Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  “They were after me - they made no attempt to search this place,” she said matter-of-factly, with a surety she didn't understand. “I don't know why. But check my office - I'll bet it hasn't been touched either.” She pointed to her office door, and he limped off that way.

  When the coffee was done, he hadn't come out, so she brought the coffee, on a tray, into the office.

  He was rooting through her files. Fury flashed through her. It was like being violated all over again.

  And that errant thought brought everything she'd been suppressing to the surface, so that she started to tremble and managed to put the two cups on her desk just in time to avoid spilling their contents.

  “Your coffee,” she said in an icy voice. “If you want something in there, I'll be glad to help you.”

  “Sorry, just trying to see if they'd rifled anything.'' Yates came to the desk to take his cup, and she realized again how large he was. Large, rawboned, a little on the past-tense side of muscular; what certain people, if they'd seen him, would have referred to as “Ella's type.”

  And he might have saved her life. There was an awkward pause in which he took his coffee mug and she took hers. She wished he wouldn't look at her like that, so intrusively.

  Holding his cup in his seared left hand, he reached out for her hand with his right. Somehow she didn't pull away in time.

  “So,” Yates said, “we're going to keep this between us for now, okay?”

  She slid her hand out from under his. “That means that we'll be working on this investigation together.” It was the only arrangement possible under the circumstances; she hadn't meant it to sound like a proposal.

  “A deal,” he said with a lopsided smile. “Now, let's figure out how we can work this.”

  How, indeed? He looked like he'd been run over by a truck and then torched. She said, trying not to let her embarrassment show, “I've got some clothes that somebody left here . . . they might fit you. Those, plus some judicious clean up, and you could probably make it to Central Medical without arousing too much suspicion.”

  “Terrific,” he said with boyish enthusiasm she hoped was real.

  At least he hadn't asked about how the clothes had come to be here. Not that it was any of his business. She raised her coffee mug to her lips and said over it: “All right, then. While we're getting you dressed for polite society, we'll concoct some sort of plan.”

  And you can convince me that you aren't part of whatever it is that's going on, Sam Yates, that there's some good reason you don't want the UN mission to know that we were involved in what happened out there.

  Because she couldn't think of a single reason why he hadn't called his office from here, why her apartment wasn't swarming with his colleagues by now, or why he wasn't more concerned with his wounds than with what she would or wouldn't say to any subsequent investigators.

  She was even beginning to wonder whether she'd tell him that she'd sent a data request - NYU Project 32/149 - via a UN Lunar Headquarters terminal to Sky Devon, asking for everything Devon had on Rodney Beaton.

  “Supervisor Yates, if you'll come this way . . .” It sounded stiff and distancing to her own ears, but she was leading the man into her bedroom, where she was about to give him another man's clothes.

  He followed her out of the office, coffee cup in hand, saying, “Look, we were on first-name terms before all this happened, Ella. Remember? I'm still Sam, okay?”

  She spoke over her shoulder to the man on her heels. “Fine, Sam. Tell me, have any other Le Moulin Rouge customers from that night been attacked ... or died in odd circumstances - any circumstances different from those of virus-enhanced respiratory failure? In addition to myself and Rodney Beaton, I mean.”

  “Not yet,” he said as he followed her into her bedroom.

  His answer was noncritical. Noncommittal, even. And softly, intimately spoken. He meant to asssure her he didn't think she was paranoid, that he wasn't patronizing her.

  She swung around to face the big man, suddenly aware that she could have had him wait in her office, in the living room, anywhere else. He could have changed in the bathroom. She hadn't had to bring him in here. And he knew it.

  Flustered, she raked her hand through her hair. “Just a second, and I'll have these things for you.” She fled to her closet, sliding back one mirrored door.

  The bed was between them and it was, she supposed, natural for him to sit on it, his good leg crooked under him - he was injured, after all. Now she felt herself flush, and that made her feel even more foolish.

  She rattled the hangers, looking for the clothes Taylor had left here when he'd been recalled to Earth. Taylor McLeod's office, in the U.S. Mission to the lunar UN, had helped Ella ram her innocent-looking request for background material on Rodney Beaton through the data queue to the head of the line.

  Helped without question, without a blinked eye or a ruffled feather. Nice to have friends in high places, even when those friends were absent. Taylor wouldn't mind that she'd used his clout or his staff the way he'd mind that she'd loaned another man his clothes.

  But it couldn't be helped. Not now. She'd replace the garments before Taylor returned in two weeks, if she was still alive in two weeks. If anything such as where to get real merino cut on Savile Row to McLeod's measurements mattered in two weeks ...

  “Here we are, Sam. The style's loose, so they should fit well enough.” Turn your blood blue in the process, Mister Security Man. She held out the pale, fine wool fashioned into an unconstructed sports jacket and pleated pants, neatly hung over a Sea Islands cotton shirt and rep tie.

  Sam Yates didn't move from the bed. He looked at the clothing and one eyebrow raised. “I wouldn't be caught dead in that, most times, but these aren't most times.” There was a challenge in his voice that at first she didn't understand.

  She brought the clothes to the bed and held out the hanger stiffly. “I'll be in the living room.'' Her own voice sounded like a stranger's. She wasn't going to defend or even discuss the taste of the man whose clothes these were, not with someone of Yates' breeding.

  “Your boyfriend's?” Yates asked the obvious question as he held out a hand, not to take the hanger from her, but to feel the material between his thumb and forefinger.

  “A friend of mine from the diplomatic corps,” she said stiffly. Short of tossing the clothing to the bed and stomping out, there was nothing for it but wait until Yates took the hanger from her.

  Instead of doing that, he got up slowly, with obvious effort, and moved close.

  He reached for the suit and her at the same time.

  She thrust the suit on its hanger against his chest, and there was an awkward moment where his good arm was around her, pulling her toward him, and her own was stiffening against his chest with the suit hanger as a pry bar.

  Then she managed, “Please, let's not make this any more awkward than - “ but the big man was already bending to kiss her.

  She should have turned her head, let his lips brush her cheek, but she didn't. His lips were dry and rough where they'd blistered. He'd saved her life, she told herself. Worth a kiss, she thought as she returned a chaste one, her lips firmly closed.

  And a hug, to make it more clear that she wasn't being standoffish. But Yates returned that hug with one much more sensual than decorum required.

  “If you're worried about him learning,” he murmured, “look - I'm not gonna tell him.”

  His lips traveled down her neck when she turned her face away. She had to do something before he got the wrong idea, if he hadn't already. She was suddenly frightened - he was so big, an unknown quantity. She didn't know him at all. His arms around her were far too strong.

  “No, not now. I - “ She stepped back, and he didn't force her against him. That was something, anyway. Flustered, she said, “We hardly know each other . . . I've had a rough night. I can't - “

  He let go of her with pained reluctance and they stood at arm's length. She could see his chest rise and fall.


  He said at last, “Your call, Ella. But really, it doesn't matter about him - “

  “It does to me,” she said stiffly, and backed three steps. “Come out when you've changed and we'll see how you look.”

  She left him alone in her bedroom, closing the door on his half-hopeful, half-annoyed smile.

  Of course it mattered - even if Taylor and she hadn't been more than friends, it would have mattered. It mattered that Yates said it didn't matter - that he'd consider it acceptable behavior to fool around with another man's woman so casually. And it mattered that he assumed she was of the same disposition.

  In Ella Bradley's world you didn't hop into bed with just anyone, merely because the opportunity presented itself. Especially when that someone presumed he was cuckolding someone else.

  She decided that she didn't like Supervisor Samuel Yates very well at all. Well, what did you expect? He's just a glorified beat cop, an ex-soldier - a Nicaraguan vet with some permutation of delayed stress syndrome. People in Ella Bradley's circle hadn't gone to Nicaragua - unless they went on diplomatic or intelligence assignments, or right out of West Point as part of the Military Assistance Command structure.

  The well bred, the well heeled, and the well educated had stayed out of that war as they'd stayed out of every war since the Korean conflict: there were plenty of expendables like Sam Yates to fill America's ranks.

  Not that Ella Bradley's peers didn't fight, or sacrifice, in their way. Some, like Ella, ventured deep into the jungles with the Peace Corps or the UN; some, like her absent friend, Taylor, fought shadow wars in hallowed diplomatic halls and exotic back streets. But all of them knew, without question, their place: they were leaders, they were role models, they were the bearers of the torch of civilization which, for Americans, had become epitomized in a single word - democracy.

  Ella's peer group fought to promote that democracy - freedom to learn, to think, to live, and to vote - worldwide.

  Some of them had brought that struggle to the Moon, because the UN was the real battleground, not some soggy jungle where primitives lobbed grenades at one another in thoughtlesss fury. Taylor McLeod had told her once that each person chose only his appropriate battlefield - that all human existence was warfare; even the claim of noncombatant status or nonviolent protest was warfare by inaction, as effective a strategy in many cases as warfare by direct action.

  Ella's specialty was tribal peoples, every disparate group from Kabyles to Zulus who still professed national identity and thus kept representatives at the UN, and every subgroup threatened with extinction by the homogenizing process of civilization and tribal warfare. There were fifty-two wars in progress, down on the placid-looking blue planet called Earth.

  Every nation had a representative here on the Moon. Every power bloc sustained by brute force feared America because it feared democracy, the greatest homogenizing force of all. So there were as many possible culprits in her attempted abduction as there were tribal factions who feared Americanization, Ella told herself dreamily, sitting on the couch while she waited for Sam Yates to emerge from her bedroom.

  Americanization meant democracy. Democracy meant equal rights - one person, one vote. Sometimes, like tonight, she understood viscerally why so many people perceived democracy as their enemy. Democracy allowed for excellence but inclined toward mediocrity - the presence of Ella Bradley and Sam Yates in the same apartment was sufficient proof of that.

  When Yates came out of her bedroom, hitching up the waistband of pants slightly too loose, Ella broke the silence before he could. There was no use of either of them prolonging what had become an uncomfortable situation.

  “Before you go, Supervisor, perhaps I'd better tell you that I put through a request for deep background on Rodney Beaton - to Sky Devon.”

  “Chrissake,” said Yates, halting in midstride. “Now you tell me.”

  Chapter 13 - CENTRAL MEDICAL

  “Feels like you've got me wearing a lead tube,” said Yates, rubbing his left thigh as he stepped out of the treatment room. From the way he burned, deep into the muscles, it felt as if the lead had been poured over him to congeal against his flesh. “It's - is it supposed to be this stiff?”

  “It'll loosen up as you move, sir,” said the medical technician who had supervised Yates' treatment according to the parameters ordered by a doctor and a bank of diagnostic computers. “By tomorrow you won't notice it, almost.''

  The technician, whose name tag read da Silva and whose delicate features were Filipino, winced sympathetically as he watched the care with which his patient drew on his trousers. “The pain stops in three, four hours, sir. It's part of the healing, really.”

  “Could've been worse,” said Yates, managing a smile to show that he appreciated the med tech's concern. It embarrassed him that his pain was so obvious . . . but then, da Silva had probably seen enough burn victims to know exactly how the transparent cast over Yates' thigh must feel.

  The cast replenished fluids that had been seared out of the shrunken muscles; supplied nutrients and antibiotics at a metered rate; and covered the seriously burned area until the skin grew back. Yates' memory of the plasma bolt that had ripped the wall of the passageway beside him was lost in other events. He kept remembering his own shots and the awesome coruscance of the blast which lit the darkened stairwell before him.

  But that first shot had damned near done the job. It parboiled his left thigh, despite the considerable insulation provided by the leg of his trousers.

  Maybe he ought to replace the now-carbonized gray wool with a white linen suit that'd reflect more radiant heat the next time he was a finger's breadth from a plasma discharge.

  “Excuse, sir?” said da Silva, warning the security man that he'd been muttering under his breath.

  “I was thinking,” Yates explained in modified form as he shrugged into the shirt, “that I wouldn't have been wearing my good suit tonight if I'd known there was going to be an explosion beside me.

  “Any idea” - he couldn't help the change in his voice, but he covered it by putting on his new jacket - “what it might've been? I just got the hell outa the way, and it wasn't till I was changing clothes that I saw I'd really been hurt.''

  That was the official story; and the last part of it was pretty close to the truth.

  The med tech grimaced in negation as he readied his treatment cubicle to be used again. He was stripping the cover from the couch on which patients were gripped and ministered to by robot arms. Normally, patients walked here from the diagnostic cubicles at the other end of the facility, where more delicate probes and sensors assayed them under the titular control of an MD.

  In fact, the MD was as much a caretaker as the med tech here. At need, a patient could be transported from diagnosis to treatment by a robot gurney while the parameters of his care were blipped from machine to machine on a dedicated data link. Untouched by human hands or will, the patient's chance of recovery would be as good as that of others who had the advantage of human oversight.

  Barring electronic or mechanical failure.

  Which killed only a fraction of those who had succumbed in past decades to doctors with more interest in real estate than diagnosis, and nurses who misread a decimal point in the medication order.

  The clothes Ella'd given him were loose. At the time he'd figured maybe all the clothes on that side of the closet were cut the same way - God knew, the fellow who owned 'em didn't have any more taste in color than a camel. Maybe she hadn't, from their few meetings, noticed Yates' preference for tailoring that showed off the lines of a body he was damned proud to have kept at his age - or perhaps she did understand and was making her own cool response to the way he was coming on in her apartment.

  It struck him now that the woman had simply realized that loose fabric would be a lot more comfortable than garments that prodded his bums every time he moved. He shouldn't take everything so damned personal.

  Knowing that she had a live-in - or at least a steady - whom
she hadn't bothered to mention, meant that Yates had misjudged how personal she was being on other stuff. Well, you win some, you lose some - and some get rained out.

  “Say,” Yates said, converting a thought into a request, “do you have a phone I can use? I need to report this, I guess. And I oughta call my office.”

  “Yes sir,” said da Silva. “It's on the end wall.”

  He also, Yates realized as he punched in the number of Entry Division's front desk, needed to get up with Ella Bradley and retrieve the ID card he'd left in the other suit when he changed. But he wasn't ready to talk to the lady just yet.

  “Entry Division,” said the speaker. “Rosario.”

  There was a flurry of noise behind Yates as da Silva scrambled to help a woman whose right arm was in a bloody bandage. There was a man beside her, both of them screaming in an unfamiliar language. The glance Yates threw at them left him in doubt as to whether the man was supporting the woman or threatening to finish her off.

  Raising his voice, and hopeful that he wasn't going to get involved in another brawl in a moment, the security man said, “This is Supervisor Yates. I've been involved in an accident, and I may miss the first couple hours of my shift. Leave a message for Emeraud to take my calls till I come in, okay?”

  “Supervisor?” said the phone. The receptionist's raised, quizzical voice made Yates wonder how much was getting through the commotion ungarbled. The victim was entering the treatment cubicle, but she continued to cling to her companion with her uninjured hand.

  “Yes,” Yates said, “yes-Yates here.”

  “Supervisor, there's an ASAP message for you to call a Lieutenant Yesilkov,” the phone said. “She, ah ... she told me I'd better not drop the ball on this one, sir.”

  “You haven't, Rosario,” the security man said with a smile that reminded him of the blisters spattered on his face by molten glass. “And it sounds like I'd better not mess up either. She leave a number?”