She brought the end of the tube up to his neck. With absolute horror, he saw the end was shaped exactly like a Skin circulatory nozzle. It clicked neatly into his carotid valve.
"It won't work," he said hoarsely. "If you want me dead, you'll have to do it the hard way. It's not that easy, bitch!"
"Good-bye, Mr. Johnson." She glanced at her ring.
Jones laughed in her face. Stupid bitch didn't know the valves were e-alpha protected. His laugh burbled away to a terminal scream as he saw his precious scarlet blood race down the tube and splatter into the container.
He actually saw her flinch. There were tears in her eyes, revealing shame. "Know this," she said. "Your essence will go forward to flourish in a world free of sorrow. I promise you." Then she turned away.
He cursed her to hell and beyond. He screamed. Pleaded. Wept.
All the while his blood flowed along the tube.
Fight it, he told himself. The boys will find me. Don't lose consciousness. They'll rescue me. They will. My friends. There's time. There's always time.
One of the containers was completely full. And still the tube was red as his heart pumped away faithfully.
Blood and world began their final fade into gray.
CHAPTER NINE
Lawrence's flight to Earth lasted several weeks. He didn't have any of the claustrophobic cabin restrictions and mind-rot routines that were the norm throughout his every subsequent flight. Passengers traveling from Amethi were a rarity; there were only eight on board the Eilean when it activated its compression drive. It meant only one life support wheel was active. But even then he had a whole family cabin to himself, and the rest of the place to roam through. The crew tended to ignore him, assuming he was some rich brat whose overindulgent Board family had paid for the flight and a tour around Earth. He never even registered with the other passengers, McArthur ultraexecutives who spent the whole time interfaced with their personal AS. He got to spend as much time as he wanted in the gym, while the rest of his waking hours were taken up accessing the ship's extensive multimedia library.
It should have been, he decided later, golden-age space travel, slow and leisured. The only possible equivalent was a voyage in a 1930s-vintage airship, although those would probably have better food. And a decent view.
Perfect, if he could just have forgotten about her. But the loneliness and relative isolation contrived to tweak every tiny memory into a full-on reverie. The color of a graphic display reminded him of a certain dress she wore, exactly that shade of turquoise. Food was a meal they had shared once. Menus on the multimedia library brought back the hours they spent accessing together, curled up in each other's arms on the couch in his den.
Starflight, the desire of his life, was made wretched by the love of his life. Ironies didn't come much worse.
Earth, however, did not disappoint. During the orbital transit flight from Glencoe Star, McArthur's Lagrange point base, he spent almost the whole time pressed up against one of the ship's four viewports watching the planet grow larger—blissfully unaware of the radiation threat. He'd thought his departing view of Amethi to be the most wondrous sight of his life, with its surface features of ocher, ash and white, and Nizana's dusky radiance reflected from Barclay's Glacier. But Earth with its vibrant montage of living colors made his heart ache as it grew closer and brighter. He landed in a Xianti, bitter at the spaceplane's lack of windows.
McArthur's principal spaceport was Gibraltar, the Rock's inhabitants still stubbornly clinging to their independence from Spain, if not the European Federation. Their government council had negotiated a deal with McArthur, involving liberal taxes in exchange for infrastructure investment and a mutual noninvolvement/liability clause.
The politics went clean over Lawrence's head. Once he was out of the spaceplane and through the arrivals hall (where he generated a brief flurry of interest from security— uneasy at allowing a Board family member to wander around unaccompanied), all he wanted to do was get outside and experience the romance of the Old World. He walked away from the terminal building that now occupied the site of the ancient RAF base and went down to the huge spaceplane runway that the company had built, a five-kilometer strip of concrete stabbing out into the Med. For hours, he simply stood in wonder on the boulders that skirted the concrete, looking out across the water. Spain was on one side, an unbroken swath of urbanization that ran along the shoreline right over the horizon, with the mottled brown slopes of low mountains rising up behind the tumbling sprawl of whitewashed buildings. Africa haunted the other side of the sea, a dark, featureless stripe highlighting the boundary between water and sky.
For some strange reason, given how he'd actually flown across half of Amethi, this planet seemed much larger. He simply couldn't get used to the scale of the elements. So much water, lapping and frothing around his feet. It gave off the most potent smell, hundreds of subtle scents blending together in a harsh salt zest. And the air... nothing had ever been so warm in his life, he was sure of it, not even the tropical domes. The heat and humidity made it hard to breathe.
It wasn't until the sun fell and the lights from the Costa twinkled over the swelling water that he turned around and made his way into Gibraltar town. Money wasn't too much of a problem; his Amethi credits were easily changed at the bank for EZ Dollars. With the resulting balance he'd be able to stay in any average hotel for several months before even thinking about getting a job. That wasn't what he wanted.
He remained in Gibraltar for several days, spending nearly all of the time accessing the global datapool, filling in significant gaps in his political education. The one thing Roselyn had been truthful about, he was relieved to discover, was Zantiu-Braun. Most companies were reducing their starflight operations to an essential minimum: keeping in contact with existing colonies and asset-realization missions on planets newly acquired from their struggling founder companies. While almost alone, Z-B maintained a small exploration fleet, and was still establishing colonies through their portals. Although even they weren't building any new starships. All the Lagrange shipyards had either been mothballed or turned into service and maintenance bays.
Starflight really was an era that was drawing to a close. But it wasn't over yet Even at its current wind-down rate, there would be ships flying for decades.
A week after arriving on Earth, he took a train to Paris and walked into Zantiu-Braun's headquarters. The personnel division, like McArthur security before them, were slightly flustered by his origin. However, the AS and human supervisor managed to convince him his best way into the exploration fleet was through their general Astronautics Division. He didn't, they pointed out, have enough money to buy himself an initial stake in Z-B large enough to select his career path. What he should do, like hundreds of thousands before him, was get in on the bottom rung and earn the stake necessary to make the transition. As an added advantage, people who applied from in-house were always given preferential selection over those coming from outside. His lack of a university education was dismissed as unimportant at this stage: Z-B always offered educational sabbaticals to any staff member eager to progress up through the company structure. And as it happened, there were openings in an Astronautics Division that would serve as an excellent primer to their starship officer college. Had he ever thought of a career in strategic security?
Two days later he was on the train to Toulouse.
Eight months after that, he was in space again, heading for the Kinabica system. He and Colin Schmidt, the two newest members of Platoon 435NK9, were held in pretty high contempt by their fellow squaddies.
Kinabica was one of the earliest star systems to be settled, and in two and a half centuries it'd achieved a respectable socioeconomic status, with a high-level technology base. Quite how and why its founding company, Kaba, had divested itself of such a primary asset was never detailed in the briefings the platoon were given. Kinabica with its population of seventy million was now effectively self-supporting. All the principal investment ha
d been made. There was no more heavy-duty industrial plant to be shipped out, no more biochemical factories or food refineries required, no mining equipment that couldn't be built locally. Everything was there, in place, wired up and chugging away merrily.
"It's because there's no dividend," Corporal Ntoko told Lawrence one day during the flight. Like every newbie, Lawrence was filling his day with questions, though he asked a lot more than Colin. Ntoko had taken some pity on him and supplied him with a few answers. It did at least stop the questions for a while. "Kaba has poured money into Kinabica ever since its discovery, and it's getting virtually nothing in return. The whole place is a rotten stake for investors on Earth."
"But it's a whole planet," Lawrence insisted. "It must be profitable."
"It is, but only within its own star system. Suppose they produce a memory chip with a density equal to anything on Earth: they still have to ship it across fifteen light-years to sell it. While any Earth factory producing the same kind of chip has only got a couple of thousand kilometers to reach its consumer population, and that's by train or bulk cargo ship. Which transport method is always going to be more expensive?"
"Okay, so Kinabica should produce something unique. That's how real trade works, an exchange of goods between supplier and consumer on both sides."
"That's the theory, sure. But what can Kinabica produce that Earth can't? Even if they got lucky and designed a neurotronic pearl way ahead of anything on Earth, it would only take a couple of months for any of our companies to retro-engineer it. At our current level of manufacturing technology, the only production that makes sense is local production. Starflight is just so goddamn expensive."
"Then why are we doing this?"
"Because asset realization is the one thing that can justify interstellar flight. On Earth, the concept is plain digital accounting, swapping figures around in spreadsheets. There's very little actual money involved. Z-B accepted Kaba's negative equity loading to help with its own starship operation funding problem; the two complement each other perfectly, provided you have the balls to see it through. That's why we're out here in a tin can flying faster than a speeding photon, to turn all that nice corporate financial theory into dirty physical practice. Z-B was in almost the same boat as Kaba was when it came to financing our starflight division; they'd laid out a trillion-dollar expenditure over the last couple of centuries and have precious little on the balance sheet to show for it, except for fifty multibillion-dollar starships with nowhere to go. Except now we have Kinabica's debt on our books, we can legitimately employ our own starships to collect some equity. As we've essentially written off the planet's founding investment debt, all we need is the products from their factories to sell on Earth. That way, the production costs are simply cut out of the equation, so now all the money realized by the sales of Kinabica's high-tech goodies goes directly into maintaining Z-B's starships, the strategic security division, and servicing the equity debt. If the accountants do their sums right, we also come out with a profit."
"Sounds like piracy to me," Lawrence said.
Ntoko laughed at the youth's surprise. "You got it, my man."
Platoon 435NK9 was scheduled to land on Floyd, a large moon orbiting Kinabica. While the rest of the Third Fleet platoons would be trying to keep a lid on Kinabica's resentful and resourceful population, they would be intimidating the three thousand inhabitants of Manhattan City.
Floyd was just large enough to hold on to an atmosphere, a thin argon-methane envelope that occasionally snowed ammonia crystals during midnight on the darkside when the temperature became seriously chilly. There were no seas or even lakes; its surface was covered with a spongy dull rouge vegetation, like a lichen with dendrite fronds. The claggy stuff covered every square centimeter of the moon, from the top of its few sagging mountain ranges to the bottom of crater basins. Not even boulders or cliffs remained free: its grip was pervasive and total. The locals called it Wellsweed, after the avaricious Martian weed in The War of the Worlds.
From the platoon's landing vehicle it looked as if they were gliding over an ocean of thick liquid, with strange crumpled wave patterns suspended in time, casting long, low shadows. They were having to use heavily modified Terran lunar cargo landers to get down to the ground. The vehicles were normally a simple cylindrical pressurized cabin, with rocket engines, tanks, sensor wands, thermal panels and cargo pods clustered around it in an almost random pattern, while three metal spider legs were flung wide underneath to absorb the impact of touchdown. Now the whole clumsy edifice had been encased in a lenticular composite fuselage designed to protect the vulnerable bulky core from the meager atmosphere during descent and deceleration. It was the closest the human race had ever come to building a flying saucer, though it certainly lacked the smooth elegance normally associated with the concept.
The sun had just risen above the low hills behind Manhattan City, beginning its seventy-five-hour traverse of the sky, when they wobbled in over the spaceport. Various strobe lights and guidance instruments ringed the patch of blasted rock that served the city (all currently dark and inactive). Noxious yellow flame belched out of dark holes in the vehicle's fuselage. Legs unfolded with labored jerky motions, allowing them to settle to the ground with alarming creaking sounds and the muted roar of the rocket jets drumming against the badly stained fuselage.
A second, then a third vehicle from the Third Fleet swooped in gracelessly and touched down beside them. Nothing marked them out as interlopers more than the local ground-to-orbit shuttle craft that were parked along the far side of the spaceport, silver-white spire rocketships standing vertically on curving scimitar fins, their pedigree taken direct from the dreams of the 1950s.
The platoon disembarked, edging clumsily down an aluminum ladder welded to one of the landing legs. On the ground, Lawrence's muscle skeleton AS struggled to compensate for the low gravity, restraining every movement. They jostled, bounced and slithered their way toward the main airlock of Manhattan City. Bulky impact armor worn over the muscle skeleton made it look as if they'd sealed themselves in puffball spacesuits to cover the short distance.
The smaller one-person airlocks only just allowed them to pass through.
It was the combination of Floyd's minerals and the odd biochemistry that Wellsweed employed that had justified the construction of Manhattan City. Essentially it was nothing more than a dormitory town for the refineries and processing plants that produced complex organic molecules that were used by Kinabica's medical and chemical industries—high-value, low-mass products, perfect for Z-B to reclaim and transport back to Earth.
Once the platoons were inside Manhattan, the mission proceeded along more standard lines. The commanding officer delivered his polite ultimatum to the city's administrator, who immediately agreed to all the demands. Technical support teams came in and started going through the inventory and refinery specifications.
There were plenty of suitable products that could be shipped back up to the starship orbiting Floyd. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of anything stored at Manhattan; batches were usually delivered straight down to Kinabica. For some inexplicable reason all Manhattan City's industrial facilities had been shut down five hours after the Third Fleet had emerged from compression.
Platoons were dispatched with Z-B technicians to "assist" city personnel in restarting the production lines with minimum delay.
On day two, Lawrence found himself with Colin, Ntoko and a couple of other 435NK9 squaddies, bouncing and tottering over the ubiquitous Wellsweed into a small crater a kilometer to the north of Manhattan City, where a chemical plant had been dug into the protective insulation of the regolith. They were escorting a pair of Z-B technicians and five of the chemical plant maintenance crew who had been assigned to restart the systems.
He scanned his image-intensifiers around, eager to absorb as much as he could. His first Alien Planet. Admittedly it was different from both Earth and Amethi. He was just slightly disappointed that it wasn't more interesti
ng. Wellsweed made it look as if the whole place had been meticulously foam wrapped ready for storage. He kept looking up at the huge, brilliant crescent of Kinabica hanging above the horizon, wishing he'd drawn that assignment. A genuine new world. The i-i's made it glow enticingly.
Apart from the spaceport, the crater was the first area they'd encountered where the Wellsweed was patchy. Dozens of crude tracks and wheel furrows crisscrossed the floor, cutting right through the vegetation. The center of the crater was home to a series of regular humps, each one a couple of hundred meters long. Ribbed cylindrical heat exchange towers stood on top, resembling the brick chimneys of the Industrial Revolution four centuries and seventeen light-years distant. The dirty soil that had been bulldozed on top of each bunker was speckled with dull rouge blooms of new-sprouting Wellsweed, stains that were gradually spreading and merging. In comparison to the torn carpet on the crater floor, none of the new growths seemed particularly healthy.
The airlock was large enough to hold the whole group. After it cycled, the inner hatch opened into a warren of concrete corridors. Long rectangular windows set in the walls provided views across chambers full of tangled machinery and piping. Blank steel doors led away into offices, workshops and vaults lined with deep storage tanks.
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