Changer of Worlds woh-3

by David Weber

  The almond-shaped eyes moved slightly, looking past Kennesaw’s own head. “I’m not sure how well this is going to work. I’m sure he’s got an absolutely phenomenal pain threshold.”

  Finally, Kennesaw heard the monster speak. “Don’t care,” came a hoarse grunt. “I’m sure he was one of the men who took her, which means there’ll be traces of where they went somewhere in the apartment.”

  The Oriental face frowned. “Then why—”

  Even as dazed as he was, the brief exchange made clear to Kennesaw the identity of his assailants. He managed some grunting words of his own. “You crazy, Z’wicki? Anyt’in’ happen t’me, ’ey’ll kill ’er.”

  The clasp tightened, and Kennesaw couldn’t prevent a low groan.

  “I don’t think so. As sloppy as you people are, they’ll just assume you’re goofing off somewhere. How would I know you were involved?”

  Despite the crushing pain, some part of Kennesaw’s brain was still functioning objectively. So he understood the incredible strength which lay behind those words. Precious few, if any, of the Select themselves would have been able to so completely immobilize Kennesaw. Much less, at the same time, manage to speak in what was almost a normal tone of voice!

  “And you’ve already told me the only thing I really needed to know from you,” continued the hoarse voice from behind. “I’m not cold-blooded enough to kill a man I’m not sure is guilty.”

  It took a moment for the meaning to register on Kennesaw. He tried to grunt another warning, but the hoarse voice overrode his words.

  “This is called a full nelson, Scrag. It’s an illegal maneuver in tournament wrestling. Here’s why.”

  In the brief time that followed, Kennesaw understood some of what the little Oriental had been trying to explain to him. Variation. He never would have believed that any subhuman would have been strong enough to—

  But the thought was fleeting. The pressure on his neck, crushing his broken chin into his chestbone, drove everything but pain and terror away. And then his vertebra ruptured and Kennesaw thought no more at all.

  Victor

  Victor spent the evening in the company of Usher’s wife, being given a guided tour of the upper levels of the Loop. He had intended, burning with desire to undo Durkheim—somehow—to return to work immediately. But Kevin had driven that notion down with his usual sarcasm.

  “And just what do you intend to do, youngster?” he demanded. “Stay out of trouble, dammit! I’ll get the ball rolling at my end. You don’t do anything—nothing, you understand—until you either hear from me or Durkheim approaches you, whichever comes first.”

  Victor frowned. Kevin chuckled. “He will, he will—I’ll bet on it. Didn’t I tell you this scheme of his is going to start unraveling? And that, when it does, he’s going to have to slap together a jury-rigged back-up team to clean up the mess?”

  Usher didn’t wait for a response. Clearly enough, he had once again left Victor behind in a cloud of mental dust. “So who do you think he’s going to approach? Not one of his experienced field agents, I’ll tell you that. No, he’ll go to the same wet-behind-the-ears, naive, trusting, dumb-as-a-brick, do-as-he-says young zealot that he used to pass messages to the Mesans in the first place. You.”

  “Me?” Victor scratched his cheek. “Why? He never told me what those messages were, or who I was passing them to. I figured it out on my own. As far as he knows, I don’t know anything about the situation.”

  Victor hesitated, youthful pride warring with his innate honesty. Honesty won.

  “The truth is, Kevin, I really am kind of”—sigh—“wet behind the ears.” He scowled. “It hasn’t helped any that Durkheim hasn’t given me any really important assignments since I got here, fresh out of the Academy. All he’s used me for is routine clerical stuff and as an occasional courier. My knowledge of fieldcraft is really pretty much book-learning. If I was putting together a back-up team to clean up a mess like this, I’d want an experienced field agent in charge of it.”

  “You don’t think like Durkheim does,” replied Kevin. “You’re still thinking in terms of making the assignment work. For that, sure, you’d want a real pro.” He shook his head. “But don’t ever forget that Durkheim is a bureaucrat, first and foremost. His central concern—now and always—is going to be his position within the power structure, not the needs of the struggle. When a job goes sour, his first thought is going to be: cover my ass. And for that, ain’t nothing better than a dumb young greenhorn—especially one who has a reputation for zealotry.”

  Victor flushed a bit. “What’s a ‘greenhorn’?” he growled.

  “It’s a Terran term. Refers to a variant they have here of cattle. A young bull, essentially, who’s got a lot more testosterone than he does good sense.”

  Victor’s flush deepened. “You’re saying he’ll expect me to fail?”

  Kevin grinned. “Go down in flames and smoke, as a matter of fact. With enough pyrotechnics that he can wash his hands clean and claim afterward the whole thing was your idea and he didn’t know anything about it until the boom happened.”

  Kevin looked away for a moment, thinking. “What I imagine he’ll do is give you a squad of experienced SS troops, with a citizen sergeant in charge that he trusts. Someone with some familiarity with the Old Quarter—the upper levels, at least. You’ll be told that the Scrags have run wild—went ahead and kidnapped a Manty officer’s daughter, the maniacs. He’ll probably claim they were simply supposed to search his apartment and panicked when they found the girl there.”

  Usher waved his hand. “Yeah, of course the story’s ridiculous. Why didn’t they just kill her on the spot? But he won’t be expecting you to scrutinize his story for logical fallacies.”

  By now, Victor had caught up with Usher’s thought train. “So I take this squad into the Loop with orders to find the girl and get her back.” His face tightened. “No. Not get her back. Just—”

  “He won’t give you that instruction, Victor. No matter how zealous or naive he thinks you are, Durkheim’s not dumb enough to think he can tell a youngster to murder a girl in cold blood without creating possible problems. No, he’ll tell you the job is to rescue her. And kill the Scrags while you’re at it. But the citizen sergeant will see to it that the girl doesn’t survive.”

  “Or me either.” The statement was flat, direct.

  Usher nodded. “Or you either. When the dust clears, what do we have? A young and inexperienced Havenite SS officer, discovering some kind of Mesan/Scrag skullduggery underway, went charging off half-cocked—entirely on his own initiative and without getting authorization—and made a mess out of everything. Both he and the girl die in the crossfire. Who’s to say otherwise?”

  “The whole story’s preposterous!” protested Victor. “The Manties’ll never believe it. Neither will the Sollies, for that matter.”

  Kevin laughed harshly. “Of course they won’t. But they won’t be able to prove any different, and Durkheim doesn’t care what they think anyway. After Harrington’s escape—sure as hell after Parnell arrives here and starts shooting his mouth off—nobody on Terra will believe what Haven says about anything. So what’s another little goofy story? All Durkheim cares about is covering his ass with Saint-Just.”

  Usher laughed again, and just as harshly. “Who won’t believe the story either, mind you. But he’ll be satisfied that Durkheim had enough sense to cut his losses. And Saint-Just has enough problems to deal with now that he’s not going to run the risk of penalizing Durkheim.”

  Silence followed, for perhaps half a minute, while Victor digested this—indigestible—meal. He felt nauseated. As a young and eager SS officer, Victor had prepared himself for ruthlessness in the struggle against elitism. But this—

  “All right,” he said. “So what do wedo?”

  “You leave that to me, Victor.” Usher’s face was bleak. “I’ll do my best to see to it that both you and the girl survive. But I can’t make any promises. The truth is, I’m g
oing to be using you for bait. And bait has a way of getting eaten.”

  Victor nodded. He’d already deduced that much. But Victor had understood the risks of being an SS intelligence officer when he applied to the Academy. Danger, he could accept. Foulness—for no more purpose than a bureaucrat’s self-aggrandizement—he could not.

  “Good enough. Concentrate on the girl’s survival.” Stiffly, with all the pride of a greenhorn: “I can take care of myself.”

  Usher grinned. “The girl might surprise you, lad. Don’t forget whose kid she is. She even has her mother’s name. Oh, and I might mention something else that I’m sure Durkheim doesn’t know—she’s the youngest person who evergot a brown belt from Robert Tye.”

  Victor sighed. Again, he was in a cloud of dust. “What’s a brown belt? And who’s Robert Tye?”

  I’m getting a little tired of that damn grin, he thought sourly, seeing its reappearance. The words which followed didn’t help a bit.

  “Not a devotee of the martial arts, are you? Well, I’d figured as much from our little fracas in the tavern.” Grin.

  So, Victor had wound up idling away the day with Usher’s wife in the Loop. Her name—or so she claimed, in defiance of all logic—was Virginia. Victor had his doubts, especially in view of her scandalous clothing and the way she continually tormented him.

  But he was obscurely relieved when she explained that she wasn’t really a prostitute.

  “Not any more, anyway,” Ginny explained—although, at the moment she spoke the words, she was doing her best to prove to the world otherwise, the way she was pressed against him as they ambled through one of the bazaars in the Old Quarter. Under Victor’s prodding, as they made their way through the crowded streets and open-spaced bazaars, Virginia gave him some of her life’s history.

  Before too long, he was sorry he had asked. Not because Virginia prattled—to the contrary, her narrative was terse and brief. But simply because it is one thing to understand, in ideological terms, that a social institution is unjust. It is another thing entirely to hear that injustice graphically described by one of its victims. The first causes abstract anger; the second, nausea and helpless fury.

  Virginia had been born—bred—on Mesa. C-17a/65-4/5 was the name on her tongue. The label, it might be better to say. The “C” line was one of Manpower Inc.’s most popular breeds, always in demand on the market. Sex slaves, in essence. “17” referred to the somatic type; the “a” to the female variant. Her genotype had been selected and shaped for physical attractiveness, and for as much in the way of libidinal energy and submissiveness as Mesa’s gengineers could pinpoint in the genetic code. Which, of course, was not much—especially since the two desired psychological traits tended to be genetically cross-linked with a multitude of opposing characteristics. One of which, unfortunately, was a type of intelligence popularly characterized as “cleverness.” As a result, a high percentage of C-lines had a tendency to escape captivity once they left the extreme security environment of Mesa itself.

  To combat that tendency, and in an attempt to “phenotypically induce” the desired submissiveness, the developing C-lines were subjected to a rigorous training regimen. Manpower’s engineers, of course, had an antiseptic and multisyllabic jargon phrase to describe it: “Phenotype developmental process.” But what it amounted to, in layman’s terms, was that C-lines were systematically and continually raped from the age of nine.

  “The worst of it,” Virginia mused, “is that there wasn’t even any real lust involved. No emotion at all. The rapists—sorry, the phenotype technicians—have to be chemically induced to even get an erection.” She actually managed a giggle. “Sometimes, looking back, I almost feel sorry for them. Almost. I don’t think there exists anybody in the galaxy as bored with sex as those people.”

  “Nine?” Victor asked shakily.

  She shrugged. “Yeah. It hurts. A lot, in the beginning. And it’s even worse for the b-variants. Those are the boys.”

  Victor felt like he was wading in a cesspool. But he finally understood the sheer savagery of the Audubon Ballroom. He had never approved of the kind of terrorist tactics which their militants often applied to individual targets. Counterproductive, ideologically. But—

  She laughed harshly. “Almost! Ha! That one time Jeremy X and his comrades caught a phenotype technician here on Terra—stupid bastard went on vacation, can you believe it?—I raced down to see the body like everybody else.”

  At one time, Victor would have winced. Now, he simply growled his own satisfaction. He knew the incident she was referring to. It had been one of the most famous exploits of the Ballroom, and one which had produced a gale of official outrage. The Solarian League’s Executive Council met in an elaborate palace. As part of the palace’s decor, there was a statue in the center of the antechamber. The statue was a human-sized replica of a gigantic and long-destroyed ancient monument called the Statue of Liberty. The Council members had not been amused to arrive one day and find the naked body of a “phenotype engineer” impaled on the statue’s torch, with a sign hanging around his neck which read: Hoist on his own petard, wouldn’t you say?

  He took a deep breath. “I still think the tactics are counterproductive.”

  Virginia smiled slyly. “That’s what Kevin says, too.” The smile faded. “I don’t know. I suppose you’re right. But—”

  She took her own deep breath. “You don’t know what it’s like, Victor,” she said softly. There was a hint of moisture in her dark eyes. “All your life you’re told you’re inferior—genetically. Not really human. You wonder about it yourself. Sometimes I think the way I put on such a slutty act is just because—” No hint, now; the tears were welling. She wiped them away half-angrily. “So maybe you and Kevin are right. All I know is that after I saw that body I felt a lot better about myself.”

  The moment passed, and Virginia went back to her customary badinage. “Anyway, after I escaped I made my living as a whore. The pay’s good and what else do I know how to do?” Sourly: “Kevin insisted that I give it up, when he proposed.”

  Victor had learned enough to resist his natural impulse: But surely you were glad to abandon that life of degradation! Virginia, he was quite certain, had been happy enough to quit the trade. But she enjoyed goosing the greenhorn.

  Ginny goosed him again. “And he was so mean to my pimp, too.” Sigh. “Poor Angus. He was so refined, and Kevin is such a ruffian.”

  When she realized he wasn’t going to rise to the bait, Ginny grinned. The grin, of course, was lascivious. Whatever the reality of their relationship and repartee, Victor realized that Ginny was a far more experienced field agent than he was. Except for that one brief teary-eyed moment, she had never once broken cover. Any of Durkheim’s men who was following them would be quite certain by now that Victor Cachat had finally abandoned his stiff and proper ways. Another puritanical revolutionary undone by the fleshpots of Terra. Join the club.

  And so, just as Usher had planned, it would never occur to them that the same Victor Cachat was getting a better introduction to the Loop and its secrets than they’d ever gotten.

  “Smart man,” mused Victor.

  “Isn’t he?” agreed Ginny happily.

  The Third Day

  Helen

  Helen had no way of keeping track of time, beyond the meals which her captors gave her. After four meals, she decided that they were feeding her twice a day. Which, if she was right, meant that she had now been imprisoned for three days.

  The food was plentiful, but consisted of nothing more than some kind of standard rations. For troops, possibly, although Helen suspected darkly that the rations were designed for convict laborers. Nasty stuff. She certainly wouldn’t feed crap like that to armed soldiers. They’d mutiny within a week.

  The stuff didn’t do wonders for her digestion, either. Fortunately, her captors had provided her with a modern portable toilet instead of the crude bed pan which was always provided in the adventure novels she loved to read.
She got plenty of use for the thing. More than her captors had intended, in fact, because she had quickly learned that the slot behind the heatflash disposal mechanism was perfect for concealing her digging shards.

  That was about the only good thing about the disposal mechanism. It was so old and poorly maintained that it barely served for its official function. And not well enough to cover the stench which slowly, as the hours and days went by, began to fill the cell.

  But that too, Helen decided, was all to the good. She noticed that after the second day, her captors came in and out of her cell as quickly as possible. Holding their breath all the while.

  So she continued her dogged tunneling in a cheerful enough mood. She even had to restrain herself, once, from humming.

  Victor

  The next day seemed endless to Victor. The only assignment Usher had given him was to do nothing, beyond his normal tasks as an SS officer in the embassy. Which, in Victor’s case, amounted to glorified clerical work.

  He even found himself looking forward to the evening. He was supposed to meet with Virginia again, in a tavern deep in the Loop, and then spend the rest of the night with her at a nearby cheap hotel. The cover was the obvious one of a man having an assignation with a prostitute.

  Despite his certainty that Ginny would tease him mercilessly—especially once they were in the hotel room—Victor was looking forward to it. Partly because she might have news, and partly because it would at least give him the feeling he was doing something. Mostly, he just wanted to see her again.

  In the solemnly self-critical manner which was Victor’s way, he spent some time examining that desire. Eventually, he was satisfied that there wasn’t any foul concupiscence lurking beneath. It was just—