Orion Arm

by Julian May

  "What's this?" I asked.

  "A coffin, dummy. Did you think you were going to push a shackled, unconscious Galapharma spook through the terminal in an invalid chair? I told you we were going to draw a veil over this arrest. The officers involved think Lee is a well-connected Rampart exec wanted for nameless database perversions. We Kedgeree Kops are discreetly giving him the boot back into Starcorp jurisdiction."

  He swiped a card through the detention room lock slot and the door opened. We went inside, where there were two small cells fronted by force-fields. Chained hand and foot to a bunk in one of them was a handsome Oriental male wearing a designer business suit and impressive jewelery. He was out cold. I stood staring at him for a few moments. It was still hard to believe he'd been netted so easily.

  "Lee might be a real prize, Jake. If his probe comes up aces at Rampart Central, it could help save the Starcorp's bacon."

  "I thought you didn't care."

  I sighed. "Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. It's a puzzlement."

  "It's your damn daddy's fault," snorted Jake Silver, "and I really hate Freudian shit like that."

  "You're nuts, Super."

  "And you're a poor putz in search of a father figure. Thank God you latched onto Bermudez instead of me. Come on, help me carry the prisoner." He shut off the confining field and we went into the cell. Jake readjusted the restraints.

  "Did you sweep Lee for suicide devices?" I asked. I wasn't about to touch the psychoanalytical wisecrack.

  "Don't be silly. You can do a full body scan in your corporate torture chamber on Seriphos. The magnum stun-dart he took during the scuffle is good for about three more hours. All the same, I'd keep his cuffs on."

  We lugged the body out into the corridor and boxed it. Jake had thoughtfully bored holes in the plastic casket's sides. When the lid was closed and fastened, he climbed into the antigrav cart's driver seat. It was only large enough for one.

  My face fell. "You mean I have to walk? I'm not a well man."

  "So ride on the coffin, cowboy."

  I mounted with creaky caution, feeling like the actor Slim Pickens in the last scene of the classic film, Dr. Strangelove. In due time we reached Plomazo's berth and stowed the cargo. The Y700 had already taken off and it would certainly reach Vetivarum Conurbation on Seriphos long ahead of me. Mimo's personal starship cruised at a zippy enough sixty ross, which would get me and my prisoner there in about two and a half hours.

  At the last, I explained to Jake how I'd be playing dead, and what his role in the upcoming media farce was to be. He began bitching before I'd even finished.

  "You get somebody else to play straight man in your scam! I have no intention—"

  "It's a small thing, Jake. You won't be compromised in any way by issuing a simple announcement of my apparent death, and Kofi's. You can qualify the news release any way you like to cover your ass. You 'received a report.' It's hearsay."

  "Well..."

  We were standing on the open tarmac, getting wet. I switched to wheedle mode. "Earlier, we spoke of Christmas—I mean, Hanukkah! Would you consider leaving K-L and taking a highly remunerative executive security position in the corporate sector? Provided that the sector doesn't go belly-up that is."

  His lip curled in a wry smile. "If we're talking pie in the sky, I'd rather rejoin CCID back in Toronto. My wife misses the grandchildren and I wouldn't mind seeing snow again before I die."

  "Ah."

  "But you don't have that kind of clout, Hell-Butt."

  "I'll give it my very best shot, Jake."

  He made a raspberryish sound that mingled cynical disbelief and tired resignation. "Just get out of Dodge and make damn sure none of your Rampart tsuris comes down on me or my little planet."

  Superintendent Jacob Silver turned and squelched off into the rain. I climbed into Plomazo and called the tower for a tow to the launch pad.

  Chapter 5

  Light snow was sifting down when I landed at Rampart Star-base on Seriphos. During the few days I'd been gone, winter had arrived on the planet. The huge port facility had most of its docking accommodations tucked away underground, but I made special arrangements so my prisoner and I could bypass the terminal.

  A gobot truck towed the starship into one of the elevator sheds, out of the weather. Instead of programming a descent to the service area, I waited. After a few minutes a hopper-craft bearing the Rampart crenellated-wall logo came gliding across the field, meter-high. It wafted into the shed along with a swirling cloud of snowflakes and settled. A stocky figure dressed in winter gear climbed out and waved. Karl Nazarian had come to meet me as I had requested.

  Karl was one of the charter Rampart Small Stakeholders, a contemporary of Simon, Ethan, and Dirk Vanderpost. Sometime during his long life he'd had a course of rejuvenation, but his face still looked like a topo map of the Caucasian mountains divided by an aggressive buzzard-beak nose. He had founded the Starcorp's security force and headed it for over thirty years, prior to the regime of Oliver Schneider. Until he joined my infamous Department of Stupid Projects, Karl had pottered his twilight days away working on Rampart's archives. When I told him I was quitting, he had threatened to go back to Earth and retire to a lakeside cottage in Armenia. I wondered if Simon had persuaded him to change his mind.

  I gathered my stuff, such as it was, donned a nifty Burberry jacket of Mimo's with a scannerproof visor hood that I found in the flight-deck locker, and came down the cargo ramp with my boxed and still-snoozing prisoner trundling behind on a tote.

  En route from K-L, I'd warned Karl via SS com that Mimo was coming in with a stolen starship that would require immediate cosmetic detailing and a counterfeit registration. I also told him that I was supposed to be dead, had a Gala-pharma covert operative in custody, and urgently needed help in a top-secret psychoprobe gig. My former colleague had reacted to this news with his usual equanimity, reining in his curiosity until he could question me in person.

  Karl shook my hand after I buttoned up Plomazo and sent her downstairs to a berth. "Welcome back, Helly! I rather thought we hadn't seen the last of you."

  "I'm not rethinking my resignation, if that's what you mean. And I was a little surprised to find you still holding down the fort at Special Projects when I called. I thought you were going to disband the outfit for me."

  "The letter of intent is in my computer, but—"

  "Send it. Dated three days ago. I mean it. I have a job for you and a few other adventurous SP souls that'll require your instant severance. You'll be going to Earth, driving the speedboat I just rode in on. Pardon the cliche, but Rampart's life could depend on it."

  "What about your life?"

  "Karl, I told you I'm a dead man. For the time being, anyhow."

  "Is your resurrection contingent on what we can squeeze out of the person inside that box?"

  "Maybe. It might depend even more on you and your crew hauling the person safely to Toronto when we finish pumping him. Did Mimo come in okay?"

  "Over half an hour ago. The new ship is docked in the restricted area, under guard, being refueled and modified according to his instructions. Lotte Dietrich is helping with the computer data-dump. How about if I take her along to analyze it en route to Earth?"

  "Good idea." She was Special Projects' best encrypt breaker, one of the faithful little band that I'd left in the lurch when I skipped out. "Let's take our friend here to the Library and get started on the quiz session."

  When Simon had dragooned me into being VP Special Projects, in essence forming an independent internal investigation force that reported only to him, I'd set up a secret command center in the subbasement of the Vetivarum Public Database. Presided over by Karl, our tiny gang of counterespionage agents and cybermavens had been completely divorced from Rampart Central and what was then the undesirable scrutiny of Vice President Schneider and his suspect Department of Confidential Services—which included both the External and Internal Security divisions. We called our lair the Library.
For reasons of my own, I wanted to question Lee there, rather than at the now sanitized InSec facility inside Central.

  But Karl's black eyes did a shifty little dance and he raised one shoulder in apology. "Um. There's been a slight change of plan. It just wasn't practical to move the heavy-duty psycho-probe equipment across town from InSec on such short notice. And you know the Library isn't really set up to handle high-risk prisoners, either. We'll do the work at Central."

  "But I told you—"

  "Don't worry. Matt Gregoire will stay out of the way to spare your wounded male ego."

  "That's not it at all," I mumbled.

  "The hell it isn't."

  "Dammit, Karl! I'm not trying to avoid Matt. There's still a remote chance that Rampart Central might harbor a Gala-pharma spy. It's vital that news of this prisoner's capture and interrogation doesn't leak out. And the same goes for my still being alive."

  "Don't worry. I've got everything arranged." My hood was still pushed back, and he seemed to become aware of my battered face for the first time. "You know, you really look terrible."

  "Damn right I do, and I'm sick of hearing about it. Among other things, I'm cruising on two hours' sleep, and I can't hit the sack until you and I finish grilling this Galapharma turkey." "Do you want to tell me what's been going down?" "I'll fill you in during the flight into town. Help me load the prisoner and let's get going."

  The city of Vetivarum, home to almost all of the half-million human inhabitants of Seriphos, is sited on a picturesque bay at the edge of the planet's rugged north polar continent. In summer, the climate is pleasantly temperate and the days are long and sunny. In winter, storms sweep down from the interior icefields and produce weather conditions similar to those of terrestrial Greenland. As the days shorten and become frigid, the Zmundigaim Insaps of Seriphos, whose culture is somewhere in transition between paleolithic and technogalactic, abandon their primitive camps in the geo-thermal mountain valleys where they earn a living gathering rozkoz spores and migrate to coastal villages. There, in huts loaded to the rafters with modern Earthling comforts, they basically party all winter long.

  Human Rampart employees and the service personnel who cater to them, trapped in the work ethic, just hunker down and endure until spring. My former colleagues had told me that most folks didn't mind the dark Seraphian winter. Those who did took their holiday breaks then, fleeing to planets with milder climes. Such as Kedge-Lockaby.

  Flying above the sprawling conurbation, where dusk was already coming on at 1500 hours and powerful streetlamps shone fuzzily in the snowfall, I silently wished I were back on good old K-L myself. Or just about anywhere else except the headquarters of my family's endangered Starcorp.

  The ziggurat bulk of Rampart Central, three hundred stories high, glowed against the darkening sky like some monstrous wedding cake spotlit beneath a scintillating canopy of sparks. It was the only structure in Vetivarum with a protective force-field umbrella, a white truncated pyramid ornamented with blue and gold, which proclaimed its domination of the planet and every person living on it.

  We touched down on the landing pad atop the building and were met by Matt Gregoire and three armed paramedics. She didn't say anything to me, but of course I was incognito by then, behind my mirrored face-shield. Garth Wing Lee was immediately transported to the interrogation chamber of the Internal Security Division, where a doctor waited to revive him and prep him for the procedure. Matt took Karl and me to a small observation booth above the chamber.

  I doffed my disguise. "Thanks for helping us, Matt."

  "I haven't yet assigned anyone to record your prisoner's deposition," she said briskly. There was no smile, not even a greeting for me. "Will Karl be handling that?"

  "I need his assistance with the questioning. If you would, I'd like to ask you to supervise the recording and witness it officially. It's best if as few persons as possible are involved at this point."

  "Very well. I presume that you do know how to operate the psychoprobe equipment."

  Interrogation wasn't my specialty when I was with ICS, but I'd learned the basics, just like all the other agents. I kept my expression neutral when I replied. "I can handle it. You may recall that I also had personal experience being hooked up to the machines on Cravat."

  "Yes." She looked away.

  And when I regained consciousness in an underground cell, pain-racked and weeping from shame, my head was lying in Mart's lap.. .

  Karl asked me, "Didn't they ream you when you were accused back on Earth?"

  "As a noncorporate defendant I had the option of not submitting. So I didn't. Psychoprobing can sometimes do permanent brain damage, and my lawyers didn't want me to risk it. They thought they could prove my innocence by conventional means, since the trumped-up evidence against me was so circumstantial. They were wrong."

  A voice came through the annunciator. "The prisoner is ready, Vice President Gregoire." The physician and her aides looked up at us.

  "Thank you, Dr. Krasny," Matt said. "He'll require intensive resuscitation later, since he's being transported offworld. We'll call you when we need you."

  The medics filed out.

  Matt turned to Karl and me. "Do what you have to do."

  One of the first things Lee confessed was that he had been fitted with two ingenious microminiature destructive devices, in addition to a conventional suicide implant. Matt, Karl, and I hastily took cover while the unflappable Dr. Krasny returned, wearing bomb-disposal gear, and removed the lethal trinkets from Lee's body cavities through neat keyhole incisions under local anaesthetic.

  When the prisoner was no longer in a position to kill us or himself, Karl and I questioned him for nearly five hours. Rampart's legal justification under CHW law for taking a de-positio sub duritia was thin but valid: that Lee had conspired to murder a high Rampart official—to wit, me—since my resignation had not yet been completely processed and finalized at the time of Kofi's attack.

  Theoretically, the high-intensity psychoprobe procedure is capable of emptying the entire memory bank of a subject; practically, results are limited not only by time considerations but also by the amount of neuron destruction the inquisitors are prepared to inflict upon the inquisitee as they obtain the deposition under duress.

  Lee was by no means scrubbed clean, wrung out, and hung up to dry at the end of the session, since I wanted to keep him in reasonably good shape for further questioning on Earth; but we had gleaned a fair amount of raw data from him.

  Garth Wing Lee—his real name, to our surprise—was a high-ranking agent of Galapharma AC, having the innocuous title Deputy Chief of Client Services. His immediate superior was Tyler Baldwin, Gala's top spook. He was originally based at Concern headquarters in Glasgow but had been working in the Perseus Spur for two years. Regrettably, he had not been a close associate of the late Elgar/McGrath.

  Lee did not know the precise whereabouts of Oliver Schneider, who was apparently the responsibility of an another Gala operative named Erik Skogstad; but he did confirm that Schneider and his men were alive and working for Galapharma somewhere in the Perseus Spur.

  The most important information that we obtained from the prisoner involved his formal assignment—to spy on the Haluk while overtly expediting the aliens' illegal purchases from Galapharma, Bodascon, Sheltok, Homerun, and Car-nelian Concerns. Lee thus was a material witness to, and a participant in, a grand conspiracy by the five Concerns to violate CHW Statute 50, which prohibited trade of certain high-technology equipment and disclosure of certain scientific procedures to nontreaty alien races. Going by the letter of the law, it was treason.

  This chunk of evidence comprised what is known in the intelligence trade as platinum poop, or a Gotcha. Small wonder our prisoner had been a veritable walking booby trap.

  An emergency order from Baldwin had sent Lee hightailing it from the Haluk planet Artiuk, the aliens' principal Spur colony and a center of Galapharma huggermuggery, to procure my homicide on K-L. Lee was not privy to t
he motivation behind the order. I asked him why in God's name Baldwin had sent a hypersensitive operative such as himself to waste Little Old Me—and why he hadn't chosen to stick around long enough to ensure that the job was done properly.

  Lee had been told by his superior that my immediate death was deemed "crucial." No other explanation was given. Erik Skogstad, an experienced assassin who might more logically have been sent on the assignment, had been unavailable, so Lee was pushed into the breach. He had delegated the job to Kofi because he himself was "a specialist in xenorelations, not wet affairs." His overhasty departure from K-L was occasioned by a nasty flap back on Artiuk involving some drunken Carnelian robotics engineers, a much-prized xeno domestic animal, and an enraged Haluk bureaucrat. Soothing the latter was judged to require Lee's personal intervention.

  Interesting as it was, this portion of the confession was worth diddly squat relative to Rampart's case against Galapharma. Since I was now well and truly disenfranchised, neither Gala nor its agents could be convicted of instigating my botched murder. Under Commonwealth law, Throwaways might be slaughtered with impunity—although the deed was mercifully rare in civilized venues—provided that their deaths did not inflict a "consequential" civil wrong upon any citizen or corporate entity, or result in a public nuisance.

  When the questioning was finally over, I had come to an unhappy conclusion. Garth Wing Lee was a vitally important material witness for the Commonwealth. All by himself, he would provide sufficient evidence to bring in an indictment against five Concerns for illegal alien trading and possibly for treason. Unfortunately, he wasn't worth chickenshit in Rampart's life-or-death battle against the Galapharma takeover.

  To win that one, we still needed Oliver Schneider.

  Dr. Krasny and her paramedics returned to take Lee to a secure recovery facility, while Karl went off to supervise the disbanding of Special Projects as an arm of Rampart Star-corp in the Perseus Spur. Most of our hastily recruited SP agents would be returning to private life; but Karl had invited three peculiarly talented individuals to accompany him to Toronto on Plomazo: the computer analyst Lotte Dietrich, a cunning old InSec operative named Cassius Potter, and Hector Motlaletsie, a retired Fleet Security spook. Some stealthy business needed doing back on Earth, and Karl and his associates were the only ones I could trust to handle it.