Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  The patrolman looked frail enough, even for a woman, but a determined exercise program could make a major difference in the strength of humans living under conditions of reduced gravity. She seized a double handful of the chauffeur's iridescent bodysuit, holding the front where his lapels would have been if he wore them. Twisting, she dragged the driver half out of his seat and bent him toward the scene behind.

  “Look at it, fuckhead!” the patrolman screamed. “And then back the fuck outa here or I'll mop it up with yer nose!''

  The car's sole passenger was a heavy black woman who wore jewelry of cast gold, including a bracelet whose charms were assayers' weights from ancient Benin. They clinked warmly as she rose from her seat. Beaton, stepping into the vehicle as an obstacle to be crossed, was drawn also to look at what had caused the trouble.

  There were perhaps a dozen uniformed patrolmen. Most of them were trying to reroute traffic while white-coated medical personnel knelt and muttered and jumped up to get additional equipment from the pair of ambulances parked on the island between lengths of slideway.

  There were three bodies. They must have been riding the slideway when they collapsed, because they were sprawled at the edge of the island while the rolling surface continued to jiggle them into a semblance of life. The turban of one of them had begun to unroll beyond him.

  There was enough blood on the clothes and startled faces of the victims to have begun painting the corridor. Beaton, struck by dreadful surmise, looked back at the slideway on which he as well as the corpses had been riding. The streaks on the moving surface, unnoticed even by travelers less distracted than the technician had been, was blood smeared along the continuous belt by the rollers inside.

  Blood that contained the same virus had been rubbed into Beaton's clothing by the man at Le Moulin Rouge.

  The only thing that saved the British technician from immediate screaming panic was the camera woven into his lapel and the reflex that made him shift for a better angle and begin to subvocalize, “One male adult, one female adult, one pubescent female” - the child's veil of tiny beads had been pulled away between the slideway and the lip of the island - “at corridor reference ...”

  Beaton glanced behind him, found the tile glowing on the wall. “Reference D-D two-ought-one,” he continued. No need to give the time - the recorder's microprocessor did that automatically - but . . .

  The technician turned and bent forward a little so that the lens array could pan the slideway beneath the feet of further travelers. “Residues on the moving belt indicate the event took place some minutes before.”

  The chauffeur settled back into his seat. Unexpectedly, his passenger vomited over the gorgeous print patterns of her dress.

  They hadn't expected so much blood. Beaton hadn't, at any rate. He trembled as he scurried past the island, almost colliding with the sweaty man in Bureau of Utilities orange who had been summoned to shut down the affected section of slideway.

  Dead, of course. But they should have died quietly, hunching over like the white rats and snuffling the floor until they were racked by an uncontrollable tremor and all movement ceased. Instead of this - gore. Beaton had seen nothing comparable except for the time he had opened the chest cavity of a living pigeon. Blood everywhere, bright and crawling with the virus.

  Blood on Rodney Beaton, on his clothing and perhaps his skin.

  Perhaps in his lungs.

  The technician was running again, but his conduct was less likely to attract attention now. A car that had been turned at the police cordon sped down the sidewalk, its occupants white-faced and frozen. Other pedestrians - some of them sparked by Beaton, perhaps - began to shuffle faster, looking back over their shoulders at the carnage they had passed.

  “D-D two-ought-three,'' Beaton muttered to himself; and at the next island where a corridor crossed, “D-L niner-one-niner.''

  An ambulance sped down the central aisle of the cross corridor, its flashers and two-tone hooter blaring warnings. The technician stepped in front of the vehicle. It missed him only by the amount its driver swerved up on a moving slideway. Beaton loped onward, oblivious to his near escape and to the curses the two ambulance attendants rained back over him.

  The bloody-jowled Arab on the back of the ambulance was too obviously a corpse to have required that amount of haste.

  Beaton had assumed that the other fatalities came from air being recirculated through the restaurant by the colony's atmosphere plant. That might cover the family at DD201 — they might have passed Le Moulin Rouge on their route to hemorrhage and death - but it did not explain this latest body on the ambulance.

  The aerosol phial the technician now carried empty in his pocket had been brought to the restaurant sealed under negative pressure. There should not have been any chance of release before the planned moment, and the exterior of the phial had been sterilized with ultraviolet radiation as soon as it was filled.

  Something had escaped early or had been spread by unexpected vectors. If they - he and his superiors - had underestimated one aspect of what they were doing, then they could have made another mistake as well.

  “L-L fiver-three-one,” mumbled Beaton pointlessly, fearfully.

  Suit rooms with airlocks to the lunar surface were scattered throughout the colony, but the British technician needed a specific location.

  The colony's waste disposal was handled by surface lines fed by pumps instead of gravity-powered collectors buried under the streets, as was usual in those nations Downside that had heard of sewer systems. The energy to run the pumps was cheap, and collectors laid on the open surface could receive taps or be doubled in capacity without adding to the colony's horrendous traffic problems.

  Although they were heated, the sewer lines - like the water and air supply lines which paralleled them - sometimes froze. They could be blocked by caking sediment and could fracture out of sheer cussedness, dumping recyclable nutrients in splendid plumes which sublimed into vacuum at lunar dawn.

  The crews of the Bureau of Utilities had to have frequent access to the surface - though human nature being what it was, all options of dealing with a problem from inside were going to be exhausted before anybody went out into the void. The air locks placed for Utility use served the purpose of Beaton and his superiors as well.

  Beaton's mind was back in its mechanical mode again. If he permitted himself to drift into emotional data, the technician would break, would fling everything aside until he had cleansed his body and destroyed all the clothing he had worn in Le Moulin Rouge.

  But the bodies on the slideway and in the ambulance showed how vain such attempts would be. If he abandoned his task in panic, he would lose the chance of wealth and power for which he had risked his life.

  Was still risking his life.

  “L-L fiver-three-niner,” the technician's tongue mumbled, but he had already stepped onto the next section of slideway before his brain processed the information. This island was his destination.

  Beaton turned and jumped back the way he had come, colliding with a pair of men in medal-fronted Argentinian military uniforms. Other travelers had been only a gray blur to the technician since he passed the ambulance at DL919, like the corridor walls and every part of his surroundings save the location tiles at intersections.

  The two Latin Americans threw everything back in focus. Not only did they fling the technician aside with a vigor that proved they were recent arrivals from Downside, but one of them reached under the breast of his jacket to touch a bulge which might not have been a needle stunner.

  Beaton sprawled on the central aisle while the moving belt carried the Argentinians away. They snarled invective in Spanish over their shoulders for the initial thirty meters while other travelers looked around in detached curiosity.

  The man from Sky Devon got to his feet slowly and walked the few steps back to the island and the access door in one wall of it. He hoped the men had Arab blood in them, lots of Arab blood. They were swarthy and greasy-looking enoug
h, Jesus knew. They shouldn't have limited the test to Arabs anyway. They should have gone for all wogs, all the scum that had spread over Britain and had driven a true Englishman to risk his life by working on an orbital habitat.

  And to risk his life much more greatly than that.

  Beaton walked to the access door, using exaggerated care to keep from bumping any of those crossing from one section of slidewalk to the next. The edge of physical violence the Argentinians offered when they thought their manhood was challenged, had appalled him. They had been willing to hurt him - to kill him, perhaps - because of a trivial accident. As if there weren't dangers enough, without imbeciles exploding like emotional gelignite. . . .

  The access door was a sandwich of thin metal stiffened with glass sponge. It might as well have covered a broom closet.

  The exterior of the panel was marked with the numerals 137 and a slashed circle to forbid entry. An English legend, Authorized Personnel Only, would have been understood by at least ninety percent of the adults in Headquarters Colony; but the political problems of using a single language here were as awesome as the practical problems of adding the hundred-odd other national languages and major dialects.

  The door was locked, but an Afrikaner had given Beaton the simple magnetic key when he arrived. The key card had been supplied originally by the same Bureau of Utilities superintendant who had promised to keep this suit room out of normal service for a week, in return for more money than he would ordinarily earn in a month.

  There was no certainty the superintendant could keep his crews out of lock 137, since it was in the nature of the job that emergencies would occur - but that was not really crucial. Any crewmen who saw Beaton when they were heading topside or returning after rodding a line, would think the same thing their superintendant did: that there was a smuggling operation going on, and that it wasn't up to them to do Security's job.

  In a way, they were correct; but what the Sky Devon technician was smuggling was information.

  He swung open the flimsy door, stepped inside, and latched it behind him. The glowstrip that was supposed to light the base of the ladder was faulty, barely able to illuminate its own leprous surface. The strip at the top landing beside the air-lock door was sufficient, especially since Beaton had already entered the suit room once.

  The only way of sending a message off-Moon from within Headquarters Colony was to use the regular communications net. The three meters of rock covering the colony were as impervious to radio signals as they were to the cosmic rays against which they armored the residents.

  The data that Rodney Beaton had collected could not wait for his personal return to Sky Devon, a laborious process because there was no direct shuttle from the Moon to that habitat. Neither were his superiors willing to entrust to regular channels a block of data with the implications that this had.

  The choice was for Beaton to transmit his data directly from the lunar surface.

  The technician punched the big latch plate of the air lock at the top of the ladder. The mechanism hesitated briefly while it determined that the door at the other end of the suit room was sealed. Then the pressure door sighed outward, forcing Beaton to move to the edge of the landing so that he wouldn't be brushed aside. The access shaft was close quarters, even now that he wasn't burdened by the laser communications gear he had stored in the suit room upon arrival.

  The shaft smelled musty. The suit room wore a muted reek composed of excretions from utility crewmen who had worked in the stored space suits over the years, then compounded by minute arcs in the suit mechanisms and charging equipment. Though the atmosphere was voided every time the outer lock opened, residues from the suits of returning crewmen were always sufficient to color the volume of the small room again.

  Beaton touched the inner latch plate of the shaft door. The lock pistoned shut obediently. The brief compression wave in the suit room raised a sympathetic shudder from the technician's body.

  Four suits stood ready in the charging rack. They were sized from small through large, though in theory all were universals, usable by anyone who fit within their hinged halves.

  Beaton ignored them for the moment. The communications gear was in what looked like an ordinary sewer-crew tool chest, shelved with two others across from the suit rack. The . 1 cubic-meter chest Beaton had brought from Sky Devon was locked, and he had fused its casing to the titanium shelf by setting off a high-voltage welding strip between the metal surfaces.

  The case would remain after Beaton's mission was completed, but it would suggest no more than horseplay among the Utility personnel.

  The British technician unlocked the tool chest with a key card externally identical to the one that had opened the access door below. His tracking-and-sending unit was inside, its spidery legs and antenna quills collapsed for storage. Until the solidity of the unit's handle reassured him, Beaton did not realize how much he had feared that this crucial device would have disappeared, would somehow dissolve in smoke even as the cover lifted to display it.

  He set the communicator down beside the chest in which it had been concealed and reached for the flat videochip recorder hooked to his waistband. In sudden revulsion, the British technician stripped off his tweed jacket and flung it with its blood smears into a corner. The thin leads from the lens array to the control box broke, dangling like wisps of cobwebs as his trembling fingers opened the recorder and removed its data chip.

  First he would cleanse himself of the information he had acquired. Then he would bathe in antiseptic-charged water for as long as it took to wash away memory of the security man grabbing him with red, virulent hands.

  Beaton carefully plugged the data chip from the recorder into the transmit socket of the laser communicator. He was very close to success - to completion, to escape - and he could not let his shuddering body betray him now.

  The chip locked home.

  Beaton stood up, angry at his momentary dizziness and the clamminess of his palms. He had not eaten for too long. He would do that very soon.

  He stepped to the charging rack and wrestled the end suit, the smallest one, from the bayonet connectors that kept its air and power topped off while the garment was out of service. The suit was an awkward burden, even under gravity much lower than the technician was used to. At least it did not flop around. Micromagnets kept the suit's skin rigid until someone wearing it moved so that the servoreceptors in the lining had a command to transmit.

  The suit's white outer surface was dulled by dust and scratches, and the reflective face shield was scarred badly enough that it would probably be dazzling if Beaton faced in the direction of the sun. The sloppiness offended him - the lab he maintained at Sky Devon was always spotless - but it wouldn't prevent him from accomplishing his final task.

  Beaton was perspiring, in part from the effort. He knew that experienced crewmen opened the suits while they were still racked in, then closed the unit around them and stepped away, letting the garment's power assist do the work. The technician was afraid that he would break off the air nozzle if he tried that, jamming the filler valve open into a void that would kill him as soon as he opened the pressure door.

  He set the suit down with the right glove poised just over the communicator's handle. One arm was attached to the suit back, the other to the front. The remainder of the unit, including the legs and helmet, clamshelled open and closed in a tongue-and-groove seam. The junction was sealed by the same micromagnets that flexed the suit under the control of the wearer's muscles.

  Beaton pressed the release button under the left armpit to open the suit. He had worn hard suits before on occasion, and he dreaded the feel of the inner lining expanding to grip his whole body beneath the neck. He had taken off his jacket, but the rest of his clothing and his skin were surely contaminated. Invisible flecks of blood and sputum holding a virus that might not be dead, might not be -

  An Arab in orange coveralls fell out of the opening suit, into Beaton's instinctive grasp. The inside of the fa
ce plate was covered with the blood the man had coughed out in his last instants of life.

  Beaton screamed and hurtled sprawling as he leaped away and tripped over the laser communicator. He crashed into the three suits still on the rack and howled again, as if they, too, were corpses. Perhaps they did contain more Arabs Who had suited up and died of their infection before they could move again.

  He had forgotten his task, forgotten his dreams, forgotten everything but anguished faces gouting blood toward him. It should not have been so messy.

  The technician slapped the latch plate. He had no idea of what he would do after he escaped this enamel house. His wild appearance would attract attention in the corridors below, and the jacket he was leaving behind might lead to his identification. Beaton could no more have picked up the bloody tweed again than he could have enclosed himself in the space suit from which the utility crewman had slumped.

  The silence when the flaps closed over the air vents would have warned him if he hadn't been so distraught. As it was, Beaton didn't realize that he had opened the wrong pressure door until the suit room voided its atmosphere across the Moon's surface in a fan of crystallizing water vapor.

  By then it was too late even to scream.

  Chapter 3 - TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

  When the blood-spewing Arab waiter crashed backward over his table, Piet van Zell realized that they had won. He would be going home - not today, but someday soon - to the farm outside Pietermaritzburg where he was born, or to anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa that he and his fellows chose. They would be the only ones who were prepared.

  It was just a matter of arriving at a price. That negotiation was in the hands of other men, but van Zell could not imagine that the sum could not be found for a prize so great.