Orion Arm

by Julian May

  They'd tried to keep it a secret from Simon, too, but he pried it out with a combination of threats and bribery.

  Eve's suggestion to me that the Qastt prisoners might provide a clue linking Gala to the Haluk seemed highly unlikely. It was more logical that the Haluk would have told the Squeakerinos as little as possible about their reasons for wanting PD32:C2, to keep the price down. I'd have to ask Karl Nazarian to reinterrogate the Qastt pirates just in case they knew something, but the odds were that they'd be just another dead end.

  Kofi might not be, if he could lead me to the Galapharma agent who'd ordered my death.

  It took over an hour for the spongid venom antidote to take effect completely. I was up and about even before the paralysis had completely faded, shucking the remnants of my skinsuit, standing in a shower screaming my head off as cold and then hot water laved my wounds, shooting up with antibiotics and painkiller. My cuts, bites, and bruises were numerous and picturesque, but not as serious as I had feared. I found everything I needed to treat them in Pernio's well-stocked meds locker.

  When the doctoring was done, I dressed in a set of sweats and rain gear, cranked up the flybridge, and started the sub's engines. I'd have to take her out of the dangerous shallows running on the surface—and do a damn quick job of it. The first rain squall of the approaching tropical depression now lashed the waves with gale-force winds, and the old boat wallowed like a drunken sow, as she always did riding topside in rough seas.

  Finally we reached a safe depth. I went below again and submerged, and the chaos of the storm vanished miraculously. Pernio picked up twenty knots of headway. I fed the course into the MFCS, engaged the autopilot, and went to my bunk.

  I'd intended to sleep during the three hours it would take to get home, but my damned imagination wouldn't let me. I brooded about what I was going to have to do to Kofi. Then I thought with growing dismay about Eve's overly optimistic notion that she and I could save the Starcorp by dint of fancy footwork that would impress the ICS Status Review Board.

  It wouldn't happen. Not unless we could nail Galapharma to the wall before the crucial six weeks were over—that is, come up with evidence that would justify immediate and massive legal action against it.

  Alistair Drummond wouldn't sit quietly by, watching Rampart straighten up and fly right under a new regime. If Eve and I openly took command and somehow made Rampart look good to the ICS, Drummond would have no choice but to accelerate his assault to a red-line pitch. He'd destroy Rampart rather than let it slip out of his grasp, because the takeover was no longer a mere matter of profiteering.

  Galapharma's own survival, and that of its Big Seven allies, was at stake.

  The more I thought about this angle, the more certain I became. Sending Kofi to kill me had been a bizarre step smacking of panicky improvisation. I'd been working on Seriphos for months, vulnerable to professional hit men, and yet Gala had done nothing. That Alistair Drummond was actually worried about the prospect of my rejoining Rampart as Chief Operations Officer seemed ridiculous on the face of it; but try as I might, I couldn't figure any other motive for a sudden attack by an amateur killer. It only made sense if Drummond felt he was engaged in a desperate holding action that he could not afford to lose.

  In her eagerness to have me consent to her plan to save the family farm, Eve had discounted what we'd learned in the caverns of Cravat from a pathetic woman named Emily Blake Konigsberg, the former lover of Alistair Drummond. Emily's story had been almost beyond belief, but Matt Gregoire and I had both seen the proof of it with our own eyes.

  And Eve herself was living proof.

  This is what Konigsberg had told us:

  When the Galapharma CEO cast avaricious eyes on the Perseus Spur, he had a greater goal in mind beyond simply getting back the valuable properties that his predecessors had foolishly let slip away. Drummond envisioned a vast new market among the teeming Haluk, whose star-cluster boasted an abundance of valuable ultraheavy elements—a market not only for the drugs and biologicals of Galapharma, but also for the products of Bodascon, Sheltok, Homerun, and Carnelian Concerns. Which Galapharma would broker, for a stiff percentage of the take.

  Emily started it all.

  Until she convinced him otherwise, Alistair believed, like everyone else, that the Haluk were a hopelessly treacherous and xenophobic lot who nursed an implacable hatred of more scientifically advanced humankind. Emily Konigsberg, who was an academic of distinguished reputation and naive idealism, had made a special study of the Insaps of the Perseus Spur. She persuaded her lover that the antagonism between humanity and the Haluk was rooted in misunderstanding, together with a tragic envy by the aliens of our more efficient racial biology.

  Together, Emily and Alistair conceived a daring strategy that they were certain would win the Haluk over... and generate colossal profits for Galapharma and its allies as a felicitous side effect. Never mind that it was highly illegal for a nongovernmental organization—even one of the mighty Big Seven Concerns—to negotiate a secret pact with an alien race, bypassing the Commonwealth Assembly. The two conspirators believed that if CHW was faced with a successful fait accompli, it would be forced to grant retroactive approval to a project so objectively worthy.

  And so advantageous to Big Business.

  Armed with conditional offers of support from four other members of the Big Seven—Omnivore, the food and beverage colossus, was not invited to join the cabal because the aliens didn't favor human comestibles, while the Chairman of Macrodur was a notorious straight arrow who couldn't be trusted to place his bottom line above his moral principles— Drummond's agents presented the proposal to the Haluk leadership. In exchange for enormous quantities of unhex-octon, unhexseptine, and other transactinide treasure, Galapharma pledged to set aside no less than fifteen hundred terrestrial-class Perseus Spur planets for Haluk colonization, said worlds to be delivered when the expected Gala takeover of Rampart was accomplished. In advance of that, as a supreme gesture of good faith, Emily and a team of other Galapharma scientists would assist the Haluk with a certain complex genetic engineering project that the aliens deemed crucial to their racial destiny. The human assistance came at a high price, which went without saying, but the Haluk eagerly accepted.

  The genen aspect of the scheme had gone into operation about four years ago. Participation by the four other big Concerns followed later, as Drummond demonstrated the enormous profit potential of Haluk trade. Bodascon supplied top-of-the-line starships that were needed by the Haluk to step up emigration from their home star-cluster. Sheltok provided advanced fuel additives needed to propel the vessels, as well as energy generators and force-field projectors. Home-run sold heavy equipment and machinery that the aliens required to upgrade their industrial base. Carnelian supplied a wide variety of robotics, sophisticated communications equipment, and electronic controls.

  The grand conspiracy had worked beautifully ... until I came along with my unlikely crew of spoilers and threw a monkey wrench into the works on the planet Cravat. Emily Konigsberg had died there, trying to escape an underground holocaust. The Haluk genetic engineering project she had supervised, a crucial component of the secret trade deal, went up in smoke along with her.

  Drummond and his cabal were undoubtedly hard at work attempting to repair the damage. But it seemed certain that none of those corporate hotshots had the least notion that the xenophobic, needy Haluk might have other goals in mind besides upgrading their inconvenient physiology, finding a little Lebensraum, and taking care of business.

  I now had a pretty good inkling of the awful truth. But since no one in authority would listen to me, I was merely a Throwaway version of Chicken Little, yammering that the sky was about to fall.

  In my present depressed and frustrated mood, I was damn near ready to let it.

  Only maybe not quite yet.

  When Pernio made a cautious passage through the surf-pounded reef of Eyebrow Cay, the lights on shore were barely visible in the torrential downp
our. I didn't want to tie up at the marina, in case Kofi was still on his boat. There was also a chance that he'd be spending the stormy evening hoisting a few with the gang in the back of the general store, where Billy Mulholland operated a shebeen that purveyed alcoholic cheer as well as espresso drinks and simple pub food.

  I moored my sub in the lagoon just outside the cove where I lived and went jouncing ashore in the inflatable. I was wearing a rainsuit with a fanny pack full of necessary stuff buckled over it. My dive knife in its scabbard was hidden beneath the jacket. Wind roared through the trees like a stampede of Brahma steers, and the surging sea nearly reached the steps of my house; but the shack was on high pilings, like most of the other island dwellings, and safe enough from most of the local weather. As I reached the top of the rocky rise that separated Kofi's place from mine I saw a glimmer of light among the thrashing palms and fingerwoods and gave a satisfied grunt. He was probably home.

  There was no need for a cautious approach with the storm making such a racket so I just stole up his front steps. They sagged alarmingly. Like the rest of the tumbledown old building, they were rapidly biodegrading. Kofi had the shutters lowered on the windows facing the raging sea. I went around the open deck to the side of the house and peeked in. There was my treacherous bud, taking his ease in a ratty old recliner before the television. A nice fire was burning in his glass-door Franklin stove. He hadn't gotten around to fixing the leaky roof, having killed the day (so to speak) with me, and a bucket was set out to catch drips. He had a brew in one hand and the remote in the other. The screen on the wall was showing previews from the Purple Pipeline featuring frisky ladies doing unlikely things to one another.

  I crept back to the front of the place and began to pound on the door and shout in a strangled, high-pitched voice. "Kofi! Open up, it's Mimo! Help me, for God's sake!"

  The door suddenly flew open. I stood out of arm's reach. The rainjacket's hood hid my face. I teetered from side to side like a sick old man.

  Kofi said, "What the fuck?"

  I whimpered, "Ayudame, amigo!" and took a faltering step backward.

  As he came out the door, I straightened and brought up my right fist in a short, wrecking-ball uppercut that took him square on the chin. Any ordinary guy would have gone down like a sack of sand. (Any ordinary embezzling accountant would have gone lullaby for a week!) But Kofi Rutherford just rocked on his pins, gave a bellow of rage, and tried to envelop me in a rib-crushing bear hug. I thumb-fisted him in the balls. He leapt back screeching and landed a solid blow to my left eye.

  We danced around and I charged him with a body block. The two of us crashed to the rough boards of the deck and rolled about, grappling and howling, neither one daring to release his grip on the other. He got hold of my ears and pounded my head into the floor. I broke his pinky finger. Roaring with pain, he nevertheless trapped me in a headlock. I turned my face into the crook of his elbow to stave off strangulation, raked his flesh with my nails through the thin fabric of his T-shirt, caught him with my legs in a scissor lock, and rolled. We cannoned against the deck railing, and the half-rotten supports snapped like matchsticks. Still clamped together, we went over the edge and fell more than two meters. The rain-hardened sand was like plascrete.

  I landed on top, but even so, the impact stunned me. Kofi woofed and was still. I lay there for a minute or two, then felt him stir beneath me. He began to mumble, "Ah shit ah shit ah shit." It was black as midnight under an iron skillet and pouring fit to drown a frog.

  I found Kofi's north end from the noise he was making, fitted my hands around his throat, and was pressing my thumbs into his jugular when he gurgled, "Quits! Quits! Fuckin' leg's broke. Something wrong with my arm, too."

  I eased on the strangling a mite. "If you're lying—"

  "Get off me and see for yourself. I ain't going nowhere."

  "Don't move!" Still sprawled on top of him, I groped for the small flashlight I carried in my fanny pack and turned it on. A portion of the smashed railing lay beneath us, partially driven into the sand. He moaned as I slithered off his body. I drew my knife from its sheath, let him see it in the beam of the flashlight and said, "I'm gonna get up."

  "Yeah, yeah." His left leg was bent at the knee in an unnatural way, either broken at the joint or badly dislocated. His left forearm, flung wide, was lacerated and bleeding, pierced by a splinter the size of a bayonet. He reached across his chest with the other hand, the one with the broken finger, touched the wood shakily, and cursed.

  Struggling to my knees, I took stock of myself. One of my eyes was swelling shut. There was a throbbing knot at the back of my skull. I tasted salty blood from a split lip and my ears were on fire. My jacket had come unsnapped and blood was smeared all over the front of me, probably from old shoulder wounds that had torn open. My bones seemed to be intact.

  I said, "What's the name of the guy who told you to kill me?"

  His eyes were fixed on the illuminated knife in my hand and he sneered. "What? You gonna start cutting me open if I don't confess?"

  "I need a description and his phone code at the Big Beach."

  Kofi ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, spat out something, and muttered, "Shee-it. You damn near knocked my teeth out with that sucker punch."

  "Tell me about the contact."

  His face twisted in agony and he shuddered. When he finally spoke, his voice was full of sad surprise. "Y'know? I think I'm really fucked, man. Hurt like hell inside."

  "Where?"

  "Left. Maybe broken ribs. You came down hard on me, but I traded you some. Should see your face!" A soft giggle. He squeezed his eyes shut as another spasm of pain washed over him. To my surprise, he asked, "How you doing?"

  "Okay. You broke my fall."

  "That, too?" He took a ragged breath, then flashed me a bloodstained grin. "You're somethin' else, Hel. Know that? Dodged the sea toad, got rescued off that damned comet, bisected ol' Bron Elgar like a bagel out there on Cravat... How the hell you get away from those damn fish down in the Glory Hole? Man, you got more lives than a New York alleycat."

  "The name," I repeated. I brought the blade down in front of his eyes, keeping the flashlight on his face. Falling drops bounced and beaded on the bright metal. His dark cheeks were streaming. There were tears mixed with the rainwater. I said, "Please, Kofi."

  "Hey, now!" He gave a crazy kind of laugh and winced at the effort. "Interrogating the suspectpo-litely! You crazy? Go ahead—start slashing! Carve me like a pork roast. I deserve it, right?"

  "All I want is the information."

  "Don't wanna do the torture thing? Not even a teensy bit of revenge? Get some satisfaction for the way I sold you out, poked holes in you, wouldn't even let you die easy down in the hole? Come on, make me talk. See if you can!"

  I held the knifepoint a few millimeters above his right eyeball. "Tell me, Kofi."

  "You gonna do it," he whispered, "do it!"

  For a long time I didn't move. Then I withdrew the blade, replaced it in its sheath, sat back on my heels and stared at him. The rain cascaded down on us. Waves were thundering on the rocks below Kofi's house, and the leaves of the alien trees clattered in the fury of the gale. I was soaked to the skin in spite of my rainsuit. I'd lost one sea boot. My wound collection ached like blue blazes and I had dribbled blood all over the broken man lying on the sand.

  "Do it!" Kofi screamed.

  "Shut up."

  I undipped my fanny pack, rummaged, found the phone and tried it. The case was cracked. The thing was dead as a chunk of corned beef. "Is your phone up in your house?"

  The sound he made was half a sob. He writhed, trying to pull his arm off the impaling splinter. "Left it... on the boat to charge. House charger unit fritzed out. I was gonna ask Oren to fix it."

  "Terrific. Lie still."

  I'd have to go back to my place to get help. The nearest Medic Unit was on Gingerbread Island, over three hundred kilometers away. I thought it might be better to fly Kofi over in
Mimo's speedy Garrison hopper rather than wait for an evacuation, but he'd have to be stabilized first.

  I used the flashlight to find my missing footgear and gather loose deck palings that would serve for splints. The arm would be a tricky job for somebody whose first-aid skills were as rusty as mine. That dagger of wood couldn't be left in place, but he'd probably bleed like a son of a bitch when I removed it. I dragged as much of the shattered railing out from under Kofi as I could and then shed my rainjacket. The knife served to slice off one of the long sleeves of my sweatshirt. I chopped the thick cloth into pieces.

  "Can you hold the flashlight?" I asked him.

  He took it. "About that button man on the Big Beach—"

  "To hell with him." I took the roll of duct tape out of my pack.

  "What you gonna do with that?"

  "Boy Scout stuff."

  A despairing chuckle. "Why bother? You think I'm dog shit."

  "Wrong. I think you're guppy shit."

  "Hah! I know why you can't torture me, muthahfuckah. Because it'd lower you to my scumbag level. You're a Boy Scout for real! Can't stand soilin' your lofty moral principles—"

  "I've got to lift this arm off the wooden spike poked through it. It'll hurt. I'll try to be quick."

  As I did the job, he yelled, "Shiiiit!" and dropped the flashlight.

  I caught it and held it in my mouth. Blood was pouring from both ends of the puncture but I didn't see any strong arterial spurting. I held the pressure point in the bend of his elbow until the flow eased, simultaneously clamping wads of cloth over the holes. I really needed another hand. I could feel at least one broken bone moving inside the lower arm. Blood continued to ooze slowly as I wrapped it firmly with the wide tape and applied a splint.

  "Now I'm going to cut your shirt and check your side."

  Kofi spoke in a faint, strained voice. "Can't you do this... repair work someplace dry? Feel like I'm freezin'."

  "Soon."

  He cried out weakly as I felt along his side. There was no external wound and it was impossible for me to see any bruising on the dark wet skin. "You feel ribs grating in there? Take a breath."