Orion Arm

by Julian May

  What if the dive computer wasn't working properly? How many times had my right wrist smashed into coral rock during my struggles down in the Glory Hole, jolting the thing's delicate innards? Surely it wouldn't hurt to break stroke and take a peek above water, just to make sure I was traveling in the right direction...

  I didn't dare give in to the temptation. If I knew the real distance I still had to cover, rather than the virtual, I might give up in despair.

  Maybe I'd do that anyway! What the hell. I was tired enough to die.

  But I kept on feebly kicking.

  My eyes rebelled against the strain of focusing on the lens display, went bleary, and finally drifted shut. I was on total cruise control now. Boop-beebeep. My heart and lungs labored in anguished overdrive. The water of Kedge-Lockaby's ocean is warm, but a cold feeling was creeping up my thighs now, tagging after the deadly pins-and-needles. My face had gone numb. Below my knees there was nothing. Below my shoulders there was nothing. I moved slower and slower.

  I wasn't going to make it.

  Never mind, Helly. Remember why you came to K-L in the first place, after they threw you out of the ICS. How many times did you aim a "borrowed" sailboard out to sea when you were a drunken derelict living on the Big Beach, intending to make an end of it? Haifa dozen times, at least! But you always lost your nerve. Tough to deliberately decide to die when you're a burnt-out case. But no decisions are necessary now. All you have to do is let go...

  You fucking loser.

  That's what my father had called me: a loser. He believed that I'd lost my nerve.

  Was it true? Had I turned my back on Rampart Starcorp because Simon was an idiot and I'd done my damnedest before reaching a hopeless dead end ... or was I just ducking the challenge, as the old man had said?

  God damn him, expecting me to come to his rescue! Did he stand by me when I was up against it during my trial for malfeasance? Fuck if he did. He still believed I was guilty of the trumped-up charges. But he'd use me any whichaway if it meant—

  Bonk.

  Oh, Jesus.

  I opened my eyes and saw a freshly painted yellow flexi-hull. I'd kept on kicking throughout my incoherent bitch session and I swam right into Pernio's flank.

  Now what? Look, Ma! No hands...

  But the descender platform was still down, a mechanism designed to spare effete sport-diving clientele from having to leap ignominiously off the sub into the sea or strain tired muscles climbing back out. I hoicked my fanny onto it, tapped the control pad with my faceplate frame, and upsy daisy! I was flopping on the aft flat like a gaffed halibut. Even though the anchored vessel wallowed in the choppy waves, the stanchions and their narrow railing were still deployed so I managed not to fall overboard.

  Kofi had retracted the flybridge, battening down for the storm, but it was easy enough to tell the computer to open the main hatch, which was nearly flush with the dorsal surface. All I had to do then was maneuver myself over the coaming and descend the ladder to the command deck without fracturing some vital part of my anatomy.

  Easily said. I wore large, awkward jetfins, smallish tanks, and a helmet that had seemed featherlight when I donned it this morning but now threatened to snap my neck with its oppressive weight. There was no helping it: the gear had to come off.

  Getting rid of the fins was easy. I slithered into position on the heaving flat and used the leverage of a stanchion to pry the Corbys off, cringing as the expensive things fell into the water and sank out of sight. The helmet, attached to the gas tanks and rebreather unit by its feed lines, had to come off next. Then I could hit the quick-release buckle on the main harness and dump the rest of the equipment that was strapped to my body.

  I squirmed and I rumbled. But no matter how I tried, I was unable to remove the headpiece. It was secured by a tenacious neck-hugging skirt of flexible plastic, impossible to budge without the use of my paralyzed hands. I briefly considered and rejected the notion of discarding the harness and letting the deadweight of the attached diving gear pull off the helmet. But the sub was bouncing too violently. I might be dragged back into the sea along with the equipment.

  I decided that I had no time left to waste. Rolling to the open hatch, I pulled myself into a sitting position and allowed my nearly deadened legs to drop into the opening. The ladder was angled slightly. I intended to descend it with my back to the rungs, as though it were a flight of steep stairs, performing a sort of jolting slide and praying that the tank module didn't get snagged.

  The helmet made it hard to see my insensate feet. When I decided they were resting securely on one of the ladder rungs, I started to wriggle downward, arms dangling limply. My dying thigh muscles quivered like jelly with the effort of lifting my inert legs, and I whacked my backside atrociously at every bump of the descent.

  When I was halfway down, a big wave broke over Pernio and the sudden flood of water nearly knocked me off the ladder. Fighting not to panic, I told the computer to close the hatch. I reached the bottom miraculously standing on my dead feet, but almost immediately the sub rolled. I lost my balance on the wet sole, went sprawling, and banged my head so hard on the flybridge enclosure that I knocked myself silly.

  The mishap was a fortuitous one. When I recovered my wits, lying on my stomach, I discovered that my chin had somehow popped through the helmet's snug-fitting neck seal. With a little more head-bashing and prying against the support of the command seat, I was finally able to pull the damned bucket off my head. The tanks and BC fell free when I hit the buckle-release against the seat's footrest.

  Centimeter by centimeter I wormed my way to the first-aid locker beneath the navigation console, struggled up onto my benumbed knees, and poked the code numbers into the simple safety lock with my unfeeling nose. My teeth served to pull out the tray of biotoxin antidote self-dosers. I dumped them onto the wet sole, oblivious of sterility considerations, collapsed, and rooted around in the heap like a dying pig until I found the correct doser. Never mind taking it out of its transparent plastic envelope. I flipped the med with my nose so that its explosive injector sleeve faced up, then fell on my face, shooting the antivenin into my numb cheek.

  Yes!

  A surge of idiot exultation blazed through me. I was slashed, bashed, semiparalyzed, half conscious and running on the fumes. But I was going to recover and make it back to Eyebrow Cay. And when I got there, my old friend Kofi Rutherford had better look sharp, because his ass was grass and I was the Grim Reaper.

  I waited for the lifesaving drug to kick in, reviewing the situation, considering my new options, wondering where I'd stowed my own roll of duct tape.

  Chapter 3

  Fifty-six years ago, in 2176, Galapharma Amalgamated Concern decided that its remote Perseus Spur colonies were no longer economical and retreated to the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. Seven years later a spunky shoestring outfit called Rampart Interstellar Corporation, founded by my uncle Ethan, my father, and their friend Dirk Vanderpost—my mother's brother—came along and proved that the Concern had made a big fat mistake.

  It had been Gala's policy to treat preindustrial alien natives as virtual slave labor. Ethan Frost decreed that Rampart would pay the Insaps fairly. In return the Zmundigaim folks of Seriphos gave their new human employers a little present that they had kept secret from the Gala exploiters: a basket containing a candylike treat they called rozkoz, said to "gladden both the mouth and the mind."

  Ethan realized immediately that the confection, more delicious than chocolate, was a potential goldmine. It founded the fortunes of Rampart and brought modest affluence to the Zmundigaim who chose to work for the Starcorp.

  By 2232, Rampart had claimed and exploited sixty-four of the most resource-rich Spur worlds. Its ICS mandate also gave it conditional title to nearly three thousand other terrestrial-class planets in the Spur, excepting the handful inhabited by the stargoing Qastt and Haluk races, which were off-limits under Statute 44 of the CHW Code.

  Insaps lacking interstellar technolo
gy had little to say about human exploitation of their territory, whether in the Perseus Spur or in other parts of the Commonwealth. If the Earthlings who invaded them were reasonably enlightened— as Rampart was—primitive Indigenous Sapients often prospered. But if the encroaching Concern or Starcorp treated alien peoples unjustly, they had very little recourse in CHW law. Certain humans, including myself, thought this was deplorable; but we were a powerless minority during the heyday of the Hundred Concerns.

  The Qastt and the Haluk were not consulted when CHW awarded the vacated Perseus Spur Mandate to Rampart. Why should they have been? During the Galapharma occupation, the two races refused to trade or even conduct polite diplomatic relations with big bad scary humanity. Since the weaponry and ultraluminal transport technology of the aliens were inferior to Gala's, the Concern just kissed 'em off.

  The trouble was, they didn't stay kissed for long. Instead they turned pirate, attacking vulnerable human starships and raiding the weaker Spur colonies. An armistice, brutally forced upon the Qastt and Haluk during the Galapharma years, was still nominally in place. In spite of it, depredations by both alien races, officially attributed to "uncontrollable lawless elements," had continued virtually unabated throughout Rampart's tenancy.

  The diminutive, falsetto-voiced Qastt, who occupied thirty-two Perseus worlds and were the most persistent bandits, represented a relatively minor nuisance.

  The allomorphic Haluk were something else altogether, as I'd discovered through personal experience. No one trivialized them with droll nicknames. Their hijackings and planet raids were always well-planned, ruthless in execution, and targeted toward specific high-tech commodities. Currently, they had only eleven outpost colonies in the Spur, but they inhabited tens of thousands of other overcrowded planets in a satellite star cluster off the Spur's tip. Haluk emigration to the Milky Way Galaxy had been very slow because of their primitive interstellar transport system, as well as certain limiting peculiarities of the racial physiology.

  Both those problems were in the process of being solved, thanks to egregious meddling by Galapharma and certain of its Big Seven allies.

  Of the as yet unclaimed Rampart mandated worlds, 206— including Kedge-Lockaby—were freesoil human colonies, former wards of Galapharma presently governed by the Commonwealth until Rampart chose to move in and assume responsibility for the infrastructure of civilization as we know it. The other planets of the mandate had no permanent human settlements and were informally classified as "wildcat," theoretically wide-open to squatting or plundering, but in actuality too inhospitable or economically challenged to attract small-time opportunists.

  CHW Zone Patrol, overworked and underfunded, kept an eye on the freesoil and wildcat worlds and tried to prevent any significant incursions by human or alien predators. Rampart ExSec was responsible for maintaining law and order on most of the Starcorp-settled planets, although a few of the more remote worlds were policed by Rampart Fleet Security.

  Under the leadership of the late Ethan Frost, Rampart had flourished and grown apace. In fact, it was on the verge of making the quantum leap from Interstellar Corporation to Amalgamated Concern, whereupon its growth would have become explosive, fueled by venture credit infusions available only to members of the Big Boys Club. However, when Uncle Ethan died in 2227 and my father took over the CEO slot, the company lost its momentum. Simon had never possessed his older brother's entrepreneurial zeal. He lacked the imagination and energy necessary to advance the corporate fortunes and he made a number of very bad strategic decisions.

  Among other things, he halted the acquisition of new freesoil planets, cut back on new product research and development, was stingy with employee and Small Stakeholder benefits, and spent too much on ill-considered marketing schemes designed to give Rampart an impressive image that he hoped would dazzle the politicians in Toronto and speed the upgrading of Rampart to Concern status.

  Among the worst of Simon's mistakes, to my mind, was his choice of Ethan's son Zared to be Rampart's President and Chief Operating Officer. Zed Frost was a very smart and charismatic frontman who talked a good game; but when it came down to nitty-gritty operating decisions, he was overly conservative, even more cautious than Simon or my older brother Dan, Rampart's top legal eagle. Zed's handpicked top management men—Leonidas Dunne, Chief Technical Officer, and Gianliborio Rivello, Chief Marketing Officer-were cut from the same bolt of stodgy cloth. The pair served on the Board of Directors and invariably voted along with Cousin Zed.

  A sudden string of costly setbacks and several blatant instances of sabotage turned Rampart's stagnation into a genuine downhill slide. It was ripe for a takeover when Galapharma made its first tender offer in 2228. Zed, Leo, and Gianni declared themselves in favor of the merger. So did Emma Bradbury, Ethan's widow, who controlled 12.5 percent of the corporate shares, voting them as instructed by her son, Zed.

  The attempt by the colossus to gobble Rampart made Simon's blood boil. He rallied opposition among the stakeholders and Gala's initial bid was voted down.

  As time passed and disasters multiplied inside the Star-corp, Simon's principal boardroom allies—my brother Dan, Thora Scranton, who was the Small Stakeholder mouthpiece, Gunter Eckert, the financial chief, and even my mother, Katje Vanderpost—began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of linking up with the big Concern. Alistair Drummond submitted new offers, sweetening the pot each time and applying more and more pressure.

  By the time I came onto the scene in 2232, after Eve's kidnapping, Simon was fighting a rearguard action with the Rampart board. He suspected that one or more of them might have made an under-the-table deal with the enemy.

  Corroborating that belief was an enigmatic remark that had been made by Gala's late assassin, Bronson Elgar, implying that a member of the Frost family—presumably a secret Galapharma partisan—was responsible for the diabolical suggestion that Eve be demicloned. This pointed strongly to Cousin Zed as the viper in the corporate bosom. He certainly had a bitter resentment of my older sister. They were open rivals for the top executive position, and Simon had been very nearly ready to promote Eve and repudiate Zed at the time of her abduction.

  I had found no firm evidence of treachery by Zared Frost during my own investigations, undertaken during the six months following the rescue of Eve from her kidnappers. My associate Karl Nazarian, who had been Simon's original head of corporate security and knew more about cyberespionage than anyone else in the Perseus Spur, had analyzed Zed's spoor within Rampart CorpNet over the previous several years and come up with nada. Not even my cousin's open endorsement of the Gala takeover proved he was a traitor. He might just as well have been motivated by expediency and honest greed as by perfidy.

  The only other thing even remotely suggestive of incrimi-nation was Zed's close relationship with the turncoat security Vice President, Oliver Schneider. He'd nominated Schneider as Nazarian's successor when the old man decided to retire, and he'd strongly supported Schneider when the latter made certain controversial—even disastrous—security decisions. But Zed seemed to have done so without any devious motives.

  Karl Nazarian had proved Schneider's guilty association with Galapharma by following his secret data-trails; but none of those trails had led to the office of Rampart's incompetent President and Chief Operating Officer, Zared Frost.

  If only it had been possible to interrogate Zed and Ollie with psychoprobe machines! But my cousin's high corporate position made such a fishing expedition inconceivable, while Schneider and his four asshole buddies, who'd engineered the campaign of subversion and sabotage, were gone with the wind.

  Matilde Gregoire, the former Fleet Security Chief who had taken over Schneider's position as VP Confidential Services, had ferreted out a number of other low-echelon saboteurs and dirty-tricksters emplaced in various departments of Rampart; but these perps knew nothing at all about any upper-level treachery. Machine probing affirmed that they were all in the game for the money alone. They had taken their orders di
rectly from Schneider's minions and knew nothing about any Gala connection.

  Our attempts to find other material witnesses implicating Galapharma in a conspiracy to devalue Rampart had failed. Without them the investigation had reached a dead end.

  Or had it?

  There were still the captive Qastt pirates Eve had mentioned ... and Kofi Rutherford.

  As I lay helpless on my submarine in a pool of blood and seawater, waiting for my poisoned nervous system to recover, I did some serious thinking about the new suspects.

  The Squeak buccaneers had an unusual history. Several weeks before Eve's kidnapping, they'd got into a firefight with a heavily armed Rampart freighter and were forced to surrender. When a human prize crew boarded the Qastt vessel, they discovered a Haluk passenger who had just committed suicide. The Squeakers were narrowly prevented from destroying the body.

  Now, it was totally unprecedented for Haluk to travel on Qastt starships. The two races had almost nothing in common except their hatred of humanity. When the Qastt crew were interrogated by Rampart security agents on Nogawa-Krupp, they admitted that the Haluk had been on board to broker an instant deal for the Rampart freighter's cargo, should the bandits succeed in grabbing it. Subsequently, I discovered which portion of that cargo was particularly coveted by the Haluk. It was the obscure genen vector PD32:C2, produced only on the Rampart planet Cravat.

  At the time, neither Eve nor the authorities on N-K suspected that the Haluk corpse on the pirate ship had any sinister significance. Because this particular alien race was still little known to human science, the body was sent to Tokyo University for study. The Japanese researchers' findings had been astonishing, providing the first clue to the nature of the Haluk's mysterious genetic engineering project. But in no way did the Tokyo data implicate Galapharma. The scientists very properly decided to keep their discovery secret until the study was completed.