The 97th Step

by Steve Perry

  "So bitter for such tender years. Tsk, tsk. Shall we get back to the matter at hand?"

  Ferret grinned. "Yeah, might as well. Beats you talking about whatever gut rot you had for breakfast this morning."

  "You wound me," Stoll said, sounding altogether un-wounded. "Now, some of the guests will keep their stuff in the hotel vault, that's out. But some of them will trust their own security…"

  Ferret listened, absorbing the information Stoll fed him. A lot of things were covered, but there would still be more than a little risk. But nothing worth having was ever easy, he had learned.

  Ferret looked up and saw a Confed factor and three attendants walk past, a lord of all he surveyed.

  Ferret glanced away quickly, to avoid giving any appearance of offense. Cats might look at kings, but anyone lower than those fortunates who wore the Confed mantle had best be very careful about how or when they watched. Like ancient samurai, the elite of the Confed could slay with a wave of a hand, and be inconvenienced little by such actions. Ferret was not political, but one did not need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. Once he was rich, he could buy respect; until then, he'd seen too many people get squashed by being insolent—or stupid. Best to take care; even a fringe dweller could be caught short.

  The city of Kazehi had a sharp-edged newness to it found on a lot of the later-settled planets. Time and the elements had yet to smooth the burrs from the pre-fab plastic and local stone and wood. Like a fresh chapel painting in a candlelit church, the colors were still bright and unsmoked. Thompson's Gazelle had been settled all of fifty years before Rift and Lee, the only other two inhabited worlds in the system, and the footprints of man and mue had yet to settle too deeply into the fertile soil.

  Here stood rows of giant warehouses, squat blocks of stressed plastic, full of grain and other foodstuffs, baking in the tropical sunshine. There, apartment cubes littered the hillsides like children's blocks dropped in a hurry.

  The streets ran thick with electric carts and flitters, windows open to the humid heat, drivers cursing each other for various infractions. The crisp aromatic stink of partially utilized fossil fuels lay over the city like a miasma, rich in hydrocarbons and unnoticed by the inhabitants. Confed troopers walked in pairs, Parker .177s slung over their shoulders, artificially alert, but hardly worried. There was little danger of rebellion here. Life was too easy. There were fortunes to be pulled out of the ground and seas here—war was for the hungry. Confed oppression was everywhere, but conscription and regulation and the killing taxes were bearable on such a world. As it had always done, money talked, and what it said was, "Leave me alone and I'll pay you well."

  Ferret grinned at the sights, sounds and smells. There was a bristling aliveness about frontier worlds, a taking-care-of-business attitude that permeated the air and made such places more exciting than the worn worlds of Earth or Titan or Alpha Point, places he had visited in his lane days. What the new planets lacked in culture, they made up for in brashness, and he felt much more at home in this city than he could ever feel in Earth's New York.

  "There's Volny," Stoll said, interrupting Ferret's philosophical ruminations.

  Volny was a short and slender man of indeterminate age; he could have been forty or seventy, his face seamless and bland. He made his living as a fixer, somebody who could put together intricate puzzles of the right people with the right caper at the right time, and he had a good record. With Volny working the background, you didn't have to worry about trying to find your haul-ass ship when you got to the port. It would be there.

  Volny spotted the two thieves and nodded to them. They would speak to him later, in the opaqued privacy of their hotel room, the anti-bugging also courtesy of Volny. For now, it was enough to know he knew they had arrived.

  The Woodwind was the best the planet had to offer, and like the city, was brash and colorful. The architect had tried to make the buildings look organic, as if they had somehow grown up from the land, but the hotel looked more like rocks in a garden than plants. No matter. The Woodwind boasted all the conveniences stads could buy, and its very complexity was the only thing that made the caper possible.

  No matter what anybody said, Stoll was convinced that an alert guard with a gun was a lot harder to fool than a computer chock full of security programs. He was telling Ferret this for perhaps the hundredth time since they had met, but he was preaching to the converted. No laner worth his body metals felt any different.

  "We have two-level police insurance," Stoll said.

  Ferret nodded. That meant not only the first cools to get the call, but their immediate supervisors were being paid to respond somewhat slower than normal. A good cool was hard to buy outright, but who could point a finger at a man whose flitter took a couple of tries to start because of a wobbly converter?

  Or one with a bad transceiver that garbled a call? Thirty seconds, a minute, success was often measured in far less time, and a few thousand stads for a few seconds was a good investment. Nobody was asking for an honest police officer to do anything other than his job, save that he stop to buckle his belt correctly on the way. It was a powerful rationalization, and Ferret and Stoll had used it more than once. No guarantee, but an edge, and edges were what allowed a fringer to survive and prosper.

  Ferret had made some calls on his own. He said, "Winkler is in to rascal the room comps."

  From the plush leather chair in the room's corner, Stoll smiled. "She's good. They might as well leave the stuff sitting in the halls and save us the trouble of opening the doors."

  "Don't be too sure. Billy Boy says about half of the check-ins so far have been hauling personal squeals and screamers. And not a few lock boxes."

  Stoll waved one plump hand in dismissal. "Don't bother me with trifles. We have Reason's best can opener and suppressor. Sixty-three thousand standards each. Money back if they don't work to level seven complexity."

  "I'll be sure to tell the judge that. And the jailer."

  "You worry too much, m'boy."

  "And you don't worry enough, fat man."

  The noon sun beat down upon the city, and suddenly, it was time. Too soon for Ferret, in that he was always sure something major had been forgotten. But as Stoll pointed out, they were as ready as they were ever going to be, and after the wedding, all those jewels and precious trinkets were going back to their respective worlds. The happy couple would be united on the morrow, the evening remaining between would be filled with parties, dinners and other social gatherings, with the valuables hanging from wrists, necks, ears, noses, breasts, and assorted clothing. The job would have to be done during the day, when people were out and jewels were not.

  As the two men started to leave their room, Stoll said, "You forgot something."

  I knew it, Ferret thought, I knew it. "What?"

  "Here." Stoll held out a small, multiple-charge hand wand.

  Ferret stared at the weapon. It looked innocuous enough. The wand was a thin cylinder, eighteen centimeters long and maybe twelve or thirteen in diameter. About the size and shape of a good erection—there were offbeat weapon makers who sometimes designed wands to look precisely like that particular organ, surely bespeaking psychological volumes about the man or woman who would buy such a design. The one Stoll held out was merely a cast aircraft-aluminum tube, featureless save for the operating stud. Point the thing, press the button, and any complex animal within range was knocked unconscious by the combination of ultrasonics and neomagnetic resonance. The parasympathetic nervous system did not understand the particular energies of the wand, and shut down a whole shitload of functions to protect itself. It was a humane weapon, in that it did not ordinarily kill its victims. Fifteen minutes of unconsciousness and a splitting headache for several hours thereafter was the usual result of being flashed by a hand wand. As such things went, being alive to gripe about it was infinitely better than your friends gathering for your funeral.

  Ferret glanced at Stoll's face, which was uncharacteristicall
y hard. "Take it," Stoll said.

  Ferret nodded, and took the weapon. He felt the smooth metal, warmed by the touch of Stoll's hand, and he stared at it for a second before he thrust it into his jacket pocket. It would stay there until the job was over. He had never used a wand or any other hand weapon since he and Stoll had started their partnership. He only carried them because Stoll insisted. It had been the only major point of contention between them over the years.

  Stoll refused to work with anybody who went unarmed on a caper. Even after ten years, Ferret had not been able to convince the fat man that he was no good with weapons, and would just as soon not have one. Stoll never seemed to believe him, and Ferret knew deep down that Stoll was not convinced because he could hear the truth buried under the protestations. Even though he had not fired a tight beam hand wand in more than a dozen years, he knew he could outshoot Stoll, who practiced regularly. Like as not, he could outshoot any but the most expert, for when it came to small arms, Ferret was a natural; he was a master. No matter that he tried to deny it, it would not stay down, and Stoll somehow knew his protests were lies.

  The wand tugged old memories from Ferret's past into the fore, memories he would just as soon not have come up now. But once started, that particular flood would not be dammed. Could not be, not by Ferret.

  It was the year before he had met Stoll.

  The year he had run with Bennet Gworn.

  Ten

  THE SPACEPORT ON Gebay was the worst Ferret had seen in over three years of running the lanes.

  Some said Spandle was worse, and some said the wheelworld of Golda, circling Rim in the Beta System, was the bottom, but they were wrong. Ferret had seen Spandle and Golda, and neither came close to Gebay, for sheer boring. To be posted to Gebay by the Confed was considered just short of being jailed—and the word was, prison anywhere except the Omega Cage was better.

  Ferret sat in the VIP lounge, courtesy of a hotwired upgrade on his ticket. This was supposedly the best the port could offer, a bare room, sporting a dozen hard-backed plastic chairs and an empty table. Word was, the Gebayans didn't think much of travelers, those so idle they had no work to keep them home.

  There was no provision for food or diversion in the VIP area. Chairs, so you could sit; a table, so you could put your work on it, that was it. At least there weren't a dozen armed guards staring over your shoulder, eager to protect the industrious citizens from the influence of slothful offworlders. According to what he'd heard, the standard greeting on Gebay was, "Why aren't you working?" It didn't matter if you were working when you heard it—if you have enough time to listen, you were probably a slacker. Nice attitude, these folk. Next to them, Confed cools were soft rods.

  The main entrance to the lounge slid open, and Bennet Gworn walked inside, looking as arrogant as always.

  Ferret had brushed by Gworn a few times in the last couple of years. Lane runners were a fairly loose group, but there weren't that many of them. They shuffled from world to world, yanked as they were caught doing one form of rascal biz or the other, or sometimes just getting tired and dropping out, finding a spot to stay. Some tried local crime and some even gave it a try as cits. Ferret couldn't see that, himself. The Confed sat on honest citizens, made life hard for them, while fringers had almost total freedom. At a price, of course. Hardcore runners numbered maybe a thousand, and Ferret had met more than half of them at one port or another. Gworn had been around at some of the hot spots that inevitably brought clusters of laners. Sometimes it was the rumor of easy money; sometimes the word was that the local cools had gone slack. Different reasons.

  They were the only two passengers in the lounge. After looking around, Gworn ambled over toward Ferret. He was taller than Ferret by six centimeters, probably that many kilos heavier, and had chocolate skin and kinky black hair. He wore a civilian copy of jumpship trooper leathers, tight but flexible, and orthodotic molded slippers with nail-grip soles. Fast on his feet, Gworn was. A thief, like Ferret, specializing in break in and barrel ass.

  "Nice place you got here," Gworn said, gesturing at the inside of the lounge.

  "Glad you like it," Ferret said, his tone matching Gworn's sarcasm. This was standard laner-speak, all surface tension and no depth. "I had it upgraded when I heard you were coming. You shoulda seen it before."

  Gworn dropped onto a chair nearby. He slouched, resting on his backbone well above his buttocks, legs extended straight and locked. "Yeah, well, you shouldn't have. It's all too flash, you know what I'm saying?"

  "Anything for a laner."

  "So, how'd you get stuck on this dirtball? Bad connect?"

  Ferret shrugged. "I snatched a half-system ticket with a penalty for re-route. I was heading toward Three-One-Three-Cee but it was here or come up with stads for a change. I'm glued here for two days."

  "You going to Ohshit? How come?"

  Ferret shrugged again. The Nu System had one world, a heavy gee planet that exported mostly heavy metals. Officially, it was called 1313-C, a number its discoverer had hung on it and then never gotten to change before he died in a windstorm. The popular name came from what the majority of new visitors said when first they felt the gee-and-a-half and saw the surface of the world, which seemed at first glance all bare rock and stubby plant life. Then on second glance, it really looked bad.

  "I hear there's a change in the local Confed government. The new people are looking for tourists, so there are ticket points and freestarch at every spaceport. Supposed to be seven ports."

  "Eight," Gworn said. "I touched down there last year. They built a new one."

  "Whatever. I thought I'd take it easy and spend a month or two there."

  Gworn bent his legs and sat up straighter. He looked tired all of a sudden.

  "You ever think about quittin'?" he asked.

  The question surprised Ferret. It sounded sincere, and sincere was something you usually didn't hear from other laners. Everybody had a blade to sharpen, and if you didn't watch close, you'd get it in the back. But Gworn's question didn't sound like a knife being honed. For a moment, he almost dropped his guard. Not quite.

  "Sometimes. But what would I do? I don't have anything anybody wants to buy, leastways nothing I want to sell."

  Gworn leaned back and sighed. "Yeah. I hear you."

  Ferret felt uncomfortable. This was not a conversation he'd had before, and not one that led to pleasant thoughts. The road ahead loomed long and tricky, and while it was the only thing he knew how to do, he was pretty sure it eventually would take him nowhere. Free, all right, but at a price, always. There was the danger, sure, but more than that, there was worse, the being alone. Trusting anybody else usually got you hurt. It was one against the universe and fuck you pal if you get in my way.

  But something about Gworn touched him, made him feel, if only for a moment, somehow safer. As though Gworn had risked something by talking to him.

  "Uh, look," Gworn said. "I got a place. Not much, but it'll sleep two. If you're interested. No wires on the offer."

  Ferret looked at Gworn. Jesu, he was no more than a boy underneath all that leather and dazzle. And what Gworn was feeling had to be the same thing he was feeling: lonely. It was a big galaxy, and the lanes weren't places to be vulnerable. They'd eat you alive out there, and smile around your splintered bones.

  So you toughened or you didn't make it. Ferret was tough, and he knew Gworn had to be tough, too, and yet what he felt at this moment was what he saw from Gworn. He was tired and he was lonely.

  Maybe, just maybe, they could trust each other. Eventually. It was risk, more than theft, but what the fuck—everything was a risk. Gworn just happened to come along at the right place and the right time.

  Maybe it was more than coincidence. Maybe it was like fate or something.

  "Sure," Ferret said, his voice clear of sarcasm. "Why the hell not?"

  So it began. At first, it was warm bodies together, hands and mouths and nerve endings, touching, but with eyes open, giving, but ho
lding back, taking, but with caution.

  After a time, it seemed more comfortable, two against the road, and so keeping the dark at bay was only half as hard.

  A few months later, they loosened up, and began to see that they could trust each other. And why not?

  They had nobody else, and everybody needed somebody.

  So they slept together, though it was no big deal; ran together; stole together. They laughed while running from vigilantes on Hadiya; got stoned stupid and nearly drowned while on Maro; scored high on a theft of suckee powder on Kaplan, then lost the money gambling. They were young and invincible, nothing could stop them, now that they were together. They were Ferret and Gworn: touch one and the other would be on your back. It built up into something, something more than they'd had before. It was scary at times, exposing yourself, but Ferret learned to enjoy it. A friend was something he had never had, and he was sure he would have cut off his arm for Gworn.

  Nearly a year after they met, Gworn disappeared for a few days on the frontier world of Greaves. At first, Ferret didn't worry; they didn't dog each other's shadow, and there were spaces in their togetherness. But after nearly a week, he began to get really nervous. They were due to meet on the spinward outbound ship, and it was leaving in two hours. Where was he? Had something happened to him?

  Finally, Gworn showed up, grinning like a wirehead and looking five kilos lighter.

  "Where the fuck have you been?" Ferret managed, his voice quivering from the relief of tension. A minute earlier, he had been scared; now, he was angry.

  "Hey, flo'man, I spent some time in the woods. I hit a mark with some pull, and he had sniffers all over the place looking for me."

  "Yeah, well, you could have let me know you were doing something stretchy, you know? I would have helped." His anger warred with his relief, and the relief won. Gworn was all right. An asslick nodick, but that was fine, as long as he was okay.

  Gworn grinned, white teeth against chocolate skin. "Nope. This was my caper, Willie. Had to be. It's your birthday today, check?"