Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  Janet Morris and David Drake

  1987

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 - DlNNER FOR ONE

  Chapter 2 - HOBSON'S CHOICE

  Chapter 3 - TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

  Chapter 4 - ELLA BRADLEY

  PART TWO

  Chapter 5 - DATA SEARCH

  Chapter 6 - SOMEBODY ELSE'S JOB

  Chapter 7 - DOWNSIDE

  Chapter 8 - THE CLUB

  Chapter 9 - IMPROVISING

  Chapter 1O - HOUSE CALL

  Chapter 11 - MODIFIED PROGRAM

  Chapter 12 - BRADLEY'S APARTMENT

  Chapter 13 - CENTRAL MEDICAL

  Chapter 14 - TEAMWORK

  PART THREE

  Chapter 15 - THREE ON A MATCH

  Chapter 16 - ENTRY'S PROBLEM

  Chapter 17 - GONE TO GROUND

  Chapter 18 - INTERROGATION

  Chapter 19 - TURN-AROUND

  Chapter 2O - STRINGS

  Chapter 21 - A VIEW OF SKY DEVON

  Chapter 22 - DOWN ON THE FARM

  Chapter 23 - BRADLEY'S MOVE

  Chapter 24 - DAMAGE CONTROL

  Chapter 25 - PRISONERS

  Chapter 26 - LADIES FIRST

  Chapter 27 - HEAD GAMES

  Chapter 28 - BACK CHANNEL

  Chapter 29 - A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

  Chapter 3O - COLLISION COURSE

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 31 - CRISIS COMMITTEE

  Chapter 32 - CLUB OUTING

  Chapter 33 - PARTY FAVOR

  Chapter 34 - LE MOULIN ROUGE REDUX

  Chapter 35 - SECURITY MEASURES

  EPILOGUE

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 - DlNNER FOR ONE

  If Sam Yates hadn't been so upset by the call he'd just gotten from his wife back on Earth, he might have paid more attention to his waiter before the fellow died.

  Communicate through my lawyer, Cecile'd written in the note she sent after slamming the phone down a month ago. He'd called her then to say he was accepting the transfer to the headquarters to the UN Directorate of Security.

  On the Moon.

  Cecile'd said she wanted to talk about his feelings. More accurately, she'd wanted to tell him what his feelings were . . . and when he disagreed, she'd hung up on him. That was fine, since it absolved Yates of a duty he was otherwise going to feel no matter what.

  But why in the name of all that's holy was Cecile calling him directly, now - at his office - to natter on in her usual fashion at Earth-Moon rates?

  “Sit here, please,” said the Arab waiter to another customer, a little man whose puffy, pasty features indicated that he had been away from Earth's sun and gravity much longer than Sam Yates.

  Le Moulin Rouge served French cuisine, but it was owned and operated by what had been a family of Algerian diplomats accredited to the UN. They were Arabs, only two generations removed from their Egyptian roots. The Kabyle Revolution had deprived them of their diplomatic posts and probably gave them good reasons not to return to Algeria as well. The restaurant was an obvious source of livelihood for expatriates who chose to remain on the Moon.

  The little man trying to insist on a separate table for himself obviously didn't understand the peculiar conditions of the Moon. Yates wasn't a cop - not really: he nudged microchip files - but categories were his life, and the argument caused him to shift his tablemate from one slot to another. The fellow wasn't a Moon local, as he'd assumed, but rather a recent visitor from an orbital habitat.

  It was a paradox of human psychology that space was at a premium on the Moon, a planet comparable to Mercury or Mars in size; but orbital habitats, built in hard vacuum, were under no such restraints. The first construction at a habitat site was the electromagnetic envelope which turned away the hard radiation of space. A habitat could be armored with slag to soak up radiation the way the Earth's atmosphere did, but that wasn't nearly as practical for an installation that was expected to grow over a period of years.

  As soon as an electromagnetic shield was in place, it could be expanded simply by reeling out more wire and boosting the current flow. Habitats grew like coral reefs, accreting layers of aluminum beams and foamed-glass paneling on the outside. Often the habitat's rotation was slowed while progressive demolition turned the old core areas into low-gravity recreation areas.

  But humans on the Moon lived in tunnels carven through rock, a laborious process complicated by the difficulties of getting from one point on the perimeter of a colony to another. Much of the volume created when teams tunneled outward had to be devoted to roadways. On an orbital habitat elevators crossed the center of the dome or sphere and reached the opposite perimeter with very little intrusion into the population's living area.

  It would have been easy enough to build up from the lunar surface, creating structures similar to those of orbital habitats, except that they were stressed against the Moon's real gravity instead of the centrifugal force that mimicked gravity off-planet. The problem was that the mass of the Moon prevented electromagnetic shielding, and the faint lunar atmosphere and magnetic field did little to protect humans on the surface from the constant, omni-directional sleet of cosmic rays. Even transportation across a colony was as difficult on the surface as it was beneath several meters of shielding rock.

  But the most important reason lunar colonies were underground was that humans on the Moon clung to tunnels as the proper way to live, with the fervor of northerners refusing to give up their clothing in the tropics of Earth. The edge between survival and death for humans was so narrow everywhere off the planet on which they evolved, that customary uses quickly gained the stature of laws graven on stone.

  So the dining area of Le Moulin Rouge was cramped into six double tables, and the likelihood of the little man from a habitat occupying a table alone was roughly equal to his chances of floating home without a ship to carry him. Yates tried to ignore the silly argument beside him by glancing at his fellow diners until his truit amadine arrived.

  Only two of them were women - a consideration never far from the surface of Sam Yates' mind. A party of Indian diplomats filled the tables on the other side of the narrow aisle. In addition to the five men in severe suits and string ties, there was a woman wearing an orange sari and a caste mark on her forehead.

  Yates' side of the restaurant had a more diverse clientele. Two men at the table behind him were talking volubly in low voices. The language sounded Slavic to Yates, but he couldn't be sure even of that.

  The two people at the table closest to the kitchen door were not a couple. The man was craggy, severe, and wore a full black beard that added an apparent ten years to what was probably his real age of forty or so. Like Yates, he was waiting for his meal. The way his hand hovered over his ordinary goblet of water suggested that he, like the little man arguing with the waiter, was from an orbital habitat where the rims of tumblers were turned against the slosh induced by rotation. He did not speak, and his eyes focused inward with no attention on his immediate surroundings.

  Part of those surroundings was the woman who shared his table. She was as well worth a man's attention as anybody Yates had met thus far on the Moon.

  She had short black hair and a skin whose translucent white avoided the pastiness that drove many of the Moon's inhabitants to tanning lamps. The neutral colors of the woman's skin and hair made her a true exception, a person on whom kaleidoscopic contact lenses were attractive instead of being merely fashionable.

  As she lifted a careful spoonful of onion soup from beneath its insulating blanket of cheese and crouton, those dazzling, prismatic eyes met Yates'. The woman looked away as her features hardened into something less attractive.

  Yates looked away also, embar
rassed in spite of himself. It wasn't a crime to look - wasn't a crime to ask, for God's sake, and he'd always been willing to take no for an answer.

  He didn't get told no very often, of course.

  The little man sat across from Yates, stiff with an emotion the security man assumed was anger. Yates nodded to him, a gesture calculated to lie between curt insult and a desire for conversation. The cultural assumptions behind the nod were those of central Pennsylvania, where Yates was born and raised; not those of the Moon, and certainly not those of the habitat from which this visitor came.

  Which the categorical part of Sam Yates had decided was Sky Devon. It might be Sky Devon, the agricultural habitat funded by British “farmers” —most of whom were titled— with the aim of one day supplying the food requirements of all humans off-Earth. A self-sustaining orbital farming operation - foods that humans liked to eat, not simply algae to cleanse and reoxygenate the atmosphere - was the most expensive part of an orbital habitat, as well as being more difficult to set up and maintain than non-biological construction processes.

  Sky Devon was intended to replace self-sufficiency in the design parameters of future habitats. The low cost of orbit-to-orbit ballistic trajectories was combined with biological expertise in tailoring plants and animals to controlled levels of light and gravity. The biotechnicians and agronomists of Sky Devon were in every professional way the equals of the engineers employed on metallurgical and power satellites.

  The little man's Yorkshire accent, coupled with a jacket of lightweight tweed, made Sky Devon his most likely provenance. That didn't matter to Yates, beyond the fact that it was a win in a game that he played with himself, and wins were pretty damn hard to come by, some days.

  A dumb twat like Cecile shouldn't have been able to get to him. Not that she was that stupid. And not that the whole thing, the marriage and the reasons the marriage hadn't worked, weren't more the fault of Sam Yates than of any of the remaining five billion possibilities, give or take, in the human universe.

  Yates raised his water glass. His tablemate was staring after the waiter and growling.

  No, by God, he was subvocalizing, speaking in the back of his throat to trip what must have been an implanted microphone, because there was no mike pad visible above the collar of jacket. That was unusual enough to make the security man in Yates wonder - until his ice water bathed him, nostrils, eyes, and forehead to the line of his dark blond hair.

  The Moon's gravity was sufficient to make Earth-standard tableware perfectly practical, but it demanded slight differences in technique. Mostly it demanded a little care, and Yates hadn't had enough time on the Moon to develop care at a reflexive level when his conscious mind was distracted.

  Just now the Moon had reminded him that the water in his glass had as much inertia as it would on Earth, even though there was only a sixth as much gravity to hold it back when the container stopped at the level of the drinker's lips. Yates sputtered, the focus for everyone else in the restaurant. The waiter, returning from the kitchen with a pair of croissants and a ball of whipped butter, paused to snatch up a napkin to replace the one with which the embarrassed customer now mopped himself dry.

  Out of the comer of his eye Yates could see the woman with prismatic lenses giggle, then look away demurely as she raised another spoonful of hot soup.

  Well, it had been that sort of day, hadn't it?

  Thinking of Cecile tossed Yates' mind back to the woman at the next table. She ought to smile more. Good humor turned features that could otherwise look sharp, almost jagged, into something close to real beauty.

  The body wasn't bad either. He'd seen bigger tits than the pair beneath the dress of black fabric with a white stripe woven in with deliberate irregularity. Still, these breasts were the right pair for the ensemble - taut body, firm legs, and better muscle tone than Yates expected to claim himself after he'd been in low gravity as long as she'd been.

  The way she moved proved she'd been on the Moon for a while. Her motions were smooth as those of a gear train: without the fits and starts that would, for instance, have spilled soup from her spoon. There was also an underwater slowness about the arcs that her hands described. Faster movements, no matter how smooth, would spill fluid from an open-topped container - the way Yates had drenched himself with his water glass.

  The Arab waiter set the dish of croissants down beside the tall, bearded man sharing a table with the woman. The fellow ignored the food - and the water - with a studiousness that would have constituted a deliberate snub under other circumstances. Was it some sort of cultural thing? Goodness knew where the bearded man came from.

  Now that Yates thought about it, he realized that the fellow hadn't stared when Yates had made his newcomer's error with the water glass. That pair of eyes, set deep in a craggy face, remained turned toward - if not focused on - a wall during the impromptu comedy. The bearded man was either preoccupied, drugged to inertness, or - just possibly - scared out of his mind.

  “Permit me, sir,” said the waiter in French-accented English. He set down the fresh napkin and whisked the damp one out of Yates' hand before the security man recalled himself to the business of being a customer in a restaurant.

  Yates wondered how many other languages the waiter spoke. English would be technically sufficient in a diplomatic enclave like this; but part of the ambiance of a restaurant was the degree to which it took the customer's personality into account.

  The waiter coughed, spattering the security man and the table with fluids. Yate's tablemate flung himself backward into the wall - a load-bearing section of living rock which didn't quiver at the impact.

  The waiter covered his mouth with the wet napkin. His eyes above the linen looked startled. Yates blinked at him in surprise, then glanced away in transferred embarrassment. Didn't seem to be anybody's day. At least customers at other tables weren't staring at the waiter the way they had when Yates' water -

  The spatters on the tablecloth were ruby, and the drop that the waiter had coughed into Yates' glass was swirling and dissolving in eddies of fresh blood.

  Yates was a big man, six-two and, on Earth, a hundred ninety pounds, but he placed more stock in his quickness than he did in mere physical strength. He stood, his braced legs hurling the table in one direction and his chair in the other as he reached for the waiter.

  The man coughed again, then threw himself away from the hands Yates was clamping about his shoulders to restrain him. The motion was convulsive, not a deliberate attempt to escape. The napkin flapped to the ceiling, then drifted down. It was soaked with blood of so bright a crimson that it looked orange.

  Yates' chair had clattered against the table across the aisle, exciting the sextet of Indians into a flurry of motion and words in several non-English languages. They didn't know what was happening.

  Neither did Sam Yates, except that the waiter was dead even as his body arched toward the table where the woman and the bearded man sat.

  Yates had three years in the U.S. Army behind him, two of them spent in Central America while President Stewart tried to make the world safe for oligarchy by stationing an American soldier in every hut in Nicaragua. He'd seen men die like this before, an instant after an unstable bullet hit then on one side of the chest and keyholed through both lungs before blasting a hole out the other side as well.

  He should have heard the shot. Damage like this was a velocity effect, and the ballistic crack of a multisonic bullet ought to have echoed like machine-gun fire in these narrow confines.

  The waiter's body sent the French onion soup off in a lazy trajectory of its own as the table collapsed and the black-haired woman tried with partial success to avoid the corpse. Her mouth was open but she was not screaming, and the hand she raised toward Yates was an instinctive defense against the man whom she believed was responsible for the waiter's bloody collapse.

  The bearded man rotated his head to watch the body thrashing on the overturned table. His attention was mechanical, a thing that his
eyes were doing while the higher faculties of his mind remained dissociated.

  Sam Yates had more pressing problems than the varied reactions of the diners between whom the corpse lay. No one from that direction had shot the waiter, so someone at the outside door must have—

  Or maybe not.

  The two Europeans who had been seated at the table nearest the door were in panicked flight. As the security man turned, one of the pair slammed the red emergency exit plate set into the center of the clear door panel. Alarms rang, audibly and at the nearest patrol substation.

  The door, impeded by those waiting outside, did not open immediately. The customers in the corridor had become spectators. They pressed against the door for a better look, their faces suffused with interest rather than terror.

  Nobody'd been shooting from the corridor. The sight and sound of the weapon would have scattered those people like bits of a dynamited tomato.

  Yates almost grabbed the two Europeans, but the goblets and flatware they'd been using were scattered across their table. The men weren't escaping assassins, but just a pair of citizens terrified by gouts of pulmonary blood. They'd be needed for evidence, but the fingerprints they left all over the utensils made them easy to find. Hell, they'd probably contact Security themselves, once they'd talked to their home government and their panic had subsided.

  Couldn't blame them for panic. Yates' hands were scarlet with the reminder of the waiter's dying hemorrhage.

  No one ran from the kitchen in response to the alarm. Humans were too rare - and therefore expensive - on the Moon for service industries to be staffed at levels that would have been normal on Earth. One waiter, supplemented from the kitchen at need, handled all the dining-area functions, including those of maitre d' and cashier.

  The door to the corridor kept diners in the restaurant until they had paid and would-be customers outside until there were tables to seat them. Because that was normal on the Moon, diplomats from UN Headquarters accepted Four Star food in an ambiance close to that of a Downside - Earth - lunch counter.