Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  And there had been none offered by a voice on the other end of the off-Moon line when Steeks called today. The phone had rung unanswered.

  “If they will not withdraw us from here,” said van Zell, “we must withdraw ourselves. Here we are useless, so we must go someplace we can be of service. To the Plan. To something.”

  He scowled at his partner. Van Zell was afraid, but even more than that he was angry because the situation had become unimaginably complex. If someone were telling him what to do, things would be simple. If not - Piet van Zell would simplify them himself.

  One way or another.

  “I don't see ...” said Steeks, pausing because there were too many ways to complete the sentence, too many things that he neither saw nor understood.

  In the silence between words and thought, the air-vent shutters slapped closed like multiple gunshots.

  That was the sort of disaster to which the Afrikaners' background fitted them to react.

  They moved in opposite directions. Steeks half climbed, half vaulted, into one of the pressure suits open on the rack, while van Zell jumped toward the inner, colony-side, air lock door.

  When the speaker plate of the emergency phone on the wall crackled into life, van Zell twisted in mid motion and snatched up his plasma discharger before his left hand hit the latch.

  “Both doors of this air lock are being controlled by the emergency overrides in Central Mechanical,” rasped the speaker, harsh with adrenalin and distorted reproduction but still female in its underlying timbre. “I am Lieutenant Yesilkov of Security. You must prepare youself to surrender according to my directions.”

  The latch should have resisted van Zell's hand, given sluggishly under his pressure. Instead it clacked instantly against its stops, jarring the Afrikaner's arm to the shoulder. Somebody had, just as the crackly voice was saying, disconnected the door from its normal controls within the suit room.

  “In a moment,” the speaker was saying, “I will open the inner door wide enough for you to drop your weapons through it. If - “

  Van Zell screamed a curse and spat at the phone. Then he spun and kicked at the latch plate. The shock threw him back across the cluttered room. The door remained as solid as the rock floor of the suit room.

  Steeks had closed his suit. He was reaching for the latch of the outer door lock.

  “A squad of armed patrolmen are waiting to take you into custody,” lied Sonya Yesilkov through the speaker of the emergency phone. “If you attempt to - “

  “Wait!” van Zell screamed to his partner. He hadn't— consciously - meant to point his plasma discharger at Steeks, but a use for the weapon might have occurred to him in the next instant if the man in the hard suit had not grabbed for the motion and torn the gun away.

  The muscles of both Afrikaners were atrophied to great weakness by Earth standards, but the suit Steeks had donned more than made up for his own lack of strength. His gloved left hand rose with the weapon.

  But his right, continuing the motion that had panicked his partner, bounced off the latch to the outer air lock as vainly as Piet van Zell had done from the inner door.

  “Your only choice,” crackled the speaker, “is whether you come now, uninjured, or you come after we've fired a couple of plasma bolts into the room. Even with suits on - “

  Van Zell clung to his erstwhile partner's arm with both hands and all his strength. It was not enough to prevent Steeks from inexorably aiming the plasma discharger at the outer air lock.

  “It won't work!” screamed the suitless Afrikaner. “You can't open it by - “

  But when he saw the armored finger start to squeeze the trigger, van Zell ducked out of the way. Steeks didn't know if he could burn his way out of the air lock either, but he wouldn't be kept from the attempt by the fact success would leave his partner trying to breathe vacuum.

  Van Zell's world exploded.

  The jet of plasma blew a cavity from the door the way a meteor dimples the surface of a planet, converting solid matter into a ball of vapor and molten droplets. The first bolt did not punch a hole all the way through to vacuum.

  The shock of the confined plasma discharge was a thunderclap that thrust Steeks back a step and deafened him. The front of his suit was a dazzling mirror where the titanium burned from the door had recondensed. The thin but perfectly opaque layer of metal deposited over his face shield would have blinded him, except that the muzzle of the weapon itself had blocked a portion of the expanding cloud. A clear swatch like a petrified shadow fanned across Steeks' helmet, leaving a triangle of face shield still transparent.

  The Afrikaner aimed, covered his eyes with his free hand to keep from blinding himself completely, and fired again.

  The gun blew up, vaporizing itself and most of the pressure-suited man who held it.

  Steeks' first point-blank shot had laid a mirroring coat of titanium over the nose of the next round loaded into his weapon's chamber. When the second, precisely-balanced nuclear explosion took place, the layer of redeposited titanium reflected it for the microsecond that was enough to turn the gun into a fusion bomb in the hands of the man who pulled its trigger.

  Piet van Zell had been partly shielded by Steeks' armored body. The heat within the suit room was so intense that when Yesilkov opened the inner door from the Mechanical section's control room, air blasted out at several times normal atmospheric pressure. The tall Afrikaner was alive, but he could not see Yates and Ella Bradley as they dived through the door.

  “I said stay back!” Yates shouted to the woman who had heard and ignored his orders. The air in suit room 312 was furnace hot, with a greasy, metallic aftertaste.

  But there was no other danger within, no need for the needle stunner in Yates' hand. The surviving Afrikaner moaned as he writhed on the floor.

  And both of his eyeballs had been melted from their sockets.

  Chapter 18 - INTERROGATION

  Ella Bradley watched with growing horror as Sonya Yesilkov interrogated the blinded, burned Afrikaner still writhing weakly on the floor of the suit room nearly fifteen minutes after Yates and she had burst in here.

  “Yates,” Ella whispered urgently, hugging herself. “I must insist that you call a doctor for this man.” For what was left of him. Ella Bradley kept seeing torched slums north of Capetown and blackened swathes in the Congo where all that remained were awful, akimbo limbs like uprooted trees. The wages of prejudice, the aftermath of societal collisions . . .

  Maybe Yates was thinking something similar - or remembering something he'd seen in Nicaragua. His face was sheened with sweat and his eyes kept roaming everywhere but to the tableau of the Russian woman kneeling beside the stricken man, holding a hand-recorder close to his blistered lips.

  Yates said, “Yeah, we'll call somebody, soon as we can.” But he didn't move toward the phone in the suit room, a phone that probably still worked, shielded from the blast in its nook the way it was.

  The man whose beard was singed away was sobbing for a doctor and Yesilkov kept promising him one “as soon as you tell me what I got to know.”

  Ella wanted to bolt for the phone herself, but she had a feeling that Yates would physically intervene. This man was dying, didn't either of them realize that?

  And then she understood why Yates hadn't moved toward that phone, why Yesilkov was methodically and ever so slowly questioning the dying man from Le Moulin Rouge, and even why no other security personnel were here with them: Yates and Yesilkov wanted this horrid, blinded thing that had been a man to die before anyone else could talk to him.

  It was murder. Her blood seemed to congeal in her veins. On numb, still legs she walked over to the man on the floor, who twitched and rasped occasional answers to Yesilkov's questions - walked as if she were a robot, devoid of volition. And knelt down there, beside the man whose skin now bore the pattern of the clothing he'd been wearing, as if the explosion had stamped the weave into his flesh.

  Yesilkov and Yates didn't want a living witness to what h
ad happened on corridor MM. They didn't want anyone but themselves questioning this man about plasma rifles and casualties - or about Ella Bradley's abduction. They'd never reported it; they'd eyed each other in distress when Ella had mentioned McLeod's office.

  They would let this man die rather than admit they'd withheld what they knew about the slaughter in the corridor - about what Yates had done. So where did that leave her? Ella Bradley was a principal in the MM kidnapping. Was she going to end up like this poor fool gasping for breath on the floor, while Yates watched everying else but her dying breath, and Yesilkov interrogated her about who she'd told?

  She hadn't told anybody, she wanted to scream. She hadn't done anything, she wanted to shout. She'd just leave now, she wanted to whisper. And get out of here before these two security people secured their own careers by making sure that Ella Bradley couldn't threaten that security.

  Just as she was beginning to shiver, to double up, her arms against her belly in prelude to vomiting, Yates' hand came down on her shoulder. “Come on, you don't need to get so close to this.”

  She shrugged off his hand and said, “Don't I? I'm lucky that's not me there. I - “

  “Shut up, both of you, damn it,” Yesilkov whispered fiercely, her palm shielding the tape recorder's integral microphone from their chatter.

  And then Ella listened, for the first time, to what the man was telling Yesilkov:

  “The Plan,” he was saying raggedly, coughing little suppressed coughs as he tried to breathe. The effort of concentrating on those words made Bradley's eyes fasten on the Afrikaner's blistered lips and the pink foam at their corners.

  “Yeah, y' told me 'bout the Plan, van Zell. Y' told me all about the Plan to wipe out every black on Earth. Now what about the perps? The perpetrators? Who, where, and how, van Zell? C'mon, man. Don't die with this on your conscience. Who is it you report to? Who do you call?”

  “Call ...” Piet van Zell tried to close his lids, what was left of them, over his ravaged eye sockets.

  Ella Bradley's hand pressed against her mouth as if she must physically contain her stomach's contents by that means. Yates, now, knelt down beside her on the blackened stone of the suit room floor. He took her other hand, cold and clammy, in his hard, warm, dry one. She hadn't the strength to pull it away.

  Piet van Zell was murmuring numbers, and when he'd finished a twenty-one digit string of them, he gasped. “Tha's the code; that's the call. From an off-Moon booth. Call.” He coughed. “Test's successful. Arabs, but what the hell? Works, works good.”

  “Where's the call to, van Zell? Who's doing the testing? Where's the stuff made?”

  “Beaton,” said van Zell. And laughed. “Ask Beaton, or the Sky Devon . . . lab.” And laughed again, a horrible wracking laugh Ella Bradley would never forget, because in the midst of it van Zell fell silent.

  “Aw, c'mon, you racist bastard, don't die on me,” Yesilkov said softly. She shook the man, then slapped him, then pounded his chest in some flurry of activity.

  A flurry that Yates joined.

  Bradley realized they were trying to restart van Zell's heart, the way they were pounding his chest. Yates straddled the corpse for a better angle, and Yesilkov pinched his nose, opened the blistered mouth with two fingers, and pressed her own lips to the dead man's.

  Ella Bradley turned her head away and gave up the contents of her stomach. When she was done retching, she stumbled to her feet, wiping the back of her mouth with her hand.

  Funny, the smell of roast flesh and feces were so strong in the close air of the suit room, she couldn't smell her own vomit - not even taste it.

  She leaned against the wall and shook, waiting until the two security people gave up on van Zell.

  Yesilkov prodded the body one final time with her booted toe, and the two approached Ella, leaning again the wall by the phone.

  Yates was saying, “. . . got to go to Sky Devon, five will get you ten.”

  Yesilkov responded, “Not till I check this phone number,” she shouldered past Bradley to pick up the suit room phone.

  “Works,” Yesilkov said with a triumphant grin.

  “Who's she calling?” Ella asked Yates, trying to see in his narrow eyes whether her own death was next on his agenda.

  “Her office: call in the phone number, get a check on where it rings. Won't take long. Then I'll take you home.''

  “What about. . . ?” she gestured weakly in the direction of the horridly burned corpse. They could have saved this man, with immediate medical attention, she knew. She also knew that they knew it, and that they knew she knew they did.

  She wanted to go home, all right. Home to Earth. Failing that, she wanted to go to her apartment, alone, and call Taylor McLeod's office. She needed to tell somebody what was going on up here, somebody who'd follow up if anything terminal happened to her. “Fine, you can take me home, but all I want then is a good night's sleep. Alone.” Clear enough, Yates? I don't trust you worth a damn. Worse, you and your ghoulish lady friend make me sick. There's a puddle on the floor here to prove it.

  Yates had paused, his eyes drawn in the direction Ella had pointed - drawn to the corpse. “What about him, you mean?'' he answered her unfinished question. “We're keeping this pretty tight, just between the three of us for now. Yesilkov'll have somebody she can trust pick up the body; we'll log it as a casualty in the pursuit of presumed felons armed with plasma weapons. This guy and his very dead buddy over in the corner there are responsible for the firefight on M-M, sure enough. Got the exploded plasma rifle to prove that. It'll close the case, unless you say something you shouldn't.”

  '' I won't, really; I won't.” It came out of her too quickly.

  His eyes measured her with all the cold of interstellar space behind them. “You bet you won't - it was you, maybe still is you, they were after. We don't know who we can trust, so we don't trust anybody. Clear? Not your friend with the fancy clothes, not anybody. You don't say squat about this until Yesilkov and I give you the word. Un - “

  “Until we get back from Sky Devon,” said Yesilkov, palming the phone as she hung it up. “That's where this phone number rings, Sam - it's the paging system designator assigned through the Sky Devon Division of Pest Control Research. Head there's named Dr. Kathleen Spenser, the next person we've got to see. And see fast.”

  “Is that what they're calling 'em now - 'pests,' I wonder?” said Yates in a voice that told Ella he wasn't wondering at all.

  Yesilkov grimaced. “I dunno how much you heard - van Zell was talking about the Plan . . . some bug that'll wipe out any genetic strain selectively. And guess who these Afrikaner buggers are selecting? Ain't white folks, you can bet.” Yesilkov, for the first time in Ella's memory, seemed actually upset.

  “But you can't go to Sky - “

  “Whadya mean, Dr. Bradley?” Yesilkov snapped at her fiercely. “Why 'can't'? You got somethin' in mind to stop us - like talkin' to your fancy friends? Well, don't - “

  “She didn't mean that, Sonya,” Yates interrupted.

  “God,” Ella Bradley said, scrubbing her eyes with her hands. “Can't we get out of here? I'm going to - “

  “Faint? Puke again? What?” Yesilkov bore down on her inexorably. “Look, Ms. Sensibility: your life's in the hands of whoever I assign to protect you while we're gone, 'cause you sure can't protect yourself. Not from this shit - “ She waved behind her, where van Zell's corpse was. Over in the corner were other remains, hardly recognizable as having once been part of another man. “Y' understand me?”

  “I understand,” quavered Ella, who needed to hold onto something for a moment. The only thing near was Yates' arm, so she grabbed his elbow with both hands.

  The big man put an arm around her protectively and said, “Shelve that, we don't need to make this any harder on her, Sonya. I'll take her home and we'll meet” - He consulted his watch - “at your office in, say, three hours. You check the transit schedule to Devon and get us seats.”

  “Yeah, and I
'll find some guy to put on Bradley for security who'll stick, this time.”

  “Great, I'll stay with her until that somebody shows up,” said Yates.

  Ella Bradley didn't like the way the two of them talked about her as if she weren't present; she didn't like it at all. But if Sam Yates was taking her home - and if he didn't kill her to keep her quiet - then maybe she could make the big man realize that she wasn't part of the enemy. Not like the corpse on the floor, who stared sightlessly through empty sockets at eternity.

  “So, Supervisor Yates, am I under house arrest?” said Ella as Yates, with a flicked salute to the stolid patrolman who waited unspeaking by her apartment's door, took her key card from unresisting fingers and inserted it in the lock.

  Yates didn't answer until they were both inside, the door between them and the patrolman in the corridor firmly closed.

  Then he said, “I wish you'd stop thinking of me as the enemy. My name's Sam, and all I want is to keep you from ending up wherever van Zell and his playmates were trying to take you.”

  “I wish I could believe that,” she said uncertainly. She'd thought almost the same thing about him, and Yesilkov, that she wasn't the enemy. “But you're making it difficult, Sup -”

  “Sam.”

  “Sam.”

  “Good,” he smiled. “That's a start. Now, how am I making it difficult? I don't want to . . .”He was moving by her, and she found herself scurrying from his path as if this were his apartment, not hers.

  She thought he was going to sit on the couch, but he didn't. He paused between her and it and finished his sentence, “... especially not after what you've been through. The patrolman out there is here for your protection - you don't want him, he's a memory. Just tell me flat out.”

  He was close enough that she could see the amusement lingering at the corners of his mouth as she shook her head; close enough that, if she fainted, he'd probably be able to catch her before she fell.