Reese shook her head again. “I can handle this. I’m gonna get on the phone, see where this order came from. Talk to our consul—”
“Lal. That creep.”
“Don’t interrupt me, buck.” Steward looked up in surprise at the venom in her voice. She was glaring at him. “I’m going to get some guarantees from the Vesta personnel. They’re going to look out for you.”
Steward laughed. Reese jabbed a finger in his face. “I’m dealing with it, Steward. If you get near the first-aid chest, I’ll put you on report. I put myself on the line to get you out of the Pulsar Division and I’m not going to let you disappear again, but I’m not about to cost our nation a fortune, either. So pack yourself three days’ worth of gear while I get on the telephone. I’ll let you know how it all comes out.”
He looked at her levelly. “They’re going to kill me, Reese.”
“I don’t plan on letting them.”
“I don’t think you can stop it.”
Her look was unreadable. “Then I’ll be wrong, won’t I?”
She closed the sliding door behind her. Steward could only stare at the door for a moment. There was something wrong here, something unbalanced in Reese’s behavior. She’d seen the shape he was in when the Pulsar Division let him go. He wondered if Brighter Suns had paid her to get him killed.
He grabbed a ruck from his closet and packed in a fury for the first few minutes, then paced the cabin like a madman, patrolling back and forth in a room only three paces across, his fingers working as if clutching Angel’s thick neck.
Then, slowly, he began to calm himself, forcing his mind to cope with what now seemed inevitable. He’d given away his plan to make himself sick, and although he could do it in spite of his announcement, the drugs would wear off sooner or later and then he’d be flung out into the Power Legation anyway.
He’d just have to be ready. He changed his belt to one with a heavier metal buckle in case he had to use it as a weapon. He clipped a knife inside the waistband of his jeans, where the top half inch of the hilt that protruded above his pants would be covered by his jacket. He had no other weapon—a rigger’s knife wasn’t unusual, and no one would look twice at his belt, but anything else would be cause for comment. He’d simply have to be ready for whatever Pulsar would use, the zap glove or dart gun or poison spray.
Steward changed his jacket to something heavier, to better resist attacks. He put on a pair of insulated gloves that he might be able to use to block a punch from a zap glove. He went to the crew locker and got a fire fighter’s Kevlar hard hat with plates that fell from the rim to protect his neck and the sides of his head, as well as a detachable transparent shield to cover his face.
He sat on his rack and waited. Listened to himself breathe. Felt the blood course through his limbs. Trying to ready himself to face the moment of annihilation when it came. He was going to be following his Alpha a little sooner than he’d thought.
One arrow, he thought, one life. A short ride from bow to target.
Reese was gone half an hour. When she came back, she had a printout in her hand. She looked at his helmet and grinned. “Take a look at this, samurai,” she said, and drifted it across the room toward him.
There were two documents. The first was a statement from the Starbright consul—Steward sneered at Lal’s signature—that he had Brighter Suns’ assurance that Steward was not a subject of inquiry. The other was a signed statement from Brighter Suns security stating they had no further interest in Steward, that there was no investigation concerning him, and that he was free to come and go as he wished.
He grimaced, folded the sheets, put them in his jacket pocket. “They’ll make a great epitaph.”
“Off the rack, Steward,” Reese said. “I’m tired of you doubting me.”
He stood and slung the ruck over his shoulder. “Lead on,” he said. “I’ll look out behind.”
As Steward drifted down the access tube, Vesta’s gravity tugged at his stomach and for a moment there was panic, the sense of falling head-downward. Bile surged into his throat. He swallowed it with savage anger and tried to resurrect his calm. Before he could, the whistles and sirens, the crashes and bustle of the loading dock, roared up around him. His head moved wildly, looking for things out of place, for big men in bulky jackets.
“I’ll stick to the wall, okay?” he said, remembering the feeling of drifting helplessly in that vast space, but Reese shook her head and pointed to the Starbright logo on a long narrow tunnel shuttle stuck to the chamber’s alloy wall by electromagnets. Eight seats were lined up behind the driver. It looked like an alpine bobsled.
“That’s our transportation,” Reese said.
Steward kicked off from the wall and shot the ten-yard distance to the shuttle. He absorbed the shock of impact with his arms and swung himself aboard, into the seat behind the driver. The driver looked back at him.
“You planning on putting out a fire or something?”
“I’m just safety-conscious, buck.”
“Whatever you say.”
Reese swung herself gracefully into the seat behind Steward. They buckled themselves in and the driver cast off from the wall. Blipping the air horn to let others know he was moving, he guided the craft across the loading dock and into a narrow one-way tunnel. There he programmed his destination into the shuttle, gave command of the transport to the Vesta traffic computer, put his foot on the deadman, and crossed his arms. Steward was punched back into his seat as the Vesta mass drivers began to sling the shuttle down the tube like a needle out of a gauss gun. Wind howled over Steward’s helmet. Shining bits of mica and nickel in the tunnel walls flashed by in the shuttle’s headlights. He could feel himself tensing, waiting for the crash. A simple accident, that was all it would take. Override the controls on the mass driver from the central security computer and plow this bobsled into the back of an ore carrier.
The shuttle began to decelerate in a hiss of air. Steward’s straps dug into his lap and shoulders. The shuttle came to a stop. The driver took his foot off the deadman and piloted the shuttle across another large space—an empty one—and toward a small airlock.
“This is as far as I go,” he said. “I’m not allowed into the Legation—I got bugs, I guess. Your job’s to unload a Power cargo ship, get everything on pallets, then to the big cargo airlock. We can move it from there.”
Sweat was trickling inside Steward’s helmet. He was still looking for an enemy, but the room was empty. “Right,” he said.
“You’ll be decontaminated on the other side of the lock,” the driver said. “No worry. It’s to make certain you’re not carrying anything on your skin or clothes.”
There was a green light over the airlock. Inside the air had a tangy, antiseptic smell. Chrome nozzles protruded from the walls like automated weaponry, and batteries of UV lights waited behind screens. Reese and Steward were told by an automated voice to remove their clothing and place it in the lockers provided. Small personal articles were to go into a bin behind a small hinged lid.
Steward’s sweat floated out in salt, reflective globes as he took his helmet off and tossed it tumbling into the locker. There was a thud as it hit the padded wall. He was trapped in this situation, inside a huge machine that, sooner or later, was going to try to kill him, and he had no choice but to go through the motions and wait for the moment that the machine would choose, and somehow be ready.
Reality was taking on a hard-edged, surrealistic quality, as in a nightmare. Everything he saw was filled with potential menace, the chemical smell, the row of shining nozzles, the small padded room with its battery of screened lights like those in his Pulsar Division cell. His heart was hammering, and he tried hard to control it. He and Reese stripped and put their gear in the places provided. He found it hard to put away the knife—he held it to the last and had to take several breaths before he could bear to put it in the bin. He could feel Reese’s eyes on him as he gave up his weapon.
The automated voice retu
rned, telling Steward and Reese to put on the UV goggles provided and float in midroom with their arms held high. When they were ready they were to say “Okay.”
They obeyed and the UV lights came on, a short, high-intensity dose to kill bacteria on the skin. Then the chrome nozzles began to track them and fired a gentle mist of disinfectant over their bodies. Steward tried not to shiver at the silken touch of the spray. The spray ceased and powerful fans came on, sucking the disinfectant out of the air, blowing warm wind over his skin, drying him. He spun in the nearly nonexistent gravity, drying evenly, his arms held high like a figure skater doing a scratch spin.
The fans ceased and the doors on the lockers unlocked with a solid click. The automated voice told them to put on their clothes and leave via the door with the blinking light. Reese kicked off from the wall and floated across the lock to one of the doors, then opened it. She reached in and pulled out items of clothing. Steward noticed an old scar that tracked down her lower back.
The clothes were dry and warm and smelled of disinfectant. They’d been folded neatly. The pocket flaps were all open—some security personnel, or perhaps a robot, had gone through them for harmful items. There was nothing missing.
Steward, his mouth dry, reached for the personal items bin and pulled it open. His knife waited. A credit needle floated out. He clutched the knife and only then reached for his clothing. Reese looked at him, indicating some units set in the walls. “Those look like X-ray scanners to me,” she said. “They were looking for implants.”
“Those I don’t have,” Steward said.
“I’ve got a few pins holding my ankle together,” Reese said. “I wonder if they’re going to ask me about them.”
Reese rotated clumsily as she struggled into her trousers. She reached out to one of the walls, stabilized her tumble, then Velcroed her fly. “Gut bacteria must be okay,” she said. “They’re not handing us suppositories.”
“That might be the next room.”
They finished dressing and Reese pressed the button that signaled the inner door to open. It slid neatly to one side, and an alien breeze entered the airlock door.
The air of the Power Legation was rich and thick, cooler than in the human section of Vesta but filled with organics, an airborne soup that made Steward’s nape hairs tingle. There was a yeasty taste on his tongue. He had read of the Powers’ using hormones for communication but hadn’t realized that the air would be so filled with them, that it would make his movements seem like swimming through a fog.
Steward followed Reese into the next room. His heart lurched as he saw a man in the uniform of a Brighter Suns internal security cop standing on one of the walls, his feet planted onto Velcro strips, and Steward tensed, ready for combat, keenly and suddenly aware of the pressure of the knife along his side. The cop had a scanner in his hand. His skin was bright orange and Steward concluded the man had been overdoing carotene supplements.
“Reese?” the cop said. “I’d like to look at that ankle, please.”
Steward warily moved into a corner, putting his back against one wall and his feet on the Velcro strips of another. Reese drifted up to the cop and hung onto the wall near his feet. He reached out, scanned her ankle for a few moments, looking for explosives or wetware or a reservoir of hostile biologies, then the cop smiled and lowered his scanner.
“You scan clear,” he said. “Your ride’s waiting on the other side of the door.”
Steward kicked out hard for the door, hoping to catch the cop by surprise, then hit the button and tumbled out as soon as the door started to slide open. A sound arose like the whining of an untuned organ. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. The next room was big, and it was full of Powers.
Something squirmed in Steward’s insides. There was an acid tang to the air here that had been muted in the airlock antechamber. The Powers ignored him, their centauroid bodies rocketing at high speed across the long chamber, propelled by thrusts from their powerful rear legs. Their forelegs and ropy arms were cocked forward to absorb the shock of impact, and their eyes were moving constantly in their flexible heads. The organ-pipe sounds came from their upper nostrils and echoed from the hard stone and alloy walls. Steward hadn’t realized they’d be so big. Though they were shorter than he, their body mass exceeded his by at least a factor of two. Their size seemed threatening.
And they were fast. Their heads twitched, and their bodies, arms, and legs moved with inhuman fluidity as, nearing each other, they performed their rituals of obeisance and power.
Reese drifted gently up from the door. Her head moved as if on a stalk, scanning the echoing, shrilling room. “Jesus,” she said.
“I thought you’d be used to them. Having been on Archangel.”
She looked pale. “I don’t like the Powers. Even if they did save our asses in the war.”
The organ keening wailed in Steward’s ears. He shuddered and thought of Griffith. “Some people love them.”
“Not me.”
The cop emerged from the door, his face set in a knowing smile. Steward imagined he saw this reaction often, on people first exposed to the Legation. The cop waved a sketchy salute, then jumped out across the room, swimming for an exit marked with a bright orange holographic numeral. There was the sound of an air horn, blatted twice. Reese looked down, then tugged Steward’s sleeve. “Our transport,” she said. He took his eyes away from the Powers and saw another shuttle waiting, a smaller four-seater, driven by an impatient man in Starbright coveralls.
“Sorry to rush you,” he said, as they began buckling themselves in, “but we’ve got a situation here.” The accent seemed faintly South American, but he could have been born anywhere in human space. “The Powers’ automatic unloaders have broken down completely, and a lot of our people came down with dysentery from some bad food in the cafeteria.”
“I don’t mind,” Reese said. “I wasn’t doing anything.” Steward gave her a look.
The driver turned around. His skin was blue-black, with diamonds set into his brows and cheekbones and a black plastic radio receiver implanted where his left ear had once been. “I’m Colorado, by the way,” he said.
Steward looked into Colorado’s eyes and wondered if he was the assassin. The man seemed too soft, but you never know. “Pleased to meet you,” Steward said.
Colorado blatted the horn and fired his hydrogen maneuvering jets. He took them across the room, toward an exit marked by a flashing green holographic target symbol.
The next room was huge, a kilometers-long docking bay so vast that the far edge of it was obscured in a haze of the organic smog generated by the Powers. Aliens and robots were moving giant blocks of cargo about in the near-zero gravity. The shuttle entered a nonautomated traffic lane and whistled half the length of the dock before braking. Its electromagnets engaged a ferrous strip laid near a twenty-meter-square docking gate.
The smell was different here. More acrid.
Steward began to unbuckle. “The cargo’s all consigned to Starbright,” Colorado said. “The auto cargo movers in the Power ship are slagged out—I heard they’re going to crucify their maintenance officer, or chief engineer, or whatever it’s called. We’ve got to go into the holds, grapple the containers manually, and wrestle them out of the tube and onto the dock, then snug ’em down to pallets. The station equipment handlers can take it from there.” He looked at Steward and grinned. “Good idea, bringing your own hard hat. The rest of us have to draw them from stores.”
*
Steward worked one and a half shifts, sweating in his helmet and jacket, and no one tried to kill him. There was an ozone feel to the air, and he could almost feel the hair on his arms crackle when he moved. There were four Powers on the work gang in addition to nine humans, and the aliens worked like demons, moving in utter silence save for the keening organ calls that rose up in a strange minor-key chorus when one of their superiors arrived to check their progress.
The cargo, whatever it was, was in standardized alloy cont
ainers that allowed the contents to be flooded with disinfectant or radiation when they moved out of Legation territory. Ferrous strips along the side of the containers allowed them to be held by electromagnets to the surface of the cargo hold. Steward had to grapple peroxide maneuvering jets to the containers, turn off the magnets, then fly the cargo out of the hold and onto a pallet attached to the wall of the dock. It was tricky work; some of the containers held up to six tonnes. Gravity could be discounted but momentum could not, and a container that massive could do damage if it hit the interior of the Power ship’s bay. Steward moved his containers very carefully.
At the end of the second shift there was a lot left to do. They had emptied one bay and started on a second. There was a third untouched cargo space yet to go.
After work, Colorado took Steward and Reese to a human habitat in the big Legation centrifuge. They were to share a small two-room guest apartment, and were given meal tickets for the cafeteria. Here the rich smell of the Powers faded into the background.
“I’d stay and show you around, and maybe have a drink,” Colorado said, “but I’m dead tired. I’ve been working two and a half shifts. Sorry to be so unsociable.”
“You won’t join us in the cafeteria, at least?” Steward asked.
He shook his head. “I called my apartment from the dock and told it to cook me dinner. I’m going to eat and hit the rack.”
“See you tomorrow.”
The cafeteria was okay, Steward thought. It was completely automated, and he chose his food at random, planning to avoid poison. He sat with his back to a wall and ate warily.
Reese watched him, quietly amused. Her attitude irritated him. “Going to take your helmet off when you go to sleep?” she asked him.
“Maybe.”
“If they wanted to,” she said, “they could have gone on board the Born and killed you just as easily. You know that.”
He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. Reese was right.
It didn’t stop him from taking a chair and blocking the door when he went to sleep. He put the knife under his pillow.
Voice of the Whirlwind Page 17
