The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  The comment startled Trent. "You don't know?"

  She shook her head, a quick efficient back and forth motion. "No. Domino said you would tell us. She told me we were hitting the Peaceforcers, and that you would tell us the rest; that was enough."

  "You seem to trust Domino a lot."

  "I trust many people. Trent--" She hesitated, and it struck Trent that it was the first time she had addressed him by his name. "Isn't there anyone you trust completely? Who you have faith in?"

  Trent did not even have to think about his answer. "A girl I know on Earth."

  "Then you understand," Callia said simply. "If Domino told me my eyes were blue, I would assume that they had changed color since the last time I looked in a mirror."

  Trent nodded thoughtfully. "Callia? May I ask you a question?"

  "You can ask me anything. My life is a public Board, Trent."

  "You're a member of the Erisian Claw."

  Callia did not even blink. "Yes." She seemed surprised. "Is that a problem?"

  "You've promised your life to the overthrow of the Unification."

  "Yes," she said serenely.

  Trent said very slowly, "I've never known anyone in the Claw, but one of my closest friends is Reverend of a Temple in New York. Callia, are you Erisian first, or Claw first?"

  Callia Sierran shook her head. "That's a question that has no meaning, Trent."

  "The Erisian Temples preach that life is sacred, Callia."

  "The Claw believes the same, Trent." Her gaze did not waver. "Our lives as much so as those of our enemies. When our lives are threatened by our enemies--and they are, every day--we do what we must."

  "I need a promise from you, Callia."

  The woman said instantly, "Done."

  "You don't want to know what it is?"

  "I would like to, yes."

  Trent shook his head, grinning despite himself. "All right. You can't kill anyone on this job. Not even Peaceforcers."

  For the briefest instant he thought she was going to argue, and then she nodded once. "I will do as you say. So will Lan. I can't speak for Yevgeni." She paused and then said, "Lan will want to know why we are not to kill Peaceforcers."

  Trent sat in lotus, studying something he had never seen before in his life. "But it doesn't matter to you?"

  "It matters to me, yes." Callia Sierran shrugged. "But not as much as doing what Domino has told me to do."

  "Which is?"

  "Domino," said Callia, "told me to do whatever you told me to do."

  * * *

  24.

  Domino had arranged for them to take over a suite of five rooms at a friendly hotel outside the Jackson Town dome. Trent wandered through the rooms briefly: a central room with a small kitchenette attached, with a window overlooking the Jackson Town dome; four bedrooms, one for Trent, one for Callia and her brother, one for Yevgeni Sergei Korimok--

  --and one for the seven bodies.

  Callia showed Trent the room that they had saved for him, said a quiet good night, and went to the room she shared with her brother.

  Trent opened his eyes to cool, bright yellow sunpaint and the smell of good coffee.

  The room was large, with a writing desk and chair and a bed. A closed door concealed the room's small shower. There was a terminal at the desk, turned off. The two suitcases Trent had left aboard the rented semiballistic had been put next to the desk.

  The boy sat at the foot of Trent's bed, wearing a brown robe that had seen better days and drinking from a bulb of coffee. His clear blue eyes were fixed on Trent, gaze steady and unblinking. He was sixteen or seventeen and slim, with long brown hair bound in a ponytail, and had either just depilated his facial hair or had never needed to.

  He smiled at Trent. "Good morning."

  "Good morning."

  "You sleep pretty hard."

  Trent sat up in bed, slowly. "At 3:38 a.m. you stood in the doorway for twenty-two seconds, turned and left. At 6:12 you came in and sat in the chair for four minutes and eight seconds. At 9:05 you came in again, dropped my luggage next to the desk, stood at the foot of the bed and mumbled a sentence that included the word lazy, and left. It's now 9:22, and you've been sitting at the foot of the bed for not quite three minutes."

  The boy blinked. "How do you know that?"

  Trent said, "I don't sleep very hard. You're Lan Sierran?"

  "Yeah." Lan grinned suddenly. "Got it. You have an inskin monitoring your auditory nerve."

  Trent looked at Lan Sierran thoughtfully. "Good guess. Excuse me." He got out of the bed and went to take a shower. He did not hurry. When he came back out again, one towel around his waist, drying his hair with another, Lan was still there, reading from the holofield of an InfoNet handheld.

  A second bulb, still sealed, had appeared on the endtable by the bed. "Coffee," said Lan, without looking up at Trent. "With cream, no sugar. This place has its own kitchen." He did look up then. "I've never been in hotel rooms before that had their own private kitchen attached. Domino told me you said you didn't want room service, not even waitbots."

  "I said that, yes. Are Callia and 'Sieur Korimok here?"

  "Nope. Went to Jackson Town. Yev's going to buy me and Callia scalesuits. Yev is a big believer in scalesuits."

  The memory popped up so fast and strong that for a moment it was as though Nathan were there in the room with him. "A friend of mine," said Trent, "said that scalesuits were disasters waiting to happen." Trent opened one of his suitcases, took out a pair of black cotton slacks and a long-sleeved gray shirt and put them on. Lan watched him dress with unabashed interest.

  "You have nice muscles. You don't see that on the Moon very much. Except on Peaceforcers," Lan amended. "But that's regs for them, they have to stay in shape so they can be sent back to Earth at the end of their tour." He shrugged. "I don't sleep with Peaceforcers."

  "I hope not," said Trent mildly. He settled on the bed in front of Lan and twisted the ring at the neck of the coffee bulb. He sipped at the coffee.

  Lan watched him. "You like it?"

  Trent blinked. "Yes." He smelled the coffee. "What is this?" Nothing he had drunk since he'd been on Luna had come close to tasting like real coffee.

  Lan nodded. "I hardly ever drink coffee myself. Caffeine's bad for you. And it doesn't taste as good as orange juice or tea. Or milk. But Booker Jamethon said you were a coffee junkie so we brought two kilos of S&W Colombian up with us when Domino told us to come."

  Trent glanced at the boy sharply. "You spoke to Booker?"

  "Not me. Callia. Domino works with the Syndic a lot, she has to." Lan shook his head. "When Callia found out we were going to work with you she researched. She's good at that, but even so she didn't get a lot. You have a lot of friends, but we left Earth before the--" he grinned "--news conference, while the Peaceforcers weren't certain still if you were alive or not. So we couldn't very well wander around asking people what sorts of things you wanted from home. 'Sieur Jamethon said you were a coffee junkie, and a Brother Andrew at the Flushing Street Temple told Callia you liked S&W Colombian. Nobody else talked to her very much."

  Trent nodded slowly. "Good. That's good to hear."

  "So anyhow," Lan continued, "what are we doing here?"

  "We're going to steal the LINK."

  "Okay. I'm supposed to blow something up?"

  "At one point, yes."

  "What is it?"

  "A Peaceforcer troop transport rolligon."

  The boy grinned broadly. "Great."

  "We are not," said Trent patiently, "going to kill anybody."

  The grin vanished. "You're kidding."

  "I'm not."

  "Not anybody?"

  "Nobody."

  Lan looked vaguely distressed. "You're going to blow up a Peaceforcer troop transport," he said, "without killing anybody?"

  "Exactly."

  The boy thought about it for a long moment. "But what's the point?"

  Later that evening the four of them sat in t
he dark with a glowing holograph in the center of the table. The holograph showed a map of Farside, with the triangle of Jackson Town, Zvezdagrad, and Jules Verne. A dotted red line ran from Zvezdagrad toward the crater Jules Verne; there was a big blue X where the line entered a series of low hills, just before the line actually touched Verne crater.

  "Everybody has summaries? Yes?" Trent looked around the table: Lan looked bored, Korimok was quietly following him, and Callia listened intently, as though worried she might miss some subtle nuance. Trent smiled at Lan. "Let's recap. On December twenty-second a man named Benny Gutierrez is scheduled to ship up to Luna City. Gutierrez is a webdancer, and from what I've been able to learn about him, a fairly good one. On January third he's scheduled to report for duty at the Lunar DataWatch base at Jules Verne. SOP for PKF personnel transfers of this kind goes this way:

  "Gutierrez isn't important enough to come in via semiballistic. In a way that's unfortunate; he'd probably be alone, or with one other passenger at most, and it'd make taking his place a lot easier." Trent shrugged. "Win a few, lose a few. At any rate, he's scheduled to arrive at Tsiolkovsky with five other DataWatch Peaceforcers on the monorail from Luna City. From there they rolligon to Jules Verne.

  "Gutierrez is ideal in many ways. He's American and he speaks French with an accent. Not my accent exactly, but it's unlikely the PKF at Verne will know that. He has a radio packet inskin. It's not my model, but they'd have to do a workup on me to prove that, and if they get that suspicious I'm blown anyhow. He's new to Luna, new to the PKF. Best data I have on him says the only other Peaceforcers he's likely to know are the ones in the rolligon with him when he leaves Zvezdagrad."

  Trent had found himself instantly at ease with Yevgeni Sergei Korimok; the tall pale loonie was pure Syndic, professional and detached where the work was concerned. "Therefore," Korimok said, in a high quiet voice that seemed perfectly in keeping with his demeanor, "the Peaceforcers in the rolligon with 'Sieur Gutierrez must not reach Jules Verne."

  "Now how the slithy hell are we going to do that," said Lan softly, leaning across the table to stare at Trent, "without killing them?"

  Trent stared through the gloom at the boy. "I have bodies coming to stand in for the Peaceforcers who'll be on the rolligon. We've got good med records on the Peaceforcers who'll be with Gutierrez; the biosculptor who did me agreed to take five corpses, men who died of natural causes, and do dental work on them so they'll match the dental records of the five Peaceforcers coming in with Gutierrez. We have two more corpses, a man and a woman, to take the place of whoever ends up driving the rolligon. There's no way to make a good guess about that; any of literally dozens of Peaceforcers could draw that particular duty, male or female. There aren't many female PKF at Jules Verne, only about ten percent of the total complement, but it's a possibility to plan for. Whether it's a man or a woman driving the rolligon we have a body to substitute. We won't have that person's dental records but if we sufficiently damage the body we substitute for the driver then we won't need them."

  Korimok nodded slowly. "So this gets you in, yes?"

  "Yes."

  It was Callia who said, "How, then, are you going to get out?"

  Trent told them.

  There was a hushed silence when he was finished.

  Lan said, "That's crazy. You're just going to get yourself killed."

  "Maybe."

  Callia stared at Trent. "Trent, he's right."

  "It's a risk," Trent agreed. "But not an impossible one."

  Yevgeni Sergei smiled thinly. "A problem with so many young people, I have seen. This desire to be a hero."

  "A hero," said Trent, "is someone who knows when to run away."

  Everybody stared at Trent.

  "I," Trent proclaimed, "am a hero."

  Three bodies arrived in stasis fields the next morning.

  In the hills to the west of Jules Verne, Trent sat alone in Nathan Dark Clouds' chameleon. He had parked the chameleon just north and above the ravine where the Peaceforcer rolligons passed on their way to the DataWatch base at Jules Verne.

  Six hours. At 10:12 a.m. Capitol City time a single rolligon crept through the Lunar night, twenty meters beneath Trent and forty away, headlamps sending quarter-million candlepower beams of pure white light out into the Lunar night. Trent sat almost motionless, breathing deeply and very slowly.

  Part of him watched.

  Most of him was elsewhere.

  Johnny Johnny was almost gone; Trent had very little impression left of his Image as something separate from himself. Johnny Johnny's voice came less frequently now, as Trent assimilated the program that had once been his Image. There was no sadness in it, for it was a completion, not an ending. The person who took shape in the darkness, in a place as remote as possible from the scouring storm that Players call the Crystal Wind, was far greater than the sum of his parts.

  At 12:20 exactly a caravan of four rolligons passed. At 12:36 another rolligon passed, and then nothing until 3:07, when a pair came by together.

  At four o'clock that afternoon the man who had once been Trent, and once been Johnny Johnny, turned the engine on and headed back to Jackson Town.

  The mass driver at Jackson Town stretches three and a half kilometers in a series of superconducting magnets spaced consecutively further apart. The separation at the catapult head is only forty meters; at the far end it has stretched to seventy-five. Lunar orbital velocity is only 1.6 kilometers per second, but even so loads boosted from Jackson Town must undergo upward of one hundred gravities acceleration in the course of launch.

  Trent spent most of December 22, the Sunday morning before Christmas, in the control booth from which the Jackson Town catapult was run, watching as loads were boosted into orbit. The booth was small, just barely large enough for Trent, Yevgeni, and the woman running the mass driver.

  Trent was not introduced to the woman, a small Asian woman with a blue-silver skin dye and pale gold hair who was so delicate that if it had not been for her shortness--about 165 centimeters--Trent might have pegged her for a loonie.

  He watched her work for several hours without interfering. He watched carefully, recording into his inskin.

  Yevgeni remarked, dryly, that Trent was acting as though his life depended on understanding how the catapult was run.

  The work was reasonably straightforward on her end. A group of men in scalesuits, without any heavy moving equipment, would load a single capsule at the catapult head, placing the capsule in a cradle-like contraption that looked like half of an egg shell. The egg shell sat some thirty meters back from the first magnet, and was completely open at the end facing the first magnet. Trent watched better than a dozen launches, and they never varied. The egg shell was attached to a sixty meter long maglev rail, and each launch began with the egg lifting about twenty centimeters above the rail, a lift that was barely visible from the control booth, and then accelerating toward the first ring. At the end of sixty meters the egg shell slammed into a pair of long vertical bars that prevented it, but not its load, from continuing any further. The capsule continued on into the first magnet, moving so quickly now that Trent could barely see it--

  --and vanished as the magnets grabbed it at a hundred gravities.

  After fourteen launches the crew broke for lunch. The Asian woman did not get out of her chair; she blinked once, took her traceset off, and smiled at Trent. Her voice surprised him; it reminded him instantly, both in quality and choice of words, of Jodi Jodi. "What do you think? Yev says you're a webdancer, you could do what I do. Want a job?"

  Trent shook his head and smiled back at her. "Forgive me, but just what do you do?"

  "Oh." She looked startled. "I guess it's not very obvious from watching me sit there like a juice junkie? I monitor. Before every launch I run diagnostics and do a go-nogo for every ring, then the same thing for the maglev rail the swatter runs on, then for the release mech on the swatter."

  "The swatter is the egg-shaped thing?"

&nb
sp; "Yes. That's basically what it does, you see. Sort of swats the load so that it's moving even and steady when the first ring grabs it. I can abort the launch at any time up to the point where the first ring grabs the load. After that it's gone."

  "How long have you been on the job?"

  "Two years, a couple months."

  "Ever had to abort a launch?"

  "I delay launches maybe one every six weeks or so, because the superconductor fields are fluctuating, the swatter rode rough on the prior launch, a couple other reasons. I only had to attempt an abort after the swatter started moving one time. We lost power on a six hundred meter section of the catapult." She shrugged. "Didn't catch it in time. You know what the odds are against a load taking out a ring that's maybe five meters wide? When the rings are separated by an average of sixty meters?"

  "Eight point five percent."

  The woman looked sharply at Trent. "We ended up on the short end of the stick. Lost a ring."

  Trent nodded. "What would happen if you tried to launch something without using the swatter?"

  "You mean a free load?"

  "I suppose that's what I mean."

  The woman blinked, looked interested for the first time. "Good question. I've never heard of anyone trying it; catapult design is pretty standardized aside from things like length and boost. I think you'd lose the load. And maybe part of the catapult as well. The load needs to be kept stable in the early part of the launch; that's the place where you're likeliest to have enough wobble that you'd lose it. It's more important on the midget here than it is on longer catapults," she added. "Over at the Luna City catapult you're only pulling three gees, and a miscalc early on probably wouldn't take the catapult down. Even at the Verne catapult your top boost is only around nine or ten gees. Not much danger of knocking out one of the catapult rings with a missed load. Here it's something to watch for."