Comlink tones sounded in my head, startling me. I hadn’t received a call since leaving Panamá and didn’t know I could receive one while jacked into the simulator, but it made sense—calls bypassed my little dream monitor back home.
I engaged the comlink. The sounds of the crackling flames from the burning hovercraft quieted. A husky, almost raspy voice came in on audio.
"Jiminez Martinez here, aide to General Garzon. The general has asked me to get the answers to a few more questions."
" Sí, that would be fine," I said, not in the mood to answer questions but happy to hear from Garzón, thinking he might tell me something about Tamara’s condition.
"First, the general would like to know if you have any more ideas on the whereabouts of Señor a de la Garza," Martinez said.
"What?" I asked. The general knew better than I did where Tamara was.
"The whereabouts of Señora de la Garza?" The man who called himself Martinez waited expectantly.
Only an Alliance agent would ask such a question. Since my interrogator had responded so quickly to my question, he had to be aboard ship. Radio waves would have taken several seconds to travel even to a nearby ship. My would-be assassin was taking a great risk fishing for information this way.
I thought of him, stuck at the other end of the ship, wracking his brain to learn what I knew, trying to find a way to reach me, and I was happy to give all the information I could.
"As I told Garzón, Arish admitted to murdering her before I finished him, but I did not think to ask where he had disposed of the body."
"I see ..." the husky-voiced man said. "And about herself? Can you remember anything else of importance—anything she may have told you about herself?"
"She was running from her husband, Señor Jafari. I thought it a breach of manners to inquire into her personal matters, and she never volunteered further information. As I told Garzón, if I can remember more, I’ll be happy to let you know."
"I see. Thank you. You have been more help than you know."
He disconnected.
"I’m glad you think so," I said to the empty air. I concentrated on the way his voice had sounded, so deep and gravelly, and tried to commit it to memory until I believed that if I ever heard anyone speak with that voice again, perhaps I’d know him.
I could tell by the sky that Perfecto and Hector had reached the hovercraft long before they reached me. The valley began to fill with light as they roared up the canyon, shooting streams of plasma into the air.
As they drew close Perfecto said over the helmet, "Angelo, any sign of that last samurai?"
"No," I answered.
"We’ll slow down when we come to your bend. Hop on and grab a turret. Shoot any place where someone might be hiding."
" Sí," I said.
I watched the canyon sides fill with light. When I knew they were almost on me, I strapped my rifle to my back, jumped up, and lunged into the open.
They hit the comer at 60 kph, then reversed thrusters. I grabbed the handrail and swung into the hovercraft. We darted off at full speed.
Hector drove. I climbed up in the turret behind Perfecto and started discharging plasma into the rocks and trees. Our trip back up the canyon was different from the trip down. With the turrets firing, the hills were fairly well lighted.
No snow flew in our face to obscure the view. The only sound was the echoing whine of the hovercraft and the whuft, whuft of the plasma. It was peaceful. The silence reminded me of the others who’d already jacked out.
Mavro’s probably already swaggering around the room and smiling, I thought. Mavro was good that way, very tough on the inside. He told everyone that eating processed algae three times a day was like having a continuous banquet after the odious dishes his girlfriend had cooked him only a week ago. And as for the rigorous exercise Abriara put us through, Mavro boasted that he’d gotten more exercise chasing down the dope addicts he mugged as a child.
People aboard ship responded to that kind of toughness. Mavro could walk into a room full of despondent people and, between his bragging and the cigars he passed out, within a minute he’d have them laughing at their own pains. I wondered if perhaps this talent hadn’t allowed him to talk the mercenaries into the harebrained scheme of commandeering Sol Station so he could rescue an old murderer from the clutches of the police.
We’d almost reached the spot where we’d first come down the mountain when we met the Yabajin.
We were heading toward a tree and Hector slumped forward with a moan. Perfecto yelled, "Jump!" and began blasting at a pine on the canyon slope. I dove into the snow and sat up as the hovercraft crumpled around the tree trunk.
The pine Perfecto had shot blazed along its entire length like a giant torch. The samurai began running uphill, away from his exposed position.
I pulled down my rifle and flipped on the sights, ran the blue dot up the ground behind him. He glanced back and saw the dot in the snow, spun, and fired.
I pirouetted quickly. My thigh warmed where his shot scored. I pirouetted again.
Perfecto said, "I’ve got him."
I stopped. Perfecto was squatting next to the wrecked hovercraft, rifle in hand, pulling the trigger. The samurai had quit running and he spun crazily, making it impossible for Perfecto’s shot to burn through the armor.
I fired at the Yabajin to keep him hopping. "Go beat him to death!" I screamed.
"Good idea!" Perfecto said. He stood and walked slowly up the hill.
I continued firing and the samurai, dropped his rifle and kept up his dance. From time to time he would step downhill, descending to meet Perfecto.
When Perfecto was ten meters below the samurai, the samurai leapt on him. He spun in the air and kicked at Perfecto’s chest. Perfecto dodged aside and slugged the samurai in the back. The armor on Perfecto’s fist shattered from the impact.
The samurai slid almost to the bottom of the hill.
He started to rise and I fired at him for good measure, hoping he was stunned, but I hurried the shot and hit the slope behind him. Perfecto jumped downhill in two strides. The samurai wasn’t quite standing yet and appeared dazed and off balance, but when Perfecto got within striking range, the samurai belted him in the jaw.
The blow lifted Perfecto in the air and sent him sprawling on his back.
I shot the samurai, but he was already in a spin and headed in my direction. My hopes for a fortune in prize money quickly dissipated. I ran to the crashed hovercraft, and jumped up to the plasma turret.
Perfecto shouted, "I’ll get him!"
I turned the guns in time to see Perfecto dive into the samurai from behind. For a moment the two were just a tangle of armor on the ground. Perfecto hissed in a voice filled with frustration and rage, "Shoot us! Shoot us!"
His neck snapped loudly; then both bodies rose up and began to rush toward me.
The Yabajin carried Perfecto in front of him, using his body as a shield. I could tell by the way his arms and legs flapped that Perfecto was dead.
I understood Perfecto’s anger, at that final moment, his feeling of helplessness. I shot a steady stream of plasma at the Yabajin’s legs, then at the arm clutching Perfecto’s throat. The armor couldn’t withstand the impact of a direct hit at such dose range, and plasma shot straight through the samurai’s arm. I thought he’d stop, but he kept coming.
I fired at the bit of the samurai’s helmet that showed above Perfecto’s head. The plasma hit his helmet and blew a gout of molten matter away.
By the time the Yabajin jumped up on the rail of the hovercraft, I could see the bones in his left leg charred black and blistered. His right arm was limp, useless. The molten plasma had eaten through it, leaving only a stump above the elbow and a hunk of meat hanging loosely in the samurai’s armor. I looked at him and thought of all the times I’d died in the simulator.
At not one of those moments had I endured half as much pain as this samurai was suffering. I screamed at him and leapt for his throat.
/> He slugged me in the neck with his good hand, shattering my armor and knocking me off the hovercraft. I gasped, and found my esophagus smashed.
While I slowly strangled, the samurai sat down on the rail of the wrecked hovercraft to scoop up snow and bathe the remains of his feet.
When I jacked out, Perfecto was struggling out of his armor. He smashed his helmet against the wall and kicked off his leg pieces. He panted and his eyes were bloodshot with rage. I wouldn’t have gone near him for any money. My nerves were jagged, but I felt lucky. All my deaths in the simulator had been easy that day.
Zavala waited by the door.
Kaigo sat patiently on his dais, surrounded by students, waiting for us to leave so he could jack them in. I removed my armor and hung it on the wall and followed Perfecto and Zavala from the battle room. Perfecto glared at the cream-colored floor and walls as he walked down the hall, averting his eyes from the lighting panels on the ceiling.
"Are you angry with me?" I asked.
"Angry with you? What for?"
"For losing the battle."
"No," he said. He sounded remarkably calm. "I’m angry because I think the samurai are cheating. They’re putting us in a situation where we can’t win. They give us no chance of success. I fought that samurai in hand-to-hand—no mere human is that strong."
"You must remember that he’s been training at 1.5 g’s for the past two years," I said. "He’s had a lot of time to perfect his skills and become strong."
"Perhaps, but I still think they’re cheating. They’ve got the simulators rigged to enhance their strength and cut their reaction times. It’s as if they must win at any cost."
Zavala eyed us both skeptically, as if preparing to argue, but said nothing.
I thought of the samurai in the simulators. If they worked eight-hour shifts, they might go through twenty battles per day. No one could endure the repeated psychic torment of twenty deaths per day.
Perhaps they did cheat. Perhaps they had good reason to cheat.
We climbed the ladder. Garcia and Hector were in our room with their teams. Garcia was smaller and older than I’d expected a timid-looking man with sea-gray eyes who kept rearranging his hands as if he didn’t know where to put them. I once knew a woman who had a deformed hand who hid it that way, and I watched Garcia to see if his hands were deformed: he had a white scar in the palm of each hand and a white scar on each wrist.
Garcia had obviously once played Jesus Christ in a passion play and had been crucified. By these signs I deduced he was from Venezuela, where such plays are common, and young men vie for the chance to be crucified.
One big chimera hunched over a battered guitar and strummed it softly, his amplifier down low. Full mellow notes filled the air. He sang an old Bolivian love ballad dedicated to women with large breasts. Some found the courage to muster wan smiles. Mavro had opened my chest full of liquor, and everyone eyed the bottles. They’d obviously prepared for a victory celebration, but now were forced to put the best face on it they could.
Mavro said, "Ah, here is the man who owns the liquor. Now the party can begin!" He passed out bottles of Flora Negra whiskey, and everyone accepted them gratefully.
Mavro handed me a bottle and I took a swig. It was too soon after the run in the simulator—my throat tightened, and I had to spit the first swallow to the floor.
The visitors stared at our living quarters as if they were medieval peasants visiting a castle for the first time. The regular living quarters were not nearly so spacious as our stateroom. They murmured approval. "Think how easy it would be to keep people from stealing your things if you had a nice room with trunks like these!" one said.
I felt uneasy with these strange people coveting my things, and I could tell Perfecto felt the same. He looked at his little blue lines on the floor and saw that they were obscured by feet and bodies as people ignored his boundaries.
We lay on the bunks and sat on the floors and drank and smoked and discussed our near victory from every angle, boasting of how well we’d done. Miguel and I had each made two kills. Mavro rewarded both of us with a fine bottle of dry wine. By that time I’d finished half my whiskey and the wine didn’t settle well with the liquor I’d drunk earlier, and soon I imagined the liquor was eating holes through my stomach.
The din of people talking became a droning in my ears. A man at the foot of my bed had a problem with gas, and began farting. Each time he farted someone would say, "I hear a frog," and we’d laugh.
I wanted to sleep, but my mind kept returning to Martinez, the man who’d pretended to be Garzón’s aide. I rolled off the bed, pushed a couple of sleeping guests off my trunk, got my list of biographies, and stepped into the hall to call each man who’d boarded the ship at Sol Station.
The liquor had almost blinded me, and I found it difficult to read the comlink codes. As each man answered, I listened to their voice and then hung up. Two men bad deep gravelly voices so similar I couldn’t distinguish one from the other: Alphonso Pena. and Juan Carlos Vasquez. 1 hunched over the biographies and laboriously studied the files of each man. The files appeared as if written on a billboard barely visible through a deep fog. Once I read something I had to hold it in my mind for a long time to make any sense of it.
Alphonso was a large man with a long list of credentials in targeting-system repair for particle-beam weapons.
How would one repair a targeting system on a particle-beam weapon? I wondered in my drunken stupor. What did he really do for a living? I didn’t know, nor could I deduce if he was any good at repairing targeting systems for particle beams. Juan Carlos was the plumber who’d defected from Argentina, the cyborg who’d worn the silver face at Sol Station. I liked his job. A plumber was something easy, something you could hold in your mind and say with certainty, "This man’s a plumber."
I knew exactly what it meant. In fact, if someone had walked down the hall, I’d have told him, "Juan Carlos is a plumber."
I remembered trying to read his body language at Sol Station, and he’d seemed perfectly at ease. But then, I thought, maybe this dog feels at ease when planning murder. He was Argentine. That was bad Argentina is where the Nicita Idealist Socialists first took over.
Also, he was a cyborg, though not a military model. Jafari had been in charge of Cyborg Intelligence for the Alliance. So it made sense: Juan Carlos was a cyborg, and an Argentinean, and a socialist assassin. And a plumber.
I set out down the hall to find him and stab him. But after I’d walked twenty meters I saw the ladder going up to the air lock and remembered I couldn’t get to him. I thought I should tell my compadres what I’d learned, but first I wanted another drink, so sat down to rest my wobbly legs looked around for my bottle of wine, then realized I’d left it in my room. I curled up in the hall and fell asleep.
A short while later Sakura woke me. He bent over me and shook my shoulders. Down the corridor two squat maintenance robots scoured the floor.
"Come now, are you ill?" Sakura asked. "Can you sing the company song for me, from the heart! ‘Motoki Sha Ka’? Show your gratitude to Motoki!"
He sang the company song line by line at the top of his voice. He’d caught me alone and helpless, so I followed his lead. When he was done, I sat on the floor and watched him climb down the ladder, searching for another victim.
The hallway was silent except for the whirring motors of the maintenance robots. I suddenly felt cold, and something strange happened: I felt the presence of someone else in the hall, an invisible being. The ghost of Flaco.
Even though I couldn’t see him I was certain he was there. I felt him walk down the hall toward me, then go to the ladder. He stood and looked up at the air lock, as if indicating he wanted to go find Juan Carlos.
I felt that he bore me no malice for letting him get strangled, but that he still wanted vengeance against his murderers—the death of Jafari’s employers.
The hair raised on the back of my neck. I’d felt a similar thing when I planned to leave
Tamara—the fear of her ghost, of being haunted—but this time it was much stronger.
Logically I knew there was no ghost. Psychologists have proved that people see ghosts in reaction to unbearable stress—the death of a loved one, a terrible accident. Certainly I’d felt such stress in the past few days. But the sense of Flaco’s presence was more persuasive than logic. I staggered up and ran for my room.
When I got to the door, I tried to compose myself. I’d feel silly if everyone saw my fear. I remembered a night in a small resort town in the Sierra Madres in Mexico. The night had been very cool and the air perfectly still. I’d taken a walk, and as I was coming around the comer to my hotel I’d seen a silvery human shape standing in the doorway outside the hotel. For a moment I’d been terrified, thinking it was a ghost, but the apparition quickly dissipated and I saw the truth of it: someone had been standing in the doorway only a second before, and the air had heated around his body, and as he stepped into the doorway the warm air stayed behind.
My prosthetic eyes had then detected a vaguely human-shaped apparition. It was a very strange occurrence, one never to be repeated. But this thing with Flaco, it was different. I’d not seen Flaco, only felt him.
I heard someone speaking behind the door: "You ... you can’t ekshpect too much from him—" one of the chimeras said—I think it was Nero, "he’ sh an old man."
"You mean an old handicap," Mavro said. "We always lose because of him. "
"Yesh," one of Hector’s men said. "Maybe if Angelo would have shlugged that lasht shamurai—just pushed him away, that plashma would have, would have ... eaten right through. Eaten right through the leg. Then what? We would have won!"
I jerked open the door. Those still sober enough to be awake turned to look at me, heads tottering.
Chapter 11
On My Way to Paradise Page 18
