I’d spent the rest of the previous day searching until finally crashing in my hotel suite for a couple of hours’ kip before heading out again. Now I headed away from the hotel at random, floating up, down, this way and that along Liberty’s maze of passageways and spaces, here in a rock-lined tunnel, there in a glass, domed crevice, here in a tunnel again.
Do it for long enough and you feel like a hamster, in one of those expandable hamster home sets.
If you’re ever looking for somewhere to hold someone hostage, a place tunnelled out of rock in three dimensions is probably a pretty good one. Needle in a haystack didn’t begin to cover it. If she and Giles weren’t anywhere where they were supposed to be—and they weren’t, Liberty’s rent-a-cops had checked that much—then they could be anywhere.
I floated past a series of low-budget hostels and into a small mall area. To my left was a shop selling clothes, taking advantage of Liberty’s not quite zero-G micro-gravity to pile them high and presumably sell them cheap.
(It costs a lot to lift goods out of Earth’s gravity well—so emigrants are best off riding the shuttle with nothing but the clothes on their backs and then buying a new space-manufactured wardrobe when they get to Liberty).
I glanced idly across the shop’s display. T-shirts. Socks. Underpants.
Underpants.
Nigel.
That was where I’d seen him. Two years ago, when I was lying in a cramped bunk in an American mining ’roid and flicking through a communal, and much thumbed, clothing and general goods catalogue.
Somewhere around page 567 had been Nigel, gazing a thousand yards into the distance while set into a heroic pose marred only by the fact that he was wearing nothing save a pair of blue and white striped Y-fronts and some matching socks.
I’d probably never have remembered him if he hadn’t have looked so stupid.
But how the hell did a male underwear model end up floating dead in Cislunar space? Shame he’d never know that his demise was down to a pair of Y-fronts.
I floated through random passageways until I found a small phone booth.
Silvie—bless her—answered on the second ring.
‘Central Security, Mister Peterson’s office. How may I help you?’
‘Hi Silvie, it’s Pete. Can you check the files and see if there are any photo shoots or similar registered? Anything to do with models or things?’
‘Yeah sure.’ Sounds of tapping at a keyboard came down the line, followed by the sound of the handset being picked back up. ‘No photo shoots, but there is short film being shot in an unfinished hotel complex up at the eastern end of the Equatorial Rift. Some English guy called Gerald Trent. You want the address?’
‘Yeah. And anything else you’ve got on them.’
The Equatorial Rift was a deep irregular canyon that snaked its way around two thirds of Liberty’s twenty-mile circumference. Most of the asteroid’s development was clustered around the western and central sections of the rift, its sides now studded with windows some two dozen stories deep, and its expanse crisscrossed by a web of silvery metal and glass pedestrian float-tubes.
Had it been finished in time for this season’s transfer, the Hotel Astropolis would have catered for the more discerning traveller; but being as it was an unfinished shell that was pressurised but not much else, it was currently catering for no-one but a British film crew apparently looking to make a series of ‘experimental’ films.
Right.
I’d taken some unfinished tunnels to within a mile of the hotel then space-hiked the rest of the way along the rift, breaking into an airlock with an override code I’d found while poking around Peterson’s office. I probably should have called for reinforcements, but I didn’t trust Liberty’s ‘finest’ to do anything more than alert Sophie’s kidnappers. I felt pretty naked without the gun I’d been forced to give up by Liberty’s customs men, but then I’ve always found weapons a poor substitute for intelligence and quick thinking.
Not that I was necessarily using those at the moment.
Plan A had been to sneak as far as I could without being seen, but when the place turned out to be chockfull of people I switched to plan B: walk around like you’re supposed to be there and hope that it’s one of those outfits where half of them are strangers to the other half.
Turns out they weren’t, strangers to each other that is, because the first guy I breezed past with a nod and a smile reacted with first a look of confusion and then a shout of, ‘Hey, what? Who the—’ and only stopped speaking because I’d punched him in the mouth. I gave him a second punch in the ribs and then a third cross to the temple that left him out cold.
I’d now have been on plan C, had I had one, but that dilemma was avoided by the swift arrival of another goon, who also didn’t recognise me, but who unlike his earlier and now silent compatriot, had the benefit of entering the conversation holding a firearm. It was expensive looking model, American, designed to work in zero-G, and held by a man who looked like he knew which end was his friend.
I raised my hands slowly, and smiled a cautious smile. ‘Is the hotel not open yet?’
Two other guys with guns had quickly arrived and together they’d pushed, prodded and dragged me to what would one day be some kind of lounge or bar, empty save for the array of handhold encrusted pillars that a large, high-ceilinged near zero-G space demands. I could have tried to escape, but getting away wasn’t my objective; that was finding Sophie, and I’d figured that if these guys conformed to cliché, they were probably taking me to either her or Giles or both.
I was right.
Sophie was there, in a sleeper bag attached to a pillar, apparently sleeping, probably drugged. Giles was beside her, an arm wrapped lazily around the pillar.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Space Lieutenant Peter Stone. How nice to meet again.’
I gave him no reply save a non-committal shrug, partly because I didn’t really want to get drawn into conversation, but mainly because I’d just had a gag shoved into my mouth and was being tied to the pillar in front of Sophie’s.
Giles floated, as theatrically as one can float, across the floor between us. The three goons took up positions either side of me and beside Sophie while Giles found himself a spot to pontificate from and began to talk.
And talk.
And talk.
It took him a full half hour of petty resentments, bitterly remembered slights, and hardcore Marxist-Leninist theory, before he finally made it out of his childhood and into his time at Oxford and his recruitment by a Soviet sleeper agent. As it happened, I’d managed to break the bonds securing my hands a full fifteen minutes before that point, but I was holding fire on escaping because I wanted to find out how the story ended.
Ten minutes later, Giles finally got onto the plan.
‘It’s simple,’ he told me. ‘Brilliant. Direct. As with all things Soviet. Someone dressed in Sophie’s spacesuit will be boarding her ship—’ he paused and looked at his watch ‘—about two hours ago actually. Nice thing about races is you get to avoid all the usual customs hassles if you just turn up that little bit late. Sophie’s ship will set off, but a half hour in, or about ten minutes ago, its pilot will set it to explode and then bale out wearing a rather sophisticated stealthed spacesuit. As far as the world will be concerned, Sophie will be dead. Tragic young heroine. Never grow old. State funeral, commemorative coins, the works. Meanwhile—’
He paused for a moment, smiling, apparently needing a moment to consider his brilliance.
‘—we’ll still have Sophie, and we’ll have her all to ourselves for another one hundred and forty-five days. When the time comes for her to walk past those customs men with dyed hair and a fake ID she’ll be a loyal Soviet agent, and we’ll have her entire education on film. On Mars we’ll get to the Soviet colony, and they’ll ship us home, ready for Sophie to be the figurehead of a people’s revolution. We’re going to create a new Britain. A classless society, in which the old order is just dust beneath our boots. I
shall be first citizen, leading the workers into the new age!’
He smiled, and then added, with no trace of irony that I could detect, ‘After all, I have the breeding for it. Which probably just leaves one question in your mind. What was Nigel doing?’
I shrugged, in half confirmation.
‘That was annoying. The plan was for one of the Victoria’s lifeboats to eject and home in on Sophie’s replacement, screened by the chaff—with everyone watching thinking they’d seen some sort of malfunction, an ejection followed by an explosion. Of course, thanks to you the poor girl’s now waiting for a rescue that will never come. But I’m sure she’ll be glad to die for the glory of the revolution.’
I tried to say something past the gag. It might have been ‘Nice!’ but what it was didn’t matter.
‘You have something to say, Space Lieutenant?’
He pushed off from his pillar and floated over to mine, stopped himself, and bent down to lift the gag out of my mouth—just in time for me to hunch forward and bite down on his outstretched finger, hard. He screamed. I grabbed hold of him and slammed him into the goon who was floating to my left—something I was only able to do because my feet were tied to the pillar—and then swung an elbow into the face of the guy who was floating to my right.
That gave me the couple of seconds I needed to bend down and release my feet, then I was pushing down hard to send me cannoning up to the ceiling. I wasn’t worried about Giles; he was still cart-wheeling slowly through the air waving his bitten finger while screaming like a girl. Professionals first, amateurs later.
And from the way they held themselves, moved, and stared, these guys were professionals. Three armed against one not was pretty poor odds for the not—except that from the slow and deliberate way they moved I was pretty sure they were new to zero-G.
They weren’t clumsy; these weren’t clumsy people. But I was gambling that their mental battle-space would still be resolutely two-dimensional. Look left. Scan right. Fail to notice the guy coming down from above. I twisted round in mid-air to hit the ceiling feet first and pushed hard to send me straight back down into the guy to Sophie’s left. Nothing pretty, just his head into solid floor.
A gun boomed, but I was already heading up, and then back down. Goon number two went the same way. I made a grab for his gun, but the impact had sent it floating across the room. No time, up, across, down, slam.
‘Impressive, Lieutenant Stone, very impressive. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to join us?’
Giles. Who’d manage to stop screaming about his finger and grab the floating gun, and was now slowly drifting away from me towards the doorway, making damn sure to keep the gun pointed straight at me.
I shrugged. ‘Don’t think I’d get on with the management.’
‘Shame.’
‘Perhaps.’
I had to keep him talking just that little bit more.
‘It’s inevitable, you know.’
‘Really?’
Bit further.
‘You’re a small man, Lieutenant Stone. Seeing the world only as it is, and not as it could be.
Just a little bit further.
‘You think the Russians are going to leave you in charge?’ I asked.
‘They’ve promised!’
Almost there. If you can read body-language, if you can see a man’s desires in the tightness of his smile, you can tell when a man with a gun is just about to shoot you. And Giles was just about to shoot me.
‘When the time comes mate, you’ll be off to the Gulag, and you’d just better hope they don’t give you to the Siberians to play with on the way.’ There. Just about in the doorway. Now. ‘Still, probably nothing you didn’t get at public school.’
I pushed off from the pillar just an instant before I heard the gun fire. The rocket powered slug tore inches past me and exploded against one of the huge plate windows, shattering it into a thousand pieces and leaving the room open to space.
I had just enough time for the thought to occur that the builders might not have completed the decompression safety systems. Then I felt the thud as heavy metal screens slammed down across each window.
And across each door.
I quickly floated across to Sophie. She was woozy, but a few gentle slaps got her awake.
‘Stone? What? Where’s Giles?’
I looked at the cloud of blood and body parts floating in front of the now very closed exit.
‘He had a bit of a problem with the door.’
Liberty
Late afternoon, 4th January 1989
By time Sophie and I’d snuck our way out of the complex, space-hiked our way back to civilisation, called Peterson, explained what had happened, waited while his guys checked out the Astropolis and took all concerned into custody, and then explained to him that Her Majesty’s government would be awfully grateful if none of this was mentioned, at all, ever, it was rapidly heading towards the end of the day.
Sophie came back from chatting to the British Consul just as I was finishing tapping out a somewhat abbreviated witness statement on a borrowed terminal. She wasn’t crying. But from the look in her eyes she wanted to.
‘It’s such a mess. The press are telling everyone I’m dead. The authorities have let my family know I’m not, but aren’t sure what to say publicly. Giles is the Queen’s nephew and it would be just awful for it all to come out. And now I’ve just found out it’s too late for us to get off Liberty. Apparently, we’re too far past Earth and travelling too fast for anything to get off now and get back home. So I’m stuck on here heading for Mars. It’s probably going to be a couple of years before I can get back to Earth, I’m going to miss university, parties, everything! What are we going to do?’
I put a finger to her lips, wondered over to the Consul, and showed him my badge. ‘Stone, SIB. Say nothing to the press. Tell the authorities I’m handling it. Need to know and all that.’
I didn’t wait for his reply, but returned to Sophie, grabbed her by the shoulder, and pointed her at the door. ‘Come on.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Home.’
‘But they said there’s no ship—’
‘If you’re civilians, and you’re following the rules there’s no ship. So it’s a good job I know some guys with five tons of Rolls-Royce’s finest at their backs and the best damn navigator in the fleet.’
Ten minutes of phone calls from a public call box later and it was all sorted. Butler and the boys were already into a hard burn that would put them on course to intercept Liberty in four hours. They’d pick us up and take us back to Chatham, where an announcement would be made that while on routine patrol they’d found a spacesuited Sophie drifting in space after bailing out of her exploding craft.
No mention of Giles, or of me—which is just how I like it.
Only thing that could bugger things up would be if someone spotted Sophie in the next four hours. We needed to hole up, fast. Across the passageway was a hotel that looked cheap but discrete, in a pay by the hour, reception desk behind a grill, kind of way. I nodded at the hotel. ‘We should hide out over there. Make sure you don’t get spotted.’
‘But Space Lieutenant Stone,’ Sophie said, a very naughty smile playing across her lips. ‘What on Earth are we going to do to amuse ourselves in a cheap hotel room for four hours?’
I hooked my arm through hers. ‘I’m sure we’ll think of something, Your Highness.’
Cursebreaker: The Jikininki and the Japanese Jurist
Kyla Ward
‘As often as I see it, I’m still amazed so many curses transform the victim into an uncontrollable monster. Don’t you people ever think?’
‘It wasn’t me! The Abbot said Brother Manabumaru’s sin deserved the most horrible degradation!’
‘But you’re the one who summoned the Cursebreaker, yes?’
‘I, ah… ’
‘Come on; when I materialised, you didn’t even blink.’
‘You won’t tell the Abbot, will
you?’
‘I suppose that’s why you summoned me into the bath house.’
‘No one comes down here anymore. The Abbot says it softens the flesh.’
‘Oh, that it does. Can’t remember the last time I had a real bath, let alone in a hot spring… oh, alright then, Brother—?’
‘Shichiro, honourable lady of the spirits.’
‘Please, just call me Mark. Especially if I’m in a monastery somewhere in Japan… I don’t suppose you could give me some idea of when? I mean, Buddhism is pretty conservative. You could be wearing that robe whether this is the sixth century or the twenty-sixth. By the three, you’re buff for a monk.’
‘It is the fifth year of the Son of Heaven Ogimachi.’
‘Who’s the Shogun?’
‘There’s some dispute.’
‘So we’re probably talking the sixteenth century, age of the country at war. Now I’m surprised that a single corpse-eating maniac is causing such a fuss.’
‘These are the sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzan. The war does not come here. But now the people say we have lost the grace of the mountain spirits and soldiers shall come, to plunder our treasures and their grain.’
‘And in the meantime a jikininki is despoiling their graveyard.’
‘He steals their sake, rapes the women and boys. No warrior can match him and when the exorcism failed—’
‘I can see I’ll need a word with this Abbot of yours. That’s the second thing. Don’t worry, Shichiro, I’ll say I came according to the mandate of Heaven.’
‘Many thanks, honourable lady. May I ask what is first? We can climb down to the village and see if they—’
‘Some clothes. Tea would be nice. I suppose a massage is out of the question?’
In the ancient chronicle, Things Unseen in the Middle Kingdom and Therefore Anywhere Else, Shichiro had read of the Cursebreaker. When those afflicted by unbearable fates beseeched Heaven for aid in the right terms, a strange, pale-skinned woman might appear. A creature of some impossibly distant realm, she was bound herself by the most terrible of curses to aid the afflicted and would do so, although the book warned that the results might not be quite as the summoner expected. In the darkness of the Lesser Hour of the Hare he had resolved; the summoning was his only hope. But now, as he escorted the spirit incarnate back up the path, Shichiro wondered if his success might not validate everything the Abbot had said.
The New Hero: Volume 1 Page 12
