by Mike Resnick
"It can't be refrozen," she replied. "We'll just toss the syringe into an atomizer when we're done."
"Terwilliger," ordered Cain, "get over there and hold him still, just in case he has a change of heart."
Terwilliger stared reluctantly at Socrates.
"Why don't you do it yourself?" suggested the gambler.
"My job is holding the gun," said Cain. "Yours is doing what I tell you to do. Go on; he won't kick you."
Terwilliger hobbled over to Socrates very cautiously.
"I know about niathol, but I've never used it," said Cain. "In my business, we're not usually after confessions. How long before it takes effect?"
"About ninety seconds," replied Virtue. "Maybe a little longer." She had Terwilliger hold Socrates' arm motionless, jabbed him a couple of times until she found a vein, and then began injecting the niathol.
And then things happened so rapidly that even Cain wasn't sure of the exact progression.
Socrates casually removed his cigar from his mouth with his free hand, then suddenly pressed it against Virtue's right wrist. She yelped and jumped back, letting go of the syringe, which remained stuck in his arm. Terwilliger reacted instantly, taking a roundhouse swing at Socrates. It landed on his neck, but the momentum carried the gambler's body between Cain and Socrates.
"Hit the ground!" yelled Cain, but even as the words left his mouth and Terwilliger dropped to the floor, Socrates had forced the syringe's plunger all the way down before Virtue could stop him.
"You lose, Sebastian," he said with an ironic smile as Cain realized what he had done and lowered his weapon.
"You dumb bastard!" snapped Virtue. "You'll be dead inside of a minute."
"At least it's painless this way," said Socrates, his words starting to slur.
"Well, as long as you're finally going to meet your God face to face, I hope for your sake that He's the forgiving type," said Cain.
"Not to worry, Sebastian," said Socrates with a hollow laugh. "He's in the bag."
He slumped forward.
"Shit!" snapped Virtue. "Who the hell would have thought he'd do something like that?" She opened one of his eyelids, stared at the pupil for few seconds, then let it fall shut again. "He's done."
"He's really dead?" asked Terwilliger, staring at him.
Virtue stared contemptuously at him and made no reply.
"Thanks a lot," said Cain sardonically.
"Don't you go acting so goddamned superior!" she shot back. "If you thought he was going to do that, you should have said so."
"I should have done it my way."
"Your way wouldn't have worked, either. Don't you understand that he was willing to suffer anything you could offer up rather than let Santiago know he'd betrayed him?" She paused and stared thoughtfully at Socrates. "Just what kind of man can put such fear into people?"
"Maybe you'd be better off returning your advance and not finding out," suggested Cain.
"Most of it is spent," she replied. "I can't go back without my feature. Besides, I've already spent a year of my life on this project."
"There are men who have spent thirty years hunting for Santiago," noted Cain.
"Most of them never got this far," said Virtue. "And the journalist who actually brings back tapes or holos of Santiago will be as famous as he is; she'll need a warehouse just to hold her awards, and she can choose her own assignments and name her own price for the rest of her career." She paused. "It's worth the effort."
"Have fun."
"I'm not beaten yet," she said with determination. "I have other leads."
"Oh?" he replied, suddenly alert.
She nodded. "Well, Mr. Cain?"
"Well what?"
"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," she said with a grin.
He shrugged. "Why not?"
"There's a condition."
"What?"
"We keep in touch, and give each other progress reports."
"How?"
She jerked a thumb in Terwilliger's direction. "Use him. He's not much good for anything else, is he?"
"Now just a goddamned minute!" said the gambler hotly.
"Out of the question," said Cain. "I'd have to give him his own ship."
"Let him use yours," said Virtue. "We won't be that far apart."
"What makes you think he won't just take off with it?"
"Will you stop talking about me as if I wasn't here?" demanded Terwilliger petulantly.
"Shut up," said Virtue. She turned back to Cain. "Offer him ten percent of the reward. That ought to buy the little bastard's loyalty."
"I'm not giving him any percentage right now. Why should I change that?"
"Because you don't have any information right now."
Cain lowered his head in thought for a long moment, then looked up.
"If your leads are the same as mine, the deal's off."
"Fair enough," she replied.
"Don't I get a say in this?" snapped Terwilliger.
"Do you want ten percent of twenty million credits enough to do what you're told, or not?" said Virtue.
The gambler glared at her, then realized what was being offered and smiled sheepishly. "I'm in," he said.
"Somehow I'm not surprised," she replied. "Well, that's settled. Now I suppose we'd better do something about the body."
"I'll take care of it," said Cain.
"After you visit the local post office and see if there's any paper on him?" she suggested.
"That's right."
"I think I should get half," she continued. "It was my niathol that killed him."
"Are you a journalist or a bounty hunter?" Cain asked wryly.
"Why don't we say that I'm an underpaid journalist, and let it go at that."
He stared at her and finally nodded in agreement. "Okay. If there's any reward for him, you get half."
"You know," commented Terwilliger, who had been scrutinizing her, "you could be damned attractive if you'd just go to a little effort."
"Too bad the same can't be said for you," she said, turning her attention back to Cain. "All right, Songbird—are you ready to compare notes?"
"I'm ready," he answered.
"I have a feeling that this is going to be a long and amiable relationship," predicted Virtue.
"I'll settle for its just being profitable," replied Cain.
"That goes without saying."
He smiled and shook his head. "That's the one thing that never goes without saying."
She extended her hand. "Partners?"
"Partners."
They shook hands over the unmourned corpse of Whittaker Drum.
Part 2: The Virgin Queen's Book
6.
She can drink, she can swear, can the Virgin Queen,
And she isn't a stranger to sin.
She knows what she wants, doesn't care where she's been,
And she'll do what she has to to win.
* * * *
The name was Black Orpheus' idea of a joke, because while Virtue MacKenzie was a lot of things good and bad, virginal wasn't one of them.
He met her just once, out by the Delphini system—which was as close to the worlds of the Democracy as he ever tended to go—and she made quite an impression on him. She was drinking and playing cards at the time, and she wasn't even aware of his presence; but when she accused a fellow journalist of cheating and backed it up with a couple of swift kicks to his groin and a whiskey bottle slammed down on top of his head, she guaranteed herself a couple of verses in his ongoing epic.
In point of fact, she didn't even know she'd been written up until some months later, and then she was furious about the name he'd saddled her with—but after a couple of weeks she cooled down, right about the time she decided that being in Black Orpheus' song just might open a couple of doors for her out on the Frontier.
It did, too. She had to wait until the balladeer's disciples and interpreters figured out that Virtue Mackenzie and the Virgin Queen were the same
woman and started disseminating the information across the Inner Frontier, but once the word got out it helped her get into a couple of previously inaccessible places on Terrazane, where she found out about Socrates, and it got her Socrates' address from a trader on Jefferson III.
It hadn't done her much good here on Pegasus, but this was the Democracy, not the Frontier, and Black Orpheus wasn't much better known here than the outcasts and misfits that he sang about. She and Cain had traded their information in Socrates' apartment three weeks ago, each holding back a couple of tidbits—at least, she assumed Cain had withheld some information; she knew that she had—and it was decided that Cain was better equipped to track down a professional assassin like Altair of Altair, whereas Virtue knew her way around the Democracy better than he did and would begin her hunt among the Democracy's older, more established worlds.
She had spent the better part of a week searching for Salvatore Acosta, one of the four black marketeers who had delivered Santiago's goods to the Sargasso Rose, and had found out from her own sources that he had been murdered on Pegasus two months earlier.
Pegasus was a former mining world, rich in gold and fissionable materials, which was now a heavily populated member of the Democracy. It had been named for the planet's dominant herbivore, a small horselike animal that possessed a pair of fleshy protuberances just behind its withers. (They had never been used for anything other than balance, but they looked remarkably like vestigial wings.)
The planet itself was one of those odd scattered worlds that seemed Earth-like, but wasn't truly habitable in the normal sense. It possessed oxygen, nitrogen, and the various inert gases that Men needed, but they existed in the wrong quantities, and twenty minutes' exposure to the atmosphere left one breathless and panting; an hour could be fatal to anyone with a respiratory problem; and even the healthiest settlers couldn't breathe the air for two hours.
But for some reason—possibly it was the view, for Pegasus was a gorgeous world, with snow-capped mountains and literally thousands of winding rivers, and was possessed of gold-and-brown vegetation that made the landscape look perpetually crisp and autumnal; though more likely it was the location, for it was midway between the Spica mining worlds and the huge financial center on Daedalus II—the planet became a very desirable piece of real estate. The original miners had lived underground, artificially enriching their air while protecting themselves from the extremely cold nights; but once the world started drawing crowds of permanent residents, construction began on a domed city, then five more, and ultimately a seventh that was almost as large as the first six combined. All of the cities bore Greek names; the newest and largest of them was Hektor, named after the supposedly mythical warrior who local historians had erroneously decided was either the rider or trainer of the winged horse.
Upon reaching Pegasus and taking a hotel room in Hektor, Virtue MacKenzie had immediately contacted Leander Smythe, a newsman who owed her a favor and very begrudgingly allowed her to access the raw data he possessed on Acosta's murder from her room's computer. There wasn't much information to be gleaned: Acosta had a long record of shady dealings, and more than his share of enemies. His throat had been slit as he was leaving the Pearl of the Sea, a restaurant and bar catering to the less wholesome elements of Pegasan society, and he had died instantly. It was assumed to be an underworld murder, if only because Acosta himself hadn't associated with any noncriminals in more than a decade.
Virtue then called up the shopping and restaurant guide that every hotel possessed but couldn't find any listing for the Pearl of the Sea, invariably a signal that a local pub or restaurant had a steady clientele and neither needed nor desired any new business. She then accessed a video overview of the city and homed in on the area around the restaurant. It seemed as sleek and shining and well kept as the rest of Hektor, but she noticed that the police patrolled the area in pairs—which tended to support her tentative decision that visiting it alone and asking pointed questions wasn't worth the risk involved.
Five minutes later she tied in to the local police headquarters' press department and quickly ascertained that the authorities weren't about to hand any information over to an offworld journalist. She immediately called back, asked to speak to the homicide department, identified herself as Acosta's grieving half sister, and demanded to know what progress had been made in apprehending his killer. The answer was simple enough: There had been absolutely no progress, nor was there likely to be. From the contemptuous way they spoke about Acosta, she got the distinct impression that the only thing they would do if they actually found his murderer would be shake his hand, and perhaps pin a medal on him.
Finally she had the computer check her message drop—a dumb terminal in the city's central post office—to see if there was any word from Cain or Terwilliger, found nothing waiting for her, and decided to spend a little more time investigating Acosta's murder before going after Khalythorpe, the methane-breathing smuggler who was next on the Sargasso Rose's list.
She asked the computer for a running total on her expenses thus far, found that she had run up almost three hundred credits in user and access fees, and told it to warn her when she reached the five-hundred-credit mark.
She then opened a bottle of Camorian vodka, filled a cup from the bathroom, pretended that there was an olive in it, sipped it thoughtfully, and decided upon her next step, which was to access the local library's main computer. She had it scan the past five years' worth of news reports, keying on Acosta's name, and came up absolutely empty. She then tried to find some similarity between his murder and other killings that had taken place in the same area, and discovered that of the thirty-nine murders in Hektor during the past year, thirty-two of them had occurred within a mile of where Acosta had been found, and nineteen were the result of stabbings. It was quite possible, she concluded unhappily, that Acosta simply had been in the wrong place at the wrong time; at any rate, there was no reason to assume that he had died because of his association with Santiago.
Dead end followed dead end, and finally she was faced with two alternatives: start questioning people who might have known Acosta, or give up and go after the methane-breather. She made her decision, then instructed the computer to patch in a visual connection to Leander Smythe's office.
A moment later a portly, middle-aged man with a sightly uneven hair transplant appeared on the small screen just above the speaker.
"I know I'm going to regret asking this," he said when he had recognized her, "but what can I do for you?"
"I'm up against a blank wall, Leander," she said.
"Who are you trying to kid, Virtue?" replied Smythe. "You've only been on the damned planet for four hours."
"That's all the time it takes to know I'm not going to get what I want through normal channels." She paused. "I hate calling in favors," she added insincerely, "but I need your help."
"You already collected your favor this morning," he reminded her.
She smiled. "You owe me a bigger one than that, Leander. Or would you like me to refresh your memory?"
"No!" he said quickly. "This isn't a secure channel."
"Then invite me to lunch and we'll talk face to face."
"I'm busy."
"Fine." She shrugged. "Then I'll just have to hunt up someone else from your network who'll do me a favor in exchange for a very interesting story about a local journalist."
She reached out to sever the connection.
"Wait!" he said urgently.
She withdrew her hand and grinned triumphantly.
"There's a restaurant on the top of my building," he said. "I'll meet you there in half an hour."
"Your treat," she said. "I'm just a poor working girl."
She broke the connection, ascertained that 493 credits for computer usage would be added to her hotel tab, entered a request (without much hope) for a ten percent professional discount, took the elevator down to the fourth floor of the hotel, walked out on a platform, and caught the Hanging Tube—the inhabit
ants' term for the elevated monorail—to Smythe's office building. She noticed in passing that a thunderstorm was in full force outside the dome and that the noonday sky was almost black, and wondered idly what the little herbivores for which the planet had been named did to shield themselves from the weather, since she had seen precious few natural shelters on her way from the spaceport to the city.
When she arrived at Smythe's building, she presented her credentials to a security guard at the door. The man gave them a perfunctory glance, nodded, and passed her through to the upper lobby, where she took an elevator to the roof.
The restaurant would have impressed anyone who had been born on the Frontier, but Virtue found it just a bit overdone: the tables were too small, the furniture too ornate, and there were too many very self-assured waiters hovering around. She ascertained that Smythe wasn't there yet, found that he had reserved a table for two, allowed the maitre d' to escort her to a seat, and ordered a mixed drink from the bar.
Smythe arrived about five minutes later, walked directly to the bar, ordered a drink for himself, and then joined her at the table.
"It's good to see you again after all these years, Virtue," he said, greeting her with an artificial smile.
"How nice of you to say so," she replied dryly. "And how well you lie."
"Let's at least maintain the illusion of civility," he said, unperturbed. "Until we're through with lunch, anyway."
"Suits me."
He picked up his menu, pretended to study it for a moment, recommended a dish to Virtue, signaled for a waiter, and ordered for both of them.
"It's been a long time," he said when the waiter had gone off to the kitchen. "What is it now—five years?"
"Six."
"I've seen your byline from time to time, when some of your features have come up for syndication. That was a very nice piece you did on the war with the Borgaves."
"Ugly beasts, aren't they?" she commented.
"How did you manage to land with the first invasion wave?" he asked. "That's usually reserved for senior correspondents."
