The 97th Step

by Steve Perry

  He looked at the representatives of the Confed, secure in their invulnerability, then back at Von, impassive behind his shroud. He could still search for that sense of inner peace, but he could also do other things along the way. After all, God was patient. God could wait.

  Odd how such major changes in a man's life could come about so quickly, based on such flimsy things as feelings.

  In the flick of an eye, he made his decision. A new direction, bam, just like that? Yes. Just like that.

  Damn.

  Thirty-Three

  SO PEN LEFT, perhaps not certain that he finally knew his path, but convinced he at least had a valid reason for moving. The Confed was an evil thing, and illusion or not, according to the rules of the cosmic game, part of his reality. Therefore, he was justified in doing something about it. What? Why, he would bring it down, a simple enough goal. Not an easy task, but then few things worth doing were easy. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, after all, and one against billions was certainly a stretch, for any man.

  Despite that, he felt confident. He would do it. He had learned skills, he could learn others, he could find the way. For the first time in his memory, he had a real goal. That meant something.

  What to replace it with? Well, that might be harder, but by the time he got to that point, he was sure he could figure something out.

  He got a job tending bar on Hadiya. The Shin System was one of the majors, even if Hadiya was one of the less advanced of the six worlds in it. He built and served drinks in a spaceport pub called the Nocturnal Eye, and he spent his off-time fomenting revolution. His converts were mostly students, the young and idealistic, and they knew him only as Mwili.

  Once away from the pub, he had a formidable disguise: he wore a throat inducer that changed his voice, and a thin-layered skin mask. More important, he used Von's trick—he left his shroud at home. Anybody who knew anything about the Siblings knew they never went unshrouded in public. Pen still shook his head when he thought about Vaughn/Von. He had never suspected, and he had known the man under the layers of near-living kawa.

  He studied the subject of revolution. He read political texts, ranging from Mao Zedong and Machiavelli on old Earth to Carlos Perito on Alpha Point, to Lord Shamba and his doomed army; he watched holoprojic program balls on revolution, dug from dusty library sockets; he began to learn the mechanics of guerrilla war. It was not so much shooting as ideological conversion. He had to convince people that the Confed was evil, which should be no problem; more, he had to convince them they should do something about it, and that might be a bit tougher. He was confident.

  The pub he worked in was seldom without a contingent of troopers, either waiting to ship out or in a holding pattern on Hadiya itself. There were others who frequented the Nocturnal Eye, men and women who spent a lot of time looking over their shoulders. To all of them, Pen listened.

  "—damn uplevels twat thinks she knows it all," said one soldier over his spiked wine. "Just because she's a fucking officer. Well, she wasn't so know-it-all when we were rolling around in bed together."

  Pen nodded, pouring the man more wine. "On the house, trooper," he said. "Man like you deserves a free one."

  And likely a man like you won't be around much longer, bragging about sleeping with a superior officer.

  Either she would take care of it or the Confed military would.

  "Goddamn straight, pal. Thanks."

  The man spilled half of the free drink, sloshing it all over his uniform as he tried to down it. Drunk. But that was okay with Pen. Drunks were a great source of information. The soldiers had a word-of-mouth comline that was faster than White Radio, and all kinds of classified scat got into it. And what drunk trooper couldn't trust a tender who gave him free drinks?

  "—yeah, well, the fucking uplevel toad heads is doing it to us again," the soldier continued, "spacing us to squash some kinda student unrest on a dinky wheelworld in the Bibi Ah-whachamaeallit System."

  Pen nodded, and added more free liquor to the man's glass.

  Propaganda, his for the taking. Good agitprop was better if it could be gotten before the public media started chewing it. It made a would-be revolutionary feel like he or she was one up on the enemy to know things in advance.

  So far, his revolutionaries had only printed radical pamphlets and pulse-painted graffiti on a few Confed walls. A gnat flitting around a dinosaur, to be sure, but a start. A message to the dissident students on the wheelworld—he'd have to pry the name out of the drunken soldier carefully—from their brothers and sisters on Hadiya would create a sense of solidarity. He hoped. Whether it would help those about to be flattened by the Confed military machine was doubtful, but it would make his small group feel as if it had struck some kind of blow for freedom. Sometimes one had to nurse a tiny spark for a while before it burst into a major conflagration.

  Pen also knew that inflammatory holograms and defaced walls were not going to be enough. In order to damage the beast, direct action had to be taken. Revolutionaries needed rallying points, events to which they could point and count as moral victories. Enough straws could break the back of the largest beast.

  The three men and two women leaders used pseudonyms, at Pen's insistence. He had organized his radicals under the old cell concept, keeping each group to a maximum of five, using phony names, and never telling any one cell any more about the others than was necessary. In truth, he had only thirty-five people enlisted all total, but he allowed them to think the "Movement" was much larger. An old trick, but one these children did not know.

  Children they were, too. Most of them were students, still young and idealistic, full of fire and rage against Confed oppression. There were a few older people, mostly with their own knives to sharpen over some wrong done them.

  Talk was cheap, holograms denouncing Confed atrocities not much more expensive, and Pen had little trouble fanning his radicals into enough of a heat for a direct strike. The plan was simple: they would topple a power substation, the one that fed the local garrison. Put out the lights, and let the army know they weren't safe even at home. It was, Pen knew, no more than a psychological strike—the Confed had its own generators and they would be online within minutes of the power failure. Still, the point would be made, and it would be made cheaply and without much danger.

  Every text he'd read on revolution made that very clear: don't stand facing a stronger opponent unless you need a martyr; better to sneak in and prick his unprotected ass and then run. Even a big man can bleed to death from pinpricks, if there are enough of them. Pinpricks and straws were what made a revolution. Those, and information.

  The main problem with the plan lay in coming up with sufficient high-powered explosives to do the job properly. Sure, there were ways to use readily available chemicals, making one's own bombs, but Pen did not want to appear to be some half-baked radical group. That was true enough, but he wanted his troops to seem much more dangerous. What he wanted was state-of-the-art weaponry, something that would make the Confed worry. Sure, a couple of kilos of homemade dynamite or nitroflex would do the job, but anybody could come up with those. A few grams of L-40 MicroGel or a cable of slapfuse would make the military engineers studying the explosion sit up and take notice: nobody but the Confed was supposed to have shit like that! What are we dealing with here? Precisely the kind of question Pen wanted them asking.

  Of course, that was a problem. One did not walk into the local chemstore and buy such items. They were available only on the black market, and the price was high.

  Pen explained none of this to his five cell leaders. Instead, he said, "I will secure explosives from our supply depot off-world. You five have been chosen out of the hundreds of cells because of your abilities. You are the best."

  Pen paused, to let that sink in, knowing it would give them a warm ego-glow.

  "Return to your cells, but say nothing of this. I will contact you with further plans in a week."

  The five filed out of the cheap room. Pen
had rented the place under a pseudonym, wearing his skinmask. It would be used only this once. The owner had been led to believe it was for a sexual encounter.

  After they had gone. Pen left, and took a public transport in the form of a wheeled bus. After ten minutes, he alighted, caught another bus going the opposite way, and rode for another fifteen minutes. Finally, certain he was not being watched, he switched to a port shuttle, got off at the port, and walked the klick back to the pub.

  If his five cell leaders talked to their members, so much the better. He had given the impression they were part of a large organization. Such a feeling would help the troops. And, in the unlikely event one of them should be picked up for Confed questioning, any kind of electronic or chemical truthscan would reveal the same information. The Confed would be a lot more worried about some shadowy organization purported to be thousands strong, with easy access to military-only explosives, than it would about a local group of students.

  Pen felt a small pang as he thought about one of his people being caught by the Confed, but he pushed it into a corner of his mind. There were risks in disobeying the law. He had known of them as a thief.

  But not when you were young and running with Gworn, said the voice in his head. The young cannot really believe anything bad will happen to them.

  He pushed that voice away, too. The path he'd chosen had its dangers. He was prepared to risk the consequences personally, but he did not know how ruthless he could be when using others, and that worried him. All the texts pointed out the obvious: one could not make an omelette without breaking eggs. In this case, however, the eggs would be starry-eyed young radicals. Could he send them out to be injured or killed? He didn't know. Did the end justify the means, as so many of the revolutionary heroes of the past had asserted? Sometimes it did, certainly. Sometimes, maybe not. Pen did not know if it was possible to be a humanist revolutionary. The term might be oxymoronic. But he was going to find out.

  The man Pen was looking for sat in a corner of the pub, sipping ale. Pen didn't know his name, but he knew what the man was. You didn't spend years running the lanes and then as a full-time thief without learning to recognize one of your own. Without being obvious the man watched the inside of the pub, quickly shifting his gaze back and forth, looking for trouble. He was young, early twenties, Pen figured, but he had the look of somebody experienced in the biz. A couple of days had passed since Pen's meeting with the cell leaders, and he needed somebody. This might be the one.

  The place was fairly crowded, and three servers worked the floor. Pen pulled one of them aside and asked him to watch the bar for a few minutes. Then he put a glass of icy ale on a tray and moved toward the young man in the corner.

  The man looked up. "I didn't order this," he said.

  "A man at the bar sent it to you," Pen said. "Along with a message."

  The young man searched the stools at the bar, flicking his gaze back and forth. His body language was good; from a few meters away, you wouldn't be able to tell what he was doing.

  "What man? Which one?"

  Pen turned and pretended to look at the line of customers seated and standing by the bar. He turned back. "Funny, he's gone."

  "What did he look like?"

  Pen was glad his face was hidden behind the shroud. This one would be hard to lie to if he could see your face. "Medium height, about my size. Wore a cargo handler's coverall, maybe thirty-five T.S. Short hair, kind of gray."

  "That's all?"

  Pen shrugged. "I get a lot of customers. He gave me a five-stad coin to deliver the ale and the message."

  "What's the message?"

  " 'Maybe you and I can do some biz. Meet me at the port sleeper, stall #363, two hundred, if you're interested.' "

  The man sipped at the fresh ale. "That's it?"

  "What he said."

  The young man's stare was direct. "You been a tender here long?"

  "A few months."

  "You some kinda priest, aren't you?"

  "Priests have to eat."

  "Yeah. You know the local cools?"

  Pen glanced around, then back at the man. Here was where he made the sale. He rubbed his thumb over his fingertips, the ancient sign for money.

  The young man smiled, a hard-edged expression. He produced a five-stad coin and flipped it at Pen. Pen caught the coin and shook his head. "Guy at the bar wasn't a cool."

  "You sound sure. You ever done biz?"

  "Some. It's been awhile."

  "Thanks for the message."

  "Thanks for the stads." The conversation finished. Pen turned and walked back to the bar.

  The young man showed up at the sleeper stall fifteen minutes early. Pen, sans robe, now wearing, a. new skinmask and a hidden throat inducer, had arrived fifteen minutes before, that. He opened the door. The sleeper had a chair next to a bed, and enough floor space to stand—Pen lay sprawled on the bed, hands in the open and away from his coverall.

  The other man remained standing.

  "I don't know you," the man said.

  "Mwili Kalamu," Pen said "from Cibule." True enough.

  “I hear you are looking for something." He kept his hand near the, pocket of his synlin jacket. Probably had a small gun there, Pen figured.

  "You got a name?" Interesting, how fast the flow of biz came back to him. It wouldn't do just to blurt out what he wanted. There was a kind of protocol, and a certain amount of tough that had to be put forth.

  Not fugue, exactly, but enough of an undercurrent to let someone know you weren't a cool or a Confed or if you were, you were a hell of a fake.

  The young man thought about it. In biz, you trusted your gut more than your ears. Good instincts were worth more than brains. "Maro. Dain Maro."

  Pen grinned. He'd passed the first test. "After the planet," Pen said.

  "My parents liked it there."

  "Hypothetically speaking, suppose I knew somebody who wanted something only the Confed military was likely to have on hand?"

  Maro grinned. Biz-talk. It wouldn't keep somebody listening from being, suspicious, but it might keep a conspiracy charge off your back. "Hypothetically speaking, I might know somebody who might be able to get ahold of something like that. Depending on what, it was. But I probably wouldn't want to talk about it here."

  Pen sat up straighter on the bed, and said, "In my right coverall pocket I’ve got a confounder. I'll take it out, real slow."

  Maro nodded. His right-hand slipped into his jacket pocket.

  Pen came out with the electronic jammer. It was the size of a deck of cards, with a pair of LEDs on the back, next to an off-on button. Green light pulsed from one of the LEDs. He put the device on the bed.

  Maro moved his empty hand from his jacket pocket. He reached for the confounder, picked it up, and looked at it. "Nicholson Five," he said. "Nice machine."

  "Hard to rascal," Pen said.

  "What I understand. And I just happen to have a line scanner." From his left jacket pocket, he pulled a small, flat disc and pressed his thumb against the center. It beeped once, and flashed a thin line of LED red. "So, your confounder is running."

  "I don't want anybody listening."

  "I like a careful man."

  "So do I."

  The two men grinned at each other. They could do biz.

  Maro was a smuggler, mostly, but he had connections. He never said, but Pen figured the young man was dancing with Black Sun as a sometimes partner. The crime syndicate did serious biz, and they could get anything they wanted. Three hundred grams of slapfuse? Sure, Maro had said, I can get that. No problem. He named a price. Pen halved it, and they bargained for a few minutes before settling. Maro didn't ask why Pen wanted the explosive, and Pen didn't say. In biz, you kept things as simple as possible.

  It took three days for the delivery.

  "Pleasure," Maro said, counting the hard curry Pen gave him. "You ever need anything else, leave a message with that tender, the one in the blankets."

  "I will," Pen
said.

  He watched Maro leave, and smiled at the retreating figure. Maro reminded him of a time that seemed long past.

  The run at the power substation was anticlimactic. It was a one-man job, but Pen included the five cell leaders. A moonless night under an overcast sky gave them a thick darkness in which to work. Rain began sprinkling down as they cut through the fence and made their way into the unmanned station. No guards, no security, save the tall mesh fence topped with razor wire, but Pen made his group think a Confed quad might arrive at any second, Parker carbines blasting. Adventure and risk would buy more troops, once the story got out. The story would get out—he'd make sure of that.

  He laid the explosive cord against the main rebroadcast unit and triggered the timer.

  When the station blew and shattered. Pen was tending bar. The rain damped the sound somewhat and swallowed the ensuing fire, but the effect was immediate. Some of the Confed troops had seen combat, they knew a cord explosion when they heard one. The soldiers streamed out of their barracks, armed ants, looking for an enemy. They didn't think for a moment that the cause was serving drinks in a port pub less than a klick away. In five minutes, the back-up generators had the garrison lit up again, but the damage had been done. Somewhere in the city, a handful of radicals must be grinning like fools.

  The gnat had bitten the dinosaur.

  The revolution had begun!

  Pen knew he couldn't stay. One small group on one world could not begin to do the job needed. He brought the brightest of the cell leaders into a rented room and passed the mantle of command to her.

  He, he told her, was being called offplanet to another post. She knew the goals, and was being given command of seven cells, as a beginning. If she handled them well, and recruited others, she would be promoted. Somebody might check on them, from time to time, but she must consider that she would be on her own, maybe for a long period.