It wasn't until he fulfilled a contract job on Nostramedes one time that he discovered just how bitter a joke that was.
He turned left onto Corridor 117, which was flanked by dozens of doors, their yellow panels dirty and worn. He reached No. 99 and bopped an entry code into the door computer. It winked its little red light at him as it took his video trace and then the door slid open with a slight squeal of protest.
In the narrow hallway tottered stacks of data modules a meter high. Each was neatly identified by colored tags. White tags were subscription-journal data, to be picked through for selections. Red tags were Mass Murder Squad cases, a whole section was devoted to them. A much larger section, marked with purple, contained Meg's Masque records.
Meg Vance meant nothing to the megahab-oriented social world of corporate Hyperion Grandee. She survived on freelance work. She was also that rarity, an immigrant to Hyperion Grandee from an older gigahab.
But in the world of Masque, the complex computer games in which everyone on Hyperion Grandee indulged, Meg Vance was of the aristocracy. She maintained seventy-three advanced characters in twelve separate games, including a queen in the top game, "Hidden Notebook."
In the main space there was an awful lot of equipment, much of it old. The DAex Ram 44000 that was Meg's primary unit took up only a little room, but its peripheral devices were everywhere. Alongside them were smaller devices that hooked into the DAex Ram's main rival in Meg's universe, the Bioram Sha3. That device, a flat tank like a tabletop containing forty pounds of human brain cells, grown in thin sheets and laid down in programmable jelly, was actually hidden from view inside a network of support systems that took up a full third of the space.
Meg herself was on the phone, no surprise there. He recognized her friend Ingrid's face on the phoneplate. Meg had her silver-gray hair tied up in an untidy bun, she wore a gray zipsuit and red plastic shoes. She sat on a chair riding an extensor bar, surrounded by five floating flatscreens, with a keyboard array poised to hand. Two other extensor seats hung in the computer pit because on some games—a two-screen combat unit in the Phototronic Gladiation League, for instance—Meg was joined by her friends Ingrid and Sindar.
He went over to the single monitor on a small desk in the corner of the room to review the contents of the mail stop he maintained there. A brochure on datachip gave him a full-color "introductory offer" to an auction of the famous Ugun Huxha ranch on luxury megahabitat Gloaming Splendor. For a mere 250,000 credit units down and 100,000 a year for twenty years he could bid on square-kilometer parcels of habitat forest and lawn.
He blipped the rest of it. His savings account held just 27,000 credit units after nine years' work in the squad. It was hard to get ahead when the price of existence on Hyperion Grandee was so high. Without a corporate rent plan he had to pay half his income for one of the endlessly similar apartments on Medium Rent that the squad found for him.
Of course he'd tried Low Rent, the illegal, sometimes dangerous world of apartments in parts of the habitat structure that were not built for human occupation. Once he'd had a long, narrow room, with a smoothly curved ceiling, situated on an engineering level in the hab-shield. It had been big enough to contain five apartments the size of his present one.
It had seemed a wonderful bargain for 600 credit units a month. He began to make plans for extensive interior decoration. Then Winter Month ended and the air-conditioning heat vent above the ceiling began to work. Through Spring it was like Summer Month, 80 degrees every day. In Summer it became an oven, more than 120 degrees on the day he gave in and moved out.
The rest of the mail was Masque-oriented junk, which he consigned to the wastebasket. Jon had never been more than a Masque viewer.
Meg finished her strategy call and emerged from the pit for an instacaf break. She gave him an affectionate peck.
"Well, I heard the story on Arnei Oh this morning. We were right about the university, just didn't think of the Orbiters. It sounded terrible. Do you feel terrible?" She wrinkled her little round nose at him.
"Today? No. Then? Yes. What else would you expect? He took a goddamn scalp in the bushes, that's what saved us. Otherwise I think he would have fragged the shit out of them and left us with thirty bodies or more."
"Coptor was good afterward." She gave him a cup.
"Coptor is always good. If only the rest of the operation was good as Coptor and you, maybe we'd have a chance."
She chucked him under the chin. "I thank you, wonderboy. What have you got for us next?"
Iehard finished the instacaf in a gulp. "You're going to hate this next case."
She grimaced. "Laowon work again, don't tell me it's that."
His eyebrows rose; Meg was right. She was always right. Sometimes it was uncanny.
"Big stuff. Someone has killed laowons. Lots of them, and there's a big hunt on. We are to track him."
"Why us? Why not Military Intelligence?"
"We are the psi-able. And this fugitive is really sensitive apparently. Look, Petrie himself called me in. I had to listen to three laowon treat him like some servant. They hectored me on the need for quick progress with minimal disturbance. The quarry is exceptionally aware of detection and surveillance. So normal MI procedures are out." He paused, became thoughtful.
"It's worth five thousand credit units apiece too."
"Blue-skin blood money. We're bounty hunters now."
"Yes, that about sums it up. But I don't think we have much choice. They can apply pressure to get what they want."
"What about Superior Buro?"
"Of course. They'll be around."
Old Meg shivered. "That sounds ominous."
"Look, the new Morgooze of Blue Seygfan, for this entire sector of space, was there this morning. He's young. I suspect he has only recently advanced to his full Morgooze. The target has killed excellencies, Grand Weengams and Twirsteds. The laowon are in a state of exalted rage."
"I'll bet they are," she said sourly.
"They'll try to get a bug in here again. You can count on it."
She looked around warily. "Right, I'll put Daisy onto that. Full search program, Daisy!" she called. The DAex Ram 44000 shifted to a program kept resident on a security data module. It began a detailed examination of the room and its contents. Sensor nubs stuck to the walls, floor, and ceiling searched for penetrations.
"Anyway, here's a picture of the target. I've asked for a full dump from MI databank, it should be along soon." Jon fed the datacard into a function box inside the computer pit.
A face blinked into view on the main graphics screen.
"An Elchite!" she exclaimed. "The Red Crescent group from that earring."
"Yes, very fiery group apparently."
"'Man-Must-Rise' and all that." She sipped her instacaf.
"The laowon are beside themselves."
"Serves them filthy right. When I think of all we have to put up with from them. They bleed our system. Every laowon vessel fuels its cavernous tanks with good, easy-access Nocanicus gas. And what do they pay for it? Almost nothing; amounts set by treaty centuries ago. Oh, I know what they say." She looked at him angrily. "We're on the flight schedules of the jumpers and we got some technical help, and we're even allowed a few exploratory missions to some of the least valuable nearby stars. But Nocanicus will run out of easy-access gas within another century at the rate the laowon are pouring in, and we'll be left to slowly wither away in isolation. I mean we don't even have any marginally habitable worlds to go savage on in this system. So we'll either die out or take NAFAL back toward the Hyades and who knows how many will survive the trip in deep freeze."
He shrugged. She was indubitably correct. "There's nothing we can do about it. We have to live by their rules."
"But Jon, Nocanicus was human settled, even before Testament!"
"Meg, we're on the frontier. The laowon could take this system anytime they wanted it. Testament's been dead for a thousand years." His reply sounded too sharp, even to his o
wn ears. But this argument was an old one.
"But it's not forgotten!"
He fought the urge to shrug. This was Meg's dream; let her hang onto it. For quite a while, Jon realized, he'd been avoiding the fact that he had lost his own.
He was just living day by day, had been for years. Sure he saved, but it was pointless. Costs ate everything up when you were just on salary. But saving was only part of it. There was no future, nothing that Jon could feel enthusiastic about. Nothing he wanted to make plans for. No woman who would complete his life.
She saw his mind was drifting. "Jon Iehard!" Her eyes were like green gimlets. "Are you giving up?"
He managed a grin. "No, Meg, we'll never let them rule us. We'll never let them have that victory."
But Iehard knew of the studies predicting that within a decade the population of humans who served the laowon on laowon worlds would likely outgrow the population of humans in human systems.
The High Corporate systems, like Nocanicus, without habitable planets, were just a small lake in these oceans of humanity. Free human expansion had ceased. They were becoming a client race. Human science had stalled. Human-laowon scientific cooperation had been one of the first things the Laowon Imperiom had demanded right after the signing of the treaties. The best human scientists were constantly siphoned off to work on laowon projects.
Time was running out for the human race. Had been since the Testamenters first brushed up against the laowon, far away in the Orion galactic arm.
That meeting had been exactly what Earth had feared, from the moment the headstrong Testamenters succeeded in perfecting their Faster Than Light drives.
For a thousand years humanity had been spreading across the starfields within the realm of the supergiant Canopus. Within the hundred-light-year sphere were hundreds of human colonies. From red dwarf systems with marginal planets, to yellow stars with earthlike worlds. Beyond this sphere were sprinkled High Corporate systems, established on the twin pillars of fast NAFAL colonization and the deep-voice communication system that could plug through the distances between the stars.
In the Hyades stars, the corporations had risen far. They had pushed out to systems like Nocanicus and Testament.
Then the Testamenters had developed their fleet of Faster Than Light ships and gone out to explore the Galaxy. They'd ignored the pleas for caution from older systems.
And then, far away, on a distant star reef, the Testamenters met the laowon.
The shock was something humanity had never recovered from. It was as if Columbus had sailed the Atlantic in 1492 and discovered the United States of 1992 rather than the continent of Amerindians, buffalo, and grizzlies.
The surprise went both ways, however. And the Testamenter ships represented a tremendous breakthrough into a technology that the laowons had never stumbled on. When a misunderstanding escalated into hostilities and the Testamenters destroyed a laowon battlejumper, a spasm of terror shook the entire edifice of the Lao Imperiom, an interstellar social organization that had persisted for nearly twelve thousand years.
The Imperiom reacted with tremendous energy. A full sector fleet, seventy battlejumpers, hunted down the Testamenters and destroyed them in the Testament system itself. Two months later the Imperial Fleet entered the human home system itself and dictated the first laowon-human treaty.
Legend had it that the first humans to enter laowon service left with those same lao battlejumpers. In fact, the laowon found it relatively easy to buy human genetic material, even to buy live humans, who would happily sell themselves to escape the drab life on the Greenhouse Earth of the fourth millennium A.D.
Pretty soon humans became as common a part of laowon life as the laa and pesski, the pets that the blue-skinned lords of the stars had brought with them from their homeworld.
Meg had been reading his thoughts.
"If only the laowon had been horribly ugly. Or reptiles, or anything but so similar to ourselves," she said in a mournful voice.
"Why do you say that? Wouldn't it be worse to service monsters?"
"Silly man, no, they wouldn't have thought us attractive to have around if we were really different. As it is we're physically smaller, neater, and sexier than they are. So they love having us as slaves. If it were the other way around and we had the upper hand, we would never have mixed with them. Would you willingly fill your home up with the big ugly brutes?"
He chuckled. It was true as well that the fashionable look in the Imperiom involved having one's ears trimmed to human size and shape. It was regarded as a point of beauty now, to have gracile ears like the subordinate race.
With a bleep and a red flash, Daisy reported no traceable bugs within the computer room.
"Where to begin?" Meg asked.
"I guess we need to get the MI file dump. Then let's look up the files on Elchites."
"Into the computer pit then," she ordered. He took a seat and dialed up Military Intelligence.
CHAPTER FIVE
In an aerie on the laowon level, high above Octagon Six, Commander Petrie attended a most unusual meeting. Despite the fact that he commanded the major security organs of Hyperion Grandee, Petrie had never had contact with the uppermost laowon security controller, a remote personage, beyond diplomacy, not even officially recognized as being aboard the habitat.
Now Padzn Birthamb, Superior Buro chief for Nocanicus system, sat in the twilit shade opposite him. Although the floor was above the surrounding towers, the windows were polarized and the only light came from projectors in the ceiling. Therefore the suite was lit as if it were sunset on ancient Lao.
Padzn Birthamb had a harsh, angular face, even for a laowon. So harsh were his features that he was instantly, recognizably alien. His skin was a dusky blue and he spoke with a strange thick accent that told of an upbringing on a world on the far side of the vast Imperiom.
He wore a plain uniform of black cloth, adorned with a single star, a diamond, on his breast.
Also present was the Urall Gold and Blue.
"So, Commander Petrie, you now understand that this case has political dimensions beyond the immediate surface. That Blue Seygfan itself might collapse in civil conflict. There are certain aspects that must be kept suppressed. Superior Buro has received orders to impact the case."
It was hard to follow Birthamb's strange accent, but after so many years, Petrie had to struggle to suppress a weird sense of elation at actually being privileged to meet his opponent. For so long Padzn Birthamb had been a shadow, a menace without substance.
"In addition there are the military aspects. It is enough for you to know that among the dead on the pleasure habitat was Space Admiral Gufk, commander of the Pleides sector fleet."
Before Petrie could reply, the Urall interrupted.
"The Morgooze of Blue Seygfan carries letters with the Imperial seal. That must take precedence. His initiative is to be the primary one."
"My Urall, there are aspects of this case that are of such extreme importance—" Birthamb began.
But the Gold and Blue cut him off. "Nothing can override the Imperial seal." The Urall knew he faced insuperable odds. Lao was far away, and there were layers of bureaucracy to work through to reach the one who signed those letters for the Morgooze. Nor was the Urall entirely comfortable in his role.
"My Urall, there are perhaps more layers to this than even you are aware of. I have the latest information."
Something in his tone convinced the Urall to proceed cautiously. "What are the conditions you spoke of?"
"There will be a lock of all data connected to the case. Superior Buro will be ultimate arbiter of what information can be released."
"That is tantamount to taking the case away from us!" exclaimed the Urall hotly.
Padzn Birthamb shrugged in the hunter's tongue. His eyebrows rose slightly. "Whatever it means, that is what I must demand. Your pursuit can continue but it is to be a mock-pursuit. The Buro will handle this case."
"Then Blue Seygfan begins to fl
y alone." The Urall sounded depressed.
"My Urall, this case has implications that go beyond inter-Seygfan conflict."
Petrie was hearing things he didn't want to hear. The death of a lao prince who commanded sixty vessels of war, a fleet with enough power to shatter whole worlds. The Superior Buro taking control of human information banks, overriding human authority.
"What will I tell the young Morgooze? The fire is hot in him!" the Urall implored.
"Tell him nothing! Let the case continue. The operatives will conduct a search, but their access to data will be severely restricted. Should they come close to anything, we will know about it in time to take action. I doubt they will get very close. In the meantime the Buro has gone on full alert. This operation will receive our undivided attention."
"It will not be easy to keep the Morgooze quiescent. I warn you, Birthamb, you will have to deal with him yourself." The laowon fell silent.
Petrie spoke up. "How is the Superior Buro planning to lock all relevant data away from the operatives?"
A brief silence was broken by Birthamb. "Superior Buro has activated a data control program on all major databanks. No outside access to certain files will be allowed without Buro approval."
"You can do that? Execute such a concept?"
Birthamb did not answer. Petrie flushed angrily but held his tongue.
The Urall changed the subject. "Commander, the man we met today, Operative Iehard is his name. Is he completely reliable? In light of the fact that this case is so gravely important I must ask you this."
"He handles only the toughest assignments for the Mass Murder Squad, a very valued operative. His psi ability is high, especially on the hysterical frequencies. He can sense his targets quite well."
"But there is another aspect. His colleague, a freelance computer operative; she presents problems, doesn't she?"
Petrie shrugged. "Panhumanism is a very human emotion, I'm afraid. We have to live with it."
"This case may not allow for it. Tell Iehard to restrain his colleague."
Padzn Birthamb did not include an "or else" but Petrie was sure it was there.
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