by Brian Daley
* * * *
Raul Plantos, Langstretch Field Operative Class Two, was the one who'd just come through the aeroponics shed after Floyt and Alacrity, the one who'd offered terms of surrender to make it easy for him to braise them.
He was leery of his two targets; he was familiar with their astounding dash to Terra in a privateer star-ship, their final planetfall in a superstealth spaceboat, and their key roles in bringing down the Camarilla. In some fashion no one seemed to quite understand, the two hapless vagabonds had defied certain death and beat the odds, not just once, but repeatedly.
Plantos had read of their exploits in those absurd books, determined to know his prey as well as possible. He dismissed just about all of it as sheer fantasy, but was troubled by occasional doubts. How could the pair have survived what they had, out on their own in the Third Breath, if they didn't have hidden resources? That seemed as unlikely as the Amazon Slave Women of the Supernova. He knew he had them cornered, but Plantos still felt misgivings.
Footshuffles and hop-sounds came his way from behind. He whirled, fearing the targets had managed some flank attack, but it was only the last of his strike force, for a total of five. They moved loudly and were less professional than he preferred, but there was no help for that now.
Plantos, a deceptively lean man with a protruding Adam's apple and sleepy eyes, motioned with his scatterbeam assault weapon; the manhunters took cover to await orders. He cursed the need for haste that had required his obtaining local help. But the boxtown mayor's tip came out of the blue, and there was no telling when Fitzhugh would drop from sight again, leaving an absolute-zero trail, as he had in the past.
The standing bounty on Fitzhugh, already generous enough to let a field op retire in rare style, had been increased. That meant Fitzhugh and, inevitably, his sidekick Floyt, must be nulled with dispatch, before someone beat Plantos to it.
"Get ready," he said in a low voice. "They must be in there somewhere."
"We found the kid, Quirk," one of the latecomers said. "He's crammed into a locker. Him, we can adjust later."
"Come," Plantos said, rising. He advanced with the scatterbeam's skeletal stock clamped firmly to his right hip. His dearest wish was that his mission partner were there to help; a human juggernaut could be a liability at some times, and frightening, but a welcome companion at others.
But his mission partner wasn't there, so Plantos directed the assault with professional calm and skill, letting the local hirelings take most of the risks.
Counterfire didn't come when and where he expected it, which was disturbing. The targets had been driven into a dead end, an old land-dozer hull the Sockwallets used as a warehouse. There wasn't even access to the Lunar surface, not that that would do the quarry any good.
Plantos, bringing up the rear, found himself staring down a short passageway and through an open hatch into the warehouse. It as empty except for odd bits of trash, with no cover to be seen but for a low life-support service unit with its access panel hanging open. If the targets had gone to ground inside it, they were as good as dead. There were a few little viewblebs in the place, through which harsh sunlight flooded.
The locals were wary but eager as weasels, itching to have it over with and collect the head bounty. One threw himself down in a good firing position, leaning against the circular plug-hatch that was swung back, flat against the bulkhead. A second hireling got to the other side of the hatchway for a crossfire and still there was no sign of opposition. Plantos ordered up the remaining two gunmen, establishing commanding fields of fire. There was no sign of Floyt or Fitzhugh in any direction, including up.
Then he himself advanced to weigh the situation. After some tentative ducking in and out, a laser marksman and a scatterbeam gunner were inside, seeing no prey.
Plantos crouched in the hatchway, taking a better look at the service unit. The open panel had a symbol qwik-graffed on its inner side, a trefoil with a human eye beneath it. The blood in his veins seemed to stop.
"My god! The damned transport system! The secret transport system!" That explained some of Fitzhugh's and Floyt's unlikely triumphs. Plantos still didn't believe in Lunar Ancients, but apparently those books had some truth in them after all.
Plantos leapt through the hatch, plucking at his belt for the stun grenades he couldn't use earlier when he was in the same compartment with Alacrity and Floyt. He had no idea where the bolthole led, but knew that if he didn't act fast, the quarry would escape. His men crowded after, ready to fire at the first sign of a target.
Two gunmen took up firing positions inside the hatchway; the others and Plantos closed in on the service unit with infantry-style rushes. Plantos invoked an icy calm; he maneuvered to his right, scatterbeam leveled. At his command, his men advanced on the open access plate. He prayed that the targets were still within range of a dropped grenade; the thought of chasing armed enemies down through some underground maze made his skin crawl.
"Suppression fire." Plantos got ready to open up.
They would riddle the service unit and inspect for subsurface escape shafts afterward.
All at once a tremendous gunbolt crashed across the warehouse to blast out one of the viewblebs. There was an eternal instant as an ocean of air, drawn irresistibly to vacuum, mobilized itself, during which Plantos whirled and saw Alacrity standing in the half-closed hatchway, the Captain's Sidearm held cup-in-saucer style. Though the hunter-killer team couldn't see him, Floyt was struggling from hiding too, shoving himself from the cramped hiding place that had been left when the hatch, like a number of others, was gutted for salvage.
The hatch was moving as the lashup's tremendous mountain of air surged into motion. Alacrity was putting another shot into the shattered viewbleb to be sure; a spectral wind-howl had begun.
Most of the assassins were too startled to move, but one began bringing his pulsed-laser alley broom around. Floyt fired the Webley again and again as the wind tore at him, throwing the man into convulsions of pain, the air whiplashing them all in a monumental surge.
Plantos was yelling, drowned out by the howling air-leak, and Alacrity dropped the Captain's Sidearm to grab Floyt, who was in danger of being whisked into the warehouse. Alacrity dragged his friend to one side, reaching for purchase with hands and feet, the light gravity working against him as the hatch was swung shut by the vast atmospheric flow. It nearly sucked them through, and the hatch came close to chopping off half of Alacrity's left foot.
The hatch whammed shut with such force that Alacrity feared it would split up the middle and give way. A few feeble alarms began, tribute to the Foragers' endlessly cautious engineering.
There were some few screams and impacts from the ruptured warehouse, but they grew fainter as the atmosphere bled away.
Floyt only had to wave the Webley around once or twice and that was it; the boxtowners kept an emphatic distance. They were scavengers, with no taste for gunplay and firefights.
When Alacrity showed up at last, in the repaired vac-suit he'd rented from the local protection committee, he looked several shades paler than usual. The raptured viewbleb wasn't very big, so Floyt didn't want to think about what the assassins' remains looked like strewn across the airless lunar landscape.
"One of them was Langstretch," Alacrity said, throwing down carry-pouches and proteuses and an armload of guns. Searching quickly, they found that only the Langstretch man had much cash, but he was pretty well heeled.
"We don't have time to fence the guns," Alacrity admitted, "so I propose we give 'em to the protection committee, where they'll do some good."
Floyt fingered through the money solemnly. "It isn't enough to get us very far on our way to Windfall, though, is it?"
"No. This is." Alacrity held up a spacecraft code-key, smiling triumphantly. "That skinny guy who had all the money—Plantos, his name was—he was a Field Op Two. We needed a break, and it came to us the strangest way I ever saw: Plantos."
Floyt held up one hand. "Wait; slow down. Yo
u're saying to me that we have ourselves a starship?"
Alacrity was rubbing the end of the code-key on the tip of his nose, beaming. "Provided there's enough money here to pay the right bribes. The ship's called, um—" He double-checked—"The Lightning Whelk. And she's ours if we move sprightly. I say again: let's houdini the hell outta here."
Floyt was grinning. "What's the weather like on Windfall?"
Alacrity looked thoughtful, seating a new charge in the Captain's Sidearm. "It's nice there, Ho. It's always nice on Windfall."
Chapter 3
Dark Matter
"Not very well equipped, was he?" Floyt announced after he and Alacrity had made their inspection of the Lightning Whelk.
"I mean, for a Langstretch man? I don't see much of the paraphernalia that Victoria carried."
"Me either," Alacrity said, feeding the last of the mathematical models into the computer guidance suite. The pliability of Lunar port officials increased when Alacrity flashed the sheaf of money he'd recovered from Plantos's leg pouch. It had cost most of the op's cash, but Alacrity and Floyt received priority clearance and made immediate lift-off.
"But she's a Field Op One and he was only a Two," Alacrity added. He glanced around a cockpit/bridge that was roomy enough for one but cramped for two. It wasn't set up for two, but the rest of the Lightning Whelk was, Plantos's permanent living arrangements augmented by temporary provisions for a second person. Or thing. A quick look at those accommodations gave Floyt an uneasy feeling.
"Still, a starship," he said. "We must be pretty high up on their shopping list, Alacrity."
A starship, but a small one resembling, from the outside, her namesake, a contoured, torch-shaped snailshell hulk some thirty meters high when sitting on her tapered tail with berthing stabilizers deployed. She was old, much overhauled and patched, dangerous when it came right down to it. But Alacrity fell for her wholly and without reservation, swelled in ecstasy by winners-keepers ownership.
"Umm," Floyt mulled. "With no cargo, she's only slightly worse than Pihoquiaq was." He saw from the look on Alacrity's face what he was about to say, and chimed in, so that they said it at the same time, "But still, a starship!"
Floyt eased down into the standby's jumpseat. "Nobody from Luna was interested in us, Alacrity? Nobody following?"
Alacrity was punching up various scope images, checking all the detectors. "Nope. What're you worried about, the Golem?"
That was Alacrity's name for Plantos's absent partner or hireling or whoever it was. The name seemed to fill the bill; the Golem's makeshift bunk was outsize, long enough for someone a meter or so taller than Alacrity and with three or four times his cross section. It was braced and reinforced to support enormous weight.
"Maybe Plantos was just keeping a couple of old reactor containment vessels in there, or something." Alacrity smirked. "Anyway, whoever it is, we left 'im behind. In another little while we can forget about him for good, because we'll be in Hawking. Good old sinful Luna. Buddha smile on everybody who can be bought and stays bought."
"Good to us, anyway." Floyt shifted the cuptray he was carrying, setting it on a flat area of the console.
"What's that you got there?"
"Breakers, have you forgotten so soon?"
"Managgia! It's been so long since we were on a regular Hawking jump, I didn't even think of blastoff cocktails."
Floyt nodded, handing out the drinks, two big, chilled hurricane glasses filled with some frozen concoction. Alacrity was right; except for their original departure from Luna inboard the freighter Bruja, their headlong comings and goings were usually in escape or as captives or bilge-class deadheaders. It was nice to have time for the amenities again.
Floyt turned the rimed glass in his hand and got to something that had concerned him. "Alacrity, see here. I know this Perlez fellow, your father's mentor, is supposed to help you, and I'm not trying to play Miraculo the Mindreader, but something about this situation is just eating you up."
Alacrity sampled the drink. "Not bad. Frozen, uh, banana daquiri? Except it doesn't really taste like bananas."
Floyt leaned his head against a power panel. "They're something called fidberries, from some planet named Anybody's Guess. The potables report is pretty bleak; a few hundred milliliters of perfumey-smelling vodka left and a half case of that defanged beer with neothanol in it. Plus an inhaler of updust, and of course that swill the whole ship reeks of."
Floyt held up a bottle whose label read "Old Four Smokes Wallop." "Some kind of drugged liquor, or nostrum, or whatever."
Unstoppered, it was the source of the stomach-turning odor that permeated the Whelk; the Golem's bunk in particular smelled of it.
Alacrity took a whiff of the Old Four Smokes Wallop and made an awful face. "Ug, I'd rather be sober! Pour it out, will you?"
Floyt restoppered the bottle. "No argument."
"So like that oldtime Earther said, we have to survive on food and water?"
"And not an awful lot of food," Floyt said. "We're going to be eating protein paste on crackers after a while, I should think."
The computers began running the transitional sequence. Alacrity sipped again. Floyt looked to the forward viewpane; this would be the first time he'd ever actually watched while a starship went superluminal.
"I'm not really that worried," Alacrity blurted. "At least, no more than usual. It's just—everything's riding on this. I'm sure I can trust Lord Marcus—except, aside from you, I don't trust anybody, really."
The Breakers cut in and the Lightning Whelk's Hawking Effect generator seemed to vibrate the vessel like a banjo string. Floyt drew a quick, deep breath as he felt again that peculiar impression of velocity without movement. Then there was the profound over-the-top sensation. The Hawking generator put the Whelk beyond normal limitations and the outboard screens went blank.
Alacrity raised his glass and clinked with Floyt. "Breakers!"
There was nothing to see out the forward viewpane, but Floyt's brain insisted on imposing images. Or, if you listened to certain scientific popularizers, as-yet-undiscovered forces and influences were transferring information directly to his mind in some enigmatic way.
"No music," he realized suddenly. "I meant to find 'The Planets' and put on 'Venus, Bringer of Joy.' "
"Trite as hell, but it's a favorite of mine, too," Alacrity confessed. "That and 'Brainwire.' Oh, well, too late now. Tell you what I did find while I was poking around the data banks and memory files: whoever Plantos was, he liked current events. He left us with the latest news packets, bought on Luna about four hours ago."
"Where? Let's screen them!"
The fastest that news could travel between the stars was the speed of a starship, so news traveled slowly, filtering through the Third Breath over a period of weeks or months. No one really had any coherent idea of all that the human race was doing, especially out where the frontiers were ballooning. So people were always hungry to hear news and tales of strange new doings and places. Literature, drama, history, and the rest had taken a decided backseat; the traveler's journal and explorer's diary commanded Homo sapiens' attention as never before. People who could observe, survive, and come back to convey what they'd seen were icons of the Third Breath of Humanity, which was the species' current great leap outward after the end of the dark age that followed the collapse of the Second Breath. The illusion of "true" adventure was the appeal of Sintilla's shameless fabrications.
Once Floyt, who'd grown up on preterist Earth, hadn't given the matter much thought. Now he was as greedy for information as anyone else abroad in the Third Breath.
Alacrity activated two infoscreens and a holographic projector, adjusting for quick scan. The news flashed in a dazzling mosaic, headline blurbs with in-depth stories available on access request. They glanced from display to display, barely keeping up with the highlight-dollops.
Researchers on New Saigon claimed an astounding breakthrough that confirmed the existence of psi powers and made them subjec
t to rational study and control. The new discipline was called Psience, its attendant mechanisms, psenses.
"How many times have I heard that chestnut in one shape or another?" Alacrity snorted. "The sucker quotient never goes down … "
The new official religion of the Trilateral Dominion was a kind of massage therapy.
Due to genetic drift and loss of gene diversity in many human colonies isolated since the end of the Second Breath, plasm-trading looked to become one of the great growth industries and most competitive businesses of the Third Breath. Piracy and strongarm commercial violence were becoming more and more common.
A war had broken out between the New Hanseatic League and the Bamboo Confederation over contractual obligations and alleged treaty violations. It revolved around disagreements arising from incompatible time-computation systems; delegations of temporal arbitrators were trying to hammer out a compromise by getting a mutually agreeable reckoning system in place. The announcer reminded the audience of the tragic Calendar Wars, which had started in much the same way.
Rumors from Amalgamated Science Networks, Inc., had it that a true "psychocopier," allowing detailed and orderly mental writing, was in prototype phase.
"Only about thirteen hundred years too late for poor old Boswell, who always wanted one," Floyt remarked dryly.
Truth-in-advertising laws in the Spican Union now required that all clergy, professional councilors, clairvoyants, and lonely hearts agencies refer to those who engaged their services as "customers."
And so it went. There were stories about the Camarilla, of course, and the uproar Alacrity and Floyt and their allies started, but not much new. Floyt was shocked to realize that he was already rather blasé about the whole thing. He and Alacrity scanned avidly, though, to see if the Astraea Imprimatur had been found, if the outlaw Janusz and Victoria Roper, the former Langstretch op, both of whom had led the fight against the Camarilla, had been captured. Most of all, Alacrity hunted the displays for word on Heart, the Nonpareil, the woman he loved, who'd stayed with Astraea Imprimatur on her escape, to aid Victoria and the injured Janusz in finding sanctuary. Heart's parting with Alacrity was bitter.