Drakon

by S. M. Stirling

  The gullwing hatch of the pilot's compartment opened and the plane was hauled alongside the pier. Fresh warm air gusted in; she held grimly onto her attache case as a swarm of very black men in white shirts and shorts descended on the Americans' luggage. Others handed them out onto the dock, where the IngolfTech greeters waited.

  That's the CEO? Jennifer asked herself incredulously. Far too young and blond.

  "I'm Alice Wayne, Ms. Ingolfsson's chief executive assistant," the woman said, with an Australian accent. "Please, this way. Everything's waiting for you, and I'm sure you'd like to freshen up before dinner."

  ***

  Plenty of boat operators here in Martinique, Ken thought.

  The problem was getting one who was . . . flexible . . . enough to do what he wanted but smart enough not to try and rob him and drop the body over the side out beyond the territorial limit.

  "You wan' to talk wit me, blanc?"

  Ken rose and extended his hand over the table. The black man in the sailor's cap looked at it a moment before extending his own. His eyes widened a little when Lafarge matched the crushing grip pressure for pressure. The local was taller than the Samothracian's six-two, and heavier; a bit of a gut bulging the stained T-shirt, but most of it in heavy ropy muscle over his shoulders and arms, hands like callused hams. Many of the other patrons in the little bar had their hair shaved in symbolic patterns, but this man kept his in a plain close crop, with a wisp of beard along acne-scarred, eggplant-colored cheeks.

  "You got balls, comin' here."

  The voice was soft, accented—the Creole French of the islands that turned "r" into "w," spicing English learned here in the Caribbean.

  They sat. There was a slight relaxation among the onlookers, like a pack of junkyard dogs returning to their fleas but keeping the corners of their eyes on a possible meal. Games of dominos and low-voiced conversation resumed; men moved to the bar and back, drank beer and straight rum, listened to the thudding beat of reggae-rap from the machine in the corner. Occasionally someone would walk into the glaring white heat of the afternoon outside, broken only by a sad-looking palm whose fronds rustled dryly, a sound like bones. Despite the warmth many of them were wearing jackets of one sort or another. Sonic and microray scan showed a lot of metal: guns, mostly, and ratchet knives. The AI drew a schematic over the room for an instant, outlining the weapons. There were a fair number of cellular phones, too. The air smelled of sweat and sickly-sweet rum, faintly of ganja and mildew.

  "I've got business here," Ken said expressionlessly. "I need a boat."

  The black leaned back and stuck a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. "You want to fish, maybe? Marlin? I know someone who got a good deep-sea boat."

  "I'm not a tourist."

  "Funny, blanc, you look like one."

  Lafarge was wearing a loose colorful shirt, duck trousers and sandals. The shirt was useful in a number of ways, not least for what it let him wear next to his skin.

  "I need," he said, "a charter. Wooden boat, doesn't have to be fast. A couple of runs past Andros, in the Bahamas; then a night drop-off inshore, the boat waits for a couple of hours, and back to Miami. No papers, no problems with the police."

  Smoky brown eyes regarded him expressionlessly. "You wouldn't be a police-mon, tryin' to entrap a businessman, maybe?"

  Lafarge grinned mirthlessly; the other man's chair creaked as instinctive reaction tensed his body.

  "Fort-de-France police?" he asked. "Would they send me?"

  The black relaxed suddenly, with a mirthless chuckle. "Vwaimen" that not too likely." Nordic types were wildly conspicuous in this section of town—in most of the island apart from the tourist areas, for that matter. "Maybe you want to step on toes, be cuttin' on other mon's turf, get me killed that way."

  Lafarge shook his head. "No boat in to shore, no cargo in or out," he said. "One time, all cash, you walk away."

  "Plenty seen me with you now."

  Teeth showed between the Samothracian's lips. "I need a man with balls," he said. "Ten thousand on deposit with a bagman; you get it when I get back. I pay your costs upfront."

  Antoine Lavasseur, the AI supplied. A list of criminal convictions followed: mostly in Martinique. A wonder that he was still walking the streets.

  False identity, the machine supplied hopefully.

  "Andres," Lavasseur said thoughtfully. "Pretty long way, three days, peut-être. Staniard town? Kemp's Bay?'

  Ken shook his head. "Off the west coast, about halfway between Pine Cay and Williams Island."

  The sailor chewed on his toothpick. Suddenly he called out, without moving his basilisk stare from the Samothracian's face:

  "Ti' punch!"

  The bartender's assistant hurried over; only the best for this customer. A bottle of Pere Labat rum went down on the table, chunks of cut lime on a plate, a pitcher of water, a bowl of brown sugar and two reasonably clean glasses. The local occupied himself with the ritual for a moment and then rolled the thick scratched glass of the tumbler between pink palms.

  "Those bank waters, bad sailin', beaucou' shoal, reef, spiderhead, coral," he said. "Can' get nobody close, there."

  "A mile or two will do fine," Ken said. "I'll be going in alone, swimming."

  The toothpick stopped in its migrations. "Either you got balls like brass nuts, blanc, our you got malheuw d'tete," he said.

  "My head's not sad enough to take money on board," Ken said.

  This was almost enjoyable, like a historical epic. Better than a neural-link simulacrum, because it not only felt real, it was. The hard wooden chair under him, the scarred surface of the table with its stains and chipped paint, the smell of stale tobacco and beer from the man across the table—none of them would dissolve if he told the compweb to end the scenario.

  Of course if he got killed, that would be permanent too. Far worse: defeat would be real here as well,

  Lavasseur took off his cap and threw it on the table. "Bon. We talk about the money."

  ***

  Gwen swiveled slightly in her chair, looking at the images in the monitors, picked up from the guest rooms. The three Primary Belway Securities executives, of course. Interesting. Two males in late middle age, and a female, younger—the analyst. It was going to be a challenge, making this all look like legitimate business. Alice was changing for dinner in her room; she looked up and winked at the spyeye.

  Gwen smiled. The challenge made her feel good, loose and hungry and alert. That was the problem; the Race had been designed for conquest, and then they'd won so thoroughly that they had to devise artificial stimulants to keep from terminal boredom. This was far more exciting than hunting grizzly bears with spears, combat on levels far beyond the physical. One drakensis against six billion humans, with a whole planet for prize . . .

  She turned away from the monitors and looked out the tall windows, out over the planet.

  "I'm hungry," she whispered.

  A gluttonous feeling, like an infinite banquet; the promise at last of satisfaction to match the power of her appetites. Appetites for which food and rut were simply symbols.

  Closing her eyes, she ran through the dossiers on the three Primary Belway Securities executives. Money, fear, personal glamour—there would be a key to each of them. Probably money; it was the counter in the game they played. She stroked the information, looking for weaknesses and strengths; neurosis, obsession, trauma. At the same time she set herself for the proper pheromonal clues; nothing too heavy, of course. Not at first. A tang of apprehension; fear would produce respect. A muted undercurrent of sexual attraction. And dominance; humans would perceive that as personal magnetism. There.

  She concentrated for a minute or two, then took a deep open-mouthed breath to test the scent. Perfect.

  ***

  Jennifer looked at the head of IngolfTech out of the corner of her eyes. It was indecent. Women that good-looking were supposed to be in the profession of being good-looking; it must take hours a day just to keep that figure, e
specially if she was the early-thirties the records indicated. The surprisingly incomplete records. You could be born rich and look like that, or marry the money, but unless you were an actress or model you couldn't earn yourself rich and look like that. There wasn't the time, on top of a real career. Not unless you had more luck in the genetic lottery than any one human being was due.

  "We'll save the numbers for tomorrow morning, I think," Ingolfsson said.

  There was a murmur of agreement around the table. The meal had been long, complex and memorable; the dining room was cool and palely elegant, open to the tropical night through tall french doors. The founder of IngolfTech was looking elegant herself, although Jennifer admitted she wasn't overdoing it. The gold and ruby brooch at her neck was the only spectacular item, shaped in the form of a tiny bat-winged dragon, grasping something in its claws.

  She went on in the same mellow, purring voice: "Except the basic ones. I came here in '95 with a few hundred thousand dollars. Two months later I had eight million dollars . . . and that might have been luck. Now, by your own conservative estimate, my company has a net worth of one hundred and seventy-eight million dollars, and that cannot be luck."

  "Ummm . . ." Vice-President Coleman said. "Ah . . . how exactly was your initial financing arranged?"

  Gwen smiled with white even teeth. "With respect, Mr. Coleman, that's irrelevant. What is relevant is one hundred and seventy-eight million dollars' worth of developments in biotechnology and other fields, every one of them bought, developed, patented, and then sold or licensed by IngolfTech. The patents and contracts are a matter of public record. Our cash flow this year should be better than twenty million from licensing fees alone. That's not counting any new products; and believe me, you'll be seeing enough of those to assure you of doubling, or possibly trebling that figure."

  Jennifer cleared her throat. "Ms. Ingolfsson, I have been going over the figures with some care. Your R&D overheads are . . . well, they're extremely low."

  The servants brought in coffee and liqueurs. Gwen nodded and thanked them in some musical language that sounded like French but wasn't; Jennifer couldn't place it. The entrepreneur went on: "That's how you make profits, Ms. Feinberg. Low overheads, high receipts." The green eyes turned on her, and Jennifer felt a sudden prickling over the skin of her face. "My concept isn't complicated; I search out cheap scientific talent—in the former Soviet bloc, in South Asia, elsewhere. There are a lot of very good people there, although they don't have the infrastructure they need. I provide seed money. If the idea looks promising, I buy it—fee-for-service—and develop it to commercial stage. Dr. Mueller and Dr. Singh do, rather."

  She nodded at the two heads of research: a pale soft-looking middle-aged German and a lean dark Punjabi.

  "Then we sell it."

  Director Klein smiled. "Essentially, IngolfTech's main asset is your nose for salable ideas, then, Ms. Ingolfsson."

  She nodded coolly. "I wouldn't expect anyone to value that highly without a track record," she said. "That's why I haven't taken the company public to date. However, now we do have a track record."

  "And a rather impressive one," Klein said genially.

  "We'll go into the details tomorrow," she said, lifting her wineglass. "In the meantime—to a long and profitable association between IngolfTech and Primary Belway Securities."

  They all raised theirs in return. Gwen's head turned towards Jennifer, and her nostrils flared very slightly. "That's Scheherazade you're wearing, isn't it, Ms. Feinberg?"

  Jennifer put her wrist to her face reflexively. "Why, yes," she said, startled. The perfume was barely detectable to her, and the IngolfTech CEO was sitting four places away.

  Gwen smiled again. "I have a very sensitive nose," she said.

  ***

  Adieu foulard, adieu madwas Adieu, gwain d'or, adieu collier-chou Doudou a main li ka pa'ti Helas, helas, c'est pou' toujou' . . .

  The clumsy weights of the scuba gear clanked together as Ken walked to the side of the motor-schooner lying nearly motionless under bare poles two miles off the coast. The crew were looking elaborately innocent; Captain Lavasseur stood at the wheel, singing the old Creole folk-song under his breath.

  There it is, Ken thought. There were lights; probably the main house, although there was a seaplane dock and a beach chalet. They moved slowly with the gentle sway of the ship; the headlights of a car went by somewhere inland, flickering between trees. He could hear faint music, and a dog barked. The seaplane was docked at the pier, next to a paved landing ramp. So peaceful . . .

  Philosophers he'd read on this Earth sometimes doubted that evil was a real or tangible thing, relegating it to a matter of perspective and custom. Samothracians had never had that luxury; they lived in the same universe as the Domination and its masters. It waited there: a living, breathing snake. He'd studied them all his adult life, killed—and been killed by—thousands of them in neural-link simulations. Odd. Only here in another universe have I ever walked the same planet with one.

  Anger was a calm thing; the neural implants wouldn't allow more than that with combat to await. Still . . . kill it and I save a whole world, he thought. Repeal the unhealed wound of the Last War.

  A sudden thought shocked him. Kill it and I'm stuck here forever. Wondering about the future wasn't something you did much of when you'd volunteered for a suicide mission. He filed the thought for later consideration.

  "Exactly here," he said to Lavasseur.

  The islander tapped the GPS monitor mounted by the binnacle. "Exactly, blanc."

  The local satellite positioning system was crude by Samothracian standards; back home, the implants everyone had made it impossible not to know precisely where you were at all times. It was functional enough for this. Lavasseur's eyes and teeth showed briefly as the display lit them; for the rest the deck was very dark, only starlight on the waves to glint on rare pieces of metal. The Mait' Carrefour was surprisingly clean, but the crew did not go in for polishing the brightwork. Just an innocuous little working boat of the type that still knocked around the out-islands or took an occasional tourist charter . . .

  Ken took the rubber-tasting mouthpiece between his teeth and went backward over the rail in the approved local style. A knotted rope dipped down to the bottom a hundred feet below; he stripped off the native gear and bundled it, laying it on the sandy seabed. A quick gesture, and the transparent face-film of his softsuit covered eyes and nose and mouth. He spat the bitter salt of seawater out and rinsed his mouth with fresh. Across his eyes the film adjusted, thickening into a lens that corrected the distortion of seawater and amplified light.

  Magnification 5x, he thought/commanded.

  In a floating, toe-touching walk reminiscent of a low-gravity asteroid, he began to stride toward shore. The equipment clipped around him was all his own, small and non-metallic and nearly undetectable.

  Not as powerful as he'd have liked; given his choice, a miniature antimatter bomb from twenty thousand kilometers would do nicely. Too bad about the bystanders, but worth it considering the stakes. That was exactly what he must not do, of course; far too much noncongruent energy release to be safe, with the Domination's scientists searching the continua. He'd have to do this . . . what was the local's expression?

  "Up close and personal," he murmured.

  He was walking through coral in a thousand shapes, branched and brain-knobbed, crimson and white and starred with drifting clouds of fish colored like finned orchids. The water carried the grunts, groans, clicking sounds fish made—more were active at night—and the chitinous scuttling noises of the lobsters and sea urchins that marched across the bottom, eye-stalks swiveling to track him. Something heavier and gray swept its tail through the water above, dorsal fin and wicked little eyes, underslung jaw with multiple rows of shearing teeth born on a living torpedo of gristle and sinew. It half-rolled to examine him and then swam on, warned away by the vibrations his softsuit bled into the water.

  "Up close and personal," Laf
arge said again, with an expression very much like the shark above him.

  ***

  Jennifer tossed the pen down. She was too wired to take notes, by hand or on her laptop or the workstation, certainly not in a mood for sleep. Instead she rose and paced restlessly. The main house was old, though recently renovated, a rectangular block of pink-stuccoed coral blocks three stories high, with tall Doric pillars in front. The guests were housed in new wings on either side. Her own suite was three rooms giving out onto a balcony overlooking the rear gardens; bedroom, a sitting room with terminal and multimedia center, and a bathroom that centered on a huge D-shaped sunken tub that looked as if it were carved out of a block of marble. Nothing vulgar, exactly—the fixtures weren't gold or anything—but there was something about the whole place . . .

  She looked at the workstation. The electronics were set in smooth panels of tropical hardwood: swing-out keyboards, old-style and an adjustable ergonomic split kind, fax-modem, adjustable thin-section screen on a boom, all the latest. She settled for the speakerphone and punched out a number.

  "Hi, Henry. Hope I didn't wake you," she said.

  "Nah, I'm a night owl. You okay?"

  Despite that, he sounded a little sleepy at first; it was past midnight. But the last words were sharper. Why did I call Henry, in particular? she thought. They'd only known each other a couple of months, really—that first time back after Stephen Fischer was killed didn't count. Does sweetums want a big, stwong man to holdums widdle hand? she scolded herself. Then again, Henry was a friend . . . and he did have a different perspective on things.

  "I'm fine, really. I just wanted to talk."

  "Fine by me," Henry said, with a chuckle in his voice. "So, how are things going?"

  What do I say? The truth, she supposed. "Fine, but I've got a weird feeling about it," she said slowly. "For one thing, this place is odd. It's too beautiful."

  "This lady's rolling in it, from what you said."

  "Henry, she's made it all in the last four years. You don't have time to collect toys while you do that; believe me, I've known a lot of these entrepreneurial types. They don't do that while they're driving for the top."