Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  The commander’s files were the stolen originals. Where and how he had gotten them, she didn’t know.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “We’ll be running a team on Kon-Tiki, some of them undercover, some in the open. You’ll be on the clandestine side.”

  “You didn’t keep your promise, Commander—I’m rewriting our contract. I’ll cooperate with you, but not on a team.”

  “You’re too well known, Troy. As soon as you stick your head up, somebody’s going to shoot it off.”

  “I’ll keep my head down. I will report to you and you only.”

  He heatedly argued the need for constant communication—impossible if she worked alone—the need for surveillance teams to follow suspects one person could not follow undetected, the need for close coordination with intelligence support, logistical support, etc… She was unmoved.

  “Alone then, if you must,” he said at last. “I’ve arranged clinic sessions beginning tomorrow afternoon, at Earth Central.”

  “What sessions?”

  “You can’t keep that mug, Troy. You’re an interplanetary viddie star.”

  “No.”

  “Do you like your looks better than the ones you were born with?” He sounded genuinely astonished.

  “No more surgery.”

  He grew very still. “All right, why don’t you just tell me now: what orders are you willing to take?”

  “No orders, Commander. I’m willing to hear your suggestions.”

  “You think you don’t need us, is that it?”

  For an instant her gaze slid away, evading his.

  “You’re very wrong, you know,” he said softly. “I hope you don’t learn it the hard way.”

  “Everything of value that I know, I’ve learned the hard way.” She meant to be hard when she said it, but she knew he wasn’t fooled. She hadn’t even fooled herself.

  They had further fruitless talks, but before long he was saying a short goodbye to her in front of the Earth Central building on Manhattan’s East River.

  She was wearing Space Board blues and carrying a regulation duffel bag when she took a magneplane to the Newark shuttleport, but she never arrived there; as the saying around the investigative branch had it, she had gone off the scopes.

  To disguise herself, she didn’t bother with time-consuming and expensive plastic surgery. Surgeons kept records, and there was always the possibility that their greed would not stop with bills for services rendered but might extend to blackmail or betrayal. Instead she drew on an older tradition.

  An altered hairstyle or a wig, colored contact lenses, a tuft of cotton under the tongue—sometimes just a spot of color on the cheeks—was enough, when combined with subtle changes of gesture and expression and accent, to make her unrecognizable to anyone but a well-programmed machine. Her first transitory disguise made use of a greasy black hairpiece with a ponytail down to her belt.

  In a cosmos of strong and varied perfumes, altering her smell was even simpler. She wore leather pants and a leather jacket around the clock for a week and frequented New Jersey waterfront bars where the occupants mistook her ripe aroma for their own.

  It needed a couple of days of stalking, keeping her eyes and ears open—she had very good eyes and ears—and some hours of haggling prices over pitchers of beer, but Sparta managed to acquire two illegally programmable I.D. slivers. She never met the people who’d made them, and the people who sold them to her had no idea who she was.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, a pretty redhead named Bridget Reilly showed up at Newark and boarded the supersonic jitney for London.

  8

  Wearing a conservative dark suit and red silk tie, carrying the large black document case he usually carried, Blake left the fortified lobby of his parents’ building at the same hour he had for the previous two weeks and headed uptown, taking one of Manhattan’s restored antique subway trains.

  He’d deliberately established a predictable pattern, spending the early morning hours on the commlink seeking job interviews and leaving home shortly before the lunch hour. He liked to travel by subway rather than robotaxi; by switching trains he could tell whether anyone was following him on foot.

  He got off at his usual stop in the upper sixties and walked two blocks east on sidewalks bustling with happy workers and shoppers. It had rained the night before and the robosweepers had polished the shining marble streets. Now the clouds were breaking up, as Blake and everyone else who’d paid attention to the weather report knew they would, and their ragged remnants were tinged with gold in the noonday light.

  Blake walked past the Indian restaurant that he’d made his favorite lunch place, but he didn’t go in. He continued to the end of the block and used the public commlink on the corner of First Avenue to make a reservation for a compact hydro coupe, to be picked up in a village north of the city, on the east bank of the Hudson.

  Then he caught a swift, quiet, hydro-powered uptown local bus and rode to the 125th Street plane station. The elevated station was the crystalline jewel of its renovated neighborhood, its entrance resplendent in an autumn display of maroon and yellow chrysanthemums.

  Blake caught a fast magneplane upriver. He got off one stop before the village where he’d reserved his car and waited on the platform to see who else got off with him. No one worthy of suspicion. Good. Just before the magneplane’s doors closed he got back on and rode it three more stops.

  Making a reservation from a public infobooth had been a feint. The night before he’d used his father’s computer to reserve a different car under a different name, originating from somewhere that would look—to even a determined observer—like a different place.

  He picked up the little gray two-seater electric from the curbstand, freeing it from its shackle post by inserting his modified I.D. sliver. He drove slowly around the streets of the tiny town before heading north, into the preserve. He was confident that he had eluded surveillance.

  Twelve hours later: it was 1:00 A.M., a cold and moonless night under a sky brightened only by hazy stars and the ring of reflecting space junk that circled the Earth all the way out to geosynchronous orbit. Blake had crept within sight of the outer perimeter of Granite Lodge.

  The woods were thick with undergrowth and saplings, with an occasional dark conifer among the bare trunks of red oaks and maples and weedy sumac and the hundreds of other species preserved in the parklands of the Hendrik Hudson Preserve. Blake moved as quickly as he dared across the thick layers of dead leaves, still soaked from yesterday’s rain.

  He knew there were image enhancers and infrared sensors mounted at intervals around the electrified fence, and he knew there were motion detectors between the fence and the wall. There were chemical sniffers scattered throughout the woods, and organic sniffers—in the form of dogs—prowling the lawns. He knew that he was not going to slither undetected onto these grounds. There were no unguarded secret passages; no daring midnight climb up the cliffs would get him past the sentries.

  But he’d prepared for all this. After hiding the rented car he’d shed his clothes and pulled on a full body suit of impermeable clear polymer, which incorporated a total skin-area heat exchange system and a shielded internal heat sink, mounted between his shoulder blades.

  The heat sink would be saturated in little over an hour now, whereupon it would automatically vent a stream of superheated gas into the atmosphere behind Blake’s head, turning Blake into a walking blowtorch. This would be inconveniently conspicuous, although preferable to the alternative—for if the unit failed to vent, it would go critical and turn Blake into a walking bomb.

  Until that spectacular moment, however, Blake would stay as cool as a salamander. Externally he had the temperature of his surroundings—

  —which made him invisible, not only to the infrared sensors but, since he was sealed in odorless plastic, to the sniffers as well.

  His other preparations depended crucially upon the weather. Clear skies… The li
ghtest of cool breezes flowing downriver from an approaching high pressure system… Right about now…

  Yes, there they were, way off to his right, a fleet of orangy-pink glowing globes drifting among the stars—

  —drifting down the wind, drifting toward the cluster of buildings on the center of the grounds, which were dominated by the stone mansion itself.

  Lights blazed in the big house and across the grassy lawns. Barely visible human and animal shapes spilled out of darkened doorways and spread to the sides, keeping to lanes of shadow in a well-rehearsed defensive pattern.

  No sirens sounded, however. Blake knew from experience that the folks at Granite Lodge didn’t want to wake their neighbors unless they thought they had something really serious on their hands. Which is why there’d been no sirens the night he tried to break Linda out of there.

  Blake caught the faint but frantic hum of multiple step-monitors as the nearest railguns bobbed and swung, searching the skies, but no hypersonic chunks of steel were launched at the glowing globes overhead. The globes were virtually invisible to a very confused AARGGS, the antiaircraft railgun guidance system—

  —because the targets were only twenty meters off the ground, unreflective, and so small that at radar wavelengths software written for targets no smaller or lower or slower than parasails and hang-gliders couldn’t resolve them.

  Blake was attacking Granite Lodge with a fleet of stealth balloons. It would have been overkill to shoot down toy balloons with hypersonic missiles. Still, if the radars found their targets and the railguns fired, it would ruin Blake’s scheme.

  There were a dozen of the gossamer silk dirigibles, each powered by nothing higher-tech than a bit of burning parafin—a fat candle, bright in the infrared—but steered by feathery vanes and gill-like vents that opened and closed according to instructions from sophisticated guidance chips—preprogrammed for tonight’s weather. Slowly, silently, the dirigibles tracked their targets with microscopic visual sensors, drifting in like a fleet of stinging jellyfish.

  Too late for AARGGS. Now the human defenders of the lodge opened fire on the aerial fleet—but like the radars, they misjudged the size and range of their targets.

  Blake kept still in the darkness, taking long seconds to observe; these defenders were skittish killers, if they were killers at all. Their weapons were silenced, and they weren’t using tracer bullets. And their noise suppressors played havoc with accuracy. Without tracers they had no way of knowing where their bullets were going in the night sky. They might even be so scrupulous, Blake thought, as to be using rubber bullets, as they had the night he tried to escape.

  Someone got lucky: a burst from an automatic weapon hit one of the little balloons.

  There was a blinding flash and a terrific report. Spectacular streamers of light shot out of the blazing balloon as it fell to the wet lawn, where—in an effect so weirdly counterintuitive as to seem alien—it erupted in frenzy, sending little balls of pinkish yellow fire skittering across the damp grass like tiny creatures desperately running for cover. At the uncanny sight, well trained guard dogs howled and fled.

  If Blake hadn’t been so involved in the moment, he would have laughed. Those bouncing, scurrying points of pink light were a handful of BBs of sodium metal, fizzing into tiny rockets upon contact with the wet grass.

  Now the rest of the fleet found their objectives. White, pink, and yellow fireworks erupted on the roof of Granite Lodge. A couple of balloons floated under the porch roof and flashed into incandescence, setting the big wooden beams and the knotty pine planks ablaze.

  The three little airships that had been targeted for the garage landed almost simultaneously. Less than a minute later the garage’s hydrogen reservoir went off like a real bomb, blowing the walls out of the old carriage house and reducing the vehicles inside to vigorously burning wreckage as a great ball of flaming hydrogen rose into the night sky.

  So much for waking the neighbors.

  Blake figured he’d created about as much diversion as he could. He went swiftly through the remaining strip of woods. The electrified fence yielded to clips and cutters from his pack. As he crossed the ten meters to the low stone wall he hoped the guardians of the lodge were really as benign as he supposed, for this was the right place for antipersonnel mines in the ground and fléchette booby traps in the trees.

  He reached the wall without incident. The orange flames from the porch and garage cast dancing cross-shadows on the side lawn. The area ahead of him was lit only by floodlights. He clambered over the wall, careful of the thin plastic skin that was all he had between him and the black, angular stones. He moved into the white light, walking confidently upright. May as well be confident. Nothing could hide him now, until he reached the triangular shadows beneath the walls.

  Once into the darkness near the house he ducked and ran and vaulted onto the side porch. Doors were open where the staff had run out to defend the place. A human shape passed him at the corner of the veranda, shouting back over a shoulder. Blake ducked inside the nearest door.

  He went through the darkened library, into the entrance hall. The plans he’d studied, although he knew they lied, had nevertheless revealed the location of the lodge’s nerve center. While the huge curving main staircase left an impression of massive foundations, Blake knew there was a room under the stairs, a big room, no doubt acoustically silenced and furnished with consoles and flatscreens and videoplates, perhaps comfortable couches and chairs.

  With his clock running out fast he didn’t have a lot of time. He found the lock, hidden in the carved wooden paneling, and packed it with plastic. He stepped back seconds before the door crashed inward. He tossed a gas grenade into the room, waited a few seconds, and as he ducked into the room he dropped another grenade behind him in the hall. Why not, he wasn’t breathing the stuff!

  Inside the room, a lone young woman in a white uniform was already sound asleep in her contour chair in front of the display screens, her head thrown back and her long blond hair spilling almost to the carpet. Her right arm hung over the chair and her fingers trailed on the carpet.

  As Blake pulled her chair back, away from the console, his gaze was snagged by the ring she wore on the middle finger of that trailing hand, a gold ring set with a garnet carved in the shape of an animal. Later he was to realize that if some recent, separate thought hadn’t formed an association in his mind, he would have forgotten the ring as quickly as he noticed it.

  Blake looked at the screens and determined that the defense forces were outside diligently putting out fires. He studied the board and realized this was nothing but an I/O layout; the processors were elsewhere.

  He took a moment to absorb the room’s plan, following the electrical buses and cooling lines … there were the main computers, inconspicuous in an equipment rack against the short end of the room, where the ceiling descended steeply under the stairs. He didn’t have time to stay and play—he tore them out of the rack, breaking their connections, and stuffed them into his pack. He took the trays of chips he found nearby and emptied them in on top before he sealed the pack’s flap.

  He was out of the room and through the smoke-filled hall—

  —he was into the darkened library and through it, and through the doors, and onto the porch—

  —he was vaulting the porch rail, hitting the soft grass running … running and running across it, catching sight of other running shapes out of the corners of his eyes … over the wall, through the fence, into the woods…

  He took care to slow his pace, to move with caution and stealth through the damp woods. Behind him, the night sky was aglow with the burning. Sirens and amplified squawks from commlinks and the guttural roar of high-powered, hydrocarbon-burning engines approaching up the main drive drifted on the night, covering the squish of wet leaves underfoot and the scraping of branches as he worked his way through the woods.

  His car was parked some twenty minutes’ walk ahead through the night woods, well off the road, but a gl
ance at his plastic-covered watch showed he had a wider time margin than he’d planned, so he kept the plastic suit on; it was all that protected him from the bitter cold.

  He found the car without trouble—he was a confident nighttime navigator—and tossed his pack into the forward luggage compartment. He slammed the hood down upon it, then opened the door on the driver’s side. He reached in and fetched his sliver from under the seat. He inserted it in the ignition; the board showed power to the wheel motors.

  He reached to rip open the front of his plastic suit, which would disable the heat transfer system. Once he was safely away, he could dump the stored energy in the suit’s heat sink. Before he got his hand on the seam sealer, they came out of the woods—

  —three of them in white uniforms, all young, all blond, none looking very happy.

  “Hands up,” said the leader softly. He was a tall kid with a blond crewcut so short he looked bald.

  They had him on three sides, and all of them were pointing assault rifles at him. At this range it didn’t matter whether the bullets were rubber or not. They could still rupture his spleen or put out his eyes or break something else valuable.

  Baldy looked at Blake, naked inside his clear plastic suit, and sneered. “Fetching outfit.”

  “Glad you like it,” Blake said, his words muffled through the plastic film that covered his mouth. What could you do when you were wearing nothing but sandwich wrap, except try to hold on to your sense of humor?

  Baldy gestured to his two companions. They bundled into the cramped back seat of the little electric while Baldy kept his rifle pointed at Blake’s lower middle section. “You drive,” he said.

  “Four people weigh a lot,” Blake mumbled. “I don’t know if I have enough charge for all of you.”