come up with something. I don’t know how you storm a castle with a slingshot when they know you’re coming.”

  “I do,” Duncan said. “You use the servant’s entrance.”

  Twenty minutes later, they peered out through the grille of an air-circulation tunnel ten meters from Tokugawa’s office door. They were all wearing stock p-suits scavenged from the riot-control locker, but maintaining radio silence. Jay unsealed his hood and sniffed the air; when he didn’t pass out, the others did the same.

  “I think we’re inside her perimeter,” Duncan said. “I don’t see anything in that hallway that looks like the business end of a laser.”

  Jay wedged past him and looked. Bare walls. He clutched the tank of sleepy gas to his chest. “So one of us tries it and the other two avenge him if necessary.”

  “Let’s not rush into this,” Rand said.

  Jay laughed mirthlessly. “Feel a little stuffy in here to you, bro?”

  “Now that you mention it, I’m sweating like—oh!”

  “When a groundhog starts to sweat, he smiles and reaches for a cold beer. When a spacer starts to sweat, he reaches for his p-suit.” The hotel’s backup system had power for air circulation and limited lighting—but none for cooling. The Shimizu was a shiny ball of metal in the sunshine, full of heat-producing people, and contrary to groundhog belief space is not cold at all. “Folks are going to start dying if the system doesn’t come back up in the next hour or two: we’re running out of time.”

  “How do you plan to get her to open the door for your gas?” Duncan asked.

  Jay grinned wickedly. “I don’t need to. Ev Martin drilled a neat little hose-sized hole for me about a meter earthward of the door.” He started to push the grille free, but Rand stopped him.

  “Let me,” he said.

  “I claim privilege,” Jay protested. “I’ve known Eva and Reb a lot longer than you have.”

  “My point exactly. You said before you almost hope she hurries you. I don’t. I have less need to find an excuse to kill her.”

  “That could get you killed.”

  Rand grinned. “Well, bro, just now the world doesn’t need a first-class shaper as badly as it needs her.”

  “I’m faster than both of you put together,” Duncan said.

  Rand turned to him. “Yeah. But that’s a massy tank: you haven’t got the muscles to hump it. Some things, earthborns are better at. Besides, it’s my turn to do something heroic. Okay?”

  After a moment, Duncan nodded. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  After all that melodrama, the capture itself was ludicrously easy. Everything went like a good opening night, just enough adrenalin to keep you in top form and no surprises you couldn’t cope with. There were hidden gas-jets in the hallway—but p-suits made them irrelevant. The laser-hole by Tokugawa’s door was the perfect gauge for Rand’s hose. She had a p-suit of her own stashed in her office, and managed to reach it—but passed out before she got its hood over her head. Once they had access to her terminal, Jay and Duncan were able between them to coax the system back up and on-line in a matter of minutes. As the main lights came on, they could almost feel the cheer reverberating around the Shimizu. Then, ignoring the hundreds of incoming calls, they put in an SOS to the Space Command, and soon found themselves talking to an Admiral Cox, an old warhorse who was most interested in—and totally unfazed by—an attempted overthrow of the planetary government. With a minimum of words, he extracted from them every scrap of useful information they could give him, then put them on hold.

  Despite a mild sense of anticlimax, Jay felt himself grinning. “We did it, guys,” he said.

  “Hell of a note,” Rand said. “I started the day a respectable artist—and now I’m running a goddam hotel.”

  Jay giggled. “You may be going out there just a star, kid…but you’re coming back a waitress.”

  “You know,” Duncan said, “
I always thought I could run this dump better than that asshole.” He gestured at the sleeping Tokugawa, and all three of them broke up. She did look silly. In the absence of gravity, simply binding a person’s wrists and ankles does not immobilize her effectively enough; instead you tape each wrist to its related bicep, each ankle to its thigh, then tape elbows and knees together. The result looked remarkably like a Buddhist in the midst of prostrating herself.

  But their laughter chopped off short when they noticed that she was no longer breathing.

  “…and about half an hour later, Commander Panter showed up with six Marines in full armor—and here we are,” Jay finished. He glanced at his watchfinger. “I’d say she died about two hours ago. That’s everything we know, Admiral.”

  He and Rand and Duncan were in a place any small boy would have killed to visit: the command center of the Citadel, the UN Space Command’s principal fortress in space. It looked just like it did in the movies. The only person with them now was Admiral Cox himself, a grizzled old centenarian with a startlingly warm smile—but Jay knew perfectly well that every word he’d just said had been heard by literally hundreds of people on and off Earth. It was beginning to make him distinctly uneasy too. Cox was treating them as vip guests—but Jay was beginning to suspect how long it might be before he slept in his own bed again.

  Cox sucked coffee from a battered military-issue bulb, and nodded sadly. “Post mortem shows a fatal allergy to sedation. Iatrogenic, of course. Her superiors didn’t even give her an option. They wanted her interrogation-proof. Interesting people.”

  “I’m sorry, Admiral. We should have thought—should have given her antidote right away—”

  Cox shook his head emphatically. “There was no other way to take her; you’d have thrown your lives away trying. And it was too late for antidote the moment she lost consciousness. More coffee, gentlemen?”

  Jay had been too busy talking to consciously taste his; he queried his tongue and learned that the brew had come from the Atherton tablelands of Queensland. “Yes, please, Admiral.” The others accepted as well, and a servobot much uglier and clumsier than anything in the Shimizu brought them fresh bulbs.