“Sorry,” she said, and raised the gun. What the hell else could she say? Maybe we can still be friends, after this is over?
Steward was trying to say something. She felt herself wring out again.
She shot him three times with her silenced pistol and left. The police guards didn’t look twice at her hospital coat and ID. Proper credentials had always been her specialty.
CYA. REESE HEADED for Japan under a backup identity. Credentials her strong suit, as always. On the shuttle she drank a star beast and plugged her seat’s interface stud into the socket at the base of her skull. She closed her eyes and silently projected the latest scansheets onto the optical centers of her brain, and her lips twisted in anger as for the first time she found out what had really gone down, what she’d been a part of.
Alien pharmaceuticals, tonnes of them, shipped down under illegal cover. The network had been huge, bigger than Reese, from her limited perspective, had ever suspected, and now the L.A. heat had everything. Police and security people everywhere, even in the space habitats, were going berserk.
All along, she’d thought it was friends helping friends, but her friends had jacked her around the same way she’d jacked around Steward. The whole trip to L.A. had been pointless—they had been stupid to send her. Killing Steward couldn’t stop what was happening, it was all too big. The only way Reese could stay clear was to hide.
She ordered another drink, needing it badly. The shuttle speakers moaned with the same tuneless synthesized chords as had the speakers in the hospital room. The memory of Steward lying in the bed floated in her mind, tangled in her insides.
She leaned back against the headrest and watched the shuttle’s wings gather fire.
HER CAREER AS a kick boxer ended with a spin kick breaking her nose, and Reese said the fuck with it and went back to light sparring and kung fu. Beating the hell out of herself in training only to have the hell beaten out of her in the ring was not her idea of the good life. She was thirty-six now and she might as well admit there were sports she shouldn’t indulge in, even if she had the threadware for them. The realization didn’t improve her mood.
Through the window of her condeco apartment, Reese could see a cold wailing northeast wind drive flying white scud across the shallow Aral Sea, its shriek drowning the minarets’ amplified call to prayer. Neither the wind nor the view had changed in months. Reese looked at the grey Uzbek spring, turned on her vid, and contemplated her sixth month of exile.
Her hair was black now, shorter than she’d worn it in a long time. Her fingerprints were altered, as was the bone structure of her face. The serial numbers on her artificial eyes had been changed. However bleak its weather, Uzbekistan was good at that sort of thing.
The last person she’d known who had lived here was Steward. Just before he came to L.A. and blew everything to smithereens.
A young man on the vid was putting himself into some kind of combat suit, stuffing weapons and ammunition into pockets. He picked up a shotgun. Suspenseful music hammered from the speakers. Reese turned up the sound and sat down in front of the vid.
She had considered getting back into the trade, but it was too early. The scansheets and broadcasts were still full of stories about aliens, alien ways, alien imports. About “restructuring” going on in the policorps who dealt with the Powers. It was strange seeing the news on the vid, with people ducking for cover, refusing statements, the news item followed by a slick ad for alien pharmaceuticals. People were going to trial—at least those who survived were. A lot were cooperating. Things were still too hot.
Fortunately money wasn’t a problem. She had enough to last a long time, possibly even forever.
Gunfire sounded from the vid. The young man was in a shootout with aliens, splattering Powers with his shotgun. Reese felt her nerves turn to ice.
The young man, she realized, was supposed to be Steward. She jumped forward and snapped off the vid. She felt sickened.
Steward had never shot an alien in his life. Reese ought to know.
Fucking assholes. Fucking media vermin.
She reached for her quilted Chinese jacket and headed for the door. The room was too damn small.
She swung the door open with a bang, and a dark-complected man jumped a foot at the sound. He turned and gave a nervous grin.
“You startled me.”
He had an anonymous accent that conveyed no particular origin, just the abstract idea of foreignness. He looked about thirty. He was wearing suede pumps that had tabs of Velcro on the bottoms and sides for holding onto surfaces in zero gee. His hands were jammed into a grey, unlined plastic jacket with a half-dozen pockets all sealed by Velcro tabs. Reese suspected one of his hands of having a weapon in it. He was shivering from cold or nervousness. Reese figured he had just come down the gravity well—he was wearing too much Velcro to have bought his clothes on Earth.
Some descendants of the Golden Horde, dressed in Flieger styles imported from Berlin, roared by on skateboards, the earpieces of their leather flying helmets flapping in the wind.
“Been in town long?” Reese asked.
HE TOLD HER his name was Sardar Chandrasekhar Vivekenanda and that he was a revolutionary from Prince Station. His friends called him Ken. Two nights after their first meeting, she met him in the Natural Life bar, a place on the top story of a large bank. It catered to exiles and featured a lot of mahogany imported at great cost from Central America.
Reese had checked on Ken—no sense in being foolish—and discovered he was who he claimed to be. The scansheets from Prince mentioned him frequently. Even his political allies were denouncing his actions.
“Ram was trying to blame the February Riots on us,” Ken told her. “Cheney decided I should disappear—the riots would be blamed on me, and Cheney could go on working.”
Reese sipped her mataglap star, feeling it burn its way down her throat as she glanced down through the glass wall, seeing the wind scour dust over the Uzbeks’ metal roofs and receiver dishes. She grinned. “So Cheney arranged for you to take the fall instead of him,” she said. “Sounds like a friend of humanity to me, all right.”
Ken’s voice was annoyed. “Cheney knows what he’s doing.”
“Sure he does. He’s setting up his friends. The question is, do you know what you’re doing?”
Ken’s fine-boned hands made a dismissive gesture. “From here I can make propaganda. Cheney sends me an allowance. I’ve bought a very good communications system.”
She turned to him. “You going to need any soldiers in this revolution of yours?”
He shook his head. His lashes were full and black. “I think not. Prince Station is a hundred years old—it’s in orbit around Luna, with ready access to minerals, but it cannot compete effectively with the new equipment on other stations. Ram wants to hang on as long as possible—his policy is to loot the economy rather than rebuild. He’s guaranteed the loyalty of the stockholders by paying large dividends, but the economy can’t support the dividends anymore, and the riots showed he has lost control over the situation. It is a matter of time only. We do not expect the change will be violent—not a military sort of violence, anyway.”
“Too bad. I could use a job in someone’s foreign legion about now.” She glanced up as a group of people entered the bar—she recognized a famous swindler from Ceres named da Vega, his hands and face covered with expensive, glowing implant jewelry that reminded her of fluorescent slime mold. He was with an all-female group of bodyguards who were supposed to stand between him and any Cerean snatch teams sent to bring him to justice. They were all tall and round-eyed—da Vega liked women that way. He’d tried to recruit Reese when they first met. The pay was generous, round-eyed women being rare here, but the sexual favors were supposed to be included.
One of those jobs, Reese thought. She was tempted to feed him his socks, bodyguards or not, but in the end told him she was used to a better class of employer.
Da Vega turned to her and smiled. Uzbekistan was
suddenly far too small a place.
Reese finished her mataglap star and stood. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
“AN ARCHITECTURE OF liberation,” Ken said. “That’s what we’re after. You should read Cheney’s thoughts on the subject.”
The night street filled with a welling tide of wind. Its alloy surface reflected bright holograms that marched up and down dark storefronts, advertising wares invisible behind dead glass. The wind howled in the latticework of radio receivers pointed at the sky, through a spiky forest of antennae. A minaret outlined by flashing red strobes speared a sky that glowed with yellow sodium light.
“Liberation,” Reese said. “Right.”
“Too many closed systems,” Ken said. He shrugged into the collar of his new down jacket. “That’s the problem with space habitats in general—they strive for closed ecological systems, and then try to close as much of their economy as possible. There’s not enough access. I’m a macroeconomist—I work with a lot of models, try to figure out how things are put together—and the most basic obstacle always seems to be the lack of access to data. We’ve got a solar system filled with corporate plutocracies, all competing with each other, none giving free access to anything they’re trying to do. And they’ve got colonies in other solar systems, and nothing about those gets out that the policorps don’t want us to know. The whole situation is far too unstable—it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen because the data simply isn’t available. Everything’s constructed along the lines of the old Orbital Soviet—not even the people who need the information get the access they require.
“Prince Station’s main business is processing minerals—that’s okay and it’s steady, but the prices fluctuate a lot as new mineral sources are exploited in the Belt and elsewhere, and it requires heavy capital investment to keep the equipment up to date. So for the sake of a stable station economy, it would be nice for Prince to develop another, steadier source of export. Biologicals, say, or custom-configured databases. Optics. Wetware. Export genetics. Anything. But it takes time and resources—five years’ worth, say—to set something like that up, and there are other policorps who specialize in those areas. We could be duplicating another group’s work, and never know it until suddenly a new product comes onto the market and wipes out our five years’ investment. All this secrecy is making for unstable economies. Unstable economies make for unstable political situations—that’s why whole policorps suddenly go belly-up.”
“So you want the policorps to give away their trade secrets.”
“I want to do away with the whole concept of trade secrets. Ideally, what I’d like to do is create a whole new architecture of data storage and retrieval. Something that’s so good that everyone will have to use it to stay competitive, but something that by its very nature prohibits restriction of access.”
Reese laughed. The sound echoed from the cold metal street. “You’re dreaming.”
He gave her a faint smile. “You’re right, of course. I’d have to go back two hundred years, right to the beginning of artificial intelligence, and redesign everything from the start. Then maybe I’d have a chance.” He shrugged. “Cheney and I have more practical plans, fortunately.”
She looked at him. “You remind me of someone I used to know. He wanted to know the truth, just like you. Wanted access.”
“Yes?”
The cold wind seemed to cut her to the bone. “He died,” she said. “Somebody shot him in a hospital.” Somehow, caught in the warm rush of memory, she had forgot that ending.
“A funny place to get shot.”
She remembered Steward’s last comprehending look, the final words that never came. The northeaster touched her flesh, chilled her heart. The lonely street where they walked suddenly seemed endless, not just a street but the Street, an endless alloy thoroughfare where Reese walked in chill isolation, moving between walls of neon that advertised phantom, unreal comforts…She shivered and took his hand.
Ken’s voice was soft, almost drowned by wind. “Were you close?”
“Yes. No.” She tossed her head. “I wanted to be a friend, but it would have been bad for business.”
“I see.”
She tasted bile on her tongue, gazing down the endless gleaming Street again, the dark people on it who touched briefly and then parted. Sometimes, she thought, she just needed reminding. She wondered what Steward’s last words might have been.
A bare yellow bulb marked the door to Ken’s apartment building. They entered, the yellow light streaming through the door to reveal the worn furniture, the bright new communications equipment. “Hey,” Reese said, “it’s Agitprop Central.” She was glad to be out of the wind.
The room blinked to the distant red pulse of the minaret’s air-hazard lights. Reese stopped Ken’s hand on the light switch, stopped his mouth, every time he tried to talk, with her tongue. She really didn’t care if he had someone special back on Prince, preferred this to happen in a certain restrained, ethical silence. Her nerves were wired for combat and she snapped them on, speeding her perceptions and making everything seem in slow motion, the way his hands moved on her, the susurrus of her own breath, the endless red beat of the strobe that sketched the outlines of his face in the warm darkness…She could hear the bluster of the northeaster outside, the way it knocked at the panes, shrieked around corners, flooded down the long and empty Street outside. Kept securely outside, at least for this slow-moving, comforting moment of exile.
A DAY LATER a maintenance seal blew out on Prince Station and killed sixteen people. Ken was pleased.
“We can do a lot with this,” he said. “Demonstrate how the administration’s cronies can’t even do simple jobs right.”
Reese stood by the window, looking out toward the distant brown horizon, tired of Ken’s torn wallpaper and sagging furniture. In the distance, foreigners on Bactrian camels pretended they were carrying silk to Tashkent.
“Sabotage, do you think?” she asked, then corrected herself. “Sorry. Destabilization is the proper term, right?”
He sat crosslegged on his chair, watching the screen with an intent, calculating frown. “It could have been us, yes. An effective little action, if it was.”
“The people who got killed weren’t volunteers, anyway. Not your people.”
He grinned in a puzzled way. “No. Of course not.”
Reese turned to look at him, folding her arms. “That’s what scares me about you idealists. You shoot sixteen people into a vacuum, and it’s all for human betterment and the triumph of the revolution, so everything’s okay.”
Ken squinted as he looked at her against the light. “I’m not sure it’s different from what you do.”
“I’m a soldier. You’re an ideologue. The difference is that you decide who gets killed and where, and I’m the one that has to do it and face the consequences if you’re wrong. If it weren’t for people like you, I wouldn’t be necessary.”
“You think this difference somehow makes you less responsible?”
Reese shook her head. “No. But the people I fight—they’re volunteers, same as me. Getting paid, same as me. It’s clean, very direct. I take the money, do a job. I don’t know what it’s about often as not. I don’t really want to know. If I asked, the people I work for would just lie anyway.” She moved to the shabby plush chair and sat, curling one leg under her.
“I fought for humanity once, in the Artifact War. I was on Archangel with Far Jewel, making the planet safe for the Freconomicist cause. Making use of the alien technology we’d stumbled on by accident, all that biochem ware the Powers are so good at. It sounded like a noble adventure, but what we were doing was looting alien ruins and stealing from the other policorps. The war blew up, and next I knew I was below the surface in those alien tunnels, and I was facing extermination cyberdrones and tailored bugs with nothing between death and my skin but a very inadequately armored environment suit. And then I got killed.”
Ken looked at her with his h
ead cocked to one side, puzzled. “You had clone insurance? This is a different body?”
Anger burned in Reese as she spoke, and she felt it tempering her muscles, turning them rigid. Remembered dark tunnels, bodies piled in heaps, the smell of fear that burned itself into the fibers of her combat suit, the scent that no amount of maintenance and cleaning would ever ever remove.
“No. Nothing like that. I did the killing—I killed myself, my personality. Because everything I was, everything I’d learned, was just contributing to help my employers, my officers, and the enemy in their effort to murder me. I had to streamline myself, get rid of everything that didn’t contribute in a positive way toward my own physical survival. I became an animal, a tunnel rat. I saw how qualities like courage and loyalty were being used by our bosses to get us killed, and so I became a disloyal coward. My body was working against me—I’m too tall for tunnels—but I tried real hard to get short, and funny enough it seemed to work. Because in times like that, if you’ve got your head right, you can do what you have to.”
She looked at Ken and grinned, baring her teeth. An adrenaline surge, triggered by the violent memory, prickled the down on her arms. “I’m still an animal. I’m still disloyal. I’m still a coward. Because that’s the only way to keep alive.”
“If you feel that way, you could get out of the business.”
She shrugged. “It’s what I do best. And if I did something else—got a job as a rigger, or some kind of tech—then I’d just be somebody else’s animal, a cow maybe, being herded from one place to another and fed on grass. At least this way, I’m my own animal. I get my reward up front.”
“And during?” Ken’s dark eyes were intent.
Reese shifted in her seat, felt a certain discomfort. Nerves, she thought, jinking from the adrenaline. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“You like the work. I have that impression.”
She laughed. No reason to be defensive about it. “I like being wired and hanging right on the edge. I like knowing that I have to do things right, that any mistake I make matters.”
The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century Page 44
