by M S Murdock
“None of your effing business!” Black Barney leaned over and hollered into his face. “Check it out. Why I tell you to is none of your effing business!”
Baring-Gould stiffened at the console. With a phlegmatic expression, he shifted into a more professional mode and turned to confront the master panel with its sophisticated panoply of screens, keyboards, dials, and printout mechanisms. Efficiently, he began to register codes and instructions.
Baring-Gould, of course, was a genetic inferior-at least to Black Barney, albeit superior to most terrestrial and other-world beings. Gennies, for the most part, were highly reliable subordinates without the normal baggage of human frailties. Black Barney’s crew of gennies was highly devoted to him and each had particular practical gifts, as well as worst-case scenario fighting and surviving skills. Baring-Gould happened to be a superior directional wizard.
He was also iffy in a physical showdown and rarely left the airship during any of the contact raids-mot that there was anything soft in his makeup. But something in his mental programming made him less than aggressive, and while in combat, he tended not to act, but to react. It was Black Barney’s gospel always to strike the first blow.
On the other hand, there was no gennie that Black Barney knew of who better understood the relativity of the physical universe. No gennie had a better grasp of maps, geography, weather and climate, proximity, conditions, time, distance, and the intangibles. Baring-Gould always got the Free Enterprise where it was going as fast as it could get there with a minimum of slack. There was no better astrogation officer. If there had been, Black Barney would have dumped Baring-Gould in an instant. Not because he dislike-d Baring-Gould--he rather liked him, about as much as he liked Quinto, which wasn’t that much, really but because it was a point of pride for Black Barney to have the best possible crew.
“As far as I know,” Baring-Gould drawled, scanning the information that came up on the system, “ The Juno-Vesta arc is nothing but an astral junkyard-debris of various types, chunks of planetary matter, refuse of past civilizations, nothing spe cial, alive, or valuable.”
Baring-Gould spoke with a slightly hickory accent, another peculiarity in his makeup. True, he had been modified on Earth, and it is possible that some of his inheritor genes were drawn from that region of people, but it was more likely a signature characteristic of the laboratory that had supervised his mutation. In spite of himself, Black Barney had to admit he liked that about Baring-Gould, too. One could get awfully tired of monotones and blank expressions in gennies. Black Barney liked his crew to have variety and a bit of personality, too.
“Of course, the Juno-Vesta arc is roughly one thousand cubic miles,” continued Baring Gould, when Black Barney said nothing. “It would take me maybe ten days to scan it in its entirety, and even then it would be a weak scan. It would help if I knew what I We looking for.”
“If I knew what you were looking for,” commented Black Barney, with a heavy tinge of sarcasm, “1 wouldn’t need your assistance.”
“General location within the sector?”
“Negative.”
“Relative coordinates would help,” said Baring Gould.
“No kidding,” said Black Barney.
Baring-Gould looked like an ordinary human, except that he was six feet tall, perfectly sculpted, blue-eyed, and blond-haired. The trend in gennies was a certain California surfer look, dating from the ancient twentieth century, although of course there was no such thing as a California surfer anymore, owing to Earth’s radioactive oceans. The surfer look was one that dovetailed nicely with the regulation skinform worn by a lot of space crews, including Black Barney’s.
The only obvious gennie touches in Baring-Gould were a silver tinge to his flesh tone and slightly enlarged, leaf-shaped ears. The ears had the quaint capacity to turn pink when he was under some internal pressure, and they did so now. Another genetic glitch. Gennies were always full of distinctive glitches that theoretically did not impair their ability to function with maximum performance.
Baring-Gould knew better than to say anything else when Black Barney was in this kind of temper, so he turned back to the master panel and confronted the task at hand. 'Ib speed things along, he patched into a backdoor hookup in the RAM central computer system, something he and other black marketeers liked to do for fun. Information raced across the screens and receptors.
Baring-Gould attacked the dials and buttons on the master panel with the demon energy of a polka accordionist. Even Black Barney could not keep track of all the data and symbols blinking on and off at blip« speed. Baring-Gould absorbed all the data intently, silently, as the minutes passed. Black Barney knew, and Baring-Gould knew that Black Barney knew, that a certain amount of luck was involved in a problem like this.
Black Barney paced behind Baring-Gould, thinking furiously. It was rare that he should encounter another Barney. Unsettling, somehow. It was, he supposed, rather like gazing at one’s own reflection in a mirror. Black Barney never gazed at mirrors, but if he happened to pass one, of course he liked what he saw. He was the master creation: chiseled symmetry, optimal dancer’s grace, awesome power. No vulnerabilities. No human sentiment. No fear. One of only fourteen extant Barneys, and by anyone’s reckoning the toughest and meanest of them all.
“Nothing notable in archive,” reported Baring-Gould.
“Keep checking,” snapped Black Barney.
No other Barney had cut such a terrible swath through the solar system. No other Barney was reputed to be as pitiless or barbaric. No other Barney was as rich from plunder and ransom, either. And no other Barney even dared call himself a Barney; it was tacit among the Barneys that such an honorific belonged to Black Barney alone.
The others-the other survivors of the Dracolysk Uprising-had their individual traits. Black Barney admitted that. He was even a little proud of that.
He knew that Ochoa-Varilla, for example, had a rare genius for invention. It was Ochoa-Varilla who conceived the effective (and deadly) “liquid sound,” and lived in splendor and isolation on his own private asteroid, as a dividend of that patent alone. Paris Joan (yes, there were two female Barneys among those who had escaped Dracolysk) had uncanny extrasensory perception, and had a mystique among the elite and royal of all civilized nations as one who could foretell and advise. One of the Barneys had actually become a philosopher and written a book entitled Power and Darkness, with the theory, congenial to Black Barney, that the two were inseparable, Of course, Barney had never read the book. He had never laid eyes on the book. He had neither the time nor the inclination to read books. Books!
All the Barneys were cruel, remarkable killing machines, even the philosopher Barney, even though he chose to live in an academic surrounding, entertain himself with pretty coeds, and spout aesthetic babble. Hah! Even the philosopher Barney could match up against ten of RAM’s gung-ho finest, if need be. If one of the Barneys chose to live with some pretensions, why, that was none of Black Barney’s concern, he mused.
He and the other Barneys were not friends, and they were not enemies. They were not in touch with one another under usual circumstances. But they were forever clone-brothers originated together on Dracolysk, and they knew, even if they did not care to reflect on it, that they lived and breathed as parts of each other, as parts of the whole of a fantastic experiment gone amuck. Consequently, it was a kind of rare self-revelation for Black Barney to be in the presence of another Barney. It was . . . unsettling.
“Nothing in the latest RAM sweeps of the quad rant,” reported Baring-Gould, with a trace of weariness. Still, Black Barney said nothing. Baring-Gould sighed and returned to the challenge.
The memory of the uprising was a kind of birth trauma. The one thing that the Dracolysk Corporation had not counted on was the resistance of its slave creations. When the signal had come down, the one hundred and fifty Barneys had acted as one. Freedom was a deep-down impulse that could not be purged in the gene-processing. The battle had been incredible. Every othe
r fight Barney had ever been in was like a slow-motion underwater ballet in comparison. It was one of the things that had tempered and forged him for the future.
The Dracolysk minions had fought their creations from building to building, finally taking refuge in the administrative tower. Then it was hand-to-hand fighting from floor to floor, ground level to the thirty first, the Dracolysk forces yielding each floor stubbornly, bloodily, before ascending to a higher retreat. Soon there were only a few dozen of them left, barricaded behind the doors of a huge laboratory, along with a handful of top company scientists. They were hoping, perhaps, that corporate security would rescue them by air, but security would have to fly support personnel over several thousand miles, transmissions for help had been cut off, and the executives realized what the outcome would be.
Three of the Barneys had left before the final attack. There was no reason for them to stay; they were free and Dracolysk had been defeated. One of them was Sattar Tabibi, Black Barney recalled grimly, but it was not something he held against his clonebrother. It was just something he had jotted down in his memory. Sattar Tabibi had fought bravely and mercilessly with the others until the tide had turned, and then he had sought flight and opportunity, and opted against revenge.
Black Barney and the other Barneys, however, had an unquenchable thirst for revenge.
Black Barney would give up profit long before revenge. He was in the last surge of Barneys who stormed the great bolted laboratory doors to wipe out all living traces of the clones’ unfeeling creators.
The more intelligent Dracolysk defenders, when they realized that rescue was a pipe dream, smashed the windows and leaped to their deaths through the fetid, oxygen less atmosphere of the nondescript, out-of-the-way asteroid, thirty-one flights down, to solid rock. They trampled over each other in a panics, reach the windows and escape the Barneys’ wrath.
There were many among the great scientists and researchers of the Dracolysk Corporation--those great minds that had not figured on the psychology of slavery-who were themselves, of course, pathetic physically inferior specimens (wire-rim glasses and all that), who did not quite make it aboard the lemming like suicide express. The Barneys caught up with them. They were torn and gutted, their limbs and torsos strewn bestially around the room.
Black Barney smiled forbiddingly at the joyous recollection.
Then they had torched the complex, so that all record of what had occurred there, all evidence of the secret origins of the Barneys, remained with the victors. The Barneys then had dispersed in the available flight vehicles and gone their separate ways to roam and rampage. They had about as much interest in a reunion party as ex-Death-Row cellmates.
The Barneys rarely had crossed paths in their larger universe, and thinking about it now, Black Barney realized again that it was too, too convenient for Quinto to have joined him for lunch at the Club Noir.
Too, too convenient.
“Nothing at all,” summarized Baring-Gould with his hickory drawl.
Black Barney whirled and grabbed Baring-Gould by the shoulders and picked him up off the command chair, nearly choking him with his ghastly grip.
“There’s something out of the ordinary in that sector, and I want you to find it,” snarled Black Barney through bared teeth.
“Steady, boss” gasped Baring-Gould, struggling for breath. “With a few of RAM’s low-level programs, I have perused the sector and all perimeter sectors. Nothing out of the ordinary comes up on the update. No satellites or large storages. Nothing that hasn’t been in that sector for hundreds of years.”
Black Barney pulled the astrogation officer close to his face and squeezed until the man’s ears really turned pink. Then he squeezed a little harder, until Baring-Gould got the point. He stopped and let his officer down slowly.
Black Barney was thinking. He would have to come at this from another angle.
“Transverse travel?”
“Of course,” said Baring-Gould in a relieved tone, as he sat back down on the command chair and returned to the control panel. “But all are approved trajectories. Freight and cargo. Nothing military. Nothing exploratory. I checked that.”
“Scan the interplanetary travel coming from other sectors and see if there are any unusual intersection points in that vicinity,” suggested Black Barney.
“How . . . ?” Baring-Gould saw the clenched expression on Black Barney’s face and quickly said, “I can’t do that at random, boss. It would take months, and even then it would be impossible to . . .”
Without warning, Black Barney hurled himself at Baring-Gould. There was a sickening crunch, as Baring-Gould caught the brunt of the big man’s back hand across the side of his jaw.
The astrogation officer couldn’t say anything in reply. His mouth was wracked with pain. Baring-Gould had never seen his commander so worked up before-and over what? With renewed effort, Baring-Gould pushed buttons and twirled dials on the control panel.
“I’ll try a different area of RAM Central,” he advised in a low voice.
“Good,” said Black Barney, pleased. “Now you’re thinking.”
There was a whir of noise while Baring-Gould scanned the update.
“Nothing,” Baring-Gould said quietly.
“Backdate it,” ordered Black Barney.
“I already have,” responded Baring-Gould. “Everything in that general direction is bona fide.”
That doesn’t make sense, thought Black Barney. He paced a little more, and the veins stood out on his forehead. He knew damn well he was taking his frustration out on Baring-Gould, and that aggravated him even more. “Try Earth,” he said, on a hunch.
“Earth?” asked Baring-Gould dubiously.
“You got some problem with Earth?” asked Black Barney with a hiss.
“No,” said Baring-Gould hastily. “But we could be doing this for six months before we get lucky.”
“I’ll get lucky,” Black Barney said. “I always get lucky.” There was a silence from Baring-Gould as he pondered the long form of the readout.
“I have two things.”
“What?” asked a surprised Black Barney.
“Two things,” repeated Baring-Gould.
“Location?”
“Two different locations,” said Baring-Gould. “Both headed roughly for that sector. Neither with clearance. Neither with known personnel.”
“Where?” asked Black Barney.
“Something out of Chicagorg,” said Baring-Gould, still pondering the information.
NE0 headquarters! Black Barney’s mind exclaimed. So the rebels of the New Earth Organization were in on this, whatever it was. That didn’t make much sense, either. Black Barney could not imagine NEO paying well enough to have someone like Quinto on the payroll. And why would they need to hire Black Barney as an intermediary? They had their own mercenaries at beck and call.
Baring-Gould was still scanning and deciphering. “The other contact point,” he drawled finally, “is out of Australia.”
Black Barney was most assuredly nonplussed. “Australia?”
“Australia,” confirmed Baring-Gould.
“What the hell is even in Australia?” asked Black Barney.
Baring-Gould called up some reference material and perused it as quickly as he could. “Primitives, mutants, nut cases, lowlife mineral barons . . . and”-
his voice rose and sounded with a hint of triumph-“a hard-case prison for RAM recalcitrant.”
“A prison” ”wondered Black Barney aloud. “Can you index the population?”
Baring-Gould flipped some switches. “Negative,” he responded. “Ninety per cent of them go to Australia and never go home. It’s a given. No records kept. Undesirables. The living dead. All files destroyed. Except, of course, at RAM Central.”
Black Barney was considering this piece of the puzzle.
“Boss?” “Yes,” said Black Barney. “Cross their trajectories.” “I already have,” said Baring Gould, now eager to please In reality, nobody but B
aring-Gould could have nailed this down as fast as he did.
“And?”
“That’s what stumps me,’ ’drawled Baring Gould. “I get the Juno-Vesta arc, all right, a tiny northeast corner of it, through which there is generally very little cross-traffic. And there are no way stations, no mining operations, no outposts, nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“It’s kind of a historical site. Remnants of long-ago space battles. A dumping ground for ancient hard ware. It doesn’t even show up as such on most maps, and it’s hard to say what’s there, exactly, if anything.”
“Can you call up a catalog on it?”
“I might be able to call up the private library of Simund Holzerhein, if you like,” said Baring-Gould, adding with a cautious intake of breath, “but it will take some time--“
“Call it up,” commanded Black Barney.
“Only,” Baring-Gould felt compelled to add, “I don’t see what could be in a junkyard that would be of any interest to NBC, or RAM, or-”
“Neither can I,” Black Barney admitted. He glanced at his wristchrono and gave Baring-Gould a nod of appreciation. “But keep checking. Meantime, I have an appointment to keep.”
00000
It was Black Barney who suggested a friendly game of pigsmear before finalizing the arrangements. Quinto took the suggestion in exactly the non-negotiable spirit in which it was made-a challenge more than an invitation. Like most space hooligans, although Quinto was certainly a cut above the usual such person, Quinto enjoyed the occasional down-and-dirty game of pigsmear. So he said, by all means, yes.
The pigsmear quartergym was located in the Tingeltangel Center, in Barbarosa’s south wing, where the more adventurous, macho facilities were located. The quartergym was tucked into a remote basement corner, beyond the tremendously popular simulated wilderness range-with its foamy whitewater rapids (genuine spring water), daredevil rappel course, artificially harsh midwinter conditions, and surprise rockslide.