Callia sat motionlessly on the long couch in the main room, watching Trent. She wore modest red fatigues, zipped all the way to her collarbone. Her maser was strapped to her thigh, and for an instant the image bothered Trent. Then it swarmed up out of memory: Domino, standing in the airlock at Bessel City, had been dressed just like that, down to the quick draw holster on her thigh.
When the eggs were done he put one egg on top of the mayonnaise, a slice of cheese on top of that, the second egg on top of the cheese, and the mustard-covered piece of toast on top of that. He sliced the sandwich diagonally and handed half of it to Callia without asking her if she wanted it.
"Come on," he said wearily. "Let's go."
Callia was silent on the way down to the hotel's garage, eating her half of the egg sandwich. She was silent while the chameleon cycled through the garage's airlock, silent as Trent drove. She said nothing all the way out to the spot where Trent parked the chameleon and turned off the engine.
It was five minutes before 10:00 a.m.
Sitting inside the chameleon with no artificial sound but the gentle murmur of the airplant, Trent was intensely aware of Callia on the long bench seat next to him. He could hear her breathing; with some concentration, filtering out the sounds of his own body, he could hear her heartbeat.
Noon came and went without a single Peaceforcer vehicle passing them.
"Most of the men I have ever known," said Callia, "found silence very uncomfortable."
Trent sat comfortably in the dark silence without replying.
Over half an hour passed before she spoke again. Trent could almost hear the smile in her voice. "I'm not going to outwait you, am I?"
"Are you trying to?"
"Not any more. I want to talk to you, Trent."
"Feel free."
"How did we get out here?"
"I drove us. In the chameleon. You were there the whole way."
"That's not what I mean."
"Then I don't know what you do mean."
"It's night, Trent. The terrain is practically invisible. You didn't use the headlamps all the way out here. You didn't yesterday, when Lan went with you."
"What do you think the PKF would do, Callia, if they looked down from one of their Orbital Eyes and saw some fool driving out every day to park and watch PKF rolligons wander by?"
"That's clear enough. What I don't understand is how you could see to drive without lights."
"I have this great inskin."
"Trent."
Trent paused, thinking. "All right. You know anything about image processing?"
"A bit. Like what a night scope does for snipers?"
"Interesting choice of analogy," Trent said quietly. "But essentially correct. I can do something very similar with my inskin."
"I've known two Players before you, Trent. I've never even heard of someone being able to do something like this."
Trent shrugged. "It's a new model inskin. A nerve net with fairly remarkable processing power. It's only been on the market for about half a year."
"Are you really a genie?"
"Yes."
"... you're not--very human--in a awful lot of ways, Trent."
"Humanity," said Trent, "is overrated. One of my friends is a replicant AI. Another's a genie. Another's a completely normal human who's studying to become a lawyer. Ask me which one I trust most."
"That's almost not what I mean. You are about to hurt the Peaceforcers worse than I think they've ever been hurt before, and I'm not sure why you're doing it."
"I already had that conversation with--a cranky old woman. She decided I was a man of virtue and good motives."
"Trent, why are you here?"
Trent did not answer her for a while, thinking. Finally he said, "Do you really need to know?"
"Not really." She was silent a beat, then said, "You're confusing Lan."
Trent laughed aloud. "I don't think so. I think Lan knows exactly what he wants."
"You said no to him."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I prefer girls."
"Hmm." Trent could hear her shifting position on the long bench next to him. "You couldn't tell it by me."
"Insulted?"
"A little, perhaps," she said softly. "Not very. Are you in love?"
"In love? I don't know.... Yes. A girl I may not ever see again."
"You're probably going to die at Verne."
"Good chance of it."
"Do you want to survive the boost?"
"That's a stupid question."
"Is it? I haven't known you very long, Trent. The only other person I ever knew like you got to be a hero about a month after he started acting the way you're acting right now."
"I'm a little tired, Callia. That's all."
He heard the long slow exhalation of her breath. "Have you learned anything out here, watching the Peaceforcers?"
"A couple things. There's one daily rolligon from Tsiolkovsky, comes by every afternoon between one and two o'clock, usually closer to one than two. It's never come earlier than 1:08, never later than 1:56. Aside from that one rolligon there's no regularity to the traffic that I've been able to determine; I presume that one regularly scheduled rolligon heads back to Tsiolkovsky sometime later at night. I've learned that Lan has no patience and that you do."
"Trent?"
"Yes?"
"Have you ever made love in a crawler?"
"No. I watched a man die, sitting where you are right now. This was his crawler. It was a bitch to get the blood off the seat." Trent paused. "It's been a bitch of a year."
"I'm sure." He heard the rustle of her clothing, of the woman undressing in the dark.
Trent said, "Do you know what you're doing?"
"I am reminding you," said Callia Sierran, "why you want to survive this boost."
The last two bodies arrived that evening.
* * *
26.
On January second, 2070, the night before they were scheduled to ambush the Peaceforcer rolligon carrying Benny Gutierrez, Lan and Callia went to Jackson Town, to pray at the Temple. Trent did not go, nor Korimok. They sat together in the main room, in a comfortable silence. Korimok was playing a sensable, Trent did not know by whom, the overlarge sensablist's traceset resting lightly on his temples. His eyes were half open and his lips moved whenever the sensable's viewpoint character spoke. From the half-spoken words Trent heard from Korimok, he did not think the sensable was in either English or French.
Trent sat on a couch looking out the window.
The existence of the window, the fact that their rooms were above ground, screamed "tourist." Loonies do not care what things are like outside; whether it's night or day does not matter to them. There's never any air and it is always either far too hot or far too cold. When the sun is in the sky the landscape is white and gray, as dull and boring as Earth's Antarctic deserts. When the sun is not in the sky the landscape is invisible.
It was nighttime still on the far side; but the two week night was nearly over, and before eight hours were up the sun would rise. Now nothing but the starshine illuminated the plain that surrounded Jackson Town and the hills that rose away from it.
It was as bright as daylight to Trent. He played with the data from his optic nerve, slowly building up, one second's image on top of another, an image of the Lunar landscape outside the window that was of photographic quality. At any given moment the scattered starlight was nearly indiscernable; over the space of minutes the landscape slowly evolved into a glaring panorama that stretched to the horizon.
Only a small part of Trent watched Yevgeni; another small portion processed the image of the Lunar desert.
Most of him was inundated by the Crystal Wind.
The preacher is a middle-aged man with a pot belly, pounding on the pulpit as he reads from the Bible. "Hath we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our father?"
>
Text, no video, no sound: Jerusalem (AP)--Shoichiro Okaya, the text says, Japan's ambassador to the government of Greater Israel, was killed today when a car bomb blew up outside a Palestinian college 'Sieur Okaya was visiting.
A woman wails in the back of Trent's skull, wailing as the holocams pan around the devastation at Tunis airport, where a semiballistic has come down out of control and smashed into an aircraft that was taking off. Mahliya Kutura sings to Trent, from a live concert in China, sings to him of her despair, of her love. The Unification Council approves construction of a warship tentatively called the Unity; at an estimated cost of nearly eight billion Credit Units, it will be the single most expensive spacecraft ever built. A woman in India drowns herself and her three children. A man in Canada is killed when the world's largest collection of Wagner memorabilia falls on him; it makes the late edition of the Electronic Times.
There was movement around Trent; Yevgeni rising, the gentle whisper of doors opening and closing.
A squad of PKF Elite raid and burn to the ground an ideolog camp at Kochovskaya, Russia. In Oakland, California, in Occupied America, a suit is filed in California's Superior Court to prevent a suspected genie from playing in the WFL System Bowl until he has undergone a test to verify that he is not a genie. The captain of a tuna boat reports seeing, for the first time in over five years, a school of dolphins on the open sea, two hundred kilometers west and south of Hawaii; his report is widely discounted. The Loos Microlectrics Corporation of Mexico City reports the largest first-year revenues of any startup corporation in over two decades. Douglass Ripper, Jr., Unification Councilor for New York Metro, submits a bill to the Unification Council calling for a reduction of PKF forces in Occupied America amounting to nearly one quarter of the total PKF presence in Occupied America.
Trent was distantly aware of Lan's presence, but it did not draw him away from his immersion in the Crystal Wind until Lan said almost hesitantly, "Trent?"
From a great distance, Trent said, "Yes?"
"You know," Lan said quietly, "sometimes I sleep with people who slept with Callia. They all say I'm better than she is."
Trent opened his eyes slightly. The room's lights had been turned off; to Lan it must have seemed that he stood in very nearly complete darkness. To Trent's dark-adapted genie eyes, without even employing the image processing his inskin gave him access to, the boy was a barely visible shape standing in the doorway to the bedroom he shared with Callia.
Trent said simply, "I believe you."
"I'm probably never going to see you again after tomorrow."
The boy's image flared slowly, as though a bright light were coming up; it was not something Trent had consciously decided to do. "In the real world, Lan, people, even good friends ... part. Sometimes you see them again, sometimes you don't."
Lan said with such certainty it chilled Trent, "I'll never see you again."
"I'm sorry, then. I like you."
"I'm sorry, too. Good night, Trent." Trent sat watching the boy; Lan started to turn away and then stopped, just stood in the doorway with the unreal starlight reflecting off the planes of his face.
"Trent?" he said at last.
"Yes?"
The boy said awkwardly, "I really do like you."
"Go to bed, Lan."
"Trent ... I'm cold."
"Lan, it's not...." Trent trailed off, remembering Jimmy Ramirez's shocked reaction on the very cold night Trent had asked to sleep with him, and finally he said softly, "All right. Go get a blanket and come over here."
Lan was back quickly with a light blanket. He sat down on the couch next to Trent, cuddled up against him. Lan was shivering and it was a long time before he stopped; Trent sat quietly with the boy in his arms, waiting while Lan dropped off, watching the impossible silver starlight while Lan slept.
The preacher has reached a fine height of screaming euphoria, has built to a shrieking, pulpit pounding finale. "And Behold, the Lord said to Malachi, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of Hosts! But who may abide the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth?"
* * *
27.
In the early hours of January the third, 2070, a pair of chameleon crawlers and a single very expensive chameleonized rolligon pulled out of the hotel garage outside of Jackson Town, and set off across the sunlit Lunar surface.
Behind them, in the hotel, Trent had turned off the radio packet InfoNet service; if things went well, two Peaceforcers with radio packet inskins would be held prisoner in those rooms for two or three days, and Trent didn't want them making calls.
He had left Lan's gift, the gun, in Callia and Lan's bedroom.
In the rolligon as they left that morning were a loonie and a crazy woman and seven bodies; in the lead chameleon there was a nice young ideolog, and in the chameleon at the tail of the procession was a man wearing a Peaceforcer uniform and a Peaceforcer's face.
By 9:00 a.m., more than four hours before Benny Gutierrez was due to drive by, they were in place.
The elongated shadows of early morning were scheduled to last all day. It made the hilly landscape around the gorge eerie; the long, jutting spires of rock casting long sweeping shadows behind them.
Trent did not like the scalesuit he wore.
He sat unmoving in the shade, out of the broiling sun, on the shady side of a large boulder that would keep him from the view of the approaching Peaceforcer rolligon until the rolligon was immediately beneath him. He was on the far side of the crevasse from Callia and Lan and Yevgeni S. Korimok; the rolligon would pass between them.
Trent found that he had grown used to soft pressure suits; the stiff scalesuit, its front blackened as though by heat damage, had already rubbed him raw at the back of his neck, and was starting in on his thighs. The inside pocket where his handheld was stored pressed against Trent's hip; the spot where the handheld pressed was going numb.
The fadeaway bomb sat at his feet. It was an improvement on the device he had used at Luna City, and had cost him better than twenty times as much as that small device. The bomb was oval, about the size of a football; one surface was completely flat. If the bomb worked correctly, as the prototype had, it would connect itself to the surface of the Peaceforcer rolligon by a superconducting magnet, punch a sixty centimeter long spike down through the stiff outer wall of the rolligon, and, through the spike, spray fadeaway at high pressure across the interior of the rolligon. Assuming they were wearing their suits with the helmets off--standard PKF operating procedure--the fadeaway would get them all.
The chill of the frozen stones Trent sat upon was reaching up through the scalesuit, despite the best efforts of the scalesuit to keep Trent warm--the softsuit Nathan had bought Trent had kept him far warmer. Trent was hidden in the shadow of the boulder; there is no atmospheric scattering on Luna to prevent shadows from being completely black.
Radio silence was in force. He could not talk to Callia or Sergei, waiting in the chameleonized rolligon on the other side of the gorge, or Lan, in the crawler a third of a kilometer to the east.
The Peaceforcer rolligon came from the west, from Tsiolkovsky Crater. Trent's inskin placed the time at 1:14 p.m. when he first saw the approaching rolligon's headlights, invisible in the harsh sunlight. The scalesuit Trent wore was an exact duplicate of the ones the Peaceforcers used, down to the PKF insignia on the breast; it was equipped to monitor both standard PKF com bands and emergency broadcast frequencies.
Complete silence on every band. Trent cycled up and down through the eight channels the scalesuit was capable of accessing; nothing. The PKF rolligon moved slowly forward, made its creeping way across the regolith. The vehicle faced directly into the low sun; their visibility would be terrible. Trent sat patiently, waited while the rolligon, painted in the black and silver of the United Nations Peace Keeping
Force, grew large before him. Fifteen meters long, three wide, the rolligon had six huge unpressurized wheels that lifted dust up into the early sunlight, where it hung for long moments before beginning its descent back to the Lunar soil.
Trent had set his scalesuit's radio for Channel Eight, emergency frequency for the PKF.
The nose of the rolligon was passing underneath Trent.
Trent picked up the fadeaway bomb, held it in one hand, and jumped.
His hiding place was just over ten meters above the surface of the crevasse, and the top of the rolligon was four and a half meters above that; he fell not quite six meters in one-sixth gee while the rolligon moved beneath him.
He landed unsteadily on the tail end of the rolligon with a thump that rocked the vehicle slightly. He scrambled for balance, hampered by servos that were slower than his own muscles, lunged forward at the last moment and landed belly down across the top of the rolligon, still holding the fadeaway bomb. He took the time to do it right, laid the bomb across the smooth metal of the rolligon's upper surface, and thumbed the pressure point that activated it.
The heat reached him through the insulating layers of the scalesuit. The surface of the rolligon glowed red over a half-meter wide section. Trent had only an instant to realize what was happening; he had an instantaneous vision of the maser blast that had taken Nathan in the stomach, and in one convulsive leap got off the surface of the rolligon and fell tumbling the rest of the way to the bottom of the crevasse.
He sat up slowly.
The rolligon continued its crawl toward the east. There was no sound on Channel Eight; Trent cycled through the rest of the PKF com bands.
Silence.
The rolligon crept deliberately forward, moving straight forward, not veering, not even when the road did.
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